The Last Ordinary Mile
The second letter caught Eddie before he reached the gorge.
A boy riding a spotted mule came out of the western wash with his hat in one hand and a folded paper in the other. He had ridden hard enough to darken the mule’s shoulders, though the animal had plainly decided that part of the journey was over.
“Bone?” the boy called.
Eddie drew Jack to a stop.
“Who’s asking?”
“Woman in Mercy.”
Beside him, Mary Jane shortened her mare’s reins.
The boy looked between them.
“She said a man on a black horse. Might have a woman with him who’d look like she was doing the thinking.”
Mary Jane held out her hand.
“That sounds right.”
***
They read the letter beneath a cottonwood growing sideways from the wash.
There was barely enough shade for the horses. Eddie stood beyond it, the paper resting against his saddle while Mary Jane read over his shoulder.
*Mr. Bone,*
*Someone has come asking for them.*
*There are six now. The three newcomers arrived after midnight. A man followed carrying a hooded lamp and a book. He knew their names and wanted them to sign that they had been received. He would not explain who sent him.*
*I refused.*
*There was a six chalked on the stable door by morning. I have moved everyone into the house.*
*If this letter reaches you before the first, I am Clara Mercer, and I keep the boardinghouse in Mercy. I would appreciate an answer that does not involve putting these people back in the ground.*
Below her signature, in smaller writing:
*The moon remains where it was.*
Eddie read it twice.
The boy watched him.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“A preacher?”
“No.”
The boy frowned.
“She seemed to think you’d know something.”
Eddie folded the letter.
“So do I.”
That appeared to satisfy him less than either of the other answers would have.
Mary Jane offered him their water bottle.
“What’s your name?”
“Toby.”
“How far to Mercy?”
“Hour and a half. Less if your horses don’t stop to argue.”
He gave the mule a tired look.
“Did Mrs. Mercer say whether the man came back?” Eddie asked.
“Not while I was there.”
“Were there more people?”
“Just the six.”
The boy drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and handed the bottle back.
“Marshal’s angry, though.”
“With whom?”
Toby considered it.
“Mostly Mrs. Mercer. Then everybody who agrees with her.”
Mary Jane glanced at Eddie.
“Sounds like a busy man.”
***
They let Toby rest while the horses drank.
Eddie crouched beside the wash and splashed water over his face. It was warm where the sun had reached it, cool beneath the bank.
His reflection broke apart around his hands.
For six weeks, the world had mostly behaved.
Water had stayed in basins. Roads had led where their ruts suggested. His mother had stopped checking his bedroom when she thought he was asleep, or had become quieter about it. His grandfather had taken to sitting outside in the mornings with coffee held in both hands.
Eddie had repaired a gate, a stove hinge, and the axle of a cart whose owner insisted the trouble was in the wheel.
Ordinary work.
He had begun to trust it.
Behind him, Mary Jane loosened a strap on her saddlebag.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
“What?”
“Looking as though every bad thing within riding distance has your name nailed to it.”
He dried his face on his sleeve.
“She wrote to me.”
“She asked you to come.”
“That’s generally how it starts.”
Mary Jane took a small cloth bundle from the bag and opened it. Bread, cheese, two apples that had bruised together on the road.
She handed him half the bread.
“Eat before you decide what’s your fault.”
He accepted it.
For a while, they listened to Jack drinking.
Then Eddie said, “I’ve seen what happens when a man with a book won’t explain the terms.”
“I know.”
“This could be different.”
“It could.”
He looked at her.
She bit into an apple.
“We’ll ask questions until we know which parts.”
***
The moon appeared shortly after they crossed the dry wash.
Eddie did not see it rise.
One moment, the eastern sky was pale and empty above the cliffs. The next, Jack took three short steps and stopped with his ears forward.
The moon hung over a split in the ridge.
Red.
It showed through the afternoon light with a dull, solid clarity, like something painted on the sky.
Mary Jane brought her mare alongside him.
“Well,” she said.
Toby kept riding.
“You get used to seeing it.”
“Do you?” Eddie asked.
“No.”
The boy did not turn around.
Eddie looked west.
Ordinary sky. A few thin clouds. Dust behind their horses.
He dismounted.
Mary Jane watched him lead Jack backward along the trail.
At the edge of the wash, the moon vanished.
Eddie stopped.
He moved forward.
There it was.
No shimmer. No gradual change of color. The cliff remained in the same place. So did the clouds above it.
He could find no line on the ground.
Mary Jane dismounted too.
She crossed where he had crossed, watching the ridge.
“About here,” she said.
Eddie took a nail from the small tool roll strapped behind his saddle and scratched a mark into a flat stone beside the trail.
Toby had turned his mule around.
“What’s that for?”
“So we can find it again.”
“You can find the wash.”
“I want to find the same part.”
Mary Jane stood with one boot on either side of the place they had marked.
“Nothing hurts,” she said.
Eddie waited.
No pull beneath his ribs. No taste of river water. No borrowed memory opening behind his eyes.
He could hear the horses breathing and Toby’s mule worrying at a dry branch.
That ought to have reassured him.
Instead, he found himself wishing the thing had offered some explanation for being there.
Mary Jane took out a pencil.
On the back of Clara’s envelope, she wrote the time and a few words about the ridge.
Then she tucked it away.
“Now we know one thing,” she said.
“What?”
“It has an edge.”
***
Mercy had been built where two roads met and neither offered a better place to stop.
A well stood near the center of town beneath a timber frame. There was a general store, a smithy, a saloon with one shutter hanging crooked, and a row of houses crowded close enough to share the sound of arguments.
The boardinghouse faced the road from behind a narrow porch.
Someone had carried three trunks outside.
A woman stood over them with her arms folded while a man tried to secure all three to a wagon already loaded beyond reason.
“No one told us,” she was saying.
Clara Mercer stood in the boardinghouse doorway.
“I told you as soon as there was anything to tell.”
“You put them upstairs.”
“They needed beds.”
“We were sleeping upstairs.”
“You still could be.”
The woman stared at her.
Clara came down one step.
“Mrs. Haskett, you slept beside your husband through six weeks of that cough last winter. I didn’t put either of you in the stable.”
“That is hardly the same.”
“No,” Clara said. “I didn’t charge you for the extra blankets.”
Toby made a small choking sound.
Mary Jane looked away.
Clara saw them then.
Her gaze passed over Jack, stopped on Eddie, and stayed there.
“You got my letter.”
“Both of them.”
She came off the steps.
He had expected someone older.
Clara’s dark hair was streaked with gray near the temples, but her face had more exhaustion than years in it. One sleeve was rolled higher than the other. There was flour on her skirt and a dark stain at the edge of her cuff.
She looked him over with the frankness of someone assessing a tool she had ordered by description.
“You’re younger than I expected.”
“I’ve had that complaint before.”
“Can you help?”
“I’d like to meet them.”
She nodded once.
That seemed to be enough to begin.
***
Inside, the boardinghouse smelled of bread, lamp oil, and soap.
Eddie stopped just beyond the threshold.
Six people occupied the dining room.
They were not arranged for inspection. That mattered to him immediately.
A heavyset man with a wrapped leg sat near the window, peeling an apple with a small knife. An older man repaired a torn shirt at the end of the table. A woman stood beside the stove stirring something in a pot, while another sat close to a young man whose bare foot rested on a folded towel.
The sixth person was washing bowls.
All six looked up.
Clara shut the door.
“This is Mr. Bone. And—”
“Mary Jane.”
“They’ve come to hear what happened.”
The heavyset man set down his apple.
“You the one from Ash Springs?”
Eddie nodded.
“Thought you might be taller.”
“Seems to be a disappointing day all around.”
The man almost smiled.
Almost was enough to change the room.
Clara brought chairs.
Eddie took his hat off before sitting.
“My name’s Eddie,” he said. “I was shot outside a mine. Buried afterward.”
The woman beside the stove stopped stirring.
“I don’t remember all of what happened between that and waking up. Some of what I do remember took time to come back.”
Nathan Pell dried his hands on a cloth.
“Does it?”
“Some of it.”
“Do you sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Properly?”
“Not every night.”
Nathan looked relieved by that answer in a way Eddie would remember later.
The young man with the injured foot leaned forward.
“Do they come asking for you?”
Eddie glanced at Clara.
She remained standing beside the door.
“Someone did,” he said.
“What did you do?”
“Asked who had sent him.”
Benjamin’s fingers tightened around the edge of his chair.
“And?”
“He didn’t like being asked.”
The room became quiet.
Eddie rested his hat on his knee.
“I can’t promise the man who came here is the same kind of trouble. I’d rather you tell me what you remember than have me tell you what it ought to mean.”
Esther nodded first.
Then, slowly, the others did.
Mary Jane pulled her chair toward the table.
“Mrs. Mercer,” she said, “could we borrow some paper?”
***
The marshal arrived before they had finished with Nathan.
His name was Hollis. He had dust on his trousers, a sunburned neck, and the careful manner of a man entering a room where he expected to be disliked.
He removed his hat.
Clara did not invite him to sit.
“I hear you’ve brought someone in,” he said.
“He brought himself.”
Hollis looked at Eddie.
“Bone?”
“Yes.”
“I know the story.”
“Which one?”
The marshal paused.
“The mine.”
“That happened.”
“So I’m told.”
His gaze moved to the six people around the room.
“I’m trying to keep this town calm.”
Clara folded her arms.
“Then stop putting locks on my doors.”
“Someone threw a bottle through your kitchen window yesterday.”
“I remember. I swept it up.”
“They could throw something burning next time.”
That quieted her.
Hollis looked tired now.
“I had two men outside the stable all night.”
“Did they see the visitor?” Eddie asked.
“No.”
“Were they asleep?”
“They say not.”
“Did they hear the bell?”
The marshal’s jaw shifted.
“Everybody heard the bell.”
“How many times?”
“Six.”
Mary Jane laid down her pencil.
“Where did it come from?”
“The gorge.”
“Is there a bell out there?”
“No.”
The old man at the end of the table drew his needle through the shirt.
“There used to be.”
Everyone turned toward him.
He examined the stitch before continuing.
“At the quarry camp. Rang it when they fired a charge.”
Hollis frowned.
“That camp’s been shut near twenty years.”
The old man looked up.
“I didn’t say it was open.”
***
They waited until the marshal left before asking about the quarry.
The old man could remember the camp road, the cookhouse, and a mule that bit a surveyor badly enough to end an argument over ownership.
He could not remember what had happened to the bell.
By the time Clara brought supper, Mary Jane had filled three sheets.
Different deaths. Different places of burial. None of the six could account for the whole journey to Mercy.
But four remembered the split rock.
Three remembered the lamp.
And all six, when asked why they had come to the boardinghouse, gave some version of the same answer.
There had been a light in the window.
After supper, Eddie went outside.
The street was nearly empty. Someone hammered a shutter closed farther down the road. At the smithy, a bucket struck the ground and water hissed across hot metal.
Above the gorge, the moon remained where it had been when they arrived.
Mary Jane joined him on the porch.
“Clara says she’ll give us the front room.”
“You take it.”
“Two beds.”
“Oh.”
She leaned against a post.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then Eddie said, “They followed her lamp.”
“Yes.”
“What happens if she puts it out?”
Mary Jane looked through the window.
Inside, Clara was helping Benjamin shift his chair closer to the table. Esther had found a deck of cards. Nathan watched the freighter shuffle them with hands that were becoming steadier.
“I don’t think she will.”
The first bell sounded before Eddie could answer.
It came across the rooftops with a hard, clean note.
Inside, the cards stopped moving.
A second.
Mary Jane straightened.
Eddie stepped off the porch.
Three.
Doors opened along the street.
Four.
At the well, Marshal Hollis turned toward the gorge.
Five.
Clara appeared in the boardinghouse doorway.
Six.
The sound faded into the cliffs.
Eddie waited.
So did everyone else.
Then the bell rang again.
Seven.
Clara looked back into the room.
Eddie could see her counting.
All six were there.
At the far end of town, beyond the last wash of lamplight, something moved on the road.
A figure came slowly out of the dust.
It was small enough that Eddie thought at first it must be farther away than it looked.
Then it passed the smithy, and he saw a little girl carrying one shoe.
Clara drew breath behind him.
Eddie was already walking.
The girl stopped when she saw him approach. Her dress was pale beneath the red dust. One foot was bare.
He crouched a few paces away.
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head.
“What’s your name?”
She looked past him at the boardinghouse lamp.
“Is that where we go?”
“You can come inside.”
“Will you come too?”
“Yes.”
Only then did she look at his face.
Her expression changed.
Not relief.
Recognition.
“You’re Eddie.”
He felt Mary Jane stop beside him.
“Who told you that?” he asked.
The girl lifted the shoe against her chest.
“The man waiting up the road.”
Eddie looked beyond her.
No one stood between the smithy and the dark mouth of the wash.
“What man?”
“The one with the lamp.”
The girl’s lower lip trembled.
“He said to tell you there’s been a mistake.”
Eddie kept his voice level.
“What mistake?”
She glanced toward the empty road.
Then back at him.
“He says he only meant to wake you.”
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