The Waiting Pistol

Nell wakes before dawn, while the rooster remains furled in his coop. She touches her father’s old revolver on the bed stand. She eyes the muzzle, black and scarred, as she tugs on her father’s boots. The heels echo throughout the squat one-story prairie house––her small bedroom leading to the short hallway with the spare kitchen on the left and the anterior reading room with an oak rocking chair. The half-empty china cabinet rattles from beside the rocking chair when the front door slams shut.

With the sun gleaming high above, she rides an aged warhorse along her property lines, letting him steer their normal course. They jog past large tracts of land, but barely half of it seeded: wheat and barley mostly. The earth is well cared for, the golden crops healthy and marketable.

She pats his mane and says, “Not too bad, Ulysses.” Muscles ripple in the horse's neck, and she traces a finger along his quivering ridges. He neighs and whisks his large head from side to side. She smiles and pulls him northward in time to see a small plume of smoke rising behind a hill. The shot’s sound reaches her seconds later. Nell bites her lip. She tries to pull Ulysses back to the house, but he resists her and snorts in the direction of the rising smoke.

They crest the hill as two riders push their horses beyond her borders. She glares, and they look back from the top of another hill. One waves a hat, the other a rifle. They leave, and she wonders for how long. The dust swirls behind them, hanging in the air, and looking like a far-off rain.

Beneath her horse’s glistening and heaving flanks, a man lies on the ground, groaning, and squeezes his eyes in prayer and pain––oblivious to the woman watching him. His mouth trembles, words spilling out like the crimson streak spreading from his hip. Motes of dust rise up from the blood’s path over the trampled soil. 

Nell remembers herself at five years of age, scared and miniature and shoved aside while men pummel her father to a pulp. The crash of china mutes the whispering of a dying man.

He looks at her, eyes struggling to focus, lips trembling. “Afternoon ma’am.” She stares at the gun in his hand, his empty holster stitched with a rearing horse, and bullets belted to his waist. A wide brimmed hat tumbles in the breeze, edges splattered red. The man’s eyes close, and Ulysses whinnies.

She kneels beside him, his face frozen in agony. With a cough, he sputters alive, arms grasping out, and finds her wide shoulders. Nell flinches, recoiling from his sudden movement, before allowing him to rest his head over her shoulder. His breathing is ragged and hot against her ear. A shiver runs down her spine. 

“That’s buzzard bait if I ever seen it,” he croaks.

Nell turns to a Ulysses panting and sweating in the afternoon heat.

The man staggers up and says, “My name’s Sherman and he’s a damn fine horse, ma’am, pardon the language. He’s just baked to hell, I believe, ma’am. Pardon. Looks near to death.” At this, he signals a cross over his chest and cringes, Nell catching his dropped shoulder.

“You need rest,” she says.

“Yeah and a posse.”

--

In the darkening evening with Sherman lying in her bed, Nell bandages the wound as best she can beside a flickering lamp. He looks at the loose wrappings. “Thank you, ma’am, but I reckon this is the worst fixing if I’ve ever seen it.” He chuckles.

Nell arches an eyebrow. “All you’ve ever seen is a gun shooting in the wrong direction.”

She fusses at the dirty bandages. “Will those men be back?”

“I believe they think I’m deader than dead. But ma’am, they’ll be back. They think I hid my share here. It wasn’t much but––.”

“You hid stolen goods here?”

“Well ma’am, no but––.”

“Then why did you––”

“Will you let me finish, ma’am? Now, I told them I hid it under your house. I thought I was a goner and didn’t want to give them boys the satisfaction. It ain’t really here. I was just trying to string ‘em along.” Nell glares. He, in exaggerated grimace, lifts his arms. “Listen, ma’am, I am real sorry. I know I’ve put you out.”

She grabs the revolver from the bed stand and inspects it, turning it slowly in her weathered hands, which shake badly.

 “You gonna use that?” he asks.

Slouched against the fallen china cabinet, her father calls out to her, blood dripping down his crushed face. He calls and calls, but she doesn’t answer. She cradles her knees beneath the kitchen table.

Nell cocks the hammer back. “You just gonna lay there?”

--

Nell waits for them in her father’s reading chair by the front door while Sherman lies in the backroom bed, bemoaning the pain and mice and lack of alcohol. The chair and floorboards creak as she rocks back and forth. Nell begins to stand and stretch when he falls silent. The house dies down and only the crickets make themselves heard. They had agreed to turn off the lamps, so only faint light from the half moon falls through the house’s windows. 

A small click reaches her.

Ear-pounding booms follow moments later from the back, shaking the windows and lamps and china. Sherman fires all six rounds. She imagines the flashing of his muzzle lighting the room in brilliance for the briefest seconds: from the dancing horse on his holster, to a grimace on his wind-burnt face, to the shattered windows smashing against the ground with a hundred moons captured in their prisms. The back quiets.

Boots stomp along the front porch and stop at the screen door. The outline of a man rears up.  She stands finally from her chair, wincing at the mellow creaks, and rests her trembling palm against the hammer, pulling and holding it half stop; her heart thunders, her ears still ringing from Sherman’s gun blasts.

The man at the front kicks down the screen and yells out, “Die you sumbitch!” He fires four bullets into the house.

Nell waits.

In the ringing silence, the man peers with a heavy lean into the dark.

With a deep breath, Nell fully cocks her revolver and kicks over the chair. It tumbles to the side and she fires a shot at the moonlit silhouette in her door. The man screams and she dives to the side and two bullets hit where she stood. Splinters fall around her. A shrieking laugh bubbles out of the man, and he steps into the house––his spurs clinking in an unsteady rhythm.  He repeats, “I got him...” When he reaches the spot where Nell had fired, his confusion manifests in a loud swallow, heavy breathing, and violent shuffle to reload.

From the floor, Nell quickly cocks the hammer and fires, the bullet catching him in the chin and snapping his head back. With a grunt, the man collapses and drops his pistol. She rises to her feet and stands over him––a pleading mess––fires once more, then prods the corpse with a boot.

She whirls on Sherman limping down the hallway with a lamp in hand. He freezes. A small china cup tinkles to rest in the cabinet. His bandages are bright red and fresh blood blooms from his collar, but he grins.

“Well I’ll be if that ain’t the deadest man I’ve ever seen.”

Nell smiles and the revolver falls from her hand.