Page 40 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

After we ended the call, I had a few more minutes before my meeting with Orson Jardine.

I pulled up Irene’s manuscript.

* * * *

(Notes: Maggie talking with boy earlyish. At creek hunting for smooth rocks for laundry. Boy comes . . . creeps up. Sits silently by her.)

“I go. You?”

She glanced around at him, then back to the creek.

He meant run away.

“No. I stay.”

“You are not of them. They say that.”

She worked with the stick, digging around, then sliding it under to free a medium-sized stone, put it on her pile to consider further.

He waited.

“After the people took me, after the first days, and when it seemed tomorrow would be like today, which followed like yesterday,” she said. “I swallowed a hard darkness.”

She held up another rock. It wasn’t smooth and rounded like she wanted. It was sharp and jagged, like the hard darkness she swallowed, weighing down as it also cut from inside.

“I taste this hard darkness,” he said.

She knew. “It was being the only one. Always the only one. As you are here.”

He considered this. “Here you are a different only one.”

“Yes.” Still holding the jagged rock, she turned toward him. “I will always be the only one. You will always be the only one. Everyone sees that in us. It is clear. They see from the outside that we carry this rock inside us. But others are also the only one.”

He scoffed with a single sound.

She saw he accepted her state of only-ness and his own, of course. It was what made him consider leaving. But he did not see beyond that.

“Major Brand,” she said.

He didn’t move, but a stillness came to him. He was thinking. Seeing.

She added, “Corporal Fletcher.”

“No.”

“Yes. Look more closely.” Peter, too. But she would not disclose Peter’s rock of only-ness when these two still tussled as boys.

His silence opened to contemplation, the beginning of acceptance.

She raised the rock. “I have this inside me. You have it inside you. They have it inside them. Leaving here cannot change that. You will have that wherever you go. You think to go back? Your rock will grow even larger. You know. You know. You go elsewhere, your rock is still with you. You go alone to the mountains and still your rock remains. Because it is in you.”

She placed the rock on her discard pile.

“Find how to live with the rock, then go if you want. Do not go to leave the rock, because you will not.”

He watched Maggie talk to the boy.

He couldn’t hear the sound of it above the murmur of the creek, the shifting of the breeze. Except every once in a while, a whisper of it came through.

She was talking. Easily, freely.

She rarely did. To him only the necessities. He’d caught a few words between her and Peter and in such a way as to make him think there were more conversations between them.

* * * *

So, Ransom was promoted to corporal.

I was oddly pleased for a fictional character.

And it didn’t bother me that Irene hadn’t spelled out when or how it happened. Neither did the references only to the boy. I was getting the hang of reading this incomplete manuscript.

The next section started with more notes from the author.

* * * *

(Notes: Ransom is talking with a sergeant who’s a veteran of Dakota Territory and fighting Indians and has been shifted to their company. Talking about how there are small pockets of soldiers dotted along the telegraph wire, trying to protect it from Indian attacks.

“When you’re strung out here like a bit of twine trying to hold back a river, you don’t ask where the other strands come from.”

“Some do.”

The sergeant snorted. “Some are fools. Don’t know the difference between good soldiering and a fancy uniform. An’ mor’n likely, if they get assigned to the fancy uniform, they get themselves kilt before they find out.”

Ransom eyed the other man.

“Who would you pick to be assigned to?”

“The Marble Major,” came the answer without hesitation.

Ransom had heard the nickname for Brand used among the other troops, but not by any of his unit.

“Thought Brand wasn’t much liked.”

“Liking’s got nothing to do with it. We’re talking about keeping alive. Though I’m not like some, I don’t hold nothin’ against him.”

“What’s to hold against him?”

“There are those that say he’s a coward.”

Ransom stared at the man. If he’d said Brand had killed a man in a cold rage, he might have believed it, but cowardice?

“I didn’t say I believe it,” the man went on defensively, clearly picking up Ransom’s disbelief.

“Story is, Brand was out here before the war, fresh from West Point. But he wasn’t above learning what warn’t in books.

And the old Jim Bridger took a shine to him, and pretty soon, this Brand looked like he was going to do real well.

And when the war broke out not long after, he got called back east, so’s to be right in the thick of it, and was getting promotions right and left.

I mean, he was looking to be a general before you could blink. ”

He bent his head over his whittling.

Ransom didn’t believe that level of devotion to the bit of wood. If he waited long enough . . .

But how long was long enough?

Ransom gave in. “What happened?”

“He gets called home on leave, because his mama’s not well, and his step-father’s a big yahoo back in Philadelphia, and he can do things like get a major a leave just like that.

So Brand goes right from the front where they’re bleeding and dying and suffering, back to this fancy house and it’s like he has a fit or something.

That’s where some say his nerve broke — couldn’t face going back to the front after having it easy a couple days.

But I don’t know as that makes sense, because what he did then, was go right to Washington and get hisself transferred out here, when he coulda stayed right there in Washington from what I hear tell, working in one of those offices, snug and warm for all his days. ”

“Couldn’t have done his army career any good,” Ransom said thoughtfully. Advancement was in the east, not in the far-flung posts of the hinterlands.

“Kilt it,” said the sergeant cheerfully.

“But he’s not mourning. I hear tell he’s set to resign.

And that’ll be too bad. ’Cause if he’s a coward, he’s the most peculiar kind I ever seen, because he’s worried about others’ hides as well as his own.

Yup, if I gotta go out there beyond the stockade, I want to go with the Marble Major, because he’s most likely to get me back. ”