A Talk with My Mother
Charlaine Harris
I sat on a bale of hay and stared at the horses in their stalls and the cars parked in the other half of the stable. Weren’t enough horses to fill it up any more, and visitors wanted to put their cars somewhere safe. Not that our little town had many visitors. When there were strangers, they stuck out. Strangers didn’t seem to understand that. I laughed a little, and I wiped the wetness from my face. I knew what I had to do next. I had to talk to my mother before anyone else got to her.
I stood. The corral and the parking area were both empty, to my relief. I took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadowy stable, looking up at the sun. About four o’clock.
It was a good time of day to find my mother alone in the house she shared with her husband, Jackson Skidder. Mom had dismissed the kids from Segundo Mexia’s one-room school two hours ago. She might have dropped by the grocery, but then she would have gone home. Mom often took a little time to relax before she started supper.
Jackson, who was my mother’s husband, but not my father, would be out and about attending to one of his businesses. With any luck, I’d have enough time to talk to Mom alone. Tell her what I’d done.
I felt a little off plumb as I walked from the stable to the house. It was not far, a block and a bit from Main Street, but my feet didn’t seem too well connected to the rest of me.
I remember somewhere along that walk, someone said, “Hey, Lizbeth,” and I spoke back. Don’t know who it was or what I said.
When I’d unlatched the gate in the fence and stepped onto the stone walkway to the porch, I pressed my lips together so hard they hurt. This was going to be very hard. I forced my feet to move forward, onto the porch. I took care to wipe my feet on the mat. Mom was rigid about stuff like that. I had dust all over my boots. Plus, I smelled like horse.
I used my special knock.
“Come in, Lizbeth,” Mom called. “If you’ve wiped your feet.”
Mom and Jackson have a nice house by Segundo Mexia standards: one big room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. I had done some of my growing up in this house. There was still a bed in the second bedroom for me, though I had my own place now.
Mom was sitting in her easy chair with her feet up on a stool. She’d been snapping beans. She put the bowl on the table beside her and scooted forward as if to get up.
“Stay still,” I said, motioning her down. I bent to give her a hug and then sat right opposite. I not only reeked of horse, but I had death hanging around me. I could feel it, almost smell it. I didn’t want Mom sensing that.
But Mom smiled at me, though I already saw some doubt creeping in.
Mom’s name is Candle Rose, and she’s real pretty, and she’s smart, and she has what Jackson calls “integrity.” I think that was the clincher after he first noticed her. Jackson wasn’t put off by Mom having a ten-year-old. If he had misgivings, he’d kept em well hidden.
And in all the years I’d watched em, they’d gotten along real well.
Mom kept the house neat and straight, and she ran things the way lives ought to be run. She was a good cook, and meals were on time. Jackson had bought her a big wood stove, after she’d turned down an electric stove. (Our electricity is what you might call unreliable.) Jackson worked hard, never came home drunk, and didn’t visit whores. He gave Mom respect.
“Lizbeth, how you doing?” Mom’s eyebrows had drawn together, and her smile was long gone. She knew something was wrong. But I couldn’t just plunge right in.
So I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “You?”
“Teaching kids is not as easy as it used to be,” Mom said. “Especially now that I’ve got twenty-four, all different ages. And especially now I’m in my thirties.”
Mom was young to have a grown girl like me. I’m eighteen, and her only child; Mom had me when she was fifteen. She’d had a hard row to hoe. Her mother and father had kept me during the week while Mom rode the bus to the training course for teachers.
Mom had not married, hadn’t even considered it, for most of my childhood. I’d asked her why more than once. She’d finally told me, “After—you know—what happened to me, I was real man-shy. That’s the first reason. For another thing, I loved you so much I couldn’t be with any man who didn’t love you, too. Who might just put up with you because he wanted me. Who the hell wants to be with a man who thinks I ought to be grateful for the privilege of sharing a bed and an income? I figured I’d rather pay my own way than be dependent and beholden.” Though these were bitter problems, Mom had smiled at me as she closed that conversation forever.
I understood how much she loved me.
I felt that love now, and wished I had the words to tell her how hard I returned it. But I’m not good with words. I’m more of a doer than a sayer. As I looked at her, the sunlight from the window glinted on a white thread in the black river of Mom’s hair. It would be a blow to her pride when she noticed that.
“How is Jackson?” I asked, because she was looking at me funny. It was kind of a waiting look, kind of anxious. Moment was approaching when I had to speak up.
“He’s well. You know that man never gets sick. He was saying just the other day it had been too long since you two had been out hunting together.”
“I’ll be glad to go hunting any day he picks, if I don’t have to work.” If Jackson Skidder had ever thought I was a burden, he sure hadn’t shown it. “You know I love to hunt.”
“Oh, Lizbeth,” Mom said, shaking her head. “You love your guns.”
That was the truth. I loved the bolt-action Winchester my grandfather had left me. He’d carried it and used it through many skirmishes, and it had a history of accuracy. I also loved the matching Colts Jackson had given me. I wore my sidearms everywhere, and I’d just put the Winchester in its rack by the door where it kept company with Jackson’s rifles.
Of course, I was not the only gal in Segundo Mexia who liked to hunt. And I was also not the only gal who was a good shot. But I was one of the few who made a living with my guns.
Tarken had taken me onto his crew when he’d had a vacancy. (When there’s an opening on a crew, it means someone died, nine times out of ten. I’d taken Callum’s place when his wounded leg got infected, which is what killed him.) Not many doctors left now, after the flu, and the banks failing, and no crops for a while.
“I love the work,” I said. “I got a knack for it. Galilee and Martin and Tarken say so.” So had Solly, until he got killed on a run to Mexico.
“I guess the money is okay?”
“The money isn’t bad.” Every now and then, I slipped into the house while she was gone to hide some money in the secret hole in the wall in my old room. I was sure she knew that.
“You all have a job lined up?”
“Tonight. A run to New America. Piece of cake.”
Mom sighed. “I wish you’d get a regular job with some nice people.”
But she knew I couldn’t have borne to teach school like her, or work in a shop, or take care of a house and kids and cooking and laundry—the never-ending work of keeping a family running—like my neighbor, Chrissie. “Me and the Colts and the Winchester, we work together,” I said.
Mom shook her head and got up to start supper. Looked like that would be chicken and rice and the green beans. In quick movements, she dumped the snapped beans into a pot of hot water and added a dollop of bacon grease.
“Heard you were seeing Tarken after work,” Mom said, taking care to be turned away from me when she said it. She tried to sound casual. She was poking around trying to find out what was wrong with me. Trouble with a man would always be the first suspicion that sprang to her mind.
“It’s a new thing. Me and him hit it off.”
“He and I hit it off,” she said, in her “teacher” voice.
I had to smile. “Yes, ma’am. He and I hit it off.”
Mom knew better than to ask any more questions. Our crew guarded cargo, be it people or goods, as we moved it on its way to wherever it needed to be, by means of Tarken and Martin’s big truck. The two men had put it together out of parts from this and parts from that, and they worked on it every day.
The Tarken Crew took refugees—almost all from the area Mexico had annexed in the 1934 war—and ran them up to New America, the plains north of Texoma. Sometimes we took goods from New America down to other towns in Texoma—which used to be Texas and Oklahoma, more or less. Every now and then we went east to Dixie.
Sometimes nothing happened on these trips. Sometimes we were attacked by bandits, or Indians, or wild dogs. Sometimes our employer decided not to pay us.
And on those occasions, I got to work with the Winchester. Or my Colts. Depending on distance.
“You let us know if we need to do anything,” Mom said, still thinking about me and Tarken. She meant that she and Jackson would hire a church for a wedding or make him marry me if I got pregnant… if that was what I wanted.
Mom was pretty sensitive about the consequences of men and women getting together. Some people hadn’t been kind to her when her stomach began to show. Because Mom was pretty and smart, they were sure she felt superior to them. Which was not true. But people are like that—they know what they’d feel, and they’re sure you have to be the same way.
If Mom had been ugly and dumb, no one would have thought twice about her condition, my opinion.
“I don’t think you need to be worried about Tarken and me,” I said, to close the door on that subject. Now she’d turned her back again to add something to her cook pot. I must start talking about today.
I wanted to walk out of the house so bad, but I would not be a coward.
“Listen, you know Skelly, over in Cactus Flats?” Easing into it. “Jose Maldonado, everyone calls him Skelly, though. Owns Elbows Up?”
“I went to school with Jose,” Mom said, real slow. I could tell she was wondering where I was going with this. But she wasn’t going to rush me. “He inherited that bar. And the hotel next to it. And he usually has a worker or two.”
By “workers” my mother meant “whores.” Mom said that whoring was hard work, and the men and women who chose to make a living that way deserved to be treated with courtesy. To my surprise, Jackson agreed with her.
“Skelly’s always had a great opinion of you. Did you know that? You taught his nephew, Roberto. He turned out real good.”
“I’ve had a few Robertos,” Mom said over her shoulder. “One had the last name Maldonado. Smart kid, good with numbers.”
I nodded. “That’s the one. Anyway. Dan was over in Cactus Flats making a delivery for his folks, and he dropped into Elbows Up, and Skelly gave him a message for me.” Dan Brick and I had grown up together.
My mother turned away from the stove, and put her hands on her hips. That meant she was giving you serious attention. It also indicated she didn’t like what she was hearing. “What was the message? Just go on and tell me.”
I took a deep breath. I tried again to think of any way I could delay this talk, any way I could just not have it.
I straightened my spine and went on. “Skelly told Dan that the man who’d raped you was in Cactus Flats. Skelly recognized him. He told Dan to let me know.”
Mom’s face froze. She stared at me without a blink or a twitch or a frown. I didn’t think she was breathing. “Mom,” I said.
Finally, my mother nodded, in a jerky way. “I understand,” she said. She took off her apron. Looked like she was going somewhere. But instead, she just sat in her chair again clutching the apron. She waited for me to say something else.
“So I went over to Cactus Flats late morning,” I said. “I rented a horse at the stable. Vangie, the gray mare? It only took me a couple of hours to get there.” I started to say something about Vangie being a good horse, and then I just shut my mouth. Took a deep breath.
My mother made a “come on” gesture with her fingers.
“First thing, I saw Cal and Maria,” I said. Cal Trujillo was the sheriff in Cactus Flats, and Maria Hannigan was his deputy. Cal was the better tracker, Maria the better shot.
“They know you,” Mom said, which was an odd thing to say. I figured she meant they’d be coming after me.
I shook my head. “Cal just nodded at me, and shut the door to the sheriff’s office. Not before Maria pointed at Elbows Up.”
Mom drew in a deep, shuddering breath.
“It was when the sun begins to slant, and the bar door was open, but I couldn’t see inside. There was a fancy car parked outside the hotel, and you know where the saddle shop was, went out of business last year? There was a big banner tacked over the door, said ‘The Great Karkarov, Mystic and Magician.’”
Oleg Karkarov was a grigori, one of the wizards who’d fled with their leader, Grigori Rasputin, all the way from Godless Russia. When the old tsar and his family had made it to the boats, the grigoris had made their escape possible by magic, or so I’d heard. Given Karkarov’s age, it was more likely his dad had been the original refugee.
Course, not all of them could work for the tsar. Those with less talent had to make a living, same as the really good ones, who were healers or killers or weather controllers. The most hapless of the grigoris had little traveling shows that moved through New America and Texoma. Like regular magicians, grigoris performed slight-of-hand tricks. Unlike regular magicians, grigoris also produced illusions and did other amazing things with their power.
One of the things this grigori, Oleg Karkarov, had done was bespell a pretty girl in a rural town. Then he’d raped her. Then he’d left town, never minding that behind him he’d left a miserable girl who would never be the same… and her child.
Mom turned her palm up, asking me to break my silence, to let her know what had happened in Cactus Flats. She wanted this talk to be over as much as I did. I saw how wide her eyes were.
So I resumed telling the story.
“The door of the bar was open but, like I said, it was too dark inside for me to see the customers. So for a while, I sat on the porch of the general store right across the street, and I waited. Ralph came out to sweep, or so he said, but I think he wanted to make sure it was me, and find out what I was doing there. He went back inside after he’d moved the broom around a little and talked to me. He turned the sign to say Closed.”
I snorted, remembering. That had made me feel kind of good and kind of bad. I already had a name in that town.
“You have a reputation,” my mother said, like she was an echo in my mind.
I hadn’t realized Mom knew that.
I shrugged. You were only good as long as you shot first and accurate. If people were scared of me, all the better. They might live.
“I got tired of sitting on the porch, and I could see the alley behind Elbows Up was in shade, so I decided to move. I got Vangie some water and relocated.”
“I recall that their outhouse is back of the bar,” Mom said.
“Yep. Skelly has plumbing indoors, but he just only lets the ladies use it.”
I think Mom would have smiled if this had been an ordinary story, but her mouth only twitched a bit.
“You waited between the back of the bar and the outhouse.”
“Yes. I waited.”
“For God’s sakes, Lizbeth, tell me he didn’t rape you.” Mom’s hands were shaking.
I should have known her mind would go there. “No, Mom. No!” That was a sickening idea. I’d thought of many things he might do to me if he got the chance, but I’d never thought of sex. So since I’d first held a gun, I’d practiced to be the fastest, the sharpest, the most accurate.
“What happened?” Mom said, almost yelling.
“I shot him dead.”
And that stopped her again, brought back the frozen look. “You killed him?” she said, in a whisper, just trying to make sure. “For real?”
“Yes, Mom. I killed him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Four shots before he hit the ground,” I said, tapping the point right under my breastbone. “Course, I went and checked.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
I don’t think Mom even knew she was talking.
I nodded. Confirming to her it was true, that she should believe me.
Mom had thought of another thing to worry about. “You’re sure it was him?”
I grabbed a hold of my patience, before I said something I’d regret later. Took a deep breath. “Yes, ma’am. He had blond curly hair and blue eyes, like you said.” I’d inherited the curly and the eyes, but my hair was black like Mom’s. “And I asked him.”
“Asked… ?”
“I said ‘Are you Oleg Karkarov?’ And he said, ‘One and the same, pretty girl.’”
“And then you said… ?”
I blocked that out. “I didn’t say nothing. I drew.”
Mom’s eyes were as wide as they could get. “Did he try to hurt you?”
“He started saying some words, and he grabbed at a pocket in his grigori vest.” Oleg Karkarov had reached into one of his many little pockets. He’d pulled out a pinch of green powder. He’d twisted his wrist to fling it on me. His lips had been moving the whole time, spell words.
He’d been fast. But I was faster.
“I got him first,” I said, remembering how smooth it had been, my Colt in my hand. “I shot him. Bam bam bam bam.” I looked away from her.
“So none of his powder touched you?” She reached over and took my hand. “You weren’t harmed?”
I shook my head. “I was fine.”
Mom shuddered. “So after he fell, what happened?”
“Then. Hmmm. Well, I heard a lot of yelling from inside the bar, and I think there were people starting for the back door to see what was going on. So I got on Vangie and rode away.”
Mom hardly knew how to feel. “This was today?” she asked, almost at random.
It felt strange to realize that yes, it was the same day, and yes, I had really shot Oleg Karkarov, and here I was telling my mother before anyone else could.
Just that moment Mom’s door flew open. We both jumped a mile.
For a second I thought it must be Cal, maybe having decided he should arrest me after all. But it was Jackson, and he was in a state. Though what kind of state, I could not have told you.
“Candle!” he said, not yelling but not quiet, either. “Candle!”
Then Jackson saw me sitting opposite Mom and holding her hand, and I didn’t know what he was going to do. With some relief, I watched him relax bit by bit.
“I’m glad you come to see your mother,” Jackson said, well in control of himself.
Jackson and I are more alike than my own mother and me. He’s not a big man with words, either.
“As soon as I could,” I said. I left out the half hour I’d spent in the Segundo Mexia stable when I’d returned Vangie to her stall. I’d shivered and shook like I had the influenza. ’Fore I could screw up my courage to head for Mom’s.
“You done telling Candle about it?” Jackson said.
“Just did.”
“Candle?” Jackson asked. “You okay with this?” I couldn’t say his voice was gentle, it never was, but it was as soft as it ever got. He only used that voice with my mother. It was one of the reasons he was the best present our little family of two had ever gotten.
“I’m thankful Lizbeth is unhurt. About the rest of it, I don’t know,” Mom said. She shook her head, and then she got up and went to the stove to stir something, add salt to something, whatever she had to do to keep her back to us while she got her face straight.
“Lizbeth, how are you?” Jackson asked next. Though he moved stiffly, still wary of the situation, he went to his chair and sat.
“I feel pretty good,” I said, stiffening my back. “I done my job.”
“I’ve done my job,” Mom muttered.
I smiled at Jackson. “Yes, I’ve done my job.”
And my stepfather smiled back. I’d hardly ever seen him smile. “You did,” he said. “You’re a good daughter, Lizbeth. And a fine gunnie.”
“Thank you.” Jackson didn’t give out many compliments, so I valued that.
There was an empty second. “I got to go,” I said, and I stood.
“Wait,” Jackson said very quietly.
I looked down at him.
“You checked to make sure he was dead?” Jackson said.
“I did.”
“Four before he hit the ground, I heard?” The smile flickered again.
“Yes.” I held my hands in a circle to show Jackson how small the spread had been.
“I’ll send a donation to the burial fund in Cactus Flats,” Jackson said. “Don’t need to spend the town’s money putting that piece of shit in the ground.”
It had the makings of a joke, the “piece of shit” when Oleg Karkarov had been gunned down outside an outhouse. But I wasn’t in a jokey frame of mind at the moment.
“I got to be getting along,” I said. “Thanks, Jackson. Mom, I’ll see you soon.” I wanted to add, I hope you’re not mad at me. I hope you don’t think I’m going to hell. But right now, I just couldn’t ask her those things. Maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to.
As if she’d known what I was thinking, Mom faced me. “We will never talk about this again,” she said. “Ever.” She wasn’t angry at me. She was sad I felt I’d had to kill a man because of her.
“Ever,” I agreed.
As I was on the path out of town and up the hill to my place, I remembered him coming out of the bar, the shock of seeing him so much my likeness. Slight but sturdy, slender jaw, big eyes, thick curly hair. Short.
And I’d said, “Oleg Karkarov?”
“One and the same, pretty girl.” At that second, his eyes had widened. He’d realized he needed to defend himself.
And then, as I’d raised the Colt, I’d said, “Dad.”