3
Ben sat his horse staring down at the bald patch of land. He'd slung his right leg across Buck's neck, curling his knee around the pommel. He felt like curling up even further and weeping for the loss of the young trees. It had never been his intention to log that piece. The trees were an important wind stop for gales, rockslides and avalanches coming down off the mountain. The roots kept the soil healthy and deadfall kept it fertile.
Had Noah come to Ben asking for wood, willing to pay, Ben would have given it to him, even if it were for as foolish an endeavor as that blasted ark. But Noah hadn't asked, he'd taken. And he'd implicated an entire community of people in doing it. Crazy or sane, Ben raged at the man, not just for the theft, or the damage to the land, but for claiming that God would have told him to do such a thing in the first place.
When his youngest son came riding up behind him Ben decided he was done brooding. He waited for Joe to join him then guided Buck into a gentle trot heading back for the main house. While they traveled, Joe pattered on about his own thoughts on the subject, and the culpability of the old man. Ben wanted to interrupt his son, and redirect him to other things, simply to keep his own heart from beating out of his chest, but he didn't.
A few miles from the main house his son caught on, and fell silent for the rest of the trip. Joe even offered to take care of Buck, and Ben went straight into the house. He checked on Elizabeth, who was sleeping, then went to his desk to begin figuring the exact cost of the lumber, and the repairs to the land.
Not only had it been an area he never intended to clear, but Ben had been considering that lot, along with ten others, for a new conservation theory known as selective clearing. Because the hillside had a mix of hardwood and softwood, all the approximate same age, he had hoped to clear only one breed of tree from that area. In others he would clear a different breed, and each stand would become its own experimental biome. As each stand continued to grow Ben would be able to see which was the dominate species, which had a mutualistic or parasitic relationship with the others, and which could regrow the fastest, with adult trees still using the majority of the resources. It was an experiment that Ben had been looking forward to dedicating his time to when he gave the boys the ranch.
Noah had effectively ruined part of Ben's retirement plans, by cutting in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. It rankled Ben, even more so, because it felt like a personal attack against him. Unprovoked and undeserved. Ben tried over and over to tell himself it was only one stand of trees. He reminded himself why he had never put barbed wire fences around all of his property. Why he had always maintained that anyone was welcome at the Ponderosa. There had been attacks like this before, and incidents that made him angry at his fellow man, and Ben knew that time would heal the hurt, but in that moment he wanted very much to see Noah strung up by his toes.
When Adam and Hoss didn't return by suppertime, Ben grew even angrier, and anxious. Rather than send Joe on the longer ride to the site of the ark, Ben asked Joe to go to Virginia City to see if Roy Coffey had returned. Ben sat up for several hours with a fussy Elizabeth, struggling to get her to go to sleep. By the time Joe returned, saying that Roy had sent a telegram from Reno that afternoon, but still hadn't returned, Ben was ready to fill a bucket with pitch, ride out to the desert and set the whole thing aflame.
Joe took Elizabeth and went upstairs with her to give his father some peace, and Ben paced the main room of the house trying to fathom what could have gone on after he left.
It was well past dawn, and Ben had hitched a team to the strongest wagon he had, before Coffey, Adam, Hoss and Thomas rode into the dooryard. Hoss had a bandage around his head and Thomas looked like he'd had a gallon of pulque the night before. Ben ran to his middle son, guiding him to sit in the wagon before he looked at the bandage, spotted with blood.
"Hoss..what in tarnation…"
"Noah hit me in the head with his staff, Pa. Had a bunch'a his men clobber me and Thomas, too, and tied us up in one their tents."
"What!?"
Roy was still on his horse. "Adam and I come back from Reno with the sheriff and one of his deputies. We spotted their horses in the corral, but no sign of them two. When we asked Noah what had happened, he told us straight out that he had attacked both of 'em, tied 'em up. Said God's work wouldn't be stopped. Reno sheriff arrested Noah, and he's in the jail there. They got some deputies guardin' the camp and the ark, and I've asked for the army to send out some men. They should be there by nightfall."
"Where were Bucky and Jimmy?" Ben demanded.
"I sent them back to the ranch to start clearing the ground, so that we could get seed and saplings planted as quickly as possible." Adam said, the irritation in his tone rising. "We had no reason to believe Noah would be dangerous."
"We don't know Noah from Adam." Ben snapped, his eyes going to Thomas.
The big man straightened from his hunched position, meeting Ben's eyes dead on, but instead of an explanation, Ben got a silence from Thomas that he had forgotten about over the past few months.
"Has he seen a doctor?" Ben asked.
Roy nodded. "We stopped off in Washoe, and the doc cleaned him up and sewed him up. Said he needed rest, good food, and cold compresses on that bump."
"Adam, get your brother inside and get him some food." Ben hissed, waiting for Hoss and Adam to get all the way inside before he turned on Thomas. "I want to know everything you know about that old man. I want to know why he's chosen here and now to make a nuisance of himself and I want to know every part you've played in this fiasco, beginning to end."
Thomas' arms went across his chest and his eyes settled on Ben while he thought. Finally he looked to his boots and said, "Mr. Cartwright, you don't own me. You can't order me to tell you anything."
"The agreement my son made with you was that you would serve out your prison sentence on our ranch, or return to Carson City to serve it in a cell. If you don't like it here, and if you don't want to follow my orders, you can go back with Sheriff Coffey right now. And if you've had any part in bringing this...foolish nonsense to the Ponderosa, I'll press charges so quick your head will spin." Ben stood his ground, straightening his back. Thomas still towered over him by a foot.
"I'm still a convict. I guess any man would have reason to suspect me of breaking the law. Maybe I put too much faith in the fairness of the almighty Cartwrights. I guess I've learned my lesson on that account. Anything beats prison." Thomas said through gritted teeth.
He took in a deep breath and said, "Noah was a slave on the same plantation that I was born on, and grew up on. He might have been my blood somewhere down the line, and he was like a grandfather to most of us kids. He's an old man who crippled his back out in the fields and was given to a local preacher as a help around the church. When the war started, he disappeared. I thought he was long dead until I rode up on that ark. That's all I know."
Ben backed away a step, dropping his eyes from Thomas' gaze. He caught Roy looking at him and avoided his friend's eyes, too.
After a moment he softly said, "Thank you, Mr. Freeman." He wanted to apologize, but couldn't find the words. Thomas stepped up into the saddle and rode slowly out of the dooryard, his shoulders tight as if he was waiting for someone to shoot him in the back or order him to turn around. Ben and Roy said and did nothing to stop him, and Thomas kicked his horse up to a gallop once he had rounded the barn.
Ben leaned on the tailgate of the wagon, with both his hands pressing into the hard edges of the wood.
"Are you gonna be alright?" Roy asked quietly after a moment.
Ben sighed. "This whole situation...it feels evil. A foolish, mindless waste. All those people, doing whatever Noah tells them to. Destroying property, attacking and hurting their fellow man, there's no limit to the hurt he'll cause and he continues to do it in the name of God." Ben paced away from the wagon, then back. "And Thomas stands there, blithely, calm as ever, as if this is normal."
Roy's jaw clenched and he shook his head, but he didn't have an answer. Ben watched him for a time until the house door clattered and Adam walked out into the door yard.
"Where did Thomas go?"
"I don't know." Ben growled softly.
Adam blinked at him, then at Roy, then said, "Pa, he's got a concussion. He shouldn't be alone."
Ben turned a glare on his son and said, "You want to go after him, go after him. He's your social experiment, not mine."
Adam's teeth came together before he carefully said, "Ok." Adam stepped up into the saddle and rode Sport out of the dooryard.
"Ben…" Roy said.
"I know. I'm going after them." Ben walked to the driver's seat of the wagon and stepped up, waiting for Roy to be clear of the wheels before he whipped up the team and headed out after the growing parade of men suffering from his anger. Roy watched him go, his heart aching for everyone involved in the situation. His brief investigation into the attack on Hoss and Thomas had revealed that even some of the kids had been encouraged to beat the two men with sticks until they'd been subdued. That hurt his heart more than anything else.
Much as he wanted to stand in judgement over the people who followed Noah, he knew full well where that kind of hate came from. It sickened him to think that wrongs that had been done to the Mexican immigrants, the natives and the Africans brought over on slave ships, might never be forgiven. Though the world was changing, it was doing so slowly, and Roy had seen what one generation did to the next, poisoning minds, and drilling hate into their children.
Would the children, and children's children of the freed slaves, or the Mexicans, or the natives, continue to keep that hate alive? Long after the whites who had done those atrocities had died, would their children and children's children still be paying the price? Was that the true curse that had been laid on man when Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of Eden? Hatred and anger so ingrained in the seed of man that it passed from father to child like a mutation that couldn't be bred out.
Roy would have pointed to the Cartwrights and said, "There...there are two generations of the new mankind. There is the fine breeding stock of man's future." But no man was perfect. All men had that flaw, even if it was better disguised in the Cartwrights.
All that was left was hurt. More hurt than there were bodies to make it right.
As Roy mounted he sent a small prayer heavenward. It was a private moment of raw honesty with his maker that ended before he had cleared the dooryard, but one that he earnestly hoped God had been listening to. They were going to need an awful lot of help this time around. And more than man could muster.