A/N1: A prelude to Book Two, much as Chapter One was to Book One.
The narration grows more complicated.
Heaven and Hell
Book Two:
The Hells Are Everywhere
CHAPTER TEN:
Overlook
Wednesday, September 30, 1885
Idaho Falls
Near the top of the hill, Sarah Walker, head hanging, sat astride an alert, deep-chested black stallion.
Rider and horse sat darkly in the dark shadow of a great pine, the shadow lengthening; the gathering evening made the outlines of the pine's shadow vague, dark bleeding into the growing dark.
Everything was darkening.
Sarah felt lost and alone, adrift. She forced herself to sit up straight in the saddle.
Sarah reached up to lower her hat but realized, again, that she did not have it. The nervous gesture was futile. Futility. She had left her hat in Chuck's room the last time they had talked. That night. More than talked - when they held each other. Chuck.
She named the ache inside her.
In the almost two weeks since that night, she had not been able to get away from the ranch alone. She had not been to town. Her father, David Shaw, or Daniel, or one of Daniel's men, was always around, around, always watching, watching. Watching. She was a field mouse on bare ground, exposed beneath a parliament of owls.
But Daniel was out of town again for a few days. Her father had gone hunting. Casey has run interference with Daniel's man. Casey did not ask her why she wanted him to do it; he just did it. But he told her to take care. He knows my heart is in town. She had gone to her room, donned her riding habit, and she had left the ranch house.
She mounted her sorrel, Sam, and rode him to a small farm near the ranch.
It was run by a past foreman of the Walker ranch, now too old and infirm to work. Her father had given the house and the land to the man, Justin Villa, and his wife, Yvonne. A gesture of thanks. There would be no Walker ranch without the Villas. The two were Sarah's closest friends and, in effect, her grandparents - as close as she would ever have to the reality.
Justin kept the black horse there for Sarah. The horse was wild, unbreakable, half-mad. Bloodthirsty. But Sarah broke him - or, better, she won a meeting of hearts and minds with him. He would let no one else near him. They kept him penned, quarantined, as it were, shut away from the other horses. He had killed two who had been penned with him.
No one on the ranch missed him when she took him to Justin; everyone had given up on him, despite his grandeur. They called him Demonio. Sarah did not name him. He was too much horse to name. But he knew her, her voice and soul, knew her as his rider. And she knew him, his whinny and spirit, knew him as her horse. All the rest were details.
Sarah changed clothes in Justin's barn, put on her black shirt and pants, and her long black cloak, pulled as much of her hair as she could beneath a large black bandana. Then she climbed on the black horse and rode away.
She had ridden to the spot where she first laid eyes on Chuck.
She had hoped to catch just a glimpse of him as the stage went past, but she had been forced to take a long way around. She had feared she would miss her glimpse, despite her horse's furious speed beneath her. Instead, she arrived to see Bob, obviously dead, on the road, and to see the hold-up in progress. She had a small hunting knife with her, but no rifle, no pistol; she had not intended to target-shoot, as she sometimes did on her black-garbed outings.
She could discover no tactic to intervene without worsening the situation. She could not risk Shaw knowing what she had done, wondering why she had been just there, just then. So she sat in unbearable tension and held her breath, trembling for Chuck and the others. Through a trick of acoustics, rocks and trees, she had been able to hear what was said below her and to hear Chuck resist Number Two.
Chuck thrilled her heart. She heard Two list the items in Chuck's pillowcase (pillowcase!), she memorized the short list. She was surprised he had a gun. After staying long enough to see Chuck's reaction to Bob's corpse, she left. She glanced back to see Chuck carrying Bob to the coach, then she crested the hill and could see no more. She rode at a distance behind the stagecoach as it headed to town. Once it arrived safely, she turned her horse and rode to Justin's. She changed clothes and horses and returned to the ranch.
Now she was in that spot again and trying to coax her heart into manageable order. She had to give Chuck up. She had to for his sake and for her father's, for the ranch's sake. If she did not marry Shaw, she might start another range war, a major one this time, and not just Chuck and her father but all her father's men - and even the men's families - might suffer for it.
Sarah did not believe she was under any illusions about Shaw. She knew he was an arrogant, cruel man. Her life with him would be long and loveless and lonely - if not...worse. She wondered, though, if it would also not be justice.
She had a past that shamed her - a crooked past that had led her and her father and (eventually) her mother to Idaho Falls, that had allowed them to buy the land and build the ranch. After traveling her crooked path, what right did she have to travel the straight and narrow path with Chuck? With Chuck, she thought, there was no shadow of turning.
A life with Shaw - that was her punishment, and her father's, for their past.
All Sarah did was turn, turn, turn. Even after her father 'went straight', there was still the turning, turning, the constant hiding of the past, fear of its revelation. The shadowy past. Sarah's mother had helped them both, and if Emma had lived, maybe all this, Sarah's life, would be different, better. But Emma had not lived, and Sarah had not had her mother long enough to master her mother's gentle candor, her mother's soft sweetness. Sarah knew she had it in her, as her birthright, but when she found it and showed it, as she had to Chuck that day at the cemetery, it always seemed to worsen her situation, not help it. Maybe her mother's death was a punishment too.
She took a breath and held it, released it slowly.
She reached behind and to her side and opened up a saddlebag. She pulled out the book she had taken from Chuck's room, the one Number Two mentioned in the hold-up, Swedenborg. Heaven and Hell.
She wondered at the 'and'. Why not 'or'? Who was this Swedenborg?
Opening the cover, she saw Chuck's name on the fly-leaf. She rubbed the name gently and softly with her hand.
What does this book mean to Chuck?
Why would he carry it all the way out here - the only book he carried?
Did he keep my ribbon?
Her horse pawed the ground restlessly beneath her. He was not used to her reading in the saddle. He was unsure of what she was doing, of what, if anything, she needed or wanted from him. She shut the book carefully and placed it back in her saddlebag. Reaching down, she stroked the horse's neck, soothing him.
As the sun forfeited the day, she took one long, last lingering look around.
The horizon shined orange, as if the meeting of earth and sky created a vehement heat, as if the horizon was ablaze. But vaulted above the orange was a deep, still blue. The landscape was overpowering, mighty and inscrutable. Sarah loved this country dearly. Her love of it was one of the reasons she and her black horse went on their secret journeyings.
She considered the beauty around her. Her breast swelled. - It was heaven.
She blessed Chuck, he lost to her. She cursed Daniel, she ensnared by him. Her heart ached. - It was also hell.
Heaven and hell.
A/N2: And so Book Two begins. In case you are confused, we haven't switched POVs, we've just added Sarah's to Chuck's.
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