I dreamed of a morning
when nobody asked
which road the sheriff would take.
A morning with a wash tub,
a hot plate of eggs,
and a wage I could name out loud.
Rusk laughed when I told him.
We were camped above Dry Creek,
three miles from the freight yard.
He was oiling his boots.
I was twenty.
He still called me boy.
He had found me at fifteen
asleep beneath a butcher’s cart.
He bought me soup,
then asked me to watch a road.
For five years
one favor had followed another.
That night the gang was going down
to take the freight workers’ pay.
I knew the gate,
the guard,
the hour he ate his supper.
Finding those things was my work.
“We could leave it,” I said.
“There’s a ranch beyond the ridge.
They’re hiring men.”
Rusk pulled his boot on slowly.
“Men with names they can give.
You’ll last one hour.”
He wasn’t wrong about my name.
Kit Vale was on a notice
outside the freight office.
I had seen it while I counted guards.
The drawing gave me a beard
I hadn’t grown yet.
The theft beneath it was real.
I asked him once more.
He struck his boot against a stone.
“You ate my food.
You rode my horse.
You don’t leave me in the dark.”
I took that horse into town
and stopped at my sister’s laundry.
Dell was lifting shirts from a line.
When she saw me,
she left one sleeve pinned to the wire.
I offered her money.
She looked at the coins
and asked where they came from.
I told her about the robbery last month.
Then I told her about tonight.
The shirts smelled of soap.
A man’s collar had been worn thin
at the back,
where I had never thought to look.
He’d paid Dell to wash it.
She’d worked before she took his coin.
“Can I stay?” I asked.
She drew the last shirt down.
“You can eat.
You can wash your face.
You cannot make me hide you.”
A deputy had passed her door
not ten minutes before.
He was waiting at the town gate
with two men and a lantern.
They’d heard our gang was near.
“They’ll put me away,” I said.
I wanted her to say they wouldn’t.
She put a bowl beside the stove.
She did not say it.
I ate, leaving the money
untouched beside my hand.
Then I rode to the freight yard.
The guard was cutting an onion
outside his hut.
“They’re coming for the pay,” I said.
“Before nine. From the creek.”
He held the knife still.
“Who are you?”
I told him my name.
His eyes went to the office wall.
Then he called two workers
to lock the money in the iron room.
He sent a third for the deputy.
He kept me in the open yard.
I could still have ridden away.
The horse knew the creek.
She pulled toward it,
wanting her oats
and the other horses.
I got down and held her reins.
Rusk came alone to check the gate.
He saw me standing by the guard.
His face went quiet.
“Give me the horse,” he said.
I remembered the soup.
I remembered his hand
pulling a blanket over me.
I remembered a freight driver
we had left tied beside the road.
Both memories belonged to him.
“No,” I said.
He walked toward me.
I stood close to the horse’s neck.
I had a gun in my belt,
but I did not pull it.
The deputy’s lantern rose
above the gate.
Rusk heard the men behind it.
He stepped back,
then ran between the freight sheds.
They didn’t catch him that night.
They took my gun
and the stolen coins in my pouch.
They took the horse
until her owner could be found.
The deputy put a hand on my shoulder
and told me to walk ahead.
Dell met us at the gate.
She had brought my old coat.
It was clean.
It didn’t make me clean.
I wore it anyway.
That winter I learned the prison wash.
One officer counted sheets.
Another counted us.
My wrists grew sore
turning heavy wet cloth.
The court had set years,
not weeks.
My small laundry wage
went partly to the people
whose money we had taken.
There was no song about that.
Dell visited when she could close early.
She talked of a leaking roof,
of customers who argued over stains,
of a woman who wanted
her husband’s shirt ironed twice.
She didn’t promise me a place.
In the morning I stood at the tub.
The bell rang.
There were twenty sheets before dinner.
I put my hands in warm water
and began with the first.
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