Part 5
“Mulatto,” Nathan whispered in surprise.
“Yeah,” Chris rasped harshly.
Buck didn’t look at him as he said, “I don’t know
why Ezra didn’t like you that day, but it wasn’t because of your skin
color. For that matter, if Ezra had
really been a bigot, do you really think he would have gone with us at
all? We were going out there to protect
a tribe that was a good half former slaves, for crying out loud. Yet he goes with us, he keeps the children
entertained and out of the way, gets them to set up decoys to help us. I still remember what he told that one kid
about courage.”
Nathan and Chris looked at each other to see if the
either of them knew what Buck was talking about, but they both came up
blank. Seeing their confusion, Buck
quoted, “’There are two types of courage. There are those that seek battle and do not
fear death, like them. And there are those that run from battle, but will stand
and fight to the death if their loved ones are threatened, like them. That is true courage.’” Buck finally looked up at the end. “We were
the first group, the villagers were the second.
He knew what he was talking about, too.
I’d like to think that we’ve been growin’ into
the true courage group since then, but I’m thinkin’ we have a long ways to go
yet.”
Chris nodded, Ezra was a wise man at times, but he
could cloak that astute soul and hide it so well that you wondered how the man
had lived as long as he had. “Still
doesn’t explain that first day, but we may never know why, unless we can get
him to tell us.”
Nathan moved over beside where the insensate man
lay, still gripped by the fever. In his
mind, he tried to make sense of this new knowledge and fit it with what had
happened so long ago. A sickening thought came to him, and it showed on his
face.
“Nathan?” Chris asked, concerned about the suddenly
anguished expression on the healer’s face.
“Why did he go for me when he woke up?” Nathan
asked.
“You said he wasn’t seeing us,” Buck reminded him.
“No, he wasn’t, but he could have latched onto
something general,” Nathan said.
“Like skin color?” Chris asked,
his voice low.
Nathan nodded.
“They could have been black.”
Nathan swallowed his nausea and explained how he had come to that
conclusion. “Some would have considered her marrying a white man betrayal of
her people. Ezra said that he killed her
when he married her, so that would fit.
And Ezra said that whoever this was, she had helped. There are few white people that would need or
accept help from a colored woman.”
Buck swallowed repeatedly to keep from throwing
up. The harm men could do to each other
was something he could not fathom at times, but that a man could destroy a
woman, one of God’s most perfect creatures, because she had fallen in love with
and married a man of a different color, was something that he wasn’t going to
even try. It was completely
incomprehensible.
Chris’s rage was just waiting for something to
flatten, but there was no bandit to chase down and punish. This was something that had happened years
ago, and there was no one to vent on.
Ezra was unconscious and couldn’t be counted on to show up late for
patrol, giving Chris a reason to explode.
With a start, Chris realized how many times Ezra
had given him the release he need, just when he needed it. Ezra would calmly stand there and take
whatever verbal abuse Chris could dish out, and then go about his business as
if nothing had happened. Chris had a
sneaking suspicion that he did it on purpose.
How many times, he wondered, had Ezra stood by
and watched Chris’s building temper and decided that he should be the one to
bare the brunt of it. It was rarely
anything of any consequence that got Ezra into trouble, usually just being a
few minutes late for a scheduled shift or complaining a little too much about
things. Chris vowed then and there that
he as going to find some other way to vent his temper, because he knew if he
didn’t, Ezra would continue to draw Chris’s temper on himself.
Buck broke into his thoughts when he suddenly
asked, “What about the boys?”
“Huh?” Chris asked, not making a connection.
“The two boys in the picture,” Buck asked again.
Both men looked at Nathan, who visibly winced.
“They were probably killed, too.”
When Chris left the clinic a few minutes later, the
room was silent except for the harsh breathing of the sick man on the bed. Buck and Nathan were both thinking of how
badly they had misjudged the gregarious gambler. They had assumed that what they saw was the
reality of the man’s life. Even after
they met Maude and found out what she was and had done to her son, they never
stopped to re-evaluate what their concept of the man.
When they had first met him, Ezra had seemed like
your typical gambler. Greedy,
conceited, untrustworthy. It had
taken him almost two years to prove to them that he could be trusted. After the village, only the incident with the
assassin’s money cast any shadows on Ezra’s character, and that was as much
their fault as it had been his.
After a while, Vin and JD
started growing closer to the gambler.
The elder members of the group had been wary, lest Ezra became a bad
influence on them. Buck could remember
one particular occasion, when Nathan had started harping on Ezra about his
gambling. Ezra had eventually gotten tired
of it and left. JD had asked Nathan what
the big deal was and told him to leave Ezra alone. When Nathan had started arguing that he had
seen Ezra win a lot of money off of a local farmer who had a mortgage payment
due soon, JD had asked what the big deal was.
JD explained to him that Ezra had agreed to play
with the man for a fee, and then they had gone to the bank together to make the
payment. The farmer gotten to have some
fun playing what seemed to him like a high stakes poker game and make his payment
to the bank, too. Nathan had been
dumbfounded, and then complained that Ezra should have just told him that. Vin had spoken up
then, pointing out that Nathan hadn’t asked and it wasn’t any of his damn
business away.
Buck sat there wondering if there were others
things like it that they had jumped to conclusions about. Probably. It would take a quite a while for them to
make up for it, Buck mused. Looking at
the still figure on the bed, he just hoped they would get the chance to try.
