Montana Sky

out.”
    She began to see, too well, the bitterness of the woman planting the bitter seeds in the child. “I’m sorry, Jim. Maybe he didn’t believe her.”
    “He should’ve!” He slammed his fist on the rock. “He’d done it with her. He’d come to her regular, promised her he’d take care of her. She told me how he promised her, and she believed him. And even when she had me, took me to him to show him I had his eyes, and his hair, he turned her away so she had to go back to Missoula and beg her family to help her out. It’s because he was married to Louella then, snazzy Louella, and he’d just got her pregnant with Tess. So he didn’t want me. He figured he had a son coming. But he was wrong. I was the only son he was going to get.”
    “You had a chance to hurt Lily. In the cave, when Cooke had her.” He was too good with a rope, she thought. She couldn’t budge the knots. “You didn’t.”
    “I wouldn’t hurt her. I thought about it, sure. Early on when I first found out what he’d done in his will. I thought about it, but they’re kin.” He drew a deep breath, rubbed the side of his hand where he’d bruised it on the rock. “I promised my ma I’d come back to Mercy, I’d get what was mine by right of birth. She was sickly, having me made hersickly. That’s why she needed the drugs to help her get through the day. But she done her best for me. She told me all about my father, all about Mercy. She’d sit for hours and tell me about all of it, and what I’d do when I was old enough to go right up to his face and tell him I wanted what was mine.”
    “Where’s your mother now, Jim?”
    “She died. They said the drugs killed her, or she used them to kill herself. But it was Jack Mercy who killed her, Will, when he turned her away. She was dead from then on. When I found her lying there, cold, I promised her again I’d come to Mercy and do what she wanted.”
    “You found her.” There was sweat pouring down her face now. The heat had eased from the air, but sweat ran and dribbled into the raw skin of her wrists to sting. “I’m sorry. So sorry.” And she was, desperately.
    “I was sixteen. We were in Billings then, and I did some work at the feedlots when I could. She was stone dead when I came home and found her, lying there in piss and vomit. She shouldn’t have died that way. He killed her, Will.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “I figured on killing him. That was my first thought. I’d had a lot of practice killing. Stray cats and dogs mostly. I used to pretend they had his face when I carved them up. Only had a pocketknife to work with back then.”
    Her stomach rolled, rose up to her throat, and was swallowed down. “Your family, your mother’s family?”
    “I wasn’t going to go begging there, after they’d pushed her aside. Hell with them.” He picked up the stick, stabbed it at the rock. “Hell with them.”
    She couldn’t hold off the shudders as he stabbed the rock, over and over, repeating that phrase while his face twisted. Then he stopped, his face cleared, and he tapped the stick musically like a man keeping time.
    “And I’d made a promise,” he continued. “I went to Mercy, and I faced him down. He laughed at me, called me the bastard son of a whore. I took a swing at him, and he knocked me flat. He said I wasn’t no son of his, but he’dgive me a job. If I lasted a month, he’d give me a paycheck. He turned me over to Ham.”
    A fist squeezed her heart. Ham. Had someone found him? Was anyone helping him? “Did Ham know?”
    “I always figured he did. He never spoke of it, but I figured it. I look like the old man, don’t you think?”
    There was such hope, such pathetic pride in the question. Willa nodded. “I suppose you do.”
    “I worked for him. I worked hard, I learned, and I worked harder. He gave me a knife when I turned twenty-one.” He slid it out of its sheath, turned it under the moonlight. A Crocodile Bowie, with an eight-inch blade. The sawtooth top glittered like fangs.
    “That means something, Willa, a man gives his son a fine knife like this.”
    And the sweat on her skin turned to ice. “He gave you the knife.”
    “I loved him. I’d have worked the skin off my hands for him, and the bastard knew it. I never asked him for a thing more, because in my heart I knew when the time came he’d give me what was mine by right. I was his son. His only son. But he gave me nothing but this knife. When the time came, he gave