Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

told the child. “But do not worry. I am here and I will keep you safe.”

To my astonishment, the child appeared to listen closely, and she nodded when Boon finished speaking. Boon smiled at her. The child did not, but kept her gaze upon Boon. An understanding was there that had nothing to do with me—something I could never understand or be a party to. I felt vaguely guilty in that moment, and I could almost grasp what Boon had been talking about. Not quite, but on the cusp. She was no fool, my dear friend Boon. But Christ knew I was.

Gulls screamed overhead and men shouted from every skiff and ship’s prow. Animals wandered free underfoot and the air at the water was cool and rank and felt thick in my throat. Boon touched the child’s face, studied her closely. So slight and pale, in need of a bath. She was all Boon could see for all the pell-mell madhouse confusion all around us. I tried to read her face, to see if it was the case that we were simply beaten. Her revenge aborted, her mission replaced with this silent child in whom she seemed to see so much of herself. And if so, what of all of it? The killings, the blood and bone, the fire and iron? Death did not mean much, most times. I never figured mine would. There would never be any children to carry on my worthless line, and I could not think of a single soul apart from Boon who would ever have reason to recount my name and life long after I got put in the cold earth to rot. Nevertheless, I liked to think I never took away a man’s life without cause, and that cause was in service to the private war into which I was conscripted. For all my effort to keep away from the War Between the States, Boonsri Angchuan snatched me up into battle all the same. And now, it appeared all for naught.

All except for the little ward now with us.

God in Heaven, I could have cried myself.

“I don’t know what we’re about no more,” I said. “And I do not care except for I will need a bottle of something strong wherever we are going.”

“You been sober so long I can’t say as I’m not shocked to hell you ain’t shaking all over,” Boon said.

“I drank some last night.”

“You never get your fill.”

“I ain’t yet, no.”

She shook her head. The girl looked from her to me and back again. I had no experience with kids, really. To be honest, I was mostly spooked by her.

“We are not done,” Boon said then, and as though that settled anything, she took the child by the hand and they walked together along the docks to the north.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“She’s dead, you know,” she said.

“Who is dead? Your mother?”

She kept walking, the child’s tiny hand in hers.

“Boon?”

No answer came. There was nothing else to do but catch up.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The next couple of days were spent on the periphery of the city, wandering through small mining camps where mostly we were met with suspicious men who were much better armed than we. There could not have been one speck of color left in all California by then by my reckoning, but I figured men would keep trying for it until all the world burned up and maybe some after. For the first day and a half I could not figure out Boon’s objective and for the large part I just hoped she hadn’t cracked and decided to look for gold instead of vengeance. It wasn’t until we reached a derelict shack sandwiched between two tremendous rocks north of San Francisco, near a creek and alongside a narrow canyon, that I understood otherwise. She crept up to a cold firepit beside the place and hovered her palm over top of it just long enough to determine that it was warm enough to have been recently used.

“We keep going,” she said.

Boon hadn’t said much of anything to me in the time since we’d absconded from the city, so it was only then I gathered that she was looking for an abandoned camp to settle into while she healed up and we sorted out what was next. There was plenty of her squatting down next to the girl, whispering to her so that I could not hear, but I was little more than a camp follower and I confess that I came to resent it.

It was hard going afoot, though on the third day we reached the Grizzly Flat Road off the old Carson Trail and caught a ride with a small caravan of Mormons, disappointed with the prospects of California and turning back toward Utah. They all eyed us cagily and I could not blame them, for not one of us did not look like we’d been through hell and the Mormons were not to know whether it was a hell of our own making. Boon and the child rode in the back of a wagon with most of the other women, while I sat up on the lazy board with a scowling teamster and stared at the oxen’s asses for the rest of the day. The teamster never spoke a word to me. He never even met my eyes.

We disembarked at Placerville and shared a short and silent meal with the Mormons, consisting of salt pork and hardtack and creek water. I soaked my portion of the hardtack in the water to soften it. Otherwise it was unpalatable.

The Mormons made camp and Boon fell into some conspiratorial meeting with one of the men leading the caravan, apart from the fire at a stand of sycamores. When she returned with the child to the campfire, she said, “There is an old shack down the middle fork of the river, up on the flat. These people stayed in it before and say it is livable. We’ll hole up there