Free Bitterroot by James Lee Burke

hard inside my hands, and in minutes the ground around the stump was littered with white strips of kindling.
    I held the ax blade flat against the stump with my knee and filed it sharp, then attacked another pile of wood.
    My head was singing with blood, my palms tingling. I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro up on the edge of the tree line, his coat hitched back of his revolver, and I knew what was really on my mind.
    The adrenaline rush that came with the smell of gunpowder and horse sweat during our raids down into Coahuila had the same residual claim on my soul that heroin has on an intravenous addict’s. In my sleep I desired it in almost a sexual fashion. It drove me to the grace and loveliness of women’s thighs. It made me yearn for absolution and kept me in the Catholic confessional. It made me sometimes sit in the darkness with L.Q.‘s blue-black custom-made .45, its yellowed ivory grips like moonlight between my fingers.
    I went into the house and showered inside the tin stall and kept my head under the hot water for a long time. There was an old bullet wound, like a putty-colored welted star, on top of my foot, and another on my arm and another on my chest, two inches above the lung. I never associated them with pain, because I had felt only numbness when I was hit.
    In fact, the memories they caused in me had never given me trepidation about mortality. Instead, they reminded me of a potential in myself I did not wish to recognize.
    I started to comb my hair, but Maisey’s robe hung over the only mirror in the room. I removed it and put it on a clothes hanger and hooked the hanger on top of the closet door. The robe was pink and covered with depictions of kittens playing with balls of string. I tried to imagine what Doc was feeling, but I don’t believe that anyone could, not unless he has looked into his daughter’s eyes after she has been systematically degraded by subhumans whose level of cruelty is in direct measure to their level of cowardice.
    My hair was reddish-blond, like my father’s, but there were strands of white in it now, and neither time nor experience had taught me how to deal with the violent legacy that my great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Holland, a besotted drover and gunfighter and Baptist preacher, had bequeathed his descendants.
    I had admonished and cautioned Doc, but in truth I felt Maisey’s attackers were born for a cottonwood tree.
     
     
    I DRESSED in fresh clothes and slipped on my boots and went back into the living room. Doc was scraping the ashes out of the fireplace with a small metal scoop and dropping them into a bucket that he covered with a lid each time the ashes puffed into the air.
    “The older you get, the more you look like your dad. He was a good-looking fellow, wasn’t he?” Doc said.
    “Family trait,” I said.
    He wiped soot off his face with his sleeve and grinned. He waited for me to speak again, reading my expression with more perception than made me comfortable.
    “I thought I might go into town,” I said.
    “What for?”
    I cleared my throat slightly.
    “If Cleo’s not at the clinic, I thought I might invite her to lunch,” I said.
    “You took her to the rodeo, didn’t you?”
    “I guess I did.”
    “You want some advice? Most of us have fond memories of first love because it was innocent and we didn’t exploit it to solve our problems. Later on we use romance like dope. Headstones don’t keep people in the grave and neither does getting laid,” he replied. He turned his back on me and scraped a load of black ash from the firestones and dropped it into the bucket.
    “That’s a little bit strong, Doc.”
      I thought he would turn around and grin again and perhaps indicate some form of apology.
    But he didn’t.
     
     
    WHEN I DROVE into the Jocko Valley the meadows and hillsides were covered with sunlight, but the sky in the north had turned the color of scorched tin, and I could see lightning pulsing in the clouds above the ridgeline.
    Just as