Read Online Sacred Is the Wind by Kerry Newcomb - Free Book Online Page B

father. Aurelia Bragg reached out and slapped her son across the face, rocking him back against his brother. Tom, only eight, stared with mute incomprehension. Cries of the wounded and war whoops of the Cheyenne breaking from cover mixed with the brittle exchange of gunfire as an age-old tragedy played out the final minutes of its final act.
    â€œMama!” Jubal screamed. His face was red from her hand so moist with the blood of his father. Jubal pushed himself off the ground. He didn’t want to leave. Not without his mother. Fear had turned his flesh icy cold. He shivered and tried to find the strength to speak, daring another blow to try to change his mother’s mind. But his voice was lost in the din. Bullets thwacked into the wagon bed, showering the boys with splinters. Somewhere up ahead a keg of gunpowder, secreted in the flaming wreckage of a covered wagon, exploded, rending red flesh and white into unidentifiable fragments. Tommy Bragg began to cry. Jubal dragged his brother to his feet and wasted precious seconds dusting him off.
    â€œIt’s all right,” he said.
    Twelve years later, Jubal still remembered saying, “It’s all right.” Just as he remembered turning back to his mother, only to find her sprawled across his father, part of her skull torn away by a piece of shrapnel as large as a wheel hub from the obliterated wagon. Jubal grabbed his brother by the arm and ran. He ran then with the sounds of slaughter at his heels. He ran and did not stop until he reached the riverbank. A brave struggled up from the water’s edge. The two boys barreled full tilt into the warrior and knocked him backward down the bank, the boys came tumbling after. A jumble of arms and legs, a twist of torsos, separating at last. The moment froze as it ever did, for this was the climax of his nightmare … the brave’s face streaked with yellow war paint, his war club raised as he emerged, dripping from the shallows, Tommy curled against his older brother, as Jubal, his father’s cap-and-ball revolver gripped in both hands, worked the hammer back, the barrel trembling. “Fire … for God’s sake, fire!” a voice screamed. Jubal hesitated, staring into the face of the Indian, transfixed, as the savage’s face seemed to change, puzzling him. Then, the moment broke. Kill him! Kill him! The brave’s shrill war cry hung on the air, he lunged with his knife. The boy squeezed the trigger.
    A shot, a flash of gunpowder illuminated the wall nearest the bed. The lead slug blew a foot-long strip of wood away. Jubal screamed, fired again. A water pitcher exploded into a thousand china fragments. The door to the room flew back and Tom in pajamas rushed in from the hallway. Jubal spun toward the light. Marley loomed out of the blackness and knocked Tom to the floor as Jubal realized too late that he was no longer at the scene of the massacre but safe in his own bed at the Hippolyte Hotel in Castle Rock. He squeezed the trigger on his Colt dragoon. The revolver roared a third time and an inquisitive resident of the hotel ducked and retreated down the hall as a chunk of the doorsill turned to sawdust; the bullet ricocheting toward the other bedroom doors that hurriedly slammed shut.
    â€œColonel!” Marley shouted.
    â€œWhat the …?” Tom muttered, trying to rise. Marley shoved him back down to the floor.
    Perspiration dripped from his jawline, beaded Jubal’s forehead, rolled into his eyes, stung there. Jubal did not care. He lowered the gun, his hand trembling until it reached the bedding. Even in the gloom the room began to take on a definition, a caneback rocker, a nightstand, two hurricane lamps at either end of a couch that Marley had been using for a bed. Moonlight pressed against the drapes, seeped in silver slivers where the velvet failed to meet.
    â€œC’mon,” Marley said, lifting Tom by the scruff of his pajamas and propelling him toward the