Deep in the Heart

by jann

He sat alone atop a hill. Below, the rest of the Seven gathered in the night about a campfire, the occasional word or bit of laughter floating up the hill to him like sparks from the fire rising on warm air. He kept his back to them and his gaze turned from the light. Instead, he looked to the east, not in search of what he'd lost but simply to gaze upon it in memory if not in fact, his thoughts unformed, memory an ache in his breast he couldn't ease.

He didn't know what had brought on that deep-seated ache for a home that was not of walls or even people but of a land that stretched from horizon to horizon as if it were all the world, land and enough for a man to lose himself in and never be found. Only, he had lost himself not in the land but somewhere far away from it, had ridden across the border into some other land, miles and another border set between him and what would maybe never be home again.

It was childish, that ache in him. He'd ridden away from things more real, from roots not set down, from people and hopes and what might have been and never was. He'd ridden away from all those things and hadn't looked back. Yet there he sat atop a hill in the night with his back to friends and to the warmth of the fire around which they gathered. They were right there, real and solid in the night. And there he sat atop a hill alone and aching for what he couldn't have.

If he had any sense in him, he would get up and walk down that hill to the fire holding back the night, would regain the place between friends he had abandoned to walk up that hill alone. He'd never had much sense though. Not that kind, anyway. So he sat on his hill wanting to be somewhere else. Somewhere where the land was a country in itself, where a man could ride for days without seeing another human being, white or red, where he could lie at night beneath the stars and not feel alone.

He thought then maybe it was the stars that had brought on that ache in him. Or maybe it was being in company with friends. No matter that it felt good and right to be among them, it hadn't that certainty that was all he'd ever been sure of. People could up and leave or turn out to be someone you didn't recognize. They could hurt or grieve you, could lie to you and break your heart. People changed, didn't stay. Home with them was a temporary thing, like a blanket laid on the ground and ready to roll up and carry away. They were never a fixed place. You couldn't follow the stars back to them if you got turned around and unsure of your place with them. There was no map you could draw to remind you of the exact terrain so that you always knew how to get from one place to another without getting lost between.

It wasn't that he didn't like people or have need of them or want to be among them. It was only that sometimes he needed not to be among them, needed to be where there was only the land and the stars and him caught between.

Another round of laughter rose into the night, and with it came another sound, that of boot heels on hard ground. JD, the footsteps recognized. Even had the pattern of them not been familiar, he would have known it was JD climbing the hill to him -- the others of the Seven would have known better than to disturb a man who had set himself apart in the night, would have waited down by the fire for him to be ready to take up his place among them again. JD though was still too young to know how hurtful it could sometimes be to have another man draw near.

He wanted him gone, had the words ready on his lips that would send him back down the hill. But when the kid had stumbled his way in the dark to where he sat no longer alone, he came to a stop two feet away, looked to the east, and said, "You can see forever up here."

He spoke with an awe sounding in his voice that had Vin holding back those words readied for him and instead asking, "What do you know about forever, kid?"

His words were a question, not a challenge, and JD took them as such. "All's I know is it's a damned long time. Too long it seems sometimes, like when you're a kid waiting on something to happen that doesn't seem like it ever will. Other times, though, when you want a thing never to stop, it doesn't hardly seem long enough."

Forgetting in that moment that he didn't want JD there, Vin set his gaze on him instead of the home he couldn't see and said, "What kind of thing?"

JD shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. Like riding with you boys, maybe."

Vin huffed out a scoffing breath. "Getting shot at and beat on is that much fun you want it never to stop?"

"Nah, not that part." JD remained in place, his gaze still on forever. "That's just the price a man has to pay for being part of something bigger and better and truer than what most folks give their lives to."

That time Vin didn't scoff. Instead, he cocked his head as at a curiosity and said, "That the way you see us? As something bigger and better and truer? You figure dying is worth the glory of being one of us?"

JD turned towards him, surprise sounding in his voice as he said, "Don't you?"

Again Vin didn't scoff, the words next offered those of a man who had lived too much of life to care much at all for its ending. "Ain't no glory in dying, kid. There's a whole lot you can say about a bullet in the brain or through the gut, but glory ain't a word you'll ever hear those doing the dying use."

"Now, that just ain't true!" JD spoke the words with a fervor only those near the beginning of life could bring to a discussion about the ending of it. "There's lots of men died for glory."

Vin was back to scoffing. "How you figure that?"

"I read."

The kid's tone said he really thought a man could learn all there was to know from ink on paper, like there could ever be words sure enough and true enough to make all things known without a man having to actually live them. "Tell me, JD, that you ain't talking about what men the likes of Jock Steele write."

"I read other stuff too." JD's tone had turned defensive. "Real books. And newspapers. About war. About men standing up for what they believe in. About men who are willing to die for some right cause."

"And you figure that's you?"

"Well, ain't it? Ain't it me same as the rest of you saved the town? Saved the judge and little Billy? Saved them working girls and the folks on that wagon train?"

"Yeah, JD. That was you. It was us, too. But you reckon it's all about glory? About being bigger and better and truer?"

"Well, ain't it?"

Another ache started in Vin, one for a youth lost not so many years in the past. He remembered how it had felt to be that young, that sure of the world and one's place in it. To believe life was a grand adventure just waiting to be lived instead of a heavy weight that would wear a man down ‘til there was nothing left of him but dust. He remembered, but he was no longer that young, so he said, "Sometimes, JD, it's about doing no more than what's right, because you can or just because you can't not try. Sometimes it's about having your back up against a wall and no way out but through trouble coming right at you with guns blazing. And sometimes it's just about wanting to live."

"But not all the time."

The kid sounded so earnest Vin felt his bones creak with age.

JD went on, still in that earnest tone. "What about all those battles in the war just fought? What about Shiloh and Antietam? Or Gettysburg? What about other wars, other battles? Yorktown and Waterloo?" He paused. Then, as if he'd hit on the one argument he thought would prove his point, he said, "What about the Alamo?"

Vin laughed, the sound not one of derision but of dismissal. "The Alamo? Hell, kid, that wasn't about glory. That was about nothing but being a Texan."

JD was silent for a moment as if searching words out. Then, none apparently having come to mind, he said, "Huh?"

Vin remembered home then, not with an ache but with the pride of a stubborn man for a stubborn people. "You ain't never been to Texas, have you, JD?"

"No. But I'd like to. I'd like to join the Rangers. One day when this is all over."

Vin shook his head at the kind of innocent gumption that either got a man killed or landed him a fortune. Betting on the former when it came to JD, he said, "Hell, kid, Texas would chew you up and spit you out."

JD was all wounded pride. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just that you ain't an ornery enough cuss to stand up to Texas and not get slapped down." Vin turned back to the dark, sought out that land well missed and too long unseen. "You think on Texas and you likely think on something bigger and better and truer than other places could ever even hope to be. Truth is, though, Texas is a mean one. Summers there are so hot men have been known to go to Hell just to cool off. And the winters will mess with your mind something fierce -- one day you'll be peeling your clothes so's the sun can boil the sweat off you, the next you'll be scraping off the breath froze to your face. And as if that ain't bad enough, there's tornadoes and winds coming off the Gulf, droughts and floods and so much wet in the air you feel like you might as well grow gills and get it over with. Then there's bugs and critters that'll bite or sting a grown man to crying for his ma and land that don't give nothing a man don't fight to take. You want to survive there, you got to be just as mean -- if not meaner."

"You sound like you hate it."

"Texas?" It was Vin's turn to be surprised. "Hell, JD, the only folk who ever hate Texas are the ones Texas beats. And she ain't beat me yet. Don't reckon she ever will."

"So you aim to go back one day?"

"I reckon I do."

"Why, if it's as awful as you say?"

"'Cause it ain't awful -- it's Texas." JD wasn't getting it, so Vin tried to make it less plain. "Don't you ever miss home? Don't you ever want to go back to where the land beneath your feet is familiar ground?"

"I miss my momma." JD spoke with a quick certainty, that truth offered one he didn't need to think on. "But the place I grew up was never home. Pretty much everything we ever had was someone else's. The house. The furniture. The horses I used to sneak rides on. We never had anything I would have fought to keep. Hell, there wasn't anything worth staying for much less worth going back for."

That truth offered, JD sought out a different one. "What about you? Would you have fought to keep Texas? You know, like they did in the Alamo?"

They were back to that then. "You're thinking the Alamo was all about glory?"

"Well, wasn't it?"

"I don't know, JD. You're talking about Texans here, along with folks come from a bunch of otherwheres who might as well have been Texans for all the bullheaded notions that took them there and kept them in a crumbling-down mission they couldn't never have hoped to defend. I been there, JD, and I'm telling you they'd have been better off in the Seminole village than in that place."

"Then why'd they go there? Or stay?"

"Because they were Texans."

There was no room then in Vin for that ache that had had him climbing a hill. His memories of home had become a reminder of who he was and how honestly he'd come by that wild in him. Texans didn't just live on the land, it lived in them, became a part of who they were, made them who they were. He might have left Texas, but Texas hadn't left him.

With that pride in who he was and what he came from sounding, he said, "Texans ain't never been followers, JD. You ever seen a dog round up a flock of sheep? Where one sheep goes, they all go. That ain't Texans. You'd need as many dogs as you got Texans to round ‘em all up -- ain't a two of them ever going to agree to go in the same direction if there's any other way they can go and even if there ain't. So it's no use trying to tell one what to do -- like get gone from that crumbling- down mission. Them Texans figured they knew better, so they stayed. And not even the Mexican Army could get them gone."

Vin smiled with fond admiration for a stubborn people born of a stubborn land. "You come down to it, JD, there wasn't a fight that won Texas free -- or that nearly lost the chance at it -- that wasn't fought by men doing whatever they damned well pleased. Hell, truth be told, if Texas had been won free by men who were anything but quarrelsome, full of themselves, and stubborn as a mule, all doing whatever they felt like doing in the face of common sense and good advice to the contrary, it wouldn't be Texas."

JD chuffed out a small breath of disapproval. "You sound like you don't think the men in the Alamo were heroes."

"They stayed, didn't they?" Vin's smile faded and a new ache rose in him, for those lost rather than for what had been gained by their loss. "They thought it would be all right, that help would come. They thought they'd whup the Mexicans that time like they'd done all the times gone before, no matter that what went before weren't much at all except maybe there on that very ground they run the Mexicans off from a few months before."

Vin turned back to the night and stared into the dark across miles and years to a crumbling mission that had served the lesser gods of war rather than the One God it had been built to serve. "They thought they were something, JD, the way men do when things come easy. But it stopped being easy, there in the Alamo when the Texians were the ones having to defend it. It stopped being easy, and still they stayed. Whatever kind of men they were before, in their lives that stopped when they rode through the Alamo gates, they stayed where, after a time, they had to know they were going to die. You can say it was for glory or for Texas. I don't know, JD. Maybe that why they stayed. But I don't think it was glory or even Texas they were thinking on when they died. I don't think, in the end, it ever comes down to that."

Vin thought then on waiting for what didn't come, on meeting head on what did.

JD must have been thinking on that as well, as he said, "Would you have stayed?"

"I'd have stayed for Texas," Vin said -- and didn't say that he hadn't stayed for himself, not when it had meant risking his neck in a hangman's noose. That ache he'd thought banished came back then, and he turned away from it to JD, saying, "They were men who didn't want to die, JD, who couldn't have wanted to stay in that place once they realized help wasn't coming and that the Mexicans weren't going to wait forever to come over those walls. Them staying is what made them heroes, not their dying or even them deciding to plant themselves somewhere they maybe shouldn't have."

"You think they shouldn't have planted themselves there?" JD's words weren't a challenge but a searching out of some truth he wasn't sure he'd recognize or believe.

"I might be talking Mexican to you if they hadn't."

"So then, Texas is free because of them."

"Because of them and because of eighteen long minutes on a little field in another part of Texas. Because of about a thousand other Texans just as stubborn and contrary and not inclined to be led." Vin could have stopped there, but didn't. "They ran, JD. Did you know that? After the Alamo, after Goliad, the people and the Army loaded up their wagons and fled for the eastern border, running ahead of something bigger and meaner than they were. They stopped before they reached the border, though, on that field, and they did what they were of a mind to do, against all common sense and facing an army larger than theirs. You can call that glory if you're a mind to. Me, I call it being Texan."

JD must have gotten it then, as he said, "And being a Texan means you're going back one day, even if you might get hung for it?"

Vin said it then, simply because he couldn't not say it. "I ran, JD. Just like them other folk did when something bigger and meaner than them come after them. And just like them, one day I'll have to stop and make a run right at that bigger and meaner something coming at me. Either that or I'll have to keep on running."

Vin thought then on going home. That ache worked in him, yet laid over it was a determination and a pride in that land and its people, no matter how wrong-headed they might sometimes be. Remember the Alamo had once been his people's battle cry. Remember you're a Tanner had been his mother's. For him, it had always been: Remember Texas.

Soft laughter rose in the night, and Vin turned to look down the hill to the fire burning there and to his friends gathered around it. Not all of them though were there. One drawn near still stood beside him, with something more to say.

"You know, Vin," JD said. "I'm meaner than you think. And stubborner than any mule. Might be I could come in handy if you ever decide to make a run at that bigger and meaner something waiting on you back in Texas."

Vin turned to look up at him silhouetted against the night sky, a brash kid come West and bound for glory. Vin thought then, that perhaps, if he and the rest of the Seven could keep him alive long enough, it might could be he'd find something bigger and better and truer than glory to hang his heart on, something maybe even worth living forever for.

He stood and took one last look toward home. Then, turning away from it to JD, he said, "I'll keep that in mind, JD. For now though, what say we join the boys, grab us a piece of that fire they been hogging."

He started down the hill, only to stop when JD called his name. Turning, he said, "Yeah, JD?"

The kid's voice came soft and wondering out of the night. "If it wasn't glory they were thinking on when they died, those fellas in the Alamo, and if it wasn't Texas, what was it?"

"Family," Vin said without thought or hesitation. "Ain't that what it all comes down to in the end?" He slapped a hand against his leg. "Come on, then. I could use me some warming up."

Again he started down the hill, only to again stop when JD softly said, "But what if a man ain't got a family? What's he think on then?"

That time Vin didn't turn back. Instead, he fixed his gaze on five men gathered around a fire, five men who had watched each others' backs and risked their lives time and again for folk they didn't know for reasons they couldn't have named. "Then, JD," he said, "I reckon, you think on whatever's bigger and better and truer, on whatever it is you wish would go on forever."

"Yeah," JD said behind him, that truth one he recognized and believed. "Yeah, that'll work."

They went down the hill then to fire and friends, to laughter and to the night held back, and to something bigger and better and truer.

The End