The Last Ranch: A Novel of the New American West (The American West Trilogy, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL McGARRITY is the New York Times bestselling author of Backlands, Hard Country, the Anthony Award–nominated Tularosa, and eleven other bestselling Kevin Kerney crime novels. A former deputy sheriff for Santa Fe County, he also served as an instructor at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy and as an investigator for the New Mexico Public Defender's Office. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife, Emily Beth.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Michael McGarrity

1

In the pale moonlight that floated through her bedroom window, Anna Lynn Crawford studied Matthew Kerney’s face. Fortunately for both of them, tonight he slept quietly. Whenever he stayed the night at her house, he often woke with a start from bad dreams that left him shaking, and she would find him sitting silently alone on the front porch at first light. When he was restless, Anna Lynn took to curling up on the floor with a pillow and comforter in the hope her absence would have a calming effect on him. Sometimes his breathing eased and the night passed peacefully. But most mornings, she found him on the porch in her rocking chair, un- moving, his hands clutching the armrests, his face moist with sweat.

Six months earlier, Matt had returned home from the war with a patch covering his left eye, which had been destroyed in a land-mine explosion during the Allied invasion of Sicily. He only removed it at night. As he lay quietly sleeping, Anna Lynn snuggled close to examine the wound Matt insisted made him ugly.

His upper-left eyelid was missing completely, shredded during the explosion, and there were tiny, jagged shrapnel scars around the socket of the eye, which was covered in a murky film. There was a slight puffiness under the eye she hadn’t seen before. She wondered if it was causing him pain.

You’re still a handsome man, you fool, she thought to herself. You still look like you.

She’d told him that if he stopped wearing the patch, folks would soon pay the injury no mind. But Matt immediately dismissed the suggestion the two times she’d made it, the second time so vehemently that she hadn’t mentioned it since. She had to try again to persuade him to listen to reason but dreaded his reaction. He was, and he wasn’t, the man she knew before he went into the army.

What she knew about Matt’s war experience came mostly from an army press release printed in every New Mexico newspaper the week after his discharge from Fort Bliss, the army post outside of El Paso. He’d been decorated for bravery under fire for clearing a fortified enemy position above a beachhead, where troops had been pinned down and taking heavy casualties. His actions had allowed a battalion of men to move inland without suffering further serious losses. He’d been promoted to platoon sergeant on the spot and was later awarded another medal for using captured enemy horses to carry equipment through rugged, mountainous terrain, which aided the Allied advance against a large, retreating enemy force. He’d lost his eye in the final push to liberate the island and had been evacuated to a hospital ship, where he’d received the Purple Heart from a general after his surgery.

She snuggled closer and gazed at Matt’s face, remembering the only time he’d talked about those experiences. After making love early one morning, they’d sat quietly together on the veranda of his ranch house overlooking the wide expanse of the Tularosa Basin, her daughter, Ginny, sound asleep in bed and Matt’s father, Patrick, away in town. She’d broken the silence by asking Matthew to finally tell her what had happened to him in Sicily. It earned her a sad-faced grin and a loud chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“It was all a big frigging joke,” he answered without rancor.

“How so?” Anna Lynn asked.

Still smiling, Matt rose from his chair. “Wait here and I’ll show you.”

He returned and gave her two cartoons from the pages of an army newspaper. One showed a sergeant with a shiny medal pinned to his uniform explaining to a ragtag private that he’d been decorated for scaring the enemy away by speaking “Eye-talian” at them. The second cartoon displayed a grizzled sergeant pointing a finger at a sorrowful-looking horse, demanding to know if, as a POW, the animal would abide by the Geneva conventions.

Anna Lynn looked up from the cartoons. “I don’t see what’s so funny.”

Matt smiled at the only two memories of Sicily that brought him any pleasure to recall. “What makes them funny is they show exactly what happened to get me decorated like some kind of hero. On the beachhead, all I did was talk some Italian soldiers into not shooting at us anymore. They withdrew from their position and we were able to move inland. There was nothing heroic about it. Later on, when we were in the mountains, my platoon stumbled on a herd of abandoned enemy ponies that we commandeered for the regiment to use as pack animals in the high country. Because it helped force the Germans into a hurried retreat, I got another medal, and it wasn’t even my idea in the first place. That’s the sum total of my so-called bravery.”

Anna Lynn gazed at his face and his eye patch. “That may well be, but it doesn’t make you less of a hero. You were smart and saved lives, and besides you were gravely wounded.”

Matt’s mood shifted as he thought about the men in his platoon he’d lost. His expression turned somber. “I didn’t save enough lives. And I lost an eye for being stupid and not paying attention to what I was doing.”

The image of Pvt. Joey Cohen taking a bullet in his head, twirling around, and dropping dead at Matt’s feet replayed through his mind as it did at least once a day. He shook it off and pointed at the signature on the bottom-left corner of each cartoon. “I thought you would have noticed by now who drew these,” Matt said, trying to sound lighthearted. “They’re both signed, ‘Bill Mauldin—Sicily.’”

“Bill Mauldin!” Anna Lynn squealed in surprise. “Our very own little Billy Mauldin?”

Matt smiled and nodded. “Yep, the one and same scrawny kid who peddled his drawings and cartoons to folks up and down the west slope of the Sacramento Mountains. I still have a stack of them put away somewhere. He sends you his regards.”

“Oh, that sweet, lovely boy,” Anna Lynn said, blinking away a tear. “Is he a war correspondent?”

“Nope, he’s a soldier in the 45th Infantry Division, if he isn’t already among the dead from all the casualties we took in Italy.”

Anna Lynn’s face clouded at the mere thought of it. “Oh, please don’t let that be true.”

“I sure hope he survived,” Matt agreed. “I figure he’s gonna become rich and famous if he comes through the war alive and intact. The troops already love him.”

Matt took the cartoons from Anna Lynn’s hands. “That’s all the talking I want to do about my time in the army. I’m home now and that’s the end of it. Understand?”

Anna Lynn nodded. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

Matt had countenanced no more talk about the war after that morning, although he diligently followed the battlefront newspaper and radio reports, especially the ones from Europe, which often threw him into a funk. As time passed, his interest waned in anything or anybody other than the war, Anna Lynn’s five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ginny, and the ponies on his ranch. He withdrew, turned inward and silent. His visits to her farm became less frequent, their conversations, once so engaging, became awkward; their lovemaking, always passionate, turned perfunctory at best.

The changes between them chilled Anna Lynn. Here, close to him in her bed, his warm breath against her cheek, she wondered if she’d lost Matt completely because of the...