The Bleeding Man by Craig Strete Read Free Book Online

his wagon was weighed and unloaded, the others sat apart from him as if he was a
man of their race who was somehow not of their race. And the way women of his own kind passed
their eyes over him as if he were something unclean filled him with a chill that seized him by
the heart.
    One day he met
Droble at the weighing office, Droble who had two Riyall women. And as Gantry sat there, he
listened to the talk around him. The men were talk­ing about the changes around them, about the
men who had pioneered this land. The pioneers were send­ing their Riyall women back into the wild
lands from which they had come, sending away their half-breed children, sending them back to
their own kind; at least, the ones with any brains were, was what the men said. Droble turned
pale as he heard their conversa­tion, the idle chatter of men who had come to this world long
after others had made it soft and easy for them. Droble stood up and stalked out of the office
with a kind of hurtful violence. Droble still had his two Riyall women. Droble was the kind of
man who needed people, a loner who still must be a part of society. Later, as Gantry was picking
up his check for his crop, a man ran into the office shouting that Droble had just blown his head
off in the middle of the street. The men in the office all dashed out to see it for them­selves.
Gantry felt all the weight, the hopelessness of his mistakes come crashing down on him. It might
have been him out there on the street instead of Droble.
    He went home late
that morning, very, very drunk. In the morning, the last part of the night, the fatalness of his
mistakes was apparent to him. He was no Charlie Droble and he knew that the decision that Droble
had made was an easy one compared to the one he knew he would have to make. Couldn't help but
make.
    But home in his
own cabin, watching her and the boy eating, washing their food as was her custom, he found that
he did not have the strength to do it. He remembered back to the time before his people had
caught up with him. Had she ever really held him tenderly? Was it his imagination that had built
her into a person, into a human being? Perhaps she was a fabrication, a cold, emotionless
creature he had shaped with his imagination and his great need into more than what she really
was. She had never told him that she loved him, for there was no way for her to communi­cate
that, to tell him that. But he had always assumed it, hadn't he? Hadn't the care, the
expressionless but gentle caring for the boy convinced him of that?
    The winter came,
and with it a deep gloom that set­tled over the little cabin. There was no help for him­self,
Gantry knew. He was committed to her, to his son, and he .could not sever those ties. She in her
strange way sensed his great sorrow, and whether com­prehending its source or not, seemed to
spend more time with the boy, less time with him, a thing that Gantry experienced with a kind of
relief. He had found himself very critical of her lately, found him­self very quick to notice
faults in her, faults that had never seemed obvious to him before.
    The meteor shower
had lasted two days, longer than any other shower he ever remembered. He sat at the table eating
his food, lost in the kind of misery that comes over a child forced to stay inside when it rains
and there's nothing to do. He kept running it over and over in his mind, kept staring at them as
they ate their meal, washing each bite of food first. The day before, the boy had said his first
word. He had sensed it, had sensed that the boy was beginning to take on her per­sonality even
though the boy seemed to look a great deal like him. He had understood that first word of his and
it was one of her language and not his.
    It was funny how
that bothered him the most. That the child would speak her words and not his. And it came to him,
then, it came to him like a painful tear­ing sound, and he knew that he could not