A man can be a poor excuse for a man and still find a woman who'll love him. But it's when a woman shows that man that he's more than what he was, that he's also what he's capable of becoming and that she wants to come along for the ride to find out ... that's when a man knows he's found a woman with the grit to stand by him through it all, come what may in life.

Women have that ability. I believe the Lord made them the nurturers because men are not selfless enough to love like mothers love. There are some who point to the Bible to explain the role of women and they are not wrong.

But all I ever had in life that was worth really knowing about women, I learned by observing the women who loved me. The two who made the biggest impact on me were my mom and Jessie.

My mother loved me because it was an instinct and because I had come out of her. She used to tell me that she'd loved me from the moment she realized I was growing inside her. She said she'd sit and talk to me about the world I'd find when I was finally born. She said she wanted to fill me with hope and love.

I wish she hadn't died. I have a feeling that I'd be the man she would have thought I was capable of becoming if she'd lived long enough for me to find out what kind of man she saw in me.

All those years, from then to now, I'd never met another woman who I ever just knew loved me for me. Not for what she could make me into, which is never anything permanent because a man don't change for anyone but himself, truthfully. But she loved me for who she saw. She saw my faults; they never mattered, they just were, she said. She saw my good points; they were what she concentrated on. She listened to my hopes and dreams ... she told me hers.

Riding along that trail, knowing Gila Bend was maybe two hours hard running away, I made this pledge to try to make at least some of her dreams come true. That's when I knew I was going to ask her to marry me. I started laughing.

"Good Lord, Cort, you shoulda bought a ring in Yuma City!" I shouted to the sky.

She hadn't needed a ring to say yes. I knew she wouldn't. I waited two days until we went on a picnic at Chandler Spring. I made her a necklace of daisies, knotted together carefully while I listened to her dream-soaked visions of what it would be like to be traveling to Europe to see fashions and art. When I hung the necklace on her, she told me she no longer had to go to Europe to see the greatest treasure of the art world because she was looking right at it.

And she'd meant it.

That's how Jessie is. She can say things like that, things other folks would say and you'd laugh at them ... but when Jessie said them, they were from her heart.

My Jessie, I thought as I watched her twirl around wearing nothing but her camisole and slip and the daisy necklace. When she twirled back close to me, I grabbed her hand and drew her to a stop.

I told her that if she married me, I'd take her to Europe some day and I'd give her babies and I'd love her forever and I'd make her happy and I'd make her proud to be my wife. I held up a clover chain ring I'd been knotting together while she'd been twirling around with the daisy necklace and I promised her a diamond for that finger to take its place if she'd say yes.

She just stood there looking at me and then she started crying. I hugged in around her waist and buried my face in her belly. I felt her droop her body over mine; I heard her whispering. I gathered her in to me. We sat there, all wrapped up in each other.

"We getting married then?"

"When can we do it, do you suppose?"

"If that's a yes, Jessie, I just need ... I am far from a perfect man. But I love you like no man's ever going to. And I mean that. You know I do."

"I know you do. And I will love you the same way, Cort. Forever."

I held her face in my hands and searched her eyes. This woman who'd lost her husband, who'd once thought she'd never survive his death as anything but an unfeeling shell of a person ... she was using the word 'forever' when it came to loving me. That's the kind of woman Jessie was. I have never to this day forgotten the power of that realization.

We made love right there. It was not hurried or desperate. It was not a celebration. It was a forever kind of lovemaking. It was the deepest commitment of my life.

She tastes so good, Jessie does. Her mouth is like the sweetest sensation on my tongue. Sometimes I think I'll never again feel that rage of mine when she's holding me and kissing me ... she makes these little sounds when she kisses me. I try to listen for them because I know each one of them. There's one that's when she finds herself so pleased to have my tongue on hers. There's this one she does that's deep inside her throat that is a cross between a gasp and a curse ... she makes that sound when she wants more and thinks she'll never get enough. And there's one that's like this little soft release of her spirit and that's when she surrenders to me totally.

Her skin tastes good, too. It's a different kind of taste. It's not really sweet; it's like sunshine mixed with a woman's sweat. It's clean but just on the edge of earthy. It's real and it's invigorating. Sweet Lord. Then there's her taste below. There're really two distinct tastes I get down there. There's that taste of just her secret place. That's so mixed in with her natural odor there, between her thighs, that it's hard to think of the taste without the smell. It is tangy, sharp, salty, musty. It makes me feel powerful to have it on my tongue.

When she gets excited, starts moving with my touch, she cannot hold back the flow of her essence. It tastes soft, unexpected even now, mysterious, complicated. I told her once that sometimes I have wondered if I like the taste of her fluid or the taste of her tongue better. She giggled and giggled when I told her that. She was still laughing even as I slid inside her.

I love to see her laugh. She does it with style. It's not like some women laugh, where they put their whole body into it and you wonder if they'd be embarrassed to see how they looked. She just flings herself into a laugh and enjoys the hell out of it. I love it because it makes me feel so good.

But I also like to see her pant out my name. That's the other end of the spectrum, I think, when it comes to me and her. There's that laugh ... and there's her unable to control herself when I'm loving her and she's loving me. You should see her face. I think she's so beautiful when she laughs but then I see her coming and I know this is her real beauty ... I imagine part of it is that I know this is a beauty only I will ever see. No one will ever witness how beautiful she is when she comes for me.

Sometimes after we make love and she's lying in my arms, I wonder what our babies will look like. But I think I know. They will look like she does when I sneak into her neat little house after I've been on the trail for too long. She sleeps as if there is nothing to fear in this world. Her face is tranquil and incredibly beautiful in its innocence. Almost every time I come to her like this, I sit on the floor next to her bed and just watch her sleeping face. I can tell when she's dreaming because her eyelids flutter and sometimes, she mumbles in her sleep. Her hands clench and release on the edge of her blanket. Her hair floats around her. Sometimes, I have to gently move it from her face just so I can really look upon her.

When I do move to wake her, there is this particular smile she gives me when she realizes I'm with her again. And she always says the same thing: "Cort! You are the devil's own coming in here like this."

We grin at each other; it just never fails.

And then she's clutching on to my shirt and pulling me atop her. She likes to bury her nose in my neck and tell me she missed my smell. Believe me, I tell her, she wouldn't like it if I hadn't stopped at the hotel and taken a washing before coming over there.

So that was me. A child of God who became a murdering outlaw who evolved somehow into a man of God who fell from that height to learn how to choose the life he'd lead and in the process, had found a woman who thought him capable of being a good man, her husband and a father to her children.

I was proud of what I'd become in her eyes. Those hazel eyes with gold flecks that could see me and not see what it had taken to get to where I was with her. She told me that the one thing she'd noticed first about me was that I held myself with dignity no matter who I was dealing with when I'd come to town to take over as the new Marshal.

The first thing I'd noticed about her was how she rarely talked in anything much more than a monotone except when she talked about books.

It was the first thing I ever got her to discuss with me when I felt like she was actually listening and responding. Every other time, like when I would go in her store knowing there was probably something in there I could buy, I felt like when she talked to me that she was waiting for the conversation to be over. It was like she just knew before I opened my mouth that whatever it was we'd say to each other, it wasn't going to be anything that mattered in the long run.

But I'd noticed that she was always reading a book whenever I went in the mercantile and she wasn't busy dealing with customers or tidying up in there. And I had seen her sitting on her porch, on this white wicker chair, just reading and never looking up when I'd ride by to see what she was doing.

I don't know really what first caught my eye. It sure wasn't the conversation, I liked to tease her. She always blushed when I would. I think maybe it was just this sense of her; not to mention that I thought she was one of the most striking, honest-looking women I'd seen in too many years. Well, that and she had breasts that would make me hard at night when I'd think on them and wish to earn the right to caress them with my lips.

Until the day I finally figured out that she'd talk to me about books, I wasn't sure she even knew me except sometimes I'd walk next to her on the way into church, hold the door open, smile, tip my hat and greet her with a soft, "Morning, ma'am." She'd look at me then with a return smile. But that was it, really.

Then one day, I asked her to recommend a book. I told her I was interested in ordering a book that would make me feel like I'd gone to a foreign country and wondered if she knew of one she could order from Denver for me. I asked her that because every book I saw her reading dealt with other places in the world. She started sharing her books with me. At first, she gave me books on England. Then Italy. I wanted books on art after that.  I mean, this was not for show or to gain her attention; I really did want them. There had been chapters in the book on Italy about the Sistine Chapel and I realized that I had heard my mother speak of the art in the churches of Rome ... and I was seized with the wish to see what she'd been talking about for the first time in my life.

Jessie must have seen the enthusiasm; she must have wanted nothing more than to foster it. She gave me some of her favorites and told me they were a present. I took that first real conversation with her and began calling on her after that. We simply fit together. There was a part of each of us that must have known its mate.

We thought it was fate that brought us together. But had we made our fate or had fate been thrust upon us?

It was something that built slowly but once it began to blossom, we were both rushing. We loved in that same wild, natural, all-encompassing way. And as she loved me, I put away the past that had haunted me in exchange for a present and a future that I chose. And as I loved her, she closed off the pit of loss and filled it with the reality of what we had together.

Maybe a month after she said she'd marry me, we set the date. We planned it to take place in three weeks when the circuit priest would be coming in for his four days of the month. I sent him a wire and let him know about the wedding the day I rode out of town heading for Yuma City to get Jessie's ring. She wanted only a gold band; I figured I'd get one for myself and let her put that on me at the ceremony after I put hers on her finger.

I got home two weeks before the wedding. When I rode up to her little house, I never once guessed that my past was back with vengeance.

There's a lot of stuff written in the Bible that my mother swore was to be taken as literal fact. It's the Gospel truth, she used to say. I used to wonder if I would go to Hell for thinking maybe some of it wasn't much more than an exaggeration meant to instill fear in ignorant pagans.

When I was living as a priest, I used to preach only the portions of the Bible that I could believe had a basis in reality. I have always been a proud, stubborn man. This was one of the ways I believe it was evident.

In the Bible, there is a parable I always liked because it seemed practical and right. It's about how one can tell that summer is close at hand when one sees the new growth on the fig tree. And in that same manner, St. Luke tells us, one must look for the signs that God is nigh at hand for when these signs come to pass, we can lift up our heads knowing that our redemption draweth nigh.

I rode up to Jessie's house after nightfall. I figured the light I saw in her window meant she was awake and perhaps hoping that I would arrive on this night.

But in my prideful belief it meant nothing than that she was eager to have me be with her, I missed every sign that something was wrong. And therefore, I missed the signs that might have warned me that my moment of reconciliation with my sins was at hand. Not that I could have avoided this reparation that was drawing nigh. But I would never have sacrificed Jessie on the altar of retribution if ever given the choice.

I never made more than a passing notice of a buggy drawn up near her home. I did note the way her curtains were tightly drawn but did not find it remarkable at the time. When I knocked, I mistook the look upon her face as the jitters of a bride-to-be who faced marriage to me within less than two weeks.

There was a man inside her home. It was only in seeing him pointing a gun at me that I began to take in the telltale details I'd missed. Jessie's fear. The rip in her bodice. The atmosphere heavy with hate and anger.

Hannah stepped from behind the door; she'd been hidden from my sight as Jessie had let me in.

I would have fought, even then, except the man did the one thing he must have known would still my heart. He pointed the gun at Jessie's head. I heard the hammer cock back and raised my hands.

Hannah took my guns from me. I was told to kneel in the middle of Jessie's drawing room, where a warmly glowing lantern had seemed the most welcome sign to me not minutes before. Now, its wavering light seemed to make me sweat as I watched Jessie's attempts to be brave about to crumble.

"You'll be fine, honey. We'll just do as they say," I told her, keeping my voice calm.

"I don't understand, Cort. What they've told me ... I swore to them they had the wrong man ..." Her voice broke and she went to come to me but the man yanked her hair back hard.

"You son of a bitch," I grated out to him when I saw her neck snap back and she fell to her knees, off balance and unprepared for such treatment at a man's hands. I was almost off the floor except I stopped instantly when he shoved the gun's barrel into her mouth.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for this ... I'd never before had anything worth as much to me as Jessie was. I didn't know how to face this threat to her that I was helpless to fight because he'd kill her if I did ... and yet ... I had once lived a life that prepared me in the most obscene way to know what the man with the gun wanted me to do to give him the impetus to go through with what he had planned. But I also knew just what I needed to do to save Jessie's life. I could not break before him. I had to call up the person who could scare him, who could make him hesitate with just a look ... who could make him lose a fraction of a second that I could exploit. I looked in Jessie's eyes and saw her belief in me.

I looked up at that man and stoked my rage again. I let it build inside me until he could read it in my eyes. I used the most deadly voice I could. "I'm the U.S. Marshal in this territory. You think you'll get away with this?"

Only an empty stare of a lost man came from his eyes as he looked from Jessie to me.

"Do you remember me?" he asked me.

Jesus, help me do this, I thought. I looked at Hannah. I shook my head. She slapped me hard; my pistol gripped in her hand gave the blow extra force. I tasted the tinny blood bloom in my mouth. My eyes never left hers. I wanted her to see that I would not break before them. But I could bend.

"You must be Jeremiah," I said, turning my eyes to look back into his. He grinned in satisfaction. But his grin faded instantly when I continued to stare at him.

"Cort, you know them? I can't believe ... I thought maybe they were lying ... I was so sure," Jessie said, her soft voice confused and scared.

"Honey, just trust in me, okay? They don't want to hurt you; it's only me."

"You're wrong, mister. I plan to use her to hurt you," Jeremiah told me. He'd wrapped his hand in Jessie's hair and was cruelly pulling her up to him. I felt the cool barrel of my own pistol as Hannah lodged it against my jaw. But I never took my eyes from Jeremiah. They were both my adversaries but each had to be played differently if I was to exploit their weaknesses.

His face was in Jessie's by then. He spoke to her but his words were meant for me. "This man here, your intended, he thinks he got away with it all, see? But he didn't. You have no idea what they did to my mother, do you? She died the next spring. Imagine that? All your life knowing that some pig took your mother, made her bleed, hurt her? That she killed herself rather than bring his seed into the world?"

"Cort would never ..." Jessie's words were breathy, frantic.

"Shut up! You know nothing about what this animal did to us!" Hannah screamed out. In her fury, the gun wavered in her hand. "Just do it and we can go."

"Don't touch her," I told Jeremiah, my voice calm. I felt my body slow down. "You'll never live to have another woman if you do. Remember who you're dealing with, son. And remember this ... I was not the one to do that to your mother."

"You were there. You were the one I had nightmares about. What you did to me ... you have no idea how much I have hated you," he told me. I watched reason flicker in his eyes.

"John Herod is dead. That's the man who did that to your mother. Your mother's had her vengeance. Don't be like him. Don't be like the man who did that to your mother."

I was concentrating so hard on Jeremiah that I did not see Hannah's boot coming at me. She caught me just under my ribs; it was a vicious strike that jarred my entire body. I overplayed the jolt and fell to my side, groaning for all I was worth.

"You may have everyone else fooled, but we know who you are," Hannah spit out to me.

When Jeremiah ordered me to rise and sit in the straight chair that Hannah dragged into the center of the room, I played as if I was in agony, moaning about a broken rib and feigning difficulty straightening up. I took long enough that Jeremiah got impatient with what he was already planning to do.

I saw Jessie wince in pain when he reached back to slap her; she gave a tiny cry of fear when he grabbed her hair and drove her face-first into her sofa.

Before I could blink, Hannah was before me, the gun leveled at my head. By the time she moved, telling me to watch what would happen to the woman I loved now that I knew there was a gun trained on me, Jeremiah was moving over Jessie. He had a knee in her spine and the gun at the back of her head. He turned to look at me, frozen in the pre-motion of a man who knows he's defeated in the long run, but willing to take whatever victory he can in the short run because scoring at least one point is more important than winning the war.

"Now who's the big man? Now who's scared?" he asked me. 

I had to keep thinking. I had to save Jessie. It would never end with a rape. Jessie would fight him. I knew she would. Once she realized what the real stakes were, she would try to fight. He wanted that. He wanted me to watch her fight and to be broken before me. He wanted a reason to beat her.

And if she didn't fight? I looked at her body, lying there on that sofa, her arms beneath her, her legs still. Then I saw one hand slide out and clutch at the cushion so hard her knuckles turned white.

Please, Jessie, believe in me. I prayed she would give me time to take my shot.

It seemed obvious to me that Hannah must have left Yuma City with one intention ... if the law would not make me pay, she would. Tracking me down to where I lived would have been no problem. Once in Gila Bend, they must have found it easy to learn about my life and my love. They had personal experience, courtesy of me and John Herod, of how much more it can hurt a person to see a loved one suffer.

"Call him off her," I told Hannah. "I won't be responsible for what I do if he hurts her."

"Do you have any idea what you did to our family?" she asked me. "You destroyed us as surely as if you'd taken our lives."

"I'm sorry for that. I surely am, Hannah. But you're wrong if you think doing this will make things better for you."

"Better? You think we're doing this so we'll feel better? We're doing this for them. For my parents. For revenge."

"Your parents would not want this," I told her. I saw her hand waver and her eyes cloud up. I glanced at Jessie. Her face had turned to me and I saw her wide eyes filled with blank fear as Jeremiah began pulling her skirt up. I looked back into Hannah's eyes and saw hers were wide with the reality of what she was doing. It's never as easy as a good person thinks it will be to exact such revenge. "They don't want you to die with a mortal sin on your souls, Hannah. I know they were Christians. I saw the Bible in your house. I saw the cross you wore. Don't go down this path. There is no hope for you in eternity if you do this. Learn from me, Hannah. I will never outlive my sins against your family. You don't want that kind of life."

"I ... No, you are just trying to confuse me. I ... won't ... I  ...," she stammered and looked at Jeremiah. The gun wobbled in her grip. "Jeremiah, I don't know if I can do this anymore ... Maybe ..."

"Stop talking to her!" Jeremiah yelled out. "Hannah! Just keep the damned gun on the bastard. He's just trying to confuse you. Remember what he did. Remember how he touched you."

I heard Jessie's muffled cry and then heard a rip of cloth. This was when my rage became the old monster I had once relied upon to survive when life made the choices for me and I had no power.

"This is what you want, Hannah? Has your entire life from then to now been about nothing but me? I see you've never married, girl. Did you spend all these years waiting on me to come back and take you like I wouldn't that night?" I said it soft, a whisper. But there was a lethal mix in there if only she'd been really listening.

Because my words stopped her movements and shook her to her core. I knew they would. I sensed there might have been some truth within them. But all I really wanted was the chaos to cover what I was about to do to them. Her mouth opened as my words stung into her already confused state. The second her hand holding the gun drooped and I could see Jeremiah was more involved in what he was doing to Jessie than in me, I moved.

John Herod was always impressed with my speed. That natural gift had never failed me when I'd needed it.

I was out of the chair too fast for her to even react. I had her neck in a vise grip and the gun in my own hand ... she hadn't even uttered a sound.

"Get off her, you God-damned bastard," I told Jeremiah.

He was slow on the draw. Slower than me ... I'd counted upon that. Again, my pride. But I did not kill him. I spared his life out of some instant wish to find a better person inside my raging soul who could believe that God is the only One capable of granting true redemption to a man like me and that moments like this define us for eternity.

I shot the arm that controlled his gun hand. I heard the pistol clatter to the floor. He howled and crumpled from the couch, landing much too close to Jessie.

"The next one will be through your heart," I told Jeremiah. "Now, move away from her."

I got this instant memory of the demonstration of my abilities with a gun that I'd done at John Herod's instructions. We used Jeremiah as the example in order to place fear inside his father, a man I knew was good just from watching how his family was close, supportive and loving. That demonstration had been effective; it was to that day. He whimpered and sobbed at the bloody mess of his arm but Jeremiah crawled to where I indicated with my gun.

Hannah had been struggling against the pressure of my arm on her throat. When she clawed at me, I shook her hard and choked her tighter until she went limp. I threw her on the floor in the direction of her brother.

"Go on and kill us," Jeremiah finally gasped out to me. "It's what you want to do."

It was what I wanted to do.

It was.

He must have been able to see it in my eyes.

The rage I felt inside was all consuming. He'd touched my woman. He'd hit her, he'd pawed her ... he was planning to rape her. And why? To weaken me. To destroy me.

To destroy the first really good, really important choice I'd made in my entire life.

And what raged worse was the knowledge that my hand in the destruction of their family had been just as calculated to instill fear and pain. The difference was ... they'd done nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I edged over to the sofa just as Hannah coughed and came to. She reached for her brother as if on instinct. She rocked him in her arms ... huddling on the floor together as red oozed and dripped from his arm down to his hand. I remembered how their father and older brother had supported each other through their long, cold ordeal.

I kicked his gun under the sofa, out of his reach. Only then could I really look at Jessie. I slipped down to my knees next to her.

She lay stock still. Her dress was hiked up; I pulled her skirts down gently to cover her bare legs. Her arms were held tightly to her chest, protecting herself. When I reached to stroke her arm, she shrunk back from me in horror.

"Jessie? Honey, it's over now. No one's going to hurt you."

Others had heard the gunshot. I heard a pounding on the door. Minutes later, one of my deputies burst into the room. He was out of breath and surely worried. By then, Jessie's neighbors were there. The two men helped my deputy haul Jeremiah and Hannah away to the jail. I told them I'd be there shortly.

Suddenly, silence was all that remained in that parlor. I went to pick Jessie up in my arms and carry her into her bedroom. She fought me off. She walked on wobbly feet, under her own power, her head high.

In all the time I'd known Jessie, I'd never known one time when she'd had reason to fear. So to see her rejecting my attempts to remove her fear was humbling to a man of my pride. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to make it right. I wanted to tell her that I'd never let her be hurt, that I'd keep her safe. But all I could do was stand there in her parlor, alone and humbled, as she cried in her bedroom.

I got one of her neighbor ladies to stay with her until I could return.

It took me two hours before I was ready to go back to be with Jessie. I let the deputy stow them in their jail cells. Doc Johansen tended to Jeremiah's wound.

While all that was going on, I acted on some instinct to lessen the damage to Jeremiah and Hannah. I am sure it was the overriding sense of guilt for how my life had twisted theirs ... and perhaps even because I believed there might have been something to what the Bible had to say about turning the other cheek and about the quality of mercy being improved with abundant use.

I sent wires to Phoenix, Yuma City, Mesa and Tucson asking the Marshals there for help in locating any relatives of Jeremiah and Hannah. This was the first time I ever learned their last name was Wilson. I only learned that because I needed to track their relatives down. Somehow, that seemed to make them real people to me for the first time since my life had changed theirs on that snowy, bitter night so long ago.

It was all I could do for them but at least it was something. But I honestly didn't know how much it would help, even if their family came to them. There was little doubt they'd be sent to prison. After all, they'd tried to kill a U.S. Marshal.

As I rode slowly through the town, heading for the only person who'd made it the one place on earth I'd think of as home, I couldn't help feeling as if maybe Hannah and Jeremiah hadn't been justified in what they had tried to do. Weren't they entitled to a sense of justice for the crime I'd committed against them? What difference could it make to Hannah's sense of outrage that I had recanted my old ways, sought to repay the world by choosing a life of service to others if it didn't benefit her in a personal way?

Would Jeremiah feel that I had ever really done reparation for my sins if those I'd sinned against still felt violated?

There were a lot of people who would condemn Hannah and Jeremiah for what they'd tried to do to me and Jessie because all they would ever really need to know was that these two kids had attacked a lawman ... someone who took on the dangerous but necessary job of standing against the forces of anarchy and helped protect their little corner of our world.

Would they, though, have felt different if I wasn't someone they depended upon now? Would they have perhaps sympathized with Hannah and Jeremiah if but for the fact that I was now wearing a silver badge?

Many people say foolish things when they would best be served by their own silence. I am not a man given to saying two words when one or none would do just as well. This does not make me wiser than another who speaks out; it is often a measure of the prideful nature of my desire to not appear foolish.

There have been times in my life when I have known the exact words to say to comfort one whose world has changed for the worse. At times, I have even approached a kind of terse eloquence. I believe there are many who think my usual reticence to speak in long narrative tales is a mark of some depth of character or great hidden stores of heroism.

More often than not, I do not speak unless I believe what I have to say will be welcomed by the person to whom the words are directed.

When I was a younger man, I was mute in times of rage. I let my fists or my fingers upon a trigger do my speaking for me. In the years since I met the priest who proved a catalyst to change me into a man who did not accept fate but chose his life's course, I used my inherent rage as best I could. By controlling that rage, one benefit was that I found myself able to think ahead to what I'd want to gain and the rage would become determination to be strong enough to walk through any fire to reach the end result I desired.

Even when I was a man of God, I did not preach aloud in wild or long sermons as if I was wise enough to know the way. I did believe I knew something important about the way people should not take. However, most people, in my experience, do not want to learn from another's mistakes; they always believe their situation is unique and that no one has ever really faced the specific set of circumstances. In so doing, their pride refuses to let them see this fundamental truth: there are only so many choices a person can make.

You can accept or you can fight. You can live or you can die. You can kill or you can save. You can walk away or you can intercede. You can rage or you can love. You can run or you can stay. These are the choices of life; they are not mutually exclusive.

I remember pleading with Ellen once, long ago in Redemption, to learn from my mistakes. I wanted her to see that her choice to exact revenge would do more damage to herself than it ever would to John Herod.

Those words of mine came back to me when I saw Jessie over the days that followed what had been done to her by Jeremiah. The reality of that counsel to Ellen had been this: even I was willing to repeat a sin from my past when I was so proud as to believe that my circumstances were so unique that no one else had ever faced them. The truth was, while I prayed she would forsake her bloody search for personal revenge, I was even then staking my route to gain retribution for the sins John Herod had committed against me. I told myself I was doing it for others; that I would put a stop to his ability to hurt or kill anyone else.

But in the years since, I admitted to myself that my purpose was not as pure as I might have wanted to believe. There was a part of me that remained single-mindedly focused on killing John out of malice for what he'd done to drag me from the path I'd chosen. I had never seen, for so long, that one reason I had wanted out of Redemption was because I had never forgiven myself for the things I did in that town to help bring John down.

The Bible says that any man can be forgiven if he seeks forgiveness. It's in forgiving himself that a man is most likely to fail.

It was a devil's bargain, wrought in hell. It no longer mattered that I had reformed my ways, that I had chosen a new life that allowed me to use my deadly skills to help the helpless and to keep order among the wicked. Every step I ever took with John Herod had come back to haunt me in the form of Hannah and Jeremiah.

I had stopped the actual rape of this woman I loved. Only in that moment had I even realized how much I loved Jessie. When I'd heard the sounds of the impending violation of her innocence, I felt a rage within me that obliterated the years between what I'd been and what I was. I used that and I knew I was using it. I felt no mercy against those who would touch Jessie. I was not gentle with them; I spared them only to spare myself the agony of guilt I instinctively knew I'd feel if I had killed those against whom I'd already sinned.

Within the Proverbs in my Bible, I remember a passage about mercy. It says that the merciful man does his own soul good; but the cruel man falls under the weight of his own wickedness.

Why then did I not feel good about the mercy I showed to Hannah and Jeremiah?

How could a man feel good to see the woman he loves as she cries out to him for a sense of safety she no longer feels unless he is with her? How could a man feel good when this woman rages at him for answers to his past that he knows will forever taint her ability to see within him the capacity for love and goodness she once saw?

I spent a lot of time praying to a God with whom I'd not intimately conversed in some time. I prayed not for me, but for Jessie. I prayed to have this heavy weight of revenge taken from my heart.

For in those days, I turned from a man whose instinct was to show mercy into a man who believed his woman would not be safe unless he exacted revenge enough to assure that no member of the Wilson family would ever bother her again.

What were my choices after all? I could stay and build my life with Jessie with this burden between us. I could leave and she would be safe from my past. I could insist Jeremiah and Hannah pay for what they'd done to Jessie. I could get them released from jail and hope they would not bother us again. Not all of these choices were mutually exclusive.

For two nights, Jessie passed word to me through the neighbor lady who sat vigil over her. She wished to heal; she wished to be alone. 

On the third day, I returned in the late afternoon and sat in Jessie's white wicker chair upon her porch. I made a choice to stay. I was not going to give up a life with her. How could I? She was my life. But I would face what had happened; I would put it right for us both.

When I first met Jessie, I would have said it was a loser's hand that this fine, beautiful woman would ever open to me. I sat there on her porch that day and thought about the days of my life since I'd walked the path of loving Jessie.

Like every other major path, I had never once considered that this one was a path I would not be on forever. Not once we fell in love.

The first time we touched each other and allowed it to turn into something more than kissing or caressing had been a dust-caked, dry hot late summer day. We had taken to using a buggy borrowed from the livery to ride out into the desert every Sunday after church. Most days, Jessie packed a basket she filled with fixings of the best picnics I'd ever seen. I used to tease her that she would make a horrible wife because she'd make her husband fat within the first year with all that good food.

I was always careful with Jessie. It was the most difficult thing I'd ever done with a woman before. I simply knew that if it happened that we would make love, I wanted it to be a mutual decision. Truthfully, I wasn't that used to being with a woman like her ... a woman of grace and dignity and fire who reserved her charms for only the man she loved. I never wanted to pressure her ... though I do admit, there were times when I was holding her that I did whisper to her of my desire. The evidence of my desire I never hid from her. I never felt I had to.

She was not a virgin; she'd been married before. She knew all about what a man felt for a woman. But I knew, always, that for Jessie, it was never just a physical release. It was a commitment and it was an emotional experience.

Maybe I was already fitting her for her bridal gown, even back then.

I never have known why it happened that day. In the weeks leading up to it, we'd seemed to draw back from each other. I do remember wondering if what I'd held hopes for, that the love I thought I felt for her, if that wasn't just an illusion of proximity and similar interests.

We rode out to a natural spring tucked into a small valley in the foothills just east of town. It was one of our favorite places to picnic. Between the small Joshua trees and the tall saguaro, there was shade near the water where we stopped. The stream that led away from the spring was choked with large rocks and deep pools formed along its route. We had spread a blanket near one of those pools and let the horse roam to fill her belly with the sweet water and the sprigs of grass nearby.

I can still remember how Jessie's skin glowed as she undressed before me. There is something about the sight of Jessie unbinding her underskirt that from that first time has proven among the most arousing, sensual sights.

But it was the view of her bending over that filled my mind with deeply erotic impulses. My Lord. She had turned from the intensity of my gaze to neatly lay her camisole upon the blanket. She had been completely naked. Pale, warm skin that I longed to touch to learn its secrets. When she bent over, every base instinct I'd ever had roared in my ears. My physical reaction was instant; when she turned back, her eyes dropped straight down, perhaps driven to my groin out of natural curiosity.

Her eyes flared; her lashes lowered as she looked upon my erection. She pulled in a breath before looking into my eyes. I was filled with a surge of pride over her obvious excitement and admiration for my endowment.

"This is what the sight of you does to me," I told her.

She had walked right up to where I knelt on the blanket, with nothing left on me but my unbuttoned shirt. "Can you feel what the sight of you does for me?" she asked me.

It was one of those few times when I have been so carried away by the experience with a woman that when it's over, I have to wrack my brain to see if I have memories of having cared for the woman rather than only myself. I had vivid awareness of the feeling of putting myself inside her. I know that before that, all I wanted to do was kiss her ... everywhere ... nowhere was safe from my mouth. She kissed whatever parts of my body I let her get near. I was far more consumed with the need to possess her than I was with what she could do for me.

Inside her, she felt warm, soft ... I sunk into her, inside her ... I had trouble breathing. She told me not to hold back. I remember holding her hips; I remember my hands stroking and caressing her breasts; I remember kissing her. I remember groaning; both her and me. I remember feeling I could not hold back. I think I remember gripping hard into her hips to hold her steady while I pumped, fast mixed with slow.

She came and I felt it inside me, as if I shared her orgasm. I remember that feeling and remember the way it awed me to kiss her after she came. I can to this day feel her small hands clutching into my ass, pulling me into her even as I thrust. I remember at the end that all I was capable of doing was leaning on my elbows, my fists clenched above her head, and just losing myself in this need to pump and thrust inside her until I came. More than anything, I remember the sound of my own coming. It was from the pit of me; it was a surrender to the rightness, to the power.

In a hush after the exhilaration of that experience, we told each other of our feelings of love. She cried in my arms and I rolled to my side to cradle her forever. I do not believe there was ever a moment in my life when I felt more powerful, more virile, more at peace.

I know I fell asleep after that. I had this weird dream of running toward a stagecoach only to have it turn into a barn. Inside the barn, I wondered why I was there. I saw my father holding a pitchfork. He turned to me and he was wearing a hat John used to wear when I knew him. I woke with a start. It took me a while to remember I was not in the barn but by the side of a stream.

When I was fully awake, I knew I was alone. For a moment, I wondered if I'd been dreaming Jessie. I heard a noise in the water and turned to find myself staring at this miraculous image of Venus splashing in the sea. For a moment, I expected her to float above the foam and offer me a pearl. I was fascinated to watch a Goddess cleanse her body in that stream, sending cascades of water between her legs and under her arms and even on her face.

And then the apparition turned to me ... and I realized I'd been lingering in my dream but that I'd been watching a real woman all along. Jessie.

From that day forward, we were rarely apart. She showed me a woman of depth, strength, character, passion and intelligence. She laughed often when she was with me. Nothing ever made me happier than to realize I was responsible for her joy. I felt myself relax finally around another human. I fell in love completely, absolutely, madly.

I thought about all these things, all these wonders of Jessie's impact on me as I sat on her porch days after she'd nearly been ripped from my life. I thought about how I had to find out if what had happened now meant she would never want me again.

She opened the door when I knocked. She said she'd seen me out there on her porch; that she'd watched me. I stood there looking at her; my fingers trembled as I touched the remnants of a bruise along her jaw. I could not move other than that. I wanted to take her in my arms, to hold her tight and never let go. But I didn't know if she even wanted me anymore.

"Make me safe again," she whispered to me as her hands slid slowly up my chest. "I know you can do it. I know you would never have let him ... Would you?"

"Never," I choked out. I reached for her body. Her arms slowly snaked around my waist; I circled her within the hold of my arms. I rocked her gently. My cheek slowly rested atop her head. We stayed like that for so long. I could feel the wild flutter of her heart begin to slow. Only then did I release her so that I could draw her inside her home with me. I shut the door behind us and took her hand. She refused to let me draw her toward the bedroom.

"I have never seen you like that night ... your voice ... your eyes ..." She said it softly.

"Would you like to know why they hate me?" I asked her.

Her eyes never faltered. All the reasons I loved her were right there, just right there in that one tiny, inherent ability of hers to never blink from the truth. "They told me."

"Nothing I ever do will make that right."

"You once told me about killing that priest. You told me about being an outlaw. I just never asked for details. All that ... it was in the past. It never seemed important. But now ..."

"Now you wonder just how bad I am capable of being? It's okay to think those things about me."

"It's not that."

I saw it all before me just then. My life was what it was. Who had I ever been to think my past entitled me to an easy future? The God my mother had believed in, the Christ I had preached about with a belief that gave me dignity and a nobility of purpose ... the Bible was never going to make it easy on me. It preached one thing and then another. There were contradictions but in some ways there was only one absolute: a mortal sin could never be forgiven, no matter how many times the Word as written by the Apostles claimed forgiveness was ours if we asked it of a merciful God.

"Jessie ..." I heard my own voice break and dropped the hand of this woman I would never stop loving. How could I expect that if God would not forgive me, that she would? "It's okay. Giving you up will be the hardest thing I will ever do but I would never feel right staying when you have such doubts about me."

"Don't you dare judge me, Cort," she said. Her voice was like a whip in the still of that house. I flinched, I know that I did. "Who do you think you are to judge anyone?"

When I looked at her, I finally saw the real evidence of her anger written as plainly as if the accusation 'killer' was etched in the air between us. "You have the right to hate me, I suppose. Somehow, I had hoped you loved me enough to ..."

"Loved you enough to what?"

My jaw tightened in an involuntary show of temper. But as quickly as it did, I felt the practiced release of the rage into the cynicism I wore like a shell. I had never lied to her. I was who I was. I thought ... all this time, I had such belief in her, that she saw the way I struggled and had overcome my own past to make myself over into the man I really could be when I was making choices.

"Enough to know me, Jessie. I'm the same man you fell in love with. The man you said you'd wed. I am only who I am. If it's not good enough for you, best we both know it now." I felt my hand slide up to the front of my holster; I recognized the belligerence of the stance just as surely as I recognized that superior smile in the face of fate that I felt coming across my lips. "I have lived with my own sins far too long. I face the punishment as I always have. Alone."

"How do you live with it?" Again, her eyes would not flinch from mine.

"What else would you have me do, Jessie? Was I supposed to die to gain absolution? That won't work; I am condemned in the eyes of our Lord. I know that. I cannot erase my past. I feel tremendous guilt for what I did but that's how life is, you see?"

She turned away and wandered about her drawing room. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her chest. I felt like walking right up to her and shaking her hard. How could she let me down like this? I lashed out in words instead.

"You can't always make things right just because later you regret what you did. Sometimes, all you can do is shoulder the guilt, to use the weight of it to grow stronger as you carry it all by yourself. You think that's easy?" I heard my voice rise and saw her jump at my rage. It ebbed from me; I felt empty in its wake. My voice was so much softer when I said, "It's not, Jessie. It's never going to be. I won't shirk from it; it's my responsibility. But why must it be all that I am? At what point am I permitted to earn some happiness in life? Never? Is that it? I can never be happy again? I won't accept that. I have another life now. I worked hard for it. I worked hard to earn the right to love you and for you to love me."

Her feet stopped moving. Her chin came up and she looked out her front window; I saw her eyes linger upon the chair on her porch where I'd sat making my choice to stay and fight for what I wanted with her. I didn't move to hold her. Some instinct told me that she needed a certain amount of distance from me in order to tell me.

"I don't understand why you didn't kill him." It was such an unexpected sentiment for her to express; the coldness in her voice made me realize I hadn't understood what she'd been feeling. And that I didn't know what was coming next. She turned then and looked at me. "I felt like I learned something I never knew about you when you didn't."

"Do you wish I had killed him ... maybe both of them?"

"I did for a while, yes. All that time I waited for you to return from Yuma City, they told me things about you. And, of course, you have told me enough about your past ways that I could believe this could be true even if I wondered if you might tell a different perspective on it. But I knew you would not shrink from admitting your own transgressions. But what they did to me ... it was wrong, Cort. I have been so angry that they did that. That he ... I kept thinking, Cort will kill them for this ..."

"To wish for an avenging angel to strike at your foes is a natural desire. Do you wish for me to make them pay for what they did to you?"

"Yes, I do." I saw tears in her eyes. "And, no, I don't."

It was like a punch in my heart. I wanted so badly to save her from this thirst I knew she was feeling. "Jessie ... don't go down the wrong road."

"I need you, Cort," she suddenly yelled at me. "I can't make it in life without you. I was angry with you when he touched me. Angry. So angry, you have no idea. But now I see ... I'm so very confused by how I feel. How can I be angry at you and yet need you so badly?"

I'd felt this way before. Angry to my core with someone I loved and needed more than I'd ever realized before she let me down. I remember that feeling ... when my mother died, I was a 14-year-old boy who found himself suddenly abandoned. I hated my mother for a long time for leaving me alone. And at the same time, I needed her with an ache that never left me. It took me a long time to reconcile those feelings. It took me a long time to understand them and not be embarrassed by them. I forgave her long before I forgave myself. Even today, I remember the abject misery of not having her around to help me figure out why my rage stemmed from my love for her.

What would I have most wanted in those early days in dealing with the loss of my innocence? 

I wrapped Jessie in my arms even as she struggled and cried. It took a long time for her to rage against me and tire from the emotional release. Through it all, I held her tight to me. I wanted her to believe in me ... to see I now understood just what kind of man I was capable of being because of her love.

When I felt Jessie give out, I picked her up as if she were a baby and carried her to her sofa. I held her and rocked her until the shadows of night chased away the glow of day.

"Do you want to know something, Cort?" she whispered at one point. I stroked her hair and told her to tell me. "When I was watching you today, out on my porch? I was struck so hard by the look on your face. You were afraid. I've never seen you afraid before. I always thought you were the one man I ever knew who never got scared."

"We all fear, Jessie. All of us."

"What scares you?"

"The thought of you being taken from me."

"Oh." Her arms reached around my neck and she clung tightly to me. "You'd never let that happen."

"Never."

We sat in the dark. I listened to her breathe and felt the reality of her body pressed to mine. I am a weak man, I suppose. What I desired more than anything in that moment was to make her mine again. To make mine the only man's hands that touched her skin. But I resisted the urge because I knew it was wrong to put my needs before hers.

For as long as I live on this earth, I will remember the moment in that night when I realized that I had misjudged Jessie ... when I gained a new understanding that a man seldom fully knows a woman's mind. I had thought she had been disgusted by my past's intrusion on her present. I had not thought that it might have been more about her own confusion over the instincts she felt versus the way she might have assumed she'd feel.

It happened when the silence between us seemed to draw us closer. When maybe we simply clung to the one person we most believed in.

"Sometimes, it does a woman a world of good to be given a clear moment to remember why she has chosen a man. And that's what I had in that moment when I knew you'd come there that night. I knew I could count upon you, Cort. I knew I was safe once you were there. Even when I was angry at you for what was happening ... I know what kind of man you are. I knew you loved me too much to let them kill me. I have always believed in you. I always will."

She felt my sigh and hugged in tighter. She was so close, so open ... so vulnerable. I wanted nothing more than to keep her safe. She was the most precious thing I'd ever had in my life.

And the thing about it was this: in this time when I felt that my highest duty as a man was to protect and shelter the woman I loved, her instincts as a woman were to reach out and give me strength by believing in me. If I'd never grasped it before, it was then that I felt the enormity of what her love gave me.

A man's life takes many twists and turns. Each path brings with it new horizons. To walk on, to weather what comes, to find the courage ... my way forward would be forever entwined with this woman who through it all still believed in my essential value.

Maybe this was the only proof I'd get in this life that even for a man who'd once raged as the Devil's own, there was some forgiveness possible from a merciful God.