Sinclair’s eyes widened. “William?” he whispered.
William balled up his scarf and put it in his pocket. “I heard you were out here. Tried to send you a letter. Some fool told me you rejected it and said you don’t have no son. Is that true? Am I no longer your son?”
“Letter?” Sinclair asked. “What letter? Oh, was that you? Aw, shoot, I was in town making a delivery and some fool come running up to me, waving this envelope in the air, shouting my name in the street for all folk to hear, and I thought he was trying to give me something from the government. That’s the letter I refused. He didn’t say nothing about it being from you.”
“I’m glad to hear that. There were plenty of times over the past few years I’d have had it easier with a different last name than the one you gave me, but I still never changed it.”
“That’s good, son. You look good. God, you’re tall now. Got yourself a nice wagon. A fine horse. You must be doing well for yourself.”
“I’m doing all right,” William said.
Sinclair ran his hands through his hair and tried to smooth it down. He was suddenly aware of the filthy tools lying on the ground near his pelt-stretching boards and the stinking wet clothes he’d hung from them. He looked back at the cabin and said, “You want to come in? I’ve got a stew cooking and some whiskey. You’re welcome to it.”
“Actually, there’s something I came out here to show you.” William looked over his shoulder at the covered wagon. “Come on out. Don’t be shy.”
Sinclair leaned to the side to look past his son and saw the canvas flap move on the wagon’s side. A tiny hand pushed the canvas out of the way and a little boy, no older than five, jumped down. He had curly blond hair with blue eyes and he was dressed in a bright blue suit. He ran toward William as fast as he could and threw his arms around William’s thigh. William looked down at the boy and smiled. “Connor, this is your grandfather. Say hello.”
The boy tucked his face against William’s leg and hid.
“That’s my grandson?” Sinclair whispered.
“That’s right. People say he looks just like me, but I can’t be sure.”
Sinclair was mystified. “Where’d he get all that blond hair from?”
William smiled. He looked back at the wagon and said, “Honey? Come on out here. It’s all right.”
The flap moved again and Sinclair watched as a beautiful blond-haired woman emerged from the wagon. She brushed herself off and headed toward William with her head down.
It took Sinclair a second to realize that she wasn’t looking at him because he was still only in his britches. He snatched his shirt off the rack and threw it over his head. He struggled to get his soaking-wet pants on next.
“It’s all right. We’re all family here,” William said with a laugh. He put his arm around his wife and said, “Isn’t that right, Jesse?”
Sinclair yanked his pants up to his waist and said, “Jesse, is it? Well, if I knew I was meeting my daughter-in-law today, I wouldn’t have been wearing just my britches. Nice to meet you, young lady.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “It’s all right, sir. We met once before.”
“We did?” Sinclair asked.
“At the courthouse. The day you and my father were sentenced to prison.”
“That’s right,” William said. He looked down at his wife. “She said that when I stepped in to defend her from that deputy, she knew I was a man who could be relied on. Me and Ma took her home with us and we’ve been together ever since.”
Sinclair felt frozen in place. His eyes fell on the woman’s face and he studied her in greater detail. “You’re Odell’s daughter?”
“I am,” she said.
Sinclair turned toward his son. “You married an Odell?”
“Yes, I did,” William said.
Sinclair pointed at the little blond-haired boy and blinked in disbelief. “You mixed our family blood with”—he sputtered and raised his finger toward Jesse—“with that?”
William’s eyes narrowed. “Now, hold on just a second.”
“Henry Odell is the reason I went to prison. The reason I wasn’t there when your mother died! How could you do that to me?”
“Do that to you?” William asked. “How I could do that to you? Do you have any idea what me and Ma went through because of you? What it was like to have to grow up as your son?”
Sinclair and William started yelling back and forth until Jesse held her hands up and cried out, “Please, enough of this! We didn’t come all this way to fight.”
William clenched his jaw and stopped himself from speaking.
“Your son has made himself into a success since you’ve been gone, Mr. Sinclair,” Jesse said. “For years, I listened to people tell him he was nothing more than degenerate scum on account of being your son, but I knew that wasn’t true, because I heard the same things they said about me for being an Odell. He hired on at a local ranch and busted his tail day and night. He learned how to drive cattle and work horses like you can’t believe. He became the youngest top hand in the whole county and saved up enough money that we’ve bought our own place. It’s good land and we have plenty of it. That’s why we come all the way out here.” She put her hand inside William’s and squeezed it. “Go on. Tell him.”
William took a deep breath. “I’ve got enough land to offer you a piece of it. We can build you a house there and you won’t have to live out in this cabin no more. Unless you like living out here in the mud like some kind of animal.”
“William,” Jesse said.
William looked down at his son. He ran his finger through his little boy’s curled hair. “The truth is, now that I have a boy of my own, I’ve been thinking about you and me a lot more. I thought that maybe, when I was young, you might have felt the way about me that I do about him and I guess I felt the same way about you as he does me. Somewhere along the way, that got all messed up between us. I won’t never let anything like that happen between me and him, but if it does, I’d want to try to make it right before it was too late. Anyway, that’s why we come out. I’m asking if you want to come live with us. As a family.”
“There’s more, though,” Jesse said. “Tell him the rest. He needs to know all of it before he makes up his mind.”
“Jesse’s father will be living there too. What’s fair for one is fair for all.”
Sinclair’s eyes widened in surprise. “You want me to come with you and them?”
“That’s right,” William said.
“To live with Henry Odell out on your ranch?”
Jesse put her hands on the little boy’s shoulders. “It’s a fresh start for our family. All of us together. Most important, you two will get to know your grandson, Connor, and he’ll get to know both of you.” She looked up at Sinclair with her big blue eyes and asked, “What do you say, Pa?”
“Don’t call me pa, you Odell trash,” Sinclair snarled.
William shot forward and snatched his father by the collar of his shirt. His right fist was raised inches from Sinclair’s face, ready to strike, but all Sinclair did was put his arms up to cover himself.
“William! No!” Jesse cried out.
William threw the old man to the ground. “I guess you learned how to take a beating in prison real good,” William spit. “If all those years of them beating you didn’t knock some sense into you, another one from me won’t do any good.”
“Get the hell off my property!” Sinclair shouted.
“Take the boy and go get in the wagon,” William told his wife. He waited until Jesse had carried Connor too far away to hear.
William leaned down and said, “I knew you’d never change, old man. She begged me to try and I told her it was a waste of time, but I guess deep inside I prayed things might be different. They aren’t. Fine. Hear this. You’re dead to me. Don’t get sick and come ask
ing me for money for medicine. Don’t starve in the winter and come asking me for food. I wouldn’t roll you into the gutter if I saw you dead in the street. Do you understand me?”
Sinclair went to get up, but William shoved him back down. “I came out here to offer you a chance at life and you spit your last bit of venom at me? So be it. You’re just a pathetic old snake now, and you can’t hurt me or anyone else no more. You know what? I wish you a long life. So long that you can’t get out of bed in this here cabin, and you lie there, starving to death. I hope you scream for help loud enough that the animals come and have some fun with you before you perish.”
Sinclair aimed a crooked finger at his son’s face. “Know this. I never loved you, boy. Not even when you was young. Them feelings you said you have toward that half-breed Odell child, I never had them for you. You was never worth it.”
“Well, I reckon that’s the only honest thing you’ve ever said to me,” William said. He wiped his hands together and brushed them against his shirt. “I lay my curse on you, old snake. By the moon and the stars. You’d have an easier time lifting that than you would shedding your own skin. You and I will never see each other again.”
Sinclair watched his son climb up into the wagon and pick up the reins. He watched the wagon turn around and go between the trees and bounce along the woodland floor as it rode away. Through the openings in the cover, Sinclair saw the little boy sitting on his mother’s lap. Jesse stroked the child’s hair while she stared at Sinclair with blazing hatred. The little boy took his fingers out of his mouth and raised his hand to wave Sinclair goodbye.
Sinclair slapped the dirt and struggled to get back to his feet.
PART TWO
OLD VENOM
CHAPTER SIX
Years passed and Sinclair lost track of how many winters there had been since McClusky died. It all blended together now. In his youth, the snow would fall gently out of the sky and lie across the earth like a soft blanket. After that, everything would be mild for a while and the world turned green again. The summers were sunny and hot and good for fishing in the creek with your shirt off and your pant legs rolled up. Then, in the fall, the trees turned orange and red and filled up the pastures with fallen leaves that crinkled when you ran through them. No more.
Now it seemed everything was just wet all the time. Sometimes there were periods of bitter cold that ate into you and snapped off your fingers if you didn’t protect them. When it snowed, it didn’t fall gently from the sky anymore. It dumped on top of you in a heap and made it impossible to move. As soon as the cold ended, everything turned hot enough to stifle a man after he took no more than a few steps outside.
There were no more in-between seasons. No more soft places. It went from wet to cold to hot to wet again and it did it over and over until Sinclair stopped bothering to notice.
His beard had turned white. That much he knew.
He had a lingering cough that did not go away. It started when he woke up in the morning, until he’d had his coffee and had the chance to spit a few times and get himself going. It came back when he exerted himself and he’d have to sit down and take deep breaths that made him cough. It came back again at night when he was in bed. It didn’t matter if it was cold or hot out. The cough was there and it hurt his chest.
Speaking of his chest, he realized he would sometimes feel the same pains that had been described to him by McClusky. He’d get a sharp pain in his back while he was coughing and have to regain his breath. He didn’t feel the pain in his arm that McClusky had told him about, so he decided it was most likely not the same problem. When his chest hurt, he figured it was burning in there from something he’d eaten.
There were times when it occurred to him that he might be at the end of the trail. He’d added to the special stash of pelts over the years. Nothing as fine as what McClusky had found, except for that bobcat so long before. But he’d taken many nice foxes and badgers and beavers and saved at least half of the ones he’d harvested. None of them would bring any great deal of money by themselves, but if he had enough of them, it would add up to something.
He wasn’t sure about going to live in any boardinghouse and paying for doctors, though. He thought a better idea was to cash those pelts in and go on a real good drunk for as long as the money lasted. If he drank only what was cheap, it might last quite a while.
Every time he got close to loading up the wagon one final time, he told himself he’d give it just one more season. There were always traps with fresh bait he’d still need to check. Vegetables growing in the garden that were about to come in. Weather that was either too cold or too hot to endure on a trip into town. But really, it was the idea of being back in the world that bothered him the most. He had no great need for the world and no great interest in it either. At least, where he was, no one came that far out into the woods to bother him.
Until the day someone came that far out into the woods to bother him.
The visitor arrived at dawn on a tall brown stallion that twitched its head and snorted as it stamped the ground. The rider had a gold star pinned to the lapel of his left breast. It was before dawn and the woods were still blue and gray and wet with dew, but the star was shining. The rider held up his horse and called out, “Ash Sinclair? You still alive in there?”
Sinclair pushed open the cabin door. He was dressed to go check his traps but hadn’t put on his boots yet. His took a sip from his coffee and said, “Who wants to know?”
The rider rose up in his saddle and pointed to the star on his chest. “I’m Sheriff Elliot Reuben Junior. You knew my daddy, Sheriff Reuben Senior. He’s the man who sent you to prison.”
“Yeah, I knew him,” Sinclair said. “He too scared to come see me himself?”
“He’s dead. Five years on now.”
“Well, good,” Sinclair said. “He was always a mean bastard.”
“That’s my daddy you’re talking about, sir.”
“So it is.” Sinclair sipped his coffee.
Reuben Jr. opened a tin of tobacco and stuck a wad of it inside of his lower lip. He spit out a few flecks and said, “You have any guns on you, sir?”
“Government said if I ever had any guns on me again, they’d put me in jail the rest of my life.”
“Not even for hunting? You look pretty well-fed. That’s not just from eating the nuts and berries around here, I reckon.”
“You ever seen how much meat comes off a beaver, boy?”
“Sheriff,” Reuben Jr. corrected him.
Sinclair gave a thin smile. “You ever seen how much meat comes off a beaver, Sheriff?”
“No, sir, I have not.”
“Well, it’s enough that I don’t need no guns,” Sinclair said.
“You mind if I come in there and check?”
Sinclair pushed the cabin door open wider and stepped aside. He waved the sheriff to go ahead in with the same hand he held his coffee in.
Sheriff Reuben Jr. stayed in his saddle. “You know, I grew up hearing so many stories about you. Everywhere my daddy went, it’s all people wanted to talk about. The day he brought down two gangs at the same time and hauled the ones he didn’t kill into jail, single-handed. He was real famous for it. He wrote a book called Paladin of the Frontier. You ever heard of it?”
Sinclair said he had not.
“Well, I’m guessing you don’t get many books out here. It sold pretty well in New York City from what we heard. He used to carry copies of it around and sign them for people. He’d leave copies in the jail cells so the prisoners could read them. If they could answer ten questions about the book, he’d cut their fine in half.”
“How kind,” Sinclair said.
“You had a big part in the book, as you can imagine. It talked all about you leading them Venom Snakes on rampages through four different states before he caught up with you. In his book he said you killed more Pinkertons and
trainmen than all the train crashes in the history of the United States put together. Is that true?”
“I never killed nobody,” Sinclair said. “Not according to the judge that sentenced me to prison.”
Sheriff Reuben Jr. spit a mouthful of tobacco juice onto the grass. “I heard that too. You know, there’s still some Pinkertons left who’d like to put a bullet in you or worse.”
“Well, go on and tell them where I am, then,” Sinclair said. “I’m sure they’d love to come toss dynamite at this here cabin in the dead of night same way they did poor old Zerelda. Unless there aren’t enough women and children inside this cabin for them to blow up.”
“My daddy said that story was a load of hogwash made up by the newspapers. He always had the greatest of respect for the Pinkertons and I do too.”
“I have no doubt,” Sinclair said. He tossed the rest of his coffee into the weeds and said, “Young man, I have things to do this morning. You come all the way out here to tell me your father’s dead and argue with me about the Pinkertons, or is there something else?”
Reuben Jr. stroked his horse on the neck and patted it. “Actually, what I come here for was to bring you some bad news. I wasn’t sure how to say it at first.”
“Well, I hope you figured out how to by now,” Sinclair said. “I’m busy.”
The sheriff spit the chunk of tobacco out and wiped his mouth. He ran his tongue along the inside of his gums to get the rest of it and spit that out too. “Your son, William, is deceased, sir.”
Sinclair scratched his chin beneath his beard. “How?”
“You ever heard of Nelson Granger?”
“No.”
“Well, shoot, mostly everyone else has. He’s one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the state. He gives money to orphanages and poor folk and sends all the sheriffs a big fat turkey and a bottle of whiskey every Christmas, just as a way of saying thank you. He was a good friend of my daddy’s and I’ve known him since I was just a little squirt, and I’m telling you, he’s a great man.”
Ralph Compton Face of a Snake Page 6