McNally fell at Vicksburg after serving with the Nineteenth Cavalry for two years. Owen was downed at Blair’s Landing in Louisiana while firing his old cap-and-ball pistol on a Confederate gunboat run aground on the Red River, the same gun he had used to kill the horse thief.
When Nate finished talking, he was certain Dr. Tom must have nodded off. He had surprised himself speaking for so long, in so much detail, and he’d spent the last half hour staring at his boots, too self-conscious to look the ranger in the face. Dr. Tom had not said a word for over an hour, but when Nate finally looked up, the ranger was gazing at him, his arms crossed, his mouth curled in a smile. Nate realized that prior to this, he had not told the story in its entirety to another soul besides his wife.
Nate stood abruptly, suddenly shy in the too-quiet room, and said, “Well, I guess I’ll see what use I can put myself to.”
He walked to the door but turned when he heard his name called.
“Nate,” Dr. Tom said. “You’re going to make one hell of a good lawman.”
The following morning early, the three left Austin, stopping first at Hillyer’s Photographic Studio at Dr. Tom’s insistence. “Hell, I’ve got on a new shirt, thanks to Nate. Might as well capture the day.”
Hillyer posed them in different configurations, finally settling Nate in a chair between the two rangers, his new Winchester across his lap. Dr. Tom placed one hand on Nate’s shoulder and held his Colt aloft with the other. Deerling stood to the other side, giving a heated stare to the photographer as he took his time adjusting the boxy camera. In the moment before Hillyer removed the lens cap, and while he was admonishing the men to stay perfectly still for the count of a full minute, Nate felt Deerling’s hand come slowly to rest on his other shoulder.
The photographer nodded to them when the image had been captured and they could move again. He said, “I’ll have the prints made from the glass negative within the hour, gentlemen.”
Deerling shook his head, already walking to the door. “We don’t have time to wait. We’ll take receipt of the prints when we return.”
The trip to Houston would take another fifteen days, and they hoped to bypass the main city, riding for the small settlement of Frost Town on Buffalo Bayou to the north. There, Deerling would speak to the woman who had been shot and whose family had been killed by McGill’s men.
The journey began favorably, the weather mostly dry and temperate, so that sleeping outside at night was a pleasure, though the first few evenings Dr. Tom began to run a fever and coughed his way through till dawn. He had quickly pitched into the bushes the respiratory cure given to him by the doctor in Austin, saying that there were enough opiates and alcohol in the syrup to stun a horse. Deerling and Nate slept little themselves, listening to the wet rumbled hacking that sounded ominously like pneumonia settling in.
Deerling asked after his partner’s health so often that once, when the captain handed Dr. Tom his morning coffee, he responded by saying, “Thank you, dear.”
The Blackland Border, as Dr. Tom called it, was hilly at first, then gave way to gently rolling pastures abundantly watered with streams and aquifers. On the banks of lakes were farmhouses and barns made of chalky white stone and timber collected in tight, defensive formations against Indian attack, like mushrooms sprouting after the rain.
They followed the path of the Colorado River southeast through sycamore and willow, carefully easing around the giant cutbacks, the eroded earth chopped away from the banks during the recent flooding. As the land flattened, the sky opened up with only a few wisps of clouds, stretched to near transparency with strengthening gusts of wind.
Dr. Tom sat in the saddle with his head down, one hand supporting his lower ribs, his face drawn and pale.
Nate rode closer to Deerling and asked, “Is he all right?”
Deerling turned briefly to look at his partner and frowned. “He’s fine.”
“He doesn’t look fine.”
Deerling craned his neck around once more, but kept riding. “He’ll tell us if we need to stop. We’ll find a doctor in Columbus.”
But the townspeople there informed them there was no doctor, only a retired quartermaster living a few miles away who had had some field-hospital experience during the war and who, it was rumored, kept a stockpile of grain alcohol in his barn from which he was known to sample frequently.
They camped on the outskirts of town. Deerling rode away to the south and returned an hour later leading a squalling, unhappy man tied to a horse. The man had the bulbous, pocked nose of a lifelong drinker, and when he was untied and pulled from his horse, he commenced complaining to Nate how he had been roused from his bed, hit over the head, and kidnapped.
Deerling put a finger in the quartermaster’s chest. “You’ve been paid for your time.” He then pointed to Dr. Tom, shivering under a blanket. “Mr. Odum, there’s your patient. If you don’t want another rap on the head, I’d suggest you see to him.”
Odum bent over Dr. Tom, blowing his sour-mash breath into his face, and poked around the ranger’s middle, feeling under tender ribs until Dr. Tom waved him away, saying, “Hell, George, a horse doctor would have done me better.”
“The patient has pleurisy,” Odum announced. “He’ll need a mustard plaster under flannel.” He then walked to his horse and pulled a bottle from his saddlebag. He handed it roughly to Nate and, after a few missed tries, got his boot into a stirrup and rode off in the direction of town.
The following morning, at Dr. Tom’s insistence, they continued on, following the road due east to Houston. At night, Nate gave Dr. Tom his extra blanket, and he did what he could to provide food the sick man could easily swallow, simmering cornmeal to mush and boiling dried jerky in water for a soup. Five days after leaving Austin, they camped at the crossing of the Brazos. Dr. Tom was barely able to sit in his saddle from the fever shakes.
Nate watched him that night as he huddled under a blanket close to the fire. Dr. Tom’s usual banter had ceased the day before, and the ride was silent except for the sound of labored breathing. Deerling pulled Odum’s bottle from his pack, uncorked it, and made his partner drink.
Dr. Tom swallowed and gaped. “That’s pure grain alcohol. I may go blind.”
“Tom, if you don’t get some sleep tonight, I won’t either, and I may just be mean enough tomorrow to put you out of your misery myself.”
When Deerling went off to find more wood, Dr. Tom gestured for Nate to come closer. He took Nate by the arm and said, “We get to Houston, I’m staying. You go on with George. Don’t let him quit on my account. I’ll catch up later, if I can.”
Nate nodded and Dr. Tom handed him a folded piece of paper. “The damnedest thing about having some medical knowledge is knowing how sick you are when you do catch something. I have pneumonia bad. In both lungs, most likely. I’ll either get well fast, or not at all. Take this letter. If I’m dead when you get back to Houston, give it to George. But don’t tell him you have it in the meantime. He’s got no patience for waiting, and he’ll want to read it right away. And then, if I’m still alive, I’ll have to live with him bein’ awkward and stony-faced all the time.”
Nate took the letter and tucked it into his coat. “What’s driving all this, Tom? Why are we riding all this way for some man-killers that the county sheriff could just as well chase after?”
“We have our reasons. George most of all.”
Nate opened his mouth to speak but Dr. Tom held up a hand. “It has to do with family and that’s all I’ll say about it. It’s up to George to tell you, when he’s ready.” He curled away into his blanket and promptly fell asleep.
In Houston, Nate and Deerling helped Dr. Tom into a physician’s home, where he was placed in a sickroom in a clean bed with a fire built up to bring on the sweats. Nate sat, and Deerling paced awhile, restless and breathing through his nose impatiently, uncertain what to do. He finally pulled the old newspaper from Dr. Tom’s pack, which had been thrown into a corner of the room, turned to
the page with the Dickens story, and placed it on the bed.
Dr. Tom wiped a hand over his sweating face. “You are about as much help as a pig on fire. Either read it to me or get gone.”
Deerling pulled a chair over to the bed and positioned the paper in the lamplight and began reading in a slow and halting way, as though he were having difficulty seeing the words. “‘And yet, proceeding now, to introduce myself positively, I am both a town traveler and a country traveler, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there.’”
“George,” Dr. Tom said, “you need glasses.”
Deerling put the paper aside. “My eyes are as good as they’ve ever been…”
Nate listened to the back-and-forth for a while, the rangers’ voices sounding like smoked bees, all buzz and no sting, and then he stood quietly and left the room. He saw to the horses and then bedded down at a boardinghouse, waking only to the sound of Deerling coming in for the night. But Deerling walked to the window, leaned against the sill, and remained there as Nate fell back to sleep. When Nate woke the next morning, Deerling was still in the same place, looking out over the street, his face lined and pale with worry, his chin unshaven for days.
“Tom says to go on without him,” Deerling told Nate. “We’ll ride to Frost Town to talk to that woman that survived McGill’s last shooting. There’s not much we can do here today.”
They reached Frost Town in a few hours—a German settlement with its own post office and school—and were directed by a livery hand to a large farmhouse fronting the bayou. The farmer who lived there was named Muller, and he led the men into the simple parlor, where his wife served them coffee and warm biscuits.
Muller said, “Mrs. Shenck has been deeply marked by the deaths of her husband and children. She is better in the body, but in the mind…” He pointed to his head and twisted his finger against his temple, like a screw being worked into a board.
Muller’s wife led them upstairs to a bedroom, and, after knocking softly, she opened the door and gestured them into the room. Nate followed Deerling and saw a woman reclining in a small bed, propped up against several pillows, staring out the nearest window. She turned her head to look at them with swollen eyes, and Nate removed his hat. He lingered by the door, not sure where to stand, but Deerling took the one chair in the room, moved it next to the bed, and sat.
“Mrs. Shenck, I’m Captain Deerling of the Texas Rangers, and this is Officer Cannon of the Texas State Police. We’re here to talk with you about the men who killed your family. Are you well enough to tell us what happened?”
She nodded uncertainly but remained silent. Nate watched the subtle movements of her body turning away from Deerling, and she placed a shielding, protective hand over her chest. Nate would have approached the woman more carefully. As with a battered horse, a wounded person had scant resources left even to keep the body upright, the eyes directed forward, and the mind balanced. He thought a good place to start would have been just to hold her hand for a while.
Finally she said, “There were three men. They came into our house one day. They had guns.” Her voice was low, the words softly accented. She took a sip of water from a glass next to the bed with shaking hands. “They said if we caused them no trouble, if we didn’t try to run away or tell our neighbors, they wouldn’t kill us.”
Deerling asked, “How long did they hold you?”
“They stayed for five days. I and the children cooked for the men, and they would come and go, two men leaving and one man staying behind.”
She became silent again, her focus softening as her head tilted towards the window. Deerling placed a hand on her arm, startling her.
She licked her lips and reached for the water once more. She said, “One night we heard them talking about a farmer who found gold coins on his land. Some sort of pirate treasure, he said. They bought him whiskey, to make him careless. But the farmer wouldn’t say precisely where the gold was.”
Deerling asked, “Who was the farmer?”
She shook her head. “They never said his name or where he was from. The leader of the men, this McGill, became angry with them for speaking of such things in our presence. But seeing I was scared, he took my hand and looked into my eyes and promised me that no harm would come to me or to my family.”
She clenched and unclenched her fingers entangled in the shawl around her shoulders. She stared wide-eyed at Deerling and said, “I believed him.”
Watching her pale and disbelieving face, Nate remembered seeing the same expression come over a Confederate deserter, a man at the end of a line of deserters about to be shot by his former comrades and thrown into a ditch. He thought of his own daughter and tried to imagine what her dying would do to him. And then he tried to imagine her being shot in his presence.
To comfort the woman, Deerling reached out and clasped her two hands in his. “Mrs. Shenck, thank God, you’re still alive.”
She began to breathe queerly, her gaze panicked, and Deerling stood up, alarmed. “Are you in pain, Mrs. Shenck?”
The woman thrashed on the bed, making sounds like an animal in agony, and Nate thought to fetch Mrs. Muller, but the woman fixed her eyes on him and he became very still, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. He saw clearly the bruised flesh on her face and wasting tautness of the skin on her arms, and she whispered, “I am not alive.”
Mrs. Muller appeared at the door and ushered the men from the room. They went downstairs and were joined on the porch by Mr. Muller. The three stood for a while absently watching the looping banks of Buffalo Bayou, listening to the shrill weeping from the woman upstairs.
Muller said, “The devil shot her last of all. First the husband, and then the two children. The killer made her watch.”
Deerling asked, “Do you have any idea where these men went?”
Muller said, “In her ravings she said Harrisburg, but…” He shrugged, turning the palms of his hands up.
Deerling worked his hat in his hands. “Take the train west from Harrisburg and it stops at Alleyton and a few cotton farms. To the south, the railroad goes to Galveston.” He turned to Muller. “There’s nothing important in Harrisburg except the railroad depot.” He stopped for a moment, gnawing the inside of his cheek, and looked at Nate. “What do you think?”
“Well,” Nate said, shifting his weight to the stronger leg, “there must be drinking places in Harrisburg. Places where cotton farmers who have money to spend gather. Maybe our farmer is close by.”
Deerling nodded and said, “That’s where we’ll start, then.”
The two men thanked Muller, and within a quarter hour, they had turned south again, heading to Harrisburg.
Chapter 11
Lucinda sat, listening to May sing. While the girl’s voice was not unpleasing, it had a curious lifelessness to it, as though the words were devoid of meaning. She was singing “Lorena,” a tune over which Lucinda had seen hardened men weep, thinking of their lost wartime loves. This in the cathouses where they were being entertained, their hands on the whores they had just had or were about to have.
Jane played the accompaniment on the square piano that had been shipped by barge from Galveston a few months earlier and that, surprisingly, had held most of its tuning.
Lucinda stole a look at Bedford Grant, the girls’ father, standing next to Jane and turning the pages of the music folio. He had been stiff and formal at dinner, a meal of chicken and mainly dumplings, and it had taken a great deal of effort on Lucinda’s part to help him keep his half of the conversation alive. She suspected that he had not had female company at his dinner table, other than his daughters, in a good while. She also suspected that his looser manner after the meal and his ruddy complexion were thanks to a furtive trip to a whiskey jar kept somewhere in another room.
He looked up at that moment and smiled, the open g
rin of a father’s pride. Lucinda gave him a slow smile in return, and he blushed a deeper crimson, quickly returning his attention to the sheet music.
After acquainting herself briefly with Bedford, she thought him a shy but intelligent man, flattened and embattled by the brutal uncertainties of life. He had, it seemed, failed at everything he had ever set his hand to, as speculator, merchant, and now probably as farmer, although, in recounting his past to Lucinda, he had framed his failures as “mistimed ventures” brought to unsuccessful ends by the inability of the South to secure secession.
For a short while he was even a bookseller, which explained the sagging shelves filled to overflowing with books. It also explained why May, who came so rarely to the schoolhouse, was so informed. Both sisters had the best possible library on subjects as varied as history and the natural sciences, and there were more than a few novels.
Earlier in the evening, Lucinda had pulled one of these novels from a shelf, its spine partially eaten by mice, the pages spotted with black mold grown from the damp air, and read the title: The Woman in White.
May, standing next to her, exhaled dismissively and asked, “Miss Carter, have you read this one? Well, don’t bother. It’s a very tiresome plot about madness and confused identities.” She pulled another book from the shelf, Lady Audley’s Secret, and handed it to Lucinda. May traced the title with a finger and whispered into Lucinda’s ear, “She is a very bad woman.” Lucinda quickly looked at the girl’s face and saw her eyes creased in mischief, and they laughed together.
Lucinda, lost in these thoughts, became aware that May had finished singing. She clapped politely and, rising, said, “Thank you, May. That was quite lovely. But it’s late, and I should leave. I thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Grant.”
He stood staring at her blankly for a moment while his daughters looked expectantly at him until he realized he was supposed to do the gentlemanly thing and walk her back to the Wallers’ home.
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