All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  I told him there was no need to watch myself.

  “You say that,” he said. “I think you know better.”

  “I’ve no ambition against the Irish, doctor. I’m half Irish myself.”

  “You were born in this country?”

  “Kentucky,” I said.

  Chalmers nodded. “Then you’re about as Irish as a mesquite.”

  All this drunken palaver was wearing thin. I gave the doctor two gold eagles and a shiny Liberty Head half eagle and turned to leave.

  “Captain,” he said.

  I looked back at him.

  “A man hurt like Juan—just because he’s walking around and talking doesn’t mean he’s like he used to be. You meet up with him, you’ll see what I mean.”

  * * *

  We were bivouacked on the Colorado when he found us. I recognized the moro gelding from a quarter mile away; as did the other men. They all stood and gave a hurrah. But when the rider came closer, the cheers quieted. Soon, all you could hear was the crackling of the camp fires.

  Juan got down from his horse and came forward. His hair was cropped very short, and since I’d last seen him, it had gone white. As had his whiskers and his beard.

  “Juan,” I said, and we shook hands.

  We stood there a moment. I was about to say how good it was to see him—which would’ve been halftrue; it was good to see him alive and walking—when I heard McClusky voice from back behind me saying, “Where is he now? Where is our Lazarus?” Apparently, the Irishman had been down to the latrine when Juan rode up; now he pushed his way through the press of bodies and stood gaping at Juan as if he had indeed risen from the dead.

  And well he might’ve.

  He glanced over at McClusky.

  You could not tell whether he recognized McClusky or not, whether he gave any thought to the price he’d paid for rescuing this man. He simply nodded at the Irishman.

  At which point McClusky doubled over and went to blubbering.

  Though somewhat theatrical, it was a genuine display, and none of us was unmoved. What must that have been like: to know a man you’d once despised had liberated you from the clutches of the enemy at such cost to his person? I never wanted to labor under such a debt.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep that night: something gnawed at my spirit. I rolled it back and forth in my brain. I ought to’ve accepted Juan’s return as the miracle it was. But it unsettled me. Perhaps it was seeing this once healthy man in such reduced capacity. Perhaps it was the outpouring of emotion I’d witnessed. Around first light, I gave up my attempts at slumber and walked to the river to wash.

  When I walked back into camp, the eastern sky had paled. I was the only thing up and moving. I passed Dan Bannon in his bedroll and Uncle Ike in his, working my way around the sleeping bodies in their blankets.

  And here was Juan, lying on his back with both eyes closed, his chest rising and falling. He was thinner than before, his body loose inside his clothes. I stood there watching him, the sky growing lighter, and I noticed something I hadn’t been able to the previous night. I’d made out the silver stubble on his scalp and the silver moustache hiding his upper lip, twisted to sharp points the same as ever. Now I saw that his skin had a gray tint to it as well. At first, I thought it was just the morning light, but when the sun breached the horizon and the rest of the world blushed pink, Juan’s flesh was still the color of ash. That feeling of desolation swept through me; I couldn’t decide the source of it. I thought about Sam, his frontier wife and child. A panic was moving in my blood.

  Then I saw McClusky. The Irishman had spread his blankets crossways at Juan’s feet so that their two bedrolls made a T. The image of a pet lying at the foot of its master’s bed flashed through my brain and I turned and went back to the river.

  * * *

  It was long about this time that I noticed my eyesight starting to flag. Though never as eagle-eyed as Sam, my vision carried farther than most men and a good deal of what I was able to accomplish with a rifle depended on it. I could still count the leaves on a limb at half a furlong, but my knack for telling an “h” from an “n” had flatted out.

  I discovered this flipping through Juan’s Wordsworth. I’d been planning to reunite book and owner at some opportune moment, and removing the volume from possibles one morning I performed a little gesture I’d seen my father execute a thousand times with his Bible: opening the book and then holding it at arm’s length to bring the words into focus.

  Levi was sitting there beside me at the fire, molding rifle balls, and he turned to give me a look.

  “You need spectacles?” he said.

  “Mind your business,” I snapped, feeling my cheeks color.

  Levi shrugged. “Lots of folks require spectacles, Cap. I didn’t mean to rile you.”

  It didn’t matter to me that he was right: vanity cares nothing for the truth, and I was sour over it the rest of the week. I’d wake in the morning before the others were up, take the slim volume and walk out a ways from camp, standing with my back to the east, waiting for sunlight. Something in me hoped my eyes might recover; maybe they were only tired. But when I saw the text was no clearer on day seven than it’d been on day one, I decided it was time to acknowledge the corn: these eyes God gave me were wearing out and it would not be long before other things began to wear as well.

  It put me in a frail frame of mind. Perhaps it called up Pap for me; perhaps it was just my pride. But over the coming months all this touched off some strange alchemy in my brain: my weakening eyesight caused me to question a dozen other faculties, and finding them less robust than they’d once been I began to question my place as the head of a ranger company. These men had become my brothers, the only ones I’d ever have. Of what use would I be to them if I continued to decline?

  Of course, the decay was mostly in my noggin. It was only that I’d never given much thought to my mortality before now, and cast in a new light, the path I’d chosen to ride seemed thick with obstacles, and my prospects rather grim. I woke one autumn morning smelling decay on the breeze and knew I would return to visit Sam. Forget my embarrassment, my jealousy.

  There is so little time, I thought. If I am forced to leave this family of rangers, I will need to find another.

  I did not stop to consider that acquiring this family would mean separating Sam from his.

  How is that the heart refuses to tally such costs?

  CECELIA

  —TEXAS, 1845–1846—

  Samuel spent his days hunting and trapping, gathering pelts, riding into Bastrop to sell the surplus. The country was settling up, which seemed to disgust him, but there were always new men to purchase his meat and skins, so he was of two minds.

  Cecelia was of one mind and one mind only. That was new for her. For years she’d been divided. She’d separated herself into parts that could take pain, absorb loneliness, soak the hurt up like cotton. And there were parts of her to minister to these parts, to build them up again.

  Then there was Samuel. There was little Robert. Wasn’t it strange how other people could unite you, collapse your halves into a whole? She thought it was strange, but the more she dwelled on it, the more she suspected it wasn’t strange at all. This was how folks ought to function. It was Virginia that was strange, Mississippi and Louisiana: no wonder she’d been a stranger there.

  * * *

  With an infant, her life was food and sleep. She could hardly tell one day from another: bright sunshine one moment, moon and stars the next. It was fall, then winter, then here came spring again. She didn’t know where the time got to, but she was content like she’d never been.

  Robert was walking by eighteen months. He was a graceful child, agile in his movements. His hair black and soft as down. The green eyes in his beautiful face. His father’s eyes, she thought. Never mind the color: it was Samuel’s vigor,
Samuel’s fire.

  These days, Sam was burning with it. He rode back and forth to Bastrop, fretful as a cat. More and more, he worried about this Republic he’d fought for; folks said it would be annexed by the States. The frontier would vanish. According to Samuel, it was already vanishing. Game was still plentiful, the soil still black. But make no mistake, he told her: the Americans were coming. Men were buying up headrights, plowing and clearing land.

  Samuel shook his head. “Fore too long, you won’t be able to turn around.”

  She believed him, but it was hard to feature. The country they’d passed through eight years ago was wilderness. They’d moved onto this acreage, and she hadn’t stepped foot off the property since. She’d seen all of the nation she wanted to, thank you kindly. On this property, she was a queen.

  That fall, their visitor came calling again—Duncan Lammons, one of Samuel’s compatriots from the Revolution. He was a tall, gray-eyed man with thick dark hair and a coal-black moustache that reminded Cecelia of a brush. He had a low, gravelly voice that sounded like he was constantly clearing his throat. He had eyebrows that needed trimming. He was a courteous man, but there was something about him she didn’t trust.

  He’d paid them a visit the year before, riding up out of the woods one morning on his appaloosa. The two of them had sat at the table, talking, making over Robert, but then he started looking poorly. He stood up, staggered out the door, and then she heard his horse pounding along the trail. Sam had followed him outside, trying to call him back.

  “Is he all right?” she asked when Sam came back inside, but Sam wouldn’t talk about it. She figured that was the last she’d ever see of him.

  Now she saw him all the time. Twice a week, he’d ride in to take supper with them; he and Sam would sit up trading stories: fights against the Caddo, fights against the Apache. She wasn’t thrilled about hosting the man, but his presence seemed to please Samuel.

  Sitting at the table one evening, she turned to him and said: “Were you ever married, Mister Lammons?”

  He looked over at Samuel. “Why’s she call me mister?”

  “Cause she hadn’t seen you with a jug in hand, rooting around like a hog. You ain’t shattered your respectability.”

  “Yet,” Lammons said.

  She said: “Do you drink whiskey, Mister Lammons?”

  “Does he drink whiskey,” said Samuel. He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Good Lord Almighty.”

  “Duncan,” Lammons told her. “Call me Duncan.”

  “Duncan,” she said.

  Lammons ignored the remarks about his drinking and went back to the topic of marriage. He said, “The ladies never much took to me.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, “there are plenty of women who’d have you.”

  “Supposed to be a leper colony out by Bexar,” Sam told him. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a blind one.”

  Yes. The two of them put on quite a show.

  In bed that night, after she’d gotten Robert down, she said, “Do you think Duncan is lonesome?”

  Samuel didn’t answer for several moments.

  Then he said, “How’s that?”

  “Duncan. The way he looks at you. He seems lonely to me.”

  “Could be,” Samuel said.

  They lay there for a time.

  “What’s on your mind?” she said.

  “I just get to thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “These settlers,” he said.

  “Is it as bad as all that?”

  He said it was. The men coming their way were a different breed entirely. They didn’t have frontier values.

  “What do they value?”

  “Cotton,” he told her. “Much as they can plant.”

  She thought it couldn’t possibly be so dire.

  But it went just as he said: Texas became a state that December, and February of the next year relinquished its sovereignty.

  Sam had been expecting this, but he didn’t expect the Mexican cavalry who crossed the border in April to rout U.S. troops; he didn’t expect Congress’s declaration of war on May 13th.

  Sundays, he rode into Bastrop. He’d come back and report the news: how Santa Anna had returned to Mexico. How, once he was at the head of an army, he pronounced himself president and vowed revenge on Texas.

  “Wasn’t ten years ago, we had him prisoner. Some of the boys were for stringing him up right there, but the aristocrats shouted them down. I could’ve walked over and stuck him with my knife.”

  “Santa Anna?”

  Samuel held his palms a few feet apart. “I wasn’t that far away.”

  DUNCAN LAMMONS

  —TEXAS, 1846—

  One cold January night, we were bivouacked in the belt of loblolly pines there in Bastrop County. I’d dozed off by the fire in a pleasant, drowsy mood and when I woke to high, hideous shrieks my first thought was that the band of Comanche who’d wrought such destruction on our company had somehow located us and determined to finish us off. I grabbed my pistols and began shouting for the boys to rouse themselves and offer a defense.

  Which was when McClusky sprinted from the trees into the light of our campfires, the Irishman shielding his head with both hands and caterwauling like he was being pursued by Furies.

  “Where are they?” Levi English yelled. “I can’t see them, Cap!”

  Nor could I. It took us several minutes to realize there were no Indians at all. McClusky had been attacked by an old hoot owl protecting his brood.

  Which might sound rather comical, but I assure you, there was no humor in it. McClusky had woken in the night and stalked off into the trees to relieve himself. He was standing there, doing his business, when there came a great blow from above and hot blood ran down his face. He said it felt like knives carving his scalp. Then here it came again. Wings slapped his cheeks, his shoulders; he ducked and raised his hands to fend off the assault and the tip of a talon pierced his left eye.

  We tended him the rest of the night, offering whiskey to calm him, and by first light he was drunk as a fiddler.

  He might well have wished it had been Indians who’d beset him: he was a bloody, mutilated mess. Patches of hair had been torn out and they’d never grow back: the hideous gashes the owl made would turn to slick, red scars.

  At just that moment, it wasn’t his appearance, but his vision, that concerned me. I knelt there in front of him and tried to examine the wound, which seemed to bleed whenever he blinked.

  “What can you see out of that eye, Felix?”

  “I can’t see nutting,” he told me. “Nutting a’ tall.”

  Over the coming weeks, the iris faded from brown to cloudy white. Men who’d been disfigured in this way often wore a patch—out of respect for others more than anything. But McClusky wouldn’t hear of it. He seemed almost proud of the deformity.

  He figured that if the world was unfair enough to allow such horrors to befall a man, he would remind every person he spoke with of that grim fact. To his thinking, there was no reason why misery was visited on one and blessing bestowed on another. Good and bad deeds didn’t enter into what Provi­dence parceled out for us.

  And so, he would not trouble himself with questions of right and wrong.

  I didn’t bother to remind him that he’d never done so.

  * * *

  Of course, it was not just McClusky who’d been inconvenienced by the tides of fortune. Surely, Juan had much greater cause for bitterness.

  And I suspected that he was bitter. He just didn’t trumpet it like his Irish friend.

  The previous year, after Juan had returned to us from his sojourn with the doctor, I walked over and sat beside him, resting my saddle bags on the ground beside my knee.

  “Juan,” I said, “it is mighty good to have you back.”

&
nbsp; “Yes,” he said, nodding, and the corners of mouth twisted up in a smile. But there was no smile in his eyes.

  Reaching down in my saddle bag, I pulled out Juan’s book of poems and handed it to him.

  I assumed he’d thought it was lost forever, along with the rest of his traps, and that being reunited with the volume would surely raise his spirits.

  He took the book and stared at it a moment, then opened the cover and began thumbing pages. I thought he was looking for a particular passage, but he closed the volume and set it on the ground.

  “I thank you,” he said, and I realized in that moment he did not recall my name. He knew me, remembered me as his captain, but the name itself wouldn’t come to him.

  It was uncomfortable to sit any longer, so I bid him good evening and made my way back to my bedroll.

  A few nights later, Juan came across camp and sat beside me, returning the visit, I suppose. He had his volume of Wordsworth in hand and my name was on his lips again—he’d likely had McClusky refresh his memory.

  We sat in silence several moments. Then he turned and said, “Captain Lammons”—very formal, and this tore at my heart as he’d become light on ceremony when speaking with me.

  “Captain Lammons,” he said, nodding at the book of poems, “did I used to read this book?”

  The question frightened me in a way I didn’t understand.

  “It’s your book,” I told him, then wished there’d been a more delicate way to phrase it. But I was too startled.

  He nodded and I watched as his eyes welled with tears and spilled onto his cheeks. Not tears of sorrow, mind you, but of rage. He wiped them away.

  “I have read it cover to cover,” he said. “I cannot recall a single word.”

  “You’ve been through a deal of suffering. It will come back to you by and by.”

  He shook his head, turned and looked at me.