by Aaron Gwyn
He said, “The hoss is ride!”
“Well, sir,” I said, “that’s a fact or I never heard one.”
“The hoss is ride!” he squealed.
Directly, I was laughing along with him, and by the time Sam came out to check on us, Bob and myself were friends.
* * *
I was in Bastrop about a week later, visiting with Timothy Lynch at his hotel. John Berry walked over from his shop—he’d ridden in my company back in ’38—and said, “You just missed them.”
“Missed who?” I asked.
“Your man Felix and the Mexican. They come in wanting me to work on a rifle they’d dry-balled.”
I listened for a moment or two before what he’d said sunk.
“Felix McClusky?” I said.
“Yeah,” said John, “and his greaser friend.”
“Juan Juarez?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s not Mexican,” I said. “He’s Spanish.”
Timothy laughed. “Well, there’s a great distinction.”
“Anyway,” said John, “you’d have seen them yourself not half an hour ago.”
“Were they looking for me?” I asked.
“Never mentioned you,” said John. “I just know Felix had ridden with you, is all.”
This was a troubling piece of blather, though I couldn’t exactly say why. Perhaps the thought of running into Juan and Felix was a bit prickly for me, given how things had gone at the battle of Monterrey.
Of course, there was also the fact that Juan knew something about me other men didn’t. I didn’t believe he’d trumpet the knowledge, did not even think he’d tell Felix.
It was more him knowing in the first place that bothered me.
I bid Tim and John a good day and went to visit Sam.
CECELIA
—TEXAS, 1846—
Robert turned three that fall. The boy had his father’s energy; he was into everything there was. Cecelia would get so exhausted she’d break down crying. Then she’d start to laugh.
“What is it?” Sam asked, coming inside one afternoon to find her wiping tears out of her eyes, chuckling to herself like a madwoman.
“Your son,” she said. “He never stops.”
Sam glanced over at Robert who, as if to spite her, was now napping on their bed.
He said, “Looks like he’s stopped pretty good.”
“Half an hour ago he had the sugar loaf down in the floor.”
“I need to build another shelf,” said Sam. “Move things up a little higher.”
“It won’t help,” she told him.
There was something that did help, and that was Duncan Lammons. Robert developed a fondness for the man like she’d had never seen. Lammons would ride down for supper, and the moment he walked in the door, Robert would be in his arms. It might have embarrassed her, but she could tell Lammons enjoyed it. He’d sit there with Robert snoring against his chest.
“Here,” she’d say, “let me take him.”
“Leave him be,” Lammons told her. “What’s the Savior say? If a man sleeps, he does well.”
Sam shook his head.
“Well,” he said, “that fixes it: boy’s got you playing nursemaid and quoting scripture both.”
Lammons patted Robert’s back. “He’s good, this one.”
“He is,” Sam said. “Wish he was a better judge of character, but you can’t have everthing.”
It moved Cecelia, watching the child with Lammons. Didn’t make her trust him any better—he still stared at Sam with the same longing—but his skill with Robert certainly surprised her. She could tell it surprised him too.
To hear Sam tell it, Lammons was as ruthless an Indian fighter as ever walked the earth. Men feared him, and she knew it wasn’t for no reason. She hadn’t seen that side of Lammons, but she could tell it was there.
Robert saw another side. He’d be sitting on Lammons’s lap, pawing the man’s moustache with his fingers. You’d think it would annoy someone like Lammons, but it was just the opposite. The man’s features would start to soften: his eyebrows arched and a light came into his face. She watched him become a grandfather before her eyes.
She thought it was so curious. Who were these people down inside us? Who did she have inside of her? She’d been a house servant, a field hand, a runaway. Then, unexpectedly, a frontier wife to a man who stumbled into her at a slave sale. Now she was a mother, and perhaps other things as well.
Who would she be next year?
Who would she be in years to come?
DUNCAN LAMMONS
—TEXAS, 1846–1847—
For years I’d barely drawn a sober breath, numbing myself to loneliness and the horrors of battle. I must’ve reckoned I was very brave, but once the grip of the demon rum had loosened from around my throat, I was like a raw nerve in the wind—the slightest breeze could overwhelm me.
I wish I could say that parting ways with liquor freed me of the stain of jealousy. But sometimes I’d see Sam glance across the supper table at his lovely helpmeet and envy would twist my innards like a rag. It is a shameful thing to admit. A man may rectify his behavior but changing the desires of your heart is another thing entirely.
It was Robert who salved this wound and kept my feelings from festering into resentment. I’d had no experience with children. I must’ve thought of them like a crop you tended. I hadn’t the least notion that they tended you as well. The affection of a child can mend the raveled hem of your soul. They are such genuine creatures; there is no feigning or fakery with them, nothing counterfeit.
Robert made a place for me in that family—let me say that right out. Only my mother had ever given me such unearned approval. I’d carve him horses out of cedar, whittle little soldiers out of pine. I’d get down and wrassle him around the cabin floor, and the sound of his laughter chased away my sadness.
* * *
In those days, I was back and forth to Bastrop all the time, making forays for this or that. As I’d never set up a proper house, I was always needing provisions or tools or some blasted thing. I’d acquired thousands of acres in my years of service but ended up selling a good deal of it for operating capital. My ambition had been to maverick up a herd of cattle, but that proved considerably more work than I’d reckoned, and I had no talent for it. In truth, I just wanted something to keep me busy between visits to Sam’s cabin.
At the time, Bastrop was a few dozen cedarwood stores and houses. Most of the streets were named after trees, others after the great men of our Revolution. I’d ride in to visit John Berry at his gunsmith shop or Timothy at the City Hotel.
I was in the general store talking with Amos Alexander late one evening when John Berry came in and clapped me on the shoulder.
I said, “Do you ever spend any time in your own shop or do you just wander about?”
“He wanders,” said Amos. “Ask him how much coffee he drinks. He can’t sit still.”
John said, “Come visit with me ’fore you leave out.”
“What is it?”
“Just come talk with me,” he said. He looked over at Amos and said, “Get back to work, loafer.”
“You get to work,” Amos said.
John went back out and Amos shook his head.
“He’s a secretive sumbitch, ain’t he?”
“I guess so,” I said, though secretive wasn’t a word anyone ever laid at John Berry’s door. If he ever heard a piece of news he didn’t tell, I’m a senator’s son.
Directly, I said my goodbyes to Amos, walked down to Berry’s shop, went in and found him standing by his furnace. His demeanor had stiffened some.
“They aim to take Sam’s headrights,” he said.
“Who’s going to take them? Where’d you hear that?”
“Don’t worry where I heard it. You
just convince him to clear out.”
“Clear out to where, John? That’s his land.”
“It was his land,” he said. “Is it true he’s took up with a nigra?”
Well, that raised my hackles. I said, “What’s it to you who he’s took up with?”
“Duncan,” he said, “I wouldn’t care if he married an alligator. I’m trying to tell you something, is all.”
“Well, tell it.”
“You never seen people so greedy for land. And Sam didn’t help hisself, thumbing his nose at the Rangers, neither.”
“He didn’t thumb nothing,” I said. “And come to think of it, I didn’t see you signing back on.”
“No, you didn’t. But Mrs. Berry is a white woman, and there’s no comparable gossip to help the land-jobbers swindle me out of my claim.”
I stood there, staring at the fire. This low talk about Cecelia made me ashamed for my own ambition against her. How did I tell her it wasn’t her skin I begrudged, but where she laid her head at night?
Then something occurred to me.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Sam. Why didn’t you tell him they’re moving on his claim?”
“I ain’t never been out there,” he said.
“Yeah, but that’s not it, is it?” I saw how nervous he was acting, anxious to be associated with Sam in any way. His conscience gave him just enough courage to warn me what was coming.
“You’re really something,” I said. “You know that, John?”
“Dammit,” he said, “you just make him understand. These folks are going to end up with that property. If he just moves along, it’d be a lot easier.”
“There’s nothing easy about somebody stealing your home from you.”
“There’s plenty worse things,” he said. “You make him listen. I don’t want to see something bad happen here.”
“You really think folks in this town are going to stand by while a man who fought in the Revolution is run off his own property?”
“Duncan,” he said, “you don’t have no idea. It ain’t that they’re going to stand by for it. I know these people pretty good. If it comes to it, they’ll pitch in and help.”
CECELIA
—TEXAS, 1846–1847—
That winter, Samuel went to work on a cow pen. Mister Lammons rode down on the weekends and the two of them would spend the day cutting pine trees from a grove beside the river.
Then one morning the man turned up in the gray light of dawn and as soon as she opened the door, she knew something was wrong.
“Miss Suss,” said Lammons, and the look on his face was grim.
She showed him inside, put a mug on the table, and set the kettle on to boil. Sam roused himself from bed and came in knuckling sleep from his eyes.
“Duncan,” he said, and you could tell he was bewildered; they’d not been expecting him so early.
“You need to get to the land office,” Lammons said. “They’re going to contest your claim.”
“Do what?” Sam asked.
“Your headrights,” Lammons told him. “I’d not even wait for your coffee.”
It was spitting snow when they rode for Austin, and it was dark and raining by the time they got back. Samuel came in and sat down at the table. He wouldn’t look at her.
They’d woken Robert up. The boy got off his pallet, walked over and Lammons took him on his lap. Usually, Robert ran to greet the man, but even a child could read the atmosphere in the room.
She sat beside Samuel, waiting for him to speak, a steady patter of rain on the cedar shingles.
“They say there’s a flaw in our title,” Sam told her. “They say we have to buy it from them or lose our improvements.”
“What title?” she said.
“Our property,” Sam said. “This property right here.”
She didn’t understand what she was hearing. She said, “You got this land for your service.”
Sam nodded. “Now they got witnesses saying it’s an old Spanish grant, so it wasn’t ever the Republic’s to offer.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” she said.
“It’s not right,” said Lammons, who up until now had been silent. “They manufactured this business about a Spanish grant. These witnesses of theirs are just men they bought off.”
“Who’s they?” she said. “Who’s doing this?”
“Could be anybody,” said Lammons. “Someone working in the land office, someone who’s moved out from the States and has taken a shine to your property.”
For the rest of the evening, she listened to Sam talk about the evils of annexation. Hadn’t he told her these things would happen?
She had a cold feeling, very cold. She couldn’t help but think it might even be Lammons himself working some scheme against them.
After the man left and she’d gotten Robert down, she went and knelt beside Sam.
She said, “Folks know Duncan socializes with you.”
“Seems to me they know pretty much everything a body does,” but before he could start ranting she said, “They’re trying to scare us. They want to know if we’ll spook. If Mister Lammons will take our part in it.”
Lammons was back over a few days later and she told him of her suspicions. Or most of her suspicions. She certainly didn’t mention her misgivings about him.
He listened to everything she had to say, stroking the whiskers on his chin, his gray eyes intent. When she was finished he looked at Sam and said, “I think she’s right.”
“About which?” Sam said.
“All of it,” Lammons told him. “They want to see if you’ll just fold. They’re not sure how you’ll come at them.”
The three of them sat for several moments.
Then she turned to Lammons and said, “What should we do?”
Lammons scratched at his cheek. “Sam ought to go see Joel Ponton first thing tomorrow morning. He knows these titles inside and out.”
“Lawyers,” said Sam, shaking his head.
“Why us?” Cecelia said.
Lammons said, “Pardon?”
“Why’d they pick us to torment?”
“It’s not just you,” said Lammons. “A lot of folks are being done brown. They did the same thing to Noah Smithwick’s mother-in-law. And her a widow with children.”
“Is it just that Sam wouldn’t ride to Mexico with them?”
“That is part of it,” Lammons said.
“Part of it,” she said. “And what is the rest?”
Lammons glanced down at the table and cleared his throat. she watched him. She didn’t need him to say it.
Or actually, maybe she did.
“It’s me,” she said.
Lammons didn’t say anything. He didn’t look up.
“I saw how they looked at me and Robert when they came out here asking after Sam. They’re going to keep at us and keep at us till we’re gone.”
Lammons shook his head. “It’s shameful, Miss Suss. It’s not everyone thinks that way.”
“No,” she said. “Not everyone.”
* * *
The next day, Sam hired Joel Ponton to act as their agent. Ponton said he’d ride to Austin the first chance he got and see whether their title was truly flawed or if it was all just a swindle.
She was proud of Sam not going for his guns, though she knew that’s exactly what he wanted.
And Lammons seemed worried it still might come to that. He showed up the following day to give Sam a pistol.
It was a beautiful, shining thing with walnut grips and an octagonal barrel. He said the weapon had come from Paterson, New Jersey. It would fire five times, quick as you could work the hammer.
Sam stared at the gun for several moments, then looked up at Lammon
s.
“I can’t take your pistol,” he said.
“You will take it,” Lammons said. “You’ll take it and you’ll keep it handy.
“I’ve got a pistol,” Sam said.
“You’ve got a one-shot hand musket that takes a minute to reload. You’ve got a rifle that’s the same way. That’s two shots, if you’re quick. I know you don’t count very good, but this here’s an improvement.”
That night, she lay in bed, trying to think it through. Everything seemed to be speeding up on them; everything was going very fast.
She rolled over and looked at Sam.
“Why don’t we just leave?” she said. “Why not let them have it? We can find another piece of land.”
“Let them have it,” he said.
“I know how they are. They won’t let up.”
“I won’t either,” he said.
She put her palm on his chest. “I know who you are, Samuel Fisk. You don’t need to prove yourself.”
He stared at the ceiling. “I’m not going to give them our home.”
She lay there, breathing. She’d known she wasn’t going to convince him.
He drew her head to his shoulder. “Let’s hear what Joel Ponton has to say.”
She thought the next time Lammons visited, she’d pull him aside. Maybe the two of them could go to work on Sam together.
They were expecting him that weekend, but when she heard the sound of hooves coming up the trail and opened the door, it wasn’t Mister Lammons’s appaloosa she saw but the apron-faced sorrel with its four white stockings. On the horse’s back was the Irishman with the milky eye. McClusky. She couldn’t recall his Christian name.
It was evening. The weather was unusually warm. Riding next to the Irishman was a balding man in store-bought pants and an oilcloth coat. He sat a little steel-colored Welsh pony with gray splotches over its hips. The two men reined up several yards from the cabin, McClusky staring at her, the other man studying the ground.
She turned to call for Sam, but Sam was already there beside her. He walked a few paces out into the yard and she saw he had the pistol Lammons had given him tucked in his belt.