Doubtful Canon

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “We’d be out in the open,” Ian Spencer Henry said, and I knew he was right. “And Jasmine can’t walk that far. Look at her now.”

  Resting on a rock, she bit her lip, gently massaging her ankle, saying nothing.

  “The house.” Miss Giddings’s head bobbed.

  “But,” I argued, “that’s the first place they’d look.”

  “I know, Jack,” she said. “But remember…they threw my rifle, the one Mister Spoon gave me, out the front door. It still shoots, the stock’s just busted. And they threw the other rifle out there, too.”

  “Mister Grey’s Colt, too.” Ian Spencer Henry liked her idea, whatever it was. “I don’t think they picked up any of those guns. Might have, but I’m certain sure they didn’t get those rifles.”

  “We couldn’t fight those men,” I complained. “That’s Johnny Ringo and Curly Bill. They’re killers. They’ll gun down every last one of us.”

  Eyes flaming, Miss Giddings raised her voice, and almost waved a finger in my face, stopping herself at the last moment. “We don’t have any choice, Jack! We have to go to the house, get those guns.”

  Jasmine let out a little sob. Her head shook, and she dropped her head. “I don’t think I can make it to the house. That’s at least two miles from here.” She brushed away a tear. “Y’all leave me here.”

  “We’re not leaving you!” I said angrily. “If I have to carry you….”

  “You’re not going,” Miss Giddings said. “None of you shall go to the house. Like Jack said, that’s where they’ll look.”

  I felt confused. “But you just said….” I started, only to be interrupted one more time by my best friend.

  “We can’t stay here!” Ian Spencer Henry looked at the sky. “It’ll be dark soon. Well, not soon, but…well, soon.”

  Miss Giddings glanced up the cañon, then down, wet her lips, and offered a faint smile. “You can stay here. All of you. I’ll go to the house, get the guns, hurry back.” Another smile, even weaker than her first effort. “With luck, maybe Ringo and that other man, maybe they’ve given up. Rode off up the cañon, trying to find Ringo’s horse. I don’t think either is so hungry for gold. I think they’re both scared.”

  “Not Curly Bill Brocious,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “And sure not Ringo.”

  “Ringo the most,” she said. “He’s scared of dying. Petrified. Scared of his own mortality. I’ve never met a man as scared as he is. You saw it, Jack.” Her eyes held mine, but I didn’t know what she meant. “When you told him he’d be dead in two or three years. He went straight to the bot-….”

  Both of our eyes fell as we thought about my father.

  “You were very brave, Jack.” Miss Giddings tried again. “Very brave.”

  “Then I should go for those guns,” I said.

  “No.” Her head shook.

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “Like you said, ma’am, maybe Ringo and Brocious turned yeller and ran. Rode double. Got out of the cañon, went on to Arizona.” His head nodded as the idea grew on him. “Yeah, that’s what I think. So we’re safe.”

  “No, Ian.” Miss Giddings was the only person I ever knew who called him only by his first name. “We have another person to consider, and I don’t think he’s about to give up his search for that money.”

  I mouthed his name. Whitey Grey. Then I said: “I’ll go. You three hide. I’ll come back for you. I promise.”

  Yet Miss Giddings would not relent. A Shakespeare mule could not match that lady’s stubborn streak. “No, Jack,” she said. “Again, no. But thank you. I’ll go. You children hide.”

  “But where?” Jasmine asked.

  She grinned again. “I know just the spot.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  With Jasmine leaning on my shoulder, we slowly covered another three or four hundred yards, then dipped through the maze of fallen boulders and squeezed through the little opening. Ian Spencer Henry had called our natural redoubt a fort, and it probably had saved our lives when the Apaches had attacked a day earlier.

  Limping only slightly now, Jasmine reassured me: “I feel fine, Jack.”

  So did I…until I saw the graveyard.

  “Wow,” Ian Spencer Henry said tightly, “would you look at that….” His voice trailed off.

  You couldn’t help but look, because even though I wanted to turn away, I couldn’t. Open-mouthed, horrified, I just stared, blaming myself. We hadn’t given Willie Spoon much of a burial, hadn’t had time, once the Apaches hit us, to cover his grave with stones the way the freight men had done over the two other graves twenty years earlier.

  After muttering a prayer—or starting one, at least—Miss Giddings shielded Jasmine’s eyes, but that maternal act didn’t last long either, for she realized the hopelessness of it. Instead, her long arms dropped to her sides, and she caught her breath, tried to fight back the choking sobs.

  “Poor….” she said. “Poor, poor Mister Spoon.”

  His rib cage and skull lay close to the dug-up hole, the rest of his bones scattered across the area. No blood, no flesh, just bones, stark and empty, not quite bleaching but haunting nonetheless.

  “They picked him clean,” Ian Spencer Henry said to no one in particular, sounding a lot like Whitey Grey, and turned to me. “You reckon Apaches done it, Jack?”

  My head shook. Like many other men I had known, Whitey Grey called the Apaches practically fearless, except when it came to darkness and death. They didn’t even like to speak of the dead, and to touch them…well, I had seen the look on the Chiricahua boy’s face when he had leaped on me. It had been a face of strength and brutality, even after I had shattered his nose, until he rolled into the grave and had seen death so close. He had cried out in fear, and only then did he turn and run. We hadn’t whipped that Indian, not by any stretch of the imagination. Willie Spoon had won that battle for us, won it in death.

  And this is his reward?

  The thought shuddered me, but I managed to answer Ian Spencer Henry. “Wolves, I guess. Ravens.” I looked skyward. “Maybe buzzards. Ants.”

  “That’s gross,” he said.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “Come on, children.” Her courage returning, Miss Giddings led us through the feasting ground, careful not to touch any of the strewn bones.

  “Shouldn’t we…?” Jasmine swallowed. “Shouldn’t we bury…what’s left?”

  “No time,” Miss Giddings said. “Later maybe. Later, certainly. But first I want y’all to hide. And stay put.” She turned the corner around a clump of catclaw, her eyes searching the cañon walls.

  “You looking for the cave?” Ian Spencer Henry said. “The gold?” No doubt about it, the buried fortune occupied his thoughts. My friend couldn’t keep from studying the cañon, tripping over rocks, and almost walking into a yucca plant, wetting his dry lips, scouting for that tree that marked the location of the treasure.

  Not that he was alone in that pursuit. Honestly I felt my own eyes trying to find that sliver in the ground near the alligator juniper—at least for a while—with about as much success as I would have had looking for a sober man at Falstaff’s Tavern. The thought, the imagery shattered me. I pictured my own father, in his cups, in front of that bucket of blood back in Shakespeare. I saw him begging Dutch Ringo and Curly Bill for a coin, anything to slake his thirst.

  “Watch where you’re going, Ian!” Miss Giddings called out, but she didn’t heed her own advice. She stopped, leaned against a chalky boulder, squinting her eyes, shaking her head after a couple of minutes before moving on, slowly, deliberately.

  The wind blew in a sudden gust, bringing the chill in the air. Since the rainstorm, the air had turned cooler, reminding the desert that autumn had arrived.

  “There!”

  Miss Giddings pointed, but it took a moment for the slit to register. “That’s it,” she said, scrambling up the rocks, kicking loose a river of dust, pebbles, and cactus spines. “This is where I hid from the Apaches. At
first, I mean, after….” Stopping, she knelt and held out her hand. Jasmine took it, and Miss Giddings pulled her up. Ian Spencer Henry and I climbed up ourselves, without help, and eased our way into the opening.

  “Mister Grey might have hid here, too,” Ian Spencer Henry said, then frowned. “I hope there ain’t no tarantulas in that hole.”

  “I’m not sure a spider could fit in there,” I said, but the crevasse was misleading. With Miss Giddings’s help, Jasmine slipped into the small cave, and Ian Spencer Henry and I followed, but not before she pressed a canteen in my hand.

  “Take care of them, Jack,” she said. “Stay alert.” She pointed. “You’ve got a good view of the cañon from here. Don’t make a sound. Don’t answer to anyone till I come back. Just be still and quiet. You can see out, but it’s hard for anyone to see inside, so you’ll be safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She hesitated, found the sun, bit her lower lip. “It might be morning.” She listened, but we hadn’t heard any noise in the longest time. No gunfire. No horses. No Apaches or Curly Bill Brocious or Dutch Johnny Ringo.

  “I’ve got Pa’s Colt, ma’am,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “I’ll take care of my friends.”

  She smiled, sad but sweet, and her nod lacked confidence. “I know you will, Ian. Jasmine, will you be all right? How’s your leg?”

  “Better,” she answered. “I’ll be good as new with a little more rest. Just walked too much today.”

  The rock walls felt cold, and I tried not to shiver. Whether or not Miss Giddings returned, we would have a long walk. Two miles or so out of Doubtful Cañon, another six or eight to the Southern Pacific tracks…in hard country, with Apaches and outlaws on the loose. I shook the canteen, testing the water. Miss Giddings carried the other canteens.

  “I’ll fill these at the spring,” she said. “Get the weapons, come back. But like I said, it might be morning. I couldn’t find this place in the dark.”

  Then she did what struck me as odd. She slipped into the opening and hugged us, I mean a bear hug, almost forcing the air out of my lungs, kissed Jasmine’s forehead, and climbed out. I watched her until she disappeared, then leaned back into the creeping darkness.

  “Jack?” Ian Spencer Henry asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t reckon she’s going to leave us here? Do you?”

  After the sun sank, I thought about Ian Spencer Henry’s question. Earlier I had scoffed at my friend’s suggestion—so had Jasmine—but with the cold and dark blanketing us, listening to the wolves and coyotes, reservations about Eleora Giddings entered my mind.

  Would she return? I mean, why? She’d have enough water to get to Stein’s Peak, could handle one of those George S. Sheffield & Company velocipede cars as well as we had. We’d just slow her down. She’d have weapons, and, most importantly, she’d be out of Doubtful Cañon. Why would anyone return? Walk two miles into one of Southwest’s most treacherous cañons, then another two miles to get out. She’d witnessed all this country had to offer, had seen how it had killed her father. Come back? To save three children she didn’t even know?

  Once more, a wolf sang out, and a dark cloud swallowed the moon.

  I woke stiffly after a fitful night of bad dreams, none of which I could remember clearly as dawn broke with drab gray skies and a bitter, persistent wind. After craning my neck to stretch the aching, tight muscles, I stepped out of the entrance and looked.

  Nothing. No sound but the wind. Nothing to see but the confines of the cañon, the bleakness of desert. I sank back into the shadows, trembling.

  “People disappear all the time,” I remembered my father telling me when we had first settled in Shakespeare, on Halloween if I recalled correctly. “Out there.” Smiling at me, winking at my mother, he had pointed westward. “One moment they are living, breathing individuals, full of hope and foibles, and then they are like the dust, maybe they are dust, their memories, their lives, just blown away and forgotten.” He had tousled my hair. “Apaches claim some, banditti many others, but I suppose most are just driven away by the land itself, killed from exposure, Nature, thirst, sickness, even madness.” He’d snapped his fingers. “Like that.” Another smile and another wink. “So be careful, my boy. Don’t let New Mexico swallow you up.”

  Ian Spencer Henry blew on the cylinder of his Colt, and looked up at me. “You reckon Injuns waylaid Miss Giddings?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I heard a lot of commotion over yonder way.” He gestured toward the burial ground.

  “Wolves,” I said, and shuddered at the thought of Willie Spoon’s bones. “Or coyotes.”

  “I thought I heard horses, too.” He shoved the pistol in his waistband.

  The sound of hoofs came back to me, and, recalling the noises of the night, I looked up and down the cañon again. Had that been a dream? I wasn’t sure.

  “I’m hungry, Jack,” my friend said.

  Jasmine echoed his statement. “Me, too.”

  “How’s your leg?” I asked her.

  “Better.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Sure.”

  Ian Spencer Henry rose, his right hand gripping the revolver’s butt. “Then let’s go.”

  I shook my head. “We wait,” I said, “for Miss Giddings. Just like she told us to do.”

  So, we waited, our stomachs growling, the wind rustling through the rocks and juniper, whipping the remaining moisture from the cañon.

  And waited….

  “She ain’t coming, Jack,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “She run off.” His head shook. “No, no, I don’t think she’d do that. She took a shine to Jasmine. She wouldn’t leave her.” He frowned. “But maybe the Cherry Cows got her.”

  Waiting…even when I knew Eleora Giddings would not return. We waited and watched until the walls of the little slice in the rock closed in on me, and I darted out of the confines, into the noon light, and hollered at my comrades: “Come on, let’s get out of here!” The echoes of my voice startled me, but I refused to retreat.

  What was I supposed to do? Stay in that hole until we all died, died of starvation, linger until we turned to dust to be blown away and forgotten?

  “What are we going to do?” Jasmine asked after I helped her down off the rocks.

  “The same thing Miss Giddings planned,” I said. “Go get those guns, fill this canteen at the spring, backtrack our way to Stein’s Peak, and wait on the next Southern Pacific train. Westbound or eastbound, I don’t care.”

  Just get out of this country.

  I started walking, not even slowing down when Ian Spencer Henry called out in a hushed but urgent whisper: “But, Jack, you’re going the wrong way.”

  “First,” I said, “we rebury Mister Spoon’s bones.”

  Strange, my preoccupation with giving Willie Spoon a decent burial. My friends sure found it odd, that obsession. Not that I could explain my reasoning, if indeed it was reasoning to them. Not that I even understood my actions myself. My father’s words kept dancing in my head: One moment they are living, breathing individuals, full of hope and foibles, and then they are like the dust, maybe they are dust, their memories, their lives, just blown away and forgotten. I pictured Willie Spoon in that shallow grave, watching his face turn into my own.

  Something else my father had once said also came to me, more words that I could not clear from my troubled, tired mind.

  “In the end, Jack, the only thing a man has is his conscience. Forget about money, home, fame, any of that stuff. Nothing matters,” he had told me.

  “What about his word?” I had asked him.

  He had shook his head. “A man’s word doesn’t mean anything without his conscience. That’s a man’s being. That’s a man’s worth. That’s why some men do the right thing, and why too many others don’t. Some men will do the wrong thing, but, in the end, they’ll make it all right…if they have conscience.”

  I kicked a stone savagely, rocketed it twenty feet into the cañon wall. What ha
ppened to your conscience, Pa?

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  I blinked away my tears. I didn’t realize I had said that aloud. “Nothing,” I told Jasmine. “We’re almost….”

  We were there, and I stopped, gasping.

  Willie Spoon’s bones were gone. The grave remained uncovered, bits of cloth that I hadn’t noticed the previous day here and there, but I found no bones, nothing left of Willie Spoon except dust. My heart sank.

  “It must have been the wolves,” Ian Spencer Henry said.

  The wind kicked up even harder, kicking up dust, and Jasmine’s voice quaked when she asked: “Can we get out of here now?”

  I didn’t answer, just looked. We should have buried those bones yesterday. No, no, Miss Giddings was right. We didn’t have time, couldn’t chance it. I stopped debating myself, tried to tuck away those doubts always plaguing me. Sighing, I looked at the yucca near the graves. I caught my breath again.

  “What is it?” Ian Spencer Henry said.

  “The spade.” A shaking finger pointed at the desert cactus. “The pickaxe,” I said. “They’re gone.”

  We had left them behind, after the Apache ambush. Closing my eyes, I tried to remember, picture the details. Evening. The albino had crawled to us. Leave the pickaxe and that spade here, by ol’ Willie Spoon’s grave. Whitey Grey’s wild drawl sounded clear in my mind.

  “Apaches must have took them,” Ian Spencer Henry said.

  “Maybe,” I said, but again I heard Whitey Grey. Don’t reckon ’em Cherry Cows’ll touch it.…

  I looked up, catty-corner from the graves, and the mirage came to me, as clear as the white-skinned man’s words.

  A deathly pale figure came sliding down the cañon, flowing along the loose gravel and dirt as if canoeing through the rapids toward a waterfall. Tan-colored duck trousers were stuck inside battered boots of different sizes, different colors, though it was hard to tell from all the dust on the leather, and he wore grimy braces over a plaid bib-front shirt missing several buttons, not to mention the green and white bib. An ancient calico bandanna kept his hat, the ugliest, dirtiest thing I’d ever seen, from blowing off, the kerchief wrapped around the crown, pulling the brim over his ears, knotted underneath his chin. He carried no gun that I could see, balancing himself on his descent with a pickaxe in his right hand and a broken spade in his left.