Apparently, the loggers were still in the forest, and the tavern was almost empty except for a glassy-eyed old man whose head bobbled precariously above the counter while clutching an empty
glass. Not knowing what else to do, Jesse stood next to the man and smiled and nodded; after all, his mama had taught him even a heathen deserved civility. Then Mr. Percy slid a shot of red-eye toward Jesse: “This here's a mill establishment. I can only take company tokens, but seein's as how you're an outsider, this is on the house. From the looks of you, one's all it'll take.”
“I don't drink, sir...but thank you.”
“Where in this world did you come from? This red-eye's meant to take the chill away on a rainy night...cuts mucus from the lungs! That's what I tell the Mrs.”
“Well then...in that case...”. Jesse tentatively sipped, then gulped the fiery liquor, and it warmed and relaxed him to his core. It was even sufficient to overcome his natural reserve, causing him to grab the photograph from his pocket and toss it on the bar; “Have either of you seen this man in town? This is the way the man looked twenty years ago, but its the only image I have.”
Mr. Percy's small bird eyes darted to and from the tintype of Clinton McCann as he studiously re-wiped an already spotless glass. “No, never saw the man.”
Now the old man was coming to life and lifted his head to peer at Jesse. “What's this man to you, boy?” he croaked. “Be you a bounty hunter?”
“No sir, he's my papa. I have reason to believe he may be here in Morgans Bluff...though it is reported that he's dead and buried with his people in North Carolina. My mama hired a man from San Antonio eleven years ago to find out if he was dead or alive, and
he told her my papa died here in East Texas. Mama remarried after having him declared dead.”
“Then why not let it rest at that, fella?” The old man's watery eyes opened wide and in eyebrows arched to accent an obvious question.
“ All my life I had dreams of seeing my real papa, and I promised myself that when I got old enough, I'd come east to find him. That day finally came. I figure money can just as easily be paid to hide the truth as to find the truth...and I just have to know if he is dead or alive.”
“What you expect to tell your mama if you found out he is alive...and her already remarried?”
Jesse thought for a moment, but before he could think of the answer, talk was brought to an end by the rumbling of wagon wheels over wooden planks on the muddy street out front. The lumberjacks had arrived. Jesse bid his impromptu companions farewell, stepped out under clearing skies and onto a bench facing the street. From there he could see every man passing by, beneath the obscurity of a quarter moon nestled among drifting clouds. The men were all unshaven, weary looking, and dull eyed as they entered Percy's. After re-examining the photograph of Clinton McCann, he saw no resemblance to any of the men. His father's features were finely chiseled, and his eyes were almost startling in their pale intensity beneath closely clipped dark hair. He was clean shaven and wearing a suit and high starched collar and looked more like an aristocratic land baron than the no-account drifter Grandma Kessler declared him to be. By now, age had most likely transformed his father's features; yet, all the same, Jesse showed the photograph to every man as he passed. They shook their heads “no” and shuffled on.
As night settled in, Jesse decided to take a room at the Hotel Excelsior as it was the only one in town that accepted hard cash rather than company scrip. His first experience with alcohol had left him fuzzy-headed and in need of a soft bed. After securing his room, Jesse canceled out the idea of food and a hot bath and fell fully clothed across the bed to dream: A shadowy, faceless being rode out of the forest and straight at him, only to disappear when asked who was there. Jesse awakened with both head and heart pounding at the same time.
The early morning light streamed in to blind him, until he lowered the window shade against the sun. He arose stiffly and looked around to find a tin tub of water, a bar of soap, and a fresh towel, all of which had been placed there as he slept. He quickly disposed of his clothes, stepped into the warm water, and closed his eyes and mind against all thought for the duration of a long soak. Just as his mind grew mercifully idle, he heard heavy footsteps that stopped right at his door, and his eyes flickered open at the sound of the door knob slowly turning.
Filling the doorway stood a mountain of a man with black braids and dark, deep-set eyes. Jesse, for the first time in his life, wished that he carried a firearm. Kate had been opposed to weapons of any kind, and his father had not been around to set her straight. So there he lay in a hot tub of water, naked and unarmed.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Name's Domingo. I have a message for you. Do not bother looking for the man you call Clinton McCann. He is dead and he had no son. You are wasting your time.”
“What business is it of yours, and who sent you?”
“Just saving you some trouble. Consider it a favor.” These were the final words before the man called Domingo turned to go, leaving Jesse bewildered and angry. After his relaxation was interrupted in such an unsettling manner, he decided to wash quickly, dress and head downstairs for some much needed nourishment. Maybe food would lift the fog from his befuddled brain.
Downstairs in the dining hall, he ordered bacon and cornmeal flapjacks with sorghum syrup, served up by a girl the customers referred to as Annie. He ate silently until his hunger lifted and then motioned for Annie to fill his coffee cup. “ Do you know a man named Domingo?” he asked her.
“The one who came up to your room?”
“Yes.”
“He's what is called a “bull 'o the woods” in the lumber camps...the big boss....the man who oversees the loggers. From New Orleans so I've heard. Some say he's part Comanche...part Creole....and some even throw in a little Gypsy blood. Whatever he is, he's not a man to cross. That much everyone can agree on.”
Annie's gray eyes scanned the tables for new diners and then she bustled about to take their orders, leaving Jesse intrigued by her brisk manner and unusual looks. Her snub nose, auburn hair and ivory skin spoke of Celtic ancestry, like the majority of East Texans. The Irish and Scots-Irish, his mama had once said, often married cousins within their clan and thus preserved their heritage. Yet a few intermarried with Native Americans or German newcomers and adopted different cultures. Although the girl, who seemed to be his own age, had traits of European descent, there was some more exotic blood running through those veins and a different cadence to her speech. In a word, she was unusual.
After breakfast, Jesse resumed his search for his father by riding out to the logging camp that skirted the endless acres of majestic pines. Around the tents at the edge of the woods, dirty faced children tossed pine cones and buried each other in mounds of pine straw in playful abandon. They stopped long enough to stare gape- mouthed at this stranger so different from their heavily muscled and rough handed fathers. Jesse smiled and spoke, but the children backed away.
In passing, Jesse watched the harried mothers tending the dried beans and salt pork bubbling in iron kettles over camp fires and inhaled the sweet earthiness of the crackling oak. The women stopped and looked up with world-weary eyes, while their children ran to hide behind their long mud-caked skirts. And all the while the sound of sawing filled the woods around them; and the earth shook as the colossal trees crashed to the forest floor.
Then Jesse saw him. Overseeing the sawyers' progress, Domingo stood upon a wagon with massive brown arms folded, his face cloudy with contempt. He had Jesse in the bull's eye of his gaze.
III: New Directions
After several days stay at the Hotel Excelsior, Jesse was flat broke. Mr. Perry suggested he seek employment at the saw mill office and advised him to request any position other than lumberjack or swampier. Jesse figured Mr. Percy supposed he was too soft to fell giant trees or clear thick underbrush. Jesse, however, was willing to take any job offered him. Following Mr. Percy's directions, he rode B
elle across a shallow ford in the Big Muddy on his way to the mill office. Just beyond the camps he came to a ramshackle cabin displaying a sign above the door: EMPLOYMENT---PAY---B. Hennessy, and underneath in smaller letters: Reese Morgan, owner, Morgan Mills.
Buck Hennessy hired, fired, kept time and distributed company scrip, the bartering pay that could only be traded for goods and services at company stores. At first glance Jesse was surprised to see a peg-legged, pot bellied little man with listless eyes and shaggy mane. The man gave the appearance of dissipation due to a misspent youth that had turned into a mundane middle age. Before Jesse could open his mouth to ask for a job, Buck Hennessy offered him a position he had never heard of and would never have wanted:
“I need someone to walk the campgrounds at night to protect the families in the tents while they sleep...protect them from predators... and one in particular...a lone she-wolf. She's been illusive for many years. You'd be expected to shoot on sight. We also have a company nurse who needs protection, since she comes at night to tend folks with fever or infection from snakebite. Annie Morgan's her name. Works at the hotel dining room by day.
“Yes sir, I've met her, but I didn't know she was a nurse.”
“Not formally trained,” said Hennessy. “She learned working along side her grandmother when she was a little girl. She learned the art of mixing potions and poultices with herbs and natural ingredients. She tends the fevers that come on with summer at the Boggy Slough and measles and croup amongst the kids at the logging camp. She and others are all wide open to predator attacks...although this wolf has never harmed a child. In other words, McCann, for lack of a better term, I need a wolf hunter.”
“Must I kill the animal? Do wolves ever attack people?”
“Some say one in particular is big enough and bold enough...a big gray female . The females are the deadliest you know. Folks call her “Tah-sha”, the Caddo word for wolf...named long ago by the full blood Minna who lives on the bluff outside of town.”
“ I thought all the natives were sent to Oklahoma years ago,” said Jesse.
“Minna was never sent away like the rest of those from the mound builder's tribe. She was the consort of a powerful man. No need to tell you now who that man is. Any how, Tahsha protected Minna from a black bear one day, maybe twenty years ago. So the woman thinks of her as an animal spirit and revers her. You can't tell these natives animals have no souls. That so called “animal spirit guide” killed a logger once, even though some said the man was beating his children in public. I say good riddance to bad blood any way.” Buck Hennessy propped his one surviving leg on his desk, unstrung a pouch of Bull Durham and continued with what seemed to Jesse a twisted tall tale.
“Then there was the time twenty years ago when a young man went into town to fetch the mid-wife 'cause his wife seemed unable to deliver their first child. They say her screams echoed through the hills all night. When he got back around dawn, he found his wife dead, but there was evidence she had delivered the baby. There just wasn't a sign of the newborn any where. Outside in the dirt were wolf prints....big ones. The papa figured he knew the fate of his newborn baby. Grieved mightily, moved off and got on with his life. Five years later when the timber operation moved deep into the woods, some loggers spotted an unclothed little girl with tangled hair running toward the wolf's den. They finally captured the little girl and locked her in a shed until they could find out who she was. She wouldn’t take nourishment, and she beat her little head against the walls all night.”
“Did they release her back into the wild?” asked Jesse.
“Well, no, a relative took her in and raised her. That's a story for another time.” Mr. Hennessy cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. “Was she the newborn taken by the wolf?”
“Yes. She was. The animal had two sides to her nature, one side ferocious, one side nurturing. You see, the night was bitter cold, and had the wolf not taken the baby to her den and kept her warm, she might have been dead from exposure by the time the midwife arrived. But I'm growing old... and I talk too much. You'll know the whole story someday... but not today. Now....do you want the job or not?”
“Why don't the men take turns standing guard? Why would the company pay someone?”
“ 'Cause nobody else will do the job...that's why. Superstition! Years ago, the natives placed a charm on the animal, so that any man who tried to do harm to Tahsha would meet a bad end.”
The two men, one young and naive, one aging and jaded, sat silently sizing each other up. Buck Hennessy took Jesse's silence as acceptance: “Your job is simple...to stand guard...to walk the paths around the camps at night. Look after Annie Morgan when she comes to tend the sick. Shoot any wolf on sight...but make sure it is a wolf and not somebody's dog.”
“I think I would know the difference between a wolf and a dog,” Jesse responded.
“Have you ever seen a wolf?”
“Well...no...only photographs and pictures.”
Buck Hennessy snorted and spit. “Pictures in books don’t tell half the story. Full blooded wolves have wild hazel eyes that change colors with the light and with their mood. Sometimes you see only their eyes in full darkness...watchin' and waitin'. And in the still of night they howl at the moon...a blood-curdling sound like no other.”
The hair rose on the back of Jesse's neck as he came to terms with the danger in accepting such an assignment. Sensing the stall, Mr. Hennessy changed the subject: “Know anything about firearms?”
“Of course,” Jesse lied.
The company man peered straight through the greenhorn and spit a fresh chew of tobacco into a can. “Don't matter much whether you do or not. I figure you could pull the trigger if old Tahsha corners you some night. There's man enough in you for that!”
As if on cue, Mr. Hennessy pulled a rifle from a wooden box on the floor beside him. “This here's an old Whitfield. ” He lovingly turned the rifle in his hands as if it were a treasured old friend. “Used this one when I was a Confederate sniper some twenty odd years ago.” He tossed the weapon to Jesse who fumbled to catch it. “Consider this yours as long as you have the job that goes with it.”
“So you were in the war between the states. Is that how...”
“How I got this here?” Buck finished Jesse's sentence with a tap on his wooden leg. “No indeed. Logging accident after the war. Leg got crushed by a fallin' tree measuring thirty feet around. Happens sometimes, even in this day and time.”
Jesse grew quiet. He had fallen into a quagmire for which he was ill suited and unprepared. The feeling was like a slow sink into quicksand in the middle of nowhere. Even so, he accepted the job of wolf hunter, despite his misgivings. It was preferable to going hungry and sleeping on the ground, especially with a wolf on the prowl.
“You can start your shift tonight,” Buck said. “But watch out for that boss man Domingo... if you meet him on the road...in the dark. Talk is...he doesn't take to you for some reason.”
IV: Lost and Found
Later that evening, a persimmon sunset graced the skies over Morgans Bluff; and as the rain soaked earth cooled, a ghostly haze shrouded the countryside. Jesse rode past the logging camps to Buck Hennessy’s office and hitched Belle around back. He figured the young mare would be easily spooked should they come upon a panther or bear or Tahsha herself. He then headed back on foot to the camp with the unfamiliar weight of the rifle slung from his shoulder. He walked for miles upon the paths, even as the last kerosene lantern was snuffed out. Darkness soon engulfed him.
Nighttime within the thick, towering pines produced a darkness he had never experienced back home. Farther west, the treeline lowered until, at last, there was merely the sky meeting the earth in an unbroken line. But there in the piney woods, the depth of dark was intensified, as the moon lowered. As Mr. Percy had said in that backwoods colloquialism: “Dark it be in them there woods.”
Gradually, nighttime chorus surrounded him with owls hooting on branches above, hogs rooting in the t
hickets, joined by the snorting alert from the white tailed deer. Man is near. Beware. Man is in our territory. Small, scurrying creatures he could not see rustled through the underbrush. The night had come alive. From the rolling hills beyond, came the melancholy and startling howl, fierce and guttural, echoing across the valleys.
If the wolves come, will I see them in time? Get a hold on yourself, man. They sense fear. They can smell it from miles.
Jesse walked and watched, peering about in the dark, oblivious to the path he had taken. Soon it became apparent that he had lost his direction and had ended up at the edge of a bayou the townsfolk called Boggy Slough, around which were rows of tar papered shacks forming Shanty Town. These were the shot-gun shelters of trappers and farmers who lived from hand to mouth, severed from civilization by circumstance. Now he was in a place he knew nothing about and had unknowingly left the boundaries of his patrol. The greenhorn from the wide open spaces of West Texas was lost deep in the woodlands.
Suddenly Jesse heard the clip-clop of horse's hooves, first faint and then growing louder as a rider approached from behind. Then the sound magnified as the rider crossed the rickety bridge over Dead Man's Creek. Could it be Domingo stalking him in the darkness? He quickened his pace, grabbed hold of the rail and dropped into the water. There under the bridge he crouched under cover waiting to see who passed. Then the horse stopped midway across and right above him. Then came the sound of a female voice: “You....down under this bridge...let me see your face!” He recognized the lilting voice of Annie Morgan, the girl from the hotel.
“Jesse McCann here. I got a bit turned around...just started patrol for the saw mill.”
Annie Morgan's answer was tinged with amusement: “ So you decided to hide under the bridge until you remembered your way?”
Jesse McCann: The Journey (The McCann Family Saga Book 1) Page 2