Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  The reasons for Sam’s friendship with the others were more obvious. Henry Underwood was from Indiana, like Sam, and had worn the Yankee blue in the war, like Sam’s older brother, who was killed in Kentucky. Maybe he had known Sam’s brother or served under the same commander. I don’t know. Anyway, they had Indiana in common, and strangers in a place are always glad to happen onto someone who shares something of the past with them. Henry was married and made his living hauling firewood and driving freight between Denton and Dallas, but I considered him a shiftless sort. He spent too much time in town, drinking and gaming at the Parlor Saloon, and his wife’s life was a hard one.

  The Parlor was run by Henderson Murphy, and it was there that Sam met Henderson’s son, Jim. Although I consider saloon-keeping a questionable way to win a livelihood, no town could ask for a better citizen than Henderson Murphy. He served several terms as alderman, and outside the town he owned even more land than I did. He sired the first white child born in Denton, and several others afterwards. That was lucky for him, for he suffered terribly from consumption and needed all the help he could get to tend his property. And no man could ask for a more helpful son than Jim was, particularly around the saloon. He was blessed with that cheerfulness and gift of talk that makes Irishmen such perfect hosts and a skill with his fists that enabled him to keep order without calling for the law. If the other saloonkeepers in Denton had been as well equipped for their calling as young Jim was, my lot would have been a happier one.

  Sam and his friends were an odd bunch. Frank Jackson wasn’t far beyond childhood, hardly old enough to need a razor. Henry Underwood was at least a dozen years older than he, and a family man besides. And Jim Murphy, despite his jolly manner, was a man who took his responsibilities seriously, especially his duty to his father, while the others didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I think if Sam hadn’t been around, they wouldn’t have paid any attention at all to one another. They weren’t really friends of each other. But each, for his own reasons, was Sam’s friend, and whenever he was around, they moved to him like horseshoe nails to a magnet. So the four were often in each other’s company, and the town got used to seeing them together. Sam had a charm of some kind, I guess, but I can’t say what it was, and he lived with me for three years.

  He came to work for me very like the way he had gone to the Widow Lacy. Out of pure restlessness. I was sitting on the courthouse steps one evening as usual, and he sat down beside me, just as he had when he was working for Bob Carruth. He breathed a sigh and slumped forward. “Lord,” he said, “that hotel is getting the best of me.”

  “The Widow’s getting her money’s worth, is she?” I said.

  “She is. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. And the worse thing is, I’m staying in the same place.”

  The remark didn’t make sense to me, and I asked him what he meant.

  “I mean I ain’t going nowhere,” he said in that high-pitched twang that he employed when complaining. “I’ve been around that damn hotel all day and most of the night for nearly two years now, and every time I get out of sight of it, that widow woman hollers so loud you can hear her all over the square. She might as well tie me up like a dog.”

  “She likes you,” I said.

  “But I’m too old for that kind of work now. Hotel work is boy’s work. And women’s. A man’s got to move around. In all the time I’ve been in Texas I ain’t been no farther from this spot than Carruth’s place.” He lapsed into a kind of reverie, just staring into the evening for some time. Then he said, “I shouldn’t never have listened to you. I should have went buffalo hunting.”

  “Well, you’d probably be dead now.”

  “Dead is better than what I am.”

  “Pshaw, Sam!”

  “Well, I believe it,” he said. Then he fell back into his silence.

  It was full dark when he spoke again, and the saloon lamps were casting an inviting glow onto the sidewalks around the square. “Come have a drink with me,” he said.

  “You know I don’t drink, son.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Let me drive for you, then.”

  At that time, besides being sheriff, I had started a small freighting business. Just two wagons that I ran between Denton and Dallas and Sherman to fetch goods from the railroad depots whenever there was call to. Although I had competitors in Henry Underwood and others, my business was growing, and I employed two teamsters. But I didn’t need another one.

  I did need help, though. In addition to the family ranch west of town, where my brothers did more than their share of the labor, and my twelve-acre town place west of Bolivar Street, where my dear wife was too heavily burdened with the care of our large garden and the domestic animals, I recently had bought a hundred-and-sixty-acre place to the northwest that was in need of improvement. As I said, I’m a man of property. But the growth of the town and the troublesome times were demanding more of me than I had expected when I was persuaded to run for the sheriffs office, and I was proving a neglectful steward of what the Lord had given me. So I said, “I’ve got no place for another teamster now, but I do need some help.” And I told him about the new place and all that needed to be done there, and offered to let him live with Mrs. Egan and me at our town place. I also promised that if one of my teamsters quit, he could have the job.

  He accepted my offer with enthusiasm, and wanted to move his belongings into my house that very night, but I refused. “It would be unfair to the Widow,” I said. “Tell her what you’re going to do and give her a few days to find somebody to take your place.”

  “She ain’t going to like this, Dad,” he said.

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Will you tell her? She’ll kill me.”

  The prospect of telling the Widow Lacy that she was losing her right hand didn’t thrill me, either, but I agreed to do it. Sam wanted me to go to her right then, but I decided to wait until morning, when the woman wouldn’t be so tired.

  The Widow gave me unshirted hell. She even wept, and accused me of stealing the boy away from her. But I told her Sam was so restless that she was bound to lose him soon, anyway. And she had begun to suspect that, and finally told me that if she had to lose him, she was glad he was coming to me. She implored me to treat him right, and I promised that I would. She took my hand and pressed it and wiped her eyes, and that was that.

  A few days later, Sam moved his gear into the little room off my back porch. I rode out to the new place with him and my younger brother Armstrong, who is called “Army,” and showed Sam the work he would have to do, with Army’s help. The prospect would have disheartened almost anybody. Nobody had lived on the place in years, and the cabin was in ruins. I didn’t care about that, since I didn’t plan to live there anyway, but the land was on the verge of ruin, too. The fields were overgrown with weeds, and the brush was making a vigorous comeback in the pasture, and the fences would have to be rebuilt. The improvements I wanted were minimal, since I intended to use the land for grazing and for the firewood I could get out of the bottom on the back side of the place. But Sam and Army would have to spend days in the pasture with grubbing hoes and axes, hacking at the brush and snaking timbers out of the woods and splitting them to rebuild the fences, and chopping and hauling the firewood. Just looking at it made my back ache, but Sam and Army regarded it as nothing. Youth is wonderful.

  Within a month they had the fences up, and I bought a few head of stock and moved them there. The boys cut enough firewood to last the whole winter and hauled it to town. Then Army went back to the ranch and left Sam alone with his grubbing hoe and ax and the brush. Every morning Mrs. Egan fixed him bacon and biscuits to take with him, and he would saddle the little buckskin and ride out just after daylight. He would stay out there all day by himself, working like a nigger, and ride back in time to milk our cow, gather the eggs and do anything else he could to help my wife. He would dandle my daughter Minnie on his knee, and let little John ride
him piggyback. He called John “Little Pard.” He made a lot of progress on the pasture, too, and I guess he would have grubbed brush all winter if Billy Chick hadn’t quit.

  Billy was one of my teamsters. When the weather started getting cold, he looked for an inside job and found one. I wasn’t sorry. He was lazy, and I probably would have let him go anyhow.

  I was looking for a way to reward Sam, since he hadn’t uttered a word of complaint and I knew he wouldn’t be happy hacking brush forever. So when Billy quit, I offered his job to Sam.

  I’ll never forget the day of his first trip to Dallas. The wagon was piled high with buffalo hides, and they stank to high heaven. But Sam had a brand new haircut and a shave and was wearing new black pantaloons and a checkered shirt that the Widow Lacy had given him. I don’t guess he had worn them more than twice before.

  “Lord, son,” I said, “you look like you’re going to church.” “Better than that,” he said. “I been tending these goddamn horses all my life, and now they’re going to take me somewhere.”

  He came back a few days later full of tales about the city. His eyes flashed as he described the iron toll bridge across the Trinity River, the street with the outdoor gas lights that made night almost as plain as day, the huffing of the steam locomotives, the mule-drawn cars for the public to ride on Main Street. You would have thought he was Marco Polo home from Cathay. His taste of the wider world had given him such a thrill that he was a pleasure to see.

  He hinted of sampling the city’s darker pleasures, too, offhandedly mentioning the elaborate gambling setups in some of the saloons there, the piano music and the women with uncovered shoulders and plumes in their hair who knew how to separate a man from his money. I suspected they had separated Sam from some, but if they did, it was his own money and not mine. He returned with every penny he was supposed to, so I didn’t ask how he took his ease in Dallas. I had sent Sam to the city to do a job for me, and he had done it. I was satisfied.

  And I was more satisfied as time passed. Sam was the most willing, capable hand I ever had. He became the man I relied on for any duty requiring intelligence and a sense of responsibility. It was he who hauled the first load of ice from Sherman to Denton, a day of note in the history of the town. The ice had come all the way from the Great Lakes by riverboat and train, but so much of it could have been lost on the hot fifty miles from Sherman that the enterprise wouldn’t have been worth the effort in the hands of a careless man. Sam packed the big blocks in the wagon with a care befitting glass, surrounding and covering them with straw before he lashed the canvas over them. When he arrived, he and Frank Jackson chipped off two big chunks and danced a jig in the street, holding the ice over their heads, shouting its coming to the town. The butchers and saloonkeepers bought it quickly at a premium price, and the ice run to Sherman became one of Sam’s regular duties. I wouldn’t have trusted it to anybody else.

  Sam lived in my house and ate at my table and had my leave to treat most of my goods and belongings as his own. My children worshipped him. My wife pitied him and tried to teach him to read and write. He wasn’t much of a pupil, but he did learn to write his name. When my wife concluded that he was enduring her instruction only to please her and not out of a desire for learning, she gave up. He received two or three letters from his family in Indiana, and Mrs. Egan would read them to him and write out his replies for him. In one, I remember, a couple of his brothers were inquiring about Texas and expressing an interest in joining him here. And he told Mrs. Egan to tell them they were better off in Indiana.

  Sam had several brothers, I gathered from his rare mentions of his family. One was named Denton, the same as our town, I recall, but if I ever heard the names of the others, I’ve forgotten them. He had some sisters, too, I think. They were orphaned when Sam was just a boy. Their farm and everything on it were sold at auction, and Sam and the others went to live with an uncle, who had a large family of his own.

  From Sam’s vague references to that time I deduced that he was a runaway. He mentioned a quarrel with his uncle, about wages, I think. “I walked away without nothing but the shirt on my back,” he said. He went to St. Louis and hung around the waterfront for a while, then drifted downriver to Mississippi and got a job at a sawmill. It was the same work he had done for his uncle, but they paid him for it in Mississippi. He saved enough money to buy a horse and a gun, somehow hooked up with Bob Mayes and his family, and wound up in Denton because that was where Bob Mayes was going, and one destination was as good as another to Sam, just so it was Texas.

  There was nothing interesting in his story, and nothing unusual. The world is full of runaways, and many of the best citizens of Denton admit to scrawling “GTT” on their doors back home, a message to friends or the law or creditors that they had gone to Texas. There’s no shame in being a runaway or even an outlaw here, so long as the wrong was done somewhere else. Since the war, many decent people have fled carpetbag debt and carpetbag law, and there’s no disgrace in that, just as there’s no disgrace in being a poor freedman, now that the Yankees have cut the niggers loose from the secure places they used to know. What matters here is what people make of themselves after they get here, not what they were where they came from.

  Nobody tried harder to make something of himself than Sam did. As I’ve already said, he was a hard worker, and at that time there wasn’t a cheating bone in his body. He returned from every freighting trip with all the goods and money he was supposed to bring back, and sometimes more. Once he returned so much of the expense money I had given him that I asked if he had fed the horses during the trip. He just said, “Don’t worry till you see their ribs.”

  I didn’t worry. I would have trusted him with anything, especially my horses. People around town took to calling him “Honest Eph.” I don’t know why, unless they just thought “Honest Eph” sounded better than “Honest Sam.” Anyway, he earned the name. And I couldn’t have felt closer to him if he had been my brother or son. I even invited him to sit with me and Mrs. Egan at night when we read the Bible to each other. “Are you reading the Old Testament or the New Testament? “he would ask. When we were reading the Old Testament, he would join us sometimes, but he wouldn’t when we were reading the New. He didn’t care about Jesus and Paul, but he loved some of the stories in the Old Testament, especially those about Samson and those about David before he became king, when he was a bandit.

  One night I read the story about Pharaoh’s dream and Joseph’s interpretation of it as a sign that Egypt would have seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. “And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand,” I read, “and put it upon Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck.”

  “Did what Joseph said come true?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and I went on to read about the famine that hit Egypt, and how Joseph’s preparations had saved the people and brought his brothers out of the land of the Hebrews to buy corn from him.

  Sam was astonished. “Is there really people that tell you what dreams mean?”

  “Things happened in Bible days that don’t happen now,” I said. “It was a special time, and God was closer to people than He is now.”

  “I was thinking of my horse dream,” he said. “I ain’t no Pharaoh, but I’d give a penny to know what it means.”

  “I don’t think dreams mean anything,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Why does it come to me all the time if it don’t mean nothing?”

  “You’ve just got horses on the brain,” I said.

  No one could doubt that he did have horses on the brain. His whole life was horses. My freight animals were entirely under his supervision, and he had begun spending more and more of his idle time at the racetrack at the edge of town. Army was responsible for that, I regret to say. Army shared Sam’s love of horseflesh. They also shared a love of gambling. Army loved the races and had known most of the sporting men around Denton for years. He introduced them to
Sam, and after a while the races became a regular part of their Sunday afternoons. Sometimes Frank Jackson or Henry Underwood would go with them.

  By the standards of my native Kentucky, the Denton races were pitiful. The track was just a quarter-mile stretch of harrowed prairie with a row of primitive chutes at one end and a finish line at the other. The performers were usually just cowboys and cow ponies racing for a new hat or a new suit of clothes or a bottle of whiskey. A few townspeople who owned good horses but didn’t know how to ride them would hire the young darkies who hung around the track to climb into the saddle in their stead. A few of the niggers were excellent riders and fulfilled all their worldly needs in that way, never turning a hand at honest labor.

  Those races were taken very seriously by many, though, especially those who bet habitually and heavily. And since those chosen to judge them often were incompetent and all the spectators and many of the riders were drinking, there were many cries of foul and many accusations, threats and fights resulting from them. It was as unholy a way to observe the sabbath as the devil has devised, and I had as little to do with it as possible. Any attempt of mine to break up a fight out there likely would have led to another fight, so I left the sportsmen to settle their own disputes. I rarely even went to the track except when a stranger would ride into town leading a thoroughbred behind him. I knew that he was a professional, and that he was going to taunt the locals into laying outlandish bets on some hometown favorite, and I knew he was going to win the race. On those occasions I would go to the track and do what I could to see that the race was run fairly, that the professional got his money, and that he got out of town quickly and safely.