Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  “I’m sorry you see it that way. You can pick up your wages tomorrow.”

  “I still owe you better than two hundred dollars.”

  “Pay me when you can. I trust you.”

  He put on his hat and started toward the door, then said, “I ain’t had that dream no more since I got Jenny.”

  I still wonder sometimes if things would have turned out differently if I hadn’t made him leave me. But it’s foolish to speculate on what might have been. If Adam hadn’t bitten the apple, we would still be in the Garden, wouldn’t we? Or maybe Cain or Enoch or Methuselah would have bitten it later. The snake would have kept trying, that’s for sure.

  Frank Jackson

  I’m free to say I don’t regret riding with Sam Bass. And if some miracle happened and Sam tracked me into New Mexico and found this village, and if he could divine that the strange name on the shingle over my office door designates his old friend, Frank Jackson, and if he asked me to live it all again, I would do it.

  Sam and I were brothers as surely as if we had been pulled from the same womb. Fate had made us orphans. Fate had decreed that we find one another. Only other orphans on equally harsh frontiers might understand the loneliness in which we lived before we met. The Widow Lacy and Dad Egan were kind to him. They even tried in various ways to make him a part of their own households. But that kind of kindness only salts the pain of an orphan’s loneliness, making it intolerable. An orphan knows that anything that’s given out of no obligation can also be withdrawn, and he’s afraid to accept the gift, for fear that he would love it and then have it taken from him. The wisdom of that wariness was proved for Sam when Dad Egan made him choose between keeping his mare or his job. Sam had never permitted himself to think that he was really a part of Dad’s family, so he could defy Dad with a clear conscience, knowing he had earned everything he received from his benefactor and had accepted nothing free.

  My situation was a little different. Ben Key, in whose shop I worked, was married to my sister, so I was, at least in the formal sense, a member of his family. But my sister was a brood mare. It was a rare year that didn’t witness the arrival of another tiny Key in their tiny house. And when Dr. Ross, after his delivery of one of them, turned to me and said, “Pack your gear, son, and come live with me,” Ben and my sister exchanged a glance of such amazement and hope that I didn’t even hesitate. But the ease with which people parted with Sam and me inspired an anger in both of us, I think.

  Dr. Ross was lonely, too, and old, and angry and a drunkard. He was a graduate of Transylvania University in Kentucky, and even in his drunkenness he possessed an aristocratic dignity that made people respect him, even as he staggered from saloon to saloon. He even staggered with a certain high-born deliberate-ness. He was a noble-looking man, tall and broad-shouldered, with long white hair and beard that contrasted vividly with his black, professional coat. His eyes were icy blue and gazed steadily, hardly ever seeming to blink. They had sadness in them, and anger. Behind them, constantly in his mind, must have been the memory of something terrible or tragic, the reason for his being in Texas and a drunkard. But he never told me what it was, and he wasn’t the kind of person you could ask. The most unusual thing about him was his feet and hands, which were tiny, like a woman’s. Those hands, slender, smooth and white, holding the whiskey glass delicately between thumb and forefinger, were what set him really apart in a country full of big, rough, knobby hands.

  His house set him apart, too. It was a small white frame structure not far from the square, very ordinary looking from the outside. Inside, though, it was a clutter of books and journals and shiny medical instruments of brass and steel and bottles full of mysterious powders and liquids. In a corner of one room was his bed, always rumpled, and in the corner of another was my own, always rumpled, too. The rest of the house was given over to the clutter.

  He never suggested that I read any of the books, and never objected when I did. When I asked questions about them, he would answer them, but he never elaborated. He wouldn’t lecture. It was the same with the instruments and bottles. I would pick up some tool or bottle and ask its medical use, and he would tell me. He even allowed me to be present when he treated patients. I assisted him any way I could, fetching things for him, holding patients still while he poked and probed at them, and he answered any questions I asked.

  I was free to take or use anything he possessed, but he never offered anything. I was a colt wandering in a pasture of learning, free to nibble what I pleased. All Dr. Ross expected of me was to keep his horse groomed and fed, his hack in good repair and his liquor supply ample. In return I received food and shelter and access to the clutter.

  I discovered a copy of Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad among Dr. Ross’s clutter and tried to read it. It was damn difficult until Dr. Ross showed me it was poetry, which I had never seen before, and read a passage aloud, showing me the cadence of Pope’s lines. Then I began to love it. I memorized snatches of it and recited them to Sam while he fed the animals at the Lacy House. The verses bored him. He liked Homer’s stories, though, and when I told them in my own words he would listen. The same with Shakespeare. He loved the blood and guts of Othello and Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Later he would see his mare, Jenny, as the fulfillment of a dream he had about a horse, and would become a believer in omens and portents. I think Macbeth and Caesar were responsible for that.

  When Mrs. Egan gave up trying to teach Sam to read, I offered to tutor him. “What for?” he asked. “I got you, and you tell tales better than them old bastards in the books.” But I think the real reason he rejected even rudimentary book learning was the slowness of it. Sam would give himself completely to any enterprise that interested him, no matter what labor or danger it involved. But he was impatient. Progress toward the goal in his mind had to be quick, in giant strides. If he had ever seen an hour glass he would have considered it a hideously boring means of measuring life. Grains of sand, falling silently from one small chamber to another, over and over again. It’s a fitting symbol of most lives, I guess, but Sam’s should be measured by boulders thrown into a pond. Each would splash and make ripples, and when the pond was full of rocks, well, that would be that. No turning the glass over and over again.

  Well, I’m no poet, but you get my drift. He was as angry at life as I, and wild, and I loved him. The day he rode off to Indian Territory with Henry Underwood and the nigger Dick, I wept. I thought I would never see him again, and I was angry at myself for loving him so, for thinking him different from the others. He, too, had parted from me without much regret. One morning he rode up to Dr. Ross’s house and hollered for me to come out. He was on his little buckskin, grinning. The nigger was mounted on a mule and leading another with a pack on it. Henry was on a big chestnut. The Denton Mare’s lead rope was tied to his saddle horn. “Leaving?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Jenny and me is running out of suckers around here.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Up to Montague County to find somebody that ain’t heard of Jenny yet. Then up to Injun Territory. I hear them Injuns up there is mighty proud of their horseflesh.”

  “That’s dangerous,” I said. “Indians don’t like to lose. And when they lose they don’t like to pay.”

  Sam smiled. “We’ll find a way.” He leaned down and shook my hand, then wheeled the buckskin and headed northwest at a fast trot. After all we had been to each other, that was it.

  Stories soon began drifting back to Denton. Jenny had won in Montague County and in Indian Territory as well. As I had predicted, the Indians hadn’t taken kindly to her victories, and Sam and his bunch had fled back south of the Red River. The following spring I heard he was in San Antonio, that Dick had been killed in a knife fight, that Underwood had split with Sam and joined a cattle drive to Kansas.

  Then I heard that Sam had gone into partnership with a saloonkeeper named Joel Collins. They were pretending that Collins owned The Denton Mare, and she was racin
g at South Texas tracks under his name. Meanwhile Sam was pretending to be a trainer and judge of racing stock and was roaming the southern part of the state checking other people’s horses. Whenever he found one that he knew Jenny could beat, he advised the owner to match it against the Collins mare and bet heavily. Of course, Jenny always won. If rumor can be trusted, Sam and Collins played that trick from San Antonio to the Rio Grande, and even in Mexico. Then I heard that Sam and Collins had bought a herd and headed north.

  But in the fall of ‘77 the horrible story came down the trails. A gang headed by Joel Collins had robbed a Union Pacific train in Nebraska. Collins was dead, the cowboys said, and Sam Bass was on the run.

  One night not long after that, I was in Ben’s shop, mending a coffee pot for a traveling preacher, and Sam stepped in and closed the door. I glanced up, but his side of the room was dark, and he had grown a mustache. I didn’t recognize him. “I’m closed,” I said. “Soon as I finish this job, I’ll be going home.”

  “Still lazy, ain’t you, Frank?”

  “Sam!” I fairly sprang to him and embraced him, and he laughed. We made the nonsense noises that friends or brothers make when they meet after a long time and slapped backs and patted arms. I poked him in the belly with my thumb and touched something hard. He unbuttoned his shirt and whipped out a money belt and held it out like a fat, heavy snake.

  “Me and Joel got lucky,” he said. He laid his hat on my work bench beside the lamp. He opened the belt and tilted it into the hat, as if pouring grain into a trough. Coins glittered in the lamp light, clinked into the hat until it was full. “That’s what’s in them Black Hills.”

  “Your partner’s dead,” I said.

  “I heard.” His black eyes flickered in the dim light. “What the hell, Frank. We all go sometime.”

  “Not Collins’s way. They shot him down like a dog.”

  Sam scooped up a handful of the coins and dropped them into the hat one by one. “I’ve got five hundred of these,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “You oughtn’t have come here, Sam. Everybody in Denton knows you.”

  “How many coffeepots would you have to fix to get ten thousand dollars, Frank?”

  “Every one in the world, I guess. You better ride out of here.”

  He shook his head. “I got plans. Lay down them tools and come with us.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “Me and Underwood. He’s with me. I need you, too, Frank.” “Not me, Sam.”

  He gazed into my eyes for several seconds, and I gazed right back, refusing to look away, thinking of Joel Collins, determined to convince Sam I was staying put. Then without a word he picked up the money belt and began scooping the coins back into it. The last fistful he held out to me. “Take this, pard,” he said. “I’m giving it to you.”

  “Keep it. You’re likely to need it.”

  He held his hand there, extended, the gold so shiny it seemed alive. If the eagles had flapped their wings and ascended from his palm, I wouldn’t have been amazed.

  “You keep it, Sam.”

  He shook his head and slowly dropped the money into the belt, then held out his hand again, holding only one coin. “Here. At least drink to my luck.”

  “No, you keep it,” I said. “Who knows you’re back?”

  “Just you and Henry.”

  “I’ll bet the law’s connected you with Collins already.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve got some time.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Honest Eph.”

  He smiled. “It was easy. Blow out the lamp.” He opened the door and slipped into the darkness.

  I went home. Dr. Ross was standing in front of the fireplace, still wearing his black coat, his hands clasped behind his back. He had built a fire. His glass of whiskey was on the mantel. “It’ll be an early winter,” he said.

  “Yes, I reckon so.”

  “Your friend Bass is in Denton.”

  “How do you know?”

  His blue eyes narrowed. “The Denton Mare was tied behind your shop.”

  “Yes, he’s here.”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  Every time I would doze I saw Sam’s hand full of gold. Until that night I had never thought much about money. I knew little about it, having had so little. The wages Ben paid me were small. Dr. Ross paid me none. But lying in my bed with the vision of Sam’s gold in my head, I began to make connections between money and things I wanted. The house in which I was lying. Hadn’t it cost money? How much? I had no idea. And the things that mattered more, Dr. Ross’s books, his instruments and bottles. It had never occurred to me that he hadn’t been born with them. He had acquired them with money. How much money? I had no idea. Not to mention his education. How much did it cost to go to Transylvania University and become a doctor and learn about poetry? I had no idea.

  I reached to the small table beside my bed and picked up a book I had found among the clutter almost five years before, not long after I moved to the doctor’s house. It was written by an English doctor named John Aiken and was called Essays on Song-Writing. I mentioned to Dr. Ross when I found it that song-writing was a strange subject for a doctor, and he looked surprised and took the volume from my hand. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t seen this in years.” He leafed through it, smiling now and then. “An old professor of mine gave it to me, to teach me that physicians needn’t think constantly of disease and death.” He handed it back to me. “Keep it,” he said. “I learned its lesson long ago, and then forgot it.”

  I loved the book. Not only because it was the only one I owned, but because Dr. Aiken had included with his essays a “Collection of Such English Songs as are Most Eminent for Poetical Merit.” They were short and most of them merry and easy to remember, and just the thing for reading at bedtime. The book was over a hundred years old, and I’ve never heard any of the songs sung, but I still keep them beside my bed. Reading them keeps the memory of Dr. Ross fresh in my mind.

  But Dr. Aiken’s songs couldn’t compete with Sam’s gold that night. So I finally closed the book, blew out the lamp and stared at the dark ceiling, thinking about money and what it could do for me, if I had any.

  I got up before Dr. Ross did, which was rare, and fried the bacon and made the biscuits and gravy and coffee. I was eating, reading Dr. John Eberle’s Notes of Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Medicine, when Dr. Ross came in half dressed, his suspenders flapping about his legs, and poured his coffee. He grabbed four biscuits and opened them and poured the hot gravy over them and sat down across the table from me. He craned his neck to see my book “Eberle,” he said. “My God, you’re a serious young man.”

  “Weren’t you?” I asked.

  “Ah, yes. I was. It’s a curse that afflicts some people. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “Am I smart enough to be a doctor?”

  “Of course you are. Intelligence has little to do with it, anyway. It’s the being serious that’s important. You’ll know nothing about most things that ail people, but if you’re serious, they feel better, and Mother Nature takes care of the rest, one way or the other. You must grow a beard, though, so you can tug on it at the right moments.”

  “You’re not serious now.”

  He laughed. “You’ll find out. Your reputation will depend on the fullness of your beard and your use of it.” He sucked at his coffee, making a noise like a horse at water. “What did young Bass want?”

  “He wants me to go with him.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going?”

  “No.”

  “But you want to.” I said nothing.

  “You tossed all night. Come, Frank, am I not your doctor?

  Didn’t I cure your croup? Doctors are sacred, like priests. We don’t have to testify to anything.”

  “Testify?”

  “Bass is a bandit, isn’t he? He helped that Collins fellow rob a train, didn’t he? Amazing! He prob
ably has some similar adventure in mind.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, he’ll have an exciting life. It’s a good thing he didn’t ask me. I would go.”

  “Now you’re not serious.”

  Dr. Ross arched his eyebrows. “Oh, I wouldn’t have gone with him when I was young. I was much too serious. I thought an exciting life couldn’t be a responsible one, and I chose responsibility. Now look at it.” He waved toward the clutter. “That’s all there is.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  “But this is all there has ever been, Frank. And it was my choice.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Yes. It isn’t so bad for an ending, but the beginning was the same. That’s what I regret. A young man should gather memories that he’ll enjoy living with when he’s old. All my memories are of denying foolish impulses and being responsible.”

  We had never talked like that. I didn’t know what to think of it. “I don’t want trouble,” I said.

  “And I’m not saying you should go,” he replied. “You’re a good tinner.”

  “But I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “As long as you stay here, you’ll be a tinner. That’s the nature of things, my boy.” He pushed his chair back and got up and pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and buttoned them.

  Well, that conversation and the memory of Sam’s hand full of gold wove themselves in and out of my mind all day while I worked in Ben’s shop. I had never paid much attention to the shop before, never looked at it closely. But I did now, and the battered work benches, the worn tools, the bits of metal littering the floor seemed squalid and hopeless. I tried to imagine myself ten years older, Ben’s age, standing in the same spot, holding the same pair of shears. The ease with which I imagined it frightened me, angered me. All I had to do to make it happen was nothing more than what I was doing now. Just keep on living as I was living now, and it would happen. Wasn’t that what everyone was doing? A man could ride into Denton, write a list of all the people he saw and a description of what they were doing, then leave and come back ten years later and do the same, and the lists would be almost identical. Oh, some would have died or moved on, but their places would be filled by others, and nothing would have really changed. And it was the sameness that people valued. A man who did the same thing over and over again for years, and nothing else, was a good man, like Ben. A man who refused to submit to sameness or got tired of it and got drunk too often or tumbled the wrong woman or got money in other than the prescribed commercial ways was soon dead, or was driven farther westward to places that were still uncivilized.