by Donis Casey
Gee Dub sat down heavily. “Great day in the morning, Dad! I thought you were killed for sure! Are you hit?”
Shaw put a tentative hand on his own chest. “I don’t think so. I just tripped over that hunk of firewood. Get out of this light, son, in case he’s still alive and looking to shoot something.”
“You hit him for sure, Dad. I see him lying over yonder like a pile of rocks.”
Shaw didn’t try to look. He kept his gaze on Gee Dub’s face. “Is he moving?”
“No.”
“Help me up. I’ll see what’s what.”
Gee Dub grabbed his father’s shoulder and shoved him back down. “You lie still.”
Shaw opened his mouth to protest, but the nineteen-year-old was too fast for him. By the time he had rolled up onto his elbow, Gee Dub was leaning over the dark figure. “He’s not moving, Dad, and I don’t hear breathing. Looks like you got him in the chest. I think he’s dead.”
Shaw managed to drag himself to his feet. A sharp pain in his ribs caused him to clutch his side and double over, one hand on a knee. He struggled to catch his breath.
“Are you all right?” Gee Dub said.
“I got the wind knocked out of me is all.” He straightened as best he could and got himself over to his son’s side. Gee Dub turned on the flashlight for Shaw’s benefit and shone it into the creature’s face. For a long moment, the two of them stared at the monstrous figure with the gaping wound in its chest. It was a man, all right. After a fashion.
“This is Roane Hawkins?” Gee Dub asked at length. “Grandpapa’s friend?”
“Well, now that I get a look at him I can’t be sure. Might be. I haven’t set eyes on Roane Hawkins for fifteen, twenty years. But he is the only one who I could figure would be old enough to be white-haired, have lived on this place, and known me to see me, all at once.”
Gee Dub cocked his head, the better to study his subject. “Half his head is sheared off. It almost comes to a point. There isn’t even a socket for that missing eye. What do you suppose happened to him?”
“Who knows, son? It was bad enough to take the human soul out of him, looks like.”
“If this is him, why would he track and kill his own sons?”
Shaw grimaced at the pain in his side. “If this is him, I expect he didn’t have mind left enough to figure a reason.” He sighed. “Get the horses, son. It’ll be dawn soon. We’ll pack up and haul this carcass into Oktaha.”
While Gee Dub was gone, Shaw stood over the body and tried to connect this half-human thing with the tall, wise-cracking Irishman with the sly blue eyes and greying blond curls he remembered from his youth. Roane Hawkins had been charming as all get out, but slippery, too. If you intended to keep company with Hawkins you kept your eye on your wallet.
Was this really him? The wide open eye could have been blue and the curly white hair perhaps had been blond years earlier. More importantly, was it at all possible that he had murdered Crying Blood? Did this creature have the capacity to plan a hunt and kill two healthy young men? His gaze shifted to the discarded rifle lying next to the body. Even in the dark, he could see three stripes painted on the stock. Hawkins had known enough to pick up Crying Blood’s rifle. And he still knew how to shoot it. Thank God his injuries hadn’t improved his aim.
Shaw was mulling the possibilities when the rag pile moved.
He straightened, surprised. The cyclops eye blinked at him. Shaw kicked the rifle out of the way and drew his revolver.
“Shaw Tucker. You tell her…” The voice was not much more than a rasp, but Shaw understood it, all right. His heart began to thud uncomfortably.
“Who? Tell her what?”
“…that’s what she gets.” The white-haired man emitted a noise that was part bark, part laugh, part cackle that turned into a snarl. He flung himself over on his side and grabbed the ankle of Shaw’s boot with a clawlike hand.
Shaw shook him off and took a step back, his hair standing on end. The thing—Roane Hawkins, he was sure of it now—was writhing on the ground, hissing and trying to move toward him, leaving a smear of blood on the ground as he slithered on his belly. Shaw moved back out of his reach, watching the horrifying display with a cold detachment that surprised even him. His lips thinned with distaste.
“You should have stayed dead.”
He leveled the revolver in his hand and shot the creature in the head.
The echo of the gunshot dissipated into the mist, leaving total silence. Shaw looked up at the sky. The fog was thinning. He could see the diffuse light from two or three stars directly above his head.
He turned around to see Gee Dub standing behind him, holding their horses’ reins. Both mares snorted and sidled unhappily at the blood-covered heap on the ground. It was too dark to judge his son’s expression.
When he spoke, Gee Dub’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Are we going to take him into town now?”
Shaw stretched a little to ease his sore ribs. “I guess we ought. It’ll go better if I turn myself in.”
Gee Dub didn’t move. “Looked like self-defense to me.”
“It was, until I shot him in the head.”
“Because he was trying to take your leg off.”
Shaw smiled. “Maybe that’d fly, son, if one thing followed close upon another. But I don’t think the law will see it that way.”
Gee Dub shifted his weight to one leg, prepared to stand there and reason with his father all night if he had to. “What do you mean? I saw what happened. He came at you like a wounded mad dog and you shot him.”
“Gee Dub, you’re splitting hairs. I don’t aim to lie.”
“I don’t see as you have to. Besides, what good would come out of you spending a year in jail for manslaughter and leaving Mama and the children all alone, just for the matter of ten seconds? Daddy, there’s the legal thing and then there’s the right thing.”
Shaw looked down at the bloody pile at his feet. He had no regret over his action. In fact, he felt better than he had felt in months. He had done what needed to be done and his heart was straight. He raised his head. “Now you do sound like your mama. But I guess you have a point.”
He barely heard Gee Dub’s relieved exhale. “Well, thank you. I think.”
“Let’s roll this critter up in that old horse blanket and see if Hannah will deign to carry him back of the saddle. If she shies, I reckon we’ll have to rig a travois.”
Shaw’s step was noticeably lighter as he moved to pull the blanket roll from behind his horse’s saddle. “We’ll wire Scott from Oktaha, get him to ride out to the farm and tell your mother what’s going on.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Shaw removed his black woolen jacket and steeled himself for Alafair’s reaction. It wasn’t as bad as he feared. She drew in a breath between her teeth but didn’t gasp or exclaim.
“It’s just a scratch,” he said.
This was the first time he’d actually gotten a look at the long gash in his side, but he had known from the first that the wound was minor. It had bled enough to ruin his tan shirt but not so much that he had been weakened from the loss of blood.
No, it wasn’t the wound that threatened to do him in. It was sheer exhaustion.
When Shaw and Gee Dub had finally ridden up to their farm’s main gate, it was already late enough in the day that the shadows were growing long. Shaw had not slept for a couple of days, and for much of the trip Gee Dub had kept an anxious eye on his father lest he fall out of the saddle.
Deputy Morgan released them earlier in the day, after taking charge of Hawkins’ body and questioning them five ways from Sunday. It was Gee Dub, then, who had navigated the return journey from Oktaha. He had ridden as straight a path as he could manage, across farmers’ fields, through patches of woods, fording shallow creeks, until they got close enough that the horses could smell home and he could give them their head.
When Gee Dub dismounted to open the gate, a black and tan blur rushed up the drive to meet him.
“Howdy, Buttercup!” The dog jumped up on him and he paused to scratch her ear before he pushed her down and returned to business.
Shaw, still on his horse, laughed at the sight. “I see you’ve been let out of solitary, girl.”
The dog happily trotted along beside the horses as the men neared the farmhouse. Normally they would have called out to alert those inside of their approach, but Alafair was already standing in the drive, the older girls behind her, the younger ones in front, a bulwark around her.
Gee Dub had wired the Sheriff’s Office in Boynton early that morning, so Alafair knew the broad details already. She had meant to alert Shaw to the fact that visitors were waiting and then usher him immediately into the parlor. But the moment she saw his face she had insisted he take the time to wash and change before he had to deal with anything else.
He was standing in their bedroom now, as Alafair inspected his wound from her seat on the bed. She wiped the blood from his side with a wet cloth. “This must hurt like fire.” Her tone was perfunctory. “I don’t think you’ll need sewing, though.”
“The bullet just barely nicked me. He was a bad shot.”
She dabbed ointment on the gash and bandaged it with white cotton strips, practical and competent, her silence telling her thoughts better than words.
He regarded the top of her head for a long moment, weighing whether it was wiser to speak or keep his counsel. He decided to chance it. “Are you vexed with me?”
She made a noise that could have been a laugh or a sob. She seized his jacket off the bed and stuck her fingers through the bullet holes on the left side, one in the front, one in the back, and waggled them at him. “This coat is ruined.” When she looked up at him he could see the tears welling on her lower lids.
He bit his lip to keep from smiling at the way she had chosen to voice her displeasure. “I needed a new one anyway.” He put his hand on her hair. “Me and Gee will have to go into Muskogee next week and talk to a judge. Barger doesn’t think it’ll take very long. Good thing, because I’ve got to get to…”
“Shaw, I’m proud of you,” Alafair interrupted. “I know you did what you thought was right. But I wish you hadn’t of run off like that without so much as a how-do-you-do. I was scared stiff. And what if you had been killed? These children need you. The girls need an example of what a good husband and father looks like so they won’t settle for nothing less. And as for the boys…well, a girl can just naturally become a woman but a boy needs to be taught what it is to be a man.”
Shaw was taken aback, touched and regretful all at once. “I understand you, Alafair, and I apologize for causing you grief and worry. I didn’t undertake to go after that creature lightly nor did I do it for fury or revenge. My aim was not to punish him for what he done, but I couldn’t let that evil remain abroad in the same world as you and the children. Not if I could help it.”
She heaved a sigh. “Well, I just had to say it.”
“I know, honey.” He nodded toward the closed door that led into the parlor where their company, bolstered by cake and hot tea, awaited them. “How long have they been here?”
Alafair stood and helped him into a clean shirt. “A couple of hours. Scott asked Deputy Morgan to wire him when y’all left Oktaha this morning. He wanted everybody to be here already when you finally made it home.”
“I nearly dropped my teeth when I saw Doolan and Papa together in the same room.”
“I expect you did.”
Shaw drew a sharp breath through his nose. The iodine had made the wound tender. “What about the woman?” he asked.
“What about her?”
“Are you going to tell me who she is?”
Alafair didn’t answer. The question was meaningless. Shaw knew very well who the visitor was.
Chapter Fifty-three
“I figured from the first that it was him who done in Goingback. That was when the world got throwed out of whack, and if I had put things straight right then, all this wouldn’t have happened. But Goingback was a bad husband and I was glad to get shet of him. Hawkins wasn’t no prize, but he was a good provider. My children liked him, and he never did beat me.”
Shaw studied the little brown woman with the face like a dried apple, trying to connect her in his mind with Roane Hawkins’ pretty wife who had brought him fried squirrel and cornmeal dumplings every day for dinner twenty years earlier, when he was clearing trees for her husband. Last he had heard she had dropped off the face of the earth, abandoning her children—or were they her grandchildren?—and selling her property to Peter McBride after her husband disappeared.
Yet here she was, Lucretia herself, sitting on the horsehair-stuffed settee in his parlor next to Peter’s nemesis, Doolan. The long, black hair he remembered had turned slate grey and was now parted in the middle and cut in a severe, shoulder-length style. When he had known her she didn’t speak much English. She was fluent enough now, speaking easily with a tonal, singsong, Creek accent. Her black eyes gazed at him out of a mass of wrinkles. “I remember when you come to work for us out to the farm, Shaw. Hawkins always was partial to you. Said you was a good worker, gave an honest day’s labor.”
I could have done without that kind of ‘partial,’ Shaw thought. He turned to his stepfather. “You knew all along that she was living in Okmulgee with Doolan and not in Nebraska?”
Peter was aware of the flash of irritation in Shaw’s voice. “There was a reason she didn’t want to be found, son. Hear her out before you judge.”
Shaw looked back at Lucretia and settled himself in the armchair to listen. Scott and Peter were seated in cane-bottomed kitchen chairs to his left. The young people had been sent about their various afternoon tasks. Except Gee Dub, who was listening discreetly from his place on Charlie’s cot in the far corner of the parlor. Sally and Alafair were perched on the piano bench at Shaw’s right side. Alafair reached out and placed a supportive hand on his thigh.
Lucretia nodded and began her tale. “Hawkins, he had the white man’s sickness. A worm got in his head and made him want to own land. That worm give him a idea that if he was my man he could control that plot the tribe passeled out to me. So he fixed it that a tree fell on Goingback, then offered to marry up with me. I suspicioned all along what he done, but I wanted him. So I believed it was a accident like he told everybody.
“But that worm had took up housekeeping in his head, and even after he got what he wanted and we had children of our own, that worm whispered to him that Goingback’s boy, my oldest son Chitto, he had him a parcel of land, too. And Chitto’s piece connected our land to the main road that led to the railhead. And if that boy died the Creek courts would say his land belonged to me.”
Shaw leaned forward with his elbows perched on the arms of the chair. “Chitto! Was that your son’s name?”
Lucretia blinked, momentarily disoriented from being taken out of her story. “Yes. Chitto. That is my family name. My clan. My son was Chitto Goingback.”
Shaw flopped back in his seat, the hair on his arms prickling. He didn’t speak much Creek, but he knew that word, Chitto. Snake.
“So he took my son out hunting,” Lucretia continued, “like he done a hundred times before. But this time he aimed to rub him out. He’d of buried Chitto, I reckon, and told me that he run off. But my second boy, Ira, my oldest son with Hawkins, he seen what happened. Now, Hawkins tried to kill Chitto, but they went to fighting and ended up killing each other. Ira come back to the house and told me what happened. I went out there to the creek bed and brought my boy back home. Ira covered up Hawkins’ body with dirt and rocks and stuff. We just left him there.
“For four days me and my family, we sat with Chitto. Then we buried him up there in the woods. We put tobacco in his grave and wrapped him in his favorite quilt. You give me that quilt, Shaw. He slept under it ’til he died. I put a piece of it in his medicine bag to keep him comfortable in the place up there. Then we lit a fire and kept it burning ’til his spirit found t
he passage to the sky.”
Shaw rubbed his mustache with two fingers. “What about Reed? Where was he while this was going on?”
“Reed was just a little fella. My daughter Jenny took care of him while me and Ira buried her brother.
“After Hawkins and Chitto killed each other, I figured everything was straight again, and it was all over. Then near to a year later the ghost started haunting us. It stole all our meat. It busted things and took our tools. It killed our goats and chickens, hamstrung the mule. Spoiled the well. I thought at first it was Chitto, mad at me ’cause I didn’t cry blood for his father. But then I seen it late one night when the fog came up. It spoke to me. That’s how I knew it was Hawkins. He aimed to send us all to the dark place where he lived. We never showed him how to get to the world above, so he was still wandering around in this world with that worm still eating his brains. It had almost eat his head clean off. I knew he’d get us all if he could. So I give away my young ones. I split them up so he’d never find them.”
“Was Jenny Reed’s mother?” Scott asked.
“Jenny?” Lucretia repeated. “Naw. Who said so?”
It was Alafair who explained. “When Sheriff Tucker and I were visiting the Reverend Edmond in Eufaula, he told us that Jenny was the one who brought Reed to the Boarding School. She told them that she was his mother.”
Lucretia’s eyebrows peaked. “I told her to say that. They wouldn’t have took him without his mother signed him over. I’d have done it myself, but I was taking Ira to the Orphan’s Home west of Okmulgee.” She continued with her tale before her audience could sidetrack her with more questions.
“I went to McBride.” She looked at Peter. “McBride is a good man. He give Hawkins money when y’all first came to the Territory. Him and Sally give us food and furniture and clothes for the children. Then Hawkins and McBride fell out. Over money, a woman, I don’t know. I never saw McBride for ten years until I went to him for help. I didn’t know nobody else with money. I told him that Hawkins had left me and Chitto had run away. I told him about the haint, too. I said I was scared it’d get me or my children. But I never said I knew that it was Hawkins.