by Bill Brooks
For Bob and his beautiful daughters, Maggie and Claire
Copyright © 2009 by Bill Brooks
First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2014 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Print ISBN: 978-1-62873-628-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62873-985-5
Printed in the United States of America
Part of the cursedness of the shotgun messenger’s life—the loneliness of it. He is like a sheep dog, feared by the flock and hated by the wolves. On the stage he is a necessary evil. Passengers and driver alike regard him with aversion, without him and his pestilential box their lives would be ninety percent safer and they know it. The bad men, the rustlers—the stage robbers actual and potential—hate him. They hate him because he is the guardian of property, because he stands between them and their desires, because they will have to kill him before they can get their hands into the coveted box. Most of all they hate him because of his shotgun—the homely weapon that makes him the peer of many armed men in a quick turmoil of powder and lead.
Wyatt Earp
Chapter One
The day had started off fine enough. The air was clean and crisp and the mountains shone in the distance and the river ran clear and bright.
Ophelia and I had made love just before dawn broke. An hour later we all sat at the table eating a breakfast of flapjacks covered in molasses, fried ham, and coffee.
My boy, Nicholas, just turned ten the week before, sat across from me, a reflection of myself at that age. A hank of wheat-colored hair fell unruly over his forehead. He ate like he had to catch a train and was already late.
We were a happy little family. After years of me being a loose-footed rambler, I’d finally found what I’d been looking for—love and peace.
Nobody could know that tragedy was less than an hour away.
I was in the garden, hoeing weeds out between the rows of chest-high corn when it happened.
I heard Ophelia scream, looked up, then toward where she pointed, toward the river that came down from somewhere high up in the mountains, down through a stand of loblolly pine and snaked below our cabin.
Nicholas was drawn to the river every free minute he wasn’t doing chores or his studies, which Ophelia was strict about.
“Don’t want you growing up ignorant as a stick,” she’d tell him whenever he bucked against the traces of responsibility. “You want to end up swamping out saloons?”
He’d grin that winning smile at her and try to win her over to his side of things—why it was more important to catch fish or go hunting with me than it was to learn multiplication tables—but she stood firm on his learning.
But it was Sunday and she let him enjoy himself, saying even God took his leisure on Sunday.
The reason for her startled scream was a dark shape moving with unbelievable speed toward Nicholas who stood frozen, watching the thing, too. A big grizzly. It had come from the dark stand of pines upstream. It must have seen my son and saw him as an easy kill.
I ran without thinking, the hoe still in my hand. There wasn’t any time to go to the house and get my gun.
The distance was two hundred yards easily from garden to river, but on a downward slope. I yelled all the way, screaming for Nicholas to lay down, curl up. Running would only incite the bear. I knew this from an old man who used to do nothing but hunt them. He said the worst thing you could do was look a bear in the eyes or run from one.
“Ain’t no human alive can outrun a bear. They can be fast as a race horse in a short distance.”
This one was, a rippling mass of dark fur and muscle. Its neck and head were extended, its big paws tossing up loose clods of earth.
“Get down, Nick! Get down!”
But my son did what just about anybody would do. He ran.
I had halved the distance between us when the bear took him down. Ophelia had stopped screaming. I don’t know why other than she was probably just frozen with fear.
I couldn’t see my son under the bear. It was hunched over him, tearing at him. It felt like my feet didn’t even touch the ground.
I could hear its huffs and I swung the hoe blade as hard as I could and struck it across the neck, and it jumped and turned on me. I swung again and nearly cut off its nose, and it roared and fell back away, hurt, because the old bear hunter had said to me: “You ever find yourself in a tangle with a bear and you got no gun or knife, jab its eyes or hit it in the nose . . . that’s your best chance if you got any at all.”
The piece of nose dangled from the end of its brutal face, and it turned and ran off back toward the woods, and I picked up my son.
His head was bloody and he was limp, not moving or even breathing. I didn’t want to believe he was all that hurt as I rushed back to the house, meeting Ophelia halfway up the hill, her face stark and drained of color, her mouth open in a wordless cry.
A bear knows how to kill quick, like any predator.
I laid Nicholas out on the kitchen table so we could wash the blood off him and see how bad he was hurt. But I already knew he was dead. I just didn’t want to believe it.
Ophelia worked feverishly over him, speaking his name in a pleading way.
Finally I put my arms around her to stop her.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“No,” she said.
She fought to free herself of me, turned her anger and fear and pain on me, and I didn’t try and stop her from beating at me with her fists. I felt the same fear and anger and pain, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Finally she collapsed in my arms and I held her for the longest time—until she stopped sobbing. Then she seemed to gather herself and said softly: “I have to wash his little body and dress him in a clean set of clothes. You dig him a grave.”
It almost sounded like someone else speaking from within her, a stranger who’d come to the house to take care of matters.
I went out and began digging the grave, west of the house with a fine view of the river.
I dug until my hands were blistered and bleeding, until my eyes filled and stung with tears, until curses escaped my breath.
I blamed myself for not saving my son, for moving here to this wilderness instead of in a town somewhere. I had to have openness, be surrounded by trees and mountains and a river. I’d bought the place with the cabin on it from the old bear hunter who’d told me about how bears acted. He claimed he’d killed them all out and was moving on farther up into the mountains.
“Where there is still some bar,” he had said. “I can’t stand no kind of civilization and I can’t stand no place where there ain’t bar.”
That was five years earlier.
The bears had come back. At least one had.
We wrapped our son in a handmade quilt given us on our wedding day by Ophelia’s folks a
long with $200, “to fix up that old Stevens place,” her pa said. They were both good people.
If there had been time and I had the right tools I would have built my son a coffin, but I had neither. I had grief and vengeance on my mind even as I laid to rest our only child, even as I shoveled in the dirt over him and carried large stones to stack on his grave so no animal could dig it up.
Ophelia stood silent the whole time. I think she’d gone away in her mind and wasn’t coming back anytime soon.
Some storm clouds grew dark over the mountains and by nightfall there was a heavy rain drumming down on the roof. Ophelia sat in a rocker staring into the dark shadows where Nicholas’s little room stood just off the kitchen.
I knew what I had to do.
In the morning I packed a horse and saddled another.
She stood watching me.
“Don’t leave me,” she said.
“I got to go,” I said.
“For what reason?”
“You already know.”
“No. It won’t change anything. It’s too late, Royce.”
“Maybe it is for him,” I said, looking off to the pile of stones, the wood cross I’d lashed together. “But I aim to find that god damn’ bear and lay waste to it.”
“And if you don’t come back?”
“Why wouldn’t I come back?”
The fear in her eyes was something she couldn’t hide.
I slid the brass-fitted Henry into the scabbard.
“No bear will stand up against this,” I said.
“I’ll hate you if you go and leave me.”
“I got no choice. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
She turned her gaze away from me. What was left of her spirit, I thought, had gone where the souls of the forever heartbroken go and don’t return. Still, I couldn’t get beyond my own mad heart, my own taste and need to avenge my son’s death. Our son’s death.
“I’ll kill it and be back in under a week,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
I rode away feeling I’d lost everything. I was right. I had.
Chapter Two
Summer turned to autumn and autumn turned to winter and the snow trapped me up in those high mountains. By then I’d killed twenty-three bears and not one of them with a cut nose.
I aimed to quit, to go home, but then the snow came heavily one night and I woke up under it and I was sure by the end of that day I was going to die in those mountains along with the bears I’d killed, that it was some sort of strange way God had of testing me. Like I was Job or somebody.
But I’d stopped believing in any sort of God the day my son was killed and I cursed Him even though I did not believe. I cursed Him every day up in those mountains and I cursed him for wanting to kill me by freezing me to death.
As luck would have it, I found the old bear hunter—his shack, at least, and what was left of him. He was sitting upright in a snowdrift, frozen white, one hand reaching for the sky, his eyes wide and staring and glazed over, his mouth open.
I couldn’t do anything for him as nearly frozen as I was.
The shack was the size of a single room but it had a wood burner in it—the one I’d seen him pack on the back of his mule that day he had sold me the cabin and went off. And there was some split wood to feed it and a nice narrow hand-hewn bed with a rope mattress and blankets.
A necklace of bear claws lay on a small table along with a few cans of beans and peaches.
The wind blew hard for five straight days and the snow piled up to the roof. When it quit, the old man was buried somewhere under it, and I thought it was just as well since I had no tools for digging a grave even if there was a way to dig one in that frozen ground.
I ached to get back home again, but there wasn’t any way—not till spring. I cursed everything and everyone I could think of, then I lost my mind for a while.
By spring I couldn’t even find a shoe from the old man. Something had come and dragged him off, had clawed through the snow to get him. I figured it couldn’t be a bear since they denned in the winter. But something had got him.
Only one of my horses survived. I ate most of the other one.
Then I made my way back home again.
Ophelia and some of her things were gone.
A note lay on the kitchen table where we last ate a happy breakfast with our son.
Dere Royce,
Just as you’ve left me, I’ve left you. Please don’t come in search of me. Things can’t ever be the same between us. I hope you didn’t die up in the mountains looking for your dam bear. I hope you find a new life. Just as I seek to find my own.
Ophelia
I read it a dozen times hoping the words would change. But they never did. I found an old bottle of bourbon left over from a long time ago and drank it straight until it was empty, and I fell drunk out on the porch and lay there a long time with the world around me spinning. I knew liquor could cause some men to forget their troubles, or at least make them seem not so bad. It didn’t mine.
But I passed out from the long journey, weariness, frustration at never finding my bear, and now my wife had gone off.
I thought about putting my pistol to my head and ending it. What did I have to live for?
But in the end it seemed to me the coward’s way out and I knew I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t any coward.
I saddled my horse, rolled up what few belongings I had into my sougan—a couple of shirts, extra pair of denim trousers, socks, soap and razor, and a tintype of the three of us taken in a photographer’s studio in Bozeman the year before the bear came out of the woods. I lashed it to the back of my saddle, filled my saddle pockets with extra shells, some beef jerky I found in one of the jars, and slid the Henry into the scabbard.
I burned the house and rode away in search of Ophelia.
Chapter Three
The summer and fall came and went before I found her.
I was in a saloon in Butte when I heard about a woman they called the Rose of Cimarron, a prostitute they said was the best-looking whore any of them had ever seen. I heard one patron describe her as having a rose-shaped stain on her hip and that’s how she come by the name.
Ophelia had a rose-shaped stain on her right hip, a birthmark.
It was hard news to hear and I wanted to kill the fellow who said it. But he was just talking about a woman he didn’t know and couldn’t understand and I was relieved to have found her.
I asked him about the Rose of Cimarron and how I could find her. He told me and I went to the place and stood there at the foot of the outdoor stairs, looking up at the lighted window. It was near Christmas and cold with patches of old snow on the ground that looked ghostly. I heard the laughter of men up in that room and saw shadows pass back and forth behind the yellow light of the window.
I drew my piece and held it in my hand when the door opened and two cowboys stepped out onto the landing, still laughing over something.
I waited till they descended the stairs, then stepped out of the shadows, my piece cocked and aimed.
They stopped dead in their tracks, their hands instinctively raising, open so I could see they had nothing in them.
“What you want, mister?” one of them said. He was tall and lanky, wearing a sheepskin coat. His hat was high-crowned with a feather in the band. He looked like a kid. The other one was older, shorter by a head. He had long dark moustaches and a crooked nose.
“I aim to kill you,” I said.
“For what reason?” the older one said.
“Just for being in the wrong place,” I said.
They looked at each other disbelieving that such a good time had suddenly turned into a bad one.
“Are you crazy?”
“No,” I said.
Then suddenly something unexpected happened.
The shorter man pulled his piece fast as any draw I’d ever seen, just as the taller one crossed in front of him.
The gunshot echoed in the dark
cold night like somebody had just slammed shut a door. The taller one staggered from the punch of the bullet in his back, then fell into a pile of dirty snow, screaming.
“You shot me, Daddy!” he yelped.
The shooter stood, disbelieving. He looked at me.
“Put your damn’ gun down,” I said. “Help your kid to his feet and get the hell out of here.”
He did as ordered, the kid still yelping, blood dripping from somewhere under his coat, but he did not look near fatally wounded.
They staggered off into the shadows and out toward the street.
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.
She opened it.
We stood there, looking at each other. She was worn and thin and looked as if she’d aged twenty years. Her hair was tangled about her head and her eyes were red and cheeks sallow. She was skin and bone, standing there nearly naked in a cotton shift.
At first she didn’t recognize me. I’d let my beard grow all that previous year until now. I kept meaning to shave it off but hadn’t. I must have looked like hell, too.
“Ophelia,” I said.
Then her eyes widened.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I come to get you.”
“Get me for what?”
“Take you home.” Then I remembered we had no home. I’d burned it to the ground. But I’d get another home and we’d start over and we’d have another son and things would go back to how they were even though the grief for Nicholas was still in my heart like a dagger.
“Take me home?” she said.
“Yes.”
“This is my home.”
I pushed past her and closed the door behind me.
It was what they called a crib—the lowest form of prostitutes were the crib girls—a small spare room with only a bed and a chamber pot, a tin pitcher and pan with water and a rag floating in it on a little stand by the bed. Next to the pan was a bottle half full of liquor.
“Get the hell out of here!” she said. “Or I’ll call the law.”
I took off my hat and combed back my hair with my fingers.
“I made a mistake by leaving you once,” I said. “I’m not going to leave you again. Put your things together and let’s go.”