by Tim Bryant
You could see Doon trembling from where I was standing, I guess just from being that close to the rope. Maybe he had a guilty conscience. Maybe he just shook by habit. I hadn’t gotten to know him that well in Wichita Falls.
“Well, sir, it wasn’t so much a turning him away. I mean it wasn’t nothing to do with the fella. This fella here,” he said. “Leastways, not right at the first. We’d had a outbreak of what they call Nervous Fever. That’s what I always heard it called. The doctors call it Typhoid. Something like that.”
He looked like he was still suffering the effects of Nervous Fever to me. And he was standing so close, he was beginning to contaminate me.
“So you were merely trying to warn him,” Jack said. “How did he respond?”
I didn’t remember any mention of typhoid when I was there that day. Just a few men telling me I wasn’t welcome.
“He was in a hurry to sell off a bunch of cows he had,” Doon said. “I didn’t want them cows. A man who was there with me, now he’s a rancher. He took a look and said okay. I was uneasy about it, I guess you could say. Way I seen it, anybody take twenty-five, thirty dollars for, I guess it must’ve been seventy, eighty head of cattle or so, you can just about go tell it on the mountain. You understand what I’m saying? I knowed there was something going on.”
I remembered most of what he was saying, even if I didn’t remember it exactly the same. It was a way of looking at it.
“And what then happened?” Jack said.
The puzzle got harder.
“What you mean?” Pete Doon said. “My friend Rafe paid that man right there and took his cows back to his pasture.”
I wanted to mention that there was only fifty-eight of them, but I waited until the right moment had passed, so I kept that detail to myself. I couldn’t remember if I’d already gone on the record about that or not.
“This is getting a little ridiculous,” the Reverend said. “It’s utterly obvious. This man, United States Army Private Liquorish, didn’t murder or do anything to purposefully take the life of anybody in Wichita Falls. He didn’t even set foot in Wichita Falls. What he did was swap a herd of cows for a fair price, plus a few bottles of needed medicine, which he was bringing back to his crew. That, my friends, is hardly criminal.”
I liked the way the Reverend sounded. It reminded me of Ira Lee after he’d had several beers and started expounding on why slavery hadn’t ever been needed in Texas and why John Booth hadn’t really been killed in Virginia like they said. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a thing is true. It’s just whether it’s said right and heard right.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It wasn’t Leon Thaw. It wasn’t anybody I’d ever seen before.
He walked into my field of vision like he was walking into a bank and I just happened to be the teller on duty. I thought he was going to rob me. One of us would have died right there if he had.
“Stranger.”
I figured him to be a fur trader due to the pelts lining the top of his wagon. I’d seen wagons like it in San Antonio, usually parked in the market. As a child, I had wanted one of the beaver pelt hats I’d seen a fur trader wearing there. Of course, it was priced out of our reach. If I’d got one, I likely wouldn’t have remembered it nearly so well. Hunger provokes many actions, good and bad. Eating provokes a siesta at best. Poisoning and death at worst.
“Takes one to know one, don’t it?” I said.
He stepped down from his wagon, his hands in front of him. He knew I could see the Colt Dragoon on his hip. He’d already scoped me out.
“That’s a mighty fine looking animal you got there,” he said. “What are you doing way out here in the middle of nothing?”
What threatened to loom large perched on top of the wagon was, at ground level, not so much taller than me. He didn’t look like a local. With his beaver hat and fur, he certainly wasn’t dressed for the weather.
“What I hear, somebody hid Fort Worth around here somewhere,” I said.
I ignored the part about Bird. I wasn’t interested in selling her.
“Five, six miles maybe,” he said. He looked me up and down like I was the one dressed funny. “What kind of business you got in Fort Worth?”
I wasn’t sure I had any business at all there, but I was bound and determined to get there and have a look around. I also had the name of the man we were to meet up with when we got there. Any pay for delivering the eight hundred head of cattle had burned up in the summer heat, but I wanted some kind of satisfaction for all the trouble we’d been through.
“I aim to see a man,” I said. “Personal business.”
The stranger pulled his hat off, wiped his brow and replaced the hat. His hair fell down around his shoulders, but he was smooth as a baby’s ass on top and damn near as pasty.
“Don’t ever make your business too personal,” he said. “Who is it you’re looking for?”
I scraped the map out of my bag and unfolded the name written across the back.
“William Henry Tubb,” I said.
He spit at the ground and stared at the pattern he made.
“Don’t reckon I know him. Heck of a lot of people I don’t know though.”
It was like he’d seen something in that design on the ground, because when he looked back up at me, he was looking different. I thought he might have it in mind to rob me, even though I had nothing of any value.
He laughed. “Don’t worry, friend. I like the looks of your horse, but I’m not gonna hold you up or nothing. I can be a handful of trouble, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t mete it out on the undeserving.”
He gave the appearance of reading my mind. I didn’t much care for it. Didn’t like him talking about my horse either.
“I have five more miles, I’d best be on my way,” I said.
I’d hoped he would climb back up that wagon and git, but he didn’t do that. He stood there like he aimed to watch me walk away, unable to kick up any proportionate amount of dust as I slowly made my way across the expanse before me.
“Watch yourself,” he said. “There’s more crows than true sparrows on the road ahead.”
He had a way with words. It reminded me of Bricky Lusk, except for being easier to understand.
“You a fur trader?” I said.
I was trying to get a move on and be friendly all at the same time. I was feeling a little bad for thinking he was going to rob me, but I was mostly still trying to keep him from wanting to. Why didn’t I just draw iron and shoot? Believe me, I considered it. The fact I didn’t may give you some inkling how petered out I was.
“I prefer the word furrier,” he said.
I couldn’t help laughing. It wasn’t a deep, belly laugh. I didn’t have the lungs for that. It was just a small chuckle really, mostly from hearing this fella, dressed to the hilt in animals, trying to sport such verbosity. He didn’t take kindly to it.
“Get your hands in the air, friend!”
He had that Dragoon steady between my eyes before I even heard the first word. My reflexes were off. My instincts were shot. I didn’t have a move, and we both knew it.
“I’m taking your horse,” he said. “I don’t want anything else. I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m going to keep this leveled right at your brain, and, assuming you don’t do anything foolish, I’ll just ride away. I’m going toward Nacogdoches. You’re going to Fort Worth. Got it?”
I was fine with it. It wouldn’t have been worth making a move. Not if he’d taken Bird. When he reached over and grabbed Roman’s bridle, that changed things. I couldn’t stand by and watch him ride off to Nacogdoches on Roman. I’d have rather died right there, five miles from my destination.
I pulled Ira Lee’s Colt just as he was swinging his leg over Roman and caught him in the side. Roman reared up, not liking this stranger any more than I did. He fell off backward just as I shot again. The second shot hit Roman. He fell sideways. It took all of five seconds.
There’s not a lot I can say about what happened there on the
outskirts just south of Fort Worth. No way of describing what it felt like to see Roman lying there, bleeding into the dirt. I could have just as easily put a gun to my own mama’s head. I shot twice, and I made them count, because I was saving bullets. The only thing that pushed me through it, watching my closest friend—maybe my only friend—dying at my own hand, was the hatred of this furrier who’d brought this all upon me.
“Don’t shoot me. Please don’t do it.”
Those are some lousy last words to cap off anybody’s life. They didn’t do much for me.
“You should’ve taken the mule,” I said.
I shot him once right in the gut. Then I shot him in the knees, just to make sure he wasn’t going anywhere. When he hit the dirt, coins spilled out of his clothes like a pinata. I gathered up a handful. I didn’t kill him. The crows would do that soon enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“I never killed nobody,” I said, “but there was some people who died of their wounds.”
The people in the street loved that line. Most of the people on the stage with me didn’t. Reverend Caliber was intent on wrapping things up. There wasn’t a case to be made, far as he could see, and it seemed he’d done a decent job of making those in the crowd see it too.
“Indians and the like,” the Reverend said.
He was going back through my history, or, at least my history since it had been set down in writing. That meant more or less everything from Fort Griffin until the present day.
“Mostly Indians,” I said. “Not so much the like.”
Gentleman Jack had heard enough. He was pacing back and forth like a tiger who was scared of looking like a housecat. He pulled his watch from his jacket pocket and flipped it open.
“I think we’ve afforded this man more of a defense than he deserved,” he said. “Is there anyone here who has anything else useful to add, either to his credit or his detriment?”
Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. I looked to the side of the gallows and saw Sunny coming through the throng of people, Madam Pearlie right behind her and pushing.
“I want to say something,” Madam Pearlie said.
People turned to take in the sight. Most everyone in Hell’s Half Acre, if not all of Fort Worth, knew Madam Pearlie on sight, knew her as the owner of the Black Elephant. More had graced its interior than would have admitted it there in broad daylight.
“Madam Pearlie, step forward,” Gentleman Jack said.
As if she wasn’t already doing so.
“I have a few things I want to get off my chest, Jack Delaney,” she said.
I was hoping she would climb the steps to the top of the platform. Partly because it would make me feel better, but mostly because I knew it would make Jack feel worse. She was a big woman, and she wasn’t intimidated by his fancy clothes and slick act.
“I can hear you just fine where you’re at, Madam Pearlie,” he said.
She walked all the way up to the front of the crowd. Refusing to look up to Jack, she spun around and addressed the people in the street.
“I’m a businesswoman here in Hell’s Half Acre, and I have gotten to know this young man, Wilkie John Liquorish, over the past few days,” she said. “Wilkie John Liquorish arrived in our town weak and hungry and needing a place to stay. We took him in at The Black Elephant, because that is what we do. That’s what Fort Worth does. At least, that’s what we always did.”
The Reverend leaned over to me.
“That’s a good woman.”
I knew he’d found a place to stay there more often than I had.
“When people come into my place, we don’t ask what they’re leaving behind them,” Madam Pearlie said. “They’re all the same to me. Colored, Anglo, slave or free, they come to The Black Elephant to get away from whatever they’re leaving outside. Same as Jack Delaney here did.”
Jack had been standing to my side, biting off his fingernails and spitting them at me. Finally, he’d heard enough.
“Careful, Pearlie,” he said. “I’ve seen you doing some questionable things. Why, I could just as easily snatch you up here and put you on the stand.”
I’d seen her throw men out of the saloon herself for less. She looked smaller than usual but no less fierce down there among the rank and file.
“If I’ve violated a law, I’d like for you to name it right now, Mr. Delaney,” she said.
Jack looked bewildered, like things were starting to get out of his control.
“I seem to recall you celebrating the High Sheriff’s death a few days ago,” he said. “Surely that’s not the type of thing we would expect from a businessperson in the Acre.”
There was an immediate swell of shouts toward the sky. Celebrations were still going on from one end of Hell’s Half Acre to the other, even if Jack was somehow unaware. I had watched them in amazement, not quite sure what to think. The Black Elephant and the White Elephant, never adversaries to begin with, had both slashed prices upstairs and downstairs. The same with the Red Light Saloon. And the Emerald Saloon. The Nance Hotel. The Cigar Factory was handing out free cigars.
I had almost come clean to Sunny on two different occasions. The only reason I kept mum? I didn’t want to put her in a position later where Jack was pressing her for details and she had to make a decision.
But there on the corner of Main and Houston, with the crowd egging me on, and the rope hanging loosely around my neck, with Gentleman Jack acting like some Southern preacher and the Reverend looking unsure if even he would see tomorrow, I made a decision.
Truthfully, I don’t think there was enough of a mental process to call it a decision. I didn’t use my heart either, for I knew it couldn’t be trusted. Something came back to me that mama had said one day when we were standing at the front door of the Alamo mission. Every year around Christmas, mama would get sentimental, and we would make the journey to the place. There we would stand quietly and stare until mama was satisfied that respects had been paid. I thought for years that Henry had died within the walls.
“Great men laid down their lives for a cause,” mama said.
I tried to imagine them shooting from the doorway or pouring out into the dirt lot with bayonets. It all seemed too quiet.
“Who killed them?” Ira Lee said.
I can still remember this all, clear as a bell.
“The Mexicans did.”
We looked around us in astonishment. Mexicans lived all around us. They ran the shops, made the food, some of them walked the streets in U.S. Army battledress. Mama saw our faces and quickly added, “Different Mexicans.”
Before we left that sacred spot, mama bent down and huddled us together.
“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t wish to do. Sometimes adults have to do terrible things so that people, their children, can have a chance to live a better life.”
I always thought she was talking about Henry. Later, I realized who she was really talking about.
“When things are going bad, when you’re surrounded and you don’t feel like you have a satisfactory exit,” she said, “remember that you’ll always be okay if you go with your gut.”
I looked up and saw Madam Pearlie looking at me. It was like she was hearing my thoughts. I don’t know exactly what Gentleman Jack was saying. Something about the price of killing. I raised up my hand. I had something to say.
It seemed like the whole town fell silent. Maybe it was the blood rushing to my ears.
CHAPTER FORTY
The carpet of sand laid out between the spot where I buried the best horse a man ever saw and where I rode into Fort Worth on a mule named Bird was more dangerous than quicksand. Comanches didn’t call the area home, but they were known to cross in and out of it, sometimes at battle with the Tonkawa. It was known to be Tonkawa land, and more than one unsuspecting Anglo had found himself caught between two warring parties. In that case, you could be forgiven for wishing there was a little quicksand or a mud bog to hide in.
I wasn’t in the
best of shape, and my spirits were even lower. Bird was a little shaky and seemed to be watching close for snakes. She wasn’t dumb to do so. Stories had been traded way back along the trail of giant nests of rattlers.
“You could hear them things buzzing for a quarter mile,” Leon Thaw said.
That had seemed something to marvel at, a saving grace, at the time, but now there seemed to be a constant buzzing inside my head, and if I would turn it one way or another, it might strike and fool me into near hysterics, jumping no less than if it had been a snake.
I might very well have died out there in that desert. Truly, something inside must have. If so, it wasn’t the distance between me and Greer that did it, although it probably could have been. It wasn’t the death of my brother Ira Lee that did it, although it might well have been that too. If part of my heart was left on that deadly stretch, it was the part that beat inside the skin of that faithful Saddlebred, and I had been the one that stilled it. To say it killed me to ride away was closer to truth than anyone might have suspected.
Sometime in the night, a man on a black mare pulled alongside Bird and me and traveled with us clear through till daylight. I didn’t recognize him, and he never uttered his own name or asked for mine. He claimed to have come from Acorn, Arkansas, where he worked on the section gang of the Texarkana–Fort Smith Railway line.
“You a long way from home, mister,” I said.
I didn’t know where Acorn, Arkansas, was, but I knew it wasn’t anywhere south of Fort Worth.
“I been gone two whole months,” he said. “A man can see a lot of country in two months.”
We would travel for a while in silence, which was fine by me as I had no urge to talk and not much of one to listen either. He didn’t seem to mind that any. Sooner or later, something seemed to nudge something in his mind, and he would go to talking. Sometimes I would act like I was asleep in the saddle, and sometimes I might have even fooled myself. But he kept on talking, all the same.
“They got word to us in Acorn that the bridge had washed out down on Chances Creek,” he said. “The train was coming down, and there weren’t no way to get word out. This was middle of the night, mind you.”