by Braun, Matt;
“Have you forgiven yourself, Henry? With God as your witness, have you?”
There was no answer. Laird’s eyes dulled and appeared to turn inward on something too terrible for speech. A sickness swept over him, and there was a sensation of devastating loneliness, all the agony of grief and despair he’d buried with his son so long ago. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead, and the ache became violently physical. He heaved himself out of the chair, walked to the edge of the porch, and took a deep breath.
Suddenly he stiffened, even in the midst of his sorrow, reverting to instinct. The night had become unnaturally warm and muggy. His head felt queer, almost as though his eardrums were blocked, and on a listless breeze he caught the crisp scent of the seashore. He whirled away and rushed inside the house, halted before the barometer.
The mercury level had fallen to 28.95 inches.
Laird stared at it for several moments, immobile with disbelief, then tore himself away and hurried out the door. As he crossed the porch Angela came to meet him, her face stricken with a look of dread and uncertainty.
“Henry! My god, Henry, what is it?”
“Hurricane! On the coast. You and Trudy stay inside!”
Angela ran for the door, calling Trudy’s name. A few minutes later, huddled beside a window, they saw him spur his horse into a lope and disappear into the darkness. He rode toward Brownsville.
Chapter 13
His horse faltered within sight of town.
Laird swung down out of the saddle an instant before the gelding collapsed. He’d ridden through the night, never once pausing for a breather, and he counted himself lucky to have made it this far. Too late, he wished he’d brought a pistol, but he hadn’t and there was nothing to be done for the animal. He dismissed it from his mind and took off running toward town.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sun slowly crest the earth’s rim. But it was the smoke that claimed his attention. A dead calm, without a whisper of sound, had settled across the land. Ahead, tendrils of smoke drifted skyward, then hung there, suspended over Brownsville like a dark shroud. Nearer the edge of town, he caught a faint smell, harsher than wood-smoke but mingled with a sweetish odor. He recognized it as the stench of burnt flesh, and picked up the pace, sprinting the last fifty yards in a burst of apprehension.
It was worse than anything he’d imagined. The hurricane had swept inland from the south, raging along the border with gale force, and tore a swath through the heart of Brownsville. The town’s main street had simply disintegrated, transformed by titanic winds into a tangled mass of bricks and glass and timber. Flames still licked through the ruins, every store in the downtown area reduced to a smoldering ash heap, and it was apparent the entire business district had been enveloped in a roaring holocaust.
On the outskirts of town, the devastation was only slightly less complete. All through the residential area, the hurricane had blown off rooftops and then battered the houses to flinders. It seemed another World, eerie and spectral, somehow demonic, the streets dotted with crackling flames and twisted rubble. Corpses littered nearly every yard, charred and mangled beyond recognition, and survivors clawed through the wreckage with a look of numbed horror. The stench of death grew stronger as the sun rose high, and in full light it was as though some diabolic force had struck the earth, leaving behind a blotch of scorched destruction.
Laird stood for a long while, regarding the havoc of the storm in a kind of witless stupor. Once before, when he was a young deckhand, he’d weathered a hurricane at the port of Mobile. But it was nothing like the carnage before him now. A lifetime of violence and death hadn’t prepared him for the virtual annihilation of a town. He could only marvel that anyone had survived, and in the back of his mind, he wondered how many had perished beneath the fury of the squall. Finally, with the sense of entering a nightmare, he collected himself and walked toward the river.
Along a side street, the steeple of the Methodist church had toppled over, blocking the road. He veered around it, cutting through the yard of a house that had been leveled to the ground. As he passed the spire, a figure emerged from the ruins of the house, one arm dangling loosely, blackened from head to toe with soot. The man limped toward him, calling his name, and only then did he realize it was Fred Tate, the hardware dealer.
“Laird! Help me, Laird. I can’t find her.”
He stopped and Tate hobbled closer, clutching at his arm. “Have you seen Martha? Or the kids? Have you, Laird?”
“Sorry, Fred, I haven’t. I just got to town.”
“Oh Jesus. They’ve got to be somewhere! Somebody must’ve seen them.”
“Weren’t they with you?”
“No, I was at the store. When it hit.” Tate blinked, licked his parched lips. “Her and the kids were in the house—they must’ve been—but goddamn, Laird—it’s gone. The house is gone!”
“Take it easy, Fred. You’ll find them. Maybe they’re over in the church.”
“I looked there, first thing. Right after the wind stopped.”
“Why didn’t you come home before then, before the storm hit?”
“No time. No warning. Jesus Christ a’mighty, it was raining one minute and then the whole world just blew apart! You never saw anything like it, Laird. It was ... it was just ...”
Tate’s voice trailed off, and a pinpoint of terror surfaced in his eyes. Whatever he’d gone through, it was too horrible to articulate, and his mouth froze in a silent oval. Laird watched him a moment, almost certain now that Martha Tate and her children were buried in the house. He sensed that Fred Tate knew it as well, and simply couldn’t bring himself to accept the truth. Yet there was nothing he could do, and by the looks of the town, he had problems of his own waiting at the docks.
“Fred, listen to me. You keep looking and I’ll send some of my men up to help. That’s a promise, just as quick as I can.”
Tate gave him a glassy-eyed stare, then turned and wandered back toward the pile of rubble. Laird hurried down the street, avoiding everyone he encountered, paused only long enough to chase a couple of dogs off the body of a woman lying black and bloated in the sun. Then he broke into a run, goaded by his own fears and a sudden urgency to reach the riverfront.
The wharf had vanished. Laird trotted past a mound of brick and embers—what had once been the Mercantile National Bank—and abruptly slowed to a walk. For an instant, he couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the destruction, and he had the fleeting impression of a world turned topsy-turvy. Then it registered, jolted him into a state of acute awareness. It wasn’t that at all. It was the end of the world. His world.
The hurricane had snuffed out the warehouse, and like so many matchsticks, simply uprooted the docks. Then it shredded beams and stanchions and pilings into kindling wood, and scattered the remnants of the debris across a wide path below the business district. To the west, along the shoreline, the trees had been stripped clean of bark and leaves, standing ghostly white against the brown earth. A haze of smoke drifted listlessly in the still air, and throughout the wreckage, tongues of flame blinked and flickered with the erratic brilliance of fireflies darting through the gloom of night. Yet, terrible as the destruction was, Laird saw it through a prism centered on his own personal hell. He was staring at the boats.
The Mustang was aground, heeled over on her starboard side, the bow wedged within a tangle of refuse. Another boat had been beached and gutted on the rocks, then slammed back into the shallows with its stern underwater. Several older craft had simply ruptured and sank, either blown apart or cleaved into splinters by the force of the wind. Three of the newer boats had been hurled into the wharf, upended and overturned, then twisted together in an unrecognizable mass of timber and steel. But the onshore wreckage was mere prelude to a still greater disaster.
Berthed upstream of the warehouse, the Border Queen had snapped her hawsers and careened away from the docks.
Adrift and floating downstream, it was apparent the crew had fired her boilers in a valiant effort to gain power and ride out the storm. With only modest luck they might have pulled it off, but one of the older boats, docked below the warehouse, had also slipped her moorings. Swung hard astern by the wind, the boat had hurtled into midstream and rammed the Border Queen amidships. The collision breached the larger boat below waterline, and almost upon impact, her boilers exploded with a molten roar. Now little more than ravaged hulks, it was evident the boats had been consumed by fire and quickly settled to the river bottom. The superstructure of the Border Queen had collapsed, buckling inward, but the stern rose defiantly from the water and her flag still flew.
On shore, Laird stood for several minutes, his face a mask, eyes fixed on the smoldering wreck. It had been his grandest dream, and in the death of the Border Queen he sensed the end of many things. The kingdom he’d won was a kingdom no longer. With the loss of his riverboats, and the threat of the railroad, his rule of the Rio Grande was a thing of the past. Yet it all fit together like a template—too precisely— events dovetailed one to the other with uncanny timing. And he wondered if the God of retribution—the one Angela worshiped so devoutly—hadn’t exacted the crudest punishment of all. Her words still echoed through his mind, and it occurred to him that if a man couldn’t forgive himself, then even a merciful God might find it difficult to grant absolution. Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps God lurked in the shadows, waiting for a man to erect his kingdom on earth, then destroyed it in the blink of an eye. Let the winds blow and summoned a hurricane to act as the instrument of punishment.
It was one answer. Perhaps the only answer that accounted for such uncommon coincidence, and luck turned sour. Certainly no Irishman’s luck deserted him without reason, and if ever he needed convincing, he had to look no farther than the middle of the river.
Laird had no idea how long he’d been standing there. He vaguely sensed crewmen picking through the rubble, was aware that several of them had spoken to him, but he hadn’t replied. His thoughts were hardened around an indrawn bleakness, and he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the Border Queen. At last, someone placed a hand on his shoulder, and he turned. Sam Blalock nodded, clearly groping for words, then lowered his gaze to the ground.
“Sorry, Cap’n. We did the best we could, but it wasn’t no use.”
“Aye, from the looks of things, nothing would’ve helped. I’m obliged to you all the same, Sam. Nobody could’ve done more.”
Blalock’s features were worn and haggard. His clothes hung in tatters, and the whites of his eyes seemed to pop out from a face blackened by wood-smoke. He still appeared dazed, and after a moment he shook his head.
“Goddamnedest thing I ever saw, Cap’n. The mercury dropped close to two inches in less’n an hour. We was still trying to secure the boats when the sonovabitch come howlin’ in and just chewed us up and spit us out. Never had a chance.”
“Forget it, Sam. It was a freak and nothing to be done. Just be glad you pulled through in one piece.”
“Only by the skin of my teeth. And that’s the God’s truth.”
“Well, it’s over now.” Laird glanced past him, searching the ruins. “That reminds me, though. Where’s Arty? I don’t see him around.”
“He’s dead, Cap’n.” Blalock gave him a hangdog look, then gestured toward the demolished warehouse. “Caught it right off, when the roof went. Never knew what hit him.”
Laird scanned the debris, spotted it quickly, felt his stomach knot and tasted bile. A falling timber had impaled Artemus Johnson, spiked him to the floor, arms and legs splayed outward by the impact. Oddly enough, the sight somehow brought the Crucifixion to mind, and it occurred to Laird that Angela might take solace in the thought. Then he noticed the charred skin and burst blood vessels, all clothing consumed by flames, and made a mental note. That part he wouldn’t tell her.
“Sorry we haven’t got to him yet, Cap’n. We’re still diggin’ to see if there’s any survivors.”
“Of course.” Laird swallowed, eyes grim. “What about the skippers?”
“Don’t know about Gilchrist. He was downriver on the Sam Houston.”
Blalock paused, and the timbre of his voice changed. “Lee Hall went under with the Queen. I was on the dock when her hawsers broke and she drifted past. Lee waved at me—grinnin’ big as life—then the wind sucked her away. ‘Course, he had her boilers fired and he was makin’ a game fight of it till the Lone Star took him broadside.” His Adam’s apple bobbed and he cleared his throat. “That’s the last I seen of him.”
“How about Gilchrist, think there’s any chance?”
“None a’tall, Cap’n. It must’ve been ten times worse closer to the coast. God knows, I hope he pulled through ... but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“The crewmen—the ones here—how many made it?”
“Half, maybe a few more. Like I said, we’re still sortin’ through the wreckage and—awww goddamnit to hell! I’m just kiddin’ you and myself and everybody else. There’s some of ‘em we’ll never find!”
“Easy does it, Sam. You’ve no cause to fault yourself.”
“Yeah.” Blalock’s eyes misted over and his voice cracked. “Brave lads, Hank. Uncommon brave. None of ‘em run, not the first man. Stuck it out and tried to save their boats. You would’ve- been proud of ‘em. Real proud.”
“Aye, that I would. They’re of a breed, these rivermen.”
Laird’s jawline tightened, and his gaze drifted cross river. Matamoros looked as though it had been bombarded by thunderbolts. Buildings and houses had simply crumbled before the wind, and the town was pocked with smoldering heaps of adobe. The shrieks of women mourning their dead were audible even on the north shore, and Laird was reminded of an ancient Mexican proverb.
Suerte y mortaja del cielo bajan.
It was true. Fortune and death come from above. Yet he was struck by the irony of it, for the thought stemmed from an older and even more stoic maxim of a people who had learned to endure. Con el favor de Dios. If God wills it. And perhaps, within the bittersweet irony, there was a message for all men, most especially an Irishman whose luck had turned sour.
For a long while no one spoke. Blalock stared wretchedly at the ground, and Laird studied Matamoros with the look of a man who had stumbled upon an unexpected revelation. The sunken hulk of the Border Queen merely reinforced his vision of all that lay ahead. It unfolded before him with blinding clarity, and fearful he might change his mind, he suddenly turned to Blalock.
“Will we be able to salvage any of the boats?”
“Only one, Cap’n. The Mustang. She’s stove in pretty bad, but nothing that can’t be put right.”
“Would you like to buy her?”
“Buy her? I don’t follow your meaning.”
“God’s teeth! It’s simple. I’m asking if you’d like to go into the steamboat business?”
“I dunno. Hell, I never ... well, yeah ... I suppose so.”
“Done!” Laird motioned grandly toward the boat. “We’ve a bargain and she’s all yours—for a dollar!”
“Cap’n, if it’s not too much trouble, what the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“Exactly what it sounds like, jocko. I’ve quit the river.”
BOOK TWO
1873–1875
Chapter 14
On New Year’s morning Laird and Trudy rode west from the Santa Guerra compound. A full day lay ahead of them, and despite a thundering hangover, Laird himself had suggested the ride. He felt it was important that the people see El Patron mark the beginning of a new year in the saddle. It would serve as an example, and set the pace for what he already envisioned as a banner year in the fortunes of the Ele Flecha brand.
A squad of vaqueros fell in behind them as they rode through the front gate. These days not even Laird ventured outside the compound without a
n armed escort, but he quickly motioned the riders to trail them at a distance. This morning his head felt the size of a melon, and the drumming thud of hoofbeats merely aggravated his condition. Yet Trudy was in customary high spirits, completely undaunted by his gruff mood. She began peppering him with questions the instant their little column wheeled west along the creek.
“Pa, have you decided about roundup yet?”
“Aye, I’ve decided.”
“Well ... c’mon, tell me ... when?”
“The end of the month.”
“Honest? Valgame Dios! Why so soon?”
“Because I intend to get an earlier start this year.”
“Earlier start ... are you talking about the trail drives?”
“Naturally. Is there a better reason to hold roundup?”
“How many drives?” Trudy demanded impatiently. “More than last year?”
“Claro que, si. Ten, maybe more, depending on the gather.”
“But that’s ... that’s twenty thousand cows!”
“Aye, it was the figure I had in mind.”
“Madre mio! Why so many?”
“Porqui no?” Laird shrugged. “Why not?”
Indeed it was the very thing Laird had been working toward since he’d quit the river. In a brief stretch of six years he had extended his landholdings to 600,000 acres, and the Santa Guerra herds now exceeded 100,000 longhorns. His lodestar was the image of himself as a cattle baron, and he went at it with all the determination he’d once devoted to riverboats. In his mind, ranching was merely an enterprise, not all that different from the steamboat business; it was susceptible to organization and efficiency, and could be operated to yield maximum profit. His goals were long range and far-reaching, predicated on an ever-growing market for beef, and he approached it with the systematic calculation of a man whose dreams were the offspring of reality.
The brand—commonly called Ele Flecha—was now known from the Rio Grande to the Kansas cowtowns. Hank Laird himself was older and wealthier, though hardly mellowed, and still a man to be reckoned with along the border. He had forced Joe Starling to lay track to Rio Grande City, instead of Brownsville, which made him a pariah among the townspeople. And aside from Los Lerdenos, he was considered a scourge by the Mexicans. Any derecho holder laying claim to Santa Guerra land was offered payment; those who refused were dealt with harshly, and Laird was only too willing to demonstrate that possession was nine points of the law. Having lost a river kingdom, he had built himself a cattle empire, and no one doubted his ability to hold it.