All Things Left Wild

by James Wade

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, anything. Something about the weather, maybe.”

  “It’s hot.”

  “Yessir, it is that.”

  We rode on, but silence was not much of a strength for Shelby, no matter the circumstance.

  “You reckon Philadelphia stands a chance against Chicago in the World Series?” he asked. “I saw in the paper in Tucson where they’ll be matching up.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It ought to be a good one.”

  “Alright.”

  “What are you so sore at, little brother?”

  I pulled up on the horse and Shelby made a circle and did the same and there we set in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day, sweat pouring from our bodies and with it any righteousness we’d ever known.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “That boy is dead, and you want to talk about baseball?”

  “Well it ain’t gotta be baseball. We could talk about boxing, but I didn’t really want to get started on that nigger Johnson. I promise you if they give ol’ Jeffries a rematch—”

  “Stop. Just quit opening your mouth.” I spit into the dirt and put the horse forward and Shelby scowled and followed.

  “You better watch how you talk to me, son,” he said. “Outlaws turn on their partners all the time. That’s a fact.”

  “We ain’t outlaws.”

  “Sure we are,” he said. “We’re the Bentley Brothers, known far and wide as the most dangerous guns west of the Mississippi. Hell-bent on living a life full of adventure, stealing horses and the hearts of women, and riding them both as long as it suits us.”

  “And you’d like that life?” I asked.

  “I might even steal me one of them Ford motor buggies.”

  “You wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”

  “I bet I could I figure it out.”

  “You realize Dawson probably has every marshal in the territory hunting us? We’re gonna hang. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Shelby shrugged.

  “I ain’t got no problem killing a marshal,” he said. “But if it makes you feel better, how ’bout we just make it into Mexico, find us a little ranch to work on. Piquito ranchero, I believe they call it. Then we can be real vaqueros instead of outlaws. How ’bout that?”

  “Look yonder,” I said, pointing.

  Dust drifted up from an old wagon road crossing east to west below us. Men on horses moved past like miniature figurines, the dust trailing them as they rode. There was no sound.

  “What?” Shelby asked.

  “Might be a posse. Might be hunting us.”

  Shelby laughed.

  “You read one too many of them dime novels, little brother.”

  We set and watched the riders as they dismounted and moved into the brush along the road and then were back on the horses and moving down the trail and dismounting again, searching for something.

  “Still,” Shelby said, “I guess it’s best we steer clear.”

  * * *

  We rode past the Papago Indian Reservation and into the Coronado Forest. We wound our way through Santa Cruz, watering the horses at stock tanks and creek beds. We passed only game hunters and tree dwellers, gruff folks who eyed us with suspicion and madness.

  There was no rain. The days fell hard upon my skin, which burned and peeled and burned again. I imagined it a precursor to Hell, and during the long rides with little water I became convinced whatever god controlled the sky was surely showing me my future eternal.

  Whether Shelby felt remorse, I could not say, but in the end it was not him who’d murdered the child. And so it was my soul, beyond saving, that was bound to navigate the everlasting flames of the underworld. Never seeing my mother again.

  We made no fires at night, and the heat from the day was chased away by an urgent cold that sank into my bones, and I shivered in and out of dreams. I saw her face and the face of my father and the face of the boy. They were each one set against dark clouds and a rolling thunder. When lightning struck, the faces were illuminated and I could see they weren’t all the way human. They were ever-changing, like portraits with dripping paint, and their mouths were open wide like they were screaming, but I heard only the storm.

  2

  The sky darkened and there were naught but bones and Randall felt them and saw them—his own bones aching and Harry’s resting in the box—and the rain was like a crawling shadow on the mountains beyond. The site was slanted and covered in desert spoons, which were Harry’s favorite, likely because of their name, and the gathering storm sent ahead its wind so that the tall plants might bow before it. Randall’s body mimicked their contortions. With the shovel he lurched toward the dirt, the blade piercing the earth again and again, and the wind carrying the sounds of his mother’s whimpers. He swore he heard the pounding of hooves, but when he looked up all was still and bracing. His mother’s head was lowered in grief and tears, but his wife stared straight ahead with no emotion to be discerned. Randall watched her until her eyes found his, and he saw there a hollowness to rival any canyon, and she turned away as the first drops of rain turned dark brown on the dust before him.

  Some of the ranchmen had come, and others had stayed behind at the barracks. Randall had not required attendance, though he doubted the difference that would have made. As the rain began to fall in earnest, the men replaced their hats and started a staggered and premature dispersion. None offered their help, and Randall hated them all and drove the shovel down with a violence he was not accustomed to. His hands bled against the wooden end and his back and shoulders were afire. He saw in the distance several head of cattle making for a mesquite grove to wait out the storm. Above them the sky fractured and cracked and the herd called out to him or to one another or to God as the dirt went to mud, slick and unbalanced.

  Among those gathered stood a boy Randall recognized. A boy, inexplicably called Tadpole, who had been a friend to Harry during the lonesome days on the ranch. He still held his hat across his chest and was the only one to do so, and his lips trembled so that he might not cry and show weakness to the older men around him.

  The preacher had been delayed on account of the weather and so it was Randall, covered in mud and rain, who spoke the words of the Lord to the few souls who yet remained.

  “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Amen.”

  “Amen,” whispered a few.

  “Harry was a good boy,” Randall said, then paused. “A good boy who loved horses—” His voice cracked and so too did the thunder. “. . . horses and his family and . . . he was only trying to do what was right. Trying to protect us.”

  Randall began to sob. “I should have protected him,” he cried, and with a muted lurching the coffin came unsettled from the stunted hill.

  It slid into the hole and Randall, falling backward, narrowly avoided its path. The wood crashed below and Randall’s mother screamed and the lid splintered and snapped, and Harry’s body spilled out into the mud and pooling water. Randall dove, splashing into the grave, and picked up his son and held him close and rocked and cried. His wife stood straight and stern and unchanged.

  * * *

  The storm since passed, Randall was on the great porch and looking out at the land, his land, where always his father claimed the future of their family lay. And how right he had been, Randall thought, and a rainbow came and the cattle returned across the mesa and he felt his wife by his side.

  Joanna was the daughter of a highly regarded doctor in the bustling metropolis of Philadelphia, and he a budding poet—so said those who cared of such things. He used the words of his father and his grandfather before him t
o speak of a West he could barely remember. As a boy he’d ridden a horse, he knew, and once stalked a great elk with his grandfather, but he’d grown up in academies along the East Coast and had learned table manners instead of survival skills. Still, his inexperience did not dilute his romanticism of the wild spaces that lay beyond the setting sun and with his words he entertained and entranced the young girl. He promised a life of adventurous splendor and did so with all the confidence and naivety of the soldier yet to see battle, and in the end his tenderfoot notions had betrayed them both.

  His grandfather, the esteemed commander Lieutenant Travis Dawson, hero of the Mexican War, had been given land in the new territories of the Southwest as a grant from the United States. His grandfather would often say the government hoped the Apaches would kill him off, so as it could take back the lands once they proved fertile for cattle. Instead of only his own fresh scalp, the lieutenant brought to the Southwest a group of renegade soldiers who wanted no part in the coming conflict between the states. In exchange for parcels of his land, they helped Dawson drive back the Apaches and established several ranches in parts of the Arizona and New Mexico Territories—the greatest being Longpine, which soon became a boomtown of sorts.

  When the Civil War did come, covering the country in a dark ritual of familial bloodletting, Dawson and his comrades had no qualms enriching themselves through cattle trade to both the Union and Confederate armies. The territories followed the violent example of their creator and divided themselves during the war. Dawson, being perhaps the most well known of the pioneers at the time, was asked by a newspaperman from Taos which side he supported.

  “I will take no side save that which furthers my fortune,” his quote read. “And should there be a man obliged to point out my sin and greed, I would say to him: I have served the United States in its wars, now I will let its wars serve me.”

  The lieutenant’s son, Randall’s father, had been raised in a boys’ school in Baltimore but was summoned West before the war in an attempt to keep him away from the fighting. During his first five years in the territory Edmund Dawson had taken a wife, lost an arm to a poisoned Apache arrow, and been appointed as a delegate to the newly reunited states. Despite having a wife who had fallen into depression after losing two children before birth, Edmund was a successful statesman and made the harrowing trip to and from Washington, DC, with growing regularity. Randall was born while his father was away in the spring of 1878 and by the time he was of schooling age the two switched places, Randall taking up residence at Mormont Boys Academy in Philadelphia and his father returning to the territory with a dream of statehood.

  He wrote Randall frequently, describing the majesty of the West and the unbridled opportunity of expansion and wealth. It was poetic and it called to Randall, and so he read and wrote of these spectral visions in his mind. Whether they were memory or fantasy or some crude conjunction of the two, he could not say. He knew only that his destiny, like that of his country’s, would be found among the red rock and deep canyons of the storied frontier.

  * * *

  “You brought this upon me.” Joanna’s words were glazed in a frost, and when he turned to her she would not face him. “You gave me nothing save death and hardship and then at long last there he was and he was mine and you let them take him away.”

  “Joanna, we must not—”

  “You let them take him,” she cried and there was a craze in her voice, and Randall thought of the child that was never born as they’d first journeyed west, and the girl taken by fever only days after entering a world that wouldn’t keep her. They’d tried many times and nothing would take, and then there was Harry and he brought back a light once lost and now lost again, perhaps forever.

  “I am sorry, Joanna, truly,” he said, and his own grief burrowed inward as his nature was to tend to hers instead.

  “I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want your ranch or your cows or your goddamn poems. I don’t belong here,” she wept and looked to be on the verge of collapse, but before Randall could move to embrace her she stiffened again.

  “You don’t belong here,” she said, flat. “This is a cold, wild place, and for better or worse you are neither.”

  “What do you want?” he asked and there was an urgency in his asking and she heard it and she looked at him and answered.

  “I want you to kill them. I want you to find those boys and I want you to kill them for killing your son. My son.”

  “What?” he asked, having expected a plea to go back east for a visit or even for good. Though he knew it to be inappropriate he was close to laughter at the thought. “I’ve already sent word to Sanford in Texas.”

  Joanna turned away again and folded her arms and was silent and this caused him to continue. “The brothers Bentley were seen headed south and with the political upheaval along the borderlands they will surely turn east. There are two marshals, very fine lawmen, in New Mexico who are no stranger to our family, and Sanford’s Rangers are camped just a few days’ ride into the Texas plains. They will have nowhere to go.”

  Still there was silence and again Randall attempted to talk the shadows away from his wife’s soul.

  “Darling, you can’t possibly believe I’m better equipped to hunt these men than a trained officer of the law.”

  There was movement and Randall hoped it was a spark of reason and she turned to him once more.

  “I do not believe you better equipped,” she told him. “I do not believe you remotely equipped for this or any other action outside of scribbling falsities on parchment, but I do believe—I know—that it was your son they killed. Your son. Not Sanford’s or his Rangers’ or any other man’s. Yours. And I also know that I cannot bear to live another day with a man who would not seek to avenge his own son. That is what I know with God as my witness, Randall. Your line has been broken, and though it pains me greatly I will try again to give you another son but not until you have set this right, do you understand? You set it right, Randall. You set it right for our Harry.”

  And then the tears came and again he moved to embrace her but she pushed him away and retreated into the house, and he was left alone with a soft wind and the faraway howling of a single coyote calling out for anyone to answer.

  3

  We were two days through Santa Cruz, keeping the river as a barrier to our west, when we came to the border. We crossed a few miles east of the Sonoran city of Zorrilla. The river was shallow, its current weak. The land on either side mirrored the other, two halves of an equal world.

  We rested the horses, then led them up the southern bank and onto a ridge overlooking the new country. We stayed on the ridge, bearing west until we chanced across a bygone path too narrowly trodden for cattle and followed it away from the river and across the salt flats and into the wastelands.

  When one trail gave out another started up, and even in this remote and uncultivated landscape there were signs of those who’d come before, those who’d carved out from the desert their own bearing and set forward across the plains and lived in ways followed and ways abandoned, all the while a reminder that no course is left uncharted, no lesson learned of its own accord but rather taught. Always taught. And in these observations, be they fruitful or sterile, we can see only what we’re shown. The world builds of itself, knowledge carried and stacked like bricks and with such heights, such illimitable reaches before us. And so we are forever engaged in the quest for the greater, our ambitious eyes blinded to the footprints of our ancestors and the bones and dust left behind and also ahead, and so on in rhythm, in pounding percussion.

  Still we forge onward, as if ours were the first world, as if we alone by our very existence are inimitable across the vastness of the universe, and in doing so we elevate our own creations to undeserving positions of power and importance. And for all that is ennobled there are those left lowly, those who are bound to carry upon their bent spines the worries of a
burning world—a world which will rise again from the ashes and bury its transgressions shallow, in graves overflowing, and set about the search for a new fire, so all might burn once more.

  The matrix of intersecting game trails and old Indian bridle paths and the decisions made therein brought us at last to the prominence overlooking Zorrilla. The outskirts of the town lay desolate and depraved upon the desert, and were it not for the crude homesteads, the scene could have easily belonged to some lost world, some fallen kingdom.

  I put the horse forward and we navigated the unstructured placement of a half-dozen hovels and lean-tos, each shack more tumbledown than the last. From one such structure came a three-legged dog, not much larger than a newborn kid, and the small creature commenced to yapping and bouncing about. My horse, none too impressed, studied it as we moved on. Two women, one old and one not, crouched over stained buckets and shucked corn. They looked up as I passed, and I stopped my horse and touched my hat. The old woman paid me no mind, but the younger one rose and walked out to meet me. Her hands on her hips, she looked up at me as if I were some oddity to behold.

  “Hola,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Hola.”

  “Dónde es saloon?” Shelby shouted and the girl backed away.

  * * *

  We moved through the shanties and back onto the plains.

  “We’re Mexicanos now, bud,” Shelby said, taking off his hat and waving it in celebration. His shouts and yips carried across the Sonoran Desert and died before reaching the horizon.

  I stayed quiet.

  Dark clouds moved in, robbing the world of light. Within minutes the rains were falling, and Shelby and I moved the horses into a thick canebrake near some offshoot of the big river.

  “Think it’ll flood?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “River was too low to start with.”

  He nodded.

  The rain came and would that it could wash away our sins. Instead it only turned the dirt to mud and sent all manner of creatures, good and evil, seeking whatever shelter might be had. Water pooled at the rim of my hat and hesitated there, as if unsure what to make of this newfound freedom, then continued on to the ground, where it was lost to the silt and slush of a saturated truth.