The Sons of Grady Rourke

by Douglas Savage

  “Sean?”

  The older brother opened his eyes slowly and turned his face toward his brother. In the fireplace light, the right half of Sean’s face looked to Patrick like an ancient and gnarled oak tree—the kind in which mystical oriental kings buried their children in the tales of far away, which Patrick could vaguely remember in his mother’s own voice.

  “Are you all right?”

  Sean turned back toward the iced windows. He laid his hand across the top of his tin cup as if to say that he was finished drinking.

  “Well enough.”

  ONE OF THE sergeants had stoked the fire back to life by the time their guests rubbed their eyes and climbed out of their blankets. Someone put a hot tin cup into Sean’s hand before his eyes were open.

  “Thanks.”

  “Ain’t nothin’, sir. You’ll need some heat in you just to make it to the mess tent.”

  The travelers were surprised to see that the sky was still the hard blue-black of morning twilight in the mile-high morning. Although the wind had stopped howling from the western mountains, the pre-dawn air remained painfully cold. The civilians buried their faces in the collars of their ankle-length coats that dragged on new, powdery snow. Half a dozen cavalrymen in blue greatcoats escorted their guests to breakfast. Low in the east, the sky over Lincoln, New Mexico, was just turning pink. When Patrick looked up, he could still see a few bright stars shining. The moon had set and the stars did not twinkle in the thin, brittle air.

  In the mess tent reserved for noncommissioned officers, the atmosphere was wonderful with the hearty scent of sourdough biscuits fried in bacon fat, strong coffee, and tobacco smoke. To Sean Rourke, the large tent smelled better than any woman he could remember. Breakfast comforted the brothers to their bones.

  By the time the brothers pushed themselves outside, the stars were gone and the sky was clear and blue. The blinding snow in the valley was too bright for either brother to make out where the plain ended and the western mountains began. The snow cap on Capitan Mountain to the north was too painfully bright to look at.

  The two travelers were surprised to find their mounts and pack horses already tacked and ready for the day’s ride to Lincoln. Two troopers held the reins and halters.

  “Thank you,” Sean said to one of the soldiers.

  “The smithy reset the hind shoes of the bay, sir.” The private glanced at the brown animal that had snow glistening on his whiskers. “Said one was coming loose. So he done them both to set the angles right.”

  Sean reached into his fur coat’s deep pocket.

  “Will you give your smithy a gold piece for us?”

  “No need, sir. Besides, he won’t take it from you. The old man said you was a soldier once.”

  “Then tell your man that we said thanks.”

  “I’ll do that, sir.”

  The tall youth handed the leathers to the two brothers. Sean and Patrick mounted slowly with their heavy coats holding them back. The orderly stepped back and looked up at Sean’s ruined face. Gathering his reins, Sean straightened in the saddle and snapped off a brisk salute with parade ground precision.

  Both orderlies took one step back, squared their heels, and returned the military courtesy with equal dignity. Sean nodded and led his brother east across the ocean of unspoiled snow.

  THE ROURKE BROTHERS slowly followed the frozen Rio Bonito eastward for ten miles. After half a day, the frozen river turned south.

  “La Placita should be a mile beyond the bend.” Sean’s words came with a cloud of steam. He was not yet accustomed to calling the town by its new name, Lincoln.

  “I suppose,” Patrick stammered with lips too cold to work.

  Sean reined his horse northward, away from the Rio Bonito. Directly ahead, Capitan Peak glistened brilliantly high in the southern sky. Leaving the river trail, the men guided their horses between waist-high gray boulders. The sun gave the icy rocks the glitter of diamonds. Rounding a slight rise a mile from the river, they stopped side by side. Beneath them in the midday sunshine was a run-down ranch house and crumbling outbuildings. Without a word, they spurred their mounts forward at an easy walk.

  The four horses had to pick their feet up as they made their way over downed fence rails, which lay in heaps where a fence line had once stood. The riders drew rein and stopped five hundred yards from the ranch house. They glanced at each other and then back at the Rourke family ranch. At least a hundred head of cattle pawed the snow in search of grass. Some of the steers walked casually upon the weathered front porch.

  “Pa’s?” Patrick said as his lips cracked from a single word.

  “No. Look at them ears. Seen it before down Pecos way in Texas.” Sean pointed to a thin steer fifty yards distant and not the least fazed by the horsemen.

  Squinting into the sun, Patrick could see that each steer had the same ear defect or wound: Each animal’s right ear was cut lengthwise to its base. Where the ear met the head, the lower half of the ear’s underside flapped behind the eye. Every animal grazing had the same mutilation.

  “A brand?” Patrick held his hand over his mouth when he spoke to ease the pain of the cold wind against his gums.

  “John Chisum’s brand. He calls it the ‘jingle-bob.’ Didn’t know he had cattle this far north. But we ain’t been home in six years. Guess things change.”

  “Maybe Pa bought them?” Patrick sounded hopeful.

  “Ain’t likely.” Without more, Sean spurred his horse through the cattle, which shuffled out of the way of the two riders and their pack horses. The droopy-eared steers seemed unafraid of mounted men as if they had experienced them often. When the brothers reached the house, they dismounted and led their four horses into a clapboard barn. It was too cold to leave their horses outside for long. Unsaddling their mounts and untacking the draft horses required ten minutes. The hungry horses nosed around for forage and found only moldy hay. But they snorted with relief to be sheltered from the biting wind.

  Walking to the house, Sean used his hat to swat the rump of a steer that had claimed the front porch as his own. Before stepping off the porch, the animal left a hard and steaming cow pie behind, aimed with precision at the spot where Sean took his next step. With a curse, the older brother wiped his boot on the wooden railing before he opened the unlocked front door.

  Inside, ragged furniture was covered with six inches of clean snow. One of the front windows was completely gone. Patrick went back out into the sunny afternoon. Sean went directly to the single large fireplace where he found unburned logs piled neatly against the stone. He knelt, removed his gloves, and worked to kindle a fire. His hands were stiff and his fingernails were blue from cold. By the time the fire was catching, Patrick entered with a hammer in his hand. He quickly pulled faded curtains across the broken window and nailed the cloth to the window frame to keep the winter outside.

  “Pa had a tool box,” Patrick said with three rusty nails in his mouth.

  A thin veil of white smoke rolled through the large room until the hearth began drafting into the chimney. With the door closed and the broken window covered, the house slowly warmed.

  The Rourke brothers idled in the center of the room. They seemed uncomfortable, as if they were trespassing and expected to hear footsteps on the front porch. But the only noise was from the nearby cattle and the crackling hearth.

  Sean peeled off his heavy coat and draped it over a high-backed, leather chair—a father’s chair. The coat blew a small cloud of snow onto the snow drift in the middle of the floor. Water was already seeping from the drift and running between the floorboards. Patrick wiped snow from a second chair before he laid his coat down. The brothers stood side by side with their palms opened toward the blazing hearth.

  “Smaller than I remember it,” Sean said into the fireplace.

  “Me, too. Guess we growed over the years.”

  Sean shrugged. As he warmed to the fire, he moved around the room, but came back to the hearth every few minutes to open his hands abov
e the flames. Patrick kicked snow away with his boots and made tracks across the floor.

  The ceiling was not flat. It was gabled down the center of the room and housed a single loft above a wooden ladder. From below, several travel trunks were visible, aligned neatly like small wooden coffins awaiting their final resting place in the frozen earth.

  A single doorway opened along the long wall. Bright sunlight shone upon rusty hinges on the half-open door. Inside, a small bedroom contained a single bed, which stood high off the dusty floor. At the narrow end of the living room was a tiny kitchen with closed cupboards, a dry sink, and a large pump with a wooden handle. Walking closer, Patrick saw open tin cans with jagged tops pointing toward the rough hewn ceiling; it was as if the owner had started dinner but had not had time to finish preparing it. Looking down, Patrick saw that each can was still full of something frozen and unidentifiable. Whatever it once had been, it had half rotted during the fall before freezing in the high-country winter.

  Stepping back into the harsh daylight of the living room, Patrick came closer to his brother’s side. Sean frowned down at a waist-high bureau against a wall. On top, wooden picture frames sat in puddles of melted snow. The melt water ran brown with dust and grime. The frames will filled with browned portraits of dour faces—painfully rigid from holding their breath for the long exposures of the photographic processes common to the West.

  “I remember that one,” Patrick smiled at a portrait of three scruffy little boys.

  “We don’t look real happy,” Sean said without emotion.

  “Except for Liam.”

  The youngest child—no more than five years old—wore the smudged mouth of a boy who could not hold still while the plate was exposed.

  “Liam always took Ma to heart,” Patrick said warmly.

  “‘God sees smiles,’” Sean said softly as if reciting something important learned at school.

  “You remember Ma saying that to us?” Patrick sounded surprised.

  Sean’s broken face smiled awkwardly. He seemed out of practice.

  “I knowed her before you did, little brother.”

  Patrick gently touched his tall brother’s shoulder and looked down quickly before his eyes showed wet.

  “Pa.” The smaller brother studied a stem face with hollow cheeks and a double row of brass buttons running down the puffed-out breast.

  “I remember his uniform from Mexico. He was proud of it.” Sean did not seem to notice that the frame held two portraits in the glass. The second showed a man in a Confederate uniform with corporals’ stripes. The beardless face was untouched by the ravages of war.

  “Pa must have put you in the frame with his picture.”

  “Or Ma did.”

  “Don’t matter who, does it?” Patrick stopped short, wishing that he had not spoken quite so quickly.

  “Don’t matter at all,” Sean said as he laid the double frame into the last of the snow melting on the little bureau. He turned when he heard cattle hooves on the front porch. “Think I’ll go outside and make some fresh beef for dinner. Why don’t you broom out the kitchen?”

  “All right.”

  “Tomorrow, we’ll ride to town to find Lawyer McSween what wrote us to come for probating Pa’s will.” Sean heaved his soggy coat over his shoulders. He paused to examine the cylinder of his Peacemaker revolver. He knew that its six chambers were loaded. But he checked anyway as he walked quietly into the blinding sunshine.

  Inside, Patrick Rourke heard his brother’s spurs jingling on the porch followed by the clatter of cattle feet. He knew that Sean would guide one of the steers toward the barn before putting it down. While he waited for the single report from a .45-30 cartridge, Patrick picked up his father’s framed face and gently wiped snow melt from the knotty wood. He studied Grady Rourke’s clear, pale eyes, which stared straight ahead. Patrick blinked as if his father’s youthful eyes were watching him. Then he looked at his brother’s face from sixteen years earlier. Sean’s eyes were slightly pursed at the bridge of his nose. It was a teenage warrior’s face that seemed grimly aware of its certain future.

  Patrick did not startle when a single pistol shot cracked outside. From inside the barn, the thin mountain air muffled the round into a faraway pop like dry kindling under foot. He set the double frame back where it belonged.

  “We come home, Pa.”

  Chapter Two

  THE ROURKE BROTHERS RODE INTO LINCOLN FROM THE WEST. Their steak dinner and their steak breakfast did not keep them warm during the short ride to town. Scarves of coarse wool held their sweat-stained hats down over their ears. Riding with their heads down against the wind, the Rourkes had to squint their eyes within the shadows cast by the hats’ wide felt brims. An all-night feast of clean hay and rolled oats found in the barn put the light back into the black eyes of each rider's horse. Oats burn slowly inside a horse, and each animal carried his feet high as their warm bellies and thick winter coats kept the mounts comfortable under the bright midmorning sun. The men felt the confidence of their heavy Colt Peacemakers rubbing against their hips beneath their fur trail dusters. The sun glinted off the riders’ spurs.

  Riding slowly eastward, the brothers followed Lincoln's only dirt road. The hamlet was nothing more than a single row of wind-burned and sun-bleached adobe structures on each side of the street, 5750 feet above sea level. Behind the single-story buildings on their left, the frozen Rio Bonito river bed ran east and west, parallel with the street. Its near bank was hardly twenty yards from the rear of the ragged buildings on the north side of the road.

  They passed the town's only two-story building on their right. Men already bustled in and out of the prosperous mercantile. The sign said J. J. DOLAN AND COMPANY. Ten yards further into town stood a single-story adobe building on their left, opposite the Dolan store. To the right of the building, a large corral was empty of livestock.

  “Let's try the store, Patrick.”

  Without comment, the younger brother steered his mount toward Dolan's hitching rail. They dismounted and went inside.

  Half a dozen men stopped chattering when the brothers entered. The travelers’ beards, trail coats bulging at the right hip, and their general disrepair called the patrons’ attention to the strangers. The brothers unwrapped the scarves covering their heads and removed their hats. They walked on stiff legs toward a ratty bar along one wall.

  “A little early in the day for hard liquor, boys,” a friendly man said behind the bar. His pot belly was stained with tobacco juice. “Coffee’s strong and hot, if you have a mind.”

  “Coffee would be just fine,” Sean said. His left hand reached across his chin to pull the right fur collar of his coat high up on his disfigured face.

  “Here you go,” the barkeep smiled. If he noticed Sean's face, he did not even blink.

  “Thanks.”

  “You boys passing through?”

  “No, sir. We live here. Leastwise our folks done for years.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re Rourkes. I’m Sean and this here is my little brother, Patrick.”

  The barkeep squinted in the bright sunlight streaming harshly through wavy windows. He studied Sean closely.

  “I'll be damned. Old Grady’s boys come home? Yes, I can see it now. Around your eyes. Just come in?”

  “Yesterday. Ain’t had time for a bath or shave yet.”

  “Guess not. Sorry to hear about your pa. He had friends here in Lincoln.”

  “Yes,” Sean nodded, lifting a heavy coffee cup to his beard. “Lincoln. When did it get a new name?”

  “Back in ’69, I suppose. When we finally got a Post Office. Old-timers like me still call it La Placita del Rio Bonito.” Though blond and blue-eyed, the barkeep's Spanish accent was perfect from a lifetime in New Mexico Territory, where native Mexicans and Mescalaro Apaches still outnumbered the Anglos.

  “We're looking for a lawyer, Alexander McSween. Know where we can find him?”

  “Jail more ’n likely,” someon
e behind the brothers piped up.

  The brothers turned toward the man behind them: another Anglo, middle-aged, with a frightened, hungry look in his eyes.

  “Jail?”

  “Yes. McSween's under arrest for stealing from old Fritz’s estate. Got took to Mesilla to tell it to the judge down there.”

  “Emil Fritz,” another man joined in. “Used to be one of the owners of Dolan and Company. Consumption killed him when he went home to Germany a while back. Old McSween had his dirty little hand in the cookie jar.” A gathering of townsmen laughed together around the brothers, who were suddenly uncomfortable with so many strangers blowing tobacco breath down their necks.

  “McSween has papers for us,” Sean said firmly, hoping to bring the conversation to a quick resolution.

  “See the Wortley ’cross the street?” The barkeep pointed out the front window toward Lincoln’s only boarding house and hotel. The brothers squinted toward the snow-covered street and nodded. “Well, ride past it, and past the Mills’ house. The fenced-in building on the left will be McSween’s house. No one’s home now.” The cluster of men chuckled. “His law office is next door in Tunstall’s store.” The man said Tunstall as if the word had a bad taste.

  The brothers laid their empty cups down on the bar.

  “Thanks for the coffee. What do we owe you?”

  The barkeep smiled with strained courtesy.

  “Nothing this morning, boys. It's on old Grady. Ask for Shield. He's McSween's partner.”

  “Shield,” Patrick repeated.

  “McSween's wife is Mrs. Shield’s sister,” one of the nameless men offered.

  “Thanks, again,” Sean said as he walked an anxious step ahead of Patrick into the sunshine. They mounted, crossed the street toward the Wortley Hotel, and continued slowly past an apparently deserted adobe structure surrounded by a fence. The place looked like a small fortress. Within minutes, they reached the second large building on the river side of the street. Its front porch ended at the street. The entire rear of the building was a corral, where a lone horse stood quietly, fetlock-deep in new snow. The brothers tied their animals to two of the beams that held up the porch roof. They entered the single-story building. A young, thin-faced boy with pale blue eyes stood behind a counter.