by Mark Warren
Wyatt watched his father’s face turn in profile as though he were studying the horizon for what lay ahead. Or maybe it was the past. Nicholas had always come out on top and been vocal about his methods, which had generally followed with the law . . . though not always. Supplied with pious platitudes on every subject, he nevertheless bent the rules when it was to his benefit. He had bootlegged liquor in Illinois, Virgil had once told Wyatt. Along with that trade had come the craft of barrel-making, a respected profession. There was good and bad in most everything, Wyatt figured. He thought no less of his father for the moonshining. It was a business venture, nothing more. No one had been hurt by it.
The wind at his back picked up and bristled the spring grass. There was a sweet anise scent in the air from where the horses had been cropping the grasses. Wyatt scanned the plain, thinking how—with this sudden wind—now would be the time for an Indian to make a move, if only by a few inches. Nicholas seemed oblivious. Wyatt seldom saw his father contemplative like this.
When the breeze settled and the creek gargled again, the world before them seemed to open back up to its unending expanse. Wyatt wondered how much farther the land could unfold before they reached California.
“Coplea will take your place at midnight. Stay sharp, son. The damned Sioux might be beggars in the daylight, but they’re a damned mite bolder at night, even this close to town.”
“I’m awake,” Wyatt said and touched his thumb to the hammer of the rifle in his lap. He let his eyes relax to include everything—checking for movement. There was none to see.
For a time they did not speak, and then Nicholas stood and walked back to the wagons. Wyatt swiveled and watched his father’s dark hat and overcoat meld with the horses then dissolve through the picket line. There were times he could not stomach the man’s arrogance, but Wyatt had seen that arrogance work in his father’s favor too many times to dismiss it outright.
Wyatt rose and moved among the horses, speaking low to them with reassuring words. Then he returned to the rocks to think. Three hours till midnight. He liked having time to think about things. Nestling in, he kept his eyes and ears sharp, even as he let his mind roam back to Omaha City. He saw himself standing in the muddy street, watching the tall mustachioed man stalk him from straight ahead. And while he imagined dealing with that kind of crisis, he knew the intent of his actions would be as quietly aligned and familiar to him as the stars, fixed in their assigned places in the night sky. And he would do what he needed to do.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
Summer, 1864: Oregon Trail—Nebraska through southern Wyoming, across Utah and Nevada to the Santa Ana River Valley, California
Well into Nebraska they entered the sandhills and followed the lazy wind of the North Platte. Here the land seemed cleansed and full of promise. Storms marched in dark columns across the distant sky but could span the plain from one end to the other without affecting the wagon train’s immediate surroundings. Lightning forked and pulsated on the horizon in a silent echo of itself, the grumble of thunder arriving sometimes half a minute later. By the time one of these storms did wash over them, they had watched its approach for hours. Between flash floods, the river was wide and shallow—a mere ribbon of water. The rolling dunes of grass seemed more of a river, boundless and swaying as though pointing toward something better.
At Fort Laramie the Earp party was warned about hostile activity from the Sioux, but only twice did bands of Indians pose a threat. Each time they were a loose bunch, half-starved and abject in their ragged animal skins. Neither encounter amounted to much. Most of it posturing, on both sides.
On the first attempt at an attack by the Sioux, it was Wyatt who, high on his sentinel’s post, had spotted a skulking party wending its way along a stream bed toward the horses. He fired off the warning shot that set the camp into motion, foiling the raid before it had begun. Still, the men of the train made much of the confrontation and rode out to give chase. A farmer named Chapman was shot in one of these forays, but it appeared to have been an accident, the hapless fellow felled by one of his own party in a moment of crossfire, though no one would admit to it. On the occasion of each attack, Wyatt remained with the livestock, for that was his job. Still, he remained prepared to fight. He was, in fact, heavily counted on for his hunter’s reputation as a marksman. He kept his gun free of dust and grit by wrapping the receiver and lock in a strip of lightly oiled muslin. The barrels he plugged with small stoppers of cork. Each evening after supper he cleaned the weapon as a nightly ritual.
When the Rockies finally reared up like great jagged teeth from the floor of Wyoming, the migrants then had a significant landmark on which to fix their eyes. The wagons rolled on, averaging ten or twelve miles a day, but even after several days those mountains seemed no closer. Weeks went by where one day was hardly discernible from another, marked only by the steady plummet of morale under Nicholas Earp’s stern manner of controlling the Iowa party.
Then, as if they had dropped their attention for too long, they realized the mountains were lifting them upward and looming over them like an abrupt challenge from God. Now the crossing became the dreaded uncertainty of which they had been warned, and the pilgrims looked to their leader like children lost in a wilderness.
Soon the terrain broke up into shelf and fissure, the land tilting ever upward. Nicholas showed no mercy to the draft animals, whipping them up and over every obstacle. As instructed, the men pushed at the rears of the wagons like doomed characters trapped in a fable that could end only in folly. If a wagon refused to go, Nicholas, still a stranger to these migrants, boldly climbed aboard to inspect its contents and threw out whatever he deemed expendable. The owners could only glare mutely at his back, their contempt for him building less on account of their losses than the peremptory swiftness of his decrees.
Nicholas, Wyatt knew, had been born for moments like this. To lead. To levy judgment. To reap scorn he cared about no more than the damned greeners foolish enough to waste their energy on such emotion. The timing was everything, and everyone who had signed on had to understand it. The mountains had to be crossed before first snow. Nicholas’s pace was slow but steady, and he would not waver from it. Any complaints about the Earp captaincy were confined to diary entries or private conversations, never voiced to Nicholas’s face.
Often Wyatt found himself on the receiving end of the train’s silent resentment, as though he were but an extension of his father’s brash ways. A scant few pitied him and went out of their way to show him extra kindness. Caring for neither treatment, he kept to himself. If he learned nothing else from this journey, it was not to confuse his own estimation of himself with anyone else’s.
He had heard stories about the mountains, but none had prepared him for their raw beauty and sudden views of gaping spaces. The difficulties of travel aside, the Rockies were a world unto themselves, cool even in summer, rife with wildlife, and cloaked in regal evergreens that scented the air with a pleasing antiseptic cleanness that made him want to inhale deeply into his lungs. The roiling streams tumbling down the rocky slopes ran clear as glass, except where they pooled to green or foamed into brilliant white. Wyatt remembered his schoolteacher once talking about the gods of an ancient time living on an exclusive mountain, and now, on this pristine spine of the Rockies, he forever held a picture that served for that lesson.
By the time the train leveled out again on the flats of Utah, the Earp rule had taken its toll. Few spoke to Nicholas unless necessary. Charlie Coplea started taking his meals with the Rousseaus. Even James broke free, declaring himself for Austin, Nevada, on the pretense that his old wound needed professional tending. Nicholas might have believed it, but the rest of the family knew that James, his store of whiskey depleted, would be seeking his medical aid from a saloon.
On the morning of his departure, James said his goodbyes to his family and then pulled his horse alongside the wagon Wyatt drove. He held out a bundle of burlap tied with brown cord.
> “Thought you might need this,” James said. When Wyatt took the gift and felt the heft of it in his hand, James turned his head away and held out his palm to stay Wyatt’s protest. “Don’t say nothin’. I got another . . . an extra I keep in my bag.”
Wyatt untied the package and fingered the familiar contours of the Remington revolver James had used in the war. He had openly admired it, even asked to clean it on several occasions. A glow of pride spread from the center of his chest and coursed through him like a fever.
“There’s balls and caps and a powder flask in there,” James said. “Cleaning rod, too.”
Wyatt nodded and set the gift aside on the plank seat. “When’ll I see you again?”
James smiled and leaned on his pommel. “Can’t say for sure, but the Earps always seem to come back together sometime.” He coughed up a dry chuckle. “I ain’t sure if it’s a curse or a blessing.” He winked and reined his horse away from the redundant churn of the wheel and scrape of axle. The last Wyatt saw of him was a dot on the horizon fading in the north.
Through all the discord within the train Nicholas kept his eyes stolidly on the trail west. Wyatt noted each phase of the social breakdown—marking the flaws in his father’s ethic of leadership . . . as well as the flaws in the wagoners’ expectations of him. But he also noted the occasional ruined wagons they passed, monuments to the failures that had come before them. They were wooden ghosts, listing on bare axle hubs like ships run aground and stalled in a calm. But the Earps sailed on.
The arid stretch from Salt Lake took them southwest along the Mormon cutoff, across the austere flats of Nevada, and then the richly ochred Mojave, where the land was a skillet of rising heat. The fertile valley of San Bernardino provided a fitting climax to the epic journey. Reaching it in mid-December, the Earps hastily shed themselves of their fellow nomads and began scraping out their new start on the headwaters of the Santa Ana River.
Without a hard freeze in the sheltered valleys of southern California, Wyatt found himself quickly returned to the plow in an abandoned orchard field that had never known the farmer’s passion to furrow. He deemed it his duty to settle the family into their new homestead. It would be a final gesture of obedience to maintain the appearance of familial ties—something he did mostly for his mother’s sake. As usual, he took to the task with quiet dedication, his hands regaining their rough crust of callus as his heart hardened to his father’s rule.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Winter, 1865: San Bernardino, California
On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, the Earps took their wagon into San Bernardino to join in the holiday celebrations planned by the locals. The occasion drew people from miles around to mingle on the esplanade. The music was festive, Mexican tequila in abundance, and betting on horse races fast and loose.
Nicholas pretended to be pulled into the wagering against his will, but Wyatt knew gambling to be the reason they had made the trip into town. He watched with interest as his father shouldered his way closer to the race entries to assess their attributes. Each time Nicholas laid down a coin on the barrelhead, he pointed to the very steed Wyatt had favored by private appraisal. Despite the gulf widening between father and son, Wyatt was often reminded of their commonalities.
In the plaza the anticipation of the race bets escalated to a near frenzy, each man declaring his horse a winner through the euphoric prophecies of tequila. A tittering audience of colorfully dressed senoritas only fueled the male performances. The mayor and several other village officials managed to bring a semblance of order to the drunken chaos, and finally all bets for the first race were declared closed. At the mayor’s signal the small band of guitars and trumpets fell silent. Then the crowd quieted. All eyes were on the two racers lined up at the starting mark.
A swarthy man in a purple vest with gold embroidery called out the starter’s cadence in Spanish, and a gun popped above the heads of the onlookers. The cheering broke out of a sudden and propelled the two riders and their mounts out of the semi-circle of audience like a wave pushing them forward. It was a short sprint the length of the plaza, around a stone well-house and back. Even before the horses could be reined in, the winners converged on the bet-takers like starved beasts claiming their share of a downed prey.
“Wyatt, git over here and set with us a spell.” Charlie Coplea stood awkwardly in a brown suit, white shirt, and red silk tie. His dull brown hair was oiled and combed close to the skull—a futile effort to iron flat the curls that forever twined around his simple face. He walked his hat brim through his fingers as he held the hat flat against the front of his coat. He shifted uneasily from his good leg to the other, like a man testing his weight on ice.
“Damn, Charlie,” Wyatt said, examining Coplea’s clothes. “You running for mayor?”
Charlie’s face flushed, and his gaze lowered to the ground. “Want you to meet somebody, Wyatt.” He gestured behind him, and Wyatt followed his gaze. Amid the crowd dining under the cantina ramada, a slender Mexican woman sat alone at a table looking back at them. Her coal-black eyes stared at Wyatt with a confidence that belied her small stature. “I done told her who you are. How we crossed the divide together and all. Come on, I’m good for a drink.”
Coplea waved Wyatt to follow and then limped a weaving route through the tables. Wyatt stood for a moment, considering the invitation. Coplea had not spoken to any of the Earps since Nicholas had cursed him as a “deadweight biscuit eater” in front of the other pilgrims. Wyatt ran his fingers through his hair, re-fitted his hat, and pushed through the crowd toward the table.
The woman was not a woman, but a girl in women’s clothes and women’s jewelry on her fingers. A golden luminescence lifted off her dark skin—warm and sweet as fresh-churned butter. Her face was severe, with hard shadows in the hollows beneath her cheekbones, but softened by the fullness of her eyes. Her hair, black as ink, fell behind her in a train that reached below the seat of her chair. Though she looked down at the cup set before her, Wyatt felt her attention on him, as though she were peering at him through some clever arrangement of mirrors. When her eyes came up, they surprised him with their effortless utility—like precision tools meant to pry into his mind and expose his private thoughts.
“Wyatt, this here is Valenzuela Cos.” Coplea looked at the girl and shrugged awkwardly at the obligation of introductions. “This here is Wyatt.” Charlie waved his hat toward a chair, and they both sat.
The girl looked out at a race taking shape in the plaza, but her eyes showed no interest. As she raised her cup to her mouth, she turned those dark eyes on Wyatt again, a faint smile lifting the corners of her mouth. The smile disappeared behind the cup’s rim as she drank. Against the pockmarked ceramic vessel her fingers were long and silk-smooth. She set the cup back on the table and returned her attention to the plaza.
“Helluva country, ain’t it, Wyatt?” Charlie babbled.
Wyatt nodded to Coplea, who turned his hat by increments on the tabletop, careful to keep it away from his beer glass and the unlit candle glued upright in its own wax atop a flat stone.
“Cómprale un trago a tu amigo, Char-dree.”
Charlie’s head came up, and he stared at the girl, his eyebrows pinched together. Smiling, she glanced at his beer mug.
“Oh . . . yeah . . . sure . . . how ’bout a drink, Wyatt?”
Wyatt nodded to the girl’s cup. “What’s she having?”
Coplea made a face and tentatively leaned toward the girl’s cup. “Some kind o’ tea, I think.”
“I’ll have some o’ that.”
Wyatt dug into his trouser pocket for the few coins he had brought, but even as he sorted through them in his palm, the girl reached across to his hand and closed his fingers with her own.
“Eres nuestro invitado.” Her voice was a smooth purr that became a texture moving across his skin.
He looked at her arm stretched across the table and thought of the grace and muscle of a catamount. Her grip was f
irm, yet it was a woman’s grip—its strength coming not from the tautness of tendon but from the certainty of its intent. She seemed older than her years, as though the events of her past would tell a story about hardships most men would not know.
He was half sure she was a whore, but then again Wyatt recognized in her the very thing that he prized in himself: this girl was clinging to a resolve to take hold of a better life. He wagered she would find it, too. Women with that kind of beauty usually did. She released his hand and looked at Coplea, who rose instantly and looked around, leaving his hat on the table.
“I’ll go find us a waiter,” he mumbled as he wandered into the crowd.
Not wishing to embarrass himself with his child’s grasp of her language, Wyatt sat back and focused on the music of the mariachis. The lively notes washed between them like a border river breaking over shoals while the two of them sat on opposite banks, and he dared not yell above the rapids. With such a clear gulf between them, he should have felt safe and content, but somehow he didn’t. Stirring inside him was an uneasiness about their aloneness within the crowd. When he glanced at her, she was smiling as though privy to his thoughts.
“Me dijeron que manejaste los vagones a través de las montañas.”
Wyatt offered up a smile of surrender and shook his head.
“¿No?” she said.
“No Español.” He dipped his head and raised a hand palm up from the table.
“I have heard that d’jou led the wagons here to California.” Her use of his language was startling and musical, the words coming effortlessly from the delicate curves of her lips. Wyatt studied her face as if seeing her for the first time.
“You speak Amer’can.”
“If I have to,” she said and smiled a smile that did not include her eyes.