by Mark Warren
The light from the kitchen window sufficed to guide him to the well, where he stopped and leaned into the mortared stone wall and stared out at the dark scrim of trees beyond. Behind him the kitchen door opened, and he heard Newton quietly call his name.
Without turning, Wyatt raised a hand to halt his brother. Soon the door pulled shut, and Wyatt was alone again. Closing his eyes he let his head sag, and when he opened his eyes, he peered down into the dark maw of the well. The wind picked up and flapped his blouse, drawing a shiver from the center of him. He could hear the trees swaying gently at the back of the lot, their bare limbs tapping out a message that held no relevance for him.
Rilla, he tried to say, but no sound would issue from his throat.
Daylight was beginning to fan across the eastern sky. There was no color, only gray. The world was a wasteland. And though he could not see it, he felt the curse of that amber moon resurrected, hanging over him like a cruel eye risen from common mud.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
Fall, 1870—early spring, 1871: Lamar, Missouri
After the funeral, Wyatt let no one in the house and spent his aimless energy cleaning the bed mattress and scrubbing the floor, just as Rilla would have done. In a stack of brush piled behind the house, he burned the dark-stained sheets along with dozens of bloody rags and towels. He even fed to the flames the crib he had built with the scrap lumber left over from the horse shed.
He set the fire late at night, standing under a vast firmament of stars, soaking up the radiant heat of the flames until there was nothing left but a smoking black scar on the land. The scorch mark that remained was like a monument to his spiritual ruin, and he found himself drawn to it at all times of the day and night, sometimes staring at it from the bedroom window, as though he were standing vigil over a last glimpse of what his life might have become.
Newton was the first to visit. Everyone in the family knew it was he who stood the best chance of reaching Wyatt. He came early on a Sunday, but Wyatt would not see him. Sympathy was not what he needed.
Then Virginia came, with Morg and Warren in tow. The two boys remained in the spring wagon and stared at the house, watching their mother knock on a door that remained closed and locked. Reluctantly, she left a basket of food and a vase of flowers on the porch.
Nicholas had lost a wife, too—Newton’s mother. He had always been quick to contribute something on the subject of whipping oneself back into shape and getting on with life, but with Wyatt, he was not prepared to voice his philosophy, and not once did he try.
Although Virgil argued against it, Virginia finally forced him to take a fresh basket to Wyatt. After knocking on the door off and on for ten minutes, Virgil sat in the rocker where Rilla—just weeks ago—had knitted clothes for the baby and confided the names she had chosen. Together they had listened to Wyatt hammer together the crib out in the horse shed, and, in listening to her, Virgil had come to understand that she and Wyatt had found that kind of partnership that made other men feel they had come up short in the world.
A scraping sound brought Virgil out of his reverie. Rilla’s bay gelding had worked its head through the lower opening in the fence to nose at a tussock of dried grass. The horse’s head retreated and it looked back at him as it chewed. The bay snorted and then ducked through the slats for more. Just beyond, Wyatt’s blaze chestnut mare nipped at the withered grass bunched around a fence post. Its mane and tail were crusted with burrs. Virgil pushed up from the chair.
“Wyatt?” he called, pounding the door. He waited again, wondering if he could be heard over the blowing wind. “It’s Virge. I come to talk to you.” When no sound could be heard from the house, Virgil stuffed his hands into his pockets, widened his stance, and let his head slump. “We’re all wanting you to come stay with us. I figure you and I can do some huntin’.”
When Wyatt opened the door, Virgil tried not to look shocked at the face so drawn and pale. Wyatt’s blond hair hung over his forehead, partially covering his dead eyes. His face was rough with a weed-bed of whiskers around his tawny moustache.
“You won the election,” Virgil said, evening his voice. He tried to smile and opened his mouth to speak again but failed on both attempts. When Wyatt stepped outside to stare at the horses, Virgil turned, too, and together they watched the animals nose at the dry grass. The two horses seemed bound by an invisible tether, maintaining an easy proximity as they moved about.
“You got hay in the shed?” Virgil asked. “I could throw some out.”
Wyatt made no response. Virgil picked up the basket of food he had brought with him, as though he might formally present it. Instead, he set it down and walked to the shed. When he had tossed the hay over the fence, he started back for the house, but the porch was empty. The basket sat where he had left it.
After climbing into his saddle, Virgil looked back at the horses, thinking he should have saddled Wyatt’s horse and coaxed his brother out for a ride. After a minute, he kicked his heels into the flanks of his horse and made for the constable’s office. That was where he could help his brother. There was nothing to do at the house. Wyatt needed time.
In two days, Wyatt showed up at the office and found Virgil sitting at the desk, sorting out the active circulars and summonses. They nodded to one another, and Virgil stood, gathered up the papers, and laid them out on the table where the jailor took his meals. Wyatt hung up his coat, sat at the desk, and pulled out the city ledger. He began to enter the school tax figures from the fines he had collected before taking leave of his post, but he found Virgil had already posted the numbers. His brother’s scrawling was almost identical to his own.
“Didn’ realize how much money passed through this office,” Virgil said as he thumbed through papers, his back still to Wyatt. “Do they allow you a percentage like the county does?”
“No,” Wyatt said. His voice had no bottom. The word floated about the room, light as a dust mote. It was the first he had spoken since the funeral. “Being constable won’t ever help a man to get rich.”
Virgil turned at that. “Well, it’s better’n a lot o’ other work around here.” Resting his forearm on the windowsill, he stared absently across the square at the bakery. Virge took in a lot of air, and let it ease out. “Hell, I ain’t cut out to be no damned baker.”
Wyatt stared at Virge’s back. “I’m beholden to you for what you done here.”
After a time of silence, Virgil held up a paper and slapped it with the back of his hand. “Jim Cromwell’s brother-in-law died. No need to serve his papers. Probate court will take what he owes out of his holdings.” Virgil walked to Wyatt, laid the warrant on the desk, took his mackinaw from the coat rack, and slid his arms into the sleeves. “No call to be beholdin’, Wyatt. That’s what brothers do . . . help each other out.” Virge looked down at the top of Wyatt’s head as he read the paper. “I could stick around if you want,” Virgil suggested.
Wyatt looked up and then turned his gaze to the window. “No need.”
Virgil continued to watch his brother. It was as though he had already left, and Wyatt was alone in the room. The only sound was the light rattle of a pane of glass worried by the wind.
“I’ll be down at the bakery if you need anything,” Virgil offered. He waited for a reply, but none was forthcoming. “Hell, you’d be doin’ me a favor if you did.”
Wyatt laid down the paper. “What about Rozilla? Can’t she take it over and free you up?”
Virgil made the deep, raspy laugh in his chest that served to sum up untenable situations. “She can’t hardly make coffee without me showing her how.” Virgil turned his head to the holding cell, and the cartilage in his jaw flexed in a steady rhythm like a pulse. When he looked back at Wyatt’s taut face, he exhaled heavily. “I ain’t so sure I like this married life.”
Wyatt sat back in his chair, stood his pen in its perch beside the inkwell, and stared at the ledger. Virgil stepped back to the window and watched the town go about its business.
When he spoke, his voice came off the windowglass with the blur of an echo.
“I should’n’a said nothing like that . . . about bein’ married.” Virgil turned, his face darkened to a shade of embarrassment. “Not with what you just been through.” He leaned against the windowsill and lowered his eyes to the floor. “Hell, a big brother is s’posed to know what to say.” He took in another long breath and exhaled it slowly. “Hell, I ain’t really your big brother no more.” He looked back at Wyatt. “We’re just brothers.”
A gentler silence filled the room, and with it came remembrances of their history before the war. Each brother knew that their bond was somehow tighter with Rilla passing.
Virgil pushed off from the window. “Ma’s wantin’ you to come out for dinner.”
Wyatt opened the drawer at his belly, put away the ledger, and pushed the drawer shut. “I ain’t gonna be out at the folks’ house any time soon, Virge.”
Virgil pursed his lips and began to nod. “Hell, I wouldn’ either. I reckon Pa’s pious platitudes are hard enough to swallow on a good day.” He moved to the door and took a grip on the doorknob. “Let me know if you need me,” he said and left.
For the next weeks, Wyatt went about his constable duties with a plodding single-mindedness, patrolling the streets late into the nights, sometimes repeating the routes when the moon was late to rise. He had never told Rilla about Valenzuela Cos and that moon putting its contrived limits on the Mexican girl’s life. That experience had held no relevance for Missouri. Now it did. He thought of that cursed orb as his partner in a nightly ritual. Though he could no longer call up the image of Valenzuela Cos’s face, her prophecy in that California peach orchard stuck with him like a crimson stain on a bedsheet.
“La luna de adobe,” she had said in her beguiling border accent. The memory of that night was now like an exotic tale that had reached him secondhand from a far-off land. Each time the moon floated up over Lamar, he felt its story exhume the sense of loss he had tried to bury with Rilla’s coffin. He had become morose, he knew, and the amber glow of the moon had become an unwanted emblem of his temperament.
On the streets he seldom spoke, and it did not take long for his stoic demeanor to wear thin on some of the self-important citizens who warranted they deserved more from a city employee. As these businessmen reasoned, no special allowances were due a man in mourning if he refused to receive their condolences. One of the town’s leading merchants quietly petitioned for his dismissal. To convince him to step down, the council became more selective about which of his court duties warranted extra pay.
It galled Wyatt that he was collecting fines for the very people who were shorting him his due. He was now serving like a rich man’s puppet, but, worse than that, he was playing the fool. He knew he could tolerate neither practice for long.
His resolve finally broke when a farmer laid down seventy-five dollars to cover a court cost. Wyatt entered the amount in his ledger, but, after the man left, he stared for a long minute at the stack of bills, before taking twenty dollars off the top. He pocketed the money and altered the figure in the book.
“To hell with ’em,” he muttered. He would keep a private tally of what he was owed. The practice became a habit that transferred into other areas of his job, even skimming off the taxes he collected for the school fund. It was easy to rationalize the “adjustment,” but he knew Rilla would not have approved. He came to understand that she had been his conscience for the past year. Without her now, he didn’t care what the city elders thought of his methods. He almost hoped they would challenge him.
When the city clerk discovered the deficit of school funds, word spread from city hall into the general populace, until a few weeks before Christmas everything came to a head. At the Bon Ton Saloon, Gran Brummett and his two brothers cornered Virgil and were getting loud about the misappropriation of funds and the hypocrisy of the elder Earp’s moonshining enterprise. Irrationally, the accusations swung in an all-encompassing arc to include some kind of vague culpability for Wyatt in Aurilla’s death. Virgil was livid.
When the news reached Wyatt that Virgil was outnumbered, he marched from the office to the saloon and found Newton standing beside Virgil, his face set for a fight. Wyatt stood in the doorway long enough to hear his wife’s name thrown out for all to hear.
“Granville!” Wyatt bellowed. Every face turned to him, and the room went suddenly quiet. “Outside!” Wyatt ordered, his authority coming not from his badge but from the iron in his voice. Wyatt walked into the street, pulled his revolver from its holster, and handed it to the first man he met. Without comment the bystander received the weapon and backed away.
Wyatt squared himself in the street and watched the three Brummett boys file out. When Gran was close enough, Wyatt broke his nose. Gran went down on his knees, his hands pressed to his face like a decrepit beggar offering a prayer. The other Brummetts came at him like savage dogs, dragging Wyatt down, their fists pounding at every part of him. Virgil jerked one of them back by his hair and flung him into the edge of the boardwalk. From out of the crowd came the Sutherland brothers, then Newton, and the altercation escalated into a brawl that spread from the walkway to the center of the street.
Neither side fared well. At five-to-three odds against them, the Earp boys were bloodied and their blouses torn. But the Earps kept getting up. They got up so many times, it became evident that quitting was not a part of their makeup. Virgil’s lower lip had burst open like an over-ripe plum. Newton’s left eye was swollen shut, and he was fighting with one arm.
Wyatt fought without a sound, his face set like stone. His head chimed with the punishment doled out to him, but the latent poison of his grief boiled in his veins, giving him a kind of vindictive energy. He held to the single-minded purpose of fighting as though it were the only reasonable course of action to embrace. He almost welcomed the diversion of physical pain.
Someone led Gran away to a doctor before his nose became irreparable. Then some of the gamier citizens insinuated themselves like a wall between the two factions and yelled for the combatants to go home. But the Earps would not give up their ground until their opponents were escorted away. The Sutherlands and the Brummetts walked backward toward their homes, all of them vociferous and vain and boasting of damage done.
Wyatt retrieved his gun and walked to Newton to check on his damaged hand. A storekeeper gave Virgil a rag soaked in witch hazel, which he pressed to his lip as he walked stiffly to his brothers.
“Those sons of bitches got damned big mouths on ’em,” Virgil growled.
Wyatt’s face was still hard and unyielding but for a blue vein pulsing at the bridge of his nose. “They know who walked away.”
“You’ll catch hell for this, Wyatt,” Newton said. “Likely throw you off the police force.”
Wyatt spat blood into the dirt and looked west down the street. The town of Lamar appeared to him now like a door forever closed. He wiped at the blood on his mouth and spat again.
“Hell, I was gone a month ago.”
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Late winter, spring, 1871: Fort Gibson and Indian Territory
There was no solace in the openness of the land, just as there was no healing in the isolation he sought in the barren plain of winter-killed grasses. The prairie seemed nothing more than an extension of the boundless emptiness that had opened inside him. Neither his mount nor his packhorse seemed a companion—but victims of his own aimlessness. The voiceless plain only provided a silent space for his demons to follow and murmur in his ear. Rilla’s bloodied body shadowed him as vividly as if dragged behind his horse on a travois, scraping a scar across the dry land.
The child was not real. There were no memories attached to a nameless son to haunt him, save the mental picture of that inanimate thing tucked against its dead mother’s ribs. The child had seemed more an extension of Rilla’s suffering, giving her death a measurable size and shape. Mother and son comprised a common image render
ed in scarlet, and the image had been painted on a permanent altar inside Wyatt’s mind.
Secondary to that, but nagging, was the compromised way he’d handled things in the constable’s office. He had left behind a smear on the Earp name. Without knowing about his docked pay, they would call him a thief . . . a man who had absconded with money collected for a new school. Now that he had so much time, it was difficult to rationalize what he had done, so he simply added the theft to the memory of the funeral pyre behind the house.
He plodded on southwest with no destination, no plan, just moving, sometimes drifting toward a town but usually cutting a wide path around it. The closest he got to any kind of peace of mind was in that flash of a second when he flushed a prairie chicken and raised the breech-loader shotgun, seated the stock against his shoulder, and engaged in the delicate duet of leading and squeezing fluidly at once. The illusion of normality was short-lived. After stuffing the bird in a saddlebag, he was back on his horse with only the blank slate of sky to swallow his thoughts.
Only early morning and twilight offered any redemption. It was the change of light, the feel of the world turning toward something new. Something beyond the monotony of his failed dreams. But those crepuscular transitions were fleeting and, in the end, only teased him. One bled into the bleakness of another day. The other ushered in the darkness waiting for that damning moon.
He crossed into the Indian Territory—the most lawless piece of real estate on the continent. It was probably where he belonged, he thought. In that exiled land, most men were hiding from something. Only the Indians retained any right of dignity, which, by their known scorn of the whites, merely fortified his low opinion of himself.