Zeke and Ned

by Larry McMurtry

  Frank tied his horse, walked over, and told me Ned was murdered.

  I felt like Victor Horsefly had pitched an anvil on me, when I heard that they’d finally got Ned.

  “The goddamn marauders!” I said—but the moment was critical— I still had my arm in the cow, and could not stop my work. I felt a powerful need to sit.

  “I’ll take over the calving for you, Zeke. I know you’re upset,” Frankie Beck told me.

  “Aw, hell, I’m already bloody,” I told him. Though it was a fine, neighbourly offer, I never met a Beck who knew anything about livestock. I turned and turned, and then the calf slipped on out, healthy and soon on its feet. May came to the well with me, and helped wash off the blood.

  Later, Frankie and me took a jug up to the smokehouse and drank far into the night. I told more stories about Ned Christie than I even knew I remembered, and the stories multiplied upon themselves as the night wore on.

  We had some fine times together, me and Ned, in the short years of his life.

  I was right in the middle of a story about me and Ned on a deer hunt—while hunting deer, Ned always insisted on using the bow and arrow—when, to my surprise, Frank Beck started to cry.

  “It’s Davie, Zeke. He’s gone now, too,” Frank told me. “If any more of us dies, I’ll be a goddamned orphan!”

  I hadn’t given a thought to wild Davie Beck in a number of months.

  “He was digging a mine somewheres in Colorado, and the dirt collapsed on him and smothered him out!” Frank said.

  “Why, you mean Davie’s smothered?” I said. I thought it best not to remind him that I had done my best to strangle Davie with a handcuff chain that day in the courtroom in Tahlequah. Frank was grieving for his brother, and I was grieving for my lifelong friend, shedding my own measure of tears.

  It was no time to be bringing up them old disputes.

  38

  FRANK TOLD ME THE MILLERS HAD BROUGHT JEWEL HOME WITH THEM and were caring for her. The report was that she couldn’t hear at all.

  Jewel was deaf, but the sadder part was that she had come slightly unhinged in her mind. I had acquired a light buggy in a trade with Little Dan Bobtail, and I drove over to Tuxie’s to fetch my daughter home.

  Dale saw me coming, and met me down by the chicken yard. The Millers had enough chickens by then to start a hen business.

  “Well, Dale, how is my girl?” I inquired.

  “She’s poorly, Zeke,” Dale told me. “She ain’t sleeping so good. She’s laid awake the past two nights, tense as a wire. She may get over this, and she may not.”

  “But she’s a young woman yet, Dale,” I told her. “Young folks, they can get over most anything, if they live.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Dale said. She looked doubtful about the matter.

  Jewel was sitting in a rocking chair, covered with a soft blanket, when I came in and bent over to hug her. She lifted her eyes to me, and recognized me right away. Tears formed in her eyes, but she didn’t speak.

  “We’re going home, darlin’,” I told her, hugging her tight and squeezing her hand. “Your pa’s gonna take you home.”

  I felt a clench in my stomach when I looked into Jewel’s face. Her features were young, but her eyes reminded me of my mother’s eyes. I was but seven years old when we walked the Trail of Tears up from Georgia, but I’ll never forget the look in my mother’s eyes the day we were wrenched from our home by President Jackson’s army. It scared me, seeing the same look in my own daughter’s eyes, so many years later. My mother never recovered from that loss; I feared my own daughter wouldn’t recover from hers.

  When it was time to leave, Tuxie walked down with me to the pond and helped me water the buggy horses.

  “Jewel can’t hear a thing,” Tuxie remarked. “I don’t think it’s soaked in yet that Ned’s been killed.”

  “It ain’t soaked into me either, Tuxie, and I heard the news plain from Frank Beck,” I said.

  I turned, and looked back towards Tuxie’s house, where my sorrowful daughter waited.

  “You have to give things like that a little time,” I told him.

  EPILOGUE

  Later Years in the Going Snake District, as Remembered by Ezekiel Proctor

  ONCE THE WHEEL IS BROKEN, IT CANNOT AGAIN BE BOUND UP RIGHT, is a saying from the Book, I believe. But whether it’s from the Book or not, it proved true of my Jewel.

  I took her home that very evening in my new light buggy. She went back to the room she had resided in as a maiden girl and lived in it thirty-two more years.

  Jewel’s hearing came back a little, but her mind was off its hinge and could not be fixed. The fact that Ned Christie was dead never did soak in.

  Whenever a horseman would ride up to the farm, Jewel would colour as if from a fever and run out the door, thinking it was Ned.

  Over and over I explained to her that our Ned had been killed back on the Mountain by an Arkansas posse. Though it was the truth, in Jewel’s mind it didn’t take hold.

  “Ned’s on the scout, Pa,” she would say to me. We might be in the chicken yard, or working in the garden, and Jewel would say it. I suppose in her mind, that was where he was.

  The last time I recall her saying it was more than fifteen years after Ned was dead and buried.

  “Hell, we all might be crazy, for all I know,” Tuxie Miller said, when I spoke of the matter to him. “Dale believes there’s angels up in the sky that play golden harps, but I don’t. At least Jewel ain’t the harmful sort, Zeke.”

  “Better than that. She’s my comfort,” I told him. And I meant it.

  May’s notion of mothering was much like a hen’s—once her pullets got big enough to get around, May was ready to be shut of them.

  I doubt any of my six younguns by May would have lived to be full-grown if Jewel hadn’t taken a hand and been a good and dutiful half sister to them all. She was a fine help with the triplets, too. It was my

  Jewel that bathed them, and fed them, and seen that they done their lessons, once they were school age.

  Jewel lived in her thoughts, mostly, but she looked after me kindly, as I got old, and was a fine nurse when one of the little ones got sick.

  I lost my dog Pete scarcely a year after Ned was killed.

  A pack of wild curs cornered Pete, and chewed him to a frazzle.

  For want of better employment, I took up politics and was made sheriff of the Going Snake. The thing I liked best about being sheriff was that it kept me ahorseback. I have always enjoyed fast travel and a good lope on a fine horse.

  I arrested a goodly number of rough scamps and harassed the whiskeysellers so severely that most of them moved out of the District.

  Chief Bushyhead died about that time, and they come to me to be President of the Senate. It was a big honour, but I passed. I do not relish bookkeeping, which was mostly what the job entailed.

  Chasing scamps on a good fast mare was more to my taste.

  During my years as sheriff, I had occasion to arrest five of the Arkansas boys who had been in on the last raid on Ned’s fort. Their names were Heck Tolbert, Dade Bruner, C. D. York, Lee White, and Charley Hare. The first two were bank robbers; C. D. York was a horse thief; and the last two committed murders in the course of desperate brawls.

  Judge Crittenden had been shot down himself by this time, the killer being a white man, the father of a boy he hung for horse thievery. They had persuaded old Judge Parker to pick up his gavel once again. All five of the culprits were tried in his court. He hung the horse thief, and one of the murderers; I don’t recall what happened to the other fellows.

  It gave me some satisfaction to bring the scoundrels in. They hounded Ned Christie to death, took my Jewel’s mind and happiness, and then turned criminal themselves.

  Judge Isaac Parker never remarried. Every fresh widow in Fort Smith set her cap for him, but Judge Ike resisted them all. He remained a lonely man to the end of his days.

  In the years when I was sheriff, I was in and
out of his court quite a bit. Sometimes, if I was bunking in Fort Smith for the night, I’d go up and entice him into a game of rummy. He still wore his necktie when he chopped wood; his promise to his wife held good throughout the years.

  Judge Ike was a blue streak when it came to card games. I rarely won a hand from him, and I’m no slouch at cards.

  “Where’d that skinny bailiff go, the one that brought me my amnesty?” I asked him one morning, when he had allowed me to join him in his walk by the river, a walk he invariably took.

  “Ohio,” the Judge replied.

  “Well, but why Ohio?” I asked. “What took the man there?”

  “The Widow Silvers,” Judge Ike told me. “Chilly’s a married man now, and his wife ain’t poor, neither. I imagine he’s set for life, if he behaves.”

  Judge Ike had not lost his ability to cast stern looks. He cast one at me, right there by the Arkansas River, but I did not respond.

  My guess is the Widow Silvers set her cap for the Judge, but couldn’t get him.

  So, she took the bailiff instead.

  Judge Isaac Parker was found dead by his woodpile one morning, still wearing his frock coat and string tie.

  I enjoyed a game of rummy with him, about a month before his death. He was drinking bourbon whiskey from a tin cup throughout the game.

  Several times over the years that I knew the old judge, I started to ask him what he thought about Ned Christie, and the war that came about because he sent those posses after Ned.

  But I never asked. Just didn’t.

  “You sure hung a bunch of men, Judge,” I did remark, one day when we had both been sipping from the tin cup.

  “Any regrets?” I added.

  “If I was to start in with regrettin’, Zeke, they’d have to send me to the asylum, I expect,” was all the Judge said.

  When he fell dead by the woodpile, he cut his head a little on the edge of his own axe.

  My Jewel was long thought to be the best-looking woman in the Going Snake. There had never been anyone to hold a candle to her, in the beauty department. Her high cheekbones, her long, black hair, and her modest ways caught the eyes of most of the available men in the District. Before a year had passed, men started coming by our home, in the hopes of courting her.

  They came and came, a stream of them, for nearly thirty years: good men, and bad; tall men, and short; loud men, and fellows so quiet you wouldn’t know they were even alive, unless they belched.

  I doubt that Jewel noticed the men coming to court her. In her mind, she was still Ned’s wife. And that was that.

  If a fellow was polite, she might offer him vittles—but nothing else.

  Arley Silk, who was a very decent fellow, courted Jewel for over ten years. Ned had been dead twenty years by that time, and Jewel had done raised most of mine and May’s kids.

  I thought I’d put in a word for Arley, and I did, though I was mostly thinking of Jewel, when I did it. She was still a woman in her prime, and only a little unhinged in her mind now. She could have made Arley Silk a fine wife, and had a little enjoyment for herself, too.

  But it was wasted breath, what I said to her.

  Arley Silk finally had to give up, and marry his second cousin.

  The week after my sixty-eighth birthday, that rascally little May ran off with a horse trader from Texarkana.

  The devil came to sell me a gelding, and promptly ran off with my wife.

  Of course, May would flirt with a stump, but I never expected her to leave me. I grabbed up my pistol and a horsewhip, and set off in hot pursuit. I meant to shoot the scalawag if he wouldn’t stand still for a horsewhipping.

  I chased them halfway to Wichita Falls, Texas, before it occurred to me that I was behaving like an old fool. May never cared for me, anyway—not like Becca did—and she spent my money on anything she could find to buy.

  That horse trader could supply her with money himself, if he liked her so much.

  So, I coiled up my bullwhip, and went home.

  Six months later, May was back with some wild tale about the horse trader trying to sell her to the white slavers. She claimed he had slipped powders in her coffee, powders that made her unable to think straight.

  “Scat, May, you ain’t even a good liar,” I told her. But the next spring, my Jewel died of scarlet fever. When the fall came, and the days turned gloomy, I got to where I couldn’t stand the empty house.

  I found my rascally little May, and took her back home for good.

  Tuxie and Dale worked hard and prospered. They acquired Ned’s acreage and set their oldest children to working it. The old fort was converted into a fine stable. Tuxie got better sense, as he got older; finally, he got so sensible that they made him President of the Cherokee Senate. He made a good president, too, although my suspicion was that Dale did the bookkeeping for him.

  As the years passed, and then the decades, it seemed there was no end of interest in Ned Christie and his war.

  It started the day of his death. That drunk Yankee newspaper fellow with three initials in front of his name met the posse at the ferry that brought Ned’s body across to Arkansas. He got a story in the New York paper, and the San Francisco paper, and maybe a lot of other papers, too, for all I know. I heard the news even crossed the seas.

  Over the years, the newsies kept finding me and following me home, always to ask about Ned. If I was drunk, I would usually talk to them; if I was sober, I’d chase them off.

  I was sent quite a few of the write-ups, over the years, but I didn’t study them much. I wasn’t up to it. Whenever I’d see Ned’s name in the papers, it would make me tear up.

  That’s how much I missed the living man.

  I missed his joshing, and his sweet behaviour, particularly to my beloved Jewel. Except when he was riled and in a temper, Ned Christie was as sweet a man as there’s ever been, or ever will be.

  I even missed the way Ned twisted his neck around, when he caught a glimpse of a squirrel, high up in a tree. His rifle barrel would come up; there would be the shot; bark would fly from the limb the squirrel was on; then Mr. Squirrel would come sailing down.

  He made it seem as easy as whistling, Ned.

  Easy as whistling, was how Ned made it seem . . .