by Tony Masero
Minnie still stood beside the tree, Winchester in hand and not moving from her post.
‘Settle down now, Minnie, everything is fine,’ advised Jethro. ‘Where you headed?’
She shrugged and traced out a word in the pine needles – ‘away’.
‘Guess that covers it,’ chuckled Jethro. ‘You leaving something bad behind, huh?’
Minnie nodded emphatically.
‘That how this happened?’ he asked, his face serious and a hand brushing across his mouth.
Minnie nodded affirmation again.
‘Well, I tell you true, lady, we are not the best of fellows you have met up with. This is a bad bunch you’ve run into. Have to say we are a regular band of rumbustious road agents, ain’t that right, boys?’
Les, the ex-Confederate, looked up slyly at her, ‘Just that times are hard,’ he confided.
‘Now don’t say that,’ scolded a grinning Jethro. ‘You making us seem like no-account amateurs you say things like that. We do alright, Minnie, don’t you pay no heed to him.’
Minnie raised doubtful eyebrows; she was beginning to feel more comfortable with the men and she liked their joshing and friendly attitude with each other.
‘Come on, Jethro, own up,’ confessed the bearded Barnaby. ‘We ain’t had a decent hit for over a twelve month.’
‘There was that trading post in…. where was it?’
‘Holding Pass, Indiana and we didn’t net no more than three hundred dollars in that pathetic fiasco,’ complained Barnaby a little resentfully.
‘That’s right,’ piped up Freddie. ‘Only three hundred dollars!’
They all turned and frowned at him.
‘Shut up, Freddie,’ said Les.
‘You want some?’ Jethro asked, offering Minnie the bottle.
She shook her head and indicated the coffee pot.
‘Sure thing,’ he said, swilling out the leavings in his mug and filling it for her. ‘Sad thing, Minnie. To see a pretty lady like you without the ability of speech. Now some might say that’s a bonafide blessing in the female gender but me, no, I don’t agree. I like the soft tones of a woman’s speech and even better the sound of a lady singing a sweet ballad of loss.’
‘That’s a fact,’ agreed Les. ‘Why, I just loved to hear my mommy sing. She used to do it all the while when I was little, afore she upped and died on us. Whatever she was a-doing she would sing. Mostly them old songs, you know? The ones that go way back.’
‘Give us a taste, Les,’ urged Barnaby, in deep rumbling tones. ‘He has a real fine voice,’ he advised in an aside to Minnie as she squatted down beside them and accepted the mug of coffee from Jethro.
With no more urging, Les broke into an old Appalachian Mountain rendering of Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair. His voice was sweet and light and he held the tune well.
‘Black, black, black is the color of my true love's hair. Her lips are like a rose so fair and the prettiest face and the neatest hands. I love the grass whereon she stands, she with the wondrous hair….’
It brought a lump into Minnie’s throat as the song hovered over them in the still of the forest. The sound of Les singing a gentle rendering and the flickering warmth of the fire brought the group closer together. The song touched her with a note of sadness as well, as she realized she would never be able to sing again herself – nor talk, hum or whistle or make any sound but a grunt and a gurgle and the thought filled her with renewed venom towards her cruel husband James Burk.
Jethro noticing the change in her reached over a rough hand and patted the back of hers where it rested on her crossed legs, ‘Have no fear, little girl. You have other things to offer, I feel sure of it.’
Minnie swallowed hard and tried to stop any tears over his gentle touch of sympathy at her plight and she looked up at Jethro steadily, blinking back the haze of tears as she did so.
She nodded at him, a sign of grateful appreciation.
‘I reckon you should come along of us,’ said Jethro, suddenly slapping his thigh. ‘What do you say, boys? We’ll get this wounded sparrow to sing again, won’t we?’
‘Why the hell not?’ agreed Barnaby with a broad grin.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ whined Freddie. ‘She’s a mean tempered female. You seen what she done to me, didn’t you? Why, my poor head is still sore.’
‘Ah, shutup, Freddie,’ growled Les. ‘You is one miserable head-in-the-sand, poe-dunked sonofabitch, you really is.’
‘I was just saying,’ mumbled Freddie.
‘That’s okay, Freddie,’ mollified Jethro. ‘But we’re all agreed here, right? Miss Minnie can ride along with us if she’s a mind. What say you, girl?’
Minnie looked at them all one after the other, then her tight face broke into a smile and she nodded acceptance. It felt strange to her to smile and she realized that it had been a long while now since she had worked the muscles in her jaw to do such a thing.
She had to communicate with them; it was suddenly a great necessity for her, anything to stamp out the sense of loneliness and separation. In desperation she pointed a finger at them collectively, circling her hands she brought them together as if closing a book. There was silence for a moment and then Jethro got it.
‘How did we all meet up?’ he asked.
And Minnie nodded enthusiastically.
‘Aw, that’s a story. Me and Barnaby, we was the first, weren’t we? It was at some country fair, you remember?’ he asked Barnaby, who grinned widely through his beard.
‘Somewhere in Illinois, if I remember correct.’
‘That’s right,’ Jethro agreed. ‘Now me and Barnaby are both fair shots with a rifle, although he’s a mite better than me when he gets behind that Sharps long gun of his. Anyway, there was this shooting match and we both went in for it. Both down on our uppers and hungry as hell and hoping to take away the first prize. There were maybe twenty other old boys in there and the rule was Winchester repeating rifles only. So, we started off and gradually the others were knocked out one by one, as the targets got more and more difficult. It was shooting candles at ten, twenty and fifty yards, that kind of thing. So it ended up with only me and Barnaby left in the running and boy, I have to tell you that’s when it got real tough. They wanted us to knock the eye out of an ace card at two hundred and fifty yards. Man, I could hardly see the damned thing. Well, we both popped off, only old Barnaby he fires off three shots one after the other. Bang! Kerchung! Bang! Kerchung! Bang! Kerchung! So we all walk up to take a look and me, well I clipped the corner but this darned polecat, he not only put out the ace of spades but also the little pictures they put in each corners. You know? Where it gives you the number and designation of the card.’
‘I was lucky that day,’ smiled Barnaby.
‘So you won big?’ asked Freddie.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Jethro. ‘He won real big, first prize was a plucked turkey, a twenty-four egg basket and a peach pie.’
There were chuckles all round at that.
‘That is how you met, really?’ asked Les.
‘Sure is, why we sold that turkey for a bucket of beer. Made the biggest damned omelet you ever seen and ate the whole blasted lot and the peach pie too.’
‘Couldn’t move for a week after that,’ added Barnaby.
A smiling Minnie pointed a finger at Les and opened her hands in query.
‘Me?’ said Les. ‘How’d I get involved with this here gang of reprobates? Ah shucks, I don’t want to get into that.’
‘Come on,’ urged Jethro. ‘Own up.’
‘Well, okay,’ sighed Les. ‘I was travelling up north at the time and came into this town where they weren’t too fond of us southern gentlemen. I was twelve year old when I went along and joined the Confederacy with my pa, weren’t no more than the two of us at home and daddy was determined to serve the cause, so I went with him and became a drummer boy for the army. Anyways, my pa didn’t make it back, him buying his ticket to glory at the battle of Gettysburg, but I had
this here uniform he left me and I’m right proud of it but maybe it wasn’t so bright to wear it in this particular place. I got the message I weren’t too popular from the locals and moved out of town to a barn nearby to spend the night and wouldn’t you know it, but soon enough these liquored up guys came looking for me. Weren’t a soul in that town that hadn’t lost somebody in the war and they was all afire to get some comeback against the boys in gray.’
‘I like this bit,’ chuckled Freddie, obviously having heard the story before.
‘You wouldn’t have, you been at the end of that rope they was threatening me with. This old boy who was the leader, he was a fat old gent with whiskers and a curly brimmed flat-topped hat and he was all a-fluster. Hot with liquor and rage, he tosses this rope over a nearby branch and they puts my head in the noose right then and there. Lord, I tell you I thought my day had come, I surely did. Then there’s this almighty bang and the old fellow’s hat gets whacked by a fifty-caliber shell that opens up the top like a tin of beans. It were a sight to see, I can tell you. Them rednecks was running around like headless chickens and old Barnaby here, who, unbeknownst to me had been sleeping up in the loft with Jethro, saw them all off with that long gun of his. We been together ever since, ain’t that right?’
‘I’m his cousin,’ Freddie put in a little shyly. ‘So I’m kin, that’s how I got to be here.’
‘And that’s why old Les treats him so bad,’ laughed Jethro. ‘But Freddie here has his uses. As you can probably see,’ he said to Minnie. ‘Freddie has this open way with him, looks about as dumb as tent peg. So he goes into town before us and sees what’s what. Maybe he’ll get a job in a store or something, find out if there’s anything worth robbing. Bank, stage office, that sort of thing.’
Minnie shook her head and looked at them one after the other. What a sorry bunch, she thought but she had to admit she liked them right off. It was a foolish thing, she knew it but she was alone and friends were hard to find for her now so she decided to tag along with them. It would do no harm as long as they kept their place and anyway, she thought, it might be some fun.
‘There’s a town called Reservoir Flats down the road a-piece and that’s where we’re headed now,’ Jethro added. ‘Freddie goes in tomorrow and if there’s anything worth taking in the burg we’ll do her, won’t we boys?’
Something flicked through Minnie’s mind at that moment, she was not sure what it was and the thought was lost as soon as it came. But there was something, a vague idea of a notion and it lay in the back of her mind, hidden away for later.
Chapter Seven
They looked a fine pair, they really did.
Billy Lee and Doctor Jack appeared something terrible being soaked and covered with mud and they knew they had to get some decent clothes before they brought attention and were jailed as wandering vagrants.
A farmer’s washing line supplied their wardrobe and nothing fitted either of them too well but at least it was clean and almost dry. With an overlong work shirt flapping at his waist and denim overalls that came up to his shins, Billy Lee hoped he did not look too foolish. Doctor Jack shed his buckskins and wore a long and frayed overcoat he found in a shed and matched that with some old work boots and a pair of canvas pants.
Attired in these ill-fitting clothes and still looking no better than drowned rats they set off inland and made for the nearest town that proved to be a place called Windsor, a stopover on the Norfolk Western Railroad line. Billy Lee bummed a few dollars at the station and they bought a loaf and some cheese and hopped on a freight train heading north.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company was at this time recovering well from all the damage that had been done to Virginia during the war and once more ran as far north as Alexandria at the head of the Potomac River. But the two men were forced to leave the train when it arrived at the end of line in the city depot across the James River. Richmond, where they found themselves, was a city recovering by leaps and bounds from the devastation manifested on it during the war.
When the victorious 25th corps of the US Colored Troops had marched into the city in the April of 1865 the old city was being swept by raging fires and a quarter of it no more than a heap of smoldering rubble. Now it was a powerhouse of industry with a major railroad crossing and sixty three thousand inhabitants thriving on the booming tobacco trade.
There was work to be found as the city rebuilt itself and soon the two were hired off as laborers on one of the many construction sites. They worked tirelessly and saved their meager earnings by taking refuge in one of the many still ruined houses dotted about in the city, it was not a particularly pleasant existence but Billy Lee had plans.
As they sat one evening in their stained work clothes next to a small cook fire. The jagged pinnacles of the high and gloomy soot stained walls of their shelled and burnt out dwelling rose about them and Billy Lee brought attention by cracking open the newspaper he had lifted from his foreman’s work pail that day.
‘See here, Doctor,’ he said, pointing to an advert. ‘They need haulage men for a carriage of goods up north.’
‘So?’ asked Doctor Jack. ‘You want to head back there?’
‘I do, I have a debt to repay up there in Maine.’
Doctor Jack eyed him judiciously, ‘I take it this is not a financial debt of any kind.’
‘You have that to rights.’
‘What kind of debt are we talking of then?’
‘One of the killing kind.’
Doctor Jack went quiet for a moment, then he said, ‘Tell me about it, if you so wish.’
Billy Lee looked at him across the firelight and beginning with a deep sigh told him the whole story of his adultery with Minnie and James Burk’s cold retaliation and his subsequent watery escape.
‘Well,’ said Doctor Jack when he had finished. ‘That is some tale and I can appreciate your resentment.’
‘Not only that,’ said Billy Lee. ‘I must know how Minnie fares and take her from there if I can.’
‘I see that,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘But you realize it has been a while now and it may be that she is no longer the woman that you knew back then.’
Billy Lee nodded, ‘I understand that but she is a strong woman, one of the surviving sort and I owe that pig for what he did to her and for trying to have me killed.’
‘It would appear this man is powerful and well protected.’
Billy Lee nodded agreement.
‘And still you will go against him?’
‘I’ll find the chink in his armor.’
Doctor Jack was serious, he sat deep in thought for a long moment his deeply sunken eyes dark in the firelight, ‘Well, brother, I will tell you. I have an inkling to return also to my homeland, it is not well for one of my blood to be too far from the land of his people, there are so few of us left now and soon there will be none if we leave the place entirely.’
‘So, you want to come along?’
‘I do.’
‘There will be trials I fear, but I shall be glad of your company.’
‘Are we not brothers? My heart is with you, Billy Lee.’
Billy Lee smiled and they shook hands across the fire, ‘Then I shall go and see what this haulage task entails and maybe it will be a way for us to travel with our food and lodging paid for.’
‘It will be so much easier than hauling bricks and mortar, I think.’
That particular statement proved to be one large error of judgment on Doctor Jack’s part.
Billy Lee took time off work the next day and went along to the offices of the Boone Brothers Haulage Company and stood in line to make his application.
The elder of the two Brothers, Mister Eloquent Boone was doing the vetting and sat behind a small desk in an equally tiny office at back of the two-city-block stables and yard where the mules and wagons were kept. He was a florid gentleman dressed in a fancy checkered waistcoat and carrying handsome sideburn whiskers of extravagant proportions.
He looked up qui
ckly from his paperwork and gave Billy Lee the once over with a steely glare.
‘You have experience?’ he growled.
‘Oh, yes,’ Billy Lee lied, although he did consider the question was not one asked in the specific and in direct answer he certainly did have experience, if maybe in a different direction than that implied. ‘I had experience in the army,’ he added quickly.
‘During the late war between the States?’ the owner asked, avoiding eye contact and looking down his paperwork.
‘No, sir. During the Indian wars on the western frontier.’
‘I see, then you are conversant with discipline and the use of arms?’
‘Most well acquainted,’ Billy Lee assured him.
‘You’ll need to be,’ murmured Mister Boone gloomily. ‘This is no fair trip we have planned, sir. Over five hundred miles overland, three weeks of hard travelling to get there and the same to get back.’
‘And the cargo, may I ask?’
‘A bridge, Mister LaBone. An iron bridge in sections all manufactured here at the Tredegar Iron Works and headed for delivery in Titusville, Pennsylvania. I’ll not fool you, it will be tricky work, we’ve had to have special wagons constructed for some of these parts, they are over forty feet long.’
‘That’s a mighty size alright,’ Billy Lee said in a knowledgeable fashion even though he had little experience of mule drawn wagons or their handling.
‘Pay is twenty dollars a month and you’ll take your orders from the wagon master, after him it’s the mule handler, the caporal. How does that sound?’
The money was of a top rate and it told Billy Lee that it would indeed be difficult and dangerous work, ‘Sounds fine, sir.’
‘Good make your mark or sign your name,’ Boone said, holding out a scratch pen to Billy Lee.