AN EYE FOR AN EYE
THE TALES OF ZEBADIAH CREED
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
MARK C. JACKSON
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Copyright © 2017 by Mark C. Jackson
Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Jackson, Mark C. author.
Title: An eye for an eye / Mark C. Jackson.
Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, 2017. | Series: The tales of Zebadiah Creed
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037253 (print) | LCCN 2016049123 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432832971 (hardback) | ISBN 1432832972 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781432832926 (ebook) | ISBN 1432832921 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432836252 (ebook) | ISBN 1432836250 (ebook)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3292-6 eISBN-10: 1-43283292-1
Subjects: LCSH: Revenge—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Westerns. | GSAFD: Western stories. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3610.A3543255 E94 2017 (print) | LCC PS3610.A3543255 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037253
First Edition. First Printing: January 2017
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3292-6 ISBN-10: 1-43283292-1
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Printed in the United States of America
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Dedicated to my mother and my collaborator, Judith Ann Jackson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so very grateful to my loving wife, Judy Walsh-Jackson, for your patient understanding and loving support for what it has taken to write this book. You inspire me every day of my life.
I am so very grateful to my children, Denise, Joshua, and Sarah, for your patience and love during my four-year obsession with writing and finishing this book.
I am so very thankful to my mother, Judith Ann Jackson. Through our collaboration, you have inspired me to find out who Zeb really is, as you seem to know him better than me. Your voice rings true through my phone with, “Honey, Zebadiah wouldn’t ever say a thing like that!” THANKS MOM!
I am so very thankful to my sister, Linda, for sharing my obsession with creating something worthwhile and whole out of nothing but our imaginations.
Thank you to everyone in the San Diego Professional Writers Group for all your support, especially our fearless leader Chet Cunningham who, at one of our read and critiques, asked me if I had done the research on how long it takes a man to bleed out. If it weren’t for you, I would have stopped at five thousand words. You forced me to tell the whole story!
I thank Matt Cunningham for introducing me to your grandfather who “has written like four hundred books and might want to read your story.”
I thank my great friend Pamela Haan for your moral support and unknowing guidance in finding the strong, fearless women Zeb meets along the way.
I thank my mountain-man friend Tim Chandler for allowing me to wear buckskins, shoot your black-powder rifles, and to help me feel what it must have been like to live in Zeb’s time.
And last but not least, I am grateful to the San Diego Writers Inc. and their Flash Fiction class where I wrote a little story called “The Hanging” and found my good friend Zebadiah Creed.
PREFACE
I have lived my whole life on a whim, and continue to live in this light today. The words I have written down on these pieces of paper reflect my life in such a way that I myself am surprised at the outcomes, good and bad, right and wrong. The end of one story is always the beginning of the next, as it should be, until there are no more stories left to tell. A long and winding path taken through many lands and oceans, often to find oneself circled back to the beginning and, some would say, quite a fitting end.
I have never considered myself a writer, though with the first publishing of my story “The Hanging” in the periodical The Atlantic, it would appear to others that I am. I have come late to this profession and only through the strong suggestions and guidance by my gracious friend, Sam Clemens, am I able to resemble a real writer, much less a published one such as himself. He taught me to be fearless in my writing and not back down to those who would censor the words I choose to use. He said to write with confident humility and never give in to those demons all true writers stir up from the dust of the earth and in our own minds. To my friend and fellow writer, I say thank you. I am and will always be grateful for your kindness and support.
The story you are about to read is true, or as much of the truth as I can recollect. To shine a light back to when I was a young man of twenty-five, has been trying and at the same time exhilarating. To write about my brother Jonathan’s death and the subsequent repercussions has brought a flood of memories that I thought for years had been left behind somewhere along the great Mississippi River. Though the muddy water disappears to become whitewash behind a steamboat’s paddle wheel, it is still muddy water, long after the last trace of the steamboat is gone. I have learned lately not to drown but to float gently down the big Muddy, on to New Orleans, to the end of this story, and the beginning of the next.
Zebadiah Creed
The Continental Hotel
Mendocino, California
October 1880
CHAPTER 1
Lower Missouri River, late summer 1835
Ten or so miles up from Glasgow, a steamer hit our keelboat square, whirled us off her bow, and sent us scraping down the right side toward the single paddlewheel. Jonathan used his guide oar and shoved away from the slow-spinning slats, only to slam us against the wheel’s outer rim. We were swamped by churning whitewash but did not break in two. The steamer traveled on downstream, through the early-morning fog and out of sight.
We carried three packs of fifty or sixty beaver pelts each on board and with our boat half-flooded, sat low in the water. In early spring, the Missouri ran fast and deep with snowmelt. It being late summer, we hit a sandbar head on thirty feet from shore.
Jonathan glared back at me. “What the hell, Zeb?”
I operated the rudder.
We bailed out water and rocked the boat side to side, loosening the hull from the sandbar but not free. Stripping naked, I jumped into the chilly river to try to dig us out with a wood plank, almost catching my arm as the boat shifted. I was about to climb back aboard when Jonathan whistled his high, shrill warning.
A square barge, a third larger than our 16-footer, was headed right at us. One man squatted on the bow ready to throw lines. Another held the aft rudder. A third stood at the pilothouse with a foot propped on an over-turned water pail, his arms folded across his chest.
“Lookin’ like ya might need a hand or two, or three!”
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br /> I pulled myself up onto the platform behind the tiny cabin and reached in the open port for my pistol. Jonathan glanced at me and shook his head, then looked back to the barge drawing close.
“Obliged for the help,” he hollered, caught the first rope, and tied it up to the front cleat.
“If ya had a flatboat like ours here, that there bar wouldn’ta snagged ya.” The man at the pilothouse yelled back, “You there, naked, with a pistol, we ain’t here ta hurtcha nor steal from ya. An’ there ain’t no whores ’round ta plug yer pecker in!” The other men snickered. “ ’Sides, ya took a mighty turn at the wheel a’ that steamer an’ I bet yer powder may be a bit soggy?”
I laid down my pistol and slipped on my buckskin britches, smock, and belt, my long knife and tomahawk at the ready. As Jonathan used a hook to retrieve a second rope from the water, I moved forward to cut the first rope if need be.
“Baumgartner’s my name . . .” The man took off his top hat and bowed. His hair, what little he had, lay plastered across his forehead. His crooked smile showed almost perfect teeth. He was tall and lanky, skinny even. His clothes were made for style and of fine cloth, but that day had come and gone. He seemed less a man of substance then a man of airs.
As they pulled alongside, the squatter jumped to our running board, nearly knocking me into the water with the long pole he balanced at his chest. He stepped onto one of the wet beaver packs, squished his toes into the soaked deer hide cover, then jumped back to the running board and on up to the bow. The other man stood ready by the barge’s rudder.
“. . . And if ya please, Rudy there, an’ me an’ Ole Jeffery here’ll pull ya outta this mess ya find yerselves in.” Baumgartner declared.
Jonathan tied the second rope around the back cleat. I moved up and stood within arm’s length to Rudy. He thrust the pole into the sandbar as Jeffery worked the barge, turning it into the river’s current. Baumgartner, using a wide, flat oar, paddled slowly away from us pulling the ropes taught. Our boat jerked sideways then stopped. Rudy lifted his pole up and thrust it back into the water and sand pushing hard, out and away. We moved again, slow and steady, until we broke free.
Both boat and barge caught the current and were swept to the middle of the river. We stood ready, Jonathan at our rudder and me at the bow facing Rudy. He held the pole across his chest, staring at me with a knife in his belt. I turned and looked back as Jonathan pulled his rope bringing the rear of the barge closer. I did the same. Rudy stood motionless with a slight grin on his face, humming a simple tune. As we drew close, Jeffery must have turned the rudder making their square bow swerve toward us. I ran the slack out of my rope as Jonathan raced to draw the rear of our boat even with the barge. Rudy was back up on the running board tipping us sideways. He threw the pole across the water and jumped several feet to land with a grunt beside Baumgartner. I pulled my knife as the ropes went limp, thrown into the river by Jeffery and Rudy. We drifted apart.
“Gentlemen, I say bye, bye fer now. We’ll get them ropes back from ya another time!” Baumgartner exclaimed and bowed once more, holding the top hat at his chest. The sun glared off the water and his bare head. He straightened up and smiled, showing his perfect teeth one more time.
To his men he bellowed, “Off we go my fellow Rusty Guts, off we go!”
We were half a mile from the barge when Jonathan asked, “Figure they helped ’cause a’ their good hearts?”
Staring back upriver, I did not answer.
“Thought not,” Jonathan muttered and continued to steer us away from Baumgartner and his men.
CHAPTER 2
We passed Glasgow at midday; the steamer was berthed next to two barges. Blue smoke belched from both its stacks, as if the captain was anxious to get on with business downriver. Packs of what looked like deerskins, maybe ten or twelve, were being unloaded off one of the barges then loaded and stored onto the steamer’s outer decks. Deerskins commanded almost as good a price as beaver. It seemed any animal skin was bought back in the Eastern cities and in France and England.
The American Fur Company owned the steamboat. Of the companies Jonathan and I had traded with, including the Rocky Mountain and Santa Fe Traders, they were the most competitive and ruthless.
A month earlier at Rendezvous, I tried working with their two agents, a man named Fitzpatrick and another named Fontenelle, for a fair sale of our furs. They told me the markets back east were drying up then threatened to undercut our profit by thirty percent. When I suggested we take the furs downriver to St. Louis and find out for ourselves, Fitzpatrick laughed and said we would not make it to the Mississippi without getting taken over, or worse.
I was not to be put on by a scoundrel like him and said as much, calling him a thief. He laughed again and stood up. I hit him in the face, shattering his glasses. As Fontenelle disappeared into the shadows, their men went for me. Stepping back, I pulled both pistols, staving them off. The trappers behind me also pulled their pistols along with knives and tomahawks. As Fitzpatrick wiped shards of glass and blood from his eyebrows and nose, I bid him and Fontenelle good day and left their tent office and compound. I despised being forced into a proposition by intimidation, and being laughed at. Jonathan’s reaction to my decision was none too happy once he realized he was to make a thousand-mile trip to St. Louis and back.
There at the pier in Glasgow sat the company steamer, which five hours earlier had almost sank our furs and us. I looked down and rubbed the fresh scars on my knuckles.
We passed anonymously, with nothing said between Jonathan and me.
Baumgartner followed us. Enough behind to appear like any other barge on the river, yet close enough to keep us wondering.
“The other side a Arrow Rock an’ past Jameson Island’s a creek. We can lose ’em there,” Jonathan declared as he navigated the wide bend that wound around the well-known landmark. He worked the boat cross current toward the southern shore and into the afternoon shadow of the bluff. Spying the creek, we slipped our boat easily through its mouth. Jonathan stood on the platform behind the cabin and guided us upstream. I rowed from the middle of the boat, my oars almost touching both banks. Before the first bend, through overhanging trees, we stopped and watched Baumgartner and his crew float past.
“That’s that,” I said, relieved.
“Reckon so . . .”
About a mile up the creek, we found a good-sized clearing, large enough to off-load our pelts. They were wet and we had to dry and re-pack them before they became damaged goods. Once on the ground, Jonathan cut the willow straps, peeled off the deerskins holding the packs together, and began separating the skins. Most all our possibles were also wet, including flints, percussion caps, and gunpowder. Flints could be wiped down but all I could do with the gunpowder and caps were to let them air dry. It being late afternoon, the sun was not much help. Our three pistols, two Hawken rifles, and the old Kentucky flintlock needed to be oiled as they had already begun to rust. I laid all the powder and guns aside and struck a fire using my flint and steel with a bit of char-cloth. I hung the rest of our belongings—clothes, bags, and other sundry items—near the flames. We had deer jerky and pemmican left from Rendezvous and the flour somehow stayed dry, so there were biscuits to be made, and coffee.
Jonathan separated the pelts, still folded, and laid them out across the clearing. There were a hundred and fifty-three in all, with a tattooed mark on each one.
“These skins ain’t as bad as I thought,” he said. “Don’t think they need stretchin’ again. A day ’er two in the sun, repacked an’ we’ll be on our way.”
My brother was the real trapper between us. His word was as good as the pelts lying on the ground. He had more to lose than me for he had a Blackfoot wife and son to get back to when our transaction in St. Louis was finished. I had no one but him.
The late afternoon lingered into a warm summer evening. Katydids echoed through the Missouri forest—comfortable tunes to keep us company after a long, hard day. Sitting still, the sul
try air seeped through my smock and clung to my skin. From somewhere near wafted the faint scent of mint, to be found in the morning for tea. The darker it got the more fireflies appeared out of nowhere to swarm our camp. Fallen stars to guide wandering spirits back to the netherworld, as Jonathan would say.
Our fire was small and we kept our voices hushed, not knowing what or who might be lingering at night in the forest. With no pistols or rifles ready, all we had were our knives and tomahawks in case unwanted guests were to visit. After supper we smoked. Along with the flour and coffee, our tobacco had stayed dry. With little conversation, Jonathan lay down on a bed of leaves, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and in minutes began to snore.
CHAPTER 3
The night was peaceful. Only twice the katydids grew quiet as some creature passed through the forest. Jonathan slept and I kept watch until around midnight. When I woke him, he was speaking our old tongue, asking me to heat the water for redroot tea.
I answered in English, “Brother, I have only coffee. Tomorrow, I’ll make us up some mint tea, I promise.”
He wiped the sleep out of his eyes and accepted the cup I handed him. Holding it in his left hand, he picked up a piece of dry wood, leaned over, and laid it on the fire. It caught immediately, opening up the circle of light surrounding our camp. Black pelts lay scattered about on the damp ground. Jonathan’s face lit up, his eyes did not.
“Where’d you go tonight?” I asked.
“I was with Mother.” His voice was low and hoarse, as if something down inside his throat wanted out.
“We was in our tipi, like when we was young-uns. All I remember was the cedar smell of the fire, an’ sage, an’ taste of buffalo tongue. An’ ’course, the freezin’ cold outside, how warm it was inside. I was the same age as now but Mother, she was young, like when she would hold me as her new son.” He smiled and looked up. “She was singin’ softly. Weavin’ the blowin’ wind an’ rain into her evenin’ song . . .” Jonathan lowered his eyes again and stared back at the fire. “But to herself. Not for me, as if I weren’t even there.”
Eye for an Eye Page 1