by John Larison
Solstice and I come off that hill at a run and slowed into an alley. I dismounted and led the mare to the post and knotted the reins over the wood so she would not rip free. I sat my hat on the horn and knotted on the bonnet. I unbuttoned my jacket and drew the revolver to check its loads and then slipped it back into place. “Be right back, girl.”
The street was quiet, as you’d expect of a frontier town at that hour. I walked along the muddy strip, checking for faces in the windows and doors opened just wide enough for a barrel. All seemed right enough. But then behind the saloon stood three saddled buckskins.
Buckskins could belong to any man, maybe Montana was full of them. But these was the first I had seen since leaving the Governor.
I drew a breath and felt the now familiar calm spread through me. At least the waiting was over.
I looked to the rooftops. I looked to the edges of the buildings. I made a point of every crack in the glass, each woodpecker hole in the wall. If they was indeed onto me and I turned and rode back the way I’d come, I would only draw their malice to you.
So I took a last plug and walked toward the saloon. I would occupy them while you crossed, to safety. This was the gift that only I could give.
I pushed open the door and saw just one man in the room, the barkeep who was busy at his labors. “Whiskey,” I said. “Big as you got.”
He avoided my eyes. “Sure thing.”
If I didn’t before, I knew then. When a woman orders a whiskey before noon, the barkeep don’t say, “Sure thing.” Not even in Montana.
He set my drink on the bar. He turned back to the glasses he was drying.
The back door was closed, the balcony empty. I turned the whiskey.
A flicker of light caught the mirror above the barkeep and I turned to see him in the street. Drummond. He held a Winchester over his shoulder. His duster was tucked behind his pistols.
Greenie appeared beside him, with a long-bore side-by-side. It is queer to admit but I felt relief to see Greenie in that moment. To have a friend there.
Greenie who wore his hat low. Red hair before his ears and freckles upon his nose. Greenie looked toward me but I don’t reckon he saw nothing beyond his own reflection in the window. He was thinner and there was darkness below his eyes. I wondered what he’d heard about the high country. I wondered if he’d lost friends to our knives.
“How’d they reckon it?” I asked the barkeep.
The man looked on me like I was some manner of circus creature. “Is you really Samuel Spartan? Don’t shoot me or nothing, but I figured you’d be bigger. You wear that dress womanlike. Damn authentic.”
I paid the barkeep for a corked bottle and left it sitting on the counter. “This is for that red-hair out there. Make sure he gets it?”
Then there was nothing left to do. I took down the glass of whiskey and walked toward my due death. I did not shake or shiver, I only walked on my own two feet through that door and into the hard gaze of their barrels.
It was Drummond who spoke, not Greenie, but I could hear nothing that was said. In my ears was the rush of a thousand winds, I was upon a sea which reckons no borders, and my course was set.
I remember a mourning dove upon the roof across the way. I remember it lifting from its perch and falling before it flew.
I had every intention of dying willfully and yet all the practice and drilling rose in me as instinct. When Drummond braced my bullet beat his, a maul to the bridge of his nose. I turned and fired what I had left through the glass to put Tuss on his knees as he come through the back door. I did this and then saw what I had done and saw too what I could never do, and I flipped my pistol to the earth for the final time and offered myself to Greenie.
Hope dies last and I was just two hundred paces from the border and all he had to do was lower that barrel. He could say I’d ridden south. You would cross and I would be to you in minutes, and about you for all these years since. That was the gift only Greenie could give.
But I was in that dress and he’d watched me ride away with Noah Harney and he must’ve wondered if he’d ever known me at all. His jaw hardened. His voice turned cruel. “You look like a damn fish in that dress.” I was surprised to see his hands take new grip of the side-by-side. “Who are you for real?” His voice was shaky. I had never seen him scared.
“It’s me, Greenie. You know me.”
His eyes darted over the dress. There was time. There was time enough to save us both.
* * *
—
They put my body on a train, and I rumbled a two-week ride in a day. It was the first time I was ever on a train and it was the last time I was ever someplace else.
This year marks my forty-fourth summer inside the Federal Penitentiary for Women Convicts in Laramie, Wyoming. There is a moat and in spring the fowl linger about us, and the flowers show their purple tops over the green grass. In some years a pair of cranes dance about the blossoms. Iron bars could never hold their music.
They tell me Greenie’s barrels was loaded light, bird shot, a hundred tears of lead. So he had come, then, with the intention of firing when duty demanded it but without lethal result. Yet when he could’ve said “go,” he instead directed his barrels at my face.
My arms saved my vision, for that I am grateful.
You made it across the border in the commotion of bodies in the street. Nobody noticed one strange little family in a wagon when nearby lay a shot-up outlaw in a dress. I know it was hard on your pa to just roll by.
Toward Greenie I hold no ill will. Each day since I have risen and known you to ride free, and that is more life than I deserve.
I hope you understand my brother could not confess our true origins until his final hours, even to kin. Don’t hold his caution against him. You’ve had more privilege than you knew and profited from crimes that ain’t yours. I ask only that you live every year you have left in honest reckoning. Our story is yours to make.
Jane’s letters have come every month without fail, and so I know of your childhood, and your family now, and the good work you do. You never knew me, child, but I have always known you.
Constance is in touch less often these days but there was a time. She used to tell me of your trips with little Will. She once sent me the portrait she had taken of you both in some park out east. She wrote in the most perfect little script in the corner, “Rosa and Will in summer. 1894.” I can’t tell you the pleasure that portrait brings, even now when I know you both to be older.
The other photograph I have is you on horseback. In the background I can see the slab of some great mountain. The little girl is still in your face, but I can tell you ride like your old man. I so wish that just once you and me covered miles together.
You can’t know what your gift means. A fiddle in this place is like a horse anywhere else. I play each day until my fingers ache. That music carries me through hills and across plains and into mountains deeper than these. You, child, delivered me home.
So near my own end, I often think of those before us who stared into forever. What did they see within those flowing prairies and toothless mountains? What did they feel when a herd of bison surged across a river or a pack of wolves stood cradled in the valley below? As families gathered on the bows of ships delivering them from persecution, as men and women rose from the cotton to learn their children would be born free—in that forever after, did they see tomorrow or yesterday?
Our founders told different stories, but in the spirit moving over these waters we’ve all chosen to see our due reward.
Child, do as we have not. Wander this land together and with your eyes wide open. Trust the mountain, not your name for it. Bury your hands in the common loam and feel there the blood sent like a flood upon this place.
Feel too the roots and seeds.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My forever thanks to Team Whiskey: Andrea
Schulz, Beena Kamlani, and Emily Wunderlich; David Gernert and Ellen Goodson Coughtrey; and to the team’s earliest member, Ellie Rose.
I am also grateful for the guidance offered by many friends and readers who offered their time to these pages at various stages: Al Aronowitz, Thomas Christensen, David James Duncan, Dylan Tomine, Elaine Larison, Gretchen Goode, Jim Larison, Joy Jensen, Nathan Koenigsknecht, Rachel Teadora, Steven Perakis, and Wayne Harrison. Also to the larger crew at the Gernert Company who offered their reactions, including Flora Hackett (who read repeated drafts), Rebecca Gardner, Luke Gernert, Will Roberts, Erika Storella, and Anna Worrall.
Also, a perennial thank-you to my mentors: Tracy Daugherty, Paul Dresman, Ted Leeson, Marjorie Sandor, and Keith Scribner.
I also owe a deep debt to Gillian Welch, whose music was there the night this book was born and nearly every day after. A lyric from her song “Tennessee” ricochets about the title.
This novel would not exist without public support for city libraries, county museums, and academic historians.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Larison earned an MFA from Oregon State University in 2007. During the eight years he was writing Whiskey When We're Dry, he worked as a fly-fishing guide, a college writing instructor, and a freelance contributor to outdoor magazines. He lives with his family in rural Oregon.
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