South by Southwest

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Gonzales kept walking alongside, encouraging him, and when Ebenezer got into trouble, the Mexican would help Ebenezer get out of it. The mules tended to mind Gonzales’s voice a lot better than they did Ebenezer’s, though he would proudly admit that he did better on his first day as a muleskinner than he had ever dreamed he could do. By the time the train pulled into Jefferson, however, Ebenezer’s nerves were shattered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  With its thick growths of piney woods, and rich black-land cotton plantations, East Texas reminded Ebenezer Chase a lot of Florence, South Carolina. Yet whereas Florence was a railroad town, Jefferson was a river port, and that’s where Captain Taneyhill led his train.

  Side-wheelers and stern-wheelers lined the wharves, some of the stacks coughing out thick black smoke as the steamboats prepared to shove off and head down Big Cypress Bayou, which was big, deep, and black. Never had Ebenezer seen so many boats, but Gonzales shrugged and said, “That is nothing. You should have seen this city before the war. Yankees control the Mississippi, and that has stopped much of the traffic up the Red River and across Caddo Lake to Big Cypress Bayou.”

  As the mules pulled the wagons down busy streets, Ebenezer was struck by the realization that Jefferson hadn’t been touched by this war. Maybe that’s why the roads had been full with so many travelers leaving Mississippi and Louisiana. Texas must have seemed like a godsend to many of those poor folks.

  To Ebenezer, Jefferson looked like a boom city, especially when he recalled the destruction he and Zeb had seen in Columbia, Atlanta, Meridian, Vicksburg. He tried to block out the images of the battlefield graves they had passed, or the cemetery where their journey began back in Florence. Here, there was no sign of war. Women, dressed in the finest clothing, walked down boardwalks, and men in silk hats and broadcloth coats smoked long cigars as they idled outside of the businesses.

  Yes, there were slaves. Ebenezer had seen them in the fields they had passed, planting cotton and corn, or plowing new rows. In Jefferson, they unloaded the ships on the docks, sweating as they strained to move bulky, five-hundred-pound cotton bales. Others hammered horseshoes in the stables, sat in fancy carriages waiting for their masters to finish their business, or walked behind the ladies, carrying brown packages full of merchandise, never lifting their eyes.

  Maybe the war isn’t over, Ebenezer thought. Maybe we’ll never be free. Maybe Mister Lincoln fought that war just to keep the Union together. Maybe some slave-man will find me, bring me back to Master Hall, and this time Missus Hall won’t be able to save me from Mister Anderson’s whip. He tried to stop such thoughts and forget the images of the black men and women of Jefferson, Texas. Slaves. All of them slaves.

  Tried, but couldn’t. Not completely.

  Big brick warehouses lined the wharves, and Ebenezer saw the black letters against whitewash that spelled out the building they were bound for.

  TANEYHILL FREIGHTING CO.

  ESTABLISHED 1853

  Gonzales told him to stop, and Ebenezer tugged on the brakeline, and yelled at the mules, “Whoa!”

  “Keep the brake taut,” Gonzales said. “The mules will want to follow the others.”

  Behind him, Captain Taneyhill was already giving orders. “Sweazy, Pitch, take your loads over to the Rebecca’s Wake. Captain Hollister will be wantin’ to shove off quickly. Jerome, get yours over to Dekalb’s. Tell Frank we’ll settle up later.”

  The door underneath the TANEYHILL FREIGHTING CO. sign opened, and an older gentleman in a white shirt, loosened tie, and sleeve garters stepped outside, tamping tobacco into a fancy ivory pipe.

  The wagons skinned by Sweazy, Pitch, and Jerome rumbled by, and just as Gonzales had warned, Ebenezer’s mules wanted to follow, but he kept saying, “Whoa!” Pruden bellowed as his mules wanted to keep moving, but both muleskinners managed to keep the wagons in place.

  “Bueno,” Gonzales said. “You may dismount now.”

  As he slid out of the saddle, Ebenezer’s legs felt wobbly on the ground again.

  Captain Taneyhill rode up. “Rest of you men, get the wagons into the warehouse. All except yours, Severo, and yours, Gon—Ebenezer. Yours are bound for Dallas. Help Gonzales unhitch the mules. Ebenezer, get them to the corrals.”

  Chaos returned as the other mules pulled out, taking the wagons into the warehouse as the big brown doors were pulled open. Men, women, and children, white, black, and brown, stopped on the other side of the street to watch the show.

  A man in front of the office door had his pipe going. “Hello, Liv,” he said to Taneyhill, and gestured at Ebenezer with his pipe stem before sticking it back in his mouth. “Who’s the new ’skinner?” The pipe didn’t stay in his mouth long, because Luansy and Petey were climbing out of a wagon and onto the boardwalk while Zeb eased his bay gelding to the hitching rail, cradling that Sharps rifle across the pommel, waiting for instructions.

  Ebenezer admired the way Zeb rode. Looked like he was born in a saddle, and only a few weeks had passed since he had swung onto his first horse.

  Staring for a minute, the man with the pipe regained his senses, and grinned widely. “You starting up an orphanage, Liv?”

  The captain slid from the saddle and handed the reins to Amado, who kicked his horse into a trot and disappeared around a corner.

  “Chas McCampbell,” Taneyhill said, “meet Zeb Hogan and Ebenezer Chase.” Ebenezer looked up from over a mule’s harness, and nodded, but McCampbell ignored him, staring at Luansy as the captain continued the introductions. “This is Luansy and Petey Taylor. They ran into some trouble east of Monroe.”

  McCampbell’s head shook, but his smile never failed. “And you just had to help.”

  “They’re earnin’ their keep,” Taneyhill said, rubbing his bad shoulder. “Zeb here’s about as good a rifle shot as Sweazy.”

  “They run into trouble. How about you?”

  “Not this time.”

  “No Yankees?”

  “Didn’t see any soldiers, blue or gray.”

  McCampbell smiled at Petey. “What’s the boy do? Or her?” he added, glancing again at Luansy.

  Zeb didn’t like how McCampbell looked over Luansy.

  “Like I said, Chas,” the captain said, “they had trouble.”

  McCampbell shook his head. “You’re a good Samaritan, Liv.” He turned and finally gave Ebenezer a moment’s consideration. “Thought you didn’t hold to slavery.”

  “I don’t. I hired them. Ebenezer’s got the makin’s of a good muleskinner.”

  McCampbell tapped his pipe against the red brick wall. “You’ll get a sheriff serving you with a writ, Liv, you start harboring runaway slaves. It’s bad for business.”

  Captain Taneyhill climbed up the steps to the boardwalk, and gave McCampbell a hard stare. “Maybe you ain’t heard, Chas, but Lee surrendered.”

  The pipe returned to the man’s mouth, but he kept talking. “Kirby Smith ain’t. Not yet, and we Texians ain’t never gonna bend to no damnyankee rule. And maybe you ain’t heard the news, Liv. That Abolitionist zealot, Abe Lincoln, he’s dead.”

  * * * * *

  For the rest of the day, Ebenezer felt as if someone had whacked him alongside the head with a sledge-hammer. He moved around in a daze, sick, worried, wondering what Mr. Lincoln’s death meant for his kind. He and Gonzales got the mules to the corral, then wandered back to the warehouse to help the others unload the wagons and then load them up again with sacks of flour, gallons of molasses, and crates and crates of shoes and boots. There must be a big cobbler operation in this town, Ebenezer decided. Captain Taneyhill ordered them to be real careful with a dozen bolts of calico cloth. Cloth was hard to come by in Dallas, he said, and he would make a handsome profit on that fabric. Two wagons were loaded with farm equipment.

  Hard work it was. The weather had warmed, the day remained humid, and Zeb and Ebenezer were sweating fiercely by the time they finished shortly after dusk.

  “What happens now?” Zeb asked.

&n
bsp; “The four wagons of sugarcane and these others, they will go to Dallas,” Gonzales replied.

  “When will we leave?” Ebenezer asked.

  “¿Quíen sabe? The day after tomorrow? Perhaps longer. It is up to Señor Taneyhill.”

  “How long will it take us to get there? To Dallas, I mean.”

  “Fifteen, sixteen days.”

  Ebenezer nodded. In a little more than two weeks, he could be with Lizzie and Tempie, but he didn’t know how to feel about that now, not with Mr. Lincoln killed. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to find his family, or, if he did, what he could do? What if slavery wasn’t over?

  Amado came over, spoke in brisk Spanish to Gonzales, then turned to Zeb and Ebenezer. “You two,” he said. “Vámonos.”

  The boys dragged their feet out of the warehouse and down the streets. People looked at Amado with silent respect, or maybe fear, and they eyed Zeb curiously. They barely gave Ebenezer any consideration.

  On Delta Street they turned and walked a few more blocks before coming to a big wooden house, a single-story painted yellow with red shutters, four towering columns, a covered porch lined with rose bushes that had already greened up. Three red-brick chimneys climbed out of the wood-shingled roof, and two bois d’arc trees in the front yard.

  They climbed the steps onto the porch. Ebenezer and Zeb felt shocked when Amado walked in the front door without knocking, motioning for the two boys to take a seat in the parlor. They obeyed, and the segundo walked down the hall, calling out something in Spanish.

  It was Captain Taneyhill’s house. Ebenezer knew that because he saw the captain’s belted revolver, hat, and coat hanging on the coat rack in the foyer. Although the outside of the house was fine and rich-looking, the inside was rather Spartan. A saddle was draped over a rocking chair, and the only picture on the wall was a portrait of a red-haired lady in a fancy dress whose eyes seemed to follow Zeb no matter where he wandered in the parlor.

  “You reckon that’s the captain’s dead wife?” Zeb asked.

  “I’m not going to ask him,” Ebenezer said.

  Hearing footsteps, the two lads turned, waiting. Zeb practically shot out of the sofa when he saw who it was, the Sharps carbine falling off his lap and onto the rug. He swept off his hat, staring with his mouth wide open. Ebenezer’s mouth dropped open as well.

  Chapter Twenty

  She took their breath away.

  Zeb had always figured that Luansy Taylor was a right handsome girl, but never had he seen her so dolled up, wearing a visiting dress of blue cotton, with white satin trim on the sleeves and collar and a false-fronted white vest. She had taken a bath—he could still smell the rose-scented soap on her—and her hair was not only combed, but also curled. Her lips, which had always appeared so rough and chapped, were rosy against her fair skin.

  “How do I look?” Petey, at Luansy’s side, blurted out, but Zeb couldn’t take his eyes off the girl, whose face started blushing.

  “You look real good,” Ebenezer said.

  “What you think, Zeb?”

  Zeb made himself turn from Luansy, and nodded at Petey. Luansy’s little brother had also bathed, and Zeb barely recognized him without dirt caked to his face. The four-year-old wore front-fall trousers the color of nutmeg, an osnaburg work shirt, untucked, and brogans.

  “Lu-Lu made me take a bath.” Petey sneered. “I didn’t wanna. Captain Taneyhill brung me these clothes. Brung Lu hers, too. She had to take a bath, too. I don’t think she minded it. She kept hummin’ while she was a-soakin’.”

  “You both look nice,” Zeb said, and looked back at Luansy. He knew he didn’t look nice. He had ripped a shirt sleeve loading wagons, and his hair remained matted and damp from sweating like a hog in that warehouse. He felt downright filthy. Kept waiting for the captain to show up and demand that he get in a tub of water. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually bathed. Floating across those streams and rivers didn’t count.

  More footsteps sounded down the hall.

  Captain Taneyhill, his face shaved clean now, his hair cut, slicked back, and combed, wearing a fine green frock coat, striped britches tucked inside shiny black boots, stopped in the hallway. Amado Chavez y Castaño stood at his side.

  * * * * *

  “The Jimplecute doesn’t have any news about the assassination.” Folding the newspaper, Captain Taneyhill set it on a table next to a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler filled with amber liquid. “From what Chas McCampbell told me, though, Lincoln was shot at a theatre in Washington City.”

  They sat on the front porch, bois d’arc trees swaying in the evening breeze.

  Captain Taneyhill took a sip of whiskey and, facing Ebenezer, said, “I don’t know what this means, Ebenezer. To you. To your people.” He looked past Ebenezer and down Delta Street. “To Texas or the South.” His good hand found the tumbler of whiskey, and he polished it off. “You still want to go to Dallas?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ebenezer said. “I’ve got to.”

  The captain’s head bobbed slightly. “You’ll go with him, Zeb?”

  Zeb nodded. Dallas, he had learned, was on the way to Franklin.

  “All right.” Taneyhill filled his glass with more whiskey. “We’ll leave Wednesday at first light.”

  That told Zeb nothing. He didn’t know what day it was, hadn’t for a long, long time.

  “I have contracts to deliver freight to Dallas, and Franklin intrigues me, Zeb. I don’t want you to think I’m as good a Samaritan as Chas McCampbell thinks I am. This is business for me. There’s salt for the takin’ near Franklin, and it’s through country I’ve never seen. I’ve always had a touch of the wanderlust. Still, I could make a handsome profit deliverin’ goods to Franklin, maybe as far west as Mesilla in New Mexico Territory, load the wagons up with salt, come back here. But that’s a two-month journey, probably more, to Franklin, and it’s rough country. Water’s scarce. Comanches and bandits aren’t.”

  “As long as I get to Franklin, I don’t . . .”

  “That’s just it, Zeb. You might not get to Franklin. You might get killed.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve made it this far.”

  “Why? What’s so almighty important in Franklin?” He took a big gulp of the whiskey. “I know Ebenezer’s reasons for getting to Dallas. Good reasons, too. What are yours?”

  Zeb met the captain’s stare. “I thought you said out West, people minded their own affairs.”

  Taneyhill lowered the whiskey. “You work for me . . . it is my affair.”

  “He wants to kill a man.” Zeb, Taneyhill, and Ebenezer turned to see Luansy standing in the doorway, staring through the screen door. She didn’t look so beautiful. She looked mad as all get-out. “Sergeant Ben DeVere.”

  “Sergeant?” the captain asked.

  Zeb cleared his throat. “He ain’t no soldier no more.”

  “How about you?” The captain’s green eyes turned fierce.

  Zeb had lied to so many folks, it came natural. It often felt as if he were spouting out the gospel, yet there just was no way in blazes he could ever lie to Captain Taneyhill. He couldn’t find any words, not even to speak the truth.

  “Zeb,” Taneyhill said easily, “I know you wore the blue. Engstrand, that sergeant major you spoke of, that’s a Yankee name.” The captain sighed. “And I don’t know too many Southerners, not in this day and age, who’d be travelin’ across Louisiana with a young runaway slave, and a couple of kids. I think you know me well enough to know that I won’t turn you in to the provost marshal, Union or Confederate.”

  “Tell him, Zeb,” Luansy pleaded.

  So Zeb did.

  * * * * *

  They all gathered around the table, even Amado, the segundo, in the big dining room later that evening, and when a plump, graying Mexican lady named Consuela brought in a massive ham from the detached kitchen, Zeb’s mouth started watering. He had never seen so much food: pecan-laced biscuits, sweet potatoes, rice, goober peas, plus cream for coffee or te
a, and apple cobbler cooling off in the pie safe. He felt ready to make up for practically starving to death at Andersonville and Florence, and the nigh thousand miles Ebenezer and he had traveled since then.

  “It ain’t even Thanksgiving!” Petey blurted out, reaching for one of the biscuits, only to have his hand swatted by his sister. He jerked it back, rubbing it, and then, in a calmer voice, asked, “You celebratin’ the end of the war, Capt’n Taneyhill?”

  “Lincoln’s dead,” the captain said firmly, shaking his head. “I don’t know what that means. General Kirby Smith and his boys haven’t surrendered. Nor has that Cherokee Confederate, Stand Watie, up in the Indian Nations.” He pushed back in his seat and looked across the table at Ebenezer. “Right now, as far as Texas is concerned, your wife and daughter are still slaves, with an owner in Dallas. Now, I don’t hold with slavery . . .”

  “Then why did you fight in the war?” Luansy’s voice and eyes seemed colder than ice.

  Taneyhill looked over at her. Gently he asked, “Did your folks own slaves?”

  “No,” she said. “They were all around us, though.”

  “Yet you said your brother was fightin’ for the Confederacy. I’m a Texian, Luansy. I was fightin’ for my home, same as your brother.” Offering a smile, he continued. “Ebenezer’s bound and determined to go to Dallas. Zeb still says he has to make Franklin. What about you? And your little brother?”

  Her lips started trembling, and she bit the bottom one to stop, giving Zeb a quick look, then staring at her little brother who was fidgeting in his chair, his boiler about to blow, wanting to know why everyone was talking and not eating the food before it turned cold.

  “You mean . . . ?” Luansy began.

  “You can stay here. We got a fine subscription school in town. Got us a crackerjack teacher named Waldeck.”

  “Can I think about it?” Luansy asked.

  “Most certainly. Now let’s eat.”

  “It’s about time!” snapped Petey.

  * * * * *

  Zeb stood on the porch, talking to Captain Taneyhill about nothing important, just anything, enjoying the singing of crickets, the warm breeze rustling the leaves. A steamboat whistled somewhere on the bayou, and the faint sound of music from one of the saloons carried across the evening air.