“I am not a Catholic priest, but I will do the best I can, Mister Taneyhill. I have not yet been ordained, just felt the calling.”
Zeb Hogan would have known that voice anywhere. He whirled, mouth hanging open, dropping the shovel, his eyes hardening. The little runt in the black broadcloth suit looked up at Zeb, blinking away his own surprise.
“Private Hogan?” Sergeant Ben DeVere asked.
* * * * *
“After Beth died of cholera here,” DeVere said, “I drank myself into oblivion. Like I always did. When I sobered up, I realized I couldn’t go on as I’d been going. I’m probably the last man on earth you’d ever think would feel the call to spread the gospel, to help others.” DeVere shook his head.
Zeb kept quiet.
“I was never a fit soldier, Zebulon. Dare I say, I was a coward. Yet the love of God has filled my heart now. After I’d passed out, after I had missed Beth’s own funeral, I woke to find somebody had left me a Bible, put it in my hands. I read it, filled with the love of God, of Jesus Christ. I knew this was where I must be, helping wayfarers, helping, saving myself. Yet I owe you an apology. I owe all of Wisconsin, all of the Union Army, an apology. They let you out of the Florence Stockade in February, right?”
They walked through the little cemetery, Ben DeVere acting as if they were long-lost friends, Zeb despising himself for letting the traitorous sergeant think that. Zeb hated himself for not having killed DeVere when he had first seen him.
Finally Zeb found his voice. “They didn’t let me out. I escaped. It was after Sergeant Major Engstrand died.”
Shaking his head, Ben DeVere stopped walking and started to cry. “Engstrand was a good man. Better than I’d ever hope to be.” A curious look appeared on DeVere’s face, and he stopped sobbing just long enough to ask, “When did . . . you escape?”
“February. Couple of weeks, I reckon, before Sherman burned Columbia. I been running ever since, chasing . . .” Zeb couldn’t finish, though, looking at DeVere’s weak face, watching tears spill down his cheeks. The man was crying for Sergeant Major Engstrand.
“Forgive me, lad. May God have mercy on me. I am . . .” As the tears stopped, DeVere sighed. “You poor lad. Had you stayed at the Stockade, you would have been paroled. The Rebs turned them loose . . . likely just after your escape.”
Those words almost knocked Zeb to the ground. “How’d you know that?” he asked.
“’Twas in one of the newspapers a traveler left me. Brigadier Winder, the prison commander, the man I hold responsible for those wretched conditions we . . . no, you . . . had to deal with in the Stockade, died of a heart attack in Florence. After his death, Colonel Forno closed the Stockade, shipped the prisoners to North Carolina . . . to be paroled.” DeVere stopped talking, and pointed. “Here. Here is Beth’s . . .” Yet he couldn’t finish. Taking a number of steps forward, clutching his Bible, he fell to his knees, sobbing again, praying for his dead true love, for his own miserable soul.
Zeb looked at the little cross, saw the name scratched into one of the timbers, studied the cacti blooming like regular flowers on her grave. Most of the graves here were sunken, without markers, but not Miss Elizabeth Gentry’s. The wind blew. Zeb heard the sound of Ben DeVere’s sobs, the sound of the spades striking earth as men dug the new graves in the post cemetery.
Two graves, Zeb thought. We ought to be digging three. His hands balled into fists. He had vowed to kill the man, but he kept thinking of something Sergeant Major Engstrand had told him, after that first battle in Georgia.
It’s a hard thing, Zeb, to kill another man. And it should be a hard thing. It should always be hard.
Captain Taneyhill’s more recent words, too, echoed in Zeb’s ears. It weighs on a person, killin’ a man. You take away his life, but you also take away a good part, the better part, of yours.
Images of the men shot the day before flashed through his mind. Likely Zeb had killed some of them. He had spent most of last night shaking, throwing up, sick at all that he had done. Not that he was sorry, just sick. Like the captain once said, he sure didn’t wish to trade places with the men he had killed.
Slowly Ben DeVere rose, mumbled an apology, fished a handkerchief from his coat pocket, and mopped the tears off his cheeks. “Well,” he said, “I suppose it is time for the first funeral. Come, Zebulon. Let us pay our final respects to Señor Gonzales and, yes, even that blackheart, Cain Riddell.”
* * * * *
It was June 19, 1865. While Zeb Hogan and the others stood there on a hot, windy day in West Texas, a Federal general named Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 from a balcony in Galveston:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves . . .”
From then on, men and women of color in Texas would celebrate June 19 as their holiday. Juneteenth, they would call it.
The people gathered for a double funeral at Phantom Hill, of course, knew nothing about what was going on more than four hundred miles away. They just watched the Reverend Ben DeVere and listened to his words.
He preached a good funeral. Said some fitting, comforting words over Miguel Gonzales’s grave, and did the same for Cain Riddell. Afterward, the captain paid the Reverend Ben DeVere a little bit of money. The preacher thanked him, and turned to leave. He did not look at, or speak to, Zeb Hogan.
The wind blew hard, warm. It was spring, practically summer. Ben DeVere kept walking, head down, never glancing back.
“Well?”
Zeb looked over at Captain Taneyhill. Beside him stood a beaming Ebenezer Chase, holding his little Tempie in his left arm, his right hand gripping his wife’s hand.
Zeb turned and briefly watched Sergeant Ben DeVere walk to the little whitewashed adobe building, Bible in hand. The man Zeb had traveled more than one thousand miles, south by southwest, through war-ravaged Southern states, across the savage plains of Texas to kill.
A lot of country Zeb had traveled. He had grown up, too. A boy when he escaped the Florence Stockade, with some boyish notion of duty. Ebenezer had been right. Duty . . . honor. They had been just words to Zeb Hogan. He hadn’t truly known what they meant. Now he knew.
Zeb had a duty, to God, to Luansy, Ebenezer, and Captain Taneyhill, but mostly to himself. He had to honor himself, too. Once he had been a Union soldier, and he could not disgrace that uniform by murdering a man, a pathetic shell of a man, but a man of God. A man who had begged for forgiveness.
“Well?” the captain asked again.
Zeb shrugged. “Can’t kill no preacher,” he said.
Ebenezer smiled. “You couldn’t have killed him anyway. I know you too well, Zeb Hogan.”
Without answering, Zeb headed for the mules.
Ebenezer Chase was right. He usually was.
THE END
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won four Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing,” in 2002) and the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life, New Mexico Magazine, Persimmon Hill, and True West. His Western novels cover a wide ra
nge. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (Five Star Westerns, 2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (Five Star Westerns, 2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (Five Star Westerns, 2002) and Ghost Legion (Five Star Westerns, 2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (Five Star Westerns, 2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (Five Star Westerns, 2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (Five Star Westerns, 2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’s narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe. His website is www.johnnydboggs.com.
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