I Got to Keep Moving

by Bill Harris

  Son asked what he thought about Hitler.

  “He’s a bully. I do not abide bullies,” Branch said. “They’re only strong because they make you think they are. And the longer you believe it the stronger they get.”

  “Who taught you that?”

  “My Uncle. He taught me a great many things.”

  “Did your father teach you things too?”

  “I had two fathers, and that uncle.”

  “Two fathers?

  My first, my real father, died.”

  “Like mine.”

  Branch told Son of a saying from his uncle: “‘Only say what you mean, mean what you say, be true to your word, and people will respect your strength.’ Do you understand?”

  “Even from a boy?”

  “Yep.”

  “Even from me?”

  “You too. But you won’t be a boy much longer.”

  That was what he wanted to know most about. Being a man. Asked Branch about his father. What had his father taught him?

  “To treat people with respect, and they were more likely to treat you the same way.”

  “Even white people?”

  Branch thought about it, allowed, “Even some white people.” Thought about it some more. “And horses.” That, Branch said, was why he most often preferred horses to people. Horses didn’t discriminate. They didn’t have the capacity for being cruel based on race hatred. “You ever been on a horse?”

  “Just behind one, in the wagon with Mr. Amalfi. He let me guide sometimes—but mostly the horse knew the route. I was in an airplane one time,” Son said.

  “I grew up around horses. Fact, I learned about respect from horses.”

  “How?”

  “When I was a little older than you my father got possession of a horse everybody thought ought to be put down. It had been mistreated and was so skittish nobody could get near it—nobody but my father.”

  “And you?”

  “Not at first.”

  His (second) father, Haskell, showed him to approach the horse without fear, showing respect, expecting it. Over time, with gentle treatment, and respect for who the horse was, and the troubles it had had, his father won the horse’s trust and was able to bring it back to health and usefulness.

  It was from his uncle that he learned about the book American Notes by Charles Dickens. Had Son heard of it?

  Nope. Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, which he’d heard adaptations of on the radio, but not that one.

  “It was about Dickens’ trip to a place, I don’t remember the name, in Boston. He told stories to the boys and girls there, who were blind, like you, but also couldn’t speak or hear.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were taught to make things and use a signing language to communicate.”

  He thought for a moment. His silence gave no hint as to his thoughts.

  “We have an advantage,” Branch said, “and a disadvantage. When people don’t know us, and what we’re capable of—who we are—then they underestimate us. That’s the advantage part. But if they know us they try twice as hard because of who they think we are—how good we are.”

  Son felt two jabs from Branch’s fingertip: one to his chest, the second to his forehead. “What they don’t know is that they don’t matter. It’s about us, not them. We’re not trying to beat them, or be smarter than them. Being the best at what we’ve been taught—that’s what drives us. Only we can know how good we can be.”

  The boy said nothing. Only slightly nodded.

  He knew how to be quiet. He would be good on a hunt.

  Another night. The Lone Ranger had said his final A-wayyy! Tonto by his side, they had galloped off at the end of another episode brought to them from WXYZ.

  “He’s for justice,” Son said.

  “What is justice?” Branch asked.

  “Things coming out right. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Where in the old west did you grow up?”

  “Malone, Oklahoma. An all-colored town.”

  “Wow.”

  “Till then it was the first big town I was ever in.”

  “Mama and I were in lots of towns, big, little, middle sized. Where were you before you were in Malone, Oklahoma?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell me?”

  Old Miller’s Allotment, Oklahoma. 1910.

  Knew, the boy did, he was the first to see the approaching figure, floating from far as his eye could reach, forward on the flat of the Oklahoma prairie, as if through waves of water. Not that he’d ever seen any more water than down a well or in a creek wider than a running leap at its width. A man, it was sure, rising over the eastern edge of the world like in the beginning of the dream of his. Coming beeline straight, but as deliberate as Bossie at her cud.

  Being the first to rise it was his privilege to be the first to espy the figure. And thought, who first must he tell? The two asleep in the barn he had just emerged from, who had arrived in a like manner two days ago? They had specifically told him to tell them in the event of another’s coming. Or tell Niall, likely still asleep in the mud house behind him? Or tell the woman, who’d be by now at her first morning stirrings? Let her tell Niall, their boss.

  What he had an impulse to do was not let on at all to any of them. His knowing, and their ignorance, was two things of his own to hoard. Though he knew that if he did not tell at all, or delayed too long in the telling, it too would cost him. He weighed the worth of what pleasure there was of having the secret knowledge of the approaching man—what in the name of thunder was taking him so long—that none of the other of them did, against the certainty of reprisal from some or all concerned. Deciding that although being buoyed on the raft of his secret was like hurtling toward an impending falls, the thrill of even the limited time of his ride was worth it.

  His reentering the barn where they were sleeping awakened the men.

  “Somebody’s coming.”

  They started as if dowsed with cold water. Pelting him with questions and curses they scrambled about, struggling to their feet, wiping at their eyes with the heels of their hands, brushing straw from their hair, stomping into their boots, strapping on their gun belts.

  “How many?”

  “How far off?”

  “Why the hell’d you wait so long to tell us?” the younger one asked, gripping the boy hard by his upper arm before shoving him stumbling, cross-footed, through horseshit and against the stable wall.

  “Was whoever it was close enough to tell who it was?” the older one asked.

  As if none of it was of any matter to him, he didn’t answer as he moved methodically about his horse dung-shoveling chore.

  They, unshaven, ash blond and hazel-eyed, had come in like coyotes two nights before. He’d overheard them tell Niall they were willing to pay for sip and sup and a place to lay their heads. Niall had greedily agreed without explanation of where they’d left or were headed. Didn’t care as long as they paid in advance and gave assurance they’d tarry no more than the time they’d paid for.

  They offered the boy the payment of a nickel for keeping an eye out for approaching strangers, again with no explanation for their request.

  The men, brothers, scurrying like ants at a drop of rain, were considering contingencies. Arguing about what they should do and who should do what and when and how.

  The younger one, undercover, weaseled around to the sod house; the other stayed out in the barn. The boy was delegated to go out and greet whoever the hell it was.

  Standing in the yard, the pitchfork tines resting in the dirt when the man halted his horse. He dismounted, horse between him and the barn. He was lean and average tall. Somewhere between a town man and a cowboy. A wide-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat shaded his bronze brown face, about the same color, the boy thought, as me. The man was Negro with the look of some Cherokee. He was not mustached or bearded but needed a shave.

  He wore a trail-soiled
white linen shirt, buttoned at the wrists and neck under a dark, dusty vest, and dark, ribbed-textured pants tucked into calf-high brown boots. Cartridge-filled belt with what looked to be a Colt Dragoon revolver on his right hip. He held his lever-action carbine, its blue barrel up against his left shoulder. But most notable was a round, gold lawman’s badge centered with a five-point star pinned two or three inches above the top left-hand pocket of his vest.

  The boy felt the man slowly and totally surveying the layout of the sorry allotment for signs of movement near the various clumps and implements that could hide a man. Foremost being the soddy house, like a dauber’s nest of mud, stacked stone, buffalo grass, and castoff canvas, burrowed in a small hillock. All of it old, old when first taken up by its present owner, and now in even greater state of misuse, at the hands of one ill-suited for its care.

  Then the man turned his inspecting gaze on him. He felt his heart double pump, leap like a hard-spurred horse, like it did during a hundred nights with the dream that startled him to waking among the stable’s chorus of nights sounds: scurry and squeak of rats, pouncing of cats, screech of owls, horses’ clipped whinnies and snores as they flinched through their dreams. His awakening always so sudden and disquieting that he could not remember what it was that came immediately before the snatch from one mind to the other. He stood not skittish but straight, flat-footed, braced as if for a blow or lash. Wanted the man, who looked like he had come to wake snakes, to know something of him, whatever might come after. That he was not of these people, only subject to their maltreatment, same as the other things in Niall, the squatter’s seeing.

  “There strangers here?” the man asked him quietly, his tone and look expecting nothing but the truth.

  Looking him in the eye, the boy nodded once.

  “House or the barn?”

  The boy nodded to the barn and then to the house.

  The man took the pitchfork from the boy and drove its tines into the ground.

  “Walk my horse to the trough and give him water,” the lawman said. “Then fill the canteens and stay at the well until I’m through with my business here.”

  He took the reins, leading the horse away.

  The lawman announced, loud enough to be heard in both structures, “I am Cochrane Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. I have an affidavit for the apprehension of Gideon and Zachariah Turlock. Turlocks, show your selves and submit to arrest, or suffer the consequences.”

  On seeing the way the lawman had taken the measure of his surroundings, the boy had thought him a man of caution. Where, the boy wondered with building anger at the man’s recklessness, is the caution in standing unprotected in the line of fire from both places, and I already told him where they at?

  Niall Burleson, the boss, ruddy, red-headed, came out like he was mad as a peeled rattler, his attention on the lawman, but cussing the boy as he crossed the yard, the pistol in the waistband of his pants, his hand on the handle. Niall saying in his sing-songy way of speaking around what was likely a new chaw of tobacco, “I’m Niall Burleson. Owner of the place. Did you bloody ask me if you could be watering his fucking harse?”

  Niall, tough as Old Testament vengeance on a boy and a woman, didn’t drink to get mean, the boy thought. He could quickly get that way without drinking a drop. Just come on him like a fever. And when on him it was deep as it was wide. See how, the boy thought, he fares with this man in the flat straw hat, star badge on his vest, carbine leaned on his shoulder.

  Niall nearly across the yard saying now to the man, “Did you ask for my water?”

  The lawman repeating, “I am Cochrane Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. I have an affidavit for the apprehension of Gideon and Zachariah Turlock. Unhand the weapon.”

  Niall drawing up short then, them within three strides of one another.

  “Unhand the weapon,” the lawman said. “My business is not with you.”

  “Any business here starts with me,” Burleson said, adjusting the chaw until it was in place. “This is my bloody property.”

  “You are harboring fugitives, Gideon and Zachariah Turlock by name. Send them out and I’ll have them off your property before you know it.”

  “Get, goddamn you!”

  His tone the same as when he first spoke to the boy, the lawman said, “Lay that firearm down, and if you jump funny I’ll knock you cockeyed.”

  Niall Burleson didn’t move.

  Neither did the lawman. Instead he asked, “What is that boy to you?”

  Without looking back Niall said, “He’s nothing.” And spit a skeet of tobacco near the man’s boots. “Drug in about a year ago like a wet cat out of the rain.”

  “Are you are the cause of his condition?”

  “He ain’t complained,” Niall said, his hand, well-practiced at beating the boy and woman to blisters, still on the weapon. “He’s working off the debt of my taking him in. I treat him ’cording to his worth . . .” was as much as Niall could say before Utterbach stove in his nose and mouth with the brass-trimmed butt of his rifle. The spattering of bone, teeth, and blood sounded, even to where the boy stood, like a bundle of dry kindling was snapped.

  The lawman’s started, like he said he would, the boy thought, standing still and silent beside the lapping horse.

  Niall slumped to his knees, moaning into the blood in his cupped hands. The lawman knelt in front of Niall, partially blocking him from view from the house. He pulled the handgun from the groaning man’s belt and stuck it into his own. He raised his rifle and aimed it at the slowly opening door of the barn and the owl-like complaint of its rusty hinges.

  “Gideon Turlock in the shed, you are in my sights.”

  The words froze Turlock like the unexpected sound of a snake’s rattle.

  The lawman said, “I come to deliver you to the justice you deserve. The manner of that delivery will be of your choosing. Throw your weapon out and follow it. Am I clear?”

  Across the yard the penned hogs paid no mind as Turlock stepped out the barn entrance, his pistol half raised.

  “You broke his god-damned face.”

  “Turlock, drop the pistol. Come to me, or go to God.”

  “Fuck you, you black son of a bitch.”

  “I take your words as resistance to my intention.”

  “Right, goddamn you,” he said, raising the pistol.

  Gideon Turlock, shot in the chest by the lawman, dropped to the dirt like a hay bale kicked from a cloud.

  The pigs squealed at the sound of the shot and then their snouts in the slop returned to their rut and snuffle.

  The lawman stood and moved quickly by Niall, still kneeling in the dirt and moaning in his hands. He ran to the windowless soddy wall and stood with his back against it, his carbine newly cocked.

  From inside, Zachariah, with a howl like a coyote’s, wailed his brother’s name.

  “Zachariah,” the lawman called out, “Gideon, by his resistance, has forced me to shoot him.”

  “Did you kill him, you son of a bitch?”

  “I give you the option I gave him. This is a sorry place to die.”

  “Maybe I won’t.”

  “You will. Surrender or suffer the consequences. Do you understand?”

  “I want to see my brother.”

  “Step out.”

  “Gideon!” Zachariah called from inside to no answer. “All this over some old nigger?”

  “That you killed,” the lawman said.

  “Did you kill my brother, you son of a bitch? Is he dead?”

  “You understand my terms. I await your decision.”

  “You think you can kill my brother, and I’m going to surrender back to your nigger town?”

  “Either way it’s likely your last day in the sunshine.”

  Zachariah burst from the weathered canvas-covered doorway, cursing and shooting, but not knowing where his target was. He realized too late.

  And
now the lawman’s done, thought the boy who had observed it all as steadily as he did each evening, watching the sun’s slow bleed, red as a reopened wound, over the western edge. Not, as in that instance, squinting, eyes slightly averted, but looking directly into the heart of the lawman’s doings. Wanted to yell for him to kill them! Kill them all . . . her too, still in the house, who had stood, watching in taciturn disinterest when Niall had been teaching him with a stick of wood to properly mind . . . Kill them in a flood of Hell fire, but the words stacked against his voice box like rocks damming stream waters, and he stood mute.

  Through it all the lawman’s horse had kept lapping water, like it was deaf, or had seen it all before.

  The woman came out then, her face white as milled flour, her hands up, and like a cur trained by the boot, cautiously approached Niall still kneeling in the dirt, rocking, moaning, and muttering. She was not cautious enough, for in his pain and anger Niall swung a bloody backhand fist, striking her weakly on her leg as he sputtered a profanity, but for his effort paid the price of additional pain. The woman cringed away. Niall then waved a searching, bloody-palmed hand in her direction and she stepped forward again. His hand clenched her skirt, and crying and gurgling, he gingerly rested his forehead against her thighs.

  The lawman told them, “I repeat, I am Cochran Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. The purpose of my visit is completed. But when this boy tells me your parts in the nature of his condition I might return. Meanwhile we’ll be in Malone. Now, you have seen what I do. If there is any part of what you have caused here you do not accept, we can continue. Is there any part of this that is not clear?”

  The dog, sniffing about Zachariah’s sprawled body, nipped at the circling flies.

  “He understands,” the woman said, helping the stumbling Niall to his feet.