Now there was a bottle of tequila with them. Johnny said, “I bet this is the only bottle of tequila in all of Pennsylvania.”
“Now, that would be a downright shame,” Matt said, holding the bottle. He had just taken a chug and was relishing the feeling as it traveled its way down.
Ma and Pa were always death against drinking alcohol. There had never been any on the farm. Johnny’s first taste of it had been when he joined the Army. His first taste of tequila had been when he joined the Rangers.
Apparently Matt was no stranger to drink now, either, because he took the first belt of tequila like it was water. Johnny said as much.
“Well,” Matt said, handing the bottle back to Johnny, “on a ship, rum’s a big favorite. And scotch. I dare say I’ve developed a bit of a taste for both. Something else I wouldn’t want to share with Ma and Pa.”
Johnny took a drink from the bottle. “Of course, there’s gonna be hell to pay if we come back into the farmhouse smelling like tequila.”
“Tell me something,” Matt said. “What happened with the Army? Did you get kicked out?”
Johnny nodded. “I beat up an officer. I was lucky I got kicked out and not thrown in the stockade.”
“Dishonorable discharge.”
Johnny nodded again.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really. But,” he shrugged, “why not? There was a town near the fort where I was stationed. And there was a girl in town, and I’d ride in to see her once in a while.”
Matt shook his head. “Add a girl to any equation, and trouble seems to brew.”
“It did this time, that’s for sure. Seems she was also seeing a lieutenant. A West-Pointer, by the name of Samson.”
Matt laughed. “Samson? No kidding. Did he have long hair?”
Johnny chuckled. “No. But he was right full of himself. A West-Pointer, and he was oh so proud of it. He was all upright and held his head high. He ordered me to stay away from his girl. He did it like he was ordering me to saddle his horse. But it was just him and me. There was no one else around, so I told him I was off duty and he had no business ordering me anywhere. He then slapped me across the face, like a girl would do. I think he might have been trying to challenge me to a duel, or something.”
Matt was chuckling. “No kidding. What’d you do?”
Johnny shrugged. “What’d you think I’d do? I slugged him in the face.”
Matt was now laughing outright. “No. You didn’t.”
Johnny was laughing, too. Something about tequila made things seem extra funny. “I did. A right hook. Caught him right square in the cheekbone. His knees, they buckled, and he went down. To make matters worse, we were in the livery barn in town. When he landed, his shoulder went into a pile of fresh horse droppings.”
Matt was now hanging onto his stomach, he was laughing so hard.
Johnny said, “You should’ve seen this guy. His uniform was always clean and neatly pressed. Well, it wasn’t so clean, afterwards.”
“So, that’s what they kicked you out for?”
Johnny nodded, and handed the bottle back. “That’s about it.”
“Striking a superior officer. How did you manage not to get thrown in the stockade?”
“When he got to his feet, with horse dung on his shoulder, he was so furious I thought he was gonna cry. He stood there, face all red. Eyes all waterin’ up. I don’t think any of his West Point training ever prepared him for getting slugged in the face in a barn and falling into a pile of horse droppings.”
“What’d he do?’
“Well, he just stood there for a minute, huffing at me. I said to him, ‘Well, are you gonna swing at me, or not?’ He said, ‘I’ll see you thrown out of this man’s army.’ I said, ‘You’d best clean the dung off your shoulder, first.’”
Matt took a swig of the tequila.
Johnny said, “I guess he figured he wanted me as far gone from there as possible, so I couldn’t tell the story of how the West Point lieutenant almost cried after getting hit and falling into a pile of poop. I never did see the girl again. I’d met a couple Texas Rangers when I was in town on furlough, and I showed them all how I could shoot and ride. They told me if I ever needed a job to look ‘em up, and they’d take me to their captain. So I did, and they did. One of ‘em was a feller by the name of Zack Johnson. Became one of my best friends.”
Matt said, “You always were too good with a gun for your own good. You were always practicing with Uncle Jake’s guns.”
Their Uncle Jake was Pa’s brother and had been a Texas Ranger back in the thirties, in the war between Texas and Mexico. He had gone west for a taste of life beyond the farm, fought in the war and returned with a pair of Paterson Colts. When Johnny was fourteen, Uncle Jake started showing him how to use them. Johnny practiced with them until he could make trick shooting look easy. Pulling stunts like having Matt throw a silver dollar in the air and plugging it clean through with one shot before the coin hit the ground. Or lining up cans on a fence, and drawing the gun and getting all five with five shots. Uncle Jake had shown him how to execute a border shift, and with a week of practice Johnny could do it like he had been doing it for years.
Uncle Jake said he had never seen anyone able to handle a gun like Johnny. Matt had tried some target practicing with one of the pistols and he wasn’t a bad shot, but Johnny handled those guns like it was second nature. After a time Uncle Jake gave the guns to him, something Ma never approved of.
Matt said, “You took those guns with you when you went West, didn’t you?”
Johnny nodded. “I had no idea how the Army worked. I thought they’d let me carry them. But everything was Army-issue, including the weapons.”
“Do you still have ‘em?”
Johnny shook his head. “Lost ‘em in a poker game, down in Corpus Christi. Not one of my finer moments.”
Matt held up the tequila bottle, now half full. “You know, Pa’s gonna kill us.”
“No he won’t. Come on.” Johnny slapped him in the shoulder and got to his feet, and he climbed down the ladder from the loft to the barn floor. Matt followed.
Johnny reached into his saddle bags and pulled out a half full sack of coffee and a beaten-up tin kettle. “We can go out into the woods and make us a little camp fire and have some coffee. That stuff Ma makes is so weak compared to the trail coffee I got used to out in Texas. That stuff could take the rust off a nail.”
Matt nodded with a smile. “That’s the way we used to make in on the ship. Let’s go.”
The land was a series of low ridges that rose and dropped. The woods behind the house were mostly poplar, oak and maple, some of them standing tall, and the ground was covered with dry leaves and underbrush.
Pa had been told by many farmers in the area that he should have clear-cut these woods to make more room for pastures or crops, but Pa’s father had given him a love for the forest, and so he had let a couple hundred acres of trees remain. They still had almost a thousand acres for corn, which was Pa’s main crop. More than enough, Pa had said often.
Even though Johnny and Matt had been gone only three years, they found the land had changed. One outcropping of bedrock seemed more pronounced, and another was partially covered over with dirt, grass and leaves. A long alder had fallen across a small stream, and another log that had been across that same stream years ago was now rotted and had fallen into the water.
They found a section near the stream and built a small fire. Unlike the Texas countryside Johnny had grown so accustomed to, the earth here was covered with a few inches of dried leaves. Tinder that an errant spark could catch onto and bring down half the forest. Johnny cleared a circle five feet in diameter, all the way to the bare ground.
Also unlike the Texas countryside, this land was damp once you got below the top covering of leaves. It rained often here, and water was close to the surface. It was also prime country for mosquitoes, critters you didn’t see much of in the arid drylands of central Texas
.
Johnny and Matt used some dry leaves for tinder and found some small sticks for kindling. A deadfall provided some old, weathered oak branches that were easily snapped into a useable size, and they had wood for the fire.
Johnny dipped the small kettle into the stream to fill it with water, then dumped in some coffee and stood it in the fire to set it to boiling.
Matt sat on the ground, his arms resting across his knees. “I have one question for you. Becky Drummond.”
Johnny snickered, and shook his head. “That’s a name, not a question.”
“It’s also a question. I didn’t want to ask you back at the house, because you’ve always been private. Not as much as Joe, maybe.”
“No one’s as private as Joe. With him it’s more about what he doesn’t say than what he does.”
“I also knew Joe and Luke would needle you about it.”
“And you would have, too.”
Matt raised his brows with mock innocence and said, “Whatever do you mean?”
Johnny grinned. He was on one knee, using a broken branch as a poker to stir the fire. “What made you think of Becky?”
Matt shrugged. “Back before we left home, it was hard to think of you without thinking of Becky Drummond. You two seemed almost destined to be together.”
“Isn’t that exaggerating a little?”
“Nope.”
“And here I thought Becky and I were being discreet.”
Matt shook his head. “We all saw it. Ma and Pa talked of it. You two were always at each other’s side, even when you were little kids. Catching frogs and lightning bugs together in the summer.”
Johnny nodded, smiling a little at the memory. “She always was a tomboy.”
“Then she got older, and started looking quite fetching in a dress, if I remember correctly.”
Johnny nodded again. “She wasn’t such a tomboy then.”
“Did you ever write to her?”
Johnny shrugged. “I wrote her a letter once I arrived at Fort Kiowa. But the postal service out there is so sketchy. It can take sometimes months for a letter to get from one place to another. If it arrives at all. I never knew if she got it, and I never got one from her.”
The water eventually boiled. He took it off the fire and let the water calm down a bit, then he returned the kettle to the flames. “This is the way we make it out there. When it boils over three times it’s ready.”
Matt chuckled. “Not much different than the stuff we drank on the ship.”
“So,” Johnny said, “how’d you get kicked out of the Navy? What’d you do?”
“It’s not common knowledge, outside the Navy itself, but there are what they call hazing rituals. Abuse given to young sailors. It’s a way of unofficially initiating them into the ranks. I saw a sailor, a shipmate of mine, beaten to death. They decided I was fair game but I’m our father’s son, and I wasn’t going to stand for any of it. And I have our mother’s temper. I beat the hell out of three of them. Threw one of them overboard. He almost drowned. The captain decided he’d had enough of me, and he had me locked up until they reached shore, which was Fort Sumter in South Carolina. They set me ashore with a dishonorable discharge, and I signed on with a merchant ship.”
“But, you were in the right.”
“I was. But I was trying to buck a long established tradition, right or not. I was viewed as a trouble-maker. It would shame Ma and Pa to have a son bearing the label of trouble-maker. Society seems to be less interested in right and wrong, and more interested in labels.”
Johnny snorted a bitter chuckle. “Well, maybe I belong carrying the label. I could have handled my situation better. I didn’t have to try and show up that lieutenant. I could have just said yes, sir, and let it go at that. But I couldn’t. Pride, I guess. Ma and Pa raised us better’n that.”
Matt nodded. “Maybe. But you figure, farming is the kind of job where you work for yourself. You answer to no man. True, you answer to the weather and to the price of crops, but there’s no overseer telling you what to do. You take two farm boys who grew up in an environment like that and put us in the military, where it’s all rules and regulations. Where it seems like they not only fail to respect independent thought but discourage it. Add into the equation Ma’s temper and Pa’s backbone, which we both seem to have, and you have a reputation for disaster.”
“Maybe we should have seen it coming.”
“So. You never answered the question.”
“What question?”
“Becky Drummond.”
Johnny gave a shrug. “That’s a question I don’t know if I know an answer to. I’m not the same man I was when I left. She may not be the same girl.”
“We all change.”
“But if we had stayed, then she and I would have changed and grown together. By doing it apart, we may have grown in such different directions we might not even recognize each other. I know I’m not the same.”
“No, you’re not. Neither one of us is. Even if Joe hadn’t got you talking about those raiders and Indians you killed, I would know you’ve killed a few men. I can see it in your eyes. Your manner.”
“I’ve killed more than a few.”
Matt hesitated a moment before asking the next question. “How many have you killed?”
Johnny shrugged again. “I’ve lost count.”
Matt let the weight of that statement settle in.
Johnny said, “Been shot at a few times too many, too. That’s what my friend Zack says. That’s why, even out in these woods, I feel uneasy without a gun. I know in my head there’s no renegade outlaw out there waiting to ambush us. But I’m constantly looking about us. Constantly listening to every sound the woods make.”
“Well, you won’t know about Becky until you see her.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Matt smiled. “You can’t hide out here on the farm, forever. You have to go into town eventually. Come Sunday, Ma will be dragging us to church.”
Johnny said, “I saw a Chinaman eat this way, once. With two sticks. He would trap his food like that and lift it off the plate. Neat as you please. As easy as you or I would use a fork.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that too. We docked at a port in Asia, more than once.”
“And he was hell on wheels in a fight. He was running a small farm in east Texas. Not many Chinamen in Texas. You see more in California, or so I’m told. I saw him lay out three highwaymen one time. Neat as you please. Used his feet, too, and made it look almost like a dance. Showed me a couple things about fighting.”
“You were always top notch in a fight, yourself. As good with your fists as you ever were with those guns.”
Johnny nodded. “He showed me a thing or two about fighting, and I taught him how to shoot.”
They sat in silence for a moment, while the coffee boiled in the kettle.
Matt said, “Johnny, you’ve seemed kind of ill at ease since we’ve been home.”
“Guess I have.”
Matt waited, to see if his brother would talk.
Johnny was silent a moment, listening to the coffee stir and hiss inside the kettle.
He said, “This place used to be home. I guess it hasn’t really changed any, but I have. When I was out there, that wide open country somehow snagged hold of my heart. I don’t know just how. But there are places where you can sit in the saddle and see the land stretch out before you. Not like it does here, for maybe a half mile in some places, but for miles. Miles, Matt. And when the wind is just right, the grass blows in waves, almost like an ocean of grass. For miles all around you. In the spring, the grass is green, and wild flowers grow.
“And the sky, Matt. The horizon is so low, and that big, blue sky rises up from one side and all the way down to the other. And at night, the stars are so big you feel like you can almost reach up and touch ‘em.”
Matt said, “It’s like that at sea, too. I would sometimes stand at the bow—that’s the front of the ship, for you land lubbers..,”<
br />
Johnny laughed.
“...and I would just look off to the horizon. All that water, rising in swells that would just flatten out, and then rise again. More than once I would see porpoises out there, just frolicking. We saw whales, more than once. One time, a whale came to the surface just a few yards from the ship. It let out this honking, wailing sound. Like nothing I’ve ever heard before. More incredible than music from the finest instrument. A bunch of us were standing there, watching it. Then it dove back down, its tail flapping the water hard on the way down, and soaked us. It was wondrous.”
“I guess I just feel like an outsider, here. An outsider in the place that was once my home.”
“You don’t consider it your home any longer?”
“I want to. I used to. The whole time I was in Texas, I thought of this place as back home. Whenever I talked about the farm, that’s what I called it. But now, I’m realizing my home has become that open, wild land, and wherever my horse took me.”
“I think I know how you feel.”
The kettle began boiling over for the third time. Johnny grabbed his two sticks and pulled it from the fire. “Coffee’s on.”
14
Johnny and Matt returned to work in time to saw up a couple more logs each before Pa, Joe and Luke came home from the field.
At supper, Pa said, “I will admit, the way you two were pestering each other about work, I figured to find you had cut a cord, each.”
Luke chuckled.
Matt said, “Sorry, Pa. We wound up sitting in the barn, talking. A lot to catch up on, I guess.”
Ma said, “I’m glad. You boys shouldn’t have to be put back to work as soon as you get here. There’s plenty of time for that.”
Johnny said, “We’ll do better next time. Of that, I promise.”
Matt nodded. “Definitely.”
Ma had baked up a load of chicken and potatoes. She had also fixed a huge plate of biscuits. Johnny brought one, oozing with butter, to his mouth and chewed into it. One thing was true—he had never found cooking like this on the frontier.
Johnny McCabe (The McCabes Book 6) Page 6