Gannon was not a political man then, and he was not a political man now. He cared little for those who governed; no land in which he had ever lived or worked or fought bore more than just temporary scars from its leaders. His grandfather Peter used to say that when it is time for institutions to fall, they fall on their own. Gannon was not convinced that the end of slavery required the ghastly spilling of blood he had seen. It would have been replaced soon enough by the age of machines that was coming. He had already seen pictures of horse-drawn reaping devices in magazines. Unlike slaves, they did not require food, clothing, shelter, or doctoring.
And how can one spot on a map, on the border between North and South, know what is best for the growing nation? he thought. Tallahassee and Austin know better than Washington what is right for Florida and Texas.
But Gannon was not the President or a member of Congress, nor did he want to be. And Texas was not Florida. Not worse, not better, but with very different needs and benefits. Defoliating any of these trees would set the state back in terms of soil erosion, wildlife, and just looking like something other than future desert. There were even rules about that in the Texas Special Police handbook. But he had no choice.
Walking the horse to a twelve-footer and tying him to the trunk, Gannon used strong fingers to wrench off three low limbs that he used to fashion a hurdle. With rope for a towline, he attached it to the saddle, placed Sketch Lively on top of it, and rode the eleven or so miles back to town.
* * *
Austin was preparing for church on this bright and serene Sunday morning. The citizenry had not been happy about the murder in their streets the night before. Austin was civilized, now. Threats from Mexico, from Comanche, and even from the venerated Sam Houston—the capital being his namesake city—were largely in the past. Not just cowboys and ranchers were out at night but, increasingly, families. They mingled with an increasing population of freed blacks and workers from Mexico. The growing city had gone from its pre-war adolescence of wooden wagon sheds, saloons, and makeshift everything else to a city of masonry and brick. The capital was solid and manicured and pointing the way not just for the state but for the restored Union.
But Austin was even more unhappy, on the Sabbath, to see the makeshift cortege come darkly into town, a somber horse and rider with a litter pulled behind. To the few Irish residents, who crossed themselves at the sight, it was like the arrival of the Cóiste Bower, the death coach, of the home land. If it had been the local undertaker approaching, that might have had an appropriately funereal, religious feel. This was just the dead.
There were others who were unhappier still to see a dead black man being dragged behind a horse. Only the young, eastern-educated editor of the Daily State Journal did not seem disturbed. It was not the kind of newspaper front page coveted by either Governor Davis or his agents, which was just the kind Vance Vale liked to run. It guaranteed him access to men in power, and that assured a report that would be sold throughout the nation.
But most unhappy of all was the commander of the Texas Special Police, whose function was to augment local law enforcement throughout the state. The police served at the pleasure of Governor Davis, who mandated that they pay particular and very careful attention to racially based crime. There were pamphlets in the commander’s office that the men were compelled to read, and seminars he personally conducted, instructing the men how to deal with violent or indigent former slaves, desperate and bitter orphans, and those who were slow of speech or unable to read. Many blacks were physically disabled by their years in bondage: backs crooked, leg muscles damaged or cut to prevent escape, broken limbs improperly healed.
Captain Amos Keel was a one-eyed Civil War legend who had shifted from fighting the North to fighting Comanche. He was the one and only choice of Governor Davis to head this outpost, one of the few who had the temperament to run an outfit consisting of men like Sgt. Calvin who were former enemies. He was wise enough to have a suggestion box for anonymous ideas pertaining to the smoother running of his operation. His men liked and respected him. Citizens admired him. Children cried when he showed them his glaring glass eye. They cried harder when he took it out. He had his own pew at church, which he visited most Sundays when duty did not take precedence. His spinster sister Carol, with whom he lived, was very close with the wife of the governor. Keel was widely read, especially in the area of geology—which, he said, being in a vast state like Texas was useful knowledge to possess. Only a handful of Texas Special Police were stationed in the capital; when men were moved between outposts, or summoned to this one, it was good to know just what crossing a plain, desert, or foothills actually required in terms of supplies and time.
Keel was a big round man, a head taller than most, with a woolly moustache and a hand-rolled cigarette usually poking beneath it. He did not walk so much as orbit, like the moon, moving slowly and with stoic purpose, shedding light and guidance on dark circumstances. That was how he appeared now, when word came that Hank Gannon had returned—not with a prisoner but with a cadaver. Wearing a black vest, white shirt, and tent-wide black trousers, he flung his cigarette aside as he walked up the center of the dirt street that ran through the orderly quadrants of Austin. His usually affable expression was instantly disapproving when he saw the man that was supposed to be a “prisoner” lashed to a sled with the same rope that was looped around the saddle horn tugging the construct with fits and starts. Whatever the explanation—and it could be as reasonable as “Sketch fell from a ledge”—it would run counter to the policy of the governor. The captain’s lips moved a little, bobbing the moustache up and down, as he softly prayed that the increasingly large crowd did not raise the governor from his residence. Mrs. Anne Davis was a devout woman for whom Sunday was not a day for socializing—or news-making.
Keel motioned with a thick arm as Gannon approached, but the lawman was already ahead of him. The officer turned off the main street toward the small stone stable where the police kept their workhorses and personal mounts. Gary Bosley, the teenage stableboy, shut the big wobbly doors behind the men as they entered. The only light came from a hayloft with open service doors in the back. A side door, behind the stalls, was latched shut.
The captain’s good eye went from Sketch to Gannon, rising like mercury in a thermometer and with the same indication of fever.
“Gary, get the doctor,” Keel said, the eye fixed on the tracker.
“Yes, sir.”
The thickset man cracked one door to exit, closing it quickly behind him. It rattled in the darkness. When that stopped, Keel could hear muffled talk on the other side; editor Vale questioning Bosley.
Keel turned his head to the closed door. “Vance, let my man be about his business!” he shouted.
“I want an interview with the officer who just arrived!” Vale yelled back. “Gannon, isn’t it?”
“You’ll get a statement from me!” Keel told him, pulling a box of matches from his vest pocket.
“That’s not enough to support a headline!”
“I know that!” Keel replied. “Now leave us be!”
The captain struck a match on his shoe and walked over to the corpse. His expression did not change a whisker. Keel was accustomed to seeing grotesquely dead men. Men who had been too close to cannonballs or too long in a desert, brought down by starving animals or flayed by hostile Comanche. What he was not accustomed to was laying his good eye on fatal incompetence. He shook out the flame, ground it under his toe, and went back to the front of the horse. He did not have to ask to be told what happened. Sliding from the mustang, Gannon faced his superior and briefed him concisely and truthfully. Keel listened without comment until the report was finished.
“How did he take you by surprise like that?” the commander asked.
“Same as a rattlesnake you don’t shoot when you first see him,” Gannon replied. “Sketch was on his feet and he sprang. I could have shot him point-blank but didn’t. Like I said, he grabbed the throat-latch, cheek piece, and
my horse panicked.”
“What about the busted knee?” Keel asked disapprovingly. “And the lump on the side of his head?”
“That happened first,” Gannon said. “He was runnin’ and took it hard when I bumped him down.”
“You ran him over?”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t do that to any man.”
Keel said gravely, “So he fell down and then he got up. He ran, wounded.”
“He didn’t seem to know he was hurt, sir. You know how that is. I saw men in the War run with their arms blown away. Sketch—he was down, got up, ran again, I pursued, and then he turned and attacked.”
“Why were you still mounted?”
“’Cause Sketch was fast, we all know that,” Gannon said. “I knew if he ran I might not’ve been able to stop him. I was tired an’ he was rested. He’d been sleeping other side of the Colorado. He heard me come across and got away. He wasn’t too winded when I first caught his scent. But then he’d hide, rest, shoot off in another direction. Smart, an’ I was thinkin’ that was how he first came to be a runaway.”
Keel shook his head. “If I tell that theory to the governor, he won’t buy it.”
“I can’t answer for him, only for me,” Gannon said. “I fought for the South, sir, like you, but I have no hatred for the black man, Captain,”
“I know that, but Vale is tool of the governor,” Keel said. “By the time he’s finished the crime will be what you did, not what this man did. Everything you just said—that’ll get buried in courtroom reporting.”
“Courtroom?” Gannon’s stubble emphasized the sudden darkness in his features. “A trial, Captain Keel? I’m entitled to a police investigation—”
“You’ll get that first, and then there will be a trial,” Keel said, his voice rising the first time. “Man, the facts are all on this stretcher. There will be a trial, and it will be followed by a conviction. Rebel soldier? Dead freed slave? The governor will have you tried and found guilty of murder.”
Gannon’s square jaw was set. “That, Captain, is just all balled up. I didn’t want to kill the man!”
“I believe you. Yet here he lies, dead.”
“You’re forgettin’, Captain—a killer lies here, dead. People saw what he did.”
“You’re forgetting that even a killer deserves a hearing.”
The doctor arrived then. Anton Zachary was one of three physicians in Austin. One worked exclusively for the railroad, where a looming deadline made for haste, which made for injuries; the other had a general practice and worked for the general citizenry; and Zachary worked for both the public and the police. When Captain Keel needed his services, a stipend ensured that Keel’s project took precedent. The medic was in his early sixties, short and slightly hunched from bending over bedsides, stretchers, and patients passed out on the ground. He was humorless, charmless, but sober. The medic was followed by the stableboy. Bosley grabbed a lantern from the hook by the door, lit it. As they made their way to the body, Keel walked Gannon toward the stables.
The dozen horses were side by side by side like the members of a jury, arranged from the smallest to the largest. Gannon’s brain echoed the words he had lately uttered to Sketch Lively: “That’s for a jury to say.”
Keel was thoughtful, silent for a long moment. Gannon dug at the edge of a hay pile with his boot. The officer had already replayed the events in his mind as he rode to town; there was nothing to think about, other than how this was unfortunate but also unintended. Not like what Sketch had done. Surely, Keel had to see that, had to be considering a way to make that point to the governor.
The silence wore quickly on Gannon. He had expected the support of his superior. His successful record of tracking should have earned him at least the man’s neutrality. Gannon did not sense he had even that.
“Listen, Captain, I did everything by regulations,” Gannon finally broke and said in his own defense. “Takin’ him down—hell, you know I done that dozens of times. Never happened like this.”
“Officer Gannon—”
“It’s ‘Officer Gannon’ now?” he interrupted. “What, we’re no longer friends?”
Keel resumed as if nothing had been said. “Officer Gannon, none of what you just told me is going to impress the governor. Or, more importantly, a jury, which his own attorney general will interview and help empanel.” He shook his great, round head. “None of it.”
“I did not realize, sir, that pleasin’ Mr. Davis was on my list of duties.”
Keel fired him an uncharacteristically harsh look. Gannon knew why. There was a narrow, often winding line between the extremes of duty and policy, between vainglory and political gaming. For better or worse, that was the path Keel had chosen.
“I am displeased,” Keel said. “You did not do what I sent you to do, and I suspect that is because you were in a hurry to get back to your girl.”
“I was that, sir, but not enough to trample a man to death—”
“Enough to be distracted,” the captain continued. “And why in the name of dear, sweet God did you have to bring him in that way?”
“On the sled that you taught us to make?”
“For the injured,” Keel pointed out.
“I did that because I didn’t want to leave the man under a pile of rocks for varmints to pick at,” Gannon told him. “Would that have been better?”
“What would have been better is if you had left the horse and the dead man just the other side of the river, come and got assistance,” Keel said, his voice rising for the first time. “Instead you made an entrance like Edwin Booth on opening night. You should have known better—Sunday morning, Officer Gannon? What did you expect?”
“The support of my superior, Captain.” Gannon moved closer to the big man. “I’ll accept whatever blame is due me, but the real problem wasn’t entirely me. What would have been better is if you’d sent one of the black officers to fetch Sketch Lively. Or one of the Tejanos.”
“You’re the best tracker.”
“Well, he wasn’t havin’ any part of me, personally. Or what I had to say.” Gannon shook his head. “Maybe I should’ve let Sketch Lively get away. I’d be in church, now, and so would you. There’d be only a dead white Louisianan to deal with, and Governor Davis—he’d’ve been happy.”
“That’s enough,” Keel warned.
Gannon was growing exasperated. No one had ever questioned his judgment before. Not in war, not in peace. In his thirty-seven years he had been a bold but careful man. If nothing else, short of cowardice, that was the only way to survive a war.
The doctor walked over, staying a respectful distance until Keel turned to him.
“Go ahead,” the captain said.
“Sketch’s chest was crushed by the horse,” the bearded physician said. “Hooves have traces of blood. Sternum and at least four ribs shattered, bone tore up the heart and lungs. You can see them in the wound.”
“I see. All right—you can take him,” Keel said. “Is there family?”
The question was out before Keel realized what he had asked. The doctor did not know what had triggered the attack in the first place and said he would find out. The captain did not say anything else until he turned back to Gannon.
“I want you to resign,” Keel said. “This morning.”
Gannon stopped kicking at the hay. The rustle and thud of the body being removed from the hurdle sounded very far away. The thud of his own heart sounded very loud. The lawman couldn’t even respond, the idea was so unpalatable.
“If there is a trial, and there will be,” Keel went on, “this becomes a Reconstructionist nightmare. Every abolitionist with nothing to do will make this a national issue. Politicians will turn over peacekeeping entirely to the occupying Union army. Freed slaves? They will come here and demand government land and they will get it. From where? From who? The Comanche. And that war we’ve been fighting with them for half a bloody century will have to be fought all over again.”
He jerked a thum
b over his shoulder. “All because a horse got spooked.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” Gannon said. “People are smarter.”
“I’m sixty-two, got a score of life on you,” Keel said. “The only consistently smart creatures I’ve met are dogs and hogs, and sometimes horses and crows. People? If they’re smart, it is only about how to get more. And that is what Governor Davis and all those people I just mentioned will be smart about. Getting more power. More land. More wealth.” He shook his head. “The governor will not want those things either. Most of them. He will unhappily accept a death certificate that is attached to your resignation.”
Gannon definitely felt the way Sketch must have felt in the last moments of his life. Disbelief and rising defiance.
“I won’t do it, sir. I won’t resign.”
“You will or I will have you arrested here and now,” Keel replied.
“Why, to impress a mob? The governor?”
“No, Gannon. For disobeying an order. The other charges—those’ll come later unless you get out now. Hank, I’m doing you a favor.” He threw a thick finger down the row of stables. “I’ll have Bosley ready your saddlebred. Don’t shave. Piss when you’re gone. Just get your effects and come see me about your wages.” He looked at his gold pocket watch. “It’s 10:03. You’ve got till the half-hour. Do you understand?”
War Valley Page 2