War Valley

by Lancaster Hill

  I did have one customer at the moment, though. I’m pretty good at reading my customers, but this was a puzzle of a man.

  The oil lamps nailed to the wall behind me, athwart the big mirror, cast just our two shadows across the half-dozen empty tables, the unlit lamps upon them, and wooden floors, planks that were scuffed from boots on the bar side, scarred with barrels being rolled and tugged across the other.

  The man at my bar was about sixty. He might’ve been younger; it was tough to say with a face so cracked and lined it looked like sunbaked clay. He wore a beard though that might be from inattention rather than choice. It was careless and naturally uneven. My customer hadn’t bothered to take off his hat, so I couldn’t see anything above the middle of his nose. But the tilt of his head said he was looking down. Remembering, from the stillness of him; tired men don’t sit still, they pass out. I couldn’t tell the man’s trade either. He didn’t stink like a trapper or a ranch hand, which was most of my trade that weren’t soldiers or Indians. There was a faint smell of gunpowder about him, possibly from the two Colt revolvers I saw him wearing when he walked in. The firearm was new but these did not gleam in the light. They looked as toughened as their owner. There was also a long, sheathed knife tied to his right leg.

  The man’s clothes looked as weathered as the man who wore them. He had on a sheepskin vest, dirtier I’m sure than the sheep who once wore it. His slouch hat was probably gray under its uneven, dusty coat. His beard and moustache were as ungroomed and wooly as his vest, though they were definitely gray. He had likely washed his face in the horse trough after riding in from wherever he’d come. The mouth tucked amongst the whiskers was pencil straight and only moved for the intake of liquor.

  This gentleman’s tall, lean frame was bent over slightly, like there was a slow-leaking sack of grain on his shoulders; they had risen just a little since he sat down. He was leaning mostly on his left hand, which was flat-open on the bar. The other hand did not release the glass. I’ll get to those hands in a moment.

  He was drinking the house whiskey—Wildnut by name, on account of the bit of walnut I brewed in with the alcohol, sugar, and chewing tobacco. He had sat there for maybe ten, fifteen minutes before gulping the glass down. Then he sat there some more, not moving, not saying anything. I gave him a shot on the house, not even sure he could pay for the first one, but what the hell. Another one might open him up, help me pass the night. The man acknowledged by raising a finger. He didn’t look up, he didn’t say “thanks,” he just lifted that finger—which, like the rest of him, looked like it had seen better days. Now I’ve seen stranger fingers since I draped that big Open for Business sign outdoors that got blown away the first day. I saw one that got flattened by a cow and looked like a spoon; one that got shot off by an arrow at the knuckle, leaving little notches in the adjoining fingers; one with a tattoo of a naked squaw who danced when it moved. There’s a lot of uncommonness comes through my swinging doors.

  But these fingers were not simply grotesque, they were—I once heard a traveling salesman describe a brass nutcracker as “utile,” and I would use that word to describe eight of these fingers. They were straight and they were filed or stropped sharp, except for the trigger fingers. Those nails were sawed-off at the tip. The skin was also utile—rough-looking, almost like tree bark. Taken as a whole, each hand had four sturdy little knives like some beastie from the English penny awfuls I read when I attended the Philadelphia College of Apothecaries. The creatures and unnatural beasts of those stories gave me the shivers, and so did these devilish little fingers. And they hadn’t even done anything, except one of them coming briefly to attention.

  That was the thing about this man. Based on absolutely nothing that he had done, he seemed like a coiled snake, just waiting for the wrong thing to make him strike. I didn’t want any question of mine to be that wrong thing, so after pouring the second drink I walked away to blow dust from the bottles that lined the wall under the mirror.

  But I glanced at him again, though, at his reflection. And I saw something I did not expect to see.

  A single lamplit tear on his left cheek.

  There being no minted money in these parts, not yet, I was always curious to see what my customers would offer for payment. This man had a pouch under a kerchief and used a long nail to hook out a lump of gold. He dropped it like a shovel emptying dirt. I swept it up, put it in the till behind me, and turned back to him. “Do you have a place to stay?”

  After dusting and polishing and stepping outside to look at the full moon, I risked asking that question because it was not personal, it showed polite concern, my voice quiet like I was talking to a spooked mustang, and it was the kind of thing any barkeep would hospitably be expected to inquire about.

  It was the first time I heard or saw the man breathe. He drew air through his nose, the mouth still not moving—though, while I was distracted by my busywork, he had managed to empty the second glass.

  “The question I have been pondering, sir,” he replied in a deep, quiet voice, “is do I have a place to go?”

  He obviously did not mean for the night. His searching question—though directed more at the surface of the bar than at me—prompted me to ask, “May I inquire where you have come from?”

  I thought he had gone dumb on me again when he finally answered in a voice barely more than a whisper, “El degüello.”

  That was Mexican death music. It signified the slitting of the throat, murder without quarter. I had heard it discussed by the soldiers, in particular a bugler who played the damn thing and brought the kind of silence to the Hick that is reserved for churches and piano recitals.

  The man’s dull, mournful reply suggested one answer to all the questions I had.

  “You were there,” I said.

  I didn’t have to say where “there” was. His silence was my answer.

  He had come from the Alamo.

  I moved away slowly, respectfully giving him room to reflect without distraction. But he did not seem to need—or want—privacy. He looked up for the first time, that single streak now dry on his cheek. The face was like something on a Creek totem, stiff and grim. But the eyes were bright and green, almost like emeralds with a touch of mint.

  “I was there but I was not,” he said. “God Almighty, I was unable to help my brethren.”

  As he spoke, and probably without realizing it, he used the sharp middle finger of his left hand to cut what looked like a small cross in the drink-stained surface of my oak bar.

  “What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?” I asked anyway.

  “John,” he replied wearily, as if he were falling asleep and already had one foot in a dream.

  “I’m Nedrick,” I told him, a little more sprightly. “Nedrick Bundy.”

  If he heard, he made no indication. “The degüello,” he said again.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  A pained squint slowly closed in around John’s eyes. “They needed guns. Men. You know what I had?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He was still looking through me with those narrowed eyes. A second tear followed the first. It was not a dream but a nightmare he was in.

  John uttered a single word with such sadness, such longing, that it uncorked a bottle of hurt that just flowed . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mansfield, Ohio, December 1834

  For half the year, the hills and the farms are easy. The two fingers of the Mohican River were touched by God with fertility, as surely and whole hog as the rambunctious Adam and Eve. The town that grew there was just as fecund, producing farms and businesses and population with rapidity that at first intrigued the local red men, then perplexed and alarmed them.

  I got there in 1832. I was in my fifties, then, and a little less patient than I had been in my youth. No, maybe that’s not the word. I was patient to watch things grow. I was unforgiving—that’s a better word—unforgiving for things that grew bad. I could nurse blight or bugs
from my plants but that was a natural, God-created competition. What people do is rarely that.

  Where I lived before, in Warren, Pennsylvania, was showing signs of smoky, noisy blight. Too many forges, too many mills, too much hammering, too many people hollering to be heard, too many horses complaining, too many cartwheels turning, too many youngsters shouting and crying and getting yelled at.

  Too much civilization.

  I worked on a sheep and goat farm nigh the Allegheny River and wasn’t attached to a thing but the earth. I would always stay out until sunset and took that moment to look west and admire what remained of the uncorrupted work of God. I would go to my shack, then, and read the Good Book by the failing light before joining my employers, the elderly Brandons, for supper in the main house. It was over apple pie one night that I announced my intention to leave. I hadn’t planned to say that, hadn’t even planned to go; it just, suddenly, felt right. I waited till a replacement could be found, and set out on a spring morning, at dawn, with just a rifle, my Bible, and a grain sack generously filled with produce I had grown.

  It took me about six months to arrive at where I didn’t even know I was headed. I was meandering west, and Mansfield got in the way. I planted myself there for two reasons. First: the soil was so rich I wept when I touched it. I swear, if there were seeds, those tears would have grown them. It was like God had sent me a vision instructing me to work this land. Second: that good earth was the only sign of God in the region. Oh, people had dutifully built two churches, but few parishioners passed through their doors and the parsons lacked enthusiasm. One of them told me he had agreed to this sinecure just to be close to Pittsburgh for when some aged clergyman there hung up his frock.

  “I want to be in a real city,” he told me, “with real sin.”

  I was not sure how the padre meant that, but I decided to trust the calling and not the man.

  With more faith than planning, I elected to use what money I’d saved to buy a small plot, plant my own fruits and vegetables, and use the unsteady old barn for Bible meetings.

  I did not grow up prayerful. I was born and raised on a small farm in Massachusetts before, during, and after the War for Independence. We were the people who constantly broke the King’s peace, and we suffered the first and enduring wrath of the Redcoats. Floggings, hangings, deprivation of goods and services. I learned to shoot at a young age—at game, since my pa was off fighting. I learned to work the land. When the war ended and pa didn’t come back, me and my younger brother Nathaniel stayed on till my ma went, too. From sadness, I believe. She was the one who had turned to the Holy Book and found solace in its lessons. I often sat by her as she read, more for her comfort than mine. She taught me reading, and soon I was reading to her—right up till the end.

  Nathaniel apprenticed with a granite-carver—he had the stocky build and arms for it—but I did not want to stay. The spirit of freedom smelled too much like blood. It still does, only then—well, then I was younger and thought a new place would clean it from my nostrils. I picked and hunted my way through New York and into Pennsylvania. I read verse by the light of many a campfire. I felt the presence of God Himself under the million eyes of night—the stars above and the lesser ones lurking in the shadows, “all kinds of living creatures” that were created amidst the innocent coming of the world. I stopped in Warren, partly to share my faith but also to put my hands in soil again, to make things grow. When the choke of man became too great, I departed.

  You know of my reaching Mansfield, about me growing food outside the barn and over the next two years, one by one, then two by two, and eventually in groups of ten or twelve growing souls inside the barn. They grew me, too, a community of loving souls as surely my God had intended. Eventually, I fell hard in love with a member of the flock: Mrs. Astoria Laveau, a New Orleans–born widow who used her inheritance to found and run a library.

  I knew how to read, but it was there, from her, that I learned how to read. How to understand what was in the mind of the writer, why words were chosen just-so, why some writers described everything in detail and while others did not. Why some stories were told by narrators and others were not. A world opened for me, and with it—my heart opened, too.

  Everyone, if they’re lucky, has love. She was deeply mine. She was spiritual. She had all those many books—not a day went by that I did not learn from her. She was worldly and desirable yet we did not cross into sin. Not that I did not desire it. I went to kiss her, one time after a springtime walk, but she bowed her forehead to me. It was love-made-chaste. . . at least, for me. Alas, when I finally summoned the gumption to propose an official courtship I was spurned. Astoria said she loved me as a preacher, as a friend, as that accursed word “brother,” but not as a man. I learned that at the same time I was considering betrothal she had feelings for another man, a blacksmith. It was just gossip, whispers, until they came to a dance together and I saw how affectionate she could be within the bounds of public decency. My heart stopped beating for anything but getting away.

  I left carrying what I had left Massachusetts with. It was nearly winter, last winter, and at my age and lack of girth, it meant the only direction I could plausibly head was south.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, May 1836

  “So you got away to Texas,” I said. “Love broke your heart. Did Texas heal it?”

  “In . . . in a manner of speaking,” he replied.

  John was still looking ahead. He had told the story without stopping, without hesitation, and without emotion. Just like he was reading from the Bible, but to himself.

  When John didn’t answer, didn’t nod, didn’t even blink, I approached the bar with a cloth and pretended to wipe it. I had already done that before he’d arrived, and it was spotless.

  “You got to Texas a year ago,” I coaxed. “That was before things boiled over.”

  His eyes shifted to the mirror. If he saw his own reflection, he did not react.

  “So few people . . . so much anger,” John said. Then said no more.

  “I heard people talking here how Santa Anna upset his own people when he threw out the Constitution,” I said. “Do you remember that?”

  “Central government, more power to him, less to the states,” John replied, nodding. “I remember that. And the revolts. We heard about the revolts in Oaxaca, Zacatecas, others.”

  “We?”

  “Colonel Fannin. Colonel Bowie.”

  “Jim Bowie? It must have been exciting to know him,” I said. I took a second look at the knife visible on his hip. It was as sure a carte de visite as any.

  “It was—a time,” he said vaguely with the first hint of a smile. “I learned that Bible, fist, and gun were connected. Knit. Security, life, and salvation did not exist separately.”

  He was becoming talkative, and I went to pour him another drink. The hand uncurled from the glass and settled on top.

  “Thank you, no,” he said. “Any more would be vulgar.”

  I had no idea what that meant, except that he didn’t want any. I set the bottle down. “I have bread . . . some rabbit in the back.”

  He did not respond. I shouldn’t have led him down another road. His story interested me, and I wanted to hear it.

  “Where did you meet Colonel Bowie?” I asked.

  He replied, “Just outside a war, in Mexico.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LANCASTER HILL is the pseudonym of New York Times bestselling author Jeff Rovin. Rovin has been an assistant editor for DC Comics and the editor in chief of the Weekly World News, and has authored multiple titles in the Tom Clancy: Op-Center series, as well as the science fiction novel Zero-G with William Shatner and the fantasy novel A Vision of Fire with Gillian Anderson.

 

 

 
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