by Hazel Rumney
“My ears are listening, Pastor, and I don’t hear a goddam thing.”
“Don’t blaspheme God, John Wesley, or you’ll tempt fate.” The pastor extended the Bible toward Wesley. “The Holy Book will save me.”
“Nothing can protect you now, Gentry, and save your breath ’cause you’ll need it to dig up Tom Blevins.”
Gentry pressed his Bible against his heart and walked silently toward the crude cross Samuel had fashioned from a pair of weathered boards. The pastor walked slowly, taking a half hour to reach the site. John Wesley relished the walk like a tomcat toying with an injured mouse before the kill.
When they reached the cross beneath a stand of live oaks, Gentry ignored his accuser and stared at the earth, gratified that he had taken twice as long as usual to give Tom Blevins a proper grave, not just a hole in the ground.
“Quit stalling and start digging,” Wesley ordered. “I want his body removed and scattered to the four winds.”
Gentry smiled at the command, even if the task was repulsive and ungodly. He removed his coat and hung it from the stub of a broken tree branch, then placed his Bible on the rock at the base of the tree. After rolling up his sleeves, Gentry stepped to the mound of dirt and attacked it a shovelful at a time. He worked slowly and deliberately, tossing the dirt in a pile that grew taller as he dug deeper. The digging was easy compared to the first time he had excavated the hole. He had thought a lot that dark night about how to provide Tom Blevins a grave beyond John Wesley’s reach.
As the pastor shoveled dirt, John Wesley circled him on his horse, never getting down, likely so he could dash away if anyone approached. Gentry doubted that possibility as no one else but him and the dead man’s wife and son knew where Tom Blevins lay buried. Gentry kept digging, confident that Tom Blevins would rest in peace in spite of John Wesley.
Finally, when the hole was about three feet deep, Gentry hit hard, unturned dirt. “I’m at the bottom,” he announced.
“Then throw out the body.”
Gentry shook his head. “Can’t do it.”
“I don’t care how disgusting the chore is, throw out the body.”
“It’s not here!”
“What do you mean, it’s not here? Don’t tell me Tom Blevins arose from the grave!”
“Well, he’s not here. Come see for yourself.”
Wesley yanked the reins on his black gelding and steered him to the shallow pit where Gentry stood. The gelding shook his head and blew his displeasure as Wesley forced him to approach the hole and the pastor. Standing up in his stirrups to inspect the hole, Wesley pointed the shotgun at Gentry.
“There’s nothing here but me,” Gentry said.
Wesley’s face reddened with rage. “What’s your play, Gentry?”
“I dug two graves the night you ambushed Tom Blevins.”
“Then you dug a grave too many, Gentry. Take me to the other and dig him up.”
“Won’t do it, John Wesley. Your hatred ends here, ends now.”
“My hatred will simmer until every carpetbagger and Yankee-lover like you is dead in Texas.” Wesley twisted the reins and directed his horse to the foot of the hole, all the time aiming the shotgun at Gentry. “Take me to his grave or die here, Gentry.”
The pastor shook his head. “The feud’s over for Tom Blevins! You’ll not drag him back into it.”
“Then, Gentry, you just dug your own grave.”
The parson unrolled his sleeves, then buttoned the cuffs. “I’d like to die in my coat with my Bible in my hand.”
“Nothing doing,” Wesley answered, pointing the shotgun at Gentry and backing his horse away from the foot of the would-be grave.
Gentry stared at the shotgun’s twin black eyes, looking into the darkness of eternity. His faith gave him courage as he stepped to the foot of the hole and used the shovel to push himself out of his grave, pulling the implement with him. He straightened to his full height, then stepped away from the edge of the pit, his hand gripping tightly the shovel’s handle.
The gelding tossed his head and snorted. Wesley struggled to control the animal and keep his weapon aimed at Gentry.
“You plan to shoot me in the back like you did Tom Blevins, John Wesley, or can you look me in the eyes when you pull the trigger?”
“Damn right I can, Pastor. Prepare to meet your maker, you son of a bitch.”
Gentry nodded, vowing to die as a man, not a coward. He thrust his chest out and flung the shovel aside.
The abrupt movement frightened the fidgety gelding, which suddenly reared on its hind legs as John Wesley tugged the reins to control the animal. The rider cursed God as the gelding landed on his hooves.
Gentry flung his hands in the air and jumped at the horse, screaming shrilly.
The frightened animal bucked and reared on its hind legs again.
Wesley yanked the reins with his left hand, while his right hand flailed to control the shotgun.
Gentry kicked the shovel at the bucking mount.
The whining gelding reared again, kicking the air with his forelegs, as Wesley lost his balance.
Boom! The shotgun exploded, then fell from Wesley’s hand.
The black hide of the gelding’s neck turned red, splotched with blood.
Wesley tumbled backward, just as the dying horse collapsed on its back, the gelding’s legs twitching uncontrollably. Wesley disappeared beneath the horse, which thrashed about momentarily until death overtook the gelding.
Wesley screamed in agony, first at the pain and then in horror as he realized he was pinned between his dead mount and the cold earth. He fought against the carcass to free himself, panicking at the futility of his exertions, then glancing about to find his shotgun.
Realizing Wesley’s goal, Gentry dashed around the slain horse and grabbed the shotgun. He stepped to Wesley, thrashing on the ground, his right arm flopping helplessly at his side, evidently broken in the fall. Desperate, Wesley reached with his left hand for the pistol pinned under his right hip, but he could not reach the sidearm, the pain from his broken bones pulsing like molten lead through his body. He screamed. Gentry stuck the shotgun at Wesley’s ear and stepped on his broken arm, drawing more shrieks and curses from his former captor. The pastor bent over and yanked the revolver from Wesley’s holster, then backed to the rear of the horse, pulling Wesley’s carbine from its scabbard.
“I can’t use my arm,” Wesley cried. “My leg feels broke. Help me! Please, Pastor, help me!”
Gentry carried the weapons to the tree where he had hung his coat, dropping the rifle and revolver, then breaking open the shotgun’s breech to make sure both barrels had been fired. They had. He then snapped the barrels back in place, grabbed the business end of the weapon, and beat it against the tree until the stock broke.
All the time Wesley screamed in agony. “Help me, don’t shoot me,” he cried.
Until then, Gentry had never considered shooting John Wesley, so he picked up the carbine and pointed it at the feudist.
Wesley begged for mercy. “Please don’t, Pastor, please don’t shoot me. I’m not ready to die.”
“Neither was Tom Blevins,” Gentry answered, then aimed at Wesley’s hat a couple feet behind the wounded man’s head. He pulled the trigger. The gun exploded. The hat flew backward. Wesley flinched, then begged for mercy.
Gentry fought the devil’s urging to shoot John Wesley and put him out of his misery like he would a wounded animal, but animals didn’t have souls. John Wesley did, no matter how dark it might be. Instead of shooting over his antagonist again, Gentry turned to the hole he had twice dug and then he fired, emptying the gun into the pit that John Wesley had planned to make the pastor’s grave. When he had levered the final hull out of the weapon, he grabbed it by the barrel and beat it against the tree until it, too, shattered.
Once the carbine was useless, he picked up the revolver and took it over to Wesley, whose eyes widened as he whimpered in pain and fear. Wesley fought against the gelding’s body to
free himself, but the excruciating pain of his crushed hip and broken leg left him breathless and grimacing as tears of agony drained from his eyes.
In an ungodly moment, Gentry squatted by John Wesley and stuck the revolver barrel in his ear. “The devil in me says I should pull the trigger. What do you think, John Wesley?”
“No, no,” Wesley pleaded.
Gentry nodded. “Maybe you’re right.” He stood up, then stepped to the gelding’s head. Bending over, he shot the animal in the ear, not to ensure the gelding was dead as much as to terrorize John Wesley. It was an ungodly gesture, Gentry knew, but one that seemed appropriate nonetheless. Then he shot the pistol in the air until it was empty, broke it apart, and tossed the parts in the directions of the four winds, just as Wesley would have had him do with Tom Blevins’s body.
Gentry retreated to the tree to retrieve his coat, which he grabbed and draped over his arm. He picked up his Bible, held it against his heart, and offered a silent prayer of gratitude to God.
“Please, Pastor, please!” Wesley sobbed, “Help me! Don’t leave me trapped here!”
Gentry finished his prayer and turned to his tormentor.
Wesley pleaded, “Give me a chance!”
“Like the chance you gave Tom Blevins or planned to give me?”
“I was funning you, Pastor,” he cried. “It hurts, it hurts bad. Please help me.”
Gentry nodded. “Okay, I’ll give you the best medicine I can, the Word of God.” He opened the third chapter of Ecclesiastes and read to John Wesley about a season and a time to every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die. When he completed the chapter, he closed his Bible and looked at John Wesley, helplessly trapped beneath his horse. “I think, John Wesley, you need some time alone with God. May he have mercy on your soul for I have no more to spare today.”
“Don’t leave me, Pastor, don’t. I hurt so.”
“No more than the families you’ve wounded with your meanness. Good day, John Wesley. You need to have a long talk with God about all your sins.”
“Please don’t go.”
“I promised my family I’d be back for my noon meal,” Gentry said, “and I promise you I’ll be back tomorrow.” Gentry turned his back on his tormentor and walked away. He was halfway home before the sound of Wesley’s screams and cries died away in the distance.
As he came within sight of his modest home, the front door flung open, and Susannah and Sammy bolted out toward him, shouting and crying as they ran. He raced toward them, opening his arms for them. They ran into his embrace, and he grasped them both.
“We heard shots, then feared you were dead,” Susannah sobbed.
“Are you okay, Papa?” Sammy asked. “What happened?”
“God decided not to call me home, son.”
“But John Wesley,” Susannah asked, “what about him?”
Gentry pulled himself from the grasp of his wife and son, then put his arms over their shoulders as they walked back to their humble place.
Sammy echoed his mother’s question. “What about John Wesley?”
“He’s contemplating his relationship with God.”
“And what about you?” Susannah asked.
“I’m fine, just hungry. In the morning, though, I’ll need to retrieve my shovel and see if I dug a grave too many.”
Preston Lewis is the Spur Award–winning author of thirty western, juvenile, and historical novels. He is best known for his comic western series, The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax.
FRANK & JESSE
BY BILL BROOKS
I
They were hired to go up to the summer range and watch over Mr. Flaver’s herd of shorthorn cattle for the season and then bring them down to the valley before the snow fell.
“You boys think you can handle that?” Mr. Flaver asked over whiskey at the Two Queens there in Askin.
“We’ve been watching over cattle a lot,” Frank said. “Rode all the trails before them Kansas grangers put the kibosh to the herds and starting putting up bob wire.”
“You boys in the war too?”
“Was, ain’t no more,” Jesse said. “I reckon you heard that, though.”
“I reckon I did, seeing’s how it’s been over ten years. What you boys been doing in the meantime?”
“Knocking around, mostly,” Frank said.
“Knocking around,” Mr. Flaver said, as if he didn’t see that as much of an accomplishment. But he needed two men to ride up into high country and take over from the two that was there. Or, make that one. Blevins had come down two days ago asking for his pay.
“I’m sick,” he said.
“Sick of what?” Mr. Flaver asked.
“Sick of them goddamn stinking cattle and sick of that one-eyed son of a bitch Morrisey. He can’t cook worth a damn and I sure can’t neither, nor will I. So let me collect what I’m owed for the past month and good luck to you.”
“Well, that is a hell of a piece of news,” Mr. Flaver said, getting out his checkbook and scratching a month’s pay on it with a nib pen he dipped into ink; then he tore it out of the book, handed it over, and said, “I sure hope you ain’t lookin’ for no work ’round Askin no more, ’cause nobody’s gone hire a quitter.”
“That’s fine, they ain’t, ’cause I’m quittin’ this country and headed for the gold strikes up in Colorado. Georgette Mims is going with me.”
“You mean that crib whore works out behind Winegrove’s lumberyard?”
“I reckon you met her, then?”
“I reckon I heard of her. She’s diddled ever’thing that walks or talks, you included, must be.”
“Well, she’s officially out of the whore business. We’re going to get married.”
“Sounds like you two will make the perfect couple. Don’t let that door hit you in the pockets.”
So that was it and Mr. Flaver needed a hand to hire to go on up to the summer meadow and help out Morrisey, the leftover man. He ran into Frank and Jesse there in the saloon and judged they looked like hands the way they were dressed in faded blue shirts with large kerchiefs draped around their necks, dungarees rolled halfway up the shafts of the worn boots, and those Stetsons that had seen better days notched back off their white foreheads and weathered faces.
They were as lean and hard as fence posts but stood relaxed with one foot resting on the rail and elbows propped on the bar slavering over a nice cold beer and a shot of good whiskey before them.
Jesse smoked a cigarette and Frank stared up at a mounted buffalo head over the bar and muttered, “Big son of a bitch, ain’t it?”
Frank looked, and said, “Yeah. Wonder who got that and where they got it at. Ain’t seen a buffalo anywhere in Texas no longer or nowhere else for that matter I know of.”
“Me either,” Jesse said, lifting his beer and swallowing half down, then swiping his long sable mustaches with thumb and forefinger to get the beer foam out. “I knew an old boy in the war claimed he hunted buffalo with Custer in Kansas. Said that son of a bitch missed and shot his own horse out from under him, and this was in Kiowa country, I do believe.”
“Jesus, he was that bad a shot, huh?”
“I reckon. Must have surprised the shit out of that buffalo.”
“His horse too, I reckon,” said Jesse.
They both laughed at that.
They were just getting around to that other thing cowboys talk about, women, when Mr. Flaver approached them.
“Stand you boys a drink?”
“I won’t stop you,” Jesse said.
“I won’t neither,” said Frank.
Mr. Flaver circled a forefinger in the air and the barman brought over a bottle.
“Whyn’t we walk this over to a table,” Mr. Flaver said.
“Sounds like a capital idea,” Frank said and the three took the bottle and found an empty table and propped themselves into chairs. Flaver poured, then they drank, then he refilled each of their glasses.
“I was wondering if either of you is looki
ng for a job maybe?”
Frank looked at Jesse and Jesse looked back. Frank usually did most of the talking because Jesse didn’t care much for discussing business of any kind. He’d talk you to death if it was talking horses, dogs he’d owned, which was the best of the cattle trails he and Frank had ridden—Jesse was partial to the Goodnight-Loving while Frank thought the Sedalia-Baxter Springs was the better, but that was only because he met a strawberry blonde chippie who’d taken his virginity in Baxter Springs, and a man’s first time is something not easily forgot or let go of.
But neither Frank nor Jesse missed too much about trailing them damn mossy horns that would hook, or stampede, in the middle of the night, and you go racing after them on the deck of a hurricane pony praying to the Lord it don’t step in some damn gopher hole and pitch you headlong just to be stamped into ground meat by those hooves.
A cattle drive was, in fact, how Frank and Jesse first met, going up the Western trail.
Frank and Jesse had both fought in the War Between the States: Frank for the Union, and Jesse for the Confederacy. But once the war was over, they put it away because a man just can’t keep fighting a war forever is the way they both looked at it and that’s what struck a chord of friendship between them. They were just young men who were lucky enough to survive getting shot or bayoneted and came home with all their limbs attached.
They’d both taken up droving for the time being. It was an adventure—kinda like the war, only not so terrible.
And besides, they got to do it from the back of a horse and they both admired and appreciated that species of animal a great deal.
“The onliest thing can match a good horse for beauty is a woman,” Frank often opined around the fire or in a saloon.
“Except if the woman is ugly like some I seen,” Jesse offered.
“Listen to me, old son,” Frank would as likely say. “You turn out all the lights and they’re as beautiful as you like them to be.”
“True enough.”
“A woman and a horse has a lot in common,” Frank would say.
“And you can ride both.”
“True too.”