Make Me No Grave

by Hayley Stone

  But there were no gamblers in the Baxter Saloon, nor even a table looked suited for play. In fact, there was hardly a soul in the place, with the exception of the proprietor sleeping on his fist behind the counter, and a lady sitting all by her lonesome. An untouched glass of something gold and murky sat on the table in front of her.

  I took my hat off and motioned with it to the seat across from her. “Mind if I join you?”

  She must not have been all there, because when I spoke, it seemed to give her a start, though she recovered quickly, face hardening like granite. Her shoulders stiffened into the back of her chair.

  “Are you one of the marshals everyone’s been talking about?” she asked me. She had a unique way of looking ahead without making eye contact. Made me wonder if she were putting on airs for my benefit, or if she acted this way with everyone. Like she was seeing past them.

  I looked at the drink. Or maybe it’s got something to do with what happened today.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, smiling hesitantly, and leaning into her line of sight. “Though I can’t speak to what’s been said about me.”

  She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t object to my taking a seat either, so I sat.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t been properly introduced.” I reached my hand over the table. “Apostle Richardson.”

  Her eyes cut to me. They were neither blue nor green, but some kind of middling color. A defeated shade of spring. Reminded me of my home back in North Carolina, before the war had its way with the countryside.

  “Apostle?” she repeated, and for the first time, there was some evidence of life in her voice and manner. She pushed a straight curtain of black hair away from her face. “Like a disciple of Christ?”

  “Well, I like to think so. Then again, some days it’s just a name.”

  A smile shivered on her lips but was gone almost as soon as it appeared. Driven out by discipline, I wagered. This was not a woman accustomed to making light. She gave my hand a quick, fragile shake—as if it were a snake that’d bite her—and introduced herself as Ruth Kingery.

  Well, that explains it. I recalled Dick and Chuck’s earlier commentary on Ms. Kingery’s humor. Or lack thereof.

  “Nice to meet you, Ruth.”

  “Miss Kingery,” she corrected. It sounded tired and rehearsed, not defensive. Apparently not wanting to offend, she added more gently, “That is, if it’s all the same to you, Marshal, I prefer going by Miss Kingery.”

  “Apologies, Miss Kingery. Meant nothing by it.”

  “I know,” she said and went back to watching the still surface of her drink.

  I was about to get up, supposing my company wasn’t welcome and not wanting to impose on the woman, when Miss Kingery asked, “You’re here about the outlaws, aren’t you?”

  Relaxing back into my seat, I answered with a simple nod.

  “Then why weren’t you here sooner?” The area around her mouth was tight, lips pulled in against her teeth. Before I could reply, defend the tardiness of myself and my colleagues, it was like the pressure escaped her, and she shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that. It wasn’t a fair question.”

  “No. You’re right, Miss Kingery. We should’ve been here. We should’ve stopped these men…” and woman, “…weeks ago. But it don’t always work out that way. Time and distance ain’t always on the law’s side.” I rotated my hat by the brim, turning it around a couple times, running my fingers along the loose edge where the fabric was starting to peel back. “Honestly, ma’am. I would’ve prevented the bloodshed if I could, and I do regret we weren’t here in time to help the folks of Baxter Springs.”

  She watched me intently, her face softening. “You speak well, Marshal. I appreciate the sentiment. Though it doesn’t change what’s happened, does it?”

  “No, ma’am. Sadly, all the words in the world can’t reverse a bullet once it’s been fired.”

  “No…” she agreed slowly, a frown dragging down her features. She was the kind of woman a man called handsome, being not quite pretty and not quite ugly, and him trying to be polite with what words he’s got. Even with her square jaw and underbite, she was still attractive in her own way, though she didn’t seem the type to take much pride in her appearance, given the rags she wore and the makeup she didn’t. Not that it was my place to judge.

  Over at the counter, the owner snored loudly enough to wake himself. He looked around in sudden alarm before remembering where he was and seeing there was no cause for concern. As he settled his cheek back into his palm, I lifted a hand to catch his attention. He perked up, cleared his throat.

  “What can I do you for, Marshal?” he asked from across the room.

  “Sarsaparilla, if you’ve got it. Water if you don’t.” I was tempted to order something stiffer—a whiskey, say—but each time I considered alcohol, the ghostly prospect of my father loomed tall and ugly in my mind. A wretched shadow of failure. I feared the same weakness for drink nested somewhere inside me, just waiting. My father wasn’t always a lousy drunk, after all. There had to be a time before the bottle.

  The owner ambled over and set the sarsaparilla down in front of me. When I went to pay him, he just shook his head. “On the house, Marshal.” I nodded my thanks, and he went back to the bar where he pretended to clean some glasses for a while, made a lame attempt to polish the counter, all before finally dozing off again on one of the stools.

  “You don’t drink?” Miss Kingery asked me while I tipped the sarsaparilla bottle back.

  I thought about all the times when I was younger, my mother shifting me from one side of her hip to the other while trying to appeal to my father’s sense of responsibility, surrounded by the other patrons’ lurid stares. For heaven’s sake, Nathaniel, she’d say, sometimes discreetly and sometimes not, this has got to stop. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you? Can’t you see what it’s doing to your family?

  I wiped the corner of my mouth, swallowing quickly to answer. “Not if I can help it. And by the look of it, you don’t either.”

  “Oh.” She peered down her stubby nose at the full glass. “I wasn’t going to drink it.”

  “I gathered.”

  “I find the taste revolting.”

  “Why’d you order it then?”

  She shrugged, the most human gesture I’d seen from her thus far. I think she was starting to warm to me. I took another swig while she thought about her answer. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to know what it felt like to have the option.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Option of doing what, you don’t mind my asking?”

  “The option of sleeping. Forgetting myself. Just for a little bit. I just need—” She stopped and picked up a thought from somewhere farther down the trail. “Anyway, that’s how liquor works, doesn’t it? You drink it, and the whole world goes away.”

  “Afraid it always comes back, and never kindly. Besides, what’s got a gentle lady like yourself so desperate to forget anyhow? Can’t imagine you’ve many skeletons cluttering your closet.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes, boring holes into the top of the table. “This have anything to do with what happened today? With that fellow who talked you up?”

  Her lips parted, but it was another few seconds before any words came out of her mouth. “How do you know about that?”

  “Everyone’s got a story when you’ve got a badge,” I said with a brief smile.

  She ran a single finger along one wooden crevice in the table, going over it enough times that I began to worry she was going to pick up a splinter. “You may not have noticed, but I’m not a very personable person. I know what they all say about me when they think I’m not listening. They call me cold.”

  “Pious was the way I heard it.”

  “Pious,” she repeated with fake surprise. “Funny how something that’s supposed to be good can be made into such an insult.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following. What’s this got to do with the outlaw you spoke to earlie
r?”

  “I liked him.” I saw it then: the passion in her eyes, the embers of some deep feeling. Wasn’t love, of course, but given time, might’ve become it. “He was the first man to treat me like I was a woman of flesh and blood. Not some stony gargoyle on a church—architecture to be ignored. He made me feel like I could be something other than walking scripture. Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised…”

  “Proverbs 31.”

  “You know your Bible.” She nodded approvingly. “But I haven’t been praised, Marshal. I’ve been condemned. Isolated. Cast out. People look at me, and they think I’m judging them. All the time, judging. And who wants to constantly be reminded of their sins?”

  “What’d he say to you, Miss Kingery?”

  “What’d he say to me? He said, ‘God surely broke the mold with you, Miss.’ I told him, ‘If you’re trying to appeal to my sense of vanity, sir, you’re wasting your time and mine.’ You know what he said to that? He said, ‘Actually, I was appealing to God's vanity, and His good taste, but you go on and take the credit, if you like.’"

  She laughed—the sound bursting suddenly from her like a sneeze, and she was too slow in clapping her hand over her mouth to stop it. Tears clung to her lashes, about ready to fall.

  I didn’t know what to say, or whether I should say anything, but I was starting to think maybe she needed that whiskey after all.

  “The first man,” she said again, hiccuping dryly, “I’ve ever given consideration to, and he turns out to be a damnable outlaw. Wouldn’t it figure?”

  “That’s surely some bad luck, ma’am,” I said, heart hurting for her.

  “Bad luck or poor judgment?”

  Her eyes were shining, wet and dark. I patted my vest pocket instinctively, but I wasn’t carrying a handkerchief on me. I’d stopped that habit around the time my wife left me. Hadn’t needed one after that.

  “Sometimes there’s no difference. Did he say anything else?” I was hoping for some nugget of information that might lead my band to discovering the bandits’ base of operations. It felt a touch dirty, given the poor lady’s state of distress, but the best way I could help Miss Kingery was to make sure something like this didn’t happen in Baxter Springs ever again.

  Pressing her thumb into her sleeve, she used it to touch the corners of her eyes, her breaths coming and going in quick little gasps. I was reminded of the way my mother tried to stop herself from crying in front of me after my father leveled some particularly mean or nasty epithet at her. When she stood in the square of light coming from our front door, watching him storm out and disappear into the dark fields, heading to God-only-knows-where.

  “Ma’am.” I reached over, taking her free hand. It was the only thing I could think to do to help comfort her. Miss Kingery looked down at my hand, but without the same suspicion as before, and she didn’t remove hers. “Please, this could be important. Did he say anything else?”

  “He liked my bonnet.” She rolled her eyes, as if even she recognized it as a line.

  I smiled. “I bet he did. Anything else? Anything about where he was headed to, or coming from?”

  She thought long and hard, moving her eyes along the ceiling. “I remember asking him whether he meant to stay in Baxter Springs long. He said he’d love to, but that he had some business with the railroad that was taking him north.”

  Might’ve been a story to look upstanding and professional. But it also could’ve been an indication that the gang meant to hit a train. I held the Kansas geography well in my head, so I knew how far it was to the first junction. Wasn’t a stretch to imagine them heading up toward Emporia, Peabody, or Walton, or swinging harder west toward Wichita. It’d take some hard riding, but they could do it if they’d a mind to.

  There was no lack of railway to prey on. The Santa Fe had most of the territory in Kansas platted out, and as of the beginning of this year, its main line had made it as far as the Colorado border, pushing to meet up with the Central Pacific out of Sacramento and unite the coasts. The Best Enterprise in the West, as the papers toted it, was moving ahead full steam, spreading across the face of the country in a spiderweb of steel. It was a fine, marvelous thing by all accounts, but it made it damn near impossible to predict where a robbery might take place. Everyone expected the marshals to keep order, but we were already spread thin. Simple reality was we couldn’t be everywhere all of the time.

  Still, it was something. More than we had to go on before, and it gave me an idea about the route the gang might take. I thanked Ms. Kingery for her help, and placing my hat back onto my head, I stood to leave.

  “He’s dead now,” she said, looking straight ahead again. “Chuck and the sheriff shot him as they were leaving the bank. You probably saw him out there on the street, all full of holes.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Along with the others.”

  “The bullets didn’t kill him immediately, not like the one shot in the bank. I was there with the doctor. I remember the look in his eyes, as he was dying. He was afraid, Marshal. He was so afraid.”

  Most men are at the end.

  Ms. Kingery stared up at me, and I was afraid she was going to start crying again. There was something desolate about her expression, like a man in the desert who can only go five miles more without a drink of water, and just realized he needs to go ten in order to reach it.

  “I can’t get that image out of my mind. Him lying there, pawing at me with his hands caked in blood and dust, begging me to save him—pleading for his life—and me sitting there, helpless as a fish.” She shut her eyes and shook her head. “I know it’s foolish. We’d only just met. But it feels like I watched an entire future drain into the dust. Just a few hours earlier, I’d imagined what it might be like to live in the light of that cowboy smile, day after day. And now I’m never going to see it again. It feels like God gaveth, only so He could taketh it away. How does a person reconcile with that?”

  I thought about my ex-wife. The way she’d wear her hair up when it was hot, and the way she’d playfully swat at my hands whenever I went to move away some of the strands glued to her neck. I thought about the way she smiled at me without ever showing her teeth, sensitive about a snaggletooth she had. And how I took for granted that that was how it would always be, just me and her. I thought about the man with the fancy suit, the black derby, and bright liar’s eyes, who smelled like the city and came with money and promises I couldn’t make.

  I might’ve gone by Apostle now, but I was no preacher. I didn’t know what words of advice or consolation to offer the lady.

  “You just do,” I said, a dull ache beginning in my chest that I knew would eventually float to my head, making it hard to think. I hoped sleep would head it off.

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “Then I’m not saying it right. It sure ain’t easy. There’s no trick to it either. Just takes time. But look: that man made his choices, and he answered for them. You’re still alive to make yours. That’s something.”

  I wished Ms. Kingery a good rest of her night and took off. Last I glimpsed the poor woman, she was slamming back her glass of stale whiskey and making a face.

  Chapter Eight

  Walking into Coffeyville with a badge was tantamount to walking into a storage room full of black powder with your hair on fire. You’d find out what was in there all right, but you were just as likely to get yourself blown away for the trouble.

  Wade knew as well as I did that nobody in Coffeyville was going to roll over on their fellow outlaw, not on account of any marshals. I considered going in under the pretense of being a couple of cowpunchers, but it was a bit early for driving season, we had no cows, and there was a good chance Wade or I would’ve been recognized, besides.

  So I came up with a different approach, though nothing so fancy as to be considered an actual plan.

  “I have to say, Apostle, this has got to be the most brainless, idiotic, stupid idea I’ve ever heard of, let alone
participated in,” Wade complained from the seat beside me, holding the coach gun in his lap. He smiled suddenly, a bit of breakfast still lodged between his canine and another tooth. “And I love it. Hah! How long now, do you think?”

  Above us, the Kansas sky was a wrinkled blanket of grey, and behind us a fierce wind was blowing up from the south, plastering my coat to my back. I’d already had to give up wearing my hat, lest I lose it to a sudden gale. “Could be another few hours,” I said, watching the road, “Or it could be another day. Hard to judge.”

  Wade banged on the roof of the carriage in a quick one-two with the side of his fist. “How you holding up, son?” he hollered to Dempsey inside.

  There was a weak bang in reply.

  “Maybe we should pull off, let the poor kid out for some air,” Wade said.

  We’d discovered early into our trip, not long after our departure from the first stage near Coffeyville, that Dempsey suffered from coach sickness. Maybe it was the constant rocking motion—up, down, and around, like a baby bounced on a knee—combined with the tight interior of the coach that did it for him. Whatever the case, Dempsey needed out every few hours or else he decorated the thorough brace with vomit. Each time I was sure he didn’t have anything left in his stomach, he surprised me by poking his head out past the heavy curtains and heaving onto the wheels. Poor kid.

  “You want to switch off?” I asked Wade.

  The man frowned beneath his whiskers, eyes going dark and humorless. “I didn’t say that.”

  Wade shared Dempsey’s hostility toward the inside of the coach, but for a different reason. He didn’t like being shut up whatsoever. I think it had something to do with an event in his childhood involving a cabinet or a trunk, but he wouldn’t talk about it. I’d learned not to ask.