The Whippoorwill Trilogy

by Sharon Sala

  “Well, let’s get moving,” Eulis said, and turned the mule away from the fort toward Dripping Springs.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Letty asked.

  Eulis frowned. “You heard the directions the same as I did. If you have a different opinion as to where I should aim, then let me know now.”

  “I suppose we’re going in the right direction,” Letty said.

  “All right then,” Eulis muttered. “Giddyup mule,” he said, and kicked the mule lightly in the flanks.

  It responded with a buck and a kick and something that sounded suspiciously like a fart.

  Letty rolled her eyes. Someday she was going to live in a fine house and surround herself with people who talked pretty and smelled the same way. However, it did occur to her that if it got dark, and she could no longer see where they were going, all she had to do was follow the smell, which her old mare was already doing.

  A faraway mountain range broke the contour of the horizon, strung out along the edge of the world like a length of discarded blue ribbon. Something about the scene accentuated the emptiness with which Letty lived. She took a deep breath around what felt like a sob, then focused on the man and the mule in front of her. She couldn’t afford sentimentality. That was for women who still had hopes and dreams.

  And so they rode—across the unending prairie, toward the ribbon of blue mountains—bringing them ever closer to Dripping Springs. Beyond that, only the Good Lord knew what might happen, and Letty was hoping and praying that He understood they meant no disrespect for their pretense.

  They made camp in a grove of cottonwoods on the banks of what Eulis called a fair-to-middlin’ size creek, which he explained was one too wide to jump over, but not deep enough to drown in.

  Letty didn’t care where they stopped, only that they had. She’d ridden cowboys for the better part of her life, and had never been as sore as she was now after only one day on the back of that mare. And as if that wasn’t misery enough, she’d hoped to bathe in the creek. That dream had been dashed by the stupid mule that, not only waded into the creek to drink, but had then proceeded to get down and roll until it was wet all over, turning the water to the consistency of thick soup.

  Her mare had smelled the water and stumbled down the creek bank and into the water with such thirsty desperation that Letty couldn’t bring herself to care that her plans for a bath had been thwarted. She unpacked their meager store of supplies, walked up the creek a short distance to try and find some water that hadn’t been muddied, filled their canteens as well as a small bucket, and started back to camp.

  Even though she couldn’t see him, she could hear Eulis talking to himself as he gathered up dead fall for firewood. It sounded to her as if he was practicing a sermon. She had to give him credit for perseverance. Never in a million years would she have believed that her moment of desperation when the real Randall Ward Howe had up and died on her that their lives would have taken such a drastic turn. Sobering up the town drunk and passing him off as the preacher from back East had been the gutsiest and the craziest thing she’d ever done. That it had worked still amazed her. And here they were, following Randall Howe’s itinerary down the Amen Trail, preaching and marrying and burying wherever the need arose. She didn’t know what awaited them in Dripping Springs, but after what they’d endured, it was bound to be a snap.

  Still following the meandering creek back to their campsite, Letty paused to resettle the canteen straps on her shoulder and get a better grip on the bucket. As she did, something rustled in the bushes behind her. She turned abruptly, and as she did, accidentally spilled the water in the bucket she was carrying. Disgusted that she was going to have to make another trip back for water, she stared into the darkness, trying to see what was there. Nothing moved. She stared for a moment more, then bent down, picked up her bucket and started backing up.

  The sound came again, only off to her right.

  Her heart started to thump erratically. Whatever or whoever it was, there had to be more than one.

  Letty never had felt comfortable being outnumbered and decided it was time to call for help. She raised her voice. Not loud, but enough that she hoped to be heard a short distance.

  “Eulis!”

  He didn’t answer her, although she could still hear him preaching somewhere off in the distance.

  She took another step back. The sound followed her—now from behind. She spun, the bail of the empty bucket held tight in her hand and ready to swing.

  “Eeuulliiss!”

  She was moving away now at a swifter pace, and because she wasn’t looking where she was going, she fell. Head over heels—bucket up—canteens down—and into a tangle of scrub brush and vines. The vines came loose as she fell and once loose, automatically curled around the first thing in which they came in contact, which happened to be Letty’s arms and neck.

  Certain that she’d been captured by heathens and wasn’t long for this world, she began to scream in earnest.

  “HELP! HELP! EEEEUUULLLIIISSS!!! THEY’VE GOT ME!!”

  Something rustled near her left ear—scratching closer and closer in the dead leaves and dirt as she struggled helplessly to get up. Now it was around her ankle, then her wrist. She whimpered.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she begged, then took a deep breath and started to gag.

  Eulis was right in the middle of his third recitation of the Ten Commandments and was down to Thou shall not kill when he thought he heard Letty call. He paused, tilting his head to one side as he listened. He heard crickets, some birds, and a coyote somewhere off in the distance on an early evening hunt, but no Letty. Shrugging off the notion, he bent down to pick up another stick of firewood and resumed his recitation.

  “Thou shall not commit—”

  “HELP! HELP! EEEEUUULLLIIISSS! THEY GOT ME!”

  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Letty! Something was happening to Letty! He dropped the armload of firewood and started to run, calling out her name as he went.

  Letty heard Eulis calling, but was too busy dying to answer. Every breath she took was followed by a retch that turned her guts inside out. She tried once more to call Eulis’s name but couldn’t stop puking long enough to say the word. She was caught in a snare of vines, lying in her own puke, and except for one other time, as scared as she’d ever been.

  For a couple of seconds she was twelve years old all over again—listening to her father’s dying screams and smelling the fire as their home burned to the ground with her father in it, praying that the badger hole she was hiding in would be deep enough to keep the Indians from finding her.

  Her muse quickly ended as someone began pulling at her, freeing her arms and her neck then dragging her out of her own mess. She wanted to see—needed to know who it was that had come for her—but she was still gagging to hard to ask.

  All of a sudden she was in the water and being dragged farther and farther from the bank. She gasped as the water washed over her face and up her nose. Dear Lord. Just when she thought she’d been saved, they were trying to drown her instead. With one last surge, she came up from the water, wind-milling her arms as she tried to break free.

  Eulis ducked to miss her fist then let her go. Satisfied that she was coming to herself, he ran out of the creek and up onto the bank, putting as much distance between them as he could. There were some things that were stronger than friendship, and being skunked and all that came with it topped the list.

  “Letty! Letty! Take yourself a breath now… but just a little one. Easy now, girl. You can do it. Splash some of that water on your face and then breathe.”

  Letty shuddered then splashed, following the advice. It was Eulis. He’d saved her after all. She tried to get up, then tried to look up, but was beginning to realize her troubles were far from over. She couldn’t see, and it was all she could do to keep breathing. Her throat was tight and swollen from the inside, and her eyes burned something fierce. Still, she did as he said, splashing water and then inhal
ing, splashing again on an exhale until slowly, slowly, the gagging reflex began to slow down.

  “Oh God, oh God,” she mumbled, and then rolled from a sitting position in the water to her hands and knees. Her dress was plastered to her limbs and she could feel the long wet locks of her hair swinging back and forth against her face and neck as she rocked.

  “I’m gonna die,” she said, and then gagged again.

  Eulis sighed. Poor Letty. Once when he was a kid, he’d suffered a similar fate and he knew from experience that nothing but time was going to cure what ailed her.

  “No. You ain’t gonna die,” he said. “You might want to, but it ain’t gonna happen tonight.”

  She bent down and sloshed her face through the water, then raised up again.

  “I am. I am going to die. Something got me. Something bad. I’m blind and my guts are coming out my mouth and nose.”

  Eulis shifted nervously and took a couple more steps back. He was upwind from her and it was still not far enough away to escape that putrid stench.

  “You ain’t blind, Letty.”

  “I am so,” she said, and then started to cry.

  Eulis sighed. “Don’t cry. Please, Letty, don’t cry. You know how I hate to see a woman cry.”

  “Just shoot me now and put me out of my misery,” she begged, then dipped her face in the water again to relieve some of the pain.

  “I can’t,” Eulis said.

  Letty slapped the water with a fist and then pushed herself upright. Her hair was plastered to her scalp. Her dress was saturated clear to her skin and near to weighing her down as she swayed where she stood.

  “Damn it to hell, Eulis Potter. I’m begging you to shoot me to put me out of my misery. After all I’ve done for you, are you too big of a coward to grant the only thing I’ve ever asked of you?”

  Eulis frowned. “You’re a fine one to call a man a coward, and it’s damn sure not the first thing you ever asked me to do and you know it. I’m not the one who went and killed the preacher, but I am the man who helped hide his body and kept you from gettin’ hanged. I’ve waited on you hand and foot at the White Dove Saloon every night for the past twelve years, and you’ve still got the guts to stand there stinkin’ to high heaven and accuse me of not helpin’ you?”

  Letty’s shoulders slumped. He was right.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and shed tears anew. “You’re right. I’m wrong. So please let me die.”

  Die? Why did she keep wanting to die? Eulis could tell that she wasn’t going to get off that pity horse unless he dragged her. As badly as he hated to get close to her again, he held his breath and waded back in the water.

  Letty staggered when he grabbed her by the wrist and started pulling at her. She kept rubbing her eyes with her hand and bending over to puke, only there was nothing left to come up.

  When she could catch her breath, she begged for him to stop.

  “Eulis… wait. I can’t walk in these clothes.”

  He frowned, then took a knife out of his pocket and started cutting at the cloth.

  Letty screamed and started grabbing at herself. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Taking off your clothes so you can walk.”

  “You can’t do that! They’ll be ruined.”

  “Hellsfire, Sister Leticia, they’re already ruined.”

  She ignored the sarcasm as she swatted at his hand. “What are you talking about!”

  Eulis paused. “The smell. It ain’t never gonna come off the clothes, and it’ll be a while before it comes off of you.”

  “Smell? What smell?” Letty asked.

  Eulis gawked. She had to be kidding. Then he realized that if her eyes were swelled shut, she’d probably gotten it square in the face, which meant that the smell had so overpowered her senses that they were most likely damaged. On the one hand, that was unfortunate, but on the other she wouldn’t be likely to be complaining about farts anymore.

  “You got skunked,” he said. “Real good… or I guess I should say, real bad. It swelled up your eyes some and that’s what’s makin’ you sick. That will pass, but you’re gonna stink for a while.”

  Having diagnosed her situation, he ripped off the last of her dress, leaving her standing in her bloomers and a short shift that covered most of her top parts.

  Letty, on the other hand, was so shocked by what he’d said that she didn’t even object when he ripped away the last of her clothes.

  “It was a skunk? That’s what I heard in the bushes? That’s what did me in?”

  “I reckon so,” Eulis said, and tossed her clothes into the brush. They were too wet to burn and their camp was across the creek, so the smell shouldn’t bother them much. Letty’s presence, on the other hand, was going to be a hindrance to a good night’s sleep.

  Letty groaned and then gagged. “I still wish you’d just shoot me.”

  “I can’t,” Eulis said.

  “I know… I know. You don’t have the guts.”

  Eulis glared, although the emotion was wasted on Letty since she couldn’t see his face.

  “No, ma’am that’s not it at all. It ain’t from lack of guts, I just don’t have a gun.”

  His answer was as rude as a slap to the face. Just as she was about to give him a piece of her mind for making light of her plight, her stomach turned on itself and she began gagging all over again.

  Eulis cursed beneath his breath, tightened his grip on her wrist, and pulled.

  “Follow me, and for once, don’t argue. We’re goin’ back across the creek. You’re gonna lay down and be quiet while I cook us some supper. Then—”

  It was the word supper that did her in. She bent all the way over until her forehead was nearly touching her knees and puked until she finally passed out.

  Eulis thought about leaving her where she’d dropped, and then realized he couldn’t do that again. Like it or not, he was responsible for her welfare.

  He tried to pick her up, but he’d spent too many years lifting nothing heavier than a full bottle of whiskey. Not even his intermittent jobs of grave-digging had prepared him to be able to lift Sister Leticia’s dead weight. So he grabbed her by the wrists, dragged her off the bank, back into the creek, and then out the other side. By the time he got her to the camp sight, she was covered in a thin layer of dirt which was rapidly turning to mud and doused with a second layer of grass and leaves.

  He retrieved the firewood and quickly built a fire so that she wouldn’t catch cold, then covered her up with one of their blankets. It was a shame to use it because the smell would stick to it, too, but he could hardly leave her there to catch pneumonia and die. Like it or not, they were in this together.

  Later, after the fire had burned down some, Eulis cooked up a piece of fat back and made a pan of johnny cake. When he’d asked Letty if she wanted to eat, he’d gotten a moan and a gag for an answer and took it for a no. He would have liked some coffee but that would have meant a trip back up the creek. He didn’t want to leave Letty alone, so he settled for a swig from one of the canteens and called it a night.

  Letty had come awake only once in the night. She’d laid there for a moment trying to figure out what was wrong, but couldn’t focus her thoughts. At that moment she heard a whippoorwill call and wanted to cry. All her life, the whippoorwill had meant home and family—sitting with her mother out on the front porch as darkness fell and listening for the call of that small brown bird, then waiting to hear if there was an answering call from its mate.

  She’d spent her entire adult life listening for the first call of the evening and wishing for a mate of her own. But it had never happened. Once she’d come close, but death had snatched him away and she was too hardened by failures to care to look again. Only now and then the call of a whippoorwill would remind her of what she’d lost, and she would suffer a moment of pain. But it never lasted long. Living was difficult enough without wishing for things that would never be and tonight was no exception.

  Disgusted
with her situation, she ignored the small bird and let her misery take her under as she slept the rest of the night away.

  Letty came awake in increments, hearing first the shuffle and snort of their animals, then the scolding chatter of a squirrel in a tree somewhere overhead. The early morning sun had found a pathway through the leaves and was shining on her face. She knew because she could feel the warmth against her cheek.

  Eulis was reciting the Twenty-third Psalm, and she could smell wood smoke, which meant breakfast was probably cooking. She started to roll over and sit up and then realized her eyes were swelled shut.

  Shocked by her condition, she began running her hands all over her face and her hair. At that point the over-powering smell of skunk began to resonate all around her.

  “Oh my God,” she moaned.

  Eulis looked up. “Oh. You’re awake.”

  “That smell,” Letty cried.

  “It’s you,” Eulis said.

  “I’m going to puke,” Letty moaned, and rolled over on her hands and knees.

  Eulis rolled his eyes. “Not again… and not here. I’m a’cookin’ our breakfast.”

  “Christ All Mighty,” Letty said, and then retched one for good measure. “Stop talkin’ about food.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Eulis said.

  Letty stumbled to her feet then grabbed at her hair.

  “What in hell happened to my hair?” She touched her breasts. “And my clothes… where are my clothes?”

  Eulis frowned. Since her eyes were swelled shut, he should have felt safe enough to confess, but he still found himself taking a couple of steps back.

  “I reckon there’s some dirt and grass in your hair. Course it will wash right out. I can’t say the same for the smell.”

  Letty gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. “I can feel the dirt and grass. What I’m asking you is how did it get there?”