Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

“Parrots can’t cook,” Ike pointed out. “They can talk, though. I saw one at a carnival once. And an elephant, too.”

  “Jesus,” Ringo said, and went back to his book.

  The boys came straggling in for supper, but later that night Curly Bill’s mind returned to Ringo’s notion, for Bill was getting on toward forty and past the age when sleeping on the ground is easy.

  Take the inhabitants of Texas, he thought, staring up at the stars. A man might wind up in Texas for any number of reasons, but few of them were based on solid achievement elsewhere. In Texas, your Pilgrim Fathers were leftover Mexicans, a bunch of land-hungry German immigrants, and hardscrabble Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen. After the war, you added your white trash and bankrupt planters driven off their land by Yankee troops and carpetbagger taxes—all of them resentful about the way the war had ended. Course, there were Yankees in Texas, too. They were apt to be cheerful about the outcome of the conflict, but generally arrived in Texas just as broke. The past fifteen years had not been easy ones, what with the depression and the droughts and so on. Round the population out with orphans and runaways looking for others of their kind to gang up with—Johnny Ringo was a fair example of that. Anyway, “failure” might be too hard a word for those who’d come west. Unlucky, maybe.

  If things had turned out just a little different, Bill himself might’ve been a ranch foreman by now. As it was, he held a similar sort of position, standing between Old Man Clanton and the boys. Settling disputes. Defusing fights. Keeping the business running, day to day.

  Still and all, it was true enough that most men went west in search of a fresh start after a poor showing elsewhere. They might even go so far as to adopt a new name in an attempt to restore an unblemished record—a circumstance with which Curly Bill himself was familiar, for while he’d stuck with “William” after moving to Texas, he had so recently and so abruptly shifted from Graham to Bresnaham to Brocius that he was still unsettled as to how to spell his newest surname.

  There were those who said Johnny Ringo’s name was really Johann Rheingold. Juanito had denied that with a certain amount of heat, declaring that he had no love for Dutchies and sure as hell wasn’t one himself. As far as Bill knew the story, Ringo got his start in Texas during the Mason County War, when the sons of German settlers ran afoul of the great-grandsons of Ulster clansmen, who considered cattle raids an old and honorable form of enterprise and entertainment. Mexican cattle were fair game for rustlers, but the Dutchies of Mason County objected to their well-bred European short-horns being run off and branded as mavericks. When Ringo got arrested for cattle theft, his young friends sprung him. The Rangers caught up with him later on and when they did, they had him on a murder charge. In those days, however, frontier jails were still in the experimental stage, hardly capable of holding a stray dog captive if it spotted a rabbit a few yards away. Ringo got loose and lit out for Mexico, where he picked up a little Spanish while drinking and lying low. That’s where Curly Bill noticed him in a cantina and recruited him for a raid on a Sonora herd for Old Man Clanton.

  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Juanito wasn’t like the rest of the boys. Juanito was intricate. He was sick a lot. Headaches. Stomach pains. He was fine when there was action to take his mind off his troubles, but when things got peaceful, Ringo got moody. When he got moody, he drank. And when he drank, Lord have mercy!

  Once, in a bar up north near Prescott, Ringo offered to buy a man a whiskey. All that fella said was “No, thanks. I’ve got a beer.” Ringo shot him in the neck. Just like that. Walked away like he’d swatted a fly. And he had this trick where he’d smile at a new kid who was looking to get into the gang. “You’re all right,” Ringo would say. “I like you. You’re all right.” Then he’d slug that kid in the gut with no warning at all. The new kid would drop to his knees, sucking air, and Ringo would walk away like nothing had happened.

  The first time Ringo did that, it was so sudden and over so quick, nobody had time to react. Now, though, the boys all expected it, so they’d wait, grinning, and laugh their heads off when it happened. The new kid would be kneeling in the dirt with his eyes bugged out, and when he got enough breath back to ask what in hell he’d done to deserve that, the others would tell stories about how Ringo did the same thing to them once. Juanito always felt better afterward. And the kid who got punched was probably used to getting hit back home.

  The moon was setting by the time Curly Bill was ready to drop off. He listened for a time to the cattle and the horses, to the night birds and the breeze. Fished a couple of stones out from under his bedroll. Turned onto his side.

  Boys will be boys, he thought. His crew were just boys with fists, knives, pistols. And Johnny Ringo wasn’t the only one with a warrant or two tied to his tail.

  THIS RECKLESS COURAGE WILL DESTROY YOU

  YOU SEEN THESE?” FRANK MCLAURY ASKED HIS brother, slamming a collection of torn and crumpled papers onto the table.

  Tommy smoothed out the least-damaged flyer and read it with growing dismay. Lieutenant Joseph Hurst was offering a reward for information leading to the arrest, trial, and conviction of the thieves who’d stolen six army mules, which were last seen in the possession of Frank and Thomas McLaury.

  “They’re tacked up all over the county,” Frank told him. “I found one on our own damn fence post out front!”

  “Well, it doesn’t say we stole the mules,” Tommy pointed out, but if Hurst’s careful wording skirted a straight-up accusation of theft, the nuance was lost on Frank. “I promised him I’d bring the mules back and I didn’t, so what was he to think?”

  “That wasn’t your fault,” Frank countered, for Billy Clanton had shown up early the next morning, paid Frank for changing the brands, and taken possession of the animals again. “You couldn’t have returned them.”

  “True,” Tommy admitted, “but that would be hard to explain to a judge. And the fact is, we received stolen property. That’s aiding and abetting, Frank.”

  Frank knew that was true, but he was the kind who just couldn’t stop picking at a scab until it bled again, and the longer he thought about Hurst’s flyer, the angrier he got.

  All through supper, he fulminated about abuse of federal power and the army’s interference in decent citizens’ lives. While Tommy washed the dishes, Frank found paper and a pencil and stayed up late that night, composing an essay on the subject. Tom entertained some hope that this might get it out of Frank’s system, but the next morning, Frank woke up with the phrase “damnable despotism” on his tongue and added it to the piece before he even went outside to take a piss. Later on, while he was fixing the roof of the horse shed, he came up with a line about how his honor had never been impugned before and he didn’t propose to start tolerating it now. That sounded good, so he dropped the hammer, climbed off the shed, went back inside to rewrite the whole thing, and made Tommy listen to the essay again.

  This was tedious but not alarming until later that day, when Frank managed to talk himself around to the notion that Lieutenant Hurst had stolen the mules himself.

  “He stole ’em and he sold ’em for his own gain,” Frank declared, “and now that army sonofabitch is trying to pin the crime on us!”

  “Billy Clanton stole those mules, and you know it,” Tommy cried, boggled by this turn. “Frank, there are witnesses who saw the mules out in our coral!”

  “Well, it’s their word against ours!”

  Tommy sighed, for there are people—his brother among them—who can become so convinced of their own rendering of events that believing something is tantamount to proof. Arguing only makes them dig in deeper. So Tommy stopped talking and hoped the whole thing would blow over, but Frank not only added the accusation against Hurst to his essay, he copied it all out again neatly. Then he saddled up and rode to town, determined to get it published.

  FRANK’S FIRST STOP was at the office of the Tombstone Epitaph. He expected the editor to be sympathetic to the interests of one of the few Repu
blican voters who lived outside Tombstone, but John Clum read the essay and handed it back.

  “Mr. McLaury,” he said, “in my opinion you would do well to forget the whole thing.”

  “I didn’t ask your opinion,” Frank said. “I told you to print mine.”

  “I will be happy to print it on flyers and you can tack them up wherever you please, but nothing goes into my newspaper unless I decide to put it there.”

  “Are you saying you won’t print it?”

  “My decision is in your own best interests, Mr. McLaury. Your speculation could be construed as libel. Lieutenant Hurst could take legal action against you.”

  “Well, I read law for a year and I’ll by-God decide what my best interests are,” Frank told him. “There are other newspapers in this town, you know. I can take this letter to the Nugget. Harry Woods might be very happy to accommodate an honest citizen’s protest against governmental tyranny!”

  This was not exactly news to John Clum. It was a frustrating fact of life that however well reasoned and factually correct the opinion he published in the Tombstone Epitaph, Harry Woods over at the Daily Nugget would print the exact opposite with similar confidence in the irrefutable logic of his own editorial.

  “Do as you see fit, sir,” Clum replied. “I’ll have no part in this.”

  Frank loitered in the office for a while, denouncing damnable despotism. He even declared his intention to turn Democrat over the issue, but not even that threat swayed John Clum, whose mind was closed to all reason, as far as Frank could see.

  What happened next did not seem important to Virgil Earp at the time. He happened to be walking past the Epitaph’s office when Frank McLaury came stumping out, so intent on his own righteous indignation that he slammed straight into the federal officer. Frank’s hat hit Virgil about chest-high. Virg caught it before it could fall to the ground. Another man might have snapped, “Watch where you’re going!” but Virgil handed it back with a good-natured “Whoa, there!”

  Another man might have said, “Sorry,” but Frank McLaury was the kind who often confused I am short with People look down on me. And that afternoon, he was in no mood to be reminded of his size by someone who was nine inches taller, even if Virgil Earp couldn’t exactly help that.

  “Were you in on it with that sonofabitch Hurst?” Frank demanded.

  “In on what?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me!” Frank warned, his neck cranked back so he could glare at Virgil. “You ever come out to our ranch again, you’ll have a by-God fight on your hands.”

  Living with Allie Sullivan should have made Virgil Earp wiser about advising small, excitable, angry people to calm down. Such a suggestion is rarely taken well, but the words were out of his mouth before Virg thought better of them, and that was when Frank McLaury started hollering about “malicious liars” and how “this matter will be ventilated,” adding other memorable phrases that were fresh in his mind from having worked on his essay so much.

  While that was going on, somebody went around the corner to the Oriental and told Wyatt Earp that his brother and Frank McLaury were putting on a good show over by the Epitaph. Wyatt finished out the deal, shut down the faro table, and went to see what was happening.

  “Don’t think you can gang up on me!” Frank warned when he saw Wyatt. “I got a brother, too! I got friends who’ll stand by me! You sonsabitches come near my ranch again, you’ll answer to the Cow Boys!”

  “What was that about?” Wyatt asked, watching Frank go.

  “Hell if I know,” Virgil replied. Eyes narrow, he turned to Wyatt and asked, “Did that sound like a threat to you?”

  CIRCULATION OF THE DAILY NUGGET went up almost 15 percent when Harry Woods printed Frank McLaury’s essay, for the notion that Lieutenant Hurst had stolen those army mules himself caused quite a stir in Pima County. Republicans in Tombstone and Tucson considered Frank’s charges absurd. Democrats in the countryside thought that was just the sort of thing a damn Yankee might do.

  In Sulphur Springs Valley, ranchers who’d been standoffish when the Iowans arrived suddenly found it in their hearts to drop by the McLaury place and express their support. Frank enjoyed the attention, and Tommy hoped his brother would be satisfied now. But no such luck.

  Everything Frank’s eye fell upon reminded him of the mules, or Lieutenant Hurst, or the Earps, and he’d start in again on injustice and honor impugned. At first, Tommy tried agreeing with him, just to keep the peace. Frank could tell he didn’t mean it, though, and kept arguing until Tommy finally said, “Frank, I am done with this. I am not going to listen to another word.” For the next few days, Frank tested Tommy’s resolve. Tommy continued to ignore him, which might have been a mistake, looking back on it, for that was when Frank started seeking companionship among the Cow Boys.

  Whenever they came by with livestock after a raid, Frank would work himself up enough to throw down his tools or walk away from a half-milked cow. He’d pick a fight with Tommy and end by hollering, “I already got the reputation of a rustler, so maybe I oughta get the good of it, too!” Then he’d ride off with Curly Bill and the boys to have a few drinks at Frank Stilwell’s saloon down in Charleston.

  Leaving Tommy to finish the chores.

  EVEN BEFORE THE MULE INCIDENT, Frank McLaury had been hinting around that he’d like to go along on a raid into Mexico, but Curly Bill had always discouraged the notion.

  “I am due for some excitement!” Frank would declare, casually mentioning four or five times that he’d like to investigate that side of the cattle business himself.

  “Frank,” Curly Bill would say, “you are overestimating the romance of the profession.”

  Sure, cattle raids could be fun, especially if the federales gave chase on the way out of Mexico, but once you were north of the border? Rustling was just chasing half-wild beasts through cactus in sun glare and heat. Sleeping on stony ground under thin blankets in the desert cold. Eating dust by day and beans by night. “You only see the end of the trail,” Curly Bill would tell Frank, “when the boys are finishing up and ready for a good time.” He was trying to be nice about it, but the truth was, Curly Bill had enough trouble keeping his crew sweet without adding a bantam rooster like Frank McLaury to the mix. So Bill did his best to change the subject whenever Frank asked about joining the gang and in the autumn of 1880, that was easy.

  All you had to do was pour a couple of whiskeys into Frank McLaury and say, “Mules!” It was like touching a match to a fuse. Frank would spark and sputter, telling everyone about how “I read law for a year!” and “I know my rights!” And then he’d holler about how his brother Tommy might be content to trudge along behind a plow horse, letting himself be slandered and abused by the likes of a lying Yankee thief like Lieutenant Joseph Hurst, but Frank himself would not let such things slide, by God.

  This was always a good show, and Curly Bill would pretend to share Frank’s outrage and indignation, just to see how excited the little man could get. Which was plenty. And it was interesting to Bill how the target for Frank’s outrage began to shift. Joe Hurst was stationed way over at Camp Rucker, whereas there were four Earp brothers right there in Tombstone. And though Frank had crossed words with Virgil in front of the Epitaph office, his animosity seemed to settle on Wyatt, for Morgan was always pleasant and James Earp just sold beer to Chinks, but Wyatt! Hell if he’d ever said a single word to Frank McLaury!

  “Last time I was in town to buy supplies, he passed me without so much as a nod!” Frank cried one night. “It’s about time I show that arrogant, stuck-up sonofabitch a thing or two!”

  “You’re gonna have to climb a ladder to do it,” Sherm McMasters pointed out. Everybody laughed, which made Frank hot up worse.

  “Well, then, I’ll get myself an equalizer!” he declared. “Wyatt Earp ain’t too tall to shoot!”

  EVEN FRANK GOT TIRED of the mules after a time, but as the 1880 Pima County elections approached, he found a new hobbyhorse to ride, for hadn’t Wya
tt Earp been appointed deputy sheriff by Charlie Shibell, who was a Democrat? And wasn’t Wyatt now supporting Shibell’s Republican opponent, Bob Paul? What kind of perfidious, back-stabbing Yankee ingrate would do such a thing?

  “And what kind of name is Bob Paul anyways?” Frank wanted to know. “Why doesn’t he have a last name?”

  Ever since the Nugget printed his letter, Frank had been practicing up on being a Democrat. To hear him talk now, you’d have thought he was from South Carolina, not Iowa, what with all his “damn Yankees” and “no-good carpetbaggers.” Curly Bill always found that funny as hell.

  “Frank’s right! It is a crying shame!” Bill said one afternoon in Frank Stilwell’s bar. “These Republicans move into Tombstone because of the silver, and now they want to take over Arizona. Why, it’s just like after the war, when those sonsabitches took over the South!”

  He was aiming at Frank McLaury, but it was Johnny Ringo that Curly Bill hit, for Ringo read newspapers and took a lively interest in politics. He’d even won an election once when voters in a Texas township made John Peters Ringo a constable, figuring an outlaw might be just the man to deal with others of his kind. The job didn’t last, but Juanito knew his way around a ballot box.

  “We have to do something about this,” he said, and there was no fun in his voice. “I am damned if I will be run out of Arizona! By God, there’ll be no Brownsville here! Bob Paul will not become the McNelly of Arizona!”

  That was when the mood changed, for all the freelance cattle importers in the Southwest knew that Captain Leander McNelly’s Texas Rangers had killed a dozen rustlers down near Brownsville and stacked their bodies like cordwood in the town square to show that cattle thieves were no longer welcome in the Lone Star State. Word was, Bob Paul planned to clean the Cow Boys out of Pima County if he got elected, and if Bob Paul was sheriff, Wyatt Earp would likely be his undersheriff, with all the inflexible, humorless intolerance that implied.