“I really think he is a frank, honest man. But you will learn more about him, right?”
“Saturday night. The first time he hugs me he will realize and know for sure, won’t he?”
“I am sure then he will.”
“I am sorry I hid this from you, Father. I was ashamed but I believed Norton would come back rich and marry me. I am a dumb stupid daughter who could not wait or listen. I must pay the price, but I thank you for your support and your promise to help me and my son when he comes.”
On Saturday evening, O’Malley drove up with two fancy, sparkling black horses and a luxurious buggy to take her to Cane Hill. Easter’s dress, washed and ironed, looked very nice on her. Her mother pinned her hair up, and the black wool shawl would keep her warm going and returning.
She knew, when his powerful hands were on her waist to easily lift her up on the buggy seat, he could tell her son was hiding there. But he was unshaken by anything, and once Easter was safe on the seat, he waved at her parents, ran around the buggy to the other side, and took command of the horses.
“Well, how are you today?” he asked.
“I feel like a fairy-tale princess sitting high up here on this seat and those wonderful horses pacing along to the jingle of the harness taking me to a castle in the Alps.”
“You write storybook fables?” he asked.
“No, but these are not your horses or rig are they?”
“No. I borrowed them to impress you as to how serious I am.”
“I am impressed. I never saw a rig this nice or fancy on the road before in my life. Be careful. If we wreck it you will spend the rest of your life repaying the owner.”
“I could have hired a driver, but I wanted us alone to talk with no one around. I have no crazy ambitions or needs, but I feel you need to know that nothing in your past bothers me—tomorrow will be a new day and I hope we can walk hand in hand down the path of life together. I knew that day I saw you in the garden, I wanted to know you better.”
“You don’t understand it all.”
“I know you told me he, like my Ruthie, is gone. So the living must continue.”
“I agree, but he was a Cherokee. His son—” He’d swapped the reins to his other hand and put his finger softly on her lips to silence her.
“His son will be our son, red or white. Our son. I will never let him know he isn’t mine and yours. And when he is grown I will tell him or you can tell him about his true father. That is not an issue for me. If you have children that are half out of their heads, you love them. His skin color will not bother me.”
“Hiram O’Malley, you are so persistent that I am beginning to believe all you are saying.”
“Good. When will you become my wife?” He halted the team where the road passed through some dense hardwood forest.
She blinked her eyes at him in utter disbelief at his words. “I have no idea.”
“There will be a minister there tonight. Marry me tonight. We can go back and tell your folks we are married and go home to my house and farm.”
“You have not even seen me and what I look like. You may be shocked.”
“Why?”
“I look horrible.” She searched both ways and found the road hidden by woods, and no one stirred. She unbuttoned her dress, then raised the slip to show him. “My bulging belly is disgusting to look at. I saw it so in the mirror in Mother’s room.”
“May I touch it?”
“I guess that won’t hurt him, but don’t you see how ugly my body is?”
“Oh, honey.” He swooned. “It is gorgeous.” His calloused hands were softly running over all her skin. His fondling of her belly almost made her sick. She couldn’t understand his joy.
“Marry me?” he said, sounding excited.
“You will regret it all your life.”
“Never. Never. Never.”
“Folks will think we’re crazy . . . What are you doing now?” she asked.
“Kissing your wonderful belly.”
Oh, my God, he did, and she about peed. What a wild crazy man.
They were married an hour later. Two hours afterward they drove back and relayed the news to Easter’s folks. They acted a little set aback but wished them good luck. Three hours later she was in his wonderful feather bed and she let him kiss her all over wherever he wanted. Here was where she also found out what real love was like—oh, she would always regret her one transgression from before, but she was so excited about the real man who loved her homely swollen belly and her. She thanked God that night for his deliverance of her from her sorrow and depression.
* * *
Hiram taught her how to shoot and load a. 30-caliber Colt Paterson. She learned she had to cock the hammer back on the pistol to get the trigger exposed. It didn’t take long before she could shoot it and bust all the bottles set on a rail fence. Her being alone worried him when he was gone trying to stop the raids by outlaws on country folks in western Washington County, Arkansas.
Her pregnancy went well and a midwife delivered her son easily.
Long John O’Malley was born on May 5th that year. The afterbirth was buried and the midwife sent home that evening. The baby boy was in the bed with them, but she knew Hiram wanted her and despite being sore, she wanted him. She decided not to say that she had heard that nursing a baby was good birth control, and good that she didn’t. Nine months later, February 5th, in a snowstorm, her second son Harper Alan came in their world screaming. Another long baby son, with blond hair this time. Two babies nursing at the same time was enough for any woman, but she had the milk so they flourished.
Easter and Hiram couldn’t be apart, but it was three months later when she realized that nursing two boys must have made for birth control. Apparently God said that was enough. They laughed about it but kept trying for more though none ever came. Both sons, at age six, went to the first grade in the three months’ school held in the one-room schoolhouse near their farm. But when the teacher moved on to another rural school, by the third year, Easter had already taught them to read aloud from the Bible, do the multiplication charts, and write in a good penmanship. They read every book they could find, beg, or borrow.
One day Easter was home alone. The boys and their dad had gone to buy a horse for one of them, when an outlaw came by and dismounted at the yard gate. She saw and appraised him out of the small window and immediately went for her loaded Colt Paterson.
He pounded on the door.
Holding the cocked pistol out ready, she warned him, “I am going to blow your head off if you come through that door.”
“Bullshit, you whore—” He broke the door down and it fell inside on the floor.
She saw the shock written on his face as he saw the gun and right before the fiery blast came from the gun’s muzzle. He wore the look of a man who really regretted what he’d both said and done. She shot him again in the chest before he slumped down in the doorway. With the room full of gun smoke, she decided to go out the back door of her house because she didn’t want to step on him to get outside.
Later she harnessed their gentlest mule and tied a lariat to the dead man’s feet. She clucked to the mule, and Jasper began to drag him out of her doorway and to the yard gate, making sure he didn’t block the gate. Unhooking the rope, she coiled it up, drove Jasper back to the barn, unharnessed him, and laid the harness in the hay. When Hiram and the boys came home, they could put it up on the holder. Then she turned Jasper loose in the pasture again, went back into the now smoke-free house, and finished her dishes. Hiram could fix the door, too.
Her men came running into the house shouting, “Who was he? Are you okay? What happened?”
“Some bad-mouthed man broke in my front door. I warned him I’d shoot him. Now he believes it. You boys can repair the door, and you need to hang up the harness that I used to drag him out to the gate.”
“Why did he do that to you do you reckon?” Hiram asked her.
“He called me a whore. I knew he had the
wrong house.”
Her husband wrestled her into his arms. “Baby, he sure was at the wrong house.”
Not long after that Hiram heard about Texas. Nothing could change his mind, so he sold their place and the four of them loaded up—lock, stock, and barrel—and headed there in two wagons. The homestead land Hiram found for them was west of Fort Worth right in Comanche country. To tell the truth, in Easter’s opinion, Texas was no richer farmland than Arkansas.
Those boys grew up fast. They became Texas Rangers at fourteen. Oh, they didn’t go chasing down outlaws, they were part of a poop patrol on the outlook for Comanche that snuck down in their country and killed folks, kidnapped teens, and generally raised hell.
The brothers rode all around looking for scattered horse apples, which meant Comanche were in their midst. They learned quickly that a barefoot range horse stops to poop in a pile and an unshod Indian pony scatters his as his rider goes on. If that sign showed up, they and their neighbors were fixing to have a whole lot of trouble with war parties.
They wore .30-caliber Colts and had a Spencer under their stirrup. Of course by then the Civil War was on, and most of the men and even boys had been called up. Hiram and his team of rangers were left at home as point people to protect all the manless settler families living in their county. Hiram didn’t like it, but someone needed to be in charge.
Coffee got so high priced they did without it. And sugar, too. Even cloth for new clothing became extinct.
One day, when the boys were attending a three-month school session, they came home all beat up, and one of Long’s overall suspenders even had been torn loose. The sight of them shocked Easter. Black eyes, noses bloody, their clothes in rags.
Her hands on her hips she demanded to know what they had been doing.
“Mom, three grown men rode up and called Miss Shepherd a-a whore,” Harper said. “And for her to come outside—I remembered the man called you that and made you so mad you shot him. Well, my gun was out on my horse, so me and Long went outside. We had to clean their plows.”
“Who won?”
“We threw them on their horses and they left bawling,” Long said.
“What did the teacher say?”
Harper answered. “She said she didn’t think them men will be back.”
Long nodded. “They got the worst of it from us I am sure.”
“Let me dress your cuts and then you two change into some work clothes. I am sure I can fix these to wear again.”
“Mom, there wasn’t a thing else we could do.”
“You boys did the right thing. I am just not used to seeing you two so beat up.”
“They were big as Dad.”
“I understand. Let’s wash those cuts. I’m proud of you two. I bet the teacher is, too.”
“Oh, she told us so,” Harper said.
She was proud of her boys.
Around then, rumors started that the dreary war was going to soon be over and maybe things in everyone’s lives would improve. Texas was broke and sinking. Hardly anything was on the shelves in stores, and what little could be found was at sky-high prices. No one had any money left. Hiram traded for another place farther from the persistent Comanche threat, to near Camp Verde above Kerrville.
A nearby rancher, Captain Emory Greg, had been by talking about taking a large herd of Texas cattle to the nearest railhead up at Sedalia, Missouri, and sell them as soon as the armistice was signed. But if the war did not end he said he thought he could get past those Federal troops who might stop him up around Fort Smith, Arkansas.
The former Confederate captain said that during the war they had eaten up every chicken and hog in both the north and south parts of the country. Yankees had money, and if they wanted meat it might as well be Texas beef. But the trip to Sedalia would not be an easy one. Lots of outlaw bands and free holders roamed the mountainous region of Arkansas and Missouri and would surely try to steal a large herd of cattle—or anything worth ten cents for that matter.
“Can he deliver them do you think?” Easter asked her husband.
He shrugged. “I don’t guess that anything can’t be done. And with enough good help he might get there and sell them for a profit.”
She shook her head, bewildered. “Cattle sure are not worth ten cents apiece around here.”
He hugged her and kissed her like he did all the time even though she had been his wife for eighteen years. “We will survive.”
Bless his heart, she decided, but when her two sons came home that night and told them both they were going to Sedalia, Missouri, in two weeks with the Greg herd, her heart stopped.
“You boys may be able to beat up some sorry ranch hands, but you two are not going to Missouri and get killed by angry Yankees,” she told them.
“Aw, Ma, we are only going to herd some longhorns up there. The war is about over. Why Greg’s going to pay us fifteen bucks a month if we get them up there.”
“Who will bury you?”
“Ma,” Long said in a voice she could hardly tell from his brother’s, “we aren’t getting killed. We’re just going to be herding some cows.”
She looked up at the underside of the split shingle roof for help. “Hiram! Tell them no.”
He hugged her like he always did when he wanted to change her mind about something. “Darling, you have to let go of the boys some time, even when you don’t want to, so they can fly from the nest.”
“I don’t want them to fly anywhere. They don’t have wings to start with, and they’d need them to ever get those crazy cattle north of even where we came from.”
“Aw, darling.”
“Don’t aw me.” But even as he kissed her she knew she’d lost another battle to this big burly man she loved so much.
Ten days later, teary eyed, she watched her only two wonderful sons ride off. That was the worst day in her entire life. She felt she might never ever see either of them again. Her husband hugged and kissed her. “Those boys are plenty tough to survive.”
May God help them.
CHAPTER 1
Harper rode a red roan horse his father said was a Comanche buffalo-hunting pony. The powerful former stallion they’d neutered to save fighting with, as a stud was a tough enough horse. Harp, as his brother Long called him, felt comfortable he had the steed to carry him to Sedalia, Missouri. Both boys were wearing new shirts their mother made from pillow ticking material. She said it was the best material to last for the drive.
The memory of the tears on his mother’s beautiful face still stabbed at Harp, but both he and Long were going north for good or bad. He reset the .30-caliber Colt in the holster on his hip. His father said the revolver was a plenty big enough hand gun, plus he could put five of the five bullets in a bouncing tin can with it, and with a larger gun he would need lots more practice to be that accurate with it. The lever-action Spencer rifle under his right leg was another weapon he knew all about. Stirrup to stirrup he rode beside his brother Long, headed for Captain Greg’s ranch. They were going to be grown-ups soon and people would have to accept them as men.
“Long, what do you think Missouri will be like?”
“Mother said they’ve got more rain and the trees were bigger than Texas. I want to see them.”
“What about those big rivers we have to cross?”
His older brother shrugged as if they’d be nothing. “We can swim. Lots of Texas boys sure can’t do that.”
“You reckon those cows can swim?”
Long shook his head. “There ain’t a cow in the whole lot of them. They’re all steers.”
“Ah, you know what I meant.”
“Yeah, I bet them steers naturally know how to swim.”
Harp agreed and vowed he’d never say cows again. Among real cowhands he might sound dumb. Last thing that he wanted to happen was for anyone to think he was a dumb farm boy. They rode on to Greg’s Bar 87 Ranch that day.
The place was abuzz with activity. They dismounted at the headquarters office. A man with
a quirley in his mouth came out onto the large step. “You boys are the O’Malley brothers?”
“Yeah, where do you want us?” Long asked.
“The herd is two miles west. Report to Matt Simons. You’ve got bedrolls and war bags?”
“That’s what they told us to bring,” Harp said, patting them tied on behind his cantle.
“Good. Some boys coming ain’t got nothin’. You guys been around cattle, Simon needs both of you to hold them steers in a herd.”
With everything said, the two O’Malleys turned their horses and rode west.
Harp heard the cattle bawling long before they rode out of the cedars into the meadow. Most were grazing and bawling between bites of grass. Their incisive loud calls hurt his ears, but like it or not he knew he’d hear them clear to Missouri. Several mounted herders on hard steering horses were trying to keep them contained in the large meadow. They found a rider about their age and asked him where the boss was.
He waved them north and took off after another wild steer headed for the brush. The horse the boy rode didn’t look up to the job noted Harp. In disgust he shook his head and his brother agreed by making a disapproving face after the rider.
They found Simons. An older man with gray sideburns who greeted them and told them to unload their bedrolls and things in the second canvas-covered wagon. He had watched them ride in. “I am damn sure glad some real cowboys got here. When you get your things put up, I am going to split you two up. Harp, go right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go help them, boys. I’ll send some replacements later. Long, you ride north. Those boys up there are not cattle-wise at all. They ask, you tell them I said both of you are in charge and you tell them what they must do to keep them cattle together.”
“Are there some better horses for them to ride?” Harp asked him, pained about the mounts they had seen so far.
Simons shook his head. “Not many of them.”
“If Mr. Greg’s going to herd these cattle very far, he better find some.” Harp shook his head in concern and parted with his brother.
Harp spent the rest of the day keeping the herd quitters in the large meadow. His buffalo horse could work circles around the mounts the rest of them rode. By late afternoon they finally had them settled down some. The steers were mostly lying down and chewing their cuds when Simons brought some fresh hands on more horses not ever used before for herding. Harp noted that about the mounts the moment they rode up.
The O'Malleys of Texas Page 2
