by Tim Bryant
He lived not only to tell the tale but to report back to work the next Monday, but his head of black hair turned white as snow almost overnight. I took it for a warning and quit the next morning. I never even took my final pay.
Things were good for us there for a while, and we might have made a boring little couple there in Mobeetie. She learned to make brooms, which were then sold in the store downstairs, and I continued with my gravedigging. On a cool spring morning, she took me aside with promises of good news. I remember hoping she’d found a new place for us to live.
“We have a new member of the family joining us.”
I stood there and waited for the rest of the news. A brother of Bricky or a long lost uncle following the mad trail across the south into oblivion.
“We don’t really have the room here for more,” I said.
She didn’t get cross at my lack of insight.
“I don’t think they’ll take up much room, Wilkie,” she said.
She had to look down at her slim belly and make a few faces.
“Oh,” I said.
I tried to think of more, but a silent stillness seemed preferable to anything I knew how to say. I felt unlike I’d ever felt before or since, which is as it should be.
“You’re happy?” Greer said.
I nodded my head against hers. It was all I dared to do. You didn’t dare say you were happy. That was challenging the fates. It was enough to feel the way we felt in that moment and contemplate what the future might be bringing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Gentleman Jack wanted to take everybody back to the beginning of the cattle drive, so we all convened in the big muddy middle of Mobeetie. This was all a mental exercise, of course, so I’m not sure if everyone else pictured Mobeetie the way it was on that July morning when Ira Lee came to town with Simeon Payne, Leon Thaw, and William Gee, looking for a couple more people to move eight hundred head of cattle to Fort Worth and then north to Kansas City.
“There’s a straight shoot from here to Dodge,” I said. “Why would you go all the way down to Fort Worth?”
It seemed like a harebrained idea to begin with. Almost all cattle drives took what they called the Jones and Plummer trail to Dodge City. They could sell their cattle there for a good profit. It was easy. It was a straight shot.
“We’re meeting up with a bunch of other boys down there. They got almost two thousand more. They said if we could join them and do most of the work between there and Kansas City, they’d split the money.”
I could see the attraction in it. I also knew twenty-eight hundred head of cattle was going to be a handful for five of us, if we were pulling most of the weight.
“You really think five of us can pull it off?” I said.
I didn’t know any of the other guys from Adam, and I didn’t hardly know Ira Lee. He was taller and skinnier than when I’d last seen him, and he moved like a marionette come to life. No strings attached. I didn’t much like the looks of the Leon Thaw character. He was driving the coach and didn’t show any aspiration for climbing down off of it. He seemed to like looking down on us.
“We expect we’ll need one or two more,” Ira Lee said. “Unless you know your way around a bowl of beans, a good cook would come in mighty handy.”
I immediately thought of my old friend Jacobo. If he was available, I might be talked into it.
“I know a good cook named Jacobo.”
I didn’t have high hopes for seeing him again. Last I’d seen him, he was peeling potatoes at Fort Griffin and looking pretty happy about it.
“Jacobo Robles?” Leon Thaw said.
I’d forgotten he was even a part of the conversation. And I had no idea if he was Jacobo Robles. I knew him as Jacobo.
“He cook beans for the king and queen of Mexico?” I said.
Leon said he didn’t reckon that he did and resumed his silence.
“Cooked beans for the king, and the king let him go,” Simeon Payne said. “I’ve crossed paths with him.”
The Army, trying to push cattle ranchers farther across Texas and the Indians into the territory to the north, had moved Jacobo and about half the Fort Griffin soldiers to Fort Eliot just outside Mobeetie. As a result, Jacobo, who was indeed Jacobo Robles, was peeling potatoes less than five miles from where we were standing.
Ira Lee and his boys camped out at Mobeetie for three days. Ira Lee lost half of his money betting on horse races, and Leon Thaw slept all three nights on the coach, never climbing down to do anything other than visit the latrine and get food from Old Vick’s restaurant.
On the third day, the boy named William Gee showed up at the undertaker’s office. He had somebody in tow, and I recognized him before I could even identify his face.
“Jacobo,” I said. “They talked you into going on this fool’s errand?”
He seemed happy to see me. Maybe even excited to be hitting the trail. It was good to see him, and it was good to see Ira Lee too. Good enough that it made me feel alright about casting my lot with them.
“But you’ve got a good job with Mr. Morrow,” Greer said later that night.
What she didn’t know was, I was running out of people to bury. I needed some new blood in town. New blood that wasn’t my older brother or Jacobo. And, more important, with a child on the way, we would need good money. Money to buy a home of our own.
“It won’t take long,” I said. “I’ll go as far as Fort Worth, and if it ain’t going well, I’ll collect my pay and come back. If everything’s going okay, I’ll go on to Kansas. I come back, we’ll have enough to buy a piece of land and build a place.”
Part of me really wanted to do that. Get some land and some horses, maybe do some blacksmithing. Make an honest living and maybe raise up a handful of little buckaroos. Another part of me wanted to shin out and not look back. I liked Greer Liquorish too much to hang around and mess up her life, I sometimes told myself. What kind of father would I be? I had never known one.
At the same time, I needed what she gave me too much to ride away for good. Did I love her? I know I loved being around her. At least most of the time. There were times she got moody and spilled out a terrible hurt on me. First by insinuation and then, as days went by, more directly and more often. She sometimes seemed to blame me for the deaths of her family, as if I had sent them all out into Indian country with insufficient protection. As if, had I been there, things would have turned out differently. I liked to think there might have been some truth in that, but I didn’t dare put voice to it.
Two nights before we headed out, I gave Greer my Peacemaker. I thought there might be something poetic in that. I kept the little .41 derringer. It was deadly enough when it needed to be—one like it had been used to kill Lincoln—but it was a single shot. As backup, I had the Whitworth. I wasn’t entirely happy with what I had, but me and Roman would surely luck into something better down the trail. Maybe in Fort Worth, maybe in Kansas City.
When we left out at first light, Leon Thaw was cold and silent as his name. Will Gee and Simeon Payne were laughing like two explorers off to discover a Great Unknown. Jacobo was in the back, pulling a wagon with enough meat, beans, corn, and potatoes to get us all the way across Texas. And me and Ira Lee were as miserable as a rainy fourth of July, for reasons neither of us were able to vocalize. I felt like I was leaving something important behind in Mobeetie. Like I was giving up on something. It wasn’t Greer. For all I knew, we would soon be back together and buying that plot of land on the edge of town. It was more like an idea of something. Something in my gut. I was trying my best not to listen to it, but it was there, gnawing away at me all the same. This is a part of the story that I hadn’t told. Now I will tell it as it happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Something happened to me and Ira Lee on the night before we left Mobeetie on the cattle drive. We didn’t talk about it the next day. We never spoke about it again. I never discussed it with anyone else either until I told Sunny, the night before my hanging.
We’d started the night in a bar called the Owl’s Nest. Named that for good cause, it had been converted from an old barn and came with a free family of owls in the rafters. They had since moved on, but the regulars there could all remember when you had to drink your whiskey with one hand over the glass, just to make sure there wasn’t anything added from above. The Owl’s Nest served only whiskey, but their lack of menu didn’t hurt business. They were so packed in that we soon moved on to Gin Lee. I was old enough to drink in any bar in Mobeetie, long as it was kept inside the walls, but Gin Lee pushed the point. They had a kid who was always sipping a beer at the table next to the kitchen, and he couldn’t have been any more than ten. Some said he was the kitchen help’s boy. Some said he came to town by himself and lived in the bar. Whatever the case, he enjoyed his drink considerably more than I did, which was the cause of some consternation with me.
Ira Lee was playing fifteen ball with some galoot who’d just come to town from back east, and I was raising my beer to my lip and blowing softly across the suds, hoping nobody noticed that the level in my glass wasn’t changing. A sheriff came slamming into the bar, almost knocking the door off its hinges and commanding everybody’s immediate attention. He wasn’t the Mobeetie sheriff. He’d come all the way from Amarillo to see us.
“Anybody in here know a man by the name of Henry John Liquorish?”
It was a name I had seldom heard, except in hushed tones around the house. If I had been drinking, I would have doubted my own ears.
“Ira Lee,” I said.
Ira was standing at full attention, his cue at his side.
“Henry John Liquorish?” he said.
“From New Orleans, maybe,” the sheriff said. “Least that’s what his papers would indicate. If anyone here knows this man, I would like to hand him over into your care, so I can be about my business.”
There was a moment that hung in time there in Gin Lee where I was, for the first time in my life, a father’s son. All of history was rewritten. I felt drunk.
“I’ll take him,” Ira Lee said, and the next thing I know, we were pouring ourselves out into the night to take Henry John Liquorish of New Orleans off the hands of the Amarillo Sheriff’s Department. The sheriff pulled an envelope from his pocket and pushed it into my hands. On it was printed the name Henry John Liquorish—spelled just the way it should have been—and a New Orleans address. The envelope was empty.
“He’s right down yonder,” the sheriff said.
He pointed at a body lying on the ground about fifty yards away. He wasn’t moving.
“He dead?” I said.
Had the sheriff come to ask us to take a dead man off his hands? It was a fact that Henry John’s body had never been recovered. It was always assumed by Ira Lee and me that the Comanches had taken care of that. They were known for burning and generally laying waste to whatever and whoever they encountered.
“No, but he sure may wish he was when he wakes up in the morning,” the sheriff said.
He said the man had been found lying in the middle of the road halfway between Mobeetie and Wheeler and seemed to be crawling in this direction. The sheriff had been on his way back from Wheeler, where he’d chased down a bank robber trying to sneak away into Indian Territory. He hadn’t caught the robber, but he’d found our guy instead. He seemed happy to get rid of him.
We walked down the way to where the man lay face up. He didn’t look like anything I was expecting or hoping to see. He was relatively young. Not much older than Ira Lee.
“Well, that ain’t daddy,” Ira Lee said.
I kicked at him to see if he’d respond. You could see he was breathing, but, other than that, he didn’t look too lively.
“Reckon this belonged to dad?” I said.
I held the envelope out.
This strange new Henry John Liquorish began to squirm there on the ground, and I leaned down over him. He didn’t appear to have been attacked or injured in any way. You could smell the liquor radiating from him though. If it was giving me a sick feeling, I could imagine what it was doing to him.
“Your name is Henry John Liquorish?” Ira Lee said.
He groaned something unintelligible and rolled sideways in the dirt. He didn’t seem to hear Ira Lee or even know that he was there.
“Maybe we should go get the doc,” I said.
I knew Doc Pacheco through Grover Morrow of course. When Doc wasn’t successful at his job, Grover moved in with his. It was a team effort, and everyone pitched in. We knew where the good doctor was because we had seen him just an hour or so earlier, propping up the bar in the Owl’s Nest. Ira Lee said he wasn’t sure what Pacheco could do for our inanimate friend that a few hours’ sleep wouldn’t do as well.
I wasn’t too eager to send him off with anybody else anyway. I wanted him close by, so I could keep my eye on him. By that time, I was convinced that this man had come looking for us. What other reason for him to be crawling from Wheeler in the night? How had he known we were in Mobeetie? If so, who told him? What was his connection to us? What did he want?
“Think he’s really Henry John Liquorish?” I said.
It wasn’t another way of asking if he was dad. Anyone could see he wasn’t. Still, he either had an envelope with dad’s name—and a long-ago New Orleans address—scribbled on it, or the two of them shared a name, spelling and all.
“Well, he damn sure ain’t daddy,” Ira Lee said. “Reckon he could be a cousin.”
We were circling around him, trying to find a place to light.
“Could be he’s our brother,” I said.
I picked him up by the boots and Ira Lee got him under each arm, and we toted him to the livery stable. I knew better than to bring him up the stairs to Greer. We pulled his boots off and put him to bed against a hay bale, with a horse blanket draped over him for warmth.
“We’ll check on him in the morning,” Ira Lee said to him.
He was in a hurry to get back to his glass of whiskey, and I was equally anxious to get upstairs to bed. It would be my last night with Greer for quite a spell, and I knew where I needed to be. I didn’t mention him to Greer, as she wasn’t fond of drunks passing out downstairs in the livery stable, but, try as I might, Henry John, or whoever he was, stayed pretty close in my mind that last night in Mobeetie.
My bet was that dad had come into some kind of money from the government or something, and this man had been sent to find us and give us our reward. That seemed the most logical explanation for everything. Then, I wondered if he might be some long lost brother, come to hunt down family. Maybe he would even join us on the cattle drive.
Greer didn’t know what I was thinking, but she could tell my mind was elsewhere. She wasn’t happy.
“All you can think about is your God-forsaken cattle drive,” she said.
I tried to convince her otherwise.
“No, dear, I’m just preoccupied with thoughts of leaving you here with the baby.” There was a lot of truth in that, but she didn’t buy it. She almost kicked me out of our little upstairs apartment. In a way, I almost wish she had. She was mad, and so we slept back to back when I might have gone down and shared a blanket with the man downstairs. I almost wish I had because in the morning, when I slipped down the stairs to check on him, he was gone. Horse blanket and all. Ira Lee blamed me for letting him escape, but I reminded him that the man wasn’t a prisoner. If he had been that concerned with it, he’d have tied him to a post on the night before instead of rushing back to the Gin Lee.
We checked at Doc Pacheco’s on our way out of town, and we even stopped by the jail, but young Henry John Liquorish was nowhere to be found. Another ghost along the way, in and out of my life too soon. Me and Ira Lee never discussed him again. Over time, he mostly slipped from my mind, making an appearance only on occasions when I would stop to wonder where he might have gone off to and if he was still crawling around out there somewhere, looking for me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It wa
s a seven-day trip from Mobeetie to Wichita Falls, and then another four or five to get into Fort Worth. That’s if you’re pushing along eight hundred head of cattle, which ends up looking like a lot more than you might think. I’d been told of enough two- and three-thousand-head cattle drives that I’d convinced myself eight hundred head of cattle would go relatively smooth. There might be trouble when we took on the other two thousand in Fort Worth, but we’d be good as gold until then.
It didn’t take long to rob me of that notion.
The first two days were fairly uneventful, even if we were running behind schedule by the third. We were all falling into our roles. Thankfully, it didn’t matter how we got along. The biggest part of the day, we were far enough apart that we had to shout to be heard. Ira Lee was the trail boss. He had put the whole thing together, knew both ranchers whose stock we were moving. He also put the team together and gave each of us our assignment. Simeon Payne was one of the points. I was the other. My main job was keeping the bell cow going in the right direction. Simeon made sure the others didn’t straggle too far off the path. William Gee and Ira were riding left and right flank, Ira back behind me a ways and keeping the herd moving along. Last, Leon Thaw was riding drag. While it was unusual to have a coach driver riding drag, it served a dual purpose in our case. First, Thaw was able to bring Jacobo’s supplies, which would come in handy when we made the turn for Kansas. It would be a long stretch, and to have Thaw there gave us an advantage with both food and any other supplies we picked up in Fort Worth. As important, as I found out, Thaw knew the way. He had been born and bred in Kansas City and knew the trail in addition to knowing the marketplace once we arrived. So Jacobo rode alongside Thaw most of the time, although he didn’t like the way Thaw would look at him and so sometimes moved up and rode between me and Simeon.
Jacobo purchased most of his supplies in Mobeetie after talking with Ira Lee and Simeon. Ira Lee, being the trail boss, negotiated pay for his services, and I never knew what it was. I did know he was paying me more than he paid Simeon, because he told me the first night in Mobeetie.
