by Tim Bryant
“Little brother, I’ll pay you thirty dollars,” he said. “You’re gonna have to keep it under your hat, because Payne is only getting twenty-six.”
He wasn’t making the offer out of generosity or blood bonds. He’d made an initial offer of twenty five, and I’d turned him down. I had made fifteen riding Roman around a mud track a few times. Twenty five seemed lacking.
“You paying that other joker twenty-six and all you can cut your brother in for is twenty-five?” I said.
I might have been able to get thirty-one or two out of him, but I knew the going rate. I was fine with thirty on a couple conditions. One, I wanted the first payment when we reached Fort Worth. It wasn’t me wanting money to blow on booze and hookers in Hell’s Half Acre. The reasoning was simple. If I wasn’t feeling good about things, if any of the guys were causing doubts or frustrations, I was taking my pay and heading back home. I told Ira Lee as much, and the second condition was that I would be able to walk away with no hard feelings. Now, what I didn’t tell Ira Lee, but what I thought was eating at me, was this. If I was missing Greer, I was gone when we got to Fort Worth. I believed that was more than a little possible, hookers and all.
What I feared more than anything was Simeon Payne. Not that I feared him in any kind of real sense. I could just see that he had a problem keeping his big bazoo shut, and I didn’t tolerate a lot of talk. I would get along fine with Leon Thaw, who still hadn’t uttered a complete sentence to me.
It was that third day, with us already dragging behind and having issues keeping some of the cows from straggling behind, that Simeon Payne started getting on my nerves.
“Need to keep that bell cow moving along,” he said. “Your left flank is about to run her over.”
Of course, he was talking to me, even if he never called me by name. I don’t think he knew my name or cared to learn it. But he was convinced that I was slowing us down, no matter that the right flank had been falling back and we were having trouble with stragglers, whose responsibility fell on either Thaw or Ira Lee, since he was trail boss.
“Take it up with Ira Lee,” I said.
What I was trying to get across was, there was a boss and it wasn’t Simeon Payne. I dismissed him and thought no more of it. When we broke for dinner that evening, just as the sun was starting to touch the western horizon, Ira Lee came to me.
“I’m going to switch out with you, little brother, at least until we get to Fort Worth.”
Besides being a few years older, he was also a head taller, but I outweighed him and could take him in any fair fight. I almost got to prove it. Funny enough, it was Leon Thaw was stepped in.
“Payne’s trying to get there tomorrow. It’s still three or four days off.”
Ira Lee looked at him like even he had never heard him put two sentences together before.
“We let ’em go at their own speed, the herd ain’t no longer a herd. It’s just a bunch of cows walking in the general direction of Fort Worth.”
I had to admit, Ira Lee could sound smart. Jacobo laughed at what he was hearing. I figured it might be a good time to bring up my issue with the way things were going.
“Payne’s trying to tell me the bell cow’s moving too slow,” I said. “If I speed up, I won’t even have Jacobo’s wagon in my sights.”
I was hoping Ira Lee would have forgotten about his decision to switch me over to the right flank. My hopes were dashed.
“We’re like a damn accordion, pulling apart and pushing back together across the trail. I’ll run point and keep the bell moving. Wilkie John, you pull back and ride swing on the right side. Help Simeon keep everything running and, if you need to, pull back and help Willie.”
After a plate or two of beef jerky and beans, there came a fitful night of sleep and staring up at a skyful of far away promises, us taking turns to keep the fire burning and the coyotes at bay. In the morning, we got up and went to work. Ira Lee had the final say, and that’s the way we done it. Unfortunately, for all Ira Lee’s bossing, that’s where it all started going to hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Gentleman Jack looked good on the stage, even from a distance, in his dark blue frock coat and red hat, but I noticed it was missing its feather. I had a work shirt and a sack coat, no hat and little of Jack’s way with a crowd. Reverend Caliber wasn’t half bad. He certainly knew how to work a congregation up, but this was no normal congregation he was facing on this not-so-good Friday. Most of them weren’t churchgoers. Most weren’t believers in anything except their own hard work. I may not have been as book smart as Jack and Elijah were, but I think I grasped that one truth a long time before they did. The folks out there in the street were a lot more like me than either of them.
“So when you look at this young man,” Jack said, “you may not believe what you’re seeing, but hear me out. This is the face of a murderer, because he did rise up against the very men he was working with, and then he proceeded to visit his death and destruction on the innocent people of Wichita Falls.”
The Reverend had his arms folded and was shaking his head side to side. Several people in the street were watching him with some amusement. Maybe it was the heat, but I felt like my knees were going to buckle and kept trying to reposition myself against falling flat out on the stage between them.
“But let me back up a bit,” Jack continued. “This all started when the cook on the cattle drive, a Mexican named Jacobo Robles, came down with a bad case of food poisoning. Halfway through the trip into our fair city, he got extremely ill. From what I can tell from Simeon Payne, who luckily managed to survive this horrific ordeal, the cattle drive was already in deep peril. Our young murderer here had already been reprimanded for slowing the drive down. Had even been taken from his post at the head of the drive and put in a less crucial one. It seems the men in charge were already trying to keep this murderer in check. All their foresight was to be of no avail.”
Now it was me who was shaking his head. And me who was thinking I should have killed Simeon Payne, if I was half the murderer they claimed me for.
“I don’t think the facts bear out this little flight of fancy at all,” Reverend Caliber said.
I’m not sure half the people even understood what either one of them was saying.
“According to Simeon Payne, a man who has no bad history following him, the cattle drive’s cook got sick very quickly outside Wichita Falls,” Gentleman Jack said. “The drive continued, he says, but it was forced to stop at several points to contend with this illness. Finally, both Ira Lee Liquorish and Mr. Payne suggested that you and the cook take some cattle into town, sell them, and call for a doctor to attend to Mr. Robles.”
He then walked over to me.
“The rest of them would wait outside of town, settle in for the night, and move on toward Fort Worth in the morning.
“Is this fairly close to the way you recall it, Wilkie John Liquorman?”
He knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite catch on.
“Liquorish,” I said. “And Jacobo had already died by the time I went into town.”
He cupped his ear and leaned in.
“What was that?”
“Jacobo was dead,” I said. “And my name is Liquorish, not Liquorman.”
I knew I had fallen into a trap before I ever heard it close around me.
“But Liquorman—isn’t that the name you used when you were jailed in Mobeetie just a few years ago,” he said.
The snap was quick and clean, and, like that of any good trap, mostly of my own making. I looked down into the crowd, and they were still looking back, but they were seeing me different now. I could see it. I was trouble visited upon Fort Worth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
On that fourth day, Jacobo woke up with the chills. That might have put Leon Thaw in a bad mood if there had been a way to tell. But even mornings in July were a long way from cold, so everyone knew it was something serious. And where usually you would point the finger a
t the cook, we all felt bad about blaming him for his own sufferings, so we played it off.
“It’ll pass by noon,” Ira Lee said.
“Lie down inside the coach and try to sleep it off,” I said.
“Those beans are too good to do you that way,” said William Gee.
All of our expert opinions were for naught as we lurched to stop after stop along the north Texas landscape, looking for a tree or at least a cactus for Jacobo to crawl behind. And then William Gee started to feel it.
“Your mind is playing tricks on you, because of Jacobo,” Ira Lee said.
“Just make it to Fort Worth and we can stop for a day or two,” I said.
“I’m telling you, it can’t be those beans,” said William Gee.
Jacobo thought it was a case of bad chili, and he had me and William dig a hole to bury it in halfway between Mobeetie and Wichita Falls. We held onto the beans and the meat. It was still enough to get us to Fort Worth. Through it all, Leon Thaw didn’t say anything, but his expression said plenty. Finally, I started suggesting that, if we could make it to Wichita Falls, we would look for a doctor. By the time we were getting close, the first few cows were starting to get sick. It moved swift and silent like a wolf through the herd. The first of the livestock went down before noon that day. By noon, there were half a dozen.
“We’ve got to separate the herd,” Ira Lee said. “We know the bunch up front and to the right of the bell cow have all the symptoms. I need a couple of us to break off and pull the infected ones as far from the rest as possible.”
I drew the short straw and took William with me. For all the trouble we’d had keeping the drive together, once we started culling the sick ones, we found it difficult to keep them separated. For the most part, cattle like staying together, and they weren’t inclined to separate from the main part of the drive.
“It’s like they know what’s coming,” I said.
William Gee reminded me of myself, maybe because he’d done most of his growing in San Antone, and I found him easy to talk to, even if he was a little green.
He laughed, and I could tell by the way it came out that they knew more about what was coming than he did.
“I don’t have a whole lot of shells,” I said, “but I can get more once we get to Fort Worth.”
My gun was better for the job than his. I was better for the job than he. So William Gee wrestled the already-dying cows and the sick cows and the seems-like-they’re-getting-sick cows and the they’ve-been-hanging-around-close-to-the-sick cows into an area between a bend in the Wichita River and a patch of undergrowth that narrowed into a piece of bottomland about an acre across, and I loaded the rifle and went to work.
I don’t have much compunction with shooting livestock. They’re raised for food or for hide anyway. But when you have to put that many down, and you aren’t able to use the meat, it’s not a satisfactory feeling. The buzzards were already circling, waiting for us to clear the area, by the time I worked my way through. When I finished, I looked around to find Gee upchucking into the undergrowth.
“I must have a touch of whatever’s going around,” he said.
He looked a little peaked.
“You’d best hope not,” I said, “or I might have to put you down next.”
I was only half joking. Maybe not that much. I was beginning to suspect we had something bigger on our hands. Something that had stricken the herd and the drovers alike. I knew it happened. The only positive I could see in it, it probably meant Jacobo hadn’t poisoned himself. The negatives were too enormous to contemplate.
I rejoined the main part of the drive within a couple hours, and things hadn’t gotten better there. Ira Lee had stopped just a couple miles outside of town, downstream along the Wichita River, and was trying to replenish our stock of water.
“We’ve been drinking water, trying to clean whatever it is out of our system,” he said. “I was watching the cattle drinking right down from us, and it hit me.”
Ira Lee didn’t look good, but I didn’t dare mention it. I was trying to make it be the pressure of the drive or maybe the lack of sleep the previous night.
“I’ve heard of cow-pox,” Simeon Payne said. “Ain’t never seen it.”
The best part of taking the sick cows off from the drive had been having a few hours without Payne. I wanted to tell him that never in my life had I met a man so of a piece with his own name.
“It’s not cow-pox,” I said.
I had no way of knowing such a thing, but I had already seen Ira Lee shaking his head no, and so felt fairly secure in shooting the idea down.
“No, it ain’t cow-pox, and it ain’t bad chili,” Ira Lee said. “I’m fairly sure we’ve got red water disease. And the worst thing I can tell you, I’m seeing it in a few of the head here.”
Red water disease didn’t sound all that mean and menacing. The red part sounded a little bloody though, which was a bit unsettling.
“How bad is that?” I said.
Usually, when a disease struck animals and man in the same swipe, it wasn’t anything to laugh at. Still, at that point, my concern wasn’t for myself or anyone else as much as it was for my friend Jacobo. Jacobo was wrapped up in two quilts and sweating like a pig on a spit, but Ira Lee said if I came to his rescue, he would stop sweating the poison out of himself and would quickly make a die of it.
From time to time, he would come to himself and talk perfect sense, even if it was uncomfortable to listen to. He said he could hear a mariachi band playing in the sky at one point, which even spooked Leon Thaw, who climbed down from his perch on the wagon and took a long walk to stretch his legs. Later, Jacobo started talking to me in Spanish, and I couldn’t be sure of what he was saying, but the words familia and Méjico came up a lot, so I knew he was wanting to go home.
During this time, Ira Lee and Simeon came up with a plan. We would push on for Wichita Falls. If Jacobo wasn’t better by the time we reached town, I would take him and ride in with a small selection of our best cattle and try to sell them for medicine and clean food. That might have been a workable plan. I’ve wondered what might have happened if I had been able to fulfill it. Instead, in the hour between coming up with it and getting the cattle together, Jacobo fell into a deep sleep. When it came time to move out, I couldn’t stir him. He died there in the dirt, peaceful but maybe too peaceful. No one there to know that he had once cooked for kings and queens, that his cooking had once saved his life. Nothing we did could save it this time, and I buried him in a shallow grave next to Wichita River. It wasn’t the Rio Grande. He would never see his Mexico again, and I wondered if his familia would ever hear of the manner or location of his death.
I didn’t have time for much contemplation. I had to get into town and see if I could do something to keep the rest of us from following in Jacobo Robles’s dying footsteps. I still had enough hope to think maybe we would find help, that we would find an end to our troubles in Wichita Falls.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Reverend Caliber didn’t believe in hanging anybody. His reasons were complicated, but they centered on an undying belief in the ability of God to turn any man around and to use him, even if the man didn’t believe in God or himself or anything else.
“Wilkie John,” he said, “I believe God will use a fool to teach a wise man. You understand what I’m saying?”
He already knew I didn’t put any stock in what he was yacking about, and I’d made it clear it was only my neck that needed saving and not my soul.
“I think you’re calling me a fool,” I said.
This conversation was being had on the gallows, during a five minute break to allow Gentleman Jack, the Reverend and I to empty our bladders and take a drink of our preferred beverage. I’d just knocked back a beer. I didn’t much care for it, but I hoped it might take the edge off my nerves. The Reverend had surreptitiously been delivered a vodka that appeared as water to anyone who didn’t know better.
“I’m saying one man’s fool
is another man’s sage. And that you are here to accomplish something that nobody sees coming, that nobody has ever seen.
It still seemed like he was calling me a fool, but I knew what he was trying to say. That we were going to turn this thing around on Jack Delaney in a way he wouldn’t see coming. Not until it was right on top of him and running him over. I wanted to believe. I truly did.
Five minutes came and then six and seven, all with no sight of Gentleman Jack.
“The Gentleman Mr. Delaney seems to have gotten himself trapped inside the earth closet,” Reverend Caliber said.
I wasn’t sure what an earth closet was, and the look on my face must have said so.
“The privy,” he said.
A few men close to the stage got plum tickled over our conversation and began to roll off all their favorite names for doing one’s business in the latrine. One old cowboy said his father had always called it cutting off a monkey’s tail. His friend answered that his father had referred to it as lengthening your spine. It provided a few moments of levity while we waited and, in spite of and maybe because of the gravity of the situation, gave us all a good laugh at Gentleman Jack’s expense when someone said they saw him coming. Before that happened, though, Reverend Caliber did pull me aside and whisper in my ear.
“Jack’s gone. What you say, we kind of just mosey on outta here?”
Now the good Reverend said what he said, but I saw him look around and check out the stairs for a back exit first.
“I was thinking about it,” I said. “This crowd would probably string both of us up.”
There was a slow murmur through the crowd, and then the sound of feet climbing the thirteen steps to meet us. The way the footfalls fell around one another, you knew it wasn’t just Gentleman Jack. It sounded like a band climbing up—a drunken band—and they were carrying horns and drums along.
