by Tim Bryant
The ranchers back in Mobeetie had drawn us out a map to Fort Worth. None of us had ever been, and now Ira Lee never would. It was one more reason that pushed me on, even though the rancher had said if we got all the way to Meridian, we’d gone too far. I would turn and go northeast and leave Simeon Payne behind. There was no sweet sorrow in the parting. I hadn’t liked him from the get-go.
That left me and Leon Thaw. I made the turn for Fort Worth, and Leon came right along with me, never saying a word about it. I was glad to have him back there over my shoulder. We had thrown out most of the remaining food after it became obvious that we were all either sick or dying, and then we’d eaten what little jerky remained. The water was gone as well. I had given too much of it to Ira Lee as he lay dead in the dirt, soaking it up but needing none of it. That had been the last straw for Simeon. Now, I regretted it as well.
“Don’t waste effects on the dying.”
I had heard Granville Hanley say it. Back at Fort Griffin, it had been drilled into all the soldiers. Medicine, food, water. All limited resources. You had to know when someone was dying and accept it. There was time for a goodbye, maybe a last message for a mother or a sweetheart, but you didn’t pour out rations on a dying man. I started to wonder what Hanley would do if he were in my position.
Roman was suffering too, so I walked alongside him as much as possible, stopping to ride only for short intervals. I thought I was a day and a half outside Fort Worth. Just close enough to keep me moving, it was the carrot on the horizon, the mirage on the stick. That switching of images in my by-now fevered brain set me off in a fit of laughter that came periodically as I pulled myself across more sand than I had ever imagined. I tried looking down at my feet, thinking progress would come faster if I wasn’t watching it. After almost stepping on a rattlesnake, I nixed that idea. Looking up, it didn’t seem I had come any perceptible stretch anyhow.
Somewhere on that first day, around sunset, I looked back to see a cloud of dust moving northward across the skyline. With the sun filtering through it, it almost looked like a ball of fire. I sat on a nearby rock and watched it grow smaller and smaller, its tail burning away in the orange-pink light. My first thought was it was Indians. Probably Cherokee, maybe Blackfoot. Later, I thought it might have been a meteor. I’d seen one of those follow the horizon before out in the empty spaces south of Fort Griffin, and it had taken my breath away.
I didn’t sleep much that first night. I had nothing to make camp with. Nothing to make a fire and nothing to cook on one. I could tell Roman was jittery too. He was tired, but he wouldn’t lay down. He wanted to be ready to go at a moment’s notice if we were approached. Nothing approached us all night long except for the cattle. We were leaving a trail of them behind us, some just giving up and dying. Worse were the ones who fell and lay there blinking away dust, lowing and waiting for death to steal them away.
Leon Thaw had fallen away to leave me alone in a hard country full of danger. If I didn’t exactly notice when he disappeared, it couldn’t be surprising. He had followed behind and to my left most of the way, often falling almost out of sight and saying little during the times we were together. I waited for him to show up for a while, thinking he’d likely stopped sick at one end or the other. Hadn’t we all, some more than others?
Ira Lee, I hated thinking on. I would sometimes momentarily forget, thinking I was still to meet him in Fort Worth. Or was it Amarillo? The next morning, after finally getting a little sleep, I was awakened by a rustling and a voice. Long Gun. I heard him, but not clearly; saw him, but not well. Still, he was there, standing right in front of me.
“We need to get a move on.”
And then, “stand yourself up, Wilkie John.”
I didn’t know where I was, and it was a confusion that stuck with me on and off through the day. At times, it seemed I was walking to Amarillo to find Ira Lee, and I believed it would come into sight at any moment. I told Sunny about it later, and she said I should tell her friend Reverend Caliber. That was actually how I first heard his name. I never told him. He would feel a need to find meaning in it. I went the opposite direction.
It was just me and Roman, still alive and somehow wandering on in the general direction of Fort Worth. Of course, I yakked my jaw off to Roman. I always had, especially when we were out on long stretches of the trail. I had known him longer than anyone except Ira Lee, and he was now gone. So it wasn’t unusual that I would talk as we went along. I felt like we had passed through some kind of gauntlet, that we had passed a test of some sort, and it brought us even closer together.
“I don’t think Long Gun was real,” I said.
I had pretty much convinced myself of that. How else could he have disappeared like he had? Even a Blackfoot Indian couldn’t have gone anywhere but into the ground or into the sky. Blackfoot Indian. Was he a Blackfoot? What was he? I couldn’t remember. I walked on, and I might have walked him back out of my mind if I hadn’t looked down to see his rifle in my hand.
“You are Long Gun.”
Maybe the words were just bouncing around in my fevered head, but I heard them as loud as the ones that had awakened me. Once I chased the rabbit that far, I naturally went a step farther. It’s the same thing I had that kept me moving.
“If Long Gun was never real, maybe Greer wasn’t real. Maybe Fort Griffin. Ira Lee. Mobeetie . . .”
San Antonio was real. Mama. After that, it got questionable. Maybe I hadn’t been jailed for refusing to hand over my Encyclopedia Britannica, sixth edition. Had that been real? Had I shot those Indians in that hotel in Mobeetie? Had I even been a gravedigger?
I still don’t know what part of that second day was real. Dreams and reality arm wrestled over me until I finally fell face-forward into the dirt and passed out. I wouldn’t even know any of it happened if I hadn’t opened my eyes under a night sky that was raining down on me. I instinctively opened my mouth and drank it in for as long as it lasted. Then I fell back asleep. When I awoke again, the Milky Way had stretched out above my head and the clouds had passed to the east.
I studied my map, unsure of where I was, and decided to continue northeast.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Leon Thaw arrived in the coach a day after Wilkie Lee,” Gentleman Jack said. “Unfortunately, poor Mr. Thaw had taken a gunshot to the head, and arrived too late for any medical help.”
Jack held up a photograph of Thaw stretched out on the slab in the photographer’s studio, the top of his head noticeably missing and no noticeable brain at all. The men in the crowd all shielded the eyes of their women and children, and the children fought to see through and around their fathers’ hands. I had seen enough that it didn’t bother me much, but I looked away anyway. It seemed like bad luck to gaze upon a dead man from my perch on the gallows.
“Mr. Simeon Payne is here to confirm that Leon Thaw was alive and fairly healthy at the time that he left the drive,” Jack said. “Would you step forward, Mr. Payne?”
Simeon took three steps forward, his knees locked in a soldierly fashion. I caught the eye of Greer, but she quickly looked away and repositioned her hat to block me out of her line of view. I didn’t recognize the hat either.
“The cattle were all dying,” Simeon Payne said. “Ira Lee, my co-leader of the drive, had fallen ill and died. As had the cook. As had William. The only two who were in good shape when I left were Leon Thaw, who was driving the wagon, and him.”
He pointed at me.
“What do you think happened after you left?” Gentleman Jack said.
The Reverend jumped in.
“What does it matter, what this man ‘thinks’ happened? I don’t care what any of you ‘thinks’ happened. That has nothing to do with why we’re here. Maybe I ‘think’ Jack Delaney is no gentleman at all. Maybe I ‘think’ he murdered this coach driver whose photograph he waves around. If I can’t prove it, I probably shouldn’t even bring it up. It’s all about what he can prove. Remember, don’t let him fool you.”
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br /> Gentleman Jack waited for Caliber to make his point and then picked up where he left off.
“Mr. Payne, could you kindly tell these people what you think happened after you left and returned to Wichita Falls?”
Payne’s answer seemed well practiced.
“I knew one of them, either Thaw or Liquorish here, had poisoned the crew. Everyone was falling ill except for them. I couldn’t figure out which was the guilty party, but I didn’t aim to stick around and find out. I knew one of them would show his hand.”
I found myself getting interested in his thinking, even though I knew it to be flawed at best and completely hell-bent on railroading me at worst. I was no great admirer of Thaw, but why in blazes would either of us want to poison the crew?
“Why would I do such a thing?” I said.
I had almost forgotten I could speak up, and so had some of those watching. One of them being Simeon Payne. He looked at Jack as if asking for permission to speak.
“Maybe you wanted all the dinero for yourself,” Payne said.
The only dinero I received had been taken out of the Tubbs’s General Store till. It hadn’t covered expenses.
“Here’s what I propose,” Gentleman Jack said. “We know the cook, Jacobo Robles, knew Wilkie John previous to the cattle drive. I believe Mr. Robles and Wilkie John conspired. I believe they planned to poison the crew, mostly likely after reaching Wichita Falls. Most likely with the plan of bringing in these eight hundred head of cattle themselves, collecting all of the money, and moving on.”
The Reverend said, “Mr. Delaney, I believe, if you check the facts, it was Jacobo Robles who died first.”
Gentleman Jack had sprung yet another trap.
“Simeon Payne will tell you fine people he is the reason for that most unfortunate turn of events,” he said. “Mr. Payne, can you enlighten us please?”
Simeon Payne had remained in position, still on the front line and awaiting further orders.
“The cook was making beans that afternoon,” he said. “I saw him dipping out of two separate bowls and approached him about it. I didn’t trust him, him being a Mexican. He stammered around and said one beans was made with one recipe and the other beans was made with another. I made him switch with me. If he wasn’t willing to eat from my beans, I didn’t want no part of it.”
There was another collective gasp from the crowd. I raised my hand like a school child waiting to solve a problem. Jack ignored me. The Reverend came to my rescue. I told them everything I could recall about Jacobo being the official cook of the king of Mexico, and how his beans had been good enough to set him free and keep him alive during the final days of the king’s reign. I think I got most of the important details right.
“What the blazes are you trying to say, son?” Gentleman Jack said.
He knew how much I hated being called son.
“I’m saying that his special beans were in one pot and the not-special beans were in the other,” I said.
I didn’t know this to be true, but it certainly made more sense to me than what they were claiming. Jacobo was new to the drive, as I was, and I’m sure he was anxious to impress. What better way than to make a pot of his most acclaimed dish.
“If Wilkie John’s right, and there’s no proof that he isn’t,” Reverend Caliber said, “you’re accusing this cook, Robles, of acting to poison himself.”
Gentleman Jack pushed on, undeterred. I’m not sure he’d heard a thing we had said.
“Woefully, I also have Wilkie John’s most unfortunate wife, Greer Lusk from Scotland,” he said. “When we think about Simeon Payne’s account, that this cook and Wilkie John had connived to kill off the crew and split the money, we can turn to this lady for her accounting.”
Greer took a step forward where Simeon had taken three and kept her eyes fast on the floor. Looking at the face I knew so well, I saw every sorrow she’d ever had to face and then some. She seemed older but not wiser in the ways you would hope.
“Mrs. Liquorish, could you please state, for the record, what you told me about this matter?”
She never raised her head, and her words spilled onto the floor as if she was bleeding them out. Caliber caught me by the shoulder to keep me in my place.
“He said he would bring back enough money to buy us a piece of land and set up a ranch.”
The crowd was quiet, trying to piece the words together. Slowly, they understood what she was saying.
“I would suggest that the pay for a drover, on one very small cattle drive, would hardly cover such an expense,” Jack said.
Simeon Payne knew we were planning to meet another drive and move on to Kansas. He didn’t seem in any great hurry to mention that part of the story.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Walking to Fort Worth for those final thirty miles took the most of two days, and they were two days filled with sand and death. I found one of the cows wandering far from the trail and shot it. Partly to put it out of its own suffering but mostly for food. If I hadn’t done so, I’m not sure I would have survived, as my energy was quickly wasting away.
The sand was everywhere. In my shoes, in my clothes, my eyes, my hair. I had been wearing a hat at least as far as Wichita Falls, but it had mysteriously disappeared. Mostly, the sand was in my mouth. I could feel it on my tongue, between my teeth. If I breathed through my nose, it filled my nostrils. Breathing through my mouth, I could feel it all the way to my lungs. At times, I had so much trouble breathing, I believed I would drown. And die of sand.
The cow was more of a job than it should have been. It was scrawny and as near to death as I was. Either I needed to eat it or it me. I had the upper hand there, but just barely. I shot it with Ira Lee’s. 44 but quickly discovered I lacked the strength or the tools to properly do anything with it. I certainly couldn’t hang it and butcher it. I was finally able to get it to bleed out enough to take a little meat from its shoulder. Tried eating it raw, right there where I’d shot it. Not successful at all.
I took a short nap and got back up as the sun was setting. Afraid that if I didn’t do something soon, the meat would spoil, I worked on lighting a fire and was able, with greater work than usual, to raise a little blaze against the approaching dark. There I cooked enough of the meat cut from the shoulder to fill me and Roman and have extra for later.
The combination of the rainy night and then the small meal saved me. Almost immediately, I had more energy. As we broke camp and began a search for the trail leading into Fort Worth, we happened on a bridled but unsaddled mule on wobbly legs. I didn’t recognize it, but I thought it might have been William Gee’s. He’d had a mule named Bird, strangely enough, and I wasn’t sure what had happened to it.
I fed Bird a handful of our meat then tied her to us and pressed on. I found that my mind was in constant turmoil, spinning from one subject to another, none of them calming or satisfactory, and so I searched through my bags and found a worn copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne and was thus able to focus my mind on Hans and Axel who had nothing to do with sand, Indians, and dying cattle. Or maybe they did. I could relate to Alex who seemed sure he was seeing things.
Seeing things. What a peculiar way of talking, saying one thing and meaning the opposite. If you were seeing things, and they weren’t there, how were you to believe anything? All reality became suspect. Again, I was circling back around to a world in which nothing could be taken for granted except for me. I was on my own journey, and, with the heat edging higher and higher, I wouldn’t have been at all shocked to see the sand open up and turn to a river of lava.
Even so, riding across the sand reading from the book, sometimes aloud to Roman and sometimes, when he appeared disinterested, silently to myself, was more agreeable than thinking of Ira Lee or Greer. It passed much of the second day and, when we unexpectedly reached darkness before we reached the town, I lay next to a small fire and kept reading until I could barely make out the letters.
I was concerned that
I had fallen off course and missed Fort Worth all together. I’d seen neither hide nor hair of anything resembling humanity since Simeon Payne and Leon Thaw left, and they were a close call. The only map I had was drawn by memory from a man I couldn’t even name. I looked at it again, tucked away in the back of the Jules Verne, and decided I’d veered too far south.
The last page of the book. Oh yes. They had been going southeast, same as me, hadn’t they? They had been hit by a white and azure blue ball of fire that nearly wiped them out and set them off course. I thought of the light I had watched moving across the horizon. What were the chances? Had I been dreaming it? Was I dreaming now? I couldn’t be sure, but I couldn’t dismiss it.
I decided to tack northwest for a while and see if I lucked up on something. There wasn’t any other option really, except for laying down and dying. The closer that got, the more frightening it seemed. Dying. We all ran from it our whole lives, even as we ran right into its arms. I tried to remember the psalm from my childhood, at the Catholic church just across the way from the District. There was a nun there—Sister Mary Constance—who repeated it all the time. Sister Mary Constance. How could I recall her name and not the prayer?
I walk through the valley of death and fear no evil.
I hoped that was enough. That seemed like the important part. The gist of it. I repeated it, over and over, that one line, trying to summon more from the darkness of my memory. It was no use. I was there, and if it wasn’t the same valley of death Sister Mary Constance had been praying about, it was damn well close enough. The fear wasn’t of shadows or monsters in the dark. It was the dark itself.
“Roman, you remember what things were like before you was born?”
I waited, out of respect, for him to think on it, even if he wasn’t inclined to answer.
“I can’t remember anything at all.”
The three of us might have walked for a quarter mile. The darkness seemed unending, so distance hardly seemed to matter. This wasn’t the kind of darkness I could ride out of. I was going to have to think my way out.
