The Legend of Perley Gates

by William W. Johnstone

  “I asked you politely to watch your language. Now you’re gonna force me to do something that there ain’t no call for at all,” Perley said. He looked at the woman, standing wide-eyed and stunned, and said, “Jenny, take your son and walk away from here.”

  Seemingly paralyzed moments before, she suddenly realized that all hell was about to break loose. She turned to her son and screamed, “Tommy!”

  But it was too late. The huge rattlesnake coiled just beneath the rotted-out boards of the old shack was already set to strike the youngster poking around its nest.

  With no time to think, Perley spun around, drew his .44, and fired, splattering the rattler’s head onto the walls of the shack. It happened in less than a second and left the two drifters, as well as the shaken mother, stunned.

  Perley twirled the pistol on his finger and dropped it back in the holster; then he turned to face Zeke again. Unable to believe what he had just witnessed, Zeke found himself virtually paralyzed. It took Lige no more than a moment to realize Zeke was facing instant death.

  “We’re done here, mister. Come on, Zeke, we’ve got no more business in this town.” He tipped his hat to Jenny. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, for our language.”

  Zeke, still suffering from the shock of the draw he had come close to facing, needed no further encouragement. Almost stumbling, he climbed onto his horse and followed Lige out the south end of the street, wanting no part in a shoot-out against a draw too fast to see.

  * * *

  Still shaking, Jenny McQueen finally asked, “Who were those men?”

  “Ah, nobody important, I reckon,” Perley replied, greatly relieved that the trouble had gone no further. “Just some drifters passin’ through town. I’m real sorry you had to hear their rough language. They most likely ain’t been around civilized ladies like you in a long spell.”

  He looked at Tommy, clutching his mother’s skirt now. “Reckon this old shack ain’t a good place to play. Looks like a family of rattlesnakes has moved in.” Perley looked up to see Paul McQueen running from his forge. “Here comes your daddy, now, so I guess I’ll get along.”

  He climbed up in the buckboard, since some other folks were running to investigate as well, and he didn’t want to hang around to answer questions. “Maybe your daddy will skin that snake—make you a nice belt, like the Indians do.”

  “What was that shot I heard?” Paul asked excitedly when he ran up.

  “Just shot a snake, Paul,” Perley answered. “That’s all it was. I think Tommy’s thinkin’ about skinnin’ it.”

  He popped the horse with the reins, and the buckboard pulled off toward the diner.

  * * *

  He tied the horse at the rail before the small frame structure with the sign that proclaimed it to be the Paris Diner. Most of the locals referred to it as Beulah’s Kitchen, since it was owned and operated by Beulah Walsh. Perley stepped up onto the stoop, removed his hat, and brushed his hair as best he could with his fingers.

  This was an important day for Perley Gates, for he had made up his mind to let Lucy Tate know that he was interested in the two of them getting to know each other better. The slight distraction earlier with the two strangers had already left his mind, banished by his thoughts of developing something between himself and the attractive waitress. Lately, it seemed she had not disguised her interest in him, so it couldn’t hurt to let her know that he was attracted to her as well.

  “You goin’ in?” a voice behind him asked.

  “Yes, sir, excuse me—I was just tryin’ to remember something,” Perley mumbled to the elderly man on the step behind him. He opened the door and held it for the man. “After you, sir.”

  Perley stood there in the doorway for a few moments while he looked over the dining room. He didn’t see either of the two waitresses, so he passed by the long table in the center of the room and sat down at one of the small tables against the wall. He usually sat at the long table, but on this day, he preferred the privacy one of the side tables offered. In a minute or two, Becky Morris came from the kitchen with a full dish of potatoes. She set it down on the big table, then came over to greet Perley.

  “Howdy, Perley. I didn’t see you sneak in. Whatcha doin’ sitting over here by yourself? Did they run you off from the big table?”

  “Howdy, Becky,” Perley answered. “I just thought it’d be easier to talk if I wasn’t sittin’ in the middle of the big table. Where’s Lucy? Ain’t she workin’ today?”

  Becky smiled. “Yes, Lucy’s working today. She’s in the kitchen. I’ll tell her you’re here. First, I’ll get you some coffee, though.” She left to get his coffee.

  “Thanks, Becky,” Perley said when she came back with a steaming cup of coffee; then she left him to tell Lucy he was there. Perley watched the slight girl until she disappeared through the kitchen door.

  He liked Becky. She was always pleasant and cheerful, and almost always took the time to ask how his folks were doing. Thoughts of her were immediately lost a few seconds later, however, when Lucy Tate walked in from the kitchen.

  “Well, hello there, stranger,” Lucy called out as she approached his table. “I was wondering what happened to you, you haven’t been in for so long. I brought you a plate of stew. If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, I’ve got a fresh batch of biscuits coming outta the oven.” Her smile seemed to warm the entire dining room. “Whatcha been up to? Keeping out of trouble?” she teased playfully.

  Standing in the kitchen door, Becky watched Lucy charming the unsuspecting young man, and it suddenly made her angry. Lucy was a friend of hers, and Becky didn’t care how she turned her charm on the young men around the town. She just wished Lucy wouldn’t lead Perley on. He was especially vulnerable to her flirting, seeing as how shy he was in a woman’s presence.

  “You know me,” Perley said, “tryin’ my best to stay outta trouble.” He swallowed hard, his mouth having suddenly gone dry as he realized he didn’t know how to tell her what he had come to say. “I wanted to come by to see you before we get the cattle ready to drive to market,” he finally managed. “I’ll be gone for a couple of months, so I figured I’d best come in to talk to you before I go.”

  “About what?” she asked.

  “You know,” he stumbled, “about one thing and another.”

  He had hoped she would know what he wanted to say. She had to know, and she wasn’t making it easy on him, so he dived right in. “You know I think a lot of you.”

  “Why, I think a lot of you, too, Perley,” she replied. “You’re a good friend.”

  “Well, I’m thinkin’ maybe we could spend more time together,” he came back weakly.

  “Are you trying to say what I think you are?” A mischievous smile parted her lips.

  “Yeah, I reckon I am,” he confessed. “I was just thinkin’ maybe I could call on you sometime when you ain’t workin’.”

  “Well, that’s really sweet of you, but I’m not interested in you in that way, but thanks for the offer.” She smiled sweetly and walked back toward the kitchen. “I’ll check on the biscuits.”

  He felt as if he had been shot, and wished at that moment that he had been. He felt like a fool for having interpreted her flirting as genuine interest in him. Sick to his stomach, he stared at the full plate of stew before him and knew he could not eat anything. He pushed his chair back and stood up, feeling that every eye in the room was on him. Knowing he had to escape, he shoved his hand in his pocket, pulled out some money to leave on the table, and headed for the door, his face flushed with shame.

  “Perley! Wait!” Becky Morris ran after him. “Wait, Perley,” she pleaded, until he finally stopped to untie his horse from the rail.

  “I left the money on the table,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” Becky said. “I care about you. I know what just happened back there. You don’t have to be ashamed of getting the wrong impression from Lucy’s flirting. You’re not the first. It�
�s a game she enjoys playing, and it’s a terrible thing to play on someone as decent as you.”

  He finally looked up to meet her eyes. “Thanks, Becky. I ’preciate you comin’ to tell me. I just feel like a damn fool, and I wanna find me a hole somewhere and crawl in it. I ain’t nowhere near ready to court a woman anyway. I don’t know what I was thinkin’.”

  “I know how it feels to be attracted to someone and know they don’t feel the same way about you,” Becky said.

  “You do?” Perley replied. “Then I reckon that gives you and me something in common.”

  “That’s right,” Becky said. “That’s something we’ll always have between us, so don’t let this keep you from coming back to the diner when you’re in town. I always look forward to seeing you.”

  “Why, thank you, Becky, I ’preciate it. Now I reckon I’d best haul this stuff back home, before John or Rubin sends somebody to look for me.”

  He climbed up on the buckboard seat and turned the horse toward the street. She stood out in front of the diner and watched him until she heard Lucy’s voice behind her.

  “Hey, are you gonna help with these dishes, or are you gonna stand out here all day?”

  Becky looked around to see Lucy standing in the doorway.

  “He’ll get over it,” Lucy said.

  “Lucy, you really are a bitch,” Becky said. “That’s the most decent man in this county.”

  Lucy laughed. “You think so, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Rachel Gates walked out to the back porch, where her daughter was shelling peas for supper. “Esther, go down to the barn and get your brothers. Tell them to come up to the house.”

  Esther was struck by her mother’s grave manner. Spoken softly and calmly, her words conveyed a heavy sadness, causing Esther to drop the pan filled with peas and ask, “Daddy?”

  Her mother nodded solemnly. “I’m afraid so,” she murmured. “Go fetch your brothers.”

  Rachel hesitated a moment or two to watch Esther run toward the barn, oblivious of the spilled pan of peas, half shelled, lying on the ground at the foot of the steps. She turned then and went back to the bedroom where her husband, Nathaniel Gates, lay in eternal sleep.

  His death was not totally unexpected, for he had taken a turn for the worse over the last few days, when he appeared to have come down with a pneumonia-like fever that didn’t seem related to his accident. Up until that time, the whole family assumed he would recover from being thrown by a horse, landing him hard on his neck. It was not the first time he had been thrown, and every time before he had recovered, like the indestructible man that he had always been.

  Rachel placed her hand on her husband’s cold brow, then gently closed the stark blue eyes that gazed into the world beyond the life he had known. She took a step back when her daughter-in-law appeared at the bedroom door.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?” Lou Ann implored. Having seen Esther running to the barn, calling out to the men, she had paused only to pick up the pan of peas Esther had dropped before rushing into the house. “Is Papa all right?”

  “He’s gone,” Rachel whispered, struggling to hold on to her emotions. “I just came in to see if he felt well enough to drink some coffee, and he was . . .”

  Unable to finish, she tried to hold back the tears that choked her. Lou Ann stepped close and took her in her arms. They were both crying when Rubin and John ran into the room, with Esther close behind.

  Rubin, the eldest of Nathaniel and Rachel Gates’s sons, moved at once to comfort the two women, with his arms around both of them. Right behind him, John paused to stare at his father, barely able to believe he was dead.

  “Perley’s down near the river, lookin’ for a bunch of strays that wandered off after that thunderstorm last night,” he said, his gaze still fixed on his father. “I sent Sonny to find him.”

  They were joined then by John’s wife, Martha. “What is it, John?” she asked upon seeing them gathered in her father-in-law’s bedroom. “I was feeding the chickens when I heard you shouting to Sonny to go fetch Perley.”

  He held his arm out to her, and she, seeing something wrong, stepped inside his embrace.

  “It’s Papa,” John said. “He’s gone.”

  She gasped in response, even though she had already feared that to be the cause of the sudden gathering of the family. It was almost impossible to believe that the powerful head of the Gates family had succumbed to a fever that none of the family thought a serious threat.

  Nathaniel Gates, having grown up on the small farm his father had abandoned when Nathaniel’s mother died, took it over and built it into the giant cattle ranch it was today. A small empire carved out of the Texas plains, it continued to grow under the hard work and guidance of Nathaniel’s family, who were all gathered now in this sorrowful room, with the exception of one. Rachel, his widow; Rubin, the eldest son, with his wife, Lou Ann; John, one year younger than Rubin, and his wife, Martha; and Esther, Nathaniel’s only daughter, all stood in shocked distress. The one surviving son missing was Perley, the youngest of the brothers at age twenty.

  * * *

  The Gates brothers, all strong, hardworking men, were cast in the same mold but were not identical after the final polishing. Rubin was born a serious man of high morals, with a sense of responsibility and total dedication to the family. John was equally moral but somewhat less serious in his approach to hard work. He was the strongest of the three brothers, but not by very much. The youngest, Perley, seemed not to be bothered by much of anything, taking whatever was offered at the dawning of each new day with the same open mind that he had the day before. The only one of the brothers who had not married, Perley had never exhibited any urgency to find the right woman, although his brothers accused him of being particularly fond of a young woman who worked in the diner in town. He was awarded the unusual and often fight-provoking name Perley Gates, to honor his grandfather, the original Perley Gates. When his grandfather was born, his mother had named him Perley, in hopes that it might help guide him to a righteous life that would see him approach the Pearly Gates of Heaven at his life’s end. She was not an educated woman, so she misspelled his name, but that made little difference to the family.

  The name proved to have minimal influence upon the life of the original Perley Gates, for he was born with a lust for wandering and a constant yearning to see the far side of the mountain. To his credit, he tried to harness his adventuresome nature, even to the point of taking a wife and trying to scratch out a living on a hardscrabble plot of ground in north Texas. His wife died not long after giving birth to their one son, Nathaniel, who was named after his wife’s father. The boy was raised there on the farm by his mother’s parents after Perley reached the end of his patience for the hard work of farming and left Texas to seek the peace he sought in the mountains to the northwest. Some years later, Nathaniel learned that his father had actually made it no farther than the Sans Bois Mountains in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma and was rumored to be living with a Choctaw woman in a shack somewhere in that small range of mountains. Nathaniel had no desire to contact his father upon learning that. It was not until years later, when he started his own family, that he began to understand the nature of his father and truly forgave him for his wanderlust. It was this change of heart that inspired him to name his youngest son Perley to show his sincere forgiveness, unaware that of his three sons, Perley was the most like his namesake.

  * * *

  “Perley!” Sonny Rice yelled when he saw him near the edge of the river.

  Perley looked back from the bank to see the young hired hand loping toward him on the little paint mare the boy most often rode. Perley turned his attention back to the steer on the end of his rope and continued to back his horse up the bank. By the time Sonny rode up to a stop beside him, the cow Perley was in the process of rescuing found solid footing and scrambled up onto the bank.

  Perley dismounted and removed the rope from the cow before asking, “What’s up, Sonn
y?”

  “It’s your pa!” Sonny exclaimed. “I think he musta died. Everybody went runnin’ up to the house, and John sent me to fetch you.”

  Perley was immediately concerned. Like the rest of the family, he had expected to hear that his father was beginning to recover. “Are you sure?” he asked, for sometimes Sonny got things mixed up in his head. “Did anybody say Pa was dead?”

  “No, but they was all actin’ kinda worried, and John told me to fetch you in a hurry.”

  “All right,” Perley said. “Let’s get goin’, then.”

  He looked back at the cow he had just pulled out of the area of quicksand, to make sure it didn’t venture back toward the same section of riverbank. When the steer trotted away to join the other cows farther up the river, Perley climbed back onto his horse and started toward the house.

  Perley was not prepared to deal with his father’s passing. Nathaniel had always been a paragon of strength and endurance that all of his sons tried to emulate. Now, as Perley rode the two miles back to headquarters, as the ranch was referred to, he hoped and prayed that Sonny had leaped to the wrong conclusion—but he feared the worst.

  As soon as he pulled his horse up to the front porch of the house, he guessed that Sonny’s assumption had been correct. John and Martha were out on the porch talking, and they stopped abruptly to greet him when he came up the steps. Martha’s eyes were red from crying, and she held tightly onto John’s arm as he relayed the sorrowful news to Perley.

  “Papa’s dead, Perley,” John stated solemnly. “Rubin and Lou Ann and Esther are in the bedroom with him and Mama.”

  Perley shook his head slowly but made no reply. Martha released John’s arm long enough to step forward and give Perley a firm hug before stepping back beside her husband. She wondered if the youngest son had had a premonition of his father’s death, because he had acted strangely ever since he came back from town a few days ago. John had told her that Perley wanted to work alone out on the range with the cattle. She would not be surprised if Perley had received some kind of message in a dream, or something. There were folks who got those sorts of messages, and Perley was strange in a lot of ways.