All Things Left Wild

by James Wade

  41

  The horses weaved through the thorn-covered ceanothus and blunt-tipped lobes of the apache plume and the high desert reached out ahead of us, laying certain a path into the morning and we followed it at a trot. The sun grew curious, as it does, about the happenings to the west and moved toward the empty plain to look closer upon it and by the time it was overhead we had reached the hills outside of Austin.

  We moved east until we met the sloping Colorado River and continued east alongside it. We stopped on the outskirts of town, where oak trees grew unfettered and shaded the country and those who traveled it. We pulled the last potato from the sack and cut it into chunky strips and fried it in the cast-iron pan over a small fire. There was no salt, but we ate just fine and watered the horses and ourselves in the calm river.

  Ahead was the vast Brazos Valley and the rivers coming up from the gulf like a reaching hand, cutting tributaries into the land and nourishing the farm fields and timber tracts alike. Here was the beginning of a landscape unseen by me or many of those born in the rugged, rocky dirt hills of the West. As my wounds healed so too did my soul, and with Sophia at my side I gave no thought nor concern to such things as heaven or hell or gathering storms. I wanted to be where she was, and she was here, and this was now, and all else was of little regard.

  We came to the Brazos three days later and in the distance the light from the sun played tricks upon the water’s surface and we rode toward it in a way both desperate and relieved, and we rode the horses down into the river and sat and patted their necks as they dipped their heads to drink. The water came up to our knees and I leaned to my good side and scooped water into my hand and drank and repeated the process many times over while Sophia did the same. Small pines grew along the eastern bank and gave good cover and a vantage of the way we’d come. We put the horses across and out and into the trees and left them saddled, and Sophia made a fire over which to cook supper. I walked back to the river we’d crossed and looked out at the country we’d left behind.

  I filled our canteens in the shallow water and stretched my shoulder and fought the urge to itch at the wounds. I knelt and removed my hat and cupped my hands and splashed the river onto my face. I stayed hunched over in the small rocks for a time uncertain and there in the soft, understanding flow of the water I watched my reflection shimmer and stretch and reform again. I saw the world and everything in it turned upside down and wondered at a life in such a place and wondered if when we die we simply grow gills.

  Sophia had piled pine needles against a charred log burned in some long-ago fire and she bade me sit and rest, and I did. She brought me pan-fried strips of backstrap and when I had eaten them all she brought me more. The meat was tender and filling and soon I was asleep against the log without having untied my bedroll.

  I dreamt that night of my brother and in the dream we were walking, the two of us, down a dirt road, and the road was laid out across prairie land and rolling hills and it would disappear over a rise and then pick back up closer yet to the horizon. Shelby said it looked like a great rope laid across the land by God, and I told him it was built by men. We walked the road and came in time to a single horse grazing in a field of oats and ryegrass and we stopped to watch her.

  She was an American saddlebred, all brown with a slightly darker mane and then lighter near the feet. She stirred a bit and walked slowly toward us with her head down and only then did I see Shelby was carrying his saddle and I couldn’t remember him having it before. He worked the straps under the horse’s belly and then found the stirrup and swung himself up. I knew I couldn’t go with him but I wasn’t sure why and he looked down and tipped his hat and said mine would be along shortly and then he rode away. I called to him and said I didn’t have a saddle, but he wouldn’t turn back.

  I awoke and Sophia had curled herself beside me and slept with her head on the left side of my chest and she’d doused the fire and covered us both with blankets. I couldn’t tell the hour but it was dark still and I could see in the moonlight the outline of the horses where they were tied. I heard no sounds save the crickets and cicadas and an owl who’d taken to a tree near the water and there stood guard over the river world. I kissed Sophia’s head and closed my eyes and thought of the Dawson boy and him leveling the pistol and when I bore down on him it was Shelby’s face at that age and he was frightened and our mother was sick and death comes for young and old alike.

  * * *

  The following morning we were intimate for the first time since I’d been wounded. After, we lay on the blanket in the wet grass and watched as the sun woke the rest of the world from its slumber. Shadows became country and Sophia’s dark hair fell across my chest with her head on my shoulder and I took it in my hand and felt of it, and she asked what I was thinking.

  “I’m thinking about this,” I told her and motioned out to the thick grass just outside our pine grove and the banks of the Brazos beyond to the blue water and great hills dotted with green and then finally the horizon as it held up the clouds bleeding into the purple sky.

  “And what do you think about this?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s ever been more perfect.”

  “He will not stop looking for us.”

  “He might,” I said.

  “He will not.”

  “Well, then I’ll kill him when he gets here.”

  She scoffed, “You cannot kill a demon. They do not die.”

  “He ain’t no demon. He’s just a man gone wrong.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What kind of man are you?” she asked.

  “I’m the kind who won’t ever leave you. Who won’t ever pick up another gun unless I have to. I say we go out to the logging camps, change our names, settle down like a real family might, and never give another thought to all these things left wild.”

  42

  three years later

  East Texas was as green a place as Randall had ever seen. The hills were masked by pine and sweet gum and oak, the lowlands full of dwarf palmetto and club moss, and the two of them, Randall and Mara, never went more than half a day without coming upon a river or creek or some tributary thereof.

  Randall rode through Mount Selman, Jacksonville, and Rusk, following the Neches River and the logging camps that had sprung up alongside it. His face was dry and it itched in the spots where his beard had been thickest. He scratched his chin and looked at his own hand before him. It was rough, pitted, and calloused over. The dirt under his nails seemed as natural an occurrence as sunrise, and the aches in his back and legs from riding would leave him unwhole were they to disappear.

  Two years he’d spent in the saddle, trekking east from the rim country into New Mexico along Apache Creek. He’d seen Santa Fe and Taos and ventured north into Colorado, then east again through Oklahoma and Arkansas. His reputation as a bounty hunter grew, in part due to his never staying still, but also because of his famed standoff with Harvey Dwyer.

  Dwyer and his outfit, a few Appalachian boys who called themselves the “Hang Gang,” had romped through Tennessee and Arkansas lynching black men, and even a few black women. They holed up in the Ozarks with federal men closing in. A lot of the locals took up the cause and saw fit to protect Harvey’s Hang Gang by spreading misinformation, disabling motor cars, and in general causing chaos in the hills.

  Randall saw it all in the Tulsa paper. He had been reading about Agua Prieta, how it was captured and recaptured, and how el revolución was still in full swing. He’d thought about going back to the desert to fight, but there was no solace in killing soldiers—soldiers were only doing what they were told. He wanted the men who were deciding their wrongs—men like Dwyer.

  So he rode east from Tulsa and into the Ozark Mountains and while the federal boys scrambled to control the locals and obtain warrants in each county, Randall pushed past them and caught Dwyer and his men just
outside a place called Eureka Springs.

  There were six of them by a creek and Randall could see only one awake. He shot that man first. The rest were no trouble, Randall mounted and firing from each hand. It was over in seconds.

  He’d been in tighter spots riding alongside dozens of lawmen in Oklahoma, chasing down Elmer McCurdy after his failed train robbery in 1911. Still, the story of “Dead” Randall Dawson spread. People bought him drinks, patted his back, shook his hand. They’re all weak, he thought, like I was.

  In three years he’d seen mighty country and killed unmighty men. Sometimes, from the corner of his eye, he’d think he saw them, faces from the past—the boy, the Bentleys, his beautiful Charlotte. But in truth his past was falling away quickly and now, looking at his own hand, he recognized nothing of the man who’d come west all those years ago.

  Randall sat Mara near the base of a mulberry tree in full bloom and the limbs above him hung low, weighted down with the fresh fruit of spring. He reached up and picked a handful of berries and ate them and Mara took a step and he reached up again. When he’d eaten his fill his mouth was stained and so too his hands, and when he looked down at them he saw only blood.

  * * *

  He awoke under the tree, Mara tied loosely to its trunk. Cows huddled nearby, paying no more mind than the occasional glance. They fed on the scutch grass and tall fescue and Randall sat awhile and watched them. He looked at his map and added the days between himself and the gulf, and when he reached it, he thought, what then?

  He pulled from his satchel some parchment and a pen and wrote quickly, before he could change his mind.

  Dear Joanna,

  I am glad to hear the child is doing well. It was good of you to take him. I have sold the ranch and all it comprises. My man, Mr. Landrum, will oversee the details. He will be in contact shortly. I have put all the money in your name. I am sorry I could not do more.

  Randall

  He folded the paper and tucked it away and the cattle began to stir behind him. He put a hand on his gun heel and turned to see two farm boys atop sad-looking mounts, come to collect the cows.

  They stopped when they saw him.

  “Mister, this here’s private property,” the older of the two boys said.

  Randall took him to be in his teenage years. He slowly held his hands up.

  “I don’t mean any trouble, boys,” he said. “I was just passing through. If it’s alright with you all, I’ll be on my way.”

  The younger boy leaned over on his horse and whispered to his brother, then they both stared back at Randall.

  “Is that Mara?” the older boy called, and Randall turned to look at his own horse and then back at the boys. “Are you ‘Dead’ Randall Dawson?”

  “I am,” Randall answered, which set both boys off into a frenzy of hoots and hollers.

  “I’ll be damned,” the older one finally said, breathing heavy. “Randall Dawson is right here on the Neches River. Hell, he’s right here on our farm.”

  The younger boy shook his head in amazement.

  “You a-huntin’ somebody?” he asked Randall.

  “Yeah, I suppose I am.”

  Again the boys were beside themselves.

  “Who is it? What’d he do?” they asked excitedly.

  “Didn’t keep a promise,” Randall answered. “An important promise he made to himself and his son.”

  The boys exchanged glances, then shrugged.

  “You been after him long?”

  “A few years now.”

  “Dadgum,” the younger boy said.

  “Would you mind, Mr. Dawson, signing your name onto something for us? Daddy ain’t gonna believe this.”

  Randall bent down to his satchel to look for the fountain pen while the boys argued over what to have autographed. He pulled and put to the side some papers, a few cans of beans and a tied bag of peppered beef. When at last he emerged with the pen, he found the boys staring at him.

  “You after Mr. Crawford?” the older boy asked, confused.

  “What’s that now?” Randall replied.

  The boy pointed to the fading and fragile poster, torn near the edges, creased and covered in time.

  Randall’s breath caught in his throat. “You know that man?” he asked.

  “Sure, that’s Mr. Crawford. He worked the camp down in Alto for a bit. Used to come up on trade days with his wife. Real pretty thing.”

  Randall steadied himself.

  “He still there?”

  The boy shook his head, and Randall felt his heart sink.

  “Think he caught on with an outfit down in Angelina County,” the boy said. “You can just follow the river on down and be there in a day or two, I imagine.”

  Randall shoved his things back into the satchel and unlooped Mara from the mulberry tree and mounted up.

  “Thank you, boys,” he called, riding hard through the pasture, the cows crying in protest as he raced by them.

  “Wait,” one of the boys called after him. “What about signing your name?”

  He felt Mara’s strength beneath him, carrying him through the fields and forests. He stopped to give her food and water and rest but took none of these things for himself. He was a man long lost having finally remembered his purpose and he survived on that purpose alone.

  “We found him, Harry,” he said aloud.

  43

  I paid for the horse with my own money, and because of that I called her my own, and I named her Gracie. Together we rode out to the big lake near Manning and rode the dirt trails around it. Sophia’s aunt from Piedras Negras had come up a month past and was waiting on the baby like everyone else, and at the kitchen table she’d smiled with her coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other and I’d told her Sophia was sleeping.

  I was riding just to ride. Watching the morning. Squirrels ran along the trail with all the urgency of life and death and then froze solid for a heartbeat and quit the path, fleeing into the woods with some new destination in mind, or maybe an old one, just a new way of getting there. The trees reminded me of my childhood in the rim country, but that was a place from long ago—a place purposely forgotten, buried and rebuilt upon.

  I traced the west side of the water and sat Gracie near a low bluff and watched the sunlight turn the surface of the lake to diamonds. The azalea was in bloom and the honeysuckle made sweet the thick air, and I could’ve sat forever.

  The timber work was hard and that’s what I liked most about it. It was hard and honest and at the end of the day I was exhausted and happy. I used the name Crawford, like Shelby had said, and no one looked twice. I suspected I wasn’t the only man in the logging camps trying to hide. It was difficult in the beginning. The camps would move and the conditions were raw and unforgiving and I didn’t like leaving Sophia in the scum and squalor of the tent towns near the work sites. My hands bled from the saws and axes and the felling of trees was only a portion of the job. We hoisted and loaded logs and drove mules and horses and worked some in the river, everything flowing south to Beaumont.

  In less than three years’ time we’d cleared more tracts than had been cut in a hundred years. The logging industry was booming and a permanent town was set up in Angelina County near the Manning sawmill. Mr. Manning, some old boy out of Monroe, Louisiana, had built one of the first steam-powered sawmills in East Texas back in the ’80s, and the Carter-Kelly Lumber Company took it over a few years back and moved all us hands down into the deep pines. Once the railroad connected through to Huntington there was more work than we knew what to do with. More than seven hundred people settled in Manning, with a post office and a schoolhouse and everything me and Sophia could want.

  We built a two-room cabin between the mill and the lake on a little parcel I leased from Mr. Crain. There was a living room and a kitchen in the front, separated by a piped stove, and a bedro
om in back. Sophia didn’t have to sleep in a timber tent, and I came home to a warm house with a sturdy roof.

  Some nights I woke shaking and sweating and Sophia would hold me and whisper to me and the ghosts would dissipate and she’d hold her hand over my heart.

  She had saved me—if not my soul, then certainly my life. And now there would be a new life to shape and shelter, and perhaps we could right the wrongs visited upon us as children. The building and rebuilding of the world hinges on our ability to correct our mistakes rather than continue them, passing them down as heirlooms or birthrights so that each generation may be as tainted and broken as the last.

  The light leapt through the trees and danced across the pine needles, led by the slow swaying of the wind. A crane swooped past and settled into an effortless gliding just above the water. I heard something moving down the ridge and dismounted and squatted and watched a velveted buck cautiously drink from a narrow stream.

  He raised his head and looked across the water and then behind him and then drank for a short while before checking the world again. After he’d had his fill he climbed back up the sloping bank and paused at the sight of Gracie and me. I stayed squatted. We looked at one another and I could see him breathing, heavy and uncertain. I was foreign to him. Some two-footed god come to kill, as all gods do. And it occurred to me nature’s obsession with death—the frailty with which most all animals view their own life, and why not? They have no concept of life, no awareness. They know only death, and death is always coming.

  It’s a terrifying thought, that when we close our eyes there’s nothing waiting, and after working so hard on being human it turns out we’re just that—and that means goodbye. But we don’t think of it that way—we can’t—and somehow the mystery of the world was solved at least once, on that day when our minds and souls and all our gods got together and said we wouldn’t think of it, lest we be driven mad by the knowledge of our thought.