He built his home in the midst of a field scattered with pine and spent hours sitting in a chair on his back porch trying to find peace. Even in the silence of a warm summer day, that kind of solitary contentment was hard to come by. Cold, hard memories, bitter loneliness, an ache so cold he swore his heart was frozen, all these things fought the warm peace of the valley. When the memories forced him off the porch, Wyatt went to the stables.
That Thursday by midday, he was in the stables rubbing down Annabelle and filling her trough when the owner of the mercantile rushed in blustering. His home was as busy as the Docs when an emergency hit. Bill was a puffy man with thick jowls made all the thicker by the dainty gold glasses that rested on his nose. “Stage coach was robbed this morning, east of town.”
Wyatt closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the acrid smell of horse manure and hay filling his nostrils. He'd picked Red Bluffs because the railroad towns in the south drew the dangerous types, the outlaws hoping to rob a train and the rough men seeking work. The riots and lynchings and gun fights and uprisings centered in the busy towns far away from Red Bluff. All those robberies and lynchings were supposed to happen somewhere else to someone else.
The sheriff was on friendly terms with the driver, an older fellow who was as smart as a whip and a card-shark to boot. Wyatt asked, thinking that his friend might have been killed, “What happened to Jerome?”
Bill removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “In the back of the store. Didn’t know quite what to do with him. The feller’s not right in the head. He’s been going on about the walking dead. Not a scratch on him, though.”
“The walking dead?” Wyatt felt his stomach lurch as he closed the stall door with a final thud, his mouth firmly set. “I’d best see him.”
Bill nodded and together the two men walked down the compacted dirt street to Bill’s shop. Wyatt brushed by the bolts of cloth and sacks of flour on his way to the small kitchen nestled cozily behind the shop. There in the back of the mercantile Jerome huddled on a stool staring at the floor with his hands curled into fists. Not a muscle on the driver was relaxed. He looked scared. Scared the way a boy felt when he was picking up a bayonet and walking with the column just minutes before his first battle.
When he saw Wyatt, Jerome cried out,” The Clayton gang...they weren’t human, Wyatt. They was once but not no more. They got red eyes and smell like the grave..” Jerome stared wildly at Wyatt his voice hoarse as if he’d screamed himself to a whisper. “Jim Clayton. He’s got red eyes. Red eyes.” His voice seemed to echo in the tiny room.
Wyatt wondered then why everyone looked to him for help, asked him to solve problems no man on Earth could solve. But this was Jerome. If it was strange that the Clayton gang hit a stage coach when they had been robbing the trains and banks, then Wyatt supposed the insanity had a reason. But what Jerome said about red eyes and the smell. That brought back memories of the war Wyatt left buried on a wooded hill a long time back.” Where were you when they hit?”
“A couple miles from the Summer place. The carriage overturned and the horses were screaming. I ran for the treeline before they could see me.” Jerome's clothes were muddy and his face scratched where he'd gone through a bramble”
“What happened next?” Wyatt didn't want to hear. He knew he didn't. But somehow he asked the question.
“I looked back once I was hidden in the trees. If they saw me, they didn't care. They stumbled like drunkards and howled like animals and started at the horses, I saw a man take a bite out of Ranger's ear while the horse was still trying to clear the harness. Ranger kicked him solid, but he didn't even feel it. Went right back to the horse. I ran. I had a gun and I could have stopped them but I ran.” Tears spilled down Jerome's cheeks. The salty man spare of words and slow to show any emotion.
“Jerome, I can promise you, running was the only thing you could have done. One man against three and if the horse kick didn't stop them, a gun wouldn't either. I can help you home if you want.” Wyatt offered. He didn't relish the thought of driving Jerome all the way out to his ranch, not on a Thursday when he allowed himself to drink until the pain stopped. But for Jerome, he would.
“I live out in the boonies. They’ll come for me.” Jerome’s voice rose to a shrill sound that Wyatt had sworn could only come out of old Mrs. Hopper down the street.
“You can sleep here tonight. We’ve got a cot. Thirty cents if you’re willing.” Bill was always on the lookout for more money and it helped that Rebecca liked Jerome. Or at the very least didn't dislike him.
Jerome nodded, a little of the fear easing from his eyes. “That would be best, I think.”
Wyatt’s brow furrowed and he stood, hat in hands, trying to think of the right words to soothe Jerome. Nothing came. “Well, you take care, then.”
Jerome tilted his head back, looking Wyatt in the eye with feverish sincerity. “Wyatt, don’t you go tonight. There’s not enough time before now and sunset and you don’t want to meet them in the dark. Promise me you’ll wait until the morning.”
“The Clayton gang is long gone by now, but I’ll wait.” Wyatt told himself that he was doing it for Jerome, but Wyatt had reasons of his own to fear the gang. As for the undead, well, Wyatt feared them most of all.
Wyatt walked into the saloon, hat in hands and boots clattering across the floor. Missy Prince flushed while pouring a whisky straight for a kid young enough to be her son and smoothed her hair.
The sheriff, smooth-faced with rather short hair and a cowlick right at the crown of his head, looked nothing like the straggly men vying for Missy’s attention on a rowdy Friday night, and she decided the first minute of the first second she saw him that Wyatt was the man for her. That was three years past. Unfortunately, he didn’t know it yet.
Missy dreamed of another life. When she poured drinks, she imagined her own bar, a clean one without muddy prints or unmentionable splatters on the floors. Oh how she detested spittle. That was another thing she liked about Wyatt. He respected the floor. The worst he’d done was tracked in some mud on a rainy day and what man didn’t.
Wyatt swung his body on the high stool with an ease that sent Missy’s heart fluttering. Smoothing out her hair, blue black and dark as a crow’s feather, Missy straightened her dress. She noticed old man Tate moving in to take Wyatt’s order and hauled her pleasantly plump body across the room.
“Wyatt. So wonderful you stopped in. What can I get ya?”
Wyatt turned, the tiny lines at the corner of his eyes crinkling with his smile. It wasn’t a special smile just for Missy. He as like as not gave the same smile to the mangy mongrel in the stables, but Missy took special note of it anyhow. The white dusting of his sideburns where Wyatt had grayed ahead of his time made him look distinguished. His brow furrowed and Missy could tell something was bothering him when he said, “Missy Prince, are you still haunting this old saloon with your pretty self?”
Missy warmed with the compliment, shallow though it was. Wyatt said such things to her every Thursday night, but not once asked her to open herself up to him in any way, verbal or carnal, nor did he pay more than brief attention to her regardless of how hard she tried to get him to notice. Missy was a selective whore, only performing when she was really short on cash and only with men who caught her fancy.
Wyatt was so handsome, Missy had a mind she’d give herself to him for free. He never asked, not once, but she never let Wyatt see her sell herself to anyone, either, so she figured she had a chance. As far as he knew she was a friendly bar maid.
Wyatt stared into his drink, ignoring Missy’s flirtation. Normally he’d flirt back a bit, but not tonight. His mind and heart weighed sore heavy on him and Missy watched his vacant stare with growing unease.
“What’s got your belt in a buckle?” Missy leaned across the counter and Wyatt glanced down the line of her cleavage against his own power to stop it.
“Clayton’s gang stole a few horses and then robbed the coach, just outsi
de of town.” Wyatt threw back his drink, relishing the sting in his mouth, the burn down the back of his throat.
“This town?” Missy’s eyes, the color of a roan…a man could drown in those eyes. Wyatt might have seen an expression of concern, had he been able to think clearly between his drinking and her flirting.
“A few miles back. Jerome escaped clean away. Course he ran before they could grab him. Said the Clayton brothers smelled like death and their faces were pale as milk.”
Missy played with the ribbons on her bosom and Wyatt followed the movement, the fidgeting. That girl was set to reel him in like a trapper baiting a den. No sir. He’d not be another ribbon on her bosom.
“I heard the sheriff three towns over shot Jim Clayton dead.” Missy sighed and stopped fidgeting. Wyatt was the stubbornest man this side of the mountains. She’d lured Tommy with the blue ribbons. Wyatt would require stronger bait.
“That’s the problem. That right there.” Wyatt’s pale blue eyes gazed off into the distance, his jaw slackened, and then he shivered. “You ever see something…wrong?”
“Like what?” Missy leaned in. She loved it when the lads started telling war stories and backwoods adventures.
“Ever seen a dead man walk?”
That got Missy to thinking of old Hiram Blackfeather, with his flyaway white hair and translucent skin. The man tottered about like a tumbleweed in the wind. He never seemed quite alive to her, but then Wyatt was talking about something else.
Missy shook her head. “Don’t reckon I have.”
With a hand on his cowboy hat, Wyatt rose from his seat.
“Now you just wait a minute, Wyatt Stillman. Don’t you think you can start a story like that and then just leave it there.”
Missy slid a drink to him before folding her arms across her ample chest.
A shame to hide those beauties even for a minute. Wyatt shook himself out of his reverie and sat back down. “Well now, I suppose I can tell you a bit. There was this one time in the war…”
Wyatt settled back into his seat and the bar quieted. Everyone wanted to hear Wyatt’s tale of tragedy and woe.
“The cannonballs were flying. Made a man scared to move any direction. Me and my buddy stayed back in the trees. I’m no coward, but I wasn’t as eager to die as some.” Wyatt put an elbow on the bar and rested his chin on his hand, deep in thought.
Missy grabbed his glass and poured another, wiping the counter with a cloth that’d seen better days. Wyatt paused a moment in his story to wonder why she bothered.
“Never gave much thought to the dead before. Plenty of thought to dyin’” Wyatt shifted, straightening up and staring into his glass, sloshing the amber liquid around as if to see answers written at the bottom.
“Did you think you were going to die?” Missy settled in next to Wyatt while one of the gentlemen in the back sidled closer as Wyatt’s voice lowered.
“When a man’s layin’ in mud as thick as butter and watchin’ men twitch and holler while bullets whiz past his ear, he gets to talkin’ to his Maker. I didn’t want to die. That’s a fact, but for a while there, I thought it might come to my sorry hide in a mass grave.”
“How close did you come?” Missy asked breathlessly, leaning forward with just that slight parting of the lips, pretty lips, but they’d sure kissed a lot of men.
Wyatt smiled. “Aw, shucks, we’re not talkin’ about me. We’re talking ‘bout another feller. Don’t reckon I knew his name, but he lay not ten feet from me under a twisted old tree bleedin’ and cryin’ for his mama.”
“What happened then?” The kid drinking whisky shouted from the corner table.
“Well, he died. I know it. I saw him breathe his last and all day watched the flies land on him, but I stayed down.
Wyatt sloshed his whisky once more before tipping it back. Boy would he be drunk by the time he was done with this story. Maybe even drunk enough to play the fool and hunt the Clayton gang tonight. A man would need a lot of whisky to go playin’ with the dead.
“The night was miserable. By the time dark was at its deepest, the fighting had passed us by. The fields were littered with screaming men. The smell, it was like walking past the butcher’s shop but these weren’t no cows. And I shook so hard my teeth rattled, even soaked as I was in sweat. Longest night of my life.”
The saloon took on that eerie quiet feel a place has when something too big for words is happening. Not the smallest whisper crossed between the men. Not the scuffle of a boot or the clanging of a glass.
“The next morning I watched a shell of the fellow get up. His eyes,” Wyatt stared into the distance before swigging the last of his whisky. “The feller was dead and his eyes were empty, like they was starin’ but not at anything in this world. Well, this feller picked up his rifle and walked down the ridge just like he planned to join the fight.”
“Did he?” Old Man Tate hovered at the bar, waiting for the story’s end.
“Nah, he found a corpse and started gnawing on it.”
Missy laughed then, bright and explosive and waved a hand in front of her face to pull in air. “Whooo, Wyatt, you had me going there for a while. Dead man picked up his rifle and went gnawing at the other men like a rat. I thought you were going to tell a real honest war story. That’s some tall tale.”
Nervous laughter broke out as the miners turned away from Wyatt and went back to their drinking.
But Wyatt never finished what he had to say. That boy on the battlefield wore a hole the size of an apple where his heart should have been. No one walked away from a wound like that. And even now, on moonless nights, Wyatt woke in a cold sweat from dreaming about that boy’s eyes and the sounds of slurping when he bent over another dead soldier. It was no tall tale. And his heart pounded while the saloon relaxed back into laughter and quiet conversation.
Putting on his hat, Wyatt tipped it in Missy’s direction.
“See ya round. You take care of yourself”
Wyatt left the bar eager to sleep off the whisky and cold images flashing through his brain. The yipping of a coyote didn’t bother him none. It was the dog at the mercantile slurping up his dinner that left Wyatt with an icy sense of foreboding.
***Thank you for reading***
Moon Struck: Book 1 (When, Were, and Howl) Page 15
