by Mark Warren
Wyatt considered the appraisal. “I don’t reckon any man wants that.”
Doc removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a white handkerchief. His face looked raw and naked without the lenses, like he had just awakened from a deep sleep.
“Couldn’t prove it by me, Wyatt. Not with what I’ve seen.” He hooked the spectacles around his ears again and lifted the reins.
The horse raised its head and perked up its ears. “Got to go see about a baby,” the doctor said, squinting. He pointed with the knuckle again. “You might think on being a doctor, Wyatt. There’re always going to be babies.” His eyebrows bobbed. “Busted lips, too, for that matter.” When he snapped the reins, horse and buggy picked up right away into the rhythm by which they had arrived.
Inside the rows of cornstalks Wyatt stationed his brothers on either side of him and began the steady litany of slicing steel into earth, heaping mounds of dirt over the corn roots—a rhythm redundant even before he began it. This had been his war. Two hours before school and three after. Sometimes all day, if the weather dictated it. Wyatt had always gone about it resigned and quiet, never speaking of it in any way. That was his father’s rule. Complaint was a weakness, Nicholas always said, and no Earp displayed weakness.
As he worked Wyatt kept watch on the road. Morgan asked twice what he was looking at, but each time Wyatt only prodded him back to the hoeing. The three brothers hacked at the soil in silence as the trees across the road filled with a chorus of morning birdsong.
Finally, when his father took the chestnut mare at a walk past the open row where they worked, Wyatt stopped, feeling the onset of his emancipation as keenly as if a heavy chain had dropped from around his neck into the soft earth. He watched for a time as Morgan and Warren flailed at the dirt like young soldiers issued weapons beyond their size or mastery. Warren looked up, his dark hair framing his face like a warning of his brooding nature. It was Warren, Wyatt knew, who could be the problem.
“Morg,” Wyatt said, “you’re in charge now.”
Morgan stopped working and straightened. “What do you mean?”
Warren stabbed his hoe into the dirt and stood in the pose of a challenge. Wyatt, setting his face like stone, held his eyes on Morgan.
“I’m goin’ today.”
Morgan swallowed hard. He drew the haft of the tool closer and pressed it to his chest, one fist stacked above the other, elbows splayed outward like folded wings.
Warren’s eyes jumped from Morgan to Wyatt. “Goin’ where?” he demanded. When he got no answer, his face flushed with anger.
Wyatt knelt and kept his voice both firm and gentle. “I ain’t no farmer, Warren.”
For once the youngest of the Earp brothers had nothing to say. He breathed through his teeth as he took in Wyatt’s meaning.
“Wyatt’s joinin’ up with the army,” Morgan announced. “Goin’ off to the war.”
Warren’s face creased like a twisted rag. “Well, I ain’t no damned farmer neither.”
Wyatt took a grip on the boy’s arm, but the shake he gave him was less a reprimand than a way to smooth out the boy’s quick temper. “It ain’t your time yet, so git that outta your head, you hear me?” Wyatt looked to Morg for help. “Keep on puttin’ in your day’s work, and when you’re asked about it, just say I took off for town. You ain’t gotta know why.”
Morgan nodded, but tears had begun to well in Warren’s eyes. Wyatt squeezed Warren’s arm again and stood. He offered his hand to Morgan. As they shook, it occurred to Wyatt this was their first handshake that had not involved a wager.
“How’re you gonna sign up in town with Pa working at the recruitin’ office?” Morg asked.
“I ain’t going into Pella,” Wyatt said. “I’m headed to Ottumwa.”
Morg frowned. “How’ll you get there?”
“I’ll get there.”
“Well, when are you comin’ back?”
Wyatt looked off toward the east as though an answer waited for him there. “Once the war’s done, I reckon.” He stepped back from his brothers, and they watched him from a combined stillness he had never before witnessed. “I’ll try and write if I can get a hold o’ some paper.”
There was nothing more to be said. He turned and jogged for the barn for his bundle of clothes. The wind picked up and molded his shirt to his back, making him feel light, while all around him the downy seeds of prairie weeds lifted on the currents and trailed off ahead of him toward some untold destination to find their place of beginning.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
Summer, 1862: River road to Ottumwa, Iowa
Through the morning he followed the Des Moines River, until sometime after midday he jumped a freight wagon that carried him to Mahaska County. There he bedded down under the awning of a coach’s way station. On the second day, an old Dutchman with a square-cut beard pulled Wyatt up behind his saddle. The old man started up asking questions in that chopping, rise-and-fall accent that Wyatt had been taught to despise through his father’s constant mimicry.
“I’m goin’ into Ottumwa,” Wyatt explained. “Bound for the recruitin’ station.”
The old man turned partway and lifted an eyebrow. “Oh? And how old do you be?”
“Sixteen,” Wyatt said, the lie slipping off his tongue so effortlessly, he fairly believed it himself. In that easy fabrication he felt the world open before him like the river off to his right, numinous and prophetic, ready to take him on the grand ride for which he yearned.
It was late afternoon when they rode in tandem into the township of Ottumwa, and Wyatt had barely begun searching the storefront signs for a soldiers’ station when he saw his father step into the road and grab the Dutchman’s horse by the cheek strap of the bridle.
Nicholas glared at Wyatt. “What’s wrong?” he demanded, ignoring the Dutchman’s protestations. The horse nickered and went wall-eyed, jerking its head as it began to circle.
“Let go uff my horse!” the Dutchman ordered.
“Has something happened at home?” Nicholas demanded. When the Dutchman kicked out at his intruder, Nicholas heaved down on the bridle with his weight. His boots skidded across the dirt as the horse backed away. Wyatt was almost unseated when the horse crouched. Then the material at the back of his shirt knotted, and he was jerked from the haunches of the horse. Squirming in his father’s grip, he barely got his feet beneath him before hitting the street.
The rider regained control of his mount and circled to face Nicholas. “Take your hands off dat boy!” The Dutchman’s jaw was locked with indignation, though it was no match for the storm brewing in Nicholas’s dark eyes.
Nicholas’s hands clamped down on Wyatt’s shoulders and shook him. “All right, you found me! Now tell me what’s happened!”
“Why are you in Ottumwa?” Wyatt said.
Old Nick frowned. “I come down yesterday,” he barked.
When Wyatt said nothing more, the Dutchman lost all that remained of his patience. “He comes to join up fer da war!” he yelled. “Now let him be!”
The fire in Nicholas’s eyes gathered into a baleful smolder. Then a growl rumbled up from deep in his chest as he threw Wyatt back onto the seat of his pants. The Dutchman started to dismount, but Nicholas swatted at the horse, forcing the man to regain his seat.
“This is my son, goddamnit! Now go about your business!” He glowered at the incensed old man, who turned his horse and whipped the tails of the reins sharply across its rear flanks. The animal crow-hopped and then moved with a stutter-step down the street.
One hand shielding his eyes, Wyatt squinted up at the silhouette of his father, who appeared taller than he was by virtue of the black suit and hat he wore like a vestment of ordained power. On the lapel of his coat shone the provost marshal badge he polished once a week with ritualistic devotion. A great woolly beard wrapped around his broad jaw, giving him the appearance of something wild and untamable. Beneath his bushy eyebrows his glare was fierce as it fixed upon the ro
ll of clothes now lying in the street.
Nicholas picked up Wyatt’s travel bundle. “Your mother know you’ve run off?”
Wyatt pushed up from the street and stood, the clench of his teeth his only answer.
“You must’ve left yesterday,” Nicholas growled. “Don’t you think she’ll be sick with worry, son?” The two Earps stared at one another with a willfulness differentiated only by age. “And what about the corn about to come in?”
Wyatt swiped at the dust clinging to one arm. “I thought you were in Pella.”
“Well, I ain’t,” Nicholas barked. “What the hell’s got into you, boy?”
“I ain’t a boy no more.”
Nicholas’s jaw knotted, and he exhaled heavily through his nostrils. “You are, by God, long as I say you are.” He scowled at the bundle. “So you think you’re ready for a war.”
Wyatt tried to push a rough edge into his voice. “I ain’t cut out for farmin’.”
Nicholas’s face darkened, and Wyatt thought for a moment that his father might lose whatever restraint he had manufactured for the sake of the people who had gathered to watch them. But the old man’s eyes closed, and he breathed in deeply, then out, the air wheezing from his nose, stirring the wiry strands of his moustaches. When he opened his eyes, his disappointment stung Wyatt more than a slap in the face. Then the stiffness in Nicholas’s posture wilted, and the taut skin around his eyes relaxed, like a man forced into an admission against his will. His somber gaze fixed on Wyatt.
“You don’t always get a say in that, son. You do what you have to do.”
Wyatt had never heard this sound of compromise in his father’s voice.
Nicholas snapped out of his reverie and began herding the onlookers away. Still carrying the bundle of clothes, he stepped closer to Wyatt. When he spoke, his voice carried the low rumble that he sometimes used in church when he dared to add his rough voice to a hymn.
“You ain’t never quit on nothin’ before, Wyatt.” And with those words, Wyatt felt the seed of guilt take root in his gut. “I ain’t hardly got what all I’ve aimed for myself,” Nicholas continued. They were the most unguarded words he had ever shared with his son. “I know you’re ’bout growed . . . but I need you to stick for a while more. Can you do that?”
Wyatt lowered his eyes to the street. “Yes, sir. I reckon I can.”
Nicholas stepped forward and cupped his hand over the sloping muscle at the base of Wyatt’s neck. “Hold up your head, son.” Wyatt looked up to see his father’s face spent but composed. The old man’s eyes seemed to be gathering in the whole of him. “I want you to git yourself home now, and git back to your work.” He leaned to position his face before Wyatt’s wayward stare. “Will you do that for me?”
Wyatt looked down the street in the direction from which he had come. Beyond the cottonwoods, the river shone in patches of reflected light. His plan of leaving was like the river’s current, already sliding downstream to a place too distant to retrieve.
“Yes, sir.”
Nicholas handed the packet of clothes to Wyatt, and then he turned and marched across the street to the covered boardwalk. There his dark visage was swallowed by the shade of the awning as he pushed through a canvas curtain that served as a door. A hand-painted sign next to the doorway read: US Government Recruiting Station.
With the sun falling off to his left, Wyatt started the long walk back to Pella, his only company the scuff of his boots on the rutted road. He traveled through the night and all the next day, seeing no one, his mood gone sour over the long journey ahead of him, but more so at having to move back into a tedious life he had not expected to face again.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
Spring, 1863: Earp farm, Pella, Iowa
On a cool day in April, after starting his brothers on the whitewashing of the barn, Wyatt tended to the horses and hammered new rivets into the worn leather harnessing. Like Morgan and Warren, he felt the loss of the barren season and its reprieve from the field work, but the feeling of life returning to the surrounding woods stirred him to be a part of it. With the desiccated stalks of corn long since slashed and plowed under, the crop land would lie still as a graveyard for another week to ensure the end of freezes before the planting would begin.
In late afternoon, while spreading hay in the paddock, he looked up to see two dun deer browsing on the bark of saplings beyond the curve in the road. No more than shadows moving against the gray scrim of barren trees, they foraged with an indifference to proximity to the farm.
When the deer dissolved into the shadows of the forest, a distant thunder rumbled in the west. Wyatt checked the angle of the sun, latched the barn doors, and walked to the scaffold where Morgan and Warren slapped paint onto the weathered boards. He stood for a time and watched them work, their weary strokes silently condemning the rote nature of the work.
“You boys paintin’ the barn or yourselves?” he called out.
They turned in unison, each with a brush suspended in one hand. A streak of whitewash ran across Warren’s forehead into his hair.
“Might be some rain comin’ in,” Wyatt said. “Why’n’t you climb down off there and clean up. We’re headin’ across the road.”
They watched him walk up the rise to the house and disappear through the kitchen door. When he returned from the house, he was packing the over-and-under that his father had entrusted to him—a combination shotgun and forty-four caliber rifle. The two boys scrambled down the rungs of the ladder, put away their buckets and brushes, and hurried to join him, walking with a quickened pace to match the stride of his longer legs.
Forming a flank, they crossed the lane and stepped into the twilight under the trees where they inspected the fresh stripping on a stand of young plum trees on which the deer had fed. Wyatt laid the weapon in the crook of his arm and instructed both boys to sniff at the mangled bark, but the scent held their interest for only a moment before their eyes settled on the gun. The old shoulder-buster was like a fourth member of the party, one to which the younger brothers showed uncommon deference. Each, Wyatt knew, hoped for a chance to use it.
“What’re we doin’?” Morg asked.
“We ain’t got to slave all the time,” Wyatt said quietly.
Morgan allowed the little laugh that made his eyes crinkle. “Reckon when Pa sees the barn ain’t finished he’ll beat all of us? Or just me and Warren?”
“You got to learn about huntin’ some time,” Wyatt said. “I figure we can use the venison.”
“Well,” Morg said, adopting the devil-may-care tone he had been perfecting over the last months, “since I’m bound for a lickin’, I reckon you’re just about as bound to let me shoot.”
“Do like I say and you might,” Wyatt said.
Warren’s eyes burned as they fixed on the gun. “Do I git to shoot?”
Kneeling to the forest floor, Wyatt clutched a fistful of dead leaves and dirt and rubbed it against Warren’s trouser leg. “Grind some o’ this duff into that whitewash on your clothes.”
Warren frowned. “What for?”
Morgan thumped him on the back of his head, and Warren swatted at his arm. Morg made an actor’s face like he was surprised, and then laughed at Warren’s flash of anger.
“No more horseplay now,” Wyatt said, putting his years into his voice. “You need to cover up any smell that don’t fit with what’s already here.”
The two boys scooped up leaves and crushed them into their work clothes, the smell of the earth like the new scent of spring itself. When they finished, all the spite and banter was gone, as if the cleansing ritual had sunk beneath their skin and united them in a single purpose.
“Where’re we goin’?” Warren whispered.
Wyatt shifted the gun to one hand, taking it at the point of balance that angled the barrel slightly downward. “Down to the low ground by the creek. Stay behind me and don’t talk.”
They followed him into the trees, attempting to match the quietness
of his footfall in the dry leaves. When thunder rolled across the sky again, Wyatt stopped long enough to gauge that the storm was moving south of them. He turned and dropped to one knee, propping the rifle skyward with the butt of the stock planted on the ground. He pointed to a felled tree, and the two boys waited for him to speak. Instead he moved in a slow, cat-like crouch toward the log.
The wood was narrow between two fallow fields. Where the creek crossed through it, the undergrowth was thick with prime cover for bedding deer. When Wyatt settled in behind the log, Morgan and Warren squeezed in beside him. Their chosen spot commanded a view along both floodplains of the stream. There they waited—Wyatt with his eyes relaxed to catch movement, the two boys pivoting their heads at every sound.
Keeping his eyes fixed on the game trail by the water, Wyatt half turned his head and spoke in a low monotone. “First you got to know where to spend your time waitin’. Else that’s all you’ll be doing . . . is waitin’. Look yonder at that scuffed up juniper.” Slowly, he raised his hand and pointed. “A buck scraped his antlers there. You see it? He chose that tree for the sharp scent of its sap. It sends a message.”
The two boys’ boots clawed for purchase in the dirt as they pushed higher to see over the log. “What’s the message?” Warren whispered.
“This territory’s taken,” Wyatt explained. “He’s claimed this place for his own.”
Eager to please, both boys nodded, their faces bright and open, soaking up whatever Wyatt was willing to share. It was one of the few times that they had seen fit to agree on something.
“Next thing is to get nestled in,” Wyatt continued. “Become part of the place. No moving . . . no exceptions. Deer see movement before anything else.” Wyatt turned back to the hollow. The late afternoon shadows pooled and coalesced to make a dozen niches in which an animal could hide. He dropped his voice to the barest whisper. “And if you’re skittish . . . tied up in a knot of nerves, they’ll feel it . . . and they’ll keep out of your range.” He turned to look at his brothers with the unblinking stare that brooked no insolence. “If you can’t control yourself, you ain’t never gonna control nothin’ or nobody else.” Then he nodded once, and by this gesture alone the two boys knew they could do what he had asked.
