by Peter Corris
Bracken coughed. 'Must you? I thought I might discuss a business proposition with you.'
Lincoln recovered his hat from the bar and settled it on his head. 'Like to come along with me, then? You look like a sporting gentleman.'
'Where are you going?'
The American leaned down. 'I'm going to a whorehouse, Mr Bracken. The only one for a hundred or so miles around.'
Bracken felt a surge of excitement. This might be the thing to cut through his torpor, and he had a feeling that Lincoln could be just the man he needed. He finished his drink and stood unsteadily. 'I believe I'll accompany you.'
'Buy a bottle,' Lincoln said.
PART III
Wesley
Lincoln
16
Wesley Lincoln's earliest memory was of his father carefully removing his stovepipe hat, unbuttoning his black frockcoat and undoing his string tie. The tall man with the head of frizzled grey hair then uncorked a whiskey bottle and took a long drink straight from the neck. His somewhat stained and wrinkled black pants were held up by braces but he also wore a broad leather belt around his skinny middle. He took this off and swished it through the air.
'Bend over, boy, and just remember this—I ain't stroppin' you I'm stroppin' the evil in you.'
Wesley later told the story many times, always with the remark that, 'I don't know how the evil in me felt, but it sure as hell made my backside smart.'
The Reverend Shelby Lincoln had never attended a theological college and his knowledge of the Christian religion was of the slightest. He knew about heaven and hell and the money that was to be made by promising people the one while frightening them about the other. He had seen this in operation as a boy growing up on an Arkansas dirt farm. He was born in 1815, the grandson of Roger Lincoln, sentenced at the Derbyshire assizes to transportation to the American colonies for life for the offence of forging and uttering. Roger Lincoln's crime had been of the crudest description—stamping a botched royal head and indecipherable figures on lead discs and attempting to pass them as coins of the realm.
Granted his ticket-of-leave on the condition that he could never return to England, Roger Lincoln retreated south and west from the scene of his bondage in Virginia. In Buffalo Bone, Arkansas, he met and married the widow Ellen Trask, née Makepeace, who was one-quarter Sioux Indian. Through her slave-owning, womanising grandfather, Ellen Makepeace had inherited an infertile plot of land and managed to retain title to it despite the efforts of Hiram Trask to sell it and drink the proceeds. Ellen later confided to her new husband that she had used Indian poisons to secure her land and her widowhood. Roger Lincoln became a dutiful spouse so dutiful that he sired five sons, among whom the meagre land-holding was eventually divided.
Plenty Lincoln, the fifth son and Shelby's father, had a very small patch of land to work. The most distant from the only reliable stream, it was plagued by drought and as the years went by had difficulty in producing enough vegetables to feed the family, let alone cash crops like tobacco. Plenty Lincoln was the first of his line in North America to die from overwork and Shelby was determined not to follow his example. Early in life he took to the riverboats, first as an engine stoker, later as a gambler. He travelled thousands of miles up and down the Mississippi-Missouri system, moving between the soft life in the paddle-steamer saloons and the stifling hell of the boiler rooms according to the luck of the cards. On a high-rolling run of straights and flushes, he stripped the Reverend Josh Jones of his money, leather-bound Bible and silver-plated hipflask. Then his luck ran out and he landed back in Buffalo Bone in response to a message from his dying mother, with a Bible, a smart suit of clothes and a resolution never to work with his muscles again, as his only possessions.
Shelby took to the road as a preacher and healer of bodily ailments through faith in Jesus. He called himself a minister of the One True Church of the American South and vowed he would never go north of the Mason-Dixon line, cross the Rio Grande or preach to niggers. His time on the riverboats had given him an easy spiel and a wide knowledge of people and places. He could arrive in a town and within minutes judge what line was likely to appeal—the promise of rain, the exorcism of demons, the elimination of crop pests. He was also adept at sizing up the state of health in a community and directing his efforts towards characteristic local afflictions—goitres, malaria, deafness. He developed sermons which assigned causes to these disorders and prayers and blessings to relieve the symptoms. He frequently departed with the takings from his meetings, plus donations, leaving sufferers feeling better, or at least not worse.
Shelby Lincoln's great weakness was drink. After a successful tour he would habitually lodge in some place where he wasn't known and proceed to drink the proceeds. It was this habit that brought him to Snakehole, Texas, in the winter of 1844. He got drunk, bedded Maria Burgos and when he sobered up he found that Maria's three brothers were resolved upon becoming his brothers-in-law. His options were to stay in Snakehole, a border town devoted mostly to passing stolen cattle backwards and forwards across the river, as the husband of Maria, or to remain as a resident of the town's Boot Hill. Pedro Burgos, in making a point, managed to break Shelby's leg so badly that the doctor who set it told him he would have a permanent limp. That seemed to close down his career as a faith healer.
Shelby married Maria and the One True Church of the American South finally had a permanent home—a clapboard building on the edge of the town where Shelby held regular Sunday services. Through the week he made moonshine whiskey which he sold illegally to Mexicans and Indians, both operations being conducted under the watchful eyes of the Burgos brothers who operated a small ranch and a poor-yielding silver mine.
'Put down roots, children. Anchor yourselves in the soil not in the sea,' Shelby would rant to his congregation while he yearned to be moving on, to be waking up under different roofs and, above all, to be seeing different faces. He made a living, moving between the church and his still with the pronounced limp and sampling more of his own product than was wise. When his wife complained of his frequent drunkenness he blamed her brothers.
'I only drink to relieve the pain. And the only reason I got the pain is because Pedro done broke my leg.'
'You would have run away.'
Shelby shook his head. There was no arguing with a Burgos. Burgoses made up their minds instantly on whatever facts or fancies they had to hand and never changed them.
Maria seldom spoke two sentences in succession but she did on this occasion. 'And left your child without a father.'
'What child?'
Maria ran her hands over her belly.
'Lord Jesus, you're with child? But we married near two years, woman. That's got nothing to do with my broken leg.'
Maria smiled stubbornly. 'You would have run away.'
Shelby Lincoln took out all his frustration, resentment, boredom and despair on his son, Wesley, who was born in a backroom of the One True Church in the spring of 1846. The mixture of Indian, Spanish and English ancestry produced a strange hybrid in Wesley Lincoln. He grew to be tall with olive-tinted skin and light hair and eyes. His eyes were his most remarkable feature, not only for their appearance but for the extraordinary function. Wesley could see things at a distance long before ordinarily sighted people and up close he could distinguish different grains of sand. His physical coordination was remarkable and he could out-run, out-jump and out-fight any boy and most of the men of Snakehole by the time he was fourteen.
By then, he had endured enough of Shelby's 'stroppin' and the last two times the father had attempted to chastise the son he had been thoroughly thrashed. Wesley Lincoln attended school when it suited him and when a teacher was available in Snakehole, which meant that his instruction was patchy and irregular. But he mastered sufficient of reading, writing and figuring to surpass his father in that regard too, and Shelby fell into an attitude of drunken respect for his remarkable offspring.
The boy had a talent for riding and roping, horseshoe throwin
g, whittling and carving, harmonica-playing and singing and it surprised no one when he turned out to be the quickest draw and best shot anyone in those parts could remember. One of his Burgos uncles gave him an old Belgian-manufactured revolver which had been much modified by amateur gunsmiths, along with a leather and wood scabbard. Hundreds of shattered bottles, scores of perforated cactuses and dozens of dead snakes testified to Wesley's proficiency with the weapon. One day, while out shooting at prairie dogs, the revolver misfired. Wesley shifted it across to his left hand preparatory to examining it and the gun exploded, driving pieces of metal into his palm and fingers.
There was no pain at first and his main thought was for the loss of the gun. Then blood spurted and dripped and a shudder ran through him. He ran three miles into town with the hand wrapped in his bandana. The doctor was the same one who had set his father's leg.
'Should take it off,' he said.
Wesley's prairie dog-skinning knife jumped into his hand. 'Clean it up and sew it, doc. If'n you want to chop somethin' off, make it your pizzle.'
'You're a bad boy, Wesley Lincoln.'
'Maybe, but I don't aim to be no one-handed boy.'
The doctor put water on the stove, tore up a cotton sheet and threaded a needle. 'Could sicken on you and kill you.'
Wesley laughed. 'If it does, I won't blame you. I know you're one of my Daddy's best customers, so how's to fetch me some whiskey so I can get through your butcherin' without hollerin' like a girl.'
'You're too young to drink whiskey.'
The knife nicked the doctor's Adam's apple. 'I'm not too young to slit your gizzard. Move!'
Wesley drank a tumbler of neat whiskey and passed out early in the process from the combined effects of the spirit and shock. When he regained consciousness his shirt was sweat-drenched, his hand was swathed in bandages, and he was still drunk. 'Hope you did a good job,' he slurred.
'Best job you'd get between here and Fort Stockton. Rest easy, you've still got your hand.'
Wesley looked at some bloody, mis-shapen lumps wrapped in rag. 'Wha's that?'
'Them's bits of two of your fingers, second and third. Weren't no way to save them. They was hanging by threads. You've also got a big chunck outa the palm.'
Wesley, sobering fast, saw that his knife had been placed out of reach. 'Will the hand work?'
'Should, with luck. Course it won't work good. You've got ligaments and sinews busted. It'll be stiff, but I guess it's better'n a hook.'
'How will it look?'
'It won't be pretty. Now, who pays me for patchin' you up?'
Wesley had been stretched out on a table. He slowly straightened up and swung his legs clear. His head spun and his stomach contents rose sour into his throat but he fought the feelings down. 'I'll get Pa to pay you in whiskey.'
The doctor scooped up the bits of detached flesh and bone and threw them in the stove fire. 'Guess that'll teach you to play with guns,' he said. But Wesley had picked up his knife and hat and left the room.
Wesley Lincoln became a hell-raiser, drinking in the town's saloons, consorting with whores and gamblers and stealing cattle from across the Mexican border. He seldom went near the dwelling at the back of the One True Church and only occasionally visited at his father's still when he needed whiskey to trade for some purpose. His left hand remained weak and stiff and was frequently painful. He could do up buttons with it and use a fork and learnt to control a horse's reins by bringing his wrist into play, but he never let anyone see it. The black glove covered a mangled palm and ugly stumped fingers.
By the age of seventeen Wesley Lincoln had had three gunfights and fought several times with knives, suffering small wounds himself and inflicting more serious ones on his opponents. His temper was hot and short and he was frequently half-drunk and in the company of men in the same state. Because he could not fight with his fists he honed his gun and knife skills and many people were aware that, in general, the men Wesley shot and cut were lucky—he could easily have killed them. His periods of wildness around Snakehole and nearby towns in Pecos County were interspersed with days, sometimes weeks, spent in the desert either on his own or with a small band of Mescalero Apaches.
Many of the Apaches carried wounds like Wesley's and worse from conflicts with other Indians, whites and wild animals. They called him 'Half Hand', a term which would have brought a gun or a knife into play in Snakehole but which Wesley accepted from these people with a nod and a grin. In return for the time they allowed him to spend with them, learning their language, their skills with horses and how to live in the arid country, he gave them whiskey. Many of the Indians were confirmed drunkards, consumers of tiswin, a native beer, and mescal, the sticky, sweet liquor derived from the cactus plant. Wesley knew that the whiskey was bad for them and some whites, nervous about drunken Indians, told him so.
'Hell, that's right,' Wesley said. 'It's bad for them, it's bad for me and it's bad for you. That's the point of the goddamned stuff. That's why it costs more than milk.'
He was unsentimental about the Indians as they were about him. The Mescaleros were hard people who displayed little humour. They grunted with amusement when someone fell off a horse and would give a second grunt if a leg was found to be broken. The second grunt might indicate more amusement or concern—Wesley found it hard to tell. The men treated the women like slaves, as beasts of burden and food gatherers to be beaten, abused and fed last and least. Old people were given scant attention and were frequently abandoned when they could no longer contribute to the survival of the group. Affection was displayed only towards young children. Wesley could not tell if these habits were new, results of the pressures the Indians were under from the reduction of their hunting grounds and the introduction of diseases and whiskey, or whether it had always been so. He did not much care.
He 'went native' on these expeditions, never washing, growing his hair, wearing leggings, soft leather boots, an old calico shirt and a head scarf. When he was with the Indians he did not wear his glove. His beard had scarcely grown and he was able to shave off the fluff with his Bowie knife to avoid the Indians' mockery of facial hair. After a long stint with the Mescaleros at the end of the summer of 1863, Wesley joined them in a prolonged drinking bout of Shelby Lincoln's moonshine and some fiery mescal in an arroyo on the outskirts of Snakehole. When he staggered away from the camp, Wesley was drunker than he had ever been in his life.
He reeled into town late at night, wearing Indian costume, reeking of sweat, horse, chilli beans and liquor. His rollings with Indian women in blankets that smelled of dog, vomit and urine failed to satisfy him and he wanted to bed a white woman. His drunken lurching took him to the door of Lucille Bannon's whorehouse which he hammered on with the butt of his knife.
'Lemme in, sons of bitches,' he yelled, or at least that was what he thought he said. His disordered brain produced the words in guttural, whooping Apache and when the madam opened the door she gave a shriek and fell back into the room.
'Apaches!' she screamed. 'Apaches!'
Men poured from the house and hammered the shambling, drunken boy into the dust. The whorehouse customers were all drunk, though not as drunk as Wesley. They mauled and kicked him, incensed that an Indian would have the temerity to want to buy a white woman.
'Shoot 'im!'
'Scalp the dirty bastard!'
Wesley rolled on the ground bellowing Apache obscenities until a boot under the chin shut him up.
'Don't waste a bullet or blunt a knife. Let's hang the murderin' savage.'
This found hearty approval. The men dragged Wesley to the back of the building and looped a rope over a branch of a mesquite tree.
'Branch's a mite low. Sure it's high enough to hang him? He sure is tall for an Apache.'
'It'll do. It's jest high enough to make the bastard dance.'
They lopped some rope off and tied Wesley's hands and feet while the noose was being fashioned. Wesley had been knocked almost senseless by the kick but he slowly came ba
ck to awareness as he felt the rope bite his wrists and then the heavy weight fall over his head. He spat blood in the face of the nearest shouting would-be lyncher. 'I'll cut your fuckin' tongue out if you don't shut up, Tom Tully. I'm Wesley Lincoln and I want to know which one of you sons of bitches kicked me in the goddamn head?'
The mob was not drunk enough to proceed with the lynching but they were too excited to let Wesley go. A few of the men had grudges against him and old scores to settle and they prevailed against the others who were slowly seeing the funny side of it. They dragged him, still trussed, to the blackmsith's shop, where they tarred and feathered his head. Then they threw him over a mule and told him to go back to humping Mescalero squaws where he belonged.
17
In the fall of 1863 the army of the Confederacy was basking in the warmth of the victory at Chancellorsville but lamenting the loss of Stonewall Jackson. Though no Lincoln had ever owned a slave and Wesley had seen very few Negroes, something of his father's southernness had rubbed off on him and, like many Texans, his natural instinct was to fight for the South. He rode to San Antonio and offered himself as a mounted trooper to a recruiting post in the town. By this time the damage done to his head and hair by the tar had almost healed and he was wearing his glove. He was thin after weeks on the trail but his beard had strengthened and he could pass for eighteen. Both armies recruited fourteen-year-olds and even on occasions younger boys, but not as cavalrymen.
The recruiting sergeant looked the lanky youth over and noisily moved his tobacco chaw to the other side of his mouth. 'Name?'
'Wesley Lincoln.'
'Wesley Lincoln, Sergeant!'
'I aint in the army yet.'
The sergeant looked up from the enlistment book. 'You got a loose mouth, boy.'
'Name's Wesley Lincoln. I told you that.'
The sergeant ruled a line on the page. 'I figure we might have a problem here.'
