“There’s nothing I can do,” I said, thinking now of Montana.
“Get out of here,” she said. “You dog.”
“If that’s how you feel,” I said.
I went back to Hijinio’s under those crazy cypresses with the thrust-out fingers and the Spaniard’s beard and the red soft growth like antler’s fur burning the undersides, and I stared at the thin trail and the crumbling shells of the mound and at the narrow strip of surf-beaten moonlit water and at the great whited rock with the squatting gulls and cormorants. The tallow candle still burned in the window sill but when I went inside I saw the Kid was not there. I looked down at where he had fallen. There was blood on the floor. The knife and gun were gone too. It was a hell of a thing, me his compadre just standing there in the hot room in my bare feet on the dirt floor and feeling tired and sleepy and a little drunk. I wished then I had stopped off in my place for another couple of drinks.
I stood in the doorway and looked around outside and saw lights in the barn and figured they had carried him there, so I went there to get another look at him. Remembering I was bare-footed, I stuck to the middle of the trail and tried not to brush up against the poison oak, which I could see shining in the moonlight. I stumped my toe against a rock and then cut my left foot on a shell. What was I doing without my gun just because Longworth and his deputies were around? I thought about this but couldn’t come to any decision and so I just kept going toward the barn. I figure now sometimes that a man with guts and a sixshooter and rifle could have finished those three off and I wonder why I didn’t do it. But I know why, only that’s not part of this story.
They were standing on the right of the barn, against an adobe in the shadow of a large pine, their guns in their scabbards and their hands on their butts. They weren’t any too happy standing there, thinking they’d be jumped any minute, and I wondered why they didn’t light out, but then it occurred to me that Dad would want an inquest to make everything legal. He was probably waiting for the wake to end so he could have the inquest afterward. They must have been tired and sleepy and itching to go back to town. It wasn’t the first man Dad had killed and I had heard he didn’t mind letting a fellow lie to rot, without a thought about an inquest, but this one was different, this one had friends who would be waiting to blow Dad’s head off from an ambush and if enough feeling got stirred up he might even get himself strung up, his big feet kicking at the state of California. Besides, his reputation was at stake. It was up to him to prove he had killed the Kid fair and in the line of duty. It was always healthy in such circumstances to have an inquest quick and over with and on the record, so some jokers couldn’t later indict you for something you had had to do, jokers who were after your scalp, say when some time had passed and maybe with a new set of fellows in office.
When they saw me they stirred but they did not pull down on me. They weren’t too eager to have a shot fired now, being afraid that if one man fired a lot of others would come piling in and finish them off. They were playing it soft now, hanging around for a purpose and hating it and expecting to be attacked any minute. I give them credit for that night’s work. Of course it was only Longworth who had to stick it out. The other two could have moseyed off, but if they had they would have been through in that country.
I entered the barn and saw the women were dressing the Kid. They had laid him out on a workbench and I could see that he had cooled off and was stiffening. It was funny to think of him as cold on that hot night. You wouldn’t find more than a couple of nights a year like that on the Punta and it had to be one of them the Kid was killed on. The barn was lit by a few tallow candles. When Francesca saw me she gave me a hard look and I knew she hated me now but I had my own worries just then and I didn’t give a damn for her anyhow, knowing there was nothing I could do unless I was a better or a different man from what I was, and anyway I would have to be leaving soon and it would be no great weight for me to carry, that look she gave me. I knew what she was thinking and I couldn’t say I blamed her but I knew that the Kid would see no sense in my having myself killed under the circumstances.
I went over to the workbench and watched. They were dressing him in his best clothes. I thought: So long Kid. I won’t be seeing much of you after this.
He looked in a way I have always remembered. His face was not pale but reddish, with the thin skin that burned so easily, and the light lashes which were sometimes invisible, and the small reddish ears, but I suppose the candles might have given him some of that color. He was a nice-looking kid, all right, and I could see why the senoritas had gone for him. He had those slate-colored eyes and the golden eyebrows and the brown-golden cropped head and the good nose and bright teeth and the strong fast body. And of course his smiling and laughing all the time had pleased them. You would have thought they would not have gone for his red-rimmed eyes and the thin burned skin that never turned brown but the senoritas liked him for his coloring, he was so different from the fellows they knew. He was still laughing now. The little laughter muscles around his nostrils and mouth were pinched and the curves around his mouth had broken out and you could catch a glimpse of his teeth, with the slightly purple lips around them. Someone had closed his eyes, which had been open in Hijinio’s adobe, and I was glad.
They dressed him in a white shirt, Francesca at the last minute swabbing down the front of his chest, and they fixed a black string tie on him and drew on a dark jacket and then they placed lighted candles all around him and sat down and began to weep. Some of the paisanos came in and watched, not saying much, only a few words now and then behind a hand, and looking sad. Nobody said anything at all to me. After a while I got tired of this and I thought, Well so long Kid, and I went out and went down to the rocks jutting out toward the seawolves.
They are strange rocks down there, in places sharp as knives. I had to be careful in my bare feet. As I went down from the hill where the meadow is I saw the small spired windcut castles, strong in the moonlight, and behind them the hill and behind that, across the cove, the cypress grove. I saw the little beach on my left below me and went down on the hard rocks with the stones jutting out, the stones that looked burned through, and I heard a gull cry. And all the time I heard the seawolves barking and snarling, the sound coming in with the wind, and now and again I heard the women crying up in the barn.
I went down to the flat-lying smooth rocks which looked like big aprons tilting into the sea, and I could feel the ripples of their muscles against my feet and the lacy patterns where the tides had eaten them, and then I went to the left to the cutting rocks again and climbed down among them and jumped the small fiord and crawled out to the outermost rocks, the steel rocks like knives, which I would have thought had come from an earthquake but which Francesca said had been an old river bed, and I sat there looking out toward the seawolves and thinking nothing. Now I could not hear the women crying. I heard the wind and the waves and the seawolves snarling and I thought of nothing.
Then I thought, Well so long Kid, and began to think of leaving in the morning. Then I wondered what Nika was doing. I wondered if she were still lying there like that, naked, and if any of the men had gone in and seen her, and if Francesca had covered her. Then I heard a noise behind me and I saw her coming, the other side of the fiord, wearing a thin old dress.
“Nika,” I said.
She stopped. When she saw me she turned around and went back.
“Nika,” I said, but she kept going. “Have it your own way,” I said.
I would have followed her but I was too tired. What was the use of it anyway? I wouldn’t have slept with her even if I could have, not on that night, not while the Kid was lying all dressed up in the barn. But her coming there had spoiled the spot for me and I got up and climbed back. I slipped once and cut my left heel and cussed. I saw the castles again and heard some gulls and saw two pelicans flying across the cove and saw the whole placing swimming in moonlight and I climbed up to the meadow and as I walked through the meadow I decided
to have me a couple of drinks. I went into my place and had them out of the bottle and then I went into the Kid’s.
She was still lying on the bunk where I had left her, her elbows across her face. She had not left the bed. It had been some other girl who had come down to the rocks.
“Nika,” I said.
She uncovered her face and looked at me. Her face was stained with tears.
“He was my compadre,” I said.
She only looked at me. It was not a hard look and not a soft one.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” I said.
She just looked at me with those sunken eyes, her cheekbones very sharp and high.
“Nika,” I said.
She kept looking at me.
“I’m lonely Nika,” I said.
She covered her face again and I went out and went over to the barn. The Kid still lay there, with the tallow candles around him. Jesús Garcia, who had killed the yearling and was a pretty good carpenter, was nailing together a coffin out of some old boards. I watched him. When he finished, he and I lifted the Kid and put him inside. Francesca began crying and said, “My poor boy, my poor Chivato.” Jesús Garcia nailed down the boards and he and I and two other fellows carried the coffin out to the grove and there, in the little opening near the ghost tree, the very old tree without leaves, the tree with the weathered greens and blues and the burning rust, we buried him. Jesús Garcia had made a little cross, which he stuck at the head of the grave. Longworth and his deputies had joined the small group and they stood there with their hats in their hands, but their hands low to be near their guns.
Then we all went back to the barn and Longworth had his inquest. It said something about how these fellows, Mexicans, had heard that Hendry Jones had been killed in the house of one Hijinio Gonzales on the Punta del Diablo and how they had proceeded to the said house and found the said Hendry Jones, alias the Kid, with a bullet in his chest above the heart. How they had heard Hijinio Gonzales’ story and how this story told of the killing of Hendry Jones by Samuel Longworth, sheriff. And how they, the jury, found that the act of the said Longworth was justifiable homicide. There were six in the jury but only two could sign their names to the paper, the others putting down exes. The paper was written by Hijinio and handed to Dad. Now that he had it, Dad could leave.
He and his deputies went out and mounted their horses. They were about to ride off when one of the fellows of the jury—I don’t remember who—went up to the head of Dad’s horse and said:
“Is it true you cut off the Kid’s trigger finger?”
This fellow had been conferring with the others and so Dad looked at them all.
“Hombre,” he said quietly, “are you loco?”
Webb said, “Go on give them the finger Dad.”
“Yes,” said the man. “Give it to us.”
Dad looked hard at them, then said: “What would I want with his trigger finger? Don’t you know that I liked him? That I was once his pard? That the only reason I killed him was because it was a groundhog case of him or me?”
One of the men said to Francesca, “Did you see the trigger finger on his hand?”
She thought, then shrugged one shoulder.
The man asked another woman, “Did you see the trigger finger?” She also thought, then shrugged.
The men conferred and decided to dig the Kid up. I went up to my place and strapped on my gunbelt and returned as they were about to start digging.
“Hombres,” I said.
They turned around and looked at me.
“If you had asked me I would have told you,” I said. “Nobody took his finger.”
“You know nothing about it,” one of them said.
“Hombres,” I said. “Don’t dig him up. He was my compadre.”
“Some compadre,” one of them said.
“Hombres I ask you,” I said.
“No,” said the man.
I shrugged. “Then I’ll kill the first man who touches his grave with a spade,” I said.
They looked at each other and then looked at Longworth, but Dad only took a deep drag on his cigarette and said nothing. The men threw down their spades.
One of them said, “I think I saw his trigger finger.”
Francesca said, “Yes it was on his hand.”
Dad was about to ride off.
Then somebody said, “It wasn’t the Kid who got killed. The Kid got away to old Mex. It was a fellow looks like the Kid. They couldn’t kill the Kid that way. The Kid’s in old Mex having himself a time.”
Longworth shook his head unbelievingly. “What a loco bunch,” he said.
The fellow asked Francesca, “Do you think it was the Kid?”
“How should I know?” she said.
“Hombres,” I said, “don’t disturb his grave.”
“We won’t,” said one. “Because it’s not the Kid.”
Dad wheeled his horse.
“Come on,” he said to his deputies. “Before I go loco too. I got some sleeping to do.”
They trotted off towards the mission road, Dad looking back now and then.
“It wasn’t the Kid!” cried one of the men.
And Francesca Zamora said to me, “It’s not the Kid. The Kid’s in old Mex.”
“That’s very good Francesca,” I said.
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About Charles Neider
CHARLES NEIDER (1915–2001) was a prolific essayist, novelist, nature writer and Mark Twain scholar. Born in Odessa, his family moved to America when he was five. In addition to Twain, he edited the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving and Leo Tolstoy. The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, first published in 1956, was the basis of the only film directed by Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks.
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Carl Rungius (1869–1959). Two Cowboys in the Saddle, 1895. Oil on canvas. Carl Rungius was born in Germany, but spent most of his life painting in the western United States and Canada. Active primarily in the first half of the 20th century, he earned a reputation as one of the first career wildlife artists in North America.
© Shelburne Museum, Vermont, USA / Bequest of Mr. William N. Beach / Bridgeman Images
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The Apollo list reflects in various ways the extremity of our time, and the ways in which novelists responded to the vertiginous changes that the world went through as the great empires declined, relations between men and women were transformed and formerly subject peoples found their voice.
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First published in the United Sates of America in 1956 by Harper.
This paperback edition published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by A
pollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd.
Copyright © Charles Neider, 1956
The moral right of Charles Neider to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB) 9781784977719
ISBN (E) 9781784975142
Apollo
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Page 16
