Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  I froze and then looked over my shoulder.

  Luther was halfway up the ladder, swaying now, and even as I watched he let go and plunged from the side of the bridge to vanish into the waters below.

  EPILOGUE

  It was a Tuesday afternoon a week later and I’d gone to Carter Crossing to visit Tally Galt at her telephoned request. The weather for the last three days had been warm, in the sixties, and people were talking about an early spring. We walked around the covered swimming pool and stood facing the hills, as if the house had ears.

  “I couldn’t let this finish without talking to you,” she said. “And apologizing.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for her to choose her words.

  “When you came here last time you frightened me rather badly,” she said. “That’s why I called Chaney.”

  “You have some interesting friends,” I told her.

  “He isn’t a friend. I knew he’d jump at any chance to embarrass Jeff, though.”

  “And you were willing to sacrifice Jeff’s political career?”

  “What choice did I have?” I saw her fist clench and unclench by her side. “It was either that or let everything come out.”

  “Didn’t Reilly wonder what this was about?”

  “I’m sure he did. But he wasn’t going to turn down something free. Here was a chance to do a favor for somebody whose husband could help him.”

  “And now …?”

  “Killing a man who was running away, even if he was an escaping prisoner, is something he’s having a hard time explaining, especially since Luther didn’t have a weapon. At least, that’s what I hear. Maybe you hear something else from Jeff.”

  “I don’t hear anything from him.”

  “Too bad. I know he’s sorry about what happened, and I’m really to blame for it, not him.”

  “Jeff’s a big boy,” I said. “Like you reminded me before, he can handle himself. Or did he ask you to call me?”

  “No, that was my idea. He doesn’t know you’re here.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “Partly to watch me eat crow. Partly to hear you say you aren’t going to tell anybody who shot at you that day.”

  “There’s nothing to be gained from that,” I said.

  “Thank you. For your information, I was up at the camp getting some things I left after the last night we spent there. When I saw you and Luther coming I panicked. I guess I was a little paranoid. What if somebody had been following me? I was just trying to scare you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “All?” Her dark brows rose. “You mean, may you be dismissed? Not quite yet.”

  She reached into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a slip of paper. “I don’t know what you think of me and ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but for some reason I do. You’re like a, well, conscience. Does that make sense? Don’t answer. I know it’s just my guilt. You can’t sneak around like Jeff and I’ve been doing and not feel guilty. At first it’s so much fun because you are sneaking, and it’s like you’re getting away with something, but after a while it’s like carrying a ton of concrete.”

  “I’ve been called a lot of things,” I said, “but concrete’s a first.”

  “I’m perfectly serious. You have that effect, at least on me. But, then, like I said, it’s mostly in my own head, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “when a person feels guilty about something, sometimes they look for a way to make things up. This is mine.” She handed me the piece of paper. “I found this on Arlo’s desk. When I realized what it was I was hor rifled. I didn’t know what to do. You’ll understand when you read it. I don’t know where he got it but he buys the strangest things and trades people for old documents. Of course, this is just a copy I made when he wasn’t home. He wouldn’t like the idea of my pilfering his desk and his precious collection.”

  I unfolded the sheet of paper and looked down at a page filled with the kind of handwriting common in the last century, when people still practiced penmanship.

  April 16, 1858

  My Dear Grandson,

  You have often expressed an interest in our family and I have tried to tell you all I know about it. You asked recently about the story of your Uncle William and his encounter with the late Col. James Bowie, who as you know has gotten a reputation as a patriot of sorts due to his death in Texas some years ago. I think that, being a young man, you fancy a tale of romance and derring-do, as in the novels of Mr. Scott. So, as I am now not so young as I used to be, it seemed to me appropriate that I should tell you the whole story, as it was told to me by your Uncle William, my late brother, who lived in Lordsport on the Cane River at that time.

  In the winter of 1833 Mr. James Bowie, a land speculator and adventurer, rode to Lordsport from Natchez, on his way to Alexandria, where he had business dealings. Mr. Bowie had some notoriety as a brawler in these parts and it was said he had made and lost several fortunes through unsavory land dealings, as well as by running slaves from Galvez Town in Texas. I don’t know if any of this is true, but that was the man’s reputation. He also had a name as a duelist who’d killed a man in Natchez some years before. Your Uncle William always said Bowie’s reputation was somewhat overblown and aside for a fondness for drink the man was mainly braggadocio, but I don’t know about that.

  When Bowie arrived in Lordsport in late 1833, he was on his way back to Texas, because certain of his schemes hereabouts had fallen through. He had lived in Texas for several years at that time & had married a wealthy Mexican woman, which would I suppose put him in the class of fortune hunters, but the word was that he really loved this woman & she died while he was away in Louisiana and Mississippi, leaving him quite inconsolable. In any case, he resolved to return to Texas and wished to liquidate whatever holdings he had in the United States.

  At that time, Bowie was the owner of a tract of land in the hills, which rumor said he had acquired some years before and tried to sell for silver mining. You know as well as I do that there is no silver in those hills and so Mr. Bowie was never able to sell that land but on his way to Texas he thought that he might be able to sell it cheaply because the word, according to William, was that the Bowies were always short of cash.

  He stayed at the Phelps boardinghouse, which, as you know, is still there. While in Lordsport it seems he indulged his habit for strong drink and inquired about local sporting events, all of which caused him to be directed to a card game in the home of a certain Mr. Amos Light, who was himself much addicted to racing horses and card playing.

  Your Uncle William was a young man then and not at all the sober, careful man you remember. You were only eight or nine years old when he passed away at the age of fifty-two. You may recall that he married late, at the age of forty, & before that there was much in him that was wild.

  Now what follows I have directly from William and as he told me the story many times & I never knew him to tell a lie, I believe that it is the truth & that you may believe this as factual.

  The night after Mr. Bowie arrived William happened to attend the card game at the home of Mr. Light & it was in the course of this game that Mr. Bowie became very drunk. When he had lost all his money he put up the deed to the two hundred acres in the hills & shortly lost that as well. Then he pulled a large hunting knife, which he used to wear in a sheath at his belt, & said it was a knife that had killed a man & would be worth something & that, by G—, if nobody would purchase it so he could continue to play cards he would as leave use the blade to cut his own throat because life was not worth living for him anyhow. His companions thought it best to humor him, because it was not safe to leave him in possession of such a weapon in that state of mind, & so they let him pledge the knife and two of his pistols & I think Mr. Light won the pistols & William got the knife and also the tract of land which, however, he never thought of much value. The next day Mr. Bowie was in a more reasonable frame of mind but there was much discussion about what
to do with his weapons. It was finally decided to let him continue with several other travelers who were themselves armed, but to hold his own weapons until such time as he or a family member came to redeem them, as he was far from recovered from his intemperance.

  I don’t know what happened to the pistols. William said that for many years Amos Light had them but then they disappeared. But William was always careful about the knife, which he said had a certain history, having killed a man & been associated with Mr. Bowie. He thought someone of Mr. Bowie’s relatives might come later & wish to redeem it because there was a story that it had been made at the request & order of Mr. Bowie’s older brother, Mr. Rezin Bowie, but Mr. Rezin Bowie died five or six years after James, so it appears the knife is ours fair and square, such as it is. Your uncle showed it to me once. It was an ordinary-looking butcher knife with a blade about nine inches long and a wooden handle & nothing that would distinguish it from any other knife of a similar sort. After he died, your Great Aunt Sophie kept it and some of the silver pieces from that card game and the Bible our mother gave William and some of his other possessions in a locked box but I talked to her the other day & she expressed a willingness to let you have the box & its contents since you were interested in the family.

  I don’t know if this is anything you want especially but it is something having to do with the history of our family & it seemed right for you to have it.

  Your loving Grandfather,

  Arthur Davis McElwain

  When I’d finished I looked up at Tally Galt.

  “I am glad you called me,” I said.

  “I’m happy to hear it. But, of course, it leads to another problem …”

  I nodded. “Your husband’s the one who went to Hightower and told him to get the knife.”

  “Yes. Arlo would never have proposed anything illegal, of course. I’m sure he just wanted this Hightower to act as a go-between, to be sure that what he got was authentic and that he wasn’t overcharged.”

  “But McElwain wouldn’t sell. Or maybe his price was too high and Hightower saw his commission going down the drain. So he sent Jacko to steal it, only Jacko being Jacko, he killed McElwain and took everything else he could get his hands on.”

  “That’s what I’m sure happened,” Tally said. “And my husband could have done something at the time, but he didn’t. His reputation is too precious. So he just stood back and let events take their course and four people are dead. All so Arlo Galt could touch and handle and caress a knife that has history attached to it and have people admire it on his wall.” She gave a little laugh. “And it was all for nothing because Mr. McElwain didn’t even have the knife, did he?”

  “I think he had it,” I said. “It’s just that nobody recognized it.”

  “Oh?”

  “They expected a knife that was like Prince Valiant’s singing sword. A mystic blade. True collectors, like Hightower, knew that wasn’t quite accurate, but Jacko and Luther didn’t.”

  “Life is full of ironies,” she said.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Galt. I hope things work out for you.”

  “Oh, they will. As you may have noticed, your friend Jeff is a realist. He’s lived dangerously up to now but I think he’s had his fill.”

  “You don’t seem very upset.”

  “Did you think I’d break down and cry in front of you? There’s plenty of time for that when you’re gone.” She summoned up a smile. “Our Jeff is going to make a fine politician.”

  “I’m sure.” I started away, then stopped: “You don’t know where your husband got that letter, do you?”

  “You see through me, Mr. Graham. It was mine, of course. My grandmother was a McElwain. Somehow Tom McElwain’s side got the knife—one of those messy family disputes where everybody grabs things after somebody dies. But our side kept the letter. I mentioned it to Arlo one day without thinking. You know the rest.”

  She followed me to the door and we shook hands, and as I started down the steps I heard the door close behind me.

  I drove back to Lordsport, crossing the ancient bridge, and then passing the turn in to the archaeological camp, where today there were no cars parked. I kept going out Highway 20, past the high school on the hillside to the right, past Gunn’s Road, all the way to the place where a dilapidated double-wide sat in a bare space, a beaten blue pickup in front of it.

  When I knocked Alice Mae came to the door. Her eyes were red and her cheeks sunken.

  “Mr. Alan,” she said, touching her stringy hair selfconsciously.

  “Hello, Alice Mae. I wonder if I could ask you something?”

  “You’re the first person come by here since Paw was killed. At first there was all kinds of people, ladies, who brought me things. Pies and cakes and sandwiches. I still got some of it in there. I can’t eat all that. Then nobody come no more. I been sitting in there watching TV and sometimes I think I can hear his voice. But I know I don’t really, because Paw’s dead. He was killed by that man. And it wasn’t right, Mr. Alan. It wasn’t right what Sheriff Reilly done, because my paw didn’t kill nobody.”

  “Of course not,” I murmured. “Alice Mae, do you remember a knife your paw used to skin that deer with? A butcher knife with a wooden handle?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know where he got it?”

  “I reckon.”

  “He brought it home after going out with Jacko, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. But—”

  “Alice Mae, do you know where the knife is now?”

  She stared at me for so long I thought she hadn’t understood and then she broke into a laugh that lurched from mirth into hysteria and tears started to roll down her cheeks.

  I grabbed her shoulders. “Alice Mae, what’s so funny?”

  “Do I know where it is, you asked. And the answer is of course I know where it is. I took it with me when Paw sent me to collect the money from that man in Mississippi, the money Paw said the man was supposed to give me to get Paw outa jail. When I went to get the money, the man was already leaving his shop and I followed him down to Natchez and watched him go to the motel, and I sat outside a long time, trying to figure what to do and wishing Paw was there to tell me. And finally I figured I better just go to his room and ask him. But when he saw who it was he started to laugh, said he wasn’t going to pay Paw nothing. He saw he was crazy to be worried about somebody that had to send a dumb, ugly girl to do their work. And then he said if Paw didn’t leave him alone he’d do him like he did Jacko.” She shrugged. “That’s when I pulled out the knife.”

  “Alice Mae …”

  “I killed him, Mr. Alan. I stabbed him until I was too tired to stab him anymore and then I left him there and I drove back to Louisiana.”

  “And the knife?”

  “When I was halfway over the bridge I throwed it off.”

  I thought of the blood-spattered young woman, the knife flying through the air and then landing in the muddy waters. Landing near the place where, in the last century, a sandbar had existed, a sandbar where there had once been a duel …

  “Alice Mae, listen. I need to get some help for you. I’m going to call some people.”

  But she just kept on laughing. I figured she wouldn’t stop until after the deputies got there. Then she’d tell them the story all over again. But before I called them I wanted to hear Pepper’s voice, to remind me that there was still a sane world out there.

  “Hey,” I told her, “I love you and I’m coming home.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is a vast literature on James Bowie and the Bowie knife. These include both biographies and novels. Probably the two best-known fictional treatments of James Bowie’s life are The Tempered Blade (1946) by Monte Barrett, and The Iron Mistress (1951) by Paul I. Wellman. Of the two, the Barrett book is closer to the truth, probably because his work was published two years before Raymond Thorpe’s purportedly historical Bowie Knife, which apparently influenced Well-man by its uncritical acceptance of the James B
lack story.

  There is no space here to recapitulate the evolution of the Bowie-type knife, but the best concise treatment this writer has seen appeared in a 1979 commemorative publication by the Commission des Avoyelles, entitled Bowie Knives, Origin and Development. This valuable publication, which relies heavily on collector Bill Williamson’s work, establishes definitively that the knife was invented by Rezin Bowie and details, with drawings and verbal descriptions, the stages through which the weapon evolved.

  More recently, the historian William Davis has published a highly readable and informative account of Jim Bowie’s life and adventures in his excellent book Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barrett Travis (1998).

  What is presented in the preceding pages is fictional, but though place names have generally been fictionalized, it is set in a place where the Bowies once owned land and which they frequented. The author makes no claim that what is recounted herein happened. But it could have happened …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful to his editor, Jennifer Sawyer Fisher; to her assistant, Clarissa Hutton; to his agent, Peter Rubie; and to the unsung copyeditor who saved him from so many embarrassing errors. He is especially grateful, however, to his friends in Louisiana: Paul Lemke, Esq., Jack F. Owens, Esq., Mrs. Joy Trunzler, forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein, aka “the Bone Lady,” and Tom Wells, historic archaeologist and expert on metals. Their assistance and kindness can never be adequately repaid.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher