Pa said, “I’m heading into town tomorrow, to get some supplies. Your mother’s kitchen is a little barren, and we’re going to have to stock it good if we’re going to keep feeding you boys.”
Ma said, “I had forgotten how much four growing boys can eat.”
Pa glanced to Johnny. “It wouldn’t hurt you to come along, too. Get a haircut. You still look like a wild man from the frontier.”
Johnny’s hair had last been cut months ago. It covered his ears, and fell to his collar in back.
Pa then turned his gaze to Joe. “Wouldn’t hurt for you, either. You look a lot less like a savage than you did when you first got here, but a good haircut is what you both need.”
He didn’t take to the idea of going to town, because that might mean a chance meeting with Becky Drummond. He glanced at Matt, and the look in Matt’s eyes said he understood. But Johnny decided to say nothing.
“There you go, Johnny,” Fred Whipple said.
He was a man of about Pa’s age, but with a balding head, a round soft stomach, and a bubble of flesh beneath his chin. He wore a bushy mustache that rose at the corners to meet two bushy sideburns. He was the only barber in Sheffield, Pennsylvania.
Johnny removed the white apron Whipple had tucked under his chin and looked in the mirror. His hair was now short cropped and combed away from his face, exposing a high forehead that seemed a little higher than the last time he had sat in this chair.
“I look downright civilized,” he said. “First time I’ve looked civilized since I don’t remember when.”
Matt was sitting in a chair by the window. He had a newspaper open. “Why, Johnny, you’ll never look truly civilized.”
“Well, you have to give Fred an A for effort.”
Johnny stepped out of the chair, and placed his hat on his head. It fit a little looser than it had when he walked in.
Joe sat beside Matt. He had picked up a paper and read a bit, but had dropped it back to the stack of papers on the window sill. Joe was not a reader. He was often too restless to simply sit and read.
Fred had worked on Joe and Matt before he started on Johnny, and since the shave Joe had given himself the day before hadn’t been all that clean, Fred had gotten out the razor and now Joe’s jaw was smooth.
They paid Fred and then stepped outside. Johnny slid his hands down his hips to check his guns out of habit, but found they weren’t there. It was now Day Two of no guns. It still felt unnatural not to have them buckled on, and he wondered if he would ever grow used to it. He had thought about wearing them today, but Matt had said he would scare the good citizens of Sheffield to death if he did.
Pa was at the grain and feed store. The boys were to head down there and help him, as soon as the haircuts were done. Afterward, they were going to the cemetery to visit Grams’ grave.
“You boys go on ahead,” Johnny said. “There’s something I gotta do.”
Matt was following his train of thought. Matt said, “Are you sure?”
Johnny said, “Yeah. Gotta get this over with.”
“Come on,” Matt said to Joe. “We can help Pa.”
Johnny strode along the sidewalk, his pants tucked into his riding boots, his hat pulled down over his head. He was wearing a dark blue, double-breasted shirt he had rolled up in his bedroll. A shirt he had picked up in Texas. A lot of the men wore them, there.
People looked at him out of curiosity. He realized he looked as out of place as he felt. Some recognized him after a first glance and gave him a greeting or a nod of the head. The town had grown a little, and there were some folks Johnny didn’t know.
A woman with a deeply lined face, and gray hair protruding from under her bonnet, nodded at him and smiled. “Good morning, John. I had heard you and your brothers were back. It’s good to see you again.”
Johnny touched the brim of his hat. “Good to see you too,..,” what was her name? Oh, yeah. “Mrs. Goodson.”
They had ridden in only two nights ago, and already people had heard they were back. News sure traveled fast, Johnny thought.
Johnny stepped into the doorway of the general store, the heels of his riding boots clicking on the floorboards and his spurs jingling a little. He removed his hat and reached up to flatten his hair, only to be reminded Fred Whipple had cut most of it off.
A man stood behind the counter. He was somewhere near Pa’s age. A white apron was in place, and arm garters held the sleeves from drooping. He was bent at the shoulders, which put him maybe an inch shorter than Johnny.
The man looked up at him and said, “Johnny McCabe.”
“Mister Drummond.” Johnny walked over to the counter and extended his hand and Drummond grasped it firmly.
The man said, “We had heard you boys were back among us.”
“Yeah. Word travels fast.”
Drummond nodded with a smile. “It surely does. I suppose you’re looking for Becky.”
“Well,” Johnny gave a half shrug. “It’d be nice to say hello.”
Drummond nodded with a knowing smile. It struck Johnny the man smiled a lot. He hadn’t noticed years ago. Pa had often said, beware of a man who smiles too much.
Drummond said, “I’ll get her for you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Drummond stepped out through a doorway to a back room, which Johnny knew to be a store room. Within a few moments, she stepped out into the room. Becky. Her face lit with a smile.
“Papa told me I had a visitor,” she said. “I was hoping it would be you.”
Johnny took in the view that was Becky Drummond, comparing the Becky who stood here now with the Becky he remembered from three years ago. She seemed like she had lost a little baby fat in her face, which made her cheekbones seem more pronounced in a way that struck Johnny as classy. The freckles were still there. But her eyes, which had once danced with the joy of life as a young girl, were now glowing with the sensuality of a woman.
Her hair was a chestnut brown, and where it had been usually tied in a braid or just falling free in times past, it was now wrapped into a bun at the back of her head.
“Hello, Becky.” He didn’t really know what else to say.
She said, “We heard you and your brothers had come home.”
Johnny nodded. “Word travels fast.”
“It sure does.”
He wondered how many more times he would be saying that today.
She stepped toward him, tentatively at first and then more hurriedly, and stretched up onto her toes to plant a quick kiss on his cheek. He was not tall, but even still she rose barely above his cheekbones.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I was so hoping you would come by the store.”
“I had to come by and say hello.” There was so much he wanted to say, and yet he didn’t know quite how to get it all out. It was like there was an invisible wall between them. A wall created by an absence of three years.
He remembered how she had cried when he told her he was leaving to join the Army. He remembered their final night together, a moment stolen in the back of Pa’s buckboard on a dark, wooded trail. How she had rested in his arms and told him she would wait for him, for as long as it took.
He hadn’t waited for her. The more time that passed, the more distant his life in Pennsylvania seemed to become. As time went by he had thought of Becky less and less. At one time, he wasn’t even sure if he would ever return to Pennsylvania.
He wondered if she had truly waited for him. Part of him hoped not, because the boy she said goodbye to and said she would wait for had never really come home. That boy didn’t exist anymore. What stood before her was a gunfighter. That was the word for it. He had stood among gunfighters, fought beside them and against them, and rose to stand among the best of them. And he wasn’t ashamed of it. He was what he was. He hoped Becky was living her life, not waiting for some boy who could never really return.
She said, “So, are you going to the dance?”
His brows rose questio
ningly. No one had mentioned a dance.
He said, “There’s a dance? When?”
“Saturday night.”
“Well..,” he wasn’t sure how to phrase what he wanted to say. Matt was so eloquent, but words often didn’t come easily to Johnny. “I don’t know if I have a right to ask this, but..,”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes dancing. “If you were going to ask to be my escort to the dance, then the answer is yes.”
He couldn’t help but grin. She had gumption, but never crossed the line into brazenness. The thought occurred to him that she was more woman than he had ever deserved.
“The dance starts at seven,” she said. “A barn dance. At Logan Everett’s farm.”
Johnny knew the name Everett well. He had gone to school with a couple of the Everett boys. When he was fourteen, he and Pa and Matt had pitched in for a barn-raising after the Everett barn had burned to the ground.
He said, “I’ll pick you up then at, say, five-thirty?”
She nodded. “That would be most fine.”
“Give us a little while to talk.”
“I’ll see you then.”
He looked at her long. There was so much he wanted to say. So much bottled up inside him. He wanted to tell her she looked beautiful. He wanted to say he was sorry for becoming something that could probably never belong in a small farming town like Sheffield.
What he managed to say was, “It’s really good to see you, Becky.”
He left the general store and headed to the grain and feed store. He found himself thrilled that Becky was still unmarried, and yet he was afraid that once she got to know him as he was now, she would be disappointed. The thought gave him an ache down deep inside. He found himself wishing he had never come back home at all.
15
Once they were back from town, Johnny and Matt attacked the woodpile. Johnny worked in silence, focusing on sawing the wood. Cutting every log into stove-lengths. Hauling it by the armload to the woodshed, which was a small lean-to built onto the side of the barn. He would then grab another log and lay it across the saw horse and have at it again. He wore his hat to keep the sun from his head, but he had peeled off his shirt, and his undershirt was soaking with sweat.
He realized Matt had stopped sawing and was watching him. Johnny stopped and looked at his brother and said, “What?”
“Tell me about it. How’d it go?”
“How’d what go?”
“Becky Drummond.”
Johnny looked back to the log he was halfway through cutting. “Come on. Let’s talk over some tequila. There’s still a little left.”
Matt took a swig and handed the bottle back to Johnny. They were stretched out in the hayloft again.
Matt said, “You know, Pa’s really going to kill us. The second day we were supposed to attack that stack of wood, but here we are.”
Johnny said, “We can go back to work after a while.”
“Full of tequila?”
“It can be done.” Johnny took a pull from the bottle. “What you do is drink a lot of water, and work like there’s no tomorrow. You sweat it out of you. I’ve done it before.”
He handed the bottle back to Matt, who took another drink. Matt said, “This tequila grows on you. Beats rum all to pieces.”
“I got so I was drinking a little too much of it, back in Texas. That old scout I mentioned, Jim Layton, sort of took me under his wing and offered me some advice. One piece of the advice was to get out of the life I was leading. Stay away from tequila and go home. I was considering his advice when I got the letter from Ma telling me Grams had died.”
Matt handed the bottle back to Johnny. “So, you took his advice and here you are. Except you’re still drinking tequila.”
Johnny nodded, looking at the bottle. “Become a habit, I guess. But I think I’ll make this my last bottle for a while. I keep a flask of corn squeezings in my saddle bags, but that’s to prevent infections in case of a bullet or an arrow wound.”
Matt was grinning. “Seriously?”
“The captain I rode for in the Rangers is where I got that idea from. I saw a man take a bullet in the forearm. It broke the bone. That wasn’t really a problem, because if it was set properly and splinted, he would be back in action in maybe six weeks. The problem would be if infection set in. If that happened, he’d be dead in four or five days. That’s the most common form of death in wartime, you know. Infection from wounds. And there’s nothing the doctors can do except stand by and watch.”
Johnny took a pull of tequila, and handed the bottle back to Matt.
Johnny said, “Well, that man who got the bullet in his arm, the doctor wanted to saw off his arm off in an attempt to prevent infection. But what the captain did, he had a couple of us hold the man down, and he dumped a couple ounces of corn squeezings into the bullet wound.”
“No kidding,” Matt said, looking at Johnny wide-eyed.
Johnny nodded his head. “I can tell you, that man did holler. He screamed like a banshee. You would’a thought Comanches were working on him. He bucked and screamed. But he kept the arm and infection never set in. The captain said it works every time. I said, can I have some? He handed me an old metal flask he had and filled it from a bottle.”
“You ever use it?”
“Only once. A friend of mine. That Ranger I mentioned, Zack Johnson. He caught a Comanche arrow in his leg. I pulled the arrow out, then sat on his chest and poured corn squeezings into the wound. He kept his leg. That was the time I had to shoot those Comanches. Zack was on the ground behind me with that arrow in his leg.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“What question?”
“Becky Drummond.”
Johnny chuckled and shook his head. “All right. Becky Drummond. I’m taking her to the dance Saturday night.”
“The question is, though, where do you stand with her?”
“I guess the answer to that question is...I don’t know. On one hand, if she’d have me, I could build us a farmhouse and raise children. Pa’s offered me a section of land.”
Matt nodded. “He’s offered one to each of us.”
“Becky’s a one-of-a-kind woman. As great as she was at fifteen, she’s double that now. But..,”
“How can there be possibly be a but?” Matt said.
“Because of that land out there. What we were talking about yesterday. The wide-open land. Long, low grassy hills that stretch for as far as the eye can see. And in southern Texas, you get canyons and desert ridges. It’s a hard land, but it’s a beautiful land. As beautiful as it is hard. And the desert’s not a dead place, like people think it is. It’s alive. Little bushes and wild flowers. Little animals.”
“But it’s dry. There’s no water.”
“Oh, yes there is. If you know how to find it. I listened to men like the captain I rode for, and that scout Apache Jim. That Chinaman I mentioned told me about roots and stuff you can dig from the ground to eat. And I learned from an old Kiowa scout. They talked and I listened.”
“That land to you is like the ocean is with me,” Matt said. “It got a piece of your heart.”
“I think it got more than a piece. I’ve been gone from it for only a few weeks, but it’s like I can feel it calling to me. I could marry Becky, if she’s foolish enough to have me, but could I ever really be happy here?”
Matt still held the bottle. He looked at it thoughtfully. “I suppose you could always take her with you. Build a home out there. Cattle, or something.”
“If she would go.”
“You could always ask her.”
“I spent a lot of time with her when we were growing up. I practically grew up alongside her. Somehow, I don’t think the girl I knew would want to go.”
Matt handed him the bottle. “There’s something I have to tell you. Something I heard at the feed and grain store, yesterday. After Joe and I went back to help Pa, and you went to see Becky.”
Johnny waited. He took a belt of t
equila. His head was starting to swim a little bit, so he figured this would be his last belt. He planned to get back to working on the wood, and making good headway with it before Pa got back from the fields.
Matt was hesitating, like he didn’t really want to say what he had to, but felt he should. “I’m not sure I should say this because it’s something I’m not sure you’re going to want to hear. But you’re going to hear it sooner or later. Might as well be from me.”
“Well,” Johnny said, “don’t keep me in suspense.”
“It seems Becky has been seeing someone over the past year. Trip Hawley. No one knows how serious it is, but he seems to escort her to every dance, and most of her dances are with him. And he stops by the store a lot. He’s had dinner with the Drummonds more than once.”
So, Johnny thought. She hadn’t waited for him, after all. He felt a little relief, because this sort of released some of his guilt. And maybe if Trip was in the picture, then it might make things a little less complicated between him and Becky. While Johnny was now something of a stranger in this little farming community, Trip belonged here. Trip could build a life with Becky, and maybe devote himself fully to her and their children.
And yet Johnny realized he was also feeling a small twang of jealousy, as irrational as it was.
“Come on,” Johnny said, getting to his feet. A little unsteady, because of the tequila. Maybe it was best to focus his mind on something else. “Let’s get some water into us, and get back to work.”
16
When Johnny and his brothers had left home three years ago, he had left his Sunday go-to-meetin’ suit hanging in the closet. It was made of a gray woolen material, and it had fit nicely when he was seventeen. Now he was twenty, and was finding the jacket was too tight through the shoulders, and the trouser legs were about an inch too short.
Matt laughed. “Looks like you’re ready for a flood.”
Johnny said, “And what are you going to be wearing to the dance?”
Matt produced from his duffel bag a folded suit. Charcoal gray with little pinstripes. With a smile of triumph, he said, “A while ago, I decided to buy a suit that fit. As first mate of a merchant ship, I expected to be going into business. I’d been saving money, hoping to buy an interest in our ship. A business man needs a suit.”
Johnny McCabe (The McCabes Book 6) Page 7
