The Fall of Abilene

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Neither Nora nor myself had the honor and privilege of knowing Grace Lavender,” the parson said solemnly, and I shot a glance at Mike Williams, wondering what kind of lies he had told the preacher to get a whore buried at a Baptist church. But then I recalled that Tom Smith, the murdered marshal before Hickok arrived in town, had been buried here, and he had been Catholic. Maybe Baptists weren’t all that particular about who got planted with their blessings. All those things we Methodists had said about Baptists had been overly harsh, I realized. Perhaps Baptists weren’t the hard rocks we took them for.

  It was a short funeral. Williams handed the parson a few crumpled bills, nodded at the gravediggers, who he must have already paid, and then we left. There was no need to see the coffin—Willie had not dared call Williams’ bluff—covered with sod. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

  I left the cemetery at the Baptist church for the last time. Before coming into town, I had thought I would visit the grave of Bear River Smith, but now I knew I could never come back here again. My heart would break.

  “I hope to see you at our services,” the parson’s wife called out as we were walking.

  Mike Williams turned and bowed, saying: “Alas, good lady, I am of another faith.”

  She looked at me. “And you?”

  “Methodist,” I told her.

  Her eyes arched, but she smiled at me, too. “Well, both of you are welcome any time. Go with the blessings of our Lord and Savior. Go in peace.”

  Peace, I thought with sarcasm as we headed back. Peace? In Abilene?

  * * * * *

  I stopped on the boardwalk on Cedar Street. Mike walked right past me, but finally stopped and turned around. He glanced through the windows of the millinery, then studied me. “Is there something you want?” he asked.

  “Why are you doing this?” I demanded.

  “Doing what?”

  “Helping me.”

  He let out a gentle laugh. “Last time I checked the city ordinances, that was no crime.”

  “You don’t even know me,” I told him.

  “You think I don’t know you. But I do. I was your age once. Just as rambunctious.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Think about it, and the definition will come to you.”

  “But I still don’t know why you’re helping me.”

  He laughed again. “Everybody deserves a second chance. And hell’s filled with fools who never realized or believed that. But I know you deserve it. I have faith in you.”

  He had so much faith, he turned his back on me. I could have cut down the alley. Found a horse on the next street. Stolen it. Raised dust to Texas. Or Colorado. Anywhere.

  But he just kept walking, and like an ignorant puppy, I followed him back to the stone jail on Texas Street.

  Inside, Mike handed me a cup of coffee, but not before he had sweetened it with a dose of rye he retrieved from a bottle stashed in a desk drawer. He poured three fingers’ worth into another cup that contained no coffee. This he drank down quickly.

  “You all right?”

  I shrugged, wiped my eyes. “This town is nothing but filth,” I said.

  “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Mike agreed. “But it makes a lot of men rich.”

  “It ought to be cleaned up. Or burned down.”

  He didn’t reply, just studied the ceiling. The door opened, and Hickok entered wearing a low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, striped britches, brocade vest, black Prince Albert, and red silk cravat. He smelled of perfume. I had to fight back my tears because the perfume carried the scent of lavender.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked as he removed his hat, hung it on a deerhorn. He put his hands on his hips where his two Navy Colts were stationed as usual.

  “Noah says he wants to clean up Abilene,” Williams said.

  Hickok picked up the bottle, throwing the cork on his desk. “You drinking my whiskey, Mike?”

  “I’ll give you one on the house at my place in Kansas City,” the deputy said.

  Hickok corked the bottle, opened the drawer, deposited the rye there. He looked at me, frowning, and looked questioningly at the deputy.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Mike asked.

  When Hickok did not answer, Mike repeated: “He wants to clean up Abilene.”

  I just stared at my coffee and rye, not drinking, not thinking, barely listening.

  Hickok twisted a strand of his auburn hair around a finger. “Mayhap we should pay Judge Canfield, Mayor McCoy, and Mr. Kilpatrick a visit.”

  * * * * *

  Judge William H. Canfield tamped tobacco into a fancy pipe, Mayor Joseph McCoy clipped his fingernails, and E. L. Kilpatrick read the Chronicle. Kilpatrick was the youngest, thinnest, and tallest. Canfield had hard eyes and packed the most weight. It was damned hot in the courthouse, and sweat gave all of our faces a wet sheen. Even though he just sat in a high-backed chair messing with his fingernails, McCoy looked the toughest, with well-groomed dark hair and a cowlick, eyebrows that marked him for a Scot, a mustache and long, scraggly goatee that stretched all the way down to his paper collar. All three men looked solemn.

  I sat on a hard bench between Mike Williams and Wild Bill Hickok.

  “What’s the lad charged with?” The judge sounded bored.

  Mike glanced at Hickok, who shrugged. “Drunk and disorderly.”

  That caused the mayor to forget about his fingernails. He said: “Kind of young for that, isn’t he?”

  Hickok sighed. “We’ve had younger.”

  The judge set his pipe next to a big volume of Blackstone, tugged at his paper collar and string tie, and said: “He needs a lawyer.”

  We all looked at the clerk, who kept his eyes on the back page of the newspaper.

  “Pro bono,” Hickok said.

  Now the clerk sighed, folded the paper, and looked up.

  “What’s your recommendation, Marshal?”

  “He works for us till he pays off the fine. We feed him. We board him.”

  The judge stopped fidgeting with his collar and tie. “Hold on there. You mean to say you’re gonna make this boy … a kid from Texas … a deputy?”

  “Hell, no, Judge,” Hickok said. “He gets neither badge nor gun. Definitely not a gun. He just”—Hickok winked—“cleans up Abilene.”

  “How?” McCoy asked.

  With a grin, Mike said: “Oink. Oink.”

  E. L. Kilpatrick, attorney at law and city clerk, laughed, picked up the newspaper, found a notice, and read.

  Be it ordained by the Mayor and Councilmen of the city of Abilene:

  Sec. 1. That hogs found running at large in the streets of the city of Abilene shall be taken up and impounded by the Marshal and shall by the Marshal be advertised for the period of three days, and if not called for by the owners before or at the expiration of said three days, the Marshal shall proceed to sell the same at public auction, Provided that the owners of hogs calling for the same after impound, shall pay a fine of $3 per head and shall pay all expenses incurred.

  “What the hell?” I cried out.

  The mayor, clerk, judge, marshal, and deputy just laughed. Real loud.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Some things a Texas cowboy prided himself on never, ever doing. Yet I walked down the streets of Abilene in my McInerney boots, with a lariat and a big grain sack, hunting for stray sows, hogs, and piglets.

  I pulled the collar of the slicker I wore up high, while bringing the ball cap’s brim down as far as I could to shield my face. The slicker I actually needed. It rained all the previous night and well into the morning, turning the dust of the streets into a thick, stinking mud.

  The big hog I’d been following from a livery stable moved off Texas Street and onto the boardwalk by Ringoshie’s saloon. I followed it down the alley, around the b
ack of the building, and squeezed through the narrow passageway that separated the saloon from Gus Mills’ clothing store.

  “Oh, my goodness!” said a lady with a pink and white dress and yellow parasol. The hog lumbered on past, back into the muddy street. The woman’s eyes widened as I passed. I tipped the brim of my cap and kept after the hog.

  “That gave me a start,” the lady told Mr. Mills, who had walked out to see what the commotion was all about. I don’t know if she meant the pig or me.

  Men idling outside the barbershop laughed. Both men and women, even a kid or two, across the street cracked jokes. That’s why I kept the rust-colored slicker’s collar pulled up and the baseball cap’s brim pulled down. I wasn’t known in Abilene, or among most drovers in town, but, the way my luck had turned, someone was bound to recognize me.

  The hog stopped in front of the Bull’s Head. Of course, a crowd of beer drinkers and gamblers had decided to come outside for the show.

  Maybe the filthy pig had tired. It grunted.

  “Easy.” My boots made a sucking sound while slogging through the bog. “It’s all right, boy.”

  Laughter caused the pig to turn around, and when it did, I sprang forward.

  No way in hell did I plan on trying to rope that devil, because as sure as I would have missed, everyone on the streets would have howled and hooted. The editor of the Chronicle would’ve put a story on the front page, and every newspaper in Kansas, and perhaps as far south as Goliad, would have reprinted that story.

  To everyone but me, it was downright comical. I had the hog by its hind legs, and it squealed and twisted and snorted, but somehow I managed to drag him between my legs, turning my face to keep from being blinded by the foulness the creature was plowing up from the street and into my face.

  I planned on putting the beast in the sack. That would blind him, he’d turn quiet, and I’d just lug him over my shoulder all the way to the marshal’s office and jail. That was my plan. But I had underestimated exactly how big that hog was. I’d forgotten something else about pigs.

  “Shit.”

  Turning the hog loose, I desperately flapped my hands like a bird’s wings; the grunting beast skedaddled toward the K. P. tracks.

  “Yes, it’s shit.” I recognized Ben Thompson’s peculiar accent. “And now it’s covering you.”

  Wiping dung off my hands, sleeves, pants, shirtfront, I looked up toward the Bull’s Head, where another man stood laughing. “I’d give you my handkerchief, constable,” he said, “but, well …” He pointed at the sign above the door, the one depicting a bull in all its glory. “We’re the Bull’s Head. Not the Pig’s Dung.”

  That wasn’t so funny, but everyone on the streets laughed.

  He was Texan, not an Englishman like his partner. That was my first meeting with Phil Coe. Broad shouldered, he was dressed in a black vest and coat, with a fancy collared white shirt and a black tie. A thick mustache and beard hid his lips. His nose was long, his dark hair thick, well-groomed, slicked back. And his pale eyes were the deadliest I had ever seen. Colder even than Wild Bill Hickok’s.

  I pointed at the trail the hog had left in the muddy street. “Whose pig was that?” Stupid. What a damned fool thing to say. More folks laughed, even Mr. Gus Mills down the street.

  “McKay,” said a blonde man in sleeve garters, holding a stein of beer.

  “Who’s McKay?” I demanded.

  “The hog,” the man said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Not a McKay. It’s a Duroc,” said the fat fellow next to him, pulling a cigar out of a pocket of his checkered vest.

  “Bullshit,” said the blonde.

  “You mean hog shit,” said Phil Coe.

  The man laughed, but only briefly, and he pointed after the pig and told the one who was lighting that cigar: “Didn’t you see how black that beast was, but with a white belt?”

  “Hard to see white, covered with mud and all as it was.”

  “Well, it sure wasn’t a Duroc.”

  “Ears sure didn’t look like a McKay. And I thought it was more red, dark red, than black.”

  The two were buyers, the Abilene Chronicle reported in its next edition, for Plankinton & Armour’s packing house in Kansas City.

  I was getting nowhere with these fools. I found my feet, my sack, my lariat, my baseball cap, and followed the stinking trail the pig had left. My ears reddened. Blood pounded in my head. I swear to God, had Mike Williams or Wild Bill given me permission to carry a pistol, I would have shot one of the men making jokes at my expense.

  * * * * *

  I did catch the Duroc. McKay my ass. There wasn’t a spec of black on him, once all the mud came off. I dragged him to the pen behind the jail.

  One of the prisoners, a green pea from Waxahachie, washed my clothes as part of his sentence. Another filled a tub with hot water, for neither Mike Williams nor Wild Bill would let me inside the office until I was scrubbed free of the coat of mud and manure.

  As I worked the suds in my third tub of hot water, Hickok sat back in a chair he had dragged from his office, rocking it on its hind legs, and sipping a porter. Mike rested on a crate, watching the prisoners with a keen eye but paying more attention to the bottle of beer in his hand.

  “Among the dungs in the world,” Hickok said, “I always found that of horses to be the most fragrant.”

  “Makes the best fertilizer, too,” said the boy from Waxahachie. “Ma uses it in her garden.”

  “Cow shit isn’t too bad,” Mike said.

  “You never had to smell it for eight hundred miles,” I contradicted him.

  “That’s the danged truth,” the boy from Waxahachie agreed.

  “I smell enough of it in Kansas City,” Mike said. “It’s better than pig shit.”

  “What about dog turds?” the other prisoner asked. He started to roll a smoke. Hearing no objection, he sat on the last bucket of water he had emptied. The kid from Waxahachie leaned against the tub that had been flipped over, further soaking the already waterlogged ground.

  The sun had started to sink. The rain had cooled things off. Another prisoner was frying ham for our supper, so its aroma now permeated the air outside, instead of me.

  “Dog shit,” Hickok said, “is the price we pay for the privilege of having a loyal friend.”

  “Amen.” Mike sipped his beer.

  “Always wanted a dog.” The prisoner shook his head sadly and lighted his cigarette.

  “Yes.” Mike’s head bobbed as though he had solved the great mystery, this debate of feces. “The worst shit there is comes from the pig.”

  I could not argue with that.

  The prisoner doing the cooking, however, could. “Bullshit,” he said.

  Hickok shifted his beer to his other hand and turned, staring at the man working the fork and skillet. “I believe we have already decided that the manure dropped by a bovine is not overly repugnant, mister.”

  “Ain’t denyin’ that,” our cook said. “Just sayin’ that answer’s bullshit.”

  Mike finished his beer, tossed the bottle into the heap next to the woodpile. “So what smells worse than pig dung?”

  I wanted to know the answer to that myself.

  “Chicken shit,” the cook told him.

  Hickok lowered the front legs of his chair, pitched his bottle, which shattered in the trash pile, and began smoothing his mustache as though in great contemplation. “Chicken shit,” he pondered.

  “Coyot’s et up all our chickens,” said the man with the cigarette. “I was a kid. I don’t recall much of an odor.”

  “That’s because the coyot’s got ’em,” the cook said. “You try havin’ a big coop of chickens. In South Carolina. In the misery of August. After a hard-soakin’ rain. Wet chicken shit. That’s the granddaddy of ’em all.”

  “Chicken shit,”
I said.

  “Wet chicken shit,” the cook said, “in especial.”

  Hickok brushed the long hair off his shoulders and sat up straight. “There was a fellow in Troy Grove,” he said. “Yes, yes.” He slapped his thigh. “By grab, sir, you are absolutely correct. There is nothing more repugnant than chicken shit.”

  “Wet or dry.” Mike nodded. “Want another beer, Jim?”

  “Supper’s ready,” the cook announced, found a plug in the rear pocket of his britches, and bit off a mouthful.

  Rising from his seat, Mike tossed a towel in my direction.

  “Any further discourse or arguments about the state and smell of shit in this world?” Hickok said.

  No one commented.

  The prisoners picked up their plates and cups of coffee and returned to their cells. After Mike locked them in their cells, he brought out bottles of beer, and we sat on the front porch, watching the hitching rails in front of the saloons begin to fill up. Pianos could be heard, along with the occasional banjo or fiddle, even a mouth organ.

  I began to cut off a piece of ham but suddenly lost my appetite. I had seen enough pork for one day, and tomorrow promised no relief.

  “Abilene?” Wild Bill asked, after swallowing a mouthful and washing it down with beer. He wiped his mustache and lips with a blue-and-white-checkered napkin. “What is twenty-five percent of three dollars?”

  I ran the problem through my head once, then again to confirm my answer. “Seventy-five cents.”

  Hickok nodded. “Very good.”

  “Is that how much I get?” I asked. “For each pig I bring in?”

  Hickok and Mike laughed.

  “It’s what I get,” Hickok said. “Twenty-five percent of every fine I collect. Do a better job tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “If the smell of dung gets any thicker,” Brocky Jack Norton said, “I’m moving to Ellsworth.”

  Brocky Jack was one of Hickok’s deputies. I couldn’t stand him.