Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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She stood up naked and made no secret of herself as she buttoned on just her shirt and walked down to her horse for a long skirt.
Yountis grinned. ‘Not a bit bashful, is she.’
My brother lifted his .45 and clicked the hammer back. ‘I don’t want you weaseling around down here. I don’t want you to expect her or covet her or even dream about her. I catch you in Miss Moore’s vicinity and I’ll attach an animal to ya.’
Yountis got up out of his frog squat. ‘I like my whores just fine,’ he said. ‘There’s two that got real educations about men.’ He carried the bushel basket to where Bitter Creek and I were sleeping. He kicked us awake and set out a supper of corn bread and hog jowls and kidney beans with capped jars of grainy coffee. Then he walked up to his shack.
By which time Ransom Payne was riding drag and shouting headlines about himself to a posse of Cherokee policemen. Ahead of him were five Oklahoma marshals and an ex-sheriff from Kansas, Ed Short, a robust man who could not have suspected that he had only three months to live before he’d be gunned down in a railroad baggage car by Blackface Charley Bryant.
The posse was misled so often by informers that they soon gave up the hunt. They never got within twenty miles of the gang: the Daltons had that many friends; the railroads were hated that much.
We stayed on the sad farm of Ol and Esther Yountis three days. Whenever Yountis walked out to plow with his middle-buster, Newcomb called upon his sister. Bryant and Newcomb and I played cards and dominoes on a horse blanket spread over bluegrass and wild onion. Bob and his woman walked down to the creek where they knelt and washed each other in running water so shallow they could hear the stones click under it.
Eugenia washed Bob’s chest with a sponge and said, ‘Do women get weak when they see you?’
‘Nope. Mostly they just look bored.’
She said, ‘That’s because they’re defeated. They probably think you’re out of reach.’
‘Aren’t you a comfort,’ he said.
She said, ‘I let only one man visit my body while you were gone the winter. He was heavy and an informant and I didn’t stir until he left me. I spent my afternoons with the pleasure of you, feeling you there and wishing whenever I saw my bed I would see Bob Dalton in it with his gun on the blankets and the sparkle in his eyes and all the bones showing in his chest. I’m not a good woman at all. I’m fickle and strange and common as a hotel, but I do love you Bob Dalton; you’re my permanent resident.’
His answer was to kiss her and to pull her down to him.
She left that afternoon for Hennessey to arrange a purchase of land.
One hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece wasn’t hardly enough for the gang, so that night, after drinking potato whiskey, Newcomb and I left the camp at midnight to laugh like kids and thrash through the bramble and grabbers until we came to a horse pasture owned by George and William T. Starmer. We peed against a fence post and took off our boots and hats and slunk through the wet grass until we saw a dozen horses and foals asleep on their legs or reaching for short clover. I used comforting talk on the animals until I could pet the velvet of a horse’s nose; then I fed it sugar lumps and pulled it away to Newcomb with a rope thrown over its ears. A few got peeved and tossed away but many just nickered and sleep-walked behind us and in this way we got ten horses by three in the morning and rode them back in a trotting string made noisy by the two Yountis dogs. We picketed the herd with wooden stakes in the ivy and planned to leave with them in the morning after alteration of the brands.
George Starmer discovered the missing broncs when he carried out the milk pails. By six-thirty he’d collected his brother and William Thompson and four immigrant farmers they’d sponsored out of Sweden. And the first place they checked was the Yountis property because he was slovenly and disliked in the county.
The dogs announced themselves to skittish horses and Ol emerged from the shack in his bib overalls and he kept on rubbing his eyes as the farmers shouted. He turned his back and slammed the screen door behind him without ever answering them, so they rode around to the back of the yard and saw the puzzle of hoofprints and the broken weed stalks, the grass beaten down, and the farmers went after us in a rush, ducking low as the flanks of their horses to escape the maul of the trees. But Bryant had been sleepless with his pain and heard them soon after the dogs barked. And the gang was gone and somewhere in the trees when the farmers dropped from their horses.
William Starmer had been a military man in the War Between the States, and he directed a sweep through the forest, but it did the men no good because the four of us took off our boots and clothes and smeared ourselves with black mud and hunkered down under broad leaves while Bryant towed the horses south to the road. Then we crashed loudly through the weeds or we yodeled or pitched stones, drawing the farmers where we willed.
The farmers were unequal to it. They hunted like a parish men’s club out for a rabbit shoot. They fired at screams and shadows and flashes of a runner in the trees. Seven men used up four boxes of cartridges by noon. At which time they discovered themselves exactly where Bob had wanted them, in canebrake one mile from Beaver Creek, slapping gnats from their eyes, biting nettles from their wrists, feeling the sting of sweat in thorn scratches. Bob and I and Bitter Creek crouched behind a havoc of lightning-struck timber in the dark of standing trees, looking down at the brush-stopped farmers from topography known as Twin Mounds.
Bryant was with us, sitting with his trousers at his ankles and his sick parts exposed on a flat rock that was hot from the sun. Then he loaded the two chambers of a ten-gauge shotgun he’d bought from Yountis for thirty dollars. He buckled his trousers and limped over next to me. He said, ‘What do we have for targets?’
The immigrants were yelling in Swedish to each other and firing at the unseen but the four of us didn’t answer until we saw the front rank of men struggling in the weeds below us. Then Bob whispered, ‘Now,’ and we lifted our rifles overhead and fired down into the bracken without raising to see if we’d even got close to any mankind.
Somebody struck William Thompson at once and he slumped against a tree. When a friend lifted him to standing, the whole front of his shirt was sagging heavy with blood. The gang of us fired again but sporadically, cautious about the few unspent cartridges still in our pistols, the six cartridges grating together in our hands.
Two farmers pulled Thompson by the collar of his coat into a shaded clearing of wet leaves. ‘What a bellyache,’ he said. ‘Merciful Jesus, it hurts.’ He rolled to his side and vomited food and blood. He heaved until he was empty and it was coming out of his nose. A friend wiped Thompson’s face with his sleeve. ‘Feels like acid and razor blades.’
Word carried back to William Starmer who became so crazy with rage that he lurched straight at the two breasts of land where we were hidden, firing at us until he’d shattered much of the bark off the timber, until he’d used up all his shells. Weeds snatched at his legs like heavy dogs and he was clutched and slow and scratched in the face, only ripping his coat sleeve free of thorns, when Bryant wandered out into the sunlight with his ten-gauge and blew the jaw off Starmer’s head.
Bitter Creek Newcomb left Twin Mounds at a slow lope. He had one hundred fifteen dollars in his bedroll and one of Starmer’s brown horses jolting behind him on a rope and the brim of his hat slapped up in the front like a cavalryman’s. He stopped in a small town that afternoon, ate chili in a tavern, and drank warm beer with an egg yolk in it. He found the town prostitute doing laundry outside in a washtub and they leaned against a trellis that was strung with green beans. She was four inches taller than he was. Her wet sleeves were cold to his skin.
He had a squatter’s farm of sixteen acres near Guthrie that he arrived at on a Sunday. He swapped Starmer’s horse for a mule and some farm implements, and he gave over the next three days to cursing his animal and driving a two-blade plow, and his summer was spent walking the plant rows under the hot sun with a soaked bandana tied to his head, sloshin
g water from a bucket.
In June he had somebody who was educated, possibly Rose Dunn, a pretty girl he’d begun courting, print a letter to my brother that said, ‘I think you should consider expanding the gang to include Bill Doolin, Bill Powers, and Dick Broadwell, who are exceptional men with real sand in the craw who do not wither under gunfire. The railroads are getting nervous. We’ll want the extra security.’
Since I was closer to Guthrie than he was, Bob sent me to chat with Newcomb about the proposal and Bitter Creek agreed to make the necessary connections. And I sat up in bed that night to smoke a cigarette and saw Newcomb in a rocking chair on a hill of Russian thistles and blond grass in the middle of his property, feeling the gun in his lap like a blind man, clicking the cylinder around. A summer wind filled his shirt. He stared at the stars until his neck hurt.
After the gang dispersed at Twin Mounds, Bob gave me control of the horses and was bold enough himself to ride into Kingfisher where he paid for a bath and a haircut and had supper that night with Mom and our sister Nannie Mae and her husband J.K. Whipple. Whipple owned a meat market in Kingfisher and he later spied on us for Marshal William Grimes, the top lawman in the territory and later a Republican governor. Whipple gave Bob a six-cent cigar.
Then my brother splashed his horse along the river and hurried it up a silt bank where I was growing a smokeless fire. The stolen horses all had their heads down in the sweet grass, their tails flinging and shoulders twitching flies away, stomping whenever they walked. I was scraping dried green saliva from a clove bit so I didn’t take hold of the newspaper section on farm sales when Bob unfolded it for me.
‘Which one?’
He said, ‘The circled one, doorknob. Hundred fifty acres, spring-fed.’
I read about a farm sale from someone recently deceased. The bereaved were coming down from Wichita on Thursday to hold the auction. That meant we could hide the remuda at the farm for a day or two. ‘Is there hay in the barn there?’ I asked.
Bob nodded and poured an inch of coffee into a cup. ‘Dropped by to check this afternoon. Wasn’t nobody home. Best keep the horses in stalls until Annie Walker sends her buyer.’
I hung the bridles on a branch and then the two of us squatted by the fire and I stared as it burned down to nothing. He said, ‘I didn’t sleep at all last night. I just hunched next to a tree and stirred the dirt with a stick and tried to decide if I had any remorse for those men that got shot. I couldn’t find anything. Sometimes I wonder if I’m human.’
I said, ‘It’s the railroad’s fault, appears to me. They grab up land and cheat the farmers and make these tremendous profits. It ain’t right. They got all the money in this country locked up and pay almost no taxes at all. They’re the working man’s enemy, is what they are, same here as in California. And if somebody sides with them and gets killed in the bargain, welp, that’s too bad and it makes me miserable but it’s like that in every battle. This is civil war.’
Bob got a cigar out and pushed it against a coal and when it was drawing he stood. ‘I don’t feel guilty; I just feel sad. I guess that will disappear too.’
‘You leaving tonight?’
‘Yep.’
‘What do I do? Mail your half to the Hennessey post office?’
‘Care of Daisy Bryant,’ said Bob, and got up on his horse and hauled its head around. I doused the fire with what was left of the coffee and it whispered for a while.
I stared at the face of my pocket watch and told myself to wake up at three. I opened my eyes at 3:10, and dunked my head in the river and buttoned on a wool shirt and strung together eleven horses with quarter-inch rope I looped through the bit rings. And even with them kicking and jostling and making indignant noises, I had them stabled in the vacant barn by nine. I forked silage into the feeders and carried a bucket of oats from stall to stall and pushed their noses away. Once they cooled they gave off a smell like apples that’ve gone brown.
I locked the barn and walked through a hairy yard of rusty machines and tools and implements waiting for auction: three hog pens on limb skids, a bee house, a pile of harness and leather yokes, a roll of barbwire deep in weeds, and two unpainted wagons with extra wheel spokes in their flatbeds. I smashed out the window to the kitchen door with a dry mop and walked through a shut-up house with all the valuables crowded on the dining-room table or tagged on the living-room floor. Drapes lifted at me when I opened a bedroom door and I saw that Bob had climbed through the window and left the sash halfway up. On the lavender bedspread were the printed tags for what he’d stolen: ‘1848 New York crystal.’ ‘A valuable silver set made by Paul Revere.’ ‘A fine authentic oil painting depicting Venus and the four seasons.’
I opened a closet door and found a laundry bag hanging by its drawstring. I dropped the laundry itself on four pairs of polished high-top shoes and I walked out of the bedroom with a teakwood letter opener, a bottle of perfume still in its velvet box, and a pair of eight-inch Army binoculars in a black case skinned brown at the edges.
I cooked three eggs and I sliced potatoes and bacon together in a skillet and sat at a kitchen table with coffee and the binoculars up to my eyes, counting blackbirds and grackles in a hornbeam tree a half a mile away. Then I washed off my plates and sat in a green wingback chair and stayed the binoculars on the north road where a man and a horse were walking the rightward wheel rut. He rocked deep in a Mexican working saddle and sucked a toothpick between his front teeth and his nose looked like it was pressed against a window.
Annie Walker’s buyer. Charlie Pierce. A jockey-sized man nearly forty years old with deep vertical lines on his face. Newcomb’s bosom buddy.
I ran to the barn and tugged two horses that walked into the afternoon sunshine as if each leg weighed ninety pounds. Charlie Pierce sat in his saddle next to a birdhouse, then threw his reins and his horse clopped up into the yard.
‘I seen you a mile away,’ I said.
He sneezed into a folded white handkerchief. His nose was flat as a thumb. ‘So?’
‘I think that’s pretty amazing.’
Pierce got off his horse and nodded toward the binoculars. ‘You own them things or invent ’em?’ He walked up to a filly I’d pulled out and he ran both hands along her. He lifted a shoed hoof and dropped it. ‘Look at them bent-over nails. That’s a scandal.’ He pried open the horse’s mouth and wiped his fingers on his pants as he squinted at the teeth; then he walked right past me into the barn. His boots were collapsed at his ankles like ice skates on a child. He stood in front of the, stalls watching the horses and came back out drying the inner headband of his hat with the elbow of his shirt. His hair was oily and creased where the J.B. Stetson had been.
‘Emmett, you got one Roman-nosed bay mare looks pretty funneled to me; another one’s so hard in the mouth a cowboy’d have to steer her by the ears. If I was a horse trader like your dad was I’d say three of those broncs are going to be cheaters. Plus, you got a roan back there with four white socks and a white face. That’s about a two-dollar animal and you know it. You’d do as good if you took him out back and shot him.’
I patted the neck of a yearling next to me. ‘Cast an eye this direction, though, Charlie. This one’s got superior conformation, don’t it?’
He talked to the horse and walked around it with his hand. ‘Good shoulder angle, spring of the rib; cannon turns out some but that’s all right. Nice hind leg if he didn’t pass so close at the hocks.’ He straddled a rear hoof and dug at it with an open pocketknife. ‘Soft as a biscuit,’ he said. ‘If I had the money for carrots and sweetfeed I might groom this one myself.’ He scraped the varnish around the shoe, then stood away, folding up his knife.
‘I’m gonna have to cut off these brands and eat ’em,’ he said. He took out a piece of paper and wrote on it with a stub of a pencil. Then he said, ‘You outlaws are beginning to worry our first territorial governor, the Honorable George W. Steele. He says you’re retarding Oklahoma’s progress toward statehood.’ He handed me the pa
per. All it said was: $300.00.
I nodded and opened the barn doors wide. I said, ‘I saw a paragraph in the newspaper said Grimes is after us with something like fifty other lawmen.’
‘There’s mucho consternation, I’ll say that.’ He unbuckled a saddlebag and counted fifteen twenty-dollar bills out of a limp white envelope with fingerprints on it in brown. He tied the horses bridle to tail and when he had them in train he got up on his saddle and rubbed his white handkerchief under his thumb of a nose. ‘I only do chores for Annie Walker. She wouldn’t fuss if I left for more satisfying endeavors.’
‘I’ll mention you to Bob,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I’ll write your name in my Bible.’
Blackface Charley Bryant spent half of June in the Rock Island Hotel in Hennessey, about twenty miles north of Kingfisher. The hotel was named for the railroad spur that served it and was run by a pretty lady named Jean Thorne and her brother, who had known Bryant as a cowhand. For a dollar a day, Bryant got a spring bed and a bureau and a cotton-stuffed chair with doily protectors on which he’d pinned a new reward poster for the murder of a Wharton ticket agent. Miss Thorne brought up his food on a tray and she put a poultice on his thighs and stomach where they were streaked red with infection and she scrubbed his sweating face with a washrag. But he got tired of the mothering and limped downstairs and skinned a yard-tree branch for a cane and rode over to Buffalo Springs one Tuesday at nightfall. There was a cow camp there of five hundred cattle and some cowboys in Confederate Army tents. He’d pay a nickel for his chow and sleep on his bedroll under an Army cot and some afternoons he’d ride forty miles for doctoring from Jim Riley’s squaw. The cowhands all swore by her. She could cure baldness and croup and rheumatism and she could urinate on your hands and heal warts. I don’t know what she did to Bryant, only that she used a glass chemist’s pipe.