Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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My brother heard of Bryant’s treatments and to needle him snipped out a newspaper advertisement that he mailed care of Jean Thorne. The clipping read: ‘Weak men! Vitality weak. Made so by too close application to business or study; severe mental strain or grief; sexual excesses in middle life or from the effects of youthful follies. All yield readily to our new treatment for loss of vital power. Drs. Searles & Searles.’
Below that Bob wrote, ‘Or else you might consider the Ripans Tabules. They regulate the stomach, liver, and bowels. The perfect remedy for biliousness, Bright’s disease, catarrh, colic, hives, nausea, salt rheum, scrofula, torpid liver, water brash, and blotches on the face.’
My brother Bob had twenty pounds more nerve than I did. I would have feared assassination from Bryant over something like that, but as far as I know he just tossed the letter into a fire.
That summer I stayed fifteen miles from Riley’s main house where I rode the south fence of his ranch for two dollars a week and otherwise worked with spade and axe on a dugout I’d paced off as eighteen feet square and marked off with railroad spikes. Bryant would stop by and lean on his ash tree cane and spit tobacco while I chopped at the red clay in my bare feet and no shirt on my back. I dug it four feet deep and raftered it with tree limbs and when I was done I had a house for six men in the cedar brakes next to the South Canadian River. The roof was sod kept green with a watering can and inside I’d lashed together bunk beds and cur portholes into the clay walls for rifles and ventilation. Bryant hung a Navaho horse blanket in the doorway and he stole a smokestack from somewhere and bricked up a four-burner stove. After Pierce sold the Starmer remuda for Annie Walker, he joined us too and spent three days swinging a machete in the willow brush until he’d made a bramble corral that was tall as his neck and big enough for thirty ponies. At a hundred yards you could barely see that hideout; at a quarter mile it wasn’t there.
I’d curry the horses after supper and dip the scum out of their water, then take my binoculars and wade miles through yellow buffalo grass that was high enough to seed the pockets of my shirt. I’d squat on a hilltop and see five miles to a farmhouse where a woman was washing her hair in a trough with her gray dress stripped off to her waist. Or I’d see a nodding man on a slack horse take the wagon road up the Gloss Mountains or I’d just admire my handicraft from afar. Toward the end of summer Bill Powers would lift the horse blanket and stand outside with a calabash pipe, or Dick Broadwell would slide down the ravine to the river and later climb back up buttoning his trousers, tucking in his red shirt. It was a good summer place and when the word got out every kind of Oklahoma badman would ride by to visit and report and to sleep for a night in its cool. It got quite a reputation. When I married Julia and moved to California after those years in the Kansas prison and working as a policeman in Tulsa, one of the first things I did was tell a man I’d dig him a basement for fifty dollars. That was 1918. I’ve been a building contractor going on twenty years now.
Bryant kept himself at the cow camp in Buffalo Springs and Pierce was busy with rodeos and horse racing all that summer, and Broadwell, Doolin, and Powers didn’t arrive until almost July, so about the only man besides myself who was constant at the dugout was a black cowpuncher named Amos Burton, forty-four years old and raised by whites and one of Bob’s good friends. He’d drive a buckboard to the nester settlement of Taloga and come back with flour and beans and baking soda, or he’d load a shotgun and hike along the river stuffing a grain sack with rabbit, squirrel, grouse, and wild turkey. Afternoons I’d lay in my bunk in a small square of porthole light and read the Sears Roebuck catalogue, pointing at things I wanted, and Amos would just hum to himself and carve duck decoys out of beechnut.
I rode up to Bartlesville on a Sunday in June to visit Julia Johnson, who’d managed to convince both herself and her parents that the railroad and Wells Fargo claims against me were preposterous; and yet she seemed remote and subdued despite my strenuous attempts at humor, and I feared that she was lost to me forever. We walked under fruit trees and I rolled my jeans to my knees and waded out to watch the Caney River move over my toes. I ate ham hocks and navy beans at a supper table of women in bad-smelling dresses and hired men in suspenders and white shirts with brown stains under their arms. I smoked a cigarette on the porch with Texas Johnson and listened to him chastise President Benjamin Harrison and the Republicans. He had already decided that he’d vote for Grover Cleveland in 1892, that is, if Sockless Jerry Simpson didn’t run.
He said, ‘What we need is a man to take on the national banks and twist them around to the farmer again. Then he’d have to roll up his sleeves and take on the railroads. You know it costs three times as much to freight wheat east to Chicago than the longer distance from Chicago to New York? Corn was selling for ten cents a bushel in Kansas—ten cents!—and the shipping rate on it was nine. A man had to harvest a bushel for his kids and another for the railroad. That don’t seem right to me. I go along with Mary Lease: I think we oughta raise less corn and more hell. The railroads forgot the little man a long time back. They favor large shipments over small, cities over country towns; they own every dang legislature west of the Susquehanna—the railroads miff you too?’
‘They could use some enlightenment,’ I said.
‘You said plenty.’ He tamped a pipe and struck a match on the chair bottom. ‘You gonna tenant farm or cow-punch?’
I told him I was a hired hand and I lived in a bunkhouse at Riley’s but I had half a mind to enlist as a U.S. deputy marshal soon as Grat and Bill were acquitted in California.
‘I think the dishes are done,’ he said, and got up out of his rocker.
Julia and I strolled down to the pond where Hereford cattle chewed the sweet grass and stared, and green duckweed encroached on the water. I said, ‘Your dad and I hit it off real good. We see eye to eye on a lot of things. We’re just like hammer and tongs.’
She walked barefoot through the grass with her head down and I galumphed in my boots to catch up. I slung my arm around her and she said, ‘When my sister’s gone I lock the bedroom door and cry into my pillow, or sometimes I take my clothes off and swim in the pond so my tears don’t show. If I owned a house it would have a special room with dark blue walls and a leather fainting couch and a drawer full of hankies.’
I said, ‘What do you have to be sad about?’
Her eyes stayed on me for a second and then she turned to walk to the house where she sat in a swing with her cheek against one of the ropes while I leaned against the hemlock tree playing soft on my Harpoon. At nine she walked me to my horse and I gave her the stolen teakwood letter opener and the bottle of perfume still in its velvet box that I picked up at the auctioned house.
I wanted to tell her then that I loved her; that I’d get a steady job and marry her, or some real loot and sweep her away; but she touched her finger to my lips and handed me a page of diary paper folded up four times. ‘Don’t read it here. Read it later.’
I could see her at the screen door as I rode away; then the screen door closed and I stopped my horse in the center of a road under a white moon. I tore open the paper and held it close as my nose until I could make out her writing. It was Scripture: ‘“But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.” Paul to the Thessalonians, chapter 4, verses 10 to 13.’
That just about sunk it.
Newcomb busied himself and made connections, and three saddle hands I’d roped with on Oscar Halsell’s Bar X Bar ranch, the same three Bob stole me away from in his peace officer days because he considered them bad company—Dick Broadwell, Bill Doolin, Bill Powers—stopped by in late June and stayed on.
Dick Broadwell was a wild and comical man, the second son to a prosperous family in Hutchinson, Kansas. He’d married a green-haired woman who’d run away with his belongings afte
r a mere two weeks in Fort Worth, Texas, and he moped back up to the territory with the alias of Texas Jack Moore. He was thin and pale and book-smart and suspicious. He wore canvas goggles with glass lenses to keep the blowing dust from his eyes and he was bald to halfway back on his head where he kept his dark hair eight or nine inches long. It would lift in the wind like pages and scatter over his eyes. He’d do anything on a dare: leap off the roof of a boxcar, swallow a live cigarette, throw a jack-knife between his toes. He came to the sod hut with a black kitten he called Turtle that he fed sardines from a tin. He had warts on his fingers that looked like cauliflower.
I spied Bill Powers three miles off from the dugout walking his horse through grass high as the wooden stirrups, solemnly staring at the cedars and the light snapping off of the river. I recall he had a red bandana over his nose for the chaff, his shirt collar buttoned, a rifle crossed over an apple-horn saddle, and a violin case in his left hand. He was using the name Tim Evans in those days. I never discovered why. He was a tall and clean and handsome gentleman with a big mustache and no sideburns, as quiet and unemotional as a good butler walking upstairs. He spoke fluent Spanish; he could make a pipe draw two hours; he had chipped fingernails that were pale as piano keys. He used to sit on a bottom bunk with a meerschaum and an oil can and an alarm clock with its hundreds of gears and pins and washers on the blanket, wiping each down with a handkerchief, fitting each with its mate, until he could lie back with the ticking next to his ear. He’d eat lunch in the sun with his eyes shut and he’d walk the Canadian with my binoculars and Mr. Audubon’s book, identifying birds. Broadwell would call out, ‘You see any of those double-breasted mattress-thrashers, you be sure to call me, okay?’ Powers would smile and strike a match to his pipe bowl.
Last of all was Bill Doolin who rode in from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he took the medicinal baths for his rheumatism and courted a preacher’s daughter by the name of Edith Ellsworth. Doolin later had a gang of his own that included my brother Bill, but in those days he was merely a lanky, red-headed, hat-rack of a cowboy with gander blue eyes and a woebegone look and a mustache long as his lower lip. Tied to the tail of his saddle horse was a pack mule with a tarpaulin cover over his skillets and cake pans and jars of spices: cayenne red pepper, arrowroot and chives, mace and dill seed and cloves, rosemary, ginger, basil, and thyme. He was a good cook and took Old Lady more than his share and he would have lasted with us longer than he did if he wasn’t so sure to his bones that he was tougher than two men and smarter than Bob and the natural bona fide president of any company he kept. He’d smirk and ignore and argue whenever my brother talked. He was contrary as a teenager sometimes. Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas organized a party that used a shotgun on him in a cornfield in 1895, and they took a photograph of Bill Doolin dead in a chair with his shirt off and his blue eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The shotgun holes looked like pennies on his chest.
My brother left me with the stolen horses in late May and I didn’t see him again until July. He rented a wagon and drove it west of Hennessey twenty-three miles, to a big farmhouse being hammered and scraped and painted white by three black men hired out of Dover. Bob walked to the back porch with a net bag of oranges and a man on a ladder took off his felt hat.
‘The lady of the house around?’
‘Mrs. Jones, she in there with the othuh gemmun.’
The gentleman was Blackface Charley Bryant who’d stopped by to visit on the way to the Rock Island Hotel. He’d left his run-over boots by the butter churn in the back and was slouching on a red divan, his feet on a coffee table, while Miss Moore stood on a footstool and hung white draperies. She heard Bob’s footsteps on the kitchen tiles and let the draperies fall. Bob stood there in black corduroy trousers and a blue shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, his hair combed with kitchen water.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Jones.’
She said, ‘It’s been nearly a week.’
‘I know that.’ He walked into the front room and nodded like a country boy at Bryant. ‘Hey Charley. How’re things?’
Bryant crossed his legs. ‘Pretty quiet.’
Bob smiled at Eugenia and hugged her off the footstool and lifted up the net bag. ‘I brought you oranges.’
She kissed him and said, ‘I think we should go upstairs.’
So they went upstairs to a bedroom of six tall windows with a bed of carved walnut where they stayed the afternoon. They could hear putty knives grate and sing on the wood. A two-section ladder banged all around the house. And I guess Bryant was still on the divan eating orange meat from the peel when Bob and Eugenia came back downstairs for a dinner of chili and corn bread. Bryant scraped out the bread pan with his knife and rolled the crumbs into a cornball. And Eugenia said, ‘I tried on stitched aprons in a Hennessey dry goods store and asked the ladies their opinions while letting it slip that I’d just divorced a brute of a man named Harry Jones in the Dakota Territory and that the settlement was substantial enough to buy and repair this homestead. You’ve never seen such pity.’
Bryant grinned. ‘Ain’t she the cleverest woman, Bob?’
My brother banged his spoon down and said, ‘When I’m gone this house is off limits, Charley. I don’t want you anywhere near her. Soon as you’re gone I’ll probably throw your plates in the compost heap.’
Bryant merely smiled.
Bob poured coffee from the pot at the stove and lifted the apron hanging there. ‘What are these supposed to be on the pockets, Easter lilies?’
She looked and turned back to the table. ‘Yes.’
He let the apron drop. ‘Don’t wear it. It gives me the shivers.’
After Bryant left that night, Bob hauled inside what he’d piled on the wagon: a spindle rocker and two pink-flowered lamps, a wedding-ring quilt, a trivet, a peach crate stuffed with wadded newspaper and 1848 New York crystal. Also two books of poetry, one by Tennyson, one by Longfellow; a fountain pen and an inkwell; a valuable silver set made by Paul Revere, a drop-leaf cherry wood table, and a fine authentic oil painting depicting Venus and the four seasons.
He said, ‘This is better than money can buy, Miss. You don’t see finery around these parts like this. Do you? The answer is no. This is San Francisco quality; every blessed piece.’
And they sat naked on top of the sheets upstairs with warm champagne and a white candle burning orange on a chair seat. She asked, ‘Do you enjoy having people afraid of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like your father better than your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Emmett your favourite brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Umm. If you had a choice would you rather live in the city or the country?’
He poured champagne into his crystal glass and put the bottle down on the floor. He drank the champagne looking at her. ‘City. New Orleans maybe. Next to the ocean.’
‘Do you dream about me?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Am I naked?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled and kissed him on the shoulder. She got off the bed and poured the rest of the bottle into her glass and blew out the candle on the chair seat. ‘When you’re inside me what does it feel like?’
He looked down into his glass and finished off what was there. ‘Ask me another question.’
Eugenia stared out the tall windows. The wind was teasing the curtains. She rolled the glass against her cheek. ‘Okay. Spend some time on this. Don’t give just a short answer. What do you think about when you’re alone?’
He rocked forward with a pillow mashed in his face, worrying it and muttering. Then he drank from her champagne glass and shut his eyes. ‘How famous I’m going to be. How it’s just around the corner.’ He opened his eyes as if that were enough.
‘Amplify,’ she said.
He shouted, ‘How famous I’m going to be. How—’
‘Idiot,’ she said.
He kissed her hand and put his head on her thigh and b
rushed the blond bangs from her forehead. ‘My name’s going to be in all the New York and Chicago and Denver papers; boys who only saw me once will say we worked a hay baler together, and Easterners who never stepped in a cow pie will make up adventures about me for Beadle’s Half-Dime Library. I’ll be as important as Jesse James and soon as I’m dead they’ll steal my clothes and auction off my pistols and strangers will visit my grave. I’m looking forward to it.’
She sat there in the dark.
He said, ‘Do you want me to ask you questions now?’
He never told me what they were.
9
They honeymooned all that summer. They’d sleep until ten and swim naked in Canton Lake and sit on a yellow porch-glider at dusk. They didn’t even farm. But they put tables in the front yard for a cookout in July and the whole of the Dalton gang was there: Bob, Eugenia, Julia, myself; and Doolin, Broadwell, Powers; Bitter Creek Newcomb and his buddy Charlie Pierce; Blackface Charley Bryant came with Miss Jean Thorne, and the black cowpuncher Amos Burton brought three prostitutes from Dover who ate their suppers on the back porch and later walked into the crab apple tree shade with the cowhands.
That was diamondback rattlesnake country. Newcomb and Broadwell stuffed their pants in their boots and hunted dry coulees and burnt ground and the stone rubble of hills with forked sticks and gunnysacks and they came back at two o’clock with a dozen live snakes that Broadwell dangled over the chopping block so they could strike and flutter their tongues before he lopped off their heads with a hatchet. Powers skinned them and Doolin fried them up and we ate them with scrambled eggs and strawberries on biscuits until the sun was glinting in the leaves of the trees and our black shadows were long in the grass. Eugenia stood at the head of the table and lifted a glass of warm tea. ‘Here’s to robbery,’ she said.