Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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‘Did a posse stop by here the other night?’ Grat asked.
The farmer squatted in snow and looked at the axe still stuck in the tree. ‘I suppose it was you they was cross with.’
Grat said, ‘Unhook your team and strip the harness off that near horse.’
The farmer grumbled and slammed his apple into the paper sack and did as he was told. My brother then stole a frozen gunnysack from the farmer’s shed and jars of preserves from the farmhouse cellar, dust puffing out from the sack when he tossed the plunder in.
So he could find out about himself, Grat rode the farmer’s horse from Merced to Tulare on the dirt road that is now concrete and Highway 99 and traveled by black Chevrolet coupes at 35 miles per hour. He had a skunk smell to him, his scalp hair was knotted, and his bristle beard had yellow seeds in it, so he could clomp down the board sidewalks of Tulare, raincoat over his mackinaw, and not be recognized by anyone but kin. Sheriffs stepped out of his way.
That afternoon a boy ran up to him with a note telling him to situate himself in the rear of a blue hotel that night. There he discovered an Indian pony with saddlebags crammed with hard biscuits and beef jerky and three canteens on the saddle horn. He gazed up to a second-storey window and nodded to my brother Bill who sat by a kerosene lamp.
Grat hammered thick plate shoes on his horse at Bakersfield, the cowboy capital, and he took the Tehachapi trail for Barstow and the Mojave desert, thence to Needles and across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, sleeping afternoons in caves or in the tangled shade of mesquite or Joshua trees, feeding on fence lizards, salamanders, greasy peccary and drinking sulphur water. The land was bare as worn carpet except for the balls of tumbleweed and the animal carcasses and the purple mountains in the distance. He’d see strands of smoke from Hopi and Navaho fires fifteen miles away, but by the time he got there the cooking stones would be cool, the wickiups would be empty, and vicious travois dogs would bark and lunge at his horse. Sheep would stare as he slumped by at night; rattlesnakes would stab at his stirrups and flop down to squirm under sagebrush; small tarantulas crawled over his face to drink water from his eyes as he slept.
He lost thirty-two pounds, pried out an aching tooth with his dinner fork, blistered both heels so far down to the bone that he could pour blood when he took off his boots. I suppose Grat’s brain cracked just a bit with aloneness because he invented a cowboy named Dangerous Dan who supposedly rode an albino mule and caught turtledoves in his hands and talked to Grat about railroads and how they were going to get even. ‘Old Dan, he was good company,’ said Grat. His journey from California to Oklahoma took one hundred and seven days.
12
My brother Bill was in the Oklahoma Territory by then. Soon after Grat escaped, the railroad detectives uncovered evidence that seemed to put the blame for the Ceres train robbery on the Sontag-Evans gang and might even have implicated them in the three previous holdups. Given those circumstances, the Tulare County district attorney thought a second conviction of a Dalton might be difficult and he ordered my brother Bill, twenty-eight years old, released on his own recognizance.
Bill returned to his farm near Paso Robles for the harvest, then took a hotel room in Tulare and sat on its blue porch in a spindle-back chair, whittling dolls’ heads and gaining an audience with talk: ‘Making these for my girls,’ he said. ‘Not like when I was a boy. When I grew up we were so poor we couldn’t pay attention.’ Nervous laughter. ‘I said, ‘Momma, I don’t have nothin’ to play with,’ so she chopped the bottoms off my pockets.’ They chuckled. ‘Told my dad I wanted a watch for Christmas—so he let me.’ Somebody giggled; other men hooted. ‘Not that I learned anything. I was so dumb back then I thought girls were just bumpy boys.’ And so on.
I personally find talk like that tiresome, but the Tulare menfolk laughed and laughed and Bill would grin along with them. He’d have the porch chairs filled and men sitting on the hitches, and then he’d spice his ramble with sermons about politics and the railroad and at sundown stand up and stretch. ‘Oh me, but I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.’ Like as not a man would then buy him supper and whatever liquor he wanted in a saloon. And down the block there’d be a man in a gray vested suit and brown shoes with a pistol in a sweat-black shoulder holster and a Southern Pacific badge in his pocket, watching for clues and information that might lead them to the apprehension of Grattan Dalton.
My brother Bill was aware of that and of the detectives on horses in the Russian olive tree shade back on his Paso Robles farm. Yet there he kept, in plain view, until the winter rains came and he saw an oily, wild-looking man with a beard and a skunk smell to him clomp along the board sidewalk on the other side of the street. Then Bill sent a boy with a note and he paid out a hundred dollars and tied an Indian pony up behind the hotel and sat at the screened window that night, watching as brother Grat, in all his coats, rode off for Oklahoma.
Bill packed a suitcase and carried his best serge suit down the street on a hanger and left it with an actor friend named Lonnie, I believe, who thereupon shaved his jaw beard until it duplicated Bill’s chin brush. He proved a good impostor.
The railroad detectives lost Bill in Tulare but the men staked out at my brother’s farm said they’d picked him up there. And for two weeks they sent reports to San Francisco saying Bill was puttering in his toolshed or picnicking at Pismo Beach on Sunday or driving his wife to town in a buggy, wearing his blue serge suit.
It was only then, two weeks after Bill took a night train to the Oklahoma Territory, that the detectives learned they’d been duped.
And it was about that time that Chief Marshal William Grimes and authorities of the Southern Pacific decided to combine their manpower and intelligence to bring in the infamous Daltons; and dispatched to San Francisco was a new U.S. deputy marshall from El Reno named Christian Madsen.
Chris Madsen was our undoing.
He was a wide and blue-eyed and sober man, built from the belly up like he should’ve been six-foot-six, but he walked on runty legs that sawed him down to five-foot-five. His sideburns were cut off at the top of his ear; he had a brown mustache that was six inches across his face; he was losing his wispy blond hair. He was foreign-born, forty-one years old, a Dane; slow to anger, methodical, organized; a retired Army supply sergeant from Fort Reno who’d bought sides of beef in the past from Nannie’s husband, J.K. Whipple, and who knew my brothers and me and Eugenia Moore—whom he called ‘a hard-bitten bitch’—ever since my brother Frank was shot dead and promoted to Glory.
He had a three-ring notebook of wanted posters and a mahogany file cabinet with information about every criminal who’d spent any time whatsoever in the territories. When he boarded the train for San Francisco, he had a twine-wrapped bunch of manilla envelopes and printed on each was a name: R. Dalton, E. Dalton, George Newcomb, and so on. When the train made a water stop at Kingfisher, he looked up from his notes to see my brother Bill with a goon face on, his nose smashed up against the window so that he resembled Charlie Pierce. Bill backed away, grinning, rubbing his nose, and shouted through the glass, ‘Hello, Chris!’
‘How’d you get back here?’
Bill cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What say?’
Madsen glowered at him.
Bill said, ‘Maybe we can chat a little longer next time you’re passing through.’ He strolled down the platform into the station house and then the train banged into motion.
Deputy Madsen stopped first at Visalia to talk with Sheriff Kay and see the green London-made safe with three thousand dollars stowed inside, the reward for Grattan Dalton, dead or alive. Then Madsen interviewed a trustee in the Tulare jail, Sheriff Ed O’Neill, the railroad’s chief detective Will Smith, and lastly attorney Breckinridge who would die shortly thereafter with a glass of port wine in his hand, five thousand dollars richer, it’s said, for his perfunctory defense. Then Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen, with more material for his files and three new photographs, took the train back to Guth
rie, the territorial capital.
Not thirty miles west of Guthrie was the Kingfisher farm my mother Adeline was working with two of the girls. Bill would shovel silage or nail tar paper down on the roof or lard his arm to shove it up a cow to feel that her unborn calf had turned breech. Soon there weren’t many heavy chores left to do, so he borrowed a stable mare and took it to Woodward where Eugenia Moore had rented a small bungalow that was completely darkened by sagging evergreens.
Bob and I had stayed cooped up there since Leliaetta in September and now it was late November and I was growly when Bill rode up into the yard. It was seven o’clock in the morning and I was sitting in the two-seater porch swing using my fingers to rub brown paste polish into my boots. I heard his horse nicker and cocked a pistol that was folded into my coat; then Bill lifted a pine branch aside from the lintel and green needles cascaded down. He said, ‘Excuse me but I’m looking for Pecos Pete.’
I grinned and said, ‘You got the next best thing.’
Bob heard Bill’s voice and hopped barefoot in his bedroom, hurrying into bib overalls, then banged out through the screen door to clap Bill’s back and hug him in welcome and call for Eugenia to meet his older brother.
Her blond hair was unpinned onto shoulders of a white robe that she was tying as she came out. She shook his hand and stayed shy and tilted her head for her comb. I don’t think she liked Bill much.
My brother Bill put on an apron and cooked a Spanish omelet and fried potatoes and the four of us sat down for a long breakfast during which Bill announced his plans. He wanted a fresh start, to get into Oklahoma real estate, move his wife Jenny and the kids back, study law. He’d settle scores with the railroads, talk with the common people, run for the state legislature. He’d be governor when he was forty. He’d be the good Dalton, the front. He’d invest whatever money we stole and mail what we needed down to the Argentine. And he could spy for us, take the heat off, coddle the lawmen and maybe wangle a pardon for us some day. ‘It’ll work, Bob. By God, it will!’
‘I take it you’re asking Bob to stake you,’ said Eugenia, blunt as a ball-peen hammer.
‘I’m asking, Miss Moore, for a loan; that’s all.’ He winked in my direction. ‘I’d borrow from the Katy but I heard the railroad already gave all its money away.’
Bob rocked back in his chair, amused. He folded his arms and looked at his woman, awaiting her response.
I said, ‘I couldn’t come up with a more bodacious idea if I tried.’
Eugenia turned her coffee cup. ‘Have you had experience in the real estate business, Bill?’
Bill rolled his eyes at my brother. ‘I confess, Miss Moore, that I haven’t traded in land, not in this neighborhood, but I guarantee that during the last thirty-nine years I’ve been out of the nest I haven’t exactly had my thumb up my keester and my mind off in Arkansas!’
Bob said, ‘I get asked for loans all the time, Bill. I’m trying to clamp down. How much was it you needed?’
Bill purchased a farmhouse in Bartlesville, which was oil country then, about five miles from Julia Johnson’s place, about thirty from our hometown of Coffeyville. Soon after he arrived he took the train up to Coffeyville and stayed two days in the Eldridge House where he had businessmen up to his room to taste his Jack Daniel’s Green Label whiskey. He had his hair cut by Carey Seaman, bought buckle overshoes from Charles Brown’s shop, and reintroduced himself to the bankers, C.T. Carpenter at the Condon bank, Thomas J. Scurr, Jr., president of the First National. They were suspicious at first because the Dalton exploits were well publicized thereabouts, but you didn’t dislike Bill for long and by afternoon of the second day, he had them convinced that Bob and Grat and Emmett were merely bad seed.
Then he went around buying. A farmer would die and his widow would ache to go back East. Bill would handle the sale. Homesteaders from the East who rushed out to the territories to grab the cheap land would discover farm work was hard and the weather mean, and they’d give up the caboodle—barn and plows and ox yoke, dirt-floor house and artesian well—for barely five or ten dollars. Bill would pick up the title and split the resale profits with the railroad land bureaus that solicited settlers for the West. And he staked claims for us along the South Canadian River far ahead of the federal government’s approval for public sale: we were ‘Sooners.’
Whenever I visited Bartlesville, I’d sit in Bill’s rocking chair with one of his law books in my lap while Julia stitched a sampler next to me, and I’d see Bill at the dining room table with the kerosene lamp turned up, scratching out ten or twelve pages to his wife, long essays about the economy, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Royal Neighbors of America, the wolves of Wall Street, and the railroads: the Southern Pacific, the Atchison & Topeka, the MK&T, the Rock Island, the Santa Fe. Julia would put an ironstone kettle on the fireplace logs and lift it off with a kitchen towel. She’d ask, ‘Would you like some tea, Mr. Dalton?’
Bill would look up with glazed eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘Julia,’ I said.
‘That’s right, that’s right.’ He touched her cheek as if she were his eldest daughter. ‘No, Julia, I’m very busy now. I have to put some thoughts down before they’re lost forever.’
Julia would bring me tea and a half-dozen macaroon cookies and whisper in my ear, ‘He’s kidding, isn’t he?’
I’d sip from the cup and stare.
Jenny answered her husband’s letters with daily notes mailed general delivery to whatever remote post office Bill considered safe that week: Cleo Springs, Anadarko, Bushyhead, Sapulpa. Whenever legal fees were required on deeds, he paid the court officer something extra. Wherever he went he made friends with the sheriff and attended the local trials, taking notes on procedural matters on the backs of his wife’s envelopes. He flattered and joked and gave horehounds to children; he had a private table in Guthrie’s Silver Dollar Saloon where he weighted his stack of greenbacks with a shot-glass and poured ‘toddies’ out to strangers and talked like a newspaper about monopolies and jurisprudence. He got people to believe the Daltons were on their side, near saints, that in stealing from the railroads we were doing them a good turn.
Bill talked and strutted and Bob and I laid low. I’d stay in the bunkhouse on Jim Riley’s ranch and ride fence for a couple of weeks or I’d sojourn in Dover to chat with my mother and bobber fish on the Cimarron, or I’d spend a month in my brother’s farmhouse in Bartlesville reading the middle sections of Bill’s thick ancient books in a rollaway bed, listening to the squeal of a pumping oil derrick, visiting Julia Johnson at her papa’s big boarding house, which wasn’t far away.
I’d devour a peach and throw its stone at her window and she’d hunker down with me in the weeds beside the Little Caney River, a quilt thrown over our shoulders and her black hair against my cheek.
I asked, ‘Do you need any money?’
She shook her head.
‘Because I’ve got it. I’ve got plenty. More than I can spend.’
‘You’re very nice but no thank you.’
‘Late at night I stroll the road in front of Bill’s house smoking a cigarette and stargazing and somehow I see you sleeping naked under a sheet and I want to be next to you and kiss you under the ear and have you turned to me in the dark.
‘I want you in whichever house I’m at, I want to hear you singing in the next room when I look up from work at my desk, and I want you to bring me pump water when it’s hot and I’m chopping weeds in the sun. I’d be willing to pay a lot for that. I’d give you the best I could afford. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with.’
‘But it’s ill-gotten, isn’t it.’ She gazed at me. ‘Isn’t it. That makes it impossible. That makes your romance just a storybook dream, doesn’t it.’
‘About whether it’s ill-gotten or not, well, you can’t look at it that way. Indians ate the heart of Father Marquette and farmers stole land from the Cherokee; in Mississippi they raped and sold brown women slaves and the Union
Army looted Savannah; railroads pushed Chinamen into tunnels with explosives tied to their backs and now train robbers stuff money into grain sacks. The world rocks a little off balance and then it adjusts itself. There’s misery in every human enterprise and whether the outcome is good or evil depends pretty much on who you’re talking to at the time.’
Julia looked at me with one of those ‘do tell’ expressions. ‘And who have you been talking to?’
‘Bill,’ I confessed.
She put her head back where it had been. ‘Bill. That’s what I thought. At least Bob doesn’t make believe.’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘That’s his real attribute. Bob neither shirks nor confuses.’
13
Miss Moore took a stagecoach from her bungalow to my mother’s Kingfisher farm where she helped with the canning and made applesauce and left a cigar box with two hundred dollars in it hidden behind the apricot preserves. At the standard Sunday meal with the family, she said she was moving to Guthrie to hunt work as a seamstress. Ben and Littleton ate like machines but my brother Bill let his fork clink on the plate and looked at her as he drank a glass of milk.
My sister Nannie Mae’s husband J.K. Whipple leaned over his mashed potatoes, his tie sliding in gravy, to see Eugenia at the end of the table. ‘What about Bob? Where’s he hiding these days?’
‘I honestly can’t tell you,’ said Eugenia. ‘Bob and I have split up. For all eternity.’
‘Well, that’s a bolt out of the blue,’ said Ben.
My frail mother folded her napkin, ‘Just the same, you’re welcome here irregardless, dear. You don’t have to be relatives to visit.’
Whipple whispered into his wife’s ear and giggled. Nannie Mae frowned. ‘Oh shush.’
The next morning Eugenia sat in a shawl and coat beside Whipple in his decorated sulky. The woodrows were furred with white frost that was turning to sweat in the sun. She could see the horse exhale as he walked; steam curled off his back.