Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

“If I’d been in the States, I probably could have got an emergency leave,” Clete said. “But not from the ’Canal.”

“Honey, don’t apologize for something you couldn’t control,” Martha said. “And there was nothing you could have done. He just keeled over in the bar of the Petroleum Club, and that was it.”

“Goddamn!”

Martha moved out from under his arm, walked to the pole-and-chain fence surrounding the small cemetery, and pointed to one of the poles.

“You know what that is, Clete?”

“Looks like drill pipe,” he said.

“It is. I was going to use cast iron, but the cast iron place in New Orleans is out of business for the duration, so I had them cut up some pipe, and weld some chain to it to keep the cattle off. I thought I’d get the cast iron after the war, but now I’m not so sure. What’s wrong with drill pipe? And chain. God knows, in his life he wrapped enough chain around drilling strings.”

“Looks fine to me the way it is,” Clete said.

“That’s good, for there’s room in here too for you and yours, whenever that happens,” Martha said.

His eyebrows went up, and she saw it.

“He left you the ranch, Clete,” Martha said. “Less mineral rights. You get some of those, too, but he wanted you to have the ranch.”

“Jesus! What about the girls?”

The girls, both students at Rice University in Houston, were Martha and Jim’s daughters. For all practical purposes, they were Clete’s sisters.

“He asked them first, and it was all right with them. They don’t want to live out here in the sticks. I get what they call ‘lifetime use.’ It’s all pretty complicated. You better find time when you see your grandfather to have him, or one of his lawyers, explain it to you. There’s a provision in there that if you ‘die without issue,’ it reverts to the girls. Or their ‘issue,’ I forget which. Do we have to talk about this now?”

Clete shook his head no.

Then he said, “I’m surprised.”

“I don’t see why you should be. You weren’t only his nephew. The way things happened, you were the son I could never give him.”

He looked at her, then back at the tombstone.

“Seen enough?” Martha asked. “It’s as cold as a witch’s teat out here.”

“Why, Miss Martha, how you talk!”

She walked to the pipe-and-chain fence and stepped over the chain, then slipped behind the wheel of a 1940 Cadillac coupe. Clete followed her and got in the passenger side.

“There should be a bottle in the glove compartment,” Martha said as she started the engine. “I think I’d like a little taste about now.”

He opened the glove compartment. Inside was a quart of Jack Daniel’s, unopened, a leather-bound flask, and a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver in a holster. He shook the flask, heard it gurgle, unscrewed the top, and handed it to Martha. She put it to her lips and took a healthy swallow, then handed it back to him. He took a healthy swallow.

“Are you going to have time to go to Houston before you go where you’re going?” Martha asked. “The girls will want to see you.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. I’ll know for sure when Colonel Graham tells me when he wants me in New Orleans.”

“What are you going to do in New Orleans?”

“Except have the Old Man find fault with the way I blink my eyes, you mean?”

The Old Man was Cletus Marcus Howell, Martha’s father-in-law and Clete’s grandfather.

“He’s not that bad, Clete.”

He laughed.