Desperadoes

She was born in Kentucky and lived for some years in Texas where her father was a stockman. She had one sister, Lucy, and four brothers, two of them sheriffs. The Johnsons had moved only months before to a farm in Bartlesville twenty miles south of the Kansas line, and I commenced courting her there almost every night, making a nuisance of myself, until I broke down her resistance and she began thinking of Emmett Dalton with some fondness.

I shorthand that romance because it seems to me now so usual. I’d show up on her porch with a red bandana around my neck and my boots shined with tallow, a clutch of peonies in my hand, and I’d have supper with the Johnson family and try not to shovel my food. She’d do chores and I’d tag along. She’d wash the dishes and I’d dry; she’d ride the bell cow in from the pasture and giggle as I stumbled backwards over calf puckey, spouting about myself, and she’d sew my initials on white handkerchiefs while I pumped a frenzy in the butter churn.

My brother Bob was involved at that time with a girl of the same last name, Minnie Johnson. She was no relation to Julia but she was to Bob and me: a cousin, the daughter of my mother Adeline’s dead sister. She was a pretty girl just turned sixteen, with green eyes and sausage-curled brown hair and skin as fair as white bread. She’d once let Bob unbutton her in the barn and he said she was as fine in the shingle light as the naked French actresses on postcards. And when she was thirteen she had allowed Bob to sneak into her bedroom on Christmas night and have his way with her.

She stayed off with my sisters Eva, Leona, and Nannie Mae most of the years that she and I shared the Dalton farmhouse, and after I left I hardly saw her at all except when she was hugging Bob’s sleeve in a stroll down the Coffeyville streets, or at the contest booths under the shade trees at the Fourth of July picnic.

My brother wore a straw boater and a wrinkled white suit with his deputy marshal’s badge pinned to his pocket. He’d deign to pitch a baseball at wooden milk bottles or toss pennies into teacups, but most of the afternoon he spent tipping his hat to ladies and carrying on like a boulevardier with his adoring cousin latched to him.

Whereas Julia and I took twenty nickel rides on a mule-pulled merry-go-round that had a fiddler turning with it for music. We drank lemonade from washtubs and reclined with Bob and Minnie on a patchwork quilt at night to gawk at the fireworks that whined and popped over the Caney River.

Bob sat back on his elbows and whispered to Minnie, ‘What’s that one look like?’

She gazed at a red explosion dangling pink. ‘I don’t know.’

‘A spider,’ he said. ‘What about this one?’

This time she just looked at his upturned profile and his glazed eyes.

And he said, ‘An elephant. See, there’s its trunk.’

She frowned. ‘Where are you getting all of this?’

He continued staring at some bursts of Roman candles. He said, ‘You just missed an orange tulip.’

She said, ‘I don’t think I understand you.’

I spent more time in Pawhuska that autumn so I could be close to Julia, and Bob mixed more often with our older brother Grat at the eastern border, where they made do on pretty skimpy paychecks by selling liquor to the Indians and engaging in graft against the pioneers. My brothers would stop ox-pulled Studebaker wagons and lean on their saddle horns shouting questions at the driver: ‘Where you from?’ ‘Haven’t I seen you somewheres before?’ ‘You ever been arrested for introducing?’

The canvas tops would be jagged with bureaus and desks and tapestried sofas that always seemed to get dumped in a sutler’s ravine before the boomers got west of the Cimarron, and a woman would sit next to her husband with a blanket so much around her she hardly had a face.

Grat would plant unlabeled whiskey bottles in the flour sacks and accuse a farmer of bootlegging, or they’d demand an axle toll for a bad clay road that Bob insisted was a turnpike, and they’d trot away from the schooners with coins jangling in their pockets. One woman said, ‘We are three weeks out of St. Louis. We are used to hooligans by now.’ Squatters were sport in those days.

Bob mailed my mother twenty dollars a month, and to Minnie he sent boxes of frilled blouses, silk scarves, and long white gloves that buttoned past her elbows. And I’d receive letters recounting Grat’s wild schemes for pocket money.

Bob was astonished by Grattan then, before Grat became alcoholic. He was twenty-seven years old, five-feet-ten inches tall, and weighed over two hundred pounds; broad and hard as a desk he was, with hands the size of telephones and too little imagination to ever be scared of anything. He could break through doors with his forehead. He could throw barrow hogs onto a porch roof. He was a bully throughout his school days, and after he flunked sixth grade two years in a row, he never returned. If someone snickered at his reading, he’d make the kid’s mouth bleed at lunch. If someone fired him for letting a cow get mired during calving, Grat would sneak back at night and castrate the rancher’s best seed bull. But Bob got a kick out of him. He’d write, ‘Good old Grat. Never smiles. Trims his mustache with lighted match sticks. Seen him peel the ears off a drunken Indian. The doors slam on churches when he rides past. He’s an original Grat is. Tough as a night in jail.’

I don’t believe I saw Bob or Grat three times until December 1888, when my fourteen year old brother Simon died. He’d always been puny and crouped, but that autumn he kept shoveled-up in his bed and withered away and turned the sheets brown with his fever.

I’d already arrived at our Labette County farm in Kansas when the undertaker drove his black carriage up. It was cold enough that the roa

d out was jagged with frozen horse tracks and the saddle stock tied up to our white picket fence were shaggy with winter hair. I stood on the porch with my hands in my jeans, staring at a Christmas wreath of pine needles and cones that had been dipped in black paint and nailed to the front storm door, and when the hearse stopped I fetched four large men out of the whitewashed farmhouse, all kin to Simon and me, each with mustaches and suspenders and their pants shoved inside their high boots. We wobbled some as we carried the coffin up two steps and into the living room where we set it down on two chairs, picked our plates up, and ate lunch standing up, not saying a peep to each other.

Later I sat at a window and heard the screen door bang and saw Minnie in the backyard, taking down the gray laundry that flapped on the line. Red leaves swam around her on the grass. I saw her shade her eyes and stare across the cornfield to the pinkish woodrows and then I saw Bob and Grat on their horses, ducking under the colored trees. Minnie looked into her apron and walked back inside the house.

I saw Bob throw off his coat and hat in the tack room and I crossed the backyard rubbing my arms. Despite the cold, he knelt on the slick boards under the pump and jerked the handle till water gushed over his head. Goose bumps spread over his back.

‘What say, Bob.’

He grinned. ‘Well, hello there, doorknob.’ He reached a cold wet hand out and I yanked it once like a homespun farm boy.

I needled, ‘The saints still call you one of their own, or have you yielded unto temptation?’

He gave me a quizzical look, as if he suspected I’d been reading mail meant for him. Then he said, ‘I’ve got change in my pockets. That’s all I care about.’ He washed with hard yellow soap and I changed the subject to medicine and Simon’s demise and I humped Bob’s saddle and blanket into the barn while he brushed his pants off with a currycomb and buttoned on a stiff flannel shirt that was like cardboard on the clothesline.

He said, ‘Did you notice how peculiar Minnie was?’

I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve spoke three words to her. She’s stayed pretty much to herself.’