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.
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.