Desperadoes

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.