“You don’t think it’s bad news, do you? People always say wire messages contain notices of accidents and deaths and such.”
“The telegrapher listened to the tapping on the key and wrote out the message. He didn’t seem to give it much mind, if that he’ps you at all.”
“It certainly does. You’re a very nice boy. You’re a good-looking boy, too. You like lemonade?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody does.”
“Why don’t you come to see me sometime? We’ll have some.”
“If I’m out this way, yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
She gave him a dime and watched him climb up on the mule, waiting to see if he would look back. But he didn’t. Innocent boy, she thought. Better to learn about the nature of the world from a gentle hand rather than a coarse one. I wish I had been so lucky.
Where was the telegram from? It could be from the Ranger Frontier Battalion in Austin. Her husband had talked of getting back his badge. Or it could be from Denver. She steamed open the envelope. The message read, “Yes, Yes, Yes.”
It was not signed. It didn’t have to be. It was from Denver, and it contained an affirmation to a question obviously asked by the addressee, Hackberry Holland. She folded the telegram and replaced it in the envelope and resealed the flap and set the envelope by the letter propped against the flower vase.
She sat on the porch most of the afternoon and into the evening, without eating supper, and watched the leaves toppling out of the trees onto the surface of the river, gathering into channels between the rocks, then eddying and sinking beneath the current as though they had never been part of a wooded hillside. The sky turned the color of torn plums. Just before the stars came out, she saw a mounted man approaching the front lane; he sat tall and erect in the saddle, the stirrups extended two feet below the horse’s belly.
She rose from the chair, her hands knotting and unknotting at her sides. Destroy the letter and the wire, a voice inside her said.
No, I’m not afraid of the dutchie, or whatever she is.
She stiffened her back and set her jaw and fixed her gaze on the horseman, determined not to be undone by self-doubt. The horseman rode by and disappeared into the dusk.
She woke at sunrise and began fixing breakfast. She heard the foreman and the hired hands driving the Angus across the river to a pasture that hadn’t been grazed during the summer. She heard the cook washing a bucket full of tin pans and forks and knives and spoons from the bunkhouse under the spigot on the windmill. Then someone hollered out, “By God, there he comes!”
To the waddies and farmhands and drifters who worked for him full-time or came and went with the season, he was a composite of Captain Bly and Saint Francis of Assisi and somehow always one of their own. Down at Eagle Pass, he had beaten two of King Fisher’s old gang almost to death with a branding iron. He had turned loose a caged cougar in a Kansas saloon that refused to serve Texans. On the Staked Plains, he froze to the saddle returning a kidnapped three-year-old Comanche girl to her parents. If he hadn’t been a drunk, he could have been a congressman or the owner of an internationally famous Wild West show. Why did she stay with him? The answer was not one she liked. He was wealthy, at least by the standards of the times, and second, when it came to adversarial and life-threatening situations, he never winced. When she was with him, no one short of Genghis Khan would bother her.
She stepped out on the porch and saw him at the bottom of the lane, his hat tilted back, the sunset on his face, a bouquet of flowers propped across the pommel. He was wearing a dark suit and a blue silk vest, clothes he must have bought in San Antonio. She went back into the house and ripped pages from a Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them among a pile of kindling. Her hand was trembling when she lit the paper. She stood back as the fire caught the draft and twisted into a yellow handkerchief through the chimney. She dropped the telegram and letter from Denver and the lock of Ishmael’s hair into the flames and watched them blacken and curl and dissolve into carbon and then into ash, her face glowing from the heat.
HE REMOVED HIS hat when he entered the house, and tossed his saddlebags onto the divan. The boards under the carpet creaked with his weight. “I almost forgot how beautiful you always are, regardless of the hour,” he said.
“Did you make a side trip somewhere?” she said. “Maybe to Canada?”
“If that’s what you call falling into a bathtub full of whiskey.”
“I thought we were done with that.”
“You were. I wasn’t. Now I am. I think.”
“You found Sundance and Harvey?”
“I wouldn’t call either of them the thinking man’s criminal. I just had to knock on one door in the brothel district. Fannie Porter’s place.”
Her gaze left his. “You came home to shame me?”
“I never held your past against you. I’m just telling you where I went. I didn’t accomplish much by it, either.”
“Much of what?”
“Logan and Longabaugh said they didn’t hurt you. Later I saw Logan burn a roach to death with his cigar. So I knew he’d burned you, too.”
“You didn’t call him out?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”