The Big Gundown (6 page)

“You was always a favorite of mine,” Reese said softly.

“You was of mine, too,” Willy said.

Then they didn't say anything for the longest time.

“Take that money, Reese, get yourself a room, a bed to sleep in, some food in you regular till you get things worked out.”

Reese's eyes grew suddenly wet and spilled over.

“The good news is,” he said, “I ain't got that long to work 'em out, Willy.” Reese took the money and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “I can't promise you I can pay this back—you understand…”

“I ain't wanting you to pay it back. I'm giving it to you.”

“Willy…”

“What?”

“Your ma…she died. I didn't want to have to tell you…But she died of something two years back. I went back to see her when I heard—her grave, I mean. I put some nice flowers on it—roses, which was her favorites—and told her I was sorry. But I knew it was way beyond her forgiving me…”

“Shit, Reese,” Willy said, standing, adjusting the plainsman hat on his head. “You take care of yourself.”

“Willy…” Reese said.

But Willy never looked back. Him and Reese were quits and he didn't want to know the outcome of things. He already knew enough to last him the rest of his life.

“N
OW, WHERE YOU THINK
that peckerwood's really going?” Dallas said to Perk as they stood outside the bunkhouse, smoking.

“Get his tooth pulled?” Perk shrugged, he couldn't be sure the answer Dallas was after.

“Hell, we should have held him down and let you take your pliers and pull it out and see if it really was he had a bad tooth. I don't trust that boy. Anybody who'd drink with a nigger and whore with him.”

“Sure,” Perk said. “Whatever you say, Dallas.”

Snow stood white over the grasslands and a man had to squint to look at it long. The horses nickered in the corral like they could smell freedom, their coats shaggy. Some of the boys were firing up the forge to shoe a few of the horses, and others were getting ready to go ride fence because the boss said it was easy enough to lose cows in this country and if it wasn't the cows busting down the fences on their own and getting lost, it was enterprising rustlers coming along with wire snips, cutting the fences and helping the cows get lost.

“It's been a lean year, boys,” Bob Parker had told them. “Cain't afford no more losses or I might have to let
some of you boys go.” It worried them in a way, even though they told themselves they didn't care much for the work or the cheap wages. Still, a job was a job and hard to come by with winter setting in.

Taylor, Harvey, and Lon came over to where Dallas and Perk were leaning on the sun side of the bunkhouse, smoking, and Taylor said, “You gone ride with us to check them fences?” Mostly he directed his question to Perk and only obliquely to Dallas, who didn't do anything he didn't want to and they all knew you didn't tell him to do this or that.

Perk looked at him with those walleyes of his and shrugged and said, “I dunno.”

“Listen,” Dallas said to them. “We best keep an eye on that damn fool kid case he decides to say something that would set that law dog on us.”

“Like what would he say?” Taylor said. “He don't know nothing. I mean he wasn't there with us when we…” Dallas cut him off with a sharp warning look.

“He don't have to know nothing. All he has to do is tell what he does know, about that nigger and the girl and me and you all.”

Taylor stood there, his fists jammed down in the pockets of his mackinaw. His breath rushed out in smoky streams through his nostrils. Lon and Harvey stood without saying anything, mostly looking down, their noses red from the cold; Lon kept wiping at his with his coat sleeve.

“What you want to do about it?” Taylor said. “If he
is
saying something?”

“I don't guess we'd have much choice if he is, do you? I guess we'll have to put him under.”

Taylor looked at Lon and Harvey, who didn't look up.
Their Stetsons were all sweat-stained and grimy from several seasons of dirt and dust, rain and fire smoke.

“Same goes for anybody else who wants to mix in with our business,” Dallas added.

“That law dog, too?” Taylor said. “Is that what you're meaning?”

“That law dog, too, if we have to. Less of course you want to end up hanging down in Bismarck.”

Taylor said, “We best go on and fix them fences for now.” And with that he turned and Lon and Harvey fell in behind him as they headed for the corral to cut out saddle horses.

“You want I should go with them?” Perk said.

“No, you and me are going to ride into town and see what that kid is up to.”

Perk sneezed and wiped his nose on his big red bandanna hanging around his neck and said, “Whatever suits you, Dallas.”

 

“What girl?” Jake asked the kid.

“She lives just east of here. Her and a kid brother and their old mother. Some say she's a witch, the old woman is.”

Jake said, “What's the girl got to do with any of this?”

“She was Dallas's gal before…”

“Before what?”

Tig rubbed his hands together and blew on them.
He is frightfully young
, Jake thought.

“Before Nat took up with her.”

“She liked Nat better than Dallas? Is that it? Is that what happened, they got into it over a girl, Dallas and Nat?”

Tig nodded his head.

“That'd be my guess.”

“But you don't know this for sure?”

“No sir. But I don't know no other reason they'd done what you say they did to old Nat. That's a pretty mean thing to do…”

“Yes, it is.”

The youth's eyes brimmed with tears.

“I been trying to think on it, what it must have been like for him to be done that way. He was a good fellow, always happy. Pulled me out of a tight spot more than once. Nat was loyal to his friends.”

“Were you his only friend, son?”

“I reckon on this outfit maybe I was.”

“Tell me how I find this girl,” Jake said.

The boy told him.

J
OHNNY
S
T.
J
OHN WAS A BOUNTY MAN
and he'd been up in Bottineau County, hunting a man named Elmore Flogg wanted for train robbing, murder, and arson. Johnny caught him in an outhouse and Flogg shot Johnny's little finger off and it made him so damn mad that after Johnny killed him with three shots through the chest, he dragged him out of the privy and chopped his head off.

He built a little fire right there and cauterized the end joint of the shot-off finger by sticking his knife blade in the flames till it grew white hot and then seared it against the flesh.

He hopped around on one foot till the pain eased up, then kicked Flogg's head as far as he could kick it and watched it roll, then went and gathered it up and put it in a burlap sack, saying, “I'm gone take you back down to Bismarck and stick your fucken head in the window of the newspaper office so everyone can see you don't outwit or outrun Johnny St. John, you son of a whore bitch!”

Blood and some other things seeped through the bot
tom of the sack and the cold wind dried it to a hard rusty crust and if it had been hot at all the thing might have made Johnny's horse puke, but with it cold like it was, there wasn't much stink and Johnny thought sure it would still be in good enough shape to put in the newspaper's window down in Bismarck.

He'd ridden two days when he come across the stranger riding the same road opposite direction. They stopped there in the road for a brief moment, as was the custom among men in that country.

“How do,” Johnny said. He was full of dope pills and whiskey because that was the way he lived—it was all that kept the demons in his mind at bay—the dope pills and whiskey was.

The stranger nodded and Johnny saw him eyeing the burlap sack tied to his saddle horn.

“I'm headed to Bismarck,” Johnny said. “But I ain't et nothing but my own grub for two days now. There a town near here anywhere close a fellow could get some regular grub?”

The stranger thumbed back over his shoulder.

“Sweet Sorrow,” the stranger said.

 

Jake had been on his way to see the girl—the one Tig told him about who was involved with Nat Pickett—when he saw the rider approaching along the north road. He was an odd-looking duck, wearing a tall beaver hat and a velvet coat. But it was the blood-crusted burlap bag hanging from the man's saddle horn that caught most of his attention.

The man asked him about a town, said he was headed for Bismarck. Jake told him about Sweet Sorrow.

“Appreciate it,” the man said.

And then he looked down at the sack and said,

“Prairie chickens. I shot a bunch a while back and was planning on eating them for my supper, in case I dint come across no town.”

“Well, then, I guess you saved yourself the trouble,” Jake said.

The man said, “I reckon so.”

Jake wanted to ask him what was really in the sack because it looked a lot fatter and heavier than prairie chickens. But he had no official cause to do so—and out here in this country, you just didn't get into a man's business without due cause.

But he opened his coat enough for the man to see the badge pinned to his sweater.

The man's eyes narrowed.

 

That son of a bitch is a lawman
, Johnny told himself when he saw the badge.
And he wants me to know he is. Well, so the hell what if he is. I ain't done nothing illegal and if he asks, I'll show him the dodger on old Elmore here.
Somewhere it sounded like music playing in his head—music far off, like it was every time he took the dope pills and drank them down with whiskey overly much.

I could cut off your head as easily as slicing off a slab of beef
, he thought, looking at the lawman's neck.

 

Jake waited for a second longer, then said, “I've got to get on. But know this, mister, I'm the town marshal back in Sweet Sorrow. I don't like trouble.”

“Shit, you'll get none from me,” Johnny St. John said. “Me and trouble is strangers.”

“Yeah, that's what I would have guessed,” Jake said sarcastically, for the man did not look like anything but trouble.

Jake touched heels to his horse and rode on, wonder
ing at first if he might have made a mistake showing his back to the man in the red velvet coat and beaver hat.

 

Johnny St. John sat there staring after the lawman, thinking he had a pretty head.

“Me and trouble is strangers,” he muttered, then laughed and anyone who would have talked to him for more than five minutes would know that Johnny St. John was crazy as a bedbug.

I
T WAS A MILE,
more or less, to the place. It looked like any other homestead upon the grasslands: simple and efficient. Jake was still getting the lay of the land, the people who had migrated to it, who they all were and where they had come from. As town marshal, he didn't have much reason to call on many of them who didn't live right in Sweet Sorrow. Unless, of course, there was a problem, some sort of trouble, like now.

The sun stood straight up and glaring off the snow. Warmer than you might think, the snow growing to slush in some places along the road. Jake loosened the buttons on his coat.

He dismounted in front of the cabin and knocked on the door.

“Are you Marybeth Joseph?” he asked when the door opened a crack and a face peered out.

“Who's asking?” the woman said. “If you're a drummer, keep moving. Got no need of anything and got no money.”

Jake told her who he was, why he'd come: to speak to Marybeth Joseph. She looked him up and down.

“What's she done the law wants her?”

“Nothing,” Jake said, “I'd just like to talk to her.”

He heard another feminine voice say, “Oh, Mama, let the man come in, ain't you got no manners.”

The door opened wide enough for him to enter.

There in front of the fireplace a boy sat in a copper tub, his hair soapy, and a young woman knelt next to him with a bar of scrubbing soap in her hand. Their eyes came to rest on the tall man. It was plain to see the young woman was heavily pregnant.

“Ma'am, my name is Jake Horn,” he said, removing his Stetson and sweeping back the hair from his forehead. “Are you Marybeth Joseph?”

“I am,” she said.

“You know why I want to talk to you?”

She shook her head. He guessed her to be hardly more than sixteen or seventeen; the older woman, maybe fifty; the boy, nine or ten. Marybeth Joseph was a big boney girl made bigger by her swollen belly. Broad face but cheerful eyes. Skin about the color of goat's milk and pitch-black hair twisted up into a bun atop her head and held with Spanish combs.

“No sir, I wouldn't have the slightest notion why you'd want to talk to me,” she said. He could see, though, from the look she gave him that she
did
have some notion of what he wanted to talk about.

The old woman had gone and settled into a high-back rocker near the fire. There were several tintypes in tarnished frames atop the rough-hewn mantel. Stark, unsmiling faces staring out, and one of a young soldier holding a pistol in each hand across his chest. He had the look of a man about to be shot.

“Maybe we could have a private word,” Jake suggested.

Marybeth Joseph stood with much effort and wiped
her wet hands on her skirts and said, “Let me get my coat.” The old woman looked at her sharply, said, “What about Frisco?”, moving her gaze to the boy in the tub.

“Maybe you could finish him up, mama.”

The old woman said, “Lord…”

Once outside Marybeth Joseph said, “She had Frisco real late in life. Daddy was already dead by the time he was born. Died of consumption. Daddy would have been surprised he had it still in him to sire another one. Is eight years between Frisco and me. She likes to believe Frisco is mine and not hers; I'm like his ma to him.” She rubbed her stomach with both hands on either side.

“How far along are you?” Jake said.

“Due anytime,” she said. “I never had a little one. Sometimes it scares me.”

“You know why I came, don't you, Marybeth?”

“Is it something to do with Nat?”

“It is,” Jake said. “He is dead.”

He saw her face crumple and she squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to fight back whatever tears wanted to come. He thought she might lose her balance, but she steadied herself by leaning a hand against the door where the sun struck, turning the wood pleasantly warm.

“I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you.”

“They killed him, didn't they?”

“Who are
they?
”

“Dallas and them.”

“You saw them take him out of here?”

“They wore masks, but I know it was them.”

“Will you swear to that in a court of law?”

She looked uncertain then, turned her attention to the pigs rooting in a little wooden pen, tears coursing her cheeks.

The pigs rooted and snorted and pushed against one
another, trying to get at the slops. They reminded her of the way men were sometimes, rude and rough and mean. She looked at them with something akin to disgust.

“I can't get involved in all this,” she said, her voice quaking.

“What was the trouble over?” Jake said.

“This,” she said, patting her tummy. “It's what led to the trouble between them. Dallas might have thought this child I got in me is Nat's.”

“Is it?”

She looked at him with her muddy brown eyes.

“I can't say, rightly. Could be Nat's, could be Dallas's. I guess I won't know until it comes out and shows itself.”

“So Dallas suspected you and Nat were having relations.”

“He accused me of it because someone told him they'd seen Nat's horse tied up out here. He slapped me around some next day and wanted me to tell him, but I was afraid he'd kill me, so I denied it.”

“Do you know if Dallas ever threatened Nat?”

“Only to me, he did. Said he'd kill us both if he found out I was messing with him.”

“I'll need you to testify against him,” Jake said.

“Nat had a good soul, mister. You couldn't help but like him. He fixed our roof without me even asking and he took Frisco for horse rides and bought him candy, too. He was real nice to all of us.”

“How come you didn't do anything when they took him?”

She shook her head.

“I don't know,” she said. “I was scared. I figured they'd rough him up some, maybe run him off. Nat told me not to worry about it, said it was some sort of joke be
ing played on him. I knew it wasn't no joke, but I was scared.”

Tear spilled down her cheeks and she swiped them away with the edge of her hand.

“I can't risk it,” she said. “He'll kill us all, me and Mama, and even Frisco was I to go against him. He'd kill this child, too.” She rubbed her swollen belly, her eyes full of fear and remorse.

“You think he suffered much?” she said.

“No,” Jake lied. “I don't think he did at all.”

“That's good,” she said.

A flock of geese went honking overhead, their calls starting out farther than the eye could see, then they appeared in a wavering V shape, their long dark necks extended, their wings drumming the air, their honk growing louder and louder, then fading away to nothing as though they'd never even existed.

“Will you go and arrest him?” she said. “Dallas, I mean?”

“I'm going to have a talk with him,” Jake said. “Right now I've got nothing but suspicion to arrest him on. You're sure you didn't see their faces? I mean, even if you didn't and you knew for sure it was them, would you testify in a court of law to it?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I mean, it could be Dallas's baby, too, I'm carrying. I don't know if I could say something against him to get him hanged, knowing it might be his…”

Jake started to turn to leave, then turned back.

“You got someone to help you deliver that child?” he said.

“Mama,” she said.

He nodded and put a foot in the stirrup.

Marybeth Joseph said, “Wait,” then went quickly into the house and returned again with a piece of paper in her hand. On it was written a name and an address:
Ophelia Pickett, General Delivery, Tulsa, OK Territory.

“Nat give it to me just a few weeks ago, said if anything was to ever happen to him I should write his mother and let her know. But I don't reckon I could ever write such a sad letter to her. Least not now. I'd appreciate if you was to write her and tell her what happened. I'm sure she'd want to know.”

Jake took the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.

He rode away, thinking
There are just some situations sadder than others, some folks who just don't stand a chance.