Desperadoes Read online

  Bob and I had a big restaurant supper of ham hocks and beans, during which he wiped his mouth with a napkin and concluded that what I’d done was almost legal and the sort of simple justice that he’d recommend in the future.

  Maybe he thought I needed the salve but my conscience hadn’t even tingled, whereas I think Bob got beat up by his. He denied himself the next day and that night; before he gazed up at the galaxy of stars, he probably took stock of himself in his diary and listed three or four more resolves.

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  He used to claim that he knew secrets about women that no other man did, and there were rumors late in his short life that prostitutes would take him upstairs for free just so they could be schooled; and more than once I saw Bob straddle a chair opposite a strange woman at a café or train depot and, after some brief talk, stroll out the door with her arm engaged in his.

  I never had his knack but I was jealous of it. I was common as toads to women. To work up even the faintest glimmer from them took everything I had and I’d sleep that night plumb worn out.

  Julia Johnson was my sweetheart then and twenty years later I married her. She was sixteen when I first saw her practicing hymns on a church pedal organ that had a small mirror on the music stand so she could see the altar and pulpit. I rode up so close to the church window that my horse sunk down to its fetlocks in a spaded flower garden, and in the mirror Julia saw me leaning in with my elbows on the sill and my fists making my eyes slant like a Chinese rube, and her eyes dispatched me with one of those glances that girls have the handle on, which said I was boring and simple and big-eared and she’d just as soon I disappeared. I was seventeen and sold on myself in those days, however, and I couldn’t countenance disregard, so I clomped inside that vacant church in my brown plow boots with red mud sliding off them in dollops and with two months’ worth of smoke and unpleasant smells in my coat, and I slumped in a pew fairly stupefied as she worked through every song she had, from funeral to wedding march.

  She had sun-browned skin the color of gypsies, and blue-black hair that was dark as a raven’s wing and spilled down her back almost to the bench she was sitting on. I recall to this day that she wore a light-blue dress with a bow at the waist that had come untied, and she wasn’t wearing shoes, just knee-high white socks that seemed new. And I believe the first sentence she used on me in that church was, ‘I hope you’re not going to make a nuisance of yourself.’

  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.’

  He said, ‘It’s like I haven’t arrived yet.’

  He stomped the dust from his boots and joined the family in the living room where tallow candles were out on the tables and a glass bowl heaped with rust-colored leaves sat on the head of the coffin. Minnie was sitting with my sisters but looking out a window that had started to frost. Bob stood by the oil lamp where the wallpaper was peeling down, combing his hair flat, staring at his sweetheart, wiping the water trickle from his neck.

  ‘She’s lost heft too,’ he whispered.

  I said, ‘Why don’t you be quiet about her.’

  Some visitors arrived for viewing after their Thursday night chores and with my brothers Ben and Charles and Henry and their wives and children, plus my sisters who were still at home, we had to take turns at the dining-room table, eating bowls of pork-belly stew and corn biscuits. Bob was still observing things about his loved one, and Minnie’s eyes were avoiding. When she spoke at all it was about cooking. She thought pound cake was too heavy with four eggs.

  Vespers were at seven. Julia bowed her head next to me and we clenched hands as a Methodist minister with a marled eye read from the Good Book and Grat slunk in from the kitchen and dug at his teeth with a thumbnail. After prayers were finished, everyone just sat around and looked uneasy and drank coffee. The cups clacked loudly in the saucers. The women comforted my mother until she began to cry, and then they took her to a back bedroom. ‘Lean on the Lord, honey,’ they said. Mom sat on a spring bed and wiped her eyes while a woman professed that Simon had been taken unto his heavenly Father’s bosom and to that special place where the righteous know not fear.

  I left Julia cutting chocolate-frosted cake and discovered Bob in the master bedroom with my father, who sucked at his pipe and spit into an empty peach can by his chair. ‘Your mother wants to divorce me, did you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bob.

  ‘The doctor says I should drink castor oil for my liver.’ He tapped his pipe into the peach can. ‘Minnie’s been seeing a boy with a criminal record. That’s news, I’ll wager.’

  Bob leaned forward from his seat on the bed. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Charles Montgomery. Good manners, about thirty years old. Has a prominent nose that carries a wart. Served time for burglary, introducing.’ Dad blinked in my direction. ‘Which one are you?’

  ‘Emmett.’

  ‘And you’re Bob?’

  My brother said, ‘This is the hired hand, right? Sleeps in the loft of Ted Seymour’s barn?’

  My father tossed his pipe onto the bed quilt. ‘I’m seventy-four years old and I don’t care if I’m married or not. When I was a boy we used to poke heifers. You know what Simon loved most in the whole world? Licorice. I remember him better than I do either of you two fellas.’

  I think Bob closed Minnie’s bedroom door behind him and had violent words with her while the assembled drank milk that my twelve-year-old sister Leona poured straight from the pail. Along about nine o’clock those people not family left and Ben took a kerosene lamp to the outhouse with him and I took Julia to a widow’s house where she was being put up until the funeral. I played three games of pinochle there and returned to see that drapes were blowing out through Minnie’s shuttered bedroom window.

  I hung my coat on the hall tree and heard Bob and Grat whispering in the front room so quietly all I could make out were the consonants, the k’s and p’s and t’s. It was like hearing a fire snap and hiss and fall apart in a far-off kitchen stove. I walked into the front room. Grat said, ‘I believe that’s what I’d do,’ and Bob shoved past me into the kitchen and let slide out of its brown suede case a Winchester 1866 carbine that was then called The Yellow Boy for its brass. He slammed the back door behind him.

  Apparently Minnie had crawled out through her window and plunged through cornfields to Seymour’s in her Sunday dress in order to deliver a warning to her lover.

  I asked, ‘What’s Bob going to do?’

  ‘I make it a point not to meddle,’ said Grat. And I sat in a stuffed chair ruminating, staring at the coffin, while my brother snapped cards over into an upended hat.

  I fell asleep shortly thereafter and woke to see Bob in the kitchen, opening pantry doors and closing them. He got a handful of oatmeal cookies and piled them on the kitchen table where he was cleaning his unused rifle. I straddled a chair and ate one.

  ‘The lovers flee,’ he said.

  I brushed cookie crumbs off my shirtfront. ‘How does that make you feel?’

  He oiled the trigger mechanism and ignored me until I left.

  Simon’s funeral service the next day was fairly well attended. Children scrunched at the house windows, staring in, and farmers stood reverently in the yard while the minister read from the Psalms in the front room. Then participants and grievers alike mounted buggies and buckboards and clucked their teams in a slow walk to the Elmwood Cemetery and a plot next to Frank’s where Grat had dug the grave himself, swinging a pick so hard the ground chipped up like arrow-heads.

  There was a lunch at a neighbor’s farm and then Bob rode with Grat into the Coffeyville business district to help him lay in winter supplies. They bought deviled ham and raisins and boxes of dried figs to stuff in their saddlebags, and flour and lard and beef jerky to store in the Tahlequah office. Then Grat threw up his arm in a wave good-bye and Bob crossed Union Street to have his boot heel restitched by Mr. Brown.

  Bob put a penny down for a paper and saw Charles Montgomery walk into Rammel’s drugstore and walk out again with a paper bag. He was riding a horse with the Ted Seymour brand. Bob read the newspaper through with coffee in a cafe. The Kansas State Grange and Patrons of Husbandry were meeting in Olathe, it said. Ted Seymour had taken his wife with him to the Armour stockyards in Omaha.

  I guess Bob then went to the city marshal’s office where he reviewed the conviction record of Charles Montgomery, and instead of riding
on to the Indian Territory, as he’d planned, he returned to the Dalton farm where he harnessed a dark brown team to a gray board-wagon and drove them to a ditch of sunflowers beside the Santa Fe Railroad tracks.

  Bob loaded his rifle and crept across the Seymour backyard to squat in the empty chicken coop and stare at the barn and empty house. Sparrows had their nests in the coop and they chased and screeched a while. Snow began to fall and the temperature dropped to ten degrees, but Bob just huddled down in his mackinaw with the rifle cradled warm inside his coat and the barrel against his cheek. It was eleven o’clock at night and the ground was thick with snow when Montgomery pounded out of the Seymour house with dresses draped over his shoulder and two pair of ladies’ shoes in his hand. When he was inside the barn he shouted to someone, ‘Look what I got for you.’

  Then he came out of the barn and swung a working saddle up to the top board of the fence. He went inside and brought out another saddle by the horn and Minnie Johnson stood in the doorway in Mrs. Seymour’s shawl and watched Montgomery tug over a horse by its rope bridle. They spoke to each other and she shivered and went inside.

  Bob told me this years later when we were on the porch stoop at Hennessey and Eugenia Moore was in the kitchen with a creaky ironing board. He said he had cocked his rifle four hours before so he did not do that then. He stood up and slowly pressed open the chicken coop’s wire mesh door. He stood still a minute, then walked toward the barn. The falling snow was a grainy sound in the trees; otherwise it was silent night.

  Montgomery was reaching under the belly of the horse to bring the cinch through the brass loop. Bob brought his rifle up and stood twenty yards away as Montgomery lifted up hard on the cinch strap. Minnie came out with one of Montgomery’s coats and a carpetbag. She saw Bob and it so shocked her she couldn’t say a thing. Montgomery turned his head just a little and there was gunpowder noise and a rifle bullet ripped into his neck, splitting his throat like a swamp root. He smacked against the saddle and the horse changed its hooves; he lifted a yellow-gloved hand to his neck, his mouth open like he was yelling or had just burst through the surface after touching the mud in a deep lake. He pawed for balance on the horse but it reared away and yanked the reins from their wrap on the fence. Minnie Johnson’s hands were in prayer at her face as she sank down to her knees, and Montgomery fell off and died on his back in the snow.