He revisited the accounts Deerling had given him earlier that day, of McGill’s murderous path through Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. He had killed both men and women, a sixteen-year-old boy, and even two lawmen who had been on his trail. Most of them had been shot during the course of a robbery or at a card game gone bad. But a few of the killings had seemed random and pointless: a careless word, an incautious step, a shadow thrown over the killer at just the wrong time. And now, after the murder of the settlers in Houston, McGill could add two children to his tally.
To dispel those images, Nate thought of his wife in the garden, her fingers smelling of fall okra, green and tender-hulled, and he decided to post a letter to her from Fort Stockton. He thought of the stories of raiding Comanche and Kiowa and ruminated on the wisdom of carrying cyanide.
Just before dawn, he walked to Deerling’s bedroll to wake him. But the man’s eyes were already open and cleared of all sleep, as though the ranger had been wakeful in the dark for some time.
The three riders entered Fort Stockton, sixty miles on from Fort Davis, to acquire food and ammunition. As with Fort Davis, buffalo soldiers supplied the bulk of the outpost troops. But where the former station was poorly situated, Fort Stockton was armed and well provisioned, behind stone walls and stockade fences with lookouts.
Dr. Tom nodded with approval. “They don’t call this Comanche Springs for nothing.”
The officer, a young, tubercular-looking white man in a too-large Union coat, warned them that raiding parties had been seen in increasing numbers through the Edwards Plateau, following the Pecos River Valley.
“Fort Lancaster is completely unmanned now,” he said. “If you are engaged, there can be no help for you.”
Deerling thanked him and they rode on to the nearby town of St. Gall for a bath and a decent bed for the night.
They tossed a coin for first to the bath, Dr. Tom winning both throw-downs. He clapped his palms together, smiling. “Dress and delight, boys,” he called out to them as he pulled a clean shirt from his pack and headed for the door. “Dress and delight.”
Nate called after him to ask when they’d be riding out in the morning, and Deerling, sitting in a chair pulling at his boots, gave Nate a hard eye.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Dr. Tom answered, nodding towards the chair where Deerling sat. “George is rather touchy on the subject of keeping the Lord’s day.” He closed the door and walked down the hallway, hitched and flat-footed.
“Don’t you go to church?” Deerling asked Nate.
“It’s been some time since.”
“Didn’t your mother raise you up to it?”
“She was raised with a mission church. She wasn’t too fond of it.”
“You a Catholic?” The hard eye returned.
“No,” Nate said, standing up from his place at the floor, where he had been sorting through his pack. “Baptist.”
“A Baptist?”
“Yes, an Oklahoma Baptist, if that’s all right.”
“Well…all right.”
“Glad you can accommodate that.” Nate turned his back to Deerling and kneeled down to resume looking for a less soiled shirt. After a while he added, “It seems to me that a man’s beliefs are his own affair.”
Behind him from Deerling he heard a grunt, although whether it was a noise of assent or merely of physical exertion he couldn’t be certain, as it was followed by the sound of a boot clattering to the floorboards.
Nate sat on the bed with a piece of paper and a stub of pencil and commenced writing to his wife.
Dear Beth,
We have arrived in St. Gall, having safely passed through Forts Davis and Stockton. The countryside is mostly scrub and desert and a hardship to our horses as, at times, they were fed only cactus pears with the thorns knocked off. We have seen no Comanche, but buffalo soldiers aplenty posted on the Government Road for the protection of all and for the gain of everyone but themselves. There is early frost on the ground out west, and snow in the sierras, which turn blue at night and orange with the sunrise.
The two rangers I am commissioned with, Tom Goddard and George Deerling, are experienced men of resolute purpose, but I fear their years on the borderlands have made them at times…
Here he paused, searching for the correct word. He didn’t want to seem disloyal, but the memory of Maynard Collie’s death still pulled at him. He thought about writing unheeding of due process but decided it would alarm his wife and wrote, instead, hasty.
Tom Goddard is a medical man from back East but knows more than any man I’ve ever met about the ground we walk on, its history and its beginnings. He is a reader of books and can imitate any bird or animal by breathing through his clasped fingers. His cougar call is a wonder and would make you blanch to hear it.
George Deerling has personal reasons for wanting to capture or kill the murderer William McGill, but what those reasons are, I cannot guess.
We are following McGill to Houston, which will take the better part of a month. But be assured that I will write you as often as circumstances will allow.
Send my love to Mattie. My hope is to see you both in early spring.
My love always, Nathaniel
After consideration he added a postscript telling her to write him in care of the postmaster in Austin and saying that he would be attending church in the morning, knowing it would bring a slow creeping smile to his wife’s face.
When it was his turn, Nate paid for a half bath, the price of the full bath being too steep. The bathhouse was a large tent behind the main house with a tub, a washstand, and a small mirror nailed to a support post. He washed standing up and then combed his hair and shaved at the mirror. He observed that his hair was too long for ranger service and would soon need cutting. Since the war, he had worn it full, in pride of the Confederacy, but also because cropping it, he felt, would make him appear too young and inexperienced.
He scraped the razor over his cheek, breathing in the mustiness of the canvas sides, and realized that the tent had most likely been used in the field. He turned to observe the spray of darkened stains on the lower half of the far wall; it told him the tent had been in hospital service. When he turned back to the mirror, he saw reflected on the mottled glass what his naked eye had missed: one rust-colored blot on the canvas, vaguely the shape of a man’s palm. He stared at the reflection for a good while, the razor poised in his hand, and thought of the field hospital in Arkansas in which he had spent some time, and of the men lying in it, suffering typhoid and dysentery and pneumonia, men and boys who had yet to see battle or even fire a gun but who were dying just the same.
Finished shaving, he quickly dressed, giving his work shirt to the boardinghouse lady to be washed. When he returned to the room, the two rangers looked awkward, as though their conversation had been cut off abruptly upon his entering.
Dr. Tom stood up from the bed. “Well, Nate. We thought you’d run off with the woman of the house.”
The three of them walked the short distance to the public house to eat dinner, a meal composed of pot squash and steaks of indeterminate origin. They ordered three whiskeys and all stared for a long moment in appreciation of the warm oaky color and burned-barrel scent before draining their glasses.
They looked around at the empty hall and watched the barkeep cleaning used whiskey glasses with his tongue. The barkeep pointed to a sign over his head, which read Dances, Two Bits, and told them that the dancing would commence at eight o’clock, along with music the likes of which, he was certain, they had seldom heard. The girls, he assured them, were genuine hurdy-gurdy girls from Europe, and no common whores.
He added, “These foreign-born like dancing more than you’ve ever seen. You’ll see. It gets rigorous.”
As the barkeep had promised, within the hour, a small group of men and women quietly entered the public house and seated themselves on benches set against the far wall. One man unpacked a fiddle and another a squeezebox, and they began to play a song. Three young wom
en, the hurdies, dressed in full skirts hemmed just above the ankle, nodded to the music, their old-fashioned sausage curls coiling and uncoiling in time with their bobbing heads.
Soon more men and women began to enter the public house, Irish, Mexicans, and Rhinelanders among them, each in his own dress, all speaking incomprehensible languages. Most of the men, and a fair share of their women, bought small glasses of beer and crowded the open area to hear the music that was played in ever-increasing tempos. Eventually, a couple of men bought their dance tickets from the barkeep and shyly approached the hurdy girls. Like the men were draft horses, Nate thought, too long at pasture.
The seated girls chosen to dance smiled and led their callers onto the floor, where they guided the men through a near approximation of reels, polkas, and galops, their partners changing after every song. Swiping his mustache, Dr. Tom walked to the bar and bought two tickets. He chose his partner and commenced an admirable waltz.
Nate turned to Deerling. “You gonna dance?”
Deerling took his hat, which had been balanced on one crossed knee, and set it on the table. “Never much cared for it. You?”
“No.”
“Your wife don’t miss it?”
“She didn’t marry me for my dancin’.”
“What did she marry you for?”
Nate saw it was a friendly-enough question. “She told me I was constant.”
Deerling considered that for a moment. “Constancy in men is like fidelity in women. Much to be desired, but seldom found.” He stared at Nate for a brief moment before shifting restlessly in his seat.
“That’s a hard line to take,” Nate said.
“No. It’s not.” Deerling stood up and faced him. “Oklahoma, I’m sure your wife is as faithful as the North Star. From what I’ve been told, you’re not much for farming, but you know horses better than most, and we fight for the same side. But I didn’t spend the past twenty years of my life learning to appreciate the merits of mankind. You’re young. You’ll learn.” He fit his hat carefully back on his head and said, “Church is at nine.”
With a nod to the barkeep, Deerling walked out of the hall just as Dr. Tom finished his first dance and returned to the table. Clapping Nate on the shoulder, he moved his chair around to better see the floor, now crowded with a dozen or more couples wheeling about the room.
Dr. Tom leaned close to Nate and said, “I didn’t understand a word that girl said, but she could sure wing a lively one.” He smiled and looked around. “Where’s George?”
“He left. I think I put him awry.”
Dr. Tom crossed his arms. “Oh?”
“He holds a darkened view of humanity.”
“One thing you’ll discover about George is that he takes his time with people. When I first rode with him, it was near a year before we had more than a passing of words. Just keep a steady path and he’ll soften up.”
Dr. Tom took a sip of whiskey, then thoughtfully sucked the remainder from the bottom of his mustache. “Listen,” he said. “More than any other man I know, George would give his life for a friend. We were forty miles into Mexico—oh, this was in ’fifty-five—chasing some Lipan that had been raiding in Uvalde County. There were about a hundred of us, but we got pinned down at a stream called Rio Escondido by about five hundred Mexicans. George waded into that stream four times to pull out wounded men. Got shot in both arms. We thought he was going to have to pull the last fellow out with his teeth.”
Nate smiled. Ranger lore, more than any other kind, valued the power of understatement.
Dr. Tom danced one more time with a different girl, and then he and Nate walked in amiable silence towards the boardinghouse.
The sky was dark and filled with stars, and Dr. Tom stopped once and rocked back on his heels to look up. He said to Nate, “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it.”
“Yes, it does.” Nate watched Dr. Tom watching the stars. The ranger’s mouth was open in awe, like a kid’s, which made Nate smile.
Dr. Tom traced the arc of a shooting star with his finger. “Celestial wanderers,” he said. “Sort of like me and George.” He looked at Nate. “It’s hard to imagine, seeing how crowded the sky looks tonight, how far away one star is from another. Like people, really. We can appear to be standing right next to each other, and yet in our minds, we can be thousands of miles away, lost to the outer reaches. But we’re all together in the same black soup, which makes us all related somehow.” Dr. Tom shook his head. “George rags on me about my pondering such things. It’s good to have a sympathetic ear, though.”
They walked up onto the porch and Dr. Tom placed a hand on Nate’s arm. “Tomorrow, after George gets his church, we pick up the pace. We didn’t want to run breakneck through the desert, but now there’s more water and graze for the horses, we’ll be riding fast.”
They entered their room quietly as Deerling seemed to be sleeping, though the lamp was still burning.
Nate removed his clothes down to his long underwear and crawled into the bedroll. His ear pressed close to the floorboards, he could hear the woman downstairs stepping around the parlor, locking up and humming to herself. His wife would often hum. Sometimes it seemed to Nate that the same strangely lamentable song had stretched out over the entire five years of their marriage. Strange because his wife was always smiling and seemed, more than anyone he knew, to be satisfied in full with her life, although she’d had troubles enough to be dour. Losing three babies from her belly in as many years could have made her bitter and resentful. But she rose cheerfully in the morning and smiled secretly against his fingers in the dark of their bed at night.
He turned over once to still those thoughts, and slept.
Chapter 5
The river barge, the Emmelda Tucker, slipped easily through a fog bank, eastbound with the tide on Buffalo Bayou. Lucinda had boarded at Allen’s Landing in Houston early that morning with a dozen other men and women traveling to Harrisburg or Lynchburg or even farther on across the bay to Galveston Island, more than sixty miles to the south. An early-fall rain had soaked the cattails growing on the banks, and when the sun broke through, the matted rushes spilled mist over the river like smoke from a shanty fire.
Lucinda put a hand to one cheek, felt the tacky, saltwater air from the Gulf covering her face like a second skin. She stood on the bottom deck and, closing her eyes against the glare off the water, leaned against one wall of the barge’s passenger cabin. Above her, on the hurricane deck, the men walked about, smoking and laughing good-naturedly about the fine weather, expressing hopes or giving assurances that the passage would prove calm.
From within the passenger cabin, she could hear some women talking, enjoying an effortless voyage where they could sit at their ease. It would be cooler inside, away from the press of the sun, but Lucinda had no desire to talk mindlessly for hours about children, husbands, relatives soon to be found or lost, tatting, quilting; the disasters of small days, the tragedies of long nights.
She had waited for three days at the Lamplighter before her suitor had come. By the evening of the second day, she had been close to panic, pacing her room, parting the curtains to watch the streets for him. He was a cautious man, but he had always been punctual in his habits with her, and a vision of his possible injury or death sent her searching for the laudanum bottle to ease her into sleep.
On the third day, she sat for hours in a chair, certain he had abandoned her, and now her troubled visions were of herself alone, sick and discarded. She stared at the laudanum bottle, still half full, and considered drinking it all. She returned to her bed and lay, unmoving and cold, trying to recall his touch, or any touch in her brief life that had not been prompted by anger or empty, ungratifying lust.
He slipped into her room on the evening of the third day, well past dark, making his way soundlessly to the bed after she had already fallen into a drugged sleep. She woke as he was easing himself naked under the quilts next to her. He clamped his hand over her mouth, his quiet laugh in her ea
r, and he whispered, “You didn’t wait up for me.”
He raked up her nightdress with his other hand and then covered her eyes as well as her mouth but made no moves to have her until she had molded her body willfully against his. This initial withholding on his part—the momentary passivity so contrary to his restless animal strength—always excited her. It gave her a fleeting sense of control, a temporary feeling of safety, which was replaced by the even greater excitement of his forceful lovemaking.
Afterwards, they lay for a while, not speaking. She turned her back to him so that he wouldn’t see her tears of relief and biting anger. “You left me alone here for days,” she said. “With no word of where you were, or when you were coming.”
He traced a fingernail against one shoulder blade. “The vagaries of surveying, my dear. You must be patient.” He yawned as though he were falling asleep, but then he asked, “You’ve secured your position at Middle Bayou?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ve written that I’ll be arriving in two weeks’ time.”
“Good.”
She turned to face him. He was motionless, but she could see the partially opened lids, the eyes watchful. “You’ll come soon for me?”
He smiled and said, “You look flushed. Is it another fit coming on?”