Christmas in the Lone Star State Read online

  “Don’t,” he said, calmly. “Just don’t do it.”

  She looked up at him then, a blank expression on her face, but her eyes were the windows through which he saw the flood of overwhelming emotions in that moment—fear, anger, and, most of all, grief. She didn’t obey him, instead curling her fingers around the revolver’s grip, and he didn’t waste time trying to get through to her. He bent over, grabbed the pistol by the barrel, and yanked it out of her grasp before she could slip a finger through the trigger guard. As he turned to see to his brother, the woman rolled over and crawled on hands and knees to the sheepherder’s corpse. When she saw that the side of his skull had been cracked open by Mal’s bullet, she sat on her heels and her hands flew to her face but she didn’t make a sound. Mal glanced at her and felt a sudden, surging rage. He turned on Lute.

  “You’ve done it again now, haven’t you! Get up!” He grabbed Lute by the arm and hauled him roughly to his feet. “Get up, goddamn you!”

  Lute gasped and winced at the breathtaking pain that shot through him. Hunched over, he held his right arm tightly against his side. “I—I think I broke my arm,” he whined. Mal was looking down at the dead man and the woman kneeling and rocking back and forth, the soundless wail still caught on her tongue, and so Lute looked too. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done,” he said, with the petulant outrage of the falsely accused. “You’re the one who shot him, I didn’t.”

  “I shot him,” said Mal grimly, “because he was about to kill you. And to think, when you came charging down here I just about rode off and left you.”

  Lute shook his head. “You would never do that! You made a promise to Mum.” Seeing the fury etched on Mal’s face, his tone became less stridently defensive and more deferential. “All we have is each other now. Look, I’m sorry. I was … I was just bored, okay? It’s just … when the sheep started running seemed like it would be fun to shoot some of them, that’s all.”

  Trying to tamp down his anger, Mal shook his head in disgust and took a long look around. The sheep were well scattered now and far afield. One had succumbed to its wounds and lay a stone’s throw away on the other side of the creek. The dog was nowhere to be seen. He turned his attention to Alise and fresh anger surged through him again. He spun Lute around and pointed at the woman’s corpse. “Well, you won’t be having any more fun with her now, will you,” he snapped crossly, handing Lute his gun back. Lute took it with his left hand. He kept his right arm tight against his side.

  Lute had been so focused on saving his own life, and then the lancing pain in his shoulder, that he had completely forgotten about Alise. “Just my bloody luck,” he muttered, frowning at her corpse. “I was starting to like her.”

  Mal huffed incredulously. He glanced at the sod house, realizing that more than two people might live here. The door was ajar, the interior dark. He turned to the woman kneeling by the dead sheepherder. “Just the two of you live here?” Immersed in inconsolable grief, she didn’t seem to hear him. She sobbed quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks. Mal was short on patience. Grabbing her by the arm, he pulled her roughly to her feet, spinning her to face the cabin door and wrapping a burly arm around her waist to hold her in front of him. His right hand, holding the Gasser, was down at his side. Bowing his head down he murmured in her ear, “If there is someone in there you really should call out to them. Tell them to show themselves—and make very sure their hands are empty.” His voice was soft, but the menace was like cold, sharp steel.

  He felt her body stiffen. Her head came up. “There is no one,” she said flatly.

  “I’m not sure I believe that.” He looked around at Lute. “You think you can keep an eye on her while I look inside?”

  Lute was pale. His features were drawn tight with pain. “I think I broke my arm, Mal.”

  Mal muttered a curse and frog-marched the woman to the door, kicking it wide open before pushing her inside. The interior of the sod house was not markedly different from the cabin where Alise had lived with the hunter. It struck him that these frontier people did not have much more in the way of personal belongings than Whitechapel’s poor. What they did have, though, was their own land, and it was the land that could make all the difference. With the land there came hope, and hope was something that was notably lacking in the poorhouses back home. He felt a kind of comradeship with this woman—and her dead husband outside. They were poor people, like his own family. But they had been given an opportunity to make something of themselves and worked hard to do just that. And then he and Lute had come along. As Lute trailed in behind them, Mal looked at his brother with disgust, but managed to hold his tongue. A sweeping glance around the cabin was enough to convince him that the woman had been telling the truth. There was no one else here. He released her. She turned to face them and took a few steps backward until she fetched up against a rough-hewn counter. Grimacing, Lute sat down on a three-legged stool near the fireplace, where the orange glowing embers of a morning fire still provided some warmth. He bent over and groaned.

  “He dislocated his shoulder,” she said. “It ain’t broken or he’d be making a lot more noise. I’ll set it. Give you some food. If then you’ll just ride away and…” She had to stop and fight back the tears. “Ride away and leave me to bury my man.”

  Mal admired her fortitude. He nodded, lifting his peacoat to shove the Gasser under his belt at the small of the back. “You have my word.”

  At her direction he helped Lute get to his feet and move to the bed. She had Lute lay so that his right arm and shoulder hung over the edge of the bed. Pulling a chair up, she took hold of Lute’s right wrist with both hands, placed a bare foot against his armpit, and slowly, steadily, began pulling the arm away from the body. Lute groaned through clenched teeth, body stiffening, arcing, and Mal had to hold him down until, the muscles stretched, the joint popped back into place. The woman got up and went to a trunk in the corner and, sitting on her heels, opened it, telling Mal she was going to make a sling for Lute’s arm. Lute waited until she was across the room then grabbed the lapel of his brother’s peacoat and pulled him closer.

  “We need to take her with us.”

  “No,” said Mal, adamantly.

  “I need a woman.”

  “You’ll have to go without for a while.” He glanced over his shoulder and saw her standing there. She was looking understandably afraid, and her brightly gleaming eyes told him that she wasn’t sure he would keep his word. “We had an accord, and I intend to keep my end,” he said, hoping to reassure her.

  Lute was irate. He was accustomed to getting his way. “No! She’s coming with us!”

  “You lay a hand on her and I’ll break it. Now go and find your horse.”

  “But you said we wouldn’t leave any witnesses behind us,” replied Lute, sullenly. He had made Mal angry before, but there was something different about this time. Not one to consider the consequences of his actions, the fact that his older brother had even thought about leaving him to his own devices shocked him. Even so, he felt compelled to complain.

  “Aye, I did. But if you will recall, that was to leave no evidence of the direction we were taking after we got off that riverboat.” For his part, Mal had in the past tried to explain those decisions of his that ran counter to what Lute wanted, in the hope that Lute would learn something. He realized now that there was no more hope of Lute becoming more circumspect in his actions than there was of his acquiring a conscience. “Killing Alise’s husband probably ruined any hope of that. And now … this.”

  “You shot her man,” said Lute, gesturing at the woman. “Not me.”

  “I had to because you were too busy shooting sheep to notice he was aiming a shotgun at you, you bloody glock.”

  Lute fumed in silence a moment, then shook his head as he turned resentfully toward the door. “I can’t believe you’d cut me over that worthless twist there,” he groused with a surly look at the woman.

  “Hurry the hell up,” Mal barked as
Lute went outside, then turned back to the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly. “Sorry for killing your man. But … I had to. That’s my brother and … well, he’s all the family I have left.”

  “You have more than I do now,” she snapped, and the anger was responsible for the way her nostrils flared as she lifted her chin at a defiant angle.

  “Close and bar the door,” he said as he turned to go outside. “Don’t come out until you’re certain we’re gone.”

  Lute was coming around the side of the house when he stepped outside. “Bloody horse ran up into the trees,” groused Lute. “I went all the way to the top of the hill but I don’t see it.”

  Mal spotted his horse standing nearby and was relieved when the animal let him walk up and climb into the saddle. Lute got on behind and they rode up the hill, following the errant chestnut’s tracks in the snow. Reaching the top of the hill, Mal saw that the timber thickened on the other side. The wounded horse was nowhere to be seen, and Mal wasn’t surprised. Ever since the confrontation with the coppers on the Mustang they had been dogged by one mishap after another. He had to believe the law was on their trail now, and he was not inclined to linger in the valley looking for a horse that didn’t want to be caught up. Without a word he rode into the deeper woods, with only his innate sense of direction to guide him.

  Day Seven

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sprawled in a rocking chair close by the fireplace, Purdy was adrift in that place between waking and dreaming where the physically exhausted and emotionally distraught often find themselves. She heard a rhythmic tapping sound and found herself at the Cameron undertaker’s, watching the man hammer nails into the lid of her son’s coffin, sickened by the realization that she had just looked her last upon Joshua Eddings, her flesh, her blood, her joy. She couldn’t breathe, and gasped sharply as her eyes flashed wide open, glimmering with tears. The tapping continued and she knew then it was not the undertaker sealing her boy’s mortal remains in a pine box but someone knocking on the farmhouse door. Buck was lying at her feet and had raised his head, looking at the door. An irrational fear gripped Purdy. She had this crazy idea it was Norris, standing just outside the door, knock, knock, knocking, his throat still a mass of brutalized flesh, his arm and chest shattered by buckshot. She wondered why Buck wasn’t barking up a storm. Perhaps the graveness of his injury had taken too much out of him. Trembling, she moved hesitantly toward the door, then decided to peek out the window first. She was able to breathe again when she saw the corpse still sprawled in the snow. The tapping continued. She opened the door.

  A woman stood there in shadows that were gathering under the porch roof in the half-light of those moments when day succumbed to night. She was short and slender and getting on in years, if her long gray hair and creased face were any indication. But her bright, inquisitive eyes and her warm, gentle smile seemed ageless. “Oh good, you’re still here!” she exclaimed with girlish delight. She had Purdy’s black-and-gray scarf in her hand and now held it out. “This is yours, I believe.”

  Purdy stared at the scarf a moment and felt remorse as she remembered wrapping it around her naked shoulders right before wading into the Little River to end her existence. Had that happened only yesterday? Time had ceased to matter the way it once had. In fact, she wondered if she had been standing there, staring at the scarf for too long, and looked apologetically at the visitor. “I’m sorry. Yes … yes it’s mine. But … how did you come by it?”

  “The river sent it to me. I found it today, caught on some wood along the water’s edge right near my raft.”

  “Your raft?”

  “Mhm. I live on a raft a mile or so downriver. Have for many years. It is all I need or want. There is a little shanty on it, you see. The river provides me with plenty of fish and fresh water year-round. I wouldn’t want to live in town. Too crowded.” She held the scarf up a bit higher than before. “Your scarf, dear?”

  Purdy took the scarf, suddenly feeling quite ashamed. She didn’t care to explain how her scarf had come to be in the river. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I-I was trying to remember where I lost it.”

  The woman nodded and smiled. “My name is Mary.” She glanced over her shoulder at the corpse of George Norris. “Seems we’ve lost one of our neighbors,” she added, matter-of-factly.

  Mary’s detachment when it came to a dead body struck Purdy as rather odd. And while it didn’t seem as though her visitor was going to ask questions regarding the corpse, the way most people would, she nonetheless felt compelled to explain. “I had to do it. He was going to kill my dog, who was only trying to protect me.” She glanced at Buck, who was still beside the fireplace. She noted that he didn’t look alarmed at all, which was odd, as Buck never liked strangers. He didn’t seem to mind the old woman at all. Or maybe this uncommon complacency was due to his injury. “And Buck, well, he’s all I’ve got left. I thought I’d lost him too, but he came back to me.”

  Mary nodded. “I confess I never liked Mr. Norris. He was not a good man. No person is born bad but sometimes they go too far down the wrong path to be saved. Maybe next time.”

  “Next time? What do you mean?”

  Mary made a don’t-mind-me gesture. “Oh, it’s not important right now. Please forgive an old woman for blathering—and for not minding my business—but you probably shouldn’t leave him lying out there too long. Will attract the wrong kind of varmints.”

  Purdy sighed, nodding. “Yes. Like sheriffs.” She had tried to put her mind to the problem but just hadn’t been able to. She was tired of thinking about death. Trying to dig a grave in the frozen ground was more than she could do. Norris had outweighed her by quite a lot, and she couldn’t drag the corpse any great distance. She didn’t even feel like making all these points to Mary as justification for leaving the dead man where he lay, so instead she stepped aside and made a gesture for the visitor to enter. “I’m sorry. Where are my manners? Please, come warm yourself by the fire.” She glanced again at Buck, whose tail was actually thumping slowly on the floor as the old woman drew closer. “My dog doesn’t mind, it seems.”

  “Thank you, dear. I could stand a bit of warming up. I do believe Norris had a plow mare. I’ll go fetch it, and we’ll use it to drag the body back to his property. Otherwise you might have coyotes visiting or, worse, a cougar.”

  “I don’t know,” said Purdy. “I mean, I’m not sure what to do with the body.” A thought occurred to her. “How did you know that was my scarf?”

  “You were wearing it at the cemetery the other day. I am so very sorry about your son. I didn’t know. Just happened to go to town that day. Noticed people heading to the cemetery and followed out of curiosity, I suppose. Funny how things happen sometimes, isn’t it?”

  Purdy nodded. “I didn’t see you there. I’m surprised I haven’t ever seen you, since we’re neighbors.”

  Mary chuckled warmly. “I am often overlooked,” she said wryly as she built up the fire with fresh wood and then stood right next to Buck and rubbed her hands together in the toasty-warm updraft.

  “How long have you lived around here?”

  “A long, long time.” The old woman nodded and smiled. “I knew your pa, in fact. Even rode on his riverboat once. My, that was a long time ago!” She cupped her chin and looked up at the rafters in a thoughtful pose. “Going on thirty years now.”

  Purdy sank into the rocking chair, watching the flames cavort under and around the firewood. “You’ve been alone on a raft all that time?”

  Mary turned and looked at her with a soft and sympathetic smile on her lips. “I had a husband, and two strapping sons. My husband was a good man, a farmer. But he had a powerful dislike for Mexicans. I think it was because his father died at the Alamo. I don’t think it was so much that he died fighting for Texas. It was how Santa Anna ordered all the bodies of the defenders piled up and burned. Anyway, he wanted to fight in the Mexican War but by the time he got down there, word came that Winfield Scott had captured M
exico City and the volunteer company he had joined turned right around and came home. Then, back in ’59, when Juan Cortina quarreled with the town marshal of Brownsville and ended up taking over the whole town, my husband rode south to help take it back. But once again he was too late. He was on his way home and just a few miles shy of it when his horse threw him on account of a rattler. Best we could tell, the fall broke his back and the rattler killed him off.”

  “My God,” said Purdy. “How terrible.”

  Mary sat on a three-legged stool that stood off to one side of the hearth, and Purdy felt a pang in her heart because the stool had been where Joshua sat on cold winter evenings while she read to him from the Bible. “Both my sons went off to fight in the War Between the States,” said the old woman. “One for the North, one for the Confederate states. Lot of people on either side of that war here in Texas. Think we would have all been better off staying out of it. I would have, because neither one of my boys came back. I never knew exactly what happened to them or where, but I’m sure they would have come back to me had they survived.”

  Purdy was astonished by how dispassionately Mary spoke of these tragedies. “I couldn’t hold on to the farm and wasn’t sure what would become of me,” continued the visitor. “And then one day I was walking along the river looking for a likely place to camp for the night and fish for my supper when I came upon the raft. Found a skeleton in a chair in the cabin. There was a parchment pinned to its jacket. Last will and testament it was. ‘I, William Henry Tasker, trader, of sound mind even though my body is ailing, leave all my belongings, which includes my raft, to the first person who discovers my remains, since they are no damned good to me anymore.’” Mary smiled softly. “Just when you think you have no prospects, no hope, no luck…”