Sam Bass (3 page)

Billy was one of my teamsters. When the weather started getting cold, he looked for an inside job and found one. I wasn't sorry. He was lazy, and I probably would have let him go anyhow.

I was looking for a way to reward Sam, since he hadn't uttered a word of complaint and I knew he wouldn't be happy hacking brush forever. So when Billy quit, I offered his job to Sam.

I'll never forget the day of his first trip to Dallas. The wagon was piled high with buffalo hides, and they stank to high heaven. But Sam had a brand new haircut and a shave and was wearing new black pantaloons and a checkered shirt that the Widow Lacy had given him. I don't guess he had worn them more than twice before.

“Lord, son,” I said, “you look like you're going to church.” “Better than that,” he said. “I been tending these goddamn horses all my life, and now they're going to
take
me somewhere.”

He came back a few days later full of tales about the city. His eyes flashed as he described the iron toll bridge across the Trinity River, the street with the outdoor gas lights that made night almost as plain as day, the huffing of the steam locomotives, the mule-drawn cars for the public to ride on Main Street. You would have thought he was Marco Polo home from Cathay. His taste of the wider world had given him such a thrill that he was a pleasure to see.

He hinted of sampling the city's darker pleasures, too, offhandedly mentioning the elaborate gambling setups in some of the saloons there, the piano music and the women with uncovered shoulders and plumes in their hair who knew how to separate a man from his money. I suspected they had separated Sam from some, but if they did, it was his own money and not mine. He returned with every penny he was supposed to, so I didn't ask how he took his ease in Dallas. I had sent Sam to the city to do a job for me, and he had done it. I was satisfied.

And I was more satisfied as time passed. Sam was the most willing, capable hand I ever had. He became the man I relied on for any duty requiring intelligence and a sense of responsibility. It was he who hauled the first load of ice from Sherman to Denton, a day of note in the history of the town. The ice had come all the way from the Great Lakes by riverboat and train, but so much of it could have been lost on the hot fifty miles from Sherman that the enterprise wouldn't have been worth the effort in the hands of a careless man. Sam packed the big blocks in the wagon with a care befitting glass, surrounding and covering them with straw before he lashed the canvas over them. When he arrived, he and Frank Jackson chipped off two big chunks and danced a jig in the street, holding the ice over their heads, shouting its coming to the town. The butchers and saloonkeepers bought it quickly at a premium price, and the ice run to Sherman became one of Sam's regular duties. I wouldn't have trusted it to anybody else.

Sam lived in my house and ate at my table and had my leave to treat most of my goods and belongings as his own. My children worshipped him. My wife pitied him and tried to teach him to read and write. He wasn't much of a pupil, but he did learn to write his name. When my wife concluded that he was enduring her instruction only to please her and not out of a desire for learning, she gave up. He received two or three letters from his family in Indiana, and Mrs. Egan would read them to him and write out his replies for him. In one, I remember, a couple of his brothers were inquiring about Texas and expressing an interest in joining him here. And he told Mrs. Egan to tell them they were better off in Indiana.

Sam had several brothers, I gathered from his rare mentions of his family. One was named Denton, the same as our town, I recall, but if I ever heard the names of the others, I've forgotten them. He had some sisters, too, I think. They were orphaned when Sam was just a boy. Their farm and everything on it were sold at auction, and Sam and the others went to live with an uncle, who had a large family of his own.

From Sam's vague references to that time I deduced that he was a runaway. He mentioned a quarrel with his uncle, about wages, I think. “I walked away without nothing but the shirt on my back,” he said. He went to St. Louis and hung around the waterfront for a while, then drifted downriver to Mississippi and got a job at a sawmill. It was the same work he had done for his uncle, but they paid him for it in Mississippi. He saved enough money to buy a horse and a gun, somehow hooked up with Bob Mayes and his family, and wound up in Denton because that was where Bob Mayes was going, and one destination was as good as another to Sam, just so it was Texas.

There was nothing interesting in his story, and nothing unusual. The world is full of runaways, and many of the best citizens of Denton admit to scrawling “GTT” on their doors back home, a message to friends or the law or creditors that they had gone to Texas. There's no shame in being a runaway or even an outlaw here, so long as the wrong was done somewhere else. Since the war, many decent people have fled carpetbag debt and carpetbag law, and there's no disgrace in that, just as there's no disgrace in being a poor freedman, now that the Yankees have cut the niggers loose from the secure places they used to know. What matters here is what people make of themselves after they get here, not what they were where they came from.

Nobody tried harder to make something of himself than Sam did. As I've already said, he was a hard worker, and at that time there wasn't a cheating bone in his body. He returned from every freighting trip with all the goods and money he was supposed to bring back, and sometimes more. Once he returned so much of the expense money I had given him that I asked if he had fed the horses during the trip. He just said, “Don't worry till you see their ribs.”

I didn't worry. I would have trusted him with anything, especially my horses. People around town took to calling him “Honest Eph.” I don't know why, unless they just thought “Honest Eph” sounded better than “Honest Sam.” Anyway, he earned the name. And I couldn't have felt closer to him if he had been my brother or son. I even invited him to sit with me and Mrs. Egan at night when we read the Bible to each other. “Are you reading the Old Testament or the New Testament? “he would ask. When we were reading the Old Testament, he would join us sometimes, but he wouldn't when we were reading the New. He didn't care about Jesus and Paul, but he loved some of the stories in the Old Testament, especially those about Samson and those about David before he became king, when he was a bandit.

One night I read the story about Pharaoh's dream and Joseph's interpretation of it as a sign that Egypt would have seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. “And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand,” I read, “and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck.”

“Did what Joseph said come true?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I went on to read about the famine that hit Egypt, and how Joseph's preparations had saved the people and brought his brothers out of the land of the Hebrews to buy corn from him.

Sam was astonished. “Is there really people that tell you what dreams mean?”

“Things happened in Bible days that don't happen now,” I said. “It was a special time, and God was closer to people than He is now.”

“I was thinking of my horse dream,” he said. “I ain't no Pharaoh, but I'd give a penny to know what it means.”

“I don't think dreams mean anything,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Why does it come to me all the time if it don't mean nothing?”

“You've just got horses on the brain,” I said.

No one could doubt that he
did
have horses on the brain. His whole life was horses. My freight animals were entirely under his supervision, and he had begun spending more and more of his idle time at the racetrack at the edge of town. Army was responsible for that, I regret to say. Army shared Sam's love of horseflesh. They also shared a love of gambling. Army loved the races and had known most of the sporting men around Denton for years. He introduced them to Sam, and after a while the races became a regular part of their Sunday afternoons. Sometimes Frank Jackson or Henry Underwood would go with them.

By the standards of my native Kentucky, the Denton races were pitiful. The track was just a quarter-mile stretch of harrowed prairie with a row of primitive chutes at one end and a finish line at the other. The performers were usually just cowboys and cow ponies racing for a new hat or a new suit of clothes or a bottle of whiskey. A few townspeople who owned good horses but didn't know how to ride them would hire the young darkies who hung around the track to climb into the saddle in their stead. A few of the niggers were excellent riders and fulfilled all their worldly needs in that way, never turning a hand at honest labor.

Those races were taken very seriously by many, though, especially those who bet habitually and heavily. And since those chosen to judge them often were incompetent and all the spectators and many of the riders were drinking, there were many cries of foul and many accusations, threats and fights resulting from them. It was as unholy a way to observe the sabbath as the devil has devised, and I had as little to do with it as possible. Any attempt of mine to break up a fight out there likely would have led to another fight, so I left the sportsmen to settle their own disputes. I rarely even went to the track except when a stranger would ride into town leading a thoroughbred behind him. I knew that he was a professional, and that he was going to taunt the locals into laying outlandish bets on some hometown favorite, and I knew he was going to win the race. On those occasions I would go to the track and do what I could to see that the race was run fairly, that the professional got his money, and that he got out of town quickly and safely.

The track was a thorn in my side, and I'm sorry that my brother was so devoted to it. But nobody can be his brother's keeper in all things. Nor could anyone foresee what terrible consequences would result when Sam caught the contagion in earnest.

That happened the day he returned from a freighting trip to Sherman and walked into my office at the courthouse and stood trembling before me. “Dad!” he said. “The horse in my dream is tied outside!”

The beast that had galloped through Sam's sleep was a little sorrel mare, about two years old and fifteen hands high. She had only one marking, a white stocking leg, the left hind one. She was a fine animal, but I saw nothing about her that should inspire such ecstasy in a man. I've never seen an expression on another face to compare with what I saw on Sam's. Moses must have looked like that when he beheld the burning bush, and the Emmaus pilgrims when the risen Christ revealed himself to them. It's blasphemous, I suppose, to compare the effect of a mere horse on a man to revelations of God, but no other comparison will do. Sam trembled as he stood there staring at that animal, and his face shone with a light that I can only call holy. Finally he stepped to the mare as if in a trance and extended his hand, and the mare nuzzled his palm.

“How do you know it's the one in your dream?” I asked.

“I just know.”

“That mare belongs to Mose Taylor. I've seen her many times.”

“I never seen her but in my dream,” he said. “I know she's the one. I must have her.”

“I doubt Mose will sell.”

“He'll sell. God wants me to have her.”

That's the only time I ever heard Sam speak the Lord's name outside our evening Bible readings, except in curses. His admission that God lives and works in our lives surprised me, and I was moved by it. “Come on,” I said. “I'll help you find him.”

Mose Taylor was a farmer. He lived in the eastern part of the county, off the McKinney road, and didn't come to Denton often. But I knew him and, as I said, I had seen the mare before. Mose was standing at the bar in the Wheeler Saloon when I introduced him to Sam.

Sam said, “I want to buy your mare.”

Mose laughed. “So do a lot of people.”

“I don't want to haggle. How much will you take for her?”

Mose regarded Sam with some surprise. “Six hundred dollars,” he said. His eyes roved over Sam, over his shaggy black hair, his unshaven face, his patched pantaloons and scuffed boots. “Not a penny less.”

He might as well have demanded a million. I knew that, and I knew that Mose knew that. It was a ridiculous price for any horse in Denton County. But Sam didn't bat an eye. “Give me time to raise the money, and you've got a deal,” he said. “Will you shake on that?”

Mose didn't want to sell the mare. He glanced at me, but I just gave a slight shrug. Then Mose extended his hand. “The shake is good for a week,” he said. “After that there's no deal. Dad is our witness.”

Sam shook his hand and walked out without another word. I followed him. “You don't have anywhere near six hundred dollars,” I said.

“No.”

“How much
do
you have?” “About two hundred.”

“You're crazy. Where are you going to raise four hundred dollars in a week?”

Sam gave me a tight little smile. “Don't worry, Dad. I'll get it.”

He did, too. He got it from Army. The next Sunday, they rode out of town together in the morning and returned near sundown, Sam astride the mare and leading his buckskin. He was grinning bigger than I'd ever seen him. “Dad, meet Jenny,” he said. “The fastest horse in Texas.”

Army was grinning, too. He said, “There's many a dollar in Jenny.”

Then I knew what their intention was, and I was troubled.

Army owned two-thirds of Jenny, but she really belonged to Sam. I gave permission to stable her in my barn, and every day when he finished his work Sam went straight there and put a hackamore over her head and leapt upon her bareback and rode out to the racetrack. There he galloped her up and down the harrowed stretch until darkness brought him home. Sometimes he wouldn't arrive until after supper, and Mrs. Egan complained of that, but Sam always refused to let her warm it for him. She complained of his no longer milking the cow or gathering the eggs, too, but I reminded her that those were no part of the duties for which I was paying him. Nor was he obligated to carry the children piggyback or attend the Bible readings, which he no longer did. He tended the animals and drove my wagons with the same care and profit as before, and that was all I had a right to ask of him.