The Outcasts (13 page)

“Where is it?” He shook her again, brutally, causing her teeth to pierce her tongue.

As he opened his palm to slap her, a small red crater appeared below one eye, accompanied by a meager popping sound. He staggered once, dropping Lucinda onto the ground. He touched his face with one hand; his fingers came away bloody, and he moved his mouth as though chewing taffy. Then he pitched over backwards and lay utterly still.

Lucinda pulled her knees up to her chest, struggling for air. The whole attack had lasted less than a minute and yet food and broken cutlery were scattered everywhere; her dress was torn, her throat raw and burning. Both May and Jane were breathing raggedly, hollow-eyed in terror, but they weren’t looking at her—they were looking at something behind her, their mouths slack with disbelief. Thinking of another attack, this time by someone with a gun, Lucinda jerked her head around and saw only Elam in his chair, but he had his right arm outstretched. The lap quilt had been thrown to the ground, and in his extended hand was a small pistol.

Whatever emotions had been resurrected in him during the attack still played across his eyes and mouth but were starting to evaporate, like water off a glass. In the few seconds it took Lucinda to get to him, his face returned to an expressionless mask. She gently pulled the gun from his outstretched hand, and the arm fell heavily into his lap. She stooped down, retrieved the quilt from the ground, and settled it around his legs. She put the derringer back under the quilt.

She turned to the sisters, still clinging to each other in fear. Remarkably, she felt no signs of a coming fit, no trembling or heaviness in her limbs, only the exhilarating jab of rage. She had complete mental clarity and could envision the sequence of necessary actions, see them falling into place, like the solutions to familiar mathematical equations.

Lucinda knelt in front of them and took both sisters’ hands into her own. “I knew this man from Fort Worth.” Her words sounded thick, and she realized that her tongue was beginning to swell. “He was a day laborer assigned to repair the schoolhouse where I taught.” She was warming to her fabricated story, the particulars unwinding as easily as thread off a spool. “I didn’t know how dangerously unbalanced he was until he mistook my kindness for permission to make advances towards me. He followed me everywhere and became the main reason I had to leave.”

“He became obsessed with you,” May whispered, her color high.

She’s finding the story exciting,
Lucinda thought.
Like a passage from one of her novels.

Jane was shaking her head as though trying to cast the terrifying images of a deranged man from her mind. She said, “We have to tell Papa.”

Lucinda pulled Jane into a tight embrace. “Of course you want to tell your father. But then he will have to tell Euphrastus about Elam. Elam might be tried as a killer and sent away to an asylum, at best, or even prison.” She took Jane’s face between her palms. “Jane, can you imagine Elam in prison? He saved our lives. Would we repay his bravery with that kind of hell?”

Jane looked at her, stricken, and began to cry.

“Only we four know what happened.” Lucinda looked at the body of the German. “How many times have you heard your father say that the bayou resurrects death into life in endless cycles? All we need do is drag the body to the water…” She looked at the sisters, waiting for them to comprehend that once the body was in the water, the alligators and fish would feed on it until there was nothing left of the German but his boots. And in time, even those would disappear.

Jane’s eyes widened hysterically and she shook her head back and forth until Lucinda held her again and rocked her, assuring her that all would be well.

Within a half an hour, the three women had filled the dead man’s pockets with stones and rolled him into the water. Jane was shaking and pale, crying noisily, but May regarded the sinking remains with a kind of fascination, with no tears or lingering signs of fright. Lucinda knew that if they kept their secret for even a few days, the likelihood was great that they would keep it for a good while longer, their collective silence working like the heavy stones in the German’s pockets against the revelation of truth.

D
eerling was buried in the city cemetery north of Houston. For a long time Dr. Tom stared into the pit where the coffin had been laid, ignoring the dust spray kicked up by the damp wind. He was supported by the doctor and the undertaker, one on either side, so he could stand through the brief service. If the ranger’s pneumonia had improved at all in the short while that Nate and Deerling had been gone to Harrisburg, Nate couldn’t see it.

When the minister stepped away for the earth to be filled in, Dr. Tom turned and was helped into the wagon that had brought him to the cemetery. He lay in the back, eyes trained on the sky, wordless, for the mile’s journey into town. Nate rode with him in the wagon, his head buried in his forearms across both knees.

Nate had given his full account of what had happened in Frost Town and Harrisburg to Dr. Tom in his sickroom the evening he had limped back into Houston bringing Deerling’s body. To the county sheriff, a man named Taggert, he later gave only a partial story. At Tom’s insistence, Nate did not reveal Prudone’s telegram to McGill in Lynchburg or his involvement in Deerling’s death. He was not questioned further, and he had no idea what, if anything, the sheriff planned to do about finding Deerling’s killer.

When the funeral wagon stopped at the doctor’s office, Dr. Tom was carried to bed, and Nate pulled the doctor aside and asked him what his expectations were about the recovery.

The doctor took off his stiff collar to rub at his neck. “Well, he’s angry. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Nate sat by the bedside for two days before the ranger was able to speak to him again. Mostly he lay in a fever, unconscious. Other times, late at night, Nate thought the man’s lungs would appear through his mouth, so violent were the coughing spells.

Following Dr. Tom’s spitting up blood on the second night, the doctor ordered Nate to hold him down while he forced laudanum down the patient’s throat.

After swallowing the laudanum, Dr. Tom rested more quietly, but awake or asleep, he held on to the letter Nate had returned to him, clutching it until it was wilted with sweat.

On the fourth day after his return from Harrisburg, Nate finally received a letter of his own, from his wife. It seemed it was the third letter she had written, the first two, he guessed, delivered to Austin after they had already passed through. He read the letter several times, lingering over the news about his daughter.

His throat closed at the last, but he imagined the delight in his daughter’s face at the moment of the necklace’s discovery. He held fast to that image, countering the memory of Deerling’s lifeless stare after he’d stopped breathing.

“You’ve still got George’s blood all over you.”

Dr. Tom’s eyes were open and Nate wondered how long he’d been watching him. Nate looked down at his coat sleeves and at the brown stains that mottled them.

Dr. Tom turned his head to better see. “You wearin’ that coat as some kind of penance?”

Nate looked away, his eyes seeking a blank wall but finding Deerling’s Whitworth propped in the corner. Dr. Tom coughed once and a grimace passed over his face. Nate started to stand to help him, but the ranger waved him down. The spasm passed, and, after the chest rattling had calmed, Dr. Tom rasped, “You’re not to blame.”

Nate did stand up then and fled the room. He walked down the street and paced in front of the dry-goods store and the post office, wiping at his eyes with his sleeves when he thought no one was looking. He considered writing his wife. He would pour out his pain to her in the hopes of gaining some relief from the guilt over Deerling’s death.

But he started walking north instead and kept going until he had come to the cemetery where they had buried the ranger. He stopped for a brief while at the grave, the clods and raw earth already settling into the spaces that the shovels had made. They hadn’t readied the headstone yet, but he knew what it would say:
George A. Deerling, born
1813, died 1870, Comrade in Arms, Father, Friend
.

He found his way back to the road again and continued walking.

Wagons headed for Houston passed him, the travelers inside giving him cautious looks. He was a horseless man walking on narrow, round-heeled boots and wearing a coat stained like an old butcher’s apron. His stride was still uneven from the bruising his hip had taken from the fall, but the jagged sensations somehow helped to quiet his mind.

After a few more miles, he came to a farmhouse with a rail fence, and he sat on it, facing away from the road. The fields were flat prairie land, like his farm in Oklahoma.

He thought of his wife and daughter and a feeling like a blow to the chest closed up his throat. Deerling had been right: Nate wasn’t much of a farmer. Still, the land was biddable enough, and he was young enough to learn. He could, over time, make a better farm. His true desire, though, was to begin his own herd of horses, to breed the best working animals, combining Texas cow ponies with the Oklahoma-reservation stock. But it would take more money than he could make farming, and his decision to join the Texas police had been a way to earn the seed money to begin the herd.

His mind turned round and round on these topics, like the blind pony he had bought for Mattie who knew only one route: down the path, around the field, and back to the barn. The little horse never stumbled, but he never found new ground either.

The sun had angled steeply to the west before he climbed off the fence and walked the miles back to Houston. When he entered the sickroom, he pulled off his coat and wadded it into a corner. Dr. Tom looked at him through pooled, glassy eyes, but his color was better.

Dr. Tom nodded for him to sit in the chair. When Nate had settled, he said, “You should take George’s horse. No, now, listen. That horse is too big for me, and mine is already set to my ways. I wouldn’t entrust him to anyone else.” Dr. Tom faltered and looked at the ceiling, struggling to quiet a sudden wash of grief.

He cleared his throat, wiped his face with the bedsheet. “I’m going to be in this bed for a while yet, and you need to go on to Lynchburg alone. You can’t be walkin’ the distance, and that big bay would take you to Canada if you asked him to. I want you to listen good, ’cause I’m too winded to repeat myself. You’re going only to see if McGill and his men are encamped there.” He pointed a finger at Nate. “You don’t engage. Hide your badge, keep your head down, and get back here to me.” He paused, his breathing labored. “There’s one last thing. A woman’s been traveling with McGill, and I want to know if she’s there in Lynchburg.”

“A woman?”

Dr. Tom palmed the sweat off his face. “She’s George’s daughter.”

Nate sat back in the chair and stared at Dr. Tom. “I thought his daughter was dead.”

Dr. Tom shook his head. “She turned bad and ran away. George tried bringing her home, but she always left again. A while back, she took up with McGill. George’s mission in life was to redeem her or see her in prison.”

“He would have sent her to prison?”

“She’s a grown woman involved with a man that’s killed eleven people along with two children. You saw that widow in Frost Town. What makes you think that a woman with any decency left would cleave to an evil man like McGill?” Dr. Tom paused, his hand clutching his chest as if to will himself into a calmer state.

Nate recalled that Deerling’s exact words were “I had a daughter”; he didn’t say that she had died, and Nate saw in ways that he wished he didn’t how the world could swallow a child just by spinning from one day to the next. Deerling’s single-minded mission to find McGill suddenly made sense.

Nate asked, “What about Taggert? I still don’t know why you didn’t want me to tell him about McGill in Lynchburg.”

“Nate, we’ve come too far to let a county man have McGill. That’s why I asked you to keep quiet about the telegram.”

“And Prudone?”

“First things first. We put an end to McGill, and then I’ll settle with Prudone in my own way. That son of a bitch will be going to hell already torched.”

Nate sat quiet for a moment. “I don’t know about this, Tom. It all feels too…”

“Personal?” Dr. Tom asked. He struggled to sit up in the bed. “Isn’t that what you told me that first day out of Franklin? You said, ‘Hell, it’s
all
personal.’ Getting to McGill was not personal just to George; it’s personal to me too. More than you could possibly know. And with you or without you, I’m settling on McGill and then Prudone.” He let Nate think on that a bit and then asked, “Why did you go after those horse thieves in Arkansas, Nate? They only took a few horses. They shot a kid, but you were just a kid yourself. Why didn’t you just let it go?” He closed his eyes for a moment, his chest moving erratically. “You didn’t let it go, because it would have eaten at you the rest of your natural life. This I know about you. You have a fire in you to make things right. Don’t you think going after George’s murderer is as right as reclaiming a few horses?”

Nate sat with Dr. Tom until he had drifted off to sleep and then spent the rest of the night sprawled in the chair.

The next morning early, he walked to the livery and took some time letting Deerling’s horse settle to his touch and smell; although his own saddle had been retrieved from the Harrisburg-to-Houston road, he steadied the bay with Deerling’s familiar tack.

He mounted and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks, and the bay crouched and bolted, ears flattened, nose forward, and Nate reined him to a stop, saying, “Let’s try that again.”

He tapped him once more, and the bay started an easy trot, the muscles in the shoulders and rump bunching and releasing under the rippling hide, like a steam engine under velvet.

Following the roads and cow paths by Buffalo Bayou and skirting the swampier tracts, he reached the old San Jacinto battlefield in a few hours. The ferryman who took him across the confluence of the San Jacinto and Buffalo Rivers was a survivor of Shiloh. He had two wooden legs, and he told Nate cheerfully that he’d quickly drown in the river if he ever fell in, so heavy were his replacement appendages. “But,” he said, “it would take another cannonball to sweep me off the deck.”

Nate rode into Lynchburg at midday and, after tying his horse to a post, walked slowly up and down the main street, looking into storefronts. His story, if asked, was that he was just another cowboy from West Texas looking for work on one of the big cattle farms south of Houston.

He’d been given a description of two of McGill’s men, Purdy and Crenshaw—stunted and weasel-mouthed in the first case; Gallic-nosed and Cajun in the second—as well as of McGill himself. He was a man of average height, slender, dark-haired, with no identifying scars or marks on the face or hands—a description that could have applied to half the men in Texas. Both Deerling and Dr. Tom had seen McGill’s image on Wanted posters but had never looked him in the face.

Of the daughter, Dr. Tom told Nate that she was twenty-three years old, fair-skinned and dark-haired, with a small mole under her right eye.

The only other bit of information Nate possessed was that Crenshaw had a rare grulla mare, a horse he had most likely stolen from one of his victims. As Nate walked the main street, he saw no gray horses and very few people. He ordered a beer, which was warm and flat, at the one saloon in town. The barkeep, a top-heavy man with a dirty towel draped over one shoulder, offered the news of the day, all of it unremarkable.

Nate thanked him, and after walking around some more and drifting through the small hotel, he mounted his horse and rode back to the ferry. To his thinking, the whole town seemed too open, too transparent, for McGill and his men to hide in.

Nate was surprised to see another man waiting at the ferry ahead of him. Once afloat, they dismounted from their horses, both looking at the murky water rushing by.

The man finally said, “Makes me a little dizzy watching these currents.” He turned to Nate and smiled amiably. “You don’t want to get too close to the edge. The currents here at this spot are so powerful that even a strong swimmer would fail to gain either shore.”

“That so,” Nate responded, taking a step back from the shoddy railing.

The man stuck out his hand. “The name is Estes.”

Nate clasped the man’s hand. “Nate. Nate Cannon.”

“You here looking for work?”

Nate nodded. “You?”

“Always.” Estes smiled again, and he and Nate chatted comfortably for a while about their recent journeys.

When the ferry docked on the western side, Estes waved and said, “Good luck. Keep a close eye on those deep waters.”

He rode away to the south and Nate felt an immediate downward turn of emotions that he recognized as simple loneliness, the want of cheerful company.

When Nate returned to Houston, he found Dr. Tom sleeping. He sat quietly by the bed until the ranger opened his eyes and then he recounted the events of his trip to Lynchburg. Nate could see the disappointment in Dr. Tom’s face as he rubbed his hand over his mouth in frustration.

Nate began telling him about the return trip on the ferry, but he stopped when he saw his partner’s face.

Dr. Tom hiked himself up to a sitting position. “What did you say?”

Nate repeated his last bit of information. “The traveler’s name was Estes.”

“What did he look like?”

 “Bearded, spectacles, my height. Said he was a surveyor.”

Dr. Tom reached out and grabbed Nate painfully around the wrist. “Do you know what McGill’s full name is? It’s William Estes McGill. The only reason you’re still sitting here and not floating in the Gulf somewhere is that you didn’t make him. But I’ll bet he made you. Christ Almighty, Nate.”

The face of the surveyor on the river had seemed to Nate placid, the eyes behind the spectacles keen but friendly, and he had felt an immediate liking for the man and a desire, once he arrived at the other side of the river, for continued conversation. The sense of isolation and apartness he had experienced during the past few months seemed to sharpen after his fellow passenger had ridden away.