The Outcasts (3 page)

Nate stood studying his hands for a bit, considering, and then dismissing, the idea that this was all some elaborately staged rite of passage, like pulling the short hairs on the last boy out of his bedroll. He decided it was not. “Goddamn it,” he muttered.

Dr. Tom said, sympathizing, “A hell of a first day.”

“What’s his choice?” Nate finally asked, lifting his chin back toward the camp.

“The big bite. Or something else, something less pleasant.”

Nate thought about the shell Deerling had shown Maynard and about the impact of the blast that a 70-grain cartridge used in a .50-caliber shotgun would make. What the “something less pleasant” would be, he couldn’t imagine. “You said the prisoner wasn’t going to be shot.”

“He’s not.” Dr. Tom spat between his teeth and watched some buzzards circling high up.

Regardless, Nate strained his ears for some sounds of a struggle back at the camp, bracing himself for the concussion of a shotgun fired off. He wondered what the hell he would say to Drake when it came time to bring what was left of Maynard back into town. He had only just been sworn in a week ago and didn’t think his word on the matter would be taken for much.

“I guess you never heard of a big bite before?” Dr. Tom asked. “Buffalo hunters on the south plains started carrying ’em a few years back. The hunter empties out a cartridge and fills it with cyanide. If he gets close to being taken by Indians, he nestles it between his teeth and bites down. It’s pretty fast.” Dr. Tom batted at the gnats beginning to swarm around his face. “At least, it’s faster than watching your own tender bits cut off by Kiowa.”

“Is that what’ll happen to him if he refuses to take the cyanide?”

“Oh, I think not,” Dr. Tom said. He stood up stiffly, brushed off the seat of his pants, and straightened his hat, as though a train, long awaited, had just pulled into the station. “The big bite’s a hell of a lot faster than doin’ the hurdy-gurdy at the end of a rope. And anyway, if Maynard cooperates, George will make sure Maynard’s kin get the reward that would otherwise go to some latecomer. I think he’ll see reason.”

“What’s it goin’ to look like when we bring him back to town?”

“I imagine it’ll look like what it is.”

“Which is…?”

“Self-inflicted mortality.”

“What about the trial? You think no one’s gonna ask questions?”

Dr. Tom sighed as though Nate had posed a delicate philosophical question. “The honest truth is, no one is gonna give a damn, except maybe the judge if he makes the trip for nothing.” He stood for a while watching Nate shaking his head. “If it makes you feel any better, we could say that you come upon us after Maynard passed on.”

“You want to add more lies to a killing?”

“Don’t take this personal, son.”

“Hell, it’s
all
personal.”

“I see you feel that.” Dr. Tom squinted against the light and crossed his arms, regarding the toes of his boots. He shifted once, and then raised his eyes to Nate’s. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but there was nothing menacing in his face. “Maynard Collie is a done deal. He slaughtered a few pitiful whores, and most people wouldn’t even bother to dig a hole to bury him in. But McGill, see. McGill is still alive and full of malice. You think you know what McGill has done, shooting near a dozen men in the past few years, but you don’t know the half of it. We’ve been following him and his men for over twelve months. We lost him for a short while, but we got the scent again. And you can take it to the bank that this
is
personal to us. Now, you can ride away back to Franklin right now and tell Drake whatever the hell you want to, but me and George need to finish this up, get him back, and head for Houston.”

Dr. Tom adjusted his hat and began walking to the camp. “I think it’s been time enough.”

Nate followed him back, almost expecting to see the prisoner still pleading with Deerling, his hands filled with rocks and dirt. But when he got close he saw Maynard lying on the ground, the leg irons removed, his stocking feet splayed and unmoving. His eyes were open, and a frothy ribbon of spittle rolled down one cheek.

“Well…” Dr. Tom said, looking at the motionless form.

Deerling, tightening the cinch on his horse, looked over his shoulder at Nate. Then he turned to Dr. Tom and asked, “Is he comin’ to Houston?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Tom answered. He picked up a blanket to cover the body. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Nate, peering at Maynard, was surprised to feel nothing even close to outrage, more of a wilting pity than anything else.

“Just tell me one thing. He done this with his own hand?” Nate asked.

Deerling kneed his horse briskly in the belly and pulled the cinch tighter. “I talked. He listened. He saw the sense in not dragging out the inevitable.” He tugged a few times at the stirrup and then walked to stand at the remains of the fire.

Looking at Maynard’s diminished form now under the blanket, Nate wondered if the prisoner had put out the last of the coals like Dr. Tom had told him to do before swallowing the poison. He believed, almost knew as a certainty, that this was the closest thing to a recounting of the events that he was going to get for a good while, maybe ever.

After a bit, Dr. Tom called, “Nate. Come help me lift old Maynard here up onto the mule.”

Nate wiped the sweat off his face with one sleeve, stooped down, heaved Maynard up by himself, and carried him to the mule. He draped the body over the withers, facedown, and secured it with the long ends of the rope.

He mounted his own horse and began leading the mule southwards, back to town. He did not wait for the other two men to trail directly after. He did wonder, though, and often, in the days following, whether he should have pressed Deerling more about what Maynard’s other choice had been.

T
he coach arrived in Hearne at eleven that morning, having been on the road for over two days, changing horses and drivers every forty or fifty miles and discharging passengers in the late afternoons to whatever overnight lodging they could find and pay for.

Grateful for the few hours before the train was scheduled to depart for Houston, Lucinda walked up and down the main street, carrying her carpetbag close to her body, wandering in and out of the open shops, their shelves filled with goods carted in from San Francisco and Boston. She lingered over some dressmaking cloth and finally bought a jar of gooseberry jam, thinking to eat it all in one sitting. She felt well and strong; hopeful, now that the journey was almost done.

During the first night, there had been a moment when a sudden headache had spawned worries of a coming fit, but a few drops of laudanum judiciously taken in water had given her sleep, and the head pains were gone in the morning.

There seemed to be as much street traffic here as in Fort Worth, with an abundance of men who looked more like merchants than farmers or stock handlers and who had uncallused hands and fresh-creased pants. The men tipped their hats and smiled through their beards at her. She nodded in return, her mind reflexively reducing the distasteful but necessary acts of her profession to the more comfortable rules of mathematics, geometry in particular. Where two bodies in motion, with their collective points, curves, segments, and surfaces, intersecting in the horizontal and the vertical, from above and from below, could be reduced to the abstract. It was a trick she had cultivated as a child when committed to an asylum. Her mind quickly grasped the theorems and concepts and could then distance itself from the terrifying experiences of ice-water baths, forced feedings, and painful restraints by reducing the nurses, doctors, and other inmates to mere points in space.

She had come to stand in front of the plate-glass window of a grain store and paused to study her reflection: a woman in a plain cotton dress and a paisley shawl drawn modestly over her shoulders. A man soon came to stand next to her. She sensed him watching her reflection, waiting for her to smile, to turn her head and speak. Instead she stepped away and walked to a hotel set back from the train station.

She took a room, paying for hot water to be brought for a bath. Soon a large tin washtub was brought in by a gaunt, harried woman, along with just enough scalding water to fill it a quarter of the way. The woman then brought a bucket of well water, a chip of soap, and a cloth for drying. She admonished Lucinda not to overturn the bucket and left in a huff when Lucinda asked for more hot water.

Lucinda removed her clothes and sat waist-deep in the water, her legs drawn up almost to her chin. It was not in any true form a bathtub, and yet the heat on her skin was the most pleasure she had had in weeks. Wrapping her arms around her shinbones, she rested her head on her knees and breathed deeply as though sleeping.

She thought of the letter, and of the letter writer, telling her to come to the Lamplighter Hotel in Houston. She thought of his hands as he wrote the letter, the fingers slender and tapered with beautiful nails like a woman’s, and of the long lean bones of his thighs, the hollow of his throat, the jutting ridge of the collarbone.

He had first come to her during her time at Mrs. Landry’s, setting his coins in two neat stacks on the dresser. They had lain together twice with hardly a word spoken apart from the erupting sounds of release and polite good-byes. He was clean, restrained, mannerly.

But on his third visit, a violent fit had overtaken her as she began to undress, and, panting and jerking, she begged him to leave. The few men who had previously witnessed the onset of symptoms had scrabbled for the door as though she had called out,
Typhoid.
But he carried her to the bed and laid her down, stripped her until she was fully naked. He lay on top of her, still wearing his trousers and jacket, holding her thrashing head cupped tightly between his palms. He brought his face close to hers and tracked her eyes with his own.

He asked, “Are you dying?” His breath was over her grimacing mouth, and she believed that she was. His palms pressed more tightly into her temples to stop the spasms, and he asked her again if she was dying. She was in the full measure of her sickness, with no control of any part of her body other than the erratic pumping of air in and out of her lungs. His weight had become unbearable, even with the bucking movement of her body, but when she closed her eyes, he pried the lids open with his thumbs, saying, “Look at me.”

He smiled, his lips parted with a kind of wondrous expectation, as though he had come to peer into a small pit but instead found a fissure of unknowable depth. He spoke to her, saying, “Here, here,” not the calling of a parent to a wandering child but a demand for her to keep her eyes open and focused on his.

That she would die from her malady, Lucinda had no doubt. Uncontrollably pitched from a landing, or stairs, or even from her own bed, she would one day strike and crack her skull. Perhaps she would lie in the bottom of a bathtub, flailing and twitching, like some boneless sea creature, slowly drowning in terrified helplessness.

But as he pressed himself over her, the dark irises of his eyes inches from hers, she began to feel a retreat from fear, a blankness of soul. She never fully lost consciousness and was keenly aware of the skin of her belly incised with the sharp edges of his belt, the buttons of his coat imprinted on her ribs and breast.

The entirety of her life up to that moment had been a torment, a restlessness of mind, as though her brain were a frightened, overly large fish inside a brittle bowl. His near-ecstatic study of her eyes dancing on the edge of nothingness had in the instant changed that balance, rendering her mind becalmed and her body agitating for even a careless, wounding touch.

When she had quieted, he undressed and lay back on the bed, then ran his nose along her skin as though sniffing out the source of the illness. Then he touched her for a length of time and brought her to another kind of shuddering.

A sudden, hard knock at the door signaled the hotel woman’s return with the hot water, and Lucinda called her in. The woman closed the door behind her and walked farther into the room before she realized that Lucinda was naked in the bath. She drew herself up short, quickly turning her head away in embarrassment, her face pinched and disapproving. Lucinda asked her to bring the bucket closer, and, as the woman drew near, Lucinda, smiling sweetly, let her knees draw apart to the sides of the basin, showing through the shallow water the private hair between her legs. Dropping the bucket onto the floor, the woman fled the room.

Lucinda finished her bath and dressed in the clean, heavier woolen dress from her bag. She would buy more dresses in Houston and so left the soiled cotton dress behind in the room. Before leaving, she spoke with the hotel clerk, an aging man with inflamed red eyes, and asked him about the dangers of riding the ferry to Galveston. If the German happened to find his way this far south, there was no harm in pointing the trail away from her true destination.

Lucinda boarded the train’s passenger car behind a stout, respectable-looking woman with two small children. She sat facing the little family and smiled pleasantly at them. The ride would be six hours, and she settled back on the bench to look out of the window. The train lurched twice and then slowly began to gain momentum once it had passed the abandoned cotton gin on the outskirts of town.

A few miles south, they slowed for a bridge crossing, and a man in a long frock coat and feathering silver beard walked from the underpass and came to stand near the tracks. He held up a large board as the train’s passenger cars came abreast of him. Printed with hand-blocked letters, the board read
God Is Coming. But He Is Not Here Yet.

The woman clucked in agreement and, speaking with the heavy accent of some distant place, told Lucinda she was going to Houston to be married, her first husband having died the year before. She had been a lady’s maid once, but after the chaos and ruin of the war, she had been hired by an undertaker to do the hair and face-painting of the dead. Business had been very good for a few years, but of late the undertaker’s establishment had gone into a decline. She still had nightmares of the dead coming to life and grabbing her around the wrist as she worked on them, but she told Lucinda, “One does what one must to live.”

Lucinda agreed with her. The woman soon fell asleep with the rocking of the train, and Lucinda looked out the window again at the slanting light blazing the grasslands and prairies and thought,
Yes, one does what one must.