The Outcasts (5 page)

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 women, 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.

T
he 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 ear, 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?”

She frowned and flopped away from him again, lying on her side. He pressed himself against her back, palming one breast. “Lucy,” he said, the nickname that was his alone to use. “You know I’ll never leave you. I’ll never abandon you, but you shouldn’t question me. Do your job. Write to me of your progress, and, when the time is right, I’ll come for you.” He expelled air into her ear mirthfully. “Then, when I introduce you to my mother, I can truthfully say that my wife has been a teacher, not a whore.”

“I thought you liked the whore.”

She could feel his lips curling against her shoulder. “Oh, make no mistake. I like the whore just fine. One might even say I like the whore better than anything.” He rose up on one elbow, looking down at her. “The whore neither spins nor sews, but neither is she idle. She is not deceitful in her chosen enterprise; she is not puffed up. She is what she seems to be. Purely the embodiment of both commerce and discourse, pressed and distilled to a place no bigger than a sparrow’s nest.” He stroked her hair and slipped his fingers between her thighs. “Why, the only difference between you and our family deacon is the fob watch…”

Now, a movement next to her as she stood on the barge pulled her thoughts back to the river, and she saw a man standing close by in a startling orange-and-brown-plaid suit, the tight-fitting coat long to his knees. He removed his hat, nodding to her awkwardly, his hair nearly as orange as his jacket. She suppressed a smile, imagining his tailor convincing the man that the mirroring colors of the cloth were complimentary to his person as well as fashionable.

He pointed to the riverbank and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

She followed his gaze and saw a large persimmon tree, the ripened fruit like scarlet globes of Italian wedding glass, perfect and seemingly untouched by birds.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful.” She looked at his white, spotted profile and pale hands and realized he was closer to a boy than a man. “I’ve only ever tasted one, and it was near heaven.”

He looked at her for a moment and then began to unbutton and remove his coat. “Shall I swim over and get you one?”

She laughed, shaking her head no, but to her amazement, he smiled more broadly and began to remove his stiff collar and shirt as well. He drew laughs and shouts from the men above, which brought the women out of the cabin, looking to see what the excitement was about. Lucinda held her hands over her mouth in disbelief that he could be so foolish—perhaps he truly was a lunatic.

He began pulling off his boots with some difficulty, and she then realized that he had been drinking, most likely fed whiskey by one of the other men. The women squealed in protest, and, while the men shouted encouragement, Lucinda fell helpless with laughter watching the boy stripping down to his undergarments and preparing to crawl over the railing.

The captain shouted a warning at them from the steering house and climbed down the ladder holding a rifle. He grabbed a handful of the boy’s undershirt and quickly hauled him back off the rail and onto the deck. The captain whistled shrilly, and his dog, a black spaniel, leaped into the water and began swimming towards the shore.

The captain turned to the boy and said, “Watch and learn.”

The dog had not swum ten yards before the water under the reeds started to boil, and the logs that had rested against the bank, bobbing gently with the current, began to move purposefully toward the center of the river. The captain whistled again and the dog turned and began paddling back to the barge.

The once-featureless logs resolved themselves into leviathans with churning legs and tails, three of them swimming rapidly to where the dog, his narrow-snouted head showing above the glassy surface of the river, was treading water in a way that seemed to Lucinda too languid for safety.

The passengers, men and women, came to stand at the railing to watch the dog’s progress, the near-naked boy forgotten. The alligators had closed the gap between themselves and the dog by a good twenty feet when the captain took aim with his rifle and fired. The bullet struck the first gator in the broad space between the eyes. The impact of the bullet on the skull made a sound like a mallet against a watermelon, and the creature sank without a struggle.

The ship’s fireman, his face and arms blackened from stoking the engine’s furnace, joined the group, and he swung open the boarding gate and hunkered down, readying himself to pull up the dog once he breasted the hull.

The remaining two gators had closed the distance farther and Lucinda quickly calculated the amount of time left before the precise meeting of the surging bodies. The dog had, at most, only a few minutes. All eyes were on the captain, who stood poised with the stock of the rifle against his shoulder.

The dog was within a few feet of the boat, the gators perhaps the same distance behind, when the captain finally discharged the rifle, striking the closest creature midback. The wound, at first as white and dense as a man’s thigh, soon bubbled blood like a fountain, and the gator’s companion, without hesitation, turned and began to tear at the exposed flesh.

The dog swam abreast of the deck, and the fireman reached down, grabbed the long, wet fur with both hands, plucked the animal out of the water, and put him on the deck. The dog shook himself mightily and went to lie down, unperturbed by the events, in the shadow of the passenger cabin.

The men, and a few women, continued to watch as the remaining alligator ferried the carcass across to the far side of the river.

The boy had collapsed onto the deck, and the captain leaned over him and said, “Here ends the lesson.” The captain climbed back up to the steering cabin, and the boy gathered up his clothes and was helped inside by two of the older women.

Lucinda watched the dead gator float for a moment in the shallows and then saw it pulled under, with barely a resulting ripple, the persimmon tree on higher ground yet glorious and unmolested.

By midafternoon, the last of the passengers had stepped off onto the landing at Lynchburg, and she was alone, apart from the captain and fireman, for the last leg of the journey to Morgan’s Point at the true beginning of Galveston Bay. From there, she would be met by a cart sent to fetch her overland to Middle Bayou.

After the boat docked at the old Confederate pier, the captain handed her off the barge, along with her bag, and she stood in the shade of some abandoned barracks for a while, watching the road for an approaching rig. There was not another being in sight across the grasslands to the west and the marshlands extending far to the south.

Bored with waiting, she walked onto the pier and looked out across the greater bay. A cooling breeze whipped at her skirts, and she watched the sky haze over with mackerel clouds tinged pink with a late sun. A coral snake, disturbed by her footsteps on the wooden planks, swam into the deeper channel, and she wondered what form of gnawing, rending, stinging death would claim her if she were to jump into the water.

The clapper in the old kitchen bell stirred with the breeze, a resonant sound that put Lucinda in mind of a ship’s bell. She allowed herself to imagine a water voyage across the Gulf to Galveston, and then on to New Orleans, away from the grinding dirt and dust of beggared towns. Soon, he had promised her, they could go wherever they liked.

She heard the sound of a horse approaching and turned to watch a buckboard carriage with two occupants, both female, pull up the long, flat road to the barracks. She had expected her employer, a planter named Euphrastus Waller, to meet her. But when the carriage drew to a stop next to her, the driver was an unremarkable young woman with light hair and eyes, no older than seventeen. The younger girl sitting behind her, with arms draped around the driver’s neck, smiled, and Lucinda caught her breath. Through Kansas City and Abilene, she had seen women of wealth and status stand heel to heel with high-dollar whores, but she had never seen a more beautiful girl. If a virgin—and undoubtedly she was—this girl could earn more than a thousand dollars in a night over one bloodstained sheet.

“Are you Miss Carter?” the older girl asked.

Lucinda nodded. “I was expecting Mr. Waller to come for me.”

“This is his carriage. I’m Jane Grant. And this python about my neck is my sister, May.”

The girl unclasped her arms and sat back against the rear bench. “Mr. Waller is certainly not with us.” She laughed and patted the place beside her, saying, “Come sit here.”

“No, May. Miss Carter is sitting next to me.” Jane motioned for Lucinda to put her bag in the cart and climb onto the front bench.

No sooner had Lucinda settled herself when she felt May’s arms wrap tightly around her own neck. Jane waved her sister away and gave the reins a shake. “It’s nothing, Miss Carter. Her mind is often elsewhere.”

They rode in silence, shielding their eyes against the sun flattening itself on the western grasslands. The shadow of the cart followed behind them like a run of tar flowing into the general darkness of twilight. They stopped only once, when a feral pig, massive and tusked like an elephant, rushed onto the road. Its glistening snout, open-holed and almost obscene in its suppleness, tested the wind, but it was too weak-eyed to make a charge, and soon it waded into the tall brush on the other side.

For miles, Lucinda looked about for cabin light or campfires, but there was nothing man-made beyond the pale road she saw stretching ahead between the horse’s ears.