The Outcasts (6 page)

D
eerling sat with a map spread out in front of him, positioned so that Nate and Dr. Tom could see the planned route. They ate supper while they studied it, finishing the last of the food packed by the boardinghouse woman in St. Gall. They had set up camp in the abandoned stone buildings of Fort Lancaster, and they were spent, having made fifty miles in three hard days, riding through country of steep mesas and hardscrabble depressions, crossing the mostly dry riverbed of the Pecos without incident. Barring accident or injury, they would be in Austin in a few weeks. From there to Houston was another one hundred and sixty miles.

Deerling pointed over the map. “We’ll pass through Forts McKavett and Mason, right through the heart of Edwards Plateau.”

“With full Comanche presence up this corridor until we get due east of Mason,” Dr. Tom said, sweeping his finger south to north. He turned to Nate. “You ready for this?”

Nate grinned; Dr. Tom had seen such a look of eagerness in boys looking to put a hammer to a percussion cap. “I imagine so.”

They sat for a while in the quiet, enjoying the last of the cornbread, which they dipped into their coffee. It seemed to Nate that Deerling was more at his ease, or perhaps only less guarded, after the Sunday in St. Gall. They had spent the entire morning at the immigrant church, housed in a large tent set with an odd assortment of chairs provided by the parishioners. An older settler standing at the front suggested to Deerling in broken English that he leave his guns outside. Deerling ignored the old man and found a place in the front row, where he sat with his arms crossed, as if preparing for an argument.

Soon after the preacher began his sermon, a group of large, kite-eared boys began to laugh and talk loudly.

Dr. Tom leaned towards Nate and whispered, “Hellfire’s comin’.”

Deerling stood up, passed in front of the preacher, who faltered in his sermon, and calmly walked to the row of chairs where the youths sat. He pulled one of the Colts from his belt and tapped the boy nearest to him none too gently over the head with the butt end. In the shocked silence of the tent, Deerling walked back to the pulpit, coming to stand behind the sermon giver. The ranger directed the shaken preacher, “Go on ahead with your lesson. Just think of me as the angel Gabriel.”

From that Sunday forward, Deerling had appeared as close to cheerful as Nate had yet seen him.

The food was soon swept away, and the weapons were brought out for inspection.

Deerling gestured to the Dance revolver and Henry rifle that Nate was cleaning and said, “You’re going to need to get more firepower than that.”

“I will when I can pay for it.” After a pause he asked, “You think we’ll see any play?”

Dr. Tom shrugged. “We don’t want to linger here any more than we need to. What’s the farthest distance you’ve ever gotten out of that Henry?”

“A few hundred feet, maybe more.”

“Or maybe less.” Dr. Tom laughed.

Deerling looked at Nate for a moment as though deciding something; then he got up, walked to his bedroll, and reached for a long leather case. Nate had seen the case strapped to the mule and guessed it was a rifle but had not yet seen what kind.

Out of the case, Deerling pulled a Whitworth and handed it to Nate.

Dr. Tom said, “Well, this is a kiss-and-make-up. He don’t even let me hold that rifle.”

Nate had never seen a Whitworth rifle, much less held one. A few Confederate sharpshooters had used them to great effect, but they were rare, and a one-shot deal in a hard engagement. Of all the weapons spread out before him—including two navy Colts, a Smith and Wesson top-break pistol, two Walker Dragoons, and two Winchester rifles—the Whitworth was worth the most, more than all of them put together.

“It’s light,” Nate said, surprised.

Deerling nodded. “I’ve got only six bullets left for it.”

Nate sighted down the barrel, swept it in a slow arc from window to door. He then passed it back to Deerling. “Where’d you come by it?”

“I negotiated heavily for it.”

Dr. Tom slapped the table. “He liberated it from some old reprobate perched on a gully firing at the Henderson town sheriff a quarter mile away. That rifle shoots twice that distance without breakin’ wind.”

Deerling carefully returned the rifle to its case, and Nate thought he looked pleased by the memory. Deerling added, “Maybe I’ll let you fire it sometime. We get to Austin, we’ll draw pay and see about you getting another rifle.”

Nate nodded his genuine thanks and he sat comfortably for another hour in the shadows cast by the oil lamps listening to commentary, mostly by Dr. Tom, about the distances yet to be traveled, the streams and rivers and wide-gaping arroyos to be crossed. About how the land would change, from sand and rock to hills of black soil and prairie, the bands of colors changing with the ground from the damnation red and purple of the desert to endless shades of yellow and green of grasslands.

Having little hardware or tack to clean, Nate crawled into his bedroll and left the two rangers to finish their business. When he woke, it was to the milky, diffused light of dawn. Through sleep-gummed eyes, he became aware of a figure standing next to his bedroll.

Deerling said, “We’ve got to leave now. Tom’s out readying the horses.”

Nate drew his head back like a tortoise, rubbing his face and squinting to better see. Deerling hunkered down next to him and held out, between the fingers of one hand, a large-bore rifle shell. He had Nate’s full attention as he balanced the shell upright on the ground next to Nate’s head, the faint smell of almonds wafting over the tang of the lead casing.

He told Nate, “Let’s hope you never have to use it.”

The tone of Deerling’s voice was as flat as a capstone to a building, but the image of Maynard’s stiffening body filled Nate’s mind. Within minutes, he was dressed, and after grabbing up his bedroll, he followed Deerling out the door, the big bite dropped into his pack.

They filled their canteens at the runoff of Live Oak Creek and rode east, towards the ascent of Government Road, which wound its way up a steep hill to the plains beyond. Deerling led the mule, but after a few hundred feet, the creature balked at the incline, and Dr. Tom had to take a prod to his bunching hindquarters to edge him up to the summit.

At the halfway mark, Dr. Tom directed Nate to stop and rest his horse on a flattened stony shelf that jutted out a few feet from the mesa wall. He pointed to the striations of rock, reddish bands on ashen gray, revealing to Nate that the whole of the valley had at one time been a vast inland sea with creatures of shell, more than any man could count, that swam through it. He gestured to a swath of black cutting through the rock face and said, “The graveyard of this whole world pressed to the size of a lady’s ribbon. If you know the history of rocks, you know the history of the world.” He spurred his horse back to the ascending road; loose pebbles were kicked out behind him like stinging missiles.

Nate held back a bit before giving rein, wondering what Deerling thought of Dr. Tom’s theorizing on ancient seas, theories that might fall outside of the biblical word. “Are you really a doctor?” he called up the path.

“Oh, that’s been George’s doing, in the main. I went to medical school in Baltimore for a term. It wasn’t for me, though. I left and came down here, and he got to calling me Dr. Tom. A year spent with medical men, and their potions and devices, and I’ve done my best since to stay away from the whole lot of ’em. I get shot, I’d just as soon visit the local baker than the surgeon.” He looked briefly over his shoulder at Nate. “I did, however, keep my medical kit. Never know when someone will need a good wrist saw.”

Once they reached the apex of the road, they sat for a few minutes looking down at the valley spread out before them. Dr. Tom took field glasses from his saddlebag and scanned the entire broad expanse in a sweeping motion of his head. He offered them to Nate, who took them and looked down at the stone buildings of the fort.

Dr. Tom said, “It didn’t look so small coming from the western approach, did it?”

Nate agreed, took one last pass with the glasses across the southern basin, and saw a puff of dust wafting upwards. Traveling animal, he thought, coyote or wolf. The early sun had not yet thrown light fully onto the valley floor, and he couldn’t see a defined silhouette at such a distance. He waited a moment more, aware of Dr. Tom’s hand outstretched to take back the glasses.

Deerling’s horse shifted. “Come on, Nate.”

Several more dust funnels appeared, like small tornadoes forming in reverse, and he thought he saw dark shapes moving through a distant stand of oak. He brought both hands up to the glasses to steady the view.

“What is it?” Dr. Tom asked.

“I don’t know.” Nate pointed to the southwest where he had seen movement and gave the glasses to Dr. Tom.

Deerling pulled his horse back to the lip of the ridge. “Tom?”

“Hold on. Not sure yet.”

Nate could see the tiny spray of dust expanding, and a moving band of animals cleared the trees, following a dry creek bed.

“Wild horses?” Nate asked.

After a moment, Dr. Tom said, “Comanche raiders.” He lowered the glasses and handed them to Deerling, who looked for a brief while, and then dismounted.

Nate recalled that only a few years back, Deerling and Goddard had been a part of the skirmish at Dove Creek. Two ranger companies, along with a few hundred Confederate troops, were outgunned and outmaneuvered by seven hundred Kickapoo Indians. That the Kickapoo had been mistaken for fighting Comanche or Kiowa and had been seeking only to escape the ravages of a civil war did not lessen the surviving rangers’ desire to kill any Indian, regardless of his origin. The remnants of the tribe were chased into Mexico; often they were shot in the back, or, as some of the rangers referred to it, the “northward side.” Dr. Tom had told Nate he never cared for that tactic or the expression—“unbefitting,” he called it, a shameful comedown for those in service.

Deerling said to Nate, “Follow me down to the ledge, and bring my Winchester along with your Henry. Tom, keep watch here.” Deerling yanked the Whitworth from its case on the mule and they began quickly sidestepping down the hill off the main road.

Once he’d gained the ledge, Nate flattened himself next to Deerling, who used the glasses to watch the approaching horses. They were still more than a half a mile distant, traveling north, but Nate could make out four men on horseback driving the herd of about twenty horses at a fast walk. The outcropping where the two men lay was in shadow, but the valley was now torched with clear light.

Deerling said, “They’ll switch course to the runoff.” He passed the glasses to Nate, who watched the herd soon being driven to the creek.

As the horses waded into the water, their heads bent to drink, Deerling asked, “What do you make it?”

“Between a hundred, hundred fifty yards from the base road.”

“And we’re two hundred yards up?”

“Maybe less.”

Deerling removed his hat and carefully raised himself to a one-kneed position, then sighted down the side scope of the Whitworth. He adjusted it and gave Nate the rifle to shoulder. “In a minute, one of those bucks is likely to cross the stream to our side. Take a look.”

One of the riders broke off from the group and splashed through the stream, scanning the rise. Through the scope, Nate could clearly see the pearl-white buttons on the man’s shirt. After a moment, the rider turned his horse around and sat loose in the saddle, his back to the cliff.

“I don’t have a fork for the barrel,” Deerling said. “So you’ll have to hold firm for the kick.”

Nate pulled his eye away from the scope and peered sharply at Deerling.

“You only get one shot, so make it count.”

“They don’t see us, there’s no cause to shoot.”

Deerling sat back on his haunches and stabbed a finger toward the herd. “All of those horses are branded. When you joined the force, it should have been explained to you that a horse thief is a man just waiting to be dead. Now take the shot.”

“Christ Almighty. They’re not a danger to us—”

Deerling put his face close to Nate’s. “I’m not telling you again. When that gun goes off, and he goes down, the rest will scatter with the horses. You miss, and they’re likely to regroup and kill us on our descent. Fire the weapon.”

Nate sighted down the scope and watched as the rider kicked his horse forward and the three men on the far side of the stream began waving the herd into motion again. His finger slipped inside the trigger guard and curled around the trigger, but an instinct as strong as breathing made him pause.

The rider had crossed the stream, and Nate lowered the gun. “I’m not shooting a man in the back, horse thief or no.”

Deerling pulled the Whitworth from Nate’s hands. “You just failed your first test.” He stood up, and with the rifle shouldered and carefully aimed, he whistled through his teeth, as if he were calling in a field hand. The rider yanked the reins, wheeling the horse about, and Deerling fired. Following the shattering boom of the Whitworth, the man was thrown backwards into the water, a red mist scattering where his head had been moments before. Several rifle shots from Dr. Tom were discharged from the summit above them, the bullets tearing clods out of the streambed.

The three remaining riders flagged the horses into a panicked run, and they raced north again up the valley, leaving the body in the shallow current. Deerling turned and began climbing towards the top of the road.

Nate sat on the ledge watching the distant body floating in the stream. The riderless horse had stampeded away with the herd, and a turkey vulture circled in ever-tightening spirals in the warming updrafts. By the time he had gathered up the two rifles and started back up the mesa, the sun had come to shine on its western face and he didn’t know if the two rangers had waited for him or if he would breast the hill and find himself alone.

T
he Waller family sat facing Lucinda as though they had been elaborately posed for a theatrical performance or daguerreotype. Euphrastus Waller was a large, somber man dressed in a dark woolen suit with a black silken tie drooping beneath his chin. His ample haunches looked to be uncomfortably planted in an ornate, tufted chair, and Lucinda suspected, from the way his coat stretched across his chest, that he was wearing a corset.

His wife, Sephronia, sat to his left on a low bench. Her hair was in a tight knot at the nape of the neck, her scalp an unblemished white through the exactly centered part. Her dress was also of silk, although the hem was frayed, and she had voluminous petticoats under the skirts, the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of Atlanta. The daughter, Lavada, sat in an even lower chair to his right.

Good God,
Lucinda thought.
The girl’s wearing gloves.

Next to Lavada, close to a window, was the Wallers’ son, Elam. He sat motionless in a wheeled, cane-backed chair, his face towards the light, his half-open eyes focused on nothing. Lucinda must have looked overly long in his direction, as Lavada offered, “Brother has had a hard life.”

“My son…” Euphrastus began. His voice trailed away and he cleared his throat.

“Our son was wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg,” Sephronia said pointedly. “He has been in a decline.”

“It was a siege,” Euphrastus corrected. He glanced briefly at his wife, and she blushed under his scrutiny and looked down at her hands.

“Ah,” Lucinda said, focusing on the wall above their heads. It was a small parlor, but it had high ceilings, and the maroon-and-green-striped wallpaper gave the room extra height so that she felt a momentary sense of dizziness, as though the floor were falling away from her chair. To counter the effect, she moved her gaze to the mantel behind Euphrastus and saw perched there a stuffed and mounted owl with amber glass eyes.

Euphrastus said, “I suppose that, as it was dark when you arrived last night, you will be eager to see the school.”

Sephronia nodded, as if it were a startling, momentous observation. Lucinda was uncertain whether or not this was her cue to leave, so she nodded as well, and waited.

He continued, “And to the subjects being taught?”

“As I wrote in my letter,” Lucinda said, “reading and penmanship, mathematics, geography—”

“From what map?” Euphrastus muttered.

“And, of course, the natural sciences.”

Sephronia’s head came up. “Miss Carter, are not all sciences natural?” She smiled at her own cleverness, and Lavada stifled a laugh behind one gloved hand.

“And elocution, Miss Carter?” Lavada asked.

She handed Lucinda a slender volume engraved with the title
The American Speaker.
Lucinda opened the cover to the table of contents and read the first two entries: “Religion Never to Be Treated with Levity” and “The Folly of Misspending Time.”

Euphrastus stood abruptly. “I think we should show Miss Carter where she will be teaching.”

He led Lucinda down the front-porch steps and onto the path away from the house, and she could see what had been hidden in the dark: a whitewashed two-story house, hastily built, with the wash already peeling.

Behind them, the two women pushed the wheeled chair down a ramp, Elam seemingly insensitive to the world around him.

Euphrastus gestured to the north and the south of the path as they walked, naming the homesteads and farms. Behind them, to the west, ran Middle Bayou, with live oak and magnolia growing in abundance, and crape myrtles newly planted for color.

He told her that he was growing cotton and planned to plant cane for a sugar mill.

She allowed him to take her elbow as she stepped over a deep rut in the path, observing that he was mindless of the women struggling with the wheeled chair. She let his eyes linger over her naked fingers.

Turning her face slightly to him, she curled her lips upwards and asked, “Is that what you did before coming to Middle Bayou?”

“Yes. I had twelve hundred acres of cotton and tobacco in Mississippi. Before the war.”

He stared off down the road, his eyes fixed and tormented-looking, his momentary silence testament to all he had lost. He released his grip on her elbow and pointed out the Grant farm in the distance. The main house was a small, misshapen affair but situated in a field of flat-leaved grasses that reflected sunlight off their wavering tips like an ocean of copper mirrors.

Approaching Red Bluff Road, Lucinda saw the schoolhouse and was surprised. She had been prepared for a refitted barn or disused carpentry shed, but at the juncture of the Middle Bayou Road and Red Bluff was a new pine building, the boards still oozing sap. The women positioned Elam in the shade of a tree and followed Lucinda inside.

There were only a few windows, and they all stood quiet for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the darkened room.

“The desk was brought from my own office,” Euphrastus said. Lucinda ran the pads of her fingers appreciatively over the carved surfaces, allowing one forefinger to slip lingeringly into a bit of scrollwork.

Euphrastus, watching the movements of her hands, became short-winded and made a show of studying the view from one of the windows before sweeping his wife and daughter to the door. “We will accompany you tomorrow morning, Miss Carter, to introduce you to your pupils.”

She watched them walking homeward for a while, standing at the same window Euphrastus had been looking through. This time, Euphrastus pushed the wheeled chair. Lucinda stretched her arms and pulled off her bonnet. She examined the readers and workbooks stacked precisely on the desk and counted thirteen sets of each.

There were three rows of sturdy benches with long, unbroken planks in front of them, raised and tilted, for writing. She sat in the wooden chair behind Euphrastus’s desk and let her mind wander.
Only a few weeks of this,
she reminded herself,
so it hardly matters what I stuff their heads with;
she would teach the farmers’ offspring what she liked, and put laudanum in the water bucket for the troublemakers.

She shifted her gaze and saw May in the open doorway. The girl wandered in and came to stand in front of the desk. She was wearing a dress of cornflower blue, the same startling color as her eyes. The dress was ten years out of fashion but capably reworked to fit her small frame.

May picked up a reader and pretended to study it. “Do you want to know a secret?”

Lucinda smiled. “Only one?”

May slipped onto one of the benches and rested her elbows on the writing board. “My name is not really May.”

“Oh?”

“It’s Jane.”

Lucinda cocked her head. “Isn’t that your sister’s name?”

“It
is
Jane. We’re both Janes.” May stage-whispered the last and, laughing, sprang from the bench, coming to alight on the desk in front of Lucinda. “My mother, who was the second Mrs. Grant, had her way and named me Jane also. It was the only name she said she’d ever wanted for her girl. Father couldn’t abide having two Janes under the same roof, though, and took to calling me May, the month I was born.”

“And what does your mother call you?”

“My mother calls me nothing. She is not with the living.” May slipped off the desk and Lucinda watched her progress about the room, examining and overturning every item, looking into each corner. Lucinda reminded herself to be cautious with this one.

“The last time I saw my mother,” May went on, “I was four years old. She sat next to Father in a buggy headed to Little Rock. Father had told us that she was very ill and he was taking her for the doctor. She was wearing a bonnet, one with colored ribbons. He returned later that night, alone, my mother’s bonnet hanging by its ribbons from the struts. There’s a big river on the way to Little Rock, you see.”

Lucinda did not see, but May suddenly said, “I hear Jane calling.” She darted for the door, but before leaving, she stopped and turned, smiling through bowed lips.

Lucinda watched her hurtling down the road and off into the fields, her dress showing in blue, vibrating swaths through the tall grass.

She stayed at the school until the supper hour and then left, latching the door, thinking she had forgotten to ask Euphrastus for the key. But there was no lock on the door—nothing but knowledge to steal—and, arranging her bonnet on her head, she walked down the road back to her room at the Wallers’. There had been biscuits and cornmeal for breakfast. She hoped there would be meat for dinner.