“I’ll send someone as soon as I get in range of a cell tower. You sure you’ll be okay with him? I could just leave him tied to a tree.”
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art… watching, with eternal lids apart.”
“I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near an eternity. Maybe twenty minutes, half an hour.”
By way of answer, he placed his hand on her shoulder and smiled down on her.
She glanced around at the children, who had passed through the terror phase and were now beginning to talk madly about the adventure, words tumbling over themselves. She looked back at him and said, “Thank you. He’d have shot me for sure. I should have been more cautious, coming here.”
“There is no fool like an old fool,” he said, as if to excuse her.
She laughed. “You’re right there. The last thing he could’ve expected was an old man with a cudgel.”
“Every inch that is not fool is rogue,” he said, his eyes sparkling.
“Well, I thank God for that. Okay, I’d better get these kids home. I’ll see you at the station.”
He merely smiled and leaned on his staff. She gathered up Enrique and his pair of protectors, got them across the creek dry-footed and into the car.
When she turned back, she saw Erasmus still standing there, outlined by the glow from the second propane lamp. “I met a fool in the forest,” she murmured, as a line from one of the summer Shakespeare productions percolated into her mind, “a motley fool.”
She got a signal for her phone two miles from the cave and called in her report. As she made her calls, she was dimly aware that the kids had moved on from reliving the moment of the gun going off to speculation about Erasmus. Enrique thought he was a hero in disguise. Ernesto wondered if he’d just dyed his hair and painted lines, to make himself look old. But Mina, with the superiority of age and the wisdom of her sex, said he was an angel, and that shut both the boys up until they reached the station.
Bonita Mendez thought all three might be right.
Of course, she could never be sure, because when the police arrived at the turnaround and followed the light to the thoroughly trussed Taco Alvarez, Brother Erasmus was no longer there.
Burying Mr. Henry by Polly Nelson
They lifted my rag-wrapped body off the top of a munitions wagon and left me in Stratford County, Kansas, where I remained unconscious for the better part of two months due to infection, pain, and an excess of laudanum. Eventually the leg wound healed over and my addiction came under control. My aversion to the battleground remained, however; so when Stratford asked me to serve as part-time marshal, I was quick to raise my saber-scarred right hand. Thus ended my part in the great War Between the States.
I was still young in 1864 and I believed that, except for a slight limp, the personal effects of the war were over for me. But as most career lawmen will tell you, at least once in a lifetime some case will come along that offers you an education, and if you’re lucky it will touch your head, your heart, and your gut in equal measure. For me, such a case involved the burying of Mr. Henry: an event that came to represent everything I’d observed about the War Between the States and about the myriad odd effects it had on those who survived it – especially those made less by their exposure to that war. Many wished they could simply forget, transform, and become somebody else. A few of us succeeded, even if only for a short while.
I had never considered becoming a lawman, but it turned out to be a good decision for me. The only talents I’d developed during the war were a knack with a Colt firearm and – I like to think – a level head when it concerned my fellow man. Before the conflict began, my family had paid my ticket into the territory, so that I could cast a vote on whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Dear God, that the issue of slavery could have been resolved so simply. Anyway, coming out of my somnolence that painful November, I realized that I could hardly face the thought of returning to clerk in my father’s office.
I considered the possibilities, and it took me no more than a few days, maybe a week or two, before I decided that I could probably pass as a local. What might have been a temporary job as marshal grew into my permanent position. At my retirement in June of 1893, I had served in that capacity for twenty-nine years. The day I started, my constituents numbered just over sixty, but toward the end I had close to twelve thousand people under my jurisdiction.
In 1864, Stratford was pretty much unsettled, like any of a dozen other cow towns growing up around an assortment of settlers who came from as close as Illinois and as far as the steppes of Russia. Most of the older men had fought along the Missouri line, and most of them wanted never to see fighting again.
It looked to be an easy job, even during cattle-drive season, when the town might swell from sixty to a hundred fifty. I had an affinity for those young boys driving cattle for weeks on end. Many of them had no idea how to settle down because, even as young as twelve and thirteen, they had been forced to take up arms for one side or the other and fight for survival. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t recover from the experience as it was that they’d had no chance to experience a life worth recovering. And so they had to be protected, lest they stumble inadvertently beyond gambling and minor crimes into a shoot-out at dawn where death didn’t matter; they’d already seen too much of it. For them, the world remained a great lawless universe, and my job was to give them rules to live by – at least within the Stratford city limits.
That uneasy balance shifted when the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through about a half-mile west of downtown. Even before those tracks could be tested, the permanent population of Stratford swelled to three thousand people. In addition to the cowboys and the settlers, I began to deal with railroad workers, buffalo hunters, Mexican vaqueros, former slaves hoping to stake a claim for freedom, ex-soldiers still battling over abolition, and even some wealthy Easterners looking for adventure, come to see what all the hoopla was about. I had to deputize Arlen Dexter to help me keep order.
Arlen played a very important role in the Mr. Henry case: first, because he was my part-time deputy, and second, because he was Stratford’s fulltime undertaker. We never spoke about it, but I’m pretty sure Arlen saw no service in the war. Plenty of red-blooded Americans lost themselves in the territories until the war was over, and – some may not recall – plenty of red-skinned Americans found themselves on the front lines, defending both sides of the slavery issue. For the most part, the nondrinking community members avoided the topic of who fought where, when, and why, lest bloody Kansas should begin to hemorrhage again.
I never really cared much for Arlen. He had a limited sense of humor and was way too fussy about clothing for my sensibility. He had a tendency to evaluate people based on the way they looked. And if a handsome young cowboy died, Arlen also had a tendency to show up a few weeks later in the same clothes that the cowboy had expired in. Still, while he might not have been the most scrupulous undertaker, he was a very good deputy. He was always prompt to the scene when there’d been a shoot-out. After all, it was in his best interest both as deputy and as undertaker to claim the victims. Somebody had to arrange for those burials.
If no kin came forward, the town would pay pauper’s fees, but Arlen was diligent about finding family, even months after the last rites. More times than not, Arlen would shame some relative into paying for the coffin and decent black suit that the undertaker said he’d provided the corpse, claiming that, come Judgment Day, every rising soul had a right to look decently saved. This was still in the days when the soul’s salvation meant something to those who considered the West to be God’s gift to the white man.