Sylvie's Cowboy (16 page)

Enjoying the clear Florida sky, the azure
lake, even the hissing, milling ducks, Sylvie strolled through the
lot toward the hospital entrance.

Minutes later, she exited the elevator onto
an upper floor and breezed down the hall, flowers and books in tow.
She started talking even before she was through the door of the
familiar hospital room. “Sorry I’m late. Had to chase old
Beauregard halfway to Okeechobee—”

She finished the sentence under her breath,
“—before I could shut the gate and leave.” The bed was empty. A
nurse’s aide was stripping the sheets. Sylvie couldn’t get air into
her lungs.
Oh, please, God! He can’t be dead!

“What happened!”

The aide looked up at the visitor.
“Pardon?”

“Where have they taken him?” Sylvie demanded
to know.

“Who?”

“Mister McGurk! Where is he!”

A teenaged Candystriper volunteer entered
with an armload of fresh linens. “I think she means Walt,” the teen
told the aide.

The aide smiled and nodded, “Oh, Walt! He’s
down in physical therapy. Be back in about half an hour.”

Sylvie felt as if a valve in her feet had
opened and her blood had simply dropped out of her body like water
down a flushing toilet. She dropped her load of flowers and books
into the visitor’s chair near the door and leaned against the
doorjamb to keep from collapsing on the cold tiles.

The Candystriper worried that the cowboy lady
was going to faint. “Are you okay? Ma’am? Are you—” Sylvie was
gone. She had bolted as if the room were afire.

Sylvie didn’t stop moving until she reached
the shore of the small lake outside the hospital. She slumped onto
a bench and tried to calm her panicked heart. She watched the ducks
on the lake. On the opposite shore families strolled. Children
floated toy boats along the water’s edge twenty yards away. At
first the sights were blurred, but she soon had herself under
control, and tears stopped flowing.

She didn’t know how long she sat there. She
didn’t hear the man wearing bathrobe and slippers who limped up
behind her, leaning heavily on a cane. She rubbed her temples.

A deep voice said, “Headache?”

She started and would have turned toward him,
but he leaned his cane against the bench and used both hands to
begin massaging her neck and shoulders. “There now,” his velvet
voice soothed her, “just you relax. Let Uncle Walt make it all
better.”

She nodded and closed her eyes.

He continued the massage. After a minute had
passed in silence, he inhaled deeply and said, “I was twelve and
living on the streets. He was ten years older and a hundred years
meaner and drunk as a skunk. He tried to knife me for the two
dollars I had in my pocket and I killed him. Deader’n dirt.”

She tried to stop him, “You don’t have
to—”

He went on as if she’d said nothing.
“Juvenile Court put me in the custody of a man named Harry Pace—who
came down to speak up for me because his wife read about it in the
papers and wouldn’t let him rest until he did something to help.
So, Harry and Helen sent me to boarding school and college and set
me up in a business. Took care of me like a son even though they
had a little girl of their own. I didn’t see her but once or twice
a year, when I’d come home for school holidays, but I always
thought she was the most beautiful thing God ever made.”

He seemed to wait to catch his breath, but
the massage never stopped. Soon he spoke again. “I woulda been dead
or in jail a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Harry. I ain’t
excusin’ what I done, helpin’ him with his crazy scheme, but I owed
him a big favor, and he collected. I swear I’ll never lie to you
again.”

Sylvie slid away from his hands and turned to
face him. “Why are you telling me this?”

He let the back of the bench take some of his
weight. “I think one should be familiar with one’s associates. You
ain’t asked to be a partner in this ... enterprise, but I intend to
take an active role in signin’ you on.”

He looked down at his feet, smiled, and shook
his head. He lifted his head to gaze into her waiting eyes. “I
know,” he said, “I oughta be on my knees right now, but I’m some
stiff yet.”

Sylvie rose, walked around the bench, and
melted into his arms. “Are you proposing, McGurk?”

“Well,” he said, “as much as I hate to ask
you to give up a promising career in electrical appliance
repair...”

She kissed him.

He pulled her closer and kissed her. Bathrobe
and cane notwithstanding, he kissed like a man whose strength and
health were fully restored.

###

Iris Chacon’s ancestors have lived and farmed
in Florida as far back as the Spanish occupation in the 1700s. Few
people know that North America’s first cattle ranches and cowboys
existed in Florida, even before places like Texas and the great
American Southwest became the sources of cowboy myths and legends.
Iris has a home in small-town central Florida, is a wife and
mother, and writes for radio, stage, and screen as well as for
ebooks.

Facebook
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LinkedIn
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Iris Chacon

Send email to Iris Chacon by sending to:
IrisChacon137 at gmail dot com

Cover art is by
Fiona Jayde
of Fiona Jayde
Media

Enjoy the following sample from Mudsills &
Mooncussers, the next ebook by Iris Chacon.

What can Yankee spy Aaron Matthews do when the
Confederate agent he seeks appears to be the very woman with whom
he has been falling in love?

It’s a deadly game of spy vs. spy in Civil War Key
West.

The Facts

In 1860, the small population of an island
called Key West, southern tip of the United States, had grown
wealthy upon the wreckage of ships. The noble citizens of Key West
often rescued passengers and crews when tall-masted wooden ships
were forced by storms onto the shallow, knife-edged coral reefs
lining the Gulf Stream waters called the Florida Straits. Maritime
law stated that the first boat captain to hail the foundering
vessel earned the right to salvage and sell whatever could be taken
off the wreck before it was claimed by the sea.

Less noble citizens had been known to build
fires on nearby islands north of the official Key West lighthouse.
Such a false light could cause helmsmen to turn toward the shore
miles before it was safe to do so, driving their doomed ship onto
the reefs and into the hands of the waiting wreckers. Moonless
nights worked best for fooling unwary mariners onto the rocks. For
that reason, these dishonest ship wreckers were known as
“mooncussers.” In the worst cases, mooncussers had been known to
kill—or perhaps merely fail to rescue—passengers and crew members.
Dead men tell no tales.

The wrecking business was lucrative—and
sometimes even honest—and by the 1850s had made Key West the
richest town per capita in Florida. Of course, there were few towns
in the state at that time. Citizens of Key West did their shopping
in Mobile, Alabama, or Charleston, South Carolina. The nearest
Florida ports of any significance were Tampa and St. Augustine. At
the mouth of the Miami River was a small trading post at meager
Fort Dallas, but the city of Miami would not flourish until early
in the next century.

What the “War Between the States” was called
depended on where one lived. Some saw it as The American Civil War;
some called it The Great Unpleasantness; southerners sometimes
labeled it The War of Northern Aggression; some just said it was
the fight between the North and the South.

Whatever its moniker, the war played out in
microcosm on the tiny island of Key West. Located just 90 miles
north of Havana, Cuba, Key West was a community of staunch
southerners—indeed, they considered themselves the southernmost of
the southerners. The cay was too small for even one plantation and
housed very few slaves. Still, as a matter of pure geography, no
one was more southern than the so-called “Conchs” of Key West.

That’s why it was ironic, and more than a
little vexing, that a small battalion of Northern soldiers managed
to march out of their barracks one night and steal across the
island and into its only military installation: the
mostly-completed Fort Zachary Taylor. Thus it was that, when the
metaphorical smoke cleared over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and
war began in earnest, the southern citizens of Key West found their
city occupied by Yankee soldiers without a shot having been
fired.

Key West was to remain in Union hands
throughout the war. But since nobody had the prescience to know
that fact ahead of time, the North and South waged war in their own
unique way, on the miniscule island at the bottom of the North
American map.

Those are the basic facts. But to know the
truth in its entirety requires more than the facts; it requires the
story.

The Story

At twilight on January 13, 1861, the sun’s
fiery ball sank into the blue-green Gulf of Mexico at the edge of
the world. Clouds bled pink and purple. Bird shadows fled to their
roosts across the red-orange orb or splashed into the limitless
sea, spearing a last-minute meal and carrying it away.

While the city of Key West slept, a small
group of Yankee soldiers slogged through mangrove swamp in the dead
of night and occupied an unfinished brick fort on the southern tip
of the southernmost island of the United States.

Wooden sailing ships crowded the harbor.
Tift’s Ice House, the Custom House, and various warehouses squatted
on the shoreline. Bahama-style homes lined the wide dirt street
that ran north-south, from water to water, across the small
island.

Key West was the most strategic point in the
Confederacy, covering access from the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean
Sea to the Gulf of Mexico and the Confederate harbor cities from
Texas to Florida. This small band of soldiers would hold Key West
for the Union until reinforcements could arrive four months
later.

When April arrived, and with it the
anticipated Union reinforcements, that first puny band of soldiers
breathed a sigh of relief. After four tense, exhausting months as
the minority representatives of the United States of America,
surrounded by Confederate citizens, the Yankees’ numbers had
finally increased. Their position in the fort was secure. They
thought the worst was over, the hard work was done. Of course, they
were wrong.

Sergeant Jules Pfifer, a career Army man,
marched his patrol briskly through the evening heat toward one of
the tall wooden houses along the dirt street. Atop the house was
perched a square cupola surrounded by the sailor-carved balustrades
called gingerbread. These porches, just large enough for one or two
persons to stand and observe the sea from the rooftop, were known
as widow’s walks. From this particular widow’s walk an illegal
Confederate flag flaunted its red stars and bars against the clear
Key West sky.

The soldiers in Union blue marched smartly
through the gate in the white picket fence, up the front steps, and
in at the front door—which opened before them as if by magic.

“Evenin’, Miz Lowe,” Sergeant Pfifer said,
without breaking stride.

“Evenin’, Sergeant,” the lady of the house
answered, unperturbed.

On the Lowe house roof, the stars and bars
were whipped from their post; they disappeared from sight just as
the soldiers, clomping and puffing and sweat-stained, arrived atop
the stairway. Pfifer and another man crowded onto the widow’s walk.
Consternation wrinkled the soldiers’ faces when they found no
Confederate flag, only 17-year-old Caroline Lowe, smiling
sweetly.

...

In the twilight, the brick trapezoid of Fort
Zachary Taylor loomed castle-like over the sea waves, connected to
the “mainland” by a narrow causeway. Yankee sentries paced between
the black silhouettes of cannon pointed seaward. Firefly lights
sparkled on the parade ground and among the Sibley tents huddled on
shore at the base of the causeway.

Midway between the fort and Caroline Lowe’s
flagpole, on the tin roof of a three-story wooden house, behind the
gingerbread railing of another widow’s walk, two athletic, handsome
youngsters stood close together, blown by the wind. Twenty-year-old
Richard scanned the sea with a spyglass. Joe, an inch shorter than
Richard, kept one hand atop a floppy hat the wind wanted to
steal.

Richard found something interesting to the
east. He handed over the spyglass and pointed Joe toward the same
point on the horizon. Joe searched, then zeroed in.

“Some rascal’s laid a false light over on
Boca Chica,” Richard said. “Come on!”

They tucked the spyglass into a hollow rail
of the widow’s walk and hastened down the stairs.

...

On neighboring Boca Chica island, night
blanketed the beach. A hunched figure tossed a branch onto a
blazing bonfire then slunk away into the darkness. Pine pitch
popped and crackled in the fire, adding a sweet piney aroma to the
tang of the salt breeze off the sea.

...

Inside a warehouse on Tift’s Wharf, all
shapes and sizes of kegs, boxes, and wooden crates towered in
jagged heaps. Sickly yellow light from a sailor’s lantern sent
quivering shadows across the stacks. A spindly boy of 15, Joseph
Porter, kept watch through a crack in the door.

On the floor a dozen teenaged boys hunkered
down, whispering. Richard sneaked in from the rear of the building
to join them. Behind him, out of the light and keeping quiet, came
Joe.