Authors: Larry McMurtry
But I volunteered for that War, because I wanted to fight the Rebs. It was bastards from Georgia and Carolina and the South that herded up the Cherokees and the other Indian people, and marched them along the Trail of Tears, where my ma died, and many another. I had good reason to fight the traitors and the killers that herded us away from our homes and our farms, taking away nearly everything we owned, breaking our hearts and our spirits, and causing us to die by the thousands on that march.
Jewel had no such reasons for being in a war. She had come home with her husband to bear children and care for a family. She hadn't courted trouble, but here she stood, in a fort, of all things, with boxes and boxes of bullets stacked against one wall. My daughter Jewel seemed farther away than her own motherâand her own mother was dead.
“Jewel, I don't know that I could bear it if I lost you, too,” I blurted.
A sag came on Jewel, when I said it. She looked down again, and turned away. She started for the door, but she stopped and turned back, taking my hand for a moment.
“Ned got Preacher Joe to come,” she said. “The two of us are married proper now, Pa.”
“Well, that is one good thing, honey,” I said.
But she was already gone out the door.
I
WAS RAISED TO BE USEFUL, SO
I
PITCHED IN WITH THE PLANTING
. Ned looked a little startled when I got myself a shovel and joined in the work.
“You ain't the only man in the world who knows how to plant a spud, you know,” I said, when he threw the startled look at me.
Ned kept a milk cow staked to a long grazing rope, moving the stake every day so the cow would have fresh grass. I didn't see any pigs; I guess they butchered them and salted them down, so they would have plenty of meat inside if the whites showed up in force.
Ned seemed to prefer to work in silence, so I obliged him for a while. I unsaddled my own horse and put him out to graze by the milk cow. In the afternoon, we walked over to the creek, washed the dirt off our hands, and took a long drink. I didn't mind the working, but I felt like I was going to bust if I didn't say something about the situation Ned was in.
So, I just came out with it.
“They say they're bringing a cannon, next time a posse comes,” I informed him. “I'm surprised the authorities would drag a cannon this far, but I guess that L. P. Isabel is a determined fellow.”
“He froze three toes himself, I expect it riled him,” Ned replied. “Dale Miller cut them off with the sheep shears.”
He nearly broke down and smiled, at the thought of the marshal's discomfort, and Dale's brass.
“Are you determined to die, then?” I asked. I knew I had best seize my chance for a discussion while enjoying a cool drink of water.
“Nope, ain't aiming to,” Ned replied. “They've come at us six times, and not made a dent in this fort. They can't get close enough to burn us out, and I doubt these logs would burn, even if I let them build a bonfire.”
“Yes, but what about the cannon?” I asked him. “They'll make a dent in the fort, if they bring a cannon.”
Ned
did
smile, then.
“I'll worry about that when I see the cannon,” he said. “I doubt they've got the patience to blast me out. Even with a cannon, it might take a month.”
“Well, now, that depends on the cannoneer,” I said. “I've known
gunners that could put a cannonball down a chimney at six hundred yards.”
“Yes, but I doubt any of them fellows are available in Arkansas,” he said.
“I think it's a risk,” I told him.
Ned shrugged, and started walking back toward the garden.
“These possemen ain't patient,” he said. “They come hell-bent-for-leather, and shoot every gun they've got as fast as they can shoot, until they bust the barrels. Then they wait for a week, griping, and getting drunk. Then the weather gets cold, or else it gets hot, or else it gets rainy, and the whiskey runs out. About that time, I manage to wing one or two of them, which is usually enough to make them go on home.”
“It might not be that easy forever,” I told him.
“I don't know much about forever,” he said. “It's been that way six times.”
Ned almost started having a normal discussion again, and then he remembered that he was done with normal discussions.
He drew back.
“You ain't going to live forever yourself, Zeke,” he added, giving me a stern look.
I thought I might as well say my piece about the Militia, while Ned was at least listening.
“I've got up a fine militia, Ned,” I told him. “It's Keetoowah brothers of ours that's in it. We put twenty-five well-armed men in the field the last time they sent marshals after me. The result was, it turned them back, and me and most of the boys got pardoned.
“They know they ain't got the manpower to arrest twenty-five of us,” I went on. “So, they gave up. But there's just one of you . . . where you're concerned, they won't give up.”
“I'd say they made a bad choice, then,” Ned replied. “I expect they could whittle down two dozen of the boys easier than they can take me.”
“Why, Ned, that's vain,” I told him. “What makes you think you can outfight twenty-five men?”
“The fact that I got a fort, and they ain't,” he said. “A fort's proof against ambushes, and ambushes is what you have to fear.”
That was the end of the conversation, as far as Ned Christie was concerned. I started talking about the Senate, and how I thought I
could win a vote on an order for his protection. My plan was to have five or six militiamen take turns helping Ned guard the fort, but before I even finished describing my plan, Ned shook his head.
From the way he looked at me, I knew he'd had enough of my blab. But I'm a terrier, when I'm talking. I won't be shook off that easy.
“You should listen to me, now!” I told him, getting louder. “I'm not only your friend, I'm the father of your wife. The white law won't give up. It's got no reason to. There'll always be young fools willing to take a chance on killing a famous outlaw, and there'll always be governors or judges who'll deputize them.”
Ned went back to his gardening, as if I wasn't even talking.
“Another thing is, they know where you are,” I went on. “If you was willing to go on the scout, you might have a chance. These woods will hide you till you're an old man. Jewel can live at home, and you can slip in and see her when it's clear.”
That seemed to anger him. He whirled towards me, with fight in his face.
“My wife will live where I live,” he said. “I'll either protect her, or die in the effort.”
A little later, I saddled my horse and got ready to leave. I think Jewel would have asked me to stay, for seeing me seemed to bring back memories of a time when families visited freely. But the memories didn't come quick enoughâor strong enough. Jewel was half willing to ask me; maybe, if I hadn't irked him, Ned would have been half willing, too. But they had lost the habit of society.
When the shadows began to stretch out from the ridge and it was time to quit the hoeing, Ned and Jewel stood together again, and nobody asked. Ned shook my hand hard, as I was leaving, and Jewel hugged me hard, too. If I had asked, I'm sure they would have spread me a pallet for the night and made me a meal.
The truth was, I felt too peculiar to ask. One minute, I was glad I had come; the next minute, I regretted making the trip. I felt like I'd visited two ghosts. Tailcoat Jones had done a better job than he knew, before he drowned with his whore. He hadn't killed Ned or Jewel, but he drove them from the common walks, and the child they should have been raising in happiness was lost to a hillside rape.
I felt so peculiar about the matter that I rode all night, though I was dead tired from trying to show Ned that I could plant as many potatoes as he could.
I'd seen Ned and Jewel, but I hadn't reached them, not as I could have reached them before the Tailcoat Jones attack. I had to doubt that I'd ever see either one of them alive again; and that's a terrible doubt, considering that Jewel was my oldest living child.
“At least you tried, Zeke,” Arch Scraper said, when I described the visit to him. I was eager to talk to someone, and Arch was the first person I met.
“Tried, and failed,” I replied.
Tried and failed would be my feeling about that visit for many years to come. I told myself many a time that I ought to have done more.
Then I realized it was one of those hard games where you're beat before you start. Ned Christie didn't want my help, or anybody's help. Jewel didn't want it, eitherânot by then.
What they wanted was what they had: their fort, each other, and their war.
I
RODE HOME, AND MARRIED
M
AY
. S
HE WAS BUT NINETEEN, AND
skinny-legged as a killdeer, but she made as merry a wife as any man could want. To the triplets, she was like a sister, before and after she became a wife to me.
I had taken to reading the Bible some, the same book Becca had thrust on me in the Tahlequah jail. There was foolishness in it, and way too many names, but I noticed that all the old prophets and patriarchs had themselves wives. I felt it was no slight to Becca's memory that I took May as my new wife. I am not a monk, and cannot abide without a woman to lay abed with. Some would say May was too young to be made my wife, but I dispute thatâand besides, there's nothing in Bec's old Bible about the age of wives, nothing that I could locate, anyway.
The proof is in the pudding, they say, and the pudding in our case was a fine baby boy May produced a mere nine months after I'd had Preacher Joe in to marry us.
To my surprise, May fought me to a standstill on the name. She wanted to name the baby William, after her grandfather, but I insisted on naming him Ned, after my friend Ned Christie, the great warrior of the Cherokee people. He had stood off the white law for more than three years, when our little Ned was born.
Then, to my vexation, May started calling the baby Billy anyway. May might have been young, but what a will she had! She would resist to the end, if she wasn't allowed her way.
“His name ain't Billy, it's Ned!” I told her, one day when I caught her using Billy.
“Don't you forget it, either, May Proctor!” I went on. I was getting fairly riled that she would be bold enough to defy me in such a matter.
“He's gotta have a nickname, don't he?” she asked. May tended to colour up in the cheeks when her temper flared. She was colouring up pretty good when she looked at me.
“His name is Ned, and that's his only name!” I insisted. “A Cherokee warrior don't need any other name but his own.”
May didn't answer, but she was looking at the baby as if she was passing a secret to him. I knew she meant to call him Billy again, the moment I was out of earshot.
I went off my head for a minute, and shook May like a terrier shakes a rat.
“You'll call him Ned, by God!” I told her. “If I catch you calling him Billy again, I'll slap your cheek and give you old bully hell!”
But then the triplets started calling him Billy, and the hired help, too. Billy was the name that stuckânot Ned. I guess May had her way that time, though it's a mystery to me how she got it.
By the time the boy was five, I was calling him Billy myself.
I've pondered it, and the only notion I could come up with was that the boy wasn't meant to have a warrior's name. He grew up to be so shortsighted that he couldn't count his own fingers, not with his arm stuck straight out in front of him. The glasses the eye doc fitted him with were thick as a plate. He was good with figures, though. He could do sums in his head that I couldn't have got correct if I had a month.
I held the name business against May. It was a bone we fought over time and time again, whenever either one of us felt cranky.
“I thought I ought to get to name my firstborn son,” I told her. “But, by God, I didn't!”
“Billy ain't your firstborn sonâWillie is,” May reminded me.
“So thanks to your damn stubbornness, we've got two Bills in the family,” I pointed out.
“Billy was
my
firstborn son!” May retorted. “I suppose I had as good a right to name him as you.”
I took no part in the naming, after that. One of our girls was nearly
six months old before May got around to telling me her name. I was sheriff of the Going Snake District by then, and was on the road a lot, rounding up various rascals who were trying to elude the law.
She was a bright-eyed little girl, too. She was just beginning to gum bones and try to crawl around, when I come in and happened to notice her on the floor, making straight for the fireplace.
“What's that little one's name?” I asked.
“Dorothy Ruth,” May told me. She was cooking at the time.
“Why, that's two fine names wasted on one tot,” I told her. “Why not save the Ruth for the next little gal that comes along?”
“Her name's Dorothy Ruth, Zeke,” May informed me. And that was that.
T
HE FALL AFTER MY VISIT TO
N
ED AND
J
EWEL, WHEN THE FROST ON
the Mountain was hard enough to leave ice in the wagon ruts, the last battle of Ned's war was fought to its bloody conclusion. L. P. Isabel led fourteen marshals up the Mountain; a coloured man drove the mule team that pulled the cannon.
Rather than come through the Going Snake, where folks would have noticed them and given Ned the alert, the marshals dragged that blessed cannon nearly forty miles out of their way, in order to come at Ned from the eastern road, where there were fewer neighbours.
It was wasted effort. Arley Silk was up on the eastern reaches of the Mountain on a deer hunt, and saw the posse coming. He raced ahead of the bunch and informed Ned. The difference it made was that Ned had time to get his milk cow into the fort, along with sufficient fodder to keep her inside for a while.