A Congregation of Jackals (6 page)

“I’m not here to eat. The light in this car is better than in the others. May I sit?”

“Them tables is ‘ready set. Don’t mess them up none.”

“I won’t. Thank you, ma’am.”

Oswell sat down in a cushioned chair and withdrew an envelope from his jacket. He opened it and extracted ten sheets of paper, an amount which he anticipated would be enough for his task if he did not make too many errors. He withdrew an eight-inch case of lacquered wood decorated with gold-filigree whorls and opened it, revealing an enameled fountain pen. Elinore had given this to him for their tenth wedding anniversary.

“What you got there?” asked the young male Negro seated beside the woman, most likely her son. “That a knife?”

“That’s a pen,” the woman corrected. She looked at Oswell and asked, “You ain’t got to fill it up with ink, does you? With a eye dropper like I see some folks do? That makes a mess no nigger can clean.”

“This is the kind that uses a tablet.” He twisted the iridium ring at bottom of the pen; it clicked; he slid open the flap on the side of the cylinder and slid the ink cartridge in as if it were a bullet. He held the pen up for the woman to see; he closed and locked the barrel; it clacked.

“Watch that your writin’ don’t bleed through none.”

“I will.”

Oswell pressed the heel of his right palm across the creases in the blank papers and pondered what he was about to do . . . what he was about to set down.

He intended to write “My Dearest Elinore,” but his hand wrote only,

Elinore

He looked at her name alone on the blank page and knew that his hand was correct—neither affection nor sentimentality had a place in this letter. This missive should be a clear communication of what had transpired years ago, a catalog of his wrongdoings.

Below the name of his wife, he began to unravel his knotty past with the iridium tip of the fountain pen.

This letter is to be delivered to you if I die in the Montana Territory
.

You have never asked me about my life before we met, you are a good wife and respectful of my privacy and moods, but I wanted to give you the choice to learn what killed me and so am writing it out for you now. If you don’t want to know, throw this letter in the fire. This is your decision
.

I am the man you married, but a long time ago, I was not a good man. I will not incriminate the others I rode with, because I don’t have the—

Sorry about that, I slipped. I am writing this on the train and it shakes sometimes
.

I don’t want to incriminate anyone else, though I will mention a bit about my childhood with Godfrey so you can see the whole story
.

Oswell read what he had written; he felt like he was trapped within a stagecoach that had two wheels hanging over a cliff edge. He continued writing.

I grew up in Pineville, Tennessee, which I told you a little about, but not much. After my mom died blind and without any money, the bank took the house and Godfrey and I didn’t have any place to go. We went to
the bank and asked the manager if he would let us stay in the house until it was sold and he said no. We asked for a loan and he said no, he wouldn’t give a loan to two kids—I forgot to write that I was thirteen and Godfrey fifteen when mom died. We got angry and then the manager said something rude about our mother who was doing what she had to as a poor widow to feed us kids, so I broke his jaw and then Godfrey, who was solid with muscle then, picked him up and threw him against the vault door where he hit his head and cracked his skull
.

Godfrey and I were locked in jail while the doctors worked on the manager. They saved him, though he was slower than he was before the injury and walked always veering to the left. We did our time in jail and, in a couple of months, Godfrey and I were run out of town, two outlaws even though we weren’t even men yet. I won’t write any more about my brother, I just wanted you to see how I got the anger in me when I was young
.

Sorry about that smudge, the pen got stuck and I shook it too hard, though mostly it works real fine—it’s the one you gave me for our tenth anniversary
.

I tried being a cowboy for a while. I mentioned this to you once when I first started courting you, but I just didn’t get along too well with those fellows, though I liked the animals. When the cowboys weren’t riding or corraling beeves, they played horseshoes and cards and I was never much for games. Or they talked about whores and that was talk I didn’t at all like hearing and threw more than a couple of fists over stuff that was said. A cowboy who fights gets his pay withheld an extra week, and the one who started it loses half his pay, and because I was unliked, I was always blamed
for starting it whether I did or not. The last time I rode beeves across four states I got into so many brawls that I didn’t get any pay at all. It was on this last ride that I met a guy named J
.

J was a huge man nearly six and a half feet tall and with fists like two hams. J’s pa saw the size of him and from an early age raised him to be a pugilist. Boxing was illegal in the state he came from, so he went with his brothers and pa to New Orleans, where people pay to see fights in a ring. J was so big it took some time to find an opponent that wouldn’t make people think of David and Goliath when they were paired up together. The first fellow he fought was a swarmer six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter. J took the fellow’s blows on his arms and they didn’t hurt him any. When the man got tired, J threw a big one that cracked the man’s nose and eye socket and the poor guy went into shock and died right there. J didn’t want to box again after that, but his pa insisted. A couple more times J stood in the ring and took punches, but he never threw any himself other than to back the other guy off
.

Pretty soon his pa gave up on him and went home. J didn’t go with him. He took to drinking and working in stables for a couple of years and, eventually, doing some work as a vaquero. The first year I knew him I don’t know that I ever saw him sober, but he was a quiet drunk and not at all mean to animals or women the way the cowboys were, so I rode near him and pitched tent with him. Killing that fellow in the ring had made him quiet but he didn’t blubber on like some men did about things that can’t be changed
.

We got jobs with the railroad—cutting trees and swinging sledgehammers and putting down ties for the tracks. We tried to get in with the Oryntals because
they never said anything we could understand and I wouldn’t get riled listening to them go on, but they wouldn’t have us in with them, so we worked with white folks and I got into brawls. The last time I mixed it up with a fellow in the rail gang some others jumped in and so J got involved and broke nine of some fellow’s ribs with a sledgehammer. We were fired from the outfit and we never got our pay. I went to the foreman that night with J and we broke his hands, but still we didn’t get it. Negroes and Oryntals were doing better than us. I’m not sure if that’s how you spell Oryntals
.

I was nineteen. We were in Alabama and didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. It was getting cold at night and I said we should rob a bank and J said he thought it was a good idea and better than starving or begging. I had two guns I had taken from a cowboy who had threatened to shoot me when I was sleeping, so we had the gear to do it. We didn’t plan to shoot any people, just throw a scare into them, do some yelling if we had to, grab the money and get out
.

The first bank we robbed, that is exactly what happened. We walked to a small town, figuring the banks there wouldn’t have any armed guards like the ones in Mobile did. We covered our faces with scarves and went into the bank, J got the door, the other fellow with us menaced the customers and I went up to the teller and told him what to do
.

Oswell wondered if it would be obvious to his wife who “the other fellow” was. He supposed it did not matter as long as Godfrey’s name was not written out explicitly in a way that would legally connect him to the crimes.

He pressed the iridium tip to the top of the fourth page and continued scratching away layers.

J and the other fellow and I were calm and easy the whole time we were in there. We left that Podunk bank with more money than we had ever looked at in our entire lives, even though it was not really very much. We camped out in the wastelands between towns because they were looking for us. It was cold but we didn’t feel it. A couple of days later we went to another town, bought horses and clothes and more guns and ate three dinners each we were so hungry
.

For the first time in my life, I was proud of something I’d done. I imagine that seems strange to you, but all my life I felt like a fellow was digging his spurs into my sides and for once I felt like I’d thrown him from the saddle
.

We robbed small banks for t

“That there’s bleedin’ through the paper. It’s gettin’ on the tablecloth,” the colored woman said to Oswell.

He raised his fountain pen and looked down; he was on the fourth page, which had six more beneath it; the ink was not bleeding through.

“No. That one there,” the woman said, pointing to the second page he had written, drying to his left. The blot of ink from when the pen had stuck was soaking through onto the lace tablecloth.

“I’m sorry ma’am.” Oswell lifted the paper and set it upon the ground.

“Sorry don’t get it clean. Mr. Randolph don’t care none about no ‘pology and it don’t get out no ink stain.”

“My name is Oswell Danford. Tell Mr. Randolph I did it. If I’ve ruined the tablecloth, I’ll pay for it.”

The two adolescents at the table, who were playing dice at the time, looked over.

“Make him pay,” the boy said.

“It cost fifty cents,” his sister added.

“No it don’t—it’s two dollars.”

The woman looked at her kids and eyed them angrily.

“You get on back to your dice and keep quiet,” she said. “You get a wart for each fib you tell and don’t neither of you know what this thing cost.” She looked back at Oswell and said, “Tomorry I ask Mr. Randolph what to do. Maybe he goin’ to tell us to cut it up for napkins and you won’t have to pay nothin’ for it.”

“Thank you. What’s your name?”

“Addy.”

“Thank you, Addy.”

“I know it was a accident and you a nice man.”

Oswell was glad that she could not read the papers she had glanced at.

The woman walked back to her kids; Oswell yawned. He wanted to finish the letter, but he had a lot more to write. He figured that he had better try to get some sleep while he could. With his cramped fingers, he twisted the cap back onto his fountain pen and replaced the enameled tool in the felt bedding of the wooden case. He yawned once more while he waited for the ink to dry, watching Addy’s kids throw ivory dice and do computations with their little fingers.

Beatrice Jeffries walked across the grass toward Jim’s home, a small A-frame at the southwestern limit of Trailspur, Montana Territory. Her titan sat upon a small stool near the north side of the house, combing Joseph’s fur with a wire brush; the coydog noticed her before he did.

The twenty-nine-year-old woman was not sure whether Jim loved her more than he loved his three pets, but he did love her enough to marry her.

The first time that the six-foot-five-inch-tall blond man had asked her to dance at a church social, she was so surprised by the request that she had said, “No thank you, Mr. Lingham.” To that, the tall man had said without arrogance, “I got good feet. C’mon,” took her left hand gently in his big palms and pulled her out to the floor.

To her surprise, the titanic man did have abilities as a dancer . . . and was actually quite graceful. However, because he dwarfed the petite woman so substantially, the experience, though agreeable, was like dancing with a twisting redwood. Over time, Beatrice had adjusted: she grew accustomed to tilting her head back whenever she spoke to him, and soon viewed any man under six feet tall as puny.

Jim courted her for a long time before he kissed her, and she later found out that he had actually asked permission from her father to do even that. No matter
where she was or what she was doing, the thought of that conversation (at which she was thankfully not present) always made her smile.

He was fairly intelligent for a fellow from Mississippi, and he was as polite as the Englishmen she read about in the periodicals and books her great-aunt sent over from Manchester, England. In fact, Jim was so courteous, he would do practically anything to avoid an argument—even apologize for things that were not his fault (though he would never tolerate anyone maligning her or his coydogs for even a moment).

Beatrice said to her seated titan, “Joseph is looking very handsome today.”

“He is now. Got into some mud and had to wash him twice.” Joseph’s purple-black tongue lolled from the animal’s long narrow snout.

“Where are Jesus and Mary?”

“They saw a rabbit this morning. Ain’t seen ’em since.” He looked at the basket hooked over her right arm. “What’s in there?”

“This is a surprise, Mr. Lingham.” He accepted the mystery and pulled his brush through Joseph’s brindled brown and silver coat. She walked up to her fiancé, leaned over and kissed him; he returned the kiss, though his hands did not leave the coydog. Beatrice patted Joseph’s snout, walked up the three steps onto the porch, strode through the slatted door and into the house. The dwelling still smelled like a place where a man lived alone—the odors of socks, boots, dogs, pipes and ashes dominated.

As the door shut behind her, she heard Jim call out, “Jesus! Get your nose outta that!”

Beatrice walked up the hall of the house her fiancé had built by himself for two years, and she recalled the first time she had been introduced to the coydogs. She
had questioned the sagacity of the names he had chosen for the animals, but he succinctly and unswervingly defended them. She had gotten used to the supernal allusions over time—even if she did have to regularly explain the choice to others—but still she shuddered when she heard him say things like “Jesus! Mary don’t want you back there. Pull that outta her.”