Galveston: Between Wind And Water (A Historical Literary Fiction Novel Filled with Romance and Drama) (3 page)

But the loyal home guard changed all
that
.

Scraped and bruised, Bret climbed up the rocky river bank. At the top of the bank he spotted the gibbets in the distance behind a few hundred feet of bush and trees. He looked over his shoulder hoping beyond hope that somehow his mother had managed to follow him.

He prayed to hear her comforting voice draw near, instead, heard only the quiet hush of the slow-moving water. Though the sun beat hot against his face, he shook from a deathly cold that had taken hold of his thin body and bones. He coughed and cried, cursing himself for being a terrified boy. “But what would father say if he saw me like this?” he thought.

Bret wiped his sweat and tears on his jacket sleeve. Reverend Vaughan’s homestead lay on the other side of the gallows, but if he went around them through town it would take too long. He gulped and wet his parched lips with his tongue. No one would notice a small boy in a big crowd. Bret scrambled over the edge and ran through the bush and trees toward the gallows.

The captain yelled out the name of the final man on the platform. “William Kelby McGowan.”

When Haines tried to pull the sack over McGowan’s head, the conspirator shook his neck so quickly Haines dropped the sack onto the platform.

Someone hollered from the back of the crowd. “Try it the same way you bag a chicken when you steal it from a coop, boy. Wring its neck first.”

Captain Boland laughed with the others, taking pleasure in watching Haines flush redder than a robin with each roar of laughter from the crowd.

When Haines bent down to pick up the bag, McGowan asked Captain Boland if he could say something to the people. “It’s the last Christian and civil thing you can let me do.”

The captain strode across the creaking, freshly cut timbers of the platform and punched the Union boot-licking bastard square in the guts.

Captain Boland paused for a few moments and allowed the gentleman to recover his breath, then stepped up and secured the noose around the man’s neck. “Anything else?”

“Yes.” The traitor wet his dry, cracked lips with his tongue. “A drink of water, please.”

The captain nodded. “Why, of course, sir.” He spat a wad of chewing tobacco juice on the man’s cheek. “And don’t be shy to ask for seconds.”

People standing nearest the front of the platform pointed and guffawed.

William closed his eyes for a few moments. “What did my family or I ever do to you, Hugh Boland . . .” He opened his eyes again. “. . . that would make you forsake your soul under the eyes of God?”

For the life of him, the captain couldn’t answer. Flushed and wet with sweat, he turned away from the prisoner. He peered into the crowd. The stare of an old woman met his and she would not let it pass. She pulled her torn, blue shawl over her head and pushed her way back through the crowd.

The captain cursed her and turned back to face the condemned man. “All right! Speak your piece and be done with it, but watch yourself. Things are bad enough around here already thanks to lying traitors like you.” He turned his back on the prisoner and lowered his voice. “Or I’ll have to pay another social call on your wife.”

William McGowan jerked his head toward Boland. “What? What was that?”

The captain strolled to the opposite corner of the platform. “Ain’t nothing you can do anything about anyways, Mr. William … Kelby . . . McGowan.” Boland enjoyed the tension-filled pause after each word in the traitor’s name.

William cleared his throat. How he would have preferred tasting the sweat he felt in his palms instead of the dry, dusty roof of his mouth. He looked around the crowd. Fellow farmers and churchgoers, people he had known since childhood, stared up at him with solemn expressions. The war had changed everything and these people couldn’t risk displaying their sympathies in public.

William breathed in deeply then let the air out in a slow, constant exhalation. He was grateful his wife and young son had obeyed his wishes and not come to the station to meet him today. His man, Philip, had promised he would keep an eye on them to make sure they were safe.

He was thankful to the Lord too, that his family had been spared the wrath of the vigilantes and the martial law of their so-called “Citizen’s Court.” His family would still be left most of his cotton farm and livestock, which was a world more than the families of the other men standing at the gallows.

The bound man on one side of William began wetting his trousers, his legs trembling beneath the light fabric as the stain spread down the length of his pants.

“Hurry up!” a man hollered from the back of the crowd. “They’re startin’ to piss and shit themselves like babies!”

The crowd roared like the drunken audience at a traveling circus. William wet his lips with his tongue. “I find it ironic,” he said, measuring his words, “that all of us want law and order, yet many have chosen to break the law in the false hope of saving our way of life. Can’t you see everything you are doing will play into the hands of our enemies and end up destroying all we hold right and sacred?”

Someone threw a rotten tomato that hit William in the chest.

A young woman stepped forward from the crowd. “Speak plain or don’t speak at all.” The people around her clapped their hands and shouted approval. The young, freckle-faced woman pulled back her black kerchief letting her red hair fall around her shoulders. “After climbin’ into bed with those Yankee sons of bitches, how can you stand there preachin’ to us?” She wiped tears from her eyes. “You ’n’ your ‘Peace Plot!’ Why? So we can let the slaves take over our farms while our husbands, sons, and fathers are dyin’ every day like pigs in the dirt?”

She threw another rotten tomato , this time hitting William in the temple. The crowd clapped even louder this time. “You forget Nat Turner, mister? Let them niggers kill your children, but they ain’t gettin’ any more of mine.”

William shook his head, trying to steady the tremors building in his body. “My prayers are with you, ma’am, but I ...
we
all want the same thing.” He spat the words out, feeling the tightening of the noose around his neck. “But only a strong federal government has the means of suppressing slave insurrections and hostile Indian attacks. I beg you,
all of you
, to listen to reason. There’s still time to stop and end this madness. There are many in the North who—”

Captain Boland punched him in the jaw. “Copperheads ain’t worth a damn. You could have voted for secession when you had the chance or kept your trap shut afterwards.”

Bret stumbled breathlessly up toward the back of the noisy crowd. Everyone kept staring ahead and no one noticed him peer around a tall pine.

He shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted up at the platform.
So many people, so many . . .
Bret gasped.
No . . . was that—
His eyes went wide with horror. He opened his mouth to scream when two strong, black arms reached around his mouth and waist, yanking him off the ground.

Bret struggled to break free as the black man carried him back swiftly into the concealing shelter of the trees. Still looking at the platform, tears filled Bret’s eyes as he saw the man open another sack.

Arley Caldwell and his new eighteen-year-old bride, Melissa, turned to see what the commotion was about. Only the trees stood towering in mute witness to the unfortunate proceedings before them. 

He tapped his pipe.
You should have listened to me, William, and you would have been standing here with your friends instead
. He smiled at his radiant, auburn-haired wife who had insisted they be present so that everyone would know they were respectable, decent folk who didn’t want any trouble. Arley slid his arm around her slender waist and gently turned back to face the gallows.

Haines pulled the sack tight over the traitor’s head, muffling his voice. “Captain’s right. Once we whoop those Yankee Nancy-boys, we’ll dig out every other nigger in the woodpile down here ’n’ string ’em up with yer Union flag. Just like you.”

William heard the crowd yell and clap its approval through the burlap of the flour sack. Fear and lack of oxygen made his knees wobble and buckle as his head became lighter.
I love you Lorena. Thank you for the best years, darling. Take care of our son. When Bret’s older, remember what you—

The roar died away, and the creaking of the trap door lever was the last sound William McGowan heard on Earth.

CHAPTER 3

Friday, August 24, 1900

Bret shot bolt upright in bed, gasping, drenched in the sweat of his fever dream, his eyes searching frantically around his luxurious bedroom as though he expected the home guard to leap out of the cherry wood linen closets at any moment.

Still trembling, he wiped his forehead with the blue silk bed sheet. A sudden fit of sharp coughing made him reach for the small, dark brown medicine bottle on the polished walnut bedside table. 

He unscrewed the cap with fumbling fingers and drank until the bottle was empty. As the soothing warmth spread through his body and mind he leaned back on the embroidered Persian pillows and stared up at a small plaster crack in the high ceiling.

Once more the terrifying faces and sounds retreated into the darkest cavern of childhood nightmares. Bret brushed his damp black hair behind his ears and glanced at the dark circles and lean face reflecting back from the full-length dressing mirror on the wall. 

Although never one to be too concerned with personal appearance—rugged work makes for rugged men, as the saying went—he had to admit that he was looking more haggard these days; something, without a doubt, the rarified Contessa Da Rimini and the aristocratic ladies of her Italian Riviera circle would never have tolerated.

Easy to blame it on the long, hard hours out at the Beaumont field and the uncertainties of securing the necessary financing, but the faded luster in his intense, blue eyes told him it was something else.

Within a few months of his arrival the exotic allure of European women had already started to fade. Their perfumed finery and seductive glances slowly replaced, as he feared it would be, by his cherished memories of Gabrielle.

Bret closed his eyes. Although it had been over two years it sometimes seemed like only yesterday they were together. Gabrielle Mavis Caldwell, the clever, impetuous, and stunningly beautiful daughter of cotton magnate Arley Falkner Caldwell. How long ago had it been now since they watched the treetops stir with the whisper of a warming breeze?

Bret let his mind drift back to the spring of ’89, when the countryside around Galveston had been verdant, unblemished. In the early morning, faint puffs of vapor hung over freshly ploughed fields. He saw himself strolling through that beautifully wooded section of the waterfront park near the boardwalk with its low, rolling hills intersected by a clean running stream flowing to the Gulf.

He had first seen Gabrielle sitting on the bank looking into the cool spring water. Her long, bright auburn hair, tied back and pinned, gleamed with deep, gorgeous red shadows under her parasol. 

Concealed in her summer finery he sensed a slim, wild beauty with hips that tapered smoothly into long, straight legs. Gabrielle looked up at him with warm brown eyes, flecked with gold that seemed to sparkle on the surface of the rippling mirror.

Bret lowered his eyes and shook his head. But that was all in the carefree past of another century. Those thoughts and feelings had no place in the shrewd, levelheaded business of the new millennium.

After hot coffee, a hot shave was all a man needed to set things right
. While he was in town tomorrow he’d get a haircut and buy a few new shirts, and anything else that struck his fancy. Bret rose naked from bed. He stretched and walked up to the huge bay window of his bedroom. 

Parting the fine white muslin drapes he gazed out on the Gulf of Mexico shimmering in the endless blue under the brilliant summer sun beating down on the sandy beaches of Galveston.

Bret gazed down at the gently swelling waves reflecting the beauty of the cloudless sky. A group of young women dressed in their brightest Gibson girl tailored shirtwaist blouses and long skirts giggled and laughed as they plodded across the sparkling white sand clutching their parasols, beach umbrellas, and wicker picnic baskets.

Bret winced from the intensity of the sunlight and stepped back. How long had it been since he enjoyed an untroubled, relaxing day at the beach?

Was it with Gabrielle?

He closed his eyes, letting the healing rays burn away the last remaining darkness of his dreams.

CHAPTER 4

Saturday, August 25

Gabrielle fanned herself as she sipped iced tea on the veranda of her family home. She was barely listening to the men discussing politics and business but still kept a keen ear open for any comment or important piece of news that could help her family’s business.

On a summer day such as this, she much preferred the vivid bloom of the rosebushes that accented the bright pinks and yellows of the freshly painted homes on each side of the clean, wide street. 

It went without saying, of course, that Blue Haven
,
 her family’s grand, Beaux Arts-style mansion, was one of the more magnificent homes overlooking the Gulf, although some would say her father had close competition when speaking of the McGowan’s property.

But few people cared to speak of the McGowans these days in polite company.

Gabrielle stared at the shining water brimming with sailing boats and pleasure yachts enjoying the late summer sun. In the heat she was glad to have her hair pinned under her hat in a small coiffure of French twists that suited her dollish curls. A few loose, long tendrils brushed against the soft, blushing rose of her cheek.

In the distance, the bustling waterfront was crowded with cargo ships and commercial fishing boats. Before her mother fell ill, she used to bring Gabrielle to the dock fish market to buy fresh seafood. As a little girl, Gabrielle was enthralled watching the dock men hoist pulleys, lift bushel after bushel of fresh produce, and haul nets up overflowing with the daily catch.