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Authors: Brett Cogburn

BOOK: Panhandle
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I mumbled my good-byes, and left Long and his bride standing in my dust. If I had ridden fast and hard before, then I must have looked like I had hellhounds on my trail the way I left out of there. That damned Billy had killed my wife.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
ONE
I
t was New Year's Eve when I found Barby Allen laid up at Ft. Elliott with the post surgeon to tend her while she was on the mend. I felt like somebody had reached in and tore the heart out of me when I first laid eyes on her swaddled in fever blankets up to her chin. A weak, faint smile lit her face, and for once where she was concerned, I knew just what to do. I took a chair at her bedside, and proceeded in earnest to tell her how I felt about her. I told her about the hopes I had for the two of us, and the kind of man and husband I'd try to be for her. I swore by my soul and damnation that I'd never fail her, and that I loved her so much I was of a mind to kill my own best friend for putting her in such a shape.
“Put your little hand in mine, Barby, and say you'll marry me.”
All eternity's prospects seemed to hang in the balance for me, as suspended as the empty hand that I held out to her. That hand seemed to weigh twenty pounds as I waited and hoped for her to bring her own hand out from under her covers and to place it in mine. Barby's eyes turned down, and I heard the quaver of her chest as she sucked in a quick breath.
“Give me your hand, Barby,” I asked again, more softly than before—so softly in fact that my voice was lost to my own ears. It was as if I was afraid that even so subtle a thing as my own breath could blow away that fragile moment and tip me over the void above which I felt suspended.
“I'm going to have a baby,” she whispered, and her eyes never rose.
The knife fate had driven toward my heart never struck home. I have a lot to be ashamed of in my life, but that moment wasn't one of them. My hand steadied, and my heart grew strong. I knew that I wasn't worth one little drop of sweat on her upper lip even if you had chopped both the legs off of her right then, and damned her soul to perdition for the taint of her very name.
“Look me in the eye, and take my hand.”
Her eyes slowly rose to search my face for I don't know just what. After a long moment she timidly removed her hand from under her blankets and reached out to me. Big tears slid down her cheeks and she stopped her hand just short of mine.
The little hand she held up was missing the last two fingers—frozen to the quick in that terrible storm, and cut off by the surgeon. It was as if she purposely held it for my examination, as if to say, “This is what I am.”
I grabbed that beautiful, pitiful little hand and hung on for dear life. I kissed the bandaged stumps of those fingers of the past. “You're still beautiful.”
“You're a blind fool for wanting a crippled woman already carrying a bastard child two months grown,” she sobbed. “You don't want a loose woman.”
I stopped such talk with my finger across her lips. Half of a day went by while I pulled her to me and fervently plead my love, coaxing and comforting like some maddened priest from the mountains, come down to whisper prayers in the ears of all the wretched and abused.
“Will you marry me?”
“I love you, but I don't deserve you.”
“I had hoped you wouldn't figure out what a sorry catch I am until after I had a ring on your finger.”
She laughed for the first time, and smiled a little like her old self. I propped open the door to our room, and sat beside her on the edge of the bed where I could hold her. The two of us sat long into the night watching a full moon glowing so big it seemed just outside the door. The cast-iron stove in the corner ticked away the hours while I fell more in love with her than ever.
Long into the evening she finally looked up to me and whispered, “I'll be a good wife, I promise.”
I was sitting in a rocking chair watching her sleep when the surgeon walked in at daylight. After one of those doctor lectures about how much she needed her rest I decided to go see if I could find Billy and settle whatever needed settling between us. I shoved my hat on my head and headed out the door with bad things on my mind. “Remember your promise.” Barby's voice caught me at the door.
Right off the bat I was learning that women often couldn't be made to wake up when you wanted them to, and never seemed to sleep when you needed them to. I turned in the doorway to look at her, for I thought it could be the last time.
I had ridden to Mobeetie half ready to kill my best friend if Long's story proved true. Somewhere in the night, after hearing Barby's story, I had promised to forgive Billy, partly because she gave me no other options. If she and I were to have a life, then I had to act as if she and Billy had never met. I had to act as if my best friend had never lain with the woman I loved, and then dragged her into a blizzard to freeze her and the unborn child near death.
I nodded to let her know that I would keep my word, and walked out the door. The peaceful look on her face was no match for the hell in my heart. I had agreed to act like I forgave and forgot, but there was no forgiveness or memory loss in me right then. I would try my best, but Billy and I were going to come to an agreement about certain things, one way or another.
I made a long walk down the length of Mobeetie looking for Billy. Barby had told me the truth about her and Billy in the blizzard, and I could find no fault that belonged to him, except, perhaps for bad judgment in his choice of timing and weather. Still, a man set to steal my woman away and carry her across the plains horseback should keep his eyes on the skyline.
I guess what I aimed to settle with Billy was the fact that Barby belonged to me from then on. I was going to marry her, and be a father to the child he sired but would never know as his own. I didn't have a lick of give in me when it came to that. I knew how I felt about Barby, and thus assumed that Billy could feel the same way. Given that assumption, maintaining possession might end up a matter of the last man standing.
When I asked around for Billy I got a funny feeling and curious looks from people, even if they hadn't seen him. It seemed that folks were already forming their own opinions about Billy's escapade with a certain young lady of good standing currently healing up at the Post. Given that almost everybody knew that Billy and I were friends, nobody would tell me what rumors were going around.
I passed Barby's father storming up the street. He was making his way from the stage stop, and the driver was yelling after him about what to do with his luggage. Mr. Allen didn't stop, or even turn back to answer the driver. He was so wrought up with going to see his daughter for the first time that he didn't even acknowledge the friendly nod I passed his way; he just kept marching to the hospital. I decided I could deal with him later, and kept on my course.
When I stepped into the Lady Gay I immediately noticed one thing, and failed to notice another. The thing I noticed was Billy standing by himself at the far end of the bar. The thing I didn't notice was that everyone in the place was giving him so much room to himself that they had crowded back against the walls.
Billy looked at me over his drink, and a face that was momentarily hard started to soften, but didn't quite make it there. I still didn't have a clue just what I was going to say when I asked for a drink beside him. The bartender was taking his sweet time, and that left me standing at a loss.
“We've got some things to settle, Billy.”
He acted like he knew what was coming, and it bothered me some how he was standing with his right hip well clear of the bar and his right thumb hooked in his gun belt. But the look on his face wasn't threatening; in fact, I could see the emotion welling up in him.
“I'm sorry, Nate. I'm sorry for it all.” He said it like he really meant it.
“You like to have gotten her killed.”
I watched as he quietly soaked in what I'd said, and he never dropped his gaze from mine. He looked tired all over, and his eyes were bloodshot and haggard. It dawned on me that the five-day stubble of whiskers on his face was the first time I'd ever seen him unshaven.
“Some people are saying I got scared and left her out in the cold to save my own hide,” he said quietly.
“I know that ain't true.”
“You've been to see her?”
“I sat with her most of yesterday.”
“She told you all about it?”
I merely nodded my head at his question. She had indeed told me all about it. She had told me how she'd saddled the palomino before supper time, and then sneaked out to meet Billy outside of town that night. She told me how they laughed and talked on their way across the plains on the way to the dance, unaware of the cold marching rapidly down upon them. I held her while she relived the fear and the cold when they suffered their way blindly into the face of the norther, only to finally seek shelter in the lee side of a cutbank, where Billy failed to start a fire from the leftovers of an old wagon bed. And I had almost cried with the wishing I had been the one there to hold her close while they shivered and hurt as the storm tore over them.
“She told me she begged you to leave her and save yourself, and she told me you wouldn't go.”
“I didn't leave her until daylight when the blizzard was over. I didn't have a single match left, and we'd lost both our horses that night. I went to find them or somebody, because I knew I had to get her out of there. She didn't have anything left in her to get up and go with me.”
Even though I had heard it all from Barby, I could tell Billy had to tell me himself. I nursed the drink I really didn't want, and listened.
“I headed south and walked ten miles looking for those drifted horses. Every mile I was looking back over my shoulder, knowing I was getting farther from her and that the day was ticking by.
“The odds were long against it, but I found our horses still alive about late morning, but I couldn't catch mine. I took hers and struck out for where I'd left her, but he didn't have any speed left to give. It was just about noon when I rode up to where she should have been, only she wasn't. A bunch of the boys from down south were headed to Mobeetie late, and stumbled across her.”
As he told it, I remembered how she said she had crawled to the top of a rise and waved at them, and cried out for help with her voice so weak she was sure it wouldn't carry all the way to the passing men. She had been sure they would ride on to leave her to her fate, and that same fate she had already decided the departed Billy must have shared.
“I followed them up to town, but they were a half day ahead of me,” he added.
“I know, Billy, you don't have to tell me more.”
“Just want you to know I'm sorry, because I know how much you think of her.”
“Then why were you taking her to a dance?”
“Because I think just as much of her.” His tone left no doubt that he meant what he said.
There it was, out between us. The problem was that only one of us was to have her.
“We're getting married as soon as she's well,” I said without a clue as to how he would take it.
I believed him when he said he cared for her, and I understood the knife I'd slipped in his gut right then. His face turned harder, and I looked at a man close to the raw edge of something.
“I suppose you took the opportunity to talk me down a little, and talk yourself up pretty high at the same time.”
“You know me better than that. I asked her, and she said yes. That's all there was to it.”
Billy didn't like it any more than I would have, but he offered his hand. I was as false right then as Judas, because I took that hand. I shook his hand like all was settled when it wasn't, at least not on my part. I took his hand, because there was growing in me a terrible, weakening fear of his finding out about the child if I let on like he had more to answer for than just a blizzard and a dance.
“She couldn't have done better.” We both knew he said that only because that's what a friend and a good loser is supposed to do.
Deep down I knew how far I would have gone had things went differently. I was willing to lose my friend for Barby, but the same didn't seem to hold true for Billy. Right then, some of the anger in me toward him started to slowly seep out, if even by the stain of my own guilt.
“Nate, you'd better go along.” Billy's voice was as hard as nails.
I thought maybe he'd put up a front as long as he could where Barby was concerned, until I noticed he wasn't looking at me at all. Instead, he was looking over my shoulder toward the far end of the bar. I turned and saw Rory Donnovan was standing there facing us with a sneer on his drunken face.
“That man's been spreading it around that I ran out on her and left her to freeze to death,” Billy said.
I'd like to tell you that I tried to talk Billy out of what I could see was going to happen, but I didn't. I knew Billy too good to waste my time, and had I been in his shoes I wouldn't have taken it either. I'd never liked Rory Donnovan anyway. He was a loud-talking, greasy runt that cowboyed some, but spent most of his time out of work and hanging around with the Mobeetie crowd. Rumor had it that he had killed a man or two, but folks said that about everybody who acted tough those days. All I ever knew he'd done was beat a whore half to death in Caldwell, Kansas.

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