Prologue
Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, May 1836
NED’S STORY
Save for the steady plick, plock, plick of the longcase clock across the room, it was another cemetery-quiet night at the Hickory Bar. That was the saloon I established two years ago, shortly after graduating from school back east, coming west, losing my wife Lidyann and child in childbirth, and finding just enough silver in a sandstone deposit to buy out the barbershop and the cooper’s place. I knocked down the wall between them and used the barrels the cask-maker left behind to start distilling my own brands. One day, I hoped to sell them. First, I had to keep from going broke.
The Hick, as she’s called by those who love her, is just a big jump past Fort Gibson, whence came most of my legal clientele. The illegals—Creeks mostly—had a special knock they used at the back door in the small hours of the night to make their own private, illegal purchases. As of this evening, the Indians were my only regular customers, sometimes paying in gold dust; I hadn’t much use right now for the animals they also brought in exchange for alcohol, since there was no one around to enjoy my celebrated Three Hare and a Frog Stew.
The Hick was a very private place. The entrance was not at the front but on the side, on a broad alley. That kept the dust and the sound to a minimum. It also allowed me to focus on my job tending bar, not listen for every potential new customer. But there’s private . . . and there’s dead.
Right now, we were dead.
I take the liberty of sharing this little bit about myself and my place of business because, frankly, this is all the time I get in the footlights. Hereafter, the stage belongs to another. Another who is unlike any man who ever passed through my swinging doors. A man who would become a legend different from the legends he would talk to me about.
This night—the sixth in a row, by my mournful reckoning—the Hick lay as hollow and silent as the Liberty Bell. The chalkboard hanging behind me had the same scant menu it had a week ago. There was a section of the wall across from the door where I hung pictures drawn by customers of the strange things they had seen on their journeys, from man-bears to contraptions that flew. One of my regulars from the fort, a Frenchman, was an expert with the rapier and had given me such a relic to hang there. I looked at it often, thinking about the weapon that helped to conquer an old world compared to the new and better firearms that were spreading us west and south.
I had not added anything new to the wall for weeks. Things had been that way since the troops and harder-drinking officers of Fort Gibson had been sent south to babysit the war. Old Hickory, the president of the United States—for whom this institution was respectfully named—the great Andy Jackson had drug every man in uniform, and some who weren’t, from the garrison and sent them to the Texas border in case any Mexicans tried to enter the territory in pursuit of rebels. I didn’t know how that struggle for Texian independence was going, save that everyone was upset about the massacre at the Alamo. But I kept a flintlock musket under the bar in case any of Santa Anna’s weasels tried to enter the Hick. The only ones who liked those kill-minded loons were the Indians, only because the Mexicans were hated more.
I did have one customer at the moment, though. I’m pretty good at reading my customers, but this was a puzzle of a man.
The oil lamps nailed to the wall behind me, athwart the big mirror, cast just our two shadows across the half-dozen empty tables, the unlit lamps on them, and wooden floors, planks that were scuffed from boots on the bar side, scarred with barrels being rolled and tugged across the other.
The man at my bar was about sixty. He might’ve been younger; it was tough to say with a face so cracked and lined it looked like sunbaked clay. He wore a beard, though that might be from inattention rather than choice. It was careless and naturally uneven. My customer hadn’t bothered to take off his hat, so I couldn’t see anything above the middle of his nose. But the tilt of his head said he was looking down. Remembering, from the stillness of him; tired men don’t sit still, they pass out. I couldn’t tell the man’s trade, either. He didn’t stink like a trapper or a ranch hand, which was most of my trade that weren’t soldiers or Indians. There was a faint smell of gunpowder about him, possibly from the two Colt revolvers I saw him wearing when he walked in. The firearms were new but these did not gleam in the light. They looked as toughened as their owner. There was also a long, sheathed knife tied to his right leg.
The man’s clothes looked as weathered as the man who wore them. He had on a sheepskin vest, dirtier I’m sure than the sheep who once wore it. His slouch hat was probably gray under its uneven, dusty coat. His beard and moustache were as ungroomed and woolly as his vest, though they were definitely gray. He had likely washed his face in the horse trough after riding in from wherever he’d come. The mouth tucked amongst the whiskers was pencil straight and only moved for the intake of liquor.
This gentleman’s tall, lean frame was bent over slightly, like there was a slow-leaking sack of grain on his shoulders; they had risen just a little since he sat down. He was leaning mostly on his left hand, which was flat-open on the bar. The other hand did not release the glass. I’ll get to those hands in a moment.
He was drinking the house whiskey—Wildnut by name, on account of the bit of walnut I brewed in with the alcohol, sugar, and chewing tobacco. He had sat there for maybe ten, fifteen minutes before gulping the glass down. Then he sat there some more, not moving, not saying anything. I gave him a shot on the house, not even sure he could pay for the first one, but what the hell. Another one might open him up, help me pass the night. The man acknowledged by raising a finger. He didn’t look up, he didn’t say thanks, he just lifted that finger—which, like the rest of him, looked like it had seen better days. Now I’ve seen stranger fingers since I draped that big OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outdoors that got blown away the first day. I saw one that got flattened by a cow and looked like a spoon; one that got shot off by an arrow at the knuckle, leaving little notches in the adjoining fingers; one with a tattoo of a naked squaw who danced when it moved. There’s a lot of uncommonness comes through my swinging doors.
But these fingers were not simply grotesque, they were—I once heard a traveling salesman describe a brass nutcracker as “utile,” and I would use that word to describe eight of these fingers. They were straight and they were filed or stropped sharp, except for the trigger fingers. Those nails were sawed-off at the tip. The skin was also utile—rough-looking, almost like tree bark. Taken as a whole, each hand had four sturdy little knives like some beastie from the English penny awfuls I read when I attended the Philadelphia College of Apothecaries. The creatures and unnatural beasts of those stories gave me the shivers, and so did these devilish little fingers. And they hadn’t even done anything, except one of them coming briefly to attention.
That was the thing about this man. Based on absolutely nothing that he had done, he seemed like a coiled snake, just waiting for the wrong thing to make him strike. I didn’t want any question of mine to be that wrong thing, so after pouring the second drink I walked away to blow dust from the bottles that lined the wall under the mirror.
But I glanced at him again, though, at his reflection. And I saw something I did not expect to see.
A single lamplit tear on his left cheek.
There being no minted money in these parts, not yet, I was always curious to see what my customers would offer for payment. This man had a pouch under a kerchief and used a long nail to hook out a lump of gold. He dropped it like a shovel emptying dirt. I swept it up, put it in the till behind me, and turned back to him. “Do you have a place to stay?”
After dusting and polishing and stepping outside to look at the full moon, I risked asking that question because it was not personal, it showed polite concern, my voice was quiet like I was talking to a spooked mustang, and it was the kind of thing any barkeep would hospitably be expected to inquire about.
It was the first time I heard or saw the man breathe. He drew air through his nose, the mouth still not moving—though, while I was distracted by my busywork, he had managed to empty the second glass.
“The question I have been pondering, sir,” he replied in a deep, quiet voice, “is do I have a place to go?”
He obviously did not mean for the night. His searching question—though directed more at the surface of the bar than at me—prompted me to ask, “May I inquire where you have come from?”
I thought he had gone dumb on me again when he finally answered in a voice barely more than a whisper, “El degüello.”
That was Mexican death music. It signified the slitting of the throat, murder without quarter. I had heard it discussed by the soldiers, in particular a bugler who played the damn thing and brought the kind of silence to the Hick that is reserved for churches and piano recitals.
The man’s dull, mournful reply suggested one answer to all the questions I had.
“You were there,” I said.
I didn’t have to say where “there” was. His silence was my answer.
He had come from the Alamo.
I moved away slowly, respectfully giving him room to reflect without distraction. But he did not seem to need—or want—privacy. He looked up for the first time, that single streak now dry on his cheek. The face was like something on a Creek totem, stiff and grim. But the eyes were bright and green, almost like emeralds with a touch of mint.
“I was there but I was not,” he said. “God Almighty, I was unable to help my brethren.”
As he spoke, and probably without realizing it, he used the sharp middle finger of his left hand to cut what looked like a small cross in the drink-stained surface of my oak bar.
“What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?” I asked anyway.
“John,” he replied wearily, as if he were falling asleep and already had one foot in a dream.
“I’m Nedrick,” I told him, a little more sprightly. “Nedrick Bundy.”
If he heard, he made no indication. “The degüello,” he said again.
“What about it?” I asked.
A pained squint slowly closed in around John’s eyes. “They needed guns. Men. You know what I had?”
“Tell me,” I said.
He was still looking through me with those narrowed eyes. A second tear followed the first. It was not a dream but a nightmare he was in.
John uttered a single word with such sadness, such longing, that it uncorked a bottle of hurt that just flowed . . .