“What kind of boy were you?” Son asked.
Branch said, “My mother said she saw will and determination in the way I learned my lessons and shied away from the other children, except for one boy there. At the start that friendship was as much a standoff as a friendship. But it was something we each recognized in the other. That and we both loved animals—and fairness. So we could relax with each other.”
Branch watched strangers meeting Son for the first time. Often they tried to talk to him like being blind meant that he didn’t have good sense. Branch would see them thinking he was a fool, and then get put in their place. By the time Son got through with them their mouths would be hanging open and they’d be scratching their heads, wondering what just happened. But one thing for sure, they had learned something, something about the world, or themselves, or something. After, they were some ways different, that was guaranteed.
That, Branch knew, was because Son had so much common sense, more even than most old, grizzled people. Probably Branch included.
Neither Son nor Pearl thought being blind had any bearing on what the boy could do. If he didn’t do it, his attitude said, it was because he didn’t want to, didn’t need to, didn’t have to, or just hadn’t gotten around to it. Not that different than Branch’s adopted family had made him feel about himself.
His mama, Pearl, was a handsome woman and a good mother. Among the three best Branch’d ever seen, including his two. But good as she was she was a woman and a mother and the boy needed a man to fill in the other parts of him. Son knew it and spent as much time as he could with the other men of the house, sopping up what he could from them as he did with everything. The boy was like a cactus in that. And was as curious as a cat. He demanded information. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t ask, and he took it all to heart, which was why Branch took time with and had serious interest in the boy.
Son asked what he thought about Hitler.
“He’s a bully. I do not abide bullies,” Branch said. “They’re only strong because they make you think they are. And the longer you believe it the stronger they get.”
“Who taught you that?”
“My Uncle. He taught me a great many things.”
“Did your father teach you things too?”
“I had two fathers, and that uncle.”
“Two fathers?
My first, my real father, died.”
“Like mine.”
Branch told Son of a saying from his uncle: “‘Only say what you mean, mean what you say, be true to your word, and people will respect your strength.’ Do you understand?”
“Even from a boy?”
“Yep.”
“Even from me?”
“You too. But you won’t be a boy much longer.”
That was what he wanted to know most about. Being a man. Asked Branch about his father. What had his father taught him?
“To treat people with respect, and they were more likely to treat you the same way.”
“Even white people?”
Branch thought about it, allowed, “Even some white people.” Thought about it some more. “And horses.” That, Branch said, was why he most often preferred horses to people. Horses didn’t discriminate. They didn’t have the capacity for being cruel based on race hatred. “You ever been on a horse?”
“Just behind one, in the wagon with Mr. Amalfi. He let me guide sometimes—but mostly the horse knew the route. I was in an airplane one time,” Son said.
“I grew up around horses. Fact, I learned about respect from horses.”
“How?”
“When I was a little older than you my father got possession of a horse everybody thought ought to be put down. It had been mistreated and was so skittish nobody could get near it—nobody but my father.”
“And you?”
“Not at first.”
His (second) father, Haskell, showed him to approach the horse without fear, showing respect, expecting it. Over time, with gentle treatment, and respect for who the horse was, and the troubles it had had, his father won the horse’s trust and was able to bring it back to health and usefulness.
It was from his uncle that he learned about the book American Notes by Charles Dickens. Had Son heard of it?
Nope. Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, which he’d heard adaptations of on the radio, but not that one.
“It was about Dickens’ trip to a place, I don’t remember the name, in Boston. He told stories to the boys and girls there, who were blind, like you, but also couldn’t speak or hear.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were taught to make things and use a signing language to communicate.”
He thought for a moment. His silence gave no hint as to his thoughts.
“We have an advantage,” Branch said, “and a disadvantage. When people don’t know us, and what we’re capable of—who we are—then they underestimate us. That’s the advantage part. But if they know us they try twice as hard because of who they think we are—how good we are.”
Son felt two jabs from Branch’s fingertip: one to his chest, the second to his forehead. “What they don’t know is that they don’t matter. It’s about us, not them. We’re not trying to beat them, or be smarter than them. Being the best at what we’ve been taught—that’s what drives us. Only we can know how good we can be.”
The boy said nothing. Only slightly nodded.
He knew how to be quiet. He would be good on a hunt.
Another night. The Lone Ranger had said his final A-wayyy! Tonto by his side, they had galloped off at the end of another episode brought to them from WXYZ.
“He’s for justice,” Son said.
“What is justice?” Branch asked.
“Things coming out right. Right?”
“Right.”
“Where in the old west did you grow up?”
“Malone, Oklahoma. An all-colored town.”
“Wow.”
“Till then it was the first big town I was ever in.”
“Mama and I were in lots of towns, big, little, middle sized. Where were you before you were in Malone, Oklahoma?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me?”
Old Miller’s Allotment, Oklahoma. 1910.
Knew, the boy did, he was the first to see the approaching figure, floating from far as his eye could reach, forward on the flat of the Oklahoma prairie, as if through waves of water. Not that he’d ever seen any more water than down a well or in a creek wider than a running leap at its width. A man, it was sure, rising over the eastern edge of the world like in the beginning of the dream of his. Coming beeline straight, but as deliberate as Bossie at her cud.
Being the first to rise it was his privilege to be the first to espy the figure. And thought, who first must he tell? The two asleep in the barn he had just emerged from, who had arrived in a like manner two days ago? They had specifically told him to tell them in the event of another’s coming. Or tell Niall, likely still asleep in the mud house behind him? Or tell the woman, who’d be by now at her first morning stirrings? Let her tell Niall, their boss.
What he had an impulse to do was not let on at all to any of them. His knowing, and their ignorance, was two things of his own to hoard. Though he knew that if he did not tell at all, or delayed too long in the telling, it too would cost him. He weighed the worth of what pleasure there was of having the secret knowledge of the approaching man—what in the name of thunder was taking him so long—that none of the other of them did, against the certainty of reprisal from some or all concerned. Deciding that although being buoyed on the raft of his secret was like hurtling toward an impending falls, the thrill of even the limited time of his ride was worth it.
His reentering the barn where they were sleeping awakened the men.
“Somebody’s coming.”
They started as if dowsed with cold water. Pelting him with questions and curses they scrambled about, struggling to their feet, wiping at their eyes with the heels of their hands, brushing straw from their hair, stomping into their boots, strapping on their gun belts.
“How many?”
“How far off?”
“Why the hell’d you wait so long to tell us?” the younger one asked, gripping the boy hard by his upper arm before shoving him stumbling, cross-footed, through horseshit and against the stable wall.
“Was whoever it was close enough to tell who it was?” the older one asked.
As if none of it was of any matter to him, he didn’t answer as he moved methodically about his horse dung-shoveling chore.
They, unshaven, ash blond and hazel-eyed, had come in like coyotes two nights before. He’d overheard them tell Niall they were willing to pay for sip and sup and a place to lay their heads. Niall had greedily agreed without explanation of where they’d left or were headed. Didn’t care as long as they paid in advance and gave assurance they’d tarry no more than the time they’d paid for.
They offered the boy the payment of a nickel for keeping an eye out for approaching strangers, again with no explanation for their request.
The men, brothers, scurrying like ants at a drop of rain, were considering contingencies. Arguing about what they should do and who should do what and when and how.
The younger one, undercover, weaseled around to the sod house; the other stayed out in the barn. The boy was delegated to go out and greet whoever the hell it was.
Standing in the yard, the pitchfork tines resting in the dirt when the man halted his horse. He dismounted, horse between him and the barn. He was lean and average tall. Somewhere between a town man and a cowboy. A wide-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat shaded his bronze brown face, about the same color, the boy thought, as me. The man was Negro with the look of some Cherokee. He was not mustached or bearded but needed a shave.
He wore a trail-soiled white linen shirt, buttoned at the wrists and neck under a dark, dusty vest, and dark, ribbed-textured pants tucked into calf-high brown boots. Cartridge-filled belt with what looked to be a Colt Dragoon revolver on his right hip. He held his lever-action carbine, its blue barrel up against his left shoulder. But most notable was a round, gold lawman’s badge centered with a five-point star pinned two or three inches above the top left-hand pocket of his vest.
The boy felt the man slowly and totally surveying the layout of the sorry allotment for signs of movement near the various clumps and implements that could hide a man. Foremost being the soddy house, like a dauber’s nest of mud, stacked stone, buffalo grass, and castoff canvas, burrowed in a small hillock. All of it old, old when first taken up by its present owner, and now in even greater state of misuse, at the hands of one ill-suited for its care.
Then the man turned his inspecting gaze on him. He felt his heart double pump, leap like a hard-spurred horse, like it did during a hundred nights with the dream that startled him to waking among the stable’s chorus of nights sounds: scurry and squeak of rats, pouncing of cats, screech of owls, horses’ clipped whinnies and snores as they flinched through their dreams. His awakening always so sudden and disquieting that he could not remember what it was that came immediately before the snatch from one mind to the other. He stood not skittish but straight, flat-footed, braced as if for a blow or lash. Wanted the man, who looked like he had come to wake snakes, to know something of him, whatever might come after. That he was not of these people, only subject to their maltreatment, same as the other things in Niall, the squatter’s seeing.
“There strangers here?” the man asked him quietly, his tone and look expecting nothing but the truth.
Looking him in the eye, the boy nodded once.
“House or the barn?”
The boy nodded to the barn and then to the house.
The man took the pitchfork from the boy and drove its tines into the ground.
“Walk my horse to the trough and give him water,” the lawman said. “Then fill the canteens and stay at the well until I’m through with my business here.”
He took the reins, leading the horse away.
The lawman announced, loud enough to be heard in both structures, “I am Cochrane Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. I have an affidavit for the apprehension of Gideon and Zachariah Turlock. Turlocks, show your selves and submit to arrest, or suffer the consequences.”
On seeing the way the lawman had taken the measure of his surroundings, the boy had thought him a man of caution. Where, the boy wondered with building anger at the man’s recklessness, is the caution in standing unprotected in the line of fire from both places, and I already told him where they at?
Niall Burleson, the boss, ruddy, red-headed, came out like he was mad as a peeled rattler, his attention on the lawman, but cussing the boy as he crossed the yard, the pistol in the waistband of his pants, his hand on the handle. Niall saying in his sing-songy way of speaking around what was likely a new chaw of tobacco, “I’m Niall Burleson. Owner of the place. Did you bloody ask me if you could be watering his fucking harse?”
Niall, tough as Old Testament vengeance on a boy and a woman, didn’t drink to get mean, the boy thought. He could quickly get that way without drinking a drop. Just come on him like a fever. And when on him it was deep as it was wide. See how, the boy thought, he fares with this man in the flat straw hat, star badge on his vest, carbine leaned on his shoulder.
Niall nearly across the yard saying now to the man, “Did you ask for my water?”
The lawman repeating, “I am Cochrane Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. I have an affidavit for the apprehension of Gideon and Zachariah Turlock. Unhand the weapon.”
Niall drawing up short then, them within three strides of one another.
“Unhand the weapon,” the lawman said. “My business is not with you.”
“Any business here starts with me,” Burleson said, adjusting the chaw until it was in place. “This is my bloody property.”
“You are harboring fugitives, Gideon and Zachariah Turlock by name. Send them out and I’ll have them off your property before you know it.”
“Get, goddamn you!”
His tone the same as when he first spoke to the boy, the lawman said, “Lay that firearm down, and if you jump funny I’ll knock you cockeyed.”
Niall Burleson didn’t move.
Neither did the lawman. Instead he asked, “What is that boy to you?”
Without looking back Niall said, “He’s nothing.” And spit a skeet of tobacco near the man’s boots. “Drug in about a year ago like a wet cat out of the rain.”
“Are you are the cause of his condition?”
“He ain’t complained,” Niall said, his hand, well-practiced at beating the boy and woman to blisters, still on the weapon. “He’s working off the debt of my taking him in. I treat him ’cording to his worth . . .” was as much as Niall could say before Utterbach stove in his nose and mouth with the brass-trimmed butt of his rifle. The spattering of bone, teeth, and blood sounded, even to where the boy stood, like a bundle of dry kindling was snapped.
The lawman’s started, like he said he would, the boy thought, standing still and silent beside the lapping horse.
Niall slumped to his knees, moaning into the blood in his cupped hands. The lawman knelt in front of Niall, partially blocking him from view from the house. He pulled the handgun from the groaning man’s belt and stuck it into his own. He raised his rifle and aimed it at the slowly opening door of the barn and the owl-like complaint of its rusty hinges.
“Gideon Turlock in the shed, you are in my sights.”
The words froze Turlock like the unexpected sound of a snake’s rattle.
The lawman said, “I come to deliver you to the justice you deserve. The manner of that delivery will be of your choosing. Throw your weapon out and follow it. Am I clear?”
Across the yard the penned hogs paid no mind as Turlock stepped out the barn entrance, his pistol half raised.
“You broke his god-damned face.”
“Turlock, drop the pistol. Come to me, or go to God.”
“Fuck you, you black son of a bitch.”
“I take your words as resistance to my intention.”
“Right, goddamn you,” he said, raising the pistol.
Gideon Turlock, shot in the chest by the lawman, dropped to the dirt like a hay bale kicked from a cloud.
The pigs squealed at the sound of the shot and then their snouts in the slop returned to their rut and snuffle.
The lawman stood and moved quickly by Niall, still kneeling in the dirt and moaning in his hands. He ran to the windowless soddy wall and stood with his back against it, his carbine newly cocked.
From inside, Zachariah, with a howl like a coyote’s, wailed his brother’s name.
“Zachariah,” the lawman called out, “Gideon, by his resistance, has forced me to shoot him.”
“Did you kill him, you son of a bitch?”
“I give you the option I gave him. This is a sorry place to die.”
“Maybe I won’t.”
“You will. Surrender or suffer the consequences. Do you understand?”
“I want to see my brother.”
“Step out.”
“Gideon!” Zachariah called from inside to no answer. “All this over some old nigger?”
“That you killed,” the lawman said.
“Did you kill my brother, you son of a bitch? Is he dead?”
“You understand my terms. I await your decision.”
“You think you can kill my brother, and I’m going to surrender back to your nigger town?”
“Either way it’s likely your last day in the sunshine.”
Zachariah burst from the weathered canvas-covered doorway, cursing and shooting, but not knowing where his target was. He realized too late.
And now the lawman’s done, thought the boy who had observed it all as steadily as he did each evening, watching the sun’s slow bleed, red as a reopened wound, over the western edge. Not, as in that instance, squinting, eyes slightly averted, but looking directly into the heart of the lawman’s doings. Wanted to yell for him to kill them! Kill them all . . . her too, still in the house, who had stood, watching in taciturn disinterest when Niall had been teaching him with a stick of wood to properly mind . . . Kill them in a flood of Hell fire, but the words stacked against his voice box like rocks damming stream waters, and he stood mute.
Through it all the lawman’s horse had kept lapping water, like it was deaf, or had seen it all before.
The woman came out then, her face white as milled flour, her hands up, and like a cur trained by the boot, cautiously approached Niall still kneeling in the dirt, rocking, moaning, and muttering. She was not cautious enough, for in his pain and anger Niall swung a bloody backhand fist, striking her weakly on her leg as he sputtered a profanity, but for his effort paid the price of additional pain. The woman cringed away. Niall then waved a searching, bloody-palmed hand in her direction and she stepped forward again. His hand clenched her skirt, and crying and gurgling, he gingerly rested his forehead against her thighs.
The lawman told them, “I repeat, I am Cochran Utterbach, deputy marshal, and officer of the court of Malone County, Oklahoma. The purpose of my visit is completed. But when this boy tells me your parts in the nature of his condition I might return. Meanwhile we’ll be in Malone. Now, you have seen what I do. If there is any part of what you have caused here you do not accept, we can continue. Is there any part of this that is not clear?”
The dog, sniffing about Zachariah’s sprawled body, nipped at the circling flies.
“He understands,” the woman said, helping the stumbling Niall to his feet.
“In addition,” Utterbach continued, “if I see you in Malone I will assume, until I know otherwise, you have come with larceny in your heart, rather than an apology on your tongue. Is that clear also?”
Several chickens were pecking at the teeth in the dirt as if they were bloody kernels of corn. Niall attempted to kick at them and lost his balance, falling against the woman with a pained grunt. She cooed softly to the man who had maltreated her. “I know him,” she said, leading Niall, half bent, waddling wide-legged, leaving a weaving trickle of blood, as if he were trailing a snake. “You explained it clear.” Stopping to gently pat his back as he shook through his belly’s wrenching discharge. “He understands,” she said. She continued guiding him to the well.
He started it and now he is done, the boy thought, as he led the watered horse back to the lawman. He wondered how many men over time the brown-skinned man had killed.
“You saw it all?”
The boy nodded. Knew these were not his first.
“You had breakfast?”
The boy shook his head, indicating he wasn’t hungry.
“Get what belongs to you and a horse. You’re coming with me.”
The boy took the bay Gideon Turlock had ridden in on, and the tack and trail gear with it. He had nothing of his own to take, not even the nickel from the Turlocks he was owed.
To Malone
As noon was approaching and they had been riding for four hours or so, moving across the terrain like two ants on a tabletop, the lawman said, “Telling each other stories is how people get to know one another. I’ll start.”
For the three days of their journey, riding deeper into the empty terrain, he told a sluice of tales, breaking the boring sameness of the skillet bottom-flat western high plains: short grass, dry lakes, the occasional sagebrush: coyotes, deer, antelope, quail, prairie dogs, or small herds of cattle watering themselves in a stream near the occasional distant homestead of sod brick dwelling, outhouse, barn, or shed—the family pausing from their toil to stare and wave, their yelling children and yapping dog running along after, until ordered to halt and scuff back to their chores and sentry duty. For the boy these lasted only however long it took for them to appear and then for them to pass from his view. He did not look back, as if assuming they would not be there if he did. Only later did it occur to him that the lawman’s wave to the distant people had not solely been a polite gesture of acknowledgement but of thanks for their assisting him in his search for the Turlocks.
Meanwhile the lawman told of the sorrowful history of how Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek came at gunpoint, staggering and bedraggled to Oklahoma. How it was cruelty in its most treacherous form. Told of the history of coloreds there, escaping new forms of after-Reconstruction slavery. Told too, on that first day and evening, of his family, of his father’s place, as an Indian-fighting soldier from seventeen, good man that he was, in Oklahoma’s story. Told of his brother Haskell, who ran a stable, feed, and transport business in Malone, and his sister-in-law Florine Bell, the schoolmistress.
They stopped that first evening, as would be their pattern, while there was still light to read by after a simple supper. The lawman reading aloud by last daylight and then campfire from American Notes by Charles Dickens, detailing the Englishman’s travels by rail, coach, and steamship during his trip to America, mostly way out east. The boy slept a tossed, grunting sleep.
The man said the morning of the second day, “I must be telling it well, since there have been no interruptions for events to be clarified or people to be explained.” Then for much of that day he told about the land, its ways, and the secrets of surviving it.
The boy listened, deep. Not missing a word of the stories, or readings, or the way Cochrane Utterbach did all he did. The way he walked, talked, was aware of where he was, as he had been in the yard.
“My daddy used to say you let a man know that you hold him in respect and it’s likely he will rise to your expectations,” the lawman said on the third evening. “Said, Make no enemies by mistake.”
It was too dark to read under the cloudless, twinkling night canopy, them stretched out beside a trickling spring, propped against their saddles, the winking flames of the ticking twig fire licking at the blackness. As his goodnight, Utterbach said, “We get to Malone in the morning. If you want, no matter what went on before, your new life can start right now. Do you understand?”
It was then the boy spoke. Told him, a word at a time:
Everybody had died but him. Sister got an achy, vomiting cold, believed to have been the Spanish flu. Mother thought if looked after proper it would be gone in three days. Instead, by the fourth, it was Sister who was gone. Buried among the patch of primroses she so loved. Three weeks later Mother went down with the same symptoms. He and Father, at Mother’s insistence, had slept in the barn, and therefore thought that explained their survival. Then Father contracted it, with the same result.
He, for who else was there, had buried them, as best he could, in shallow, stone-topped graves by the flowerbed. And then with what he could carry on horseback wandered until near death to, if it was called anything, Old Miller’s Place. Wondered why Niall Burleson, who already had a dog and a woman to fetch and beat, didn’t run him off, or, just let him die.
Said he had thought about running away but had feared there was no escape across the flat of the ever-same emptiness.
Said that much and then quit, though there was still so much he couldn’t make himself tell.
That night he slept through moonset without dreaming.
The next forenoon, after having passed the increasing scatter of farms and ranches, Utterbach halted his horse, handed a pair of binoculars to the boy, and pointed ahead of them.
He saw the train off to their right crawling along the far horizon like a linked line of ants inching its way toward a point right-angle to their route, and its whistle that he had heard some nights back, stealing in on eastern night winds faint as a mouse’s heartbeat. That had made him hug himself as he trembled nearly to weeping.
The boy had already seen the town, had watched it grow, as it was rising from the ditch where the dusty flat of the earth met the expanse of rain-gray sky.
Two circles hot against his sockets, unfocused at first at his memory of his recurring dream on waking, then converging to one circle, and with a last slight adjustment of the binoculars’ knob there it was, the town in sharper detail. Buildings, and smoke, but still too far distanced to make out people or horses.
Utterbach, in that moment, quiet as the boy had been over their time together.
The boy handed the device back. He told himself he had known this day was coming. It was the final seen but unseen part of what he had dreamed.
The lawman hayed his horse and the boy hayed his. The lawman picked up his story where he had left off, the boy watching, trying to control his breathing, as they approached Malone. A place with colors and no hateful people, a place he had wanted so hard he thought maybe that he had willed it with each body clench, lip bite, and fist clutch against stinging blows from Niall’s lash across his back, hinny, and thighs.
When they reached Malone the train had arrived before them and was being readied for departure. The engine was a shiny black, steam-snorting bull, hunkered, ready to heave up and roar forth. The depot on the left at the end of the main street was empty of passengers and freight that had been on board. The lumberyard was on their right.
As much time as he had spent—multiple days dreaming and fitful, half-awake a.m. hours—constructing detail by detail the world over the gray horizon, nothing had prepared him for the sudden whirl storm of unimagined things that swept across the flat gray plains of his vision and limited experience. It was a swirling whirl of eye-popping new. Two-story-building tall poles strung together with wire running down the length of both sides of the main street and alongside the railroad tracks from way, way back until way, way off where they met at a dot.
Machines, horseless carriages that he had only heard spoken about. They seemed smaller versions of the train engine, self-powered and of shiny metal, with room for two or four. The horses didn’t take notice or shy away at the loud chug and honk of them as he did.
They crossed the railroad tracks, and were on Malone’s main street, lined on both sides with commercial establishments. Buildings with specific purposes—bank, hotel, restaurants, stores, and others, including the stable—none of which had been detailed in his dream.
The thing his dream or the binoculars had helped him foresee was the color in the town, the surprise of the stunning-hued signs, facades, products, their containers, and the cheerful clothing of the townspeople. It was like a dream garden. He had not seen colors to match since the primroses and petunias where he had put his people.
Malone on first impression was a place of laughter and high chins and postures like iron poles on the townspeople—mostly, it seemed, people of color and Seminoles and Creeks in broad-brimmed hats—who spoke, nodded, hunched one another, and stared, questions on their faces. Pointing.
He and Deputy Marshall Cochrane Utterbach reached the stable, harness, saddlery, and horseshoeing establishment on the main street near the edge of town. A small crew of coloreds serviced customers on horseback and in wagons. And a man in a derby, a leather apron over his clothes, came out grinning. He featured the lawman except for his drooping mustaches. The brother, the boy figured. Haskell Utterbach. They embraced and expressed their genuine joy at seeing each other. After their greeting they spoke softly below the conversations of the customers and clang of horseshoeing, the stable man nodding before slapping Cochran on his shoulder and reentering the stable.
Cochran motioned to the boy to dismount, and a young man came from inside the stable and took charge of their horses.
They stepped up onto the long boardwalk that ran the length of the block of buildings, the lawman’s treads echoing with each step.
“Is the judge about?” Utterbach asked, as he stopped in front of the U.S. Land Office to converse with the three men lounging, laughing, whittling, chawing, smoking there, who proved to be lawmen like him.
Teasing the lawman: “See you brought in a desperado.”
“Looks like he put up quite a fight.”
Laughter.
“There a price on his head, Cochran?”
“Price? Or lice?” someone asked.
Laughter.
The lawman cussed them good-naturedly, and once their joviality faded one asked, “You find the Turlocks?”
The boy wandered a few steps off, head swimming in the blazing of sights and smells, sawdust, paint, food odors, perfume, liquor, and sounds, layers of conversations, wondering if he would ever be able to go to sleep among all the bustle and confusion. He moved up the plank sidewalk to the general store to look in though the polished glass. Saw instead a skinny scarecrow in tatters in front of a boy in city clothes. He turned quickly and the city boy was there. Wearing a cloth cap, store-bought jacket with too-short sleeves, knee britches, long socks, and ankle high shoes. There was no scarecrow behind the town boy. They stared at each other until the town boy held his nose, crossed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue before he raced off laughing as if in tickled terror toward the train as it whistled, bellowed, and churned into motion.
The boy turned quickly back to the reflection in the window glass to see the scarecrow turn as he turned to face it. He was the scarecrow in filthy tatters. He stared in wonder at the grimy bundle of rags he was clothed in. That was the condition the marshal had referred to and held Niall responsible for back in the yard! He began to itch, as if the lack of awareness of how he must look to others had protected him from realization of the filthiness that covered him.
His stare was broken by the lawman’s whistle and motion for him to come.
The Turlocks will maraud no more, was how the lawman put it to the man he introduced as Judge Cleve Chitwood. Asked by the judge why had he not brought the bodies as usual, the lawman said for one thing he left an ignorant, heavy-handed Irish son-of-a-bitch some chores to do while he healed.
“And?”
“Brought a reliable eyewitness instead,” Utterbach said.
“That?” The judge asked.
“My witness.”
The boy stared at the shelves of what he guessed to be law books in the back room of the U. S. Land Office. They were the first books of any kind he had seen since he wandered from his home.
Called by the judge, the thin man on crutches they had passed in the outer office hobbled in, propped his crutches against the wall, and sat at the side desk. They gave him time to get ready. When he nodded the lawman spoke his deposition, as the judge called it, and the thin man wrote.
“I, Cochran Utterbach, Deputy Marshal of Randolph County, Oklahoma, am speaking in the matter of the deaths of fugitives Gideon Turlock and Zachariah Turlock, brothers, wanted in the county of Monroe, state of Oklahoma, for the crime of murder.”
The boy watched the ink pen dipping, lifting, soaring like a hawk on the wind, flowing the words onto the paper, as Utterbach told how it had been back there outside in the yard. His part in it, how he had cooperated in the apprehension by volunteering the whereabouts of the felons, was included. The lawman then looked the paper over and signed it.
“And as my witness,” Utterbach said and turned to him.
“Are you of sound mind?” Judge Chitwood asked.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, although he was not totally sure.
“Can you read and cipher?” the judge asked.
“I learned some—before,” was as honest as he could be.
“Do you know who the president of the United States of American is?”
“It was President Taft.”
“Still is.”
“Yes sir. William Howard.”
The judge nodded. Did he know the year?
That he was certain of. “1910.”
“Right you are. Place your left hand on the bible,” the judge said to him.
He did, raising his right as the lawman Cochran Utterbach had done.
“Repeat after me,” the judge said. “I . . .”
“I . . .”
“State your name,” the thin man said, not looking up.
“Your name,” the boy said.
“Tell your name.”
“Branch Ottley.” He felt foolish.
“I, Branch Ottley.”
“I, Branch Ottley.”
“Do swear . . .”
“Do swear . . .” Trying at the same time to watch the pen writing his words, and to keep his hand from trembling like an anxious dog due a whipping. The pen dipping, gliding along the paper.
“That the foresaid facts relating to Deputy Cochran Utterbach’s attempt to arrest Zachariah and Gideon Turlock for the crime of murder, and their subsequent actions of resistance that resulted in the deaths of the Turlock brothers . . .”
He repeated the judge’s words.
“Are exact as you witnessed them?”
“Are exact as I witnessed them.”
The judge nodded, moving the bible away. “Anything to add to this account, Master Ottley?”
“No sir.”
“Thank you very much sir.”
The writing man blotted the white paper with a smaller square of green and handed it to the judge, who looked over as the thin man dipped the pen, tapped off the excess, and offered it to the boy. The boy took it, his hand trembling.
“Affix your signature or mark,” the judge said.
Branch Ottley feared he had forgotten his letters and how to sign his name. Willing himself not to look at either of them, and with a heavy hand, he scratched his shaky signature into the paper. He laid the pen down and stepped back, sweating, smelling the stink of his clothes and himself, and studied the grain in the floor.
The judge picked up the pen and signed the document, blew on it, and handed it back to the thin man. “Mr. Ottley, you are now an official part of the history of the town of Malone, Oklahoma territory.”
On meeting Branch Ottley, Haskell’s wife Florine Belle, smiling her sunrise smile, asked, “Should we feed him before we bathe him, or you think we might lose him in the deluge of resulting mud?”
“How did you feel all that time, before that lawman came to save you?” Son asked.
“He didn’t come to save me,” Branch said.
“But he did.”
“He didn’t even know I was going to be there.”
“I was.”
“And you thought it was your fault?”
“What? That he killed them?”
“No. Before he came. Your fault that you couldn’t do anything?”
“Like what?”
“Get away.”
“Maybe. You ask tough questions. At first I was a little mad at him.”
“Who? That Irishman Niall? I would have been too. A lot.”
“At the lawman, my uncle—”
Son knew to wait.
“—for taking so long to come.”
“But you didn’t know he was coming.”
“Not him, but somebody.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Sometimes I knew somebody would come because I wished it so hard. But sometimes I knew Niall would kill me, or I would just die, before anybody came.”
“Were you scared when he came and started fighting with Niall and the Turlocks?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember watching him.”
“Was he scared?”
“He told me later that all he focused on was what he was doing.”
“Not even that they might shoot him?”
“Nope. That’s what he said.”
“Just what he was doing?”
“Yep.”
Son asked, “Did you ever think about going back and hurting Niall some more?”
“Yes. A lot. Every time I got scared—or mad.”
“Did you?”
“No. Not him.”
“Do you still think about it?”
“You were lucky.”
“I was.”
And they were both silent. Tired.
“It’s a good story,” Son said finally. “It has a good ending.”