Every morning for a week Temple Hanley visited the Cameron telegraph office, in the hope of hearing something from someone regarding Jake Eddings. A very punctual man, he woke at seven, had his breakfast at home at seven thirty, and was in his office on Cameron’s main street by eight. He found comfort in routine. It gave one the sense that one exercised control over one’s life. It was order in the midst of the chaos that was a frontier town. And while he was relieved to get Ranger Sayles’s telegram from Huntsville, he was also ill at ease. It meant he would have to put a notice on his office door informing whoever might be looking for him that he would be away for much of the day. Then he would have to hire the buggy at Cornell’s Livery and ride out to give the news to Purdy Eddings that her husband was on his way. And it made his full stomach feel unsettled just thinking about that poor woman. It was difficult to face someone who had lost everything—even, it seemed, the will to live. Purdy challenged his most cherished belief—that a person was the master of his or her own fate.
He was making for his office, the telegraph grasped excitedly between pudgy fingers, when Emmett Placer approached him in an ungainly run across the street, a hand on top of his straw boater to keep it from blowing off, as the north wind was gusting down the town’s wide muddy thoroughfares. His hat’s security was further threatened because he kept looking up at Hanley then down to try to differentiate between slush and mud and horse and mule excrement. Getting mud-caked shoes was bad enough without sinking to the ankles in shit.
“Lawyer Hanley! Lawyer Hanley, a moment, sir!”
Hanley sighed, hastily folding the telegram several times so he could conceal it in the palm of a clenched hand, as it was too much trouble to secrete it in a pocket of his low-cut vest, which was beneath his buttoned tailored frock coat, which in turn was under his buttoned buffalo coat. He would have to nearly undress to do so, and it was much too cold for that. He pushed his bowler hat down more firmly on his head, then combed his thick but well-groomed rust-red beard at the chin with thumb and forefinger, a nervous habit, as he was very self-conscious about his appearance. He felt it was his duty to set an example of civility and good taste in dress, speech, hygiene, and behavior in this rough-and-tumble frontier community. Never mind that technically the Texas frontier was at least a hundred miles farther west—and with the removal of the Comanches to the Indian Territory, it would likely move still farther west at a much quicker pace in years to come.
Hanley assembled a polite smile on his lips, turning up one corner of his mouth and then the other, and remembering to unfurl his brows as he waited for the newspaperman’s arrival. “Good morning, Mr. Placer, you’re out and about early, aren’t you?”
“Morning, Lawyer Hanley,” said Placer affably. “I’ve noticed of late you’ve been going to the telegraph office first thing each day.” He glanced at Hanley’s apparently empty hands. “And correct me if I’m wrong, but I could’ve sworn you left there with a telegram just a moment ago.”
With a sigh, Hanley said. “You are very perceptive, Mr. Placer.”
“I cannot help but think the telegram has something to do with Jake Eddings. Will he arrive soon? At long last can his poor wife give a decent Christian burial to the mortal remains of her young son, so tragically wrenched from her loving arms at such a tender age?”
Placer often spoke to others employing the purple prose with which he wrote articles for the local newspaper, and Hanley was of the opinion that he was writing the story in his head and giving voice to snippets here and there to let his ears—and those of others—luxuriate in their worthiness. Hanley normally found this habit of Placer’s mildly amusing, but this morning it put him in a bad temper. He straightened his spine so as to tower imposingly over the slightly built newspaperman, and puffed out his barrel chest. At six feet six inches he towered over most, just as did Sam Houston, who was of the same height. His girth was quite a bit greater than Houston’s, though.
“Sir, where is your sense of decency?” he boomed, in the voice he normally reserved for cross-examining a witness or admonishing a jury to remember that a defendant was innocent until proven guilty. “Where is your compassion? You cannot seriously consider profiting from the great misfortune that has befallen that family!”
Put on the defensive, Placer bristled. He wasn’t easily intimidated, and it helped that he knew Temple Hanley, as impressive as he was in size and voice, did not pose a physical threat to anyone. “I have a duty to the people of this community to keep them informed of important matters. And you must admit, Lawyer Hanley, that Jake Eddings being allowed to attend the funeral of his son at the order of the governor, no less, is newsworthy. You had something to do with it, too, did you not? You wrote Governor Coke, that much I know. What possessed you to do that, Lawyer Hanley? Why did you set in motion a chain of events that will result in a desperate man being set loose among us? A man with blood on his hands!”
“It’s called compassion,” replied Hanley, wrapping himself in the impenetrable and somewhat haughty calm he summoned when he felt himself becoming the target of verbal slings and arrows. “And Mr. Eddings will not be ‘set loose.’ He will be in the custody of a Texas Ranger.”
Placer’s eyes widened. “A Texas Ranger! Indeed! Well well, this is news, indeed! A Texas Ranger coming to Cameron. Who is this man? What’s his name?”
Sometimes, a commitment to being unerringly truthful was a burden, but Hanley wouldn’t lie, even though he had a sinking feeling that the forthcoming revelation would guarantee that poor Purdy Eddings would have to suffer the torment that no mother should have to suffer while in the public eye. “His name is Sayles.”
Cupping chin in hand, Placer looked off into his memory a moment, then shook his head. “Never heard of him. No matter. A Ranger coming to Cameron is certainly newsworthy!” He touched the brim of his boater with a crooked grin that infuriated Hanley. “Thank you, sir, thank you!” And off he went, returning to his lair, again trying to distinguish mud from excrement en route.
A disgruntled Hanley walked to his office and from there to the livery, stopping first at the general store to put together a box of foodstuffs, informing the storekeeper he would come back by to pick it up. At the livery he paid for the buggy and stood outside the barn while waiting for a sturdy piebald mare to be hooked in its traces. He was quite warm in his buffalo coat, though his cheeks were numb and rosier than usual. He glumly studied the depressing gray overcast while reflecting on God and the vicissitudes the Almighty often visited upon individuals to gauge their worthiness to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In his opinion, the worst was the loss of a child, and while it was not always so, today he was glad that marriage and family were not in the cards for him. He had seen firsthand the terrible effect the loss of her boy had wrought upon Purdy Eddings, and one’s first impulse was to believe no one deserved that. But his religion informed him that it wasn’t about what a person deserved in this life but what he—or she—deserved in the next.
With these thoughts he was trying, without fully realizing it, to buttress himself for the unpleasant duty that took him to the Eddings homestead out by the Little River. By then it was midmorning, but it was impossible to distinguish midmorning from any other part of the day with this dreary sky. Hanley fervently wished for a little sunshine, as so many consecutive gray and lifeless days were depressing. Not as depressing, however, as the sight that he beheld when he rolled up to the plain but sturdy Eddings farmhouse—a sight that would remain etched in his memory to his dying day.
On one side of the porch, resting on sawhorses, was a plain pine casket. Hanley knew it contained the body of eight-year-old Joshua Aden Eddings. On the other side, Purdy Eddings sat in a rocking chair. She was barefoot, clad in a plain brown walking skirt and gray blouse buttoned at the neck. The only hint of color was in the crocheted green-and-brown shawl around her shoulders, and also her auburn hair, which he remembered to have been quite full and lustrous at one time but which now lay in unwashed and tangled strands around her shoulders. Her complexion was ashen and her violet-blue eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. It profoundly saddened him to see how tragedy had sapped the life right out of her. Once upon a time she had been such a lovely, vivacious young woman.
As Hanley drew closer his heart lurched, because she didn’t move, didn’t look his way, just sat there, quite still, in the rocking chair. A shotgun lay across her lap, and for one frightening instant he wondered if she was alive. He was so focused on her in that moment that he didn’t see the big yellow field dog at first. The beast lay half under the porch, but as Hanley brought the buggy to a stop in front of the house the beast came charging out with a deep and menacing series of barks that scared him. The sound animated Purdy. The chair began to rock and she shushed the dog, which responded at once, clambering up onto the porch to sit beside the chair, tail swishing across the snow-swept and weather-warped planking, panting with its big pink tongue lolling. But its gaze never left Hanley.
“Good morning, Mrs. Eddings!” said Hanley, managing to sound cheerful. It wasn’t easy. In fact, the scene before him nearly broke his heart. A lawyer had to be part stage actor. Knowledge of the law and of human nature was not all that was required for an effective summation or cross-examination. One had to be able to portray confidence, conviction, skepticism, compassion, indignation, whether one felt anything or not. He was vastly relieved to see that Purdy was, indeed, still among the living—and that the dog, which had to weigh a hundred pounds and appeared to be all bone and muscle and gristle, was at bay.
Purdy looked at him then. “Mr. Hanley,” she said, her voice as drawn and melancholy as was her expression.
Hanley descended from the buggy and walked around it to approach the porch, keeping a wary eye on the dog. He noted that Purdy had spared him a mere glance and was now focused on the coffin to her left, staring at it as though she expected something to happen over there. He tried to distract her with the box of foodstuffs purchased at the general store, placing it on the porch beside the rocking chair. The yellow dog watched every move he made with his strange eyes—one was a bright blue, the other a golden brown—and now that he had come closer to Buck’s owner, his tail had stopped wagging.
“I’ve brought you a few things, Mrs. Eddings. Let’s see what we have here. Flour, sugar, baking soda, oatmeal, molasses, dried beans, crackers, coffee, some airtights—peaches and tomatoes—as well as…” He pulled each item out of the box as he named them, then stopped, noting that she wasn’t paying any attention. It was as though she hadn’t heard a word he said. He rose and touched her cheek with the back of his hand—briefly, since a menacing rumble rose up from down deep inside the yellow dog. His name was Buck, but Hanley preferred to think of him as the Hound from Hell. “You’re freezing cold,” he told her, alarmed. Moving circumspectly, he took off his buffalo coat and draped it over her like a blanket. The dog was grimly watching his every move while sniffing the coat suspiciously.
“Thank you,” said Purdy, flatly. “I’m not really cold.” But she didn’t remove the buffalo coat.
Hanley sighed and was about to place a comforting hand on her shoulder when the dog’s head came up and he thought better of it. Instead he turned up the collar of his frock coat and held it closed at the throat. Without the buffalo coat the bitter cold wasted no time in chilling him to the bone. He looked down at Purdy, alarmed by how much Joshua’s death had changed her. He remembered her as such a pretty young woman-child, one of the prettiest in the country, with such a sunny disposition, such a breathtaking smile, so full of life. Every man in Cameron and the surrounding area had desired her. Of this he was sure. Even he, in a moment of bittersweet whimsy, daydreamed about what it would be like to live his life with such an angel. And an angel she was. Her father, a steamboat captain, had turned to drink after Purdy’s mother ran off with a gambler. His health rapidly deteriorated as he grew old, and Purdy had taken care of him, doted over him, working menial jobs in Cameron to keep a roof over their heads and a little food on the table. Though at times it was a real trial for her, she was always ready with a kind word and that breathtaking smile of hers.
But now there was a palpable sadness in her, so intense that he found himself thinking she would surely never smile again. Never laugh again. This was why every time he laid eyes on her, it felt like his heart was going to break.
He glanced out across the snow-carpeted fields that stretched from the house to the line of bare-limbed cottonwoods and willows that marked the course of the Little River. Though he knew nothing about farming, he could sense the allure of this river bottom land even under the harsh veil of winter. In a perfect world a family could grow this land and prosper from it, and he knew that the start Jake and Purdy Eddings had made here had been a promising one. But the weather had wreaked havoc. Hanley sometimes hated the weather in Texas. It was brutal, extreme, unpredictable. In a broader sense this was true, he mused, about much of the West. Why would anyone endure such conditions, such uncertainty? Because there was land for the taking, for farming or mining or raising livestock, and land not only nurtured dreams but sometimes made them come true. There was land enough for everyone out West, but not everyone had the grit—or the luck—to succeed in an environment that was routinely hostile.
Hanley knew something about real estate, though he had never aspired to own a farm, or “spread” as they called it in these parts, being quite content with his house in Cameron. This farm should have provided the family who lived on it with a comfortable life—if one could remove the vagaries of the weather from the equation. Which led him to speculate about Purdy’s future. He did not see her holding on to this land for the next thirteen years, until her husband got out of prison. Her father dead and her mother vanished, she had no other family as far as he knew. Had she and Jake owned the land outright, she could have sold it for a handsome sum. But Jake’s father had put the farm up for collateral to secure a loan from the Cameron bank, money he had spent to weather a stretch of hard times a decade ago. Paying on that loan was what had driven Jake to the commission of a crime, and now Purdy carried that financial burden alone. Hanley doubted that she could. But until her boy was buried he could not bring himself to broach the subject of the farm and the possibility of giving it up. After all, the farm was all she had left of what had been a happy life with bright prospects.
Purdy rose from the chair with a suddenness that startled him. The buffalo coat slipped off her body and onto the porch as she lurched, swaying on unsteady legs toward the casket. She gripped the shotgun by the end of its two barrels, dragging the stock. She was shaking, and Hanley bent to retrieve the coat, but the yellow dog was on all four feet again and bared its fangs at him. Hanley left the coat where it lay and went after Purdy, gently taking the shotgun from her. She didn’t resist, didn’t even seem to notice. He quickly lay the shotgun on the porch, as he had a powerful aversion to guns.
Hanley realized then that the top of the casket was propped up against the wall of the house, and he caught a glimpse of the dead boy’s face, as white as the snow that lay on the ground. A primal chill ran right through him, and it had nothing to do with the winter wind that occasionally whipped the woolen trousers he wore against his stocky legs. He tried to interpose himself between Purdy and the casket, thinking it would be better if she did not see her son’s corpse before he began to consider why the casket was open and who had opened it.
“I need to see him,” Purdy explained, trying to go around him. “I need to see my son,” she said, louder, frowning at him as he continued to be an obstruction. “I have to make sure he’s still there!” she shrieked, when he gently took her by the arm. Now very agitated, she wrenched her arm free and pushed away from him.
“Of course he is still there, Mrs. Eddings,” Hanley replied, employing his most soothing tone. “He is resting peacefully…”
“Resting peacefully?” She began to back up, staring at him indignantly. “Resting? He’s DEAD! My beautiful boy is dead! He’s not resting!” And then she turned away from him, covering her face with her hands, her body racked with anguished sobs that managed to bring tears to Temple Hanley’s eyes.
At a loss what to do, he stood there a moment, feeling quite helpless and demoralized as he watched her suffer so horribly. Hanley’s self-worth was vested in his belief that with all his gifts, he could set things right for others. That he could employ his agile mind, his gift with words, his kind and compassionate nature, and sometimes his talent in a courtroom to that end. He had tried to do this by representing Jake Eddings pro bono because he believed Jake was a good man and feared he might face a hangman’s noose. But confronted by Purdy’s inconsolable, soul-wrenching grief, he concluded he couldn’t do anything to help apart from trying to see to her physical well-being. He was not a brave man, but Purdy was in such need he risked antagonizing the yellow dog. His nape hairs rose as the beast snarled at him when he picked up the buffalo coat to wrap it around Purdy again, buttoning it at the collar.
“I certainly did not mean to upset you, dear Mrs. Eddings,” he said, getting her back in the rocking chair and tucking the voluminous coat around her.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and then looked around in dismay. “The shotgun. Where is the shotgun!” She looked at him, her eyes pleading for help. “I must have it, or the coyotes will come steal my boy away. I stayed out here all night to keep them away.”
“My God,” murmured Hanley, fetching the shotgun and laying it across her lap. Standing there, hugging himself against the numbing cold, he considered his options. He would have to subdue and tie her up to take her back to Cameron, of that he was certain. And then what about Joshua’s corpse? He could not transport it in the buggy. Was there someone he could cajole—or even pay—to look out for her? Perhaps his own housekeeper, Miss Bishop, would be a Good Samaritan, and if not he was willing at this point to pay her to do it.
But right now, this instant. he had to do something for the unfortunate Purdy Eddings. He remembered the box of foodstuffs and picked it up. “You must be starving. When was the last time you had anything to eat?”
She looked at him blankly. “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.” She seemed more composed now.
“You must keep your strength up. I’ll make something and perhaps you will find your appetite. I’m quite a good cook, you know. I don’t have a housekeeper because I need someone to cook for me. I just hate cleaning up the dishes.” He chuckled, trying to convey that it was meant as humor. He had elicited laughter from others using that same line, but it was lost on Purdy. She didn’t seem to hear him or even know he was there, anymore. She was gazing off across the fields, now barren of life, not to mention hope and dreams, though Hanley didn’t get the sense she was even seeing them.
With a sigh, he carried the box inside, put it on a table, and looked around. The house was a two-room affair and the main room, the one in which he stood, had a neglected look. It was dusty and unkempt. He built a fire in the stone hearth. On one knee, he warmed himself for a while, glancing several times at the table. He saw with the mind’s eye a tableau that had Purdy and her husband and son around that table. It was suppertime, in a cabin that was warm with color, filled with life and laughter and loving smiles. He couldn’t get it out of his head.