BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan
Holland, a drover who
trailed cows up the Chisholm from San Antonio to Kansas. Most of his
life Great-grandpa Sam fought whiskey and Indians and cow thieves and
with some regularity watched gully washers or dry lightning spook his
herds over half of Oklahoma Territory.

Whether it was because of busthead whiskey or just the bad
luck to have lost everything he ever worked for, he railed at God and
the human race for years and shot five or six men in gun duels. Then
one morning, cold sober, he hung his chaps and clothes and Navy Colt
revolvers on a tree and was baptized by immersion in the Guadalupe
River. But Great-grandpa Sam found no peace. He sat each Sunday on the
mourners' bench at the front of the congregation in a mud-chinked
Baptist church, filled with an unrelieved misery he couldn't explain.
One month later he decided to ride to San Antonio and kill his desire
for whiskey in the only way he knew, and that was to drink until he
murdered all the warring voices inside his head.

On the trail he met a hollow-eyed preacher whose face had been
branded with red-hot horseshoes by Comanches north of the Cimarron. The
preacher made Sam kneel with him in a brush arbor, then unexpectedly
grasped Sam's head in his hands and ordained him. Without speaking
again he propped his Bible against Sam's rolled slicker and disappeared
over a hill into a dust cloud and left no tracks on the other side.

For the rest of his life, Great-grandpa Sam preached out of
the saddle in the same cow camps his herds had trampled into shredded
canvas and splintered wagon boards when he was a drover.

His son, Hackberry, who was also known in our family as
Grandpa Big Bud, was a Texas Ranger who chased Pancho Villa into Old
Mexico. As a young lawman he locked John Wesley Hardin in the county
jail and was still wearing a badge decades later when he stuffed Clyde
Barrow headfirst down a trash can in a part of Dallas once known as
'The Bog'.

But Grandpa Big Bud always made sure you knew he was not at
Arcadia, Louisiana, when Bonnie Parker and Clyde were trapped inside
their car by Texas Rangers and sawed apart with Browning automatic
rifles and Thompson .45 submachine guns.

'You don't figure they had it coming?' I once asked him.

'People forget they wasn't much more than kids. You cain't
take a kid down without shooting him a hundred times, you're a pisspoor
Ranger in my view,' he said.

My grandfather and his father were both violent men. Their
eyes were possessed of a peculiar unfocused light that soldiers call
the thousand-yard stare, and the ghosts of the men they had killed
visited them in their sleep and stood in attendance by their deathbeds.
When I was a young police officer in Houston, I swore their legacy
would never be mine.

But if there are drunkards in your family, the chances are you
will drink from the same cup as they. The war that can flare in your
breast with each dawn doesn't always have to come from a charcoal-lined
barrel.

I lived alone in a three-story
late-Victorian house built of
purple brick, twenty miles from the little town of Deaf Smith, the
county seat. The house had a second-story veranda and a wide,
screened-in gallery, the woodwork painted a gleaming white. The front
and back yards were enclosed by poplar trees and myrtle bushes and the
flower beds planted with red and yellow roses.

I made sun tea in big jars on the gallery, grilled steaks for
friends under the chinaberry tree in the backyard, and sometimes
cane-fished with a bunch of Mexican children in the two-acre tank, or
lake, at the back of my farm. But at night my footsteps rang off the
oak and mahogany woodwork inside my house like stones dropped down an
empty well.

The ghosts of my ancestors did not visit me. The ghost of
another man did. His name was L.Q. Navarro. In life he was the most
handsome man I ever knew, with jet black hair and wide shoulders and
skin as brown and smooth as newly dyed leather. When he appeared to me
he wore the clothes he had died in, a dark pinstriped suit and dusty
boots, a floppy gray Stetson, a white shirt that glowed like
electrified snow. His hand-tooled gunbelt and holstered revolver hung
on his thigh like a silly afterthought. Through the top buttonhole of
his shirt he had inserted the stem of a scarlet rose.

Sometimes he disappeared into sunlight, his form breaking into
millions of golden particles. At other times I did pro bono work on
hopeless defenses, and my spectral visitor declared a temporary amnesty
and waited patiently each night by himself among the mesquite trees and
blackjack oaks on a distant hillside.

The phone rang at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April.

'They got my boy in the jailhouse. I want him out,' the voice
said.

'Is that you, Vernon?'

'No, it's the nigger in the woodpile.'

Vernon Smothers, the worst business mistake in my life. He
farmed seventy acres of my land on shares, and I had reached a point
where I was almost willing to pay him not to come to work.

'What's he charged with?' I asked.

I could hear Vernon chewing on something—a piece of
hard
candy, perhaps. I could almost see the knotted thoughts in his eyes as
he looked for the trap he always found in other people's words.

'Vernon?'

'He was drunk again. Down by the river.'

'Call a bondsman.'

'They made up some lies… They're saying he raped a
girl down there.'

'Where's the girl?'

'At the hospital. She ain't conscious so she cain't say who
done it. That means they ain't got no case. Ain't that right?'

'I want a promise from you… If I get him out, don't
you dare put your hand on him.'

'How about you just mind your own goddamn business, then?' he
said, and hung up.

The county courthouse was built of
sandstone, surrounded by a
high-banked green lawn and live-oak trees whose tops touched the third
story. The jailer was named Harley Sweet and his mouth always hung
partly open while you spoke, as though he were patiently trying to
understand your train of thought. But he was not an understanding man.
When he was a deputy sheriff, many black and Mexican men in his custody
never reached the jail. Nor thereafter did they stay on the same
sidewalk as he when they saw him coming in their direction.

'You want to see Lucas Smothers, do you? We feed at
twelve-thirty. Better come back after then,' he said. He slapped a fly
on his desk with a horse quirt. He looked at me, slack-jawed, his eyes
indolent, waiting God knows for what.

'If that's the way you want it, Harley. But from this moment
on, he'd better not be questioned unless I'm present.'

'You're representing him?'

'That's correct.'

He got up from his desk, opened a door with a frosted glass
window in it, and went inside an adjoining office. He came back with a
handful of Polaroid pictures and dropped them on his desk.

'Check out the artwork. That's what she looked like when he
got finished with her. She had semen in her vagina and he had it inside
his britches. She had skin under her fingernails and he has scratches
on his body. I cain't imagine what the lab will say. You can really
pick your cases, Billy Bob,' he said.

'Where was she?'

'Thirty yards from where he was passed out.' He started to
drink out of his coffee cup, then set it back down. His silver
snap-button cowboy shirt shimmered with light. 'Oh hell, you want to
spend your Sunday morning with a kid cain't tell the difference between
shit and bean dip, I'll call upstairs. You know where the elevator's
at.'

When other boys in high school played
baseball or ran track,
Lucas Smothers played the guitar. Then the mandolin, banjo, and Dobro.
He hung in black nightclubs, went to camp meetings just for the music,
and ran away from home to hear Bill Monroe in Wichita, Kansas. He could
tell you almost any detail about the careers of country musicians whose
names belonged to a working-class era in America's musical history that
had disappeared with five-cent Wurlitzer jukeboxes—Hank and
Lefty,
Kitty Wells, Bob Wills, the Light Crust Dough Boys, Rose Maddox, Patsy
Montana, Moon Mullican, Texas Ruby.

His hands were a miracle to watch on a stringed instrument.
But in his father's eyes, they, like Lucas himself, were not good for
anything of value.

When he was sixteen Vernon caught him playing triple-neck
steel in a beer joint in Lampasas and beat him so unmercifully with a
razor strop in the front yard that a passing truck driver climbed out
of his cab and pinned Vernon's arms to his sides until the boy could
run next door.