The Kid: A Novel (15 page)

Some guns went off on July 15 but in a lazy kind of way, like an old cuss in a rocking chair spitting sunflower seeds. Because of overcrowding, Susan McSween sent away the servants Sebrian Bates and George Washington, and that Monday night she entertained her houseguests on the parlor organ with “Dear Old Pals,” “Early in de Mornin,” and “Time Was When Love and I Were Well Acquainted.” Tom Folliard hunched beside her on the bench and she taught him to play “Chopsticks,” laughing with gaiety and saying, “Isn’t that fun? It was composed in England by a girl just your age.”

With some jealousy over Susan’s attentions, the Kid later noted that Tom had gotten a haircut.

“Yes, I did.”

“You do it yourself? With a bowl and scissors?”

“No, a barber fella helped me.”

“Oh, Tom,” the Kid said. “He was no help at all.”

Folliard went to find a mirror as the Kid stayed up late with Alex McSween, who sipped from a snifter of brandy as he ruminated on their situation. “These are the ruthless devils we’re dealing with. The lackeys and foot soldiers of Thomas B. Catron. He became an expert in property law and saw his iniquitous opportunity while looking into the old Spanish and Mexican land grants, held by families for generations. With his former law partner Stephen Elkins, a member of Congress, and himself the United States Attorney for New Mexico, Catron could rule that those land grants were fraudulently platted and were without a clear conveyance of title. Whereby he could steal thirty-four magnificent properties for himself, three million acres!
Connecticut
is only slightly bigger. And the Mexicans lost their farms, their homes, their ancestry. That is why so many of them have affiliated themselves with us. We are redressing a grave injustice in a West where judgments of legality go to the highest bidder or at the insistence of a gun.”

The Kid nodded and said in a headstrong way, “We belong to the grievance committee.”

“Well put.”

The Kid asked, “Would you like me to find a six-shooter for you?”

The former candidate for the ministry seemed to find his misunderstanding repellent. “I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which I would intentionally harm another human being.”

*  *  *

Jimmy Dolan, a former corporal there, rode southwest to Fort Stanton on Tuesday morning to lobby Lieutenant Colonel Dudley, the post commander, for his intervention in the “uprising.” At an inquiry later both would lie under oath saying the conversation never occurred.

But that Tuesday evening, some Regulators on McSween’s flat roof shot at “a colored man” riding in from the west on the Fort Stanton Road. Although he only fell from his horse in dodging the gunfire, he was a federal, a courier with the segregated 9th Cavalry Regiment, on his way to give a message conveying the post commander’s promise of assistance to the sheriff.

Lieutenant Colonel Dudley thought the failed shooting was “an infamous outrage.” Calling for an investigation of the incident, on Wednesday he sent three officers, including the post surgeon, Major Daniel M. Appel, who’d conducted the postmortem on John Henry Tunstall and doctored the gunshot injuries of Jesse Evans, John Middleton, and George Coe. Major Appel would report that “everything is closed in Lincoln, every home shut up, no one is in the street. In the east end of town there is a faction of men and in the foothills to the south there is another and these worthies are keeping up a persistent and continuous exchange of gunfire.”

Also on that Wednesday, Doc Scurlock’s bored father-in-law, Fernando Herrera, accepted the challenge to try to nail one of the Boys on the southern hill that was called Chichi because it resembled a woman’s breast. Even with a Sharps rifle, it was an impossible distance. The Iowan “Lallycooler” Crawford was no more than an iota up there in the scraggle near the hill’s nipple, but Herrera managed to shatter Crawford’s spine, paralyzing him with what Herrera’s congratulating chums called “among the great examples of marksmanship.” And when the Army surgeon and his soldier aides floundered up the steep hillside to rescue the fatally injured Crawford, Regulators stupidly shot at them, too. Major Appel reported, “We thought the shots came from the Montaño house, judging from the loud whistling of bullets within a few feet of us.”

In June 1878, Congress had forbidden the use of the military in a civil affair unless it seemed an insurrection. The post commander now felt that was the case. Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley was a monocled, fifty-three-year-old bachelor and alcoholic with a gray whisk broom of a mustache and a Prussian officer’s fierce and fixed ideas. Earlier he’d been court-martialed for disobedience, conduct unbecoming, and drunkenness on duty, but received only a verdict of forfeiture in pay and a short suspension due to the skillful lawyering of Thomas B. Catron. So Dudley was yet another who was beholden to the Santa Fe Ring and inclined to benefit a friend when he read the note from Jimmy Dolan (but signed by the illiterate Sheriff Peppin) stating:

If it is within your power to loan me one of your howitzers, you would confer a great favor on the majority of the people of this County, who are being persecuted by a lawless mob.

Ever consistent in his bad judgment, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley, four officers, and a caravan of the 9th Cavalry Colored Regiment entered Lincoln around noon on Friday, July 19, with horse teams pulling a Gatling gun served by a feed of two thousand rounds, as well as a field howitzer cannon that fired a twelve-pound shell. Establishing his camp in midtown and frankly heralding whose side he was on, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley ordered the howitzer trained on the José Montaño store and house where the Mexican Regulators who’d shot at the post surgeon were on a cautious watch. And then he smoked a cigar in relaxation on a folding canvas chair as Dolan’s men jockeyed for position in hiding places around McSween’s house, including the horse stables of his backyard.

Seeing the cannon aimed at them and anticipating their obliteration, the Mexican Regulators waited only a few minutes before they scurried from the Montaño house to Isaac Ellis’s store in the east. But the artillery officer merely redirected the howitzer. Soon both groups of McSween men were hurrying out to their horses and racking off for the foothills across the Rio Bonito. The Gatling gun traced each of them in their retreat, a sergeant saying “Pow pow pow” as he pretended to mow them down, his lieutenant having wisely denied him permission to shoot.

Alex McSween found relaxation only in work, so that Friday he wrote a carefree note to Postmaster Ash Upson in Roswell, requesting he send postage stamps and promising to help with establishing a school; then he sent a check to
Scribner’s Monthly
, renewing his subscription.

Seeing his calm, John Middleton imitated Alex by writing a jaunty letter to his former employer, saying, “We have taken the town.” After listing the killed and wounded on both sides, he noted, “Everything is fair in war. Seen Jim Reese the other morning walking down the street. Cried because he is on the wrong side but he cain’t get out of it. All of them have taken an oath to stand by each other unto death, so I guess we will kill a lot of them afore they skedaddle.”

The Kid took a ladder up to the roof and crept from the west wing to the east to scan the area, seeing in the north the majestic limestone castle of El Capitán looming over the greenery that moated it, and just beyond McSween’s backyard was the gurgling, crystal-clear Rio Bonito. To the south the sheriff’s men and a hundred soldiers freely walked about with guns at the ready, as if just waiting for an officer’s instruction to overwhelm the Regulators. Hearing a man yell, “Hey, Billy!” he looked to the House and saw his old friend Johnny Jones waving and grinning on the veranda.

The Kid smiled as he called back, “Dang, Johnny! You siding with the devil?”

“Whoever’s got the mostest cash!”

“Well, if you get the chance you’ll make sure to miss me, won’t ya?”

Johnny shrugged. “Reckon I’ll have others to shoot at.”

The Kid laddered back down and went to the sitting room. Alex McSween was standing with his Holy Bible and reading Psalm 86 aloud to Yginio Salazar and Vincente Romero, who were lolling on the floor. “ ‘Bow down thine ear, O LORD, hear me: for I am poor and needy. Preserve my soul; for I am holy: O thou my God, save thy servant that trusteth in thee. Be merciful unto me, O LORD: for I cry unto thee daily. Rejoice the soul of thy servant: for unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul.’ ”

Cued by Alex McSween’s fear and trembling, the Kid stood over the parlor organ to write a farewell letter on the upper-board. He was halfway through when Susan McSween noticed him hunched over his handwriting.

She asked, “Even in such jeopardy, you’re writing a letter?” With the effrontery of the privileged, she looked over his shoulder. “To Miss Sallie Chisum! Well, she is a
darling
girl.” She lifted the letter and frowned as she read it, even sighing. She tore the letter up as she said, “Oh, Billy, this will not
do
at all. Here, let me help you.”

On July 20, just the next day, Miss Sallie Chisum received a handwritten letter from the Kid but dictated by Susan McSween:

My darling Sallie,

The indications are very strong that we shall have a battle soon, and I feel impelled to jot down a few lines that may fall under your eyes when I shall be no more. I have no misgivings about the cause in which I am joined. We are dauntless. Yet I fear you do not yet recognize that you have filled my heart with longing and my love for you is deathless. Oh Sallie, the memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you overwhelm me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed such cordial regard in your uncle’s home. It is my intent to return to you unharmed but if I do not, please know, my dear Sallie, that I will whisper your name with my last dying breath.

Yours truly,

Billy

*  *  *

Within the hour on July 19, Deputy Bob Olinger, a lout and bully who’d joined up with the Rio Grande Posse, hunched across Main Street to crowbar the shutters off McSween’s front windows. His accomplice smashed the plate glass and toppled the heaped adobe bricks on the sills. Olinger shouted inside, “I have warrants for you and others in the house. Will you surrender?”

Alexander McSween called, “We have warrants for
you
!”

Olinger was at a loss and could only inquire, “Where are they?”

The Kid yelled from inside, “Our warrants are in our guns, you cocksucking sons-of-bitches!”

His foul language caused Alex McSween to give him a disapproving glance.

Meanwhile John Kinney and some of his Boys were hauling lumber to the east side of McSween’s house, the only property the Regulators still firmly held. Inside they were hot and stinking and without water. Alex went to the east wing and heard lumber being stacked and Kinney calling for kerosene.

McSween hastily wrote a note in pencil, and his ten-year-old niece, Minnie Shield, walked it to the commanding officer in the folding chair. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley read:

Would you have the kindness to let me know why soldiers surround my house? Before blowing up my property I would like to know the reason.

Nathan Dudley replied that he sought no correspondence with Alexander McSween and, deliberately misreading the lawyer’s syntax, he stated in his note,

If you desire to blow up your own house, the commanding officer does not object.

Kinney’s fire on the east wing of the house wouldn’t catch or was doused, but Andrew J. Boyle, formerly a rowdy British soldier in Scotland and now a Seven Rivers rancher, flung lit dried wood soaked in kerosene into the outdoor kitchen of the west wing. Some firewood was stacked there, and dish towels and aprons, and flames soon crawled over the adobe walls as though ravenous for paint.

The Kid was the first to smell the acrid smoke, and he ran down the hallway with a Shaker broom, intending to swat out the flames, but he found a conflagration. And when he gave extinguishing the fire a go, he was shot at from the stables.

When he got to Alex McSween, he reported what was happening, and Tom Folliard, overhearing, said, “Don’t worry. All is not lost.”

McSween asked in exasperation, “If all is not lost, where the hell
is
it?”

The fire’s fierce appetite shifted southward to the McSween quarters, and with temperatures nearing a thousand degrees, the hallway wallpaper curled, then blackened, then chafed into flying ash. The adobe bricks burned like charcoal. The houseguests backed up from room to room to avoid the heat and lung-racking smoke, and were soon crowded into the front parlor, their clothing drenched in sweat, handkerchiefs and dish towels held over their noses and mouths to inefficiently filter out the fouled air.

Harvey Morris looked out at forty soldiers and civilians waiting by the front fence and its south gate, and told no one in particular, “We’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.”

Alexander McSween said with despair, “I have no idea what to do,” and fell onto a sofa, his head in his hands as though doomed. “I seem to have mislaid my mind.”

His wife sat on the bench of her parlor organ and seemed to be itemizing all the expensive possessions they’d lose soon. Wood smoke grayly filled the room like a dense fog. Walls were hot as radiators.

Little Jimmy Dolan now tilted forward on his crutches to drunkenly watch indigo clouds of smoke roil up from the house next door to the Wortley Hotel. His room’s plate-glass window so scalded his outreached hand that he withdrew to the hallway to continue his staring.

Erratically choosing action, then inaction, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley was eating dinner from a mess kit and worrying that no women and children were exiting the incinerating house. He’d intended to explain to higher-ups his presence in Lincoln with a previously composed memorandum that he was going there “to protect women and children; and we shall not take sides.” Charred bodies would not do. So he was relieved at nightfall to see five enlisted men hitch a wagon and go into the Tunstall store to get the Ealy belongings and to escort out of town Dr. Taylor and Mrs. Ruth Ealy, their two small children, and the schoolteacher Susan Gates.