The Outcasts (27 page)

T
he man perches next to the girl in her bed, the covers tucked around her small frame, telling her, as he often does, stories of his life: of his boyhood spent in want on the heavy, compacted soil of Oklahoma, not fifty miles from where they sit, softly talking in the half-light of her room. He tells her what he learned from his father growing up: how to break a horse to hard service, with rope and a whip. But he reveals how, years later, he learned from his wife, the girl’s mother, how to gentle a horse to usefulness by watching and reading the signs that he gave; to move obliquely, and without menace, into the horse’s line of sight; to stand calmly, staring into the middle distance, giving the horse a chance to order its quicksilver thoughts inside the passages of its narrow skull.

He tells her how he left home for Texas and at sixteen was called to fight a war in Arkansas. The girl speaks for the first time, recalling that he was too young to fight.
Yes,
the man says,
too young to fight, but not
too
young to bring three hundred horses back to Texas.

All but two,
the girl says.

Yes, all but two,
the man answers.

He recalls how he met her mother at a mission dance and how she looked in a pale summer dress, her black hair swept back from her face like wings, and the girl smiles and adds, as she always does,
And then I came.

Yes, and then you came.

He recounts how he left for Texas to serve as a lawman for half a year, and here the girl attends more closely as the man’s story becomes more expansive, and he describes his fellow lawmen, Texas rangers who fought for twenty years to bring order to chaotic, lawless places.

The girl offers the names of these rangers dutifully, carefully,
Captain Deerling and Dr. Tom
, as though reciting her own lineage, understanding that, though they were not blood kin, they were of close fellowship to her father; knowing too with a child’s innate sense of fairness that blood alone does not make lasting connections between people, any more than does desire or time or proximity. She repeats their names so they won’t be forgotten.

He nods at her recitation, describes to her their journey together for months across the entire expanse of Texas: the cactus ringed with purple and blue-tinted agave and saw grasses that when taut were sharp as knives. He recounts seeing striated rock, pink and gray, with overlying dirt the color of blood. He was witness to caves worn into cliff faces, looking like open, staring eyes, and indented spaces worn by cliff-side floods, appearing as doors cut into the rock by giants. Trees would lean over the edges of rocks as though listening to their passage, their twisted, hanging roots looking like nothing so much as legs crossed in timeless waiting, and abutments the shape of horse’s heads or pointing fingers piercing the scudding clouds that formed and disappeared and formed again in tumultuous succession.

He tells her of the cities farther east, Austin and Houston and Galveston, and of the legends of pirate’s gold in a place called Middle Bayou.

Here the girl holds out her hand and the man places into it the heavy gold coin, old and worn, warmed by his own fingers.

Middle Bayou,
he says, stressing the words as though in admonition; the passing-through place, the place of constant sorrows and unexplained miracles, of contrary laws to man and nature, where the lame can suddenly walk, and armored monsters swim in warm and muddy rivers preying on man and beast alike.

And then,
the girl prompts,
and then to the city across the Gulf.

To the city, he agrees, where horses fly from boats and swim to far islands like waterbirds; with streets the width of rivers, and men who do battle in those streets like Old Testament warriors. He tells her of the king of thieves holding sway over his court, residing in a bell tower above an ancient church, and of the king’s challenge to him to bring down a terrible rooster, perched on a high aerie over the city, the rooster legion in size with a body of beaten copper and a head of ruby glass so cunningly faceted that at sunset it blinded all the citizens with its light.

He recounts for the girl the preparation needed for the rifle—the heavy powder measure, the six-sided bullet, the copper caps made only in England—given to him by Deerling. The only gun to make the impossible shot…

Nine hundred and eighty yards,
the girl whispers.

Nine hundred and eighty yards
, the man affirms. He had once marched off the distance carrying her on his shoulders, designating a large tree as the target, and he remembers her disbelief that any bullet, from any gun, could traverse such a distance.

But he makes the impossible shot, he assures her, knocking the head from the rooster, and the king and the citizens rejoice and, as reward, he takes back from captivity a beautiful lady who’d been stolen by pirates from Middle Bayou, a schoolteacher who had, because of the terrible hardship of her journey, become lost in her mind. He had taken her back to Texas, to a high-walled place where she could regain her better self.

And is the lady returned to herself?
she asks.

But the girl’s eyes have begun to close and he doesn’t answer the question, sitting with her instead, watching the soft sheen of her cheek, the spread of her hair across the pillow.

He takes back the coin from her uncurling fingers and slips it into his pocket. She had asked him once about the nature of good and bad and if the coin itself was evil, having moved so many people to violence. He told her what Dr. Tom had once told him: that most things had been placed in the world either to assist in a man’s journey to his better self or to tempt him away from it. The danger with gold, and silver, Tom had said, was that they had the ability to do both, with the result that men had always, since the betrayal of the Nazarene, and would always, to the end of time, be the best and the worst of creatures in their presence.

He watches her sleeping and sees the growing angular planes of her face, so different from the moon-shaped roundness of her mother’s. He remembers the day-old infant with the pale skin and the dark furze of hair placed in his wife’s hands by the missionary workers, his wife who could bring life to the most arid plot of land but who could not grow a child in her belly.

He had read Lucinda’s note, the one given to him in the Austin jail, only after crossing the Red River on his return trip to Oklahoma. In the failing light of dusk, he had stared at the letters trailing looped and elegant towards the edge of the paper, like birds rushing for flight, and his hand holding the note had dropped onto his lap. With a growing sense of wonder, he saw what had been hidden before in the face of his daughter: Lucinda’s alert, challenging gaze and Dr. Tom’s smile of genuine pleasure at a world revealing itself in all its startling complexities.

It was another seventy miles to Tishomingo, but he touched his heels to the bay’s ribs and let the horse run himself out. He made camp an hour after sunset south of Marietta to build a fire and slept on top of his blanket in the silky air.

He dreamed that night of an island densely covered with oak and elm, heavily shrouded with winter rains, and a mound of earth between the trees opening up, like a grave in rebellion, pushing the pale bodies of two seamen, long buried, to the surface. The rain stopped and scavengers appeared, beetle, fox, and coyote, to devour the men in unison in a peculiarly slow and stately manner. And in the fashion of dreams, he was not repelled by the sight, but rather awed by the bloodless, almost gentle feeding.

The bones of the once-buried were quickly scattered by wild boars that chased sunning copperheads from the cages of the bleaching ribs. Itinerant ospreys collected for their nests the remaining hair, still intact on the skulls, like lichen on sea boulders.

Left was only the inert detritus of the disappeared—the metal piece of a gun, a buckle, a button, a single gold coin—which in time also mingled with the earth, conjoined with it, related in all its finite parts. Kin.

My deepest gratitude to my agent, Julie Barer, for all her support, encouragement, and direction; she is in one person cheerleader, tutor, first reader, and friend. My abiding thanks to Reagan Arthur, my superlative editor, who, through her guidance, patience, and advocacy, has made me a better writer.

My heartfelt thanks also to the wonderful people at Hachette/Little, Brown: David Young, Michael Pietsch, Heather Fain, Sabrina Callahan, Nicole Dewey, Anna Balasi, Sarah Murphy, Miriam Parker, and Amanda Tobier.

 They say third time’s the charm, so to Pamela Marshall and Tracy Roe, my copyeditors, I say, How lucky can one writer get!

The idea for this novel and its legends of pirates’ gold began with my brother’s recounting of the history of Middle Bayou (now Armand Bayou) in southeast Texas. My admiration and thanks go to Kevin (the Captain) Hickman for sharing his knowledge of the Civil War, its armaments and its warriors.

My love and gratitude go to the Cannon family, Danny, Beth, and Mattie, for their hospitality during the many hours in which they revealed so generously their extensive knowledge of horses and horsemanship.

To Tom Godwin, doctor, historian, and archaeologist, and his wife, Patsy, I send my deep appreciation for sharing their knowledge of the early settlers of Middle Bayou. And also to George Dearing, for retelling stories of Texas from an earlier, wilder time.

My research was enhanced immensely by the generous contributions of the following historians: Helen D. Mooty, director of the Galveston County Historical Museum; Don Harper, associated with the Galveston Railroad Museum; and Doug Wicklund, the “Gun Whisperer,” senior curator of the National Firearms Museum, expert on the elusive but legendary Whitworth rifle.

My enduring love and gratitude go as well to my sister, Kim Morrison, for her abundant inspiration and creativity, and to all my family and friends who encouraged and supported me during the writing of this third book. And finally to Jim: the adventure is just beginning.

The Heretic’s Daughter

The Traitor’s Wife
(originally published as
The Wolves of Andover
)

Kathleen Kent is the author of
The Heretic’s Daughter
and
The Traitor’s Wife.
She lives in Dallas.

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Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Also by Kathleen Kent
About the Author
Newsletters
Table of Contents
Copyright