The Outlaw Album: Stories

            Mr. Ronnie Thigpen, Egypt Grove, 1994: “I went back by once the sheriff come along for a look. There was a bunch of two-by-fours that was splintered a little bit and had bloody places on ’em. Five or six, I guess. I seen the sheriff sort of kick those two-by-fours away from the tracks, down into the creek there. That’s when he said, ‘Looks to me like ol’ Blue jumped in front of a timber train. Amen.’”

            Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, accosted and held by the wrist, outside the Front Street Church of Christ in 1998, a month after her husband’s death: “They was all brought together by love, Danny. The love of that horse. Your granddaddy doted on that thing, him’n Blue, then somethin’ soured and Blue got drunk’n died. That horse was magnificent, hear? Beautiful to see, he was. Would’ve won any race he could’ve been got to—just that special. He was just so special.”

            My oldest living relative, sitting in a shaded parlor, upon reading my notes and turning over the last page, folded her old hands and closed her eyes: “There never was a horse. The rest is true.”

Woe to Live On

I. Coleman Younger, The Last Is Gone—1916

            The river takes it from almost anywhere, trims branches with floating logs, smoothes edges on miles of rocky bottom and sandy bank, distorts the shape of the former tree by sucking it down at a hundred eddies of swirling murk, then spewing it back to the polishing touches of the everlasting current. Sometimes the river leaves the driftwood on a sandbar’s lip, or jabbed into a dike—a present for me. I transport such gifts to my workshop. There I take my Barlow and ease it against the wood, scraping gently at the layers, taking substance away to reduce the piece to the design I see in it. I labor on it for days, and I have been laboring thusly for years, but humility commands an admission—many times the river’s hand carved more truly, and I bring no improvement.

            On the day that I learned Coleman Younger had passed on to his stoked reward I searched for a special piece, and the river, now an occasional ally, sharing with me both muddy history and uncertain age, obliged.

            I enlisted a hangdog grandson to assist me. His name was probably Karl, although he looked a lot like Kurt, especially as regards his subdued aspect. They are both like their father; blond-headed Dutch boys with that sort of Germanness that tape-measures all it meets and argues the logic of all that is not numbers. Not what I’d ever wanted to be, or been, or even tolerated.

            The rarity of that clean-shaven oak length being so handy was not lost on me. Luck is a goddess, but if you bet on her she will desert you faster than a Frenchman. But that day I did not hope for luck, so there it was, a four-foot section of river-planed oak. There is never much oak, and this oak was on the first sand spit below the bend in the Missouri River. Karl or Kurt and I never had to wet a boot. We dragged a trail through the packed sand, he being too young to lift it alone and me too close to being young again, I feared. We lugged it along the path through the trees, up the glistening mudbank by the railroad tracks, then across the rails and back to town.

            We pulled the wood onto our shoulders when we came to Main Street, me in the lead, my hunched form not much taller than the boy’s. Our boots slipped on the cobblestones, from brick to brick, not slickly enough to trip us, but enough to lend a whoosh to our passing. There were louts on horseback, the shod animals sparking with each step, to avoid. Hemsath the egg man left his wagon in our path with one of his girlish brood sitting on the seat, using a switch to tease the mule about the eyes. A mule will not tolerate such levity long, so we stepped quick and put the pair behind us.

            As we passed the Fremont Room of the Saint Charles Hotel, nearly home, a voice called out to me.

            “Old Roedel,” he said. “You must be sad that Younger has gone. You may be all that is left now.” I turned to see who spoke. It was Harvey Ball, a man of two-shot killing size, as death would have to scream its presence a while to make it known to the ends of his form. “Let me buy you a drink.”

            “I am not a drinking man,” I said. “You know this.”

            Ball had that confidence that horsey size gives a man. He reached out to grab my shoulder. “Naw. Come on now, Roedel. You must’ve split a jug with Black John Ambrose of an evening.” I shook his hand off but he took no hints. “William C. Quantrill, the Jameses and Youngers, and Arch Clements and Pitt Mackeson—you tellin’ me they were Baptist men? True Vine Pentecostal and would not drink?”

            “I am telling you this—in many a jug there is a trigger, and where there are triggers, fingers multiply.”

            “You have plenty of fingers from the history of it,” Ball said. “Did yours work dry?”

            Karl or Kurt nudged me in the calf but did not speak. We began to walk on but Ball did not move from our path.

            “I whip mules that buck me,” I said. “Beware.”