The Outlaw Album: Stories

            “Do not raise yourself into some sort of hero with my children,” Jefferson said. “Boys tend to admire war and lengthened necks and all. I know better and someday so shall they.”

            “I fought,” I said, “for my comrades, and myself, but no more bravely than others.”

            “Your bravery,” he said, nearly spitting it, “is a midnight legend.” Jefferson leaned toward me, blowing his chest expansive and crossing his arms, as if I could be frightened. “So bold and brave were you that you managed to kill your father—too bad he failed to see the safety in being your traitorous comrade.”

            “I did not kill him.”

            “You did not pull the trigger.”

            “Exactly.”

            “Alf Bowden pulled the trigger,” Jefferson said. “The one man you should have killed, you let go. Did you fail to realize that an American would seek satisfaction from your kin?”

            Yes, I thought, gray heads had suffered while young ones went unnoosed. Alf Bowden was yielded to life while nine of his comrades were forfeited, but this did not make a friend of him.

            “Shot him in the neck,” Jefferson said. “In front of your mother, he not even having English enough to know why he was killed. Small blessing.” Jefferson kicked about in the wood curls. “What a mess you have made.” I said nothing. “Your scarlet oaf of a comrade, Younger, ruined you for me, Jacob. He should never have visited.”

            It was true; I lost something when Coleman Younger happened by. It was the year of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, and he was not long out of prison. I had not seen him since I returned from Old Mex in sixty-eight, but I had read about him often. He came to the door and knocked. When I answered it he said, “Jake Roedel, it is your old comrade, Coleman Younger.” I saw that he told the truth and said so, then welcomed him in. Prison had paled him, and he had become a pinkish man, a color I had never thought him capable of. I remembered him red. I offered him wine, but he was prepared with a flask of his own. We gathered at the table. Jefferson, a young man meeting history, sat at Coleman Younger’s elbow. We drank. The freeness of my own remembrances encouraged my guest to candor, and he spoke truly of our shared activities. Jefferson questioned him, and he answered directly, not noticing that my son was of the generation that cared less for America than they did the land that earlier generations had fled. There was now pride about the awkward consonants of foreign names, and narcissism in noodles called spaetzle, and in porkpie hats called homburgs. In Coleman Younger’s answers were accounts of the days of the Dutch boy, Alf Bowden, Creve Coeur Gap, and numberless others, for the war went on unblunted by my famous deed. Jefferson’s eyes fixed on me when the talk shifted to baseball and the World’s Fair, then he quietly left the house, easing the door closed behind himself. I knew then that he was lost to me.

            “I could not turn him away,” I said. “You gained from him—a great bitterness to drive you.”

            “My boys will not inherit such from me,” Jefferson said. “They will not find that I killed my own people in the service of traitors, or that I scalped possible cousins for sport.”

            They littered Creve Coeur Gap. Their uniforms were valuable plunder, and their sourdough bodies began to rise with the sun. Little Arch Clements started it. They all watched me, and I knew it. They came off with a steady pull, a sound like that of a toothless grandma sucking on a cob of corn accompanying them. I saved mine for some time before flinging it to the river.

            “I took no pleasure in that,” I said.

            “I take no pleasure in you,” my son said.

            He left me to myself.

            I went back to work. The voice in my blade called out chop! chop! And my hand obeyed. Slash! Stab! The wood flew until only nubbins survived, and these I ground beneath my boots.

            My hand had carved I knew not what, I had not restrained it, and what it wrought was bark chips and wood curls, sawdust and splinters.

            Could this be? Could my passport be such?

            The chips and curls would not mend. No other design would grow from them. I gathered a handful of the fragrant flakes and raised them to my face. My nostrils rested on the little pile, my tongue touched their salt. Nothing but wood chips—the large rendered small, and confusing.

            I blew on them and they began to spray about, then I tossed them to the corners.

            Oh, that voice in my blade had divined me well. I would seek no other monument.

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