“People ask me what I thought of the world back then. I didn’t think about the world. The men in it were enough. Now they’re all dead, and I’ll be joining them within the hour. I’m the last testament to a braver age, silenced by rope and trapdoor.” – Ault Pierce, 1894
“Tom never was much for patience. He was a loud mouthed bastard with an affinity for six guns, long rifles, and whiskey. ‘Bout the only good thing you could say about him is that he’s dead.” – Whiskey Sam at the funeral
My earliest memory is the gentle flow of piano music that found its way down the street to our house every night. My father was a gambler who stumbled upon a gold mine. His complaint was that it didn’t make him wealthy, but he never saw my mother for the jewel she was. My mother told me had fought in the Civil War and gotten a medal for something, though I never believed it. As gamblers go, his luck was pretty good until a hot July night when he bet the house at a poker table in Dodge. Pa was a poker man and he won, but one of his drunken compatriots let his greed get the best of him and my father ended up with a bullet in the back along with the rest of the pot. He died in the street without a friend in the world, drunk and alone. The next day my mother sold her only heirloom, a wooden brooch from Scotland that my grandmother had carried over on the boat, to buy him a decent funeral and a pine box that was more than he deserved. The preacher tossed my father’s box in the hole and said some fine words. Two days later we packed our belongings and left.
It was a deadbeat town with a name that changed most every other week. My mother took a job at the saloon, dancing with the cowboys and singing “Adam at the Gate” every Saturday night with Sheb the piano player. She sent me packing off to a one room schoolhouse during the day. Most of the other kids didn’t understand my fatherless home and I grew up mostly by myself. Regular teasing and beatings lined my lunch hours until I got big enough to throw a punch and knocked a boy three years older onto his back and made him cry. The school master didn’t like my easy manner regarding violence and sent me home. The doctor was a good friend of my mothers and took me in for an apprenticeship. Medicine was something I excelled at and when a rancher from up the valley took an interest in my mother, she dug deep into his pockets to send me to a fancy medical school back east. A week after my seventeenth birthday I got a telegram saying my mother had died.
I caught the first train home and used all the money I could get from my school things and my remaining tuition to buy her a good headstone and a nice burial. When the rancher didn’t show up I started figuring things out. After picking around town I discovered that the rancher had gotten angry with my mother and her persistence, especially regarding my education, and, in a drunken rage, had killed my mother. The whole town swore it was an accident, but I never was much for forgiving. Against the protests of my old mentor, Doc, I sold what was left of my mother’s things and bought a Colt revolver. I had never shot a gun before but on the sixty mile walk to the Hanging J Ranch, I learned all I needed to know. Somewhere around midnight I finally crept up the steps of the ranch house and into the bedroom of the unsuspecting cattle baron. The surprise on his face was paled in comparison to that of his female companion that had apparently replaced my mother. With an inexplicable hatred I squeezed the cold steel hammer back and the thundering report stole his life’s blood through an open wound in his head. The wound didn’t kill him immediately and he struggled on the floor for several minutes before his groans finally got to me and I thundered another round into his chest. I felt no remorse as I left his whore screaming naked in his bedroom and stole his money, a horse, and his silver lined hat. Through dusty towns and questionable saloons I rode, finding deeper and deeper holes to drink myself into. I was on two wanted posters by the time I walked into the Auraria camp in December, broke and reluctant to live.
My horse, rather the horse of some dead cattle baron, had died about forty miles outside of town. No one had ever taught me the rules of horse riding and the limits of the animals, so my first lesson sent me walking forty miles with a saddle and my belongings. As I walked down the boardwalk, she stepped right out of the tailor’s and right into my path. It was there that I gave up drinking and hopelessness. She had long dark hair down to her shoulders and a dark complexion that glowed in the sunlight. She was wearing a light dress and her smile slipped easily out from under her hat and parasol, coaxing the sun from its shade the moment I laid eyes on it. She was the start of the most beautiful thing in my life and I was in love with her the moment I laid eyes on her. She walked right by me on that narrow boardwalk with the simple stride of a girl who knows she’s being admired and I followed.
Three months later, after countless romantic picnics and several long evenings, it was all over. A drunken cowboy had robbed the bank and strangled the only witness. Lori’s smile was gone, her empty eyes pleading with me as I stepped into the room before a line of witnesses at the door. I laid her gentle form across my arms and carried her two blocks to the undertaker, spurs clinking against the boardwalk with every dreaded step. I sold my silver spurs and my saddle to buy her a funeral and a headstone but I didn’t stay for the funeral. The sheriff was drunk and lying in his own vomit when I arrived. He didn’t pay much heed to the deputy badge I took from the drawer and pinned on the shirt Lori had sewn for me for my birthday. I took a rifle and the sheriff’s horse and rode until the horse died from exhaustion. Then I walked until my feet were so blistered I couldn’t walk anymore and my feet were so swollen my boots wouldn’t come off. And then I crawled until I dropped face first on Death’s doorstep and fell into darkness with a mouthful of prairie dust and hate in my heart.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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