Destiny, Texas Read online

  Gunn nodded and looked away from the body.

  “It’s a hard thing there, especially as young as you are, and I hate it for you. But if it helps, that Indian would have done worse to you and yours.”

  I think it was Papa mentioning Gunn’s age that made Gunn say what he said next. He took it in mind to prove some point to us.

  “Somebody let me borrow their knife,” Gunn said.

  “Whatcha want a knife for, young ’un?” Old Ben asked.

  Gunn looked at him like he was daft. “I guess I ought to scalp him.”

  “You’re going to what?” Papa asked, spurring his nervous horse to keep it close to the body.

  Gunn clenched his lower lip in his teeth and stared defiantly at Papa with his bony chest puffed out, although his jaw trembled a little bit. I think he realized his big talk had backed him into a corner, but wasn’t going to quit what he started and lose face.

  “You was raised better than that,” Old Ben said. “Civilized folks don’t scalp people. No, they don’t.”

  “Texicans do,” Gunn said. “Man I talked to back in Fort Worth showed me his scalps. Every real Indian fighter has some.”

  “A man you talked to?” Papa asked.

  “Said he was a Texas Ranger. Had two pistols and a knife as long as that.” Gunn held his hands wide apart to approximate a very, very large knife—one of those downscaled swords Texans called a Bowie, and good for anything from splitting wood and skinning buffalo to lopping off people’s limbs. Texans are high on utilitarian, versatile weapons.

  “Quit that foolish talk,” Papa said.

  Gunn had been avoiding looking at the dead Kiowa since I first walked up, but he had another glance and spotted the sheath knife in the Kiowa’s belt. He took a deep breath, and then jerked it free with a quick tug.

  Papa had used up the last of his patience, and I thought he was on the verge of snatching Gunn up and giving him what Old Ben called the “what for.”

  “The Indians need to know not to mess with us,” Gunn said, oblivious to the limit he had pushed Papa to, or not caring. “They would see the scalp and know that this is Dollarhyde country. Not theirs.”

  “Dollarhyde country?”

  “Our country,” Gunn said.

  “Where does he get this stuff?” Papa asked Old Ben with a little less frustration in his voice.

  Old Ben shrugged and the two of them shared a look.

  “Killing isn’t something to be proud of, nor to be taken lightly,” Papa said.

  “Are we going to bury him, Papa?” I asked.

  “That Indian’s long past caring. Burying him or all the ceremony in the world won’t make it any different,” Papa said. “We’d best get the wagons to where those folks out there are holed up. They might need our help, and we can fort up with them if need be. More of those Indians are liable to come back for the body and catch us out here in the open.”

  “I hear they never leave one of their fallen after a fight if they can help it,” Old Ben said.

  “You two boys get yourselves back to the wagons,” Papa said. “I’m about half a mind to tan you both for not staying where I put you.”

  Papa was done talking and already riding away, and even Gunn wasn’t so stubborn as not to know what would happen if he argued anymore and didn’t do as he was told. He threw one last glance at the dead Kiowa. Tough, maybe, but I noticed he gagged when he looked, and quickly turned his back on the sight.

  “I bet you wish you had shot that Kioway,” Gunn said to me as we followed behind Papa and Old Ben.

  I didn’t egg him on by answering him. What he wanted was to argue more.

  “I’m going to be the best Indian fighter in Texas,” he added. “You watch and see.”

  “You’d better put that Kiowa knife away before Mama sees it,” I said. “She’s going to be mad enough at Papa for leaving her in the brush.”

  He gave me another one of his defiant looks, but tucked the knife into his belt behind his back. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?”

  “You don’t think I would have scalped that Indian, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past you.”

  “I can whip you any day.” He shouldered into me and gained two steps on me while I regained my balance. “You know it.”

  Papa was looking over his shoulder at us, so I kept quiet.

  “You may be older, but I can still whip you,” Gunn said after a bit.

  “Okay, you’re the toughest.”

  “I’m going to be tougher than even Papa someday.”

  “Maybe, but I’m going to be smarter than both of you.”

  “You might be, at that. I wouldn’t put it past you.” Gunn found his hat where he had lost it at the edge of the woods. He picked it up and dusted it off and twirled it around in his hands. I could tell he was still thinking something over.

  “I wouldn’t have scalped that Indian,” he finally said. “Not really. I was joshing.”

  “I know it.”

  “Never thought it would feel like that. Didn’t feel like that when I pulled the trigger,” he said. “You know when you’re all excited and shoot a rabbit and then you walk up to it and feel kind of bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was like that, only way worse,” he said. “Papa shot one. You think he feels the same? He shot lots of men in the war.”

  Papa never talked about the war, and Mama said not to ask him. All the other boys back in Alabama bragged about what their fathers did in the war, but the only things we knew about Papa’s service were bits and pieces we overhead from grown-ups when they didn’t know we were around. Old Ben wouldn’t even tell us anything, and said Papa had done things he wanted to forget. Him saying that only made us more curious.

  “Try not to think on it and remember if we hadn’t come to help, those Indians might have got him and Old Ben,” I said.

  “You weren’t the one that shot him.”

  “Come on, you two,” Papa called back to us. “And don’t tell your mother that you were in the middle of that fight. She’s most likely to find out anyway, but don’t you say anything.”

  Papa put his horse to a trot, and I picked up my pace. I didn’t want to miss what Mama had to say to him when he got back to the wagons, especially when she found out he had taken her boys into an Indian fight. Papa was right. You couldn’t hide much from Mama.

  Wouldn’t you know it, but Gunn slipped off again. I was almost back to the wagons before he caught up to me. He was leading a blue roan Kiowa pony and smiling like he was the king of England. I compared the way he had looked only a bit before to the way he looked then, and it was like two different people. He was always moody and changed like the weather.

  “My horse,” he said.

  I didn’t argue any. I was too busy trying to hear what Papa and Old Ben were saying.

  “Dollarhyde country,” Papa said.

  “That boy’s something else. Kind of reminds me of you at times,” Old Ben answered. “No offense meant.”

  “None taken,” Papa said. “Dollarhyde country. That boy worries me, but I kind of like the sound of that.”

  Chapter Three

  The emigrants were waiting for us behind their wagons or hidden in the ruins of the old settlement. Many of them were black with soot where they had been fighting to put out the fire in one of the half-collapsed buildings near their wagons. There were better than twenty of them: five men, their women, and a whole lot of big-eyed, snotty kids peeking out from behind them. They must have been unsure who we were, for it took Papa two shouts to get them to come out and talk to him.

  “Thank the Lord for hearing our prayers,” the oldest of the men said in a crackling voice when he walked up to Papa’s horse. He was tall and thin and his hatless, his bald head was sunburned and spotted with peeling blisters. “Welcome.”

  Papa looked over the group a long time without speaking while he studied the remains of the settlement on eit
her side of an overgrown, short stretch of street. There had once been ten or so buildings lining that street, but most of them had been burned to the ground years before. Only two shelters could be termed to be still standing. One of them was nothing more than some rickety log walls with a portion of caved-in roof hanging over it, still smoldering from the day’s Indian raid, and the other was a half-completed sod structure those emigrants had been working on. Some charred, salvaged lumber was piled alongside it, as well as a stack of fresh-cut sod bricks and a moldboard plow.

  Last, Papa’s eyes landed on a brand-new sign nailed to a post beside the old man. DESTINY, TEXAS was painted on it in wavy, unsteady red letters.

  “People back down the trail never mentioned a place by this name,” Papa finally said.

  “It wasn’t what it was called before the war,” the old man answered. “I mean, before all the people left it to the Indians.”

  “Looks like you’re aiming to rebuild this town,” Papa said.

  “We were, indeed,” the old man said. “A new name for a reborn place.”

  “Were? Changing your mind?”

  “We’re rethinking things. Praying on it. I don’t know if God intended for men to live out here.”

  “Is this all of you?”

  The old man turned to his people to pass somber looks between them, and then shook his head. “No, Brother Ezekiel and Brother George are out there on the prairie where they went to greet those Indians. Sister Josey, George’s woman, went crazy when she saw what they did to George and took two arrows before we could drag her back.”

  “Mind if we camp here for the night?” Papa asked. “Could be, those Indians will come back.”

  The old man acted as if he didn’t understand. But then again, it could have been the sun in his eyes. The Texas sun was hard on a man without the good sense to wear a hat.

  We formed our wagons up in a square against the front wall of the dilapidated log building after we put out the smoldering parts with handfuls of dirt, and Papa built a fire inside the log walls and under where the roof was missing. Mama sat in the shade, fussing over my baby sister while the wife of one of the Mexicans, Juanita was her name, started cooking us some supper. Juanita was young and pretty, but I soon tired of watching her and went to double-check that I had tied the horses securely, as Papa would hide me good if one of them got loose.

  Papa was leaning against a wagon tailgate, puffing on his pipe and staring at those emigrants over by their own wagons. They were sitting in a circle on the ground, facing one another. Some of them were reading from Bibles, some of them had their heads bowed, and occasionally one of them would break into a hymn or quote some scripture.

  “What kind of people are those?” I asked. “I’ve never seen church held like that.”

  “Quakers,” Papa said. “Call themselves Friends, or some such like that. Gentlefolk.”

  “Papa, why would gentlefolk come out here?”

  “Looking for a place they fit, I guess.”

  “They don’t look like they fit.”

  Papa tapped his pipe on the heel of his palm to knock out the ashes and nodded at me. “No, they don’t look it. My impression of this country is that it’s going to require a scrapper.”

  “Mama says it’s going to be hard out here. Living, I mean.”

  “Don’t let things vex you. You’re bad to be thinking instead of doing.”

  I was about to ask Papa more, but he was already looking over my shoulder at something else. I turned around and saw that Gunn was trying to get on the Kiowa pony he had claimed, but the crazy little paint kept either shying away from him before he could get close or dumping him on the ground as soon as he could get a belly across its back. Both of us could hear Gunn cussing, and from the way those Quakers were looking his way, they heard him, too.

  “That boy is as stubborn as your mama,” Papa said. “I guess I’ll have to give him a whipping if she hears him talking like that.”

  “Gunn likes to fight,” I said. “And he doesn’t care about anything except what he wants to do.”

  “Gunn makes his mind up in a hurry. He’ll take some hard licks because of it but he’ll eventually learn.” Papa walked off toward Gunn and his Kiowa pony. “That fool boy is going to get himself killed if he doesn’t leave that horse alone.”

  Gunn came to bed a long time after sundown. He smelled like horse sweat, and I guessed he had kept after that Indian nag in the dark.

  “Wake up, Hamish. You ain’t going to believe this.” Mama had told him over and over to quit saying “ain’t,” but it never did any good.

  “Be quiet.” It had taken me more than an hour to get to sleep, and I was cranky enough to punch him in the nose for disturbing my rest.

  Earlier, Gunn just had to tell a story about a man he had heard about who was bitten by a big black centipede with orange, bony legs that crawled under his blankets. He said it rotted off the man’s big toe where it bit him, and eventually a doctor had to amputate his whole leg. No matter how I checked around me and shook my blankets, I kept imagining creepy-crawlies all over me. It’s hard to get to sleep when you’re worrying about big black centipedes tickling their bony digits up your bare legs.

  “Wake up.”

  I propped myself up on one elbow and saw that Papa was sitting at the fire on the other side of the building from us. What’s more, Mama was next to him and Mama didn’t like to stay up late. The man with the sunburned head was sitting across from them.

  “Looks like they’re trading,” I said.

  “They’re trying to give Papa a kid,” Gunn said. “Mama wants him, but Papa ain’t having any of it.”

  Chapter Four

  “Can you believe Papa gave them a horse for that little ole runt?” Gunn asked the next morning.

  Mama had Beth in the crook of one elbow and the other arm around that boy, hugging him to her until he was half-hidden in her dress. He was thin and stared at us with big, dark-ringed eyes. His tangled blond hair stuck out every which way, no matter how Mama absently ran her fingers through it, as if she wanted him to make a good first impression on us.

  “Looks like he’s about to cry,” Gunn said to me as we walked up.

  “Boys, I want you to meet Joseph,” Mama said. “He’s going to live with us.”

  “What about his people?” I asked.

  Mama glanced at the three fresh graves under a little oak beyond the Quakers’ wagons. “The Kiowa took his folks, and none of the others are set up to help him. They’ve all got troubles of their own.”

  “More like they thought more of that nag of a mare,” Gunn said under his breath. “Indians shot one of theirs, and they ain’t going back where they came from without enough horses to pull their wagons.”

  “What’s that?” Mama looked hard at Gunn.

  “Nothing, Mama.”

  It wasn’t even real daylight yet, but the Quakers were already preparing their wagons. Gunn was right; they were harnessing a plow mare that Papa had brought with us. She was so old that none of us understood why he had even brought her along. Her teeth were bad, you could count her ribs, and she hadn’t been in harness since we left Alabama.

  “Say hello to Hamish and Gunn,” Mama said to that boy, pointing us out as she named us.

  The boy didn’t say anything and ducked his head.

  “What did you say his name was?” Gunn asked.

  “Joseph,” Mama said.

  Gunn whispered, “I think I’ll call him Peckerhead.”

  “You two let Joseph ride the oxen with you if he wants. Get to know each other.” Mama noticed Gunn wasn’t paying any attention. “And mind your manners, Gunn Dollarhyde. I raised you better than that.”

  Joseph shuffled forward uncertainly, with Mama’s hand gently pushing him. Snot shone on his upper lip and there were tear streaks down both dirty cheeks. He followed us, although we didn’t say anything else to him until we were almost to our wagons.

  “Mama ain’t been right since she h
ad Little Beth,” Gunn said. “Papa even says so.”

  I considered that. Papa had told us more than once to go easy on her until she got better. Neither Gunn nor I was sure what was wrong with her but both of us knew that Mama had been better before Baby Beth and before the Blue Bastards burned us out. She would still read to us at night, cluck her tongue and tend to our scrapes and bruises, and occasionally pass us a sweet smile for no good reason we could see for it. But she was different. There was no denying that.

  Mama was quieter, and cried sometimes for no reason we could see. She still smiled, but even her smile seemed a little sad at times. It was probably true that Papa was trying to coax her out of whatever funk she was in. That was the only reason I could see that Mama could talk him into trading for a Quaker boy.

  Texas was the first and only place I ever saw where you could horse trade for a half-starved child as bony as a bag of sticks and with black-ringed eyes like a corn crib raccoon. Indians, sky, and burned-down towns in the middle of nowhere, plus kids for sale—I told myself not to be surprised at anything that happened next.

  Papa was already in the saddle, and the Mexicans had our wagons ready. We came to the oxen and I jumped on the wagon tongue and climbed on Speck’s back.

  “Take your pick,” I said to Joseph, pointing at the four oxen behind me.

  “He can ride my steer if he wants to,” Gunn said. “If he ain’t scared.”

  “Isn’t.”

  “What?”

  “If he isn’t scared. You aren’t supposed to say ‘ain’t.’ It isn’t proper.”

  “Proper? You sound like Mama.” Gunn spat in the dirt. He didn’t chew tobacco but he was absolutely fond of spitting when he wanted to make a point. “Nobody talks like they do in those books you’re always reading. Most times, real people are in too big of a hurry to worry about what words to use.”

  Joseph looked from one of us to the other with blank eyes, and I was beginning to wonder if Gunn was right and the boy was a mute. I guessed he was maybe seven or eight years old. It was hard to tell.

  “Are you going to walk?” I asked Gunn. We had come a lot of miles riding beside each other on those oxen, and as irritating as Gunn could be, I didn’t like the thought of having to spend all day with a stranger that didn’t or couldn’t talk, and didn’t have the sense to wipe his nose.