James Burke - Cimarron Rose

'Don't think too harsh of her. Working for the G and falling in love with a guy like you probably ain't a good combo,' he said.

'Not tonight, L.Q.'

'Stonewall Judy might have give you the riot act, but you could tell she admired what you done. I like when she said, "Get your star back, Billy Bob, or stay out of my court." That's the kind of female I can relate to.'

'I'm trying to concentrate.'

' You got to turn loose of what's fretting you. You and I both know what that is, too.'

'I mean it, L.Q. Stop it.'

'You cain't be sure that Mexican is the right fellow.'

'I see his face in the gun flashes. You broke your knife blade off in his kidney.'

'So you gonna bust a cap on him and always wonder if you killed the right man? Ain't you had enough grief over that stuff down in Coahuila?'

I picked up Sam's journal and turned on the light in the kitchen and read at the breakfast table. I heard L.Q.' s spurs tinkling behind me, then it was quiet a moment and their sound disappeared down the front hall into a gust of wind that pushed open the screen door and let it fall back against the jamb.

September 3, 1891

I washed my jeans, my blue cotton shirt, my socks and underwear in a big cook pot and dried them on a warm rock the evening before I was to ride out. Then I packed my saddle bags with my Bible, spectacles, word dictionary, almanac, razor, soap, and a box of Winchester rounds, and rolled a blanket inside my slicker. The Rose of Cimarron seen all this but said nary a word. I don't know as she was hurt or if she did not give a damn. Tell me if there's a louder silence than that of a woman. I lay down in the dark and thought she would come to my side. But she walked down the hillock with a pout on her face to the mud caves, to join in the drunken frolic of her relatives I reckoned, and I knew I had commenced the most lonely night of my life. Outside the window I could see trees of lightning busting all over the sky. In my sleep I thought I heard thousands of cows lowing at the smell of rain, then going from hell to breakfast over a bluff that didn't have no bottom.

The morning broke cold and mean out of the north. You could see hail bouncing on the hardpan and big clouds swirling and getting darker all the time, like a twister was kicking up dust and fanning it out across a black sky. Jennie had not come back from the mud caves. I cooked my breakfast on the woodstove and fried some salted pork and put it and three smoked prairie chickens in my saddle bags. I put on my slouch hat, my vest and cotton shirt, my chaps that has turned black from animal grease and wood smoke, and hung my Navy revolvers from my pommel and pulled my Winchester '73 from its scabbard and rode down the hillock through the dead campfires and litter and venison racks of the subhumans that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang.

The burlap sacks that was hung across the cave entrances was weighted down with rocks to keep the wind out. My horse clattered across some tin plates and tipped over a cook's tripod and iron kettle and pushed over a table loaded with preserve jars. But not a soul stirred up in the caves where my Jennie slept. I looped my lariat and tossed it over a venison rack and drug it through the firepit and kicked down a lean-to with a drunk man in it and dropped the gate on the hog pen and stove out the bottom of a boat that was tied in the bulrushes.

But it was for naught. Jennie did not come out of the caves. Instead, one of the Doolin party did, this fellow with a beard like black grease paint and a head the shape of a watermelon. He was barefoot and in long red underdrawers with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pepperbox pistol in the other. I laid one across his cheek with my Winchester barrel and left him sitting in the mud like a man just discovered he had mumps. But my behavior was that of a child. My Jennie was gone, just like my reckless youth.

I forded the Cimarron and rode north in the storm. I was a drover and meat hunter on the high plains after the War, but I never saw the like of this storm. The tumble brush was like the Lord's crown of thorns dashed in the face. I could actually hear the dust clouds grinding across the hardpan, the way a locomotive sounds when the wheels screech on the grade. Up ahead the sleet was white all the way across the crest of the hills, and I knew me and my poor horse was in for a mighty hard day. I didn't turn in the saddle when I heard hooves coming behind me, supposing it was just hail beating on my hat. Then I seen her pouring it on her buckskin, bent low over the withers the way a savage rides so he can shoot under the horse's neck, her dress hitched plumb over her thighs.

I don't know how to explain it, but whenever I saw that woman ride a horse a banjo seemed to start ringing in my lower parts.

Hailstones and wind and flying brush could not diminish the beauty of the Cimarron Rose. Her smile was as beautiful as a flower opening in the morning and my heart fairly soared in my breast. Tied to her pommel was the fattest carpet bag you ever seen.

Are you looking for company? she asked.

I surely am, I said.

Then I would dearly like to ride along with you.

You was all packed and never told me? That's a mean trick to play on me, Jennie.

This bag here? No, this here is money that's twice stole. They ain't coming for it, though. I turned their horses out.

I beg your pardon? I said.

My relatives has robbed Pearl Younger's whorehouse and the Chinaman's opium den in Fort Smith. You reckon this is enough to build a church?

Good Lord, woman, you don't build church houses with money from a robbery.

I could see I had hurt her feelings again.

I can't preach nowhere cause I got a warrant on me, anyway, I said.

They say there ain't no God or law west of the Pecos.

We rode on like that, the wind plumb near blowing us out of the saddle. We stopped in a brush arbor, just like the one I got ordained in, and I put my slicker on Jennie and tied my hat down on my head with a scarf and built us a fire.

I bet there ain't no preacher like you on the Pecos, she said.

Just gunmen and drunkards, Jennie.

My mother says under the skin of every drunkard there's a good Baptist hiding somewhere.

Now, what do you answer to a statement like that?

Then she says, I bet the devil don't hate nothing worse than seeing his own money used against him.

I unrolled my blanket and covered our heads with it and put my arms inside her slicker, her face rubbing like a child's on my chest. I could feel her joined to me the way married folks is supposed to be and I knowed I didn't have to fight no more with all the voices and angry men that has lived inside me, and I saw the hailstones dancing in the fire and they was whiter than any snow, more pure than any words, and I heard the voice say Forgiven and I did not have to ask Who had spoken it.

The bailiff called from the courthouse. The jury was back in. chapter thirty-four

It wasn't a dramatic moment. It was a Friday night and the jury had asked the judge they be allowed to deliberate that evening, which meant they had no plans to return Saturday or Monday morning. The courtroom was almost deserted, the shadows of the oscillating fans shifting back and forth across the empty seats, the sounds of the late spring filtering through the high windows, as though the theater in our lives had already moved on and made spectators of us again.

Except for Lucas when the jury foreman read the verdict of not guilty. He shook hands with the jurors, the judge, with me and Vernon and Temple, with the bailiff, with the custodian mopping the hallway, with a soldier smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps.

'That's it? There ain't no way it can be refiled, huh?' he said.

'That's it, bud,' I said.

His face was pink in the waving shadows of the trees. I could see words in his eyes, almost hear them in his throat. But Vernon stood next to him and whatever he wanted to say stayed caught in his face, like thoughts that wanted to eat their way out of his skin.