Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Finished shaving, he quickly dressed, giving his work shirt to the boardinghouse lady to be washed. When he returned to the room, the two rangers looked awkward, as though their conversation had been cut off abruptly upon his entering.

Dr. Tom stood up from the bed. “Well, Nate. We thought you’d run off with the woman of the house.”

The three of them walked the short distance to the public house to eat dinner, a meal composed of pot squash and steaks of indeterminate origin. They ordered three whiskeys and all stared for a long moment in appreciation of the warm oaky color and burned-barrel scent before draining their glasses.

They looked around at the empty hall and watched the barkeep cleaning used whiskey glasses with his tongue. The barkeep pointed to a sign over his head, which read Dances, Two Bits, and told them that the dancing would commence at eight o’clock, along with music the likes of which, he was certain, they had seldom heard. The girls, he assured them, were genuine hurdy-gurdy girls from Europe, and no common whores.

He added, “These foreign-born like dancing more than you’ve ever seen. You’ll see. It gets rigorous.”

As the barkeep had promised, within the hour, a small group of men and women quietly entered the public house and seated themselves on benches set against the far wall. One man unpacked a fiddle and another a squeezebox, and they began to play a song. Three young women, the hurdies, dressed in full skirts hemmed just above the ankle, nodded to the music, their old-fashioned sausage curls coiling and uncoiling in time with their bobbing heads.

Soon more men and women began to enter the public house, Irish, Mexicans, and Rhinelanders among them, each in his own dress, all speaking incomprehensible languages. Most of the men, and a fair share of their women, bought small glasses of beer and crowded the open area to hear the music that was played in ever-increasing tempos. Eventually, a couple of men bought their dance tickets from the barkeep and shyly approached the hurdy girls. Like the men were draft horses, Nate thought, too long at pasture.

The seated girls chosen to dance smiled and led their callers onto the floor, where they guided the men through a near approximation of reels, polkas, and galops, their partners changing after every song. Swiping his mustache, Dr. Tom walked to the bar and bought two tickets. He chose his partner and commenced an admirable waltz.

Nate turned to Deerling. “You gonna dance?”

Deerling took his hat, which had been balanced on one crossed knee, and set it on the table. “Never much cared for it. You?”

“No.”

“Your wife don’t miss it?”

“She didn’t marry me for my dancin’.”

“What did she marry you for?”

Nate saw it was a friendly-enough question. “She told me I was constant.”

Deerling considered that for a moment. “Constancy in men is like fidelity in women. Much to be desired, but seldom found.” He stared at Nate for a brief moment before shifting restlessly in his seat.

“That’s a hard line to take,” Nate said.

“No. It’s not.” Deerling stood up and faced him. “Oklahoma, I’m sure your wife is as faithful as the North Star. From what I’ve been told, you’re not much for farming, but you know horses better than most, and we fight for the same side. But I didn’t spend the past twenty years of my life learning to appreciate the merits of mankind. You’re young. You’ll learn.” He fit his hat carefully back on his head and said, “Church is at nine.”

With a nod to the barkeep, Deerling walked out of the hall just as Dr. Tom finished his first dance and returned to the table. Clapping Nate on the shoulder, he moved his chair around to better see the floor, now crowded with a dozen or more couples wheeling about the room.

Dr. Tom leaned close to Nate and said, “I didn’t understand a word that girl said, but she could sure wing a lively one.” He smiled and looked around. “Where’s George?”

“He left. I think I put him awry.”

Dr. Tom crossed his arms. “Oh?”

“He holds a darkened view of humanity.”

“One thing you’ll discover about George is that he takes his time with people. When I first rode with him, it was near a year before we had more than a passing of words. Just keep a steady path and he’ll soften up.”

Dr. Tom took a sip of whiskey, then thoughtfully sucked the remainder from the bottom of his mustache. “Listen,” he said. “More than any other man I know, George would give his life for a friend. We were forty miles into Mexico—oh, this was in ’fifty-five—chasing some Lipan that had been raiding in Uvalde County. There were about a hundred of us, but we got pinned down at a stream called Rio Escondido by about five hundred Mexicans. George waded into that stream four times to pull out wounded men. Got shot in both arms. We thought he was going to have to pull the last fellow out with his teeth.”

Nate smiled. Ranger lore, more than any other kind, valued the power of understatement.

Dr. Tom danced one more time with a different girl, and then he and Nate walked in amiable silence towards the boardinghouse.

The sky was dark and filled with stars, and Dr. Tom stopped once and rocked back on his heels to look up. He said to Nate, “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, it does.” Nate watched Dr. Tom watching the stars. The ranger’s mouth was open in awe, like a kid’s, which made Nate smile.

Dr. Tom traced the arc of a shooting star with his finger. “Celestial wanderers,” he said. “Sort of like me and George.” He looked at Nate. “It’s hard to imagine, seeing how crowded the sky looks tonight, how far away one star is from another. Like people, really. We can appear to be standing right next to each other, and yet in our minds, we can be thousands of miles away, lost to the outer reaches. But we’re all together in the same black soup, which makes us all related somehow.” Dr. Tom shook his head. “George rags on me about my pondering such things. It’s good to have a sympathetic ear, though.”

They walked up onto the porch and Dr. Tom placed a hand on Nate’s arm. “Tomorrow, after George gets his church, we pick up the pace. We didn’t want to run breakneck through the desert, but now there’s more water and graze for the horses, we’ll be riding fast.”

They entered their room quietly as Deerling seemed to be sleeping, though the lamp was still burning.

Nate removed his clothes down to his long underwear and crawled into the bedroll. His ear pressed close to the floorboards, he could hear the woman downstairs stepping around the parlor, locking up and humming to herself. His wife would often hum. Sometimes it seemed to Nate that the same strangely lamentable song had stretched out over the entire five years of their marriage. Strange because his wife was always smiling and seemed, more than anyone he knew, to be satisfied in full with her life, although she’d had troubles enough to be dour. Losing three babies from her belly in as many years could have made her bitter and resentful. But she rose cheerfully in the morning and smiled secretly against his fingers in the dark of their bed at night.

He turned over once to still those thoughts, and slept.

The river barge, the Emmelda Tucker, slipped easily through a fog bank, eastbound with the tide on Buffalo Bayou. Lucinda had boarded at Allen’s Landing in Houston early that morning with a dozen other men and women traveling to Harrisburg or Lynchburg or even farther on across the bay to Galveston Island, more than sixty miles to the south. An early-fall rain had soaked the cattails growing on the banks, and when the sun broke through, the matted rushes spilled mist over the river like smoke from a shanty fire.