Johnstone, W.: Last Mountain Man

Emmett’s eyes flicked over the .36 stuck behind his son’s belt. He said nothing about it.

“Pa?”

The father looked at his son.

“I’m glad you’re back.”

The father stepped forward, put his arms around his son, and held him.

Over greens and fried squirrel and panbread, the father and son ate and talked through the years that they had both lost and gained. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence between them until they both adjusted to the time and place, and then they were once more father and son.

“We done our best,” Emmett said. “Can’t nobody say we didn’t. And there ain’t nobody got nothing to be ashamed of. I thought it wrong for the Yankees to burn folks’ homes like they did. But it was war, and terrible things happen in war. But the bluebellies just kept on comin’. Shoot one and five’d take his place. They weren’t near ’bout the riflemen we was, nor the riders, but they whipped us fair and square and now it’s time to put all that behind us and get on with livin’.” He sopped a piece of panbread through the juice of his greens. He chewed for a time. “You know your brother, Luke, is dead, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t know if you did, or not. I heard he was killed in the Wilderness, last year. Fightin’ with Lee, wasn’t he?”

Luke had always been Pa’s favorite, so Kirby had felt.

Emmett nodded. “Yeah. Tryin’ to get back to the Wilderness, so I heard.” Something in his eyes clouded, as if he knew more about his son’s death than he was telling. “I don’t see no sign of your sister, Janey, and you ain’t brought up her name. What are you holding back, Kirby?”

The moment the boy had been dreading. “She run off, Pa. Last year. Run off with a tinker, so he called himself. But he was a gambler, I’d say.”

“Smooth-talker, I’d wager.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’d his hands look like?”

“Soft.”

“Gambler. How’d your Ma take it?”

“Hard.”

“Probably helped kill her.” He said it flatly, then shook his head. “Well, past is past, no point dwellin’ on it.” He rose from the table. “I’ve ridden a piece these last weeks — wanted to get home. Now I’m home, and I’m tired. Reckon you are, too, son. We’ll get some sleep, talk in the morning. I got a plan.” He covered his mouth and coughed.

Breakfast was meager: fried mush and coffee that was mostly chicory. A piece of leftover panbread.

“I don’t think it good to stay here, boy,” Emmett said, surprising the boy. “Too many memories. Land’s got too many rocks to farm. I think it best for us to pack it up, sell what we can, and head west. We’ll sell the mules, buy some pack horses. The mules is gettin’ too old for where we’re goin’. What is today, boy?”

“Wednesday, Pa.” West! he thought. The frontier he’d read about in the dime novels. Buffalo and mountain men. Then he sobered as he thought: Indians on the warpath.

Emmett pushed his plate from him and put his elbows on the table. “We’ll ride into town today, boy. Ask around some. Kirby, I brought that bay out yonder home for you.”

Kirby mumbled his thanks, pleased but embarrassed. He had never had such a grand gift.

“How far you been from this holler, boy?”

“A good piece, Pa. I went to Springfield once. Took us a good bit of travelin’ to get there, too.”

Seventy miles.

Emmett stuffed his pipe and lit it, then pushed his rawhide-bottomed chair back and looked at his son. “Toward the end of the war, Kirby, some Texicans and some mountain men joined up with us. Them mountain men had been all the way to the Pacific Ocean; but they talked a lot about a place the Shoshone Indians call I-dee-ho. Or something like that. I’d like to see it, and all the country between here and there. I been all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, boy — you never seen so much water. You just got no idea how big this country is. But west is where the people’s got to go. I figure we’ll just head on out that way, too.”

“Pa? How will we know when we get to where it is we’re goin’?”

“We’ll know,” the man replied, a mysterious quality to his voice, as if he was holding back from his son.

Kirby met his father’s eyes. “Whatever you say. Pa.”

They pulled out the following Sunday morning, just as the sun was touching the eastern rim of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Kirby rode the bay, sitting on a worn-out McClellan saddle; not the most comfortable saddle ever invented. The saddle had been bought from a down-on-his-luck Confederate soldier trying to get back to Louisiana.

In Kirby’s saddlebags, in addition to an extra pair of trousers, shirt, long handle underwear, and two pairs of socks, a worn McGuffey’s reader his Pa had purchased for a penny — much to Kirby’s disgust. He thought he was all done with schooling.

The boy had no way of knowing that his education was just beginning.

The McGuffey’s reader was heavy on his mind. As they rode, he turned to his father. “I can read and cipher.” He knew his protests would fall on deaf ears. Once his father made up his mind, forget any objections … just do it.

“I ’spect you can,” Emmett said, his eyes still on the little valley below them. His eyes lifted, touching the now tiny cross on the faraway knoll. He touched his boot heels to his mount and father and son headed west. “What’s a verb?”

Kirby looked at him. “Huh? I mean, sir?”

“A verb, boy. Tell me what it is.”

Kirby frantically searched his memory. “Well,” he admitted. “Reckon I forgot. You brung it up, so you tell me.”

“Don’t sass me, boy.” But there was a twinkle in the father’s eyes. “I asked you first.”

“Then I reckon we’ll find out together, Pa.”

“I reckon we will at that, boy.” Emmett turned once, twisting in the saddle to look for the last time at the cross on the knoll. He straightened in the saddle, assuming the cavalryman’s stiff-backed position. He asked his son, “You got any regrets, Kirby? Leavin’ this place, I mean.”

“Hard work, not always enough food, Jayhawkers, Yankees, cold winters, and some bad memories,” the boy replied honestly, as was his fashion. “If that’s regrets, I’m happy to leave them behind.”

Emmett’s reply was unusually soft. “You was just a boy when I pulled out with the Grays. I reckon I done you and your Ma a disservice — like half a million other men done their loved ones. I didn’t leave you no time for youthful foolishness; no time to be a young boy. You had to be a man at twelve. I don’t know if I can make up for that, but I aim to try. From now on, son, it’ll be you and me.” For a little while, he silently added. He coughed.

Together they rode, edging slightly northward as they went. They skirted Joplin, a town on the Ozark plateau. It was a young town, only twenty-five years old in 1865. Joplin had a few years to go before it would become the metropolis of a three-state lead and zinc field. Kirby wanted to ride in and see the town; the only other big town he’d ever seen was Springfield. But his father refused, said there were dens of iniquity in there.

“What’s a den of in … in … what’d you say, Pa?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, I reckon.”

“Why don’t you tell me, Pa?”

“’cause I ain’t of a mind to, that’s why.” The father seemed embarrassed.

“Sure must be something pretty danged good.”

Emmett smiled. “Some folks would say so, I’m sure. Never been to one myself. And don’t cuss. It ain’t seemly and you might slip and do so around a lady. Ladies don’t like cussin’.”

“You say hell’s fire, Pa,” he reminded.

“That’s different.”