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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Blackguard Father
Tom Sheehan
Only two times had Zack Harbolt seen his son in this life … at birth, when the new father abruptly rode off on another cattle drive north, and 10 years later when he rode back into Texas and watched the boy from a distance riding his mount, a pretty paint that had a bunch of ginger in him. The boy did well on the horse, which was enough for Harbolt to turn and ride away again, satisfied that the youngster showed gumption and a natural ability on a horse. Harbolt had no yen to see the boy’s mother, a Cherokee squaw he had camped with on the plains for nearly a year. Her name was Wing Walker. Harbolt had revived her after pulling her from the Wichita River nearly dead. She called her son Eagle Talk, but Harbolt called him Cooper Harbolt, after his brother, a cavalryman killed in the Indian Wars and he had written up a paper that spelled those facts.
Zack Harbolt rode north again after learning on this return that a rancher met years earlier, So-High Smith, had taken Wing Walker and her son into his home. Harbolt saw first account that the youngster was already a very good horseman and seemed promising.
“It is,” he whispered while mounted on his stallion nearly hidden in a tree line, “the most important thing for anyone living on the prairie because a man and his horse are one.” One of his firmest beliefs slipped away across the grass, like much else of his beliefs and promises.
“Thus the blood line,” he yet quickly affirmed in the same breath, “is alive and kicking; Cooper Harbolt lives on.” It was the liveliest his happiness ever carried, and he felt his brother’s presence as if he was standing right beside him. Such a revelation will change many a man, or knock him for the everlasting loop, but Harbolt carried on in his seldom-disturbed manner; a man alone with his thoughts.
He also had to admit that So-High Smith, at several new and old views, was the smallest man he’d ever seen riding a horse, with special stirrups to boot, and felt a lick of favor for the smaller man. He’d remember him sitting a mount like a piglet on a sow’s back; that image did not leave Harbolt no matter how hard he forced the issue.
As Fate has its way often in the second-time-around, Wing Walker died in a rustlers’ stampede when she was caught in her secret garden, one that she planted away from the house, a garden producing several select table surprises every year, as though she had a special handle on the Earth itself.
Cooper Harbolt was 17 at the time of her death. He was a strapping young man, who was like a son to Smith, when the two of them silently buried Wing Walker at the edge of her garden right at the spot where her body had been found. It was as if a sign from one of her high gods had to be answered.
Each one of them, in his way, knew Wing Walker carried many of her secrets back into the deep Earth that harbors all secrets. The tribal fathers knew it was the way to control secret divulgences just the way a warrior had to command his quiver. Even though the Earth is a storehouse, for man and the gods, it needs replanting and cultivation from those who depend on it. When Smith talked about swapping fields around for better fertilization and yield, young Cooper understood the reasoning; a pasture became a wheat field, a wheat field became a pasture, and the Earth collected the on-going benefits too.
As young Cooper grew and learned, his father, seemingly at the other end of the world, forgot quickly what he himself had learned, seen, and only half understood in his self-centered way. Once in a while, even riding drag on a drive, or riding guard on a moonless night, which allows all kinds of phantoms and spirits to kindle their lives in men’s mind, he’d think of his son Cooper in odd situations, but never imagining how much the lad had grown, or what kind of a man he might have become if he’d become a man; that slight vision was always strained, distant, not quite imaginable for a man of his lot and drawing.
His thoughts, of course, were nameless scenarios of the wandering life of a for-hire cattleman, a drover, a simple ride-and-eat-and drink-and sleep cowpoke. It kept saying a man had to do what a man had to do, and his life was on the endless trail of driving cattle herds, enjoying the camaraderie of cowpokes from all over the west. They’d get to new towns, see some settlements or towns die between trips years apart, and see others rise from the dust. They’d hear the whistle of a distant train and see the plume of black smoke rise over the horizon as Time began to tell it own time across the western landscape.
So as one drive ended, with the omen rising of new jobs promising to be far apart, talk in a Kansas saloon shifted to a personal note, curiosities becoming meat of the talk.
“Say, Zack,” a cowpoke pard name of Garvey Masters said as they hunched over the bar, “we talked afore ‘bout not hearin’ your family name very much. Fact is, I never heard “Harbolt” until you was introduced to us on the Melkin drive. Never heard “Harbolt” afore but I just heard it today again, like it’s been hiding out all the time. Seems a quick gun wears the shiny brand and the shiny name. Down to Rizzletown he had a fight with some Connery men and left two dead in an honest-to-god duel. The whole town was watchin’, all a them sayin’ he was sure the fastest ever after them Connery men drawed on him and all for nothin’, they say, like the color of a gal’s dress hangin’ on a rail to dry an’ ya could see right through it and all that hidden meanin’.”
He coughed his declaration at the see-through thought, raised his eyes in grave approval of all such things, and said, “Guns and dresses sure as hell make things different for a body, don’t you agree, Zack? Guess it’s been that way since Gert Preble went showin’ off way back in the Red River just that one time.” He paused and reflected, “Yep, guns and dresses makes the big difference.”
That woke Zack Harbolt from a long sleep, it seemed. Here he thought his kid was a natural horseman decided and had seen his life go that way. Hell, how long had it been and not a word in between about Cooper’s life with So-High Smith? He couldn’t rightly remember. His own gun on his part was deadly fast, but he had managed to keep the fact hidden. His gunfights were mostly past issues growing out of cross words or plain anger and not much else. He often saw the face of the last man he had killed over something so stupid he could not remember the cause; but the boy he pictured was an exuberant redhead graced with speed and harmony with his horse. Harbolt remembered the boy’s blue eyes and flaming red hair; he couldn’t forget them and they had kept his guns often in place, where some situations with him involved would have been quick-drawn and spat death.
“What’s his handle,” Zack Harbolt asked, sort of off-handed, “his first name, this Harbolt you heard of?”
His companion, Garvey Masters, said, “Never stopped to rope that in, Zack. Things happen so fast. First names really don’t mean much when the first bullet makes the tally. Those kind a gunners walk in with the sunshine at their back like celebratin’ was all in order and all it is is one shot and never a good look at what he sees in the river when he’s shavin’, whether he’s good lookin’ or not.”
Garvey Masters looked around and added, “Could be in the room with us, right now, and I couldn’t pin a tail on him. But a young pup, for sure. A real young pup.”
Zack Harbolt went back ten years in time quicker than ever, the younger images coming to him like reflections off a bright wall, and full of color. The boy’s hair came back in a hurry, the red flare of it all splotchy and never knowing a comb or a brush, but some gathered twigs used for making a fellow somewhat presentable to gals in towns rising on the horizon
like Paradise on the loose.
Also he scanned the room under the brim of his hat as he slowly turned away from the bar, a beer mug up close to his mouth, his dark eyes rising over the brim and gazing around the whole room, table by table, man by man, face by face … in a search he’d rather not make.
There was one young face he did not recognize, with his hat drawn down tightly in place as if he was a social outcast in a room full of men. He could not see the color of his hair or his eyes drawn into a retreat of sorts. When the young man drank a sip of beer, a reddish hue slipped from under his hat. It was enough for guesswork, and indecision. But it would make him look again in his scanning of the saloon.
He saw nothing else possibly recognizable. Nothing out of the past. Nothing of a young Cooper making an advance on the old Cooper, the one he was named for. Not the “Eagle Talk” boy of the prairie Indian woman. Not in the whole room, though some of the figures looked darkish, specter-like, out of place in corners where light was faint. Sweeping his gaze again around the room, nothing changed, even when his attention fell on simple characters, double checking some dim-lit cowpokes at ease, at drink, bent in near sleep from the liquor, the long drive that had not let go its grip. One way or another, most all of these men would manage to burn off that grip.
But it relaxed him, that thorough look around the saloon. What a place it would be to meet his son, in a saloon, him how many years older, his guns shiny, perhaps his guns so soon from spitting death. He hoped not to that extent.
He tossed off another beer, set his jug up for a refill, swore to enjoy the night once more. The dark-haired girl he had smiled at was on a trip upstairs. She’d be back soon. Things were lively, promising.
It was loud in the room, which was built adjacent to the jail and the sheriff’s office, and already had a strong connection, a history suddenly rampant in the territory. A month or so earlier five prisoners, due for hanging, had escaped through the Horse Cart Saloon on a night of thunder and lightning followed by a rainstorm not seen in years in the area. The sheriff had been left hanging in his own jail, on his own rope. All his rifles were gone, the rifle rack destroyed, all other weapons taken, all wanted posters taken too and later assumed to be the ashes of a small fire in a cave a posse found on the escape route. Then to the livery. Horses away!
When all the pieces had been put together, it was a former deputy, back in town for a short visit, who had done the arranging for the escape. He was hanged subsequent to investigation and a trial, though whispers of others who participated in the escape continued to make the rounds.
Much of this was also going through Harbolt’s mind when a sudden chill touched him on the back of the neck. There came newness, an excitement he had not experienced in years. He spun around in place at the bar, scanned the room quickly feeling some old warning elbowing its way loose. It was like being on night watch on the herd, a rustling sound in the air, a new smell riding on a wafting breeze trying to wake him from half sleep, trying to be known. It was a feeling to be trusted, to believe. He’d heard the odd bird calls Indian scouts used, heard the stone-clickers of one unknown tribe who signaled in darkness as good as telegraphers, imagined army signalmen shining their messages from the rim of a mountain ledge down to a thin passage of grass in a canyon.
It was Garvey Masters at his side, not one of the strangers, who brought alive the next alarm.
“I got to tell you, Zack, there’s somethin’ ferociously odd goin’ on in this saloon right now. I can smell it like the spit’s on fire. Can’t pinpoint it, but it’s here. You feel what I’m feelin’?”
His eyes moved through the room again, looking for the odd sign, the awed sign, the declaration that danger was on the loose. His awareness was as quick as Harbolt’s, but never his gun. He was shorter than Harbolt; not as strong or as quick, but alacrity was built in his eyes and it pored across the whole saloon. So many times his quick eyes had spotted an enemy, a danger, a trap artfully set in place that triggered him; often his life had depended on such quick sights.
Alone, amongst all those men in the saloon, he knew one secret: he had seen Zack Harbolt in gun action, how speedy it was, like it was an effortless action, smooth as honey on a bear’s tongue. Zack and he had made a great pair on several drives, drawing down their pay with select work.
And the odd feeling kept tapping at Masters, making the alarm significant, at the exact moment was aware the same signs were working on his trail pard.
It was his quick, keen eyes, of course, which gave him the biggest cause of alarm, the eyes switching from that face showing a tint of red under the hat to a man a few tables away, rising slowly, almost casually, but his gun hand dipping into a position of impending action. The man wore a checkered green shirt and a Mexican hat, where every other man in the room was wearing a Stetson and two other men with derbies.
The checkered green shirt was turning toward the tinted red hair under the Stetson at the rear table, the one he had just noticed. Masters could smell the signals coming up on a trail drive, the imaginative ones. And the real ones!
Things rushed together for him. It was action time. Coming a step away from the bar, he yelled as loud as he could, unsure of who he was calling out to, the young man in red hair or his own trail pard, “Look out, Harbolt! Mexican hat is drawin’ down on you!”
There was action galore and only the barkeep was able to declare in the aftermath that he had seen it all. “The gent in the Mexican Hat was goin’ for his gun and he was lookin’ at the red headed kid in the corner who was just mindin’ his own business, and this gent at the bar with his pal must have seen it all and yelled out a warnin’.” Here he pointed at Garvey Masters still standing in the same exact spot the whole time.
“Well,” the barkeep continued, “all hell broke loose. Mexican Hat shot at the red head, who shot back and the sheriff shot at Mexican Hat and my pal here shot the dry gulcher right through the eyeball like the eyeball was leadin’ the bullet all the way in.” He patted Zack Harbolt on the back, his old riding pard and now a known gunsmith.
There was a reunion bound and due, a melting of souls, a celebration, and two histories piled on top of each other.
It was Zack Harbolt who promised Garvey Masters, “I’ll tell you all about it sometime when the three of us are on night watch on a new herd. One’s gathering right about now, headin’ north, and we can move on from here and all that came to light in this saloon includin’ my son Cooper’s part in it from the beginnin’ and a nice old gent named So-High Smith and an Indian maiden called Wing Walker and a rotten but dead dry gulcher we got to call Mexican Hat.”
He laughed when he said, “If that ain’t enough, you’ll have to make somethin’ up.”
Garvey masters noted a new tone in Zack Harbolt’s voice.
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