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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Boy from Boston
Tom Sheehan
With fifty dollars in his pocket and a newspaper tucked under his arm, Schuyler Bowdry, known locally in Boston and other Commonwealth cities as “Sky,” boarded the stage heading west from the town of Worcester where he said goodbye to his grandfather. He was glad to leave the area, as he hated fog that crawled in from the Atlantic, sat like moss on everything in sight, not just the north side of trees. He’d always wanted a clear sky over him, either on a sunny day or a star-lit or moon-lit night, which he never got with the fog, and ground under his feet. For too long he had dreamed about a horse being under him, over hill, over dale, over miles of wild grass.
And out west, people still pushing toward the Pacific against all kinds of odds, where wild horses roamed the land in large numbers, he heard they’d rarely have fog between him and that Pacific Ocean. He took that fact on faith.
His clothes fit him well. He appeared lithe and tall and clear-eyed, with a sense of attention about his person, the way a searcher, a seeker, might look … intent, noticing everything about him. His hair was roan-colored, fuzzy at the ears, low on the back of his neck, falling over a blue denim shirt. His pants were worker’s pants, of another level of darker denim, and his boots were ankle-high but not made for the saddle. On his belt he carried an old Colt his grandfather had given him at parting, feeling strange wearing it, but not afraid to. Guns had been in his sporting hands for a long time. Though he was just 19 years old, he was declared a marksman with the rifle.
The world, for Sky Bowdry, was a plumb to pick off a low branch.
Bowdry’s journey to Missouri, though long, was uneventful. Days were filled with scenery, changes in the land, and remnants of war seen in many places. Nights were bare discomforts in places that left no decent memories. He waited for a new life to spring upon him, from the top of a mountain if need be, or from the depths of a mystic canyon. He had heard such canyons were filled with echoes he yearned to hear and understand, with the music of the land swelling in them. Perhaps it would come off the grass that swept across the land for miles upon miles.
Sky Bowdry was also aware of other motions and notions working throughout his senses and his body. Adaptive, adaptable, he kept saying, as though he could already fit into the land, was becoming a part of it. Yet he had not sat upon a horse, his riding en route always in a carriage or a wagon or a coach. That excitement lay before him, and during the journey he studied men on horseback encountered along the way, how they rolled and bounced lightly in the saddle with a sense of timing, a sense of music. The rhythm of it was trying to break out of him as if he was born for the ride.
Things happen on a journey as they may, as fate wills it, as men are driven by lop-sided needs.
Outside of St. Joseph, Missouri, as the stagecoach closed to a few miles from a night stop, a rifle shot went right through the coach, back to front, and hit the shotgun rider. The driver screamed for help, and Sky Bowdry, alert, athletic, muscular though inexperienced with stagecoaches, clambered from the inner section of the coach, swung himself up on top and took a seat alongside the driver. He picked up the shotgun’s rifle after thrusting him out of harm’s way, the rifle comfortable in his hands from firing range practice, knowing he was a dead shot in competitions.
Behind the stagecoach, pounding down the road, were three masked horsemen, yelling and firing their weapons in a wild manner, as if to unnerve everybody in the stagecoach.
“Don’t let ‘em near us,” the driver yelled. “They ain’t goin’ to do us any good, thet’s for sure.” He nodded at the rifle in Bowdry’s hands. “Ya any good with thet thing?”
“I’ll do,” Bowdry said, knowing that something positive and cool had set upon him, and started firing back at the trio.
Moments later the stolid Sky Bowdry, escaping Boston and the foggy east, handsome as a magazine ad, who had garnered most of the looks from two female passengers up to that time, killed his first man with a shot from the boot of the stagecoach. The rifle, a Winchester Special with an inlaid handle sporting some of the original silver, felt like an old friend shaking hands with him.
When he hit a second man, the third road agent pulled to a stop and let the stagecoach go out of sight.
The driver, snapping the reins, exhilarated, said to Bowdry, “Ya hired, son. Ya on the payroll, and ya ridin’ for free. I’ll take care ev’rythin’ if’n we get there.”
In the stop-over that night, after the driver told everybody how Bowdry had stepped up to help them out, the station manager said, “Is it true, son, that you’ve never ridden a horse? I find that hard to reckon with.”
“It’s true,” Bowdry said. “I’ve been watching riders all the way on the trip here from Boston. Looks like it might be fun.”
“Well, hell, son, we got a good moon tonight, so I’m going to give you your first lesson. We’ll make a cowboy out of you yet, and I got the first chance to start a new career for you. You game for that?”
“I have been waiting for this since the first day on the journey.” Bowdry tipped his hat to the ladies as he stepped outside. Their smiles were authentic, deep-seated, and accented by blushes.
Outside the music of the ride came to him in a matter of minutes, the sense of timing, the rhythm. He was adapting all the way. It was like music on his skin.
“I’ll tell you, son,” the station master said, “I must be a good teacher. You ride that horse like you was born up there on the saddle. I ain’t seen a tenderfoot ride like that, not ever.” He slapped the horse’s rump again and saw Sky Bowdry riding around in the moonlight as though he had never been anyplace else.
“How far you going, son?” the station master said later as night settled over the station.
The driver and Bowdry and the station man were sitting at the fire in the station yard.
“”As far as I can until something tells me ‘Whoa,’” Bowdry said, as he stepped toward the corral where the horse was almost bronze in the moonlight. He saw the light spread its gold stain over the barns and outhouses of the station and the terrain beyond. Overhead he saw a thick black cloud almost starting its pass across the face of the moon.
Fate was still working its way on Sky Bowdry at the exact moment when gunshots rang out and the dark cloud slipped across the face of the moon. Bowdry grabbed the rifle he had stood against the bench at the fire, measured how far he had to run to get away from the station, and how long the cloud would blacken the moonlight.
He sprinted away from the glare of the night fire.
The gunshots continued, a fusillade of them, and then a voice yelled out, “We want that man who killed two of my pals on the road today. I’m here with their brothers. All we want is that crack shot, the one went topside on the coach from inside.”
The voice had come from the flat darkness out on the grassy plain. No shadows stood tall in the grass, no silhouette of a man appeared anywhere, including the station master, who was either hit by gunfire or had fallen to protect himself.
“Ya hear me in there?” continued the voice of a man still out of sight. “Just the sharpshooter, or we’ll kill all of you, passengers and all, ladies, men or young un’s, makes no difference to us.”
A single round slapped against the front door of the station. A second shot came with deadly accuracy, landing right near the first shot, the man stating his intentions in more ways than one.
By that time, when the moonlight again came down in the broadest beams imaginable, Sky Bowdry was out on the grass, prostrate in the grass behind a small clump of rocks. The muzzle flashes from a rifle told him just about where the shooter was located, his voice marking it too.
Setting his sights near that location, estimating the distance, Bowdry waited for any silhouette to lean into the skyline. All his senses were coming into sharp focus. He saw the dark shadow rise up. He aimed and squeezed the trigger. The round sped on its way; a direct hit made the man scream, “Charlie, get that guy in the grass. He’s the one shot your brother.”
As Charlie whoever stood, Bowdry put a round in his leg, and another scream came as the wounded man swore at Bowdry out on the grass, “I get my hands on you, mister, you’re a goner.”
The voice limped away once it hit the grass, falling down, caught up. Silence, Bowdry reasoned, comes hurriedly in this wild land. He could hide in it, hide behind it, and use it to his advantage. Then, in a whisper to himself, he agreed silence was often a gift as well as a tool … take it from where and when it comes, for often there is no accounting for silence.
Overhead, in a continuing thrust of fate, such as comes to those who can grasp it, who are smart enough, another cloud slid over the moon. Bowdry, knowing how tenuous his position was, and not knowing how many were in the attacking gang, sprinted for a new position under cover of the darkening moon, somewhere off to the left and behind the attackers. Moving fast, athletically, balanced, bent over, the new position was reached without any alarm, and the smell of the grass again filled his nostrils with a significant familiarity he could not explain.
He was in the new land of the open west, he was in action, he was contending, him, a Boston boy who had never ridden a horse until this night, out on the grass and in the moonlight, of all places.
Lying tight to the ground, the grass stood above him, at attention to the slightest breath of air, whose waves he had noticed time and again, the way waves arrived at the beaches back home, endlessly, with music in their motion. The thinnest of these sheaves, with a mixture of wild flowers he had seen in a flurry of colors all along the trails, offered him protection, throwing shadow and shade into the midst of him, and being aromatic to boot. These were luxuries he had not thought about, could not have made up. These were beyond the early ideas he had, the straight-out adventures of a new life … rushing across the plains with a herd of cattle, fighting off rustlers and Indians, brothering up to old leather-type cowboys that had been described to him by visitors and writers, night campfires loaded up with personal legends and lore. There had been dreamt hours of breaking the wild strain of horses that ran loose on the plains from the time the Spaniards came searching for gold, searching for their own Eldorado.
What else was coming to him? he wondered, as he snuggled into the grass. What else was being prepared for him? Set up for him? What was making its own demands?
It said “attention” in an instant. It said “stop dreaming or dawdling.” It said “keep ready.” “Look out.” “Be alert.” “Be on your toes.”
He snickered a little at himself, at that heady realization of what he was at, where he was in this mix, a tenderfoot. But the rifle was real in his hands. The grass tickled his nose, threatening a sneeze. He had to be ready for that, lest he give his location away. He was using what was at hand for his own gain; all of it part of his adaption; the silence, the shadows, the sense of belonging where he wanted to be. The clarity of it hit him down in the folds of grass; he was fitting in, becoming what he wanted to be for such a long time, a cowboy. He had ridden a horse. He had resisted bad men. He was continuing to resist bad men. The reward, in the least, would be his full assimilation into the new world of the west. Even though, he thought, he had not driven a cow, or dropped branding iron onto a simmering place, or rode all night in torrential rain around a nervous herd, singing a soft song whose words he never knew.
The silence was broken again, from off to his right.
“Where’s he hidin’? Anybody seen him out there? “
Pause, silence, a whisper of wind coming slowly from the west, carrying the smell of dung, gun oil, burnt powder, the landscape again arriving all at once.
“Anybody?” It was as much demand as question. “I said, ‘Anybody.’”
New silence.
Bowdry, fully aware that something had settled over him, on him, like a mantle of sorts, let it all happen; threatened with gunshots, death, new to the land, he was still adjusting, performing. Prone in the grass, the moon bright overhead, something came upon him as sure as his breathing. The grass gave him nothing but shadows, distortion of darkness, which was enough for the current situation, as that “something” kept saying to him, even in a silent moment.
And yet, if asked for a name or a description, he might not be able to answer. He might call it comfort, acceptance, getting the lay of the land, honing in, ready for whatever. He did not feel like he’d become an executioner, for the men he had wounded or killed were bent on great harm to ordinary and innocent people. Amends had been made. He’d make sure others would follow. He was the wick in the candle, he realized; the capacity to perform these deeds had always been with him, waiting for this time, foresworn.
He did not have names for some of his deeds, but he had performed, survived or, in the midst of survival, swung the odds about.
He had arrived where he wanted to be. He had become all that he left behind … The Boy from Boston.
It all brought him back to his current circumstance and he acknowledged that surprise would be the thing. Rushing them. Confusing them. Coming out of the darkness if moon and cloud would help his cause, come into union with him. By this time, he was sure, others at the station had brought arms to bear.
One black cloud slipped into his future as it slid under the yellow moon. The darkness descended in a newer wave that ran at him, at them, across the grass, like it had long legs, leaping in huge chunks of shadow as the land played back at it, as it dipped into a wadi or crevice, leaped the side of a hill, ran like a stampede on the grass, swift the way a shadow of a bird darts across the ground.
Sought him out.
Running, firing from the hip, the muzzle blazing away, the boy from Boston started his own legend of the west and he was not yet out of Missouri territory.
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