There were a hundred things I could say to justify myself. I looked to Aubrey, wishing he’d told me the right words to use. After a minute, I said, “I’m not done fighting to keep my land, sir.”
“Well, you are for a while. This is utter nonsense. Oh, oh, must be formal, eh? The court, as it were, myself, finds that Mrs. Elliot is the rightful owner of all claim to the property in question. Without prejudice.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
The judge made a face. “All right. Go along now. If I don’t eat exactly at five o’clock, my insufferable bowel acts up. Good day.”
As Aubrey drove me home, it was all I could do not to hug him right there in public. He’d done it. Felicity had legally abandoned my brother Ernest. There could be no lawsuit, no claim. The land was ours, fully and completely. Much as I felt like abandoning that ranch, that would happen when I decided it, not because someone came along with a story to take it away from me. At my house, Aubrey helped me from the buggy and I took his hand in both of mine and shook it. “Thank you,” I said.
I told Aubrey to make me out a bill. I knew my brother Albert had said he’d pay Aubrey, but he’d done a lot of things for me. I wanted to make sure the money got put down in writing, so I could start working on it. He asked me two times if I was sure I wanted it right away, and I said, “I want the whole bill. Everything I owe you. I’ll pay it back if I have to sell every inch of ground.” He nodded and set his hat, then went on his way.
Well, the next day, by special delivery, I got a message from his office, written on that fine thick paper. I swallowed hard, wincing as I opened it. I had to read it several times over. “For services rendered, this receipt for the amount of one dollar, paid in full.” I hugged it to my chest. Udell had raised a really fine boy. A man. Lord, I’ll have to get used to the men around here, I told myself.
Now I had nothing to do but bide my time until Willie’s trial. Then I could go home and start picking up the pieces. The house felt empty, a shell of a place. Never had I felt so shaken loose from everyone I loved. Almost all my family was tending to Savannah’s mourning. As they should be. As I should be, too, not stuck here with Willie. I wandered through the place, top to bottom. The house had always been temporary. Not my home. Even when we built it, lived there, it had seemed only a way station, a place to sleep until I could get back to the land that was part of my blood and bones. That day, I swept it clean, from the attic down. Found a nickel on the back stairs. I’d come up a hundred percent in the world, financially speaking. Owned a beat-up ranch, ten and a half starving cattle, a house in town, and a nickel.
I reckoned, I could at least spend a little more time with April and her children. So that afternoon, I hitched up the wagon and set off for her place.
October 15, 1906
The days passed more quickly than I’d expected. April had said she’d be staying away from the trial and all the proceedings. Bad enough rumors flew through town. Still, bless her, April came to my place almost every afternoon, holding her head high, driving right to the front door proudly, not concerned if any of the hoity-toity ladies saw her.
I filled time. Wrote letters to Harland and Granny, to Savannah and Albert. Instead of feeding and hauling water, I rose every morning, made a little breakfast, and then lowered Granny’s quilt on the frame Jack had built for me years ago. It hadn’t been used in a decade. Each day, I’d work on the quilt for two or three hours, trying hard to make my stitches as tiny and perfect as my mama’s had always been. The needle went up, down, four times. Pull, do four more—I heard Willie’s voice with each one—when the thread grew short, tie a knot. Tried to read between his words to find what had sent him the way he went. Searched my own words to find where I’d gone wrong. Whether I could have said one thing or another, showed him a book, or explained better what I wanted from him. No answers came to me.
I stitched until my fingers hurt and grew blistered. I kept on until the blisters popped and I had to wrap my fingers to keep the quilt clean. I had done the best I knew how, and it hadn’t been enough. Couldn’t change the boy. And then along came some man riding hell-bent through a thunderstorm, ruining the only thing Esther took with her besides the clothes on her back, then handing it to Willie, to whom it was a biblical revelation. I reckoned some things would have turned out the way they had, no matter what. As if they’d been set in stone before we ever came to the dance.
Suddenly, I jammed the needle into the cloth and stood up, as if I’d seen a vision in the calico flowers marching in stair steps across the grain. Lazrus. A white man, living in the wilds, near a stream. Come across the foolish couple, her a moonstruck dreamer, him more useful at writing poetry than staying alive. They’d crossed paths with the crazy water witch. There may be no way to prove it, but I made up my mind then and there that I had to see that camp myself, see if it had a sign around that’d point a finger at its owner.
At ten o’clock each morning, I doctored my fingers with plasters, put on my nice gloves, and walked downtown to see Willie. I stopped on the way home and bought potatoes or lettuce, or got a chicken to roast for supper. April spent an hour in the afternoon, usually bringing the children so I could hold them in my lap and tell them a story or read to them. She always invited me over for supper, but I only went twice. In the evening, while there was light, I rolled down that quilt again and worked until I couldn’t see it in front of me. After supper, when it was cooler, I dug weeds in the flower bed, hauled water, and tidied the yard, scraping up rocks where Ezra had started it.
As I sewed the front to the back of that quilt, I finally came one morning to the edge and had to repin it where it had slipped off at one corner. On the back, all the pattern of quilting was reversed. The knots I hadn’t done well showed. Everything was in the right place, but not pretty like on top. I wondered if Willie had come to us like that. Every rule we made for him to follow turned upside down. Everything I wanted to help him with just looked backward and ugly to him. You couldn’t know what was on a person’s insides, just like this quilt here. Granny had pulled and stretched this layer of cotton batting between the two layers of cloth. She’d washed it and shrunk it, pieced it and shaped it just right, so that when the whole thing was finished, it could be washed. When it dried, it would be straight and neat, not shrunken or pulled off-kilter or with some old gray wool blanket—something I’d seen women use for stuffing a quilt—showing though. Maybe Willie had some dark place inside him that no pinning or shaping could reverse. When he hit the wash, all the worst came out of him. No telling what got into him to set him right. Fear, I reckon. Nothing like peering right down the barrel to change a person’s point of view. It had changed mine more than once. That and a few words from the Good Book. Why, in all of Creation, any wisdom had to come connected to Lazrus, I’d never pretend to guess.
October 22, 1906
The day before the trial, I washed the best dress I had brought with me to town and my gloves in cool water. The clothes dried on the line in just a few minutes. Then I heated up the stove and opened all the windows so that I could have a bath and run the sadiron over them a few times. I hung those clothes over a chair right in the kitchen so they’d be ready for the following day.
When April came that afternoon, she brought with her a paper-wrapped package. It was a getup she’d had Mrs. Logan make for me, from the measurements she’d taken in preparation for the tea party. I suppose it will be quite a while until she has a party, now. It was a black skirt and jacket, with a lavender blouse. April carried a large hatbox, and in it was a wide Gibson of black straw with lavender tulle. I told her, “This is too fancy for me, honey. I washed my dress.”
April picked at the tulle on the hat for a second before she said, “Mama, if you want to wear your old dress, that’s fine. But you said yourself you don’t know this judge. If you go there dressing proudly, as if we have some standing in this community, it will say a lot about our family.”
“Why should I want to say anyt
hing about our family other than I’m sorry we have a no-account, horse-thieving nephew?” I asked.
“What we want to say is that we are good people. People of virtue and pride, merely subject to the vicissitudes of life.”
I thought that over a minute. “Won’t it seem, well, sassy?”
April smiled. “No, Mama. It’ll seem proper.”
I told her I’d think it over. So when she left, I laid that dress on another chair, the hatbox on the floor under it, and went and pulled down the quilt.
Good to his word, Charlie came back to the house that night. While he ate supper, he talked about how they had been trying to fix up the house. How he and Gilbert and Grampa Chess had worked the livelong day. How the heifers they’d found seemed to be happily getting a little fatter on the new grass, and how El Capitan was making good use of his time. He said Gilbert and Udell both wanted to run fence between our places and Rudolfo Maldonado’s. He wanted to know my opinion. I told him I wanted an adobe wall twelve feet high between me and Rudolfo, and Charlie laughed. He said, “That stuff would take an army to move.” Then he went to bed.
Next morning, on the twenty-third of October, I dressed carefully in the new clothes. My hands were swollen. While I struggled with the little buttons, I thought on things. I expected that I’d have to testify. It was my money, my cattle and horses that had been stolen. They’d ask me, I reckoned, what I thought of it, how I knew it was Willie who’d taken them. I rehearsed it over in my head, trying to come up with exact words to use. To tell the truth, but not send Willie to the gallows. I put gloves over my sore fingers, then placed the broad hat on my head, fixing it with a hairpin. This outfit would make them think I still had plenty left. Maybe hide the situation Willie had brought me to. But something told me April was right, so I went to help Charlie hitch the rig. He told me to wait at the front door and he’d drive around.
A light breeze rustled trees and bushes as Charlie drove me to the courthouse. In just the few weeks living in town, the air had cooled, so it was no longer a misery to walk downtown. The hot weather was coming to a close. In the courtroom, I sat right behind the railing, close as I could be, so Willie would be able to see I was there.
There were about eighteen other people in the room besides the judge and myself. A deputy walked Willie in. Willie was wearing chains, like a trained bear. He seemed quiet and shrunken. He could hardly raise his head when the judge asked for his name. The judge asked him to step forward and be read his charges. Willie stood, his hands chained together but his arms held out as much as he could, in that old stance of his, as if he were expecting a punch in the stomach. The court clerk read, “Ernest William Prine, Jr., alias Willie, alias Boots the Kid, you are charged with loitering, disturbing the public peace, cattle rustling, and horse thieving. How do you plead, guilty or innocent?”
Willie said, “I plead guilty, Your Highness.”
People around the room laughed. I hurt for him.
The boy tried again. “I done them things, sir,” he said. “I’m ready to go to jail.”
The judge leaned forward and glared at him. “Do you have a lawyer representing your case, boy?”
“No, sir. I come representing my case of guilty.”
“Well, then—”
“And there’s plenty more, sir. A whole plenty lot more.”
The judge thundered at him, banging that gavel. All pompous and puffed up, it seemed to me. He hollered, “Do not interrupt a judge while he is talking.”
“Yes, sir. But there’s more I done. I come to confess it all. The honest truth is, I stole them horses and cattle, sure. I took my Aint Sair’s cash box and busted it open and stole a thousand and one hunnert and four dollars. I got with some old boys and we run them cows near to Mexico. On the way there, though, oncet I shot a feller who was looking at me odd. He’d stuck a knife in a man for cheating him at dice, and I was scared of him, so I shot him dead. Then I killed another boy for some boots, ’cause mine were torn and he had some nice ones. Then it was raining and cold. We’d been driving them cows to kingdom come, and there was this little house. The man said to get away from there. He said I couldn’t stay there ’counta he had a wife and children. So I shot them children. Shot the wife and shot the man and ate their supper and slept by their fire.
“Then I went on down south. Never even got across the border, ’cause the Ranger caught up with us. And some other banditos were there. There was Rangers a-fighting us, and bandits trying to steal the cows, and it come a battle like a war, and then a storm started. The cattle spooked and lightning hit right in ’em. Killed a hunnert or more right like that. Another lightning bolt hit a man square in the saddle and tore him open like a gutted fish. Knocked me off my horse, and knocked all the sense out of the animal, too. Thought I was dead, but I rose up. And the sky opened like a hand, reached down, and got me. When the clouds busted up, a man come on a white burro and give me this here and told me to go home. I think it was Jesus. I really do. He ripped that Bible in half and it screamed just like a woman. That’s when I come back. I done all that and more. Killed a outlaw name of Shank with my knife. Cut him until he bled to death, and even though I told him I was sorry, and he said that was all right, he still died. That’s what I done. Stole and robbed ’n killed and murdered. I’m here to take my due.”
I sat there with my mouth open. Numb. I’d never have imagined what he had done. I’d never be able to tell Albert and Savannah. I just held on to the seat of the chair until my hands ached, pinching the ends of my blistered fingers so I could feel the pain. It no longer mattered what I’d intended to say. Least of all, what I wore. Willie had just condemned himself.
The judge banged the gavel down to caution the crowd. My ears filled with cottony noise, and I rocked a little on my seat, as if I was quieting a baby. I heard words. They came through the noise in my ears, and still they didn’t reach my understanding until the judge was long past them and saying something else. He left the room, and the crowd was standing all around me; people were moving toward the door. There would be no testimony. No need for my careful words. Willie’d said all the judge needed to hear.
I stared at the floor, hearing the strange words again. “Inasmuch as you have by your own admission … murder … by the neck until pronounced dead …”
Three days hence. How formal. Elizabethan. Like something from the Bible. I couldn’t look at Willie, though I knew his shocked expression well. Mouth open, arms out, even in chains, his back hunched over. I could feel it from where I sat. All I’d considered was several years in jail. As long as he’d escaped a lynching somewhere along the line, I figured he’d just go to jail. In ten or twenty years, older and wiser, he’d come home and work and live on our place. Never in my life had I expected him to hang. I looked at him then, expecting him to be surprised, but there was no surprise on Willie’s face. He’d known all along what he meant to do.
On the drive to the house, Charlie told me he again intended to ride south for the ranch. Couldn’t bear it, he said. I told him that was all right, but I had made a promise, I said. I’d stay. Charlie rode away fast. Hardly said good-bye.
I went to see Willie again that afternoon. When I walked in, he looked up, and for the first time, he wasn’t crying. Wasn’t hunkered over on the cot. He stood up and came toward the bars. “Aint Sair? You got a new dress just for my trial?”
“Yes, Willie,” I said. I wished it had been my idea.
“It ’as purty.”
“Thank you. Why, Willie, did—”
“I don’t want to talk about none of them things, Aint Sair. All right?”
“All right. Do you want to talk about anything else?”
“Naw. I reckon not. You’re going to stand by me, aren’t you? You promised. I don’t mind if you don’t, but you will, won’t you?”
“I will, son.”
He smiled and said, “I knew you would.”
October 24, 1906
The next day passed, slow and fast
at the same time. I quit working on the flower bed. Kept the curtains drawn. Sewed on that quilt until my fingers bled. I heard every tick of the clock in the parlor. The time between the sounds was eternal. At ten o’clock, I went to see the boy. I took him food, but he didn’t eat. He sat on his bunk, holding his tied-up “half a Bible.” He seemed thinner and more haggard.
The second day, I took him some doughnuts. I asked Willie if he remembered taking the sack of doughnut holes to the boys.
He grinned and said, “They sent me for postholes. Took me some time to laugh about that. I pulled it on a friend of mine, though. He got pretty mad, too, like I did. Rangers shot him, though.” He put the doughnut to his mouth but couldn’t eat. “Smells real nice.”
“You doing all right? Anything I can get you?”
“You said how you’d see me through. You’re going to be there, aren’t you?”
I nodded. I said, “I didn’t know about the other. I never thought you’d get more than prison.”
“I knew I done murder. I was trying to be the meanest thing alive. Drinking all the time, just meaner than a one-eyed pirate. I couldn’t admit it to you. Had to tell the judge, ’cause he don’t know me. I just need to know you’ll come with me. I can’t do this if you don’t. You promise, Aint Sair, you’ll see me through?”
“Promise.”
“If my ma shows up, you don’t have to explain nothing. If she wanted to know, she’da come here. If a lady like you could come here, she coulda.”
I quilted all afternoon, and into the night. With every stitch, I watched my children grow up in my mind, saw them start their first days at school. Saw April give a recitation at the eighth-grade graduation. Saw Gilbert learning to strum his first guitar chords under Mason Sherrill’s watchful eyes. Saw Charlie cut his hand on Jack’s saber, practicing drawing it from a belt wrapped twice around his middle. Everything I had poured into my children, I stitched into that quilt.