THE HOUSE OF MISERY
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me,
'This is going to take more than one night.' " (Charles M. Schulz)
Hello again... This here's Nonie Sherman with another excellent adventure from the chronicles of my sometimes illustrious ancestors, Slim Sherman an' Jess Harper. Now folks, if you make it all the way through to the end a this one you might say to yourself, 'Aw... that warn't nuthin' but just another tall tale!' But I swear every bit of it's true 'cause Great-Granddaddy Slim described this as Numero Dos on his list of 'Top Five Worst Experiences of My Life So Far' an' Great-Granddaddy Jess penned 'If anything like this ever happens again I'll just shoot myself and save someone else the trouble of having to do it.'
You're probably thinkin' how interestin' can a story be 'bout a house fulla sick folks? But after readin' all them different journal accounts of this here particular fiasco I thought the whole thing was pretty darn comical an' a real good example a frontier ingenuity. 'Course, if I'da been there an' done that as either a patient or a caregiver, I reckon I wouldn'ta found it a dang bit amusin', the state of the medical arts bein' what they was back in them days...
(Note about writing-style continuity... Harp [that's my other half] seems to think I'm allowin' too much personal commentary to intrude on the storyline. Well la-di-da an' stick it in your ear, old man! For one thing, they's meant to convey facts what I think the readers oughta know about an' I can't help it if a personal opinion happens to fall in every now an' again. Harp also opines my writin' style lacks continuity an' confuses readers... on account of sometimes I write like Gracie Sherman, retired history teacher [which I am] an' sometimes I sound like plain ole Nonie Sherman, ranch wife. He may be right about that. I'll see what I can do but ain't makin' no promises, you unnerstand. If you got issues with that, go read some other story. Otherwise, thank you kindly for your patience! • Gracie Sherman—aka Nonie)
CHAPTER ONE—PART ONE
ON THE ROAD WITH A REMITTANCE MAN
"The more human beings proceed by plan, the more effectively they may be hit by accident." (Friedrich Dürrenmatt)
(Gracie's preface... Your classic Victorian-era remittance man was usually some talentless ambition-challenged good-for-nothing slacker whose gotrocks family paid him a salary to go away and stay away from home for as long as they could afford it. With any luck he'd get himself killed early on by a coconut falling on his head while he was soaking up rays on a beach in Bora Bora and they could put the funds to better use—such as underwriting a generous dowry for a coyote-ugly shrew of a daughter to entice some near-sighted dimwitted fool into taking her off their hands.
Since Western Union hadn't got around to inventing wire fund transfers yet, they'd send money or bank drafts through the mail post restante to prearranged pick-up points or—with your classier families—provide their black sheep with a personal letter of credit he could take to any affiliate bank and get cash from.
Now a dark-side remittance man—often just a hop, skip and jump ahead of incarceration or retribution of the terminal variety—was one who'd either besmirched the family name back in the Old Country, run afoul of the authorities there whether accidently or with malice and aforethought, and/or perhaps had despoiled some innocent flower whose humorless and bad-tempered daddy wielded power and influence [read: even more money].
The soldier of misfortune you're about to meet falls into the latter category, more or less. We pick up his trail in southeastern Wyoming—not his original destination... but then, excrement occurs.)
Saturday, October 1 (midday)... Traveling westward and following the stage route, our traveler (we'll call him 'Kim' on account of that's his real name) had started out that morning from the Hickman relay station near the Buford trading post, figuring on a break at the next stage stop before covering the remaining twelve miles to Laramie and calling it an early night there. The deceptively flat and featureless terrain had abruptly inclined toward a jumble of forbiddingly stark granite outcroppings—a place supposedly sacred to the natives, he'd been told... and cautioned to not stray too far from the road. Ahead of him rose the narrow Laramie mountain range. The hard rain of the previous evening (the reason he'd pitched his bedroll in the Hickman barn) had given way to a nice day, although the going was still mucky in the ruts. A thin band of cumulonimbus clouds building on the far southwestern horizon presaged another round of precipitation. Kim gauged that wet weather was still many hours off and reckoned he had plenty of time to reach town and get under cover.
Kim's wish list included checking his pony into a livery stable for oats and a well-earned respite, checking himself into whatever passed for a hotel, enjoying an invigorating steamy soak in a public bathhouse, and—after identifying the least greasy of available eating establishments—chowing down on something tasty and (more importantly) identifiable. (Breakfast had consisted of stale biscuits, refried beans, runny eggs of doubtful antiquity and sausage of dubious origin. Mister H's coffee had tasted like gunpowder recycled through a mule but at least it was hot.) Then Kim was going to plant his weary carcass on a real feather mattress with down-filled pillows, pull a fluffy comforter up to his eyeballs and sleep until his kidneys floated him out of bed the next day, after which he intended to sashay over to the post office. That was the plan, anyway.
Of course, our traveler wasn't so delusional as to expect all his desires would be fulfilled, having got an earful earlier from his less than jovial host. Mister Hickman had gloomily opined that Laramie amounted to little more than a ramshackle assemblage of shady commercial enterprises frequented by low-born vice-ridden scoundrels and crawling with vermin-infested heathens of the lowest order. (He hadn't been there in a while. Maybe he wasn't aware that now that the railroad had arrived, a higher class of white-collar criminal had taken up residence.) In other words, Laramie was a 'wretched hive of scum and villainy' (which phrase a certain Mister Lucas most certainly later cribbed from Mister Hickman).
"Them folks is so sorry they won't keer none 'bout yer Injun blood. You'll fit right in, sonny!" That worthy elder had thumped his Bible for emphasis before insisting his guest join him in select scriptural readings before breaking bread.
Actually, Kim took no offense—the gentleman was merely stating the obvious, which was fine by him. Since hitting the road he'd been constantly adjusting his appearance, demeanor and speech in order to pass unremarked and unmolested through the disparate subcultures springing up like mushrooms in these western territories. By keeping on the move and hiding in plain sight among the locals along the way he hoped to elude pursuit.
Everything about Kim was shabby and travel-worn. He looked as if he had nothing worth stealing—certainly not his stumpy gargoyle-ugly pony. Due to a random combination of inherited multiethnic traits plus a few aberrant chromosomes in his DNA chain, Kim was a small-statured individual with a guileless, youthful face that belied his actual chronological age—he could and often did pass for a seventeen or eighteen year old. His personal appearance was so inoffensive most other men ignored him after a cursory appraisal rendered him unworthy, beneath their dignity to trifle with—just another mixed-breed mongrel kid. In six months of travel he'd encountered relatively little unpleasantness and only occasional inconvenience—until today, which we'll get to in a little bit.
It might've been nice to be the tall, dark and handsome dude with the macho physique the ladies seemed to go for, but there were definite advantages to being short(ish), blond(ish) and innocent-looking. In his very few forays into saloons and dance halls, gals had fussed over him because (he suspected) he reminded them of their baby brothers back on the farm. Unfortunately, they also rarely took him seriously. Once, after concluding his transaction with one of the angels of the night, she'd patted him on the head, given him his money back and said 'My treat, honey... no harm done!' More than a little demoralizing if he dwelt on it. Took awhile for his libido to recover from that incident, although he was confident he'd acquitted himself honorably enough.
There were aspects of Kim's person beyond disguise—for one thing, skin color just a shade darker than your average plainsman of European extraction. In another era he could've been just another Malibu beach bum with a glowing golden-brown tan and sun-bleached hair (except that surfing wouldn't be introduced to California until 1885). But if you happened to catch a glimpse below the equator, so to speak, you'd know that tan owed more to genetics than ultraviolet exposure. Kim's large, slightly protuberant eyes were unfortunately distinctive due to unusually colored irises—a rich sherry topaz that in ambient light glowed like a cougar's. Mustaches or a beard would have been helpful but the best he could do was caterpillar fuzz that might require scraping once a week or so. Then there was that tattoo between his shoulder blades, in a land where such body art was rarely seen except as practiced by indigenes—that, at least, he could hide under a shirt.
Two weeks in-country and several hundred miles away from his debarkation point, Kim arrived at the perplexing realization that he was losing his cultural identity—being often mistaken for part-Indian or part-Mexican, no matter that his eyes and hair were far too light for either ethnicity. He wasn't too sure how he felt—or ought to feel—about this, but finally concluded that it was probably an advantage in throwing any searchers off his trail.
At the beginning of his odyssey Kim didn't know enough about American aborigines to convincingly pass himself off as belonging to any one particular tribe. His first contact with natives was with members of the Makah nation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington Territory. The most striking impression he came away with was the eerie similarity between their artwork styles and what he carried on his back. But that was the only similarity. He still stood out like a sore thumb.
His problem was neatly solved when, crossing into Idaho, he encountered a band of fur traders heading east to their summer encampment at Spring Creek in Montana's Judith Basin, and from there to their permanent settlement in the Dakotas. They called themselves Métis, which literally meant 'halfbreed'. These second and third-generation mountain men were a hodgepodge of mainly Scots, Irish, French, Cree, Chippewa and Shoshone with a spoonful of other marginal tribes and European nationalities thrown in for seasoning—a veritable hobo stew of humanity. Of the twenty-three individuals in the party whose skin color ranged from taffy tan to beaver brown, Kim fell squarely in the middle. Several had hair much lighter or much darker than Kim's as well, although none shared his peculiar eye color.
Readily accepting their invitation to ride along with them all the way to Spring Creek, Kim spent eight weeks among their families, enjoying their hospitality and immersing himself in their culture—in many respects not unlike his own. Their language—Michif—was a polyglot of native borrow-words, English and French (which Kim already had)... and he was a quick study. Being rather fond of tattoos themselves, they were enthralled with his, though they didn't understand what it represented. Their lexicon did not include a word for 'dragon'. Neither did their mythological oral traditions. Which is how he acquired the nickname 'Lézard Du Ciel' or 'Sky Lizard'—as close as they could envision a fire-breathing lizard with wings. It wasn't long before most of the boys in the band were getting their mothers to replicate it in beadwork on the backs of their moosehide jackets.
Feeling he'd already stayed in one place too long for comfort, Kim regretfully declined their invitation to winter over with them in the Dakotas and elected to turn south into Wyoming Territory. By then he'd cobbled together a creditable replacement identity, although presenting himself as an authentic American native halfbreed wasn't without its difficulties, of course (for every solution there's always a new problem).
He hacked his thick hair back to shoulder length and reassumed the more drab appearance of a typical drifter, except for the fancifully beaded mukluk moccasins and the osprey flight feather over his left ear (knotted into a tiny braided warlock by a laughing Métis maiden) which advertised his mixed-breed status without being overly specific. Having been advised that Métis rarely traveled solo and seldom ventured as far south as he intended to go, his cover would be that he was Sky Lizard of the fictional Osprey Band of Métis Makah, on his way to visit a sister who'd married into a band of Colorado Shoshone. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! But in the two weeks since, no one had asked.
With no specific destination in mind, Kim had turned eastward at the South Pass and then south toward Cheyenne, where he debated hopping a train. Asking himself which provided the greater benefit—speed and distance or a cunningly convoluted trail—he opted to turn west toward Laramie.
Kim did not own a projectile weapon of any description, having taken to heart this sentiment voiced by an old grizzled one-armed bullet-scarred veteran of the pistolero trade, wielding a sodden mop rag in a barroom in Seattle: There are old gunslingers and there are bold gunslingers... but no old, bold gunslingers (paraphrased from a quotation attributed to E. Hamilton Lee in a later age but probably plagiarized from that old barkeep). Not that Kim had any interest in becoming one—handguns weren't his weapon of choice and he'd most likely end up shooting himself in the foot. Or his pants would fall down from the weight of the belt. Besides, he couldn't wrap his mind around the ethos of gunfighting—of men dedicated to shooting one another for sport or profit.
Kim's trapping skills were adequate to keep himself in snared hare and sage hen and any fool could catch fish. If a need for self-defense arose, he was pretty handy with the Chinese river pirate fighting knife in his belt sheath and the Japanese throwing knife in his moccasin boot. The eighteen-inch cane knife in its saddle sheath served other purposes. Mostly he depended on tact, agility and unobtrusiveness to either avoid trouble altogether or withdraw from it with his hide intact. Or he just flat ran like hell—which had been his response to the trouble he'd brought down on himself back home.
Although generally a sunny-natured optimistic fellow, our accidental tourist had a lot on his mind that fair October morning and was feeling quite discouraged about it all. He missed the familiar trappings of home and his noisy, fractious extended family thousands of miles away. He was anxious that all that zigzagging, doubling back and cutting across country might not be obscuring his trail as well as he hoped. And down below his as-yet undigested breakfast was roiling ominously.
CHAPTER ONE—PART TWO
ONE A THEM DAYS
"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain." (Colin Wilson)
At the same time... Rancher Matthew 'Slim' Sherman's day hadn't gotten off to a good start. To begin with, he'd woke up feeling a bit off—nothing he could really put a finger on, just not quite himself. Before setting out to mend fences that morning he'd partaken of a modest breakfast as usual. Not so usual was barfing it right back up after five minutes on the jolting buckboard. And the morning had gone downhill from there.
A gust of wind had blown off his new hat, sailing it directly into a fresh cow pie. Then he'd gashed a thumb on some barbed wire. Then he'd discovered he was one short of replacement fence posts needed to finish the job. Finally, the handle on the shovel cracked. Giving up on fence mending for the day, Slim aimed the buckboard toward home, sucking on his injured digit and enduring with gritted teeth the shrieking of an axle in need of greasing. By the time he pulled up in the yard, one of the team was hobbling from having cast a shoe. Could it get any worse? Of course it could.
His little brother Andy glumly greeted him with the news that their new milch cow was once again on the lam. She was a four-year-old Jersey for which Slim had paid a suspiciously small sum. He should've known there had to be a good reason her previous owner was in such an all-fired hurry to get shet of her. Another clue should've been her original name: 'Trouble'. After three days he'd re-renamed her 'Deecy'—the prettified version of 'DC' for 'damned cow'. If not for the inarguable maxim that a growing child's health depended on a ready supply of fresh milk, he would've shot and butchered that damned cow weeks ago and enjoyed every mouthful of steak since.
"I checked the fence line... twice... honest, Slim!" Expecting a dressing down and close to tears, Andy peered up at his older brother. Minding the cow was his personal responsibility. Normally Slim would've unloaded on Andy there and then. But after doing a perimeter check himself just a few days ago, Slim was just as mystified as to how the cow was getting out... all the posts appeared upright and no wires missing or broken. No matter, there was nothing for it but to turn around and hunt her down before she wandered off too far. He jumped down from the buckboard seat.
"I know you did. I'm not blaming you... this time... but..."
"Slim!" The husky voice of Slim Sherman's number one (and at the moment only) hired hand rasped from the shadows beneath the lean-to where he'd been laboring at the forge all morning.
"Yeah Jess, what is it?"
"Could I see you over here?"
"In a minute..."
"Now, please?"
Slim threw him an irritated glance but asked Andy to get him some coffee while he unhitched the team. The boy turned away toward the house as Slim watched him with questioning eyes. Andy was usually so full of vitality, running instead of walking, but he'd been sniffling the past few days and today was dragging his heels. It was no easy business, raising a brother almost young enough to be his own son, but Slim felt he'd done a creditable job these past two years in the absence of any formal educational facilities or a civilizing female presence in the home. Sighing, he turned toward the forge and his filthy sweat-grimed ranch hand, shirtless under a grease-stiffened leather apron.
A little over five months ago when Jess Harper first appeared, Slim—two years older and half a head taller—could probably have easily bested him in a wrestling match. Not a big man to begin with, Jess had arrived in less than prime fettle—legacy of years on the drift and irregular meals. Between the family cook's determined efforts to 'feed him up some' and the sheer effort of daily dawn-to-dusk physical labor required to keep a ranch going, he now sported greatly improved upper body musculature, but for all that he remained slender and wiry. Slim, on the other hand, had always been a big-boned man and inclined to put on an extra pound or two whenever he slowed down, which was hardly ever except in the worst winter weather months.
Neither one liked forge work or fence repair, but neither chore could be put off, so they'd flipped a coin and Jess had lost.
"Whaddya want?"
"I don't want anythin'..." Jess growled. "I just wanna say somethin'..." Azure eyes gleamed out of a soot-blacked face.
"If you just have to..." Slim sighed with resignation.
Jess, too, had noticed something definitely amiss with Andy but reckoned he was just suffering a spell of the moody blues—which he'd been having a lot of lately—and was thinking the boy could do with some distraction from his teenage woes.
"Why don't you take Andy... give him a chance to do a little trackin' an' ropin'? He'd like that."
"He's not done with his chores."
"I'll finish up for him. I need a break anyway... an' he could use a little brother time," Jess volunteered, reminding his buddy of promises made only a few weeks ago—that Slim was going to be less rigid about rules and more accommodating about Andy's needs as an emerging adolescent.
(Nonie's note... It'd only been a month since the two friends'd got in a big ole flap over Andy's behavior and Slim's parenting technique, which Jess didn't have no room to talk about but did anyway. You'll have to read 'Sea Change' if you wanna know what all that was about.)
As he walked back out to the wagon with Slim, Jess noted his friend didn't seem up to snuff either. "Or I'll go after Deecy, if you'd druther... you look done in already an' the day ain't half over yet."
"No, I'll go," Slim sighed. "Hate to leave you with..."
Jess grinned. "Yeah, yeah, yeah... trust you to always go for the easy job..."
Andy returned, coffee-less. "Jonesy says there ain't any left but he can put a fresh pot on..."
" 'Isn't' not 'ain't'..." Slim corrected automatically. To Jess he said, "I guess it wouldn't hurt... just this once. If you don't mind the extra work..."
"Don't mind a'tall... an' it'll cheer him up."
Andy looked expectantly from one to the other until Slim spoke to him with faked sternness. "It's time you learned the consequences of letting an animal under your supervision escape, Andrew."
The boy's face fell. "Aw, Slim... I said I was sorry..."
"I'm afraid you're going to have to do the tracking and catching, sonny. I'll just go along for moral support."
Andy's eyes were big as dinner plates. "You mean it, Slim? You're lettin' me ride with you... oh... but I ain't... isn't done with all my chores yet."
Slim winced. " 'I'm not', not 'I isn't'..."
Jess snickered. "He don't never let up, does he?"
Andy let the latest correction pass. Sometimes his older brother's relentless insistence on proper grammar got on his last nerve.
"Your pal here's offered to finish your chores," Slim continued.
"Gee, thanks, Jess! I'll go get PeeWee." He started toward the pasture.
"Wait a minute!" Jess called him back. "C'mere, pard. This job calls for a real horse... you take Traveler—he needs the exercise anyway. An' use my saddle, not yours."
Both Shermans' eyebrows crawled up to their hairlines—Jess never offered to share his horse if he could help it.
"Might as well get Alamo, too, while you're at it..." Slim put in hastily.
Andy ducked into the barn for two leads and the 'bait bucket'—a battered tin pail half-filled with hard kernels of corn that rattled enticingly whenever one wished to attract the attention of horses—and happily skipped off to fetch both horses from the pasture, whatever was ailing him earlier forgotten. Slim found himself the object of a long meaningful look from his partner. He knew that look. The younger man had something to say about their bone of contention—Andy—but was doing a poor job of holding back. No doubt remembering, as was Slim himself, the debacle resulting from the last time he'd spouted off about Slim's parenting skills.
"Go ahead... spit it out, Jess, before you choke on it..."
"Boy needs a decent horse..." Jess mumbled, sidling away under the pretense of leading Jake and his teammate Willy into the corral, noting the missing shoe and making a mental note to take care of that later on.
"I know that!" Slim shot back, trying not to be defensive as they walked into the barn together to get their tack. Last summer's growth spurt had made it abundantly clear that Andy would soon outgrow his beloved pony.
Jess Harper had many good qualities but picking up a cue that someone else wasn't in the mood to debate a touchy subject wasn't one of them...
"Well, then... what about lettin' him have Scout... like he was supposed to in the first place?"
"Who told you that?"
"Jonesy mentioned it a while back... right after you told me to use him as my remount."
"That old man talks too much."
Scout and Ranger, Slim's remount, were three-year-old bay geldings, issue of Slim's Quarterhorse mares bred to neighbor Garland Bartlett's Morgan stallion, Colonel. True... it had been Slim's intention to present Scout to Andy as a surprise on his thirteenth birthday, but by then Jess had been there two months and needed an immediately usable remount, not one requiring training. Slim had been meaning to look around for another suitable horse for Andy as the only other ranch-raised colts on hand were yearlings.
"I'll get around to it... when I can find the time..."
"Plenty of good horses on the range... why, I seen a band just the other day..."
"Forget it," Slim forestalled. "We've got too much to do as it is without having to break in wild stock... besides, I don't want him on something that might go haywire without warning."
Privately, Jess didn't believe a wild-caught horse was any more dangerous than a green ranch-raised one—they fought and bucked just the same first time under saddle. Once broken and trained, a mustang made as fine a working horse as anything with proven bloodlines that you had to pay good money for... and they were free for the taking. He was about to ask if the boss had any objection to his catching, breaking and training a range horse for his own use and on his own time when he realized Slim was speaking to him...
"Sorry... you was sayin'?"
"I said... I am curious about one thing... why did you tell Andy to use your saddle? What's wrong with his?"
Jess' saddle was a new Denver Heiser and he took particular loving care of it as if it were a family heirloom. He would have brought it into the parlor every evening for a daily soaping, oiling and polishing if Jonesy hadn't threatened him with bodily harm. Jess knew his next words would aggravate Slim but he said them anyway.
"It don't fit him no more. Guess that's somethin' else you ain't had time to notice."
Slim threw his saddle on the top fence rail with more force than strictly necessary.
"Jess... don't start with me... I mean it. Not today. I'm just not up to it, okay?"
"Okay. You did ask, though..."
Andy walked up leading the two horses, looking suspiciously from his brother to his friend. "You're not fighting again, are you?"
" 'Course not," Jess said, running a currycomb over Traveler's back to remove any speck of irritant before placing the blanket and meticulously smoothing it down. "We're just havin' us a difference of opinion, is all." He stepped back and motioned to Andy to carry on, all the while observing with a hawk's eye to make sure the saddle was seated properly.
Slim and Jess double-checked cinches and secured catch ropes. Andy got a boost up, fidgeting with excitement as Jess shortened the stirrups for him. As the pair moved off, Slim called back with false heartiness, "Save us some lunch, hear? Don't you go eating it all by yourself!"