Sons of Guns (and other stories) by Tom Sheehan

TOM SHEEHAN

Sons of Guns, Inc. and other stories

Sons of Guns, Inc. and other stories A project developed by Nazar Look Attitude and Culture Journal of Crimean Tatars in Romania www.nazar-look.com

Sons of Guns, Inc. and other stories

by Tom Sheehan

ConstanŃa, 2015

Descriere: SHEEHAN, TOM Sons of Guns, Inc., and other stories / Tom Sheehan.

ColecŃie de naraŃiuni. ConstanŃa: 2015 ISBN 9781508675235

© Copyright 2015 Tom Sheehan

ISBN-13: 9781508675235 ISBN-10: 1508675236 BISAC: Literary Collections / General Volume editor: Taner Murat Artwork: Sagida Siraziy (Sirazieva)

Copyright © 2015 Toate drepturile asupra acestei ediţii sunt rezervate autorului

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

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Sons of Guns, Inc.

Sheehan has 28 Pushcart nominations.

His latest books, 2014 from Pocol Press, are In the Garden of

Long Shadows, and The Nations, about Native Americans.

Next publication is Where Skies Grow Wide. His print/eBooks are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; A Collection of

Friends; From the Quickening, Korean Echoes, nominated for Distinguished Military Award, and The Westering, nominated for National Book Award. eBooks, from Danse Macabre are

Murder at the Forum, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment and An Accountable Death. He has work in Indiana Voice Journal, The Path, Rosebud, Linnet’s Wings, Copperfield Review, Literary Orphans, Frontier Tales, Belle Reve Journal, Provo Canyon Review, Eastlit, Western Online, Wilderness House Literary Review, Serving House Journal, You are Here, Nazar Look, 3 A.M. Magazine, etc.

Sheehan served in 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea 1951.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

Home Is the Sailor from the Sea

At

the Rialto Saloon in Point of Interest, Nevada, after what was undoubtedly a difficult ride for most horsemen, Burl Edwards, a Navy veteran, had ridden from San Francisco just to lean on this bar before he headed home. Here he had had his last drink with his father, Sullivan Edwards, some eight or nine years earlier, in 1874, an unsettled adventurous spirit taking him off to sea. Now he was but ten miles from home after a trip nobody else in the room or in all of Nevada might have accomplished. It was not just the rough 500 miles from Mares Island Naval Base to Point of Interest, Nevada‌ with some other interests en route. This sailor'd been farther and deeper into dangers, made tougher decisions that others' lives depended on, seen more of the top of the world than all the Rialto customers put together, and survived where none of them likely would have come out alive.

Rough and ready was he, a sense of timing built into his make-up, and an innate ability to see what made some men tick in their roles in life.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea There were times that sense proved some men were lacking where others were heroic. Life in many places is accompanied by chance, and what else you might find around it. The young but experienced Edwards might have said, anytime he was back in America proper, "I've been there and seen most all of it," or what might sound like that.

Perhaps it was an element of temperament and taste, or the devouring curiosity that comes with adventure, or a hunger for other and newer space, but Burl Edwards, armed with these attributes, was one tough dude, though he was not a dude; not in the least, and not because of the clothes he wore, or the manner he dressed in them. Something about him said, along with his actions, a full statement about himself: "I can make myself at home anyplace I drop the reins or serve my thirst. On my hip I carry a Navy Colt .44 revolver a dying shipmate gave me with his last breath, his very last breath, just an hour before I slipped his body off a huge icepack into Alaskan waters with a commensurate salute."

Three of the Rialto's working women had immediately and with some admiration looked upon Burl Edwards as a stranger, and a new breeder type; he was a picture for them, clean-shaven, showing blond curls on his neck and at his collar, blue eyes that could open conversations from either side of a meeting of the sexes, long and rugged fingers showing a bit of foreign-earned music in their simple application of holding a glass, just the way some

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa women might envision such a grace. The handsomeness of the man was very apparent to them, enough to make them stare dreamily at him, life being unsettled enough as it was in the daily grind.

Burl Edwards, for sure, had raised all eyebrows at his entrance to the Rialto with the odd mixture of clothes on his rugged frame, salvaged from his navy career, over for good now that he was home, though his garb had not called for "all" the attention. He wore a Russian fur hat, an Eskimo sealskin vest, a rifle that had not been used for a thousand miles plus and for which he paid $10 in a used gun shop, and a pair of spurred boots bought from the widow of a man killed in a gunfight. The boots had been the best deal of all.

He was comfortable with his clothes and gear though he was fully aware of the odd looks he was receiving. Such looks or passive curiosity, as it proved, did nothing for him, coming or going, and the whiskey at hand settled an old argument within him: anything out of the ordinary is unusual with some people his shipmates had dubbed "half-souls."

The bartender said, as he poured another drink, "You sure enjoyed that drink, Mister, so the next one's on me. You passing through Point of Interest? I think a good drink is worth a little light conversation when all these other dudes are hard at messing up their day." He released a short harumph

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea of a laugh. "My name's Max Gilbert and I own the place."

"Then you've been here no more than eight or so years," Edwards said, much to Gilbert's delight.

"You've been here before and you hit the time right almost on the minute hand. I'm coming up on five minutes to eight years owning the whole thing."

His smile was still in place as he spread his arms after looking at his pocket watch.

"You bought it from Silky Smithers. Is that right?"

Edwards had the drink to his lips when Gilbert shook off the question by saying, "In a manner of speaking. I won it in a card game, a game that Silky should not have been in." No explanation followed, and Gilbert walked away as though a mystery should remain a mystery.

Edwards, at that point, was a mystery to the bartender and to all the patrons in the saloon; he didn't recognize a single one of them though looks came furtive, sidelong, looking for some kind of information that might feed the general curiosity abounding in the room as though he was supposed to alleviate all their questions.

He could have done that so easily. About eight years earlier he had wandered away from town and eventually ended up on the Jeannette, a bark-rigged wooden steamship he knew had been built in England in 1861. It was commissioned as the British gun

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa vessel Pandora and was sold in 1875 for an Arctic voyage. A New York newspaper owner, James Bennett, eventually purchased the boat in 1878 and renamed her Jeannette. She was sailed from Europe under control of the U. S. Navy's Lieutenant George Delong who had planned with Bennett to use the ship to try to get to the North Pole. Under an agreement, the Navy provided officers and crew for the North Pole expedition, Bennett paying for all other expenses. The Jeanette was refitted at the Mare Island Navy Yard in San Francisco Bay with new boilers and other equipment, and the hull was heavily reinforced to withstand and navigate among Arctic icepacks, which constantly endangered ships in northern waters.

In July, 1879 the Jeannette, under DeLong's command and according to her log book, sailed with four other Navy officers, twenty-three enlisted men, one being Burl Edwards, and three civilians. Visiting Alaska, she stopped at Unalaska and Saint Michael, where two Inuit dog drivers with their dogs and sleds joined the boat's complement. The Jeannette then called on an eastern Siberian port to refuel, went through the Bering Strait and headed for Wrangell Island in Alaskan waters. The ship was frozen in the icepack on September 6, 1879 but was carried the next twenty-two months by drifting ice for several hundred miles in a northwestward direction, until June 12, 1881. That day her hull was smashed open by the crush of ice and she sank the next day after all boats, equipment and provisions were off-loaded for a

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea long journey on foot across ice to reach open water north of Siberia.

Eventually, as Edwards would tell some of his new friends in Nevada, only thirteen of the crew survived the sea in an open boat, perhaps 11 of them died on the tundra after they landed, and supposedly only two men returned to civilization. But Edwards, separated from others, found survival with an Eskimo group. His stories were long and emotional and filled with admiration for Eskimos.

Burl Edwards came home in the year 1883, a year that had come around the corner in a hurry. This seemed so to his father who had rushed into town at the prompting of a neighbor, yelling out his good day and, "Sully, I saw a stranger ride into town earlier dressed like he's been livin' with Eskimos and he's the spittin' image of your son, Burl, I ain't seen all the years since Martha left me."

Sullivan Edwards slid out of the saddle at the Rialto rail, rushed inside and hugged his son in a long and hardy grip.

Reunion soon reigned in the Rialto. "The bar's open," yelled Burl's father, the crowd rushing to get its share and the small talk starting in one corner; "By God he don't look like no cowboy I ever seen," said one cowpoke at a table, by name of Spurs Spurrier, "not with them duds, a hat like he's been born a foreigner and been pokin' fun at the hats we wear, a vest like he's an Eskimo and a funny look on

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa his face like he don't believe anythin' he sees, that's meanin' us, me and you, Sparky, spendin' more time here than anybody in town, us reg'lars. If he's to look funny at either of us, he gets what's comin' to him, father or no father that's a rancher."

Sparky Tottingham, by all who knew him from older events, was ignitable, on the spot ignitable, as one townie was generally credited with saying numerous times, "That Sparky can git lit quicker 'n a sparkler, and he ain't got no proper name but his nickname."

Spurrier patted the side arm in his holster and his pal Tottingham slapped the table top with a loud bang. If Edwards had been at that table, heard that conversation, he'd have known they were "halfsouls." As it was, he didn't have to budge very far before it came up in a louder conversation, which the senior Edwards tried to still with an additional round of drinks. The drinks were finished off in a hurry but the idle and irritating chatter continued with Spurrier and Tottingham until the elder Edwards stomped back to their table, slammed his fist on the top of it and said, "If I was a pup I'd smash you down with my bare fists."

The wise but unfortunate retort from Spurrier was, "Well, I see you got a pup over there with you.

What's he up to in them duds he's awearin'?"

He received his reply from the seaman's rifle stuck in his mouth by Burl Edwards coming to his

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea father's aid. "Taste the iron before you taste the lead, old half-soul, before you're all kinds of alloy and sorely mixed up in this life. If you apologize to this elderly gent who's been buying you drinks and who's my father I haven't seen in a long haul, I'll let it go, but if you're not so agreeable, we sure can find agreement other ways." He was standing over the table looking like a select man posing for the sculpting of a testimonial statue. Impressive he was, impressive and measurable to the whole of the saloon crowd.

Slowly withdrawing the wet tip of the rifle barrel from Spurrier's big mouth, casually, not in the slightest rush, he rubbed the rifle tip through the crook of his left elbow as if getting rid of germs, turned his back on the pair at the table and rejoined his father at the bar. All that crawling time of wiping the rifle tip clean, it was pointed directly at Spurrier, informing Spurrier and everybody else in the saloon that he would entertain no surprises. Not in the least.

And never once did he seemingly acknowledge the other man, the one called Sparky.

Alternate periods of silence and buzz made awkward ways through the patrons of the Rialto, some of the buzz being recognition of the sailor/cowboy come home from his earlier years as plain cowboy. One old timer, sipping an hour on his beer of the day, declaring, "That boy had an adventure workin' on him since he could walk. I 'member his pa findin' him down at the riverbank one

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa time like he was gonna float off 'n' visit anybody he could find. Scared old Edwards half way to Hell, kid was gone for hours. He musta knowed what was comin' along with that boy. Some of 'em come that way. My Paulie went off to Pilgrim Hill once just to deliver a package for Alden Smithwyck and ain't seen him since 'n' I can't do no more searchin' but worryin' takes all the time anyway."

Two drinks were waiting on the bar for the pair of Edwards, Gilbert the bartender smiling and nodding his head with more of his own thanks, and managed, in a later aside, to offer a bit of advice to young Edwards; "That noisy fella, Spurs, is a bad one. You got him cowed now, sure as shootin', but the one you gotta watch is that quiet one, Sparky. He ain't to be trusted no way in Hell. He ain't said much of anythin', but talkin' ain't his way." His eyes finished off the incomplete statement with a sour-faced and positive declaration and an imaginative smoky finger as he attended another customer.

When the Edwards duo left an hour later, headed for home like it was always going to be there come Hell, high water or Alaska, darkness was setting its way off the peaks, along the river bank, out past the end of town where the trail twisted with the river before the trail rose to the east and pointed the way to the Two Caliber spread. The ride was comfortable, uneventful even in the darkest areas where a struggling moon had begun its own ride. Sullivan Edwards watched his son study the rising of the moon

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea and the position of the stars as though he was reading a chart. He said, "You know your way around up there, Burl? I haven't ever made any sense of them but that they hang around forever in their own way."

"Well, that's part of it all, Pa. You can count on them if you can see them. If there's no clouds you can find your way east, west, north or south and most of the in-betweens. At sea you have to know what they'll give you. It's not like a trail the Indians cut out a hundred years ago or the cows bring up with their push for water. If there's too many clouds to see the stars, I can make do here, with knowledge of the peaks, how the rivers run up or down, or a hundred other signs. At sea, it's like the boys say, 'a whole other world.'"

The father, looking back over his shoulder, said, "Think those two boys from the saloon will try to square things away with us, try to get even with that rifle poke. He never saw that comin' at him in the blink of a cow's eye?"

Burl Edwards could have pounced on the "us" his father had announced, which meant he was still the top dog, the sharer in all things to do with the family. He turned sideways in his saddle and qualified his own thoughts on the matter, "One of them isn't ever going to do anything, Pa, but follow the other gent's lead. He's the one I'll look for, but first I got to see Mom and give her a present I bought in Alaska."

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa He looked up at the moon still working its way over a peak, saw the Big Dipper tell its silent story, and heard a shipmate, part-time astronomer and fulltime story teller, explaining the role that Orion played in the heavens while it was nailed against the deep blue of the night sky and the almighty universe itself going every which way on its own. That part-time astronomer had said of Orion, "That bunch of stars has more secrets tied to it than any other bunch of stars up there in the Milky Way, the universe, and all the other worlds put together. I heard that from one of the old Indian folks who said it came down the line to him all the way from the beginning. Said his folks knew more about the stars than anybody and learnt a lot of it from drawings on cave walls and deep cuttings."

Myra Edwards was a bounteous, round-in-theface happy woman, but never happier than when she heard the unmistakable voice of her son from outside, from the tie rail in front of the house, and her husband's generous and hearty laughter also in joyous accompaniment. She couldn't remember how long Burl had been gone. Suddenly, as she stood transfixed in her kitchen, alone, a whirlwind happening within her body, being "taken over again," she saw him at age ten when she first noticed what she'd call "the long look in his eye."

That feeling came back to her in a rush, the awareness that her little boy wouldn't be little for long and there would come a kind of separation. Acutely,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea as if it had happened only moments ago, that feeling had returned and she felt like Owl Who Speaks Thunder, the shaman of a local tribe, exhorting her to be aware of all tendencies, all motion, all things that mattered to her. The first time he had said to her, in a swap of goods, "Winter comes twice, ice melts twice, fire logs run away in the smoke." It had drawn her imagination and she had had her husband gather and stack twice the amount of wood he had planned on. It was all used up by the fiercest winter the family and the ranch, had ever encountered.

So aware, so agonized, yet so happy, she swept her boy into her arms, amply hugging and kissing him, the full grown man he had become, at one and the same time, her kitchen immediately turned upside down, her excitement obvious.

Burl, caught up in his own excitement, handed her the carefully wrapped present that he had carried many miles, though neither of them would ever know how far. It was wrapped in a cured leather skin that had earned a shine from handling and tied with leather thongs with Navy knots practically needing a code to untie.

After she hugged him for an eternity, she held the package in her hands. There seemed no tendency to open the present right away, but she added a quick and logical dictate to that appearance: "You've filled out, Burl, grown fully, and you've been gone a long time. Obviously you have learned something in the time you've been gone. I'll just think about what

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa the present is for a few days, maybe until next week, next month, wondering, after all this time, what you brought home for me, what made you choose it, what you were thinking. Is that okay with you?" She hugged him again and ushered him directly to a seat at the table in the kitchen; mother's work was at hand She smiled widely, clapped her hands, tousled the hair of both men in her life and said, "I suppose you men will want a drink or two to celebrate. I'll go right along with that." Three glasses came right onto the table and she poured the drinks, the aroma coming to her quickly as well as views of other years in quick succession..

They had a grand homecoming.

In the morning, Burl heard early kitchen work being done in a quiet manner, but pots and tins were not usually quiet in his mother's hands. Burl swung the blanket around him and went to the kitchen just as the sun was barely coming upon the house. His father came barefoot from the bedroom, pulling up his pants. His eyes were forcing themselves open.

"Don't go outside, either one of you," she said, a threat in her voice. "I've been cooking since four this morning, never heard anything, but we've had company. Don't go out until you've had breakfast.

You won't like what you see."

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea When her husband rushed for the door, she looked at Burl, shook her head, and added, "The first thing he'll do is come and get his rifle."

Her husband came in cursing loudly, and grabbed his rifle from over the fireplace and grumbled about where he had left his boots the night before.

"Those sons of bitches, he said. "One of our best cows is out there, cracked on the skull and dragged right into our yard here on two ropes still tied around her neck. Both our hired hands are over in the north canyon bedded down with the herd, so they wouldn't have heard anything during the night."

With boots on he went back outside followed by his son, also carrying a rifle, the one last in someone's mouth.

Sullivan Edwards walked around the cow, bloodied, two legs broken, bones showing through the breaks. With his belt knife he cut lose the two ropes and tossed them aside.

Burl, now in his pants and boots and a hanging shirt, gun belt in place, rifle in one hand, picked up the two ropes. His father didn't notice, but his mother saw Burl studying the knots in the ropes, how the loops went, where the sure knuckles came in the knots, what else he might glean from their knotted composition. She kept such thoughts to herself; it was her way not to embarrass her husband with finds or secrets he had missed in his observations‌ it had

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa always made for the healthiest of marriages.

But she managed to say, "Nice homecoming for you, son. Did you gents step on some toes in town last night?"

Sullivan almost exploded. "That son of a bitch last night, the big mouth, I ought to go in there now and kick his ass all over town." He was spinning around in his anger like a top spins, in place, and then a slight wobble took hold of him.

Burl said, in a measured and sure tone that perked his mother's interest and intelligence in a hurry, "It isn't the mouthy one, Pa. It's the other gent. Spurs is not the fellow who set this. It was the other fellow, the one they call Sparks, not the one who doesn't like iron in his mouth. But we'll surprise him by going the way he won't expect us. Right through his buddy, Spurs, the talk of the galley."

Sullivan Edwards shook his head in wondrous doubt, while Myra Edwards, secretive on some things, quite open on other family matters, smiled at the years that had topped her son's thinking, whatever it was, whatever it intended. Her small wonder of a boy was now a grown up wonder, and a stalwart hero and survivor of a harsh naval experience and, with his return, a future rancher of means. She laughed inwardly at that as she thought, "Ah, the east and west meet, the cowboy and the sailor do mate up."

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea She knew she might as well put all her change on the table and count it out, so she said, without a trace of coyness in her tone, "When are you gents going back into town to square this away?" She looked out the window at the trussed up and dead cow, read the serious invisible signs employed by the perpetrator and knew quick action would be the best method of revenge for whatever comes out of it, for it would be revenge. The innocence of the cow in the incident might have made another woman cry seeing the protrusion of sharp, broken bones, one eye busted free, two legs broken, and the awful sense of revenge, anger and hate welling up in her usual "toobusy-am-I for that kind of Tomfoolery."

"Not me," issued from under her breath, for the trail to this very location had been a long one from Missouri, her first born buried en route in a lost and lonely place along the way, never to be visited again, she knew without doubt, because it would never be found again. Her morning prayers for him, already said, were said again, making repetition feasible, amenable. But she had kept serious thoughts on the job, kept them working, worked them into knitted or crocheted patterns spread about the house, in each room, as visible as she was: Happiness is not where you are, but what you allow around you.… Relationships come with clasp and the last fingernail and are not accidents of shallow touch.… Time doesn't have a whistle or a gong.…

Mountains move and so does Time, but the speeds are different.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa She looked sneakily, sideways, at her son Burl, gone for so long, back in the bosom of the family to be enjoyed, and to make amends when required; It was what older sons were born for. And out here, beyond Missouri, beyond the great river, beyond the lost graves, those needs were inevitable the way the west moved in continuous motion.

A few hours after breakfast, and after the dead cow was tended to, the two Edwards men tied up at the far end of the Rialto rail, at Burl's insistence.

Overhead the sun was a brilliant flame of orange as it soared between clouds, as it poured sunshine onto the whole of Point of Interest through the same breaks in the clouds.

The pair walked casually past the horses gathered there, and the younger Edwards studied each horse as he passed by them, stopping twice to check out two horses, both grays, all the while his father kept shaking his head. Burl had not said a whole lot on the way into town, except to say, "The man who dragged our cow left a marker on his work."

The Rialto, of course, came to full attention when the Edwards tandem walked in and went straight to the bar where Gilbert at the bar asked, "Beer or whiskey, gents?"

Openly, he spotted the change in clothing that the returned sailor was wearing, those making him look like a working cowboy; the Stetson, old as Box Mountain perhaps, sat square on his head, the shirt

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea had a worn but clean color, the denim pants slim by choice and discolored by wear wrapped under a gun belt primed with a Navy Colt .44, which, to the bartender and a few older men in the room, looked as mean and as tough as the man at the drinking dais who was obviously delivering a message to someone in the room, of whom Gilbert would make no mistake selecting.

"Bit of both," Burl Edwards said, his voice in immediate ascension, marked for close listening, the far corners of the room coming to rapt attention, poker hands being dealt coming to halt, creaking chairs leaning their weights in silence. "We come to fetch a yellow-belly cow killer. Dragged a cow almost to our doorstep, two legs broken, one eye lost, and dead as a marlin spike. Now you tell me, Mr. Saloon owner, what kind of a patron would someone like that be, yellow all the way through his guts, or just yellow on the back of his neck or down that thin little yellow stripe that crawls down his back and hides from everybody's eyes in his all-year-rounders? You know, those duds he ain't washed once since a year ago Tuesday next and I can smell him from up here even with a strong whiskey in my nose."

Not once had he looked at the table where Spurrier and Tottingham sat, not once in any portion of the special delivery message to the Rialto-at-large.

He swallowed the shot of whiskey, picked up his beer, held it aloft, and said, in a firmer and louder voice, "Here's to the yellow belly wherever he's hiding

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa at this moment, and to his best pal, who's not as yellow as him because he did not dare to do what his yellow-belly pard did to a damned harmless cow that ain't got no way to hit back even to anybody wearing that much yellow-to-the-bone way under his dirty old year-rounders he'll wear until they go to tatters on some prairie yardarm."

Burl the sailor, as if he were on the waves again, or the immense icepack that carried him and his shipmates months on end and hundreds of miles, faced the throng of patrons as he had faced polar bears, wolves, and the madness of a crazy, riflewielding, partly-clawed prospector he'd met in an Alaskan gold field. He figured then he was halfway home to Point of Interest, Nevada and another threat in front of him against that journey's completion.

Each of those appointments had been met with courage, ingenuity and utter confidence. He'd been a crew watchdog; now he was the family watchdog. At the back of his head was the phrase his mother had crocheted in a frame beside the mirror in the hall; Who sings to my family sings to me, and I hear all the curses too.

For the hundredth or so times, he realized how far her words travelled to get to him. One place was near the top of the world; another was at the Rialto Saloon in Point of Interest, Nevada. There was nothing like home teaching, he had boasted to his shipmates and had told them countless times about his mother's methods, and one other saying stitched

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea on the wall and in his mind forever: The least expected is always the last on the horizon, so don't wait on Santa Claus.

Spurrier made the first attention-grabbing move, tapping Tottingham on the shoulder, accompanying it with the age-old gesture of ignorance, the hunch of his shoulders and a hands-up and silent gesture that said, "Are you goin' to take that from him, Sparky? From that stupid sailor?" and then looking around for support for his questions, as though he had some part in arousing his pal from the dumb silence at their table.

Tottingham ignored him completely, keeping his eyes on Burl Edwards the way a lion tamer has to tend his fanged subject‌ or face the consequences, the awful consequences. The old man of the Edwards was not so noticeable, not so formidable, or so he thought as he started to find new things, prominent new things, about the younger of the clan, the way he had directed a clear and clean challenge right at his feet, where he sat at the table, where he now felt the chip on his shoulder was heavier than ever before.

Tottingham might have said to himself, "I'd better not mess with this gent, no matter what he looks like, even though he doesn't look as different today as he did yesterday: there's a power emanating from the sailor boy I'd not ordinarily contend with."

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa On the other end of things, Spurs Spurrier and his stupid talk bothered him, and had already pointed him out to every person in The Rialto as the man who sure looked like he had been the one who killed a helpless cow and dragged it into the Edwards' yard and who sat here challenged, so he might as well stand up and face the music.

Noisy Spurrier, it appeared, wasn't about to let it go. Wasn't his pard the toughest thing ever to sit a saddle, flop a pistol out of a holster, hit what he was shooting at‌ and every time? No matter what the target was, how big it was, how small it was, how fast or slow it moved? Wasn't he?

"Whadya say about this make-believe cowboy wearin' an old gun, Sparks? He don't look as tough as some gents you've took care of, does he, Sparks?

Does he?" He was getting animated while egging his saddle pard into a sure-fire easy fight. "He looks light enough for me to take." His smile was wide and cocky, but in the same breath of words he was wearing thin on a lot of folks‌ that included Gilbert the bartender and owner of The Rialto, the many patrons in The Rialto, the two Edwards men standing at the bar, and most of all, his own pard sitting right at the same table.

The Rialto crowd, from the tension at the table, knew something was afoot in their midst.

"Okay," said Sparks Tottingham, throwing both hands into the air. "Okay, you want him, Spurs,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea you got him. Go get him." He held one hand out as if he was an usher at the church showing the way to a nervous groom-to-be. Bustle, ado and snickering snuck around the room swift as a quick draw calls attention to its motion.

Fear crossed Spurs' face as if an inner torch had lit it up. "I didn't mean it all like that, Sparks. Not like that. Hell, I didn't drag that cow in there. I can't tie them knots like you can, those ones you learned on the Mississippi like you said. No sir, I ain't no fair mix for him like you are."

Gilbert, ashamed himself, almost said it, but Sparks Tottingham, suddenly aging, feeling the power of self-measurement, grabbing at full manhood, said it first, "Why the hell don't you get on your damn horse, Spurs, and get out of town, all the way out, before I ever catch sight of you again. Now git." His voice had risen, and so had Spurs Spurrier, amazement crowding his face, standing, walking backwards to the door, his hands checking the way through the crowd behind him, as though he was going to get shot in the back.

In a matter of echoed seconds, his horse took off down the main road of Point of Interest and nobody, for sure, would ever see him again.

Inside, between the table of interest and the bar, the space seemed like a vacuum, silent, not quite holy, but a change, a transition, taking place in front of everybody. And that vacuum was altered like

28

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa it might never be altered again in the same kind of situation.

Sparks Tottingham, face gone ashen gray, hat tipped back on his head, placed his hands palms down on the table. He spoke directly to Burl Edwards; "I'm so damned sick and tired of him I couldn't stand any more of him. Y'all know I killed that cow cause I was mad at how you stood up to me. I don't know if I can outdraw you, but it sure don't look like it'd be worth it. You got a ton of guts and it looks like you got them from your Pa there, and I never had none of that. Not one minute of it from the first day I was born. Not one minute of it." There was loss and loneliness and honesty now invested in his voice, a whole wagon-load of it.

"I worked some as a kid on the big river on a few boats before I come out here and I'd sure like to know what you did and where you went in the Navy.

I'll pay what I owe for the cow and I'll apologize to the woman of the ranch and to them what cleaned up that mess. Hell, I'd even go to work for you if you'd give me the chance."

His head shook in doubt, as if he didn't believe what he had just said to practically the whole damned town of Point of Interest. "Hell," he said, "I came out here to be somebody, not a coal stuffer on the river, not hid down below all the time and never gettin' to see any of where we went along the river."

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Home Is the Sailor from the Sea Silence stood at attention in The Rialto, and Gilbert, a man with keenness in his bones, said, "The bar's open. I think we just celebrated big time in Point of Interest, and I'm pretty sure we've just seen a new hire taken on at the old Two Caliber Spread. * * *

30

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats

First

there was a smaller sail out on the water. And then there wasn’t any sail, as if it had been erased. Bartholomew Bagnalupus did not blink at the contradiction his eyes gave him. There were things like mist and eyespots and vacuums of sight. Been there, had that, he thought, as he swung his short-handled curled pitchfork into the earth of Mussel Flats. Another bucket of worms he’d have before the tide would drive him off the flats.

Out on the bay the light sail boats were running under the small breeze, and in the slash of waters that would cover the stretch of Mussel Flats before the day was half old. Young Bartholomew Bagnalupus, sixteen by a few weeks, thought the sails looked like napkins off his mother’s table, the way they folded in triangles, ran the breeze as if the front door had been opened and whipped them from the

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats table. Contrast was never far from his mind as he dug in the muck for worms, at four cents a piece from the bait shop.…the white sails out there on the bay and him on his knees here in the muck.

The sun, insisting it was fire, cussed its way across Bart’s shoulders. The bucket was only half full of worms, gray water, sand and minute debris, and his short angled fork dug into the muck of Mussel Flats in the way only he could attack it. His grandfather, the great Bartholomew himself, had shown him how to worm when Bart was just out of diapers. “On your knees, boy, ‘cause that’s the way the good Lord wants you serving. On your knees and your eyes wide open. Never forget that.”

Now his eyes were open and the salt was into every crevice of his body. He thought it an iodine, a thinness with the point of a stiletto. His body ached the way it did every afternoon, his knees sore, sneakers sopped and loaded with mud, the sun past ignition, his mind filled with the being of salt, with his grandfather, with the waters of the ocean that had taken his father.

If there were railroad tracks at this end of town people would have said Bartholomew Bagnalupus lived on the other side. He was a worm digger, a clam digger, a hauler of kelp.

At the back of his mind, some awareness pulled him into another consciousness. At a different level, more pronounced, it was a severe yank, and

32

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa one he knew would be folly to ignore. Be alert to your own voice, old Bartholomew had said. Be alert. He stood up to get a better view of the small bay now growing under the tide, the tide’s reach coming in over the flat land. As he put his hand up a visor over his eyes, stories of old Bartholomew flooded him and he fastened onto the first of the legends of the old man now sitting in a chair in the sunroom of his daughter’s house.

As a youngster of eighteen, in the little village of Pratolino outside Florence, his grandfather’s Saturday task was to take horse and wagon and crops about fifteen miles to the market for sale. It was repetitious and boring and offered little escape from the centuries old drudgery of the rock-strewn farm. The Cohorts were long gone. The Legions were long gone. Adventure was long gone. Pieces of mountains came up profusely through farmlands.

Italy rendered little but continual labor. So one Saturday morning Bartholomew Bagnalupus, yearning for more, hearing the voice inside his body, sold the crop, then sold the wagon, then sold the horse and bought a ticket on a ship headed for America.

Seventy years later, three wives later, fifteen children later, thirty-five grandchildren later, he could still demand attention from his youngest and last grandchild, and the fourth one to bear his name.

There had been a sail out there and now there wasn’t. Bart dropped his pitchfork and raced toward the water. His sneakers were filled with water and

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats muck and he struggled in parts of the flats. Out on the water he could see the half silhouette of a capsized sailboat, but saw no movement. In minutes he knew he’d be in the water so he took off his sneakers and dungarees at the banking. Then he thought about his wallet. Pulling it from his pocket he placed it under a flat stone that would be there when the tide was out again. Bartholomew Bagnalupus, fourth of the name, worm digger, from the other side of the tracks, dove into the water off Mussel Flats and cut his strong arms through the water like a propeller. As if a buoy had found release from a tangled underwater line, a girl popped to the surface a few yards from the overturned sailboat. Air and noise and blubbering came from her mouth, and one arm swung like a hen’s broken wing against the water. In a few strokes he was at her side, grasped her in his arms, pulled her close to the boat.

Bart held her against the hull and could feel her body pressing back at him, the curves and softness he had only dreamed about. Blonde tresses swung like leather traces over her eyes, thick, knotted and rope-like. The one arm that had swung idly now wrapped about his neck. Her lips were soft looking. Against him her breasts were softer. A knee, lightly, accidentally, not quite harmlessly, touched at his groin. He could feel the new action in his body.

Even above the salt in his nose, at his eyes, a new essence came to him, filling his head. Listen to your body, old Bartholomew had said. Now he was listening.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa He was listening and it was the girl who spoke.

“God, you smell good,” she said as her second arm swung limply about his neck. Her whole frame was pushed against him. “Thank you for jumping in. I’d have been all right except for the line that caught at my foot. But I think I’ve hurt my arm. Do you always dig out here?”

Bart could not answer. Had she smelled saltresidue, shaving lotion, pasta, sauce from the back of the stove, the harsh cut of liberally dosed garlic, the riches of his mother’s kitchen? He knew what she smelled like. It was new; it had smooth edges to it, and then a cutting edge. It filled his head. If he had socks on they would have been knocked off his feet.

And her body, even in the water, was warm and fresh and totally new in experience against his body, floating against him the whole length, all the curves and softness bending to his bends, following his contours.

Suddenly he realized he was in his skivvies, practically undressed, and aware of an erection starting on its route. What an embarrassment! Yet her eyes were telling him something, even as a voice came to them over the water: Marcy,are you okay?

Her eyes closed once, she leaned against him the whole way, and said, “You’re precious.”

The voice came from another boat. It was Marcy Talbert’s father, the banker, the man who owned most all of Pressburn Hill off the old pond, who owned Vinegar Hill and Applepine Hill and Cutter’s

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats Pond itself and practically half of Rapid Tucker’s Pond.

The broad, heavy-chested man was in the water and lifting his daughter into the other boat and climbing back aboard. His hand came down to Bart Bagnalupus. “Come aboard, son. I’m damn glad you were around.”

Bart did not accept the hand, his erection still somewhat in place. “Thank you, but I left my wallet back there under a rock.” I’d be embarrassed to hell, he thought. Over his shoulder he looked, back at the expanse of Mussel Flats. Time and tide had closed down on him and the rock was now under water.

“Not going to find it now, son. Come aboard.”

His hand came back down to Bart. His eyes were big and pleasant, and the face kindly though he had not shaved this day. “I know you’re in your skivvies, son.

She told me. It’s okay. She don’t mind, I won’t mind.

She’s mine and she’s precious, even if a little headstrong.”

Those were not harsh banker’s eyes looking down at him, not a banker’s hand extended fully to him. “I’ll have to dive for it,” Bart said. “It’s all I have and my mother needs it. My father was lost in his boat a few years ago.”

“You the one always digging for worms out here?” The hand came again, still fully extended. Bart took it and the big man hauled him out of the water in one swift movement. His erection was gone. He felt shrunken and weak and his breath suddenly came in

36

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa loud gasps. The banker threw a blanket over Bart’s shoulders. "Was your father the one who tried to get that other crew out of the storm when their boat went under?”

“Yes, sir, that was him.” The girl Marcy was staring at him, first at his face and then at his crotch.

A redness ran all across his face. She smiled again. A haunting and passing beauty glowed on her face. Bart felt he’d never see this same beauty again in his life.

“Knock it off, Marcy,” her father said. “Why don’t you kiss him and let it go for now.”

Bartholomew Bagnalupus said to himself, I better listen to this man the same way I listen to my grandfather. Hesays things you have to find for yourself.

“That arm looks bad, Marcy. We better get you down to see Doc Smithers.”

The girl with the soft lips, the warm frame, the deliciously new body, spoke up. “I won’t go see that drunk. He’s always peeking down my blouse or up my skirt. Take me to Doc Higgins. He tends to business.”

Bart was listening. Learning was coming at him from every direction. This girl was beautiful, willful, and independent. Gray-green-hazel eyes were knocking his socks off. Her father threw Bart a pair of swimming trunks. Bart put them on. Marcy still smiled at him.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats They ran ahead of the breeze, all the way into the marina. Banker Talbert drove them to Doc Higgins’ office. Marcy was but bruised. Bart was just chilled. Then the banker drove Bart home. He spoke to his mother. “He saved my daughter’s life, Mrs. Bagnalupus. He’s not hurt, but if I were you I would not let him out of the house before tomorrow. Doc says he might have a reaction. Keep him inside and rested. He’ll be okay tomorrow. Tomorrow’s a great new day. You and your son please come to dinner at my house tomorrow evening. My daughter demands it and I concur. I’ll come and get you at five-thirty.”

He looked at the two teen-agers sitting on the steps. “I think they have already had some kind of mental correspondence.” His eyes were light and friendly. At the end of the porch an old man rocked away in an old rocking chair, alert, nodding.

Early the next morning, when Bartholomew Bagnalupus clomped out onto the muck of Mussel Flats and the tide had gone out to sea, the rock he had hidden his wallet under was sitting on the mud like a pancake. The wallet was stuffed with hundred dollar bills. The first thing he thought about was handing it to his mother, seeing the glow on her face.

Then, seeing Marcy’s face and the face of her father, he began to wonder how he would handle it all.

But all along his body, though, he could feel the softness of the girl in the water, knew the smell of her in his nostrils, could hear her straightforwardly

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa saying, “God, you smell good.” If he told the old man in the sunroom, he’d nod and smile, nod and smile. * * *

39

Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman

Odyssey of a French Swordsman

“Who

among you will swear to devote his life to country and crown? Stand you then and be appointed.�

He had stood up on that solemn occasion, had been counted, and subsequently dishonored and disparaged by his entire country, which quickly had gone under a different rule.

On a night dark as new promises, the year of turmoil 1793, hoof beats announcing organized columns of one belief or another without a known flag borne for identification and loyalty, the air reeking with forebodingness and clandestine alliances, Jacques de Lemoine, 22 years of age, experienced in battle, soldier by profession, horseman by choice, swordsman by desire, bound elsewhere, slipped out of France from an unknown port on a small fishing boat and landed in Spain.

His landing was a serious affair, the boat capsizing in a storm, the others disappearing from view even after a desperate search, yelling out names

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa of comrades, and trying to measure the distance to shore. In one moment of search, self-preservation kicked in and he struck out for the shore. He touched solid earth under his feet, stood up in the sea water, knew Spain underfoot, and strode ashore. His sword was gone, his boots gone, his cape gone, all shed for survival to overcome the pull of the water threatening to drag him down. If he had his choice, he thought, he’d rather be on a steed heading into battle, his weapons at hand as well as the enemy, for he knew what he was capable of, what he had done, where he had been. He was not a man of the sea; he was a horse soldier, a cavalryman, a veteran of wars at a young age, who now needed a new cause; that was his destination, his odyssey.

On the beach, leaning on a wooden bench, an old man stared at him, a decrepit old man, a funny hat on his head, the oddest cane in one hand, wielded as if just torn from a tree, a heavy knob on top that could be used as a weapon. The shaft of the cane exhibited many sharp points where branches had been slashed away, each remaining nub capable of depositing pain upon an enemy. In advanced age the man still looked formidable, able to take care of himself. Lemoine wished himself that formidable after uncountable more decades.

But several times the inquisitive old man looked back over his shoulder, to the chimneys and rooftops of a nearby town set inland less than a half mile away. Lemoine thought him at first to be looking

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman for compatriots, perhaps another coastal watcher at the same duty, but the man was not alarmed at the sight of him; more curious than alarmed.

Then the old man said in Spanish, “Lo que le trae por aquí?” (What brings you here?”) They were at the very edge of the ocean, the place called Castro Urdiales behind them showing a few housetops, smoke rising from morning fires, the scent of cooking food in the air, olive oil and the riches of women working in the grand mix of early day. Then he repeated his words in French, “Ce qui vous amène ici?”

Lemoine, aware of the furtive looks in the old man’s eyes, said, with considered pauses breaking up his words, “Puede usted hablar inglés, lo cual será más fácil para mí?” He offered an immediate translation into English: “Can you speak English, which will be easier for me?”

“Yes,” the old man replied, a glint in his eye, a look again over his shoulder as if there was another listener hanging about them.

“Our boat was swamped,” Lemoine explained.

“There are no other survivors that I know of, but I must search along the shore to make sure. They were good men to take me away from my troubles.”

“How did you alone survive?” The old man’s English was excellent. “I have seen no one else come out of the ocean, no strangers other than you on the

42

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa beach. I have been here since before the sun came lifted out of Asia.” He pointed westward.

“I am a strong swimmer,” Lemoine replied, his eyes searching the old man’s face for other signs, and then his own look sent off to the nearby community.

“You are French, are you not?” the beach watcher said. “Do you flee the unrest in France? Were you loyal to the crown or to the new ideals?” The look on his face, at the choices mentioned, was neutral at delivery. Age itself, it was easy to see, had a solid grip on him, but his hair was thick on his head under the brim of his strange hat, and flowed down on worn shoulders, gray as a cloudy dawn sky. The tunic he wore was torn in a few places, and dearly in need of cleaning, as were his pants, but his boots were close to shining, as though they had been gifted to him by a generous soul.

“I was a soldier. I was doing my duty.”

“Aha,” said the old man, “without a king the kingdom goes away and with it goes its army. You must leave here soon. Find a boat going to the new world, to America. Everyone there and everyone going there get a new start with a new government of the people. Think about the new chance in a new land, going to the new place with all your old skills that have proved their value. You may go without baggage but you do not go empty-handed. You have those skills you sharpened in your service and a new chance to use them again.”

43

Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman His delivery sounded like a tutor at work; and Lemoine heard the depths of it.

Back over his shoulder the old man looked, first along the beach and then back to Castro Urdiales, the old one still on guard, using his experience, before he renewed his talk. “It is better than going back. I too was a soldier and was hounded, but have found a place here. It can be treacherous some days, for many factions move among us. From France, too, they have come, like you or those searching for those like you. Just a few days ago such men chained up a few men they found coming in on a small boat, just before dawn. I heard they would have their heads chopped off once they were brought back to the chief city, to Paris, to the guillotine. As for me and my past, it goes away at times. And I am too old to go any other place, but caution should be exercised by you for escape. Some you meet will be wounded by a word before the tip of the sword makes them flinch. Watch for such men. Be alert for such men. Use them ably. They too provide opportunity.”

He was imparting as much lesson as warning; again it came home to the Frenchman in flight.

Alertly like the good watchman he had become, the old man scanned the area behind him and then out in front of him. “Go along the coast, on that road there.” He pointed to a marked trail along the water. “I have a horse you can buy if you have money, or else you can have him. Wherever you

44

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa leave him, say he belongs to Armand the Cripple of Castro Urdiales. He will come back to me one way or another.” He nodded his head in assurance, as though he was known along the whole coast of Spain.

His eyes sparkled with belief, with a clutch at humor.

Lemoine noticed once more the man’s leg, how it was bent at a strange angle, how it said pain in a familiar language of the mind. They were brothers in the art of warfare, their memories perhaps the same, but their lingering pains now different.

When he mounted the golden horse, Lemoine said, “I will make somebody promise to bring the horse back to you. I will find an honorable man. As I said, I am sorry I do not have any money for you.”

“Aha,” said Armand the Cripple, “I have found not only an honest man, but a man of standing, a soldier. We of Spain sent off our horses many, many years ago to the New World with our explorers, gallant men going into the unknown breech of darkness. Some of their horses were the likes of my Carlo, gold as the sun or a full moon above the orchards. He will not make that trip. Do not worry about him. He will come back?” His head nodded in affirmation, a smile grasping his whole face.

Quizzically, knowing the old man’s tune had suddenly changed, Lemoine asked, “How are you so sure about the horse Carlo coming back? Do you know everybody I will see on the way?”

45

Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman Armand the Cripple laughed heartily, “Oh, he is one of promise, my Carlo, his name meaning the free one. He always comes home. I have sold him five times,” a smile adding, “and he always comes home.”

He laughed again, “Without fail.” He laughed again and added, “Perhaps more than five times.”

The two men roared at the edge of the ocean, and Lemoine rode off, on his next leg of the trip to America, laughing at a sudden image of one Spaniard saying to a fellow countryman, “Do not buy the golden horse Carlo, the free one, who belongs to Armand the Cripple of Castro Urdiales, for your money will only call him home again, back to Castro Urdiales and to his one and only master. One bit of gold draws and matches the other. The cripple gathers twice the fee.”

In 1803 and again the following year Lemoine thought of going back to France when Napoleon was exerting his influence and crowned as emperor in 1804, but he realized the changes were too dramatic for him.

Time, the way it can leap with the adventurous, to men on various pursuits, brought Lemoine, now 33 years of age, in that latter year of 1804 to a small town in the western part of Ohio, to a saloon that had drawn him by its name, Le Cheval d'or Saloon, The Horse of Gold Saloon. Behind the long bar, adorning a good length of the wall, was a painting of a palomino pony in graceful flight across a grassy plain. The golden hue of the horse almost sang

46

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa out to Lemoine when he first walked in and stared at the palomino, for he thought immediately of Carlo, the horse he had borrowed years ago from the old man at Castro Urdiales, a horse as golden as a new coin.

From the moment of his entry, though, Lemoine wanted to call the saloon The Museum, for much of the walls and the overhead beams were hung with old weapons. He saw lances and shields and swords as well as old matchlock pistols and flintlock blunderbuss rifles with bores like hungry mouths, like angry mouths. He noted familiar dragon pistols, the dragon’s head clearly visible around the muzzle that many cavalrymen had carried and had brought about the name of the Dragoons in some cavalry units in Europe. His eyes landed on favored weapons his hand itched for, his past called back again, and it made his gaze move onto all weapons in a twist of memory.

Meanwhile, the long ride he had just accomplished working on him, Lemoine thirsted for a taste of wine. He had in no way lessened that taste in his western stay, and drank it in preference to all other liquors and beers if it was available.

And this was not the first time it had brought about a confrontation with other patrons of a saloon.

One burly cowpoke at the bar, broad in the brow and the shoulders and aware of a difference between him and the slim and handsome Lemoine

47

Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman standing on his right, decided he’d put the differences to a test.

“Say, there, stranger,” he said, “are you new around here? I never seen you in here before. You come far?” He had turned to face Lemoine straight on, a silly look on his face, as if he was facing a totally unworthy opponent in a silly grudge match.

Lemoine had seen it all before, the same look, the down-range appreciation of differences between men. He took a deep breath.

The big man continued. “You sure look like you come from some other place.” He looked about the saloon and tried to bring others at the bar and at tables to side with him, and nudged the man on the other side of him, urging him to enter the cajolery.

Lemoine, not looking at the man, and holding the glass of wine close to his mouth, only said, “From far enough to appreciate my own habits.” He voice was level, moderate, in no manner offensive, except for his crystal clear intention of saying, in other words, “I come from a place where people mind their own business.”

But the big man was not sure of what the remark meant. “What does that mean, mister? You pokin’ fun at me?”

He nudged the bar patron on his left, saying, “What do think of this foreigner pokin’ fun at a real American cowboy? Huh, what do you think of that? “

48

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Turning back to Lemoine he said, “You goin’ to answer me, mister, or do I call you out?” His hands dropped to his sides, close to a pair of side arms on his belt.

Still sipping at his glass, Lemoine said, “You mean, am I challenging you to a duel, or is it you challenging me to a duel?”

“You’re damned right I’m challengin’ you. I don’t plain like your attitude. You foreigners always bother me bein’ so smug and tricky, like you’re better than any of us here, us real Americans. I was born here when this country was born.” Pride hung on his voice thick as syrup.

“Then I guess you’re challenging me to a duel.

Is that what you’re saying?” Lemoine had his hand on his sidearm.

The big man smiled and said, “Damned right I am.”

Lemoine said, “Then I have my choice of weapons? Is that the art of the west, the way of the west? The way of the new America where I have been for 11 years of my life, working my way toward California and the vineyards there. Is it my choice of the weapons in this challenge?” His hand touched again the pistol on his belt.

“Sure is, pal. It sure is.” The big man’s smile was as wide as his face.

49

Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman Lemoine reached overhead and drew down from a beam a sword, a long, tapered sword. Light from lamps in the room reflected off its long, thin shaft. “I choose swords,” he said. He leaned his whole long and thin body onto the sword as it touched the floor, the thinness of each as if posed together.

The big man’s pal pointed overhead and excitedly said, “Grab that big one up there, Gunther!

You can crush him with it! One swing and he’s on his butt. Grab the big one looks like a hunk of iron from the blacksmith shop down the street. Smash him, Gunther. Smash him a good one!”

A hint of strange intervention crossed Gunther’s face as his expression said, “Oh, oh,” but it could not be said aloud. Pride, and the usually blustery nature of the big man, made him reach for the broad sword. It was heavy to his hand, but a strange power in its weight, a sold heft came in its handle. He slapped it into the air, clomped it against the overhead beam, and felt the ominous striking power that had come to his hand as the building shook.

Chairs creaked and scraped on the floor as patrons pushed themselves out of danger that created a wide space in front of the bar, like a small arena bound by the bar on one side and patrons at table on the other sides.

50

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa At the back of the saloon, other men, not in the affair from the beginning, stood to get a better view.

One of them said to a table partner, “Looks like Gunther Locumb’s at it again. But he ain’t got a gun in his hand this time. Got a stupid wide blade sword like he’s gonna chop down a tree. Oh, boy, I don’t see this starting right for him. That other fella looks like a sword himself. Maybe this is the day we been waitin’ for. Better have a look.”

The other man at the table stood, a smile on his face, and said, “Think we never been lucky at cards, huh?” Down on the table he threw his hand of cards, “and me with three aces.”

In front of the bar, in front of people who had known him for practically all his life, Gunther Locumb hefted the sword again. “How do we do this?” he said.

“I ain’t ever used these before.”

Lemoine said, “Stand in that corner near the bar. I’ll stand here. The barkeep says, ‘Go,’ and then we start. May the best man win.” He said the last part in French also, as though it was a prayer: “Pouvoir la meilleure victoire d'homme.”

He held his sword upright in front of his face as a salute to his opponent, the flat of the weapon touching his nose.

It infuriated Gunther Locumb who rushed at Lemoine, not just in distaste and anger, but with vile hatred, the broad sword swinging in crude arc over

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman his head as though he was going to crush Lemoine with the weight of it.

Lemoine was ready. He stepped to his left in a slight feint, saw Locumb lean that way, came back in a swift dance and stepped to the right, saw the broad sword swinging its clumsy arc from high overhead as though to cut him in half. The thin rapier, in the hands of a skilled swordsman, slashed into the air, provided the sleekest cut at the wrist of Gunther Locumb, and the heavy sword fell uselessly to the floor.

Silence, an occasional gasp, filtered in the room as the rapier, like a needle, was at the throat of Gunther Locumb full of the direst threat, a horrible death. Locumb did not move, the point of the sword at his Adam’s apple, the way a stiletto might feel, keen, sure, a vile outcome at hand.

Lemoine, with a loud voice, said, “If you swear peace with me, and friendship, it is over and done with at this minute. If not, I will carve you to pieces.”

The thin blade had not moved, had not quivered once in its position, Lemoine’s arm as steady and rigid as a fence pole.

Only Locumb’s eyes moved, searching out the room, seeing the moment of truth descending upon the silent audience as though it had been cast on the place from high heavens. He dared not swallow for fear it would signal a movement from either combatant. He wondered what the next drink would

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa taste like… if he got to it. He wanted that drink, but was no longer sure of anything else except that he could die in a hurry, at the hands of the stranger who at one point, only most recently, had not seemed to belong in this hard world of the west.

Desperate, but his mind working against his normal ways, Locumb dropped his weapon, unhitched his belt and all in the saloon watched it slide down his legs, the era of one bully at the end of a long trail. It was as though one universal breath was let go from one chest, the sound coming clear, relief in order.

Locumb’s pal turned his back on his one-time pal who stood, harmlessly, at attention, while the slim stranger slowly withdrew his slim blade from Locumb’s throat and set it on the bar.

The barkeep spoke first. “You kin have it, mister. You earned it, though I’d begin to tell stories about it if you left it here for us to look at once in a while.”

With a quick motion Lemoine hung the sword back on the two nails that held it on the overhead beam. “It’s my pleasure to return it to its place.” With a slight bow, “Merci,” came from his lips, and then Lemoine said to the barkeep, “Please pour a drink for my new friend here, and another glass of wine for me. I’d buy a drink for all present, but I can’t afford it.”

“Hell, mister, the drinks are on me. We’ll celebrate the Day of the Sword from now on. I can

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman just see a match come out of it, a day-long affair, a shivaree for Le Cheval d'or Saloon.” He did not offer it in the best French, but all understood.

From one side of the saloon, a heavy-set fellow wearing a wide brimmed and sparkling-clean white sombrero approached Lemoine. “Sir,” he said, “I am Augustine Lombard of the Little Italy Ranch that sits along the river ten miles west of here. I ask to whom I am talking and if you’re open to offers of employment, I sure could use a man like you. The pay to start with would be three dollars a day and board and keep and one weekend off a month. You appear quick, smart, and possessed of the talent to survive. Have you been a member of the military?”

He put out his hand.

Lemoine shook Lombard’s hand. “Sir, he said, “I am Jacques de Lemoine, soldier, horseman, swordsman, bound someplace lest a job detains me. I am once of Colonel-General Cavalry of the besieged garrison at Lille, France in 1790. We fought among ourselves, the people and the cavalry, and one of us lost his way. I have come to America, perhaps 10 years ago, and have worked my way in many places, done many things, and look for the future all the time. I would like to buy you a drink and one more for my new friend here, Gunther, but one apiece, mind you. It is all I can spare at this time.”

So it was that three strangers came into diverse roles, friends to each, one an employer, one

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa employed, one still looking on, the way things change in life for one and not for another.

“What do you say to my offer, Mr. Lemoine?”

Lombard had his hand out, waiting for the acceptance.

“If you offer Gunther a job, I will take the offer. One needs friends no matter where he is in this world, or what he does. Gunther is now my friend. I am his friend, though I have come from afar. Do we not all come from elsewhere? And now Napoleon is to become Emperor of the French, in my own language ‘L'Empereur des Français.’”

Lombard shook with laughter. “You are right, Mr. Lemoine. We all come from elsewhere, myself from Italy 20 years ago and your new Emperor, the General, has a foothold in my old homeland, too.” He turned to Locumb with the origin question on his face.

“I was born here, in Pennsylvania,” Locumb said, almost apologetically, “but my folks came from Germany, from the forests of Bavaria. I am the first horseman in our family.”

“Now you are hired, Mr. Locumb,” Lombard said, “for I have Mr. Lemoine’s word of acceptance.”

Fate moved swiftly for the three men, tightening the bond from a strange beginning; twice more Lemoine saved Locumb from certain death, once with the sword pulled miraculously from his scabbard when both rifle and pistols had fully discharged all ammunition against a gang of

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman renegades, and once with a deft shot from his rifle at a bear about to tear Locumb apart. The swiftly ascended foreman of Lombard’s ranch saved his daughter Alicia, 20, from a kidnapping plot by sheer bravado and trick horsemanship, and Gunther Locumb had in turn saved Lombard in a mad stampede of cattle, using his brute strength to pull the cattleman from a certain trampling.

A few years later, in 1806, Augustine Lombard stood happily and proudly as his daughter Alicia married her savior with Gunther Locumb standing as best man at the wedding.

A son was born in late 1807, Benjamin Lemoine and Lombard threw a boisterous party at the ranch. Thereafter, in testimony of events and celebrations, Lombard started a small shrine of sorts with memorabilia in place: Lemoine’s sword and his original matchlock pistol, two shoes taken from the horse Locumb rode to save the rancher, Lombard’s own pistol that had jammed and did not fire when he aimed at what he thought was an intruder but was only a hungry vagrant that ended up working for him, and Benjamin’s birth record handwritten by the local sheriff.

As a separate part of the testimonial wall at one end of the family room, Lemoine started keeping pertinent records of his new family and his old days that had gone anew in France. He used dated events burned into a simple slat of wood that were placed in ascending order, oldest to the newest. This slat

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa method enabled him, when news came much later than the event and oftentimes after other events had been entered earlier, to be posted in proper chronological order.

The notations were by year only, and were maintained faithfully by Lemoine, which began simply as: 1806, Alicia Lombard and Jacques de Lemoine married. (The legend burned with care into the simple wooden slat showing an artful hand.)

That first entry set the tradition off and running, Lemoine looking to his past, his old homeland, his new homeland, his military and family interests, as follows: 1807, Son Benjamin born to this house.

1807, Victory of Friedland over the Russian, and Code Napoléon enacted.

1809, The Emperor moved into the Elysée Palace.

1809 Napoléon departed to rejoin the Grande Armée.

1809, Napoléon’s victory at Wagram and at Znaim.

1809, A daughter was born to this house, Mary Elizabeth.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Odyssey of a French Swordsman 1810: Napoléon married Maria Louisa, Archduchess of Austria, Civil marriage at Palace of Saint-Cloud and a religious marriage in the Louvre.

1811, Son born to Napoléon and Maria Louisa at the Tuileries Palace, with title of King of Rome.

1812, Son Norman born to this house.

1812, French troops entered Prussia.

1812, Napoléon departed for the Russian campaign. Another son was born.

1812, The United States declared war on Britain.

1812, Napoléon victory of Borodino or the Moskova.

1812, Gunther Locumb killed by Indians… (never married, no children) 1812, Napoléon entered Moscow and left, starting retreat from Russia.

1813, Prussia declared war on France.

1813, Augustine Lombard Lombard died from drowning.

1814, Benjamin’s tutor, Fitzgerald arrives and starts lessons.

1814, Napoleon exiled to Elba (300 days) 1815, Napoleon returned to France 1815, The battle of Waterloo is lost.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa 1815, In the Elysée abdicated in favor of his son.

Palace,

Napoléon

1815, The allies entered Paris - Louis XVIII returned to Paris.

1815, Napoléon tried to reach United States.

Instead, as war prisoner, deported to Saint Helena.

1816, Fitzgerald says Benjamin is the best student he has taught.1821, (Saturday May 5) Napoleon died and I, Jacques de Lemoine, was 50 years old this same day.1822, Benjamin wrote his first story, The Golden Horse. (“A gift is ours,” Lemoine burned into the wooden slat as a post script to this entry.)

Jacques de Lemoine, Jack Lemoine to all his friends, was constantly exclaiming to all those friends about Benjamin’s story of a golden horse named Carlo that was sold 17 times and kept coming back to his master who raised hundreds of golden horses from that sire. “The lad has such a grand imagination to conceive of such a tale and I am sure that this family will see a new hero rising in its midst, a master storyteller, not born to the sword, but born of it. No doubt he has many more stories to tell in his time.”

As Lemoine waited to read more stories from his son, he continued to live the legend of his times. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse

Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse

Long

before the Japanese planes took off from their aircraft carriers hiding on the broad Pacific, most of the world already awake to one kind of a storm or another, Sawyer’s Icehouse on the Cliff Road side of Lily Pond was a haven for returning icemen each winter, for hockey players needing a break from games that often lasted for a whole weekend day, and for midnight lovers getting out of a bitter north wind and breaking the frigid barrier in one manner or another.

As it was, the icehouse was used by skaters and swimmers for romantic interludes, in seasonal appreciation.

Frank Parkinson, who also had a key to the mostly secret clubhouse on Henshit Mountain, kept the icehouse availability in his back pocket. Once he told a confidant (trusting him only as far as he could toss him), “I know where one gent hides the key to his place on the pond. If it ever comes down to a quick move, I have a place to take the lady.”

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Frank never spoke of a female acquaintance other than “the lady” no matter who he was talking to. Never was a name mentioned. And he’d never let on it was the icehouse he was talking about, letting his pal think it was one of the two dozen summer camps crimped about the edge of the pond. Little did any of them know that in a matter of a few years after the war out on that same wide and sandy Pacific and parts of the Atlantic, with most of Europe thrown in for kicks, they’d be jacking the camps up with cement blocks or poured foundations, winterizing them, and bringing their war-worn brides to babyhood, which brought one town wag to say, “It’s like Halloween all year over there at Lily Pond, with all that bumping going on in the night.”

He might not have been far off the mark. It was paradise for a time in the late ‘40s. Only the knots or the knotholes knew the difference. Scars as well as sutures made the trip home from the far places of the ignited globe. When Sawyer’s burned down after the war, most of the secrets went with it… except those that survived in special ways.

At Harry Bamford’s Rathole, the only pool, billiard and bowling emporium in Saugus, Frank was a connoisseur of the first table in the establishment, meaning he had first dibs in a tie for game-break.

And the local ladies loved him, mostly, as it turned out, in a secret way. Frankie never breathed a word about one of them. Today, in Valhalla, in the armory of the war gods and occasional lovers along the way,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse he is as quiet as a frog on a lily pad. The big bite on a girl’s reputation, as far as he was concerned, might come from any direction, but never his.

Frank told his late date that night: “This is the place where Dick McDonald got himself about 200 stitches when the big ice saw went wild. Here’s where we push the ice blocks onto the ramp from the pond, then a saw, a huge band saw, cuts them in neat blocks for storage until summer. Well, it went wild and loose, that old saw, getting Dick on his arms, his legs, across a chunk of chest. ‘Just think,’ Dick told me the night he left for the army, ‘I could have lost my pecker in the whole shooting match. Where the hell would that have put me in all of this?’ Isn’t that some kind of situation to find yourself in?”

She crumbled as he entered her. “God, Frankie,” she screamed, an octave even the thick walls did not hold all the way, “I’m glad it didn’t happen happen happening to you you you.” She never knew she climaxed again and again and again in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in the middle, too, of the Panzers and German infantry after sand storms and Egypt’s sun god at his fiercest. Frankie took her on a world tour, right in the ranks with him, and never once said her name, awake or dreaming, the night full of her to an astounding reality, more than one comrade, the observant kind that might be found in some ranks, noticed Frankie’s honeymoon kind of smile on odd mornings.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Her name, it must be told from this end, was Millie, and one night, a whole war later, parked alongside the pond in the dark shadows at the side of Sawyer’s, Millie said to her boyfriend of a year or so, “I heard there are a ton of stories connected with this icehouse.” Nothing secretive would ever pass her lips, no old tale, no fresh memory, nothing.

“Oh, Millie, I’d guess there are. I worked here as a kid. If you whisper in there, it will never come out through those walls filled with sawdust more than a foot thick. Part of the insulation to keep the ice solid through the summer.” His hand, under her skirt, was at the crux of the matter, silken as a spider web, gentle as suds, and she was positive she loved him.

“Like secrets locked home forever?” fell from her open mouth, but her eyes were squeezed shut, keeping an image in its proper place.

She hadn’t seen Frank alone since he’d come home, wrapped into a bunch of scars and memories and silent announcements she never could understand. Her father, in a conciliatory manner, said, “Frank’s not the same kid that went away to save the world, Millie. He barely saved himself, and I don’t know how far that will go for him. They say he went through three kinds of hell out there if there was one. I know guys who said Africa has three kinds of faces she wears.”

With parts of France and Germany still locked in his own mind, he knew a bit of Frank’s journey

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse past himself. He sometimes admitted sharing was the hardest part because it brought guilt and amazement about his own salvation, if he could call it that. At the edge of every image and thought came faces of lost comrades barely recognizable because they only came back in pieces, never whole except for the names. He’d admit later on that the names also went on by, all in their own time.

“He won’t even talk to me, Dad. Never says a word other than ‘Hi’ and on his way.”

“He has too much baggage, Millie. I believe he really thinks the world of you, but doesn’t want to bring too much of the baggage with him and drop it in your lap. Obviously, it’s never going to leave him.

Some of the old guys down at the hall say he just walks out when they begin to hash out stories about their war and where they’ve been, and no telling where and how far when they all get together.”

“I could handle that, Dad,” Millie said.

Her father coughed and started a bit in place before he replied, “Your mother couldn’t, Millie, not that she didn’t try. It was just too much of my baggage. I can say that now, looking back, but I couldn’t then. It was just too much for her.”

Europe, for him, was a horrible little animal with ragged nails that clawed at him for almost thirty years.

Millie, as she had for half a dozen years, tried hard to see her mother’s face, but it was lost in a

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa series of quick images. Frankie’s face was clearest, even from the darkness of Sawyer’s Icehouse the night she and Frankie celebrated love and war; and departure, as it proved. A return to a moment of true passion never found any promise in her mind, though she dwelled for memorable dark hours recreating it.

By then Millie was a nurse working at Massachusetts General Hospital, loving her work, once in a while coming across a patient who had been in Egypt during the war. She found them fascinating, realizing she had a connection at hand, but none of them knew Frank until one afternoon when a strange reunion happened on her floor.

Three young ladies had come to visit one patient. Young, all beautiful to the extreme, dressed like models off the pages of a ladies magazine, they were vibrant, noisy, talkative, bringing the patient whose name was Reggie almost to tears. He laughed so hard that Millie, who had seen his chart earlier, feared stitches would loosen and mess up his surgery.

Then she heard one of them say, “Was it Sawyer’s Icehouse, Reggie? We’ve heard some stories about that place.”

“So much history went down in that old icehouse,” Reggie said, “they ought to write a book about it, but the stories would have to come back from elsewhere, not from inside. There must have been a pact somewhere along the line. Nobody I know has ever let a secret out of there.”

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse That ‘nothing ever said’ was a huge revelation.

Something grasped him even as he spoke, feeling he was in dangerous territory. A ghost or some kind of providence was upon him, possibly a formidable robed judge whose territory included Sawyer’s ice house.

Reggie, it seemed, might have been on the verge of hidden information, but abruptly shut that route off when the nurse entered the room. There was a command in order when he saw her, her face red as if she had been the subject of the immediate conversation. There was also a familiarity about her face, a part of his past, a bit of Saugus. It came home in a hurry.

Reggie said, “I was never in the place, but I heard the usual romantic bits. It was like any place on the pond where you might take a girlfriend.”

Reggie looked at Millie and knew they had shared something. The feeling swept through him.

The visiting girls were quiet, alert that they were in the middle of an exchange, though nothing was said.

Secrets always have a way of escape.

At the other end of the icehouse the night Millie and Frankie had parted, Reggie’s sister Francie sat astride Herbie Williams, pounding him into total submission, and when she said, “Good luck in the war, Herbie,” he said, “I’m never going to die out there, Francie, but I might die right here.”

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa All the connections had been made at the icehouse, one way or another.

Francie had told Reggie and he now told Millie when his visitors left the hospital that day, the sudden compulsion coming over him that he should get closer to her, that they ought to share a part of the past. Millie married Reggie well after his release from the hospital, the ice house connections still moving.

Thereafter, in the scheme of events, Frankie, drinking as ever to escape some of the past, was found at the end of Lily Pond one morning, where he had passed his last night in the open, the war still with him, with nothing else except the freezing cold, which also had taken hold. From where he was found, the icehouse was only a couple of hundred feet away.

When the war was over, Francie married Herbie and they had 52 great years until he fell down the stairs one day after getting several trays of ice cubes from the freezer in the cellar. She had never forgotten the night at the icehouse. Not for a minute.

Some girls find it that way.

And some guys.

Reggie and Millie moved away from town, some place out there on the broad Earth. Few people had heard from them until they came to Herbie’s funeral on a terrible winter day. Millie wanted to visit Frankie’s gravesite but the weather was too bad, snow falling, the wind icy and brittle in its attack on

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Sons of Guns, Inc. the veterans’ section, the pond a white expanding promise, and Sawyer’s icehouse, all the old boards and beams and sawdust and secrets, long gone to ashes, then to dust, then to weeds and brush.

Millie had the longest memory of all. And like most of the players, she kept it for her own. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint

Earl

Chadsey, whose leather work on accepted orders was so exceptional that folks called him The Latigo Saint, was a widower for 15 years of his 75 years on the range. In a studious manner, aware of his surroundings, he heaped another bucket on the pile of earth behind his barn.

Shadows had already begun their soft, silent approach falling eastward from the high peaks and the taller trees at the foothills and jack rabbits ran quick, sprightly maneuvers in the grass. Somewhere along the line he had tired of spreading the bucket loads behind the barn, and now the one pile was almost as tall as him. He didn't know when he had stopped walking around letting the earth slip from the tipped bucket as he shuffled along, spreading it as wide as walking, but it was long after he'd buried Maybelle all by himself and the three horses watching him from the fence until he watered them.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint He shook his head again at the unbelievable loneliness a man has to contend with come each evening; as such a man he felt he was directly chosen and picked on by the coyotes calling out like brazen horns from highly musical canyons or wailing birds' cries sounding like lost children, his sympathy rampant but transient, moving with the crowd of calls. As yet he didn't feel the chill on the back of his neck, the first usual landing place for it, but knew it was coming the way the leaves had miraculously thinned in the trees overnight and nature's paint brush had made its first dip into the pot, the splurge of red and orange taking the lead. All of this distraction made him think of Maybelle's nightly last inviting look over her shoulder as she moved into the small bedroom where they could never get away from each other; each day he missed her terribly, all his days now pushed into work whose exhaustion brought him through the dark and lonely nights.

He had promised her an outlet, a safety springboard in case they were ever attacked by renegade Indians or more likely by a gang of thieves or rustlers looking for mount changes. The tunnel, over 17 years of work and still under construction, all done by him, every shovelful, every bucketful, started right under their bed. That's where she tried continually to start a child, and failed on every outing, him or her unable to bring it to summation, though it was never discussed.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa "Nobody will look under the bed, Maybelle, unless it's an accident. People been hidin' things under the bed for centuries, so it's the first place to look quick, and they'll only sweep up the blanket cover and look underneath in a half look." A pat on her back and she was satisfied that her man would take care of everything that came their way. Hadn't the people in Stockwell, including her brother, Bill Wendley the sheriff, been calling him the Latigo Saint, and not without reason? She enjoyed the attention spun upon her husband.

That's all that was said, and Chadsey kept his mouth shut on any surprises "in the dark place," as he called it at certain times. As it was, the tunnel was just about that time half way to the barn, and he had long been saving the destination for one of his surprises. She never got to see that surprise.

Now, on another lonely day come around again, four cowpunchers, only a few miles away, their herd bedded for the end of a day and being readied for the 10 mile push into Stockwell in the morning, and the end of the drive, sat at their early fire drinking coffee, tasting the beer or whiskey coming on the morrow.

Three of them were young and bright looking and the fourth, and oldest in the group, Barney Elmwood, said, "I was up ahead a few miles settin' out the night guards and saw that old fellow's set-up beyond that last rise off there to the north, towards the foot of that mountain and somewhat out of our

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint way. He's the one with the funny-lookin' barn I told you about and he looks 100 if he's half a day, but he's stuck together pretty damned good. Talks like he should be wearin' a white collar, tight on his neck like his Adam's apple got the Hell squeezed out of it, praisin' God like listeners don't believe He's up there lookin' down on us. Hops around a bit, he does, with a gimpy leg stuck at the knee like he don't favor no axle grease in his joints, and yet swings a rifle like he was in a few good battles in the big war. But he's got this pile of earth that's a mite taller than he is and I don't see where he's dug any holes in the ground. Not a one and makes me think he might have some kind of mine workin' out of sight on the property and don't want anybody peekin' in there. He's the one last time I said lost his wife a long time ago."

"Think it's a gold mine, Barney? The talk says they got gold up this way. Ruben Hallis said that, heard it from the last bartender he talked to up there in Stockwell. Some rich stuff too, rich as jewels hung on some pretty throat, like what we saw on that woman in Kennelridge that time." They all nodded in agreement, money and women always in the back of a cowpoke's head, money being gold, silver, paper stuff if need be, and jewels, especially jewels on a beautiful woman, a mix they didn't get to see very often.

"Maybe," said Barney, coming out of an apparent deep thought, deep enough to bring up scowls on the others as though they could hardly wait

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa on what it might express, "we can buy his claim off him for the next trip around. Maybe get it cheap.

Don't look like he'll last too long and twice through here in three years and I never saw another soul around. So if he was to fall down dead and all alone, some stranger gets it all and we get nothin' from all his hard work."

The marks of hard years and desperate encounters in life showed across his skin like territories marked on a map. There were personal stretches and privations measured and squared away with hard lines and those lines were cut deeply in places. He was north of 50 already and crusty as a bear on a rumpus when he wanted to be, needed to be, or whenever he felt Hellish at the break of day or late at night, the last embers of a fire telling him stories he had already forgotten and sent out to sleep.

The younger ones in any drive were apt to listen to him and his tales until the crankiness took over, and then they'd roll over in a thin blanket or hug a saddle for a bit, tired bones and tired muscles calling in their turns. They looked into his eyes and upon his wind-driven face, each in turn, and each in turn knowing what was coming at them downrange in the life they worked at‌ cows and cow towns and crowded bars in crowded saloons and new drives and new pards and the same old landscapes setting out there after breakfast at a chuck wagon if the herd was quiet and orderly at dawn. And to a man they'd

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint agree that dreams came full of easy gold and lovely women, or lovely gold and easy women. Once in a while they'd remember a girl at a dance in an old barn and close their eyes on that.

"We could lighten his load of worries," another of the bright lookers said, before the fire was gone, and a third said, "We could walk into that mine and just grab a handful, couldn't we?"

"Or strip it clean, you mean," Barney said, his eyes lit up with the possibilities and the lines in his face showing new prospects.

They all went to sleep looking at the stars and the constellations they knew in their slow dance across the night sky. Perhaps they knew some constellations by name and some not, the mesmerizing power of stars as good as it ever was.

Sparks from the waning fire now and then matched the brightness but not the durable longevity of the nightly turnarounds. Barney's imagination kept returning to the shine of gold on repeated occasions, the stars holding less and less allure, the pile of earth saying something to him that might be worth listening to, the strange way answers and solutions beckon to souls once in a while in every odd moon.

Back to his small spread, Chadsey, with a habit of talking as if Maybelle was right alongside of him ready to chatter, talk back to him, offer a suggestion or two, said, "There's cows down there in the valley, Maybelle, like a herd of 'em comin'

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa through today with the Lord's permission or design, or tomorrow and headin' for the pens over in Stockwell. Best be ready for company for those that like to nose around where they ain't wanted or where business is the Lord's alone or our piece of it all writ out by the big judge."

He took the bucket just emptied on the pile, went to the well and emptied the well pail into it, sloshing water around and washing it clean and setting it down by the well. "Conspicuous it is but hidden, Hon, all part of the Almighty's gift to you," he offered to his long-gone wife as though she was still right beside him. "And you're as good as an angel on the watch as you always were." He wondered if he'd ever believe he was alone and even if he did die someday in the tunnel, Maybelle could reach out underground and touch him.

He caught the smell of the herd on a breeze and affirmed, "No tunnelin' today, girl. We keep it quiet less they go off talkin' all about it. Only a few feet left, girl, to the second stall in the barn, the way I measure it." His eyes paced the way to the wall of the barn looking like a church the way he built it, even to the cross on top, painted bright yellow like it was struck by lightning right at the beginning with gold all over the cross smooth as a watch lid. After he had painted the cross, he'd say good words and prayers to anybody passing by whether they asked for them or not. As it was, some travelers called him the Latigo Saint.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint The four horsemen drew up to the rail in front of the cabin and Chadsey heard the riders talking.

"Might as well say hello and be neighborly if we aim to get anythin' here." The voice carried some age in it and was not the crackle of a whippersnapper still creaky and growing.

The older voice said aloud, "Hello the house. I met you two years ago, old man. Name's Barney and you watered us up last time. 'Member me? Barney?"

Chadsey could picture him full of bluster, half boss and half not, and showing off in front of young ones. He stepped out the door and recognized the heavier and older puncher.

"That's a mighty high pile of dirt you got over there," Barney said, pointing to the pile. "You diggin' a mine someplace on your spread? You find any gold yet? Any chance you want to sell the place? You can go to town and live the easy life. No more work for you. No lonely life. You must be alone. I been here twice now and never saw another soul but you."

"My Maybelle, in a kind of a way, went off a long time ago. Left a lot of signs for me, though. I can still track her around the place, things she did, things she touched, that's why I'm never leavin' here." He looked past the edge of the pile and was staring at the foothills, his face twisted into an acre of sadness.

Barney wasn't about to let go of his argument.

"Listen, old man, you don't have to dig your way to

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Hell. You can find that in town easy enough. It's all over the place in town if you open only one eye. Give it a shake. Sell us the place and we'll be partners and split all the gold we find. We'll write it all down.

Chuck, here, can write like a school marm, spellin' and all that kind of stuff. I bet he could whip up a bill of sale in ten minutes. D'you ever think you could get rid of all your troubles so fast?" The big guffaw came roaring with the last question and he slapped his pants like he was the funniest man this far west of St. Louis, making the others do the same bit of mimicry.

"I go to town once every two weeks, and I just went yesterday," Chadsey retorted, the lie almost sticking in his throat, to which he might have added, "in case something happens here."

"Hell," he thought, afraid it was a mite too loud, "one little lie, even two of them, don't mean much 'less I'm a hurtin' a bit and I don't like the look in the eye of what the good Lord give big mouth Barney here at the start of life. I am due tomorrow for my visit to Shady's Place and then the Sheriff's office to pay my respects to Maybelle's brother, still lord high sheriff in Stockville , and play some checkers and get some trading done. " Old Earl Chadsey saw it all happening just the way he had seen it a hundred times since Maybelle had died and just sort of hung around waiting on him.

He picked up his rifle and said, "Never mind where I'm diggin'. You'll never find it. Now, I've watered your horses again and you can clear out soon as you

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint mount up and I can go back to work." He looked over his shoulder as if he was looking at the pile of dirt and said, "Isn't that right, Maybelle? Like the good Lord promised. They can't ever find it, can they?"

Barney, pretending he was going to mount his horse, snuck his pistol from the holster and shot under his arm, dropping Earl Chadsey dead on the spot. "Toss him behind them bushes," he said to the others, nodding at bushes sitting thick against the house, only the tops trimmed where they grew in front of two windows that brought morning sun into the kitchen.

The four of them tore through the house before Barney, on his third pass, checked under the bed again and found the entrance cover for the tunnel. The bed was pushed aside and exclamations ran through the house.

"I told you the old coot was up to somethin', " said Barney, as he ordered them to make torches to check out the tunnel. He kept saying remarks such as, "If we find gold down here, we got it made," or "We got ourselves a Hallelujah comin' right down here under our feet." He knew how to keep his boys in line.

A few hours later a rider, eldest son of another rancher higher up the divide, Gary Prine, came rushing into Stockwell and went right to the sheriff's office. "Hell, Sheriff, it was like a bomb going off and Chadsey's place just blew up as I was goin' down the

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa divide where that new herd is. The whole house is gone. The barn is still there and I checked in there and nobody's around. I didn't even see your brotherin-law, old Chadsey. Not a sign of him, but there's four new horses in his barn I never saw before and that yellow cross is still standin' right on top of it like it always has. You gotta get out there, Sheriff, I don't know what the hell happened. I never found my father's order in the barn either, said it would be real special."

The sheriff knew about the tunnel and remembered what Harley at the store told him one day years ago when Chadsey had bought some dynamite from him and never heard of it being used.

Could have been an accident, he thought, but the four new horses set his thinking in a suspicious manner, and today was the day that Earl was due in town for his checker game. The tote board sat on the wall facing his desk and he felt the fears reaching for him.

Sheriff Wendley told young Prine to go to the saloon and get posse volunteers to check out the Chadsey property. The property would be his if something had happened to old Earl.

After some difficulty moving debris around, they found Earl Chadsey's body under the bushes loaded with debris and laid him out on flat ground.

The shot in the chest was clearly evident as a death shot, and the four strange horses were still saddled and in barn stalls. After a thorough search, all

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint through the house debris, the barn and in the general area, Chadsey's body was the lone body found.

Sheriff Wendley didn't want to reveal the secret of the tunnel as it might come in handy some day, but that intention was thwarted when young Prine made a strange announcement from across the yard, between the barn and the remains of the house.

The posse gathered to listen when Prine said again, "I hear somebody down under me talkin' and yellin' like tomorrow ain't comin' when it should." He held a finger to his lips and the posse of 8 men stood their ground in silence.

The noise came from beneath them, apparently from deep in the earth, a torrent of babble and yelling, none of which was understood except for the fear and terror in its tone.

One of the strange horses began to act up in the barn and when Wendley investigated, he believed the yelling came from directly below the horse's stall.

He admitted that it would have frightened him too if he hadn't known about the tunnel. Old Earl had been right on the mark.

In short order they had Earl Chadsey's killer and the whole story on finding the tunnel entrance, going down there with torches to see if there was gold laying around just to be picked off the ground, and the moment when Barney with a "What's this?" pulled on a rope running the length of the tunnel, and the whole place behind them, tunnel and house,

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa must have blown sky high, and trapping them in place, "Waiting for rescue, ready to 'fess up what we did to the Latigo Saint." * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc.

Sons of Guns, Inc.

Four

young men came together in the Miner's Bench Saloon in the town of Sedgewick in the Arizona Territory on the hottest day in several years. It was 1880 and the prison was five years old. They had come to investigate the incarceration of each one's father, each tried and convicted‌ and each one innocent of their crimes, each crime dastardly and murderous to begin with, planned and engineered and had committed by assignment by the same man, Howard Trask, notorious rancher, spender, three times a widower of women dead too soon after marriage, whose entourage of help and gunsmiths were some of the most notorious men in the west. That crowd of scoundrels and killers at heart had come to him like bears to honey, wanting a bigger piece of the hive, more territory for their scanning, more silver for their fat pockets, and had gotten that way in a hurry.

Each father of the four young men was the owner of a substantial piece of property in the territory, from ranch land to town holdings, which

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa could be squeezed after a fashion from old men and youngsters not yet born to the game, not yet aware of sly deals, crooked judges, friendly thieves in their mix. To which their attention was soon mustered, scouted, accounted from several gatherings and common talk between them.

In their estimation and dutiful note-taking and otherwise keen observations, the four sons had gathered the names of those men outside Trask's inner ranks but who had been dirtied by him.

Included were a mixture of territorial judges, lawyers, sheriffs, and ready-to-position standby eye witnesses who would swear to what was put on their plate by his Number One Emissary. This emissary was the tall, neat and overly officious Luther Baines, accountant, organizer, aid de camp, rascal in regal rags, murderer in his own fashion, stiletto introducer to squawking women who had paid their dues, given over their illgotten gains, had tired themselves in the hands and hungers of Trask or his counterparts.

Yuma Territorial Prison was as hot as this day for legally-tried and convicted prisoners, but was a Hell-hole for those improperly-jailed men such as the fathers of those young heroes mentioned above, the sons bearing in each case the same names of their fathers; Trout was tall but an easy rider, Blaney was bright as the new moon, Hardwick was wide at the hips and strong as a healthy ox and Cobine was dramatically fast with a gun, quite unlike his father

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc. who suffered from poor sight and a shaky hand, brought on by long years as a tailor.

The four "sons of guns" came together again on this day before one of their monthly visits. "It's time we get past mere visits," young Blaney said, shaking his head, nodding at the squat box of the prison in front of them, a heated oven for prisoners.

"We have to find the leverage to get at Trask, his weak spot, the link easiest to break in his chain. I know it sounds like the old hogwash we've been throwing around for a few years, but this has to stop.

We can't do anything just for ourselves, but for our fathers. We're hurting but they're in death's throw, wrapped neat as can be. There's no out for them but breaking down Trask. That's what we have to do."

He looked at them as if looking for one to grasp the ring and pull it, knowing right from the beginning he was to be the man.

He didn't pause in his pitch. "I have some assignments to start us off, and each one is as important as the others. We've alluded to links in Trask's chain, so, Otter, you find out what his weakest link is. You have two months to find it. I think it has to be in his family structure." He rolled his eyes, and that could only mean Trask's daughter Emily, 18, ready for an eastern college, and as beautiful as her father was bad.

He looked at Zack Hardwick, saw nothing but strength and will power, could see him in some deal

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa calling for endurance and lasting will, and said, "Zack, we'll leave Luther Baines to you. Turn him upside down and inside out if you have to. Maybe in some lonely canyon or empty cabin, but break something loose from him. He has to be carrying a ton of dirt in his mind and he also might be the kind of gent that writes little notes that he puts aside to save himself somewhere down the road when times get tough.

We've met one or two chatterboxes in our lives who carried such ammunition for life or money."

Cobine looked up, patted his guns, nodded and knew his assignment; he was the group protector and special gun hand, for due causes rather than for hire.

Nobody had to tell him he was accountable to stave of trouble from Trask's gun hands. He relished the deal, let his guns sit in place for the time being, no show in him but ready at the first snap for action when it came. His eyes were the bluest blue imaginable, sharp while being soft; his face a handsome and tanned issue that made most women look back at him when he passed by, and a calm air or aura sat about him as long as his guns were in place on his belt. Nobody knew he had horrible dreams and nightmares at night when his guns sat, reachable but not in hand, on a wall hook, remembering he was unarmed when men came to take his father off to jail, and he was just turned 15 at the time. The haunt sat upon him always.

Blaney was sure of them all, each for their specialty, and each one of them standing together for

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc. the group and their single aim‌ freedom for their fathers, some of them now five years in jail, and life in Yuma wholly intolerable.

But it was Zack Hardwick, meeting Emily Trask in the general store before Otter Trout had the chance to doff his hat to the girl. She was indeed a lovely creature and Hardwick couldn't believe she was a product of the Trask line. Her slim waist caught his eye first, for she was facing away from him, and the elegant lines of slimness were naturally magnetic for him and he knew immediately he wanted to have the assignments changed. That she was wearing riding clothes enhanced her appearance much more appealing to him, more so than " a young lady's proper attire." There was no argument in the matter and it was easily scored.

As for Zack Hardwick's part in this ballad of attraction, Emily knew of him as a powerful and placid man who exerted a magnanimous force in any effort, and saw him as the kind of man the west needed; the land, she well knew, had to be worked relentlessly‌ and then some more. And he was so different from her father, from her first realization of her father being a grasper, a taker, an all-out thief regardless of who lost as long as he won. She often vowed that the man she'd give her life to would never be a man like her father; and that task was directly in her hands, in her power. She remembered her mother saying, just before she died in a strange accident and just before her father married a younger

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa woman, "You are the only saving grace in this foul marriage." It took her a while to understand those near-final words.

As was his way, Zack Hardwick went directly to Otter Trout and explained that he was caught up with the dastard's delightful daughter. "Well," Otter said, "that's before I got into my end of the bargain, so be it. I'll tell Duke right away that we've switched, and if she generates the interest you've expressed, we might even be better off, ahead of the game." He threw his hands in the air and yelled, 'Look out, Trasks, we're coming after you."

Hardwick did not miss the plural use of the name.

Meanwhile, Otter Trout, now targeting Luther Baines, relished the assignment right away, his mind clicking over pre-gathered knowledge about the mysterious Blaine, wondering foremost what spell or eventual proof of criminal activity the man held over the head of Trask. It had to be inexplicably true and accurate; it had to be borne by at least one other witness other than Blaine himself; and it had to be concrete, something that could be seen, touched, smelled, hitting the senses with solid belief. He brought to mind the transfer or sale deeds enacted on property, in themselves a mess of dribbles and drabbles the local judge had no problem reading and understanding, as if, for sure, he had read them beforehand, well and often, and, as Trout saw with a glimmer in his eyes, how a trail of such documents

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc. went into and out of the judge's office… along with a sum of money. He wondered if an account record existed some place in the town.

For the next unattractive but important element, after locking Blaine's and the judge's allegiances into the same pig sty, Trout saw the sign over the Hotchkiss Funeral Parlor; it leaped at him in its large and ornate lettering, the biggest sign on the street, bigger than the Miner's Bench Saloon. which had more traffic by the hundreds on a daily basis. He didn't like Hotchkiss for a blank second and suspected short-cuts were part of his busy operations… the less done for a deceased's interment, the better pay-off for him. That made him think about Trask's three dead wives. Murder, if it cropped up as a possibility for their deaths, would guarantee a change of sleeping arrangements for Trask… for the long foreseeable future or a quick rope. he didn't know which would be the truer justice… incarceration in Yuma Territorial Prison, or the quick movement of the gallows.

The delicious.

phantom

joys

he

experienced

were

That enjoyment was short-lived as Duke Blaney hailed him and nudged him down an alley beside the saloon, consternation and worry riding his face.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa "You look fearsome worried, Duke. What's wrong?" Trout said, patting his usually stoic pal on the back. "Don't keep it from me."

"I just heard a report from Yuma. The warden has hauled all our fathers out of their cells and sent them to tight confinement in solitary for insisting long and loud, day and night, that they are innocent and Trask had them sent to jail to get them out of his hair and out of his business. He called them 'The Yuma Chorus,' but now they can't even talk to each other, the walls are so thick in that dark Hell." Anger rode his face blatant as a runaway horse.

"It's my turn to call some shots here, Duke.

We can't let you go off an get killed and tale a quarter of our army away from us. We need each man, just as you said. just as you've said a hundred times, and said about our Pas bein' away all this time and them gettin' close to dead down in those holes.

Then he said, with a look over his shoulder to where they could see the sign of the Hotchkiss Funeral Parlor, "Let's go pay a visit to Hotchkiss while Trask is out of town."

The pair entered the funeral home and accosted Hotchkiss in his office. "What can I do for you boys? Lose somebody close to you?" The direct irony was evident in his voice and in his eyes.

Trout leaped right into the middle of it with a plan he'd hatched on the way in the door; he couldn't

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc. think of anything else but seeing Hotchkiss on the hot seat‌ whether it was contrived or not.

"Here's how it stands, Hotchkiss, right from the horse's mouth or from the horse's ass, anyway you'll take it. The Territorial Governor has been advised that the bodies of Trask's three dead wives are going to be exhumed, and very soon by his agent, and if any bullet holes or other evidence of a murderous nature are discovered, then you and Trask and one or more of his henchmen will be charged with their murders."

"Why me?" Hotchkiss yelled, his face gone quickly to a sickening, deep red and his eyes popping up with the bulge of frog's eyes, as if they'd fall right out of their sockets. His face reflected one sensation ad that was unabridged fear.

Trout had made an incision, he believed, in Hotchkiss's armor. "Because," Trout said, his finger pointing at the funeral director, "you marked each of those deaths as being attributed to natural causes and gun shots ain't quite natural causes no matter how anybody in this world looks at it. In fact, nobody."

Hotchkiss melted in front of them. "He'll kill me as soon as look at me."

"Sign a paper saying all this and we'll protect you. We'll hide you where him and all his men won't be able to find you in a million years." And he could

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa feel the passage of a million years in the deepest part of his mind.

When Trask returned and found out about Hotchkiss and found his daughter missing also, he went on a rampage, ordering his best shooters to go kill the four Sons of Guns if they could find them.

It was Emily Trask, of course, who advised them of the best hiding place, right down under her father's main barn where she led the four Sons of Guns and their prisoner, Hotchkiss the undertaker, after she read the paper he signed, saying that it was her father who killed her mother and two others.

Trout barely stopped her from taking a pitch fork to Hotchkiss who cowered in a corner in front of all of them, having to wrestle the pitch fork from her with decided roughness.

They were hidden for three days, the Territorial Marshal was in town asking questions and unable to find any of the key witnesses, when Trask finally thought of the hiding place below the barn.

"I'll kill that damned girl too if she's part of this. She's just like her mother, nothing but a damned prairie dog."

He sent his best gunman to do the job after telling him about the hiding place. The shooter ran into Gene Cobine in the tunnel under the barn. The handy killer, excellent with his side arms, fearless, was not a feasible target for a man who's father had been illegally incarcerated for five years for a crime

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Sons of Guns, Inc. he did not commit. The fight was over after several wayward shot were fired by the hired gun and one death-seeking bullet from the barrel of a trusted and dutiful pistol was sent on its dual commission of mercy and revenge.

When the Sons of Gun, their prisoner Hotchkiss and Trask's daughter Emma left the confines of the hiding place, Otter Trout had to again forcibly take the pitchfork away from Emma Trask, holding the girl in his arms until she started crying again. The sobs eventually reduced to a soft cry and she continued to hug Otter Trout as she remembered hugging her mother before she died‌ and never once her father, all as if she had lurking suspicions.

They found the marshal, sent by the territorial governor, who was waiting for a new judge, also sent by the territorial governor, to arrive in town. With the judge came five more deputies for the marshal, and order, law, and a court session quickly followed.

Hotchkiss, never once daring to look Trask in the eyes, read his signed confession into the court records. Trask was convicted of murder on three counts, including the mother of Emma, three of his hired thugs were found guilty of other crimes as the case expanded even as the judge sat behind a makeshift bench in the saloon, the court session running for three full days.

There had been nothing like it for years, as a parade of criminals approached Yuma Territorial

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Prison, and a small and selective group of older men, some sorely disabled by their treatment at the hands of jailers and the indifference and ignorance of the warden, was soon out the door of the penitentiary and ensconced in a fancy riding coach for the trip home across the scorching, arid and mostly empty territory around Yuma Penitentiary. For the first time in five years the fathers of the Sons of Guns, Inc. got to spend time on property legally returned to them by the courts.

Trout Otter and Emma Trask were married, Gene Cobine was appointed as the new sheriff of the town, Duke Blaney went off to law school, and Zack Hardwick opened a livery and a blacksmith shop, all of them leading decent lives and enjoying their fathers for sufficient number of years, long enough for the elders to forget the years of imprisonment and the horrors of Yuma Territorial Prison, and meeting every Friday evening for poker session that generally lasted until midnight, and often keeping them abed until noontime on Saturdays, with nobody bothering to wake them up. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention

Murder by Invention

Looking

down from his second floor window in his Charlestown townhouse, fifty-year old, athletically handsome, Max Kulkeen saw the old-time politician Georgie Bettencourt get out of a black car parked tightly against the curb.

There were times when he knew Georgie Bettencourt would have to slip and shift sideways through spaces in life. This, he said to himself, is a new assignment, and chauffeured no less. A dim flash of a Boston Herald obituary page slid across the back of his mind.

With it came a listing of towns that death in the past had come to visit, a regular daily feature of the Herald, days without end. There was a time, back in the Linotype era, when he knew what the lead would say before the typesetters did. Now there were times he knew before the computer set-up jockeys went to work.

Max Kulkeen was a killer, no two ways about it, but he made it, as he said on a few occasions, an art form. He thought of himself as a classicist, a most sophisticated designer of death; he could bring new ideas and new ways out of the ether. Pride of

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa accomplishments was continually measured by this man who had not even graduated from high school.

Philosophy on death came out of his mouth: All this is just a short cut to the end that’s coming down the road right at you whether you like it or not. On a number of instances he had referred to himself as The Tempered Torpedo, punctuated with a smirk or a giggle, depending on the listener. Despite years of worry, of unbelievable concentration on targets, hundreds of hours on his own brand of stake-out, Max had kept his dark-eyed handsome looks, his Florida tan always highlighting a Florida golf shirt, and a face free of the work lines some jobs put in place for visage keepsakes and remnants. Some people said he looked like a just-retired professional ball player, hard-jawed, determined, ready to take on the world anew. Just a missing hunk of ear put a hole in his good looks, a jagged cut that a premature explosion had exercised, feeling himself noble and lucky for all the noise that had come at him that time, and the instant matter of shrapnel.

Now, for a change of pace and a kick for a hot Sunday afternoon, here’s the head of one of the state’s major political parties coming to stand in front of him, hat in hand, ready to kiss my ass if need be.

Sometimes Kulkeen took a year to put into play his mortal standards; they were studied endlessly, programmed, projected. Nobody had ever been shortchanged and nobody had ever been caught, neither him nor those who put him up to his art. His reputation was nation-wide, in the right circles of

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention course, which meant, no doubt, that the cops knew about it all along but could never get him tied into anything. Yep, master of it all, he was, the clean killer, Rinso bright and all that white. It was a quick tune Max Kulkeen whistled whenever he was alone, which was most of the time. He’d known early that death has few acquaintances and fewer friends on this side of the grass.

"What brings you to my door, Georgie boy?"

Max thought he best give it to Georgie right from the get-go. "Want me do your mother holding on to her three digs in Charlestown so you can get your hands on them?" Kulkeen pored his eyes right through flabby George Bettencourt, enough so he could see the pimples on his ass or his limp frog. One man he’d never liked was fat ass Georgie Bettencourt all the way since way back when. He remembered Georgie in grade school, at the old Kent School in Charlestown, wiping down the blackboards every day, swapping great lunches for special favors just because his old man had some connections and had the dough coming in, sometimes barrels of it.

Georgie’s wattle wiggled when he talked, his eyes changed colors between green-blue and a great summer sky blue, and Max thought he could make a pig sick by hardly trying, his little stubby fingers so sticky.

"Max," Georgie said, shifting his weight, "we have a serious problem and I have been directed to you by the powers to be." Like coming out of a long

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa skinny pipe, this messenger’s voice was alto and then some and Max would bet it could make some people wince, like at the old blackboard with a hunk of chalk, just to get your hair up on end.

"You mean to tell me, Georgie boy, that you’re not one of them sitting at the top. All this time I thought you was one of the biggies and now I see you’re just an errand boy who’s gonna get his hands dirty if this thing you’re looking for is in my line of business and the boys up top, not including you, want my services. Give me a name and a location." Hit ‘em like a gunshot. Make ‘em part of the package forever.

Never let them be free of any of it. Murder One has wings and covers us all.

"It’s Sparks Gregson. In Peabody, near the Liberty Tree Mall. He’s been collecting dirt for years and has a whole computer run full of it. We think he’s holding it just in case he gets swung up by his heels and needs some ballast, his hands’ve been in so many tills. So we aren’t in any great hurry, but it’s got to be clean and his file system has got to be wiped out, too. That’s specific, from up top. He’s got data on the lottery we don’t want in anybody’s hands, no way. They think he has hard copies along with PC stuff. They say you can go your own speed, but have to get one guarantee from you, that if he threatens action or something starts to shake the crap out of the trees, you’ve got to do it within 24 hours."

Max put a phony glare on George Bettencourt.

"You mean you guys aren’t playing the lottery clean

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention either? I should have known, bet a few bucks and it’s money down the damn drain. You telling me it’s all throwaway money, Georgie? Oh, well, I’ll tell you this, it’s gonna be double, Georgie. That’s two bodies you want from me. The price is doubled. And no room for argument." He paused, letting the 24-hour thing sink in, measuring response, thinking about his bad knee, thinking about being hindered, thinking about some innocent getting caught up in the mix if he had to do it fast. "That last clause makes it a triple play, Georgie, right out in Red Sox country. And I get paid two thirds, in my dukes, before I do the fast-food stuff. You know damn well MacDonald jobs are not on my menu, not even for lunch."

"I’m prepared to go that much, Max, double your usual, or triple if need be." Shit, if he didn’t say Max like he was praying to him, Max was thinking.

"That’s the word they’ve given me. Half now, and half later, after it’s done. That’s double your usual ante, or triple, the way it figures."

"You think I can’t friggin’ add, Georgie? Give me an outside date, if you’ve got one."

"They think the County Stakes trial, maybe in six months, now forming for Grand Jury, might be some kind of cut off point, but not for sure. Sparks’ files would be a blockbuster if the jury got hold of them."

"Why not just get his files?"

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa "He has back-ups, no doubt, beyond the hard copy crap, floppies or CDs or whatever, and we don’t have any computer whiz to find that out. We want to knock a hole in all possibilities."

"You friggin’ guys are way behind the times.

Even the Spicks on the dope run have a computer, and a whiz kid to run it for them. Kid just bought a house out in Melrose on half a goddamn hill, gets paid so good. That’s why they are going to own Charlestown and Chelsea and Everett and Malden before you guys know it’s gone right out from under you. E plurubus siccum, if you know what I mean, Georgie boy, Boston Latin boy. Like the old doc had on the wall in his office, Doc Lindsay. Remember him, the old lead removal specialist before there even was the lead removal law? Illegitimus non carborundum, Georgie. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, Georgie."

"How will you do it, Max?" Fat Georgie’s invisible hat was being twisted out of shape in his fat little hands. Max noted his little pointed nose that was too small for his body and too small for his face and thought about a terrier, a fat terrier, trying to get a rat, only he couldn’t get in the rat hole. The nose had a shine on it. One side of Georgie’s shirt collar was not buttoned and it had curled up, looking like a comma out of place, but pointing itself at the shiny nose. The shirt was blue and was another case against Georgie, definitely looking out of whack against his brown suit. "Not that I want to know your

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention business. I was just wondering how you get started in something like this." Georgie was standing mostly on one leg, teetering a little bit, off balance, not wanting to be right where he was at the moment, in the frigging firing pan now and forever. Max thought he might have hot coals under the souls of his feet; least, he can feel them, he thought. Life was changing all the time, and all the odds with it. He was willing to bet that Georgie was measuring his own chances in all of this, the old Rinso white theory at work.

"You want to know, but you really don’t, do you, Georgie? No track, no trace, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Well, I haven’t got the slightest, Georgie, and if I knew I wouldn’t tell you. Not that I don’t trust you guys, but that’d be the way to get rid of me, wouldn’t it? No track, no trace, but there’d be my fingers in the ink, and you guys could give me up without trying. I go about my work like a kid doing a science project. I study, take notes, get ideas, make plans, see what a dummy project looks like, pull the fucking trigger or drop the bomb or let cyanide get in the guy’s fridge. Piece a cake, Georgie boy." Georgie, he knew from way back, had a thing for ice cream, for cake, for Jell-O with whipped cream on top.

Max could see Georgie having a hard time swallowing the last part, the cyanide in the ice cream or the bowl of Jell-O or in the tapioca pudding. The cake, even. The ice cream cake. The coals were too hot under the one foot, so Georgie shifted that whole

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa frame of his to the other foot again. When he left Max’s place, a silence followed him down the hallway. * * * For thirteen days Max had watched Sparks Gregson, could mimic his walk, direct his taste selections, and even pick out the kind of women he’d take a second look at. From inside his panel truck, solid sides, he could watch with ease, half a dozen field glasses at hand for special viewing. Sparks had an office/apartment where he worked, slept, brought an occasional woman and weekly groceries, and most likely sat for hours in front of a computer. Now and then, as if determined by the space of days, a visitor came by, spent a few minutes, left as he came, unobtrusive, indistinct, near indistinguishable. Max could picture some kind of minor business transaction taking place: a pay-off, a special bet without benefit of phone, information being sold, green stuff swapping wallet compartments. Sparks lived where darkness abounded.

On two of those days, both of them Sundays, and from a distance, Max heard the high whining sound of small motors, a dizzying sound, sometimes high-pitched and sibilant, a whishing leaping through the air. The puzzle took him on the second Sunday back through a break in a tree line, through the swings and slides and jungle-gym bars of a small neighborhood park, and onto the parking area of a garden-type industrial complex. A four-story, red

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention brick building, with many wide windows, fronted on one whole side of the lot and appeared clean and new, two wide doors shiny with aluminum. Its small lawn was trim and green. A small sign read Halverstrom Laboratories in plain letters.

Max’s approach was hailed by a swooping dive of a model plane that buzzed but feet over his head, then winged away, above the trees, the whine of its engine trailing out a small spitzing sound, much as a sewing machine or a blender gone crazy he thought.

Thin and faint as whispers, a slight blue line of exhaust trailed out behind the aircraft.

Amazement came to him when the plane effortlessly glided in for a landing on the hot-top and halted at the feet of a group of men clustered in a corner of the lot, a variety of gear, tool boxes and containers in their background. A dozen other planes, of all models and shapes and colors, sat on the pavement as if they might be parked on some foreign tarmac out in the world. He introduced himself as Craig Winslow, new to the area and brought to the area intrigued by the sounds and dexterity of the small planes, all controlled by radio and all gaspowered. A sole image came to Max, and that was a true whippet of a greyhound coming out of the box at Wonderland looking for the rabbit, looking for Swifty.

"Name’s Syd Colpits, Craig," one of the group said as he held out his hand. He spit off a few names of others in the group and they all nodded in their turn. Syd Colpits' head swung around as he saw a big

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa black limousine swing into the far end of the lot. "Oh, oh, here comes the target shooter." He turned back to Max, "Wait until you see this guy do his tricks, Craig. We call him Wrecks Waco, originally from Texas and wrecks a model every week, he does. Must have a hundred of them backed up. Drops it like a Smart Bomb into one of those trash barrels over there, then leaves." He pointed at a collection of trashcans at the opposite side of the lot. "Some honeys he’s wrecked; Spitfires, North Americans, Northrups, F-86s, Grummans that look like birds coming in for a landing. Sweet pieces, every damn one of them. Wish I had his kind of dough. If he makes them, he’s an artist."

That final qualification got Max’s attention.

The limousine stopped, two men got out, one of them waved at the group and took a model out of the back of the limousine. Placing it on the ground, holding it firmly in place, as if it would take off on its own accord, he fired it up. The propeller spun smoothly after moments of the engine’s coughing small clouds of fumes. The second man held a radiocontrol device, with an antenna pointing upwards, in his hands and looked at the group of model makers.

They nodded back. The plane ran down the pavement as quick as chipmunks move and took off.

"That’s a P-51 Mustang," Syd Colpits said.

"Aint she a sweet son of a bitch." The engine spun out its Mixmaster-cry as it leaped into the air, the pale blue flume of smoke out behind it like a wake of

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention a sleek sailing ship. It flew like a demon, doing loops and dives and wide swoops about the air, its engine throwing off those high-pitched sounds across the whole sky it seemed. Then, minutes later, looking at his watch and as if bidden by a weird desire, by some malevolent calling out of nowhere, the man at the radio controls turned the plane over in one sweet arc, and dove it, unerringly, into the mouth of a trash barrel fifty yards down the parking lot. There was a small explosion, as if a small canister had emptied its powder.

Max Kulkeen, standing stock still, breath deeply locked in place for long moments, was enraptured. * * * Next day, out of town, Max bought himself six model plane kits, complete with engines, and the latest in radio-control devices. He listened to the men of the Sunday gatherings, taking in all ideas, suggestions, and hints. Two months later when he brought out his first craft at another Sunday gathering, a British Spitfire, camouflaged as of old, the other model builders almost held a celebration.

The Spitfire was authentic, right down to the supercharger exhaust Max had designed using spent .22 caliber shells, the casings at a hard shine on the nose of that sleek craft.

"Hell, man. That rig looks like it could take on a Messerschmitt ME-109 right now. Marvelous job,

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Craig. One marvelous job." He shook Max’s hand vigorously and turned and smiled at the others. "We got ourselves one helluva convert, gents! One helluva convert!"

"I have to admit," Max said, "I snuck in a little practice on you guys. Got it off the ground during last week, at a hockey rink parking lot over in Bedford.

Had it up for a while, but still learning."

The half dozen model makers stood by when Max’s turn came. His Spitfire hurtled down the hot top and rose quick as a bug to a height of 100 feet, and veered in a wide curve around the parking lot. A vague stream of exhaust was visible behind the plain.

Colpits said, "My god, it goes like Paddy Finucane was flying it! The great ace, he was. You got a pretty good fuel mix too, Craig. Running like a damn pocket watch." He watched as the plane in ethereal elegance straightened out its curve, and went into a hurtling run across the top of the parking lot at a mere sixty feet off the ground." He twisted around to warn the new flyer. "Watch it, Craig!" he yelled as the plane crashed into the limb of a tall and stately but old elm tree and fell in pieces to the ground. It had crashed right where Max wanted it to crash.

"Ah, shit, man," Colpits said, "Sorry about that, Craig. You gotta admit, that was one helluva maiden flight."

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention Max said, "I’m still learning. Got another one almost done. Be here in a few weeks, I’d guess. He retrieved all the broken parts and departed. That night, under cover of darkness, with a large Bowie knife sharpened right to the hilt, Max cleared off a six-inch ring of bark around the tree. It was another death move. A month later the tree warden took down the old elm, certain to die on its own hook. A small sign warning off vandals and those who would destroy trees soon appeared in the small park.

Sparks Gregson’s patterns in the meantime were so firm that Max could say without doubt when he’d be in his rooms, for the next three months continuing his watchdog look at the target. Sunday was one day that Gregson remained somewhat fluid in his habits. But Saturday, not Sunday, was as sure as the bible; Sparks would be at home every Saturday, until late noon.

Just after noontime on a Friday, Sparks off to his sister’s place in Saugus where he’d spent most Friday afternoons, Max saw the black limousine touch at the curbstone below his window and fat Georgie Bettencourt slide out of the back and look up at his window. Max waved him on.

Georgie’s invisible hat was still in his hands, being wrenched and twisted. Max thought that the possibilities of connection were gathering in force in Georgie and making their demands, politically, spiritually and morally, and probably in that order.

"What's got you out on the weekend starter, Georgie?

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa You not going over to Mom’s place to keep the claim open? Sister and the kids gonna be there ahead of you?" That’d get Georgie to really start thinking about his part in all this, Max thought. He’s in it up to his peckerwood. And he knows I got a live line on him.

Make the fat son of a bitch do some of the sweating too. I’ve never been alone in any of this, except in the doing, except in the drop of the Guillotine, the hammer, the awl driven home.

"Max," Georgie said, a twisting gone to fidgeting, legs at imbalance, his collar still loose and awry, sweat maps moving glacially on his suit coat, "some things are starting to fall apart, plummeting.

Sparks is getting in the soup, really in the soup, in a couple of days. Now he’s marked more ways than one. It’s got to be this weekend. That’s what they say, this weekend." Little balls of sweat poured off Georgie’s red brow and were dripping on a light blue shirt stretched over his gut. The underarms of his gray suit coat were darker yet with the spreading sweat maps, and the legs of his trousers looked like he was wearing shin pads under them. From one foot to the other he kept moving, as if he’s still trying to get out of the line of fire, thought Max, the personification of cringe.

"It will be this weekend, Georgie, per the contract." He stared at Georgie Bettencourt, seeing the pimples again, the limp frog tucked away forever.

The invisible hat was seriously being wrenched out of shape. "How will you do it, Max? How will you

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention do it without being traced? How do you always get away so clean? I can’t begin to imagine whatever you’ll come up with. I couldn’t come up with any kind of plan other than just plain shooting him in the dark and walking away. They say you’re so good at this you’ve never even been questioned. They tell me you’re an artist, Max. I sure hope it goes that way this time. Sparky’s done a twist on things and it has to be done. I sure as hell hope it’s clean and quick.

He’s not a bad guy, Sparky, just got his nose in the wrong place at the wrong time." Max understood Georgie had removed himself somewhat from the line of fire with his take on Sparky Gregson.

"Oh, Georgie boy, remind me never to play the lottery again. It sure ain’t worth it from where I sit.

It’ll be clean, and quick, guaranteed. I got nothing against Sparky either. Me and you are together on that." He whistled the Rinso tune and saw the recognition in Georgie Bettencourt’s eyes. "You go back and tell them your part in this is done, Georgie.

It’s almost all over for you." The double entendre was a stroke of the needle for Max Kulkeen, and it went right down through the total fabric of fat Georgie Bettencourt.

Just after dawn, Max Kulkeen, in the area where he was known as Craig Winslow, convert to the model flyers club, slipped out of his car on the deserted parking lot and set a clumsy-looking USAF Fairchild PT-19 Cornell on the pavement that he had taken carefully from a special cradle in the trunk of

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa his rental car. The four story building had a few maintenance lights glowing in the depths of hallways beyond windows, yet the neighborhood beyond the small park was generally without lights on a Saturday morning sleep-in. A lone bright light showed through a break in the trees from the rooms occupied by Sparky Gregson.

With minor prompting the PT-19 Primary Trainer slid down the runway of the empty parking lot and went airborne. The engine purred in its loud morning chatter and Max Kulkeen swung the craft out over the parking lot in a swift arc. Then, as if he were playing a game at the computer, the joy sticks in his hand, he circled the bulky-looking Trainer in a last pass over his head and aimed it for the light in Sparky Gregson’s place. The model arrowed through the air loaded with its deadly little cargo and smashed right through Sparky’s picture window, and ten feet inside exploded in a great ball of fire and the sound raced back to Max Kulkeen getting into his car and slipping away in the dawn of a new day.

Georgie Bettencourt came with the final payment. "Don’t know how you did it, Max. No witnesses, no traces, and Sparky and his files all gone. Poof! You are an artist, Max. A real artist.

Nobody will ever track anything back to you on this."

Or to you and the mucky-mucks, thought Max, the money heavy and solid in his hand.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Murder by Invention It was early Monday morning, near the end of his shift, when the third shift security guard at the Halverstrom Laboratories began to examine the weekend film from the motion-activated TV security cameras.

When one film rolled out in front of him, he jumped off the seat in amazement. Even as he played the film back again for another look at the parking lot, Saturday at 4:45 A.M., he reached for the telephone. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais

It

did not come with electricity or a smash of static on the air, but it was there. Brittan Courvalais, five minutes into the darkness of a new day, a streetlight’s glow falling through his window like a subtle visitor, was caught on the edge of his chair. Knowledge flowed to him, information of a most sublime order, privacy, intimacy, all in one slow sweep of the air; his grandson was just now, just this minute, into this world, his only grandson.

He could feel him, that child coming, making way his debut into the universe, and his name would be Shag.

And for this life he and Shag would be in a mysterious and incomprehensible state of connection. This, in the streetlight’s glow, in the start of a new day though dawn not yet afoot, he was told.

People of the neighborhood shortly said that the oldest man among them, white-bearded, darkeyed, seventy-five-year-old Brittan Courvalais, loved his only grandchild Shag in a deep and special way.

They said there was a virtual connection, a most generous connection between them, more than the usual. At times they dwelled on the love ingredient, and then on the old and the young, the near gone

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais and the coming. On days when young Shag came by, just an infant in his mother’s arms, the old man’s step changed, his gait changed, his shoulders stiffened, his voice went lyrical. Some heard him singing under the silver maple tree in the side yard, the tone reaching, ascendant, carrying more than day in it or cool evening or a new stab at dawn. Shag would come, put his arms out, and nestle against the old man’s beard. The pair would look into each other’s eyes and the world about them seemed lost, distant, at odds with the very young and the very old.

Brittan’s daughter Marta could only beam when the topic was broached, or say, "I don’t know what it is.

It mystifies me, but it’s as if they share an infinite else." She’d smile broadly when she said it, shrug her shoulders, be fully happy in her puzzle.

From just about every aspect, Brittan Courvalais was a very ordinary man, until such time as an extraordinary demand was placed upon him.

Neighbors of the old war dog only knew what they saw and heard but a little of the hidden parts of his life, where valor had surfaced when needed. Stories had been told, sometimes whispered. In Korea, it was said, he’d taken on a mountain and the enemy and beat them both. Just after Korea, out on the highway, he’d pulled an unconscious truck driver from the cab of his truck minutes before the whole rig exploded in a huge ball of fire that shut down an overpass for nearly five months. Later, on a cold spring day, skies heavy, off the wash of Egg Rock out in Lynn Harbor, he’d gone under a capsized boat and extracted two

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa unconscious sailors. And every year since then, without exception, and for the everlasting grace of the neighborhood, the two sailors, on the morning of the Fourth of July, would set up a flag on Brittan’s front lawn, plank down three or four cases of beer and drink them off in a day long salute. Three or four times the truck driver came to celebrate. People said that other unknown visitors would drop by, have a beer, casually say a word or two to Brittan, shake hands and quietly leave, like shadows in a man’s life.

Such shadows made more stories, and naturally, with such kicks for a starter, the Fourth always came up a party.

Otherwise, in his quiet and retiring life, Brittan Courvalais raised an exceptionally small patch of tomatoes with an exceptionally good yield, so good that from that little patch some neighbors could preserve a great deal of tomato sauce. That a seventy-five-year-old man had such a green thumb was quite acceptable; he’s been around, hasn’t he?

That’s why his lawn was generally trimmed and healthy looking, a few beds of flowers hosted a smash of colors every year. His small cottage stood as a marker of time, of the seasons, a sort of contentment in itself. Retirement in a very tolerable neutral gear, life ebbing out in a comfortable wake, long days astern.

And then one day, at a nearby park, when the seat of a swing hit another child and Marta rushed to help, Shag disappeared. Nobody, in all the hue and

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais cry had seen him go. Nobody had seen anyone carry him off. Hundreds hunted all the fields and pathways.

No Shag. On the second day the two sailors came by to help. And the old man sat on his porch sad, morose, and ready to scream. The authorities declared it a kidnapping. Brittan, for four days, sitting on his porch, waited for some word. Marta started to speak one day coming up the stairs and the old man held his hand up, as if listening. He kept his hand in the air for a full five minutes. Marta did not speak.

Later that afternoon, when the mailman came by, Brittan Courvalais once more held his hand up for silence. At his next gossip stop, at Jed Hendry’s Barbershop, and again back at the post office, the mailman repeated the story: "The old soldier is listening for something, as if it’s going to come from out of space, a space probe, mind you. Should have seen his eyes, would scare the pants off you. Like he was hearing something!"

Marta and her husband came by each day after their visit to the police station. She’d make coffee, put nibbling food on the porch table, and look at her father’s face. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to be a child again for him, but the look in her father’s eyes frightened her. "I don’t know what he’s going to do, Earl," she said, "he’s so locked up into something, something so very different." Then she’d go into the house and cry for an hour or more.

The weight of the world, thus, crushed down on the old man who sat waiting for good news only.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa On the sixth day, all hope fading, to some all of it gone, one neighbor saw Brittan Courvalais standing on his porch, his head tipped, as if listening for a bird’s call or someone calling from out of sight, perhaps in the house or down the street. Brittan held his hand in the air as though he was asking for quiet or noting peaceful intentions to an unseen guest. The neighbor looked about and saw no other person except a delivery driver stepping down from his truck eight or nine houses away. Slanting rays of May sunlight were flashing down through young leaves and limbs and falling on Courvalais like pieces of newly minted coin. On the porch floor pieces of shadow or shade were cast like dominoes. A slight breeze talked in the same leaves and began to whisper on the edges of gutters and down spouts.

Two or three times the old man cocked his head, his mouth slightly ajar, stony in intent, inert. The wind whispered, the sun’s rays played tag, the gutters and down spouts answered. Then, as if coming from a slight paralysis, unfrozen for a moment, he picked his jacket off a chair, got into his old Plymouth Duster and drove down the road. At the end of the road he turned left, toward the highway.

Three days later he was still gone.

Marta was beside herself, now with a double worry. And the police came to the house, eventually asking odd questions. First a uniformed sergeant came, questioning, slowly inserting the knife under thin skin. Then, after the topic was broached, a

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais lieutenant of detectives came, a cigar in his mouth as he stepped from the car and came up the front walk.

He didn’t stumble or trip over his words, bringing them up quickly and darkly from the cavern of his chest, half cough and half words, "Why was your father so attached to the child?" "Harrumph. Hack.

Hack. Harrumph."

"He’s his grandchild. He loves him."

"Was it not an unusual love? Is it possible that the old man has taken the baby? Harrumph. Hack.

Hack. Harrumph. That right now he’s with him someplace?"

People of the neighborhood began to talk. The mailman heard the talk and carried it. Some of those old stories were, in fact, made up. The old man wasn’t what he appeared to be after all. What have we made him? What kind of a man would drive his daughter into this near madness? You really don’t know, do you, what lurks in the heart of a man. * * * He’d been mystified by many things in life: the small man down in Homestead, Florida who secretly moved stones weighing many tons, supposedly by himself; a rocking chair sculpted from stone and weighing thousands of pounds, a tall vertical solid stone gate of equal tonnage that swung on small points of balance, seemingly immovable yet moved and placed. How the all-state halfback he played

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa behind when he was a young man told him, just before the big game of the year, that his turn was coming, and there he was rushing on the field breathless in the first quarter. What had pulled him up that mountain in Korea to what he thought was certain death. How had he been able to go into the cold water to save those men after almost drowning under a raft in Lake Hwachon when his unit crossed by rafts mounted on boats with outboard motors and a mortar round had landed right beside them, all of them trussed in full gear? He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten out of the clutches of all that web equipment, or Sanders’ hands pulling at him, hauling him down.

And he never professed to understand the knowledge that came to him about Shag from the moment of the boy’s birth. That they were connected was enough for him. The corners of the boy’s mouth when he smiled up at him were locked behind his eyes.

And here he was, seven days later, vaguely answering some unlimited connection, some communication, coming at him. He didn’t know where it was coming from, and he had driven endlessly it seemed from the day he had left home, sometimes three or four hundred miles a day, sometimes fifty to sit in the middle of a park or a village green, listening.

Now, on the seventh day, hearing his name and description aired over the radio, also a subject of

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais search, he was on the outskirts of Schenectady. He did not know how he had gotten here, but the urge was unarguable, unimpeachable. Shag was calling him. It had been that way in the beginning. It would always be that way. He knew he was near. The parts of the city spread out, and the possible routes cluttered his mind, but there was notice of a kind pulling him. It was unmistakable. It was Shag. He drove around for three hours, like a moth around a huge glowing light, the last light of the year, October light crowding down on the life of the moth.

And then it was stronger than it ever was. He was beside a mall. The voice on the radio was giving out the description of his car, the registration number, and his description. He was at least three hundred miles from home. Nobody would know him.

He parked the car. Six hours later, tired, exhaustion finally coming down upon his body, he sat in a small diner and ate his first meal of the day. Shag had come and gone, but he knew this was the place. It had been so from the beginning. Sanders, all the way from Chicago, had been from the beginning, and the mountain in Korea had been from the beginning. The trucker had always been coming at him, a journey started a long time in the past, like the two sailors caught under their craft, unconscious, waiting for him.

He finished his meal and walked back outside.

As he neared the Duster he saw the policeman sitting

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa in a patrol car a few spaces away. Brittan turned to move in the other direction.

"Sir!" the voice said. "Sir!" It was a strong young voice, somewhat friendly in tone.

He turned back to the voice. The young policeman stepped from his car. "May I ask you some questions, sir? Is this your car? Do you have some ID? Are you Brittan Courvalais? Someone spotted you earlier and called it in, said you were hanging around too much. There’s a warrant out for you."

"I’m looking for my grandson. That is no crime."

"Why are you here in Schenectady? You must be hundreds of miles from home." Blue-eyed, pinkcheeked, probably shaved only three times a week, the young officer was dubious, but not uncomfortable.

"I checked out your car, and you in the diner. I know you don’t have your grandson with you. Not unless he’s with someone else local. Why’s his name Shag?"

He was pleasant in an unpleasant situation.

"I’ll tell you, son. I don’t know why his name is Shag, but it was always going to be that. And I don’t know why I’m here, but something is telling me that he’s near here. I cannot leave this place. I’ve driven over 2000 miles, some of it in circles, around mountains, across bridges and rivers, down beside the huge Finger Lakes, Canandegua on the crown of a hill perhaps just because of its name, something pulling at me, drawing me, and it’s brought me here.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais I can’t leave here. I’ve done nothing but look for that boy. It’s like he keeps calling for me, but I never hear his voice. It’s a kind of impulse, the only way I can describe it. It beats or hums, but no words to it."

"I know about names," the officer said. "My father named me Sawyer. I am Sawyer Billings and had a hell of a time with the name as a kid. My father says he has no idea why it came to him. I handle my dukes pretty good. Had a lot of scrapes over that name."

"Ever think that’s why your father did it? I know of someone named Lawyer and he makes tackles and interceptions, and he’s pretty tough at that."

"Not until now, sir. Is there any way I can help you? I can make a report or hold it up. The only one who’d get upset about any delay would be the captain, and he takes enough time off so it won’t matter."

"Just let me be around here. Whatever it is, it’s very strong. I have to check it out."

"Where? In a particular store? Nearby?"

"I don’t know. If I knew I’d be there now. I’d have you by the collar pulling you with me. I just don’t know."

"Well, sir, I’ll sit on it for a while. My sister was crying about Shag the other day, saying how sad it was. She has two of her own. Father named her

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Cameron. Never hurt her. She’s a fighter too. But gets sad." He walked to his patrol car. "I’ll be around.

Good hunting, sir." The car slipped out of the mall like a small animal passing through the brush. * * * A few hours after the patrol car had departed the parking lot, his neck stiff, an old injury talking through his knee, he woke with a start. Now it was stronger, that call of Shag, that disruption on the air.

He shook his head, looked for the patrol car, walked toward the mall. It came again, stronger, not a voice, not words, not his name, but a humming, a vibration, near electrical. Twice he went past one store, only to come back and feel the announcement again. This was it. Again he looked for Sawyer Billings or his car and saw neither.

He entered the store, an open building that seemed to spread as wide as three football fields. He could smell popcorn, flowers, and the burnt skin of chicken frying. Should he stay by the door? Was it the only way out of the store? Would he be here for hours? No, he would be active. He would pursue the feeling, the sensation, that vibrating hum still coming at him.

Scanning the store for the silhouette of someone carrying a child, he picked an aisle and started down it. Back over his shoulder he looked, afraid he might miss something, and looked down

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais side aisles. A hum of voices came to him, a caustic static that intruded on the vibrating hum. A wife arguing with her husband. A father calling for his son to hurry. A brother teasing a younger sister. Then, from another aisle, the next one over, beyond the display of electric cords and lamps and shades and rows of batteries and bulbs in blue and white boxes, he felt his grandson. He felt Shag.

Back he went to the main aisle, crossed over, looked down the aisle. The silhouette was exclusive; a woman holding a child. A man near her was looking at a display of security alarms, a big man, wide across the shoulders, in worn dungarees and work boots. The woman was in her late thirties, dark hair, red lips. She hummed to the infant in her arms.

The eyes of Brittan Courvalais met the eyes of his grandson Shag. The boy’s head came up off the woman’s shoulder. Brittan stepped closer, saw the curve of a smile on the child’s lip as if it were juxtaposed on the back of his brain. He was ready to grab the boy when Shag said, "Gampa."

The woman spun on her heels, looked into Brittan Courvalais’s eyes, saw some kind of trouble or ownership there, said, "Harry," in a very demanding voice. "We have to go. Now! Now, Harry!"

The big man also spun around. Courvalias screamed, "Get the police. This baby’s been kidnapped. This is my grandson Shag." He reached for the child. The woman spun away. The man pushed

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa him. His knee pained its whole length. The mountain was in front of him again. The frigid waters of Lake Hwachon were there again for him. He reached, grabbed the man’s arm, pulled him at himself, and tossed him against a display. Boxes tumbled.

The woman screamed. "Help! Help! He’s trying to steal my baby!"

A man rushed down the aisle and went to grab Brittan’s arm. Brittan yelled, "Quick, get the police.

Sawyer Billings is outside in the police car. Get him!

Hurry." His fist closed around the woman’s wrist. The baby let out a yell. Their eyes locked again. Then Brittan’s eyes locked with the woman's eyes. It was then she knew her first terror. It was so very real, so unexpected. They had only been looking for a simple night-light. A simple night-light.

Officer Sawyer Billings was Johnny-on-thespot, having spent some off-duty hours at the mall, watching the old man from a distance. Cuffs were soon on the big man. The baby was taken from the woman’s arms and put into the arms of his grandfather, who was feeling the ultimate joy, who could already hear the phone ringing at his daughter’s home 300 miles away. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River

The Old Man of the River

There

were times, Musket Jack Magran swore, he could hear a dog pissing in the night, a drunk pissing in another alley, a moth touching down on a lighted globe or, between his ears and his fingertips, humming and vibrating, the vast platelets of the Pacific Rim moving on each other their endless rhythms. In tune with the universe was he, had been forever, and tonight was no different. He had his booze, he had his sack for the night, he was in touch.

Pieces of a broken moon splashed on the dark blue waters of the river and shot off the ripples of a late wake, a small craft having passed by minutes earlier against the other bank, a craft without night lights, dark, sly, faintly noisy, like a ferret in the rushes. It had been down river, possibly out to sea.

Musket Jack Magran, groggy from sleep yet ears cocked, bones still bearing an ache in his old body, could hear the fading engine’s hum from upstream

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa darkness, where trees on the curved banking and a small copse of birches gave off vertical neon, slim arrows in a quiver, catching moon traces.

Skullduggery without lights, he whispered as darkness swallowed up sound, as night crawled back to its place of keeping, the gathering of silence and darkness.

On the deck of someone’s lobster boat tied up to the T-shaped pier at the Lobster Co-op’s landing, Musket Jack Magran had begun another night free of rent. His old canvas shelter-half, infantry issue, its Army legend imprint long faded, not mated for thirtyodd years, edges frayed and stringy, the sheen gone to lively abrasions, still kept the dew and late dampness off his single blanket. He knew the odd stars; on five continents he had slept out in the night, and on islands and territories too numerous to mention.

Now and then he’d swear the water lapping at the dock or the sides of the boat was hypnotizing him, melodies lingering in the sweep and ripple, old station or post songs mostly without words, the wide world at call and command… China Night… Japanese Rumba… Manila Moon… The Maids of Mandalay… and, for brief catches, Lily Marlene, underneath the lamplight by the garden gate. It was better sleeping on an odd lobster boat on the river than under the steel bridge or up above the pier on a park bench, old ladies too nosy or too solicitous, or old men looking for company or a voice in the darkness. Side benefits

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River came easier on strange boats; general silence within darkness, the long and rhythmic inland reach of the sea, time passing off its melancholy and letting him handle it on his own terms. In another five or six weeks he’d think about hitching a ride south from a gypsy truck driver. On this night, like the others on numerous occasions, came back the old promise he’d made to himself in too many dry and arid infantry posts that some good part of his life later on would be spent on the water, the obverse life of a sailor, the eternal hum coming off that span about him. These lobster boat nights were part of that promise.

The last burp of the boat whispered to him from the bend of the river, beyond the silvery copse.

His large ears, derided by many for years, were keen for sounds and had saved him and comrades in numberless firefights or skirmishes. For the bracing of comrades, being called "Wingsy" by some, "Elephant Ears" by others, he readily absorbed and accepted the ability to hear the click of a rifle in the mountain or jungle darkness, or on the wide sands of the Sahara Desert.

Then, for a lucid moment, another piece of the moon falling across his eyes, he heard again his father on the porch back in Vermilion, Ohio talking about Black Jack Pershing, a perfume of cool sweet breath coming off Lake Erie, Canadian air at its best.

In another moment, as if in a movie, he saw himself caught in his tracks on a distant post at distant years as Call to the Colors came to him, hauntingly clear

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa and infallible. All this time the tune was still riveting, making shivers at his spine, making dictates, driving his mind for known or unknown reaches. What post it was he could not remember, some place off in the vast world of his adventure, but he heard the bugle as clearly as that same revered moment, and then came the command in his father’s voice. He flirted with an argument about memory’s structure but quickly gave it up. The last ghostly purr of the faint motor sound brought him back. Two nights earlier, just after midnight, the same boat, or one sounding just like it, and without night-lights, had crawled by his night bed, the deck of another lobster boat.

Not only a free sleep brought him to the river, or the toss of the sea, but also an occasional beer found in a cockpit or cooler, forgotten with a good day’s catch. Tonight he’d found a six-pack and drank two cans, putting the empties back in place, draping the plastic loop around the cans. And a half pack of butts with a lighter, quick treasure. Yet his mouth was sour for the find, his palate sassy. The low hum of the dark boat having faded completely, he whispered half aloud through that sour mouth: Tomorrow night, from the other side, from the Lynn side, I’ll watch for that boat. Something tricky in the wind, I’ll bet. What moves in darkness sure isn’t light.

From the other shore, eastward under the moon, from a distance on the Lynn side, came the closing of a door, a faint yap of a dog at relief, a hushed command, the door closing again on the night.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River Well before dawn he slipped off the boat and made his way around the lobster shack and up the road heading into town. Few cars moved on the road, but their lights danced on his face as he moved towards a morning of washing dishes at Smokey’s Diner, where lobster boat crews swallowed breakfast like a Lenten fast was over. Their breakfasts were mountainous, as if they’d be at sea for a week. And they talked as they ate, part of the ingestion process, noisy and garrulous like someone gargling and getting rid of a bad night. He loved to listen to them, their gripes as timeless as the tides, sea stories like barracks stories with characters rising from their oratories like people off-stage in a play, not seen but heard from. "Friggin’ line was cut by knife, ain’t shittin’me none, them assholes from Bev’ly!" "Swear she’s got these humungous tits you can tie knots in!"

"When she straddles, man, you fucking disappear from the face of this here good earth."

Often they were subject to poor fortune and seas that turned savage in eye flashes. But they were a vibrant bunch in spite of their lot in life, hard drinking and hard swearing, riding at times the crest, at times not. Jack had seen hands and fingers mangled by sudden ropes or arthritis or the curses of salt water, arms laced with scars so deep they could make you wince. He’d seen storms that sat in some men’s eyes long after the wind had faded on-shore.

Like watching a late movie, he said to himself.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Dud Whelmsly of all of them intrigued him the most. Dud, to Musket Jack’s eyes, was built like a Budweiser keg with short arms and short legs, the lord of the realm perhaps, perhaps of the river and the fleet itself, but a voice with a threat of music in it.

"Goddamit, Smokey, repeating this all the time just about spoils my day…don’t break the yolk in my egg sandwiches. Let ‘em break themselves and sop in, the way I like ‘em. Let ‘em sop into them there bulkie rolls, goddamit!" Jack almost broke a gut the night Smokey came out of the men’s room right behind the counter zipping his fly, the hopper flushing, and started to mold two hamburger patties for Dud. "How'd you want them hamburgers, Dud?" he had said. Dud had looked up from his newspaper spread across the counter, looked around the room, caught a few eyes, bent his head in the way he had of doing it and said, "Well, Smokey, might’s well cook the piss out of them two little fuckers."

Now this morning, the sea out there for the moment calm, the noise here intense as the day loomed in front of them, there was talk among the lobstermen of thievery, missing lobster traps, lines cut. Some unknown force, out and about the good earth, was lining up against them. There was talk of a night watch and Coast Guard involvement. The small diner hummed with a loose vengeance and anger. It was a recent activity obviously grown out of hand.

Eyes often spoke as loud as words, layers of cigarette smoke cut by their stares, revenge working the horizon.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River "He comes under my knife he’s chum bait," burly fisher Fall Dixon said, patting the near-Bowie blade sheathed at his belt line. That patting hand was enormous in its spread, and bulbous as though an arthritic warrior had lodged there. The years of seawater and salt, hawsers and traps, inured skin and bone and callus with a quick identity. Fall, like Dud, would be known hands-down in a crowd, lobsterman.

"I’m suspecting he must sure know his way around what he’s at," Dud offered, half pivoting on the counter stool, a page of the paper twisting with him.

"What the hell does that mean, Dud?" The voice was from behind a newspaper in the corner.

"Simple," Dud said. "One a us or knows us too good. The price down, what a small catch does to a man’s day. Anyone know anyone wants a boat real bad?" He stared out the diner window, not letting his gaze rest on any man, effecting neutral for what it was worth, yet it was like slipping a knife point into the clasp of a sea clam or quahog. It was harsh intrusion, the room itself being cut.

Musket Jack saw rather than heard the silence.

Heads lifted, eyes aimed like pistol sights, jaws froze on words. Union and divinity and brotherhood were once again at the forefront. Musket Jack, for all his downhill slide through a whole lifetime, knew what was happening there on the line. He could feel its net, had lived within it, depended on it; Hug Scroggins’

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa dive on top of the grenade seemed a hundred years since came back with ferocity; and followed Little Davie Davenport’s sucking up pieces of his own grenade. They had made and broken many a day.

The elitism of fragmentation, its hunger and global dissemination, leaped at him. These lobstermen all about him were certainly now in the throes of some kind of war. Hostilities had begun in part, he was sure.

The corner speaker spoke. "You’se first hit, Dud. Seen nothin’ that day you went out? You was early enough, I know."

"Nothing but my lines cut. Lost thirty traps and whatever was caught. Nothing on the horizon. No oil spills. No markers of any kind, but what he loosed from me. Rat-ass bastard’ll get chummed, that’s for sure. I guess nobody here knows anything or they’d be speaking up about now. Never too late, even if it’s your brother or your son or your son-in-law or your old daddy."

"You swearing to that, Dud, that it’s one us or close to? That’s powerful stuff for breakfast." It was Napoleon LeMars who Dud had fished out of the Atlantic two years earlier, after twenty-two hours in the water. "I’m going to take an early look. Over by Hatty’s Run, then I’ll come back by the Pines Light."

"You not fishing today, Nap?" Dud said.

"I’m giving my day up for looking. Somebody else can do it tomorrow. No kids sitting to my table."

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River He snickered, "Least not so’s I know." The ladies’ man of their group basked in a moment’s glow, not one hair of his thick crop out of place, pleasant crinkles at his eyes, his Roman nose as clean as the day he was born. "If’n I see anything I’ll let you know. Tomorrow’s somebody else’s day. But, hell, Dud, I don’t know what the hell to look for even."

Dud was not imperious, but a bit lordly in his advice. "Keep a sharp eye, Nap, for what ain’t supposed to be where you see it. If it’s not in among us, it’s sure like us. That skirmish they had in Beverly back a few years, when they were losing boats and traps and lines galore, it was outside but inside, if you know what I mean. Someone wanted the riverfront or the harbor for commercial stuff the guys of the fleet couldn’t touch in a hundred years. If anybody hears about that kind of thing coming here, we got to sit up right away."

Fall Dixon came off his stool. "There ain’t been a whisper about someone new trying to get the river cleaned up, and us out of it. Not for a few years now, but it’s always there. That ain’t anything new, but it’s sure been quiet. No snoopers I know of. No real estate guys walking around with little notebooks in their hands or talking into small recorders, getting so frigging lazy at it now. You heard anything, Dud?" Musket Jack loved to watch Dud Whelmsly operate. He’d seen a hundred company clerks over the years running the whole show of an infantry outfit, and Dud was not unlike them, letting

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa innuendoes and side remarks do the work of order and command. Mere suggestions built slowly on themselves, became laws unto themselves.

Questions, posed the right way, in the right tone of voice at the right time, in some measure became fact. It was an art form. Dud’s head lowered on his massive body like a turtle retracting, then he scrunched his eyebrows and looked deeply into Fall’s eyes as he let his baritone voice float across the diner. "What’s a stranger among us, if he’s not a brother?" At an angle he held his suppressed head, for a moment breathless on stage. Musket Jack shook a little in admiration. "What’s a visitor in our midst, if he’s not a brother? Who are we, being alone, but brothers?" It was part of the art form, as if he had gone down into his body to find those words and then shared them.

And it was as if an edict had been posted in Smokey’s Diner, an imperial edict. In the kitchen, looking out through the serving window, the old soldier almost pissed his pants having a good laugh.

Dud Whelmsly had said nothing at all, not a damn thing, and here was rapt silence stunning the room as if some ages-old philosopher had made a pronouncement. He could remember no beliefs or espousals except names. Dud could be like Locke or Kant or Descartes or a hundred others floating at the back end of libraries, dust coming down atop their words, dead a hundred years and still making waves just off the river. Dud’s head was still at that most confidential angle, that sharing pose.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River "You oughta be in the movies, Dud." The voice was still behind the newspaper, like a small bell tinkling a few stray cows home.

Dud pretended he didn’t hear that pronouncement. "If there are people who want us off the river, they’ll come at us any way they can. But the pocketbook’s the best way. That’s my traps and your traps. My boat and your boat. My catch and your catch. No boubt adout it!"

Now, Musket Jack also realized, Dud Whelmsly was coming at them with the real ammunition, Topkick stuff. He suddenly realized that Dud knew there was an enemy within and about. Was damn sure about it. And Musket Jack himself had been witness to some piece of it. The fading sound of the midnight engine came back to him, even as dishes rattled and glasses tinkled against one another and silverware was in minor crescendo. The idea of energy came at him, the spurt of it, his blood moving.

First it was heat from his task, the water scalding and steamy. Then it was an old convoy climbing the long slight grade of a hill he thought perhaps was outside Wonson on the way out of the Pusan Perimeter. Then it was a flotilla of craft as they crossed Lake Hwachon, a whole battalion of infantry. Then it was the men of the lobster fleet sitting out there in the little stuffed diner, the smoke hanging in the air like old rifle residue and burning cosmoline and spent gunpowder going on a day old and the hurt still in place.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa "All I can say is that it’ll probably start at the town bank if that’s what it is. But I’m telling one and all, something’s up and about and it pays us to look close to anything odd. From the landing, and both river banks all the way out to the Big Daddy." * * * Musket Jack Magran was a listener. He kept his ears cocked for every piece of input. Washed out, but fed well by Smokey, an old soldier himself, the small mountain of morning dishes washed and put away, Jack walked away from the diner at ten of the morning with two fried egg bulkie roll sandwiches in his pockets. Way ahead of time he had planned his move to the other side of the river. If that boat came again, in the slip of darkness, he’d be watching.

After midnight, cloudy, the moon off someplace, the old soldier felt the disturbance in the air before he heard any sound. On the other side of the river, from the Lynn side, after passing through the small yard of boat gear, he had slipped aboard another lobster boat. He had spread his blanket and shelter-half, found two beers in a cooler, had a few nips picked up earlier, strictly for his late watch.

Darkness invaded his thoughts. The river, like every river he had ever known, was alive even if mute, from the Pukhan to the Mekong to the Saugus. From deep in his past he remembered a perimeter outpost, two ration cans tinkling on a strand of commo wire as the Chinese infiltrator tried to come up his hill just

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River beyond Lake Hwachon at three in the morning, to try to toss a grenade into the listening post bunker. He felt anew the chill slipping up his spine as he remembered that slight tinkle of cans, and now, under dark clouds on a dark night on somebody’s boat, the small vibrations came to him from the body of the river. The supposedly mute river, its waters trying in vain to catch another tune.

Musket Jack Magran sat up slowly, the shelterhalf sliding off his form with the soft grating sound of canvas. That old sourness was in his mouth and a new ache at his shoulders. He cursed a sleeping foot yet caught with tingles. Commiseration was his until the purr and put-put of an engine brought him to attention. There was no moon, no offshore lights falling on the body of the river, but there were shadows. Shadows in spite of their being give measurement, and he peered over the low gunnels, giving least mark to the given contour. Other lobster boats rose dark in the darkness, small radar and radio equipment slim atop their shapes. The water slapped almost in silent applause against his bed boat, the small boat coming up the river sending tremors ahead of its passing. The slow roll of his craft was sensual, the rivers of the world never letting go.

He saw a girl on a bed of straw reaching for him, that too had been beside a river whose name was now gone, as was her name. The boat rolled again, slowly, the sound of an outboard came like a whisper. He saw a shadow moving. Then he saw two men on a small dinghy. He heard the splash of liquids. One of

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa the men was spilling liquid from a five-gallon can as they circled around each lobster boat. He recognized the dinghy with the phony spar out front. It was Dud Whelmsly’s dinghy, but neither of the two lank and lean men on the boat was Dud Whelmsly.

Then Musket Jack caught the unmistakable odor, the rich purifying odor, the nostrils-cleaning odor of raw gasoline. They were going to torch the river! They were going to torch the fleet. Tag! He was it! Tag! He was the sole guardian of life and limb and liberty. Scroggins came back, his dive through the air on top of the loose grenade. Little Davie Davenport had carelessly dropped his grenade at his feet. His eyes had gone wild as he looked around at the squad, and then fell down on top of it. They were faces in his night, Scrog and Davie. He saw their eyes, their mouths, their chins. He knew them again, knew that they would never leave him. Had never left him. I’m half drunk, he said to himself, as the dingy circled around another boat, and another five-gallon can spilled against the side of a boat and splashed on its deck. I am the last night guard, he whispered. They were forty feet from him. He was sure he did not know them, sure they were not part of the crews at Smokey’s Diner. That thought sat well with him. What could an old drunk soldier, years past his last hitch, do in such a situation?

Musket Jack Magran let the shelter-half and thin blanket fall away from his body as he stood in the shadows of the cockpit. "Halt!" he yelled out.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River "Hold it right there. I’ve got a wild-ass Forty-five aimed at your last can of gasoline. You so much as move a muscle this little cannon of a sidearm’s going to go off with a bigger bang than you ever heard!

Now you tie off onto that boat and sit in your little dinghy until I rouse some help or so help me you’re nothing but flames."

He yelled, loud and hard, for help. Upriver a light went on, and then another. Behind him he heard a door slam. There was a pounding of feet, booted feet, on the Saugus side. He kept on yelling.

"They’re pouring gasoline on the lobster boats.

Watch your ass! Don’t light anything near a boat."

"Who’s that over there?" one voice said, throwing a torchlight onto the river, letting the light ray fish around.

Jack recognized Fall Dixon’s voice. "This here’s Musket Jack. There’s two skinny gents who were dousing gasoline onto the boats. They’re tied off to Gunther’s boat here, the Maryanne Kay. I got a Fortyfive aimed somewhere near their balls and their last can of gas. Call the fire department if you want these boats saved. They been using Dud’s dingy. Better get his ass down here."

One of the men in Dud’s dinghy moved. "You move again, feller, and you’re flame. I swear to God you’re flame." Back across the river he yelled to Fall Dixon, "Better hurry, Fall, my goddam finger is getting tired on this here trigger. These Forty-fives

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa were never any good. I couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with one, but the round’ll go someplace close."

The night watch of Musket Jack Magran was over. The scramble came: firemen and hoses and decks washed down, police going out to the dingy and bringing the two tall strangers ashore, Dud finding his dingy chain snapped through at one of the lower links against the dock. The smell of gasoline slowly dissipated in the morning air as the dew came down and the tide went out.

One policeman, coming across the river in a small dinghy, said to Musket Jack, "I’ll take that Forty-five now, mister."

"Shit, man," Musket Jack said, "I wouldn’t own one of them little cannons for all the tea in China.

Never was any frigging good at all, them things, ‘cept you carry it you didn’t have to shoulder a rifle. And that was pretty good unless you had to use a rifle."

He held up his empty hands. He smiled at the policeman.

At Smokey’s Diner, the air thick with cigarette smoke, a brand new pack at his elbow, a pile of scrambled eggs and bacon and a pot of coffee in front of him, the new god of the river told his story over and over again. And the identities of the two men and their connections were swiftly known and more arrests promised. "They must have been casing the river the night before, trying to see who or what was

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Old Man of the River round, what the lay of the land was, what they could get away with."

The voice behind the newspaper said, "They never counted you being on guard, Jack, no boubt adout that."

Dud Whelmsly said it at last, his head in that confidence-sharing angle, his voice dramatic but honest, "The Staties’ve been onto something for a long while. Some development company from out of Providence, and you know what that means, wants the river for something big. Maybe gambling or a casino-boat kind of thing. Who knows but them who wanted to put us out of the river. Hell, taking traps never did it, or cutting lines. We’ve been through enough of that crap. This was going to get us big time. Me and Fall’s been keeping an eye for a long spell, but I was too quick to sleep the night before and Fall was out of it last night. Took the old soldier here, half in the wrapper I bet, to stand guard for us, like he’s always done."

Another spill of Jim Beam went into Musket Jack’s coffee cup. "You got a day of it coming, Jack, and then we dry you out and get you a ride south. No more dishes for you, soldier."

Musket Jack Magran, an aura of cigarette smoke swirling around his head, his eyes beginning to fish once more, the alcohol putting the quiet down in place, old scars getting buried bone-deep in his body, vaguely remembered a boat ride on a river flowing

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa away from the hills above Leyte. A girl’s dark skin he could recall and the light of stars in her eyes, but could not see her face. The way the Earth shifted under him, quietly but dramatically, came back, the whole range of it. A tune from down a wide river came at him as if night were finally taking leave of itself, a post soldier out on the edge of darkness playing his guitar, while overhead the Manila moon went sailing wherever its voyage took it.

And for long hours no person had called him "Wingsy" or "Elephant Ears." Not a one. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered

Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered

My

Grandfather Johnny Igoe was a little Irish man. He stood a mere five-foot-six, but was a giant to me when his poetic voice rolled across the lamp-lit porch floor. He always wore a felt hat, a white beard, and often a pair of bicycle clips on his pant legs in the later years so he wouldn’t trip himself. His blue eyes were excavations, deep and musical, caught up in other places you could tell, places where poems rang and memories, old names, old faces, and the geography of mankind dwelled.

They held places he had left and feared he’d never get back to. Each of his canes knew the back of your knees, the rump, in a grab at attention. Older townsfolk, walking by, talked to him at the open kitchen window, the curl of pipe smoke rising between them, while Grandma was at her oven, her room full of breads and sweets.

On our summer porch at night, the fireflies hustling about in the near fields, my Grandfather read William B. Yeats to me when I was a youngster. He rocked in his chair, smoking his pipe, making music

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa and rhythm in his life, and in mine. I was, at the first of Yeats, about six years old.

“Listen,” he’d say, pointing his finger up. “Hear the music. Know the sound. Feel the grab.”

Johnny Igoe, spellbinder remembered.

On that porch on Main Street, a mere mile out of Saugus Center, he and Yeats holding forth, his voice would roll into the field where fireflies lived and where Chuckie Shipulski’s house now sits. His words, mixed with the fireflies waiting on my bottle, captured a sense of deeper darkness where they could further show off their electric prowess. The times were magnetic, electric. I knew what attention was.

Oh, I loved those compelling nights filled with Horseman, ride by; Prayer for My Daughter or old marble heads, captivating me with a sound so Irish I was proud. I will arise now and go to Innisfree oh, and the deep heart’s core. The lineage found me: I didn’t find it, and the echoes of those nights ring yet.

But other things come repeatedly for him: Johnny Igoe only ate oatmeal in the morning, a boiled potato and a shot of whiskey for lunch. By and on other things he lived.

On the handle of a cane he would rest his chin, his eyes on you making announcements you dared not lose. He made Yeats’s voice to be his voice, that marvelous treble and clutter of breath buried in it, The Lake Isle of Innisfree popping free like electricity or the very linnets themselves. Maude was like some creature I’d surely come to know in my own time.

Johnny Igoe also wrote his own poems, and yielded

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered me Mulrooney and Padraic Gibbons as well out of the long rope of his memory. The knots of that rope untied all those Saturday evenings of his life and mine, on that porch. He launched many of my own poems here, by the dozens, and at the end, at 97, stained, shaking, beard gone to a lengthy hoarfrost, potato drivel not quite lost in it, he gave me his voice and eyes alive to this day, sounding out in his own way.

Later, time hustling me on, in a Caedmon Golden Treasury of Poetry record, I heard Yeats read his own material, three short poems. I swore it was Spellbinder Johnny Igoe still at work.

But first things first: I quickly remember him as the Dumpmaster at the City Dump in Malden, Massachusetts, where he ended up after his early travels and began his family. He had been the first Irish sailor of his family, sailing here alone, while his mother was on her death bed. All those long days and nights at the dump, the destitute came to him for warmth, for food, for a place to put up their feet on a freezing night. They came to him, the drunks, the homeless vets still wandering loose from France and WW I, street people who then had no such name.

They knew the welcome of his fire, the monger’s stove to wrap around, hot curbing to prop cold feet, quick difference from the frozen air, wind-swept railroad tracks, bare entry ways, darkness where howling ghosts abide. Or, as often was the case, their last resort, the slim cardboard wrap.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa He burned clinkers in a little shack he made of scrap. The lost, lonely birds came to him to roost.

They flew in at dusk. He stoked the fire to stir up flames, dried their feathers off. Just as often he left his lunch about like tasty suet hanging in the yard.

On Saturdays I brought his lunch, dense laminates of meat and bread, thick and heavy and coarse as sin, brown banana we would not eat, molasses-brown coffee in whiskey bottles wound about with paper bags. I never saw even one pint bottle finished off within his grasp. I rarely saw his small hand feeling inside a paper bag. His birds did the picking, had suet choice, hens dining before the cock.

That was as much his legacy as anything else he might have done or said. He cared for the downtrodden, those short-circuited by life, those who had paid their dues and somehow, through their humanity itself, had fallen prey to loss and deprivation. Mercy was what he preached, and that memory should be noble, and comfort to the aggrieved and succor for the pained should be a career. He made me observe the human condition. He made me look at man from the floor up, from his lowest grovel to his pinnacle, to realize that we end in dust before we move on, the manner of a man being God-like.

This kind and thoughtful man for years dreamed of his return to Ireland, but he never made that trip. That lost dream trip pained him. His eyes said so, his voice said it too, and in his own poem: The Dream of the Roscommon Emigrant

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered There is a land though far away that’s very dear to me, an island in the ocean most picturesque to see. As each day goes by I heave a sigh for those lovely native scenes: Ah! Isle of Saints and Martyrs, I see you in my dreams.

I’m at the gate of Clooniquin, I hear the pearling stream now wend its way to Ross and then to far Culleen. I hear the thrush and blackbird in the holly and laurel tree; my soul says I must loiter in this fair locality.

I cross the bridge and up the walk and toward that lovely grove; with ecstasy my heart does bound as onward I do rove. From the countless pines a shadow runs to meet me on the hill where the pheasant and rabbit doth wander there at will.

Ah, solitude, thy charms are dear, to me how sweet they seem as I set me down and look around on Nature’s lovely scene. The hills of Ross are beautiful, and so the lovely glen and meadows fair that stretch between those hills and dear old Elphin.

From Castlerea to Carrick I see the places all, from Roscommon down to Lulsk and to the Plains of Boyle. As I travel o’er that scope, with Nature’s gifts so strewn, I stop halfway where I was raised now aided by the moon. I look around bewildered on all that I behold; the tree of ash, the hawthorn bush, now burnished in their gold.

The cottage I was born in and raised by parents kind, I enter with impatience but there I could not find the one above all others whose love

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa was dear to me. She has gone to her heaven for all eternity.

Father, brothers, sisters, I join in fond embrace as tears of joy and sorrow roll swiftly down each face. I see the good old nabors, each remembered a pleasant day, and shake each hand with affection as I did when going away.

In harmony we all did join and traversed those weary years since that eventful morning when I left them steeped in tears. Now fond adieu to all my friends around the dear old isle, though adopted by Columbia I am Erin’s faithful child; For the Stars and Stripes with the flag of green will line in unity. Adieu again, old Ireland, farewell my dear country.

But others made the trip for him.

On our honeymoon in 1973, my wife Beth and I visited at Elphin and the cottage where John Igoe was born, where I saw the star peep through the thatch roof and call his name, and where lived my mother’s last two living first cousins, Peter and Joseph Cassidy, since gone. My mother, with four daughters, was able to get over and visit there in 1987.

And in September of 2003, our children sent us back for our 30th anniversary. The eyes are so pleased at times that the heart sees. I told them the following happened on our trip: One Monday noon I stood in an Elphin, Roscommon pub, a Guinness pint in hand, and said aloud to the dozen men at the bar, “Gentlemen, do any of you remember Peter and Joseph Cassidy who

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered 30 years ago, when we were here on our honeymoon, lived outside of town near the statue to The Rising.

They were well into their 70s then and long gone now, but I’d like to know if anybody remembers them.”

All hell broke loose at the bar, eyes twinkled, smiles came galore, and one man leaped off his stool.

“Eddie the Fiddler!” he yelled. “If Peter and Joseph were relatives of yours, Eddie the Fiddler is.” He yelled to the barkeep, “Dermot, get Eddie on the phone!” Twenty minutes later I thought my grandfather Johnny Igoe was walking through the door. It was a cousin of mine, Eddie Cassidy, in his sixties, I had never met and had not known about.

We had a ball!

It was a great trip and Johnny Igoe was with us every step of the way.

He had bent his back in Pennsylvania’s and Illinois’ mines and swung a hammer north of Boston, poled his star-lit way down the Erie Canal, and died in bed. His years are still with me in the wind he breathed and storms he stood against and earth he pounded with his fist to fill the mouths of his children and my mother. When he was lonely he was hurt and sometimes feared the pain he could not feel because he knew it and knew how it came. He said a man had to think hard and often to be wise and nothing was useless to man: not a sliver of wood because it makes a toothpick; not a piece of glass broken from a wine-red bottle because it catches sun and makes wonder. Neither a stray stone nor brick were useless

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa because they were wedges or wall-parts or corners like one, the first or the last, put to the foundation of the old gray house that clings to the light and had wide windows and doors that were never locked.

On snow-bound mornings he laughed with us when daylight sought us eagerly and in cricket nights of softness that spoiled kneeling prayers. Sometimes his soft eyes were sad while we laughed. We didn’t know about the man down the street or the boy who died racing black-horse train against young odds. His prayers were not an interlude with God: they were as sacred as breathing, as vital as the word. And the politicians never got his vote because he knew the pain they intended and he hated hurt. Hated hurt.

The floorboards creaked beneath him in the mornings and he brought warmth into chilled rooms and his coffee slipped its aroma between secret walls to waken us.

The oats were heavy and creamed in large white bowls, and “Go easy on the sugar� was the bugle call of dawn. His books had a message that he heard, alone, quiet, singing with the life he knew was near past and yet beginning. He pampered and petted them like he did Grandma, and spent secret hours with them and lived them with us rehearsing our life to come, and teaching us.

Then, a high-biting, cold spring day in 1955 I knew would be memorial, the sun shone but in snippets, ice still hiding out in shadow, winter remnants piled up in a great gathering, me bound to

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered a shovel for the tenth day in a row. That’s when I heard of Johnny Igoe’s death so late in life.

Grass and buds and shoots and sprigs of all kinds were aimless as April. All vast morning I’d hunted the sun, tried to place it square on my back.

But the breeze taunted, left a taste in my mouth.

Sullivan Marino, brother-in-law, boss who loved the shovel, sweat, doing the Earth over, walked at me open as a telegram. Sicilian eyes tell stories, omit nothing in the relation.

“Your grandfather’s dead.” He was vinegar and oil and reached for my shovel. It would not leave my hands.

I saw Johnny Igoe at ten at turf cutting, just before he came this way with the great multitude. I saw how he too moved the ponderous earth, the flame of it caught in iron, singing tea, singeing the thatch, young Irish scorching the ground he walked.

He had come here and I came, and I went there, later, to where he’d come from; Roscommon’s sweet vale, slow rush of land, shouldering up, going into sky, clouds shifting selves like pieces at chess, earth ripening to fire. I saw it all, later, where he’d come from, but then, sun-searching, memorializing, Sullivan quickly at oil and odds, his hand out to take my tool away, could stand no dalliance the day Johnny Igoe died.

And when he died, they came by the dozen to grieve the savior of their awful nights; the drunken, besotted, brothered band who so often drained his cup. The mottle-skinned came, so soured of life, the

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa pale host of them, the warred upon and beaten, they came to cache the little man who offered what was left of God. The saga of Johnny Igoe is the epic of a nation; The root cell, Johnny Igoe ran ahead of the famine that took brothers and sisters, lay father down; became sick in the hold of ghostly ship I later saw from high rock on Cork’s coast. In the hold he heard the myths and music he would spell all his life.

He remembered hunger and being alone and brothers and sisters and father gone and mother praying for him as he knelt beside her bed that hard morning when Ireland went away to the stern. I know that terror of hers last touching his face.

He might be housed in this computer, for now he visits, or never leaves. Yeats talks on record but the voice is my grandfather’s voice, the perky treble, the deft reach inside me, the lifting out, the ever lifting out. His books still live, his chair, his cane, the misery he knew, the pain, and somewhere he is. In the dark asides before a faint light glimmers it is the perky pipe’s glow I see, weaker than a small and struck match but illuminating all the same. I smell his old Edgeworth tobacco faint as a blown cloud in the air, the way a hobo might know a windowed apple pie from afar. I hear the years of literate good cheer, storied good will, the pleasantries of expansive noun and excitable verb. I hear his ever-lingering poems, each one a repeated resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. I hear his rocking chair giving rhythm to my mind, saying over

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered and over again the words he left with hard handles on them for my grasping. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

The House No One Lived in

They

considered themselves midnight adventurers, coming off the hill they so lovingly called Henshit Mountain, to cross the pond in the dead of winter with sleds to “borrow” lumber from Artie Donolan who had ”borrowed” it from Breakheart Reservation, a state park. The park, at its deepest end, bordered on land that the Donolans had worked for years, including timber they ripped out of the state park as long as a few eyes stayed closed. To the boys from Henshit Mountain, the Donolan rape was not unknown, not to these teenagers, who were only enacting their own form of justice, borrowing enough lumber to build themselves a clubhouse at the thickly-treed section of the mountain. With various spurts of energy, even in summer when they floated rafts of lumber across the same pond from the same lumberyard, rooms were added to the clubhouse. The building rose majestically, they all agreed, they who had to a man become proficient carpenters and finish men.

Over a number of years, as they grew toward a global war surfacing on both oceans, meetings were

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The House No One Lived in held, elections concluded, designs and improvements of all genres initiated, trysts enamored, hope burst continually from that domicile in which no one lived, not as a home site.

When the town, through the office of the chief of police, demanded taxes be paid on the property, thus quickly abandoned by the clubmen to the town, to the weather, to the times. They relocated their activities to another phantom house they’d build on land without a road, deeper in the tall pines, stray apple trees feeding off the ground since the Civil War days, and tyrant oaks that held their territory.

The membership included Frank Parkinson, Eddie Oljay, Bud Petitteau, Homer Barnard, Allie Devine, Clete Weavering, Asa Parnell, Poker Symonds, Nial O’Hara, Chuck Grabowski, and others, by adoption or temporary association, whose names will only resurface as the story progresses. Some girls, of course, toward that quick run at war building in Europe, had honorary admission at all hours of day or night after a code of secrecy had been imposed.

Not one of those girls, from what I have heard over the long years, ever broke that code.

Even as the members pillaged materials in small doses from ready sources on Route One, begged and borrowed in addition to the stealing, the noises on the far side of two oceans began to sift into their meetings.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa “Hey, guys,” Poker Symonds said one night as the moon sifted down through the trees, “I just heard today Buzz Marchowski joined the Canadian Air Force and is already in Moncton or Shediac or St. Something somewhere. Eddie Smiledge down The Rathole told me. Says Buzz’s all pissed off about the Germans screwing up Poland where his grandparents are living on the family farm.”

Symonds, his name changed from hard-topronounce beginnings like Sczy and whatever, kept shaking his head as if he wondered why his name had been hidden behind soft edges. As it turned out, he was the first to leave the clubhouse one night, never to come back. Under the moon that night and light of kerosene lamps, others knew what was cooking in him; his eyes told the deep unrest so recently kicked free.

Each knew his turn was coming, that he was bound elsewhere on the globe’s face. If it touched Saugus in any manner at all, all swore an oath they’d be in the first line of recruits.

Germany was making too much noise, stepping on too many toes, bustling and bragging of their great inroads on small nations guarded by token armies, and Japan, like a lecher, was stretching its imperial hands across the rich skin and into too many orifices of the tasty Orient. In a matter of a week the balled fist of war came at them; one classmate, flying for the RCAF, was shot down over the English Channel; another enlistee, a neighbor of Parkinson’s,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The House No One Lived in was missing from an RAF flight over France; an uncle of Clete Weavering was stomped to death on the China coast as he tried to sneak out to sea to board a submarine after secret service on the mainland, and Oljay’s distant cousin was shot in front of a firing squad at the edge of a ghetto in Poland.

War, in its demand for enlistment, called them, young and exuberant in their outlook and it was in the next week they gathered in the clubhouse, the house nobody lived in, and made their plans to help save the world.

Frank Parkinson said, “We don’t go as a group.

We don’t get in one line to any branch of the service, and end up in one squad or one flight or one patrol, go down with one bang. We each go our own way. If we come back, or those who do come back, we’ll meet here. No Trafalgar Square for us or even under the clock at The Ritz. We will celebrate here someday.

We ought to go down to see the Chief and tell him our plans. He might understand. If not, we’ll tell him not to tell us.”

“Why can’t we go as a group, the whole club of us?” Oljay said, seeing the whole group as a squad of its own, firepower from the start, Robin Hoods or Lone Rangers waging battle.

Parkie said, “No matter if we walked in and got consecutive numbers, they’d split us up. They do things like that so we don’t clique it up. Makes sense to me, so we should each go our way. I’m going in

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa the army. When I heard about Big Red in Burma, it said I’d join the army.”

In a day’s time, it was all decided, for each of them, and all services were involved.

The war to end all wars bruised them all, each one, each in different ways, some with dread permanence. Clete Weavering was blown off the deck of a Navy supply vessel in the Pacific, never to be seen again. A year later an envelope ended up at the Legion Hall, from Clete, simply addressed to The Boys of Henshit Mountain, Saugus, Massachusetts. The Post Office, having no proper or known address, delivered it to the Legion Post, #210, to hold for any survivors of the war who might have been one of The Boys of Henshit Mountain. As it was, one old WW I vet said he knew of them and would deliver it to the first one who came home. The Legion held the letter for almost two years.

Then it was delivered to Bud Petitteau one evening at the Meadowglen Club as Bud had come home from two years in the far Pacific and hospital time, one hand gone from a nasty grenade. The old Legionnaire had heard Bud was home, spending time at The Meadowglen with some guys who had come home, and made a trip to deliver the letter, which was simple enough in its message: “Miss you guys like hell, but some good guys here. I just wanted to see if this gets through to the clubhouse or to any of you. We have heard stories

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The House No One Lived in about miraculous deliveries of real short addresses. If I don’t get to see you on the mountain, I am sure that we will catch up to each other sometime, someplace. Your clubhouse pal, Clete PS: Say hi to Mildred Derning for me. I got her last letter about a year ago and never did answer it for one reason or another. She’s a real cute kid I’ve thought about a few times.

(A note here: It was not revealed until 1950 that Mildred Derning had an eight-year old son she had named John Cletus Derning. She never married as far as I know and died in 1981. John Cletus Derning took down his physicians shingle in 2002. I don’t know if he ever knew anything about his father, but I hope he did. If this tells him, it’s about all I can do.)

Homer Barnard didn’t come home from the 2nd Infantry Division in the Pacific, and the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea, until 1954 and after he had served in a POW camp in North Korea for two years. One of his letters, addressed to The Clubhouse on Henshit Mt, Saugus, Mass., was hung up in a dead letter box and a postal center under construction until it fell from between the cracks of time in 1963. It was delivered back to Homer by a personal friend, an employee of the USPS and an army comrade from basic days, who had intercepted it finally en route to Saugus and recognized the sender’s name. He drove from New York one day in the fall to deliver it and spent a week

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa in Saugus. He even visited the original clubhouse, which by then had been jacked up and a cellar placed under it, three rooms added, and a porch wrapped half way and more around the house from where a huge section of Rumney Marsh was visible as well as a great chunk of the Atlantic Ocean on a good day.

The two men sat on the porch a good part of one afternoon with the owner, in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division with a few other Saugus boys, and the beer was free. They even went to see the Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs at Fenway Park, which ended up in a tie game.

Parkie, who admittedly only wrote one letter to the guys, which has not yet surfaced, but about whom much has been written by me, ended up on the hot sands of the Sahara and could have been dead a few times. Of him it has been said, him being The Municipal Subterranean in a poem: He comes up, goggled, out of a manhole in the middle of a street in my peaceful town, sun the sole brazier, like an old Saharan veteran, Rommel-pointing his tank across the four-year stretch of sand, shell holes filling up quick as death. I think of Frank Parkinson, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk, now in his grass roots, the acetylene smile on his oil-dirty face, the goggles still high on his high forehead, his forever knowing Egypt’s two dark eyes.

Frank told me his story one evening as we drank beer by old Lily Pond. It came around as

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The House No One Lived in “Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk,” and many people have read it elsewhere.

Asa Parnell, it has been said, wrote dozens of letters to the guys but sent his via Harry Clemson at The Pythian Alleys (The Rathole Poolroom its other half), who held them until one of the guys picked them up in 1945, after the big boom went down.

Parnell had 25 missions as a waist gunner of a B-17 over Europe well before D-Day and during that whole week of early June, went to school on the GI Bill, ended up with his PhD, taught at two Maine colleges for more than 30 years before he drowned in a kayak ride on the Allagash River when he was over 70 years old. He only came to Saugus at the Founders Day festivities, out front of the Town Hall in September of the year when, at times, 10-15 thousand people might pass through the center of town during the celebration, the accompanying mini-marathon race, and the high school football game every other year.

One year I heard that he found two other guys and they sat for four hours on the steps of the library hashing over the old days, and then he went north again, for his last ride a few years later.

Every so often, as if I’m being summoned by a voice, a face, the edge of a shared incident, I leave the vets section of the cemetery and visit Henshit Mountain, trying to find any remnant of a clubhouse, cellar in place, second floor added, perhaps a porch and a garage, a garden for summer attendance. Once an old fishing buddy, who had lived on the mountain

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa for many years, pointed out two or three places that had strange beginnings. “There are no shortcuts in those places. They were built well by guys who knew their business. They had OJT before there was OJT. Go down alongside old Lily Pond and more than half the houses down there were summer camps before the big war, and when the boys came back home from Europe and the Pacific campaigns and were looking for cheap quarters, they bought a camp erected on cement blocks and after a while jacked it up, put in a stone or poured foundation, got central heating, raised a family, added rooms, sold it, bought or built a new place, all part of the economy. Some of the original camps are now so sprawling over the landscape you’d have to get a pre-war aerial map to find the beginning forms of them.

Parkie carried on for 20 some torturous years before he hugged the earth for the last time, but not on Henshit Mountain, home away from home for a long time in his short life. Every Memorial Day I reflag his grave along with a host of people, and have done so for more than 25 years.

All of them are gone now, some here, some elsewhere. Four of the membership share the same plot with Parkie, and also with young S/Sgt Artie DeFranzo, of the 1st Infantry Division, who earned a Medal of Honor near the town of Vaubadan, France six days after he had gone ashore on Omaha Beach.

None of them ever climbed to the back end of Henshit Mountain after the war. The house that no one lived

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The House No One Lived in in really had passed on in their growth, even its nostalgia, for they had rushed onto the real estate of the whole globe.

Now and then, usually close to Memorial Day and again at Veterans Day, I drive up the hill, for that’s what it really is, a rise of about 300 feet above sea level, on a series of paved roads. From the road I can see two houses, now lived in for more than half a century, where no one lived when they were built. I can visualize the membership crossing the pond in winter on sleds loaded with purloined lumber and supplies, or on rafts tied together in the dead of summer nights. I know where they kept their beer in underground coolers, where it stayed cool and was hidden from the temptation of potential thieves. I know some of the girls, still here with us, grandmothers time and again, and greatgrandmothers, who swore to the secrecy code and will carry it away with them.

It’s on a rare occasion when I come face to face with one of those ladies in the aisle of a mall store, or at the library with a chosen book, or in the cemetery on a special day, and get a wink acknowledging the deep and mostly hidden years. We understand the past, the pact, the passions. We understand what loyalty means, and where things have gone in this short passage. * * *

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Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House “What the good Jesus!” Pete Tura yelled and disappeared, and as he said it again, his voice muffled, his mouth most likely closed by horse manure, a whole nine yards of it, the bottom of the collection box hanging from the second floor of the Hood’s Milk Company horse barn in West Lynn let go, taking my pal with it. I last saw one arm, not waving goodbye, probably trying to keep the pitchfork from doing him damage. Possibly he had tried to throw it behind him. That innocent weapon of deadly tines was not in sight as I peered down into the mixture of black clutter and hay still settling down with a metronomic slowness you could count.

In my throat came this heart of mine, bursting, threatening, making echoes of its own, surrealistic at best. Sounds of soft thumping rose up, of giant corduroys rubbing each other or horsehide and emery at toil, at once a bodily bang, a whoosh of air coming back with a smell I can recall yet, but no scream at first. Again I looked down at the pile, like a miniature pyramid of horseshit, in the bed of the

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House truck, an old Chevy stake body. Oh, fair, fair oh Pete, the new Egyptian, entombed; then he sounded out, he was down there, grunting, cursing in a closed mouth emphasis his surprise, his anxiety, his pissedoff frame of mind. Would he tell some girl tonight, I wondered, where he had been today? I saw the handle of the pitchfork extending from the pointed pile, motionless, obviously not having gored my pal.

Pistol Pete, safe but cruddy.

Dark-eyed, pimple-faced but still a ladies’ man to hear him tell it, Pete was facing Navy service in a few months. He had driven the truck from Fred Rippon’s mushroom house on the edge of Lily Pond in Saugus for the weekly collection of horse manure from a scattered half dozen horse barns. Whiting’s, McLean’s, Hood’s, The Creamery, lined our route for the morning. The afternoon ride would take us to a long, narrow fence-lined field in West Peabody where a pile of manure, now fifty yards long, five feet high, ten feet wide, waited new deposit.

It was 1943, the war on in newsreels at the State Theater and in onionskin letters from brothers out there where it was happening. Milk was still being delivered by horse-drawn wagon, and mushrooms were dependent upon the humus horse remnants and stall hay for successful spawning of the button type that Fred Rippon raised in the old icehouse. Once the mushroom house was Monteith’s Icehouse where ice off Lily Pond, at the tale end of winter, would stand thirty feet high in cut blocks amid a mix of insulating

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa sawdust. A steam boiler, ahuffing and apuffing, kept the temperature at 120 degrees Fahrenheit during mushroom crop growth. Now, they tell me, the whole process of raising mushrooms is computer-controlled, down to the critically required degree of heat and percent of humidity.

The bottom box-wide doors of the contraption had been unpinned and dropped open, and the week’s collection usually, from its own plug at wet gravity, dropped without hesitation to the truck bed aligned under it, stake sides made taller by the insertion of high boarding. This morning the box load hadn’t dropped. We tamped at the stubborn mass, jabbed it, forked it, and levered it with pitchforks angled against the edge of floor. We were grunts at grunt labor, straining muscles, trying not to breathe too deeply, but working in unison. Mule-stubborn, the horse manure would not find release, perhaps clutching unknown edges or frozen against the sides of the metal box eight feet wide, eight feet deep, eight feet high, angled steel holding the box below and grasping it from above. During the week the barn sweepers cleaned the stalls and dropped wheelbarrows of manure into the box. Contracted for free, we took the detritus, a weekly chore for some select Saugus boys wanting cash on the barrelhead for a day’s work, and generally on a Saturday of school weeks. Between the pleasant rides from one barn to the next, a routine of stories, cold Coca Cola or Royal Crown or Moxie from bottles filling in the passage, waving to girls, whistling, singing, was some

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House stinking hard work that left its residue odor upon the person.

Coming into Saugus Center one or more voices could be heard, from the steps of the Rathole Pool Hall or the front of the Slop Shop Diner or the doorway of McCarrier’s Package Store, sometimes in unison, always at a higher than ordinary octave.

“Hey, guys,” they’d yell, “there go the shit kickers!”

And with that yell there was lots of hand waving and pointing us out to general citizenry.

Pete, unfazed generally, now and then would yell out his window, “Go play with yourself, pal. I got cash in my pants!”

In the dead of winter he had initially taken me to the field in West Peabody, up the Newburyport Turnpike, westerly on Lake Street, perhaps the day at 25 degrees, though the Saturday sun bright as a bottle top in the sky. I was thirteen, the newest hire, rippling with young muscles ready for trying on hard labor, yearning for coin in my pockets. Of the pile of manure there had been stories. It would steam no matter the temperature when worked on. You could strip to the waist in mid-winter toiling in the middle of it. Steam poured from it like an engine off the Saugus Linden Branch, not as black but as impure, in odor, in fetid thickness that rippled in the nose strong as a summer outhouse.

Pete was no harbinger of fairy tales. “There are times, will be times, Tom, when you’ll bust your

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa ass working, but the pay is good. You can jingle your pockets at night. Even take my kid sister to the movies like you did the night we sicced the dog on you and he chased you all the way home. Shit, we laughed all night at that.” Pete roared with laughter as he drove the old Chevy truck up the Newburyport Turnpike.

I had never been there before, and Pete had said it flung itself, that pile, down the length of a field. It was as much as 150 feet long, he said; could be somewhat longer, spread its blackness ten to twelve feet wide, and loomed four to five feet high at a glance. And black as Hades, he said, black as Hades. It had a dark crust frozen over the length of it in winter that some days had to be chopped open, broken apart, with axes before it could be tossed into a spreader machine and fed other vermin- or pestchasing materials, such as peroxide. “Some pests, like flies, can ruin a whole crop,” he told me, holding the wheel with one hand, sitting back like a teacher in class.

As he often did, he paused and looked me in the eye, and I knew that was a signal for one of his worldly observations. “You don’t have to know all that, but it takes a special will to work on it.” Pause again. “I shit you none,” he guffawed, “and it makes demands!” And he could laugh at it all in that special way he had, possibly the art of suddenly putting unimportant things aside. Then, after a long moment of silence, he reflected more on the pile, as if he had

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House spent time on its introduction, weighing all the possibilities, measuring portent or promise, and said, “All that heat being held in just for us, just for that mid-winter steam bath. It seems like it’s always waiting for us.”

He said “us” collectively, and with some warmth. I liked that association and I suspected he was thinking about soon leaving it all behind. Many of our pals, neighborhood guys, slightly older, heroes before donning a uniform, were leaving us. In a hazy kind of celebration we’d learn ourselves only a few years later, Korea becoming a new word in our lexicon, we saw them off.

There was a whole gang of us, mostly from the nearby neighborhoods. Some of us off the farms that still greened part of the town, and off both sides of the river shoe-lacing through our end of Saugus. We desperately wanted a few bucks in our pockets, or to bring it home to parents, the lessons of the Depression still etched on our souls. Oh, the names.

Stan and Kenny and Lonnie and Donald Green, of which Stan had his own mushroom house later on.

Smiling Everett “Dingle” (last name lost forever but who could laugh from one end of the day to the other). Pete and Lennie and Charlie and Joe Tura who lived over against the edge of Vinegar Hill and who had a sister named Mildred. Don Ryder who became a pretty fair boxer I was in the ring with once and who was in Korea with me later on and wounded and walked with a limp and later saw poet friend Dan’l

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Shanahan in Alaska addressing a letter to me and asked is that Tom Sheehan from Saugus? Charlie McMillan from the edge of the pond. Ussed Hashem from across the river opposite the First Iron Works of America and who was universally liked and had a great smile of white teeth in a dark face. Reliable George Cronin (who went in the Navy with Ussed and his own brother Larry and they had lost their cousin Joe Berrett in Burma, a young, bruising giant of a kid I’ll remember forever, with great wrists and who could throw a football about the length of Stackpole Field). Everett Jiggsy Woods and Wally Woods (whose brother Dick had a power boat on the pond and a blue, propeller-driven iceboat that went like hell across the pond after telling skaters to clear the ice) and future brother-in-law Alfred Trahan who married their sister Tessie. Charlie Lawrence with whom I had a long bout in Ryder’s garage ring. A kid named Manuel also off the edge of the pond who had dark eyes and a nice serious face and who one day just disappeared out of my life like some of the others did, including tall and likable Bobby Lightizer. Bobby stepped out his front door one morning when I was walking the mile to school to tell me there was no school because it was 17 degrees below zero and hustled back inside.

They are all memorable, but of all the memories, I can see them most vividly at the pile of manure at Lake Street in West Peabody. Summer would be down on the top of us, or winter coming up out of the pile, the steam bathing us stripped to the

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House waist and red as tissue paper. Or we’d be shoveling it into the back of one of Rippon’s trucks or stomping it out of one of the milk company’s huge collection boxes on the second floor of huge barns. Some days we carried into the mushroom house hundreds and hundreds of baskets of manure, the substrate I learned later on it was properly called, that the elite button mushrooms were to grow in. That and a top inch of sterilized loam we also hustled into place.

Vermin and disease could raise hell with a mushroom crop. A crop could die. That happened too.

Life and hope and loss went on all around us, even as we spent our energies, thirteen and fourteen year old bodies coming of age, coming with inordinate demands being made on them, coming with the flow of grown-up mysteries, coming with hair in the crotch and strange misty mornings that somehow started to rule our lives, or put credence into them.

One of those days the telegram from the War Department about Joe Berrett came. Fire Chief George Drew, in perhaps a draw of the cards, had ended up with the awful assignment of walking up front walks all around town to tell parents their sons had been wounded or killed in action against the enemy. How he must had dreaded those trips, yet he wore his white hat with the shiny black visor, and a single medal on his chest, and gold buttons down the front of his jacket. Joe’s was one of those telegrams that sent a silence down a street of Saugus until the whispers gathered to a small storm in Saugus Center.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa One of the parents the chief visited, a coal man working in his yard after delivering coal all day, probably the soft coke the war had imposed on us, in all his black clutter and instant grief, chased Chief Drew down the street with a coal shovel, screaming at the top of his voice that his son was not dead. And later there was silence in the neighborhood one could weigh by the pound. I can feel it yet, cool and strangling and touching behind the eyes.

The coal man’s old truck, a megalithic machine, the monster chain having ripped out some of its guts, inert, gone to deep rust, finally disappeared one summer into the soft flank of Rumney’s Marsh. That’s the East Saugus wetlands area forever ferrous in taste, the way iodine and salt and iron inevitably come about as one odor and the always singular flavor. The truck was a Reo, the son’s name was Adam; my early casualties, along with Joe Berrett, that never let go. Not ever.

Yet mushrooms and horseshit continued to play a role for us. We’d have stripped the mushroom house in our work, or one section of the house, of all the mushroom beds, breaking down the beds built earlier seven-beds high and each one about four feet wide. The planks and boards would be taken outside the house, cleaned, steamed and sterilized before being taken back into the house, and piled up for the next bed construction. We’d set the first bed, then fill it with the warm compost, then set the second bed and fill, until we reached the top one.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House The process consisted of preparing the manure or substrate compost in the beds, adding spawn (you might call it seed) to it with a sterilized loam over the top of the manure about an inch thick. It had to be taken care of then for a number of weeks under the most suitable environmental conditions, until the mushroom crop was ready for harvest. The growing period oftentimes took eight or more weeks, with the cultivation completely independent of weather or seasonal changes. Temperature and humidity had to be carefully controlled for ultimate growth and reaping.

Our growing medium or compost was, as I’ve said, milk wagon horse manure. It did not come off the streets the way some gardeners in those days would walk out with a bucket and shovel to scoop up the droppings for small gardens. Weekly we cycled it out of the barns and added it to the pile, until the compost was ripe. Mushrooms, for your information, do not contain chlorophyll and do not need sunlight for their nutrients. Their nutrients come from the organic matter in the compost, in this case the richness of treated horse manure. And they do not grow from seeds, but from microscopic spores, which are fungi, grown from mature mushrooms. After a matter of a couple of weeks, the spawn shows it has grown throughout the treated manure and looks like a thinly-veined network of white lace, called mycelium, and is actually the roots of the coming mushrooms. The beds, now covered by this veining, are topped with a layer of sterilized or pasteurized

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa soil or loam, which acts as a reservoir for moisture.

The mycelium grows up through this last layer and forms white pins, which grow sometimes twice their size in 24 hours, until the button mushrooms are ready for the knife, and the neat five-pound basket, and the market.

The walls of the mushroom house, the old Monteith Icehouse, of course, were nearly two feet thick and were filled with an almost orange sawdust, providing the best known insulation for the time. It always makes me think of two closely related things; Sawyer’s Icehouse at the other end of Lily Pond, where I worked one and only one winter, and my return from Korea where I had gone in my turn at departure, as you’ll see.

At Sawyer’s Icehouse: Where it was always horses, dragging ice to the wooden ramp obeying chugs of the gasoline engine, their traces often slack as the ice slid on ice and thundered slowly and resolutely from hard shore to hard shore. Up the ramp the ice cakes lumbered, six feet of Arctic beauty before the huge saw found the blue and silver-red signals sitting just under cover and waiting to flash once more before sawdust poured down on their frantic coloring. I have no hard memory of the men who steamed their labors on the hard pond, who swore and drank coffee from bottles whiskey belonged in, who went gloveless and carefree and irreverent to winter. Of their faces I have no memory, or names, or how they spent their money downtown,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House or where they trod for stitches when the angry saw went haywire. I only know they poled ice floes and huge cakes with an indifferent touch, that they argued long hours against the cold, the wind, and the incessant need and desperate need for sleep, that at zero degrees they mopped brows with red kerchiefs large as sails.

They were the reverse itinerants who came not for fruit but for ice drop. They appeared one Saturday in December and began to take away pieces of our pond, huge rectangular chunks they hitched up to horses shrouded wholly in steam, their wide mouths rimmed by thick lips often white with frost around the red tongues. The ice harvesters wore soft felt hats, brimmed, jackets so odd you could not find a mate, but boots with horsehide laces, wide belts, and looked westward where the sun would set part ways through the afternoon. In latest July, ever, you could find December deep in the icehouse under the waves of orange sawdust still wet with some of their sweat. It was a cool hideaway to puff the stub of a cigarette, touch a first glorious breast, play hide and seek for hours as winter sprawled under our feet cold and foreboding and nearly two floors high inside redan walls two feet thick. Mostly I remember the eyes of a horse that plunged through the ice, like great dishes of fear, wide and frightened and full of the utmost knowledge. His front hooves slashed away at the ragged rim of ice, but could not lift him out, or leather traces or ropes or sixty feet of chain, and when he went down, like a boat plunging, huge

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa bubbles burst on the surface and a December afternoon became quiet. We stood transfixed, as if frozen in the gray of that day, the itinerant workers, other horses at rest, my shod friends, as Lily Pond began its disappearance under the edge of yesterday.

But those days were our own glory days at Rippon’s Mushroom House, working hard, sweating, being part of a force, the group effort, and having cash put into our hands at the end of the day. Part of that force moved off and away from us at regular intervals, bound for army fatigues or sailor blue or marine or flyer’s gear.

And younger replacements came as we moved manure from the milk wagon barns to the field for the compost pile and mixing of peroxide to kill vermin and pests. Finally, after many turnings and aeration, we trucked it to the mushroom house where we filled and hauled and carried hundreds and hundreds of baskets of it inside.

In summer weather, the day of labor behind us, we’d often go fully clothed into Lily Pond off the remnants of the ice ramps, where ice floes once were hustled into the old icehouse. There’d be hollering and noise and snapping of wet clothes in an attempt to rid them of the day’s odors, and an eventual move back into sopping dungarees and sneakers for the walk home.

Now and then we’d catch sight of a girl or two peeking at us from behind bushes and we’d vie to get

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House their names. Some of us might have paid for that information. But we paraded like soldiers afterward, a day’s work done, our spirits high, and we marched joined, confederated, clubbed by our choice at labor.

The shit kickers at payday, dropping coin onto the kitchen table, pitching in while our older brothers were out there in all that noise we only heard in the newsreels of the State Theater, or when a silence on one of our streets could suddenly, after the fire chief got out of his car in front of some friend’s house, thunder down into the center of town. In June of 1952, after a year in Korea, I came home and was separated from the Army. The next month, at ten o’clock on the night before the Fourth of July, the mushroom house caught fire. Flames roared through the sides and came up through the roof as all that wall-packed sawdust exploded like canon shot.

When the roof imploded and a huge ball of fire and smoke shot into the sky, gutters and roof tops in Lynnhurst more than half a mile away caught fire. I sat on the peak of my parents’ home watching the flames carry away lots of memories that have just started to come back. And I wonder about Bobby Lightizer and Manuel and Donny Ryder and where they are and what they are doing, and some of those other warm and memorable shit kickers who have passed on but are here remembered, for this moment at least. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

Lover, not Yet Lover

And

so it was, plain and simple, a necessary thing to do, an oath moving in one’s self at the beginning of resolve, a slow upward presence, a climbing of spirit, so that he saw it coming as if from a field of mist caught out atop a pasture, the morning young, dew spread and spent under the sun exerting itself always, and with it all he saw the outcome, how it would come down the line swift as a memory in some far place where he was out of this habit range, this wide place he might have called home grounds except it was not solicitous at the time, and that memory, as stark as it might be at the finish of its appearance, would come like that same mist off the grass, at first as conceivable, then as probable, and finally, with a conscious note of thanksgiving, come whole and moving and it would be her in a final presence in the same place, in his heart and not his mind, in his heart and not behind his eyes where he thought he’d see it again and again, in his heart and not in his hands the way he’d recall her at odd moments of the night with a twist and a turn and a sigh, but sleep now a dread enemy, sleep an

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Lover, not Yet Lover impossibility, sleep that came of wretched evasion and long mourning, and just as always she’d be visible in a new haven, looking at him, her chin in hand, blue eyes as wide as ever, and sending him that continual message, only to have it waylaid by someone other than either one of them, another body in her place, a new touch, a new taste, a woman of thought, a woman possible, perhaps around the corner, perhaps at the next cup of tea, perhaps a pair of eyes he’d know would be her eyes in the second place of their coming, and he’d roll over and hate himself and cry his poor soul to sleep.

Where it all began and might end had come upon him as surprise comes to any alert soul, her illness an unaccustomed turn, a brevity of concern at first, a slight indication of some small piece not working, the way it happens in ordinary door chimes, the least of importance, for the knock would follow and the entrance conducted and the gaiety loosed once more, or then, more thorny, as in a clock where a spring might be caught unawares or a notch filled with debris or a gear snagged, and time, by the minute, would go its way, or an hour, to the end of the month where some due would get undone, unfinished, lost.

He’d know his loss more than separation, more than death.

She had the last words saved up for a delivery meticulous and persuasive: “Do not stop what you

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa are doing; do not chase after me in any hurry; and in all loyalty and bound by this promise, find someone to talk to, to read to, to release to.”

He brought himself back to a new day where it would begin for him, coming that ordinary way, in a soft hour of evening as the sun tipped its hat goodnight at the kitchen window and across the room in a friend’s house he could see her acknowledging again one of her last days, in that special way she had of salutation, reminding him how everybody on God’s hard earth loved her, the patients whose cries she could hug, the nurse orderlies that she trumpeted to all and sundry, how they had come from devastation and nothing to hope for, unto this place of hope, agreeing with her that all should be pain free and exalted in their dignity, even as all those days dwindled into sobs few heard but her at the door of the room, at the end of the hall, with the last step from the inside of that huge place to the outside, the evening blessing her tired moves, her muscles, her spirit looking for nourishment for the day to follow, for surely repetition was the sin there.

He knew how it would happen.

It began for him, across a room in that friend’s home where people mixed in merriment and talk of another loss and celebration, the babble and groundswell moving in slight waves keeping all corners alive not with the same words but with the same intents … the look, the approach, the answer,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Lover, not Yet Lover the assent without a sound, agreement working the fields of the bodies in the large room, in the field of his body, that new pair of eyes saying all the things he might want to hear, putting aside judgments and comparisons, putting aside the cause of the initial attraction, because her eyes were running with the words he could not hear but understood, the way semaphore flags at the lip of an aircraft carrier can spell its position and its acceptance to a pilot winging his way home, out of gas, praying for the lap of safety, the parts all together for maybe the last time in this life.

Later, the stub of afternoon coming spent, the one with the announcing eyes would point out the window to three children of the neighborhood playing in a side lawn of a neat house whose red bricks had taken on a dusky red hue the sun has some days in late summer, whose hedges were trimmed by a barber with comb and scissors, and whose windows must have been dressed by a quaint old lady who had asked for one more turn at decoration to carry her name and her last thought caught up in a pairing of colors.

This mere stranger for the moment, who had come from across the room at the beginning of her place in all of this, with her own loss, stared at the children, a light falling across her face, across the lenses of her eyes in the way those children ought to be seen, in a choice part of the inner eye, a roll call

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa brought to bear with their histories coming on, the schools of their growing years assembled piecemeal in the new fiction as though they were now promised, or had been promised long before these new parents had come on the scene to make their wishes, to say their prayers, to offer their thanksgivings.

Her voice had a mysterious quality in it. “Let’s make them ours.” She said it with soft passion, with an eye on their clocks, and with solemn promise, as if it had already happened, that mini-adoption, that quick attachment. “Let’s watch them whenever we can, as obliged we would be, enjoy their goodness ahead, their coming small sadness, see them leap up and onward, and hold them dear as we ought in the silence of our hearts. That is the most of love I can muster.”

The words that followed might have been spoken before, by her of the past.

“Let’s be in love again, each of us, with all possibilities for as long as we can.” She took his hand and held it close and in another moment he knew she’d move his hand upon the promise.

The nights would say their names and it would be enough to hear the soft syllables.

And so the way it was supposed to happen, it did, love advancing the soul’s illumination of inner light, the mass of it coming at once, at first an illusion

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Lover, not Yet Lover so beautiful it was previously unimagined, and then, after his wanton sleep was beset and circulated with toss and turn and turmoil, and with a side glance at once mistrusted but leaving a hard dent in his memory, she moved from the covey of her own shadow into the scan of his horizon, and remains in that one spot, that totally owned place by herself, a grace emanating from that aura unseen as music but the tempo and the unbidden language coming along with it, the rhythm of a woman who moves with ease into the depth of a man where she assimilates, absorbs, animates by a motion so subtle to this day it still overpowers him .

She moved like the appreciation of a mountain morning hovering over a lake, a mist slow in ascension to translate into an unseen level allowing iridescence of innumerable growths to appear in a painting his eyes said existed solely for his vision, at the moment no other person seeing what he was seeing; and in its climbing into a nothing that did exist for his wonder and awe, became the other side of the lake, she in one image he had put away for all time as that one image to salvage him from despair and loss so unequivocal it promised no future to his natural hunger and need; knowing from the inception she was a dream come alive for him, this woman, a mere mist at first, coming alive, a smile wide as horizons, coming alive, a voice saying she was real, coming alive, its tone so meticulous and full of clarity it struck him with lightning delivery, the first word

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa coming alive his name, the very first sound saying she was thinking of him and beset with the energies and want that had littered his days and nights steady as cast-off memories shunted aside but never letting go, the other truths hanging on, past dear life.

His name came softly in the night, in the truth of darkness, on the breath of a woman moving the way only a woman moves, a languorous length of her, a gloried broadness, a hip salutation as much signature as identification, into his mind before all else, into the spirit sitting there alone and waiting for the word, the gesture, the hand sending its touch on a linen full of sound but so silken and smooth it was as if his name came carried there first, the manner of the passage as much invitation as any invitation might be broadcast from soul to soul, the call heard and the reply sent outward, the elegant length of her reduced, brought closer, a loop in its coming, a grasp, a homing brought to bear his all, an ascension of will silent at first but then pounding in his heart, and then to his mind where it evolved as the transfer of love more monumental yet existing in that languorous depth beneath him in a grip only her kind owned.

He said her name, and it rose pious, devout, though of a second nature, an element about in the night like an unseen feather on unseen air but letting off a whisper of sound, a whisper of such promise and continuity it came of soul salvage, of mere dreaming, of harnessed energy, of the ultimate connection of

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Lover, not Yet Lover essence and turmoil mixing the grander ingredients where imagination alone is the king, the guidepost, the whip soft as bee flight, as positive, her grasp essential.

Then, in brevity of concern, of conscience, he heard her voice as from the far end of a tunnel, or the top of a mountain so distant it was out of sight, the soft syllables advancing on him the way balm dissolves worry and fright, the way it descends on the ache in a spirit.

It was necessary now, he thought, the time arrived for it to happen, and he moved a ways and looked behind him and saw how far he had come in this loneliness, in this short time, and it was bigger than an ache, and it moved on him as slow as he thought about himself and then her, and there was silence he could not comprehend, which made him think of being a distant star looking back here and saw himself less than he was and knew the difference, knowing nothing of time, only of manner --- how it happened, not why, not where, but knowing the form of it.

It was her. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

The Storekeeper

Before

I knew what was going on, at twelve years of age, I saw what was going on… with Putney Grimes, who owned the Pioneer Grocery and General Store near my house, and one of his customers, Maxine Greenery.

Truth of the matter was I didn’t know what I was actually seeing, or couldn’t understand it until much later, but parts of this life were moving around me, memories as well as history being made, records being kept, innocence being expelled one way or another, true innocence. World War II, of course, was trampling on a whole tide of innocence. Glad tidings said General MacArthur was back in the Philippines, but on the other side of that, Glenn Miller was reportedly lost in the North Sea. My mother looked dreamy-eyed at that news, the way she could share some things without talking about them. In my own little way, then with just those dozen years in hand, I knew I was part of it all, part and parcel. Pieces of it

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper enveloped me, or lifted me, or brought me down; experience building its everlasting testimony.

As for Putney and Maxine, a warmth was in our midst, in spite of the shape of the world, even if I could not give it a name. I couldn’t name it and I couldn’t touch it, but it was there. It all centered in the store, small heart of the universe we knew. Much later I could call myself, in retrospect, the love child because I saw the love blooming between them right there in front of me, day by day, even though it took more than a few years time, and I, of course, in my own growth, felt the changes.

The way it was for a while was that Maxine Greenery could be a widow for all we knew, and with two sprouting boys. The hard words came one evening just as supper hit the table and twilight was still holding sway, the shadows soft, day dwindling down to its knees: her husband Harry had been declared missing, lost at sea from a destroyer in the Mediterranean Sea, half a world away, a lifetime away. Shadows joined with shadows, loss atop loss.

George Drew, the Fire Chief, brought the word. He was the self-appointed dispenser of the awful tasks in his snappy uniform, black gloves, white hat, pants pressed so that the creases were like sheet metal lines, and all blue, the length of him all blue. When he tucked his white hat under his blue arm, every person on the street knew it was not an inspection of the premises being approached, the slow walk into a front

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa yard, the unhurried climb to the porch, the soft tap on the door. And nothing followed that first announcement of the loss of Harry. No whispers. No rumors. Loss settled on us, heavy as one could imagine.

Harry was one of the good guys around our corner before he left, and Maxine was seen as a regular customer of Putney’s. She had been a customer since Harry put her in that converted barn he had worked on for Ladd Griffin just around the turn from Putney’s store, when he went off in the Navy. Harry was a magician with hammer and saw, good old Harry, and had the acute eye for resurrection, bringing old lines of structures into new lines, new plumbs, walls standing the way they were meant to stand, with the good shoulders. In due time, the way promise evolves, as all the neighbors had said almost at once when he went away, that Harry would build his own house when he came back, when his turn came up, but those chances were now gone and slim at best, it appeared.

But the main guy here from my angle, Putney Grimes, owned and was the sole employee of the Pioneer Store in my end of town, near the first Iron Works in America that lay untouched for more than 300 years. When my pals and I had a few spare coins, Putney’s store was where we ended up, a postDepression magnet for kids used to grasping. Many of my friends had found labor to our liking, our stretch

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper to manhood, the war moving at far edges, almost visible, the way we saw the Newsreels at the State Theater on Saturday matinees. And we had small jobs then, paying small change. We had a lot to do with scrap metal drives, paper collections, keeping our lips zipped, pretenses of one sort or another.

Earlier, in a stretch toward manhood, we had carried baskets of manure and sterilized loam into the old mushroom house on Lily Pond. It used to be an ice house before Freddie Rippon converted it to a mushroom house where, if the crop was fairly large and there was no disease, he could make some good money. As kids we shared that whole enterprise, eventually loading trucks going off to the market in Boston, filling our pockets with slim coins while mothers sat at their kitchen tables waiting for donations.

As it was, most of my pals had a handle on such tasks in Saugus, closing in on the mid-century mark, money times better than they had been for a handful of years, and some of the old guys that made it back from Europe and the Pacific were comfortably on leave or medically discharged, enriching all of us with new gestures, new stories, seemed like a whole new language. They brought their pieces of the world back with them, dumping much of it in our laps, the laps of those who had stayed at home, the kid brothers and kid neighbors and those who couldn’t

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa make the fit. My brother came back from the wild Pacific, right off an aircraft carrier twice hit by Kamikazes and once by a torpedo, never telling us until he got home, and my cousin Warren came back from Europe after Patton shook his hand in front of a gathering of troops out there on the edge of the Old World. Pretty special for a Saugus kid.

On the other hand, a few of their comrades managed to slip off the trains in Saugus Center near midnight, coming right out of North Station and the Army Base or the Charlestown Navy Yard, like they were total strangers. And I guess some of them were, they had changed so much, had seen so much. All their stories, though, came as gifts, long into our new nights of discovery, a new expression, a new outlook, a new hope even as we realized many of the dark parts were being glossed over. Some did not make the return trip and there was a time when I knew all their names and all their faces, what they had left in the till for me, a kid from this end of town.

Putney’s Pioneer Store was where much of the talk and information passed from hither and yon to all the houses in our end of Saugus. He carried a whole arsenal of goods besides the usual grocery items; most of the time catering to the ladies with cloth goods, small hats, big bowls, you name it and he’d get it. He specialized in information too. You could tell that Put was eager for all kinds of intelligence, as though he had been selected to be a communication

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper center, keeping people informed, ranking news, passing tidbits that ordinarily didn’t plan much hurt for anybody. Some things, I knew, he kept to himself, letting others pass the word, as if he was a sieve screening out the bad parts.

I think it was the melancholy of the war that mostly triggered Putney, changed his expression, changed his manners, and damn near changed his language. The war and its odd pieces daily came down the street and through his door like the wind had kicked it open, like the words of another telegram hitting straight at a heart or two, or a distant shot or shell seeming to come home to the storekeeper in a gulp of morning air, as though aimed at him from the very beginning. All this culminated for him in Maxine and her current status as “widow.� He was the onlooker who cared even though it was at a polite distance. They regarded each other in these times with awareness, each of them at some point of loss, at loneliness or linen.

Then, in days of recovery, when the war was finally being won, Putney and Maxine were allowed to be drawn by their needs. As it stood, the future loomed lonely for both of them. When Maxine was in the store, she was always visible to Putney, who would put himself to that advantage no matter what aisle he was working in or who he was waiting on. He did it casually, not at all obvious to most other customers, but a perfect chameleon to my eyes. On

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa odd occasions he’d let me sit beside the side door and read comic books for free, as long as I did not crease them too much. It was a measure of his charity, of the blossoms that ripened in his heart. From my spot at the side door I had a view down the front counter and down the back aisle. The first time Maxine stretched to put something back on a higher shelf, a packet or container she had dislodged from its place, I caught a half smile on Putney’s face, though at the moment he was waiting on the neighborhood witch, Ethel Nourseling, my old teacher with the strap or the harsh ruler for a wayward tongue. Maxine always wore dresses that seemed to have been slipped onto her slim frame, silky and soft and smooth the way they flowed with her curves and graces and all the goodly package; that package contained blond hair soft as a summer cone, wide eyes that surprise found a good home in, lips a favored pink blossom had touched just about every time out, and a warmth, a warmth that was never spectacular, not for those of us who looked closely, but always countable, easily marked and noted, as though a small party had started someplace and she was invited.

Putney, a bachelor all the way to forty, was not a handsome dog, as one wag said, but he was neat. You might know it… grocers tend to be neat, sort of going along with the territory… everything in its place to catch they eye, the silent art of advertisement, the handless reach. Things that look good might taste good, or feel good. To boot, certain

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper facets of Put’s behavior ought to be mentioned for the best picture of him. For absolute sure, he knew the store the way a woman knows her kitchen, shelf and larder, cabinet and cupboard, the bins and barrels at the end of the main aisle like greengrocer totems… what’s stacked where, or put behind, what’s left in easy reach and another tucked away under the counter for special days, or consigned for the next special sale or holiday. His clock, or his calendar, was pretty near perfect for his customers, for our neighborhood. Now and then we’d see it working, the close lookers among us, like him spotting old Della Crandall coming down the street and dipping below the counter to lay out what had been hidden for more than a week, a new bolt of cloth or an infernally new utensil the adventurous lady would grab in a minute.

They’d been ordered for her and salted away for the most appropriate visit, as if old Put had a hand directly on her pulse, on her current interests.

In addition, he always wore an apron that was adorned with the day’s work, wore it like a good soldier wears his chevron, as one might say. He was proud of his work, his store, and he was potentially if not actually prosperous. As a stock boy he had worked there for the previous owner, went away for ten years, came back and bought the place, as if he had planned it right from the very start. His hello each morning was broad, meaningful, countable, him having risen early to greet the day, to be there before the baker and the milkman and the newsboy. Early

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa energy became him, the quick movements, the lack of indecision, jump starts on a new day. One man operations have to be fed that way.

His razor thin mustache was little more than a hairline’s width, and moved each time he spoke, smiled or expressed want or dislike. I never really knew what color his eyes were; I guess I never really looked, though they did come off as some kind of greenish bit, sort of changeable under other expressions or enlightenment. Narrow in the waist from a lifetime of shelf stocking and lifting, and a sane and steady diet one could imagine, he moved about athletically, as if he were in a game. Neat and athletic our grocer. On top of the small ladder he could stock the top shelves with good speed, never losing balance, reaching just far enough when he had to. The neatness advanced in order to the store’s ambience, the certainty of odors that abounded on certain days, on every day of some sort or other.

There came coffee grinding and candy smothering my mouth and nose the minute I entered the door. It had been that way for a couple of years, the grateful larder of the corner store, pungent and ripe and so full of goodness I could feel the blossoms of it coming into the branches of me. There was the fresh vitality of new bread, fresh baked and threatening the back of my throat, saying I could grab some and run, or scrounge for a half loaf, and worry about the butter later on. And jumped up the freshness of lettuce and husky tomatoes and apple stuff so rich it could make

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper your knees bend. Lastly, just as threatening, came the special meat days, when pork came on the run or cow’s liver or lamb kidneys advancing a whole new odor the kitchen got ripe with. Some days it could have been the edge of the slaughterhouse dumped on us, or the block outside Kmita’s chicken house where the ax swung in morning sunlight and I could see a hen’s last roost as darkness came close to it. I finally figured a whole lot of it out, all on my own… I had always been hungry, the Depression Kid always with an angle toward food.

Once, just as the door opened and a whistle of wind came about, or an airy breath because it was spring, Putney came to attention. I caught the scent too, the fragrance, not of the day or the May smells that came along in with it, like new leaves and new blooms and the old earth winding itself up again, but another and newer one, especially for me… and old Put, hardly paying attention the minute before, spun on his heels and Maxine was there, slim as ever, in her light blue dress sitting on her like a blossom, inhabiting the doorway. There was first the alert of fragrance, then the heart of fragrance, and a rocking in our souls, in deeply where it must count, where redolence, known, gathers all kinds of reactions. It was a sharing, that frequency coming on air, a quite special broadcast of a special bouquet. It fully carried Maxine on those private sheets of air.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa And old Putney was at heads up. And Maxine glowed her usual warmth, as if she belonged in that place more than any place else, in the midst of all the sensual goodness. To my eye he and Maxine each had a fair amount of grace. I think, even from my angle, I put them together before they were together, though I’d never be sure of the timing.

Some of it meant, at least for me, that it was okay for them to look upon each other, that it was okay to look good, look neat, look to one’s best advantage, if merely for the looking. It was permission from two lonely people not saying a word about such acceptance. Every time a teacher said, “Neatness counts,” I was alert to Putney and Maxine, if but the extension of their images working the back of my head like a piece of a black and white film. Now and then, of course, in my mind’s eye, going through my own exploding new dimensions, I was alert to her preparations, as to how she primped and primed herself, where she sent the kids while she did so, at least not alerting them that their mother was being a bit selfish, reaching out in a most harmless way but behind a closed door, locked away with herself and whoever might be tempting her company.

Putney was harmless from any standpoint, but he had keen eyes. I was always sure that she knew about his eyes. And I knew how her dress slipped easily onto her frame, thought of how she might have shrugged but a single shoulder to let it fall gracefully

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper in place, and fully assumed that Putney had the same picture, the soft sounds of elegance and mystery coming together in the same motion, the same slow blur of beauty that might be slipping into place from a simple shrug.

When Doug Matlick’s body was shipped home from a Marine plane crash in North Carolina and lowered into the Veteran’s Section of our cemetery, I was there with my father who had been in the Marines. It was his own salute to Doug. Doug was Harry’s best friend. Putney saluted too, the only time I ever saw him in a suit, plain and gray and new looking, and never once looking at Maxine the way he did in the store, for Maxine was there, being an old friend of Doug’s. Before I knew it, we were there again, for another of Harry’s friends who had come home for good, almost able to touch his old pal and teammate Doug, for they were now part of a new huddle in a corner of the cemetery, close as they ever were. For sure, teammates again.

I knew every face at both services and the burials and could mark each of them in their places around town, and felt all the sadness you could expect a body to hold. I didn’t cry, though, did not a shed tear, but when I looked at Putney I saw he was shaken past his roots. It was as if everything all the others had felt closed in around him, and around Maxine who only once turned and looked at him with

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa the most serious look I had seen in a long time. It was as if she had spoken, but with silence.

I watched them for two years as the slim war victories became big victories, and more of them came rousing across the face of the globe. The two of them eventually seemed to grow toward each other without really knowing how close they were.

Wiley Okens said at The Vets one night that “them two ought to find how to scratch each other’s backs ‘stead of sparrin’ around like pretending.” Many folks in town knew that Maxine was finding a bit of release in Putney from what was hounding her, the squeezed pillow, the silent nights. Putney allowed her more than a sense of hope, but all of it at a distance no matter how close they got on days she came to the store to pick up a few things for the house. Even when there were days it came off as mere exercise to walk to the store and go away empty-handed, she did not leave with an empty heart. Yet, at forty years of age, distilled in his manners and outlook, damn near cemented in place if not character, Putney had that one old-time speed. Of course, Maxine’s two boys would now and then enter into the slow-moving stand-off of sorts, tipping the scales in pro and con arguments the way kids do more than people realize.

Malcolm Burdus the undertaker offered, “One mouth advanced to four mouths is some kind of algebra no matter what math says.”

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper Putney’s down to earth and thoughtful approach was appreciated by those who voiced opinions on romance, illicit or otherwise. “He don’t rush that girl out of her boots none at all,” Malcolm told Wiley one night and later on said, “If he don’t hurry up, I’m going to beat him to it.” All of them somehow knowing that Putney had ceased a regular Saturday night removal from town that was seen as a concession to Maxine and the space that had grown in his heart.

“Hell,” Wiley replied, “he’s got all the time in the world, Malcolm, and you got all the room in the earth. But I’m suspecting that ole Put has just that one speed and we ain’t seen it yet.” So the talk moved on about them, and the store leaped upon good days for Putney when Maxine came in through that front door like spring was sliding around behind her playing games.

All the time, no matter how we read it, the unknown sat on the face of each of them, the uncertainty, the Fates that move all around us like the tides on a beach, touching, drawing back, nipping and tapping, neap and run, like the manner of unvoiced threats and promises.

As it turned out, things happened at night to old Putney. It was always at night or the approach of night as it gathered down the street or from across town and he could feel a descent coming down around him.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa One evening, almost to closing time on one of his late night closings, a shower and a visit to the library ahead of him, two young fellows robbed bachelor Putney of what was in the till. The eleven dollars, all singles, were hardly worth their efforts, as he had hidden under darkness the balance of the day’s take inside a pair of rubber boots hanging on the wall behind the counter, safe enough for the bank in the morning. But one of the young fellows snatched a candy bar as he and his companion were leaving with their eleven dollar gain. It was a Sky Bar. All Putney could think of was somehow getting a box of candy to Maxine, then he realized he hadn’t been shot for eleven dollars. He told that to the police chief, in so many words.

Then, on another night in our local history, without notice or fanfare, from what unknown terrors he had been caught up in, and much older, Harry came home, came into the store late, as if riding the darkness itself, the ghost of all ghosts, despite the edge of his voice yet still haggard and not at all like his old self. He hailed Putney from the door. “Hey, Put,” he said, “howdy partner, I’m going up to surprise Maxine. Got a nice box of candy for me?

Good as you got. I ain’t got much else to carry.”

Putney would never forget those words of Harry’s.

If it was a bad turn and a bad year for Putney, it was a bad year for Harry too. And also for Maxine,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper as one could imagine. Harry, after the quick celebration and a hundred stories taking all kinds of shapes, the dark and the doomed, filled with odd characters and fairy people, ogres and demons of all measures and reaches, drank from one end of the day to the other. For a whole year he didn’t pick up a hammer or a saw. Maxine once in a while would come into the store with a puffy lip, or a tear in her eye.

Put had to look away, mind his own business, fall out of love if he could, for beyond all things that mattered it was a hopeless situation. She was hurting and Put stopped looking at her the way he had for those few years of his dependence on her.

The story that made the rounds was indeed bizarre, if anything more bizarre than war can be, and rescue at the ends of desperation. Harry, it was learned, was pulled from the Mediterranean by a French fisherman and hidden in the fisherman’s house. For a long while he was tucked away in a secret space in the attic of the fisherman’s house, where, through one small opening above an eave he could watch the small village square as it revolved under the war and under Nazi occupation. One hellacious day he saw the Germans execute three American fliers right in the square and saw their bodies dropped into a hole, doused with gasoline, and torched. When the fire died out, the remains were covered over at the end of the day, interred right in the square of the little village. Three days later, when house searches were renewed by the Germans, the

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa fisherman moved Harry to another house and a secret room whose access was halfway down the depth of an old well in the cellar. That “hole in the wall” led to a spacious room dug into the hillside many years earlier for a different cause. The new “landlord” had a daughter, Yvette, just 17, who shined on Harry and visited him at least once a week and often stayed most of the night. When she became pregnant, it was apparent the family wanted to keep Harry under cover for as long as they could. Yvette gave birth to a son, and Harry was kept in the room some months after the war was over before he climbed out one night and made his escape.

He fled his European life.

But, as one must realize, the memories of Yvette, and the memory of another son, never quite left Harry. Maxine never admitted to knowing, but she must have known some of the mystery. Harry’s long incarceration, the visitations of his young lover, the subsequent son, all hounded him no end. All of it had followed him home to Maxine and the two boys and the subsequent nightly visits, away from home, to bar after frivolous bar, to friend after frivolous friend. The pattern was constant and unbreakable and the deadly inroads were open.

We did not hear the stories come up as spoken history here in town; they drifted in on their own feet, on an everywhichway wind from odd sources coming across town lines by postmen, taxi drivers, delivery

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Storekeeper men, the coal man Merv Takens who thought Harry should be hospitalized because he had flown on that same flight of alcohol. Problems knocking at Harry’s heels were openly discussed in the barber shop, the post office, and in our own bars, though never in the ear of Harry on his way back to the house after a night on the next town, or the one beyond that. After a while we could picture him being followed, ghostlike, by his French lover and mother of his son, and the son himself. That had to be a bear to carry on one’s back already borne to drop weights easier than promises.

One night, the moon behind a sudden cloud, mist rising as from the earth the way fog walks on water and roadways and intemperate reaches, history making new demands, life itself asking for settlements, Harry was killed as he walked across the turnpike from one bar to the next, going from John’s Bar to Ma Taylor’s Kitchen across Route One. One of his own drinking buddies ran him down, never seeing him on the dark road, never seeing the dark specters stepping right out behind his drinking pal, never seeing those who were keeping Harry company.

Putney, to his everlasting credit, started all over. And I watched him again, from a new perspective and a new awareness, only this time he must have measured time and what had been eaten up of that which had been granted to him in the first place. For he picked up some speed in his delivery,

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa like he was coming right out of the bullpen at Fenway Park.

One night a few months later he carried with him his best box of candy and Maxine opened the door for him. Putney the storekeeper shifted directly into second gear. Nothing was ever the same again. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner

The Rig Runner

For

a pure moment trucker Rene Destot had felt above it all, above dawn at its tatters, above the voice coming at him from day’s edge. King of the throne he was, king of the hill, the road having slammed under him all night long. The 475 horses loose in the truck’s Caterpillar engine sounded their endless music, hummed under his seat bottom, talked lightly to his wrists. (Controlled rampage, the voice had said long before he used to think about owning a Kenworth, Earth-mover, star-hauler.) House-big, highly modified for cruising, a Caddy in a sense, the Kenworth T2000 went over the crown of the hill. He froze on the edge of the seat.

Had the voice had been talking about this?

Night has justice. Day has none. What curve in the road?

Gray skies to the north were releasing massive shapes, taking on lesser ones. Night was crawling away on hands and knees. Rene, not yet bleary-eyed, knew the thievery of it, the moment, the uncertain

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa reigns of clarity that can fall into one’s hands as night departs. In obstinate pieces the pre-dawn had been talking to him in the scary way it manifests intonations. Some days pass easily. This one will not.

Hearken. Night is a beginning and an end. Even knowing it was his own voice did not make it any more reflective. He had heard it before, sometimes operatic, then in whispers, but not on the road.

Never before on the road. Not behind the wheel. The road, with a justice all its own, has a demand all its own.

Now, in that clarity at hand, sudden sunlight scattered ammunition out there on the road in front of him, sudden flares of chrome flashing in every direction. About another day he thought, odd and rampant shrapnel loose at dawn, detonation and combustion everywhere, decisions at hand, Sgt. Rumney at his feet and crying, metal from their own high angle devils still burning its way through his body. A scant 50 or 60 yards ahead of him a car was broadside in the road, the sun almost breaking down the catalogue of the vehicle’s parts. And though there was apparently room on either side for safe passage of the rig, he thought his tires would take an unnecessary beating.

He identified a ’98 Crown Victoria, slammed the gears in downshift, feeling the weight pushing at his back, popping the rig towards a slow-down, the gears abruptly humming their mesh of music, just like

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner the back row of the orchestra at a Copland night at Symphony Hall. Forces, as always, were all around him. It was like stopping the world to get off, some kind of carousel, centrifugal. Remembering a French horn destroying a note one night deep in his past made him think about the way the crew packed the load back at Swanton’s Ridge, not at perfection, thinking it might start shifting, daring to stand on its feet, threatening to jackknife. Then he saw the woman step from behind the car and dart to the side of the road. In his mind was the converse turmoil of a lady in distress and the cost of new truck tires. There was feeble juxtaposition to contend with.

The rig slid by the left side of the Crown Victoria. Gravel and shoulder waste and perimeterloose asphalt and pebbles sang under his wheels, pinged away as if from a hundred slingshots and he could feel the rig momentarily hang in the air. The woman, young, trim, hair proud-red and like a ball of fire, was waving at him as he veered by. For scant seconds the trailer, potentially a deserter, AWOL in promise, tugged at his backside. From his lungs a pocket of air came loose with a bang. Gears shutting down into lowest low, the cargo still threatening movement, morning suddenly full of other energies, the huge Kenworth and its attachment came to a stop.

In the side mirror the woman was waving at him. The voice, talking again, was unheard.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa Dropping down from the cab, the demanding rigors of the road fully in his mind and having been in worse spots, he checked the tires on his side. He walked back to the young woman and the car. She was not in panicsville, though her cheeks were flared red. Instantly, with a quiet daring, her eyes measured his eyes, the depth in them, the span of his shoulders, his hipline, the bleached impact of his worn but neat jeans. Rene, at 37, slim and rugged from a decent regimen and a usual tussle with weights, even out on the road, was aware he had certain attractions. Ease, supposedly, was one of them.

“Will the engine start?” he said, looking at the crown of the hill he had just come over. She was trimmer than he thought at first.

“No. Just died on me,” she said. One shoulder shrugged. “There’s been trouble with it the last few days.” The shoulder shrug was the universal one, her head tipping to meet it, eyes shifting color. Her legs were marvelous. She looked clean as a new napkin, but her eyes darker at the moment.

“You watch for traffic,” Rene said. “I’ll try to get it out of the road.” Noting her slimness again, how her red hair glossed against her neck, he advised, “Wave something. A sweater, a pocketbook, anything. Wave something.”

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner He dropped into the seat, kept the door open, and keyed the starter. The engine coughed and jerked and he did it a second time. He tried it again and popped the gear quickly into neutral after catching a minor thrust from the starter, and with one foot pushing got the Crown Victoria rolling on a slight grade and coasted it off the road.

“I can give you a lift down to Crawford. It’s about twenty miles. There’s a garage there. Probably help you out.”

“That’s great. Let me get my bags. Only a couple.” Her eyes, chameleons at work, were as green as a lagoon ought to be. She spun away with a youthful twist, energy riding off her frame. Other forces, the voice said, are about.

Back on the road, the Caterpillar touching him in the wrists again, in the seat of his pants, Rene caught her from the corner of his eye. He knew she was identifying the music on the radio, low and quiet.

Her legs were remarkably elegant, even, he thought, for the cab seat of a Kenworth. He’d saved for eight years for the rig, elegance itself, and here was more elegance sitting in his cab than he had ever dreamed of.

“That’s lovely,” she said. “ That’s Nessum Dorma and I’m Lila Endwell.” Musically she said it. “I was heading home to Ossipee, to see my family.

From college. I teach, a half professor. Do you always

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa play that kind of music when you’re driving?” Lila Endwell had turned to face him. Her eyes he caught first, now of another hue, not lagoon green, not as dark as earlier, and then her mouth. He could taste her mouth, the serious red lips. It was in his eyes.

“You’re blushing. I like that kind of honesty in a man. If you screw up, you screw up. That’s really charming, courageous, and extremely sexy. Oh, my brother Tim says I’m too damned direct, but life’s too short to be otherwise. Things need doing. My father is godawful overprotective, now, but he’s the one should watch out for himself. Thinks he owns half the world and wants the other half. It’s going to kill him. I tell him he’ll be sorely missed, but that’s only a mere caution.”

“What’s he do?”

“He owns.”

“That simple?”

“That much and that simple. If you’re going on to Boston, we’ll be going right by his place. A long ride by. It’s like a border, like you need a passport.”

“Your mother?”

“The owning killed her. I got out. I still love him, in some way, but I got out. She worked forever for him, at anything, and when she wasn’t there any

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner more, neither was I. She used to slip into my room at night, barefoot, smelling nice, and tell me stories.

Sometimes she kept me up looking at the stars, the moon, telling me stories her mother had told her.

About witches and sadness and losing the moon when you wanted it most. And he was downstairs doing the books. We knew the difference, and the parting. We all parted before we knew it. As a kid it was all done.

Before she died it was all done. Can you reach something like that?”

“Yes. If you’re looking for something besides the trucker response, I’ll find it for you.” He could have harrumped, but let it go. “I guess it’s like notes in music that come up in one place but you know they belong someplace else. Only if you really listen, nothing else in your mind, absolutely no taste in your mouth, no beauty in your eye, nothing to touch. Even the composer never knew it. All things aren’t what they always seem. My pal Eddie drives a Diamond-T and he knows every damn word of Gilbert and Sullivan. Every damn word.”

“That’s wild! I’m sorry for the unintended aspersion. Are you a composer? A Musician? A music buff? Love Country and Western? Blues besides the longhair? Where does Jazz fit itself, on an edge?”

Each of them realized that she could go on much longer, but was being temperate, allowing her eyes to change again.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa “You keep talking like that and I’ll remember you a long way down the road.”

“Oh, you’ll remember my good legs and thinking about the oral stuff, the way you guys do.

What do they say, every five or six seconds? My God, how can you drive? I think it comes with the equipment, doesn’t it? Part of the spec sheet? Au naturel. My God, I’d be running all the red lights!” He realized there was not an edge to her voice. It was the way she talked, so utterly natural. And for kicks the air caught a small grasp of a new aroma, an essence of personal identification, more than newly cut grass or a vast salty marsh or a whole mountain cleansed just after rain. It said, for that moment and forever, Lila Endwell. He didn’t know if he had said her name or the voice had said her name. He pretended ignorance.

“Head on and no red lights?” His thumb hit a switch on the wheel and Eddie Arnold, somewhere in a corner of the huge sleeper cab, was about as sad as one can get, the kind of song Sgt. Rumney had played and leaned on all the time.

“I like Country. I like him. It’s what the traffic bears, but no adjusting of personality. I like myself sometimes. I love my father, I guess, but I don’t like him. I liked my mother and loved her, barefoot, smelling nice, the moon in the window like colored glass. I think already I like you. You come this way often? Where from? Where to?”

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner “I’ll go by three more times in the next week and a half.” He looked at a small calendar on the visor. “Then maybe not again for three or four months.”

“Will you blow that crazy horn, if you have one, when you go by?”

“Sure.”

“I’d rather you stopped and knocked at the door, if you could manage it.”

“What would your father say with this rig at his door?”

“All he has to dictate is his will, and I think he’s done that by now. I’m on my own, up to my own. The critters in my puddle are the ones I float with.” She popped fully sideways in the seat. “You’re coming back this way, right?”

Her knees shone at the back of his eyes, a field of white, expansive, compelling. If he saw much more of her, he’d explode. “Tomorrow, back over the same route.”

“Let’s drop in, say hello, get the car squared away, and then I’ll go to Boston with you. I’ll treat you to dinner. I’m on vacation.”

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa He understood the aegis of her argument. “I won’t leave the truck for very long. And never in the city if I can help it. The investment is enormous.” If he ever needed the voice, now was the time.

“Then we’ll party here. After, you can bring me back home, and when you leave you can blow that crazy horn.” Standing up beside the seat, she slipped into the back of the cab. In half a yodel she said, “Hell--o.” There should have been an echo. “It’s like a damn gymnasium back here. I saw you looking,” she said. It was not coy. Did not come across that way.

“There’s nothing but silk under there. Nothing but silk.” …They had stopped, met her father. She kissed her father after showering, steered Rene out the door, left her father on the huge porch in the exhaust of the Kenworth, in its shade. His shoulders were slumped. Rene, remembering later, swore he could hear her mother telling a story in three rooms, in the huge hallway, in the dining room, in the den where they had a glass of wine. It was another voice, at least.

His cargo was delivered, a new load put on for a return trip. There was dinner for two outside the city. A few glasses of wine. Later, a bottle of Madeira she took from a small case she brought with her.

They made love in the Kenworth cab, parked in a rest area with a dozen other trucks holed up for the night.

Rene Destot fell in love after they made love, after

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Rig Runner she showed him there was nothing but silk under there. “It’s the wave of the future,” she said. “It’s our call,” as she explained how she shaved herself. He shivered.

He was in Vergennes, outbound, when he found the suitcase on the lower bunk under a pillow and blanket. The neat blocks of currency were piled like Leggos in the case. He counted to a million and fifty thousand. There was no note, but he could smell her, like he could hear a high note left on the air.

When he drove back to the mansion, the police were there. There was noise, static, the sound of sirens. One trooper told him a woman had killed her rich father, and then herself. “No note,” he said.

“Strange, you have to admit. Had everything going for them. Or so it seemed.” His voice was distant, like coming down a long tunnel, night behind it, pushing for all it was worth.

It all came back. Some days pass easily. This one will not. Night is a beginning and an end. * * *

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

Plumbeck the Fiddler

Watching

every move about the campfire, studying each face lit up by the flickering flames, the fiddler Sam Plumbeck idly held onto his instrument, waiting for the proper moment. Time, he could feel, was pressing down on him; it had different parts that moved in different ways. The stars all the way to the horizon dip were many and miraculous, the horses silent for the most part even though a coyote cry filtered in now and then, and the darkness beyond wrapped them like a giant robe spread under those stars. He had ridden in, apparently aimlessly to all the trail hands, and joined up with them on their way back to their ranch, the promise of music being hailed by all the hands who had delivered the herd, were through with the drive. He alone, out of all these trail hands who had hit the jackpot, knew what was coming down on them. Nothing is supposed to be perfect or fair; at least this side of heaven, or the mass of a blue sky, or the dash of sunlight on a rainy

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler day. And he, just a picker of strings, with not a coin of the gold in the lot having his name on it, could only wait it all out, hoping for the best and only seeing the worst coming up.

It had been that way for him since his wife Elsie had died and left him to tend their 8-year old daughter Alma.

And now Alma was gone, stolen from him a night earlier, right from their little cabin, in the middle of the night, and him bleary-eyed and hung over and not knowing until well after dawn that she was gone.

They had made themselves known a day later, riding up from right out of the cluster pinon pines, as if they were lost, to greet him in the yard. They rode two roans and a paint that looked out of place for a minute, and Plumbeck noted the animals seemed well cared for. Small signs gave bits of evidence he could trust as being the real thing. A long time ago, he had learned that a man’s audience gave away as much as it took in, whether they knew it or not.

There were three of them, well armed, with six shooters on both hips and rifles tucked into saddle leather, the stocks he saw scarred and showing long wear or use. Because they were strangers, he studied the three men quickly, putting away as much detail as he could; right off he swore he could pick two of them off skyline silhouettes, how they rode tall in the saddle like they owned the earth. He decided he

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa didn’t like them, any of them, and wondered why else he had made such a quick decision.

It didn’t take long for him to discover why.

The slim fellow, in a Stetson fitting on his head like a giant mushroom, too big for the little stem of a man, did the talking, though the other two riders were bigger men, thicker in the chest, wider in the shoulders, meaner than each other, if that was possible. They all wore trail-dusted outfits, and a bit raggy at that, heavily-worked denim shirts and pants grained with the trail they rode, and each one with a dark red bandana looped at the neck. All three of them were soft riders, he said to himself, sat the saddle well, were at home there.

“Know your audience from the very first note,” his father had told him long ago, in advance of life alone, life in front of people, fiddlers holding sway in the family for generations.

The slim speaker’s voice came softly, almost diminutive, the words deliberate, as if he was a bank teller doing regular business with regular customers.

“We know where your daughter is, Mister Plumbeck, with friends of ours. She’s okay, but to get her back, and safely at that, you have to do a few favors for us.

It should be pretty easy work.” He stared at Plumbeck the way a teller stares at a little old man struggling to put a few dollars to account.

Plumbeck, quickly alert to other causes, said, “She’s not hurt is she? She’s all I have. What do you

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler want?” He tried to remember Alma’s face; only small pieces of it came back, how her lips curled in an honest smile, how the dimple, like Elsie’s, came back before anything else and lasted longer. It was the dimple he was seeing now. He couldn’t remember if he had kissed her when he came in from town, or the Mexican woman who took care of her some nights.

Sometimes he kissed her too, and now and then she’d kiss him back when Alma was asleep or when they were in the barn saddling her horse to go home.

“First off, you were pretty much out of it last night. We walked in and walked out with your daughter all wrapped up and warm. She’s with lady friends. A ways from here. You’d never find her.

Neither would the sheriff, not a posse either if they mounted one for searching, which I doubt they’d do anyway. “ “What do you want of me?”

“You see the Double-Bar X boys in town the other night, after they delivered the herd?”

“I heard them more than I saw them.”

The slim talker said, “They worked off a whole lot of the trail in town, now they’re going to head back home with a passel of horses, and a whole lot of money that didn’t get put into the bank. The safe was blown up a few weeks ago, by some hombres not us.

I don’t like big noise. We know their money’s in the chuck wagon and we aim to get it. But they won’t let us ride in on top of them in the daylight, and they’ll

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa be twice on guard at night. With a week on the trail ahead of them, there’s time enough for trouble to set down on them.”

“Where’s that leave me?”

“They know you, every one of those boys.

They liked your music in the saloon those two nights of resting up. Really liked it, how you pick at that thing like you’re a magician. Not often we hear the likes of it. Not that way, leastly. We could tell from all the way across the road. You had them boys really hooting it up. Brought the Texas right up out of their boots, them dancing like they did, half crazy with all the ladies of the premises, like there was a full moon shining down on them.” His eyes closed for the merest second. “Especially that one called Wilma who wears all that red stuff comes ashining back in the night when you least expect it.” His eyes went flickering and shining and sent off messages that Plumbeck knew from way back when he was the youngest fiddler in a Texas band, fourteen if he was a day and life opening like an open road across the wide prairie.

“How’s that go for me and my daughter?” He was hoping he could stay in some kind of control, not of them but of himself. He saw Elsie’s dimple and it sat like a warm pool or a small star on Alma’s face, grabbing all the attention he could muster, and there came the same secret smile that she could flash when nobody could see her but him, like it was a signal of times to come.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler He began to add things up: there were two of them, the ladies in his life, but really, at this time, there were none of them. They were both gone. All he had left was the fiddle, and the mule, wherever he was chewing the cud now, and this suddenly diminished piece of property.

“You somehow get yourself attached to them, play them a few songs, warm them up and relax them. Can you do that? We got an extra horse here for you, in place of that old mule you ride. By the way, where’s your mule?”

“I fell off him last night and lost him. Just about got home.”

“You know the song She’s Just a Mountain Girl?’

“Yes, I do.”

“Let’s hear how you do it.” He sounded like a bank president more than a teller.

Plumbeck reached behind him and picked up the fiddle. In a swift and trained movement, he swung into She’s Just a Mountain Girl as easy as plucking strings, all of them.

Mr. Smooth Talker turned to his riding pards.

“Listen to how it sounds. That’s how we’ll know when to rush them, when he plays this song.” His head was moving smoothly, as if still in tune with the music, remembering another time, another girl shining in

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa red. He turned to Plumbeck and said, “Play it again, Sam.” Plumbeck, natural as they come with the strings in his hand, bounced through the song again.

The way he played it, with all he could get from those thin wires, had the two big pokes bouncing in their saddles, nodding at the rhythm, accepting his delivery, maybe wishing it was Saturday night all over again. It was in their faces, but wasn’t that way with the little gent, the slow talker. He decided there was no music the second time around in the obvious leader of the pack, but only because the other two were so open, so transparent. The big cheese had to keep some secrets from the open mix.

“Let’s go talk in the cabin, if you will,” Mr. Smooth Talker said, as if he was putting the frosting on Plumbeck’s idea of him. “There are a few facts I want to make sure you understand.” He nodded at the other two, and said, “Keep your eyes open for any strangers. Make sure nobody has any idea of what we’re up to. There’s a sweet payday coming. We can count on that.” He waved the two big hombres away from the cabin. “Keep your eyes open. Never know who’s tracking us from back there.” He looked off toward the town a few miles away.

Plumbeck had hailed the distance, waving at him, yelling Alec. It’s Plumbeck here. Heading I’d like to ride along. I brought my

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trail boss from a his name. “Hi-yo, back to Texas and fiddle.”

Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler Alec Winship said, “It’ll be a pleasure having good company, Sam. Boys’ll love it. They had a hard time coming up here. You sure had ‘em goin’ the other night. Really got them goin’. You do that every time out of the corral?” He looked at Plumbeck’s horse. “You been ridin’ hard to catch us? Don’t wear that animal out. Out here, he’s your best friend. Even comes ahead of that there fiddle you’re totin’.”

“I didn’t want to be alone tonight, not out here,” Plumbeck said, putting a little doubt into his voice, shrugging his shoulders, appearing fearful of the open plains.

“Well, we all got company tonight, Sam, and plenty of vittles. Homer says he’s got bean soup and steak and his best biscuits for the night meal. How’s that sound?”

Plumbeck slapped his fiddle. “I got my vittles’ chit right here, all tuned up.”

He shrugged his shoulders in a universal gesture, some decision left up to others, a yes or no in the movement as if he was asked a question that might not demand an answer. At the same time, his eyes shifted across the grassy horizon, and then glanced east and west, north and south, the whole compass in two moves.

He was sly about it, thought he could be nauseous if he let himself go.

They rode after the chuck wagon setting up for the night less than a mile ahead of them just before a narrow pass in the hills. The two men had fifteen

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa minutes of honest conversation while riding. The evening sun, beginning its descent, touched the tops of the hills in a fond farewell to another good day. No stars had shown up yet, but the moon pushed up its silver crescent in the eastern sky and gave off the promise the sun had set free that morning. Horses, driven together, nickered as if they too were having late conversations.

Six hands were setting up camp for the night stop, and odors had already begun to circulate from the chuck wagon. Beans and onion smells swirled smoothly in the air. A few other hands continued tying up ropes for a horse tether for the night. All of them, in turn, hailed Plumbeck with favored salutations. “Hey, fiddler, we wuz talkin’ about you all day, ‘cause that wuz some night we had for ourselves, that last one.” “Glad to have yore company, fiddlin’ man, and I see you brung the tools.” “Hey, that you, Sam? You look different sittin’ that animal ‘stead a strummin’. That thing you’re carryin’ there, does it get shook out of tune ridin’ side saddle like that?” “Hi-yo, Sam, you headin’ back to God’s country? Sure can make this trip short.”

To a man they were pleased to see him, perhaps a bit excited. Their jabbering said so, even the unintelligible parts of it, the distant remarks called out across the good grass, the asides tossed to one another at odd tasks: “Oh, what that man can do with skinny wire,” or “We got a good time comin’ tonight even if them girls ain’t here.” All the while,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler the food smells continued to swell and circulate in the late evening air. A coyote acknowledged the speed that aromas moved on the seemingly still air. The crescent moon continued its ride into the night sky, even the slice of it promising hence its full golden orb.

Another coyote, from another direction, started a conversation about the infiltrating aromas. Man was again penetrating domains.

Plumbeck, hearing a distant sound that sounded like a trumpet call, spun about quickly, on guard, until he realized the sound was coming from Bugle Pass ahead of them. He’d been there before, the wind whistling in from the other side of the hills and hustling through a series of boulders set on the peak of the hill in the long past by the Indians. He didn’t know what tribe had erected the odd formations but believed they were musical in their nature. At another time, in another place, he’d think about Retreat being sounded behind a fort barricade.

Winship, eating from his tin plate across the campfire, was staring at him in somewhat of a lazy manner, smiling, enjoying his meal, fully at ease, the easy-riding crescent moon sailing across the ocean of the sky. The jug he had promised the crew sat untapped at his side, like a reward to be earned. He smiled again at Plumbeck and raised his hand when his plate was clean, as if he was the maestro out in front of an orchestra.

The single musical instrument in the campsite appeared from the slight flames touching the edge of

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa the circle. The boss man’s signal had been sent. Pot and pan and tinny sounds stopped as Plumbeck stood up with the fiddle. A few notes escaped their long internment and fled across the wide grass, the slivered moon giving a hint of silver in its touch at grass. The distant coyotes, nuzzled in satisfaction, did not take note of the signal. Night began to move on.

The meal finished, tasks completed, a good number of men relaxed, some obviously still on night tasks with the animals or night riding, Plumbeck rose with the fiddle in one hand. It swung easily in that hand. Standing at the edge of flame light, he played a series of favorite songs for them. They were boisterous, but listened well, especially at refrains that rose up and fled across the grass, lifted up to the moon as if being freed forever.

The whole crew liked the first medley, Round Tree Willy and Moses Ward Goes Astray and The Girl from Calico, all of them fiddler favorites for as long as he could remember. Plumbeck had often thought that The Girl from Calico had been his father’s favorite and many times he had wondered if there was some secret behind that favoritism. He had come to accept, and even forgive, many of his father’s transgressions beyond the front porch back in Tennessee. Starkly he recalled when his younger sister died from a childbearing incident resulting from an abusive salesman, his father angrily striding off with his rifle never to be seen again.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler That disappearance shifted his mind again, recalled alertness from where it had gone. He heard a coyote from as far away as imagination would allow, perhaps in the depths of a canyon, then a whistling moan from Bugle Pass, and a wolf, loudest at the top of the food chain, taking vocal command of the once silent world.

Across the fire, almost prone on his night blanket, his gun belt flopped at the edge of the blanket as well as his rifle, Winship turned his head to listen to the same sounds Plumbeck had heard. He lifted the jug off the blanket and Plumbeck, at that movement, suddenly broke into She’s Just a Mountain Girl.

He was hardly into the song when five men, from the shadows like Indian ghosts raised from dark graves, broke into camp, their rifles leveled and ready to fire.

The Smooth Talker, his hat still too big for his frame, his body still slight out here in the darkness, but his voice decidedly harsher than Plumbeck could remember it, was yelling at them.

“Don’t reach for any guns. First man gets a gun in his hand gets dead in a hurry.” He swung his rifle around at the men at the campfire. “I mean it well, don’t grab an iron or you’re dead in a minute.

We just want the gold in the wagon. We want every last piece of it. From where I stand, I don’t think we

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa can see any heroes. Whoever decides he wants to be a hero gets dead just that quicker.”

He looked at Winship, without a weapon in his hands, still flat on the blanket, his boots standing beside him like sentinels. “The rest of your crew sleeping under the wagon, Boss Man? Better get them out here under the same terms; they’re dead if they go for their weapons.”

Later, much later, Plumbeck remembered how cool Winship had been. That coolness was in his voice as he said, “They don’t need to go for their weapons, mister, ’cause they already have them and there’s four fully loaded rifles pointed at your midsections right about now. This I can tell you, four of you die in the first round, and one will live for a bare second until he gets rounds from all them rifles together. You think about that hero stuff. And put this in your pipe and smoke it … the gold’s not in the wagon ‘cause we buried it earlier out on the range, and one of the boys has gone off to get the sheriff. We knew you were coming. It’s that easy. The fiddler there, he’s no fool.

If we find his daughter is the slightest dead, you guys get strung up on the nearest tree we find. Now what do you say to that?”

The loudest sound was from the darkness as rifle bolts slapped home.

The intruders dropped their weapons at the side of the fire, and Winship, all Texas coming up from his bare feet, jammed his revolver into the

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Plumbeck the Fiddler mouth of one of the two big men that Plumbeck had told him about. “Where’s the girl? I am only going to count to three.” He raised three fingers and dropped one immediately, as he counted, “One-two- ……”

“Wait,” the big guy mumbled, “she’s at the Kilgore place, the other side of town. She’s okay.

Nobody touched her, I swear.”

He looked fearfully at the Smooth Talker, just as Plumbeck, with all his vented fury, remembering his sister, his wife Elsie long gone down the trail as well as his father, his daughter tossed into strange hands, smashed his fiddle down atop the head of the Smooth Talker.

Winship nodded at the knowing what a fair swap was. * * *

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coming

silence,

Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa

Jail-break at Bear Creek

Not

a soul in the whole west, including Bear Creek, where the desperado Cleve Hallows was jailed and awaiting trial for numerous murders and robberies, had any idea of the man’s ingenuity and wiles.

Hallows, for all intents and purposes, was ahead of his time and his capture this time was due to good old-fashioned luck on the part of Bear Creek’s sheriff who once operated on the other side of the law, “was saved,” and like a reformed drinker or smoker, could not stand to see any other bad man make good. It became his sole aim to make sure that development did not occur in his territory, in his town.

The setting of this tale is of prime importance, so it is that we visit the town of Bear Creek and unveil its place and character.

Not one person on the town council didn’t hold it true that Bear Creek was one of the most inviting and pleasant places at the foothills of the Rockies.

Most other people in town felt the same and visitors, passing through on the Overland Stage, all admitted the same thing, some of them with a nostalgic look at

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Jail-break at Bear Creek departure. The mountains thrusting up behind town were rugged and picturesque, the creek made a sparkling and diving entrance from a steep cliff worn to a trough by the thousands of years of flow, and the spread of grass leaving the foothills was resplendent with flowers in good weather.

But within all those good feelings and euphoric hope, nobody ever asked an inmate of the Bear Creek jail, under the command of the notorious outlawturned-lawman, Crawd Dobler, how they viewed their situation. Dobler was known far and wide, including a good stretch of the Rockies, for his strict controls and harsh treatment of prisoners. He sat any chair the way he sat a horse, high and haughty, as if nothing in reach could or dared touch him. As he sat at the BC Hotel’s dining room, having his eggs and other vittles with Homer Barnes, his chief deputy, his scorn was evident concerning Barnes’ worries about a jailbreak.

“Homer, you got to learn to relax, boy. You’re a top dog around them boys back there, mostly drunks, one hungry rustler who ought to know better, and that Hallows gent who’s going to hang soon as the judge sets foot in town. Learn to relax, snap the whip when you got to, and don’t let them get any closer than spit range.”

He sat his chair ever upright, on top of it all.

“You got to relax, Homer. That’s the key in this whole thing, relaxing, not letting them scum know what you’re at or how you feel.”

“He’s out and out mean, Crawd, to those other boys in there. Those poor gents who have paid for

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa spending their money in the saloon first chance out of the saddle. I don’t hate them poor pokes. They have it tough enough out there with the cows and some of them cow drovers would drive me crazy too. Don’t know what Hallows’d do if he caught hold of one of us. Only real thing about him is him wanting to read all the newspapers I can find.”

“Worry about yourself, Homer, but not on the outside, not on your face. Don’t show them nothing but boss. It’s all that counts. I’ll break Hallows' arm or his back he makes a move at me. Count on it. Now eat. You need it.” Ramrod straight as ever, Dobler lifted food to his mouth, eyes moving, measuring all in sight, the morning shadows caught in corners, the grass smell riding the air as if sighing off the prairie, how people moved at their early tasks. “Probably trying to find where his name is printed. Make sure he gets none of that. Give him what you have where his name is not printed. That won’t hurt a bit.”

At that same moment, sun breaking clear of clouds and mountains, prairie personality spilling into the town, as Dobler and his deputy ate breakfast; Cleve Hallows fed some of his breakfast remains from the day before to a bird that had lighted at the barred cell window set into blocks of squared mountain rock.

Cool prairie air fed itself into the cells, bringing a bit of comfort atop the general deposit of stale air.

Hallows spent ten minutes at the opening, feeding the bird. Smiling, nodding a kind of approval that was not really approval, he ignored some of the whispers that

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Jail-break at Bear Creek came to him from the other prisoners. He caught every word sifting through the cells of the jail.

“He ain’t so tough, the bird lover. He’s been doing that for weeks now. Bet he couldn’t last a week on a drive, some drover boss find him out soon enough. ’Magine the big killer and robber playing games with the birds. If that ain’t the proper clue to the real man, every morning I been here, I don’t know what is.”

As for Hallows, he kept most things to his own person, but allowed himself to hear again and again some words he’d recently said to Dobler at one point, and a second message said to a confederate another time.

“Tell you what, Dobler. I’m going to be the first man to break out of your jail and I’ll spread the word across the grass and up and down the Rockies.

Won’t miss any odd lots, kinfolk, townspeople, drovers passing each other out on the grass or in the pens of the railheads. Conductors on the UP will spread the word and the last of the wagon masters coming to a stop from the east. They’ll all know about it sooner or later, and that’s a promise.”

Dobler, as always, looked as cool as a mountain breath of air. He smiled, waved his hand as if nothing at all had been said, sat tall and rigid in his office chair just outside the main cell section. Every morning he came clean-shaven after a decent breakfast at the hotel.

Up in the Rockies, at a hideout operated for a few years by Hallows, his confederate Jud Parsons

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa could easily recall Hallows’ words said a few weeks earlier: “Do just what I tell you, Jud. It’ll be easy. I’ve taught you all I know. Just make the best of each trip. No load too heavy it messes up. The judge won’t be here for a couple of weeks. I know that for sure, and got some other stuff hidden up in here we get to split when I get out of here. I got a lot of sauce for the gander. Count on it.”

He had been whispering all the while in the jail at Parsons’ visit. “Make sure that damned sheriff don’t follow you back uphill to the place. I’m counting on you, and the big payoff is coming. You can get that spread back in Wyoming you always wanted, let your old man get his hands dirty the clean way.” He smiled at his own turn of the phrase, seeing a glint of joy cross Parsons’ face, knowing he had touched a soft spot. Things were so easy, he believed, and Crawd Dobler would find that out the hard way.

A few weeks later, Dobler sauntered into the cell section and said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage, “Judge is coming in two days, Hallows. Got word last night. Looks like a piece of cake from where I sit out there in my office. Piece of cake. Sure as the best brand you know heading back east for them Chicago butchers and them New York platters.”

“Don’t count on it, sheriff. That judge has me to contend with. I ain’t no kid at this business.”

“Is that the killing business, Hallows, knocking down old ladies and old men who can’t point a weapon at you? That your kind of business? I never did that stuff. Oh, I robbed a few trains they don’t

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Jail-break at Bear Creek know about and a few stage coaches in the mix, but never killed an old man or an old lady. You got to have rules in that game. You got to be your own judge before you stand up in front of a real one.

Prepare your own way as they might say down at the church. Looks like they’ve been right all along, the parsons and preachers and such.”

“Sure agree with you there, sheriff, on those men.” Hallows did not even break a smile as he saw his sidekick Jud up at the hideout, getting ready for another task. The hideout sifted into his mind and he received an image of its hidden beauty in among some serious rocks and secret growth. He’d found it by accident and he’d been caught by Crawd Dobler because he had relaxed his mind descending from the place, wondering why he loved it so much, letting himself fall into the hands of the sheriff also by complete accident. Chance happened to the best of men, he agreed. Looking up he had seen the sheriff’s rifle pointed right at his guts.

Jail at Bear Creek came sooner than he ever thought.

Now the judge would be here in two days. He had one day to get ready. The time had to be right.

The breadcrumbs fell from his hand atop the stone block the bars were set into. The bird fluttered in a little later. The whispers started again in the cells.

At midnight, all cellmates asleep, some snoring up a storm, Hallows rose from his cot. The breeze at the window was minimal but fresh, right off the prairie or down from a mountain canyon. He

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa didn’t care where it was from, but it was free and almost liquid in his throat. Some of Bear Creek, the real creak, came along with the drink.

Beyond the jail, through window opening without glass but with stout bars, Bear Creek was dark and silent. The nicker of two horses came from close by, at the end of an alley beside the jail.

Overhead, the moon was not due for three days, according to his count. Beside his bunk, from behind the cell slop pail, Hallows pulled a pouch filled with a dark mixture. From behind a cot leg, he pulled a long thin funnel made from newspapers and hardened by a mix of water and urine. It stank as bad as he imagined it would, even gone dry and sort of rigid, but suitable for its purpose.

Hefting the pouch, he pictured the smile on Jug Parsons’ face, as he would have smiled filling the small bags he attached to a homing pigeon every morning for weeks, as he thought about the ranch he was going to buy in Wyoming.

All the planning came back to Hallows as he listened again and heard only silence beyond the snoring. The funnel was set up, aimed right down into the cell door lock, the backside of the key hole fitted with paper plugs he had also formed from the newspapers. Taking a thin blanket off his cot, he wrapped it around the lock on the cell door.

Then, thinking of the haughty sheriff with the sickening grin on his face, trying his best to hide it, being as tricky as he could be, he started pouring the mix from the pouch down into the funnel and into the

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Sons of Guns, Inc. Jail-break at Bear Creek lock on the cell door. When the lock was full of the pigeon-delivered gunpowder, and some left over for kicks, Hallows contemplated the coming few minutes.

The deputy Barnes would be asleep on his cot, his boots off, his revolver near. He would rush through the door into the cell area when he rudely awoke.

He’d hit him with the slop pail, get his gun, and run out the door and down the alley to Parsons and the horses. They’d be out of town before the sheriff knew what happened. He could see the look on the sheriff’s face. It was priceless. He’d give away a bank’s haul for the privilege of seeing it.

He lit the fuse, dropped the rest of the blanket over the key hole, and stepped back.

The blast blew the cell door wide open.

Cellmates screamed.

The deputy, frantic, opened the door and was hit on the head with the slop pail. He fell as if he had been gunned down, his revolver falling to the floor.

Hallows grabbed it and raced to the front door and ran down the alley. In a matter of minutes, he and Parson were heading out of town on a well-used trail marked by recent traffic.

“Free as a bird,” Hallows said aloud, and seeing Crawd Dobler trying forever to determine how the jail-break had come off.

Once they got into the Rockies, up in the safe area, he’d let Parsons go chase his dream. As for himself, he just had to know, somehow, how close Dobler might get to the truth.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa There was always the chance the revelation might come, but he’d wait on it.

Maybe he’d send a few messenger pigeons to test him. * * *

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos

The Horseman of the Davidos

Legends

begin in strange settings with strange characters in strange times. This was such a story, in the shadows of The Davidos, where it began and where it ended on a very mysterious note.

And it was a time when the west was wild and wooly; sheep wars raged, stagecoaches and banks in small towns were objects of quick riches in the minds of scattered gangs, murder became commonplace in saloons at the drop of an ace of spades not fitting the deck, and out of the Davidos Mountain Range, in the Utah shadows, a black clad horseman, a single horseman, came off the rocky skyline and thwarted a series of holdups, robberies and thefts of all magnitudes. In a short time, the way legends move at breakneck speed, he became the dream of maids and maidens, the envy of sheriffs and marshals of the territory, and the figure young boys imagined when they looked down-range on their future.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa A hero had arrived in the wild and wooly times and became known far and wide as The Horseman of The Davidos, a special man from a special place. The Davidos, for those who had not set eyes on the area, sat as pretty as any range of mountains, not at all as huge and terrifying as the Rockies, but a minor edition of a lovely but rugged setting on the edge of a most pleasant run of rich grassland for a hundred miles or so, between two grand rivers that more northern ranges had birthed.

The single horseman, riding a huge black stallion he called “Beau,� wearing black garb head to foot including the mask hiding just enough of his face to deter recognition, firing two black-handled pistols unerring in accuracy, always appeared on the scene as if he had been created on the spot for the purpose of rescue and salvation for young maidens, old men and much money.

His sense of timing was so provident that he was said to have the ear of the Almighty One looking down from the Mountain of Creation, a name given by local Indians. Men of deep imagination said the Indians in time would come up with a better name, once the word spread among them that the horseman favored no man, no tribe and no nation except those subject to unlawful alarm, trepidation, outright danger and, on certain occasions where plans went awry, death and mayhem.

At the ninth or tenth rescue of coach passengers on the Bellville-Campasa Road alone,

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos brigands scattered to the winds or slain by the single horseman heedless of his own person, the word about the new hero leaped from town to town, ranch to ranch. In turn, the entire Davidos Range was invigorated by the claims of witnesses about the mysterious horseman, regardless of several claims appearing to be inflated, as timing said they happened on opposite ends of the road at the same hour of the same day.

He could not be in both places at one time… it was said… unless there was more than one of him.

In Campasa, at the council meeting of elders, the meeting held in the rear section of the saloon with the bar closed temporarily, the talk kept coming back to the horseman clad in black garb who had thwarted the known hold-up attempts and more as the whispers and rumors spread and fed on themselves.

Rex Morgan, the blind rancher who had lost his eyesight to such a group of roadmen five years earlier, led the conversation back to the strange savior each time the topic seemed to switch around.

“Whoa, here. Dammit, whoa,” Morgan would say, in his demanding voice, an operatic tenor at command. “What’s going on here? I thought we were talking about this unknown hero, this gent in black, and suddenly, like dinner came on the table, someone wants to talk about the price of cow meat. Money won’t mean a damned thing if the robbers keep

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa hitting the stages, the banks, the mine deliveries.

One man can’t be everyplace at once. We got to set some rules here. If we find out who he is, do we make him marshal of the territory? “ His eyeless gaze went around the room, faceto-face, eye-to-eye, in a display of mysterious intensity, as if he was actually seeing each face and peering into each mind, the way it was said he declared his intentions to the soldiers under his command in the war.

“Do we give this gent a posse to run the bad guys aground? A big posse? An army of a posse? I say ‘Whoa, robbers’ when I think of him in command of a militia. We have problems in our lap that one man is facing down. I want answers plain and simple.

For all we know them gents doing these deeds, or trying to, have set their eyes on our bank as a new target just as we sit here and talk about it. Wouldn’t surprise me one tail feather. They’re human like us, and they grow and get better at what they do, or they fall back and finally disappear. I’m not waiting for them to disappear, and I want to know who is or who ain’t. Looks like they got trouble with this strange gent, but not from us, least the last time I looked.

Let’s get together on it for once and for all.”

Morgan’s story was known, if only transparent a bit, by all the council and those citizens who sat on the side. The upshot of it all, behind his bravado, was that Morgan kept hidden some element of the accident that caused his blindness, which he had

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos never revealed to any other person, as if he alone on this good earth was to make amends, even in his blind state: he would see justice done, reparations made, vengeance accounted. The secret would stay with him until resolution.

He was a man of his word, just as the horseman from The Davidos was to his mission. Any new man in town, looking on Morgan, would find certain parts of the man coming back at him in a strong manner. They would be his sense of directness, his perseverance of task, an innate muscular power that remained about his person in spite of blindness, and the ready grin or grimace called up from down around his toes by which he was able to diffuse people when he wanted a discussion turned his way, diverted or changed.

The merchant of the group, Toll Brandon, with heavy investment in inventory for the territory, averse to any and all challenges except those he could read all the way from the start, like sure things, stepped into the argument, standing for attention the way an orator sets his stance or the Sunday preacher making the point of his sermon.

“Rex,” he said, “I go along with what you say, but don’t you think we should expend some effort in finding out who this gent is? Put a bird dog on the job? I’ll put in some of the money. Have the bird dog start searching The Davidos for the man’s place of operation? He has to hide out up there in the rocks.

He found it, why can’t others? A hideout is just that, a

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa place to rest between operations. If it’s not a cave or an old mine, it’s visible from someplace else, from higher ground, from an old trail. Mountain men been traipsing up in there for more than 50 years I reckon.

To a trained eye there shouldn’t be any surprises.”

He had made his entry and passed through.

His gaze also went around the room, seeking acceptance, acknowledgment, never knowing the blind man in front of him could see every move he made, every change in stance, his total presentation.

Morgan, keen as ever, understood the merchant, and did not like him for a variety of reasons. But this revelation came strongest knowing that the merchant had made a verbal stance, had made himself “active” in the barest sense, reading it in the man’s voice. Morgan had been able to do that since his first day of command in the army of the Potomac; it had become habit with him. He had a keen ear that had gotten keener at all levels since his loss of sight re-established the old saying that the blind get keener with other senses. He trusted his readings, swore he could smell cowardice or duplicity.

Two days later, with services ongoing in the Campasa Church of the Favored God, an excited rider dismounted at the church and hustled to Sheriff Bean Calder who sat right inside the door of the church.

“He did it again, Sheriff, drove off some masked men trying to take the stage due here this morning. Two folks are being tended outside town at the B-Box-B Ranch, two robbers are dead, and three others broke

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos off and ran. The Horseman from The Davidos did it again. Then headed up into the mountains like he was following the runaways. Ain’t he the wonder?” He looked around at the congregation, as if he wore a deputy’s badge, and said, “Want me to round up a posse, Sheriff? We can chase them gents to ground if we get hot on their trail. Maybe this Davidos gent leaves us some markers on the trail. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

Calder said, “Hold on, Baker. I’m waiting on the council to make up its mind.”

“Hell, said the young man, they been sitting on it for weeks. You don’t expect them old bucks to do anything that gets them too excited do you?” He looked around at the congregation as he understood what he had just said in front of all those in the church. He saw a few red faces, a few hidden faces.

He saw a smile fly across the face of Rex Morgan, the blind rancher. Morgan’s thunderous “Amen,” echoed in the corners of the church.

Calder, in his quick survey, saw that most town men and ranchers were at the services. He tried to remember later who did not fit into his picture.

Who he remembered at first call were Toll Brandon, the merchant, an odd sort to begin with, one deputy who had a new girlfriend out on an outlying ranch, and two men from the stage line that had an office and a livery in town. Most other respectable men of town and local ranches came to services on a regular basis.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa When services ended in a matter of minutes, all men including most of the town council gathered around Calder as he stood off to the side.

“Give me the word right now, gents, and I’ll organize a 10-man posse and commission it for a week if need be. We hope the Davidos Horseman will leave some kind of trail as he follows those gang members who got away. The trail is barely a few hours old. We have a good shot this time.” He seemed anxious and nervous, like a racer getting ready to compete.

There was murmuring, a bit of noise among the gathering, and then Morgan said, “You got ‘em, Sheriff. We’re all volunteers now, on town payroll if needed. It’s been set by the quorum in attendance at this moment. You pick the ten men. You’re the boss on this. Those who stay will make sure the necessary work is done for the men you pick for the posse, ranch-wise, cow-wise, whatever.”

He shook Calder’s hand as the sheriff began calling out names. There was no further discussion, and an hour later, the posse headed out of town, bound for the trail up into The Davidos foothills, on the trail of The Horseman of The Davidos on the trail of desperadoes on the run.

Morgan and a few men headed from the church to the saloon, the minister with them. It was a Sunday ritual, right after the other ritual, offering thanks from one and all.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos In his fashion, in his way, Morgan knew who was with them and who was not without asking a single question. He knew every voice, and could bring back a five-year old image of the man’s face, provided he was not a newcomer to town. Satisfied with some things in his mind, and quizzical about others, Morgan departed the saloon and proceeded to the telegraph office. It was an easy walk for him, knowing the layout of the town.

“Hey, Jess,” he said to the man operating the telegraph key and sending out a message. “You on all week again?”

“Rex, you amaze me the way you can read who’s sending on the key. I saw your head cocked as you came around the corner. You knew it was me and not Desmond soon as you turned the corner, didn’t you?” He put out the non-working hand and tapped Morgan on the wrist. “You found out early on that it was all on the wrist, from what I figure. And I also figure, it being Sunday and some of the boys washing the whole week out of their souls, that you have something else on your mind. But for the life of me, I can’t figure that part. I guess I’m blind to that part.”

He chuckled a low laugh that Morgan counted on. “So what’s on your mind, Rex?” “I have to dig for some information, Jess, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Maybe something out of the ordinary, like information on stage shipments, stage passengers, mine shipment deliveries, and who has been privy to that stuff, or,

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa more important, who’s been asking the same kind of questions that I am.”

“Got to do with the masked horseman and the way he knows where the boogie men are? I have to think about that. Sometimes it’s like an offhand question from somebody, and I just pump out the works. Yet, wait a minute. Hey,” he said, “if he needed it, the gang needed it just as much.”

“So, something working in that noggin of yours?”

“I’ll tell you something, Rex. It concerns a couple of people that downright ain’t on my favorite’s list.”

“That being Toll Brandon for one, Jess, and I’ll let you have the other one as a surprise for me.”

“Brandon’s right. Seems to sneak information out of me without trying, but he has a lot of business by stage and wagon, so I never questioned that.”

“Who else?”

“Sheriff Calder, for one, and that guy who packs iron for the freight agency, Burl Smithers.

Calder’s doing his job, I figure. Maybe the other guy, but he comes around regular, gabs a bit, spends an hour like he has a whole day to do nothing, and then he’s out of here like he got hit in the ass, like he’s been shot.”

“Any of them make notes?” Morgan said.

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos “Just Brandon. Carries that work pad everywhere with him like his life depended on it. That enough for you, Rex?” Morgan nodded, put one hand out that the telegrapher touched, and they parted without any more word exchange. And Morgan had more questions in his mind than when he entered the telegrapher’s office.

Three days later, in the heat of evening, the posse came back to town, and every man headed straight for the saloon, but Calder and his deputy were not with them.

One posse member yelled out to the saloon owner, “The sheriff and his deputy will be in later, Harry. They’re doing something at Morgan’s place they said. He let us go after the fight up in the hills, after we got all the gang and brought three of them back. They’re in the jail now, locked up tight.”

The saloon owner said, “The Horseman of The Davidos lead the posse to them?”

“Damned right he did,” the posse member said. Last, I saw of him he was pointing down into a box canyon. They were hiding behind a rock fall, with their horses. That guy in black sat his big horse uphill of us, on the other side of the canyon. The bad boys were shooting at him. He might have been hit, but I’m not sure. Sheriff just said for us to hightail it back here and get wet on the town fathers.

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Tom Sheehan massachusetts, usa There, an hour after arrival, Calder filled in Morgan with all the missing information, and in a backroom. He insisted on privacy.

“Hear me out, Rex. This is pretty hard to swallow, and it sure is a mixed up story, but I have to tell it my way. Please hold off until I’m done. Like I say, it’s damned involved.”

He paused, took a swig of beer, and then went right into it. He drew a piece of paper from his vest.

“This is a bill of sale, with the owner’s name signed and my signature as witness. All you have to do is sign it where I tell you. It’s the bill of sale for all Toll Brandon’s property. It’s yours to do as you wish.

Secondly, Toll Brandon is now buried on your ranch, in a far corner. His horse is corralled in that L-shaped canyon off the hills. The horse, too, now belongs to you, in a manner of speaking.”

He took another swig of beer. “It’s a big black.

The black clothes that the horseman wore are now in safekeeping with your wife. We spent an hour with her today. She knows everything and it’s all legit.”

Morgan, catching an edge in the sheriff’s voice, said, “There’s a whopper here, Bean, that you’re not telling me, like maybe Toll Brandon was the ringleader of the whole bunch.”

“That ain’t quite right, Rex. He was The Horseman of The Davidos, lock, stock and barrel, and he swore us to secrecy, you and me, as he lay dying in my arms. He knew he wasn’t one of your favorites

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Sons of Guns, Inc. The Horseman of the Davidos and he kept it that way. ‘We’ve come a long ways,’ he said, ‘and we can’t stop now. Have someone put on my clothes and become me. Pick a good and trusty man. Promise me. Get to Rex Morgan and tell him the same thing. Rex is a good man, even if he can’t see it all.’ He laughed his last laugh at that. ‘Let The Horseman of the Davidos keep riding, keep after the bad guys. Let him ride forever. We need someone like him. If he gets killed, dies like what’s about to happen to me, get someone to take his place. We’ll all be better for it, especially me if I’m lucky enough to be looking down on you from the Mountain of Creation.’ He closed his eyes then and was gone.”

And so it was, thirty years later, when Rex Morgan was sick abed, Sheriff Calder long since dead, that Morgan told his wife, “Don’t let any of our boys wear those clothes anymore, Ethel. Tell everybody that The Horseman of the Davidos died in the waters of one of the two rivers, his clothes beside the stream, his latest horse tethered nearby, and his body not to be found anywhere.”

But The Horseman of The Davidos patrolled the road for all those thirty years along the Davidos range, like the legend he had become. * * *

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acknowledgements

“Murder by Invention” first published in Word Riot “The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais” first published in Lit Pot Press “The Old Man of the River” first published in Poets Haven “Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered” first appeared in "A Collection of Frieds" published by Pocol Press, 2004 “The House No One Lived In” first appeared in the literary magazine Ken* Again, 2009 “Fred Rippon's Mushroom House” first appeared in "A Collection of Frieds" published by Pocol Press, 2004 “Lover, not Yet Lover” first appeared in Nazar Look Journal, 2013 “Plumbeck the Fiddler” first appeared on Rope and Wire Magazine, February 4, 2009 “Jail-break at Bear Creek” first appeared on Rope and Wire Magazine, July 21, 2009 “The Horsemen of the Davidos” first appeared on Rope and Wire Magazine, July 14, 2009 “Home Is the Sailor from the Sea” first appeared in Nazar Look Journal, 2014

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Sons of Guns, Inc. and other stories

table of contents Home Is the Sailor from the Sea .........................7 The Boy Who Dug Worms at Mussel Flats ..........31 Odyssey of a French Swordsman.......................40 Secrets of Sawyer’s Icehouse............................60 The Silent Mystery of the Latigo Saint................69 Sons of Guns, Inc. ...........................................82 Murder by Invention ........................................94 The Rescues of Brittan Courvalais ................... 111 The Old Man of the River................................ 124 Johnny Igoe, Spellbinder Remembered............ 142 The House No One Lived in ............................ 153 Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House ...................... 163 Lover, not Yet Lover....................................... 177 The Storekeeper ............................................ 185 The Rig Runner ............................................. 204 Plumbeck the Fiddler...................................... 215 Jail-break at Bear Creek ................................. 229 The Horseman of the Davidos......................... 238 acknowledgements............................................ 251

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