Saddlebag Dispatches—Winter 2020

AFTER GRADUATION, I LEFT town to work on my uncle’s Wyoming ranch where the wind never stops blowing. When I came back to Oklahoma, a year later, Pep O’Hara said Lillian Gish used to go to school with us, but I didn’t know who he meant. Pep and me were pals in high school, class of 1912. During our junior year, we did everything together. “Pep and John Mark,” they’d say, “two peas in a pod,” but in a sad sort of way, like nobody expected us to stick together, and I guess they were right.

When Pep latched onto the topic of this girl, I wasn’t exactly surprised. He was always going crazy about one thing or other.

That summer, the weather in Shawnee wasn’t all that different than in Wyoming, and it was funny how I’d gotten to think of that rugged mountainous state as my home, even though I grew up on the flatland. The sky was big in both places, but in Wyoming, it was polished clean like a looking glass crystal so blue it made you your eyes water to see it. Oklahoma always had a perimeter of dust kicking up at the horizon, and the whitewashed clapboard buildings downtown were a bearcat to keep clean

The summer after I got back from the ranch, I worked in the downtown, first at the haberdashery, steaming cowboy hats and denting the crowns just so, then at the constable’s office where I first got to wear a star on my flannel shirt.

It was gawdawful dry that summer, which didn’t help the dirt problem, and hot enough to fry grasshoppers on the sidewalk—which isn’t even much of a fib. I seen it.

To cool off, we’d go to this little drug store called Alderman’s where a few of us would buy ice cream or sodas after we got off work at night. Pep and me would walk across the railroad track from Main Street, and some of the boys would ride in from the farms on their horses. Sometimes they’d bring a girl or two, usually their sisters. There was a little nickelodeon next door with a hitching rack out front.

Once in a while—maybe on a Friday night—we’d go see a show.

One night I missed the show and met Pep afterwards at Alderman’s. He sat there with his ice-cream melting into a puddle, slender fingers drumming on the table, his watery blue eyes fixed on the ripples he made. When I slid into the booth across from him, he didn’t say anything.

“I’m starting work in the constable’s office,” I told him, just to say something. “Snub Buckner is my dad’s cousin. He recommended me to the job.”

“That makes you a cop?” he said, just like that.

I didn’t know why he should be upset. Pep had a solid carpentry job with the railroad making signposts and hewing replacement ties.

“I’ve never liked cops,” he said. “That’s all.”

Pep was good at woodworking. Everybody thought he’d go into business for himself someday, maybe building cabinets or doing baseboard trim, but he never did.

Then he said, “Up there on the screen, tonight. It was our Lillian.”

“I don’t know who you mean,” I said.

“She’s the one sat in front of me in Geometry. Our winsome, blonde angel.” Already when he talked about her, he was possessive.

“I guess I never really knew her,” I said, not really knowing what winsome meant.

Pep said Lillian was friends with Gladys Gilbert, who Jeb Saunders liked, and he thought it was out to his ranch where she first rode a horse, but maybe not.

“Lillian lived with her aunt and uncle in Shawnee, didn’t she?” I said, remembering a little more. “Her dad was in the hospital.”

Pep nodded. “She wanted to stay here in Shawnee, even after her dad passed. Gladys said Lillian didn’t want to go back east. But they made her do it. You understand? They didn’t give her any choice.”

“I hadn’t heard any of that,” I admitted.

The nickelodeon played two or three pictures each night, often the same one over and over again. You paid your coin, and if you had some left over, the lady behind the counter served coffee or lemonade, both the same temperature. I usually had a lemonade. One time, Pep snuck in a flask, and the old lady read him the riot act and made him dump it out.

So, we’d go behind the curtain, and Mr. Wyatt, the projectionist, would always be tinkering around with his machine. One time, I just happened to be carrying a screwdriver, the type he needed. It wasn’t much of a place, to be honest.

After enough folks got in there and crowded in on the little wooden benches, Wyatt would shine the light up on a white bed sheet that was stretched over a big hunk of lumber. The flickers—what we used to call them—were pleasant enough, but I still preferred books. My imagination had color and sound.

“She’ll come back, John. Believe me. Nobody respectable makes flickers. Lillian’ll sow some oats, then come back and raise a family here. It’s what she wants. You can see it in her face,” said Pep. “There’s a scene in this current story where you can see her true self.”

“How many times you seen this show?” I said.

“Three times.”

“Well, she’s an actor isn’t she?” I said. “How do you know what her true self looks like?”

“She isn’t an actor at all,” he said, shaking his head. “She never was. She’s just a poor, scared girl.”

I kind of thought maybe he was pointed in the wrong direction there, but I didn’t say.

“This show is called The Battle at Elderbush Gulch. Lillian plays a young mother, and if you saw it, you’d see the glow on her face. With that baby in her arms, it’s clear that’s right there where she wishes she could be. I mean, that’s the real Lillian. A baby in her arms.”

“Your ice cream is melting,” I said, but he ignored it.

“I think I’m going to ask her uncle about her,” said Pep. “Next time I see him.”

“You know her aunt and uncle?”

He admitted he wasn’t well acquainted with the couple, but in a small town with one main street it wasn’t too odd to occasionally bump into someone. Or orchestrate a meeting that seemed accidental.

Later on, I saw that Elderbush Gulch movie and didn’t like it. Lillian did well enough, but her name wasn’t given. I guess it was her. The bad part was all these typical English fellows pretending to be foolish Indians. I didn’t think anyone could ever believe it.

“Isn’t there one thing you love more than anything else in life?” said Pep. “Something you’d rank above everything?” This was a few weeks later, when me and Pep were both on the tar crew, coating the roof of the Lutheran school that sat way out on the empty prairie.

We were way out there, far west of sin, and the question sorta hit me off guard. I had to chew it a while. I almost said that the most important thing to me was family, meaning Mom and Dad and Sis, but it seemed immature to say so, and I didn’t think that’s what he meant.

Finally, I said, “Maybe dime novel stories,” because I dearly loved to read.

Right away he said, “I don’t know what you see in them.”

“Well, they’re exciting,” I offered. “There’s one I just read the other day about a British lord who got raised by apes in the jungle.”

“Them stories aren’t about real people,” he said, like that made them bad. Like they were from the devil or something. That’s how I took it, judgmental like that. Maybe, because it was a church school under our feet.

Pep was especially irritable on that job. I guess we all were. It was hard work pulling buckets full of hot tar up two stories by rope. Also, Pep had lost weight since high school.

“What is it you love more than life itself, Pep?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

A day or so later, I got an earful from one of the boys on the police force. Snub Buckner was a big ol’ fella with a pickled nose and a heavy mustache half full of dry soup. He used to ride this big speckled bay around town.

“Hey, John Mark, are you friends with that Pep O’Hara?” he said, cornering me one day with that bay. Talking down to me from the saddle.

“I know him,” I said.

“What’s he doing over at the Gish place every night?” said Snub.

For a minute, I thought he meant the nickelodeon.

“Naw, I mean old Grant Gish’s house,” said Snub. “Pep O’Hara sits in the driveway late at night. Just loitering around afoot or sitting on his horse. Nursing a flask, I suspect. You see him, you tell him to knock it off or somebody’s gonna get on him.”

When I asked Pep about it, he said he was waiting.

“Lillian’s coming home,” he said. “I got a New York letter from her that says so. That’s where she lives, New York. That’s where American Biograph is, the company that enslaves her.”

That’s what he said—enslaves.

I figured there was no letter. I never saw one if there was.

Turns out though, there had been more movies from American Biograph. Pep saw them all. The Green-Eyed Devil. The Battle of the Sexes. The Quicksands. While Pep moped around, Lillian was keeping busy.

Saturday night after Thanksgiving, cold and damp, Snub Buckner sent me over to the Gish place.

A fine mist of ice was coming down when I hitched up the wagon, and I was thankful for the old buffalo blankets Snub kept handy. Main street was mostly dark with a few electric lights punching through some of the storefront windows. Most places were still lit by coal oil lanterns like the metal one I carried on my wagon.

When I rounded the corner to the Gish house, all was dark, but I saw an outline of a horse in the lane.

I plucked the lantern from its hook on the sideboard and walked across the road.

Sure enough. Pep’s horse.

Walking around the front of the house I couldn’t see anything inside, but when I got to the porch, the banging screen door made me jump, and I saw the front door was open.

The wind blew, gusting the door open, then it pulled shut with a bang so loud it made me jump and wish I had a revolver, but I was unarmed.

Thank you, Snub Buckner. Sending me out while he sat fat and cozy in front of the fire.

“Pep? You in there?” I said.

I wondered where Lillian’s aunt and uncle were. “Mr. Gish? Mrs. Gish?” I knew the uncle’s name was Grant. “Grant Gish?”

No answer, but I was sure I heard something scuff a floorboard.

I pushed open the door and went into the room.

A figure reclined in a chair on the far side of the house. I lifted the lantern and saw him there by the chimney, pink wallpaper behind, a hat rack above, a mirror that shined back in my eyes.

Pep stared at me without saying anything.

Was he dead?

“Pep? Are you alright, boy? What are you doing?”

He stirred then, moved as if seeing me for the first time. “Look what I made for her, John,” he moved his arm. On the table beside him were a dozen small wooden boxes.

“I carved them for her, John. One for each story I’ve seen her in. One for each so she can remember them later.”

“Where are Mr. and Mrs. Gish, Pep?”

He shrugged. “Out. This was my first chance to leave my gifts for her.”

I’ll admit, for an instant, I worried some sort of foul play might’ve befallen Mr. and Mrs. Gish.

“Tell me again,” I said. “Why are you here?”

Pep stood up and stretched like he was waking up from a Sunday nap. Like he owned the place. He walked right up and talked to me in the dark.

“I made them boxes for Lillian,” said Pep. “For when she comes back.”

“What if she doesn’t come back?” I said.

“Don’t say that, John. Don’t ever say that.”

Never had I heard such anger in my friend. “I’ll make sure she comes back.”

“Let’s go, Pep. Let’s go have a drink.”

“Too cold for ice cream,” he said. “You take back what you said, about Lillian.”

“Okay Pep. I take it back.”

“I made these for her.”

“They’re nice,” I said. “Real nice.”

“She’ll see them when she comes back for the funerals.”

A thousand frozen ants climbed up my back. “What funerals are those?” I said.

I didn’t have a revolver, but Pep did. He pulled it then.

The ants sorta spread all over me.

“The Gish funerals,” said Pep. “It’s them that made her leave. Now, I’ll make her come back. She’ll have to come back for the funerals.”

“And then she’ll see your gifts,” I said, figuring out his weird logic.

“When she sees how much I love her, she’ll stay. And it’ll be like the Battle of Elder Gulch. It’s all going to be okay.”

Just then, I heard a wagon pull up outside, and my stomach hugged my backbone.

I couldn’t let him go through with his plan.

“Drop the gun, Pep,” I said.

But he wouldn’t. So, I swung out with the metal lantern, and he moved. Instead of his arm, I hit his head, and he fell over.

There was an awful lot of blood. Head wounds bleed the worst.

I got him out to the porch, and the wagon wasn’t the Gish’s but Snub Buckner, who helped me load Pep onto the wagon.

He died right there, and a couple weeks later, I quit the wide-open Shawnee range and went back to my uncle’s ranch on the other side of the Laramie Mountains. Three years to the day, and I became sheriff of my Wyoming county.

And the wind hasn’t stopped blowing since that night in November.

Sometimes still, all these years later, I think about Lillian, the girl we once knew. I still don’t truly remember her, but I recollect the other gals, and I recall school well enough, how the future was spread out in front of us all, how anything was possible in the new century ahead. I was going to my uncle’s ranch to be a cowboy, and Pep was the best wood carver around, and one of the girls would go on to become a movie star—though we couldn’t comprehend such a thing then.

When I think back, there was a time when I was overly concerned with folks and their problems, and I got in the middle of things without knowing what was what and who was who.

Sometimes, I think it might’ve been better if we all had let it lie, just taken jobs at the livery stable or the mercantile or at least not pushed so hard to climb up the various pedestals we aspired to. Sometimes, I can’t help but think that, when we lost Lillian Gish, we lost the best parts of us. I don’t know if I can forgive her for that. While here in Wyoming, at least the sky is clear. And for that, I’m grateful.

Richard Prosch grew up planting corn, tending cattle, and riding the Nebraska range in a beat-up pickup and a ’74 Camaro. He worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South Carolina, and Missouri, while amassing enormous collections of paperback fiction, comic books, MEGO action figures, and vintage vinyl. With his wife, Gina, he created “Comics and Emma Davenport,” a strip that ran in the Comics Buyers Guide newspaper and spawned ten issues of Emma’s own comic book. The duo continued their creative endeavors, developing licensing style guides for several cartoon properties and working with Tribune Media Services and the Hallmark Channel. In the 2000s, Richard built a web development studio while winning awards for illustration and writing (including a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America). His work has appeared in novels, numerous anthologies, True West, Roundup, and Saddlebag Dispatches magazines, and online at Boys’ Life.