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Excerpt

Chapter 3
Ed Takes His Share

February 3, 1889

    The sound of the horse drinking at the water trough awakened Pearl. When she looked out the window, she could see dark splotches on its neck and mane, perhaps blood. She finally realized the horse was Venus, her mother’s mare, and it seemed to have injuries.

    Pearl got up from the bed, went to the door and opened it. “Ma?” she called out into the cold afternoon. The only answer she got came from a crow cawing somewhere down by the river. The air stood still and damp; a scent of impending snow seemed to fill it. The mare turned its head toward her and neighed softly. Pearl grabbed her shawl by the door, and wrapped it around her as she headed for the saddled mare. The animal seemed skittish at her approach, jerking its head upward with wide whitened eyes. She looked cold and frightened.

   “Easy, easy. Whoa,” Pearl coaxed softly as she reached for the loose reins dragging the ground. She examined the blood spots on the mare’s neck and could see only a few turkey shot-sized wounds. A smear of blood ran down the horse’s shoulder, and Pearl could tell it wasn’t the mare’s. “Mother?” she called again, this time with growing alarm, looking frantically about.

Big, soft snowflakes had started slowly floating down, when Pearl found her mother. Back at the house, she’d hitched Clod, the big bay mule, to the wagon, and headed toward the landing of Hoyt’s Ferry on the north shore of the Canadian River. With the rider-less mare showing up, Pearl knew her mother must be somewhere between her home and the ferry crossing. The only way back to Younger’s Bend from Fort Smith was to use the ferry to cross the river near Whitefield. Three miles from the house, Pearl found her. She lay beside the narrow road with a light covering of snow over most of her, except for those large shotgun wounds in her back, neck, and face. The blood remained warm enough to melt the snow’s collection upon those places. However, Pearl held no doubt her mother, Belle Starr, was dead.

She loaded the body into the wagon and headed back up the road to Porum. Whitefield was closer, but Porum had an undertaker and a sheriff. Besides, in her current state of mind, Pearl didn’t want to have to endure the incessant yakking and questioning of Bud Hoyt’s ferryman, Cecil Loudcrow. Cecil was the best way for news to travel in those parts.

“Whur’s Ed?” the Sheriff asked Pearl.

“I ain’t right sure,” Pearl answered. “I ain’t seen Ed in over a week. Him and Ma got into it about something and she took a horsewhip to him. He cussed her good, and lit out.”

“Izzat right,” the portly sheriff said, nodding. Then he spit into the brass spittoon next to his desk. He knew about the hostility between Ed and his ma. He also knew about the whippings, as he’d personally witnessed one. Belle had found the boy, then a teenager, inside the Porum Saloon sharing a whiskey bottle with Big Elsie, and chased him out onto the street with a bullwhip. She laid into him over and over, Ed on the ground wailing and begging her to stop. Even though the sheriff regarded Ed as a no ‘count and mean little bastard, he had tried to make Belle stop the whipping. But she pulled a pistol on him and said it was between her and Ed, and she’d shoot him, meaning the sheriff, if he interfered. Everyone knew about Belle’s explosive temperament, and it didn’t take much imagination to believe she would do what she said. The man cared much more about his life than Belle’s and Ed’s differences, so he’d stepped back.

The sheriff figured Ed Reed was a prime suspect in Belle’s killing; on the other hand, so were about ten other people. Belle wasn’t a popular woman around those parts, and there wouldn’t be much mourning at her passing. It didn’t seem to him that investigating her murder would be a good use of his time. But he did have a civic duty to uphold the law, and there was an election coming up, so he decided he’d arrest Ed Reed for the murder of Belle Starr, the next time he saw him. And that’s what he told everyone, including Pearl.

When Pearl returned to Younger’s Bend from Porum after depositing her mother’s body at the undertaker’s, she found Ed in the cabin sitting in front of the fire staring in to it.

"Ma’s dead,” Pearl told her brother.

“Yeah, I heard,” Ed said.

“How’d you hear?” Pearl asked. She wasn’t entirely unsuspicious of her brother.

“Cecil Loudcrow told me,” he said.

“How did Cecil Loudcrow know?”

Ed shrugged and didn’t say anything for a few seconds, continuing to stare into the fire. Finally, he said, “He says he talks to crows. Maybe they told him.”

Pearl walked to the fireplace and put her hands out to warm them. “Sheriff Connelly said he was going to arrest you for killing Ma,” she said. “Did you kill her?”

Ed didn’t say anything, so she looked back at him. “Did you, Ed?” she asked again.

Ed looked up at her, his eyes dark and sunken in his fire-lit face. “Cain’t say the thought never crossed my mind, but no, Pearl, I didn’t kill her.”

Pearl nodded and turned back to face the fire. They both kept silent for several minutes, and then Pearl said, “I wonder who did?”

    The only sound in the cabin for half a minute was the pop and hiss of the burning wood. “I think you better leave here, Ed,” Pearl continued. “That stupid sheriff in Porum may decide to get up a posse and come after you. He’s lazy, and I don’t think he much likes you. He’d just as soon see you hang for Ma’s killin’ as anyone.”

    “I’ve already been thinking about that, Pearl. I’m riding out in the morning. But before I go, I want to settle up with you. You know, Ma had a lot of loot stashed around here. She told me where she kept most of it. Well, I divvied up what I could find, and I put your share in on your bed. I kept a little more than I gave you, but that’s because I want you to have all the land and live stock and the house here at Younger’s Bend. I figure you’ll get a pretty fair price if you decide to sell.”

    “How much you leaving me, Ed?” Pearl asked.

“Close to fifty thousand dollars, I reckon. That ought to keep you going for a good long while.”

“Well,” Pearl said. She turned her backside to the fire. “I expect so.” Then she added, “Where you going to go?”

“I thought I’d head up north a ways; see if I can’t mix in among some of them Starrs up around Tahlequah; some of old Sam’s kin. I’m gonna take Clod to pack my stuff. I figure John Christie will sell you another mule.”

Just before daybreak, Ed had all his belongings, along with his share of Belle’s gold, silver, and paper money, packed up on Clod. He tightened the cinch on his gelding, and then turned to Pearl. He looked at the ground, then the sky, then his sister. “Well, goodbye, Pearl,” he said. Neither was sure they’d ever see the other again.

“I think I’m gonna bury Ma out here under that hickory tree, rather than in town,” Pearl said. She turned and indicated the large tree forty yards from the left corner of the front porch. Then she surveyed the whole homestead, looking last down towards the river. “Ma liked it out here, especially in the fall.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.

Pearl opened up then, and started sobbing uncontrollably. Ed put his arms around her and patted her back. He didn’t know what to say, so he just stood there and let Pearl cry. After a few minutes she slowed and then stopped. Ed kissed her on top of her head, then he mounted up and rode off without saying another word to his sister, pulling along the lead to Clod.

Prologue

Friday, November 16, 1973, 9:14 p.m.
Wade Rokes Stadium; Hert City, Oklahoma.

When the sneering human wrecking ball got off him, sophomore fullback Buddy Tarlson rolled from his back and came to his knees, his breathing ragged and painful. On all fours he looked imploringly to the sideline hoping the coaches would see fit to send in his relief. But Coach Stott, a slight smile on his face, stared toward the prancing Hert City cheerleaders at the far end zone; and Coach Doyle stared darkly at the ground in front of him, his arms folded across his chest. Besides, no replacement for him existed. He’d come into the game in the first quarter to replace senior starter Charlie Hoff who’d been led away to the dressing room and never returned. Tarlson staggered to his feet and wandered back toward the loosely forming huddle.

The young fullback bent forward at the waist with his bleeding hands on his knees, and sucked in what air he could. But the cracked rib on his left side made it feel like inhaling shards of glass. The left tackle, Junior Waxworth, another sophomore replacement, stood behind Buddy in the huddle, and tried to use him as a leaning post.

             “Back off, Junior!” Tarlson rasped and pushed him with his butt.

              Waxworth, consumed by his own infirmities didn't, or couldn't, respond. Senior quarterback Beau Roberts, misshapen by his swollen lower lip and left cheek which had closed his left eye and turned the color of squashed grapes, showed fright in his one good eye as he called Tarlson's number again. The fullback winced, emitting a short moan, as much in dread as in pain. But he was, for all intents and purposes, their only choice. Lyle Bonner, the only tailback left, could barely stand on two sprained ankles, and Bobby Snider, the slot back, no longer seemed to recognize the planet they were on, and had taken to whimpering. Roberts wasn’t about to pass it, even if he could. They all just wanted to let the clock run. Tarlson glanced up at the game clock. His single solace came when he saw that only one minute remained in his, and his team’s, miserable season.

            Tarlson rubbed his swollen dislocated right pinky as they broke the huddle, and looked painfully across the line of scrimmage at the waiting defensive tackle for Hert City, whose team members had repeatedly referred to as "Bubba" throughout the contest.

"Way to stick, Bubba!" they had said. "Screw 'em in the ground again, Bubba.” “He’s comin’ to your side, Bubba.” “Rip his head off, Bubba!"

Bubba’s reputation had preceded him. All season long newspaper stories had been written about his exploits on the high school gridiron. Those became further enlarged by oral accounts from the usual gatherings of town men at the diners around the district and at the farmers’ co-ops. His prowess had become legendary in three short months. Legendary, yes, but Buddy Tarlson and his fellow Tsalagee Redmen knew first hand none of his ability was mythical. That knowledge hung on them as real and debilitating as a bully punch to the stomach.

He’d emerged out of nowhere, moving into Hert City in the summer from somewhere in Texas. Some said Houston; some said Dallas. Some said he swirled out of Midland-Odessa like a Permian Basin dust devil; half-man, half roughneck. The details remained sketchy on that part, just like the how and what concerning the large sigma shaped scar on his left bicep. But its exact proportions looked too perfect to have resulted from an accident.

When asked repeatedly how such a phenom had come to be on his team all of a sudden, the Trojan coach smiled his mirthless smile and said, “Here in the Trojan Nation, we don’t worry about the color of the horse, we just load the wagon.” And then would go on at length about the winning attitude of “these kids” and how the “kids” were focused on getting to another championship. To which the interrogator would frown and nod as if all the coach said had made perfect sense, and then would write it on her pad as a quote for the Tuesday edition.

Beyond Junior Waxworth’s three-point stance, Tarlson could see a smirk curl Bubba's upper lip, but no humor escaped from his dark recessed eyes. Tarlson decided Waxworth would receive yet another brain jarring forearm to the jaw, and he himself would once more abruptly meet the frozen turf of Rokes Field compliments of Bubba.

At the snap of the ball, Tarlson took a jab step to his left then veered right, his arms open to receive the hand-off from Roberts. Roberts spun quickly counter-clockwise, but in his half-blind and fully terrified state, he turned his head to his left in order to keep his good right eye on the lookout for the inevitably charging Bubba. As a result he lost the timing and ran flush into the slanting Tarlson. Buddy tried to make a correction and grabbed at the ball still in Roberts fear-frozen hands. The two of them danced a short frantic jitterbug more or less toward the line of scrimmage, Roberts obviously more concerned with the whereabouts of Bubba than giving the ball to his fullback. Just as Tarlson broke the ball free from Roberts’s grip, Junior Waxworth flew backwards into the conjoined duo, sending the three of them crashing to the ground and the ball squirting skyward. A meaty black arm reached out and gathered in the ball, and beneath a groaning Waxworth and a whimpering Roberts, Tarlson watched the ogre called Bubba jog the ten yards needed to the Tsalagee goal line. That upped the score sixty-two – zip, Hert City.

All Buddy Tarlson could think to say at that point–a phrase on the lips of his hapless teammates all that night; words echoed throughout the season in every town across the tri-county district–was, “Who is this guy?”

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