There was somethin’ about that cowboy. He was always mad and I was always scared of him but I still liked it when he come around. There was just somethin’ in how he done me. He could be real mad at my mama but he was always real tender with me. We didn’t talk when we was ridin’ back to Goodnight but he had me sittin’ in front of him on the saddle. His arm was around me. He was holdin’ me tight against him and he must have been sweatin’ real hard. It didn’t seem that hot to me but I could feel water hittin’ me on the back of the neck. It wasn’t rainin’ so it had to come from sweat from his face.
I’m generally one for talkin’, but that mornin’ talkin’ would have took away what I was feelin’. I was likin’ how he was holdin’ me. I reckon in his head he was just holdin’ me there, keepin’ me from fallin’ off, but in my head, he was huggin’ me. It give me a real warm feelin’.
When that big, red-headed cowboy got me back to my mama she just looked at me and said, “What you doin’ back here?”
The cowboy went to tellin’ my mama what he seen. Didn’t seem like my mama was scared of nothin’. I seen her pistol-whip men when they was tryin’ to beat her up when they was whorin’ on her or when they was tryin’ to get away without payin’ her. She didn’t use no sense. She’d talk right up to the meanest drunk and she didn’t always come out on the best end. She got beat up plenty and she was always gettin’ into things that wasn’t none of her business. Reckon she didn’t think none, that’s why she wasn’t scared.
But she was scared now. I think she knowed that cowboy real good and it didn’t take no thinkin’ to tell she better not fuss too much at him. I didn’t hear everything they was sayin’ but I did hear him sayin’ that he better not hear of me bein’ back in that orphanage. Even didn’t she do him like she done most folks, I could tell there was gonna be some yellin’. I’d been yelled at enough in that orphanage. Even though their yellin’ wasn’t bein’ done at me, I just left and went on down in front of the saloon to see what was goin’ on.
Me and my mama lived in that same cabin for three more years and mostly we didn’t even talk to each other. Sometimes there was food in the house but I mostly done chorin’ for folks and bought the stuff I needed. Even was I only eight years old, a whole lot of folks got to likin’ how I chored for them. I done good. Like I said, some of them Goodnight folks run me off and a lot of them that didn’t wasn’t too nice to me but they liked how I chored for them.
One of them ladies I run errands for give me clothes her boy got too big for and sometimes she even had me stay for supper. She didn’t make me eat on the back porch either. She set me down right with her family. She had that boy who was just some bigger than me and two girls who was littler than me. I knowed her husband run the General Store but I didn’t know him good. He never come to my mama.
When I was at his house and his mama was right there, that boy done me good. He didn’t name on me or nothin’. But when he was away from his mama, he done like most of them other young ’uns in town. He called me a whore’s bastard and would push me down in the dirt. One time him and some other boys throwed me in the horse tank. Lots of times, them boys throwed rocks at me. Hit me some, too. Hurt like hell. I couldn’t do nothin’ back, though. I was thinkin’ that Marshal was keepin’ a close eye on me just lookin’ for some reason to cart me off to some damn orphanage again. Take a hell of a lot more than a dousin’ in a horse tank and some rock bruises to cause me to do somethin’ that would put me back in one of them places.
I heard some of them boys teasin’ that storekeeper’s boy about eatin’ with a whore’s bastard and askin’ him did he go to see my mama too. Seemed like he had to show them boys that I wasn’t no friend of his. He was the meanest one to me in the whole goddam town. I couldn’t do nothin’ about it and like I said, I had better things to do with my thinkin’ than bein’ mad at folks. What he done didn’t stop his mama from bein’ nice to me, so what the hell?
For a long time, I could never figure out why she was havin’ me run her errands when she had that boy. After while it come to me that maybe she was feelin’ sorry for me. That made me mad. I was doin’ all right. I didn’t need nobody feelin’ sorry for me. I wasn’t so mad that I stopped runnin’ her errands or takin’ them clothes and stayin’ for supper when asked though.
When I come back to our cabin from them houses where I done chorin’, I’d get a kind of sick feelin’. We was livin’ like rats. I’d try some to clean the place up but it didn’t do no good. Everything we had was all raggedy and even when the place was some clean, it still looked like a rathole. Got so I only stayed there for sleepin’ and sometime when it was rainin’ or somethin’ like that.
My mama was always drunk. She got so she’d go for days not eatin’ nothin’, only drinkin’ whiskey. She’d drink so much, sometimes I’d come home and find her sleepin’ on that dirt floor. She smelled real bad from all that whiskey and she never bathed. Hell, she never even washed her face or her hair. Her face had sores like all over it and her hair was all stringy and she was gettin’ skinnier and skinnier. Wasn’t too many men come to see her no more but I didn’t see how the ones that did could stand her. Like I said, I didn’t stay around the cabin too much but when I was there, I didn’t see hardly no men no more. She’d just lay there on that dirty bed and when she wasn’t passed out from drinkin’, she’d cuss when she seen me.
I think that whiskey was makin’ her crazy. Once when I come in she chased me around the cabin with an ax. I wasn’t really in no danger from her ’cause I can move pretty fast and she was so drunk she’d be lucky if she could hit the floor with that ax. I never could think why she hated me so. She was always sayin’ how she was gonna do me real bad and even though she never done nothin’, it questioned me why she’d keep sayin’ them things. She’d always tell me I was just like that goddam son-of-a-bitch and she was gonna shoot me like she should have done him long ago. I reckon she meant that red-headed cowboy she hated so much.
But she never done nothin’ like that to me. She was mostly too drunk or too lazy or maybe too weak from not eatin’ to get off her bed so she just cussed me out or said them mean things whenever she seen me. The only time she’d get off that bed was to get another bottle and every so often she’d drag herself to Hans Gutner’s saloon when she couldn’t get no one else to get her a bottle or when no men had come to the cabin for a while and she felt like whorin’. If you was lookin’ at her when she was tryin’ to get up, you’d get the feelin’ she’d rather just lay there and die.
I used to think on her dyin’ and wonder how I’d take it. I never could think out how I’d do. I don’t think I wanted her to die but I had the feelin’ that she wanted to. Reckon I knowed that she would before I was growed. I needed her to keep me out of them orphanages and even though we never talked and she done me bad, she was still my mama. I’d think sometimes that it didn’t make no difference to me if she lived or died but there was this feelin’ in me too that I should be doin’ somethin’ to help her. I’d feel sad for her sometimes. I don’t remember hardly ever feelin’ mad at her. I do remember tryin’ real hard not to think about her at all but I knowed I had to. It was her dyin’ that was my real danger. Folks might bitch about me livin’ with a whore but as long as she was alive, I reckoned they’d leave me be and not be tryin’ to send me off to some goddam orphanage.
I had these mixed-up feelin’s about my mama dyin’ but I knowed I didn’t need her. Hell, I didn’t need no one. I was doin’ real good on my own. I had lots of folks would hire me for chorin’ and I had my own secret places where I could do my thinkin’ or just be by myself when I couldn’t keep hold of my thinkin’ and it was startin’ to get away from me. Nobody was gonna tell me what to do or how to think. If I let anyone—my mama or them mean, name-callin’ folks around Goodnight—make me mad, I was lettin’ them tell me what to think. When I could feel my thinkin’ gettin’ away from me, I’d go to the creek. Somethin’ about watchin’ that runnin’ water. How that water made me get hold of my thinkin’ again questioned me but I didn’t think too hard on it. I just let that water make me feel good.
Hans Gutner was gettin’ real mad at my mama. He didn’t want her in his place no more, her bein’ and lookin’ and smellin’ like she was. She didn’t whore there at all no more. Hans had brought in another whore from Austin and he’d get mad as hell when Mama’d go there and take his customers. I can’t think why. Anybody who’d go with her wasn’t worth havin’ for a customer anyway. But Hans was real jealous about his customers and he was one who liked to be mad anyway so he hated my mama.
That new whore, Emma, wasn’t like my mama at all. She was real young and some pretty. I seen a lot of men buy her drinks but I never seen her drink any of them. Hans had a pan behind the bar and when them men wasn’t lookin, Emma would pour them drinks in that pan. When the next man wanted to buy Emma a drink, Hans would sell him the same whiskey. Seemed like Emma wanted to look after me. Sometimes when I couldn’t find no chorin’ and didn’t have nothin’ to eat, she’d bring me somethin’ from Hans’ kitchen. If you tried to give somethin’ away that belonged to Hans Gutner, you better be damn careful. If he caught you no tellin’ what he’d do. But Emma wasn’t scared of him. If she thought I needed feedin’, she’d feed me. Hans knowed she was doin’ it and you could tell it made him mad but he never said nothin’. I think he was scared of her.
Now, that questioned me. Hans was a real big man and Emma wasn’t too much bigger than me. But she had somethin’ about her. Ain’t sure what it was. She didn’t talk mean. I never even heard her cuss. She wasn’t big enough or strong enough to do somebody bad that way but somehow folks knowed to leave her be. Emma was more growed than me and probably knowed better what she was doin’ but it come to me that maybe her thinkin’ was some like mine. She was gonna be her, not what other folks thought she was or wanted her to be. I hoped I could be like her when I was growed. She was the toughest but the kindest person I’d knowed up to then.
Emma knowed I knowed what whores done and she knowed I knowed what most folks thought of whores. She told me that she wasn’t proud of what she done but she wasn’t ashamed of it either. She said there was nothin’ for her at home. Her folks was dirt poor and there was seventeen young ’uns. Emma was in the middle somewheres and she said that them in the middle ain’t nothin in them big families. She said the older ones get attention ’cause they’re old enough to raise hell and the littler ones get attention because they’re babies and the ones in the middle ain’t nothin’ but there. She got sick of it.
She said that whorin’ wasn’t no worse than livin’ like a rat. For a girl that had no chance to get no schoolin’, whorin’ was the only way to get a better life. When she’d saved enough money, she was goin’ to San Francisco and get a respectable job and be a proper lady. Wasn’t no Hans Gutner or uppity Christians gonna stop her from doin’ that. She said I could come to San Francisco with her did I want to.
I liked Emma real good but I couldn’t let her get too close to me. Seems like when folks is givin’ like Emma was you get all scary. I don’t mean just givin’ things. Emma was givin’ me part of her and that was scary. When folks are givin’ you part of them it feels like they’re takin’ part of you too. That was the scary part. I think when I was real little I tried to give my mama part of me. She didn’t want it. I can tell you all I want about me not thinkin’ on my mama, but way inside me I knowed I was hurtin’ ’cause she didn’t want what I had to give. I wasn’t takin’ no chances on givin’ to nobody else. If you wasn’t givin’ you wasn’t gonna get your feelings hurt if folks didn’t want what you had to give. Hell, I didn’t need Emma. I didn’t need nobody.
That questioned me. If I didn’t need Emma or nobody else, how come sometimes at night when I was tryin’ to go to sleep did I think on her or on that big red-headed cowboy? How come did thinkin’ on them people make me want to cry?
I reckon Emma knowed what I was thinkin’. She kept kind of lookin’ out for me but she didn’t push me for too much givin’ back. She said to me once, “I got me the feelin’ that you don’t let yourself feel nothin’ ’cause you can only see meanness and hate in your life. You’re too smart to let them things run your thinkin’ and I’m proud of you, boy, the way you let them mean sayin’s and doin’s slide right off you. It’s good not to let folks get to you but don’t ever stop feelin’ things. Even if you can’t see them, there’s good things in your life. Find them, Sammy Boy. Find them and feel them and hang on to them and let them grow in your thinkin’. They’ll push out all the hurt and the mad. But you got to feel things. If you don’t, you’re dead.
“The big reason I couldn’t live at home no more was that all them people was dead. Oh, they ain’t in their graves but they ain’t livin’ either. Sammy Boy, all them people, my ma and pa and all my brothers and sisters was poor. I lived like all the rest of them. I didn’t have no more than they did but I was never poor, Sammy Boy, I was never poor. Didn’t make any difference what we had or didn’t have, I wouldn’t let myself be poor. Do you understand what I mean? I think you do. You won’t let yourself be a whore’s bastard.”
I didn’t understand all she was sayin’ but I kind of knowed. Like I said, I kept hold of my thinkin’ but I couldn’t always keep hold of my feelin’. I think Emma was tellin’ me not to try to keep hold of my feelin’s. Like I said, I felt sad some about my mama. I felt hurt when folks done me bad. I felt real soft and almost cryful with them Emma and them red-headed cowboy thinkin’s. I felt them things but I couldn’t let on ’cause folks might think what they was doin’ on me or sayin’ on me was gettin’ to me. What you’re feelin’ is too much part of you. It’s too private and ain’t nobody’s business. Folks bad-mouthed me enough for what my mama done. That didn’t really matter to me. But, like I said, they had me placed in their thinkin’. They was gonna bad-mouth me anyway. If they really knowed me, they’d bad-mouth me for me. I knowed I couldn’t keep hold of my thinkin’ if they done that. Reckon you can’t stop yourself from feelin’ but you can stop yourself from lettin’ on about it.
It was this feelin’ I had about Emma and that red-headed cowboy that was the only thing that questioned me that I hated to think on. Mostly, I liked thinkin’ on them questions. Sometimes, I’d think them out but mostly I’d just think on them. But them Emma and them cowboy feelin’s hurt you in the chest when they come to you. Them feelin’s was wantin’ somethin’ from me and somethin’ from Emma or that cowboy but I could never think out what the hell it was. The only time I didn’t feel like I was doin’ just fine the way I was livin’ was when I was havin’ them Emma and them cowboy feelin’s. Mostly, I acted real growed up. Folks I done chorin’ for even said I was. But when I was havin’ them feelin’s, I felt like a real little boy. I reckon, when I think back on it, my life wasn’t much. Most of my time was spent lookin’ for chorin’ jobs. I spent some time at the creek and, when they’d let me, I went to school but mostly I’d get up, look for some chorin’ to do, eat when I could and go to bed. It was the goin’ to bed part that almost caused my danger to take me. I reckon even a growed man has got to sleep sometime. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with it but I felt like I was careless when my danger near about took me when I was sleepin’.
I already told you that Hans Gutner was gettin’ real mad at my mama ’cause she wouldn’t stop comin’ into his saloon. She wasn’t cuttin’ into his business much but she would go in there and get some men. Mostly she just went in there and raised hell. She’d got real crazy, even for a damn drunk. She’d pick a fight with anyone and even did they try to pay her no mind, she’d fuss at them until they was about to kill her. More than once Hans throwed her in the street like he done them drunk cowboys.It was real late in the night, like about three o’clock in the morning, I reckon, when some gun shots woke me up. Livin’ in a town like Goodnight you kind of got used to hearin’ shootin’. Mostly they was just some drunk cowboy shootin’ in the air, lettin’ off steam so I didn’t think nothin’ of them. I went on back to sleep.
I don’t know how long I slept but when I was woke up again, it was still dark. This time I was woke up from hearin’ talkin’ outside the cabin. The talkin’ was comin’ from the Marshal and that storekeeper’s woman and Emma. They was talkin’ real soft but I could make out what they was sayin’. They was sayin’ there was no use to wake me. She’d be just as dead in the mornin’. The Marshal was sayin: No, Emma couldn’t move into the cabin and look after me. That boy needed better up-bringin’ than a whore could give him. He’d let things go so long as his mama was alive but he wasn’t havin’ no more of it. Anyway, folks wanted him out of this town.
The storekeeper’s woman was sayin’ she knowed he had a lot of good in him and if it wasn’t for the way folks thought on him in this town, she’d take him in and raise him. But she had to agree with the Marshal. He’d have a better chance where folks didn’t know him, in the county orphanage.
Well, it happened. I didn’t know if them Christians run that county orphanage or not but I wasn’t takin’ no chances. Our cabin wasn’t very big and my mama found out a long time ago that she couldn’t keep me out all the time. I’d seen what she done with them men since I can remember and it got to where watchin’ didn’t mean nothin’ to me and I mostly wasn’t there anyway. But I couldn’t be gone all the time and of late, even though there wasn’t hardly no men no more, seein’ her do it made things happen way down inside me and sometimes I couldn’t make myself stop lookin’. She knowed I was watchin’ so she had one of them men string a rope across the cabin so she could hang one of them big wagon tarps over it and make a kind of a wall. After that, when she had them men there, she was doin’ her whorin’ in a little room instead of the whole cabin.
That was fine with me. Since I come to know what it was she was doin’, watchin’ her do it disgusted me but, like I said, sometimes I couldn’t make myself stop lookin’. Now I had a place where I didn’t have to look and it made it easier not to try to watch.
There was only one door in the cabin and that was in Mama’s little room. I had dug me a hole under the bottom log in the south-west corner, under my cot, so I could come and go when Mama had men in her part of the cabin. I had to wiggle out on my belly ,but I could get out fine. The trouble was, if I could get out, rats and rattlers and skunks and such could get in. They did too, sometimes, but I could either kill them or run them off. Skunks was the worst problem. Mostly, I just let them be until they got ready to leave on their own. They didn’t come too often and if they did, they didn’t stay too long. There wasn’t nothin’ to eat in there. I don’t think Mama ever seen any of them varmints that come in there. Least ways, she never said nothin’. She could have seen them though. Most times she was either too sleepy or too drunk to notice anything. That talk about the orphanage got me awake and thinkin’ right now. I pulled on my britches and looked around to see did I want anything there. I had the feelin’ I’d never see this place again. Didn’t matter none. This was a rat-hole and wasn’t hardly nothin’ worth havin’. I did take a leather poke Mama had hid in a hole behind the chimly, and a six-shooter, holster, and six boxes of bullets she had took off some man who didn’t have the money to pay her. He was too drunk to know that what she took was worth a lot more than two dollars.
I knowed she had that money since I can remember, I reckon. I knowed she had it but even though I easy could have, I never took none before. The way we was livin’, couldn’t a been much there and anyway, the way she done me—I didn’t want nothin’ from her. But she was dead now. I might as well have it as the rats or that damn Goodnight Marshal. I found him in our cabin a whole lot of times lookin’ for that money. He even hit on me tryin’ to make me tell where it was. He never even come close to makin’ me tell. He’d hit on me but he never done it too bad. I knowed he was big enough to do me real bad, did he want to. But every time he’d start hittin’ me, somethin’ would come to him and he’d quit. It questioned me, why he done that but I didn’t think on it too hard. That damn Goodnight Marshall wasn’t the kind you’d want to think on.
The ones who was talkin’ outside was by the door doin’ their decidin’ so I bellied out that hole under my bed. It was almost daylight and the country around Goodnight was real flat and there wasn’t no trees. I knowed they would be lookin’ for me and I knowed I couldn’t get far enough away to hide anywhere before they could see me good. I picked a place they’d never look. I didn’t like it much but I’d been there before and I could make myself stand it until it got dark again and I could get away without bein’ seen. I hid in the pit of our shit house. Hell, the way it sounded, Mama was dead. Nobody was gonna shit on me. Anyway, I’d been in worse. After about an hour that stink got my belly so tight from rememberin’ I thought I was gonna die but I made myself stay there.
There was people around the cabin lookin’ for me all day. The Marshal had come around several times, and you could tell, he was gettin’ more and more put out. He’d been lookin’ for me all day. He’d rode to all the folks I was knowed to chore for and sittin’ a horse wasn’t one of the things he liked best. He liked sittin’ in his office with his feet on his desk, smokin’ them long, black cheroots and actin’ like he was a real important man. He was a real tough man in the talkin’ but somehow when trouble come up, he was hard to find. He was always talkin’ real mean with me and treatin’ me the same way. Did he have to face some drunk with a gun, he was so scared he was almost shakin’. I reckon a ’leven-year-old young ’un didn’t seem like trouble to him so he wasn’t too scared to act tough with me.
Lazy as he was, I reckon a lot of folks was wonderin’ why he was workin’ so hard to try to find me. That questioned me too but not too much. He was about the laziest man I ever knowed but I think he hated me more than he liked bein’ lazy. I reckon he knowed I didn’t want no part of any of them damn orphanages and he hated me enough to work hard to put me in one.
By the time he met Emma at the cabin toward evening, I wasn’t about to let him find me even if he wasn’t gonna send me to the county orphanage. He probably would have wore me out. You could tell he was rattled from havin’ to face my mama’s gun and you could tell he was mad as hell at me for keepin’ him on a horse all day like I done.
Most folks around Goodnight didn’t think much of the Marshal. There really wasn’t much Marshalin’ to be done in a little town like Goodnight and I reckon he worked cheap. Some of them folks I done chorin’ for told me that he used to cowboy for some big ranch over toward Pampa and that him and my mama come to town together. They was real good friends for a while. That Marshal lived right in the cabin with my mama and a whole lot of them people thought he was my daddy. As I growed though, you could tell he wasn’t nothin’ to me. I hear tell, too, he was run off from that Pampa ranch. I don’t know why them ranchers run him off but it didn’t question me much. He was the kind folks would want to run off.
Even though folks didn’t like him much, they was takin’ his side on my mama’s shootin’. From what they was sayin, Hans told my mama to get the hell out of his saloon. She wouldn’t go and he come at her to throw her out like he done before. Mama pulled a gun from the holster of one of them men at the bar and shot at Hans. She missed and was about to shoot again when the Marshal just happened to come in the door. She turned and pointed the gun at the Marshal and he pulled his gun and shot. From what they was sayin’ he was so shook, he emptied his gun into her. Folks was sayin’ they reckoned that one shot would have been enough but you could hardly blame the man. After all, the woman was tryin’ to kill him.
I found out how I’d think if my mama died. I couldn’t blame him either. I think you’re s’posed to feel bad if your mama gets killed. I think you’re s’posed to, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel nothin’. When them people was talkin’ about my mama gettin’ killed it was like they was talkin’ about someone in another town, someone I never even heard of.
Copyright © 2003 Gordon L. Klopfenstein