Death in the Tallgrass follows a young man in 1904 as he searches for his motherâs brother, kidnapped by Comanche warriors thirty-four years before. Crossing the rugged plains of Texas, Harry Bonner is confronted by land, people, and cultures that challenge his upbringing as a privileged child of a wealthy family. He battles Comanche magic, puzzles his way through dreams of his uncle fighting against his enemies, and suffers the brutality of men terrorizing the Texas countryside, all while being consumed by a new-found love in the unlikeliest of people.
When he loses that love, Harry explodes with violence and rage, betraying the personal and professional values he has always respected. He is left emotionally adrift on the prairie when he is called to experience the last episode of his uncleâs life.
Death in the Tallgrass follows a young man in 1904 as he searches for his motherâs brother, kidnapped by Comanche warriors thirty-four years before. Crossing the rugged plains of Texas, Harry Bonner is confronted by land, people, and cultures that challenge his upbringing as a privileged child of a wealthy family. He battles Comanche magic, puzzles his way through dreams of his uncle fighting against his enemies, and suffers the brutality of men terrorizing the Texas countryside, all while being consumed by a new-found love in the unlikeliest of people.
When he loses that love, Harry explodes with violence and rage, betraying the personal and professional values he has always respected. He is left emotionally adrift on the prairie when he is called to experience the last episode of his uncleâs life.
It was in late April, 1904 that I sat on a stool next to the metal-topped baking table in the kitchen, watching my mother work on a rolled-up cylinder of dough with layers of brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. It would soon become a plate of small cinnamon rolls for her suffragette friends to nibble on at their usual meeting. I had returned home after a morning of classes at the St. Louis School of Law and was not in a good mood. Besides having professors rushing to finish their class notes before the end of the semester, it was an unusually cold and windy spring day and I was angry at my mother for having lied to me.
I had brought a handful of papers and put them on the table in front of me, patting them into a neat stack.
âDidnât you tell me your brother died from cholera?â I asked.
She had her knife positioned over the cylinder, ready to slice, but stopped and looked at me.
âWhere did you get that question? My brother died more than thirty years ago.â
âIâm just wondering why you didnât tell me the truth.â
She put down the knife and eyed me suspiciously. âWhy are you asking me this?â
I had a special relationship with my mother. Being the firstborn, I was the child my mother was most available for raising. She turned out to be a naturally nurturing parent who loved me dearly, taught me the excitement of learning, and had fun with me at the same time she was ardently raising me to be smart, diligent, obedient, trustworthy, devoted, and all those other attributes most parents end up only wishing for their children.
It made us unusually close, honest with each other, and more often companions than adversaries. Life became more complicated after having me, so my four siblings, Vincent, Charlotte, John, and Alice, werenât so privileged. My name is Harold, but Iâm called Harry.
âI found your brotherâs death certificate and he obviously didnât die from cholera, so you lied to me. Were you covering up something I shouldnât know about?â
My mother backed up two or three steps until she leaned up against the countertop behind her. She crossed her arms, tilted her head, and looked at me with interest.
âWhere in the world did you find his death certificate?â
I laid my hand on top of the stack of papers. âI got these from Nevâs safe.â
Her eyebrows shot up and her eyes took on a look of both surprise and apprehension.
âYou opened his safe? No one is allowed to even touch it and you know that includes you. I hope to God he doesnât find out.â
âSince he canât even get out of bed anymore, Iâm sure heâll never know.â
âDonât underestimate him. He can still be a dangerous man, so you let me know immediately if anything happens because of it.â
Still concerned with what Iâd done, my mother glanced at the clock on the counter and quickly resumed her work on the rolls, slicing the soft cylinder into inch-thick swirls, careful to not squish the sides, and laying each swirl on a cookie sheet.
âI didnât tell you the truth,â she said as she worked, âfor any number of good reasons. But since you seem to think youâve been terribly mistreated, Iâll tell you why I didnât.
âWe lived on a large cattle ranch out in the country. It was the 10th of August, 1870, almost thirty-four years ago. It was my brother Samâs tenth birthday, and my mother was making a birthday cake for a party we were having in the afternoon. He and I had finished our pancakes for breakfast when she asked Sam to take our two milk cows up the road to a pasture with fresh grass. Two Comanche Indians surprised him on the road, tied him up, roped him onto the back of a horse, and took him away. We never knew anything more about him until a search party found his body.â
âMy God, he was kidnapped and killed by Indians? Thatâs horrible! No wonder you never told me.â
âPrecisely,â my mother said. âI never told any of you the truth because I could remember the nightmares I had after he was taken. Even after being sent all the way here, I would wake up in the middle of the night, shaking and crying, worried that the Indians were coming back to get me. I didnât want you to be scared, so I decided that since my parents had died of cholera, Iâd say that Sam died the same way.â
âWell, you still should have trusted me with the truth.â
She again laid down the knife and gave me a stern look. âYou were how old? Six, eight? Sometimes, you donât get to know the truth until you can handle it, and you, my over-achieving son, werenât anywhere near ready to handle the truth.â
âHey, I was older at six than a lot of kids are at eight,â I said, ready to argue the point.
âCongratulations, but you were more educated, not smarter. And neither of those has anything to do with being scared by dreams. It was my decision, and I made a good one. Now, do you want to hear more of the story, or should I assume youâve heard enough?â
âIâm sorry I came across like I did, but Iâm pretty sensitive to what is and whatâs not the truth these days. Call it a symptom of learning to be a lawyer.â
My mother came back to the baking table, took up her knife, and continued slicing. âMaybe itâs also a symptom of you being too full of yourself?â
I smiled. âIâm tall, rich, extremely smart, good-lookingâseems like I have a lot to be full of.â
She paused her slicing and looked at me with a surprisingly serious expression. âI donât like what Iâm hearing. Learning to be a lawyer is no excuse for being rude to your mother, nor should it be a mark of superiority.â
I could feel my face growing as red as my inherited Irish hair. âIâm supposed to be rude and aggressive. Thatâs the way successful lawyers behaveâalways seeking the truth, not stopping until they know everything, making witnesses squeal.â
âItâs never okay to be arrogant and to wield power over people to make them feel small,â she said, tilting her head. âNow, do you want to hear more or are we done?â
I was sweating around my collar. âIâm truly sorry for being rude, and, yes, I would like to know what else you have to say.â
She resumed slicing. âMy brotherâs kidnapping changed everything. My mother was devastated, and my dad was hit hard with guilt and remorse. We lived some miles outside of town, and things had already become difficult financially, so after what happened to Sam, my dad decided to give up ranching, sell everything, and return to St. Louis. He sent me back to stay with Nev and Nanna, while he and my mother waited for the ranch to be sold. I was just six years old, so my dad had one of the housemaids bring me.â
âBut they died before it sold, right?â
She nodded. âNev received a letter in November from the local sheriff, stating that both my parents had died during a cholera epidemic. He included a death certificate for Sam. When Nev contacted the sheriff, he said a search party had found his body in an Indian camp close to the Texas border. He guessed they buried him where they found him. Thatâs the truth youâre so suddenly interested in.â
âSo, with your parents dead, Nev and Nanna adopted you, which is why you refer to them as your parents rather than your uncle and aunt.â I knew this part of the story. Her original name was Lucille Mulvaney and her true parents were Cyrus and Violet Mulvaney. With their deaths and her adoption, Nev and Nanna became her parents, and her name became Lucille Simpson, with everyone calling her Lucy. The name Mulvaney was never mentioned because Nev held a deep resentment towards Cyrus for taking Violet to the rough and dangerous frontier, as well as his being a full-blooded Irishman.
âDo you remember what town your ranch was close to?â I asked.
She kept slicing in rhythm. âSome little town in New Mexico Territory. I donât remember the name.â
âWas it Las Vegas?â
She glanced up with suspicion, laid her knife in front of the uncut portion of dough, and looked at me. âYouâre just full of surprises today. How did you know that?â
âYou know Iâve been helping Nev with his mail every day. I get his correspondence organized and take it up to his bedroom. I spread everything out on his bedspread and point at whatever looks important.
âYesterday, I was at his desk when I opened an ordinary-looking envelope and out dropped a lease agreement for a house located outside a town called Las Vegas, in New Mexico. Attached to the agreement was a letter from a law firm in town, summarizing that the house had been leased to the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church in Santa Fe, representing an organization called The Sisters of the Holy Light. Theyâve leased the house and are turning it into a sanitorium for tuberculosis patients.â
I took two papers from the top of my stack and slid them in front of her. The first was the lease and the second was the letter from the law firm.
My mother looked at each one with a serious expression, then held up a finger. âWait until I get these in.â
She sliced what remained of the cylinder, put the new swirls with the others, evened up the spacing, and slid the cookie sheet into the oven. Then she sat on a stool beside me, leaning one elbow on the table and looking me in the face.
âNev owns a house outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the Catholic Church in Santa Fe just leased it?â
âYep.â I pointed to the lease. âSigned by the secretary to the Archbishop of Santa Fe, and by Anthony Belderhand, a lawyer in Las Vegas, on behalf of the owner, Neville Simpson, of St. Louis, Missouri.â
My mother shook her head, her eyes downcast, her forehead wrinkled in thought. âIt canât be the mansion. It burned down the year after I came to St. Louis.â
âMansion? You lived in a mansion? I thought houses in New Mexico were made of mud.â
She took a deep breath. âAfter becoming rich as a lawyer in Las Vegas during the Civil War, my father decided to become a cattle rancher. He bought a hundred thousand acres of prairie between the town and the Canadian River, which is a river to the east. He also bought a small part of the river canyon for the ranch headquarters. He hired an army of carpenters to build a family house, a barn, some corrals, and a bunkhouse. The house was huge: a three-story brick Victorian with a dozen gables in the roof, twenty or twenty-five rooms, a hundred windows, slate shingles, and a three-story column of rooms that made a turret out of one corner. There wasnât another house in the area even close to that size, so everybody called it the Mulvaney Mansion.â
My mother looked out the kitchen window at the tree-shaded street. âOur part of the canyon was a beautiful little valley, with tall cliffs on each side, a grove of cottonwood trees upstream, wild raspberry bushes along the base of the cliffs, thick green grass everywhere. The river had crystal-clear water shallow enough to wade in. My mother would go out with us every day and weâd gather flowers and wild onions, hunt for mushrooms, and pick raspberries. Sam looked for interesting rocks while I tried to catch frogs along the riverbank.
âIn the fall, the cottonwoods turned yellow and gold, and the evenings cooled enough that weâd light a fire in one of the fireplaces. During the winter months, whenever it snowed, our cook baked cookies for us to have with the milk Sam had brought in from the barn. With the quiet sounds of the river, flowers and grasses growing everywhere, deep snows during the winter, and a thousand adventures for me and Sam, I thought we were living in the Garden of Eden.
âAfter he was taken, I was most bothered by Sam not having a chance to say goodbye to all his thingsâhis room, his rocks, the baby goats we were raising. He didnât even have a chance to say goodbye to me, and I know he would have wanted to. I was also sad heâd missed his birthday party. He had looked forward to his birthday for such a long time that I felt him missing his party was terribly cruel and unfair. I cried every day, wishing heâd at least gotten his cake.â
My mother slid off her stool, checked the rolls, then moved next to the flour-covered spot on the table, wiping the area clean and laying out two cooling racks.
âNow,â she said, âwhat other papers did you find in the safe?â
âOkay. Back to my story. I looked at the lease and couldnât understand why Nev would own property in such a remote part of the country, so I took it up to him and asked. He blew up like a stick of dynamite, yelling at me for prying into his business, for opening his mail, for invading his privacy, all while throwing in lots of foul words. I will never understand his hatred of the Irish.â
âHeâs famous for it.â
âWell, I must have enough Irish blood in me that he considers it a fatal flaw in my very existence. I left the nurse to calm him down, went back to his study, put his mail back in the envelopes, and left everything in the middle of the desk. After staying up half the night, getting even madder at him, I went back this morning, got the combination he keeps in the middle drawer of his desk, and opened his safe. What I found says that Nev stole a half-million dollars from you.â
My motherâs eyebrows shot up, again, but, glancing at the oven, she motioned for me to wait. She pulled out the cookie sheet and slid the small bubbling rolls onto the cooling racks. Sheâd mix the glazing and spoon it over the top of each one once the swirls cooled.
She sat down beside me.
âTell me everything,â she said.
I swiveled my stool to face her. âI was interested in the house: a description, when heâd bought it, maybe an explanation of why heâd bought it. As I fingered through the files in the safeâs drawer, I found a folder marked âMulvaneyâ. I pulled it out, making sure I could put it back exactly like I had found it, leafed through the papers inside, and found these.â
I took the next sheet off the stack and slid it in front of her. âHereâs the letter from the sheriff reporting the death of your parents.â I slid over the next one. âAnd this is the death certificate for Sam. Itâs signed by a Sergeant Martin Tillson, who is identified as the leader of the search party that found Samâs body.
âThat didnât sound like someone who had died from cholera, and thatâs when I knew you had lied to me. Now, look at these.â
I thumbed through several of the papers and slid them over to her. âThese are a dozen or so bills of sale. Iâve ordered them by date. Each shows the sale of a parcel of land from five to ten thousand acres in size, all east of Las Vegas, all done within a ten-year period, from 1871 to 1881. Look at this one.â
I pointed to the name of the sales agent, Clinton Walters, his law firm printed below his name. âThis man sold each of the parcels, Nevâs name being listed as the primary owner.â I pointed to the location, date, and price.
âTotaled, Clinton Walters sold about ninety thousand acres of land for a little over a half-million dollars. Thatâs a lot of land and a lot of money, and from what youâve just told me, it had to have been your ranch.â
My mother shook her head in disagreement. âCanât be. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I badgered Nev to tell me what happened after Iâd been sent away. My father had spent his savings and gone into debt building the ranch and the cattle business. After he and my mother died, the land was divided into parcels and sold at auction to cover the debt, while the cattle herd was sold to cover the taxes. The house, the barn, and the buildings had not sold, but caught fire in a lightning storm the next summer and burned to the ground. A neighboring rancher bought the land for some trivial amount, and that was it.
âThere was no inheritance left; Nev even had to reimburse the burial costs for my parents. Everything connected to my family was gone by the end of 1871, so the bills of sale canât have been for the ranch land, and the lease canât be for the house I grew up in.â
I reached across the table, grabbed a freshly baked cinnamon swirl, and thinking it unmanly to nibble, stuffed it whole into my mouth. Hot, hot, hot, hot! I worked it from one side of my mouth to the other, huffing in and out until it cooled down and I was able to chew it.
âMaybe the lease is for a different house,â I finally said, âbut if The Sisters of the Holy Light are making a sanatorium out of it, it has to be a really big house, and that doesnât fit what Nev would buy for a lease property. Heâs too much of a skinflint to buy anything thatâs not cheap, and it being out in the country makes it even less likely.â
My mother was silent for a minute, and then an irritated look took over her face. âIf the lease is for the mansion, it means that Nev owns it. The fact it still exists is one thing, but that he bought it at some point seems strange.â
âWell,â I said, âhold that thought for a moment, because Iâve got a different explanation that youâre really not going to like.â
I took the final three papers and lay them side-by-side in front of her. âThis paper is dated October of 1870 and is signed by a judge in Las Vegas. It must have been made after the reading of Cyrusâs will. It appoints Nev as your guardian, and looks like standard stuff.
âThis second one is dated a few months later and is signed by a judge here in St. Louis. It converts Nevâs guardianship into a full receivership, which means that everything belonging to you as an heir to the estate became his, including any land, buildings, and cash.
âThatâs highly unusual. How could Nev have wrangled a deal like that? The answer is provided by this.â
I put my finger on the third paper. âThis is a formal Declaration of Incompetency, dated February of 1871, with the name âLucille Simpsonâ on it. The paper makes it clear that you, as Nevâs legal dependent, had been determined to be mentally incompetent, as if you were a lunatic or brain damaged or something. It doesnât seem to have mattered that you were only six years old.
âNev had a death certificate for your brother, but you would still receive everything when you came of age. However, if you were declared incapable of acting on your own, while he was legally your father, Nev could be declared the owner of your estate. All he had to do was find a judge to sign a declaration of incompetency, then the receivership paper, and, in one fell swoop, he would own a hundred thousand acres of pastures, cows, and horses, as well as the mansion and your Garden of Eden.
âAfter getting the ownership, he made almost a half-million dollars by selling the land, while the house is still sitting there. Heâs been making a fool of you for more than thirty years.â Â
I really enjoyed Death in the Tallgrass. Firstly, it is best that you know that I love any book which is set in the Wild West: in the days of the pioneers and settlers and their encounters with Native American tribes; with the less reputable white folk who find themselves down on their luck and trying to find a way to survive; where people were exposed on the plains and carried guns for protection and to use for hunting for sustenance. It is the perfect setting and environment for a tense tale of adventure. And that is what Willerton has created here.
Our hero is Harold Bonner, a privileged young man, training to be a lawyer, from St. Louis, Missouri. He lives a comfortable existence but embarks on an adventure after a conversation that he has with his mother which sees him leave his pampered home for Las Vegas in search of the truth about his kidnapped uncle and his supposed death. Was Sam really a victim at the hands of Comanche Indians? Or was he still alive somewhere?
Bonner believes himself worldly but he soon discovers that he has a lot to learn. He makes it to Las Vegas but on getting there, he finds himself on a quest for truth across the wilds of America with a young lady as his guide. It is tough in many ways, and Bonner is exposed to attitudes and dangers that he would never have encountered in the social circles of St. Louis.
Willerton adds an extra element when Bonner starts to dream about a native and lives this warrior's past experiences, giving Bonner a window into a world and lifestyle to which he would never be exposed. He sees its hardships, its savagery, its normalcy and I like the way that Willerton uses this to dispel stereotypes to show the humans behind preconceptions. Willerton also does this with Alice, Bonner's guide, who is originally called "Teats" in the text, labelled this because of her enormous chest but gradually, Willerton, through his depiction of Alice's interaction with Bonner, shows her as a person of worth for her skills and her ability to survive, rather than just a sexual object.
Willerton ends his book with loose ends tied and brings to a close a tightly written, well-plotted novel with engaging characters, who grow and who, as a reader, you like and root for.