Folks around here say the Beatty boys were just plain wild and no good, and that they made us all look bad here in McDade. Made the whole county look bad in the eyes of the rest of Texas. Like we were all wild and no good ourselves, to have grown up such bad boys, like that Beatty bunch.
That’s Beatty with the a sounding out. But not B-A-T-E-Y like it was spelled in that newspaper article that came out three weeks after Christmas. January 18, 1884. Most everything in that article was wrong, and I dwelled on it after I got back home. Just sitting out on the hollow log back of the barn by the running creek those first days back, dwelling on how that Beatty name got spelled wrong. It had been raining. Awful cold. Enough to make water come out my eyes and nearly freeze to my face.
The Beattys didn’t have a mother. Daddy neither by the time I knew them. Old man Beatty had died a year or two before. Some say he poisoned himself with bootjack whiskey and Tutt’s pills. Liver disorder was how Marion explained it to me. But he never said much about his mama. What she went of. Birthing Marion is what Mrs. Kennedy told me. Plumb wore herself out having those last three boys right in a row like she did, one every year till Marion came. I sat on that hollow log by the creek for three days thinking about her, and about how it seemed like they didn’t any of them ever exist. I guess I was the only sad one in the whole town.
My own daddy left me alone those three days. So did my two brothers and my sister. And then the morning of the fourth day, Papa came out to fetch me, saying, “That’s all now, Lily. That’s all the grieving you got time for. There’s bread to bake and hogs to slop, and them little ‘uns can’t tend to it all alone.”
You see, my own mama passed on in childbirth too, so I guess I know what it’s like to come up without your ma. It’s hard work, and it’s lonely, and there ain’t ever anybody there to tuck your covers and pat your head when you’re feeling poorly. And even though I’m the oldest, fifteen now, and can take care of the others, I know a little bit how those Beatty boys felt. How come they turned out so wild and misbehaving.
Jack was the oldest, and so I don’t remember him much as a little kid. Azberry neither, though he was just two years in front of Marion. The oldest boys were the two roughest, lowest talking. One time, I heard Az tell Mr. Westbrook down at the lumberyard to get off his lazy-ass butt and saw up a board for their wagon. He said it loud enough folks heard all the way down the street to Billingsley’s store. Marion said Az just liked to show off for folks, prove he was a man himself and could say those dirty words. I never heard Marion cuss. Never once. But the rest sure could. Even Haywood, who only outdid Marion in age by ten months or so.
The four of them, I swear to you, were as different as sugar and salt. Az and Haywood had the dark hair. Az kept a kinky beard like coal dust on his cheeks. Those two were blue-eyed. Jack’s and Marion’s eyes were brown. But Marion had soft eyes, not small and cold, or set deep back in his head like Jack’s were. Jack had light hair, but he wore it so dirty it turned to the color of the ground inside a hog pen. Marion’s hair was red. Not red like the magnolia seed on the tree by our house. But red like the later end of sunset, spang through with streaks of gold and yellow, and darker shades underneath like heavy, low clouds hanging at the horizon.
When I noticed him again, after years of raising my brothers and my sister, and after growing into womanhood—when I saw him again like it was the first time, standing in the dust and daylight there on the road outside Billingsley’s store, it was that funny-colored hair of his I noticed, flecking at me like a length from a bolt of the best organdy in Bastrop.
He was standing beside his horse, his hat off, inspecting something inside the crown like a burr had caught up in a seam. He looked up, as if my eyes had stung him somehow, and when he saw me looking, a smile cracked out one corner of his mouth. He cupped his hat back onto his head, covered up that flashy hair, and gave the brim a tip in my direction.
“Well, hello there, Lily DeLony,” he said. “Sure ain’t seen you in a while.”
It kind of surprised me how he remembered my name. Last I could recall he’d been about twelve years old, stumbling over the words in Miss Huddleton’s reading books at the schoolhouse behind the city bank. He wasn’t twelve anymore, but he had the same face. Same soft, shy eyes. The spit dried up inside my mouth.
“Hello yourself,” I said, pulling Dellie with my free hand towards the spring buggy we used for hauling store goods. Nathan sat behind the mule, waiting on us, popping the leather whip at a ball of flies swirling under Mr. Billingsley’s awning.
I stepped off the walk with my sister and my package of sugar, some nickel-plated sewing needles, a twist of tobacco for Papa. It wasn’t heavy. I didn’t feel a strain. But Marion ducked around the hitching rail and grabbed the package from my arm.
“Lemme help you with this, Lily,” he said, even though we weren’t but two steps from the buggy. He put the package inside the plunder box, then lifted Dellie under her arms and swung her up to the seat. “This ‘un yours?” he said to me as she squealed out a giggle from being swung so high and fast. Her skirt ruffled out around her as she plopped onto the cowhide.
“She’s my sister. I wasn’t but eight when she was born, so I ain’t old enough to be her mama. She’s seven now.” I put my foot on the booster and pushed my own self up to the seat. He didn’t reach to help.
He slapped the bench beside Nathan. “Hello, Bob- boo,” he said.
My brother sneered down the length of his nose. “My name’s Nathan.”
“He’s nine,” I said.
Marion grinned wide. “Too young to be his ma too, I guess. It don’t seem like folks would lose track of each other in such a dinky town, does it, Lily?”
“I hear tales about you and yours.” I smoothed at the uncaught hair beside my ears, peeved that the piece of twine wouldn’t keep my pigtail in tow. I’d been hoping for hairpins from Mr. Billingsley. He was still fresh out.
“Can we go now?” Nathan was ready to crack the mule on his rump.
“What tales?” Marion said, his grin nearly fading.
Somebody whistled from the door of the rock saloon, then catcalled, “Whoo-ee! Come take a look at what Shot’s found hisself.” After that came some more caterwauling.
I glanced and saw Azberry and a man named Charlie Goodman, and another one of Marion’s relations, Thad McLemore, who lived down in the bottom with his older brother and sister-in-law. They had a shack on a couple of acres of weeds. No means of livelihood that anybody in McDade could see. The McLemores hadn’t been in town long. Only about two months or so. Rumor was Thad had left a wife and six kids somewheres over in Fayette County.
The three men standing at the saloon door leered at me. They looked half-drunk already, at just a little past high noon. All three of them wore gun belts strapped around their hips, leather thongs tying the holsters onto their thighs. We had a no-gun law in our town but wasn’t anybody with nerve enough to force it on the Beattys.
Azberry cocked his fingers like they were a pair of six-shooters and fired them off in our direction. The two fellows standing beside him hawed with laughter.
I reached to tap Nathan to whip up the mule. Marion walked beside the buggy a few steps. His face had gone purple.
“Don’t pay them no mind, Lily,” he said. It bothered me how he kept saying my name. It seemed impolite some way.
I looked back at him over my left shoulder. The buggy wheels were throwing grit on his britches, spatting like a hard rain at the buckskin vest he wore. The Beatty boys were all big for the buckskin. It made them look like gunmen, or outlaws. Which I guess, when you think about it, is what they were.
Well, they weren’t ever big-time outlaws. Not like John Wesley Hardin or Sam Bass. The Beatty gang was small-time, McDade-size outlaws. At least back then they were. Mostly they just pestered Mr. Nash, who owned the rock saloon.
They’d get drunk and shoot up the walls or ride their horses in over the board gallery and through the summer doors. The saloon was built of fieldstone and couldn’t hardly be hurt none. They left a few bullet holes in the mortar, hoof prints in the pine floor. They scuttled a few poker games, I expect. No real damage though. Mr. Nash didn’t complain. The Beatty gang were his best customers.
Marion quit running alongside the buggy. “Don’t judge me by them over there,” he shouted, waving towards Az and Charlie Goodman and Thad McLemore. When his arm moved out, I caught a glimpse of the blue steel end of a pistol inside his vest.
My shoulders raised in a shrug as Nathan drove us off towards the farm. How else was I supposed to know him? Or judge him, or whatever he meant? I wondered why he said that to me, and what matter it made to him what I thought. I was just a girl he used to know in school. Nothing else.
But those words of his kept coming to me—as I’d be scrubbing Papa’s work shirts, or Dane’s, out back in the soak box; or as I’d be feeding the chickens or gathering the eggs they laid under the porch. For days after that trip to town I thought about Marion and his hair, and about how he’d said for me not to judge him. And then me and Nathan got the garden ground started for the fall crop of vegetables, hoeing and planting seed, and watering in. Pretty soon, Marion Beatty slipped from my mind.
