LOOKING AFTER LILY

Wash Jones wasn’t no fancy-Dan lawyer. He wore a town suit, but it was just of homespun and a little tattered around the edges. He had a tin tobacco ring hanging from his vest pocket instead of the Turkish cigars the lawyer for the State had sported. The paper collar at Jones’s neck was unbuttoned and flapped out about his ears.

            “Know where you’re bound?” he said, pushing himself back from his desk. The wheels on his chair needed a squirt of oil. The squeak they made raised the hair on my neck.

            “Thought about San Antone,” I answered and Jones nodded.

            “Got relatives there?”

            I shook my head. “Just an interest. I thought I might try my hand at the cattle business.”

            “Buying or selling?”

            “Punching.”

            “Oh.” His eyebrows bent in the center. “Just so you behave yourself.”

            “I will.”

            I stood up to leave and he studied on me for a few more seconds. “I’ve a brother in Parker County,” he said, “with some farmland he can’t tend to. Got the backstrain and can’t go full-speed anymore. Needs a good man working for him, if ever you’re interested.”

            I thanked him and we shook hands. He pulled the tin ring from his breast pocket and gave me his cigarette makings, which I greatly appreciated. I was all the way out the door and headed down to the livery stable before the notion struck me that Wash Jones had just called me a good man.

Now, I’d been called a great many things in my life. Murderer, thief, coward, outlaw, even bandit, but nobody had ever said I was a good man. Not to my face or behind my back either, so far as I knew. And although I didn’t give one hoot nor holler about ever hopping clods behind a bull-tongue plow so long as I lived, Wash Jones saying I was a good man made it some easier for me to dodge the hateful glances I got out on the street, and to fend off one or two abusive remarks made under somebody or other’s breath as I passed by. 

            I bought a light wagon with a spare wheel and a broke-down pulling mule named Sassy. I also bought what all provisions I thought we’d need for the eighty-some miles to San Antonio. By the time I got a cigarette rolled and lit, the first pull of smoke giving me a dizzy head I hadn’t enjoyed for nearly six months, Lily was coming out of the jailhouse wiping at her cheeks. 

            She didn’t make a comment about the wagon and mule, or about Mollie tied on behind. She didn’t glance to notice the box of stores in the back, or say one thing to me at all. Her face was puffed and splotchedy, and she looked to me near to being wrought up into a fit of desperation. She held out her hand, like she was the queen of Sheba, for me to help her up onto the high-seat. Like I said before, I wasn’t much for comforting a person, especially not a female person, and so I ignored her hand and took her by the waist, swinging her off her feet and up into the wagon.

            She was heavier that I’d thought, and I had to give her backside a shove once her feet cleared the railing. She stumbled but caught herself before anything tragical happened, like her falling out and dashing the baby in her belly on the street. Shot would of never forgive me for an accident like that. 

            I gave the jailhouse one final look, feeling glad to be going, but irritable at Shot for heaping all this responsibility on me. Then I got up beside Lily and took the lines. I popped them down on the mule’s rump and we started off.

            “You ain’t gonna tell him goodbye?” she said, turning to stare back at the red brick jailhouse.

            “Already did.” I cracked the lines again, and whistling through my teeth said, “Giddup, mule.”

            Didn’t seem to matter how much I throttled her, that old Sassy had her mind set to take it at a walk. If it’s one thing in this world I hate, it’s a godamighty mule.