Walker Canyon

Part 1: 1873

Chapter 1: Silver City

Wooden wheels creaked along the rutted trail. Goats and children bleated complaints at the hot sun. Men whipped beasts of burden and cursed the day’s grievances. Women stared from hard wagon benches into the bleak, lonely distance.

Tad Walker and his sister in law, Clara, swayed atop their tired mules, passing it all by with nary a second glance. The scenes of the Santa Fe Trail had repeated too many times in the frigid months since departing Missouri to be worthy of note. With satchels full of supplies from Albuquerque, riding south under New Mexico’s warm March sun, they had little desire to regard the rote misery of life on the wagon road as they cajoled the mules to catch up with the rest of the Walker clan. It was no easy task, given the role of stubbornness in the matter. Not so much the mules as Tad’s Pa, set as he was on finally delivering the family to Silver City, the end point of his grand plan to Go West and grow up with the country.

It was much more pleasant to pass the time musing with Clara on the latest family intrigues. Cramped up in a too-small wagon with his ornery wife and bickering parents, Tad had found the confines of life on the trail disagreeable. But when he could break away and enjoy the open air of the west, soak in Clara’s good humor and keen insights, he felt at ease.

“Asa thinks Abner is still pouting about Pa giving up the farm,” Clara said.

“I guess he never heard the one about cryin’ over spilt milk.”

Clara chuckled and rolled her eyes. When Tad first met her, she was quiet, meek even, working hard at pretending to be a lady for the Walkers, one of the first families of northern Alabama with its sprawling cotton plantation. But that was all before the War Between the States. Before Clara had grown comfortable in her place, becoming a good wife to Asa and a real sister and confidant to Tad.

“Abner’s a lot like Zelda when he don’t get his way,” Tad said. “Neither of ’em ever let you forget the injustice of it all.”

“Oh, give Zelda some grace,” Clara said.

“Don’t pretend she don’t rub yer backside raw — beggin’ yer pardon. I seen it on yer face when she’s grousin’ about the women’s chores.”

“Maybe,” Clara consented, “but that doesn’t change the fact we all owe her more grace.”

“More grace? After putting up with her constant griping for months?”

“She didn’t know the Walkers before Pa set us off on this goose chase, Tadpole. She barely knew you. Put yourself in her shoes. She thought she was going to be a plantation wife in Alabama. She’d been raised her whole life for it. Give her a chance to get settled in Silver City. She’ll be better. You’ll see. Especially once you stop sharing a bed with Ma and Pa and have a moment of privacy to get her with child.”

Tad blushed.

“I reckon.”

Clara laughed. “Will you look at that? You clam up bad as my Asa when you get embarrassed.”

With no desire to pursue such an uncomfortable topic, Tad was relieved by a distraction on the horizon. An old man hobbled up the road toward them, propped up on a bent stick. It was rare to see a man alone on the trail, much less without a wagon to drive or at least a donkey to ride. Clara followed Tad’s gaze to the peculiar sight just in time to see him falter. The old man’s makeshift cane slipped from his hand and he tumbled forward. Tad glanced around and, seeing no one else on the road, spurred his mule ahead.

The man remained on his hands and knees when Tad and Clara reached him. He made no effort to look up from the ground. “You alright, old timer?” Tad said.

Only then did the old man look up, revealing hollow, haunted eyes. It wasn’t just that they were milky white with cataracts, causing him to look through Tad rather than at him. There was a sadness in them, as if his blindness were caused by a loneliness that left him unable to bear looking on the world any longer. They besieged Tad with a feeling of emptiness, of shame that he should have so much (even though the Walkers had nearly nothing) while another should have so little. Not even his eyesight.

“Don’t hurt me,” the old man sputtered. Clara climbed off her mule and the man instinctively shied away. “Don’t come no closer. I’ll shoot.”

The threat was empty, seeing as the man clearly had no gun, nor even his walking stick. His clothes were barely rags; old flour sacks poorly stitched together that hung loosely from his emaciated body. Clara crouched next to him and touched his arm. He shivered.

“I’ll shoot, I tell ya.”

“I hope not, sir. I’m Clara. That’s Tad. We don’t intend to hurt you or rob you. But maybe we can help you get where you’re going.”

To Clara’s great surprise, the man leaned into her, embraced her and began to sob like a child. Clara looked up to Tad, unsure what to do or what to make of the frail, stinking collection of bones she seemed to be holding together in her arms. Tad shrugged his shoulders, equally stumped. He looked around at the great emptiness surrounding them, calculating the miles between the road and the Rio Grande, the nearest source of water. The man couldn’t possibly make it in his state, not unless they were to throw him on a mule and take him, which they didn’t have time to do, lest they wanted to catch Pa’s wrath.

“What’s the matter?” Clara said, patting the man on the back like a baby that needed burping.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” he wheezed through fits of tears. “I just know I got to get away.”

“Get away from what?” Tad said, alerted to the possibility of danger ahead.

The old man’s tears dried quite suddenly. “Don’t make me say it. I can’t speak of that evil no more.” His haunted whisper added to Tad’s sense that he and Clara had stumbled upon a ghost.

“We’re driving down the road the way you come from with our whole family,” Tad said. “You best ought to tell us if there’s trouble.”

“You got family?” the man said.

“I have two boys — 9 and 7,” Clara said. “And my husband. Tad here has a wife. And there’s his parents, and six more besides that, including three other children.”

“I used to have daughters. Two beautiful girls.” The old man’s sunburnt, flaking lips quivered beneath a great heap of filthy beard that might’ve been white if it weren’t stained brick red by the desert’s thin soil.

Tad felt himself losing patience, felt Pa driving the Walker wagon train further south while the milk, eggs, sugar and flour he bought for Zelda’s birthday cake soured in the heat. Clara must’ve sensed his angst. She caught his eye and pleaded silently for time. He recalled her advice about offering Zelda grace and held his tongue, which was rewarded when the old man’s cracked lips again parted.

Two words emerged, barely a whisper, quieter than a breeze drifting over the grassy plains of Colorado. “Silver City.”

“Why, that’s where we’re going,” Clara exclaimed. “To stake our claim in the silver rush. What’s so bad about it?”

Despite his cataracts, the old timer searched and found Clara’s eyes. Unlike with Tad, when the man seemed to see nothing, looking through him to the infinite desert void beyond, he saw her. He really saw her, and his eyes begged her to heed his warning. “It’s evil. An evil place. Don’t go there. Specially not no women or children. They murdered my wife. Took my girls, to whore, to do the devil’s bidding. Beat me to a bloody pulp, left me for dead, after the mine took my eyes. Dirty, filthy place. No good for any decent human. I’d burn it, if I could see to light the fire. Burn it to the ground.”

“You’re hurting me,” Clara said. Tad looked down to see her struggling to pull away from the old man’s vulture-like grip. He was stronger than he looked, it seemed, and Tad jumped off his mule to free his sister in law from the claws that left deep red marks in the bronzed skin of her wrists. Perhaps too hasty, Tad knocked the old man onto his back, where he coughed and wheezed. Clara sat the man up and rubbed his back until his wheezing stopped and he could breath again.

“We got to help him, Tadpole,” Clara said. The old man had gone quiet again, retracting inside himself. The memory seemed to have done him in, as if he had no will left to utter another word, much less take another step away from the place he claimed had ruined him so. “Maybe we should take him with us.”

“No,” the old man said, and he scrabbled away from Clara like a scorpion, coiling his body into a position to strike. “Please,” he whimpered. “Don’t take me back to that hell on earth. Not one step closer.”

Tad scowled, feeling himself cornered between a rock and the Christian thing to do. He pulled the canteen of cow’s milk he had filled at the dairy outside Albuquerque and forced it into the man’s hands.

“But Zelda’s cake,” Clara said, once again petting the old man’s back like a soothing mother.

“He needs more’n water to get where he’s going, or anywhere at all,” Tad said. “We can’t just leave him out here to die.”

“No,” Clara said. “I don’t reckon we can.”

The man opened the canteen and began to greedily slurp, carelessly spilling milk down his soiled shirt, if it could be called as much. It was as if Tad and Clara weren’t there at all, as if they didn’t exist.

“Let’s go,” Tad said, helping Clara onto her mule and mounting his own. “We done what we can.”

“Good day, sir,” Clara said, before she spurred her mule south, closer to Silver City.

“They’ll take them,” the man mumbled, his filthy beard wet with wasted milk. “Whore your children. Murder your wives. Beat you to a pulp.” He rocked back and forth, seeing only the haunted past in his mind.

He was a ghoul, Tad decided. A nightmare, sent to frighten him away from the destiny his family had fought so hard to reach. Or maybe he was a vision, a glimpse at an ugly future.

Tad watched the man, who paid him no mind, until he was too disgusted to think any longer about the precious milk that was surely wasted on such a hopeless waif. But as he spurred his mule after Clara, he was unsettled to find the man’s warning rode with him. What did the Walkers know of Silver City, after all? It was nothing but a dream to them, an idea hatched by Pa to pry them away from a South the family clung to, yet did not exist.

***

Pa Walker had not fully appreciated how long it would take to move a family of 14, including five children, across the great expanse of the United States, in three covered wagons pulled by six mules — seven, if you counted the one Demus rode — loaded down with water barrels, goats, clothing, food, firearms, tools, cookware and personal effects.

He read a book about the long journey, but books were for average people. The Walkers were exceptional. Destined. The easy steamboat floats up the Tennessee River and then the Mississippi to St. Louis stoked his confidence. He purchased the wagons and mules and off they went.

Winter struck early on the plains of Kansas. At least, what Southerners like the Walkers believed was winter. The Kansans just called it November. Their progress ground to a halt. Pa spent the season — due to cold wind and hot anger — with his bald head circulating through various shades of red, as if his skin was trying to recreate the ginger bristle that once graced his crown.

They were saved many times over by the kindness of strangers. A warm buffalo fur here. A fill of water from a farmer’s well there. Their mules, exhausted and pushed too hard in the snow, died in the cold. Money meant for food went to new mules, so old mules became food. It took three months to pass through that hellscape, and more than one instance of Pa resisting Ma’s overtures to turn back before it was too late. It was too late to turn back the day the South lost the War Between the States, as far as Pa was concerned.

More southerly latitudes and the high spring sun melted away those dark, cold memories. Pa’s faith — in God and family — had been rewarded. The sight of Silver City on the horizon felt an answered prayer. Pa’s every impulse was to run into that mining boom town, start swinging a pickaxe and never look back at what had become of their life in Alabama. It was hard enough to be the veteran of a lost cause; harder still to live under the thumb of the victors as they crushed the economics of the family cotton farm.

But the climb up the southern tip of the Black Range reminded Pa just how weary they were from hard months on the trail. Earning their view of Fort Bayard and Silver City beyond it to the west left the mules weak and the women and children in need of rest.

“What ya thinkin’?” Demus said from his mule, buffalo fur wrapped around his shoulders to break the cold March wind whipping over top the range.

“I’m thinkin’ these ladies ought to be a little tougher if they’re gonna be frontier women.” Pa spat on the rocky soil and hopped out of the driver’s seat to unhitch the mules from his wagon.

Ma huffed. “Don’t blame the women when you were the one falling asleep driving. Let me take the reins. I’ll get us there tonight and we’ll sleep in a warm bed.” Pa ignored her, which generally meant she wasn’t wrong.

Asa and Abner pulled their wagons alongside Pa, and the Walkers began the work of making camp for what they hoped would be the last night for a very long time.

They were nearly out of food, and dinner was a meager affair. Tad managed to shoot a pair of rabbits before sunset, which they cooked up for the children. The rest ate salted beans and stale bread that had been meant for the goats, who instead had to graze on desiccated desert scrub. When they arrived in Silver City, Pa knew it wouldn’t be a day too soon. They were flush out of food, money and options. The Walker men needed to swing their axes and earn their keep in the silver mines.

Night on the mountainside was cold, but they had faced colder. Spirits were high, despite their hunger and exhaustion, and Demus told tales about the war as they sat around the fire. “Why, if there was a hero of the Battle of Shiloh, it was none other than my big brother, Frank Walker.” Demus shook Pa’s shoulder, laughing. Pa kept his eyes fixed on the lamplights of Silver City, down in the valley. “They say the Union won that battle, but ask all the dead Blue Coats Grant left behind. They’ll tell you Frank won that battle.”

“Pa was that fine an officer?” Tad said. “I sure woulda liked to seen it. Wish I’d been old enough for ‘em to let me fight.”

“You’dve been a wet spot at the end of Grant’s canon line,” Abner jested.

“Says the man spent the war holed up in the Ozarks drinking moonshine,” Tad mocked. Abner rose to the insult, or tried to, struggling against sore knees. Demus held up his hands to restore peace, and Tad leaned back, knowing the days of his eldest brother pummeling him for his smart lip were left in Alabama, far in the past.

“Truth is,” Demus said, “neither of you greenhorns know diddly about war. Now, Asa, he got a little taste of it, right near the finish, and he’ll tell you it ain’t nothing you want to be a part of. Ain’t that right, Asa?” Asa nodded. He didn’t like to talk about his time as a soldier, when he was barely more than a boy. There were times when Pa or one of the other boys would catch him staring off in the distance, and they knew where his mind was trapped. Demus took up his story again. “But yer pa, see, yer old pa is built of different stuff. I never seen anything the like of it. He would stare down the barrel of a Union rifle from 10 feet, and I swear those Blue Coat boys would turn and run. Mad Frank Walker, they called him.”

Ma rolled her eyes and made an excuse to leave the warmth of the fire to clean dishes. Her upset didn’t escape Pa’s notice, and it frustrated him that it bothered her so for Demus to build a little legend around the Walker name. But nothing could keep his eyes and his mind and his heart from the twinkling lights of Silver City in the distance. It was a place of motion, of energy, building a new direction for America, away from old farming ways into an industrial future. Pa bet everything his family owned that he was right, and tomorrow they would cash in.

“I’m right,” Pa whispered to himself as Demus carried on about the war. “I’m right.”