The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

Genres: Action & Adventure; Small Town & Rural; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

A tale of love and vengeance at the dark dawn of the East Texas oil boom from award-winning novelist Joe Lansdale

Jack Parker thought he’d already seen his fair share of tragedy. His grandmother was killed in a farm accident when he was barely five years old. His parents have just succumbed to the smallpox epidemic sweeping turn-of-the-century East Texas—orphaning him and his younger sister, Lula.

Then catastrophe strikes on the way to their uncle’s farm, when a traveling group of bank-robbing bandits murder Jack’s grandfather and kidnap his sister. With no elders left for miles, Jack must grow up fast and enlist a band of heroes the likes of which has never been seen if his sister has any chance of surviving. But the best he can come up with is a charismatic, bounty-hunting dwarf named Shorty, a grave-digging son of an ex-slave named Eustace, and a street-smart woman-for-hire named Jimmie Sue who’s come into some very intimate knowledge about the bandits (and a few members of Jack’s extended family to boot).

In the throes of being civilized, East Texas is still a wild, feral place where oil wells spurt liquid money from the ground. And Jack will soon find out that blood and redemption rule supreme. In The Thicket, Joe R. Lansdale lets loose like never before, in a rip-roaring adventure equal parts True Grit and Stand by Me—the perfect introduction to an acclaimed writer whose work has been called “as funny and frightening as anything that could have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm—or Mark Twain” (New York Times Book Review).

Release date: January 1, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

I didn’t suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I’d soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I’d take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that’s exactly how it was.


It was the pox got it all started. It had run through the country like a runaway mule and had been especially unkind to the close-by town of Hinge Gate. It showed up there as a bumpy, oozing death, and killed so many it was called an epidemic. Two of the ones that died were our ma and pa, and neither of them had ever been sick a day in their lives. I, on the other hand, was sickly all my early life up until the time I got my health, and Lula had been kind of scrawny her whole time, but neither of us took it. I was by this time a healthy sixteen-year-old, and she was fourteen and right on the verge of her bloom. That ole pox passed us by as if it was blind in one eye. It crept up on Ma and Pa, fevered them up, covered them in blisters, and made it so when they tried to breathe it sounded like a busted squeeze box. The worse thing was, we had to sit and watch them die, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. We couldn’t even touch them for fear of coming down with it.

Pox ran all through the town like it was looking for money. Dead people were piled up outside houses, loaded in wagons, buried quickly. In some cases they were burnt when nobody knew who they were, as there were folks who traveled through town and got it and died without leaving information on their names or where they’d been going. Sheriff Gaston finally had to put signs out on the roads coming in that said nobody could leave and spread it, and nobody could come in for fear of getting it.

There was people who burnt smoke pots around their houses and inside, thinking that would keep the pox out, but that didn’t help—it just made it smoky and caused the ones who had it to have a harder time breathing than before.

We lived out on the edge of town, and I always figured it was the tinker who brought it around, carried it to our place like it was one of the wares in his wagon. I think when my pa shook hands with him and bought a skillet that was the end of it. He and Ma came down with it right away, though that tinker didn’t have a spot of it on him that I could see.

Right away I rode into town on the mule and fetched the doctor. He came out, seen right off saving them was like trying to bring to life an oil painting. Wasn’t a thing he could do, though he gave them a couple pills to take just so as to look like he was trying. A few days later Ma and Pa got real bad, and I rode into town to see I could get the doctor back out. Doctor had died himself of it, and was already buried, and someone had left a burning smoke pot on his grave. I knew that because I seen it out there in the cemetery when I was riding in, and then seen it again going out, knowing then whose grave it was. I guess someone thought that smoke would keep it from spreading from the dead body. Hard to know what people were really thinking, because that pox had not only killed a good bunch of folks, it had scared the living and taken their reason, and mine wasn’t all that good, either.

When I got back home Ma and Pa were both dead, and there was Lula out in the yard crying, a strangled chicken still flopping in one hand because she was setting about making dinner, even with them dead in the house. Me and Lula had been living out under a tree to stay out of the way of getting the pox, and we cooked out there and ate out there. Grandpa would come in and check on Ma and Pa cause he couldn’t catch it. He’d had it and lived through it when he was younger, and he couldn’t get it anymore. He caught it way up among the Cheyenne near the Wind River Range, which was nowhere close to where we were in East Texas. He got it the same way the Cheyenne did—some infected blankets given to them by white folks as a kind of joke. He was a missionary and had lived up there with them. Both he and Grandma had it and lived, and then some years later Grandma was run over by a frightened cow near Gilmer, Texas, while she was trying to calm it down for milking. The pox couldn’t kill her, but a cow that didn’t want to be milked had.

I barely remember Grandma. I guess I must have been about five when that cow done her in. Lula was three years old. Grandpa, according to family story, shot the cow and ate it. I guess he considered that was getting even, having a steak made of the murderer. I never heard him speak sadly of the death of Grandma or the cow, but he and Grandma seemed to have gotten along fine, and up until that day neither he nor the cow had experienced a minute’s trouble, I’ve been told.

On the day Ma and Pa died, I went in and looked at them, but I didn’t stand too close and I didn’t touch nothing. They looked horrible, all pocked over and bloody where they had scratched and those little odd blisters with the dents in the middle had broken open and bled. I rode our tired old mule over to Grandpa, who lived down from us a little ways, and he put on his dusty suit coat and hat and rode back beside me, driving his wagon. He brought with him some sacks of lime he had for his garden and a couple of pine boxes he had already built, being pretty certain what was coming. He had also packed some bags and put them in the wagon, too, but at the time I didn’t know what that was about and was too stunned to ask. If a pig had flown by with a deck of cards in its teeth it wouldn’t have fazed me.

Me and Grandpa dug graves for Ma and Pa. Because Grandpa couldn’t get the pox, he rolled them onto fresh sheets, dragged them out of the house, lifted them into those coffins, and poured lime on them. I helped him lower the coffins down in the holes with rope. He said when we were covering them up he felt the lime would hold back the disease so it wouldn’t spread from their bodies and give it to others. I don’t know. I figure six feet of dirt helped quite a bit.

We got them buried and he preached some words over them with the Bible in his hand, but I couldn’t tell you what section he preached from. I was too stunned to tell, and Lula looked as if her mind had gone to a place no one could find; she hadn’t said anything since I found her with the dead chicken, which we had ended up tossing in a ditch. When he finished up with the preaching, he set fire to the house and put us in the wagon and started us out, my old mule tied on a rope line behind the wagon.

“Where are we going?” I said, looking back at our blazing home. It was all I knew to say. Lula was all huddled up and not talking at all. Anyone didn’t know her they’d have thought she was a pretty mute.

“Well, Jack,” Grandpa said without so much as looking over his shoulder, “we’re not going back to that burning house, that’s for sure. You’re going on up to Kansas to stay with your Aunt Tessle.”

“I don’t even know I’ve met her,” Lula said, this being something that brought her out of her stupor and gave her a tongue. She said it so suddenly and unexpectedly I hopped a little, and I think Grandpa did, too.

“I barely remember her,” I said.

“Be that as it is, you’re going to live with her,” Grandpa said. “She don’t know it yet, but I figured it might be best not to give her time to recollect on it. We’ll spring a surprise on her. And considering I’m planning on staying as well, though I’ll come a little later, so as not to overwhelm the situation, it’ll be a surprise. Never cared for Tessle, actually, as she always seemed to be Mama’s favorite, but tragedy makes strange bedfellows.”

“You sure that’s the best way?” I said. “Just showing up?”

“It might not be the best way,” he said, “but it’ll be our way. I’ll tell you two another thing. I saw this coming, and I’ve sold off all my livestock except these two mules, and you have your pa’s mule, and you now have contracts for both pieces of land, your father’s and mine. They’re in the bank at Sylvester. I didn’t put them in your hometown bank because I figured with all the pox going on, there was just too much confusion. I have set it all up with a lawyer named Cowton Little. He’s to sell the property for a fair price, when you’re ready, and give you two the money, minus his commission, of course. I have no idea how long this will take, but mine is prime real estate when the town grows out, and it will. Your folks’ land is good land, too, soon as the pox passes, and there’s no consideration on how they died, it, too, will be prime. You understanding all this?”

We both said we understood, though Lula seemed to have drifted away again, like a balloon. She was flighty enough under normal circumstances, always wondering about the shape of clouds and asking about why things were green or some such and never taking “God made it that way” as an answer. She was always looking for some greater truth, like there was one. Grandpa used to say she always had to figure that if there was a hole in the ground something was in it, and for a reason, and it had a history, even if she couldn’t see it. She never could accept a hole might be empty and if something was in it, it might not have thought on why or how it got there at all. “Beware a woman that wants reasons for everything,” he said.

Grandpa reached inside his suit coat and pulled out a paper, said, “This here is all the paperwork you’ll need on the matter of the property. I go up to Kansas I won’t be coming back, and you might not, either, but you can do your dealings with the lawyer by mail, you need to.”

I took the papers he gave me, folded them up, and stuck them down deep into the pocket of my overalls.

“You mind those papers, now,” Grandpa said.

“I will,” I said.

“They’re in both your names, but if one of you was to get killed or die, then it’ll go to the other. You both get killed, well, I guess if I’m still alive it will go back to me, and if we’re all dead, I guess Tessle owns everything, though I thought about giving it to one of the churches in town, but they’re all Baptist and they’re going to hell. I thought maybe I could start a Methodist church on my land, but that ain’t gonna happen now. Even if I wasn’t leaving, I haven’t got the energy for it. I left you as the executor, though, Jack. Lula gets a piece of any part or all of the land you sell, but it’s yours to make the deal because you’re the oldest and a man, or will be one.”

Now, it may seem I was taking all this damn well, the death of my parents, but I assure you I was not. I had sort of seen it coming for a few days, and there had been so much death about I guess I had embraced the whole thing better than I might had I just got up and found them dead without any sign of sickness. We had even laid aside clothes early on and kept them at Grandpa’s, just in case they didn’t pull through. They were something that might be clean of the pox and out of the house. I realized now those clean clothes were still in those bags he had packed for us, along with other things we might need. He had just rolled them up in the sheets and put them down. That sounds cold, but Grandpa was a practical man.

Still, down deep in my bones—and I’m sure it was the same with Lula and even Grandpa, for that matter—I was trying to get my heart and head wrapped around the idea that they had been taken so brutally and so quickly from us. It was like I was too dry to cry. I wanted to but couldn’t. Lula was the same way. That’s how we Parkers were. We took what came the way it came. Least it was that way on the surface. You scratched us a little, though, you could find some jelly there pretty quick. We were the kind that found it hard to cry, but once we got started you best be ready for high water and the loading of animals two by two.

So there we sat in that butt-rattling wagon, as stunned as if a stone had been dropped on our heads. Pa’s mule was tied to the rear of it. Lula was in the wagon bed, and I was up beside Grandpa, him clucking to his mules and being rather pleasant with them, which was different from what I was used to. Pa always cussed them and called them names and such. He didn’t mean nothing by it. He was good to those mules. That kind of talk was just his way, and the mules understood it and dismissed it, being a whole lot smarter than horses. Two horses put together haven’t got the brains of one old mule, and bad language can make them nervous.

“Way I figure it,” Grandpa said, “I can leave out for a few days to get you to the train over at Tyler, and then you can go on up to Kansas. I’ll give you some directions on how to find Tessle, but it wouldn’t hurt when you got there if you asked about for her house, cause I don’t remember where she lives all that well. I can come on by wagon, as there’s some places I want to see along the way. I figure this is my last trip anywhere. Besides, I don’t want to buy three tickets.”

I was surprised he wanted to buy two. Daddy always said Grandpa was so tight that when he blinked the skin on his pecker rolled back. Grandma was always wanting some little thing or another, Mother said, and he wouldn’t want to buy it. He kept everything he had up to snuff so not much needed replacing; he had tools he had bought used that looked better than new ones cause of the way he kept them. He figured you wanted to buy something, if you couldn’t use it for something practical or eat it, then you didn’t need it. And that included new sun hats and dresses Grandma wanted. I guess with Ma and Pa dead, and him realizing he might have to put up with us all the way to Kansas, maybe it was worth two train tickets just to have peace and quiet and the pleasure of his own company.

“Don’t you think you ought to write her a letter?” I said, still thinking on Tessle. “Let her know we’re coming?”

“By the time I write and mail it and it gets there, you two could have the pox. No, sir. You and your sister are leaving out of here today.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“They were just fine a few days back,” Lula said. It had popped out of her like a seed squeezed from a pomegranate.

“That’s how it works,” Grandpa said. Sitting by him on the wagon seat, I felt him tremble a bit, which was the only sign he’d given yet that the whole thing had got to him in any way. I reckon a man who has buried a number of children, preached some funerals, butchered animals for food, seen death among the Cheyenne, and survived the pox gets a bit firm in his thinking about dying; and then there’s that whole thing about Grandma being killed by a cow. He was a religious man and always had the view he’d see everybody again in heaven. It was a firm and solid thing with him, and it comforted him under all circumstances, and he had taught me that was the way to deal with the world, and to not go and think too much on my own, cause it might lead to other ideas that might be right but unpleasant.

As we went, I saw the sky was darkening up more in the northwest, and the smell of rain was on the air, sweet and dirty, like a damp dog. When we got to the Sabine River the sky was furious black, and the bridge for the crossing was burnt out. There were just a few timbers on both sides of the water, and they were charred and broken down. It wasn’t a wide expanse of river, but it was broad enough and deep enough a bridge was normally needed, except in a really dry season.

There was a shallow crossing about five miles down, but that wouldn’t be necessary, because now there was a ferry that came across in place of the bridge. We could see it on the other side. It was a pretty wide ferry and could hold a good bit of horses and such, and the man who was managing it was a big, hatless, redheaded fellow, like me. He was waiting for a wagon pulled by two big white horses to roll off the ferry, and when that was done he closed up the gate, started pulling on one of the ropes that was hooked to a trolley rig, and began drawing the ferry back across.

The ferry was new, built as of recent, and the ferryman was having a hard time of it. There was something about his motions that made me think he was new to the process, as if it were a recent trade he had taken up. We waited on him to get to our side, and when he did, he threw a kind of wooden brake on the rope and let down the hatch on our bank of the river. He stepped out on solid ground in a manner that made him look as if he were standing on peg legs, which was for me another clue to his newness to the profession. Grandpa gave me the lines, got off the wagon, and walked over to him. I could hear them talking.

“What happened to the bridge?” Grandpa said.

“Burnt down,” said the ferryman.

“I can see that. When?”

“Oh, a month ago thereabouts.”

“How?”

“Caught on fire.”

“I know it caught on fire, but how did it catch on fire?”

“I can’t say.”

“Is someone going to build it back?”

“I ain’t,” said the ferryman.

“Guess not. How much?”

“Two bits.”

Grandpa stared at the ferryman as if he had just asked him if he’d like a stick in the eye. “Two bits? You are surely exaggerating.”

“Nope,” said the ferryman. “Don’t think so. If exaggerating means I might be saying a price I don’t mean, I ain’t doing that, not even a little bit.”

“That’s highway robbery,” Grandpa said.

“No, sir. That’s the fee to cross this river on my brand-new ferry,” said the ferryman, scratching at his red hair. “You don’t want to pay, you can go on up five miles and cross in the shallows. But you do that, you got a rough patch before you can get on a trail that will then lead to the road, say, a mile or so later. It would be a tough go for a wagon.”

“I need to get across now,” Grandpa said. “Not five miles from now.”

“Well, then you’re going to need to pay two bits, now, aren’t you? You could maybe swim the horses across, but it’s too deep for a wagon, and to float it, you’d have to cut trees and tie them to the sides, and that would take more time and effort than you might want to do with. Besides, I bet you ain’t got an ax, and I don’t loan any. So now that leaves you with the other choices, going that five miles to the shallows or turning around.” The ferryman held out his hand.

Grandpa pushed his hat up on his head, letting his wild gray hair escape. “Very well, but I do it under protest, and with the warning to you that God does not like a thief.”

“It’s the toll—nothing thieving about it. It’s just more than you want to pay, and God ain’t needing to cross the river. You are. Now, you want on or don’t you?”

Grandpa dug in his pocket like he was reaching down in some dark mine for the last piece of coal left in the world, and pulled out his hand with two bits in it, slapped it on the ferryman’s palm, and came back to the wagon. He appeared more upset about that toll than he was about putting his son and daughter-in-law in the ground earlier that day.

He climbed up on the wagon and sat there for a moment, looked up at the sky. “I reckon we could go five miles, but that storm looks to be coming quick, so I gave him his overpriced fee, and I’ll let him live in God’s judgment.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I think he burnt that bridge to build that ferry,” Grandpa said as he looked down at the ferryman. “He looks to me like a man who would do that, don’t you think? Not a God-fearing man at all.”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “If you say so.”

“I say so, but we need to cross. And when we get on the ferry, mind the ferryman and keep your distance. I think he has a head full of lice.”

Grandpa clucked up the mules and started guiding the wagon toward the ferry. While he had been sitting there, contemplating, a big man on a sorrel horse had ridden up and got on the ferry. We could hear him discussing the fee with the ferryman. He seemed to come to the conclusion it was worth it a lot sooner than Grandpa had, and by the time we got down there, I could see that across the field, coming down the trail where there were still trees on either side, were two men on horses. Rain-cloud shadows lay over them like dirty moss. It looked like the ferry was going to be filled tight with folks and horses and our wagon.

Grandpa’s mules were tied to a railing up front, and the wagon wheels at the back were scotched with blocks so they wouldn’t roll. My old riding mule, Bessie, stayed tied to the rear of the wagon, and me and Lula stood near her—but not too near, as she had a habit of kicking out sideways like a cow, trying to clip you a good one if she felt you were too close to her rear end. I’m not sure what she thought might be going on back there, what plan we might have, but I want to note quickly that we were not Bessie’s first owners.

The big man on the horse had dismounted, and he took his sorrel up front and tied it alongside one of our wagon mules. He came by us and looked at Lula, said, “Aren’t you the prettiest thing?”

I haven’t spoken on how Lula looked, really, and I guess I should now. She was tall and lean and redheaded, with her hair streaming out from under a pretty blue travel bonnet with a false yellow flower sewn on one side of it. She had a silver star on a chain around her neck. I had bought that for her in town in the General Store. There were other gewgaws there, but they were silver flowers and little hearts, and I reckon they would have suited her fine, but just the year before she had pulled me outside the house and pointed up at the night sky and said, “See that star there, Jack? I’m claiming that as mine.” That made about as much sense as polka music to me, maybe less, but I remembered it, and when I was in town one day and had a bit of money, I bought it for her. She never took it off. I was proud to have given it to her, and I liked the way the light caught it and made it wink around her neck. She had on a light blue dress with yellow trim to match that flower, and she wore high-topped laced boots, black and shiny as axle grease. It was clothes that Grandpa had taken out of the house early on, before they got tainted with the pox. Dressed like she was, she looked like both a young woman and a child. She was pretty as a picture, but the way that man said it bothered me. Maybe it was the way he smiled and the way his eyes ran up and down her; nothing you could lay a hand on or put a word to, but something that made me keep an eye on him nonetheless.

Lula just said, “Thank you,” and ducked her head modest-like.

The man said, “That ain’t a bad looking set of mules, neither,” which to my mind sort of put some dirt in his earlier remarks.

I don’t think Grandpa heard all this. He was still fussy and talking to the ferryman, seeing if he could get back part of his money.

When that didn’t happen, Grandpa said, “Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

“On those two men on horseback,” the ferryman said.

“How about you take us across, then come back for them?”

“It’s work for nothing,” said the ferryman, scratching his red head, then looking at his fingernail to see if he had captured anything of interest.

“We paid our two bits,” Grandpa said. “We should go across. Besides, two more, that would be a tight load on this craft.”

The big man said, “Those are friends of mine, and we can all wait.”

“We don’t have to,” Grandpa said.

“No,” said the man. “But we will.”

“I think we should,” said the ferryman. “I think we should.”

Now, let me explain something. Grandpa was a large man. He may have been around seventy, but he was still commanding, with a big shock of gray hair that was once red, and it surrounded his head like a lion’s mane. He had a thick beard the color of dirty cotton, and that made him look even more like a lion, even when he was wearing a hat. He had a face that was always flushed. He looked as if he were about to boil over all the time. He called it his Irish skin. He was wide-shouldered and strong-looking, having done hard work all his life. And then there was that air about him of I-know-how-the-horse-ate-the-apple, this being due not only to his size and experience but his true and abiding belief that God was on his side and probably didn’t care as much for anyone else. This was a sentiment I figured came from having been a preacher and feeling that he had been handed special knowledge about life, and that when he got to heaven he’d be singing hymns with God personally, maybe the two of them leaning together with smiles on their faces, passing some tasteful joke between them—meaning, of course, it wouldn’t have anything to do with women or the outhouse.

But for all his size and bluster, when Grandpa looked at the big man who had rode in on the sorrel horse, he went quiet as a mouse tiptoeing on a soft blanket. He had seen something there that didn’t set right with him, same as I had. Grandpa could be silent a lot of the time, but when he was anxious to get on his way, or was in a spin about money, he could be talkative and angry, way he had been earlier. Looking at that other fellow took it right out of him, sent him into a stone silence. I could see why. The man was big as Grandpa, easily half his age, and he had a face that looked to have been shaped with a rock and a stick wielded by an angry circus monkey. He was scarred up and his nose was bent and one of his eyes had a lid that drooped over it about halfway, so that his peeper seemed sneaky all the time. I was pretty sure that at some point someone ha. . .