Available now!
Death In The Tallgrass: A Young Man's Journey Through The Western Frontier
By Donald Willerton
By Donald Willerton
An epic tale of western adventure and first-time love.
Death in the Tallgrass follows a young man in 1904 as he searches for his mother’s 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 uncle’s life.
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 uncle’s life.
Read two chapters
Chapter One
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.
“Didn’t you tell me your brother died from cholera?” I asked.
She had her knife positioned over the cylinder, ready to slice, but stopped and looked at me.
“Where did you get that question? My brother died more than thirty years ago.”
“I’m just wondering why you didn’t tell me the truth.”
She put down the knife and eyed me suspiciously. “Why are you asking me this?”
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, weren’t so privileged. My name is Harold, but I’m called Harry.
“I found your brother’s death certificate and he obviously didn’t die from cholera, so you lied to me. Were you covering up something I shouldn’t know about?”
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.
“Where in the world did you find his death certificate?”
I laid my hand on top of the stack of papers. “I got these from Nev’s safe.”
Her eyebrows shot up and her eyes took on a look of both surprise and apprehension.
“You opened his safe? No one is allowed to even touch it and you know that includes you. I hope to God he doesn’t find out.”
“Since he can’t even get out of bed anymore, I’m sure he’ll never know.”
“Don’t underestimate him. He can still be a dangerous man, so you let me know immediately if anything happens because of it.”
Still concerned with what I’d 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.
“I didn’t tell you the truth,” she said as she worked, “for any number of good reasons. But since you seem to think you’ve been terribly mistreated, I’ll tell you why I didn’t.
“We 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 Sam’s 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.”
“My God, he was kidnapped and killed by Indians? That’s horrible! No wonder you never told me.”
“Precisely,” my mother said. “I 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 didn’t want you to be scared, so I decided that since my parents had died of cholera, I’d say that Sam died the same way.”
“Well, you still should have trusted me with the truth.”
She again laid down the knife and gave me a stern look. “You were how old? Six, eight? Sometimes, you don’t get to know the truth until you can handle it, and you, my over-achieving son, weren’t anywhere near ready to handle the truth.”
“Hey, I was older at six than a lot of kids are at eight,” I said, ready to argue the point.
“Congratulations, 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 you’ve heard enough?”
“I’m sorry I came across like I did, but I’m pretty sensitive to what is and what’s not the truth these days. Call it a symptom of learning to be a lawyer.”
My mother came back to the baking table, took up her knife, and continued slicing. “Maybe it’s also a symptom of you being too full of yourself?”
I smiled. “I’m tall, rich, extremely smart, good-looking—seems like I have a lot to be full of.”
She paused her slicing and looked at me with a surprisingly serious expression. “I don’t like what I’m hearing. Learning to be a lawyer is no excuse for being rude to your mother, nor should it be a mark of superiority.”
I could feel my face growing as red as my inherited Irish hair. “I’m supposed to be rude and aggressive. That’s the way successful lawyers behave—always seeking the truth, not stopping until they know everything, making witnesses squeal.”
“It’s never okay to be arrogant and to wield power over people to make them feel small,” she said, tilting her head. “Now, do you want to hear more or are we done?”
I was sweating around my collar. “I’m truly sorry for being rude, and, yes, I would like to know what else you have to say.”
She resumed slicing. “My brother’s 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.”
“But they died before it sold, right?”
She nodded. “Nev 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. That’s the truth you’re so suddenly interested in.”
“So, 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.” 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.
“Do you remember what town your ranch was close to?” I asked.
She kept slicing in rhythm. “Some little town in New Mexico Territory. I don’t remember the name.”
“Was it Las Vegas?”
She glanced up with suspicion, laid her knife in front of the uncut portion of dough, and looked at me. “You’re just full of surprises today. How did you know that?”
“You know I’ve 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.
“Yesterday, 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. They’ve leased the house and are turning it into a sanitorium for tuberculosis patients.”
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. “Wait until I get these in.”
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.
“Nev owns a house outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the Catholic Church in Santa Fe just leased it?”
“Yep.” I pointed to the lease. “Signed 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.”
My mother shook her head, her eyes downcast, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “It can’t be the mansion. It burned down the year after I came to St. Louis.”
“Mansion? You lived in a mansion? I thought houses in New Mexico were made of mud.”
She took a deep breath. “After 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 wasn’t another house in the area even close to that size, so everybody called it the Mulvaney Mansion.”
My mother looked out the kitchen window at the tree-shaded street. “Our 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 we’d 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.
“In the fall, the cottonwoods turned yellow and gold, and the evenings cooled enough that we’d 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.
“After he was taken, I was most bothered by Sam not having a chance to say goodbye to all his things—his room, his rocks, the baby goats we were raising. He didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to me, and I know he would have wanted to. I was also sad he’d 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 he’d at least gotten his cake.”
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.
“Now,” she said, “what other papers did you get find in the safe?”
“Okay. Back to my story. I looked at the lease and couldn’t 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.”
“He’s famous for it.”
“Well, 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.”
My mother’s 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. She’d mix the glazing and spoon it over the top of each one once the swirls cooled.
She sat down beside me.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
I swiveled my stool to face her. “I was interested in the house: a description, when he’d bought it, maybe an explanation of why he’d bought it. As I fingered through the files in the safe’s drawer, I found a folder marked ‘Mulvaney’. 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.”
I took the next sheet off the stack and slid it in front of her. “Here’s the letter from the sheriff reporting the death of your parents.” I slid over the next one. “And this is the death certificate for Sam. It’s signed by a Sergeant Martin Tillson, who is identified as the leader of the search party that found Sam’s body.
“That didn’t sound like someone who had died from cholera, and that’s when I knew you had lied to me. Now, look at these.”
I thumbed through several of the papers and slid them over to her. “These are a dozen or so bills of sale. I’ve 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.”
I pointed to the name of the sales agent, Clinton Walters, his law firm printed below his name. “This man sold each of the parcels, Nev’s name being listed as the primary owner.” I pointed to the location, date, and price.
“Totaled, Clinton Walters sold about ninety thousand acres of land for a little over a half-million dollars. That’s a lot of land and a lot of money, and from what you’ve just told me, it had to have been your ranch.”
My mother shook her head in disagreement. “Can’t be. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I badgered Nev to tell me what happened after I’d 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.
“There 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 can’t have been for the ranch land, and the lease can’t be for the house I grew up in.”
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.
“Maybe the lease is for a different house,” I finally said, “but if The Sisters of the Holy Light are making a sanatorium out of it, it has to be a really big house, and that doesn’t fit what Nev would buy for a lease property. He’s too much of a skinflint to buy anything that’s not cheap, and it being out in the country makes it even less likely.”
My mother was silent for a minute, and then an irritated look took over her face. “If 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.”
“Well,” I said, “hold that thought for a moment, because I’ve got a different explanation that you’re really not going to like.”
I took the final three papers and lay them side-by-side in front of her. “This paper is dated October of 1870 and is signed by a judge in Las Vegas. It must have been made after the reading of Cyrus’s will. It appoints Nev as your guardian, and looks like standard stuff.
“This second one is dated a few months later and is signed by a judge here in St. Louis. It converts Nev’s 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.
“That’s highly unusual. How could Nev have wrangled a deal like that? The answer is provided by this.”
I put my finger on the third paper. “This is a formal Declaration of Incompetency, dated February of 1871, with the name ‘Lucille Simpson’ on it. The paper makes it clear that you, as Nev’s legal dependent, had been determined to be mentally incompetent, as if you were a lunatic or brain damaged or something. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that you were only six years old.
“Nev 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.
“After getting the ownership, he made almost a half-million dollars by selling the land, while the house is still sitting there. He’s been making a fool of you for more than thirty years.”
I had brought a handful of papers and put them on the table in front of me, patting them into a neat stack.
“Didn’t you tell me your brother died from cholera?” I asked.
She had her knife positioned over the cylinder, ready to slice, but stopped and looked at me.
“Where did you get that question? My brother died more than thirty years ago.”
“I’m just wondering why you didn’t tell me the truth.”
She put down the knife and eyed me suspiciously. “Why are you asking me this?”
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, weren’t so privileged. My name is Harold, but I’m called Harry.
“I found your brother’s death certificate and he obviously didn’t die from cholera, so you lied to me. Were you covering up something I shouldn’t know about?”
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.
“Where in the world did you find his death certificate?”
I laid my hand on top of the stack of papers. “I got these from Nev’s safe.”
Her eyebrows shot up and her eyes took on a look of both surprise and apprehension.
“You opened his safe? No one is allowed to even touch it and you know that includes you. I hope to God he doesn’t find out.”
“Since he can’t even get out of bed anymore, I’m sure he’ll never know.”
“Don’t underestimate him. He can still be a dangerous man, so you let me know immediately if anything happens because of it.”
Still concerned with what I’d 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.
“I didn’t tell you the truth,” she said as she worked, “for any number of good reasons. But since you seem to think you’ve been terribly mistreated, I’ll tell you why I didn’t.
“We 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 Sam’s 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.”
“My God, he was kidnapped and killed by Indians? That’s horrible! No wonder you never told me.”
“Precisely,” my mother said. “I 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 didn’t want you to be scared, so I decided that since my parents had died of cholera, I’d say that Sam died the same way.”
“Well, you still should have trusted me with the truth.”
She again laid down the knife and gave me a stern look. “You were how old? Six, eight? Sometimes, you don’t get to know the truth until you can handle it, and you, my over-achieving son, weren’t anywhere near ready to handle the truth.”
“Hey, I was older at six than a lot of kids are at eight,” I said, ready to argue the point.
“Congratulations, 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 you’ve heard enough?”
“I’m sorry I came across like I did, but I’m pretty sensitive to what is and what’s not the truth these days. Call it a symptom of learning to be a lawyer.”
My mother came back to the baking table, took up her knife, and continued slicing. “Maybe it’s also a symptom of you being too full of yourself?”
I smiled. “I’m tall, rich, extremely smart, good-looking—seems like I have a lot to be full of.”
She paused her slicing and looked at me with a surprisingly serious expression. “I don’t like what I’m hearing. Learning to be a lawyer is no excuse for being rude to your mother, nor should it be a mark of superiority.”
I could feel my face growing as red as my inherited Irish hair. “I’m supposed to be rude and aggressive. That’s the way successful lawyers behave—always seeking the truth, not stopping until they know everything, making witnesses squeal.”
“It’s never okay to be arrogant and to wield power over people to make them feel small,” she said, tilting her head. “Now, do you want to hear more or are we done?”
I was sweating around my collar. “I’m truly sorry for being rude, and, yes, I would like to know what else you have to say.”
She resumed slicing. “My brother’s 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.”
“But they died before it sold, right?”
She nodded. “Nev 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. That’s the truth you’re so suddenly interested in.”
“So, 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.” 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.
“Do you remember what town your ranch was close to?” I asked.
She kept slicing in rhythm. “Some little town in New Mexico Territory. I don’t remember the name.”
“Was it Las Vegas?”
She glanced up with suspicion, laid her knife in front of the uncut portion of dough, and looked at me. “You’re just full of surprises today. How did you know that?”
“You know I’ve 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.
“Yesterday, 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. They’ve leased the house and are turning it into a sanitorium for tuberculosis patients.”
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. “Wait until I get these in.”
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.
“Nev owns a house outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the Catholic Church in Santa Fe just leased it?”
“Yep.” I pointed to the lease. “Signed 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.”
My mother shook her head, her eyes downcast, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “It can’t be the mansion. It burned down the year after I came to St. Louis.”
“Mansion? You lived in a mansion? I thought houses in New Mexico were made of mud.”
She took a deep breath. “After 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 wasn’t another house in the area even close to that size, so everybody called it the Mulvaney Mansion.”
My mother looked out the kitchen window at the tree-shaded street. “Our 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 we’d 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.
“In the fall, the cottonwoods turned yellow and gold, and the evenings cooled enough that we’d 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.
“After he was taken, I was most bothered by Sam not having a chance to say goodbye to all his things—his room, his rocks, the baby goats we were raising. He didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to me, and I know he would have wanted to. I was also sad he’d 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 he’d at least gotten his cake.”
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.
“Now,” she said, “what other papers did you get find in the safe?”
“Okay. Back to my story. I looked at the lease and couldn’t 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.”
“He’s famous for it.”
“Well, 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.”
My mother’s 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. She’d mix the glazing and spoon it over the top of each one once the swirls cooled.
She sat down beside me.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
I swiveled my stool to face her. “I was interested in the house: a description, when he’d bought it, maybe an explanation of why he’d bought it. As I fingered through the files in the safe’s drawer, I found a folder marked ‘Mulvaney’. 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.”
I took the next sheet off the stack and slid it in front of her. “Here’s the letter from the sheriff reporting the death of your parents.” I slid over the next one. “And this is the death certificate for Sam. It’s signed by a Sergeant Martin Tillson, who is identified as the leader of the search party that found Sam’s body.
“That didn’t sound like someone who had died from cholera, and that’s when I knew you had lied to me. Now, look at these.”
I thumbed through several of the papers and slid them over to her. “These are a dozen or so bills of sale. I’ve 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.”
I pointed to the name of the sales agent, Clinton Walters, his law firm printed below his name. “This man sold each of the parcels, Nev’s name being listed as the primary owner.” I pointed to the location, date, and price.
“Totaled, Clinton Walters sold about ninety thousand acres of land for a little over a half-million dollars. That’s a lot of land and a lot of money, and from what you’ve just told me, it had to have been your ranch.”
My mother shook her head in disagreement. “Can’t be. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I badgered Nev to tell me what happened after I’d 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.
“There 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 can’t have been for the ranch land, and the lease can’t be for the house I grew up in.”
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.
“Maybe the lease is for a different house,” I finally said, “but if The Sisters of the Holy Light are making a sanatorium out of it, it has to be a really big house, and that doesn’t fit what Nev would buy for a lease property. He’s too much of a skinflint to buy anything that’s not cheap, and it being out in the country makes it even less likely.”
My mother was silent for a minute, and then an irritated look took over her face. “If 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.”
“Well,” I said, “hold that thought for a moment, because I’ve got a different explanation that you’re really not going to like.”
I took the final three papers and lay them side-by-side in front of her. “This paper is dated October of 1870 and is signed by a judge in Las Vegas. It must have been made after the reading of Cyrus’s will. It appoints Nev as your guardian, and looks like standard stuff.
“This second one is dated a few months later and is signed by a judge here in St. Louis. It converts Nev’s 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.
“That’s highly unusual. How could Nev have wrangled a deal like that? The answer is provided by this.”
I put my finger on the third paper. “This is a formal Declaration of Incompetency, dated February of 1871, with the name ‘Lucille Simpson’ on it. The paper makes it clear that you, as Nev’s legal dependent, had been determined to be mentally incompetent, as if you were a lunatic or brain damaged or something. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that you were only six years old.
“Nev 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.
“After getting the ownership, he made almost a half-million dollars by selling the land, while the house is still sitting there. He’s been making a fool of you for more than thirty years.”
Chapter Two
I was busy for the next few weeks and didn’t speak again to my mother about her stolen inheritance. I wished she had reacted more emotionally to the news. Maybe a half-million dollars wasn’t overly significant because my family was already wealthy beyond belief, but I still wanted her to explode with anger. Instead, she just got up and mixed the glaze for the rolls. I understood her not wanting to waste time and effort on yet another instance of Nev’s corrupt behavior, but for the fraud he had committed and for as long as he had hidden it from her, she should have erupted like a volcano.
Neville Simpson was a stingy, self-centered, violent bully who had dedicated himself to making money. After the Civil War, when commerce on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was growing in leaps and bounds, he built warehouses at every dock to provide rental storage for the goods carried by steamboats going up and down the rivers. A few years later, he started a distribution business, hiring out workers and wagons for moving the warehoused goods into the surrounding towns. By selling his services to both suppliers and customers, he dominated his competitors and became one of the wealthiest men in Missouri.
Nev then used any means, legal or illegal, to maintain his dominance. He manipulated, cheated, lied, bribed, and used a small army of thugs to beat up any competitor threatening his territories. There had been enough lawsuits and arrests through the years to make the truth obvious, but he survived by paying off judges, packing juries, and bribing the police.
By the 1890s, however, railroads were replacing steamboats for moving goods, mail-order catalog stores were delivering merchandise directly to customers, and individual business owners were being replaced with boards of directors. Nev’s kingdom crumbled. By the turn of the century, Nev had little control over anything. His own children had deserted him, and when Nanna died two years ago, his loneliness began sucking the life out of him.
Having wrapped up my law classes by mid-May, I was in my room, daydreaming of what I might do during the summer when the housekeeper brought a note from my mother, asking that I come to the kitchen. I found her in the final stages of fixing a cake for another afternoon meeting but it was obviously not going well—I had never seen my mother manhandle a pastry with such force. I quietly took my place on the stool.
It was a round three-layer cake, each layer currently lying on a separate cooling rack. My mother was mixing a bowl of icing, stirring it as if beating it into submission. Once done, she flipped one cake layer from its cooling rack onto a glass plate and spooned frosting on top. Swiping at it with the pastry knife, she followed with a second layer and more frosting, and then squished on the third layer. She added whatever frosting was left in the mixing bowl, but it was clear she had not mixed enough.
The frosting was also too thin and every swipe of the pastry knife around the edges left swaths of buttercream dripping onto the platter, while the swirls on top slowly ran towards the rim. To make things worse, the three layers were skewing to one side and refusing to settle upright. She was talking to herself, which is not like my mother, as she swiped the gathering drips of frosting off the plate and spooned them back on top. The top layer suddenly slid off and folded itself onto the counter. My mother picked it up with her hands and slapped it back in place. She then reached high with the frosting knife and plunged it through the heart of the cake. After yanking the knife out with a flourish, she picked up the cake and dumped it into the trash can.
I was too astonished to say anything.
She threw the knife and plate into the sink, washed her hands, and gripped the edge of the table, looking at me with her brow furrowed. “I want you to go to New Mexico, and I want you to go now,” she said.
“Uh…” was all I got out before she picked an envelope off the countertop and threw it at me.
I found a note written in a shaky handwriting:
Dearest Daughter Lucille –
Ha Ha Ha Ha – your kid probably told you my little secret. Your damned house is still sitting next to that river. You were so easy to fool! I took your inheritance, too. I took it all. I made a lot of money over the years on what your precious daddy left you, and you never
knew a thing about it.
Tough luck, sweetheart.
Nev
I had been astonished before, but was now flat-out stunned. The reason behind my mother’s cake assassination was perfectly clear.
“You want me to go to New Mexico?” I asked.
“Do you still have those papers?”
“No. I put everything back in the safe and left the lease on the desk.”
“Get them and take them with you. Contact anyone who’s mentioned in them. I want you to find any information that will help our family lawyers take that son of a bitch to court. I want everything he’s got left and I want him to squeal as I’m ripping it from his hands.”
I had never seen her furious and had never, ever heard her use words I’d gotten spanked for.
“Uh…you want me to go, now?” I asked feebly. “The World’s Fair is opening across town, and I want to see the exhibits.”
“You can go when you get back. Go to New Mexico and find proof that Nev stole my inheritance. If you find anything at all, I’m going to sue that bastard for every penny he has.”
“You want to sue your own father?” I asked. “Uh…have you talked to Dad about this?”
She actually snorted. “Your father is on his usual tour of the factories. I haven’t seen him in weeks, and he isn’t typically interested in my problems, anyway. We’ll tell him when you get back.”
Far from being as bad as Nev, my mother’s husband was her most on-going hardship.
Lucy Simpson and Carl Bonner were happily married in 1884. After inheriting a meager boot-making business, Carl turned it into a shoe manufacturing empire that currently included two large factories and seven distribution centers; two hundred different agreements for supplying shoes to major department stores along the East Coast and in the Midwest; and his most prized acquisition—a contract with Sears, Roebuck and Company to provide the mainstream footwear advertised in their catalog. His business dealings had made him fabulously wealthy and well-known, admired, and emulated, and earned him a reputation for being one of the great business leaders in America. In their twenty years of marriage, he had already made more millions than he could count.
To my mother and me, as well as the rest of his children, Carl Bonner was very successful, very rich, and very absent.
My father was a shoe-sole manager, measuring his effectiveness as a manager by the number of times his shoes had to be re-soled during the year. Carl went everywhere: to every major store selling his shoes, to every distribution center supplying those shoes, to every factory making those shoes, and to every shoe convention promoting those shoes. He was on hand for displaying new styles at Macy’s shoe department in New York City, attended the twice-yearly Woolworth’s clothing products show in Chicago, and he stood behind every speaker announcing a new addition to the line of clothes from Sears.
My father was almost never home and never appeared to miss it.
By most measures, my father was a nice man and a reasonably good father. I’d traveled with him on business trips and he was truly a brilliant businessman who commanded respect from everyone he met. But his obsessive attention to his shoe empire trumped any family concerns, leaving my mother to answer for all he ignored. She assumed all the responsibilities of running a twelve-bedroom, nine-bathroom house, including utilities, taxes, upkeep, renovations, and repairs; paying the bills, hiring and firing the nannies, servants, gardeners, and cooks; interacting with the city, churches, social clubs, benevolence societies, and schools; and spending the rest of the minutes God gave her raising five children.
As I sat on my stool, I wondered if my father wasn’t as much the source of my mother’s anger as Nev. From the tears rolling down her cheeks, I could sense the depth of her frustration. She had no one to stand up for her, no one to share her anguish, and no one to rush in to protect her against enemies.
She stood silently a minute or two more, and I watched her face relax as her personal values of kindness and grace slowly brought back the mother I knew. As much as I had wanted her to erupt in anger, I was glad it was over.
My mother sat back on the stool next to me, took a deep breath, and put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. From the time Nev met me at the train when I was six years old, he’s been trying to destroy the memories of my early life. Whenever I wanted to tell him about my parents or the ranch or all the fun Sam and I had, he’d squash my every attempt with words like inadequate, foolish, wasteful, or irresponsible. He never missed an opportunity to belittle my father, or even Violet, and worked hard to convince me that only after I had come to live with him did my life have any meaning.
“I resented it for years, but eventually learned to live with his meanness. This letter came this morning and I lost control. He has no right to treat me this way. He has no right to gloat over taking Sam’s and my inheritance. He shouldn’t treat me like a fool, and I wanted to punish him for it.
“You don’t have to go to New Mexico. It’s useless to take Nev to court, whether we have proof of anything or not. He’d just find some way to lie his way out of it.”
I had always wanted to be my mother’s knight in shining armor. She’d suffered the tragic loss of her family, been robbed of her childhood, was burdened with an absent husband, and now had found her inheritance stolen by a father with the gall to officially declare her incompetent. This level of betrayal called for outright retaliation, and if my mother needed me to fight for her, then fight I would. If it meant going off to the wilderness, then I would do it.
“Mom,” I said with resolve, “I’ll go to New Mexico. If I can find proof that Nev deliberately stole everything Cyrus left you, we’ll take him to court and get back every dime.”
My mother gave me a closed-lip smile. “Taking a trip and spending time alone might be good for you. You’ll get to see some new country, and you’ll see how other people live. But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I’m fine.”
I stood up from my stool, hopefully looking capable, courageous, and unstoppable. “I’ll leave as soon as I can get a ticket for the train.”
Neville Simpson was a stingy, self-centered, violent bully who had dedicated himself to making money. After the Civil War, when commerce on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was growing in leaps and bounds, he built warehouses at every dock to provide rental storage for the goods carried by steamboats going up and down the rivers. A few years later, he started a distribution business, hiring out workers and wagons for moving the warehoused goods into the surrounding towns. By selling his services to both suppliers and customers, he dominated his competitors and became one of the wealthiest men in Missouri.
Nev then used any means, legal or illegal, to maintain his dominance. He manipulated, cheated, lied, bribed, and used a small army of thugs to beat up any competitor threatening his territories. There had been enough lawsuits and arrests through the years to make the truth obvious, but he survived by paying off judges, packing juries, and bribing the police.
By the 1890s, however, railroads were replacing steamboats for moving goods, mail-order catalog stores were delivering merchandise directly to customers, and individual business owners were being replaced with boards of directors. Nev’s kingdom crumbled. By the turn of the century, Nev had little control over anything. His own children had deserted him, and when Nanna died two years ago, his loneliness began sucking the life out of him.
Having wrapped up my law classes by mid-May, I was in my room, daydreaming of what I might do during the summer when the housekeeper brought a note from my mother, asking that I come to the kitchen. I found her in the final stages of fixing a cake for another afternoon meeting but it was obviously not going well—I had never seen my mother manhandle a pastry with such force. I quietly took my place on the stool.
It was a round three-layer cake, each layer currently lying on a separate cooling rack. My mother was mixing a bowl of icing, stirring it as if beating it into submission. Once done, she flipped one cake layer from its cooling rack onto a glass plate and spooned frosting on top. Swiping at it with the pastry knife, she followed with a second layer and more frosting, and then squished on the third layer. She added whatever frosting was left in the mixing bowl, but it was clear she had not mixed enough.
The frosting was also too thin and every swipe of the pastry knife around the edges left swaths of buttercream dripping onto the platter, while the swirls on top slowly ran towards the rim. To make things worse, the three layers were skewing to one side and refusing to settle upright. She was talking to herself, which is not like my mother, as she swiped the gathering drips of frosting off the plate and spooned them back on top. The top layer suddenly slid off and folded itself onto the counter. My mother picked it up with her hands and slapped it back in place. She then reached high with the frosting knife and plunged it through the heart of the cake. After yanking the knife out with a flourish, she picked up the cake and dumped it into the trash can.
I was too astonished to say anything.
She threw the knife and plate into the sink, washed her hands, and gripped the edge of the table, looking at me with her brow furrowed. “I want you to go to New Mexico, and I want you to go now,” she said.
“Uh…” was all I got out before she picked an envelope off the countertop and threw it at me.
I found a note written in a shaky handwriting:
Dearest Daughter Lucille –
Ha Ha Ha Ha – your kid probably told you my little secret. Your damned house is still sitting next to that river. You were so easy to fool! I took your inheritance, too. I took it all. I made a lot of money over the years on what your precious daddy left you, and you never
knew a thing about it.
Tough luck, sweetheart.
Nev
I had been astonished before, but was now flat-out stunned. The reason behind my mother’s cake assassination was perfectly clear.
“You want me to go to New Mexico?” I asked.
“Do you still have those papers?”
“No. I put everything back in the safe and left the lease on the desk.”
“Get them and take them with you. Contact anyone who’s mentioned in them. I want you to find any information that will help our family lawyers take that son of a bitch to court. I want everything he’s got left and I want him to squeal as I’m ripping it from his hands.”
I had never seen her furious and had never, ever heard her use words I’d gotten spanked for.
“Uh…you want me to go, now?” I asked feebly. “The World’s Fair is opening across town, and I want to see the exhibits.”
“You can go when you get back. Go to New Mexico and find proof that Nev stole my inheritance. If you find anything at all, I’m going to sue that bastard for every penny he has.”
“You want to sue your own father?” I asked. “Uh…have you talked to Dad about this?”
She actually snorted. “Your father is on his usual tour of the factories. I haven’t seen him in weeks, and he isn’t typically interested in my problems, anyway. We’ll tell him when you get back.”
Far from being as bad as Nev, my mother’s husband was her most on-going hardship.
Lucy Simpson and Carl Bonner were happily married in 1884. After inheriting a meager boot-making business, Carl turned it into a shoe manufacturing empire that currently included two large factories and seven distribution centers; two hundred different agreements for supplying shoes to major department stores along the East Coast and in the Midwest; and his most prized acquisition—a contract with Sears, Roebuck and Company to provide the mainstream footwear advertised in their catalog. His business dealings had made him fabulously wealthy and well-known, admired, and emulated, and earned him a reputation for being one of the great business leaders in America. In their twenty years of marriage, he had already made more millions than he could count.
To my mother and me, as well as the rest of his children, Carl Bonner was very successful, very rich, and very absent.
My father was a shoe-sole manager, measuring his effectiveness as a manager by the number of times his shoes had to be re-soled during the year. Carl went everywhere: to every major store selling his shoes, to every distribution center supplying those shoes, to every factory making those shoes, and to every shoe convention promoting those shoes. He was on hand for displaying new styles at Macy’s shoe department in New York City, attended the twice-yearly Woolworth’s clothing products show in Chicago, and he stood behind every speaker announcing a new addition to the line of clothes from Sears.
My father was almost never home and never appeared to miss it.
By most measures, my father was a nice man and a reasonably good father. I’d traveled with him on business trips and he was truly a brilliant businessman who commanded respect from everyone he met. But his obsessive attention to his shoe empire trumped any family concerns, leaving my mother to answer for all he ignored. She assumed all the responsibilities of running a twelve-bedroom, nine-bathroom house, including utilities, taxes, upkeep, renovations, and repairs; paying the bills, hiring and firing the nannies, servants, gardeners, and cooks; interacting with the city, churches, social clubs, benevolence societies, and schools; and spending the rest of the minutes God gave her raising five children.
As I sat on my stool, I wondered if my father wasn’t as much the source of my mother’s anger as Nev. From the tears rolling down her cheeks, I could sense the depth of her frustration. She had no one to stand up for her, no one to share her anguish, and no one to rush in to protect her against enemies.
She stood silently a minute or two more, and I watched her face relax as her personal values of kindness and grace slowly brought back the mother I knew. As much as I had wanted her to erupt in anger, I was glad it was over.
My mother sat back on the stool next to me, took a deep breath, and put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. From the time Nev met me at the train when I was six years old, he’s been trying to destroy the memories of my early life. Whenever I wanted to tell him about my parents or the ranch or all the fun Sam and I had, he’d squash my every attempt with words like inadequate, foolish, wasteful, or irresponsible. He never missed an opportunity to belittle my father, or even Violet, and worked hard to convince me that only after I had come to live with him did my life have any meaning.
“I resented it for years, but eventually learned to live with his meanness. This letter came this morning and I lost control. He has no right to treat me this way. He has no right to gloat over taking Sam’s and my inheritance. He shouldn’t treat me like a fool, and I wanted to punish him for it.
“You don’t have to go to New Mexico. It’s useless to take Nev to court, whether we have proof of anything or not. He’d just find some way to lie his way out of it.”
I had always wanted to be my mother’s knight in shining armor. She’d suffered the tragic loss of her family, been robbed of her childhood, was burdened with an absent husband, and now had found her inheritance stolen by a father with the gall to officially declare her incompetent. This level of betrayal called for outright retaliation, and if my mother needed me to fight for her, then fight I would. If it meant going off to the wilderness, then I would do it.
“Mom,” I said with resolve, “I’ll go to New Mexico. If I can find proof that Nev deliberately stole everything Cyrus left you, we’ll take him to court and get back every dime.”
My mother gave me a closed-lip smile. “Taking a trip and spending time alone might be good for you. You’ll get to see some new country, and you’ll see how other people live. But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I’m fine.”
I stood up from my stool, hopefully looking capable, courageous, and unstoppable. “I’ll leave as soon as I can get a ticket for the train.”
Death In The Tallgrass: A Young Man's Journey Through The Western Frontier
By Donald Willerton
By Donald Willerton