The Rustle of Donald Cooley's Bull

By Terry Dressler

Reuben Cox is on the cusp of adolescence and living an idyllic life on his family's horse farm in Kentucky, receiving a classical education from his tutor and learning about the horse-raising business, martial skills expected of a man, and the responsibilities of duty and honor from his stern but loving father. Through her example, his mother provides for the growth of his heart and conscience. Suddenly, the outbreak of the Civil War bursts this idyll to pieces, and as a young teen, Reuben finds himself riding with Quantrill's raiders. Despite his youth, Reuben becomes skilled and efficient at the violent duties of war, but at the war's end, he is unable to return to his former life. Among many of the young male diaspora from the South, he seeks his fortune in the post-war Texas cattle industry. In Texas, he finds himself caught up in another battle, a range war between two wealthy cattle barons. Even more so than the Civil War, this range war will not only force the limits of Reuben's martial abilities but also put his sense of duty, honor, pride, justice, and love to the ultimate test. The story weaves in and out of the lives of three families who, having built edifices of power and wealth, must face the fragility of those walls. This is a story about building strength out of courage and is also a story about the dangers of pride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642145731

Book preview

cover.jpg

The Rustle of Donald Cooley's Bull

Terry Dressler

Copyright © 2018 Terry Dressler

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64214-572-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64214-573-1 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

The story you are about to read is a retelling of a first-century Irish legend called the Táin Bó Cuailnge (pronounced toyn bo kooling) and translated as either the driving off the cattle of Cooley or the cattle raid of Cooley, which was preserved for us in the scriptoriums of medieval Irish monasteries by diligence and perseverance that I fear does not exist in human culture nowadays. The monks found the stories fantastical, unbelievable, profane, and irreligious; and they commented as to their doubts and disgust in the margin notes of their translations. Yet these diligent and dedicated religious men dutifully copied and translated this text again and again over centuries in order to preserve it for posterity.

I first encountered this story during my early thirties while exploring my Irish ethnic roots and found it again in my early sixties while on a walking tour in southwestern Ireland. It was then that the themes of heroic martial prowess, the manner in which early exposure to warfare may shape a person’s life, and cattle rustling all presented themselves to me to be ripe for a retelling of the story as a western, a cowboy tale, a horse opera.

First-century Ireland was divided into four major kingdoms—Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, and Munster—and subdivided into a few minor kingdoms within the major four and under the control of the four rulers of the primary subdivisions, one of whom was the woman, Queen Medb (pronounced Mayv), who, with her husband, Ailill, ruled Connacht. Unlike the popular concept of a Dark Ages medieval kingdom, which most of us hold in our minds from our knowledge of history and literary and cinematic entertainment. First-century Irish kings were not executive rulers who sat upon thrones and directed a staff of subalterns (i.e., counts and barons, etc.) who, in turn, directed a staff a bureaucrats, knights, and soldiers to collect taxes, fight wars, build public works projects, rule over farmers, herders, and tradesmen, and so on. Rather, first-century Irish kings were what we would call today cattle barons.

The economy of first-century Ireland was based on cattle husbandry, much like that of Texas and much of the Southwestern United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most of the wars fought between the kings of Ireland at the time were precipitated by cattle rustling and the stealing of one king’s cattle by the subjects of another king. Consequently, each king kept a staff of retainers who were no more than hired warriors, mercenaries ready to go into battle at the mere suggestion of their respective king. A warrior’s status in the society was based on nothing more than his martial prowess, and he was trained in his role from early childhood. A great deal of boasting and a bloody and violent pattern of conflict resulted from this culture, and it lasted well into the fifth century. The Táin concerns a particular rustling incident carried out by the kingdom of Connacht against the kingdom of Ulster, the war that ensued, and the exploits of the Irish hero/warrior Cúchulainn (pronounced Koochallin), who was the Ulster king’s finest champion.

Similar to first-century Ireland, after the end of Civil War in the United States and lasting well into the 1880s, there existed a cattle-based culture in the Southwestern parts of the country. The culture spilled as far east as Arkansas and as far north as Kansas and Missouri; cattle were driven to these places in order to be placed on trains and distributed to the Northern and Eastern parts of the United States. An additional element of this culture was that it was heavily populated by a diaspora of young men who had left their homes in the Southern states in order to seek their fortunes or at least find work and to escape the complete destruction of the antebellum culture and economy of their former homes. These men had spent four years of their formative youth in one of the most violent and deadly wars in human history to that date. They were, to a man, all familiar with firearms, killing, and the possibility of sudden violent death. The famously violent outlaws as well as the equally famous and equally violent lawmen of the time are familiar to all through books and movies and television productions that romanticize this period in history. While much of what we think we know about this time in The American West was formed by fantastical tales and popular media, the fact remains that all those tales were based on a set of historical and well-documented facts. There were cattle drives, rustling, lawlessness, range wars, lynching, gunmen for hire, and gunfights. It is estimated that upward of twenty thousand men died from gunshot in the American West between 1866 and 1900; most of these deaths occurred in Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. During the American Indian Wars between 1850 and 1890, there were more than twenty-one thousand casualties. While gun fighting was much more rare than depicted in popular entertainment culture, the numbers cited above are not trivial.

The parallel violence of post-Civil War Western United States and first-century Ireland seemed, to me, to lend itself to the retelling of the Táin in the form of a western. The original story itself is a stunning heroic narrative that reveals more about the nature of human pride and our capacity for violence than any social or psychological interpretation, anthropological treatise, or philosophical text could ever accomplish. I hope that I have done the story justice in my retelling, and I encourage the reader to discover and enjoy the original as well.

Prologue

Ibecame acquainted with Reuben Cox in December of 1864 after the military unit in which he served had retreated to east Texas for the winter. He was only fourteen years old at the time, but he had already killed many men. I was serving as the pastor of a small Catholic parish in Rusk, Texas, when this boy entered the church one Sunday, fully armed with three pistols about his waist. He removed his hat respectfully and sat in the rear pew during the entire Mass, neither standing nor kneeling when the ceremony called for it. He recited the Lord’s Prayer at the proper time but added, For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forevermore at the end, which marked him as a Protestant.

At the end of the Mass, he approached me and introduced himself and asked if he might attend services on Sundays as he had always attended services in his home in Kentucky, and he wished to bring that habit back into his life. He admitted that he was not a Papist but that he preferred the Catholic Mass to other services that he had visited. I welcomed him but suggested that, perhaps, his guns were unnecessary in the house of God. The next Sunday, he arrived unarmed.

Later, he admitted to me that it was the Latin liturgy that drew him to the Mass. He had studied Latin in the nursery and wished to continue his learning of the language. When he realized that part of the Mass included a call and response in Latin, I noticed that he assiduously pronounced each word, unlike most of the flock who simply spoke out phonetically without understanding what their mouths were speaking. One Sunday, he approached me and asked if I might have any books in Latin that he could borrow. It was then that began my relationship with Reuben Cox, which we would share for the rest of his life.

I have assembled this story from the letters he sent me. The end of the story, I learned from a long letter sent to me by a Mrs. Vanvicker.

This is Reuben’s story.

Fr. Absalom Herbert, SJ

Part 1

Coo Cox

Chapter 1

The Teaching of Reuben Cox

On his eleventh birthday, the morning of April 14, 1861, Reuben James Cox woke in his bedroom in the family manse in Woodford County, Kentucky, unaware of what was taking place in Fort Sumter, South Carolina, six hundred miles to the southeast. He voided his bladder into the chamber pot beside his bed, pulled off his nightgown, and dressed as he would have on any normal day. He expected to ride with his father this morning and dressed in riding trousers and calf-skin boots that he pulled up to just below his knees. The boots felt tight in the toes. He was growing.

Before donning his blouse, Reuben went to the dressing table, poured water into the ceramic bowl, and scooped two handfuls of water onto his face and through his straw-colored hair. After wiping his face dry, for his mother’s sake, he ran a brush through that thick hair, which fell down the length of his neck, nearly to his shoulders. His light blue eyes stared back at him in the mirror with a questioning look, but he paid them no heed. He was not inwardly focused.

Reuben dressed in a white linen shirt and a green short-waist calf-skin jacket and left his room to descend the stairs to breakfast. For a long time now, he had not needed the pickaninny to wake him in order to attend breakfast at the appointed hour. His father had insisted early on that Reuben be able to roust himself out of bed, dress himself, and get himself down to breakfast without the doting of the house staff. Reuben had risen to the responsibility.

As he entered the dining room, he quickly noticed that, uncharacteristic for breakfast, his entire family was assembled—his father, his mother, and both his younger sisters. The table was set with his favorite foods, spoon bread, ham, and potato soup. His father was sipping his first sour mash whiskey of the day and enjoying his first cigar. The sweet scent of the tobacco was familiar to Reuben, and his father’s proud smile would ensure that the scent of cigar smoke would elicit nostalgic feelings in him for the rest of his life.

Congratulations on the day of your birth, son, called out his father from the head of the table.

Reuben advanced to his place at the table and said, Thank you, Father.

Nothing else was said as the servant served the food and the family began to eat. After a polite period of silence for eating, Reuben’s mother turned to her husband and asked, James, what do you have planned for our son on the celebration of his birthday?

James put his eating utensils on his plate and placed his hands on his lap and replied, Well, my dear, I believe we should ride and shoot and perhaps practice at fencing. However, first he must attend to his lessons. One’s birthday does not exempt a boy from his lessons.

Laura Graddy Cox lowered her eyes just a bit for just a moment to demonstrate her disapproval of her husband’s stricture and then raised her head with a smile focused on her son and said, Well, Reuben, you should enjoy a very diverting day. Finish up now so that you can attend your lessons and be quickly off to more pleasant pursuits.

Reuben never knew how to negotiate these subtle disagreements between his parents, especially when they concerned him. He quickly shoveled a forkful of spoon bread and ham into his mouth and washed it down with a large beaker of warm milk before responding, Yes, ma’ am. Father, at what time will you fetch me?

James pulled a large watch from the pocket of his vest and, after consulting its face, replied, I will come for you after midday. Ensure that you have had your dinner, for we shall not return home until suppertime.

Reuben quickly cleared the food on his plate and finished his milk and asked to be excused to attend to his lessons. Both his mother and father nodded their heads, and he quickly rose and left the table to make his way to the room where the tutor gave lessons. On his way, his bowels rumbled, and he detoured to the outhouse.

There was a time when Reuben found the voiding of his bowels to be a burden in his life, but recently, he had embraced the daily ritual as a relief and cleansing. He used the time alone to think about things that he did not otherwise consider. Today, he considered his relationship with his father. He loved his stern and demanding father just as much as he loved his devoted and doting mother, but for different reasons. His mother was a nest of safety into which he could retreat in times of trouble. His father, on the other hand, was a source of knowledge and strength that he needed to become a man. Then his mind wandered to his tutor. His tutor was simply an annoying and tedious distraction from what Reuben perceived to be the necessary progress of life.

Reuben’s tutor, John Graves, who was the cousin of a local plantation owner, had been brought from Virginia at great expense to teach the Cox children in grammar, arithmetic, writing, and Latin. John was a thin and sallow and shy young man who, while being a competent instructor, was singularly boring and uninspiring. Reuben did not enjoy his lessons with John but attended to them with alacrity out of respect for his parents. Reuben hated the lessons in Latin the most, finding the learning of the language that no person spoke to be the most profligate waste of time. However, when, after Reuben had mastered Latin at a certain level, he was introduced to a copy of The Aeneid, Reuben began to appreciate his lessons, if for no other reason than to follow this story to its conclusion.

Sitting in the privy, Reuben began to think about his readings in The Aeneid and how the world had changed so much from those days and how people had not changed so much. He wondered if his father could ever leave his mother for some higher purpose as Aeneas had left Dido. Reuben could not imagine ever leaving his mother for any reason and wondered how Aeneas could have left his wife just because he believed he was destined to accomplish important things. John was not helpful with these questions. John simply expressed his happiness that Reuben understood not only the words but also the underlying meaning of the text and shrugged his shoulders at the existential questions.

Reuben wiped his arse and hiked up his trousers and repaired to the classroom (which had been called, when he was young, the nursery). John was waiting, patiently reading a book of poetry as if it did not matter whatever time his charges appeared for their lessons. He looked up from his book and paused a bit as if he were refocusing his attention on a different reality.

Well, there you are, my young man. I understand that today is the celebration of the day of your birth. I wish you many happy returns of the day.

Reuben sat at the small desk in the room and replied, Thank you, John. Let’s get on with this. My father is coming to collect me after dinner for riding and shooting.

John closed the book into which he placed his finger to hold his place and said, "Very well. Let us start with geometry.

Chapter 2

Father and Son: Horses and Sabers

At noon, Reuben descended the stairs and entered the dining room for the second time that day. This time, however, instead of being greeted by his entire family, he was met only by old Paul, an elderly white-haired black man wearing a suit of black clothes and a white shirt with a starched color closed at the throat but no tie.

Dinner presently, Mr. Reuben, can I bring you a cup o’ sumpthin ta quench yo’ thirst? he said as he pulled a chair out away from the table.

Reuben walked over to the table, took the chair, and allowed himself to be pushed into place.

Yes, Paul, I believe that I will have cider please.

I’ll bring it right along, Mr. Reuben. Macey should be bringin’ in da chicken an’ taters anytime now.

Paul left the room quietly, leaving Reuben alone at the long table that could easily have served twelve people. It was considered one of the largest tables in Woodford County, and all of the county’s leading citizens had taken meals at its white linen cloth, fine English-made porcelain, and gleaming silver. From rote habit, Reuben removed his napkin from its silver ring and placed the cloth on his lap. No sooner had he done this than a short and very thin black girl, who could not have been more than two years older than Reuben, slipped into the room burdened by a large porcelain plate on which were arranged assorted pieces of battered and fried chicken and a large pile of mashed potatoes covered in white gravy. She placed the food in front of Reuben and left without saying a word.

Paul returned before Reuben had a chance to lift his first fork of potato into his mouth and delivered a large crystal goblet of apple cider.

Thar ya go, Master Reuben. Anythin’ else for ya now? asked Paul.

No, thank you, Paul. If you see Father, tell him I will be finished soon.

Now don’t ya go wolfin’ dat food, Master Reuben. Yo’ daddy will be ready fo’ ya when yo’ properly done.

Reuben ignored this comment and tore into his midday meal with a relish and determination that would have offended his mother, who had spent so much time teaching him the proper manner of a gentleman’s eating habits.

No sooner had Reuben scooped the last bite of gravy-sopped potato into his mouth and sucked the last piece of gristle off the end of a chicken leg than James entered the dining room holding a chicken wing in one hand and a beaker of whiskey in the other. He had obviously passed through the kitchen on his way and was having that most dreaded and uncivilized of repasts in Laura’s opinion, the kitchen counter meal.

Eat up, son. The afternoon is waning, he said with his mouth full and punctuated his statement with a gulp of whiskey.

Reuben grabbed the napkin from his lap, wiped his hands and mouth, pour down the rest of his cider, and rose from his chair all in nearly a single motion.

All finished, Father, he also stammered out with his mouth still full.

Good, I’ve had horses brought to the front. Let’s be off then, James said and then tipped up the beaker and finished off the better part of three ounces of whiskey in two or three swallows. James placed the beaker delicately on the table and marched from the room without looking back at his son. Reuben quickly followed his father.

The horses were being held by their halters by two boys from the stables. The boys were Reuben’s age but appeared older due to their serious facial expressions and their well-muscled forearms, which were veined and swollen from holding the spirited horses at bay and tossing hail bales. Their black faces were handsome, but it was obvious that they were unaccustomed to smiling. Reuben had sometimes wondered about the lives of people who served his family, but they had always been there, and they seemed to live in almost a different world than his that he had kept putting those thoughts aside for another day. The servants (his mother insisted that they not be called slaves) lived a different life than he did, and he would, one day, speak with his parents, and maybe with Paul, about this difference. But not today.

Father and son mounted their respective steeds, reeled them about, and galloped down the driveway, soon turning into an open field, leaping a fence and then racing toward a low-slung outbuilding a half a mile distant. Due to his lighter weight and fearless riding, Reuben won the race by several lengths.

Reuben’s face was flush pink, and he was brushing back a damp forelock of his thick blond hair that had fallen across his forehead as his father rein his horse to a halt.

Well ridden, son. Be careful about standing in those stirrups. It’s a sure way to get unhorsed. Keep your knees engaged. That will give the horse confidence, James said in an even voice not the least labored or out of breath.

Like Reuben, James’s hair was thick and worn a little on the longer side, but unlike his son, the father’s hair was as black and shining as coal. His eyebrows were thick and black as well, all of which gave a more striking look to his fair skin, ruddy cheeks, and azure blue eyes. James was dressed in green leather riding jacket under which he wore buff-colored leather vest and white linen shirt. His riding trousers were dark indigo with a buff leather seat, his boots the finest and softest leather, blacked to a high shine. He sat his horse with the erect pride of a medieval knight. James was ever admonishing his son not to slump in the saddle, and Reuben was always careful when riding with his father to sit tall in the saddle as well.

Come, son, we’ll practice our fencing today in the shade of the stable, he said as he urged his horse to trot with the merest of pressure with his knees.

They trotted their horses to the stable and dismounted. Stable boys quickly took charge of the steads and began to unsaddle and comb the sweat from their flanks. James and Reuben walked into the shade of the stable where the central corridor had been cleaned and spread with fresh hay. Midway between the two wide doorways, displayed on a crude rack, were two sabers, each with a three-foot blade. James had requisitioned the swords to careful specification. Each was heavier than a normal cavalry sword, the hilt guard was broader (to protect the hand), the blades and points blunted to prevent the ability to cut. They were training weapons.

James and Reuben removed their jackets and placed them over the rail of one the stalls. They each drew one of the swords from their rack. The swords were identical in construction and appearance, yet the two combatants each showed his preference for a specific weapon. They faced each other, the sabers pointed down. James spoke, You have previously demonstrated your fencing skill and technique for which I am very proud of you. I wish that you would put such energy into your study of Latin.

Reuben had not expected this rebuke and began to defend himself. It is difficult, Father, to learn a language that no person speaks. Still I endeavor.

Your effort is all I require, replied James. Today, your effort will require you to change your idea of fencing. Today, I am going to teach how to defend yourself with a saber against a man who is bigger and stronger and who will use his size and strength rather than his fencing skill to kill you.

Reuben took a defensive stance and raised his blade.

Rest, son. First I will tell you what to expect. Then we shall play, said his father with a proud smile at his son’s instantaneous response.

Reuben lowered his blade and James continued.

When a man believes he has the advantage of strength and weight, he will press forward and bear down with great force. His advance will seem, at first, to be implacable and indefensible, and it is true that if you fall back in defense and raise your blade to protect your head, he will beat you back, put you on your heels, and defeat you. You will die. But the bigger and stronger man is not always the victor in a contest of blades. With blades, as you have learned, quickness is an essential element of success. When faced with a large and strong opponent, you must never move back in a straight line but rather move to the side to avoid his onslaught. Your strike must be quick and decisive. Do you understand?

Reuben could only say, Yes, sir.

James replied, Then we begin.

James immediately charged his son with brutal speed and overhead strikes that seemed as if they would have split logs. Reuben fell back, parrying the strikes, just barely, his knees buckling under the weight of the sword strokes falling on his outstretched blade. Against his father’s instruction, he moved backward in a straight line. He parried and parried and parried and then felt the blade of his father’s saber fall on the corner of his neck and shoulder.

James pulled up. Reuben