The Forsaken and the Dead: The Bass Reeves Trilogy, Book Three: The Bass Reeves Trilogy
Autor Sidney Thompsonen Limba Engleză Paperback – oct 2023
2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist in Historical Fiction
2023 National Indie Excellence Award Winner in Western Fiction
All heroes have fatal flaws and a moment of defining hubris, but few rise from the ashes to achieve greater heights. In 1884 Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was arrested for murder and placed among his own prisoners in Hell on the Border, the infamous federal jail in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was the single greatest setback of his illustrious career, but it wouldn’t be his last mistake or trial by fire.
In The Forsaken and the Dead we meet Reeves again. In the 1890s, past his prime, Reeves proceeds through the valleys and shadows of Indian and Oklahoma Territories. Despite his caution and innovations as a lawman and detective, his nation no longer seems a product of his own making—so much like his children and his marriage to Jennie. While a modern world implodes around him and demons from his past continue to haunt his present, he remains resolute in his faith that he can be a steady rider on a pale horse.
Preț: 97.74 lei
Nou
Puncte Express: 147
Preț estimativ în valută:
18.71€ • 19.43$ • 15.54£
18.71€ • 19.43$ • 15.54£
Carte disponibilă
Livrare economică 13-27 ianuarie 25
Livrare express 27 decembrie 24 - 02 ianuarie 25 pentru 38.24 lei
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496220325
ISBN-10: 1496220323
Pagini: 236
Ilustrații: 1 photograph, 1 map
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Seria The Bass Reeves Trilogy
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496220323
Pagini: 236
Ilustrații: 1 photograph, 1 map
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: BISON BOOKS
Colecția Bison Books
Seria The Bass Reeves Trilogy
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Sidney Thompson teaches creative writing and African American literature at Texas Christian University. He is the author of the award-winning Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves: The Bass Reeves Trilogy, Book One (Bison Books, 2020) and Hell on the Border: The Bass Reeves Trilogy, Book Two (Bison Books, 2021), adapted for the Paramount+ miniseries Lawmen: Bass Reeves, directed by Taylor Sheridan and starring David Oyelowo.
Extras
1
Thatch
Indian Territory was in a dry season in May of 1895, leaving Rock
Creek in the Creek Nation especially shallow in its broad bed, the
water steepled with rocks where turtles sunned. The three buzzards
that the three men had waved away from the bank floated directly
above them as if the men’s halos had loosed from their moorings
from transpiration and in their haste to rise heavenward had collided
to form a circling, circling chain that bound these chance
souls to this moment and place, their lives to their inevitable long
home—starting now.
“He was there, face down in it.” The white man who’d introduced
himself as Lee nearly two hours earlier in Keokuk Falls pointed with
a thrusting action of his rigid coat sleeve to help Bass Reeves sight
the spot. “Where it’s smooth there, betwixt the froth and them two
chicken turtles stacked, that’s where I drug him up from to keep him
from drifting.” He spat the color of wet rocks and let his arm hang at
his side. “He weren’t that heavy. He might look big but really ain’t.”
Bass let his chin drop, and he eyed the clothed hump buzzing with
flies. It was crisscrossed with ropes that were tied to tree branches
and rocks. Eddie Reed, a young deputy Bass was mentoring, wore
his neckerchief bandit-like as he stood on the slope of the bank at
an angle near the water’s edge. He checked the dead man’s pockets,
but a wadded handkerchief was all he found.
“He smelled better this morning,” Lee offered.
“I reckon so,” Bass said. The buzzards had flayed the back of the
man’s head, ears, and neck. Surprisingly there were no signs the
buzzards had pecked his hands, despite the exposed flesh of two
missing fingers severed at the second joint on his right hand. The
man’s skin had begun to marble pink and white all over. He looked
to be a white man. Bass strained to bend down but hesitated from
the sting in his thigh.
“Want him rolled over?” Eddie asked, standing over the dead
man’s feet. A sock still remained where one of his boots was missing.
It was a rich man’s sock.
Bass nodded. “Sure could use the help today.” He took hold of
one of the ropes that wrapped around the man’s back and tugged,
testing if the rope was taut enough. It was. “Come on,” he said, and
he and Eddie rolled the man over.
The center of the man’s forehead was both concave and swollen,
imprinted with a fist-shaped blow, and purple-black with a gash
across the top that had long stopped bleeding and opened to redness.
The skin around the gash, among the whiskers on his face, and
down on his neck seemed to slide away like wet paper.
Bass shifted his eyes to Lee, who was hitching up his trousers,
but Lee’s gut instantly weighed them down again. “You positive this
Thatch?” Bass asked.
Up on his toes, Lee leaned over the body, then rocked back on his
heels. “That’s who he told me last night he was.” He spat and wiped
his chin and beard on his sleeve. “I was setting my traps when I
come up on him in the evening time. He was stirring up something
to eat for him and some sidekicker he had with him, and he say for
me to join them. He introduced himself as Zachariah Thatch from
Washington County, and the one who ain’t here was Jimmy Cash or
something, from Arkansas, too, but from Faulkner County, he say.”
“If Thatch was the one cooking,” Bass said, “what makes you think
the one with him was working for him and not the other way?”
Lee hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know, ’cause Thatch was twice
as old as him and dressed and talked like he had money. I mean,
Thatch was white while the younger one, Jimmy, shore wasn’t. I
mean, he was white-looking but mixed with dark. What kind a dark
I couldn’t tell you. And while Thatch talked big about inspecting
some land about to open for settlement in the Kickapoos, Jimmy
was quiet on it. Course, I got family in Washington County, so me
and this dead man here did most of the talking about some apple
growers we knowed in Georgetown. I guess you know it by Lincoln.”
Bass gazed blankly. “Know it by the apples.”
“Best anywheres,” Lee said.
Bass nodded. “Anything else you recall?”
Lee’s eyes seemed to fix on the handkerchief wad on a patch of
grass. “His friend say he just got back from Keokuk Falls. His head
was bobbing like a cork he was so sour, while this one here didn’t
act like he drank a drop. Didn’t smell like he did, anyhow.”
Eddie took a step closer as if to join the conversation, but Bass had
never known him to be much of a talker in the company of others.
“Which saloon did he say?” Bass asked.
“Red Dog. He talked about a shooting there. That a man died
dueling a colored lawman. He was laughing about it.”
Bass turned to Thatch and studied his milky, bloodshot eyes. He
eased down on his good knee and waved flies away with his hat,
then pressed his fingertips against the man’s forehead, around the
gash, feeling the give and listening to the bits of skull crackle. “That
was in the evening you saw them, you say?”
“That’s right,” Lee said as Bass lifted a branch off of Thatch’s chest
to look for holes in his clothes. “Weren’t dark yet but getting there.
The two shots I heard come later. I was in my own camp by then.”
Bass tipped one of the rocks on its side as if he were hunting
underneath for worms in the man’s heart. “Like pow pow?” he asked.
“No,” Lee said. “Like pow . . . pow. Like enough time for a bad
shot to jump up closer, you know?”
Bass lowered the rock back down, and with his Sheffield Bowie
knife, he began cutting rope. Eddie freed the weights from the rope
and tossed them aside. A rock tumbled into the water while Bass
unbuttoned the man’s shirt. Not until Bass had unfastened the man’s
trousers did he find what appeared to be a .38 entry hole, like a new
navel, a few inches below his original one. Bass squinted up at the
dark silhouette of Lee’s head, like a hole itself in that sunny sky—the
buzzards so slow around that hole to almost be flies crawling.
“Guessing you was that colored lawman,” Lee said.
Bass nodded. “I ain’t the white one that died.”
“But he got you, I see.”
Bass shut his eyes and took a deep breath despite what the air
over this decaying dead man smelt like. Getting shot for the first
time in his life was not something he was proud of. He took up his
knife. “God allows the devil to have his luck.”
Lee chuckled. “The other one drawed first, didn’t he? Don’t that
make you the lucky one?”
Bass rested the point of the six-inch blade on Thatch’s entry
wound. “Fear’ll make a body move quick, sure true.” He pressed
the blade down and wiggled it back and forth as it sank and as he
felt for the slug in that bloated belly flesh, soft as curd. “But quick
ain’t the whole of it, you know?” Bass said. “I tried to warn the boy.
Sure he was real fast, just like he said, uh-huh. But like a lot of ’em,
he couldn’t shoot both fast and straight.” Once the blade disappeared
up to the brass cross guard, Bass eased up on the pressure, and the
blade rose back out almost on its own accord. Then he tried again
by going perpendicular to the previous puncture mark.
“Jesus,” Lee said. “You gotta have it?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Bass said. “But I want it.” He wiggled the
knife back and forth again as he continued to press it down deep,
still not feeling that hard button of lead, so he pulled the blade out
just a little, until he had good leverage with it, then pried the belly
fat out of the body, spilling it in chunks, like a congealed flower
of head cheese. He laid the knife on the ground beside him and
searched through the fat with his fingers until he found it: a .38 slug
of lead the size of a pearl. He reached for his knife, stood upright,
and limped to the water’s edge to rinse his hands, knife, and the
bullet that might or might not prove that the young man Zachariah
Thatch had invited to accompany him on his travels had murdered
him in cold blood.
Pow. Thatch hadn’t seen it coming. With no time to reach for a
weapon, he could only throw up his hands to shield himself. Maybe
that was how it happened, first losing the two middle fingers on his
right hand, but there was no telling where that slug went. Then came
the second pow once the shooter had moved closer to his target—this
one striking Thatch in the gut to slow him even more so that
either Jimmy Cash or someone else with high nerves or a poor aim
could finally step all the way up to him, right to his head, and finish
him off with something as solid as it was blunt.
Bass stared at the water, clear as glass at the surface but golden
as a picture frame at the bottom, then at the belly slime stringing
away from his hands like some enormous spiderweb that fell apart
as the wind blew. “Can you point out where they camped?”
Lee didn’t say a word. He spat as if that were enough of an answer,
and indeed it was. When Bass heard him step away, he knew to
push on up to begin loading the corpse into the wagon so he and
Eddie could follow.
Thatch
Indian Territory was in a dry season in May of 1895, leaving Rock
Creek in the Creek Nation especially shallow in its broad bed, the
water steepled with rocks where turtles sunned. The three buzzards
that the three men had waved away from the bank floated directly
above them as if the men’s halos had loosed from their moorings
from transpiration and in their haste to rise heavenward had collided
to form a circling, circling chain that bound these chance
souls to this moment and place, their lives to their inevitable long
home—starting now.
“He was there, face down in it.” The white man who’d introduced
himself as Lee nearly two hours earlier in Keokuk Falls pointed with
a thrusting action of his rigid coat sleeve to help Bass Reeves sight
the spot. “Where it’s smooth there, betwixt the froth and them two
chicken turtles stacked, that’s where I drug him up from to keep him
from drifting.” He spat the color of wet rocks and let his arm hang at
his side. “He weren’t that heavy. He might look big but really ain’t.”
Bass let his chin drop, and he eyed the clothed hump buzzing with
flies. It was crisscrossed with ropes that were tied to tree branches
and rocks. Eddie Reed, a young deputy Bass was mentoring, wore
his neckerchief bandit-like as he stood on the slope of the bank at
an angle near the water’s edge. He checked the dead man’s pockets,
but a wadded handkerchief was all he found.
“He smelled better this morning,” Lee offered.
“I reckon so,” Bass said. The buzzards had flayed the back of the
man’s head, ears, and neck. Surprisingly there were no signs the
buzzards had pecked his hands, despite the exposed flesh of two
missing fingers severed at the second joint on his right hand. The
man’s skin had begun to marble pink and white all over. He looked
to be a white man. Bass strained to bend down but hesitated from
the sting in his thigh.
“Want him rolled over?” Eddie asked, standing over the dead
man’s feet. A sock still remained where one of his boots was missing.
It was a rich man’s sock.
Bass nodded. “Sure could use the help today.” He took hold of
one of the ropes that wrapped around the man’s back and tugged,
testing if the rope was taut enough. It was. “Come on,” he said, and
he and Eddie rolled the man over.
The center of the man’s forehead was both concave and swollen,
imprinted with a fist-shaped blow, and purple-black with a gash
across the top that had long stopped bleeding and opened to redness.
The skin around the gash, among the whiskers on his face, and
down on his neck seemed to slide away like wet paper.
Bass shifted his eyes to Lee, who was hitching up his trousers,
but Lee’s gut instantly weighed them down again. “You positive this
Thatch?” Bass asked.
Up on his toes, Lee leaned over the body, then rocked back on his
heels. “That’s who he told me last night he was.” He spat and wiped
his chin and beard on his sleeve. “I was setting my traps when I
come up on him in the evening time. He was stirring up something
to eat for him and some sidekicker he had with him, and he say for
me to join them. He introduced himself as Zachariah Thatch from
Washington County, and the one who ain’t here was Jimmy Cash or
something, from Arkansas, too, but from Faulkner County, he say.”
“If Thatch was the one cooking,” Bass said, “what makes you think
the one with him was working for him and not the other way?”
Lee hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know, ’cause Thatch was twice
as old as him and dressed and talked like he had money. I mean,
Thatch was white while the younger one, Jimmy, shore wasn’t. I
mean, he was white-looking but mixed with dark. What kind a dark
I couldn’t tell you. And while Thatch talked big about inspecting
some land about to open for settlement in the Kickapoos, Jimmy
was quiet on it. Course, I got family in Washington County, so me
and this dead man here did most of the talking about some apple
growers we knowed in Georgetown. I guess you know it by Lincoln.”
Bass gazed blankly. “Know it by the apples.”
“Best anywheres,” Lee said.
Bass nodded. “Anything else you recall?”
Lee’s eyes seemed to fix on the handkerchief wad on a patch of
grass. “His friend say he just got back from Keokuk Falls. His head
was bobbing like a cork he was so sour, while this one here didn’t
act like he drank a drop. Didn’t smell like he did, anyhow.”
Eddie took a step closer as if to join the conversation, but Bass had
never known him to be much of a talker in the company of others.
“Which saloon did he say?” Bass asked.
“Red Dog. He talked about a shooting there. That a man died
dueling a colored lawman. He was laughing about it.”
Bass turned to Thatch and studied his milky, bloodshot eyes. He
eased down on his good knee and waved flies away with his hat,
then pressed his fingertips against the man’s forehead, around the
gash, feeling the give and listening to the bits of skull crackle. “That
was in the evening you saw them, you say?”
“That’s right,” Lee said as Bass lifted a branch off of Thatch’s chest
to look for holes in his clothes. “Weren’t dark yet but getting there.
The two shots I heard come later. I was in my own camp by then.”
Bass tipped one of the rocks on its side as if he were hunting
underneath for worms in the man’s heart. “Like pow pow?” he asked.
“No,” Lee said. “Like pow . . . pow. Like enough time for a bad
shot to jump up closer, you know?”
Bass lowered the rock back down, and with his Sheffield Bowie
knife, he began cutting rope. Eddie freed the weights from the rope
and tossed them aside. A rock tumbled into the water while Bass
unbuttoned the man’s shirt. Not until Bass had unfastened the man’s
trousers did he find what appeared to be a .38 entry hole, like a new
navel, a few inches below his original one. Bass squinted up at the
dark silhouette of Lee’s head, like a hole itself in that sunny sky—the
buzzards so slow around that hole to almost be flies crawling.
“Guessing you was that colored lawman,” Lee said.
Bass nodded. “I ain’t the white one that died.”
“But he got you, I see.”
Bass shut his eyes and took a deep breath despite what the air
over this decaying dead man smelt like. Getting shot for the first
time in his life was not something he was proud of. He took up his
knife. “God allows the devil to have his luck.”
Lee chuckled. “The other one drawed first, didn’t he? Don’t that
make you the lucky one?”
Bass rested the point of the six-inch blade on Thatch’s entry
wound. “Fear’ll make a body move quick, sure true.” He pressed
the blade down and wiggled it back and forth as it sank and as he
felt for the slug in that bloated belly flesh, soft as curd. “But quick
ain’t the whole of it, you know?” Bass said. “I tried to warn the boy.
Sure he was real fast, just like he said, uh-huh. But like a lot of ’em,
he couldn’t shoot both fast and straight.” Once the blade disappeared
up to the brass cross guard, Bass eased up on the pressure, and the
blade rose back out almost on its own accord. Then he tried again
by going perpendicular to the previous puncture mark.
“Jesus,” Lee said. “You gotta have it?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Bass said. “But I want it.” He wiggled the
knife back and forth again as he continued to press it down deep,
still not feeling that hard button of lead, so he pulled the blade out
just a little, until he had good leverage with it, then pried the belly
fat out of the body, spilling it in chunks, like a congealed flower
of head cheese. He laid the knife on the ground beside him and
searched through the fat with his fingers until he found it: a .38 slug
of lead the size of a pearl. He reached for his knife, stood upright,
and limped to the water’s edge to rinse his hands, knife, and the
bullet that might or might not prove that the young man Zachariah
Thatch had invited to accompany him on his travels had murdered
him in cold blood.
Pow. Thatch hadn’t seen it coming. With no time to reach for a
weapon, he could only throw up his hands to shield himself. Maybe
that was how it happened, first losing the two middle fingers on his
right hand, but there was no telling where that slug went. Then came
the second pow once the shooter had moved closer to his target—this
one striking Thatch in the gut to slow him even more so that
either Jimmy Cash or someone else with high nerves or a poor aim
could finally step all the way up to him, right to his head, and finish
him off with something as solid as it was blunt.
Bass stared at the water, clear as glass at the surface but golden
as a picture frame at the bottom, then at the belly slime stringing
away from his hands like some enormous spiderweb that fell apart
as the wind blew. “Can you point out where they camped?”
Lee didn’t say a word. He spat as if that were enough of an answer,
and indeed it was. When Bass heard him step away, he knew to
push on up to begin loading the corpse into the wagon so he and
Eddie could follow.
Cuprins
Note on Language
Part 1. 1895
1. Thatch
2. Keokuk Falls
3. Before, During, and After
4. The Kickapoos
Part 2. 1896
5. Living God
6. Home
7. Geronimo
8. The Court of the Damned
9. A New Moon
10. Pauls Valley
11. A Devil
12. Smoke
13. The Washout
14. Snuff
15. Hello
Part 3. 1898
16. The Treeing Walker-Mountain Cur
Part 4. 1909
17. The Beat, the Bag, and the Boy—So Bright
Acknowledgments
Part 1. 1895
1. Thatch
2. Keokuk Falls
3. Before, During, and After
4. The Kickapoos
Part 2. 1896
5. Living God
6. Home
7. Geronimo
8. The Court of the Damned
9. A New Moon
10. Pauls Valley
11. A Devil
12. Smoke
13. The Washout
14. Snuff
15. Hello
Part 3. 1898
16. The Treeing Walker-Mountain Cur
Part 4. 1909
17. The Beat, the Bag, and the Boy—So Bright
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
"An excellent read."—LeRoy A. Peters, Roundup Magazine
"Thompson pens this historical fiction in such a way as to make it as readable and entertaining as a dog-eared Louis L'Amour paperback. . . . As engaging as any Larry McMurtry tale."—Jimmy Henderson, Jackson Clarion-Ledger
“Sidney Thompson is a master of craft. Full stop. Each sentence compels us onward with lean, restrained prose. I was completely pulled into the vortex of Bass’s world. I couldn’t put this book down. Thompson is not just a good storyteller, thank goodness, but a great one.”—Daniel Peña, author of Bang
“Finally, the fictional treatment that Bass Reeves deserves! This is historical fiction of the highest order: an unwavering allegiance to the historical record combined with vivid, lyrical writing and deeply drawn characters. Sidney Thompson skillfully weaves together historical elements in this compelling story of one of the greatest lawmen to put on a badge, a sweeping saga reminiscent of Lonesome Dove or The Son. Thompson’s trilogy should be required reading for anyone who loves American historical fiction, Westerns, or just a finely told story about real-life heroes.”—Matt Bondurant, author of Oleander City and The Wettest County in the World, basis for the movie Lawless
“With the spellbinding conclusion to his magnificent trilogy, Sidney Thompson has finally corrected a shameful wrong. Invisible to history and literature for far too long, Bass Reeves is risen, resurrected. In sonorous prose, with the mastery of a singular storyteller, Thompson has turned the word into flesh and has rescued Bass from the enclave of the forsaken and the dead.”—Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West
Descriere
Set in the 1890s, The Forsaken and the Dead follows Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves as he moves through the valleys and shadows of Indian and Oklahoma Territories as the modern world implodes around him.