The Last Western

(1978)

This is a work of fiction. Not one of the characters is based, on a living person, and any resemblance between any character in the book and any living person is entirely coincidental.

THE LAST WESTERN. Copyright © 1974 by Thomas S. Klise. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Argus Communications, 7440 Natchez Avenue, Niles, Illinois 60648.

First Edition

Standard Book Number: 0-913592-31-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-94482

Designed by Edit, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is for

Elizabeth,

Molly,

Sarah,

Kate,

Julie

and Jim.

And also,

for Marjorie.

BOOK ONE

Mr. Coleridge, our Neighbor, drinks

laudanum & neglects his Oats. He has

written a Poem concerning a magical

flying creature & a dream-like voyage in

the Polar clime. Sarah, the Wife, is out of

countenance as the Child is sickly & the

cottage full of mice. In the Poem, the sea

vessel is propelled by Spectres as Mr.

Coleridge himself seems to be, though

professing of Christ, & painfully pious

in outward Manner.

From the diary of Andrew Felder

January 8, 1798

Nether Stowey, Somerset, England

Willie was born
in the town of Sandstorm, New Mexico in the times that are now forgotten.

Very few people were ever born in Sandstorm, New Mexico, and the few who were have passed on.

Sandstorm itself has passed on. It was one of those towns that the great Southwest Storms of 1988-89 blew off the prairies.

At the time of Willie’s birth, the population of Sandstorm was 261, and that included Willie.

The town did not have a car agency or a TV repair or a school or even a grocery store. It was just a place where the wind blew.

The only public building in the village was the church where Willie and his father and mother and grandmother went to Mass.

All 261 residents of Sandstorm went to Mass, even the six or seven who were not Catholic. The church was the only place the people could meet under a roof, out of the storm that raged constantly across the desert.

This church was a shabby, sorry-looking affair that had been badly beaten by 100 years of wind.

Half-buried in the sand, it looked like a ship about to go under.

Inside, where the people knelt on hard wooden kneelers or sat on the dirt floor, it looked even shabbier and sorrier.

The windows were dingy and narrow and gave no light so that the people could not read even if they knew how to read.

On feast days the people would bring candles into the church and light them and hold them close to their faces. But the gloom still hung in the air like fog; there were not enough candles in Sandstorm to burn it away.

To Willie the church was a hiding place where many secrets were buried, some of them happy, some of them strange, and one of them sad beyond words.

Above the altar of the church, suspended from the rafters, was a great black cross and on the cross a man ten feet high.

This man was in the worst possible condition.

His eyes stared upward at the rafters; his arms stretched out painfully; real nails held him fast; dark red blood streamed down from his hands and feet and from a cut in his side.

The man strained forward on the cross as if asking someone to help him out.

About the time Willie turned four years old, he began to study this man most carefully, wondering who he was and how he got into such a fix.

He began to think of this man even on days when there wasn’t a Mass.

He felt sorry for the man and tried to think of some way to help him.

“Who is that man?” Willie would ask his mother.

“Jesus Theelord,” his mother would answer. She was trying to teach Willie to speak in English.

Willie did not know who Jesus Theelord was. There were two boys in Sandstorm named Jesus, but their last names were Gonzales and Sanchez. Willie had never heard of anyone with the strange name of Theelord.

One summer afternoon Willie sneaked into the church with a ladder that he had found in back of the shed near his home.

He propped the ladder against the cross.

Then he got a tin cup and filled it with water.

He climbed up the ladder and looked into the red-rimmed eyes of Jesus Theelord.

Slowly he poured the water into the cracked plaster lips.

But Jesus Theelord didn’t drink the water. The water ran down the flaked plaster of the body and spilled on the floor.

When the padre came the next Sunday, he was angry about what had happened to the crucifix. The water had run the paint that had been applied to the wound in Jesus Theelord’s side.

Willie’s parents took him to see the padre after Mass, and Willie said he was sorry, just as his parents had told him to do.

The padre, a kindly man, patted Willie on the head.

He told Willie he understood why he tried to give Jesus Theelord a drink.

“You see though,” said the padre, “that is just a figure. The real Lord Jesus is in heaven.”

Willie did not understand that.

But he learned this at least, that no matter how sad statues are, there isn’t anything you can do about them.

They will go on looking sad.

The people
who lived in Sandstorm were Mexican-Americans. Most of them had light brown skin, brown eyes and black hair. Each looked different but still they looked a good deal alike, as if they might all be members of a large family.

Four people in Sandstorm looked different from the others: Willie’s father, Willie’s mother, Willie’s grandmother, and Willie.

Willie’s father had red hair and red-brown skin and blue eyes.

Willie’s mother had black hair and black-gold skin and almond-shaped black eyes.

Willie’s grandmother had red-brown skin and dark amber eyes.

Willie had red hair, red-black-brown-gold skin and blue eyes flecked with brown.

Willie’s father was an Irish Indian.
His
father—Willie’s grandfather—had come to the United States of America to find silver. From him came the red hair. He had come all the way from Ireland to find silver in the state of New Mexico, but all he found was sand. In a small town, though, he met a beautiful Indian girl named Cool Dawn.

Cool Dawn was from a tribe that had once lived in the state of Oklahoma. Cool Dawn’s tribe had once been proud and rich, but it had been scattered and broken up back in the days nobody remembers. Some of the people of the tribe had gone to California. Some had gone to Mexico. Some few had come to the Sandstorm area where the red-haired Irishman was trying to find silver.

Cool Dawn and the Irishman married each other, and Willie’s father was born, a red-haired Indian with blue eyes. Not long after that the Irishman died, or at least went away. Nobody could remember exactly what had happened to him. Willie never knew this grandfather, but Cool Dawn kept a picture of him. Willie thought he was a kind, happy, good man who might be a king. Very handsome with his blue eyes and red hair, he looked like he could see to the end of the world.

Willie’s mother was a black-gold lady from San Antonio, Texas. She was as beautiful as Willie’s grandmother, Cool Dawn, but where Cool Dawn had red-brown skin the color of an October leaf and eyes that were brown and sparkling as rich maple syrup, she, Willie’s mother, had an even more striking appearance.

She had the wonderful ebony skin of the people of West Africa, where on her father’s side her family had once lived. And she had the golden tint and the soft almond eyes of the people of China where her mother’s side of the family had once lived.

Her father’s people had come to the United States of America on a U.S. slave ship called
Liberty
, back in the days that are forgotten. Her own father had drifted west and found a job as a garage mechanic in San Antonio.

Her mother’s people had come from China long ago to settle in the Chinatown section of the city of San Francisco, California. A part of the family moved to Texas after a few years, and it was in the great city of Houston that Willie’s grandmother was born.

This Chinese lady moved to San Antonio and there met the black garage mechanic. They married each other and had three children. Two of the children died. But Willie’s mother managed to live.

She grew into a beautiful black-gold lady with a sweet voice and that wonderful black-gold skin drawn like satin across the high cheekbones and with almond eyes that seemed to say: The world is most beautiful.

One night in the dead summer of a long-gone year Willie’s red-haired Indian father went to a dance in a magic building called The Alamo Roundup Bar and Grille and there, waiting table, serving food and drink to the people, was this beautiful black-gold lady.

Willie’s father fell in love with her. Willie’s mother fell in love with him. So they were married in the church of the sad Lord in Sandstorm and there made a home for themselves in a school bus that no one had any use for.

It was in this school bus that Willie was born on a cold night in November.

Cool Dawn, Willie’s grandmother, helped bring Willie into the world.

The villagers came to look at the new baby.

They took note of his marvelous appearance: the red hair, the red-gold-black-brown skin, the blue almond-shaped eyes that were spangled with brown. Much as they marveled, no one in Sandstorm, or anywhere else for that matter, had any way of knowing that Willie was the only Irish-Indian-Negro-Chinese boy born into this world on that unremarkable night.

When Willie
was a baby, he used to look into the soft almond eyes of his black-gold mother and in those reflecting mirrors of life and the world, he saw that the earth was a splendid lovely planet.

Those eyes made the school bus seem a castle.

When the winds blew hard, rattling the rusty walls of the place where he slept, Willie, seeing those eyes, could believe that the sand beating against the bus was a sweet rain falling on magic fields.

Sometimes his grandmother, Cool Dawn, would hold him and sing to him.

She would croon songs about things that had happened many years ago. Songs about the desert and the wind and the pale gray mountains that appeared in the north on certain fine days. Songs of an enchanted garden beyond the mountains, a garden at the floor of a wild canyon no man had ever seen.

Sometimes, too, Willie’s strong father would hold him.

He would hold him very close, especially when he came home from the long journey he made each summer.

Willie’s father, like all the other grown-ups in Sandstorm, was a migrant worker.

Each spring he would go to far unknown places in the north of the United States to pick berries and fruits and cabbages and pumpkins.

A truck would pull up to the church one day, and all the men and older boys and even some of the women would get aboard.

Then the truck would drive away, with everyone waving good-bye and shouting farewells that were often sad, shouting and waving as the truck got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared over the horizon.

For a few days after that, Willie would be sad. He would miss his father.

But each week a letter would come, and the priest who said Mass would read it to the people after the final blessing.

The letter was written in Spanish—that being the main language of the people of Sandstorm—and it told the news of each man and boy and woman who had made the trip north.

The people strained forward to listen to the letter, which the priest would read twice.

All through the following week the mothers and grandmothers and the old men and the children would repeat what they had heard in the letter. They continued to find it exciting and would repeat the stories the letter contained right up to the Sunday when the next letter would come.

Often the letters were funny in a simple way.

“Manuel endeavors to shave each day. By Christmas he will need to put a blade into the razor-holder.”

“Today the grower made a serious speech about the need to be careful of peaches. He could not understand why his speech made us smile. Of course he does not know Peaches Gutierrez.”