stove was cold, nothing left for Charlie to do

but make bacon and eggs,

twice in one day, mind you.

Soon enough, I got word where she was,

loaded my six-shooter and went to get her.

I found her with a Freedman.

That’s what they called freed black slaves

I said, “Come on out, you black sumbitch.

I’m itching to kill you.”

He come out shooting, all the while

she was crying.

Meanwhile, I was shot through my thigh,

blood running into my boot kinda tickled me

and hurt too, of course.

I musta blacked out, because when I came to,

she run at me with a knife, screaming,

“You killed my daddy.”

Well, I just about soiled my pants.

She had never said a word to me about a daddy.

I thought she didn’t have one.

She didn’t even look like one athem mixtures,

looked full-blooded to me,

but maybe I just couldn’t see it, being a white man

and not used to how they turn out.

I mean, I had seen some of them.

They looked like any other coloreds to me.

“I’ll be,” I said, then out come her uncle.

I knew him. He was part white.

“What the hell?” I told him, “This is too confusing.

A man ought to know who he’s shooting, oughtn’t he?”

He raised holy hell about it, then whispered, “Good shooting,”

to me under his breath.

I just wanted my wife to come back.

She did a few days after the funeral,

caught me in bed with the redheaded daughter

of that Irish pots and pans mender,

who used her to get work.

She knew how to make a man feel like a man

if you know what I mean,

not like my first wife, Iola, who lay there

wincing the whole time.

Annie cursed me in Choctaw. I knew what she said,

but I kept it to myself.

The redhead cried, “You going to let that squaw

talk to you that way?

She says she’s going to cut it off.”

“Why Moira, I didn’t know you could speak Choctaw,” I said

like it was just an ordinary observation,

as she dressed

and left me trying to defend myself.

A few days later, the tribal police come to my place.

They asked me to ride with them in a friendly way,

but I knew they wasn’t.

They was relatives of Annie’s.

I told them I’d come after I fed the cattle,

then saddled up and rode hard into Texas.

That ride made me a fugitive from justice,

but Indians don’t mess with white men in Texas,

so I became what I had always been,

a white man who had lived among Indians,

but had not become one of them.

I had tried. I’d married their women

would have had children then too,

but the first one, a bastard, was stillborn