Authors: Ron Hansen
Catherine seemed not to have been overly fond of Antrim, either, because she left him with little more than a fare-thee-well, having heard fortunes were being made in the frontier cattle town of Wichita, Kansas. Mother and sons headed west, and in the summer of 1870, five years ahead of Wyatt Earp, she and Josie and Henry hauled their few belongings to a clapboard rental on Wichita’s Main Street, where they occupied the second floor and she opened City Laundry on the first. She was dismayed when Billy Antrim slavishly followed the family like a tardy but loyal hound, and though she’d let him have his way with her on some overnighters when the boys were gone, she insisted on a semblance of ladylike propriety. So he filed for a homestead of farmland six miles northeast of town and got jobs as a bartender and carpenter just to stay in orbit around the spellbinding sun that was Widow McCarty.
When a petition to have Wichita become a municipality made its rounds, it was signed by 123 men of commerce and one sole woman: Mrs. Catherine McCarty. She was that alluring and revered. There was no public school in the region then, so their self-taught mother was the boys’ only and quite excellent teacher. Because of his mental limitations, Josie ended up just a notch above illiterate, but in Wichita, Henry learnt to write a fair letter in a legible hand, seldom misspelled words, could swiftly handle arithmetic in his head, and became an avid reader of exciting tales from the Old Sleuth Library, the Police Gazette, and Beadle’s Dime Novels. A favorite book was Edgar Allan Poe’s
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
, and he held fast in his head Poe’s quotation “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
Seeing how nimble and graceful her son was, his mother taught him Irish jigs, English waltzes, and French quadrilles, and when he was in his late teens, Mexican sporting ladies would find themselves wanting him for his dancing alone. But at twelve he wasn’t yet as tempting to the opposite sex as he would be; he was merely blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, and undersize, and even friends thought him rather pretty, his hands and feet too dainty. But he was chipper and quick and an ambidextrous marvel who stunned them by pitching rocks just as well with either hand, a trait that would pay off in gunplay later.
Wichita was wild enough then that huge herds of longhorn cattle were driven down the city streets to the Southwestern Railroad line, which connected to eastern cities; stinking, fly-swarmed hides of buffalo were laid out on the sidewalks for sale; and saloon owner Rowdy Joe Lowe and his wife, Rowdy Kate, sponsored public footraces in the Delano district that featured fully naked prostitutes running to their house of ill repute. Hearing of one announced race, Josie snuck Henry into the front of the hooting crowds of men for a look-see. Watching the gorgeous melons a-bobbling awakened a new excitement that Henry later innocently confessed to his mother. And soon after that she decided to leave Wichita.
But the wildness there had only a little to do with the move, for Widow McCarty’s fortunes had turned sour when she took ill with night sweats, coughing, continual weariness, and loss of appetite. A Wichita doctor’s diagnosis was that she’d caught the airborne lung sickness of consumption, for which there was no remedy beyond the help of the high, dry climates of the West. She shrank in weight and vivacity and finally decided to sell her dank, damp laundry and journey west to find a cure in the mile-high city of Denver.
Billy Antrim rented out his Wichita land and hand-built house and tagged along again, getting a job as a teamster with the American Express Company in Denver. Josie found the city so agreeable he would return there for good in his middle age, card dealing and horse gambling his sole professions, and dying in 1930 without ever telling a soul who his infamous kid brother was.
The McCarty family did not stay long in Colorado, for Catherine’s kid sister Mary announced in a telegram that she’d married a Juan Salazar and was now residing in Lincoln County in the territory that was won in the Mexican-American War. And it just so happened that Billy Antrim’s sister soon invited them to winter with her in the health-giving climate of Santa Fe.
And so to New Mexico the four of them went, and there, with a depth of pity and motherly courtesy for his caring, Catherine consented to marry William Henry Harrison Antrim on March 1, 1873, at the old adobe First Presbyterian Church, the Reverend David F. McFarland presiding. Henry and Josie, aged thirteen and eighteen, were witnesses and signed the marriage certificate. There was a small party for the Antrims in the Exchange Hotel, at which Henry treated them to the Scottish jig “Haste to the Wedding,” singing in his choirboy tenor, “Come haste to the wedding ye friends and ye neighbors, the lovers their bliss can no longer delay. Forget all your sorrows, your cares, and your labors. And let every heart beat with rapture today.”
Billy Antrim slumped in his chair as the wedding party applauded, because he was either in a champagne stupor or else plunged into a what-have-I-done depression.
There was no honeymoon, just a southward ride along the Rio Grande into Lincoln County, where Catherine’s sister got the Antrim four lodging in a one-room piñon log cabin at the intersection of Main and Broadway in the mining community of the aptly named Silver City. Mexicans outnumbered the Anglos by four to one, so Spanish was the main civic parlance, and Henry, who could not not learn, became rather fluent in it just by mingling with the Salazars and his chums. Josie and the other Antrims did not.
Mr. Billy Antrim found a half-time job slaughtering and dressing cows and hanging the heavy sides of beef in the hot box of Knight’s Butcher Shop. But he frittered away his wages on gambling and was ever more fascinated with scouring for precious metals in the hills of Georgetown, Piños Altos, and Chloride Flat. So Mrs. Catherine Antrim became the family’s financial support, baking sweetcakes and pies that she’d sell across the street in front of I. N. Cohen’s dry-goods store or to the kitchens of the Keystone and Star hotels. She also accepted desperate male room-and-boarders who’d just arrived in the West and agreed to sleep on straw mattresses on the floor of the boys’ quarters, which were sectioned off from the main room with hanging wool Army blankets.
Coincidentally, one renter was an Eastern newspaperman named Ash Upson, who nine years later would become the ghostwriter of
The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado
by Pat F. Garrett. But thirteen-year-old Henry Antrim was then just a scrawny, jesting schoolkid who shared the room. It was the jaunty, radiant Catherine whom Upson fell for. Writing of her in 1882, Upson couldn’t help but rhapsodize that she was “courteous, kindly,” and with a “benevolent spirit.”
“She was about medium height,” he noted, “straight and graceful in form, with regular features, light blue eyes, and luxuriant golden hair. She was not a beauty, but what the world calls a fine-looking woman. She kept boarders in Silver City, and her charity and goodness of heart were proverbial. Many a hungry tenderfoot has had cause to bless the fortune that led him to her door. In all her deportment she exhibited the unmistakable characteristics of a lady—a lady by instinct and education.”
Catherine was also loved by Henry’s friends, whom she welcomed after school with raw milk fresh from the cow and with just-baked oatmeal cookies still so hot from the backyard oven that they bent in the hand. She’d take a rag to their faces like their mothers, but unlike them she was fond of jokes. Like “Paddy went to a pub”—she pronounced it “poob”—“and tole the bartender he’d been having himself a draft of whiskey each hour to ease his dyspepsia. A doctor overheared him and says, ‘There’s a better cure for you than that,’ and Paddy tole him, ‘Hush now. I don’t wanna know it.’ ” Or “You boys recall the one about the petty thief getting sentenced by the judge? Judge says, ‘Either five pounds or five days in jail,’ and the scoondrel give it some thought and says, ‘All right then, I’ll take the five pound.’ ”
She laughed so heartily at her own jokes that the jolliness itself was a cause for their laughter.
And Henry was much like his mother. Ever smiling, witty, and genial when not riled by an injustice, he collected friends without effort and, because of his quick mind, became without campaign their leader, initiating pranks and risky competitions and being as overrambunctious as boys can be, so that an insulted local journalist called the lot of them the Village Arabs.
The Kid took after his mother physically, too, with fine, handsome features, tawny blond hair when freshly washed, dead leaf brown when not, and with ever twinkling, canny, mischievous eyes that were blue as Wedgwood and checkered with sunlight. Like his friends, he favored moccasins over shoes and wore his felt hat far back on his head. His aching teeth with their rabbit centrals had never seen a dentist, and he only cleaned them by eating apples. He would reach a full height of five feet seven and never weigh more than 130 pounds. A fourteen-year-old in 1874, he was much smaller.
And that amused Levi Miller, owner of a ramshackle shelter with the signage of
THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH
. Earning ten cents an hour, the Kid, as he was called by Levi, worked the bellows, raked the stalls, walked in horses in need of shoeing, and took grief for his littleness, with Levi or the loiterers in the shop jerking him up off the ground and dandling him, flinging him in wide circles by wrist and ankle like he was a fine delight, and calling him a peewee, a pissant, a walking hat. Sometimes the Kid’s mouth trembled and wet filled his eyes, exciting more ridicule from the miners there. Levi’s wife warned her husband that he was “turning Henry mean,” and the hot-tempered boy finally showed it one night by borrowing a shotgun and destroying the fire bellows with a coup de grâce of twelve-gauge holes, then blowing out the
B
in the sign so Levi became a
LACKSMITH
.
Silver City people heard the shotgun explosions, but there were so many each night in the hurrahs and quarrels outside the saloons that no one could pin the wreckage on the Kid. Levi suspected him, though, so Henry took a job at the City Meat Market.
Although there were refining operations that hung foul smoke over the city, Catherine’s health got a little better now that she was far from the weather extremes of the Midwest and at an elevation of over six thousand feet, and for a time she was able to entertain onlookers with the highland fling at the dances held at McGrary’s Hall. But the tuberculosis took over. She tried to no avail the sulfur baths at Mimbres Hot Springs some miles southeast of town and was finally conveyed home in a one-horse shay, lolling this way and that in a faint.
She stayed in bed for four ever more hacking months, being tended to by a friend, Mrs. Clara Truesdell, who’d been a registered nurse in Chicago but now owned a millinery shop, and whose son Chauncey was Henry’s schoolmate. After a coughing jag that spotted her handkerchief with blood, Catherine fell back and said, “I’m so knackered, Clara. So utterly weak.”
The nurse told her, “Well, that’s to be expected with an affection of the lungs.”
“Am I truly dying?”
“Alas, I believe so.”
Catherine considered it, then squeezed Clara’s hand gently while saying, “Oh, I do thank ye for not giving me false hope.”
Realizing that her shiftless husband would be selfish and neglectful in raising the boys alone, Catherine asked the nurse to watch over them once she’d passed. Mrs. Truesdell consented.
“I’m leaving my sons in wild country,” Catherine said. “Wild, wild, wild.”
All that summer she would cough through the night as she struggled for the hidden treasure of breath. She told Henry, “Oh, my darling, I’m fading so very fast. I’m on a train there’s no getting off.”
Warned by Mrs. Truesdell of his mother’s serious decline, Henry sent the telegram
YOUR CATE WORSENING
to Billy Antrim via his new job at the Metcalf Copper mine in Clifton, Arizona.
VERY SAD,
was Antrim’s insufficient reply.
Without his mother’s pastry income, and with Josie unwilling to share his scant earnings from the Orleans Club, where he fetched and carried, Henry was forced to ignore the eighth commandment and conceived a scheme to steal the jewelry in the front window display of Matt Derbyshire’s furniture store, inveigling another schoolmate to join him in the burglary. “We’ll fence it in Old Mexico,” Henry said, having read the gangster lingo in the Five Cent Wide Awake Library.
But on the night of the heist, his schoolmate weakened and confessed the plan to his father, saying he’d joined the Kid in plotting the crime because “Henry had me hypnotized.”
Both boys were sternly chastised by the owner of the furniture store, but were then let go since nothing illegal had actually been done. Yet his bedridden mother heard gossip of it and got up as high as she could on her chair of pillows to wheeze for air as she scolded her favorite son, saying she had a mind to put him over her knee for a paddle and worrying that if he went on thieving he’d be hanged before he was twenty-one. Soon worn out with speaking, she shut her eyes and covered them with a forearm, and Henry guiltily listened as she wept.
Henry’s lunkish, lubberly, hard-to-love older brother feared the hex of Illness, so he hung shy of his mother to silently observe the dying from afar like a vulture. But each evening Henry would feed and tend to Catherine, tenderly holding her hand or petting her damp-with-fever hair as he sang her to sleep with Scottish ballads like “Annie Laurie” or, because of her maiden name, “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” When she was near the end, Henry softly sang for her a final, old, mournful hymn: “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I’m traveling through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going there to see my father. I’m going there no more to roam. I’m just a-going over Jordan. I’m just a-going over home.”
She died on Wednesday, September 16, 1874, at the age of forty-five.
Henry was fourteen.
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THE HABIT OF LARCENY