Friar Thomas & the Western Express - Chapter 2

Chapter 2
Inside the coach sat a man named King,
With a wife and two sons to boot,
And a daughter whose eyes were dark midnight skies,
And ringlets of ebony soot.

Come from Virginia to settle the West,
Chasing the glory of gold
But whether they’ll find a fortune in mines
Is an outcome that’s yet to be told, lads –
A story that’s yet to be told.

As of yet Mr. King is poverty struck
A former ship’s cap’n just down on his luck…

Mr. David King, his wife, and their family of three children bumped around miserably in the Western Express stagecoach. It was hot. It was dusty. The delicate handkerchief Mrs. King held in front of her face was no longer white; it was streaked with brown, and when she took it away from her face to speak to him he could tell from where the dirt began and ended on her face where she had been holding it.
“David,” she said wearily, “are we there yet?”
He sighed as he patted her knee. “No Jessebell, we’re not. And we won’t be for days.”
His twin sons, Saul and Jonah, had long since given up their excited chattering about the adventure of moving to the West. They were even too disenchanted to hit and poke each other any more, which was a mercy because Mr. King was heartily sick of trying to keep them from touching each other or breathing on each other in this close space. Only his eldest, Delilah, had been relatively patient about their long and arduous trek.
Ah, Delilah. Mr. King gazed at her fondly as she tried to nap against the jostling coach. His beautiful girl – a woman grown now! Her fine looks and good behavior had earned her an enviable place among the other young women of their hometown in Virginia. None had been able to hold a candle to Delilah at her seventeenth birthday celebration, the last big party the Kings had been able to throw before receiving word that their cargo of tobacco had been captured by pirates as it sailed on the family ship to foreign ports. By the end of the week their creditors had descended on the home, and Mr. King was left a shameful debtor. Even now his eyes stung to think of it. And now they were on their way to the West, chasing rumors of gold and fleeing the prying eyes and wagging tongues of their former friends and neighbors.
Delilah’s magnificent raven locks were rough with the wear of travel. Her dress was stained and limp. The jewel of the family and pride of his heart was covered in dirt, bedraggled but still pretty enough, even if the men who had so admired her before would now be more likely to offer her a hand-out rather than offer their hand. Her father had certainly seen her looking better, and chose to close his eyes to what he’d reduced his little girl to and remember her instead as he’d seen her at her birthday party, the belle of the ball…
The stagecoach began to slow. The horses needed a rest and the driver did too. He’d been paid handsomely by the Kings for his services, enough so that he wouldn’t take any mail along with him. Though he had protested mightily, being a firm believer in the delivery of mail, Mr. King had insisted that carrying mail meant risking highway robbery.
“Mail coaches attract thieves like flies to manure!” Mr. King had said. The coachman had seen his point and his thick wallet, and had agreed. However, he’d since come to suspect that Mr. King’s thick wallet was thicker with moths than it was with cash, and had decided that he wouldn’t kill himself or his team getting to California.
Mr. King noticed the coach slowing and rapped on the ceiling. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why are we stopping again?”
“Horses need to rest!” shouted back the coachman, not really caring what Mr. King thought about that.
Mr. King grumbled a bit to himself but really didn’t mind the chance to stretch his legs one more time. His family was stirring as well, brought to life by the possibility of escaping their rattling prison for a time. They hadn’t been out of the coach more than three minutes, however, before their driver muttered a curse and yelled for them to get back into the coach quick. He launched himself onto his seat and continued hollering as the family scrambled, clearly anxious to get going as fast as possible. The door to the coach hadn’t even been shut before he’d whipped the team with a sharp “Hee-yaw!” As they lurched forward Mr. King pulled the door shut, the ground already moving quickly beneath them.
“What the devil is the meaning of this, sah?” he shouted at the driver. He didn’t often use curse words in front of his family, but confound it, what did the man mean by stopping the coach and then yelling at them so rudely to get back inside? “I demand that you answer me! How dare you – “
“We’re bein’ followed!” hollered the coachman. “Bandits! Thieves! Outlaws!”
“Impossible!” Mr. King retorted even as his blood turned to ice. “We don’t have any mail! Why would they come after a coach that doesn’t have any mail?”
“They steal things other than mail, you idiot!” was the answer, and the coachman applied the whip over the backs of his straining horses.
The Kings sat in stunned silence at this revelation. Mr. King had never considered that they would be pursued just for the merest possibility of something worth stealing. Didn’t outlaws only steal mail, payrolls and such? His wife clutched his arm and searched his face for comfort he was unable to give. His boys looked at each other with faces aglow: finally, something exciting was happening! He felt pity for them, these innocent boys who never considered what might happen if the outlaws actually caught them. These were desperate men, no doubt; men who would do anything to satisfy their carnal desires and raging greed.
“No worries,” he tried to say cheerfully. “I’m sure they’ll give up soon when they find they can’t catch us. Besides, we have nothing they could want.” And then Mrs. King whispered a single word in his ear that caused his gut to churn: “Delilah..!”

Jeni's Story - Friar Thomas & the Western Express

This story was written by Jeni and was the inspiration for this quilt that has blocks named after events/people/items in the story. This is the first Chapter. I'll hand out a chapter a week. I love to create suspense. Please don't copy this unless you have permission from me or Jeni. Thanks.

Friar Thomas & the Western Express

Chapter 1

The sun burned high in the sky that day,
The heat made waves in the air,
And not a soul stirred but the critters and birds
For no others dared to live there.

Then the trail rumbled with thunder
And the critters all fled in distress,
Like a shot from a gun it came by at a run
T’was a stage from the Western Express, lads!
A coach from the Western Express.

The horses’ flanks steamed but their man paid no heed,
Onward they flew as he whipped them to speed…

Friar Thomas of the Eddystone Light of God Monastery sat quietly during his morning meal, sipping his weak vegetable soup. He always sat quietly during the morning meal, and the evening meal too for that matter. All the monks did. Friar Thomas had taken the vow of silence willingly ten years ago when he joined the order, but lately it seemed his voice prowled restlessly in his throat like a caged beast, desperate to get out. Sometimes Friar Thomas had to bite his tongue to keep from suddenly bursting forth with a mad tirade of gibberish at the top of his lungs. Other times, like right now, he had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting a curse at the rock-hard biscuit he’d absently picked up and stupidly tried to nibble. Instead, he dropped the biscuit, pressed his hand to his lips and cursed silently but with great feeling in his head. His curse went something like, “Dadblast it! Dang stupid git! Blast yew to tarnation, yew yeller-bellied fool of a biscuit!” He let the string of profanity hang in his head for a satisfying second before repenting. Friar Thomas had learned his curses from a few short cowboy stories published weekly in Eastern newspapers: his cherished, secret sin. The newspapers had been left several years ago by a lost traveler – a cowboy hopeful from Delaware – who had stayed at the monastery for a few nights. Friar Thomas thought about the much-creased, well-loved papers tucked under his thin mattress and wondered, not for the first time, if he should get rid of them. While he was debating internally the effect that contraband was having on the state of his immortal soul, his traitorous fingers again found the biscuit and brought it up to his mouth. The monk next to Friar Thomas jumped slightly as the biscuit rocketed back down to the rough wooden table a second later.
Maybe the biscuit really was an omen for the rest of the day, or maybe Friar Thomas just allowed it to be an omen. In any case, Friar Thomas had a day that felt a lot like breaking his teeth on a hard biscuit. After breakfast he followed a few other friars into the monastery’s garden to participate in some farming. When he was done pulling weeds from the sandy soil and trying to water the struggling vegetables with buckets of water from the river, he assisted in the gathering of sparse native grasses for the small herd of burros kept in a crude stable. Following his session of farm duties Friar Thomas was assigned to participate in some sewing chores. The monks lived in an isolated part of the Texas territory, the nearest neighbors being about one hundred miles away. Isolation might be ideal for a life of prayer, but it sure put a cramp on bartering. Due to the lack of other resources, the monks grew all their own food and made most of their own things, though once every year two lucky friars would make the journey to the nearest trading post for some needles, thread, cloth, dried venison, and other items the monks couldn’t make for themselves. Friar Thomas had never been selected to make this trek. He wished he would be, because he would do his best to bring back some better cloth than what was usually procured. All the monks sewed their own unmentionables and habits, but things like sheets and bedding were a group effort. Today the brethren were working on a quilt for the Abbot, who was getting old and frequently caught chills in the night. Friar Thomas surveyed the beginnings of the Abbot’s quilt with dismay. The monks lived a life of poverty and economy. They also believed in the use of coarse cloth both in clothes and bed sheets, hence their habits were made from a brown fabric that was also used to groom the donkeys, and their bed sheets were burlap. A few small piles of familiar brown and straw colored squares sat at each place of the table, and two friars were busily snipping away at old habits, creating more squares for more piles. He sat down in resignation to his spot at the table and began sewing square after square of coarse brown cloth and burlap together in rows. Eventually he ran out of burlap and had to sew brown square after brown square together. The monks doing the cutting were paying more attention to using the least worn pieces of the cloth than they were to how large or small their squares were, the end result being that the squares weren’t all the same size, so the rows of the quilt varied in length, height, pattern, and direction. Several other monks joined the quilting bee throughout the day and by dinner time the quilt was finished. It was roughly in the shape of a rectangle with interesting growths sticking off here and there, had a piecemeal burlap backing, and one monk had the bright idea to tie the quilt with some spare pieces of twine. Beautiful it was not, but the Abbot accepted it gratefully.
The evening meal differed from the morning meal only by the length of the prayer that was offered. Thomas ate another bowl of vegetable soup, the broth of which wasn’t strong enough to affect the biscuit, which sat like a stone at the bottom of his bowl. He absently used it to sand the table while he waited for the other friars to finish eating.
After nightly prayers and silent scripture study, all the monks returned to their cells. Friar Thomas flopped wearily onto his cot, all monkish dignity abandoned. The molten rays of the setting sun ran like syrup down the bare walls of his room, marking the end of another blistering day on the banks of the Eddystone River. Friar Thomas lifted his silly bangs to wipe his brow as he bid good riddance to the sun. Life as a monk was not easy, he thought to himself. Besides the terrible biscuits and perpetual silence, the rough habits they wore that chafed the skin, the rising at dawn and sleeping at sunset, and the laborious farming of scrawny vegetables, he mostly resented the confounded sun beating mercilessly upon his shaven skull. It was too hot to wear a cowl all day while working under the sun. This autumn it would be his turn to keep aside some corn husks to weave a breezy hat with, but until then his poor pate suffered.
“Why do we have to live in this sand pit anyway?” Friar Thomas muttered with hushed rebellion. He often did this at night; to hear the sound of his own voice even in a whisper was to know that it still worked. Did the other monks do it as well? He’d probably never know.
“Of all the places to build a monastery…I mean, thank God for the river, but the soil is still so poor it’s almost not worth the effort of farming,” he continued. “And would it really hurt our spiritual welfare to have some bread we could actually chew? It doesn’t have to taste good, just be chewable.” At this point several scriptures began creeping into his head to admonish him. To stave them off he reached under his mattress and pulled out his “Westerns,” as he liked to call them. Secular books were forbidden in the monastery so no one knew Friar Thomas possessed these unholy reading materials.
His calloused brown fingers traced over the deeper creases with loving concern. His Westerns were falling apart. Did he dare copy them onto stronger paper? Where would he get the paper, let alone the ink? Suddenly, Friar Thomas remembered the surprising discovery he had stumbled upon that morning while he was fetching buckets of water from the Eddystone. How grateful he had been to find himself alone at that moment! Tiny treasures were not exactly forbidden; he knew several friars had found pretty stones here and there and kept them, but he feared the other monks would perceive how much more than just an interesting object this was to him – how it shone to him like a beacon, beckoning him to a life of gun-slinging sin… He slipped it out of his habit and held it up reverently in the final glow of the dying sun. He knew from his reading that real sheriff’s stars had five points and were of polished silver that sent bright, piercing rays of intimidating justice into the dastardly eyes of desperados. But even though this star was broken, boasting only four remaining points, and though the metal was tarnished and rusted, he could still make out the original title in firm, no-nonsense script pounded faintly into the face: “SHE FF.” To further tickle his imagination was the unmistakable bullet hole where the “RI” should have been. He fingered the star gently for a long time.
Finally, after creeping to the door to peek out to satisfy himself that there was no one out there, Friar Thomas gleefully turned his habit around and wore it backwards. Pulling the cowl up like a bristly bandana, he straddled his narrow bed like a horse and, holding the star in place on his chest, brandished his other hand in a finger pistol. Suitably armed and ready, he proceeded to capture four bank robbers, a murderer, and two corrupt town officials single handedly. After the dust settled Friar Thomas stopped just short of allowing himself to woo or be wooed by the Mayor’s beautiful daughter, Mary, whose hair shone with all the yellow glory of a Texas rose, and whose eyes were as guileless as a pair of newly sprung bluebonnets. No, his monkish conscience preferred instead to remain a mysterious, lonely menace to the lawbreakers of Eddystone. So he merely tipped his hat politely in response to her breathless thanks for saving her life, and left her sighing in time with the clink of his nickel-plated spurs as he moseyed back to his steed. Off he rode into his dreams, lulled to sleep by the gentle ‘clop clop’ of his faithful mustang and the howls of distant coyotes, clutching the broken star in his hand.