The No-Name Fella Who Weren't Able To Die

The hearth ablaze and the windows frosted, Wayland and his dear wife Florence sat idly in the hours following the first frozen gall. Winter impacted their neck of the woods a month later than it should’ve so they’d long since finished their year of chore and were advanced on the next. With nothing to do without the home and little to do within, the couple planned to rest until sunset, at which time they would attempt to muster up a youngling before next autumn.

In their bored evening, Wayland opened the tribunal he’d purchased in Boulder some weeks back. He’d gotten it to read but never did much of the sort so this was his first time looking beyond the exterior headlines. Only a moment following, however, he woke his dozing lady with a query.

“Ever did I tell ya ‘bout the feller that ain’t had no name an’ weren’t able to die?”

She set forward and thought.

“I believe not.”

And so he folded the pages and recollected, aloud for her benefit, a day in his teens upon which he was asked a similar thing.

“You lot heard o’ the traveler came in last night? Ain’t got no name? Cain’t die?”

He had not and neither had the others. They were all fifteen, give or take a couple years, and the man inquiring was their employer, a big man called Boss to their respect. This was five years back, before Wayland found work northward and met Florence, when he was still doing odd jobs around town for Boss— and losing half his earnings to him, too.

But Boss went ahead and told them that he’d, “...been sittin’ over at Whiskey–” which was the name of the lone saloon in town– “an’ some folks a table away from mine must’ve asked the fella that came in without no horse sometime last mornin’ somethin’ he’d been asked some times before ‘cause his skinny self gone an’ stood up tabletop, knockin’ drinks an’ things around all inconsiderate, an’ said to everyone, ‘I ain’t got no name! Folks’ll say ‘feller,’ ‘pal,’ ‘stranger,’ ‘sir,’ an’ older folks’ll say me ‘son’ or ‘boy’ or somethin’ else. It don’t bother me what you call me by s’long’s I know yer talkin’ to me an’ if’n I cain’t tell, I ain’t takin’ blame ‘cause I’m tellin’ y’all now. And I ain’t got no name cause my daddy died ‘fore I’s born and my mamma died birthin’ me. Addin’ to that, I cannot be killed. Fer that I ain’t got neither no reason nor story but it’s just as true as I ain’t got no name an’ as God is good an’ as frogs is green. Now I ain’t gonna say no more ‘bout neither them things for nobody but if’n you er someone y’know needs ta hire a hand fer cheap, I’d be obliged to speak in negotiations.’”

Boss explained that he believed neither claim, assuming all men had a name just like all men could die, but he appreciated cheap labor more than any other and took advantage of it whenever available. He hired the nameless man for a buck a week, which was low for one of Boss’s boys, and Wayland got paired up with him. They were intended to go around the single womens’ residences all week, the widows and the orphan-maids and the whores and so, to do whatever each needed done. With two men on a one-man job, they were expected to finish in half the time.

Wayland met the man with no name the following morning and found him still a young man but older than his teenage self by seven or eight years, by appearances. Wayland delegated the mending of Mrs. Douglas’s rocker to his new partner and went out to put a new pane in the shed window, drown half her bitch’s fresh litter, and put the outside cellar door back on its hinge. By the time he’d come back in, no-name was barely finishing the chair.

They soon found out why the fellow only cost Boss a dollar a week, and even that might have been too high, but he’d dealt his boys too narrow a length of time to finish the work he’d promised done so he kept the stranger on for the sake of helping more than hurting, even if by a thin margin.

Wayland wasn’t sure if he believed the notion of immortality, but he also hadn’t attributed to it an overabundance of thought, until a series of events suggested the man had either been truthful or was, “...the luckiest sumbitch I ever saw, strike me down,” as he recited it to Florence.

Eventually Boss sent Wayland, the fellow, and a couple others to the Floyd farm a few dozen miles south, where the trees grew thick and rain came heavy, for a week’s cheap labor since the oldest Floyd boy had fallen feverish.

They were breaking old Mr. Floyd’s mare for breeding when the wild thing kicked out behind itself just as nameless was going around back of her. She gave him every bit of herself through her rear right hoof dead to the middle of his chest, no more center than if it’d been measured, and he flew farther than most men could throw, ricocheting off of a post and flipping midair until landing on his neck beneath the barn awning— the only dry spot for ten miles around— where mud couldn’t break his fall. Wayland tried not to feel too faint since seeing the man’s body contort wild and limp in the air and prayed a quick prayer for his soul while keeping his focus on the mare’s mollification but, before he could grab her hide, the worker with no name came trotting back without so much to show for the ordeal but a crescent mark on his shirt and some dirt in his hair.

Nobody asked him anything, for he had said not to back in Boss’s story, but Wayland did say something along the lines of, “You ain’t got much of a knack fer horses,” to which no-name grumbled, “You thinkin’ I ain’t got a knack fer horses? I’ll show you then. I got a knack fer ‘em. I’ll show you I got a knack.”

It was only two weeks before another set of circumstances put them in a potentially lethal predicament.

The team had gotten marooned during travel and were forced to camp with only their guns and two horses between six men. Some outlaws woke them in the night, put their noses on rocks, and stuck barrels in their backs. One rifled through their sacks when Wayland’s party member without a name began whispering.

“I reckon I run an’ y’all kill ‘em,” he said and, before a response could come, he ran to the other side of the bandits and danced around like a crazy man ten feet away or less. The man who seemed the leader emptied a gun on the maniac but he kept on hooping and hollering. Another bandit started shooting and at this point, Wayland and his compatriots having gotten somewhat attuned to no-name’s condition since his business with the horse, they were able to recover their senses while the highwaymen fired futilely. The tables turned and the party overpowered the robbers, killing two and sending the others running horseless. The fella claimed the first open horse for himself.

The final instance, “...I cannot attest to, on the half o’ neither side,” Florence was nobly informed. It was another week or so past and Wayland had been painting cabinets in Miss Suzie’s kitchen when a commotion beckoned him up to her bedroom. Miss Suzie was squawking about the nameless fellow stealing jewels. Whether he was stealing them couldn’t be known for certain to anyone but him, and Miss Suzie if she was correct, but Wayland only knew the facts as they were, which accounted to knowing very little about no-name other than his salary was so meager. Regardless, Miss Suzie was an upstanding prostitute in town, servicing Boss himself regularly, while the nameless stranger was just that, barely holding reputation beyond his lack of a Christian nomenclature.

The sentence was to hang and they strung him up the next day. Wayland was there to watch and pray, having befriended the man somewhat, and, “...it weren’t ‘till when they were droppin’ the fella that I sworn I seen him give a wink an’ a grin.” The rope tightened and snapped. The man with no name landed perfectly on his heels and ran. They fired a crate’s worth at him but all anybody shot was the rope binding his wrists, freeing him. He nabbed a horse and a half-dozen took chase but none turned up with anything. He’d outpaced them all on a stolen steed.

“He showed me,” Wayland said with a sigh. “Seemin’ he still is, too.”

Florence shook her head. “If that ain’t the biggest fib you told me…” she giggled in offense.

Wordlessly, Wayland flipped his tribunal inside out and tossed it in her lap.

DROWNED MAN FOUND ALIVE IN MORTUARY

 Gregory Belham, owner of Belham’s Mortuary in Three Forks, inexplicably found a living man locked inside of his professional property Sunday morning. The man had drowned in Gallatin River and was declared dead the night prior, being brought to Belham’s in the form of a cadaver. “Sorry for the trouble,” the man, who’s name was never learned, was quoted as saying before absconding with local barman Ronald Marlin’s horse. A warrant for arrest has been issued.