Epilogue
WEATHERFORD, TEXAS
Three weeks after Allen Duvall and Ricky Lee Pink were sentenced for their crimes, D Wayne Cutter buried his wife in the East Greenwood Cemetery five blocks from the Weatherford Courthouse.
Her grave was in the shade of a near-perfect pecan tree, a stone’s throw away from the remains of Oliver Loving, of the Goodnight-Loving Trail.
Bose Ikard, the former Mississippi slave Charles Goodnight trusted to carry the camp money belt during their cattle drives, was interred a few dozen yards away.
Mourners had packed Northside Baptist Church during Lucy’s funeral.
Cutter had been too blind with tears to count but learned later that the procession from church to cemetery was a hundred and six cars long, over a third of them an honor guard of marked police units from every agency within a hundred miles.
Pastor Tim’s graveside message was short and heartfelt.
Cutter hardly heard a word of it. He was too busy watching a dusky little whippoorwill that had settled into a crook of the pecan tree above Lucy’s grave.
Some folks believed whippoorwills were harbingers of death, that they came to carry off the spirits of the recently departed.
But Lucy had loved the little birds. If anything was going to escort her spirit to heaven, a whippoorwill seemed a pleasant choice.
Cutter didn’t normally hold with such sentimental notions, but he could have sworn the bird looked directly at him while the crowd sang “Amazing Grace.”
Moving on autopilot after the service, Cutter sold most everything he owned.
A farrier from Palo Pinto County bought his anvil and tools, including the cedar shoeing box Cutter and Bodie had built together when Bodie was ten years old.
Sheriff Langford gave him top dollar for his cattle and the claybank dun—paying far more than the animals were worth as a parting gift.
Cutter kept his saddle. Giving that up seemed a kind of sin.
Parker County deputies, city officers, and DPS troopers pooled their money and bought Cutter a 1931 Winchester Model 1895 in .
30-06. Chief Smith presented it to him during his going away party at the sheriff’s posse rodeo grounds, saying that if Cutter was going to hunt outlaws with a lever action, he needed something that shot a little flatter than his old .
30-30. Cutter kept both his rifles but gave his Smith & Wesson Model 27 revolver to Lafayette Johnson.
He’d always heard the adage—and believed it to be true—that you should beware the one-gun man.
The Florida Marine Patrol issued Colt Pythons.
One revolver would be plenty. LJ wept, which Cutter thought was a good thing in one so young.
It meant the kid understood the spirit behind such a gift.
The property north of town sold to a schoolteacher from Mineral Wells.
The day of closing, a blustery morning in mid-October, Cutter loaded everything he owned in the back of his candy-apple-red Chevy El Camino.
The yellow cur dog climbed in the passenger seat.
He stopped at the 7-Eleven on South Main for a large black coffee and some jerky for the cur, then jumped on the Interstate heading east. He’d make Mobile, Alabama, by nightfall and be in Fort Meyers by late tomorrow.
A pair of blue baby booties dangled from the rearview mirror—Lucy’s last project.
Bodie and Ursula’s new baby was two weeks old now.
A boy. They called him Arliss. Cutter’s new job with Marine Patrol didn’t start for ten days.
That gave him more than a week to visit with little Ethan and the new baby.
He was happy about that. Grandfathers never got to spend enough time with their grandkids …