True Grit

He said, “Be right still.” I looked around for Lee and figured he must have gone to bed. Rooster said, “I will try this the new way. Now watch.” He leaned forward and spoke at the rat in a low voice, saying, “I have a writ here that says for you to stop eating Chen Lee’s corn meal forthwith. It is a rat writ. It is a writ for a rat and this is lawful service of said writ.” Then he looked over at me and said, “Has he stopped?” I gave no reply. I have never wasted any time encouraging drunkards or show-offs. He said, “It don’t look like to me he has stopped.” He was holding Papa’s revolver down at his left side and he fired twice without aiming. The noise filled up that little room and made the curtains jump. My ears rang. There was a good deal of smoke.
Lee sat up in his bunk and said, “Outside is place for shooting.”

I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life

a cotton house made over into a little cabin. It had a good roof.

rs. Floyd wrapped a rag around my neck that was soaked in turpentine and smeared with lard. She dosed me with something called Dr. Underwood’s Bile Activator. “You will pass blue water for a day or two but do not be alarmed as that is only the medicine working,” she said. “It will relax you wonderfully. Grandma Turner and I bless the day we discovered it.” The label on the bottle said it did not contain mercury and was commended by physicians and clergymen.

om Chaney raised his rifle and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly.

ke a thunderclap. Here is what happened. Papa and Tom Chaney arrived in Fort Smith and took a room at the Monarch boardinghouse

boats went up there and some people sold their cotton up there but that was all I knew about it. We sold our cotton down in Little Rock. I had been there two or three times.

outh bank of the Arkansas River not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansa

I advised Rooster to get a written statement from Smallwood to that effect, along with an itemized, timed and dated receipt for the two sacks of “booty.”

Rooster said, “All right, you hold Billy for the family and bury these others. I will post their names in Fort Smith and if anybody wants them they can come dig them up.”