A Western Noir
The town slept easy. It never asked why.
Coming 2027.
Italy, Texas, 1900.
Italy, Texas, 1900. Seventeen-year-old Will Reece has buried his father, a gentle preacher the whole county pitied, and come up the Katy to learn to be a different kind of man. His uncle Gus is the town marshal. Gus doesn't hold trials. He doesn't need to. When trouble comes to Italy, he rides out after dark, and by morning the trouble is gone and nobody asks where it went.
Then a widow in black steps off the train.
She is gracious, and grieving, and very good with figures, and before long the whole town has taken her in. Will can't stop watching her. With the biggest payday in the town's history coming down the line, he is about to find out what his uncle's kind of justice really costs, and who has been counting on it all along.
A literary western noir about fathers and sons, the stories towns tell about themselves, and the hardness we mistake for strength.
“He killed men. I will say that plain.”
“The law's a fence, son. It's a good thing to have. But I've seen the kind of wolf that jumps a fence, and a fence never once stopped one. All a fence ever did was tell the wolf which way the sheep ran.”
“They slept easy because of my uncle. They did not ask themselves too hard why they slept easy.”
“The town took her up entire.”
“Her hands were not a widow's hands. I noticed that and did not know what I had noticed.”
Background: cotton pickers near Dallas, Texas, 1907. Berry, Kelley & Chadwick. Library of Congress.
“A town that has quit asking why it sleeps easy has signed something it would rather not read over.”
The town in this novel is real.
The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway is incorporated in Kansas.
Source: WikipediaThe Katy becomes the first railroad to enter Texas from the north.
Source: WikipediaThe Aycock brothers build the first house on the town site: home, grocery and post office in one.
Source: TSHA HandbookWaxahachie postmaster Gabriel J. Penn names the town Italy, for a climate like “sunny Italy.”
Source: TSHA HandbookDecember: the Katy reaches Italy, and the town becomes a market center.
Source: TSHA HandbookItaly is incorporated and its first newspaper is published.
Source: TSHA HandbookThe Katy announces its Katy Flyer, running between St. Louis and southwest Texas.
Source: Union PacificItaly's population reaches 1,061, with six churches. The novel opens this spring.
Source: TSHA HandbookSeptember 8: the Galveston hurricane kills more than 6,000 people.
Source: History.comJanuary 10: Spindletop blows in near Beaumont, the birth of the modern petroleum industry.
Source: TSHA HandbookEllis County grows a record 187,449 bales of cotton.
Source: THC markerInterurban electric trains begin running between Dallas and Waco through Italy.
Source: TSHA Handbook
Italy almost had another name. In 1879 residents debated Houston Creek, after the creek where Sam Houston reportedly camped, but the post office rejected it to avoid confusion with another Houston Creek (TSHA). Its population doubled from 500 in 1890 to 1,061 in 1900. Italy Institute, Southwestern Normal College and Hope Institute drew more than 350 students by 1894.
The railroad's nickname came from “KT,” its timetable abbreviation and stock symbol, which became “the Katy” in the 1890s. It reached Dallas in 1886, Waco in 1888 and Houston in 1893. It was a railroad of its era: the Dalton Gang robbed a Katy train in Indian Territory in 1892 (Wikipedia).
Ellis County sat on the Blackland Prairie, whose dark clay locals called “black gumbo” and “black velvet”; by 1900 nearly all of it was under the plow (Wikipedia). The county grew 91,298 bales in 1900 and often ranked first in the state and nation from 1895 to 1915 (THC marker).
Sources: Texas Blackland Prairies (Wikipedia); Cotton Industry in Ellis County, THC marker (HMdb)
Texas counted 3,048,710 people in 1900, up from 2,235,527 in 1890 (Texas State Library). That year Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch sat for a portrait in a Fort Worth studio, and the Pinkertons put it on wanted posters across the West (Wikipedia). Within months, Spindletop would announce the oil age. The old West and the modern one overlapped, and this novel lives in that seam.
Sources: United States and Texas Populations (Texas State Library); John Swartz (Wikipedia); Spindletop Oilfield (TSHA)
Will Reece, seventeen
His uncle Gus, the town marshal
A widow in black
Danny Gentry, Ed.D., spent more than twenty-two years leading schools and is the author of The Collapse, The Serpent of Houston Creek, and The Kindness Tree.