Summary:  “If I’ve told Joe once, I’ve told him a thousand times to keep those elbows in!”  We’ve all heard Adam utter those words while Joe is getting himself thoroughly beaten by Jean Millain in the “Julia Bulette” episode.  This is the story behind that line.

Key words: Julia, Bulette, fight, young, fighting, brother

Rated: K+  WC 4200

Fight Club

1852

Adam examined Joe’s left eye and winced.

“Is it black?” Joe asked him.

“A very deep purple, actually,” Adam said. He cocked his head, appraising the damage more closely, and added, “With some dark blues thrown in. It’ll look even better tomorrow.”

Joe sighed. “Don’t tell Pa, Adam. He’ll be mad.”

Adam sighed too. Pa would find out about the fight the second he laid eyes on Joe’s face. But Adam didn’t bother to point that fact out to his brother. Instead he asked, “Who was it?”

Joe scowled and jerked out of his grasp. “None of your business. Anyway, it don’t matter none who it was.”

Chewing thoughtfully on his bottom lip, Adam eyed him. “No, I guess it doesn’t. Want to tell me how he managed to get such a solid punch in?”

Staring at his boots as he kicked at the dirt, Joe shrugged. “He was bigger than me.”

Most of the boys in school were bigger than Joe, but Adam did him the kindness of not mentioning that. Besides, Joe’s smaller size had never stood in the way of him keeping pace, so chances were that it wasn’t an issue now. Adam casually returned his attention to the saddle he had been polishing. “Did you forget to weave in and out like Hoss and I showed you?”

Joe considered. “No, I did that real good. We went round and round for a good long while, and I kept weavin’ in and out just like you and Hoss told me to.”

Adam looked up at him. “And?”

Joe’s scowl vanished to be replaced by a huge grin. That grin never failed to startle Adam due to the fact that it so often came only seconds after a fit of bad temper; it was like watching the sun break through a thick brace of dark clouds after a bad storm. Always such a full smile, with nothing careful about it. It often managed, though, to be a huge source of annoyance to Adam, for it often made it too easy to forgive Joe even when he was clearly wrong. It worked on Pa. It worked on Hop Sing. It worked on Hoss. It worked on everybody, sometimes even Adam himself.

This time, though, he didn’t know whether to be annoyed because he didn’t know whether Joe was wrong or not. He didn’t know any of the details. And so far Joe hadn’t seemed much inclined to give him any.

So he asked again, “And?” He hoped the questioning wasn’t going to take all day like it sometimes did. For a kid who wore his heart on his sleeve, Little Joe could be reluctant to come forth with the particulars involved in a situation like this.

Not today, though, thank goodness. Today was one of those times when it took only a few gentle pokes before Joe gave a little sigh and then launched into the story. “And Harvey kept swingin’ and missin’. And then he got really mad and swung so hard he fell. Right on his backside.” Joe smiled bigger, obviously enjoying the memory.

Adam wasn’t distracted by his smile this time, for Joe had inadvertently handed him a clue regarding the culprit who had tried to rearrange Joe’s face. Harvey. Adam only knew of one Harvey who was young enough to be in school.

“Harvey Middleton? Are you telling me Harvey Middleton did this to you?” The wisps of anger Adam had felt when he’d first seen Joe’s black eye stirred to life again. Harvey Middleton was three years older than Joe and probably outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

Joe’s scowl returned. He clamped his mouth shut and looked disgusted. He hadn’t meant to let that slip, Adam knew. But his reaction told Adam that he’d been right; his opponent had indeed been the Middleton boy.

“What started the fight?”

Joe’s mouth crimped tighter.

Adam shook his head. “All right, all right. So if you were ducking and weaving and it was working, how’d you get hit so hard?”

“Well…I got tickled when he spun around and fell like that. There he was, talking about other people bein’ so clumsy…”

Ah, another unintentional clue. Harvey had been insulting someone, and it hadn’t set well with Joe. It was doubtful it had been the boy himself whom Harvey had deemed clumsy. Joe was small, but the boy was exceptionally spry on his feet and anything but awkward in his movements. No, he’d been angry on someone else’s behalf. Adam was almost certain of it.

But finding out exactly whose honor he had been defending could wait. Joe was involved with relating the story now, and all Adam needed to do was hold on for the ride.

“…and then he fell, and I swear, Adam, he looked just like a big ol’ turtle on his back, heavin’ around and tryin’ to get up to come after me again.” Joe sighed, and his smile faltered. “I started laughin’ so hard I guess I didn’t see him comin’.”

“Mmm. Not a good move on your part.”

“No. I shoulda backed further away before I started laughin’, I guess,” Joe said, his voice so rueful it made the corner of Adam’s mouth twitch. He coughed to subdue the chuckle that threatened to rise from his throat, and tossed aside the cloth he’d been using to clean the saddle. Standing, he moved to stand in front of Joe.

“Show me how you did it,” he ordered.

“How I did what?”

“The way you moved around before you got distracted and let Harvey hammer on you.”

“The weavin’ thing, you mean?”

“Yes, the weaving thing.” Adam doubled up his fists and took on a fighter’s stance. “Come on. I’ll try to hit you, and you concentrate on trying to make me miss.”

Joe grinned again, obviously enjoying the thought of an opportunity to show his oldest brother what he could do. He got into position, bouncing a little on his toes. “Okay, Adam. You asked for it. Ready?”

Adam grinned back. “Ready.” They circled one another, and Adam’s left fist reached out to tap Joe on the shoulder—a big-brother type of punch, hard enough to knock him off balance a little and maybe even hard enough to sting some, but not hard enough to really hurt him.

Joe shook it off. Adam hit him again.

“Ow!”

“You aren’t paying attention. Come on, now. Focus. Pretend I’m Harvey Middleton.”

Joe’s young face set in frowning concentration. Adam swung again—and this time he missed when Joe bobbed and slipped to the left. Another swing, and another miss. And yet another.

Adam grinned his approval. The kid really was astonishingly fast. Too bad his concentration time hadn’t lasted longer with Harvey Middleton.

“Yep, you’ve got the ducking and weaving part down to a science, all right. When Harvey got the jump on you, did you swing back?”

Joe looked insulted. “Of course I did. Do you think I was just gonna stand there and let him pound on me?”

Adam’s brow rose. “Did you actually land any of those punches?”

“Well…some of ‘em.” He gave a gloomy shake of his head. “Didn’t seem like he felt ‘em much, though,” he muttered.

Adam nodded. “I see.” He cleared his throat and pushed his shirt sleeves up. “All right, let’s go again. This time, I’ll move around and you try to hit me. Let me see what you’ve got.”

After a few wild swings from his little brother that did little more than slice through air, Adam called a halt. “What we need to do is refine your technique.”

Joe pursed his lips, considering. “I don’t know if my technique can be re-fined. I think it’s about as fine as it’s gonna get.”

“You need to learn how to jab.”

Joe pushed his chin forward in stubborn denial. “I already know how to jab.”

“Then show me.”

Joe struck out with an enthusiastic punch, which Adam deftly blocked by catching Joe’s wrist. Joe’s face fell.

“See?” Adam said. “That’s not a jab. It’s too wide, too slow. Your opponent can see it coming. A jab is like this.” Adam lashed out at the air with a movement that made Joe’s eyes widen in awed approval.

“Gee, you’re right. That is faster,” he said, and tried another punch, which Adam again easily stopped.

“No, not just faster. When you jab at your opponent, you move your arm in a different way. Like this.” He demonstrated. “You kind of wind it up a little, sort of like the spring under a buckboard seat. That way it has a little more snap by the time it reaches the other guy’s chin.” He moved around behind Joe and took the boy’s fists in his own to guide them through the movements. “Start with your lead hand, the one you’re going to jab with, near your chin. As you shove your fist forward, rotate your body a little—” He dropped Joe’s hands to turn him. “—like that. Gives the punch more power. Keep your elbows in, or you lay yourself wide open. And at the same time, you need to move your other fist into the guard position at your chin. Did you remember to guard your face when you were scrapping with Harvey?” The scathing look Joe shot him from his blackened eye made him laugh. “Sorry. Guess not. Tell you what—you work on that jab, and the guarding part. We’ll work on other types of punches after you get that down.”

Intrigued interest lit Joe’s face. “There are other kinds of punches?”

“Yeah, but the jab is the most important. That’s the one you’ve gotta practice. It’s the foundation of boxing. Trying to fight without it is like riding a saddle with no horse underneath—you aren’t going to get very far.”

Joe nodded, full of enthusiasm. “I’ll practice hard, Adam. I’ll get this down, and then you can show me those other ways of punching.” He began to dance around the barn, boots kicking up spurts of dust and hay as he threw his fists this way and that. Suddenly he halted directly in front of Adam. All signs of a smile were gone from the boy’s face. “Hoss ain’t clumsy. He’s just so strong he don’t always know to hold back, so sometimes he breaks things. Ol’ Harvey Middleton is just too dumb to know the difference between strong and clumsy.”

Ah, so that was it. The real reason behind the fight. Adam looked into his kid brother’s eyes, wide with hopeful entreaty, and gave him the confirmation he needed. “We all know Hoss isn’t clumsy,” he said gently. “But you can’t always make people see reason, Joe, and you can’t always take the mean out of somebody, especially by using your fists. You know that, don’t you?”

Joe swallowed, and then nodded. “I know. And Hoss wasn’t even there to hear, so his feelin’s didn’t get hurt. But when Harvey started saying those things, somethin’ inside me just got all burnin’ hot and my breath started comin’ all fast and everything, and the next thing I knew, I was throwin’ punches. The wrong kind,” he added glumly. “The kind that miss.”

Adam drew his bottom lip in between his teeth, debating as to what to say. He wanted to tell Joe he was proud of him. He wanted to say that he’d done the right thing by taking up for Hoss. But the fact was that his kid brother had always had a temper, and now, even at ten years old, it was becoming a formidable thing. And that raging temper, so quick to appear and so explosive, made Adam uneasy; it was a trait that made Joe, already a reckless sort of kid, apt to get himself into scraps he wouldn’t always be able to haul himself out of.

So Adam did the best thing he could.

He gently turned Joe around and nudged him forward. “Go back to practicing, Joe. Keep working on those jabs. That’s it. You’re getting it. Keep those elbows in. That’s it. Joe, elbows…elbows, Joe!”

**********

1857

“Dang, what’d they do to you, boy?” Concern hoarsened Hoss’s voice as he laid a gentle finger along the bruising on Joe’s cheek.

Joe pulled away, irritation plain on his face. “It ain’t all that bad.”

“What isn’t all that bad?” Adam asked as he came around a corner of the barn. “Hey, you two, I’ve gotten a wagonload of fence posts still sitting here that need to be unloaded—” He stopped short as he got a look at Joe. White heat rose up inside him. His youngest brother had obviously been badly beaten. “My God, what happened?” Adam nudged Hoss’s fingers out of the way to investigate the damage himself, only to have his hand slapped away.

“Mind your own business, both of you.” Joe turned his back and, head held low, led Cochise into the barn.

Hoss slid a dark glance toward Adam, then back toward the barn door where Joe had disappeared. “Looks pretty bad, don’t it? That eye will be off-color for weeks. As swollen as it is…well, he’s lucky. I thought at first the jaw bone might be cracked, but he let me look long enough to decide it’s still in one piece. His bloody nose I’m still not too certain about.”

As hard as his teeth were clenched together, Adam thought his own jaw might be in danger of cracking. “Who did it?”

“I asked. He wouldn’t say.” Hoss’s voice was tight with controlled anger.

“Well, he’s going to say,” Adam snapped, and headed for the barn, Hoss on his heels.

A half hour of cajoling and shouting, reasoning, and insults resulted in no further information from Joe. At last he effectively ended the conversation by stalking to the house, trying without success to hide a limp. His brothers followed him inside, only to watch him escape upstairs to his room, shutting his door behind him.

“Never mind, Adam,” Hoss said grimly. “When Pa gets home you can bet your last dime he’ll find out what happened. Then we can take care of it.” He shook his head. “That was no little beatin’ that kid took. Did you see the bruise peekin’ out from the collar of his shirt? If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looks like a boot print.”

“I saw.” Neither that mark nor any of the others marring Joe’s face would escape Pa’s notice, Adam thought. The boy would have to ‘fess up, and it was for his own good. Whoever had been involved in this incident had gone too far.

Hoss gazed up at the stairs with a thoughtful expression. “Been a good while since he’s taken a bad lickin’. I don’t know as I’ve ever seen him take one this bad. Hard to say if this was a fair fight in terms of numbers or size,” he said, and his face hardened as he added, “ but I don’t much cotton to a man who’ll stomp on a fella’s chest when he’s down.”

“Pretty poor sign of character,” Adam agreed, and then shook his head. “How does he get himself into these messes? He was just picking up a spool of wire from town. That’s it. How can he continuously get involved in trouble with so little effort?”

Hoss frowned. “Little Joe sure enough has a penchant for flushin’ out any scuffle within a twenty-mile radius and inserting himself smack dab in the middle of it, don’t he?”

He sure did.

Pa was just as adamant about finding out the specifics of the fight as Adam had expected he would be. After turning Joe’s face this way and that and inspecting the bruises covering his face and body, Pa’s concern and worry gained a hard edge. He demanded to know exactly what had happened, and even Joe’s legendary hardheadedness couldn’t hold up forever. At last he grudgingly admitted that a lady had been involved.

“A lady? All this—” Pa waved a hand in vague indication of Joe’s darkening bruises and shiny swellings “–over a girl?” Joe, sitting in his interrogation spot in the middle of the settee, stared sullenly at the floor while Pa rattled off all the ways he had erred. Finally Pa straightened and threw up his hands. “I swear, Joseph, sometimes I don’t know what to do about you.”

When Joe failed—wisely, Adam thought—to offer up any suggestions as to “what to do about” him, Pa sighed in angered frustration and sent him up to bed without supper. Hoss waited—another wise move—until Pa had gone to bed himself before sneaking a plate of leftovers up to Joe.

Adam waited some time himself before slipping into Joe’s room. One thing he had learned about his youngest brother—keep asking questions and sooner or later everything would come spilling out. Often things he refused to tell Pa eventually came out when he was talking to his brothers. Sometimes it took awhile, but it almost always worked.

Hoss was still in Joe’s room, sitting on the side of the bed. He and Joe looked up at him, Joe’s expression forlorn and Hoss’s grim. Adam looked from one to the other and then back again, aware that something had transpired between them, but not sure what it was. Some part of the story had been told, certainly.

Adam cleared his throat. “Everything all right?”

“Everything’s just fine. Joseph here is gonna finish drinkin’ this glass of milk, and then he’s gonna get some shuteye. He’ll be feeling better in the mornin’.” He winked at his younger brother, but there was an edge of something in Hoss’s expression that made Adam’s gut clench.

Once they were out in the hallway and pulling Joe’s door shut behind them, Adam shot Hoss a questioning look, but Hoss shook his head.

“Let’s go out to the barn. I don’t want Joe overhearin’ us. Pa neither. Not yet, anyway.” Once out in the barn, Hoss told him how the boy had taken on a couple of miners.

“Remy Fulton and Pete Richmond? They’re full grown men!” Adam had barely gotten the enraged words past his lips before he was turning and grabbing up his saddle. Hoss’s hand on his arm pulled him up short.

“Adam . . . I don’t think us goin’ after those two is the answer.”

“Are you telling me you think we should let two grown men beat up a fifteen-year-old kid?”

“No. No, I ain’t sayin’ that. In fact, I’m darn sure plannin’ on ridin’ in with you and moppin’ the street with those two. If they got any brains left in their skulls when we get through with ‘em, they ain’t never gonna lay a hand on Joe again.”

“Fine. So let’s go.” Again Adam turned toward Sport’s stall, and again Hoss stopped him. Adam’s brow rose. “What?” he snapped.

Struggle showed itself in Hoss’s expression. “It’s what the fight was about,” he said finally.

“Look, heaven knows this isn’t the first time Joe’s fought over a girl, but Hoss, those two—”

“Lady,” Hoss broke in. “He said ‘lady,’ not girl. Adam, the fight was about Mama.”

Their eyes locked for a long moment, a moment full of old grief and the fear of new heartaches come to pass. Then Adam swore softly and gently set his saddle down.

He let his eyes close, trying to get his emotions under control as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. Memories over a decade old swirled through his head, thoughts of times when doors had been closed to Marie and therefore to the Cartwrights. Thoughts of women on Virginia City sidewalks moving their skirts aside so as to not let them brush against Marie’s. Thoughts of ugly rumors, of wild stories all the more painful because they included thin strands of truth. Thoughts of secrets kept.

Opening his eyes, he blew out a long, slow breath. Secrets kept within a family were the most dangerous kind of all. Those were the kind of secrets spoken of only in whispers, secrets kept sealed behind walls that could be toppled at a moment’s notice. Walls that were mortared together with nothing more than sheer force of will. Walls like those that had been erected over time for the sake of protecting Marie. Protecting the family.

Protecting Joe.

And today those walls had been breached. How much damage had been done?

“What did they say to him?” he asked quietly, and he heard the brittleness in his own voice as he tensed for the answer.

Hoss sighed. “About what you’d expect. They weren’t quite grown themselves when Marie was alive, but—”

“But they heard things back then, saw things, and they haven’t forgotten,” Adam finished for him, and let his shoulders sag in sudden weariness.

“No, they ain’t forgot.” Hoss’s voice was edged with hurt, with anger and regret. “Joe didn’t believe none of it, of course, so we’ve got that on our side.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Adam bit out.

They ain’t forgot. No, they would never forget. Not Remy and Pete, not the whole stinking town. Adam realized he had let himself begin to hope that the stories attached to Marie would eventually fade away, but what had happened to Joe today was proof that such hope was nothing more than wishful thinking.

A sudden surge of rage made him smash his fist into a supporting timber with force hard enough to raze the skin from his knuckles. He shook his hand out and then rubbed it with the other hand, mindless of the tiny drops of blood that fell from his fingers and thankful for the mind-clearing pain.

Hoss never moved, only watched him and waited.

“This isn’t the last time this is going to happen,” Adam said to himself as much as to Hoss.

“No.”

“We can take care of Pete and Remy—we will take care of Pete and Remy, but there will be others who will drag it all back up again.”

And having “it” dragged back up over and over would eventually destroy their kid brother.

“He’s got a high mountain to climb, Adam,” Hoss said carefully, “and we ain’t gonna be standin’ there every time somebody tries to push him off the side of it. The way I see it, the best way to help Joe is to make sure he’s got what it takes to stand up to all comers. Because you and I both know enough about him by now to know that he’s gonna take ‘em on whether he stands a decent chance or not.”

They stood staring at each other in the darkened barn, their distress honing itself into a sharp, thin blade of determined intent.

They did things differently after that. So it was that on any given evening, the barn rang with shouts—shouts of anger, shouts of encouragement, shouts of triumph. The three Cartwright brothers slugged back and forth through the barn’s interior whenever they had a spare moment. They worked on technique. They worked on speed. They even worked on “fightin’ dirty”, as Hoss put it. And to Pa’s credit, when he discovered what was going on, he grumbled something about “fire and brimstone” but otherwise left them to their own devices with only a warning not to “bring it into the house.”

At last the day came when Joe when landed a one-two punch to Adam’s belly and nose that sent him sprawling backward into the dust. Stars swam before his eyes, and warm wetness trickled from his nose. He’d seen it coming, and he’d tried with everything he had to get out of the way. He hadn’t been able to. Stunned, he let his head fall back into the dirt.

And he grinned.

*********

1859

“I’m tellin’ you, give that kid a little more time and he’s gonna be able to beat that Frenchman,” Hoss insisted as he hoisted his unconscious little brother up to lie across the saddle in front of Adam. Behind them, Julia’s Palace was still filled with raucous laughter and boisterous celebration, the sounds of it spilling out onto the street along with yellow light from the door and windows.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, smiling as he caught sight of Jean Millain through the window, still gingerly touching his nose. “Not today, but someday. Someday soon.”

They set out for home, and the movements of the horse elicited a small, miserable groan from Joe.

Hoss chuckled. “He sure got the better of you tonight, didn’t he, little brother?”

Adam whacked Joe in the middle of his back with a slap full of stinging, brotherly-type sympathy. And though he was pretty sure Joe hadn’t yet come around enough to hear, he said it anyway.

“Joe, how many times do I have to tell you to keep those elbows in?”

The End

 

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.