Once Upon a Time in Texas....BLOOD BROTHERS

Santa Claus had barely boomed out a slurred “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!” when a bullet ripped through his throat. He reeled through the saloon door clutching wildly at his spurting neck, whipping out a pistol as he crashed wild eyed through a  table full of gamblers to the floor. The bartender, smoking gun still in hand, drunkenly accused Santa for being the foul seducer of his wife – “a lowdown skulking sonofabitch and all philanderers should meet the same fate!” Santa’s pistol roared to life, bullets sailed with curses and slammed into the cuckolded bartender’s belly. The man in red collapsed in death with a final harsh bubbling noise. 

One of the gamblers crept over to the red figure laying in a widening halo of even darker red. 

“Tommy Jones? You done shot Tommy, George!”

The rotund bartender clutched his belly as he tried to staunch the red fountain rushing from his belly. “Hell no! That’s Jake Dooley. Dooley’s the one defiling my marriage bed.”

“Jake’s got a mustache you damfool!”

“He’s GOT a mustache!”

“Of course he’s got a mustache. HE’s playing SANTA!”

The gambler ripped off the blood speckled cotton mustaches and beard revealing a plain shaven face. He threw the wadded up red and white mess over at George.

“Oh my dear lord,” wailed the bartender. “No no no no no” rattled through his trembling lips as he dragged his gut shot body toward Santa Corpse. “No, Tommy, no, not Tommy!” The wounded man’s “No’s” turned into a wild wail of anguish as he wrapped the dead man in his arms, Tom’s blood bathing George's arms and chest, mingling with the blood gushing from George’s guts.

“I killed my best friend. Oh Lord, I killed my best friend in all the world!” The man George Franks cradled in his arms was indeed Tom Jones, his “very best friend in all the world,” who not only shared the saloon business with him but even roomed in the same house with George and George’s suspected wife and their children. Jake Dooley was the man George believed his wife to be sneaking around with at the moment. George forever gave a suspicious glance at his children's faces which reminded him of nothing about himself, wondering how long she’d been running around with other men passing through the bustling frontier town of Cottonwood, Texas. Owning a saloon certainly didn’t help with marital bliss, giving Mrs. Franks easy access to many young and inebriated roosters to ruffle her tail feathers. George was three sheets to the wind and had seen who he thought was Jake Dooley tromping towards the saloon dressed in seasonal costume. Alas, he found out his mistake too late. Now the dead eyes of his best friend stared up at him in bewildered accusation.

“He was the best friend a man could have and damn me, I deserve to die for what I did.” He cradled the corpse like a baby, weeping in ragged convulsions. He looked up at stunned gamblers through red eyes and snot running down his face. “I am shot to pieces, boys. Please, please bury me with Tommy. I am certain my wife will run off with Dooley as soon as I am dead and I don’t want to lie all alone in the cemetery. And the least I can do is keep Tommy company now that I have sent him there ahead of me.” He pressed his brow to his friend’s and continued to weep. All the town had come rushing at the sound of gunfire and now crowded around the doorway, flabbergasted by the strange image of a sobbing man cradling a blood drenched Santa in his trembling arms.

George Franks died the next day. As he requested, he was buried in the same grave as his best friend. George’s marker is there still, faded and stained by time, but you can still manage to read:

George W. Franks 

BORN: January 1, 1848 

DIED December 29, 1882 

He’d almost made it to his 35^th birthday. 

Tom Jones’ marker has been destroyed or stolen and now there’s just a much more modern stone with simply “Tom Jones” inscribed with no dates. But there the two best friends still lie side by side in death, a tragic Damon and Pythias.

And to top it all off, the much maligned Mrs. Frank didn’t end up running off with Jake Dooley after all.

She ran off with his brother.


copyright Ben Friberg, 2020

Photos by Ralph Terry for the Cottonwood cemetery page on Find A Grave