Stooped and with thinning hair, Ernest went back to Osage
County, where at first he stayed with his brother Bryan. “When I
met Ernest, I had just become a teenager,” Margie recalled. “I was
very surprised he looked so grandfatherly. He was very slight with
graying hair; his eyes looked so kind. He wasn’t rough even after
all those years in prison. And I couldn’t fathom that this man had
done all that...” Her voice trailed off amid the insistent beating of
the drum. After a while, she continued, “It was so hard on my dad.
He and Liz were ostracized by the tribe, and that hurt so much.
They needed family and support, and they didn’t have any.”
The experience made her father angry—angry at the world.
Andrew, Margie’s husband, pointed out that Elizabeth was also
deeply affected. “She was kind of paranoid,” he said.
Margie nodded and said, “Aunt Liz couldn’t stay in one place and
was always changing her address and phone number.”
Elizabeth showed little interest in seeing Ernest, who eventually
moved in to a mice-infested trailer just outside Osage County, but
Cowboy occasionally visited. “I think a part of him longed for a
father,” Margie said. “But he knew what his father had done. He
called him Old Dynamite.” When Ernest died, in 1986, he was
cremated, and his ashes were given to Cowboy in a box. Ernest had
left instructions with Cowboy to spread them around the Osage
Hills. “Those ashes were in the house for days, just sitting there,”
Margie recalled. “Finally, one night my dad got real mad and took
the box and just chucked it over a bridge.”