Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “It wasn’t my money.” I figured MacCallard wouldn’t mind if I were a little generous with the per diem and, more important, it was company script. It was only valuable here. Any slips I brought back to New York would be useful only as bookmarks.

  Once inside, the widow stopped crying long enough to fiddle with her apron. Her face was lined with grief and worry. She looked old enough to be my mother, though I doubt she was a day over thirty. After a moment of fumbling, she produced a piece of paper and gave it to her boy.

  He stood a little straighter and took it from her. It was company stationary. As he read the note, his jaw set like a man in thought. There wasn’t a sign of mourning in him. He didn’t have time for it now, not if he was going to be the man of the house.

  Somehow, that depressed me more than the dead man.

  The new head of the family looked at me as if he didn’t know what to say.

  I was too savvy to ask him if he could read. “They use technical gibberish?” I asked instead. “They use bean-counters to write everything so as to confuse the employee.”

  His pride mollified, he handed me the note.

  I was uncertain if I wanted to laugh or cry. “It’s an invoice,” I explained in a flat voice. “For burial expenses.”

  I’d read some cruel invoices in my time, but this was by far the cruelest. Tallied for their convenience were all the associated funeral expenses—plot, casket, preparation of the body. Embalming had become popular after Secession, on account of all the men who died so far away. Why they needed to embalm a poor Irish miner, I don’t know, especially since there wasn’t going to be a viewing.

  The keening started up again. I motioned the boy to join me outside.

  “Where’s the body then?” he asked. “What’d they do with Pa?” He took the note back, as if it would tell him where his father was.

  I shrugged. “I guess they buried him after they took him out.”

  “But can we see him? Isn’t there going to be a wake?”

  “It looks like they’ve already buried him.”

  Phoebe took the paper from the boy and shook her head.

  A few of the crowd lingered. They approached and Phoebe handed them the invoice. They passed it around, pretending to read it, and mumbled to themselves.

  “One more way the company squeezes you.”

  “They pay us in that dandy pink script. They make us buy our fooking food from the company larder. They make us buy our fooking shirts from the company store...”

  “And when we die,” someone finished for him, “they put us in company caskets.”

  They thrust the page back and forth between grimy hands until coal dust blotted out the numbers.

  “So why not a wake?” the boy asked, voice cracking. He could accept his father getting swallowed by the earth, but this was too much. There’d be no goodbye, no kiss on the corpse’s cheek, no flowers and no singing.

  “It ain’t Christian,” one said with a shake of his head.

  “Sure it is,” a gaunt fellow with a quiet voice said. “It’s his kind of Christian. You know Mr. Liutt hates it when we drink. So to stop the drinking, he’ll steal the body. No corpse, no wake.”

  The idea settled on their heads like ash from a smokestack. When the notion sank deep enough, the miners began cursing and swearing more loudly than before. The whispering man just stood and listened to them. Guys like that were more dangerous than a hundred screaming rabble-rousers.

  Just then, a voice cut through their rants: “Mr. Schist can help you.”

  I turned and suppressed the urge to slap Phoebe. The crazy chit had no idea what they were saying—it was all in Irish—but she felt the need to weigh in.

  “He’s a detective,” she said, oblivious to my glare. “The union hired him earlier. You could hire him now to get the body back.”

  The miners stopped and stared for a moment, as if they didn’t understand. When comprehension dawned, they looked me over from behind ashen masks.

  I gave a weak laugh. “Very funny.”

  “He is,” she insisted.

  “An independent detective,” I quickly explained. “No affiliation with the company types, I assure you.”

  They just stared. It didn’t matter if I worked for Harriman or Pinkerton or St. Patrick himself. Detectives were the enemy. Whatever small service I’d done didn’t change that.

  “Time to leave, Phoebe.” I grabbed her arm, tipped my hat to the keening widow and fled.

  The hard eyes of the miners followed us up the street. The boy at least looked sympathetic, though there was no way he could sway the other men.

  “I felt pretty bad when I left you in the courtyard with the Gatlings,” I told her as we walked. “Now I don’t regret it at all. My life expectancy would be a lot higher if one of them had cut you down!”

  “What? You took a job from the union—”

  “Shut up!” I glanced at the nearby shanties. No one appeared to be listening. “Don’t say union in this town or any other, do you hear me? There is no union!”

  She blinked. “I thought maybe you could help those people. You’re stuck here anyway.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, I have a job already. Two, actually, if I count you.”

  “Can’t you, I don’t know, do them all at the same time?”

  “Don’t ask a hound to sniff two trails, Phoebe.”

  “In a way, the jobs are similar. They both involve finding people.”

  “Except that half the people I’d be looking for are toe-tags and the other half are scabs.” I rolled my eyes. “And what would those micks pay me with? More worthless company script?”

  The girl mulled that over.

  “This was supposed to be an easy damn job, a nice train ride through the country. It was going to be an excuse to get away from Moira for a day or two.”

  “Who’s Moira?”

  “My wife.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Yes,” I said mechanically. It wasn’t affection but fact that made me answer.

  Phoebe’s brown eyes were full of curiosity.

  “Why do you care?”

  She shrugged. “I’d be interested to know what kind of woman would marry you, Mr. Schist.”

  “Not the pleasant kind, I assure you.”

  “But you said she was pretty.”

  I laughed. “A pretty face doesn’t make you pleasant.”

  “Sometimes I feel pity for you, Mr. Schist.”

  “I’m glad one of us can. I gave up all my pity in the war. It was a helluva bargain—I got to keep my limbs instead.”

  I gave a dry laugh. It died in my throat when I remembered the field hospital. I’d seen this tin bucket there, filled with jumbled arms and legs like a bunch of kindling ready for the fire. Their ends had been purple and black from congealed blood and flies.

  “You’re right,” I said with a scowl. “I’m not very funny.”

  Chapter Ten

  Phoebe didn’t pursue the conversation any further, for which I was glad. I told her Liuttsville was off-limits to both of us now. We could’ve tried talking to Dr. Lichfield or one of his employees, only the hospital was still busy from the morning’s slaughter.

  I resolved to wait and try my luck later in the evening. Graveyard shifts tend to be filled with poachers who are either too new or too lazy to get a better shift. New guys always have the worse pay, so a bri
be would go further.

  Our next move was a quandary. It was anybody’s guess how long Stanny’s scrags would cool their heels. Thugs were about as patient as they were subtle, so it was a fair bet they had vacated our room by now. If they were keen, they’d have it watched.

  “We’ll probably be safe back at the hotel,” I said. All evidence so far had suggested Stanny’s boys were about as sharp as a rusted screwdriver.

  “Would you look at that crick?” Phoebe asked.

  I glanced around. “What?”

  “The crick.”

  A stream went under the road through a culvert. It was gray with slag.

  “Oh. The creek.”

  The water oozed along slower than we walked, a rainbow slick glimmering in the reflected light from above. I suspected it was bound for the river, where it would dump more fuel into the fire.

  “Good evenin’,” Phoebe chirped.

  Several factory workers slouched by, their backs bent under heavy packs. If I had to guess, I’d say they were carrying everything they owned, which wasn’t much. They glared silently as they passed, ignoring her hello.

  “You’ll have to forgive them,” I told her. “They just got handed a death sentence.”

  These were the folks, after all, who had just lost their jobs in Liuttsburg. Now they were miners.

  She looked over her shoulder with a pained expression.

  There was no time to dwell on other people’s problems, though. Once we were alone, I threw out the spent casing and put a fresh round into the .22. I wanted every shot if the welcoming committee was still in our room. I didn’t need it, though, because the only ambush at the hotel was an angry clerk. It wasn’t the weaselly guy anymore, but an older, serious-minded fellow who didn’t know I had a friend among the Harrimen.

  “What in the blazes is going on?” he demanded as we came in. “There were men in your room, brutal men. My staff refuses to clean their mess!”

  One look at our room and I knew why the cleaning crew wouldn’t do their job.

  After our pursuers lost the girl again, they resorted to the only solution they knew: blatant thuggery. They took their frustration out on the hotel furniture and, most unfortunately, our possessions.

  My new carpetbag had been torn brutally open and its contents strewn around the room. My shirts—fresh as well as dirty—had been torn into rags. Phoebe’s effects had not been spared, either. Her eyes welled with tears as she saw her outfits ripped to shreds.

  “I saved for months,” she moaned, shaking her head.

  I didn’t have the heart to point out that her special frocks were at least a year behind current fashion. I nearly joined her in weeping, however, when I saw what they had done to my book.

  It lay, pages down, in a large dark puddle.

  “Those cretins,” I snarled. I drew my truncheon and flipped it face-up, examining the tome as I would a murder victim.

  “What is that?” the clerk asked from the door.

  “Urine.”

  The clerk gave an embarrassed gasp and put a kerchief to his mouth.

  Phoebe wrinkled her nose and arched a brow. “It wasn’t important, was it?”

  “It was the third volume of Gesammelte Schriften.” I bit my lip. “I was going to read it on the train after I dumped you on your parents.”

  She leaned over to examine it. “You can read that? What is it, German?”

  “After Hegel,” I told her crisply, “Dilthey is easy as reading nursery rhymes.”

  Phoebe made a face which plainly said she didn’t care about Hegel or Dilthey or hermeneutics. I dug deep into my soul and found the patience not to strike her. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds, since I was married to Moira, another woman who cared nothing for philosophy.

  “What are we going to do, Mr. Schist?”

  “It seems I’ll find out why Comte is wrong later. In the meantime—” I looked around at the devastation, “—I think I’ll kill someone.”

  The clerk thought it was hyperbole until I drew the revolver. “Heavens above!” he cried.

  “Where did those two-legged rats go when they literally pissed on knowledge?” My voice shook.

  The pistol wasn’t aimed at him, but it might as well have been. He stared as if it were a hissing viper. “I don’t know. This—this happened before my shift. They left. Out.”

  I looked at the floor for a moment. The rude bastards hadn’t bothered to wipe their feet. Mud and wet ash coated our floor. As if I had any doubts as to the culprits, the footprints were clearly made by half-brogues, an urban style ill-suited for a factory town.

  “They’ll go to the saloon,” I said, more to myself than the shocked pair beside me. “In Juniper Junction. It’s the only place they can get a drink. When guys like that aren’t doing mischief, they’re drunk.”

  I started out of the room.

  Phoebe’s skirt rustled behind me as she trotted to catch up. “Should you start a fight, Mr. Schist? I mean, with me under your care?”

  “There’s not going to be a fight,” I told her as we stepped into the street. “I’m just going to kill a couple men.”

  “Actually, there were three.”

  “Okay. I’m going to kill three people then.”

  “This seems ill-advised.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The math is easy—six shots, three guys...that’s two per man.”

  “But what if they have guns?”

  I stopped. “Did you see any?”

  “Well, no...”

  I nodded and started up the lane again. Stanny’s operation was in New York City. A gun could get you arrested there, so they were used to being creative about their murder. What’s more, Stanny’s reputation was for slashing, not shooting. I, on the other hand, had contacts in several detective agencies and a few on Park Row.

  I had an advantage in firepower and this time, they wouldn’t surprise me.

  After a few steps I remembered that the town was practically at war with itself. I hid the piece in my overcoat. Moments later, a squadron of hardheads marched by, glass eyes flashing ominously as they looked us over.

  It was thirty minutes to the Junction and Phoebe peppered me with questions the whole way. I ignored her. I knew I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised how completely the situation had come off its brackets. I never really had control to begin with. The train proved that. I couldn’t help but think that murdering Stanny’s scrags wasn’t an act of revenge so much as an attempt to reassert dominance over my fate.

  It was night when we walked into Juniper, cold and dark and red, just like the eerie forest behind us. I calmed down a little, but not enough to cancel the assassination attempt. I was tired of looking over my shoulder. Dead men made poor tails.

  The Akronite lay unsteaming, an iron dragon frozen in rigor mortis. The engineer and crew were nowhere to be found. The passengers who had previously waited on the platform were gone. It was too miserable outside to wait on a train with a dead boiler.

  The saloon’s windows were merry through the gloom, a patch of warmth in the cold town. We passed the spot where Stanny’s goons had nearly scragged me. I grabbed Phoebe, who gasped in shock, and hoisted her up to look through the window.

  “Mr. Schist!” she protested.

  “Do you see ‘em?”

  I would probably have recognized them by their city threads anyway, but she had seen them up close in our room. I had only seen them in a dark alley.

  P
hoebe struck me with her small gloved hands. “Put me down!”

  “Do you see ‘em?”

  “No.”

  I gently lowered her to her feet and considered my options. When I looked up, I saw Phoebe was blushing.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The walls were...the pictures had...” She closed her mouth and shook her head.

  In my single-minded blood thirst, I had forgotten about the pornography. “Yeah. Saloons have some pretty colorful art.”

  “Colorful?”

  I shrugged. “Christ alive, girl. It’s not like I commissioned them.”

  Phoebe gave me a glare as if I had, in fact, commissioned them.

  I suppose I deserved it. I’d always enjoyed the soft languid thighs and hanging breasts that graced those paintings. They sure beat looking at the men around me.

  Before we could continue our discussion on art and female anatomy, a word cut through the chilly night. “Steamcoach.” It wasn’t yelled or anything, but it got our attention all the same.

  We spun around and saw two men in the street outside the saloon. A third was on the porch with a suitcase. By their fashionable mustaches and bowlers, I knew them for fellow peregrines.

  “Didn’t you hear? There’s a coach around the corner!”

  “A steamcoach you say?” I called over to them.

  The man on the porch nodded. “There’s men inside but it doesn’t look full!”

  “Let’s go,” one of the travelers said.

  They hurried off the porch and up the street.

  In a heartbeat, I forgot about the men we were chasing. This was a chance to escape. Revenge could wait if it meant leaving this war zone where rivers were too stupid to know they shouldn’t burn.

  “The coach,” I said, jogging after them. “Must be back from Pittsburgh.”

  Phoebe fell in beside me. “What about Mr. MacCallard? What about the job?”

  “Company script never buys loyalty, girl. Only greenbacks do that. We might have a chance to get out of here. I’ll wire him an apology from Pittsburgh.”