by John Maclay
So I set off the next morning pulling like a mule, and many’s the time I cussed myself out for shooting the only transportation I had to my name. Sometimes Dan’l Blackwith could be pronounced Dan’l Lackwit.
* * * *
That was one long sonofabitch trail, but when I came in eyeshot of Kaylowe Junction, which was a long way from my original goal, I still had my tools. I could see the shapeless clump of buildings, huddled together under that endless sky, for a long distance.
As I got nearer I could tell that a carpenter was not only needed now, he’d been needed back at the beginning. A bunch of ham-handed incompetents had put up the most godawful batch of shacks it’d ever been my misfortune to set eyes on.
There wasn’t a corner in the entire place that was or ever had been square.
The roofs looked as if they’d take off in a big gust of wind, and the porches and steps were a reminder of the shortness of life and the frailty of human bones. When I settled my plunder beside the collection of loose boards marked HOTEL (in letters so faded you had to guess at them), I didn’t risk the steps. I trod mighty lightly on that porch too.
The inside floor creaked and shimmied, and I had a vision of cracked and dry-rotted joists trying to hold up two stories of junk. It made me shiver, but not as much as the wind and chill of sleeping out in the open did.
An old fellow almost as creaky as the floor came sidling out of a back office when I rang the bell on the dusty counter. “Help you?” he asked. His voice matched the rest of the place, a sort of rusty whisper.
“I need a room. Don’t know how long I’ll be here, but maybe a week. You want pay in advance?”
He almost went into shock. “No, no, you can wait till the end of the week, if you want. Nobody pays up front. Nobody. You certain sure you got that kind of money? A room costs a dollar a day, and you’ll have to eat at Aunt Belle’s, down the street.”
“I think I’d better pay up front, just to give you the experience,” I said. I pulled out my leather purse and counted out seven dollars in silver. When I got cash payment for the house back home I turned it all into silver coin. It’s heavier to carry than gold, but it’s not nearly as tempting to thieves.
I saw the old man slide his eyes sideways to judge the heft of that bag, but I keep only about fifteen dollars in it. The rest is in the money belt around my waist. I don’t look rich, and I ain’t, but I don’t intend to get any poorer than necessary.
I handed him those coins as if I squeezed ’em out of my veins; he looked disappointed and put them into a cash box somewhere under the counter. Then I signed the register, which hadn’t been used in two weeks, and went up to my room.
“Where can I put my carpenter’s tools?” I asked him when I’d washed and come back downstairs. “I can’t afford to lose ’em. They’re all I have in the world.” Which wasn’t too far wrong, at that.
“You’re a carpenter?” he asked, his colorless eyes widening. “A real live carpenter that can build something that won’t fall down?”
“Been one all my life, and my Pa and Grandpa before me,” I told him. “Back East I worked for a contractor that built the Missouri State Capitol Building. I can put up a pigsty or a palace, if you give me the materials.”
“What about a...gallows?” he asked. “We need one real bad.”
I felt something like a shock go through me. I’d never built a gallows in my life, but the principle was simple. “I expect I could. Why?”
“Cause we got us a man we got to hang, and the last time we tried it, the damn gallows fell down and kilt the hangman. The killer just got a broke leg. If you think you could do the job, the marshal and the mayor would likely pay you well; you might even set up business here. Things don’t hang together very well in Kaylowe Junction.”
I thought wryly that it sounded as if they didn’t hang at all, but I kept that to myself. This place needed a topnotch carpenter more than most anyplace I ever saw, and if these folks could afford to pay me to do a gallows, surely they could pay me to set their houses right. There was no reason I had to keep on to Twining. It had just been a spot to shoot at when I started out.
Towed along by Rufus Feldmaster, I crossed the wide street, dust boiling around my ankles as we moved and blowing away toward the tottery gray church at the crossroads. The sheriff’s office was slightly less shaky than the hotel. Its sign, however, hung from rusty hinges and creaked like a graveyard ghost as it swung slowly back and forth.
That porch almost held us up without threatening to fall through, and I suspected the marshal of doing some sneaky night-work with a hammer and nails. The door was open, letting in the heat and an army of flies generated by the horse dung in the street; we stomped through and faced the little man sitting at the desk.
I assumed he was a deputy or clerk. He wasn’t the size of a washing of soap, and he had the biggest, softest brown eyes I ever saw in all my life. Looked like a sweet little old fellow that couldn’t hurt a cockroach.
“Marshal Pinner, this here’s Daniel Blackwith, and he’s a carpenter. A genuine builder that can fix a gallows that will hang Ole Tollersen. I think you’re going to be tickled.”
The old man shambled back across the street amid gusts of red-dust-laden wind, leaving me face to face with this unlikely marshal. He smiled gently and rose to his full five-foot-nothing.
“Welcome, Mr. Blackwith. We badly need your services, and we will pay well. Let me show you where the gallows must be placed—we cleared away the debris of the other after the catastrophe earlier this month.” He tip-tapped out onto the porch in his shiny size-three boots.
The wind had picked up as the sun went low in the west, and dust hid a lot of what he tried to show me, though I did locate the post-holes that had footed the frame. No wonder it fell—they weren’t more than six inches deep.
“We need to hang poor Ole before the end of the month, if it’s possible. We have to borrow the hangman from Calito, and he can only come between the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth. Do you think you might get it built that quick?”
I ruminated for a bit. This was the twelfth. I could put up a one-man gallows with one hand in about three days, if I had the beams and boards and somebody able to help saw them to my measurements. But it was best not to make this look too easy, so I squinched up my eyes and looked serious.
“Ye-es, I think I could do it. But I’ll need some help with the cutting, and I have to have materials. I don’t have the time or money to go off and buy them and haul them in.” Even as I spoke, I wondered where in tarnation in this flat, treeless country you were going to find lumber.
“That’s no problem at all. Ole is a bachelor, and his house will be empty after the hanging. We’ll just take the lumber from his home and build his scaffold with it.” He beamed at me.
It sounded heartless, hanging a man on his own house, but I didn’t say anything. Probably this Ole fellow deserved to die.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’ll start tomorrow, if we can come to terms on the pay for this job. What’re you offerin’?”
He pulled a small black notebook from a coat pocket and riffled through the pages. “Last man got paid forty-five dollars for the entire thing, but it fell down, and we ran him out of town. I figure we got about what we paid for. So this time, to get it done right, we’re offering a hundred dollars, and we supply all the materials.”
That was a handsome price, and I grinned my agreement. “I may just set up shop here, Marshal, if it’s all right with you,” I said. “I guess the fellow who built your gallows also put up the other... buildings...in town?”
The Marshal looked glum. “He did indeed. They’re all about to fall down too, as you probably noticed. We can use your skills, Mr. Blackwith. I hope you decide to stay.”
As I ambled back across the street to the hotel I thought about this crazy place. It just might be that I’d found my na
tural home, because everything I’d ever done was out of kilter, with the lone exception of my buildings. I run my folks half crazy with my schemes. I run my wife into the grave worrying about the money I kept losing on bad investments. Kaylowe Junction might be the place for me.
When I got back to the hotel, Feldmaster had my tools all neatly stored in a back room behind his counter, and he was beaming as if I was the best thing he’d seen in months. Looking around the Junction, I decided that, homely as I am, that just might be the case.
The café where I ate supper was a surprise. Aunt Belle wasn’t plump and smiling as I had expected, but the wiry little woman wearing a permanent frown dished up as tasty a stew and as flaky a crust under her dried apple pie as I ever put in my mouth. But what took my eye was her niece, Lily, who swished around the cramped dining room like a dancer, her trays never wavering, not a drop spilling. She was no beauty, having more freckles than a dog has fleas, but her smile warmed up the whole room.
All in all, when I got back to my dusty room that night I felt as if I’d somehow come into my own. Next morning I was sure of it.
When I left the hotel for breakfast, there was already a pile of timbers in the middle of the square, and a bunch of fellows were busy hauling in more in a couple of wagons. I could have built a house—and then I thought. It was a house! Ole Tollersen’s house. Damn! The idea bothered me for some reason.
The job was a snap. My only problem was making it seem like a lot more work than it was, and that was made easier by the fact that all my helpers, enthusiastic as they were, turned out to be accident prone and stumble-footed. For some reason that didn’t surprise me at all.
But I went about that gallows-building as if I was building the Royal Palace in London. I measured Ole Tollersen, so the crossbar would be high enough to give the rope some play, the noose hanging just at the right height. The trap had to be big enough to let his size sixteen boots through the hole. I fitted that thing to him like a wedding suit, and if he didn’t appreciate it, I didn’t much blame him.
He wasn’t a bad old bird, once I got to know him. He was the size of a house, of course, which had to be why there was so much timber in the stack growing beside the gallows, but he seemed nice and gentle, if you didn’t rile him. Which, of course, three folks had done, in the past few years.
When he smashed the last one with one of those pile-driver fists, the citizens of the Junction decided he was too dangerous a neighbor to keep around and finally tried him for murder. Wasn’t a doubt of his guilt, of course, and the judge agreed.
I stretched out the job until a week before the borrowed hangman was due to arrive. The Marshal seemed happy as a pig in clover, and everybody else likewise. Lily smiled at me when I went into Aunt Belle’s, and when I asked her to sit down and eat supper with me one evening, she plopped right down and her aunt didn’t say a word. Even Belle’s frown eased up about three wrinkles worth.
The day of the hanging I didn’t go. I was busy moving from house to house, store to store, trying to gauge how much work was necessary to keep the entire town from falling flat.
The wind was blowing harder than usual. Fat black clouds were piling up on the horizon, and I was glad I wasn’t standing there in the open square, waiting to see poor Ole get his neck stretched.
Noon came, and I ate dinner with Feldmaster’s brother-in-law, whose house I had just inspected. He and his mousy wife seemed tickled to have me stay, and we was sitting around the table, belching and making small talk, when I heard a train, way off in the distance.
I wasn’t from Missouri for nothing. I dived under the heavy oak table, and Mr. and Mrs. Jenks joined me without wasting time. A good thing, too, because the walls went everywhichaway and a chunk of the roof fell right on top of that table, which was a stout piece of work, all the way from England.
The rain came down like Noah’s flood, and when we finally peeped out into the rubble that had been the house, it was almost impossible to find a way out. The Jenks’s house had been the solidest one I’d looked at yet. As I crawled out, I wondered what the rest of Kaylowe’s Junction looked like.
Did my gallows stand? With a sigh I rose to my feet, pulling up by a chifforobe with a lace curtain spiraled around it, and reached down to help the Jenkses out from under the table.
The sky was getting lighter, though it was still raining fit to drown a cat. We picked our way out, Mrs. Jenks crying softly every time she spotted something busted or missing, and by the time we got into the front yard we could see that where the town had stood there was not much left. Scatters of junk, mostly.
I ran toward Aunt Belle’s. Lily! Was she all right? I found her under the horse trough, which was rolled against a cottonwood tree. She looked dizzy, but once I lifted the thing (must have weighed a ton) so she could crawl out, she looked up and saw me and smiled, and the sun came out for me, right then and there.
The hotel was leaning over like a drunk at midnight. I carried her over and set her on her feet just in time to see Mr. Feldmaster stagger up from a ditch, holding his head and looking dazed. I helped him sit down on what was left of a step and turned, wondering what I would find of my gallows.
It stood there, rock solid, the trap visible where it had flapped down under poor Tollersen’s boots. A foot of rope, dangling from the crossbar, moved in the wind and dripped rain.
There wasn’t a sign of Tollersen. “Where is he?” I asked Lily.
Somehow I had put my arm around her shoulders, and I felt her begin to shiver. “Lord, Dan, that funnel come swooping down and carried him away with the rest of that rope whipping behind him like the tail of a kite. The stores and the hotel and the houses just seemed to collapse, and I think the Marshal’s buried under that pile of lumber over there.”
She pointed to another mess of trash beyond the gallows, and I ran to dig into it. That little fellow was probably as flat as Ole’s enemies. But when I come to one of his boots, not so shiny now but still size three, I heard a string of cussing to equal anything I ever ran across.
I pulled him out and we set about finding the scattered remnants of the population of Kaylowe’s Junction. It was a good thing they’d mostly been out in the open, watching Ole dangle and catching up on gossip. If they’d been at home, there would have been a lot of deaths that day.
As it was, they’d dived into ditches and behind rocks, of which there was a nice selection, and most come out all right. But not a single house in that entire town was left with a roof and walls enough to keep off a shower.
I never much believed in Providence, but I’ve changed my mind. Since these folks needed a builder the worst way, and since I’d proved my stuff to them, hands down, I’ve been busy as a tick in a tar bucket ever since. Lily helps me too. She hated working in the café, but she’s a master hand with hammer and saw, and I’ve discovered that there can be marriages made in heaven.
The gallows is still there, though since Ole left us there’s nobody mean enough to need hanging. The folks seem to like having it there, knowing it weathered that twister and never stirred a peg. Come another, I hope their houses will do the same.
We never found Ole. I wonder if some Injun village, someplace, had him thump down among ’em and never did figure out where he come from. But that’s neither here nor there. The main thing is that the Junction is going back up, solid as granite, and business is booming since the main trail westward has livened up some. Cattle are scrounging grass out on the plain now, and even our little Marshal has gained a pound or two.
So has Lily. When Young Dan’l comes along next summer, we’ll have another carpenter to raise to keep the town in shape when I’m gone.
From time to time I think of old Henry. Does Providence make a plan, the way I do when I build a house, and mark out how everything a man does affects everything else? It seems sensible to think so.
But if that’s the way it is, how on God’s green ea
rth was it planned that I had to shoot a mule to set my life on track? Seems almighty cruel to me, and I figure old Henry would be the first to agree.
HEAVY, HEAVY HANGS OVER YOUR HEAD
I love the mountains of eastern Oregon. They are harsh and comfortless and demand much of those who would live there.
He could hear it humming in the wind. Not that anyone else could hear it—he’d asked some of his infrequent visitors and all had denied noticing it. But he knew. He heard it not only when the wind blew over the hanging rock, he could feel it at any time of the day or night, suspended over his house on that unsteady ledge, waiting for its chance.
The feud had begun the moment he picked this spot to build his cabin. This sunny niche on the south-facing wall of the narrow valley was ideal for his purposes, with a spring gushing from the rock not twenty feet from his door. It even had trees—six thick-bodied junipers had defied the elements to live to ripe old ages. He enjoyed hearing their husky voices when the wind blew. They almost drowned out the voices of the stone.
No sooner had he leveled a spot in the soil for his foundations than the mountain began throwing things at him. Gravels, at first, followed by rocks the size of footballs.
More harassment! He had left the world of his fellow men because of such things.
But he had retreated as far as he intended to go. He would make his stand in this spot, and if it meant a feud with a mountain, then so be it. He had lumber hauled up at ruinous prices. He sawed, measured, hammered in nails until he had a stout shelter in which to try to heal the wounds he had suffered “out there.”
While he was building, he felt the mountain staring over his shoulder, like some oversized cat surveying its prey. That only made him more determined. On the day when he hung the front door, a heavy affair of oak boards secured with metal bands, the mountain made its first serious move.