God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  “Oh, my.” Martha did not know how to react, she felt a glow spread in her that had nothing to do with the fire’s heat. She was that pleased to have their good opinion, though why should it matter what a darky thought? She didn’t know, but somehow it did.

  “Thank you,” she said, and Tabby looked her in the eye for the first time and smiled the merest bit, but Martha knew that sometimes the biggest changes show in the smallest things, a leaf turning yellow on a tree, or a child sniffling. A black woman smiling at a white.

  Blinking in the sunlight, the Stevens woman came out. “He’s sleeping. I got to thank you.” She was talking to Martha, but including Tabby, though she could not admit to owing a Negro anything, much less the life of her son. Her hair was coming down. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes, and the black eye stuff mixed with her paint smeared across her face and soiled her sleeve, but she had no thought for her looks, though the took out the pins and started in to fix her hair. Before Martha could speak, she said, “I got to say this, and fast, so you listen good. And don’t you never tell no one I said it. You hear?”

  Martha nodded. What on earth could this woman want to say that was so important?

  “I know you was a friend of Nick’s. He was a good boy. The kind of boy I wisht mine was.” She sighed. “That shouldn’t ought to have happened to him.”

  “No, it shouldn’t, sure enough.” Martha wondered what she was getting at.

  “You remember when that fella was murdered on the main road a few weeks ago? Right out in the open?”

  “I recollect.” Plenty had seen it, but said they weren’t close enough to tell who did it. Maybe they were too scared to say, and who could blame them? Who to report it to, anyhow? Gallagher? “About the time Nick disappeared, wasn’t it?”

  “Round about then. George Ives bragged at Fancy Annie’s he done it. Said he was the Bamboo Chief what killed that man and got away with it. After, he went over to Long John’s place and laid low in case someone spotted him.”

  “Dear Lord in heaven.” Martha made herself breathe, in and out, in and out, because it was plain there was more to come, and presently, the Stevens woman told Martha how she happened to overhear, her and the man she – and she turned her face away from Martha, while the redness rose up her neck, and Tabby poked the mattress and Martha felt her own face could burn the thing.

  In almost a whisper she continued, “Most of the boys are all right, a little woolly around the edges, maybe, but no real harm in them. Some of them others, that Boone Helm, now, they’re downright evil. They told me, keep my damn mouth shut about things, but I figure I can trust you. Keep me out of it.” She paused, watched toward the saloon, before she added, “I figure sooner or later they’ll get Jacky involved in their doings, if they ain’t already. I don’t know how to stop that. My boy’s lacking, poor soul, and he ain’t got sense to say no to these fellas, but if Ives is found guilty over at Nevada City it might put the fear of God into him.” She sighed.

  “You know how it is. You got a boy, too. My Jacky, he wants to be just like George Ives. If he sees it can happen to Ives, maybe he’d turn onto a better road.”

  “We got to keep our young’uns safe.” Martha was thinking how mothers all had something in common, even her and this – woman. They’d do most anything to keep their boys straight. And alive.

  “Here she comes.” Tabby was looking down the path to where Helen Troy hurried toward them.

  “I got to go in. Remember now. I never said nothing.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  The Troy woman held a poke in one hand and the ledger book and a pencil in the other. She pressed the poke into Martha’s hand. “Thank you. You done a brave thing.” When Tabby grunted and shifted her feet, the Troy woman said, “You both did. Free darkies don’t have to tend white folks.”

  Martha and Tabby walked up Idaho in the bright sweet air. “Half of what’s in this poke is yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “For certain,” said Martha,.“You didn’t have to stay.” Her thoughts ran to how Nick’s mother had loved him, and thank God wasn’t alive no more to know how her boy had been killed. George Ives had a mother somewhere, too, who loved her boy. What could mothers do to keep their sons safe from being murdered or murdering? How to raise them up right in these violent, troubled times?

  Tabby stopped, and Martha walked on. She had to pass on the message. Find a way to tell Mr. Stark without anyone else knowing. McDowell wouldn’t like it none at all if he come to know she’d carried information against George Ives. The preachers said a wife wasn’t to go against her husband, but the Lord said plain enough: Thou shalt not murder, and she thought that included helping a murderer get away, which was what might happen if Mr. Stark didn’t know about the Bamboo Chief.

  But how to get word to him?

  When she realized the darky wasn’t with her, she stopped and waited for the black woman. Tabby began to talk about how to get a message to Mr. Stark, and Martha thought there couldn’t be tears in her eyes, but if so, what for? And then Tabby come up with a smart plan for her and Albert to take Martha over to Nevada, and Martha did a little jig, right there on the corner by his and Jacob’s cabin. “Tabby Rose, you do have good ideas, don’t you, now?” She’d tell Mr. Stark, and the typhus give her an excuse she could use with McDowell if he found out she’d been over there, and she’d see him, but not like this. She’d wash first and put on a clean dress so as not to carry the contagion with her. Or the smell. And she’d see him. She’d see him.

  * * *

  Firelight licked at the stars and wavered over men’s faces, along the ground to the recorders’ table where young Pemberton tested the ink on his pen’s nib. Finding it would not flow, he laid the pen in the gutter of his notebook. Dan thought of reminding him that with sunrise, the ink would blot the book, but Pemberton was not of an age to appreciate such reminders. Out beyond the circle of firelight, the crowd roamed; the roughs in their midst, armed with the courage of darkness, shouted threats: Say your prayers, you’ll need them! This’ll be the last sunrise you ever see! Let George Ives go or you’re dead!

  Evil from the dark. The tiger in the night, eyes gleaming, just as he now made out a hooked nose, a button’s shine, a bottle uptilted to a mouth. Tyger, tyger, burning bright in the forest of the night. Malevolent glares battered at him. A bullet from the dark would not be so difficult. He willed the sun to rise, but it stayed stubbornly below the jagged rim of the mountains, while somewhere beyond the firelight, the Ives faction skulked.

  A voice from the darkness, “Plummer will be here soon!”

  “Damn!” Sheriff Hereford beat his gloved hands together. “Plummer could be here any time.”

  “God help us then,” said Judge Wilson, and he looked around, as if Plummer would materialize out of the restless gathering.

  Dan touched the rifle’s stock, and the hard steel reassured him, but could he shoot fast enough one-handed, to save his own life? Unsling it, lever a shell into the breech, cock, and fire? Could he shoot a man, even in self-defense? In this matter of killing, it was not true what Beidler had said: Quarry was not quarry.

  In the darkness lurked the possibility of Plummer’s arrival. “‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ in the forests of the night.’” Dan murmured the lines to himself.

  “‘What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’” Sanders’s quiet voice spoke the next two lines.

  Dan started. “Another Blake reader?”

  “Not especially,” Sanders said. “He’s too fanciful for me, but my young cousin, Mattie Edgerton, loves him. She has recited this poem so often I’ve learned parts of it.” He added, “Rather as one’s coat absorbs tobacco smoke.”

  Bagg took his pipe out of his mouth, assumed an orator’s stance, and pointed the pipe stem upward: “‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’”

  Dan laughed until he felt on the verge of hysteria.

  Bagg lifted one eyebrow. “I didn’t think
I was so amusing. Maybe I should go on the stage.”

  Wiping his eyes, Dan said, “Your imitation of Senator Douglas is magnificent.” One-handed, he folded his handkerchief and stowed it away. “I saw him speak in New York.” With Grandfather. Douglas had spoken on the subject of “The Rights of Man,” specifically property rights, the property, of course, being slaves. Grandfather had hoped Douglas would convince Dan, but Dan had been incensed, and their homeward argument had caused feelings that lasted until Father’s fatal bullet.

  “We can imagine his subject,” Sanders said, with a twist to his lips. “The poem raises an interesting question, though, how a good God could create a world in which evil exists.”

  “We could propose that at the next meeting of the Philosophical Society,” Dan said.

  “Oh?” Bagg’s pipe was out. He struck a match and puffed to start it again, his cheeks filling and flattening. “There is such a thing here?”

  Dan was about to tell him about it when a blast in the diggings not far off startled them.

  “Sounds like cannon,” Sanders said. “Today is remarkably reminiscent of a battle’s second phase.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Bagg said. Dan felt left out; the two war veterans shared an experience, a perspective, that he never would have. “We won the skirmishes yesterday. Today the battle.” The prosecutors met each others’ gaze, and read the same understanding: the war could still be lost.

  Judge Byam rang the cowbell and called for order. When he could be heard, Sheriff Hereford shouted: “William Palmer!”

  Dan admired Palmer’s courage. He was the first man who dared to testify to what he had seen and heard. The tall, thin Englishman marched toward the green wagon as if the threats, “You’ll pay for this!” and “You’re a dead man!” landed in the fire. The cowbell rang out, the judges yelled for silence, miners shouted at the roughs: “Pipe down!” and “Shut up!” The threats died with the cowbell’s echo, the crowd settled into stillness so deep that Dan felt he could hear it breathe, as if all the individuals, Union and Confederate, roughs and miners, had melded into a single creature, not so frightening as the tyger.

  Bagg looked like most of the men in the crowd. In his ragged grey uniform and his long matted hair, he was the picture of a miner too intent on digging gold even to trim his beard. His Southern drawl and Palmer’s London accent caused some comical misunderstandings that had men smiling, until the saloonkeeper came to tell how on Thursday, just four days ago, he had been happy to do some shooting, and how happiness had changed to horror when Providence dropped the sage hen on Nick’s body.

  His description of the corpse chilled the people as sub-freezing temperature had not. The distant piano music and high-pitched cries of little boys at their games seemed sacrilegious, like spitting in church. A woman sobbed. Dan saw faces rapt with attention, downturned mouths, eyes brimming with tears. Faces. He saw faces. Sunrise.

  When Palmer told how Long John Frank and George Hilderman had refused to help him, some men called out, “No!” A woman screamed. A few men booed, at what, Dan didn’t know. A deep voice boomed, “Liar! Liar!” Dan swung around. McDowell shook his fist at Palmer.

  God! That her husband would be so calloused, so indifferent to Nick’s death. McDowell had known him! How had such a decent woman come to link her future with this oaf? Dan’s left hand clenched into a fist, and pain stabbed his arm. He opened the fingers, and the pain settled to a hard throbbing.

  Several in the crowd shouted at McDowell to shut up, and behind Ives men pushed and shoved, but the guards thrust shotgun barrels between them. Judge Byam rang the cowbell and rang it until quiet returned. Dan dared to admit a small hope; it was the first time miners had confronted the roughs.

  Bagg climbed down from the wagon, and Sanders and Dan congratulated him, but Bagg shook his head. “Time will tell.”

  Thurmond stood within two feet of Palmer and stabbed his middle finger toward Palmer’s eyes. “I put it to you, that you are lying!”

  “Scoundrel!” Palmer stood his ground. As tall as Long John, he towered over the defense attorney, and shook his fist in Thurmond’s face. “The whole Gulch saw me bring that poor lad’s body in.”

  “Oh, you may have found the body, but you’re lying about what Long John said.”

  “I ain’t lying!” bellowed Palmer. “I give full measure in my saloon, and I don’t put my thumb on the scales.” He appealed to the crowd. “Have I ever cheated you?”

  Cheering answered him. Among the advisory jury, several men shook their heads, and one shouted, “Palmer’s no liar!” Dan let his small hope grow a little.

  The sun traveled southwesterly on its shallow winter arc, as Thurmond struggled to trick Palmer into saying he had misquoted Long John, even by one word, and the prosecutors shouted out the same objection time and again, that he badgered the witness, and the judges ruled in their favor, until at last Thurmond gave up.

  Surrounded by guards, Long John walked into the court. Dan thought of gladiators or Christians entering the Coliseum. Would the juries turn thumbs up or thumbs down? He longed for a stick to carve, wished his left hand could hold one. George Ives turned to joke with his friends. Long John climbed into the wagon and took the oath amid jeers and threats, and Ives laughed at a joke, as if all this were a grand party just for him.

  “Doesn’t Ives understand he’s on trial for his life? Has he no fear?”

  Sanders said, “Perhaps to him this is some sort of drama being played out, and nothing to do with him except he must sit there for as long as it takes to resolve this.”

  Bagg put Long John at ease with questions designed to show him in the best light possible. When he led Long John to tell what happened when Nicholas Tbalt was killed, Dan leaned against the green wagon and watched young Pemberton’s pen scratch across the page. There was a large blot in the gutter. Pemberton, Dan recalled, did not believe in Ives’s guilt. What would he think when this day was done? The crowd was as silent as a thousand men in one place ever could be. A rough shouted, and other men cut him off. The air stretched tight with listening, and on the benches, men craned forward to hear over the crackle of flames.

  Before Bagg finished, Thurmond and Smith began a low-voiced argument, and when Smith attempted to rise, Thurmond jumped to his feet and pushed him back.

  “Long John, I put it to you that George Ives did not kill Nicholas Tbalt. You killed the poor lad and are trying to save your skin by blaming Mr. Ives. He’s a respectable businessman and rancher here, and you’re jealous because he’s more successful than you are. That is the truth, is it not?”

  “No, by God, it ain’t.” Long John’s voice rang out. “Like I said, George went after him, and I heard a shot, maybe two, and a little later he come riding back with the mules and the dust.”

  “How many shots were there?”

  “I disremember exactly. One, maybe two.”

  “You remember word for word what Mr. Ives said, but you can’t recall how many shots you heard?”

  “Like I said, I disremember.” His tongue circled his lips. “I was trying not to listen for shots.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I was afeared of what Ives might do to the kid.”

  “You knew he would kill him, didn’t you?”

  “I was afeard he might.”

  “You knew in advance, and you did nothing to stop him?”

  “I was afeared, I’m telling you.” Long John looked down at his feet. His voice was so low he could not have been heard beyond the fire.

  Thurmond shouted at him, “Speak up, man! You knew Ives would shoot him and you did nothing about it. Why not?”

  Long John reared up, seemed ten feet tall. “I told you! I was afeared! You ever try to cross George Ives? It’s a good way to die.”

  Thurmond swept one hand to the side. “Never mind that. What happened to the mules?”

  “Ives turned them out to pasture. I already said that.”

  “So you did. Why haven’t t
hey been found?”

  “He sold them two, three days later to a man heading for Salt Lake.”

  “I see. Now tell me this. What happened to the dust?”

  Long John’s tongue circled his lips before scuttling back into its cave. “George kept it. I didn’t want nothing to do with it.”

  Dan snapped to attention. As if a breeze, blowing through a window in his mind, had caught a pile of papers without page numbers and scattered them, so he had now to reassemble his ideas. Long John always licked his lips when he lied. Damn! He lied about the dust. Dan walked aside, away from the defense and Thurmond. Now what? Admit they had made a mistake? Set Ives free? Yet in Dan’s heart he was still certain Ives had killed Nick. He thumbed through his memories, rummaged among his recollections. What had Long John said when his tongue came out? For the life of him, Dan could not recall precisely. He had not noticed at the time. Fool!