“Oh, there’s a hell,” said X. “A heaven, too. But only one man’s come back to tell about it.”
“I wasn’t there,” said Fitch, his voice disgusted as always when religion came up.
Someone else said, “That’s why we read the Bible. Them fellas was there.”
“It’s getting cold,” X said. “It’ll freeze deep tonight, sure. Give it a few days and we’ll be having winter again. This has just been a little thaw.”
“Cold enough for hell,” Dan said.
“I thought hell was hot,” Fitch said.
“According to an Italian poet, the bottom circle of hell is ice. Guess he thought being cold was worse than being burned.”
“Oh,” sneered Fitch, “poetry.”
“I can’t say nothing about that,” X said, “but the bottom circle is about where these boys belong.” He jerked a thumb at the five corpses.
Williams said, “Some of us will be riding up to Hell Gate after Carter and them.”
“Can you leave in the morning?” asked Pfouts.
“Sure,” Williams said. “Might’s well get it done.”
“That’ll be a long, cold ride,” said Beidler, “a hundred and fifty miles north.”
Dan began to ask a question, but Williams said, “Not you, Counselor. Not with that leg. You stay here and keep order. We can’t have the roughs making trouble.”
“They won’t.” Dan felt as if he’d taken a solemn oath, that never again would honest men and women fear to travel, or walk on a street. The work of God’s thunderbolt, as Martha had said. Martha, now reunited with her husband. Martha, lost. We are God’s thunderbolt, he said to himself, looking at the five corpses now yielding to darkness, and this is our work. The lines from a poem by Emerson came into his mind:
My will fulfilled shall be,
For, in daylight or in dark,
My thunderbolt has eyes to see
His way home in the dark.
Someone lit a stub of candle, and another man lighted a lantern. Their shadows sprang across the floor, across the corpses’ feet. Dan shivered. A small breeze stirred among them, and a rope creaked on wood, Gallagher’s body turning slightly away, swinging back. A small motion, but the hairs rose on the back of Dan’s neck. “Jesus.”
Perhaps a half hour later, Cap Williams said, “That’s enough, boys. Let’s let their friends have them. We’ve done our duty here.”
In the street, a few people waited: friends of the five and other Vigilantes among them, watching. Jacob stepped out to walk beside Dan. From among a small knot of tearful women, one broke away, screamed at the Vigilantes, “You goddam stranglers! They didn’t deserve to die! Stranglers!” It was Isabelle Stevens, her hair coming down around her face, her eyes puffed and red from weeping. Her son, Jacky, stood with her and shook his fist at them. “Stranglers,” he yelled, and other friends of the hanged men shouted, “Stranglers!” Hatred contorted their faces.
Dan swung the muzzle of the Spencer across the crowd, and a man shushed the Stevens woman. “Don’t give them trouble,” he said. “Pipe down.”
Jacob said, “There is more trouble.”
“Trouble?” Dan could not quite grasp what Jacob was telling him. His leg ached, every step on it a blow.
“Sam McDowell. He has hurt his wife.”
Dan forgot the leg, the pain, quickened his step, slipped on some icy mud and nearly fell, grabbed Jacob’s shoulder to steady himself. The wound burned, and tears came to his eyes. “Hurt his wife?” Despite the pain, he hurried, Jacob’s shoulder under his arm, helping him. Oh, God, let her be all right. “That God damn son of a bitch.” He had not freed McDowell so the bastard could hurt Martha. Dear God, Martha. He’d kill McDowell. He’d kill him. The anger swelled inside Dan, so that he felt it about to explode.
Perhaps Jacob guessed. He said, “McDowell, he is gone.”
“Gone?” As if from a sucker punch, Dan’s breath burst out, leaving him spent, collapsed inside. “Gone?”
“Ja. Where, no one knows. But he is gone.”
* * *
The cabin was crowded with women, and lamps and lanterns had been lighted as though lamp oil were cheap and would last forever. When Dan threw open the door, Lydia Hudson bent over the bed and stretched out her arm to shield Martha who lay – oh, God! – too still, though he could see only the quilt pointed where her toes raised it. An Indian woman squatted at the stove, stirring a pan of some fragrant liquid. Dotty, sitting on another woman’s lap, scrambled down to run and throw her arms around him, and he lifted the child up on his right arm, where she clung to him, a terrified baby bird fluttering against his chest. He pushed Lydia Hudson and Tabby Rose aside, or they made way for him, and he looked down at Martha, who lay on her back, her face bruised nearly out of recognition. She was breathing, her chest rose and fell. He wanted to bury his face in her hair and weep.
Lydia Hudson touched his arm. “She will be all right. No bones are broken, and her face will heal. He had no time to do more damage.”
“Why? Who?” Dan heard himself stutter. He couldn’t look away from Martha. McDowell, that son of a bitch had beaten Martha, left her for dead. Left her, his children in this state. Left his wife –– Ah.
Left his wife.
Dan set Dotty on her feet. He laid the back of his hand against Martha’s hair. The women had let it down, and the thick braid lay down her shoulder, over her breast. Almost to her waist. McDowell had left his wife. Her hair was a dark rich brown, and Dan had never touched anything so soft. Thank God he was not riding to Hell Gate in the morning with Williams and Fitch. He would protect her in case McDowell, damn his soul, came back.
Mrs. Hudson said, “Timothy got shut of him.”
“He did?” Dan looked up, saw Tim for the first time, sitting at the kitchen table.
“Yup.” The boy held a steaming cup in his hands. “I hit him over the head with Ma’s frying pan, and when he got up, I kicked him.”
Dan did not need to ask where. “Good for you.”
“He had it coming a long time.”
Mrs. Hudson bumped at Dan with her hip. “Go sit down there, if thee wants to talk.”
Dan obeyed her. Dotty came to sit on his lap, but he fended her off. “I took a bullet, little one, so it’ll be a while before you can sit on my knee.”
The Indian woman set a mug of tea in front of Dan. It was strange stuff, but after the first sip, tasty and soothing. “Thank you,” Dan said, and she ducked her head and smiled. A pretty woman in her deer hide dress, who somewhat resembled Martha in the dark eyes and high cheekbones. Dotty poured herself a cup and sat on the fourth chair. “Her name’s Berry Woman,” Dotty said. “She’s Fitch’s wife.” The Indian woman nodded and smiled. Dan held out his hand and said his name. Dotty added, “She’s Mam’s friend.”
Dan smiled to see how grown up Dotty acted, sitting there with two men, one her brother. But her eyes were big, the pupils dark and fearful. “What if Pap comes back?”
Tim said, “I’ll kill him, he comes back here.”
“No, you won’t.” When the boy started to protest, Dan merely looked at him, and Tim nodded as if he understood that he wouldn’t have to. Because I will, Dan said silently. This woman, this child, and the boy would never face that bully alone again. “You don’t need to worry. I doubt very much your father will ever come back here. We’ve taken care of his friends.”
“Oooh!” Dotty’s heels beat against the rung of the chair. “You hung them?”
The room hushed as Dan said, “Yes, we did. This afternoon.”
After a moment, the little girl said, “Good. I didn’t like them one bit. That Lyons, he looked at me funny.”
Dan’s jaw tightened. “From now on, if a man looks at you funny, you tell me.”
Beside the bed, the women stirred. Dan straightened, craned his neck to see past the curtain of their skirts. A thin trickle of a voice called: “Dan? Daniel?”
Mrs. Hudson said, “She’s asking for thee.�
��
All the uncertainties of the last month sloughed away in the few steps to the bed, where he went down on one knee and took her hand and laid it against his cheek. In calling his name, this plain sparrow of a woman had wrung out his heart and pinned it on her life.
* * *
Yet there remained unfinished business in New York. Each evening, as he sat at supper with Martha and the youngsters, the knowledge of it pecked at him, but Dan did not know how to broach the subject. Truth to tell, he feared going back to confront Grandfather’s expectations, Mother’s tears, the children’s disappointment. Miss Dean. He did not think of her as Harriet now, she had become something else, a woman of his acquaintance with whom he had once fancied himself in love. All of that paled before the larger fear, that Martha might in her turn become someone he had known during his sojourn in a faraway place. He must tie himself to her somehow. Somehow.
As her bruises faded, she became more beautiful to him than ever. Some strain wearing away from her face relaxed her features into sweetness, and she put on a little weight. Not that she would ever be plump, but her body softened. Not that she changed her mode of dress, for she was a modest woman, but that occasionally she would move, all unconsciously, about her activities in such a way as to weaken his knees so that he regretted having put away the cane. As she leaned forward to lay a plate on the table, her shape under the blue shirtwaist would alter. Or, as she peeled one last potato into the slop pail with quicksilver strokes of the knife, her skirt might flow in a certain way against her rounded posterior.
At those times, he would make haste to shift his eyes to the youngsters, and do his best to appear fascinated by something one of them said. Or ask Dotty how she was doing in school, or suggest to Tim a card game after dinner. He was teaching the boy to play poker, both so that he himself would have someone to play with away from the saloons, and so that a card sharp would not humbug Tim.
They spent comfortable snowy evenings that way, sharing the pool of lamplight on the table after dinner, Dan and Tim at their cards, Dotty and Martha taking turns reading aloud from Martha’s Bible and sewing. He helped them with the hard words, and when the sewing basket emptied, Martha asked if she could mend some of his garments. He brought her two shirts and the trousers he’d worn when the Mexican shot him.
It felt like a family, because he was the only boarder. Not long after she was able to get about, he had found her rolling out pie crusts when he came to pay his board bill in advance. Pressing the poke into her hands, he’d said, “You don’t have to work so hard any more.” Then he held her while she sobbed against his coat. Lest he do something to make her despise him, he had pleaded the press of business and gone back to work.
Without his active encouragement, people were bringing him legal work. Because he had helped to successfully prosecute Ives, the problems came in thick enough that he had to rent an office on Jackson, below Wallace. He found that he liked practicing law here, enjoyed solving the problems they brought, was interested in them. These cases were not the dry leaves of contract law; they were flesh and blood and mattered to people, affected people’s lives.
Away from Grandfather’s overpowering control, the law was his vocation.
Sanders sent word that he would soon move to Virginia from Bannack, and Dan looked forward to having another Union lawyer to talk things over with. The roughs melted away from Virginia as they had melted from Bannack, and the town settled into quiet. Alex Davis stopped by Dan’s office from time to time, and they discussed establishing a “people’s court.” Dan proposed Davis as its judge, and the other Virginia Vigilantes agreed. They would not hold his defense of Ives against him, for he was an honest man.
Somewhere, in the snow-piled mountains, companies of other Vigilantes rode, and Dan, hurrying between business and Martha’s cabin, tried to imagine the storms, the darkness, the cold at seven or eight thousand feet. If he’d been a praying man, he would have spent hours on his knees, but he knew Martha prayed for them.
All the month after he’d hanged Gallagher, he postponed the distasteful task of telling the family he must make the trip to New York. Then a man who owned a dry goods store and wanted to leave the Gulch, offered to sell his cabin. Without thinking twice, Dan bought it, along with some furniture, and moved in. Jacob, now working for the Morris brothers, could keep the bachelor cabin for a nominal rent, and share it with Tim.
The first night in the double bed he rejoiced at the pure luxury of so much space to himself. The next day he began his campaign.
It was his deal, and the rhythmic slap of cards onto the table did not falter. “I have to make a trip.” He spread his up-facing cards as he spoke. By the way their heads lifted, alert as deer scenting danger, he knew this would not be easy. Dotty, who had trusted everyone before McDowell left, now had the wary look of the puppy she and Tabby Rose had rescued. Tim held the beginnings of anger in his clenched hands. And Martha’s head, bent over her Bible, stayed down as if to ward off a blow. Damn McDowell anyway, wherever he was. Best place, in hell.
“I will be gone at most four months. A month to travel to New York, a month to travel back, two months there to situate my family and take my punishment.”
“Take your punishment?” That caught Martha’s attention.
“Yes, because they are expecting me to stay, and I shall return to Virginia City. To you.” He inhaled to the limit of his lungs. This was the hardest to explain, considering what came next. “I have also to break my word. To a woman.”
“What woman?” Tim’s man’s voice rasped, and he cleared his throat.
“Her name is Harriet Dean, and we were engaged to be married.” How much easier it was to say it than he had anticipated, as if the regret and the pain had all drained away.
Dan faced Tim’s next challenge, aware that this boy was growing fast, and filling out, and could soon grow to a man bigger than his father. He had assumed a man’s role, protector of his mother and sister, and Dan knew that if he were to gain the mother he would have to convince her son. He could not hope to conquer the mother without Tim’s approval, or offer himself as head of the family unless Tim willingly allowed him. “You come here and forgot you was promised?”
“Not quite. Before I left New York, Miss Dean returned my ring and would not promise to wait for me.” Confronted by Tim’s skeptical silence, Martha’s wary expression, and Dotty’s bewilderment, Dan began to disrobe, to relate the entire sordid story, and with every piece of it revealed, he felt more naked. He related how Father’s suicide revealed that he had gambled away not only his personal fortune, and the Firm’s funds, but their clients’ money as well. How Grandfather had bankrupted himself and sold the family home to pay back the clients, and it had not been enough. How he had charged Dan with bringing home gold to repay the rest of the clients’ funds and restore the family to honor, if not to their former social status. How Grandfather expected he would take over the Firm. How he had promised Miss Dean to return even though she returned his ring.
“Have you enough gold?” asked Martha.
“Yes.” Dan removed another garment. “From survey fees, a little speculation in claims, winnings at poker, and legal fees.”
Tim said, “And you expect punishment from what? Not taking over the Firm, as you call it, and not staying to marry a woman who maybe didn’t wait for you?”
“That’s right. Grandfather is very strong-willed, and I gave my word to Miss Dean. I shall break it while I’m back East, and come home to you three.”
“Home?” Martha asked. Her eyes had that luminous glow about them. “Here?”
“Yes.” Dan stripped himself entirely naked to them, let them judge for themselves the build of him, the set of his shoulders, the width of his chest, the tapering of his belly toward his loins. He spoke to Martha: “Because I have come to love you, you and your children.”
In the following silence he had time for the beginning of despair before Martha rose from her chair and gathered him to her,
rested his head against her breast, kissed his hair. Dan, closer to tears than he had been since he was four, wrapped his arms around her thighs. He nestled there, and watched Tim, who appeared to be adjusting his ideas to the sight of his mother holding Dan to herself.
The younger man nodded. “Very well. I’m believing you, Mr. Stark.” He pointed his index finger at Dan. “But if’n you don’t come back in five months, allowing for accidents, or if’n you hurt my Mam, I’ll travel back to New York City and I’ll find you, so help me God I will.”
* * *
He’d said he wanted her to look the new cabin over before she and the youngsters moved into it, to keep it for him until he came back, but that was a ruse, to hide the question burning his throat since McDowell left. Now, some days after he’d told the family he had to go back to New York in the spring, Dan considered the time was as right as it ever would be. McDowell was still absent, everyone on Yeager’s list had been accounted for. The Vigilantes controlled an outwardly peaceful region, and the new “people’s court” with Alex Davis as judge, had begun regular sessions.
God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana Page 41