Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  “It is time, Blaisedell,” he said, and he hoped that Blaisedell would remember, but still there was no answer. The rocking chair creaked again. He repeated the words.

  Then he took a deep breath and said, “Marshal, I will have to come after you if you are still here by morning. I—”

  “Not Marshal,” Blaisedell said. “Clay Blaisedell.” Blaisedell laughed, and he stepped back, against his will, from that laugh. “Are you running me out of town, Deputy?”

  He could see Blaisedell’s eyes more clearly now, and more of his face; the welts on it looked like tattoo marks. “No, I am just saying I will have to arrest you in the morning. So I am asking you to go before.”

  “Nobody tells me that,” Blaisedell said. “Or asks me. I will come and go as I please.”

  “Then I will have to come after you in the morning.”

  “Come shooting if you do.”

  “Why, I will do that if I have to, Marshal.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  He stood there staring at Blaisedell, but Blaisedell was not looking at him any longer. “It is a damned shame, Marshal!” he burst out, but Blaisedell said nothing more, and finally he started on, holding himself carefully and tightly as though, if he did not, he would fall apart like something made of wet straw. He moved on east on Main Street without even being aware where he was going. When he looked back he could no longer see Blaisedell in the darkness.

  At the comer of Grant Street he saw a light from the General Peach thrown out onto the dust of the street in a long, dim rectangle. He turned away from it and started up toward Kate’s house with the key suddenly a very conscious weight and shape in his pocket. He took it out as he mounted the wooden steps. It rattled against the metal of the lock.

  When it entered he turned it and thrust the door open. Inside the floor creaked beneath his weight. He closed the door and stood there waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the deeper darkness here. His shoulders ached, and dust and ashes itched upon his face and around his neck. He could make out a shape like a deep coffin on the floor between him and the bedroom door, and there was a flicker of light in the doorway beyond it. Kate’s disembodied face appeared, filled with shadows, with a candle flame below it. The box before him was one of her trunks.

  “Deputy?” she said, in a calm voice, and he answered yes, nodding, but he did not move, shivering still, though it was warmer here. Kate lowered the candle a little and he saw that she wore a loose robe which she held clasped at the waist with her left hand.

  Kate watched him without expression as he removed his hat and started toward her. It was a waxen face above the candle flame, with no paint on it, and a cloud of thick black hair framing it. The beauty spot was missing from her cheek. She looked very slim and boyish in the robe, but a dull point of a breast showed through the silk with the pull of her hand at her waist.

  As he approached she moved back with a slight inclination of her head, and, hat in hand, he passed into her bedroom. He watched her place the candle on a box beside her bed. The room was barren now, as he had seen it once before, with only a few clothes hanging upon the wire stretched across one corner, the sad-faced Virgin and her other things evidently packed away for her departure. She sat down on the edge of the bed, stiffly, her eyes raised to him. There were blue-black glints in her hair from the candlelight.

  His tongue felt thick in his mouth. “I have told Blaisedell he is to get out of town by morning.”

  “Have you?” Kate said, tonelessly, and he nodded.

  “And did he go?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  Her full, pale lips opened a little and he could hear the sudden whisper of her breathing. He felt sweaty, foul, and exhausted, and there was a slow, crushing movement in his head, like the laboring of a walking beam. “What do you want of me?” Kate whispered. “Are you afraid?” She unclasped her hand and the robe fell open down her white belly. He averted his eyes.

  “Why, I can fix that,” she continued. “That is what men come to women for, isn’t it?”

  “I guess I’m not very much afraid,” he said.

  “Come to brag? What a man you are?”

  He flushed and shook his head.

  “Someone to be sorry you are dead?” Kate said. He shook his head again, but she went on. “I have seen all those things. When you have seen everything you still have to watch it over and over—” Her voice broke, but immediately she regained control of it. “And over,” she said. “The same tilings happening and coming on. But I have seen one thing new. I have seen Tom Morgan kill himself, and I know he did it for Clay Blaisedell.”

  “He has to go,” he said. “He is on the prod and mean. He burned Taliaferro’s place down, and all but burned the town.”

  “Oh, he will go. You can make him go by letting him kill you. That is brave, isn’t it?”

  The candlelight gleamed in her black eyes that were like deep ponds. “But not quite brave enough? Did you come to get the rest from me?” She said it as though it were important to her.

  “There is no one else but me to do it,” he said hoarsely. “And—and everything’s come to nothing if I don’t. It is up to me; do you think I want to do it?”

  “Do what? Die? Or kill him?”

  “Why, put it to him, even.” He wrenched his hat between his hands, and stared down at the swath of her flesh where the robe hung open.

  “Tom would kill himself for Blaisedell, but you would do it for a silly star on your chest,” Kate said. “Take it off—I will take a man, I won’t take a sharp-pointed tin thing like that against me. Take it off!” she said again, as his fingers fumbled the catch loose. He dropped the star in his pocket.

  “Not afraid?” Kate said, mockingly; but her face was not mocking. “Wait!” she said. “Tom to pay for Peach, and you for Tom. But I will have my pay too. What for, Johnny? You are not fool enough to think you can beat him?”

  “No, I know I can’t. That’s it, you see.”

  Her eyes narrowed. With a blunt movement of her hand she pulled the robe further open. “Then why?”

  “If I am killed—”

  “Give you the rest of your life in a night?” she said. “All of it?” In her face he saw what seemed to him a half-amused contempt, but triumph in it, and increasing triumph, and then pain showed naked there. “Come here then,” she said, in a voice he didn’t even recognize.

  She pulled at her robe again as he dropped to his knees before her. He stifled a sound that welled in his throat, and flung his arms around her and pressed his face into her flesh. She brushed her hand over his head.

  “You smell like a horse barn,” she said gently. Her hand pressed his face against her. “Johnny, Johnny,” she whispered. “Do you think I’d let him kill you?”

  He didn’t know what she meant. He felt the heavy swell of her breast against his cheek and stared down in the pale dark between them at the gleam of her thighs. Her breast pressed hard against him as she drew a deep breath; she blew it out, and there was darkness. Both her arms held him against her. She smelled very clean, and he was foul. He ran his hands along her body inside her robe, and he had never felt anything so smooth beneath his hands.

  She rocked with him, forward and back, and whispered words in his ear that had no sense and were only disconnected sounds, but that were the sounds he had always wanted to hear without ever knowing it before. He was shivering uncontrollably as her hands rose and pressed flat against his cheeks and pulled his face to hers. Her lips were wonderfully warm in the warm darkness and her sharp-pointed fingers pressed into his back with exquisite pain. He twisted his lips from hers once, panting for breath, and she pulled his face into her throat where he could hear her own swift, shivering breath. Her body arched and strained against him, and he cried her name as they fell back and away through darkness, and her flesh enveloped him.

  67. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE

  June 5, 1881 (continued)

  THE fire in the Lu
cky Dollar has been quenched, and just in time, for a strong wind has come up. Thank God it did not arise earlier, or this town would have burned as swiftly as dry paper—a burnt offering after a man’s reputation, or his sanity. A town to form Morgan’s funeral pyre, and Blaisedell’s parting salute. Or is it of parting? Those who saw him say he was quite insane. Almost, as I write this, I find I wish he had burned us all out: Warlock gone and ourselves scattered, leaving Blaisedell to brood here alone in his madness.

  There will be no sleep this night.

  The news of the death of General Peach comes as no shock. Neither have I taken it as a sign of New Hope, as Buck Slavin seems to. It is only a meaningless bit of information. Perhaps it is not even true.

  I have had a stream of callers. I suppose they have seen my light and sought a fellow human to talk to. Kennon says he has heard that the strike has been settled. Mosbie’s arm is broken, but he is not seriously wounded; I had thought he was dead. Kennon says he will resign from the Citizens’ Committee; he does not say why. I feel the same. All reason is gone. Egan says that Morgan had got the drop on Gannon and locked him in the jail, which was why our brave deputy was so little in evidence this evening. He did appear during the fire, and helped organize a bucket brigade, the pumper having broken down. Egan says we will have to have a proper fire department; I stare at him stupidly as he says it.

  Buck Slavin has come in again and told me the latest news. It is true, evidently, that General Peach is dead at the border. A Lieutenant Avery was here with a detachment—unobtrusively, for I did not see nor hear of them until now—to dispatch back to Bright’s City the wagons that had been brought here to transport the miners to the railroad at Welltown. Peach’s body is with the main train, which has hastened back up the valley. Whiteside is now presumably acting governor, and Buck is overjoyed. Avery told him, however, that Whiteside seemed a man in a trance. Evidently he was very close to the General when he fell (as he was always protectively close), and was much shocked by the incident, which was, however, a fortunate one. Avery said it was obvious to all but Peach by the time they reached the border that the massacre had been perpetrated by Mexicans in revenge upon the rustlers, and it had taken place, as well, upon Mexican soil. Peach, however, was determined that it was his old antagonist, Espirato, and seemed prepared to pursue him to South America, if necessary. But before he had passed onto Mexican soil, his horse slipped in a narrow defile at the mouth of Rattlesnake Canyon, he fell and died instantly, and mercifully. Whiteside, accompanying him, was the only man to see it. Afterwards his only concern was to get the cavalry and Peach’s body back to Bright’s City in order to give him a military funeral before decomposition of the remains begins.

  Buck has no doubt that Whiteside will now, according to his promise, rectify all our wrongs and wants, and sees Warlock as a future metropolis of the West. Buck is an optimistic and public-minded man. To his mind Blaisedell is only a small and temporary blight upon the body politic; with all else healthy and aright, he will automatically disappear. Like the rest of us, but perhaps for different reasons, he too is no longer interested in the Citizens’ Committee. I am apathetic of his ambitions, I am contemptuous of his optimism. The old, corrupt, and careless god has been replaced in his heaven, and so, he feels, all will be well with the world, which is, after all, the best of all possible ones. It is a touching faith, but I am drawn more to those who wander the night not with excitement for the future but with dread of it.

  I can see many of them through my window, unable to sleep now that the fire is out. For what fire is out, and what is newly lighted, and what will burn forever and consume us all? We will fight fire with futile water or with savage fire to the end of this earth itself, and never prevail, and we will drown in our water and burn in our preventive fire. How can men live, and know that in the end they will merely die?

  Pike Skinner, who is frantic, says that Gannon has warned Blaisedell that he intends to arrest him at sun-up. Skinner says that Blaisedell will kill him, and I cannot tell whether he feels more horror that Blaisedell should kill the Deputy, or that the Deputy, who is Pike’s friend, should be killed. Once I would have stupidly said that the Deputy would not be such a fool. I have been shown fatuous in my skepticism too many times. Now I neither believe nor disbelieve, and I feel nothing. There is nothing left to feel.

  It is four in the morning by my watch. Mine is the only light I can see, the scratching of my pen the only sound. Here astride the dull and rusty razor’s edge between midnight and morning, I am sick to the bottom of my heart. Where is Buck Slavin’s bright future of faith, hope, and commerce? What is it even worth, after all? For if men have no worth, there is none anywhere. I feel very old and I have seen too many things in my years, which are not so many; no, not even in my years, but in a few months—in this day.

  Outside there is only darkness, pitifully lit by the cold and disinterested stars, and there is silence through the town, in which some men sleep and clutch their bedclothes of hope and optimism to them for warmth. But those I love more do not sleep, and see no hope, and suffer for those brave ones who will fall in hopeless effort for us all, whose only gift to us will be that we will grieve for them a little while; those who see, as I have come to see, that life is only event and violence without reason or cause, and that there is no end but the corruption and the mock of courage and of hope.

  Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see—as I realize now the doctor saw before me—that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men’s hearts to false hopes forever?

  This is the sky of Gethsemane, and that of Bethlehem has vanished with its star.

  68. GANNON SEES THE GOLD HANDLES

  I

  GANNON came awake with a start and stared at the outline of the window that was emerging gray from the surrounding darkness. He raised himself carefully on one elbow and looked down at Kate’s sleeping face, with the soft mass of hair beneath it on the pillow like a heavy shadow, the soft curves of her lashes on her cheeks, and her lips, which looked carved from ivory. He watched the rounding and relaxation of her nostrils as she breathed, and the slow, deep rise and fall of her breast. One arm was thrown across it and her fingers almost touched him.

  Slowly, watching her face, he began to slide away from her, stopping when her lips tightened for a moment and then parted as though she would speak. But she did not waken, and he eased himself from her bed, and carried his clothing, shell belt, and boots into the living room to dress. His holstered Colt thumped upon the oilcloth-covered table as he set it down, and he held his breath for a moment, but there was no sound from the bedroom.

  He looked in at her one last time before he put on his boots. Her hand had moved over a little farther, to lie where he had lain. He put the key on the table, went outside, and in the dark gray chill set his boots down and worked his feet into them, and softly closed the door.

  The town was empty and out of the grayness buildings and houses came slowly at him like thoughts emerging from the gray edges of his mind, to hang there unattached, two-dimensional, and strange in the silence that was broken only by the hollow clump of his boots upon the boardwalk.

  Down Grant Street he could just make out the high bulk of the General Peach, lightless and asleep. He turned right down Main Street. A few stars still showed frail shards of light, but almost as he looked up they were gone. He walked past the hotel and the empty rocking chairs upon the v
eranda, and across Broadway; he felt a strangely intense sense of possession of the vacant town in the early morning. He passed the ruin of the Glass Slipper, the pharmacy and the gunshop with their shattered windows, and skirted again the charred timbers on the boardwalk before the Lucky Dollar. The sickly sweetish stench, and that of whisky, were dissipated now, but inside the wreckage was still smoking. He crossed Southend and halted for a moment beneath the new sign to gaze into the dim interior of the jail, and felt the adobe breathing the night’s chill upon him.

  He waited there until he heard the judge stir and snore in the cell, and then he went on to Birch’s roominghouse, again removing his boots so he would awaken no one as he climbed the stairs to his room. Upstairs there was a dull concert of snoring, which faded when he closed his door. He lit the lamp and held his hands to its small warmth for a moment, and then he stripped off his clothes and washed himself, soaping and scrubbing his white flesh with a rag and icy water from the crockery pitcher; he shaved his face before the triangle of mirror. He laid out clean clothes and dressed himself with care, his best white shirt, his new striped pants—store pants from the legs of which he tried to rub the creases—and dusted off his new, too-tight star boots, and painfully worked his feet into them. After rubbing his star to a shine he fastened it to his vest, and put that on, and donned his canvas jacket against the cold. He rubbed the dust from each crevice between the cartridge-keepers of his shell belt, frowned at the torn hole at the back, and polished the sharp-edged buckle. He buckled on the belt, cinching it a notch tighter than usual against the crawling cold of his stomach, thrust it down as far as it would go, and knotted the scabbard thong around his thigh tightly too.

  Then he produced a whisky bottle half full of oil, and a rag, and sat down at the table to clean his Colt, and oil it, and wipe it dry. He did this over and over again with an intense, rapt attention, rubbing patiently at each small fleck of Main Street dust until the old forty-four-caliber shone dully and richly in the lamplight. He oiled the inside of the holster too, and worked the Colt in and out until it slid to his satisfaction. He replaced the cartridges in the cylinder, let the hammer down upon the empty one, seated the Colt in the holster, scrubbed the oil from his hands, and was ready. Now he could hear some of the miners waking and stirring in their rooms.