by Ian Weir
They had looked at John McCutcheon, the both of them at once. Two pinched faces, close together: the boy’s great luminous eyes lost and hopeful; the sister’s eyes—nearly as large—drawing narrow in appraisal. This had put John McCutcheon in mind of a drawing he had once seen: two elven children, winsome and yet somehow malignant, although Billie was more than a child. McCutcheon perceived this straightaway. She had a bold way of staring that might have come from her mother, who had reputedly been an actress at one time, or a whore, or something partway in between. Her arm crooked protectively about her brother’s thin shoulders, and in that stare John McCutcheon had felt himself measured and found wanting; felt himself shrivelling and less adequate than he had been just the moment before, and Christ knows he had felt inadequate to begin with.
Now with the coming of that winter’s night they watched the outlaws instead.
One of the outlaws, the youngest, had been wounded. This had been plain in the way he sat his horse: hunched down and tilted to one side, as if the next gust of wind could topple him. He came into the roadhouse gaunt and shuddering, and huddled thereafter by the pot-bellied stove.
“He’s been shot,” Gimp Tom whispered to his sister, in a private moment in the shadows in the farthest corner of the room, where they supposed themselves momentarily unobserved.
“You don’t know that,” Billie said.
“Oh, yes I do.” He had read enough books to know it for a certainty. “That’s a boy who’s been shot, and there’s a posse on the trail. Could be just bounty hunters they’re running from, or maybe the Law and Deputies. Or it could even be worse than that, such as Texas Rangers.”
“Rangers?” Billie said. “From Texas?”
An older sister would in her time hear much imbecility, but this evidently took the cake. This claimed first prize in the cake-baking tent at the harvest fair for idiots.
“But that’s just it,” Tom said. “That’s all of it, right there in a walnut shell. A Texas Ranger don’t give up—not ever. A Texas Ranger, Billie, keeps on coming. I pray for your own sake that you never find out what it means, to have a Texas Ranger on your tail.”
Implacable pursuit seemed to be much on the minds of the outlaws already. The boy had set himself to watching them as closely as he could.
The oldest was a man called Cousin Fletch. So at least he said they should call him. A lean, leering man in middle age, with a cornpone voice and a grin like a tumbledown churchyard. “They’s nobody coming,” he said to the Man from Decatur. “Not on a night like this.” “He’s coming,” the Man from Decatur said. He paced to each window in turn, brooding into the darkness and the storm. The old house shook with the wind.
“Well, then let him,” said Cousin Fletch. “Let the cocksucker get himself froze. They’s no one stays alive in cold like this.”
The wounded outlaw moaned. He had just turned nineteen years old—so Gimp Tom would presently establish—though his suffering made him seem older. Dirty yellow hair and a straggle of unsuccessful beard. In happier times, it seemed, he had been capable of a sweet slow smile, so full of light and life that you could scarcely credit the deeds alleged against him; deeds so vile as to defy earthly explication, unless you allowed that some devil had whispered him onward.
Billie Skiffings herself would not have believed it—not on that first evening, sitting halfway down the stairs with her half-brother, watching. The outlaws had clustered for warmth around the stove, on the rough wooden chairs that would serve for parlour furniture until such time as the hotel of John McCutcheon’s imaginings took form.
The Man from Decatur called for whiskey. Then he called for more.
“Here’s where it starts,” Tom said, very low.
He had already begun to guess the true identities of these three men. The knowledge chilled him worse than any storm.
Gimp Tom knew much more than you might suppose. The boy was sadly crippled, which legacy his uncle ascribed to the Skiffings side; he moved herk-a-jerk with a queer industrious hitching of his elbows, as if the active exhortation of his upper half were required to stir his nethers into spidery locomotion. But his brain was both nimble and capacious: the McCutcheon side, very clearly, showing through. He knew the name of the first man ever shot dead by Wild Bill Hickok, which was McCanles, and the motto of the Texas Rangers.
Such facts and many more besides were contained in the nickel magazines and dime novels that he kept in a tin box in a cubbyhole beneath the floorboards, and which he studied at night with rapt assiduity. These included such works as Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, and a memoir written by Colonel George Armstrong Custer, entitled My Life on the Plains, or, Personal Experiences with Indians. This famous memoir had been published two years previous, in ’74. It had been left behind at the roadhouse by a man passing through with a railroad survey team. Gimp Tom would proceed to read it twelve separate times, beginning to end, committing entire passages to heart, prior to the sad events that lay scant months in the future, when in June at Little Bighorn Colonel Custer would add to his list one culminating experience with Indians.
The tin box contained other treasures as well. Some were from his earlier childhood in Victoria, in the time before his Ma grew wan and dwindled. Others were of recent provenance, left behind by passers-through on different occasions under varying circumstances, wittingly and otherwise: a jackknife and an inkwell and a fishing lure, and an old pistol wrapped in rag and tied with string. The pistol was his most prized possession, being highly illicit under British law, which restricted the private ownership of sidearms. It was an English model, a .45-calibre Deane-Adams five-shot: a notoriously shoddy piece of workmanship, as liable to explode in your own face as to spit lead death at your adversary, but similar to the pistol carried in early life by the great Wild Bill himself. He had as well a box of cartridges, with which he would in secret moments load the pistol and take dead aim at villains out the window, imagining himself a Wild Gimp Tom and performing mighty deeds in defense of his sister.
He had loaded the pistol that evening, with the coming of the riders.
Snow fell heavily throughout the night, and on through the day that followed, driven by a bitter wind out of the east. A snowfall without precedent in the memory of any white man living; prodigious even by the reckoning of the Nlaka’pamux, who had lived here since the mountains were small hills. With the onset of a second night the snowfall ceased, but as it did the temperature plunged and the wind shifted into the north. It howled relentlessly down upon them, whipping the new-fallen snow into drifts that choked the trails and wagon roads. The roadhouse was islanded now.
No one could stay sane in such conditions. Not even someone who was halfway sane to begin with.
The Man from Decatur brooded. He had been drinking steadily since their arrival; now he drank some more.
“Chrissakes,” Cousin Fletch said. “He’s not the Lord Almighty, stuck on a stick and rose again. Besides, we crossed the Medicine Line. He got no jurisdiction.”
“D’you suppose he cares about that?” the Man from Decatur demanded. “He don’t. And I’ve known him all my life.”
He would go away, then, at such moments—a thousand miles, without ever leaving the room. He might sit immobile for an hour or more, shadows from the firelight writhing on the wall behind him and hovering above his head like the black wings of deeds he was contemplating. Then abruptly he would stand up and be jolly, calling for whiskey and someone to sing him a song.
“You.” He swivelled to Billie Skiffings. “What can you sing for me?”
She’d been on her way to the back door, lugging a bucket of slops. “What would you give me?” she said.
“What do you want?”
“A dollar,” she proclaimed.
“You’d sing me a song for a dollar?”
“I would.”
“What would you do for ten?”
It stopped her dead for half a moment, the size of it. The implication. “Ten dollars?”
She gave a nervous laugh. She found herself considering: What would she do for ten dollars? More, possibly, than she might have supposed.
The Man from Decatur had that effect. He was dark as a mineshaft, but he was also Dionysus when he chose. And he took you with him. He was anarchy set loose in the world. He licensed you to be your own worst self—the self we all of us want most to be, deep down in the privacy of our heart’s desire. And if you can’t admit that, then you don’t know your true nature at all. Or else—which is more likely—you’re just a liar. As that understanding began to dawn upon Billie Skiffings, he crooked up a smile.
“Should I ask what you’d do for fifty dollars?”
“No,” she said. “You should not ask me that.”
“’Cause why?”
“You’d be wasting your time.”
The Man from Decatur smiled some more.
“Then what would you do for five hundred?”
And you want to find that out. Oh, yes you do. You want to go there with him—just like Billie Skiffings, and the others who were islanded in that roadhouse for eight days in the winter of 1876. You want to follow him all the way down, and find out.
Such at least is one way to explain what happened thereafter.
Eight days and nights. Then the weather broke. And the Reckoning came.
A solitary rider, looming in the west. A long man in a buffalo-shaggy greatcoat, astride a grey hammerhead. They came through the trees and up the rise and into the clearing in front of the roadhouse.
John McCutcheon had come out with the rider’s approach. He stood now stooped and squinting in the lemon sun: sallow, unshaven, working up the rictus of a smile.
Three men, the rider said. He was looking for three men. Three killers.
He might have been forty years old. His voice was thick with the South. A slow, dark baritone, rumbling ten feet up—so it seemed to John McCutcheon—from the hang of the scrotum.
Yes, the innkeeper said. Oh yes, they’d been here. But they’d gone.
“How long?”
The man only had one eye. It was ice-blue and piercing. A patch was across the other, and scarring beneath. His hair was brambled and tangled.
“A day or two, I’d guess,” John McCutcheon said.
“Don’t guess.”
“Two days—when it cleared. That’s when they rode out. Two of them did.”
“The third one?”
“Yonder.” John McCutcheon gestured with his chin.
The sawed-off eight-gauge in the rider’s right hand had appeared out of nothing at all. He had shifted his shoulders and there it was, newly conjured into the universe: such an engine as could cut down a cavalry charge. This at least was the evidence of John McCutcheon’s eyes, though the flat winter glare was a dazzlement and his vision had been dizzied to begin with by sleeplessness and busthead whiskey. It occurred to him that the shotgun had been nestled all along in the folds of the coat, just waiting to be shrugged into the sunlight.
The third outlaw—the youngest—leaned up against a shed. He was not moving, being roped to a plank around the chest and thighs and angled at forty-five degrees, as dead outlaws will be when placed on display. He might have frozen solid in the very act of rising—stiff and staring—from the grave. Round his neck hung a board on which someone in charcoal had scrawled: One theef was damned.
“The devil is this?” said the man in the buffalo coat. He’d dismounted and stalked closer.
“A Passage,” John McCutcheon said. “The Bible, or some such.”
“I can read. I’m asking: The devil happened?”
“Yes, sir,” McCutcheon said, discovering his voice unsteady. “Yes, he did. That’s as near as I can say myself. The devil happened, and here we stand today.”
The one-eyed man’s breath billowed white. The temperature had plunged again, after two days that had hinted at a thaw. Sun slanted from an empty sky and all the world stood mercilessly revealed.
“Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t. He’d been shot already.”
“Shooting never broke his neck.”
The man with his one eye had seen that straightaway. The crick in the neck and the rope-wrenched skin.
“It was never me,” McCutcheon said. “I swear.”
He himself stood nearly six-foot-two, but the one-eyed man towered over him. The shoulders inside the buffalo coat were as wide as a canyon. So at any rate it seemed to John McCutcheon: as if the stranger commanded by some unquestioned right a larger share of Creation than the innkeeper had ever dreamed of laying claim to.
“Would you lie to me, friend?”
It came to John McCutcheon: Yes, he would. He would lie with great industry and application, if only he could. But this was not a man you could lie to. There was about him something grim and elemental; he was Saul or Goliath, except much colder. He was Judgement itself, come to Hell’s Gate.
“God’s own truth,” McCutcheon said.
“Who else is here?”
“There’s nobody.”
“Call them out.”
“No, look—you can’t blame neither of them. They’re just children.”
But of course they weren’t children at all. Not any longer—not after what had happened. John McCutcheon knew that already; he saw the recognition of it cross the stranger’s face. The boy and his sister had come out of the roadhouse: Gimp Tom and that uncanny gal, ruined and shivering.
“It’s true,” Billie Skiffings said. She squinted against the glare. “What my Uncle John just told you.”
“All of it?”
“Near enough.” She stood in unlaced boots and a thin white smock, a blanket clutched about herself for warmth. “They rode out, the two of them. This dead one they left behind.”
“Dead already?”
“Like my uncle said.”
The low winter sun was behind the stranger now. His shadow stretched toward them.
“What road did they take?”
“The road you’re on,” said Billie Skiffings. “There’s but the one.”
The stranger looked at each of them in turn. “Here’s what you’ll do. You’ll give that boy a Christian burial.”
“The ground,” John McCutcheon began to say. Meaning that the ground was frozen solid, three feet deep.
“You’ll find a way. Whatever he done in life, he’s paid his debt. Paid in full, which is more than you’ve ever done.”
“Yes, sir,” John McCutcheon said.
“Your boy here can see to my horse. Whatever grain you have. The girl can fetch dried meat for myself—salt pork is good. Some flour, and bacon. I’ll pay you fair value, cash money, and be on my way.”
Billie Skiffings said: “They’ll kill you first, if you find them. Those men.”
“They’ll try.”
“There’s two of them. They’ll shoot you down like a yellow dog. And mister? You’ll deserve it.”
“I’ve told you what I need from you. I need you now to do it.”
Gimp Tom had not moved. He said: “I know who you are.”
It was the certainty of the man. Tom would recollect this most clearly of all, about that afternoon. A vast and terrible certainty, such as he had never before encountered, and never would again.
He said: “You’re his brother. You’re Strother Purcell.”
His uncle cleared his throat. “The boy reads books.” McCutcheon said it shamefaced, as if some mitigation were needful. As you might say, The boy has foaming conniptions, or, When he was six weeks old his Mama dropped him. “Dime books, and magazines.”
Gimp Tom paid no attention. He felt suddenly a desperate need to confess. To fall down upon his knees and blurt out what he had done, two nights previous and on the night before that; to confess to each ill deed that he had ever committed, on all the nights and days of his ten and one half wretched years upon this earth, and all the other crimes—too horrid even to imagine—that he must surely commit in the nights and days and
years that lay ahead, if by some oversight he were to be left un-Judged and un-Smited and un-Ground into dust beneath the boot-heel of Righteousness.
Instead, the boy heard his own voice, crying out: “I want you to kill them both. D’you hear? I want you to kill both those fuckers dead, and stick their heads on stakes!”
*
His last glimpse of Strother Purcell that day was of a vast implacability, riding along the Wagon Road into the gathering shadows of the Black Canyon. He would not lay eyes on Purcell again for more than sixteen years, nor learn for a certainty what the one-eyed man had wrought.
In due course, Word would begin to filter down from the mountains of the Cariboo, two hundred miles north and east: whispers of a dreadful debt come due and a gunfight that was to have consequences beyond imagining. By the time these reached McCutcheon’s Roadhouse, Gimp Tom himself had moved on, leaving behind a mystery of another kind: the question of what had transpired during those eight lost days in a storm-locked roadhouse in the winter of 1876, to have left the outlaw Dooley Sprewell dead and two children ruined beyond all hope of redemption.
Word continued to filter nonetheless. In the fullness of Time, it filtered all the way to San Francisco, where in April of 1892 it came to preoccupy the aspirations of an erstwhile scribbler of dime novels named Barrington Weaver.
–THREE–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
1.
WYATT EARP was the gunman I had in my sights.
Oh, I’d heard of Strother Purcell. Strother Purcell had been from Tennessee, or Carolina—one of those backwoods places where God only knows what deviltry transpires up yonder Smoky Mountain. There’d been a blood-feud, after which Purcell achieved notoriety as a lawman in the Southwest. There’d been a confrontation in New Mexico that led to his hunting down his own outlawed half-brother—a vengeance quest that led him two thousand miles north into the frozen wastes of another country entirely, and made his name a byword for bloody-minded perseverance, against all sense and reason. At the end of it there’d been a final showdown, but—as far as I knew—it had left Purcell dead. As far as anyone knew. Purcell and the outlaw half-brother, too. But this had all been some years in the past, and there’s only so much a man can make of the frozen corpses of shot-up hillbillies. So to speak.