by Ian Weir
They were going to be cattlemen, he said. There was land up north just for the asking, whole parcels of it, in the Cariboo. Gimp Tom had maybe heard of that place?
Tom said he had.
“Is it like they say?” said Dooley.
“I expect it probably is,” Tom replied. “What is it they said?”
Dooley Sprewell had heard it was ten thousand miles of rolling grassland. Plains as wide as the gaze of the Almighty, and as green as Eden at the daybreak of the world.
Yes, said Gimp Tom. That was pretty much his understanding too.
A notion came to Dooley then. He said: “You could come with us.”
“Me?”
“And your sister—you could fetch her along. D’you reckon?”
The young outlaw’s eyes shone diamond-bright with hopefulness, and with the commencement of fever. Gimp Tom had seen fevers before, and knew what followed next. Dooley shivered, despite two extra blankets clutched around his shoulders.
“They got everything we’d ever need, up there,” said Dooley. “Grass up there as high as your horse’s belly. Kin you imagine?”
“They got winter up there too,” Billie said. She had come up while Dooley was conjuring his ranch. “Got winter ten months out of the year.”
Dooley’s smile wobbled, just a tick. “Well, but winters come in diff’rent kinds. And maybe we’d all get used to the cold. I b’lieve I’m getting used to it already.”
Billie looked surprised. “This, you mean? Why, this ain’t hardly cold at all.”
With nightfall it grew colder. The wind rose up again, seeping through every chink in the walls and shaking the timbers of the lodge when it gusted. They stayed in the one main parlour now as much as they could, the five of them and Dooley Sprewell shivering by the woodstove.
The parlour of John McCutcheon’s aspirations would call to mind a hunting lodge in Bavaria. A roaring fire in a great stone hearth, and the mounted heads of moose and elk. A hardwood floor stained to a mahogany gleam, covered over by bearskin rugs and one of them in particular: the vast brown silver-tipped pelt of a grizzly bear that John McCutcheon had shot personally, at much peril to himself. For the present, though, the roadhouse made do with a rough plank floor and threadbare bits of carpeting. But at least the woodstove was halfway warm—excepting when someone went outside or came back in again, opening the door to a frigid blast. This was primarily Uncle John, who shouldered the Cross of fetching in firewood and seeing to the horses in the barn. Swaddling himself at two-hour intervals, to return after fifteen minutes numb and blue, his breath billowing white as he clomp-footed through the door.
Cousin Fletch looked from Dooley Sprewell to Billie. “This boy needs someone t’warm his bones.” He waggled his eyebrows as he said it, in case she somehow missed the insinuation.
Billie was turning to secure the door, seeing as John McCutcheon’s hands were too stiff to manage. She made as if she hadn’t heard.
“Got one of my own she could work on,” said Cousin Fletch, “if she needs to get herself up to speed.”
“I swear to Christ, old son—you are a caution.”
The Man from Decatur said this. He was sitting apart from the rest of them, by the ladder up to the loft. Rocking back in a wooden chair, taking from time to time a swallow from a bottle. It was colder there, away from the stove, but whiskey was a compensation.
Cousin Fletch chuckled, mistaking the tone for affability.
The Man from Decatur said: “You’d shame them in Gomorrah. You truly would. A leering old disgusting goat like yourself.”
“Here, now,” said Cousin Fletch.
“Those sinners in Gomorrah, lusting after God’s own angels.”
“Angels?”
“Read your Bible.”
Still smiling as he said it. Almost playful. Leaning back in his chair and eyeing Cousin Fletch with a look of speculation. As if he found it a question of genuine interest, what the older outlaw would say next, or do—and what he might do about it in return.
Cousin Fletch chuckled again. It lacked conviction. “No call to bring goats into the discussion,” he said.
“No?”
“Don’t see no goats in here. Nor angels neither.”
“You could be right.”
“Just making a suggestion to the gal.”
“Then give her a coin.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
There was silence for another moment. From all of them, this time—Billie most of all.
Cousin Fletch rummaged inside his pocket and pulled out a silver coin.
“Now another,” the Man from Decatur said.
“I ain’t give her the first one yet.”
“We already know what she’ll do for a dollar. What we don’t know yet is what she’ll do for two.”
He looked straight at Billie Skiffings as he said it.
Billie looked almost everywhere at first, excepting back at the Man from Decatur. At length she met his eye.
“Well,” she said. “I s’pose I’d better show you.”
*
Years later, looking back, it would seem to Gimp Tom that a bargain had been transacted in that moment, between his sister and the Man from Decatur. Tom had stood there slack-jawed, looking on—as we do, all the rest of humankind, whenever such bargains are made. In a moon-silvered clearing in the wood, say, or at a lonely crossroads with a gibbet, such locations being much-favoured by the devil. So the old tales would have it, though in fact a snowbound roadhouse will serve as well. Or anywhere.
Later still, it would occur to him that the moment might never have taken place at all, at least not in the manner that he recollected: the bloom of defiance on his sister’s face, and his own instinct to cry out, “Don’t you do it!” Perhaps such clarity had only been achieved through years of brooding; the telling and retelling of the story to himself. It would even cross his mind to wonder if he’d had it the wrong way around: that the soul being bartered had been the Man from Decatur’s.
One way or another, Billie took the coins.
She would gladden their hearts, she said, with songs of the South. Their hearts, she said—but she sang to Dooley Sprewell. A Minstrel song first, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” She sang it so sweet that poor Dooley commenced misting at once. Gimp Tom might almost have misted himself, if he hadn’t begun to glimpse what Billie intended.
Her own eyes misted as she sang of a home irretrievably lost, though Christ knows which home she might have had in mind. Not her father’s home, with her step-mother in it—she had hated it there, as Tom could have testified, if anyone had asked him. And she hated their Uncle John’s house even worse. But there was poor Dooley Sprewell from Alabama, wrapped in blankets and shivering by the stove as the north wind howled outside. When Billie sang “Old Folks at Home,” there was pure desolation on Dooley’s face. His eyes were orphaned, and tears as fat as late-spring lambs came trickling down his cheeks.
“He’s a killer,” Gimp Tom said to his sister, when they finally had a moment alone. “Like the others—all three of them.” He’d guessed that from the start, but now he knew it.
It was deep in the night. He kept his voice to a whisper, confiding to Billie what Dooley had confided to him, and adding to it pieces of his own.
“A year or so ago, in a place called Santa Rosita. A shooting scrape. They killed three fellas—a Sheriff’s Deputy was one. They shot some poor gal, too, who had no part in it at all.”
“Then why’d they shoot her?”
“Spite.”
They were in the back room where they slept. One cot on either side and a ragged sheet hung up for a divider. Gimp Tom heard Billie breathing on the other side, as she decided how much of this she could believe.
“Which one of them did the killing?” she said.
“Dooley Sprewell. I’m pretty sure of that. Or else the one you got your eye on.”
“I don’t have my eye on nobody.”
“The one who says he’s from Decatur.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m not. I read about these fellas.”
In his magazines and books, he meant. Billie knew that without asking. The dime stories he kept in his tin box of treasures.
“You never read no such book,” Billie said, “’cause there isn’t one.”
“I read enough,” he said. Enough to fit together with other things that Dooley Sprewell had let slip, and with news he himself had heard from travellers passing through along the Wagon Road, or scavenged on his bi-monthly journeys with his uncle to Yale. There the riverboats arrived three times each week with news from New Westminster on the West Coast, and the whole wide world beyond. This was an expertise of his, collecting up bits of news and squirrelling them away like nuts. You can learn a great deal from listening, if you have the knack and listen hard enough, and have as well a memory that locks up tighter than any tin box ever did. Billie knew that, too. He sensed her movement, on the other side of the divider.
“It was Dooley, then,” she said at length, keeping her voice to a whisper. “He’d be the one to kill a gal. Him or Cousin fucking Fletch.”
“Fletcher Quarles,” Tom whispered back. “That’s his name. Fletcher Quarles the outlaw, out of Missouri.”
Time would prove this supposition correct, along with numerous others.
“The other one,” Gimp Tom said. “I believe I know his real name, too. D’you want to hear it spoke?”
“No,” said Billie. “Not by you—’cause you don’t know it.”
“Elijah Dillashay. From Carolina.”
They heard the creak of footfalls, overhead. The Man from Decatur—Lige Dillashay, if Tom’s supposing was correct—had claimed the sleeping loft for his own. The others were in the parlour, just beyond the blanket that hung in place of a door. They heard Dooley Sprewell out there, and Cousin Fletch: muttering in unquiet sleep, and farting evilly.
The Man from Decatur never slept. So it would seem from his pacing, all night long. Four steps from the ladder to the window, looking north. Six steps the other way across, west to east.
Billie was silent for a goodly while.
Sometimes she would light a lamp on an overturned apple-box she had for a bureau. She would do this late at night or first thing in the morning, before the dawn. By lamplight her silhouette would show clear through the ragged sheet, while she stretched like a cat scant inches away from her brother, or stood by the window all but naked.
“They done things to gals as well,” Tom whispered. “Other than just killing them.”
“What things?”
“Bad ones,” he said. “The worst.”
“You heard this said, or you know it?”
“It stands to reason. These are killers on the run, Billie. Outlaws with a price on their heads. These are men who’ll stop at nothing. I know it, and so do you.”
Right above their heads, the footfalls stopped. Tom heard a breath catch in Billie’s throat; felt himself clench, supposing that their whispers had been heard. That the Man from Decatur had ears just as keen as Old Jehovah’s, up on Sinai, and views on retribution no less stark. Tom did not let his breath out until the pacing resumed—away from them, toward the window. There the footsteps stopped again, and Tom could imagine him standing: stooped beneath the downslope of the rafters, staring out into the night.
Billie said at last: “How much, d’you reckon?”
“How much what?”
“The price on their heads. How much is it?”
*
Billie’s Ma as a young gal had sung in music halls in London, England, where she was known as the Lanarkshire Lark. Later in her too-brief life she had appeared in concert saloons and melodeons in San Francisco, where she had ensorcelled men too numerous to tally, and ended in marrying one of them. This was Edward Skiffings, a sober and stalwart man whose offer she had accepted after auditing the hopes and dreams of her inmost heart and concluding that her modest talents as an artiste had taken her as far as they possibly could, and that the sands of her hour of maidenly bloom were dwindling.
Billie’s Ma believed with all her heart that a gal must have faith in herself. She also knew what became of those as misevaluated their assets, or bungled the imperative to sell at the height of the market. She passed most tragically when her only child was just four years old, but in those four years she saw clearly and beyond all doubt: Billie Skiffings was her own true daughter.
And now, years later, Billie saw with clarity the nature of her own dilemma. The question was: how might she resolve it?
She turned first to her Uncle John, despite suspecting from the start that he would be no damned use. She found him at the creek below the roadhouse, chopping a hole through the ice with an axe. This was early morning on the third day. The snowfall had ceased, but the temperature continued to plunge. Twenty-five below in the shelter of the trees; ten degrees colder in the open. The wind continued to angle from the north: a cold incessant muttering, rising at moments to vicious gusts that scooped up snow already fallen and flung it.
“He keeps lookin’ at me,” Billie said. “The old one—‘Cousin Fletch.’”
She had brought two buckets down with her. Rags wrapping her hands against the cold, lurching through thigh-high drifts. Uncle John had broken a trail partway, but his footprints were spaced too wide.
“Looking ain’t a crime,” he said. He laboured red-faced, clinging precariously to his footing on the rocks. The ice on the creek had formed three inches thick. The water beneath splashed warm, so much colder was the air.
“It’s the way he looks,” Billie said.
“Which way is that?”
“You seen him. Smiling.”
“Nothing wrong with a smile,” McCutcheon said. “Hell’s bells.”
“They put five hundred dollars on his head.”
It made Uncle John break rhythm. He staggered, half-slipped. Cursed between his teeth.
“Five hundred at least,” said Billie. “Could be more like a thousand.”
“Your brother tell you this?”
“Between the three of them, could be three times that much. Could be five thousand.”
“If pigs had wings, imagine how they’d fly.”
“So this would be your last word on the subject?”
The question made him miss a second stroke. His breath came in painful wheezes. Cold this intense would hurt each time you drew it in; you’d feel it all down your breastbone.
“What exactly are you asking me?” he said.
“I’m asking: What am I supposed to do?”
He hadn’t met her eye. Not once, since she came slip-staggering down through the trees with her buckets, the roadhouse behind her half-buried in the snow. The smoke from the chimney was swept sideways by that bastard wind; icicles hung like daggers from the eaves.
Uncle John had made his calculation. That was plain for any child to see, even one twice as young and half as clever as Billie Skiffings. Totting it up like numbers in his ledger-book, and arriving at the inexorability of arithmetic: three desperate outlaws under his roof, ten miles from Yale. No one leaving and no one coming for at least another day. Two children to look after, and one solitary uncle entrusted with the task. And what use would John McCutcheon be, in this regard or any other, if he ended up out back in the privy: upside down in the glory hole with his neck wrung like a chicken’s?
“Hell’s bells,” he said. “A fella smiles. Couldja try smiling back?”
So Billie did a calculation of her own. Totted up the numbers. Separated them into two columns, the debit and the credit. Checking and rechecking the sums—as her Ma the Lanarkshire Lark would have done—to be certain that her totals were correct. That she had avoided the fatal blunders that undid so many gals and brought their best-laid plans to ruin.
She found that each calculation ended up with the identical result, and pointed her infallibly in the direction that she had known by intui
tion from the start: toward the loft.
Gimp Tom had resolved to stay awake that night. He secretly loaded three cartridges into his Deane-Adams five-shot, and slipped the pistol in between his mattress and pillow.
“I’ll be here.” He said this in a low voice to Billie’s shape, on the other side of the hanging-sheet divider.
“Where else would you be?”
“I’m just saying. I’ll be right here if you need me.”
“Get some sleep, Tommy.”
“Come what may.”
He had read this latter phrase in a book and thought it particularly fine. But his sister made no reply. A methodical rasping came from her side of the divider. It took him a moment to make sense of it, against the moaning of the wind outside and the midnight creaks and protests of the timbers.
She was brushing her hair.
“Billie?”
“Go to sleep.”
Her voice sounded strange and distant. There was a quiver in it. This he attributed to the cold, which was worst down low, by the bare floor. Gimp Tom cocooned more tightly in his blankets, redoubling his resolve to stay keen and sharp and watchful until daybreak. Some small while later his eyelids shuddered shut.
Cousin Fletch was slumbering as well, having swallowed sufficient whiskey to tamp down the hobgoblins of vigilance. His bedroll as before lay beside the woodstove, across from poor dying Dooley Sprewell. But he twitched awake as a small shape coalesced in the doorway to the back room. It was slender and insubstantial in the flickering spill of firelight, gliding straight toward him on soundless feet that never touched the floor. He levered himself up on one elbow, blinking against the evidence of his own two eyes: the slip of a gal with fine pale hair, shins stick-thin and bare above ravelled wooden socks, a blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders—as frail an angel as ever appeared to the hoariest old sinner in Gomorrah.