by Ian Weir
“The Prodigal, swanning home at last.” Mr. Dillashay spoke through gritted teeth, looking blackly at his step-son. “Dawdling. Not caring if his Mama lived or died.”
They were in the kitchen. Overhead was the bedroom. Strother heard his Mama’s cries.
He said: “Is there something I can do?”
“Oh, you done enough, boy. Done quite sufficient for one day.” Mr. Dillashay was in his way a handsome man, but just now in the candlelight he was a troll. “I give him one job,” he said. Speaking to the whiskey, as men may do when the subject of their discourse won’t bear naming. “One job, and he couldn’t do it right. Fetch help, I said, and look after the horse.”
Above, the cries went on and on. At length Drusilla Smoak came down the stairs.
“Well?” Mr. Dillashay demanded. He had lurched to his feet at her coming.
“Baby’s turned the wrong way,” she said.
“So turn it right.”
The granny-woman was haggard with the fight. Her hands and forearms were streaked with blood.
Mr. Dillashay cried: “Get yourself back! The hell did you come down here for?”
“A decision.”
Strother asked: “Will she die?”
“That choosing isn’t mine.” She was looking at Mr. Dillashay as she said it. “I might could still save one of them. Not both.”
Strother knew at once what choice he would make, were the choosing to be his. Lige would spend his whole life knowing it, too. In later childhood he would picture making the same choice himself, and each time in these imaginings he chose self-sacrifice: the very choice that Jesus would have made, or Strother. “Take me, Lord,” he would cry, this Elijah of his imagining. “Save my Mama, and let the club-foot die.” But he knew he could never say it as instantly as Strother would have done, nor with such perfect nobility.
Lige’s Daddy would have chosen to save the child. He would say so openly in later years, muttering it into his whiskey. On one terrible night, he hurled it in fury against his wife’s bedroom door, which she had barricaded against him.
But in the moment, Mr. Dillashay stood stricken. He began to tremble, the brutal bulk of him quaking in such manner as his stepson would scarcely have credited.
“No,” he said. “No, you can’t just ... You’d ask a man—?”
Then distress burst out of him the customary way and he began to rage, cursing Drusilla Smoak for a fraud and a witch. She had come in the guise of a Christian woman, and what had she done instead? She had tormented his wife to no purpose, and ruined his horse. The gelding, so lamed that it was doubtless past the saving.
The granny-woman’s expression changed. “That horse is still alive?” she demanded.
Alive, cried Mr. Dillashay, but lamed beyond all mending, for which she would pay him cash money in recompense.
Drusilla Smoak said: “Kill it.”
“Damned if I won’t have to do just that,” Mr. Dillashay cried. “First light, my best damned horse!”
A gleam had come upon the granny-woman. She said: “Kill the horse now.”
What his step-daddy thought—how much he understood—Strother would never know for a certainty. But Solomon saw clearly. This understanding marbled him in the doorway, a statue of a Christian man aghast. Mr. Dillashay was already slamming past him. Seizing his rifle he stormed to the barn, where the gelding was moving gingerly. It lifted its head uneasily and nickered. Mr. Dillashay raised the gun and fired. The gelding’s legs folded neatly and it fell, dead before it hit the ground.
A half-hour later Elijah Dillashay was born. He came squalling into the world, as red as if he’d been boiled. Drusilla Smoak noted with grim satisfaction that the baby was robust, with five fingers and five toes on each appendage, though twisted and clubbed in the left foot. The mother would live as well, and with time might even be hale again.
“You’ll want payment, I expect,” Mr. Dillashay said.
“A gift. Whatever seems right to you.”
She had washed her face and arms at the trough, and taken some nourishment. Dawn had broken, and she waited for Strother to bring the mule. Mr. Dillashay stood in the doorway.
“I consider your service to be worth five dollars,” he said. “The gelding was worth ten. We’ll call it square.”
“You do not want to say that, Jacob Dillashay. You want to think again.”
“Get off my land.”
Drusilla Smoak took his measure. “I’ll come back,” she said, “another day. When I do, I’ll name my own gift. And you’ll owe it.”
–SEVEN–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
THEY KNEW SOME TRUTHS, those old Greeks. Dire and gloomy truths, for the most part: the implacability of flint-eyed Nemesis, hunting each one of us down like the dogs we are; the awful irrevocability of deeds once done, and the certainty that we are trapped without hope of reprieve in the vast grinding cycles of Destiny and—worse yet—by our own nature. Truths without a speck of hopefulness in ’em, as opposed to the shiny new can-do truths that we peddle to each other in America.
But truths are truths; they don’t ask us to like it. I would have cause to ponder this, long after the events of the spring and summer of 1892—events that I helped set in motion. At the time, of course—in April and May and June, right into July, when I was there in the midst of it all—this never occurred to me. I mainly thought that events were unfolding quite well, and that Young Weaver was a fine and clever fellow.
Just the way we always think.
Those old Greeks knew that, too.
I found Tyree at his street-corner newsstand on Market Street. This was a day or so after the night of my incarceration.
I was feeling much more like myself, by now. Tyree, on the other hand, looked poorly. His shoulders were hunched and his face was tinged with grey, but he sketched up the ghost of a wry grin as he saw me.
“Let you out, did they?”
So he’d heard.
“I hear a lotta things,” he said. His chuckle gave way to a cough. It would seem he’d taken chill during his trudge home through the rain; it rattled in his narrow chest and came out wet and wheezing.
I said, “Are you all right? You sound halfway to dying, there.”
The little man waved the concern aside. But his breath took a moment before returning, and he sat down abruptly on the wooden box he used for a stool. Another cough came rattling on. Pulling out a soiled excuse for a handkerchief, he hacked and wiped his mouth and glanced—a nervous, sidelong flicker—to ascertain what he’d produced. It was a gesture I recognized; my father had done that, during his long decline.
Passersby edged away.
It was mid-morning. Foot-traffic was brisk, coming and going—Tyree had a good location. His stand was a species of makeshift shed, with newspapers in stacks and a plank for a roof overhead, to keep off the worst of the weather. It was halfway sunny this morning, and almost warm—a San Francisco springtime day to fill the heart with optimism. Clouds scudded white across a pale blue sky, and a fresh salt breeze gusted in from the ocean.
I’d taken some steps since they’d turned me loose the previous morning. Small ones, admittedly—but all of them steps in the right direction. I’d pawned my father’s pocket-watch. A gold-plated watch on a modest gold chain, passed down through three generations, father to son, and one of the only keepsakes I possessed. But it fetched enough to secure a coffin-sized room in a verminous rooming-house on the edge of Chinatown, with two weeks’ spending money left over—enough to tide me through till the next remittance from my mother.
So. Homeless no more. Coat brushed, fresh shirt, clean-ish underwear. The jingle of a few coins in the pocket, and—most of all—the first glimmering of a sort of plan. I said, “What can you tell me about Strother Purcell?”
Tyree’s fit of coughing had subsided. He looked up quickly at the name.
“You said you knew him, once upon a time,” I said.
> “I said I seen him. Once. He was riding by.”
“And?”
“...And what, Mr. Weaver?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking. How much do you know about him?”
Tyree’s gaze had narrowed to a point. He said, “Why?”
“Because I’m a writer. There’s nothing sinister, here—no ulterior motive. I’m just looking for a story to tell. And I’m wondering if Purcell’s would be a good one.”
“For—what—one of those dime novels, of yours?”
“Or else something I could peddle to the newspapers.”
Tyree said, “No.”
It perplexed me, I have to say—this queer reaction. I said, “Come again?”
“’S not a story you want to tell.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it’s grim. Then it gets grimmer. Then it ends.”
A customer arrived, interrupting us—a man in a fine frock coat, who wanted a cigar. Tyree hiked himself to his feet and obliged. His hand inexplicably shook as he counted out change.
“Tell me,” I said, intrigued, as the man in the frock coat continued on his way.
Tyree hardly looked at me, now. “Purcell was a lawman,” he said shortly. “From down South.”
“Carolina,” I said. “Yes, I know that much about him.”
“I understand he killed some people there. Killed some others, elsewhere. Then he went after his own outlaw half-brother. Chased him all the way from New Mexico—up through the Oregon and Washington, into Canada. Kept on chasing, all to hell and gone, up North.”
“And killed him?”
“They killed each other. Or some such. That’s my understanding. The two of ’em rode up into the mountains, and neither one of ’em rode back.”
“And this was...?”
“Years ago.”
“How many?”
“A goodly few. Fifteen or so. Sixteen.”
“Sixteen years?”
“The winter of ’76. According to accounts.”
“You must have been a boy,” I said. The realization was neither here nor there—but it startled me a little, nonetheless. “If Purcell disappeared sixteen years ago—you’d have been just a boy, when you saw him.”
“We both started out as boys, Mr. Weaver. ’N look at us now.” He sketched up a small, grim smile.
I said, “And neither Purcell nor his brother...?”
Has been seen again, since. Not by me. Nor by anyone else, that I ever spoke to. And trust me, Mr. Weaver—I’ve asked.”
It was a queer thing to have said. I thought so at the time—and continued to think so, afterward. “You’ve asked?” I said. “Why?”
“’Cause I like to know things. And maybe ’cause he left an impression. Sure, let’s put it that way. I seen him once in my life. I was ten years old, Mr. Weaver. But he was not a man like you and me—not a man you could forget.”
“Describe him to me.”
“Describe him?”
“Yes. What did he look like? That day when you were ten years old, and Strother Purcell rode by.”
“He looked like Judgement Day, come to call.”
The coughing took him over again. A fearsome bout of it this time, shaking his shoulders and curling his spine. He sat down hard, and it shook him some more, till it passed.
“You should probably go home,” I suggested, gingerly. “Lie down—get some rest.”
He hawked into that rag again. Flicked a nervous glance, as my father had done. My father’s clean white handkerchief would be spotted with red.
At length, Tyree drew in a rattling breath, and looked up. “Forget about Strother Purcell, Mr. Weaver. That’d be my counsel. Find yourself another tale. One that has some hope in it, somewhere.”
*
I had no intention of forgetting about Strother Purcell. But first I had to find him again.
I’d passed out, at some point subsequent to my derelict cellmate’s astounding claim to be the wreck of the legendary gunman. I’d awakened hours later, face-down in an empty cell, with an Officer’s boot prodding my ribs. “Off y’go, Sunshine,” he grunted.
They’d set the old man loose already, along with the sorrowing muskox. They didn’t know where the old man might have gone—and couldn’t have cared less, either. They didn’t even know he had a name.
“Old Cadaver, you mean?” the Officer demanded. “The hell d’you want with him?”
“What sort of a name is that?” I heard myself asking. “That’s no sort of name for a human being.”
“That’s not so much of a human bein’, neither.”
We were at the exit door, at this point. The Officer elbowed it open. Outside, the skull-splitting sunlight of morning blazed down upon the alley.
“And you don’t—?”
“No, I don’t have no idea where you’d find him. But I got a suggestion for you. D’you want to hear my suggestion? Here it is: Fuck off.”
Off I fucked.
But I didn’t give up. After getting myself set up with a room, I went looking for Tyree. After that, I commenced searching through the sinks of San Francisco—the Barbary Coast dives and alleys, and the flea-pits down by the docks—looking for Old Cadaver, or for anyone who might have knowledge of him.
At the end of a day and a half, I was still looking. As mid-day rolled around, I found myself in the rough dockside area south of Market Street, with its jumble of match-stick buildings. The Salvationists had set up shop here a few years earlier—you’d see them on street-corners, banging drums and bugling Hallelujah. There was a Gospel Mission too, where indigents could get a free meal by yielding themselves up to a dose of preaching. That’s where I encountered Brother Amos.
He was ladling out stew to derelicts at a makeshift dining-tent. These were the sorriest specimens of humanity you could imagine—shambling men in rags, missing arms and legs and ears and God only knows what else, men of sundry ages, and women too. Beggars too pathetic to be snatched up by the waterfront press-gangs, who’d shanghai damn near anyone who drew breath. They slunk in a line to a cauldron at the front, where Brother Amos presided with his ladle. Then they slank past to sit and slurp at long wooden tables underneath a canvas awning.
“Old Cadaver?” Brother Amos said, when I sidled up and introduced myself and asked him. “Friend o’ mine, I do not recognize that name. But I recognize a soul in desperate need. Get yourself a plate, and get in line.”
“Me?” I almost laughed. “No, pal, you’ve got the wrong fella. I’m not—”
“Sure you are,” he said. “Maybe you just don’t understand that, yet.”
My heart sank as I recognized the type.
Brother Amos was my age, more or less. An emaciated man with burning eyes, so thin that his head was damned near just a skull, with skin and hair stretched over it. Oh, he was the strangest duck—but weirdly compelling.
“Break bread with us, friend o’ mine. Or else don’t—it’s up to you.”
“Look, all I want is—”
“Jesus sees you, just the same.”
He reminded me of my mother. It was those damned eyes.
My father the Reverend Weaver was a man of abiding faith, but his was a religion of hope and comforting nostrums. Not that it kept him from dying, of course. No one’s faith does that, and my father turned the trick before he was forty, coughing up blood and bits of lung.
My mother’s religion ran more toward hellfire and torment. Her people had been Presbyterian—doughty Calvinists who foreswore all mirth on Sundays, and on the other days of the week just to be safe, and whose response to a glorious morning in spring was: “We’ll pay for this.” She thumped out hymns on the organ, quoted dire passages of Scripture with ominous satisfaction, and held out little hope for your immortal soul and—most especially—for mine. True, she had continued to send money, all these years, to her prodigal boy. This was Christian of her, I suppose, and possibly even evidence of some vestigial love. But there was an unspok
en understanding in the arrangement: the remittance would keep coming, but on the whole she would prefer that the prodigal stayed lost, on grounds of being a grievous disappointment. So I did.
Now here was Brother Amos, with Mother Weaver’s eyes in his head.
“Friend o’ mine, I was a drunkard and a wastrel. I was given over to all manner of dissipation.”
I told him that I didn’t doubt it. He kept on going.
“I swindled and I stole. I lost every friend I had that was worth keeping, and I broke my mama’s heart. But I was Saved, nonetheless.”
“Hallelujah,” muttered the derelict first in line. He was a man of middle years, managing to reek in the open air, and evidently hoping that a praise the Lord would earn him extra stew. It didn’t. He scowled at the portion that Brother Amos had glooped onto his plate, then slouched away to find a place to sit, stink-eyeing Young Weaver as he did in a less-than-Christian fashion.
“Saved, friend o’ mine,” Brother Amos repeated. “And saved, if you’d believe it, by a fearsomer sinner than I had been myself. For I was called to the Lord by the Reverend Jacob Jacobson, one year and eight months and twelve days ago, in a hail-flattened cornfield in Ulysses, Kansas.”
He clearly thought I ought to be impressed. He seemed to expect that I’d heard of the Reverend Jacob Jacobson, too. I hadn’t, and had no interest in learning about him now.
“Well,” I said to him. “My golly.”
“Now, who did you say you’re looking for?”
More stink-eyes were directed my way, as the indigents in line grew impatient. I felt a rising urgency to get away from here, truth be told. But I described the old man.
Brother Amos cocked his skull. “I do not know this man,” he said. “But I have seen him.”
“Seen him where?” I demanded. “How long ago?”
Brother Amos eyed me keenly. “Why?”
The same damned question that Tyree had asked. What was it, with these people?
“Because I want to find him, damn it,” I exclaimed. “Because I want to help him, maybe.”