The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “Got a dog there, eh?” said one of them to Rose. Trying to calculate how much he dared. “Got a filthy fuckin’ mongrel on yer doorstep. Expect the thing has fleas.”

  “Expect it bites, too,” Strother rumbled.

  The apprentices shifted and muttered. They exchanged another look. Then the first one slunk back down the stairs, and the second one slank after.

  Prairie Rose unlocked the door. She opened it, and stepped inside. A moment later, she poked her head back out.

  “You know what?” she said to the old man. “You could prob’ly come in, for a minute, if you wanted. Cup of coffee?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “But no. I’m tolerable right here.”

  *

  Oh, I laughed out loud when Rose told me that story. I laughed with pure relief, and with something else too: the warm glow that comes of knowing you’ve done something right, for a change. Some deed that in its modest way has lit one tiny candle in this world.

  Bring him here, Brother Amos had said to me. That had been his condition. Bring him here, to the Mission, and come yourself. Break bread with us, and join us in fellowship with the Lord. That’s all I’m asking of you, friend o’ mine—but I’m asking for your word.

  I had given it, of course. But why the hell would I go to that Mission now? So I put that commitment where it belonged: clear out of my mind.

  –TEN–

  From The Sorrows of Miz Amanda

  and her Two Brave Boys

  North Carolina, 1850—1861

  1.

  THEY LOST MORE THAN HALF THE CROP in that autumn of 1850, the harvest-time when Bobby Collard was hanged and Drusilla Smoak pronounced her curse. Sheet lightning had shimmered as she spoke; in the hush that followed, thunder rolled like Judgement. Such at least was Lige’s remembering, though he would afterward come to doubt the likelihood: lightning and thunder at that exact moment in time, and then rain lashing down with a fury unseen since Noah built a boat, as if the storm, so long delayed, had been conjured forth by the granny-woman herself.

  But half the crop was lost. This much could be known for God’s own truth, for the account was set down in the ledger book in old Solomon’s hand: black ink on white pages. The storm raged through the night and came back the next afternoon, flinging hailstones the size of robin’s eggs that flattened any grain still standing.

  And their tribulations had only begun. Winter came early and cruel that year, and spring brought scant relief. A late frost thwarted the planting, and then in June incessant rains flooded the lower fields, rotting the corn in the ground. Three months later, in mid-September, the best mule died: a fine strong mule struck suddenly dead, as if it had been thunder-blasted. September 15, one year to the day after Bobby Collard was hung.

  Mr. Dillashay understood beyond all doubt: this was the hand of Drusilla Smoak.

  He said so to his wife, who laughed at him. “A witch so puissant she may thunder-blast mules in the field? Why, Mr. Dillashay, then you best run. To the tall grass, Mr. Dillashay—flee! flee!—before you are ensorcelled.”

  Miz Amanda looked not unlike a witch herself, dressed in mourning-black, as she had been since Bobby Collard’s death. Strother asked her once when she might cease. “When Mr. Dillashay drops dead,” she replied. On that day, she would cast off her weeds and array herself in brilliant colours, gay as are the lilies in the field.

  The following summer drought set in.

  “Boils, Mr. Dillashay,” his wife predicted. “Boils will assuredly be next. Then locusts.”

  And—God help him—she was right. Purple sores boiled up on his back and shoulders, and grasshoppers descended in yellow clouds: multitudes of them with Biblical intent. Afterward swine sickness took hold amongst the pigs.

  “Oh, Mr. Dillashay,” his wife said to him, mocking. “Whatever shall you do?”

  Such was his dilemma. Certainty is not proof, after all, at least not in the eyes of others; Mr. Dillashay’s neighbours showed scant inclination to rally to his aid. And what could he achieve, a mortal man alone? Against a witch who rode the wind and commanded the storm, in league with the devil himself and his infernal powers, with whom she sported abominably on moonless nights—rising above Old Baldy on an eagle and yielding herself into the devil’s embrace, his dingus as rough as a cob of corn? For of course she did; Mr. Dillashay knew it. And the farm slid steadily into ruin, despite the dogged exertions of his step-son.

  So it continued until late summer of 1853, when on a warm dry night on the threshold of harvest-time Mr. Dillashay’s barn unaccountably caught fire. Miz Amanda’s cries awakened the others: “Au secours!” She did not sleep at night and thus was the first to discern the smoke. Strother did what he could to save the livestock and equipment, organizing Lige and Solomon into a bucket brigade while his beautiful, mad Mama fluttered on the periphery, crow-black in the glare of conflagration.

  Mr. Dillashay took up his rifle and was gone before anyone thought to seek him.

  It was the night of September 15.

  He rode north toward Hanging Tree Ridge, bloody murder in his eye. So Cleve Hunsperger would afterward attest. Hunsperger had a farm five miles southwest of the Collard property; he was in his field just after dawn when Jacob Dillashay rode past, shouting that he was going to hang a witch, and urging Hunsperger to ride with him if he foreswore the devil and possessed a pair of testicles to swing together. Cleve Hunsperger desired no part of this, and that was the last he ever saw of Jacob Dillashay.

  He saw the horse again, that afternoon. It was riderless, trotting sweat-streaked and flecked with foam back down the trail, which brought over Cleve Hunsperger a cold qualm of foreboding. It might very well have impelled him up that mountain road himself to investigate, were he the sort of man who intruded himself into the private affairs of others.

  The County Sheriff in Asheville was a man of similar disinclination. Asheville lay thirty miles away, and he had more pressing priorities than to investigate why a farmer might ride up a mountain without riding down again. Especially one of the Great Smoky Mountains, where grievances went down so deep and tangled that Jehovah Himself preferred to keep to His own hilltop, up on Sinai. The Sheriff had prior acquaintance with this particular farmer besides, sufficient to persuade him that the aggregate total of misery in this world would not be increased by Jacob Dillashay’s subtraction.

  Strother might have ridden up himself, if only to find out what had actually happened. He promised his younger brother that they would do so—the two of them together—at the earliest opportunity. But first they must get the crop in, and then do what could be done to raise a new barn, with the weather turning and winter coming on.

  “We can’t just let this go,” Lige said. Coming up on ten years old, he was understandably distressed. His own Daddy, after all. Despite his Daddy’s failings, you only get the one. “It might could be he needs us.”

  “We’ll go just as soon as we can,” Strother said. “You have my word.”

  “He could be hurt, or lost—he could be anything.”

  Their Mama knew otherwise.

  She had felt it in the air, she said: the very instant of her bereavement. It came at eight minutes before eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, September 16, with the ruins of the barn still smouldering and her two boys hobgoblined with sweat and smoke. They had spent the whole night battling the flames, with such neighbours as had come to assist. But during the morning the easterly wind had changed. It came now from out of the north, a bright brisk wind that carried with it a sudden waft of rot and decay: a carrion-stench wafting down from Hanging Tree Ridge. She knew this at once to be the earth’s exhalation as it swallowed down the shade of her late husband.

  “I am,” she cried to Solomon, “a widow for the second time.”

  Going directly into her room she cast off her weeds and put on her yellow frock instead, which she wore as of old with such vivacity that the sunlight itself seemed to trip with her down the stairs.
r />   A funeral service was never held. “I cannot in good conscience swear him dead,” the widow stated. “I say merely that my husband burns in hell. There is a difference.”

  Eventually a memorial stone was placed in the upper field. Strother saw to this much, at least, believing that decorum required some gesture. On it a stone-mason had cut Jacob Dillashay’s name and age and the inscription: Not forgotten. It was the early spring of 1855. Jacob Dillashay had been gone for nearly eighteen months; his stepson was entering into his twenty-first year. He had not yet gone up the mountain, despite his solemn vow to Lige, who did not forget this sort of thing—or anything else that savoured of grievance.

  No corpse was ever to be discovered, though Cleve Hunsperger was in little doubt as to his neighbour’s fate. “He got tooken up before Judge Collard,” the farmer was heard to say. “Got tooken up that mountain and judged.”

  2.

  In April of that year, at the widow’s insistence, they let the farm go and moved to Asheville. It was at that time a hamlet of some two thousand souls, nestled on a plateau between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Smokies to the west. But it was beginning to bestir itself, now that the Great Drover’s Road had been completed, stretching from Greenville, Tennessee, all the way to South Carolina, and connecting western North Carolina to the vast wide world. Asheville was, Miz Amanda proclaimed, a city on the rise. It must surely be the making of her eldest son, who would become a jurist and quite probably a Senator. Asheville was also home to Doc Semmens, the gallant young physician whose quondam solicitudes had been so earnest and so deeply appreciated.

  Strother found employment at a feed lot, and a second position keeping the books for one of the hotels. They took up the lease on a small house, where Miz Amanda spent two hours each morning at her toilette and waited for Doc Semmens to call. He did not, being greatly burdened with other responsibilities. He was also losing his hair. The widow saw this with sorrow one evening while out taking the air with Solomon. Doc Semmens, passing by on the other side of the street, affected at first not to see them, then took off his hat and offered the hurried formality of a bow, which laid bare both his shallow nature and his bald spot. He had inclined already toward portliness, Miz Amanda saw; in later life he would be florid and obese.

  She herself did not age at all. She turned forty that year, but could still fit into the frocks she had worn at seventeen. If anything these had grown too large, a discovery she noted with inward joy, scoffing at Solomon when he fretted at her to eat something more substantial. Solomon had aged sadly, these past few years. His hair was white and he walked with a stoop and a shuffle. She would tease him fondly: “You are become the lean and slippered pantaloon.” Solomon’s loyalty had never faltered, and never would. He remained at the widow’s side until the end of both their lives, which would come suddenly, three years later, on the night of July 23, 1861. He walked out with her each evening in the meantime, and undertook errands to the chemist and Doc Semmens, who though shallow and balding continued to dispense the medicine to Miz Amanda. She required it daily in a dosage that by now had grown prodigious.

  And she was still beautiful, though her loveliness was stretched ever more thinly, with eyes that burned brighter with each passing year. When she paced at night through the house, she might have been the still-living ghost of Miss Amanda Beauchamp, the loveliest debutante in Roanoke, Virginia.

  Some nights she would encounter her younger son, coming in. On one occasion in mid-summer she was startled badly, and shrieked out in such alarm that Strother came stumbling from his room.

  “Murder,” she cried. “Oh, murder!—it is my husband, Mr. Dillashay!”

  “Where?” exclaimed Strother.

  “There!”

  She pointed in terror at Lige, who had halted halfway up the stairs, and stood dark and perplexed in the wavering light of his mother’s candle. She carried a candle with her often in the night. Sometimes she left it unattended, a cause of some concern.

  “It’s me, Ma,” Lige muttered. “Chrissakes.”

  Lige was now fifteen years old, and looked indeed more like his late father each passing day: the heavy dark good looks, and the wildness. His mother at length was calmed a little. She tried to summon a laugh. “Oh, my Lord,” she said to Strother. “Oh dear Jesus Lord in heaven, I thought it was Mr. Dillashay, or the devil.” Strother saw the look that crossed his brother’s face, and reached out, heart-struck, toward him. But Lige hunched away and club-footed past the others on the landing. He stank of whiskey.

  She had come unmoored in Time.

  Solomon understood. The old man’s wits were as keen as ever, despite the tremor in his gait. But he had seen this before, though seldom in someone as young as Miz Amanda.

  “It’s old folks, where you’ll see it,” he said. “One day something tugs loose.”

  Strother would not hear this. His Mama’s nerves, he said; that was all. Her nerves were strung too tight with all the grievances life had brought upon her. This was bad nerves, and that tincture from Doc Semmens, which Strother ordered banished from the house.

  “Yes, sir,” Solomon said. His mouth turned down in a horseshoe of agreement, as in one who knew that withholding the medicine would just make matters worse. He may well have guessed that Strother knew it too. So possibly nothing was done to keep the medicine out of the house, except to bring it inside more discreetly.

  The widow slept less and less as summer came on, which Strother set down to the heat. Who could sleep, after all, in the swelter of a Carolina summer; even here in Asheville, high up in the mountains? He was sleeping little enough himself, with his position at the feed-lot full-time and more bookkeeping work in the evenings. In her sleeplessness, his Mama grew steadily more peevish. Steadily more forgetful, too: forgetting what she’d said to you, and what you’d said back, five minutes previous. Forgetting whole conversations, and then denying that these had taken place at all. A look on her face halfway between queenly indignation and pure fear.

  “Why will you torment me?” she burst out one evening to Strother, when his own frustration had left him frayed and short. “I swear, you never used to be so hard. Is this what they counsel, Louis, in those law books of yours—to be so hard and spiteful?”

  “Strother,” he said. He felt suddenly unmoored himself. “Your son.”

  “I know who you are, and you are horrid!”

  She left the room in a choler. A few moments later she returned, sudued but anxious. “We mustn’t quarrel,” she said. “I can’t bear it when we quarrel. Pax?”

  “Yes. Pax.”

  He stood and she embraced him, laying her head against his chest. She was a bird in his arms. No weight to her at all; the bones were reeds, grown hollow.

  “What’s gone wrong with me?” she whispered.

  “It’s all right,” he said, not knowing what else he might say. “It’s fine. It’s just—we’re here together, so it’s all going to be just fine.”

  “I hope you’re telling me truthful, Lou. Oh, I do so hope. But I wonder if perhaps that’s not quite right.”

  “Her eldest brother,” Solomon said. Miz Amanda had gone back into her room; he and Strother were left alone.

  “Yes,” Strother said. “Louis Beauchamp.”

  “You favour him. The resemblance ... Well, I can surely see how she’d make the confusion.” He stood for a moment as awkward as Strother himself, looking for a way to make this better. “Her favourite of all the family.”

  “Yes.”

  “A fine gentleman. The very finest. Very much like yourself, in that way.”

  Strother said: “This can’t go on.”

  Solomon grew absorbed in looking down between his feet at a knot in the floorboards. “But the thing of it is, Mr. Strother—it does. That’s exactly what it does. It goes on.”

  Inch by inch Time lost its grip entirely. Miz Amanda asked after cousins long dead, fretting that they had not come around to take tea. She would rise to h
er feet in sudden agitation, recollecting that her Papa expected her home for dinner. She would hurry into the street if not attended, and on several occasions was found wandering in confusion a mile or more from the house.

  After that she was kept to her room as much as possible, attended by Solomon. At night he would sleep on a cot outside her door; some nights when the agitation was worse than bad, Strother would turn the key in the lock. Her howls when she discovered this were piteous, and wrung his heart to hear.

  Strother worked harder, leaving early in the morning and seldom coming back again until dark. Lige came home most nights later still, or not at all. Often one of the brothers would glimpse his Mama’s face in the window, as he passed below: a chalk-white spectre with fevered eyes, half crone and half orphaned child. And so it might all have wound down of its own accord, the failing clockwork of this existence.

  Then Lige found out about Sissy Baird.

  3.

  Lige had attended school for a time when they first relocated to Asheville. But he had long since abandoned even the pretense, maintaining that the schoolmaster was a droning fool with nothing whatever to teach him. This was in fairness substantially true; Lige was whip-smart, and knew it, and chafed.

  He found employment instead, here and there: stocking shelves and making deliveries. He found himself often at Mackeson’s Tavern at the foot of Third Street, where he made himself useful: clearing tables and running errands and sweeping up in the back room, where of an evening there might be a game of chance in progress. He learned how to calculate the odds of this outcome or that, and sundry means as well of influencing that outcome: reading tics and tells, and maintaining a stony visage of one’s own, and dealing out a card that looks for all the world to have come from the top of the deck, but doesn’t.

  He discovered that he liked whiskey, very much. Women too. No, not that he liked them, necessarily; but he liked very much the possibilities they represented. And he discovered that women liked him back again: women at least of a certain caste and kind.