by Ian Weir
Wincing, Lige raised himself onto one elbow. Sunlight slanted through the curtains. “Time is it?” he said.
Strother said, “There’s warrants outstanding in Tennessee, Kansas, and Arizona. I checked it out.”
“Good thing I’m in New Mexico, then.”
“There’s a warrant in New Mexico, too. A shooting scrape near Lincoln, two days ago. The man they’re looking for was wounded—rode off on a stolen horse.”
Lige’s gun belt when he went to sleep had been looped around the bedpost, near to hand. It was not there now. Strother, in shadow, held a sixgun in his lap.
There was stillness between them.
Lige said, “You’ve made your mind up—have you, brother? Passed your judgement.”
“I’ve got no right to judge you, Lige. Nor any man.”
“You do not.”
“The Circuit Judge will have to do that, when he comes.”
–THIRTEEN–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
SOMETIMES WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was out, Little Em’ly would watch for her protector through the keyhole. The old man might hear the faintest creaking of floorboards behind him; the whisper of muslin as she crouched. Sometimes he might hear nothing at all, which was deeply impressive to him. The walls in the tenement were wafer-thin—the rats themselves could not sneak along those floorboards. And even late in life his hearing was uncanny, a trait he of necessity shared with all of the great frontier man-killers. In his prime he could hear the click of a sixgun cocked at four hundred paces, and the breech-bolt of a Henry rifle at half a mile. Em’ly never opened the door or said a word, so at first he was unsure of her intent—whether she hoped to see him present, or to see him gone. But one morning when Rose was especially late returning, he was unaware of Em’ly’s presence entirely, until he heard a single sigh one inch behind his head, and a gasp as Em’ly caught herself up out of slumber. She’d been there all along. It might have been hours; it might have been all night—just there, on the other side of the door.
He took heart from this. From here on he stayed at his post as much as was possible, save for unavoidable forays outside—to make ablutions at the stand-pipe or to avail himself of the courtyard jakes. These latter took longer than he would have wished; his bowels were not what they had been in youth. This affliction he held in common with Wild Bill Hickok, who late in life was much martyred by his digestion. He had in fact known Wild Bill, though not well enough to have discussed the gunman’s bowels; had encountered Wild Bill while passing through Cheyenne in 1873, and was sorry to hear of it when Hickok was later murdered in Deadwood. Returning, the old man would announce himself by stamping his boots as he came back up the stairs, guessing that Em’ly might not settle in her mood until she knew he was back at his post. He would clear his throat with vehemence, or whistle; even hum some little snatch of melody, a thing he had not done in many years.
The attack, when it came, caught them horribly unawares.
It was shortly before eleven a.m. when the old man went outside. Prairie Rose had come home and gone back out again, that morning. Em’ly was inside, sweeping. Their own small corner of the world seemed to be in good order. Rose would be back soon herself, and so he decided he might safely stay away just a little bit longer than usual. He might walk in the warm spring sunshine, stretch his legs.
He walked a block or two along Pacific Street. Turning left, he continued on his way. In passing he failed to take note of the two men on the nearby corner.
In his prime, he would surely have seen them and made a mental note. Two scruffy men, unshaven and unwashed, though one of them wore a red silk vest and a fine gold watch on a chain. They fell silent as he drew near, and turned casually away. He would in his prime have marked that they seemed out of place, and desirous to avoid his eye. He would at the very least have intuited, at a level more profound than conscious thought, that something in the configuration was not quite right.
But we grow old. We fall upon evil times. Lost in his own thoughts he continued past, never seeing the two men exchange a look, nor hearing Red Silk Vest say: “See?” They let him reach the next corner before turning themselves and sloping up Pacific Street.
Little Em’ly was cleaning the bedroom—the back room—and was thus in no position to notice them either. Nor could she have noted their intersection with a third man, oleaginating around the corner from the opposite direction: Rose’s gold-toothed Rent Collector. She could not have noticed their brief encounter in front of the tenement building, nor the hooded glance Red Silk Vest cast about, as if marking who might be watching. She did not see them at all until she started into the parlour a few moments later, just in time to see the knob turning on the front door.
The Rent Collector had no need to knock, of course. He had a key.
Just past eleven. A bank-clock had chimed the hour moments previous, startling Em’ly from her task and recollecting her intention to prepare a lunch for Prairie Rose. There was cheese wrapped up in paper on the shelf, and a loaf of pumpernickel, which Em’ly would slice into slabs with the bread knife. A fine knife of German make, one of Rose’s few domestic luxuries: it lay gleaming on the cutting board, and Em’ly in just a few steps more would have reached it. But she emerged one heartbeat too late. The front door was opening at her; the doorway was filling with thug. For the span of that single heartbeat Em’ly froze.
The moment was lost. She darted for the knife, but Red Silk Vest was one step ahead, his accomplice moving to cut off her angle of retreat. An Irishman this second man was: Houlihan, though the name hardly matters. Now the third man, the Rent Collector, was closing the front door behind him and locking it with his key.
“Buongiorno,” the Rent Collector said.
Trapped. They had triangulated and hemmed her in. But she was not to fear; so the Rent Collector gave her to understand. They had not come here with malignancy of intention.
“No harm you. Yes? Come in, go out again.”
The gold tooth gleamed in his smile. And that was their business here, wasn’t it? They just wanted the gold. He explained this to her and Red Silk Vest said something else she did not understand, being as it was in Sicilian.
The Irishman translated: “Yer fecking husband.”
The Utah Brute, he meant. The Utah Brute had been rich, as these Mormon bastards always were. Such was the rumour that had been festering for weeks. For months—longer, even—since Prairie Rose arrived in San Francisco. But then her sister-wife had arrived halfdead and storm-drenched at the concert saloon: a second wife fleeing, and now there could be no doubt. Little Em’ly had slit his throat and robbed him blind. She had fled Utah with a sack full of Mormon gold, and where else could it be hidden but in the flat?
This had attained to the status of incontrovertible fact in certain Barbary Coast taverns, frequented by men such as Houlihan. The Irishman had discussed possible initiatives with his colleague Red Silk Vest, who—as Fortune would have it—was not only game for burglary, and worse, but was a cousin of the very man who collected rent from Prairie Rose.
Em’ly knew none of this, of course. She just knew there was no way out. The Rent Collector turned to wedge a wooden chair against the door, as a further impediment to ingress; when he turned back his smile gleamed again. One last time he asked her nicely: Dov’è l’oro?
Little Em’ly screamed.
It was the first time anyone in San Francisco had heard her voice, except for Prairie Rose herself; the surprise made all of them jump. Em’ly opened her mouth to scream again, although there was no point. No one in the building would come to help her, would dare to interrupt the Rent Collector. His countenance grew very dark indeed.
One last time she screamed.
And the door exploded from its hinges.
Such was Em’ly’s experience of the moment. An explosion on the landing outside, and the door blown into pieces by the blast. Flinders of it, flying like shrapnel, and bits of the
wooden chair.
There in the gaping doorway stood Old Lem.
See. The syllable that had been uttered some minutes previous, as he had passed without noticing the two men on the corner. Except he had noticed them; some ancient instinct in him had stirred, without his conscious awareness. And the syllable had not been see at all, but si.
The realization had brought him shambling to a stop, halfway down the block. He’d stood for a moment in vague perplexity, shaking his grey head as if to clear all those years of cobwebs, puzzling out what had troubled him. And clarity came. Those two men, so close to the tenement. The Rent Collector, and the single syllable. Sicilian.
He turned and saw them. Three of them—one, two, three—sloping through the front door of the building.
So he started back. Found himself moving more swiftly with each stride. Back up Pacific Street; through the door of the tenement and up the stairs. Paused to catch his breath on the first landing, then resumed. Took the second flight of stairs two at a time, and halfway up the third he heard Em’ly’s scream.
The door burst apart before his boot heel.
“Exterminator, ma’am,” he said. “Come to deal with the vermin.”
Or so he would have said, if he’d had the wind. Something very much like it, or even pithier. But he was old, or seemed so to the world; this must be borne in mind. A man with nearly three-score winters on his head, and cruelly aged by years of dissipation; two city blocks at an accelerating lurch and then those fucking stairs. What wind he had left was otherwise required.
Red Silk Vest came viper-quick, but the old man smote him. One sledging blow and down he flopped in a marionetting of limbs.
Houlihan took up a chair and struck him from behind. The old man staggered and nearly fell. He might yet have been finished right then and there—killed dead, had Houlihan reached for the bread knife and plunged it between his shoulder blades. But the Irishman went for his pistol instead. It was tucked in his belt and it snagged. The old man caught him by the wrist, and wrenched; as Houlihan fell with a shriek and a feck! the old man took the pistol for himself.
He had not held a gun in sixteen years. Not since he had cast aside the firearm with which he had brought his own outlaw brother to a reckoning. The Irishman’s pistol was by contrast a risible thing: cheaply made, badly balanced, the sort of a gun to explode in your hand and take three fingers with it. But it fit into his grip. It belonged there. He lifted his gaze.
The Rent Collector remained. Three feet away: hunched and furtive, caught like a thief in lantern-light, his hand frozen partway to the derringer in his pocket.
Twenty years earlier, the old man might have given him his chance. He might have stepped back and put his own gun in his belt, rumbling: “Go ahead, then—make your play.” If he’d been a younger man, more nearly in his prime. Or if his brother had been standing across from him instead; his brother, or Meshach Collard. If indeed he’d been able to speak at all—if the room had not commenced to spin, spots like dust-motes dancing before his eyes.
So instead he reached out with his left hand, as if to seize the Rent Collector’s collar. Then, in that half-second of diversion, he swung the pistol in his right hand, bringing the barrel against the Sicilian’s skull. This was a trick that Wyatt Earp had loved to use, in his days in Tombstone and Dodge. There was, as always, a satisfying thock. The Rent Collector wobbled and sprawled.
The Irishman was already out the door, clutching his broken wrist. Red Silk Vest was right behind, and the Rent Collector grovelled after. The old man stood swaying as they thudded down the stairs: stood swaying and magnificent. He turned at last to Little Em’ly. She crouched in the furthest corner of the room, staring huge-eyed back, as if gazing upon the Beast from the Pit, or some warrior archangel.
The old man took a breath. He gathered himself to utter reassurance. His legs gave way instead.
*
Prairie Rose returned ten minutes later. Pushing through the crowd on the landing, she found Little Em’ly amidst the shambles with Old Lem’s head in her lap.
The old man had been murdered dead. So Rose had been reliably informed as she’d hurried up the stairs, by neighbours. They were appropriately sorrow-struck to Rose’s face, although privately they had known no good could come of this, consorting with violent derelicts.
But Old Lem was alive and muttering, to Rose’s great relief. Within a few minutes he was able to sit up, though he was much dishevelled and remained for some while not quite lucid. He had taken a fearsome knock to the back of the head. His hair was matted with blood and an ostrich egg was sprouting.
In lieu of a door that would shut against unwanted noses—Rose’s front door, or what remained of it, being strewn in bits across the floor—she settled for begging privacy instead. When entreaties did not avail, she shouted for it, using language that caused some grievance but brought results. Duly offended, the noses withdrew. In a few more minutes Old Lem was attempting communication. He was able to articulate a few words, in roughly the order that he intended.
“What happened?” Rose demanded.
Young Weaver arrived at a lope some short while later.
I’d heard the news while taking lunch at a saloon, half a mile away—a shooting scrape, would you believe it, at a whore’s lodgings on Pacific Street. Some old man with one eye blasting the hell out of Rent Collectors. Oh, shit-fuck-pisspots, I thought to myself, and sprinted.
So I hadn’t—strictly speaking—been an eyewitness to the confrontation. The accounting I’ve given above is more what you’d call a dramatic re-creation, based on interviews and canny suppositions, honed by years of writing yarns for newspapers. But I think I come pretty close to the mark.
Rose’s rooms, when I got there, were strewn with debris and spattered with blood. The door and two chairs were reduced to kindling, and three walls were cratered as if by cannon-fire.
“Fucksake, Barry!” Rose said to me. We were on the landing together, the two of us. Outside the gaping doorway, trying to have a private conversation. “Three of ’em—one old tramp. Jesus on a rented mule, who is he?” She was halfway giddy with relief, but she had me by the shirt front just the same: both hands clenched and nose-to-nose. “The truth, you bastard!”
So I told her. Or at least, I told a version thereof. It could hardly help the old man to start blabbing the whole truth, unvarnished and entire. Besides, I still knew only parts of it myself, despite having been busy for the past couple of days, scouring through newspaper archives in search of information. I’d written letters to old newspaper acquaintances, too, here and there about the country, casually asking for any information that fellows might have concerning the late gunman Strother Purcell. There’d been no replies as yet—the letters had just gone out—but I had hopes. And in the meantime, my archival scouring had yielded up the broadest strokes of a biographical sketch.
Born in North Carolina. Left there as a young man, after a back-country blood-feud boiled over. Turned up a few years later as an itinerant lawman in tough, rail-head cattle-towns in Kansas and Wyoming. Turned up after that in New Mexico, where some manner of reunion with his outlaw brother led to a year-long pursuit all the way into Canada—the Retribution Ride—and a Reckoning sometime in the winter of 1876.
And there’d been corpses—by his own admission, that first night in the cell. Corpses left behind, at each stop along the way.
I didn’t mention this to Prairie Rose. Not the details, and certainly not the name. Instead, I told her: “I believe Old Lem killed a man.”
“He near to just killed three more!”
“No, hear me out. He shot a man dead, a few years back. In—in New Mexico, I think.”
This was true. Almost certainly. Based on the research I had done to this point, it seemed clear that he had killed men in various States and Territories, not to mention Canada. So why should New Mexico be an exception?
“An’ now you get around to telling me? Fucksake, Barry...!”
&nb
sp; “Just keep your voice down. A gunfight—a fair fight—he was defending himself. But they called it murder. He’s been on the run, ever since. And if word of this ever gets out—well, I don’t know what will happen to him, Rose.”
Searching does not do credit to Prairie Rose’s gaze. “Is that the truth?”
“Rose, it’s God’s own truth.”
Or if not God’s own, then at least a version He might recognize as having loitered about the neighbourhood. A version that had a savour of God’s own truth in it—and in the end, we can hardly do better than that.
“Jesus, Barry.”
Rose’s vulture-clutch on my shirt front eased. Shaking her head in weary wonderment, she looked back through the gaping doorway. The old man was inside. He lay stretched out on a day-bed that Little Em’ly had cobbled together. “Lord God Christ on a sway-backed mule—but all right. I’ll keep this between the two of us.”
“Your word?” I said.
“I swear. Nobody hears it from me.”
The old man moved in with Rose and Em’ly after that—just as soon as a new front door had been installed. Old Lem did that himself, with a borrowed toolkit. He turned out to be a carpenter of no mean skill, having earned his crusts by such means through the long years of his self-exile. He fashioned a door that would withstand a bitter blast, and installed two heavy locks and a deadbolt inside, assuring the women that they should sleep soundly henceforward.
“The marvel is he didn’t saw a finger off,” I said drily to Prairie Rose. This was some days later. She eyed me asquint, as if to ask why he’d do such a damnfool thing. “John Barleycorn,” I said. “The shakes.”
“Old Lem don’t drink,” Rose said.
“The hell he doesn’t.”
She was serious. “That old man hasn’t taken drink in days. You mean to say you haven’t even noticed?”
I hadn’t seen as much of him as I might have intended. He’d been lying low—which was good. Let him lie as low as possible, thought I. Meantime the hullabaloo concerning the battle with the Rent Collector had pretty much died down, which was even better. There’d been barroom speculation for a day or so, but then San Francisco had mercifully moved on.