The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “He quit drinking for Em’ly’s sake,” Rose confided. “I’m proud of him—an’ so should you be, too.”

  I assured her that I was proud. Yes, you betcha. Proud as punch of that old man, now that I knew about it.

  And I actually was.

  It was early evening. Rose and I were walking together along Market Street, in the general direction of the concert saloon. Prairie Rose was working tonight. The evening was fine and fair, and Rose had taken my arm—just as if we were two ordinary friends, out for a springtime stroll.

  Little Em’ly had a particular horror of bibulous men, Rose was confiding. “Owing to her Daddy was a drunkard. He was drunk for ten days straight, that time he sold her to the Mormon.”

  “Her father sold her?”

  “She don’t talk about it much. Or ever. The Mormon wasn’t a drinking man, of course,” Rose added. “He just had all the other vices. Every other sin God left with Adam—but sober as a fuckin’ Judge as he sinned ’em.”

  Three sentences in a row. It was the most she’d ever said to me, about the Mormon.

  “The Mormon we’re talking about—he’d be your ex-husband?” I said, gingerly.

  “He would. Except we don’t talk about him.” Rose’s voice had grown terse and clipped. “Not now, an’ not ever.”

  Rose walked a little quicker, for a time—almost as if she feared the Brute was behind us. It was an edginess so palpable that I nearly snuck a look back over my shoulder.

  “Em’ly’s fond of that old man, though,” Rose was saying. “She don’t take to anyone—but she’s taken to Old Lem. An’ I swear he’s taken right back to her.” Rose smiled a little, at that. Smiling was a good look for her. It lifted the shadow she carried with her. “Old Lem never had a child, I think,” Rose said. “So Em’ly is kindly like that, for him, maybe—the daughter he wisht he could of had.”

  I said, “That’s a blessing, then.”

  There must have been something in my voice, because Rose looked at me sidelong. “G’wan,” she said, surprised. “You?”

  “Sure,” I said, and shrugged. It wasn’t a secret, after all—just something I didn’t tend to mention. “I have a daughter. Had one, anyway.”

  Rose’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “No, she’s still alive. As far as I know. Somewhere. We’ve been—well, it’s hard to stay in touch, sometimes. You know how it is. The years go by.”

  Rose’s expression closed down, just a little. “Sure,” she said.

  “Things didn’t work out,” I said. “With her mother. So I moved on, and afterwards...well, I guess that’s just how it goes, sometimes. Look, you can think whatever you want, but—”

  “Me?” Rose gave a small, bleak laugh. “Oh, sure—like I got the right to sit in judgement. On you, or on anyone else in this world.”

  –FOURTEEN–

  From High Crimes of the Outlaw Dillashay

  Santa Rosita, New Mexico Territory, 1874

  1.

  DEAK ROBY, RISING LATE, had watched it unfold. The Deputy had slept that night in the room he kept above the Gemstone Saloon—the second floor, with a window overlooking the main thoroughfare, by which he stood pissing into the thunder-mug as the procession of two came down the middle of the street. Deputy Purcell and his prisoner: Purcell keeping two paces behind, his sixgun in his hand. Stalking with those long, slow strides, his back ramrod straight with the Plank of Rectitude.

  The prisoner was bare-headed, and walked with visible pain, club-footing with his wrists handcuffed behind. He glanced up as they processed underneath Deak Roby’s vantage, meeting Deak’s bleary gaze with pure defiance, then nodding a sardonic greeting to a clerk staring out from a shop doorway, opposite. “’Morning,” the prisoner was heard to say. “Fine day, isn’t it? And fuck you very much.”

  Deak Roby had no idea who the prisoner was, or how he had come to be apprehended—not yet, in the hungover fuddle of the morning, with John Percy in his palm and last night’s taste in his mouth as if something furred and verminous had died there. But he found out soon enough.

  “Your brother?” Deak demanded of Deputy Rectitude. Deak had pulled on pants and boots and made his way over to the courthouse.

  A knot of gawkers had assembled outside, and from them Deak had heard this remarkable news. He shouldered through them, and clambered up the stairs to the second floor. The incumbent prisoners, Smith and Miller, were still locked in the makeshift cell downstairs. So Deputy Rectitude had placed this new prisoner in a separate room, above. It had one window, barred, and a heavy door that bolted on the outside.

  The blacksmith had already been summoned. The prisoner sat in a straight-backed chair that constituted the room’s sole furnishings, along with an iron cot and a wooden bucket. Deputy Rectitude stood guard at the open door, watching grimly as the blacksmith affixed leg-irons.

  “That’s your brother?” Deak Roby demanded.

  “Only half,” the prisoner said. His smile was sweet as Lucifer’s, welcoming Judas Iscariot to hell. “The half that’s Beauchamp is partway to a saint. It’s the Dillashay side that brings such shame on our heads.”

  “Yes,” Strother said to Deak Roby. “This man is my brother.”

  “He’s gonna watch them hang me, too.” The prisoner spoke as a man who savours the ironies of life. “That’s exactly the sort of man he is, your Deputy Purcell. I always knew that about him. But somehow—all these years—I let the knowing of it slip my mind.”

  “The hell’s he done?” Deak Roby demanded.

  Deputy Rectitude’s face was grey. “He’s done nothing. Not unless a Judge says otherwise.”

  “ Then we get to the hanging,” the prisoner said.

  “Why?”

  This was Maria Teresa Lestander’s question.

  “I swore an oath,” Strother said to her. “To your father. To the County. When I took up their badge.” There was a look on his face that Maria Teresa had not seen before, not in such intensity.

  “Well, good Lord,” she said. “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know that, Maria. It’s not up to me. All I know is what’s alleged.”

  He’d missed the point. “No,” she exclaimed, impatiently. “I’m asking—what did your brother do to you?”

  They were walking by the river, just outside the town. It was evening. The river was low and brown in midsummer, and the heat of the day still slouched, oppressive. It would be intolerable in the makeshift cell on the second floor above the courthouse.

  “My brother is a fugitive,” Strother said. “He’s wanted by the Law. What sort of a lawman would I be—?”

  “A bad one. A bad lawman, derelict at best. But...what sort of a brother?”

  “Brothers don’t come into it. The distinction is false.”

  She searched his face in some bewilderment. Maria Teresa had no brother of her own—no family at all, besides the sheriff. She would have liked, very much, to have had a brother.

  Strother drew a breath. He said, “You need to understand—”

  “What?” Maria Teresa demanded. “What is it that I need to understand?”

  “The law.” He spoke doggedly. “There’s brothers, Miss Lestander, and then there’s law. It tells us where we stand—what’s right, what’s wrong. Without the law...It comes down to obligations. Obligations on either side—what’s rightly ours to take, and what we owe. If those accounts get lost, or confused, or disregarded—then God help us. We lose our way, and then the devil only knows...”

  Strother’s voice trailed away. He seemed to struggle for words. When he found them, his voice was unaccountably hoarse. “I lost my own way, once. I collected, maybe, more than what was owed. Well, I learned from that. I learned, never again. The law. What’s due, and what’s owed. If a man transgresses, then that man must stand trial, never mind whose brother he is.”

  It was the longest speech Maria Teresa had ever heard from him. His face was red when he finished, as if from some
battle within.

  And oh, the expression he wore.

  Lige Dillashay had seen it once, though Maria Teresa could hardly have known that. It was the look Strother had worn on that terrible morning in childhood, when two boys had set forth to harvest forty acres of corn.

  Maria Teresa was nineteen years old. She was not Sheriff Lestander’s flesh and blood, although she had taken his name. She was more as you might say his adopted daughter, being the child of his late housekeeper. And she was a deep one. So her father had often reflected. A quiet gal, until a thought or an emotion should take hold. Then she would flash with it, and in that moment be remarkable. Devout, in the Popish way of her late mother: a gal for candles and Rosary beads, with uncanny Latin obsessions that would come fizzing up as unexpected as Vesuvius. Injustices could set her off entirely, sparking flames of indignation.

  But she had never supposed that Strother Purcell could be heartless—not till that evening, by the river. This distressed her more than she let on.

  The next morning, she carried the prisoners’ breakfast to the courthouse. This was a chore she regularly undertook, though usually one of the men would relay it to the cells—one of the deputies, or else Woody McQuatt, who did odd jobs and served for a turnkey when required. Old Woody might also be entrusted to escort a shackled prisoner to the courtroom when the Circuit Judge arrived.

  Today, she carried the basket up to the second-floor cell, while Woody McQuatt grumbled his way to the other prisoners, confined below. Lige Dillashay sat shackled on the cot, the leg-irons secured with a heavy chain to a metal ring in the floor. He’d been gazing out through the bars of the window, with its vantage overlooking the dusty street. “H’lo, darlin’,” he said to her. “Miss Lestander, I should say.”

  She set the basket on the floor. The chain scraped against rough planks as he shifted.

  “Like a chicken-killing dog,” he said. “Mind you keep your distance.” He summoned up a grin, but it seemed to her less devilish than wan. His face was pale, despite his natural colouration; he moved stiffly and with pain. The doctor had been by to dress his wounded shoulder. The bandage seemed almost shockingly white. “Thank you kindly,” he said, meaning the food.

  Maria Teresa thought: You heard the resemblance in their voices. The same slow accents of the South. “I know your brother,” she said. “I’m a sort of . I’m a friend of his.”

  “So was I,” the prisoner said. “But that was a long, long time ago.”

  *

  There was a small table in the second-floor hallway, outside the door of the cell. Sometimes Sheriff Lestander sat there, when he was in town, doing paperwork while keeping one eye on whatever prisoner was within. This way the door might be left open, a mercy in the heat of summer. Other times it was Deputy Roby who sat at the table, though not so much in the interests of compassion.

  He sat there for a time that afternoon, the Sheriff being still upon his tax-collecting rounds. “Next week,” Deputy Roby said cheerfully.

  “Next week what?” Lige said.

  “Circuit Judge is comin’. Big week for you fellas. You, and them two in the cell downstairs. You acquainted with that particular pair? No? Well, you ain’t missing much.”

  The Deputy did not do paperwork. Today he was preparing cartridges for his firearms. He liked to double the powder-load in a store-bought cartridge, and would carve as well an X on the tip of the bullet, working meticulously with his knife. Such loads had great destructive power, as oftentimes a lawman might require in the course of his duties. He had recently been called to dispatch a rabid, bat-bit dog. A disgusting cur, foaming at the end of a chain—not at all dissimilar to present company, Deak said affably. “No offense intended,” he added.

  “None taken.”

  “Well, what do you suppose? The bullet blew that dog’s damned head off, and the muzzle-flash set fire to the carcass.”

  The Deputy laughed uproariously at this, being a big man who could enjoy a joke at his own expense. The prisoner looked away from him.

  “If it’s jail-time, you’ll be shipped off to the territorial prison,” Deak said.

  “’Less I’m innocent.”

  “’Less you’re innocent,” Deak agreed. “Then pigs will fly.”

  The prisoner was looking out the window again, instead of at Deak Roby. The Deputy found this to be irksome.

  “If it’s hanging, they’ll do it here. Right out that window, where you’re lookin’.” The lumber would be brought in from Las Tablas, he said, by wagon. Good, clean wood was needful, and then they’d nail it together. This was no doubt disconcerting to the condemned man, Deak Roby reflected—sawing and hammering dawn to dusk, the gallows going up right there, where he could see it. “Then again, you could of thought of that before you done ’em.”

  “Done what?”

  “Your wicked deeds. Deeds so vile your own brother hates you.”

  The prisoner Dillashay was looking at him, now. Deputy Roby found that he liked this even less. It was a seething and a measuring look, despite the smile that went with it.

  “I asked myself what she sees in you,” Lige said. “The one you’re sweet on—the Lestander gal.”

  “Take care how you speak of her,” Deak Roby said.

  “Then I realized—she don’t see anything in you, at all. It’s him she favours. And I believe you know it, don’t you?”

  Deak Roby gave this due consideration. A slow, red flush crept up his neck. “You might see certain benefits,” he said, “in shutting your Got-damned mouth.”

  That evening, after dinner, Maria Teresa returned to the courthouse building. A hot desert wind had come up with the sun’s decline, tumbling a solitary tumbleweed down the street. She found Woody McQuatt escorting the prisoner Dillashay down the outside stairs in the back, for his evening excursion to the jakes.

  The outlaw shuffled like a man grown ancient, the short chain that linked the leg-irons clanking. His hands on the railing were cuffed, and when he lifted his head Maria Teresa saw that his face was battered on the one side, the eye and cheekbone swollen. He grinned most gallantly, though. “’Evening, darlin’.”

  Maria Teresa exclaimed in dismay, demanding to know what had happened. Woody McQuatt was following at a distance of two paces, clutching a shotgun against the possibility of escape. But there was an indignation about him.

  “Couldn’t say, Miss,” the old man muttered. “Wasn’t present at the time.”

  “Well, who was present?”

  “Not sure, Miss. You might ask Deputy Roby.”

  “Deak did this?” she demanded.

  “My own fault, darlin’,” the outlaw said. “Fell down the stairs.”

  Maria Teresa looked back to Woody McQuatt. He scowled resolutely into the middle distance, as a man may do who keeps dark thoughts to himself. Woody was eighty-some years old by his own best estimation, leathered and shrivelled and spindly as a shrub, but he had been a top hand in his day, riding point on cattle-drives from Texas. He had broken every bone in his body, at one time or another—so it was said, and there was nothing in his posture to dispute it. But he was a man of freedom and the open range, and had no great fondness for the jackals of authority.

  “My best regards to your intended, darlin’,” Lige said, sardonic.

  The wind had come up, with evening. A prowling mutter, gusting from time to time to sweep up grit from the street and fling it into the eye. In the desert beyond the outskirts of the town, it would be gathering force, howling with vengeance down the arroyos and setting the dust-devils spinning.

  The air in Santa Rosita had changed, as well. Across the street, two townsmen glared sidelong at the shackled outlaw, before sloping in through the bat-wing doors of the Gemstone Saloon.

  Deak Roby had been drinking there for several hours. The knuckles on his right fist were scraped and raw, a fact of which he was reminded each time he raised his glass. This lifted his mood, but only somewhat.

  Shortly after seven p.m., a ri
der had come in from one of the ranches east of the County line. This was a man named Enoch Staunton, a drifter and gun-hand who was known to hire out his services to moneyed interests. He also had direct knowledge concerning the outlaw Dillashay. “He’s a bottom-dealing gambler and a horse-thief,” Enoch Staunton had said. “And that’s just the start of it. He shot a man, two months ago, in Arizona. That fella lived—just barely—but them others didn’t.”

  “What others?” Deak Roby said.

  “Them others he shot, elsewhere. While robbing folks and terrorizing women.”

  Voices exclaimed, about them. Enoch Staunton had drawn an audience at the bar.

  “Terrorizing women?” Deak Roby demanded.

  “Countless of ’em. Widows and gals—he’s famous for it, everywhere he’s been.”

  “You’re certain of this?”

  “Hell, yes. ’Course I’m certain. Would I say it, otherwise?”

  2.

  “Look at me,” Strother said. “No, let me see you.” He lifted up his lantern. “Turn your face.”

  By lantern-light, the bruises were purple.

  “Deacon Roby did this?” he demanded.

  Lige did not reply.

  Strother said grimly, “That man’s time will come. A time always comes, for men like Deacon Roby.”

  It was later that same evening. Strother had gone to the courthouse to relieve Woody McQuatt from sentry duty. In the makeshift cell on the second floor, Lige sat on the cot, leg-irons chained once again to the iron ring.

  Setting the lantern down, Strother stood by the window, looking out into the night. Light spilled from the Gemstone Saloon across the street. Dark voices spilled with it.

  “Why?” Strother said at last. He spoke with great weariness. “Why did you have to come here, Lige? Of all places?”