by Ian Weir
“‘My Roman,’” Lige said. “That’s what she called you. Remember? The priestess Cydippe, our beautiful, brain-cracked Mama. My fucking Roman.”
Strother very nearly smiled. So it seemed to Lige, though this could have been a trick of shadow.
“I’m tired,” Lige said. “That’s why I came. I fought with you, then I fought with the whole damned world. I’m just worn out.”
Very slightly, Strother nodded.
“You could speak for me, big brother. You could do that. Take my side.”
Strother said, “All right.”
“You mean that?”
“Yes.”
Hope kindled. “You can fix this, Strother. I know you can. Talk to the Sheriff, when he gets back—tell him to put a word in with the Governor.”
“Can’t do that. But I’ll speak up at your trial.”
“My trial? No, see, that’s not what I’m—”
“I’ll stand as a character witness. Do my best.”
“Jesus Christ!” Lige’s distress was keen, almost startling.
Strother said, doggedly: “What more could you expect? I swore an oath.”
There was silence. When Lige spoke again, his voice was wormwood. “Straight and true, eh? Straight and true. Always and ever, pulling straight and true.”
“I swore to uphold the law. You knew that, Lige—before you came here.”
“And what about Hanging Tree Ridge, brother? What law were you upholding, when you rode up to kill the Collards?”
A change had come upon Strother, subtle but profound. The whole of him stiffened: all that great height, the slope-shouldered power.
“I went there to find one Collard,” he said. “I was looking for Meshach.”
“And you couldn’t find him, could you? So you killed all the rest instead.”
“State your proof.”
“Proof? I’ve got none. No one has. But I heard what they found there, afterward.” Lige leaned forward, just a little. The chain scuffed against the floor and rattled. “They found Harris Collard hanging from a tree, with old Judge Zebulon next to him. That hideous old man. Someone hauled him out of that wheeled contraption, where he sat on the porch in his prune-shat drawers, and hung him up right next to his fat fucking son.”
Strother stared out the window, into the night.
“Don’t misunderstand me, brother,” Lige said. “I don’t criticize. I’d’ve cheered you on, if I’d been there. I’d’ve whooped in celebration. We’d’ve done it together—the two of us, united in joyful purpose. I believe we might have lifted our voices in song.”
Lige’s voice could be beautiful, when he wished. There was dark music in it. His smile was sweet and serene and insinuating. “But the rest of it,” he said. “The rest of the killing that was done that afternoon—well, some of the rest was not such cause for singing, maybe.”
The smile began to grow reflective. Sorrowful, even. “The house was burnt to the ground, and there were two more bodies in the woods. That’s according to Cleve Hunsperger. You recollect Cleve? Lived a few miles from the Collard place. He rode up when he saw the birds, circling and circling over the ridge. Animals had been at the bodies in the woods. Cleve supposed it must have been the youngest Collard boys—Joey and Sam. Right little sons of bitches, the both of them. Just the kind to open fire on a rider coming up the trail. They’d have tried to back-shoot him—that’d be my guess. And they’d get what was coming to them, in return. Still and all, it’s not like they were grown men, really.
“And Ruth Collard? Fat Harris’s poor wife? Cleve found her inside the burnt-out house. The body was so badly burned that Cleve couldn’t say what had happened—whether she’d been shot first, or whether she’d just been inside that house when it caught fire. Hell, maybe she set the fire herself. Burnt herself to a cinder out of grief, or else—who can say?—out of pure relief to be finished with this life. All those years of toil and tribulation—labouring in the house and the fields all day, and all night in bed with old fat Harris grunting away on top. Yes, I can see how she’d set that fire and then weep with joy at her own deliverance. Melancholy prospect, nonetheless—poor Ruth, making such an end.”
Strother stared out the window some more, into the night.
Lige said, “’Course, Cleve Hunsperger never saw the deeds being done. The killer could have been anyone at all. Hell, the killings that went on in those mountains? Back then, under cover of the War? Scores being settled and people being and hung and God only knows what-all else.” Lige leaned forward some more. The chain rattled again. “But it wasn’t anyone, brother. It was you.”
Strother’s face in the lantern-light was grey.
Lige said: “The granny-woman, though—Drusilla Smoak. She wasn’t there, was she? Shame. She’s no doubt drawing breath to this very day. And so is Meshach Collard. He was in Tennessee, when he heard the news. You knew that already, since you went after him.” Imperceptibly, Strother nodded. “I went after him.” His voice was very low.
“Shack Collard enlisted,” Lige said. “Or so I heard.”
Strother nodded again. “Early in ’62. A Tennessee unit—the Confederate side. Then he deserted. He was with Quantrill’s Raiders in ’63—I know that for a fact. He rode with Bloody Bill in the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where they slaughtered two hundred Lincolnite civilians. He was in Missouri for a time, just after the War ended. But he was gone again before I got there.”
Lige widened his eyes, as a man may do in admiration. “You’ve made quite the study of that bastard. I declare, brother—you are a mighty scholar on the subject. Our beautiful, brain-cracked Mama would be proud. Still and all—you never did find him, did you?”
“Not yet.”
“Any notion where he is?”
“Not as of this moment.”
“Well, I do.”
Strother stood stone-still. “Is that the truth?”
“It is.” Lige leaned forward, even closer. “And I could help you.”
“Don’t you lie to me. You know where I could find him?”
“Where we could find him. We could do this together.”
Strother turned. “Tell me where he is,” he said.
“First turn me loose.”
“Can’t do that, Lige.”
“I’m your brother, you son of a bitch!”
And something wavered in Strother’s eyes. Lige saw it; he was sure of that. And it wasn’t just a trick of shadow in the lantern-light.
“I’ll tell you if you turn me loose, big brother. We’ll do this together. You have my word.”
“Purcell!”
The shout came from the street, outside the window. Deak Roby’s voice, thick with whiskey. “You in there, Purcell? With that brother of yours? Well, then fetch that bastard out—or we’re comin’ in!”
Other voices bayed in approbation.
–FIFTEEN–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
1.
THE OLD MAN did not take to the bottle again, even as time went by. And he didn’t move back out of Rose’s flat. He’d be there, inside, with Em’ly, when you arrived at the door.
Sometimes they’d venture outside together: his long slow strides, and Little Em’ly sheltering in the lee. He’d taken to washing on a daily basis; had brushed off his coat and trimmed his hair and beard. Or else Em’ly had done this for him: combing out such tangles as would yield, and cutting out the worst of what remained, the brambles and locusts, so that he looked less with each passing day like a Bible Prophet gone to ruin.
Mainly, though, they stayed close to home. Little Em’ly was very far from shedding her terror, regardless of her faith in Mr. Lem. And the old man for his part seemed strongly disposed to avoid the public eye, having no desire to be sidelonged and queried, and still less to be flat-out asked his name and whence he hailed. Oh, his past was as a haunted wood, writhing with serpents; such deeds had been done there, far from sunlight. I knew that
for a fact, and knew as well that I’d hardly glimpsed the tenth part of it.
In the night he would cry out. He’d wake up moaning and slick with sweat. Prairie Rose confided that to me. “What does he say?” I asked her one afternoon. Because I was curious—of course I was. “When he cries out, are there names?”
“I expect there prob’ly are,” Rose said.
“Such as?”
“I try my best not to listen. And if I did hear names, I wouldn’t tell you, Barry—you, nor anybody else.”
“Lige,” I said.
We were standing on the street, outside the tenement. It was late May. The air was warm and birds were singing.
“Elijah,” I repeated. “Does he say that name?”
Rose hesitated. Then scowled. “Why don’t you ask him, Barry? I expect he might tell you all about his nightmares, if he reckoned it to be your business.”
The old man was inside, sitting on the stairs with Em’ly. I found them after Rose had trudged on her way.
He was on the half-landing between floors, and the gal crouched at his back. They were both of them in shadow. The stairway stank of dogshit and old urine and whatever the tenants down below had been boiling, cabbage and onions and God knows what-all else. But it was quiet here, and cool in the rising warmth of the afternoon. Light slanted across them from one small window, but only a little of it.
“Hello, there,” I called up to them, arriving.
She’d been whispering something in his ear, as a child might do, confiding in her dear old Granddad. Or else possibly like a fledgling Fury—though that particular analogy did not occur to me at the time. She broke off as she saw me.
“It’s just Weaver,” I added, amiably. In case they couldn’t see clearly in the gloom.
“’Afternoon,” the old man said.
Em’ly shrank more closely against him, and whispered something else.
“What’s that she’s saying?” I asked cheerfully, thinking maybe the observation had been meant for all three of us to share.
“Em’ly says, she don’t believe she likes you much.”
“Ah,” said I. Feeling just that tich wrong-footed—as one does, when answers come back more blunt than one had expected. “Well, then.”
I waited a moment for the gal to grin shyly, or for the old man to chuckle and confess that he’d made this up. But they didn’t. The look Em’ly angled down at me was fraught with unease. After a moment, she detached herself and withdrew up the stairs, reticulating into deeper shadow and letting herself into the triple-bolted flat.
The old man watched till she was safely inside. Then he looked back to me. “It’s your look,” he said.
“My look?”
“She thinks there’s something shifty in it. Maybe she’s right—I couldn’t say, just yet. I expect we’ll see.”
I worked up a little chuckle of my own. “Well, I can hardly blame the child.”
“Blame her? Blame her for what?”
“Well, for—”
“What cause have you to be attaching blame?”
“I only meant—”
“Who are you, anyway?”
He’d leaned suddenly forward, his one eye gun-barrelling.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s just—it’s Weaver. I’m your friend.”
It was the strangest thing. But for just a moment, it was possible to think that the old man didn’t know me—that the look on his face was plain confusion. It passed, though. He blinked me into clearer perspective.
“Weaver,” he said. “So you are.”
“I’m just saying, the gal has a right to be fearful,” I said. “Of men in general—of anyone. Considering all she’s been through.”
“True enough.”
“I mean, my God, the brutality...”
“’Course, she didn’t say ‘men in general.’ What she said was, specifically you.”
But he leavened it with a wintry grin.
Other times, though, he was friendly, even warm. Once or twice we went out walking, in the evening. He moved gingerly still, not fully recovered as yet from his set-to with the Rent Collector and his thugs, and was reluctant to venture too far afield, with Em’ly alone in the flat. But he’d stretch his legs.
And you know what? I liked the old man. The realization startled me. It seemed almost an impertinence, to like such a man—the shambling one-eyed revenant of Strother Purcell. It seemed damned close to presumption. You’d as well presume to like the second cousin of Odin, or Goliath’s less loquacious nephew, or the shade of grim old Abraham himself, creaking sandal-shod down Sinai after his latest disputation with Jehovah. But I did—I liked him. And I guess I wanted him to like me back.
“You’re something,” I said to him. “That’s the truth. And that poor child thinks the moon and the stars of you.”
“Hmm,” he said, sounding gruff. But he wasn’t displeased. After another while, he said: “It would’ve been a fine thing, to have a daughter. I do think that, sometimes.”
“Well, who can say?” I winked as I said it, man to man. “It might turn out you do.”
“My time of life? Not likely.”
“No,” I said. “What I meant...All those years, travelling from one place to the next. A man never knows .” I probably waggled an eyebrow, as a stimulus to comprehension.
“I know what you meant, Mr. Weaver. I was preferring to let it pass.”
“Ah.”
Walking next to him, you felt easily abashed.
He didn’t care for insinuating humour; I was coming to understand that. I was coming to understand a few things about him, though he was hardly—as you might say—an open book. When he was asked about his past, the answers did not leap forth in sparkling streams.
“And you never married?” I said to him.
“Nope.”
“Never fell in love?”
“Don’t remember.”
“Oh, come on, now—everybody falls in love. There must have been someone. All those years?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Once. Long time ago. We won’t talk about that.”
We’d come to a turning in the street. The evening sun was low in front of us. The old man flinched away from it, lifting an arm to shade his face. He was still troubled by bright light—that blow he’d taken, in the melee. Terrible headaches would come upon him; he was laid low by one of them for a full day and a half. So I’d been told by Prairie Rose. He had lain on the day-bed with a wet rag over his eyes. His face beneath the Bible-prophet’s beard had been chalk-white, Rose said, and beaded with perspiration; it was no better than parchment-grey thirty-six hours later.
“And there isn’t going to be any book, Mr. Weaver. So you can leave off with such questions.”
I thought to myself: We shall see about that. Because the book I would write about him would be respectful. More than that, it would be mighty. It would be nothing at all like anything I had written before—if he’d just learn to trust me.
“You’ve been married, though,” he said.
A statement, not a question. Evidently Rose had told him.
“I was,” I admitted. “Still am, I guess. Assuming she’s alive. She probably is. That was a long time ago, out East.”
“And a daughter?”
Ahead of us, across the street, there were children playing—a rabble of boys, trying their utmost to seem rough and ready, the better to impress a fair-haired girl in a dress looking out of a window. It was one of those wide bay windows they had in San Francisco houses, on the second floor, with lace curtains pulled open on either side. I looked in that direction for awhile.
“She’d’ve been—oh—two, three years old, last time I saw her,” I said. “Turns out I had to leave.”
He one-eyed me the question, looking down. “Had to?”
“Well, sometimes things don’t work out, exactly.”
“Sometimes things get hard, you mean.”
I might have dignified that with a reply, if I could have thou
ght of one. The fair-haired girl in the dress had receded, leaving the boys on the street to show off for the benefit of an empty window.
“I guess we make mistakes,” I said at length, “from time to time.”
“I guess we do.”
He started forward again, veering eastward, away from the sunset. I kept pace and we found ourselves trudging in silence, for awhile. The past will do that, if you let it creep up on you. It’ll spread out its shadow like the wings of oncoming night, and there you are, in gathering darkness.
I said: “Tell me about your brother.”
“I don’t have a brother.”
“You do, though. At least, you did.”
The old man said shortly, “I don’t talk about him.”
–SIXTEEN–
From High Crimes of the Outlaw Dillashay
Santa Rosita, New Mexico, 1874
THERE WERE TWENTY MEN on the street in the night, milling about Deputy Deak Roby. Strother saw this, through the small barred window. So did Lige, behind him.
“D’you hear me, Purcell? Fetch that fucker forth!” Deak Roby roared.
They’d all been drinking, most of them for hours. They had firearms, and torches.
Lige had seen such men before, and such a mood upon them. That long-ago day when Bobby Collard rode off with the mare, and Jacob Dillashay raised the hue and cry and the Holcombes. He said: “Strike the leg-irons off me, brother. Do it now.”
Strother called out through the window: “You go on home, boys. Go home, and sleep it off.”
More men were hurrying down the street, to join. Someone had fetched a rope.
“Strike the damned leg-irons off.” Lige’s face was pale. “Give me a gun. We can stand them off together.”
“I can’t do that,” Strother said.
“You son of a bitch. You’d let them hang me?”
*
Hanging was too good for the likes of a horse-thief, and most especially for this one. Such was the epiphany that had come to Deak Roby at the Gemstone, drunk on whiskey and resentment and surrounded by good men and true.