by Ian Weir
Now here they were, in the street. Two dozen, now—and more still coming. It was Deak Roby’s finest hour. Deak knew this, even as he lived it. Ballads would be composed about him, in this hour. Statues would be erected.
“Ten seconds, Purcell! Then we’re comin’!”
Torchlight snaked and flickered in the night. The mob was coiled about him, a single living entity, and Deak Roby was its beating heart.
“D’you hear me? One...two...three...”
Deputy Rectitude appeared without warning at the count of seven, more suddenly than Deak had anticipated. And he came around the side of the courthouse building, not out the front door.
Deak was startled. He lurched just a little, in turning. He stumbled for an instant, tangle-footed, reaching for his sixgun. It was a fine one, too: a Colt’s .45-calibre Frontier 1871 model—the Peacemaker—purchased at considerable expense, and loaded with the very cartridges that had recently set fire to the rabid, bat-bit dog. Strother Purcell in the glow of torchlight had an eight-gauge shotgun, which he pointed at Deak directly.
“If I was you, Deak, I don’t b’lieve I’d move.”
The mob gave a wrathful exclamation. It came out somewhat strangled. Deak Roby stood almost as still as the statue that might otherwise have been commissioned.
Strother Purcell stood statue-still himself. His voice was cold. “First thing you can do for me, Deak, you can leave off reaching for that Colt. Then you can tell that fella behind me to set down the rifle.”
Deak licked his lips, discovering they’d gone dry. “What fella?”
“The one with back-shooting on his mind.”
Strother spoke without looking around. Enoch Staunton stood on a rooftop alongside the courthouse, dramatically backlit by the moon. He had taken careful aim with his rifle at a spot midway between Purcell’s shoulder blades.
“Go ahead and try it, Purcell,” Enoch Staunton said. “You’re a dead man if your finger twitches.”
“An’ you’re next,” wheezed an ancient voice.
It was Woody McQuatt. The old cowboy had crabbed his way out of the shadows beside the Gemstone. His rifle was nearly as tall as he was, but he aimed it remarkably steady, and had Enoch Staunton dead to rights.
Woody’s initiative came as a surprise to Strother, as well as to the others. Strother did not complain, though.
“You carry on, Cap’n,” Woody McQuatt called to him. “I’ll shoot this one if’n he blinks.”
“I thank you,” said Strother Purcell.
It seemed to Deak Roby that he might yet seize back the advantage. He had thirty men about him, after all. Most of them armed, and all of them primed with righteous wrath.
“What are you waiting for?” Deak demanded of them. “Rush ’im!”
No one seemed in quite such a hurry.
“It’s a shotgun,” Deak exclaimed. “The bastard’s only got two loads!”
“First load’s for you, Deak,” Strother said. “Leaves one for someone else. Any takers, or do I choose the volunteer?”
Looks were exchanged. Imprecations were muttered, and fearsome oaths. There did not appear to be takers.
“G’wan home, fellas,” Strother said. “Fun’s over.”
He continued to stand guard for some goodly while, after the last of them had sloped away into darkness. At length he was satisfied that the threat had passed.
Lantern-light still glowed in the window of Lige’s cell, above him on the second floor. Strother saw this as he turned to go back inside; the sight brought both reassurance and a melancholy ache. The courthouse building was otherwise dark as he made his way up the stairs. Reaching the top he found the cell door ajar, light bleeding out through the gap and pooling on the floorboards.
This gave him pause. He had shut the door behind him when he’d left; surely he had bolted it, as well.
“Lige?”
His voice echoed, hollow, in the stillness.
“Elijah,” he said, more loudly.
No reply.
Strother kicked the door wide, raising the eight-gauge as he entered. The lantern, set by the window, lit an empty room. The chain and shackles lay strewn on the floor, as ineffectual as shed snake-skin.
It would remain for many years unclear who’d been responsible.
Strother’s first, sick certainty was: the gal. She must have done it—his friend, Maria Teresa Lestander. But old Woody McQuatt’s whereabouts had gone unaccounted for also, after he’d stood down the gunman Enoch Staunton. This occurred to Strother afterward.
Just now, wheeling out of the makeshift cell, Strother glimpsed his brother’s face. It was grim in the half-light of the hallway. Strother levelled the eight-gauge; too late.
Instinct saved his life. He ducked back just as Lige’s bullet shivered the doorframe, driving shards and splinters into his eye. The pain was blinding and the world was black and Strother dropped like a sack.
Whoever had set Lige Dillashay free, it was Lige who subsequently freed the others, the pair of prisoners in the cell downstairs—the ones who had given their names as Smith and Miller. “Smith” was a lean, leering man in middle age with a cornpone voice and a grin like a tumbledown churchyard. “Miller” was hardly more than a boy, with dirty yellow hair and a straggle of unsuccessful beard and the sweet, slow smile of a dead-eyed cherub. They had not previously known the outlaw Dillashay, but were pleased as all get-out to be making his acquaintance now. “Whoo-ee, Fletch,” the cherub was heard to crow, as the mayhem commenced. “Nothin’ stopping us now!”
These two were the authors of the worst carnage that night, though Lige was hardly blameless. So Strother came to understand in the interminable darkness that followed, lying in a curtained room with both eyes tightly wrapped. The outlaws had burst out of the courthouse together. Deak Roby chose this exact moment to lurch back through the doors of the Gemstone Saloon, which he had ordered to remain open until Deputy Goddamned Roby said it could close. The first shot struck him exactly between the eyes, enabling the Deputy for one last instant to stand like the statue he had so aspired to. Then down went Deak, to the very great sorrow of no one in particular.
Maria Teresa Lestander would have been secretly relieved. Such was Strother Purcell’s conviction, and he carried it with him ever after. Wherever she had been ten minutes previous, the gal was at her father’s house now. She stepped out onto the front porch, drawn by the commotion on the street: the outlaws wheeling on stolen horses, men shouting and flailing their arms and shooting wildly. No one could even be sure who had fired the shot. But it left her huddled and horribly still, the night wind plucking at the hem of her frock and her eyes wide open and unblinking.
Strother Purcell’s bandages were unwrapped on the morning of the third day. Rising from the bed, he demanded to know how many men would ride with him, to hunt down his brother and the outlaws he had freed.
Few men would meet his one remaining eye.
He rode out regardless.
–SEVENTEEN–
From The Roadhouse Chroniclesof Thomas Skiffings
Near Hell’s Gate
Winter, 1876
IT WAS ALMOST DAWN when Billie climbed back down the ladder, her legs white and bare beneath the blanket she’d wrapped round herself, padding on sagging woollen socks into the grievance of Cousin Fletch’s stare and the desolation of her younger brother.
With daylight the wind came up again. Billie had taken on a new role, it seemed. She dared to essay the Pirate King’s Consort, bantering with the Man from Decatur and brazenly ignoring the sidelong looks of the others. Finding himself beside her, Gimp Tom essayed an insolent look of his own. “Well, aren’t we the Queen of Spain,” he said, not loud enough for anyone else to hear.
“Not ‘we,’” she replied. There was an archness about her, but also a desolation of her own. “Just one of us.”
It must surely drive them all mad.
So Gimp Tom thought, as one day degenerated into the next, and still the wind would
not stop. On and on, that godalmighty wind: shrieking and moaning and shaking the house, reaching down deep inside your skull where the rodents gnaw and chitter.
It had already driven his sister batshit.
“Go comfort the boy,” the Man from Decatur would tell her. So she would.
She’d sit by Dooley Sprewell, who had taken a turn from poorly to ominous. His wound, when Cousin Fletch inspected it, was angry with discolouration. The sick-sweet waft had become a stench that pushed the older outlaw back, and disinclined him to look at it again. So Billie conjured for Dooley images of the Cariboo.
She had not been nearly so far north herself. She had never in fact been north of John McCutcheon’s roadhouse. But she’d heard tales from travellers who had, teamsters and packers who trudged the Wagon Road all the way to Quesnellemouth and the Barkerville goldfields. She conjured for Dooley’s benefit the intensity of a cold that split pine trees in half, from the sap freezing solid inside—tall trees shattering with a sound like rifle-fire. The rumble and groan of ice blocks ten feet thick, shifting in the frozen lakes. Cold that would freeze the spray from river rapids, so’s it would fall one second later as crystals of ice; cold that would freeze up your fingers, black as spruce.
“Oh, Lordy-gawd,” said Dooley Sprewell, wanly. He lay haggard by the stove as she told him tales, a shipwrecked boy who would never reach the sea.
At night Tom lay shipwrecked himself as his sister climbed up the ladder to the loft. Blocking his ears as the wind told tales of how it ended, and always would, for the likes of two orphan children and their Uncle John, trapped in a roadhouse with men such as Cousin Fletch and the Man from Decatur.
The man who came hunting them was worse. Billie had this on excellent authority, and confided it in Gimp Tom. “The brother,” she said. “He claims to be a lawman—but he’s got no jurisdiction. That makes him no better’n a bounty hunter.”
Gimp Tom could think of men much worse than any bounty hunter. Outlaws themselves were five times worse: killers and fugitives, such as those they had amongst them right this minute.
“I call it low,” Billie said. “I call it lower than dirt—to hunt down your own blood, for the sake of filthy lucre.”
She’d rehearsed this in her head. Billie was like that. Essaying declarations, trying on roles. Seeing what would fit.
It occurred to him that his sister had been batshit to begin with, long before the outlaws came. Batshit deranged, as we all of us are deranged, and always were, and always will be, awaiting only the time and the place and the circumstance, and above all that most special companion, to license us in every batshit derangement that we’ve secretly yearned to indulge since the day we first drew breath.
The Man from Decatur’s moods grew more extreme. He would lapse for an hour into seething stillness, then lurch to his feet and pace, stopping at each window to stoop and peer.
“He won’t be comin’,” Cousin Fletch said. “Not today—not in this. I misbelieve he even crossed the Line.”
At first they’d avoided the use of names and specifics, from which Gimp Tom had drawn a degree of reassurance. You don’t take such care around hosts who won’t survive your departure. This was logic. Gimp Tom had faith in logic.
“He crossed,” the Man from Decatur said. “A week ago—not twelve hours after we did.” As if the Canada boundary had been drawn in black ink, and he’d had secret reports as to its crossing. Borne to him by ravens, battling their way north against the wind.
Cousin Fletch shook his head. He was in his way another man of logic. “Posse wouldn’t follow him, Lige. Whole ’nother country.”
“Suppose he cares about that? He crossed alone.”
“He’s a man. Men got limits.”
“My brother don’t.”
At first, Cousin Fletch had lived in hope that the gal might yet be shared amongst the outlaws. This hope having curdled, his notioning turned instead to defective boys. At such times he would take out his bowie knife.
It had a blade one foot long. An instrument of fearsome precision, ideally suited to all duties relating to vivisection. Useful as well for shaving down corns, which task Cousin Fletch would perform after peeling off his woollen socks and hanging them over the woodstove, the ripe-cheese odour of foot-rot and the reek of soggy sheep overwhelming for a time all other stenches of six human souls confined too closely together.
“Go see t’ them poor beasts,” he would say abruptly to Uncle John. McCutcheon might be slinking past with a bucket; trying in general to remain as invisible as a tall, spare, gangling man can be. Uncle John would stand for a moment paralyzed, all movement suspended save for a spasmodic bob-bobbing of his Adam’s apple, thinking of all the reasons why he should stay right here with his poor, dead sister’s son.
“The horses, you fucking eejit.”
“Right you are,” Uncle John would agree. Bundling on his greatcoat and boots he would slope out into the teeth of that wind, telling himself that in preserving the horses he was preserving the children as well: if those horses should perish, the outlaws would never ride off at all.
Cousin Fletch would recommence carving his corns. He would suck his teeth, studying Gimp Tom with slantways malevolence, as if considering all the sundry ways that a man with a knife and a boy and time on his hands might while away the hours.
“So what if he crossed that Line?” Cousin Fletch said abruptly, the fourth afternoon. “Let the bastard come.”
The Man from Decatur had been stooped by the west-facing window. It offered a prospect across storm-blasted pines, with a churn of rapids snaking through the river ice below.
“If he’s out there, Lige, then the cold’s kilt the fucker already. They’s a thousand ways to die in cold like that. Take my word.”
Cousin Fletch spoke as a man who had devoted a lifetime to avoiding such cold. A man who had never for one moment forgotten the lesson that his own late Daddy had taught him: avoid such cold. His Daddy had illustrated this lesson in dramatic fashion, by blundering into a Kansas winter while relocating in haste from more southerly climes, where law enforcement authorities had placed a jaundiced interpretation upon his recent activities. Ambushed by a January blizzard, he froze solid as a block of ice in circumstances of great anguish, leaving his kinfolk no consolation beyond the certainty that the son of a bitch was dead.
“And even if the cold don’t kill your brother,” Cousin Fletch continued, “for some reason contrary to all good sense, then he’s still a dead man when he gets here. That solitary bastard, on his own, against the both of us? Two compadres, Lige.”
“Three,” whispered Dooley Sprewell. He was still huddled by the stove. “Three compadres, Fletch. Don’t you be forgetting your friend Dooley.”
His face had taken on a tinge of grey, as you see in old wasp’s nests and in dying men.
“I stand corrected,” Cousin Fletch said, “in my arithmetic. They is at this moment three compadres.”
But they were wasting their sympathy, if they gave a second thought to Dooley’s suffering. This was the opinion of the Man from Decatur, as passed on by Billie to Gimp Tom.
“That boy is the worst he ever rode with,” she said.
They were at the creek fetching water. The fifth day had dawned more bitter with cold than any of the days before. Wind scythed down from the hills, whipping ice-hard crystals.
Dooley Sprewell had forced himself on gals, she said. Three separate times in the New Mexico Territory alone. “White gals, not even counting hoors. Two of ’em he left for dead. And those are just the ones as can be ascertained.”
The Man from Decatur would not abide such usage of women, Billie said. He had told her so himself.
“And you believe him?”
“What reason would he have to lie?”
Tom thought, but did not say: The same reason he has to lie to you about every other godalmighty thing.
Or perhaps he didn’t think that: not exactly, or not at the time. Perhaps he only thought
of it years afterwards, when looking back on his young self he saw more clearly what a boy could not have been expected to understand, about the ways of this world and the men and women who are in it. Perhaps on that childhood morning by the creek, he thought only of how cruel the cold was and how bitter the wind, and how much he would give to have his sister back, the way she was before the outlaws came.
“Oh, I believe him,” Billie said, in a tone of righteousness. “He does not abide that sort of a man.”
The Man from Decatur misliked Dooley Sprewell for other causes also. There was a quality in Dooley that reminded him of someone else, Billie said—some other fair-haired, laughing boy who’d taken liberties. This galled the Man from Decatur most ferociously.
“So I reckon,” she said, “that Dooley Sprewell deserves just as bad as he gets.”
She stood blade-thin against the winter wind as she passed this judgement. Her lips were blue and her teeth as sharp as icicles. Returning to the roadhouse, she sat beside the stove by Dooley Sprewell, who shuddered at the cold she brought in with her.
“Lordy-Gawd,” he moaned, “it’s perishing.”
“Not like up North,” she replied. “Where you’re going.”
It was a mighty thing, this power she had. Her brother could only watch, and marvel. She sat for hours with young Dooley Sprewell, as consoling as a mermaid on the rocks.
“Some day you’ll pay three dollars just to see me,” she told him. “When I’m an actress on the stage, somewhere faraway from here. Chicago, maybe, or New York. San Francisco. Three dollars just to stand at the very back. But of course, you won’t never be going to San Francisco, will you? You won’t be going south again. You’ll be going the other direction entirely.”
So she conjured the North for him. In the names of those gals in New Mexico, or wherever else it was, whatever the hell their names might have been. And in judgement of all the bastards just like him. All the men who ever made her terrified and small, from her Ma’s admirers right on down to her Uncle John, who would have loomed in her doorway that same night if he’d durst.