by Ian Weir
“Where you headed, Reverend?” the railroad man might say.
“Bound for Glory. Is this my train?”
Sometimes, though, the railroad man would startle at the sight of him. Hold up a lantern and eye him keener, aslant. It happened once in a railroad yard as they crossed into Nevada.
“Do I know you from somewheres, Reverend?” It was an older man, in a Conductor’s uniform.
“I don’t know,” Brother Jacob said. “Do you?”
“I seen you on some other train. Years ago, this would of been. A younger man, but he had your cast of feature.”
“I don’t believe we know each other, friend.”
The Conductor asked to know his name.
“My name is Jacobson.” Brother Jacob was still smiling, but had gone quieter, a little.
“Dillashay,” the Conductor said. “There used to been an outlaw by that name. This Dillashay ran riot in New Mexico, and other places.”
“Yes,” Brother Jacob said. “I believe I once heard something of that man. But I never saw him.”
“You’re sure?”
“And I misdoubt that you saw him either, friend. Not up close. Because you wouldn’t be standing here, if you did. From what I heard.”
“That might be,” the Conductor said. “I did once meet the brother, years ago.”
Brother Jacob went still.
“Dillashay had an older brother,” the railroad man continued. “He served as a Sheriff’s Deputy, place called Santa Rosita. A fine tall fellow—righteous in his dealings. It perplexes the mind, how two brothers could be so different—don’t it, Reverend? The one of them such a credit, and the other worth nothing at all.”
In the desert, the night can grow cold all of a sudden.
“God go with you, friend,” said Brother Jacob. “Watch out for the devil.”
When the Conductor left, they climbed onto the train. It carried them many miles deeper into the desert.
The devil was waiting for them, when they got off.
–TWENTY-TWO–
The Actress Arabella Skye8
San Francisco, 1892
MISS ARABELLA SKYE, the actress, arrived in San Francisco at five minutes before noon by the platform clock on the morning of June 30, 1892. “At last,” she whispered to herself.
She had imagined many times her arrival here, under sundry names, dating all the way back to the name she had been born with. She had hugged the image close in her thoughts: the heave of the ship upon blue water and the city rising up through the mist to meet her. She had arrived by sea in these imaginings, almost always: hands gripping the rail and her face upturned to the rapture of possibility. Her brother was with her, perched monkey-nimble in the rigging high above; pointing from this exalted vantage and then climbing higher still, in defiance of the sea-slick hemp and his own deformities—her younger brother, who had sailed with her on so many voyages of the mind, especially in the early days.
This defied the evolution of nautical transport too, considering that riggings belonged to sailing ships, which had vanished from the whale-roads by the heyday of Arabella’s imaginings. And as it turned out, her actual arrival in San Francisco was not achieved via ship at all, but on the train. She was gritted with cinder and tooth-rattled by the journey: thirty-six hours of bony-assed jouncing on bench seats, steam belching from the locomotive as it shuddered at last to a halt at the platform, and—praise be to the God who hates us all, but ordains nonetheless finite terms for most torments—disgorged.
The platform was crowded, of course. There had always been a crowd. In the halcyon days of her shipboard arrivals of the mind, there had been streamers and cheers as well, and a banner stretching overhead that proclaimed: WELCOME MISS ARABELLA SKYE! Frequently in her imaginings there had been a band, which would strike up joyfully as she came down the gangplank, one white calfskin boot before the other. “Look!” someone would cry, as she was recognized. “Is it—? Oh, it is—it’s her!”
No one recognized her today. For one disorienting moment on the train, last night, she had failed to recognize herself. Arabella, looking out into the darkness, glimpsed a face in the window, reflected back. It was eerily familiar to her, except older and harder and haggard-seeming—a thin, sharp face with small, sharp eyes, all angles and calculations.
Christ, she had thought. I have left this almost too long.
It was taking an hour and a half, these mornings, just to recover her bloom.
But now here she was, at long last. Noon, by the platform clock, which she glimpsed through the torsos jostling past. Stanley grumbled behind her, dragging the trunk. “Fucksake,” he muttered, straightening up to glare at a man who had bumped against him in passing. The man was large, so Stanley took care to wait half a moment, so as to evil-eye the back of his receding head. “Fuckin’ wotcherself, eh? Fucker. Or someone gets a fuckin’ clout.”
Stanley was an actor. He was nineteen years old, a sleek young thing with flaxen curls and ears that tucked flat against his skull, like an otter’s. He was pretty rather than handsome, and defensive about this. Stanley couldn’t really act much, either. But he was biddable, and kept Arabella warm at night. Her bed-warmers had grown progressively younger over the years, as Arabella herself had aged.
“All right,” Stanley said, looking around. “We’re here. So now what?” He was attempting an attitude of rugged insouciance, which was not the most convincing of his poses. Taking off his hat, he swiped his brow with his bicep. “San Fran-fuckin’-cisco,” he said.
Her brother was here, somewhere. Arabella tried to decide how she felt about that.
And according to the letter, he was here, too.
Arabella felt her breath catch, and quicken. “Follow me,” she said.
Stanley followed.
I am alive. In San Francisco. So is he.
The message had been delivered to the theatre in Silver City where Arabella and the Troupe were playing; someone redirected it to the rooming-house where they were lodged, so that Arabella did not receive it until later. The theatre was just a hall, with miners sardined on wooden benches: the sort of audience you’d expect at a silver town in Nevada, in the last convulsions of its heyday. The show itself was music hall fare. Clog-dancers and contortionists and comic songs; a wiry Swiss who performed a version of the Big Boots routine made famous by Little Tich, except with smaller footwear.
The tour had been interminable already—eight months since leaving St. Louis. The past sixteen years of Arabella’s life often seemed as one unending tour, through camps and whistle-stops and the occasional third-rate city, ever since she had left her uncle’s roadhouse with the man who had promised to take her to Chicago, but didn’t. Still, the miners in Silver City had been appreciative. Miss Arabella Skye had been accorded second billing, right after the wiry Swiss, which wasn’t bad. Besides, they had let her keep her clothes on. This marked a blessed change from the early days of tableaux in filthy clubs without her drawers.
On this tour, she dressed up as a swell and sang patter-songs like Dan Leno, all of them with lyrics that could be taken in two different ways, depending on your turn of mind. Arabella had a gift for this, delivering with perfect innocence such innuendo as would give your old granny the vapors. She also appeared a second time to perform a dramatic recitation. This would usually be a passage from some brooding Romantic in torment; the choice would vary, depending on Arabella’s mood. That particular night in Silver City she had chosen a tragic one, concerning a maiden left pining unto death by her Demon Lover.
Any number of the miners would have been pleased as by-golly to squire her afterwards. But she had been morose, and sat for a considerable while in the dressing-room by herself with a bottle of whiskey, long after the others had left. Of late, such moods had been coming upon her with increasing frequency. In the depths of them, she would ask herself what reason there was to keep going; sometimes she could not think of a likely answer. She thought often of her mother, who had been trag
ic and thwarted and died four years younger than Arabella was herself, which was sad and a great waste but possibly not the worst outcome, all things considered.
It was long past midnight when she went back to the rooming-house. Someone had stuck the letter in her door. She glanced at it blearily, then recognized the writing on the envelope: that tiny, cramped, spidering hand. The recognition left her rigid.
Her brother had delivered it himself—this was the thought that came to her in that first moment, lightning-struck, even though the words said otherwise: in San Francisco. She ran back outside, clutching the note and the unfinished bottle.
“Tommy?”
Light from the doorway spilled about her. She gazed around wildly, into the desert darkness.
“Tom? Are you out there? Tommy!”
But he wasn’t.
The rooming-house slouched at the edge of what passed for civilization. Points of light still flickered from the town: saloons. Distant laughter rose in bursts, but out here on the edge there was only silence.
Arabella felt unaccountably bereft. She might almost have felt tears coming on, except Miss Arabella Skye never wept. Not ever.
“Fuck you, then,” she said to the night. “You mangy fucker.”
Someone had opened a window, behind her. Stanley’s voice came querulously down. “’Bella? The fuck is—?”
“Fuck you too,” she advised him.
But she took Stanley with her, nonetheless—two days later, when she made the decision. Breaking her contract, she left Silver City, by stagecoach first and then by train. She arrived in San Francisco in a belch of steam to the indifference of multitudes, with Stanley behind her dragging the steamer-trunk. They stopped outside the station and gazed about them.
“Now what?” Stanley said. He was tired and feeling overwhelmed, which made him cranky.
“First we find someplace to stay.”
“Then what?”
There was the question. A quarter of a million souls in San Francisco—Arabella could trudge from door to door, and it might take years. She’d be a crone by the time she found either one of them.
I am alive. In San Francisco. So is he.
The solution was to draw him to her.
“I need,” Arabella said, “to find us a theatre.”
–TWENTY-THREE–
From The Testament of Rebekah
The Southwest, 1892
WHEN THE DEVIL resolved to overthrow our Lord, he did so in the desert.
The fiend is sly, and will always choose such wilderness. Rebekah knew this from her Mamaw Plovis. It is not the devil who is stronger in wilderness places, Rebekah’s Mamaw had counselled; it is we who are weaker, and the devil knows it.
Rebekah said this once to Brother Jacob. “Yes,” he replied, growing grave. He knew this for a truth himself.
In the desert a man cannot fix himself into perspective. There is nothing by which he can measure his true size. In the desert a man might be nothing at all, or he might could be Goliath. He begins to suppose he might stand as tall as the shinbone of Jehovah.
“The worst mistakes of my own life were always in the desert,” Brother Jacob said. “The desert of one kind or another.”
So it only stood to reason: the devil would be waiting for that train.
The train took them only partway, before stopping to decouple freight cars. Rousted out, they walked half a day down a road, before the sun was too hot and too high and they rested in a scrap of shade. There were trees here by the roadside, and a river, and some arable land. A little town, just ahead, where they stayed that night. In the morning, Brother Jacob was moved to preach Christ Crucified and Risen to such folks as had gathered. One of these was a man who had come to seek help for his child.
She was six years old, he said. A beautiful child with golden hair, the light and life of her whole family, excepting an unclean spirit had possessed her. Her Daddy broke down and wept as he related this, a fine strong man in his prime.
Brother Jacob said: “You lead the way.”
The farm was miles in the wrong direction, but Jacob was set in his mind upon helping that child. When at last they arrived, it was worse than he’d feared.
The spirit was a paralytic one. Such was the outward sign of its uncleanness. The child lay rigid on a bed; still living, but in mortal distress, staring wildly up toward the ceiling, as if the dust-motes dancing in a shaft of light were every one of them the shade of some poor child who’d died unsaved.
Brother Jacob saw at once what he was up against.
“Can you help her?” the Daddy asked.
Esther claimed once to have seen such a battle. Ever after, Rebekah had longed in her heart to see for herself, to witness Brother Jacob contending against the devil. But Esther had never confided how terrible it was. Or how it could end.
Stepping into the slant of light from the window, Brother Jacob placed his hands to the poor child’s head, one on either side. Clenched faces looked on: the child’s Daddy and her Mama, and one other—the Mama’s younger sister, in the doorway. A room in a small white house on a ragged-ass farm, with desert stretching out on every side and the dome of desert sky overhead. And up beyond it all the Lord looked down in vague distraction, as if tugged from mighty works by the thought that somewhere in the world below a little sparrow had fallen.
But the world is wide. It has many sparrows in it.
Brother Jacob called that spirit to come out. It was a strong one, lodged down deep, and clinging as fierce as a mandrake root. The child’s eyes rolled as he called again. Foam flecked the corners of her mouth and she juddered, spine arching.
The women were gasping and praying now. The Daddy was chalk-white.
Jacob called that unclean spirit again: “Come out!”
The afflicted child commenced to flail.
“Hold her!” Brother Jacob cried.
Rebekah caught the child’s wrists in her hands. But the gal very nearly wrenched free, before Rebekah could brace—and Rebekah was the strongest one in the room. It was all the farmer could do to clamp one ankle, the Mama clinging with her whole weight to the other. Four grown adults to hold down that little child, while a fifth one—the Mama’s sister, Dolly-Ann her name was—gawped in the doorway.
“Unclean spirit, come out!”
The little girl was now thrashing and howling, as if that spirit would shake the bed into slats. Dolly-Ann fetched a razor strop to wedge between the poor child’s jaws. She went out again to fetch drink for Brother Jacob, who was flagging sorely. An earthenware jug. She held it to his lips and he gulped it down. It half-choked him first, before he swallowed.
“More.”
Brother Jacob seemed revived. He gave his head a violent shake, and sweat-drops flew.
“Unclean spirit—COME OUT!”
And at last it did. It issued with a shriek straight out of hell, shuddering from the afflicted child like a steam-train bursting from a tunnel. The little girl lay limp and foul with the stench of that spirit’s uprooting. But she looked around with her own blue eyes at last, to the almighty joy of her poor family.
Rebekah was joyful too. She wrapped both arms around Brother Jacob, who began to sag and shake with a rumble of laughter. That’s when Rebekah understood what Dolly-Ann had done—when she was right up close, and could smell it.
The earthenware jug. Dolly-Ann had not brought water.
Rebekah was not sure, at first, what might follow, having never before seen Jacob take strong drink. But she could guess, from things he’d said and hadn’t said. From the manner of the darkness that would come creeping, with nothing worse than pure spring-water to drink.
Dolly-Ann brought the jug back again, and he drank some more. There was nothing that Rebekah could have done to stop him now. He slit-eyed her a look when she tried to caution, and then turned his attentions back to Dolly-Ann. Growing giddy and gay he danced a jig; Dolly-Ann took drink herself and shrieked with happiness.
And the devil was no
t done yet. Late that night, he whispered blandishments to Dolly-Ann, urging her out to the barn where Brother Jacob lay down his head. A shawl was wrapped round her shoulders, and she carried a blanket. In case he should be cold, she said.
“You should go back inside,” Brother Jacob said to her.
“Yes,” said Dolly-Ann. “I ’spect I should.”
He was afterward sick with what he’d done. In the purple dawn, at cockcrow. Dolly-Ann had slipped away long since, gathering her garments about her. Brother Jacob sat doleful and disgusted, his head hung low.
“Is this the way it must always be, with me?” he said. “There is not one decent act I do not defile.”
Rebekah would not look at him.
Gathering up their few possessions, they left in haste and travelled with grim purpose. Ten miles covered by mid-morning; another ten by late afternoon. Finally he allowed they should stop and rest, by a gully with the trickle of a stream. Now he discovered another loss: his Bible had been left behind, a keepsake from his Daddy.
Brother Jacob gave out a woeful exclamation. He would have turned around right then, and walked all the way back to the farmhouse to retrieve it—twenty miles, despite the suffering he endured already, from his lameness. Walking any miles at all was a trial to him, though he’d never say it.
“You go on,” Rebekah said. “I’ll f-fetch it.”
At first, he would not hear of this.
She said again: “Go on ahead. Set here, or else keep going—please yourself. I’ll catch up. And I don’t want to hear no more about it.”
She was thinking to herself that no good could come of his returning to that place. She was thinking also that she would burn in fire before he laid eyes on that Dolly-Ann again. Before he could say more, she turned and started back.