The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “Tell me what he said,” the old man demanded.

  She told him. “He said Strother Purcell was the devil.”

  “How would your husband—?”

  “He knew Strother Purcell. That’s what he said. He met the devil, here on earth. That devil was called Purcell.”

  The old man stood for a very long moment, confounded. “Tell me his name,” he said.

  So Em’ly told it—so faint and fluttering that he didn’t seem certain that he’d heard.

  “Say it again,” he said hoarsely.

  She beckoned him closer. He knelt, and she whispered in his ear.

  His face grew pale, and then very dark. A sound came out of his throat: a groan, but suffused with rage.

  “Ohhhhhhhhh,” said Strother Purcell.

  A long and dreadful syllable. It rattled like a cable in a mineshaft.

  –TWENTY-NINE–

  The Accounting of Barry Weaver

  San Francisco

  July 10, 1892, and Thereafter

  FATE—FORTUNE—call her what you will—had been an almighty bitch to Barry Weaver.

  We must consider Weaver in the third person, for a time. We have entered upon days and weeks that are dark to our wretched narrator, owing to the drubbing that was dealt him. Such details as he can muster were related to him afterward, by others. But Fortune, that harridan goddess, had done herself proud. In later years, during his lengthy twilight, Barry Weaver would tell you so himself. “I had fancied myself Fortune’s Darling, friend—but, nope. Turns out I was Fate’s Fool.” He would utter this pronouncement in barrooms, hoping that someone would stand him a drink and listen to his tale. Sometimes they did, though more often they didn’t. Weaver in latter days was a shadow of himself, his left leg palsied and weak and his left arm as well; his mouth drooped on the left side, and he slurred his words even when stone-cold sober, which he wasn’t very often, admittedly.

  “Wait here,” Tyree had bid him on that fatal night, outside the back entrance to the Blackstone Saloon. So Weaver had waited. He had paced a few expectant steps, unable to keep still. Rain lashed the alleyway, drumming violently down on the rooftops on either side. A distant ship’s horn sounded out at sea, and the din from the tavern itself seemed muffled and faraway. On such nights we are all wayfaring strangers, Weaver thought; we are orphans abandoned far from home. This was a melancholy reflection, but Weaver liked it. It was trenchant; he might work it into his book about Strother Purcell.

  The din from the tavern was briefly more distinct. The door banged open; light spilled sluggish and yellow.

  “Tyree?” demanded Weaver, peering.

  It had crossed his mind to wonder, right at the last: What cause have I to suppose that Tyree should keep his word? What have I done, after all, to earn his friendship and fidelity, or the friendship indeed of any other man?

  “Tyree, you dog—is that you?”

  It was not. Three men were moving, not one of them less than two feet taller than Tyree. The tallest bore a sheen of triumph.

  “Barry Weaver, in the flesh. Ain’t you a sight for these sore eyes?”

  A figure of speech. Ichabod’s eyes weren’t literally sore, just glinting most alarmingly. Weaver’s heart leaped up into his throat in response. His testicles shrivelled northward in pursuit.

  “Aw, fuck,” he squawked. He tried to flee, but they had him.

  Afterward, it would seem, they dragged him out to the mouth of the alley, and left him there. This might pass for consideration, under the circumstances. In the alley, he might have lain unnoticed for hours. But here he was stumbled over in due course by a pair of passing constables, who cussed him irritably for a drunken lump and kicked him to get up. But only once or twice, and without any real zest of application, before one of them peered more closely and realized that this lump had been beaten three-quarters dead already. So they took him round to the Sisters of Mercy on Stockton Street.

  Prairie Rose found him there two days later, apparently, amongst the indigents at St. Mary’s Hospital. He was one in a long row of stick-men on cots, on a reeking ward patrolled by nuns.

  “Fucksake, Barry—look at you,” she said.

  He made no reply, being still a good two-thirds dead. They’d cracked his skull and cheekbone, and fractured several ribs. Rose may have leaked out a single tear of empathy. Then she let him have it, for the calamity he had wrought by refusing to tell the truth. Her passion was—by all reports—untrammelled, her language such as to shame the attendant nuns, and Christ knows most of them could swear like sailors.

  “If you’d just told me, Barry—fucksake! Just told me who that old man was. If you’d said the name, then I could’ve told you what would happen if poor Em’ly ever found it out. And she did! She did find out, you fucker, and now they’ve gone—the two of ’em together, God help ’em both. I found out too late to stop it, Barry. They’ve cleared out already—they’ve left San Francisco. They’ve run off to kill the Mormon Brute!”

  Rose knew, because they’d left a note. Em’ly had scribbled it in haste, and left it on the table for Rose to find when she dragged herself home at last from the concert saloon. Rose had the note with her. “Here!” She thrust it at our narrator. “Go ahead—fucking read it.”

  Weaver did not take the note, owing to his general state of health. He was—so he was later assured—just two haunted eyes staring bloodshot, out of a mass of purple. Accordingly, Rose in her distress offered to leave the note with him, for him to peruse when more coherent. She would pin it to the bedsheet, or else to some item that would not be stripped away and laundered. His scrotum would serve, she suggested. Here—would he like her to pin it to his scrotum?

  Weaver’s gaze seemed to Rose both woebegone and vacant. It did not indicate a preference.

  “Do you understand?” Rose burst out bitterly. “They’re already gone, the two of ’em. They’ve gone to hunt down that Mormon Brute.”

  “In Ooh-ah?” Weaver is reported to have said. He was evidently following the gist, but slurring badly.

  “What did you say?” Rose demanded.

  “Ooh-ah.”

  “Utah?” Rose exclaimed. “Who the hell ever said it was Utah?”

  Weaver looked abject, and bewildered.

  “I never said it was Utah,” Rose cried. “You decided it must be Utah, all on your own. You never did listen to a goddamned word, not when it actually mattered. They’re bound for Oregon, Barry. That’s where they’re bound—the two of ’em, on their own. And God help them when they get there!”

  –THIRTY–

  Tyree

  San Francisco

  July 10, 1892

  THE OLD MAN and Em’ly had gone directly to the railroad station. Em’ly had some money put away, concealed in a biscuit tin beneath a floorboard in the flat. She fetched it out, hands trembling like linden leaves, and the old man said to her: “Good girl.”

  A vast and terrible resolution had settled upon him. Em’ly had never seen the like. She must surely have lost her nerve—must have stuffed the money away again, and slid straight under the bed, and stayed there—except for the old man’s resolution. It did not seem possible to contradict such certainty.

  “Say it one more time,” he said. “Say his name.”

  Em’ly whispered it.

  “There can be no mistake about this?”

  She shook her head.

  “So it’s him,” the old man said. “After all these years. And he’s the villain who done such vileness to you?”

  Em’ly nodded.

  “Well, then,” said Strother Purcell.

  A gleam was upon him. He had stuffed his few possessions into a battered valise. His razor and a change of shirt; the sixgun, as well—the one he had taken from the Irishman, Houlihan, the day the Rent Collector and his thugs had menaced Em’ly. He’d need to arm himself more formidably for the task that lay ahead, but first things first. First they needed to be on their way.

  Em’ly scribbled her no
te for Rose, and gathered her own possessions, and then they left. They were at the railway station before it was properly light.

  *

  Tyree had dragged himself back to his room on Polk Street, after leaving his sister at the Leland Hotel. But once he was back inside, he could not abide it—not the room, nor his own existence.

  He had left his sister without another word on either side, limping along the corridor and back down the stairs as she slammed the door shut behind him; past Lyndon Ackerman at the front desk in the lobby, who had cleared his throat before asking, was he all right? Tyree thought: No, he was not all right at all, and never would be—not that it mattered.

  “She turned it into a tale. She’s been telling it to herself, ever since.” Tyree heard bleak wonderment in his own voice. “All these years.”

  “Excuse me?” said Lyndon Ackerman.

  “The gal and her demon lover. Like—I don’t know—like Catherine and goddamned Heathcliff, in that book. That’s how she coped with it all, I guess. That’s how she’s kept herself going. Jesus wept.”

  Lyndon Ackerman hesitated some more. He seemed to entertain the notion that Tyree might be addled with fever. “Is there something I could do for you, friend?” he said.

  At the door, Tyree paused, one last time. Looking back, he said: “Yes. Yes, there is.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look out for her.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My sister,” Tyree said. “Look out for her, if you can. It won’t save her, if he comes. But you could try.”

  Back at Polk Street, he sat on the edge of his cot for some long while, as the rain outside subsided and darkness leavened. He thought about doorknobs and bootlaces, and his trusty old Deane-Adams pistol. But after another time, it occurred to him that there was something he needed to do before he died. There was someone else he needed to speak to.

  Struggling to his feet, he fed the laces back into his boots, and tied them. Then he used the doorknob in the conventional way, to open the door with. He went down the stairs and onto the sidewalk and set his face toward Pacific Street.

  That was where the old man stayed. Tyree had discovered that weeks ago, by following Barry Weaver. The old man cribbed with those Mormon women in a flat on Pacific Street.

  Tyree arrived there in the haze of a San Francisco sunrise, footsore and heartsore and aching in every limb. An old woman beating a rug on the tenement steps advised him that he’d come too late. The one-eyed old man and that queer little gal? They’d just left, the old woman said. They seemed bound for the railway station. Well, good luck to ’em, and good riddance.

  *

  The two of them were on the platform.

  The old man towered, one-eyeing the other travellers. The gal huddled on a bench beside him, clutching a valise. Reaching them, Tyree stood head bowed, wheezing for breath. When at last he looked up, the old man was squinting one-eyed down at him. “I seen you before,” the old man said.

  Tyree found the breath to speak. “Yes, sir. You have.”

  “By God,” the old man said. He’d realized. “You were the boy.”

  “I was.”

  “The boy, at the roadhouse. I’ll be damned. The girl, last night - and now the boy. Doesn’t that beat all?”

  “I couldn’t say how much it beats, exactly,” Tyree said. “But I expect it’s probably something.”

  Little Em’ly, tucked in the old man’s lee, peered out from the depths of her bonnet. It occurred to Tyree that he should tip his hat. Lacking one, he touched his fingers to his forehead.

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  About them, the platform thronged. A bout of coughing took Tyree, bowing him more than he was already and shaking him painfully. When it passed, they were still looking at him.

  “’S there something you want?” the old man said.

  “You judged me, once.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, sir. You did. You looked down from that horse, and you judged me in one second. You judged that I was low, and vile, and would never amount to one thing worth being, on this earth. So I just come here to tell you . I just want to say, you were right.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tyree said. “I’d say that’s about all of it. I never done a thing to prove you wrong. I never will.”

  “Why not?”

  “’S too late.”

  The old man considered this. “Are you dead yet?”

  “Pretty near it,” Tyree said. “Not quite.”

  “Well, then?”

  Tyree found himself starting to squirm, under the intensity of that eye. Em’ly was staring at him too, from the depths of her bonnet. He touched his fingers to his forehead once again, signifying that he was about to take his leave. But somehow he just kept on standing there some more.

  “Where you bound?” he said to the old man.

  “’S that your business?”

  “No, sir.”

  But then the old man answered anyway. “I’m riding to pay out the treatment that was done to this child Em’ly,” he said, “who is my most particular friend. I intend to pay it out in full, one hundred copper pennies on the dollar. And I will settle an old ledger of my own, at one and the same time.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Why else would I say it?”

  Tyree allowed as he did not know.

  “My family owes this man’s aunt five dollars.” The old man’s demeanour had grown remarkably grim. “I propose to discharge the obligation.”

  “Well,” Tyree said, after a moment, feeling as though he ought to say something. “This is honourable in you.”

  “And then I’ll collect the debt that is owed to me and mine.”

  Tyree said, after another moment: “Will you do this alone?”

  The train’s whistle sounded. A porter commenced bellowing travellers aboard. The old man picked up the valise as Em’ly stood.

  “You g’wan, now,” he said to Tyree. “Go about your business.”

  “I’ve got no business,” Tyree said. “None that matters.”

  “Find some.”

  The porter called out some more. Travellers jostled, steam from the engine chuffing up about them.

  “I’ve got cash.” Tyree had intended to bid the old man farewell, but found himself saying this instead. “Cash,” he repeated. “Enough for a ticket, I think—wherever you’re going.”

  And it wasn’t Tyree who was speaking at all. Tyree had opened his mouth, but someone else’s voice came out—a voice that hadn’t spoken in sixteen years.

  “I’ve got an iron,” said Wild Gimp Tom.

  “You what?”

  “A shooting iron. A Deane-Adams five-shot. I can use it.”

  –THIRTY-ONE–

  From The Roadhouse Chronicles of Thomas Skiffings

  Near Hell’s Gate

  Winter, 1876

  “DON’T GO UP TO HIM AGAIN,” he said to his sister. “Just don’t. Not tonight.”

  She replied to him, in a withering tone: “An’ then what—ask him nicely not to kill us?”

  They were at the creek, the two of them, fetching water. It was early morning of the sixth day since the outlaws’ coming. The morning was grey and brutally cold, but there had been the barest shifting in the wind. Gimp Tom was certain of that.

  “No, listen,” he said. “Billie? Listen.”

  She had climbed down haggard from the loft, just at dawn. He had glimpsed her face through the edge of the hanging divide as she had crept into their back room.

  “We can kill them.”

  She very nearly laughed in his face. Then she saw—by God—that he meant it. “Tommy...” she began.

  “Not three of them at once,” he said. “But one by one. We can.”

  He started to tell her, then, the plan he had made. He’d thought it all through in the night, while she’d been in the loft with the Man from Decatur. He’d had nothing but time to think it all through.<
br />
  “I’m your brother,” he said to her, fiercely. “Billie, I swear, I will not stand by no longer, while low and wicked men abuse you.”

  He had rehearsed this proclamation in his head, and said it now out loud. It sounded in his ears less grand than he might have hoped, owing to the treble pitch of his own small voice. But the words themselves were very fine indeed. They warmed him, and a thrill of desperate resolution fluttered inside his chest.

  His sister had actually been moved by his fervour. Seeing this, he thrilled more than ever. She touched his arm with her hand—the first time she had touched him since the outlaws’ coming. “Tommy,” she said, “I know you think...”

  She broke off as the door of the roadhouse opened. Cousin Fletch stepped outside, peering evilly into the morning. Billie flinched, as his eyes found her. She said to Gimp Tom, very earnest and low: “If a heart was all it took, you’d be a lion.” Then she squared her thin shoulders and straightened her back, and waded through the snow like the Queen of Spain with water buckets, or possibly Joan of Arc.

  It would occur to him, much later, that Billie was just playing a role of her own; that all of this, however dire, was not quite real to his sister. She had heard that utterance about lions and hearts in a play - spoken by her mother, perhaps, in tones no less tremulous than Billie’s own. But in the brutal cold of that grey morning, with Uncle Fletch seething in the roadhouse doorway and Billie struggling bravely away, Tom heard only how desperately she needed him.

  So he waited.

  His chance came late that afternoon.

  Cousin Fletch had gone out to the barn with the Man from Decatur, anxious to see to the horses. They took Uncle John with them. Billie had gone outside as well, back down to the creek, leaving Gimp Tom all alone with Dooley Sprewell.

  The young outlaw lay huddled by the stove, as he’d done ever since his arrival. He’d been very bad all day, dozing fitfully and moaning to himself. Now, with the coming of nightfall, he stirred.