The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “Turn around,” he said to Em’ly.

  When she came full-circle, he was frowning.

  “Puny,” he said.

  “She’ll grow,” said Em’ly’s Daddy.

  Judge Shackleford grunted, unimpressed. “Does she talk?”

  “Not much,” Mr. Braxton admitted. “But she’s got good teeth. All her limbs, too—fingers, toes, you name it.”

  Two or three of the wives peered out of windows. There was a horrible old woman, too—a hundred years old, at the very least, twisted and shrivelled and glittering with malice. Such was Em’ly’s first impression, and nothing would subsequently cause her to revise it. The old woman was some manner of relation to Judge Shackleford; she had come with him all the way from the Smoky Mountains, long years before.

  The Judge looked Em’ly up and down some more. “All right,” he said at last. He spit into his hand, and Mr. Braxton did likewise, to seal the bargain.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Em’ly’s Daddy said. “I’ll keep her for the present time, and bring her back when she’s older.” He was not an evil man at heart, and loved his daughter dearly, in his way. “When she’s fifteen, maybe. Sixteen, even.”

  The Judge said: “No. You’ll leave her here right now, and go on home.”

  Mr. Braxton was white with drunkenness. He’d have left her one way or the other—Em’ly knew that—drunk or sober. But the drink made it easier for him to bear.

  He looked to his daughter, and would have said something, if only he could think what it might be. Em’ly saw that his eyes were moist and red. Then he turned and shambled back down the trail: a small man, growing smaller with each step.

  *

  They travelled by train for the first day and a half, and by stagecoach after that. It would take them as far as a town called Mears Lake, where the old man would acquire a horse and ride the last leg of the journey.

  “You’ll stay with the gal, at the town,” the old man said to Tom. They had reached the final posting-stop before Mears Lake. The passengers had been set free to creak and stretch while the driver changed horses. The mountain air was sharp with the scent of pine, and the dust rose in puffs where they stepped. Tom stood with the old man in a scrap of shade; Em’ly was nearby at the pump, drinking water from a ladle. “I’ll ride the last leg myself,” the old man said.

  “No, sir,” Tom said. “I’ll be riding with you.”

  The old man allowed himself one-sixteenth of a smile. “You? Astride a horse?”

  “I’ve been on horses before,” Tom said stoutly. “Plenty of them.”

  “Sure you have.”

  “I know one end of a horse from the other.”

  Tom could scarcely move at the moment, truth be told—the stagecoach had no springs, and the lurchings up the mountain road were all but unbearable. But he did his best to conceal this fact, and swung his arms to demonstrate how much better he was feeling, up here in the dry mountain air.

  This was true, actually. His lungs had cleared considerably, despite the aggravation of the dust. His colour was much better, even—he knew this because Em’ly had told him so, earlier that day. “Another few days, and—by golly—I may start to grow,” he had said to her, hoping to make her smile. She almost did, which egged him on. “I’ll be cutting a caper next—you watch,” he had said. “After that? Why, it might be handsprings.”

  “I can ride,” he insisted now, cricking his neck to look up at the old man. “I’ll ride with you, against that Mormon bastard.”

  “I don’t believe he’s a Mormon, either,” the old man rumbled. “No more than he’s a damned Judge.”

  “Whatever he is, I’m riding.”

  “It’s not just him,” Em’ly whispered.

  She had come up silently, and took shelter now behind the old man. Em’ly seemed more fearful than ever of straying from him, with each mile that brought them closer to her husband.

  “It’s more than just Judge Shackleford,” she repeated. “He’s got sons.”

  It was the first they’d heard of sons. Tom shot a quick look up at Strother Purcell; the old man had been taken off his guard.

  “How many?” the old man demanded.

  “Two are full-grown men.”

  “Are there others?”

  Em’ly, deep in her bonnet, looked hunted. “Zebulon is the oldest,” she said. “Then Uriah. The others are younger.”

  “How many others?”

  “The others are boys. Robbie—he’s the youngest.”

  “You should have told me this,” the old man said.

  “’S there one of yours, too?” Tom blurted out this question. He felt obscurely relieved when Em’ly shook her head.

  “No,” she whispered. “I never had a child.”

  Tom said, “That’s a blessing.”

  The old man did not appear to perceive any blessings. He moved away from them, squinting up toward the mountains and seeming much unsettled by Em’ly’s disclosure, which Tom set down to the altered arithmetic, and the necessity to recalculate his angle of attack.

  Em’ly stood, wretched. “I should’ve said,” she whispered to Tom.

  “You did,” he told her. “You said it now.”

  “Zebulon’s nearly as bad as his Daddy.”

  “And Strother Purcell never lost a gunfight. He never once backed down.”

  Mr. Tom was the man who would know it, if he had. Em’ly knew this to be true. That head of his was stuffed over-large with all the names and dates and facts he’d crammed inside. The old man was steadier than Wild Bill ever was, Mr. Tom assured her now; he was more resolute than Wyatt Earp, and altogether more dangerous than any man she would ever meet, even if she lived to be a hundred.

  “He’s old,” she whispered.

  “Doesn’t signify.”

  But she wouldn’t be comforted. Not now, with the stagecoach driver calling out that they’d be on their way to Mears Lake in ten more minutes, and the Judge on his mountainside just two days’ ride beyond.

  “He took a blow,” Em’ly whispered.

  The old man, she meant—that day when he had kicked Rose’s door into flinders, and then stood against the Rent Collector and his ruffians. She saw clear as day how he’d beaten them, one against three; but then she’d recollect the way he had fallen afterward.

  “A fearful blow, to the head. Afterward, he was...there’s been something not quite right, ever since. You see that too, don’t you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Mr. Tom said instantly. “No, I don’t.”

  But he did.

  “That old man is Strother Purcell,” he insisted. “And he’s right as rain.”

  But he thought of an old neighbour woman he’d known as a little boy, whose thoughts had come unmoored. Her wanderings grew steadily more unpredictable, until she went out one morning naked as a jay and squatted pissing in the road, her grey-haired son trotting shamefaced to retrieve her.

  “Family,” the old man muttered, out of nowhere. “I did not stop to suppose there might be family.”

  He was standing a few paces away, still staring grimly into the distance. Now he looked over his shoulder. “How many sons?” he said to Em’ly. A shadow had fallen across him.

  Em’ly held up six fingers.

  “Six sons,” the old man said. “Are there daughters?”

  She held up a single finger.

  “God’s teeth,” the old man said. “The devil has he been up to, in those mountains? Breeding himself a damned army?”

  Em’ly stood small and mute and wretched. Then she nodded.

  –THIRTY-FOUR–

  Missus Mann14

  THE REVEREND MANN and his bride had been drinking steadily since leaving San Francisco.

  They were newlyweds, or nearly so. This was almost as you might say their honeymoon. Such at least was the missus’s version. Arabella, her name was—Arabella Mann, née Skye, the bride of the Reverend Mann from Decatur. This was the name she signed in hotel registers, and it gave her vi
sible delight to do so. Missus Mann hailed from somewhere farther north—she was apt to be sliding when pressed for specifics—though her accent would migrate to meet her husband’s. It was almost possible to suppose that she might not be a clergyman’s wife at all, but an actress playing the part of one with a wonderful intensity of conviction.

  Reverend Mann’s mood was more turbulent altogether. A dark man, scarred and brooding, his eyes and his coat both Bible-black. He would be silent for considerable stretches, his bride coaxing him into brief simulacra of jollity, after which he would lapse into shadow again. As they travelled, he would ask railway porters and ticket agents if they had by chance encountered a tall, old, one-eyed man. He had information that such a man might be travelling in this direction, having left San Francisco by train on the morning of 12 July.

  A ticket agent in San Francisco had supplied this information to Reverend Mann, when the clergyman asked him. Yes, he had said, he recollected such a traveller: a towering man, ramrod straight and with a singular demeanour, like Moses en route to the Red Sea.

  Reverend Mann had exclaimed to hear it. “Did he say where he was bound?”

  The ticket agent recollected: Oregon.

  “You’re sure of this? What else can you tell me?”

  He’d been travelling with two companions, the agent said: a gal and a cripple.

  “A cripple?” Missus Mann demanded. She’d seemed unsettled by that word, and sought clarification: An ambulatory cripple, upright and walking?

  “Yes, ’m,” the ticket agent confirmed. Upright, more or less, and walking, if such was the term that best described his means of locomotion.

  Reverend Mann was eager to know what intention the old man might have expressed, and what his final destination might have been. The ticket agent could not elucidate further; but curious, he asked to know: “Is he someone of particular significance to you, then, Reverend?”

  “We have a discussion to conclude, between the two of us,” said Reverend Mann. “It got interrupted, temporarily, in 1876.”

  Missus Mann had grown oddly agitated, or so it seemed to the ticket agent, for reasons he did not of course comprehend. “Let him go,” she urged the Reverend.

  He would not.

  The ticket agent was a man named Walter Perkins. He had a wife and three daughters, all of whom thought well of him, and of an evening would fashion little wooden models of ships, being wonderfully clever with his hands. This is mentioned for interest’s sake, none of it being germane to the present narrative, into which Walter Perkins will not reappear, except just once.

  The day after his odd encounter with the Reverend and his wife, Walter Perkins arrived for work at his usual place in the line of wickets at the railway station. As he did, he could not help but notice that a small contretemps had broken out to his left, two wickets over. A fellow ticket agent was having a difficult conversation with a customer in line: a great, ungainly, agitated gal in coveralls and clod-hopping boots. She had a strawberry birthmark stained across her face, which turned redder and redder as she tried to force out syllables.

  Walter Perkins took it upon himself to intercede. His middle daughter was afflicted with just such a stammer, which only grew worse if you badgered; after a few patient moments, he was able to explicate what the young woman wanted.

  A p-preacher. She was seeking a p-p-preacher, name of Ja-Ja-Jacobson.

  Walter Perkins did not recognize that name. But he mentioned having sold a ticket just yesterday to a preacher named Mann. Two tickets, in fact; Reverend Mann was travelling with his wife. He described the two of them, as the great ungainly gal seemed to wish: the Reverend dark and limping, one hand maimed; the wife small, sharp, and animated.

  “Wh-who-whore,” the young woman managed. Her face was now bright crimson, and her fists were clenched like hams. “Of B-b-b-b-b—”

  “Babylon?” he hazarded.

  This seemed harsh, though Walter Perkins did not say so. The ungainly gal seemed to want a ticket of her own; he helped her get sorted with this, then returned to his own wicket. When he looked to his left again a few minutes later, the gal was gone.

  He never did know what became of her, or of the Manns, or of that towering, old, one-eyed fellow. There was something lurid in the newspapers a week or two later, but the names were different, and he didn’t make a connection.

  *

  A porter remembered the old man clearly. From him, Reverend Mann learned that the name of a town had been mentioned: Mears Lake. It was accessible by stagecoach, so they went there.

  Mears Lake was a settlement of some five hundred souls, on a plateau beneath tall mountains. It existed as a centre for supplies for the ranches in the area, and was a hub of sorts for travellers as well. There were three or four lodging-houses, some of which were notorious for fleas, and the Ross House Lodge, which mainly wasn’t.

  Arriving at the Ross House Lodge, Missus Mann signed their names in the Register. They were much grimed with travel; Missus Mann expressed high hopes for a bath. Reverend Mann seemed much preoccupied instead with a party he was seeking, and described him to the woman at the desk, who shook her head. No, she did not recollect such an old man, with or without two singular companions. Privately, she thought: She would not have let rooms to such travellers, regardless. She was having qualms enough about Reverend Mann and his bride.

  The woman behind the desk was Missus Ross. She was the widowed daughter-in-law of old Major Ross, who had built the Lodge, and she had strong views concerning propriety. The Lodge was a Christian house, and the Reverend Mann and his wife were dishevelled and considerably drunker than a man of the cloth had any business being, in the Widow Ross’s opinion.

  “Just let him go,” Missus Mann said to her husband, when his repeated description had drawn a curt shake of the Widow Ross’s head. “We’re here in...where the hell are we?”

  “Mears Lake,” said the Widow Ross.

  “It’s the mountains. There’s a lake. We’re on our honeymoon. We’ll take a bath!”

  Her husband would not listen. He went back out again to search for news, and his wife with a bitter exclamation trailed after him.

  Reverend Mann found the news he was seeking at the livery stable. The man who owned it was named Emmett Hoddle, and he nodded immediately at hearing the description. Yes, Emmett Hoddle said; he had seen such a party as the Reverend described. He had in fact sold them two horses and a mule.

  “When?” the Reverend demanded.

  “Two days ago,” Emmett Hoddle said.

  The beasts had not been young, he added, but they were sound in wind and able to bear up over distances. Honest creatures at an honest price.

  Emmett Hoddle had been a blacksmith. He was a plain-speaking slab of a fellow, unlettered and unlovely, which in itself is no guarantee of honest intention. But sometimes men are indeed what they seem, and Emmett Hoddle may have been an instance.

  The travellers paid in cash money, Emmett Hoddle said, which the girl produced from out of a leather pouch. No, he could not say where they were bound. The old man had about him a manner that discouraged inquisition. “He seemed settled,” Emmett Hoddle said, when pressed.

  “Settled?” repeated Reverend Mann.

  “In his own mind,” Emmett Hoddle said. “On whatever it was he decided. That’s how he seemed.”

  It had also seemed to Emmett Hoddle that he was standing just then in the old man’s way. This did not seem the wisest place to be.

  “And you never saw which way they went?” Reverend Mann demanded.

  Emmet Hoddle shook his head.

  “And he never said a word about where he was bound—or what he wanted—or why the devil he was travelling in the first place?”

  Emmet Hoddle shook his head again.

  “Well, then which way could they have gone?”

  Emmett Hoddle cocked his head. After a moment, he scratched it. Then he shrugged his massive shoulders. “Truthfully, Reverend? I expect they could of gone pretty
much any way,” he said.

  “Let him go,” Missus Mann urged her husband yet again.

  It was later that same evening. Reverend Mann had come very close to purchasing a horse from Emmett Hoddle, with the last dregs of his financial resources, and riding bull-headed some way—any way—after his brother. But his wife had prevailed upon him to take just one more drink, and think it through. Then she prevailed upon him to take another. This led him to take a third and then a fourth, as she had hoped it might. And after all, he was worn out; he was weary in every bone; he just wanted to sleep.

  “Yes, you could track him down, sooner or later. I believe you could do that, I truly do,” said Missus Mann. “But even if you did, what would it serve?”

  They were sitting outside the Lodge in gathering darkness, on wooden chairs on the veranda. Soft light spilled through the windows behind them, and occasionally a passerby would ghost along the street. Sometimes one of these nodded a greeting, but mainly they kept their eyes averted. Reverend Mann held a whiskey bottle, which infrequently his wife took from his hand. After sipping she gave it back.

  “You’d confront him, I suppose. Demand some justification—if he’d give it. Maybe kill him, if he didn’t. Or else—what—save him? Oh, my love.” Missus Mann ached with solicitude. She cupped a hand to his stubbled cheek. “He’s long past saving, even if you tried. God knows that, too. If there’s a God at all in heaven, looking down—and who knows? It’s possible there is. If there is, He gave up on your brother, long ago.”

  Her husband would not look at her.

  “Oh, my love,” she said again. She said it with such sadness, there amidst the soughing of the night. “Your brother’s gone. You’re with me, now. Just let him go.”

  He laughed harshly. “You know what the truth is?” he said. “The truth of it is, we long since ruined the best part of ourselves. The only part of either one that might have been worth saving.”