by Ian Weir
Lige stood upright, framed against the lemon glare. But he began to slip. He reached one hand to brace himself against the rock, but this didn’t seem to help. He subsided, slowly, to sit splay-legged in the snow, wearing an expression of unmistakable irritation. He began to utter something—some pithy irony, no doubt, on the theme of brothers who shoot you dead while you’re trying to ward off a bushwacker. Blood gurgled out of his mouth instead.
Strother said to him: “Lige? Hang on. Gonna get you out of here.”
Because that was only right. That was Law. He’d left New Mexico to take three outlaws, dead or alive. Two of them were now deceased. The third, being still amongst the living, deserved all considerations pertaining to that estate: medical care till he should recover sufficient health to travel, then a fair trial in New Mexico, with benefit of able counsel and the right to due process under the law, and three square meals and a clean cell, unless and until the Territory saw fit to hang him.
Lige’s eyes met his. Strother read a look of pure disgust. Then Lige toppled sideways.
“Lige!”
Strother heard his own voice, grown ragged. He saw that the horses had spooked and fled. It occurred to him that he might fashion a travois, some conveyance by which he might transport his brother. It occurred to him that he’d best act in haste, before the cold and the loss of blood should kill him.
“Aw, God damn it, Lige. Goddamn!”
He lifted his brother in his arms. It could not be more than ten or fifteen miles, he thought, till they should come upon some manner of habitation—a trapper’s cabin with a fire, or a Native village, where there’d be warmth and sustenance and someone who might know how to help. With Lige in his arms, Strother set off down the mountainside, essaying with great sliding strides to make up those ten or fifteen miles by nightfall—gigantic strides like the boy with seven-league boots, in a tale their beautiful, mad Mama had told to them long ago. “Hang on, brother,” he urged. “I’ll get you out of here.”
He’d have done it, too. He’d have carried Lige out of those mountains. His first stride was strong and his second even stronger. But with his third, the mountainside gave way. With the fourth he was tumbling headlong. There was a roaring in his ears, and the mountainside swept him down into the darkness and left him.
He was found by an old Ts’ilquot’in man and his grandson, who dug him out. Such was Strother’s understanding of events, when he was able to piece them back together, though it was never clear to him exactly how it happened, or why they’d have bothered. No trace of Lige was found.
The Ts’ilquot’in man had been confounded to learn of Strother’s intent—that he should risk his life to carry an outlaw down the mountain to a Judge with a rope. Strother told him, “He was my brother.” This did not appear to clarify the situation.
Strother lay shuddering by the fire in a pit-house. It was some days after the avalanche; a month, possibly, or a week. Time had lost its linearity. Strother’s left leg was splinted and his ribs had been caved in and dark eyes regarded him through the pall of smoke with grave perplexity. The old man murmured something sorrowful, which the grandson, possessing some English, translated. “He says you are disordered in your head.”
It seemed to Strother that there was some reply he ought to make to this. But just when he thought he had it, it slipped away.
*
Such was the tale as it was told to Tom Skiffings, on the final night on the trail to Deadman Creek. Blackness was shading toward indigo when at last the old man finished: that time of not-yet-light when the world takes inchoate shape.
“That’s God’s truth,” the old man said. His face was an ancient mask. “I figured someone should know it. In case they kill me, today.”
The two of them sat by the embers of a fire. Behind them, Em’ly lay in unquiet slumber.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Tom said.
“Whatever seems right to you.”
Tom considered, bleakly. “’Course,” he said, “odds are they’re going to kill me, too. You figure?”
The old man considered this in turn. “Probably,” he agreed.
“I mean, if they can kill you, how fucked am I?”
“There you go,” the old man said. “All your problems, solved.”
There was the barest glint of a bleak grin as he said it. Tom Skiffings was certain of that. It brought a feeling welling up that was almost damned near love.
They rode out with the sunrise, the three of them.
–THIRTY-SIX–
Deadman Creek15
August 3 and 4, 1892
EM’LY KNEW OF AN OLDER TRAIL up the mountain: longer and narrow and rugged, infrequently used. There was less risk of unwelcome encounters with other travellers, and they’d be less exposed to someone high above them, looking down.
“With a spyglass, you mean?” Tom asked her.
“That’s one way,” Em’ly whispered.
She had withdrawn ever deeper into herself, as they drew nearer. She believed her Mormon husband, the Judge, to be possessed of eyesight so keen as to be scarcely human; that he stood on his mountaintop for hours on end—whole days, from first light to last—staring down. The granny-woman might have at her disposal other means entirely.
“She’d see us first,” Em’ly said. “I believe she’s seen us already.” “That’s not possible,” Tom said.
“You don’t know her.”
Em’ly did. She’d lived with that old woman for three terrible years. The granny-woman might lack her puissance of old, being far removed from the Great Smoky Mountains of her prime, where she knew how to read each portent. And she was ancient, shrivelled down to nut-brown sinew. Her joints were gnarled and her mind would cloud with cobwebs; she’d sit at the end of her nephew’s table like a bundle of sticks knit together by nothing but malice, with yellow egg-yolk dripping down her chin. But she’d know that enemies were coming.
The old man nodded, grimly. “She’ll know.”
It unsettled Tom, that Em’ly might place belief in such eldritch possibility. It unsettled him worse that Strother Purcell agreed.
“She’ll know I’m coming,” the old man said. “She’s been waiting for thirty years.”
They left Em’ly at mid-day, despite her protestations, half a day’s ride below Deadman Creek. She could use a gun, she exclaimed; she desired to be with them at the end, whatever it might be.
“No,” said Strother Purcell. She would stay below, in a hollow, sheltered. She had water and a horse. If he and Tom did not return, then she must flee back down the trail, taking whatever refuge might seem best to her. If worse came to the very worst, she would have at least her choosing in how she would die.
“My choosing is to die with you,” she said.
He shook his head. He must be focused on the task at hand, he said, and not be thinking of her safety. She must describe to him one last time how the Big House was situated: where the windows were, and what firearms were possessed, and whose nerve was steadiest, beside Shack Collard’s. These and sundry other details, right down to which son might carry a bowie knife, and if any one of them preferred to shoot left-handed. He needed to see it plainly in his mind. Then—once he had it clear—he would put Little Em’ly from his thoughts.
It seemed to Tom that the old man was narrowing, right there before his eyes. Shedding any thought or inclination, excepting what he would need to kill Shack Collard. This seemed dreadful, and a mighty reassurance.
“Do as he says,” Tom said to Em’ly. “Please.”
She stood in the hollow, orphan-eyed, clutching the pistol that the old man had left with her. It was part of the small armoury they had obtained at a gun shop in Mears Lake, and paid for with money from Em’ly’s secret cache: an old Smith & Wesson No. 2—the very model that Wild Bill had been carrying on his person when he had been shot dead in Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, while holding a poker hand of Aces over Eights, by the coward Jack McCall.
Tom knew this interesting historical fact, but did not confide it, suspecting that it would not contribute materially to Em’ly’s peace of mind.
“You’ve fired a sixgun before?” he said instead.
“Damn you to hell,” Em’ly whispered in reply.
Under the circumstances, Tom chose to interpret this as yes.
Behind him, the old man was riding off already. Tom stood for one last aching moment.
“Go, then,” Em’ly said.
“I’ll be back.”
He said this with scant conviction. But he sketched up a little smile to go with it, nonetheless, and hoped that it might seem carefree in the looming face of death, as were the smiles that heroes sketched up in books.
“You are low and false and I hate you,” Em’ly said.
“I know it,” Tom agreed.
“Don’t get killed.”
*
Through his spyglass, Purcell could discern three of the sons, working in the field below the Big House. The others he guessed might be inside.
He had this vantage from a rocky mesa, half a mile distant. It was nearly level with the lower field itself, but there was no way straight across. The trail led down into a wooded ravine, then back up through the trees on the other side, exactly as Em’ly had described it. There would be tree cover till the last eighth of a mile, which would require a desperate charge across exposed terrain.
“Someone could work his way on up behind,” Tom said, pointing. The house was set against the slope of the mountain, which rose steeply up behind it, rugged and well-treed except for bare precipitous strips of loose shale. “Someone could work on up, and then open fire from above. Give you cover.”
“Someone would have to get there first,” the old man said. “Someone would get his head shot off his shoulders. If he was lucky.”
“What, then?” Tom said.
Purcell gauged the height of the sun in the sky. A few hours’ daylight yet, though half the ridge was already in shadow. Beyond, to the north, thunderheads were massing; the air was oppressive with the portent of a storm.
They’d work their way closer, he said. Then decide.
*
Five o’clock p.m.
On the other side of the ravine, meanwhile, it had probably gone very much like this:
A watch had been set the previous night, owing to the agitation of the granny-woman, who was ancient and addled but uncanny in her convictions. The sons had been posted in rotating shifts near the top of the old road; the second son, Uriah, was now on duty, after a fashion. The heat was oppressive in late afternoon, and Uriah nodded with it. He was twenty-two years old: a weak man at his essence, striving but insufficient.
Young Robbie had just gone down to his brother from the house, no doubt with something to offer as sustenance, such as bread and cheese. Robbie was just eight years old, the Judge’s youngest and the favourite of all his sons. He had the keenest eyes, as well, and saw, before Uriah did, a shadow move.
“Lookit!”
The devil, eight-foot-tall with one eye, leading a monstrous horse. Thus he must have seemed to young Robbie. Behind the devil was a twisted imp.
At the Big House, they’d have heard the distant cry of warning. Robbie’s shrill exclamation—the first hint that much had gone amiss. Then the crack of Uriah’s rifle, and an answering shot, and then Uriah’s voice, feebly wailing.
Zeb might well have been at work by the barn. Zeb was the eldest son, a lean, dour man of six-and-twenty; he’d been sired in Missouri near the end of the War, before his father had taken the name of Shackleford, or commenced calling himself a Mormon—the days when Meshach Collard was still raiding with Bloody Bill Quantrill. At the sound of gunfire, Zeb would have hurried round the front of the house to see Robbie pelting across the field toward him. Robbie rode on Uriah’s horse, galloping as if the fiend himself had risen in pursuit.
“The devil happened?” Zeb would have shouted. Others would be spilling from the house behind him.
“He come up the old trail,” Robbie shouted back. “The one-eyed devil! He kilt Uriah!”
Or had not killed him yet; not quite. A feeble wailing continued, rising from the ravine, as if from some lost soul at the gates of hell, which had not yet slammed shut.
Judge Shackleford had emerged from the house. Meshach Collard, as he had been in the long-ago: a man in the last brutality of his prime, with his Granddaddy’s fearsome black stare. He was shirtless, suspenders hanging like raptor’s wings.
They heard the flat, dry crack of another shot. Uriah’s wailing ceased.
“See to your Mamas and your sister,” Shack Collard told the boy. “Go inside.”
“But—”
“Do as I say. Inside. Stay there.”
Around him, the sons were in motion. Zebulon and three others: Bendigo, Brigham, and Joseph, all of them grown men, or nearly so.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Shack Collard said to Robbie. So at least he might well have said, had some witness been standing by to record the moment. A father, speaking to his boy: “You are not to be blamed.” He might even have put his hand on Robbie’s shoulder, despite the urgency of the moment.
*
Uriah had fallen asleep while keeping watch, awakening befuddled at his young brother’s exclamation. Seeing the old man, he had lurched upright and fired the first shot, without ascertaining who had come or on what errand. He would immediately have fired again, almost certainly to greater effect; Uriah was a capable marksman, as were all of the sons. But before he could adjust his aim a blow from nowhere spun him sideways, furrowing him in bewilderment and leaving him aghast that his rifle would clatter from him.
Strother Purcell would not have fired at all, had circumstances been other than they were. He would not have announced his own coming in so peremptory a manner, with daylight still remaining. Nor would he have finished the sentry off, necessarily: taken slow aim and fired the coup de grâce, had Uriah left off his wailing, or ceased his crawling, gut-shot, back up the trail. But the killing was clean. One bullet to the base of the skull, as Uriah groped toward sunlight. It was a kindness, even, in its way: greater kindness than Uriah had come to expect from men of his Daddy’s generation.
Shack’s second son juddered, slid one coffin’s length back down the slope, and there subsided.
Tom stood very still. He had not been accustomed to death’s coming in such a manner, dealt out with such economy of purpose.
“I do not say this boy will be sorely missed,” the old man said. He took off his hat, believing that some eulogy was owed. “But he was some mother’s son, which in itself is worthy to be noted.”
He put his hat back on.
“What now?” said Tom.
“No choice. He’s forced our hand.”
Taking his horse by the bridle, the old man started up the trail again, moving fast and keeping low—as fast and low as a man may keep, who is six feet and five inches tall and old beyond his years. Above him, the trail wound upward for another hundred yards, through thickets and outcroppings of rock. Then it opened onto the wagon road. He was halfway there when the first barrage of rifle fire rang out.
Tom, right behind him, flinched back. A hornet snarled past his ear, through the space of this world that his head had occupied one half-a-heartbeat since.
The ravine was rugged and steeply sloped, which saved them. Shack Collard had the high ground, he and his remaining sons. But they couldn’t find a clear shot, not without coming down themselves.
The old man had flattened against the slope, shielded by a ledge above and by an outcropping on one side. Tom had managed to secure the horses, leading them further down the slope. When he hitched himself back up again, he brought with him water and ammunition. Two cartridge belts and the Sharps, which had been scabbarded behind the saddle.
“Good boy,” the old man said.
Strother Purcell had been hit, but not badly. So it appeared to Tom. The old man did not reply when he framed the ques
tion.
“Purcell!” a voice called from above. “That you down there?”
A cold, dry, nasal voice, curiously flat. The old man stiffened as he heard it.
There was silence for a moment. Then came that voice again, insinuating itself through the tinder-dry pines. “You killed my boy, Purcell. My second-born son, Uriah—after all the other crimes you done.”
The old man neither moved nor spoke, for a moment. He remained in perfect stillness, peering up through deepening shadow.
“Purcell? You hearing this? You still alive?”
“Your boy fired first,” Strother Purcell called up. “He brought it on himself.”
There was silence then, from atop the ridge. At last, Shack Collard’s voice said: “I never wanted this day.”
“I know it,” said Strother Purcell. “That’s why you ran. Thirty years, across half the country. Hid yourself under another name—a whole ’nother religion. But here I am.”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” Shack Collard said. “But here’s my offer. We’ll call it square. Set this killing of my boy against whatever grievance you got left—and walk away. You asked for that yourself, one time. Remember? Standing by the grave of my kinswoman, Sissy Baird. ‘Stop the dyin’,’ you said to me, ‘and move on.’ Well, I’ll do that now, if you will. Just let me fetch up the body of my son.”
The corpse lay where it had been, all along: one coffin’s length from the top of the ravine. But it was on the trail. It was visible from below. Whoever fetched it would expose himself to the Sharps.
“Are you hearing me, Purcell? I’m saying, let a Daddy see to his poor butchered boy. Let Christian honour be done to the dead.”
“Come on, then,” said Strother Purcell.
The shadows were deepening, now. Tom heard—or imagined—the quick rustling of birds in the trees along the ridge-line. Or else the hoarse susurration of human voices.