The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “You give your word on that?” Shack Collard’s flat, cold voice again, out of the twilight. It seemed to Tom uncannily remote, uninflected by human emotion.

  The old man said: “Come on down.”

  The old man’s eye was fixed on a gap in the trees at the top of the trail, one coffin’s-length above the corpse. An opening onto the sky above, into which Shack Collard would have to appear, like a tragedian stepping out onto the stage.

  The sky stayed empty. The grey of twilight and the purpling bruise of storm clouds, pressing down. The air was grown electric with dire potentiality; somewhere in the distance thunder muttered.

  “I never did aught to deserve such persecution,” said Shack Collard. An ugly note of murder had crept in.

  “You burned my Mama alive,” the old man replied. “Her and poor Solomon, both.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, you did. You killed my step-father Jacob Dillashay.”

  “And you killed my whole damned family!”

  “Not all of them, Shack. You’re still alive.”

  Still no glimpse of Shack Collard, through the trees. But the evening seethed with him.

  “So this is what it’s come to, has it?” Shack Collard said.

  “I’ve come to pay what I owe,” said Strother Purcell. “And collect what’s owed in return. Tell the granny-woman: I’ve brought the five dollars.”

  “Five dollars? The devil does five dollars—?”

  “Come on down, and I’ll hand it over. Then we’re square—no more debts owed between our families, on either side. Except for one, Shack. And that’s yours.”

  “You’re insane.”

  The sky stayed empty. It seemed to Tom, though, that the voice had shifted. It came from a distance to the left of where it had been.

  “Send the women and children up into the hills,” Strother said, “while there’s still time. I cannot guarantee their safety, else. You hear me, Shack?”

  The evening exploded into gunfire, instead: a fusillade from above, but from different angles. They’d spread out—found new vantages—now that they’d ascertained the old man’s position. Bullets snarled and rang and ricocheted, kicking dust and splintering rock. Tom could only cower and cover his head, taking as little space in this world as he might, which was still far more than he wanted. Below them, the horses trumpeted consternation.

  When at last the barrage ended, the trees themselves had been singed of foliage. A pall of gun smoke hung over the ridge, above them. There was silence, then Shack Collard’s voice. “You still living, Purcell?

  The old man did not stir.

  “If you’re living, then you’ll rue it. You’d be better off dead already. We know every tree and trail on this mountain. How to find our way down, in the dark—and back up again from below. We’ll come on you like haints, old man, and hang you. We’ll fire the woods and burn you alive, you and that rat you brung along. If he’s any friend of yours, then you best kill him. Best slit his windpipe now, Purcell—before we find him.”

  *

  Nine o’clock p.m.

  Em’ly had heard that terrible fusillade, hours earlier. It was five miles off, at the least, up the steep mountain road—so distant that it might not have been gunfire at all, just a rumour of faraway thunder, muttering across the evening sky. She told herself: That’s all it was. How could it be gunfire, after all?—not when it rolled on and on and on, as if a whole regiment had opened fire.

  It was silent, after that. Em’ly waited for thunder to resume—closer, maybe, and louder, with the reassurance that it had been thunder all along. But it didn’t. Thus she knew that the old man had failed. He’d been pinned down—in the ravine, most like—she could see in her mind where it must have happened. They’d shot him to tatters, and Mr. Tom beside him. And now they’d be coming for her.

  Knowing that, she couldn’t move. She huddled in her hollow by the trail as darkness deepened, knowing that the Mormon’s eye would find her. They’d be ravening down the trails, the Mormon and his misbegotten sons; they’d be in the trees on every side, like wolves. And just when she couldn’t breathe at all, so sure was she that someone must be there in the darkness—or there—or there—there was a sound and a shifting of shadow and someone was.

  *

  Eleven o’clock p.m.

  It seemed to Tom the worst night he had ever known.

  He was himself unharmed. But the old man had been badly hit in that last barrage, or else the wound he had taken earlier was much worse than Tom had supposed. As the darkness deepened around them, it grew plain that Purcell was dying.

  A pale moon had arisen, above the trees. A wind had come up with it, and the tinder-dry woods about them muttered.

  The old man moaned in reply. He was haunted by ghosts of the past.

  His Mama was here. So Tom was to gather. The ghost of mad Miss Amanda Beauchamp, late of Roanoke, Virginia. Strother’s own Daddy came also, and Sissy Baird; poor Solomon as well, who had been nothing else but loyal all his life, and perished horribly nonetheless. They didn’t rise as haints would do in the Great Smoky Mountains of Strother’s youth, curling amongst the tree-trunks in tatters of bluejon mist. Here they rattled as dead branches, pine-sharp with recrimination.

  The old man’s brother was the final haunting.

  “What should I have done, Lige?” the old man said. “Tell me what I could have done, and I’ll still do it.”

  “Should’ve killed me when you had the chance,” Lige Dillashay replied. It seemed to Tom he could hear that voice in the wind, as plain as if the outlaw had come up the trail behind them. “That was the mistake you made.”

  “You came to finish it?” the old man said.

  “I did.”

  “Go on and do it, then.”

  “Let me see your face.”

  “You know what I am. I’m what I’ve always been.”

  “Show me your face.”

  The old man struggled to lift his head. He shifted himself onto one elbow, despite the pain. His face showed in the moonlight, ruined and haggard.

  “Aren’t we the pair?” Lige Dillashay said at last.

  Tom looked round.

  In moonlight, the outlaw stood. He was tattered and bramble-torn; stinking with long travel and bad whiskey. Older and maimed and wearing that preacher’s hat, but still Dionysus when he chose.

  “Well, fuck,” he said to his brother. “Look at you.”

  “What will we do, Lige?” Strother said. “Tell me, and we’ll get on with ’er.”

  “I expect we better kill someone. Shack Collard, to start with. Then that old witch.”

  Behind him, Em’ly stood shaking. Her bonnet was shapeless and her eyes were vast and she clutched the Smith & Wesson in both hands.

  Lige said: “The gal can patch you up a little, maybe.”

  “I believe I’m past patching,” Strother said.

  “At least we can plug a few holes. H’lo, there, Tommy,” the outlaw added. “Long time. You look like desolation on a stick.”

  *

  Eleven-thirty p.m.

  Up in the Big House, it might have gone like this:

  The granny-woman could not settle. She shuffled and seethed and muttered, peering out into the night. “But did you kill him?” she demanded. Not for the first time, or the twenty-first, which grated sorely upon the others.

  “He’s dead,” said Zebulon.

  He had come back up with his father, after the final barrage, leaving Bendigo and Brigham posted down by the ravine, just in case. They were young and had keen eyes.

  Rachel, the eldest of the sister-wives, sat still as stone at the long table. She was Uriah’s mother. Hannah, three years younger, sat with her, clutching her hand. The boy’s body, once recovered, would be laid out here for washing.

  “Nobody could’ve survived,” Zebulon said. “We must’ve fired a hundred rounds. And I hit him—once, at least. I know that for a fact.”

  “But did you kill him? Is that
one-eyed bastard dead?”

  Shack Collard said: “No. I don’t believe it.”

  “Nor I don’t, neither!” said the granny-woman.

  Thunder rumbled.

  Shack Collard had sat silent all this while, adding greatly to the miasma of unease. He’d been working through all the steps he must take, with no margin for blunder, now that it had come to this: the day he had avoided for thirty years, come to call on him at last. When Shack Collard fell so silent, you held your breath. You did not say one word that might provoke him. Not even Robbie, his favourite, would dare do that.

  But now he made his decision. “Zebulon,” he said. “Take Joseph. Double round behind the bastards, in the ravine. Come up on ’em from below.”

  “Now?”

  “While there’s moonlight. Set fire to the woods.”

  “Lord-a-mercy,” Sarah exclaimed. The daughter. She could expect to pay a price for this interruption later, when her Daddy had more leisure at his disposal.

  Shack was intent on his planning. “Storm’s on the way,” he said to Zeb. “Wind’s coming up, from the south. Fire will flush him, if he can walk. Burn him to cinders if he can’t. We’ll have rifles on the ridge, while we wait to find out.”

  “There’s fire already,” Sarah said.

  “Quiet.”

  “But it’s true!” young Robbie exclaimed. He’d moved to stand by his sister, at the window. They stared out, across the porch and into the night.

  “Look.” Robbie pointed. “Look-look. They’s fire along the ridge!”

  The fire had been Lige’s doing, to create a diversion. In this, he was assisted by Em’ly, who revealed herself to be an incendiary of no mean talent.

  And the suddenness of it had taken the sentries off their guard. A precipitate kindling of flame amongst the pines, swept abruptly forward by the wind—as if, while they’d been nodding at their posts, the ancient gods of gorge and ravine had been breeding dragons.

  Smoke billowed up, and Strother Purcell boiled out of it: one-eyed as Odin, forked upon that godalmighty Clydesdale. The draft horse heaved, ungainly, up the last steep slope of trail; staggered, stumbled, found its footing, surged into a shambling gallop. The old man raised his sixgun. The bullet shattered Brigham’s sternum; the boy pitched from the knoll where he’d been posted.

  Bendigo turned to flee. But he’d fired his own shot first, thus settling any question that might linger, concerning his fitness to draw further breath. Besides, he was a Collard. A shot spun him, flailing herk-a-jerk; another slammed him face-down, sprawling, a hundred yards short of the house.

  The draft horse thundered over him.

  The old man had been tied in place. A rope around his waist bound him to the saddle-horn. Another, round his ankles, secured his legs. Bendigo might have seen this: a last glimpse vouchsafed, as light died from his eyes. He might even have found in it a source of wonderment, if dying seventeen-year-old boys are inclined to wonder.

  Lige had done the binding, after lifting his brother astride the horse.

  “Make ’em tighter,” Strother had said.

  Lige did so, ensuring as well that the cinch-strap would hold. “That strap busts, and you’re dead,” he warned. “No way for you to clear the saddle.”

  “This is one hell of a thing,” Strother said, “to say to a dying man.” He summoned up a wintry smile to go with it.

  Yes, it would have gone very much like that: the final words between the two of them, there at the end of the world. Tom was not standing with them at that moment, but afterward he knew it nonetheless. This is how such exchanges go.

  Lige had one half-bottle of whiskey remaining, which he now proffered. “One last drink, with your brother?”

  Strother shook his head. “Waste of good whiskey.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’d just leak out.”

  Lige drank for both of them. “Can we count on the cripple?” he asked.

  “Tom Skiffings has never once let me down.”

  “I should’ve laid on healing hands, before he went.”

  “Mite late for that,” Strother said.

  “I suppose. And relations being strained, just now, between myself and the Lord.”

  Lige took one final swallow, and slung the bottle aside.

  Strother looked down at him. “Lige? I would ride against Satan himself in hell, with all his infernal legions, knowing I had such a brother to ride with me.”

  Yes, he would certainly have spoken thus, at the end. All the heroes have done so, in books. Lige, for his part, found that words unaccountably failed him.

  “Well, then,” he managed. “For my Daddy’s sake. And for Mama. And...oh, fuck, let’s just do ’er.”

  Strother reached out one hand in benediction. “Straight and true, brother. Straight and true. Ever and always, straight and true.”

  Lightning forked as he said it.

  They’d have watched from the Big House in disbelief. Young Robbie and his sister gawping out windows, and their father bellowing, “Get away from there!”

  Strother Purcell came on.

  It must have seemed to young Robbie that Time itself had slowed down. A one-man cavalry charge, but at a fraction of the customary speed, as if that godalmighty horse came galloping through fire and treacle—a Clydesdale, save our souls, eighteen hands at the withers and hooves as wide as pie-plates. Slow, slow, impossibly slow, but unstoppable as an oncoming locomotive.

  “Jayzus Godfrey,” Robbie’d have squawked, ducking for cover one instant before a bullet shattered the window. His sister went inexplicably legless, dropping down beside him. Robbie’s hoot of laughter trailed into perplexity; it occurred to him that Sarah’s eyes were wide and blank and staring, owing to the fact that she was dead.

  Zeb now took matters in hand. The eldest son, and all. He smashed the butt of a rifle through the window nearest to him, and rising into the aperture he commenced to blaze away.

  His first shot struck the old man in the shoulder, wrenching him halfway around. But it didn’t kill him. Righting himself in the saddle, Strother fired. The bullet took Zeb through the throat and he gurgled on down; sat dumbly, as if at a loss to explicate why such indignity should be visited upon him—and in his Daddy’s front room, no less. Then he toppled.

  Shack Collard must have seen his eldest die. Saw Strother Purcell sling the sixgun aside, and reach for another. Saw the crimson totems of trees ablaze, and a second rider galloping out of the smoke: Lige Dillashay, with a Winchester rifle and a rebel yell.

  Shack understood, then, how desperate this had become.

  But there would still have been a way. Four sons were dead already, and one daughter. But two sons remained to him. Both sister-wives could shoot, and Shack Collard himself did not want for coolness of head, nor for murderous efficiency in the snuffing out of life. This was a man, after all, who had raided with Quantrill—had hung whole families from trees, from white-bearded grandfathers right on down to blue-eyed gals in ringlets, cordially inviting some sobbing wretch to choose which sibling should die first. Or so at least the story went. And who would wish to dispute a legend such as that? Yes, Shack Collard would still have had every chance to defend the house—to barricade the windows and pick off the assailants, one after the other.

  Except now he saw his youngest son, bolting out the door.

  “Robbie!”

  The boy had endured quite enough of this. He resolved to shoot that old one-eyed bastard dead, and reckoned he’d best get as close as he could to do it. Or possibly he wasn’t thinking at all, just rushing outside and firing a pistol, clutching it in both his hands and spraying bullets.

  In all likelihood, the old man never saw him. The draft horse lurched, spooked by flames and din and confounded by the old man’s sawing at the reins. He was hauling to pull a gun from the saddle-scabbard: an eight-gauge, acquired at Mears Lake, and sawed off to approximate the Hell Bitch of old. As it came free at last, the draft horse lurched again, tram
pling over the onrushing boy. Robbie cried out—or would have done, had one vast hoof not borne down, iron-shod, blotting out the Oregon sky.

  “What stops us?” Lige cried, as he reached his brother.

  “Nothing!” the old man replied. His voice was thick with dying.

  Shack Collard tried. He came out the door, a pistol in either hand. His first shot ripped through Lige, and two more struck Strother, before the eight-gauge boomed.

  The blast disassembled the Mormon. His legs struggled on, impelled by his previous momentum, but his torso would not come with them. His face turned skyward, eyes rolling. Then the legs gave way and the weight of him crumbled down, and Meshach Collard passed from this weary world, unlamented.

  The force of the recoil set Strother back as well. It left him reeling and swaying, and wrenched a woeful trumpeting from that godalmighty horse.

  The house was now on fire.

  It had started by misfortune, as nearly as could ever be determined. A paraffin-lamp knocked over, or blasted apart. A lick of flame against fabric—lace curtains, or a muslin dress—and then with a whoosh the whole of it going up.

  The godalmighty Clydesdale reared, shying from this new conflagration. O, what fresh equine hell? And the old man saw, as through a red mist, a figure on the roof. It was the twisted stick of an old woman, untouched as yet by the tongues of flame, pointing him out for eternal obloquy.

  He shouted something at her, then. The old woman couldn’t make out what it was, amidst the roar of conflagration. But she saw him reach into his shirt, and between his fingers was a glint that might almost be—though what devil should account for this, she could not say—a gold coin.

  Drusilla Smoak took dead aim with her rifle. She had him, after all these years. But just as she squeezed the trigger there came—from somewhere behind her—a muted but unmistakable Pop! Something struck her, directly between the shoulder blades. She felt herself totter—half-turned, obscurely swatted, as one might do in warding off a wasp. Then that sound again, that muted plosive: Pop! Pop!

  It occurred to her, vaguely, right there at the end: This might not be wasps at all.