The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  It was, in fact, Tom Skiffings.

  Of course it was. You could have guessed that, without having to be told. You could hardly have a tale at all, without the likes of Tom Skiffings to save the day—assuming that any part of that day or night was receptive still to salvation.

  Tom had worked his solitary way behind the Big House, exactly as he had pledged himself to do. While the frontal assault had been conceived and launched, he had hirpled himself under cover of night through the trees that skirted the edge of the field, thinking to make himself invaluable in some manner—by drawing off fire, say, or distracting savage dogs, neither of which opportunity had presented itself, thank God.

  But once he had succeeded in his quest—had crept all the way around, to crouch quaking and exultant in a copse of trees, with the light of the Big House’s back windows directly before him, no more than fifteen paces off—it dawned on Tom that he had not accomplished anything at all, except to secure for himself a unique prospect onto the end of the world. The woods before him were ablaze. Fire was crowning in the trees. The house was on fire, and Lige Dillashay was down, along with assorted Collards. Strother Purcell was riddled with bullets, and dying. And suddenly—there on the rooftop before him, standing crabbed and horrid amidst spouts of flame—was a witch with an Enfield rifle.

  God knows how she’d managed to climb up there, a woman as old as Methuselah’s great-aunt. In certain later retellings of the tale, God would have nothing to do with this at all; it was the devil who raised her to such a height of unholy exaltation, according to a bargain sealed in the Smoky Mountains half a century before. But she was set to finish Strother Purcell, one way or the other. And in that fateful half-second Wild Gimp Tom rose up, with his trusty Deane-Adams five-shot.

  Under different circumstances, he’d have called out some pithy utterance. He’d come up with a list of these many years ago, when as a boy he’d carried out in his head many feats of valour. But none of them would come to mind in this particular half-second. Most had in any case applied to shoot-outs with brooding desperados—throw-downs on dusty main streets of Dodge, and such—and did not transfer, exactly, to the back-shooting of granny-women on rooftops.

  But the first Pop! staggered her, by golly. The next two—Pop! Pop!—staggered her some more. The fourth slung her forward, and the fifth and final was not a Pop! exactly, but more of a BOOF! as the trusty Deane-Adams exploded in Wild Gimp Tom’s hand and blew off two of his fingers. But she fell. He saw it. A tattered black rag, wreathed in flame, as the rooftop collapsed beneath her.

  In front of the house, Strother Purcell fired one last blast with the eight-gauge. It bowed him backward, and this time the cinch-strap broke. The saddle swung sideways with the old man still tightly bound, pitching him under the hooves of the plunging Clydesdale.

  –EPILOGUE16–

  BARRINGTON WEAVER recovered from his injuries, after a fashion, though he was never the same man afterward. He left San Francisco early in 1893, and over the ensuing years made a meandering progress northward, picking up odd jobs here and there in Oregon and Idaho, but never staying for long in one place. He was never to see Tom Skiffings again, or Prairie Rose, or anyone else from his San Francisco days. He never learned for a certainty what had happened to Strother Purcell, either, though he made haphazard efforts to find out.

  By 1907, he was panhandling in Vancouver’s Gastown district, where he would tell a version of Purcell’s saga in barrooms, to anyone who would stand him the price of a drink. This came to be known as Weaver’s Yarn. The story would seem to have had a certain narrative force, though its provenance was murky and no one was certain how much of it to believe. Weaver had latched onto the notion that Strother Purcell and his outlaw brother had reunited to hunt down their old archenemy from Smoky Mountain days, which was close enough to the truth. This he would presumably have gleaned from barroom tales that he himself had heard, in Oregon. But he had also formed the conviction that neither of the brothers had perished at Deadman Creek.

  Weaver’s Yarn grew cryptic at this point, and the storyteller himself would turn mysterious if pressed for details. There would seem, in fact, to have been shifting versions of this culminating sequence. These evolved over time—possibly due to research breakthroughs, but on the whole more probably not. By 1909, Weaver was hinting that the reunited siblings had escaped to Bolivia, where Lige Dillashay robbed trains and banks while his older brother strongly disapproved.

  Weaver’s mother continued to send her son quarterly remittances until her death in 1910. Late the following year, he was interviewed by a young newspaper reporter who had been assigned to write an article about outlandish local characters. Weaver is quoted as telling the young man: “I met giants in my day. Truly. Oh, I met men of the most remarkable courage and achievement. I wasn’t one of ’em, myself. I was never much of anything, really. But I met ’em.”

  Two days later, Barry Weaver was found dead in a rooming-house on Powell Street. It is reported that he looked wistful.

  *

  Tom Skiffings—“Three-Fingered Tom”—survived the events at Deadman Creek, much to his own surprise. He and Em’ly left Oregon together, making their way eventually to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, where in 1916—to his sorrow—she predeceased him, leaving the consolation of their daughter, Tilda, born in 1909.

  He would never speak to his daughter about Deadman Creek, not while she was a child. She knew, though, how it ended, from her mother. Em’ly had not been present at the deaths, or at least not quite—she had been down in the ravine with the two remaining horses, her heart trip-hammering against her ribs, convinced that the world was ending just above her. She described to Tilda her sick certainty that all was lost—the terrible heat of the fire; the blood-red flickering of flames against the sky, and the shouts and screams and gunshots from the house. Then suddenly, there he was at the lip of the ravine—Tilda’s father. He came tottering out of the smoke and the red-hot cinders, ravaged and soot-streaked and maimed in his right hand, raving and choking that it was over.

  Lige Dillashay had been shot dead by the Mormon. Strother Purcell had been thundered to ruin by that godalmighty horse, slung to the ground and stirrup-drug across the field. Em’ly had not seen it, but Three-Fingered Tom had been there. He had gimped after the Clydesdale with such alacrity as he could muster. Finding his friend Strother Purcell still miraculously breathing, Tom had sat with the old man while he passed, afterward wrapping the body and digging a grave—though this did not entirely make sense, as Em’ly herself conceded, not if her own recollection was accurate. Tom would have needed all night to do all that, and surely it had not been dawn when he appeared at the lip of the ravine—though possibly it was. The more Em’ly thought, the more it seemed conceivable that hours had passed. How could anyone keep track of time, after all, when the world was ending?

  So perhaps it was dawn. Tom appeared out of blood-red daybreak. It was over, one way or the other—and the two of them had to flee, before distant neighbours, drawn by the fire, should arrive with horrified questions. So they fled.

  Tilda remained with her father for some years after Em’ly’s passing. They owned a small orchard—paid for, local rumour would have it, by a mysterious cache of so-called Mormon Gold—and grew apples and peaches and plums for market. Three-Fingered Tom lived quietly, though certain persistent speculations bat-winged about him, concerning a clandestine past. He never confirmed these, but did not entirely deny them, either.

  Late in his life, he sold the orchard and moved with Tilda to Yale, just a few miles west of the roadhouse where so much had begun. Half a century had passed since the events of 1876, and Tom himself was scarcely remembered here. He remembered, though. He remembered everything.

  He had long intended to compose a full accounting of the life and times of Strother Purcell, whom he held to be the greatest man he had ever encountered, or heard tell of—and Tom Skiffings had heard tell of them all. He had been jotting notes and
sketching out passages, as long as his daughter could remember; Em’ly had done so too, right up until her own premature demise. Now Tom began to confide certain remarkable aspects to his daughter. He intimated, for instance, that Strother Purcell might not have died that night at all—and nor had his half-brother. “They’d both died before, you see—or should’ve done,” he said. “Death can’t just haul off men like that, grabbing ’em by the scruff of the neck—not the way he’ll do with the likes of me. No, Death needs to ask a man like Strother Purcell, and then wait for a reply.”

  Tom had been talking more and more like this, which concerned his daughter. He had recently turned sixty-two—not truly old, except he’d never enjoyed robust health, or anything resembling it.

  It was 1927. They had a small house just above the river, which Tilda was fixing up—a new roof that summer, and plans to build a sun-room in the front. In fair weather, up on the roof, she would see her father hirpling down to the river, across the railroad tracks and past salmonberry bushes. She’d go down herself after an hour or so, to find him sitting, small and withered, on a log. The Fraser churned inexorably past; Hell’s Gate to the east, and the mud flats to the west, where in his boyhood the Chinese and Natives had still squatted in mute resolve, sifting for the last specks of gold. Sometimes she wondered if her father could see them still, on mornings when the season turned and the mists hung low and lingered.

  “Penny for ’em,” she would say, meaning his thoughts.

  Most often he’d just chuckle. But sometimes he’d say something outlandish in reply, such as: “Wyatt Earp was shit-scared of him—Weaver told me that. Weaver was a damned fool, but he wasn’t a liar.” Or: “A whole damned mountainside tried to kill him, in ’76. Couldn’t do it. You suppose the likes of the Collards had better luck?”

  He had heard, from somewhere, the gist of Weaver’s Yarn. He scoffed and told his daughter not to believe it—not that business about Bolivia, anyway. But late that summer, he took to hinting that another party had appeared out of the smoke at Deadman Creek: a great ungainly gal with hands like hams and a strawberry birthmark stained across her face, who had followed Lige Dillashay all the way from San Francisco, and was not about to let him die, or his brother either, when she could carry them both so easily to safety. “Shot to ribbons?” Tilda’s father said. “Hell, yes, they’d been shot to ribbons. But you want to hear a secret? Here, I’ll tell you one.” His daughter leaned in close, and he whispered: “They had doctors in the Oregon.” He also hinted that others had seen the brothers, long after Deadman Creek—they just never learned the true identities of a maimed evangelist and his towering one-eyed brother, who were ministering to the poor and sick at missions and soup kitchens on the Eastern Seaboard as late as 1912, and thus atoning ten times over for such sins as the two of them had committed.

  One afternoon in autumn, Tilda drove him out to the site of the old roadhouse, which Old Tom had conceived an urgency to visit. Tilda had recently come into a possession of an automobile: the half-wrecked relic of one of Mr. Ford’s creations, which through the alchemy of mechanical aptitude she coaxed back into operation. She could only imagine what an oncoming motorist might suppose, to see that contraption rattling toward him: Tilda at the wheel, Old Tom blanket-swaddled beside her, neither one of them touching five feet in height—just two pairs of eyes peering over the dash, as if elves had commandeered a Model T. Tilda took after her father in appearance, though she was stronger than he had ever been, and would be hale and energetic well into her nineties.

  The road out toward Hell’s Gate was little more than a widening of the old Wagon Road, still narrow and perilous beyond all sense. That afternoon, Old Tom had grown almost young again, pointing out the sites where this event had once taken place, or that one. The ruin of McCutcheon’s Roadhouse was still discernible, and the vantage-point where he had first set eyes upon Strother Purcell. But abruptly he’d grown fretful, and told Tilda she must take him back again, to Yale.

  “We just got here,” Tilda protested. She’d packed a hamper, and planned for the two of them to have a picnic.

  “It’s late,” her father told her, though it wasn’t. “She’ll be wondering where I am.”

  “She?”

  “Billie.”

  His sister. She was going to be an actress, Tom said, though at present they helped out their Uncle John. The two of them were all their uncle had, pending the arrival of a French chef from Montreal. Uncle John would be wondering where Tom was, too.

  “The chores, you see,” Tom said to her. “I got chores.”

  Tom Skiffings died that winter, leaving his project unfinished. After his death, Tilda discovered whole sheaves of notes in an old steamer trunk, along with draft segments written in her mother’s hand. There was a trove of other documents as well: yellowed clippings from newspapers, dating as far back as 1864; personal correspondence between sundry individuals; and long portions of the hand-written journal of Barrington Weaver. Tilda had no clear notion how her father had acquired all of this, but manifestly he had conducted far more research than she had ever imagined.

  In 1936, Tilda Skiffings married for the first and only time, to a man named Sturluson. She did not abandon her father’s project, however. Over the years, she conducted extensive research of her own, travelling as far afield as North Carolina. Her findings called into question various elements of the account, but turned out—sometimes startlingly—to buttress others. In 1994, long after her husband’s death, and at the age of 85, Tilda gathered whole boxes of files about her and sat down at a portable typewriter. Winding the first of many sheets into the roller, she began:

  They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinctions of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end.

  There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute...

  –ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS–

  This is a work of fiction, and the main characters are entirely fictional, although certain historical figures lounge on the periphery, notably Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus. The two of them were indeed living in the Bay Area in 1892, where Wyatt was managing a racetrack and trying to regroup after a chastening experience in the San Diego real estate market. And the broad strokes of their stories do conform, more or less, to the historical record, although Barry Weaver is far from a reliable narrator and liberties have (to say the least) been taken. Then again, there is lively dispute about the essence of Earp amongst the Earpians themselves, so Weaver has company. Of the various Wyatt Earp biographies, I particularly enjoyed Jeff Guinn’s The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral—And How It Changed the American West; and Allan Barra’s Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life & Many Legends. And Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp, by Ann Kirschner, is a gem. As for nineteenth-century San Francisco itself, I will just say this: no one should, under any circumstances, consider dying before having read Herbert Asbury’s classic The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld.

  Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Samantha Haywood, and her team at Transatlantic, for much insight, guidance and unflagging support. Special thanks as well to Jude Weir and Susin Nielsen, who read early drafts and suggested vital improvements.

  And my gratitude to Susanne Alexander and the splendid Goose Lane gang. My editor, Bethany Gibson, was (as ever) wise and altogether terrific. Peter Norman’s copy-edit was (as ever) rigorous and perceptive.

  Ian Weir is a playwright, screenwriter, TV showrunner, and the author of two previously published novels. Daniel O’Thunder was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, as well as the Canadian Authors Association Award for fiction, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the amazon.ca First Novel Award. Will Starling was longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award and shortlisted for the Sunburst Award.
Among his extensive television credits are his work as creator and showrunner of Artic Air and as writer and executive producer of the acclaimed gangland miniseries, Dragon Boys. He has won two Geminis, four Leos, a Jessie, and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award.

  Born in North Carolina, Ian Weir grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia. He now lives near Vancouver.

  Footnotes

  1 This chapter, and the chapter following, constitute the material originally left for me by “Tilda S.” in 2004. - Brookmire.

  2 It was Virginia (née Cooksey, m. Nicholas Earp). Wyatt’s brothers were James, Virgil, Morgan and Warren, along with a half-brother, Newton.- Brookmire.

  3 For an extended discussion of Chappie Gimbleton, interested readers might consult “Hopalong and Harlequino: The Trope of the Comic Servant in Dime-Novel Tradition,” by D.G. Brookmire (The Journal of Western Folklore, USWC Press, September, 1993). - Brookmire.

  4 This lurid saga, concerning the genesis of the Collard-Dillashay-Purcell feud, may have existed in oral tradition as early as the mid-1860s, and is referenced by the folklorist Edgar “Punkinhead” Slocum in his seminal survey of Appalachian feud literature, War in Them Thar Hills (Antietam Press, 1909). The author of the Sturluson manuscript clearly possessed a written redaction of the saga, of which at least half a dozen variants are known to be extant. She - assuming Tilda Sturluson’s to have been the sole authorial hand-seems to have quoted liberally from that text, while also making extensive and silent emendations, in order to incorporate independently sourced material, or more simply to shape it to her own narrative purposes.

  Even more significantly, internal evidence strongly implies that the Sturluson author had access to at least one witness with first-hand knowledge of the brothers - including the tantalizing hint that Billie Skiffings may have served as a narrative conduit. But it is not possible to establish this conclusively, and so - here, and in subsequent sections - I will pass over this reshaping without specific editorial comment, as irrelevant to the general reader. - Brookmire.