“Your Pap doesn’t want you to leave, son.”
“Aw, you can’t know that, mister.”
“Your Pap doesn’t want you to leave.”
The boy expressed his doubt, but you could tell he wanted to believe Botis. “Maybe. Ma doesn’t do much for nothing after Quentin got killed by Comanches. Anyway, Pap has Nelson to help him. He’s my little brother.”
“Your Pap needs a man to help pull stock. Nelson is between hay and grass.”
“I ain’t no man yet,” Frank admitted. “Will be someday, though.”
“Mayhap you are closer than you think,” Marwood said.
Frank thought that over. He looked as if the idea might appeal to him. “I’m good with horses,” he reflected. Then, “You men hunt out Indians? I seen them scalps.”
“We hunt everything,” Botis acknowledged.
“Ain’t there nothing you don’t kill?” Frank asked. It was clear the thought intrigued him, as all things apocalyptic attracted young boys.
Botis pointed a dirty finger at the night sky. “Do you see Old Father Moon up there?”
The full moon was like yellow cream in a barrel. “I guess I ain’t blind,” the boy said.
A few of the men laughed. Botis grinned in turn.
“If I could,” Botis said, “I’d kill that moon. I’d kill its light and erase every thought and deed and word ever said or written about it. I’d do it for no other reason than it was within my power to do so. That’s the kind of men we are.”
“Aw, hell, you’re greening me.” The boy stood up and brushed his pants. “I can bring you something to eat in the morning. If’n you want me to, that is. Ma said it was all right.”
“We are leaving before first light,” Botis told him. “But I thank you for the offer.”
“You ride back through here, you won’t be able to stop me. You hide and watch.”
“I will take your caution under advisement,” Botis promised. Frank slipped back through the trees and headed for home. They could hear his feet rustling the leaves, then nothing.
When they were sure he was well out of earshot, they laughed among themselves, yet quietly. It was not mocking laughter, but the laugh of men sharing the pain and hurt all boys who grow into men must carry in their hearts.
CHAPTER 16
They left the arid lowlands of the Pecos Valley, never to return. Ten miles farther on they brought the horses through Castle Gap, a mile-long pass of rimrock and natural blocks of limestone. Colossal mesas stood on either side of the pass like terminal gateposts opening onto some distant Brobdingnagian acreage.
Seven days sequent they rode through mansions of dust and wind. Rattlesnakes lay in the shade bush and under flat rocks. The men never saw them, but heard their buzzing when the reptiles felt the ground tremble from the passing horses.
They came upon a rebuilt colonia on the Rio Frio they had all but destroyed during their winter scourge. Botis and his men drove into them with murderous intent, firing their guns into the fleeing backs of farmers and ranchers, tradesmen and cattlemen and coopers. A dozen settlers formed a ragged skirmish line. The vanguard of Botis’s company rode into them, guns blazing. They used ropes to pull down the skeletal frames of half-finished houses, and tossed flaming brands into the shattered woodwork. They burned tents and wagons. They scalped and docked ears, and they shot Double-barred V-branded cattle and poisoned stock tanks with bags of lime.
Three days later they rode into another Double-barred V colonia on the same river. White settlers had erected, on the understructure of the routed Mexican squatters, a wood-frame church with a white steeple. They had done this in the hope a fully constructed church would attract a man of the cloth this far out to oversee their congregation. The pulpit was torn down and the church set afire by Lovich. The survivors were rounded up and brought to stand before Botis.
Botis sat in a leather chair before the flames, dressed in rancid skins and wearing his black galero. His face was like a sword, and he was prepared to pass judgment on those men who had declaimed him. Buzzards sat perched in the high branches of tall juniper trees along the riverbank. The ground below was carpeted with a bed of their long, stinking feathers.
Botis picked up the tortoise-shell pince-nez with his customary dainty ease. He set them on the end of his nose and addressed the frightened congregation by the light of the burning church.
“I am Abram Botis,” he said. “I ride with demons. I have come among you to judge all things past and future given.”
Men and women wailed. Some fell to the ground in abject terror, for the name of Botis, old and ancient as it was, had come to be known by them through rumour and revered whispers.
“Hear me,” Botis said, lifting a hand for silence, “for the grave stands naked before you. Your destruction has no covering in this land. My lieutenants will carry out my orders. Their only lust is revenge, and to a man they cleave unto the blooded wife of murder.” He half-turned in his chair and beckoned each one forward.
“Know them by their names,” he said.
And thus he named each man in his company, and they stood at his elbow with weapons drawn and the glint of red murder in their fierce eyes. When he got to the last three he called them forward one by one.
“Know him, Abaddon, the destroyer,” Botis said, “and Moloch who seeks revenge. Here, Merihem stands beside them with the fires of Hell between his hands.”
Captives were brought under gunpoint from a temporary holding place—a rope corral strung between tree trunks and fence posts. Botis required each man to confess his worldly sins.
Many did so willingly, recognizing the face of sheer madness before them. Others did not, insisting they were innocent of any wrongdoing under any known reckoning of God. By what method Botis evaluated the evidence heard, or arrived at sentences of absolution, none could fathom.
Death sentences were meted out. Acheron was brought forth in harness. Those destined for execution were given over to him, and thereupon his back did ride to their deaths. Marwood tied their hands with baling wire. They were laid across a charred tree stump in a welter of gore, each prisoner beheaded with a two-man crosscut saw. Wine red blood pooled on the sand and grass, and the nine headless bodies were strung swinging from the creaking limbs of trees.
When it was finished, the men and women left alive were covered in ashes from their own homes, tied to singletrees, and scourged naked into the desert to wander like aimless penitents among rock, cactus, and scorpion.
The company collected their horses. Rising columns of smoke marked the blown site of the last Double-barred V colonia.
Botis climbed back on his horse and led his men out. He did not look back, or ever think again upon the awful destruction he had wrought.
They rode around, aimless for the most part. At the headwaters of the Middle Concho River the Tonkawas caught up to them. The company sat on the clay banks of the river eating freshwater mussels. The cliffs overlooking the sporadic pools of green water were chiselled with Native American pictographs. The primitive carvings depicted deer, rabbit, buffalo, and snake. All manner of creature were mixed in with other odd geometric designs that represented grass, water, and sky. Alongside these were pictures of men, and painted handprints of the authors revealing themselves in signature.
Red Thunder rode lento across the grassy plain. His humpbacked cousin, Little Shreve, was behind him on a piebald pony with painted chevrons. They closed the distance. Red Thunder looked to Botis and made a negative motion with his hand.
Botis received the news, speaking not a word in return. The Tonkawas filled their waterskins and pulled out to scout the terrain ahead. Botis mounted his horse and kept his eye fixed on the horizon.
From that hour on the name of Bill Rota was never mentioned again by any living man in the troop.
PART IV
The Thunder of the Plains
CHAPTER 17
F or what is man’s mind but a caution of madness?
The words haunted John Marwood. They spoke to the aching doubt growing from an acorn stone in the centre of his heart, and to the increasing madness so evident in Botis and his wild, inexplicable actions.
Marwood was not yet of two minds, as Botis had put it, as to which way he would jump. However, following an obsessive man purposefully drowning in madness was not a path Marwood wanted to travel under any circumstances.
Nevertheless, there remained salient elements to Botis’s searing madness, which Marwood dared not deny and wanted to understand for himself, if for no other reason. In particular, they either answered, or raised questions, relating to Marwood’s own existence. Or, put more simply, events that highlighted his own singular brand of madness.
True, then, any man’s mind was his own. Marwood knew his private madness well, though he did not understand its relevance, and admitted as much to himself on any given day. Therefore, he continued to look to Botis for answers, because Botis was the only other man he knew who lived with a demon coiled like a watch spring in his marrow.
But the haunting feeling he carried with him from this moment on did not cease. It echoed in his mind like restless ghosts, and he wanted answers.
They pushed the horses through a thicket of mesquite and out the other side. Riding behind Marwood, a stray limb level with Jubal Stone’s stirrup passed between his boot and the metal dowel. The branch ran clean through the stirrup loop, stripping leaves, as Stone, unknowing, continued to ride ahead. When he did notice something was wrong he tried to saw back on his horse. The animal spooked and reared and bolted wild until the unyielding tree branch bent and stripped away rider, saddle, blanket.
Stone’s foot became entangled in the stirrup and a fork of the tree limb. The big horse dug its hooves into the ground and kicked forward with every ounce of power until the man’s leg tore from his knee and lay twisted up with the wrecked and entangled saddle.
“Oh, God,” Stone cried. He sat on the ground. One pants leg was empty up to the blood-soaked knee. A naked hairy leg with a cocked boot hung from a mesquite branch, along with the saddle.
Stone lay back, his shirt wet with sweat and fear and pain. “Dear, sweet God,” he said.
Tunk Quillen dismounted and strode quickly to the downed man. He examined with a glance the awful, mortal wound and the enlarging puddle of blood beneath him.
“There ain’t nothing I can do for him,” Quillen told Botis.
“Then do for him,” Botis said from the back of his horse.
Quillen drew a hunting knife from his belt. He crouched beside the dying man.
“Captain says I got to,” he told Stone in a sorrowful voice. “When your leg tore off the ends of your blood vessels twisted themselves up. It might take you an hour to bleed out, but you are going to bleed out.”
Stone’s face was colourless. “I guess there ain’t nothing left for it,” he said.
“You want a drink of water?” Quillen asked.
“What the hell for?”
Quillen put his hand over the dying man’s face and turned it aside. He carved the hunting knife across the carotid artery and underlying vessels. Blood spurted two feet across dry chaff. Quillen held Stone down until his struggles lessened and all was still.
Botis watched the mercy killing from his saddle. He saw the tired and drawn faces of his men. “We will camp here,” he said.
Quillen packed a tent with his additional belongings. After Spaw built a fire, Quillen erected the structure under a spreading soapberry tree. He carried Stone’s limp body inside. Then Quillen returned to his horse and retrieved the black medical bag, a separate leather satchel filled with old books on anatomy, and a lantern.
He ducked back inside the tent, drew the flaps down, and did not emerge.
The day darkened into night and gibbous moon. The men watched Quillen’s shadow move behind the yellow-lighted canvas. It would bend, straighten, elongate, stand still.
“What is he doing in there?” Charley Broadwell asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Ed Gratton said, and went back to wiping down his gun.
Broadwell watched the shadowy apparitions behind the canvas, trying to discern some meaning from them. “How come you all call him Tunk?” he asked the men around him. “I thought his first name was Joshua.”
“He picked it up during the war,” Gratton said. “It was the sound surgical instruments made when he dropped them in an alcohol bath.”
“You rode with him in the war, Ed?” Broadwell asked.
Gratton looked up, annoyed. “Are you soft-headed? And him a Confederate slaver?”
The men finished their tug. They sat relaxed about the fire. Sometimes they glanced at the shadows moving inside the tent. They hauled out their pipes and makings and smoked.
“It’s an evil thing that happened today,” Spaw said, nibbling his square of leather. The other men nodded.
Botis sat perched on a fallen tree trunk well inside the light of the campfire.
“Not so, Lewis,” he said. “The eradication of life, the destruction of all that God has wrought, is man’s one great work. If he cannot accomplish that, the earth itself must one day reach out and strike him down.”
“I’ve heard you say that before, Captain,” Broadwell said. He picked his teeth with a mesquite thorn. “But the Bible says a man is made in God’s image, and God can never die. Therefore, man can never die.”
Botis smiled at this sophistry. “Man is sinful by nature, Charley. Thus is his corruption manifested by all else that is evil in the world.”
“God created the earth, Captain,” Lovich said, coming to the defence of Broadwell with what little religious instruction he could recall from his youth. “You can’t never deny that.”
“True, Daniel.” Botis folded his broad hands on his knees. “God did indeed create the green earth and the mysterious fires of Heaven.” He leaned forward, his face gone hard. “But I tell you this, Man himself is the sole artifice of the devil. He is the vomit of the devil’s creative energy, and thus, of greater portent than anything else of God’s work. For who but the devil could bring forth into the firmament a creature with the willpower to deny God? God could not, and would not, create a being to doubt his existence. We are, all of us, the devil’s own sons.”
“God makes a man to choose the path of his own life,” Lovich said, knowing full well he was out of his depth.
“Did Jubal choose his path today?” Botis asked. “Of what use is the interpretation of books, man, when the interpreter is by artifice himself a corrupt and ignoble nature?”
“You are a spry cobber with words, Captain,” Lovich allowed, “I will give you that. But what happened to Jubal today was an accident. It was not evil by intent.”
“The warp and woof of life is itself an accident, Daniel. It was never meant to be sanctified, though man continually tries to find ways to do so. The earth is a lone green spot in the void. A flicker destined to be extinguished. Only then can God ball up and die, and only then will Man reign supreme.”
The men turned in and were soon snoring. Marwood sat beside the low fire thinking about what he had heard. The night wore on. He got up and approached Quillen’s tent. He opened the flap, ducked inside.
A single lamp hung from a centre brace. Doc Quillen wore a blood-smeared leather apron. The dissected remains of Jubal Stone were laid out on a three-and-a-half-point blanket—heart, liver, and other undefined organs rested in clay bowls awaiting closer examination. Quillen’s dissecting tools lay in a shallow pan of mescal, his only nod to the science of disinfection.
Quillen held one hemisphere of Jubal’s brain in his left hand. He poked the ridges and inspected the whorls of grey matter with a steel probe.
The air inside the tent was heavy, reeking of blo
od, formaldehyde, and a sweet ripeness that threatened to bring up Marwood’s gorge. Open books lay all around, pages earmarked and heavily annotated, including a leather journal in which Quillen had sketched, in India ink, the circulatory network of Jubal’s left arm.
Quillen looked up, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “What do you want?” he asked. He viewed Marwood with a critical eye. “You ailing?”
“Not until I came in here.”
“Never mind that. Get out.”
Quillen had erected the tent over stones large enough to serve for seats or tables. Marwood sat on one. “I want to talk about Botis,” he said.
The resurrectionist did not appear surprised, or unwilling, to pursue the subject once it had been broached. If anything, he behaved as if he expected it from Marwood. He put Jubal’s brain in an empty dish, laid the steel probe in the pan with the other instruments. He wiped his hands on the leather apron and sat on another table rock on the far side of the tent.
Quillen put his hands on his thighs and stared at Marwood with unblinking eyes. “What do you want to know?” the resurrectionist asked. “I warn you, my knowledge of Abram Botis is extensive. I have studied the man every day for every year I have known him. Which is a considerable length of time.”
“Tell me who he is.”
Quillen patted for a cigar in his vest. He nipped off the foot with his front teeth, spat it across the tent. He bent to the chimney of the lamp and lit it.
“Tell you who he is,” the doctor mused aloud, sitting back. “I expect you already know who he is. Or, more importantly, why he is. But I take your question as well meant and I will attempt to elucidate an answer you will find satisfactory.”
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