The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  Again he took the hat off, looking down. Seeing the freckles on his scalp, I wished he’d put it back on.

  “Wait here and keep out of sight until you see us heading off toward town,” I said. I couldn’t resist adding, “There’s a preacher who likes her, and she likes him back.” I watched his face, remembering with a kind of sad satisfaction the way—as I had so often told it—he’d leaned down to me, bleeding, from his horse and said, “Tell your mother there’s no more guns in the valley.”

  He put the hat back on.

  I said, “I’m hoping she’ll be tied up with him for a while, anyway, until I can figure something out.”

  “Who’s the preacher?” he said, staring.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it,” I said.

  “I’d just like to know his name.”

  I said the name, and he nodded, repeating it almost to himself. “Bagley.”

  “Now will you do as I say?” I asked.

  “I will,” he said. “If you’ll do something for me.” And now I saw a little of the old fire in his eyes. It sent a thrill through me. This was, after all, the same man I remembered single-handedly killing the old cattle baron and his hired gunfighter in the space of a half second. I had often talked about the fact that while my shouted warning might have been what saved him from the backshooter aiming at him from the gallery, the shot he made—turning into the explosion and smoke of the ambush and firing from reflex, almost as if the Colt in his flashing hand had simply gone off by accident—was the most astonishing feat of gun handling and shooting that anyone ever saw: one shot, straight through the backshooter’s heart, and the man toppled from that gallery like a big sack of feed, dead before he even let go of his still smoking rifle. That was how I had told the story; that was how I remembered everything.

  “All right,” I said.

  He took a step away from me, then removed his hat again, stood there smoothing its brim, folding it, or trying to. “This Bagley,” he said over his shoulder. “How long’s he been here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t exactly. Nobody ever counted much time in those days, beyond looking for the end of winter, the cold that kills. “Sometime last winter, I guess.”

  “He’s your preacher.”

  “I guess.”

  “Ordained?”

  In those days, I didn’t know the word.

  “What church is he with?”

  “No church,” I said. “Grafton’s. His own church.”

  “Set up for himself, then.”

  “Every Sunday. He preaches from the gallery.”

  “Does he wear a holster?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You ever see him shoot?”

  “No,” I said. Then: “Listen, shooting the preacher won’t change anything.”

  He gave me a look of such forlorn unhappiness that I almost corrected myself. “Maybe I won’t be staying very long at all,” he said.

  “Just wait here,” I told him.

  He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  On the way to town, I kept thinking of the hangdog way he’d stood watching me go back to the cabin for Marian—the vanquished look of his face and the dejection in his bowed stance. I wasn’t prepared to think I could’ve so defeated him with news, or with words. Certainly there was something else weighing him down. Marian rode along beside me, staring off at the mountains, her rough, red hands lying on her lap. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to know what she might be thinking. Those days, if asked, she was likely to begin a tirade. There was always something working on her sense of well-being and symmetry. Entropy and decline were everywhere. She saw evil in every possible guise. Moral decay. Spiritual deprivation and chaos. Along with her window sitting, armed to the teeth and waiting for marauders, I’m afraid she’d started building up some rather strange hostilities toward the facts of existence: there had even been times, over the years, when I could have said she meant to demand all the rights and privileges of manhood, and I might not have been far from wrong. That may sound advanced, to your ears; in her day, it was cracked. In any case, way out there in the harsh, hard life of the valley, I had managed to keep these more bizarre aspects of her decline from general knowledge. And I’d watched with gladness her developing attachment to old Bagley, who had a way of agreeing with her without ever committing himself to any of it.

  “So,” she said now. “Why’d you want to get me away from the house?”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak.

  “I can’t believe you remember it’s the anniversary of our coming here.”

  Now I was really dumbfounded. Things had worked into my hands, in a way, and I was too stupefied to take advantage of the fact.

  “Well?” she said.

  I stammered something about being found out in my effort to surprise her, then went on to make up a lie about taking her to Grafton’s for a glass of the new bottled Coke soda. Grafton had tried some of it on his last trip to New York and had been stocking it ever since. Now and then Marian liked to be spoiled, driven in the wagon to some planned destination and treated like a lady. For all her crazy talk, she could be sweet sometimes; she could remember how things were when Joe Starrett was around and she was his good wife.

  “We’re not going to see Bagley?”

  “We can stop by and see him,” I said.

  The team pulled us along the road. It was a sunny day, clear and a little chilly. She turned and looked behind us in that way she had sometimes of sensing things. “Look,” she said.

  It was the dust of a lone rider, a long way off, following, gaining on us. I didn’t allow myself to think anything about it.

  “I thought I heard you talking to somebody down at the spring,” she said. “Could this be him?”

  “Who?” I said. It was amazing how often her difficulty hearing yielded up feats of overhearing, long distances bridged by some mysterious transmutation of her bad nerves and her suspicions.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Whoever you were talking to.”

  “I wasn’t talking to anybody,” I said, and I knew I sounded guilty.

  “I thought I heard something,” she mumbled, turning again to look behind us.

  I had ahold of the reins, and without having to think about it I started flapping them a little against the hindquarters of the team. We sped up some.

  “What’re you doing?” she said. “It’s not Indians, is it?”

  We were going at a pretty good gait now.

  “It’s Comanches,” she said, breathless, reaching into her shawl and bringing out a big six-shot Colt. It was so heavy for her that she had to heft it with both hands.

  “Where in God’s name did you get that thing?” I said.

  “Bagley gave it to me for just this purpose.”

  “It’s not Indians,” I said. “Jesus. All the Indians are peaceful now anyway.”

  She was looking back, trying to get the pistol aimed that way and managing only to aim it at me.

  “Will you,” I said, ducking. “Marian.”

  “Just let me get turned,” she said.

  When she had got it pointed behind us, she pulled the hammer back with both thumbs. It fired, and it was so unwieldy in her hands, going off toward the blue sky as she went awry on the seat, that it looked like something that had got ahold of her.

  “Marian!” I yelled.

  The team was taking off with us; it was all I could do to hold them. She was getting herself right in the seat again, trying to point the Colt.

  “Give me that,” I said.

  “Faster!” she screamed, firing again. This time she knocked part of a pine branch off at the rim of the sky. Under the best circumstances, if she’d been aiming for it and had had the time to draw a good bead on it, anyone would have said it was a brilliant shot. But it knocked her back again, and I got hold of the hot barrel of the damn thing and wrenched it from her.

  “All right!” she yelled. “Goddammit, give me t
he reins, then!”

  I suppose she’d had the time to notice, during her attempts to kill him on the run, that he was quickly catching up to us. Now he came alongside me, and he had his own Colt drawn. I dropped Marian’s into the well of the wagon seat and pulled the team to a halt, somehow managing to keep Marian in her place at my side. She was looking at him now, but I don’t think she recognized him. Her face was registering relief—I guess at the fact that he wasn’t a Comanche.

  He still had his gun drawn. “So,” he said. “You were going to warn him.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said. I was pretty mad now. “Will you put that Colt away, please?”

  He kept it where it was, leveled at me.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to get shot. It must be God’s plan. First her, and now you.”

  “You were shooting at me.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Marian said. “I was.”

  He looked at her, then smiled. It was a sad, tentative, disappointed smile. I don’t think he could quite believe what time had done to her. She was staring back at him with those fierce, cold, pioneer-stubborn, unrecognizing eyes. “Marian?” he said.

  “What.”

  “You were going to warn him, weren’t you.”

  “Warn who?” I said.

  “She knows.” He looked past me at her. “Well, Marian?”

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “After all these years. Look at you. What happened to you?”

  He said nothing to this.

  “Will you please holster your Colt,” I said to him.

  “Marian,” he said, doing as I asked with the Colt. “You were going to tell him I was here, right?”

  “Will somebody tell me what’s going on here?” I said.

  Marian stared straight ahead, her hands folded on her lap. “My son was taking me to Grafton’s for a bottle of Coke soda.”

  “That’s the truth,” I said to him. “I was trying to spare her the shock of seeing you. I told you I had to make some arrangements.”

  “I—I was sorry to hear about Joe,” he said, looking past me again.

  “Joe,” she said. She merely repeated the name.

  He waited.

  “She thought you were an Indian,” I said.

  “I’m here to get a man named Phegley—self-styled preacher. Squarish, small build. Clean-shaven. Rattlery voice. I was hired to chase him, and I think I chased him here.”

  “This one’s name is Bagley,” I said. “And he’s got a beard.”

  “He’s used other names. Maybe he’s grown a beard. I’ll know him on sight.”

  Through all this Marian simply stared at him, her hands still knotted on her lap. “You’re going to kill him,” she said now.

  “I’m going to take him back to Utah, if he’ll come peacefully.”

  “Look at you,” she said. “I just don’t believe it.”

  “You haven’t changed at all,” he said. It was almost charming.

  “I don’t believe it,” my mother said under her breath.

  He got down off his horse and tied it to the back of the wagon, then climbed up on the back bench.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, nodding politely.

  “We really are going to Grafton’s,” I said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I don’t think Bagley will be there.”

  “I’m sure I’ll run into him sooner or later.”

  “If somebody doesn’t warn the poor man,” Marian said.

  “Well,” he said. “Phegley—or Bagley—will use a pistol.”

  Then we were just going along toward town. In a way, we were as we had once been—or we were a shade of it. The wagon, raising its long column of dust, and the horse trotting along, tethered to the back. I held the reins as Joe Starrett had held them, and wondered what the woman seated to my right could be thinking about.

  Bagley lived in a little shed out in back of the stables. The smell of horses was on him all the time, though he never did any riding to speak of, and he never quite got himself clean enough for me to be able to stand him at close quarters for very long. Back then, of course, people could go several seasons without feeling it necessary to be anywhere near the vicinity of a bath, and Bagley was one of them. On top of this, he was argumentative and usually pretty grumpy and ill-tempered. And for some reason—some unknown reason fathomable only to her, and maybe, to give him the credit of some self-esteem, to Bagley, too—Marian liked him. He had a way of talking to her as if the two of them were in some sort of connivance about things (I had heard him do this, had marveled at it, wondered about it). And he’d done some reading. He’d been out in the world, and around some. He’d told Marian that when he was a younger man, he’d traveled to the farthest reaches of the north and got three of his toes frozen off, one on one foot and two on the other. Marian said she’d seen the proof of this. I didn’t care to know more.

  What I found interesting was the fact that Bagley was usually available for our late-night rounds of whiskey drinking and was often enough among the red-eyed and half-sick the following morning—even, sometimes, Sunday morning. In fact, it was when he was hung over that he could be really frightening as an evangelist; the pains of hell, which he was always promising for all sinners, were visible in his face: “Hold on, brethren, for this here is the end times!” he’d shout. “This is the last of civilized humankind. Hold on. We’ve already broken the chain! The end has already begun. Hold on. Storms are coming! War! New ways of killing! Bombs that cause the sun to blot out, hold on! I said, Hold on! Death falling from the sky and floating up out of the ground! I don’t believe you heard me, brethren. Plagues and wars and bunched towns clenched on empty pleasures and fear, it’s on its way, just hold on! Miseries and diseases we ain’t even named! Pornography and vulgar worship of possessions, belief in the self above everything else, abortion, religious fraud, fanatic violence, mass murder, and killing boredom, it’s all coming, hold on! Spiritual destitution and unbelievable banality, do hold on!”

  He was something.

  And you got the feeling he believed it all: when he really got going, he looked like one of those crazed, half-starved prophets come back from forty days and nights in the desert.

  I hadn’t had a lot to do with him in the time he’d been in town, but I had told him the story of the gunfight. It was on one of those nights we were all up drinking whiskey and talking. We were sitting in Grafton’s around the stove, passing a bottle back and forth. It was late. Just Grafton and Bagley and me. I went through the whole story: the cattle baron and his badmen trying to run us all off, and the stranger riding into the valley and siding with us, the man with the pearl-handled Colt and the quick nervous hands who seemed always on the lookout for something. The arrival of Wilson, a killer with the cold blood of a poisonous snake. And the inevitable gunfight itself, my memory of Wilson in black pants with a black vest and white shirt, drawing his Colt, and the speed of the hands that beat him to the draw. Bagley listened, staring at me like consternation itself.

  “Wilson was fast,” I said to him. “Fast on the draw.”

  “Young man, you should tell stories of inspiration and good works. Do I detect a bit of exaggeration in your story?”

  “Exaggeration,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was being challenged.

  “A little stretching of things, maybe?”

  “Like what?” I said, angry now.

  “I don’t know. What about this Wilson? Was he really so cold-blooded?”

  “He shot a man dead outside on the street. He picked a fight with him and then slaughtered him with no more regard than you’d give a bug. We buried the poor man the day before the fight.”

  “And this Wilson—he wore black?”

  I nodded. “Except for the white shirt.”

  “I knew a Wilson,” he said. “Of course, that’s a common name. But this one was a sort of professional gunfighter, too. Sort of. Not at all like the one you describe. I hea
rd he was shot somewhere out in the territories, a few years back.”

  This had the effect of making me quite reasonlessly angry, as though Bagley were trying to cast some doubt on me. It also troubled something in my mind, which glimmered for a second and then went on its unsettling way. I was drunk. There were things I didn’t want to talk about anymore. I was abruptly very depressed and unhappy.

  “What is it, son?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  He leaned back in his chair and drank from the bottle we had all been passing around.

  “I seem to remember Wilson as wearing buckskins,” Grafton said.

  “No,” I said. “He was wearing black pants and a black vest over a white shirt. And he had a two-gun rig.”

  “Well,” said Bagley. “The Wilson I knew carried this old heavy Colt. Carried it in his pants.”

  “Come to think of it, I don’t believe I remember two guns on him,” said Grafton.

  “It was two guns,” I said. “I saw them. I was there.”

  “Boy was there,” Grafton said to Bagley. “You have to hand him that.”

  “Must not be the same Wilson,” Bagley said.

  “You ever been in a gunfight, Reverend?” Grafton asked him.

  “No, I usually run at the first sign of trouble.”

  “Do you own a gun?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I had one once. Matter of fact, this Wilson fellow—the one I knew—he gave it to me. Come to think of it, he had three of them. And he carried them all on his person. But the one he used most was always stuck down in his belt.”

  “Why would he give you a Colt?” I asked him.

  “I don’t recall. Seems to me I won it from him, playing draw poker. We were both a little drunk. He could be an amiable old boy, too. Give you the shirt off his back if he was in a good mood. Trouble was, he wasn’t often disposed to be in a good mood.”

  “Was he fast on the draw?” I asked.

  He made a sound in his throat, cleared it, looking at me. “You read a lot, do you?”

  “Some,” I lied. I was barely able to write my name, then, for all Marian’s early efforts.