“About gettin’ shaved?”
“About going to trial.”
“That’s up to Billy. I’m just riding drag.”
“Hope it goes well.”
“Makes two of us.”
“You sign papers for your belongings?” I didn’t say anything, so Quentin went on. “That horse of yours seems sturdy enough, and you got your saddle and all the gear. If it doesn’t come out right, you want to make certain all that stuff doesn’t go to the wrong people.”
“Quentin, sounds like you’re trying to shave me twice here. Once for whiskers, once for stuff. Let’s just concentrate on the whiskers for now. We clear?”
“We’re clear,” he said. “Hold still now.”
Quentin was an artist with that straight blade of his, could have carved butterfly wings into anvils if he was of a mind. He’d go over every little patch twice, taking off those little pin-feather whiskers a man finds with his tongue about halfway through the day and worries at till well on the other side of midnight. If he buried as well as he gave shaves, I might not choose to attend when the Resurrection Day stomped on in.
I heard the door open and then Omar murmured, “Hey,” so I was safe in thinking it must be Billy who had come in. Quentin made a shushing noise, and a couple of steps told me Billy was on one of the waiting chairs. Quentin put away the razor and brought on a new towel, not as hot at the first one, but scented still. He cranked up the back of the chair, then unwrapped me a second time and I was seeing Wilbur Moss like never before. Not young or handsome, not that ever, but just more pulled tight and together. I made Billy’s eyes in the reflection in the mirror. The expression was set straight and level. “How do I look?”
“Like a man ready to arm wrassle the Devil’s own.”
“That’s an off-step way of putting it.”
“Might be, but I think that’s what you better get ready to do, Wilbur.” Billy unfolded out of the chair and moved up behind us. He put one hand on each of my shoulders. He looked to my reflection, me to his. “I went to Honey’s to talk with Nicholas. Went to his room. It was empty. All his clothes were gone. He’s run off. We don’t have us a witness anymore, Wilbur.”
Quentin stepped forward. He had a bottle in his hand. The slosh in the bottle was the color of a horse fly’s stomach. “You want some cooling aromatic to finish up with?” I heard Quentin, but it was off some as I was taken up with just staring at Billy Piper’s face in the oval mirror. Quentin took my not saying anything as being the same as saying yes, so he splashed a puddle onto his palms, then smacked it all over my cheeks.
Stung like a sonofabitch.
Later on in the day, me and Billy and Pearline were in the back room at Rooney’s. I knew that things were sour and bad because Willard Ganeel had let me leave Tillman’s Tonsorial without the leg irons. Wasn’t as much diversion for the kids on the sidewalk, but I was grateful. It was too early for serious business at Rooney’s, so the room on the other side of the door was stony still. The room we were in wasn’t any different.
Billy had asked Pearline to go to Nicholas last night and talk to him about what was going on, what a trial meant, and what he was going to be expected to do. Now he asked her to tell everything that got said when she did that, and she agreed to tell, but a couple of minutes had gone past since she said so, a couple of minutes of her staring at the floor, swallowing back tears, gnawing hard on her lower lip, then squeezing her eyes shut.
I couldn’t stay still that long. I nudged Billy. “Anybody got a notion which way Nicholas went when he took off?”
“There was footprints behind, leading off in the direction of One Legged Indian Crick.”
“So he’s not headed to the mountains.”
“Wish he was.”
“How come?”
Billy looked like a man at the end of a long drive in bad times. He rubbed his face. “The railroad’s come about five miles the other side of One Legged Indian Crick. If he gets there and gets himself on to one of those supply trains heading back for a reload, there’s pretty much no way of telling where he might get to after that. I don’t know as we’d ever be able to track him down.”
“I went up to his room about seven o’clock,” Pearline said out of nowhere.
Billy and me looked over at her. Her eyes were shut and she’d pulled her knees up to her chest and had both her arms wrapped tight around them.
There were little rocking motions back and forth while she sat in the chair. Billy waved me to be quiet. We both waited.
“He was lying on the ticking mattress looking up at the ceiling, with his hands behind his head. I remember thinking it looked like the way a grown man might lie, but not a mostly boy. I pulled up the three-legged stool and sat down. He hadn’t taken a shred of notice of me. ‘How are you, Nicholas?’ I said.
“‘Fine. I’m all right.’
“‘I know you heard about Fergus Blackthorne getting killed and Wilbur Moss being in trouble on account of it.’ He nodded after a bit, still looking up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know about you, Nicholas, but I got scared when I heard there was a murder right here in town. Did you?’
“‘Seen fights before. Seen blood before.’
“‘Well, yes, there are fights, and I guess a gun gets used by some of the Rooney rumpots, but this is different, I think. You and I know the man who got killed and we know the man who did the killing.’
“‘Good.’
“‘Good that we know the man who did the killing?’
“‘No. Good that it was Fergus Blackthorne that got kilt. I hope he comes back to life, so somebody gets to kill him again.’”
Pearline hadn’t stopped rocking back and forth, hadn’t opened her eyes. There were tiny wet diamonds glistening at the corner of those eyes. “I never saw a child’s eyes like that. Even where Nicholas has been living, even with what he sees and hears, he was still a little boy, still had mischief and knew how to laugh and tease and play the way a boy will. But that was gone when I was looking at him last night. It was gone, burned out of him, the way you burn skin off the flank of a horse or a steer.”
Billy’s voice was a soft stroke. “And after he said that, what did you say, Pearline?”
She dabbed at her nose, breathed in through her mouth. “Well, I said, ‘There’s a lot of people who feel like you do, Nicholas.’
“‘Then why’s Mr. Moss in trouble?’
“‘Because that’s the way the law works. Sometimes it’s hard to understand, but that’s the way the law works.’
“‘Not making much sense to me, Miss Pearline.’
“‘That’s why we’re lucky, Nicholas.’ He looked at me then for the first time since I came into the room. ‘We have a chance to help Wilbur. We have chance to let people know why Wilbur did what he did to Fergus.’
“‘How?’
“‘By testifying.’
“‘Don’t know what that means.’
“I tried to imagine I was building a house out of little blocks, one on top of the other, slow as can be, making sure it all got balanced. ‘They have a trial, Nicholas. There’ll be a judge come in all the way from Cody. A very serious, very important man. And Billy Piper will be there. It’s all going to be where we go sometimes to see Billy, out at the new schoolhouse. And all you’d have to do is to answer some questions as honestly as you can.’
“‘Who asks?’
“‘Billy Piper. And, I guess, another man.’
“‘Who’s the other man going to be? I know him?’
“‘I don’t think you will.’
“‘What are the questions going to be about?’”
Pearline stopped. She was looking straight out at the wall on the other side of the room. What she was seeing wasn’t the wall on the other side of the room. “I said, ‘They’ll be asking about you and Fergus Blackthorne.’
“Nicholas edged away from me. ‘Why they have to know any of that?’
“‘Because it’s important to know what a bad man
Fergus was, Nicholas. And the things he did to you were wrong. It’s important that people know that Wilbur Moss found out about it and that’s why he did what he did to Fergus.’
“‘Why they got to know what he did?’
“‘To show that Wilbur Moss is a good man who made a mistake, but made that mistake just to make sure Fergus Blackthorne would never do to any little boy, any child at all, what he did to you.’
“His expression rolled over and over on itself, all wreathed in doubt. ‘I got to answer all the questions they ask me?’
“‘If you agree to testify, you’ll have to swear on the Bible, swear to God that you’ll tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ There was no way to not see how scared he was. ‘It’s the only way there is to save Wilbur.’
“He ticked off the names on his fingers. ‘So, there’ll be you and Billy and Wilbur and the important judge and the other question man ... That’s who’ll be there.’”
Billy groaned and his head moved down. He covered his face. “What’d you tell him?”
“I told him the truth. I said there’d be a lot of people there. There’d be someone to take down what got said. There’d be the marshal and his deputy. There’d be the jury, twelve, isn’t that right? And there’d be a lot of people from town coming. I told him the truth. Isn’t that what I ought to do?”
“Yes. Yes. You did what you ought to do. Yes.” Billy let out a long whistle. There was no tune to it. “What did he say after you told him all that?”
“He said: ‘How come that many people got to be there?’
“‘It’s one of the rules, Nicholas,’ I said. ‘Trials have to be out in the open. Trials have to be in public. One of the rules.’
“‘And I got to say out loud in front of all those people what Mr. Blackthorne made me do?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘And there’ll be somebody there to write it down, so it won’t ever be lost or get forgot?’
“‘Yes.’”
Billy stood up with a hand to the small of his back. He went to the door and put both hands on it, leaning hard, his back to me and Pearline. “What did he say when you told him that?”
“He asked if there would be any blacks there. I told him there weren’t that many in Salt Springs, so probably not. And then he just rolled over facing the wall and waved me away. I told him you would be in the next morning to help him with some of the questions, but he just waved me away like he did before.”
There was a rifle butt rapped on the door. “We need to get back across the street to the jail. Willard’s wife is bringing dinner over at five prompt. She rares back if things go late and her food gets cold, don’t forget.”
“It’ll be a minute, Omar,” said Billy. He looked at Pearline. She was loving him all she could with her look back, but that was all she could do and it wasn’t enough. Billy swung over to me. “Pal, we got some thinking to do tonight.”
“What about?”
“You know there aren’t any wild cards in this deck, don’t you? You know it’s not going to be that you’ll walk free away from this.”
“I know that. I’m just hoping you’ll find a way to let me have a few years of walking, period. If it’s behind the walls of the Stony Lonesome, then so be it. I just don’t want to hang, Billy. You know that.”
He understood, that was clear. But I never seen him look so old and bent. “Wilbur, the reason I wanted you to plead not guilty was so that I’d have a chance to call witnesses for you, the main one being Nicholas. Now he’s busted through the fence and is off to God knows where. We haven’t got our witness anymore.”
“And what is it you want us to think about?”
“Whether or not we should just plead guilty and hope I can get the jury to see fit to let you live out the rest of your natural span.”
Pearline let out a soft frightened noise. She reached out a hand and put it on my knee. I looked down at that hand for a long time before I looked up towards Billy. “Let’s just hope Marshal Ganeel’s wife didn’t cook up another trough of that hominy, johnnycake, and side meat again. I’m gettin’ awful weary of that crap.”
X
Next morning, I was seated cross-legged in the back of the Ganeel buckboard, hand-manacled and leg-ironed. Omar had the reins and he kept the team to a slow pace. Willard was squatted on the other side of the wagon bed, his lever-action across his knees. He was watching me the way frogs watch flies. The day was pretty as days get to be, and I was grateful for Omar’s slow pace, as the wagon bed doesn’t offer a softness to its passengers. The rough part of that job is that all the people on the boardwalk could slow up and stare as he drove me past, and even some kids could run after the wagon, just looking at me and laughing, yelling out a singsong rhyme that went: “Wilbur is a killer! Wilbur’s gonna hang!” over and over and over again. I think that Omar looked back at that and touched up the team, giving them a little bit of their head. I was grateful to Omar for that.
He reined in some after we got on the road outside of Salt Springs and the kids gave up trailing after the buckboard. It was quiet again, and I wrapped that around me. I was getting good at that. Willard Ganeel didn’t appear to have the same reaction. He was still giving me that frog look. We started up the rise, and that reminded me about where we were. My heart started to beat harder and quicker. That surprised me. I didn’t think it mattered that much to me. I straightened up, looking past Omar’s shoulder, trying to get my first good look at it.
It did matter to me; as soon as I saw it, I knew it did matter to me.
It sat on top of the little knoll and it was just like the little drawing Billy had first showed me when we were scratching out the foundation outline in the dirt. It was painted white and glowed in the new first light like a bridal veil on a beauty. The windows were in, the bell rope reached back from the pole to the schoolhouse, so it could be rung from inside. There were two outhouses in the back, GIRLS over one door, BOYS over the other. A big sign was out front by the path leading to the door and the letters on the sign spelled out SALT SPRINGS COMMUNITY CENTER AND SCHOOL-HOUSE. I didn’t carry any happiness inside about the reason for my being there, but I did tell myself that if things turned rank on account of this new plea, that if Billy couldn’t persuade them to save the lumber for the gallows, that at least Wilbur Moss would have left something behind, that there was a place that had been changed for the better because Wilbur Moss spent some time and effort there, and there’s something to be said about that. I stopped feeling guilty about how my heart started to pound when I got my first look at the finished version of the sweet-smelling raw-wood puzzle me and Billy put together. It all fit. It was sturdy and fine, and a man ought to be allowed a touch of pride for having had a part in it being there.
Omar pulled the team up and hopped down to tie them off. Willard walked over to me and got down on one knee, pulling out a key from his vest that he used to unlock the leg irons. When they come free, he tossed them off under the seat.
“Marshal, I appreciate that.”
“Don’t go all Sunday school on me, Wilbur. It’s just quicker getting you in and out, that’s all.”
I took that for what it was worth and managed to get to a standing position. Willard grabbed a handful of my shirt and started moving me to the back. There were some people filing in to the front of the schoolhouse, most of them looking back at me, then looking away as quick as they could. Heflin and the Dutchman were standing by the door and looking queasy. Mrs. Ganeel was there, too, and I thought I saw Mr. Starett duck in through the side door. Omar was waiting by the back of the wagon when Willard got me there, and Omar had his hand on the butt of his gun. Another pollywog turned frog with a badge.
The two of them walked me up the path and into the building. As soon as I stepped in, I thought of what Pearline told us Nicholas had asked her, if the trial was going to be like a show, because it was clear the answer was yes, it was. Maybe not even like a show; maybe it was a show all by itse
lf on its own. They’d brought benches in and all the people were facing to the front and there was a tall dark desk put there. It wasn’t what Billy would want for the school, so this had to be a special judge desk they got in just for the occasion. I’m not sure if I was supposed to be flattered or not.
Billy was sitting at a desk off to one side, and that’s where Omar and Willard took me. He looked up when I got to the chair, and he was all embarrassed and I knew why in a second. “Never saw you wear one of those before,” I said.
His hand went to the narrow string tie at his collar. “That’s because I never have.”
“You do the knot yourself?”
“Pearline gave me a hand.”
I looked around the room. “I don’t see her.”
“Honey told the girls they shouldn’t come.”
“Why?”
“Thought it might not look good for you. Thought it might backfire.”
That made me sad. A person shouldn’t be ashamed of just being in a room. A person’s got a right. Billy read my face.
“They’re doing it for you, Wilbur. They’re doing it because they want it to come out right.”
“Still don’t like it. Maybe they could come tomorrow, huh?”
“Wilbur, if we stick to pleading you guilty, there won’t be any trial tomorrow.”
That brought a question to my face, and Billy read it like one of his books.
“If we plead you guilty, there won’t be any witnesses for either side. Won’t be any questioning back and forth. It’ll just be me trying to convince the judge to send you to prison, nothin’ more. And the other side’s lawyer trying to talk him into the rope dance. Either way, it won’t take anything like the whole day.”
It took me a time to get all that into my head. “You mean that by the end of the day it all will be done. Whether I live, whether I die, I’ll know it all by supper time.”
“That’s what I mean. Unless you want to change your mind.”
There came a rumble of wood squeaks from the back of the room, and we turned around to the front door to see Judge Dewey come in through the door. I never saw a king, but the way he walked in was the way I figure a king must walk in to a place. He was wearing a city suit, but it was fine cut to my eye and I doubt it was made in Wyoming at all. He looked at the crowd as he moved up the aisle, smiling, moving his head up and down just a tad. Being as Dewey didn’t come from Salt Springs, I knew he wasn’t looking at people he recognized or knew. He was looking at people who he’d given the high privilege of looking at him. He didn’t have to know a soul to know that.
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