by Треваньян
"What can I serve ya?" Jeff Calder asked. "Anything you want. On the house. Man, I'd of give anything to be out there, standing shoulder to shoulder with you, facing down them no-accounts, and I would of been too, but this damned stump of mine's been acting up something fierce. I guess it's winter coming in and-"
"You just stay out of my line of fire," Matthew said in a dull monotone.
Pressing the stock firmly into his shoulder to prevent further damage to his wrists, he aimed at the nest of bottles on the shelf behind the bar. They exploded with a roar as the bottom of the back-bar mirror fragmented, allowing the top to slide down the frame and crack in half. Calmly he pulled out the spent shell and replaced it with one from his pocket, then he shifted his position to give himself an enfilade shot at the bottles kept beneath the bar. These disintegrated in a spray of liquid and glass that blew a panel off the front of the bar.
Frenchy burst in, followed by Kersti. "What the hell's going on? What are you doing, boy?"
"There won't be no more drinking in Twenty-Mile, ma'am. Not while I'm marshal."
"While you're… what?"
"It's booze that turns weak men into bad ones," Matthew quoted from a Ringo Kid book as he reloaded. He fired again, destroying the rest of the bottles.
"Now, I know you got more hooch stashed down under the trapdoor," he said. "And that's where it better stay, you hear what I'm telling you?" He slipped in the last of his handmade shells and snapped the gun shut. "Ma'am?" he said, politely pulling at the brim of his hat. And he left the hotel.
On his way up to the Reverend's depot he passed Professor Murphy who, after seeing Tiny and Bobby-My-Boy killed, had vomited against the wall of his barbershop until he was empty. Now, his lips slack and moist, he was looking down at Tiny's naked body… his pulpy, suppurating chest and stomach, his limp little penis. He dry-retched, and revulsion caused his eyes to flinch away, but morbid fascination dragged them back again.
Matthew stood in the street in front of the depot. "Come out here, preacher!" he called.
The front door was ajar, creaking slightly in the breeze that was beginning to dissipate the mist.
"You can't hide in there forever."
Nothing stirred within.
He waited a full minute, perfectly patient. Then: "All right. Here we go." He mounted the steps to the porch.
He knew the Reverend had given his gun to Lieder, but there were still kitchen knives and a poker and a kindling hatchet; and Hibbard could be behind any door, ready to spring out. So Matthew cocked the shotgun before opening the front door wide with his toe and looking obliquely in… then he shook his head, uncocked his gun, and pushed his hat back with his thumb.
The disorder within said it all. Hibbard was gone. He had returned to the depot, snatched up a few clothes and valuables, then run off. Either he was on his way up the tracks to the Surprise Lode, or he was making the tortuous descent to Destiny. Feeling suddenly empty and sour inside, Matthew sank into the chair by the table where the Reverend used to work up his hellfire sermons. Both his wrists had been wrenched by recoil, and the swollen right one throbbed with each beat of his pulse. He knew he could lose the pain by letting himself slip even deeper into the Other Place, by just letting go and sliding into the velvety warmth…. No! He stood up, tipping the chair over with the backs of his knees.
When he stepped out onto the porch of the depot, the mist had blown off, revealing the year's first snow out on the high reaches of the westward mountains. Torn shreds of cloud scuttled across a taut, wintry sky while, down in the street, the chill breeze ruffled the muddy puddles. He drew a long sigh and started back up toward the Mercantile.
He stopped at the Tonsorial Palace and kicked at the door. Murphy appeared, his eyes red from drink, his cheeks pale from another bout of vomiting.
"Come with me."
"Listen, boy, I'm feeling awful, and I-"
"Just come along."
So carefully did Murphy keep his eyes away from Tiny's gory chest and limp penis that he tripped over Bobby-My-Boy's headless corpse, and he recoiled, gagging and spitting. But he meekly followed Matthew to the porch of the Traveller's Welcome.
"Calder!"
The old veteran stumped up to the door and looked out.
"Come with me."
"Right now?"
"Just do it."
The three of them continued down toward the Mercantile, where a primitive carrion fascination had drawn the Bjorkvist men across the street to look at the remains of Lieder, which Oskar couldn't resist prodding with his toe. An act of bravado that made him tingle with frightened titillation.
"Here's what I want you to do," Matthew told the four of them. "Go fetch shovels and brooms and whatever you need, and clear away what's left of these men. Then I want you-"
"Hey!" Mr. Bjorkvist objected. "Why should we-"
Matthew shifted his shotgun and let his eyes lie heavily on Bjorkvist before saying, "I'm pretty disgusted over how none of you lifted a hand to save Coots. So it'd be a big mistake to give me any back-sass." The marshal's eyes narrowed, and he slowly inventoried their faces, one by one, causing each in turn to look down or aside. "Now like I said, I want you to clear these men away. Dump it all over the cliff. I don't want them in the same burying ground as Coots. Then I want you to sluice water around everywhere and scatter dirt until there's not a trace left. Not… one…. trace. I'll be sitting up yonder on my porch, watching you. Now get to it."
He glanced up at the doorway of the Mercantile, where Ruth Lillian was standing next to Mr. Kane, who had a bandage over his eyebrow. He nodded to them, touched his hat brim, then turned and walked up to the marshal's office.
All morning, B. J. lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes gritty and dry, as old eyes are when they have shed all the tears their ducts can produce. He had heard the shooting out in the street, but he didn't care. He had heard Frenchy and Kersti run out of the house on their way over to the hotel, but he didn't care. And now he heard the scrape, scrape of shovels out in the street, but he didn't care. For the first time, he knew that he was old. Really old. There was nothing for him to do. No one needed him. There was no one to take care of, or be irritated with, or tease. So he'd just… lie there.
By noon the street had been cleared of the last traces of Lieder and his men, dirt had been scattered over the bloody places, and the reluctant clean-up party had returned to their houses. But still Matthew sat on a chair on his porch, the ball-pointed star on his breast, the shotgun containing his last shell heavy on his lap.
Although he had been aware of her approach out of the corner of his eye, he didn't turn toward Ruth Lillian when she said, "We're waiting dinner for you."
"That's real good of you, ma'am. But I'm not a bit hungry. And anyway…" He held out his swollen wrist and sausage fingers. "I doubt I'd be any great shakes with a fork."
She reached out and gingerly touched the hot, tight skin of his hand.
"I'll be all right," he said.
But she went into the office and soaked a cloth in the chipped enamel wash-up basin he had carried with him all the way from Nebraska. He didn't object when she wrapped the sodden bandage around his wrist. "There, that'll help bring down the swelling."
"Feels better already. Thank you."
"I could bring a bowl of stew for you to eat here, if you want?"
"No thank you, ma'am. I'm just fine as I am."
"Yes, but…" She didn't know what to say. That "ma'am" was worrying. "Pa's not hurt. Just a bad headache."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"You'll be up for supper, I hope?" She smiled. "You won't have to help with the dishes. Not with that wrist of yours. You can just sit and talk to Pa."
He blinked and turned to her. "I'm sorry… what was that?"
"I asked if you'd be coming for supper."
He looked at her with a slightly puzzled frown until she said, "Well, I… I've got to get back. Dinner's getting cold."
He nodded slow
ly.
She felt she ought to say something else, but she couldn't think of anything, so she left.
Matthew did not come to supper that evening, nor did he show up at the Traveller's Welcome the next morning to make breakfast for the girls. His time as the town's odd-job man was over. Later in the afternoon he came into the Mercantile, still wearing the badge and carrying his shotgun over his shoulder, the muzzle in his fist. In his new, softly diffident voice he gave Mr. Kane an order for flour, dried beans, bacon, corn syrup, tinned tomatoes, and tinned peaches, which Mr. Kane put into his canvas satchel for him because his wrist was still swollen. When Ruth Lillian came down from above to greet him, he said he hoped she was feeling all right after that little dustup the day before. Then he told them he wouldn't be burdening them with his company at meals anymore. He'd just fix up his own grub, if it was all the same to them. Ruth Lillian was saying, no, it wasn't all the same to her… when he tugged the brim of his hat at each of them and left.
From then until the miners returned the next Saturday for their weekly blow-out, Matthew spent most of his time sitting on his porch, his chair tipped back against the wall, keeping an eye on things. Marshal of Twenty-Mile. A highly respected man.
He no longer read his Ringo Kid books.
The town slowly returned to its habitual routines and concerns. Professor Murphy found a hogshead out behind the depot to replace the barrel he had lost, and he paid Oskar Bjorkvist two-bits to scrub it clean enough for miners. The boy occasionally looked up from this work and glared at Matthew, sitting across the street, watching through half-closed eyes.
Frenchy assumed Mr. Delanny's authority at the Traveller's Welcome. She even sat at his table, occasionally laying out solitaire. After a crisp no-holds-barred talk with Jeff Calder that left his ears sizzling with accusations of kiss-ass, lick-spittle kowtowing toward those outlaws, she gave the war hero a choice between doing all the cleaning, sweeping, bed-changing, and laundry, in addition to his work as bartender, or getting the hell out and stumping his way down to Destiny. He also had to make the breakfast every morning, which he did with angry assaults on the Dayton Imperial and (when he was sure Frenchy was out of earshot) with growling mutters about uppity niggers that you can't give an inch, or they'll take an ell. His efforts at baking biscuits were so total a disaster that Frenchy told him not to bother, just go back to beans, bacon, and coffee-if he had the brass to call this gritty sludge coffee!
It was over a cup of that gritty sludge that Frenchy gave Kersti clear, unembroidered technical advice about how to work fast, keep herself clean, and handle the men. She explained that it was just a job. "That's the only way to think of it, honey. Just a job. And if anything happens that you can't handle, just walk out of the room and come down to me. I'll take care of it. I know it seems scary. It was the same with me when I started out, and I was a helluva lot younger than you. Don't worry, you'll do just fine. No, no, that's all right. Go ahead and cry, if you want to. You've got a right." But Kersti sniffed and shook her head, and Frenchy told her she could have any of her fancy dresses that could be made to fit, so she'd better go look through her own wardrobe and choose the prettiest.
Later that afternoon, Frenchy was looking on as Jeff Calder arranged the bottles of the whiskey he had carried up from the dug cellar beneath the trap door. The squeak-flap of the bat-winged doors caused her to turn. Matthew stood there, his shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. She looked at him with a defiant cock of one eyebrow, automatically turning her scarred side toward him. He scowled at the row of bottles; then, knowing that he only had one shell left, he shrugged and left.
It was three days before B. J. found the heart to drag himself out of bed, weak from muscle atrophy and not having eaten. He got the forge going out in the shoeing shed and toiled away, clumsily burning some words into one of the mining company's standard wooden grave markers, now and again looking up into the low-hanging, sky from which descended that chill, flat, no-smell smell of snow. Winter was coming in, and soon. He ruined the first two markers because burning in the epitaphs had been Coots's job. And anyway, B. J. had always been inept with tools. Coots used to rag him about it. In the end, the words looked as though a child had painstakingly scrawled them.
AARON COOTS
DIED OCTOBER 4, 1898
A BELOVED COMPANION ON THE BRIEF JOURNEY
He squinted at this last line critically, knowing that Coots would have scoffed at the sentimentalism. He considered doing another marker with just "Aaron Coots" on it, but in the end he justified his declaration of affection by reminding himself that burials and funerals had nothing to do with the dead. It was all for the consolation of the living. And if the message was sentimental…? Well, he was a sentimental man, and he wanted to say publicly that he had loved Aaron Coots.
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari captis?
The swelling in Matthew's wrist had almost gone by Saturday evening when the ore train pulled in, its kerosene headlamp picking out snow crystals that hung in the cold dry air. Its whistle screamed, and steam hissed against the trouser legs of the miners as they clambered down whooping and shouting. They knew nothing, of course, of what had happened in Twenty-Mile since their last visit.
Matthew sat on his porch, his chair tipped back against the wall, watching them tramp their boisterous way past him and up the street to grub down at the boardinghouse before making purchases at the Mercantile and beginning their funning. When the fastest eaters started back up toward the barbershop and the Traveller's Welcome, Matthew met them in the middle of the street.
"Here's what you better know, men," he said. He spoke without raising his voice, but the miners responded with impatient attention to the quiet authority of his tone-to say nothing of that huge granddaddy of a shotgun over his arm! He explained that they were free to laugh and josh around and cut up all they wanted. And they could have the girls over in the hotel, so long as the girls were willing. "But there will be no more drinking in Twenty-Mile, because whiskey causes too much of this world's pain and woe. And it's my job to protect people."
A man in the front grumbled that he'd be goddamned if any kid- "Hold your mouth!" Matthew snapped. Then he retrieved his calm. "I'm sorry if some of you don't like it, but that's the way things are going to be from now on, and you'd best not cross me."
The grumbler faded back into the crowd because the story of the shoot-out between Matthew and the three outlaws had been the principal topic of conversation during the chow-down-that and wondering what had become of the blonde waitress with the big udders.
But the crowd grew ill-tempered as it thickened with men who had poured out of the boardinghouse on their way up for their weekly ration of whiskey and poontang. Professor Murphy came down from where his boiler was puffing and hissing as steam from the barrels of hot water rose into the lightly falling snow. He asked what the hell was going on. Didn't anyone want a shave and a bath? Mrs. Bjorkvist arrived with her son and husband, who still bore yellowing bruises and crusted scabs from having had their faces clapped together. She addressed the miners, saying that Matthew didn't have no right to boss people around! She pushed her face close to Matthew's and said she wasn't going to stand by and let him ruin her business, because if the miners stopped coming down, then what would become of Twenty-Mile, she'd like to know!
Matthew was confused. But… these were the people he was protecting!
"Who does he think he is, anyway?" Jeff Calder asked from deep within the crowd. "Nobody ever elected him marshal!"
But… these people respected him. He'd faced down those outlaws to keep them safe.
Professor Murphy reminded the miners that they all had guns! "Hell, he's nothing but an uppity kid that's barely stopped shittin' yaller!"
A riffle of snorting laugher made Matthew's ears burn with humiliation.
Oskar Bjorkvist took this opportunity to throw a rock that hit Matthew, cutting his cheekbone.
The miners pressed forward.
&
nbsp; Matthew's lips compressed as he thumbed back the hammer, causing those closest to push back against the chests of those behind.
Doc elbowed his way through. "Come on now, Ringo. There's no call to-" Matthew repeated that the men could blow off steam as much as they wanted, but no drinking. "No drinking?" Doc said. "You gotta be joshing! Me, I intend to have myself a couple of stiff belts before dipping into the poontang. It's a man's right, Ringo, after a whole week up in that hellhole."
"If you try to walk past me, Doc," Ringo said in Anthony Bradford Chumms' words, "you'll be walking into history." A snowflake landed on his eyelash, but he didn't blink.
Keeping well back in the crowd, Sven Bjorkvist told the men that they didn't have to stand for that! "That kid ain't right upstairs! Are you men or not? You got guns!"
Doc forced a two-note laugh. "Now come on, Ringo! A joke's a joke, but things are getting pretty net up." When Matthew didn't react, Doc abandoned his laugh-it-off tone. "Now listen to me, kid. I'm going down to the hotel, and you can do whatever you've got the grit to do." He started to pass, but Matthew swung the barrel level with his middle.
"Don't do it, Doc." An anxious boyish note replaced the Ringo Kid's soft burr.
Doc squinted, trying to read Matthew's eyes through the gathering twilight and the snowfall.
"Don't do it, Doc," Matthew repeated. Then he whispered, "Please don't."
"Matthew?" Ruth Lillian was edging her way through the crowd. "Matthew?"
He tightened his jaw and shook his head.
Doc swallowed hard.
B. J. Stone stood on the edge, knowing he ought to do something, but not knowing what.
Ruth Lillian arrived at Matthew's side. "Give me the gun, Matthew."
"You'd best get out of the way, ma'am."
"No, I won't get out of the way. Now give me the gun."
Matthew shook his head, tears welling in his eyes.
"Here, Matthew, use my handkerchief. Your cheek's bleeding."
He slapped her hand away. "Get away from me, goddamn you! Just… get away!" His eyes searched hers desperately. "Leave me alone! Don't make me… Please… please… please!" A long, thin moan of soul-pain escaped him, and he lowered the gun. B. J. stepped forward and took it from his slack grip as, with a whoop, the miners surged past them on their way to hot baths, tepid rotgut, and sizzling poontang! Boy-oh-boy! Look out, girls, here I come! They were momentarily surprised to hear the insistent tooting of the narrow-gauge train as it returned to town, backing up the line, pulling a cone of headlamp-lit snowfall behind it. What the hell…? But the miners weren't going to let anything stand in the way of their few hours of well-deserved fun. "That kid's nuttier'n a fruitcake! You remember ol' Mule? The fella who used to do odd jobs before he went around the bend? That kid's just like ol' Mule!"