by Gary D. Svee
The Peacemaker’s Vengeance
Gary D. Svee
I dedicate this book to my sister, Shirley, and her husband, Oscar, who sold their home and pulled up their roots to help my mother through the last days of her life. My brothers, Bob and Rod, and I are eternally grateful to them.
1
Damn wind! Mac McPherson wanted to hide from it, drop behind a tombstone and wrap himself in his arms and legs for warmth. It stung his eyes with dust and his body with cold.
If they didn’t get Deak underground soon, they’d have to bury Mac, too. Most likely they wouldn’t even haul him home. They’d just toss him in a hole and cover him up. His ma would come out later, when the wind had died down. “He was just fourteen,” she would say. “Just fourteen, and he gave his life to report old Deak’s funeral. Ben Simpkins said he’d be a fine newsman some day if he weren’t so damn wordy.”
But his ma wouldn’t say damn. Damn wasn’t in her lexicon any more than the Reverend Eli Peabody had a short sermon in him.
A quarter, Ben Simpkins had said, a quarter to report old Deak’s funeral. A quarter to stand in this wind and let the cold take Mac McPherson’s life away.
Mac peered through the blowing dust at Sheriff Frank Drinkwalter. Call an end to this sham, Sheriff! Say good-bye to Deak, so they all could say good-bye to this windblown graveyard.
Sheriff Drinkwalter leaned away from the grave at his feet to stare at the slate-gray sky. The wind was strong, strong enough to shake his six-foot frame, strong enough to blow the sunshine away.
Deak wouldn’t be sorry he missed a day like this. He had been a tidy man, body and mind, and he couldn’t understand why Mother Nature would sweep the dust off a parcel of prairie one day and sweep it back the next. No, John Deakins wouldn’t be sorry he missed a day like this.
The sheriff stared down at the pine box at his feet, watched it disappear behind a tear torn from his eye by a gust of wind. Damn wind.
The scent of raw earth filled the sheriff’s nose, and he wondered if it came from the gaping wound dug into the gumbo at his feet or from the swirling dust. Nothing seemed content to stay in its place in this country. Not dirt, not water, not air—not even Deak. The sheriff sighed.
Drinkwalter had seen it coming. Hell, Deak had, too. He spent the winter withering away. Said he didn’t have much of an appetite, but there was more to it than that. The sheriff could see the pain Deak tried to hide when a spasm caught him mid-step and left him braced against the back of a chair.
The old man had come to him a month ago—no five weeks, it was—and told him what Doc Johnson had said. They had sat in the sheriff’s office, not wanting to look each other in the eye.
Deak had hidden his pain behind that bottle of laudanum. He hated that. Drinkwalter could see the old man’s revulsion every time he downed a teaspoonful of the foul-tasting liquid. But Deak had started his journey through life seventy-three years ago, and he was too worn to carry the pain alone.
Another gust of wind shook the sheriff as though to get his attention. His eyes skipped across the cemetery, stopping for a moment at the ornate tombstones carved from sandstone quarried north of town. He peered at the angelic figures through eyes squinted almost shut against the wind. Seraphs or cherubim, he supposed, not knowing what either looked like and wondering how the artist did.
He almost mistook Mac McPherson for one of the stones. The boy was dressed drab as sandstone, and he stood as still, leaning into the wind. Tall for his age he was, but skinny as a rail. The wind shuffled and reshuffled the leaves of the boy’s notepad like a gambler absently shuffling a deck of cards, waiting for a rube to step through a saloon door.
The wind stopped to catch its breath, and Peabody’s words filled the vacuum: “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes.” The sheriff wondered how many times that litany was being repeated into bitter winds around the world. The dust stinging his nose might be from some other John Deakins long dead, doomed to blow about forever in this damnable wind.
Peabody’s droning stopped. The sheriff nodded to the other pallbearers. Including the sheriff, there were three on either side of the coffin. They reached down, each taking the ends of three ropes set at regular intervals beneath the coffin. The pallbearers leaned back, the muscles of their shoulders and necks straining with the weight of the coffin and the earthly remains of John Deakins.
“Easy boys. Don’t dump old Deak.”
The pallbearers shuffled along until the coffin hung over the grave. Drinkwalter nodded, and the pallbearers let the ropes slip slowly between their fingers, letting John Deakins settle into his final resting place.
The coffin had hardly settled when Shorty the grave-digger began raining dirt down on the old man. Drinkwalter’s jaw clenched and then eased. He couldn’t blame Shorty for wanting to get out of the wind.
The sheriff nodded once more to his old friend, and then turned to the black carriage the undertaker threw in with even the pine-box funerals. He saw the boy turn, too, taking his first steps toward the long walk back to town.
“Mac!” The word fluttered and died in the wind. “M-a-a-c!”
The boy turned, and Drinkwalter motioned him back. The boy came, shoulders turned in, arms pulled tight against his chest for warmth. He was shaking with the cold, his teeth clamped shut to keep them from rattling. The widow McPherson did the best she could for the boy, but it wasn’t easy to be a grass widow in Eagles Nest.
“Might as well ride with us, Mac. Got a blanket in the carriage. Get out of this damn wind.”
The boy wavered, and then his jaw set. “Walked out here.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to walk back.”
McPherson shook his head. He hadn’t asked for any help, and he didn’t need any. The boy turned his back to the wind, setting cold stiffened muscles to the task of carrying him back.
The sheriff shook his head, watching for a moment as the boy urged his muscles into a mile-eating jog. Tough little nut. Drinkwalter climbed into the carriage, the leather springs creaking with his weight.
The sheriff sat in his office, more a cubbyhole really, in the county jail. A barrel-bellied stove was working overtime by the door, but the building was built of the same sandstone hewn into tombstones at the cemetery. It always seemed cold and damp, as though the Italian stonecutter had carved a cave and set it next to the courthouse. Come August, the sheriff would appreciate the coolness. But he could do without the ever-abiding chill in the cold months.
Drinkwalter tried to resist, but his eyes were pulled again to the envelope. For three days the letter had lain unopened on the desk. Damn it, Deak, you left me in such a hell of a mess.
Drinkwalter took his handkerchief from his back pocket and polished a little circle of clear glass in the window. The sky was one huge gray cloud stretching from horizon to horizon. It seemed cut from stone, too, allowing no warmth to fall on the Earth. Miserable damn time of year.
The sheriff sighed, and turned. It wasn’t the weather. Hell, if you didn’t like the weather in Montana, you just had to wait fifteen minutes for it to change. It wasn’t the weather.
His mind drifted back to the cemetery, and the sound of the dirt clods hitting Deak’s pine box. Another image crowded into Drinkwalter’s mind: Mac McPherson leaning into that god-awful wind.
Maybe Mac could replace Deak. The thought flickered into his mind. No, he was only a boy. But then the sheriff glanced at the letter on his desk. Maybe. No doubt the boy could use the money. Nobody who could afford a coat would have stepped into this day without one. Mac was a loner, too. The sheriff had never seen him with his classmates. He wouldn’t have any special friends with whom to share special secrets. That was the real test: Could Mac be trusted wi
th the contents of that letter?
Drinkwalter’s back stiffened. He had little choice. Desperate situations drove men to desperate acts. He stalked to the door, pulling his jacket from the coat tree Old Deak had carved from bits and pieces of wood he picked up in the hills. Pretty it was, and anything left hanging there took on the sweet, clean scent of cedar.
The sheriff slipped on his coat, turning up the fleece-lined collar as armor against the cold wind waiting outside. As he stepped out the door, the wind howled its delight at having the sheriff within its grasp, shaking him as a parent might shake a child to get his attention.
The wind sneaked under the sheriff’s collar, sending a chill down his back. Damn wind.
The sheriff turned south, each step sending up a puff of dust that disappeared like smoke. He hid in his coat and his thoughts, surprised when he came to the gravel roadbed of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Even in the wind he could smell the creosote guarding oak ties from Montana weather. Even in this wind he couldn’t resist looking down the tracks to where they came together somewhere near the west hill, wondering if they could carry him somewhere, anywhere, without a soul-scouring wind.
He didn’t go directly to the McPherson place, standing instead a hundred yards away in a copse of cotton-woods near the bank of the Yellowstone River. The McPherson house didn’t hold much promise—more tar-paper shack than home. There was no grace in the structure, no lines to catch the eye, no porch to sit on summer afternoons, languishing in the scent of mint and wild rose. The building sat flush with the ground, with no foundation to protect the walls and floor, no foundation for the people living there. The roof was cut into a shallow half-moon, the builder apparently having neither the time nor the will to build a proper roof.
Still, Mrs. McPherson had done the best she could with the little she had. The yard, little more than a clearing cut in the brush, had a sense of orderliness about it, not like most of the shacks along the river. A pump stood outside the home, near the path that led to the cabin’s door. A flower bed, brown still with winter and outlined with river rock, waited beside the front door for warmer days. Through the trees to the back, Drinkwalter could see the graying wood of the outhouse.
The sheriff ducked behind a tree when Mac McPherson appeared. Not much chance Drinkwalter would be noticed this far from the cabin, but he didn’t want to be seen skulking about a widow’s cabin. People might get the wrong idea.
Mac was carrying a burlap sack stained black with coal spilled along the railroad. The boy seemed hopelessly tired, each step an effort. He leaned against the weight of the sack and the wind. The boy opened the door, and the sheriff saw a huge range inside. They needed a range like that to heat the shack, to heat the water that Mrs. McPherson—Was her name Mary?—used for the washing she took in. It was a hard life for the two, living alone as they did.
The door closed, leaving the sheriff outside, slouched against the wind. Drinkwalter turned his attention to the cottonwoods. The trees’ branches were bare, gray arms reaching in supplication toward the gray sky. They awaited the life-giving warmth of a spring sun so they could rise from their slumber and dress themselves in the soft green leaves of spring.
The sheriff awaited spring, too. There had been so many winters, so many gray, windy days.
Drinkwalter’s feet found a deer trail following the bank of the river. The Yellowstone ran cold and black, a flash of white rising occasionally as the wind beat the water into froth.
He lost his thoughts in the depths of the river where hellgrammites lingered under rocks, awaiting warmer water and their brief flights of procreation and death.
A cottonwood log blocked the sheriff’s path and his thoughts. The years had stripped the tree of its branches and bark, leaving just its bones. Bones, everywhere bones. His chin dropped to his chest in frustration, exposing his neck to the wind. A shudder tried to chase the chill away.
Resolve straightened the sheriff’s shoulders. Mac was his best chance, if he could be trusted. The sheriff rose and turned back toward the McPherson cabin. He stepped along the trail with resolve, Diogenes seeking truth under the Big Sky.
The heat, the smell of lye soap, the steam rising from the tub on the stove hit Mac full in the face as he stepped through the door. His mother glanced up and smiled, her dark hair knotted against her brow.
Mac stepped up to the stove, absorbing the heat into his thin body, trying to drive the cold from his bones.
“Sold another story to Ben Simpkins.”
His mother turned to him and beamed, “Oh, Mac, I am so proud of you.”
Mac reached into his pocket and pulled out two dimes. They rattled against the bottom of a tin can his mother kept near the stove. “Just the twenty cents,” Mac said. “He promised me a quarter, but he only gave me twenty cents. Said I was too wordy. He always tells me that I should use as much description and as many names as I can. Names sell newspapers, he says. But when I do that, he docks me a nickel.”
The boy’s forehead wrinkled as he looked at his mother.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is that you have another story in the paper.”
She smiled at him, the weariness that marked her face disappearing for a moment. Then she reached again into the tub, rubbing the clothes over a scrub board. She paused for a moment to move her neck from side to side, and Mac knew his mother’s back was aching.
“We will have to hang these inside,” she said, more to herself than to Mac. “I like to hang them outside to pick up the scent of the sun, but with that wind and the dust…”
She stretched again and peered at her son. “You didn’t wear your coat again today.”
“Wasn’t so cold this morning. Wind came up while I was at school.”
Mary McPherson sighed. “Mac, I know the coat is patched and it doesn’t look like much, but you have to have something between you and this wind.”
Mac nodded, but the nod was a lie. He wouldn’t wear the coat. He hadn’t worn it since he saw Sally Oldham pointing at him and whispering to Nancy Goodall. Both girls giggled. Scarecrow, they called him, skinny as a stick and dressed in rags. Scarecrow.
Mac had never felt very much at home with the other children, but now the gulf was widening. Most of the poor kids were dropping out of school, called to help their parents scratch a living from an unaccommodating land. They left, eyes dead with the realization of the rest of their lives. As the others left, Mac became more and more a curiosity to poke with dagger-like words. Giggles hurt the most, stabbing him deeply enough to almost draw tears to his eyes.
Mac’s jaw gritted shut. Nobody was going to make him cry. Not those rattle-brained kids at school. Not the girls who pointed at him and laughed. Not Ben Simpkins who sent him into cold winds to report a story and then shorted him a nickel. Nobody would make Mac McPherson cry.
Still, the sharpness of the scent of soap made Mac’s eyes blurry for a moment, and Mac turned away from his mother so she wouldn’t see.
“When I took Mrs. Thompson’s clothes to her, she asked if you could stop by. She’d like to have you spade her garden this weekend.”
That was good. Good for a dollar. The garden was huge, and spading it would take most of the day, but maybe the spring sun would come back to Montana by then. Maybe he could use part of the dollar to buy his mother an ice-cream cone. Vanilla it would be, sweet and creamy and maybe with a maraschino cherry on top. Mac could almost taste the treat and rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to savor the essence of it. But the effort brought reality, not the sweetness of vanilla.
“Best get cleaned up, Mac. The soup is done, and I’ll have these clothes rinsed and hung up in just a bit.”
Mac took the dipper from its nail beside the stove, panning hot water from the boiler that sat always on the stove’s surface and mixing it in a washbasin with cold water from a bucket. He dropped a washcloth into the mix, letting it soak before rubbing it against a bar of soap. He scrubbed the washcloth across his f
ace and neck, willing it to rid him of the dust that seemed to have invaded the very pores of his body. As the water touched his arms, he was reminded again of how cold it was outside, how drafty inside the McPherson home.
Mary McPherson was wringing the clothing dry, pinning shirts and trousers and dresses on cords strung just under the open rafters in the cabin, her thoughts drifting again to the hand wringer she had seen in the window of the Eagle Hardware. The wringer would make her work so much easier, but if her work were any easier, the women of the town would do their own washing. Where would she and Mac be then?
Blessings came in strange wrappings, she thought, but they were blessings all the same.
Mac was already sitting at the table, his fresh-scrubbed face glowing slightly red, perhaps from the harsh soap, or perhaps with relief from shedding the dust. He was a handsome boy, Mary thought, wide-set blue eyes under a shock of auburn hair. His face sat on a chin that he would likely poke into the world the same way his father’s had. Mac would be a handsome man like his father, but not so ready with a laugh. The boy was as serious as he was thin.
He had been such a happy child. But she had been happier then, too, before Ephraim disappeared. Perhaps his happiness then reflected her own. Perhaps, now … she shook her head at the thought and took her seat at the tiny table. She reached across to take his hands in her own, and then she nodded. Mac bowed his head.
“Dear Lord, bless this food to our use, and us to thy loving service. Amen.”
Mac reached for his spoon. The soup was mostly potatoes and carrots left over from last year’s garden and stored in a tiny root cellar behind the shack. His mother had added canned tomatoes—there were only a few more jars on the shelves in the root cellar—and a couple strips of bacon for flavor. Mac had seen people eat bacon for breakfast, and he could hardly imagine that extravagance. A couple strips of bacon could last a family a week in stew or salad or bean soup.
For all its simplicity, the meal was good, especially with his mother’s bread, first for dunking in the hot soup and then for cleaning up the bowl. The food took the edge off Mac’s hunger, but only the edge. Always, he seemed hungry.