by Bill Brooks
“I’m already on edge, so do it slow,” Jake said when Dallas moved his fingers toward the pistol. Once deposited, Jake waved him off and waited for the others to follow suit until all five had put their pistols on the table.
Jake followed them out the doors and waited until they mounted their horses.
“Stay out of my town,” he said.
“You pushed things too far,” Dallas said with a growl. “We’re going to come back and we’re going to settle matters once and for all. Ain’t no smooth-hand son of a bitch going to tell me where I can and can’t go. You want a fight, well, by god, you just bought yourself one. Get ready, mister, because hell’s going to come down on you like a hard rain.”
Jake stood sucking in the cold air until the sound of hooves faded into the crimson night, then returned to the bar.
Tig stood sipping whiskey through his ruined mouth.
Jake slipped the revolver back in the kid’s holster and said, “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
Then the boy drew back his upper lip, his face lined with pain, and showed the bloody gums where the teeth had been yanked out.
“They do that to you?”
Tig nodded.
“Why?”
The boy shook his head.
He flinched every time he took a sip of whiskey.
“Come on, I’ve got something better than that for you,” Jake said.
Jake waited until the laudanum caused the boy to close his eyes, then dropped the key to the room he’d rented for the kid there on the nightstand next to the bed before going down the hall to his own room.
Jesus! he thought. What the hell sort of men are these who would murder Nat Pickett and now disfigure Tig? But he already knew what sort of men they were. And he knew that they’d be back, and the next time it would be a war when they came and he’d better be ready.
14
MORNING SUN FILLED THE WINDOW and fell into the room where he slept.
He dreamt of a drowning boy, and one with the busted mouth of a jack-o’-lantern. He dreamt of women and horses and war. And when at last he stopped dreaming and came out of his fitful sleep, he swung his feet over the side of the bed and sat there for a painful moment, trying to bring some warmth into him. The small wood stove in the room had grown cold and there was frost on the inside of the windows. He ran his fingers through his hair, then dressed, the cold leather of his boots stiff around his feet.
He went to the basin and dipped his fingers into the pan of cold water, lifting it over his face, the droplets clinging to his beard, then rubbed dry with the small fresh towel, donned his hat and coat, and went down the hall to where Tig’s room was and knocked on the door.
The boy answered after several moments, his face puffy and misshapen. The bruising around his mouth was especially disturbing to see. The boy didn’t try and speak this time but turned aside and went back and lay on the bed, turning his face to the wall as though ashamed to have anyone look at him.
Jake reached inside his coat and took out a pencil and a sheet of paper and said, “I want you to write it down.”
The boy didn’t respond.
“I want you to write it down what they did to you. I want your written testimony, then I’ll arrest them.”
The boy turned over slowly and looked at him. Jake handed him the pencil and paper.
“You know how to write?”
The boy nodded and wrote something on the paper, then handed it back to Jake.
They wont to kil me.
“Because they know you know that they murdered Nat…”
The boy shook his head and pointed at Jake.
“Because they know you came and talked to me?”
Tig nodded.
“Will you testify in a court?”
Tig shook his head again. No.
“Then they’ll get away with it.”
The boy wrote again, taking the paper completely out of Jake’s hand and holding it against the wall.
I dont ker.
Jake took the paper, folded it, and put it in an inside pocket.
The boy sat forlorn, his forearms resting on his knees, the dirty lank hair hanging in his eyes.
Jake pointed to the bottle of laudanum, said, “Take a swallow of that when the pain gets too bad to stand, then when you feel up to it, go see the dentist, see if he can stitch up your mouth. Perhaps he can make you some porcelain teeth.”
Tig nodded. Jake turned to leave, then paused at the door, turned, and said, “Sometimes a man’s got to fight for himself or he might just as well be dead. I could go into a long sermon on how sometimes a man has to fight for his friends as well, how if the shoe was on the other foot and it had been you they murdered and Nat that had lived, you’d hope he’d do something to bring your killers to bay. I could talk all damn day about friendship and morality and what’s right and wrong, but I’m not going to. You do what you have to, son. Fight, or leave, or just sit here in this room. Your choice.”
Jake called upon the men who more or less made up the town council, the ones who paid his wages—business owners: Otis Dollar, the merchant; Cheerless Carl, the barber; Tall John, the undertaker; Marcus Fold, the dentist; and Ted Lawton, the attorney and realtor who owned most of the town lots; and Ernst Hollingshead, the banker. The only one not there was Ellis Kansas. Jake reminded himself to check on the saloon owner soon as the meeting was finished.
They met in Hollingshead’s office at the back of the bank.
“I’ve got a problem,” Jake began, then proceeded to tell them about the trouble with Dallas Fry and the rest of the Double Bar boys.
“I think they’ll come to kill me because they know I’m going to arrest them for the murder of that Negro cowboy, Nat Pickett.”
Lawton was the first to speak to the matter, accustomed as he was to serious situations.
“Then perhaps its best you resign and find somewhere else to reside, Mr. Horn,” he said.
Jake looked at him hard.
“That’s your answer? What then, if I quit and leave? You going to take up the badge and handle the problems here? And if you do, and Dallas Fry decides he wants to kill or run you off too, are you going to tuck tail?”
“I’m just saying that sometimes avoidance of a problem is the best solution. At least it seems so in this instance. What do you propose the rest of us do about it?”
“Trust me. What you’re suggesting is not the best solution.”
The banker, Hollingshead, said, “Are you asking us to take up guns and fight with those boys?”
“I think we all need to be together on this,” Jake said. “I need you to stand with me when they come. If they see a show of force opposing them they might just give up the guilty parties and let justice have its day.”
Marcus Fold said, “Hell, I’m just a dentist. I don’t know anything about gunfighting!”
“Neither do I,” Carl said. “I’d be useless in a gunfight…I’d probably be the first one killed.”
Jake looked at the others, their eyes lowered, except finally John said, “If you need me to do it, I will, but I don’t like the idea much. I’m no gunfighter, either. None of us are.”
“Otis?” Jake said.
But Otis Dollar simply shook his head while staring at the toes of his shoes. He had not forgotten how Jake had rescued his wife a couple of months earlier when she’d been kidnapped by the mad Swede. And he prayed silently that the marshal wouldn’t throw it up in his face now and force him to admit to his own cowardice.
“Lawton?” Jake said, instead.
“I’ve no heart for bloodshed either, Mr. Horn. I wish I could say that I did, but my business depends on me remaining neutral in this matter. No, I’m afraid you shouldn’t count on me.”
Jake had to tamp down his anger. This wasn’t their fight; it was his and he was asking them to put their lives at risk for him in a fight they knew they couldn’t win. Whatever he’d done for this town and the people in it was yesterday’s news. It
was what they paid him to do.
Of the bunch only Tall John was willing to stand with him, even if reluctantly so. But he knew that to coerce a man to go against his instincts could be a fatal mistake.
There was only one other man Jake could think of who might pitch into the fight with competence and grit: Toussaint Trueblood. Toussaint had backed him before in a fight.
He turned and went down the stairs and could practically feel their stares on his back.
The old woman—the pregnant girl’s mother—was there in front of the jail, sitting atop her wagon, bundled in an old coat with a heavy wool scarf tied around her head. She looked up when he approached.
“It’s time,” she said. “Marybeth’s water’s broke, but that babe’s in her wrong. I need someone to help me.”
Jake climbed up onto the wagon and took the reins.
“How did you know I could help?” Jake asked.
“She said she knowed you’d help, that she had a dream about how you come in the night to her, that you reached inside her body and took out the babe…”
Jake put the horse into a quick trot, thinking, Everything about the girl and Nat seems star-crossed, like the only luck to be had is just the bad.
Jake could hear the girl’s moans before he reached the door, wails really. The boy, Frisco, sat on a chair staring dumbly at the girl. Her eyes came around, wide and white, when Jake approached her bed.
“Take it out of me,” she said.
“It’s not that simple,” he said. He turned to the old woman and said, “I’ll need hot water.” Then, turning back to the girl, he said, “Marybeth, I’m going to put my hands on you, I’m going to feel the position of the child.” She nodded.
“Steady your breathing,” he said and she stopped her chuffing while he ran his hands over her hard smooth belly. The old woman had been right: The child was turned the wrong direction.
Jake took the extra pillows on the bed and propped them under the girl’s hips.
“I’m going to start pushing down,” he said. “I’m going to try and get the baby to turn.”
“Don’t let it die…” she said. “Don’t let me die…”
“I won’t.”
But he knew that there was every chance one or both of them would die if he couldn’t get the child turned. He began to gently but forcibly push down with his hands at one end of the lump. Sometimes such maneuvering worked in breech births, but the odds were against it. The girl moaned. Jake released the pressure momentarily, then began to push again. Twice over the next hour something under the skin fluttered, a knee, a foot, a hand, but still the infant refused to turn.
He could see the girl was losing strength. Her color was nearly as pale as the bed sheets. He felt himself losing the battle. Over and over again he tried manipulating the babe into position—head down into the birth canal. But there was no movement over the next half hour and he suspected maybe the child was stillborn. If it was, the girl’s only chance was for him to open her up and take it in an attempt to save her life.
He leaned in close and touched her face with a dry towel and wiped away the droplets of sweat.
“Marybeth…” he said. She looked up at him. He could see the fear, the knowing fear that a woman would sense when everything had gone wrong.
“I may have to take the child,” he said. “Do you understand what that means?”
She moved her head back and forth just barely, her eyes full of deep questions.
“It might be too late to save the baby, but I can try and save you.”
“No!” she cried.
He felt helpless, even as he placed his hands against her belly one more time. This time his fingers trying to surround the tiny head, hoping to somehow transfer his need for it to turn in order to save the girl—the very life of its mother. He worked his hands in the way he’d been taught in medical school, summoning every fiber of his will if not his strength to get the baby to turn, pressing and moving, manipulating. It resisted. He knew he must make a decision quickly and said to the old woman, “I’ll need a sharp knife. Clean, let it set in the boiling water, then bring it to me. I’ll need needle and thread, too, lots of thread.”
Then suddenly the baby turned as though it understood, as though it, too, had grown weary of the struggle and was ready to come out and see what the fuss was about.
“I felt it!” she cried. “I felt it turn over!”
“Yes,” he said and set to work helping the little one meet the rest of them.
It came out deep red and squalling, slippery and warm and wet. Blood never felt so good on Jake’s hands as he held it.
“Mad as hell, ain’t it?” the old woman said, coming to the side of the bed as Jake held it forth to her. She reached for it and said, “I know what to do from here.”
The boy, Frisco, had not moved in all that time, his eyes as big as muffins.
“What is it?” he said.
The old woman looked and said, “It’s a baby girl is what it is?”
“What we gone name it?”
The old woman looked at the younger woman.
“What you gone name it?”
“Sadie,” the girl said. “Gone name it Sadie.”
“Look it all that dark hair on its head,” the old woman said.
Jake washed his hands and put on his coat, then came back to the bedside just as the old woman was wrapping the child in a small blanket.
The girl reached for his hand.
“I knew you’d come and save us,” she said.
The old woman declared it a “miracle.”
“Ain’t no miracle, Mama, I seen him come in a dream,” she said, her eyes fixed on Jake.
“I know you did, child.”
Jake said, “I’ll need a ride back to town.”
The old woman said, “Frisco, take this good man to town in the wagon.”
Then finally the boy stood up and came over next to the bed and looked at the new baby and touched the small dark face.
“Got Chinaman’s eyes,” he said.
The girl and the old woman laughed.
“They all got Chinaman’s eyes when they is first born,” the old woman said. “You had ’em, too.”
Jake and the boy rode back to town, the boy handling the reins like some old-time freighter.
“How old are you, Frisco?”
“Ten or twelve, I ain’t sure exactly.”
“I want you to promise me you’ll always look after that niece of yours,” Jake said when they reached town and he climbed down.
The boy looked at him from under the flop brim of his hat.
“That what she is, a niece to me?”
Jake nodded.
“Niece…” the boy said thoughtfully.
“If she’d turned out a boy, it would have been all right with me,” he said. “But I’ll stand her, I reckon.” Jake stood and watched as the boy snapped the reins and turned the wagon back around.
In spite of everything, Jake felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time: he felt like a physician again. And for those few hours there with the girl, he did not have to think about the troubles ahead of him, about the fact that he was in essence a man alone once more.
A drink? Why the hell not? It seemed in perfect order. So he went into the Three Aces and had one.
Word had already spread like wildfire that there was a big fight coming between the city marshal and the boys from the Double Bar. And as he stood there alone at the bar drinking, the other drinkers looked sidelong. He heard their mutterings out of the sides of their mouths, but nobody stepped forward and said they’d stand with him. And maybe the truth was, they’d just as soon see something happen with winter now nearly upon them and that long slow season staring them down.
Nobody can save me but me, he thought.
And ordered another drink.
15
DRUNK, WILLY SILK WAS unceremoniously dumped from the afternoon stage onto the cold and muddy main drag of Sweet Sorrow. The fall s
tartled him and he came to looking at the staring faces of strangers. He saw the way they shook their heads, not in sympathy, but with pity. One woman clucked her tongue, then hove her red-headed child away like a hen herding its chick from potential danger.
The driver of the stage tossed down Willy’s kit from the boot of the stage, said, “I believe that is yours,” then leaned and spat off to the side.
“Which way to the nearest saloon?” Willy asked, struggling to gain his feet. His gun had fallen out and he bent and picked it up and wiped the mud off with the tail of his shirt.
“Nearest and onliest,” the driver said, “is the Three Aces, directly down the street. But was I a guessing man, I’d guess you already have too much liquor in you. Public drunkenness is an abomination. You ought to get straight with the Lord, son.”
“Well, you ain’t nothing to me, dad,” Willy said, sliding the pistol into the hip holster. “And if you was, I’d tell you to mind your own damn business, just as I’m telling you now.”
“Pickled,” the man said.
“What?”
“You’re pickled as an egg. I seen dead men not as pickled as you.”
“How’d you like to tell your kin a pickled egg shot you through that big mouth of yours?”
The driver’s eyes narrowed.
“You scare me about as much as a garter snake,” the driver said, then turned and walked off. Willy watched him go with some small regret that he hadn’t stood and chosen to fight it out with guns, for he felt even with killing that old reprobate back in Bismarck, he could still use a little more practice. Then he puked. He straightened and wiped his mouth with the cuff of his sleeve, the bile in the back of his throat burning and raw and in need of washing.
When he got to the Three Aces, he ordered a bottle.
“Glass?” the bartender asked, setting the bottle down on the oak.
“It’s something women do,” Willy said, “drink out of glasses.” He took his bottle over to a table. He sucked a pull from the bottle and felt some little better, but not a lot. Seemed like he couldn’t get through a day, even half a day, without numbing his senses with whiskey.