The whisky warmed the back of his throat. One letter in close on ten years all he’d had from her and that he’d torn to pieces still in the envelope, no part of it read but the scrawled-out names of different places as it had followed him across the frontier.
He was better off on his own. His boot slid off the rail and hit the floor with a thump.
‘You okay?’ asked Mosley.
‘Sure I’m okay.’
The sheriff raised an eyebrow quizzically. ‘Had this look on your face, like you was a long way off … long way off an’ hankerin’ for somethin’.’
‘You bet I’m hankerin’ for somethin’.’ Hart threw back the glass and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Your turn to set ’em up. I’m just gettin’ the taste of this fancy Scotch whisky.’
Herb Mosley shrugged and did as Hart said, without ever believing for a moment the words he’d spoken. Whatever was eatin’ into him wasn’t about to be relieved for long by anything that came out of a bottle. He doubted if it would be helped by chasing up to Wells and throwing lead at a bunch of desperadoes either. But it wasn’t none of his business, nothin’ for him to start working off his mouth about. He set his glass down firmly enough and called for two more drinks.
Chapter Three
Jacob Batt pushed the door closed behind him and eased his body back against the rough wooden wall. His face was drawn and the skin round his eyes puffed and swollen; the pupils of the eyes themselves were small and dark, surrounded by a maze of red veins. It had been thirty hours since he had slept more than a few minutes together. The underside of his boot scraped against the ground, pushed hard against the stem of the creeping weed that spread heavily across the ground close by the house. The stink of stale cabbage water rose up from leaves and stem and made him suddenly nauseous. He looked at the weed as if for the first time, running from the water barrel at the far side of the door to the pig pen beyond the barn. Gill-over-the-ground: ground ivy. He vaguely remembered his father trying to kill it, poison it, dig it up and rid the farm of its roots.
The ivy was still there, luxuriant, and his father was upstairs, dying.
He had been dying for forty-eight hours. Jacob’s mother, Rachel, had found him out beyond the second pasture, rolled on to the hard ground like a log. Together with Jacob’s younger brothers and his sister, Rachel had carried and dragged him into the house, somehow lifted his six-foot-three frame up the stairs to the rickety platform that held their marriage bed. Lying there, his face gray and creased like a rotting flour sack, she had been certain that he was already dead.
But the pulse still flickered against her fingers, against the side of her face when she pressed it against his. His mouth opened and the curved end of his tongue emerged like a snake from a dark hole; the only sound was that of a man strangling slowly.
Rachel had sent the girl below to boil water in the huge black pot, told Ben to saddle the pony and ride into town to fetch Jacob from his work in the livery stable. She had not moved herself, her strong and thin fingers locked in the stronger fingers of the man she had married almost twenty years before. Twenty years when they had built the farm with those strong hands, cut and shaped each plank, lifted each stone and dug out every trench and hole. They had driven the first hogs on to the land, the bull and half a dozen cows, had bartered as if with one voice for the goats; they had sewn seed as if with the same hand.
When Jedediah’s fingers clenched involuntarily she started, certain that it was the final seizure of death. But when the grip relaxed again the crackling breathing was still there and the horned eyelids continued to crinkle like a lizard’s skin.
Rachel was there now, at his bedside, the room slowly filling with the yellow stench of a slow and bitter dying.
Jacob hacked at the stem of the ground ivy with his heel and stepped clear of the wall. Away to the left, where the alders cropped the stream, he could see his sister, Rebecca, astride her horse, long black hair falling loose to the middle of her back. Neither rider nor animal moved other than the single shake of the mare’s head as a fly bothered her eyes. Jacob could see the horse’s breath pluming up towards the branches of the young trees, the whiteness of his sister’s hand as it gripped the coarse hair at the bottom of the animal’s mane.
He tried to imagine what she was thinking but failed; how could he when he was uncertain what he was thinking, feeling himself. The man upstairs had given him life, dragged him yelping and screaming into a world of mud and animals and hard work and mire: a world where the weeds grow hardier and stronger than any crops, where stock was as like to die from disease and the bitter cold of winter as it was to produce meat or milk or money. His father had hauled him into a life of poverty where soup was made from potato peelings and a few handfuls of grain and the only word that counted, aside from that of Jedediah himself, was the Word of the Bible.
Each evening Jacob’s father would make his family sit in the half-dark and listen while he read to them by the hollow light of a tallow lamp that reeked of pig fat.
He had never forgiven Jacob for insisting on leaving the farm and going into town to work there - just as he had never forgiven his brother, Aram, for choosing the solitary life of a mountain man. His duty had been to take a wife and father children; toil over the land - go forth and multiply!
Jacob laughed bitterly: his father’s multiplication rarely seemed to bring about an increase in numbers. His family had lived in near poverty, near hunger for so long that Jacob doubted if they gave it a second thought. It was not until he had gone to live and work in town and had found himself with wages in his pocket and the freedom to spend them on whatever he chose that Jacob himself had truly realized what he had escaped from.
He looked again as his sister stroked her horse’s mane down by the alders. Maybe that was the way her thoughts were leaning. Maybe she was sitting there waiting for him to die, feeling the cords peeling off her and the young blood beginning for the first time to run through her veins.
Jacob heard his mother’s shout and turned sharply, going back into the house.
~*~
The letter was wrapped around a piece of yellowing newspaper and folded inside a sheet of calico. It had been at the bottom of the chest for more years than Rachel Batt could remember. When she had bent low over her dying husband’s head to hear what were more or less the only words he spoke during all those hours of dying, she scarcely understood what he meant. Only later, later when the boys had straightened him out and she herself had changed his clothes so that he lay there now with dimes on his eyes and a patched, laundered night shirt stretched along his long body, had she remembered the letter in the old chest.
She read her husband’s patiently scratched name and only a few words more; near the beginning she recognized the name John. After struggling with the crabbed lettering for some minutes, she passed the sheet to Jacob.
‘He says we have to see John Quinton.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Why him?’
‘He’s a lawyer. Up in town.’
‘In Fallon?’
‘In town. Yes.’
‘What in the Lord’s name—’
‘Ben!’
‘What we got to see some lawyer for?’
‘Because your pa said so. Didn’t you just hear your brother say?’
‘Jacob, what we got to go see some lawyer for?’
Jacob tapped the letter end and shrugged. ‘Find out when we gets there, likely. Not before.’
Ben sighed and swung his legs and all of a sudden the tears he’d been holding back when the others had shed theirs came springing from his eyes and he ran from the room and didn’t stop until he thrown himself against the corral fence and was gulping great sobs of air.
~*~
They buried Jedediah at the creek edge, close by the alders. Rachel sang a hymn in a strong, low voice that echoed out over the pasture and faded slow. The preacher threw back his head and closed his eyes, pointed one hand at God and clos
ed the other over his heart. He gave out a dollar’s worth of words and cut himself short when it seemed he might be giving more than he’d been paid for. Ben read a few verses from his father’s heavy, black bible and then Rachel threw the first clods of earth and the first stones down on to the rough-hewn wood of the coffin. Jacob, Ben and the youngest, Saul, shoveled the dirt back into the gaping hole and closed it quiet. Rebecca cut flowers and strips of alder and set them in a glass jar at the foot of the grave, while Jacob and Ben took it in turns to hammer the wooden cross in above the head.
When the preacher climbed on his mule to begin his long ride back to town, Jacob harnessed the wagon and the whole Batt family, save the one who was now in the ground, rode in at back of him.
They had to see John Quinton, lawyer.
~*~
The shingle that fetched back and forth in the wind over the door read John E. Quinton Attorney at Law. Jacob turned the reins about the brake handle and jumped down, helping his mother and sister to the rickety boardwalk while the two boys clambered from the back of the wagon open-mouthed. It was their first ever visit to town. They stood gawping at the buildings, some with a balcony that jutted out over the street, others with signs painted down their front walls advertising haircut and shave, laundry and the best steak in the state.
Jacob hollered at them and they came running.
He opened the door and a bell jingled above the frame. Stairs led towards the first floor office above a small dry goods store. Jacob hesitated for a few moments before climbing up. He was met at the landing by a thin man with a sepulchral face and a black suit which shone almost like glass, such was the thinness to which it had been worn.
‘John Quinton?’ said Jacob doubtfully.
‘The same.’ The voice seemed to be coming from another man in another room.
‘I’m Jacob Batt. This here’s …’He turned to point a hand to his mother half-way up the stairs.
‘He’s passed on, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘Your father, Jedediah, he’s passed on?’
‘Yeah. He … how did you know that?’
The spidery fingers pressed their tips together for a moment in a web across his chest. ‘There would be no other reason for this visit.’ He glanced down the stair well and nodded, as if confirming his impression. ‘Please come inside and sit down.’
There were chairs for them all save Saul, who stood first on one foot and then the other, fidgeting so much that finally Jacob cuffed him and he stood still and sniveled instead, refusing to use his sleeve to wipe his running nose.
Quinton offered Jacob and his mother some sherry wine to drink and Jacob refused for them both.
‘This letter,’ he said, drawing it from his pants pocket, ‘we don’t understand …’
‘I shall explain.’ Quinton raised one white hand in the air and clenched it shut as if trapping an insect that no one else had observed. He bent his back to a small safe and after several moments pulled a wide brown envelope out from under a bundle of dusty papers. He held it towards the open door and blew along both sides of its surface, before sitting down and showing the envelope to the family.
‘As you will see this is still sealed and dated, just as it was when Jedediah left it in my keeping a little over ten years ago.’
‘Jedediah! How could he ... He was never in town.’
John Quinton smiled like a candle going out. That is not quite accurate, Mrs. Batt. He visited me in my office and inquired how best to go about making out this document—’
‘What the hell is—?’
‘Jacob!’
‘What is that thing you got there?’
‘This …’ Quinton smoothed his fingers along its edge ‘… is the last will and testament of your late father, Jedediah Batt.’
‘Will? What will? Pa didn’t make no will. If he had we’d’ve known about it. Ma, you know anythin’ ’bout a will?’
Rachel shook her head, hands clenched tight in her lap. She was on the verge of tears without knowing why. Rebecca gazed at the envelope in the lawyer’s hands as if somehow it might prove the answer to some of her unknown dreams.
‘Why the hell … why would my pa bother with a will? All he’s got is that farm back there an’ a parcel of land just big enough to keep us on. Not big enough for that. He ain’t had no call to make no will. It don’t make sense!’
Quinton dimmed his tallow smile and reached inside his desk drawer for a bone-handled paper knife. He broke away a knot of deep red sealing wax and inserted the end of the blade inside the crack of the envelope; slowly he drew the blade along the stiff brown paper. The sheet he extracted was written in his own hand, using a quill pen, and signed by Jedediah Batt at the bottom. Red drops of wax spun away from the name to the foot of the page like long-dried blood.
The lawyer read the will as if reading it for the first time, his thin lips moving slightly as he spelled out the words inside his head.
‘You gonna tell us or—’
‘It seems that the farm and its land were not, indeed, all that your father had to bequeath.’
‘What?’
‘It seems—’
‘Damn! I heard what you said. What the hell’s it mean?’
‘Jacob, your language since you came to town to work is shameful!’
‘Ma, let it go. Come on, Quinton, let’s have it plain and clear.’
‘Very well.’ The lawyer glanced at the page again before laying it on the desk and setting one clawed hand firm upon it. ‘Jedediah Batt was the owner of gold to the approximate value of one thousand dollars. It is lodged in the branch of the Nevada Mining Company Bank here in Fallon.’
During the silence that followed, all eyes in the room were on the lawyer as he rubbed his right hand down the shiny lapel of his suit and waited. Rachel’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Rebecca’s heart beat so fast she was certain everyone in the room could hear her excitement and she flushed crimson. Jacob felt a grinding pain at the front of his head, as if a heel were pressing and twisting hard into him, driving him down into the dirt.
‘There’s been a mistake … there has to be …’ Rachel’s words, when they came, were faint to the point of being almost inaudible.
Quinton shook his head, swiveled the will towards her. ‘There has been no mistake.’
Rachel looked down at the paper and recognized her husband’s signature; she shook her head with a shudder and pointed to Jacob, asking him to read the will aloud.
This he did haltingly, stumbling over the legal terminology and having to be corrected by Quinton. But of the sense there was no doubt. One thousand dollars’ worth of gold was waiting in the Fallon bank and—Jacob choked on the part the lawyer had not mentioned. The sentence which said to whom that money was left.
Aram Batt.
He tried the words and found them lacking.
Aram Batt.
John Quinton nodded, exactly.
Rachel hugged herself and shivered; Rebecca began, silently, to cry. Ben and Saul failed to understand what their brother was saying.
Jacob threw the will down on to the desk and whirled aside. He bunched his fists and drove them into the partition wall, making it shake. ‘Aram!’ he shrieked. ‘Aram! My God, he hated Aram! Hated him, despised him for doing what he did. Going off into them damn mountains livin’ like some lone animal!’
Rachel squeezed herself tighter and felt the truth; her husband had not hated his brother, he had envied him.
This ain’t true!’ shouted Jacob, launching himself at the desk so suddenly that Quinton was certain he was being attacked. ‘It can’t be! Can’t be! All them years we sweated an’ starved out. on that stinkin’ place and he leaves his gold to someone we ain’t never seen. He ain’t never seen him himself since afore I was born.’ Jacob’s fists hammered the surface of Quinton’s desk. ‘It ain’t goin’ to happen. It ain’t. There’s got to be some way of makin’ it different. Gotta be!’
Quinton gripped
the sides of his chair and nodded his bony head up and down.
‘What?’ demanded Jacob. ‘What?’
‘There’s two possibilities,’ said the lawyer clearly. ‘First off, he could relinquish his claim in law, leaving the gold to you an’ your kin. Second …’ His fingers formed a cage below his chin. ‘… he would be disqualified if the same fate had befallen him as your father. If he were proved dead, the gold would pass on your father’s family.’
‘Proved dead?’ said Jacob, straightening.
‘Uh-huh, proved dead.’
~*~
Jacob lifted his mother down from the front seat of the wagon. Her face was like gray stone, her eyes hardly moved. Since the news in the lawyer’s office she was numb, going through the motions of life merely. As soon as she got back inside the house she set to the fire, going about her accustomed tasks automatically, without thought or feeling.
Ben and Saul chopped wood and fetched water.
Jacob unharnessed the mules and went in search of his sister.
He found her where he knew she would be, close by the alders, close by their father’s grave. She was kneeling at its foot, shredding the already fading flowers between her young fingers.
Jacob stood back of her, wanting to touch the nape of her neck where it showed between the long fall of her dark hair but not daring to.
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