Skin Medicine

by Tim Curran

  Graybrow scratched his head. “I’m just an ignorant savage, what do I know of your ways?”

  “ Oh, get the hell out of here.”

  Although outwardly somber, inside Graybrow was grinning like a kid that had written dirty words on the blackboard. Maybe whites didn’t find him amusing, but he enjoyed himself immensely at their expense.

  He stepped out and although the sun was shining and drying up the mud, there was a chill in the air.

  Another deputy, Pete Slade, tied his horse to the hitch post and nodded to Graybrow. “She’s a cold one today, eh, Charlie?”

  Graybrow shrugged. “I’m an injun…we don’t feel the cold.”

  Slade just shook his head and went inside.

  Graybrow pulled his blanket coat tighter to him, shivering. He was about to start down the street when another man came out behind him. He nearly stumbled off the plank sidewalk, then gathered himself. He was thin, lanky, face bruised-up, his dirty sheepskin jacket smelling like he’d just pulled it off the sheep itself. He scratched at his shaggy, knotted beard.

  “ They got m’gun in there,” he said, not seeming to address Graybrow, but someone standing behind him. “1851 Colt Navy. Big. 44, that’s what. Killed them bluebelly sumbitches with it in the war, didn’t I? They got it, say I can’t have it back. Not until, until…what did they say? Y’all remember?”

  Graybrow told him that he had forgotten.

  He knew who the man was: Orville DuChien. Some mixed-up white-eye thought he was still in the war. He talked crazy and people crossed the street when they saw him coming. He was not only disturbed, but dangerous if pushed. A couple miners had decided to have fun once by knocking him around and DuChien had sliced them up pretty with a deer knife.

  Like a rabid dog, it was wise to keep your distance from the man.

  Graybrow had only seen DuChien from a distance, had never been this close to him before. And now that he was…he was struck by something. He could not put a name to it. Not the smell or the uneasiness he inspired, but something deeper, something peculiar.

  Orv started to shake and his eyes seemed to lose focus. “Yessum, Daddy, I remember all about that, yessum. Grandpappy say I got to go down into the holler tonight, yessum tonight. Them roots and what…only show by moonlight, he say. Yes sir. I dig ‘em and Grandpappy brew ‘em up, make them warts just fade right away. Like that time…remember, daddy? Old Wiley, he had that tumor. Grandpappy…he calls them names from the hilltop, them ones Preacher Evrin say is bad, bad, bad, make the stars shake and the dead a-tremble in their graves. Them ones? Yessum. Then he…Grandpappy, yes sir…he say them words and push his hands into the innards of that slaughtered hog…lays ‘em on Wiley’s tumor. That old tumor, Mister Tumor, he pack his bags and be gone. Yessum. Grandpappy say I got the gift, too…but daddy, I don’t like it. Scairt me bad…”

  Graybrow knew and did not know. He stepped back from Orv, something in him finding revelation in that crazy, moonstruck hillbilly.

  Orv said, “Yessum, ain’t nothin’ good gonna come of this here town. Not what with them…them other ones all touched by his hand.”

  “ Whose hand?”

  That made Orv laugh. “The old hand…the old hand from the mountain…”

  Graybrow told him to relax, that everything would be fine, fine, but he knew and knew damn well that whatever had Orville DuChien was not something that would ever let go. It was bone deep. It was special.

  Orv broke into a coughing fit, then seemed to find himself. “I…I was talkin’ to that what ain’t there, weren’t I? I keep doin’ that, don’t I?” One filthy paw was clasped on Graybrow’s shoulder, squeezing, squeezing. “I talk to them no one else sees and hear them voices. They tell me…tell me what’s gonna happen and to who. Tell me things, secret things, about other folks. Things I shouldn’t know.”

  “ How long you had it?” Graybrow inquired.

  “ Always. Told Jesse and Roy they was gonna die, gonna die, gonna die! Didn’t believe me, but they died! Yankees killed ‘em like I say! Hear? Like I say…”

  Graybrow knew what it was. Sure, he was crazy. Crazy because of what was inside of him. Whites would have said he was just plain touched or maybe bewitched and they would be right on both counts…but there was more to it than that. Much more. For Orville DuChien had the talent, he was “sighted”. He had the gift. Just like that grandfather he spoke of. It ran in families sometimes. The tribal shaman had it…ability to see sprits and know what would happen before it did. Yes, this hillbilly was a prophet. Undirected, but a prophet no less.

  Orv pointed at something, something Graybrow could not see, started jabbering, then shook his head. “You tell yer daddy, you tell him it ain’t right takin’ the strop to you. Weren’t yer fault that pony ran off…weren’t yer fault…”

  Graybrow was shaking himself now. That pony. He remembered. He had forgotten, but now he remembered. The pony that ran off into the hills and how very angry his father was. The hillbilly had plucked it from his mind.

  Orv walked out into the street, stopped, nearly got run down by a lumber wagon. He stumbled back, fell against the hitching post. “Injun…you hear me…you…you tell him the bad man, the bad man is real close…the bad man will kill a fine lady what ain’t no whore!”

  “ Yes, I’ll tell him, I-”

  But Orv was already gone, running away down the street, clutching his head in both hands, as if trying not to hear something. And people fell out of his way like dominoes, because everyone in Whisper Lake knew Orville DuChien was just plain touched.

  Everyone except an old Ute Indian.

  19

  And each in his or her own way, greeted the new day.

  At the Union Hotel, Sir Tom Ian strapped on a customized leather cartridge belt and slid a British. 44 Bisley pistol into the holster. As he did so, he thought of what he had witnessed at the Cider House Saloon the night before. He was impressed that Tyler Cabe, though well into his cups, had managed to survive an encounter with Virgil Clay. It was sheer luck that Clay had missed his target at such close range…but there was no luck involved with a man who could dive out of the way and shoot with such accuracy as he fell. Impressive. Sir Tom had no love for Virgil Clay. He had put up with the man following him around like a stray, amused by his lack of social graces. That he was dead now, meant little to Sir Tom. He had a job waiting for him down in Sedona, Arizona Territory…a wild town in need of a crack pistolman with a reputation. But he was in no hurry. And particularly now that Tyler Cabe would have to deal with the likes of Elijah Clay…

  And high above Whisper Lake in a sheltered arroyo surrounded by stands of juniper and pinon, Elijah Clay was loading his pistols and sharpening up his knives. Word had reached him about Virgil’s murder…and, to Elijah, it was murder. Chewing a strip of jerky, he ran the blade of a bowie knife over a wetstone, thinking hard and thinking long about a Arkansas bounty hunter named Tyler Cabe. For Elijah was from hill people. He was part of a hill country clan back in West Virginia. And there were certain codes that were invariably followed. Wrongs were always righted. When kin was killed, blood called that you settled matters. Flesh for flesh. That Cabe was a Southerner meant very little to Elijah. He had taken up no side in the War Between the States, knowing that one government was equally as corrupt as the next. He was a free-liver and a free-thinker as all hill people were. And when it came to vengeance, hill people meted it out accordingly. Thinking these things and knowing them to be true, Elijah found himself thinking of that fancy pistol fighter from Texas that had gunned-down his brother Arvin. It had taken that cowardly sumbitch near eight hours to die when Elijah had worked him with the knife…

  At the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister found himself looking at a horror. His new embalmer, Leo Moss, though every bit the ardent professional, was equally as morbid as Caleb’s deceased brother Hiram. As Caleb had been going through the books after a heady night of sex and gambling, Moss had called him into the undertaking parlor at
the back of the building. You’ve got to see this, Moss told him. On the slab was some transient found dead in an alley. Thin, wasted, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Moss had been sorting through his innards since before first light and now proudly revealed his prize. A tapeworm. He had it in a five-gallon glass jar of alcohol. It floated in the brine, coiled like some obscene snake. A parasitic flatworm, cut free in sections. Thirty-two feet, Moss told Caleb. Now ain’t that just something? Caleb had to agree it certainly was. Life was just full of odd surprises.

  In his rooms at the St. James Hostelry, Jackson Dirker bolted awake from a nightmare which he could not remember. But as he lay there…the war was on his mind and he could just guess what he’d been dreaming of. Dirker had been with the 59 ^ th Illinois Infantry under Post. His first real taste of war had been at Pea Ridge. He could remember riding up on Tyler Cabe and his ragtag crew of Johnny Rebs. Remember them looting through the heaps of mutilated Union boys. Jesus…those, boys, they’d been scalped. Disemboweled. Faces carved from the bone so that their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. Dirker’s soldiers wanted to kill the graybellies there and then…but Dirker meted out a different punishment. He could remember the feel of that bullwhip in his fist, snapping, snapping, eating into flesh. Looking down on those dead boys, he’d lost control. Lost all sense of propriety. What he’d done was wrong. He knew that now…just as he knew now-and maybe had that day-that Cabe and his men had not desecrated those bodies. But knowing it and admitting it were two different things. For pride was a harsh mistress.

  Like Dirker, Tyler Cabe also dreamed of the war. Faces of fallen comrades floated through the mists. He saw all the blood and death, wandered from one battlefield to the next, clawing through heaped Confederate and Union dead, trying to escape, escape. Dirker passed by, shaking his head, asking him how he could allow his men to mutilate those bodies. Cabe told him, no, no, no, we didn’t, I would never allow that, never. And Cabe came awake, eyes fixed and glassy…he could smell the powder, the filth, the blood. And then it faded and he closed his eyes again.

  In a seedy hotel rooming house, the man who called himself Henry Freeman and claimed to be a Texas Ranger sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged. On the bed before him was a Green River knife with a six-inch blade sharper than a straight razor. At one time, the Green River was pretty much the official knife of fur trappers and mountain men. A practical weapon for fighting, hunting, and butchering. It was also favored by buffalo skinners, who could skin off a hide in record time with the versatile tool. And, as Henry Freeman knew and knew well, it had other uses…such as eviscerating women and cutting out their hearts. He had one such trophy before him, carefully wrapped in deerhide. Freeman rocked back and forth, listening to the voices in head. Whores were fine, they told him. They needed to be purged. But there was other game…like maybe the gentile Southern lady who ran the St. James Hostelry…

  Over in Redemption, the Mormons rushed about like busy ants, throwing the old mining town into shape. All you could hear were the sounds of saws and hammers, of lumber being stacked and wagons plying the dirt roads. Old shacks and houses were stripped to the frames and sometimes pulled down altogether, rebuilt from the ground up. The air was chill, but there was no lack of spirit or ambition as the abandoned town was rediscovered. Everywhere then, hammering and pounding, cutting and gutting. Sweat and hard labor and aching muscles. For Redemption had to be resurrected, body and soul…it was God’s will. And it had to be fortified, for one of these nights, the vigilantes would ride again.

  And in Deliverance, the Mormon hamlet that-it was rumored-had given itself bodily to the Devil, there was a haunted stillness of graveyards and gallows. It hung in the air like some secret, noxious pall. Hunched buildings and high, leaning houses pressed together in tombstone hordes, coveting darkness within their walls. Wind blew down from the hills and up the streets, membranes of ice forming over puddles. Weathered signs creaked above bolted doors and empty boardwalks. Sunlight seemed to shun this cramped and deserted village and the shadows, here gray and here black, lay like webs over narrow alleyways and sheltered cul-de-sacs. Now and again there could be heard a moaning or a scraping from some damp cellar or an eerie, childish giggling from behind a shuttered attic window. But nothing more. For whatever lived in Deliverance, lived in secret.

  Part Three: James Lee Cobb: A Disturbing and Morbid History

  1

  James Lee Cobb was born into a repressive New England community in rural southeastern Connecticut called Procton. A tight, restrictive world of puritanical dogma and religious fervor worlds away from Utah Territory. Set in a remote forested valley, it was a place where the moonlight was thick and the shadows long, where isolationism and rabid xenophobia led to inbreeding, fanaticism, and dementia.

  First and foremost, Procton and its environs were agricultural, farm country, and had been since the English first hewed it from the encroaching forests and wrestled it from the hands of Pequot Indians. The people there were simple, ignorant, and backward even by the standards of the early nineteenth century. They shivered by October fires when the wind clawed coldly at doors and windows and dead tree limbs scratched at rooftops. They clutched their dog-eared bibles and books of prayer, begging for divine protection from lost souls, haunts, revenants, and numerous pagan nightmares.

  In everything there was omen and portent.

  Folk still read tea leaves and examined the placentas of newborn calves searching for prophecy. Blood sacrifice in the form of sheep were given to ensure the harvest. But these things, of course, were done purely in secret…for the churches frowned upon them.

  At night, entrances were sensibly bolted, livestock locked-down in barns, windows carefully shuttered. Horseshoes were nailed over thresholds to turn back demons, salt sprinkled in cribs and at doorways to keep witches at bay. No sane man ventured out into the midnight fields where frosted pumpkins were shrouded by ropes of fog and nebulous shapes danced in dark glades and oceans of groundmist.

  Squatting in their moldering 17 ^ th century brick houses, the people of Procton mumbled White Paternoster, hung out clumps of Vervain and St. John’s Wort, and prayed to Christ on the Cross.

  For evil was always afoot.

  And for once, they were right…James Lee Cobb was about to come into the world.

  2

  In Procton, it began with the missing children.

  In six weeks, five children had gone missing. They disappeared in the fields, on woodland trails, the far pastures…always just out of sight. The evidence was scarce-a dropped wicker of apples here, a few threads of cloth there. High Sheriff Bolton made what he considered a thorough and exhaustive inquiry into the matters, but came up with a nary a thing. Unless you wanted to count witch tales and chimney-corner whispers of dark forces at work. And Bolton, a very practical man in all manners, did not.

  For the next three weeks…nothing, then in the first week of October, three infants were snatched from their cradles on the same grim night. Bolton made a flurry of arrests-more to allay wild suspicion and mob mentality than anything else-but in each case, the arrested were released for lack of evidence. Regardless, the tally was up to eight children by then. No longer could suppositions concerning marauding Indians or outlaw brigands suffice…there had to be a more concrete explanation. From the pulpits of Procton’s three churches, ministers were descrying with a passion that what was happening in the village was not mere human evil, but grave evidence of diabolic intervention. Despite the arguments to the contrary by Sheriff Bolton and Magistrate Corey, the clergy fanned the flames of public indignation.

  Witchcraft, they said. And demanded action.

  So Elizabeth Hagen was arrested, charged with the practice of witchcraft, sorcery, and murder.

  ***

  Elizabeth Hagen.

  She was known as the Widow Hagen and most did not know her Christian name. When someone in or around Procton mentioned “The Widow”, there was surely no doubt as to
whom they were speaking of. Widow Hagen then, it was known, had lived in the vicinity at least sixty years, and possibly as many as eighty, depending on which account was listened to. She had outlived no less than four husbands…and, in all those years, had not appeared to age beyond a few years. She was not some spindly, wizened hag…but a stout and robust woman with silver hair and a remarkably unlined face.

  This, of course, spawned suspicion…but the people of Procton admitted freely that she “had her uses”. And she did. Despite their puritanical God-fearing ways, those were hard, uncertain times. And the Widow Hagen was expert in folk remedy and herb medicine. She could and had cured the sick, lame, and terminal. And although the village preachers condemned her from their pulpits through the years, more than a few of them had been her customers when they suffered maladies ranging from arthritis to constipation, heart troubles to skin disease. She was considered to be “second-sighted” and could divine your future (and past) through divination: examining entrails and bones, melted wax and dead animals. There was little that she could not do…for a price. And that was rarely coin, but more commonly by barter…livestock, grain, vegetables. That sort of thing. And payment was rarely a problem, for the Widow Hagen, it was said, could visit tragedy and disease down upon you and your kin in the wink of an eye…and had more than once.

  Although equally feared and respected, she was not generally considered evil. She could be found digging roots and tubers in the fields, sifting through graveyard dirt and mumbling prayers to the full moon. She had a shack out by the edge of the salt marshes that was reached via a winding trail that cut through a loathsome stand of woods, where? it was said? that high grasses rustled and the tree limbs shook even when there was no wind.