Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

  His injured companion would have stood as tall as your father were he standing, but he was not. He was now crumpled on the front porch, all sinew and callouses. Hair the same color as the hay we fed the horses and drenched in sweat. His skin, drained of blood on account of injury and pain, would have been pale even in broad daylight.

  Behind me your father was gathering up his medical bag, and I took comfort in hearing him. I opened the door only a crack, enough to confirm what I saw through the window.

  The younger of them was drenched not only in sweat but in blood, his shirt and right leg dark and shimmering with it. The stench of tobacco smoke and iron sweat and lathered horses clung to them. They both wore revolvers at their waists, and the older man wore a rifle slung across his back. The younger man’s injuries eclipsed these signs of danger.

  “We need a doctor for his leg,” said the older man. “We hear there is one here.”

  I looked over the Mexican’s shoulder, where two horses were tied to the fence. I tried to scent a trap on the wind, but all I could smell was injury and necessity. Without medical attention, the younger man would die.

  Though my bones told me to stay rooted, I stepped out of the way and held the door open for them. Your father hurried out of the bedroom then with his bag, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and without another moment’s hesitation helped the Mexican carry his companion towards the dining table. I shut the door behind them and went into the pantry to fetch another lamp.

  When the wounded man’s body landed on the table, he screamed in pain and fear both, and I paused to listen before I came back out with an armful of clean rags, a bucket, and another lamp. A bullet had pierced the younger man’s belly, and his leg was lacerated. Someone had tied a belt above the wound.

  “Who put the tourniquet on?” your father asked.

  “I did,” the Mexican said.

  “When?”

  He removed a pocket watch from the vest he wore beneath his riding coat. Blood from an earlier consultation had stained the pewter casing.

  “Three hours ago,” said the Mexican. “Just before sundown.”

  Until my last breath I will remember that your father met my eyes then, and we spoke without speaking.

  You can go, his eyes said.

  I want to stay, mine said.

  Are you sure? his asked.

  Yes, mine answered.

  So your father took up a place at the wounded man’s side and examined the doomed leg. The bullet had lodged itself between the bottom of his rib cage and his right hipbone. Not a fatal shot, but as your father opened his shirt and exposed the wound, the smell of perforated bowels rose up out of it. I stood quiet and sure at your father’s side and watched him cut away the wool to expose the leg, which was a far worse sight than the laceration I had imagined it to be when I first laid eyes on him. The bones above and below the knee had snapped into stakes and driven themselves through the flesh, twisting and tearing. Unconsciousness would have been a mercy for a man surviving such an injury, but this man was still conscious, and he lifted his head from the table to look down at the mess made of his leg before he swore and let his head fall back with a bang.

  I can count on one hand the number of people for whom I would perform the ritual necessary to salvage flesh mangled so badly. It calls for blood and spit and pain, for the caster to grind up this mixture into ginger root and distilled spirits and to pray to the patient’s ancestors not to light the hearth yet, for the patient has more steps to take on this earth. When performing magick that impacts the flesh, I find it necessary to call upon the departed family of the afflicted. They have the greatest hope of steering the living away from disaster. On this point your gran and I have never agreed. She believes the dead envy the living. You will find your own way of magick, and have your own arguments with her.

  I knew the Work I could do to save it, and I knew the cost would be great. But he was not my blood, and some warning voice in the back of my mind echoed my mother’s.

  I could have read the future in the blood slicks wrung out of a linen rag into the bottom of a bucket. Magick is a tool, but I refuse to let it be a shackle. At the time, the choice I made appeared to be right. I have heard tell of witches who possess the power to turn back the clock and make a different choice, but their power extends only so far and the toll exacted is steeper than continuing on in spite of the misstep. I wish I could say I do not regret the path I took, but here I am looking back at the path and the damage done. There can be no undoing what was done without knowing what lay ahead.

  Your father saw the leg and I saw the leg and the Mexican saw the leg. When your father asked what happened, they looked each other in the eye.

  “Comanche,” said the Mexican in a voice that sounded like sand and cheap whiskey.

  “Comanche?” your father asked.

  “Other side of the mountains. They fired on us, and his horse fell on his leg, and we fled.”

  We had not seen the Comanche around those parts the entire time we had lived in the Nebraska Territory. I thought of you again and I know you do not remember how I rubbed my belly, but I did.

  “That tourniquet saved his life,” said your father, “but the rest of the leg is dying already. If I don’t take it off, he’s liable to bleed to death. I can try to patch him up, sure, get him back on his horse, but that knee won’t heal right and you might well run into trouble. Where’d you say you all were heading?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Your father cut me a glance and the younger man was no wiser for it, breathing fast and concerned with his own suffering as he was, but the older man had laid his hands on the table, heedless of the blood, a patient expression on his face.

  “What are you saying, Doc?” the wounded man asked.

  “I’m saying if I don’t remove the leg, you’re going to die.”

  The younger man began to cry, and in spite of my mistrust I found myself taking pity on him.

  “You’re not cutting off his leg,” said the older man.

  Your father said, “If I don’t, the rot will spread to the rest of his body.”

  At that, your father put a hand on my elbow and turned me away from the table. In a quiet voice he told me he wanted the leg gone before extracting the bullet lodged in the man’s gut. No point digging it out if taking off the leg would kill him, and the bullet would be a smaller pain compared to the mangled limb. Even with the Mexican’s help, I would not be able to hold still a man thrashing against amputation.

  Without saying it aloud, we both knew someone who could help us, if he had not started drinking at noon. When you spend enough time with another person, you get to where your thoughts and theirs are bound together as cords in a rope.

  Your father said, “Oh, no. Not him.”

  I said, “We need him.”

  “To do what? Disinfect the wound with his breath?”

  “You know anyone else who’ll help lop off a man’s leg on such short notice?”

  What tales I had heard tell of the butcher were of the same quality as the ones they told about me, I suspect. That he had himself a lucrative business back east collecting money and keeping his mouth shut when men and murderers brought bodies belonging to their victims to his farm in upstate New York. That he fed the corpses to his pigs, that sometimes the corpses weren’t quite corpses yet. That his wife left him because she got to where she could discern no difference between the squealing of the pigs and the screaming of men being eaten alive. A ghoulish tale and one I suspected soon as I heard it to be false, but even false stories have a dash of truth to them.

  “Be careful,” your father said.

  It is important to know your father and I married for strength and unity. My spirit met his spirit and they said to each other, Yes, I remember you, we’ve met before and we will meet again. Neither of us believed in sin or impurity, but that did not mean we did not believe in virtue and justice. We shared in each other’s lives to make a new one, and when I walked out
the door that night, I felt no premonition to tell me his would end upon my return.

  I would have stayed, if I had. I should have stayed.

  At night, the skies over the plains are clear and speckled bright with stars. The moon was a sickle blade that night and growing thinner. A cunning moon. I had little light by which to see, and I carried a lantern with me along the path leading to the town’s main street.

  Ours was a commerce town, growing fast and promising to support what businesses came out of it, but most folks just passed through on their way to something better. It was no trouble to walk from our cabin at the edge of town to the butcher’s shop a mile or so down the lane. The post office and the general store and the miller had closed their windows against darkness and drunkards both. If not for the absence of clouds and the mildness of the temperature, I would have thought a storm to be looming. The air all but crackled with anticipation, the way it does before the lightning comes.

  As I approached the butcher’s shop, I saw a light still burning in a rear window, where it stood to reason Roger Hawking took his meals and slept. Having never been to his living quarters before, I was not of a mind to invite myself around back in search of an entrance, so I walked up the steps and pounded on the front door hard as I could. I heard nothing within and assumed he had not heard me, so I left the porch and went around the building. We met each other in the alleyway.

  The butcher stumbled around the corner with his rifle pointed at me, though I doubt he could see straight enough to hit the side of the building.

  “We ain’t open,” he said in a growl.

  “Quit pointing that thing at me,” I said, raising the lantern to my face. “It’s me.”

  “Lilian?” He lowered the muzzle. “The hell you doing out here? Ain’t you know what time it is?”

  With the breeze blowing as it was, I could smell the state the butcher had worked his body into, and I thought then I ought to see him back inside and return home to your father. Tell him Hawking was in a bad way and of no use to anyone, that we could remove the leg without him if it was that important. There is not much to men’s bodies. Theirs are simpler machines than a woman’s, needing only to support one life within the span of their own, and at the time I still had in my mind a fresh image of the leg and its wound. I could assist your father in removing what he could not save. It would be no great trouble.

  I said, “Course I know what time it is.”

  “Your husband know you’re calling on me?’

  “My husband sent me, Hawking. There’s a man lying on my table with a crushed leg. Matthew is fixing to remove it, but we need your help. Are you able?”

  He stood frowning at me in the dark, swaying on his feet, and after a considerable pause said, “Weeeellll, come on inside and let’s see if I am.”

  Against my better judgment I did follow him inside, where I saw the siege of unmarried life lay upon him and his possessions. Fruit flies danced in the jaundiced light. Dried mud tracks from the bottoms of his boots marked the floorboards. The embers in the fireplace had been dead for some time, and a cloying staleness in the air set my stomach to churning. The business end of the shop was clean as a surgeon’s theater, and I wondered if that was not where all his energy went.

  The butcher rested the rifle’s stock on the floor and opened a cupboard. The bundle he removed had the heft of metal to it. Inside I am sure he had wrapped a hacksaw along with his smaller blades. This he placed in a leather satchel he had left dangling from the back of a chair before mumbling something I could not discern and disappearing down an unlit hall.

  Of everything, the absence of light did the least to impede him. I suppose something of his condition could be made of that observation, but I am not in the habit of making much of the things drunken men do in the dark.

  When he returned, the butcher wore a leather coat and carried in hand a box of ammunition and a folded object I could only assume was a pair of gloves. Shadows cut ravines into his face. One could see the ghost of the man he had been in his youth, that the years had been kinder to him than he had been to himself. Whatever he was drinking to mask his pain was carving him out faster than he could pour it in.

  “Shall we?” he asked, and held out his elbow like he was asking me to dance. That was typical of him, joking when there was no cause for it, and I neither appreciated it in that moment nor did I smile. I waited for him to take back his elbow and extinguish the lamp’s flame, and then I followed him out of the kitchen.

  Of course I could smell the stink of the horses as I came up the driveway with the butcher, but it was their number that struck me. When I had left to fetch Hawking, two horses were tied at the post.

  Now there were three.

  Lamplight blazed behind the curtains covering the front windows. Silhouettes burned as black ghosts in the fabric. I counted four. A fist in my gut tightened and tried to pull me back from the house. Hawking had the barrel of his rifle aimed at the ground, but his finger was not on the trigger as he staggered up the drive.

  I said, “Hawk, wait a minute.”

  “What for?” he asked. “I thought you was in a hurry.”

  “There’s a third horse,” I said. “There were only two before.”

  He managed to turn around without losing his balance, though the significance of what I had said was lost on him. He looked at the horses, then looked at me, then back at the horses before giving me a helpless shrug.

  “I hate to break it to you,” he said, “but I count six.”

  I said, “Something’s wrong. Just please be careful.”

  Hawking turned back around and approached the house some steps ahead of me, his rifle readied but not raised. Though I had latched it behind me, the door was open, and it allowed the sounds of a commotion out into the front drive. Men’s raised voices, your father’s low and calm. I could not make out his exact words. A shadow filled the doorway, and as it took substance, I saw it was your father, his bloodied hands held up in surrender.

  “You all right, Doc?” the butcher called up.

  Your father said nothing.

  He looked at me, and time still feels as if it has frozen in that moment. I can close my eyes and watch the explosion of blood and viscera as the lead shells left the muzzle of the blunderbuss and passed through your father’s back and out his front.

  My refusal to accept what I saw would have proven a useful instrument if I had studied Fate and Time as I have heard tell of other witches doing. But I had not, and in the time it took for me to come to my senses, your father’s knees buckled and spilled him onto the porch.

  What happened next happened in a matter of seconds, which is what it took for me to start running towards him.

  Above your fallen father was the man who had pulled the trigger. The third highwayman, the one my mother meant to warn me of. As clear as I remember watching your father’s insides turned out, I remember laying eyes on the culprit. He stood well over six feet tall, and even in his long black coat I could see he had the tapered build of a sailor or a woodsman.

  He transferred the blunderbuss to his opposite hand, drawing his revolver and firing two shots at Hawking. The first hit him low in the abdomen, causing him to drop the rifle, with the second hitting him just below the ribs and knocking him into the dirt. The man in the long black coat holstered the revolver and sauntered down the porch steps toward his horse.

  Memory is an imperfect record, my dear. I cannot be certain of what I saw that night—whether I saw the man clear as I can see him now. But I would swear to you that before mounting his horse, the man turned and winked at me.

  It was then I regained control of my feet. I ran not at the stranger but up the path and towards your father.

  Before I could make it any closer, the Mexican came out of the house, carrying the blood-soaked younger man over his left shoulder and holding his revolver in his right hand. He aimed it at me soon as he saw me.

  “You follow us,” the Mexican said, “I shoot you.”


  The Mexican reached the horses and hoisted the injured man onto the saddle. I remember now that I heard the hooves of their horses beating as they made their escape behind me.

  I took your father into my lap and pulled open his shirt to reveal the churned mess made of the torso I had memorized in darkness and in daylight, the blood bubbling up from so many places, mixing with air to make a pink froth that he coughed up when he tried to speak. And he did try to speak, for while he was dying he was still trying to ensure my safety. He knew what I was trying to do when I scratched the palms of both my hands with my fingernails, drawing blood to the surface and placing them hard and flat against the pumping arteries I knew would kill him in a matter of seconds.

  It would have been impossible for your father to feel the ley line opening up between us, even more impossible to feel it draining me of my energy and you, as well. But he knew, because I had told him what a laying on of hands cost me. My body was not my own body. This, he knew. And the fact that the air became charged with the power of my Work, that the wind began to pick up and rustle nearby trees, to rustle my hair, warned him of what I was doing.

  Since your father could not tell me to stop with his failing words, he did so with his hands. Those hands that would have taken the butcher’s hacksaw and the young man’s leg with it, that never trembled even when his mind did so. Hands that lifted me onto his horse and rubbed away at my girlish stubbornness until love shone through. Those hands that would have guided you into the world.

  Those hands, cold and bloody, wrapped around my wrists and pulled them away from his chest. I begged him not to, and if I could have enchanted my tears that they would heal him when they landed on him, I would have.