Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

Before he died, he put his hands over my belly. It took him a long time to breathe his last, and we struggled against each other during that time. To me it felt as if only seconds passed, and they did in fact pass. When he passed along with them, I called his name, shook him like he had just gone to sleep and not gone to the Summerland.

  But he had. Your father was dead.

  6

  WHEN I WAS A GIRL, your gran followed my prints in the dust to find I had pulled an old book from the shelf. Though I had never learned Latin, I could recognize its roots in the baser languages I picked up in Texas, and I understood enough. My eyes had found a forbidden spell, one intended to bring the spirit back to a dead body. Your gran had taken me by both shoulders after, looked me right in the eye, and told me I must be very careful when uncovering pages none had touched for so long, for good reason.

  As I watched the pall of death settle over your father’s body, I thought if I concentrated hard enough, long enough, I could remember the nature and order of the steps necessary to Work that spell. Your father’s injuries were beyond what I could repair in a moment, but if I had more time. If I could mend the tears in his flesh, bind his wounds, make him whole again, then I could coax the life back into him. It would not harm you. It would leave me beholden to forces I did not understand, but that would be a small price to pay.

  By the time I had decided not to accept what had happened, your father’s hands fell away from my belly, and I knew he was dead.

  The butcher’s coughs halted my thoughts. After that first burst of air, he groaned and commenced to swearing. He had the mouth of a sailor even on his best days, and I am not of a mind to commit any of his words to ink. It would be a simple task to plug the holes in the butcher’s belly, and I knew I had to tend to the living before I tended to the dead.

  Once I was on my knees in the dirt beside him and had his shirt open, I saw both shots had punched straight through Hawking’s body. I hope you never learn to identify a gut shot based on smell. The absence of that stench told me the butcher would live through the night if he held still long enough for me to apply a poultice to his wounds. To make a poultice and return to your father was all I wanted.

  I said, “I can fix this.”

  The butcher tried to sit up, but pain overwhelmed him and he used his heels instead to try to put distance between himself and me. As he did, he asked, “What the hell did you get me into, you damned devil woman?”

  Rather than answer him, I left Hawking bleeding and swearing in the drive. I walked past the bloodied table, its chairs strewn aside and the smell of burnt gunpowder in the air. My feet knew the way to the pantry though my mind was no longer with me.

  The pantry was undisturbed, and it was from its shelves that I gathered what I needed to seal the butcher’s wounds. I placed a palmful of bran into a small clay bowl and added to it a palmful of yarrow seed. These I ground up before bringing the bowl and an armful of bandage back to where he lay. I was careful not to let my tears fall into the bowl as I caught a bit of Hawking’s blood in it and then spat to finish my mixing.

  “No,” he said, “no no no no no, don’t touch me.”

  Before I rolled him to his side, I gave the butcher one of the bandages to bite down on. Then I painted his wounds with the poultice and bound them with cotton and bandage. By the time I was finished, he was pale and sweating, but the blood stopped flowing and the bandages remained clean from gore, which meant my Work had taken.

  As I sat back, I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Your father. It was the wind stirring his hair, perhaps, or a last muscle twinge as his brain followed his body in ceasing to be. In my state, I thought he was trying to get to his feet, so I got to mine, rushing over to him with his name in my throat. It never reached the air. The realization that my mind was playing tricks on me knocked the tears out of my eyes, cold as the night surrounding me. I made no attempt to staunch them. They were all I had, right then.

  A clattering of horse hooves and boot spurs came pounding up the path towards us. It was the sheriff and his deputy.

  Lieutenant Ness had been clean-shaven and polished. Sheriff Ness, however, wore a thick beard of a lighter pigment than the overgrown brown hair on his head. On any other night I would have thought him here to levy some charge against me. Despite having been a guest in our home more times than I could count, he always looked at me like I was a stain on his shirt, refusing to come up no matter how hard he scrubbed me with his furrowed eyebrows.

  I had never seen his deputy before. He was a young black man about my age, a little taller, with kinky hair and winsome features. I would imagine they heard the shots from town. Gunfights were infrequent in De Soto, and when they broke out, the sound could carry for some distance.

  Soon as he saw Hawking lying pale and bandaged on the drive, the earth dark with his blood, and your father lying mangled and unmoving across my lap, Sheriff Ness drew his revolver and asked what had happened. I knew he saw a shadow of the situation cast over us, but I cannot recall what I said. What I did was keep my hands on your father as the lawmen took bolder steps, up to the porch and into the house. As they did so, the deputy let go a hushed plea to the lord.

  “Yep,” said the butcher without opening his eyes.

  When I gathered him up again, I found your father’s body was losing its warmth. That realization on its own caused me to gasp in a way I reckon frightened the men. I ignored Ness and his deputy and began to stroke your father’s hair. My tears had left small red marks where they had fallen on his face, like grease burns from a hot pan. I began again to think of irresponsible things. Of how I could drag your father back across from the other side.

  Though I made nothing of it at the time, the sheriff was distraught. He fought against the distress, but his slow, heavy breathing and the choke of salt water in his throat were unmistakable. He looked down at your father’s body and me holding on to him, and I had no notion of what was going through his mind.

  He crouched down beside me and stared at the mess made of your father’s body. His fingertips probed the red marks on your father’s face, their redness hot where the blood splatters from the wound that killed him were not.

  “Lilian,” he said in a voice that would have scared me if either of us were thinking straight, “what happened?”

  For whatever reason, I answered true though disordered. “She warned me. She warned me, but I didn’t heed her. We had to take his leg, and I couldn’t hold him down by myself, so I fetched Hawking, when I came back there were three horses . . .”

  Ness’s breath shook as he inhaled and returned his revolver to his holster. He pinched the bridge of his nose and blew the breath back out again.

  “What are you talking about, Lilian?”

  I said nothing.

  “Who tried to warn you?”

  I said, “My ma,” and kept on stroking your father’s hair.

  “All right,” he said, and moved towards the steps as if to follow their trail. “Well, which way did they go?”

  I did not answer him.

  “Lilian, which way?”

  Ness kept talking to me like I was a busted door and he just had to keep working at my lock to open up the way between us. The roaring in my ears began to fade, and in its place I heard accusation. He abandoned the effort after a few seconds and turned his attention to Hawking.

  “Roger,” he said, “what in the hell happened?”

  “What’s it look like?” the butcher asked. “I got shot.”

  “Before that, damn it. Who shot you?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  “How many were there? Did you see that?”

  “How many what?”

  “Three,” I said. “There was three of them.”

  “I thought you said there was two,” Ness said.

  I shook my head. I had misspoken. Or perhaps the story was coming out stranger than I wanted it to. It was a strange story.

  “How many were there?” Ness asked the butc
her again.

  “How the hell should I know?” the butcher mumbled, his voice a slurry of blood loss and booze.

  “You were there!” I said. “Tell him what you saw!”

  “Lilian,” said the sheriff with an edge in his voice, “let him alone.”

  “He was here!” I said.

  “Yeah,” Hawking said. “And look where that got me.”

  Ness cut me off before I could raise my voice again, asked me where I said they were coming from. So I told him only one of them had anything to say about where they were from. The Mexican had said they were farther west when a band of Comanche fired on them.

  “Comanche,” Ness said.

  “That’s what he said,” I said.

  “Well, I hate to call him a liar, but the Comanche don’t stay this far north this time of year. They’d be headed back to Texarkana by now.”

  Whether he was a liar or not was nothing we were going to sort out that night. That a man who would shoot another man in the back would have lied about the circumstances that led to their arrival in the first place did not seem strange, but even then, something about the youngest of them told me he was no good at either the lying or the shooting. But his lying made me look to be a liar, and it was adding kindling to Ness’s doubt. I could see it in his eyes.

  “I’ll have Deputy Porter send a message out to North Bend and Omaha,” the sheriff said. “See if any of that story’ll hold water. Meanwhile, I’m going to ride out a bit, see if I can track them.”

  I said, “Thank you.”

  “You want help moving him?” he asked.

  I said, “No.”

  “I could send for the pastor. They’re going to want to bury him in the morning, you know.”

  For all I know now, he only meant to offer me hope, to let me know I was not as alone as I felt in that moment. But in that moment, I took it for a threat. All I heard was he did not trust his friend with me in either life or death, and fury began to take grief’s place. I said nothing.

  The deputy returned then, he and his horse cleaving a silence I had taken for granted. As I had not heard him leave, I made nothing of his coming back. He dismounted and walked back up the drive, told Ness he could find no hoof marks on the trail leading away from the house.

  It took both of the men to get the butcher to his feet, and once he was there, the pain of his injuries stole away his breath. Of all the places to take a bullet, the gut has to be the worst. For the first time that night, I almost felt sympathy for the man. Almost, but for the fury. I found my feet and followed them down the steps like I was making sure Hawking would not faint before the deputy got him in the saddle. In addition to assuaging my guilt, it meant I could watch them leave.

  Once the lawmen had gone and taken the butcher with them, I could not bring myself to walk back into that house and wait until morning, with the violence still thick in the air and your father dead on the porch.

  Even before I began the task of moving your father to the field out back, the thought of going on without him rose up before me, a great fog through which I could not see. This was the house we had built together. The garden, the land it was on, the family we were going to raise, all called for two people. A woman is more capable of raising a child on her own than is a man, and I would not have been the first to do so, but before I met your father I was not a woman. Before I met your father, I was a wild girl loath to let grass grow beneath her feet. Without him, I could not say as I was capable of being a mother. I could raise you, sure, but raising a person and being a mother to them are two different breeds of beast.

  My hands were cold when I held you, and the wind come down out of the mountains tugging at my hair was cold, and the trail the three men had taken after gathering their horses and racing into the thickening night was growing cold itself. If I were thinking clear, I would have sought to uncover the bastards’ tracks right then. But I was not. I was not thinking at all.

  I found no small amount of difficulty in moving your father’s body, and I did not want to drag him by his arms, so I went into the bedroom and removed the quilt from the top of the bed, brought it to the porch, and laid it out flat and rolled him onto it the same way I had rolled the butcher to get at his wounds. Once I had him laid upon the quilt, I was able to move him.

  You are the first person I have told what I did with your father’s body, and why. Death rites are as much a part of our lives as are the union rites, the fertility rites, praising the four winds and the five stages of the moon, greeting the sun in the morning and bidding it farewell in the evening. More than tradition and more than blood, I did not trust myself not to see his body as a liminal component in a ritual I had no business attempting. As an empty vessel needing filling. He did not deserve the fate of Eimhir’s beloved, nor had I any intention of meeting her end.

  So I went to the stable where the horses stood sleeping and I grabbed a shovel down from the wall and I went back into the yard to dig. Not deep enough to bury a body, but deep enough to bury what the fire would not take. For the last time, I divested him of his clothing. He would not need them where he was going.

  Into the pit went kindling and firewood and the quilt and your father’s body. When I was satisfied with the sturdiness of the pyre, I went into the garden. There I prepared a bouquet of herbs and flowers to honor and protect his spirit as it made its way to the Otherworld.

  I thought of the curiosity I had had about him after he returned me to the roadhouse and our paths diverged. How something had awakened in me when he took my hand the first time. How I hated looking forward to his letters and I hated the relief I felt each time I received one. I thought of all the wasted time in Chicago, how we could have started putting down roots there. Of all the children we did not have because I would have rather chewed carrot seeds than risk raising a wild child in such an orderly city.

  The pyre was strong and it burned steady and long, and I stood vigil as the flames caught the shroud I had made of the quilt. After what felt to me an eternity, his body began to burn. The smoke burned my eyes, and tears poured down my cheeks. I watched through the smoke and the tears and I did not flinch when the wind kicked a bit of ash towards me. After the eternity had come and gone and left me there, the pyre collapsed and the fire consumed your father’s body.

  When there was nothing left for the fire to take, I threw back my head and I screamed. The sky was lightening with dawn’s approach and the birds had started calling out to each other and my voice carried like a lone wolf’s howl. I screamed as if my pain could bring him back. I screamed without thought. My scream was an instinct, feral refusal to accept what was done, and when I was done, I sat down on the ground beside the pit and I wept. You moved beneath my ribs, your little fists and feet doing what my heart could not—remind me I, at least, was still alive.

  All storms end and my own was no different. I was drained, but I still had work to do. My face was darkened with soot, and my tears left clean trails on their way back down to the earth. Ash and dirt had made a nest of my hair, and my nightgown was stiff with dried blood. I picked up the shovel and began covering the pit with churned earth. This took quite some time, and the effort blistered my hands. I made a small cairn out of stones.

  Emptied of tears, I wanted to sleep. Since I could not take your father to bed, I lay down on the dew-damp grass beside the fresh grave and stretched my arm across the dirt as if I were settling against his chest in our own bed.

  7

  WHEN I AWAKENED, it was with the sun’s rays bearing down on my face. The breeze rustled the tall grass, and the moment before I realized why my hands were covered in soot and blood was the last peace I can recall.

  As I pushed myself upright, grave dirt clinging to my hair and cheek, the pain in my eyes and throat asserted itself. Reminded me of how I had howled at the starless sky, and how it had remained unmoved by my agony.

  All my pain and rage could not convince the Fates to give your father back to me.

  I was
numb as I found my feet and drifted back into the house. The kitchen was in order, and I had to walk into the dining room to see the first bits of evidence a tumult had occurred. Several chairs were tipped over, and the young man’s blood left a sticky silhouette where he had lain awaiting his fate. I inhaled deep and looked down at the floor, hoping one or both of the bandits had stepped in and tracked gore. All I saw was the smeared trail along which I had dragged the quilt bearing your father’s body.

  So far as I could tell, the man in black had never been here in the first place. I retraced what I thought were his steps the night before, walked as far as your father had before the shot had blown him open. Once there, I narrowed my eyes at the posts providing the porch with a roof. Blood and shot mottled the wood, and I examined its surface before digging into one of the tiny holes to produce a small piece of lead.

  I pocketed the lead ball and, memory of the gunshot ringing in my ears, glimpsed the rest of the porch. Your father’s blood had dried in an imperfect circle. My arms remembered his dying weight. Footprints large enough to belong to Sheriff Ness brought back his pacing back and forth, choking on his own grief. The butcher’s blood would stain the dirt at the head of the drive for some time, but I was not concerned with it. It was your father’s blood I could not bear to leave on the porch, echoing his death back at me until I could no longer stand it, and I felt my temper flaring up again as I thought of the mess in the dining room.

  While the hearth heated a bucket of water, I poured salt over the bloodstains. When the water was hot and ready, I began to scrub.

  Down on my knees and using both of my hands, I welcomed the effort. Not only did it allow me to continue moving in the hopes of outrunning tears, but as I focused on my cleaning I began to believe I could return the blood to your father’s body, and he to life. Quick as the thought floated up, I slapped it away.

  I must have missed something. I could see clear in my mind the pale face of the wounded young man, hear the accented quality of his English, remember his deference to the Mexican even in the throes of what must have been agony. And I had looked the Mexican in the eye on more than one occasion: when I answered the door, when I stood across the table while he lied about the Comanche and their role in the shooting, when he told me he would shoot me if I followed them. Even if I could not describe the man in black, the wounded man and the Mexican would make a memorable pair.