Devil's Call

by J Danielle Dorn

  The trotting of horses and the clattering of an empty cart drawn behind interrupted my work. Before I could empty the bucket to rinse away the lather I had made, Sheriff Ness called my name.

  With what was left of my tears lapped up by the ground, I had plenty of room for bile. The sight of the pastor following along in Ness’s shadow brought it to boiling.

  In our years living in De Soto, I had never had call to converse with the pastor. He was a portly man in his fifties, with thin white hair and watery blue eyes, and neither could I recall his name at the time nor can I do so now. It was unimportant. He was here to collect your father’s body, and that was the only reason he spoke to me at all, and he did so as if I were beneath explanation. As far as he was concerned, now that my husband was dead, everything in this house belonged to the territory of Nebraska.

  And I, filthy from my work overnight, had no right to be there.

  “Lilian,” said Ness in greeting, “we’re here to collect Matt’s body.”

  I said, “Over mine you will.”

  “Where is he?”

  I did not answer. Ness shared a glance with the pastor, whose face betrayed his disgust, then let himself inside the house. Though I allowed him in, I did not leave him unaccompanied for long. Not once I heard his footsteps, following along the trail of blood I had dragged through the house.

  He called my name again, and the pastor followed behind me as I walked slow to join him in the kitchen. He was staring out the window at the garden, and the grave beside it.

  “Lilian,” Ness said in a low, dangerous voice, “what did you do?”

  “He wanted to be buried here,” I said. “He told me so. He told me he wanted to be buried here, out back in the garden, so when our grandchildren played under the tree, he could offer them shade. Did you think I was going to let you take him away?”

  “Jesus . . .” Ness recoiled as he put together the ash and scent of burned flesh that still hung in the air. It took him some effort to say, “You burned him.”

  “Sheriff!” said the pastor. “Whatever devilry this woman has done, it has damned Dr. Callahan’s soul. She’s violated the laws of church and state both, you have to—”

  “Let me handle this,” Ness said.

  The pastor stepped back. My eyes blazed as I watched him cower behind your father’s closest friend, who stared down at his boots, shaking his head.

  “Lilian,” he said, “you’re under arrest for unlawful disposal of a body. Are you going to come quietly?”

  I took a breath, and when Ness finally looked up from the floor, I punched him in the mouth.

  My dear, this was not the smartest thing your momma ever did. Dread soon replaced what little relief throwing the punch had given me, for betrayal darkened Ness’s gaze as he wiped the blood from his lip.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Lilian,” he said.

  He was right, of course, but I would not give him the satisfaction of saying so.

  To say I did not have a choice would not be true. I could have resisted. I could have run into the fields and thrown out a spell that would allow the sun’s rays to cloak me. I could have set the damned house on fire and walked away while the townsfolk rushed to extinguish it. I could have done anything but what I did, but I was tired and your father was dead and somehow, I thought, I would have a better chance of pursuing the three men if I cooperated with Ness.

  So I did. I went quietly.

  The sheriff and the pastor had come together in a cart, intending to cover your father’s body in a shroud and bring it to the cellar beneath the only church in town to await a proper Christian burial. Now they had no body, only a widow with a baby in her belly. Ness locked the shackles around my wrists and helped me climb into the cart.

  Banked embers burned beneath my breastbone as the cart clattered down the drive to carry me into town. It was mid-morning, and folks who lived and worked along the main street were sweeping their front steps and opening their windows to the fresh summer air, gossiping outside the post office.

  Though I had always taken care to look the part of the respectable doctor’s wife when I traveled into town, I knew what they thought of me, what they said under their breaths thinking I could not hear them. And in the state I was in that day, shackled and wild-eyed, filthy with blood and earth, they thought their suspicions confirmed. I was dangerous. I was never good enough for your father.

  In time we came to the sheriff’s office, a modest building with a single wooden chair and a spittoon out on the porch, no curtains on the windows. The pastor and the sheriff exchanged a few low words, the pastor’s face pinched and the sheriff placid as ever.

  “When word gets out about this,” I overheard the pastor say, “folks are going to expect quick dispensation of justice. You know that.”

  “You worry about God’s law,” Ness said, “and let me carry out ours.”

  They parted ways then, the pastor shooting me one last look that said he would have strung me up and done to me what I done to your father’s body if he had his say-so. I stared right back at him, at least until the sheriff appeared at the back of the cart and said, “All right, Lilian, let’s go.”

  He helped me down from the cart and passed me off to the jailer, a short man with a bushy mustache and sleepy brown eyes.

  The jailer led me inside and locked me up in the third jail cell from the door. With the door shut, I had the distinction of being the only person in custody. The other two cells were made up like mine—a pillow resting atop a folded wool blanket on a wooden bench, a chamber pot and a Bible, and nothing more.

  Behind a polished wooden counter were three desks. Two of them were pushed together in the center of the room, the chairs tucked in and the desktops clear of clutter. The third, a rolltop, was flush against the wall opposite the cells. To its right was a door with a placard stating COURTHOUSE. We had not passed the courthouse on the way in, but I anticipated the sheriff would drag me there next.

  I sat on the edge of the bed but found I could not abide the roiling in my bones. So I stood. I paced. I scratched the wall with my fingernails, testing its strength. Time ran away from me, and I let it go.

  Then came the jingling of the bell over the front door and the heavy thumping of the sheriff’s boots against the floor. My hand covered the smear left behind when your father touched me for the last time. I felt you flutter as Ness dragged a chair away from his desk and angled it so I could sit on the bench and look at him direct. I did not sit.

  Ness had several years on your father, and the pain in his hip had not subsided in the time since the war. He moved through it, but I saw the stiffness in the way he sat. He leaned forward, fingers knit together, as if we were having ourselves a civil conversation over tea in your father’s kitchen.

  “How’s your jaw?” I asked.

  “Lilian,” he said, “I’m gonna ask you one more time.”

  “How many ways you want me to say it?”

  “This is the last time I’m gonna ask. You got your story straight now?”

  “It ain’t a story. It’s the truth.”

  “So let me make sure I got it in my head the way you say it went down. According to you, your ma sent you a message from St. Louis warning you three bandits were headed your way, but there’s no evidence of that message anywhere in the house. You and Matt went on about your day, neither of you bringing this message to anyone else’s attention, and come nightfall, a Mexican you’d never seen before came to your door, carrying a wounded white man you’d never seen before—”

  “Irish,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “He was Irish.”

  “A wounded Irishman you’d never seen before. Matt wanted to amputate, you woke up Roger, the both of you went back to the house, a man in black who neither of you can describe came out, shot Matt in the back, and rode off. That about cover it?”

  “He also shot Hawking,” I said.

  “The man in black.”

 
“Yes. Hawk can tell you.”

  “Hawk,” said Ness, “drinks a fifth of whiskey before noon and doesn’t know where he is half the time.”

  “Then listen to me,” I said, imploring as I had not before.

  Doubt cast a thick cloud over his face.

  “You listen,” Ness said. “You say there were three men. Three horses. Now, that’s twelve hoofprints and six boot prints. In short, a lot of tracks. I’ve tracked rustlers. I’ve tracked bandits across badlands, over solid rock, and I’ve never lost a trail, Lilian. I have listened to you. I’ve listened real careful. And I looked up and down the path to your house for the three horses and three men and found two sets of prints. Yours, and Hawking’s.”

  “There were three men,” I said.

  “We have to exhume the body.”

  “No!”

  “It ain’t up to you.”

  “Just leave him be.”

  “It ain’t up to you!” he said again. “Wasn’t up to you in the first place. If you’d have just waited until morning—”

  I bared my teeth as I drew a breath to speak, but Ness cut me off.

  “Your arraignment is slated for tomorrow morning,” he said. “After that, you’re to stand trial.”

  “For what? Burying my husband’s body?”

  “No,” said Ness. “Murder.”

  Were not for you, my heart may well have stopped then. I felt as if the floor had dropped out from under me. That appeared to be the reaction Ness was expecting, for his expression did not change. He watched me for a moment, then stood, finished with me.

  “You’ll hang, Lilian. I promise you, you will hang.”

  Blood-hot tears slid down my face, and I neither stopped nor swiped at them.

  In the endless time stretched out after Ness left me to my thoughts, I lived half a dozen other lives. Some of them had me begging for my life, figuring rotting away in prison would be a better fate so long as it meant I could watch you grow up. Some of them ended with me breaking myself out, making my way back to St. Louis, conspiring with your gran and great-aunts and cousins once removed to kill the bastards from a distance. Every one of them, regardless of my own fate, would see you safe with a family who would raise you right. We had no business in Nebraska without your father, and you belonged in St. Louis.

  I did not envision avenging your father the way I ended up avenging him. Truth be told, I only wanted to convince the judge it was they, not I, who murdered your father. Since the law insisted on carrying itself out, it might as well punish the right folks. That was where my head was at when the door opened again.

  This time, Sheriff Ness wore his weariness like an extra weapon, heavy yet useful. He had his hands on his hips as he strode over to the cell, and he looked at me with a steely cast to his gaze.

  “I’ve spoken to Judge Crewe,” he said.

  I said nothing. His eyes left mine.

  “He’s agreed, after you’re found guilty—”

  “Don’t you mean if?” I asked, though I knew the answer already.

  “You killed your husband, Lilian. Ain’t a jury in the land going to believe you didn’t.”

  “I DIDN’T,” I said. “I DIDN’T kill my husband!”

  “Lilian.”

  “It was the men, the three I told you about. I would never harm Matthew! You know that!”

  He would not meet my eye. I waited for him to, but he kept on staring at the ground.

  “Look at me! You know that, Henry. You may not like me, but you know that.”

  Ness went on, “The judge has agreed, after you’re found guilty, to issue a stay of execution until the child is born.”

  Ness had no sooner given me hope than he had taken it away again. You would be safe, but you would be born in a prison cell. Panic hit me like a bucket of water, and I grabbed hold of the cell bars as the fruitlessness of my appeal became more apparent.

  “Hank, please! Please, let me get a letter to my ma; she needs to know what’s gone down.”

  Ness shook his head.

  “We should have left you in that cantina,” he said, his voice firm but charged with grief.

  I knew he hated me, but I could not have imagined what he would say next. He ran his hand down his face, through his beard, and held it over his mouth a moment. Steeling himself to speak in spite of the tears in his eyes. He mumbled through his fingers.

  “The judge has agreed to grant me custody of the child once it’s free of you.”

  “. . . what?”

  “That child you’re carrying is the only thing left of him.” He no longer mumbled. He returned his hands to his hips, doubtless so I would not see them shaking. “I won’t have it raised in whatever goddamned den you crawled out of.”

  What wind I had in my sails died then, and I sank back down onto the bench, one hand on my forehead and the other holding on to you. Not despair, not yet, but a kind of desperation began to rattle at the bars.

  I was going to spend the rest of the summer, all of autumn, and part of winter in this cell. The men outside would keep me fed and watered like some kind of wild animal, not for my own sake but for yours. They would take you away from me, and they would hang me, and you would grow up thinking Henry Ness was your father. When you began to move your toys without touching them and announce aloud the thoughts of the people around you, when you learned to change the pattern of the wallpaper by enchanting your paintbrush and start fires by Will alone, I could only imagine what they would do to you then.

  I did not give one good damn who could hear me on the other side of the wall.

  “I have a family. This baby has a family! You have no right to take her away from them, Henry, goddamn you!”

  Ness closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Whatever he was about to say, he kept to himself. Then he turned and left the room.

  No matter what I did, I would end up back in this cell. My story would end here in Nebraska, at the end of a rope. And yours would begin not with your father, or your kin, but with the lawman who killed your mother.

  Silence and I have always had an understanding, and I did not feel threatened by its presence. Truth be told, I preferred silence to the voices of men coming and going, discussing your father’s house and your father’s body and what they were going to do with me, as if I were not sitting right there listening. I was prepared for a long stretch of silence.

  You must be wondering why I did not break myself out of the cell. The jailer had left me with bread and broth and a sneer. That sneer set me to thinking about how I could track down the three bastards who killed your father. So long as they had not crossed a river or, worse, boarded a vessel and headed for distant shores, so long as we were on the same side of the Mississippi River, I would be able to glimpse their location in the bottom of a teacup.

  I felt something I had not felt in days. Hope. Hope that I would have justice for your father. Hope that you and I would make it to St. Louis. These two yearnings were at odds with each other, and try as I might, I could not see how one might exist without giving up on the other.

  My mother, your gran, always knew what to do. I could pocket a spoon or leave a bit of broth in the bottom of a bowl, use anything I could to reflect a message back to her. If she did not already know what was happening, I could tell her. She and her sisters, my aunts, they would be able to help from afar—if they did not ride out from St. Louis that same night. If that failed, I could focus my fury on the cell’s lock, melt the mechanisms. I have heard tell of some witches being able to pass through solid walls, calling on the power of their blood to make their bodies air. Nothing I could do in an instant, but with all this time yawning ahead of me I could sure as hell try. Or I could use a darker shade of magick and hex the jailer into doing as I said. These men were set to kill me, and I was not overrun with sympathy for them.

  Amid my musings, the front door creaked open, and a figure stepped into the jail.

  It was a short man in a dark overcoat with a hat dipped forward to cover his
eyes, though the sun had set hours ago. The man took a few bold steps into the flickering light of the jail, and I cursed out loud when I saw it was Roger Hawking. The bandages I had wrapped around his trunk the night before were where I left them, adding bulk to his otherwise insubstantial trunk. He stood with his hands on his hips a moment, surveying me locked up in the cell.

  “Y’know,” he said, “gallows bird is not a good look for you.”

  “Don’t you mock me, Butcher.”

  “Darlin’, I ain’t mocking you. I’m here to save you. Now hush up so I can think.”

  “You didn’t think you might want to think before you came barging in here?”

  He ignored me, going to the jailer’s desk to rummage through the drawers.

  “What’d you figure?” I asked. “He’d be stupid enough to leave the damn keys in his desk?”

  “Hah!” Hawking said, holding up a ring with several brass keys hanging from its thick loop.

  I went on, “You going to tell the judge you got into the sauce and didn’t know what you were doing?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said, and proceeded to drop the brass ring.

  “Wait a minute!”

  He ignored me, trying several times to pick up the keys from the floor and dropping them each time. After four tries, I was reaching through the bars to pull them to me when he grabbed them up and shot me a look.

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said again, and strode towards me.

  Through the bars, Hawking smelled like cheap soap and cheaper tobacco, and booze stained his breath as it always did. All that had changed since last night was a large red mark on his hand.

  I said, “Would you quit it a minute?”

  “We ain’t got a minute.”