This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  Additionally, there had been no business because of the black wreath he refused to remove from the surgery door. And then, that morning, he discovered that in the night someone had made off with it. Even now it was probably in some drunk’s possession down on Wazee Street, or hung around some corpse’s neck where he lay propped on a tin-can pile behind a Blake Street saloon.

  Sitting at his desk chair—where Bridget once had held court—he stared through the wavy glass panes in his window to the drizzle outside. Word was that the constant storms had nearly shut the mountains down. Stories of avalanches and stranded travelers filtered down from the gold camps. The Platte and Cherry Creek were up, and people feared another flood like back in ’64.

  Doc stared down into his cold coffee, and found his reflection like a midnight mirror image. All he could see was the outline of his head. No facial features. Just black emptiness where eyes, nose, and mouth should be. Never had he seen such a true reflection of himself. An outline surrounding a stygian void.

  Bridget laughed, somewhere, far away, at the edge of his consciousness. Her smile hung wistfully in the distance … an evaporating memory. Her presence seemed like an echo coming from the very room, fading by the instant. When the last of her finally seeped away into infinity, what would be left? So little of her remained here.

  At home at night, he took out her dresses, one by one, and laid them on the bed. Lifting them, he would bunch the fabric, place them to his nose, and sniff, desperate to inhale her odor. But more and more, the only scent he could recognize was stale cloth.

  Her things remained as she’d left them, though Sarah had insisted on putting the kitchen in order and cleaning it. So, too, had she insisted on throwing open the curtains. Curtains that hadn’t been touched since Bridget closed them before bed that last night.

  Why are you sitting here?

  The faceless reflection in his coffee cup had no answers.

  You don’t have to be so pathetic.

  It was a choice. One he could change. He didn’t have to do this, live like this. If living was indeed what he was doing.

  “God, I’m tired,” he whispered to himself.

  Then stop it. Stop it all.

  Chuckling hollowly at himself, he set the coffee cup to the side and reached into the drawer. Bridget had kept a store of hard candy for the children, handing out the sweets as the child was leaving.

  Doc took a peppermint. Setting it on the desk, he began carving with his penknife, hollowing out the center. The only sound in the room came from faint scraping. Fine white powder floated down to coat his black trousers like dust.

  He glanced at the gray beyond the window, realizing that dusk was closing in. Rain pelted the glass and rattled on the tin roof. It would be a cold and miserable walk back to his empty house. And, to be honest, he was tired. As tired as he’d ever been.

  And as hopeless.

  Doc forced himself to stand and walked back to his pharmacy kit. He found the vial with its garish label. Using the small measuring spoon, he scooped out more than enough of the powder and dropped it into the white ceramic mixing cup. With care he made a paste and used the spoon to press it into the hole he’d carved in the peppermint. As a final measure, he sealed it with a plug of damp flour.

  Then, knowing his pharmacy would surely wind up in another’s hands, he carefully washed the mixing cup, and returned everything to its proper place.

  Taking the candy, he returned to the front room and resettled himself at his desk. The room was gloomy now, cold, the fading light of day feeble beyond the rain-streaked window.

  Doc stared at his deadly candy, resting so innocently on the battered wooden surface of the desk.

  “Don’t torture yourself because of me, Philip.” He heard Bridget’s voice in his memory. “Dying is part of life.”

  She had kept repeating that over and over as her life seeped away. Whispered how much she’d loved him. Pleaded that he not mourn.

  “Dying is part of life.” He nodded, thinking back to his training, to the lectures he’d first listened to about losing patients. And then working with Benjamin Morton in Memphis, how the old man had given Philip that gleeful wink when they’d pulled off the impossible and saved a life.

  And Ben Morton—a picture of health—had died in his sleep.

  Then had come the Fourth Tennessee, and boys wasting away right and left from dysentery, cholera, typhus, pneumonia. And nothing he could do about it. Clear up to Shiloh.

  Dear God, Shiloh!

  How many of his nightmares were filled with the terrified eyes, the pain-glazed disbelief sculpted into the faces of those dying boys. It was as if Doc could feel the blood caked on his fatigued hands, the exhaustion and horror in his soul as they died on the table. He’d never forget the limp and sodden weight of their amputated feet, legs, hands, and arms.

  The Federals had marched him across the battlefield to Pittsburg Landing. He’d seen with his own eyes. Impossible things: the bloated bodies rotting in the sun; the broken guns and dead horses; the splintered trees; and blasted soil.

  One Shiloh should have been enough. How did a reasonable man get his brain around twenty of them, from Manassas to Shiloh, and on to Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, and Franklin?

  And then James was staring up at him, his eyes fever-bright in the barracks at Camp Douglas. “Don’t grieve for me, Doc. You’ve suffered enough.”

  “Saint Hancock?” He rubbed his weary face, the deadly candy but a shadow on his desk. “You were like a brother to me, James. Unlike Butler, I didn’t betray your trust.”

  Butler.

  He closed his eyes, wondering where he was, if he even were alive. What happened to a lunatic in the wilderness? Had he been killed by the rampaging Sioux and Cheyenne, frozen in a blizzard while out in the open? Murdered, shot down by someone too frightened to share the world with a crazy man? Beaten to death because he couldn’t stop babbling?

  If so, he should have found his final rest behind the farmhouse next to Fly, Maw, and that unknown bushwhacker who’d stood up for Sarah.

  God, how much would have been different if he’d just told Ann Marie no when she’d suggested enlisting. As a physician in Memphis, could he have convinced Maw and Sarah to come join him for safety’s sake? They’d had no place to go as northwest Arkansas descended into madness, murder, and butchery.

  “If I could have saved them, I would have lost Butler,” he told himself. He wouldn’t have been at Camp Douglas to keep the ragamuffin from freezing to death in the snow that day.

  And God alone knew what had happened to Billy.

  “I wouldn’t have known you, Bridget. Wouldn’t have loved you until I’d given you all of me that there was to give,” he told her ghost where it lurked in the darkest of the shadows. As he closed his eyes, the extent of his loss came hammering home.

  A man can only bear so much.

  But tonight, it would be over. God could chide him for being a coward, or slap him down as a fool.

  “Let the Christians be right,” he whispered. “Let me see Bridget again.”

  He turned the candy in his fingers, feeling the round essence of it. He’d want to wash it down with the last of his cold coffee, ensure it was deep in his gut when the cyanide began to—

  Someone tried the doorknob, found it locked. A frantic hammering was accompanied by a woman’s shout. “Hello! Help me!”

  Doc set the candy aside, stood, and walked to the door.

  “Dear God!” the panicked voice cried. “Somebody, be here!”

  Doc slid the bolt and pulled the door open.

  The frantic woman was soaked to the bone, her hair hanging in straggles that leaked water. She wore a sodden wool coat, and behind her a man, bareheaded, shivering, his face a mask of torture, held a child in his arms, his posture that of a supplicant.

  “You’re a doctor?” The woman almost pleaded.

  “Philip Hancock. Yes, ma’am. What’s wrong?”

  “She’s shot! It wa
s an accident. Her brother … with the shotgun. He was shooting a rabbit. It ran in front of Bessie!”

  Doc waved them in, hurrying to the desk, fumbling for the matches. Cranking the chimney up, he lit the lamp and adjusted the wick.

  “Bring her.” He led the way to the surgery, painfully aware that it was in disarray, hardly the pin-neat facility he’d kept when Bridget …

  No, don’t go there.

  He swept the clutter off the table and said, “Place her there.” Then he went about lighting the other lamps.

  Turning to the girl, he figured her for about eight or nine. Her dress was homespun and worn, mud and blood splotched her coat. “Help me here.”

  With the mother’s help he got the dripping coat off the girl, and unbuttoned her bodice. Slipping her arms out of the sleeves, he got a good look at her chest; rain-wet bloody punctures in the girl’s left side were leaking red.

  “How long ago?”

  “Maybe an hour or two. We unhitched the horses, rode straight here. A man on the street pointed your way.”

  The little girl’s eyes were open, half lidded. She whispered, words inaudible, as if her voice were gone.

  “Help her!” the mother pleaded.

  Doc turned to his surgical kit, thankful once again that Butler and his men had stolen the best.

  “This may take a while. Nor should you watch. Please. Go back to the office. There’s coffee and water. Wood and kindling next to the stove. If you need food, I’d suggest sending one of you down to the Planter’s House. They can fix a meal in a tin to go.”

  They stared at him as he turned back to the little girl, his probe in one hand. Ether bottle in the other. “Go on! I’m going to do the very best for Bessie that I possibly can. This isn’t my first gunshot.”

  After they’d closed the door, he looked down into the little girl’s half-vacant eyes. “Sweetheart, we’re going to do everything we can.”

  And he did.

  Three hours later, his feet and back aching, Doc walked out into the office. The way the man and woman were seated on the bench, it was as if they were propping each other up. Expressions of agony were replaced with desperate expectation.

  Doc reached out. The man extended his hand, and Doc dropped four buckshot pellets onto his palm. “If she makes it, you’ll want to give her those as a remembrance.”

  “If she makes it?” The mother stared up with bloodshot and swollen eyes. She’d have been a pretty woman had her thin face not been hardened by sun, worry, and deprivation.

  Doc took a seat opposite them. “Bessie’s sleeping. The bleeding is stopped. One lung was collapsed. I’ve got it reinflated and her chest drained and sealed. She’s breathing normally again, and the strain on her heart has been relieved. From here on out, it’s up to Bessie, and if she can tolerate the infection.”

  The man nodded, the woman staring vacantly, as if unsure what to believe.

  “I’m going to keep her here,” Doc told them. “I’ve slept in the chair before. “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “My sister’s husband is a baker here in town. We can stay there,” the man said. “Theodor, Bessie’s brother, will see to the farm.”

  “Go get some rest,” Doc told them. “Come back in the morning.”

  He saw them to the door. Watched them disappear into the rain-black night.

  Sighing, he realized he was starved for the first time in days. Again, he longed for Bridget, for the hot meal he knew she would have had waiting for him. He could see the concern in her green eyes as she watched him eat, the smile she’d give him, filled with pride for the work he’d done on little Bessie.

  And he had done good work on the little girl. If the infection didn’t take her, she’d live. He’d done it. Given her a chance where none had existed.

  Glancing at the desk, he stopped, cold fingers sending a shudder through him. The candy lay there beside his half-empty coffee cup.

  What if Bessie’s father or mother had picked it up? Popped it into their mouths?

  “Philip, you are an imbecile!”

  Picking up the candy with careful fingers, he unlocked the bottom drawer, opened the cash box, and tossed it back into the tin box’s interior.

  113

  June 1, 1868

  Billy fingered the stubby copper cartridge as he relaxed against his saddle. He’d laid it over a log, and with the stirrup shoved back, used the fender as a backrest. Firelight flickered, and sections of branches cracked and popped as they burned. Overhead the trees gleamed yellow in the pale light of a quarter moon. The stars seemed unnaturally bright as they cast patterns beyond the treetops.

  “I don’t think these are such a good idea,” Billy said as he held the .44 cartridge between his fingers and studied the rimfire.

  “Why’s that?” Parmelee asked from across the fire. The man was in his underwear, hemming the ragged cuffs of his pants. He glanced up from his needlework. The man’s sun-ruddy face had surrendered to a reddish-blond beard that made him look older, almost sagacious.

  “Well, imagine that all we had were these Henry rifles. We got a total of fifty-six cartridges for the two of them. That’s all them galoots was carrying. So we get in the middle of the Big Horn Basin, like we was, and run smack inta a big party of Sioux. We fort up and swap shots with ’em for a couple of days, and shoot these little cartridges up. Now where in the name of hell are we gonna find more? I tell you, we’d have to ride plumb to Denver or Salt Lake or back to Virginia City.”

  “You don’t have fifty-six rounds for that Sharps of yours.”

  “Parmelee, I got a hundred caps, a bullet mold, and a half pound of powder. I can find lead in most any place: Fort Caspar; one of the telegraph stations; a stage stop on the Overland Trail; Fort Bridger; Virginia Dale; even Sweetwater Station or Camp Brown.”

  “Same problem with the Spencer rifle,” Parmelee said, looking thoughtful. “Carried one during the war. Even then sometimes supply didn’t have cartridges where you needed ’em. Heard that Sherman carried whole wagons full so’s he’d have enough for that march through Georgia.”

  “Notice you don’t carry one now.”

  Parmelee stared from under his hat brim. “I got a Henry with fifty-six cartridges.”

  “Twenty-eight. Half of them’s mine.”

  “You got a Sharps. You can find powder and lead anywhere.”

  Billy grinned and tossed him the cartridge. “There, I give you that one. Makes twenty-nine you got now.”

  “We come out of these hills, End-of-the-Tracks is just yonder in the flats. You ever been to End-of-the-Tracks? It’s a whole town they set out for the railroad workers. Saloons, stores, whores, gambling, hot-cooked food. Then, when the rails move on so far, they pick it up. Even the boardwalks. Haul it another twenty or so miles down the line and set it all back up again.”

  “So why are you figuring we need to go there?”

  Parmelee gave him a flat look across the fire. “Money. Or you got something hid out I don’t know about?”

  Billy nodded thoughtfully. Parmelee had been a right fine traveling companion. He didn’t ask prying questions. Didn’t offer much about himself. His only explanation for the hanging party was that the Virginia City vigilantes had heard he’d raped two women in Colorado. Then he’d dryly admitted he’d never been made a Freemason. It being well-known that the vigilance committee was run out of the local blue lodge.

  Riding cross-country as they had, Billy had shot most of the meals, using his flour and salt sparingly for biscuits. But that was mostly gone now. Even then, he’d never hinted that he had money hidden away in the lining of his buffalo coat. The heavy coat now rode folded atop the packsaddle, looking like anything but a bank.

  “How do you figure to get money?” Billy asked as he tossed another pine branch onto the fire.

  “My considered opinion of you, Billy Hancock, is that you’re a man who don’t mind busting a few heads if it will advance your cause in the world. In this case, getting us en
ough of a stake to see us back to Denver.”

  “And how’s this supposed to work?”

  Parmelee studied him across the fire. “At End-of-the-Tracks the gambling hells are big tents. The games run all night. Latrines are dug out back. The play works for one night. I go in and keep watch, playing occasionally at the tables. You wait in the darkness out by the jakes. When I spot a winner, he’ll have to piss eventually. I follow him out, which is your sign to step up behind him. As he’s draining his johnson, you sap him. Meanwhile, I’m back inside where I can be seen. You tug his sorry hide into the dark, bind and gag him, and relieve him of the cash. A couple of hours before dawn, we’re off down the rails where we don’t leave tracks. When we find some rocky ridge, we cut away across country.”

  “The railroad just lets folks get away with this? Ride in, break heads, rob, and ride out?”

  Parmelee grinned through his beard. “I used to be a provost. I know how they think. They’ll figure first that it was someone in End-of-the-Tracks. One of the locals who knows the layout. Most likely a johnny who lost at the tables, owes someone, and needs money fast to pay off. That two strangers rode in from Montana, gave it to four or five guys in the neck, and rode out for Denver in the same night? Sure, possible, but that’s pretty far-fetched.”

  “What’s in Denver?” Billy resettled himself, glancing over his shoulder to where Locomotive cropped the short high-country grasses.

  “Payback for a whore.”

  “This is the one you said stole your house?”

  “Her and her backers.” Parmelee finished his stitching and inspected it in the firelight. “I’ve listened to you talking in your sleep, Billy Hancock. I know you don’t have no special love for whores.”

  Billy ground his teeth, studying Parmelee through slitted eyes, but the older man didn’t seem to want to make anything of it.