Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Warren Groves could not bring himself to speak over Annie’s grave. He looked at the mountains for a long time and listened to the sobbing of the train families and the murmur and grunt of the laboring soldiers and the sound the wind made high up when there was nothing but people and crosses to blow over and around. Warren never was a man of fine words and he couldn’t find any that suited what he felt.

  Small fingers slid into his palm and Warren found Libby Cole standing beside him with her dark hair blowing and lashing against his arm. Her eyes were struck with tears and she was looking at the box filled with Annie.

  “Annie rode into Spark back when I was hardly a lady,” said Libby. “Weren’t no words from the Good Book or testifying to be done to me. Her friend, the one who fell sick, she tried all that. Annie just told me God made up His mind about me whatever I did, and I ought look beyond where I was and find a happiness and a goodness here on this earth, and I told her I believed she was right.

  “But I didn’t. I thought she was full of it. And I asked her later for some money. I told her it was to buy a church dress, and she gave it to me right then and took my hand and said she was giving it to me because she knew it would do good. And I bought me some morphine and shot it all up that very night. Just about killed myself.

  “I did not wake up for nine days and would have died if Annie hadn’t’ve called on me the next morning and took me to Doc Carson. I was in his tent for a whole week unconscious, and Annie had so many people she was helping then, she had to ask folks she knew, and on account of she was friends with the sheriff, she asked a man named Pat Cole to take care of me.

  “I can’t say I owe Annie a lot. That ain’t enough by half. I owe her most everything I am now. Only she wouldn’t say that. She’d tell me God always planned it and it was God that had her give me that money and God that nearly killed me shooting morphine into my arm. I will go on believing it was Annie’s doing. Bless her soul. I know she’s with God now.”

  Libby threw a bouquet of white and lavender wildflowers down into the grave. “Good-bye, Annie.” Libby gave Warren’s hand a squeeze.

  “Good-bye, Annie,” Warren said. It was enough.

  Felix and the Negroes stayed and helped him shovel earth into the grave until the coffin was covered up and the dirt was piled in a mound over her body. When he was through he shook each man’s hand and thanked them. He found Libby waiting for him by the gate to the cemetery.

  “Thank you for what you said,” Warren said. “I was—”

  Libby slapped him hard enough to take off his hat and turn his head. He began to recover and she slapped him again even harder than the first time and his cheek bore a scarlet mark where she struck him.

  “You low-down animal,” Libby said.

  “I’m sorry about Pat—”

  “This ain’t about my husband.” Libby’s face contorted in anger and grief. “You left her to die, Warren. Alone. And you’ll have to live with that. But damn you to hell for what you done with that baby. If you ever, in your life, ever, was a man at all, you’d get that little girl and you’d bring her back.”

  “You ain’t gonna change my mind on the matter.” Giving up the child weighed on him but it did not matter. He was set on his course for bloodshed and had no place left for tenderness.

  “You’re a damn fool and a coward.”

  “Might be those things. I wasn’t meant to raise a child on my own. I am for certain a killer and to that manner born,” said Warren. “I am not a good man. It was only Annie tempered me.”

  “God sees through them excuses,” she said.

  Warren looked her in the eye and considered if Elizabeth Cole should know. There was nobody else in the world who did. He slowly reached a hand into his trouser pocket and took out the black book tied up with a strap. He held it out to her, and she only reluctantly took it.

  “What is this?”

  “Open it to the first page,” Warren said.

  She unfastened the strap and opened the book. She squinted at the ink stains and childish scrawl on the first page.

  “December, 1853,” Libby read aloud.

  “That’s it.”

  Warren looked back at the mound of earth above his wife’s grave.

  “Abraham Nunn,” Libby read. “Piece of glass. What does this mean?”

  “It was the first time I took a life. I was a boy of ten or eleven when I wrote that name. I killed Abraham Nunn—I murdered Abraham Nunn—with a shard of green glass from a bottle of rye.”

  “Why?” said Libby.

  “He done some things. Some of them bad enough to be hanged for maybe, but that don’t change it. Wasn’t justice I was after. I just wanted to put a stop to him. He was drunk, and he was helpless. I sat on his chest, and I killed him with a piece of glass.”

  “My God, Warren. That’s ... you ain’t that man anymore. You’re a good man. You can be a father to that baby.”

  Warren took the book back from Libby and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “I’ve spent my life filling up that book. Writing red across twenty years. To give it meaning was why I joined the law. It was Annie who made it all right. Coming home to her, I always kept my accounts. I put down names that deserved it. Killers and violent men and men who done things to children.”

  “Does Pat know?”

  “He shouldn’t ever. He’s seen me write in that book, and that’s it. I never had cause to show it to him, and you know Pat ain’t the sort to pry.”

  “Who was Abraham Nunn?”

  Warren shook his head and walked past Libby. “I think I said enough already. If you ain’t convinced now, then you ain’t going to be.”

  The line of folk come to see the dead stretched beyond the cemetery gate and down the slope of Red Stem. Women and men in the line were weeping. Bored children played in the road. Franciscan Sisters walked the line, offering ladles of water to the folk sweltering in the afternoon heat. Libby followed Warren out of the cemetery and struggled with her bustle and crinolette and was quickly exhausting herself keeping pace with Warren’s long stride.

  “What did he do to you?” said Libby. “Who was he?”

  Libby’s bustle caught up on the cemetery fence. She was afraid of tearing it.

  “Who was he?” she said again.

  Warren saw Libby’s predicament. Hestopped and knelt in the scratch grass. He found the snag with his fingers and freed the green fabric of her skirt from the rusty hook of a nail. Libby’s hair was blowing into her face and she pushed it back and looked Warren in the eye when he stood.

  “Who was he to you?”

  “Nothing.” Warren paused and felt old things on the wind off the mountain, distant memories and voices long ago gone quiet. “My mother told me some trees grow from the soil straight and true, and some are brambles that prick your skin, and some bear poison fruit. Abraham Nunn was a poison tree. He shook his daughter till she died and buried her so shallow, the dogs dug her up.”

  The wind stung his eyes so Warren turned his face away from Libby.

  “He drank rye and beat his wife so that every day her face was swollen and changed. One night he came home broke from cards and fearsome drunk and put his fists to his wife until she lay still and didn’t breathe no more at all. No more songs from her. No more smiles. When he was asleep and snoring, I killed him. With a piece of green glass I killed him and set fire to his house. I killed my father.”

  Warren left Libby Cole by the swaying pickets of the cemetery fence. He fetched his horse from the stable and paid the boy who’d fed and watered it. Warren took from his bag a brace of pistols and he buckled them around his hips and climbed into his saddle. Before riding he examined the tin star from his pocket and looked at the word stamped in the metal. He felt the shape of it with his fingers.

  He let the star fall into the dust and did not look back to see it glittering in the road.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Something more than convenience, or the liquor poured down his neck, m
ade him use the red valise. He filled it up with the letters. Soft bundles, well-fingered, each envelope smelling like Annabelle at different points in time. There were ten, and each he knew like a favorite book, by the heaviness of it and the way the envelope was torn. He relived the brimming vault of sense and memory as each envelope passed into the dusty valise: begun hopeful, when they first encountered; becoming desperate when Warren entered her life, wistful; and finally hopeful again that she might abandon her lawman husband and run away with Gideon to Europe.

  These pages belonged in a book he would never author. Not now. He had so completely slipped the lasso of fate—mocked it, even—and here was his reward. Fate warning that if it was to be denied, it would claim another.

  He fed the last of the letters into the valise, and they lay above a pistol for which he had only one bullet. He pushed his chair against the wall and sat in it with the back of his head against the papered wall of rusted brown and gold.

  The window was open, curtains billowing in the hot wind, and the light that was colored scarlet by the curtain reminded Gideon of the crystal-lensed moon that had filtered into the esoteric cavern. Was that place real? He hardly believed it could be, yet he need only gaze into the mirror and see himself as he was long ago, not some overgrown old child living in his father’s home, but a young man fresh from England. Healed of scars and born again.

  And she no longer existed at all.

  Gideon made himself get up from the chair lest his own drunken inertia overtake him. He staggered to the writing desk again, opened the drawer he always locked with a key, and took out the lavender box. He could not look at it. He quickly snatched it up and shoved it into the valise. He put on a high-topped hat, denting its crown as he pushed it over his brow. He closed the bag and brought with him a bottle of Portuguese wine. The wax-sealed cork yielded to his teeth, and he spit the cork down the hallway, not caring who found it.

  Killing Father was so much less than he had expected. Adelaide was gone on some errand, and so he simply walked into the musty bedchamber and set about murdering Harlan Long. Father offered no resistance. He did not speak or cry out as Gideon’s hands found his throat. His eyes bulged. His pale face turned crimson. Even this was an irritation in its own way. There was no triumph in this act. Father seemed to smile mockingly up at Gideon until Gideon could not bear it, and he took a heavy down pillow and smothered Father beneath it.

  Father fought weakly in his last moments. Perhaps some animal instinct overwhelmed his nihilistic good humor. Gideon overcame the thrashing limbs and leaned heavily on the pillow until all movement ceased. When he was sure Father was dead, he fell back into an overstuffed chair and held the pillow to his chest. He looked at the black-eyed faces of his ancestors staring out as mute witnesses to his patricide. He stared at Father. Dead Father. He waited for the desiccated husk that had tormented him all those years to rise from the bed and attack him.

  Adelaide came and screamed in horror. She through herself over Father’s legs and pounded her fists upon his withered body. She wailed, and she shouted for Gideon to fetch the doctor. He had no intention of doing so but fled because of the terrifying sorrow of the stoic nurse. It was an impossible explosion, like a tree bursting into flames. He recoiled from the very idea that anyone loved his Father. He fled. Snatched the bottle and fled.

  He left the house the way he had come and walked down the cobblestones, weaving back and forth, passing through the rusty gate and whistling haphazardly from one broken tune to the next. He ignored the gawking foundry workers and the whores calling out to him from the saloons. He stopped only to tip the bottle to his lips and let the warm, sweet wine overflow his mouth.

  The cemetery was crowded with muttering townsfolk, men in suits, Negro soldiers, and strangers come from Jessup or Las Cruces or wherever else people had waited hopefully for a train that never arrived. Gideon could tell that the men in suits were Pinkertons by their demeanor—the way they leaned in aggressively at the Army officers as though expecting subservience—already brought in by the railroad to find the men who had destroyed the train. He laughed and drank more wine, amused by how easily he could surrender himself to the hands of the Pinkertons.

  Not yet. He was not ready for the gallows. He passed the bottle of wine to a man who looked like he needed it and staggered past the queue into the cemetery. There were many fresh graves and more bodies being buried. The line of corpses on the ground hardly bothered his conscience. Gideon saw the dead arranged on the ground and looked at them as the victims of a terrible accident. He wasn’t guilty. His intent was never to harm or kill those on the train. Fate, not Gideon Long, had decided they needed to die.

  He knew few would see things his way, but he did not care. He was already punished as completely as could be and wished he had died out in the desert and never learned of Annabelle’s end.

  Gideon found that her fresh grave was marked with a simple wooden cross. It was carved with the name Annabelle Groves, though her name was, and would always be, Moraud. Annabelle Moraud. Born 1851, died 1874. She lay beneath the earth in the ripeness of womanhood, slain by the stranger Warren Groves, who sat terrible and alone at night, who was sheriff, who had shot Gideon in the belly and left him to die.

  Gideon tasted the acid of his anger. It was not the time for that. He dropped to his knees in the dirt and laid a hand on the mound of earth as though he might feel the beating of her heart. He let his fingers trail through the dust and then, with only his hands, began to dig a small hole atop the grave.

  When his digging penetrated a foot or so into the earth, he took the letters out from the valise, placed them into the hole, and hung his head.

  “I wish we could have done these things, Annabelle. I would have had my father’s business, everything sorted, and all the riches to show you the world. I ... I told you of Venice, its beauty at night, but it’s nothing... .”

  Tears dropped from his chin, and he hung his head even lower so that his nose nearly touched the mound of dirt. His lips pulled back from his gums, and his face was frozen in a silent, horrible sob. He sucked in the tears and the mucus and sat up, wiped at his eyes, and took the box from the valise.

  He took out the ring. Gold and diamonds. Worth more than enough to pay all his gambling and drinking debts. He would rather die than sell it, had only bought it two years ago during his trip to Paris. It was exquisite. A dozen diamonds from an Amsterdam Jew and a twisting serpent band of gold from the Galerie de Valois, handcrafted by Frederic Boucheron himself.

  He placed the ring atop the letters. It sparkled like water in moonlight.

  “For this ... I would have killed him,” Gideon whispered. “I will kill him.

  “Good-bye, Annie,” he said, and he filled in the shallow hole.

  Gideon stood up. The mountainside seemed to roll like the surface of the ocean, and he steadied himself. He took the pistol from the valise and stuck it into the waist of his trousers, the metal cold against his leg. He took a last look at where Annabelle would always be, and he departed. There was a curious smile on his face, the cold rapture of knowing that by night Sheriff Groves would fall before the smoke of his gun.

  Turk let Warren Groves into the sheriff’s office after the prisoners. Warren wrapped his fists in cloth and beat the men one at a time until they talked. He let his anger empty into his hands and pummeled face and body until each man spilled his story.

  The stories had different beginnings but the same characters appeared in each. An Indian dressed like a white man did the hiring and the paying. An old Union engineer named Eli McClelland instructed them to dig and plant explosives at the bridges of Bear Creek and Green Creek. He was dead.

  The boss of them all was a white man with wild black hair they called Mr. Wiley. He walked with a limp and had a brace on his leg that squeaked with each step. There was a man he instructed them to kill and then take his red bag. They spit blood through split lips and said Mr. Wiley was crazy.

  Warren left the cel
lar where they kept the prisoners. Turk met Warren in the hall and watched him unwind the bloody cloth from his knuckles.

  “Did you find what you need?” asked Turk.

  “I reckon I did,” said Warren.

  “The army intends to hang them all,” said Turk. “Soon. While the paper men from Santa Fe are here. If you have the heart you should have words with Mildenhall. Not all those boys have done the same evil.”

  “Not my concern,” said Warren. Turk shook his head with dismay.

  “You can’t just turn your gun on whoever did this,” said Turk.

  Warren ignored his friend. He discarded the bloody strips of cloth on the floor of the sheriff’s office. There was a man shouting like a fool out in the street. Warren shook his head at Turk and walked out into the night with a good idea of who needed sorting.

  “Sheriff Groves!” Gideon shouted from the road outside the sheriff’s office. “Sheriff Warren Groves!”

  It was darkened to dusk, but he could see men moving within the sheriff’s office. Pinkertons and uniformed men of the Army. Groves was sure to be inside holding court.

  “Groves, you coward, get out here!”

  A man stepped out of the office and into the street.

  Gideon recognized Sheriff Groves. He was hale and handsome, a veritable champion of the West, a spirit summoned to fit the scale of the country. He seemed as indefatigable as Gideon’s father. The sort of man who would wrestle mustangs down with only his hands and kill tigers with a pistol and outfight a savage, he was a conqueror.

  Warren Groves was in his suspenders and undershirt, sleeves rolled up to show tanned arms, and no badge in sight. His knuckles were raw and red. His eyes were blue, and his short blond hair was rearranged by the wind. He posed with his hands on his hips and looked at Gideon with naked contempt.