The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  “When blooming youth is snatch’d away!”

  HENRY JAMES STOVALL

  1855–1889

  In the 34 year of his age.

  “Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”

  Not Judah. She was leaving tomorrow morning on the next stage. To please her father, she would marry the mayor, but first she would go home to her son. She needed to feel the weight of him, his damp head in the crook of her arm.

  “We should all concentrate on our most pressing question with loving reverence,” said Miss Ada.

  Did she who could not believe in Heaven have a question? Emmeline crossed and uncrossed her legs, resisting the urge to kick. Did there exist a persistent, incorporeal presence hungry and blind and monotonous as hate, one neither wholly living or dead who by being neither was cursed to wander with eternal incomprehension of both? When death came did that which animated dissolve back into the earth, or was there some union of energy wherein some shape or rather in no shape she would be with them again? Or did the straining and longing and recoiling of this life beget nothing but a silence beyond notsound? Why did this frowsy woman not weighing a hundred pounds fetid with camphor insist on trumpeting her talent of conjuring demon or angel or humbug?

  Heat soaked Emmeline’s neck like a rash, sweat itching her scalp. She should say she was too hot but she shouldn’t interrupt. Well and if it got worse she—

  She was kneeling in a graveyard. The stone slab that covered the length of a coffin was cracked, shards of granite caved in. From the oak trees around her, music was playing: fiddles and brass, the clap of boots stamping, as if somewhere there were dancing.

  “Emme?”

  She heard a cough.

  “Henry?”

  He cleared his throat. “I can’t see a damned thing.”

  She reached through the hole and through the dark, braying and sweet, she saw Henry’s discolored face, a moving bruise under his eyes. “You’ve come back—” She crushed herself in him. “I just want to be with you,” she said into his beard. “I just have to. I can’t be without you. I don’t want to, Henry!”

  “Sweet girl,” he said but she could not see his tongue move.

  “If I die, will I get to be with you?” She kissed him and he tasted of sour earth. “You have come for me, haven’t you?” She held his face in her hands, memorizing the ruin of eyes notblue.

  He shook as if swimming up to her. “I don’t want you to worry, darlin. He’s with me now.”

  “Who? Caleb? Judah?”

  She heard a noise and looked up. It was as if she were at the bottom of a well. Two faces peered down at her through a tunnel, a man and a woman whom she did not know. They seemed so urgent—shouting for her, though she did not know what they wanted, who they were, or now who she was, but that there was something of where they were which vaguely had to do with her, whoever she was. In this paralyzed musing she found herself, regardless of having made no decision, materializing into the room where they were, into the rolling furnace of a body which was hers.

  “Emmeline, Emmeline” they insisted until she knew her name.

  She lay in the dark on a sofa, the candles having gone out. Mayor Gibson and Miss Ada were bent over her, fanning her, holding up smelling salts. She burst into tears. The silence, that black halo of notsound, had left her.

  Emmeline slept into the next afternoon. It was almost sundown when she woke in a daze, everything tilted, the sun crackling like light rain through leaves. She thought she was in her bedroom in Mississippi hearing a baby cry in the next room. Standing, the blood roared oversweet in her ears. She saw the sealed letter on the dresser. She went to the nightstand, rinsing the sulfur from her mouth, and picked up her Bible, a wedding gift from Henry, as neither her mother nor her father had ever seen fit to give her one. But she set it back down between a bottle of perfume and her pincushion, placing the pipe that had been Henry’s on its cover, and again washed her mouth. She could not taste clean.

  On the balcony with the letter, the town went quiet and forgotten.

  Leaving off her veil, she stumbled down to the thoroughfare. At the window of a dance hall, she watched a man two-stepping with a tawny whore and everything in her body went incredulous with ache and she knew herself to be that little girl standing outside her father’s brothel, looking in the window at her glazed sharp mother tendering up her soft impervious breasts, manufacturing ardor for the men sore and mean with desire and her father at the glass saying No you cannot come in.

  The men and the whores had turned to stare. She was beating the window with her fists until she heard her left hand break. Then she ran through the streets until First Street, north until she reached the treeless graveyard. There, she found her mother’s grave in the older section, buried under piles of stones the same as the bandits.

  LILLIE FERRIS

  1840–1874

  “Sleep on now, and take your rest.”

  Cradling her aching hand, Emmeline knelt on the cracked dirt before her mother’s wooden marker. “You were never like a mother . . . But I’m sorry,” she cried, “I am. But now Judah’s gone where do I go? I can’t go back but I can’t stay.”

  “M’am.”

  A young man’s voice in the falling arrested dark.

  “Do y’see this here? This is my younger brother. You might look at me and think well he musta been mighty young. He was, an my mamma charged me with his keeping but I guess I did not keep him.”

  She refused to turn to him—to the constant anonymous need of the world.

  “I didn’t even kill him like Cain did Abel. Naw, I did nothing but carry him until he died right there in my arms.”

  She felt him pressing the empty space behind her and itched with a violent grim frustration.

  “It shoulda been me or Virgil or Jim. Christ, it’s hard.”

  If she were to die here, if this man were to kill her now, what would be etched on her grave?

  “Look at me, lady, I ain’t bad-looking. Goddammit, I was accounted handsome back in Carolina.”

  Not dead but gone on before?

  “Hey.” His hand on her shoulder. “I swore I ain’t gonna pay for it ever again after that.”

  Asleep in Jesus?

  He pulled her. “I could use some comfort.”

  Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

  “Ain’t this is an old grave? Why you still wearing black?” The young man stood over her drinking from a bottle of rye in the stain of the abating twilight.

  She was silent then said, “I’m a widow. This is my mother’s grave.”

  His hand went down her arm. “Did you love him?”

  Her mind’s eye passed through as many images of Judah as it could conjure until he was a sleeping infant across her lap with his thin, perfect skin and lightly open mouth.

  “Yer husband,” he said, turning the diamond ring on her wedding finger. “The one yer widowed from.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you’re gonna marry again?” He would not let go her hand. “I reckon you ought not.”

  “What then would you propose?”

  “Honor the memory of the dead like I’m gonna.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I’m gonna murder the son of a bitch who kilt my little brother. Me, ma’am? I’m a thorough cutthroat.”

  “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Would you have enough? Of the rye?”

  “Would it be fittin?”

  Her smile was bitter, brief. “You sir, have never been a delicately bred female at the mercy of her father.”

  He let her take the bottle and asked with anxious subjection, “Do I seem ugly to you?”

  “How can I say when most of you is hiding under that beard.”

  He stared down at her mother’s grave. “How did she pass?”

  “She was a whore. How ever do they all pass?”

  “Lillie Ferris. She related to Zebediah Ferris?”

  “He’s my fath
er,” she said and sweat parted down her back.

  The young man seized her wrist and the bottle smashed at her feet. He dragged her to where shep morgan had been painted on a white post above a new grave. She was not afraid because it seemed to be happening so slowly.

  “Why’d he have to shoot him?” He shook her. “It were an accident. Cause Shep—Shep he weren’t the swaggering type. Not like the rest of us, you see?”

  He shook her until she laughed. “Do I see?” she said.

  He threw her away from him. “He was jest turned fourteen.”

  “A boy.”

  “Why’d he do it then?”

  “Don’t you know how men do?” she asked.

  “I know how men die,” he said.

  “So do I,” she said and began to walk away.

  He went to her again, blocking her path. She stopped and her face hollowed with ache.

  “I’m gonna kill your father. That offend you?” he enunciated this as if through her he could reach the ears of that man.

  “Why should it? Very little is likely to offend me. I have spent a good amount of time among countless examples of intoxicated humanity.”

  “You think I am that?”

  “I suppose you must be born astray like all other men. You’ve come of age in a time rife with fearmongering. But Henry always said that I could not fully know, being born a woman, and perhaps I don’t, but then being I am on the outside perhaps I can see it all.”

  Because he too was a prisoner of the fragile flesh, because it would be a quick chaos that in its intricate burn would hold still time, because she could, she asked: “Would you lie with me?”

  He seemed to try and outright laugh, sifting the voice that had spoken to him amongst all the other voices that had ever spoken. “You jest ask me to fuck? For a fact?” He was trembling, peering at the flat land, the backs of the buildings. “Out here?”

  She stepped close enough to inspect the freckles across his sunburnt nose, the coarse twist of his red hair. He looked hungry, decorous, and young—far younger than she.

  “Ain’t you pledged to marry?”

  “I’ve decided to take your advice.” She began unbuttoning the neck of her dress.

  His fingers trailed hers helplessly. “What’d I advise?”

  “To honor death.”

  She led him to an open space between the graves. He took off his coat and made a bed in the dust, punching it soft.

  “Is that comfortable?”

  She laid back, pushing her head in the folds of his coat and feeling the ground’s retreating heat. He looked away as she bunched up her skirts.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He took off his hat and knelt between her legs, dogged and secret. “Do we—what’s your name?”

  “Emmeline,” she said, unbuckling his pants and helping him to angle inside.

  Above them, a hot wind dissolved into the dark.

  Recognition

  When I saw her instantly I felt that I had known her before. We smiled at each other across the small ballroom. The lift of her eyebrows, the look in her eyes—why else would she have smiled? She knew me as well. Yet I couldn’t place her, couldn’t remember a woman with red hair, and when I weaved my way to where she was standing by the crudité, she had vanished.

  I took another glass of wine from a passing server, vaguely surprised she hadn’t waited. Then one of the experts who had been on that afternoon’s panel beckoned to me, demanding to know what I made of his ludicrous theory about the recent discovery of the bodies. I made some hackneyed excuse and slipped away. Of course, he only wanted to compare my work with his, in hopes that I felt my theories were being threatened, which would validate his feeble cogitations. If it weren’t for the opportunity to tour the dig, I wouldn’t even entertain sequestering myself in a roomful of small, tedious men in such a far-flung place.

  On the second floor, I stood at the window of this unconvincing attempt of a hotel and looked out at the primordial red mesa with its vertical layers of white and red sandstone and the unquenchable man-made desert spreading at its feet. I went to the desk, scanning my notes from the panel, unable to contemplate even outlining my article on submerged sectarian movements. Nor could I imagine how logging the panel’s pedantic minutiae would add anything substantial to my book. For a moment, I longed to be back in that wonderful period of productive isolation two years ago where I kept myself alive on dried cranberries. But inspiration would have to wait until I viewed the dig in the morning. I was, after all, the unofficial guest of honor.

  I slipped off my shoes and lay on top of the duvet, musing instead about the red-haired woman. Brown freckles, green eyes, a round face, lushly pretty—none of that struck me as familiar. What I recognized was located in her expression, her smile. If only I could have heard her voice, I felt certain I would’ve been able to place her. I went idly through a few names, students I’d had, colleagues I’d dated, but no. I yawned. It wouldn’t do to stay up obsessing over a nameless woman when I needed to be at my sharpest in the morning. I resolved to find her during tomorrow’s antiquated complimentary breakfast.

  As I rolled onto my side, the generator kicked off. The room went fatally dark and heat crept in. I sat bolt upright. Through the window, I fancied I could make out the dig’s floodlights, rows of small tents glowing in the night. But indeed, that was impossible—it was much too far away.

  It was getting hotter and the blasted windows didn’t open. I peeled off my blazer and unbuttoned my shirt, feeling the breath starting to stack in my chest. I took a sip of rainwater from the glass on the bedside table and could distinguish voices in the hall, then the generator clicked into rhythm and there was a wash of cold air, light.

  In the morning, I woke hours before breakfast and wandered the hotel’s maroon lobby wondering why it had been done in a style contemporary fifty years ago. Saturated in mauve, gold and beige, it tried to exude the confidence of a gleaming sterility, simply unattainable in this day and age. The front desk was curiously unmanned, but I managed to scare up a cup of coffee and stepped outside, walking past the landscaped cacti. A valet getting into a jeep glanced at me. Guests weren’t supposed to venture beyond the drive without water or a guide. Or a gun, some said, as if the doomers still eking out an existence here were lurking, violently resentful at our curiosity. But it was the desert itself that offered hostility. Particularly, the man-made desert. Or that was my perspective on radically consumed spaces. Bibb’s advocating for a return to fear, was what my detractors said. A gallingly shallow misreading of my work, but I was used to it, and what was wrong with a healthy dose of fear? If one feared the right thing, that was.

  I went back in for a refill and when I returned, I came upon the red-haired woman standing alone at the edge of the drive, a conference brochure in hand. As I approached, she turned and I said, “You look familiar.”

  She stared at me with her rather wide eyes and precise gaze, and I was oddly reminded that some female spiders eat their mates after copulation.

  “It’s not a line,” I told her.

  Then she laughed and seemed softer, with a hint of the maternal. “You really don’t remember?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.” I smiled. “Lee Bibb.” I put out my hand.

  She took it, holding rather than shaking it. “Sydney Martin. But that’s my married name. We knew each other before that.”

  Married. For some unfathomable reason I was instantly depressed, though we had never dated, I was peculiarly sure of it.

  “I’m divorced now,” Sydney said as if reading my mind. “Well separated, it’s almost finalized. I’ve kept my married name. I’ve had it so long. I got married very young.” This last sentence took her away and I too began to picture her very young, though I could make out gray coming in at her temples.

  “Did we know each other in school? I think I’d remember if I knew you at university.”

  “No, even before that.” She smiled, quite mischievous now.
>
  I was thoroughly mystified. Could she have been as far back as the orphanage? My time there was relatively misty, and for a smattering of months, utterly blank. Not to imply I had been mistreated, neglected would be a better word. However, anyone could’ve read the details of my experience in one of my interviews. Perhaps we’d never met. Perhaps her name wasn’t even Sydney.

  “I presume this is what brought you?” I gestured to the photograph of the dig on the front of her brochure.

  “Isn’t it what brought everybody?” she said, managing not to sound flippant, and we both looked in the direction of the dig with a kind of reverence.

  “It is a rare discovery,” I said. “Perfectly preserved bodies apparently.”

  “They knew it would happen to them,” she said in a positively dreamy tone.

  I glanced at her half-closed eyes and was slightly repelled. “They had warnings certainly. There’d actually been a storm the week before, not of that magnitude, but still formidable.”

  To start, the community had consisted of three families who wanted to live off the grid after the war: the Corbins, Wilkes, and Ashes. Together, they bought the semiarid land dirt cheap, set up tents, and began gardening and building homes, believing they’d gotten a bargain, unaware that the land, which had long been scalped and plugged with pesticides, was turning into a desert.

  In the beginning, there was enough in the water table to hold a lawn, some trees, and eventually they set up solar panels to harness the sun. Apparently, it was Dale Corbin who first sought to move away from the alternative homesteader ideals they’d loosely nourished and opened up the community to moneyed families who wanted to escape but had a nostalgic longing for playgrounds, pools, and paved roads. For Corbin, it turned out that the community was less about religion or sovereignty or major collapse as it was a way to realize a suburban utopia.

  After fifteen years, there were forty-seven people. In thirty-five, there were close to two hundred souls. But by then, the water they could barely afford was no longer for sale. It was a matter of time before the land dried out. Most decamped, but those who stayed evidently became more fanatical. Though to be fair, there weren’t many places that would’ve willingly let them in. In the end, it was reported that there were roughly thirty-six people left—plus or minus a child.