Death Ground

by Ed Gorman

  He reached down and put his hand beneath the buffalo robes and took her wrist, frail as a flower stem, and felt for a pulse. Faintly, he felt one.

  “You do what you said you was goin’ to?” he said to the granny woman.

  The woman was nervous now. At one time Kriker had had a wife and son, the story went, and they took sick from milk that had not been put far enough down the well for keeping. A doc was brought from the closest town. Kriker’s wife and son died anyway. That night the doc was found on the stage trail back to town. His eyes had been dug out with just the sort of knife you’d cut up squirrels with. A sheriff had come out and there had been an investigation and all of the local newspapers had run angry editorials about Harry Kriker and all the things he had been suspected of over the years, but as usual Kriker and the encampment went on. The doc was buried with a mask over his eyes.

  Obviously the granny woman thought of the doc now as she rose, her old knees cracking, and said, “I give her the rattlesnake.”

  “The heart?”

  “The heart.”

  “And nothin’ more?”

  “And nothin’ more.”

  “Then why the hell’s she still sick? You said it would work.”

  Her worn brown eyes grew evasive. “I said it might take a day or two.”

  All his life Kriker had trusted granny women. He had been raised in the hills, and in the hills you did not trust docs because when you did your wife and your son died. But granny women knew things docs didn’t know at all. How to get rid of birthmarks by rubbing the marks for three days against the hand of a newly dead corpse; how to get rid of whooping cough by putting the cougher’s neck through a horse collar three times; and how to cure bedwetting—this as a last resort if beating the child didn’t work—by feeding the child the hind legs of a rat fried just so.

  Granny women knew all about these things.

  Yet this granny woman, Sadra, had been working with the girl now three days and the girl was only getting worse.

  Sadra said, “It ain’t like she’s your kin.”

  Kriker raised angry eyes to her. Nobody in the settlement understood. Three years ago he’d held up a stage and the men he’d been with had been too full of fear to go gentle. Driver and passengers had all been killed—except for the girl. They’d wanted to kill her, too, but Kriker had said, no, he would take her back to the encampment. The girl had become his life. When in town he bought her dresses. When in the timber he cut her rattlesnakes and gave her their rattle as toys. He fed her, he sang to her mountain songs in his sure strong voice, and he cradled her when she became afraid of the lightning and thunder of summer storms.

  Yet never once in the three years had the girl said a word. He saw in the blue of her eyes that her life had stopped somehow when she’d seen her parents shot to death on the stage road that day, and that no pretty dress or gentle mountain song could ease those blue eyes.

  And so he simply revered her.

  He slept on a hide cot next to her, and he brought her her meals, and on a day he designated as a birthday he brought her something new and shiny from town.

  But she never thanked him, of course. She just sat huddled in the corner of the soddie and watched him, though mostly she seemed to be looking at something no one but she could see.

  He told her of the flowers and how they smelled and how you could hold them like infants; and he told her of the mountain streams and how pure and cold the water was; and he told her of how animals could be more loyal and trustworthy friends than human beings ever could, and that was why there was no pleasure in killing animals but sometimes there was pleasure in killing human beings.

  He told her all of these things many times—this big hairy shaggy man that judges all over the Territory were just waiting to hang—told her in the soft voice he used to use with his wife and son…and she didn’t hear.

  Or didn’t seem to, anyway.

  And now she lay ill and he feared the worst and his voice grew threatening with the granny woman.

  He stood up. “I got to go see the priest.” He nodded to the bed. “You take care of this girl, hear? I want her up on her feet before tomorrow.”

  He leaned down and kissed the girl on the forehead.

  “You hear me, granny woman?”

  The threat was clear.

  The granny woman nodded and he left.

  If you stood on one of the smaller sand hills and looked into the valley below, you saw it, the settlement of sixteen soddies, with a cleared common square for meetings and children. To the east, near the stream, was where the slaughtering was done, usually by the men. The cows were knocked out and then stabbed though the breast and then bled, this blood becoming blood meal for fertilizer. Then each carcass was cut in half, right down the spine, then into quarters. Tanners in town bought the hides, with hooves and horns going to the glue factory. Even the offal was used, for tankage. This was men’s work, of course.

  The women did not want to do this kind of work, but it was about the only kind of work they did not do. They did candle making, knitting, weaving, soapmaking, spinning, herding, milking, wood carrying, planting, and harvesting (there was a woman named Beulah who could drive a team of ten oxen). The married women bore children and the young girls stockpiled clothes and skills as part of their trousseaus. A woman who could do heavy fieldwork, for example, was looked on just as fondly as a beauty.

  This then was the settlement, and it had been this settlement for ten years now, ever since Kriker had first come here on the run from a shoot-out in Montana. He had cleared the trees and made his peace with those Indians who had yet to drift to the drab reservations constructed by the Yankees. He had also invited the rabble who made up the settlement, “rabble” because the first generation here was much like Kriker himself: thieves and counterfeiters and arsonists and killers. They had come to escape prison or the treachery of streets in Chicago or St. Loo or Toronto.

  They had come because Kriker had told them that they could establish a settlement and raise everything they needed to feed and clothe themselves, and it had been a wonderful ringing dream delivered in Kriker’s pulpitlike oratory. So they had come, in rags and tatters, men of rage and melancholy, women without virtues or loyalty, and even though at first many of them deserted, returning to the familiar filth of the cities, enough of them stayed that the settlement prospered and those who stayed were transformed from rubble into human beings with purpose and dignity. The first corn came up and blackbirds had to be chased off; wild strawberries were picked in June and grain yellow as gold was toted in smoky September; and the women, the tireless ceaseless women, found that butter and eggs fetched good prices for a mere day’s buckboard ride into town.

  The settlement was born and grew and prospered, and the first generation bore a second generation. Now, as he thought of all this, the priest had only one regret—that, ironically, the man responsible for all this had not himself changed.

  Kriker.

  His rage had been too deep somehow, his ways too instinctive and reckless, for even the accomplishment of the settlement to calm him.

  And so only a month ago, they had struck a bargain, the priest and Kriker.

  Kriker would be involved in one more robbery and then he would take his part of the proceeds and take the little girl and he would leave the settlement. Forever.

  The people here were tired of being afraid of Kriker, and tired of being afraid that he would someday be responsible for the destruction of the settlement he had helped build.

  Father Healy stood now as Kriker came up the small sand hill toward him. The day was raw. Kriker huddled into his sheepskin. He carried his carbine, as always.

  Behind Kriker everything was gray. The grass and foliage were barren with winter. Smoke from chimneys curled from the roof of each cabin. The cows huddled together in the lean-to next to a long line of scrub oaks forming a windbreak.

  Kriker said, “She ain’t no better.”

  The priest could see t
ears in Kriker’s eyes.

  The priest sighed. “I’m sorry, Kriker.”

  “The granny woman even give her the rattlesnake heart.”

  The priest felt Kriker studying him. He knew that his disbelief in the granny woman’s ways angered Kriker. “The girl needs a doctor.”

  Kriker hefted his carbine. “You ain’t bringin’ no doc out here, you understand?”

  Carefully, for this was the first time the priest had said anything about the subject to anyone in the settlement: “There’s a possibility we’ve got a problem on our hands.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Other people are getting sick, too.”

  Kriker stared at him. “Like Maundy?”

  “Just like Maundy.”

  “Maybe it’s somethin’ we eat. Meat maybe.”

  “Meat doesn’t make people sick this way.” The priest pulled himself to full height, about five-eight. Inside his dusty black cassock, he was a chunky man with white hair and blue eyes. Inexplicably, there was a knife scar just below his left ear. Nobody in the settlement could ever remember seeing a priest with a knife scar before. But the priest stayed and nobody asked questions. Given the background of the settlement itself, questions were kept to a minimum.

  “We need a doctor,” the priest said.

  Kriker shook his head, waved his rifle at the encampment below. “By mornin’ the granny woman will have Maundy fixed up and then we can travel. Two men are stoppin’ by in the mornin’ and then Maundy and I will be gone.”

  “Two men?” There was recrimination in the priest’s voice. “I thought we had an agreement. We abide by the law here now, Kriker. That’s why Sheriff Decker leaves us alone.”

  Kriker grinned. “Sheriff Decker. If he only knew.”

  “What sort of men are these?”

  “Just the sort of men you’d expect me to be with, Father. Just that sort exactly.”

  “We can’t afford trouble.” The priest added, “You were part of it, weren’t you?”

  “Part of what?”

  “You know what. That bank robbery in town.”

  “I needed a stake. For me and Maundy. We’re headed west.”

  “You should find that girl a good family and leave her be.”

  Kriker’s anger was quick and startling, and in it the priest could see the mountain-man ferocity that had made Kriker so frightening both in fact and in legend. He grabbed the priest by the shoulder and said, “I lost my real child and now all I’ve got is Maundy. A man ain’t nothin’ without his offspring. Nothin’. You understand me?”

  He let the priest go.

  The gray clouds, promising snow in the west, lay like fog on the tops of the pines in the mountains surrounding them. The wind was cold enough to make the priest’s cheeks red.

  “Them men are gonna be here, and then we’re gonna split the money, and then they’re gonna go one direction and me and Maundy’s goin’ another,” Kriker said, “and then the settlement’s all yours. You do anything you like with it.”

  This was Kriker’s way of making peace after he had lost his temper. He never apologized. He merely made his voice gentler.

  “You understand, Father?”

  “I understand.”

  “You say some prayers for Maundy, too, you hear?”

  “I will, Kriker. I will.”

  Kriker nodded and then returned to the settlement below, leaving the priest to think of the symptoms he’d encountered in the settlement the past few days, and of the word he hadn’t heard since a single terrible spring a decade or so ago in St. Louis when 4,500 people had died of the same disease.

  The word held unimaginable power for being such a simple few syllables.

  Cholera.

  Chapter Seven

  It was land of ugly beauty, scoria buttes rising into rounded hills of red volcanic rock, hard ground littered with buffalo skulls bleached white by sun and now made even whiter by the snow that blew in the harsh northeasterly wind. Then there was the endless tireless prairie, untold miles of it, brown grass, the rusted ribs of deserted Conestoga wagons, and then an area of alkali desert and sagebrush spiny cactus, dead as a man’s worst fear of what lay beyond death. Two emaciated magpies fed here on the fetid meat of a gangrened deer, and thin little creeks were already frozen in the gray twenty-degree afternoon weather that continued lashing the three riders with sticky blasts of wet snow.

  They rarely spoke, James riding a grulla several lengths away, Thomas Bruckner and Guild back a ways, staying within a pace of each other. Obviously neither man wanted the other behind him with a gun.

  They stopped once to ride down into a gulley where they ate salt pork, beans, and bread, and drank water by kicking in a membrane of ice and scooping up creek water. Wind was trapped in here and it had a frightening majesty, chafing their faces, whistling off the volcanic rock that dinosaurs had once prowled. Still, they talked very little. Guild said, “How you planning to do this?”

  “We’re gonna go in at night and surprise him,” Thomas Bruckner said. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t see any reason to shoot him.”

  “He killed two men, didn’t he?”

  Guild said, “Did he?”

  “That supposed to mean something?”

  Guild said nothing. He went back to his mount and adjusted the bedding he carried, and the oilskin coat in case things got very bad, and a small waterproof bag for personal things, among which was a picture of the little girl. He wasn’t sure why he carried it. Once a priest had advised him to tear it up, but when Guild had tried he couldn’t. It rode with him everywhere.

  According to Guild’s Ingram it was 3:18 when they started riding again.

  They found the Indian just before nightfall.

  At first they weren’t sure what it was. The prairie, flat, without detail, played more tricks than a desert. A man could look a quarter mile off and see something, and then before he reached it it would change apparent shape half a dozen times.

  But they saw birds, crows and magpies mostly, and they didn’t have to wonder much here in the now-drifting snow what it was. It might be a mule or a plump rabbit, but whatever it was it was most certainly flesh of some kind or the birds would not be here on the grasses. Light faded now, and everything on the ground was becoming white, and Guild’s cheeks were red and numb and so he pulled a red bandanna robber-style across his face.

  At least there was no smell, he thought, when they reached what proved to be the Indian.

  He’d been an old man, gray-haired, toothless. The birds had eaten out his eyes and a part of his mouth and some of his belly.

  Guild hefted his double 10-gauge with one gloved hand and shot at the birds to scare them off. There was no sense killing them. They were birds and they did what birds did and you could not judge them otherwise.

  Thomas Bruckner raised his rifle and began firing, too.

  It took Guild a moment, there in the dusk, to realize what Bruckner was shooting at.

  Not the birds but the dead man.

  He put four bullets in the dead Indian’s forehead and then he laughed, “Sumbitch.” He looked back to his burn-faced brother. “Indian sumbitch.”

  The Indian lay there in his garish rags, the kind white men gave red men on reservations. No telling what he’d been doing out here or what had killed him. Could have been anything from a heart attack to simply stumbling and cracking his skull.

  “No call for that, Thomas,” James Bruckner said. There was weariness and a certain resentment in his voice. “He’s already dead.”

  Thomas Bruckner put one more bullet into the dead man. “Yeah,” he said. “But he ain’t dead enough.” He looked at Guild.

  They rode on to the settlement.

  As they rode, James Bruckner kept thinking of how his brother had shot the dead man back there. He had started twitching, James had, the way he always twitched when his brother did something like this.

  The way he had started twitching when, as smal
l boys, Thomas had doused his little brother in kerosene and then thrown a match.

  “Not near as bad as it could have been,” the circuit doc had said, complimenting the missus on applying wet tea leaves to the boy. “Not as bad as it could have been. He didn’t die.”

  But there were different ways to die, of course. You died when people laughed at you and pointed. You died when you knew you would never hold any but a housebought woman.

  There were a lot of different ways to die.

  The sounds of his brother’s rifle still echoed in his brain, as did his own screams from years ago when his brother had poured kerosene on him.

  He tilted the brim of his hat lower.

  The snow was getting bitter.

  And he was still twitching, one involuntary spasm after another, a sight ugly in his own eyes as the leathery patch of burned skin covering half his cheek.

  Chapter Eight

  By Guild’s Ingram it was 8:07 P.M. when they reached the top of the barren hill below which sprawled the valley where the settlement, in summer, yielded its bounty.

  The noon was round and silver and alien. The tired horses crunched the icy earth and snorted wearily. Blowing snow was an off-white sheet covering everything, even the deep jet shadows cast by the jagged volcanic rock. Wind came like unearthly song down the mountains and across the silver shine of creek and the grassy cradle of cultivated land where only a month ago wheat yellow as gold had been scythed. But now there was just the wind and the rock and the three men sitting on their horses, staring at the settlement below.

  Guild, leaning forward in his saddle, jerked the double 10-gauge from its scabbard. This was the surprise he’d been waiting to visit on the Bruckners ever since last night and the deaths of Rig and you Kenny Tolliver.

  He put the double 10-gauge right to the burned part of James Bruckner’s face and said, “I’ll kill you right here if you don’t both throw down your guns.”

  “What the hell you doin’, Guild?” Thomas Bruckner said.

  Into the wind, Guild said, “The way I read all this, you killed Rig and Tolliver so you could get your share of the bank money.”