Death Ground

by Ed Gorman

  Three had died in the past half hour. The cholera, as cholera always did, struck swiftly. You got stomach cramps that literally threw you around and then you began vomiting and then your fever shot up and then you were dead. Sometimes all this could transpire within three hours, start to finish, and you’d be dead. In the Territory there was nothing like it. Nothing.

  Guild sat in the cabin where the girl had been. Kriker, still cuffed, sat in the chair across from him. Guild had his double 10-gauge in his lap.

  He said to Kriker, “Why not take the drink I offered?”

  “I need my mind clear.”

  “I’m going to handle the Bruckners, Kriker. Not you.”

  Kriker, curiously reserved the past twenty minutes, said, “You owe me that at least. For the little girl’s sake.”

  They stared at each other and then Guild said, “Maybe you’re right, Kriker. Maybe I do owe you that.”

  “I don’t know many men who’d steal a little girl.”

  “I guess I don’t, either.”

  “You should have seen her with this blue hair ribbon I bought her last spring.”

  “Pretty, I’ll bet.”

  “Real pretty.” Pause. “She could die, she’s so sick.”

  “She won’t die, Kriker. We’ll get her back. Just have some whiskey. We’ll hear from them soon.”

  Kriker said, his eyes tearing up again, “You ever have children?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, Kriker. I know just what you mean.” Guild thought about the little girl. He’d been tracking a man to a cabin and he’d seen a rifle glint inside the door and he’d raised his gun instinctively and fired. Then he’d seen that the person with the rifle had been a little girl. The wanted man had been her father, who had left her behind. The girl died right in front of Guild, right in the doorway. All he could do was watch, the way the blood bloomed on her chest, and then the soft clear childish tears there at the quick last. There’d been great outrage and a trial, but he had been found innocent although not once had he ever felt innocent. Which was why, even as a Lutheran, he so often went to Catholic church and confession. To rid his mind of her image, the little girl dying there before the cabin, the scent of pines ridiculously sweet that day, the sky ridiculously blue.

  “You aren’t going to have that whiskey, I am,” Guild said and got up and crossed the cabin floor and poured himself some bourbon. He had had maybe two fingers when the cabin door swung open and with it came icy snow and wind that cut knife sharp.

  Father Healy stood there, dazed. “Half the settlement’s down with cholera. Half the settlement.” He nodded to Guild. “You have any idea what we can do?”

  “All we can do is wait till the girl gets back with the doc.”

  Father Healy said, almost to himself, “Maybe this is my fault.”

  “What?” Guild said.

  Then Father Healy shook the thought away and said, “You haven’t heard from the Bruckners yet?”

  “No.”

  The priest nodded to Kriker. “How’s he?”

  “Not much better.”

  The priest went over to Kriker and said, “The girl’s going to be all right. I’m sure she is.”

  Kriker’s rage was back. “You ain’t no priest so don’t go around makin’ like one! Just get out of this cabin and leave me alone!”

  Guild put his hand on the priest’s shoulder and pulled him away from Kriker, leading him to the door and outside.

  They stood in the wind and the ice and the silver roaring night. It was like being on a very high mountain in the blizzard season.

  Guild said, “What’d you mean back there when you said it was your fault?”

  Father Healy, exhausted looking, said, “Because I don’t have faith. Because, like Kriker said, I’m not really a priest. And that’s what we need now. A real doc and a real priest. Otherwise—” He shook his head again, talking loud into the voice-taking wind. “You see, Mr. Guild, back in Chicago I—”

  Guild stopped him. “I remember the poster on you.”

  “Poster?”

  “Wanted poster. In all the law offices. A bounty man has to have a good memory for such things. You’re wanted for killing another sharp.”

  “I didn’t kill him. My partner did. I wasn’t even there. I just came out into the alley later and saw him on the ground there and then somebody else came and saw me and started shouting and—and I got blamed. So I ran and eventually I came here.” He pointed to the semicircle of cabins seen through the haze of snow. “They’re good people, Guild. They’ve started life over and they’re raising families and—and now this.” He stared at Guild again. “They need a doc and a priest.”

  “There’s a lot of different ways to be a priest, Healy,” Guild said. “Best one I ever knew smelled of beer half the time and had wooden teeth and couldn’t pronounce his Latin. But he was damn good when you needed comfort, and that’s all these people need now. Comfort. That’s what being a priest is, Healy, and that’s all it is.”

  He had just finished speaking when he saw a lone rider on a grulla coming down the perilous slope from the north. The grulla slipped every few steps. The rider held his carbine high, like an Indian lance. Attached to it was a piece of white cloth. The rider was James Bruckner.

  He kept shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Guild had never wanted to kill a man so badly in his life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He put the double 10-gauge directly into James Bruckner’s face and said, “Get down.”

  Bruckner said, “You’re not going to kill me, are you, Mr. Guild?”

  “I said get down.”

  With the wind, you could scarcely hear their voices. You could see how the grulla was exhausted and frightened from the trip. Snow as light as dust blew over them.

  James Bruckner said, “Please don’t kill me, Mr. Guild.”

  Guild slammed the barrel of the double 10-gauge against Bruckner’s temple. Bruckner jolted and screamed. Guild had hit him very hard.

  Bruckner’s own weapon looked like a toy with the white rag tied to its end. He climbed down from the grulla.

  Guild switched hands with the double 10-gauge. He wanted his right free.

  He hit James Bruckner in the mouth and then in the ribs and then in the mouth again. When Bruckner dropped to his knees, Guild kicked him in the jaw.

  Bruckner tumbled over backward and lay sprawled on the ice.

  Father Healy came up from behind Guild and said, “Is there any call for that?”

  “I need to be alone with him, Father.” Then, hearing how harsh his voice was, he turned sideways to the priest and said, “Please.”

  “I’m asking you not to hit him anymore.”

  Guild looked at the priest for a long moment and then nodded. “I won’t hit him anymore.”

  The priest nodded and went away.

  Guild dropped to his knees and scooped up handfuls of snow and threw them on James Bruckner’s burned face.

  When Bruckner came to, Guild slapped him once viciously, then remembered what he’d promised the priest.

  Bruckner looked almost surprised that Guild had stopped with just a slap.

  Then Guild jerked the other man to his feet by the lapels and dragged him into the central cabin where the meeting had been.

  He did not want Bruckner in the same cabin with Kriker. He knew what that would do to Kriker.

  He said, “Where’s the girl?”

  “He just wants the money.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  James Bruckner, bruised badly from Guild’s fist and foot, shook his burned face sorrowfully. “Either way I turn, Mr. Guild, somebody’s gonna be out for me. If I tell you where he is, he’ll kill me. If I don’t tell you where he is, you’re gonna be mad.”

  “She all right?”

  Bruckner dropped his eyes. “Thomas says she is.”

 
“You don’t think so?”

  “She’s real sick.”

  “What’s Thomas want to do?”

  “He wants me to go with you and get the money and then he wants you to give me the money and then we’ll turn over the girl.”

  “I want the girl first.”

  “He says no, Thomas does.”

  “You really think I’d trust you or your brother to turn her over?”

  “What would we want with her?”

  “Why’d you kill Rig and Tolliver?”

  “We didn’t.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  He forgot about his agreement with the priest. He caught James Bruckner on the side of the head, where the right sort of punch would daze him and make him nauseated. Then he kicked him twice quickly in the shins and then he slapped him again.

  James Bruckner started crying.

  “Why’d you kill Rig and Tolliver?”

  “I didn’t. Thomas did.”

  “Why did Thomas kill Rig and Tolliver?”

  “He wanted all the shares of the money plus he was afraid they’d tell.”

  “Tell Decker?”

  “Yes. The Territory’s gettin’ smaller. You get a rep for doublin’ as a lawman and a bank robber and—” He shook his head sorrowfully again.

  Guild took his double 10-gauge and said, “I’m going back with you.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not going to get the money. We’re going to get the girl and your brother.”

  “You don’t know Thomas.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He’d kill her. He’d kill that little girl.”

  Guild stared at him. “You know what you’re saying about your own brother?”

  “I know.”

  “That he’d kill a little child.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your own brother?”

  “It’s how he is, Mr. Guild.”

  Guild, sensing James Bruckner was probably telling the truth, said, “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t talk.”

  “What?”

  Guild, whirling on him, said, “I said don’t talk. You understand? Don’t talk.”

  James Bruckner dropped his head the way a chastised child would.

  Guild paced and thought through things well as he could. He was tired and cold, and he kept thinking of the little girl. By now, of course, he was thinking crazy thoughts. If he could save the life of this little girl, then that would somehow lessen the terrible thing he had done to the other little girl.

  He had to save this little girl. Had to.

  He said, “We’re going to go get the money, you and me, and then you’re going to take it back to your brother.”

  James Bruckner said, “It’s the best way, Mr. Guild. Given how Thomas is and all. I don’t want no little girl to be hurt, either.”

  “If you’re so different from your brother, why do you stay with him?”

  “Look at my face,” James Bruckner said. “Who else’d have me?”

  Ten minutes later, Guild stood in Kriker’s cabin. The man lay on the cot staring at the ceiling. He had a rosary entwined in his fingers. The handcuffs were still on him. Now Guild handcuffed his ankles as well. He didn’t want Kriker getting crazy and spoiling Guild’s plan. Kriker hardly seemed to notice the cuffs on his hands. His fingers just kept working the rosary and his wet mouth kept praying big silent words and his eyes kept staring with a certain fixated madness at the cabin ceiling.

  Guild said, “What’s the easiest way to get to that cave?”

  Kriker said, “There was gunfire awhile ago. Who was that?”

  “Just me. I thought I saw something.”

  “There any word on Maundy yet?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t heard from the Bruckners?”

  Guild considered telling him, then decided he wouldn’t be doing Kriker any favors. “No.”

  “God.” Kriker sounded on the verge of tears again.

  “It helps, doesn’t it, to pray?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just keep praying.”

  Kriker had gone back to staring at the ceiling. He didn’t say anything now. He looked utterly beyond words.

  Guild went back to the cabin where he’d tied James Bruckner to a chair.

  On the way the priest stopped him. “Two more.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Guild said, “In St. Loo four hundred died in one afternoon.” Then he nodded to the semicircle of cabins. “You know what they need, Father. Comfort.”

  The priest nodded and hurried on to the next cabin.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Guild took strips of hide and lashed James Bruckner to his saddlehorn, and then Guild swung up on his own horse and they set off to find the cave.

  Both men wore bandannas over their faces and both men kept their heads down. Guild estimated the temperature now at close to zero. Purchase anywhere was difficult for the horses. If there was a trail it had been covered by drifting snow hours earlier. Despite gloves he felt the cold in his fingers especially and in his toes even though he wore $5.50-a-dozen lumberman’s socks from a Sears store in Yankton.

  As they rode, Guild tried to ease his mind from the girl by thinking of a tent-show speech he’d heard once about the Ice Age, how more than a quarter of the planet had been covered with impenetrable sheets of ice, and how two million years later glaciers formed such places as Yosemite Valley, and how right here in the Territory itself there had been an immense glacial lake called Lake Agassiz. When he thought of the things the professor had said that day in his fine, barking politician’s voice, it was easy enough to imagine that another such age had befallen the planet and that the only two people left were himself and Bruckner, tight reining their ice-flanked horses through the eternal night.

  He thought of these things as the wind whipped and the plains before them resembled a white tundra with silver dust demons and a sudden moon gazing down on them like the callous eye of a pitiless god. Everywhere you saw small black dots and knew they were animals—squirrels and raccoons and possums—that had frozen in the remorseless night. The only touch of ugly splendor anywhere was in the branches of the dead trees, silvered with ice and glinting like jewelry.

  Twice Bruckner’s horse slipped and pitched, and both times Bruckner, lashed to the saddle-horn, slammed his head against the unyielding ground. The second time blood began to trickle from his nose. Guild blotted at it with the man’s bandanna but he did not cut him free. The second time, getting the horse up was especially difficult, the animal biting Guild’s hand hard enough to draw a line of blood beneath the fabric of the glove. After a quick curse at the animal, Guild then reached over and patted the horse. Guild did not blame him for resenting the task they’d set for him. Guild would have bitten his captor, too.

  So finally they continued on their way, three hours after leaving the settlement, the wind, if anything, fiercer, the cold more unremitting.

  There would be no end to this night, Guild thought, and during it they would fall to the white ground beneath the silver dust devils and the pitiless eye of the moon and become stiff and black like the dead possums and squirrels strewn across the tundra.

  A few times Father Healy wondered if he wasn’t feeling feverish himself, but then he decided, no, it was only his imagination. His mother in Chicago had always said he’d been blessed with two things: “a face the girls will love and an imagination that’ll someday sure and get you in trouble.”

  Father Healy had spent the last two hours isolating those who showed any symptoms of the disease in the big central cabin. There were not enough cots to go around so the priest and the granny woman, who had reluctantly agreed to help him (she having no more faith in the God he espoused than he did in her remedies), spread out woolen blankets and pillows on the floor and then began to minister to the people one by one.

  The smells of vomit and sweat
were overpowering. Stomach cramps got so bad in people that they jerked about on the floor as if possessed. Every few moments somebody called out for water. But the eyes were worst. Newspaper accounts invariably described choleric eyes as “sinking.” What they meant was that the eyes became those of dead people—a milky white without expression.

  Outside the cabin door, huddled under the overhang, family members of the sick people waited word, which too often now came when a pair of burly men would be quietly summoned by Father Healy. The men would come in, wrap the corpse in its woolen blanket, and then take it outside, to put it in the communal barn. Their trek would be accompanied by the cries and screams of the children and spouses who had loved the man or woman. Twice the burly men had carried out small children wrapped in the coarse woolen blankets, and that was the worst, of course, children. The men put them in a special place in the barn, away from the others, and one of the men, after the second child, went over to a wall and began kicking it savagely, until a huge hole was rent into the side of the barn. This calmed him and he went back to waiting for another summons from the priest. All he could hope was that the next summons would not be for a child.

  At one point Father Healy had to go to the cabin of a couple whose child had just died. The boy had been their only child.

  When he entered, he found them sitting apart from each other, some terrible isolation imposed on them, as if the grief of their loss could not be shared any more than their own deaths would be shared in the final moments. They were alone, utterly and irretrievably alone.

  He went in, beads in his soft hands, and said, “He’s with the Lord now.”

  “Stan, he has his gun,” the woman said, and at first Father Healy did not understand her meaning.

  Then he saw that the husband sat on the edge of the cot with his Sharps positioned in such a way that he could easily put it in his mouth. This certainly was not unheard of in the Territory. Disease, drought, hard luck in the hills when gold had been promised but never appeared—man was the only animal who resorted to taking his own life, and this seemed at different times to Father Healy both a blessing and a curse.