The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “Well, now,” he began to say, baring his whole churchyard full of teeth.

  The angel said, “Fuck off.”

  She continued right past him to the ladder, glancing just once to the lump stretched out by the front door. This was John McCutcheon, standing guard in such manner as seemed best to him: dead-drunk and horizontal. Cousin Fletch could only stare as the fog of slumber cleared and he watched his angel ascend.

  It was almost warm in the loft, by the frigid standards of the roadhouse, provided you stayed close to the stovepipe in the middle. It glowed red in the darkness, hissing and crackling within.

  A tatter of rug on rough planks. A low roof overhead, slanting sharply down to meet the outside wall, where a filthy window faced across the river. A bedroll and a mattress and a spindly wooden table with an oil-lamp, and the animal smell of the Man from Decatur. He was at the window, straddling a chair turned the wrong way around, his back to the ladder and Billie Skiffings. He stared out into the darkness.

  “Think twice,” he said, without turning. He wore boots and trousers and a grey undershirt that had probably been white to begin with. Suspenders dangled.

  “I done that,” Billie said.

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  He dangled a whiskey bottle by the neck. The smell of him was stale sweat and hickory smoke. Outside the night remained clear and bitterly cold; moonlight slanted across the snow.

  It occurred to Billie that he could discern the shape of her, reflected in the filthy glass. Standing in the penumbra of the oil-light, in the red glare of heat from the stovepipe. A waif with stick legs, swaddled in a blanket.

  “An’ you’re a son of a bitch,” she said. “But I guess you’re better’n he is.”

  “Fletcher? That’s where you’d be wrong,” said the Man from Decatur. “I’m worse.”

  “I expect he knows not to cross you, then. Or lay hands on what’s yours.”

  Her breathing came shallow and quick, as if a band had tightened round her chest. She found herself shivering.

  “Last chance,” said the Man from Decatur. “Turn around and climb back down.”

  She unclenched her grip on the blanket instead. It slid from her narrow shoulders and whispered to the floor, and she stood in the teeth of the winter’s night as naked as Eve in sagging woollen socks.

  –FIVE–

  The Accounting of Barry Weaver

  San Francisco, 1892

  GOD KNOWS what time it was when I lurched out of Mulvaney’s Tavern that night.

  Rain pissed down. A chill wind sliced. I fumbled for the buttons on my coat, and began reflexively to turn toward home—toward the flat on California Street, a ten-minute stagger from here. And it hit me, all over again: there was no home.

  “Which way you headed?”

  Tyree had emerged from the tavern, behind me. He stood in a dying spill of light, head cocked on that ridiculous neck.

  I muttered something in reply. God knows what.

  “I expect I’ll see you around,” he said, after a moment.

  “You prob’ly will.”

  And still he hesitated. Rain spattered the thick round lenses of his spectacles; he looked like some species of small, bedraggled owl.

  He must have a room, somewhere or other. I could ask him to let me stay there for the night. The thought occurred in one of those drunken shafts of illumination. It would be some dismal little crib, ripe with the odour of wet socks, but it would have a roof.

  And he was waiting for me to ask. That came to me as well. He’d say yes—might even welcome the prospect of human companionship. The prospect of having—good Lord—a friend?

  “So long,” I muttered, and turned away.

  “Good luck to you,” he said.

  When I looked back, he was receding into the darkness. Elbows pistoning, and oversized head bob-bobbing.

  I might be homeless, but I still had my pride. So I told myself, anyway. Hunching against the slicing wind, I continued in the opposite direction.

  Deadeye Ned was no stranger to homelessness.

  Ned Hartland, I mean, the redoubtable scout and plainsman who was the hero of my three little novels, written in happier days under the pseudonym “B.W. Colton.” All three were serialized across ten weekly editions of the Five-Cent Boys’ Own Library, published by Messrs. Ferdinand & Nussey of New York, and subsequently released as individual volumes, beginning with Deadeye Ned and the Call of the Plains in 1885.

  My books are long out of print, but from time to time a copy will turn up unexpectedly. Years after that dismal San Francisco night, I would chance across Deadeye Ned and the Gallows Tree in the five-for-a-penny box at a Methodist Church rummage sale in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. It was battered and dog-eared and scourged by time, the cover half-severed and the pages rain-swollen. But it was nonetheless my little book. I picked it up and almost bought it, despite the flint-eyed scrutiny of the dour old Church Lady at the cash-box, who did not like the looks of me. And I’ll grant that Young Weaver must have had an air of dereliction upon him, there amidst the gathering shadows of autumn. A waft of garments long unwashed, and the shakiness that discourages regular shaving. Still, they’re supposed to take it seriously, these Methodists: the prospect that we meet the Son of Man each time we encounter suffering humanity.

  I set the old book down again, leaving it for someone else to discover. I thought: Who knows? Some hopeful boy of ten or twelve sweet summers. He might pick it up of a rain-sodden afternoon when there was nothing in all this world for a boy to do, save sit on the porch with a mildewed book and discover a tale that would gallop off with him.

  Or not. No, probably not. It probably went to some joyless elder who read nothing but the Bible and kept the pages of five-for-a-penny books on a spike in the jakes. Still and all, there’s a chance it went to the Boy. One chance in ten—or ten thousand, even. And that’s what we cling to, isn’t it? That’s all we ask. All of us, alive and drawing breath. Just a chance.

  I’m drivelling.

  Deadeye Ned.

  The plainsman, as I say, would hardly have blinked at the prospect of a homeless night in April. But then, Deadeye Ned was possessed of every attribute pertaining to dime-novel heroism, beginning with (but not limited to) a remarkable prowess with the lariat, the sixgun, and the long rifle, not to mention a sublime indifference to physical suffering and the ability to fashion a snug dwelling out of three sticks and a copy of yesterday’s newspaper.

  I thought about Deadeye Ned’s prowess as I reeled aimlessly through that particular night, with a rising sense of something that was very close to panic. I swear that the wind grew more bitter with each step. So did I.

  Deadeye Ned was never a natural-born killer. But he would certainly kill, if you pushed him to it. I dwelt upon this, too.

  There was nothing that Ned purely hated more than a bully. The oppression of the virtuous poor by the rich and the privileged and smug—oh, such behaviour would stir Ned Hartland to a smouldering choler. In fact, this had formed the very pith and substance of Deadeye Ned and the Gallows Tree.

  In that adventure, Ned finds himself stranded temporarily in the Kansas town of Good Hope, after his horse comes up lame. On the very first afternoon, he intervenes to prevent a young cowboy and his riotous companions from offering insult to a sodbuster’s wife. Ned is required to deal out several brisk socks to the sneezer, after which he brings the ringleader and the worst of his henchmen to a deeper appreciation of their folly by dragging them to the horse-trough, one in either hand, and soaking their heads.

  But Deadeye Ned has made a bad enemy. The ringleader turns out to have been no mere hired hand, but the heir to the largest cattle ranch in the territory. Lanky Staggars, the young man’s name is. Prosecuting a deadly grudge against the plainsman, Lanky accuses him of rustling cattle, and proceeds to “discover” a branding-iron wrapped up in Ned’s bedroll.

  Our hero protests his innocence, but Lanky Staggars has the advantage of wealth and privilege.
His father is Creed Staggars, whom Ned knows by reputation. Before settling in Kansas to build his empire, Creed Staggars had been a Captain of the Texas Rangers, known for his flint-eyed abhorrence of wrong-doers, and a man who had personally strung up horse thieves and cattle-rustlers the length and breadth of the Western badlands, wherever he could find a tall enough tree. Ned himself is to be hanged directly, regardless of his tersely worded denials, since he is after all just a plainsman with neither riches nor influential friends, despite his manly bearing and a frank and upright manner.

  But Deadeye Ned does indeed have one friend in Good Hope, though he scarcely knows it yet: Chappie Gimbleton, the Deputy Sheriff. Chappie is lightly regarded by the locals—and flat-out scorned by the likes of Captain Staggars—as a lad whose heart may be capacious, but whose wits take their time before arriving at a destination. Besides, he is puny and bow-legged. But Chappie knows only too well how sodbusters have been treated by the haughty cattlemen. There is something that just sticks in his craw about Lanky’s accusation. This is the phrase he uses himself: “It just sticks in my craw, and it won’t be swallered down.”

  And it turns out that Chappie Gimbleton can rise to an occasion. While Deadeye Ned grinds his teeth in a jail cell, watching a blood-red prairie sun rise up through iron bars, the little Deputy has picked up the trail of the Truth. It leads him to an old blacksmith—a poor man, but honest as the day is long—who will swear on his Granddaddy’s Bible that he fashioned that incriminating branding-iron at the express command of Lanky Staggars.

  Chappie gallops back with the honest blacksmith’s X on a sworn statement. Arriving in Good Hope, he discovers that Deadeye Ned has already busted out of the death cell, through coolness of head, firmness of resolve, and the unlooked-for assistance of another true-hearted American: the self-same sodbuster whose wife he had so stoutly defended. This leads in rapid succession to another escape, two chases, a near-lynching, a mighty gun-battle, and a chance encounter with an outlaw band led by none other than Jesse James in disguise. The narrative spans much of Kansas in its ten thrilling installments, culminating in a fist-fight between the redoubtable plainsman and Lanky Staggars, at the end of which the young hound can take no more and, grovelling in the dust, confesses his treachery. He did indeed plant the branding-iron in Ned’s bedroll, seeking to frame the plainsman as a confederate of the cattle-rustlers, who are in fact in league with Lanky Staggars himself.

  Hearing this, Lanky’s father is, well, staggered. Grim as hoarfrost, Creed Staggars would hang his own son, save for the intervention of Deadeye Ned. In words few but manful and pithy, the plainsman reminds the old Ranger of a Higher Justice that ever is tempered with mercy, and asks whether Captain Staggars—or any man present—can assert that his own youth was unspotted by folly. Abashed, the old Ranger is reconciled to his son, and settles for hunting down like dogs the rustlers themselves. These are the Wild Monteiro Brothers, who deserve to suffer the full force of the laws of God and Kansas, being desperate and unrepentant killers. They are also—not to put too fine a point upon it—Mexicans. Meanwhile, an enduring bond is established between Deadeye Ned and Chappie Gimbleton, who observes, “That were a mouthful you spoke there, Nedward, right and proper,” and recollects a favourite saying of his wise old Granny Hudgins: “Let the feller who’d be without sin shy rocks out his own glass winders.”3 You’d really have to read the book to appreciate the full effect. The point is, I brooded upon Deadeye Ned Hartland as I slogged homeless through the rain on that endless godalmighty San Francisco night, my gut twisting and sloshing with steam beer and grievance. As the wind grew colder and the darkness more intense, I brooded some more. Somewhere in the midst of this, a notion took shape: I needed a gun.

  I was passing by a pawn-shop as this hardened into certainty. The shop was locked tight, the windows barred. But it occurred to me that there must be a back door in the alley—or a side-window that would yield to desperation—which there was. And I couldn’t tell you, exactly, whom I intended to shoot. Ichabod Rourke was undoubtedly a prime candidate—the betting favourite, as the bookies would say. But I might just have settled for shooting Young Weaver first. Yes, Young Weaver was a dark horse, but we mustn’t rule him out. I groped for a loose cobblestone and staggered, gathering myself to smash it through the glass.

  “Hey! You—yes, you—stop right there!”

  A blue coat with an Officer in it flat-footed out of the darkness.

  *

  At this point, I should make a confession. I don’t know that I discovered what kind of man I am—not on that particular night, or on any other night that came thereafter. It’s harder than you’d think, to arrive at a moment of perfect self-definition. But I have come, over the years, to develop an alternative theory. In moments of extremity, we may at least discern our species of rodent.

  Some rats will gibber and freeze when they’re trapped. Others by savage instinct will go for the throat. Young Weaver turned out to be the third kind: the rat that drops its cobblestone and totters round to flee.

  Fat lot of good it did me. Officers of the Law travel in pairs. A second had flat-footed up behind. “Whoa, there, Sonny-Jim,” this one said. A fist like a cannon-ball came whistling.

  When I swam back fully into consciousness, the rain had ceased and the wind no longer sliced. This was due to the fact that I was inside a cell.

  Amongst San Francisco’s most wretched malefactors may be counted those who find themselves on Alcatraz Island, twenty minutes by ferry-boat across the bay. There they may languish for months and years—for the rest of their lives—breaking rocks and gnashing teeth and hearing in the slamming of steel doors the death-knell of all earthly aspirations.

  This cell, on the other hand, was just a stinking diverticulum in the bowels of the City Lock-Up, though its steel door slammed with a finality no less hideous. Cement walls and a spew-slick cement floor that sloped to a trough in the middle, with human hulks shipwrecked on either side. Two of them, besides myself: I’d glimpsed them in the shaft of light as the brawny arm of the Law slung me in. Then all light was gone from the world. A small barred grate high up in one wall opened only onto the deeper blackness of night.

  The drunk cell.

  Our hero lay stunned for a time.

  I willed myself to cease my unmanly moaning, only to find that it continued anyway. Or not moaning, exactly: a faint, high-pitched burbling, expressive of woe beyond all bearing. The ragged, soggy sorrow that gives orphans a bad name.

  It came from the largest hulk in the cell. So I realized, after another few moments. My eyes had adjusted a little, and I could start to make out shapes. A man roughly the size of a muskox, and the smell. He huddled against the wall to one side of the door, cradling in his lap something abject and broken. An image came to mind: a boy I had seen once, sobbing over a poor, dead kitten.

  Oh, Lord, I thought. They wouldn’t, surely—the bastard police. Lock up a drunk with a kitten?

  “Fella had a knife,” a second voice said. A ruined baritone, frogged with years of whiskey. “Bowie knife. In his boot. Pulled it out. Can’t have that.”

  The weeping muskox was cradling his wrist. It sheared at a grotesque angle.

  “The police did that?” I exclaimed. “Came in here and busted his arm?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Then how did—?”

  “Shout all you want—the Law won’t come in here.”

  The muskox continued to weep, a woebegone burble from the distant shores of tragedy. And suddenly I had other concerns.

  “Where is it now?” I said, feeling a certain scrotal tightening. “The knife.”

  “What knife?” said the ruined baritone.

  “His knife.”

  “Never you mind.”

  There is a consoling belief—my father subscribed to it—that angels walk amongst us. We can always know them because angels say: “Fear not.” Somehow, “never you mind” is not an exact equivalent. And when the seraphim confiscate kni
ves, they don’t snap wrists at right-angles and leave muskoxen blubbing in the blackness.

  “He’ll survive,” said the ruined baritone.

  “Oh, Lord,” I said. “Oh, Christa’mighty.”

  Somehow this seemed to constitute a final straw. I commenced blubbing myself.

  After a time, the ruined voice said: “Go ahead. Say it, if you need to. I’ll listen.”

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever it is you need to get off your chest. The whole damned story, if you have to. It’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

  So I told him. “I am a failure,” I said. “I am a disgrace. I am homeless, and hopeless. If I was a man I’d just—God damn it, I’d hang myself.”

  Somehow, the option seemed almost a lifeline. “I should do it.” I felt the thrill of despair, to say it right out loud. I savoured it, even—the way we may bite into the most appalling prospect as if it were a crisp red apple. “I should damned well just hang myself, and get it over with.”

  “Use my belt.”

  “What?”

  “There’s bars in the grate, yonder. Loop it round. That’ll do the job, if you want it done. Or else don’t.”

  I could almost see the shape of him: an old man, long and bent, sitting tattered against the wall, beneath that single barred grate. The first faint rumour of dawn came creeping through it.

  “Your choice,” he said. “I won’t stop you. Did that once—now it’s up to you.”

  “What are you talking about? Did what once?”

  “Saved your life.”

  The accent came from somewhere in the South. There was some cultivation in it, too—down deep, beneath the ruination. The old man shifted his position, and a reek came off his rags. A mighty waft of unwashed humanity, both foul and eerily familiar.

  And it came to me, where I’d seen him once before.

  My Good Angel. The one who’d lifted me up on the night of my forty-fifth birthday. Dredged me out of the mud where I sprawled face-down and drowning.