by Ian Weir
“Be daylight in an hour,” he said. “I’d do it soon, I was you, if it’s to be done. Understand, I’m not recommending, one way or the other.”
The boots that had tramped alongside mine. The tangled mane of white hair, and the face of a one-eyed Patriarch.
“It’s no way to die, hanging. Not if there’s a choice, though generally there isn’t. I won’t offer to help you with it. Not my place. Don’t suppose it ever was. But for years I wasn’t clear on that.”
“You’re telling me you were—what—a hangman?”
“Not as such.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?”
He made no reply for a considerable while. Then, at length: “I killed some folks.”
“What folks?”
“A goodly few. Some as deserved it. Some as surely didn’t. And my brother.”
A few feet and a thousand miles away, the muskox kept up his sorrowing: the same lamentation that has echoed through the world since Eve first grasped the knack of being human. You don’t even notice, after awhile. I surely didn’t notice him now, poor bastard.
“Who are you?” I said to that terrible old man.
“Just leave it. Hang yourself, or don’t. Or—hell if I care—take the knife and open up a vein. Be a Roman; that’s what they did. All them Stoics, bleeding out in bathtubs. Just make a decision and leave me be.”
He had turned his head away. His blind eye was toward me, milk-white and uncanny.
“No,” I said. “Who are you?”
“I am what you see.”
He drew in one long, weary breath, seeming to grow more ancient by the moment. At last, he said: “There used to be a boy, once. Long ago. I used to be that boy. Name of Strother Purcell.”
–SIX–
From The Sorrows of Miz Amanda and her Two Brave Boys4
North Carolina, 1844—1848
1.
THE CHERRY TREES HAD BLOSSOMED on the third day of January, the winter that Strother was born. His little brother Lige was to hear all about this from their beautiful Mama, who so loved to tell him stories. She told him of all the Signs and Wonders that had accompanied Strother’s birth, the comets and the camels and what-all else, and the old well behind the house, dry for many years, that had burbled up once again with water. Lige himself would grow to be a fine young man, strong-backed and reliable; so their Mama confidently predicted. “But Strother, now—Strother is extraordinary. He will be a scholar, as his Daddy was, Mr. Purcell. He will make us most astonishingly proud.”
They were in fact half-brothers. Lige understood this from infancy as well, believing at first that the “half” was by way of reference to his height. This was one of his deficiencies. Elijah was built blunt and square, in the manner of his own Daddy, who was a man of prodigious physical strength, though coarse. Mr. Dillashay owned the land farther up the hill, which though stony and rugged would combine to mutual advantage with the Purcell property. This he had pointed out to Lige’s beautiful Mama some while subsequent to the sorrowful passing of poor Mr. Purcell. He had made himself indispensable in the meantime, taking on the oversight of the Purcell land without ever being asked; shortly thereafter he proposed the offer of a formal union, which the widow in due course accepted.
“I couldn’t of made a well fill up just by getting myself dropped,” he would confide some years later to young Lige. The boy was five or six at the time of this exchange. “But damned if the Purcells’ only crik didn’t start on my side of the property line.” Mr. Dillashay had spoken with rough humour. In adulthood, it would occur to Lige that his Daddy had been trying in his way to reach out, in hopes that they might yet find themselves friends. But it was already too late for that. Far too much had already been done, and decided.
Strother had come into the world as easily as any first-born child might do, for all the high trepidation that had existed on his Mama’s behalf. She was a willowy creature, fine-boned and narrow-hipped, not formed at all for the brutalities of bearing children. She had been a Beauchamp before her first marriage, and a notable debutante: Miss Amanda Beauchamp of Roanoke, Virginia. But Aunt Glory had been there to catch the baby—the old Negro woman who had caught Miss Amanda herself, and many others besides. Aunt Glory had accompanied the bride when she travelled to North Carolina with Mr. Purcell to take up her new life at his side. Nine months later she had taken command at Miz Amanda’s lying in, clucking reassurances and gentling the baby into the world amidst that midwinter riot of cherry blossoms.
With Lige it had been different. He had come truculent and terrible, with such violence that his Mama was never fully to recover, though she would live on for another fifteen years. Lige knew that too, from infancy. Knew the toll that he had taken, and the obligation that this had placed him under.
“Your Mama loves you,” she would tell him, holding him with her gaze. “She loves you, but—O!—you came at such a cost. So you must always and ever be sturdy and true, and you must always—always—pay what you owe.”
“Yes, ’m,” Lige would murmur.
“Look to your elder brother,” she told him. “Your brother will be as a beacon to light your way.”
Lige’s earliest memory was of his half-brother fetching him home again, one twilight when he’d wandered into the pinewood. It was late autumn, no time for a child to be losing its way. The mists hung low in ghostly tatters, and with darkness the cold came on. A child might blunder into a pond and be found there three days later, blue and bloated; it might lose its way and never be seen again, alive or dead.
There were known to be wolves in those woods. Panthers, as you went farther up the mountain. Not many, so close to a farm—just one in ten square miles, maybe. But then, it only took the one. Besides, you’d find in the woods other perils. Indians, coming and going when you least expected. White men who posed a peril all their own: men with dwellings deeper in the hills, who peered and festered.
And witches. There were witches in those woods and up those mountains, beyond all question of a doubt. If you lived in these hills you’d seen witches, whether you even knew it. Lige understood this by instinct, as children do, and his Daddy never spoke a word to gainsay it.
But on that particular evening, Lige was to be spared all such terrors and tribulations. He saw a beacon come weaving through the murk: a lantern held up by his elder brother. Taking Lige by the hand, Strother walked him home. Carried him on his shoulder partway when his little brother flagged, which was the best and bravest vantage that Lige had ever known.
Mr. Dillashay stood stock-still at first when he saw them emerging from the twilight. He’d been labouring in the field with the hands. Now he straightened and lumbered the last few steps between them, wrenching Lige down from his brother’s shoulder and thrashing the boy until he howled, as the enormity of this transgression required: this wandering off at such peril to his life. Then he wrapped the boy in a hug that near to stove his ribs in, unmanly tears leaking out both corners of his eyes.
“You,” he said at length to Strother, straightening. “The hell took you so long?”
“He wasn’t where I expected,” Strother said.
Mr. Dillashay struck him a blow that sent him sprawling. “One job you were give,” Mr. Dillashay said. “I said, ‘Go find your brother—look after him.’ Well, next time do it halfway competent.”
There was between Strother and Mr. Dillashay a great contempt. Lige understood this from his earliest age, though he wouldn’t have known to use that word, nor exactly where the great contempt arose. There was fear as well, though not in such proportion as you might expect, and not on the side of the step-son. For Strother was afraid of nothing in this world, and never would be. From this Lige began to understand something else: that there was something irredeemably low in his Daddy, whom he loved nonetheless, and something therefore low in himself that he never could rise above.
Strother himself said no such thing. Not out loud, and never within earshot of his younger brother, b
y whom he was worshipped in return. Squat, waddling Lige, as dark as his half-brother was tall and fair, with his brow habitually knitted even in childhood, and a left foot that was awkwardly clubbed: the legacy of his violent birth.
And Strother never called Lige half a brother, either. Not once.
But he thought it.
Lige began to understand this. Strother was never less than grave and kind, but in the privacy of his own mind he reduced his brother to half of what was rightly his. “Never mind that foot,” Strother would say to him; “you can walk as tall as any man on earth.” By which Lige knew he meant: Your Daddy is small and mean and low, and you thereby are hopelessly diminished. Or: “It’s enough that you try your level best,” by which Lige heard: It will never be good enough.
Lige would beam his gratitude and resolve to do better still, while knowing in his secret heart that his brother weighed him daily and found him wanting.
2.
Strother had been sent for help when his Mama’s time with Lige came round, late in the autumn of 1844.
Aunt Glory had died two years previous, not long before Mr. Purcell had slipped away, and someone had to catch the baby. There was a young doctor in Asheville, but that was a full day’s ride. Besides, Mr. Dillashay had no use for the man. They had quarrelled on some matter concerning the sale of a horse; the doctor had held himself cheated. Doc Semmens, his name was. He would refuse to come, Mr. Dillashay said, and even if he came he could not be trusted. So he bade his stepson ride for the granny-woman, up Hanging Tree Ridge.
The boy, just eight years old, must have blenched at this, though he did not intend to show it. “Granny Smoak, you mean?”
Drusilla Smoak lived with the terrible Judge Collard and his clan; she was widely known to be a witch.
“Take the gelding,” Mr. Dillashay said.
Hanging Tree Ridge was less than half as far as Asheville, in miles. But it lay in the opposite direction: northwest, higher and deeper into the mountains, where folks grew clannish and queer. The autumn rains had come early and violent that year, and snow had fallen once already at elevation; the road higher up would be uncertain. The journey could turn out longer than the ride to Asheville, and Strother said so.
“That’s why I told you: Take the gelding. Not the mule.”
Wayfarers in the previous century had set down accounts of the singular families they’d met living deep in the mountains. The travellers wrote admiringly of the independent spirit they encountered, and of the keen intelligence too, the hills having been settled by those who desired to live in their own way, on their own terms. But that time had been many decades past already. Three generations, or four, of living in isolation, and marrying closely. Folks in such circumstances began to turn inward, after a time; such a turning must some day come upon the Collards too. Such a turning had conceivably begun.
The Collard farm at Hanging Tree Ridge was in the notch between two peaks. The road was as parlous as Strother had expected. It was mid-afternoon when he reached the last turning of the trail, and he had left home at first light.
The dogs had his measure from a quarter-mile away. Three blueticks and a mastiff bitch. They’d have gone for him, too, except for Harris Collard’s voice, cursing and calling them off. Harris Collard was the old Judge’s swag-bellied son; he was in a clearing in front of the big house, boiling the bristles off of a newly slaughtered hog. It hung head-down in a cauldron of water, suspended by a rope from an oak-tree branch. Through the steam and the smoke, Harris Collard squinted Strother into view, demanding to know his purpose.
Strother told him.
The dogs slunk round him all this while, low-bellied and snarling. The gelding high-stepped, huge-eyed.
“You’re Dillashay’s boy,” Harris Collard said. He spoke the name as if something had gone rancid.
“He’s my step-daddy. He said, ride up and bid the granny-woman come quick. Otherwise my Mama could die.”
He spoke with an eight-year-old’s urgency, as you might to a man unclear on the relevant facts. As if Harris Collard might now exclaim: Well, why didn’t you say so?
Harris Collard was a boar of a man, black-bristled and five-and-thirty, with a sagging paunch and pink watery eyes. He said: “An’ why does your Daddy suppose I might care?”
Strother looked past Harris Collard to the others. “Please,” he said.
The house was a ramshackle sprawl, a sagging veranda slung low across the front. An old man was there, in a chair with wooden wheels. A boy, four or five years old, stood by him.
The old man was Judge Zebulon Collard, of dire repute. Strother knew that without asking. Judge Collard was the man who had claimed this land in the first place, decades previous, clearing it by hand with an axe and a mule and building the house and outbuildings. He had come down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania, trailing a wife and four children. Harris was the last son standing.
Judge Collard had not stood in Strother’s lifetime. He slumped withered, the left side of his face slack and sagging, as if he had leaned too close to a fire and melted like candle-wax. A brilliant man in his time, or so it was commonly said: a man of wide learning and deep cogitation, as a Judge must needs be, though precisely where and when he had served on the Bench was never quite clear. The possibility remained that he had not been precisely a Judge at all, in the strict and formal sense of that office, but rather a man who passed cold-eyed judgement on such as came before him. He sat judging young Strother at this moment, his eyes in that slack face fixed and glittering.
The boy beside him had the self-same stare. A lifetime later, looking back, this would be Strother’s indelible recollection: Meshach Collard, standing silent and uncanny, his britches rolled and sagging at the ass, as if he had prodigiously shat himself and bore the load. His stare was so black and unblinking that Strother supposed him at first to be defective.
Others began to appear. Ruth Collard, Harris’s wife, wan and weary in the doorway. Bobby Collard, fourteen years old, as blithe as the others were grim.
“Please,” Strother said, a second time.
Harris Collard hawked and spat. “Please what?”
“For Chrissake, Harris, just boil your hog,” said Drusilla Smoak.
Strother jerked round. The granny-woman had come up behind him, so quiet he never heard it.
“You’ll be the Purcell boy,” she said, studying him closely, till she saw where he fit. “You’ve come a long, hard way.”
This was hardly a feat of divination, though it almost seemed so to Strother. A child, eight years old, alone in this place, struggling to hold in the sweat-slick gelding. The slaughtered hog, suspended above the cauldron. Steam rising as if from the coals of the Place Below. The stench of flesh and the dogs and the snarls and those Collard eyes all about him.
“Tell me what you need,” the granny-woman said.
She was not a Collard by blood, but the twenty-years-younger sister of Dorcas Smoak, who had married the old Judge. Drusilla had once been wed as well, to a man named Spivey from Tennessee, who had passed long ago and left her childless. After Dorcas’s death she had taken up with her brother-in-law, the Judge, keeping his bones warm on mountain nights. So at least it was said. So it would inevitably be said, regardless of the truth: a widow who gathered herbs and built her own one-room cabin to live in, half a mile above the big house. Her late husband had been a drunkard who raised his hand, and in consequence withered and died—so it was reliably rumoured—just two years after the nuptials. She retained for an uncanny length of years an eldritch beauty, which had not faded entirely to this very day, though she was nut-brown and gnarled and old enough to be a crone.
“Will you come?” Strother asked.
“I will.”
She sent Bobby Collard to fetch out her necessities: a cloak and a hempen sack tied with twine that was her granny-woman bag, containing the needful herbs and ointments.
“I’ll take your horse,” she said to Strother. “He’p me up.”
He hesitated, fighting down an inexplicable shudder. This she noted with a dryness.
“If I was what you’re notioning, I’d fly.”
The old woman smelled of wood-smoke and of something else, dark and acrid underneath. Stepping into his hand-hold she was light as dry sticks bundled together. The gelding skittered but steadied. He was a good honest creature and would run himself to death, if his rider asked it.
“How am I to follow?” Strother said. Evening was already coming on.
“Give him the mule,” the old woman said to Harris Collard.
“Can’t be loaning out no mule,” said Harris. “I might could trust him with the pig.”
“Give him the damned mule.”
Then she was gone, kicking the gelding into a trot and lurching with him down the trail. The dogs milled as she did, perplexed at whether to howl or let be. She clung with both fists in the gelding’s mane, back bowed and skirts flapping like bat-wings.
It was midnight when Strother arrived home, numb with cold. The last ten miles he had ridden in utter blackness. But he knew the road, and the Collard mule was stolid and sure-footed. At last there was light from the house ahead, and the wink of a lantern as Solomon came out to meet him. Solomon was Aunt Glory’s only son, old now himself.
The granny-woman had arrived hours previous, Solomon said. She’d ridden the gelding halfway to death, and lamed him.
“And my Mama?” Strother said.
“Bad.”
Miz Amanda had been bad since Strother’s leaving at dawn, and still the baby would not come. Solomon’s loyalty to Strother’s Mama was abiding, and his distress tonight was keen.
So was Mr. Dillashay’s.
Strother might have understood this, had he been a few years older. Or had he been born other than he was, and more inclined to see the world from angles and obliquities. But he had from infancy stood square-on, staring straight at what presented itself before him, which tonight as he stepped through the door was his step-father at the table, pale with whiskey.
