by Ian Weir
“Straight and true, boys—straight and true. And—O!—won’t Mr. Dillashay be rebuked!”
She had about her a desperate energy, shards of it crackling and slivering like glass. Toward mid-morning she had gone up to the house; when she returned there was a languor upon her. She wore her burgundy frock with pearl brocade and wavered in the sullen light like the wraith of some departed debutante: the still-living ghost of Miss Amanda Beauchamp, late of Roanoke, Virginia.
“Straight and true, boys—straight and true. You must always and ever pull straight and true!”
The noon-day heat grew oppressive. Lige stumbled and flailed, and felt with sudden fear that his heart was about to explode. And he saw once again the look on Strother’s face. An expression both exalted and terrifying: a sublime and appalling fixity of purpose, as if he could draw the whole world after him, straight and true.
Lige would say those exact words twenty-six years later, to a girl in the loft of her Uncle John’s roadhouse near Hell’s Gate. This was an account that she herself told, afterward. She lay in his bed, behind him, and the whole house shook in the teeth of a winter storm.
“What a godalmighty thing for a child to recollect,” he said. “Can you imagine? Waiting for his heart to explode.”
“Still and all,” the girl replied. “It didn’t.” She sounded bored. This was a knack she had, to sound dead-bored by all of life, though she’d lived so little of it.
Lige knew he was duty-bound to hand her along to Cousin Fletch—at least as Cousin Fletch would define his duty. After that her well-being would be a question unresolved.
“Unless of course it did,” she mused, by way of afterthought.
“Did what?” he said.
“Your heart. Exploded. And what you brung up that ladder tonight is a chest without a heart inside at all.”
She was the strangest creature, he thought, pinched and watchful, though not without an eerie fascination.
“What would that make me, if I did?”
“Dunno,” she said. “More int’resting than you might of been, otherwise.”
“And it wasn’t me come up that ladder,” he said. “I was here in the first place. And no one invited you to climb up after.”
“I don’t recollect them asking me to climb back down, neither.”
She had shifted her angle of perception, squinting out the small cracked window into the tumult of storm in the blackness. “Shitfuck filthy out there,” she observed.
Lige said: “She’d’ve done it, though.”
“What?”
“Kept the two of us working. Till our hearts did blow apart.”
The bed was a mattress on the floor. He sat hunched on the side, the girl behind him, wrapped in her share of the blanket against the bitter cold. The ice-blasts searched through chinks in the walls and reached up beneath the blanket at his nethers.
“You don’t care to offer a response?” he said.
“To what?”
“A Mama such as that, who’d wish her children dead.”
She just shrugged her thin shoulders. This he found irksome.
She’d been a virgin. This had surprised him, though not in any way that would make a difference. Very much about this world is unexpected, and virginity unlooked-for does not rank high on the list. Especially not on such a night, trapped in a roadhouse while his brother came on through a cold that would kill any other man, and the haints of recollection squeaked like bats.
“Am I boring you, darlin’”? he said.
The blackness had been creeping over him for hours. It was surely the girl’s own fault if she failed to see this, young as she was—and looking even younger, just at that moment. Looking secretly terrified, in fact, but getting on with what she’d set in motion.
“Boring?” she said. “No, I wouldn’t say you’re boring. I wouldn’t guess that’s one of your qualities.”
“Then what would you say?”
“I’d say,” she said, “that I have to admire it. When a man brings his Mama into my bed. I find it riveting.”
There was silence again between them. The volleying of sparks inside the stovepipe, and the shriek of wind. He found himself beginning to think: This girl might be wasted on Cousin Fletch.
“So when did you start to understand?” she said.
“Understand?”
“What they’d done. Your Mama and the Collard boy.”
*
The sky turned copper and drew low, and the men came riding back. Mr. Dillashay led the way, riding a cart-horse and leading Dapple. The Holcombe brothers were next, and then the hands, riding mules and whatever else would serve. A last few straggled behind on foot.
The mare was riderless.
Bobby Collard had gotten clean away: that was the first thought that came to Lige’s mind. But there was something hard and haggard in his Daddy’s face. His Mama saw it too; she made a sound in her throat, and stood unmoving.
“Where is the boy?” she said.
She knew already, looking past her husband to the others. They had been drinking corn whiskey since dawn; they had about them the slinking insouciance of men who have gone too far.
“What have you done?” she said to them.
Mr. Dillashay said: “His time come round.”
Lige would recollect his Mama’s cry—like a stricken bird—and his own bewilderment. He saw the lightning flash of loathing that his Daddy turned upon her, a hatred so pure and distilled that the devil himself might stopper it up in a bottle and measure it out three drops at a time. He saw his Daddy clench his fist and raise it to smite his Mama, and he heard his brother’s voice say: “No, sir. You will not.”
Strother stood ten paces behind. Slender, stone-still, holding his scythe.
Mr. Dillashay turned. “What did you say?”
“Touch her, sir, and I will kill you.”
Lige saw that he would do it, too.
The same understanding had come upon Lige’s Daddy. It batwinged across his face.
He cursed, and snarled a laugh, but lowered his fist just the same. Lurching down from the cart-horse he went to Dapple instead. The mare skittered a step or two, but steadied. Her flanks were stained with sweat from the long day’s journey. Bobby Collard had ridden her hard all the way to Chunky Gal Creek, which was fifteen miles; so Lige would afterward discover. His Daddy took her by the bridle and reached his right hand into his shirt, the mare nuzzling him in expectation of some delectable—a carrot or a bit of apple, for she was ever a favourite of Mr. Dillashay’s. He drew out a pistol instead and in one smooth movement placed the muzzle between her eyes and pulled the trigger. Dapple’s legs gave way and she subsided where she’d been standing, and Mr. Dillashay said to the world at large: “I will not abide a mare that was rode by Bobby Collard.” Then looking neither left nor right he strode away, leaving the men to stand there open-mouthed like fools.
Lige stood, as stunned as any of the others. “See to Mama,” Strother said to him. Her own legs had given way; she sat in alabaster shock, her burgundy dress tented about her.
Then Strother looked to the men, the hired hands who stood shuffling. “You’re paid to do a job of work,” he said. “Now let’s do it.”
A rattlesnake had done for Bobby Collard. They learned this afterward from Solomon, who heard it from one of the men. Bobby Collard might have ridden away clean, except the mare shied at a copperhead snake that raised up of a sudden on the trail, and threw him. The Holcombes came on Bobby after that, his left leg busted beyond all help of willow bark. They raised him up and then Mr. Dillashay raised him higher, with a rope thrown over the branch of a white oak tree.
The next evening Drusilla Smoak came.
“The devil do you want?” Mr. Dillashay demanded. He had locked himself in a room upon his return, drinking corn whiskey halfway through the night. With dawn he emerged, chalk-white but dogged, and set to work in the field. By afternoon his colour was back, though it drained away again as he faced th
e granny-woman.
She said. “I’m stopping to collect.”
She was riding in a cart. It was drawn by a dun horse and there was someone sitting with her on the buckboard. Mr. Dillashay raised his arm against the glare, trying to squint out who it was. The storm had held off for one last day and the setting sun boiled red on the horizon.
“Collect? Collect what?”
“The debt you owe me. For catching your boy.”
“I told you before—stay off my land.”
“Your debt come due.”
Meshach was sitting beside her. Shack Collard, now ten years old. Mr. Dillashay saw this now, as did Lige. He’d been working with Strother farther up the hill; they watched as the cart came wending.
In the back of the cart was burlap sacking. Some tools. Lige saw his Daddy see this too. Saw him hesitate. Squinting against the blood-red sun; trying to guess how much the granny-woman knew, and what it might take to be shed of her.
“You turn yourself around, and back you go,” he said. “Same way you come.”
“I come for Bobby Collard.”
“Well, too bad. ’Cause you won’t find Bobby Collard here.”
“Will I find him at Chunky Gal Creek?”
“You go to the devil.”
It shook him, though. Right down to the core. That twisted stick of a woman, and a silent boy beside her with his Granddaddy’s merciless black stare.
“I caught your boy five years ago—alive. So you owe me my own boy back, the same way. That’s the debt you owe me, Jacob Dillashay. Can you pay it?”
“Go back to hell, you old witch. D’you hear me? I charge you for a witch—I’ll see you hang. I’ll see you drownded in a pond!”
“Blood pays for blood.” Her voice as harsh as a raven’s. “Alive or dead, I’ll have what I’m owed. If not today, then later. You owe me one living boy—twice over.”
Looking straight at Lige as she said it. Then at Strother.
–NINE–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
1.
“MEIGGS WHARF,” Brother Amos had said. “He was sleeping rough out by Meiggs Wharf—two, three days ago. He may be still. That’s my side of the bargain, friend o’ mine. Now, don’t forget yours.”
And Brother Amos—give him credit—was true to his word. The old man was there, exactly as he’d said.
Meiggs Wharf was up at North Beach, at Francisco near Powell Street. It had once been quite the going concern, ships coming in from outlandish destinations, and going out again, and families thronging on weekends to the amusements at Abe Warner’s Cobweb Palace, and businesses sprouting around it. These days, it was all slouching into decay. San Francisco had shiny new attractions elsewhere, and most of the ships had been drawn to other piers. The world had moved on, as the world will do, leaving Meiggs Wharf behind.
It was low tide when I arrived. Strother Purcell was sitting on a rock, staring out at the ocean. In the daylight, I saw that he wasn’t as ancient as I’d supposed—at least, not in years. There was, rather, a quality of timelessness about him. He sat amidst wrack and seaweed like Moses shipwrecked and spewed ashore. He wore the same clothes as the other night in the cell—the same clothes he’d worn for weeks, presumably. I’d tell you that they’d been newly washed in sea-water, except that would be telling a lie.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I said. “All over San Francisco.”
He stared at me, bloodshot and blank. “The hell are you?”
“Your friend,” I told him.
“Friend?”
“From the other night?”
The old man’s stare stayed blank.
Shitbirds wheeled shrieking, overhead. Sea lions honked by the pier.
“Your cellmate,” I said.
And he flinched. Some dismal recollection seemed to stir. “Yes,” he said. “I drink.” That ruined baritone. “I am a disgrace.” He looked back out to sea.
This wouldn’t do, I was thinking to myself. The setting—the stink—the abjection. I’d put him somewhere else, if ever I should come to write his story. I’d give him a room, to begin with—some human dignity. It would be small—sure it would—but clean. Spartan. A bedroll and a basin and half a dozen books. A Bible, and somebody’s Collected Poems: Pope, maybe, or Dr. Johnson. The old man would have occasion to say: These were once my Granddaddy’s books. They have been the companions of my lifetime.
“You’re a man who’s stumbled—that’s all,” I said. “A great man fallen beneath himself.”
“You got no idea who I am.”
“Sure I do. You told me. Remember?”
He looked back to me, eye narrowing. He tilted his head and raised one vast, gnarled hand to shade against the sun. That waft came off him as he shifted. “I said my name?”
“You did.”
“Then forget it.” There was something in that rheumy look that made the scrotum shrivel. “Who did you say you were?”
“Weaver,” I told him. “Barrington Weaver. Barry. You gave me some pointers on hanging myself. Remember? I never took you up on it, but still and all—”
“Go away.”
“Sure. I can do that. But what I’m thinking—you should maybe try and put something on your stomach. D’you figure? A meal—or coffee, even. I’ve got some money...”
“I don’t take charity.”
“It’s not charity.”
“The hell is it, then?”
“I dunno. We could call it friendship?”
He wasn’t sure what to make of that. To tell the truth, neither was I.
He had arrived in San Francisco a week or two previous. A month, possibly—he wasn’t clear in his mind as to such details. He recollected it was cold his first night here, sleeping rough down by the docks. He’d intended to take ship, but had failed.
“Take ship?” I repeated. “What kind of ship?”
“Any kind. Whaling ship, maybe.”
“Whaling ship?”
“Old Ahab. I read that book, once. Liked it.”
He’d fallen in with sailors, he said, in a tavern. But then he’d gotten drunk and wandered off. Ships had come in and gone away again without him. “I missed my tide.” He gazed out at the ocean as he said it. The water danced in a stiff spring wind; beyond, clouds massed low. Farther still, at the edge of the horizon, a ship was swallowed slowly by the mist.
We were in an eating-house by the docks. It was dank and filthy, as you’d expect—they were willing to serve the likes of my companion. “Old Cadaver,” as they’d called him at the jail. Here—as elsewhere—they didn’t seem to call him much of anything, just gave him a wide and chary berth.
“Pork chop,” he’d rumbled to the waiter.
He’d swallowed a mug of coffee, and kept it down. Now he was girding to challenge solid food. The waiter with gestures and fragments of English gave us to understand that this was a dockside establishment: look there, through the spiderwebbed window—ocean. Patrons were better advised to take their chances with fish.
“Pork chop,” the old man said.
The chop when it arrived was vaguely porcine. Something that had at any rate been in a barnyard, at some unspecified point in its past. Now it lay grey and congealing amongst lumps of potato. The old man managed a few mouthfuls.
He’d been working at this and that for a good few years—that was the closest to a clear answer I could get from him. Working at that and the other, but travelling, mainly—drifting. “Where? Oh, here and there.” He had ended in San Francisco because it was the farthest west you could drift, without a boat. Now his notion was to take ship, and go farther.
“Right off the edge of the earth?”
I said this as a sort of joke, but the old man gave it thought. “I don’t expect that’s possible,” he said. It seemed to make him wistful.
Like Judgement Day, come to call. That had been Tyree’s recollection. Jesus wept.
“What the hell happened?”
I asked.
“To what?”
What had happened to him, of course. That’s what I wanted to ask him. What manner of calamity had led from the one to the other—from the patriarch that Tyree had described, to the one-eyed ruin who sat across from me now? But you don’t just blurt out a question like that, not to a fellow human sufferer. And most certainly not to a man who had once been Strother Purcell, and had filled more graves—if Rumour told true—than all of those doughty Earp boys put together.
“Talk about something else,” he said.
“No, listen. I’m a writer. I told you that, didn’t I?—two nights ago, in the cell. Well, I am. And that’s why I’m thinking...see, I have this notion...I’d like to write something about you.”
The old man looked at me.
I blundered ahead. “A book, maybe. Or an article, first, for a newspaper. Half a dozen of them, even. I’d write ’em, see, and sell ’em to someone—to Will Hearst, is what I’m thinking. And we’d split the money—fifty-fifty—right down the middle. Now, don’t answer right away. Take a minute, and think about it. Because what I’m proposing—”
He stood.
It could be a disconcerting thing, to watch Strother Purcell stand up, while you were seated. He would rise, and then keep on rising. And just as you were certain that he’d risen to his full height, he’d rise some more—up to the totality of his six feet and five inches, with a shapeless crumpled hat like a dead opossum on top of that, from which vantage he would gaze one-eyed down upon you, wriggling in the muck of the earth far below.
“I’ll thank you for the pork chop, Mr. Weaver.”
“But—”
“We’re done.” He walked out the door, unsteadied by the ravages of Time and John Barleycorn, but managing somehow to conjure up a ruined dignity.
And there I sat. Startled, as you might expect. Somewhat squelched. But most of all, I felt unaccountably ashamed. That’s the truth. I felt small, and mean, and grasping. I felt grubby, damn it, as if the wreckage of that man was still somehow finer than Young Weaver had ever been, even in those now-distant days when I had been young, and brim-full of promise and optimism, a lad whose father might swell up with pride, even as the consumption wasted him down to a stick in a cassock, the clerical collar around his neck grown as wide as a barrel-hoop.
