The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  Sissy Baird was of the other kind. Not plain, exactly—that would not be fair to say—but not quite pretty either, at least not in a way that declared itself out loud. She was older, and a widow. She worked at a dry-goods store and on Sundays attended worship at the Presbyterian Church, where she’d been Saved with the minimum of to-do. She was in short the exact kind of woman whom Lige would scarcely have noticed at all. But Strother had set his cap. Strother had fallen earnestly in love, which Lige was bound to notice sooner or later, despite the gulf that had opened between them. Others had noticed, and tongues had begun to wag.

  One such tongue was lodged in the mouth of Tess Thurmond. Here it had direct access to the thoughts in Tess Thurmond’s head, few of which went indefinitely unexpressed. She was married to Red Thurmond, the blacksmith, who had shoulders like an ape’s and few illusions about the inclinations of his wife, which rendered Lige’s aspirations to this particular hayloft perilous in the extreme. But Tess Thurmond had remarkable zest; her arms and legs were rubbery as pythons when wrapped about you and bouncing, and Lige Dillashay at fifteen years of age was much enamoured of risk-taking.

  “She been seen with your brother, walkin’ on the street,” Tess informed him one afternoon, as flies drowsed and Lige lay contentedly on his back, chewing on a stalk of straw. She spoke a scandalized tone, tugging her dress back down and tucking one vast pap where it belonged. “I mean, don’t your brother have no concern at all? Don’t you?”

  “Why would I care who my brother walks out with?”

  Tess stared at him in frank incredulity. “You’re sayin’ to me that you don’t know who she is?”

  Strother could not have known it himself. This was Lige’s conclusion, once past the first shock of learning.

  After all, the brothers were still newcomers to Asheville, in all the practical ways that mattered. They’d come from away, and thirty miles could serve just as well as a thousand, in a place where everyone knew where everyone else had been born, and who their relations were, and what that signified. Besides, who could have guessed it just by looking?

  “It’s the truth,” he said to Strother that same evening. “It kills me to be the one who tells you. But you got to know.”

  They were standing in the dust of Main Street.

  Lige had gone first to the feed lot where Strother worked. Learning that his brother had left an hour previous, he had hurried directly home. But Strother was not there either, and it took no great leap of deduction to conclude where he must be: in the company of Sissy Baird. Lige’s first overpowering impulse was to hunt them down.

  But he told himself—once again—that Strother must have no idea who she was. This marked the pencil-thin line between blunder and betrayal. So Lige waited, pacing to the end of the street and then back. Carts and buggies trundled; dust rose in puffs about each hoof. The sun slid red behind the Smokies and the whisper of a cooling breeze began, and finally Strother’s long shape appeared in the gloaming.

  He was alone, thank God. And whistling. Decades later, Lige would recollect that sound: his brother’s thin, tuneless whistling.

  “She’s played you for a fool,” Lige said. “I heard this from someone who knows.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sissy Baird. She’s a Collard.”

  A smile had kindled on Strother’s face as he’d seen Lige loping toward him. Now it faded.

  “She can call herself Baird all she wants,” said Lige. “That’s her dead husband’s name. But she’s a Collard. She’s kin to that fucker Harris on her Mama’s side. Her Mama was some manner of Collard cousin.”

  They’d come to a stop in front of the leased house, though neither particularly noticed this at the moment.

  Strother sighed a little. He said: “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?” Lige demanded.

  “I should have told you. It’s just ... Lige, it’s hard to see how it matters much, in the end.”

  “How it matters?” Lige heard himself starting to laugh. It came out high and shrill. “They killed our Daddy, Strother. My Daddy, at least, though I accept he was never yours by blood. Just your step-daddy, if you want to make that distinction—just your Daddy by marrying your Mama, if you want to draw that line. Though it doesn’t make one hair of difference, when it comes to what they done to him.”

  “We don’t know even know what happened, Lige. Not for a fact.”

  “Of course we know!”

  “You can hear all the rumours you like. But unless you were actually there...”

  “All of Asheville knows what happened. All of western Carolina. He rode up that mountain to face them. He went up there alone, ’cause not one of us would ride with him. And they shot him off his horse, Strother—that’s what happened! They had one of ’em laying in wait against his coming—Meshach, it was. It was fucking Meshach. Watching the trail, and shot him off his horse when he rode past. But the shooting didn’t kill him, so they put my Daddy on trial. Dragged him up before Judge Collard, who called him guilty. That son of a bitch old man—he couldn’t even say the words. Just sat there drooling in that chair of his—sat in the waft of his own shit, rising on up from his drawers—and Drusilla Smoak said the words instead.”

  Strother shook his head. He said, “Lige, you’ve got no way of—”

  “Yes I do. I do so know it! And they didn’t hang him, either. They drowned him in the pond—like you’d drown a dog. Hog-tied him, wrists and ankles. A millstone for good measure around his neck. That stinking pond, on the northwest boundary—all choked with weeds and rushes, but deep enough you can’t see the bottom. They threw him in, and watched him sink. And that’s what he saw, Strother. His last sight of this world. Not your face—not mine. Not a friend in the world. Just goddamned Collards, jeering him down. And that’s what happened.”

  Still Strother shook his head. “Lige, even if some of that was true...”

  “People know it, Strother! Everyone—the whole world! And when everyone knows a thing, then some of it has to be true. A story ain’t just made up, if everyone knows it!”

  “But Sissy Baird didn’t do it. She wasn’t there. So what could it have to do with—?”

  “’Cause Sissy Baird is a Christa’mighty Collard!” God help him, Lige could have gladly shook his brother. Could have grabbed a plank and whaled him with it. “Sissy Baird’s Daddy lay with Harris Collard’s cousin! That’s where he stuck that pecker of his. And left it there, which you’re now proposing to do yourself. Your dick in the direct fruit of Harris Collard’s cousin’s steamy loins, to the gossip and disbelief of the whole town of Asheville and surrounding environs—that being a French word, Strother, as I’m sure you know, made up of French letters, one of which I pray to God you’ve got the sense to put on your own dick, before you—”

  The twilight exploded into darkness. Lige had a sense of being flung, and falling.

  Strother had never struck him before. Not once in fifteen years. Lige found himself on hands and knees, patting the dust for his fallen hat and Lord only knows what else, as if he might collect the sundered fragments of the last few moments and piece them back together. A hand reached into his narrow field of vision, which by concentrated effort he was able to associate with his brother. It helped him back onto his feet.

  “I accept I should have told you, Lige. But I will not hear her spoke of in that manner. Not now—not ever. Understand?”

  Strother had stepped away several paces, taking hard deep breaths to compose himself and clenching down the emotion. Strother had always hated his own passions; Lige knew this about his brother. He resented them in some essential way; dreaded them, even, lest once set loose they might thunder iron-shod and ungovernable, like all the horses of the Apocalypse.

  Lige said: “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you best decide.” His own voice sounded unnaturally calm. It seemed to come from some goodly ways off. “I think you best tell me.”
/>   Strother said: “I might ask for her hand.”

  A great clarity was settling, despite the gathering darkness. Lige would ever afterwards recollect that clarity, and marvel: the world reflected back as if in the still, calm mirror of a lake.

  There’d been others on the street when they began this conversation; no one was visible now. The neighbours had drawn back. Lige looked round at the silent houses. Looked up, and saw his mother looking down. His beautiful, mad Mama, framed by candlelight in the window of her room on the second floor. Her lovely long hair, now silvered, tumbled down, as if she were Rapunzel gone grey with yearning. Gazing down at God knows what.

  “That’s it?” Lige said to Strother. “That’s all you propose to do?”

  Strother said: “It’s come time to let go of the past. Turn it loose.”

  Lige in that moment thought: He’s so young. His older brother—six feet five inches, for he’d grown now to his full height—an inch taller still in boots with heels. Towering and spare and powerful, with a tumble of fair hair over his forehead. Strother Purcell in the first prime of his manhood, with all the gifts of his birth and a will that could move whole mountains. Lige thought: In the ways of this world, he is a child.

  Out loud, he said: “I was never once good enough, was I?” And how calm the words came out. After fifteen years they might have come out howling. Ravening like wolves. “I was never going to be good enough—because he was never good enough. Not for her, not for you. He wasn’t worth a half-day’s ride up the mountain, when they killed him. You gave your word that you’d go look for him, but you never did. You broke your pledge, ’cause you didn’t think he was worth it, nor me neither.”

  Strother’s whole frame shuddered, just for an instant, as a man might do who has endured a physical blow. “Perhaps I did break my word,” he began. His voice was thick, and not quite steady.

  “Perhaps?”

  “And if that’s so, then I was wrong. But I never once thought...Lige, you’ve always been more than good enough for me. You’re my brother.”

  Lige said: “Half-brother.”

  “You need to see this clear.”

  But he was. Lige was seeing clearly for the first time. So it seemed to him in that moment, and so it would seem for almost the rest of his life. That evening in front of the house, he might have been Saul on the Damascus Road.

  “I wish you joy of your union,” Lige said. “But you won’t find it.”

  “Devil!” a shrill voice cried, above him. His beautiful mad Mama, gazing down through the open window. “Devil! Dillashay! Get thee hence!”

  It cut right through him like a rusty blade. He found a freedom in that.

  “On my way, Ma,” he said. “You enjoy the rest of your life.”

  He turned and strode away. A sullen figure, dark as a changeling, club-footing into deepening shadow.

  “Lige,” Strother called. “Elijah!” On his face was pure distress.

  Lige did not look back.

  This would be Strother’s last sight of him for thirteen years. He would afterwards wonder how much might have been changed if he’d gone after his brother right then and there. Run him down and wrapped his arms around him, weeping and raging and professing his love, as a brother might do if once he let those passions come welling out.

  In the end, he decided that nothing would have changed. No calamity averted, and nothing altered for the better. We are who we are, each one of us on this earth, and there is nothing we can ever do to escape that.

  4.

  Sissy Baird was twenty-nine years old in that spring of 1861, nearly five years Strother’s senior and practically venerable by the standards of the mountains, where girls were women at fourteen and oftentimes crones before they turned forty. She had come to Asheville in the company of her husband, a weak-lunged and much older man, whose physician had thought that mountain air might help. It didn’t. After burying him, the widow might well have left Asheville, but stayed.

  She might conceivably have done so to be closer to kin, though Strother later said this was not so. The Collards were kin on her mother’s side, but Sissy Baird never thought of herself that way: not as a Collard.

  Perhaps it came about the way life’s choices are often made: by the simple avoidance of choosing altogether. It just seemed less onerous to stay where she was. She had found a tolerable position as a clerk at the dry-goods store, and a one-room house on two acres at the south end of town, where she kept some mountain chickens and a shoat. She wore black for a time, but gave this up as impractical. The bachelors and widowers commenced to take an interest, unattached women being at a fair premium in the mountains, looks and age notwithstanding. But Sissy Baird soon made clear that she considered one marriage to have been sufficient for this lifetime. Mr. Baird had not set the strings of her heart to singing, but he was not a drunkard and had not raised his hand, being in general a man of good heart if deplorable lungs; all things considered, she thought it best to quit while she was ahead.

  So she got on with her life. For amusement she sketched, and painted watercolours: not well, as she was the first to admit. But this was not the point of the endeavour. It was only drawing, after all; it was not like fixing the roof. Once the rains left off she set about doing precisely this—repairing the roof, which leaked. Often she might be glimpsed clambering up a ladder with her skirts hiked up and her ankles on display, or sitting at the apex with a bale of shakes beside her and an expression of fierce contentment, hammering like Thor. She was a woman well suited to such occupation, tall and sturdy with large capable hands. She had overlarge feet, as well, and a nose that reddened and dripped when she was heated.

  There was a handsomeness, though, if you saw her from just the right perspective. Thus she was seen by Strother Purcell.

  She came to see him in a like manner.

  She made a sketch, which said exactly how she saw him. It was made in April or May of that year, well after they’d grown companionable, but prior to Lige’s leaving and all that followed after. Sissy laboured to refine it, shading it this way and that and refusing to let him see it, until finally—with a sunburst of relief—she pronounced herself satisfied.

  It was the face of someone much younger than himself: such was Strother’s first impression. A long narrow face that was sober but unlined, young and impossibly earnest, on the cusp of startling into a smile. He said: “That’s how I look?”

  “It is to me.”

  As late as 1892 it was still in his possession, folded in quarters and pressed between the pages of a book. A young man squinting the future into focus: awkward and earnest and weirdly beautiful.

  They often walked out together on Sunday afternoons. Sissy loved to go as well on rambles by herself. She had the gift of enjoying her own company—a gift that she and Strother held in common. Often she would walk for miles on the pretext of some errand.

  She left the dry-goods store at six o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 27. In the normal course of events she would have been expected to arrive at home by a quarter of seven. But the evening was glorious and conceivably she chose the longest route accordingly: a path that would take her up and along a steep wooded ridge, with a prospect overlooking the French Broad River. If so, she must have been light in spirit, though she would have felt misgivings as she heard a noise behind her: the crack of a twig, or a stirring in the undergrowth. The journey was not without its perils for a woman alone.

  Hearing a noise, she’d have hurried, just a little. Hearing it for a second time, she’d have turned around.

  “Who’s there?” she might have demanded. “You-all can stop this right now, or else show yourself.”

  And perhaps there never had been anyone at all. Perhaps in turning so quick she just lost her footing. This was one explanation, and surely the most probable. A tragic accident, and nothing more; though a question remained as to why she would step so close to the edge, and whether indeed such a fall could be fatal in the first place. I
t wasn’t so steep as all that, the slope that she tumbled down; not a fall that should take a strong woman’s neck like Sissy Baird’s, and snap it.

  She never arrived at home that night. The bed was not slept in and the animals by all appearances had not been tended. She didn’t arrive for work at the dry-goods store next morning, and when Strother went out to search he saw the spiral of carrion birds against the sky.

  He found Sissy Baird at the bottom of the ridge. She was lying on her back in a tangle of undergrowth, one arm flung wide and the other bent beneath. Her head was cricked sideways and she looked at the world as she always had, from a most remarkable perspective.

  *

  There was of course suspicion at the time. The malice of Outsiders could never be discounted, and of late there’d been many more of these passing through Buncombe County: carters and herders traversing the Drover’s Road, and commercial travellers from places beyond the mountains, bringing with them foreign lusts and alien inclinations. God alone knew what might result from this—although Doc Semmens said no, it was no such thing; Sissy Baird had not been interfered with. Doc Semmens had examined the body.

  She was interred in the graveyard by the church. Half the town turned out for the funeral. Strother stood alone throughout, gaunt and crow-black. Solomon had stayed at home to keep watch upon Miz Amanda, who had been took especially bad to wander and rave the past two nights. Lige had not been seen, hide nor hair, since storming away.

  Strother went back to the churchyard in the shank of the following evening. He brought flowers for the grave, and had intended to say some words out loud to tell Sissy Baird how he felt. He stood instead for a goodly time in silence, head bowed. After another while he heard footsteps in the churchyard grass. He supposed that it might be the Preacher, come back to offer some platitude of solace. But the boots that stood across the mound of earth were old, and cracked with hard use, and when Strother raised his eyes he was looking across Sissy’s grave at Meshach Collard.