The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  They hadn’t seen one another since that September more than ten years previous, when Drusilla Smoak had come with Meshach on the buckboard of the cart, bound for Chunky Gal Creek, where Bobby Collard’s corpse still was hanging. Shack had been just a boy, then; a grown man stood in those boots this evening. Not nearly as tall as Strother, but solid. A man of twenty-one or -two years old, with a triangle face and cheekbones so sharp and high that shadows seemed to hang from them. He wore ragged working clothes and reeked with sweat and the beasts that he’d been driving.

  “You had no right,” Shack Collard said. “Not to touch her in the first place, nor let them bury her so quick.”

  His voice was flat and flint-hard. So were those eyes. He’d left the Collard farm a year previous and hired himself out to a business concern, for which he was driving pigs along the Drover’s Road to market. “My Daddy’s cousin’s child,” he said. “We’d of come for her, one of us. I’d of come myself, and took her home.”

  He had arrived in Asheville that afternoon and would be passing back through in another month or so. So it would prove out in subsequent events, though Shack Collard did not say so now. Just now he said: “Who had to do with this? The killing.”

  Strother shook his head. “She just fell.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I was the one who found her.”

  “Where’s Lige at?”

  “My brother had nothing to do with this.”

  “Not saying he did. I just like to know where my friends are. And my enemies.”

  Strother straightened, aware as he did how much taller he was than Shack Collard. He felt his hands balling into fists, though he kept them at his sides. Kept his voice level, as well, though it cost him an effort.

  “He’s just a boy.”

  “Pups make hounds.”

  “Leave him be, Shack—wherever he is. Understand? He never had to do with Sissy’s death. With anything else that happened. That was all in the past. It’s gone, now.”

  “Gone?” Shack Collard said. “The past?” He looked at Strother in a kind of disbelief, that a grown man could hold to such a notion, much less say it. “My brother Bobby’s eyes were gone. The crows had his eyes before we cut him down. My brother Bobby hanging from a tree, and Lige Dillashay’s Daddy did that. Your Daddy too.”

  “He wasn’t my father.”

  “Sleep in his house? Eat his food?”

  “Never stole his horse. Which your brother Bobby did. Did more than that, too.”

  “With your Mama, you mean?”

  There were replies that Strother could have made. By the time he had composed himself, Shack Collard was speaking again.

  “You never come up that mountain,” Shack said. He weighed Strother with Judge Collard’s stare. His shoulders were sloped and his forearms were corded with muscle; they bunched and coiled as he twisted his hat between his hands. He had taken the hat off his head as he’d stepped up, out of respect one must suppose for the departed. “Not once, to pass the time of day—nor to ask what befell your Daddy in return. Shall I tell it to you now?”

  “No, Shack. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “He come up onto Collard land firing his rifle. That’s where it started, though I don’t expect there’d anyways have been a chance that—”

  Strother raised his voice. “I said, I don’t want to hear. Whatever happened that day, just leave it.” He looked down at the plain white cross: Sissy’s marker, and the flowers. He drew a breath, and forced emotion down. “Shack, there’s been enough dying, already. More than enough, for two families. Let’s you and me be the ones to let it go.” Saying so, he extended his right hand—open—across the newly filled grave.

  This stunned Shack Collard near to speechlessness.

  “Put a stop to the dying, old son?” Shack said at last, with the ghost of a taut, thin smile. Around them the crosses stretched higgledy, from the church wall on one side and on down the hillside to the fence. “Why, the dying’s just barely commenced. And I’d sooner take hold of a serpent, as that hand.”

  5.

  Life carried on, and Strother rejoined it, after a fashion. He rose well before dawn each morning, as had always been his custom, and after making his ablutions he would read for an hour, studying his books of law or else translating a passage from Plutarch or Herodotus. He found it difficult to concentrate his mental energies; most mornings it was onerous to last out the allotted hour. But he did: sixty minutes by the clock, however much his mind might balk and fret, brooding on recollections. Hearing in each creak of the house his prodigal brother’s footfall on the porch, though it never was.

  And always the shufflings of his beautiful, mad Mama, pacing and muttering above his head, in the stillness before dawn and at any hour at all of night or day. She would abruptly out of nowhere be lucid and clear—asking after Elijah, and exclaiming at the news that he was not yet home. Then just as she had it within her grasp—the reality of what had happened, and where she was—it would slip away again, sliding like minnows through the fingers. And off she would go, raving and lamenting, hunting for her Papa and her birthday frock, until Strother locked her up in her room again and hurried out of the house, certain that she must otherwise drag him into madness right behind her.

  Strother came home in the early evening of July 23. She’d been docile that morning, but was agitated now. He couldn’t bear it. Locking her in her chamber he went out again, leaving Solomon in the kitchen and taking the key with him.

  He returned to his desk at the feedlot, where he worked at his ledger books for two more hours, lighting the whale-oil lamp as night came on. He left in the last glimmer of twilight at nine o’clock. But instead of trudging home again he went in the other direction, stopping at a shanty that served for a saloon. It was not his custom to take whiskey, but he did so on this occasion, sitting alone while the darkness deepened outside. This was a low establishment, with a dirt floor and a plank for a bar, sour with sweat and tobacco smoke and high with the reek of urine; the men would go around the back and piss against the outside wall. These were men from the nearby farms, in the main, but there were men from the town as well, several of whom nodded in guarded greeting when Strother came in, stooping low under the overhang. There was sympathy for him, though he kept to himself; Asheville knew of his tribulations.

  A red-faced drunken man had been denouncing Mr. Lincoln, and now he squinted oyster eyes at Strother, goading him to articulate his views and taking insult when Strother remained silent. But someone else muttered, “Leave the man be.” It was a man called Hadley who had taken Strother’s part, a young farmer newly married to a Dutch girl. Some while later he struck up a well-meaning conversation, offering condolence for the death of Sissy Baird and mentioning—as it occurred to him—that he had encountered her cousin earlier on this very day. “Shack Collard,” he said. This came as news to Strother. “Shack Collard is back in Asheville?” he demanded. “Seems to be,” Hadley said. “Or at least, he was here today.” He made a wry expression then, and added: “That boy does not care for you, Purcell. Not for you, nor for any of yours.” Strother shrugged and put this from his mind. After taking another glass of whiskey, he reconciled himself to the necessity of going home. Now the first exclamations were heard outside. Someone’s house up yonder was on fire.

  The fire was a red ball against the night. Strother hurried up the hill with a number of the others, for of course they would help out, as neighbours. Besides, the month had been tinder-dry. In summer a house fire could spread just like that, with hideous consequence. Before they were halfway there, Strother knew with certainty which house it was.

  He made three separate attempts to plunge into the inferno, drawn by the screams of his Mama within. He was gathering himself to try again, staggering blind in the cinder and smoke and flailing his arms like a man drowning, when he was borne at last to the ground and dragged away by half a dozen men, who saw that he must surely perish else. Hadley was one of the
se, and the red-faced drunken man who had inveighed against Lincoln.

  Solomon had been in the kitchen when the fire broke out, as best as could afterwards be determined. He may have died mercifully from inhalation of smoke, though it appeared from the position of his charred remains that he attempted to climb up the stairs to his mistress’s locked door. She remained alive until the end. Alive and shrieking, when the burning floor beneath her feet gave way and the structure collapsed inward upon itself.

  Strother’s last glimpse was of a flaming tatter at the window, just as the conflagration drew her down. She seemed to find his face at the final instant: huge white eyes locking onto her son’s and a red mouth gaping impossibly wide.

  Strother had not held a firearm since arriving in Asheville. But during his earlier life on the farm, he had earned a reputation for his skill with the long rifle. Some of this was inevitably exaggerated, given the wild reports that will attach to any man who comes to be known for his killing, not to mention the persistent myth that few men ever settled the mountains of Appalachia who could not snuff a candle at fifty paces. But Strother Purcell had indisputably been a capable marksman, and on July 28 of 1861 he walked into Klingbeil’s Store in Asheville and stated his requirement for weaponry.

  It was five days after the fire. Strother had washed and shaved; Klingbeil took note of this, and mentioned it subsequently to others.

  “I need a rifle,” Strother said.

  Klingbeil replied: “We are all sorely grieved by your loss.” Meaning the entire community. It was indeed much shaken by events, though of course not as shattered as Strother himself.

  Strother had gone back to the ruin two evenings after. Had looked in a distracted manner through the rubble, as if to ascertain what personal effects might remain. Upturning a chair, he sat for a long while in the midst of it, drinking slowly but steadily from a pint bottle of whiskey. Observers spoke of a vast and unnatural stillness, as if he sat sorting it all into columns in a ledger: the immensity of the loss and the suffering, and the means by which the fire might have begun, and what—or who—might be held responsible. A funeral for Miz Amanda and for Solomon took place the day following. The coffins were clean white pine, and gave off a waft of smoke from the remains within.

  Strother himself still smelled of smoke on the morning of July 28, despite having washed and changed his clothes. Klingbeil took note of this too, finding it inexplicably unsettling: the gaunt face looking down from its great height, and the faint smell of wood-smoke.

  “A rifle,” Strother said again. “I have money. I will pay you.”

  His hands had been burned as he battled the fire, but he seemed to take no notice. He chose out a lever-action Martini-Henry. Such was Klingbeil’s recollection, although this would seem unlikely—a rifle of such design in the mountains of western North Carolina, as early as July of 1861. Asheville would boast a munitions factory in the latter years of the War, manufacturing firearms for the Confederate cause, but these were primarily Enfield-pattern muskets. More probably Strother chose out an 1853-model Enfield single-shot, which took .577-calibre cartridges and could be fired by a capable marksman at the rate of ten shots per minute.

  “Cartridges,” Strother said.

  “How many?”

  “How many do you have?”

  He also purchased a pistol. An 1851 Colt’s Navy model, by Klingbeil’s account.

  “That be all?” Klingbeil asked.

  “A bowie knife.”

  Klingbeil hesitated, then. “You’d be leaving us?” he said uncertainly.

  “I have a road to travel,” Strother told him. “Debts to pay.”

  “Debts?”

  “My family owes a debt to Drusilla Smoak. Five dollars, for the birthing of my brother. It was never paid, Mr. Klingbeil. If I pass by Hanging Tree Ridge, I will pay it. Along with other obligations.”

  He held a five-dollar gold half-eagle between his fingers, and as he spoke he placed it in his pocket. Klingbeil recalled this vividly, long after: the glint of the coin in a shaft of light through the window, and the glint in those cold blue eyes as well.

  “Yes, I may very well find other debts to pay. A man must discharge all of his obligations, Mr. Klingbeil, as I am sure you will agree. Every payment that is owed in this life, whatever it may be, down to the last copper penny. I may have let myself forget that, for a time. I will not do so again.”

  He subsequently acquired a horse from McDavid, who ran the livery stable. It was a rangy dun hammerhead, leather-mouthed and vengeful of disposition. Klingbeil saw him for the last time some while later that morning, riding westward out of Asheville. There was something in the sight of it that chilled him; some intimation of fell purpose. So Klingbeil would say when he described the sight to others: a gaunt man astride a grey horse, riding stone-faced toward the Smoky Mountains. Low-hanging cloud soon swallowed them.

  In later recountings, the horse was described as “pale.”

  –ELEVEN–

  Tyree5

  San Francisco, 1892

  MESHACH COLLARD was not at Hanging Tree Ridge when Strother Purcell arrived there in his wrath on that summer day in 1861. Tyree knew this with a fair degree of certainty, along with other details. He’d scavenged these from sundry sources, according to his lifelong habit—newspapermen’s gossip, some of it; random references in magazines; barroom tales told by travellers who could claim some connection to western North Carolina.

  Shack Collard had not been there. But others had: several members of the Collard clan, including—possibly—women and children. Tyree was obscurely troubled by this thought, the possibility that women and children had been present when Strother Purcell arrived, since he’d not heard of there being survivors when Strother Purcell left. He’d heard tell of Collards lying dead in the woods, and Collards hanging dead from the branches of trees. But no one spoke of Collards drawing breath.

  Tyree preferred to suppose that Rumour had erred, concerning women and children. Or, if Rumour told true, that they had somehow brought destruction upon themselves, and merited these just desserts. God knows, there are Innocents in this world who are anything but innocent, and deserve whatever comes their way. Often, Tyree in his secret heart thought that no survivors deserved to have been left behind when Strother Purcell rode on from McCutcheon’s Roadhouse, either, in the winter of 1876. And most especially no children.

  *

  Tyree had been living in San Francisco for three years, nearly. His arrival had not been according to any design. At least, no design of his own making—Tyree did not discount the possibility that grander designs than our own might be at work in the world, possibly Providential but probably not, and that vast patterns might yet be discerned in the fullness of time, if only we could see them from this vantage. Which we wouldn’t, Tyree thought, since we’d be dead.

  He had been reared at a ghost-haunted inn faraway in the North, as you might reasonably expect of a crippled orphan destined for future greatness. This was an answer he gave, smiling wryly, when people asked about his origins, though mainly they didn’t. Mainly they ignored him, which was fine. San Francisco was richly populated by freaks and curiosities, after all, and Tyree was hardly more freakish than most. He’d left the ghost-haunted inn six months after his sister had decamped. She had eloped with a man passing through on his way to Chicago, where he would help her make her fortune upon the stage. This had been the man’s solemn vow, though Tyree saw no reason to believe him. Neither, he suspected, did his sister. But she was determined to get away from that goddamned inn, and was set upon becoming an actress. It had subsequently occurred to Tyree that she might end up in San Francisco, sooner or later—assuming she was still alive—which was one reason he had drifted there too. There were any number of stages in San Francisco, in theatres and taverns and concert saloons, and who was to say that his sister had not found her way onto one of them? She hadn’t, though. This had been another of his life’s disappointments.

  He had a
tiny, tidy room in a flat above a milliner’s shop on Polk Street, with a dentist’s parlour next door to him and neighbours who nodded and murmured and left him alone. He had a window that looked out onto the street, and a shelf with books and a tin box full of treasures, including an old Deane-Adams five-shot that he’d carried about with him for sixteen years. He even had cartridges to go with it, though he’d only need one of those. Yes, one cartridge would suffice for the only job of shooting Tyree could imagine himself doing, when it all grew too wearisome to bear.

  He had his newsstand, and his customers and acquaintances, and a certain undeniable standing amongst the local hacks who laughed at him but respected the information he kept stuffed away in that head. He even had a new name, since coming here: Tyree. He didn’t mind. It was no worse than the old one.

  As time went by, it occurred to him that he might never leave San Francisco at all. It occurred to him that he would probably die here.

  That particular spring—the springtime of 1892—it seemed that dying might come sooner than he’d expected. A chill he’d taken had wormed down deep in the lungs. For several days he did not go outside at all, not even to tend his newsstand on Market Street. He began to wonder: Was this how the final illness felt, at its inception? The notion brought him a grim satisfaction, at first. There was in it a gallows drollery; he was impressed to discover how insouciant he was. But after awhile, he mainly felt desolate, instead.

  Then two discoveries came upon him, one after the other.

  The first was an article in a newspaper. He had returned to the newsstand, dragging himself out of his tiny room and into the open air, mainly from fear of what might come next if he didn’t. It was a breezy article on a back page of one of the out-of-town dailies—the Silver City Miner, from Nevada—concerning the touring of a theatrical troupe. One of the performers mentioned was an actress, who sang comic songs and sentimental ballads. She called herself Miss Arabella Skye.