by Ian Weir
“It can’t be that cold,” Dooley whispered. “There’s nowheres on this earth as cold as that. If there was, no one could ever know—they’d be no one to survive.”
“They don’t, mainly,” Billie assured him. “For the most part, it mainly kills ’em. The weak ones, anyway—the ones who aren’t cut out to survive in cold like that. But who knows, Dooley? Maybe you’ll get your strength back. You’ll be strong.”
Dooley Sprewell had taken no sustenance for days. His face was a skull with skin on.
“Miss Billie?” he said. “I done bad deeds.”
“We all done bad things, Dooley. At one time or another.”
“Not like me. I done such deeds, you couldn’t even know.”
It was late in the afternoon. The men had gone outside, Uncle John to batter through the ice and the outlaws to see to the horses in the barn. The wind had come up as the last light died away. That left Billie and Dooley alone by the stove—all alone in the world, and free to speak plain—with only Gimp Tom looking on from the shadows. So quiet and still they’d forgotten he existed.
“D’you b’lieve in the Lord?” Dooley said to Billie.
“’Course I do.”
This was news to Gimp Tom.
“I b’lieve the Lord is watching, right this minute,” Billie said. “Watching us and judging, the way He does.”
Dooley had commenced to weep. “So do I,” he whispered. “Oh, so do I. An’ I swear—I’d hang myself sooner than freeze to death, if it wasn’t for the thought I’d have to face Him.”
“Oh, now,” said Billie. “There, now. Maybe the Lord’s forgiven you already.”
“No,” said Dooley. “If I b’lieved that, I’d go hang myself in the barn. If I had my strength.”
Billie left him, a little time after that. Dooley lay weeping, alone. There was silence, except for the howling of that wind, and the hissing of smoke in the stovepipe.
Gimp Tom had looked on all this while, watching Dooley Sprewell. Now he sidled close. “Dooley?” he said. “God loves you. I believe that—I do. He’s got a place in His heart for you, and it’s warm.” He leaned in even closer. “And I could help you, Dooley. If it ever come to that.”
His sister could make her voice as soft as silk, when she chose. A way she had of pitching it low in the throat. Tom lacked this gift, as he did so many others. But he did his best to mimic it now.
“There’s a rope out there in the barn,” he whispered to Dooley Sprewell. “There’s rafters and a bucket to stand on. If you truly saw the need, then I could help you.”
–EIGHTEEN–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
I BELIEVE IT WENT LIKE THIS:
The old man and the gal were venturing outside frequently, by that time. In the evening, you might see them strolling half a mile afield, or even more, the girl in the lee of her protector. They might even be seen in broad daylight on a public thoroughfare. Little Em’ly grew bolder with the old man beside her, though crowds would still unsettle. From to time she would stop stone-dead and shrink deeper into herself, as if some profile glimpsed in the crowd, or the timbre of a voice, had conjured dread.
From this the old man understood: Em’ly lived still in mortal terror of the Utah Brute. The Mormon’s arm stretched out like Judgement, and the fist at the end of it was huge and hard.
“I’ll be here,” Old Lem said grimly, one night. “Whoever comes to call.” He was speaking to Prairie Rose, Little Em’ly having retired to bed with the megrim. “Let me sort out any Mormons as need sorting.”
Prairie Rose flushed at this. Her voice was brittle as glass. He would do no such thing, she said, nor even think it. “Chrissake, Lem—this isn’t no Rent Collector.”
“Nor am I.”
“You don’t know him. I do!”
She was at her needlework as they spoke, glasses perched on her nose. But her hands grew so unsteady that she had to set the work aside.
The Mormon feared no man at all, she said. The Mormon feared none but the devil—as well a sinner might who lived so steeped in wickedness. “And the devil might stand a chance,” she said, “if ever it come to a mortal fight, between them.” But Old Lem would stand no chance at all. He’d be broke and ground to bone-meal, bless his heart. “So let’s have no more talk of this—not ever.”
“Well,” said Lem. He had grown very dark in his expression.
He likewise said no more, keeping to himself what thoughts he may have harboured, concerning the Brutes of this world. He did not say, not to Rose or to Em’ly, nor anyone else: there once was a man called Strother Purcell who might pay this Brute back what was coming to him, down to the penny.
Sometimes in twilight he would walk out alone.
He would stay strong. Stay keen. You never could be sure, what might be coming.
–NINETEEN–
Tyree
San Francisco, 1892
DEAR BILLIE, he wrote. I see from the newspaper that you are in Silver City, Nevada. I hope and trust that you are well. I have thought of you often, these past 16 years. I have thought of you every day. Perhaps you have thought of me, also. Perhaps in your heart you have kept a small corner, where memories of a brother may still—
Pathetic. Maundering and soggy and pathetic.
He crumpled the sheet of paper, and started again.
Dear Billie.
He crossed this out.
Billie. So you are alive. Well, I am, too. I’m in San Francisco. Your feelings as you read this will be mixed. But there is something that you need to know. It is important, and—
The bitterness welled up, catching him off guard with its intensity. Yes, he thought—his information was important. Crucial, even. But Christ on a crutch, after sixteen years? After all they had meant to each other, once?
His vision had blurred behind the huge, round spectacles, thick as the bottoms of Mason jars. His reflection in the window pane was woebegone and absurd. Rain streamed in turn down the outside of the window, obscuring the figures who hurried through the darkness along the street.
The night was unseasonably cold. Tyree shivered, despite the closeness of his room, which would be stuffy beyond bearing in high summer. He sat at his table by the window, with a bottle of cheap whiskey and a glass and an oil-lamp and his ink and pen and paper.
He tried again.
You just left, and you never once looked back. Not once. I could have come with you. Or you could have sent for me afterward. Well, I hope you’ve been happy with the path you chose, and I hope you found joy along the way—except I don’t, Billie, I really don’t. I hope you trod in desolation, every step, and wept bitter tears in the night. Why should you be better off than me? We did it together, that thing we done.
Billie, this is what I think, so I’ll just say it. I think you are the worst person I ever knew, excepting only for myself. I think you are heartless and faithless and cold as ice. I wish I could see you one more time. I wish that very much.
He signed this with a bitter flourish. Then he crumpled it up.
But she needed to know. Not so much that he was here, in San Francisco. No, what she truly needed to know was that Strother Purcell was here as well, still alive—through some miracle of God or of the devil—though dreadfully altered, in case this should resolve her to stay far, far away herself, for the rest of her life. Or else prompt her to come here directly, in hope of making some manner of peace with the past, and all that had been so irrevocably done.
He reached for one final sheet of paper.
To the actress as calls herself Miss Arabella Skye: I am alive. I am in San Francisco. So is he.
He signed it: T. (your brother).
–TWENTY–
The Accounting of Barry Weaver
San Francisco, 1892
1.
WYATT EARP had seen him walking along Sutton Street. I learned this from Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus, and it gave me an awful turn.
&n
bsp; “Not half the turn,” she assured me, “as it give my husband.”
Wyatt had been stepping out the front door of a gentlemen’s club, she said. He had been meeting with certain Leading Men of Enterprise to discuss Unspecified Investment Opportunities, the details of which Sadie was not at liberty to disclose. “’Cause then they wouldn’t be Unspecified, would they?” But she gave me to understand that these were remarkable in scope and dimension.
This might or might not contain a grain of truth. Facts were malleable in the hands of Missus Earp, who was assiduous as ever in polishing them into Legend. But to hell with Unspecified Investment Opportunities—this was hardly a concern of mine.
“The Strother Purcell?” I exclaimed, working up a show of astonishment. “The shootist?”
Oh, yes, she said. Just a glimpse, but it was him. Years older, but the very man. Strother Purcell himself, gone gaunt and grey, and possessing one ocular orb fewer than he had done in days of yore—although she would not personally say it was “the Strother Purcell.” It was more to her mind a case of “the Wyatt Earp,” glimpsing for half a second the profile of a lesser lawman entirely. But yes, it was without a doubt that Strother Purcell.
“But—it can’t have been,” I said.
And to myself, I thought: Oh, Christ. My poor, old, one-eyed friend does not need such rumours to commence. And neither does the man who might yet become his biographer; to wit, the Reverend Weaver’s astonished-seeming boy.
“It can’t have been Strother Purcell,” I repeated. “Why, Strother Purcell is dead.”
“Or so it’s been presumed,” said Wyatt Earp, without looking up from his newspaper.
We were in the café at the Plaza Hotel, amidst breakfast smells and the clink of cutlery. Here Wyatt was wont to take his toast and eggs. It was a decent class of café, much favoured by Elite Persons of the Business World and halfway up Nob Hill, though surprisingly reasonable in price. So Sadie had confided, in the note she’d sent inviting me to join them.
The note had not come out of the blue. I’d made intermittent efforts to re-establish diplomatic relations, following the Ichabod fiasco. Sadie and I had bumped into each other on the street, once or twice. Purely by accident, you understand—and because I’d made a point of lingering near their house from time to time, just for the chance to tip my hat. A writer relies on his contacts, and it could surely do no harm to re-cultivate the Earps.
Sadie was a political creature herself, and apparently saw no need to alienate a man who might eventually stumble into success in the scribbling dodge. Stranger things had happened, after all. And I began to suspect that the Earps had their own motive for inviting me to breakfast—though it had nothing to do with this sighting of Strother Purcell. That had been a random bit of gossip, to them. I was the one who’d been riveted by it.
“Purcell has been presumed dead,” the future Lion of Tombstone said now. “By others.”
“But not by you?”
“My husband,” Sadie Marcus said, “was a lawman. And lawmen don’t presume.”
“Yes they do,” said her husband.
“Some of ’em do indeed,” Sadie amended. She executed this reversal with shining eyes and vast integrity. “Some lawmen presume in shocking ways, Mr. Weaver. It would curl your hair, the way some lawmen presume. But not my husband.”
“I never seen the corpse myself,” said Wyatt. “So I couldn’t be prepared to say one way or t’other.” He eyed me impressively, then receded behind his newspaper, giving it a shake for punctuation.
The future Lion was sitting by himself at an adjacent table, as he had been when I arrived ten minutes previous. Several papers were spread out before him, and Earp pored sagely over each one in turn. “My husband must keep himself abreast of business developments,” Sadie Marcus had confided, leading me to a smaller table of our own. It was getting past the breakfast hour, and the café was half-empty. I had of course been gracious.
“But you have no doubt that you’d recognize Strother Purcell?” I hazarded now, lifting my voice just a little and addressing the great man.
“No doubt at all.”
“So...you actually knew him? In the old days?”
“I met him. Once. A lawman don’t forget a face like that.”
“Some might,” Sadie Marcus said. “But not my husband.”
“In Dodge,” said Wyatt Earp. “July of 1873. I’d of shook his hand that day, if he stuck it out. Wouldn’t shake it now.”
“Alive or dead,” said Sadie. “Neither way.” Her gaze was luminescent in its integrity, her lovely eyes at full-wide for my benefit.
I’ll confess that I hardly noticed. “Why not?” I asked the future Lion. “What did he do?”
Wyatt eyed me portentously. “That man hunted down his brother. Rode fifteen hunnerd miles, for a chance to kill him. That was never Law—that was plain vengeance.”
“But—you did the exact same thing,” I exclaimed—or almost did. I caught myself just in time. “What I mean to say is, you rode out yourself, when your brother was shot.”
Wyatt Earp said: “That was different.”
“It was not the same, Mr. Weaver,” said Sadie Marcus. A quiver of reproach now sounded in her voice: that I could be so wrong about her husband. “It was entirely the opposite. My husband was never vengeful. He was resolute. And any man who seeks t’know my husband, must understand that. And especially any writer who might write about him, some day.”
So there it was—the reason I’d been invited to breakfast. They hadn’t given up on my proposal, after all. My heart ought to have leapt, I suppose—except somehow it didn’t.
The future Lion was leaning forward, setting his newspaper aside. “I rode with heavy heart, Mr. Weaver. To bring my brother’s murderers to book. Purcell rode against his brother.” He tapped with his forefinger upon the tabletop, for emphasis. The famous mustache walrused indignation. “I do not stand with them as turn against their kin.”
It was of course rehearsed. I was watching a performance. In his way, Wyatt Earp was as consummate an actor as his consort, who sat swelling now with tremulous admiration. If Sadie were to swell one half-inch farther, buttons would burst. They would ping from the front of her frock like bullets; bosoms would come bounding free in celebration of Wyatt Earp.
This was my cue to murmur something duly reverent, and drivel some allusion to what an honour it would be to write about Wyatt Earp. I’d have done it, too—God knows, Young Weaver had never scrupled to grovel. But that’s when the realization truly settled: I didn’t give a damn about Wyatt Earp or his deeds or his insufferable mustache.
“Tell me about Strother Purcell,” I said.
“He told you already,” Sadie exclaimed. “My husband does not stand with such men. And more than that, he don’t abide ’em.”
“I do not,” Earp said.
“If my husband encountered him on the street again, he would say so to his face.”
“Now, Sadie,” Earp murmured, with dignity. “The man ain’t here to defend himself, and we won’t speak ill of—”
“No, Wyatt, I will not be still. It’s the truth of the matter, and I’ll say it. Mr. Weaver? If Strother Purcell walked through that door right now, my husband would offer to thrash him.”
Earp looked.
Oh, yes he did. His eyes went swiftly to the door. It was the reflex of an instant—but it happened. I saw something else, too: a flicker in those famous eyes that was actual apprehension.
“How good was he?” I asked.
“What?”
“Purcell. How good was he, in a gunfight?”
Earp shifted in his chair. “Couldn’t say,” he said. “Never saw him throw down.”
“But based on reputation. How would he have done—against John Ringo, say, or even Hickok?”
“Do you truly suppose,” Sadie Marcus said, “that my husband cares?”
But Wyatt was looking oddly reflective. He cleared his throat. He smoothed that damned mustach
e with the knuckle of his right index finger. His trigger finger. “Doc said: ‘If you see him comin’, walk away.’”
“Doc Holliday, you mean?”
“Doc said he seen Purcell fight once, down South. Said it left an impression. You couldn’t always be sure, with Doc. But I halfway think he may have been telling truth.”
Another thought occurred to me, then. “Down South...” I began.
“In Georgia, or some such. Where Doc was from.”
“Did he ever mention seeing the brother?”
“What, Dillashay?” Earp gave a low, brief laugh. “Doc said, ‘If you see that bastard comin’, don’t walk at all. Just run.’ Purcell was fast—but that brother of his was faster, and meaner, and altogether worse. According to Doc.”
“And yet Purcell killed him,” I said.
Wyatt arched one leonine eyebrow.
“When he finally caught up with his brother,” I said. “There was a gunfight, or some such. And Strother Purcell shot Lige Dillashay dead.”
“Dead?” said the future Lion of Tombstone. “What makes you so sure that Lige Dillashay is dead?”
2.
“Because I shot him,” the old man said. “And I watched him fall.” We were outside the tenement on Pacific Street, that evening. They’d been out when I’d come earlier, the old man and the girl—the door he’d rebuilt with his own hands was shut tight and bolted. I’d come back twice, and then waited outside on the street, till at last the old man’s long shadow had reached out of the westering sun, the girl’s slight and wavering beside him. He’d been holding Em’ly by the hand, her hand swallowed up in his and her sharp little face peering out from the shadows of her bonnet. He’d sent her inside when he saw that I needed to talk.
“You g’wan ahead,” he said to her. “I’ll be coming up directly.” His voice when he spoke to her rumbled fond and gruff; it grew hoarse as he learned what I’d come to ask him.
