by Ian Weir
*
When she caught up to him again, night was falling on the second day. He’d been travelling for most of it, trudging west into California. Now, in gathering darkness, he sat on a hillside by the road. Rebekah nearly hurried right on by, except he’d seen her first.
“Did you find it?”
His voice was thick and heavy in the darkness. A bottle was in his hand.
She took the Bible from her pack.
He stood. “Rebekah. You are my good angel.”
“You said yourself. M-marked out for your friend.”
The Bible had been right where he left it last, on an overturned bucket. Rebekah had seen it straightaway, as soon as she’d stepped into the barn. They were setting down by a fire as she told him this. They wouldn’t be travelling again till morning: not on such a lonely road in the dark, and Rebekah so worn out already.
He asked: Had she seen them? The family.
No, she said; not hardly. She’d come and gone that quick.
“And the gal?”
Rebekah said she hadn’t seen the child. But of course he hadn’t meant the little girl. He meant the other one, that Dolly-Ann.
“Yes,” Rebekah said. “I seen her.”
“And?”
“And what? Just what I said—I s-seen her.”
It had been early that same morning. Rebekah had come upon Dolly-Ann fetching water from the river, the one that ran beyond the hill on the far side of the barn. There had been lively words on either side, though Rebekah saw no point in relating these to Brother Jacob. “You are a h-hoo-er,” Rebekah had said to Dolly-Ann. “You are l-lower than the dirt beneath his feet.” Dolly-Ann flung back at her: “You’d be lower than that yourself, if he’d have you. You’d be on your knees in one half-second.”
She and Brother Jacob sat in silence for awhile, by the roadside. He held the Bible in his hands, the smell of whiskey upon him. Firelight flickering, and darkness.
He said: “My Daddy was never good enough for the two of them. Under his own roof, he could never be good enough—nor me neither. How is it, Rebekah? You tell me that. How is it I can never be good enough?”
His face was closed and harrowed.
“I could have killed him at the end.” He said this suddenly, out of nowhere. “We came finally face to face. In the North—such cold you never imagined. But I couldn’t shoot my own damned brother.” He lifted the bottle, and took down a long, slow swallow. “He could kill me, though. Oh, yes he could. Now, isn’t that a puzzle to reflect on?”
That morning, the river had been slow and sluggish behind the farm. Such waters are a special peril, as Dolly-Ann ought to have known.
Eddies and pools along the bank, wherever the water is murky and thick with reeds—that’s where you must be mindful. Because Jenny Greenteeth lives in such places. She’ll sink down deep, deep, deep, will Jenny Greenteeth, just waiting for gals who won’t listen to their Mamaw Plovis, or neglect their chores. Ungainly gals with strawberry birthmarks stained across their faces, too ugly to be taken by anyone else—those are the gals she loves best, because nobody else will have them. And wayward gals. Jenny Greenteeth loves wayward gals beyond all measure. She’ll seize ’em and drag ’em down with her again, lank hair streaming back and fingers like talons reaching.
Yes, Dolly-Ann should have been mindful. And she should never have flung herself at Rebekah, the way she did.
She would have been found, within an hour or two. Someone would have gone out looking for her—the farmer, probably, or his wife, Dolly-Ann’s older sister. Rebekah hoped it had been one of them, and not the little girl, who might have been considerably upset to discover her aunt floating in such an unnatural manner, face-down with her arms and legs out-splayed. But this was out of Rebekah’s hands. And sometimes there’s no other way but to drown the devil.
“It all goes wrong for me,” Brother Jacob was saying, “where my brother is involved.” His voice was dark as pitch. “I want to rise up tall, but it all goes wrong. It always will, I think. It will always go wrong for me, with my brother.”
–TWENTY-FOUR–
Old Lem9
Afternoon
IT HAD BEEN A GRAND DAY for the pair of them, the old man and Em’ly both. They’d journeyed all the way to Golden Gate Park, at the end of the farthest cable-car line, where a fair was in progress, with carnival booths and a band striking up and more delights than you could imagine. They mingled with the crowds and Little Em’ly bought spun candy: a wondrous sweet confection, evanescent as a cloud. Afterwards they walked all along the row, listening to the shouts and the laughter until they came to a shooting booth. A nickel bought you three shots, and a bullseye won you a stuffed toy animal.
The Barker saw the two of them coming. As he would. Saw how Em’ly’s eye had been caught by a toy bear with a wonderfully woebegone smile.
“C’mon, then, Grampa,” the Barker called. “Make the little lady’s afternoon.”
He winked at Little Em’ly, in the depths of her bonnet. Chuckled as the old one-eyed man fished about in his pocket for a coin. “Here,” the Barker said, and handed over the sidearm. “Have the first shot for free.”
It seemed more a play-thing than a weapon. A .22 pistol. It all but disappeared into the old man’s hand. But a curious change occurred, as he took it. His hand ceased to tremble. With one smooth movement—scarcely pausing to aim—the old man snapped off a shot to the heart of the bullseye.
The Barker blinked, and reached for the woebegone toy bear. A Barker must ever be good-natured about such lucky outcomes. “Like to see you do that again,” he said.
The old man did.
Other punters began to cluster, pulling out nickels and urging the old man to have a go on their behalf. He seemed to enjoy this, firing off bullseyes as the crowd around them swelled, until the Barker’s rack of animal toys grew alarmingly depleted, a reduction unmatched since the slaughter of the buffalo herds. The Barker’s face grew hot and red. He invoked an ancient fairground rule that all punters must take their own damned shots, excepting Grampa, who should take himself to another booth entirely.
They laughed like children, the two of them. Little Em’ly had her woebegone bear and four other toys besides. The old man had a giraffe under either arm. It was the best afternoon that either of them could remember.
Later, walking home after the cable-car let them off, Little Em’ly fairly glowed in the depths of her bonnet. She had turned to the old man, about to exclaim right out loud in appreciation, when she discovered that he had stopped suddenly dead, staring at a poster stuck to a wooden hoarding. His one eye was wide in disbelief.
Miss Arabella Skye, the poster said. The celebrated actress, appearing at the Barbary Theatre. And below her name was the title of the play: The Death of Strother Purcell.
–TWENTY-FIVE–
The Death of Strother Purcell10
THE BARBARY THEATRE was a dingy nook on the second floor of a building on Jackson Street, above a dance hall. An alley door led up a set of wooden stairs to a stage and benches where eighty or ninety might wedge themselves. It was an actual theatre, though, reputed even to have its own resident ghost, as any true theatre must: in this case the spectral remains of a jilted clog-dancer who had lost in love and hung himself in protest. On moonless nights when the wind came up he might yet be heard, clomping dolefully.
Arabella had found the theatre on her second day of searching for a venue. It had been vacant for several weeks, which aided her in negotiations with the proprietor, a weary man much martyred by his digestion, who just wanted to get something signed. Arabella had a sharp head for business and had always enjoyed the bargaining process, right up to the point at which she ended on her knees—which didn’t turn out to be necessary, in this instance. The proprietor had been beaten down already by the vicissitudes of life; once Arabella had beaten him down some more, he capitulated and they shook hands. So Stanley lugged the costumes and such up the stairs, and they commenced their
preparations.
The play itself—The Death of Strother Purcell—was the god-damnedest thing. This was the consensus of those who saw it in San Francisco, as it had been of those who had seen it elsewhere. It was simply the goddamnedest play.
Arabella Skye had written it herself. There was a starring role for her, and several other parts to be played by a second actor: in this case, Stanley. He had never performed in the play before. It was not entirely clear to him why he should be performing in it now, apart from the fact that Arabella told him to.
“But why this one?” he had asked her on the train.
“’Cause this is the one we’re doing,” she had said. She sat coiled and practically quivering, staring out at the night as it rattled past the window.
It occurred to Stanley that much was involved here that Arabella had not told him. This left him uneasy. “’Bella,” he said, “I gotta think—”
“No, Stanley,” she interrupted. “No, you don’t gotta think at all. Stick to something you’re good at.”
“But—”
“You couldn’t outthink a lukewarm bowl of soup.”
Stanley grew sullen.
“And for Chrissake, don’t sulk,” Arabella said. “We’re doing the play—doing that play—and that’s all you need to think about.”
The play was narrated by Arabella. She took as well the role of a young woman whose heart had been captured by a dark and smouldering outlaw on the run, who fled through the teeth of the Canadian winter, pursued by a one-eyed lawman who was his brother. Stanley essayed the outlaw, with insipid results. He subsequently appeared as the lawman, in which role he was somewhat more successful, since it afforded him the opportunity to glower and gnash his teeth. Stanley’s glower was not half-bad, all things considered; at least it was better than his smoulder. The eye-patch was quite good, too.
As the drama escalated, Arabella narrated the lawman’s obsessive pursuit of his quarry into the frozen hell of the North. There was a gun-battle, at the culmination of which the outlaw spared the life of his brother through sheer magnanimity of spirit, and was foully backshot in recompense. Vaunting, the lawman proclaimed his triumph, only to have Nature itself recoil. An avalanche was triggered by his laughter. The mountainside gave way beneath his feet, sweeping him down—one strangled shriek from Stanley, and a descending wail—to his demolition.
Out of a dreadful silence, Arabella’s voice arose. Clad in black weeds, framed by a single light, she delivered a savage Jeremiad upon the iniquitous lawman, and a heartfelt lamentation for his brother. The text was overwrought and purple, but it had a certain force. Arabella’s performance—as several audience members would comment later—was eerily compelling. And here at the climax, the play achieved an actual coup de théâtre. Stanley had fallen to his well-deserved death as the one-eyed lawman. But as a pool of light seeped across the stage, Stanley rose again—as the outlaw brother. He tottered—steadied—stood: as if conjured back to life again by the sheer intensity of Arabella’s longing.
And then—around 9:45 p.m. on July 9, 1892, in the dingy confines of the Barbary Theatre—all hell broke loose.
–TWENTY-SIX–
Tyree Evening
THE OLD MAN had gone to the performance. He went alone, on the pretext of having some personal business to attend to, leaving Em’ly back at the flat. The name of the actress was unfamiliar to him, and he was not someone who went often to the theatre. But few men could ignore a play that had their own death in the title.
Tyree knew about the play, as well. He had seen the self-same poster, and—lightning-struck—had girded himself to attend. In the late afternoon, he betook himself to a barber around the corner and paid four bits for a shave. His hands were shaking too violently to hazard straight-razoring himself. “You okay there, fella?” the barber asked him, in the chair. “You seem kinda tense.”
“Tense?” Tyree might have replied. “Tense? I’m going to see my sister on the stage—first time I’ve laid eyes on her in sixteen years. I wrote a note and now here she is. Didn’t even look me up. Didn’t even try. The sister I would’ve died for. The sister I goddamn killed for. And you ask me, do I seem kinda TENSE?”
He did not say any of this, however. Instead, he said to the barber: “Fine. I’m fine, all right? Just, fine.”
The barber raised one eyebrow, slightly. He’d been shaving San Franciscans for twenty-eight years, and very little fazed him. “Eau de cologne?” he said, when he’d finished.
“What’s that?”
“Got eau de cologne. From Paris. Slap ’er on?”
“Slap ’er,” Tyree said.
The barber did so, charging an extra quarter. “There y’go,” he said, sweeping off the bib. “Smelling like roses.”
Tyree did smell like roses, too—at least a little. It was a welcome change from smelling like death, as he suspected he’d begun to do, up there in his tiny room. He’d put on his cleanest shirt for the play, and in a moment of abandon had purchased an actual rose from a street-seller, as a boutonnière.
But in the end, he couldn’t will himself all the way to the Barbary Theatre.
He tried. He made it as far as Mulvaney’s saloon, half a mile away. Arriving there at seven o’clock, he bought a pony of whiskey, in a bid to steady himself. His heart was thudding with great intemperance, and his breath came quick and shallow. Tossing back the shot, he had another. Then he ordered a third.
When eight o’clock came, he was on his fifth. Half a mile away, the curtain was rising. Around nine, he left Mulvaney’s, dragging himself down the road to one or two other establishments. He ended back at the Spyglass, just around the corner from his own room on Polk Street.
Weaver found him there just shy of midnight. Tyree hunched, wretched, in a blue pall of smoke, feeling as low as he had done for years.
“Tyree! Oh, for Chrissake—here you are.”
Barry Weaver was in a state. He had been looking for Tyree all over. “The old man,” he exclaimed. “Have you seen him?”
“No,” Tyree muttered.
He wished Barry Weaver would go somewhere else and hang himself. A down-the-hall neighbour at Polk Street had done just that a few months earlier. He had been discovered in his room after three days, when he started to smell—just inside his door, hanging from a bootlace tied to the knob. Tyree had been thinking about his old neighbour while he drank whiskey. He had bootlaces of his own, he reflected. And a doorknob.
“Christ!” Barry Weaver was exclaiming. “The theatre—he went to the goddamned Barbary Theatre. I was there. I need to find him!”
“The Barbary?” Tyree felt a constricting in his guts. “What’s happened?”
Calamity had happened. So Weaver gave him to understand. Disaster on a monumental scale, or at least the thwarting of Barry Weaver, which came out to the next worst thing, in Weaver’s own reckoning of the universe.
“That damned play,” Weaver said. “That goddamned play.”
Tyree said: “Tell me.”
So Weaver did. In rising dread and disbelief, Tyree listened.
Weaver had gone to the theatre, having seen a poster with the title—The Death of Strother Purcell. Weaver and two dozen others, scattered here and there. The old man had arrived just as the lights were brought down. He came in high-collared and desperately starched, said Weaver, his face chalk-white and his one eye wild, as a man might do who ascended the steps to the gallows. And then that goddamned play had begun.
“It was hardly a play at all,” Weaver said. “It was—hell, I hardly know what the damned thing was. A tale, told half in darkness, by that March-mad actress.” He reached for a stool and sat on it, much harried. He signalled for someone to bring him a goddamned drink. “Alone on the stage, half the time—some fence-post of a boy up there with her. But damn it, Tyree—somehow, she drew you in. The goddamnedest uncanny creature—eyes like lamps. Eyes like yours are, right this minute—Chrissake, Tyree, you look like death on a stick. And who the hell knows how s
he knows the story, or how much of it is even true. But I could almost believe she was there, when it all took place.”
“She was. She was there at the roadhouse, where it began.”
He’d spoken so low that Weaver didn’t hear him. Weaver kept talking, and Tyree listened some more.
“...And off they rode, fleeing north through a winter storm,” Weaver was saying. “At least, according to her telling of it. Lige Dillashay, and another outlaw with him.”
“Quarles,” Tyree said, louder.
“What’s that?”
“Fletcher Quarles, out of Missouri. The third one was a boy called Dooley Sprewell.”
“He wasn’t in the play.”
“They killed him.”
“Wait. What? Who killed him?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Tyree said. “Just tell me what happened at the theatre.”
Weaver’s drink had come. He slurped, eyeing the little man askance. But he told the rest of the story. He grew caught up in it, even—the cold, and the chase, and the showdown; the shot foully fired by Strother Purcell, and the gods of ice and earth passing judgement. “Then she called to him.”
“Him?” Tyree demanded.
“To Dillashay.”
That March-mad actress. Like some pagan priestess—like a witch. A flea-pit theatre on the second floor above a dance hall: she lifted her arms and conjured with his name. And he rose—that fence-post of a boy who was on the stage with her. He rose up, in counterfeit of the outlaw. There was a look on the actress’s face like holy dread and rapture—and then it happened.
“The old man,” Weaver said. “He rose. Strother Purcell.”
Weaver had all but forgotten about him, so rapt had he been in the goddamned play. Jesus Christ, what Purcell must have been thinking—to have sat there in that theatre all along. But now he was on his feet, in the back row: “It is infernal!”
