The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  She had seen him, then—the actress. She spied him past the glare of the footlights, Weaver said, as the rest of the audience craned and peered. That one-eyed old man, six foot five inches of him, as distressed as ever Lear was on the heath. “It is not the truth,” he cried. “I never intended...And he did not...It is infernal!” And she recognized him, Weaver said—in that first stunned instant, she seemed surely to recognize him. She gave a cry like a stricken bird, and exclaimed: “Not you. Oh, no, no, no—not you. I don’t want you—you are the wrong one! Where is your brother?”

  Well, that was it, Weaver said. The Barbary Theatre was in chaos. That actress let out such a shriek as would make a banshee quake. The fence-post of a boy stood stupidly beside her, squinting and exclaiming, while the audience milled and by-golly’d and Barry Weaver bee-lined for the old man, thinking to intercede before God-help-us-all had a chance to happen next. “Well, you know what that did? It nearly got me killed!” The old man laid violent hands upon Weaver himself, when Barry tried to impede him. He seized Weaver up and flung him bodily.

  Tyree sought to keep his voice steady. “Is she hurt?”

  “Is she hurt?”

  “The actress.”

  “To hell with her—she’s fine. He never went near. I’m the one—flung clear across three rows of seats! I swear to God—the grip on that old man. And before I could get up again, he was gone. Barged right on out of the theatre. I’ve been looking ever since, but I can’t find him.”

  The hand that had seized Tyree’s heart eased its grip, just a little.

  “...And you hear things, Tyree,” Weaver was saying. “So anything you pick up, about the old man—I need to know it. Understand? And there’s something else, too.” Weaver leaned in closer, desperately confidential. “The outlaw brother.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s alive. And as far as I know, he’s on his way.”

  “The hell are you—?”

  “I sent him a telegram.”

  Tyree felt his jaw sagging open. It was an extraordinary sensation - a weirdly detached disbelief.

  “Jacobson,” said Weaver. “He’ll be using the name Jacob Jacobson. He may arrive any day, now. And I need to know it, just as soon as he does. Anything you see, or hear—I’ll pay you. Cash money. D’you understand?”

  Tyree said, numbly: “Dillashay.”

  “Yes. He’s alive. Have you been listening to a word I’ve—”

  “You called Lige Dillashay here?”

  “I told him about his brother.”

  “Why in Chrissake would you—?”

  “Because I’m the old man’s friend.” Barry Weaver was earnestness itself. He spoke as a man might do if he actually believed what he was saying. “He thinks he caused his brother’s death, you see. I thought: What a gift this would be—as a friend—to give him his brother back. To effect a—a joyful reconciliation.”

  “Joyful?”

  “And it would bring my story to a mighty culmination. His story. The life-saga of Strother Purcell—it can’t finish until he comes face to face with the brother, at long last. There’s no Third Act without that, you see. For better, or else for—no, for better. Of course it’ll be for the better. For the best. I mean, I’d never try to engineer a tragedy—even though Tragedy is the highest form of ... Speaking strictly as a writer, you understand.”

  Weaver had grown unaccountably shifty. It was something about the eyes, though his shit-eating earnestness notched up another three degrees.

  “And there’s nothing I stand to gain, here,” Weaver assured him. “You understand that, yes? It’s just...I need to stay on top of this.”

  Tyree looked at him. When he spoke, his voice was remarkably calm. Cold, even. “I understand,” he said.

  “So anything you manage to find out .”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  “Good man.”

  Weaver clapped him on the shoulder. He looked desperately hopeful, despite the travails and dishevelments of the night. And Tyree found that he’d come to a decision. “I don’t know of any Jacobson,” he said. “But I know just the man who might help us.”

  “What man?” Weaver exclaimed.

  “I could take you to him.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll take you now.”

  A filthy summer squall had broken out. The night sky opened and rain pelted down as Tyree set forth with Weaver. They were undeterred.

  “I love that old one-eyed man.” Weaver raised his voice above the deluge. “I actually do.” He hunched his shoulders and held one arm up overhead, as if this might ward off the downpour. Here and there about them, figures ghosted. “And I only want what’s best for him—truly. You understand that, don’t you? But by golly—to bring the two of them back together. To be there—and to write about it—whatever happens. Oh, Tyree—now there’s a tale to make a man’s career. There’s a saga to make up for everything!”

  Tyree limped, implacable, leading the way. He veered into an alleyway, which took them to the back entrance of another tavern, the Blackstone. “Wait here,” he said to Weaver.

  “He’s inside? This man you know?” Weaver practically quivered with expectation.

  “He is.”

  Or had been a couple of hours earlier, the last time Tyree had seen him.

  “Wait here,” Tyree said again. “I’ll fetch him out.”

  Inside, the barroom was thick with smoke and the sour yeast-waft of all such places. The tang of sweat and horse-shit and spilled beer, and the clamouring of drunken men. Amongst them was young William “Ichabod” Rourke, still here, slumming amongst low companions.

  “He’s outside,” Tyree told him.

  “Who?” demanded Ichabod Rourke.

  “The one who chipped you with a beer-mug. Remember? Your good friend Barry Weaver. You told me once the score was only halfway settled.”

  Ichabod was flanked on either side by brutes. Their eyes—all six of them—went simultaneously wide, then narrowed to feral slits.

  “No charge for the information,” Tyree said. “Call it a public service.”

  He continued on his way through the smoke and din, leaving through the front door. Behind him, Ichabod and his companions were already sloping out the back. Into the alley, where Barry Weaver waited in such anxious anticipation, sheltering from the squall beneath his arm and a canvas awning. Shielding himself from the eyes of the Almighty.

  God had perhaps seen enough of Barry Weaver, thought Tyree. Christ knows Tyree was sick to death of him.

  –TWENTY-SEVEN–

  The Leland Hotel11

  Midnight, and thereafter

  THE THEATRE ARTISTE Miss Arabella Skye had taken a room on the fifth floor of the Leland Hotel. This was a hostelry on Mission Street, much faded from whatever grandeur it had formerly aspired to, which never had been much. But it would still lie beyond the limited means of Miss Skye, were it not for Lyndon Ackerman.

  He was the night manager. Unmarried, intense, Romantic. Not a theatre artiste himself, but a man who held strong views on the human spirit. In addition, a man much inclined—by instinct and passionate conviction—to the side of the scorned and neglected. Prone to elevating Unappreciated Artistes into a personal pantheon of the mighty: often instantaneously, on the basis of slight evidence. Lyndon Ackerman would have wept with fierce joy to have met Sarah Bernhardt. In the meantime, he had Miss Arabella Skye. On principle he reduced the rate that would otherwise have applied to the room; when that was too much, he reduced it further. He was zealous as well in guarding Miss Skye’s privacy. In Lyndon Ackerman, Miss Skye would always have a friend, regardless of the world’s opinion.

  So he took a dim view at first of the little man who came shivering in well after midnight, to stand hunched and dripping on the Leland’s faded carpet, asking after Miss Arabella Skye.

  Lyndon Ackerman said, archly: “Who?”

  “I know she stays here. I found that out. Just tell me what room
.”

  Lyndon Ackerman pursed his lips, considering. “Miss Skye is not receiving visitors,” he said. Certainly not at this time of night, he might have added; possibly not at all, depending on the reason for asking. Miss Skye was an actress, but not that sort.

  The little man did not seem that sort of visitor, either. He was small and drenched and wretched, his lank hair plastered against his head. “I need to see her,” the little man said, blinking owl-eyed and desperate behind misted lenses.

  Lyndon Ackerman hesitated again. “Will she want to see you?”

  “Prob’ly not.”

  “Then why should—?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Good God,” Lyndon Ackerman said. He peered. “Is that the truth?”

  “If I wanted to lie, I’d do it better.”

  “Fifth floor,” Lyndon said at length. “Room 501.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Except...the lift is broken.”

  The little man looked to the stairs. “I’ll manage.”

  It didn’t seem certain that he would, though. Not to Lyndon Ackerman, who had a kind heart. He watched as the little man limped his slow way to the stairwell door: as if he was climbing already, well before the stairs had even started.

  “Friend?” Lyndon Ackerman called. “You should see to that cough. Before it sees to you.”

  At each landing, Tyree stopped to catch his breath. He found it would not easily come. He hadn’t expected to feel so close to panic.

  He climbed on.

  The carpet on the fifth-floor hallway was threadbare. Cracked plaster walls, the smell of damp and mildew, and the murk of lamps at infrequent embrasures. He stopped at the door to Room 501 and composed himself to knock. Smoothed back dank wisps of hair. His hands were shaking.

  There were voices inside. A young man’s, querulous. And his sister’s, slurred and bristling.

  When he knocked, her voice abjured him: Go away! Whoever the hell he was.

  He knocked again. At last the door was wrenched open.

  Arabella Skye, dishevelled and unsteady, stood framed against the shambles of the room. Seeing him, she took one half-step back.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

  “H’lo, Billie.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hair was wild. A glass of whiskey in her hand, angled at forty-five degrees, and a cotton shift. Clothes were strewn over sticks of furniture behind her; a naked young man sprawled amidst tangled sheets on the bed.

  “The fuck do you want?” she demanded.

  Tyree said, without thinking: “You’ve changed.”

  “You haven’t. Not in any way that matters. Still the same little lying swine.”

  The naked young man on the bed squinted the intruder into focus. It would seem this was his dangerous look. “’Bella? D’you want I should—?”

  “Shut,” she said, “the fuck up, Stanley.”

  The young man commenced to look aggrieved. He was better at this expression.

  “You never looked for me,” Tyree said.

  “I’m looking at you now.”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “And you couldn’t even write a proper note.”

  “I heard what happened at the theatre,” Tyree said.

  “Your note said he was in San Francisco. Not the brother!”

  And he should have known, shouldn’t he? Should have guessed what she’d be thinking—the wild hope she’d leap to. He had always made it his calling to know such things, about other people—and above all to know them about his sister. What else could the likes of him be good for, after all?

  He heard himself sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said dismally.

  “Yes, you are. The sorriest little fucker I ever seen.”

  “I should’ve stayed away.”

  It was the truth. Whatever he’d hoped for in coming, it wasn’t here. He understood that now. Whatever bond of loyalty they’d shared had died long years ago, at the Roadhouse. It had passed with poor Dooley Sprewell.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t see each other again,” he said. “It’s no good for us to be together. Bad things happen, don’t they? Look what happened the last time.”

  “That was never my fault. That was you.”

  She flung it instantly back at him, as if it were the truth. And who knows? Maybe it was.

  “Whatever I done,” he said, “I did it for your sake.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “I’m not, though. I’m lots of things, most of ’em foul, but whatever was done .”

  “You did it, Tommy. Not me.”

  She had never been so cold, he thought, in the old days. She’d always been the sort who would coarsen with the years, and here in the glare of unforgiving light she looked ten years older and harder than she ever was on the stage. But surely she had never been so cold.

  She said: “It should of been you, Tommy—the one who ended up dead, instead of Dooley Sprewell. You should of died before that winter, even. They should of drowned you in a sack, like they do with defective kittens.”

  There is a kind of peace that comes of desolation. “Well,” he said. “Be that as it may.”

  For a moment, it seemed to him that something had wavered, in her face. That she’d rather take back what she’d just said, or some part of it at least. But of course, we don’t have that choice. When things are said and done, they stay that way.

  “I’d send the boy away, if I were you,” he said. Meaning Stanley, on the bed. “If you ask my advice.”

  “Nobody asked it.”

  “For his sake.”

  In the background, Stanley commenced to huff.

  “He’s alive,” Tyree said. “And he’s coming.”

  That’s what he’d come here to tell her. So she’d be warned. One last consideration, for old times’ sake—blood being thicker, after all.

  “I can tend to my own sake,” Stanley huffed, “an’ I don’t need—”

  “Stanley, shut your potato-trap,” said Arabella. To her brother she said: “Who’s coming? The hell are you talking about?”

  “Lige Dillashay.”

  Arabella stood very still. “So he is alive?”

  “He goes now by the name of Jacobson.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know a man. He told me.”

  “What man?”

  “A man named Barry Weaver. But you don’t need to concern yourself with him. I don’t guess anyone does, anymore. Just—look out for yourself, would you? Dillashay—Jacobson—he may be on his way this minute, to San Francisco. And whatever you’ve been imagining, all these years, to make some peace with what was done to you...Whatever you need to pretend, about who you are, and what he is, and what the two of you could’ve become...”

  “He loved me,” Arabella said.

  Tyree glimpsed it, then, in her face, both shining and constricted: the immensity of the tale she’d been telling herself, for all these years. His poor, wild, vengeful, broken, batshit sister.

  “He’s a stone-cold killer, Billie. For God’s sake, run—’cause the devil only knows what’ll happen when he gets here. Just...run. That’s all I came to say.”

  –TWENTY-EIGHT–

  Em’ly

  Dawn

  THE OLD MAN did not return to Rose’s flat at all, that night. Em’ly waited for hours in rising agitation: pacing and fretting inside the door, listening and listening for his boots on the stair. At last, unable to bear it, she wrapped herself tightly in a shawl and slipped outside to go searching, all alone in the first grey light. She took with her Rose’s sharpest knife, clenched tightly in one fist, because you just couldn’t know what might come lunging at you, out of the dawn with unspeakable intent.

  The old man took shape instead, coalescing at the bottom of the street. Em’ly cried out in almighty relief. He trudged, crepuscular, toward her, looming longer with each stride.

  “It was lies,” he said, as
he reached her. “Nothing but lies, what the gal said on that stage.”

  He’d been lumbering through the streets all night, fighting to compose himself—so it would come out later. Clenching those two great hands of his and working his jaw, such that other night-dwellers shrank back to clear his way. Rain had lashed for a time and then stopped; puddled water splashed knee-high in the vehemence of his passing.

  “Lie upon lie, Miss Em’ly—except it wasn’t. There was truth in it too, which made it even worse. But twisted and maimed in ways you could hardly recognize. I hardly recognized myself—except I did. And I recognized her too.”

  “Hush,” Em’ly whispered. She’d hurried toward him and now she clung on tightly, pressing her cheek against the rain-sodden shirt.

  “It was the child, from outside the roadhouse,” he said. “That gal from so long ago—ruined and wrapped in a blanket, knee-deep in snow.”

  His voice was a rumble against her ear. “Hush, now,” she whispered again. “It’s all right.”

  She discovered that she’d dropped Rose’s knife, in the tumult of reaching him. She stooped for it, laughing aloud and swiping at tears with the back of one hand.

  “I owe you the truth,” he told her.

  “First come inside.”

  She reached to take his hand, but he stood fast. He’d come to a resolution, and would not be deterred.

  “Strother Purcell,” he said. “My true name is Strother Purcell. That’s who I am.”

  “Of course it is.” Did he take her for a fool? She’d seen the poster for the play, just the same as he had. She’d seen the title written there, and the look on his face as he’d read it. So who else could he be? “Strother Purcell,” she whispered. “I knew already, that’s who you are.”

  “But you don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “I know enough. I’ve heard you spoke of. He spoke of you—my husband.”

  This took the old man aback. He blinked his one eye. “That Mormon, you mean? What did he say?”

  “Just come inside.” Em’ly tugged at his arm, feeling suddenly naked and exposed, here on the street. It was stirring to inchoate life. The bruise of the sky was shading toward light; somewhere, not far off, a dog was barking.