The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

  “Fletch?” he said, and tried to look around.

  “They’ve gone,” Tom told him.

  Dooley’s face was sunken like an old man’s, dying. Fever burned in his eyes. “Gone?” he said.

  “Both of those friends of yours,” Tom told him. “They rode off.”

  “Rode off?” The concept seemed difficult for Dooley to grasp. “Rode off where? When they coming back?”

  The men would likely be back in ten or fifteen minutes. That was Tom’s estimation, though Dooley Sprewell couldn’t know it.

  “They’ve left you here, Dooley.”

  “No, they never,” the outlaw said. “They wouldn’t.”

  But they would, too. Of course they would, and Dooley knew it. If not today, then tomorrow, or the day after.

  He said: “Billie?”

  “She left too,” Tom replied.

  Dooley gazed at him, seeking to comprehend. The darkness of evening was closing about them. He began to moan. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Oh, Lordy-gawd, there’s a stench in here.”

  “It’s all right,” Tom told him.

  “It’s like death.”

  “It’s just you, Dooley. It’s just your wound.”

  “I can’t die like this.” Two fat tears carved their way down Dooley’s face. “Not this way.”

  “There’s a rope,” Tom told him.

  “A rope?”

  “From the barn. I brought a rope inside. Will I tie it for you, Dooley? Help you to stand?”

  Gimp Tom knew all about the crimes young Sprewell had committed. He could guess what further evils the outlaw would surely wreak, if he were somehow restored to health, through the intervention of some wrong-headed saint in heaven—crimes too heinous to contemplate, no doubt commencing with the desecration of Billie.

  Even so, Tom had not been able to stand it, right to the end. He discovered that there is something stark and ghastly in the workings-out of justice—however poetic it might seem in the abstract—which the nickel magazines in his collection failed to mention. So partway through Dooley’s dying Tom fled and hid himself in the room at the back, squeezing his eyes tight shut and covering his ears, despite knowing that this was done for Billie’s sake, entirely for the sake of protecting his sister, and nothing else.

  Billie was the first to return, after it was over. Tom heard the rattling of the front door, as it opened. Creeping out of the back room, he saw her in the doorway. Billie stood in the red spill of light from the dying sun, staring in disbelief at the puppetry between them: the overturned stool and the feet six inches above it, toes strangely juxtaposed and inward-turning.

  “Just two outlaws now.” Somehow, Gimp Tom found his voice. “Just two more, Billie. Then you’ll be safe.” He tried, and failed, to sound plucky and undaunted.

  Billie looked at him. He would never forget the expression on her face—like the back door to hell opened up right by the roadhouse, and he had just come spidering out of it.

  –THIRTY-TWO–

  Arabella12

  July 12, 1892

  SHE HAD SENSED IT on awakening that morning: a perception that the air itself had altered, in an elemental way. From this she knew that some vast apotheosis was at hand.

  So at least she was to remember. This became the tale as she told it to herself.

  Thus she picked a fight with young Stanley, and sent him packing. The boy had grown insufferable, and was in any case no longer needed for the play, which had closed after two more performances, due to lack of an audience and the ill-health of the star, “ill-health” signifying—as it often did, amongst theatre artistes—that Miss Skye was too drunk to perform. She had been able to keep her room at the Leland Hotel through the good offices of Lyndon Ackerman, who guarded her privacy more zealously than ever and warded off visitations by such riff-raff as the landlord at the Barbary Theatre, who had come by on four separate occasions to seek payment for use of the venue. It is arduous to be the lone defender of an artiste in crisis, but Lyndon Ackerman stood fiercely by Miss Skye, though he was glad enough to see the back of Stanley.

  Early that afternoon, however, Lyndon Ackerman left his post for an hour or two’s sleep, delegating the front desk to an assistant who lacked Lyndon’s own fortitude. This would explain how the hotel’s defenses should come to be breached.

  Miss Skye had been much unsettled all morning—had been agitated, even. She had changed her frock three times and took unaccustomed care at her toilette. Ninety minutes, longer than she’d spend preparing herself for the stage.

  And such a shock it had been, nonetheless. That first sight of him, standing in shadow in the fifth-floor hallway when she answered the knock at her door: a preacher, God help us. He stood in a flat-brimmed preacher’s hat and a long black coat, despite the summer swelter. And so much older.

  “Miss Skiffings,” he said. “So it is you.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Arabella. Her legs very nearly gave way beneath her.

  Even in shadow, his face was scarred and lined. One hand was maimed, as well; she saw this as he lifted it to touch the brim of his hat.

  “A preacher?” she said. “A fucking preacher?” Her brother’s visit had braced Miss Skye against surprises. But nothing could have prepared her for this. “You come about sixteen years too late,” she said, “if you’re looking for a likely soul to save.”

  “Miss Skiffings .” he said again.

  “And the fuck is that—‘Miss Skiffings’? I wasn’t Miss Anyone, the last time you saw me. I was nothing but the gal who warmed your bed.”

  “Billie, then.”

  “It’s Arabella, now. Miss Arabella Skye. You turn up, after sixteen years—you call me Billie?”

  “I’m looking for my brother.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch.”

  Her voice very nearly broke, and betrayed her. She drew in a steadying breath, and essayed the blade-thin smile of a woman whose indifference is colossal.

  “Why would I give a damn,” she said, “about either one of you?”

  “They told me—someone said—my brother’s still alive.” His voice was exactly the same. Oh, she remembered that voice: husky and dark and suffused with the South. “If that’s true,” he said, “I want to find him.”

  “And kill him?”

  “You mistake me. I’m not that same man, anymore.”

  He was, though. Arabella began to see that. The knowledge brought a flutter of fear, and exaltation.

  “I expect you think I’ll invite you in,” she said. “Well, think again.”

  Behind him, in the shadows, something shifted. Arabella saw that he’d brought some manner of companion.

  “Who’s your friend?” she said.

  “This is Rebekah.”

  Arabella saw a great ungainly gal, with fists like hams and a strawberry birthmark stained across her face. She wore coveralls and vast clod-hopping boots, and glowered judgement down at Arabella from a towering height, as if she’d laid eyes upon the Witch of Endor from the Bible, who’d brought low mighty King Saul.

  “H’lo, Rebekah,” Arabella said.

  Rebekah glowered some more.

  Arabella thought: They’d need to be shed of this one.

  “I heard there was some play,” he said. “I thought to myself...I wondered if it was you. I need to start somewhere, you see. So I thought—”

  “Yes,” Arabella said, abruptly. “I seen your brother.”

  “When?”

  “Three nights ago. We never spoke. But it was him.”

  He had taken the preacher’s hat off. He stood squinting down at it, turning it slowly in his hands, round and round. Arabella saw that his hands were shaking.

  “How was...” he began, then trailed off. Tried again: “How did he look?”

  “Old.”

  “But was he...Would you say he was all right?”

  “It would prob’ly depend. On what the fuck that even means.”

  Behind him, the ungainly gal clenched those
hands. Rebekah seemed to be deciding that she had been in error, in supposing Arabella to be a mere witch, and not the Whore of Babylon herself.

  “Do you know where he is?” Lige Dillashay said.

  “I do not,” said Arabella. “Nor do I give one solitary shit.”

  “I should go, then.”

  “No.”

  The syllable burst out before she could stop it, like a cork from an over-agitated bottle. Lige Dillashay blinked, and Arabella wrestled emotion down. She lacquered a veneer of boredom over top and managed to recover her drawl.

  “You are going to kill him, aren’t you?” she said. “Your brother.”

  He shook his head, and said tersely: “I already told you—”

  “Now tell me the truth.”

  “I want to talk to him. Sort things. Settle with him.”

  “Settle?”

  “Certain issues. From the past. And then move on.”

  “Well,” Arabella said. “I wish you luck.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “I should go,” he said again. “Don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

  Arabella might have shrieked at him, then, and clawed him with her nails. She might have cried out: You took the last sixteen years of my life, God damn you—why scruple at taking the rest? Instead, she replied with desperate sang-froid: “Go, then. Don’t let me stop you.”

  He stood there some more, turning that hat slowly round and round, staring down as if secrets had been inscribed in mystic lettering—in Greek, maybe, or Aramaic—along the brim.

  The smell of him was exactly as she remembered: wood-smoke and the sweetness of whiskey and something deadly feral underneath it. Arabella placed one hand against the door-frame, to demonstrate perfect nonchalance and also to steady herself.

  “You look well,” he said to her.

  “Do I?”

  “Considering. We’ve all of us aged.”

  “Sixteen years. And he comes here strewing compliments.”

  “Have you been happy, at all?”

  Christa’mighty, Arabella thought; what a fucking question.

  “I expect you’ll want me to pour you a goddamned drink,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t use it anymore.”

  But he did, though. It was on his breath, thick and sweet.

  She began to see how this might go.

  –THIRTY-THREE–

  Em’ly13

  SHE HAD BEEN BORN Emily Braxton, to a Mama who died when her only child was four years old and a Daddy who drank thereafter. She’d lived with her Daddy for ten more years, and then she was taken up the mountain to stand before Judge Shackleford. That was the name the Judge called himself, though Em’ly guessed soon enough that he’d had another name, once—down South, where he came from, in Tennessee or Carolina. And that was the nub of how she came to be Em’ly Shackleford, the youngest of the Judge’s Mormon wives; she whispered the story out in bits and bobs to the old man, over the course of their journey into Oregon.

  She whispered some of it to Tyree, as well—Mr. Tom, as she preferred to call him, once he’d confided his true and proper name. The rest of it he overheard, and afterward recollected, as was his way.

  They travelled by train at first. Mountains bulked before them, the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascade Range beyond, sheering skyward. As evening came on, the shadows stretched out across them, as if the Judge had loomed in front of the sun.

  “He’s up on his mountain right this minute,” Em’ly whispered.

  “Hush, now,” the old man said.

  From time to time, the old man would stand, unfolding himself from the hard bench. “Look after the gal,” he would say to Mr. Tom, as if he might be days or weeks returning. The carriage could scarcely contain him when he rose to his full height; stooping, he would stalk along the aisle, swaying from side to side in his progression.

  His pretext was to stretch his legs, but he would hawk-eye in turn each of their fellow travellers, as if malefactors might be pocketed amongst them: concealed inside the red suspenders of the pot-bellied drummer, who had boarded the train in Sacramento, or under the bonnet of the harried young mother who sat several rows ahead, with three apple-cheeked children huddled about her. She had a weary prettiness that attracted unwanted looks from other passengers, most particularly a young man sitting on the other side of the train, facing toward her. He possessed, it would seem, a high opinion of himself; it emboldened him to eye the young mother with frank appraisal, until it occurred to him that one ice-blue eye was fixed upon him in return, looking down from a height.

  “Son, this is the land of liberty,” the old man said. “But mind how many liberties you take.”

  The bold young man said: “What?”

  “I’m sitting just back there.” The old man pointed with his chin. “Got a view of the entire carriage. Just so’s you know.”

  The bold young man sputtered briefly, as if working himself up to take umbrage. But that ice-blue stare grew unsettling. After another moment or two, the young man discovered some item in the passing landscape that caught his eye, and required his full attention. He scowled and scrunched lower in his seat.

  “Ma’am,” the old man said to the young mother. He inclined his head in respectful greeting.

  He said the same to her each time he passed. She smiled shyly in return. The eldest of the apple-cheeks—a tow-headed boy of three or four years old—grew so bold as to poke his head up from time to time above the back of the bench, grinning milk-toothed at the old man. He shrieked in delight when the old man stared right back at him, and winked.

  More often, though, the old man’s face was grim. He stayed deep in his thoughts. Sometimes you’d be sure he was asleep, only to have him open his eye abruptly.

  “Jesse was fast and cold as ice,” he said once, out of nowhere at all, after a lengthy silence. “But that didn’t help Jesse, did it? Not in the end.”

  Em’ly looked around quickly, wondering who the old man was addressing. A man sitting opposite seemed to wonder the same. His face was chipped from granite, in the manner of Frank James in tintype images, although this man was reedier than Frank James ever was, and much less certain of anything at all.

  “What matters,” the old man told him, “is you keep coming. A man in the wrong cannot prevail—not against a man in the right who keeps on coming.”

  “By golly,” said the man who was not Frank James. He twitched up a nervous smile. “I expect that’s the God’s own truth.”

  “God don’t come into it. Not at the end. You know that—same as me. It comes down at the end like it always does. Just two men, and a Reckoning.”

  The man who was not Frank James cast about for another smile. “Well,” he said, “I been told, so I know it now.”

  Em’ly would hunch smaller when the old man spoke like this. She would recede ever deeper into her bonnet, until she was just two sharp eyes, panic-bright, peering out. Oh, Lordy-God, she would think, what have I begun?

  Mr. Tom knew what she was thinking, because she whispered it to him. It was the deep blue darkness before dawn on their first night of travel, the passengers slumbering as best they could, the train crawling slowly up an incline. “Don’t you worry,” Mr. Tom whispered back. “That old man beside you? That’s Strother Purcell. Whatever’s begun, he’ll finish it.”

  Em’ly tried to convince herself this was true. She didn’t entirely succeed. “You never saw him—Judge Shackleford,” she whispered. “You don’t know what he’s like.”

  A sound came from her other side, like water gurgling in an ancient pipe. The old man had not been asleep, it seemed; he had given a laugh. “A Judge? No, he was never a Judge—not when I knew him. No more than his grandfather was, though that old devil claimed to be one too.” His one eye was open. It gleamed. After another moment, he said: “Tell me, though. Is he as bad as I suppose him to be?”

  The old man had asked this several times before. He seemed to require
particular reassurance on this point.

  Em’ly whispered: “He is.”

  “Is he, though?” He seemed to have grown uneasy in his mind. “Because I suppose him to be very bad indeed.”

  “He is,” whispered Em’ly.

  “I suppose him to be among the worst men as ever walked, and deserving of neither mercy nor quarter.”

  “As bad as you can suppose? Judge Shackleford is worse,” Em’ly whispered.

  “And deserving of no quarter?”

  “None.”

  “Well, then,” the old man said. He settled back on the bench, seeming very grim and wholly satisfied. “Then there’s no question about right and wrong. No question at all. It’s clear as clear what needs to be done. And I’m the man to do it.”

  Em’ly had been still a child when she’d been taken up before Judge Shackleford.

  This was not due to any crime she had committed. It was due to her Daddy. Mr. Braxton was a fearful man for drinking, and had acquired debts he could never hope to settle. Compounded together they made up a prodigious sum, and all of it came out in the end as a debt that her Daddy owed to Judge Shackleford, as debt in that district had a way of doing.

  “How do you propose to pay what you owe?” the Judge said.

  Mr. Braxton said: “I got the gal. She’s all I got, and all the world to me.”

  Judge Shackleford said: “Then you better fetch her forth.”

  So Em’ly had been taken up the mountain. Judge Shackleford was at the top of it, in the room where he did his calculations, tallying up the figures in his Ledger. Nobody kept accounts the way he could do, and with such cold clarity: revenues received and payments made; everything set down in long black columns. There was no one in Oregon who could calculate more exactly, nor hold out less prospect of hope for you at the end. When word was brought to him that the Braxton gal had been fetched, he came outside.

  Em’ly was fourteen years old that summer, though she knew she looked much younger, on account of her size. She saw a man of some forty-five or fifty years step out onto the porch, in dungarees and suspenders and a shirt that was soiled and frayed, and boots near as shabby as Mr. Braxton’s own, despite his wealth and holdings. He was square and hard and cold and unshaven, and he looked Em’ly slowly up and down. His eyes were black and his hair so fair that he seemed to have no lashes.