by Ian Weir
“You and your brother, you mean?”
“No. You and me.”
This cut her. It did. Still, she gave it her due consideration.
“Well,” she said, “then I’d say what’s done is done. I’d say, in the light of that, we should go upstairs.”
After another while they went inside. She led him up the stairs, the two of them ruined and reeling, to the silent disgust of the Widow Ross at the desk, who pruned her lips at the spectacle of a preacher carrying on in such a manner, and most especially with such a woman as Missus Mann most plainly was, no matter whether he’d married her or not.
As it happened, though, he could not perform his duties. For the first time in his recollection, he could not discharge the debt a husband owes a wife. At length, he gave up and rolled soddenly out of the bed. Leaving her tangled in grievance and bedsheets, he shambled back outside again.
He was sitting alone on the front steps some while later, despising the world and all those in it and himself beyond them all. Moths batted against the porch light; frogs chorused in the distance, down by the lake.
A throat was cleared.
He looked up to see a stranger standing, hat uncomfortably in hand.
“You’d be the Reverend?” the stranger said.
“What of it?”
The stranger’s name was Nickerson. A traveller, he said, passing through from the north. His errand was private in nature, which he did not divulge; Mr. Nickerson believed in tending his own affairs, and leaving others unmolested to tend theirs. This in part explained the awkwardness with which he stood now, looking more at his own hat than at the preacher.
Mr. Nickerson cleared his throat again. He’d arrived in Mears Lake a short while previous, and had fallen into discourse with the man at the livery stable: Emmett Hoddle, who was as you might say an old friend. From Hoddle he learned that a preacher had been by that morning, asking after an old man travelling with a gal.
“And?”
“I seen ’em.”
There was a change in the tenor of the night, subtle but unmistakable. So it seemed to Mr. Nickerson.
“When?” the Reverend said.
“Earlier.”
“Where?”
“Oh, thirty miles or so—northeast, up the Old County Road. The old man, the gal, and a little fella.”
“A one-eyed man,” the Reverend said.
“That’s him.”
“Name of Purcell?”
The old man didn’t give a name, Mr. Nickerson said. But oneeyed, yes. And he’d recognized the gal. Emily Braxton, as she had been once—Harley Braxton’s child, who’d been married off to the Mormon up at Deadman Creek, in settlement of debt.
“In settlement of debt?”
“Not my bidness,” Mr. Nickerson said. “Never was. But not a wholesome situation, neither.”
“Sit down,” the preacher said.
Mr. Nickerson hesitated. It unsettled him to speak so plainly of another man’s private affair. Nor did it set easily that a preacher should be so sodden with drink as this one manifestly was: pale and sour and stinking with it.
But the preacher’s stare had levelled with dark intensity. “Sit down.”
Mr. Nickerson sat, choosing a lower step than Reverend Mann was on. By this expedient he avoided that stare and could address himself more generally to the night, which by comparison seemed less black and perilous. A breeze had come up, stirring their habiliments. An owl hooted.
Mr. Nickerson twisted his hat between his hands.
He’d always felt sorry for that gal. There was the nub of it, and he said so now. She had been dealt with shamefully by her Daddy, whom Mr. Nickerson had known in a general way. Harley Braxton farmed a scrap of land near Juniper Plateau, where Mr. Nickerson himself owned property. Braxton was a feckless man who had fallen on evil times—dissipation and debt, compounding weekly. Nickerson was not a man to judge, nor to intervene. But when the daughter was as good as sold to the Mormon—well, it had crossed Mr. Nickerson’s mind to wonder if a man might go too far, in respecting the business of others. That question had come to his mind again, upon seeing the gal that same afternoon.
“First time I seen her in months,” he said. “She’d run off, y’understand. Left her husband and disappeared.”
She had fled with a pouch stuffed full of her Mormon husband’s coin, dug up from a hole in the ground behind the barn. That was the story that went around, at least; Mr. Nickerson could not say, one way or the other. But there she was again, that same afternoon: Missus Emily Shackleford, née Braxton—travelling with those two companions right back up toward Deadman Creek.
“And you spoke?” Reverend Mann demanded.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
The encounter had been odd and unsettling, as Mr. Nickerson told it. He had come around a bend in the road, to see the trio riding up toward him. It was just a wagon road, but it widened at this turning, making room for two parties to pass one another. Tufts of scrub-grass grew along the sides, despite the drought of summer; pine trees rose up on either side.
“G’day,” Mr. Nickerson had said, reining in his horse.
The old man one-eyed him with appraisal. He was forked on a horse of improbable size—a draft horse, half Clydesdale by the look; not a saddle horse at all, but of a size required to bear that old man up a mountain. The little man sat suffering astride a mule, while the gal on a small white horse hung back a little. Mr. Nickerson had recognized her almost at once; she had recognized him too, turning her face away right quick, in hopes that the bonnet would shield her features.
“What news from up the mountain?” the one-eyed old man had said, on learning that Mr. Nickerson had come from that direction.
“The world goes on as it will,” Mr. Nickerson said. “Up the mountain and down it as well, I expect.”
“How go our friends, the Latter-Day Saints?”
This had unsettled Mr. Nickerson a little further, knowing as he did the gal’s history. He would have spoken to her directly, except that she manifestly did not want to be recognized, which left him feeling uncertain where to look. Such uncertainty is awkward at a bend on a mountain road, with nothing but trees below or on either side; Mr. Nickerson felt it keenly, but did his best to make amiable conversation.
“I believe,” he said, “that the Mormons are as they were, pretty much.”
“There’s no more of ’em than there used to be, a year or so ago?”
“No, sir.”
“Nor no less neither, I suppose?”
“Pretty much the same,” Mr. Nickerson confirmed.
“Seven of ’em, then. If I’m not mistaken. The Judge and six sons. Eight Mormons in all, including the daughter, according to my reckoning.”
“Ten Mormons, including the wives,” Mr. Nickerson said. “There used to be two others, of course. Two other wives. But they left, first one and then t’other.” He sidelonged a glance to the gal as he said it, wondering if she’d make some reaction. She kept her face averted.
“Yes,” the old man said. “So I am given to understand.”
“Ten Mormons, at present,” Mr. Nickerson repeated. “Eleven of them, actually—if you’re including the old woman.”
The old man had sat very stolid all this while, forked upon that improbable horse. Now he stiffened, all but imperceptibly. An instant’s silence ticked past, and then another.
“Oh, yes,” the old man said. “I include the old woman in my reckoning.”
He leaned himself forward a little, one elbow resting on the pommel, his one eye trained intently upon Mr. Nickerson—as if holding him in the cross-hairs, Mr. Nickerson thought, till he should be satisfied with all the answers that had been given. The notion made Mr. Nickerson uneasy.
“Eleven Mormons up there, in sum total,” the old man said. “Eleven of ’em, as might bear arms. Is that correct? Supposing they should make certain choices, and it ever came to a fight.”
This left Mr. N
ickerson flat-out unnerved. “Why should it ever come to a fight?” he said.
The old man said, “Just supposing.”
On the steps of the Ross House Lodge, in the night, Reverend Mann had remained in stillness all this while. Now, perplexed, he demanded: “Why?”
Mr. Nickerson did not follow.
“Why would he care?” the Reverend said. “What’s this Mormon to him, to travel all the way from San Francisco?”
“Well ... the gal?” Mr. Nickerson suggested, lamely. None of it made any sense at all, as far as Mr. Nickerson was concerned. But the Reverend very clearly required an answer.
“Shackleford,” the Reverend said. “You said the Mormon’s name was Shackleford?”
“Judge Shackleford. Yes.” Such was at any rate the name he used, though Mr. Nickerson had once heard another. The Mormon had come to Oregon some years ago, he explained, with two wives and several sons already, and set about acquiring more of each. He was a man with a window-pane beard and an uncanny stillness about him. A way of watching like something coiled in a cave—him and that old woman who’d come with him. A twisted old stick of a female relation, Mr. Nickerson said. Some manner of granny-woman.
Reverend Mann had taken on an uncanny stillness himself. “You said you once heard another name.”
“I did.”
“Say it to me.”
Mr. Nickerson said: “Collard.”
“Judas Priest,” the Reverend said.
*
It was mid-morning when Missus Mann woke up. She found herself alone in the bed, and in the room. Sunlight pooled.
She saw the note almost at once. It was propped on the washstand, beside the basin:
I won’t be back. It’s better like this. I’m sorry. It could never have been what you wanted to imagine, whatever the hell that was. Hate me like you’d hate the devil, if you find that helps.
—Lige
She howled, instead.
The Widow Ross heard this unmistakably: a howl of such desolation that she looked up from the front desk, two floors below. Moments later, Missus Mann flew down the stairs, demanding to know if her husband had been seen. Her face was unmade and her hair was wild. A less righteous woman than the Widow Ross might have been moved almost to compassion.
Finding no one here with news of the preacher, Missus Mann rushed out in search of him. But he was gone. He was lost to her, irretrievably, though she importuned each passerby with desperate intensity and ran nearly a mile up the northbound road in wild hope that she might yet glimpse him.
At last, she returned. She was worse than merely inconsolable—so it seemed to Widow Ross at the Lodge, as Missus Mann limped back in. She seemed withered, as if she had aged half a century just that morning. She seemed as a woman might who had come to glimpse a towering delusion, and who saw her whole life—all at once—as ridiculous.
But against all hope, Widow Ross had information. Some person had been here, in Missus Mann’s absence.
“Who?” Missus Mann said.
Some person asking after the Reverend’s whereabouts. Failing in this quest, the person had asked after the woman who travelled with him.
A desperate light rekindled in Missus Mann’s eyes. “Where is this person?” she demanded.
The Widow pruned her lips and pointed: out the back.
The person hulked outside in the dust of the morning. It was quiet here at the back door of the Lodge: almost secluded. This might under less frantic circumstances have seemed ominous to Missus Mann. Instead, she exclaimed in disbelief: “Oh, Jeezus!”
Blaspheming in her wicked way and wounding our Redeemer anew. Her face whittled down to a sharp point, like it was a stick she would stab with.
“The devil are you doing here?” she cried. “Have you seen him?”
Rebekah had not. But she had already pieced it together: what had transpired, and what she must do in consequence. For Rebekah was not simple, as many had supposed. Sundry persons had made this supposition, to their cost. No, you could not be easily shed of Rebekah. You could slip away from Babylon Francisco like a thief in the night, having ensorcelled Brother Jacob. But Rebekah would pick up your trail. She would follow you all the way to the Ross House Lodge, in Mears Lake, Oregon.
“I’ve not s-seen him, no,” Rebekah said. “But there’s a w-woman who could help us.”
She stammered scarcely at all. This was often the case when Rebekah saw clear—very clear—the path ahead.
“What woman?” Arabella demanded. She almost managed to sound imperious. Yes, despite her wild distress, she was almost splendid. “Has she seen him? Has she information?”
“She s-seen him.”
“Where?”
“By the l-lake,” Rebekah said. She pointed. “I’ll take you.”
“What woman?” Arabella cried again. “What is her name?”
Rebekah told her: “J-Jenny Greenteeth.”
–THIRTY-FIVE–
Beyond Hell’s Gate
STROTHER PURCELL had ridden in grim certainty through the Black Canyon in the midwinter of 1876, following his outlaw brother’s trail. He passed through Hell’s Gate, where the ravine plunged down into the boil of the ice-choked Fraser River, then followed the trail along the Wagon Road to Hat Creek and then north into the mountains beyond the Cariboo. The outlaws had begun with a two-day head-start, but slowly, inexorably, he closed it.
This was inevitable. No man in the wrong can outlast a man in the right, who keeps on coming.
Strother Purcell kept on coming. He arrived at the Hat Creek roadhouse in bitter twilight. All around was bleak desert landscape, snow-swept and brutally cold; the Secwepemc hereabouts still wintered in the old way, some of them, in kekulis—pit-houses dug into the ground. He learned that two men matching the description had stayed at the roadhouse the previous night; they had left again, heading north, with first light.
As darkness closed he negotiated the trade of the iron-grey hammerhead for two fresh horses, with a man who operated the local office of Barnard’s stage-line. The man’s eyes widened as he saw the sixgun that Purcell kept in a holster slung round one shoulder, and the Sharps rifle in a saddle-scabbard, and most of all the sawed-off eight-gauge shotgun that he was wrapping at this moment in a bed-roll.
“The devil wouldja call that thing?” the man exclaimed. “By golly, that’s one Hell Bitch of an implement.”
Strother Purcell did not reply.
“By golly,” the Barnard’s man said again. He ventured the observation that such an implement was not exactly lawful here in Canada, strictly speaking. You couldn’t just carry a sixgun here, either.
“I can,” Strother said.
“But, see, the law says—”
“I am the Law.”
The Barnard’s man blinked. The temperature was dropping by the moment, it seemed to him, and not only because of the oncoming night. He stamped his feet awkwardly and stuck his hands in his armpits. His breath came in white billows. “Where’s this, then?” the Barnard’s man said. He meant, in which jurisdiction had Purcell been duly authorized.
“Right here,” Strother said. “I’m the Law standing right here. A few hours’ sleep, I’ll be the Law heading north. I carry it with me.”
At daybreak he rode out again, through a lashing wind that lasted for six days. When one horse broke down, he left it and rode the other. On the seventh night, snow fell prodigiously over the mountains. The morning dawned cold and unbearably bright. Strother wrapped his horse’s eyes against snow-blindness and forged on, leading it by the reins and clambering on foot through thigh-high drifts.
He never lost the outlaws’ trail. He kept on coming.
He caught up to them at last in a cleft between two hills. It was late morning. The sun rose high in a pale blue sky—a dazzling winter sun that brought no warmth. He’d have waited till nightfall, or else worked his way in behind them, except they’d seen him.
Lige’s voice floated down, lilting and sardonic. “’Morning
to you, big brother.”
They were ahead of him, and above. His brother was, at least. He had yet to pick out the other one, Fletcher Quarles. Lige was behind a snow-covered outcrop of rock.
“So this is where it ends,” Lige called. “That about the size of it, big brother?”
“Unless you throw your guns down,” Strother called back. “You and that partner of yours.”
His brother laughed. “And why d’you suppose we’d do a thing like that?”
He glimpsed Lige, now—a shadow shifting. But still he could not locate Fletcher Quarles. This was a concern, as was the fact that the outlaws had the sun behind them. But Strother had right on his side. He knew this, with certainty. He eased the Sharps out of the saddle-scabbard, keeping the snow-blind horse between him and the outcrop above.
The horse snorted, skittering. “Easy, now,” Strother murmured. To Lige, he called: “Last chance.”
Still he couldn’t locate Fletcher Quarles.
Then something changed. Something had gone badly amiss. Strother heard it first in Lige’s sudden exclamation: “No, God damn it—he’s mine!”
Lige reared, wrathful, directly into his line of sight. The sun remained behind him, though; Strother could scarcely make him out against the glare. Strother had half a heartbeat to aim and fire, and he did so.
Lige fired first. Strother heard the shot, an instant before his own. His horse trumpeted and wrenched away, leaving him nakedly exposed. But no bullet struck him, which was welcome, albeit odd. In that moment of perplexity, he had time to register the fact: this was undeniably odd. In the next moment, though, all certainties began to slip away.
There was a scrabbling in the rocks behind him. Strother turned his head to see the second outlaw pitching forward. Cousin Fletch wore the trout-faced look that may dawn on a man in the first indignity of knowing that he’s dead. While Fletch had been taking languid aim to back-shoot Strother Purcell, some son of a bitch had gone and shot him, instead. His own compadre had done this—Lige Dillashay, no less. Cousin Fletch for an instant seemed poised to launch a protest—to say, “Aw, here now, Lige, there was no damned call,” or, “Well, ain’t this just the fucking-est how-d’you-do.” Then he thudded down head-first and lay there in a heap, stone-dead before his sphincter had time to unclench.
