Angels of North County

by T. Owen O'Connor

“They get six dollars for every twelve hours, more depending on if they’re the one to find a good sleeve of silver in the rock,” Jed said.

  “You couldn’t get me in there for no amount,” Seth said.

  “You talk to ’em in the saloon and most send the money back east for family or stor’n it up to buy a good cut a land back in the old world of Ohio, or Pennsylvania; they don’t reckon to do it forever, enough to get ’em started on something else,” Jed said.

  “It’s plumb crazy, Jed, a man spend’n his days in a hole,” Seth said.

  “Yeah, well they’re looking at us say’n, look at them fools head’n to the wastelands to get their balls and hair sliced off while they’re still breath’n, and no pay to boot,” Jed reasoned.

  They met the administrator’s man, Philippe, at the ferry crossing. He was the only one permitted to ferry men across the Ash. The first mate was an old sot with a gnarled nose that was cracked like a broken mirror, sprouting a hundred crooked lines of red. He blew an endless stream of phlegm, spraying it into the river as they crossed. He had small pupils encased in small eyes permanently fixed in a squint, the deep furrows of his brow the tell that he had voyaged through a lifetime plying sun-beaten waters.

  The horsemen fed onto the long flat deck of the ferry and the great pull to the far shore began. The river had a slow current, but it flowed in such a leaden way that the secret of its fathoms depth was betrayed.

  As the ferry neared the far shore, Philippe’s eyes darted about the sandstone cliffs and the old sot rocked from foot to foot as if he was testing the lightness of his step, judging his spryness to see if he could steal back across to the far shore, running atop the water.

  Phillipe turned to the old sot. “You can let it drift with the current out fifty yards but not a yard more, I can swim that if I need to.”

  The old sailor looked up at the cliffs, an uncontrollable tick beating in the temple of his left eye. He grunted, “If they wanna get to it, you ain’t making it to no damn river.”

  “You keep it fifty yards out and not an inch more. I better not find you drinking. I’ll be back in less than two hours. And, if my ass is runn’n for it, you ding the closest ones to me. I need to clear it to the water, they ain’t much for swimming,” Phillipe enjoined him.

  “I don’t like it. We bringing white riders—they done been clear enough about that, they’re watch’n us now, I believe it.” The old man shook his head and pushed the ancient pistol with its awkward three-foot barrel around under the buckle of his thick leather belt. He hacked up a great ball and sent it into the river where it disappeared without so much as a ripple, twisting once before it disappeared into the black water. He looked at Seth and Toby, weighed their age, looked straight ahead at the sandstone cliffs, and said, “You boys is crazy.”

  Philippe mounted a beautiful brown pony, its hindquarters dappled with white spots. He led the line up a dry arroyo that had not seen flowing water in a thousand years, but the lines running lengthwise in the stone walls betrayed the strength of the tributary that once fed the great inland sea. The forgotten bed of the river was hard-packed sand, and it made for an easy climb despite the steep pitch from the river. Philippe’s horse still had wild in him, and it grew more skittish with the new smells it encountered on the far side of the river. Philippe handled him deftly, but both rider and horse were jittery as if they both knew it were a fool’s errand.

  It took an hour to climb to the top of the arroyo; once atop, Philippe turned to the colonel. “The administrator told me to take you ’til I could see the church steeple, so that’s what I’m going to do. If Farinata is not there cause he’s out doing whatever he claims to be do’n, I ain’t stay’n; but show his people the seal and tell’m you’re allowed to wait for him at the Mission of St. Pedro.”

  “You are supposed to introduce us. How’s this priest going to know we have permission from the administrator?” the colonel asked.

  “I spoke to the administrator three days ago, and he told me that riders were coming and needed a ferry to the wastelands. I already told Farinata’s people to prepare for you. You have the letter with the seal, take it to the priest,” Philippe answered.

  “I don’t understand. How’d you know we were coming?” the colonel asked.

  “If you don’t understand, Colonel, how do you expect me to understand? I am just the ferry man; maybe you’re not the riders I was told to expect. I don’t know. The administrator tells me what he thinks I need and nothing more. Take the seal to the church; it’s all you’ll need. The administrator’s seal will carry weight with the priest.”

  They rode for another hour along the top of the arroyo until it crested another hundred feet. The vista looked down upon St. Pedro’s Mission. It sat like a crown in the midst of a varicolored checkerboard of farm fields. The patchwork quilt of the earth stretched in its pattern across the valley floor as far south as the eye could behold. Philippe’s manner eased upon the sighting of the mission, but his eyes now darted about the hills as if he felt some force closing in upon him.

  St. Pedro’s Mission was enormous, and for half the length of the main building it had a second-level adobe floor that overlooked a great courtyard, surrounded by stone walls, with a large well in its midst. To the back were stables with three fenced paddocks, the split-wood railing circling to form a great clover. The mission crackled with a colony of life; farmers, women, and hordes of children milled about in white cotton frocks all synched at the waist with sashes of fine, colored cloth.

  The new church was under construction. The sacristy wall of adobe brick and the soaring steeple topped with an angel blowing a horn were finished. Dozens of artisans and apprentices worked upon the scaffolding, eight tiling the giant mural of St. Peter kneeling before Christ as he grasped a fishing net on the shore of Gethsemane. The mural would sit one day fully encased in the north transept on the Gospel side. Toby looked out over it and could not figure so beautiful a hacienda with the image of the wastelands that had been forged in his mind by the rumors and fantastic tales he’d learned as a boy.

  Philippe turned to the colonel. “There’s the mission, you can ride on from here. You don’t need me.” He reined his pony and added over his shoulder as he rode back to the river, “Don’t trust that son of a bitch, Colonel.” He moved off at a clip, and the ten watched him disappear down the arroyo galloping hard until he reached the banks of the Ash.

  The old sot pulled hard to reach him; Phillipe rode onto the flats of the ferry’s boards, and he and the old sot began pulling for the far side, the old sot yelling, “Who said thar’s no such things as miracles, you lucky son of a bitch.”

  When the company met Father Farinata, he had his back to them supervising the craftsmen working on the mural of the south transept depicting Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. The artisans eyed the priest warily and hastened to complete his direction even if he communicated it, as he often did, with no more than a nod of the head. Lucifer was depicted as a spirit wrapped in a modest reddish-brown cloak. The Savior lay prostrate, with a lean and hungry look—the forty days in the wilderness captured in his prostration. The mountaintop looked upon the glowing cities of the plain.

  The riders entered the half-erected church and saw the priest was tall, powerfully built, with a strong jaw and an angular profile most pronounced in his Roman nose.

  The colonel said, “Good morning, Father.”

  The priest turned, and the left side of his face was horribly disfigured with burns etched into his eye decades ago.

  “Good morning, Colonel, the administrator informed me you would be coming.”

  Farinata looked into the eyes of the ten gunmen standing in his church with his left eye, the horrific scarring encasing the right orb in a ring of pure white.

  “Father, we’ve been told that you could secure us passage through the Stone Tribe country,” the colonel said.

  “There’s been peace here by the river for ten years. Why do you come so adorned with
weapons? May I ask why you want to head into the wooded canyons and challenge the peace I have with the tribes there?”

  The colonel said, “We’re hunting a warlord savage by the name the White Lion.”

  The priest eyed them all in the room again. “Why would eight men and two boys ride in and challenge the army of the White Lion? You’ll never climb out of his world.”

  “Father, why don’t you let us worry about that. Can you get us the passage? We need to track that savage before his trail goes cold,” the colonel said.

  “What impresses you to believe he’s a savage?” the priest asked.

  “Father, he killed a family, blew the front door off with a cannon and slaughtered them all. He’s dragging that cattle back to the wastelands, and we aim to stop him,” the colonel said.

  “He’s no savage, Colonel. He was educated by Spanish missionaries in your lands more than forty years ago. He lived in a village that sat between two rivers in the North County. He reads Greek, Latin, can speak Aramaic. Have you ever spoken with him, Colonel? Would it surprise you to learn his entire family was hacked to death by whites and his tribe forced out of their lands? His people were chased into the Stone Tribe country, and there they were attacked again and forced to migrate farther south. They call their journey to the lakes, the Path of Blood. And now you want me to help you pass into lake country to butcher those people again?” The priest appeared to study them closely, but through the cloudy aura of his opaque eye that was encased in the scars of melted flesh.

  “The administrator told us you would help,” the colonel said.

  To reach an accommodation, the priest softened his countenance. “I can help, Colonel, but not the way you propose. I will send a message to the White Lion. I will tell him he has taken the kin of powerful warlords to the north. I will offer a deal for the hostages in exchange for horses. He can return the hostages to me. We can avoid any further bloodshed this way. I suggest you remain in Tin City. I will send word to you. It won’t be long; you would be surprised how fast information travels now between the peoples here.”

  The colonel parlayed with Gabriel, and Gabriel walked up to the priest. “I don’t recall us telling you that he had taken hostages, so maybe you’re right, maybe word does travel fast down here in this shithole, or maybe you knew what this White Lion was up to go’n north. Either way, I’m tell’n you now you best stay out of it. If he’s got an army, you’re right, what can ten do against that, so get us a safe passage through and you can keep clear of it.”

  The artisans could sense the tenor in the room and put down their tools and moved for the door, but Raif, Jed, and Abner drew pistols and told them to stay put.

  “Raphael, why do you draw your weapon in this place? Have I ever denied you anything in my mission? You and I have always been friends, when you searched for Lobo, did I not help? Have we not always understood one another?” Farinata asked.

  “I reckon, Padre, but this is North County business, and I always told you that’s where it ends,” Raif retorted.

  Gabriel asked, “How is it, Priest, you can operate this mission? How come a foot south of your fields, if it walks, crawls, or slithers it has to hide to live, yet this is no fort, and I don’t see a single man on this hacienda carrying a weapon.”

  “I share creation with the White Lion as I share it with you too, Mister McCallum. The mission is here to heal the bond between God and his creation, to care for the children of this land. Salvation underlies everything you see here. I know you, Mr. McCallum. Luther journeyed here many times and we talked of the souls in North County. Have you forgotten all the reverend taught you: ‘in his own image, and each to his own way’? The White Lion has his way, and I’m not ordained to judge God’s creation, Gabriel.”

  “You’ve bartered with them devils, and I don’t know what you’ve given them, but you gave something so that you could build this, whatever it is. You been out of the world too long, in such a place as this; I reckon one day you wake up and it all appears normal.”

  “When I came to America, Gabriel, I heard wondrous tales about the Mississippi, tales of riverboats and cities along its path, how the river gave life to the delta. The first time I saw it was on a hot August day on my journey west. I trekked to the top of a rise and asked a farmer how far to the river. He paused from his toil and led me on a path through his fields to a wood atop a short hill. He said the knoll would give the grand view of his river, a river he loved and feared since he’d first swam in it as a boy. As we reached the hill, he told me to keep straight and I would see the ruins of an old stone house built by an unknown people that had arrived and disappeared even before his people had reached the fertile land along the river.

  “I cannot tell you how great my anticipation when I climbed to the ruins and placed my hands on the stones and looked out to the Mississippi, the sight that had lived to that day only in my imagination, the wild and fabulous tales that had shaped my mind’s vision of it. What did I see as I placed my hands upon that wall and looked out? I saw nothing but a brown muddy slop. Oh, there was power, it moved things and people and fed the land, but it did it with no beauty. It was there upon that old stone wall for the first time, after years of trying, that I understood the world. Each man has a muddy river that runs through him, it is his first nature, it is the spring that feeds him—all of us, you, me, the White Lion, the same muddy river flows through us, and like the Mississippi, no banks can hold it. At times it will flood and kill the very things on its shores that worship it.”

  “I’m not a missionary, Padre, and I don’t much reckon to discover the White Lion’s nature, don’t care if it’s evil, good or not, whatever it be I’m going to find him and kill him,” Gabriel said.

  The priest seemed to relax into his cloak as he sat at a table, “The mixing of good and evil in the heart is the fabric of life—evil, Gabriel, evil is invincible. Accepting it is the only way to move forward until that day comes when we learn to stop killing each other, and until that day, some have no choice but to taste of the vinegar.”

  “Padre, you can worry about my and that heathen’s soul all you want; it’s his ass I need to shoot ’cause he took my two nieces, and whatever you’re doing here, you’re right about the river flooding, it’s gonna flood here and wash all this bullshit of yours away, ain’t nothing can be built in this land,” Gabriel said.

  “The North County exists with its Gabriels, and the wastelands exist with its White Lions. Mr. McCallum, there is no repentance for the angels after their fall, and there is no repentance for men after death. If you venture down there, you all will die bloody, and your nieces will be enslaved. The Lion will return the nieces to me, show patience. These men know it is your decision, Gabriel. Think of these two young boys, to die before being given the chance to fully live, to be men. I promise you there is no reason to venture down, the Lion can be reasoned with,” the priest said.

  “Padre, I hear them levies creaking; I’d hate to see the river start flood’n this day,” Gabriel said.

  The priest eyed Gabriel and knew the soil must cry out with blood. “Ah, each to his own way—you will have your pass through the Stone Tribe. The poor box is in the sacristy near the baptismal fount, it is one of the first things I had built after the roof—fill it with gold eagles and I’ll send word to the ancients to let you pass without violence,” the priest said.

  “We’ll fill it, Priest, but a man with one eye shouldn’t try to keep watch of two camps. Don’t send word to that heathen or we’ll come back through here after we’re finished crucifying him,” Gabriel said.

  “Gabriel, like you, I was blind before the shamans of the Great Desert scorched me; now I see more with more clarity than I ever did. One more thing: Luther borrowed a golden crucifix, it’s unique, please return it to me if you ever see North County again.”

  They rode in single file through the Stone Tribe lands upon a trail that had once ringed an ancient sea. They saw a single tribesman standing sentinel. Tob
y and Seth looked upon him on a stone ledge above the path standing in front of a cave carved out of the sandstone. He was more aged than any man they had ever seen, nothing but a sheath of dry skin shrouded over bone and sinew. His hair hung in a monkish halo stringing down to his shoulders in great wisps; it was bleached by the sun a radiant white and glowed in relief of his scorched skin. He held a spear by his side; one leg tucked up behind, standing like some rare amber pelican. He watched without passion. He had been born betwixt the ages. As a child, he ran wild in the woods without fear, his people ruling without challenge from the Ash to the southern lake. He gazed now through the cloudy aura of an aged man’s eyes upon intruders beneath his home that in his boyhood would have been torn to pieces by the warriors of his tribe. He had never weighed time, to him there had never been a past or future, only the day. Yet, he dreamed the handful of newborn males suckling in his valley would never reach manhood, their deaths written in the arrows already honed by the tribe rising to the south, and the women would be taken as slaves, to propagate a new race.

  The sentinel’s flaked spearhead had been honed to its razor’s edge with millennia of learned skill but it stood useless against the tide of the future crashing upon his tribe.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  FORGERS OF WEAPONS

  * * *

  The trail led to five canyons etched from the world by four rivers running south to the great lake. Three of the canyons were impassable to cattle, the rivers having cut narrow, deep gorges furrowed with a tangle of vine and scrub along sandstone cliffs. The fourth canyon was the path the White Lion would take. The Germans had raised their village in exile in this swallow of the third canyon.

  The colonel rode next to Raif despite the tightness of the red clay path. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew that priest?” the colonel asked.

  “Colonel, it were you give me the commission to hunt down Lobo, where’d you suppose I was gonna find that liver-eater?”