Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter

by Edward M. Erdelac

  When he turned his attention back to Sadie, he found that they were the last mourners left to watch the dirt fall on Rica’s coffin.

  “Her lovin’, grievin’ brother,” she hissed under her breath, “couldn’t even stay with her in the end.”

  “Sadie,” The Rider said. “Do you know…who would have given her the abortion?”

  Sadie looked at him.

  “You think I ought to know, is that it?” her expression was hard, and her voice trembled. “We all move in the same circles, isn’t that it?”

  “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say. “I didn’t mean it that way…”

  He moved to touch her hand, but stopped himself.

  She stared at him, looked at his hands, frozen in mid air, watched them retreat. For a moment he thought she would spit in his face, thinking he was recoiling from her because of what she was. Then her face seemed to relax.

  “You’re not supposed to touch a woman are you?” she said.

  “Shomer negiah,” he said, nodding.

  “I remember.” Her eyes looked faraway for a moment. “You only touch the woman you’re going to marry.”

  He blanched slightly, to hear it spoken by her. It was true. He had been taught that touch was a sacred, personal thing, the first among all intimate physical connections, and not something to be dispensed casually. It was not disgust that stayed his hand. It was a deep, ingrained respect. And he had come to this town to throw that away.

  “Please,” he stammered. “Tell me, why are you with this Johnny Behan?”

  She sighed.

  “It’s complicated, you know? I didn’t come out here thinking I would…I mean, I never wanted to…I don’t think any woman wants to…” She looked at him, and her eyes looked so heavy and wet that he almost embraced her. Instead, he clasped his hands before him.

  “But you know how it was, living in those tenements. Four families under a roof. I couldn’t breathe there. I wanted to just get out. My friend and I, we came out here to be actresses.” She chuckled, shaking her head, and brushed away a tear. “We joined up with the Pauline Markham Pinafore Troupe. We were headed to Prescott when I met Johnny on the trail. He was campaigning then, for County Sheriff. He had a way about him. A big way of talking. He made it sound like he could lay the world at your feet. When he didn’t win…well, we traveled together for awhile. And there wasn’t much money. And it was either I…either I got us some, or we starved.”

  She turned, and looked out across the graves. “I managed to…a man…helped me. I went home for awhile, but…home had never really been home to me anyway. Johnny sent for me. He said we could be married. He had all these schemes…we put our money in the No. 2. And well, it hasn’t taken off yet.” She balled her fists, and struck them against her thighs. “I said this wouldn’t happen again. I said I wouldn’t do it.”

  She turned, and looked at The Rider. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “But here I am.”

  He wanted to reach out to her then. He wanted to pull her by the hand and march out of Tip Top with her….what? Atop his onager? Where would they go? What would they do? Could he offer her any more than Johnny Behan could?

  “I don’t know who gave her the abortion,” she said. “I’ve heard some girls go to the two Chinese sisters who run the laundry.”

  He looked past her for a moment, and fell on the four little headstones near the brush. A little brown bird was perched on one of the planks, its throat moving as it made the queer churring sound he’d heard all through the service. A little brown bird with white dappled wings, like tree bark. It seemed familiar.

  “What is that bird?” he asked.

  She turned and looked as it beats its small wings and flew off from the plank.

  “Johnny calls them nightjars,” she said.

  The Rider stepped past her slowly, listening to the spades of the gravediggers biting into the earth. He stood over the plank where the nightjar had perched. Its crude inscription read ‘Unnamed Infant – Mar 1878.’ The other three were similarly marked, two from last year, two from this year, and the mound of fresh turned earth below which lay the aborted baby of Rica Gersten and her soldier. He wondered if the other children were the same as Rica’s. Then he noticed the other unmarked mounds. Three more, in a line.

  Four little marked graves, four married women, and no children at the funeral.

  “What about these?” he said, pointing to the unmarked graves.

  “They were here before I got here,” Sadie shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in them. I guess maybe unwanted babies.”

  “How long have you been here, Sadie?” he asked, as he heard her come up behind him.

  “Since February.”

  “Are there any children in town?”

  Sadie paused, frowning.

  “I’ve never seen any, no.”

  “Are there any other pregnant women?”

  “Manuel Calles’ wife is due in a few months,” she said. “He’s one of the saloonkeepers. Then there’s Eileen Arnold’s—she’s due any day now, and there’s a colored girl…I’ve seen her hanging clothes out back of The Bird Nest. She’s pretty well along. I haven’t seen her in awhile. It may be she’s already had her baby.”

  Pete Arnold’s wife. The blonde haired woman on the arm of the red bearded man beside Alph at the funeral. She wasn’t stocky, she was pregnant.

  He went without a word out of the graveyard, and Sadie followed, asking again and again what the matter was.

  He didn’t answer until he had his rotating vice locked onto the edge of the No. 2’s bar, and had spread out his engraving tools and some blank medallions from his saddlebags on a piece of black velvet. Three blank medallions.

  “Did your father or your mother ever tell you stories when you were a little girl?” he asked, when he had rolled up his sleeves and set his jeweler’s eyepiece in his eye.

  It was early yet, but Behan was on the other end of the bar pouring whiskey to a couple of bleary eyed men who had apparently hit the other four saloons on the road before stumbling into this one. The Rider watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were taking an interest in what he was doing, and in Sadie as she leaned on the bar beside him.

  “Sure, some. What do you mean?”

  “Did they ever tell you stories from the Talmud?”

  “Of course. Like…Moses, Noah, Adam and Eve…”

  He looked up at her and smiled.

  “Yes, exactly. Like Adam and Eve.” He took up his push graver and a tiny hammer. Joseph Klein, one of his old teachers among the Sons of the Essenes, had taught him engraving. He had chiseled and tapped the mystic etchings into his own pistol, and he had crafted most of the Solomonic amulets he wore. Those had been complex jobs. The pistol alone had taken months. This was relatively simple work. He scraped and graved as he spoke.

  “But did you know that Eve wasn’t Adam’s first wife?”

  She looked at him, waiting for his explanation.

  “In the Alphabet of Ben Sira, it says that God created another woman for Adam out of the dust, just as he was made. This woman was named Lilith, and she argued with Adam all the time.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything.” The Rider shrugged, fitting a medallion into the vice and cranking it tight. “Even…sexual positions.”

  Sadie smirked.

  “My kind of lady.”

  He took up the little hammer and carefully began to tap letters into the medallion with the iron grave.

  “Some say she fled Eden, or that she seduced, or was seduced by, an angel and ran off with him. Some say she learned magic, either from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, or from her angel lover.”

  “She traded up,” Sadie said, looking down the bar at Behan, who was now looking at them, his hands on his hips as he whispered to the two drunks. “I can understand that.”

  “Hey buster,” called one of the drunks. “Why don’t you quit that infernal tappin’?”

>   The Rider glanced over at them, held their eyes until they looked at each other, and went back to work.

  “Maybe he don’t hear so good,” said the other.

  “Maybe he don’t speak English,” said the first.

  The second man slapped his hand on the plank, upsetting The Rider’s tools, nearly causing him to fumble the etching.

  The Rider sighed and straightened. He looked at them again.

  Behan smiled and poured the two of them another drink each.

  “On the house, gents,” Behan said.

  The Rider carefully folded up his tools in the black velvet.

  The two drunks shared a chuckle.

  “I guess he speaks that language well enough,” said one of them.

  They reached for their drinks.

  The Rider took out his Volcanic pistol and slammed it heavily on the plank.

  The impact jarred the whiskey glasses on the other end, spilling liquor over their hands and shirt fronts.

  The Rider looked at them expectantly, his hand resting lightly on the gold and silver chased pistol, fingers drumming lightly.

  The two drunks looked at each other briefly, lips slightly parted. They touched the frayed brims of their hats to first The Rider and then to Behan, and excused themselves and headed outside.

  “Well that’s just fine,” Behan said, mopping up the bar with a moldy towel. “Say just what the hell are you doin’ over there anyway?”

  The Rider said back down and methodically unfolded his tools again.

  “What do you care, Johnny?” Sadie interjected.

  Behan pursed his lips and snapped the towel on the bar.

  “You’re right, Sadie,” he muttered. “I don’t.”

  He came from around the bar with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm.

  “How much longer will your cousin be gracing us with his presence, honey?”

  “Not much longer,” The Rider answered.

  Sadie looked at him and he saw, but he pretended not to notice. He turned back to his meticulous work.

  “Well you be sure and tell me when,” Behan said, slapping on his hat and shouldering into his coat. “I’d hate to miss sayin’ my goodbyes.”

  He went to the door and with an order for them to watch the bar, he was gone.

  “You could trade up too, Sadie,” The Rider murmured in the quiet.

  “I guess any man would be an angel after Johnny Behan,” Sadie said, going behind the bar. “But where am I gonna find an angel out here, in the middle of hell?”

  She looked at him pointedly, but he didn’t answer. The fact was, he didn’t know.

  “So what happened to Lilith?” she said, after the only sound for a few minutes was the tapping of his little hammer. Her voice seemed a little haggard.

  “Adam told God what had happened, and God sent three angels out to bring her back. They found her on the Red Sea. She didn’t want to return. She cursed Adam and said she would put her hand against all his children for generations to come.”

  He cleared his throat, putting the finishing touches on the medallion, blowing away the excess now.

  “The angels said they would drown her, but she made a deal with them for her life. She would have dominion over newborns. The first eight days of a boy’s life are for her to dominate, and the first twenty for a girl. In this time, if a baby sickened, it would be because of her. But she promised that if she saw the names of the angels on an amulet about a child’s neck, she would leave them alone.”

  The Rider sat back, rubbing his eyes. He gave the vise a twist, catching the coin shaped medallion. He turned its face towards her.

  On it, he had inscribed the names Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof.

  He shrugged.

  “I guess even angels want to be remembered for something.”

  Sadie’s mouth opened slightly, and she took the little medallion from The Rider. Their fingertips brushed slightly, but Sadie didn’t seem to notice. The Rider felt as if all his nerve endings had turned to his fingers, like a plant turning towards the sun. He didn’t recoil, but he felt his ears grow hot.

  He quickly put another blank medallion in the vice.

  “I had something like this, when I was a little girl. My mother told me it had been hers—that my grandmother had made it.”

  “Your grandmother was a knowledgeable woman,” The Rider said.

  Her eyes were smiling, as they had smiled when they’d first talked about San Francisco. She was far away, and The Rider wished they were in that place together. Who knew? Had Adon not found him, perhaps Sadie and he might have met near South Park, in her father’s bakery. He might have seen her in the neighborhood or at Temple. They might have found one another in the brief, simple time before their respective lives had gotten underway and diverged so dramatically, become so irrevocably complex.

  Her expression fell slightly, and she stared at him.

  “So wait, what are you saying here?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  She looked at him sideways, smiling nervously, placating.

  “Do I trust you? We don’t even know each other’s real names.”

  “Does Johnny?”

  It was a terrible thing to say, and he had said it almost without thinking. Why? She put the medallion down on the bar.

  There was a commotion by the door as four sweaty, parched looking men tromped in and stood at the end of the bar.

  “Sadie, I’m sorry…” The Rider began.

  “My name’s not Sadie,” she said. “And I’ve got customers.”

  He watched her for awhile, as if he were from a dark and lowly place and she was elevated. She smiled, and the men seemed to reflect her smile as best they could with their missing and rotten teeth. They drank. They drank to her. They drank with her. They slapped her on the behind when she turned around and she laughed when they laughed. It was as if he were a ghost. She never looked back at him.

  He finished the other two medallions quietly, gathered up his tools and his pistol and coat, and slipped out unnoticed, brushing shoulders with more dirty men coming in as he went out into the street.

  Had he been able to convince Sadie of his belief, it might have saved him trouble. That would have been a task in and of itself. Now he had to find a way to convince these three women in town, two of them married Christians and the third a prostitute, to accept and put these Hebrew charms about their infants’ necks. The amulets would protect them, and the employment of these bodyguards against Lilith would cause the demon mother to show herself, to try and stop his interference.

  He thought back to the vivid dream he had had the previous night. It was possible she was already aware of him. There was more to Lilith’s story he had not told Sadie. Lilith had had a daughter by Samael, the angel of death. She was called Nehema, the first of the lilin, the night spirts, or succubi. Nehema had then born her father three more daughters. These were the Queens of Hell, the so-called angels of prostitution. They were demonesses possessed of human form, capable of traversing the earth, the Yenne Velt, and the lower world. They visited mortal men in their dreams, weaving erotic, vivid tapestries so sensuous and real as to stimulate the physical body in repose. The seed of man contained the proto-essence of human souls, and its scattering in the physical realm outside of a woman’s body allowed a succubus to gather this primordial matter into her own demonic womb, and in this way beget more evil spirits, or ruhin.

  The Rider had suspected the presence of Lilith herself long before that dream; he had guessed it at the sight of Rica Gersten’s aborted fetus.

  Rab Judah had written of the prophet Samuel saying that an aborted infant, unclean by reason of its birth, could bear the likeness of Lilith.

  Rica Gersten had aborted a child conceived out of wedlock in the presence of Lilith, resulting in her imprint on the unformed child.

  There could be no doubt. Lilith, and perhaps her daughters, were in Tip Top. The dead infants attested to it and the deformed aspect of t
he aborted child confirmed it.

  He wondered if the other men in town had experienced the same vivid dreams. Maybe it was the reason he had been drawn to Tip Top in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t his own weakness that had brought him here. Perhaps it had been Providence, some perception of the infernal too subtle for him to notice outright. Perhaps Tip Top was a crucible to test his baser instincts, to make him face his most unworthy temptations. More probably, he was just fooling himself.

  Sadie had said the colored girl at The Bird Nest may have already had her child, so her need was the most urgent.

  Finding the place wasn’t difficult. The first man he stopped on the street gave him directions, smiling the whole time.

  “Enjoy yourself, buster,” the man said with a wink. “Finest damned women I’ve seen since crossin’ the Picket Wire. Damn near any flavor you’d like, and they’ll do damn near anything you want. I’ll tell you, you ask for Aggie if you want somethin’ real special.”

  The Rider took the man’s directions and wound up at a large stone single story house on the edge of town, well kept, with its own porch and timber awning. Red Chinese paper lanterns hung from the eaves, and there were fanciful rosettes carved into the wood shutters, and on the board sign above the door, which read ‘The Bird Nest’ and had a painting of one of the nightjars from the cemetery in flight on it.

  As luck would have it, a black woman in a red striped dress and a blue kerchief tied about her head was sweeping the porch.

  The Rider walked up and cleared his throat, indicating the sign.

  “That’s a nightjar on the sign isn’t it?”

  She seemed to recoil slightly, hunching her shoulders at the sound of his voice, and wheeling on him.

  He held up his hands and stopped where he was.

  “Please, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Thas’ awright, sir,” she muttered, looking away. “They help you inside.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for you. At least, I think I am. You just had a baby didn’t you?”

  The woman looked at him sharply, all trace of fear gone.

  “What you want? What you know about it?”

  “Sadie told me. Over at the No. 2.”

  “So what?” she snapped, and her voice was louder. “Mr. Junior!” she called over her shoulder at the house, not taking her wary eyes off The Rider.