The Winter Family

by Clifford Jackman

  A few of the riders chuckled.

  “I killed a little girl for no reason at all, other than I wanted to. I wanted to, with all my heart. It was all I could think about for days. When I finally had my chance, and I did it, it was as sweet a release as you can imagine. It was like my soul was singing. I did it. I did it. I did it!”

  This last he screamed out, so the sound of his voice echoed through the hills. A number of the riders laughed. One shouted out, “Yeah!”

  “Why? Why? I don’t know why. All I know is that it would have been a profound betrayal of who I am if I had resisted that impulse because other men considered it wrong. Do you follow me? Do you understand? But what am I saying? Of course you do. Because you’re like me. You are in revolt against the hypocrisy of civilization! You refuse to be bound by the rules of society when they conflict with your nature. You don’t listen to what people say, do you? No! You do what you want to do. That is your only law. Isn’t it? And how right you are. How right you are! For if I am a monster, is it not God who made me thus? The same God who made the lamb, the sun, this mountain, the sheriff? The scorpions and snakes? Am I not part of his plan? Am I not doing his will?”

  Homer stopped and panted while the riders tittered. Someone fired a pistol into the air. Someone else threw a whiskey bottle against a rock.

  “Hell yeah!” Johnny cried.

  “And so, gentlemen, you should spare my life. You should kill him! Kill this rotten hypocrite, and spare me! And then we’ll travel, together or separately, rejoicing in our dark natures, refusing to compromise who we are for anyone!”

  Whistles and cheers. Quentin was grinning. He holstered his pistol and applauded.

  “Bravo, bravo, Monsieur De Plessey. Powerfully done.” He glanced over at Winter, who met his eyes briefly, and then they both looked at Tom.

  “Captain Jackson. Your turn.”

  Tom blinked and wiped his eyes.

  “I ain’t saying shit,” he said.

  There was a displeased silence from the riders, and then Quentin spoke.

  “Come now, Captain, that simply won’t do,” Quentin said. “Monsieur De Plessey has delivered an admirable speech in favor of antinomianism, with elements of Augustine and de Sade. Perhaps you could deliver a speech on the necessity of laws, of organized society. Locke or Hobbes. Your choice. Perhaps you could reflect on how men such as us and your former prisoner are dependent on the very laws we constantly violate. How we could not rationally universalize our maxims. These are only suggestions, mind you. Listen to your heart. But you simply must not deny us a little talk.”

  Tom looked to the east at the rising sun. He was exhausted. His wounds—from where he had been hit in the head, shot, tied, beaten—were throbbing. It had been a very long night.

  “Lieutenant Ross,” Tom said. “I gave plenty of those speeches yesterday. I’ll be damned if I repeat myself for the likes of you and your pack of murderous lunatics.”

  “This is your life we are dealing with,” Quentin said. He had drawn his pistol and was spinning it again.

  “You folks already done made up your mind,” Tom said.

  “I told you, we’ll give you a fair chance to plead your—”

  “Not against me,” Tom said. “Against him.”

  Quentin’s eyebrows shot up and a surprised smile appeared on his lips. He looked like a boy who was halfway through opening his Christmas present and had suddenly realized what it was.

  Tom looked Homer straight in the eye. The confectioner looked puzzled.

  “On account of the color of his hair,” Tom said.

  Bill stepped forward, grabbed Homer’s hair and jerked his head back, slit his throat and stabbed him in the heart.

  How they roared, roared with laughter, delight. Whiskey was spit out, cigars dropped to the earth, men choked on tobacco juice. They’d all known the joke from the beginning, all of them. Quentin was holding his sides, tears pouring down his filthy bloodstained face. The other riders laughed just as hard. Foxglove fell to his knees. He had a hand clapped over his mouth and he was laughing through his hand. His eyes were dancing with laughter. Johnny’s voice brayed out above them all. Even Johnson was laughing, a little. He was smiling and his shoulders were gently moving up and down as he watched Homer’s body jerk and bleed.

  Only Winter was impassive. He just kept looking at Tom, unsurprised and unamused, intent and alert.

  Bill Bread knelt on Homer’s back while the confectioner’s feet twisted and hammered into the dirt. The scalping itself was deft and almost somehow humane, like an experienced butcher cutting the head off a chicken. The whole thing came off, ears and all, and Homer lay dead on the plateau. Tom tried to catch Bill’s gaze, but Bill would not look him in the eye. Tom saw that Bill’s hands were shaking very badly, and although it was cold, Bill was drenched in sweat.

  “Ah ha ha ha,” Quentin said, wiping his eyes. “Oh dear. Oh my.”

  He beamed at Tom.

  “Well done, Captain. Of course we would kill Homer before we killed you. Our shared history aside, not even a Mexican would think your scalp came from an Indian. You saw through me! Well done, sir. I don’t remember you being so clever. Are you getting wiser with—”

  “You think you’re different now?” Winter said.

  It was amazing how they all fell silent, how they all quit chuckling and spitting and whispering to one another. And looked at Winter. Just looked. Tom hadn’t really believed that Winter was their leader. Quentin Ross had developed quite a reputation during the war and the Reconstruction and Tom had always assumed that he was still running things, that the papers had built up Winter on account of his unusual appearance and his flair for the dramatic. But now he knew.

  Winter tilted his head back and his eyes glittered underneath his hat.

  “That’s what you think?” Winter said. “You think you changed?”

  Tom said nothing. Winter waited. The silence spun out. Tom remembered one particular night in Mississippi, when he’d burst into the home of a Negro politician with fifteen men, all of them disguised and carrying burning torches, and he couldn’t meet Winter’s gaze anymore; the pressure from those amber irises was just too much. He looked down at the ground.

  “You’re less than nothing,” Winter said. He made a great show of checking his pocket watch. And then he said, “Quentin, quit playing with your fucking food. We might as well run around the other side of the mountain and see if we can pick up Geronimo’s trail before we head back to Mexico.”

  Winter turned and made his way down the path. The other riders started to leave too. Quentin and Johnson glanced at each other. Quentin shrugged. Johnson spat.

  “Maybe we’ll see you later,” Johnson said. “Sheriff.”

  “Wonderful to see you’re doing well, Captain,” Quentin said. “Adiós.”

  Charlie walked past Tom and followed the rest of the riders down the hill. The last to go was Bill, who slapped Homer’s scalp on the dusty ground a few times to knock the blood away.

  “So long, Captain,” Bill said, still without looking Tom in the eye.

  Tom lifted his head and watched them go, stepping over the corpses they had left behind, and a feeling grew in him, a powerful feeling that could not be denied. He had nothing to live for and the insult of having his life spared stung him to the quick. So he lumbered to his feet and walked to the edge of the plateau and screamed down.

  “Hey, Winter!”

  Winter didn’t turn around, though several of the riders did.

  “Augustus Winter, you look at me when I’m fucking talking to you!”

  Johnny Empire laughed.

  “What are you gonna do with those scalps, Winter? Eat them? Make ’em into a rug? Hang ’em on your wall? Huh? Or are you going to sell ’em to a civilized man?”

  Winter kept walking.

  “You think you’re rebelling against civilization? You work for civilization, Winter! You think you learned something fancy in the war that regular folks don�
��t know or can’t bear to face and now you’re at war with civilization? Is that what you think? Look around, you idiot! Does this look like fucking New York City to you?”

  Winter stopped, leaned on his cane, and glanced up at Tom with interest.

  “I got news for you. The war was civilization. That was it! You ain’t fighting civilization, Winter! There’s no civilization out here for you to fight. But it’s coming. And it’s a whole lot bigger and meaner than you, friend. And it’s not going to have no use for you when it gets here. So you have a nice fucking ride down to—”

  Johnson lifted his rifle to his shoulder and fired. Tom spun and dropped to the ground. There was a roaring sound in his head, like the withdrawing sea.

  “Thank you!” Charlie exclaimed.

  “I think I just clipped him,” Johnson said.

  “So fucking what,” Charlie said. “The important thing’s that he shut up.”

  “And him saying he wouldn’t give us a speech,” Dusty said.

  “That was a wonderful talk!” Quentin said. “I was quite enjoying it. Although he had, I believe, gotten his main point across. I think Fred did him a favor by cutting him off. Brevity is a virtue. The Gettysburg Address was under three hundred words.”

  The Winter Family continued down the slope with their harvest. But Winter himself stood for a little while, looking up the mountain, leaning on his cane. The expression on his face maintained its characteristic intensity, but there was something different about it now, in a way that was difficult to explain.

  81

  Back in Phoenix, the antiquarian breakfasted in his hotel. All the talk in town was of the events of the previous night. None of the men who had set out for Tucson had yet returned and everyone was speculating about what might have happened. Whether or not the sheriff had done the right thing was the subject of lively debate. The antiquarian kept his thoughts to himself. When he had finished his breakfast and his coffee he gathered his equipment and a day’s worth of provisions and headed to the ancient canals outside Phoenix. There he spent the day digging with a pickax and carefully sifting through the loose earth. He was so focused on his task that he did not notice the new arrival until he was on top of him.

  “Goodness!” the antiquarian cried.

  It was Sheriff Tom Favorite, shot in the shoulder, shot in the face, his left ear blown off, his face burned with powder, the back of his head sticky and bleeding from a heavy blow. He was splattered with blood and soaked with sweat and caked with mud.

  “Water,” Tom said, barely a whisper, and the antiquarian scrambled for his canteen. Tom drank deeply but carefully, not wanting to get sick, and then he collapsed into the shade, leaning his head against the earth wall of the canal and pressing his hand into his sunburned forehead.

  “What happened to you, Sheriff?” the antiquarian asked.

  “We ran into Geronimo,” Tom said, his voice hoarse. “And then the Winter Family.”

  The antiquarian did not know how to reply. Tom drank again.

  “We should get you back to the town right away,” the antiquarian said.

  “I am not in a hurry,” Tom replied.

  The antiquarian tried to meet Tom’s gaze, but Tom’s eyes were downcast.

  “Sheriff, are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I will live,” Tom said. “Can we talk about something else? How’s your digging going?”

  “I suppose it’s fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  It became clear Tom was not going to say anything and he was making no move to get up. The antiquarian spoke to fill the silence. “As I was telling you yesterday, this town is a site of great historical interest. That’s why they called the city Phoenix. Rising from the ashes of whatever ancient civilizations made these canals.”

  Tom did not reply, so the antiquarian continued.

  “The Indians called them the Hohokam, but that’s just a made-up word. It means ‘those who have gone’ or ‘all used up.’ They lived here for almost a thousand years and they built this huge system of canals to irrigate the desert. There were tens of thousands of them, a tremendously developed culture. Something like the Aztecs down in Mexico.”

  Tom said, “You trying to figure out what happened to them?”

  “Certainly,” the antiquarian said. “It’s an important question. The Hohokam lived here, as I said, for a thousand years. If we wish to avoid their fate, we must make sure we don’t make the same mistakes they did, whatever they were. Was it war, or disease, or famine, or revolution?”

  The antiquarian looked at the handful of trinkets he’d dug carefully out of the earth.

  “We seem to need a dramatic explanation when something terrible happens. Perhaps we need to convince ourselves it couldn’t happen to us. My own personal theory, Sheriff, is much more mundane. We are in a desert. People need water. I believe that this land grew so overpopulated the Hohokam couldn’t support themselves. Perhaps there was a slight shift in climate or water levels. Perhaps they didn’t allow the soil time to recover. In any case, once the process had begun, it was accelerated by societal tensions. Conflict and division. Eventually people just left.”

  The antiquarian’s spectacles winked in the sun.

  “Does it seem strange to you, Sheriff, that a civilization so great and ancient could be felled, not by its weakness, but by its own strength?”

  And the sheriff said no. No, it didn’t seem strange to him at all.

  82

  The Winter Family came upon a Quechan youth hunting in the desert a few miles to the north of the border with Mexico. He stood still in the desert as they approached, wearing a clean poncho, leaning on an elderly musket, and shading his eyes with his hand. Charlie dismounted swiftly and knocked the boy’s weapon away. The young man was startled rather than angry, unable to conceive what was about to happen to him. They learned the location of his village and that there were twenty-seven people in it, along with a white man who had arrived the night before. Then Charlie stabbed the young man hard in the chest, three times, in a punching motion, while the Indian made a surprised and agonized gasping noise. Charlie jerked back on the Indian’s hair and scalped him while he still breathed.

  “Let’s get them all,” he said.

  A new recruit to the Family, a Mexican named Francisco, expressed some doubt.

  “That’s a Quechan village. They’re not Apache.”

  “You think those fuckers in Hermosillo can tell the difference?” Charlie said.

  “We are close to the border,” Francisco said. “We should get across.”

  “Come on, Auggie,” Charlie said. “This is easy money.”

  Everyone looked at Winter, but something was different about him. It was not that he was unsure, but rather that he was uncaring.

  “Auggie?” Charlie said.

  Winter leaned back in the saddle and shrugged. He was slightly tanned from all the riding in the desert but otherwise his appearance was pristine.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  An uneasy feeling settled over them. They glanced at one another.

  “Let’s go,” Francisco said.

  “No,” Quentin said. “Charlie’s right. We’ll make the detour. It won’t take long. Use your knives. There is no need to waste powder or shot. Let’s ride now.”

  Everyone looked to Winter, but he did not even nod. They were disturbed to see him following another man’s lead.

  The Family rode up hard on the little village and then dismounted. Some men stayed with the horses while the others crept through the scrub toward a few huts clustered around a well, together with a general store and some fenced-off pasture. An old woman pounding on a hanging carpet caught a glimpse of Johnny in the bush. She did not take any time to wonder who he was. She screamed, and the Winter Family sprinted toward her.

  At first everything was chaos, as men and women and children ran back and forth, shrieking, while the Family chased them. Then there was the first gunshot.

&
nbsp; “Who was that idiot?” Charlie shouted.

  A white man had come out of one of the huts. He was tall and thin with red hair, wearing only a pair of trousers with his suspenders hanging down around his knees. A rifle dangled loosely, almost carelessly, in his fingers. But Francisco was lying dead on the ground, with the back of his head a gory mess.

  “Who the fuck—” Charlie started, as he reached for his gun. And then he was shot, knocked onto his back and staring up into the sky with a peculiar heaviness in his chest. The bullet had cracked a rib.

  The shirtless man’s rifle moved from side to side with languid grace. He fired four more shots in four seconds, but there did not seem to be any hurry about it. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Four men dropped, unerringly picked off amid all the fleeing Indians, before a single member of the Winter Family could draw a gun. Then the shirtless man grabbed a revolver from a corpse and fell back around a corner.

  Charlie sat up, struggling to breathe. Johnny wrapped a thick arm around him and helped him to his feet. Dusty charged past them, his pistol at the ready, heading for the hut that was sheltering the shooter.

  And then the shirtless man stepped back out into the road, his left palm hovering over the hammer of the revolver, and he recommenced to shoot.

  “Oh!” Dusty cried, knocked back, holding his gut.

  “Go, go, go!” Charlie wheezed at Johnny, and the two Empire brothers fled.

  The shirtless man emptied his revolver with a kind of preternatural grace the veterans of the Winter Family had seen before. But whereas Lukas Shakespeare had always been exploding with passion, frantic and urgent with his need to kill, Matt was surgical and cold.

  The Quechan, heartened by the sight of all the white corpses, were now fighting back. They used what guns they had and even those without guns, even the women and children, were charging forward with knives, axes, hoes, rakes, fists, and teeth. The Family fell back, an undignified retreat, firing their weapons and falling over themselves as they ran.

  “Who the shit is that?” Augustus Winter said to Bill Bread. They had hung toward the back and were able to take shelter behind a bush when the shooting began. “He shoots like Lukas Shakespeare.”