by Brian Hart
Work in the woods is like you’d expect, toil and sweat. Our task is one of hubris, but it teaches me what a man, a dozen men, can do. There are bears and ghosts in the woods and strange noises that come through the tent walls in the night, louder than the rain, which isn’t quiet. Once we found a mass grave from what the Indians call the Big Sick (smallpox), and there were skulls like river rocks piled up, some with the flathead fronts. A man named Bennoit took a skull and kept it stashed in his bundle, but no one wanted it in the camp for the bad luck it would bring, so they made him get rid of it. We don’t think he did, though, because the very next day a man named Wilson working on another part of the crew was killed in a mudslide. First time anybody had seen that. It took half a day to dig him out. Bennoit slipped away sometime in the bustle, lucky too because the dead man’s cousins were looking for him and might have murdered him. When we freed the body the mud had been packed so deeply into the man’s eyes that they’d been pushed inside his skull and we never found them. He had a vein of mud thick as my wrist packed down his throat as far as we could dig with our fingers, and we couldn’t get it out without cutting him open. We talked of doing it, and I said I could because I’d done surgery before. A man who has hung up his scalpel to work in the woods is a man that scares people. They started calling me Doc then, and there wasn’t an endearing sound to it. We decided against the surgery because what difference would it make and who wanted to see such a thing anyhow.
For this work it’s not so much strength that is required as endurance. You cannot quit. Like chain and cable don’t quit, like the donkey engine doesn’t. Often I feel as if I’m drifting into another life, a prouder one. I could be a strong and sober man someday. I could rise from this field of battle. My father had a war; I have this. I hope you’ll wait for me. Who knows, perhaps I’ll return and you won’t recognize me for the obvious improvements. Your loving husband, Jacob.
The letters stayed tucked under the mattress, and when Jacob returned and we were alone and Duncan was sleeping I would read them back to him. The darkness he forced on me, I mirrored back to him, and I suspect the sting of it was nearly enough to break him. I felt out his weaknesses with my words, probed his very joints like a butcher. But he liked the place at the foot of the bed, under my hand, and seemed to develop a taste for my spite and venom. He begged me for it, and without knowing what he was doing created more reasons for me to lash out.
“If you ever hurt me again, I’ll leave and never come back.”
“I’ll never leave. I’ll never hurt you again. Stay with me.”
Belief is a fast runner.
Tartan
Four days they’d been locked in the union hall. Knives had been thrown at the taxidermy. Nice shot, the elk nostril. Not bad, the beaver ear. The lovingly designed flower constructed of crab shells by Bellhouse’s recently absconded girlfriend had been torn down and trampled. His desk had been used for a sawyers’ contest that he’d won. They were waiting on a telegraph. A vote was to be made, and after that an announcement. Bellhouse sent for women and liquor. Said: What the fuck is the bolero? But they’d all danced it now. Where are these women from? Skin like polished oak, but soft. Someone, Nitz maybe, had dragged beds in from next door in the rooming house. Must’ve evicted someone. He had a gash on his forehead, and he’d lost his sidearm. The beds kept coming, and couches. Bare legs spilled out from hairy backs. It was a wet, fouled slaughterhouse of a room, vomit and blood. If it weren’t for the drunkenness, no one could’ve stood it. There was a tin of whale fat that had traveled from the Arctic and Bellhouse had it smeared all over the front of his pants and his bare chest and lathered on his face. Caligula had nothing on their sinning. There was a dead man in the corner; Bellhouse had shot him for being glum or lying. Either way, he’d need to go for a dip when the tide came up.
Tartan had managed to take a turn with five of the whores, but three remained. He sat on the floor and worked out the math. Someone needed to slow it down or he’d never make it. Bellhouse had finally paid him for the last few months, and what did he say? “Blood is required.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Hank.”
“They don’t take paper money in Alaska, and they don’t take coin either.” He had his hand down the front of his britches, applying more whale fat as he eyed a dark-skinned woman with a man’s haircut. She’d taken a smack at some point that had split her lip but she didn’t seem to mind. The blood had dried in a nice straight dribble from her mouth to between her tits, disappeared into the dark hair at her crotch.
“They take gold where gold is being taken. I’ve heard that before,” Tartan said.
“Have you? Well, everybody’s got a little twist to their spine, and their peckers go the opposite way.” He flopped out his prick to show Tartan the proof. “We’re all turned. We’re all screwed. If a man asks how you dress, he’s talking about your cock.” Tartan was surprised that Bellhouse was circumcised and not bigger, and also relieved when the pale grease weasel choked by a fist was grabbed by the mannish whore and slipped delicately into her mouth. Tartan watched her and then reached out and slid his hand between her legs and probed her morosely with one finger, and then two.
“My sweetest time,” Bellhouse said to the top of the woman’s head, “was when I was a boy on the farm, Fritztown. We had cattle and it was butcher day and my cousin ran to me with a still-beating steer heart and we went in the milkshed and both fucked it at the same time. Warm as your mouth.”
The whore glanced upward, and Bellhouse caressed her hair. Her split lip was bleeding again and the blood dripped from her chin onto her chest. Tartan stopped his finger fucking for a moment when he saw the blood but then continued, driven to it, wanting to share this moment with Bellhouse. The woman lifted her hips and worked herself against Tartan’s hand, slick and open. He fumbled his prick from his pants and slid it over the arch of her foot and she pressed him there with the top of her other foot and he fucked it, closed his eyes, and thought of Bellhouse and the cow heart.
“When I got older,” Bellhouse said, “I had the opportunity to do the same to a man’s heart. I was a mile from the Liberty Bell when I did that. Evilest thing I ever did if there’s ranking, which there is.”
The whore kept sucking, but she pressed her hand to her chest to protect her heart, and Bellhouse smiled down at her. “Not yours. Oh no, not yours. None was as good as the steer’s, anyhow. My cousin was there, is why. He made it what it was. I believe we come from the devil, or at least he did. I loved him.”
Tartan didn’t have the energy to enter her so he kept at her feet and increased the depth and force of his fingers. She whimpered and pushed harder against him.
“Sadly,” Bellhouse continued, “my cousin lost his eye after he fumbled the rape of Auntie’s kitty cat, so they put him in an asylum and he hung himself, or they hung him. However it went, he died an eye short and covered in scars and scabs. Riddled with all the diseases of beast and men. Just as I imagine he would’ve liked.” Bellhouse had his hands in the woman’s hair, tracing the edges of her ears with his thumbs. “You’re a sweet spot too, sweetie. Sweet as anything. Warm as blood.”
Tartan rolled onto his knees and buried his face between her ass cheeks, and then rushed her and pushed himself inside. Bellhouse smiled at the ceiling and Tartan whispered his name. The whore offered her bloody hand to Tartan and he took it and held it tight.
Then the half-wit Willy Toker was suddenly there above him with his Russian .44. Schofield impersonator, coal-field bounty, in his hand.
“There’s something amiss with the trigger,” Toker said, interrupting but not really. This meal wouldn’t end. “See the way it hangs?” Tartan thought of Bellhouse’s cock speech, screwed; but mostly there was a gun and he wanted to hold it. He had some familiarity with the model and its workings, but Bellhouse snatched the gun from Toker’s hand before he could. Tartan brought his prick out of the girl’s slit and then put it back, stayed there inside her, gripped, unmovin
g.
“You unloaded it, didn’t you, Toker?”
“Course I did, Tartan. Course I—”
And they’d never known what surprise was until that unloaded, apparently friendly tsarist pistol blew off part of Bellhouse’s skull. The whore spit out his prick, and Tartan saw she’d very nearly bit it off. She screamed, and everyone fell over themselves and watched the blood. The party was ended.
The dead man left with Burheim and the whores. Tartan counted his pay and was glad at what he found. Dr. Haslett arrived, and after stitches and drugging, Bellhouse was deemed among the living. Tucked into one of the many beds, Tartan stayed near his boss, mourned his own drunk, embraced the rising pain behind his eyes. Word was passed on, a boy on the stairs. The vote was in their favor, charter expanded, membership dues forthcoming. All success, all victory. Huzzah.
After the long sleep and the slower waking, Bellhouse’s mind seemed to be in the wind. He confided to Tartan from his yeasty sickbed that he wished to sever his own hand because he feared he was going berserk and might kill himself. A killer’s hands look comic clutching bedsheets.
But Bellhouse soon erupted from his invalidity and murdered Toker, used his horn-handled knife, slid it up under the jaw and made the simpleton’s eye bulge out. Tartan hauled the body out of town on the back of a borrowed mule and sunk it near Preacher’s Slough. The Spanish whore with the man’s haircut disappeared from town, and Bellhouse wasn’t the only one that looked for her.
Not so guiltily Tartan collected his pay twice due to his boss’s injury, and as soon as he could he put some room between the two of them. Shows like that, the one at the hall, were enough to fade his soul to nothing, to bile. He’d had questions for himself, questions that he’d been afraid to ask, and now he knew: the black mouth of hell would have him. The price of debauchery was absolute, and absolutely everything would be absorbed by it. It had to be. No one could bear this kind of pain. His being was a rotten tooth, and he wanted it extracted, dropped in the pan, marveled at, and finally chucked or crushed under a boot heel. That is to say, he wanted to die.
Then Dr. Haslett sent him a note that gave him a purpose, and if not that, at least a destination. Tartan’s cousin had died—not his actual cousin, but a friend from his Chicago childhood. He had been born Chad Wutherstrom, but people in the Harbor knew him as Oly Knox. Dr. Haslett told Tartan that he’d fallen from his springboard and lodged a splinter deep into his knee. A month later he was dead. Tartan hadn’t seen Wutherstrom since Christmas, when they’d gone fishing for bluebacks. He assembled everything he thought he might want and hired the Indian, Cherquel Sha, to ferry him upriver.
At their destination Sha tipped his packs onto the bank, barely clear of the waterline. Tartan stood and wondered how he’d carry everything. Sha’s outstretched hand confronted him. Tartan reached in his pocket and dropped the crumpled wad into the canoe. It was three, but they’d agreed on five. Sha stuffed the bills in his jacket pocket.
“Why you need so much shit?” the Indian asked.
“I’m wondering the same thing.”
“Plenty of time to wonder while you’re sweatin yer ass off playin the mule.”
“I’ll get you the rest next time I see you.”
“No, you won’t. Go on yer walk, Dickerson.”
“Not my name.”
The Indian grinned and pushed off, and with one graceful sweep of his paddle he was in the current and gone. He hadn’t said so many words during the whole trip, kept calling him Dickerson. Tartan believed that a man who didn’t speak was more than halfway to being a great man, but he didn’t like being teased, less when he didn’t comprehend the method.
The parcels of food, bedroll, rifle and shotgun; he thought he might be able to lash it all to a couple of decent-sized tree limbs and drag it like he’d seen in the army. Failed career number four. The Indians hauling bodies and babies and everything they owned, skid on, antithetical to the railroad, the whole of their world the same way—one lasts, and one’s gone with the first storm.
He made a decision and stashed what he couldn’t easily carry and shouldered the difference and went on his way, to return later. No hurry. What were they calling this now, the bosses? Holiday. Some folks were going to the coast beaches and just sitting and eating, as if the world had ended and they were waiting their turn to take the throne.
He came to an abandoned mill, looked to have been that way for a long time. Tartan opened the door and peered into the darkness, whistled. Anyone home? He found a lantern hanging from a nail on the wall and lit it, a splash of fuel remaining. Some of the machinery had been stripped, and none of the saws had blades. He set the lantern down on the bench for the edger and found a crate underneath and filled it with all the hand tools he could find and shouldered it and picked up the lantern and went back outside. A few hundred yards up the trail he found a place in the trees and hid the box and the lantern there. He’d been good as a boy and watched over his brothers and sisters and his parents too, but they were all gone now. He knew that what makes a boy lonesome makes a boy mean. Hide what you can and destroy what you can’t hide.
The trail was overgrown in places, and the wet ferns slithered over the backs of his hands and licked his cheek. Hemlock, spruce, cedar, and fir, brush like barricades, tall and thick enough to hide an army. He couldn’t be lost here, because it was the beginning. Can’t be lost in the womb. Adam gave up a rib over by that stump. Hannibal slaughtered his horse in that draw, and the blood drained into the roots of the ferns, that’s why they grow rusted. General Washington washed his feet in the gentle water of that spring, and when he stood on the carpet of the needles and rotten leaves the wind whispered to him like God would and told him to be brave.
The cabin was a windowless hovel with a cracked woodstove and mouse turds all over the floor. Tartan left his gear outside and sat down on the stump in front of the stove. When he’d rested and the sweat had dried, he searched the books on the shelf until he found the one he was looking for. Inside its pages were pressed butterflies, and in the back were the dead man’s savings. Somebody must’ve taken his rifle already, or he’d sold it or given it away or lost it at cards. The Colt was stashed in the rafters, wrapped in oilcloth. Tartan found coffee and made a pot and poured some whiskey from his pack into the tin cup. The sun went down before he knew it, just dropped off and was gone. He built a fire in the dark. There wasn’t a lantern or any candles he could find, and if he left the stove door open it didn’t draw and the room filled with smoke. Later he heard the rain on the roof and there was nothing to do, so he unpacked his roll and flipped over the pallet bed to the fresh side and went to sleep.
In the morning he swept and cleaned and put his cookpot and cup with the bowl and the fork on a string on the wall hook. The rain quit before too long, and the sun came out. He walked back to the mill and fetched the lantern. After that he stayed inside and read and searched the rafters again for other hiding spots, but he didn’t find any. He boiled potatoes for lunch and had more coffee. After he ate, he ventured outside and found Wutherstom’s sad garden and a broken-into and bear-ravaged henhouse.
Wutherstrom had been at the orphanage for a year before Tartan arrived. Mr. Billings had him working the train station, and when Tartan was assigned the bunk next to him, Mr. Billings sent them out as a team. Wutherstom was as protective as he was patient. He couldn’t be rushed into anything. It would be months before Tartan began carrying a knife. They strolled into the service entrances of the mansions on Prairie Avenue and poked around the kitchens and pantries but rarely ventured into the houses proper. A person could get lost in the upper floors, and it was difficult to find anything small enough or nice enough to take without being told what it was. When you’re a boy, it’s difficult to steal from the rich and easy to take from the poor, but that changes as you get older. It’s like learning the difference between lazy and tired.
Sometimes Wutherstrom would take off his shirt to reveal his scars and beg on the
corner in front of St. Michael’s, one of the few churches that would survive the Great Fire. Even then, years before the spark, it felt like a place that would stand the test, and that’s why they chose it. TORTURED BOY, the sign said. NEED HELP. PLEASE. The pay was good with begging, but the pity wasn’t worth it. A day or two of that and they’d be on to something else. Grave robbing was the outside wall, and normal employment was the inside; anything in between was open contest. Mr. Billings took suggestions and told them over and over that he encouraged independence.
“Be fearless now, while you’re boys, and you’ll be smart when you’re old. The best lessons you’ll learn are from making mistakes, not from me teaching you. Wisdom comes from failure, not success. And remember, they might whip you and beat you, but they won’t hang you. Not when you’re children, they won’t.”
Wutherstrom would’ve done anything for Mr. Billings, and if the old man hadn’t died, he probably would still be there with him now. Tartan had a clear picture in his mind of Wutherstrom climbing from his bed in his dressing gown and going quietly out of the dormitory. He’d read Twist that year, met Fagin, a mirror spanning the sea. Bare feet on cold stone. He was always back from the groundskeeper’s house by morning.
Tartan heard the horses long before he saw them and leaned the shovel against the garden fence and put on his gun belt. Behind the trees he heard a man yelling and a whip crack and crack again. It was Bellhouse, leading two packhorses loaded with supplies.
“Found you. I fucking finally did. Christ.” He let go of the lead and it dropped to the ground. “Cortez had it easier. And the fucking horses.” He scraped up a handful of mud and threw it sidearm at them, and they shied away and moved toward the garden. They were lathered in sweat, and the one in the front had the stob of a treelimb stuck in its shoulder. Bellhouse took off his hat and revealed the pink glistening besmirchment of his scar.
