John Wesley’s fist jutted out fast. ‘Who the hell you think you’re tellin’ what to do? Huh, nigger? Huh, trash? You tellin’ me what to do?’ He swung his left arm and pointed behind him. ‘You’re so all-fired concerned, you get your ass in there an’ play doctor!’
Mage shrugged and turned his back, walking away fast, knowing that arguing further was a waste of time. John Wesley launched himself forward, one hand going for Mage’s right arm, the other driving against the back of his neck.
The black went jolting forwards, his knees beginning to buckle beneath him. As he felt himself being forced down, he accentuated the fall, throwing his hip and tossing his attacker off to the side. John Wesley’s fingers lost their grip and he went sliding away, landing with an awkward thump that raised a cloud of thick dust. Through the dust he saw the glint of the scythe.
The crack of pistol fire stopped all movement. Mage caught his breath, slowly turned his head to see his employer standing between barn and corral, his Colt Navy extended at arm’s length in front of him. A little smoke still drifted up from the barrel.
The scythe fell between Mage’s fingers and curved flatly on the ground.
John Wesley pushed himself up, turned, and began to walk towards the water trough.
Inside the barn, Little Billy was still sitting with his head between his knees, still trying to stop himself from vomiting through his hands.
Chapter Three
Aaron mulched the last vestiges of flavor from the remnants of his chewing tobacco and spat the plug into the fire. Flames hissed up and crackled and a thin spiral of soft grey smoke avoided the breast of the chimney and filtered out into the room.
Aaron glanced across at John Wesley, seated at the hefty rectangular table, sniffed the air, clapped his hands together and headed for the whiskey bottle.
‘Here!’ The offer was more like a blow.
John Wesley hesitated only a moment, then took the tumbler from his uncle’s hand.
Aaron swallowed half the contents of his own glass quickly and set it down on the table with a smack that was likely to break glass and table both.
‘Damn!’ he boomed. ‘Damn!’
His fat finger wobbled a few inches off his nephew’s face.
‘Damn!’
The finger pulled back into a fist, the fist threatened then unfolded. Aaron turned bulkily away, stalked across the room, pulled the door open only to slam it shut, drank the remainder of his whiskey and refilled the glass too fast, the liquor splashing over on to the floor.
‘Boy, your pa warned me you might be trouble. He said you had a temper and a half brung you by some devil, but I never known it was goin’ to be like this.’
John Wesley half rose from the chair. ‘He was just a ni—’
‘I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no nigger, I’m talkin’ ’bout my boy.’
John Wesley sat back down. ‘That weren’t no more than a bit of fun.’
Aaron lunged at him, knocking the table sideways with his hip. He caught hold of the youth’s shoulder and spun him round so hard that the chair went skidding away and John Wesley was left sitting on nothing.
‘Fun! He’s back in his room with a couple of ribs strapped up tight and there’s three teeth missin’ from his head.’ He shook his nephew hard and let go like he was touching something that wasn’t quite clean. ‘If that’s your idea of fun, there’s somethin’ strange about you that I don’t understand.’
He stood clear, reaching in his pocket for some tobacco. ‘Don’t want to understand.’ He bit off a chunk and began chomping down on it hard, getting it soft and pliable.
‘An’ as for Mage, hell, you know what I feel about niggers well as I do. But Mage’s been workin’ for me since he was younger’n you. He ain’t never talked back, ain’t never moaned about his work the way most of them idle bastards does. He’s been cursin’ me for a slave-drivin’ white bastard under his breath all the time, only natural, but he ain’t never showed it. What he did back at the barn maybe saved Little Billy’s life.’
‘That weren’t—’John Wesley began, but his uncle cut him off angrily.
‘Hold your tongue, boy! Hear me out. I’ve had to have that nigger whipped and now I’ve had to throw him off the place. I ain’t goin’ to get another one’ll work like him.’ The finger pointed squarely at John Wesley. ‘You cost me, boy. You cost me in all kinds of ways, you understand that?’
John Wesley turned away from his uncle and stood close by the window, aimlessly watching the horses shifting places in the corral. His uncle’s words spilled about him and he knew that all he had to do was wait for them to subside and stop and it would be over. There wasn’t any point to answering back. As for that dumb nigger, well, he’d got what was coming to him. He only wished he’d been able to see the stock whip being laid across his back till Mage started hollering for it to quit.
He didn’t understand what his uncle was so mad about -hadn’t he been the one tellin’ him that it was niggers killed his kin and raped their womenfolk? And weren’t all niggers alike? Ruinin’ the whole damn state if folk was weak enough to give ’em the chance.
John Wesley’s mouth ground tight. He’d reckoned his uncle as being strong enough to keep the blacks in their place. Now maybe he was finding out he’d judged him wrong. The youth’s hands made themselves into fists. The threats and warnings sputtered into silence behind him, he heard heavy footsteps and anticipated the slam of the door.
Alone, the fists remained clenched, John Wesley’s resolve became a vow.
~*~
John Wesley Hardin had been presented with his .44 pistol when he had been no more than eight years of age. To fight the good fight, his preacher father had admonished him. To carry on the crusade against the forces of the devil. As soon as the sermon had ended, he had taken his growing son clear of the house and begun teaching him to load and prime the weapon, getting the charges tamped down into place firmly. Then, two-handed, had come the first attempts to use the weapon accurately. There had been targets tacked to the side of the barn, bottles and cans first set along the uneven length of the fence and later hurled high into the air, the circular tops of cans sent skimming over the cold blue water of the creek.
When John Wesley’s mother had queried whether her son should be spending so much time learning to use a gun instead of a plough, her husband had explained the necessity of both. It was, he said, an evil world - a world inhabited by sinners and the only way to walk through it with your head held high was to have a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.
John Wesley sort of forgot about the Bible.
Not the .44.
He had it with him the day after his fight with Little Billy and his run-in with Mage; the day following Mage’s beating and dismissal and his own dressing-down by his Uncle Aaron.
‘You watch out,’ Little Billy had told him in a low voice, ‘that Mage, he’s going to get even with you. He told me so.’
John Wesley had glanced at Billy and seen from the expression in his cousin’s face that Billy wouldn’t be any too sad if he did. But John Wesley carried on saddling his horse and paid the warning no mind - other than to make good and certain that his pistol was loaded and laying on top of the slicker he carried in his saddle bag.
He had no special idea where he was heading, simply wanted to get clear from the place for a few hours, away from Aaron’s hostile eye. He figured it would all blow over soon enough if him and his uncle steered a wide berth around one another. So he rode towards the foothills that spread along the eastern edge of the trail to town. They pushed up, one above the other, like layers of some grandly designed wedding cake that had since begun to sag and decay. The upper ridges were iced with frost and unwelcoming. Back of them the clear sky was hung with tatters of darkening cloud.
John Wesley was wearing a short wool coat, his hat held tight beneath his chin with fastened cord and a brown scarf tied about his neck. Scuffed leather gloves kept the blood circulating through his fingers
. The rounded plumes of his mount’s breath rose on the wind and merged with his own before dispersing.
He circled around the small settlement of Moscow, turning in from the north past the wooden markers of the cemetery. His shout and the angry flap of his arms sent half a dozen large crows into the air from where they had been perched above the white-fringed headboards. A fine spray of frost fell over the graves as the birds worked their wide, lazy wings and made slow circles over John Wesley’s head.
He cursed them and rode on towards the saloon and dining room. A mug of hot coffee and a wedge of luke-warm pie prepared him for his return journey. The rowels of his spurs jangled discordantly as he strode out towards the hitching rail. The saddle creaked a little as he settled on to the horse’s back. He retied the scarf, pulled his gloves from where he had tucked them in his belt, and on to his hands. One pat at the bulk of the .44 in the right-side saddle bag and he was on his way.
The road out of Moscow became a straggle of shacks whose walls and roofs were nailed together from oddments and sawn-off planks of wood, scraps of tin and copious quantities of sacking. A tent sagged against the wind. John Wesley pulled down the brim of his hat and readjusted his scarf so that it covered the lower half of his face. The road was bare to his right now, the few dwellings on the other side spread further and further apart.
A sandy-haired dog ran out from behind a short length of fence that didn’t seem to be protecting anything other than itself. The dog yapped in front of John Wesley’s horse and the animal shied away, the youth controlling it easily enough, shouting at the dog and making it bark all the louder. He brought the horse round on a short rein and drove it towards the dog, which went into a yowling cringe, hair bristling, before scampering back towards the fence with a fading succession of growls.
‘Damn hound!’ called John Wesley over his shoulder. ‘Should’ve put a bullet through your head!’
He was so intent upon looking back that he failed at first to see Mage step out from the cover of the last shanty on the road. It took the black’s angry voice to make the youth aware of his presence.
‘You an’ me, we got business, boy!’
The words spun through John Wesley’s head without his hearing them clearly, though the tone was enough. Mage stood some fifteen yards down the road, a faded red shirt hanging out over his dark pants, his feet bare. His broad face stared angrily up at John Wesley and in place of the scythe from their previous meeting, a hefty, knotted stick was being tapped into the palm of Mage’s left hand.
John Wesley looked back in disbelief, recalling Little Billy’s words but still surprised that the black should dare to confront him.
‘Business, boy!’
Mage gave the stick more air and thwacked it down into his hand hard.
‘You owe me! You owe me plenty!’
John Wesley’s mount shifted off to the side and he pulled it back round. His mouth was beginning to work greedily and his eyes were narrowing down as the black took half a dozen paces towards him.
‘Get your ass down off that horse!’
John Wesley’s sole answer was a slow sideways shake of his young head.
‘I said, get down!’ shouted Mage and made a short run forward, only stopping when he was close enough to seize hold of the bridle of the white youth’s mount.
‘You lost me my job, boy, an’ got me whupped. Now I’m goin’ to whup you!’
John Wesley leaned back in the saddle and Mage raised the stick towards him.
‘Who’s yeller now, boy?’
John Wesley turned his body away from the hefty weapon and Mage allowed himself a grim laugh that froze across his face when the youth came back round fast and with a pistol tight in his hand.
‘You ain’t...’Mage began, letting go of the bridle.
‘Never knew I had this, did you?’ said the smiling John Wesley. ‘Never knew I was ridin’ armed.’
Mage looked into John Wesley’s face to see what he was going to do and right off knew the answer. He jumped back in with his stick swinging and John Wesley bit down inside his lower lip and fired into the black’s face.
The explosion rocked and startled the horse, which reared up on its hind legs and almost unseated John Wesley from the saddle. He grasped the reins tightly in his left hand and pulled them against his chest, gripping the animal’s flanks hard with his knees.
Mage, meanwhile, had staggered back, temporarily blinded, his face a mask of blood. He fell sideways, dropping the stick as he pushed out a hand to break his fall. He opened his mouth to cry out and immediately it filled with blood. Choking, coughing, Mage wiped at his face with his arm, screaming as the material of his shirt scraped across the torn opening of his wound.
John Wesley fought his horse under control and walked it slowly up to where Mage was now on his hands and knees, crawling blindly along, hands seemingly searching for his stick.
The .44 was still in John Wesley’s right hand.
Twenty yards back along the road, the sandy dog was back on its rear legs, hair bristling, barking at a fast staccato. Further towards town, men and women were cautiously appearing, several of them taking the first tentative steps towards the incident.
Mage’s fingers smeared themselves around the clumsy wooden stick and with a loud shout of pain and anger he thrust himself to his feet. Blood blinked away from his eyes, only to be replaced as more welled up from the bullet hole beneath them where Mage’s cheek and half of his nose had been blasted away.
Bone showed through shredded flesh and skin.
The black’s mouth let out a wordless shout and he stumbled in the direction of the horse.
John Wesley’s arm came level and his thumb brought back the hammer of the gun.
March’s stained and soiled body stared eyeless into the sun.
The pistol seemed to go off by itself. Mage was swung round as the slug tore into his right shoulder and he dropped the stick for a second time. For a second time he staggered away before falling.
John Wesley could hear folk shouting now and the sound of feet running towards him. He struggled with the reins, one-handed. Mage shifted his weight on to his left arm and tried to crawl forward. Blood ran easily out of his wounds, too warm for the clotting cold.
That’s what did this to your kin. Raped an’ killed and burnt...
Mage clawed the air with his hand and thrust his blood-strewn face up towards the white youth, the mouth open in a dreadful scream.
Deep down. They contaminate you. Deep down.
John Wesley bit down inside the soft flesh of his mouth until it bled. He squinted along the barrel of his pistol and fired into the center of the yelling, dying mass that was Mage. Then, with men shouting close by yet hesitating to come too close for fear the youth might run amok and turn his gun upon them, John Wesley wheeled his mount through a wide circle and kicked his spurs hard against its sides.
Mage collapsed into the dust, at least half of those watching already telling themselves that he’d got what was coming to him. By the time John Wesley was out of sight, there was no one around to watch the final twitches of the black’s life. When the last convulsion was over, the sandy-haired dog came sniffing suspiciously round and planted a couple of wet licks by the side of the dead man’s ear. After that, he lifted his leg, peed over Mage’s leg and trotted happily away.
The men who finally came to lift the black’s body away did so out of a sense of duty to the community rather than any respect for the deceased. After all, as the leader of the council pointed out, even in this weather a body gets to stink sooner or later and once the jackals and vultures began tearing strips off him, well, it wouldn’t be nice for the womenfolk to see things like that.
So three of them dragged him off the road inside a length of sacking and carried him fifty yards beyond the town limits before digging a deep enough grave to ensure he wouldn’t get dug up again by the first hungry creature that happened along. They wandered back towards the saloon, thirsty enough to drink
down the few dollars they’d been paid and were surprised to hear some of the inhabitants actually suggesting that black or no, what had taken place that day was still murder.
‘Damn me,’ said one of the gravediggers over his beer, ‘if somethin’ like this don’t bring all the nigger-lovers out of the woodwork like lice.’
His companions nodded in agreement and got back to their drinking.
~*~
Aaron and Little Billy were on their way back home after spending the best part of the day mending fences and arguing. The flat-bed wagon bounced back of the two-horse team, Aaron alternately chewing and spitting tobacco as he drove. Billy’s fingers were sore from work, calluses not yet strong enough to protect his skin from blisters. He tried to avoid his father’s eye, not wishing to be told again how he’d let him down in failing to stand up to his cousin better than he did. His father didn’t understand the nature of his cousin’s temper, that was part of the problem. If he’d seen his face it might have been different.
‘Why don’t you send him off with his tail between his legs, pa?’ Billy had asked.
‘Because he’s kin,’ his father had growled back. ‘Close kin at that. An’ a man has a duty to look after his own.’
That hadn’t allowed much argument, so Little Billy had kept to himself the thought that it would have been better to have kept Mage and got rid of John Wesley.
A couple of miles out, a rider hailed them with a wave of his Stetson and Aaron began to rein in the horses. Harry Jefferson, setting off for his own place to the west, was a bundle of old clothes seated on a shaggy mule, his unkempt beard wrapped around the stem of his upside-down clay pipe like a filthy scarf.
‘Jesus, pa,’ exclaimed Billy, ‘what you stoppin’ for? He stinks worse’n four-day-old horse shit!’
Aaron let go the rein long enough to give his son a backhander across the face. ‘Shut your mouth or wash it out! You remember who you’re talking to.’
Little Billy cringed back and choked down a cry, the cold making his face smart all the more. His small fists clenched tight against his legs and as he stared at the ground he wished he had the guts to drive them hard into his father’s back. One day, maybe he would.
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