The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  Biqa brought his mount alongside the Archangel’s Equina, which was still snorting black ash from the battlefield. The dark angel regarded Aputel.

  “You should commend this one, Jophiel. He has been chastising me for my absence. Obviously he has been paying close attention to your sermons about duty and responsibility.”

  Jophiel narrowed his gaze at the fair angel.

  “As well he should. Be about your duties, Aputel. To tarry is to defy the Lord’s will.”

  “Yes, Archangel.”

  Aputel frowned as he watched the two angels depart toward Heaven. Biqa looked back, smiled and winked. Then they were gone, lost in the brilliant incandescence of the fields.

  Already, the Darkness was receding; the angelic hosts glittered in the indigo filament. A great shape, a shape that defied the newly christened concepts of color and dimension, mass and thought, was dragged downward toward the great skeletal stage that God had named the Earth.

  The angel looked at the last of the Voidlings. His mind scrambled for purchase, for some foothold to comprehend something it was never designed to experience. The Voidling’s chains burned with the fire of unborn suns and sang endless hosannas unto the creator of the new universe.

  His heart should fill with joy at such sights, such sounds. But it didn’t. He had the sick feeling that nothing had been resolved. This new world was being built upon conflict and death. He feared such a foundation would poison the entire work. And the thing, the creature that was to be entombed at its heart, would squat in the darkness, an undying witness to the lengths to which ambition would reach. If Biqa was correct, it would seethe, it would hate and it would remember who put it there. But it would never, never die.

  The fair angel turned toward the promises of Heaven and spurred his mount. Unlike Biqa, he did not look back.

  The Queen of Swords

  Maude Stapleton tucked the derringer she held in her palm back into the recesses of her sleeve sheath with a casual flick of her hand. The men and women walking down Main Street in that moment only saw Arthur Stapleton’s odd, quiet, slightly skittish, wife gather up her flowing hair and adjust her bonnet after the commotion in front of Shultz’s store—nothing more. No one noticed her returning the small pistol to the hiding place she had carried it in since she was fifteen years old.

  The deputy, the man everyone called Mutt, had almost noticed her draw the gun when the shotgun blast bellowed out of the general store, but he was too intent on tying to save her and Constance by driving them to the ground and covering them. Mutt. She wondered why someone with such kind eyes carried such a harsh name.

  It was the same drive, to protect her daughter, that had driven Maude to draw the gun. It was an old instinct, rusty like a neglected hinge, part of the training she had undertaken when she first accepted the responsibility of The Load, when she was just a girl, not much younger than Constance was now. Maude remembered the endless training, the drilling. The instincts it had built in her had gone to sleep, lost under the strata of motherhood, the duties of the good wife, some lost to age, more buried under fear and hesitation and doubt. She was surprised how much of it was still in her, though, still ready. She was just as saddened and a little shocked at how much of it was gone.

  “Why didn’t you stop the old man when he came in the store, Mother?” Constance asked as they made their way up the plank sidewalks of Main Street.

  While still splashed with mud, horse dung and other effluents best left to the imagining, the sidewalks were practically sanitary, compared to the ditches of filth on either side of them. To allow the two ladies to pass, men stepped off the planks, stepping right into the muck without a second thought. If they wore hats they doffed them to the ladies. Maude noticed how many looked at Constance’s chest, not her face, how many smiles hid leers. She nodded politely as the men stepped into the shit and allowed her and her daughter to pass. Maude knew over a hundred ways to blind them, cripple them, make them beg for an end to the pain. She was confident she could still muster the skill and enthusiasm to accomplish at least a few, despite her decline. In time she would teach Constance how to use these men’s instincts against themselves. But for now Maude did what most women did, tried to ignore the unwanted attention.

  “He had a gun,” Maude said, “and was intoxicated. That makes it difficult to predict his actions, gauge his reflexes. That gun was pointed at you. I couldn’t take any chances.”

  Constance nodded, seemingly satisfied with the half-truth. While that was all accurate, it was also true, Maude knew, that she was getting old, slowing down, and hadn’t had to take out an armed opponent in decades. She had hesitated, been frightened, acted like a mousey, untrained woman. Gran would have cursed her up one side and down another for that, rightly so. It had worked out well, but due to luck, not preparation. And luck was as reliable as the men’s smiles that passed them.

  “That Indian deputy was looking at you funny,” Constance said with a half smile. “Especially when he was on top of you.” She giggled.

  Maude looked down at the planks as they walked. Her face reddened. She smiled and laughed with her daughter. “I suppose he did. But what men other than your father do or think is none of my concern, young lady. Or yours.”

  Constance snickered. “Yes, Mother.”

  They rounded the corner of Main Street and stepped down a short set of steps off the sidewalk. They began to head up Prosperity Street toward their house, near the base of Rose Hill. The dusty, filthy streets of Golgotha grudgingly gave way to a narrow, smooth stone path lined with shading desert willow trees. The path ran adjacent to a gently sloping dirt road that wound leisurely up Rose Hill, past the homes of the town’s most wealthy and respected citizens. The Stapleton homestead resided near the base, as afforded their station in the town’s aristocracy. Bankers, like Arthur, were wealthy, true, but they were functionaries, a necessary evil and not privy to the heights. The subtle distinction in class irritated Arthur, who constantly strove to climb Olympus, but Maude didn’t care. She had money; she’d lost it. What she carried was infinitely more precious than any treasure or status and no one could take it from her. Well, apparently no one but herself.

  Maude and Constance waved to Mrs. Kimball, their neighbor, who was tending the water pump that resided in the center of the cluster of homes on this stratum of the hill.

  “You poor dears look like you’ve been feeding the hogs!” Mrs. Kimball called. “What happened?”

  “Trouble at Shultz’s,” Maude said as she unlocked the door to her home, a modest Italianate Victorian, whitewashed and bleached silver by the attention of the desert sun.

  “Regular trouble or Golgotha trouble?” Kimball asked.

  “Regular, as far as I could tell,” Maude said.

  “Oh, good. We’ve had quite enough of the other kind to last us for some time!”

  The house was shady, quiet and cool. Dust motes drifted lazily in the shafts of light through the leaded-glass windows. Constance unloaded their baskets on the rosewood dining table they had brought with them from South Carolina, while Maude opened a few shutters to let in enough light to chase off the gloom.

  “You are a mess,” Constance said, smiling.

  “Well, you are certainly not in your finest form either. Put the provisions away and then fetch us some water. We’ll clean up.”

  “Then practice?” Constance said eagerly.

  “Haven’t you had enough excitement for one day?”

  “Please!”

  “We’ll see. Off with you!”

  Maude retired to her and Arthur’s bedroom. She closed the door and began the byzantine ritual of undressing from her muddy clothes. First the dress, gloves, boots, then unlacing the canvas stays that held her chest and spine erect. She sighed with pleasure at her escape from the bindings. Then the layers of petticoats, followed by her thigh-high stockings and finally her simple cotton shift. Maude regarded herself, nude, in the mahogany cheval mirror that Arthur had brought back with hi
m from one of his trips to San Francisco.

  She had to force herself to look up at her image. Her skin was pale; the faint memories of scars from her years with Gran Bonnie and the training were even paler and crisscrossed her body. While she carried the marks of her years and motherhood on her flesh, she retained a surprising amount of her strength and wiry youth. It was a good body, and she knew it deep inside, but it was hard to feel it under the weight of her life. She was ashamed and she hated herself for feeling that way. Ashamed of feeling old, ashamed of feeling ugly and unwanted. Ashamed of being past the point of relevancy anymore, at least to Arthur and to herself. She hated caring about all that. Why should she give a damn about what others thought of her, what men thought of her? Especially Arthur. She could hear Bonnie saying the words in her skull, but the fire and the joy they had once carried was gone. In its place she had regret and an ache stronger than any she had ever known to secure in her daughter the tools needed to never fall into the trap Maude had found herself in, the one she had sworn to never fall into.

  Her hair fell about her shoulders. She brushed the bangs out of her eyes. And wiped a smear of mud off her forehead. She suddenly wanted to cry and hated herself for that as well. She blinked and looked deep into the eyes in the mirror, ordering the tears to hold. The eyes belonged to a stranger.

  Her earliest memory was of the ships in Charleston Harbor. Father would take her with him to work in the city in the vague intervals between the care of governesses or distant relations. They would pass the harbor on their way to his offices, near Market Hall, and every time Maude would feel as if she were glimpsing some fantastical world, more colorful and exciting than any that she had been presented in the stories of Anderson and Marryat she listened to wide-eyed each night.

  The ships clustered in the docks were like alien castles: masts spiderwebbed with dark cable-like lines, the colorful flags from distant, mysterious nations snapping in the gusting wind, and everywhere the men who mastered the ships—swaggering, lanky, unkempt. They strode across the decks, scurried up and down the gangplanks and the nests; they spit, cussed sang and laughed, all with such vital purpose. They were so different from Father, so different from all the other men she had ever seen in her life.

  “Father,” she said once as they passed the harbor, “when I am grown, I wish to become a sailor and travel the world and have my own ship, with my own crew, and have grand adventures!”

  It was said with grave seriousness. Her father had smiled. In the years to come, Maude would see the same smile cross the faces of many men in her life, even when she was a grown woman. Always the same smile, full of patronizing amusement and smug condescension.

  “Don’t be a featherbrain, Maude, my dear,” he said, without a drop of malice in his loving tone. “Women can’t be sailors, or own ships. That’s the kind of nonsense that sped your dear mother to an early passing. Women simply are too delicate for such adventures, you see. But perhaps you may marry a merchant captain that owns a fleet of ships. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  That night the stories were not as magical. They never would be again. Maude had begun to wonder what else she was not allowed to do, to be. The world had suddenly become a much, much more narrow place.

  Mother’s proxies were an endless stream of brittle, joyless women paid to care for her. When one would quit or be dismissed Maude would often spend the intervening time passed from one relative or another, mostly from her father’s side of the family, the Andertons.

  Father had experienced much success in the trade and export of indigo and deerskins and was very well off. Mother had been a governess and schoolteacher prior to meeting Father. She was outspoken and well educated, a trait found in many of the women of her family, the Cormacs. Father loved her and tried to endure her mannish proclivities, including a well-known and often much-maligned enthusiasm for the abolition movement.

  As difficult as being married to an abolitionist in South Carolina could be, Mother was equally vocal about her support for the burgeoning suffrage movement. While Martin Anderton endured numerous indignities because of his wife’s views, he loved her dearly and tried to make the best of the near-constant ribbing he received from colleagues and business partners about his wife’s ridiculous politics.

  That all ended the day of Maude’s arrival into the world. Claire Anderton regarded her bloody screaming, beautiful baby girl, smiled and kissed her once before all the light faded from her eyes forever.

  Maude had just turned nine when father’s business required him to travel to Baltimore for an extended period of time. One evening over supper, Maude was told that she would be going to live with a relative she had never visited before, one from her mother’s side of the family.

  “Aunt Allison is very ill,” Father explained. “And Grandmother Anderton is touring England currently, so you will be staying with your mother’s great-great-great-grandmother, Bonnie.”

  “Oh,” Maude said, eyes widening. “How many ‘greats’ is that, Father?”

  Martin laughed. “Yes. She’s older than Moses, apparently. She lives in a big plantation near Folly Beach. House has been in your mother’s family for many generations, I’m led to understand. Grandmother Bonnie’s late husband apparently built it. Made his money in shipping, I’ve been told.”

  “How long will you be gone?” Maude said, pushing her food around her plate sullenly.

  “No longer than I have to be, dear,” Father said. “I know it’s not what you are used to, Maudie, but I simply can’t avoid this. I’ll return as soon as I can and I shall buy you every doll in Maryland.”

  He smiled. The promise of a bribe was supposed to make everything better. Maude had a huge collection of dolls as testament to this strategy. She nodded and proceeded to clean her plate. Like a good girl.

  By the following afternoon, a carriage deposited Maude at the steps of Grande Folly Plantation to the southwest of Charleston. She was alone, except for the driver, a man named Clower, who was long in the employ of her father. Father had said his good-byes that morning. He had to prepare for his own journey and couldn’t spare the time to travel out to Bonnie’s with her.

  Clower, a fat, hairy man who seemed to sweat even in winter, pulled the second of Maude’s trunks off the back of the carriage and paused to mop his florid face with a dirty rag. “Here they come, Miss Maude.”

  Several house slaves made their way down the wide porch stairs. They gathered up the large chests and luggage and carried them into back into the house. One of the men, dressed in shirtsleeves and a vest, smiled at Maude and knelt to meet her gaze.

  “Hello, Miss Anderton. My name is Isaiah. Welcome to Grande Folly. I hope your trip out was pleasant. We are very pleased to have you visit us.”

  Clower handed Isaiah a sweat-damp sealed letter he produced from out of his pant pocket. Isaiah rose. He was a good half a head taller than Clower.

  “Here ya go, boy.” Clower said. “Letter of introduction for Mrs. Cormac and promissory notes to help with the girl’s upkeep.”

  “Thank you, boss,” Isaiah said. Maude noticed all the softness had fallen out of his voice.

  “Jess’ you make damn sure that gits to Mrs. Cormac, y’hear me, boy?”

  “Of course, boss. I’ll give it right to her.”

  Clower turned and patted Maude on the head.

  “Have a good stay, Miss Maude. Someone will come to fetch you once your father has returned.”

  He rode off in the carriage. Maude stood and watched it until it disappeared from view behind the curtain of Spanish moss hanging low from the bald cypress trees that ringed the driveway and yard. Cicadas buzzed. She felt very small.

  “Miss?” Isaiah said softly from behind her. “This way, please. Lady Cormac is awaiting you.”

  Maude followed him up the stairs, across the wide porch and through the doors into the grand foyer. The house was shadow and shade after the bright summer day. It smelled of well-oiled wood and faintly of peppermint. Her things had b
een gathered here and the house slaves stood by them, awaiting orders on where to take them. Maude turned in the direction of a wide room off the left side of the foyer. Its massive sliding mahogany doors were partially open. While Isaiah paused to direct the servants in the disposition of the luggage, she carefully, slowly walked toward the fissure of the open doors.

  Her eyes widened and her heart jumped as she saw the room was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, swollen to overflowing with books, papers, even what appeared to be scrolls of ancient parchment and other tantalizing artifacts. Without even realizing she had done it, Maude crossed over into the room.

  She paused at the heavy reading table, piled high with books, reached out and touched one of them. The smell of old paper in the room, the motes of dust drifting, like planets, in the warm sunlight of the great bay windows. The feel of a well-worn cloth book cover on her fingertips.

  Maude felt the tightness in her stomach begin to ease. She could survive this place, this time. This room would sustain her, the feeling of being surrounded by human ideas, emotions, dreams; it would be fine, even if this distant, elderly relative proved to be less than pleasant company.

  There was a heavy, flat stone on the table, an island in the towers of books. It looked very old. Painted onto it were symbols all in black: Animals standing like men; stick people with triangles for shields and lines for spears. A strange looped cross. She ran her fingers across the stone. It felt smooth from age, and that made her feel good.

  “It’s from Africa,” a dry voice said from behind her. The voice had an odd accent Maude had never heard before. She turned and saw that the sliding doors had been opened fully. An old woman stood in the doorway; Isaiah stood beside her, supporting her at the elbow with a gentle but firm hand. She was slender, tall, with a pretty good figure for a woman of her years and skeletal weight. Her hair was a tangled mane of snow, with a few strands of copper and iron peeking through. It tumbled down her shoulders. Her eyes were green fire, the devil dancing in the flames. It was hard to judge her age. She looked down at Maude with an expression that was a mixture of amusement and disdain. “It’s very old. Who told you to come in here, girl? Who gave you permission?”