Sweetwater

by Lisa Henry

  What would it be like to travel on the railroad instead of on coaches that pitched and bounced their way along the wheel ruts in the road? Elijah thought it would probably be as smooth as a magic carpet ride.

  He thought of the carpet on Harlan Crane’s floor. He thought of Crane’s bed.

  “Tight. Tight little bitch.”

  His breath caught in his throat. His face burned. His cock stiffened.

  Elijah squirmed, putting the book on his lap and hunching over. If they looked at him, would they know? He was afraid they would. Dr. Carter, and Mr. Scully, and Mr. Cleaver and Mr. Sherlock. And surely Mr. Spicer, his fingers tap-tap-tapping along the spine of his Bible, would only need a glimpse to lay all of Elijah’s sins bare.

  If anyone in South Pass City ever built a church and wanted a preacher for it, then Thomas Spicer would be the perfect man for the job. Mr. Spicer always carried a small Bible with him. Sometimes he took it out of his coat pocket and put it on the table in front of him, like other men would with their tobacco. Elijah had often watched the way Mr. Spicer’s fingers were drawn to it. Hardly a minute went by when they didn’t dance across its worn black cover. Elijah wondered if the man realized how often he did it. Nobody else seemed to even notice.

  “And it’s only gotten worse since that infernal woman was appointed!” Cleaver said.

  “Mrs. Morris’s appointment had nothing to do with any decision about the railroad,” Sherlock said. “It was the surveyors and engineers who chose the route. And Mrs. Morris does the job as well as any man.”

  “You would say that since she appointed you a deputy sheriff,” Cleaver huffed. “A woman’s place is in the kitchen, not a courtroom.”

  Elijah looked up to see Sherlock laugh. “Makes no difference. She sits right there beside her stove when she passes her judgments.”

  “I suppose you’ve got no issue taking orders off a woman!”

  Sherlock laughed again. “My aunt built half this town, Lewis. I sure don’t.”

  Elijah ran his fingers down the cracked spine of his book. Maybe he should go outside. Up to the graveyard or down to the Empire. Could he do that? Go there? He didn’t know.

  The night before, Elijah had fastened his buttons with shaking fingers and fixed his gaze on the floor. He’d heard Crane talking, but the murmured words had been indistinct. It could have been mockery, and it could have been affection. Elijah didn’t know which one would have been worse.

  He didn’t know what Crane had said. Didn’t know if the man wanted to fuck him again. Didn’t know if he had the guts to walk into the Empire and find out.

  Didn’t know shit.

  Simple deaf cunt.

  He shivered.

  “Elijah.”

  Elijah looked up in time to see Dr. Carter’s palm descending into his field of vision. He sat still while Dr. Carter felt his forehead and the glands in his neck.

  “You’re a little warm.”

  Elijah shrugged, and the muscles in his shoulders and back pulled. He ached all over from wrestling with the yearling, or being fucked by Crane. He didn’t know which. And he sure as hell couldn’t tell Dr. Carter about either.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine,” he murmured. He didn’t like talking when there were people around. He didn’t know what he hated more, the laughter, or those small, sympathetic smiles that were as sickly sweet as molasses. Sometimes he thought it was sympathy. Not allowed to get angry about sympathy.

  “If you say so.” Dr. Carter smiled at him, teeth appearing through his whiskers. “No going out in the rain when it comes, hmm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He still didn’t know if he would have run into the storm or run to the Empire. Thunder and lightning, or Harlan Crane. They both made his heart race, both made his breath catch, both made him feel alive.

  He hunched over on his cot, opened his book, and listened to the indistinct murmur of the men’s voices as they played.

  A while later, the storm broke.

  On Sunday afternoon, Grady found himself back at the Empire, thinking of the butcher’s boy again and wondering why the hell it even mattered. Wasn’t like him to get hung up like this. The feeling was unfamiliar, and Grady didn’t like it.

  He didn’t even know for sure.

  Didn’t know that Harlan Crane had fucked the kid. But jealousy seethed in his gut as he threw back his whiskey. Listening to Crane hold court at his back. Laughing and joking with men and calling out for the whores to parade past and kiss him on the cheek.

  And Grady had no claim. No fucking claim at all, except he’d seen Elijah and wanted him.

  Seen him standing quietly in the dark as they’d spoken with Dawson. The butcher’s boy, with his pale face and his calico apron tied around his slim hips. His wide, watchful eyes that promised Grady something more than just a quick fuck in a dark alley. Or at least Grady imagined.

  And he’d been beaten to the punch by Harlan Crane.

  He sighed.

  Hell, there were other asses, other mouths, and it wasn’t like him at all to fixate this way. Something more than a quick fuck in a dark alley? There was nothing more. You took what was offered.

  Grady turned around and leaned back with his elbows on the bar and surveyed the Empire.

  He caught Harlan Crane’s dark gaze and felt it slide over him. Then Crane lifted his glass in Grady’s direction. Grady nodded and turned back to the man behind the bar.

  “Another one,” he said.

  He drained it, the whiskey burning his throat, before he picked up his hat off the bar and headed for the exit. Felt Crane’s gaze on his back until he was out the doors and down in the street again. Into the rain.

  The storm rolled over South Pass City, but the rain stayed behind. The sound of it, like a low, steady exhalation of breath, blanketed everything else. It sighed Elijah to sleep. His dreams were washed clean.

  “Elijah.”

  It wasn’t the word that woke him, it was Dr. Carter’s palm on his cheek. He blinked awake in the lamplight.

  “Clear the table and boil some water,” Dr. Carter said.

  Elijah nodded, hauling himself out of bed. He pulled his trousers on over his drawers, looking toward the doorway. There was a man standing there, big and bearded. Covered in mud and blood and booze. He was wild-eyed, frantic. A messenger. The others wouldn’t be far behind.

  Elijah cleared the plates from the sturdy table and stacked them on the floor. The fire in the stove had almost burned down during the night. Elijah wrapped his hand in his shirt and opened the door to add more wood. He squinted against the sudden flare of bright heat. He closed the door again, unwrapped his shirt, and pulled it over his head. He checked that there was water in the kettle and lifted it onto the stove.

  By the time it boiled, the cabin was full of men.

  They had carried the patient here. The patient was a small man, wiry, his narrow face full of bristles, and his lips twisted in a grimace of pain. He’d been shot in the back.

  Elijah stood out of the way as Dr. Carter prepared his instruments.

  “Let me have a look at you,” Dr. Carter said, helping the man strip off his shirt.

  The man’s back was wet with blood and rain. Elijah passed Dr. Carter a cloth.

  “Lie on the table,” Dr. Carter said. He looked around at the men who had brought him. “You may need to hold him down for me.”

  There wasn’t much difference between doctoring and butchering when it came down to it. You needed a strong stomach and a lot of muscle for both.

  The man coughed as he was maneuvered facedown onto the table. Blood and spittle bubbled out of his mouth.

  Elijah met Dr. Carter’s gaze. If the bullet was in his lungs, the man would die.

  Maybe the man knew it too, because he began to rock side to side on the table, fighting the men holding him.

  “Hold him down,” Dr. Carter said, wiping the cloth over the man’s back to expose the bullet wound. “There now, I see.” />
  Elijah was distracted from the wound for a moment by the old scars crossing the man’s back. He’d been whipped in the past. Maybe for thieving, or maybe he’d been a deserter in the war. The man had been through hell, in any case, and was about to set foot there again.

  Blood pumped out of the wound as the man’s heart beat.

  “Can’t pay you, Doc,” the man wheezed.

  “Lost everything in Crane’s fucking card house,” one of the others volunteered.

  Elijah stared at the wound, at the blood pumping, welling in the gaping hole until another heartbeat pushed it out and it ran down the man’s scarred back like a tear. The wages of sin.

  He wouldn’t go back to Crane.

  Couldn’t.

  Crane was too dangerous. Not just for the booze and the gambling and the whores he ran out of the Empire—there was no shortage of men making their fortune that way in South Pass City—but because Elijah had taken every stab of pain and every searing burn of humiliation that Crane had given him, and still would have taken more. He would have taken anything Crane wanted him to take, because Crane had looked in his face and seen him.

  Elijah shivered.

  The world had tipped last night, and Elijah was afraid he was still falling.

  “Can you stitch him up, Doc?” one of the men asked, his voice low with worry.

  The men were all big, all hairy, and all soaking wet and covered in blood. Miners, probably, in town to get drunk and make trouble. Elijah didn’t know them.

  Dr. Carter didn’t answer. He caught Elijah’s gaze and nodded to his medical bag.

  “Ether, sir?” Elijah asked and must have slurred it from the narrow looks one of the men gave him.

  “Quick as you like, Elijah.”

  He’d always liked the way Dr. Carter said that. Never hurry up, or get it done. Quick as you like. And it turned out that was always as quick as Elijah could because it earned him Dr. Carter’s approval.

  Elijah found the bottle of ether and tilted it away as he opened it. He dripped some onto a cloth and held it out toward the man’s face, only to jerk back when beefy fingers closed around his wrist.

  “Hold on now! I don’t want some simpleton giving my brother the Yankee dodge!”

  Dr. Carter looked up from the patient’s back. The lamplight glinted on his glasses. “My son is afflicted with deafness, not idiocy. Let him do his job, and I’ll do mine.”

  Grudgingly, the man released Elijah’s wrist.

  Elijah pressed the cloth to the patient’s nose and mouth, holding it there firmly as the man tried to pull away. Too afraid, Elijah guessed, that he wouldn’t wake up again. Elijah watched his eyes as they closed. When he removed the cloth again, it was stained with pinkish foam from the man’s mouth. He held it up to show Dr. Carter.

  “The bullet is in his lungs,” Dr. Carter said. “I will remove the bullet and do what I can, but your brother is very likely beyond all care.”

  “Harry,” the big man said to the patient, rubbing his knuckles through the man’s wet, scruffy hair. “Harry.”

  The name turned into a frightened moan that sounded just like the yearling’s.

  “He’s gotta live, Doc!” the man said. “You gotta help him!”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Dr. Carter said, and Elijah moved to help him.

  Blood and flesh and muscle and tissue and sinew. No difference at all between a man’s insides and a beast’s. Elijah didn’t flinch as Dr. Carter dug around for the bullet, but the patient’s friends did. The brother did. The patient didn’t flinch, either.

  Wouldn’t, ever again.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Carter said at last, wiping his bloody hands on a cloth. “He’s gone.”

  Elijah stepped back as the men crowded around the table.

  “Run and fetch Mr. Johansen, Elijah,” Dr. Carter said, his face somber.

  “Yes, sir.” Elijah read that look. He knew to fetch the deputy as well as Johansen, the undertaker. Maybe some other man had shot him, but this was South Pass City and these men were miners. Maybe they’d argued about gold.

  Elijah didn’t bother with his coat or his boots.

  He hurried out into the rain.

  “Terrible way for a man to die,” Dr. Carter said the next morning as Elijah scrubbed down the table with lye soap and hot water. “But those McCreedy boys are always coming into town and getting into trouble.”

  “Did the deputy arrest anyone yet?” he asked.

  Dr. Carter puffed on his pipe, taking care to remove it before he spoke. “No, but he knows the fellow who did it. Right in the middle of the card house, all over a hand of poker, if you can believe such a thing.”

  Elijah worked at a dark patch on the table, unsure if it was a bloodstain or a knot of wood. “Who did it?”

  “Someone called Anders. Well, he left town the moment it happened, but he’s got a shack outside Miner’s Delight, so Thaddeus and the other deputies are going to ride over there and bring him in.”

  “If he’s there,” he said.

  “Son, he was so drunk at the card house he probably doesn’t remember what he did.” Dr. Carter shook his head and sighed. “I doubt the McCreedy boys remember too much of how it happened, either.”

  When Elijah had returned the night before with Thaddeus Sherlock and Mr. Johansen, the men had been silent and shocked, except for the one who had caught Elijah’s wrist. He was raging, blustering, calling Dr. Carter every name under the sun for not saving his brother.

  “Watch your mouth, Francis McCreedy,” Sherlock had said, one hand on his holster and no sign of the smile he was usually so quick to show.

  “Harry’s dead! Harry’s dead because of this goddamn quack! I’ll kill him! I’ll fucking kill him!”

  “Harry’s dead because he got shot. Apologize to Doc Carter, and get the fuck out. I’ll deal with you outside.”

  Would Thaddeus Sherlock be so frightening, Elijah had worried, if he arrested him for butchering stolen cattle?

  The other men had been numb with grief, not on fire with it.

  “Can’t pay you, Doc,” the last one to leave had said. “’Cept with this. I’ll come back, Doc, get it notarized all proper.”

  The grimy paper was still on Dr. Carter’s desk this morning: Harry McCreedy’s share in a claim called Adavale. Elijah hadn’t heard of it, but there were hundreds of tiny claims around South Pass City. Most of them came to nothing. It would have been better to get paid in chickens, like last month when some kid broke her arm and her mama had no cash. They’d eaten off that for days and boiled the bones down for soup. Dr. Carter had even kept a few feathers to use for bookmarks.

  Dr. Carter looked tired this morning. He sighed again and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Stay away from the cardrooms, Elijah, won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the saloons.”

  “Yes, sir.” He hoped Dr. Carter wouldn’t see the guilt on his face.

  He wouldn’t go back to Crane.

  Dr. Carter showed him a weary smile. “Good, Elijah. Good.”

  He wasn’t. Wasn’t nothing even close to good.

  Elijah wiped the table down and carried the pail outside. He tipped the soapy water in the mud and watched it form a boiling lake around a clump of scrubby grass. The day was gray and cool. The hills of the Wind River Range were shrouded in clouds, their peaks hidden. Elijah couldn’t see the South Pass—that small dip in the hills that hinted at the passage west—but he knew the shape of the hills by heart. Sometimes he stared at the South Pass for hours and wondered.

  If his mother and sisters had lived.

  If his father hadn’t left.

  If some dream version of himself had made it west after all.

  He imagined himself surrounded by family—talking, laughing, hearing. Except every time he tried to lose himself in the fantasy, it wasn’t his family he heard, it was Dawson’s voice in his head:

  Simple deaf cunt.

  Elijah went back inside. He s
at on his cot and laced his boots.

  “Stop by the store on the way home and get some flour,” Dr. Carter said. “And see if the post has come.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good boy.” Dr. Carter scruffed his hair affectionately, and Elijah thought of Crane again.

  When Elijah headed for work, the town was full of talk of Harry McCreedy’s murder, at least that’s what he assumed. Men were stopped in the street exchanging the news, shaking their heads or nodding sagely. The cardrooms and saloons brought nothing but trouble. Trouble and money, which was why they were tolerated.

  Elijah watched the ground as he walked, avoiding puddles and the worst of the mud left from the storm.

  Sometimes he liked to think about leaving South Pass City and going west like he was meant to, like his dream-self had, except he suspected that the idea he had of what it would be like there was no more real than the version of himself that was whole. He would get there, and it would be no different than here. Going west wouldn’t heal him. Wouldn’t transform him. Nothing would.

  Even in a perfect world, Elijah would be flawed.

  If Dr. Carter’s wife and daughter hadn’t died the winter before Elijah had arrived, would Dr. Carter have taken him in still? He didn’t know and couldn’t bring himself to ask. He loved Dr. Carter and Dr. Carter loved him, but what was Elijah except a poor substitute for the family he had lost? Dr. Carter still kept Hannah’s tiny christening gown wrapped in brown paper in the top of his lowboy. And, in the folds, a stern whiskerless wedding portrait taken in a studio in Charleston. Sometimes Dr. Carter took it out and looked at it, and showed Elijah the glass-bead bracelet he’d bought the girl he would one day make his wife.

  “She had eyes the color of a summer sky,” he’d told Elijah a hundred times, his voice soft with melancholy. “Well, I wanted to buy her sapphires but could only afford blue glass. She married me anyway.”

  He would thumb the beads like a rosary while he spoke.