IV.
I awake from my nap after what seems like weeks, the sun by now just passed the sky's highest point and beginning its way toward the western horizon. I sit up and stretch the stiffness from my shoulders and lower back, a hearty yawn on my lips- stifled, when I see the distant clouds of dust kicked up on the southern road. Four horsemen, maybe five approaching our Skokie Pines. Five horsemen. Trouble.
I leap to my feet, a chill in the pit of me as I begin to leg it back to town. Five horsemen, doubtless after Ned. Would they be state marshals? Pinkertons? Federals? Unrelated? How much did they know; could they know what horrors transpired the night before? A chill in the pit of me, as cold and horrible and lifeless as they come. What could I say? What should I say to the townsfolk?
On the rocky path back, sprinting and bounding over odd stones and dusty ruts as the little township draws sluggishly nearer. I can’t run fast enough, it feels. Legs of iron, knocking hardened heels on stagnant earth. Kicking up a dust trail of my own. I’m finally running past the First Church – mounds of flesh in the yard behind – past the tailor, the smithy, to the office. Dead empty and lifeless, the lot of them. Heat of the day, it comes as no surprise. Were it not for the icy pit in my stomach I might succumb to the stroke.
I burst through the heavy wooden door, surprising Angus and little Cousin Clara playing the tarot on the great wooden desk. “Ye gods! Men approaching town- fetch Horus,” I tell to her, surprisingly out of breath now that I’ve reached my purpose. I falter on towards the gun cab as the two remain standing on, watching me with ignorant fishes’ eyes. “Now, dammit!” I wheeze as I pull out a brace of Winchesters. I hurl one blindly at Angus and grab up a box of cartridges. Gods, but my hands quiver. I drop them, one-two, as I make to load up.
“Man Jesus, Sheriff! What’s got you all huff n’ puff?” Angus gawps with the rifle hanging in his arms.
“Men!” I cry breathlessly. “Five men approaching town on horseback. Moving fast.”
“God Zeus,” he whispers, at last understanding. He scrambles for the cabinet, changing out the rifle for the double-barrel ten gauge and a box of shells. I’m still struggling to load, still dropping cartridges on the floor 6-7-8. Hands everywhere as I stumble towards the door. At last I’ve got the thing locked and ready and I’m stepping back out onto the porch as Horace walks briskly up with Clara close behind.
“I hear there’s trouble approaching, Cousin Spur? To do with the outsider?” Despite the raised eyebrows and the gapen mouth of concern, Horace seems excited; positively excited. I nod and he raises clenched fists towards heaven. “If the government wants trouble, then they shall have it!” he exclaims. “I’ll alert the folk. We shall meet them prepared.” Horace rushes off shouting, “Invaders! Marauders! Arm yon selves!” Skipping, dammit. Skipping down the street and shouting.
“Mind you do nothing drastic, Our Horace!” I cry after. “Let me talk to them! Mayhap it’s nothing!” But there’s a sickly foreboding about the words as I say them. “Mayhap it’s nothing.” I stand there with my rifle in the shade of the porch, Angus poking out his head through the doorway. We both stand, taut and unnerved for one minute, three minutes, on to ten. Finally with a hissing sigh I relax my whitened grip on the wooden stock. I tell to Angus, “Just sit back tight in there. If’n there’s trouble to say, come out blasting.”
He nods and largely closes the heavy door, and I take a seat in the creaky rocker with the Winchester in my lap. There is movement in the buildings across the street; I can hear the creaking of the floorboards grind away to stillness, an awful sort of stillness that precedes a thunderbolt before it tears the sky apart. And then… hoofpats from the east. Clolloping calmy round the last upward bend into town. I set my rifle to one side against the office wall and make to light my pipe. I can’t for the quavering hands, so I simply hold it in my lap and wait.
The five horsemen ride up the main drag, two to the front with the others hanging behind. The laggers seem awful nervy, the fat man up front right on edge. But the slender fella with the drooping moustaches rides with a buoyant calm – though he also seems eye the place with a keen regard. It is him I fear, my instinct tells me. I raise a hand to them in halloa.
“Greetings, y’all,” I chirrup in a slightly crackling voice. I make to stand on warbled legs, pressing an arm nonchalantly against the roof beam for support as I lean to one side, pipe still in the other hand.
“Greetings, Sheriff,” the thin man replies in a robust, haughty sort of voice that sends shivers down my spindly spine. His is a look of triumph, the cat that caught the canary. “I suppose you would be the one to know what became of a friend of ours, what passed through here yesterday morning? He was about on business, specifically to see your office.”
I clear my throat, an idea sprung to mind. “Yessir, a Mr. Norris it was. Collecting renders for Caesar. He came and went by noontime, once he’d seen to his business…” I’m starting to feel a little more confident, the blood returning to my hands and feet and hopefully face. But the gangly horseman nods on in that knowing way as he pouches and rolls himself out a cigarette. It’s unnerving, him sitting there atop his Appaloosa nodding on in silence with that smirk. Pressing out the lumps and rolling that cigarette between his thumbs and fores. He places the thing on his lip and produces a match, shooting me a sharp glance as he lights it.
“Afraid that isn’t possible, friend.” He inhales deeply and tosses aside the matchstick. A cloud of smoke explains, “Afraid he was to meet up with us outside of town once he was finished up hereabouts. Straight up, if you understand me. We waited til nightfall and a bit through the morning, on the off chance he was enjoying your town’s hospitality.” He pauses there, taking out his cigarette with two fingers and admiring it at arm’s length a bit. “We waited. He didn’t show up. Now we’re here to figure why, precisely. So? Where is Ned?”
The blood again flees my appendages, my knees feeling like lead weights. The man is clever, alleys covered and all. But what is he? Contract? Badge? “I told you what happened,” I tell him, trying to rouse some semblance of authority to my voice. “Now who are you to question me? I’m a sheriff, after all. I’m the law round here.” I tap my pentangle with a thumb for emphasis, yet can’t rid myself of the nervousness. I’m playing a losing hand, too far gone to fold with not enough guile to bluff it out.
“Me?” He laughs, a husky smirky sort. “I’m the Lord on High, in these parts. I’m Marshal Conniff Starks. And I’m afraid I've heard a few things about ol’ Skokie. S’why we decided to escort Mr. Norris along. S’why we’re here now. S’why I’m asking you what it is you’re doing with that Winchester perched up against the door frame, and why you’re shitting bricks at a simple question.” His dark-eyed gaze is slicing right through me now, cutting me to the very quick. He spits out his cigarette and puts a hand on the revolver handle jutting from its holster. His men are already guns-in-hands, ready to follow suit should the necessity arise. Never have I been so close to death, I’m feeling through every last strand of myself as I stand there on the open lopsided porch outside the office. As the man says, shitting bricks.
Starks sucks the spittle off the side of his great moustache. “So I’ll ask once more-” he begins, cut short by an explosive report from above Weebleman’s. The five of them are cut short as the first report is followed by a dozen others, horses trying vainly to wheel around as they and their riders drop to earth left and right. The door swings wide as I scurry over for my rifle, catching me hard atop the head and dropping me flat; Angus comes out a-screaming and empties both barrels. Catching Starks square in the chest, I believe. As I roll over on the porch I can see him sprawled out lifeless and bloodying up the dusty earth, his mates all strewn about him. One of his boys had the horse shot from under him but has managed to sprint off behind our Sheriff’s Office.
“Get the outsider!!” Horace shouts wildly as he comes charging out with a bayonet-tipped Springfield, followed by a dozen screaming fellows brandishing pistols, cleavers, and axes. A few fall upon the fallen marshals, laying in to chopping and kicking. The rest run off in pursuit, and after an exchange of shots and a bloodcurdling cry of anguish return with the decapitated head of the last. I can’t climb onto my feet, legs unwilling to support me – legs made of lard, you might say. I sit on the porch, shocked at this gratuity opened up upon the road of my town. Carnage. Bloody, horrible carnage.
And more yet to come, I realize with added horror. Starks wouldn’t have been fool enough to come without a plan of contingency. We could well have the Army sent down upon us! Carnage tenfold, if that were the case. Angus strides up, shotgun tipped across his shoulder in a cocky disposition. “That’ll show’m. Goddamned federals.”
I shake my head as Horace stands amid the corpses, admiring the scene. “The day is ours! The bloody business is finished, and there shall be much feasting the night!” There’s a general whoop as men, women, and children step out onto the road with their weaponry, exulting with each other in the afternoon’s ambush. “Prepare the fires! And prepare a pit to inter the desecrated fallen.”
I still shake my head. Fearing the worst to come, I suppose. And perhaps also lamenting our collective action, the rashness of our nearest past. Uninvolved in the melee, I can see now with outsider’s eyes the town for what it is. We are outsiders, soon to be given a rough farewell of our own once the world-that-be figures what’s become of its representatives. “We’ve lost,” I mutter, throwing head into hands.
“But none of’m escaped,” Angus corrects me, perplexed.
“None of them had to. Now all we can do is wait for the rest.”
* * *
christ! see what transpires next, soon * * *
or check out the previous installments: I II III
