"The Roughest Farewell" pt. IV

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

"The Roughest Farewell" pt. III

III.

            Morning next.  Sitting in the dark and smoke-filled office with my boots propped up on the pinewood desk, throat raw and dry from a night’s sit.  Like pemmican, I suppose.  Heavy lids dip low upon my tired eyes as I take another sip from the earthen triple-x jug set beside me on the floor.  It’s been a long night, a real hoo-haw of a thing.  My stomach muscles ache, my back hurts, my knees are scuffed, and the piles are acting up again.  But worst of all are the memories.

            “Lest we forget,” I prost myself as I tipple back anew.  Another facet of the First Church plot, another little hump of earth to forget, more water in that vast well of souls.  Lest we forget.

            “Man Jesus!” Angus whoops as he swings open the office door.  A blinding blade of light cuts in behind him before the door swings back to.  He plants his bony ass on the desk and motions over for the jug.  “That was a real hoo-haw, last night was.  Hell if they send any more tax agents round these parts!”  He swigs a taste and croaks, “Gods-blasted government.”

            “Yeah,” I sort of sigh tiredly.  Or is it wistfully?  Lest we forget.  “Those damned federals.”

            Angus hums his approval as he idles over the jug, neither drinking nor passing with the dad-gun thing set in his lap.  “Yeah, poking their noses where they dun’t belong.  Upsetting the general will, you know?  Greater good,” he mutters, quite definitely in wist.  Tottering the bottle in his lap, neither lifting for the swig nor passing it on.  Giving me the ants.  I stand.

            “Gotta get me some air,” I say, I fear with a trickle of the sweats and a shake.  Vomitous uprisings in the bowels, bit of the spleen upacting.  Lest we forget.  Hitching up my belt I decide to holster the shooter I’ve left lying across the desktop. 

            “Specting trouble?” he drawls from beneath the great flat brim of his hat.

            “Nah, just holds my pants up.”  I exit into another blinding swath of sun rising overhead.  Not nearly so high as to leave a shade on the porch, yet well above the spread of town to make it painful to the dank-weakened eye.  “Christ’s cross.”  But sun besides, there’s a mild touch of breeze about the air that seems pleasant and refreshing.  Quelling the troubles below, as it were.

            I saunter, but then there’s nowhere quite to go in town when a body wants to be alone.  I turn toward the hills, past First Church and the mounds of earth in the yard.  Mounds of flesh, sizable cups in the well.  Or maybe mere thimbles.  It’s beyond me to speculate at present.  Looking onward, the ancient shaggy Scarsdales hump along the sky’s bottom edge, a sort of earthen corrugate cut out.  Two silky plumes of smoke trickle upwards, mining camps in the hills’ midst.  No doubt still reeking of the morning’s bacon and saltpork and burnt coffee and distant shit.

            I walk along and off the dusty trail, hoofing it down a grassy knoll.  To someplace secluded and lonesome and scrubby-green.  Mayhap to laze about the junipers and sage and withered pines and ponder, or even to thoughtlessly gaze at the unending skies above.  In either case, to mull alone for a spell.  To lie upon Mother Earth and under our most distant relative, the Sun.  Among birds and mule deer and dozy bugs, to stretch out and reflect – lest we forget.  Because Ned’s world won’t forget where he’s got, and a hard rain’s bound to fall after him.

            I sometimes wish I could just up and ride away with the sun, to travel on like the unending day and ceaseless night.  But then, I don’t much like horses.  Sarta dee, sarta dum…  I find an inviting little spot overlooking the south plain and drop down in a grassy patch.  Tossing aside my hat and cradling head in hands I watch the azure skies above, clear and pure as a church pane.  Lazy clouds off to the east, drifting southward to Mexico, or the Gulf.  Hard to say for sure.

            Peaceful repose, badly needed serenity.  Lest we – and with a mighty mid-morning yawn – string ourselves up ado over nothing.  I close my eyes and it feels good, real good.  I can feel the breeze picking up, gusting the soft and pleasant scents of fresh sage to my nostrils.  Warm sun on my face, rather quickly I find myself drifting off…

*          *     is this the end? find out in our next installment     *          *

"The Roughest Farewell" pt. II

II.

            Grim dusk yawns upon us, the darkness of the sky pushing away the sun as another day meets its end.  Or at least, as another day in Skokie Pines ends.  I’ve been told the sun moves along, shining upon other lands west of us and far beyond and around until it crops up again in the east the morning next.  There really are no days, by that logic.  More like one endless day and an endless night, skulking about in an unending push and chase around our fair little firmament.

            The whole township is gathered in a great omega, facing myself, Angus, and a whimpering Ned between at the nadir of this celestial congregation on the steps of First Church.  Cousin Horace stands ahead, enrobed in the full regalia of his high office.  He prays upon this ritual in the old tongue, our denuded townsfolk bowed down over Mother Earth and saying their piece in response.  I say nothing.  I am the instrument of the body, nothing more.

            Ned is sniveling quietly, mouth agape and eyes a-popping at these proceedings.  “Easy on,” I whisper to him.  “Mussn’t heap further sacrilege upon your crimes.  Be worse if’n you do.”

            “Sheriff, this is madness,” he starts saying, and I’ve got to jerk him quiet by the collar.  Ned whispers on, “I mean, this is madness.  How can such heathenry exist in our day and age?”  And he looks at me imploringly for an answer, manacled and sweaty-browed.

            “Supposed to help the crops,” I shrug, thinking of the reasons laid down by the forefathers and yon.  “Harvest your spiritual energy for the township, in a manner of speaking.  Anyway, you shouldn’t’ve done what you did.” 

            “Hell’s bells, Sheriff… you can’t let them do this.  You’re a justice of the peace!”

            “Quit raising your voice during the ritual, dammit.”  I tap the tin pentangle pinned to my vest.  “And that’s your world, not ours.  Mine is a local office.  Anyway, it’s more or less like a hanging in other parts.  Only more meaningful.  You aren’t just dying… consider yourself becoming part of something bigger.”  Just tipping the earthen cup into the greater well, fluid and free and all-enveloping.  So we say.  It’s all one big communion by the endless day’s close.  But my counsel doesn’t comfort our prisoner any.  He mutters and shakes a right mess, I dare say beginning to go faint and fluttery as Horace ends the dedication.

            Arms upraised in a theatrical gesture, Our Horace addresses the very cosmos.  “We are now gathered before the First Church of the Aeon, to dedicate the life of an erstwhile unworthy individual – an outsider – guilty of trespassing upon the collected wills of our humble people of Skokie Pines.  Seni peikoks.  Have you anything to say before the bonding ritual is carried out, Brother Nedward Norris?”

            Angus gives Ned a shake, but it’s no good; Nedward is unresponsive.

            “Very well,” Horace continues.  “Place him in the well.”  Our cue, Angus and I drag Ned forward as the drums begin tattooing their primal thunder and the people become animated, exuberant.  Betsie locks each arm around the necks of her neighbors as they go to ground, while Anna Weebleman begins her siren song that sends shivers down my spine.  Many’s the night I awake from the sound of those drums, and that song.  Many a weary pipe I smoke ‘til our resumption of the dawn.

            Suddenly Ned leaps to life, the torso trying to tear itself from its very arms.  “Nooo!!  Nooooooo!!!”  Angus bats him in the eye with an elbow, but he rolls right with it as we drag him onward towards the center.  “You people are monsters!!  Pigs!  To Hell with the lot of you!!”

            “My my, but he’s a feisty one!” Angus squeals, baring his ugly chompers in a donkey bray.  The thundering drums pound on, a downpour upon my ears as we reach the hole.  With some pushing and kicking we get Ned’s legs in and push him down, him screaming and biting and vacillating as Angus begins pushing in the dusty red soil.  I’ve got to keep his shoulders pressed down, a hard feat considering.  Horace looms above us with outstretched hands and an upturned chin, chanting loudly away-

Mares away a fodder’s chum

Da prey ta bon num spake

In ta da erith bon num hest

Ayardi nigh da leaf.

            Sarta dee, sarta dum comes the refrain from all sides and I feel as though my very bones will jump free of my body, the pressure on my head explode in a shot of red.  Sarta dee sarta dum, sarta dee sarta dum and on and on.  Finally Angus presses the earth over Ned’s shoulders and I release them, rising to help pack it in with my spurless boot.

"GOD!!" Ned wails.

            “GOD!!” Ned wails.  “Oh Jesus Christ, Our Father who art in Heaven,” and so on, a parrying chant of his own against so many unburied others.  Horace hands me the burlap sack with the seventeen stars and I crouch down.

            “Sorry Neddy, sorry you have to experience this roughest of farewells.”  With a muffled shout the bag is placed over his head and I step away.  The drums, the thundering drums and Our Horace rising upon their rhythm with the wildest of ululations.  The mob goes mad.  Sarta dee!  Sarta dum!  They rise from their throng with stones held high overhead as the last ray of sun disappears behind the westward horizon.  All that’s left to us is darkness, darkness and a couple sundry stars as a kind of justice rains down.

*          *          *     to be continued yet     *          *          *

"The Roughest Farewell"

I.

            “Sweet Je-zus, Sheriff!  Can’t you,” and here the wormy little profligate falls into a mumbling bit of whimper.  “Can’t you just flog me, send me off and all?  I won’t come back!”

            Miserable little weed.

            “Nah, Ned, you won’t be coming back any time soon,” I tells him matter o’ fact like, rummaging through the chest o’ drawers next to the gun cabby.  “I do declare-” and I pause to relight my pipe as my thoughts hurry about the office.  Where, o where, have our black hoods gone….  They’re normally kept in the second drawer, next to the manacles.

            It’s hard to think, what with Ned yammering on from the town cell.  Not really a cell even, more an elaborate cattle pen hemmed with barbed wire and glass fragments.  Iron bars don’t grow on trees in Skokie Pines.  He stands as close to the slats as he can, pleading for his useless life with such gibbering despair.

            “Gawd- I’ll fly right off, Sheriff, it doesn’t haftabethiswayouknowIdon’t- deservetodielikethat please Sheriff, pleASE!!!”  Bawling and slobbering and snotting on, shaking like a leaf in an autumn breeze. 

            I head for the door.  “No need to shout, Ned, keep your pants on.  I’m over to Betsie’s, see if she can fix you up a proper hood and all.”  And I look back, a grin on my face.  “Wouldn’t want the townfolk have to watch your perfidious mug die, right-right?”  And I shut the door as he begins a-wailing again.

            It’s a beautiful day out the day, bright enough to blind a fella.  Course, the office doesn’t have any windows.  Very stoutly built, if simply so.  Angus idles in a rocker on the porch, hat pushed over his eyes.  “Lotsa noise he’s making in there, Sheriff.  Want me to shut’m up?”  And he gives one of those sour rotten smiles Angus and his braars are known throughout the county for.  Teeth’re the first to go in that fam.

'...more an elaborate cattle pen...'

            “Nah, none too necessary.  Gorgeous day out, though!  My word, I’m nigh on blinded by it.”  Angus hums assent and lifts his brim a bit with a thumb.  He makes another ghastly smile and lowers the hat back as he settles into his nap.  “Keep up the good work, hoss.”

            I walk on, boots scuffling along the rough dusty stretch of road that cuts through town.  Hard on the heels mostly, but a gluey morass at the first sign of rain.  Old Milo once suggested we lay down some broken stones from the mining op uphill.  A grand idea, if anyone wanted to shift them down here.  I think Milo really just wanted the township to pay him something extra, proposing it in that roundabout way of his.  In any case, it in't as though it comes as any detriment to the regular pace of things.  Old Skokie is a small sort of place, eleven buildings thrown up at the foot of the Scarsdales and the little mines and paltry claims that operate there.  

            I saunter across to Weebleman’s, a sort of one-stop for dry goods and much-about everything.  Uncle Weeb is dead now, stuck in the dusty ground behind First Church.  The store lives on via my brother Paul and his wife Betsie, formerly our Weeb’s eldest.  Course, Betsie’s sort of the family facet.  A harbringer, our stagecoach regular Emmitt once called her.  She’s outlived three husbands now; two of our cousins and another of my brothers, Geoff.  Now facets themselves behind the First Church.

            I push open the only screen door in town and step inside to the murky cool of the shop.  “Mornin’ Spur,” Betsie pipes up from behind the far counter.  That’s me by the way, Spur; called so because I don’t wear spurs, on account of my piles.  Horses and I aren’t the best of friends, let’s say.  “Ned still due for dusk?”

            “Yup, I do believe he is.  Course, do you think you can fix up a hood for him before then?  Can’t seem to find any in the office.”

            “Hrmmm,” she thinks audibly back in the coquettish, playful sort of way she does.  Everybody has a way, I suppose.  But she scrunches her face and puts a finger on those lips, amber eyes upturned off and away presumably finding the answer somewhere among the pressed tin ceiling tiles.  “You know, I think I can solve that problem right now.  We could use one of these barley bags instead.”

            She rummages one out from a pile of cloths and hands it to me, smelling of gal-musk and sassafras.  I roll the bag around in my hands; seems a proper fit for a head.  We can affix the appropriate stars and signs later.  “I dare say you’re a clever devil, Miss Betsie.  What might the township owe for this generosity of yourn?”

            She pulls the pipe from my teeth.  “Paul is away yet, 'til sometime later this afternoon.  I don’t suppose the township could part with a sheriff, at least for a little bit?”  And I hafta say, there’s nothing like a little anarchy now and then to make a community stronger.

*          *          *     to be continued     *          *          *