Текст книги "Warlock"
Автор книги: Oakley Hall
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Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 40 страниц)
June 5, 1881 (continued)
THE fire in the Lucky Dollar has been quenched, and just in time, for a strong wind has come up. Thank God it did not arise earlier, or this town would have burned as swiftly as dry paper – a burnt offering after a man’s reputation, or his sanity. A town to form Morgan’s funeral pyre, and Blaisedell’s parting salute. Or is it of parting? Those who saw him say he was quite insane. Almost, as I write this, I find I wish he had burned us all out: Warlock gone and ourselves scattered, leaving Blaisedell to brood here alone in his madness.
There will be no sleep this night.
The news of the death of General Peach comes as no shock. Neither have I taken it as a sign of New Hope, as Buck Slavin seems to. It is only a meaningless bit of information. Perhaps it is not even true.
I have had a stream of callers. I suppose they have seen my light and sought a fellow human to talk to. Kennon says he has heard that the strike has been settled. Mosbie’s arm is broken, but he is not seriously wounded; I had thought he was dead. Kennon says he will resign from the Citizens’ Committee; he does not say why. I feel the same. All reason is gone. Egan says that Morgan had got the drop on Gannon and locked him in the jail, which was why our brave deputy was so little in evidence this evening. He did appear during the fire, and helped organize a bucket brigade, the pumper having broken down. Egan says we will have to have a proper fire department; I stare at him stupidly as he says it.
Buck Slavin has come in again and told me the latest news. It is true, evidently, that General Peach is dead at the border. A Lieutenant Avery was here with a detachment – unobtrusively, for I did not see nor hear of them until now – to dispatch back to Bright’s City the wagons that had been brought here to transport the miners to the railroad at Welltown. Peach’s body is with the main train, which has hastened back up the valley. Whiteside is now presumably acting governor, and Buck is overjoyed. Avery told him, however, that Whiteside seemed a man in a trance. Evidently he was very close to the General when he fell (as he was always protectively close), and was much shocked by the incident, which was, however, a fortunate one. Avery said it was obvious to all but Peach by the time they reached the border that the massacre had been perpetrated by Mexicans in revenge upon the rustlers, and it had taken place, as well, upon Mexican soil. Peach, however, was determined that it was his old antagonist, Espirato, and seemed prepared to pursue him to South America, if necessary. But before he had passed onto Mexican soil, his horse slipped in a narrow defile at the mouth of Rattlesnake Canyon, he fell and died instantly, and mercifully. Whiteside, accompanying him, was the only man to see it. Afterwards his only concern was to get the cavalry and Peach’s body back to Bright’s City in order to give him a military funeral before decomposition of the remains begins.
Buck has no doubt that Whiteside will now, according to his promise, rectify all our wrongs and wants, and sees Warlock as a future metropolis of the West. Buck is an optimistic and public-minded man. To his mind Blaisedell is only a small and temporary blight upon the body politic; with all else healthy and aright, he will automatically disappear. Like the rest of us, but perhaps for different reasons, he too is no longer interested in the Citizens’ Committee. I am apathetic of his ambitions, I am contemptuous of his optimism. The old, corrupt, and careless god has been replaced in his heaven, and so, he feels, all will be well with the world, which is, after all, the best of all possible ones. It is a touching faith, but I am drawn more to those who wander the night not with excitement for the future but with dread of it.
I can see many of them through my window, unable to sleep now that the fire is out. For what fire is out, and what is newly lighted, and what will burn forever and consume us all? We will fight fire with futile water or with savage fire to the end of this earth itself, and never prevail, and we will drown in our water and burn in our preventive fire. How can men live, and know that in the end they will merely die?
Pike Skinner, who is frantic, says that Gannon has warned Blaisedell that he intends to arrest him at sun-up. Skinner says that Blaisedell will kill him, and I cannot tell whether he feels more horror that Blaisedell should kill the Deputy, or that the Deputy, who is Pike’s friend, should be killed. Once I would have stupidly said that the Deputy would not be such a fool. I have been shown fatuous in my skepticism too many times. Now I neither believe nor disbelieve, and I feel nothing. There is nothing left to feel.
It is four in the morning by my watch. Mine is the only light I can see, the scratching of my pen the only sound. Here astride the dull and rusty razor’s edge between midnight and morning, I am sick to the bottom of my heart. Where is Buck Slavin’s bright future of faith, hope, and commerce? What is it even worth, after all? For if men have no worth, there is none anywhere. I feel very old and I have seen too many things in my years, which are not so many; no, not even in my years, but in a few months – in this day.
Outside there is only darkness, pitifully lit by the cold and disinterested stars, and there is silence through the town, in which some men sleep and clutch their bedclothes of hope and optimism to them for warmth. But those I love more do not sleep, and see no hope, and suffer for those brave ones who will fall in hopeless effort for us all, whose only gift to us will be that we will grieve for them a little while; those who see, as I have come to see, that life is only event and violence without reason or cause, and that there is no end but the corruption and the mock of courage and of hope.
Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see – as I realize now the doctor saw before me – that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men’s hearts to false hopes forever?
This is the sky of Gethsemane, and that of Bethlehem has vanished with its star.
68. GANNON SEES THE GOLD HANDLES
I
GANNON came awake with a start and stared at the outline of the window that was emerging gray from the surrounding darkness. He raised himself carefully on one elbow and looked down at Kate’s sleeping face, with the soft mass of hair beneath it on the pillow like a heavy shadow, the soft curves of her lashes on her cheeks, and her lips, which looked carved from ivory. He watched the rounding and relaxation of her nostrils as she breathed, and the slow, deep rise and fall of her breast. One arm was thrown across it and her fingers almost touched him.
Slowly, watching her face, he began to slide away from her, stopping when her lips tightened for a moment and then parted as though she would speak. But she did not waken, and he eased himself from her bed, and carried his clothing, shell belt, and boots into the living room to dress. His holstered Colt thumped upon the oilcloth-covered table as he set it down, and he held his breath for a moment, but there was no sound from the bedroom.
He looked in at her one last time before he put on his boots. Her hand had moved over a little farther, to lie where he had lain. He put the key on the table, went outside, and in the dark gray chill set his boots down and worked his feet into them, and softly closed the door.
The town was empty and out of the grayness buildings and houses came slowly at him like thoughts emerging from the gray edges of his mind, to hang there unattached, two-dimensional, and strange in the silence that was broken only by the hollow clump of his boots upon the boardwalk.
Down Grant Street he could just make out the high bulk of the General Peach, lightless and asleep. He turned right down Main Street. A few stars still showed frail shards of light, but almost as he looked up they were gone. He walked past the hotel and the empty rocking chairs upon the veranda, and across Broadway; he felt a strangely intense sense of possession of the vacant town in the early morning. He passed the ruin of the Glass Slipper, the pharmacy and the gunshop with their shattered windows, and skirted again the charred timbers on the boardwalk before the Lucky Dollar. The sickly sweetish stench, and that of whisky, were dissipated now, but inside the wreckage was still smoking. He crossed Southend and halted for a moment beneath the new sign to gaze into the dim interior of the jail, and felt the adobe breathing the night’s chill upon him.
He waited there until he heard the judge stir and snore in the cell, and then he went on to Birch’s roominghouse, again removing his boots so he would awaken no one as he climbed the stairs to his room. Upstairs there was a dull concert of snoring, which faded when he closed his door. He lit the lamp and held his hands to its small warmth for a moment, and then he stripped off his clothes and washed himself, soaping and scrubbing his white flesh with a rag and icy water from the crockery pitcher; he shaved his face before the triangle of mirror. He laid out clean clothes and dressed himself with care, his best white shirt, his new striped pants – store pants from the legs of which he tried to rub the creases – and dusted off his new, too-tight star boots, and painfully worked his feet into them. After rubbing his star to a shine he fastened it to his vest, and put that on, and donned his canvas jacket against the cold. He rubbed the dust from each crevice between the cartridge-keepers of his shell belt, frowned at the torn hole at the back, and polished the sharp-edged buckle. He buckled on the belt, cinching it a notch tighter than usual against the crawling cold of his stomach, thrust it down as far as it would go, and knotted the scabbard thong around his thigh tightly too.
Then he produced a whisky bottle half full of oil, and a rag, and sat down at the table to clean his Colt, and oil it, and wipe it dry. He did this over and over again with an intense, rapt attention, rubbing patiently at each small fleck of Main Street dust until the old forty-four-caliber shone dully and richly in the lamplight. He oiled the inside of the holster too, and worked the Colt in and out until it slid to his satisfaction. He replaced the cartridges in the cylinder, let the hammer down upon the empty one, seated the Colt in the holster, scrubbed the oil from his hands, and was ready. Now he could hear some of the miners waking and stirring in their rooms.
He rose and blew out the lamp. As he started out he remembered the spare key to the cell door. He took it with him, on its iron ring, to leave at the jail.
Outside it was lighter, harsher gray now, and down Main Street he could see lights burning among the miners’ shacks beyond Grant Street. As he walked toward the jail more of them were lit. The dust of the street was cleanly white, and the slight breeze from the northeast was fresh in his nostrils and no longer cold. The gray above the Bucksaws showed a greenish cast now, a yellow green that faded up and out to darken and merge with the gray world, but higher and brighter almost as he watched, so that he began to walk more rapidly. He turned into the jail, where first he hung the key ring on the peg, and then sat down at the table and placed his hat carefully before him to wait these last few moments. He tried to think only of what he might have left undone.
He glanced toward the cell as the judge groaned and moved, made wet smacking sounds with his lips, groaned, and snored again; he could not see him in the darkness there.
Turning again he watched the whitening dust in the street, and leaned on the scarred table top from which the justice of Warlock was dispensed, and waited, and wished only that there were some way he could see Warlock’s future before him, and wished, with a sudden, terrible pang, that he could hear how they would speak of him.
But he felt, besides a flat and unfocused anxiety that came over him intermittently like a fever, a kind of peace, a certain freedom. He realized that there was no need for self-examination now, no need to question his decisions, no need to reflect upon his guilt, his inadequacy, nor upon himself at all. There were no decisions to be made any more, for there was only responsibility, and it was a freedom of tremendous scope. And he looked once more at the list of the names of the deputies of Warlock upon the whitewashed wall, at his own name scratched last there, but not last, and felt a pride so huge that his eyes filled, and he knew, too, that the pride was worth it all.
A slow tread of bootheels came along the boardwalk, and Pike Skinner turned in the door. There were heavy smudges beneath his eyes, so that they looked like a raccoon’s eyes; the flesh of his face was stretched tight over the bone, and two day’s growth of beard made his face look dirty. He wore a sheepskin-lined jacket.
“Pike,” he said, and Pike nodded to him, and looked in the cell.
“Chicken old son of a bitch,” Pike said, with infinite contempt. Then he glanced at the names on the wall, and nodded again as Gannon slid the table drawer open.
He took out the other deputy’s star and handed it to Pike, who tossed it up and caught it once, not speaking. He indicated the key ring on its peg. “I brought the other key along. The judge’s got one in there with him.”
Pike nodded. He tossed the star again; this time he dropped it, and his face reddened as he bent to pick it up.
“Careful of it,” Gannon said.
“Shit!” Pike said, and in the word was a grief for which he was grateful. Pike turned away. “There’s people out,” he said. “Funny how they hear of a thing.”
He looked past the other and saw the first light upon the street. “It’s close to time, I guess,” he said.
“I guess,” Pike said.
Peter came in with Tim French. There was a grunting and scraping within the cell; the judge’s hands appeared on the bars, then his face between them, heavy with sleep and liquor. The hot, red-veined eyes stared at him unseeing as he put on his hat and nodded, and nodded to Tim and Peter. Peter glanced down at Pike’s hand holding the other star.
“Chilly out,” Tim said.
He stepped past them, and outside. Down the boardwalk a way Chick Hasty stood, and with him were Wheeler, old Owen Parsons, and Mosbie, with his right arm in a muslin sling and a jacket thrown over his shoulders. There were men along the boardwalks farther down, too, and he saw the miners collecting at the corner of Grant Street, where the wagons from the Medusa and the other mines would pick them up. The first sliver of the sun showed over the Bucksaws, incredibly bright gold and the peak beneath it flaming.
Chick Hasty looked down at him and nodded. Mosbie leaned back and nodded to him past Hasty, sick-eyed. He could hear the increasing bustle of Warlock awakening. Already, with the half-sun showing, the air was warmer. It would be another hot day. He moved farther out upon the boardwalk to lean against the railing and watch the great gold sun slowly climb from its defilade behind the mountains. All at once it was free, and round, and he walked on down the boardwalk past the men leaning against the railing there, and out into the dust of Main Street.
II
Blaisedell came out of the hotel, and immediately the men began moving back off the boardwalks, into doorways and the ruins of the Glass Slipper and the Lucky Dollar. Blaisedell walked slowly out into the street, and then Blaisedell was facing him, a block away, like some mirror-image of himself seen distant and small, but all in black, and Blaisedell began to walk at the same instant that he did. He could see the slant of Blaisedell’s shell belt through the opening of his unbuttoned coat, and the gold-handled Colt thrust into his belt there. Blaisedell walked with a slow, long-legged stride, while his own star boots felt heavy in the dust. The boots hurt his feet and his wrist brushed past the butt of his Colt with almost an electric shock. He watched the dust spurting from beneath Blaisedell’s boots.
He could see the angry-looking stripes on Blaisedell’s face. He felt Blaisedell’s eyes, not so much a force now as a kind of meaningless message in a buzzing like that of a depressed telegrapher’s key. The sun was very bright in his face, and the figure approaching him began to dance and separate into a number of black-suited advancing figures, and then congeal again into one huge figure that cast a long, oblique shadow.
Then he saw Kate; she stood against the rail before the Glass Slipper, motionless, as though she had been there a long time. She too was dressed all in mourning black, heavily bustled in a black skirt of many folds, a black sacque with lines of fur down the front, her black hat with the cherries on it, black mesh mitts on her hands that gripped the rail. A veil hid her face. He saw her raise her hands to her breast, and he saw Blaisedell glance toward her, and make a curt motion as though he were shaking his head.
Straight down, straight up, Blaisedell had told him; it burst in his mind so there was room for nothing else. He walked steadily on, trying not to limp in his tight boots, and his eyes fixed themselves on Blaisedell’s right hand swinging at his side. He felt the muscles in his own arm tighten and strain at every step. He could feel Blaisedell’s eyes upon him and now he felt their thrust and still the confused buzzing inside his mind. But he watched Blaisedell’s hand; it would be soon. Now, now, now, he thought, at every jolting step; now, now. He felt himself being crushed beneath a black and corrosive despair. Now, he thought; now, now—
It was as though there had been no movement at all. One instant Blaisedell’s hand had been swinging at his side, the next it contained the Colt that had been thrust inside his belt. His own hand slammed down – straight down, straight up – but already he was staring into the black hole of Blaisedell’s gun muzzle and saw Blaisedell’s mouth shaped into a crooked contemptuous half-smile. He steeled himself against the bullet, halting with his feet braced apart and his body tipping forward as though he could brace himself against the shock.
But the shock, the explosion, the tearing pain, did not come. As he brought his own Colt up level, he hesitated, his finger firm against the trigger, and saw Blaisedell’s hand turn with a twisting motion. The gold handle gleamed suddenly as the six-shooter was flung forward and down to disappear in the street with a puff of dust.
Blaisedell’s hand moved swiftly again, and the mate of the first Colt appeared. Again his finger tensed against the trigger and again he held it back as Blaisedell flung the other down. The slight contemptuous smile still twisted Blaisedell’s lips in his battered face. Blaisedell’s arms hung at his sides now, and slowly, uncertainly, he let his own hand drop. His eyes caught another splash of dust, in the street below the railing where Kate stood, her right hand extended and open and her face invisible behind the veil. Blaisedell stood staring at him with his swollen eyes looking shut.
The realization burst in him that all he had to do now was walk the remaining thirty feet and arrest Blaisedell. But he did not move. He would not do it, he thought, in sudden rebellion, as though it were his own thought; but now he was feeling intensely the thrust of all the other eyes that watched this, and it was a force much stronger than that of his own gratitude, his own pity, and he knew all he served that was embodied in the vast weight pinned to his vest, and knew, as he made a slight, not quite peremptory motion with his head, that he spoke not for himself nor even a strict and disinterested code, but for all of them.
Blaisedell started forward again, no longer coming toward him but walking along the track of his shadow toward Goodpasture’s corner. He walked with the same, slow, long-legged, stiff-backed stride, not even glancing at Gannon, as he passed him, and turned into Southend and disappeared down toward the Acme Corral.
As Gannon turned to face the corner, he saw, past his shoulder, that the sun seemed not to have moved since he had come out into the street. But now he heard the sounds of hoofs and wagon wheels, and saw the wagons turning into Main Street. He watched the miners climbing into them, and the mules stamping and jerking their heads. More wagons appeared; the Medusa miners were going back to work. Miners appeared all along the boardwalks now, glancing back over their shoulders at him and at the corner of Southend as they moved toward the wagons. They made very little noise as they embarked.
Miss Jessie appeared among them, hurrying along the boardwalk with a dark rebozothrown over her shoulders and her brown hair tumbling around her head with her steps. She stopped with one hand braced against one of the arcade posts, and stared at Kate, and then, blankly, at him.
He heard the pad of hoofs. Blaisedell came out of Southend Street on a black horse with a white face, white stockings; the horse pranced and twisted his sleek neck, but Blaisedell’s pale, stone profile did not turn. The black swung around the corner, and, hindquarters dancing sideways, white stockings brilliant in the sun, trotted away down Main Street toward the rim.
“Clay!” he heard Miss Jessie call. Blaisedell did not turn, who must have heard. Gannon heard the running tap of heels upon the planks. She stopped and leaned against another post before Goodpasture’s store, and then ran out into the street, while the black danced on away. He saw Pike Skinner and Peter Bacon watching from the jail doorway, and more men were crowding out along the boardwalks now, and some into the street.
Miss Jessie ran down Main Street in the dust, holding her skirts up; she would run swiftly for a time, then decrease her pace to a walk, then run again. “Clay!” she cried.
Gannon began to move forward with the others, as Miss Jessie ran on. The black horse dropped down over the edge of the rim, Blaisedell’s head and shoulders visible for an instant and his ruined face turning back to glance once toward the town; then abruptly he was gone. “ Clay!” Miss Jessie screamed, with her voice trailing thinly behind her as she ran. The doctor was hurrying after her.
Gannon walked with the others down Main Street toward the rim, where the doctor had caught up with Miss Jessie. The doctor had an arm around her and was leading her back, her face dusty and white with huge vacantly staring eyes, her mouth open and her breast heaving. He saw the wetness at the corners of her mouth as he passed her and the doctor, and her eyes glared for a moment at him, vacant no longer, but filled with tears and hate. He moved on, and heard the doctor whispering to her as he led her back through the groups of men approaching the rim.
III
From the rim the great, dun sweep of the valley was laid out before them. There were wild flowers on the slopes from the recent rain. The long dead spears of ocotillo were covered with a thin mist of leaves, and from their ends red flaming torches waved and bowed in the breeze. Someone extended an arm to point out Blaisedell, where he guided the black horse among the huge tumbled boulders of the malpais. He was hidden from time to time among the boulders and each time he reappeared it was a smaller figure on a smaller horse, trailing tan clouds of dust that lingered in the air behind him. They watched in silence as he rode on down the stage road toward San Pablo and the Dinosaurs, until they could not be sure they saw him still at all, he was so distant. Yet now and then the tiny black figure on the black horse would stand out clearly against the golden, flower-speckled earth, until, at last, a dust devil rose in a gust of wind. Rising high and leaning across his path, it seemed to envelop him, and, when it had passed and blown itself apart, Blaisedell too was finally lost to sight.
