I beg you –think again – Do not be afraid – Let me husband you as you deserve, have always deserv’d, with that pride and passion and devoted friendship which the God whom you love intend’d for us – No, it is not blasphemy – think it not so – It is a clean thing,a clean thing – A home, an honest life, perhaps the laughter of happy children – how could these blessings, which are oursfor the taking , be anything other than honorable wants? – It isnot too late – We need only find courage – This round world is wider than any of us knows and need not be straitened by our fears – The crushed feelings of childhood, the failed and secret hopes, the hurts of broken love, the failure of our bodies – all of it,all of it , all can be overcome – It was you, Changeling, who show’d me this truth when all my hope was broken.
The ships leave the harbor for Europe every day – I see them from this window –Every day – A kind friend in Washington can arrange the papers – I could sign on as a crewman – No one would notice anything – There would be no impropriety to notice.
Please – my own changeling – give me the slightest prospect, the most minuscule reason to hope – Send me some token that my love might live – But it will anyways live – and shall always.
A.W.
CHAPTER 4
THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE
The mine – The nightwalkers – A cruel crime
The Colt repeating pistol – The beast in the pit
A mile westward of the colony along an ancient Koötenais track was a derelict mining camp, an eerie acre after nightfall. It was phantomed by hulks of deadened machinery, upended black barrows, shovels still stuck in the silt. You had the sense that its grubbers had only taken cover when they noticed your approach – were begrudging you, perhaps, from those coppices beyond the fence-line. The Territory would blister with many such nowheres in the years after the end of the War.
A cheval-de-frise barricade delineated part of the perimeter, but its cut-wire was rusted and in many places broken, and some of its oaken crossbeams had been burned by thieves or natives, the former for better access, the latter to watch them burn. There was little left to steal by the winter of ’65. The property had been foraged to its marrows.
Wind creaked the pulley wheels, cried a way into the forsaken shafts. Mud-birds hooted. A she-wolf lingered with her cubs. The music of the mine was strange and mournful, like a choir of lugubrious ghouls. Toad-croak. Whippoorwills. The coyotes near the dump. The scream of a cougar’s mate-call. Whiskey bottles full of beetles might be found in the riverbank muck. Panning-sieves clogged with sludge and osiers. Walking there at night you felt the futility of human hopes, the weight of your starlit smallness.
The claim had been purchased by a retired Philadelphian ophthalmologist who had shot himself and his wife when it turned out useless. You had to be careful in that place after dark. It abounded with hidden sharpnesses, crushing immensities of slag, old tripwires and brick-ends and chunks of shattered sluice runs, a thousand prospective hurts sunken into the dust, and turrets of hurt above you. A crust the color of gruel settled on the skins of the dumping pools: you could stumble into one of them, mistaking it safe to walk on, and if that were to happen you were twice as good as dead, for the cess beneath the scum was choked with discarded chains, with coils of unraveling fence wire, a nest of waiting traps. Thomas Logan was the name of one schoolboy who drowned there. But this story is not about poor Thomas Logan.
It was in the ruins of a tackle-shack close to the derrick that the Vigilantes conducted their tribunals. Why they bothered was not clear. It was not as though there was the slightest chance of exoneration. The lariat would be knotted while they stripped you and roasted the irons. If you claimed any innocence the assault would be prolonged and the tools that cluttered the floorboards, snail-glued, mushroomed, would be pressed into a gruesome resurrection. Some prisoners X’d admissions (examples may yet be seen in the County Museum, framed in ebony, like Founding Fathers’ wills); most were not able to by the time preliminaries were done. You were hefted or barrowed or flailed outside. You were lugged like a ransack of loot. These dragons of lifeless gantries, those torn-up capstans, were the last sights of earth for many an accused. They hanged you from the cottonwood that stood sentinel near the buckled gateway and crept back to the colony, to lawful life.
That hive and its dead braziers have long been swallowed by the West. The winches, the bunk-rooms, the corduroy road, the skeletons of wigwams, the hummocks of glitterless hardcore, the signboards cautioningINTRUDORS that they would be fired upon first – even the boundary posts onto which those interdicts were nailed: everything of settlement is gone. Only the strangle-tree remains of that time, and some strangely vivid lichens not indigenous to the Territory. And someone comes out regularly to set long-sprung traps for coyotes, though no one knows who, or why he would bother any more.
It was here to Morton’s Claim that Acting Governor O’Keeffe rode with two of his marshals in the dark hours of Christmas morning, through a blizzard of dime-sized hailstones. The riders had on long black oilskins: bandannas against the sleet; their sombreiros were sodden, wilted. They looked like an etching of some Old Testament triumvirate: a verse made flesh by the violence of the weather.
An informant had sent a message to the gubernatorial house, a building so new that its roof was as yet unfinished. It was swathed in canvas sheeting, bolstered up with jackoak struts – it had the look of a shipwreck, or perhaps a harvested Leviathan, with a buttress of rendered ribs. The Committee of Vigilance had adjudicated again and offered no apology for its devotion to the community; but it was not biblical to leave a corpse unburied at Christmas. This was a task for the Government.
We freemen of this Territory uniting ourselves in a party for the Laudable purpose of ending thievery & murder do pledge ourselves upon our Sacred honor each to all others & solemnly swear that we shall reveal no secret, violate no trust & never desert one another or our standard of Justice so help us God, as witness our mark – Men of the O+O.
The body was iced solid as a freak-show waxwork. Frost speckled his nakedness: a caul of silvered gray. The rope was creaking like a sarcophagus door as its consignment swiveled and grinned at its fate. The assault must have been terrible; it was the worst they had seen. Rain dribbled pink from his maimed extremities. Even after death his remains had been desecrated, whether by she-wolf or man was not clear.
A confession of highway robbery and of indecencies against unnamed women had been hammered to the tree on a bloodstained nail. But the Governor found it hard to concentrate on the words, which in any case were running in the rain. He had been drinking that night, alone at the residence, aggressively, with a sense of murderous purpose, raking over matters better left in the ashes, but which are rarely so left by the failed at Christmas. Distilledagave : toxicant; cheaply made. The flames of his hearth had been scrutinized for many minutes, until they had blurred themselves down to a coalescence of fuming reds, as though the coals might divulge to their inebriated observer the secret of what he was doing before them. The clock placked stolidly and adjusted its ratchets. There was a moment of friendless, childless grief, as unctuously intense as the larva in the dregs, and as difficult to swallow, and as hideously irresistible, and there were many other moments all to do with the past. A new year was coming and so little to show. The thoughts of an exile in Advent.
There was the tiniest confusion behind them from a pile of rotting planks, a fricative whickering, like wings beating the air. Assuming it a gallowsbird, they did not turn to investigate. Nor did they hear the mash of hurrying footfalls – the snow, I suppose, must have muffled them. They were thinking, to be candid, about how to cut down the carcass in a way that would not cause it to sag asunder in their clutch, for although it appeared frozen they could not be sure for how long, nor of what it might do when they touched it. Each had seen innumerable dead by that night; each had killed for his country. Death was not a mystery, not in any spiritual sense; it had not been for year
s, not since the carnage at Bull Run, and never would be again. But the body remained mysterious, as the body always does, enigmatic in the way of all untenanted dwellings. Somehow it commanded human feeling. One of your species had lived in it.
The moon was grubby white as the tortured man’s feet. They reminded the Governor of a painting he had seen in his youth: a gory work, Hispanically macabre, on the interment of Christ. The composition was ghastly, had been calculated to shock. The thing was like a butcher’s apron stretched onto a frame. The Savior had been laid on his back on a plinth; your viewpoint was that of a mourner standing at his feet. And you could barely see the torso, only the ruined feet – so aggressively foreshortened that the spike-punctured soles were half a yard in height.
O’Keeffe was nineteen when he was thunderstruck by that image, not long matriculated from school. His college was a Jesuit establishment in Shropshire, England; as an Irish boy he had felt out of place there. Games did not interest him. He preferred poetry, the classics. His letters home to Wexford were watchful, complex. He had promised to be tall but that had not happened. He was the size of a girl and this gnawed at him like a cramp. (‘Paddy O’Napoleon,’ his house-fellows called him, a designation he had strenuously pretended to enjoy.) It was in the Uffizi, he thought. That terrifying depiction. It unnerved him to realize that he carried it after all this time.
The kindlier of his lawmen, John Francis Calhoun, clambered onto an overturned coffer. He had once had a son, and the baby had died, and Calhoun did not like to see disrespect for the dead, thinking it hateful of life. He set to work at the rope, trying to fray it with his bowie. But the rope was hard and the only blade he carried had not been whetted since Martinmas. His comrade, Patrick Vinson, scoffed from the ground. Eyes narrowing like a cat’s when it sees a stranger come in.
‘Christ spare us,’ said Vinson. (Dia idir sinn agus an tOlc). More strength in the bastard in the noose. He was speaking in Gaelic, which he often did to Calhoun. ‘Jail-ic’ Vinson called it, for he had learned what he had of it in an English prison, where its profanities could be floated without jeopardy at the guards. They thought you were declaiming some myth.
Calhoun kept sawing: a raspy defiance. But already he was weary as an anchor.
‘Pox take you,break ,’ he muttered at the rope. He was a man of intense sweetness, though he often tried to hide it: one of those whom swearing does not suit.
Rime-frost was sticking his hands to the rope. His boots were slippery on the strongbox. He had heard from a cousin, a seamstress in Columbus, Ohio, of a scheme to sink a cable across the floor of the Atlantic, where his mother and uncles had been buried. (He’d had moments when he imagined them touching it, feeling it, while sharks snouted by in the murk.) The death-rope reminded him of what such a cable must be like: cold and hard and strong. And it began to be clear to him, as he sawed on it uselessly, and as Vinson ridiculed, and the deadman rotated, with Calhoun trying to restrain him and cut him down at the same time, and not fall from the box, and not lose face, that nothing could be done, thatnothing could be done , that the ride and the cold and the leaving of his girl’s bed, and the hail in the eyes and the sting in the knuckles had all been in vain, that the world was a latrine, and that nothing could ever be done. He could have put a blasted bullet into the corpse at that moment, and its twin into Vinson and its triplet into the Governor; but a price would need to be paid for the making of such a delivery. There would always be a price for your instincts.
And it was while he was imagining what it is to murder your only friends (Vinson’s vociferations, the kick of the gun) that he heard the shouts from the smelt-house. The Governor was beckoning, brandishing his lantern: an arc of fire on the black. Now Vinson was running, the devious little suck. And another shout was heard, and a volley of blasphemies. And the lantern was knocked over, spilling its flame into the snow, and the deadman spun monstrously like a piñata in a nightmare.
A form, a being, was alive in the sludge-pit. Vinson unholstered his Colt repeater. The weapon was new, not long arrived to him from St Louis, raveled in oilcloth like the shinbone of a saint. Lovingly larded with myrrh-like resin, it had cost him a ransom in wages. It was clumsier than he had hoped; he did not like it much. It didn’t fit his gun-hand with the heft he would have liked. But there were times you were glad to have a dependable weapon. And this was one of those times.
So he fetched out his gun as assuredly as if he were a trick-shooter being watched by an exultation ofseñoritas all bonneted on their way to the bullfights. He was going to spin the barrel, utter something terse and violent, but the Governor called him a name. And it was hard in the dark to draw a bead on the beast, which was flailing and squealing like a hogget in a shambles. But he aimed into the plash, at the epicenter of exploding mud, and discharged a shot, then another two for punctuation. I am here, announced the gun. Fear my owner. He’s a man you don’t meet every day.
The girls genuflected in the cistern of his mind. But soon they looked up. Something was happening in the pit.
‘Son-of-a-bitch is a child,’ said Vinson.
‘Dios mío,’ screamed the girls, or the wind.
CHAPTER 5
WE’LL SOON BE FREE
A further entreaty – A remembrance – A threat
NY–STLOUIS. Pony Express to SALTLAKECITY. MATSON-FORESTSTAGECOACHLINE: URGENT
ix 2 65†
Brooklyn
Lucia – my love – my only love –
I implore you – send some answer – Silence at the last? – I offer you my life + receive no reply – Can you disregard me so coldly? – At least tell me no.
I know you receiv’d my letter – I have heard from the man to whom I gave it – On his honor, which I trust, he swore he delivered it to you, on the ninth afternoon of last month – He said you were making a photograph by the river when he found you – I know he was speaking the truth.
Changeling: I owe to you the fact that I am alive – But you also have obligations: they are not all my own – If truly no hope remains to be rescued, you owe it me to say so – I want to read the words, to see which ones you deploy – You know you cannot do it and live true to your conscience, for you know the ardent admissions you have made to me while we were alone, and permitted me to make to you.
Need I write to your alleged husband + apprise him of matters? – Do you think I would not dare, or that others have probably not already? – ‘Your wife and the freak – I saw them in the street.’ –Do you think they would not thrill to say it? – Christ help me – I do not mean it – I should rather die than hurt you – It is only that I cannot bear the ticking away of our chance – We arecut , do you not see it? – The only healing is each other – Every second more is another drop of heart’s blood.
The tickets + papers arranged – Have sold all my books + everything I had of my father + can raise a little more by selling my instruments –
I beg you – But an answer – I shall never trouble you again – Say either yes or no but I will not be disregarded.
A.W.
CHAPTER 6
ONE MORE VALIANT SOJER, LORD, TO HEPP ME BEAR DE CROSS
A drummer-boy discovered – A visit to the undertaker Orson Rawls
The Great Storm and its whiteout – The killing of Christ
The soaked boy had on the flitters of a Confederate uniform. The arms and legs had been sheared so as to fit him, a frayed length of whipcord served as his belt. He was tied into his clothing, inefficiently trussed, like a bundle that has been rifled in a Lost Property office and hastily rewrapped as too worthless to be stolen. His feet were shoeless, wound round with filthy rags. He was shaking like a foal with the staggers.
About his neck was a Celtic cross carved in scrimshaw or ivory, the name ‘J. Mooney’ needled into its back. In one of his pockets was a mud-stained drumstick. Its twin was found in his sleeve. Snow liquefied on his eyelashes, which were long, like a girl’s. The hanged man was not his father, that was all he
could say, and even this little was not actually said: he just shook his head dumbly when the question was put to him, and gaped around at the desolate terrain, as though he had never seen darkness, as though somehow he found it dazzling.
The Governor’s men did not know what to do with J. Mooney. They were not good with boys. They were not good with anyone. While they shuffled calf-deep in the blood-spattered mud, trying to shake an answer from the gulping apparition, he broke from their grip and scurried. Vinson pursued him. Were there torches? Burning tapers? Recalling the event on the night he dies, the Governor will see the refraction of fire on snow.
Into the darkness Vinson ran, his cries growing fainter, until it seemed to the Governor that the night or something in it had swallowed both pursuer and quarry. Everything was silent. Calhoun looked afraid. Three men, even in danger, can think themselves a fellowship, able to present a defense if needs be; but two is merely two. And then, from the distance, they heard Vinson again, yipping like a huntsman on the track of a fox, and Calhoun trudged away to join him in the unseen, and the Governor was alone with his thoughts.
NARRATIVE OF A CRIME, MISDEMEANOR, or FELONY
COMPLETE THIS DOCUMENT HONESTLY
CRIME:Murder.
CIRCUMSTANCE:Before dawn this morning 25th Dec 1865, I, Jas. C. O’Keeffe, Brig. Gen., Acting Govnr, proceeded to Lemuel Morton’s Claim acting upon informations recd. 1 decsd., male, hanged: name Harrington or Henderson?, birthplace & cet. unknown. Drove stage for Salt Lake & Union Line. 40 yrs approxim. Accused of being road agent/molester of women. Was not.
WITNESS/ES:1 boy, vagrant, 11/12yrs? Appears Mute. Disturbed in mind. Absconded from my custody. Whereab. now unknown. Maybe mulatto.
REMARKS & SUSPECT:Vigilante lynching, 17th this year. Repeat request made continually to Secretary, for assistance in establishing law. Ten marshals reqd urgently. More judges & sheriffs. New jailhouse at Edwardstown. Monies for permanent militia. Without such assistance, am effectively helpless. Send men and arms immediately. Urgent.