The Shotgun Arcana (59 page)

“He can’t do that!” Mutt said. “That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard! You’ve risked your life for that girl; you break your back to make a good life for her out here!”

“He says that if the recent violence here won’t convince me this is no place to raise a child, then nothing will,” Maude said. “Mutt, my father is a wealthy, powerful man. He already has control of my inheritance because I’m a woman, and now he wants to control Constance too.”

“I can’t believe she went along with this without a fight,” Mutt said.

Maude nodded.

“I know. All I can assume is that he is lying to her, or influencing her in some way.”

“Maude, this is kidnapping and I can ride all the way to damn South Carolina and get her back. I’ll talk to Jon and…”

“No,” Maude said. “You won’t. You think the courts there give any more of a damn about what a woman and an Indian think is right or wrong than the courts here do? And I will not steal my own daughter away in the night like some thief. No, Mutt. I’m going home, back to Charleston, and I’m going to get my daughter back and my inheritance back, and I’m going to make this right and make it fair.”

Mutt was silent, holding her hands and looking down at them. Finally he said. “But I just got you back? I thought I lost you once and it damn near killed me. I was going to kill them for taking you, and then I was going to go die.”

Maude squeezed his hand and leaned forward. Their lips touched, as gentle as a breeze on water, then deeper, stronger. His hands to her face, her hair; hers to his shoulders, his back, clinging with need and desire. Finally they pulled away, gasping, eyes damp and blinking.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said, and hurried to the door. “You trusted me before, trust me now. Please.”

“I trust you,” Mutt said. “I always have. Do what you have to do. If you need me, call and I’ll come running. Go fight your mountain lion, Maude.”

She opened the iron door. She started to say something.

“That thing you’re about to tell me,” Mutt said. “Save it till you git home.”

She laughed, pushing back tears, and he summoned his best grin, but inside they were dying, slowly, quietly. They stared at each other in the shadows of the lantern. Emotion and meaning moved between them, unbound by the awkward shape of words. Finally, Maude spoke.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“’Bye, Maude,” Mutt said, his voice a dry small thing in his mouth. The iron door clanged shut and she was gone.

“I love you,” Mutt said to the empty room.

The Hierophant (Reversed)

November gave way to December. The new year, 1871, was only a few weeks away. Auggie was soon well enough to get back to work. Gillian had fretted over him for a time but he seemed to make a full and speedy recovery from the gunshot wound, the scar fading with each passing day. Shultz’s store saw a new boom in business as many folks looked on Auggie as a local hero—the man who stood up to Ray Zeal. Business was as good as it could be, given his limited funds and line of credit, but Auggie had never been happier. He felt like a young man again. He was wrestling the few meager crates of goods he had in the back storeroom when Gillian peaked her head through the door to the storefront.

“Auggie,” Gillian said. “Someone is here to see you.”

Malachi Bick stepped through the door into the storeroom. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, Mr. Shultz. I was wondering if I might have a moment of your time.”

Auggie, red-faced and sweating, took a handkerchief and mopped his face. He shook his head. “No, no, please, Mr. Bick, come. It is fine.”

Gillian looked at Auggie, for some cue that she should chase Bick off, but Auggie smiled and blew her a kiss. She closed the door behind her, leaving the two men alone.

“I’d offer you a chair if there was one,” Auggie said.

“That’s quite all right,” Bick said. “I wanted to come by and see how you were doing. I heard you were up and around again. It seems you are quite fit.”

“It appears Clay is a better doctor than he is a horse wrangler,” Auggie said. Both men chuckled.

“Very similar jobs in many respects,” Bick said. “I wanted to thank you for what you did for me, for the sacrifice you made, when you had no reason to.”

“It was the right thing,” Auggie said, and shrugged. “What else is one to do,
ja
?”

Bick smiled. “What indeed.” He took some folded papers out of his coat pocket and handed them to Auggie. “I think you’ll find everything is in order.”

“Wh-what is this?” Auggie said, unfolding the documents and reading them.

“Your loans to me are paid in full,” Bick said. “You are free and clear, Mr. Shultz.”

Auggie looked at Bick and shook his head. “I … I don’t understand?”

“It’s the right thing,” Bick said. “What else is one to do, yes?”

Auggie smiled and shook Bick’s hand.

“Thank you, Mr. Bick,” he said. “This is … Thank you!”

As Bick took Auggie’s hand, a strange look crossed his dark features, almost a frown.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Bick?” Auggie asked.

Bick seemed to be looking him over.

“You are feeling fine, Mr. Shultz? No aftereffects from your injury?”

“Nein,”
Auggie said, smiling. “I feel better than ever,
ja
?”

“Yes,” Bick said, seeming to chase away his dark demeanor. “Well, good. I need you in good health. I’d like to offer you a job, several actually.”

“Me? Work for you?” Auggie said, confused.

“Yes,” Bick said. “I’ve decided that Golgotha isn’t large enough yet to need two general stores, so I’m offering you the position of partner and manager of the mining company store I opened up on Argent, to be renamed—effective immediately—Shultz’s General Store. I’ll stay a silent partner, of course, in the venture, but you will own fifty-five percent of it and you can run it as you please, with no interference from me.”

Auggie looked at Bick. “But why, Mr. Bick?”

“For the same reason I’m offering you an even more important job,” Bick said, slapping Auggie on the back. “I need someone I can trust to oversee some of my business ventures here in Golgotha. I’d like that to be you, Mr. Shultz. I need someone who can tell me to my face when I’ve strayed from the path. I need a conscience, Mr. Shultz, and I’ll pay you handsomely to be mine.”

Auggie smiled. “That sounds like a full-time job, Mr. Bick.”

The saloon owner laughed.

“Indeed,” he said. “By half, I’d say. What do you say, Mr. Shultz?”

“Let me think on it, Mr. Bick,” Auggie said, picking up his broom to dust the floor. “You’ll have my answer by tomorrow.”

“Very good,” Bick said. “Tomorrow then, and thank you again for what you did for me, Mr. Shultz.”

“My friends call me Auggie,” he said.

“Auggie, then,” Bick said.

Bick was about to open the door to the storefront when Auggie called out.

“Mr. Bick? Why me? Why put so much trust in someone you hardly even know?”

“Because, Auggie, you gave me something back I thought I had lost a long time ago. I’m in your debt. Good day, until tomorrow.”

Bick shut the door behind him and walked to the front door of the store, pausing to tip his Stetson to Gillian. Clay was leaning against the counter and the two had been talking. They stopped as soon as Bick had opened the door. Bick gave them both a stern, almost judgmental look, as if he was looking through them, into them.

“Good day,” Bick said, and exited the store.

Gillian turned back to Clay, speaking in a low, almost conspiratorial tone. “I’m worried, Clayton. Are you sure there are no side effects, no aftereffects?”

Clay shrugged. “You’ve seen him, Gillian, he’s fine. The biorestorative is working. Just make sure you keep giving it to him.”

“I am, I am,” Gillian said. “He thinks I make the worst coffee in the world, but he drinks it and smiles, bless his sweet heart. Clay, did we do the right thing? Is this fair to him?”

“Would you rather visit his tombstone or have him beside you?” Clay asked. “We had to make a decision and make it quickly and we made the correct one, Gillian.”

“It’s just … You are sure there is nothing in that concoction connected to those evil worm-things, Clayton, you’re sure?”

“Why do you keep asking?” he said.

“Because I’ve been having dreams, Clayton. Dreams about floating in that black goo, about those worm-things swimming around me. I can feel them brush against me, I feel them wrap around my legs and pull me under.”

“That’s just anxiety,” Clay said. “You’re worried about Auggie. He hasn’t shown a single side effect, in fact…”

“Clayton,” Gillian said, “I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant and I don’t know if that happened before Auggie’s … death, or afterward.”

*   *   *

Little Roland Kinloch, age ten, kissed his mommy goodnight and knelt by his bed saying his prayers to Jesus, as he did every night, in his nice safe home on Rose Hill. Once he was tucked snug in his bed and mommy closed the door, Roland closed his eyes and said his real prayers. The ones the cold lady who had killed the schoolmaster had taught him, the ones to Raziel, the God of Murder and Torture and Pain. Roland rubbed the old yellow tooth between his fingers and it said the prayers with him, in his mind, like a secret song. He had taken it from the cold lady’s body in the commotion after the rescue at the schoolhouse. Roland’s was number eighteen.

*   *   *

Jim rode out to visit Sweet Molly and her sisters on a cold day in late December, when the sky was as gray as a Confederate’s coat. He tethered Promise to the simple wooden fence that marked the edge of Boot Hill, the paupers’ graveyard.

He walked out to her grave, which had only a simple little wooden cross, like most of the others. He knew it was Molly’s grave because Jim had been the only one present when they put her in the hole. He had wished he knew some fancy preacher words to say. He didn’t then, and he didn’t now. It was cold now, almost all the time. Winter had found them in Golgotha. Molly’s grave was bare dirt, cold, shifting in the frigid wind.

It all seemed so unfair to him. A sweet smile, a gentle disposition, and for that her last moments of life were filled with terror and pain most human beings could never even comprehend. It made no sense.

Jim’s hand found the bag at his throat. He pulled the jade eye out as he sat cross-legged at the foot of Molly’s grave. The sky darkened and the wind picked up. Jim relaxed, breathed, focused. He visualized Molly standing by her grave; her face was drawn, wet with eternal tears. Jim opened a door, pushed it open, and kicked it wide, like he was serving a warrant.

What he visualized on the other side of that door was Lottie, his little sister, running across a field of West Virginia wildflowers in a cold, bright spring. His mother singing on the porch on a June night ablaze with fireflies. His dad’s hands, strong and warm and callused, ruffling his hair, picking him up to an endless blue sky, strong enough to hold him aloft forever.

“You go on now, Molly,” Jim said quietly, the eye cold in his palm. “Go on through. Go on home now.”

For a moment the wind across the graveyard of the faceless, the forgotten, was warm and sweet with the scent of spring. Jim tried to hold the memory of home as tight and long as he could. He visualized Molly taking Lottie’s tiny hand, headed for home, for Ma’s cooking and Pa’s booming laugh.

The door closed, and winter returned with a frigid bluster. Jim sat for a spell at the foot of the grave. In time he stood and headed back to Promise, back to Golgotha.

*   *   *

The Bick ancestral home was a large but quaint farmhouse at the top of Methuselah Hill. It was a well-built house, but it was quite simple in comparison to the fine homes that stood at the pinnacle of Rose Hill.

Malachi Bick rode his black Arabian, Noche—of the same bloodline as his long departed Pecado—up the hill and to the house he had called home for almost ninety years. During almost all of that time, he had lived here alone.

He tethered Noche to the hitching post by the front door and then walked about to the back of the house. There he found Emily sitting in her sturdy high-backed wooden wheelchair, her easel set up. She was painting the distant rise of mountains, Argent at the immediate right on the easel, but most of the canvas was taken up by the western sky and the slowly fading sun, huge and orange, sinking behind the mountain, dabbing the sky with colors and hues that humans had no exact names for.

“It reminds me of the Fields of Radiance,” Bick said. “I remember them; remember riding them when I see the sunset.” He looked over to her and pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders. “It’s getting cold; we should get you in soon. Feel like walking?”

“In a moment,” Emily said. “Dr. Turlough came by; he gave me another of his treatments. He said I was very lucky, another inch or so and I wouldn’t have the option to walk ever again.

“Mr. Turlough is quite an accomplished … physician,” Bick said absently. “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

Emily smiled at him and his dark musings scattered. “You are a worrywart,” she said. “A huge, grumpy worrywart. It’s most unbecoming.”

“Am I? Is it?” Bick said, laughing. “Well, I will endeavor to be less so, then.”

The sky was deepest indigo. Ribbons of dying umber, crimson and gold wavered at the jagged teeth of the horizon. The stars, bright and burning and ancient, unfurled before them from behind a gauze curtain of clouds.

“It looks like heaven,” Emily said, “or what I imagine Heaven must look like.” She looked up at Bick. “Is it?”

The man who was older than the stars above them put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and felt its warmth. Her hand came up and joined with his.

“This,” Bick said, “is better.”

Acknowledgments

These last few years have been the best and worst of times. There are so many people who have encouraged and helped me. This book exists because of their love, support, and presence in my life.

To Bob Flack, a brother and a great friend. To David and Susan Lystlund and Jim and Wendy Gilraine, for being there in my darkest hours and also for being there to celebrate the light. To Eric Branscom, for sage council and steady enduring friendship. To Tim Beason, for being as generous as he is handsome and hip. To master storyteller Mark Geary, for an invaluable book on 1800s firearms and for just being so damned cool. To Katherine Milliner, for steadfast friendship, love, and for always being in my corner. To Charles Hooper and his lovely and wise mother, Bonnie, for good advice, plenty of love and support, and the best soup in Roanoke. To Brandy S. Givens, for near-infinite patience in
finally
getting her acknowledgment.