Then he was running back through the street, to the store, tromping up the steps, pounding on the glass.
Balloons, he told the lady, ye got any more sheep-guts?
Meanwhile, Gates the blacksmith had slipped off his apron and leather gloves and donned his hat and was walking toward the store when four women in black dresses and veils surrounded him with rifles. He raised his hands in surrender and they shoved him along at gunpoint to Mrs. Tate, widow of the justice of the peace and owner of most of the land around Old Texas and owner of the bank and the apothecary’s. And the hotel, recently destroyed.
They found her in her dark house at the edge of town, in her parlor with the drapes drawn. She sat beside her dead husband, very upright in an upholstered chair, fanning herself primly with one hand and with the other holding his fingers. He lay on a sideboard, dressed in a brown suit. Using pins, she’d arranged his hair despite his deflated head and placed a towel under his neck for the drainage and spread a plaid cloth over where his face had been. A tiny woman with tiny hands, Mrs. Tate flipped down her veil when they entered.
The widows shoved Gates forward and he snatched off his cap and tried to smooth his wiry hair.
Are you drunk? she asked. Such your habit.
Nome. This all is sobered me up.
Mrs. Tate snapped closed her fan and rose to inspect Gates, circling him, her head level with his biceps, poking at his kidneys with the fan.
Why weren’t you at the trial? she asked from behind him. Account for being alive. When so many better men have passed.
He stammered how he’d voted to lynch Smonk, how he’d planned to attend the trial and celebration after, but the gun-killers had robbed him and knocked him in the head. Did she want to feel the whop? He knelt as she pressed the needles of her fingers on the soft lump at the base of his skull, her touch lingering to a caress as he stammered the tragedy of his own family, dead and tarped, one and all, back yonder in his shop.
What he didn’t mention was that two of the three killers had visited his shed earlier that day, before the trial. Before the massacre. How the smith had not realized that these two strangers with a packhorse full of guns on the day Smonk was going on trial meant something was up was beyond him. He ought to of reported it. It wasn’t like there was a pair of strangers through here every day. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last new face he’d seen—other than Smonk’s. The killers had asked about a whore and he’d pointed them to his house, but instead of paying him the three dollars, they’d knocked him in the head with a rifle butt and took the coins from his pocket and left him for dead and he’d lain half-conscious on the floor in his own head blood for over an hour. It was just like Lurleen and her girls not to come get him after laying with the killers, traipsing off to the trial in their men’s duds. Lurleen would of done anything to see Smonk again, Gates knew—she still was in love with the one-eye. The blacksmith had just awakened on the floor and touched the throbbing lump at the top of his neck when he’d heard the machine gun going off.
I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tate said. Though if those women had known their places they’d be alive yet. You need the church, Portis, you always have. Now more than ever.
Yessum.
Our Scripture is very clear on a woman’s place. And the place of children.
Yessum.
A man’s too, Portis.
Yessum.
She reclaimed her seat in front of him. I believe your story. She plucked a wet cloth from a washbowl and wiped her fingertips of his filth and waved the other widows out of the room and resumed fanning herself.
But when the time comes to pay the fiddler, she continued, we’ve all got to chip in. Ante up, as a sinner like he might say. So I must ask you, Portis, to delay your mourning and commit us two jobs. First, find that judge before he tries to flee. He’s been unaccounted for since we put out the fire. And the more I’ve been considering it, the more I see he had to have been mixed up with Smonk. Else he’d be massacred too. Or at the very least knocked in the head like you or punctured like our new bailiff.
Yessum.
Second thing, she said, is that you must go with Bailiff McKissick. Make sure he kills Smonk. Help him. Come back and swear he’s dead.
Yessum.
And there’s only one way to prove that.
Yessum.
Do you know what that is, Portis?
Nome.
His eye. Bring me his eye.
Yessum. I will.
Good. Mrs. Tate gazed at her husband. She swatted a fly with her fan. She’d killed several already and formed a small pile at the justice’s shoulder and Gates watched as she used her fan to herd the fresh smudge over with the others. Then she resumed fanning. Is it true that Smonk took McKissick’s child? That boy William?
I heard it was.
Do I need to stress how your standing in our village will improve if you bring that little one back safely?
Nome.
You could be an important man in our town, Portis. Now that you’re a widower. With so little competition.
Yessum.
I think you should wash, she said. So we can see what you look like, those of us in need of a man, you now in need of a wife.
Yessum.
In search of the judge, Gates ran building to building, zigzagging through alleys, and had not been looking a quarter-hour when he spotted a pair of legs jutting from the rear window of town hall. Gates recognized the judge’s boots and seized him by the knees and wrestled him hard down into the dirt, papers from his bulging valise spilling into the sugarcane.
God damn, said the judge from the ground. He jabbed out his hand. Help me up and escort me to the gallows where I’ll see ye hanged.
They sent for ye, Gates said, pulling him into a headlock.
God damn, the judge’s muffled voice said. Let me go!
The blacksmith dragged the smaller man over the street as he flailed his arms and made a commotion of dust, still clinging to the valise. At the store across from the burnt-down hotel several women had congregated at the wagon in the alley as if the mounted gun had been scheduled to deliver a sermon or a serenade. When they saw the judge, they seized him from the smith and relieved him of his valise and raised him above their heads like a hero and he seemed to levitate down the street above them, his face the pallor of chalk.
Gates returned to his shack and sat alone at the table for the first time in ages—it was quiet without his wife’s fussing and the stepdaughters bickering at one another about whose turn it was to wash the clothes or who got to go and try to seduce McKissick. He left the table and rumbled in his dead wife’s trunk and found a shard of pierglass, a fingernail of soap, a razor, a nub of brush and a cracked washbasin which he filled with water. He studied the reflection of his face and began to scrub and shave. Twenty minutes later a ruddy white man slightly cross-eyed and with one long eyebrow looked at him from the glass, the water in the basin black as ink and full of gray whiskers.
Not half bad, he said, for a fellow of sixty-some year.
There were no weapons in his shop, but wearing his church shirt under his overalls, he crossed the dirt hefting his iron tongs and assessed them workable. He moved Clena’s legs and picked up a large pipe wrench and tested its screw. Lastly he put a fistful of nails in the bib pockets of his overalls.
I’ll be back, he said to the room. I hope.
He put on his hat and took it off when he entered the store.
We closed, said the owner’s widow. Unless it’s billed to the judge.