Then tally em up.
With her following, Gates bought a new Stetson hat, a scarf, a denim shirt with silver star snaps, three pairs of corduroy pants, long johns, two pairs of socks, a telescope and a bugle and several coiled ropes and a horsehair whip and the most costly snakebite kit on the shelf and two machetes and a compass and a Bowie knife. He bought a sleeping bag and saddle and bridle and blanket and knapsack and five pounds of salt, a bag of jerked beef, sugar, coffee, flour, cans of sardines and oysters, crackers, apples, hard candy, cigars and lard.
He bought a root beer soda and, sucking on his straw, requested a matching pair of Colt revolvers with hair-triggers if she had them and a twelve gauge shotgun with a pump action, and several boxes of shells, sixes or lower. No slugs, please.
We out of guns, she said. Bullets too. McKissick bought em all.
Ever one?
Well. I kept Abner’s birdshooter here. She drew the twenty gauge single from behind her counter.
How much?
What ’ll the judge offer?
One hundred dollars.
Sold to the judge.
In the livery stable Gates bought a silver gelding fourteen hands high without even bartering or checking its legs or eyes and a pack mule which he instructed the liveryman’s widow to lead to the store and load with his parcels, charged, including any special fees or taxes, to the judge.
You want these animals fed? the woman sobbed. She wore a sling around her arm and had a number of broken ribs. She also had two black eyes, a smashed nose and busted lips. Her dress was still torn and soiled with a hoofprint on her back. Either she was leaving it on as protest or it was her only one.
On the judge, Gates said. Was it you tried to stop Mister Smonk?
It was.
Look where it got ye.
Least I ain’t the fools going after him now.
Gates had ridden less than a mile when the horse, which was blind, stepped in a hole and projected him in his new outfit into the dust. When he rose he saw the animal had broken its leg. He raised the twenty gauge to his shoulder but it clicked. He checked was it loaded, it was, and tried again. Click.
He was using his pipe wrench to finish the horse, which was taking quite a while, when a gun fired.
Gates leapt over the animal as it convulsed one last time. He lay panting on the turf, his hands and shirt sleeves bloodied.
It was McKissick, his revolver smoking. He rode up behind Gates and reined in his mount and looked down. Who the hell are you out in these suspicious times?
The other half ye mob. Portis. Who’d ye think?
Who?
Portis Gates. The blacksmith?
Oh. McKissick put the pistol away and fanned his face with his hat. I ain’t never seen ye cleaned up’s all. Didn’t know you was so old. What the hell was you doing to that poor horse?
Putting it out of its misery. It got its leg broke and my shooter’s gone south.
Here. McKissick tossed him a thirty-thirty.
Where we going?
The bailiff nodded east. Smonk’s house first. Few more miles yonder-ways. He extended down a hand. We can ride double to save time.
And double they rode, east through fields of ruined cane, the blacksmith remarking how happy he was he hadn’t put his whole lot in sugar, considering the spate of weather they’d had. Wasn’t it something? How many weeks? Could McKissick remember the last drop of rain? Did McKissick think they could stop for some licker?
McKissick did not.
An odor had caught the wind and blew in their faces. What the hell is that? the blacksmith wanted to know and soon had his answer as they cupped their hands over their noses and McKissick tried to calm the horse, gazing down at a charred mess of burnt animal flesh beside the road, some dark satanic work of art, faces blended to other faces and eyes like strings of wax. Gates pointed out a few dog parts, a wildcat’s padded foot, a coon’s tailbone and a fox’s skull. His partner spurred the antsy horse along. The blacksmith said he reckoned the ray bees plague that had haunted Old Texas these last years was spreading all over.
McKissick said nothing.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tate pronounced the judge guilty despite his citing precedents and quoting the law in English and Latin and calling upon various prophets and heroes of the Old Testament as well as Homer, Sophocles, George Washington, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Buffalo Bill Cody who was a close personal friend. He reminded Mrs. Tate that she was a female, not a judge, as she bade the widows bind his hands. They scissored off his outer clothes and took his shoes and shoved him in undergarments wrung with sweat off the porch and past the gunwagon down the narrow alley to where his knees gave way as he beheld the town’s rickety gallows.
Ye can’t hang me! he cried. Ye can’t!
You’re right, said Mrs. Tate behind him.
At her command four widows seized his ankles and dragged him through the dust and upended his legs and two widows above from the gallows floor lowered a noose and hauled him into the air with a pulley through the trapdoor until he was hanging upside down. A dozen or so ladies began to pelt him with rocks and hit him with sticks of firewood like a piñata while two others over at the store backed a team of oxen toward the machine gun.
The judge swore and threatened and cajoled and shat hot mud down his back and stammered and tried to bribe them. His sour undershirt fell over his face as rocks bounced off him. At the creak of the gunwagon he cried, What’s that noise I hear? Is it the sound of my own demise? Two ladies unhitched the oxen and led them to safety while several others mounted the buckboard and puzzled over the operation of the giant gun, handing its steam hose one to another with no idea of its function. Mrs. Tate was the one who discerned that the lock fit in the side slot. She stood on a peach box and used both hands to latch back the bolt and two fingers to squeeze the trigger which was easier than she’d thought.
The instant thunder brought screams from the ladies but removed the judge’s right arm at the elbow and splintered one of the gallows-posts. The judge began to shriek and wriggle as the dirt stained beneath him and the widows nodded to one another and drew broom straws to establish a fair order and took turns at the trigger disintegrating the judge as a haze of steam rose from the water jacket and they fanned it with their hands and the gun hammered like a locomotive boring through the last tunnel to hell. The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming mass of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all.
6 THE ORPHANAGE
IN THE MEANTIME, THE CROW HUNTER’S HORSE SHE’D TAKEN HAD bucked Evavangeline and fallen itself and then risen in a spray of gravel and legs and with dirt on its rump fled wobbling and whinnying like a sissy-horse, taking all those saddle-bagged guns with it.
She rose and dusted her pants and tied a bandanna around her head and walked several miles, pausing in a field to snap a section of sugarcane from a stalk. She shucked it but it was dry as kindling, like chewing sawdust. She walked on as the day’s colors drained, coming upon a modest homestead, a mud cabin with a chimney composed of flat white stones and off to the side a rickety stick shelter with no pretensions of being a shed. In the pen alongside stood the same sissy-horse that had thrown her. She looked at it for a long time. It had that certain aloofness horses have. But beside it was a pony she noticed, black with a white star on its forehead.
Hey, she said to it.
Behind her there was a pump and a watering trough. An arbor with clusters of grapes which she stuffed in her mouth. All around was flat land here, with the woods miles behind her and sugarcane everywhere. The horizon east to west had grown murky with heat and overhead was the whitest sky she had ever seen. It was like the sun had exploded. The light running out.