The Six-Gun Tarot (15 page)

“Yessir,” Jim said, smiling.

“He loves it when people call him sir,” Mutt said. “He don’t hear it much.”

“Take him over to Widow Proctor’s before I fire you,” Highfather said. “I done used up my charity for the day.”

“Yes sir,” Mutt said, grinning, as he led Jim out the door.

The widow had put Jim up in a room down the hall from Mutt. His first night after reaching Golgotha, he ate and drank until he thought he would bust. The other boarders at the dinner table laughed and commented that he had eaten his weight and then some. The widow, on her way out with a basket of food, chided them to leave him be.

That night Jim had his best night’s sleep since leaving home. He woke the following morning, arriving at the jail just after six. His eyes fixed on the empty space where his wanted poster had been. He wondered how many people had seen it. How many people in just this small town? Across Nevada? It was rattlesnake crazy to be hanging around at a jail when you were on the run for murder.

A hand slapped him on the shoulder. Jim spun, eyes wide.

“Glad to see industry in today’s youth,” Highfather said. He fiddled with the ring of keys in his hand, picked a large one and unlocked the iron door to the jail. “Beating your boss here is a good way to start your first day. You grow up on a farm?”

Jim froze for a second. He figured there was no harm. Lots of people grew up on farms. “Uh, yessir.”

Highfather opened up the inside shutters on the barred windows. He paused and looked at Jim, then went back to check on Earl.

Later in the morning Mutt showed up. He tossed Jim a piece of horehound candy and a wink. “I visited Auggie; he’s fine, looked a little tired, but that’s to be expected.”

Jim swept and cleaned while Highfather and Mutt talked quietly at the desk. All the joking was gone and both men seemed to be mulling over something neither cared for. Jim noticed that the two men treated each other pretty square, like equals. Jim had never heard of anyone treating an Injun like a white man.

Jim fetched them lunch from the Widow Proctor’s around eleven and ate with the two men. Jim ended up telling Highfather about his pa being in the Union army. Turned out Highfather was a Rebel. Highfather danced around any specific details of what he did in the war, but he ended up telling Jim some pretty funny stories. Jim shared a few of the ones his pa had told him that were pretty funny too.

Mutt headed out to go see someone named Wynn up on the mountain. The rest of the day went pretty slow; Jim whittled when there was nothing to do. Highfather made rounds, saying he’d be back before four.

“Clean up in back by the cells,” he said as he buckled on his gun belt and grabbed his vest. “But don’t get too close to old Earl. He’s been sleeping it off all day, but don’t take no chances—stay clear.”

“Yessir,” Jim said as the iron door clanged shut.

It was cooler back in the cell block. There were three small cells, one with a barred and shuttered window. It was empty, its door open and the shutters thrown wide to let the afternoon sun in. The light stretched in a bright, narrow beam across the floor, stretching to the back wall where wooden pegs held blankets, toilet buckets and a large ring of keys to the cells.

The cell on the right had been occupied this morning by a pair of rowdy drunks Highfather had collared last night, making trouble at the Paradise Falls. He had let them go before lunch with a fine and warning. Now only the left cell, hidden away from the light, was occupied by Earl Gibson.

Jim began to sweep near the right cell. The straw bristles shooshed against the stone floor. Dust motes drifted in the sunbeams, like stars floating through the ether.

“Jim,” a dry, cracked voice whispered from the darkened cell. “Jim-boy, J-iiiiii-mmmmm.”

Jim froze for a second. His hands gripped the broom handle tighter. The voice didn’t sound like the old man Mutt had thrown in the cell yesterday. It was like a night wind on the desert, pushing sand along in ripples—low, almost hissing. Jim got ahold of himself and went back to sweeping.

“Jim … Negrey, is it?” the voice in the dark said.

Jim dropped the broom. He slowly stepped toward the far cell. “How do you know that? How do you know my name?”

“The voices in the rocks, boy,” the voice said. “The silver voices, they saw you coming across the desert. Jim, Jimmy, Jim … Neg-reeeeeeeee.”

He passed through the sunlight and then fell into shadow. The old man’s shape was on the floor of the cell, crouched in the southeast corner. It was only a lump of darkness as Jim’s eyes tried to adjust.

“What voices? How could they know I was coming when I didn’t even know that?”

“There are other worlds, Jim-mieeee. They could smell your approach, see the lines of fate and power, abringin’ you here, boy. They could see … the
eye,
Jim.”

Jim’s hand fell into his pant pocket; he clutched the handkerchief that held his father’s eye. He felt pulsating heat, through the cloth.

“The worms can see it, Jimmy. They can smell it in the silver darkness. The old Chinamen sense it too, calling to them, as old as the world. Your friend Mutt-woof, woof! Oh, Mutt can smell it too, but he don’t know what it is. The trick is on the Trickster, heh.”

Jim was at the bars now. Earl was crouched, like an animal ready to pounce. His eyes were wide and dark. Drool dangled from the corners of his mouth.

“I don’t understand, sir,” Jim said, resting his hands on the cold iron bars. His breath danced before his face. It was cold here, not cooler, not shady, but like up-before-dawn-in-February-back-home cold. Unnatural. “My pa’s eye—”

“Is very special, Jim, very powerful,” Earl said, finally focusing on the boy. “Quite a prize. He spoke of it often—called it ‘the Eye of the Wurm’—the Devil’s eye, boy!”

“Who, who did?”

Earl was on him faster than Jim could possibly react. The old man grabbed his wrists, pinning him to the bars. Earl’s breath was foul, like stale vomit, and Jim could now see quite clearly that his eyes were rimmed with yellow.

“The one who warned me, Jim. The one who knows the truth about Heaven and Hell, God and the false god. The one that done opened my soul to the silver song. Praise be to the silver song!”

Jim struggled to pull away, but Earl’s grip was strengthened by madness.

“I was wrong to try to warn all of you,” Earl said, nodding. “He was right; the preacher was right. Judgment has come! She will come for all of us, hallelujah!”

He squeezed Jim’s wrists, hard. The boy lifted his foot and braced it against the cell door. He pushed with all his might and felt the old madman’s grip give way. He fell back hard onto the jail floor.

“I’m so sorry, young man,” Earl said, his voice cracking. “I didn’t catch your name, but I’m so sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone, anyone! But they got in my ears with all their singing and they are coming for me. They’re coming for all of us. You’ve got to warn Jon, b’fore’n she gets here.”

Jim felt the fear clench his belly. He was dizzy with it. He scrambled up to his feet and grabbed the broom. As he backed out of the cell block, he heard the old man he remembered begin to sob.

“There’s so few crumbs of me left,” he whispered, “and so many worms.…”

Jim kept his peace about what Earl had said. Everyone at the dinner table that evening noticed how little he ate.

“What happened boy?” Bill Caruthers, that cowpuncher, said. “You bust your breadbasket after all that grub yesterday?” Everyone laughed. Everyone except Jim and the Widow Proctor.

“That’s enough out of you, Bill. Jim, are you feeling poorly?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jim muttered. “May I be excused? I just want to go to bed.”

“Yes, of course. Good night, Jim,”

“Hope you feel better, pard’ner,” Bill said, grabbing another roll. The others also wished Jim good night.

Lying in bed, he held the jade eye. He let the bright moonlight from the window caress it. As always, it seemed to drink in light and then give off its own faint greenish glow in return. It was probably a trick of the jade and the moonlight.

Or maybe not. He had tried to explain away what happened in the graveyard outside of Albright. That he was sick and angry and scared, that he missed his pa and that somehow his mind had filled in all the jagged pieces. But his gut said no. He wasn’t crazy.

The eye shined bright as he held it up to the moon. No. He wasn’t crazy, like old Earl in the jail. You had to believe in something, Pa always said, else you end up believing in everything. Jim believed his memories and his gut, and he believed in the eye too.

It was a hard year after Pa left. It was quite the gossip of Preston County for an age. Ma weathered it like the lady she was. She never spoke cross of Pa to the children, and any hint of such kind of talk out of either Jim or Lottie was rewarded with a sharp slap to the hand.

“Don’t make no difference,” Ma said. “He’s your father and you will speak of him with a respectful tongue in your head.”

Jim was mad at Pa, but the missing him won out in the end. He got in a dustup his last day at the county school, ’cause Elmer Biddle called Pa a no-account, crazy-as-a-varmint whoremonger.

Jim dropped his slate and books on the spot and dived into Elmer like a wildcat. He landed a good, solid sockdolager square on Elmer’s nose. Blood squirted out and he was laid out colder than a wagon tire. Jim caught it bad from everyone for breaking Elmer’s nose. Ma whipped Jim bad and the schoolmaster said Jim was expelled. It didn’t matter, though. He already had learned to read and write okay, and he could cipher a little too. Besides, he couldn’t have stayed in school anyway. Ma needed him.

Jim had picked up enough knowledge from helping Pa to keep doing many of the chores and jobs he had been doing for folk around the county. Lot of folk gave him work on account of feeling so bad for his family. Jim followed Ma’s lead and kept his head high and said “thank you kindly.”

Ma picked up whatever work she could find to make ends meet. She mended and washed clothes and cooked meals down at the Cheat River Saloon.

Jim got work there too. He fixed up the furniture, repaired the doors and even hung new shingles on the roof. Anything to make an honest buck for the family.

In the first winter after Pa was gone, Lottie got sick, real sick. Doc called it Miasma, said Lottie had breathed in something evil and it was what was making her so hot to the touch, and coughing all the time, day and night.

Jim remembered waking up in the loft and looking down to see Ma cradling Lottie. His little sister was like a wax doll, pale and limp. She coughed, but even that was weak, almost a rasp. Ma was crying, sobbing. She held Pa’s old nightshirt in her hands, wrapping it around Lottie. She wiped her eyes on it.

“Oh, Billy, I can’t do this alone; I can’t do this alone.…”

Jim remembered Ma and Pa talking a few times, short and sad, about his younger brother, Jessie. Jessie had died when Jim was five. Jim didn’t remember him at all; he only knew the sad look in Ma and Pa’s faces when they mentioned Jessie.

Jim prayed all night. Prayed for Lottie to live, prayed for Pa to walk through the door with the medicine they couldn’t afford in his hand. Jim prayed and he tried to remember Jessie.

The Cheat River was the last place anyone could recall seeing Pa. He had been playing cards and drinking with some local fellas. Everyone said he walked out the door a little after eleven and was never seen again.

Jim asked Charlie Upton—one of the people Pa had been playing with—if he said anything about where he was going. Jim never even saw the punch to his gut. It lifted him off the ground and knocked all the breath out of him. The next thing he remembered was being facedown on the ground, Charlie’s steel vice of a grip on the back of his neck, holding his face in the dirt. Charlie’s mouth was close to Jim’s red, ringing ears.

“What the hell is there to know, boy? Your old man spent the whole night talking dirt about your mother, then said he was headed for Charleston to find himself a whore. You keep a mind about you to forget that worthless one-eyed sumabitch, and stay the hell out of my way too, y’hear.”

It was not out of character for Charlie Upton to be a bastard. Charlie’s family owned land, lots of it. They had money and the talk was Charlie had made more during the war doing some things that weren’t too pretty. No one said any of that to Charlie’s face. You talked a certain way to an Upton in Preston County, or else you got a load of trouble heaped on you. Charlie was as mean as a snake. He’d just as soon whup you as say “how do you do.”

So Jim was none too happy when, after a year and a day, Charlie Upton came a’courting Ma.

He did it real Fancy Dan, especially for Charlie. First it was a carriage ride home after church for Ma and the children. Then it was bringing out firewood and provisions and a whole bunch of other things that the family needed real bad but Ma and Jim just couldn’t make enough to provide. But Jim knew—he knew what Charlie Upton was and he never let this guard down; not that Charlie cared.

It took a while to start working on Ma, not as long as Jim had expected, but eventually she started to enjoy the attention. It was nice to be treated like a woman, to not just toil against the relentless cruelties of life alone, to have someone by your side who wanted to help you but, more important, wanted
you
. It was understandable and the entire town was willing accomplices to the seduction. Billy Negrey was a villain—a drunk and a philanderer, who was off somewhere, whooping it up, while his poor wife and son struggled to make ends meet. Eldon Coyle told everyone he was pretty sure he had seen old one-eyed Bill over in Wheeling, with a bottle of rye in one hand and a whore in the other.

Jim refused to believe it and he took Ma’s softening to Charlie’s advances as a betrayal, most base. However, secretly, Jim knew how much help Upton was giving them and how much better their lives were with his aid. As ashamed and as sick as Jim was of himself for it, he, too, was relieved the family received it.

A year later, the wedding was announced at Sunday service. Everyone applauded politely, smiled and said their congratulations to the couple. Most folks meant it and those who really knew Charlie Upton knew they had damn well better make nice, or else.