The Six-Gun Tarot (2 page)

“Is it good, Daddy?” Lottie asked Pa. He was leaning against the fence post, eagerly finishing off his apple.

“M’hm.” He nodded. “Tell your ma, these doings are a powerful sight better than those sheet iron crackers and skillygallee old General Pope used to feed us, darling.”

Jim took a long, cool draw off the water ladle and looked at Pa, sitting there, laughing with Lottie. Jim thought he would never be able to be as tall or proud or heroic as Billy Negrey was to him. The day Pa had returned from the war, when President Lincoln said it was over and all the soldiers could go home, was the happiest day of Jim’s young life. Even though Pa came back thin, and Momma fussed over him to eat more, and even though he had the eye patch and the headaches that came with it, that only made him seem more mysterious, more powerful, to Jim.

Lottie watched her father’s face intently while he finished off the apple, nibbling all around the core

“Was it Gen’ral Pope that took away your eye?” she asked.

Pa laughed. “I reckon in a matter of speaking he did, my girl. Your old daddy didn’t duck fast enough, and he took a bullet right in the eye. Don’t complain, though. Other boys, they got it hundred times worse.”

“Pa, why does Mr. Campbell in town say you got a Chinaman’s eye?” Jim asked, with a sheepish smile.

“Now James Matherson Negrey, you know good and well why.” He looked from one eager face to the other and shook his head. “Don’t you two ever get tired of hearing this story?”

They both shook their heads, and Billy laughed again.

“Okay, okay. When I was serving with General Pope, my unit—the First Infantry out of West Virginia—we were in the middle of this big ol’ fight, y’see.—”

“Bull Run? Right, Pa?” Jim asked. He already knew the answer, and Billy knew he knew.

“Yessir,” Billy said. “Second scrap we had on the same piece of land. Anyways, old General Pope, he made some pretty bad calculations and—”

“How bad, Pa?” Lottie asked.

“Darling, we were getting catawamptiously chawed up.”

The children laughed, like they always did.

Billy continued. “So the call comes for us to fall back, and that was when I … when I got a Gardner right square in the eye. I was turning my head to see if old Luther Potts was falling back when it hit me. Turning my head probably saved my life.”

Billy rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

“You all right, Pa?” Jim asked.

“Fine, Jim. Fetch me some water, will you? So, Lottie, where was I?”

“You got shot in the eye.”

“Right. So I don’t recall much specific after that. I was in a lot of pain. I heard … well, I could hear some of what was going on all around me.”

“Like what, Pa?” she asked.

“Never you mind. Anyways, someone grabbed me up, and dragged me for a spell, and finally I heard the sawbones telling someone to hold me still, and they did and I went to sleep for a long time. I dreamed about you and Jim and your mother. The stuff they give you to sleep makes you have funny dreams. I remember seeing someone all dressed up fancy in green silk, some kind of old man, but his hair was long like a woman’s, and he was jawing at me, but I couldn’t understand him.”

“When did you wake up, Pa?” Jim asked. Even though he knew the story by heart, he always tried to flesh it out with any new details that he could glean from the retelling.

“Few days later in a hospital tent. My head hurt bad and it was kind of hard to think or hear.” Billy paused and seemed to wince. Jim handed him the wooden ladle full of cool water. He gulped it down and blinked a few times with his good eye. “They told me we had fallen back and were on our way to Washington for garrison duty. General Pope was in a powerful lot of trouble too.

“They told me I had lost the eye, but was mighty lucky to be alive. I didn’t feel too lucky right that minute, but compared to all the lads who didn’t come home at all, I figure I did have an angel on my shoulder.”

“So tell us about the Chinaman, Pa!” Lottie practically squealed.

Billy winced but went on, with a forced smile. “Well, when my unit got to Washington, a bunch of us fellas who were pretty banged up, we all went to stay at a hospital. One night in the hospital, this strange little Johnny, all dressed up in his black pajamas, and his little hat, he came sneaking into the ward and he crept up beside my bed.”

“Were you scared, Pa?” Jim asked.

Billy shook his head. “Not really, Jim. That hospital was so strange. The medicine they gave us, called it morphine, it made you feel all flushed and crazy. I honestly didn’t think the Chinaman was real. He spoke to me and his voice was like a song, but soft, like I was the only one in the world who could hear him. He said, ‘You will do.’ I don’t to this day know what the blazes he was going on about, but he said something about the moon and me hiding or some-such. Then he touched me right here, on the forehead, and I fell asleep.

“Well, when I woke up I wasn’t in the hospital anymore; I was in some den of Chinamen. They were all mumbling something or other over top of me, and they were pulling these great big knitting needles outta my skin, but I didn’t feel any pain at all. The one who came into the hospital and fetched me, he said that they were healers and that they had come to give me a gift. He held up a mirror and I saw the eye for the first time. He told me it was an old keepsake from his kin back in China.”

“Did you believe him, Pa?” Jim asked.

Billy rubbed his temples and blinked at the afternoon sunlight again. “Well, I was a mite suspicious of him and his buddies, Jim. He told me the eye was real valuable, and that I should probably hide it under a patch, ’less crooks might try to steal it. That seemed a bit odd to me. He and the other Johnnies, they all chattered like parrots in that singsong talking those folks do. I couldn’t understand any of it, but they all seemed powerful interested in me and the eye. Then they thanked me and told me good luck. Another Chinaman blew smoke in my face from one of those long pipes of theirs, and I got sleepy and kind of dizzy and sick, like with the morphine. When I woke up, I was back in the hospital, and it was the next day. I told the doctors and my superior officer what happened, and they just seemed to chalk it up to the medicine they gave me. They had more trouble explaining the eye. The hospital was pretty crazy on account of all the hurt soldiers. They didn’t have much time to puzzle over my story—I was alive and was going to keep on living. They had to move on the next poor fella. Couple of them offered to buy the eye right out of my head, but it didn’t seem proper to give away such a fine gift. And it gave me a great story to tell my kids for the rest of my life.”

Billy grunted, and pulled himself to his feet. “A while later, the war was over and I got to come home. I never saw the Chinaman again. The end.”

“Let me see it, Pa!” Lottie said eagerly, practically humming with anticipation. “Please!”

Billy smiled and nodded. He lifted the plain black eye patch that covered his left socket. Lottie laughed and clapped. Jim crowded forward too to get a better glimpse of the seldom-seen artifact.

“It’s like you got a green-colored eye,” Lottie said softly. “It’s so pretty, Pa.”

“That green color in it, that’s jade,” Billy said. “Lots of jade in China.”

“Tea too,” Jim added.

Lottie stuck out her tongue at him. “You’re just trying to be all highfalutin and smart seeming,” she said.

“All right, you two, that’s enough,” Billy said, lowering the patch. “Let’s get back to work, Jim. Lottie, you run on home to your momma, y’hear?”

Jim watched Lottie dance through the tall, dry grass, empty pail in her small hand, the sun glistening off her golden curls. She was singing a made-up song about China and jade. She pronounced “jade” “jay.”

Jim glanced to his father, and he could tell that one of the headaches was coming on him hard. But he was smiling through it, watching Lottie too. He turned to regard his thirteen-year-old son with a look that made the sun shine inside the boy’s chest.

“Let’s get back to it, Son.”

He awoke, and it was the desert again. The green and the mountain breeze were gone. The sun was coiled in the east, ready to rise up into the air and strike. It was still cool, but not cold anymore. He remembered the coyote and spun around, gun in hand. Everything was still and unchanged in the gathering light.

Promise’s breathing was labored and soft. The sound of it scared Jim, bad. He tried to get her to rise, but the horse shuddered and refused to stir.

“Come on, girl, we got to get moving, ’fore that sun gets any higher.”

Promise tried to rise, coaxed by the sound of his voice. She failed. He looked at her on the ground, her dark eyes filled with pain, and fear, and then looked to the gun in his hand.

“I’m sorry I brought you out here, girl. I’m so sorry.”

He raised Pa’s pistol, cocked it and aimed it at the mare’s skull.

“I’m sorry.” His finger tightened on the trigger. His hands shook. They hadn’t done that when he shot Charlie. Charlie had deserved it; Promise didn’t.

He eased the hammer down and dropped the gun into the dust. He stood there for a long time. His shadow lengthened.

“We’re both getting out of here, girl,” he said, finally.

Jim rummaged through the saddlebags and removed his canteen. He took a final, all-too-brief, sip of the last of the water, and then poured the rest onto Promise’s mouth and over her swollen tongue. The horse eagerly struggled to take the water in. After a few moments, she rose to her feet, shakily.

Jim stroked her mane. “Good girl, good girl. We’ll make it together, or not at all. Come on.” They began to trudge, once again, toward Golgotha.

The Moon

The darkness filled with a terrible pressure behind his eyes. The pain was thick and settled over his skull like lead syrup. Jim opened his eyes and knives of sunlight stabbed into them. A groan escaped his cracked lips.

“It’s all right,” a voice said over the clatter of wagon wheels. “We got you, young fella. You’re going to be right as rain.”

Jim felt cool, spidery hands slide under his back and prop him up. He was under a wool horse blanket. It was scratchy against his red skin, but its shade was keeping the blazing sun off his head. A pale, cadaverous hand held a canteen before his mouth. There was a sour odor coming off the hand and for a moment he thought he was being ministered to by one of the dead pilgrims lost to the 40-Mile.

“Drink,” the voice said, and he did, in greedy, silvery, cold gulps.

“Not too fast,” a second voice said. “You’ll get sick.”

Jim’s vision was blurry and his eyes felt sticky. He turned his head enough to see the man who was holding the canteen. His face was thin; his sparse gray hair was swept back from his high forehead. His features reminded Jim of a vulture. He looked concerned for the boy’s condition, but he also seemed kind of fascinated by it too. Lottie had once looked at an ant she trapped under a Mason jar the same way.

“How is he?” the driver asked.

“Sick,” the vulture-man said. “He’s redder than a preacher in a whorehouse.”

“Promise,” Jim croaked. “My horse, is she okay?”

The cold hands turned Jim’s head toward the back of the wagon. Promise was shuffling behind the moving wagon, her reins looped around the stakes that ran along the sides of the wagon. She looked tired, but she was moving and she snorted when she saw Jim.

The boy managed a weak smile. “See, girl, I told you we would—”

He fell into buzzing darkness again.

It was a hot July evening. The lightning bugs were drifting across the front acre like sparks from a bonfire. Jim was sitting out on the porch of the homestead, trying to find Sagittarius in the night sky. Lottie was already asleep in the loft, but Jim was allowed to stay up later to play fiddle with Pa on the front porch. Momma would sing as the lightning bugs danced.

But tonight there wasn’t going to be any singing or playing. Jim could hear Ma and Pa fussing, inside the house, their voices gaining in speed and volume.

“Hush up now, William; the children will hear,” Momma said.

“Hell with ’em!” Pa bellowed. “Maybe they’d like to hear what a man’s gotta put up with just to have something to soothe his burning head.”

“You’re drunk,” she hissed. “Please, William, if it’s the headaches, we can go see Doc Winslow—”

“Doc Winslow can go straight to Hell, too!” Pa roared. “He ain’t got nothing in his little bag that’s gonna stop a Johnnyman’s curse. This damn eye … like ants made outta ice crawling in my skull.”

“Let me help you, darling, please.”

There were loud crashing sounds—pots and chairs knocked about, Momma crying out in terror. Pa threw open the door and staggered out into the warm, sticky night. He froze when he saw Jim standing there wide-eyed and silent.

“Pa,” Jim said. “Momma all right in there?”

Billy Negrey nodded slowly. Inside, Lottie was crying and Momma was calling out to her.

“Jim, you know I love your mother, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Jim said.

“Sometimes this, this thing … in my head. I say things, I drink, ’cause it hurts so damn bad.”

“I know, Pa. Ma knows too. She knows.”

Billy staggered off the porch and toward the barn. He turned to regard his son. Billy’s skin was dream-spun silver in the bright moonlight. The eye patch was hidden in shadow. Jim was taken by how old he looked—not the years but the awful toll this life had exacted on him. His God-given eye fixed on Jim’s own.

“Take care of your mother and Lottie, Jim,” he said. “I’m going into town.”

A few minutes later he rode out of the barn on his horse and disappeared down the dirt road toward Albright. After a time, Lottie stopped crying. A little while after that, Jim heard the porch door close behind him and felt Momma’s small, strong hands rest on his shoulders.

“It’s all right, Jim,” she said softly. “Your poor father just needs to find himself some peace, that’s all.”

She wrapped her arms around him and began to sing “Barb’ra Allen,” her favorite song, low and sweet. It was old, like the mountains it came from, another place, another time. It was sad, but there was a beauty in the sadness that Jim didn’t fully understand but that soothed him nevertheless; it was Momma’s song. He picked up the fiddle and played it the way Pa had taught him.