And the Hills Opened Up (11 page)

19

Father Lynch watched as the men who’d carried a coffin into his church earlier that day were lowered into three of their own.  Chester would have plenty of company now—apparently his friends were as bad at keeping themselves out of trouble as he’d been.  “At this rate,” Lynch announced to the crowd assembled in the street, “Leg Jameson’s going to run out of coffins.”

“He has,” somebody in the crowd replied.  “Those cleared him out.”

Lynch scowled and waved off the gawkers, trying to make the whole lot scatter with a swipe of his hand.  He came up to the first of the coffins, made the sign of the cross above the dead, and prayed for his soul to find its peace.  Then he did the same for the second man, then the third.  He could feel the crowd’s eyes upon him and heard a few mumbled prayers echoing his own.  Never had such a large, interested crowd assembled in his own church, not even on Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday.  He figured it was death that drew them together this cool summer evening, the racy spectacle of it, and the idea alone made him feel raw and old and useless.

The drunken loafer Owen Hayes and a second man came out of the saloon and looked over the line of coffins.  Owen looked pallid and damp, with a cloth bandage wrapped around his left thigh.  The other man, who was clean shaven and hawk-eyed, looked untouched except for a ragged cut across the front of his jacket and shirt, where the blade of a knife must have passed through.

“Father Lynch, this is my older brother, Elwood Hayes.”

The priest eyed the pair closely, seeking out the family resemblance.  Owen’s face was round and soft, with the ruddiness of a habitual drinker, while Elwood’s skin was taught and deeply tanned, like a man who spent most of his time outdoors.  Yet you could discern a certain likeness to the set of their jaws, the ample breadth of their foreheads.

“You two are brothers?”

“Yes, sir,” Owen said, nodding vigorously.  “He was just coming to town to pay me a visit.”

Lynch ignored the obvious lie and scrutinized the older brother further.

“So this is how you look out for your little brother, Mr. Hayes?  By involving him in the first gunfight Red Earth’s ever known?”

Elwood Hayes returned the priest’s stare. 

“They had it coming, Father.  They stepped to us first.”

“We all have it coming, Mr. Hayes.  But no man shall say when that time has come for another.”

“That something Jesus said?”

Lynch nodded.

“Yes.  In a manner.”

The priest turned back to the coffins, considering them.  The Hayes brothers remained where they stood, also considering.  The murmuring of the crowd grew louder as people began to lose interest in the coffins and the killers standing beside them.  Two explosions, one after the other, sounded in the distance. 

“Goddamn,” Owen Hayes cursed, unmindful of the priest or his proximity to the resting dead.  “How much more blasting they bent on tonight?  Must be past nine o’clock.”

“Something’s gone wrong in the mine,” Lynch said, speaking as much to himself as the Hayes brothers.  “Men died there earlier today, and I fear more have died since.”

“They’re sealing her up,” Elwood said.  “Has the mine played out?”

“No,” Lynch said.  “Not how you mean, anyhow.”

Caleb Rollins and Madam Petrov came out of the bar.  The madam looked as angry as slapped bull, her bulk all hunched up into her shoulders.  Father Lynch would not have been surprised if she’d lowered her head right then and charged the nearest man.

“What was that explosions?”

“They were down at the mine, ma’am,” Owen said, removing his cap.  “We don’t know what they’re about yet.”

The madam’s cheeks filled with air and bulged.  “I knew, I knew!  I knew they would blow this town to high heavens!”

“Please, Madam Petrov,” Father Lynch, raising his hands.  “There’s no need—”

“I told you this afternoon, Father,” the madam shouted, stepping forward and poking Lynch in the chest.  “I told, but you did not listen!”

The priest looked around him for help.  The crowd had stepped back, including the Hayes brothers.  The madam made to poke Lynch a fourth time and he caught her fingers in his own.

“I had dream!  I had dream this would happen!”

“Please, Madam.  Calm yourself.”

“Calm myself?  Four men killed in my saloon in one day, a fifth with a shot knee, and you want me to calm myself?”

“I’m sure these men here will be more than willing—”

“You see men here?  I see nothing but dogs.  Ugly dogs fighting for no good reason in my bar.”

“Please, Madam.  I’ll be happy to house the deceased in my church until their remains can be sent to Rawlins.”

Madam Petrov closed her mouth and eyed him.  She dabbed spittle from the corners of her mouth with a linen handkerchief and took several breaths, her considerable bosom rising and falling with each lungful.  Beyond her, Lynch could see Elwood Hayes grinning like this was fine theater.

“Thank you, Father,” Madam Petrov said, stepping back.  “Your help in storing coffins would be fine.”

Father Lynch gave the madam a small bow and turned around to the crowd of men and women.

“Okay, men,” he shouted above the din.  “Who’s willing to help us move these coffins?”

The crowd quieted.  Three prospectors from the Copper Inn, all past fifty, stepped forward.  Father Lynch felt a presence over his shoulder step up as well.

“I’ll lend a hand,” Elwood Hayes said.  “Being that I was the one that put’em there in the first place.”

They carried the coffins across the street one at a time, a man to each corner, with Father Lynch overseeing the affair and holding the church door open.  By the last coffin, the crowd sensed the show was over and returned either to the Runoff Saloon or the Copper Hotel’s dining room.  The dozen or so women who were still waiting for their men to return from the Dennison Mine chose the Copper Hotel over going home to fret, entering the hotel as one large, formidable mass, unified in their worry and taking their small children along with them.  Their numbers gave the ramshackle building a holiday atmosphere—the buzz of their voices carried through the hotel’s walls and into the church, even with its windows shut.

“You’d think it was a wedding party,” Elwood Hayes said, peering through the church’s south window to take in the scene.  “Only needs a bride dressed in gauzy white to set it all off.”

They’d placed the final coffin at the back of the church, bringing the number of stored dead to four.  The other pallbearers had left already, eager to join the festivities.  Father Lynch imagined a fresh round of drinking, followed by a fresh round of brawling, with more drinking shortly after.  Anything was possible on a day like this—on the day they sealed the Dennison Mine.

Red Earth was already dead; it just didn’t know it yet.  And they’d built this serviceable church not a year before.        

“And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Elwood glanced at the priest.  “That must be from the Bible.” 

Lynch nodded, feeling old and tired.

“Don’t know how many times I tried to read that darn book, only to fall asleep by the second page.”

Lynch tugged at his clerical collar, loosening it.  “You should try again.  The holy scripture might do a man in your position good.”

“Because I killed all these fellas.”

“Yes.”

“I am a killer,” Elwood said, knocking on the nearest coffin lid.  “I’m a killer and I’m going to hell when I die.  Is that right, Father?”

Father Lynch rubbed his cheek and sighed.

“I need a drink.”

“Go on.  Don’t mind me none.”

Lynch went into his little room at the front of the church and retrieved his gin, along with two glasses he wiped clean with a rag.  When he returned to the sanctuary, he found Hayes seated in a back row pew and staring at the wooden cross hung at the front of the church.  Hayes, who sat with his back to the room’s only lantern, might have been any congregant from any of the past forty years Lynch had served the Catholic Church.

“Thought you might have run off while I was back there,” Lynch said, walking down the middle aisle.  “The company of an old priest and four dead men is not particularly enticing.”

“I don’t mind the dead.  It’s the living that cause me trouble.”

Lynch sat in Hayes’ pew and set the glasses between them.  He poured the gin carefully, not wanting to spill it in the sanctuary.  He gave one glass to Hayes and took the other in hand.  They drank in silence, listening to the wind rap against the windows and the babble coming from the hotel next door.  The priest recalled parties he’d been to as a young man in Philadelphia, the feverish, rosy glow people took on when they gathered to dance and drink and listen to music.  That loud, gauzy world had been shut to him for a long time, yet Lynch didn’t miss it, except in sudden bursts that fell upon him with the suddenness of a lightning strike.

But that was just the Devil, whispering in his ear.  Telling him to be not satisfied.

The bench creaked as Hayes shifted his weight.

“We’ve a farm, back in Nebraska.  Wheat and corn and cows.  Not a bad spread.”

Lynch sipped at his gin and felt its warmth slip down his throat. 

“You and your brother?”

“No, sir.  It’s our father’s farm.  Owen and I just did what we were told, at least until we were old enough to leave.  Neither of us ever have been much for peaceful living.  Could hardly sit still, even in a good situation.”

Lynch turned his gaze to the ceiling.  “Mr. Hayes, that sounds like nearly every man in Wyoming.”

Hayes chuckled and shifted again.  “Wandering has been in my bones as long as I can remember.  Like a whirlwind.  Like a whirlwind that’s carried me around from job to job and fight to fight.  Three years ago, I accidently killed a man with my fists.  I hit his nose too square and he dropped like a hay bale kicked from a loft.  I kept waiting for him to get up, but he never did.”

Hayes emptied his glass.  Father Lynch filled it up again.

“I didn’t want to kill him, Father.  It was just stupidness.  Not drunk stupidness, either.  Just the stupidness that rises up in me sometimes, wanting to hurt something no matter what else.”

Somebody whooped outside and was answered by laughter.  The party had started to gain steam—perhaps the miners had finally returned for the evening and joined their wives at the Copper Hotel. 

Father Lynch set aside his glass and rubbed his palms upon his knees.

“Mortal men, such as you and I, are imperfect creatures.  We are bound to be so—we cannot escape that fate.  The best we can do is temper ourselves.  Temper our rage, our sins, our urge to destroy for the sake of destroying.”

“And then we’ll get into Heaven?  If we temper ourselves?”

Father Lynch turned and looked at his visitor’s profile.  The young man’s gaze was fixed on the cross at the front of the room.

“I don’t know about Heaven, Mr. Hayes.  But it might keep you from the wrong side of a jail cell.”

A short while later, somebody knocked on the back door and let themselves into the church.  Father Lynch turned to see Owen Hayes, standing hat in hand. 

“Excuse me, Father.  I came to get Elwood.”

The older Hayes brother sighed.

“What is it, Owen?”

“Roach sent me.  He wants to know what we’re doing next.”

Lynch and Elwood looked at each other.  Elwood shrugged.

“I’ll be over.”

Owen nodded and exited the building as quickly as he’d entered.  Elwood set his glass on the pew and they shook hands.

“Thank you for the gin, Father.  I believe that is the first time I’ve ever drank with a man of the cloth.”

“Temperance, Mr. Hayes.  Remember temperance.”

Elwood nodded and rose to his feet.  As he left the church, he ran his hand across each coffin lid he passed by, his movements easy and loose.  Once the church’s door had shut behind him, Father Lynch got up and turned the lantern down.  Suddenly bone-tired, the priest went into his bedroom, stripped to his underwear, and lay down upon his cot.  When sleep arrived, it fell hard upon him, turning him into an immobile figure not much different from the four men lying in the next room.

20

Somehow, despite the chains and his ever-gnawing hunger, Johnny Miller had fallen asleep sitting at the sheriff’s desk.  When three old men entered the general store, stomping their boots and rubbing their hands like it was the dead of winter, Miller raised his head and opened his sleep-heavy eyes. 

“Took you boys long enough.  You have to lie with those three dead fellers to make sure they was dead?”

The old men looked at each other.  The store’s owner, who they called Arm or Leg or Armpit or something queer like that, cleared his throat and pointed a wobbly finger in Miller’s direction.

“You shut your mouth.”

“I will, soon as you fill it.”

Armpit lowered his finger and blinked his milky cow eyes.  “What do you mean by that, boy?  Some perversion?”

“I mean I’m hungry, goddamn it.  You ran off without leaving me a speck to eat and chained to this damn ring.  I’ve got to piss, too.  I’m fit to rupture.”

Armpit walked back to the counter.  He got an empty jar off the shelf, unscrewed its lid, and brought it back to Miller, setting it before him on the sheriff’s desk. 

“There’s your piss pot, murderer.”

“Don’t get all fancy on my account, Mr. Armpit.”

Armpit laughed and looked back at his pals.  “You won’t have to worry about fancy in my store, boy.  Maybe in Rawlins, you will.  Maybe they’ll show you a little fancy before they hang you high in the street.”  

Armpit’s wooly-looking pals whooped at that, but even their laughter seemed strange and unnatural.  Their eyes kept darting to the windows, like they expected something out there in the dark.

“What’s going on with y’all?  You’re acting funny.”

The old timers looked at each other again.

“Was those miners real ugly when they found them?”

Armpit sniffed and shook his head.

“That’s none of your business, boy.  Gentlemen, if you’ll follow me.  I have bottle we can uncork in the back.”

Miller sneered at the old timers as they shuffled past, wondering if they were close enough he could stick out a leg and trip one up.  Armpit led the way, guiding them around the back counter and through a doorway Miller couldn’t see.

“Hey!  What about that dinner?”

“I don’t feed murderers in my store,” Armpit called back, slamming a door.  Miller groaned and laid his head on the table, wishing he had a better way about him.  Even when he wanted something and wanted it bad, he still couldn’t put honey in his words. 

Muffled talk came from the back of the store.  The old-timers were keeping their voice low, like they were worried about being overheard.  What in the hell were they being so secretive about?  They were as bad as schoolgirls, whispering to each other while the teacher’s back was turned.  Mayhap it was a murder they discovered down there and not an accident.  A murder, yes, and they’d decided to cover it over with a layer of bullshit. 

And then they come back here, calling him a murderer.  Wasn’t goddamn fair at all, was it?

“I’m hungry!” Miller bellowed, rattling his chains.  “I’m starving up here!”

The talking paused as the old men laughed.

“Goddamn it,” Miller said, considering the piss jar on the table.  “Goddamn all you stinking bastards.”

Especially Elwood Hayes.  Damn him most of all.  Laying him out like that with a sucker punch, turning him over to the damn stagecoach guards.  One minute they were all thick as thieves, ready to rob the Dennison payroll, and the next Miller might have been Jesus Christ himself, so eager was Elwood Hayes to betray him. 

Well.  He’d get his comeuppance soon enough. 

Miller would see to that himself.

The piss jar must have been twenty years old.  The lid was screwed on so tight Johnny Miller practically had to bite it with his teeth to get the stubborn piece of tin to budge.  But, at long damn last, it did give and he was able to screw off the lid and watch it go spinning across the floor, like a tiny wagon wheel gone mad. 

“That’s right, liddy.  You run and hide before I stomp you twice as flat.”

The jar itself, which looked to hold a quart, clunked as Miller set it on the floor, every movement made more difficult than necessary because of the shackles.  His wrists were starting to burn with new, bone-deep pain and his lower back ached as if he was close to being snapped in half—he’d always hated stiff, proper furniture like this, preferring all day in a saddle to an hour at a dinner table. 

The chains also made fumbling with the buttons in his pants a damned chore, rattling with each poke and tug, and Miller could feel the pent-up piss inside him welling up, ready to break through with or without his orders.  Too easily, he could picture Armpit and his pals popping out of the backroom to find him sodden in a pool of his own urine.  They’d all have a good holler over that, he was sure.  Whenever they discovered another soul in misery, men never accounted for being in the same circumstance themselves someday, further down the road.  No, sir.  They just laughed and pointed like ugly, two-legged jackals.

The last button popped open and Miller stuffed his hand inside his underwear, retrieving his pecker and pulling it out into the cool air.  A hot stream of piss rushed forth immediately, magnificent in its warm force, and shot loudly into the jar.  Miller sighed and closed his eyes, thanking the Good Lord that he’d made it in time. 

He was only half-finished when the store’s front door opened, letting in a fresh batch of cold air.

“Hey there, Sheriff.”

The lawman didn’t stop and gape at Miller relieving himself at his desk, sitting in his very own chair.  He didn’t even give Miller so much as a second glance, blowing right past him.  Next came Armpit’s boy, following the sheriff inside.  The boy stopped to look at Miller’s pecker, scowled, and continued to the back of the store. 

“You fellas must be used to men pissing around here.  With all this fine hospitality and such.”

Neither man answered.  Miller finished his business, shook off the last couple of drops, and tucked his pecker back into his pants.  Hot piss smell rose from the jar on the floor, which he’d half-filled.

“Well, don’t that smell pretty.”

Again, no response.  The sheriff and Armpit’s boy were laying rifles, shotguns, and knives out on the counter, followed by shells and bullets.  Armpit Junior fed the sheriff ammunition while the lawman loaded the guns, working so fast he might have been under fire that moment.  Miller counted five shotguns and three rifles in all.

“What the hell you all planning to hunt?  A herd of buffalo?”

The sheriff looked up from the guns and across the room, focusing on Miller as if he’d just noticed him sitting there.

“Johnny Miller, how’d you like to go free?”

Miller frowned and wiped at his nose with a shackle cuff.  The sheriff’s eyes had gone bright and hot, like he was running a fever.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, how’d you like to have that murder charge dropped clean away?  How’d you like to escape that old hangman’s noose?”

Miller licked the back of his teeth, thinking.

“I’d like that.”

“I thought so,” the sheriff said, plugging two more shells into a sawed-off ten gauge and snapping the action shut.  “There’s just one condition you have to agree to, Mr. Miller.  As soon as we take off those chains, I want you to fetch your horse from the livery stables, mount it, and ride right out of town.  No circling back, no plotting a bloody revenge, no further stupidity.  You’re going to ride right back into those mountains and never return to Red Earth again.”

The sheriff gestured toward him with the shotgun’s end.

“You agree to that, Mr. Miller?”

Johnny Miller straightened in his chair, feeling the touch of grace upon his head.  He didn’t know why, but his luck was finally changing toward the better.  He was going to be spared a while longer from those fires of Hell.

“Can I have my gun back?”

“Yes, but unloaded.”

“And some food and water to take with me on the road?”

“Sure.”

“Hell’s bells,” Miller said, rattling his chains.  “I’ll ride out soon as you get these damned things off me.”

The sheriff reached into his pocket and handed Armpit Junior a brass key.  “Please free our prisoner, Henry.  I’ll prepare his provisions for the road.”

The old men came out from the backroom while Miller was rubbing feeling back into his wrists and ankles, staring at the chains piled on the floor and wishing he could, in some showy way, destroy them fully.  The sheriff had loaded up an old saddlebag with tins, bread, and a canteen of water, still moving as fast as a man under fire, and now he was emptying Miller’s revolver on the counter, paying no heed to how the bullets dropped and rolled off.  Armpit Junior was keeping a shotgun trained on Miller, his pale face flat and without expression.

“Don’t talk much, do ya?”

“He’s mute,” Armpit Senior said, puffing out his chest.  “What you doing with this one, Sheriff?”

The sheriff shoved the emptied pistol into the saddlebag, came out from around the counter, and tossed the bag to Miller, who caught it and staggered backward under its weight.

“I’m sending him on his way.”

“His way?”

“You heard me, Leg.  We already have enough trouble on our hands for one night and I can’t watch over this fool bit.”

“Mr. Cooke won’t be pleased to hear that.  He killed a coach guard.”

“Mr. Cooke can go fall in a well.”  The sheriff picked up a shotgun from the counter and waved it at the ceiling.  “Go on, Miller.  Git.”

Miller sneered at the old men and the mute and turned for the door.  “Have a fine evening, gentlemen.”

The old men muttered under their whiskers and Miller kicked his foot out, toppling the piss jar as he headed for the door.

As he fetched his horse from the livery and saddled up, Johnny Miller considered Elwood Hayes, revenge, and circling back into town.  He could find bullets in that hotel across from the saloon, he could buy ’em from a broke prospector or some other rundown vagrant.  It wouldn’t be too hard, so long as he avoided the sheriff—men would be in their cups and less watchful.  Sooner or later, the Hayes gang would attempt their big robbery and he could be there, too, waiting to get the drop on them while they were loaded up with money.

But the night was cold, the wind was starting to howl, and the men back at the general store had been acting so damn odd.  Odder than any mining accident should have allowed for, odder even than men covering up murder.  Elwood, curse his treacherous soul, had taught Miller to watch for such strangeness, had trained him to look for jittery hands and where a guard’s eye drifted during a holdup. 

If the moment ran odd, you ran, too.  You tucked tail and ran and lived to rob another day.

“Plenty of gold and silver out there,” Miller said to his horse, bending over in the saddle to stroke her neck, “but you’ve only got one life.”  The horse picked up speed, thinking he was trying to cajole her.  Miller smiled at the wind in his face and pulled a chunk of bread from his saddlebags.  They passed the edge of town and rode across the valley floor, the starlight revealing a faint, silvery trail for them to follow into the hills.  Miller chewed his bread and looked at the mountains all around, swaths of pure darkness against the white dotted night sky.  He felt like giving a large, mighty whoop and slapping his horse’s hindquarters with his hat, running her even harder, but he held his tongue and settled for more bread, every pore in his skin breathing newfound freedom.