Eutopia (3 page)

Andrew didn’t know when he’d started work on the rope around his wrists. But he knew as the poor man’s legs twitched and shook and bent, and the keening whistling started up again—far louder this time, almost like a tiny scream—he’d managed to loosen a knot. Nothing dramatic—it was just looser, not untied, and there were other knots after this one before he’d be free. But although his fingers were numb and fat with his own blood, they were still a surgeon’s, and they knew what to do. They would get those knots, because if they didn’t—well, their doctor would end up on that rope. That was not how Dr. Andrew Waggoner was meant to leave this world. Even if he was slow to realize it, his fingers knew.

Luckily, the sheets seemed to have no idea.

Their victim raised high enough—maybe three feet off the ground—they tied off the rope, and came back to watch him die. Behind him, the cart-horse whinnied.

Andrew slipped the knot free. The second was not so tight, and he got that one going much more quickly. What was he going to do when he got them free? None of the men seemed to have guns, at least none outside their sheets. So he might just be able to run for it. Except he was cramped and sore and his rib felt like it could be broken. He could probably still outrun Robert Vernon with his bad knee. But the rest?

Andrew set his teeth. It was hard to think, with that whistling getting as loud as it was, so he just kept at work. How could that whistling be getting louder? The hanged man’s airway should be about shut. The noises he could make should have changed, become more strangled and quieter.

The sheets were thinking the same thing. One of them had his hands over his ears, while their leader was shouting something else, something like an instruction. Two of them moved to obey—if, that is, they’d been told to grab the dying man’s belt-loops and pull him down to break his neck. They grabbed tight, threw their own knees from under themselves and dangled.

The final knot slid undone and Andrew slid out of the ropes. He closed his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, blinked and pushed himself up. On hands and knees, he turned around, and with the fire in his rib making him want to weep, made for the wagon.

He didn’t get far.

Andrew gasped, and his arms slipped from under him, and he thought:
I’ve been shot
. Then he found himself rolled over. He was looking into the face of Robert Vernon. The sheet was off him now, and he held a stick—no, a handle for an axe. Instinctively Andrew raised his hand to ward him off. The axe-handle hit him in the elbow with a sickening
crack!,
and he clutched it, as Robert Vernon raised his club again.

There was another
crack!
, and Robert stood there for what seemed like a long time, weapon raised. Then Robert fell backwards into the dirt. The axe-handle fell against Andrew’s hip. The sky was empty but for early evening stars and a fat yellow moon rising on the horizon.

The high whistling continued, but Andrew thought it might have been joined by another sound: the barking of dogs, and the
crack! crack!
of gunfire.

That would be good, he thought, if it were true. Then his eyelids slid shut and he let himself rest a moment.

Andrew’s eyelids flickered as someone bent close. Not a sheet. Not a ghost. It had dark little eyes, though, a face bent the wrong way. It puckered its wide mouth, and leaned forward. It breathed out an awful smell, like formaldehyde, and looked up, started, and moved fast off to the right. Andrew felt the scant weight of it on his chest only then, by its sudden absence.

Someone screamed not far off, and Andrew blinked twice before he just gave up and closed his eyes.

“Dr. Waggoner.”

Andrew felt a sharp slap on his cheek, and another.

He coughed and blinked and opened his eyes.

This time the light of a kerosene lamp was nearer him, and there was someone else leaning in. Someone he recognized.

“Doctor,” said Sam Green. “You hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Andrew.

“Good. You know who I am?”

“Sure.”

Sam Green was the boss of the Pinkerton crew. He and Andrew went back—to October, when they’d met at the train station in Bonner’s Ferry some forty miles to the south of here.

Sam was wearing his bowler hat and what looked like his Sunday best. His normally ruddy face was crimson over the starched collar and tight-wound tie. Normally when he was on duty, Sam would wear something a bit more comfortable. But today was Sunday and unlike Andrew, he was a church-going man.

“That is good,” said Sam. “You haven’t been entirely addled by those bastards.”

“Those—” Andrew tried to sit up but the pain in his back and ribs was too

much. “Those bastards,” he said slowly, “are Klansmen. They hanged a man.”

Sam might have smiled under his thick moustache, or he might have grimaced. “They are piss-poor Klansmen if that is what they even are. Anyone can pull a sheet over their head.”

Andrew coughed again, and winced. God, it hurt.

Green stood up. In his right hand, Andrew saw, he was casually dangling his still-smoking Smith and Wesson Russian revolver by the trigger guard.

“They hanged a man, Sam. They were going to do the same to me.”

“And we shot and killed three of them,” said Sam. “You stay put here a moment. Rest a spell.”

As he turned and stepped away, Andrew chanced to lift his head to see what he could see.

Andrew counted three lanterns casting beams here and there among maybe a dozen men and who knew how many dogs working the base of the hanging tree.

Nearer by, Andrew saw the bodies. The nearest belonged to Robert Vernon. There were another two further upslope toward the hanging tree, collapsed on one another, their sheets flowered bloody. Sam stepped over them like they were fallen branches and joined the others.

“He ready to move?” Sam called.

Someone in the crowd answered, “He’ll move. None too pleased about it though.”

“Would you be?” asked Sam.

And with that, the crowd broke and two men hauled a stretcher out. On the stretcher was a figure bundled in dark cloth, and (Andrew thought) tied down. The stretcher tipped and twisted as the two men carrying it tried to manhandle it away. Andrew leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

They’d hanged a sick man and tried to hang a doctor, and earlier on they’d murdered a young girl and her baby.

Christ in Heaven, there was going to be hell to pay.

“Couple of things,” said Andrew when Sam came back to him.

“You have gathered your thoughts?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. “First. There’s been a murder. Not that poor fellow just now hung, either. Another. Maryanne Leonard.”

Sam Green raised his eyebrows. “The girl with child? I had been given to understand she died of . . . womanly troubles.”

“She did,” said Andrew. “But I examined her. I believe her troubles were brought on by an abortionist. An inexpert one.”

Sam looked away at that, and Andrew let him be a moment. This was nothing for a good Catholic fellow to hear on a Sunday evening.

“You think,” said Sam finally, “that these fellows were hanging you in part to keep you quiet on the subject?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. Yes.”

Sam snorted, lowered his head to look at his feet, and said in a low voice: “Fucking animals.” Then he looked up, met Andrew’s eye. “Pardon my French.”

“It is important that they not be allowed to take the body away. It will need to be examined for proof,” said Andrew.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Sam. “Dr. Bergstrom is back at the hospital now. He has not released anything to anyone.”

“Bergstrom’s back? When—”

“After supper,” said Green. “We saw him at the hospital. These bastards left the place in a mess.”

“So he sent you after us?”

Sam’s moustache twitched. “So we found you,” he said. “That’s what’s important. And now you’ve told me about the murder you suspect. Anything else?”

“I think,” said Andrew, “I’m going to need some help out of here.”

“That so? Can’t imagine why. You feel all your fingers and toes, Doc?”

“Yes, I feel them just fine. But I think my back is hurt and I can’t get up right now. I think you’d better bring over that stretcher you used to carry off the body.”

“Body?”

“Yes,” said Andrew. “The hanged man. That other murder. I’ve got respect for the dead—but I’m going to need that stretcher more than him right now.”

Now Sam was grinning. He knelt down and patted Andrew on his shoulder. “Nobody died here tonight,” he said, “but some cowardly bastards. Old Mister Juke is fine as ever he was.”

“Mister—Juke?”

So the hanged man had a name.

“You, now . . .” Sam sat down on the ground, propping his gun on his knee and looking off over Andrew’s head. “You do look like you could use some help. But we got to get Mister Juke back to our own wagon. They’ll come back with the stretcher when that’s done.”

“Sam,” said Andrew, “don’t go changing the subject. He was hanged. He can’t be fine. He—”

“Hush,” Sam said. “You are a smart Negro, Dr. Waggoner. I don’t believe I have said so before, but I have a great respect for you in that regard. You managed to get yourself into doctoring school in Paris, France, and back out again with a medical degree. And now, you can set a bone and you can cut out a swelled-up appendix with your eyes closed I expect. But even you can’t expect to know everything on Heaven and earth.”

Andrew frowned and thought about that.

“Tell me something,” he finally said. “Did you come up here looking for me, or were you here to get that Mister Juke back?”

“Oh, we’re bringing you back,” said Sam. “But like I said, boy: ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ See now?” he said, winking again. “You ain’t the only one read a book.”

“How long,” said Andrew, “has Mister Juke been in the quarantine? Why did nobody tell me? And just precisely what—who—is he?”

“No, no,” said Sam. “You won’t get that from me, old friend. Not more from me. You can ask Dr. Bergstrom when you get back. Not,” he added, “that I am recommending it.”

Sam Green leaned back. To show the conversation was done for now, he started to whistle.

Jason Thistledown’s mama was tall and beautiful and strong; stronger of arm than many a man and more powerful of spirit than any two. Yet in the end it was not a man nor two nor even a gang of them, but a damn germ that killed her.

The night it happened it was just the two of them alone in the cabin as a terrible howl of a blizzard ran outside. The blizzard was bad for the pigs, and as it turned out one of them died because Jason would not go outside and see to them. He knew the risk in leaving the pigs out like that, but sometimes a man’s got to decide, and if there’s no man about, the decision falls to a boy. To Jason’s way of thinking, when the choice is between standing by your mama and a seeing to a sty of swine, there’s no choice at all.

He sat there and gave her water until she stopped taking it. He tried singing to her like she used to sing to him, but that felt foolish, so he said he was sorry but he was going to have to stop. He thought she might like to hear a story so he told her the one about Odysseus and Polyphemus, until he realized it became too terrifying in the middle part where Odysseus’ men were one by one devoured by the terrible Cyclops. His mama (lying on her bed, unable to move or speak, with blood welling at the base of her fingernails; brown, putrid fever-sweat accumulating in her bedclothes) didn’t need more terrifying. So he said he was sorry and tried to think of a less frightening tale. At length, Jason had to admit he didn’t know many stories that weren’t upsetting in some way or another, so he said he was sorry.

“I guess sayin’ sorry’s one thing I can do fine,” he said and tried to laugh at his little joke but wound up crying.

He cried a long time, but managed to get his wits about him before the germ delivered its
coup de grâce
.

Later on, Jason was glad for that. He was sure his mama wouldn’t have liked to have had the last sight of her son being him blubbering like a baby.

At that hour, however, Jason had not yet seriously entertained the notion that his mama was going to be having a last anything of anything. She was just poorly. She was quite poorly, sure, but she hadn’t been that way for so very long. The coughing started up on the way back from the store at Cracked Wheel, and that was just a day ago. It was probably a flu germ, she’d said, but she’d had flu before and always just walked it off. She was more worried about Jason coming down with it, and so ordered him to the far end of the cabin for all the good that would do.

Jason hadn’t come down with a thing—not so much as a sniffle. That, to his way of thinking, meant that whatever it was, it wasn’t much of a flu at all.

Still believing this, Jason dried his nose and got up from his chair and went to see to the wood stove, which was starting to cool. He dug around in the wood box and came up with a stick of birch that looked about right, and opened the stove’s front and shoved it in. It raised a little flurry of sparks in the bed of coals inside. Jason blew on it a bit, and fanned it with his hand, poked it with his fingertips until it was just right. Then he closed the door and wiggled the flue to make sure it was properly open so the fire would take.