Haxan (18 page)

I
tried to tell myself if Clayton Finch wanted to kill me he would have already done it. I had given him plenty of opportunity while I poked around outside—my back had been toward him more than once, and I had made it a point to hit the door latch hard so he wouldn’t be taken unawares.

A man like that, waiting and all alone, gets jumpy and starts busting caps at the least little noise. I had wanted Clayton to know I was coming inside the house so he could think things through a bit. It was a huge risk on my part. But if you don’t want to stake your life on risk you’d better never pin on a badge.

“I thought you were hiding up here,” I said to the figure half-hidden in the dark room. “Phaedra said you were.”

“You talked to her?”

“Of course I did. What do you think?”

He was seated behind a table. I couldn’t make out much detail other than a formless grey shape against other geometrical objects that might have been a bench, a cabinet, a churn, a flour mill. The ceiling was low. I had to watch I didn’t crack my head on the rough-hewn rafters.

“Take a chair, Marshal. You’re outlined good against the open door. I won’t miss.”

I sat at the table, moving slow.

“Phaedra took Pa to Haxan, didn’t she.” It wasn’t a question. I got the impression he was trying to find out where he fit in the world now that both of them were gone.

“Your father will be buried on Boot Hill.”

“Better to burn his carcass and feed the charred remains to rabid dogs.”

“Clayton, put that gun down.”

“Got no reason to do that, Marshal. I have no intention of going back to stand on a gallows. Besides, I don’t want to see my father, and I don’t want to see her.”

“I thought you loved Phaedra.” The quiet yawned between us like a bottomless gorge. “That’s what people say.”

“I guess I did once.” His chair made a small sound when he shifted position. “She was pretty when Pa brought her to live with us,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or me.

“We were alone after my real Ma died of the cholera. But this mountain ain’t a fit place for any woman. Especially one as young and pretty as Phaedra. Hell, it’s barely liveable for a man. I watched this mountain sap all that was good from her. All that was saveable, you might say. I couldn’t stop what happened, Marshal. I want you to believe that. When you’re trapped like we were you look for an escape. We found it in each other. When Pa found out, well, he went a mite crazy. He didn’t have far to go. He never did walk down the centre of a rail long as I knew him.”

“Don’t you have a light, Clayton? Candles or a lamp?” I wanted to get a look at him. His voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it.

“No. Pa figured a man should live by the natural rhythm of the day. Oh, sometimes he would light a tiny fire in the chimney, or light a grease-burning Betty lamp, and Phaedra would read from the Bible. She had another book, too. Old stories about the ancient Greeks and the gods they used to believe in. I liked them. She read those stories good. She made them come alive with her voice, almost like we was living it.”

Clayton fell silent. When he spoke again his voice was full of wistful longing. “She was so pretty, sitting there with the red glow of the fire in her hair and the light dancing happy on her face. She was nice, Marshal. Nicer than Pa or me ever deserved. That’s fact.”

“Why didn’t you leave, Clayton, if things were as bad as all that?”

And it was then, with that simple question, when I realized whom I was dealing with.

“Phaedra wouldn’t quit on Pa no matter how rough he treated her. Even after she and me . . .” I could hear his throat click when he swallowed. “Even after she lost the baby she felt she owed Pa her life. In a way she was right. Her family was dirt starved in Texas when Pa bought her as his bride. I remember the day we rode down to Haxan to meet her on the stage. She was so fragile, with nothing but a worn carpet handbag clasped to her breast. We had apple pie and sarsaparilla at the Haxan Hotel. Then we rode into these here mountains and never left. Marshal, it was most like something out of a storybook.”

He didn’t say anything more. He was talked out.

“I have to take you in, Clayton.”

“I will never leave this mountain.”

“You have to stand trial for killing your father.” I paused. I had to find a way to reach him. I didn’t want to kill him. There had been enough killing in this family.

“Phaedra would want you to do the right thing,” I said. “That girl you remember, and once loved, sitting by the fire reading those old stories you liked.”

I couldn’t tell if the sound he made was a sob or a snort of derision. Perhaps both. “Pa hit her, Marshal. He hit her alla time and she took it. I never could understand that. I asked her ’bout it. She said she was more afeared of going back to Texas than to die in these cold and bitter mountains. Taking a beating every day wasn’t so bad, she told me, compared to what she suffered in Texas. She was a little girl when the war ended. They had to eat raw cactus pulp and lizards what they could catch, when they had anything to eat at all.”

He made that sound again. This time it sounded like a cry for help.

“Marshal, is Doc Toland looking after her proper?”

“Yes.”

“I told her not to do it. After I killed Pa she shoved her hands in that boiling water afore I could stop her. She said she didn’t want to see me hang and so she was giving me an alibi. I suppose I got a little crawly myself. Pa was about to go after her with an axe handle, you see. I wrestled him and pushed his face down in the boiling pot. I held a wooden lathe across the top of his shoulders to keep his head down in that hot steam. When I knew he was dead I took off. I was free, Marshal. It felt good, like when you see a sun hawk falling out of the sky on a cottontail. I was falling, too. I ran all over the face of this mountain. When I got back Phaedra was gone. That little girl got on her horse and rode down to Haxan all by herself. Took her most of the night, I reckon.”

“Who built the mesquite drag? Who put your father on it? She couldn’t have done that herself. Not with burned hands.”

“Huh.” He was taken aback by my question. “I guess I did those things. I don’t remember none too clear, Marshal. Maybe I came back after I ran that first time and then took off again. I can’t see it straight in my head. I only see spots and fragments that rise from the bottom and disappear like pond scum. You know, like when a lake turns itself over in the fall.”

“I can’t leave you here alone, Clayton.”

“Ain’t going nowhere with you, Marshal. You forgot I got the drop on you.”

“Clayton, hear me out. It’s dark in here and you can’t see, but my gun is out of its holster and under this table. You shoot me, I promise I’ll gut shoot you if it’s the last thing I do. You’ll scream every last inch of your life away. That’s as bad a way to die as life ever made. And every time you scream Phaedra will hear you.”

I couldn’t tell if I was reaching him. “Do you really want to do that to her, Clayton?”

He didn’t say anything. I think he was weeping, silently.

“Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

“All right, Marshal. You win.” His gun thumped on the table. I drew it toward me. It was a single-action Colt Peacemaker, one of the civilian models with a five and a half-inch barrel. The hammer was cocked. A few ounces of pressure on the trigger and I would have been stone dead.

When you see something like that the crawl starts in your hands and feet. Then it draws toward the centre of your body like a worm crisping on hot metal.

I rolled all six of the .45-calibre centre fire cartridges out of the cylinder. They clacked and skittered on top of the pine table. I stuck the gun in my belt and got up.

I don’t know where he got the gun, but it was in better shape than the old Navy Colt he had wanted to use that night in the Quarter Moon.

“All right, Clayton, you’re under arrest. It’s time to go.”

He used his arms to push his body away from the table. I followed him outside. There was more light out here. The stars were shining deep and a slice of white moon was rocking the world to sleep.

Clayton passed my blue roan and kept on walking. He called over his shoulder, “I want you to tell Phaedra I loved her, Marshal.”

“Stop, Clayton. Stop.”

I pulled my gun but it wasn’t going to do any good. He was standing on the ledge. He turned around. He was dressed in the same torn pants and sleeveless shirt he wore the night he called me out in the Quarter Moon. He had lost his snap-brimmed planter’s hat somewhere along the way.

The light from the moon and stars was on his face. It was still a good face, confused and bewildered by life.

“I loved her bad,” he told me.

He stepped into space and disappeared.

There wasn’t any sound afterward. I walked to the edge but there was nothing but blackness. The wind from the abyss sheered off the side of the mountain and hit me square in the face.

There was no use trying to find his body. The mountain and the night had swallowed him whole.

“Clayton’s dead, isn’t he?” Phaedra asked.

It was the next morning. It had taken me most of the night to get back down the mountain without breaking a leg, or my horse’s leg, on a spall or a chuckhole. I was exhausted. It had been a long twenty-four hours. More, if you counted the previous day somewhere in there.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. I meant it. “I tried to bring him back alive.”

“I know you did, Marshal. I’m sorry, too. I know he confessed everything. That’s the kind of boy he was.” She tried on a tired smile. “He was always trying to save me.”

She stood beside an open window. Her blistered hands looked ugly in the orange light shining from a coal oil lamp on top of the dresser.

“We have to go, Phaedra. You’re under arrest for aiding and abetting the murder of Abel Finch. The Territory isn’t going to hang a woman. But I expect you’re going to do time.”

“I’m ready.”

We walked into the front room where Doc and Jake waited. “I don’t want you to worry, Phaedra,” I was saying. “I’ll speak on your behalf at the trial. I’ll do everything I can to help you get clear of this trouble.”

“I know you will look after me, Marshal.”

Something about the way she said it should have alerted me. If I weren’t so beat I would have been. She couldn’t hide a thing like that in her face. Few people could.

I blame myself. I am responsible.

We were moving for the door. Doc Toland held it open when Phaedra backed up causing us to crowd together in the doorway. Phaedra grabbed Jake’s pistol from his Mexican holster and bolted down the wooden steps, her bare feet kicking white under the dirty hem of her homespun dress.

“Mr. Marwood, I’m sorry, I never thought—”

“Out of the way, Jake.” I ran down the stairs after her. Fool girl. I was more angry than surprised. She should know she couldn’t escape.

When I reached the bottom she was already halfway across the plaza.

“Phaedra!”

She skidded to a stop. Good. At least she had some sense left.

She raised the gun in my direction.

“I know you will look after me, Marshal.”

I stopped. My mouth was cotton dry. “Put the gun down, Phaedra.”

“I know I can count on you.”

She smiled. Her lips were red as pokeberry juice and her hair was like spun gold spilling soft on her shoulders in the morning sun.

“No man can do what you’ll do for me.”

She cocked the hammer. She had to use both hands. “You’ll help me, Marshal. We both know that.”

I felt the thing inside me stir awake and lift its head.

“Phaedra, no.” My hand was already moving for my gun. I couldn’t stop it. If that was Magra standing across from me I couldn’t have stopped it.

“You go and help me now.” She fired. Wild shot, but my nerves were working on their own accord and my gun cleared leather, thumb rolling the hammer back with one motion.

She had her pistol cocked again. She snap fired. The bullet fried the air beside my head.

My first shot hit her in the centre of the breastbone and my second was three inches to the right of that. She went down on her knees, dropping the heavy pistol in the dust. Then she folded back with her legs trapped beneath her body.

I ran toward her and knelt swiftly.

“Phaedra.”

Her eyelids fluttered. The front of her dress pumped blood. “Clayton.”

I took her blistered hand in mine.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you bad.”

“Phaedra.”

She was gone.

I got up and remained alone in the middle of the plaza for a long time. When I walked out of there I was aware a lot of people had amassed in the street, watching me, amazed they had been alive to witness such a thing. Someone touched my arm in sympathy.

“Marshal,” Wicker said, “that was a bad thing. No man . . . I’m sorry for what I said earlier. All of us were wrong about what we said.”

I went into my office and closed the door. Later, I heard a stray dog was licking the white sand soaked with her blood. Little kids threw rocks and chased it away, laughing.

That afternoon four men buried Phaedra next to Abel Finch on Boot Hill.