Revolver

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Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

BOOK: Revolver
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For my brother
Table of Contents
68 LATITUDE NORTH
The King of Weapons. The Colt Revolver! Adopted by The United States Army, The United States Navy, The National Guard. Used by Mounted Police, Sheriffs, Cowboys and Frontiersmen. The various patterns have been submitted to the most exhaustive tests and pronounced The Safest, The Strongest, The Most Reliable Revolver in the World.
GENERAL ADVERTISEMENT FOR COLTS. 1896
To a professional man, everything is beautiful which shews skill and efficiency in his own particular profession; and thus a murderous weapon is beautiful to a soldier, in proportion to the execution it will commit.
CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL, 1853
Wash Day, dusk
E
ven the dead tell stories.
Sig looked across the cabin to where his father lay, waiting for him to speak, but his father said nothing, because he was dead. Einar Andersson lay on the table, his arms half raised above his head, his legs slightly bent at the knee, frozen in the position in which they'd found him; out on the lake, lying on the ice, with the dogs waiting patiently in harness.
Einar's skin was gray; patches of frost and ice still clung to his beard and eyebrows despite the warmth of the cabin. It was only a matter of degree. Outside the temperature was plunging as night came on, already twenty below, maybe more. Inside the cabin it was a comfortable few degrees above freezing, and yet Einar's body refused to relax from its death throes.
Sig stared and stared, in his own way frozen to the
chair, waiting for his father to get up, smile again, and start talking. But he didn't.
They say that dead men tell no tales, but they're wrong.
Even the dead tell stories.
Wash Day, night
I
f.
The smallest word, which raises the biggest questions.
If Sig had been with Einar that morning, what then?
If Einar had been more honest with them, what then?
And what if, what if Einar had taken the Colt with him? Would he still be alive?
Questions began to surface in Sig's mind. The death-spell was breaking. He shivered once, violently, and saw that the stove was nearly out.
He cursed with a short old word, the sort of word his father would have used, but only when his new young wife, Nadya, wasn't around, because she was very strict about these words. And if Anna had heard him, she too would have given him a stern look.
“Father!”
Then she would have laughed. Of course she would
have laughed, for she was always laughing, unless she was singing. Unless she was singing, or fighting with Nadya.
Sig waited, though he did not know what he was waiting for. Perhaps a sign of some kind, perhaps even just one single sound, but nothing came, and the only thing he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the breath on the back of his knuckles as he pushed his fist against his lips. Finally he moved from the chair and realized that the shadows had crept across the room and draped it all in darkness. The cabin glowed softly in the light from the single oil lantern hanging from a stout metal hook in the center beam of the roof.
Their cabin. Their entire world, a single room, twenty-four feet by twelve, plus the four feet square of the entrance hall, where the boots and coats waited until it was time for them to work again, and the larder room, which was behind the other inner door in the hall. The larder room, which as well as holding all their food, candles, soap, tools, and spare cloth, was at night home to Sig, who'd taken to sleeping curled up on the sacks of flour. At least it was a little inside space of his own. Outside, there was always all the space in the world; outside, there was nothing but the wide and empty cold of the North. The lake, the forest behind, the mountains in the distance.
Sig lit a taper from the embers of the fire, moving
around the table, trying to decide whether he should look at his father or not. He supposed that when he started thinking of his father not as his father but as a body, that would be the time to stop looking.
He lifted down a smaller lantern from the long shelf over the main window and magicked a flame alight with the taper, which he threw back into the belly of the stove.
In the hall, he pulled on his reindeer-skin boots and gloves, and though he didn't realize it, just the touch of the soft fur of the inverted skin made him feel better.
He shut the inner door to the cabin, put his gloved hand on the outer one, and then hesitated. He took a deep breath, preparing himself for the assault.
He tugged the latch, and before he'd even stepped outside the cold had him, grasping him, squeezing his chest and biting his face. The wind clawed at his mouth and nose, but a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, Sig had learned the trick of holding his breath inside until he knew which way the wind was attacking. Still it stole up the backs of his legs and over his face, finding a way in to drain him of his heat.
Dipping his head, he hurried across the newly fallen snow to the log pile and grabbed half a dozen pieces of wood. On his way back, he saw the lake, shining in the light from a bright moon. Somehow he'd expected it to
look different, marked by his father's death, but it didn't. He'd seen it look like this a hundred times, and then he understood what was hurting him. It looked commonplace when life had just become anything but. It didn't even occur to him that come the spring when the ice melted, the place where Einar died would disappear completely and become gentle wave crests of the wind-whipped lake once more. But then, when snow covers everything and the mercury shows dozens of degrees below zero, any season but winter is a memory impossible to summon.
As Sig stumbled back into the hall, dropping the logs and pulling off his boots, the question of the lake nagged at him. He gathered up the wood and bumped the inner door of the cabin open, his skin tingling from the sudden increase in warmth.
He made up the fire, wheeling open the air vents to allow the belly of the stove to suck in as much air as it could. Within moments the embers were glowing fiercely, and in a few moments more, they caught some curls of birch bark and the resin underneath almost exploded.
It reminded Sig of what his father had told him once, about what happens in the gun, deep inside the gun, inside the brass casing of the cartridge, when it's fired.
But the ease with which he'd lit the fire also reminded him that his father had failed to light one, which was why he lay frozen behind him on the cabin table.
Why
had
Einar gone across the lake?
He'd taken the four dogs and the small sled to Giron as usual that morning, following the track around the head of the lake, in and out of the trees, snaking around, making the journey from the shack to the town six miles when a crow would have done it in two.
It was Wash Day, and though the miners themselves would work six days, Einar's work for Bergman at the Assay Office occupied only five. On Wash Day, however, Einar always had some business or other to attend to: discussions with Per Bergman, the owner of the mine, or drinks at the bar of the Station Hotel before heading home to his family for what remained of the afternoon.
Sig loved those Wash Day afternoons. His memories of his real mother he could perhaps count on one hand, but his father's new wife, Nadya, would get all the washing and cleaning and other housework done. Then, like Vikings of old, they would take their weekly bath. Nadya and Anna boiled buckets and buckets of water on the stove, and Sig and Einar would make trip after trip to the pump for more. Einar would fetch the tin bath from the hook on the outside back wall of the cabin, while Nadya strung a blanket over a line across the far end of the room.
The girls—Anna, Sig's sister, and Nadya, Einar's wife—would be allowed the hottest and cleanest water, and
would go first. They would talk women's gentle talk, if they weren't fighting; they would spit silence at each other if they were. When they'd finished, Einar and Sig would take their turns. Sig loved sitting in the warm water, knees tucked under his chin, watching the snow fall through the end window of the cabin if it were winter, or the shadows moving in the pines if it were summer. What he loved most of all though, was the time spent with his father after the bath, as Nadya and Anna prepared supper.
It was at these times that Einar told Sig important things. The things a son should learn from his father. It was at these times that he told him about the gold days, and the gold lust, or about the revolver, which sat in its original box, like a princess's jewels in a case. And Sig, like a good pupil, would listen, always listen, with maybe a rare question now and again.
“A gun is not a weapon,” Einar once said to Sig. “It's an answer. It's an answer to the questions life throws at you when there's no one else to help.”
Sig hadn't understood what he meant by that. Not then.
And it was at a time just like this that Einar would say to Sig, “Never cross the lake once you see a hooded crow. They only return when the weather's warming. And never cross the lake by the river mouth; the ice is always thinner there. Even in wintertime.”
So why, when Einar had followed his own advice and taken the twisting track around the head of the lake when he went to town that morning, had he come home directly across it?

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