Authors: Pete Dexter
He burned the letters into a piece of good oak and nailed that to a fence post. He was pounding the post into the ground when he heard the buggy. He stopped his work and reached for his shirt, not to offend widows or children visiting the deceased.
Before he got to the first button, though, he heard Jane's voice. "Git up, now," she said to the horse, "git, git, git. . ." He buttoned himself faster and turned around in time to see the horse skid in the mud. Jane whipped him until he straightened. Then she pulled back hard against his bit. He wondered where she'd stolen him.
She said, "Whoa, there, damnit, whoa . . ."
The horse stopped and Charley stood still. "Colorado Charley," she said over the sounds of the horse. "I didn't expect to find you."
Charley didn't answer. "I been hurt," she said, "or I would of been here sooner." He nodded. "It's my leg," she said. "I broke it two places, so they tied it to the ceiling in Rapid City."
Charley noticed the creases in her neck had a green hue. He surmised it was mold. She saw him staring and pulled the brim of her hat down even with her eyes, but there was more wrong than shadows could cover.
"You got bad legs yourself, as I remember," she said.
"Not too bad," he said. The work had started them aching, though, and he knew it would be three or four days before they gave him any peace.
"They tie yours to the ceiling?" she said.
Charley shook his head. He didn't like to talk about his leg injuries with just anybody. There was something in the nature of bad legs that people felt free to bring up their condition as polite conversation, like the weather. It was like they all had an equal stake in it.
"Well, they tied mine," she said, "and left me more than a month, whilst poor Bill got shot with nobody there to watch his back."
Charley felt the bite in that, but let it pass. Bill was like bad legs—common property. "I heard the coward's been arrested and took to Yankton," she said.
"I heard that."
"A pity," she said, "that Bill's friends couldn't of caught up with him first, and done it, tit for tat." She slid over the seat of the buggy and looked at him closer. It was mold, all right, and she smelled like a dead cat.
"I thought you would of done it yourself," she said.
He shook his head. "You don't know a thing about it."
She pulled back away from him and fixed him a stare. "Ain't no call to talk like that," she said. "I got as much stake in this as anybody, I expect."
"You don't have any such thing," he said.
"The hell I don't. That man was my husband."
Charley stood dead still and looked up into the buggy. She pulled her hat down farther on her head and said it again. "We was married," she said.
He stared at her, she stared back. "I'm not going to allow this," he said.
"I ain't after no inheritance," she said.
"I know what you're after," he said, "and you can't have it."
She moved again and began to lower herself out of the buggy. She put her weight on her arms and he saw that she was going to fall. Against his will, he grabbed her sides and saved her.
She stood on one leg when he let her go, looking at the new grave marker. "That ain't bad for now," she said, "but Bill ought to have a statue."
He looked at what he'd done and thought she was probably right. "It's temporary," he said. "They put one up before this, it said Bill was forty-eight years old."
She laughed out loud. "He wasn't but twenty-seven when we got married," she said. He picked the sledgehammer back up and finished pounding the post into the ground. He felt her behind him, watching.
"The man at the livery took my crutch," she said. "To remind me whose buggy it was. I never heard of anywhere but Rapid City that they'd take a widder's crutch."
"You're no widow," he said, "unless you married an Indian and he committed suicide."
"I ain't going to set here arguing it in front of Bill's grave," she said. "I got more respect for the dead than that." She hobbled from the buggy to the head of the grave, and rested her weight on the marker. The move exhausted her, and she hung on to the marker like it was Bill himself.
"I hurt right down to my toes," she said after a while. "You never felt the way I do right now."
Charley looked her over and said, "Probably not."
She cried out then, and lowered herself onto the ground. He saw her leg bent a couple of inches below the knee. "It's a damn bobcat in there," she said, and he began to feel sorry.
"That's the healing," he said. "The more it hurts, the faster it mends." He made that up, and she believed it. Jane let go of the leg and lay on her back, holding her face in her hands.
"Is there a sawbones in this city would part with some morphine for a widder?" she said. "Or do they all want cash?"
"You never married Bill," he said. He would give her anything else, but not that.
"You wasn't with him every minute of his life," she said. "You wasn't even there when he got kilt, so how do you know what he done?"
"The same way I know a horse never climbed a tree," he said. She closed her fingers in front of her eyes and he saw he had hurt her feelings.
"It's true," she said. "Him and me loved each other."
"No," he said. Anything else, but not that.
"I can prove it," she said. "We was married in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I got the legal papers, except they took them at the hospital whilst my leg was tied to the ceiling."
Charley shook his head. "Bill never went to Lincoln except once by accident, from Chicago on the Union Pacific. He said the place was full of card cheats."
"It don't have to be Lincoln," she said, "but it was Nebraska. I remember that." And she began to cry again, in earnest. "That man and me was married," she said.
And he pitied her and let it go.
"Dr. O. E. Sick's got morphine," he said after a while, and that seemed to take her mind off Bill.
"Is he tight with a dollar? Would he trust me for it?"
"He doesn't care much about payment, now that you mention it."
She said, "That don't sound like a doctor."
Charley said, "I saw his work up close, and he can scowl as well as the next one."
She dried her cheeks with the back of her wrist and sat up. She touched her leg below the knee and made a painful face. Charley's own legs were pounding, and he wondered how long she meant to stay there on the ground.
"You might catch the doctor in his office, if you went now," he said. "He hates it to be summoned after office hours."
She shook her head. "I come out of a hospital bed to pay my respects, and I mean to do it before I deliver myself back into the hands of doctors." Charley waited. "You just going to stand there," she said after a while, "or you got enough manners to help a widder to her feet?" He got behind her and put his hands under her arms. She felt soft and unhealthy. He got her up, and she stood on one foot, looking down at the fresh grave. He started into the trees, to give her some privacy. "Where the hell are you going?" she said.
"I'll be back," he said. He walked fifty yards uphill and found her a straight piece of birch five feet long, almost no taper at all. A limb had been broken off about halfway up. He sat on the ground and put the wood between his legs and planed off the knots with his knife. He took the bark off the limb and rounded the end. It took less than ten minutes, and when he was finished he stood up and put one end against his shoulder and saw that the limb was a good height for a handle, and that the crutch was light enough so Jane would be able to use it.
He went back to the cemetery and found her still on one foot, leaning against the marker again. He stepped into dried branches, so she would hear him coming.
"You finished?"
She looked at him without answering, and he saw she needed something for the pain. "We can find the doctor now," he said. He handed her the piece of birch.
"I got to ast you something," she said. "Betwixt you and me, on threat of death if it gets out."
Charley shook his head. His own legs hurt, and he didn't like talking to Jane Cannary in a cemetery. "How come it's always got to be on threat of death?" he said. "How come you can't just ask me what you want to ask? How come you can't just feel bad for Bill like anybody else, instead of marrying him after he's gone?"
"We was married before," she said. He closed his eyes. "I can prove it."
"The doc will be closed soon," he said.
"He can wait a minute more." She bit her lip and framed her question. "What I want to know is what you're s'posed to do at graveside."
He'd wondered the same thing.
"I come out of a hospital bed, compounded-fractured, to pay my respects, but I'm damned to hell if I can figure out what I'm doin' here, or what I'm s'posed to say."
"There isn't any rule," he said. "It's better not to say anything, though, than to lie. It's just you and the dead, so there's no reason to make anything up. It's sacrilegious."
Jane took it serious.
He walked back into the trees again, thinking that underneath all her habits and affectations, Jane was true. He heard her voice then, which got louder as he got farther away. "Bill," she said, "I'm sorry you got kilt from behind like that, and I'm sorry I wasn't there to help you when it happened." There was a pause while she drew breath.
"And it makes a girl feel horrible," she said, "to be away from her husband at a time such as that."
The funeral service for Preacher Smith was conducted by Sheriff Seth Bullock, who read from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. It was the first Episcopal service ever held in Dead-wood, and followed by one day the celebration of the China Doll's passing into the next world.
Among those attending both services was Malcolm Nash, who felt no preference, one over the other. He went from each service back to Preacher Smith's cabin, where he sat on the cot and waited. The preacher had taught him to wait. "You are lost, so shall you be found," he said. The preacher was writing a new Bible—the Bible of the Black Hills—and after he said that, he wrote it down in the book.
The book had red covers and sat on the table near the preacher's cot. It was still the preacher's cot; Malcolm slept on the floor. The book had three inches of pages—the biggest, heaviest diary you could buy at Farnum's—but only the first ten were written on. That's how far he had gotten. Preacher Smith said it was a life work, and then he'd looked at Malcolm and smiled. "Perhaps two lives," he said. And five days later was dead on the trail to Crook City.
A delegation of Methodists came to the cabin to look for an address for the preacher's wife. "At least the Indians didn't mutilate him," they said. "At least that."
There was no address in the cabin, nothing written down at all except the first ten pages of the Bible of the Black Hills, and Malcolm hid that. Preacher Smith had said it wasn't for everyday Christians. "This Bible is for those that seen too much," he said. "You will recognize them, because you have seen too much also." The boy accepted that, without remembering what it was that he had seen.
The preacher worked at the book in the evening, after he came back from the sawmill. He bent over his writing, his left hand curled around his pen. The boy could see from the look on his face that it hurt to write.
He was afraid to be hurt.
Preacher Smith believed God spoke through his hand, and he told the boy that God might speak through his hand too, when it was his turn. And when the preacher was buried and quiet, with a dozen tears in his chest where the arrows and knives had been, the boy looked at the new Bible and hoped it wasn't his turn yet.
He walked to the table near the cot and let his fingers touch the letters that Preacher Smith had pressed into the cover, bible of the black hills. Beneath that, he had drawn a sketch of the Hills. An angel with a serpent's head and a halo hung over the mountain peaks.
It was a perfect serpent—detailed right down to the indentations below the eyes—and an imperfect angel. The angel-serpent was the first thing Preacher Smith drew, and the boy commented on the exactness of the snake's head.
"That's because I seen a snake," the preacher said. And the boy stared at him a long time that night, after the preacher had gone to sleep, because he had thought all ministers had seen angels.
He traced the serpent head with his finger now; the preacher had pressed it deep into the Bible. Then the boy opened the book, before he had time to consider the consequences, and stared at the first page.
THE BOOK OF HIRAM
In the beginning, there was the Hills and God, who is of two sides. In these regions, His evil side roamed, whilst His good occupied Itself in places where it was flatter and easier to see. Like Kansas.
And whilst He created light and dark, and the seas and land, and
man and woman; His evil side created the Indians and put gold in the earth.
And God did not know that was what His evil side did, but dreamed it at night, in dreams He could not remember when He woke. And God was afraid, because he knew of His evil side, but did not know how powerful it was.
The boy closed the book and put it back on the table. He stared at the serpent's head, and saw Preacher Smith's body laid out naked and torn and white in the back room of the barber shop. And he saw that the preacher was right, and saw what the evil side of the Lord had done.
He was suddenly fearful, and sat down on the cot. He knew, even before the thought shaped in his head, that it had been given to him to finish the preacher's work. Not to finish the Bible of the Black Hills—the boy could barely write—but to find the evil side of the Lord, the one that had spoke to Preacher Smith in his dreams.
He did not know where the battleground would be, it did not concern him, now that he saw his purpose. He lay back on the preacher's cot and found it accommodated his size. He closed his eyes and waited. It was a time of change in the forces of good and evil, and the boy had been picked. He waited to see what for.