Giving Up the Ghost

 

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KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

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Table of Contents

—Dodge City Times,
1877

 

 

—Mark Twain,
Letters

Consider your death,
whispered the voice in my head.
You are a stem of dry grass broken on the endless prairie, a star fallen from the lower lights to the unforgiving earth, a sparrow trapped in the chimney of an abandoned house.

I turned away from my friend and, with a gloved hand, brushed away the tears scalding my cheeks. Hating myself for my weakness, I smiled and mumbled some excuse about the cold.

“
Cré nom,
” I cursed. “Now I know why it is called the dead of winter.”

“But how still is the air, and soundless,” Doc McCarty said. “So like a dream.”

McCarty knelt beside a mound of dirt, heedless of his trousers, watching as a hired man steadily increased the pile one shovelful at a time on a newly opened grave. The man sang as he worked, a popular tune that the cowboys favored in the bars that lined both sides of Front Street.

“
Oh!
” the hired man cried. “
Give me a gale of the Solomon vale, where the life streams with buoyancy flow.
”

The man's diction was wretched, for he sang with a cheek full of tobacco, but I had heard the tune often enough to know the words. I had no idea where the Solomon valley might be, or why a pleasant wind should blow there, and I had even less of a notion of what magic “life streams” might burble. But it all sounded pleasant enough, even if the song itself was wretched.

It was a Sunday in January, a week after Old Christmas.

The sky was a deepening shade of blue, and the evening star had already appeared as hard and bright as a diamond in the west. The ground was frozen, and the hired man had earlier built bonfires over the graves, and spread the glowing coals, to thaw the earth. Still, he had been forced to use a pickax to break the top few inches. The work had been commissioned six months before, in the stifling heat of summer, but the exhumations were delayed until the cold might serve some sanitary measure.

From our perch on Boot Hill, we had a good view of Dodge City, dull and drowsy now that the cattle season was long over. The last time I had stood on this spot, more than a year before, there was plenty of room between the cemetery and the town; now I could have hit the nearest building with a not too vigorously thrown rock.

A train was at the depot, headed west, crouching toward Colorado. Black smoke curled from its stack and steam gushed from its belly, while it took on water from the tank. Behind the hulking locomotive and its companion tender was a line of cars painted an impatient yellow.

In every other direction the sea of wheat-colored grass on the dormant prairie rustled in the chilling wind, a reminder that to every life winter must come. I pulled my coat tightly around me and turned my back to the wind, but it made me no warmer.

Then the hired man's singing stopped, in the middle of a line about discouraging words. He handed up an object to McCarty.

It was a skull, as white as the natural keys of the piano in the Saratoga Saloon, but caked with the red clay of Boot Hill.

“Who have we here?” McCarty asked.

The hired man said he didn't know, for the grave was unmarked.

“Judging from the roundness, the density of the bone, and the smoothness of the brow ridge—a woman,” McCarty said. “Even in death, the fair sex retains a certain grace.”

“How old was she?” I asked.

“Thirty years or so.”

That was my age.

“May I hold her?” I asked.

“Is that wise?” McCarty asked.

“Considering my temporary burial in Boot Hill, some seasons past? I have come to terms with that unpleasantness. Besides, I would like to regard our ultimate transformation. Hand her over, and gently.”

McCarty passed me the skull, and I was surprised at how light it was. I ran my fingers over the bone, peered into the eye sockets, and traced with my fingers the serpentine channels where pulsating rivulets of blood—those living streams where buoyancy truly flows—had once stoked the thinking and feeling brain inside.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Doc McCarty grew still and the hired hand leaned on the shaft of his shovel, watching, hoping, I think, for me to receive some otherworldly intelligence from the orb in my hands. But there was nary a whisper. Her name may have been unknown to us, but the owner of the skull was among the peaceful dead, having crossed over with no unfinished business behind.

I handed the skull back to McCarty.

“She is a mystery,” I said.

“A whore, most likely,” the hired man said, and spat into the grave.

I cast my best frown upon him.

“If so, no longer,” McCarty said, using his thumb to brush away a clod of dirt from an ivory cheekbone. “The grave has removed every stain of flesh.”

The hired man spat again, harder.

McCarty smiled his knowing, gentle smile.

“‘Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?'” McCarty quoted, turning his soft blue eyes toward me. Then he answered, playing the part of the other grave-digging clown from
Hamlet
as well. “ ‘I tell thee she is, and therefore make her grave straight: the crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial.'”

“You talk nonsense,” the hired man said. “A crowner sitting on a corpse.”

“A crowner is a coroner,” McCarty said. “At least it was in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, a coroner is an official charged with inquests into the deaths of those who may have died by accident or violence, including self-slaughter—and for judging ownership of a treasure trove.”

“Treasure,” the hired man snorted, then wiped tobacco spittle from his chin with the back of a dirty hand. “No buried treasure here, just bones.”

“All the same,” McCarty said. “I am the crowner here and declare her death blameless. I bid you make her new grave straight.”

The man slowly shook his head.

“Colonel Straughn is the coroner,” he said. “And a deputy sheriff for Ford County. The town council gave him the contract for the removals, and he hired me for the work, seeing as how he is in the Colorado gold fields.”

“The fact that the work is a mite unpleasant may have had something to do with it as well,” McCarty said. “I understand John Straughn is the coroner, and I am merely an assistant. I was making a literary point, my friend.”

The hired man scratched his head.

“‘Cudgel thy brains no more,'” McCarty said.

“Lunatics,” he said. “A mad doctor and a . . .”

I looked at him expectantly and his voice trailed off.

“Go on,” I said. “How were you going to describe me?”

His reply was inaudible.

“I'm sorry, I couldn't make that out,” I said. “Were you describing me as perhaps another member of the Cyprian sisterhood?”

“No, girl,” the hired man said. “I was saying how I was afraid of you.”

The answer took me by surprise.

“What have I done?”

“Nothing. Not to me,” the hired man said. “But I hear folks talk.”

“What do they say?”

“Pay him no mind,” McCarty urged.

“No, I'd like to hear it.”

I asked the hired man his name.

“Decker.”

“Well, Decker. You needn't be afraid. Tell me.”

“They say you're a witch.”

I took this in for a moment.

“Is that all?”

“The way you dress,” he said. “It's a puzzle.”

I smiled.

“You are kind for telling me,” I said.

He gave a shrug, then turned back to his work.

“It's late,” McCarty said, glancing at the darkening sky. Then he placed the skull in a wooden box, along with some other bones. Around us there were dozens of other open graves, where the hill had reluctantly given up its dead. The bones and crumbling coffins and sometimes mummified remains with crossed boots as pillows were being removed to a new cemetery, a patch of consecrated ground a half mile northeast of town, a somber garden surrounded by a white wooden fence and which had rows and walkways and where burial plots sold for five dollars each. The new cemetery was called Prairie Grove, although there were no trees.

It was the end of Boot Hill.

The idea made me feel peculiar, because in newspapers across the country the ramshackle little cemetery had come to represent Dodge City—the wildest and most wicked and undoubtedly the weirdest town in the West. We had climbed the hill on that cold winter afternoon to say good-bye to Boot Hill and its inhabitants, a move forced by the town council to make way for new homes.

Doc McCarty and I were the only mourners.

Decker, the hired man, began singing that bloody song again.

“Home, home on the range
.
”

The deer and antelope played, there was never a discouraging word, and the skies were not cloudy all day.

My dark inner voice immediately spun back the lyrics.

“Can't you sing something different?” I asked. “Something less cloyingly cheerful?”

And harder to parody,
I added silently.

Decker leaned on the handle of his spade and stared stupidly at me.

“I like the song,” he said.

“That doesn't mean you should infect the rest of us with it.”

McCarty gave me a disapproving look.

“Pardon,” I said. “But it's a horrible song. I don't think the person who wrote it has ever been here. This is the edge of the world; the summers are hellish, the winters are brutal, and the damned wind never stops blowing. The only governing principles of human behavior here seem to be the seven deadlies, with assorted ve-nials thrown in for good measure.”

Decker sighed.

“Not to worry,” McCarty said. “We must be leaving.”

My friend stood, then attempted to brush the clay from his knees.

“You've ruined another pair of Montgomery Wards,” I observed.

McCarty cursed.

“What do you want me to do with the other one?” Decker asked.

“The other
what?
” McCarty asked, still swatting at his knees.

“The other pumpkin,” Decker said. “Kalamazoo Charley. The one that has been ventilated right here.”

Decker tapped his left temple.

“Oh, I almost forgot about him,” McCarty said. “Bring the skull to my office, won't you?”

“You're not going to keep it, are you?” I asked.

“What's a doctor's office without a grinning skull sitting on the desk, especially an interesting one with a bullet hole?” McCarty said. “No, my dear, I'm not going to keep it; my interest is strictly academic, and Kalamazoo Charley's head will be rejoined with the rest of his bones once my examination is complete.”

“It still seems morbid,” I said.

“It's not morbid,” McCarty said. “It's science. Come, let us get you home. To warmth.”

“That's the loveliest thought I've heard today.”

He offered his arm and I took it.

“Why so melancholy?” McCarty asked as we walked down the hill. “Is your last adventure troubling you?”

“Why, Doc,” I said. “You're not as oblivious as you seem. And, I should remind you, it was
our
adventure.”

“I haven't decided on a title.”

“Not to your liking?”

“Sounds like a patent application. I was thinking of something along the lines of
The Ghost in the Wire.
But I'm sure my publisher, Mr. Garrick Sloane of Boston, will have his own ideas about the title—and choose something that conjures a warm, rather than frightening, image, as he did with my first two modest efforts. In any event, the case is properly resolved, and all that is left is to put it to paper.”

“So it is not the case that vexes you,” McCarty said. “Has something transpired lately to cause some private agony?”

“All the best agonies are private ones.”

“Confide in me, Ophie.”

I paused, and because our arms were looped, this caused McCarty to stop as well. He searched my face with those bright eyes, and I looked upon that familiar face beneath the shock of boyish hair, and I softened a bit. If there was one person I could trust with a secret, it was Doc. He was the closest thing to kin I had in the world, and I loved him as I would a favorite uncle.

“Tom,” I said. “I have been reflecting of late on morbid things.”

“That is your line of work.”

“No,” I said. “I have been dwelling on intensely personal morbid things. My own mental voice has become a stranger to me, whispering the worst thoughts. As if my own soul mocks me.”

“This isn't some kind of possession?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It is, sadly, me—but the darkest and most hopeless version of me, and driven as mad as my namesake.”

“Do you feel this darkest of Ophelias is urging you to—”

“Drown myself in the Arkansas?”

McCarty paused before replying.

“Yes,” he said.

“No.”

“There are other ways of breaking the mortal coil,” he said.

“I dislike guns.”

“You have a fierce imagination,” McCarty said. “There are innumerable substitutes. Besides, women seldom commit the act with a firearm. They are most likely to use poison, in my experience.”