CHAPTER 6
Justice Street
HEPHAESTUS LOCATED PETRIE’S BLACKSMITH SHED AGAIN WITHOUT much difficulty, and found to his relief that Petrie was too busy to be mad at his late arrival—and too perplexed. As it turned out, his chief hand, Rawknor, had been one of the Bushrod Rangers who was struck blind. Petrie had no truck whatsoever with vigilantes, but he had benefited from Rawknor’s skill and was now ashamed of himself for not speaking out about his suspicions regarding his employee’s private activities. A bit of counsel at the right moment might have been all it took to turn the fellow back to the path of honesty and tolerance. Now it might well be too late. News, or rather rumors, about the incident had swept through the town, and, being more centrally located than the Clutters, Petrie had learned about the unheard-of occurrence just after breakfast. In fact, he had heard about it while astride the privy, his bowels greased with grits, and in his consternation had almost forgotten to hitch up his pants. Now blackened and sweating in his heavy apron, all he wanted was to put the matter out of mind in a banging frenzy of work, and he was just happy to have another set of hands to help him. Unlike the Clutters, Petrie ran a thriving enterprise.
Out of practice with his old trade, the lame Ohioan was hard-pressed to keep pace with his Missouri benefactor and to shake himself from the happenings, not to mention the difficult circumstances the family was continually having to adjust to, and the hopes and expectations regarding his brother’s legacy, which were beginning to reemerge with intensifying urgency as a consequence of his sobriety. But he and Petrie’s apprentice, a beefy, silent lad named Badger, set to with bellows, tongs, and hammers, and soon the familiar smells and sounds swept Hephaestus away from his and the family’s troubles. The best tonic for psychological tension is exacting physical work, and the clubfooted former inventor and drunkard found his body, if not his whole being, remembering the tasks, the touch, and the satisfaction in the exertion, as if he had stepped back into his old life again, like a worn, comfortable set of clothes. He figured if anyone knew the best way to locate a wagon and animals in Independence it would be Petrie, and so he set out to impress his employer with gusto for the job.
Meanwhile, Rapture and Lloyd, who had been entrusted with the family funds, turned their attention to the kinds of nonperishable foodstuffs and basic utensils they would need. Not surprisingly, everything seemed overpriced or of suspect quality. But they had been through so much already that this did not deter them. For mother and son, what had started off as an intimidating and alienating exercise turned into a bonding excursion. The economy of the town ran on a haggling/bartering basis, which worked to the Zanesvilleans’ advantage, for with her wits now cleared, Rapture had an arsenal of negotiating resources to draw upon, and with Lloyd’s shrewd eyes and his unexpected acuity, the two of them worked well as a team, managing to at least identify and reconnoiter the price of the bulk of what they would require. Shifting into her whitest diction and demeanor, Rapture confused many of the merchants and shopkeepers, as well as the wily street traders. Others, like the Indians and the Spaniards, cared nothing about her ancestry or her plans—they had seen all sorts of people pass through and were concerned only for their own advantage.
Most of their purchases the Sitturds set aside to pick up later and some they arranged to have delivered to the Clutters’ doorstep, hoping to time their arrival back at the undertaker’s accordingly. Others they garnered some advance intelligence about, with the intention of returning to bargain more forcefully once they had a wagon and were ready to depart. The recognition that they had made it this far bolstered them both in their own ways, and the thrill and doubts about what lay ahead for them on the trail to Texas, and the possibilities of Micah’s property and a new life, filled both their heads with a new immediacy—a condition that was reflected in the weather, for the air was rich with the scent of rain.
Their conspiratorial sense of achievement was interrupted (at about the same time that Petrie was offering Hephaestus a cold-meat snack and proposing a price for a wagon and two draft horses that he himself owned) by an altercation in the main street. Mother and son had just dined on a pig-knuckle-and-collards revitalization purchased from an old cook wagon, when their attention was drawn to a row brewing between what looked like a heavyset young miscreant and a hardscrabble muleteer of indeterminate age.
On closer inspection, the muleteer proved to be female, but she had the posture and bearing of a man, and she appeared to have been interrupted in the midst of the same sort of supply-gathering errand they were on. Her hair was cut short under a flat storm-worn felt hat the color of dried blood. She wore the same kind of coat Lloyd had seen on the mail rider who passed through town earlier that morning, but with a store-bought shirt and pipe-leg trousers that contrasted sharply with her mud-flecked boots. There was a perceptible bulge under her coat, and, notwithstanding the straightness of her back, her hips seemed to lean as when a door needs a hinge tightened, so that even just standing she gave the impression of a swagger. Lloyd had never seen a woman with such a masculine aura. Rapture, sensing trouble they did not want to be a part of, pulled her son aside. But she, too, was curious, for the frontierish-garbed woman seemed to show no signs of concern, even as the young ruffian was joined by a foursome of shady comrades, one of whom cradled a bullwhip with a menacing gentleness.
“Hey there, sugar gal,” the meaty yokel gibed. “You want some help drinkin’ that?” He gave a phlegmy spit in the mud and laughed.
The woman dressed in man’s clothing had just added a small crate of what looked like whiskey bottles onto a horse-drawn cart loaded with sacks of rice, flour, and beans. She seemed to be ticking off items against a list in her head, not paying the question any mind. Her face was lined but expressionless, her thin, pointed jaw set, mouth tight-lipped, with a long sprig of chin hair brazenly jutting out. Both the Sitturds gathered that the hulking pupstart had been following her for a while, making increasingly unwanted overtures. There was a feeling of slow-burning animosity to the scene, and the other folk nearby either stopped to gawk or shuffled on faster, heads cast down.
“I need no help, sonny boy, as I’ve told you. Now get along and go do a man’s work.”
“Bet you know ’bout that,” the boor bellowed. “Look like you piss standin’ up!”
His fellows joined in his unsavory mirth. Rapture cringed, feeling a sympathetic twinge of female loyalty and fear. Lloyd wondered where the woman’s menfolk were, and why none of the other people around showed any signs of standing up for her. The woman herself showed no sign of alarm—just like Hattie. Only growing annoyance.
“At least I don’t need help when I do,” the woman replied, and finished stowing and securing the cart without so much as a glance at her provoker.
The Sitturds’ stomachs turned at this, for they saw that the men all stepped closer as a ripple of jeers spread around the ring they formed.
“Hey, Josh. I think this bearded lady is sassin’ you!” the one with the bullwhip said, chuckling.
“Lady? Shit. Gimme that,” the big one called Josh murmured, hawking up another glob of spit, and reaching out for the bullwhip. “I’m Joshua Breed, you trouser-wearer. Do you know who ma pappy is?”
“No,” the woman said without a change of expression. “And I’m not surprised that you don’t. Your mama probably doesn’t, either.”
Hoots of malicious cackles and curses stirred around the circle as the onlookers cleared off, and the galumph who had identified himself as Joshua Breed stood fuming—a thick vein in his forehead beginning to throb, as he clutched the whip handle and smoothed out the length in his other hand.
The others were all ribbing him now and egging him on. The Sitturds flinched back against a plank wall. Rapture, who was by nature a feisty woman herself, dared not take a stand without Hephaestus against a group of men such as these. She would just put herself at risk and endanger Lloyd by doing so—but she could not bring herself to turn away, for Lloyd’s feet were rooted in place, his young green eyes wide open. Inside his coat, he reached for the Ambassadors’ box. A fury was building up inside him—at the cowardice of the other townsfolk, the stupid lugs before him. Why would no one step up to help? From the corner of his eye, he saw that the Ambassadors’ carved box was beginning to glimmer.
He could see that there was something about this woman that angered and scared not just the bruisers but the so-called respectable people, too. It was like the resentment and loathing the Quists aroused. He did not understand it, but having been a victim of prejudice and violence himself, he identified with it, and with her.
Against his better judgment about calling attention to himself and his mother, he would step forward to stick up for her. Somehow, he felt as if he were defending his ghost sister—and his beloved Hattie. And Miss Viola. He felt the Eye reaching out to him just as he was reaching for it. Would it work again?
What would happen if he torched the stooges in their tracks right there in the main street? He was torn between putting himself and his mother at risk and doing—at least trying to do—right by this stranger. His joints seemed to lock, and yet he felt his hand open the box, seeking the summoning heat of the cool green sphere—like a crystal of electric judgment. He felt a need to demonstrate the power. A glorious, gluttonous need. It was only this that made him hesitate, a fear of the Eye—a fear that the weapon wanted to use him, or that he wanted to use it for the wrong reason. The terror of all that energy surging through him. What if he ignited himself? How could he summon forth what he did not understand? Perhaps the Eye had rules, secrets. He stifled his grasp, his little boots scuffing at the dried mud where they stood. The box shimmered softly beneath his coat, as if speaking to him in a language he did not comprehend yet which reflected his inner thoughts.
“I saw you ooglin’ the dance girl at the Two Dollar the other night,” Joshua Breed growled. “We know what kind you are. An’ we don’t like it.”
He raised the whip over his head and then levered down his arm with a jerk, so that the tongue of leather thong lashed out and cracked at the caked mud of a wagon rut beside the hair-chinned woman’s feet.
“Stop it!” Lloyd cried, bursting out of his mother’s grasp. “Leave her be!”
Rapture was both horrified and proud of her son’s boldness, but these emotions gave way to sheer fright. As smart as her son was, he was still an impetuous boy—all too capable of thrusting them into hot water on a sudden impulse. She braced herself for a collision with ugliness.
Lloyd, meanwhile, had secured the box inside his coat, opting not to bring forth the Eye unless forced to. The life experience he had gained away from his parents’ attention stood him in better stead than his mother knew. The sight of a small boy, unarmed, standing up to a bunch of grown men, who were well known for such shenanigans, had a galvanizing effect on the other bystanders. Another man, in suspenders and a heavy woolen shirt, picked up a small spade that had been leaning against a keg. He said nothing, but his intention was suggestive. Of course, if anyone had known the power that Lloyd had at his disposal, if he was again able to channel it, there would not have been a person left in the street. But no one knew that and so assumed that the boy was acting out of raw courage.
The surprise at this eruption from a mere child stalled the gang and might have bluffed the others, but for the one called Josh the matter had already gone too far. He gave the impression of every movement being a complicated negotiation between his limbs and his brain, and looked to be the kind of saloon brawler who throws huge haymakers that land only if an opponent happens to be drunker than he is. His face had all the telltale nicks and scars of a lifetime of petty combat, and, like a dog too stupid to stop chasing wagons, he wasn’t going to stop now.
He did, however, know how to handle the bullwhip, and he let it fly and smack at Lloyd’s feet. The boy saw it coming, as if in a dream, and reached for the box. The death rage was upon him now, a hot green madness, as if the threat of the violence had shut down his reason. The barking snake of leather retreated and the oaf’s frame swiveled, whether to strike again in his direction or to attack the woman it was impossible just then to say. It did not matter, for faster than anyone could see, the woman flipped back her coat and whipped from a holster around her waist a Colt revolver. A shot blasted from the long barrel and took the whip clean out of Breed’s grasp. He yelped and grabbed his bloodied hand with his other, sagging to his knees. Everyone else stood startled by the weapon. Colt revolvers had been heard about by many but were still rare in those days, and although this had the same lines as the ones that some of the rubberneckers, including Breed and his gang, had seen before, it was also different—some advanced new model. It looked heavy, scientific, and deadly—and the ease with which the rail-post woman wielded it caused a communal stir in the street.
Breed tried to yank something from his own pocket, but the woman nailed him cleanly in the other hand, so that he screamed and pressed the wounded paw between his arm and his ribs in agony and astonishment. Horses bucked and stray dogs ducked under the boardwalk.
“Now, that’s just a shame,” the woman said without any intonation. “With both hands hurt, you’re going to have to get one of your friends to wipe your ass.”
One of the men picked up a piece of timber. She shot it in half, one section whacking the man in the temple and knocking him cold. One of the others bolted like a jackrabbit. Another stepped back toward where a group of horses were tethered. He pulled a rifle from a saddle scabbard. As he stood in profile, a shot whizzed past and plucked his belt buckle clean off, dropping his pants to his ankles.
“Know what I’m going to shoot off next?” the woman asked. She pulled a well-chewed cheroot from a breast pocket and popped it in her mouth, savoring it like a fresh stem of grass. Shit-scared, the man dropped his gun and dragged up his pants.
Some people in the street were laughing now, many chuckling and whispering. What was happening to Breed and his boys was something a lot of folks had longed to see. Others had run for cover or were bustling away to either call for help or seek refuge in one of the stores. Lloyd stood still in the same spot where the whip had struck, with his hand on the box under his arm, Rapture frozen in place a few feet away against the wall. Joshua Breed wheezed with hurt and humiliation and regained his feet, his eyes a mix of terror and hatred. He turned, and the Colt cracked again. Now it was his pants that fell, and a round of applause went up from those still in position. Then, flustered and off balance, he tumbled down into the rutted mud, clutching at his guts to make sure they were still in place. The fourth gang member made a move as if to charge, but the woman stood her ground and produced another revolver from beneath her coat, and leveled it at the man’s chest, all the time sucking on the old cheroot.
“All right, boys. Who’s going to wipe your friend’s ass? His hands will be a while healing. I reckon he’ll need to have many a squat before then. Or would you like another question? Like who wants to die first?”
This inquiry took everyone off guard. Whether it was the woman’s unruffled demeanor or the comical effects she had achieved, up to that moment the thought of a homicidal act had seemed unlikely, despite the lethal force at hand. Of course, there was the potential for something nasty to happen, but she seemed too in control for such a thing. Now her dispassionate mastery sent out a chill in the crowd. Only Lloyd was immune. He in fact felt an obscure kinship with it. Hattie was like that, in her own way.
Breed wriggled on his knees, trying to stand up, his tattered dirty long johns showing, flesh wounds and broken fingers in both hands. There was a rascally, doomed look in his face. All his bluster had been cowed. He more than half believed the woman would shoot him. And a part of him wanted it. To see the glee in some of the surrounding eyes was a fate more horrible than he could have imagined. To have to live with the memory and the constant reminders was more than he thought he could endure. And what would his father say? Portion Breed, reclusive leader of the local renegades—extortionist, horse thief, and reputed murderer, who holed up somewhere along the river and sent his riders venturing out (the old villain himself had not been seen in years) to pilfer the town when need be, plague the settlers, cheat the Indians and Spaniards, and bleed the neighboring country for whatever they could get, appearing in town only in groups of four or more to get drunk, molest the dance girls, and then scoot back to their hiding places until the next foray—oh, to think what his father would say if he saw him now. Josh Breed would have preferred a headshot. But something worse was in store.
“Lad,” the woman called, turning her head just enough to address Lloyd. “You’re more of a man and a gentleman than anyone else I can see here. And I reckon you’ve got a score to settle with this dolly dumpling yourself for trying to horsewhip you. Go over to my cart. Down between the groceries you’ll find my trusty old cane.”
Lloyd darted a glance at his mother, but turned when Rapture hissed at him. He did not think it wise to ignore the woman with the revolvers, and he was curious about the request. He went to her pony cart and rummaged about until he did indeed find a cane, of a kind that reminded him of the insufferable schoolhouse back in Zanesville.
Breed’s remaining mates held their ground, one still stretched out in a stupor, the other two trembling in their boots, too afraid to run because the woman was such an accurate shot. No one else had the nerve to say a thing, and the crowd that had re-formed was too amorphous a creature to have any spine, and so gave in to prurience. Just what did this unnatural woman have in mind?
“Is this what you mean?” Lloyd asked, and to everyone watching he seemed much smaller and younger than he really was, sidling between the horse cart and the rough-hewn figure holding the fancy guns without a single quaver in her arms. Where had she come by such novel weapons, and how in blazes had she learned to use them so well? That was the question on everyone’s lips. (It would have been phrased rather more caustically by Josh Breed, but the essence was the same.) The poor fool struggled to his feet at last, straining to raise his britches,when the woman squeezed one of the triggers again and clipped a clod in front of him, which sprayed muck on him and sent him sprawling down in a collapse of cursing.
“That’s just right.” She nodded to Lloyd. “Now, none of you boys have had the stones to answer my question, which surprises me not one bit. You there, Joshua you called yourself? As if I should know or care. Well, my name is Fanny Ockleman—Fast Fanny to you. But once upon a time I used to be a schoolteacher. A terror, they called me when it came to discipline. Do you know what I did with unruly boys? Boys who showed no respect and thought they could bullyrag others?”
The whole street was silent. Even the animals seemed to be listening.
“I caned them, Joshua. I caned their hides for all to see.”
Hoots and catcalls went up around the gathering, and various children and stragglers dashed down the planks to spread the word. Joshua Breed had lost his pants and his wits and was going to get a whuppin’ by a gun-totin’ woman with a good start on a beard. Oh, this was too sweet to miss!
But the woman who called herself Fanny Ockleman did not take the cane switch from Lloyd, but instead directed him over toward the hapless Breed, who groveled in the mud. The trail buddy farthest away hightailed it off like a bleating goat. The other one, who had dropped the rifle, made a lunge for it, and had it shot from his grasp, so that the butt splintered and cut his face. He groped for his trousers and pivoted to flee in one motion—but the next shot forced him to dive for a horse trough, which he splashed into like a sack of corn heaved from a wagon, producing a roar of laughter from the spectators.
The news had reached the attention of what passed for the law in town, but, still reeling from the events of the previous night, with one of his deputies having been among the blinded vigilantes, and no love for the Breeds, who more or less ruled the vicinity, the so-called sheriff was not quick to try to assert authority now. Josh Breed knew that, with his friends on the run or incapacitated, he could not count on any help that would come in time. He peered up through bloodshot eyes and saw the little boy he had threatened with the whip striding toward him with the cane.
“Son,” Fanny intoned, lowering her guns. “I want you to give that blowhard a good licking. Five of the finest you can deliver. And one more for good measure.”
“You bitch!” Breed screamed, clawing at the mud with bullet-grazed mitts—desperate to scramble upright and grab for Lloyd all at once. He wanted to bite that blasted woman’s throat out. But he did not even manage to make it up to his haunches before Fanny had grazed his shin with another bullet, just as she had meant to do. Breed plopped forward, facedown in the street, his long-johnned rear end exposed now to Lloyd and the upraised cane.
“You know what to do,” Fanny called to Lloyd across the street, and expertly spat a full three feet without losing her cheroot. “Five of the best you can give, and one more to make the memory sore.”
While all this had been happening, Rapture had been beside herself with worry for Lloyd, and now to see him actively engaged gave her a rushing sense of disorientation, not unlike what she had experienced when the odd music box was opened back at the Clutters’. She saw him once again as utterly remote from her. He seemed to fit into the scene before her like a piece of puzzle slotted into position, and the thought filled her heart with dread. There was something monstrous in him that she could not accept as having come from inside herself. Truly, he seemed more the child of this man-witch, who had brought the beasts of the frontier village under her spell with an eerily composed violence of the kind that is not learned easily and was somehow invested with an authority far beyond the ken of the shopkeepers and malingerers there to witness it. The sky had gone jet-black over half the town, a harsh religious flare of sun striking a gunmetal edge along the running sheet of storm cloud. Rapture prayed that the lightning would come and disperse the gathering. But it did not come quite in time.
Lloyd stood above the prostrate figure of Joshua Breed, wounded, humbled, defenseless now. The boy saw in his mind the way the tough had directed the whip at him. One pass to scare, the next to smart. Every taunt and insult he had ever been subject to came back to him. The harassers of Zanesville. The robbers along the road. The devil in the lane in St. Louis.
He felt again those meat-slab hands on his slender hips. The excruciating agony of the penetration … the reaming … like an auger in a summer melon. The boar-heavy grunting … and the high-pitched laughter. The stench of the dung cart. And the smack of the spittle the beast let loose on the granite cobblestone when he was done with his desecration. It all came back. Everyone who had ever angered or abused him. The brats who had sabotaged his shrine to his sister, the pig who had tortured his beloved Hattie. He would repay all the evil debts, and he slashed down through the air with the cane, slicing across the filthy long johns with a fiendish sense of release and power. Again and again he struck, as the creature before him howled and squirmed. The force he felt in his little arm was like unto the wave of energy that had radiated through him from the Eye. His sense of time and the street scene around him blurred. There was just the thrashing joy of his vengeance, intoxicating him like a drug. Where before he had always had to outsmart his enemies—or use the Eye—to unleash some demonic force that had amazed him as much as his victims, here he was enjoying the animal truth of physical aggression and he gorged on it, whaling on the vulnerable idiot without mercy. He did not hear the call of Fanny Ockleman or his mother. He did not hear the thunder rumbling like a hundred laden wagons. He did not hear the cries of Joshua Breed, who had soiled his underwear at the second shot and was now bleeding across his exposed buttocks.
It was not the rain that came in bullet-size drops which finally awakened him again to himself and his actions. Nor was it that he had felt himself becoming erect upon raising the cane the second time—the blood-hot thrill of revenge firing through his whole body, seeking outlet in his loins, while the whine of the sturdy strand and the sharp bite on the exposed ass was the ultimate sign of surrender and an invitation to torture. No.
It was something else. Something other.
They appeared on the periphery of his vision, standing in a line in the street, which no one else seemed to take any notice of. He in fact did not notice them visually at first at all. He was animally aware of them before sighting them. Even then, he did not feel that he saw them, but more that they allowed him to become aware of them where others were not.
There were six women—or so he thought—all dressed in pristine white ruffled dresses. They were as clear as anything could be, and yet somehow seemed veiled, remote. At first, he would have said they reminded him of Mother Tongue. But their dresses were stark and formal, and seemed not to be worn by them, exactly, but more by parts of them—as if they were inside some sort of armor, wedded to it the way St. Ives was joined with his hand.
Beyond the inexplicable cleanliness of their attire, given the environment, there was about them a summoning grimness that called to mind the gossiping biddies who had so plagued his and the family’s life back in Zanesville—the sharp-tongued shrews who hid behind hoopskirts, complaining shawls, and what passed for women’s stovepipe hats in those days, matronly old skullcaps tied with ribbons under the chin, only frilly and without color. The instant he was conscious of them, they filled him with a new kind of malice and unease. Abhorrence. Aversion.
No ensemble could have been less intimidating at a glance, not relative to the night thugs he had faced off against with the Eye. But that was not what his instinct told him. It screamed out to him a very contrary message.
These were ones who did not fear the Eye. These were one.
They stood not just in a line but in a plane of vision, or at least perception. There was a dimensionality to them that both seeped forward toward him and receded backward, making it seem that the very depth of field of reality—the essential fabric and framework of the street—had been fundamentally altered.
The second he thought that—as he looked closer—he saw to his unspeakable and unreasonable, shrinking apprehension that they all had the exact same face. It was not a mask, in any sense of abstraction or caricature, but it was not eccentric, individual, and animate, either. It was a face like none he had seen before, even on the nags of Zanesville—repeated, separate yet combined. Blurred. Merged.
Yes, that was what the impression was like. Six figures sharing a single face, so that it was impossible to determine if there were six figures or one.
But he heard a multiplicity of voices. Not, just six—oh, no.
They did not move—they did not have to. He heard them calling to him inside his own head. Beat him, they called. Beat him! Release your hatred …
“That’s enough!” Fanny cried, and fired one of the revolvers into the air, as the storm broke and people scattered.
Lloyd dropped the cane, leaving Joshua Breed groveling in the mud, bleeding and soiled, whimpering like the dog the day before.
The six white women with the single face were gone, dissolved in the downpour as if they had never been.