were loading a buckboard wagon. Smonk shooed them away and offered the judge the sum of five hundred dollars in a cigar box for a verdict against the town of Old Texas. The judge removed his monocle and took the box and placed it under his arm. Smonk put his cigar in his teeth and rolled back a green tarp in the wagon and what the judge beheld caused him to drop the box.
Is that a goddamn Gatling gun?
Hell naw, Smonk said. I got dirt on a general up in Washington. This here is Mister Hiram Maxim’s machine gun, the newest model. Makes a army Gat look like a goddamn flintlock.
Now, one week and one massacre later, the judge sat across from the bailiff and stuffed his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat and wished he had a rock of hard candy. From outside he heard a lady wailing.
Mic—Bailiff, he said, taking another swig, don’t trouble to thank me for my legal or scientific pursuits regarding Smonk. He rose and shut the window. On the sill outside was a parched white splat of birdshit. A monarch butterfly flittered down and landed there, then fluttered on. Thought the shit was a goddamn flower. The judge smiled. It’s been my pleasure and duty, he said, turning, to serve my fellow citizens, even unto the risk of my own life yea soul.
I ain’t a bailiff no more. Didn’t I say that?
The judge began to search his pockets ironically. Did ye file a letter of resignation in triplicate? If not yer still in the town’s employ and I can’t in good conscience accept a resignation now. In this current crisis. In other words, you the law.
What was they? asked the bailiff.
What was what.
Smonk’s motives. Which ye set out to discern and divine.
Ah. The judge looked up and to the left and composed his thoughts. Wretched, he said. There’s his motives, crystallized into one apt term. But what I’m trying to get at here is that with the justice of the peace et cetera et cetera murdered, the time’s done arrived to circumvent the natural course of law.
You ain’t got to go far to convince me, said the bailiff. Smonk kidnapped my youngun during his escape, if ye ain’t heard. Or killed him one. If you’d of asked me first off, I’d of told ye Smonk’s days is numbered fewer than the fingers on my hand and I’d of been gone.
Excellent. But ye gone need help. Man be a fool to take on E. O. Smonk without a goddamn army, jest about. I’m gone wire the governor post haste, but in the meantime is it anybody else left? Yall got to go after him now, this instant. Fore he disappears.
Holding the table for support, the bailiff stood to his feet. You dreaming if ye think he’s gone disappear this time. If ye think this is done. You ain’t the only one studied him, Yer Honor. I had my dark associations with ole Smonk too, matters not to speak of now. But in his mind, ye see, we attacked
God damn, said the judge. He sat looking perplexed. How in the hell do ye account for him?
I don’t. They say when he come out his momma’s wound he caught his foot on something in her guts and snatched it loose. Say he weighed more than fourteen pounds. Say his eyes was open when the nigger midwife peeled back the caul and he sucked and gnawed on his momma’s tit even after she’d bled to death and started to cool and he never would of stopped eating if the midwife hadn’t prized her dern thumb in to break the seal. You know what else?
What?
They say he was born with teeth. Say the midwife died from the ray bees.
God damn, said the judge.
The bailiff put on his cap. It’s some things in the world ye jest got to take for what they is. On they own terms. He took up his rifle. It’s one other fellow wasn’t numbered among the dead, I heard. Blacksmith down the way. I reckon me and him’s the mob.
Well. If it’s anything yall need, charge the town for it.
I might need a few more guns.
Fine.
And a hoss.
Whatever. The important thing is to catch him and kill him and mail me his goddamn glass eye, which I claim for a souvenir.
The bailiff moved his jaw. I best git on.
Do that. The judge raised his flask in a farewell toast. He had no intention of wiring the governor or anybody else. This backward secluded town had designed its own doom and could burn forgotten to the ground as far as he cared. And as for the bailiff, closing the door behind him, well, the judge expected never to see the poor idiot alive again.
Cheers, he told the room.
Sucking Smonk’s eye, McKissick limped out into the heat. For a moment he leaned against a column until a spell of nausea passed, then he walked faster, hand clamped to his wound. He went to the doctor’s and the doctor’s widow gave him some bandages and lamp oil and he made a poultice. Then he limped along the road to the opposite end of town to the blacksmith shed where he found Gates, a filthy man in his sixties, hammering coffin handles on an anvil. Four covered bodies laid out on various stacks of wood. He’d been staring into his fire and had difficulty seeing who it was.
Who’s that? Will the bailiff?
I was once, said he. Who the hell are you? A blacksmith, or—he indicated the bodies—the damn undertaker?
Blacksmith. By God. My talent’s about the only thing he ain’t took from me. But since old Hobbs was shot, we all jest doing our own setting by. He nodded at the bailiff’s side. Catch one?
Naw. Jobbed me with his sword.
The smith drank from a tin cup and then resumed his hammering. Don’t touch them handles yonder. They still hot.
I’m going after him, McKissick said between hammerfalls. He took my boy. The judge is conscripted me.
Gates used a pair of tongs to turn the coffin handle which glowed orange and went back to whacking it on his anvil. Luck to ye.
McKissick limped to the corner of the shed and pulled back the sheet from a corpse and winced at the face stained in blood, much of the head mown away. Who’s these fellows?
The hammering stopped. That one was Lurleen.
Dern, the bailiff said. Sorry. He cocked his head for a different angle.
Them others is my stepdaughters. Itina there and Clena and that one cut in half yonder’s Revina. I still ain’t found her legs though them toes on the salt lick there’s probably hers. They long enough.
Dern. McKissick studied Gates’s dead wife. How come she’s wearing men’s duds?
All of em is. So they could go see inside the courtroom when Smonk got ambushed. They hadn’t ever saw such a show. We put they hair up under they hats and wrapped cloth around they knockers to flatten em. They was a family of big-bosomed girls, if ye remember.
McKissick did. The stepdaughters who’d lay with any man could muster a hard-on. Their mother who wasn’t a whole hell of a lot older than her oldest daughter but a lot prettier. It was common knowledge around town that she’d had congress with Smonk.
Look close, the smith said, sipping from his cup. You can still see where we drawed mustaches on her lip with ash. We was laughing so hard. Them younguns started cutting up. Scratching they make-believe balls and pretending to hold giant peckers and take a piss. Itina went over to Revina and humped on her. We was all drunk.
My condolences. On the whole brood.
Thank ye. Mine on ye boy.
Hold off on condoling him, if ye don’t mind.
Sorry. Didn’t go to jinx ye.
McKissick picked up a coffin handle from where it lay cooling on a block and threw it down.
Hot, ain’t it, Gates said. I told ye.
