Smonk

Naw. It jest don’t take me long to look at a coffin handle. He blew on his palm. How much longer ye reckon ye gone be here laying em out?

Why?

I come see might ye go with me.

After Smonk? The blacksmith studied his black hands. Their black nails. It wouldn’t be right, he said. I can’t jest up and leave the girls.

What’s worse, leaving em to set a spell here or letting go the scoundrel that killed em? Seems like you got a lot of reason to want Smonk dead. If it’s true what they say about him and—not to speak ill of the dead—ye wife here. Seems you was spared. Like me. I ain’t never thought much of God, but if this here ain’t God saying get yer selves out on a mob I don’t know what is.

The blacksmith didn’t answer. Using his tongs, he raised a glowing bar from the fire and began to beat it.

Well? said McKissick.

Naw, said the blacksmith. I can’t. I ain’t shot a gun in I don’t know when. Don’t even own one. I’m a humble worker. If ye had twenty, thirty fellows, sure, I might go. But jest two of us? No thank ye.

They got a word for not going. It’s called being a chickenshit.

That’s five words.

Don’t be counting my words, Gates. Judge says we can supply up, charged to the town. New firearms and such. Mounts.

Preciate it, naw. These handles won’t forge they selves.

Suit ye self then, chickenshit. I’m taking off terectly, if ye grow some balls.

He raised his hand farewell, shape of a coffin handle burned into the skin, and limped out past the covered bodies. In the town proper he sidestepped a dead horse and turned the corner and limped past the wagon with the machine gun, two young women guarding it.

They were making eyes at him.

In the store the owner’s widow had laid her husband’s body on the shelf where the tins of potted meat were usually displayed. She’d dressed him in his church suit and boots.

I can’t do business today, she told McKissick from behind her black veil. We closed for mourning.

Well, this re-supplying is on the judge, he said. He’s sending me out after Smonk. I’m sure he’d be happy to pay double. The judge, I mean. Or triple.

What is it ye need?

He bought her entire supply of firearms: four pistols, three rifles and two shotguns. She tried to sell him a used twenty gauge single but he glanced at it and said, Junk.

Then he bought all her ammunition. After that he carried his packages to the livery where he bought a tall paint (on the judge) and had the liveryman’s widow remove its shoes for a quieter ride. He noticed that the livery also sold fireworks, and he charged a box of Roman candles and several bundles of bottle rockets and firecrackers, too. His boy Willie if he were still alive would love such noise and fire. And if not, the bailiff would shoot them off in his son’s memory.

Then he was running back through the street, to the store, tromping up the steps, pounding on the glass.

Balloons, he told the lady, ye got any more sheep-guts?

Meanwhile, Gates the blacksmith had slipped off his apron and leather gloves and donned his hat and was walking toward the store when four women in black dresses and veils surrounded him with rifles. He raised his hands in surrender and they shoved him along at gunpoint to Mrs. Tate, widow of the justice of the peace and owner of most of the land around Old Texas and owner of the bank and the apothecary’s. And the hotel, recently destroyed.

They found her in her dark house at the edge of town, in her parlor with the drapes drawn. She sat beside her dead husband, very upright in an upholstered chair, fanning herself primly with one hand and with the other holding his fingers. He lay on a sideboard, dressed in a brown suit. Using pins, she’d arranged his hair despite his deflated head and placed a towel under his neck for the drainage and spread a plaid cloth over where his face had been. A tiny woman with tiny hands, Mrs. Tate flipped down her veil when they entered.

The widows shoved Gates forward and he snatched off his cap and tried to smooth his wiry hair.

Are you drunk? she asked. Such your habit.

Nome. This all is sobered me up.

Mrs. Tate snapped closed her fan and rose to inspect Gates, circling him, her head level with his biceps, poking at his kidneys with the fan.

Why weren’t you at the trial? she asked from behind him. Account for being alive. When so many better men have passed.

He stammered how he’d voted to lynch Smonk, how he’d planned to attend the trial and celebration after, but the gun-killers had robbed him and knocked him in the head. Did she want to feel the whop? He knelt as she pressed the needles of her fingers on the soft lump at the base of his skull, her touch lingering to a caress as he stammered the tragedy of his own family, dead and tarped, one and all, back yonder in his shop.

What he didn’t mention was that two of the three killers had visited his shed earlier that day, before the trial. Before the massacre. How the smith had not realized that these two strangers with a packhorse full of guns on the day Smonk was going on trial meant something was up was beyond him. He ought to of reported it. It wasn’t like there was a pair of strangers through here every day. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last new face he’d seen—other than Smonk’s. The killers had asked about a whore and he’d pointed them to his house, but instead of paying him the three dollars, they’d knocked him in the head with a rifle butt and took the coins from his pocket and left him for dead and he’d lain half-conscious on the floor in his own head blood for over an hour. It was just like Lurleen and her girls not to come get him after laying with the killers, traipsing off to the trial in their men’s duds. Lurleen would of done anything to see Smonk again, Gates knew—she still was in love with the one-eye. The blacksmith had just awakened on the floor and touched the throbbing lump at the top of his neck when he’d heard the machine gun going off.

I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tate said. Though if those women had known their places they’d be alive yet. You need the church, Portis, you always have. Now more than ever.

Yessum.

Our Scripture is very clear on a woman’s place. And the place of children.

Yessum.

A man’s too, Portis.

Yessum.

She reclaimed her seat in front of him. I believe your story. She plucked a wet cloth from a washbowl and wiped her fingertips of his filth and waved the other widows out of the room and resumed fanning herself.

But when the time comes to pay the fiddler, she continued, we’ve all got to chip in. Ante up, as a sinner like he might say. So I must ask you, Portis, to delay your mourning and commit us two jobs. First, find that judge before he tries to flee. He’s been unaccounted for since we put out the fire. And the more I’ve been considering it, the more I see he had to have been mixed up with Smonk. Else he’d be massacred too. Or at the very least knocked in the head like you or punctured like our new bailiff.

Yessum.

Second thing, she said, is that you must go with Bailiff McKissick. Make sure he kills Smonk. Help him. Come back and swear he’s dead.

Yessum.

And there’s only one way to prove that.

Yessum.

Do you know what that is, Portis?

Nome.

His eye. Bring me his eye.

Yessum. I will.

Good. Mrs. Tate gazed at her husband. She swatted a fly with her fan. She’d killed several already and formed a small pile at the justice’s shoulder and Gates watched as she used her fan to herd the fresh smudge over