* * * * * * * * * *
Michael the Sacristan found Father Brendan the next morning. The young priest had collapsed halfway down the narrow stairs from the garret, spending the late hours of the night trapped in darkness, alone with his fear and the stench of grave-mould. Michael reported that Father Brendan had been muttering frantically about “hallowed ground,” but the sacristan could get no more sense than that. For when Michael bent over the young priest, Father Brendan scrambled backward with a half-intelligible scream about smelling damp earth, pointing at stains on Michael’s trouser knees from the morning’s gardening.
Father Brendan did not recover from the shocks, and lay bedridden for some weeks, whilst all the village women took it in turns to provide him with food and care. Privately, though, they whispered that the young priest’s weak heart and heavy reading had stressed him unduly. No such thing would have happened during Father Duncan’s tenure, that was certain.
Though he lingered on for a time, Father Brendan’s heart gave out entirely one mid-spring morning. He had always been a sickly sort, and no doubt the shock of his imagined nightmare caused a second attack like that which had first made him aware of the heart defect. After that, it was merely a matter of slowly fading away. So said the country doctor brought in after the first week of bedrest showed no signs of improving Father Brendan’s health.
They buried him in a torrential rain, up in a hollow very near to the one which held Seamus Rafferty. When the six strong men lowered the priest into his grave, water had already flooded the shallow pit. No priest was there to say the requisite prayers, for none had yet arrived to replace Father Brendan. Privately, the people of Ballyvaughan hoped for one more like Father Duncan than Father Brendan, though they said no such thing aloud. It would be disrespectful to the dead, though he lay in unhallowed ground.
JUDAS KISS
The last breath of a hanged man
Contains all the truth of the world.
But you must lean close enough to hear a dead man’s sigh
And feel his soul flutter past.
And the knowledge gained will not profit you
Nor ease your soul’s turmoil.
Rather you will know the taste of wormwood,
The ache of a barren womb.
For that which lies without or beneath,
Principalities and powers and thrones,
Are crueler than dirt on a pauper’s grave,
As indifferent as time.
A serpent sermon this may prove,
Leading some to harm.
But better the guilt of a thousand sins
Than the Judas kiss of the dead.
CONQUEROR
The lowly maggot
Devours even those
Who enter Heaven.
THE WORMS CRAWL IN
A man and a saddle emerged from the warm spring sunrise. Fifty miles or so back into the prairie lay what might qualify as a horse, if horses consisted of skin, bone, and bloodshot eyes. The Walking Fella treated horseflesh like his own body: As a tool. His bullets lasted longer than his horses. Some cowhands named their favorite horse. The Walking Fella struggled to remember his own name anymore. At night, he lay reciting “Ethan Walker, your name is Ethan Walker” until he could grasp his vanishing identity.
Three years awake in the darkness and dirt while maggots chewed his flesh. If the gang had finished their work, he wouldn’t be hunting them now. But they’d left him alone, alive, half-hung and gut-shot and worm-gnawed, with only fading memories to keep him company. So he would chase them down.
From Nevada desert to Minnesota prairie he’d ridden in search of his gang. They’d scattered with the four winds after piling the last rocks on his living grave. Tracking eleven criminals up and down the country took time. He didn’t have time. Sooner or later civilization’s smoky grinding progress would chain the frontier with railroads and farms. He’d seen the woodcuts—Columbia with her torch driving back darkness and savagery. And enough of his mother’s gift tainted his veins for him to know what happened to outlaws and gunslingers when real law arrived in a land. So that left him one chance. Kill the Ethan Walker Gang. His gang. Enter the history books as a last gasp of the age of “elbow room” and “westward ho!”
Whitey Grenig would know. Hadn’t that blind old coot provided detailed stage routes and range patterns plenty of times? What kept him from finding a few backshooting traitors?
Besides, if his two years hunting Whitey was any indication, Ethan would need help finding the gang. Forty-seven telegrams to almost as many old friends before Whitey popped up in Walnut Creek, Minnesota. Telegrams cost money. The gang had taken that, too. And sure, a devil or a spirit could find all of the gang in seconds, but Ethan Walker intended to avoid the hot place for a little longer.
So he dragged his saddle across the prairie toward the little town of Walnut Creek. It shone a bit with spring dew and good cheer, a happy place of apple pies and colorful quilts. Farms spread to the north, south, and west of town, patches of black, fresh-plowed earth standing out from the prairie’s young green. To the east of town lay Walnut Creek itself, a small oxbowing river butted up against a thinning oak forest.
He came upon a rutted dirt trail which ran past clapboard farmhouses. Women and children stopped their chores to stare; men in the fields raised friendly hands from their work. Haggard men in bullet-torn and bloodstained white dusters weren’t common in these parts, it seemed. Ethan ignored the farmers. Whitey was his goal.
Something tickled his throat. He raised his hand and retched. The tickling ceased. A red wriggling gob sat in his palm. Maggots and blood. Whatever he did, nothing could dislodge them all from his lungs and sinus. He wiped off his hand on a fencepost.
A half-mile of muddy road remained to trudge when a creaking wagon drew up beside him. Ethan slowed. The wagon slowed. Gingerly, he reached for his rifle.
“Hallo dere, frand! Need a lift?” A broad, ruddy Swede smiled down from a buckboard.
Ethan glowered. The Swede beamed.
“Fine.” With a huff, Ethan tossed his saddle into the Swede’s wagon. Still grinning, the Swede patted the wagon’s broad wooden seat. Ethan mumbled a slur as he climbed aboard.
With a click of his tongue and a flick of the reins, the Swede started his horses back into motion. “So vat are ya doing in beautiful Valnut Creek? Yiminy, ve don’t get many travelers tru here.” The Swede’s booming, jovial voice rattled Ethan’s lungs and aggravated his maggot farm.
Ethan told the truth. “Looking for someone who tried to kill me.”
“Uff da! Vell, dere are no killers in Valnut Creek, friend. Unless ya count neighbor Rosicky’s lumber prices! They’ll stop ya heart beating! Ha ha! No killers here! No sir! No killers here! We’re a God-fearing town!” The Swede laughed and slapped Ethan’s back. A gob of maggots in his sinus dislodged and choked Ethan. “Today I go buy lumber for a privy. The missus, she doesn’t vant to squat over hole any more. Is good for the constitution, I tell her, but vill she listen? No! Vimmenfolk... Dey are a mystery.”
Ethan grunted and swallowed back maggots. Oblivious, the Swede continued on in his rumbling bass. “Spring festival’s soon. Ve had a hard first few years. Lots of death. Volf pack, Injun raids, some accidents. But the last decade is fruitful. So we celebrate now. Is good to be alive on a spring morning, ya?”
Another grunt. One maggot had wound up in his nostril. Discreetly, Ethan hocked the grub out onto the road. Some idle part of his hindbrain rolled around the Swede’s comment about deaths, but was overwhelmed by a bawdy anecdote involving a hayloft and the hired hand.
Half a mile with the Swede lasted longer than three years in a living grave. Ethan restrained himself from murder. “No judge would convict,” he muttered.
After an eternity of bad jokes and backslapping, they rolled into town. The Swede greeted neighbors, waving and mock-flirting. Passing the jail, the Swede called out to a skinny man in a bowler hat. “Sheriff Yonson! How’
s da rheumatism today?”
Johnson waved and gave a thumbs up.
Motion blurred in Ethan’s peripheral vision. He turned in time to catch an axe-handle to the temple.