David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

The room was roughly furnished, as though the delicacy of Tindall’s receiving rooms was but posturing and here was the true man. A large oaken wardrobe, an inelegant side table, a plain bed, a bearskin rug upon the floor. Across the ceilings, rafters were exposed, built at an arc, almost as though we were in the hold of a ship. The walls were adorned with a few paintings of hunters upon landscapes. At the far wall, a dying fire burned in the fireplace.

From the rafters, near the center of the room, hung the body of Colonel Tindall, motionless, not even swinging, upon a monstrous thickness of rope. His dead face was near black, his tongue protruded, his eyes were strangely both bulging and closed tight. He was dead and had been dead for a few hours at least.

I stared, feeling astonishment, disappointment, and relief all at once. How had it happened that the very night I was to confront him, possibly kill him, he had taken his own life? I did not believe he was the sort of man to be so racked by conscience that he must choose oblivion over guilt. Yet here was the evidence before me.

I had been robbed of the chance to test my mettle, but I had nothing to gain by standing and staring, so I decided to search the house for anything of value I might take.

I took two steps into the room when I heard the boyish voice.

“I followed you.” It was Phineas. He sat in a high-backed chair that faced the fire and so had been invisible to me at the door. Now he rose and turned to face me, rifle in his hand. He did not raise it, but it was only a matter of time until he did. I had a pair of primed pistols in the pockets of my skirts, but I thought it too soon to reach for them.

“Why?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“I seen you coming through the woods, and I knew you was coming here, and I guessed why. When I saw you hiding out with the niggers, I knowed it for sure. So I come here first and I hit Tindall in the head with the back of my gun, and then strung him up like the pig he is.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“So you wouldn’t,” he said. “You come to kill him. I knowed it, and I didn’t think you should.” He laughed.

I had the strangest feeling of not being there, as though I watched these events unfolding from some distant place. Relief and disgust and terror swirled through me. “What is so funny?”

“I remember you when you first joined up with the party heading west. You was just a green gal from the East. Now look at you, killer of men, housebreaker, thief, who knows what else? I told you the truth, missus. The West changes you, I said, and by God it changed you good. But I ain’t gonna let it change you that much.”

He wasn’t going to kill me. I began to feel it, and my muscles loosened. I took a deep breath. “What do you mean?”

“You killed Hendry ’cause you had no choice, so now you think you can kill when you choose. You think it’s not so different. I did too, once. I’d killed some Indians when I was with a scouting party ’cause they ambushed us, and it felt good. I thought of my family when I fired my rifle right into those redskins’ chests. I didn’t mind at all. Then, a year later, I was coming through the woods at night and I come across a single Indian who’d made camp, asleep by his dying fire. I figure, I killed one Indian, why not another? I didn’t know if there was more nearby, so I didn’t use my gun. Instead I snuck up on him real quiet and tomahawked him right in the face. I done his mouth first, so he couldn’t scream none, and then his whole face until he was dead, and then I took his scalp. I was covered with blood at the end, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that when I was done, I knew killing ’cause you could was a different thing from killing ’cause you was made to.”

“You didn’t like it,” I said.

“Nah, I loved it. I love to kill Indians. Killing Tindall was pretty good too. But I don’t love myself no more, missus. That’s the thing.”

“Why would you do this to save me? I thought you hated me.”

“I hate me, missus, not you. I just get it confused sometimes.”

I looked at Tindall, and I could now see the back of his head. The hair was matted with blood. “They’ll figure out he didn’t hang himself of his own choosing.”

“Don’t matter,” he said. “I already wrote up a note, which I aim to bring to that lawyer, Brackenridge, in town. Then I’ll go.”

“But they’ll hunt you.”

“They’ll hunt me, but they won’t find me. I’ll be an outlaw, which I reckon I’d like.” He gestured with the rifle to the side table near the door. “There’s some notes there, a pretty good amount. Three or four thousand dollars. I don’t know what to do with paper, so you can have it. I’ll take the coins, probably six or seven dollars’ worth; they’ll think I took it all. But you best get gone.”

“Thank you, Phineas.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry I said those things to you, missus. I never had no choice in it. I had to say them, you understand, but I’m sorry all the same.”

“I understand,” I said, though I did not. Perhaps I did not want to.

“None of it meant nothing, and that’s the truth. Now, you get gone. Then it’ll be my turn. I need to get to Pittsburgh, deliver my message, and then get to killing Indians.” He waved his gun at me. “You best go. I cain’t always help what I do.”

I gathered up the notes he’d assembled and hurried down the stairs, considering how best to frame these events to Dalton and Skye. I had not been quite the woman of action I’d wanted to be, but I did not see why they had to know that.

The next morning I awoke to the emotional toll of knowing I must, that night, dine with the woman I had always loved and do so alongside her husband, a man whose improprieties had embroiled not only his own family but perhaps the nation itself.

By the time I awoke, a servant of the Pearson house had already delivered a note to the effect that I was expected at seven of the clock. I had come, in my mind, to see this evening as an opportunity to answer many outstanding questions, so there was little for me to do that afternoon. I may have fallen, therefore, into some old habits, and I spent much of the day in a few comfortable taverns, and yet I did not arrive to the Pearson house more than half an hour late. It had warmed a little and snow had begun to melt, so I should not be ashamed to own I slipped on my journey and was damp when I arrived, but as most of the damage was upon my greatcoat, I presumed my hosts would not know of it.

This house-or mansion, I might style it-was on Fourth Street, just north of Spruce on a fashionable block. The exterior was of typical Philadelphia redbrick, remarkable only for its well-appointed bushes, shrubs, and trees, the true beauty of the gardens not being visible in the winter or after dark. Inside, however, I was treated to the finest of floor coverings in imitation of exquisite white tile, a handsome silver-blue wallpaper-cunningly textured to evoke the impression of the water of a nearly still lake-and numerous portraits, many of the illustrious house of Pearson. A lower servant of some sort, a kitchen boy perhaps, offered to clean my shoes, for, unknown to me, I had traversed through horse leavings. After my grooming was so tended and I was dusted off like a freshly sculpted block of stone, I was at last permitted to ascend the stairs to the inner sanctum of excellent company.

I was shown into a large sitting room where Mr. and Mrs. Pearson sat next to one another on a settee. The gentleman of the house held himself stiffly and formally and waved his oversized hand about as he held forth on some matter of trade. His thinning white hair was wild and unkempt, and though his tone was voluble, his eyes appeared dim and hollow. Next to him, his wife wore a dress of sea green, with a flattering cut. She looked at me as I entered, turned away, then looked up once more and rose.