E. Doctorow - Welcome to Hard Times

Now from that spot there was a clear view to the rock hills lying under the moon as far east as the eye could see. I have the image in my mind of John Bear looking on from a ledge up there, although I’m not sure now this was the moment I spotted him. What can I say, he had no hat or shirt as he waited there on one knee while the mob wrecked his shack, by then he had no reason to wear white men’s clothes. I can’t understand how my eye found him, he was so still. But the moon picked him out for me, it was a lye moon etching him on my brain. There was motion in his stillness, something already done in his pose, and although I was not to see him again there is no break in the picture I have between then and this morning when I found the Russian on the floor by his bar.

Plotting for the Bad Man I couldn’t have understood John Bear last night, if I’d known what he was contemplating it would have made no sense to me. I was dragging that heavy spool up the alley in sweat and in pain and in righteousness. I saw Swede return, striding heavily toward Isaac’s store, and I called him and made him help me with the burden. “Ezra!” came Isaac Maple’s cry from within his store, “Ezraa-a-a!” out of the cracks and crashes from within and the agonized Swede wanted to go help him, but I kept him with me, infecting him with my madness, and like penitents hurrying before God’s wrath we made a bed of barbs on the porch, a trip wire from one post to the other, unwinding the roll, pushing it back and forth, back and forth, as Turner sang.

Swede had a length of planking and with it he climbed atop the overhang and lay flat, waiting; while I stepped back into the street feeling the moon’s light like a desert sun on my back. Behind the man’s horse I crouched, Hausenfield’s bay — a friend, like me, spurred to its bones — and “Turner!” I cried out. “Do you dare come out, Turner!” screaming his name again and again, the voice in my throat someone else’s, some stranger’s voice doing my work while I watched quietly as one by one the gas lights inside tinkled out and the saloon became dark. Then I shut up. My fingers squeezed out the slack in the trigger, my arm rested across the man’s own saddle, with my other hand I held the bay’s ear twisted tightly in my fist. In the great silence between that saloon door and me there was no movement. But all around there was riot: people were banging on sheet iron, attacking Isaac’s rented boxes down the street; someone was trying to get his wagon going but his horse shied and reared; it was the moment I saw, from the corner of my eye, the hunchback scuttling out of Maple Bros. store with his arms laden, a roll of yard goods streaming out after him.

Well he had the darkness he wanted, if he’d kept the light he might have seen the wire, but he needed to know where I was, where he’d be shooting. He came out, those doors snapping back against the wall, just a shape, a shadow with a hole of fire in its center. Even before the thwack in the horse’s side I had let go my shot. I heard a roar of surprise and saw him fall across the porch, a shadow becoming a man hideously stuck on those infernal barbs.

It is so easy if you have the conviction. I stood up and fired two more times, missing him but not caring, feeling the wonder of the event like a child. A fine spray of blood from the bay’s neck covered one side of my face, I could taste it. The Bad Man was trying to get off the wire, but I had hit him in the leg and he couldn’t raise himself. Swede didn’t have to swing down with that plank, he hung over the edge trying to bash the Bad Man but there was no need, his reach was too short. “No, Swede!” The man turned over on his back on his bed of barbs and shot straight up through the wood.

Swede slumped where he lay, dying like he would, with no sound. This morning Helga came back to the street from her hiding place. She called him and looked everywhere, poking at bodies in the wreckage, but she didn’t think to look up. Then she caught sight of those long arms hanging over the edge of the porch top, that head of yellow hair — and for a long while she screamed at him to come down. Swede dead was one of my blunders, one of the last great ones in my life of blunders beginning when I came to this land. I clubbed the Man from Bodie till he was insensible but it didn’t help Swede.

And then you see that wasn’t my last blunder at all, for I didn’t kill Turner I stopped too soon. It was still the Trick that made me cry out my misery and feel the shame of my being. Had I finished my work I would have only damned myself. All around the fights were going on, miners and towners trying to cripple and kill one another, hate riding their voices, gleaming on their knives, imprinted behind their running boots. And none of it had to do with Turner. He was just a man, my God! I felt his weight, I felt the weight of him over my shoulder, I smelled the sweat of him and the whiskey, it was blood that ran from his head and matted his hair. He had lost part of a staring eye on the barbs, his leg was broke, all my senses were glutted with him, I held his wrists together in my hands, and stumbled past that patient horse standing in the street and bleeding to death — and what else but the continuing Mockery could have given me the strength to tote him to the cabin?

“Alright Molly? Is it alright now? Is this what you wanted Molly?”

But she didn’t hear me. She stood against the wall as far away as she could and watched me drop him on the table. I could hardly catch my breath, I thought my head would burst and I remember falling and crawling to the cabin door and leaning my back against it because I felt if I lay down I would never be able to get up again. And I wish now I could not have seen what happened, or if I had to see it that my mind could split me from the memory. I would like to die on some green somewhere in the coolness of a tree’s shadow, when did I last sit with my back against a tree? the wish is so strong in me, like a thirst, I believe I must perish from it. When I think that Ezra Maple might have put him up on his mule and ridden him off to learn the storekeep’s trade; or that I might have taken him away myself, in those first hours, before Molly ever put her hooks into him, a carpenter’s son, just a hollow-eye orphan — a groan pushes through my lips like my ghost already in its Hell before I am dead. Helga walks up every few minutes, her hair hanging straight down, and she stands gazing at me with her mad eyes while she slowly tears her dress to tatters. Is it Molly again, those eyes? Is it all the eyes of those dead faces? I think no man has ever had such a watchfulness of dead faces, I have farmed the crop of this country, the land’s good yield along with Men from Bodie.

I told him to get by the door for it wouldn’t be minutes before the looters would reach us. I said with what breath I could gather, “Jimmy, over here, stand here with that gun.” But he was looking at her as he’d been looking for the year or more, he couldn’t do anything but look at her. It was his suffering, it was what she demanded.

What caution was Molly’s, what disbelief as she slowly moved toward Turner, the man of her dreaming, the great insulter, lying helpless in his own stinking juices on the eating table. Yes it was him alright the same one sure enough by God it was him and no need to wave her cross for protection, a knife would do, the stiletto, now she would use it. A jab to see if he was still alive, a gentle stick to hurt him awake, and he flinched and groaned. Back she jumped and then forward into another place and he tried to writhe away from the point. “Eh?” says Molly. “Eh?” as if to say remember me? remember your Molly? “Eh?” does this make you remember, or this, or this! — almost dancing with the grace of retribution.