Oakley Hall - Warlock

A light burned in the window above Goodpasture’s store. The French Palace was dark. He crossed Southend Street and stepped carefully past the clutter of boards before the Lucky Dollar where a part of the arcade roof had fallen in. He could smell wet ashes now, and smoke, and the stink of char and whisky, and the sweeter, stomach-convulsing odor with them. Further on there were still a few loiterers standing along the railing. Some of them greeted him as he went by. He passed the burnt-out ruin of the Glass Slipper and crossed Broadway. A lamp burned in a second-story window of the hotel. The rocking chairs were dark, low shapes on the veranda. One of them was occupied, and his heart clenched breathless and painful in his chest for a moment, because it was the chair in which Morgan had always sat. But it would be Blaisedell now.

He heard a faint creak as it rocked. He went to the bottom of the veranda steps and halted there, ten feet away from the chairs. He could make out the faint, pale mass of Blaisedell’s face beneath his black hat, the smaller shapes of his pale hands on the chair arms.

“I’m sorry, Blaisedell,” he said, and waited. The face turned toward him, and he could see the gleam of Blaisedell’s eyes. Blaisedell did not speak.

“It is time, Blaisedell,” he said, and he hoped that Blaisedell would remember, but still there was no answer. The rocking chair creaked again. He repeated the words.

Then he took a deep breath and said, “Marshal, I will have to come after you if you are still here by morning. I—”

“Not Marshal,” Blaisedell said. “Clay Blaisedell.” Blaisedell laughed, and he stepped back, against his will, from that laugh. “Are you running me out of town, Deputy?”

He could see Blaisedell’s eyes more clearly now, and more of his face; the welts on it looked like tattoo marks. “No, I am just saying I will have to arrest you in the morning. So I am asking you to go before.”

“Nobody tells me that,” Blaisedell said. “Or asks me. I will come and go as I please.”

“Then I will have to come after you in the morning.”

“Come shooting if you do.”

“Why, I will do that if I have to, Marshal.”

“You’ll have to.”

He stood there staring at Blaisedell, but Blaisedell was not looking at him any longer. “It is a damned shame, Marshal!” he burst out, but Blaisedell said nothing more, and finally he started on, holding himself carefully and tightly as though, if he did not, he would fall apart like something made of wet straw. He moved on east on Main Street without even being aware where he was going. When he looked back he could no longer see Blaisedell in the darkness.

At the comer of Grant Street he saw a light from the General Peach thrown out onto the dust of the street in a long, dim rectangle. He turned away from it and started up toward Kate’s house with the key suddenly a very conscious weight and shape in his pocket. He took it out as he mounted the wooden steps. It rattled against the metal of the lock.

When it entered he turned it and thrust the door open. Inside the floor creaked beneath his weight. He closed the door and stood there waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the deeper darkness here. His shoulders ached, and dust and ashes itched upon his face and around his neck. He could make out a shape like a deep coffin on the floor between him and the bedroom door, and there was a flicker of light in the doorway beyond it. Kate’s disembodied face appeared, filled with shadows, with a candle flame below it. The box before him was one of her trunks.

“Deputy?” she said, in a calm voice, and he answered yes, nodding, but he did not move, shivering still, though it was warmer here. Kate lowered the candle a little and he saw that she wore a loose robe which she held clasped at the waist with her left hand.

Kate watched him without expression as he removed his hat and started toward her. It was a waxen face above the candle flame, with no paint on it, and a cloud of thick black hair framing it. The beauty spot was missing from her cheek. She looked very slim and boyish in the robe, but a dull point of a breast showed through the silk with the pull of her hand at her waist.

As he approached she moved back with a slight inclination of her head, and, hat in hand, he passed into her bedroom. He watched her place the candle on a box beside her bed. The room was barren now, as he had seen it once before, with only a few clothes hanging upon the wire stretched across one corner, the sad-faced Virgin and her other things evidently packed away for her departure. She sat down on the edge of the bed, stiffly, her eyes raised to him. There were blue-black glints in her hair from the candlelight.

His tongue felt thick in his mouth. “I have told Blaisedell he is to get out of town by morning.”

“Have you?” Kate said, tonelessly, and he nodded.

“And did he go?” she said.

He shook his head.

Her full, pale lips opened a little and he could hear the sudden whisper of her breathing. He felt sweaty, foul, and exhausted, and there was a slow, crushing movement in his head, like the laboring of a walking beam. “What do you want of me?” Kate whispered. “Are you afraid?” She unclasped her hand and the robe fell open down her white belly. He averted his eyes.

“Why, I can fix that,” she continued. “That is what men come to women for, isn’t it?”

“I guess I’m not very much afraid,” he said.

“Come to brag? What a man you are?”

He flushed and shook his head.

“Someone to be sorry you are dead?” Kate said. He shook his head again, but she went on. “I have seen all those things. When you have seen everything you still have to watch it over and over—” Her voice broke, but immediately she regained control of it. “And over,” she said. “The same tilings happening and coming on. But I have seen one thing new. I have seen Tom Morgan kill himself, and I know he did it for Clay Blaisedell.”

“He has to go,” he said. “He is on the prod and mean. He burned Taliaferro’s place down, and all but burned the town.”

“Oh, he will go. You can make him go by letting him kill you. That is brave, isn’t it?”

The candlelight gleamed in her black eyes that were like deep ponds. “But not quite brave enough? Did you come to get the rest from me?” She said it as though it were important to her.

“There is no one else but me to do it,” he said hoarsely. “And — and everything’s come to nothing if I don’t. It is up to me; do you think I want to do it?”

“Do what? Die? Or kill him?”

“Why, put it to him, even.” He wrenched his hat between his hands, and stared down at the swath of her flesh where the robe hung open.

“Tom would kill himself for Blaisedell, but you would do it for a silly star on your chest,” Kate said. “Take it off — I will take a man, I won’t take a sharp-pointed tin thing like that against me. Take it off!” she said again, as his fingers fumbled the catch loose. He dropped the star in his pocket.

“Not afraid?” Kate said, mockingly; but her face was not mocking. “Wait!” she said. “Tom to pay for Peach, and you for Tom. But I will have my pay too. What for, Johnny? You are not fool enough to think you can beat him?”

“No, I know I can’t. That’s it, you see.”

Her eyes narrowed. With a blunt movement of her hand she pulled the robe further open. “Then why?”

“If I am killed—”

“Give you the rest of your life in a night?” she said. “All of it?” In her face he saw what seemed to him a half-amused contempt, but triumph in it, and increasing triumph, and then pain showed naked there. “Come here then,” she said, in a voice he didn’t even recognize.