Stone's Fence

The Reverend and almost Dr. Elegy Stoner turned from the bar, sipping his coffee. He studied the gambler. A suggestion of strength, but the mark of death. The palor, the bloodied handkerchief, the choked breathing, all marked him as consumptive. His hair was sandy, showing under the planter's hat. He was well dressed, at least by Fort Griffin standards.

Then the gambler turned his eyes on Elegy, and suddenly Elegy realized this man was not looking at him through his eyes; rather, he was looking through his eyes at him, his body a crumbling prison with two holes for windows, and from inside this gambler surveyed and appraised the world outside--outside of death--with bemused detachment.

"Ah, a man of the cloth" he murmured to his paramour. "We must be on our very best behavior or he'll call down divine wrath on us, or deny us the sacrament, or worse!"

Elegy continued looking at the man and his whore at the table. As he turned, his coat hung up briefly on the splintered edge of the bar, revealing his gun.

"How charming! This priest's habit is to go heeled! Tell me father, are you in the ministry of healing? If so, I think I need a treatment." The whore giggled and insinuated into the gambler's ear "you don't need a healer; I can give you any treatment you need."

"Ah, but our Father here has more than one way of ending my suffering. He can pray for a miracle, on his knees, or he can pull that iron on his hip and put me out of my misery that way, thought it might cost him."

The other men in the room had edged back as the gambler spoke, clearly insinuating a challenge to the armed clergyman.

"First, I'm no priest. I'm a Methodist. We don't have many Methodist miracles. Second, I don't have to kill you. You look dead to me already. Why don't you just play poker and leave me be."

For an electric moment, the two eyes met. Two tortured souls. Two lost people. One seeking to find his spirit, the other running from his.

Elegy turned back to the bar and sipped his coffee. Behind him, he heard the sharp ratchet of a Colt's hammer clicking back.

"You be careful sir," Elegy said. "That Colt Lightning is a double action; cocked, they can go off when you don't mean to shoot."

"Then if you don't want to be shot in the back, you turn and face me. Nobody turns his back on John Henry Holiday."

Elegy turned. "I beg to differ. It looks to me like everyone already has turned their backs on you. And maybe I'm just as tired of life and ready to die as you are. Maybe I don't care any more than you do, but unlike you, I don't have the leisure of unbelief. I know there's a God. I know I've failed him. I know the narrow way, and I know I've missed it. And so you can kill me and I won't care, and I'll have the very thing you long for: I'll be out of this life, and you will live on coughing your lungs into a handkerchief. Or, maybe not..."

Elegy had seen it. Almost a vision. J. H. Holiday was going to shoot him. From inside of him, he knew it, and knew it several seconds before it happened, and knew it couldn't happen now. Not here. Somewhere in his mind, a fire burned, guns fired, men died, and history changed. Without realizing it his Colt was in his hand, the hammer eared back, leveled on the gambler. Both men froze, cocked revolvers poised.

"Our Methodist is fast, it seems," Doc wheezed.

"Except now we are at something of an impasse," whispered Stoner.

"My mother was a Methodist," Doc mused. "But she married a Presbyterian, so she became one of those. But then my daddy came back from the war with a Mexican boy in tow, a refugee he said, but from what he wouldn't say. I suspect he was a refugee from a whore house, and my daddy was a paying customer. Once my mother saw that her husband's Presbyterian leanings didn't curb his...other inclinations... she began her own discrete dalliance, except with Methodism, since she was soured on men pretty much. Toward the end, she was a Methodist again, before the consumption took her away. Her obituary, written by that minister, was very touching. She had hoped it would insure her son's devotion to the faith, but in that, as in her marriage, she was disappointed."

Looking evenly past his Colt, past the empty windows of Holiday's eyes, into the man's soul, Elegy asked "I hope the methodism didn't kill her. It's a hard faith, harder than most. Too hard for me."

For a moment, the gambler seemed back in his body. For a moment, his eyes seemed part of his person and not just gun slits through which safely to survey the world. "No, I don't think it was the Methodism that got her; but my daddy has hated Methodists ever since."

"I never liked them much myself," Elegy answered, "but then we don't have to like the truth, we just have to deal with it."

"I would hate to shoot a man that my daddy would find objectionable. Why don't we uncock these guns, Reverend; these folks have got their hopes up, but I don't think either of us really wants to kill anybody today."

The man hanging at the end of the rope wasn't quite dead, but he was not twitching very much now, and the expression on his face had gone from tense agony to a slack resignation as death stole his ability even to grimace. The man standing beside the tree where he had snubbed the rope pondered whether to wait until his prisoner was dead so he could at least recover his rope along with his horse and outfit, or to leave the thief and murderer hanging from the branch of that cottonwood tree, a message to all who might come by, proclaiming the consequences of western justice, a justice freshly embraced and applied by the newcomer. Pondering the expense of the rope against the value of the message, the hangman chose the message. He was, after all, a Methodist minister and a candidate for the highest degree offered by one of the most prestigious universities in Europe, and a professor of Holy Scripture. Yes, a message, and a lesson. He would sacrifice the rope in the service of the message.

He just didn't look like a westerner. His hips weren't narrow, his eyes weren't bright and sharp. He didn't wear chaps, or a low, black, flat-brimmed hat. His solitary gun wasn't tied down, but worn on his left hip, butt-forward. Only slightly taller than normal, he was a thickly built man, probably a little more ample in the middle than the frontiersmen of myth, even at that early stage in myth-making. His camp did seem at first that of a seasoned frontiersman-sparse, careful, barely an indentation in the landscape-until you realized it was not the sparseness of the wilderness man, but of the scholar and monastic. Both share an austerity born of having reduced their needs to a narrow scope.

He could ride. He knew and loved horses. And he could shoot. But he wasn't "fast." His draw was simply the act of slipping a gun from the holster, cocking, steading, and pressing the trigger. He wasn't dead yet because he had one advantage. He had a way of knowing when someone was going to kill him. In seminars in Heidelberg, he'd driven his fellow students to pure, blind, raging frustration with his ability to anticipate their next debating move and cut them off at the knees. And he had also intuited a move by a young nobleman toward a young lady, and that intuition had been costly. Killing a German noble, even in a fair duel, goes hard on an academic career. They might duel to wound, to make a point, in Prussia; but this child of the American reconstruction didn't make a game of weaponry. So, his old master and Doktorvater had embraced him and said a sad farewell, watching the finest young scholar he'd ever trained quickly stuff his belongings into his warbag, including a single bundle of pages that constituted one of only two copies of his doctoral thesis, virtually complete, but never to be finished. He then slipped the little double-action smith and wesson 38 into a coat pocket and was gone in the night.

No, not fast. But accurate. And more important: he knew when to shoot.

So now he stood, the Reverend (almost) Doctor Elegy Stoner, the toast of Heidelberg, Heidelberg's exile, a man under holy orders, with a calling to see the souls of the damned snatched like brands from the burning, watching a human being dangle from a rope,a grotesque watch fob, his face now black in death.

He poured another cup of coffee and watched the man hang there. When he knew he was good and dead, he made a decision. He undid the rope, rolled the body into a crevice and piled rocks over it. taking out his Methodist Service, he read some words and breathed a prayer for the reprobate.

He had decided, after all, that he'd need that rope again.