Power in the Blood (128 page)

Authors: Greg Matthews

BOOK: Power in the Blood

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Four years after the death of her mother, Omie received a visitor, who arrived in a gleaming automobile. A man of great age, he introduced himself as Mr. Jones, but before he could state his business further, Omie told him his wife was inaccessible to his need for an interview, having already been reborn as a male in Idaho. Mr. Jones turned away, and suffered a fatal stroke less than five minutes later, while on his way to the train depot.

When Omie was forty-three she was judged to be insane. She had neglected to wash her person or care for her property in any way for a number of years, following the departure of the last in a lengthy roster of maids and cooks and gardeners. Omie had driven them all away with her strange behavior, except for the last, who left her when it became known that Omie had no money left to pay for hired help.

When county officials came to inform her that she was to be taken to the asylum, Omie laughed at them, and pushed them off her porch while standing behind her screen door. They returned the following day with several large men, but when they attempted to break down the front door, a sudden gust of flame from an instantaneous fire in the hallway drove them back. The fire appeared to ignite spontaneously in all parts of the house, upper floors and lower, and although two fire engines soon were at the scene, it was generally agreed that the best they could do was set their hoses to spray the roofs of the houses on either side. No one saw Omie Dugan alive, and her bones were never found among the charred rubble.

The mystery of the golden elk’s vanishment took hold of Noble Burgin’s imagination and was rendered into a play,
The Shining Stag,
in which Noble proposed that the statue had been removed from the train by a hot-air balloon. This aerial theft, perpetrated by a brilliant madman-inventor of the Jules Verne type, was Noble’s most audacious stage effect, and was itself hailed as the work of a genius. The production proved to be even more successful than his two previous offerings,
Red Hellions
and
The Man-eater!
Noble retired from the theater a happy man, believing he had won a permanent place for himself upon the stage of high art, and he died some years later of a ruptured appendix. In time, Noble’s great works would be forgotten completely.

In 1900, Slade’s arm was broken when he fell against an endless belt and pulley system while harvesting wheat in Alberta. The break was not set properly, and his usefulness as a worker diminished from that time. He was angry over the incident, and angry over the incompetence of the horse doctor who set the break so poorly, but there was nothing he could do about any of it. Slade had been proud of his strength and his ability to outwork men half his age, and now the source of his pride was gone. The harvest was in, his term of hire was finished in any case, so he moved on, as he always had.

Riding an empty boxcar across the emptiness of Canada, Slade saw that his life was effectively over. Unable to perform work with an arm that grew steadily weaker, he was good for nothing. To be a cripple and a beggar was more than Slade could endure, yet that was the future awaiting him. He could not recall his past with any certainty beyond a year or two, and always thought in terms of what he did with his life in the present. No past, no future, and now the present had become a burden to him. Slade found a measure of his old pride in being able to consider the facts without flinching. He had never wanted sympathy, had no use for love, but would have surrendered his other arm to know who he was.

For a time he begged for food and such work as a man with a crippled arm was capable of performing, but not enough of either came his way, and Slade despised himself for having to ask anything of anyone. Whatever the nature of his life had ever been, it had not included groveling for charity, of that he was sure. As winter came on, Slade decided he would not live to see the spring. It was the only choice available to him that did not gore his pride, the one thing remaining to him, and he took no food into his body from that moment on.

A slow death by starvation was not what he wanted for himself, so at the first opportunity, Slade took himself away from the world of men and entered the world of snow. It was the season’s first heavy fall, a blizzard of whiteness, perfect for Slade’s needs. He walked out of the town in which his decision had been reached, and within minutes had no idea where he was, so thickly did the falling snow surround him. He walked as long as he could across open prairie, his extremities beginning to lose feeling, and when he was certain he had become completely lost, and that the snow would continue falling for at least another day, he sat down and closed his eyes to await the coming of old man death, whom Slade was prepared to greet as an equal.

The process of dying by cold took longer than he had anticipated, but was far easier, once he was genuinely reconciled to quitting the earth. The warmth left his body steadily, and was replaced by a comforting numbness. He congratulated himself on having chosen wisely. This was the way to go, on his own terms, in his own company. It was a shame that he could bid a silent farewell to no one, since no one but himself existed in his memory, and even that man was reduced to one name only. His leaving of life was an anticlimax to its living, he felt, even if he could not recall who and what he truly was. It was better to end such an empty life, since it was the remembrance of his years that provided satisfaction to a dying man, assuming those years had been well spent. Slade had no idea what he might or might not have done, the attacks of memory loss had become so frequent in recent years. Sometimes it had taken an entire day to remember his own name, and in the end he had assured himself of that one thing by having
SLADE
tattooed onto his arm, lest he forget himself entirely.

It was slipping from him by degrees, his notion of aliveness, as the snow began burying him beneath its blanket of neutrality. He began to doubt the arrangements for his own demise when he saw a woman approaching him. What was a woman doing out in the cold and snow? Slade sat very still as she came near, hoping she would pass blindly by and leave him to die in peace, but the woman came directly to him, and stood before Slade with a look of great pity on her face.

Staring at her, trying to conceal his annoyance, Slade found himself attempting to give the intruder a name, and the name came to him at the same instant that he recognized her as his wife of long ago. It was Nettie standing before him, of all people. He asked her how it was possible that she had found him amid all the swirling and frigid emptiness of his chosen place, and she told him it was easy; she had been told to be with him at the last, to remind him of his life, the thing that he had chosen to leave behind. His decision would be respected, Nettie told him, but before he would be permitted to depart, he must remember everything he had forgotten.

And as she told him this, Slade remembered it all, the life of his younger self sweeping back into him like air into an unstoppered vacuum; the courtship of and marriage to Nettie; his work in the railyards of Schenectady; his gradual souring of temperament when the children came, three of them, and his love of liquor, which smothered the obligation to Nettie and the boys and girl they had produced. Slade felt shame overcome him as the night of his escape aboard a freight train was depicted before his eyes; he had ridden it west, exultant to have evaded responsibility at last. Then he saw the wreck in Ohio that cracked his skull and cured him of any need to drink by robbing him of his identity.

James Slade Dugan was his name, and Nettie Lamb had been the woman he gave that name to, as sweet a girl as he could have wished for, and he had treated her like a dog. She stood before him now, neither sad nor exultant, as young as she had been when they met, and if the freezing air would have allowed it, Slade would have wept for what had been his and he had thrown away out of sheer foolishness, to embrace an empty life of drifting and forgetting and careless murder. He saw the face of every victim, relived every blow delivered by the stranger with his face, the monster that had been himself.

“Why did you have to tell me …?” he asked his wife, and she said it was to punish him, since punishment must come from within himself, and that could not happen without a reckoning with his past, a mirror held before him like a sheet of ice, in which was reflected his weakness and folly and loss. And when it was revealed to him, the agent of his restoration of self began immediately to fade, her slender form melding with the snow, white upon white, until she disappeared.

Slade was left to stare at the great nothingness he had engendered, and into which he now plummeted like a stone, the first of the Dugans to die in the new century, the first of the last of the line; and that fact was shown to him also as he fell, so that he might know that the blood freezing in his veins would never be passed on. They all would die, the blighted Dugans he and Nettie had made, without any offspring but virginal Omie. When he had swung aboard the train so long ago he had taken himself away from his past, away from his future, and the future of the Dugans. It all would come to nothing, the passing of the blood from his father’s fathers, and it had been he who let fall the precious chalice. It had been Nettie’s blood that died the most, since she had stayed behind to do what was right. They were her children more than his; Slade had done nothing more than dilute the blood of Nettie Lamb. Now he understood his crimes, understood also that there would be no absolution. He knew, as his soul was shredded like mist in sunlight, that none was due.

About the Author

Greg Matthews is the author of eleven books, including
The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, heralded by the
Christian Science Monitor
as “the true sequel to Twain’s masterpiece,” and two acclaimed sagas of the Old West,
Heart of the Country
and
Power in the Blood
. He has published three books—
Callisto
,
The Dolphin People
, and
The Secret Book of Sacred Things
—under the nom de plume Torsten Krol. The author describes himself as “a guy in a room, writing, writing.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3489-0

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

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