The Six-Gun Tarot (10 page)

“I hear the crazy ole coot shot the sheriff three times in the chest,” Otis Peake said around a wad of wet, black tobacco. “They said it put holes in your walls but passed right on through Highfather!”

“
Nein,
” Auggie corrected, “Earl only shot him one time. It was that drunken cowboy over at the Prospect two months ago that shot him three times.”

“Surely the good Lord Himself was looking over you today, Mr. Shultz,” Mrs. O’Canton remarked as she watched Auggie clean up the mess and drag the busted pickle barrel into the storeroom. “I hope you remember that when you are saying those Catholic prayers tonight. It was God, not your pope, that saved you today.”

Auggie sighed, smiled and nodded as he wrapped up the old lady’s parcels. He had long ago learned that arguing religion in a town when you were one of the only two Catholics around was pointless.

His head ached and he simply could not calm himself down from the excitement of the day. So, at quarter past four, he locked the front door and turned the sign in the window so that it read:
Closed: Please come again.

He went into the storeroom where Mutt had crept in through the back door earlier. The room was full of crates, barrels and shelves packed with various perishables, some cured meat, mostly buffalo he had bought off a cowpuncher passing through on his way to California.

There was a heavy oak cabinet the size of a wardrobe with a set of sturdy doors on iron hinges. It was the smoke cabinet he used on meat. He and Clay had managed to seal it pretty good with leather stripping and tallow, so that very little smoke leaked out when Auggie was using it. An old stovepipe jutted out of its back and disappeared through the rear wall, to the outside.

There was the door to the privy, which contained a basin, mirror and pitcher of water he had fetched that morning from the pump and his Moule-Brand earth closet. Gerta had used to put fresh desert wildflowers next to the basin, but there were no flowers now. The realization of that made his temples throb more.

He made sure the back door was secure again after Mutt’s entry, splashed water on his face over the basin, toweled off and started to head up the narrow wooden staircase to their small apartment on the second floor.

There was an insistent knocking at the back door. Auggie sighed, turned and opened the door that led out to the alleyway his store shared with the Mephisto.

“Hello, I’m hope I’m not intruding,” the Widow Proctor said with her usual radiant smile. “Are you all right, Augustus? You look positively drained, you poor dear!”

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” he bellowed over her usual clucking. Back when Gert was still … back when they were all three the dearest of friends, Gillian and Gert would gang up on him with their worrying about his weight and what he ate and that the boxes he was lifting were too heavy and he’d get down in his back and that he should wear a hat or else he’d get his head burned. It was amazing to Auggie how much two women could find to worry about. The memory made him smile.

“You can come in, if you stop pestering me right now,” he said.

Gillian Proctor stepped into the storeroom. The widow was a handsome woman, taller than Auggie’s stout frame by a good six inches; younger too—in her late thirties. Her hair was the color of coal, shot through with silver threads, and Auggie knew it fell well below her shoulders when she let it. She wore it simply enough today in a chignon bun, high and back on her head. Her eyes were darker than her hair. Even behind the simple round wire spectacles she wore to read, they could be wide with wisdom or surprise or fear; or they could narrow in playful teasing or sharp anger. They always reminded Auggie of opals. She was dressed simply today too—a workday—in a white blouse and butternut-dyed brown skirt with a small bustle, covered by an apron. She carried a covered wicker basket.

Auggie couldn’t help but chortle, a low bass rumble in his massive barrel chest, at how Gillian desperately wanted to make a fuss, but she held her tongue and kept her word. It was one of the many things Auggie appreciated about her.

“About ready to bust, aren’t you,
ja
?”

“I heard what happened today,” she said, setting down her basket on a crate. Auggie cleared off a chair for her, dusted the seat with a rag from his back pocket and held it out for her. She sat. He rested against the broken pickle barrel, with his massive forearms crossed.

“I came over to make sure you weren’t hurt. From the awful mood you are in, I assume everything is fine.”

“Ja. Thank you anyway for coming to see. That was very kind of you.”

When Auggie and Gerta had lost little Milo to whooping cough, less than a year after he was born, he knew they had to leave Hamburg.

Looking down at his infant son’s burial shroud, Auggie turned to his young wife of only three years. Gerta was so beautiful and pale, like the sunshine flashing off of new-fallen snow. She made his breath catch in his lungs. She had wept until nothing wet resided in her soul anymore. Milo had nearly been the death of her and they both knew they would never have another child.

“I’m taking you to America,” he said. “I’ve sold Papa’s home and Herr Wishleig has voiced great interest in taking over the store.”

“Why, Augustus? Why now? I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“I know, my love. If we don’t leave this house, this city, this life, now we will both grow cold and brittle. I love you too much to ever let you endure a living death.”

“Ja,” was all she could muster before a new wellspring of pain led her to shake and moan and summon a few last tears. He held her tight until the shadows lengthened and the room grew dark.

Auggie came from a long line of shopkeepers, so he knew wherever they settled he would open a store. Once in America they headed west in a caravan of seventy wagons with a few belongings and the cash and supplies they needed to set up shop in the vast western wilderness. When they came to Golgotha, it wasn’t much more than a scrap of a mining camp. There wasn’t a lot there at the time: the Paradise Falls Saloon and a few of the other properties owned by Malachi Bick, the local cardsharp, gambler, ne’er-do-well. The Chinese had arrived to work the silver mine and the nearby railroad projects, but Johnny Town was just rows of makeshift tents then. There were gamblers and prospectors and cowpunchers. It was a rough place and Auggie’s instincts told him to move on.

Gert liked it here, though. She liked the old ruins that must have belonged to the Indians. She fell in love with the desert flowers. She kissed him on the cheek when he agreed to settle here. He still remembered how that kiss had made him feel like a hero.

They opened the general store, unsure if they would have enough paying customers to make do. Six months latter the Pratt family and forty other Mormon clans rode out of the 40-Mile and took up residence in Golgotha. Shultz’s General Store became more profitable than Auggie’s family business had ever been back home.

As the town grew up and became more civilized, more tradesfolk made it into town. People like Will Proctor and his wife, Gillian.

Auggie remembered the day the Proctors arrived in Golgotha. Will was the schoolmaster for the newly built schoolhouse, out by Old Stone Road. With the arrival of more families, there were now children in Golgotha, and they needed educating.

Gillian’s family had lived in England when she was a girl due to her father’s work with a big shipping company headquartered in Boston. She had traveled over much of Europe. The Shultze’s learned, to their delight, that the Proctors could speak German.

Gerta eventually learned that Gillian had miscarried two years earlier and was unlikely to ever have another child. That knowledge, the unspoken understanding of such intimate loss—a stratum of pain beyond the ability of human speech to express—built a strong bond between the two women. In time, Gert and Gillian became inseparable.

Truth be told, Auggie never cared much for Will Proctor. He was a nice enough young man, a bit too proud of his New England pedigree and a bit too eager to condescend to his fellow man for Auggie’s tastes, but Will’s major sin, in Auggie’s eyes, was that he spent entirely too much time sneaking off to the Paradise Falls to play cards and lose money. Auggie saw the writing on the wall, and knew the Proctors were always far too close to insolvency for Gillian’s or his comfort.

“He’s a smart man,” Auggie would tell Gerta in the darkness of their bedroom. “He’s more then willing to tell you that, and yet he fritters his money away at that smiling devil Bick’s place. A man should save, for his family,
ja
? Not be running around with a bunch of soap locks, grums and saloon trash!”

So while he was sad to see it happen, he was not that surprised when word came on a night in August of ’64, as hot and black as pitch, that Will Proctor had been shot dead during a drunken fight at a poker table in the Paradise.

It was quite the local scandal for a while, the secret life the schoolmaster had been living with whisky and cardsharps and even rumors of saloon girls. His poor wife,
surely
she must have known.…

Auggie and Gert would have none of it in their store. They chastised anyone who tried to throw dirt on their friends’ name. They also took the grieving Gillian under their wing.

Most figured that Gillian, alone and in an alien frontier, would up and head back east to her family in Boston. Instead she turned her home into a boardinghouse and pretty soon had near-full occupancy. There were rumors still about gambling debts belonging to Will she had to pay off and other mismanagement of funds that the poor widow had to deal with, but Gillian honored such gossip with no reply at all. And as the years passed, she was always the first one in town there with a cake or a basket of preserves for every birth, every funeral. In time Golgotha forgot Will Proctor and his poor wife and embraced the Widow Proctor as part of the community.

Gillian was there for Auggie too when Gert succumbed to Influenza back in ’67. She comforted Gerta through the worst of it, when Auggie had to run the store or simply collapse from exhaustion. Gillian promised her beloved friend she would look out for Auggie and not let his black moods eat him alive. The two survivors wept together over Gerta’s still, frail frame when the time finally arrived.

“What are you staring at?” Gillian asked from her chair in the back room of Shultz’s.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I did not mean to stare. I was just thinking.…”

“Yes, we have been through it all, haven’t we, Augustus?”

“Ja.”

She rose. Her movements reminded Auggie of water—fluid, effortless, something so free in them. She always seemed like she was more of the world than in it, a presence, like the breeze of the desert, or the blessed, scarce rain. She come over and put her hands on his shoulders and began to rub. They were bruised from where Earl had manhandled him earlier and her strong fingers felt good on the knots of steel under his skin.

“What is
das
?” he said, surprised but not offended. Definitely not offended.

“Hush up, you old grump,” she said. “Let someone do something for you for a change.”

It felt good to feel hands on him again. They were warm and strong, but so very, very gentle too. They reminded him of …

He stepped away from Gillian and turned, taking her hands in his own.

“Thank you, Gillian,” he said. “But I have to get supper started. It’s getting late.”

She smiled, reddened and nodded. “Yes, I guess it is. Say, why don’t you have dinner with the boarders at my place tonight. Save you from having to cook, and the Lord knows you don’t care to wash dishes.”

“Thank you, that is very generous, but I … I’m sorry, I can’t tonight.”

She picked up her basket and handed it to him.

“I thought you might be a stubborn old goat, so I went ahead and made you something.”

She brushed her soft lips against his bristly cheek and walked to the storeroom door.

“Augustus, Gerta was my best friend. I loved her very much and I miss her dearly. She would never have wanted you to dig her grave large enough to hold two people.”

“Thank you for the food, Gillian, and the concern. I’m just tired and sore and I want to go to bed.”

“Good night, Augustus,” she said.

The door closed and Auggie stood alone in the storeroom with only the lengthening shadows for company.

He locked the door and slowly climbed the narrow stairs to where all the ghosts lived.

Their apartment was small, a few rooms crammed full of the antique furniture from his family home in Hamburg that had endured the ocean voyage and the wagon ride to Golgotha. Auggie sat down in a high-backed chair and slipped off his boots. Through the windows the sun was crawling lower along Main Street. He picked up a photograph off an end table. It was of himself and Gert from the year they had arrived in Golgotha. It was taken by a roving photographer from back east who said he had come west to capture the buffalo in pictures. Auggie and Gert both looked so young in the picture, trying to stand still and look serious without laughing. So young, and thin and happy, and alive.

He stared at the photo until he noticed how dark the room was. When he looked at the Swiss clock on the wall, he realized hours had passed. He reluctantly put the photo away and stood.

Down the narrow hallway into the bedroom. The familiar stab of pain as their wedding bed taunted him with memories of love and comfort, sickness and death. He opened the closet and took down the heavy wooden box with the brass hinges and clasp. He carried it gently to the small kitchen table where they had shared meals and tears, silence and laughter. He sat the box upright and stared at it until he drowned in the shadows of the room.

He got up, lit an oil lamp and brought it and a bottle of Monongahela back to the kitchen table. Outside he heard a wagon rumble by and the whoops of the early crowd at the Paradise Falls. He emptied three fingers from the bottle into a milk-glass mug and drained them quickly. He hid the bottle on the floor under the table as he felt the whiskey warmth stretch through him. His hands stilled, his heart steadied in its palpitations.