*So, you may notice that I am posting Chapter 12 again. Well, that is because I didn’t like what I wrote. There are a few reasons why: the addition of too many characters, the contrived meeting of the added characters, the lack of interaction between my main characters (Kate and Magnus), the lack of movement. The scene of the old Chapter 12 felt silted and forced. Not alive. It didn’t feel like Big Nose Kate. It didn’t feel like the story I wanted to tell. I hope this isn’t too much of a bother, but writing serial fiction is a kind of an adventure in itself and I’m glad for the experience. But, enough about that, back to the story.*
It was the morning of the fifth day after the amputation when Cornelius Magnus entered the room behind Dr. Boone’s operating room. It was a dark, cramped space. Tidy, but dark and small. Clean, except for the dirty, little window on the wall opposite the foot of the bed. (And to be fair, the window was high up on the wall, preventing a passerby from peeping in on a recovering patient. George probably couldn’t reach it.) Sunshine filtering through the dusty panes cast a shaft of brown haze into the room that encompassed Kate like a rectangular spot light.
She laid on her back on the bed, that ran along the opposite wall, the head of it to Magnus’ right. A beehive of gauze was strapped to Kate’s right shoulder by a wrapping of bandages around her torso. Her hair was up in a bun, but sweat, the lack of a good bath, and laying down for so long, had transformed it into a tangled frizzy cloud of red and gray. She stared at the small window.
From outside, came the clip clop of a passing horse, the creak and grind of the wagon it pulled. A man hollered. Two women chatting about the last Sunday’s sermon walked by. And then the room was quiet. Some dust floated in the brown haze. Magnus removed his black hat and held it, smiling nervously. Kate didn’t look at him.
There was a chair behind him, beside the door. Draped across its back, was a dress, and on the seat were folded undergarments.
“From the doctor, I suppose?” Magnus remarked. “That’s kind of him. Not really appropriate for a blacksmith though, is it?”
It was odd to see her right arm gone. To see that empty space along her right side. Unbalanced. Asymmetrical. He saw her left hand, a tight fist, gripping and twisting the sheet. He squirmed inwardly at his own thoughtless words.
Kate’s gaze was firmly on the window. She spoke with a cold apathetic detachment. “New hat?”
He sat down in the chair. “It’s not a stovepipe, but it’ll do.”
“And a new suit?”
“Yes,” Magnus said. He wore black now. A black jacket and black pants and black boots and a black string bow tie. Only the undershirt was white. But, none of it was simple. The jacket was perfectly fitted, it was even cinched slightly above his waist to help broaden the shoulders of his slim frame. Along the lapel was a concentric outline of a fabric with a subtle blend of purple. A purple handkerchief peeked from the front pocket. It was folded precisely and dimpled handsomely. His shirt was blindingly white, even in the brown light, and it was embroidered with white (a slighty grayer white) pinstripes. All in all, he had the dress and bearing of a peacock attending a funeral.
Kate rolled her head, looking at him full on. “And a shave?”
Magnus stroked his naked upper lip. “My reputation in Goodenough has left its mark.”
“So, a disguise? Won’t performing seances call attention to the great Cornelius Magnus?”
“Whatever do you mean? I haven’t performed any.”
“Your fancy clothes. The shave. Things cost money.”
Magnus smirked. “Poker, Miss Kate.”
She shifted her gaze back to the window. “I reckon you’ve found some luck. You lost all my money the last time you played cards. Or, at least, that’s what you told me.”
“That was Faro. A game of luck. Poker takes skill.”
The room fell silent again. Magnus looked about the room, at the thick shadows lingering and looming in the corners. “Dr. Boone says you’re healing nicely. Another week and the swelling should go down. I would simply adore the privilege of escorting you about town. As soon as you’re able, of course.”
Kate’s gaze was firmly on the window. “Don’t think you owe me anything, Mr. Magnus. No code of honor. No chivalry. No Christian duty. There’s nothing that binds you to me. Lest, of course,” she looked up at him. Her eyes cold and hard as marble tombstones. The large nostrils of her big nose flaring like the snout of a bull preparing to charge. “You’re hoping for a monetary recompense for your actions. However, I offer rebuttal by reminding you of your recent dealing with the late Mr. Doolin.” She turned back to the window.
Magnus saw her bottom lip tremble, watched her bite down on it.
“My condolen…”
She cut him off. “And, I did not seek your help. Nor did we negoiate an agreement. You acted without my consent. Anyway, I must add, that I’ll have payments due to Dr. Boone for his… services, which, legally, I am bound to pay before I can even begin to entertain any recompense to you.”
“Miss Kate,” Magnus shook his head. “I have no desire for your money and I already paid the good Dr. Boone,” he smiled. “And, let me add, I’m also paying for your room and board. As a friend.”
The knuckles of Kate’s fist were as white as the center of a fire, as she gripped and twisted the sheet. “We most certainly are not friends.”
“Acquaintances then.”
“I loathe any degree of relationship with you.”
He stood, blinking. “That is a Hell of a thing to say. Especially to your rescuer.”
“I didn’t want you to save my life!” She sprang from the mattress, immediately wincing, yelping from the pain of her swollen shoulder. She flopped back on the bed, glaring up at the ceiling, her eyes burning like molten iron, her left fist clenching the sheet. “You broke a promise. What’s a man if you can’t trust his word?”
In his head, Magnus saw the dying boy. The blood from the boy’s belly seeping between his fingers. That boy had trusted him. Had put his life in his hands. The boy had gone along with his plan, assured by Magnus’ words that all would be fine. But, who would’ve thought the bank teller was going to play hero? Four against the lone bank teller, but still he pulled a revolver. They unloaded twelve rounds into that man, but that mattered little, for the bank teller got Owen.
Gut shot him.
Owen was only sixteen. And he had trusted Magnus with his young life.
But now he was dead, buried in a gulch out somewhere in the desert. And, here was Kate. Another young soul serendipitously arriving in his life. It wasn’t right what Mr. Doolin had done and Magnus truly wished that he hadn’t tried his hand at Faro and lost all of the blacksmith’s money. When she had confronted him in the Hotel in Esau, he was nearly convinced to return it. And then the stranger. The Esau Slayer, what the paper named him. Who would’ve thought Mr. Doolin would’ve run into a prospecting feud?
Again, Magnus lacked the foresight. Again, calamity had struck. Misfortune found him. But, at least he had saved Kate. She didn’t die. She was the life saved. The act of redemption. Yet, it didn’t feel like it. It felt just like when Owen slumped off the horse, miles outside of town. When he laid in the sand, coughing up blood. There was no redemption. Again, the mistake. The promise broken. He promised Owen would be fine but he had let the boy die. Kate wanted to die and he let her life be saved. He held the dying boy’s hand, hoping to comfort him, but now he reached for Kate’s clenched fist, hoping to comfort himself, hoping to soften, just a little, the hardness of her anger, hoping to dissipate the dark fog of guilt blanketing his soul. But, she snatched her fist away as though he were a leper.
“You couldn’t have meant what you said on that train,” he said. “You were delirious with pain and fever. You didn’t know what you were saying.”
“My arm has been taken, Mr. Magnus,” Kate said cooly, shifting her stare from the ceiling to him. “My right arm. For three years I trained to swing the blacksmith’s hammer. Do you know the techniques? The subtleties of the varying blows? And besides that, how can I work with only one hand? One hand needs to hold the tongs while the other swings the hammer. One pours the flux as the other turns the weld. Two are needed to file a hoof. Two are needed to nail on a shoe. So, how the Hell am I supposed to work?” She glared at him, her big nose aimed like an accusing finger. “I cannot even wash a damned spoon.”
Magnus fiddled with the brim of his black hat. “Even with one hand, you could easily wash…” he cleared his throat. “Well, perhaps you simply need help? Like the late Mr. Doolin. Perhaps you can take on an apprentice? Share your knowledge and in return…”
“No,” she said.
“Perhaps I could take you on as an apprentice.”
Kate laughed. A mean, short, bark of a laugh. “Apprentice to you? Apprentice to a scoundrel? A scalawag? A carpetbagger?” The smile beneath her big nose had smeared like a grease stain.
“You’ve yet to see my true powers, Miss Kate.”
“I have seen more of you than I wanted,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to rest. Doctor’s orders.” She went back to looking at the little window as, outside, a horse trotted by.
“Miss Kate…”
“I wish you a long and healthy life,” she cut him off. “Far away from me. Good day, Mr. Magnus.”
Magnus stood up, pausing to look down at her on the bed. “Your promise was an unfair burden. The moral dilemma it has put on my soul has torn me in two.”
“A man keeps his word,” she said.
The sentence cut him, dividing bone from marrow. He inhaled sharply, fighting back the haze of tears beginning to permeate, and adjusted his suit jacket. “Godspeed, Miss Kate.”
Outside, a crowd of boys traipsed by underneath the window, cussing and laughing at a crude joke.
Magnus made his way to the door, but he paused when he laid his hand on the knob. “Hazeleton,” he said, facing the door, his back to Kate. “Bart Hazeleton. That’s my given name.”
There was silence for a minute. Even the outside street was quiet. Magnus looked over his shoulder. Kate’s eyes possessed a hard glint, but she was looking at him, however, when he went to turn around, she rolled her head, shifting her eyes back to the little window. “A new name for a new con.”
That evening, George came to Kate’s room. He lit the oil lamp, adjusting the knob so the little flame would give a pleasing, warm glow. He brought a bowl of stew and a wedge of bread, placing them on the nightstand, close enough to the edge so it would be easy to reach from the bed. He replaced the cleaned bed pan. Lastly, he checked the small handbell. It rang daintily and he placed it on the nightstand next to the bowl of steaming stew. All the while, Kate feigned sleep.
Hours later, she lay awake, the stew remained untouched and the lantern was out. The room was full of darkness and the aroma of cold, salted beef. She looked to the closed door. There wasn’t any light along its edges. It was so very dark. Gratefully and wonderfully dark.
It would hurt to move. Even laying still on her back, the blood pulsed in her right shoulder. Under the beehive of gauze and bandage, the hot blood was desperate to flow, to flow along its familiar course along an arm that was no longer there, dammed by a fold of grafted flesh. Kate would watch as they changed the bandage, listening as Dr. Boone taught George the language of his profession. Technical. Scientific. Medical. Latin. But, what Kate saw was not the work of an expert hand, but that of a mutilator. She didn’t see it as ‘Quality Work’, but as a desecration, a monstrosity, her arm hacked off so only a two inch nub remained.
A nub.
Her strong right arm capable of conforming steel and iron to her own imagination by the expert blows of her hammer was reduced to a swollen, purple nub. A nub of severed muscle and sawed off bone sewn up like a cheap burlap sack.
It would hurt to sit up, but the bed pan was under the bed. Dr. Boone had said to ring the bell to summon George, but she could no longer bear the pity in the boy’s eyes. No matter the task. They were only filled with compassion.
They uneased her. Made her squirm. Look on me with judgment, with condescension. Look at me with derision. Look down your nose at me and spit in my face. She could bear being snubbed. She could bear belittlement. She could stand in the face of arrogance, for that was simple. Prove your better. Superior skill. Sharper intellect. Snappier wit. But in the gaze of pity, those things meant nothing at all. In front of George, she was helpless and all she could do was simply be. She was at his mercy.
She heard the faint squeak of a mattress, emanating through the ceiling of her little room. Silence returned. She looked to the door once more, steeled herself, and bit her tongue.
It felt as though her shoulder and chest had congealed and hardened into a single form, a form that must now be cracked and broken and fractured in order to move. It felt as though muscles were ripping, tearing, shredding. The pain came in a wave, a fire that swelled with boiling heat. She could foresee the growing intensity and compensate by biting firmer on her tongue, muffling her groans, but there was a surprising jolt of pain, like an unseen nail impaling a foot, that squeezed an agonized yelp from her lips. Her eyes locked on the dark door and she grit her teeth for the last motions, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Finally, she sat up, feet on the floor, breathing heavy, waiting for George to come through the door.
But, the place was silent. Gratefully and wonderfully silent.
By a stroke of luck, the bedpan lay between her feet. It was clean. Freshly washed and returned by George, before supper, with complete and utter light-heartedness. Using her feet, Kate passed it up to her left hand.
She stretched back on the bed, laying there as the pain in her chest and shoulder faded, receding like a wave, returning to the swollen nub. Then, she was left with the pulse of her blood throbbing against the seam of the amputation, the heat radiating from the stitches. Sweat lined the inside of the cocoon of bandages and her skin, around the nub, felt too soft and wrinkly, like her hands would get when she washed dishes and clothes and the fingertips would wrinkle on both her hands.
Hand, she corrected herself and raised her left, looking at it in the moonlight that came in through the window. Only one hand.
She looked at the bandages, at the empty space along her right side that her arm would’ve filled. Her skillful, powerful, beautiful arm. Perhaps the only beautiful thing about her.
Her left arm was strong. The forearm muscles rippled as she curled and straightened her fingers. But, it felt heavier. Dumber. Clumsier. It needed more focus to manipulate. Even its fist felt odd, like picking up a new tool. Yet, this was all she had now. No other hand. Only the left. Only the one that was given the brute work of holding steady the tongs. It didn’t know subtlety. It didn’t know fine detail work. It wasn’t linked with her eye, with her mind, with her soul, knowing exactly where to strike without a thought. She relaxed her fist, letting the moonlight fall on her open hand. Her knuckles gleamed like alabaster. Shadows cast from her fingers were perfectly black on her palms.
There was something familiar about it. A feeling, a notion she had once experienced in a world of haze and dreams, like deja vu.
With her left fingers, she tickled the moonlight. She tried to hold it, tried to lace her fingers between the beams broken up by the dirt on the window. Then, she noticed one ray of silver, a thread falling on her heart, and she spun her finger, as though the light was a bit of string that she was coiling about her finger. She gazed at the moon in the window. It was small and far. The size of a pearl, but she imagined it was getting bigger, drawing incrementally closer, inch by inch, as she twirled the moonlight thread about her finger.
Was it a game? From when? From when she was a little girl? And then there came the faint whiffs of notions. Things more frail than memories. Things harder to grasp than dreams. Things like deja vu, things that could hardly be expressed because they could hardly be experienced. They arose in her heart more than in her mind, rising like the aromas of flowers, yet stolen by the wind, so she was left with only a fleeting sniff to guide her through the dark forest of her past.
She continued to coil the thin ray of moonlight, hoping somehow that that would unlock who she was, what she should do next. But the moon remained where it was: the little pearl. Never drawing closer. And soon, even the fragrance of the notions evaporated. She let her left hand flop on the mattress and the bed squeaked.
From upstairs, came a series of mattress squeaks and the hollow thump of steps on the floor. Kate rolled her eyes, figuring George would soon come tiptoeing down the stairs, walk through the operating room and open her door to check on her. She stared at the empty space along her right side, a mound of gauze there in her periphery, and waited.
But, the creak on the stairs never came, nor the soft pat of bare feet on the wood floor of the operating room. No light shined along the edges of her door. Only a soft voice seeping through the ceiling down to her. The boy, George, was singing.
Kate listened. The whispered words were incomprehensible through the floor, but the melody was all too familiar. She knew it and knew it well. She raised her left hand, coiling the thread of moonlight, humming along. It wasn’t the song of goodbyes, but a story song. A song of the old ones. A song of Old Coyote.
Though the words were lost to her, she could feel the grass of the plains under his paws as he prowled. The dust of the deserts. The muddy shores of the lakes and rivers. She could taste the trout that he ripped out of the water, even see the geese that he eyed, felt his desire to sink his teeth into their long necks, felt the growl rumble in his throat, how he loathed their arrogance. They were dumb and weak. Prone to gossip. Prone to taunting. And only because they could retreat safely from the bite of his jaws, either swimming into the lake or flying into the sky. Killing was a small form of retribution. But, stealing their secrets. That would be vindication. A complete stamping out of their pride.
And so on George sang. Of how Old Coyote tricked the geese to teach him how to swim, yet how the geese, still wary of Old Coyote, only showed him a part of the secret, so that they still could swim better and faster than Old Coyote. Frustrated, Old Coyote turned his attention to the secret of flight, and the geese helped him make wings, but the geese tricked Old Coyote and the wings broke and he fell.
The last notes of the song faded and, upstairs, George crawled into bed. His mattress creaked and squeaked.
Kate continued to hum, still pretending that the moonbeams were actual threads connected to the moon. Old Coyote was an amusing tale. Yet, she began to realize, catching the fleeting whiffs of the notions of her past, that it wasn’t only a story. But, a telling of the history of an old people. A people that she was part of. However, her white arm, her white fingers. She was no Indian. Why the sense of a connection to the song that the Indian boy sang? Why the intimacy of the melody? As if the rhythm was her heartbeat? As if the music was the sound of her blood coursing through her veins? Perhaps there was more to the song. Perhaps it was a deep hope to replace the empty space along her right side.
She stared at where her right arm should be. The empty space. A space once filled. A space possessed by an extension of her soul, of her will, but now it was missing. Gone. Dry ash in the wind. She was Less and her soul was confined to a smaller vessel.
The moon in the window had slowly drifted. It was bigger. Closer as it traveled on its descending arc.
As she stared at the empty space along her right side, the whiffs lingered and billowed. The notions of her past rose like smoke and she could smell the pyre, smell the smoke as it rose up to the descending moon. In the little room. On her back in the bed, the dreams that she had nearly forgotten returned. She could hear her Hunters singing and smell the last snaking trails of smoke rising from the ashes. She saw the last embers. Freckles of orange brilliance wreathed in twinkling red, but only the size of a pinhead. Orange gave way to the gnawing red, till at last the ember faded into the ashes, a mound of shadow in the moonlight. One by one, the embers died, till the last remained, the last spark of life. Kate watched it shrink. Watched it die. A part of her was dying as well. Like the empty space along her right side, like the nub. Something was missing.
And there in the bed, there in the little room behind the operating room, Kate began to sing the song of goodbyes. Her left hand gripped the sheet, twisting it, knotting. Her bottom lip shook beyond her control, slurring her words. A lump of sadness choked her voice, but she sang louder and louder, her voice bursting through the dam. Upstairs, the bed squeaked and the floorboards complained. There then came the sounds of running feet on the stairs, thumping and creaking. Soon, there would be light around her door’s edges, soon George would come busting in, looking on her with those pitiful eyes, full of wretched compassion and mercy, but Kate kept on singing, for now, the memory was clear. So horribly clear. At last, she knew why she sang the song of goodbyes.