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chapter one (Final Day - Homecoming)
The trail had been long and bone-wearying, littered with scrapes and bruises, contradicting emotions, horrific dreams and wearying hallucinations, but at long last Devil Brigham and Rascal were on the final stretch toward home. Devil had got an early start that morning; rising long before the songbirds had shaken the dew from their feathers to sing their songs of gratitude to the warmth of the rising sun; long before the crows quorked their murderous plans for the day, setting off on their mysterious business; long before the sky pinked and transformed the tree-line from a starless black silhouette to the fleshed out guardians of ground water and clutchers of soil.
Devil had forsaken the warmth of a morning fire that would ease some of the ache out of his bones and skipped his admittedly wretched coffee. Sacrificing both for a timely arrival to home, setting out from the Highlands onto the rolling hills south of Arawana while still shrouded under night's silken cowl.
He planned to be well through town before the first blind was raised, the first shop door opened, and the first sidewalk swept. He wanted to spare his neighbours the unsettled temper he was in; his lower spine feeling like a bag of gravel from too many hours in the saddle, his neck tight from using that saddle as a pillow as he slept on hard ground; and the lingering ache in his right wrist from firing both barrels of his sawed-off three days ago.
He knew knowledge of his return would spread like a grassfire and set off telephone bells ringing from here to Nelson and ultimately to the desk of Detective Sergeant John Locke who would immediately phone him. He wanted to delay that conversation for as long as he was able and decided to take his phone off the hook when he got home.
During his long journey Devil discovered new trails, confirmed what he'd believed about his quarry, and learned more about himself than he could imagine he would setting out. He held no doubt now that he was a lawman and would continue to devote himself to keeping the peace, but he'd also learned that within his chest beat the heart of an outlaw.
His freshly awakened outlaw nature had pushed him to ignore a lawful order from a superior, bending him to assist an escape from an unjust law, then triggered him to commit cold-blooded violence on a lonesome hilltop in the southern highlands. Can a man have a boot on each side of the line between law and lawlessness and still be considered a good man? Did there still exist a clear defining measurement of good and evil in this world? In him?
The Great War had suppurated most of his optimistic delusion of good and evil out of him as it had for many men who'd survived that brutal chaos. During his almost three years in France he'd committed calculated murder almost every night and they hailed him a hero for it, pinning a medal on his chest while his ears still hissed from enemy bombardments. That brass obscenity still rested in its case at the bottom of his sock drawer; a reward for being a murderer for King and country. The best breed of murderer in their eyes.
The closer he got to the lake, the more it smelt like home and nothing calms and settles a soul more than coming home; be it from a holiday, a long suffering job of work, or a war. He missed his town and missed his ranch and embraced a small joy that he still possessed a home to return to in a land peppered with displaced people who had lost everything in the early years of what they were starting to call the 'great' depression. Though there was nothing great about it, other than the massive damage it wrought, tearing thousands loose from the lives they once thought of as permanent states of being, pushing them out onto the road with only what they could carry on their back and in their arms.
Gonna find work, they all said, Gotta be work for an honest man somewhere. But that was before the hunger and despair that turned honest men into dishonest men, turned peaceful men into violent ones, turned union men into scabs, and turned women into pickpockets and whores. It had been a hard world in the five years since Black Tuesday's crash in '29, and it was getting harder. As he passed uphill from Arawana's slumbering train station, Devil watched the mist of time lift to see himself returning home in 1919 after the war in France ended and allowed him to shed the thick soldier's skin that kept mortal fear at bay and turned him into a hunter of men.
Devil was shaken loose from the world that day in 1919; the hometown that was once as familiar as the lines on his own palms had become an alien place for him, transformed into something foreign by his three years in the mud and blood of France, committing murder and trying his best not to be murdered himself.
Yet even on that day he had the wisdom to know it wasn't his home that had changed, but rather he was seeing it through changed eyes; eyes that were sharpest discerning the starlit furtive movements of an enemy over a war-blasted, treeless landscape in the dead of night.
At some point between stepping down off the train and the long walk up the hill through the gates of the Lazy B ranch in 1919, the land had settled back into his bones and they tried to convince his eyes to see it as his home once more. The stunted pines, the sage, the golden dried grasses, the osprey, the raven, the marmot, and the wild horses who ran like bandits in the hills. Devil knew he was a fortunate soldier; he'd lived when so many died and he'd come home whole when so many returned with shattered bodies and minds. But the man who returned in 1919 was not the boy who had enlisted in 1916. That boy died in France during three freezing days of hell on the banks of the Somme river as battle raged around him, and from that shattering was born the man he had become, and in some ways, the man he still was.
Though he had left the battlefield a decade and a half before, the battlefield had never left him; clinging to him like a jealous lover, sinister in her intention to hold him tight to her festering breasts forever.
This homecoming was much the same, though in 1919 he returned from killing scores of men, as a lawman in the ensuing years after the war he'd only killed two. Two men in fourteen years set his mind to wonder if they could have been avoided like he avoided killing the murderer Claude Bedard on this very street just weeks ago.
A lawman should rely on the courts to make such life and death decisions, shouldn't he? So did the killing of two men make him a murderer?
As he rode Rascal up Main Street with the blonde yearling trailing behind them, the lingering echo of those moments followed him like a ghost determined to haunt his trail.
Devil felt the tug of the rope against his thigh that was hitched to his saddle horn and heard the whinnying complaint from the yearling filly as she pulled against it.
Like all free creatures, the filly had fought the rope halter the moment Devil had looped it around her head, and occasionally fought it still. He couldn't blame her; running free with her wild herd alongside her mama was the only society she'd ever known. Until this devil had robbed her of her place in an equine history bred through her lineage for generations since the Spanish Conquistadors first brought her ancestors from Europe.
But Devil knew she would come around given time and patience from a firm but nurturing hand. She would find a home in the barn she would share with Rascal, discovering it sheltered her from rain and snow and cold winds. She would come to learn the oats and apples she was fed as a treat were given out of kindness, whereas now she took them for granted, snatching and savouring them like a successful thief. As she grew into maturity as a mare, she would learn that accepting the rope, halter, and eventually a saddle would bring her both the reward of love and the pride of partnership with her trusted rider, and that marriage between horse and human would become her new society.
Devil knew these things because he knew horses, and had watched her opinion of Rascal change from seeing the stallion as an enemy combatant to forming a tenuous kinship. It had been a full day since she tried kicking Rascal, and for the first time that morning she didn't try to bite Devil when he adjusted her halter before they set off in the darkness.
Devil and his four-legged companions made their way up Main Street, the filly trailing behind and Devil soothed by the sound of her unshod hooves clopping lightly on the road. It was a wholesome sound, unlike the dragging and creaking of the travois Rascal had hauled behind them for miles down trails and roads until he delivered it to Constable Geary from Grand Forks. Devil had turned north after that unburdening and disappeared back into the forest once more, not wanting to speak to Detective Sergeant Locke just then and still not looking forward to that inevitability.
It was a day north of Rock Creek that he'd roped the blonde filly, pulling her from her herd, enamoured by her potential beauty and proud stance.
"Chief Brigham!"
Devil swivelled in his saddle, wincing at the popping at the base of his spine as he did. It was young Winston Tippet pumping the pedals of his bicycle, coming up from the train station, dressed in his uniform jacket and cap, his despatch bag looped over one shoulder, the strap across his chest. Winston was making his morning deliveries of the overnight telegrams from the station, and like many Arawanan's, still thought of Devil as Chief of Police.
"It's Detective Corporal now, Winston." he reminded the boy.
"Yes, sir. Glad to see you back, sir. Nice looking filly, sir."
Winston spoke in the same rapid-fire truncated sentences that were typed on the telegrams he carried in his despatch bag. It was as though every spoken word cost him a penny and he held to a spendthrift budget.
"You catch them indians, sir?"
"No. They got away."
"Too bad, sir."
"Anything in that bag for the police station?" Devil asked.
"Yes, Sir. From Victoria, sir."
"How about Mason's Funeral Home?"
"Nothing for them, sir."
"Going anywhere near it?"
"Couple of blocks from Miss Mason's house. Mister Flannery's telegram. Vancouver kin's come up sickly."
Devil dug in his pocket and pulled out a silver fifty cent piece and flipped it to Winston who caught it with a speed equal to Lou Gehrig snatching a line drive down the first base line.
"They're not telegrams, but could you let the Constables know I'm back and I'll be in tomorrow morning, so don't call me." Devil said, "And please let Miss Mason know I'd like to see her up at the Lazy B later today when she has a moment free."
"Yes, sir. I'll do both, sir." Winston smiled, holding up the silver fifty cent piece as proof of their contract before stuffing it in his pant's pocket, "Thank you, Chief Detective."
"Thank you, Winston."
Devil resumed his ride as Winston peddled up to the neighbourhood in the east to see to his rounds. The Police Department could wait a day, but Devil figured he'd best rip the bandaid off the Hattie Mason wound right away. He just hoped she'd come to the ranch after the wreckage he'd left behind when they'd parted over two weeks before.
He'd replayed their last conversation in his mind until his stomach knotted around it. Seeing it through his memory so many times, he shook his head at each sentence he misspoke and cringed at each awkward silence he should have filled with kind words. He could have done better. He would do better.
Though he wasn't one for preparing speeches, Devil had rolled up what he wanted to say into tight little scrolls in his mind and hoped they didn't unravel into nonsense on their way out of his mouth. He spoke the language of rough men with an easy eloquence, but the poetry he believed women wanted to hear was a foreign tongue to him. Even speaking a smattering of lyrical Parisian French he'd learned during the war sounded like someone pounding meat with a rock when it came out of his mouth. Devil had planned this homecoming as best he could. He'd bathed his body and hair in a cold creek the night before so his skin wouldn't smell too much like horse and sweat and regretted not packing a razor.
Once home, after he put the filly in the ring pen he'd fetch Chance home from Herb Donaldson to give her time to work through her emotions. First her anger at having been left behind that would entail her ignoring him as she made her patrol of the Lazy B. Then her forgiveness by allowing him to give her a treat and fresh water. Then finally letting the pleasure of his company surface when she relented and came to roughhouse with him.
By then he would have unsaddled and settled Rascal and the filly, unpacked his saddle bags, put his Marlin rifle where it lived inside the front door and hung his gun belt on the peg beside it. He'd change his clothes, after slipping his Haines Bowie knife off his belt that he only took on long treks to hack dried branches to length as fire wood, dress rabbits and quail he took down, and this trip; to whittle lengths of green wood as he built the travois to haul the result of his violence. By then he would be somewhat presentable and able to while away his time until Hattie arrived.
If she arrived.
Devil flinched as he realized it had been a mistake to send Winston to Hattie with his message instead of phoning her himself once he was home. But he hadn't rolled up any scrolls for that conversation and knew that if he called her after summoning her through a telegram delivery boy he'd just muck it up as bad as he had their last conversation.
As he rounded the curve from Main street to Arawana road, Devil looked to the west and was puzzled to see that a house had sprouted up where no one in their right mind would build a house. But there it was on Lake View Loop, being swarmed this early morning by carpenters already lifting walls and masons building chimneys inside them. A stout cabin tent was pegged and roped down beside it.
The house was going to be a large one, big enough for a family, and close enough to the Tumble Down Lakeside Hotel brothel to hit it with a rock.
Who wanted a whorehouse as a neighbour?
Devil made a mental note to drive down sometime this week and introduce himself to the new neighbours, no doubt someone from out of town delighted at finding a cheap plot with a lake view.
Devil shook his head; he'd been away for two weeks and as soon as his back was turned his town was transforming itself. Maybe Stuckey knew something about it.
He set his mind on the homestretch to the Lazy B. Even Rascal had perked up, stepping into an uphill trot on Arawana road, eager to be shut of his saddle and Devil's weight, longing to drink ice cold water from the ranch's spring and shelter under the trees that stood sentinel around it. The filly snorted her complaint at Rascal's increase in speed, not because she didn't love running, but because it wasn't her idea, plus the best flavour of running was running free which this devil had robbed her of.
Devil stood up in his stirrups, his knees bent like springed hinges to lift his weight from bouncing on Rascal's back, and let the stallion have his head. But truth be told Devil was as pleased as Rascal was to return home after being so long away from it even though his knees ached like a bad tooth.