Oh, Death
of the Pale Rider
Tom Sheehan
Life had its full range of artillery out
for him, front and center. Oh, Death of
the Pale Rider sounded anew in the silence of Briggs Thornton’s mind, even
as the day bore itself harsh as a frozen thunderbolt, a huge icicle with breath
and as cold as the bank was to his latest overture. Around his neck the wrap of
a muffler was not a comfortable wrap, feeling it a trade-off of an itch to keep
the chill off his nape.
Adding to all his misery, Humboldt was
sick, the stallion not going to make it out of the barn on his own, not on
those great legs for sure. And the ground now frozen at least two feet down.
Briggs Thornton didn’t know how he was going to bury Humboldt, if it came to
that, though everything pointed to his death. It would be like setting in a new
gasoline tank, all that digging. Not selling that great animal for glue or meat
was a certainty, but the weather was dropping a degree an hour and would sock
the earth into more solid granite, Mother Earth’s deep-poured concrete. Keeping
that worry company was the other onus working on him, the responsibility of
getting Dabney Overton, his last ranch hand, settled someplace, not appeasement
but settlement, not payment but duty, for the old ramrod was so owed. A seventy-year
old man doesn’t just up and move on from where he’s spent fifty years of his
life, no matter how mouthy he was getting. Of late the ranch hand’s impatience
with Briggs’ decision-making had become very noticeable. “Sometime when the
time comes, boss, it’s already gone.” And Briggs’ wife Mavreen had noted on a
number of occasions that the old cowpoke was getting “testy and stretching his
mouth too far from the saddle.”
The frozen thunderbolt clapped about him
again. Oh, Death of the Pale Rider.
At the moment Briggs couldn’t discern if
Humboldt’s problem was worse than the foreclosure he was facing, or Dabney’s
imminent plight. A hundred and twenty years on this New England land were the Thorntons from the old
country after the first of them being stashed in a horrible ship’s hold for a
damnation of a journey. And it had fallen upon him to lose the land they had
quested and conquered, land with more than one page of history. This was the
place where the first Thorntons
fought the Puritans, the Brahmins, as well as the new politics, and came clear
across the country to the new land, to the western breaths. And here long ago
was found the body of Quilkin the Sneak Pirate atop three of his crew in a deep
ditch below the cliffs in the north section, cliffs rising as a fortification
for the north pasture. The three pirates had been shot in the back, and Quilkin
in the face, as if he had shot them in the hole and one of them, not quite gone
to sea, had fired back at their killer.
Humboldt, Briggs’ own horse for years, was
a black giant, with eyes like great greenish-yellow orbs stolen out of a
Chinese color scheme. They were readable and you knew he was knowing you, but
couldn’t say if he enjoyed the company or not. Briggs’ father, Jock Taggard
Thornton, died thirty years earlier sitting up frozen on Humboldt’s sire, the
other great black that owned outright those vast spreads the Thorntons claimed. His name had been Manitou
the Magnificent. Manitou had brought the old gent back to the barn in the midst
of the worst sneak storm in a hundred years, stiff and straight up as a
bayonet-stuck rifle he was, marking his death on the battlefield of storms.
Young Briggs, from a kitchen window in the
long house, knew from the posture of the rider, from his rigid sitting the
saddle, that he had heard the last Yeats’ poem from his father on the wide
summer porch where the fireflies would dance him off to bed. In all those
years, he had not forgotten that silent death, the awful and visible stiffness
of the man of tongues, the storyteller. To that scene he had given the title Death of the Pale Rider, the way man
and horse made a dim silhouette against the snow-battered barn, a moon-like and
sparsely colored silhouette at best. But each time out it seemed as though the
old man’s voice always said the words of the title and not his own voice, not
even under his own breath where identity is always found.
Death
of the Pale Rider. The old gent had said it again,
as if hung out on a point of the frozen thunderbolt. Thereafter, the prairie
stars held it in an echo his cupped hand could find any night he sat a saddle,
watched the skies.
But Briggs kept thinking about the great
black horse, the eyes wild at times, and he could bring back instantly his own
early fright at the size of such creatures, the way they trod the fields
massive as a mountain, fearful with height. Horses like Humboldt, in Briggs’
young days, filled the barn door like some colossus out of Egypt or Rhodes
he’d only seen in picture books.
“You’ll have to truck him out somehow,” his
wife Mavreen said as he entered the kitchen, swinging her hair up in a gesture,
all the punctuation she needed to stress her adjudication. “Get him out of here
before he freezes up and in the spring rouses flies and maggots.” Mavreen had
not been on a horse yet, after eight years of marriage. That had been a minor
difficulty in the beginning; Briggs’ first wife Julia Rose had fallen from
horseback and been impaled on a broken shovel handle. She had walked to a
nearby road, holding onto the shovel handle, and collapsed in front of a car
coming over the hill. She was dead long before she arrived at the hospital.
Mavreen, in turn, was insensitive to horses of any kind, yet her shape was
still thin and curving and her skin glowed with a rosiness that five-mile walks
returned to her. At times Briggs was convinced her only care-giving was in bed.
It was not fair, he thought, but it might be true. Glory be in the truth, he
smiled sub-vocally, letting part of an argument fall away.
Clad in a denim down jacket, Briggs had
come into the kitchen for coffee, and a sheen of silver rode his hair as if the
frost had touched it with a wand. His eyes were dark and brittle and a moment
of the cold had come with him, sweeping under Mavreen’s skirts, and bristling
in its rise to touch the back of her neck. He saw her shiver, offered her his
coffee. She smiled back, “You can’t duck it, Briggs. We got troubles piling on
us. I know you love that animal, but he’s going to make more trouble, mark my
words.”
Briggs, at small evasion, felt like musing.
“The old gent must be rolling over in his grave or raising hell among the
clouds. Might be paying us back in a new storm. Forecast is unsettled but it
looks like snow, even this cold.”
“I’m talking about the bills, Briggs. They
just don‘t go away when you talk about something else. Even if you sell the
stock we have left, we can’t pull ourselves out of this one. I know you’re
worrying about Dab, too.” She tossed her hair again, as much a gesture of
futility as she could muster in the face of the man she loved but whose horses
she wouldn’t ride for love or money. “I won’t tell you what he said yesterday.”
“Don’t gunnysack me, Mav. Don’t add on to
it. I’m not struggling to realize what’s at us. I’ve been hard at it for months.
I wanted to sell off a smaller piece, but it’s like heaven or hell’s been
arranged against us.”
“Or Danton Oliver at the bank has arranged
it so that no one comes forward with an offer. He’s sworn to get this land.
We’ve known that for a long time. I think he’s spent a long time arranging us
behind the eight ball, and you keep getting hung up on a horse. My god, Briggs,
you lost one wife to a horse.” Her mouth hung open, full of her own surprise.
The chill touched her again.
The knife-edge of that implicit statement
slipped under Briggs’ skin. “Mav, you always knew and still know that what
counts first with me is loyalty. That great horse out there,” and he nodded to
the barn, “has earned his way through life. He has supported us every inch of
the way and I’ll be damned to see him cut up for glue or meat just so we can
get him out of here at the least cost to us. He’s earned his way!” As if in
agreement with Briggs’ promise, the wind shifted around and came directly out
of the northeast and banged against the windows and the walls of the old
homestead. Someplace a board was loose and slapping at its connection and the
sound of a barn door slamming boomed like a chunk of thunder. “And Dab counts,
just like you say. We can always move on I suppose, but I’m not sure he can. I
know he’s worried a whole lot more than he shows. His mouth is just part of
that.”
Briggs sipped his coffee as a signal, put
his jacket back on; the motions said things
loose have to be righted. He welcomed Mavreen into his arms as she said, “I
didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Briggs. Not really. There’s just so much
weight coming down atop us. I know what history means to you. The family. The
vows. And the promises that people long dead have exacted from you. I’m just so
helpless in this. I can’t get horses into my blood. It’s the way I am.”
She wanted to stand on her toes, to look
directly into his eyes at his level. “Horses have nothing for me. It is not a
sin for me. It’s just what I am. And now I’m damn worried about what’s going to
happen, not to us, but to all of this.” Her gesture of widespread hands meant
the whole ranch. “My very last gem was in that recent payment.” Her fingers
were bare, her wrists were bare and he knew her jewelry box was empty. Briggs
Thornton drew her tighter than he had in a long while. “I know what you’ve
given up, Mav, but don’t give up the last treasure you’ve got. Don’t give up
hope.” The steel of his arms cut her short of breath and he slipped out the
door, each of them sharing the delayed pressure of the other against their
bodies.
Leaning against the wind, Briggs saw one
barn door slapping loose and a board floating nearly free in a tall fence
beside the barn. As the wind blew around him, as the cold continued its hold on
the surfaces of all things, his mind kept searching for a solution to the
coming problem. Dabney Overton, Briggs’ last employee and fifty years at this
hitch, stood at Humboldt’s stall, his collar tight about his neck, a wool
stocking cap down over his ears, age cutting across his face the way lines cut
old canvas, eyes calling out an old ramrod’s backbone.
“It gets no better, Briggs. Soon’s it
comes, he goes down like a shot. I’ve seen it before, like I said yesterday.
Davey Warwick’s Hellfire went down the same way, like as I said. No name for it
but plain tired and life gone out of the blood.” Briggs was thinking that
Dabney’s voice was loaded with messages. “It’s the way some heroes go, Briggs.
Just the way they choose. Hellfire was not the horse this one was, but he was a
piece, I’ll tell you.”
“Soon you think?”
“Yuh, all of that. If it’s just you and me,
we best get him set for the easy move, get him where we can manage him with the
tractor.” Dabney pointed to the open part of the barn, the finger pointing
repeatedly and loaded with enunciation. “Best get him there, under a blanket or
two and wait him out. Be a trick or two if I do say.” As if to throw that
problem under the shadow of another problem, he said, “I have a few hundred
dollars in my kit and a few checks not cashed yet. You’re welcome to them. This
place has been home to me for too damn long. I don’t like the thought of
leaving it in a huff.”
Briggs wanted to put an arm around Dabney’s
shoulder, but held off. "You and Mav been the best part of me through all
this, and you loving horses and her not. Different you are and the same. What I
been thinking, Dab, is to drop him at the foot of the cliff and dropping a
chunk of it over him. Blast it off with dynamite. That long fissure across the
top face has been beaten at by wind and water and the earthchill for a million
years now. We might pop enough loose to give him cover forever.”
“That’s a decent tolerable idea, Briggs. We
got some trouble getting Humboldt into the ground where he belongs, but we can
sure keep him from the scavengers. There’s a whole lot of them out there’d like
to tear his carcass to pieces, right to the quick of his bones.” At his slight
urging, the great horse listlessly moved out of his stall and Dabney threw a
blanket over his back.
As he was about to throw the second blanket
on him, the yellow eyes of Humboldt turned white and then a lime green and full
of shadow, and the great horse crashed to the floor of the barn. The two men
could hear a leg bone breaking, caught at the wrong angle, the body athwart
itself and falling. There came no other sound but the escape of breath, as if a
huge canister emptied itself of air. The wide barn was silent on the inside,
only the wind talking on the outside, beating at boards, seeking to whistle its
entry. Humboldt allowed one more cavernous sound from his lungs and made
silence a fitting gesture, a hero easing off almost by himself. The whole
structure of barn board and beam shook down through the fieldstone foundation,
and emptiness ensued, a very heady emptiness, as if all things were beholding
to death itself, patience being the ultimate acknowledgment.
With chain and rope and a come-along, they
got the great horse onto a sled attached to the tractor, Dabney muttering all
the time he was setting chain and rope. At last, figuring to have complained
long enough, he exclaimed, almost under his breath, about the final demise of
the faithful. “Talk about a kick in the hind quarters, this is a one! Sorry,
hoss, never believed I’d see it! Get your ass dragging and they drag your ass
off!”
Briggs, tying knots, testing them, was
trying to understand all the asides thrown at him by the old rider. He felt a
crude rawness and cold stabbing at his hands and at his heart, and the muffler
failing on his neck again.
In the cold blue air they hauled Humboldt
off to the section of cliff at the northern end of the ranch, along with a
cache of dynamite.
They left the sled with Humboldt atop it
against the face of the cliff. Dabney drove the tractor into the copse of cottonwoods
standing like a quiver of arrows fifty yards away, his shoulders hanging
rounded and sloped. Briggs had not seen the old man like this before. History,
he thought, was suddenly catching up to the old rider.
Briggs set up the charges inside the
fissure snaking across the front of the cliff. Thirty minutes work in the cold
air had him sweating. The picture of his father astride Manitou, the great barn
pale behind them, kept entering his mind. He could not shake that eternal
picture or the sounds coming with it, Death
of the Pale Rider. It was neither song nor eulogy, but it was continuous,
rhythmic, in tune with the wind doing its work, spiraling the snow along. Then,
as if willing to get out from under one image, something in his mind grabbed onto
an image of Julia Rose with the shovel handle coming through her stomach. He
knew, down into his boots, that he was the one going to suffer all the family’s
history. It was his due, it was coming at him. In the midst of it all he could
see a crowded ship off the coast of Cork,
heading for America.
The teeming mass below deck was a piece of Cork itself, dark, damp and highly unsure
that trailblazing was ahead of them.
The frigid air was at his sweat, and beads
of it froze him into a new consciousness. He counted out the sticks of dynamite
he had planted and reaffirmed their locations. Calling out to let Dabney know
the blast was soon coming, he heard him yell back, his voice hollow and distant.
Briggs walked back away from the cliff edge trailing the wire behind him. He
hid behind a huge boulder, heard the wind blow around him, the short whispers
he was always prone to, heard all the ghosts, could almost feel the thickness
of clouds building darker in the northern sky, and fired the charge.
The blast set off a large section of the
cliff, as if a plate had separated from the front face, and that whole section
dropped as one piece, falling away in slow motion and then breaking up in a
thunderous roar. There was a little smoke and less dust. The wind had quieted
as if the blast had set it back on its heels. When Briggs walked off the far
end of the cliff and down past the copse of trees, he saw the tractor, the face
of the cliff broken over what had been Humboldt on the sled. They were
completely covered. He did not see Dabney anywhere, but saw one set of tracks
in the snow heading back toward the cliff.
Dabney’s impatience had won out.
Caught up in the madness of death, Death of the Pale Rider sounding out again for him, Briggs Thornton suddenly
noted, on the newly exposed face of the cliff, his father astride a great horse
silhouetted against the white of the barn, Julia Rose with the shovel handle
coming through her gut, the darkness in the hold of a ship long gone to sea, an
old man with his arm around the neck of a big black horse, and the glitter of
gold pieces and gems freed from Quilkin the Sneak Pirate’s hiding place in the
cliff.
He was not sure what his treasure was.
____________________________________
Bio
note: Sheehan
served in 31st Infantry, Korea 1951, graduated from Boston College,
1956. Books include Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; Collection of
Friends; From the Quickening; The Saugus Book; Ah, Devon Unbowed; This
Rare Earth & Other Flights. In the Garden of Long Shadows,
The Nations and Where Skies Grow Wide, were recently published by
Pocol Press. Sons of Guns, Inc., just released by Nazar Look Books in
Romania (where he was awarded a Nazar Look Short Story Award for 2014.) eBooks
include Korean Echoes (nominated for a Distinguished Military Award),
The Westering, (National Book Award nomination); Murder
at the Forum, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment, An
Accountable Death, Vigilantes East. Work in Rosebud, KYSO Flash, The
Linnet's Wings, Literary Orphans, Provo Canyon Review, Nazar
Look, Eastlit, The Literary Yard, Green Silk Journal, The Path,
Faith-Hope-Fiction, etc. He has 28 Pushcart Prize nominations.