The Death and Life of Strother Purcell Read online

  Also by Ian Weir

  Will Starling

  Daniel O’Thunder

  Ian Weir

  Copyright © 2018 by Ian Weir.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).

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  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Jaye Haworth.

  Printed in Canada.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Weir, Ian, author

  The death and life of Strother Purcell / Ian Weir.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77310-029-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77310-030-2 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-77310-031-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.E47D43 2018 C813’.54 C2018-901163-7

  C2018-901164-5

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada,

  the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

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  To my mother,

  blazer of trails

  CONTENTS

  –EDITOR’S PREFACE–

  PART ONE

  –ONE–

  –TWO–

  –THREE–

  –FOUR–

  –FIVE–

  PART TWO

  –SIX–

  –SEVEN–

  –EIGHT–

  –NINE–

  –TEN–

  PART THREE

  –ELEVEN–

  –TWELVE–

  –THIRTEEN–

  –FOURTEEN–

  –FIFTEEN–

  –SIXTEEN–

  –SEVENTEEN–

  –EIGHTEEN–

  –NINETEEN–

  –TWENTY–

  PART FOUR

  –TWENTY-ONE–

  –TWENTY-TWO–

  –TWENTY-THREE–

  –TWENTY-FOUR–

  –TWENTY-FIVE–

  –TWENTY-SIX–

  –TWENTY-SEVEN–

  –TWENTY-EIGHT–

  –TWENTY-NINE–

  –THIRTY–

  –THIRTY-ONE–

  PART FIVE

  –THIRTY-TWO–

  –THIRTY-THREE–

  –THIRTY-FOUR–

  –THIRTY-FIVE–

  –THIRTY-SIX–

  –EPILOGUE–

  –EDITOR’S PREFACE–

  THE TEXT YOU HOLD in your hands first came to my attention in January of 2004, under circumstances so singular as to necessitate exegesis. It was a bleak midwinter evening on the campus of the University of the Southwestern Cariboo; a slate-grey sky had darkened into night, and snow, lashed sideways by a bitter wind, drove the ghostly shapes of stragglers slip-sliding. I was at my car, fumbling with balky fingers to unlock the door and uttering faint heartfelt execrations, when at my back a voice said out of the storm: “You Professor Brookmire?”

  A tiny figure stood in a bright red parka: an old woman. A hat with earflaps framed a wizened face, out of which two keen eyes peered. She had just been to my office, but had missed me, she was saying. Someone had pointed me out, across the parking lot—a student, or some such. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening closely, having dropped my keys into a snowbank. Yes, I muttered, I was Brookmire. Could I help her?

  “I expect we’ll see. You’re the Purcell fella, eh?”

  “The what?”

  She looked to be well over ninety. Such was my impression, in the discombobulation of the moment. An icicle depended from her nose. “The Purcell fella. Strother Purcell. You’re supposed to be the expert?”

  I supposed this was more or less true. I’d published two or three papers on Strother Purcell, although I wouldn’t have called myself a Purcell Scholar. There weren’t really any of those, given the paucity of information about him.

  Strother Purcell had attained notoriety in his own time, but his fame—or infamy—had largely died with him. He had neither been exalted, nor reviled, by Hollywood. He never inspired a television series, not even in the wide-eyed 1950s, when practically anyone who’d fired a sixgun could ride into your living room; he never galloped through the pages of a comic book, or graced the outside of a small boy’s lunch-box. Yet this was a gunman whose prowess cowed Wyatt Earp, and whose elemental rivalry with his own half-brother had its roots in antebellum North Carolina and a blood-feud nearly Biblical in dimension, setting in motion a lifelong saga of obsession, betrayal, lost love, and retribution.

  “...And left ’em outside your office,” the old woman was saying.

  “You left...?”

  “The papers. Outside the door.” She sounded impatient. “I made copies, eh? Just a coupla bits and pieces—there’s lots more. But have a look, and see what you think. Maybe you’d have some idea what I could do with it. If you want, you could give me a call.”

  Having found the keys, thank God, I struggled back to my feet. But when I looked around, the old woman had disappeared. “Hello?” I called, uncertainly. It seemed to me that I glimpsed her, just for an instant: a stunted figure, jackknifed forward, trudging into the teeth of the storm. Then she was swallowed in darkness and driving snow.

  I might have gone after her, under other circumstances—if the wind had not been rising by the moment, slicing through my insufficient coat. I might at least have gone back to my office to retrieve whatever it was the old woman claimed to have left. As it was, I bundled myself into my car and started it up, shuddering until the blessed heat came blasting.

  This had taken place on a Friday evening. Monday morning, returning to campus, I looked for a parcel propped against my office door. There was nothing there. I felt obscurely disappointed, but somehow not surprised; the entire encounter had already taken on such an air of unreality that I could almost believe I’d imagined it. Weeks passed. Then, in April, a colleague manifested in my doorway, looking sheepish. Something had been left for me ages ago, he said, back in January—on a Friday evening, after I’d already left. He’d picked it up and put it aside and forgotten about it, until just now, when he’d stumbled across it while cleaning out his office. He held out a battered manila envelope. Inside were two documents.

  I read them, riveted. The first was a third-person accounting of an encounter at an isolated roadhouse near Hell’s Gate in the Fraser Canyon in the winter of 1876—long believed to have been the year of Purcell’s own death, in circumstances both fraught and abstruse. The account was attributed to Thomas Skiffings, a name I did not recognize. But I certainly recognized the name affixed to the second document. It was—or purported to be—the personal journal of Barrington Weaver, a failed journalist of the Gilded Age who had written, under the pseudonym “B.W. Colton,” a series of risible dime novels in the mid-1880s, featuring the fictional Western hero “Deadeye Ned” Hartland. In these journal pages, Weaver claimed to have encountered Strother Purcell in San Francisco in 1892, fully sixteen years after the lawman’s supposed death, in circumstances that were nothing short of astounding.

  Stuck to the top-sheet was a yellow sticky-note on which was scribbled, in a crabbed cursive minuscule, a partial name—“Tilda S.”—and a telephone number. The old woman, obvi
ously. But when I called, the number was out of service. There was no last name, and no address. I had no way to ascertain whom “Tilda S.” might be, or even if she was still alive. She made no further attempt to contact me. There the matter rested for eight years.

  In October of 2012, I was contacted by J.M. Cates, a solicitor. Mr. Cates identified himself as the executor for the late Matilda Sturluson, who had died some months previously in Penticton, BC, aged 103. Among Ms. Sturluson’s effects was a manuscript, along with a note indicating that, “Brookmire, the Purcell fella, might still be worth contacting. Or else possibly not.” Mr. Cates asked: Was I interested?

  Ten days later, a package arrived, containing 134 sheets of 8 x 11 paper, covered recto and verso with typescript, single-spaced. It had been typed, to judge by the typeface, on an old Smith Corona portable, at some point within the relatively recent past, since the pages had only just begun to yellow. But at least five separate and distinct authorial voices could be discerned. One of these was, unmistakably, Barrington Weaver’s. A second was that of the mysterious Thomas Skiffings, whose “Roadhouse Chronicles” continued. Other sections of the manuscript seemed to be based upon obscure but verifiable primary texts from the sparse Purcellian canon. These included The Sorrows of Miz Amanda and her Two Brave Boys, a family saga from the Appalachian region, authorship unknown, written sometime in the 1870s; and the curious narrative known to scholars as High Crimes of the Outlaw Dillashay, dating from the same era. Other segments of the Tilda Sturluson manuscript appeared to be wholly original. At first, I presumed the sole author of these to have been Tilda Sturluson herself, although six years of editorial endeavour have led me to believe that the truth was—as truth will be—more nuanced and confounding.

  But this much may be asserted with conviction: what follows is the life’s work of a scholar, untutored but profoundly diligent, who spent decades researching the history of Strother Purcell, reworking and redacting multiple existing narratives, and emending these through recourse to hitherto unknown eyewitness accounts. I have chosen to present this with minimal editorial intrusion, adding footnotes only where absolutely necessary, in hopes that the reader may encounter the text as if it were a novel: as a mystery, even—for such it is. The exhumation of the tragic history of the last, lost gunslinger of the Western Frontier, and a delving into the deepest mystery of all: the yearnings and desolations of that treacherous sonofabitch, the human heart.

  To the original manuscript, a hand-written note had been appended, in the crabbed cursive minuscule that I had first seen in January of 2004. It said: “To whosoever might be reading this—it’s true. All of it. Every damned word, more or less, except for the bits that maybe aren’t. But the rest you can take to the godalmighty bank.” It was signed, “T. Sturluson.”

  D. Garrett Brookmire, Ph.D.

  Emeritus Professor

  University of the Southwestern Cariboo

  May 2018

  –ONE–

  Near Hell’s Gate

  Winter, 1876

  THEY WERE PASSING INTO MYTH before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinctions of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end.

  There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute. Three men on horseback, ghosting their way north through the trees along the river. They had been glimpsed on two occasions earlier that day by separate witnesses, but did not seek out human interaction. A Cornishman, however, named T.E. Spurlock would in later years recall with increasing clarity that the men had stopped at his shack near Hill’s Bar some time before noon, and asked him did he have whiskey. No, replied T.E. Spurlock, he did not, this being a Christian abode. T.E. Spurlock was a drunkard and known confabulist who kept chickens and a desultory pig, but he swore till the day he died that the remainder of this account was Bible truth.

  They were U.S. Americans, he said, but not from Washington Territory; he knew this by the manner of their speaking. They came from somewhere deeper in the South. The one who mostly spoke was a man in the early prime of life, not tall but powerfully built, with black hair and a sullen satyr’s face and way of staring that prompted T.E. Spurlock to recollect that he did possess a jug of whiskey after all. He fetched it out and told the man no payment was required.

  “That is where you are mistaken,” the man replied. He reached one hand inside his coat and T.E. Spurlock saw the glint of metal. “Payment is always required.”

  There was an instant of deadly hush, in which the great globe itself stood frozen. The moment grew more protracted with each successive telling, until by 1898 T.E. Spurlock—now a resident of Kamloops, where he maintained a position as town drunk—would recollect the world’s standing still for an entire four minutes and a half, while God gazed grimly down. At last the stranger drew out his hand. The glint between his fingers was a silver coin, which he tossed into the snow at T.E. Spurlock’s feet with an infinitesimal twisting of his lip.

  “And I never knew,” T.E. Spurlock would say, marvelling anew at each retelling of the tale. “Not once did I begin to dream who it was, standing there before me...”

  –TWO–

  From The Roadhouse Chronicles of Thomas Skiffings1

  Near Hell’s Gate

  Winter, 1876

  THE THREE MEN ARRIVED with darkness at John McCutcheon’s roadhouse. The night had grown vengeful. Wind bansheed from the north, flinging the snow before it in slanting volleys. The man with black hair signed the Register, giving his name as Lightburn. Mr. Lightburn, he wrote, from Decatur. He scratched it with effort, his fingers clumsy as blocks of wood from the cold.

  “Decatur, Georgia?” John McCutcheon said this in a friendly manner, to indicate an interest.

  “No,” the stranger said. “The other one.”

  John McCutcheon blinked, as if having it briefly in mind to ask further clarification. On mature reflection, he did not. “Well,” he said. “Well, indeed. The far-flung places people come from.” John McCutcheon was himself from far-flung Nova Scotia. He had come West three years previous, buoyed by a modest inheritance and brimming with resolve, and had purchased the roadhouse from a man who saw him coming.

  The house was some miles east of Yale, alongside the fabled and perilous Cariboo Wagon Road, which crept past Hell’s Gate in the Fraser River Canyon and thence for 350 miles to Barkerville and the gold fields in the north. A sprawling ramshackle structure, as gaunt as a haunted grange in a penny-dreadful tale, with outbuildings in the trees behind and a foothold on a low bluff looking down upon the river, on which it baked all summer and was buffeted by the winds come November. It stood guestless as often as not, being scarcely the thriving hostelry of its proprietor’s fond imaginings, for John McCutcheon was a man out of step with Time. The Cariboo gold rush was a decade in the past, and the traffic along the road had dwindled to a trickle. But John McCutcheon remained an optimist on principle and planted the tattered banner of his hopes upon the certainty that the railway must come. On clear nights when the moon shone down on John McCutcheon drunk on his own bad whiskey, he could see in his mind’s starry eye a refurbished hotel with a dining room and a mahogany bar and a chef named Jean-Pierre imported from Montreal. At present he made do with Gimp Tom and the girl.

  Gimp Tom was McCutcheon’s nephew. He was the one who glimpsed the riders first, bulking into corporeality in the darkness, and knew at once what this portended.

  “They’ll be outlaws,” he said to his sister. “They’ll be killers, on the run.”

  The two of them were in the loft, peering out of the small, cracked window. They huddled shoulder to shoulder for warmth, a blanket wrapped around them.

  “We’ll be dead by morning.”

  He said it with a kind of relish, being of an age to be much captivated by outlawry, which he had encountered in books in all its sundry guises. He was in fact the exact sort of boy you would expect to meet in such a place as this road
house: as likely a lad as ever aspired to bravery and noble deeds, apart from his puniness and deformity. His sister was a different kettle of fish.

  “Dead from boredom,” she said. “There’s no one out there.”

  “No, look.” Gimp Tom had large uncanny eyes that glowed like lamps—so his sister had informed him—in moments of excitement. Now he pointed. “Down through the trees—three men on horseback.”

  She began to see them too.

  “Three riders coming hard, this way,” said Tom. “With fell intent.” He had encountered this phrase in a nickel magazine, and tried it out now for the first time. It pleased him. “They’ll ask for lodging till the storm blows past. They’ll want stabling for their horses, and a hot meal for themselves, and they’ll be cordial enough for a time. But then they’ll ask for whiskey, and when they drunk it they’ll ask for more—and that’s where it starts. You just see if it don’t. They’ll kill the menfolk first, which means Uncle John and myself. That leaves you, Billie. It grieves me to say it, and I wish it weren’t the truth. But that’s how these things go.”

  His sister watched the shadows take shape. “Well, fuck,” she said.

  At sixteen, Billie Skiffings was five and a half years older than Gimp Tom. The boy was her half-brother, strictly speaking; she was not blood-kin to John McCutcheon, being Edward Skiffings’s daughter by his first wife, before he ever met McCutcheon’s sister, the late lamented Mina. Billie had accompanied her young half-brother after Mina’s funeral—the third parent she had seen buried already, in her young life—the two of them travelling from Victoria, where they had lived, by steam launch to New Westminster first and then by riverboat sixteen hours due east along the Fraser to Yale, where McCutcheon arrived half a day late to meet them. He found them on the wooden steps leading up from the docks below Front Street: the two of them sitting close together, the sister on the step above and the brother hunched below, looking out across the mud flats and the river shallows where Natives and Chinese still squatted to pan for the last specks of gold, though the glory days were in the past and white men had long since given up.