Reckoning

He walked into town on the cusp of a storm, the air drawn tight and
sharp and the darkening promise of rain already obscuring the
mountains. The evening sunlight cast his shadow long and distinct ahead
of him and the insects had gone silent for once so that the prickly
crunch of dry gravel was curt and urgent beneath his boot. Just a
stranger passing through.

Mary sits in the corner of the room now, at the table where she
and Bonney sat, cutting cards and striking matches. Won't go out while
it's still there she says. Coppermoney paying her way.

Bonney's eyes daggers and poison then, watched coins dropped on the
bar and a saddlebag dropped wearily from shoulder to floor. Watched the
stranger flex his back and roll his neck across his shoulders and buy a
room for the night. Watched nothing but the back of a duster pick up
the bag and walk upstairs.

Mary met him then we think, introduced herself there on the landing
with the last of the light casting fairy stripes in the dust and the
first drops of rain just tapping at the window. Some say he knew her
already, say there was an obligation there. Others say he knew Bonney
from the coppermine and chose Mary as recompense for some past abuse,
say he made his own introductions. It is hard for us to imagine her so
capricious or passively seduced, we believe they met for the first time
that night.

The boys will cut it down and do what needs to be done when they
get in Friday night. They will want a good time after the working week
and find the it too grim an audience. They will laugh at us for leaving
it hanging but they did not see what we saw.

The rain like pebbles on the tin roof drowned out the piano that
night and the wind shook the window glass loose in the frame. The few
of us there drew tight around the fire and swapped storm stories across
our beer, growing closer in the adversity of the elements, every man
friend to every other. Bonney headed out to the mine, pulling his coat
tight around him and hunkering his body to the weather before he even
opened the door, not a glance backwards. Mary sat at the bar and shared
silence with the girl behind it.

The stranger descended washed and shaved, ordered food and ate it at
a table by himself. It was Mary that joined him not the other way
round, waited till he pushed away his plate and pulled herself up a
chair. We commented at the time I think but drew no conclusions.

They got a judge in from the city to do the job, took nearly
five months to arrive, a black capped crow come to deal a reckoning.
Would not believe what he was told, had Mary recount it all from the
stand, one hand refusing to release the bible after the oath, the first
time she had seen him since. His poor lawyer useless against a guilty
plea.

The coppermine flooded, Bonney and his boys barking orders up there,
prioritising the pumps between the pits. Three men drowned in the
darkness, their softened bodies not retrieved till the following week.
In town men sought shelter from the storm, the canvas covered shacks
where the miners live no place to be they said. Mary's chill glare
cutting short their comments, her and the stranger fortified in the
corner now, all of us powerless next to her resolve.

The rain abated to the point where the piano could be heard and a
fiddle picked up the tune and ran with it, some of us singing, some of
us tapping out the rhythm on the tables and others dancing. We drowned
out the wind and celebrated our shelter with cowboy songs and laments.
The bar was hot and noisy when Bonney returned late with his boys in
tow, wet and cold and tired. They set up shop on the usual table, food
and whisky on Bonney's tab. He asked after Mary and went up to find
her, the bar falling silent as he left a rainwater trail up the stairs.
None of us remembered her leaving, none of us remembered the stranger
going with her.

The whole town attended the hanging, a morbid curiosity perhaps,
or a need to see the death, to know it was final. When it came to it
not one among us dared cut the body down, left it dangling there four
days now, a halo of flies about its head.

We heard the screams and we heard the shots, three shots, and we
watched Bonney drag Mary out the door, she only half dressed, still
screaming. Took a horsewhip to her in the street, the whole bar
gathering round in a circle, unwilling to intervene but unable not to
watch, the rain still falling as Mary slipped and crawled in the
mud.

The stranger walked through the crowd, blood running freely from his
stomach, his shirt and the front of his trousers sodden with it. Bonney
dropped the whip and pulled his pistol, put three bullets through the
stranger's chest. I saw each one enter in a spray of fabric and gore
and I saw the stranger keep on walking up to Bonney and I saw the
stranger cut Bonney's throat and I saw the stranger remain standing
over the body and wait to be arrested, his blood still flowing from his
wounds and washing away with the rainwater. Not so much as a glance
between him and Mary.

Mary winces as she stands up; the scars on her back still
painful. She dreamed him into existence she says, to be her salvation,
and with one hand cradling the bump in her stomach she climbs the
stairs.