The Return of Henry Starr, page 31
She had been so intent tracking the ghost of Henry Starr from bank to bank across the Nations that she had somehow forgotten the woman, but suddenly now she was there, like the touch of a cold hand on your back when you thought yourself alone in some warm place—there, but Miss Woodly still couldn’t see her, she was just a looming black shape, the wife his wife, the woman he married, was married to, the child the store the house, what was she to him really? Why had he married, why did he leave her, what did he do to her, did she drive him out, did he run away, why did he leave her to rob two banks in one day of complete disaster at Stroud, why? The question became bigger and deeper and darker as she thought it, an undertow in which the shape of her script danced like a chip, worthless, utterly without importance beside the reality of his …
And just as she thought she was letting it go she saw with absolute clarity how the woman, the robbery, the reasons and the climax would all come together:
“The lady in the cabin!” she said, and they didn’t get it. “The woman with the child … the one you took shelter with after Coffeyville.”
“Bentonville,” said Henry Starr.
“That’s right,” she cried, triumphantly, “and which one it was made no difference to you, or to what you told her. It was a bank robbed her, and you’d robbed a bank, and you gave her some of the money and told her it was ‘a little piece of justice.’”
“It was a lie when I told it, Miss Woodly. It was to give me that kind of reputation …”
“Which you would live or die by …”
“But still not true.”
“But true enough!” she cried. “True enough to live and die by! And wasn’t it justice for the lady to get that money? And what difference which bank it was, isn’t the idea of it the same?”
“I didn’t rob the bank for the lady’s justice.”
“But you robbed it for somebody’s justice, didn’t you? That was part of why you did it, the best part, wasn’t it? And you knew that, you did!—that was why you wanted that kind of name, that kind of legend, instead of a blind killer reputation like Billy the Kid or Cherokee Bill or …”
“So: they come riding up to house …” prompted Esterhazy, leaning forward eagerly.
“… riding up to the cabin,” she said, “and the woman comes to the door—like Henry’s mother at the beginning, the same image!” She felt herself glow as Esterhazy bobbed his head and pursed his lips, so pleased with her grasp of the image. “She’s frightened—the men are rough, bloody … Especially Cherokee Bill, he’s … he’s huge, he can barely contain his … his fury, and you’re the only one who can hold him back, but you …”
“I’d just killed Floyd Wilson,” said Henry Starr, his face unreadable in the shadows, but her heart leaped because she recognized that he was playing the game with them, Henry Starr rewriting the life of Henry Starr.
“Yes,” said Esterhazy. “So audience is not sure of what you are capable.”
“And you see the woman and the child,” said Miss Woodly, “you see them … she’s poor, the clothes ragged, but she has fine features, a kind of light in her face, and she stands … she’s afraid, but she holds herself well, pride in spite of the rags, the hair blowing, her sad face—the way she holds the child to her breast you …”
Henry Starr’s shadow shape made a sound, a grating breath. It scraped on her nerves, raw and painful; had her words hurt him too? She would revise them, she wanted to make it good for him: “She’s the reason you go to Stroud,” said Miss Woodly, softly, “the reason you have to rob two banks at once: because you keep seeing her, the woman and the child and the cabin, and you want to win her some justice, you want …”
She could see it herself in the blackness, clearly and suddenly, and it seemed so absolutely and terribly true that she felt an inward whirl of horror, as if her playful fibbing had turned up a secret truth as awful as a corpse found by children playing a game of death. She knew with absolute certainty that there was such a woman, child and cabin, these were ghosts full of power in Henry Starr, the woman’s shape swelled and flowed and shifted like boiling smoke or fog or the poisoned water of a swamp, she had so many shapes: his mother, his wife, his lady-in-the-cabin—
And herself.
“I did it for her … for the woman, and for her justice,” said Henry Starr as if he were teaching himself a lesson. “And what you said, that’s just the picture of the reason I did it, which was for somebody’s justice.”
“For lady,” said Esterhazy. “All they can see of that is lady. Something that makes difference in story, so when he is in prison, yes? and Cherokee Bill makes his break, and Henry Starr stops him …
Scene: As they are marching Henry Starr and Cherokee Bill to the scaffold, Cherokee Bill suddenly breaks free, seizes a gun from one of the guards—the crowd falls back as the outlaw savagely menaces all around with the weapon, thrusting it against the head of the guard who kneels at his feet:
Title: “Spare me! My wife and children …”
Cherokee Bill motions for Starr to pick up a fallen rifle.
We see Starr’s face in close-up, and across his features the image of the woman and child passes like the shape of a ghost …
Starr strikes the gun from Cherokee Bill’s hand, the guards rise up and seize both of them roughly.
Starr’s face is calm and pale, with a light on it like that which illuminated the woman in the cabin.
In shadow silhouette, we see Cherokee Bill hanged.
Title: The Law takes its Course …
Bill Tilghman appears at the door of Starr’s cell. He holds out a paper:
Title: … but there is such a thing as justice.
Starr looks at Tilghman; at the guard whose life he saved.
Title: “I have pursued you for ten years, Henry Starr. You have courage, and you always played square. In your heart, you are a good man.”
We see Henry Starr riding his horse slowly over a hill. He pauses and looks down—dreamily, as at the beginning. We see that he is looking into a valley, in which sits a poor small lonely cabin, with a curl of fire at the chimney.
Fade out as Starr rides down the hill toward the cabin …
“I know none of it happened that way, exactly, I know,” she said. “I’ve read your story, I’ve been listening to what you’ve said. But it can’t just be laid out like a history or a novel. It has to be a picture leading to a picture leading to a picture. I have to condense all that, all the meanings of everything, all the things that happened, into a few pictures. But I … I’m trying to be true to what you … You did mean to get some justice for your family when you started, they had suffered and been pushed … and they won’t see it, won’t see the truth of that unless there is an image they understand, the mother, the child who tries to … and you did care about the woman you told us about and you must have …” and she stopped her running tongue, frightened suddenly at the line she had almost crossed, finishing in her own mind: You must have cared about the woman you married and the little boy, even though (and I don’t know why) you left them behind you when you started on the road to Stroud. “If you think I got you all wrong, if it doesn’t make sense …” She spoke softly, pleadingly: because if he did not give his life to her, then she would be weaving with smoke and it would all blow away with a breath,
“It almost makes too much sense,” he said, “this Henry Starr you’re talking about, he moves so straight from one thing to another, he seems so clear about what he … You make me too much better than I was, Miss Woodly.”
Her eyes lit with the hunting-cat fire again, and she pounced on the idea he had given her: “But it’s always better, it’s always too perfect. There’s never anything but heroes in stories, so anyone who gets remembered in a story has got to seem to be that way. And you, you know that, you lived and would have died by that yourself, even when you were racing around in that used-to-be real life you always talk about: you kept telling stories, playing out stories of yourself, so people would remember you a certain way. The movie is a story too, it isn’t against your life, it’s part of it, it … it’s …”
“… all that gets remembered,” he finished, and she answered, “Yes.”
“All right,” he said. “I understand you can’t show exactly how it used to be, truth for truth. All right. I couldn’t tell it that true either, so I don’t blame you. But it’s got to be right, even if it can’t be true. This time it’s got to be right. All I was ever trying to do those other times was get it to come out right and … but you’ve got to know”—and his eyes leveled on her and she felt their weight—“it ain’t just pictures of things. It was … the things was real, used to be real. So these pictures, they got to show so you know there is something real behind ’em, or it’s just” (and he muttered words she didn’t understand, Cherokee word for blackness, for black sorcery) “it’s just plain shit, you understand?”
“Then show me more,” she said, focusing intently on his half-shadowed face, “as much as you show me of what’s real I’ll put into the story. Only we’ll have to make it smaller to fit in these pictures …”
Could it work? he wondered, and he looked at the pictures her words left in his mind: Suppose he gave her all of it—Tom Starr, Hop Starr, Aunt Belle and the whole Starr clan, and Jesse James, and the Cherokee Nation; his mother, and his redskin book, and Colonel D’Artagnan Arbuthnot; and Cherokee Bill, and justice, and all his dark reasons and conjurings and dreamings and the ghost workings—let her have all of them, let her make them over again like you change tobacco, hyenh? like blue tobacco, like red.
The names and their ghosts made one shadow, like smoke swelling to a vague hugeness, wordless, speechless; it was as if Miss Woodly breathed that smoke in through her nostrils, drank it with her small parted lips, with her blue open eyes—and the smoke seemed to give her size and weight, as if her light body was the seed of a gigantic shadow shaped like a woman, a woman whose eyes were bright with eagerness, and bright with drinking the names of Henry Starr.
But behind Henry Starr’s back, breathing as cold and dark as the fire was warm and bright in front, there was another shadow shape, huge and strong and male and full of a rage and a hatred large enough to kill out everything between his shadow at noon and the horizon, the shape of Tom Starr, the shape of Cherokee Bill: I don’t know what she can do, but she hasn’t give me a picture yet that can stand equal to that.
He looked at her. Why did his goddamn name and story matter so much to her, so much that she seemed sometimes full of a witch’s magic with them, a woman full of lightning and the smoke of changed tobacco in which things themselves are remade—and then like now, looking at him like a child, like a child of his own, hungry for a thing from him, a word she needs to be able to live.
There was nothing he could say about it, nothing that made sense except that that wasn’t how it used to be. Which she had said she would kill him if he said, but judging by the sad eager look of her waiting on my answer, probably meaning she’d feel like killing herself.
Now why in hell should she feel like that? What did she want from him? His body answered with a flash of blood upward from his loins through his belly, but he rode it down like you ride a half-broke horse and refused absolutely to name it. It buzzed wordlessly in his brain and nerves, making him feel edgy and a little drunk. So what if she had her own reasons for making him the hero of this story, everybody always had their own reasons for everything they did, and he was dead sure she meant to show him good, to do right by him. That was a kind of truth, even if the details come out a little bit wrong. So what if she had all these moods and shapes that he couldn’t keep track of; girl, witch woman, bobcat or deer, if shape changing was her gift, maybe she could make a shape for him. All he had to do was take the chance and put his ghost in her hands.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll show you.”
“Good,” groaned Esterhazy, “wonderful … but not tonight, eh? No more tonight.”
It was late, they felt the accumulated weariness of the long day, the energy of talk was spent although the impulse and need to continue, to finish the unfinished, hung in the air. They went off one at a time into the brush, then returned to the fire—which Miss Woodly strengthened, sitting cross-legged before it, while Henry Starr cleaned the guns and set them with a soft knock back into their racks in the crate; at last rapping the nails of the crate home again with a hammer. Esterhazy came back to sit across the fire from Miss Woodly. But he had nothing to say to her, and the dark shape of Henry Starr moving restlessly like a cat outside the firelight oppressed and annoyed him. Were they just waiting for him to go to sleep so they could finish whatever it was they had started here? Esterhazy suddenly felt disgusted with himself, stood abruptly and said, “Good night, Miss Woodly,” walked into the darkness, rolled himself in his sleeping sack. He could still see her sitting by the fire, hear Henry Starr bustling around by the wagon. How do you know, he thought, that I am not lying here watching you? He smiled, and sleep came up around him like fumes.
She drifted sleepily too, feeling the warm tongues of the fire on her face and breasts; the echo of the pistol’s blast and recoil made a dimmed buzz in the muscles of her arms and chest. She was contented as a cat, neat and balanced and edgeless. It had been difficult today, there were passages of feeling she had been through that had surprised and frightened her, but she felt all right now, and that everything was going so well. Maybe it was dangerous to relax and let herself feel so comfortable, let the tight cords in the groove of her hips and thighs slacken to the fire warmth—because it wasn’t finished yet, he’d have to tell her more if she was going to know what she needed to learn, and he had to be goaded and teased and poked and winked at or he would just close up again, silent and self-contained.
It was funny that that was what drew her, that sense that he could close over himself and be all right, compact and secure—because she wouldn’t be happy unless she could pick that compactness apart: no, not pick apart, but open it up, unfold it and lift out what was inside.
He was solitary and self-sufficient, but Henry Starr needed her more than her brothers ever had, even at the beginning of their games when they still relied on her to bring them stories out of the books she read: because Henry Starr had a story, but no voice to tell it with. Oh, he talked smoothly enough, but it never got said with him, did it? It was always held back or turned aside somehow. She was the only one who could tell it all for him, and when she did, even if it was his story to start with it would be hers too. She had worked, thought, dreamed it so intently that already she couldn’t be sure that what she saw in him was not just the reflection of her own yearning: to be strong and sure and compact, to ride everything the way Henry Starr rode that horse of his, that ghost-gray Appaloosa with the moon-bright rump whose body read and followed the shifts of your mind in the grip and guiding of your knees and thighs.
His image was so sharp in her mind that it seemed almost to be an aspect of herself, another being’s ghost projected among her bones and the strings of her nerves and blood, a stranger’s ghost, but somehow also it felt like it was kin or kind with her, like a baby might feel—something woven out of yourself but also come into you from outside, out of that odd lovely pushing opening up of you by the strange lovely prong of a male body, which she knew and enjoyed except for the fear that would clench her even in the top of her pleasure when she thought of that strange thing starting itself over again inside her.
Henry Starr. I love to watch the way you move, I envy the way you seem like a veteran of your body, at home in its easy motion, settled among your muscles and the hang of your bones like a cat in a corner.
She remembered her own body feeling like the way Henry Starr moved, when she was a child. She had loved the feeling, and it made her warm toward her outlaw that he could recall that sense to her. But she had to watch the illusion: it was a snare, if you weren’t careful. It had betrayed her before. One day she was quick and limber among her brothers, the next it seemed that her strength had become a useless unwanted kind of burden or embarrassment to herself and everyone else—and her quickness of eye and thought and invention useless as well, something to be mocked and evaded. One day she had felt her own power rising in the pulse of blood in her own belly and sex, the deliciousness when she touched herself as if her fingers were wet sliding tongues, in the way men’s eyes and bodies changed at the touch of her eyes or her scent: and the next she was just one more dick-nailed cunt, used up and spraddled out on a rented bed.
But watching Henry Starr’s black edgeless shape gliding back and forth among the random licks of firelight, that other self woke up and stirred inside her skin, it was still there, as slick and lithe, as smoothly muscular and perfectly articulated as an otter, an otter that could sing like a bird and tell stories like a crystal set. When she looked at Henry Starr he seemed like an otter too, silky slippery and wild and strange to most people as a wild animal, just like her. He was her brother otter, they were two of a slippery muscular kind, she would open his throat and teach his breath to talk and sing and the gush of his stories would fill her until her muscles rested as easily on his bones as if they were her own …
That image seemed to leap at her out of the fire, and an electric shock of fear bow-strung the muscles in her thighs—as if she had felt the lick of a blunt smooth tongue in the deep socket of her hips. She hunched forward, gathered herself protectively around an invisible center. Don’t let the game play you.
He moved around in the darkness, fussing with the guns and equipment and horses, and still he could see her face reflecting a small gem of firelight from the flames. He was having second thoughts.
