The flame in the bedside lamp was just choking out when the pounding erupted at the front door. “Tunlaw! Wake up!”
He wasn’t asleep, had barely slept for weeks. But he startled upright in the old bony chair by the window. He listened. Maybe if he didn’t move, it would all go away.
“I mean it, come here!” More pounding. “I got something for you.”
It was the sheriff. Overeager former ranch hand—read too many news bulletins about those gunslinging lawmen south of here. Smart enough when you had him alone, but he didn’t often like to be alone.
Tunlaw eased his head towards the window and nudged open the curtains. There was Montley on his front porch, banging on the door with one fist, other arm hooked behind the elbows of a slumping figure in a tattered shirt. The man’s head hung on his chest, his hair so muddy Tunlaw could barely tell where his face began.
“Tunlaw, I know you’re in there, answer the damn door. Take a look at this fella!”
He should tell Montley he was drunk. It was going to be true in a few hours anyway.
Dawn was seeping through the curtains, and Tunlaw watched a moth tumble around in its pale breath. How long did moths live? A few days? A few weeks? Had it lived in this house when she lived in it too? Did it carry some trace of her within it?
“It’s a bullet wound,” Montley bellowed. “A real good one, keep you outta shaves and haircuts all day. Open the hell up, why don’t you, before he bleeds under your door.”
The moth gave up and darted into shadows. Tunlaw sat back. All around him, time hung breathless, each moment blurring into the next, all the way back to that day that seemed ages ago and one minute ago. He could stay seated here forever or he could get up—it didn’t matter. Things would happen and keep happening.
He got up and went to the door.
“What,” he said, creaking it open. Up close now, Tunlaw could see a crimson blotch under the slumping man’s shoulder, narrowing into an angry black eye.
“Aha.” Montley brightened, lifting the man almost proudly. “I knew that’d get you. What we have here is Isaac Gidden, caught running from McCall’s after shooting down one of the ladies. Cold son of a bitch. You fix him up good so he can tell the jury what he done.”
The young man stirred, mumbled something Tunlaw couldn’t make out.
“That’s Isaac Gidden?” Tunlaw squinted at the wilting specimen in front of him.
“Sure is–sick little bastard. Almost ran straight into my lovin’ arms, hotfooting it out of the place. You fix him up and let me know when the hangman can finish the job.” Isaac jerked slightly in the sheriff’s grip.
Tunlaw blinked. “Why you need a trial if that’s what you’re gonna do?”
Montley spit sideways onto the porch. “Justice, Tunlaw, don’t you know anything? You want this place to turn into Dodge City? Fix him up and call me when it’s done.”
He all but pushed the man into Tunlaw’s arms, then wheeled around and stepped off the porch. Tunlaw staggered to hold the young man upright, awash in the scent of sour sweat and metallic sting of blood.
“Where’s his gun?” Tunlaw asked suddenly.
The sheriff was atop his horse, gathering the reins in his hand. “What’s that?”
“The gun he shot the lady with.” Tunlaw plucked at the man’s empty belt. “He ain’t wearing a holster.”
The sheriff glanced at Isaac’s belt, turned, and spit again. “Musta dropped it in the confusion.” He jerked his heels into the horse’s side and clattered off into the dawn.
Isaac was pushing weakly against Tunlaw, trying to stagger inside. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he was mumbling. Tunlaw stepped back and let him pass. Around him, the sun was reaching orange fingers through the alleys and lighting up the town. It felt obscene: the days kept coming, the clouds kept moving, the light was brash and boastful. Inside, he could hear the fellow stumbling around, and he put his hand on the door. One step forward. One more thing to fill the time.
Isaac had braced himself against the long, scarred operating table in the center of the room. Almost wistfully he stared at the barber chairs by the window, an expectant row awaiting a very different task.
“My morphine’s run out, I ain’t got to Prescott in a while,” Tunlaw warned.
Isaac looked up at him. In the growing daylight, his face almost glowed, paper-white and glinting with sweat. “What’s morphine,” he whispered.
“All right,” Tunlaw grunted. “There’s the operating bed, you lie down now. It’ll hurt bad and then a lot less.”
Spurred by the reflexes of years, he began opening cupboards, picking out tools, wiping them clean. Isaac made no move to lie down, gripping the table and watching the barber surgeon’s hands as an animal tracks movement in the trees.
Tunlaw only knew him as the butcher’s boy, always lurking at the side of the shop, shirt and apron oddly clean as his father and brothers bustled around in blood and bone. The other boys would chase him sometimes, or pelt him with stones. Once, a few years ago, Tunlaw spied Isaac sitting in the dust of the butcher shop’s back alley, blood spurting from his nose onto his shirt. Then his father had yelled something from inside, and the boy scrambled through the back door, apron pressed to his face.
Now up close, Tunlaw could see that he had dark blue eyes, a delicate, freckled nose, and lips that drew together in a rosebud, tight now and trembling.
Tunlaw paused, tongs in hand. “Go on now,” he gestured at the table. “There’s worse pain in the world.”
Isaac hesitated—then eased back onto the table and screwed his eyes shut. Tunlaw strapped him into the restraints. His hands knew the rest: lay out the instruments. Cut through the shirt. Dip the rag cloth in water and dab at the wound.
From outside came the rumble of carts and patter of voices, as the town began to remember itself. Tunlaw kept the curtains drawn as he had nearly every day since, and a sickly yellow light suffused the room. His storefront sign had lain on a shelf for weeks, and yet folks still sometimes stopped by, stuttering condolences in front of requests for shaves, finally deterred by his whisky breath and hollow eyes.
At least that fool Montley had caught him early enough that his hands were still steady, and his mind—well, still a jumble, still a mess, even worse now with nothing to dull it yet. But he knew his job well enough. Find the bullet, bandage the wound, send the man on his way. Then back to the blessed bottle.
He reached now for a leather strip, stippled with the ghost imprints of other patients’ teeth. “Here,” he said. “Like I said, bad and then better.”
Isaac’s eyes opened slowly and fixated on the strip. “Sir,” he said, almost in a whisper. “You don’t have to get it out.”
The barber surgeon had seen this all before. “I told you, son, it’s quick. Now–”
“Please,” Isaac rasped. His hand bucked under the restraint as if to grab Tunlaw’s arm. “It don’t matter–it’s over for me anyway. Please.”
Tunlaw hesitated. The wound gaped up at him, begging to be fixed. He stared into its gaze, and suddenly the blood began spreading, flowing, dripping to the floor. So much of it, too much of it. Her thin voice, asking over and over if it was breathing, why wasn’t it crying. The blood pooling on the floor, his boots sliding around in it as he hunted rags, towels, tools, anything. Her clutching his hand, telling him she loved him, she believed in him, it was all going to turn out all right. Her crying when she realized it wasn’t. Ragged, gasping, fierce–then worst of all, fading.
The leather strip was trembling in his hand. And then he jammed it into the boy’s mouth and prepared the tongs.
As the metal brushed jagged skin, Isaac’s hands jolted into fists; he shrieked through the leather like a train whistle. Tunlaw was somewhere else, his hands moving without his mind. Shift through the soft to find the hard. Secure the grip: not too hard, not too loose. Coax the bullet’s buried nose out of hiding. The boy’s pain was streaming out of him silently now, in tears. His thumbs agitated over his bony fists; his boots ground mud into the table.
The bullet finally clanked into the tin, and Tunlaw prepared to dress the wound. The old comfort of the ritual trickled back to him: holding a bright compress against a dark gash, shutting its eye. He unwrapped long cotton bandages and wound them around the boy’s shoulder and chest, setting everything in place for time to heal or to worsen. It was the limit of his work.
Tunlaw unbuckled the arm and leg restraints and looked Isaac in the face. “It’s done,” he said.
A glint of blue flashed in Isaac’s crumpled eyes. He stared at Tunlaw, the sweat and tears slipping down his cheeks. His skin shimmered so white that he looked for a terrible moment like an angel, and Tunlaw felt a stab of panic. There were two lives again in this house; he could not lose another.
“Sit up, sit up.” The brandy was never far away now, and Tunlaw found a tin cup on a side table. He hesitated; it was the one she used to drink tea from in the evenings. He had kept it there as if its emptiness, its clear need to be filled and drunk from, might somehow propel her back. His own emptiness did not seem to be enough.
Isaac was wheezing as he forced himself upright on the table, and Tunlaw splashed the brandy into the cup before he could think any more about it. “Quick now, down the hatch.”
He handed over the cup, and Isaac stared at it, as if unsure it was truly there. Something made Tunlaw ask, “You had brandy before, son?”
The answer seemed to pain him more than the wound, but the young man shook his head.
“Well, even faster then. Will burn a bit and then you’ll feel better.”
Isaac kept looking down, and a smile twitched a corner of his mouth. “That’s a lot of things with you, sir, that are bad at first and then better.” He raised the cup to his lips. “I hope I live to see the better.”
He choked on the first sip, then grimaced through the rest. As he set the cup down, Tunlaw saw that the boy was shivering. The rags of the cut-through shirt hung off him as if in surrender, exposing his pale chest and concave stomach, pressed into lines as he hunched over. Usually by now, the wives or mothers or friends of anyone getting a bullet pulled out of him would have brought a fresh shirt for after the surgery. But Tunlaw wasn’t sure if the boy’s family even knew where he was.
“Hang on a minute,” he said. Tunlaw left the room and returned shortly with one of his denim work shirts, for the dusty rides into Prescott for supplies. He realized, too late, that he would have to help the young man put it on, and felt too raw for so much human contact.
Another step forward. No thinking. Bracing his jaw, he took up the scissors and cut away the rest of the boy’s shirt so he wouldn’t have to move his wounded shoulder. It was a nicer shirt than he expected, even through smears of mud and blood: one of the cotton fabrics from Copley’s General Store. He wondered idly how many days’ wages at the butcher shop it had cost.
The shirt removed, Tunlaw nudged one sleeve of his own shirt up the boy’s arm on his wounded side. He stuffed the other sleeve into Isaac’s other hand and turned away. That was surely help enough. “Thanks,” said Isaac. The sleeves reached his knuckles, and he fumbled to button the shirt with one hand.
Tunlaw sat down in a chair across from him and reached for the brandy. A few long swigs, and he already felt more himself. Or rather his new self, pierced every moment by a hundred memories and questions that could only be blunted by one thing.
“Go on and sit in the armchair,” he told Isaac. He gestured to a leather easy chair across the room where he let certain patients recover if he could abide their company. “See if you can rest your eyes a bit.” He took another drink. “I imagine you ain’t seen a lot of sleep last night.”
Isaac eased himself off the table, with a quiet yelp as his feet hit the floor. He settled into the chair and looked around as if expecting lawmen in the corners. Finally he shifted his hands onto the edges of the armrest and planted his boots on the floor. He closed his eyes.
Good, thought Tunlaw. Let him sleep, until his Pa or the sheriff or the Lord himself took him, whoever came first. Tunlaw leaned back himself, cradled in a brandy haze. And soon, he was watching his wife again in his mind.
She was sewing in her rocking chair, strands of dark hair in her face, looking up to ask if they could name the baby after her Aunt Dolly if it was a girl—such a pretty name, didn’t he think? And she knew very well he couldn’t stand her Aunt Dolly, and she laughed and laughed at the face he made.
She was baking a fig tart in the kitchen, singing “Jimmy crack corn,” thinking he couldn’t hear. She was cursing worse than a cowboy when she burned a finger pulling it out of the oven.
She was jumping into the lake in nothing but her linen shift, he was saying are you crazy, what if someone comes by. She was yanking his ankle and pulling him in too, shoes and all, and he forgot that he had ever wanted to be dry.
She was sneaking him candy from behind the store counter when her father wasn’t looking. He was leaving her books from his school by the door. He was struggling to answer the questions she asked about them; he was asking them in class and the teachers said, well aren’t you smart.
She was reading “Pilgrim’s Progress” to her little sisters by the hearth, the firelight making stars in her hazel eyes, and he decided right then he would marry her.
She was in every direction in his mind, in every time and every place. And it was baffling, and bizarre, and horrifically wrong, that he could not find her anywhere else.
The young man groaned, and Tunlaw shook himself alert. Isaac’s eyes were slits; perhaps he was halfway sleeping. Tunlaw was not sure how much time had passed, but the air was hot and thick, and he wanted to return to her. He had just closed his eyes again when Isaac murmured something: “I’m sorry about your wife.”
Tunlaw’s heart lurched, and he stared at the patient in front of him. Isaac was gazing at the rocking chair in the corner, where a blue shawl sighed over an armrest. If this damn house wasn’t full of bullet wounds.
“She was always nice to me,” Isaac continued, dreamlike. “She would look at me when she passed me on the street. She would smile sometimes.”
The young man suddenly appeared to him anew: this sight that had also met the eyes of his wife, this sight that once she smiled at. And he realized that this was all he would have now, these echoes of her in other things.
“Thank you,” he said. “She was…very kind.”
Isaac steered his eyes to Tunlaw’s. “Sorry,” he said. “Maybe you don’t want to talk about it.”
Tunlaw let out a long breath. “It’s all right,” he said. “Not like I ain’t thinking about it.”
“I can never figure it,” Isaac said after a moment. “The preacher says, ‘No harm befalls the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble.’ But then—then you got bad people walking around, easy as you please, and good people like your wife, gone for no reason at all.”
Tunlaw’s mind marinated in the rightness of this sentiment—it was unfair, it was ferociously unfair, and all the people yammering to him about God’s will and heavenly rewards were hack doctors burrowing into a wound with sharp fingers.
But something struck him funny, and then he remembered why Isaac was there. Why they were both there, for that matter, why he couldn’t spend the day alone with his damn whisky bottle.
“Good people gone for no reason—does that gal at McCall’s qualify?”
Isaac looked up at him wildly. But his answer was quiet: “No, sir. I mean, I’m sure she was good, sir. But it wasn’t me that did it.”
“Oh? Why’d you run, then?”
Isaac stared at him a long while. Outside, a wagon creaked and rattled past; a dog whined somewhere close by. “I was running from my brother,” he mumbled.
“From your—” The side of Tunlaw’s mouth turned up into what felt like foreign territory after so many weeks. “Son,” he chuckled. “You wouldn’t be the first pair of brothers come face-to-face in that establishment. What happened—he see you with his girl?”
“No.” Isaac’s gaze reached the slip of a view beyond the window curtains, and he searched there as if he would find something other than the hot-dust embrace of this town and these people that he was born of, made of, never knowing anything else. He looked and he didn’t find it.
“Don’t tell my Pa,” he said finally. And with a faint wince, he added, “Don’t matter anyway, now. But he didn’t…he didn’t see me with a girl…exactly.” His head locked towards the floor. “You can call the sheriff now.”
Tunlaw’s stomach flipped in surprise. He digested that for a while. He had heard of these things at McCall’s and knew enough about cowboy life to know there was a market for this kind of fixation. Though no one would admit the sin existed in the town, even as murders and thefts piled up in the papers. He thought back on the kids chasing Isaac, the bloody nose, the half-scared look he always wore. People were always sure what they didn’t like, even if they didn’t know why.
“I’m not calling the sheriff,” said Tunlaw. “So what happened.”
Isaac looked up. He shook his head, hands spreading plaintively. “I don’t know, sir. He was…he shot at me, I know that. Saw me there and his eyes got all wide, and I said, it’s not what you think. But he’s not—he’s a hard one, you know, my Pa works him hard. I didn’t know he’d be there, it was my first time there. I had spending money, and—so I didn’t expect him or I woulda never gone, I woulda never done it, all this would be gone, a dream…”
“What happened,” Tunlaw repeated.
Isaac drew a long breath. “He shot at me,” he said, as if watching it happen again in the fireplace before him. “And I started running, faster than anything in my life I tell you. And he followed me downstairs. Right through the saloon with all those people—and then I heard the gunshots. I hope…maybe he was aiming bad, you know. You see, I’m his next brother—he’s the oldest and then me. For a long time it was just us and we played together and we liked each other and everything was all right then. So maybe, I think—he was aiming bad.”
His eyes softened into the fireplace, and for a long time he stared through the dead, cold wood to a place beyond. And then his gaze sharpened and met Tunlaw’s.
“But then I heard the screaming, and I kept running, all the way outside. I seen people shouting and pointing and then I get this, this, sledgehammer knock me down, and they’re picking me up and saying I killed one of the ladies.”
He bit his lip, worrying at the knob of the armrest as if to push back the spill of time. “Sir, I didn’t kill that lady, I don’t know what happened. I’m guilty, I know that. I caused a mess of trouble. I know that. But you asked me about things being fair, and you were thinking I did it. But I didn’t do it, and no sir, it still ain’t fair.”
Tunlaw considered the scene in his mind—the gunshots, the screams, the woman falling, the people running in all directions. Someone pointing, yelling at Isaac—the sheriff taking aim. The men picking him up from the dust, that strange boy that always seemed a little guilty anyway. Hauling him onto a horse. Stopping at the barber surgeon and then the courthouse, waystations on the road of common sense and decency.
“Where’s your brother now?” Tunlaw asked.
Isaac lifted his shoulder to shrug, then winced. “Home, maybe.”
They were both quiet, and Tunlaw wondered if they were chewing over the same thing. “I can tell the sheriff,” he tried out. “If your brother—”
Isaac closed his eyes, shook his head. “But he might not of done it, you know. There was a lot of people around.”
Tunlaw sat back. He had weathered a march of cruel and deadening things, it had flattened the air out of him and the feelings too. He was surprised, now, to feel a prick of pain from one more thing. “Isaac,” he murmured. “That ain’t true. He did it, and you know he did it.”
Isaac met his eyes sharply. “I didn’t see it, and you sure didn’t either. For God’s sake, you’re as bad as the sheriff.”
“Isaac,” he tried again. “You’re gonna let them hang you?”
Suddenly the boy blazed to life. “Let ‘em—let ‘em!” He tried to rise from the chair, gave a little gasp, and thumped back. “So you think I’m weak then, you think that too? You think I could stop this if I was just man enough? I tell you, I let things happen all the time, all my life, and the one time I decide I’m gonna make something happen for me, what comes of it? You’re looking at it.” His eyes were bright, from tears or anger Tunlaw couldn’t tell.
“No,” he said. “I ain’t gonna say I did it, because I didn’t. But I ain’t stupid. I know what they want. I know what they think I am. Let it happen or not, it’s gonna happen.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think you were such a fool.”
He lowered his head, and the bright in his eyes turned into a rolling tear. “Agh.” He brushed at it with the heel of his hand. “I don’t wanna care about it anymore. I gotta start not caring about things now.” He cleared his throat and leaned his head back in the chair. “So we can stop wasting time—go on and call the sheriff.”
“I’m not calling the sheriff.”
And he didn’t call the sheriff. He knew, after all, that the sheriff would call on him. But he had gotten very good lately at living in a dream world and waiting for things to happen, things you couldn’t control and didn’t expect, and so maybe the sheriff had fallen off his horse, maybe the town had forgotten the whole thing, maybe tomorrow was the day the sun would stop reaching through the town and waking everyone up and they would all crash into sleep like their ancestors and friends and neighbors and wives and little silent, breathless newborn sons.
But the sheriff did arrive—that evening, as the light in the room was softening to violet.
Isaac had been silent the rest of the day, sometimes settling back to close his eyes, sometimes looking out through the crack of curtain. His presence had forced Tunlaw to busy himself in other things—burdensome at first, then oddly distracting. Checking through the cupboards of brown glass bottles, noting which medicines were low. Wiping the shelves and watching the dust fly up and hang in a sunbeam like stars. Pulling a hunk of bread from a loaf he couldn’t remember buying. (What had he eaten in the last month? She had always done the cooking.) Opening the cupboard and seeing beef jerky, potatoes, a tin of coffee. Realizing that the same swarming figures who suffocated him with pity those first weeks had also left all this behind.
Tunlaw made up a plate for Isaac, who nodded but never touched it. Tunlaw knew he wouldn’t. You can’t force anything down with your stomach twisted and your tongue tasting sour. But it was the first time in a while he had thought much about another living person.
When the thumping on the door rattled the room, they both started up, then froze. “Tunlaw, you’re late!” The sheriff’s voice ripped the air. Tunlaw thought back to the same moment that morning, right before he answered the door, when whatever he did next didn’t seem to matter.
“Stay here,” he told Isaac, whose face had gone back to chalk-white. He opened the front door and shut it quickly behind him.
“I thought I told you to call for me when you finished.” Montley loomed over Tunlaw, tapping the side of the porch post. He was wearing the same shirt as that morning, and his eyes were rimmed in pink. “You think I got time to sit around picking daisies all day waiting for you to hand over a criminal? This ain’t that kind of town.” He turned as if to spit, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve instead. “This goddamn day,” he muttered. “Where’s the kid?”
“Montley.” Tunlaw put a hand on his chest. “I’m gonna tell you this as a friend—this is a mistake. You know it and I know it. No one saw him do it, for God’s sake. You think that kid knows which end of a gun is the business side? They’ll laugh you out of court. Come on now—you want justice like you say you do, and you’ll look for a different story. I’d start with a visit to the Gidden house myself, you might—”
“I been to the Gidden house,” Montley said. He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and wouldn’t meet Tunlaw’s eyes. “They say he did it.”
The air was full gray as they bundled Isaac out of the house and onto the sheriff’s horse. Across the street, a cart rattled past, pulled by a white horse, bobbing its head and looking neither left nor right. Two cowboys stood outside the corner store, arguing with an old Apache about the price of a hide. The breeze carried the smell of smoke and mesquite, as people in town began cooking their suppers.
“Listen,” Tunlaw was telling Isaac, as the sheriff steadied him on the horse and wound a rope around his hands. “You can’t move that arm much, it’ll aggravate. You might think it feels better but don’t move it much anyhow, just let it heal. If it hurts, you ask Montley to get me, I’m getting more morphine, I’ll give it to you at the jail. And remember, don’t move it, just rest—”
“Jesus, all right,” said Montley. “As if he warn’t going to rest forever soon enough.” He swung up behind the prisoner and gathered the reins in his hands.
Isaac had been silent the whole time, moving as if in a dream. But as the horse began turning, he suddenly looked back in a panic. “Sir, your shirt,” he said. “How will I get it back to you?”
“Keep it,” said Tunlaw.
Isaac nodded. “Thank you, sir, that’s a kindness.”
“We done now, boys?” The sheriff held the reins aloft, but he waited, letting drops of silence fall in the thickening dusk.
Isaac looked at Tunlaw, his blue gaze steady. “I didn’t mean what I said, you know,” he told the barber surgeon. “You ain’t a fool.”
“It’s all right,” said Tunlaw. “You take care now.”
“You too,” said Isaac.
The sheriff spurred the horse, and they lurched forward, the two riders swaying on the horse’s back as they moved away towards the jail. Tunlaw watched until they disappeared into shadows at the end of the road. He stayed, breathing in the dusty air, laced with woodsmoke and tobacco and manure. A tawny moon lurked low in the sky.
He hadn’t been out in the open air much lately, confining himself to the womb of the house and the traces of her all around it. Everything just as she left it, waiting for her to come back.
But the house was different now. Cups and bottles and tables moved. The rags of someone else’s shirt on the waste pile. Even new blood on the floor. Time had streamed over him, pushing him around in its currents, and maybe it still didn’t matter at all, but today for the first time he was tired of not pushing back. He thought about a young man stepping into a dank cell, rope burns stinging his wrists, in the first moments down a path leading one place only. He thought about him stepping up to the gallows, sick and shaking, but wearing bandages and not a bullet.
And he thought about his wife—about her smiling at people on the street, about her wide wonder at the world. And about their baby, who never got to know any of it.
He stepped back in the house, to begin waiting for the dawn.
–
Rebecca Regan-Sachs is a writer in Washington, D.C. who works in international development. She is a graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and Oxford University, and enjoys history, physics, international cuisine, and sarcasm.
© 2023, Rebecca Regan-Sachs
Halfway Down the Stairs 