To Live and Die in Cemetery Creek

We didn't think much of him at first. We'd seen our fair share of strangers tumbleweed their way through Cemetery Creek over the years. We'd come to recognize the peddlers: their honeyed words, their dirt-free mustaches, the way they'd ride into town on mules, never horses, so we lowered our guards, so we'd think they were one of us. This man, we reckoned, was no different.

Said his name was Ambrose. Suppose he saw us on that Sunday afternoon three weeks ago, spilling out of the church's double doors, all of us in our chaps and vests, our blouses and bonnets. Suppose he thought we wanted what he was selling. Suppose he knew.

He was waiting for us in front of the saloon, leaning against an underfed mule. A young guy. Wasn't much else to him but a straw hat and a musty scent. Fanning ourselves, we asked him if he wouldn't mind moving. Told him folks in this town get a little testy when it's 100 degrees out and they can't get a glass of after-church whiskey. It was a warning.

To this, he whirled around, grabbed something from his mule, whirled again. In one hand he held a dark glass bottle. "Well, I believe I got," he said, in a voice that crackled like a bonfire, "somethin' y'all might like."

Bottle in his hand, he spoke with the conviction of a man wielding a revolver, someone who could change our lives forever with one click of his grubby fingers. And despite the heat, and ourselves, we listened. Later, we said it was only because he'd hoodwinked us by using all those fancy dime-store words: "elixir" and "vitality." But what was it in that moment that compelled us to keep listening when we'd run all the previous peddlers out of town?

Ambrose lifted the bottle above his head, and in the baking sunlight we saw its murky liquid slosh. Someone asked if it was whiskey. "This right here," he told us, "is water. But it ain't just any water. This here water comes from the Fountain of Youth."

It must be said: we were not a young bunch. Perhaps Ambrose saw that. There wasn't a single one of us under forty. We migrated here from all across the east. A grizzled patchwork of a town, our Cemetery Creek, founded in the middle of this desert. Long ago we promised each other we would never have children, never invite new life into this badlands. But would it count as new life, we wondered now, if we became the children? 

"There is no such thing as the Fountain of Youth."

This came from behind us, from old Preacher Sterling. At once we parted like the Red Sea he'd been sermonizing about thirty minutes before, and he stepped forward. We respected Preacher Sterling, the way he never sullied his sentences with words like ain't and y'all, the way he approached Ambrose with one hand curled around his Bible. He was as close to that Bible as any marshal was to their gun.

"Ain't there?" Ambrose said, waving the bottle around. "What I got here's the genuine article. Guaranteed to restore youth to whoever drinks it."

"What you're claiming, son," Preacher Sterling protested, "is an affront to God."

Ambrose considered this, then turned from the preacher to us. "What about it? Any of y'all want to see if it's true?"

A hot wind rippled through our crowd. There we were, the bystanders of a high-noon standoff, involving the preacher no less. To tell the truth, as much as we hated to admit it, there was something enticing about Ambrose's elixir, something familiar about the way his lips curled around that word "y'all." But here was Preacher Sterling, black-robed and clean-shaven, taking a stand for our town. What were we to do?

Before we could reach a conclusion, Ambrose leveled a finger. "You. Perhaps you might want to try some, ma'am?"

We followed his pinky and our eyes found Eileen Cooper. At fifty-eight, she was one of the oldest in our town, a fact that showed in her sun-raisined face, her bison-tough fingers, her thinning gray hair. Never hurt a fly in her life, that Eileen, but she fixed Ambrose with a look like she might break tradition.

Still, it didn't stop her from stepping forward.

Watching it happen, we didn't know what to feel. Was it relief, because we'd also been curious but hadn't wanted to be the first to test the elixir? Was it cowardice, because we were mutely sacrificing one of our own? Or did we, for the slightest moment, feel the whiskey burn of jealousy in our stomachs, because Ambrose saw something special in Eileen that he hadn't in the rest of us?

Eileen marched ahead until she was beside Ambrose. Preacher Sterling said her name. He mentioned God again. Someone thought they even heard him swear. Ambrose extended his arm. Eileen stared at the bottle, stared at us, stared at the bottle.

"Guaranteed," Ambrose said again, in a voice like a bonfire after you pour water on it.

She took the bottle, tilted her head back, swigged. That was old Eileen for you, tough as any rattlesnake. Beside her Ambrose's mule brayed. Something dark circled overhead in the blue sky—a buzzard maybe, a vulture. Preacher Sterling kept his head down and muttered The Lord's Prayer.

As for us? We were quiet, waiting, breathing as one.

Eileen stopped halfway through the bottle. We reckoned she didn't care much for the taste, because she had the same look on her face as last year, when one of our wagons ran over the old saloon owner's foot. She closed her eyes. We blinked. Later, those of us with pocket watches would say that we stood there for almost five minutes, and for what? To look like fools?

We might have waited even longer had Elmer Denton, the drunk bastard, not thrown that shot glass. It soared through the muggy air, catching the sunlight, and went right past Eileen's head, past Ambrose and Preacher Sterling, and exploded at the mule's hooves. At the same time, Eileen shrieked and dropped the elixir bottle. It splintered upon hitting the ground, spraying bits of glass and liquid at our feet.

Elmer Denton stumbled out of the dark saloon, the only one of us, besides the saloon owner himself, not to attend church that day. It was a miracle that he made his way to Ambrose without falling. "I been watching this whole thing," he slurred in Ambrose's face. "You ain't sellin' these folks no e-lix-ir." The word came to him with great difficulty. "Why, she ain't no younger than she was yesterday. How d'you explain that?"

This was how: Ambrose said nothing. And maybe it was this stony silence, this failure to say anything at all, that made us snap. We screamed. With sweat rolling off us, we threatened to go home and get our guns. We gave him a five-minute warning to get out of Cemetery Creek. We said that's all a no-good peddler like him deserved, just five minutes.

Ambrose looked at us, at Elmer Denton, at Preacher Sterling, at Eileen. He nodded, dropping his head to the puddle of elixir down below then lifting it to the cloudless horizon. "You ain't gotta get your guns," he said, already reaching for his saddle. "I know when I ain't wanted." Those of us with pocket watches later said it took him less than two minutes altogether to hightail it out of town, past the church, the jail, the boarding house.

Heat spiraled around us, tinged with gusts of fear and victory. We cheered and laughed our way inside the saloon, all except for Preacher Sterling, who didn't drink. We patted Elmer on the back for dispelling whatever black magic hold Ambrose seemed to have on us. The saloon owner even gave Eileen a free whiskey shot. "For your bravery," he said. She thanked him but said she'd had enough excitement for one day, then retired back to the boarding house.

***

After that, we forgot about the whole thing. Why bother? The bar needed keeping. Dry goods needed selling. Desperados needed hanging. In the days leading up to the following Sunday, we didn't see Eileen again either. Not at the general store, not down by the river.

Not until she came back to church two weeks ago.

Eileen, bless her soul, was always the last to arrive on Sunday mornings. Between the joint pain and the stubbornness, she would sooner delay church service fifteen minutes than use our arms and wagons for transportation. And we thought we'd be waiting again that Sunday, but she showed up on time. Only, it wasn't our Eileen Cooper.

No, that's wrong. It was. But she had somehow shed herself of thirty years, the same way a snake sheds its skin. Her hands were plump, the skin smooth and taut. She had hair the color of springtime hay. Try as we might, we couldn't see a wrinkle or blemish on her face, no sign of the sun's jilted fury. This woman sat down in Eileen's usual pew.

All throughout the service we waited for Preacher Sterling to address this, to speak into reality what our eyes were showing us. We thought he might during Communion, when Eileen stepped to the front of the church to receive her sacramental bread. And again, during his sermon about "having no other gods before me," which seemed to have more digressions than usual. But each time, he would only purse his lips at Eileen and look elsewhere. It was clear, then, that he'd come to the same conclusion we had: Ambrose's elixir had worked.

From then we started frequenting the boarding house every day. We walked that rickety flight of stairs just to see her. Sometimes one visitor at a time, sometimes five trapped in her small, muggy room. We asked questions. We told ourselves that we only wanted to check on Eileen, see how she was doing, how she was feeling in her new skin. We said we were doing the right thing, looking after our friend. Did she ever guess what we really wanted? Did she ever know why she was being overrun by folks who had previously never bothered to say two words to her after church?

Still, she answered our questions, told us things. In a new, tinkling voice, a voice like whiskey falling into a glass, she said she woke up on the day after Ambrose left and found her joints didn't ache. When she woke the next day, she said she could take a full, deep breath without coughing. Then came the changes that we could see—her hands, face. We sat beside her on that bed, listening with the same intensity we gave the marshal whenever he recounted winning that 3-on-1 shootout.

And then came the information that all of us, even that drunk bastard Elmer Denton, were secretly hoping was true: Eileen had more elixir.

Ambrose hadn't just up and left town like we'd thought. The last we saw of him, he was down by this boarding house. Which is exactly, Eileen told us, where she'd run into him after she left the saloon early. "Almost like he was waiting for me or somethin'," Eileen said, gazing dreamily out her window.

We nodded our heads like lunatics, trying to get the best view of her cramped bedroom. If she had more elixir, where was she hiding it?

"I felt somethin', you know," she told us. "The first time I drank that elixir. I just felt somethin' in my stomach. Like a cool burn. That's how I knew it was gonna work. That's why I bought the rest off him."

Then, like an answered prayer, she would look at each of us, grin, say, "Would you like to try some?"

And as it happens, we were wrong: not all peddlers ride to town on mules.

***

We stole glances at one another during the sermon last Sunday. We'd felt that cool burn now, the icy body chills in 100 degree weather. Each of us had woken up new, restored. In church we smiled at our pewmates with mouthfuls of second-chance teeth. Our voices belted out the hymns in perfect pitch. Our eyes, once glossy, now scorpion-sharp. We pitied Preacher Sterling up there at his pulpit, the only one of us with gray hair frosting his temples, his skin rivered with wrinkles. The only person in Cemetery Creek not to drink the elixir.

What Eileen didn't tell us, though, what we found out for ourselves, was that the elixir had a downside. 

This we discovered a week after we took our drinks. We'd only had small sips—how could Eileen have offered us all elixir otherwise? Maybe that was why our effects weren't as permanent as hers. Why we woke up in the middle of the week with overtight lungs and shallow breath, wrinkled skin and bald heads, tongues as thin as sawdust. On those pesky few days last week when we had to go out to the general store or the river, we wore wide-brimmed hats, long-sleeved shirts, even in the scorching July heat. We kept our heads down. Inevitably we'd visit the boarding house. We tried Eileen's door. She never answered. 

But the real trouble started earlier today, Sunday.

Eileen wasn't in church. Never-missed-a-day-of-worship-in-her-life Eileen. We waited thirty minutes to begin. Then Preacher Sterling sighed, skipped the hymns, cracked open his Bible, and went straight into his sermon. As always, he started with a Bible verse. Today's was "Reap what you sow." We shifted in our pews.

The service bubbled with a shared sense of unease. Now when we stole glances at each other, we startled at the sight of our sallow cheeks and calloused hands. Our fingers were crooked as outlaws. And when our loose teeth fell to the ground like snowflakes during the singing of "Amazing Grace," we lifted our heads and our voices so that God might better hear us.

After church, it was decided, by Preacher Sterling of all folks, that we would visit Eileen's boarding house. He said he wanted to check on her, see if she was okay. We tried to convince ourselves that we wanted the same thing. The walk took longer than ever. All that sun, all that heat, and no cool burn to ease it. We limped on limbs that, just the week before, bounced like jackrabbits.

When we reached the boarding house, we ascended the stairs, each of us silent but for our footsteps and our pounding hearts. If our bones ached with each step, we assured ourselves that Eileen's elixir would be worth the journey. 

Preacher Sterling knocked on her door. Nothing. Tried two more times, then turned to us and shrugged. "Reckon she isn't in."

We must have felt it again, that snapping feeling we got when Ambrose didn't answer Elmer Denton's question. That same gunburst of anger piercing our hearts. How else could we explain what we did? The way we shoved our preacher aside and heaved our desperate and dying bodies against that door, again and again, until we heard the low, satisfying, animal crack of the wood ripping off the frame and the door crashing to the floor.

And we were right. There she was, what was left of her: a pile of chalk-brown ash in the middle of the room. It had to have been her; the landlord said he hadn't seen her for days, and her room was on the second floor so she couldn't have jumped. There was no doubt: this was Eileen. A few of us fainted there in the doorway. Others padded forward, timidly calling out Eileen's name as though she might've found a hiding spot in this jail cell of a room. She'd aged too fast too soon, like us. We saw our future in her past. We needed the elixir.

The first place we looked was under the bed. That was where she kept it. This we knew because someone last week had deliberately dropped their ring on the floor to get a better look. Now, there was nothing under the mattress but lint and dust.

The second place we looked was in those ashes.

We dropped to our knees and tore through the mound of Eileen's remains, throwing debris all over the room. Dug until our arms and faces became a smoky gray. We pretended not to see the look on Preacher Sterling's face as we sifted through those ashes for even a drop of moisture. Just kept our heads down and worked our tired hands as if we were prospecting for gold.

We found nothing.

"God help you," Preacher Sterling whispered, clutching that Bible to his chest. "God help you all."

Elmer Denton rose from his place on the floor. His knees popped and he winced, but still he came at the preacher the same way he had with Ambrose. It didn't matter that Elmer was a foot shorter than he was three weeks ago, or that he'd lost all his muscle and fat. He got right up in the preacher's face. "It's y'all, goddamnit!" he screamed, filling the tiny room with his ancient voice. "The word is y'all!"

With the weight of Eileen's death, with so little time left for us, it seemed like the entirely wrong thing to be arguing about. Still, we let him go until his breath ran ragged.

In the silence that followed, Preacher Sterling took one last look at us—stooped and ash-covered and so very old, his friends and parishioners—and he shook his head. He set his Bible down at his feet. "God help you all," we heard one last time as he descended the boarding house steps, threw open the door, and left us to live our sad, sad lives.