Burning O'Neill

The last man to see Oscar O’Neill and his family alive was I, Charles Solomon, because they were my family too, and every sunrise I regret that I did not burn with them that awful night when Kendrick Jophiel marched his mob upon us on account of what was done to his kin. Done by me, and by O’Neill’s boys, Elmore Keene, Gregory, and Felix. We learned to kill together in the war of the rebellion, but afterwards we kept right on going as the cycles of spilled blood back home spun out, and the thirst for revenge hung heavy on us all, Kendrick included, so that no one had the courage to face God the way old Oscar did on that terrible night. 

As Kendrick’s posse pitched blazing branches on the roof he called out to O’Neill, offered to let him go, him and his Bertha who put so much love into that cabin sewing lace and knitting rugs that everyone in the county called it Bertha’s Place. Heck, all the women and children can go, Kendrick said, like O’Neill’s daughter my wife Helen, and our boy Corey who passed the night digging his fingers into the wool of his grandma Bertha’s dress. But O’Neill would not blink in the face of fate, he said, this was his house and always had been, and if it were to burn, it and his boys, then it was God’s will that he burn with it and that was just fine with him. So as smoke poured in and flames began to lick the old log walls, he and Bertha paced over to their bed to lay down in peace, and face whatever might come as they always had, together. But my boy Corey would not leave his grandma’s side, she had promised to stay with him, always, he cried, and so he burrowed his way between them on the bed, and I stood there in shock as my dear Helen told me she could not leave her parents and her child, and she gave me her eyes one last time, deep, and said goodbye, then took her place next to Corey as the air whined from the heat and old Oscar heaved a thick fresh buffalo hide over them all as they prepared to meet God. 

I could not bring myself to join though. No matter how I tried, the posse’s laughter rose above the crackling pine sap and I could not let it go that these men would walk the earth tomorrow while my Corey and Helen would not, and so retribution bolted me in place, powerless, and I could do nothing but watch as all that was dear to me in this world prepared to leave it, and me. 

I remained there frozen in the smoke and fire until Elmore barked my name like we were back in the war, and the heat and sweat and haze of that moment shot me right back to Gettysburg and my feet jumped at his call as they had been trained to without regard for my mind or my heart. 

Up the rafters, there is a way out, Elmore pushed, and I heard the bullets of twenty years ago whiz past me again and the cannons firing, oh God the cannons, and I told Elmore to climb my back and go first, I would hold the line, but he laughed, and said this was his feud, not mine, and he would be right behind me. Go! he yelled, palms open on his knee to give me a boost, and he launched me to the log roof and I swung up and shimmied along the main beam as it cracked and gave way and I wondered if I would fall from the heights of hell onto my dear family below as they lay in holy grace. But the gap in the wall pulled me forward as I stole one last glance back at that bed of peace before I threw myself out the window into the fresh of the night, where the dark air froze my sweat as I crashed to the ground, pain crying out and smoke and heat and fire still smoldering all over me. 

Some mad spirit pushed me to my feet though, lurching, broken, just like in the war, and I found a thick bush to hide behind, and I waited for Elmore. 

And I waited, taking in the voices of the burners. 

And I waited. 

Until a crash rang out as the back of the cabin broke, and its flaming spine fell in, and I knew my oldest friend was now with God too as I dragged myself up the canyon, to roll over its lip and from there I remember nothing more. 

Our neighbor Alfonso found me and took me in and gave me water, and food, and bid me stay in his bed while he fetched the Justice of the Peace. Half asleep for days I forced myself to hear their voices, Kendrick and the other burners, and I listed them off, all men I knew well, all men Oscar had known since they were children. But at night he stared at me from the darkness, O’Neill, eyes closed, happy in his harmony burning with his family, except Elmore whom I saw crushed by charred beams with a smile on his lips, wry to the end. 

I could not picture Helen or Corey. 

Alfonso returned with the Justice, a fellow who with some humor we called Killer Ed, because when trouble came he was the first to talk but the last to act. He looked like O’Neill’s ghost had visited him too, and he stammered, flustered, and almost broke down when he spoke his old friend’s name. Because O’Neill was not just my father-in-law, he was a respected citizen of the old frontier, the best legal mind before the law arrived, a veteran counselor and arbiter whom everyone trusted because they knew him to be a man of peace and thought who cared for his community, rather than the lone beings of whiskey and malice you see today.

We need to get the law involved, Killer Ed said. He would call in the sheriff. They would arrest Kendrick, he said. 

Days passed. 

Word spread. 

Burns healed, slowly. 

Friends cycled through Alfonso’s ranch to announce their support, while across the county sides were being taken. One old friend Rex limped in with his leg bandaged to tell us how Kendrick found him and rebuked him for not joining their posse, and drew on him but in the shooting that ensued Kendrick dodged a bullet which instead hit his nephew in the stomach, and the boy died on the spot. Kendrick knew I escaped though, Rex emphasized, and he and the burners assumed I was coming for them. 

Fuzz sprouted on my scarred head. 

Regaining my strength I demanded to go to O’Neill’s to bury my family, and the next afternoon we skirted the jagged mountains south to find the old burned out log cabin, and we sifted through the ashes to uncover, under a scorched log, my best friend Elmore Keene O’Neill unburned above the knees, with the same acid smile on his face from my visions, while under a blackened buffalo skin Oscar and Helen and Corey and Bertha lay like saints, not a hair touched on their bodies except an unlucky finger of Corey’s which had stuck out. 

We laid them at the top of the canyon and covered them with rocks as the air turned golden, and the red sun eased down behind the snow-streaked peaks, whose visage O’Neill loved so. 

Within a week the case made headlines and Kendrick was in jail, awaiting trial at the new brick courthouse with a handful of conspirators. Together they hired the best defense lawyer in Colorado, while the judge-appointed prosecutor was none other than Killer Ed, as was not uncommon in small cities at the time. 

An old frontier lawyer named Matt Piper lived in Boulder too, whom O’Neill had taken in and taught. Piper insisted on helping but a bad leg infection kept him out of court, so instead he hired a page boy to run messages back and forth between himself and Killer Ed. 

Boulder buzzed on the day of the trial as visitors and reporters turned Pearl Street into a carnival. Our pack sauntered up a dozen deep on horseback, rifles bristling to make sure everyone knew where the friends of O’Neill stood, while the burners who were not on trial patrolled the street with pistols, leering. The proceedings began with Kendrick’s lawyer challenging jurisdiction, saying only Denver could provide a fair trial. Ed sent his page running to Piper and when the message came back he followed it to a tee, arguing the pioneers of Boulder were able to tell truth from fiction without malice better than strangers. The judge agreed, and overruled Kendrick’s attorney. 

Killer Ed presented his prosecution first, to a packed gallery done up in the latest finery flurrying their hand fans in Colorado’s early fall heat. I recounted all that I have told you here, while others testified to seeing Kendrick and his posse depart. Next Ed called Reverend Elijah White who spooled out the long history of the feud, of how O’Neill’s boys got back from the war and killed Kendrick’s cousin Cornelius on account of his rebel talk, so O’Neill took in Cornelius’ son Graydon to make recompense, but O’Neill’s boys struck again and murdered Graydon in the fields as he worked and when O’Neill made a peace offering again Kendrick spat in his face and called him a briber, and his boys marked men. The late afternoon sun languished over the mountains by the time Killer Ed sent one last note to Piper, then rested his case as court adjourned for the day. 

Kendrick’s lawyer started the next morning by challenging the proceedings as a whole, claiming jury selection had been done improperly by Killer Ed. Panicking, Ed scribbled an urgent note to Piper but before he could finish, the judge agreed with the defense, and with one last bang of his gavel he declared a mistrial. Kendrick and his men were freed until a new trial date was set, leaving the whole room in shock, horror, and disagreement. 

I launched to my feet, hot anger pulsing as I glared at Killer Ed before I stamped out followed by my supporters. But before I got to the street I saw something I never thought possible: Matthew Piper, grimacing, hobbling on a crutch through the muck of Pearl Street, blood pouring down one leg and a fearsome Bowie knife slung against the other which I recognized as Elmore’s gift. Piper nodded, and laughed, and freed his blade which was already streaked with red as he told me Elmore helped him excise the weakness from his leg to be here. 

Kendrick’s friends stood nearby, one of them chuckling.

Without missing a beat Piper crutched up to them and in a single motion he drove the raw steel up through the laughing man’s gullet and picked him up a foot off the ground, to showcase him on high for all to see as the man’s eyes bulged and feet kicked and blood spewed out his front and back onto the street. 

Piper threw him off the knife and vaulted inside off his crutch, blade drawn. In shock we sprinted to our rifles as all hell broke loose, with ladies and men alike shrieking, pushing, trampling. More shots cut the air, two, three, four at a time as a mash of bodies thronged to escape. I watched for the burners and picked them off like ducks as the metal taste of vengeance crested on my tongue and, somewhere far off, O’Neill lay under his rocks as peaceful as the moment I left him.

Back at Alfonso’s we laughed, giddy, some men threw up, others bound wounds and bawled. No one spoke. I remembered the frenzy of an army camp after battle, where madness descends as you collapse or roam aimless, a pack of feral animals unsure how to become human again. 

I had never felt this without Elmore. 

Slowly we remembered ourselves that night as we ate beans and pork in silence and smoked pipes under the uncaring stars. Talk began of what to do, where we could go. Are you happy? one man asked me, and I strode up to him nose to nose and raged in his face until someone pulled us apart. 

At breakfast a consensus emerged that we should go to Killer Ed and see what deal could be worked out. Every man in the county could not go to jail. 

I spat on the dust when they told me, and without a word I jumped on my horse and left. But halfway to Alfonso’s gate I heard a call from behind, and I turned to see a young friend of the O’Neills by the name of Gerald Craig ride out. He trotted up to meet me, rifle on his back and hands up. 

What was done is not fair, he shouted from afar, and if I would have him as a friend he would help me set it right, he promised. I nodded, and together we set off from Alfonso’s ranch for the safety of the wild. 

Years stacked up as we hunted down the burners one by one, in Colorado and New Mexico, Arizona and California, wherever they went we rode, and waited, then struck when they thought about us least. In outhouses and saloons, brothels and mining camps, on the open trail or packed in train cars at breakfast we made no qualms about dispatching them in public sight to send a message. 

We had not forgotten. 

But with each gut shot, neck spurt, and hollowed out head spray I thought back to O’Neill, and the peace on his face lying next to his Bertha. 

After a few years Kendrick Jophiel returned to Boulder County. Gerald and I tracked his movements but we always saved him for last, so he would spend the rest of his days hearing about one or another of his friends being shot down in the street on his account. But perhaps I also sensed that once Kendrick was dead, and my vendetta fulfilled, I would have no reason to live. 

Was that bad? 

O’Neill knew he would have no purpose once his sons and his house burned, so he did not fight. He let go. 

Something happened to me in the war though, the same thing that made Elmore try to escape the house that fateful night. Antietam and Gettysburg built into us some raw mechanical need for survival that we could not just blow out like a candle. It had a life of its own and it would not let us give up, ever, even when death was the only way to remain human. 

And so I kept on doing what I knew to do. 

Until one day riding up the San Juans, when the earth’s crooked teeth in the distance shook me awake, and I knew it was time. We went back to Boulder but found a different city than we had known, as a decade of the railroads had changed the Front Range from frontier to town sprawl, and as we pulled up to the courthouse I asked myself what old Oscar would have thought, but a chilling reply came back as I felt in my bones the sureness of Elmore’s dry venom. Somehow it unsettled me. 

To scout Kendrick’s house we split a wagon from town with a mother and her two boys, the elder of whom looked just like my Corey. Mud ruled the road as the early summer rains broke out every afternoon, but our driver did not know how to negotiate the ruts and the wagon jumped and cajoled us in and out of our seats, until a crash boomed and the whole wagon flipped, and the mother and boys were thrown out into the road while the driver fell back on me and Gerald. 

In ruins the wagon lay, axle snapped, and now a gasp, a cry, a scream in earnest as the elder boy, the one who looked like Corey, clutched his leg in panic. His mother bounced up and hovered over him as his little brother watched. 

Do you know where we are? she asked. My son, his leg is broken, do you know where we can find a doctor? 

I looked up the road, and at the top of the ridge unchanged from thirty years ago a cabin sat, chimney smoking. 

The house of Kendrick Jophiel. 

Please, the mother sputtered, tears tipping. He needs help. 

Silence. 

Her son whimpered, more in fear than pain. 

Get him on my back, I told Gerald, and the boy shrieked as I took on his weight so I moved as gently as I could creeping forward the whole mile up to the threshold of Kendrick Jophiel’s door. 

I knocked, and took a deep breath. 

Opening the door I saw a hollow vision of the Kendrick I once knew. 

His wan eyes searched past me then shocked open in recognition, as reactions poured over his face with fear first, then panic, then shame, and skepticism, and, finally, curiosity. 

“Our wagon broke down by your house,” I said, like I had no idea who he was. “This boy broke his leg. May we come in?” 

No one said anything. 

Kendrick’s eyes checked my waist for any sign of a gun, but Gerald and I were both unarmed. 

“Please, sir,” the boy’s mother began. 

“Please!” his little brother pleaded. 

I found Kendrick’s eyes, and he froze, bewildered. 

“Perhaps we can talk?” I said, low, the weight of the corpses that lay between us pulling down my words. 

“Yes, of course,” Kendrick said, and he opened the door. “Let’s talk.”