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| The Death of Dr. Maghee by A.M. Crenshaw (Issue 9) |
It is the year 1950 and there are four old men sitting on a bench outside of the Carbon County Museum. They are smoking cigarettes and eating lunch. An old woman joins them. Her name is Lillian Heath, and she complains to them about the Big Nose George exhibit.
“They ought to have Osborne in there instead,” she says to them. “Put his face on display for what they done to George.”
One crunches an apple, says with his mouth full, “Yeah, I reckon they shouldn’t have done that.” He shakes his head. “Who are you?”
“Lilian,” she says, lifting her hand against the sun.
“Tommy. How do you do?”
“How do you do.” Lillian wears a tangerine-colored spring dress, knee-high. She is old, perhaps eighty, and the dress maybe sixty-five, something she had as a teen girl.
“These men are Jesse, Jack, and Robbie.”
“How do you do,” they say.
She nods. “Well okay, I suppose. Except upset about all this.”
Jack says, “What’s that?”
She glaces at him and then, as if annoyed, looks away. “They give George a bad name, that’s what.”
“Aw he was a road agent,” Tommy says. “Union Pacific. But a hell of a man, they say. The only one in America to be hanged and turnt to shoes.”
The men are old-timers too, cowboys once upon a time. They aren’t impressed. “What you got in your mouth...” Robbie says, snorting. “...Cept bullshit.”
“It ain’t bullshit, Rob. Dr. Osborne did it to him. Secretary of State under Wilson. You ain’t heard a him?”
“Naw,” the men say at once.
Lillian smirks to herself. “Tommy you heard of Maghee? I used to work for him. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. A nurse, if you like.”
He shook his head, frowning. “I ain’t heard from him since 1891.”
“No one has.”
“Shit,” says Tommy. “What got to him?”
Lillian grows excited and turns to Tommy very suddenly. “Would you like to know what got him?”
“Sure,” Tommy says. “You dint kill him, did you?”
She laughs. “I know who did.”
“You don’t say.”
“It was George himself,” she says.
“Shut up.”
“It’s true. I was witness.”
“Now what in hell happened?” Tommy asks, tossing his apple. He pulls his cowboy hat to just above his eyes.
“I will tell you, but you won’t believe me.”
“Tell us.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Well it won’t matter if you don’t tell us.”
**
It was 1881 in Carbon, Wyoming when they hanged George by the neck until he died. Took them cocksuckers three tries till they got it right. They got it right though. I wasn’t but fourteen or fifteen when they cut Big Nose down and brought him into the office. I worked with two doctors, John Osborne and Thomas Maghee. Quack-jobs. He and John had done one hell of an intaglio on George’s skullcap, trying to get it off. They got that right too, eventually. They inspected George’s brain for weeks, comparing it to other brains to see if there were differences between them might have explained Big Nose’s “criminal behavior.” Now it was my opinion of the time that there weren’t nothing wrong with George’s brain, but they paid me three bits a day, so I kept tighter than a horse’s ass in summer. That’s how that went for months.
But soon after they couldn’t find nothing wrong, John got his brain a bit messed up. That man started slicing George up like he was Black Angus. He carved out a mask and put it on an old sculpture. Cut the thighs and ass and nipples away and sent them off to a tanner to get them crafted into a pair of shoes, and maybe a medicine bag.
That snot-face tanner did the job, all right, even if there weren’t no goddamn nipples anywhere. When I was in his office one time I heard John complaining about it. He was real disappointed.
Later on as he grew in popularity with the people, Osborne got it in his mind to run for politics. That frightened the shit outta me, if you can imagine it. Had a Buffalo Bill prancing around wearing Big Nose’s famous nose. Didn’t matter to him, though. He offered Thomas Maghee a deal that entailed something like this: Thomas, you keep the bones in your back yard and never say nothing to nobody and I will leave you a rich man. Thomas obliged and years later he heard Osborne became the Secretary of State. Good for him, we agreed.
It so happened, however, that George wasn’t quite happy about the arrangement. His body was in pieces throughout the states. He ain’t never had a proper burial. Never made it to heaven or hell or back to earth. Just caught between all the worlds like a fly buzzing between the window and the screen. And wouldn’t you know it John Osborne still wore those damn shoes.
One night Thomas and I had dinner at his cottage. He didn’t have no wife or nothing on account of a lame dick, but I never said nothing to him about it. He looked real nervous the whole night like he was gonna propose we marry or something.
Finally I said, “The hell’s into you, Doc?”
He had been eating a salad. After the incident with Big Nose George he turned to vegetables. But he stopped eating at any case and put down his fork. “You know,” he said. “I’ve been hearing the damnedest things at night.”
I just looked at him like he was a god-damn fool.
“I know,” he said. “But it ain’t coyotes and it ain’t kids. The horses are all spooked and I hear someone talking once in a while.”
“Doc,” I said. “You need to lie down.”
He got real angry. “I didn’t have you over to make an ass of me,” he said. “I’m scared shitless. I want to leave but maybe I’m just being crazy.” The doctor’s face was so white I believed him. “I think it’s Big Nose,” he said.
“What -- why?”
“You know why.”
“Anything you want me to do?” I asked, feeling bad. He was suffering another man’s act.
“Just stay here the night.”
“Doctor I’m not doing any funny business with you,” I warned him. “Any advances and I’ll...”
“Save your shit, Lil.”
I chuckled to myself while he cleaned off the table.
**
Now late at night I woke up to the wind hitting the walls in rushes. Lightning struck in the forest over in the low hills northward. I climbed off the couch and tip-toed about the Doc’s two-room cottage. The dirt floor was cold; his fire, dead. “Doc?” I called.
He didn’t answer me, but I thought I could hear his breathing. “Tom?”
Nothing. I moved into his bedroom and lit a lantern. He wasn’t there, but his bed was ruffled. “God dammit, Doc.”
I opened his front door and scanned the road. Nobody moved about, but I should have figured that. It was pissing it down pretty bad. Then I swept across the floor and opened the back door. There was a small porch, but my feet missed it and I slipped onto my rear, immediately plastered in mud.
The harsh wind wailed like slaughtered rabbits. I picked myself up and walked toward Doc’s out back shed. My lantern light hissed out
Leaving me standing in the back yard alone and wet and cold. And there was a voice that sounded just like George whispering from the damn shed. My bones froze, but I groped about nonetheless.
As I reached my hand out to open up the shed, a gun went off and I heard a splatter against the door. Quickly I ducked outta the way and rolled into the mud like a frightened pig. “Doc?” I cried. “Doc, are you all right?”
I crawled on my belly away as fast I could. Someone after the doc would be after me too. Then I felt as though the stump of a tree had been dropped onto my back. An ice-cold glove wrapped about my cheek, and I rolled away from it like a log.
Above me was Big Nose George.
His form was like mist, I tell you, but his skull was faceless, with the cap missing. He had a six-shot in his hand, aimed right for my teeth.
All he said was, “Another to go,” and then he vanished with the next gust of wind. "That's all."
**
“Bull-shit.” Tommy chuckles and scratches his beard. “That’s a good one, Miss Lillian.”
“It’s the truth,” she says. “I was witness.”
“You dint say nothing to nobody about this all these years?”
“Well. Some people know, but not many. Among other reasons, I didn’t want George coming back for me. I wouldn’t dare disturb him.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Well it took the law forty years or more to find George in the whiskey barrel buried beneath his shed. Hell,” she explains. “Just half his skull, and bones looked like they’d been chewed on by rats.”
“Yeah so.” Robbie spits.
“They may a took me in on account of Doc’s murder,” Lillian says. “I was the only witness.” She stands up and fixes her faded tangerine dress and glances at the men and the red sun and the fields alight and red beneath.
“Maybe…” Tommy grunts, giving her a hard look. “Or maybe you’re batshit crazy.”
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