Skin Medicine

Cabe thought: You ain’t here to address past wrongs. Keep that in mind. Giving Dirker trouble won’t fill your poke. You’re here to find that Strangler, to run that mad bastard to ground. That’s it. You start trying to crowd Dirker, there’s gonna be trouble. He’s the county sheriff. He could make life real unpleasant for you.

But…Sammy, Pete, Little Willy Gibson. What of them?

Gibson had died in the woods that day, Sammy at Camp Douglas. Pete had been exchanged with Cabe, mustered out to another unit. Was it justifiable to hate twenty years after the fact? The bible preached forgiveness, but Cabe had never been a real forgiving sort and wasn’t much on scripture. But on the other hand, he was not a hateful nor violent man, despite his occupation. Whenever possible he tried to get by on his wits, to outsmart his adversaries.

But Jackson Dirker…dammit, the man knew how to yank his chain. Cabe had gone into his office, planning on staying in control and that sonofabitch had worked him into a lather without never once raising his voice.

The South had lost the war. It was a fact. Like any good son of the Confederacy, that still hurt some, still burned in a secret place. But Cabe couldn’t sit around stewing that the Yankees had trampled the family holdings like others. His people were dirt poor sharecroppers from Yell County, Arkansas…they never had shit to begin with. If the Yankees had burned the farm, it would have been a distinct improvement.

So he couldn’t cling to that.

Sometimes, he wondered just what there was to cling to.

Running callused fingers over the scars threading his face, he decided to hell with Dirker. He’d sort that out later, if and when the time came. Now there was business and money to be made.

6

Sometimes Caleb Callister thought about his life and the building blocks that it was erected from. But not often. Now that Hiram was dead and buried some seven months, Caleb was the sole owner of the Callister Brothers Mortuary which would soon be renamed Callister Funeral Parlor. Occasionally, Caleb missed his brother, but not too often. They’d always had a pretty good arrangement-Caleb made the coffins and Hiram embalmed the bodies. Handling corpses was nothing Caleb cared for. After Hiram died, he’d tried his hand at it for a time, but it made him sick touching that cold clay so he’d hired an embalmer named Moss out from Stockton, California.

Moss was capable and he minded his own business, which was a plus. Caleb didn’t have that much to hide-not since Hiram’s passing that was-but last thing he needed was some young snip fresh out of mortuary school nosing into his affairs. Caleb was a gambler and a womanizer and most knew it, but he liked to keep such things quiet. For by day he was a respectable business owner. And he didn’t need Moss spreading stories about the teenage girls Caleb had brought to the mortuary or what he did with them in the rooms above.

Some things had to be kept secret.

Like the history of the Callister brothers, for instance.

Nobody in town knew much about them. Like everyone else they had just drifted in like leaves before a harsh Autumn wind. They blew in and set up a cabinetry shop and then the local undertaker had died, so Hiram decided they should get into that end of things, too, since most cabinetmakers were undertakers as well.

So they did and in a town with a very high mortality rate like Whisper Lake, it proved very lucrative. Extremely so. Eventually (and with the population boom) the Callisters gave up making cabinets and concentrated on coffins and undertaking. And this is all people really knew about the Callister brothers, aside from whispers and gossip.

They didn’t know that they were from Logansport in western Louisiana or that their father had been a cabinetmaker and his father before him. They didn’t know what it was like growing up with a man who was hardened by life and physically powerful from uncounted years of harsh manual labor. A man that liked to drink and use his fists on his family. Caleb himself had tasted the fury of those fists on numerous occasions as had Hiram. And that time the old man had caught Hiram out in the barn with that other boy doing those disgusting things, he’d nearly beaten him to death.

Only Caleb’s intervention had saved his life.