Skin Medicine

In his rooms at the St. James Hostelry, Jackson Dirker bolted awake from a nightmare which he could not remember. But as he lay there…the war was on his mind and he could just guess what he’d been dreaming of. Dirker had been with the 59 ^ th Illinois Infantry under Post. His first real taste of war had been at Pea Ridge. He could remember riding up on Tyler Cabe and his ragtag crew of Johnny Rebs. Remember them looting through the heaps of mutilated Union boys. Jesus…those, boys, they’d been scalped. Disemboweled. Faces carved from the bone so that their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. Dirker’s soldiers wanted to kill the graybellies there and then…but Dirker meted out a different punishment. He could remember the feel of that bullwhip in his fist, snapping, snapping, eating into flesh. Looking down on those dead boys, he’d lost control. Lost all sense of propriety. What he’d done was wrong. He knew that now…just as he knew now-and maybe had that day-that Cabe and his men had not desecrated those bodies. But knowing it and admitting it were two different things. For pride was a harsh mistress.

Like Dirker, Tyler Cabe also dreamed of the war. Faces of fallen comrades floated through the mists. He saw all the blood and death, wandered from one battlefield to the next, clawing through heaped Confederate and Union dead, trying to escape, escape. Dirker passed by, shaking his head, asking him how he could allow his men to mutilate those bodies. Cabe told him, no, no, no, we didn’t, I would never allow that, never. And Cabe came awake, eyes fixed and glassy…he could smell the powder, the filth, the blood. And then it faded and he closed his eyes again.

In a seedy hotel rooming house, the man who called himself Henry Freeman and claimed to be a Texas Ranger sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged. On the bed before him was a Green River knife with a six-inch blade sharper than a straight razor. At one time, the Green River was pretty much the official knife of fur trappers and mountain men. A practical weapon for fighting, hunting, and butchering. It was also favored by buffalo skinners, who could skin off a hide in record time with the versatile tool. And, as Henry Freeman knew and knew well, it had other uses…such as eviscerating women and cutting out their hearts. He had one such trophy before him, carefully wrapped in deerhide. Freeman rocked back and forth, listening to the voices in head. Whores were fine, they told him. They needed to be purged. But there was other game…like maybe the gentile Southern lady who ran the St. James Hostelry…

Over in Redemption, the Mormons rushed about like busy ants, throwing the old mining town into shape. All you could hear were the sounds of saws and hammers, of lumber being stacked and wagons plying the dirt roads. Old shacks and houses were stripped to the frames and sometimes pulled down altogether, rebuilt from the ground up. The air was chill, but there was no lack of spirit or ambition as the abandoned town was rediscovered. Everywhere then, hammering and pounding, cutting and gutting. Sweat and hard labor and aching muscles. For Redemption had to be resurrected, body and soul…it was God’s will. And it had to be fortified, for one of these nights, the vigilantes would ride again.

And in Deliverance, the Mormon hamlet that-it was rumored-had given itself bodily to the Devil, there was a haunted stillness of graveyards and gallows. It hung in the air like some secret, noxious pall. Hunched buildings and high, leaning houses pressed together in tombstone hordes, coveting darkness within their walls. Wind blew down from the hills and up the streets, membranes of ice forming over puddles. Weathered signs creaked above bolted doors and empty boardwalks. Sunlight seemed to shun this cramped and deserted village and the shadows, here gray and here black, lay like webs over narrow alleyways and sheltered cul-de-sacs. Now and again there could be heard a moaning or a scraping from some damp cellar or an eerie, childish giggling from behind a shuttered attic window. But nothing more. For whatever lived in Deliverance, lived in secret.

Part Three: James Lee Cobb: A Disturbing and Morbid History 1

James Lee Cobb was born into a repressive New England community in rural southeastern Connecticut called Procton. A tight, restrictive world of puritanical dogma and religious fervor worlds away from Utah Territory. Set in a remote forested valley, it was a place where the moonlight was thick and the shadows long, where isolationism and rabid xenophobia led to inbreeding, fanaticism, and dementia.