Work Text:
There’s a shining iron in your face and you’re sure this is going to be the last breath you ever take.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
Now that was two breaths, but you’re still here, until–
Blam! An earsplitting crack and an explosion of smoke in your face and if you weren’t dead then you sure are now and everything was over so quickly you didn’t even have to feel how bad it hurt. It’s how you always hoped, that going out would be quick and painless in the face of a Peacemaker because that’s how you want to make your peace anyway. And now you’re hoping for the lights of heaven to come down on your face quicker but all you see is black and God still feels very far away, and the night is still cold and dusty around you and you can still hear the chirping of crickets.
“Hullo? Miss?”
A nasally, musical voice brings you back to life. Dammit, and you were so close, too. You exhale frantically as your eyes snap open like a fish gasping for air out of water and you’re met with a strange-looking man. Thin and tall like a scarecrow with arms and legs long as the barrels of rifles, dressed in white, pure white, from head-to-toe, like some angel. Manifest Destiny style, John Gast and all. Like Columbia if she were a man.
He takes off his hat and extends his hand. Then, you recognize him, with his scant hair and thin face and neckerchief.
“You!” You exclaim, voice about as shaky as topsoil under hooves. “You’se a wanted man!”
“That’d be right,” he says, hand still extended. “I ain’t here to kill ya. Don’t you worry ‘bout that, Miss.”
“Then what’re you here for?”
Behind you is the body of your to be but now was and never will be husband, growing cold like stones sitting still in the desert at night. Calm and quiet, face still asleep. Went out quicker than the butt of a cigarette against a denim-clad knee. Red spills out of the hole in his forehead like a fissure at the bottom of a leather canteen and your white wedding dress he bought you is still packed away in your boxes.
“Well, that man there would be worth a good bit’uh cash,” the male Columbia shrugs. “You knew that or no?”
“What?”
“Messed with the wrong folk. There’w’s a drawin’ of him tacked to the wall of a saloon some distance away in Antioch of Trin’ty County.” He pulls it out of his pocket, unrolling it to get a better look. “Grave robber,” he says, turning the leaflet to you.
“That’s not even him,” you yell. “Look! That man right there,” you point to the image, “he’s blonde! You good for nothing, you can’t even read! Says ‘blonde’ right there on that paper!”
He makes a face, turning the page back towards him, and then craning his head to take a better look at your spouse’s corpse.
“Oh.”
You burst into tears.
“You wasn’t crying then when I shot him but you’re crying now?”
“Just shut up ‘n leave,” you sob, a flimsy hand wet with tears trying to push him away. He moves a little but doesn’t topple.
“What’s the matter?”
“Why do you care!”
The strange fellow looks back into the tent once more.
“Well,” he starts, letting out a huff, “I see you’h’s got a weddin’ dress in that tent o’ yours there and some flowers. Ain’t even wilted yet. So, that means I musta made a terrible mistake and for that I’m dearly sorry, Miss.”
“Y’aren’t,” you sniffle, wiping your tears on the darkening fabric of your sleeves. “You’re all the same, you criminals. No ounce o’sorriness in your hearts, got no space in ‘em for that.”
“Well I can’t just leave you here now can I,” he says, voice a little bit softer. “Sorry or not sorry it just ain’t right leaving a widow to die in the cold.”
You try to quiet your sobs and stop your tears but your cries come out of your nose instead, mucus and sorrow trickling down your lips and chin.
“I am sorry though,” the man says, moving past you to inspect the body better. “Really am, seein’ you’se a nice young gal ‘n all. Could’ve made a good wife. Doubt it’ll ever happen now. You’ll want me t’bury him proper?”
You sniffle and nod, collecting yourself as the man drags the body like a sack of potatoes across the red dirt.
“What’s your name, Miss?”
A trail of blood beads over the dusty earth, pearling like water atop a copper coin.
“Doesn’t matter seein’ as I ain’t gettin’ married no more.”
You pass him a rusted spade and he catches it with one hand like it weighs nothing.
“My name is Buster Scruggs.”
He’s digging.
“I know you. You’se that San Saba Songbird they say’s got the voice of a choir boy.”
He digs like a groundhog.
“Oh, I like that name. That other one they wrote’n on my wanted posters was ridiculous.”
“The Misanthropist?”
“Mhmm.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Hater o’ man.”
The shallow little grave is done and Buster prods the corpse with the point of the shovel until it rolls in like a trout swimming back home from the shallow end of the shore. Except, it’s your former husband, and he isn’t swimming, and he’s dead and won’t ever get up again.
“How’s that ridiculous? I think you hate man plenty.”
“Maybe,” Buster laughs. “Man as in humanity, that’s what that means. But I like women plenty.”
“Like ‘em enough to kill their husbands for a quarter?”
“About right. Oh, let me take a look at that,” he pipes as he catches something glinting in your spouse’s pants pocket. He crouches down into the plot and digs into the wooly trousers until he finds it and holds it up to the sky, glinting in the moonlight. Two gold rings, one big and one small.
“Well, I reckon I shot the wrong man,” he smiles, “but I got my money’s worth anyway. Ain’t God good?”
…
“D’you really sing?”
“Sure I do,” Buster smiles, procuring a guitar from thin air. He strums it once, strums it twice, and music comes flowing forth with chirp and birdsong, clear as water and sharp like the scent of blood on the wind after a massacre. The melody is enough to surround the both of you in the sweltering sun and to reach into the Canyons beyond to fill them all the way up. Witchcraft.
“Sweet girl comin’ home from yonder Caddo Lake,
Comin’ on through Texas ‘round the valleys in the wake.
Marryin’ tomorrow as she rides o’er the Big Bend,
Weddin’ dress o’ white full o’ holes she gots to mend.
Come through Caverns of Sonora find that Texas is too hot;
Woke up in the night to find her husband had got shot!
Buried in the ground his body rests in Devil’s Sinkhole,
Left to jerky in the sun ‘till his bones turn in-to coal.”
“You write that just now?” You ask.
“That I did, Missy.”
“And here I thought’you was all hat ‘n no cattle. Got a good voice wasted on the mind of a fop.”
Buster laughs. Even his laugh sounds musical, like the sparkle of the sun rising over the horizon. Ridiculous.
“You’se tart,” he says. “Small ‘n sour. Like a hard, green clementine. Now you listen up and I’ll sing you a better song.”
“Up on the old cork ‘n wall there pinned a poster fair ‘n square:
For a bullet in his head the gift banknotes e-nough to spare.
Brought my iron down to hell and shot him deeper under still,
But my sixgun got him wrong and so I left without a bill!
His sweetheart cry’n a river with flowers still right in her hand,
‘Cause her love ain’t near the worth of any golden nugget panned.
Now she’s hitchin’ on a ride with the man who killed her spouse,
And she cries and cries and cries since she no longer can play house.”
“If’n I had a gun I would shoot you in the head and take those rings back,” you sneer. “And break that guitar.”
“If’n you’d a gun you’d already be dead,” Buster chuckles, setting the guitar down as the air around the two of you returns to its usual non-musical state.
“I’d love to be six feet under guaranteed it meant I ain’t have to hear you sing another word.”
Buster unholsters his revolver faster than you can blink, the clicking noise of its cylinder reaching your ears before you can even realize what he’d just done. You think you’ve never been more relieved in your life, much less in the face of a wanted outlaw with a quickdraw faster than the clap of thunder.
The gun clicks disappointingly empty and Buster’s shoulders droop in mock chagrin.
“You got real lucky, lady.”
…
“There y’are, Clementine,” Buster smiles as you step out of the shop doors. At least he sounds like he’s smiling but you can’t tell because he has black neckerchief tied round the bottom half of his face but then again he always sounds like he’s smiling.
“Lookin’ mighty fine, Miss.”
He gave you some wad of cash he tore off a dead body and told you to wear something nicer. A white blouse. Looks a bit like his.
“What’s the point of that rag if everyone knows who y’are already?”
“They don’t.”
“Do,” you say. “They do. Ain’t no one else west o’ the Mississippi dressed in all white ‘n with a voice like yours. And they’s got your face on just about ev’ry poster from Mexico ‘n up.”
“Well I reckon they ain’t brave enough to shoot me down anyways if’n they knew me.” He pulls down the cloth and he is indeed smiling. “This is still Texas, honey. ‘N last time I walked in-to a saloon here with an iron I let them know Texas is mine.”
“What, you sang ‘em a song and they started shootin’ at you?”
“And I was the only one left standin’, yup.”
“At least you’se a better gunfighter then you is a singer.”
“Sour as ever, Clementine.”
…
“Now you stay right here and you hold onto this,” Buster tells you, slipping his six-iron into your hand. The lacquered wooden grip is still warm from his grasp and weighs some bit in your hold. Heavier than you thought it’d be. He moves to the front of the door of your hotel room and has his hands up mid-air.
“Look, you stand there and you keep that Artill’ry looking up, sound good? Up here.”
He pats over his chest twice, some dust from his shirt dispersing into the air at the motion like he’s a sack of flour. You adjust your aim accordingly and nod.
“Now God forbid that anyone come on through this door,” he instructs you, “but the moment you see that hunk ‘o wood behind me swing open, you shoot, alright? You listen to me, just like this.” He holds an imaginary gun in front of him, a demonstration. “You squeeze that trigger tight and you don’t let go, and you keep slappin’ down that hammer as fast as y’can.”
You look down and back up at him and nod.
“Need to hear you say OK before I go.”
He unholsters his remaining revolver and prepares to make his exit, throwing a leg over the open windowsill on the other side of the room.
“OK,” you tell him, and he gives you a smile before he comically disappears with a jump. You can hear him land on his boots down outside in the dry dirt.
Say you’d gotten your hands on a gun about a week or two ago then things would be very different. Here you are, six bullets aimed at nothing on the word of a man. Same man who’s dancing right outside the window, his gun going off at just about any other man he can hear. Even his shooting sounds like music.
You think about your husband lying about under some dust way back there once more. Then again, thinking about him just a week or two before had you feeling very different. You suppose Buster’s songs and disdain for both the living and the dead have leaked into your head. You don’t think you care anymore. At least that was what you’d told him the night before.
“Ain’t that you don’t make no mind of it now,” Buster says, looking up at the sky, “I reckon you never did.”
“Ain’t true,” you protest.
“Yea true,” he smiles. “Just ‘cause you cried some tears don’t make it anything. Y’ever seen a crocodile, Clementine?”
“No.”
“Well I ain’t either, but Shakespeare said they cry when they’s hungry. Weepin’ with their teeth around their supper.”
You’re offended. You figure this is his way of getting back at you for being mean about his singing.
“Ain’t tryin’ t’be mean,” he adds, as if he can hear your thoughts. “Don’t matter what you cry o’er ‘n what you don’t. Just my gen’ral observation, is all. Seems t’me a good bunch o’ladies think gettin’ married is the fix-all of life. So when a widow is born they don’t know what it is to do when they’s on their own, nevermind feelin’ sorry for their husbands ‘cause they feel awful sorrier for themselves. Waste their lives away wearin’ black and mopin’ ‘round. Humankind seems to overestimate how much it is one person can care for another. They just go along with the motions. Easier to follow the trail of a canyon than dig one out y’rself.”
“Well ain’t that an awful way to live?” You ask.
“You tell me,” Buster chuckles. “You’se the one livin’ it.”
“He’s comin’ up, Clementine!” Buster shouts from below, and your hand grips even tighter on his gun.
Everything is quiet except for the sound of boots thundering up the wooden stairs like drums of war, the walls shaking as each step nears. And then the door cracks open ever so slightly and you let go of all hell from the barrel of that sixgun. Bits of blood and wood fly about, revolver hot and smoking as the dust settles.
You hear Buster behind you hauling his ass up and into the windowsill, landing less than gracefully on the wood floor with a thunk as his chaps and spurs clatter against.
“Y’did it, darlin’,” he huffs, out of breath. “Hell, I ain’t never seen a man fan a Single Action like that, let alone a lady.”
“Is he dead?” You ask, head craning to look at the body you gunned down.
“Well he ain’t breathin’ and he ain’t talkin’. And he sure as hell ain’t shootin’ no more.”
Buster tosses you a scrap of paper as it flutters by. Sure enough, it’s the wanted poster he’d shot up your husband over so long ago. All you can make out is the corpse’s blond hair, the expanse of his nose to neck to chest blown to bits and splintered with wood.
…
“Gave my darling Clementine her very own sixgun,
Taught her how to shoot and aim it towards the sun.
Then come grave robber thought she wasn’t strong,
Well that robber died ‘cause that robber thought wrong!
My Clementine let him know after he had all his fun
That when time comes there’s always a faster gun.”
“Oh, I like that one,” you say.
Buster smiles, like he always does. “Knew you’d come ‘round to it eventually.”
…
It is over in a flash, over about as quick as it all started. Three arrows through your heart and you are gone faster than Buster can even defuse the situation, slumped over on your horse as flowers of red bloom through the front and back of your white blouse. God knows if it hurt all bad or not but it doesn’t matter since you wouldn’t live to know it anyways. Buster reckons it’s better you died by bow and arrow rather than by bullet. Then you could brag about it to your husband once you meet him that there wasn’t ever a gun quicker than you were.
Buster buries you in the Texas dirt with your white wedding dress that he’d kept from you. Supposes it’s the last thing he could give you seeing you never got a chance to wear it. Six feet under he digs and drops a bullet in with you each foot of the way. Songbirds fill the canyon and the bend of the river, their chirps sweet and melodic.
“O my darling, o my darling,
O my darling, Clementine–
Dressed in white but never was mine,
You sleep tight, now, Clementine.”
…
Buster doesn’t see you again until it’s his turn to go, spurs traded off for wings, the last face he sees before God takes him up to the sky the sneer of The Kid that shot him down. Hole in his forehead clean through the front and back of his hat and a lyre in his hand as he sees you float past. There you are in your white wedding dress, a smile on your face, arrows still through your heart. No ring on your finger because he never gave them back to you. You’d never need it anyways. You wave at him as he passes by.
His sweet Clementine, no longer green and sour. Sweeter than honey and brighter than the sun, darling Clementine.