Redemption, Chapter 1

The land was one of savage notability, and had no room for a weak man or beast. For here the weak and unprepared swiftly perish, going through the intestines of this place and ending up as scat on the frozen ground. A preacher of the faith must have more than sermons on his mind, and more than lifting a congregation. Out here a preacher must have a calling.

Some would see fit to go teach the heathen Indian nations, and end up laying naked, blistered, dead, filled with arrows or a crushed skull. The body would be consecrated for a holy cause to the Indians, and the blood of the white man pouring to satisfy the ground, wolves, and bear.

Other preachers would find their way to gold fields, and betting establishments to save men’s souls. Those are they who would succumb to a life of man, being eventually involved by the ruckus itself or being led astray by scalawags and whores. Robbed and killed, it was a hard life for a man of holy business in the Rocky Mountains.

Reverend Gabriel William Tinley had felt divination in his calling; he would often be heard by the few who could identify him saying that God himself had told him so. The rev would ride with the good book in one hand and a Winchester in the other. He was a hunter, not of beasts, but of guilty men. In his eyes the law was not sufficient, letting men with no decency roam the virgin land. As such, it had become his own way to find and kill those who had escaped the law. Murderers, rapists, and thieves were all guilty in his eyes, guilty enough to be killed, popped off like some sick animal. Killed without the courts of men to hold trial.

In some ways, who could really blame the reverend, he’d been subjected to a world far harsher than the one he’d come from. He had built a church by his own two hands a few years back. Mud, timber, and sweat consisted of building materials. It had taken a year alone to build the foundation, digging through the hard caliche that calloused the land. He’d built it for a small community settled not all too far from Santa Fe. Before a congregation could be found to fill it, cowboys had come to town and burned it to the ground. A particular cowboy with a hide hat with an owl feather adorning it was seen to urinate on the ashes of the pine-carved pew from which the reverend had planned on preaching his sermons.

The reverend would become angry, furious, and hateful. A rage of passion mixed with despondence filled his gut, hellfire. A resolution would be made to track down and kill every one of the men who had burned and desecrated his holy offering to the Lord, and then only to bless the event by beating him half to death.

Every one of the men would find death over the next six months. None of them would be shot in the back, or taken without a weapon of their own in defense. It was December, the snow was red with the blood of the guilty man, and the only sound heard would not be one of humanity, but one of the wolves and ravens.

The cowboy with the hide hat and owl feather would be found dead, with his gun hand, knee caps, and gut shot through, his gun hand being blown off. His hat, made of calf hide, adorned with a wing feather from a great horned owl, had been nailed to his head with three nails signifying the holy trinity, ultimately sealing his painful end, poetic meaning few would ever catch sight of or comprehend.

So started the campaign and mission of Reverend William Tinley, to kill the guilty men that would escape the law, but not the wrath of the servant. Lawmen would abide by codes and jurisdictions, and get lucky every once and a while. The reverend had no codes, no jurisdictions, and would kill every last one of them he could find. The land would be baptized with their blood; God would sort them out in the end.

Marriage

I got married 9/29/2010 to my eternal companion.

He was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. He installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. His children knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks. They didn't know how their father made his living, or why they so often moved. They didn't even know their father's name. He was listed in the city directory as Thomas Howard. And he went everywhere unrecognized and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or a commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch. He had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. He was missing the nub of his left middle finger and was cautious, lest that mutilation be seen. He also had a condition that was referred to as "granulated eyelids" and it caused him to blink more than usual as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.