Borgo Press Books by Michael Hemmingson
The Rose of Heaven
In the Background Is a Walled City
How to Have an Affair and Other Instructions
The Dirty Realism Duo: Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver
Auto/Ethnographies: Sex, Death, and Independent Filmmaking
Sexy Strumpets and Troublesome Trollops
The Stripper
The Yacht People
Star Trek: A Post-Structural Critique
Judas Payne: A Weird Western
The Chronotope
Poison from a Dead Sun
Zona Norte
Judas payne
a weird western
Michael hemmingson
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Hemmingson
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
Dedication
For Jordan Faris,
A Story from Another Life Ago
chapter one
1.
When the Reverend Jedediah Payne moved himself, his young wife, and one-year-old daughter from the comfort of city life in Boston to the hedonistic West, he had aspirations of a church, his church; a congregation, his congregation—his people hinged on every word he had to give on The Word. Fundamental Baptist by training, Jedediah Payne had met with opposition from his peers concerning his “unorthodox” method of rearing a flock. Unorthodox, indeed! Obviously these fools were blinded by Satan’s crafty hand, as were so many in this day of advanced technologies and incessant bloodshed. It was Payne’s objective to make the people see what was happening, just how The Devil was interfering with their lives, and how they could prevent it…with his help, naturally. It was so simple a solution it pained the Reverend’s pious heart. And if fellow “men of God” were to criticize and ostracize him, to have him expelled from the church he preached at, then he would leave this dirty, sin-infested city and go out to the new lands of America, where people who were fresh and not yet tainted would hear what he had to say—and believe...and follow:
Him.
Payne was thirty-seven at the time. His wife, who had just turned eighteen, was not happy about leaving Boston and civilization; however, she had married a man whose mission was to save souls, thus she was avowed to accompany him, for better or worse. Katherine Payne had married the Reverend when she was sixteen. It was a marriage arranged by her father. She was, needless to say, appalled upon learning whom her betrothed was. Katherine was a quiet, shy girl who kept to her room and the libraries, ingesting the contents of books when she could and when the time permitted. She never found boys or men appealing, the majority of them lacking in intellect or address that could cause her heart to melt (the way she believed it would when love found her in its sights). Oh, she’d had her share of suitors, all of whom she had turned away like she would a glass of sour milk. Indeed, she knew she was an attractive young woman, by their standards; but she had to wonder if some of the suitors were only interested in the dowry—her father being a rather well-to-do man of Boston society. (Her mother, alas, had been dead since she was ten, a victim of pneumonia.)
Marry a man of the cloth? And this gentleman being nearly twenty years her senior? She entertained thoughts of fleeing home and hiding. She could never leave her father, however...he was sick and bed-ridden.
“I cannot marry that man,” she told her father, sitting next to his bed, her head hung low and her hands twitching in her lap like the worried and nervous girl she was.
“You will do as I say, Katherine,” he informed her. His voice was weak; he was pale and gaunt and it pained her to look at him.
“I don’t love him,” she said, “I don’t even know him.’’
“He is a good man. He is a man of The Lord. Could there ever be a more trustworthy husband?”
“Be that as it may,” she said, “I will have a life of misery. This is 1850, Father, and arranged marriages are not the staple of a civilized soci—”
“Civilized?!” her father choked. “No, my dear, this is a very bad world, one that I fear may not last long; you need a good man to protect you, because I no longer can.”
Softly, very softly, “I am but sixteen...”
“Old enough,” was her father’s reply, and that was that.
She could have refused him; she could have taken a stand; however, that, she feared, would have broken her father’s feeble heart—not because he had any concern for Payne’s interest, but the marriage put him at ease, in regards his daughter’s future days and general welfare.
Before the marriage, she and Jedediah Payne had taken a number of strolls and talked. He was an astute, tall gentleman, and a good listener from what she could tell; a little too thin for her tastes, but serious and solemn, if not perhaps a bit too quirky regarding his religious viewpoints. She liked him well enough. Any man who claimed to have been visited by an angel, and talked to the angel, piqued her curiosity.
Two days after the inconspicuous, small wedding, her father passed away.
She couldn’t stop crying for her father, long after he was buried. The man she called husband did not move to comfort her, did not put his arms around her like the men did in books of romance and adventure. He simply said, “The Lord called him; it was his time.”
She soon learned that the only emotions Jedediah Payne felt with any depth of fervor were antipathy and anger towards those who did not agree with him, those who questioned him. He believed his opinions and positions to be virtuous and correct without debate, as if handed down personally by the Almighty Himself (and, in fact, some of what he said he claimed to be straight from the angel he met, an angel sent from God); anyone who dared question the Reverend was either “on the side of Satan” or “holding an iniquitous grudge.” Paranoid, that was probably a good word for her husband, if not painfully stubborn to take a moment and consider opposing sides, and determine whether or not they had merit. Katherine Payne was grateful he was not a lawyer, like her father—her father who had become a judge and presided over the fates of many men’s lives.
Their marriage wasn’t consummated until three weeks after the wedding. The night of their marriage, she sat in her room under the bed sheets, quivering in terrible disquietude over what she was going to have to do. Would he walk in naked, prepared to ravish her? No. He came in clothed, all in black as was his preference, and sat on the edge of the bed, unable to look her in the eye.
“How are you, wife?” he asked.
She admitted to some apprehension; she didn’t want him to know how much. She didn’t want him to know that her deepest wish and desire was to run away from
