Free Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror by J. Alan Hartman Page A

right hand and pulling his drawers down with his left. He quickly finished his white man’s duty to decency, wiped with a handful of feather grass, pulled his pants up and stepped back out of the awful place. He saw the glow of his house, heard the voices of those already gathered in the Crawford town center, smiled with the remembrance of last New Year’s Eve when the townspeople had sat down to a fine supper after the blessing from Pastor Gumm had ended. He took one step into the run he knew would get him to it all a little faster, felt something clamp against his mouth as Fury was ripped from his hand and his whole body rose as he was tightly embraced by an arm around his middle. He tried to scream, and he couldn’t. Kicked his legs and flailed his arms. Knew he was being carried away from the proximity of his home, and even further from the happy sounds of those anxious to bring in the new year with good food, a warm fire, a little cider and declarations that the Good Lord would bring them a better year ahead. He felt no pain when the hand upon his mouth quickly snapped his head backward to an unnatural and mortally conclusive life-ending droop. Hiram Clop was dead, and Fury found a new home amongst other childish things—ragged baby dolls and ribbons, curled locks of hair, six-shooters of wood and wood blocks painted gaily in reds and greens.
    *
    Myrtle Roady left life on January 1, 1889, in a town of 150 souls called Crawford in southwestern Colorado; a place where scrub oak, cacti, sagebrush and saltbush are plentiful upon the land, and where the mountains and canyons beyond provide stingy embracement of Pinyon Pine, juniper, yucca and Mountain Mahogany; where cottonwoods suck sustenance from washes here and there, and sunrises come late against the rise of the West Elk Range of the Colorado Rockies to the east.
    Story is that Captain George A. Crawford passed through the area at the end of December in 1882, mentioned to a Baptist preacher/resident, Henry Gumm, that this would be a fine place for a town and the preacher and his flock heartily agreed as they watched Captain Crawford disappear into the sunset. They then and there named the place where they’d settled Crawford and set up a post office for good measure. Didn’t occur to the folks who now had a name for the place upon which their ragtag assemblage had squatted, that Captain Crawford—who didn’t even find it necessary to dismount as he smiled down at Pastor Gum and gave voice to those encouraging words—that patronization was a convenient way to just get on with more pressing business that, in Captain Crawford’s case, eventually included the founding of more hefty burgs like Grand Junction and Delta.
    Myrtle Roady was amongst the group who watched Captain Crawford ride away that day, and finding the silly hurly-burly of the gathered Baptists distasteful, she spit an epithet barely heard by the rowdy group, walked north past the outskirts of the wee settlement, climbed one hill, stepped down the other side, then trudged up another topped by her one-room roughly-hewn pine abode, entered it and farted mightily. Charley, a raccoon of mild temperament who had half-buried himself under the three deer hides spread upon Myrtle’s floor-bound sleeping corner, raised himself from his loll, studied Myrtle’s entrance, cocked his head with her malodorous release and stood up on two feet—wide-eyed and bushy tailed, as they say. Myrtle nodded, said, “Go back to bed, Charley,” and Charley did, once again digging into the bedclothes as a badger to a hole. “Goddamned Bible-thumping sonsabitches,” she said, not knowing it would be thirty or more years before her pejorative would gain prominence. Didn’t care about such things, as her priorities tended to focus on the here and now. And here and now she figured it was time to once again hone the edges of her cutlery, including the two axes she favored for endeavors past and those certainly ahead. Yes,