Welcome To Hard Times Part 10

Jimmy and Molly were still asleep. In the after- math of her great battle he had taken my bunk to be near her if she needed, and the dugout had been left to me. But I was too shaken to lie down again, I boiled some coffee and sat at my desk looking at that letter for Archie D. Brogan, thinking Here rises another morning, a little hotter than the last. If someone from the mines doesn't begin hiring soon, Jenks's wagon will be filled to overflowing. Once there was work, once there was money, I told my- self, everything would be alright. It was the promise of a year, a settlement growing towards178 E. L. Docforow its perfection. That was my notion but the only thing growing was trouble; and it made me shud- der to think whatever perfection was, like the perfection I had with Molly, it was maybe past, silently come and gone, a moment long, just an instant in the shadow of one day, and any fool who was still waiting for it, like he dreamed, didn't know what life is.

I counted the savings in my drawer-some two hundred fifty dollars' worth-and I went out and hired four men who said they knew carpentry, and I sent them on a hunt for wood. The terms were three dollars a piece for each day they took to get up an office for me against the south wall of the cabin. After I did that there was a gather- ing in front of the cabin and I spoke to a number of people, one at a time. One man said he knew the printer's trade and I gave him backing of seventy- five dollars to start up a press ha the town. An- other, an old drover, claimed he knew where if he could get a dozen head of fat prime cattle at three dollars a head, he would have them across the flats in a week and would sell them for slaughter for ten dollars. I told him to go ahead. A couple of people I lent money to straight off at a rate of one percent, and by noon I had gotten rid of all my money except what I needed to keep the three of us.

I went outside and stood up on a box in front of the windmill and I made an announcement to the people that gathered. I said until the roadwork be- gan all water was free to anyone not owning prop- erty on the street. "The banner means what it says, boys!" I cried like a true politician. "There's a psiyday coming for all, but until it comes we'll179 wait togetherl" n.o.body cheered but I didn't think they would.

In all that time Molly stayed in the back room with the door shut, the boy carrying her cups of tea or some food.

I wasn't finished by any means, I planned to write a letter to two or three of the banking companies in the Territory, asking them to con- sider opening up a branch in the town. I was tempt- ing myself to ride up to the lodes with Brogan's letter to see if I could commit someone to a hiring date. My mind was teeming with plans to keep the temperature down and the money fluent. Toward dusk Zar came barging in the front door. I had expected him.

"Mayor, what a frand is this!"

"What do you mean Zar?"

"I tell you I shall drill a well and then you cut your water prices. Is this the way a frand does?"

"Why you told me you would drill only for your own use," I said, "I shouldn't think it would mat- ter to you."

"This is dirty business, you are making angry a dangerous man!"

At that moment he didn't look so dangerous. He had on his fancy check vest and kneecoat and a hempen cravat and around it all was his barkeep's ap.r.o.n. He raged on, not even knowing he gave himself away, till finally I said: "Now you listen to me, Zar. You're sending for a well driller? Fine, you'll make it back soon enough, just go right ahead. You can hire out a good half dozen men to put up a windmill for you. While you're at it think up a couple of more jobs so you can180 give out wages. G.o.d knows you've made enough money not to have to sweep your own place."

"What's this?"

"These people are lying around here spending their cash and they're not making any. We're grabbing everything they have-"

"Is this bad?"

"It could be. The Company seems to be taking its own sweet time about the road. Until it gets going we're in a bad position. You can't just take out, you have to put back in too, you're a business- man, you know that."

"I do not make whiskey to give away, frand. I do not tell a man to keep his money so he can spend it across the street."

"Alright, you can still hire some of these people, give them a way of paying for your wares."

He looked at me, his anger forgotten: "Blue, I think you are losing your mind . . ."

"I have lived around this country a long time, Zar. Take a look at the faces along your bar; if you can't read the meanings you don't stand to last very long."

"They say you are giving away money-"

"I've invested some."

"Blue, frand, I'm sorry I have screamed. You are a sick man."

"You'd better give some thought to what I'm saying-"

He stomped over to the door shaking his head. "Alright," I said to him, "I hope you're hiding your gold in a good safe place."

But when he was gone I had to ask myself: Could I be wrong? Was I running scared? If things181 were really tight neither the Russian nor any of the others would have to be told what to do. The situation was not all that bad. Isaac Maple, for instance, I knew for a fact he credited anyone who said he knew Ezra, his brother. Every poke came into town, it didn't take him one day to find out how to get by Isaac, all he had to say is he'd seen Ezra, and was it at Bannock or'Virginia City, it was all the same, he got down on Isaac's books ...

Was this not a way of hoping; or was I just being typical of myself, unable to do something in the morning without regretting it at night?

If Jimmy understood what I had done he gave no sign. Nor did I hear from Molly. I slept well at night, there were no sounds to waken me. In the morning Jimmy dragged in that bathtub from the well and pushed it into their room. He went back and forth with a bucket, I suppose Molly had de- cided to cleanse herself of what filth she could. When he had filled the tub he sat outside her door, his neck flushed red to his ears and that cursed shotgun across his knees.

Outside the front door there was a crowd gath- ered-for what? What more did I have to do? And then Archie D. Brogan showed up. He must have pushed aside a few of them, there was a lot of grumbling and a few shouts behind him when the door opened.

"Are you that Blue feller? Mcellhenny tells me you've a letter in my name. Brogan."

I stood up. "That's right. It's been here more than a week."

"Say what?"182 "It's been here in my desk a long while-"

"Why that son of a b.i.t.c.h sot, I'll fix his hide, he just now told me last night. Well give it here."

It was clear he was a mine boss. His hat was off but just to fan his face, he was a beefy man in his corduroys and he suffered the heat. I got the letter and handed it to him.

"Too bad you had to make a special trip," I said, "you mostly get your mail up at the camp, don't you?"

"What the h.e.l.l business is it of your?" he said ripping open the envelope. And then, as he stood there puzzling out the words his florid face went pale. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and stomped out, leaving the door open wide.

Outside they made a path for him and he walked up the street to Zar's Palace. Bert was standing by the door and I motioned him inside.

"Bert, what's troubling you, what are you doing here?"

"Well Mr. Blue the girl is getting big as a melon and we don't have a bed yet for the chile to be born in. I want us to have a real furniture bed, you know how I mean, but I'm already two weeks ahead on my pay-"

"Won't Isaac Maple order on your word?"

"No sir, he knows me. Also, he's been paying my honey wages and I can't-"

"Alright, Bert, listen, I'll loan you for that bed whatever it costs-"

He stammered, he looked sorry he had joined the crowd at my door. He was a fine gawky young fellow and I remember thinking, unwillingly, how just a few years older than Jimmy he was.

"Alright, Bert, you pay me when you can, now183 listen. That man just walked out of here, Archie Brogan?"

"Sure, don't have to tell me that's Mr. Brogan-"

"Go on back to your place and keep your eye on him. He has a letter I'd give my arm to know what it says. Man has a drink he sometimes talks out loud, you know what I mean?"

"Sure, Mr. Blue-"

"I wanted to say something to him about the road, he could put all these people out here to work if he had instructions, go on now."

I showed him out and closed the door. I had been waiting for the mine boss to come down for his letter; and now that he had my heart pulsations ran so fast I could hardly keep myself sitting down. I bit off some plug and chewed and listened to the noise outside one door and the silence inside the other. The boy was gazing at me. I thought Well let me write Jenks's request to. the capital, let me compose my letter to the banking companies. But nothing I could do would matter if the mine didn't lay its road. Why had that note been addressed to Brogan care of the town? Why had Angus said nothing to him for over a week?

I stepped outside and walked quickly up the street to the saloon. Some of those people walked along with me. "I've no news, I've nothing to say," I told them as I walked. "I'm going in for a drink, anyone who'd care to stand me one is welcome to come along." That put them off and I went into Zar's and stood by the bar until I caught Bert's eye.

He put a gla.s.s in front of me and poured: "Up- stairs, Mr. Blue, he bought a whole bottle and went upstairs with Jessie."184 "Well this is a working day," I said softly, "he must have something grand to celebrate."

"He said not a word. He didn'i even act he knew who I was. Just took a bottle and marched up there with Miss Jess."

Mae came over, pushing her hair back on her temples: "I wish that b.a.s.t.a.r.d would hurry up and die. How are you Blue?"

"Mae."

. "That G.o.dd.a.m.n dealer. Two days he's been lying up there bleeding all over my bed. I don' under- stand oP Adah, she sits up theah you'd thank 'twas her own man dying'."

"Well," I said, "she has a feeling for such things."

"h.e.l.l, he's jest a-festerin' away. And Lord if it don't serve him right. First day he was here he wanted me to go upstairs just for the love of it. You hear me Blue? 'Why you cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' I tell him, 'I'll go with you and you pay me like anyone elsel' And you know he wouldn't? How do you like that for a dealer! One on the house Bertie, if'n you please."

"Where's Zar?" I said.

"Who cares!"

I sipped my whiskey and waited there at the bar, watching the stairs and trying not to look concerned. There were men sitting at the tables, talking, playing small-change poker, but the noise wasn't such you couldn't hear things. From one room above I heard the low moans of that dealer; and from another the sound of Archie D. Brogan singing up a song. After a while Jessie came down. Long Jessie went over to Mae and whispered some- thing and they both giggled.185 How many verses of that song I must have lis- tened to, making out no words, but the Irish of the tune again and again. It would stop and I'd think well now we'll hear no more, but he would start up again^ having only paused to wet his throat.

Then, finally, a door opened and down the stairs came the mine boss, lurching and holding the rail tight. He slipped and sat down on the bottom step; and he began to laugh. His face was red and his cheeks shot with thin blue veins. I was over there in an instant offering to help him up and that made him stop laughing. He waved my hand away, mut- tered something and went out the door. I followed and watched as he threw up in the street. When he was done he wiped his face with a red handker- chief and stalked into Isaac's store, walking sober as a judge.

How clear I call up these moments-even the song he sang, a wild dirge, sings in my ears. A man I never knewl He came out of Isaac's place with a bundle and brand-new saddlebags, stuffed full. He threw it on the back of his mule, mounted, and as I stood transfixed, rode down the street and into the flats.

I watched him a long while. n.o.body else seemed to notice his leaving, people were all over the street, the lunch crowd was grouping in front of Swede's tent. I went into the store. Isaac was there toting up figures on a pad. The fat Chinagirl was sitting and resting by the door, breathing with difficulty, her hands on her knees.

"Isaac what did that fellow buy?"

"Weren't that the foreman?"

"It was."

"Well he took some vittles, a fryin* pan, a box of186 cartridges, matches, a blanket, bottle of castor oil, coupla ounces smokin' tobacco .. ."

Did I have to be told? Did it have to be in a letter? The next day miners began coming down the trail, walking with their picks on their backs, riding two up on their mules. They filled the street. Angus Mcellhenny told me: "As long as the payroll kept coming, Blue, we kept diggin' that rock. But I knew weeks ago it wasn't ore we were diggin'. Twas only the color."

Like the West, like my life: The color dazzles us, but when it's too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim.

12.Of course now I put it down I can see that we were finished before we ever got started, our end was in our beginning. I am writing this and maybe it will be recovered and read; and I'll say now how I picture some reader, a gentleman in a stuffed chair with a rug under him and a solid house around him and a whole city of stone streets around the house-a place like New York which Molly talked about one night, with gas lamps on each corner to light the dark, and polished carriages running behind the horses, and lots of fine manners . . . Do you think, mister, with all that settlement around you that you're freer than me to make your fate? Do you click your tongue at my story? Well I wish I knew yours. Your father's doing is in you, like his father's was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that's all. I know it, it's true, I've always known it. I scorn myself for a fool for all the bookkeeping I've done; as if notations in a ledger can fix life, as if some marks in a book can control things. There 187.188 is only one record to keep and that's the one I'm writing now, across the red lines, over the old marks. It won't help me nor anyone I know. "This is who's dead," it says. It does nothing but it can add to the memory. The only hope I have now is that it will be read-and isn't that a final curse on me, that I still have hope? I would, laugh if I could, who will come here to find my ledgers of scrawls: that old toothless drover who took my savings to bring hack beef on the hoof? If he wasn't a liar he was old enough to be smart. I think I knew he was lying when I gave him the money, I was pay- ing him a debt, I was paying him to leave. Maybe the circuit judge . , . although now I'm not clear in my head whether I wrote Jenks's letter or not, did I give it to Alf or not, and anyway why should he come by since nothing is left to judge?

Jenks let free that bent-over fellow the minute he saw what chance there was. The hunchback scuttled off in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of him later, he was one of those looting Isaac's store. At least I think so. In all that noise I can't be sure what I saw, there was moonlight hot as the sun, bright as noon, but it was like the light of pain shining from the blackness.

"Jenks!" I remember Molly screamed. She had run outside and was standing, waving at the coach coming down the street. The Sheriff was atop his hea.r.s.e wagon, the door on the side flapping open and shut. Sitting up there with him was Miss Adah and Jessie.

He thought Molly wanted to get on. "Hurry up, ma'am," he said, leaning over to help her, "them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds is about to cut loose." And I thought too she was climbing up, even though I had de-189 spaired of getting her to go. But what she did, she pulled him down from the box and was all over the poor man, holding around his neck, clutching him, giving him kisses, moaning out her words: "Jenks, get him for me, you've got to get him, you have a hankerin' don't you Jenks, I've seen it, a woman can tell. Get him and I'll go with you anywhere, I'll be your natural wife, anything you please, I swear-"

The boy and I were looking on and the two women from up on the box. All the sound was coming from the saloon.

"For G.o.d's sake Jenks," said Jessie turning and looking back. "For G.o.d's sake will you come on!"

"But ma'am, if'n hew please!" He was trying to get loose of Molly.

"Jenks, just one shot, why the man's a target, why he's just looking to come up deadl"

"Lady I done throwed my star away."

Adah was weeping: "I left him up there, he's still breathin'. I've no call to leave that dyin" man alone."

"Hush up! You dumb old woman," Jessie said to her. "You think that d.a.m.n dealer is .worth gettin' what Mae is gettin'? You want to go back there with Mae and that other one?-Lord G.o.d, Jenks, will you come on!"

At the saloon the crowd was spilling back on the porch and into the street. People were trying to see in like a crowd pushing toward the words of a preacher. You could hear Mae's screams. I knew it wouldn't be long and we'd all be suffering Turner, feeling his sermon. When he had come only G.o.d knows. He must have ridden down from the rocks, grinning to see such a boom of people; he must190 have come from the north, on the heels of the min- ers, he had left that way after all, the scythe swings back.

Wouldn't I have seen him otherwise? All after- noon I had stood watching the dust roll back from the flats, once the stage came and went it was like a signal, folks were tying up their things, loading their animals and taking the walk. In front of my cabin it was like how many years before at West- port, Missouri, people standing and saying good- bye to each other but with their eyes gazing at the plains in front of them.

. That old egg lady left, riding a wagon empty but for squawks; a chicken feather floated out behind her. Jonce Early pulled up stakes without so much as a look back. There were other smart ones, a handcart couple walked by with no expression at all on their faces. But most of those people who'd come looking for work, they were not moving be- yond the street.

I had looked on too numb to move watching the street fill to overflow;. I didn't want to believe it, I wanted to tell Angus he was lying, I had the wild thought if I ran up the trail and pushed boulders across it, I could turn them back, those miners. It was a farrago, a sweltering of angers. The noise of talk was like a hoa.r.s.e wind blowing. A miner came up to me and said quietly, "Stage due anytime you know?"

"Why yes," I said with all politeness, "matter of fact it should be here this afternoon."

He spit out some plug and looking at the ground said, "I'll buy a pa.s.sage, ye don't mind." He gave me a pouch of dust so I took him inside and wrote393 a ticket. When he left there was another miner in the door. And before long there was a line of men waiting their turn for tickets. They dropped bills into my hand, silver, chunks of high-graded. Through the doorway, over their heads I could see some towners watching.

I wrote slowly, making more contracts than Alf could comfortably carry, and thinking Now isn't this queer how I got through these motions with my hands of ice, how peculiar to be doing busi- ness; like I once saw a man who was shot in the heart, he was as dead as you can be but he walked around awhile before he lay down.

I knew Zar and Isaac would come after me once the truth struck them, they would make me share their suffering. I gave the last man in line his ticket and they pushed in past him, their faces all dismay. They didn't want to believe what their own eyes told them.

"The road Blue, whan shall they make the road!" the Russian kept saying.

"You know these flats out here, the way nothing is growing? Well when it's an orchard of big, leafy trees with each leaf a five-dollar gold piece-that's when you'll get your road."

"It ain't fair," Isaac said, "it's not right. What do I do now, tell me what I'm s'posed to do now!"

"I don't know Isaac."

"I said it would come to this, I knew it would. I'm ruined! Ye sure sold me, ye surely traded me!"

"Maybe so."

"Why I'd have found Ezra by now, I'd be with my brother today but for you!"

"I haven't heard you complaining the past year Isaac. You've done alright."192 "Is that right, is that so? Curse your wretched soul I've put every penny I made into this street!"

'You must stop this Blue," the Russian shook his fist, "you must do something!"

"Shall I put the gold back in the ground?"

"My hotel! My beautiful hotel! From where shall come the customers-"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n you both, why don't you let me be! What is it you want of me! Why am I the one always, people come running to me--get out of here, go on get out, I'm as hung up as you, can't you see that?"

"Frand-"