Forgiving

by LaVyrle Spencer

  “No letter, Mrs. Dawkins, I’m sorry,” Van Aark told her. “But now that Miss Merritt is here, maybe we’ll have more than letters to read.” After the exchange of pleasantries the entire troop went outside to inspect Sarah’s printing press. They found it in a wagon, covered by canvas, broken down into pieces, the smaller of them crated but the largest—the frame—standing free, lashed to the side of the wagon with leather straps.

  When the canvas was folded back Sarah touched it reverently—her father’s old Washington Hand Press—a thousand pounds of steel on which she’d learned her trade side by side with him. With it were his massive rolltop desk and packing crates containing the type cases, furniture cabinet, newsprint, ink and other paraphernalia she’d packed that summer in St. Louis. She counted the crates and found them all accounted for. Her eyes took on a glow of excitement. “I’ll need a block and tackle to unload it tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got those in the store,” Van Aark replied.

  “And a tent, and a lantern and a few other things. If I make you a list can you have them ready in the morning?”

  “You bet, Miss Merritt.”

  After the arrangements were made, Sarah spent a long while talking with Emma Dawkins, learning a great deal about the town and its residents and accepting an invitation to have supper with the Dawkins family the following night. Upon leaving Emma, she looked up the boardinghouse of Loretta Roundtree, located on a path that angled up the west side of the gulch where the buildings were perched on narrow terraces with their rear ends buried in the mountain. Though Mrs. Roundtree, bluff and big-faced, said she’d have loved to rent a room to Sarah if only for the female company, she regretfully turned her away, claiming she had a waiting list of over fifty.

  Sarah made a note to that effect, and spent another hour walking up and down Main Street asking questions and taking additional notes on the status of the town before returning to her hotel room in the late afternoon.

  There, once again she took out pen and ink, drew her bedside table near the window and sat down to keep a promise.

  Dakota Territory.

  September 27, 1876

  Dear Robert,

  I take pen in hand as I promised I would when I arrived in Deadwood, which I did yesterday. This is a particularly sordid settlement which, like a boy of fourteen, is outgowing its breeches and experiencing growing pains. If all is true that I’ve heard, the population of this gulch and all its tributaries is presently around 25,000.

  Many of the men are rich, but more have not struck the big gold. These struggle along doing whatever jobs they can find. Others are now mining high-grade quartz, pulverizing it by hand using mortar and pestle. I have thought how odd that a town so rich resorts to such archaic methods.

  But enough about the commercial aspects of Deadwood. You asked me to tell you if and how I found Adelaide, my dear sister and your remembered sweetheart.

  She is here in Deadwood, but how my heart breaks to tell you what I must. Oh Robert, I fear our hopes for her were optimistic. She is not the same winsome young girl we last saw when she was sixteen. Dear Robert, do fortify yourself for a cruel blow which I so extremely regret delivering. Your fear was that I would find Adelaide married, but the truth is much worse. My sister has become a prostitute. Here in Deadwood they call her kind upstairs girls, soiled doves, similar euphemisms, but the unvarnished truth is as I said. Adelaide has become a prostitute.

  She has changed her name to Eve and works for a procuress named Rose Hossiter, an uncivil and odious bawd who raises shivers along my arms as I force myself to recall her. Our Adelaide has blackened her hair, kohled her eyes, rouged her lips and allowed herself to grow obese during her prodigal years. I shall not torment you with details of her reprehensible mode of dress. These external changes are, however, only manifestations of the inner, more disturbing metamorphosis from the darling we once knew to a woman of granite expression and stone heart.

  Though she has resisted my every overture, I will be here for Adelaide and will make every attempt to win her over and with the power of the printed word, to close down these dens of vice and corruption that turn decent, wholesome young girls like Addie into the poor, misguided, morally impoverished souls who deserve our pity.

  I grieve for your disillusionment and sorrow upon receiving this letter, and for the loss of your dreams which you have held so long and faithfully, but in all earnestness, I implore you to move forward with your life, find some deserving young woman worthy of your devotion and, of Addie, to carry the memory, not the dream.

  I shall post this by the Pony Express, which is much faster than the Cheyenne Stage, whose service is still only bi-weekly into Deadwood, and hope that it reaches you in all due haste. May your spirits not languish long, Robert, for you are too kind and good a man to suffer so unjust a sentence.

  Yours in friendship,

  Sarah Merritt

  After she’d folded and sealed the letter she sat a long time, despondent, looking out her third-story window in the direction of Rose’s. She thought she made out the tip of the building’s false front, though Addie’s window faced one side.

  Oh Addie, you could have had such a fine life with Robert. How I envied you his favor, but he had eyes for no one but you. Even after you left, his mourning allowed him to see no other woman. You could be married to him now. Instead, there you are, in that horrid place, having run off just like our mother did, abandoning Father and me. After the hundreds of times you and I talked about the hurt she caused us, I could not believe you’d do the same.

  The memories of those first days after her mother’s abandonment were still vivid to Sarah. She had been sleeping soundly on a gray morning in November when her father, instead of her mother, had come in to awaken her for school.

  “Where’s Mama?” she’d asked, rubbing her eyes, and he’d told her Mama had gone away to visit her sister in Boston.

  “In Boston?” There had never been talk of any aunt in Boston. “When will she come back?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she’ll be back in a week or so.”

  But a week had passed, then another; a month, and Addie started wetting the bed again, and crying for their mother at bedtime, and Sarah stood for hours looking out the window up Lamply Street, watching for a glimpse of the familiar dark-haired figure. A woman named Mrs. Smith was hired as their temporary housekeeper, but stayed on, and Father grew dour and his back became bowed, though he was still a very young man. Not until Sarah was twelve did she learn the truth from Mrs. Smith, who told her one day in the kitchen where they were pickling beets. “Your mother won’t be back, Sarah,” Mrs. Smith had said. “It’s time you knew the truth. She ran off with a man named Paxton—Amery Paxton—who worked for your father as a typesetter. Where they went, nobody knows, but she left a note saying she loved Paxton and was going off to marry him. Your father never heard from her again, and of course he’s never remarried, because he has no idea whether it would be bigamy or not.”

  Sarah had started collecting words that day, an acquaintanceship that would become the backbone of her life’s work. Bigamy, she had entered in a blue-lined journal, when one woman is married to two men. I know now why my mother left us.

  To this day Sarah could not eat beets or tolerate the smell of vinegar.

  Sitting in her dreary bedroom in the Grand Central Hotel, she looked down at another journal, filled with notes she had taken since her arrival in Deadwood. She sighed and drew out a clean, loose sheet of paper. When things are troubling you, her father had often said, write.

  She wrote, laboring under an intense commitment to create as accurate a picture of today’s Deadwood as it was possible to paint with words. The inaugural issue of her paper would undoubtedly be preserved for all time. In a town where history was being made, this was bound to be true.

  She worked until midnight, composing the articles for her first issue of the Deadwood Chronicle. Along with the one she’d begun in the restaurant at breakfast, the headlines includ
ed, MAIL ARRIVES AT VAN AARK’S STORE; CHEYENNE STAGE—DAILY SERVICE TO DEADWOOD EXPECTED BY OCTOBER; TELEGRAPH LINE COMPLETED AS FAR AS HILL CITY; SCARCITY OF WOMEN PREVAILS IN DEADWOOD; GRASSHOPPERS STILL PRESENT IN MINNESOTA; SEVEN BUILDINGS UNDER CONSTRUCTION ON DEADWOOD MAIN STREET; MSS..BELDING & MYERS CONSTRUCTING WATER CONVEYANCE DITCH FROM WHITETAIL TO THE HEAD OF GOLD RUN; PROSPECT ON #82 WHITEWOOD: $200 PER DAY. On her own behalf she composed a want ad announcing that the editor of the Deadwood Chronicle was looking for a place to set up her business and to lodge. But she worked the longest over an editorial entitled “Close the Heathen Brothels of the West.” It was lengthy and impassioned and ended by saying, “We must purge this city of this scandal and bring the keepers of these houses under the lash of the law. But how shall we do so when the very representative of the law itself is frequenting the fair and frail? Surely public opinion can be brought to bear against this source of moral and physical disease.”

  By the time Sarah removed her glasses her eyes burned and her shoulders ached. Addie would be angry when she read the editorial, but that was a risk Sarah had decided she must take when she made her decision to attack the disease rather than the symptom. Shut down the houses and you shut down the prostitutes. Not a popular stand, given the conspicuous acceptance of the brothels, but a journalist’s call—Isaac Merritt had taught his daughter—was not to be popular, but to be effective in forcing change where change was necessary.

  In the morning Sarah stepped outside to discover there’d been rain—both a bane and a boon, for though the streets had turned to Dakota gumbo, the absence of dust, to a printer, was the greatest blessing of all. She was surprised to find she’d missed the storm, which had left tree limbs in the street, but a blue sky above and the promise of a perfect autumn day. The smell of the newly moistened dung in the street, however, had intensified.

  She picked her way around it and posted her letter at the Pony Express office, then headed for Van Aark’s store, gathering up an entourage on the way. They followed like children after the Pied Piper: Henry Tanby, Skitch Johnson, Teddy Ruckner, Shorty Reese and finally Dutch himself, all of them eager to help her move her printing press.

  “Where do you aim to put it?” Dutch asked as he hitched a horse to the wagon.

  “Follow me,” she said and led them to the spot she’d chosen beneath an immense ponderosa pine whose bole was imposing enough to have put a gooseneck in Main Street down near the Number 10 Saloon: public property, she was sure, yet protected from traffic by the tree trunk itself and shaded by its branches.

  “Here,” Sarah proclaimed, looking up.

  “Here?”

  “We need a branch sturdy enough to support the weight of the press. That one will do.”

  “On the street?” Van Aark’s lower gums showed pink as his mouth hung open.

  “Until I can find an office, yes, this will do fine.”

  “But it’s practically the middle of the street!”

  “Public property though, right? And am I not the public? Are not you and I—all of us—the public? Who does a newspaper serve if not the public? Now if you’ll help me, gentlemen, I’ll have your first edition thumping off the press before nightfall.”

  They raised a cheer while a crowd gathered to watch Skitch Johnson swing himself from Henry Tanby’s shoulders into the tree. Within minutes the block and tackle were mounted and the rope was reeved. As it dropped down through the sheave, eager hands waited to catch the steel hook and attach it to the frame of the printing press. The frame swung up and others leveled the earth beneath with flat spades and laid down a square plank as a stabilizer. The men strained at the ropes and, piece by piece, the press took shape: legs onto frame, frame onto plank, track onto frame, tympan frame onto track. Sarah gave instructions, lifting her arms to guide the pieces into place, securing them herself with shear pins and bolts. Some shimming was required before the entire setup stood firm and level, but when it did, she demonstrated the ease of operating the machine by cranking the empty bed and lowering the platen one time. Another cheer rose.

  “All we need now is type, paper and ink and we’ll be in business,” Sarah declared.

  “How about your tent, Miss Merritt, you want we should set that up, too?”

  “I’d be so grateful if you would.”

  In no time they had her small tent standing taut and inside it her newsprint up off the damp earth. Outside, in bolder light, they uncrated all of her typesetting paraphernalia: furniture font, typecase, composing stick and leather apron. Once it was unearthed and arranged on the packing crates, she glanced around in satisfaction and brushed off her hands. “Thank you so much.” She shook hands with each man who had helped. Meanwhile, the crowd had multiplied until it hampered traffic movement in the street. Fascinated, they remained, ogling the press, waiting to see it in operation. “I appreciate the muscle and the goodwill. You’ve given me a very warm reception, all of you.”

  “When will the first copy come off the press?” someone shouted.

  “Find me another typesetter and I can be rolling ink by noon.”

  When the crowd failed to disperse, she removed her jacket, rolled up her sleeves and began setting type while they watched. If they had been fascinated before, they were transfixed now. Her right hand moved so fast the onlookers could scarcely follow it with their eyes. Over the years, setting type had become second nature to Sarah, and she did it in whirlwind fashion, often plucking the individual characters from the grid-shaped typecase by feel. She filled the composing stick in a matter of seconds, transferred the block of three lines to a flat tray called a galley, and began again.

  Meanwhile, the crowd grew.

  Two blocks away, Marshal Noah Campbell sat in his tiny office filling out more stinking licenses. Damn, how he hated paperwork! But when the town government was officially formed two weeks ago he’d agreed to take on all the duties of city marshal as prescribed by the newly drafted ordinances. Among them was the issuing of licenses and the collection of taxes from every company, corporation, business and trade in Deadwood.

  Beaudry, Seth W., Gunsmith, he wrote arduously. $5.00 Licensing Fee, Fourth Quarter, 1876, City of Deadwood. He sat back, mumbling, scratching his mustache, eyeing his work. Shit and shit twice. Looked like a drunk chicken had walked through the barnyard and across the form. He could handle a gun and a horse and any drunk who wanted to start slinging fists, but a pen and ink had the power to discommode him.

  Noah Campbell, he signed, then blew on the ink and added the license to the finished stack. He was dipping his pen to fill in the next one when he heard an ox whip. His head snapped up and he listened. The sound came again. There was no mistaking it, nor the bellowing of the skinners that drifted in through the closed door. Noah dropped his pen and his chair screeched back. In a half-dozen long strides he plucked his black Stetson off the wall hook and reached the door.

  Smiling and eager, he stood on his front step, facing the opening of the gulch, watching the lead pair of dun-colored oxen plod toward him while the sound of the ox whips cracked against the gulch walls—fap! fap! fap!—like a stack of lumber dropping. They snaked along, ten, twelve, fourteen spans, while the cartwheels creaked and the lead bullwhacker let fly a string of profanity.

  “Gee, I said, you sons of a whorin’ bitches! You mothers of whorin’ bitches! You grandmothers of whorin’ bitches! Whaddya need, gunpowder up your asses b’fore you’ll move! I’ll ram it in with my own fist and light the fuse with this here cigar between my teeth if you don’t—”

  The rest was lost in the echoing crack of an ox whip as Noah leaned back and laughed. Good old True Blevins, he knew how to put on a show. Kept the whole street laughing every time he pulled in.

  Noah and his family—mother, father and brother—had made the trip into the Black Hills beside True’s ox train in May. It was a common practice for families unable to hitch up with a wagon train to move through the hostile Indian territory in the company of one of the bullwhackers, who charged
a price for the concession.

  In Noah’s case the price had been worth it: he and True had become friends.

  True wouldn’t be too happy, though, to hear the news that he’d have to pay a license fee of $3.00 per wagon before he could unload his freight.

  The cavalcade drew abreast of Noah and moved on as he waved to True and the drivers of the successive carts. Suddenly, up ahead, he heard the bawling of the oxen and the unmistakable voice of True, cussing fit to kill. The oxcarts halted and there was more cussing down the line. From the step of his office Noah could see a bottleneck up the street near the Number 10 Saloon. Leveling his hat, he leaped into the mud and headed up that way.

  “Let me through,” he ordered, squeezing between men’s shoulders, bumping people aside as he forced his way through the crowd. He saw, even before he reached her, what was causing the traffic jam. None other than Miss Sarah Merritt, with her printing press set up practically in the middle of Main Street. Damn, but the woman was an aggravation. Dressed all in brown, with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a doughnut, tall and skinny as a bean pole, she was busy dropping type into a metal stick while the onlookers appeared to have settled in for the day, waiting to see history in the making.

  “What the Sam Hill is going on here?” He scowled and broke through the edge of the crowd.

  Sarah glanced back over her shoulder and kept clicking pieces of type into place.

  “I’m laying out a newspaper.”

  “Have you got a license to do that?”

  “A license?”

  “I told you yesterday you needed one.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot.”

  “Furthermore, you’re holding up a whole freight train and causing a road jam. You’ll have to get this stuff out of here.”

  “I’m on public property, Mr. Campbell.”

  “You’re a public nuisance, Miss Merritt! Now, I said you’ll have to move!”

  “I’ll move when I find a building to rent.”