Captains and the Kings

by Taylor Caldwell

  He lay flaccid against Joseph's greatcoat except when he struggled in his suffering. Joseph cried, "I don't know what to do!" "But you are real mad that you have to do anything, is that it? Don't blame you. I feel the same about people don't belong to me. We're coming into Titusville. Get that box of yours from under the seat. We'll just leave the Turk here. No use even to use that goldpiece. Lad looks like he's done for, anyways." But Joseph did not move. He looked up at Mr. Healey and his young face was gaunt and drawn and very white, and the dark freckles stood out on his nose and cheeks. His eyes were blue and enraged fire. "I don't know anyone in Titusville," he said. "Maybe you know somebody vvho'd take him in and care for him until he's better. I can give them the money." "Son," said Mr. Healey, standing up, "you don't know Titusville. It's like a jungle, it is that. I seen many a man, young as this and you, dying on the streets from cholera or ague or something, and nobody cared. Black gold fever: That's what's got this town. And when men are after gold, the divil take the hindmost, specially the sick and the weak. Everybody's too busy filling his pockets and robbing his neighbor. There ain't an inn or hotel in Titusville that ain't crowded to the doors, and no newfangled hospital, if that's what you're thinking about. You take people who are living peaceful in town or country, and they'll help a stranger-sometimes -out of Christian charity, but you take a madhouse like Titusville, a stranger is just a dog unless he's got two good hands and a good back to work with, or a stake. Now, if your Turk was a girl I'd know just the place who'd take him in. Own four or five, myself," and Mr. Healey chuckled. He pulled up his pantaloons and chuckled again. The train was moving very slowly now and the men in the coach were gathering up their bags and talking and laughing with the exuberance only the thought of money can induce. The coach was hurtfully glaring with sunlight but the wind that invaded the coach was very cool. Joseph closed his eyes and bit his lip so hard that it turned white. Ila- roun's restless hands were moving over him, as hot as coals. "Well, Joe, here we are, depot riding right in. Coming?" Joseph said, "I can't leave him. I'll find a way." He hated and detested himself. It would take very little, he thought, just to lift his box and walk from this coach and never look back. What was Haroun Zieff to him? But though he actually reached for his box his hand fell from it, and despair swept him like the intensity of physical illness. He thought of Scan and Regina. What if they were abandoned like this, in the event that he, Joseph, was no longer able to protect them? Would any Mr. Healey or even a Joseph Armagh come to their aid and save them?

  "I'll find a way," said Joseph to the standing man near him. He saw only the big belly in its silk brocaded waistcoat and the jeweled trinkets of the gold watch chain which sparkled in the sunlight, and he smelled the odor of the man, fat and rich and sleek. "Now," said Mr. Healey. "That's what I like to hear a man say: Til find a way.' None of that, 'For the love of dear Jaysus, sir, help me, 'cause I'm too damned lazy and stupid and no-account to do it meself. I appeal to your Christian chanty, sir.' Any man says that to me," said Mr. Healey with real pent emotion, "I say to him, 'Get off your ass and help yourself as I did and millions afore you, damn you.' Wouldn't trust a psalm-singer or a beggar with a two-cent piece, no sir. They'd eat you alive, come they had the chance." The train had halted at a dismal makeshift depot and the men were running from it with shouts to acquaintances and friends they had seen from the windows. Mr. Healey waited. But Joseph had not been listening closely. He saw that Haroun had begun to shiver and that his child's face had suddenly turned gray. He tugged off his old greatcoat and clumsily wrapped Haroun in it. A trainman was coming down the aisle with a basket, in which he was depositing the empty bottles on the floor. Joseph called to him. "Hey, there, I need a hand with my sick friend! I've got to find a place for him to stay. Know of any?" The trainman stood up straight and scowled. Mr. Healey uttered an astonished grunt. "What the hell's the matter with you, Joe?" he demanded. "Ain't I here? Too proud to ask, eh, and me your old friend, Ed Healey!" The trainman recognized Mr. Healey, and came forward, bowing his head and tugging at his cap. He looked at the two boys. "Friends of yours, sir?" he asked in a groveling whine. He looked more closely, and was astonished at the sight of the two ragged youths, one of whom was obviously almost moribund. "Bet your life they are, Jim," said Mr. Healey. "My carryall out there with my shiftless Bill?" "Sure is, Mr. Healey, I'll run get him and he can help you with-with your friends," he added in a weak voice. "Give you a hand too. Glad to do it, sir. Anythin' for Mr. Healey, anythin'!" He looked again at Joseph and Haroun and blinked incredulously. "Capital," said Mr. Healey, and shook hands with the trainman and the dazed Joseph saw the gleam of silver before it disappeared. The trainman ran like a boy off the train, shouting to someone and calling. "Nothing like good silver, as ever}' Judas knows," said Mr. Healey, chuckling. He picked up his tall silk hat and set it like a shimmering chimney over his enormous rosy face.

  "Whatever you do," said Joseph, rinding his voice and using it with hard and sullen pride, "I'll pay you for it." "That you will, boyo, that you will," said Mr. Healey. "Eh, here's my Bill." He said to Joseph, "I ain't a man for sweet talk, but I'll tell you this, Irish: A man who don't desert his friend is the man for me. Can trust him. Would trust him with my life." Joseph looked at him with the calm and enigmatic expression he had had to cultivate for many years and behind which he lived as if in ambush. Mr. Healey, seeing this, narrowed his little dark eyes and hummed under his breath, thoughtfully. He thought that there were a few men still in the world who were hard to fool, and Joseph was one of them. Mr. Healey was not vexed. He was amused. Never trust a simpleton, was one of his mottoes. He can ruin you, the simpleton, more devastatingly with his virtue than any thief with his thieving. The air was chill and bright outside the train, and the new rough depot platform milled with excited men carrying their wicker luggage and portmanteaus. Carryalls, surreys, carts, wagons, buggies, and a handsome carriage or two, horses and mules, awaited them, and a number of buxom women dressed gaudily and wrapped in beautiful shawls, their bonnets gay with flowers and ribbons and silk and velvet, their skirts elaborately hooped and embroidered. Everything dinned with ebullience and loud fast voices. If there was any thought of the fratricidal war gathering force in the country there was no sign of it here, no sober voice, no fearful word. A golden dust shimmered everywhere in the sunlight, adding a carnival aura to the scene. It was as if the insensate length of the train, itself, was quivering with excitement also, for it snorted, steam shrilly screamed, bells rang wildly. Everyone was in constant motion; there were no leisurely groups or easy attitudes. The scent of dust, smoke, warmed wood, hot iron, and coal was pervaded by an acrid odor Joseph had never encountered before, but which he was to learn was the odor of raw black oil. Just perceptible to the ear was a dull and steady pounding of machinery at a distance. Titusville, set among circling hills and valleys the color and gleaming texture of emerald velvet, was hardly a frontier town, though the normal and settled population was just in excess of one thousand, more or less. It was about forty miles from Lake Erie, and had been prosperous even before oil, being noted for its lumber production and its sawmills and its busy flatboats carrying wood down Oil Creek for distant parts. The farmers were prosperous also, for the land was rich and fertile, and life, to the people of the pretty village, had always been good and never arduous. They were of industrious Scots-Irish stock, with a few Germans equally sound and sober. But the newcomers from nearby states, and the oil frenzy, gave it the air of an exploding frontier town of the West, in spite of noble old mansions scattered at intervals throughout the town behind great oaks and elms and smooth lawns, and proud old families who pretended not to notice the raw newcomers and their frantic ways and their bawling voices. They also pretended to be immune to the new commerce on Oil Creek. They affected to be unaware of a recently unemployed trainman known jocularly as "Colonel" Edwin L. Drake, who had drilled the first artesian well in Titusville two years before. (They had heard, however, that he was keeping the Standard Oil Co
mpany at bay, and John D. Rockefeller, reputedly a nobody and a vulgarian and gross entrepreneur who thought of nothing but profit and exploitation, and recklessly destroyed beautiful countrysides in his delirious and insatiable search for wealth.) No one spoke of the new ten saloons and eight brothels in the town, two "op'ry houses," four inns, and one fairly new hotel. If these seemed unduly busy no one seemed to notice. These were for "outsiders," and did not exist for ladies and gentlemen who had vowed to keep Titusville Pure and Untrammeled, safe for Christian Families. There were six churches, filled at the two services every Sunday, and for Wednesday "meetings," and the many socials. The village, even with its new banks founded by "outsiders," was only the periphery of the churches, which dominated social life and its affairs. The cleavage between the "old residents" and the "outsiders" was apparently impassable, and both apparently ignored the other, to the "outsiders" knowing winks and bawdy hilarity. "Ain't nothing funnier than a big-mouth Christian," Mr. Healey would often remark. "And more murderous and greedy, neither. Just quote the Bible at them and you can get away with anything you got a mind to." Mr. Healey, during business sessions with the natives of Titusville, always quoted the Bible, though nobody could ever discover the text he had quoted so sonorously and with such evident reverence. He rarely, however, quoted the Bible to business associates, who were busy with the same deceit as himself. It sometimes annoyed Mr. Healey that after he had wasted time quoting the Bible at some apparently docile and gentlemanly native of Titusville and had invented sections which had won his own admiration for their eloquence and wisdom, the natives had gone out to gather up options in the countryside for themselves, "and their mouths looking just like they'd just drunk milk and eaten fresh bread," he would recall bitterly. "It just makes you remember," he would add, "that not every man who chews a straw is a greenhorn, and there's many a woman you think is a lady who can outsmart you and leave your pockets empty." Mr. Healey's "Bill" was a William Strickland from the stark hills of Ap- palachia, a Kentuckian. Joseph had never seen a man so tall and so exessively thin and lank.

  He was like a skeleton tree, narrow and fleshless and without juice. He had a face like the head of an ax, and hardly wider, and a shock of black hair stiff and lifeless like the quills of a porcupine, and as erect. His eyes, though not intelligent, were brilliantly intent and hazel, the eyes of an avid and predatory beast. His shoulders, including his neck, were no more than sixteen inches broad, and his hips appeared even more meager. But he had gigantic hands, the hands of a strangler, and feet resembling long slabs of wood crudely fashioned. His skin was withered and deeply lined, and he possessed few teeth and those like fangs and stained with tobacco juice. He could have been aged from thirty to fifty. His impression on Joseph was of a creature of witless ferocity. But Bill was strong. A word from Mr. Healey and he lifted the delirious Haroun in his arms without strain and carried him from the depot. He smelled of dirt and rancid sow belly. His voice was soft and subservient to Mr. Healey, and never questioning. He wore a filthy dark blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up over brown tendons and elongated muscles, and blackish overalls, and nothing else. His feet were bare. A thin stream of tobacco saliva dribbled from a corner of his mouth. He had glanced once at Joseph and that glance was as opaque as wood, and as interested. He showed no wonder at the sight of Haroun. Apparently what Mr. Healey ordained was sufficient for him, however strange or foreign, and Joseph thought, He would kill on command. When he found out later that Bill had indeed killed he was not surprised. Everyone appeared to know Mr. Healey's fine carryall with its fringed top, for there was an empty circle about it. Not looking to right or left Bill carried Haroun to the vehicle, which was drawn by two fine gray marcs with silken tails and manes. He laid the boy along one side and tucked Joseph's coat about him, then climbed down and awaited his employer, looking for him with half-wild and doglikc eyes. Mr. Healey was a procession in himself, accepting greetings affably, bowing and doffing his hat to the ladies, smiling and joking and smoking one of his endless rich cigars. Joseph walked at his side and attracted no more attention than if he had been invisible. In the presence of the gorgeous Mr. Healey all other human beings, and particularly a shabby and ragged youth, disappeared. Bill tenderly helped Mr. Healey into the carryall, then seemed startled when Joseph followed as if the youth had not been encountered before. Then he climbed to his seat, struck the mare with his whip and the iron- shod wheels rolled off smartly. Seeing that Haroun rocked on the long opposite seat and was in danger of rolling off, Joseph braced the boy's middle with his boots. Haroun never ceased his feverish moaning, and Joseph watched him with an inscrutable expression. "He'll live, strong and healthy, and if he don't there's no loss," remarked Mr. Healey. "Look about you, Irish, you're in Titusville now and ain't that where you want to be? We brought some life to this hick town, and you'd think they'd be grateful, wouldn't you?" Joseph thought that Winfield had been barren and repulsive enough, but he saw that what the "outsiders" had made of a once lovely and charming village was nothing short of desecration-in the name of progress and money. An apparently new and raw community had grown up swiftly in the vicinity of the depot, and the cold northern sun glared without the softening effects of trees and grass on wooden walks. The carriage rolled over broken slabs of stone and long dusty planks laid roughly and in a haphazard fashion on bare packed earth. Cheap houses, still unpainted, fashioned of crude siding or logs, huddled sheepishly between noxious saloons and tawdry shops. Small copses of trees had been chopped down to make plots of grassless clay, waiting for new and ugly buildings, a number of them in various stages of construction, and being built without regard for gracious space, inviting vistas or even regularity. Some had already been finished and Mr. Healey pointed to them and said, "Our new op'ry houses. Lively every night 'til early morning. Liveliest places in town, 'cept for the whorehouses, which does a good business all the time. Saloons never empty, neither. liven Sundays," and he chuckled fatly. "We put this town on the railroad, that we did." The "outsiders," who had come to ravish and exploit and not to create homes and churches and flowered lawns, had only alleys and bare ground and broken barrels where there should have been gardens. Swarms of dirty children played on the walks and on the streets. "Work here for everybody, even the town folk," said Mr. Healey, with pride. "You should have seen it when I first come. Like a graveyard; no life. Nothing." Joseph looked up at the green hills, steep or sloping, which surrounded the village, and he thought of the beautiful hills of Ireland, which were no greener nor more inviting. Would they soon be destroyed also, and left desolate and denuded of all that soft serenity? Joseph considered what greedy men can do to the holy earth and the splendor of the world, and to the innocent creatures who inhabited it harmlessly and had their simple being apart from men. Man, he reflected, destroys everything and leaves a wasteland behind him, and congratulates himself that he has improved the earth instead of raping and scarring it. In his hand lay the ax of death and desolation. The desert which was the mind of man made a desert beyond that mind, fruitless and evil, filled with burning stone and vultures. Joseph was not accustomed to mourning the wickedness of his fellows, for he was innured to it, but he felt a surly rage against what he saw now and what he suspected had already been done in other communities. Forests, hills, mountains, rivers, and green streams had no protection in the face of rapacity. Was it possible that most men were blind and did not realize what they were doing to the only home they could ever know, and the only peace available to them? He said to Mr. Healey, "Do you live here, sir?" "Me? Hell, no. Got a house here where I stay in town, bought it cheap from some high-and-mighty snot-nose never worked a day in his life and went bankrupt. Hard to believe in this here territory where there's so much lumber, and salt mines and good land, but he managed, that he did. Feckless. That was before the oil come in. I live in Philadelphia and sometimes Pittsburgh, where I got a lot of interests, too." Joseph reflected that Mr. Healey told as little about his affairs as did he, Joseph, and he smiled sourly t
o himself. "Now here's the square, as they call it, and the City Hall, and the best stores and the law fellers' offices, and the doctors," said Mr. Healey as the carryall entered the square. It was apparent that once this small section of land had been as entrancing and gently lovely as any other spot in the vicinity, for trees still stood on it in cool dark clusters, their leaves glittering in the sunlight, and there were gravel paths winding through dead earth which formerly had been green and soft. There was a broken fountain in the center, and a stone plinth with carved words on it, and nothing else except clay and weeds. The square was surrounded by buildings which still hinted of grace before the "outsiders" had come, ravening here, of fieldstone, and the windows were still bravely polished, but there was a sad look about them as if they were shrinking.