You could tell, maybe, what George really thought of the woman, what he really wanted of her, because he hadn’t brought her to the ranch; if George were serious, he’d certainly want her on the ranch, wouldn’t he, instead of sneaking around with her on the streets of Herndon after dark?
Phil did a lot of carving and whittling Sundays; and some braiding. He started working on a new map of the ranch to put up on the wall in the office, a present for George, one to remind him, perhaps, of his responsibilities to the family. Phil whistled a lot and lay on his bed thinking.
Early in December a sudden cold snap followed snow. The sun rose late and tired over the sagebrush hill before the house; right on top of the hill, visible from the front windows and front porch, Phil and George had built a stone cairn of rounds and rounds of flat shale at the very spot where the sun rose on the twenty-first of June — oh, hell, when was it they built it? Aught-one? Around there, anyway. The sun that morning of the cold snap was far south of it, drifting. After breakfast they still needed lights on in the living room; and the pop of the electric light plant echoed against the hill. Phil walked out onto the front porch and stood sniffing. Across the fields he heard a coyote howling — unusual at such a late hour — and then the damned fool dogs began barking. Phil scratched a match with his thumbnail and looked at the thermometer tacked up on one of the thick log pillars that held up the overhanging roof. He whistled, and peered again. Fifty-six below! There was something to tell George, something to start the conversation of the day.
‘Well, George,’ he said. ‘Guess I’ll have to get out my gloves today.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Fifty-six below, young fellow! It’s like the old days!’
‘Phil,’ said George.
‘What’s it you want to know, old-timer?’
‘Phil did you write to the Old Lady?’
‘Yeah. I shot them a line the other day.’
‘You said something about Rose.’
‘Rose? Oh, Rose. Well, frankly speaking, old-timer, you know well as I do what the Old Lady would say if you got mixed up with her. You know what the Old Lady would think, what she’d feel. George, we’ve always been close, family people, what? Think what the Old Lady would feel.’
‘The Old Lady would feel,’ said George, ‘what one Mrs Burbank would feel for another Mrs Burbank.’
‘Come again?’ Phil cocked his head, to hear better.
‘We were married Sunday,’ George said. ‘She’s got rid of her property down there.’
Phil was so God damned shocked he went outside and stood in the barn. Just the morning for his saddle horse to act up, shying around in the stall as if he’d never seen Phil before, the ignorant bastard, so Phil took the horse out of the stall and tied him up close and then slapped him over the head again and again with the saddle blanket to teach him a thing or two. The dirty God damned fool, and Phil clouted him again. The horse strained at the rope and rolled his eyes so the whites showed.
5
When George had found Rose crying, he knew he was far over his head. He thought he might have dealt with anger, but he had little experience with tears. ‘I came,’ he said, ‘to pay the bill.’ She looked at him, and shook her head. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘send it to me?’
She nodded, and turned away. He did a daring thing. He reached out and patted her upper arm, and smiled, and left, to walk down to the river, to think — he who never walked. He who had never walked by that river before, had never before heard the faint sound in the middle of it where the slow water parted around a sandbar. Suppose, he thought, if someone had found him there in the moonlight, sitting on the bank of the river where he had never been before. Well, he thought, suppose somebody did.
She was astounded to see him again a few weeks later.
What she ran was a hotel and restaurant, and people simply walked in. When you deal with the public, say good-bye to privacy.
But George Burbank knocked. He said, ‘I thought I would come to see you.’
‘Do please come in,’ she said. She was apprehensive, for why would George Burbank come to call. She had sent a bill. She had received a check. She imagined that already his car had been observed passing the saloons, and that already her reputation was slipping. ‘There’s a party coming here at noon,’ she said. ‘You see, I’m busy in the kitchen.’
‘Mrs Gordon, I don’t want to be any trouble.’
Then why didn’t he go, do you suppose, if he didn’t want to be any trouble?
‘Would you like to come sit in the kitchen?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said George Burbank.
Beside the kitchen window was the deal table where she and Peter ate. ‘Would you like to sit down here? I’ve got to mix the biscuits.’
‘You go ahead with the biscuits. I’ll just sit here.’
And so he did, and began reading the words on the sauce bottles. Peter had a penchant for sauces and spices. This most wholesome sauce, George read, is excellent with meats, cheese and fish. He traced the flowers on the oilcloth with a finger. ‘It has certainly been a dry fall,’ he offered. ‘The river is low, I notice.’
‘Hasn’t it been dry, though? Some people in here the other day were saying it’s the driest fall they remember.’
‘They’re right, those people,’ George commented. ‘Dry fall.’
‘I guess you have to expect them,’ Rose said.
He liked the look of the flour on her hands. ‘Yes, you have got to expect them. You’ve got to.’ He knew no more of love, he told himself, than he did of tears, but he enjoyed sitting there. And he enjoyed the conversation which seemed to him on the verge of taking an even more sprightly turn. In other words, he knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.
‘Peter is over at the school, washing windows.’ She paused, thinking he might take her speaking of Peter’s absence as somehow provocative.
‘I expect you must be proud of him, from what I hear.’
She felt suddenly and fiercely protective of Peter, and the sting of tears was in her eyes. ‘From what you hear?’
‘Oh, I’ve heard he’s a smart young fellow.’
Two cars drove up out front, the party from Herndon. The door opened and the little bell above gave the warning, and theirs were the voices of those excited by the cold and grateful for the warmth of the open fire. ‘I’ll go in and seat them,’ Rose said. ‘Peter should be back in a few minutes.’
It sounded to George as if they were pretty noisy in there. When Rose came back she said, ‘They have wine with them. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I’m not sure how the new law is on that, but it looks funny, if somebody came.’
George rose slowly. ‘Do you want me to go in and speak to them?’
Rose laughed, shocked. ‘Oh, no! I’ll handle it some other time.’ Imagine, she thought, if George Burbank suddenly burst in on them. From the kitchen.
‘Just as you say,’ said George.
‘I don’t know what’s keeping Peter.’
George sniffed the biscuits. ‘I expect he’s not through with the windows,’ George said.
‘And these people are early.’ Early and noisy.
‘I’d say,’ George remarked, ‘that they had more in there than wine. Sounds like booze.’
They were early, and getting noisy. Herndon people — the undertaker who looked like Teddy Roosevelt, his delighted grin contemplating your body some years hence. There was a druggist, and two blonde women. The party included the leading dentist of Herndon, a man who had recently made some sort of history by walking down South Pacific Street in a Palm Beach suit sporting a cane, and with him this cold, early fall afternoon was a woman not his wife, a woman named Consuela who handed him instruments in his office; she was a dark beauty much admired in Herndon and the dentist’s wife was a woman who thought a great deal about missionaries and the heathen and liked to drive about Herndon with her dentist husband on fine Sunday afternoo
ns in their maroon Cadillac automobile, with the minister in the back seat. The wife was at the moment with a sick friend somewhere out of state. Here now was the new crowd, the new fast crowd from Herndon, people always on the go, always aware of new places that opened up, the Green Lantern, the Red Rooster, dim-lighted roadhouses that opened and closed, shady places, smoky places with little orchestras that played suggestive music. New people with new money, but among them were young ranchers who careened about the dusty roads in big cars, having somehow got hold of the family checkbook. Some of them had been seen returning from all-night parties at sunrise, a pretty young girl sitting on the back seat of a roadster, her feet on the steering wheel! In the rumble seat of the car, a drunken couple cheered her on. Nobody could guess where it would end, people staying up all night getting distant stations on the radio.
‘I should never have put that piano in there,’ Rose said. ‘Just listen!’
As she went from the kitchen through the swinging door George saw past her that they were dancing some sort of wild dance, and they didn’t look to be doing too well at it. The whole floor shook, clear into the kitchen.
‘Goodness,’ Rose said. ‘I wish Peter would come back. I’ve got to get the chicken on, and Peter should be serving their salad. Sometimes if you get the food on the table.’ She paused, thinking. ‘Mr Burbank, I’m going to run over and get Peter.’
‘Oh, you baby doll!’ they screamed in there.
‘Shake a leg!’ someone called out.
George said, ‘Mrs Gordon, I’ll serve their salad.’
Before she could speak, he had picked up two plates from the counter, and shouldered open the swinging door. Rose saw past him that the dark beauty was kicking high and swinging her long jet beads.
When the swinging door was still behind George, Rose moved over near it, appalled at what George had done.
For a moment the noise and laughter continued, the voices rose higher. Then there was sudden and utter silence; a chord on the piano went unresolved. In the silence she heard George. ‘Afternoon,’ he said and laughed. ‘Looks like I’m the new waiter. How do, Doctor.’
When George came back for more salad, he found Rose leaning against the sink. He went to her at once, leaping to the conclusion that she was weeping, since he had once found her so. She was weeping now, but from laughter. ‘You were so perfect,’ she whispered. ‘They were so shocked. In their wildest dreams …’ and she doubled over again. ‘You were so perfect.’
Well! he thought to himself. He had done it rather well. And no one had ever thought him amusing before.
‘Mr Burbank,’ she told him later over coffee in the kitchen. ‘Twice when I’ve been worried you’ve been here. And you know, I’m not worried often.’
Had Johnny Gordon told her who’d torn his shirt and tossed him like a knotted rag against the wall, Rose would never have accepted George Burbank. But Johnny hadn’t said, feeling when you give a man a name you give him a face as well, and his humiliation was easier if the man was faceless, a force, like Fate. As she came to enjoy George’s quiet company — even to look forward to it — she rationalized the incident of the paper flowers. Maybe Mr Phil Burbank had meant nothing. For what grown man would humiliate a boy? Was she too sensitive, too quick to remember old taunts in the schoolyard, to recall them again in the words of a perfectly ordinary conversation? What grown man would humiliate a boy!
George made a grave request. ‘May I call you Rose? Will you call me George?’
‘Of course, George.’
A Sunday later, another grave request. ‘Will you marry me?’
She didn’t pretend surprise. ‘I want to be fair, George. I loved my husband. I don’t know whether a woman can love twice.’
‘Of course. How could you know? But if you liked me, and then maybe later? And I could put your boy through school. Any school at all.’
‘I could do that alone. It meant so much to John, getting him through school. Maybe the last thing he believed in.’
‘You understand I’d put him through school, lend you the money or whatever you liked, whether you marry me or not. You see, when we’re together, when we laugh and talk, why, that’s worth anything I could ever do for you or the boy.’
‘But don’t you see, I don’t want your money.’
‘Isn’t it funny,’ he said. ‘I used to think that’s all I had, was money, until we sat here and laughed and talked. Isn’t it funny that even when I’m alone now, I feel so good.’
She looked down at his wide feet. His shoes were old, but freshly polished. She raised her eyes to his hands, almost as wide as they were long, and warm, even when he’d just come in from the cold. Suddenly she felt she knew exactly what he’d looked like as a child.
He said, ‘Please don’t do that.’
She said, ‘I’m not going to cry. But I was thinking how lucky I’ve been, to have known two kind men.’
Driving home in the old Reo he hummed again and again the waltz from The Pink Lady. Suppose she was to teach him to dance, suppose that. When he squinted at the stars the light seemed to shoot right down to the ground like spears. And what a Christmas they could have together!
The elder Burbanks were luckier than most retired ranchers; many, at last broken by the long cold winters, the howling wind, the thought of uninhabited space — crippled by rheumatism and arthritis fingers twisted, drawn up into their horny palms like a dead bird’s claws, forced to watch the young take over, to watch the young ride and rope and hunt and manage as they’d never do again — many retired into dipsomania, seeking out the bars in Beech or Herndon where they stared at the reflection of their disappointed fierce old faces in the cruel mirrors behind the bar; the self-made among them thus ended drinking with the very men they had spent their lives rising above, seeking similar oblivion, sinking into the same old age. Only a picket fence, they reflected, separated Mountain View Cemetery from Potter’s Field.
At home they watched and criticized, quick to take offense, insisted on writing the checks, sulked, certain their sons and daughters wished they were dead before they, too, turned the final corner.
It was not so much that the elder Burbanks were richer than the others, for some half dozen ranchers could put their hands on two hundred thousand cash. Old Tom Bart, say — in spite of the rumors of wild spending and all-night parties in hotel rooms; the Barts and the Burbanks seldom met except perhaps on the streets of Herndon, and it was Tom Bart then who stood modestly aside, he who was known as the life of the party; he would stiffen, smiling and tongue-tied, before the Old Lady’s poise and the cut of the Old Gent’s clothes. George, of all people, secretly admired Tom Bart. Phil thought him a fool, and referred to him as a Vocal Yokel.
No, it was not that they were richer, but that they were educated and had social contacts; reading and thinking took the place of whiskey; they played Melba and Galli-Curci on the Victrola, lost themselves in the texts of Town & Country, International Studio, Mentor and Century, magazines that piled up on the table until someone drove to Beech and dropped them off at the school. Serious discussions on current events took the place of the curious excitement some find in anger and despair — furious discussions during which they sometimes paused and glanced at one another in the sudden silence.
They could not suit Phil, they could not please him, and his glances reminded them of their useless lives. After certain unpleasant episodes, the old people took a corner suite at the best hotel in Salt Lake City, had the hotel furniture (good as it was) removed and installed their own things, made friends with others like themselves, retired ranchers, lumber people, mining people who knew Australia and South Africa quite as well as they knew the American West. They wrote frequent letters back East, read the Boston Evening Transcript, walked in the sun or regarded the snow-covered mountains from their big windows on the top floor. But in their sometimes long silences the one of them would look suddenly at the other and smile quickly a brief, encouraging smile, a smile quickly acknowledged
, and then the silence again.
The Old Lady’s eyebrows flew up when she read that George might marry. On receiving Phil’s first letter, the Old Lady wrote several to George, tearing up all but the last. How absurd, she thought, writing to a grown man begging him not to marry until his fiancée had been approved, for Phil’s letter said the woman had played music in a bar and that she had a half-grown child. There was no mention of a former husband. In her final letter, she begged George to ‘think it over,’ a phrase that had long served as a maxim in the family, and in any event to allow them to be present at the wedding. ‘It would look funny,’ she wrote George, ‘if we weren’t there.’ She showed the letter to the Old Gent, who paused in his pacing of the floor.
He looked the letter over. ‘I don’t think George minds if things look funny. He’s never done anything that looked funny before. Why would one thing matter?’
‘Phil cares.’
The Old Gent turned to her. The question he was about to ask had often been on his mind. A hundred times he had phrased the question, opened his lips to speak it. Meeting her eyes, he had until now kept silent, wondering if she might not sense in the question some criticism of herself. ‘Do you think …?’ Shocked, he suddenly realized the same question had been on her mind. It was she, then, who expressed it.
‘Do I think there might be something — something wrong — something wrong with Phil?’
The Old Gent felt hollow in his stomach, but it was a relief to get the thing out in the open. ‘If there is, it’s not your fault.’
‘Nor is it yours,’ she said, and looked at her watch. ‘What time is it, please, I hate these little watches. I can’t see the hands, and they lose time.’ They sent off the letter and prepared to follow it, packed their bags and asked the maid to water the geraniums. They wired ahead for George to meet them in Beech.
The Power of the Dog Page 8