The Governor, lonely in his eminence and sick of the conversation of his aide who could think of nothing and talk of nothing but politics and of a tooth that began to give trouble, was happy at last to be greeted by George Burbank whose surname led the list in a book called Prominent Men of Our State.
‘Long time no see,’ the Governor grinned, and clapped George on his broad back.
‘How do, Governor,’ said George. They spoke as equals, each from an eminence. The one inquired after the health of the other, and of the health of the other’s dear ones. The Governor asked after the severity of the winter, and they compared its blessed mildness with the awful winter of ’19, that winter still fresh of mind, when the hay gave out, when cattle starved and froze and wild horses ate pebbles they found under the snow.
‘Now where was it,’ the Governor wondered, ‘that we last talked together?’
‘Why, in the senate restaurant,’ George said. ‘My father and I were having beef stew.’
The Governor chuckled. ‘When you get right down to it, George, there’s nothing like a good beef stew.’
‘Yes, that’s the truth,’ George said.
‘That stew, George, is a specialty of the restaurant. We have got to get together over stew again sometimes.’
‘Now that’s a capital idea,’ George said. ‘I’m sure my wife would like that.’
‘Your wife you say?’ the Governor asked, stepping back. He grinned. He had not been told of this. That was his aide for you. Aide for what? ‘Congratulations. I hadn’t heard.’
‘It wasn’t a big wedding. You see, my wife was a widow.’
The Governor nodded and chewed his cigar. He seemed to understand how George’s wife being a widow cleared up certain things. ‘Not a big wedding, you say.’
‘Not big at all. That’s what she wanted.’
‘Well, George,’ the Governor laughed. ‘I can see you’re getting halter-broke just like the rest of us. You dog, you! I’ll tell you, my wife and I want you to dinner with us, and not for stew, George, either. Not for stew!’
But then George got his own idea.
Mountains rimmed Herndon and the sun set clearly. It was thus dark before they finished their errands; the store windows were warm and inviting. George went off to the harness-makers for a new set of collars and to pick up a saddle one of the cowhands had left to be repaired. He dropped Rose off at the grocery store and she bought the cases of canned fruit, for the Burbanks fed their men well, and the men bragged to men on other ranches. She chose pears, much admired in that country, and the flinty peach halves, much fancied, so hard and slick with a thick sweet syrup that one faulty motion with the spoon sent them flying out onto the tablecloth. Having run the Red Mill, she was used to buying in quantity — half a pig, thirty dozen eggs, four hams, four sacks of potatoes, gallons of raspberry jam. But in her days at the Red Mill, she had waited her turn to be waited on. Not so now. Now, as Mrs Burbank, she was embarrassed by the clerks’ obsequiousness, by the owner himself who came to serve and ask her pleasure. ‘The elder Mrs Burbank,’ he told her, ‘used to like to stock up on specialties,’ and he touched the shelves of canned crab and lobster, the potted meats and cheeses. ‘You people have always set a fine table,’ and Rose despised herself for ordering half a case of this and of that — exactly why she despised herself she didn’t know. Maybe it was — maybe it made Johnny Gordon somehow less, and the Burbanks, who needed nothing, somehow even more. Nobody had ever pointed out the lobster to Johnny Gordon’s wife, nor left other customers waiting.
They took their supper in the Sugar Bowl Cafe; above them two huge fans hung motionless from the high ceiling of coffered cream-colored metal, reminders of the distant summer. The big room was empty except for them and two traveling men who joked with the slovenly waitress who hung over them, a new girl in town, for she did not hurry to serve Rose and George.
‘Funny thing to think of,’ George remarked, ‘but a few hours ago I had dinner in here. Lunch, they call it in town.’ He laughed. ‘And do you know. I’m going to have the halibut again.’
‘Again, George?’ Her heart went out to him when he made conversation; the making came hard and she suspected he’d been told (as he most certainly had) that he had no gift for talk. How he worked to make himself agreeable!
When they had finished he said, ‘You stay in here a minute. It’s cold out. I’ll hop out and get the curtains up. You go ahead and finish your coffee.’
He had loaded the new collars and the saddle into the back seat, and the side-curtains enclosed the stale odor of horse sweat, reminder of the ranch — that cheerless destination: the dogs would run out and bark, move out of the shadows of the moon where they slept; together she and George would tramp down from the garage, bewitched by the silence of the night; they would open the big front door and enter the silent room; George would go ahead and grope for the light switch; the room would have that astonished look in the sudden light; the light would cause the generator in the cellar to start popping its exhaust, and they would hurry to their room to undress, to put out the light that had caused such commotion. Then in the new silence she would hear Phil’s snuffling and coughing, the snuffling and coughing of one who has long been awake and waiting.
As the town slipped behind them and the last lights disappeared behind, she grew a little melancholy, thinking of people, simply people she had seen through a window, sitting down to a meal.
‘Well, we’re on our way home,’ George said. ‘Yes, siree!’
‘What a nice trip it’s been,’ she said and drew her cape close about her shoulders and shivered, recalling the still heat in Peter’s room, the curious hothouse atmosphere there and the human skull. ‘I like the moonlight.’
‘You know, Rose, I’ve been thinking.’
‘Thinking what?’
‘Remember — we were talking about pianos.’
‘I remember.’
‘Rose, what is the best piano? I always liked it when you played. Mighty cheerful, don’t you know?’
‘Of course I’d like to have a piano, but I don’t play well enough to have the best.’
‘Of course you do! You’re capital. My goodness, my mother liked to listen to music on the Victrola, but she couldn’t play a thing, Rose. I told her you played, and she said how she wished she could. She said I was lucky to find a gifted wife. That’s the word she said. Gifted.’
‘You didn’t paint me a little colorfully?’
‘How could a man do that? And do you know who you’re going to play for?’
‘For you.’
‘Me, of course. But you’ll be playing for the Governor. And the Governor’s wife.’
‘Oh my good Lord, George!’ and her throat closed.
‘He’s coming first of the month. I thought you’d like to meet him. He’s capital.’ They drove for a time in silence, and he spoke again. ‘Right back there we passed the place we had our picnic. The winter picnic, Rose.’
‘Was it just back there?’ With a chill, she felt there was much more than the picnic spot they had passed, and she prepared herself once again to approach the ranch house that would loom in the moonlight, all the bulk and logs; she’d hear again the barking dogs — it was as if she and George were strangers or gypsies. They would enter the house, and then she would hear Phil coughing and snuffling.
The Mason & Hamlin piano arrived in Beech from Salt Lake City and remained on one of those express trucks shrouded with a gray tarpaulin against possible snow until the station agent could follow instructions and get a truck down from Herndon to haul it to the ranch. He said he judged it weighed a ton. The station agent made several calls to Herndon and called George to report that the trucking company was all tied up and that one of the men who was sometimes available to lift and haul things had got married and was gone for a few days’ honeymoon like a man would, he said, but that the company was trying to find somebody else to help the driver, who said it was impossible to come out alone because you neede
d more help with a piano than he would likely find around a place like Beech. George remembered the driver as a tall man who looked over people’s heads.
Then the trucking company called the station agent, said they’d got hold of a young fellow to help the driver, a stout young Swede, clumsy and willing, but when he got down to Beech with the driver in the solid-tired chain-driven truck, he lifted the wrong way and damaged his back before they even got the piano off the express truck. He collapsed in pain on the station platform, his face ashen, the sweat beading his forehead. Was his back broken? By a happy coincidence, the sheriff of the county was standing at one of the bars in Beech with his usual and thus was available to drive the young Swede to the hospital in Herndon. They got several other men out of the bar, and between them and the driver and the station agent they got the piano on the truck, but the driver later told George frankly that piano hauling was a specialized business and it’s a wonder the lot of them didn’t break their backs. He said that somewhere between Beech and the ranch the chain drive on the truck broke, and the driver was caught there in zero weather until he improvised a pin to fix the son of a bitch.
Rose was alone to receive the piano. The driver refused the coffee she offered. ‘It’s bad for the kidneys,’ he explained. His father had never drunk the stuff, either. ‘Last time I’ll ever contract to haul a piano.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ Rose said abashed, ‘how sick I am it’s caused such trouble.’
‘When do you figure your menfolks will get back here?’ the driver asked, taking out his Ingersol.
‘Surely by noon.’
‘A wonder he didn’t break his back,’ the driver said. ‘He’s got three little children.’
It had begun to snow when they started to unload the piano. The hired men got two-by-fours and ropes from out back and they constructed a ramp to the ground from the truck, and the driver directed them, looking over their heads. ‘For the love of God,’ he said, ‘don’t do it like that. That’s how the Swede cracked his back.’
George worked along with the hired men, and at last they dragged the piano up the front steps, uncrated it, and inched it inside and got the legs screwed in. Phil remained in his bedroom. ‘Your fellow at the station in Beech didn’t say what you had there was a piano,’ the driver remarked. ‘Lots of places they get, oh, ten dollars an hour. I expect because of how you are likely to break your back.’
Hired girls, like whores, were recruited from the families of small farmers or ranchers to the south where the land was bad, alkali land, dusty land, land of tumbleweed and thistle. Unhappy, sullen, stupid girls, they loathed their lot, their fathers, the knowing they were the extra mouth to feed; and so forth.
They came with pasteboard suitcases, with their hair tightly curled — as they believed the world required — washed dishes, scrubbed floors, made beds, waited table and giggled with the hired men who had their own immediate plans. Few remained long anywhere. They soon glimpsed the aridness of their situation: they could not marry a hired man, for there is no place on a ranch for a married man; like married priests, they can’t keep their mind on their work, always running off to where the wife is. Some girls got pregnant, and disappeared; others returned to where they came from and once again wept and quarreled with parents. Some found the Dixie Rooms, where they got two dollars a trick, and ten for all night — an interesting bit of economics.
Lola, who answered George’s advertisement in the Recorder, arrived with a nightgown in her suitcase and a treasure of old movie magazines she read and read again in her small room upstairs. Many movie stars had also come from nothing, and now they rode about in limousines, took countless baths, and wore the skins of precious animals. She was a quick, frightened girl, pigeon-toed and willing. She seldom spoke above a whisper, should her voice offend. She feared Mrs Lewis who quoted gloomy axioms and spoke of pretty young girls found trussed up in trunks in California and such places; she feared the hired men who winked and suggested that she ride out with them Sundays on horseback.
Her presence left Rose idle except to plan meals and to practice the piano that had caused a fine young Swede with three children to hurt his back. Thank God, the back was not broken. The piano was black and gleaming and worthy of more than the sheet music she placed on the rack; her repertoire was pitiful, a few Strauss waltzes, a military march, sugary accompaniments to songs like ‘The Rosary’ and ‘Just Like a Gypsy,’ a piece that George liked and one he would certainly request when the Governor arrived. The pride George took in her small talent frightened her; he never noticed when she missed a note. She began to practice diligently that what she played she might play well, that he might be proud.
Phil left the room when she played; so pointed was his leaving she could no longer practice at all until she knew he was out of the house or in his bedroom with the door shut; she suspected his taste was far better than George’s, and that he silently laughed at her, knowing she practiced to impress the Governor.
Doors, doors, doors, doors; five outside doors in the house, and she knew the sound of the opening and closing of each one. The back door Phil used let the prevailing wind billow the hall carpet so it writhed like a snake. She knew one afternoon that Phil entered the house: he walked with a quick, light, high-arched step on his rather small feet; she heard his bedroom door close behind him. Protected from his thoughts and emanations by that closed door, she sat down and began to play; but as she listened critically to her own playing, she heard another sound, that of Phil’s banjo, and knew suddenly that when she practiced, he played, too. She paused, staring at the keys. The plunk-plunk of the banjo stopped, too. Cautiously, she began again. The banjo again. She paused, banjo paused. Now she knew a crawling sensation up the back of her neck: he was playing precisely what she was playing — and better.
Phil could not read a note nor did he have to; he played by ear, could play anything, having heard it once, quickly recognized the composer’s intent and pattern. Just so he recognized the logic behind Mozart’s music, music he had often heard escaping from the louvers of the Victrola; those old records caught orchestras playing Mozart arrangements for brass and woodwinds alone because wax wouldn’t catch strings in those days. He scorned what Rose played, neither one thing nor the other — the stuff she must have played in the honky-tonk or whatever; and he knew well why she practiced as she did.
Old George had let the cat out of the bag.
‘His Nibs will be here for dinner,’ George said.
‘Well, sir, ain’t we going up into Sassiety,’ Phil remarked. ‘Out with the finger bowls?’ And Phil laughed. So this was Georgie boy’s way of introducing his piano-tinkling wife to Sassiety! He got a kick out of hearing her play at the new pananno, making one howler after another, dropping notes like crumbs, and then when she’d finished, he’d play the thing correctly.
It was days before she savvied what he was doing, and then she stopped playing unless he was out. Time and again he’d hear her stop when he opened the back door, and that was almost as good as aping her. Easy to get her goat. How her hands shook, pouring the coffee! Phil had no use for people who felt sorry for themselves.
Poor thing had apparently got into her noggin she ought to dress for supper, with a thing around her head somebody must have said looked pretty, practicing maybe for His Nibs. (His Nibs was a hick lawyer until some slick politicians got hold of him and married him off to a woman with a little class.) Even old George, since his marriage, dolled up in a clean shirt, and Phil had caught a pained look from George and the little lady herself when he came to the table exactly as he always had and always would. They were living on a ranch not on some fool dude resort, as the little doll seemed to think.
Phil was surprised when George spoke to him in the blacksmith shop. Phil was standing at the forge, one foot propped up comfortably on that wood block, his long arm comfortable on the arm of the bellows; he pumped away, bending easily at the waist, chewing tobacco in time to the pumping. In the fiery nest of
coals was yet more fancy ironwork. The shop was littered with pokers, andirons and pieces with no practical use but simply expressions of Phil’s remarkable brain through his hands. He worked barehanded with hammer and tongs that no leather or cloth might blur the sharp image his brain conceived. Waiting for the metal to heat to the proper cherry red, he stared out at the snowy hill, watched the rich coal smoke drift out the big door and settle slowly to the ground. He did not speak when George walked in, looked around, and settled himself on a sawhorse. George always sat quite a spell before he spoke, for he was a slow thinker. But Phil knew he was troubled and small wonder. Maybe now Georgie boy had come to see that marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Almost every weekend he had to drive wifey to Herndon to see the precious child who needed his dear mommy. Why couldn’t she drive to Herndon herself and leave George to his Saturday Evening Post? She was scared of the winter roads. One of these days somebody would give her something to be scared about!
What had driven George from the house? The plunking on the pananno? The little lady would get started on one of her renditions, make a mistake, start again — and make the same mistake. Set your teeth on edge. Poor old George would sit there waiting for the mistake.
The Power of the Dog Page 11