by John Boyne
‘You’ll be fine,’ Adam replied, rooting around for his soap. ‘You’re just tired.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, stepping back into the bedroom as he disappeared inside the bathroom for his shower. I closed the door behind him and a moment later heard the water pour into the basin, and then its more muffled sound as he stepped beneath the spray. He began to sing quietly and I smiled to myself; he had a good voice but terrible taste in music. ‘Right then,’ I muttered to myself, closing the curtains and stepping towards the bed closest to the wall where I had placed my rucksack after coming into the room. I was about to climb into bed when my attention was taken by three small framed photographs on the wall and curiosity made me step towards them to see what they were. The photos were each about a metre away from each other, one over my bed, one over Adam’s, and one between the two. On the left there was a picture of an old Japanese man and his wife in a formal pose, their hands locked together at waist height, looking for all the world as if they were the unhappiest couple in the Far East. On the right – mysteriously – was a photo of the Eiffel Tower. I couldn’t quite see the relevance of it in a Tokyo hotel and almost muttered some comment to myself before I looked at the centre picture, when my tired eyes opened wide in surprise and my mouth dropped. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, stepping forward and peering at the brown sepia print of a middle-aged man with an impressive moustache, standing in profile to the camera, his cheekbones well defined, the line of his jaw sharp and imposing. Beneath the photograph, but within the frame, was the name of the subject, written in English. ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, it said in clear Times New Roman. 1846–1917. Although I did not realise it at the time, the photograph was taken by Ellen Rose, of whom I would learn more in time. I shook my head in disbelief and reached a finger out to touch the face of my great-grandfather, stunned that he should appear before me only hours after my arrival on the other side of the world. In his hands he held a gun, and I recognised it only too well, for it had been pinned to the wall of my London living room for as long as I could remember.
I might have stared at it for hours, but the sound of the shower water being switched off in the bathroom snapped me out of my reverie and I climbed into bed immediately. I imagined that I would lie awake for some time, thinking about this coincidence, but I felt myself grow sleepy immediately, barely hearing Adam’s voice as he climbed into his own saying ‘Oyasumininasai.’
‘Good night,’ I answered mechanically. I’ll try Japanese from tomorrow, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.
My great-grandfather was nineteen years old when he married Louisa Frederici, who he had met in St Louis the previous year while stationed at the military headquarters there. Ms Frederici was, by all accounts, a great beauty although her photographs suggest a heavy-set, troubled young woman with a lantern jaw and dark eyes. At first, Bill allowed Louisa to make the decisions in their relationship, so enamoured was he of his new bride that he set aside his own natural ambitions and desires in order to satisfy the more settled lifestyle of the married man. The war had ended in 1865 and Bill spent a short time driving a peaceful stagecoach across the prairies before agreeing with his fiancée to buy and run a small hotel in Kansas.
A state of cold war was in existence between the former combatants of the confederacy and the union but for a time my great-grandfather managed to distance himself from any trouble while he settled down to domestic life. Their hotel – the Golden Rule – kept him busy for a time, although he soon grew restless with the mundane day-to-day business of their new investment and longed to ride free across the prairies once again. Louisa, however, had other plans.
‘We need to get the army to settle more people in Kansas,’ she complained as she sat in her parlour, balancing their receipts against their expenditure unhappily, frowning at a broken fingernail for a moment. ‘Or get Nebraska into the union so there’ll be more people passing through.’
‘Nebraska will be in soon enough,’ he replied, imagining what it would be like to be able to help settle a state, as his father had done before him.
‘Tomorrow wouldn’t be soon enough,’ Louisa pointed out. ‘We need to keep the hotel busy or what hope have we got for the future?’
We’re doing all right, aren’t we?’ asked Bill, who tended to keep a firm distance between himself and the financial matters of the Golden Rule, preferring to stay out front, greeting their guests, telling romantic stories of his adventures – some real, some fictional – as those patrons gathered in the bar. ‘We’re paying our bills.’
‘We’re paying them, of course,’ she replied, not looking across at him but tapping her pencil gently against her lips instead as she stared at the rows of figures in concentration. ‘Of course we’re paying them, Bill, but there’s not much left over for us when they’re paid. We need to make some savings.’
‘What do you need savings for? Haven’t you got everything you need right here?’
‘For the future,’ she explained carefully. ‘For expansion.’
Bill frowned. It had not entirely been his idea to open a hotel in the first place. He had fallen for Louisa the moment they had met, mostly because she had been attracted to him and made her feelings known without any shame. At the time an inexperienced man in matters of love, the sudden notion that a female could care for him prompted unexpected feelings of romance in Bill’s heart and he had proposed marriage on a whim, and she had accepted immediately. Louisa had made it a condition of their marriage, however, that they settle down to a stable existence; she had been attracted to the daring and youthful adventurer of the frontiers, but what was attractive in a fiancé was not necessarily so charming in a husband. Bill had agreed to this, however, for what was marriage to him but another untried adventure. They purchased the hotel from a distance through an agent, sight unseen.
‘What kind of expansion?’ asked Bill suspiciously. ‘Really, Louisa, you’re turning into Abraham Lincoln. Always wanting to expand your empire further and further west.’
‘We may not wish to continue living and working in one hotel,’ said Louisa, ignoring the jibe. ‘I certainly don’t wish to be cooking meals for overweight cowboys for the rest of my given days even if you do. If we can make a success of the Golden Rule here, why there could be a chain of Golden Rules right across the state of Kansas. Across America,’ she added, her eyes taking on a distant look as the curvy marks of dollar signs began to appear in them. Louisa Frederici Cody was ahead of her time when it came to global enterprising.
‘I could go scouting for fresh locations, I suppose,’ said Bill, considering the advantages of a new life riding from state to state, looking for places which might need a Golden Rule Hotel. He didn’t imagine there would be too many who would, but that didn’t bother him so much. At least it would get him out of town every so often.
‘You’ll be staying right here where I can see you, Bill Cody,’ interrupted Louisa, pouring cold water on his hopes. ‘You made an agreement with me when we married, don’t you remember?’
‘I remember just fine. But you’re the one who’s saying we should—’
‘We’ll speak to Mr Banks,’ said Louisa, smiling across at him like a young mother about to pat her son’s head and hand him a lollipop for good behaviour. Mr Banks was the agent who had set them up with the Golden Rule in the first place; he kept in contact with my great-grandfather and his wife, the latter more than the former. ‘He’ll advise us what to do.’
Bill didn’t bother to protest. He was still new to wedlock and anxious to please his young wife but there was a contradiction inside him which forced him to wonder whether he had made the right decision or not. Each day he saw cowboys and soldiers passing through their town, riding together, stopping at the local saloon or at his own Golden Rule bar to drink for a few hours and share stories. He envied them their comradeship, their devil-may-care attitude and their freedom. He felt alone and bored. He had begun to suspect that stability and marriage were not things which were part of his natur
al destiny.
‘You should speak to the army,’ said Louisa, and he snapped out of his reveries and looked across at her in a daze.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What was that you said?’
‘I said,’ she repeated with a sigh, ‘you should speak to the army. Find one of your old friends who might know a thing or two about what’s happening in these parts. About the railroads for one thing. If we could get a train running through Salt Creek Valley, then the numbers of people passing through here would naturally increase. We’d have dozens of overnight guests, not to mention passing trade for the restaurant and bar. Don’t you know anyone who controls the railroads?’
He was about to point out that he had been a scout and a union jayhawker before becoming a married man and not a train driver, and thus his contacts in that line were limited when the bell over the bar door rang, indicating customers. He smiled and stood up, pointing towards the bar and Louisa nodded quickly, returning to her figures. They could continue their discussion later, she believed. She was wrong.
Bill entered the bar just as two men in army uniforms came up to it. They were laughing and had an arm around each other’s shoulders. Their faces were drawn and tired but there was an expression of vitality in their eyes which my great-grandfather could not help but notice.
‘Good day, gentlemen,’ he said affably, picking up a towel and dragging it across the bar in front of them, wiping away the dust carelessly. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘We’ll have two whiskies and then we’ll have two more,’ said the man on the right, slapping his hand down on the bar with a wide grin. They were both around the same age as Bill, twenty, but were stronger, with three-day beards, and they wore their hair shoulder length as opposed to their host, who had a neat, tight haircut, administered by his wife with the aid of a pair of scissors and a pudding bowl.
‘Two whiskies it is then,’ said Bill, placing a couple of shot-glasses before them and uncorking a bottle. ‘Where are you fellows coming from?’ he asked, glancing at their army uniforms enviously. His own checked shirt, braces and grey trousers seemed a poor substitute.
‘Fort Riley,’ came the reply of the man on the left who, Bill noticed for the first time, had only one arm. A memory came flooding back as the man continued, pointing the finger of his left arm at him. ‘I know you, don’t I? It’s Bill Cody, right?’
‘David Yountam,’ said Bill with a wide grin, knowing him immediately now although their seven-year separation had, given them both a new appearance, no longer the scrambling teenage boys they had been, but rather experienced men of the world, one a soldier, one a veteran. ‘What brings you here?’ he asked, another shot of whisky being dispensed to both quickly.
‘We’ve been with Custer’s army,’ said Yountam. ‘Like old Lew Simpson, he doesn’t seem to mind a soldier with only one arm. It’s one better than none, he told me.’
‘General Custer!’ replied Bill in admiration. He had not yet met the famous general but his legend had already spread far and wide from the many brave charges he had made during the war. At twenty-three he was the youngest general in the army and President Lincoln’s trusted friend and adviser. ‘How on earth did you get in with him?’
‘Why, the same way you got us both and Albert Rogers along on that wagon trail a few years back,’ said Yountam. ‘I went to see him and asked him could I join and he said yes, surely. There’s nothing more these generals like than a man with mind enough to just say what he thinks. This is another soldier, by the way,’ indicating his friend. ‘Seth Reid, this is the bravest fellow I’ve ever known, Bill Cody. Killed an Indian when he was only a child, you know!’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Reid, extending a hand but Bill thought he could read in it a sense of distance, as if the stranger was happy to endure a conversation with a civilian but had heavier matters to consider, the types of thoughts which a soldier and a mere bartender could not necessarily share. Bill shook his hand but returned his attentions to his old friend.
‘And what about Rogers?’ he asked, recalling their cynical tent-mate of years earlier. ‘Did he join you too? Is he still with Custer?’
Yountam shook his head sadly. ‘Killed,’ he said. ‘Shot during the war. Left a wife and baby too, you’d never believe it but it’s true.’
‘Killed,’ said Bill in sorrow, shaking his head sadly, although he was rarely moved by talk of death any more, having seen so much if it in recent years.
‘And you?’ asked Yountam, his happy voice lowering a notch as he attempted not to sound judgemental. ‘You … you work here then? I took you for a lifelong soldier!’
‘My wife and I …’ began Bill, feeling it necessary to explain himself but then shaking his head in defeat. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I own this place. We run it together. Thinking of expanding though,’ he added hopefully. ‘Soon there’ll be a chain of Golden Rules all across America,’ he said, echoing his wife’s words of a few minutes earlier but unable to infuse them with as much enthusiasm as she had done.
‘And a free drink for me in every one, I hope?’ asked Yountam.
‘But of course! What else could I do for a solider such as yourself? And an old friend at that!’
‘You could pour us another drink,’ said Reid sharply, pushing his glass forward and turning to say something to Yountam just as Bill reached for the bottle. It was empty and he was forced to walk down to the end of the bar where he kept the unopened boxes. As he reached down for one, he looked at the two men and felt embarrassed and unhappy. He shouldn’t be pouring them drinks, he thought. He should be sitting on that side of the bar with them, in uniform, happy and carefree.
‘So how long have you been here, Bill?’ asked Yountam on his return.
‘About six months,’ he replied. ‘We got married in St Louis the month before that and bought this hotel immediately.’
‘And where is she then, this wife of yours?’ he asked. ‘Are we going to meet her or is she in hiding?’
As if on cue, Louisa entered the bar area dressed in bonnet, shawl and coat, and looked at the men with some disdain, concerned that the dirt of their uniforms would spoil the oak-trimmed surface of the bar that Mary, the girl they employed for a few hours each day, had scrubbed clean that morning. ‘I’m going to the store,’ she said to Bill offering them only the briefest of nods. ‘We can talk later about—’
‘Louisa!’ said Bill, taking her by the arm and turning her to face the two men. ‘Look who’s arrived. This is my old friend David Yountam. And another soldier, name of Reid. You remember I told you about Yountam, don’t you?’
Louisa blinked as she racked her brain for the memory. ‘Yountam … Yountam …’ she said, almost ready to admit defeat.
‘We were on the trails together when we were boys,’ he said enthusiastically, to help her remember. ‘The wagon train that got burned to cinders?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Louisa after a moment, her voice making it clear that she hadn’t the first idea what he was talking about. ‘How do you do, Mr Yountam?’ she asked, extending her right hand, but as he had none himself he was forced to grasp hers in his left and she took a small step backwards in obvious discomfort, her cheeks growing suddenly pink.
‘Lost it in a fight with a buffalo when I was a boy,’ he explained quietly and a frosty silence descended on them, Bill licking his lips and looking from one to the other with a wide, toothy smile as he hoped that someone would say something. ‘Before I knew your husband, that is,’ said Yountam eventually, in order to break the silence. ‘I must admit I never thought I’d see him settling for a quiet life like this,’ he added, meaning no offence but understanding immediately by the look on Bill’s face that his words had hurt. ‘I meant settling down to a quiet life,’ he corrected himself. ‘He’s a lucky man,’ he added, but he was no actor and they could tell he was simply trying to correct a bad situation. ‘Having a wife and a … a business to enjoy.’ His words trailed off into the emptiness of the room and he looked down at hi
s drink with a frown as his companion, Seth Reid, snorted a quick laugh, as if the world of the small-town businessman was as nothing compared to the excitement and adventure of his own.
‘Right,’ said Louisa after a moment, stepping away without giving either of them another glance. ‘I may be a few hours,’ she said, looking at her husband, the words coming through thin lips, sounding as if she blamed him entirely for whatever social awkwardness had just taken place. ‘Libby Turner is ready to have her baby at any moment and I want to call on her to see how she’s doing. I’ll see you later then. Mr Yountam,’ she said, nodding her head at him to say goodbye, unwilling to shake hands again. ‘Mr … Reid,’ she said, forcing herself to remember his name.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Cody,’ said Yountam and when she was gone, he looked to his old friend with an apologetic glance. ‘That went well,’ he said quietly.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Bill, unable to look his friend in the face. ‘She’s … she’s working hard to keep this place together. She’s not enamoured of the army life.’
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you happy here?’
Bill looked up and their eyes met. He thought about it, wondered whether it was correct to confide so much of a personal nature in someone he had not seen in so long, let alone another man who he did not even know at all and who seemed slightly contemptuous of him. He thought about it and decided he didn’t care.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m miserable’.
‘In that case,’ said Yountam, draining his glass and standing up to walk towards the bathroom. ‘You’ve got a couple of hours. Remember that.’
‘A couple of hours?’ asked Bill as his friend disappeared and then, almost to himself, ‘what does that mean?’