“As a man Henry did not have to dwell, but we women must. You and I must.”
Judah kicked and Emmeline set him down, watching him toddle and yank on a curtain rope. “Gently. No, I’d not have him fall ill, of course not. Be gentle with it, Judah. And I am sorry if it gives some reason to talk, but I have to go. Mammy Eula can care for him while I’m away. It won’t be for long. A week or two. It couldn’t be for long.”
The goldgray head lowered back to the bookkeeping, scratching over the household accounts. “What would you not do for that horror of a man? As if you are his dog and he has said, Come.”
For what did her father need her, to what use could she, a mother, a new-made widow, a woman of thirty-two, be put to by a brothel-owner in a cowboy town? When the stagecoach rattled in and the ditched road bucked her one last time, the black lace went tight around her throat. But as the driver opened the door and her hands accepted his, the constriction of lace left her.
The two remaining passengers, a pregnant woman and a hazy notyoung whore, grimaced at the mud track meant to be a main street, at the slop pot stench of the tents, at the baleful eyes of purblind men. Emmeline stood in the center of the thoroughfare, drawing back her heavy crepe veil, letting in the din of burnt hard necks. How long it had been since she had known this incongruous measure of relief which now undid her as she staggered tranquil into the dusty hotel?
“Hell is in session, Emme. The town lost its marshal last month.”
“Did he run, Pa?” she asked, sitting on a chair by his bed, her hands clasped tight in her lap. She could not get comfortable.
“Naw, he was strung up. Turns out he used to be a bandit before he turned lawman and had returned to the old ways. Made a miscalculation robbing a bank near Fort Worth and those folks came down here for justice. I myself could not help him though you might have said he was a friend.” He said this while he paced the hotel room, a dirty glass of whiskey in hand.
“Oh dear. Well, I do hope they broke his neck first.”
“Naw, not that rabble. He hung there like an angry chicken for nigh on two hours turning blood purple.”
“Now Bart, you’re exaggerating. It was half that, and it was a bank near Galveston not Fort Worth.” Madame Cora, her dyed blond curls rolled tight to her head, in far finer dress than Emmeline, smiled triumphantly from above a cape of fox fur.
“Jeysus,” said Wilkie from where he stood by the door twisting the stillred of his mustache. “Sure is durn good to see ya, Emme. You look right well. Glad you come help us with them Morgan boys.”
“Shut your mouth, Wilkie,” said her father finally sitting down on a chair on the other side of the bed, a ragged titan in a new suit.
Till then she had avoided the dirty patch covering his left eye, waiting for him, but in the tension of all in the room she now sensed an agreed deflection. “What happened to your eye, Pa?”
The new gauntness of the large, square face glared at her. He leaned over the bed, flipping the patch to show a ruined hole damp with healing. “The girls got the men a little too excited and they took to shooting out the lights. That’s how some celebrate their salary.”
She wondered why he bothered with the lie. “Who did it, Pa? Was it these Morgans?”
“I see you’re still in mourning for Henry. But now ain’t you always in black.” His remaining eye which was also her eye scraped at her. “I reckon since you’re dark, being a widow becomes you.”
“Pa?” Her voice close on a whisper, as if they were alone. “The night before Henry died, I heard a dog.”
“Howling?”
“Yes.” She nodded, her eyes wide.
“Did you now?” He too came soft at speech but with an austerity she could not at that moment match.
“Yes Pa. Howling and howling. It wouldn’t stop. I don’t know whose dog—I don’t know just whose it was. And it was odd but I remembered something Ma had said, and it is one of the few things I ever recall her saying to me, but when Flossie—do you remember Flossie?—was sick with fever, Ma said that when someone is dying you must go under the bed and turn over a shoe. Remember?” He was the only person she had told, could tell.
“And did you,” he asked, “did you turn over a shoe?”
“I only remembered what Ma had said when I was in the garden with the minister and he was asking me what kind of coffin did I want. But when I went up and asked Henry—” She scratched her cheek. “No I didn’t do it right away. Do you think, Pa—?”
“It hasn’t been a year, has it, Emme dear,” said Cora, folding and refolding her cape over powdered breasts. “What with losing two sons and then your husband, Lord, why you don’t know yourself. It’s a good thing you come here to be with us.”
“I’ll have to go back soon,” Emmeline said.
“I thought you might bring the boy,” said her father.
Her face burned for she was wishing she had not come at all. “Judah is too like his father and brothers.” Emmeline untied her bonnet and smoothed the veil, seeing Judah when he woke in the morning, his undiluted joy upon seeing her face. Who else would ever look at her like that? “I suppose you want me as madam.” She spoke now with the vigilant serenity which kept her intact.
“I didn’t spend money on your fancy school for that. Besides, I got one here. Cora gabbles on but she knows her trade. I’ll give her that much. You being the grand lady in the Old States is worth something. I ain’t about to throw away all that damn accomplishment.”
“And since I’ve come on,” Cora said, “a trick here can earn five dollars—ten a week and you got fifty. We got a whole bunch of new girls too, did you see? Oh, they got to feeling blameful at the start but then they watch as their savings pile up! Emmeline honey, you could be an angel to your father now in his time of need.”
“Shut your mouth, woman. There’s a man who wants to meet you, a man I want you to marry.”
“The man who shot out your eye?” Emmeline asked.
“The man who shot out my eye is dead.”
“You do not mind if Wilkie remains, do you Mayor Gibson? It is a great comfort to my father to know that I am accompanied until I am able to hire a female companion.”
“Dear madam, as you wish. Have you had trouble finding a suitable abigail?”
From across an unvarnished table in the shadowed vacuum of the hotel parlor, there was a brutish, glittering air about the fact that Mayor Gibson’s coat reeked of cigar smoke and his breath was saccharine with brandy. He was a man who did not wear his weight well. The corpulent pucker under his eyes seemed to be dragging itself from the bone.
“Well sir, I did not know that I would be visiting for quite this long, and I find, without the least surprise, that there is a scarcity of respectable women in town.”
“Ma’am, I myself will make inquires on your behalf.”
“It is most kind in you,” she said and smiled in her light, fatal way.
“Your father has told me that you have recently lost your husband to consumption.”
“Yes sir.” At his mentioning Henry, she began to detest him.
“Such a cross to bear when already you have said farewell to others. How long has it been?”
Her throat went dry. What was Judah doing now? Likely playing in the garden, or sleeping on Mammy Eula’s lap. “Coming on eleven months.”
“So recent, so recent. Why it might feel to you he were alive yesterday. It did so with my sweet wife and little girl child. Time passes differently for the bereaved, does it not? And when you wake in the morning, there are those first moments when you are innocent of knowing like Adam in Eden.” He pressed a limp hand over her glove and through the black kid came a damp heat. “Your father said I would find us of a similar understanding.”
This man she was supposed to marry was a fool. She felt behind her to where Wilkie stood, thumbs in the pockets of his shabby waistcoat, and was scalded by his notwatching.
“Sir, I will confide to you that the reason I have stay
ed is because I am dreadfully worried, dreadfully worried that I might lose my father.” She heard her words as if someone else was speaking.
“I do believe, ma’am, that we will meet those that we have lost, that itself Death is but one level of our moving closer toward God.”
“I would like . . . I do believe that as well. Yet I cannot help but feel my father is fortunate that the bullet which took his eye did not pierce his brain.”
“In these parts, danger predominates in so many of our young men’s dispositions.”
“But sir, I have heard that these Morgan brothers are regular bandits, that they ride with posses and such, robbing the Mexican ranch—”
“As I myself am no Wild Bill, it has seemed best to let such beasts deal with their own. Is it hard on you there being no Methodist church in town? Is it possible you might find comfort at a small gathering I sometimes frequent? I could introduce you to our celebrated Miss Ada.”
She finally felt she could withdraw her hand. “What takes place at these gatherings?”
“The assembled ask Miss Ada questions of metaphysical abstraction and she answers with what I would deem supernatural eloquence. You would find her elocution upon the subject of the deceased most enlightening.”
“I suppose that I sometimes feel there is nothing noble in my grief.” This may have been the one true thing she had spoken.
“There is that which assuages the mourner, the one who has yet not charted the passage to the grave and may have a vague horror upon its account. Why ma’am, if I could but show you the liberation that could be yours—but I do not seek to proselytize, only offer you the solace which I have found. If I could arrange it, Mrs. Stovall, would you care to join us?”
“I think—”
“Your father seemed to feel you might.”
“—Yes. He is so often right,” she smiled and Mayor Gibson smiled at her, wiping his hands on his thighs. “I could do with the solace you speak of. Though I can’t help but think that I would know some measure of it if I knew my father were safe from the Morgans. You see, talk of them taking their revenge is all over town. It seems unjust when it was Shep Morgan who shot Pa, and Pa who was simply defending himself. But Shep being their kin, the Morgans shall never see reason.”
“Would it ease your mind if I had a warrant put out for their arrest?”
“It would . . .” She pretended to be flustered. “No, yes it would, that would, it’s true.”
“Please do speak freely. Are we not friends?”
She decided to lower her eyes. “I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, sir.”
“You could never.” Again, he pressed her hand.
Now she looked straight at him. “As long as the Morgan brothers are alive, my father is in danger.”
“And as mayor, I could see that they hang?”
“My father believes it would ease my mind.”
“And he being so often right?”
She need say nothing, she had won him, and was impatient for the game to end.
“Dear lady, I shall see it done.”
“Thank you.”
“Now that we are friends you must call me Jasper.”
“Thank you, Jasper,” she said.
Emmeline tucked the letter in a drawer next to a memorial tintype of August, her first baby upturned and openmouthed in her arms. Henry had not wanted Caleb photographed saying we had him for eight years, we will not forget him. He had a signet ring made; the band filled with Caleb’s hair.
The day of August’s burial it had rained, but rain so light she could not feel it, and still the dirt would not go soft, lending the shovel a feverish tinny rasp that bit and bit. But the morning after Caleb died she and Henry walked the sunny fields, their sweat and tears loose in the gold lead heat. Now she could not clearly see Caleb’s face. She who had made him—her and Henry and God.
“You’re a right good girl.”
She turned from the dresser to face the balcony. She had to close her eyes to say it. “My boy is ill.” But he was with Mammy Eula, a better nurse than herself, she knew. She hated hearing her babies cry, the pained mewl that none of her words could soothe. “I have to go back.” She pulled her trunk onto the bed, opening it.
Wilkie folded his arms, as if to shrink his bulk. “He’ll get better. Don’t you fuss yerself. Thet Miss Ada is a medium.”
She needed fresh air, outside, the fresh air. “I’ll tell Pa. I can come back once Judah’s well.” From the balcony she could see Mayor Gibson passing below. “Am I the only woman who isn’t a whore that Mayor Gibson has known in years?” She watched as a drunk was thrown from a saloon by two men who stood over him as he yelled. They took turns kicking and punching him until he went quiet in the mud.
“An you wearing black. He likes thet.”
“Mayor Gibson is a powerful man. He’s gonna be governor someday.” Her father came into the room but not onto the balcony.
“It’s all a humbug—spirit rappers,” Wilkie spat.
“As long as Miss Ada ain’t managed by P. T. Barnum she’s all right in my books,” her father said.
“It ain’t right,” Wilkie said.
She felt impatient with Wilkie, her father, the choking weight of the air. “Judah is ill, Pa.”
“There’s always a spider bite or a cut or a cold. You can’t keep them from the peril of the world—it’s the world, Emme.”
“Yes, but I have to go back. You do see, don’t you?” The words were said with a narrowing restraint.
“You’re gonna marry the mayor.”
“Pa, I’m not trying to get your back up but must it be marriage?”
“Emme, that man there is a civilizee, he don’t wanna be seen with no soiled dove. Decency and order, that’s what this town is coming to.”
She tried to wring the irritation from her voice. “But even if the mayor does hang the Morgans there will come more just like them.”
“That’s why I need this fellow in my pocket and your marriage is gonna put him there. I’m a man of business, I can’t go around having my eye shot out by every hayseed that has a hankering, now can I?” He watched Mayor Gibson walk by the drunk and enter the saloon.
“I’ll marry him when I come back, I promise.”
“She’s a beauty, ey?” Her father came behind her, clapping his hands down on her shoulders.
She flinched. “I will, Pa. But I have to be with Judah.”
“When she was a kid and she’d play outside in the thoroughfare, grown men’d watch her and weep. Remember that Wilkie?”
“But what if he should be like Caleb or August? I have to—” She tried to twist away but he propelled her inside. He shoved her down into the chair in front of the dresser, keeping his hands on her shoulders.
“Her mother too. Some men’ll perish over a woman. Not me, but some. Emme wouldn’t know but plenty tried to buy her mother off me. Lillie had a little of everything in her . . . German, Mexican, Ethiope . . . and in them days, Wilkie, any drop made you a slave.”
“Is there affection, Pa? Is there any affection between us?”
He grabbed her by the jaw. “And my Emme was so pretty, so pretty—”
She tried to pry off his hands and get up but he wrapped both hands around her neck so she sat back down.
“So when the fellas came round, asking when she’d be ready to fuck, it was me—not Lillie, not the drunk with no head for business so soaked no man wanted to get horizontal with her—it was me who held them off, me who made Emme a lady and married her to money. Wilkie, I’ll admit I never expected a man as wealthy as Henry Stovall, but I knew him for a reckless sort when I first laid eyes on him. Holding hands with Death all his life made him a gambler who wouldn’t pay any heed to the objections of his family.”
“Zeb,” Wilkie said, his hands tentatively reaching.
Her father thumbed her throat. “But I still hadn’t achieved a happy ending. For there was, you see, an impediment. What was that impediment, Wilkie? What was i
t? You remember?”
“Zeb, now I don’t mean to argufy but Emme’s a right biddable girl. Sho she’s seen to it we’ll see them Morgan boys hanged. There ain’t no need to speak on days past.”
“That’s right, her mother. Because not only was Lillie a whore but a negress and that kind of union ain’t legal in Mississippi, not then and not now, it being, according to law, incestuous and void. But as I knew Henry was the type to perish over a woman I said: pay me and they will never hear a whisper, those high-class Mississippi Stovalls. Because I am not the type to perish over a woman, because no matter what she is I am her father, I dosed Lillie’s whiskey with enough laudanum to kill an elephant.”
He let her go.
She stared at him in the mirror and then into her own eyes realizing that she already knew.
“Now Emme’s a fine lady, she can afford to have sensibility, but not me and I tell you, Wilkie,” her father said, his voice proud and violated, “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is it to have a thankless child.”
“Now you may join hands,” said Miss Ada from where she sat in a bloom of crepe and camphor at the head of the table.
Mayor Gibson took Emmeline’s left hand and an old woman retrieved her right. She ground her teeth so she wouldn’t pull away and tried to watch the medium crease with effort then fall bland, passive for the so-called spirit, intoning: “We are here tonight to seek the divine illumination of our spirit guides.”
Emmeline rolled her head from side to side, stretching her aching neck. And who indeed should be her spirit guide?
AUGUST THAYER STOVALL
1876–1876
5 mo. 11 d.
“So small, so sweet, so soon!”
CALEB EDMOND STOVALL
1877–1885
8 Y’s 4 mo. 15 d.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead Page 14