Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  “Ask away, though I may decline to answer,” she said.

  “Banbury says you’re a fine singer.”

  “That’s a statement, not a question, Mr. Sadlaw.”

  She stretched as she brushed, her back arched and her poitrine extended upward, and I thought that an observer might be forgiven for suspecting that she practiced this enticing pose in the mirror. “And that you accompany yourself very ably on the pianoforte.”

  “Another statement,” she said with a sidelong glance that set my prick once again athrob.

  “Why do you never play or sing for my benefit?”

  “The brush stopped and she set it down on her nightstand, then placed her right palm tenderly on my cheek. “Oh, my poor dear. You are a darling, but Mr. Banbury takes care of me in ways that you don’t, and it wouldn’t be right for me to share my musical gifts with anyone else. You do understand, don’t you?”

  I wanted to laugh but worried that she might bludgeon me. “I ought to tell you something,” I said, feeling for a moment quite fond of her. I knew I oughtn’t, really, but I gave her an accounting of Banbury’s plan.

  She was quiet, and she didn’t cry as I’d been afraid she might. “That son of a bitch,” she said under her breath. “If he thinks he can cast me off like that.”

  “What’ll you do?” I asked.

  “I’ll do what he makes me,” she said, and I didn’t ask her to elaborate.

  “According to Banbury, you could easily sing on the stage.”

  She gave me a look of unvarnished, venomous umbrage. “Take to the stage? Is that your opinion of me, after all we’ve shared?”

  “I meant the legitimate stage, my dove, nothing low or unworthy of you.” I made a mental note to ask around Denver about positions for experienced seamstresses. Then impulsively I said something, regretting it even as I heard the words coming forth from my tongue. “Why don’t you move in with me? There’s plenty of room, and Mrs. Fenster does all the housework. We can tell people we’re married.”

  “Well I’ll be goddamned if I’ll pretend to be anybody’s wife that lacks the balls to actually marry me,” she said, and I thought maybe I’d go down and get her a couple of spoonfuls of laudanum. She softened quickly on her own, though. “Oh, Bill, I don’t mean it’s not a sweet thing to offer. I’ll just have to think about it. I’m used to my solitude, you see.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said with no small amount of relief.

  She got up quickly and dressed, and hurried down the staircase to the parlor, where I heard her remove the tea tray to the kitchen. I put the case on the top of her placard whose small filigreed ledge obscured it from view. When I returned to the parlor she was seated on the canapé. “I suppose you’ll be going now?” she said, and I thought I heard in it an unprecedented plea to stay and pass the evening with her.

  “Expect I will be,” I said, unable to imagine what we would do now if I were to remain; play cards, perhaps, or draughts, or sing songs. The prospect of inviting a woman to move into my house, when all we’d ever done together was screw, struck me now as extravagantly foolish. Without making any further reference to my offer I stepped outside into the cold night.

  “Remember,” she said as I stepped onto her front landing, “next time you owe me a present.”

  I tipped my hat to her and got into my carriage and headed in the direction of town, troubled by my lack of self-restraint. How could I have imagined that a conjugal residence with laudanum-addled Priscilla could end in any manner other than pure disaster?

  I had long since established to my own satisfaction that I was not well-suited to domesticity. Back in Kansas I’d abandoned my sweet, randy Danish wife, Ninna, to live in town and run a saloon, leaving my farm and Ninna to the ministrations of a hired man. And when I left Kansas, with the law at my heels and the blood of Maggie’s husband on my conscience, I’d brought Maggie along, she whose beauty and intelligence were far beyond what a feckless, loafing philanderer such as myself merited; and yet within three months of our settling down in Greeley I left her, too, ostensibly to prospect for silver but in fact with the singular goal of getting away from the Greeley Colony and its prim, teetotal utopians, whose number now included my own Maggie, no longer just playing at being my legal wife but believing it herself.

  I rarely contemplated the unhappy period of my leaving her, temporarily and then for good, but my rash proposal to Priscilla brought that gloomy time back to me, and I had to remind myself for the first time in a long while that I was well off in her absence.

  FIVE

  AN EARLIER, EQUALLY ILL-CONCEIVED PROPOSITION

  I had lasted but four months at the Greeley Colony. By February I had lit out into the hinterlands with a meager set of supplies, a mule, and an overstated sense of my chances, and without Maggie’s blessing. My brief incarnation as prospector was notable for its lack of success in a time when fortunes were being made in what was still the Colorado Territory.

  The end of it came in April of 1874 when, after two luckless months, I came across a crudely built spruce cabin along Williams River. By the looks of the cut wood at least two or three seasons had passed since their felling, and the shanty’s roof was just about to cave in from an accumulation of snow. I undid the leather thong that kept the door fixed shut—whoever had been here last had shut it from the outside—and entered. Inside the windowless room, illuminated only by the light streaming behind me from the doorway, I squinted against the dark and detected a whiff of decay in the closed air.

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light I spied upon an old G.A.R. cot the cadaver of a prospector, withered as a month-old apple and wearing a shit-stained union suit. His decease had preceded my arrival by several months, and apart from the befouled long johns and the cot everything of use or monetary value had been made off with by persons unknown, most likely other prospectors, who had at least done him the kindness of lacing the door shut with that leather thong to keep scavenging animals out. Or perhaps the thieves were guilty of more, and obfuscation their intent; the wretch’s permanently open jaws and sunken eyes revealed nothing about the manner of his death.

  I had abandoned my own camp three days previous and was heading in the general direction of Georgetown. It was tempting to stay here for a while, given that the cabin already stood, but it seemed clear that its previous occupant hadn’t prospered here. And so for some reason not entirely clear to me at the time, but which in retrospect seems to me a base sentimentality springing from a recognition of myself in the poor dead failed prospector, I removed the spade from the pack on my mule, Abelard, and began digging a grave.

  If you’ve never tried to dig a grave in the Rockies in the dead of winter (and believe me when I say that this particular April qualified as such), I will warn you off of it here and spare you the effort. It was a miserable job, with Abelard staring at me with his big, black, round, wet left eye as though this confirmed every suspicion he’d had of me.

  I managed three feet in depth and congratulated myself on a job well done. At this stage of his decomposition the prospector had very little smell and I doubted that those scavengers would now show him much interest; however, having laid him in the earth and covered him, I set about covering the grave with stones to discourage any especially ravenous beasts that might disturb him.

  I was about to make my way onward but decided one last sweep of the cabin might be worth my while. A superstitious mind might conjure that this was the miner’s grateful ghost prodding me onward, with a view to his treasure not being lost forever, for in the far corner of the crude structure I spotted a patch of earth that was slightly higher than the rest, though its builder had done a reasonably good job of leveling the rest of it. Intrigued, I took the spade back off of Abelard and began digging.

  A foot or so down I hit something. I pulled from the earth a leather pouch, and dandling it in my hand I estimated its weight at about half a pound. I loosened the drawstring, and my heart filled with visions of anothe
r Omaha-sized windfall. From within I pulled a single daguerreotype and a trio of tintypes, all four framed identically. The daguerreotype was of a couple, about sixty or seventy years of age, their manner of dress suggesting material prosperity around the time of Millard Fillmore’s presidency. The tintypes were of more recent making; the first featured a boy of about eight and a girl several years younger. The second added their mother, a sweet-looking woman who was nonetheless far from pretty, with squinty eyes and a nose like a carrot. The third tintype added to this grouping a tall fellow whom I took, though neatly dressed, cleanshaven, and uncorrupt, to be our prospector.

  I placed the photographs beneath the stones marking the grave, and for just a moment thought about keeping the leather pouch, since it would be perfectly suited to holding gold dust. I said as much to the mule, who gave me a look that seemed even more contemptuous than was his habit, and I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own ridiculousness, and a sentimental urge to return to the settled life I had briefly enjoyed with Maggie.

  And so I walked Abelard for two days to a shabby new town whose name I never bothered to learn, where I traded him for a night’s food and lodging (our parting was not without its element of pathos, but mules are fickle creatures and he took quickly to the tavernmaster in whose possession I had placed him). In the morning I bought a coach ride to the town of Golden, a miserable trip I shared with a plump and talkative widow named Mrs. Miles, whose entire family history was known to me by the time we arrived at our destination the next morning. Alone in the interior of the coach, she felt no inhibition against detailing the shortcomings of her youngest daughter’s husband, which included uncleanliness, insobriety, and a violent temper. He also had the gall to move her daughter to the dirty little burg from which we had just departed, there to operate a barbershop which the widow had staked him. This selfsame fellow had cut my hair upon my arrival and given me my first decent shave since I’d left Greeley, and I had found him a sullen and disagreeable character, so rash in his handling of his scissors that I feared for my ears.

  She also recounted in lurid detail the scandal caused in 1836 when her maiden aunt ran off with the just-married son of a local minister, who at twenty-two was seventeen years her junior. In the aftermath of the pair’s departure it came out that this aunt, though unmarried, was hardly inexperienced in the ways of love, and that many a lusty young man in their Iowa town had learned the truth about the world under her tutelage. The minister’s son, dissatisfied with his new bride’s amatory skills, then convinced the spinster to run off with him. I concurred when the widow asserted that the offspring of churchmen are often impious and untrustworthy sybarites, and when we parted ways at the depot she invited me to call on her at her home. I was tempted, not least because of her sly implication that she and her wayward aunt were kindred souls. I hadn’t know a woman’s embrace in some months, but an illicit liaison seemed the wrong tack to take, seeing as I was on my way back to Maggie with an eye to reconciliation, and I regretfully declined the invitation. (Hedging my bet, I did promise that when and if I returned to Golden, I would call on her.)

  AFTER SPENDING FIFTY cents on a meal of ham, biscuits, and gravy that a billy goat might have spurned, I wandered the town looking for a spot for a photographic studio. I had nearly fifty dollars left of the Omaha windfall, very little of which Maggie and I had spent beyond securing our position at Greeley and purchasing Abelard and the contents of his saddlebag. By midafternoon I had found an ideal spot, a storefront with a second-floor skylight, and a room in the rear that would be easy to modify into a darkroom. I negotiated a rental price of fifteen dollars per month with the landlord, a rheumy and morose fellow who seemed not to care in the least whether he had tenants or not.

  The next day I started for Greeley. I expected to meet with a certain amount of disdain and even hostility from the home guard, among whom I had been an unpopular figure owing to my undisguised contempt for the colony’s aims and most particularly for its founder, Mr. Meeker, a man whose enthusiasm for industriousness in his subjects was matched only by his own fierce disinclination toward labor.

  Yet the looks I got as I wandered into the colony’s main public square were more incredulous than hateful. It had been snowing all day, big evanescent flakes that vanished on contact with the ground, and those who passed by me, hunched forward in their threadbare winter coats (the colony, alas, had never attained the state of prosperity promised by its founder), regarded me as they might have done a Saint Bernard striding on its hind legs. A mousy old squab of sixty or seventy, sporting the remains of a black bonnet in a style fashionable around the time Zachary Taylor was president, wisps of white hair peeking crazily from its edges, hissed at me as I passed.

  “Unclean thing,” was what I understood her to say, though I may have been mistaken. It was only at the sound of her voice that I recognized her as the wife of the Reverend Dunwoody, both of them kind souls who had previously treated me quite kindly.

  UPON MY ARRIVAL at my former home I was made to understand the surprise on the part of the denizens of the colony. “I told them you were dead,” is what my dear Maggie told me once she’d regained her composure and stopped pummeling my chest with her little rosy fists. “Do you think I wanted it known I’d been deserted?”

  To be truthful, this hadn’t occurred to me at all. And it was only half true that I’d deserted her, seeing as how I’d left with the intention of returning a wealthy man and luring her away from this dreadful place. I’d supposed, of course, that I would have to resort to a bit of honeyfuggling before she broke down and wept tears of joy at my return, but this degree of vitriol surprised me. I hadn’t ever seen her this put out and I very nearly despaired of the carnal reunion I’d been rehearsing in my mind for so many months.

  “Your notion that you can fly off, without my blessing, for months and months and never even let me know you’re still breathing . . .”

  Here I interrupted her, normally a perilous endeavor, but I had a legitimate objection. “Did you imagine there was a telegraph office where I was?”

  She slapped me, rather harder than a person might think possible just looking at her. At that moment I thought I’d never seen her looking so beautiful, her long, regal throat exposed and flushed pink as her cheeks, but I sensed that if I expressed that thought it would come off as pleading, and so I feigned an intention to leave.

  “All right, then, I’ll move along.” I put my hat back on.

  “Go,” she said.

  I opened the door, expecting her to weaken, but she said nothing as I exited and shut the door behind me. I heard the latch click shut as I walked away.

  THERE WAS A boardinghouse above the dry goods store, and as fortune would have it one of its tenants, Norville Queenan, had just been kicked in the belly and then, as he fell, in the head by a dray horse he’d overworked. Now he lay prostrate in the back room of Dr. Galway’s infirmary, with very little hope offered for his eventual rehabilitation. I remembered him as a particular favorite of Meeker’s, a humorless New Englander who believed in the colony as fervently as he had previously believed in Joseph Smith’s Mormon revelations and William Miller’s eschatological ones. His disillusionment with those religious movements—in 1844 he had sold his farm and given away all his money in anticipation of the Reverend Mr. Miller’s Advent, and after it didn’t arrive Norville never recaptured the relative wealth of his youth—had led him to seek an earthly utopia, and he talked often and openly about how Meeker’s notions differed from those he’d abandoned, because they were based on science rather than the supernatural.

  THAT NIGHT, LYING in Queenan’s rope bed, I heard precious little. The colony was a very tranquil place at night, having no saloons or even a beanery, and most of its citizens worked so hard at farming that they returned home exhausted in the evening and retired upon finishing their evening meal. Those who didn’t work on the farm—Maggie, for example, sewed, and I had worked as photographer and editor of the weekly newspaper—we
re expected to follow the same schedule as the rest of the colony.

  Despite the quiet I had no urge to sleep. I had seen in Maggie’s eyes that afternoon no inclination to welcome me back, no desire to forgive me my absence—or, more precisely, no desire to forgive my disobedience in setting out away from home. I had also been taken aback when the operator of the boardinghouse told me to watch out for a Swede named Thor Sundkvist, who had been bird-dogging Maggie ever since she let it be known that she was now a widow. (Which of course she was, though not my own; how odd, I thought, that she’d forgiven me shooting her actual husband, but couldn’t excuse my going off to prospect.)

  I had, of necessity, maintained a life of fidelity since my departure (or one of celibacy; under the circumstances they amounted to the same thing). The notion that Maggie might not have made my stomach hurt, although I knew the town well enough to be certain that physical intimacy between an unmarried man and a supposedly widowed woman in such a place would require a level of discretion and stealth and chicanery worthy of a stage magician. The lamps may have gone out by eight in the evening, but eyes were still peering out those windows, and malicious tongues were the norm there.

  I did finally manage to drift off, though, and slept fitfully until around three in the morning when I awakened to the sound of my door latch creaking. I reached under the bed for my Baby Dragoon, which I’d had the foresight to load in case Mr. Sundkvist got it into his head to eliminate his competition. I pulled back the hammer and growled.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who do you imagine,” I heard a soft voice say, and then my Maggie quietly disrobed and climbed into Norville Queenan’s bed with me. “I’ll do my best to be quiet,” she said.

  OUR REUNION HAPPENED quickly, too quickly for the satisfaction of either of us (remember, please, that I had been alone for eight or more weeks, with only Madame Palm and her five daughters for such comfort), and as we rested waiting for the occasion for a repeat performance to arise we spoke softly. She was ready for me to return, but only if I would take a job on the farm, as there was no need for a photographer there (never had been, really). This had been the state of affairs when I left, and I was no more ready to take her up on it now than I had been before. I didn’t argue, but I told her I wanted to go to Golden.