The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King
Page 9
—Four-Eyes, he said, I’d like to have a strangulation party right here. Give us Red Finnegan.
I hadn’t built me a boat and chased Red downriver just to surrender him to the Stranglers.
—You’ll have to kill me first.
The Stranglers chortled and slapped their thighs. I looked into their broken mouths, filled with tobacco cud. This renegade captain had had his designs on me ever since I came to the Territory and started buying up ranches. I was a hindrance to him, a rich rubberneck in a tailored buckskin suit, carrying a rifle with my initials burnt into the stock in gold filigree. I’d never accept the Stranglers. And he knew it from the start—even if I was running from the United States, just like him.
—Captain, I’m curious. Why’d you rescue that little girl and let all the others disappear in the fire?
—Because. I took a shine to her.
That lunatic was no different from the rest of us. He had his rites of civilization. He’d killed men while riding for Custer and riding for General Grant, and strangled others for stealing a cow. He didn’t harden to anything but the language of plunder.
He tossed that papoose up in the air—it waffled across the black sky. And then his Stranglers took turns shooting at the swaddling board. They ripped it to shreds, and the last piece of it floated into my arms. There was no little girl, alive or dead, nothing but a rag doll with a red mouth. Albright laughed at his own ruse.
Then the Stranglers fell back, and I slogged along in the mud. A second barn sparrow arrived, alighted on my shoulder, and chipped a night song. I didn’t have a lantern. It was pretty dark in the prairie schooner. I could have been guarding an empty wagon. I heard the scrape of a match. I saw a flicker of light inside the canvas covers. Red Finnegan was cupping his hand against the bowl of a cherrywood pipe. He was sucking hard on the short stem. That bowl of his was on fire.
I watched him with my own burning red eyes, watched him just as hard, with that sparrow still on my shoulder, delivering its night song.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 5
HER LITTLE LADYSHIP
1885
I GOT ME A ROCKING CHAIR AND A RUBBER BATHTUB THAT looked like a raft, had them delivered to the Badlands from St. Paul, and I’d sit out on the piazza of my ranch house and watch the river burst its banks or run dry as cow cake. Weather was a whispering word in the Territory. My ranch hands limped about with frostbite, veterans of an undeclared war; some were blinded in a sudden surge of ice dust; others went mad in the perpetual winter of a blue-black sky and ran naked into the wilderness, never to return.
Bamie took care of my bills.
I did not ask about live ghosts like Edith Carow. I damn forgot that she ever existed, that she’d once been a part of my life, and that I might have been in love with her a little, a long, long time ago. I’d buried her like a dead root. I was Mr. Four-Eyes, constant to a departed bride whose every relic I had rubbed raw. We Roosevelts did not marry a second time, no matter what the circumstance. I had a mourning band seared into my heart.
But Edith Carow was still on my mind. We called Miss Edith Her Little Ladyship because she had perfect posture. She’s the only one of us who had attended Mrs. Dodsworth’s School for Dancing and Deportment. She ran around with my sister Corinne and attended all our festivities. She devoured Balzac and Dickens before she was ten. She had darkly golden hair and the inquisitive blue eyes of a scientist or a great explorer. She could discuss Coleridge with my mother and Chester A. Arthur with my father. Brave Heart always found a rôle for Edie in the little plays he produced at home. She never botched a line, not once. She played Cleopatra with the exactitude of an Egyptian queen. It did not hurt to have a long, lyrical neck and a nose with flaring nostrils. She spent the summers with us at Tranquillity, when I was a young bobcat with spectacles and Edith a kitten with claws. There were reports that little Edie and I were engaged. She was just fourteen at the time, and I was about to begin my freshman year at Harvard.
Her family had not fared well. She belonged to a once-prosperous shipping empire, Kermit & Carow, with its fabled clippers berthed along the East River. But her beloved father, Charles, who had read The Arabian Nights to her when she was a girl of four, did not have half the shrewdness of Sinbad the Sailor. Edie’s Sinbad was a drunkard who had squandered the Carow fortune. He’d fallen down the hold of a Kermit & Carow clipper, banged his head, lay unconscious for hours, and was never quite coherent after that. The Carows moved from one narrower house to another by the time Edith was six, and had to rely on the largesse of relatives. Perhaps that is what had touched Brave Heart so. He invited Edie everywhere. He knew her own papa had unraveled in front of her eyes. I cannot recall if Father contributed to Edith’s upkeep. I suspect not. Her Little Ladyship would have been much too proud to appear in a beggar’s wardrobe. But her summers with us at Tranquillity must have eased the burden on her family quite a bit.
We rowed together, walked in the fields, spent long hours in the icehouse, the coolest spot on the North Shore. It was like a great bricked-in cavern, ten or twelve feet deep, with the ice blocks covered in burlap, and the tiny windows painted black to filter out the glare of the sun; specks of light still poured through the chips in the paint and cast prisms on the walls in a panoply of colors. Edie and I relished these shimmering rainbows—otherwise we would have been sentenced to sit in the dark.
But the icehouse was plagued with a tiny regimen of frogs that lived in the moss under the ice blocks. I’m not sure how they survived the cold. Edith and I had to wear sweaters and woolen socks. It was still our favorite haunt, where we had absolute privacy and could trace the swirling path of our own breath against the prisms of light. And when the frogs cut their racket, we shared a calm that could be found nowhere else at Tranquillity.
We kissed and fumbled in our layers of wool, but we didn’t fumble very far. Edith, I remember, was in one of her black moods; they would come upon her like a sudden squall. And I was beginning to weaken in my own vows of celibacy. All the lambs’ wool in the world couldn’t hide her figure. Edith had a woman’s share of flesh at fourteen.
Cleopatra.
I’d bought a few trinkets to celebrate our trysts in the icehouse: a brooch, a bracelet, and a silver ring—the gatherings of a boy who had a luxurious allowance.
“I suppose we’re engaged,” I said. “But it has to be a secret.”
Her brow deepened in that cold, dark house with its flickers of magical light.
“Ted, it’s common knowledge. We’ve been together the entire summer. Have I looked once at another boy, have I danced with your friends? And you know how much I love to dance.”
It was in the days before Father took ill, when he was the master of Tranquillity with his broad shoulders and leonine looks. He was the impresario of all our games and diversions. I hunted wild geese with Brave Heart, collected seashells, while he joined us in our tableaux. He was more enthralled about Edith than he was about her family. I was at a loss how to tell her that. Father did not want me to entwine myself with the Carows. I was harsh, I fear. I recited my calumny like a kingfisher, with its strident call.
“Papa says your father’s a dipsomaniac.”
I’d cut her to the bone. Her quick blue eyes receded with a cruel intransigence. She could never have anticipated such a remark. She’d idolized my father since she was a child, had been the proudest accomplice in all his tableaux. Edith’s perfect posture dissipated on the love seat Father had brought in from the garden; her shoulders sagged, and her breath turned blue in that temperature as she summoned every resource she had.
“Dip-so-man-i-ac, you say. Father banged his head. That’s not a disease. But the Roosevelts, I hear, are inclined to scrofula. It’s a scourge of the family.”
The kingfisher struck back. I had little choice. Scrofula was a terrible disease that doomed the victim with burgeoning pockmarks and a chronically swollen neck.
“That’s the baldest lie,” I said. “Have y
ou ever seen one scrofulous Roosevelt? Edie, feel my neck!”
“Theodore, I will do no such thing.” And she began to rise up out of that love seat like a bitter swan in all the glory of Mrs. Davenport’s posture classes. “My mother and sister would never invent a tale about the Roosevelts. They have their scruples—scrofula it is.”
Her mother, Gertrude, was a hypochondriac who dreamt up maladies for herself and everyone around her, and her little sister, Emily, was a copycat who did not have Edith’s bearing, beauty, or wit. Yet I shouldn’t have maligned Charles Carow, not with Father’s words. He really was a sad case. He’d lost his clippers, one by one. But it was a matter between Edith and myself. I preferred an invisible engagement, with the tiny token of a silver ring. I was attached to Edith, like a kind of twin. But I could still summon up the seal’s skull I had gotten from the fishmongers at the Union Square market. I had presented that skull and other treasures of mine to the Museum of Natural History, as one of its first members, while it was still housed at the Armory in Central Park, and I was hailed as Manhattan’s “teen” taxidermist. I meant to pursue a scientific career, and zoölogists were poor as mice, even with a stipend from Papa; few of them could mingle science and marriage. I professed that to Edith in the icehouse. It was the lame prattle of a nearsighted boy who couldn’t see beyond the reach of his nose. Zoölogists weren’t saints—some had wives, I trust.
Edith stared at me in the icehouse’s dark well, her face half illumined in the irregular light, like a prehistoric mask. It was almost religious, looking at her.
“Theodore Roosevelt,” she said, her lips moving in and out of multiple rainbows, “you are the fool of fools. I’ve loved you since I was a little girl, and now I’ll have to mourn a love-lost friend.”
She marched out of the icehouse with that magnificent sweep of hers and without ever returning the bracelet, the brooch, or the silver ring.
I went off to Harvard. There wasn’t a lull in our correspondence. Her letters were lively and literate, as if the incident at the icehouse had never happened, and we fell back into the “deportment” of old comrades. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding, still unwed. But we lost touch, as I drifted toward the Badlands. And I instructed Bamie:
Rather not bump into Her Ladyship on my return trips.
Please encourage her to visit your parlor whilst I’m not around.
Bamie complied with my wishes, as I wandered between the Badlands and Madison Avenue. I felt less troubled around Baby Lee. She was Bamie’s blond creature now. I was like a mysterious stranger whose visits from the wild were short enough to delight and confuse her. She loved to watch me shave, to hear the scratch-scratch of the razor against my skin. I’d acquired a roaring red mustache in the Badlands; my face and body had bronzed from chasing after heifers and riding in the saddle on nineteen-hour runs. I’d splash around in my rubber bathtub like a bad little boy and sit on my piazza, read in the dying light. I’d lost the habits of an Easterner. I hunted cougars, howled with the wolves.
I did not dream of Edith, did not dream at all. And I did not miss Delmonico’s or the dance cotillions, the coming-out parties or the debutantes’ balls. There was talk of appointing me Senator once the Territory was voted into the United States. But I was much more at ease as a deputy sheriff and the writer of Western tales about the wiles of ranching and the pursuit of desperadoes like Red Finnegan along the sinister black ice of the Little Missouri. I sought solitude, and was comforted by it.
Then that solitude was torn out of me. I returned to Manhattan to meet with my publisher, but hadn’t advised Bamie beforehand of my exact calendar. I was clumping up the stairs of Bamie’s brownstone with my satchel and my game bag when I spotted Her Little Ladyship on the landing. I froze for an instant, like a stag caught in the hypnotic blaze of a hunter’s lantern. But it was Edith who reassembled me with her own hypnotic smile. She wasn’t embarrassed one bit.
“Sinbad,” she said, “my Sinbad the Sailor.”
I knew what she meant. She hadn’t given up her love of fairy tales. Sinbad must have reminded her of Kermit & Carow’s clippers, of adventure per se. No matter what vessel he commanded, Sinbad was always shipwrecked on some remote island that could have been as desolate as the Badlands. And I had Sinbad’s husky bronze look, with my red mustache and all.
I dropped my satchel and game bag, and leapt up to greet her on the landing. She was wearing a blue bodice and a ruffled petticoat. I traced the curve of her bodice with a hunter’s keen eye. My hand touched hers, and our fingers entwined. It was no more complicated than that.
She laughed with a deep-throated warble that ripped right from her bodice.
“And why has Sinbad crept back to dry land?”
“To meet with his Cleopatra,” I said.
She frowned and pretended to scold me. “Theodore, you cannot mix the fanciful and the real—Cleopatra lived!”
“And so does Sinbad.”
Bamie must have heard our echoes from the parlor. She came out onto the landing with a quizzical glance and sensed the pure thunder of our meeting. I did not loosen my grip on Edith’s hand. We all returned to the parlor. A shiver went through Bamie, a tremor she couldn’t control. Edith had had no coming-out party, no debutante’s ball. Her father had collapsed and died of heart failure while I was still an Assemblyman with a young wife. The Carows had less and less to live on, and planned a move to Europe, a permanent move, where they could economize and not have to worry about the latest cotillions. I was confused about all this. But nothing could match the confusion on my sister’s face. She was fond of Edith, had always been, yet the suddenness of the encounter on the landing had unsettled her—seems Sister would have to share the deputy sheriff with another living soul.
“I’M A WIDOWER,” I chanted to myself.
Widowers must not remarry.
But another birdsong lingered somewhere inside me. I could have abandoned Leeholm, sold the property, and enriched myself overnight. But while I was away in the Badlands, I deputized Bamie, put her in charge—and my mansion rose on the crest of a wheat field, overlooking the bay. I rechristened it Sagamore Hill, after a warrior from a local tribe defeated in battle two hundred years earlier—the hill had once been his, and perhaps I wanted his presence and imprimatur, though I was not generally mindful of ghosts. Bamie outfitted the mansion with furniture from her brownstone and our former “palace” on West Fifty-seventh Street.
I wanted to fill those bedrooms on Sagamore Hill with a brood of my own. Yet decorum prevailed in my conduct with Her Little Ladyship. Still, our secret engagement at the icehouse ten years ago was finally consummated. I informed no one—not even Bamie—in that curtained-off Knickerbocker society of ours, where widowers had to mourn a minimum of two or three years. We had our trysts at the Carows’ crumbling townhouse in Murray Hill, full of mousetraps and cobwebs on the chandeliers. I much preferred the icehouse at Tranquillity, with its abundance of frogs. And our private meetings were usually within earshot of Edith’s mother and sister. We groped a little, but soon realized that this sordidness wouldn’t do. I wanted marriage, not a back-parlor romance amid all the mice scuttling about. But Her Ladyship hadn’t lost her good humor.
“Theodore, this house is a zoölogist’s dream. Lord knows what spiders you will find in the attic.”
“Or under our feet. But I’ve given up zoölogy. I’m now a rancher—and a lawman, too.”
And she entertained me with that full-throated warble. “Well, ranching hasn’t been a lucrative venture. How much do you earn for capturing desperadoes?”
“I’m entitled to fifty dollars a head.”
She licked away with a pencil and a notepad. “That isn’t much of a bounty in the long run. You might lose your own head to one of these outlaws, and I’d have to collect the reward.”
The good humor was gone. She could tell what was troubling me. I’d delayed going back to the Badlands, because I was a deputy sheriff with a house on Oyster Bay and a swe
etheart I had to hide from the Knickerbockers.
“Edie, I can keep my ranch or Sagamore Hill, but I can’t maintain two households.”
“Well,” she whispered, “we could solve your money troubles and elope.”
I knew what she was hinting at. Bamie was the real mistress of Sagamore Hill, and I was an absentee landlord, a sometime laird. But I planned to change that in a single stroke. I fell upon the perfect scheme to invite Edith out to Oyster Bay. I planned to hold the Meadowbrook Hunt Ball at Sagamore Hill on the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday. The Meadowbrook foxhounds had an almost mythical status. They had long muzzles, large hazel eyes, and bullet-like heads, and were notorious fox catchers, the best of their kind. These black and tan hounds were raised at the hunt club in private kennels. The hunt master was very secretive about his black-and-tans. I never even considered the damage they could do to a red fox with their lantern jaws. They were muscular and lazy, suspicious attackers taught to stun.
The hunt began that afternoon on my hill. I wore the colors of the club—a reddish pink coat and silvery black boots. It wasn’t at all like running down wolves, or riding after herds of buffalo. The hunt had its own ritual, a maddening pace that was electric and slow. The hounds didn’t even stir until the fox master blew his horn—that bleat ricocheted off the hill and seemed to last longer than any horn I had ever heard, like the ripples in a stream. The dogs leapt with their own design, and we followed them and the fox master, who contained the hunt with some invisible string. We didn’t have magicians like that out West, only hunters who had their peculiar habits with animals in the wild. These hounds weren’t wild. They were practiced executioners, and I was out on a run with them.
We had obstacle courses in the Badlands—buttes and sandbars and underground fires that could asphyxiate a man if he crept near enough. But these obstacles were man-made, administered by the maestro of the hunt himself—timber forts five feet high, fences with rough edges that could have ripped a horse’s belly, situated five or six to the mile. I had my own jumper, a huge stallion called Lancelot. I urged him on with a cowboy’s surefire yell.