Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  I was through with the Ursuline Academy, almost as glad to be shed of it as I had been to leave Ben Wheeler. I would miss Mother Theresa, whose kindness to me had been gentle and reassuring, and I would miss Jolie. Beyond that, I was glad to leave behind empty-headed girls and a stern way of life.

  Jolie had bid me farewell by saying wistfully, "I wish we had been better friends, Etta." She pronounced it funny—"Et-to."—and her accent made me smile.

  "I wish we had too," I said truthfully, but I could say no more. She would go back to her family home in Castroville, but she had hinted that there was a young man from France who would come to claim her one day soon.

  "I will be the bride," she said, "and he will make me happy."

  I envied her the settled future, the sureness that someone would take care of her. It was all too plain to me that I would have to take care of myself, even if Sundance did come back for me. The one thing that Fannie told me and I really believed was that I couldn't count on him forever. Nor would Fannie shoulder the burden of my protection forever—she had done me a tremendous kindness by educating me, but I was going to have to find my own life. Sundance, I cried aloud at night, when are you coming back?

  "We'll have to find a teaching position for you," Fannie said briskly one day. "May not be in San Antonio. I think some of the smaller towns around here need teachers pretty badly. Do you good to get away from this house." She had on her no-nonsense voice.

  "I would hate to leave," I told her truthfully. "You and Julie and Hodge have been family to me."

  The no-nonsense hat dropped away. "Lord, child, I know that, and I will miss you. Makes me feel good to have you around, but we've got to think of your future. No decent man is going to marry you if you live in a whorehouse."

  "No decent man," I retorted, "will marry me if he knows I killed my father."

  In one of her rare gestures of affection, she put an arm around me. "No matter who he is, he's never going to know that. Honey, you just have to erase that from your mind."

  Easier said than done, I thought. In truth, though, Pa had stopped visiting me so much at night, just because I had other things on my mind: Sundance's sweet parting kiss, the puzzlement of a wife he'd mentioned so casually, and, of course, the long silence. I would never ask Fannie about any of it, particularly the wife, and I couldn't talk to Annie either. Oh, Annie talked to me. A lot.

  "He's an outlaw," she ranted, more than once. "You're moping around here, looking like you're going to the gallows tomorrow, all because of an outlaw. You haven't heard from him"—she knew that much—"and you won't. Ask Fannie, she'll tell you they think they're a law unto themselves. Nobody else matters to them. You think Maud has heard from that Kid Curry?"

  She hadn't. I knew from listening to her talk at the dinner table.

  Another time: "You know what's the matter with you? You haven't known any men. Don't know how they treat women. I mean, there was your father, and maybe one or two neighbors back wherever it is you really came from."

  I could have told her about Mr. Newsome and his plans for my future, but I kept silent.

  "Fannie ought to at least let you out in the parlor, so you'd not be so sheltered."

  "And what if some man wanted to take me upstairs?" I asked as coolly as I could.

  She shrugged. "Might not be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

  Pa's face loomed before me, and I shuddered visibly. Instantly, Annie was at my side with an arm around me.

  "Honey, you can't tell me a beautiful girl like you is going to go through life having nothing to do with men just because of what your pa did to you... ah, twice."

  Or, I wanted to argue, because of what I did to my pa.

  "What," she asked, "if Sundance wanted to take you upstairs?"

  "He wouldn't," I said.

  And then she dropped her bombshell: "Don't fool yourself. Sundance is no gentleman. Where do you think he spent the nights when he was here?"

  I wanted to shout, Upstairs alone! He told me that. Instead, I just looked at her.

  "He slept with Fannie most of the time," she said, her voice even and without emotion.

  It was a joke, of course. What else could it be? Fannie wouldn't do that. She never slept with customers—and Sundance, he was special... to me. Slowly it dawned on me that Annie wasn't joking. It was true: Fannie had invited Sundance to her bed, and he had accepted—or maybe Sundance had invited himself, and Fannie had accepted. Either way, they slept together. And neither one of them would see in any way that their behavior compromised their separate and very different relationships with me.

  A kind of white rage went through me. For just a flash, I was almost out of control, speechless, shaking, filled with an anger that was beyond anything I thought was inside me. It wasn't the cold, determined anger that I'd felt toward Pa—this was instant and absolutely without reason.

  It subsided as quickly as it had come.

  "Are you all right, Etta? I... gosh, I'm sorry I said anything."

  "No," I said, striving for control, "you're not. It's a secret that's been burning a hole in your tongue. And it's better out. I'm all right."

  I left the room with all the dignity I could muster, moving slowly rather than rushing in anger. But behind me, I could still feel Annie's eyes boring holes in my back. And I could sense her wishing she knew what was going on inside my head. I never gave her that satisfaction.

  Later, lying in my bed, I reviewed it all in my mind, trying to be as clearheaded as I could. Fannie granted her favors to a very few men—I knew that, though I never figured how she chose them. Still, how could anyone resist Sundance? She would not see that as a betrayal of me—indeed, she might think she was helping me by keeping Sundance busy elsewhere. But I didn't fool myself that altruism had any big part in Fannie's motivation.

  And Sundance? In long sleepless nights after Annie's revelation, I told myself that he kept apart from me because what was between us was special. What he did with Fannie was casual and physical. What he and I had was spiritual—well, maybe that was too much, maybe emotional was a better word. In my mind I rehearsed long and earnest conversations with him, and he always explained things just the way I thought.

  For days I was distant to Fannie. I longed to shout and scream and accuse, but for a lot of reasons that was useless—and self-defeating. I had no claim on Sundance that would have kept her away from him. She knew I was interested in him, but she disapproved of that interest—and maybe she had shown her disapproval in the ultimate way.

  Fannie knew that I was keeping myself distant, and I'm sure she knew why, but she never said a word. Fannie Porter didn't have to explain herself to Etta Place... and never would.

  In the end, we never again talked specifically about Sundance's visit. But I did notice that she grew rather harsh with Annie, as though she was angry with her, and Annie, in turn, grew churlish with me. She avoided me at supper, and often, from another table, sat staring at me in an angry way.

  Sundance had set in motion a chain of dominoes that hadn't fallen until he was safely away.

  * * *

  "Being as it's summer, there won't be any teaching positions available immediately," Fannie said one day. She sat in her bed, surrounded by her breakfast tray and the morning newspaper. I had been summoned to her presence. "I'll ask Mother Theresa if she knows of a position taking care of children in the home."

  This time it was not Pa's face but that of Juniper that swam before me. "You think she can find a family who wants a girl from a whorehouse?"

  Fannie looked wounded. "You aren't a whore," she said. "And Mother Theresa doesn't tell everything she knows."

  Mother Theresa knew a woman in the parish who needed help daily, four hours in the middle of the day. She had five young children, and they were too much for her to manage alone.

  I would be less a teacher than a nursemaid, and I would be paid a pittance.

  "I will turn my salary over to you," I told Fannie.

 
; "Honey, I make enough money. Balancing the books has nothing to do with what's between us. You keep that money. Buy yourself a pretty gown, put it away for a rainy day, do whatever you want with it."

  And what's between us? I wanted to ask. Sundance? But there was nothing for me to say to Fannie, and I still debated what I would say to Sundance when, if ever, he reappeared.

  Annie had set me to thinking about more than Fannie and Sundance. If he was that kind of man—that kind being the men who frequented Fannie's house—then maybe his promise to come back for me was spun of air and smoke. That doubt flitted through my mind, but I refused to believe it. I held on to my faith that he would be back for me. But sometimes, in the dark of the night, doubts crept in, and then I would hear Annie's voice saying, "He's no gentleman.... He slept with Fannie."

  What I learned that long summer was to put my feelings into compartments: My affection and loyalty to Fannie went in one pigeonhole in my mind, my feelings for Sundance in another, and my jealousy for whatever went on between the two of them in a smaller, darker compartment in the very back of my mind.

  I went every morning to the Brewster household. Mr. Brewster was a banker who left home promptly at eight every morning, his wife having fed him a substantial breakfast. He returned home at noon every day for an equally substantial dinner. It was at noon that I saw him, and, the very first day, I took an instant dislike to him.

  "Nelda, my coffee is cold!"

  "I'll just get some fresh, Jonathan. You sit right there. No, Charlie, don't bother Mother right now." She brushed a child away as she went for the coffee, and Mr. Brewster totally ignored that child—and the other four.

  The children were Susanna, age seven; Jonathan, Jr., age six; Annabelle, age four; Charlie, age three; and the year-old baby, Samuel, whom Mrs. Brewster affectionately called "Sammie." Mrs. Brewster reminded me of Mama so sharply that some days I could hardly bear to be around her. It wasn't a good reminder. She brought back all the bad about Mama's life—she was tired, pale, and determinedly cheerful even when I knew she didn't feel it in her soul. I could imagine where all those babies came from: Mr. Brewster was probably as relentlessly demanding in the night as Pa had been.

  He only tolerated my presence. Once I heard him say to her, "I don't know why you have to have that girl around here. We don't know a thing about her." Mrs. Brewster answered serenely, "Mother Theresa at the academy recommended her. She's here because I need help, Jonathan. She keeps the babies while I prepare your supper."

  Thoughts of his own satisfaction must have quieted him, for he said no more. But I saw him watching me over his dinner plate while I fed little Sammie or mopped up after Charlie, who was wildly destructive. Mr. Brewster's eyes were dark and... well, sinister. I wondered if he was a patron of Fannie's house.

  Finally one night I asked, "Do you know the Brewsters? Mr. Brewster, he... ah..."

  "He's a wretched man," Fannie said so vehemently that I was taken aback. "Pious. The kind who denounces the sins of the flesh in church but comes to the whorehouse on Monday night."

  "Does he come here?" I asked cautiously.

  "Not anymore. I made it plain he wasn't welcome a year or so ago... He slapped one of the girls, hard, for no reason."

  I was incredulous. "Why did you send me to work in his house, then?"

  She sighed. "Because I felt almost as sorry for his wife as I have in the past for you. And because I knew he wouldn't do anything in his own house. You're safe.... And finally I guess there's the thought that I want you to see that the so-called proper side of life—those upstanding citizens—often aren't any better than those of us who admit to our sins openly."

  If I hadn't been so busy puzzling over what she'd said, I'd have laughed at the idea of Fannie confessing to sins. But she was right in her logic, though it didn't work to any goal she had in mind: Mr. Brewster probably did as much as anyone to convince me that running away with Sundance was the right thing for me. Certainly, he showed me that marriage, like his or like Mama and Pa, was not for me. I wasn't going to live that way!

  Once during that long summer, Fannie absently talked to me about her background. I have no idea what prompted her confession, or what she thought I'd learn from her story. But she looked at me one evening as I sat in her sitting room—a thing I did more since I'd been out of school and had no studies for her to shoo me back to my desk—and she said, "I was married, you know, respectable-like, the whole business. It was seven... no, eight years ago, in Stephenville, His name was J. T. Evans—I called him Jimmy, and I thought I'd found my life's love."

  Amazed, I put down the book I was reading. "What happened to him?"

  "Killed in a fight in a bar," she said matter-of-factly. "Jimmy was ever one to seek out trouble, if it didn't find him first."

  Outlaws being much on my mind, I asked, "Was he an outlaw?"

  Fannie's familiar deep laughter roared through the room. "Lord, no. Jimmy wasn't smart enough to be an outlaw. He was just a troublemaker." And suddenly she was sober. "But I loved him.... I really did, and after that... well...."

  She shrugged, and I imagined that I was supposed to understand that the loss of Jimmy had sent her into the life. I didn't think much about that, because I was puzzling over the fact that Jimmy wasn't smart enough to be an outlaw—did that mean she admired Sundance for his brains? Was she, who always warned me against the outlaw's life, making a comparison I didn't understand? Was she going to be my rival for Sundance?

  She read my mind. "I don't know why I'm telling you this, except to tell you that you can't rely on any man to take care of you—I don't care if it's Jimmy, or Sundance, or Mr. Brewster, or that... what's-his-name from your hometown that told you to look for me. One way or another, they'll end up letting you hang for yourself."

  "Not Sundance," I whispered to myself. But even as I smiled at Fannie, I knew deep down that Sundance, too, would let me "hang for myself." Still, when your heart is determined, no amount of logic will change your course. Fannie knew that, and so did I. But we didn't talk about it.

  * * *

  One day toward the end of the summer, Mr. Brewster was in a particularly foul mood. There was, as far as I knew, no explanation for it, beyond the heat that depressed all of us. But he claimed his ham steak tasted "off" and the green beans were cold.

  "The steak is fresh cut from the butcher's this morning," Mrs. Brewster said in a soothing tone, "and I'll put the beans back on the stove. They sat too long while you attended to your toilet."

  He rose angrily from his chair, a hand raised in the air. "I won't have you saying it's my fault my dinner is cold." The raised hand came crashing down on Mrs. Brewster's face.

  Almost simultaneously, Susanna and Annabelle began to scream, although Mrs. Brewster uttered not a sound. She put a hand to her face, almost tentatively, then turned back to the stove. Mr. Brewster sat down in his chair at the table as though nothing had happened. But after a minute he looked at me and said, in an ugly tone of voice, "Can't you make them be quiet?"

  Inside I was quivering. Once again, Pa's face, leering over me, flashed through my vision, and I felt that cold, detached anger. The girls were looking to me, not to their mama, for reassurance, and I pushed the anger away. Boldly, I said, "Not as long as you hit their mother."

  Mrs. Brewster gasped, a sound of fear. Mr. Brewster's eyes flew open, and he started to say something. But I turned my back on him and shepherded the children, including the two still-screaming girls, up the stairs to the bedroom. I never knew whether or not I would have stabbed him if I'd had a knife.

  I didn't go back to the Brewsters after that day.

  "How can you abandon that woman?" Fannie asked indignantly. "She needs help."

  "She'll have to help herself first," I said, and my thoughts tilted sadly toward Mama and all that she and Mrs. Brewster had in common. I was beginning to see that dying had been Mama's way of helping herself, and I hoped it wouldn't be Mrs. Brewster's. Even more than I had needed Mama, those lit
tle children needed her.

  "If you've been helped yourself...," Fannie began, her tone preachy.

  I drew myself up. "I have been helped, and I'm grateful beyond measuring, but I helped myself first—if you want to put it that way."

  I'd expected indignation or anger, but once again Fannie's laughter filled the silence. "I guess you did," she said, "and you probably aren't the first one to justify murder as 'helping yourself.' "

  I thought of Sundance and the sheriff he shot in self-defense. Was it, I wondered, the same thing? Where and when did self-protection become lawlessness?

  * * *

  No job teaching in a small town materialized, and I did not have to leave Fannie's. In September I began to teach the younger children at the Ursuline Academy. Fannie made the arrangements without consulting me and then told me that Sister Theresa had hired me. Angrily, I told her that she was treating me like a schoolgirl, making my decisions, and that she had to let me grow up and take care of myself.

  "You will," she said with a shrug. "You start Monday at eight." And that was the end of the discussion.

  At first I dreaded going back to the academy, which, with a few exceptions, had always been to me a cold and uncaring atmosphere.

  Susanna Brewster would be in the class where I was helping, and I was truly glad to see her again. She came toward me diffidently the first day.

  "Miss Place? I'm glad to see you again."

  "Thank you, Susanna," I said, putting an arm about her shoulders. She was far more subdued than an eight-year-old should be, and her round eyes were wide with a kind of perpetual fear. "How are things at your house?"

  Even as she said, "Fine, thank you," she shook her head, her gesture contradicting her words.

  I knelt in front of her and looked her straight in the eyes. "I will do anything I can to help you, Susanna, you and your brothers and sisters. You know that, don't you?"

  She nodded solemnly, her gaze avoiding mine.