The Homesman

by Glendon Swarthout

  “You’re curious about that table.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It isn’t a table at all—let me show you.” She went to it and lifted the hood. “It’s a sewing machine!”

  “Sewing machine?”

  “A very recent invention. This is a Wilcox & Gibbs. Reverend Carter gave it to me last Christmas. It will stitch, hem, tuck, cord, bind, braid, quilt, and embroider. Just thread the bobbin and away you go—so they say.” She sent a glance at the women on her sofa, to see if the machine interested them. It did not. They had eyes only for Briggs, or other furnishings, or the distance. She replaced the hood. “I’m learning to use it as fast as I can—I give classes for my friends. But it’s very complicated.”

  Her words were only words. She stood by the sewing machine, Briggs in the center of the room. He realized he’d been standing around her parlor with his hat on. He took it off. And then it dawned on him it was time to go, that Altha Carter wanted him to go, needed to tend to her own business. She didn’t blow a whistle, but there was such a head of steam in the woman that, when she was stopped up, he could almost feel the pressure.

  “I’d better get a move on,” he said.

  Her silence agreed.

  “I sure hope they stay,” he said. “They might just up and follow me.”

  “I don’t think so, not now. I think this room will hold them.”

  He turned for the last time to the giddyup girls as they sat in a row, papers in their laps: Belknap, Petzke, Svendsen, Sours. He looked into each worn face, three of them old beyond their years, at each dirty coat or wampus, at each pair of cut and run-down boots.

  “Well, well,” he said to them.

  If there had been a clock in the parlor, it would have been heard to tick.

  “Oh, say, I forgot.” He dug into a coat pocket and brought out the square of cardboard and the pink cameo pinned to it. “I found this along the way.” He showed it to Mrs. Carter.

  “It’s lovely.” She smiled.

  “I thought I’d give it to one of you girls,” he said to them. “And I guess it’ll be Missus Sours. She’s the youngest and will have the most use of it.”

  He leaned and placed it in the girl’s lap on top of her kinfolk sheet, then straightened and stood hat in hands, turning it by the brim as though he didn’t for the life of him know what to say. He was confused again, not by a kaleidoscope of events in the present but by those in the past. He recalled how they had located the women one by one, he and Cuddy; how Petzke’s husband, Otto, had cried and carried on; how he and young Sours had chaired the girl and her rag doll up the side of the ravine to the wagon; how the husband Svendsen had put a rifle on him and Cuddy had countered with her own rifle so that they could get away; how he’d had to tap Vester Belknap on the noggin to teach him not to rankle a man with a gun; how Cuddy sat up high and spunky on the seat and talked his arm off between stops; and finally, after they had gathered the four and set out east, how the women had all of a sudden set to wailing.

  “This is goodbye, ladies,” he said. “You take good care of yourselves and do what Missus Carter tells you. You’re about home now.” He inclined from the waist as though trying to bow, then clapped on his hat. “Well, goodbye, ladies. God bless you.”

  He turned, awkwardly, and strode from the parlor and blundered through the doorway.

  On the stoop there were footsteps after him. It was Altha Carter.

  “They’ll be all right,” she assured him. “I want to say goodbye to you.”

  But he was moving. He climbed to the wagon seat, got hold of a bedroll, brought it down, and presented it to her. It was her bedroll, he said, Miz Cuddy’s, and there were some things in it she could maybe use, soap and clothes and so on. She said of course, and thanked him and laid it on the stoop. Then he said he’d been thinking. He had no use for the other bedrolls, or the wagon for that matter, or the mules, so he’d give them to her and the Methodist ladies to sell and use the money for railroad fares and whatever else. Was she agreeable?

  “Oh, Mr. Briggs!” Tears glittered again even though she smiled. “Am I agreeable? I’m delighted! How generous of you!”

  He was embarrassed. He unbuttoned his shirt collar. He said all he asked in return was that the Reverend Carter feed the mules some corn before he sold them. They’d earned it.

  “I’m sure he can, and will,” she promised. “How I wish he were here to meet you. Now you’ll be gone. Where, Mr. Briggs? Will you stay in Iowa or go back to the Territory?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you do go back, please thank Reverend Dowd for me and wish him well. And tell him, please, to stick a pin in your Territorial Legislature. They simply must build an asylum. We can’t go on this way, depending on a few brave souls like you and Miss Cuddy and Mr. McAllister last year.”

  “I will, ma’am.”

  She moved to him. “Then this is our goodbye. But I’m not here to say goodbye. I’m here to thank you. Give me your hands, please.”

  He gave them, and she clasped both and looked directly into his eyes over the tops of her specs. She said she would say to him what she had to Mr. McAllister. That he had done a splendid deed. He could be, and should be, proud of it as long as he lived. That most men were good, she believed, and decent, and honorable if given the chance to be, but men who did for others what he had done of his own free will were few and far between. In his own time and place and way, he, too, had been a savior.

  “I shall pray for you,” she said, gently, and bowed her head.

  Briggs did not bow his. He stood on one foot, then the other while she composed her thoughts. He fixed his eyes on the stoop in case his four friends followed him outdoors. The mocking bird still sang, and would sing the night through since it was spring. Evening lay over the small town and the river like a benediction.

  “God our Father,” she prayed, “bless this good man wherever he may go. Keep watch over him, cause Thy face to shine upon him, and bring him home to Thee one day. If he has done this for Thy daughters, do as much for him, for he has been Thy true and faithful servant. Father, I ask it in the name of Thy son, who also did Thy work on earth, died for us all, and lived again in glory. Amen.”

  Briggs’s stomach added a loud amen, and he turned red. He was starving hungry.

  Altha Carter raised her head, disregarded her hoop skirt, stood on tiptoe, gave him a smack on the cheek, hustled away and up onto the stoop, and spoke to him a last time. “I’ll go to them now,” she said, smiling. “I hope we meet again, Mr. Briggs, and soon. Goodbye.”

  So startled by the kiss was Briggs that he was struck dumb, and when he could have said goodbye she was inside the house.

  It was done.

  He was free.

  He stirred his stumps. First he saddled the roan, tugged his bedroll from under the tarp on top, and tied it on behind the saddle with his cowcoat. Then he went up front to the mules, sidled between them, and hung a friendly arm over the Thinker’s neck and one over the Worker’s. “Goodbye, you old pluggers,” he said to them. “You are the best damn mules ever came down the pike. May the Lord bless you with corn because you are His true and faithful servants.” He then untied Shaver, the gelding, led him alongside the roan, mounted up, untied his own animal, and leaned forward. “How about some corn yourself, Handsome?” he inquired into the horse’s ear, then wheeled him and kicked him into a trot. So glad was the hammerhead to hear the word “corn,” and to be loose at last of the wagon, that he let a long, joyous fart. Out the drive to the street they trotted, rider, roan, and gelding, out of the world of women and into the company of men, where they belonged. Briggs did not look back.

  THE

  HOMESMAN

  But they had no corn at the livery, so he ordered both animals a big feed of oats and a damn good currying and then, leaving his cowcoat and slinging saddlebags over a sh
oulder, stepped down the darkening street. He was worn to a fare-thee-well. He entered the Hutchinson House. There seemed to be nobody about. He noted one counter and six cubbyholes and six keys in them and no furniture. After a wait, he brought a fist down on the counter hard enough to wake the dead, and immediately a girl of fifteen or so gawked through a door from out back somewhere. Briggs was disgusted. The company of men, hell.

  “I need a room,” he growled.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Best one in the house.”

  “That’ll be No. 5, sir, upstairs.”

  “Well aired.”

  “Yes, sir. Two windows.”

  “No ticks.”

  “Oh, no, sir. And how long’ll you be with us, sir?”

  “As long as may be. How much’ll you soak me for the room?”

  “Dollar a night, sir.”

  “I’ll want meals.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who’ll cook?”

  “My mother.”

  “She don’t seem to draw much trade.”

  “She’s a very good cook.”

  “I’ll be the judge, young lady. Let’s go.”

  The girl lit a candle, took the key, and led the way upstairs. Briggs observed she was barefoot. The room was decent enough, supplied with a small table and chair, a whiteware pitcher and washbowl and soap and towels and mirror, a high-post bed, a peepot under it, and lace curtains at the windows. Briggs dropped saddlebags on the bed, threw up both windows as far as they would go, and sat down on the bed to test it. With her candle, the girl lit one on the table.

  “Bed’ll do,” said Briggs. “I want a hot bath. Where is it?”

  “Down the hall. Fifty cents for the bath, sir.”

  “Start heating water. After that, serve me supper in here. I’ll have a side of beef, a hill of fried potatoes, half a loaf of white bread and butter, and some coffee. Real coffee.”

  “That’ll be seventy-five cents, sir.”

  Briggs gave her a sergeant’s scowl and, in so doing, actually saw the girl for the first time. He was shocked. His eyes began to sting as though there were tears in them. Double her age, darken her hair from auburn to black, put shoes on her to get a couple inches of height, and add forty pounds of flesh, and Jesus—Mary Bee Cuddy alive and breathing. Right now she was thin as a rail, all knees and elbows and backbone, but her shoulders were wide and her face plain as an old tin pail and her eyes looked through you to your shady side. He could see her someday riding a horse and teaching school and good with a rifle and living alone, no man man enough to marry her, and yes, God help her, one day brokenhearted and hanging from a tree.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Tabitha Hutchinson.”

  She wore a faded muslin dress with short puffed sleeves, clean enough but frayed at the neck and two sizes too small.

  “Hutchinson. Tabitha. All right, Miss Hutchinson, you have your marching orders. A bath and supper, the sooner the better.”

  “Yes, sir.” A spark of fire in her eye and she was gone.

  Briggs lay on the bed listening to Tabitha Hutchinson stumble upstairs with full buckets and downstairs with empty and looking around at the room, his room. It was magical to be in a real room again, with four walls and ceiling and windows. He would never again root-hog as he had the past few weeks, damn the pay or the reason. He had given enough. It was his turn to take. For a while at least, he intended to live off the fat of the land.

  A knock at the door, and he went down the hall, stripped, and washed his body and hair in a tin tub with hot water and soap and groans of pleasure, and dried himself with a thick towel. He thought it absolutely the best bath he had ever had.

  When he returned to the room, the table was set with his supper, and he lit into it. After he had sopped the plates with a crust of bread and got rid of some gas and picked his teeth with a matchstick, he thought it undoubtedly the best meal he had ever eaten.

  He locked the door then, blew out the candle, took off his long johns, opened the bed and lay down on it on his back with his legs spread and his head on a pillow, let fresh air waft over him, pulled a clean cotton sheet up to his hips, and closed his eyes.

  For twelve hours he slept the sleep of one who has done a splendid deed.

  • • •

  In the morning he thought it surely the best sleep of his life.

  He banged a boot on the floor till Miss Hutchinson, the go-ahead girl, stampeded up the stairs and took his order for breakfast.

  By the time he had snorted and dressed and spat his catarrh out a window it was on the table: four eggs, more potatoes, a stack of rind bacon, some fried bread, a piece of dried-apple pie, and a pot of coffee. He ate with appetite. The only thing lacking was one shot of whiskey for digestive purposes and a second for the well-being of his soul. Whiskey could wait, however. He had a busy day ahead of him, and a busier night.

  Going downstairs, he used a fist on the counter. “Tell me, Miss Hutchinson, where I can buy myself some new duds.”

  “Duds?”

  “Clothes.”

  “Oh. We have two general stores. I guess I’d go to Keppler’s first.”

  She had quit sirring him and started looking him over—the gun under his belt for one thing. He wondered if she would snoop in his saddlebags.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “And is there a stonecutter hereabouts?”

  “A stonecutter?”

  “Man who makes gravestones, markers, and such.”

  “Oh. I’ll ask my mother.”

  Briggs waited.

  She reappeared. “She says to see a man named Janz. He’s down the street south, not too far. There’s gravestones in front of his place.”

  “Janz,” repeated Briggs. “Thank you.”

  He took his leave and walked first to the barbershop, where he got a shave and a haircut and some information for two bits. According to the barber, one Thomas Hutchinson had started the Hutchinson House but wasn’t doing very well with it and so, being a carpenter, had hired out to work upriver on a building at the Upper Mormon crossing, and came home when he could. Meantime his wife ran the hotel, their daughter helping out. Tabitha, Briggs said. The barber thought that was her name.

  Briggs then strolled the street south. There was next to nothing to see. The principal activities in Hebron, he speculated, must be quilting, swatting flies, singing hymns, twiddling thumbs, and thumping the Bible. Why, there was a hell of a lot more going on in Loup, and compared to this jerkwater town, Wamego was practically Philadelphia.

  The stonecutter advertised his trade with a few unmarked stones in front of his place, a kind of shed attached to a small house, and Janz himself was a small, elderly man with a beard that would make a fine broom. Briggs told him he wanted a headboard. Oak or walnut? Briggs asked the difference. Two dollars more for walnut, Janz said, because it looked nicer. Walnut then, Briggs decided. And what did he want on it? Ten cents a letter. Briggs told him. Janz wrote out name and inscription and did some figuring and said the job would come to fourteen dollars and ten cents, make it fourteen even. Briggs said that was mighty steep. Janz stroked his beard. Briggs said all right, dammit, get to work, he’d be by for the board that evening. Janz said he’d have five dollars on account. Briggs tried to stare him down, but Janz played with his beard and in the end had his money.

  Briggs meandered back to the livery, saddled both horses, and trailing Shaver, rode north on the river road toward the ferry crossing. He’d no sooner trotted out of town than he met the U.S. Cavalry riding south, three of them, two officers and a non-com. The Dragoons were no more, he’d heard, having been cut down by Washington into ordinary cavalry. At the sight of the detail he broke into a cold sweat but slumped in the saddle and pretended to be woolgathering, and the military passed by without incident. Even if they had suspected, and
taken him in, they’d have had no “Briggs, George” in their records. Turning in to the first stockdealer’s he came to, he jawed away an hour selling the gelding. The trader wanted to swap him a snide for his sound animal, a mare with worn molars, a sweeneyed shoulder, and a blind left eye, but Briggs wasn’t swapping, he was selling, and eventually made that clear and eventually got twenty dollars for Shaver, saddle thrown in.

  He returned to town then, stabled his roan, and went straightaway to Keppler’s, a general store. Here he advised them he wanted new attire, skin out, top to bottom. They were pleased to oblige. In the course of the afternoon he tried on, in the back room amid bolts and sacks and barrels and boxes, and selected a black suit identical to the rusty one he had lived in all winter, plus a shirt, long johns, a hat in the same style as his old slouch, and two pairs of rugged socks. A new pair of boots he balked at, claiming them too damn dear. Furtively, while the clerk was totting up his bill, he transferred his greenbacks and the banknotes to the inner pocket of his new coat, stuffing the extra socks into a side. After he had paid, and was asked what he wanted done with his old clothing, he said to give it away to someone in need and deserving. On the way out, in his new raiment, he bought several boxes of cartridges for his repeater and for Cuddy’s rifle. He then left the store, about-faced, and went back in to buy some Star tobacco. He then left the store again, about-faced, went back in again, and consulted with the clerk. How much for a fancy pair of young lady’s shoes? High-button or high-laced? Which was the fanciest? High-button, and what color? Color? White, black, or brown? Which was the fanciest? White. Three dollars. Three dollars! For a pair of shoes? That was right. Briggs scowled and considered. Did he, the clerk, know a young lady named Hutchinson, folks ran the hotel? Yes, she came in to Keppler’s now and then. Briggs handed over one, two, three dollars. All right, the next time she showed up, fit her a pair of white, high-button shoes. The clerk said he would. Briggs said he had the money, he had damn well better.