by Pete Dexter
For every passenger the company lost to highwaymen, three of them killed each other. Or froze. It was not ordinary arguments that led to most of the gunplay, however, it was stomach problems. And in spite of Northwestern's rules, the casualties stayed constant.
The violence was built in. The huge Concord coaches were hung to their frames on leather braces to smooth the ride, and the motions that resulted were unfamiliar to anybody but children, who were used to swings, and trapeze artists. And there was something instinctive when a man threw up on your feet, even if you were on the edge of doing the same yourself, that made you want to shoot him. Especially if you were on the edge of doing the same yourself.
The stage stopped sixteen times between Cheyenne and Deadwood, for meals and fresh horses, and passengers were served hard-tack, beans, and pork at each stop as part of the forty-four-dollar fare.
It was the pork that gave Agnes Lake summer complaint. It tasted tainted, but she'd eaten it anyway. She'd paid for it. She sat stone-complected now, between a peddler and a farm boy, staring across the aisle into the face of a man named Captain Jack Crawford, who said he was returning to Deadwood to settle accounts with the killer of Wild Bill Hickok.
The man on Crawford's right was smoking cigars. She judged that he did not mean it to be offensive. He had a silver flask in his hip pocket, which he somehow timed to finish just as the coach came into each new station. Each time he drank, he offered it around the coach. It was a rule of the Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company.
And each time he offered it to the man named Captain Jack Crawford, the captain retold a story of promising his mother on her deathbed never to allow liquor to pass his lips. Agnes Lake did not drink whiskey herself, but the captain was pushing her in that direction.
She did not complain out loud, though. Not when he told the story of his promise, not when he told the story of his friendship with Bill Hickok. "If only I had been present when it happened," he said. And she noticed the awkward places he fit that into his story, and knew him for a liar.
He looked at her now and saw her discomfort. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, ma'am," he said, "to have a regurgitation. I have seen the hardest men in this country caused to do the same until they got their sea legs."
She stared at him, unblinking. Agnes Lake had cold eyes, but the captain was immune. "If you want, I could signal the driver to stop," he said. "He'd do it, on account of you being a lady." Everyone except Agnes Lake and the captain had already been sick, and the inside of the coach was sour enough now so the senses did not need Captain Jack Crawford's further suggestion.
The other passengers moved in their seats, trying to put it out of mind.
"I am quite comfortable," she said, looking into his eyes. She cramped, low in her stomach, and broke into a sweat. Her eyes were steady and calm. She had fallen once from the trapeze, thirty feet to the ground, and seen herself on the way down. She had seen other things too; some of them were comical. You never knew exactly when you would hit the ground, but that hadn't made her afraid to look.
And she stared into his eyes. The things that made Agnes Lake afraid—the things that had always made her afraid—were things that she couldn't see. She crossed her legs now, relieving the cramps, and looked out the window.
Captain Crawford watched the outline of her big legs under the skirts and then looked out the same window. "This is the richest country in the world," he said. "I've been from one end of the map to the other, ma'am, and this right here is the richest and the wildest and the best."
Agnes Lake stared at pine trees and wondered how the place had looked to Bill. Some of his letters—there were eight, and she carried all of them in her handbag—sounded like Captain Crawford, and some of them, when she thought back over them later, were telling her that he was dying. She knew she should never have let him out of her sight.
Agnes Lake was forty-two years old when she married Bill. She had been to Europe and Africa and Egypt, and to every city in America of sufficient population to attract a circus. She walked the tightrope and performed on the flying trapeze, and did tricks on horses that no one else did—man or woman. She could stand on a saddle horse at full gallop. With her own horses at canter, she could do flips on their backs, forwards and backwards. She was born with balance everywhere in her body, and had known it since she was three.
She was as strong as most men, but it was unnoticeable except in her legs, where she was stronger than any man. Bill had liked the muscles of her calves and told her not to be ashamed. He would find her like that out of nowhere, and touch her heart. No one else had ever seen that she was ashamed.
And he could say that one moment, and the next he would be staring at the sky, expounding on the nature of the problems it caused to be famous, like there was some secret to it that only the two of them knew. And that was as far from her interests as the moon.
"Are you able to continue?" the captain said. She brought her gaze back inside the coach and saw he was pale. She smiled now, but the smile seemed to bring back her cramps. "It wouldn't be any inconvenience whatsoever to notify the driver to pull over," he said. "It's been a long time between stops."
When she didn't answer, the captain leaned across the man with the flask and put his head out the window. He shouted twice, and she heard the driver shout back. She could not decipher the words, if it was words they were shouting.
As she watched, the trees on the side of the coach where Captain Crawford was conducting his conversation with the driver got closer. Then there was a sudden drop, as a wheel went off the road, and then the back end of the coach was going sideways and the driver was shouting at his horses. She heard the panic in his voice, she heard it as the horses themselves would hear it. Something fell past the window—she glimpsed it in her side vision—and then the farm boy next to her fell into her lap.
The coach lost a wheel and dropped again, farther this time, and she watched the faces across the aisle. She was not afraid. Captain Crawford rolled into the aisle and covered his head, and the boy in her lap began pushing against her legs, trying to right himself. His hands touched her thighs, but in the confusion and noise he did not notice their structure. The man with the flask and cigar fell into the aisle on top of Captain Crawford, and the boy rolled off her lap and joined them.
The coach hit a fallen tree and stopped. She saw it all; the others lay in their seats and on the floor, waiting for another concussion, until the driver opened the low-side door. Then they began to untangle themselves and open their eyes. Captain Crawford was first out of the coach. He stepped past the driver without a word and headed into the bushes.
Agnes Lake was last out, and as she stepped into the fresh air she was pleased to hear the captain vomiting. The driver took her hand as she came through the door. "Careful, miss," he said. "It's a tricky balance."
She smiled politely and disengaged her hand. Agnes Lake did not enjoy the touch of skin. She walked behind the coach, and then to the front. The horses were lathered and excited, and one had been blowing blood from his nostrils, probably for miles. None of them seemed hurt, although the larger of the lead horses was cut on both legs.
The messenger had fallen off fifty yards up the road, and when she looked he was limping toward them, cradling a muddy shotgun. She studied his face and saw it was fortunate that he was warranteed gentlemanly.
"When I looked, you was gone," the driver said to him.
The messenger saw Agnes Lake watching them and smiled when he spoke. "When you looked at what?" he said. "You sure as hell wasn't looking at the road." He nodded to her then, and touched his hat, which was muddy and squashed. " 'Secuse my language, ma'am," he said, showing teeth.
"You was asleep," the driver said.
The messenger nodded to Agnes Lake and touched his hat again. "Perhaps we ought to walk into the woods a little ways and discuss it," he said.
"Perhaps you goddamn right we ought to," the driver said. He was not warranteed, and under
no obligations to watch his language. They went into the trees, and Agnes Lake walked back up the road toward the place where the accident began. The wheel had come off where the messenger did—the tracks left the road back there and a trench began a few yards beyond. The loose wheel had rolled to a rest against the slope in the ground.
The axle had dragged through the mud for twenty yards or so, and then hit the tree that stopped it. She noticed the thickness of the pine, thinking one of the horses could have broken a leg. The axle had torn the bark off the tree trunk and wedged itself between the trunk and the biggest branch; you could not lift the axle without lifting the tree.
She felt the cramps again and walked back to the coach, keeping the hurry out of her steps. She found a toilet kit in one of her traveling bags. She crossed the road—the opposite side from Captain Crawford and the driver and messenger—and found a place to take care of herself.
When she returned, the other passengers, including Captain Crawford, were standing together beside the coach, talking about Indians. The messenger and the driver were still in the trees fighting. The man with the flask took a drink but, removed from the coach's regulations, did not offer it around. In the woods, the driver screamed once. The farm boy who had fallen across Agnes Lake's lap jumped at the sound of the yell. The captain noticed it and laughed.
"That's not Indians," he said. "That was a bite. I'd say a finger, most likely." And he winked at her. Agnes Lake felt a crawling come over her, and made herself move to keep it from settling.
The peddler and the man with the flask sat on the ground against one of the coach's remaining wheels. They each lit cigars. The noises from the trees were slower now. Agnes Lake noticed the captain watching her again. His eyes went down her body to her feet. His gaze was not the rudest she had come across, but it was plain enough in its intention, and she felt the crawling come over her again. She moved away.
Those gazes always made her move. Not the men themselves, but the intentions.
Agnes Lake was forty-three years old, and could have passed for twenty years younger anywhere there were farm women for comparison. She had always eaten fruits and stayed out of the sun. It was the sun and absence of citrus that aged women. She saw them everywhere in their hats on their way to church, baked and washed out, sitting in wagons with their farmer husbands and four or five barefoot children. The work had turned them old too. It seemed to Agnes Lake that, more than the work, they shrank under the weight of knowing it was always there to do. She saw these women and pitied them, turning old in the fields, still bearing their husbands' children. It seemed to her that at the least, the husbands could notice what they had done to their wives' looks and leave them alone at night.
She knew, though, that there were things between farmers and their wives that she didn't understand, and never judged them openly.
The captain's gaze found her face, and he smiled. The feeling ran fresh over her body, and she moved again to keep it from settling. She did not want to wake up in the night feeling that look on her skin. She walked past him and climbed onto the driver's seat of the coach. The horses stirred and she calmed them with soft words. "Here, now," she said.
She found the toolbox under the messenger's seat. The lock was broken. There were two hammers inside it and a mallet, a bottle of Huron City mineral spirits and a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla, a blond wig, and a small axe. Under the wig were a dozen modern cartridges loose on the floor of the box. There was no saw.
She took the axe and the mallet and jumped to the ground, landing as softly as if she had been dropped there by the wind. The others noticed the jump and regarded her in a new way. None of them moved. She put the tools on the trunk of the tree next to the axle of the coach and walked back up the road for the wheel.
She set the wheel on its rim and rolled it back toward the coach. It was not dissimiliar to setting Bill on the vertical and walking him to bed. The trick was all in the balance. The captain took off his hat and moved to help her, and doing that, he stepped in front of the wheel. It bounced into his legs and then dropped onto the ground.
"Let me help you with that, miss," he said. He retrieved the wheel and winked at the others. "Now," he said when he had it up, "where were you taking it to, anyway?"
"This will do nicely," she said. "If you would just hold it." The captain smiled and held the wheel. She turned her back on him and picked up the axe, and went to work on the fallen tree.
She started at the base of the branch where the axle was caught, cutting down twice, then once across. The limb was a foot thick and the wood was still fresh. The sap streaked the axe blade, and the air filled with its smell.
Agnes Lake cut with short, accurate strokes. She guided the axe into the base of the limb, but did not try to do its work. The power came from the top of her swing, and seemed connected in some way not only to her arms and shoulders, but to her back and legs., Captain Jack Crawford stood behind her, holding the wheel, holding his smile. The man with the flask seemed to toast her before he drank.
There was a rhythm to her work. There was the sound of the axe hitting the tree—two down and one to the side—and a little gasp just before, as she sent it down again and again. The wood caught the axe on the deeper cuts, and she pried it out, and then returned the blade to the same spot, as if to punish it. The wood came out in wedges and flew up over her head.
The others watched, and in a quarter of an hour the sound of the axe against the tree changed, and a few strokes afterwards the limb holding the axle broke loose from the trunk, and she pushed it away.
"A woman that can wield an axe is a gift from God to her husband," the captain said, smiling again.
She was perspiring now and damp-backed. It was a good feeling, after all the hours cramped inside the coach. "If you would be kind enough to bring the wheel to the other side of this tree," she said, "I believe we can repair the coach."
Captain Jack Crawford looked at the axle and shook his head. "It's too low to the ground," he said. "Half a foot at least."
The peddler got up off the ground and looked too. "I'm afraid he's right, miss," he said to her. "When the driver and the messenger come back, we'll have to rig a pulley to lift it up." She did not answer them. The cramps returned, and she walked across the road and found another place in the woods.
The summer complaint gave her chills, and she began to shake, feeling her skin against the damp dress. She stayed in the woods a long time, until the sensations eased. When she came back to the coach, the driver and the messenger had finished their business. She noticed the way they regarded each other and knew it was not over for good. From their looks the messenger had gotten the best of it—the driver's left eye was closed and he'd taken a fearful bite on the cheek, while the messenger was only dabbing at a bloody nose—but she had been hurt herself, and knew that the worst injuries did not always reveal themselves to others.
The men had rolled the wheel next to the empty axle and were measuring the distance they needed to lift the axle—and the coach—to slide the wheel back on. "It's half a foot, at least," the captain said.
The messenger gave him a long look but kept his thoughts to himself. He was warranteed polite, in emergencies as well as when events ran normal. "If all the men lifted, we might get it up, boys," the captain said.
The messenger closed his eyes. The new Concord coaches were built as heavy as banks. The driver spit blood. "We ought put the horses in there and lift them too," he said. "Or just wait for a train; and we could pick up that."
"We're seven able men," the captain said. He went to the axle and gave it a meaningless tug. The driver wasn't watching. He looked into the woods and finally spotted a narrow, smooth-skinned tree with gray bark, and he went for that with the axe.
It took him about as long to drop the tree as it had taken Agnes Lake to remove the branch. His work was not as pretty as hers, though, and he missed the spot often. Once he missed the whole tree. Agnes Lake stood away from the men, studying the axle
and the wheel and the ground.
Presently, the driver cussed and the tree fell. He took the branches off the trunk, and then cut the last ten feet off the top. "What we got to do," he said when he was back, "is to wedge this here under the axle and lift the coach up whilst one of us fits the wheel back on."
Before there was time for objections, he moved behind the coach to find a spot to place the tree. There was no boulder or tree stump there to use as a fulcrum for the lever, so the driver placed the thick end of the tree under the coach, and everyone but the messenger and Agnes Lake found a spot on the tapered end and pushed up.
The wagon moved forward a foot or two, and then rocked back to the spot it had been. "We got to have more back in it than that," the driver said. "It's a long walk in if we don't."
"All right, boys," the captain said, "on the count of three. Wild Bill and I once pulled a full-grown moose up a hundred-foot gully, just the two of us, on the count of three. This problem here is child's play, compared to that."
They blocked the front wheels and pushed again, and the back end of the coach rose an inch or two, and then dropped. "Son of a bitch," the driver said.
They tried again. The coach came up, the same inch, and then dropped. "We got to build a goddamn pulley," the driver said. All the passengers except Captain Jack Crawford let go of the tree. "One more time," the captain said. "We can get it, boys."
The driver looked at the messenger for the first time since Agnes Lake came out of the woods. "I hate the ones that enjoy an accident," he said. The messenger held on to his ribs.
"Pardon me," Agnes I^ake said, "but there's a spot twenty yards up the road—"
'"Secuse me for sayin' so, ma'am," the driver said, "but we got a situation here, and need quiet to think it out." It was quiet for a minute or two, and then the driver cussed and they all lined up again on the tree and pushed until the peddler fell on the ground and the driver's nose bled. "Son of a bitch," he said.