“And how’d she act after that, in town?” the hotelier prompted her.
“Just like nothing was ever doing. I’d see her in here and she’d say ‘Morning, dearie,’ like we was still the best of friends.”
Mrs. Kearney excused herself and went upstairs and we poured a couple of glasses of whiskey.
“Bear in mind that Mrs. Kearney also believes that the phantom of Andy Jackson comes to her in the night and satisfies her carnally,” he said as the door upstairs closed. “But who knows but there’s a germ of truth to that business with the Benders?”
I drank my whiskey, trying to remember if I’d seen the outline of a man drawn on the wall at the Bender home, then went upstairs to my own bed, for I had a long ride ahead of me in the morning.
As I lay in bed that night something got me thinking about the ring Juno had stolen from me, a small masonic intaglio which I would have liked to pass on to Clyde, who would never know the grandfather he resembled so strongly in feature and temperament. As a boy of seven I had surreptitiously removed it from my father’s finger as he lay in his coffin; knowing he would have wanted me to have it I felt no guilt for its purloining, but even twenty years hence, abed in the Cherryvale Hotel a thousand miles to the southwest, I could still feel the great relief I experienced then when the lid was placed onto Papa’s coffin and the evidence of my crime laid into the ground.
I returned from Fort Scott a few days later, on a route that skirted the Bender place by some distance. The winter remained harsh and dark, and once we had begun tearing the old saloon down in anticipation of the lumber I had ordered, I opened up shop in the open air from the back of an old wagon, an arrangement that suited neither me nor my customers. Like me they longed for the warmth of the stove and the shelter of the thin walls, and I sustained myself with the thought of the new saloon and its grand setting, and of the money it would pull in. There would even be a stage, upon which women might dance and sing, and Leval and I had even discussed the purchase of a piano for me to accompany them upon.
In the meantime I had tried to hammer out a deal with the hotel whereby I could have set up shop temporarily in their dining room, but despite almost ruinously generous terms from me they declined; the Barneses were opposed to liquor on general principle. Daily and nightly I stood in the open air, wrapped in the old buffalo robe, dispensing booze and growling at my clientele. Marc offered to pay young Horace Gleason to do it for me, saying that eventually I would have to abandon the tending of the bar to some employee or another, that it ill became the owner of a saloon of the higher grade to be seen working there himself. But I had little else to occupy myself with then, save the demolition of the old saloon; with a crow-bar I had ceremoniously pried away from the structure the first of the planks, and watching the creaking separation of the still-soft wood that Juno and I had nailed together was bittersweet. I loved that kind of physical labor even less than I did farm work, and chose to remain at my post as the wrecking continued.
Late one afternoon in January I stood at the wagon passing the time of day with a man named Paul Lowry. He was about my age, with a bald head and a luxuriant red mustache; he had lived in Cottonwood for more than a year, working at various jobs requiring limited skill, and he claimed to have worked as a copper in Boston before heading west. He hoped I could put a good word in with Tiny or Marc, who were discussing the establishment of an official police force. I wasn’t inclined to recommend him, since he was a mean drunk who picked exclusively on smaller men, and slow to pay his tab besides. He also drank on the job; as he stood there downing one shot after another of my lowest mark of rye, he was in Marc’s employ as a day laborer on the house. He and another man, a long-bearded Bohemian, had been sent to Cherryvale where a load of lumber had been offloaded from the train, and the other man sat fuming in the loaded wagon, refusing to join him in a drink and anxious to return to work. Unlike myself Paul seemed not at all flustered by the approach of his employer’s wife; while I found my pulse racing and my mouth going dry, he merely doffed his hat and smiled, then mounted the wagon alongside his sullen colleague.
Once he was gone Maggie, who carried over her arms what at first appeared to be a perfectly inert black dog, favored me with that off-center smile that seemed to be mine alone. She seemed to flush, though I thought it be the cold air on her face that made her purse her lips in that shy manner, pleased with herself for some reason she was anxious to tell.
“Good day, Bill.”
“Maggie.” I tipped my hat, embarrassed at its condition. “Cold enough for you?” I asked idiotically, robbed of my wits by an adolescent tightening of my chest and a tingling in my groin.
“That’s what I’m doing here,” she said, and she held out the thing in her arms. It was a beaver coat, long and finely cut. “That’s from me and Marc, it was meant to be a gift at Christmas, but it hadn’t arrived.”
I took it from her and examined it without daring a guess at its cost. “You already gave me a book,” I babbled, for want of something gracious or clever to say.
“A last-minute substitute, so you wouldn’t go empty-handed Christmas morning.”
“I much enjoyed it in any case,” I said. “I’m well into my second reading.” I put on the coat and buttoned it up against the wind. “Thank you kindly.”
“It’s been breaking my heart, watching you out here in the cold every day with just that old buffalo skin to keep you warm.”
Again I felt embarrassed that she saw me in such an unflattering light, and all I could think to say was “Thank you” again.
As she took her leave I noticed Hattie watching down the street in front of the hotel. Maggie greeted her as she passed, a greeting Hattie majestically ignored as she walked my way, her arms crossed in front of her and pressed in tight against her bosom.
“She’s spoiling you, Bill.”
“It’s from him, too, Hattie.”
“I don’t see him bringing it down to you. Bet you fifty cents he don’t even know about it.”
“And how could that be when he’s got to have paid for it?” I asked her. Three nights before Hattie had snuck out of her room and made her way to the forge, knocking quietly and throwing rocks at the side of the loft until I woke and let her in. She stayed up there under the buffalo robe with me until so close to dawn I was afraid she wouldn’t get back to the hotel before her employers did; the whole time she kept going on about how wonderful it was to be abed together the whole night, how that was the way man and woman were supposed to be, and further on in that vein. To me, all it meant was that I had swapped a whole night’s sleep for a quick screwing, and the more she went on about how cozy and nice it was the more I felt I’d made a bad trade.
Now she leaned forward, her index finger extended toward my face. “Anyway, I got news for you, Bill Ogden. Francis Comden at the hotel asked me to marry him.” I rarely saw Hattie in daylight, and now she struck me as homelier than she had before, rounder of face and duller of eye; this may have been the result of having just seen Maggie, whose countenance was the more beautiful for being slightly reddened by the chill. It may also have had to do with the harshness of Hattie’s emotion, which had pinched her mouth and eyes smaller than usual.
“Which one’s Comden, now?” There were two Francises at the hotel, and I didn’t know the family name of either. The first was the boy at the reception who loved Kate, the one whose beard had not yet started growing and whose voice still cracked merrily when he spoke; the other was a long-faced ex-rebel who never quit talking about the war. I liked them both well enough and thought in either case she’d have done well to accept.
“You know exactly who he is! Anyway, the question isn’t who asked me, it’s what are you going to do about it?”
“Do about it?” I was confused for a moment, and thought perhaps she wanted me to take a poke at him. “Do you mean to say you’re insulted he asked?”
“I mean what are you willing to do to keep me from saying yes?” When I made no an
swer she elaborated, “Are you going to make me a better offer?”
I could think of no reason why I would want her to say no to such a proposal, save the potential loss of the occasional physical release she offered me, and I would hardly let that stand in the way of the happiness of a girl I considered something of a chum. I knew that wouldn’t pass muster as an answer, though. “I’m already married, Hattie” was what came out.
“You’re indecent,” she hissed at me after a moment’s pause, then turned on her heel and ran back to the hotel. I might have followed her and tried to straighten it out, but a trio of livery workers was making their way toward me and they looked thirsty. When I’d served the three of them I looked up and saw that Maggie had been watching the whole time. She was across the street about a hundred feet away, staring at me with that odd half-smile, and she gave me a small, shy wave with her hand at her waist, as though she’d been waiting just to catch my eye, and then hurried on her way. I was delighted, or at any rate I was until I saw that she was walking toward Kate Bender, who greeted her enthusiastically. They walked off together in the direction of the Levals’ uncompleted house, and my heart dropped from my chest into my belly when I saw that they were arm in arm like the best of friends.
Once the farm’s bitter morning demands were met, my time was mostly taken up with operating the booze wagon and overseeing the construction of the saloon. During this same period Marc was occupied with myriad projects, grand and small, from establishing the Cottonwood Livestock Pen Company to annexing an unincorporated plot of land east of Lincoln Street. The annexation effectively doubled the physical size of Cottonwood, though its southern half was empty grassland. Already, though, the population of the town had begun to swell with word of the construction work his various projects offered, and Marc predicted that building would soon commence there as well. “Prosperity and growth are self-perpetuating, given the right sort of men to promote them at the start,” he said to me one evening, slightly in his cups. I had taken the evening off and Gleason stood in my stead, manning the wagon. Marc and I sat on a couple of empty wooden crates in the drawing room of his unfinished house with a bottle of brandy between us.
In the light of the lantern the unfinished walls of the house cast strange and ominous shadows, and Maggie had declined an offer to join us there. The wind whistled through the beams, and Marc laughed affectionately at his wife’s superstitious nature.
“That’d be the ghost of an Osage chief, there,” he said of a low moaning blast of air from the north. I laughed, too, but despite the fur coat’s warmth I wished we were back at the hotel. No fire could be safely built in the incomplete fireplace, and my fingers were stiff, their skin cracking as I rubbed them together. Marc was, or affected to be, completely unfazed by the temperature, and I didn’t mention my discomfort for fear of disappointing him. He was in an expansive mood, as he often was, and had just offered me a share of the Livestock Pen Company.
“I don’t have anything to invest,” I told him honestly. My investment in the saloon had been 100 percent of its existing equity, since all my liquid assets had gone into its construction. I had a little cash set aside from its running, and Marc was paying me a small salary now, but it didn’t amount to a tenth of what he was proposing to award me in the cattle pens.
“You’ll invest the sweat of your brow,” he said, and he slapped me on the back, then handed me the bottle. “You’re my friend, and in Cottonwood, Kansas, that’s enough to guarantee a place of honor.” He’d swallowed more than his usual fill that evening, and he was one of those drunks who get full of bonhomie and sentiment; it was true, though, that I was his only friend in Cottonwood. There were other educated persons in the town, but none he’d taken a liking to. Dr. Salisbury, our physician, had a solid enough background in the sciences and the arts, but he was a sot, and in his cups he railed bitterly at the fate that had brought him west, and often as not he dissolved into tears; we had a pharmacist of some learning as well in Archie Collins, but Archie kept to himself and didn’t seem interested in companionship or conversation; Tiny Rector’s wife Lillian had been educated at a fine girls’ school in New England, but she was tetchy and had to be handled gently at the best of times.
He sat back on the crate and turned around so that he could see the town through the frame of the house. “One day there’ll be streets named after us,” he said.
“Bill Boulevard,” I joked, but he didn’t laugh; in fact he got more solemn.
“Every town of any importance has great men behind it at its beginnings. We may not have founded the town, Bill, but you and I are the ones who’ll make it known to the world.” He sounded right then as if he were hollow, and only by being that great man could he fill himself up again.
“I guess that’s so, Marc,” I said, and he was quiet for a while. I handed him the bottle again and he took a slug.
“What brought you here?” he asked. “I know you staked a claim, but why’d you want to do that?”
“I wanted to make a living, I suppose.”
“Not much of a living, farming. You’re an educated man.”
“I suppose I wanted to be in at the beginning of things. Osage hadn’t been gone long, territory was practically empty. I guess I thought there’d be opportunities here to make a dollar.”
“Aha,” he said, pleased with himself. “And there weren’t many of those until lately, were there?”
“There was the saloon.”
“Aha,” he said again. “A man of vision who saw a need and filled it.”
“Well, the old saloon was gone by then. You had to buy whiskey from Tiny or George, and neither one of them’d let a man drink on the premises.”
“And so you quit farming.”
“Didn’t quit, exactly.” I, too, had drunk more than I was accustomed to, and the words I wanted weren’t forthcoming in precisely the way I wanted them to be. “Tried to quit.”
“Why don’t you sleep at the farm?” he asked.
I nearly told him it was none of his goddamned business, but the words were slow enough in coming that I was able to hold them off. “Too far to ride,” I said.
“You ride there in the morning,” he said. “What’s the difference from riding there at night? You could save yourself the rent you pay that smith.”
What he really wanted to know about was Ninna, I knew. He’d seen us together only once, at Christmas, and seen the way we acted with each other; not like a husband and wife, but like a man and a woman who didn’t like each other much playing at it for an afternoon. And of course he’d heard stories. What the hell, I decided; we’re comrades and business partners, Marc and I, and we’re drunk besides. So I told him about Ninna and the men, and why I wouldn’t go back now. He listened and nodded.
“You say she’s a Dane?”
“Born in Copenhagen. Her old man got into some sort of a scrape and had to leave, ended up in Columbus, Ohio, operating a photographer’s studio. That’s where I met her. I was learning the trade from the old man.”
“Why’d you marry her in the first place?” he asked.
“I was twenty, the war was over, and she was a big, healthy, pretty gal. Her old pa had a little money, too. Next thing I knew little Clyde was on his way and I was still working as her pa’s helper, tending bar after hours, working those kinds of jobs and trying to figure out something more promising.”
Marc handed me back the bottle. “Woman’s infidelity is so much more treacherous than man’s. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I haven’t been living the monastic life myself since I left the farm.”
“Still, she’d forgive you for it, wouldn’t she? But you can’t forgive her. It’s a different sort of treachery. Different in kind, not degree.”
I just nodded. We finished the bottle and left it standing there on the unvarnished parquet next to the crates, from which we then rose. Upright he proved to be drunker than I’d thought, and he nearly crashed to the ground stepping down from the ve
randa onto the lawn. Theirs was a large property and there was no one about as we crossed it, Marc veering from left to right and holding both arms out for balance, as if he were feeling about for a railing on either side. Abruptly he slowed and then stopped, and I stepped aside, having seen it happen a time or two tending bar. He knelt and spewed, finishing with a noise I first thought to be a whimper of self-pity, but which quickly revealed itself as laughter.
“I trust,” he said, “that my regurgitation will remain a confidential matter.” He kept laughing, and I helped him to his feet and we ambled over the lawn and crossed Seward and First Streets to the hotel.
There in their rooms Maggie sat waiting for Marc. The roughhewn sitting room was even more overstuffed than it had been at Christmas, its plain wooden walls completely obscured by furnishings too elegant for it by half; presumably the bedchamber beyond was similarly jammed. It wasn’t nearly enough to furnish the house they were building, though, and I had been told that there were three times this much houseware in storage and at least that much on order from back east. It was cramped, but the dry warmth emanating from the stove, specially installed for them, was deeply satisfying to a man who slept in a converted hayloft.
Maggie clucked at our drunken state and we helped Marc to bed, where he immediately began to snore. She stepped outside the door with me when I took my leave and whispered to me in the dark hallway.
“I hope you enjoyed yourself,” she said.
“Sorry about this,” I said, mistaking her quiet tone for one of reproach. “Didn’t realize how soused he was until he tried to walk.”
“That’s all right. Marc doesn’t really take much time for his own pleasure, he can get drunk once a year if he wants to.”
She was giving me that look, the one that made me feel certain the man we’d just put into bed wasn’t her husband at all; I just nodded, afraid that if I spoke I’d say something foolish. “Good night,” I managed to stammer, and I carefully picked my way down the staircase. I didn’t hear the latch of their door click shut until after I was out of her sight.
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 5