Telegraph Days: A Novel
Page 21
Later, when the plates had been cleared and the menfolk had gone off, I asked Jesse what the fight was about.
“Nothing—it was about nothing,” she said. “It was just time for a fight.”
The casual way she addressed it cheered me up a little. Maybe my spat with Zenas was the same sort of thing. Maybe it was just time for a fight. I had my suspicions about how Jesse and Jack made up too. There had been some steady creakings from upstairs that Cody and I tried our best to ignore and, officially, did ignore.
I had the usual bills to pay and telegrams to answer, so I let Zenas alone until after lunch.
I suppose it’s a mistake to allow yourself to believe that human beings are consistent. It’s normal for couples to have fights, as Jesse had candidly pointed out—and it’s also just as normal to get over them and make up. I assumed that’s what would happen with Zenas and myself. I didn’t like being slapped in public and I wouldn’t have liked it much better if it had occurred in private. Still, wrong as it was, I was prepared to forgive him, so I lured him into my boudoir for that purpose. I tried to seduce him—what better way to make up, as Jesse and Texas Jack had demonstrated?—but Zenas just stood there, looking about as friendly as a clam. He just stared at me coldly, as if I were the Witch of Skye, or some other bad witch. He made no move to kiss me, and when I started to unbutton his pants—one of my favorite things to do—he shoved my hand away.
Still, I determined to take a patient course. I was determined to bring Zenas back from whatever swamp of jealousy he had sunk himself in. I tried a little light kiss and he turned his head away. I tried for the buttons again and again he shoved me back, by which time my patience was rapidly wearing thin. I was beginning to get the feeling that something was really wrong.
“Zenas, stop it,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re in love with Colonel Cody, ain’t you?” he charged.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Bill Cody’s a married man.”
In fact the accusation stung me.
“Now, don’t lie,” Zenas said. “He brought you up here from Rita Blanca—he pays your salary—he lets you live in his house—he even gave you his power of attorney!
“If that ain’t love, what is?” he added.
“It isn’t love, it’s business! Business! That’s what it is!” I insisted.
“Bill Cody’s only been here three days since he hired me. When he brought me here he promptly left for two months! I work for him! I’m not in love with him.”
Zenas wouldn’t accept it—he wasn’t giving an inch.
“I thought you slapped me because I was chatting with Warren Earp,” I mentioned.
“Oh, that oaf, who cares about him?” Zenas burst out. “I doubt that fool can even read.”
“He can’t,” I said.
“I guess Cody kisses you,” Zenas went on.
“Zenas, Bill kisses all the girls he meets,” I told him. “It’s his way of shaking hands—or maybe he thinks it’s his duty as a big star. He kisses all the girls—at least all the pretty ones!”
I began to realize that our problem was bigger than I had supposed. Zenas wasn’t jealous of Warren Earp, he was jealous of Bill Cody, and Bill Cody was my boss!
Once I thought about it I realized it was something I should have expected. Zenas was a young scribbler, almost unknown, whereas Bill Cody was the most famous scout in the West—one day soon he’d probably be the most famous showman in America.
Besides which, as Jesse Morlacchi had pointed out, Cody was handsome as a god. The plain truth was that I would have been in love with Bill Cody if he’d let me be. And since I was working for him, maybe I still would fall in love with him, sometime in the future.
At least I was beginning to have a better grasp of the problem. Bill Cody had trapped me, just by giving me his trust. I lived in Buffalo Bill’s house. I did his work. Even if Bill Cody only showed up in North Platte ten days out of the year, it would still be something that would naturally spook a young man of Zenas’s age.
I suppose in Zenas’s eyes I was the damsel in the tower, with Bill Cody her knight in armor.
“I’m not in love with him,” I repeated, but rather tonelessly this time.
But Zenas had raised a big question and we both knew it.
“If you ain’t you will be one day,” Zenas said.
He left that afternoon.
BOOK IV
Tombstone Days
1
I STUCK IT out as Bill Cody’s majordomo for nearly four years, during which time I sent a mountain of telegrams, wrote a mountain of letters, and signed a mountain of checks, all on Bill’s behalf. I subscribed to three financial papers, and I read them, the better to do my job. At my best I managed to keep the Cody enterprises solvent about three quarters of the time. But no one could really control Bill Cody, financially or otherwise. He wasn’t indifferent to my expertise. He praised me lavishly and he gave me a big bonus at the end of every year. He continued to smother me with kisses when the mood struck him, which was frequently. But it went no further than kisses, just as I had told Zenas.
Otherwise, of course, he went his own way—went his way to such an extent that I began to dread the mails. Bill would involve himself in a silver mine in Arizona or a tourist hotel in Colorado or a dude ranch in some remote part of Wyoming. I wouldn’t know a thing about it until the bills began to come in. There was always a flood of bills—sometimes a tidal wave of bills—and yet, mostly, I was able to pay them promptly because of the big income Bill brought in with his performances. The first Wild West he put on, in Omaha, made plenty of money, even if it was really only a half circus, with a Western skit or two and a lot of trick riding and acrobatics. As long as Buffalo Bill himself was in the arena, on his white horse, waving his hat or busting a few glass targets, the crowd could hardly stop cheering. Warren Earp showed up and promised to ride Monarch again, but this time the buffalo won the contest. Warren Earp was thrown so hard that he was in the hospital for two weeks—Cody let me stay and nurse him, which was nice of him. I offered to hire him again, when he got well, but his brothers had too tight a grip on him and my offer came to naught.
The fact that such a big crowd turned out for the Wild West in Omaha convinced Bill Cody that his idea had been sound, despite the fact that this first effort was imperfect in Cody’s eyes. He needed Indians, he needed a stagecoach, he needed a trick roper or two and a sharpshooter with some crowd appeal.
At this time Bill Cody was possessed of boundless energies—he’d work all day and all night, training a horse, auditioning ropers, or doing whatever else it took to improve the program of the Wild West. In only two years, by a process of trial and error, he formed a troupe that was the equal of any that had ever been fired in the Hippodrome or any other arena. Annie Oakley, a petite woman who soon put all the other sharpshooters deep in the shade, became his biggest star—but he found quite a few others. Pretty soon he partnered with a fine manager, Nate Salsbury, to organize the travel and secure the dates, and a press agent named John Burke to stir up interest in the newspapers and bring out the crowd.
All the while, as Bill Cody’s Wild West became the talk of America, I sat in my office in North Platte and dealt with the problems of at least a dozen enterprises that Bill had started up or invested in or something. Now and then Lulu arrived and inspected her lucrative real estate. I had been buying up Nebraska at a steady pace, a fact which delighted Lulu Cody. We never had a quarrel. Sometimes Bill would show up, with Jesse and Texas Jack; sometimes Mr. Salsbury and Major Burke, as the press agent was called, would visit between tours. I liked them both but left them to their own devices. I was not fool enough to suppose either of them would be content to take orders from a woman. They ran the Wild West, I ran everything else, and the arrangement worked fine.
When Zenas Clark left my company that fateful day, I realized that I had accidentally trapped myself. Zenas was just the first to see it. I was not Bill Cody’s
mistress—I was never his mistress—but for several years, there was always the possibility that I might become his mistress if the circumstances were right. Bill was rarely fully sober—when we were together in North Platte there was always the chance that the fever might overcome us. Bill might decide he wanted more than a few kisses, or a look at my titties.
It never happened—but it might have happened. Lulu Cody knew it and chose to leave it alone. Jesse Morlacchi knew it and didn’t care. Who did care were my suitors, beginning with Zenas Clark. Zenas had a certain confidence, but not enough to allow him to suppose he could compete with Buffalo Bill. I doted on Zenas Clark, and had from the moment I met him. He was a fine, devilish lover and we might have had a lot more fun if Zenas could just have got Bill Cody off his mind. And yet I couldn’t really blame Zenas for feeling as he did. Bill Cody was a force of nature—he was one of the largest personalities of his time. He had done much of what he claimed to have done—been a frontier scout for fifteen years, ridden with the Pony Express, and been under fire from some hot, formidable Indians. He wasn’t bogus, and few young men would have felt up to competing with him for a woman or anything else, but especially for a woman.
In North Platte I was the main woman.
Bill Cody left two days after Zenas and I had our fight. Over time I forgave Zenas for his hasty departure, but if he had just waited Cody out we could have had a lot more fun.
It was not the end of Zenas Clark in my life. We would meet again in a distant desert—when we were together we were thick as thick. In a way I was grateful to him even while I was missing him: he did more than anyone to show me what a tight trap I had caught myself in by agreeing to be Bill Cody’s majordomo.
2
I WAS TRAPPED, in a sense, but fortunately I am too active a woman to accept permanent entrapment. I had signed on with Bill Cody for a term, but I hadn’t signed on for life.
You wouldn’t think it, but I had even begun to miss Rita Blanca. Jackson and Mandy had not been idle: they had two toddlers, both girls, and another on the way, so, besides missing Aurel Imlah and Mrs. Karoo and my little telegraph office, I was even missing out on being an aunt. I slowly began to realize that I had more that was my own in Rita Blanca than I was ever likely to have in North Platte, where I was a well-kept vassal but a vassal nonetheless.
As the telegraph lady of Rita Blanca I worked for myself while performing a service for the whole community.
In North Platte I worked only for Bill and Lulu—mostly Bill—and I am too independent a woman to spend my whole life writing someone else’s letters and paying someone else’s bills. Of course, as Cody’s representative, I was in the thick of civic life in North Platte, such as it was. I sat on all the councils, advised the Major, headed the school board, had the preacher to Sunday lunch, and did all the responsible things a pillar of the community is supposed to do—it left me bored. Of course, the civic fathers greatly preferred me to Lulu, who mainly gave them the back of her hand. The women envied me, for pleasures I never had, and the men envied Bill, just because he was Bill.
The first person I told, when I decided to quit, was Ripley Eads, my old chaperone, who had prospered greatly in North Platte. He owned a nice little clapboard barbershop and cut so much hair that he had to hire a second barber to assist him. He had married a lively little Cheyenne woman and was in the process of developing a sizable family.
“Ripley, do you ever miss Rita Blanca?” I asked, with my usual directness.
“Nope, can’t say I miss the place,” Ripley said succinctly.
“I miss it. I’m thinking of quitting Cody and heading back.”
Ripley looked stunned.
“Quit Cody?” he asked. “Why?”
“Boredom,” I told him. “The fact is that I’m bored.”
“But you’re said to be the highest-salaried woman in Nebraska, which is a good old state, in my opinion.”
“It may be a good old state, but I’m leaving it,” I announced. “Since we’re old compañeros, me and you, I thought I’d ask your opinion.”
“Which you got.”
“Yes, which I got, and it’s about as useful as a mud sandwich,” I told him.
Then I went straight to the telegraph office and sent Cody a cable giving sixty days’ notice. He was in San Francisco at the time, and the troupe was rolling in money, from all reports. Jesse Morlacchi wrote me, mentioning that they had sold four thousand dollars’ worth of tickets in one night, which is fine box office in anybody’s town.
Of course, when Bill Cody got my wire he went through the roof and immediately sent me this wire:
DEAR NELLIE YOUR TELEGRAM WAS A BITTER BLOW STOP YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY FAVORITE DARLING STOP I LOVE YOU LIKE A DAUGHTER STOP IF THE PAY IS TOO LOW I’LL RAISE YOU STOP PLEASE RECONSIDER STOP COMPANY PROSPERING LOVE BUFFALO BILL
I immediately wired him back:
DEAR BILL I LOVE YOU TOO STOP BUT I’M LEAVING NORTH PLATTE IN FIFTY SEVEN DAYS STOP DO NOT BOTHER UPBRAIDING ME BECAUSE MY RESOLUTION IS FIRM LOVE NELLIE
Two weeks later he stepped off a train in North Platte. He hadn’t told me he was coming but I was not surprised. He did his best to sweep me off my feet and got red-faced and flustered when it turned out that my resolution was firm. The man, of course, was very used to getting his way.
“But, Nellie, you’re all I’ve got,” he declared, several times. “You’re my steady anchor. Without you I’ll be ruined in a week.”
“Tosh, all tosh,” I told him. “You’ve got Mr. Salsbury, who’s a capable man.”
Then the fool pretended to cry—he’d mastered the trick of crying on demand in his acting life. If so, he hadn’t learned it well, because he wasn’t really crying—he snorted into his handkerchief while pretending to boo-hoo.
“If you can’t act any better than that I’m surprised people come to see you,” I told him. Even Gretchen and Sigurd were amused by his weak performance.
“Oh, folks don’t come to see me because I can act,” he said, giving up on the crying. “They come to see me because I’m Buffalo Bill.”
Then he dropped the histrionics and became the friendly man who had won my affection three years ago in Rita Blanca.
“I suppose the real trouble is that you can’t find a suitable boyfriend, living way out here,” he said.
I didn’t bother lying.
“You’re right, I can’t find a suitable boyfriend,” I admitted. “Give or take a cowboy or two, I might as well be a nun.”
“It’s because they all think you’re my gal—am I right?” he asked.
It irritated me to admit it—but of course it was true.
Bill Cody looked me in the face for a very long time. I believe he was trying to decide whether to let himself fall in love with me. There we were, a private pair, in a big house full of comfortable beds. He kept looking at me and I began to feel that maybe this was the day—maybe the man was finally going to seduce me. He had already kissed me several times. My susceptibilities had begun to stir. Would he take the final step?
“Oh, Nellie, I think we better not,” he said, “though you’re the peach of peaches and the fairest of the fair.”
I was disappointed, but I held my tongue and didn’t reproach him.
“I’m a better friend than anything else, Miss Nellie,” he said, in his fondest voice.
Then he sighed a heavy sigh.
“You’re right to leave—I just hope you’ll allow me to call on you from time to time, in big emergencies,” he added meekly.
“What I need, you see, is a friend for life,” he added. “I reckon that’s you, if it’s anybody.”
“It’s me, Bill,” I said. “You’ll find me a steady friend.”
Then Bill did leak a tear or two, a genuine tear or two, and I did the same.
Then and there Bill Cody wrote me out a check for two thousand dollars—no small amount of money in that day and time. We exchanged a good tight hug and that was that.
3
But I wasn’t yet a writer when I left North Platte, and my normal tendency was to blurt out everything and let the feathers float where they may.
I worked out my full sixty days, got myself packed, booked our train for Dodge City, and made provisions for a wagon and horses to await us there. Cody assigned Lanky Jake and grumbling Sam, the Dismal River cowboys, to escort me back to Rita Blanca. Jakey and Sam fully approved of me because I had managed to sell that worthless cow operation, whereupon the third cowboy, Ned, disappeared, but he crossed my path again many years later, when I was making a sightseeing trip to Death Valley.
Jakey and Sam had been working for me in North Platte anyway, tending Bill Cody’s diverse and unruly menagerie, which included buffalo, elk, antelope, longhorn cattle, and even a llama. Nobody liked the llama and the llama liked nobody.
Of course the town gave me a big send-off: there was a farewell dinner in which most of the civic fathers got drunk and wept all down their white shirts when they tried to make speeches about how much I had contributed to the growth of North Platte, Nebraska.
Bill Cody had showed up for my farewell dinner, of course. He made a long speech about how brilliant I was, and what a treasure. Then the band played and Cody and I waltzed all alone on the stage. He was wearing his best white buckskin suit, and looked fine as ever.
When the waltz was over and the cheering quieted down Bill clapped his hands and a little brown man about the size and color of one of Ros Jubb’s sepoys came tripping out carrying a velvet box on a satin pillow. He made a deep bow and offered the box to me.