The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “If you’re going in for that kind of drinking,” Nichols said, “save some of the capacity for the other side of town. That’s where Coffee and Clauson went from here Friday night. I’ve an ulcer, myself, but I’d like to go in the company of a drinking man, at least.”

  “Okay,” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

  He finished his drink and laid fifty cents on the bar. Nichols took his overcoat from the piano stool where he had dumped it. “See you later, Mac.”

  The barkeep nodded, and set the bottle on the backbar.

  “Do you know that guy’s story?” Nichols said while they were walking, “He was in the I.R.A. in the old country. Escaped over here after Easter Week, and then went back. He still had a price on his head. Somebody informed on him, and the whole family he was staying with was massacred. He ran down the informer himself and shot him, then got out of the country…. Now what I want to know is how a guy like that winds up in Winston, running a pub.”

  “I’m not going to say he was lucky,” Phil said.

  “Furthermore, he has a soft spot in his heart for Mrs. O’Grady. That’s where Coffee stayed, isn’t it?”

  “It is. I’m staying there now.”

  “Do you know where I’ve found a room? In the loft over the fire station. Wait till I put that in on the expense sheet.” Nichols rambled on. “The constable’s rounding up a jury for the coroner’s inquest in the morning, by the way. They’re going to make a real show of it, by all the signs. The coroner collared me a few minutes ago. He as much as told me to keep my nose clean. And when somebody says that to me, I’ve got a damn good notion to stick it where they don’t want it. All right, McGovern, what’s eating you?”

  Phil was scarcely listening, but the last words broke through his thinking. “I don’t know. Kind of knocked out, I guess. The shock and all.”

  “Lady Bountiful’s got her claws in you.”

  Phil looked at him.

  “Yes, I mean the one in mourning up to two inches below the knee. And that isn’t dirty, on my part at least. I’m referring to style, manners and decorum. Is there anything in Emily Post about how to act at your husband’s funeral? If there isn’t, she can ghost that chapter for her.”

  “What the devil’s gotten into you, Randy?”

  Nichols puffed out his cheeks and then burst his breath into the frosty air. “Then you are in love with her. I suspected that first thing this morning.”

  Was he? In all honesty, Phil could not answer that himself. He said as much to Nichols.

  “All right. I’m going to say something I’ve said before, kidding. I mean it now. A woman’s most dangerous when she seems the most helpless. Call that cynical, but like all cynicisms, there’s a strong element of truth in it.”

  “For the person expounding it, at least,” Phil said. “Look, Randy. I don’t want to talk about Margaret. That’s my problem. What else have you picked up about Dick?”

  “Not much. More about the Clausons—that magician and his daughter. The townspeople hold them in very low affection.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re different. That’s all. See this section of town—the names? There’s a bill of fare there on the restaurant—goulash. We’re in Slav Town. Have you any notion what these people went through when they migrated to Winston? The old priest that used to be here threatened half his parish with excommunication because they wouldn’t attend the same services with the Slavs. Bread and butter, McGovern. When it’s threatened, look out. The lambs eat the goats.”

  “What kind of security do the Clausons threaten?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s one of the things I want to find out. If Coffee was working on a social problem here, I’ll wager he wanted to find it out, too.”

  “Possible,” Phil said.

  “Mind, I’m not saying he was working on a social problem. From what I’ve heard, I’d say he was his own problem…. And here we are at the Sunnyside.”

  They stopped a moment and looked at the dust-clad building. “Aptly named,” Nichols said. “It reminds me of an old watchman at the Tribune. He didn’t know night from day except that he could read the racing form by one of them. They called him ‘Sunny.’”

  The Sunnyside had a family entrance. There was a restaurant at the back of the tavern, and the smell of onions all through it. It was deserted when they entered, the oilclothed tables like so many mushrooms at the rear of the room. On the backbar mirror, the words ACCORDIONIST SATURDAY NIGHT were waxed. “We must remember that,” Nichols said. Where the piano stood at McNamara’s there was a juke box here. When no one came, Nichols took a nickel from his pocket and went over to it. He got a flying polka. “I’ll bet if I played it blindfold, I’d get the same thing.”

  A man came from the kitchen, wiping his hands on an apron, at the sound of the music. “Yes, gentlemen? That sounds too bad, don’t it? Do you mind if I turn it down?”

  “Turn it off. We just wanted to get your attention.”

  The proprietor disconnected the machine. “It’s so peaceful in the afternoon. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like milk,” Nichols said. “Whiskey, McGovern?”

  “Make it two milks if you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind?” If they had ordered a Stump-lifter, which was also advertised on the bar mirror, the proprietor could not have been more pleasant. “I will get it from the kitchen. I don’t have ice here.”

  They watched him amble to the rear of the building, drawing his finger along a table, looking at it, and wiping the dust on his apron. He seemed very tired, but it was probably the way about him all the time.

  “I wonder what’s wrong with him,” Nichols said. “Most tradespeople here have been in the mines at one time or another, and had to leave them. I suspect in the long run there’s more money to be made in them than there is in business.”

  “Not to hear the women talking up at Lavery’s this morning,” Phil said.

  “Maybe. I guess one hand washes the other. There’s only one of the three collieries in the town digging now, I understand. The population’s been dropping off here, too. During the war it was about twice what it is now. The new migration. Where do they go from here?”

  Phil shrugged.

  The tavern-keeper returned with the milk. “Fresh,” he said. “You are strangers in Winston?”

  “Good milk,” Nichols said. “Yes. We’re friends of Dick Coffee, the man who…”

  “I know the man. I did know him, that is. You are here for the inquest?”

  Nichols nodded.

  “I have just been told to appear at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. The sheriff. It disturbs me. I do not like to be called on by the sheriff.”

  “Routine questioning probably,” Nichols said.

  The man shook his head. “I maybe shouldn’t have served him liquor that night. It’s hard not to serve when people are friendly. I am a friendly man. My wife is friendly. We like people who laugh to come here. We like it, the way our children like to play.” He motioned with his hands to illustrate the naturalness of it.

  “They were on good terms then, the old man and Coffee?”

  “They were very congenial.”

  “I wonder why McNamara kicked them out then,” Nichols said to lead him on.

  “My friend, this town is full of superstitions. The Irish, you know, are very superstitious people. Then there is the Number Three Colliery. Most of our people work in Number Two. Number Three is very old. There are people in town whose grandfathers worked in it. They feel it…” he fumbled for the words, “…it has life.”

  “But Clauson,” Nichols persisted, “he’s never had anything to do with the mines?”

  “No. But he is a magician. Maybe they think they have caught him in a trick.” The man spread his hands on the bar, the cleanest hands Phil had seen in Winston. “My friend, people do not seem to care if they are tricked a hundred times a day, if once in a while they can catch someone in a trick. Maybe it’s human natu
re. Maybe they think they have caught him in a trick…. I talk too much.”

  “You talk sense,” Phil said then. “What kind of a mood was Coffee in Friday night? Did you know him before then?”

  “He was in a couple of times before that. A nice man. A little sad, maybe, but nice. Friday night, he was…” again he fumbled for the words. He made a gesture with both hands indicating high spirits. “He was trying to convince Mr. Clauson his daughter was the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Quite a trick, from what I’ve heard,” Nichols said.

  “Not with a father, my friend. He agreed with him, but seemed to disagree—just to lead him on.”

  “And this is the testimony you’ll be called on to give tomorrow morning,” Phil said.

  “I will be asked to tell what I have heard, and I will tell it. But I don’t like it.”

  Chapter 10

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, Phil drove back to Mrs. O’Grady’s with his luggage. Two men, obviously coal miners, were washing in the back kitchen, stripped to the waist. They neither looked at him nor spoke as he went through to the kitchen. There, the widow was clattering the lids of pots, and the pots themselves, on the range. She liked noise, Phil thought. In a way it was a symbol of activity, and the symbol was as close as she came to it. She put a big spoon into the girl Anna’s hand when she saw him, and bade her baste the meat until she returned.

  She hobbled into the living room ahead of him. “It’s the room at the front of the house,” she said. “Right over our heads here. Warm yourself there at the stove before you go up.”

  He set his suitcase down and took off his overcoat. It was a cosy hodgepodge of a living room—oak furniture, leather-seated with hand embroidered pillows flung about, lace curtains, a pendulum clock. A large bay window was piled high with ferns, African violets, delphinium, and plants he had no notion the names of, a jungle of hanging, creeping vines and stalwart blades.

  “Whatever’s bad in them, there’s a bit of kindness in all gardeners,” she said. “You’ll find that about me.”

  He smiled and moved to the stove, its glass door glowing. She was following his eyes to take in every item they rested on. He looked up then to a picture that hung over the sofa. This was the instant in his observation she had been waiting for.

  “There’s not been a man like that one walk the earth since he left it,” she said, gesturing with her cane. The mild-faced O’Grady looked down upon them from the faded picture, a little uneasy about the eyes. It might have been the first picture he ever posed for. Or the uneasiness might have come from the tightness of his high celluloid collar.

  “A fine looking man,” Phil said.

  “You’re wondering how an old hag like me could ever engage a man like that.”

  Indeed he had been wondering the other way about. O’Grady hung there without a line of worry in his placid face. Phil turned and met the dimming eyes of O’Grady’s wife—fifty years later. “I imagine you were a very beautiful girl,” he said, meaning it.

  “You’ve a fine imagination then,” she said. “Sit down there a minute. She’ll put their supper up to them.”

  She lowered herself into a rocker. Instinct told him not to attempt to help her. The little peh of pain escaped her. Then she smiled, showing good teeth for an old woman. “Tim was killed in the great cave-in in nineteen-one, and us married three weeks. There was seventy-one men lost that time. The farmers brought their wagons from all around, and you could hear the hammers on the coffins all night long.”

  These were the stories told in Winston, Phil thought. They were sung out by the firesides like sad songs, or told like the beads of a rosary, over and over again.

  “We laid them out ourselves in them days. And if you could have heard the sermon Father Duffy preached, God rest his soul! He was a fine man, and not like the one we have now who wouldn’t bend over to brush a fly from a baby’s face… I can still hear Father Duffy that morning.” Her own voice rose, but the harshness was gone out of it, and the sound was like keening:

  “‘Their faces are blackened and their eyes streaming red tears, but their souls are white as the morning…and at last they go marching, hand in hand. Would God they walked that way on earth…’”

  She rocked to and fro, an old childless woman, approaching childhood herself again.

  “There’s a long and bloody history to Number Three,” she continued more naturally. “They say there’s near the size of the streets of New York down there, and some of them not traveled for fifty years.”

  “And there’s trouble there again,” Phil said.

  “Trouble, and maybe no trouble at all. Kevin Laughlin, the poor soul. We all knew he was a bit daft, but nobody had the notion where he’d go wandering through the mine. It was the safety men going through found him. He was away off in a part hasn’t been worked for years.”

  “Was he a miner?”

  “Once he was, and he knew the diggings from a long time back. They say he went in an entry hadn’t been used for years, and there’s some say he went in thinking to die. The things you can remember at my age. I remember when he was married, the girl just coming off the boat. They were kids, the both of them, and they had one of their own in no time at all, and before that one was crawling, another was on the way. Well, the baby took terrible sick one day, and the wife went down to look for Kevin. The foreman wouldn’t send down for him, for his shift was due up in an hour. Well, the girl hadn’t the sense she was born with. She went round to another entry. Nobody knows how she got in, but to make an unfortunate story short, she was crushed by one of the loading cars.

  “Kevin was never the same after that, and the baby died of the flu. That’s the time it was—the epidemic after the first war. He worked around for a while, but he began ailing and the doctor said he was tubercular. So he went off one day. A few years later he came back, and stayed a while working, but he wasn’t up to it. He drifted off again.

  “We never heard a word of him for another ten years, and then one morning this old tramp, and that he was, showed up at the parish house asking for Father Duffy. Father Duffy was gone himself then. Father Joyce took him in, I’ll say that for him, and gave him an odd job around the church to keep body and soul together. But his mind was wandering, and he was always talking about the mines.”

  She sighed. “It wasn’t much of a shock to us, him going that way, with the gas backing in there from the new blasting.”

  She pulled herself up then. “Well, you’ll be wanting your supper.”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. O’Grady. I’ve work to do for the office. I’ve got to finish the story I was doing in Chicago, and get it off on the night train.”

  “Then you better get a move on,” she said. “The night train leaves at seven-thirty, and it’s five now. I’ll put something on the back of the stove for you.”

  Later that evening he was sitting in the living room, sleep heavy upon him. To fight it off, he smoked incessantly. The two regular boarders were listening to the radio—solid, contented-looking men who reminded him of the farmhands on his grandmother’s place, except for their complexions, the pallid faces of men who spend their days underground.

  Mrs. O’Grady sat among them, crocheting. For a while, Phil watched her, marveling at the dexterity with which she maneuvered the thread over her stiffened fingers, but the monotony of the movement made him even drowsier. When their eyes met occasionally, the old woman would wink at him, and he would shift positions and hang on. As well as sleep, he was fighting his thoughts of Margaret, and the desire to see her.

  Now and then one of the men would grunt at some amusing word from the radio, and exchanged looks with the other to see if he also enjoyed it. Phil’s presence was no more to them than a cat’s on the sofa. At nine o’clock they got up, and while one turned off the radio, the other knocked his pipe out into the coal bucket. Night in, night out, this was their routine. This and a Sunday movie, and good, solid food were their pleasures, and the world go han
g, for they were not unhappy men.

  “You’ll hear the big fellow snoring in five minutes,” Mrs. O’Grady said when the men had gone upstairs. “It’s the most penetrating sound you ever heard in your life.”

  Phil went to the stove and flicked his cigaret into it.

  “You burn the coal up that way, opening the door for nothing,” the widow said.

  “Sorry.”

  “You’ll know the next time. You’ve the need of something to put a stick in your back. Go in my bedroom there and look in the cubby behind the basin. I’ve a drop I keep for colds and the like. Bring it and a glass.”

  Phil did as he was told. Finding the bottle, he went to the kitchen and brought two glasses from the cupboard. How many times had Dick done this very thing, he wondered.

  “Pour it,” the widow said. “And as long as you brought the extra glass you can give me a drop.”

  She watched him like a parrot from its perch. “Put enough so’s we’ll taste it, itself.”

  Phil poured them each a stiff drink.

  “What’s she doing tonight?”

  “Margaret? Resting, I guess. The inquest is set for nine in the morning.”

  “Wasn’t I given a summons?”

  Phil sipped his drink. Mrs. O’Grady emptied hers in one pull. “I have to take it down for I can’t stand the taste,” she explained.

  “Mrs. O’Grady, what was bothering Dick while he was here in Winston? He wasn’t much of a drinker, and yet drinking seems to have been the only pleasure he had here.”

  “Oh, he had other pleasures,” the widow said, drawing her lips tightly over her teeth. “Off gamboling in the hills with that goatherd, and her with a husband. But I’d not blame him for that. I don’t blame the man.” She leaned toward him. “I blame the one sleeping up there in the room above him tonight. She’s come now when he’s gone.”

  “There was no place for her to stay in Winston, even if she’d been asked to come with him.”