by Peter Bowen
“Friends, family, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply touched by your warm welcome (why can’t you mind your own damn business). When I left here twelve years ago I never dreamed it would be so long before I was back among you (and you ain’t seen nothing in the way of absences yet). It warms my heart (and I will warm Texas Jack Omohundro’s balls) and gladdens me that you would remember me (and when I find the bastard or bastards who sold you this pack of lies ...) and turn out today to welcome me. It has been a long journey but a worthwhile one and I must repair to my mother’s home and the bosom of my family and listen to what has transpired in my absence. (How many god damn nieces and nephews am I hung with?) The Plains Indian Wars are over (we poisoned and diseased ’em out) with the capitulation of Chief Joseph.”
Cheers! Hoorahs! Huzzahs!
“Thank you friends for such a warm welcome.” (I hope Texas Jack fries in hell.)
I tried to make a run for it, but nothing would do but these giants I remembered as grubby little buggers of brothers must bear me in triumph to the ancestral hall, nearly beating my brains out on the signs hanging from the storefronts in the process. I smiled and thought of what I was going to do to Texas Jack Omohundro.
I was deposited in a disheveled heap on the front porch of our modest white frame house and I turned to wave to my admirers. There was one man on horseback at the back of the mob. He was so tiny he looked like a jockey on the thoroughbred he was riding. He waved at me, he waved a foolscap notebook. He took off his hat and waved that. It was George Hanks, correspondent for the Hartford Courant. He smiled and spurred his horse. I smiled and waved. All right, George, I thought, I deserved that.
Dinner was laid on. The house was crowded with people who were related to me, more than half of whom I did not know. Was this slender beauty with the sad brown eyes my little sister Dierdre? Yup. Had two kids and was married to a dull-looking fellow named George—had a hardware store and a sawmill. So forth and so on. There were several hundred copies of a pulp tract supposedly authored by me, and I was to sign it. I wouldn’t, because it was a pack of lies. Sad faces, especially the young boys. I was about to set the record straight when I caught my mother’s eye across the room. She shook her head no. (Dear family, for the last twelve years I have been slaughtering buffalo, slaughtering Indians, whoring, looking for stolen gold, poisoning wolves, and watching dyed-in-the-wool fools in Army blue hack to pieces people who hadn’t any idea what we meant with those words on the treaties anyway. It’s been downright ennobling.)
I was placed at the seat of honor at my mother’s right hand, and long-thought-out arrangements for the kids were put into effect with only minor snags, like one of the four-year-old boys dropping a pitcher of lemonade and sending gouts of sweet sticky liquid and shards of ice into one corner of the sitting room like a cannon shot. I like that kid, I thinks; definitely shows promise. (I’d seen the look of evil on the little bastard’s face before he faked stumbling.) Wonder who he is?
The room grew silent and everyone looked down the length of the main table. A cadaverous-looking parson, with a face that suggested he lived entirely on a diet of codfish with the bones in, rose to say grace. He cleared his throat and began a squeaky peroration which addressed the sins of the world while the food chilled. It took twenty minutes—and two sharp kicks from my mother, who caught me looking at a quart relish bottle in front of me and figuring elevations and trajectories—before he was done squawking.
When this vulpine leech had finished and the hubbub and clank and clatter of knives and forks on plates full of cold food began, I leaned over to my mother and said, “Ma, what in god’s name is that?”
“The Reverend Dr. Spaulding,” my mother said. “He is the head of the St. James Academy for young women here, and highly thought of in the community.”
“Are any of my sisters in school there?”
“Yes, your sister Camille. And two of your brother-in-laws teach there. And he holds a note on the farm.”
“Oh,” I said, “how much of a note?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“Why did you mortgage the place?”
“We had a fire, and three bad years of crops, and your brother Robert was ill and finally died, and he was the only one old enough to do the work.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t even notice that Bob was gone.”
“Twelve years is a long time.”
I looked down at the Rev. Mr. Codfish-with-the-bones-in and smiled, receiving a wintry grin in return.
So went the day and the evening. At last, all but Camille, my mother and myself were gone to their respective homes.
“I’m going to buy your note,” I said, when Ma and me were sitting before the fire.
“I don’t know if he will sell it to you, Luther,” she said. “He’s horrible, and he has proposed marriage to me. He came here about eight years ago, when the academy was founded. He has money of his own and Church of England money, too. His hold on the town is extraordinary. He seems to have an uncanny instinct for where his money will give him the greatest chokehold on the community.”
“So that’s why he was at dinner?”
My mother nodded.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. The fire crackled low and I studied it long after she had gone to bed.
13
I BOUGHT THE NOTE from the Reverend Dr. Spaulding the next day, with no trouble. I thought the matter was over, and went hunting for grouse with two of my brothers. The matter was not over.
It seemed that both my brothers had opened their law practices without the usual beggaring partnership with an established attorney. The good Doctor had advanced them money at a stiff rate, and taken notes on their homes and some odd lots of property around Oneida that the family had owned since the first one of us showed up hereabouts in 1716. I was beginning to take a strong dislike to the man.
Curious as to why a man of the cloth should be so heavily involved in usury and such decidedly unspiritual matters, I moseyed on down to New York and paid a call on the Bishop. The Bishop concurred that yes, Spaulding was an ordained minister, and yes, he had founded the St. James Academy for Women, and as to the peculations he’d no idea and, since no church funds were involved, no interest in the matter. I was shown the door, wondering what his cut was.
I stayed in New York a week, looking here, looking there, amazed at the sheer energy of this most frazzling of our cities and ports. I went to Broadway and to the burlesque. I spent a great deal of time at McSorley’s, eating white onions and good bread, and drinking a good deal of porter and Irish whiskey.
When an Indian goes hunting, he dreams of what it is that he hunts. He dreams buffalo, or deer, or wapiti, or birds. When what he dreams of comes, then the dream and the hunt are both finished. I dreamed of the Reverend Dr. Spaulding. I was not ready to return to Oneida. So I went to Lake George and spent a couple of days on the Sagamore eating and drinking and sleeping and watching the lake get ready to freeze.
The first morning that I was on board I emerged from my stateroom only to be promptly bowled over by a short young man with glasses a half inch thick and a display of ivory so dazzling I would fear for him if he were to go to the Arctic. This was the first time I met Teddy Roosevelt. We were groping around in the half light trying to find his specs. The specs had gone overboard, we decided, and so I led him back to his cabin where he kept a gross or so of the things for occasions such as this, which were frequent in occurrence.
I liked him. He had been asthmatic and sickly, and had built himself up by a regimen of exercise that would have killed me. He was forever braining himself with Indian clubs, or lifting weights until his joints cracked, or some damn-fool stunt. He fell overboard three times in one crossing of the lake, because the day was choppy and his glasses got blurred. I kept near him, to toss him life rings and life lines and such, and fetch another dozen pairs of specs as needed. He wouldn’t drink anything with alcohol in it, but wouldn’t say why. (Years later I
found out that his older brother, Elliot, had killed himself with booze.)
Teddy came bursting into the grog shop one afternoon, wriggling like a pup smelling his first bird, and said, “You are laggard, sir, laggard in telling me that you are the famous scout, none other than Yellowstone Kelly. Laggard!”
“Theodore,” I said calmly, “my name is Luther Kelly. I have on occasion scouted for the Army, and so have several hundred other men.”
“I must come out west! You must guide me. Capital!”
I looked at the row of gleaming teeth. Oh dear god, I thought. Oh, shit.
“You simply must guide me on a hunting expedition!” he went on, his face a faint ruddy glow behind them monstrous choppers.
I had a bright idea. It was such a bright idea that I signaled for another drink. I’m even dumber than I look, and on those rare occasions when I can make a leap the size I was now looking at, it just makes me glow all over.
“Theodore,” says I (one learned quickly that calling Teddy “Theodore” had a calming influence), “let’s go back to the taffrail. I need some of your help.”
“Just say the word,” says Teddy, smiling, me thinking that if you just planted the fool’s feet in concrete he’d make a splendid lighthouse. His damn teeth made my eyes ache every time a light hit them.
“I have this problem,” I began, and I explained everything about Oneida, Spaulding, and my mother to him. He looked grave, very grave.
“Seems a bad business,” says Teddy. “I shall telegraph Mr. Root at the next opportunity. A very bad business. Yes.”
“Give me enough of a head start so I can be in Oneida,” I says.
We parted at the dock of Lake George Village, and I caught the train to Schenectady, Utica, and finally Oneida. It was well after dark before I stomped up the stairs at my mother’s place. The house was dark above, and brightly lit below. I went in, stomping the wet and the snow from my boots. The floor in the hall sounded hollow as a drum. My moustache was wet from my breath, and I could still hear the wheels of the little inter-city passenger train, a double tunk-tunk so soporific that a smart dentist might have put his shop in one of the coaches, to save his customers pain.
It was the wheels must have done it, for I was putting my coat on a hook when it suddenly swum up through my brain—I could hear my mother’s voice, breathless and angry, and some scuffling sounds in the parlor.
Spaulding had been pawing away at Ma, and was so far gone in the bug-eyed snorts that I could have knocked the door flat and he’d have paid it no mind. I stalked into the parlor and wrapped my arm around his neck with my fist in the back of his head, the way you take a sentry quiet-like, and he went limp in my arms in a few seconds.
My mother sat on the couch, and tried to remedy her mussed-up state as best she could, automatic gestures, while she made herself breathe deep and slow.
“Luther,” she said in a hoarse whisper, “don’t kill him. I know you have killed, I can see it in your face.”
“I’m taking this bastard to the jail,” I said, “and no, I won’t kill him.”
She nodded.
I carried Spaulding over my shoulder to the porch—for all of his height he didn’t weigh no more than a sack of spuds—and I hitched up a little bay mare to the poles of a sleigh. Upstate New York gets more snow than the Missouri headwaters, if you leave out the mountains above nine thousand feet. It was sleighs from November to April.
There was one sleepy-looking Irish constable at the desk, and the sounds of a couple of drunks trying without much success to harmonize baritone and tenor pukings in the marble disorderly conduct tank, or St. Pat’s Cathedral, as it was known in Oneida.
I explained what had brought me standing here with a black clad scarecrow over my right shoulder, and the Irish kid scuttled off up the street to fetch the sergeant, who was thawing out his tonsils in McGillery’s Saloon.
The sergeant came back at a run, and he had a fire like Coran cor Amaran burning bright below his thick white eyebrows.
“Molestin’ that nice Mrs. Kelly, is it?” he growls. “How like the Church of England. This way, sor, if ye don’t mind.”
The sergeant led me and my offal back to a cell, and I tossed the bastard down on the bare springs like so much sour laundry.
“Ye’ll bring yer mother in to prefer charges,” says the sergeant.
“You know Mrs. Kelly,” I says. “By mornin’ she’ll have forgiven him. But keep him in overnight, if you would, since I’d gladly kill the bastard, except that Mrs. Kelly—my mother—made me promise that I wouldn’t.”
I went home, and stayed up well past dawn, too angry to sleep. Ma hadn’t had liquor in the house since Pa left, but I did have some emergency Tanglefoot in my Gladstone, and I made hot toddies and then cold with water, and then straight out of the bottle. I still couldn’t sleep, drunk as I was. I stared out of the window and wondered how soon I could go away to where I felt comfortable, out where all there was to talk to was the wind and your horses.
Ma got up, and looked as fresh as though nothing had happened. She bustled about in the kitchen and made coffee and sweet rolls and three kinds of eggs. I ate damn near all of it, and went back to my chair and my brooding. I felt the dread twitch.
“Oh, god,” I said out loud, “damn it to hell, No!”
Gout. I may tell you that I don’t drink out there because it spoils my distance vision (which it does) or makes me a bit less keen (which it does), but the real reason that I don’t drink out there is that after a couple of weeks I have the world’s most painful big toe. It swells up, and gnats coughing in the next valley over send jolts of pain like Morse pulses up my leg and into my brain. I keep telling myself not to blow the goddamn toe off with my buffalo rifle. I chant that like a canticle at times.
Ma heard my moans and curses and came quietly into the parlor, looking with concern upon my empurpled face and the murderous expression in my eyes. How do you murder your own toe? There is no god, gentlemen.
“Luther,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron, “whatever is the matter?”
“I am ... having ... an ... attack ... AARGH ... of the ... gout, Ma,” I says, straining the words through my clenched teeth.
“Mrs. Eddy says that it is all in your mind and you must have faith and tell yourself that it doesn’t hurt.”
“Why don’t ... you go ask this Mrs. Eddy ... OOOOOH ... if she’s ... ever had the ... AHHHHHH ... GOD DAMNED ... GOUT!”
“Luther, you are swearing in my house. And to answer your question, I think that if Mrs. Eddy had gout she simply would not notice it and it would go away. Now I am going to make you a nice cup of tea.”
Every time I talk to a woman about some things I am left gapemouthed and wishing terribly that I had a large dog with a heavily callused butt.
I sat seething, watching my toe swell and turn red as a switchman’s lantern, and wondering in my present state whether I would have the stuff to be polite to my ma through all of this. She had my father and six boys to contend with before my two sisters came along, and she had lots of practice in setting us about each other’s ears so we would stay out of her hair. At any given time in my youth a couple of the family males would be beating each other witless in the back yard while the others were splitting wood and shoveling manure to work off bad cases of enraged bafflement.
The tea she brought was red willow-bark tea. Be damned to Mrs. Eddy, I says; it was the only thing that would touch my infernal toe.
“This wouldn’t happen to you if you didn’t drink so much,” said my mother, down to the arrows of advice in her quiver. “I pray every night that you don’t turn out like your father.”
That is an Irish prayer, and an Irish story is the one where the foolish young man cuts out his mother’s heart as a gift for his demon love, and as he goes down the forest path to her bower he stumbles and falls, and the bloody heart in his hands says, “Oh, I hope you didn’t hurt yourself, my son.”
The willow-bark tea reduced
the daggers of pain to dull throbs just about as bad on the weak fabric of my temper as the shooting twinges.
I had spotted a case of Saratoga Springs mineral water on the landing of the basement stairwell, and my mother brought me several bottles—gout has something to do with acid. Worst attack I ever had was after a drunken night in California where the tipple was a tart white wine.
There was a rattle at the front door, and I heard the rustle of my mother’s petticoats crossing the Turkey carpet, and the slight squeal of the hinges, needing oil this winter.
Two sets of footsteps approached my lair, one my mother’s, the other a heavy and methodical plod-plod. The plod was the sergeant of the night before, he of the bushy brows and the clotted-cream brogue.
“There has been a terrible tragedy,” my mother says. “It seems that Dr. Spaulding has hanged himself in his cell.”
“Really?” I says, to the first good news of the day. “Remorse is a terrible thing, they say. Well, that’s that.”
“If ye wouldn’t mind, ma’am,” says the sergeant, “I’d have a quiet word with yer son here—it’s standard for the inquest procedure, ye know.”
“Of course,” my mother says brightly. “I’ll put the pot on, and you just call when you are ready for tea.”
“Thank ye, ma’am,” says the sergeant.
My mother bustled off, and closed the door behind her. I was wondering what in blazes the sergeant could possibly want with me.
“He hanged himself in his cell, Mr. Kelly,” says the sergeant. “With his belt it was.”
My ears shot up. Spaulding had been wearing suspenders, but not a belt.
“Was he still breathin’ when ye brought him in, Mr. Kelly?”
Ah hah.
“Yes,” I says. “If you recall, he choked a couple of times when I threw him down on the cot.”
“I didn’t hear that—the chokin’, I mean,” says the sergeant, “so it will be hard to fix the time of death. Thanks for yer cooperation.”