“Where’s Zar?” I said.
“Who cares!”
I sipped my whiskey and waited there at the bar, watching the stairs and trying not to look concerned. There were men sitting at the tables, talking, playing small-change poker, but the noise wasn’t such you couldn’t hear things. From one room above I heard the low moans of that dealer; and from another the sound of Archie D. Brogan singing up a song. After a while Jessie came down. Long Jessie went over to Mae and whispered something and they both giggled.
How many verses of that song I must have listened to, making out no words, but the Irish of the tune again and again. It would stop and I’d think well now we’ll hear no more, but he would start up again, having only paused to wet his throat.
Then, finally, a door opened, and down the stairs came the mine boss, lurching and holding the rail tight. He slipped and sat down on the bottom step; and he began to laugh. His face was red and his cheeks shot with thin blue veins. I was over there in an instant offering to help him up and that made him stop laughing. He waved my hand away, muttered something and went out the door. I followed and watched as he threw up in the street. When he was done he wiped his face with a red handkerchief and stalked into Isaac’s store, walking sober as a judge.
How clear I call up these moments—even the song he sang, a wild dirge, sings in my ears. A man I never knew! He came out of Isaac’s place with a bundle and brand-new saddlebags, stuffed full. He threw it on the back of his mule, mounted, and as I stood transfixed, rode down the street and into the flats.
I watched him a long while. Nobody else seemed to notice his leaving, people were all over the street, the lunch crowd was grouping in front of Swede’s tent. I went into the store. Isaac was there toting up figures on a pad. The fat Chinagirl was sitting and resting by the door, breathing with difficulty, her hands on her knees.
“Isaac what did that fellow buy?”
“Weren’t that the foreman?”
“It was.”
“Well he took some vittles, a fryin’ pan, a box of cartridges, matches, a blanket, bottle of castor oil, coupla ounces smokin’ tobacco …”
Did I have to be told? Did it have to be in a letter? The next day miners began coming down the trail, walking with their picks on their backs, riding two up on their mules. They filled the street. Angus Mcellhenny told me: “As long as the payroll kept coming, Blue, we kept diggin’ that rock. But I knew weeks ago it wasn’t ore we were diggin’. ’Twas only the color.”
Like the West, like my life: The color dazzles us, but when it’s too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim.
12
Of course now I put it down I can see that we were finished before we ever got started, our end was in our beginning. I am writing this and maybe it will be recovered and read; and I’ll say now how I picture some reader, a gentleman in a stuffed chair with a rug under him and a solid house around him and a whole city of stone streets around the house—a place like New York which Molly talked about one night, with gas lamps on each corner to light the dark, and polished carriages running behind the horses, and lots of fine manners … Do you think, mister, with all that settlement around you that you’re freer than me to make your fate? Do you click your tongue at my story? Well I wish I knew yours. Your father’s doing is in you, like his father’s was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that’s all.
I know it, it’s true, I’ve always known it. I scorn myself for a fool for all the bookkeeping I’ve done; as if notations in a ledger can fix life, as if some marks in a book can control things. There is only one record to keep and that’s the one I’m writing now, across the red lines, over the old marks. It won’t help me nor anyone I know. “This is who’s dead,” it says. It does nothing but it can add to the memory. The only hope I have now is that it will be read—and isn’t that a final curse on me, that I still have hope? I would laugh if I could, who will come here to find my ledgers of scrawls: that old toothless drover who took my savings to bring back beef on the hoof? If he wasn’t a liar he was old enough to be smart. I think I knew he was lying when I gave him the money, I was paying him a debt, I was paying him to leave. Maybe the circuit judge … although now I’m not clear in my head whether I wrote Jenks’s letter or not, did I give it to Alf or not, and anyway why should he come by since nothing is left to judge?
Jenks let free that bent-over fellow the minute he saw what chance there was. The hunchback scuttled off in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of him later, he was one of those looting Isaac’s store. At least I think so. In all that noise I can’t be sure what I saw, there was moonlight hot as the sun, bright as noon, but it was like the light of pain shining from the blackness.
“Jenks!” I remember Molly screamed. She had run outside and was standing, waving at the coach coming down the street. The Sheriff was atop his hearse wagon, the door on the side flapping open and shut. Sitting up there with him was Miss Adah and Jessie.
He thought Molly wanted to get on. “Hurry up, ma’am,” he said, leaning over to help her, “them bastards is about to cut loose.” And I thought too she was climbing up, even though I had despaired of getting her to go. But what she did, she pulled him down from the box and was all over the poor man, holding around his neck, clutching him, giving him kisses, moaning out her words: “Jenks, get him for me, you’ve got to get him, you have a hankerin’ don’t you Jenks, I’ve seen it, a woman can tell. Get him and I’ll go with you anywhere, I’ll be your natural wife, anything you please, I swear—”
The boy and I were looking on and the two women from up on the box. All the sound was coming from the saloon.
“For God’s sake Jenks,” said Jessie turning and looking back. “For God’s sake will you come on!”
“But ma’am, if’n hew please!” He was trying to get loose of Molly.
“Jenks, just one shot, why the man’s a target, why he’s just looking to come up dead!”
“Lady I done throwed my star away.”
Adah was weeping: “I left him up there, he’s still breathin’. I’ve no call to leave that dyin’ man alone.”
“Hush up! You dumb old woman,” Jessie said to her. “You think that damn dealer is worth gettin’ what Mae is gettin’? You want to go back there with Mae and that other one?—Lord God, Jenks, will you come on!”
At the saloon the crowd was spilling back on the porch and into the street. People were trying to see in like a crowd pushing toward the words of a preacher. You could hear Mae’s screams. I knew it wouldn’t be long and we’d all be suffering Turner, feeling his sermon. When he had come only God knows. He must have ridden down from the rocks, grinning to see such a boom of people; he must have come from the north, on the heels of the miners, he had left that way after all, the scythe swings back.
Wouldn’t I have seen him otherwise? All afternoon I had stood watching the dust roll back from the flats, once the stage came and went it was like a signal, folks were tying up their things, loading their animals and taking the walk. In front of my cabin it was like how many years before at Westport, Missouri, people standing and saying goodbye to each other but with their eyes gazing at the plains in front of them.
That old egg lady left, riding a wagon empty but for squawks; a chicken feather floated out behind her. Jonce Early pulled up stakes without so much as a look back. There were other smart ones, a handcart couple walked by with no expression at all on their faces. But most of those people who’d come looking for work, they were not moving beyond the street.
I had looked on too numb to move watching the street fill to overflow. I didn’t want to believe it, I wanted to tell Angus he was lying, I had the wild thought if I ran up the trail and pushed boulders across it, I could turn them back, those miners. It was a farrago, a sweltering of angers. The noise of talk was like a hoarse wind blowing. A miner came up to me and said quietly, “Stage due anytime you know?”
>
“Why yes,” I said with all politeness, “matter of fact it should be here this afternoon.”
He spit out some plug and looking at the ground said, “I’ll buy a passage, ye don’t mind.” He gave me a pouch of dust so I took him inside and wrote a ticket. When he left there was another miner in the door. And before long there was a line of men waiting their turn for tickets. They dropped bills into my hand, silver, chunks of high-graded. Through the doorway, over their heads I could see some towners watching.
I wrote slowly, making more contracts than Alf could comfortably carry, and thinking Now isn’t this queer how I got through these motions with my hands of ice, how peculiar to be doing business; like I once saw a man who was shot in the heart, he was as dead as you can be but he walked around awhile before he lay down.
I knew Zar and Isaac would come after me once the truth struck them, they would make me share their suffering. I gave the last man in line his ticket and they pushed in past him, their faces all dismay. They didn’t want to believe what their own eyes told them.
“The road Blue, whan shall they make the road!” the Russian kept saying.
“You know these flats out here, the way nothing is growing? Well when it’s an orchard of big, leafy trees with each leaf a five-dollar gold piece—that’s when you’ll get your road.”
“It ain’t fair,” Isaac said, “it’s not right. What do I do now, tell me what I’m s’posed to do now!”
“I don’t know Isaac.”
“I said it would come to this, I knew it would. I’m ruined! Ye sure sold me, ye surely traded me!”
“Maybe so.”
“Why I’d have found Ezra by now, I’d be with my brother today but for you!”
“I haven’t heard you complaining the past year Isaac. You’ve done alright.”
“Is that right, is that so? Curse your wretched soul I’ve put every penny I made into this street!”
“You must stop this Blue,” the Russian shook his fist, “you must do something!”
“Shall I put the gold back in the ground?”
“My hotel! My beautiful hotel! From where shall come the customers—”
“Goddamn you both, why don’t you let me be! What is it you want of me! Why am I the one always, people come running to me—get out of here, go on get out, I’m as hung up as you, can’t you see that?”
“Frand—”
“Why you think you’re bad off? You don’t even know! You’ve made enough money from this town, you’ve made enough I’ll tell you and if you don’t have tidy little bundles cached away you’re bigger fools than I take you for.”
“Blue, please”—the Russian held out his arms and he had this begging smile on his face, I could see that gold tooth of his—“please, we are losing everything.”
I had to sit down. I put my hands on my face and I felt my breath on my icy fingers. Those white-faced, black-derbied Eastern sons of Hell! How long had they known—maybe since the afternoon they waited for Alf, fanning themselves and keeping their mouths shut? Someone said they had made tests when they were up there, they had made markings on their charts—a year past! But they’d had their intentions, else why had the Territory Office sent Hayden Gillis? How long had we been waiting for something that was never to be? Even as the street was filling up the ore wagons were carting worthless rock westerly to the mills. Even as I scanned the flats each morning that letter to Brogan was lying on my desk. There is no fool like a fool in the West, why you can fool him so bad he won’t even know his possibilities are dead, his hopes only ghosts.
I said: “Get out while you can. Load your wagons and travel, because sure as you’re breathing it won’t be long and all these people stuck here like pigs on a pitchfork —they’re going to set up a holler.”
“What’s this!”
“A pair of dumb cowboys, that’s all you are. Fretting about your property when it’s your hides you should be thinking of—”
“What ye mean?”
“God help you what do you think I mean, you got eyes don’t you? This town is a bust. Every man in it has been sold!”
Now what I wonder is why they didn’t leave. I saw by the looks on their faces they knew I was telling them right. They had the chance to get out and I can’t account that they stayed, that they ran out of my door and went back, each to his selling counter, putting on a face and coddling the customer right past the time it became too late to leave. Will we not believe our disasters? Or was there nowhere they could go? It was the same with Swede too, there was time to pack and move on before the moon rose but he didn’t, not even in those last free moments after the man came.
Molly had opened her door to see the fuss, she stood there barefooted with her hair hanging down, she looked like Wrath. By the time Zar and Isaac had run out there was a dawn in her eyes. Color came into her cheeks and she broke out in a smile and she said to the boy, who was standing by her: “Lord, did you ever hope to see such a sight? Mayor, is that you I hear telling people to get on their horse?”
She began to giggle, she was really joyful, it might have been some farm girl laughing at her suitor. “Jimmy I swear, listen to Mayor Blue here, all these people he’s been a-wishin’ and a-wantin’, well here they are and look at him, he’s sick, the shit is scared out of him—”
When Alf came along in the afternoon he had from a distance the sight of a town filled with people and he didn’t need to be told what was going on. He reined his team a good way out, near the graves, and turned them around the other way before he and his helper started to toss off the freight. Even so they weren’t fast enough, miners were running out there, lugging their gear, there was a rush for the stage. I ran out too to say something to Alf but he was in no mood for talk. He grabbed the money pouch I gave him without even counting and climbed up on the box and flung out his whip and off the coach went, groaning, men were all over it like ants. I watched it going and then one man who hadn’t gotten a good hold fell off and he ran after for a bit, ending up standing out there waving his fist as the dust covered him.
Here was all this freight, boxes and barrels, standing in the open like wreckage. In my hands was the order list for Alf, and I looked back at the street and tore the paper into pieces. Swede came out, half running, pulling a handcart behind him, and began to load it up. He grunted and sweat ran down from his yellow hair and he picked up those barrels in a hug, those crates, even scooping up crackers where they had spilled out of a box broken open in its fall.
“Damnit,” I said to him, “it’s not some lady’s rug you have to leave clean!”
He began pulling the cart in, it was Isaac’s goods more than his own, he leaned forward on the bar like some ass, some dumb ox. I couldn’t help being furious at him, I wanted to hit him.
I walked beside Swede, my eyes on the town. It had no earthly reason for being there, it made no sense to exist. People naturally come together but is that enough? Just as naturally we think of ourselves alone. “Listen to me Swede: Gather up your belongings, take the locks off your spokes and you and your woman get out of here. With those bulls you got you’ll need a good start. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Aaah, ya—”
“Find yourself some other Swedes …”
I had the same advice for Bert Albany. When I got back to the street I suddenly thought of Bert and I sought him out. He was in the crib where they lived, comforting his wife, but nobody was comforting him. At first he didn’t want to leave—“Where to?” he said, he felt a loyalty to Zar, but more he was afraid any trip would put his Chinagirl in labor. I said, “Bert don’t argue with an old man. Wrap up what you can carry and come with me. No child has ever been born in this town, and that’s the saddest thing I will ever know, but it’s true and it always will be.”
Roebuck, the smithy, had a wagon, I found him ready to leave and I gave him all the greenbacks in my pocket to take on the couple. But when I put Bert and his wife up behind him I said only: “This man has co
nsented to let you ride.” And I walked with the wagon through the milling people, stopping at the edge of the flats and watching it go on. “We was doing alright, Mr. Blue,” the boy called back, “what happened to us? Where do we go now?” And I saw that little girl turn back to look, a puffy, tear-stained face taking in with her eyes what her mind didn’t understand.
Soon there was a string of travelers spread out on the flats. And then, not ten feet in front of me, Angus Mcellhenny was standing, pulling tight the ropes on his mule’s load; and though I had known what to tell Zar and Isaac and Swede and Bert my brain was muddled now, and I couldn’t believe what was happening any more than they could. I went over to Angus but no words would leave my mouth, I didn’t even know what I wanted from him. His pipe was tight in his teeth, he wouldn’t look at me.
“You don’t tarry, Angus.”
“I’m no fool. Ye’ll be traveling yerself hae you any sense.”
“Angus,” I grabbed his arm, “can there still be gold up there?”
He sighed: “That mountain is picked so hollow, why it’s holey as a honeycomb, there’s nothin’ holdin’ it up save air. Listen to me Blue, there’s maybe a score of men still up at the site who can’t bear to be sold out. They’ll rot up there tryin’ to take it out on the rock.”
“It’s a property isn’t it? The Company will sell it if they can.”
“Aye, there’s enough fer salt. They will make a Chinaman of some poor soul who will buy the stock and come out and dig. And when he sees what he’s got he’ll blow out his brains.”
Another miner standing near Angus gave a laugh.
I tried to say something but the words choked in my throat. I looked ahead at the endless reaches, lit red in the late afternoon, and I felt the blood drying up in me.
E.L. Doctorow Page 15