She had gone back to sleeping in her bed in the little back room off the kitchen. The walls were thin, and she left the doors open so she could keep an ear out. When he first started having the horrors and screamed out and thrashed trying to get up, she’d been scared of him, afraid she couldn’t keep him from hurting himself or hurting her. But he still couldn’t get up, and didn’t have much strength even in a panic. Once when she was trying to calm him down he flailed out his arm and struck her on the face. It hurt, and she had a bruise next morning. She thought she might have to explain it. Like her mother when Roy hit her, it was just an accident, I was a little tipsy, we both were, he didn’t mean any harm. But Mr. Cowper really hadn’t meant any harm. It wasn’t her he was trying to fight off or get away from. When she could get him to quiet down he was so worn out and confused he didn’t know what he’d been doing or who he was talking to. Sometimes he was in tears like a child, crying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” His tears meant he was out of the nightmare, coming back to himself. She liked to watch that relief happening, the mind coming back into his eyes, the quietness into his face. He always thanked her.
She didn’t know anything about him of course, but she thought he was a lonely man. He didn’t complain about the pain he was in, he joked and toughed that out the way a man expected himself to. But there was a grief in him that showed in his face. It went away when he talked with anybody, but it always came back, it was his look when he was by himself. Desolate.
She knew that word, like so many others, from Aunt Bess. “Oh my sakes, this is a desolate place!” Aunt Bess had cried out once, her first look at one of the dusty little East Colorado towns Roy kept moving them to. She had been so upset Rae hadn’t asked her what the word meant then, but later on she had, and Aunt Bess said, “It means alone. Sad. Forsaken.” And she’d said some of a poem that started, “Desolate, oh desolate!”
It was a lonesome word. Forsaken was even lonesomer. She valued words like that and the people who said them, Aunt Bess, old Mr. Koons, some of the schoolteachers she’d had, the boardinghouse lady in Holt. She had treasured her McGuffey Readers with stories and poems in them. They got left behind in one of the moves to a new town. After that she knew she had to keep what she learned in her head. Even if she didn’t say them, knowing words for things she felt and knowing there were people who said them used to help some when she was feeling desolate and forsaken, in those places, in those days.
She hadn’t had friends her own age, and envied those who did. She’d used to think the girls just didn’t like her, but now she could see that her stepfather and his friends had put them on the outside right away in every town he’d moved them to. Just after they’d come to Grand Junction, Aunt Bessie had had to go back to Kansas to nurse Grandmother Brown, who was dying. She wanted to take Rae with her and Rae wanted to go, but Roy wouldn’t have it. Soon after Aunt Bessie left, Roy started bringing his new friend Mr. Van Allen over several nights a week. Rae’s mother entertained Mr. Van Allen and the rent got paid.
Girls Rae had begun to know at school stopped speaking to her. It didn’t seem to her it was her fault what her mother did. In fact she didn’t think it was really her mother’s fault. After Daddy died, when Rae was eleven, Mother had done nothing but cry, and before the year was out she married Roy Daid, as if he was the answer to anything. Mother wasn’t strong, like Aunt Bessie was. Not everybody was strong. But people wouldn’t speak to them now, and the neighbor woman said out loud to somebody in the street, “I’m not used to living next door to a slut.”
Rae was so angry at everybody by then she wouldn’t let anybody even try to speak to her. There was nobody. Nobody till Pete Tonely showed up with some of Roy’s business friends. He was so different. Younger, and really handsome. He didn’t hound her and paw her like Roy’s friends tried to, but she knew he noticed her a lot. The day after she turned eighteen and found that Sears Roebuck had turned her off from her warehouse job there, Pete had come over. He said something nice to her, and she started crying. She made herself stop crying right away, and they sat out on the back steps talking for a long time. He said, “Rae, I came over to tell you. I’m pulling up stakes. Going to Denver. Tonight.” She just sat there, dumb. He took her hand and said, “Listen. I want to take you out of this. If you want to come. I thought about going on to Frisco.” She met him down at the train station that night.
The first year had had a lot of excitement in it, and joy. She didn’t forget that. But poor Pete was always finding wonderful new friends and new prospects and then they didn’t pan out. He got fired, or he quit. As time went on, it seemed like nothing satisfied him anymore. He was never hard on her, but the joy was all gone out of it. A few months after they got anywhere, he was talking about pulling up stakes. When they were in Chico, he’d met some man from a mining town who told him what a great job bartending was, and good money in the tips. And so she’d ended up in Goldorado. Still on the outside.
Mr. Cowper’s boss came one afternoon. She made sure Mr. Cowper had his shirt on and was sitting up, and then left Mr. Ross with him. She went to the kitchen to start dinner. She couldn’t help but hear what they said. She didn’t much like Mr. Ross, a pink-faced man with cold eyes. He was a gentleman but it wasn’t the same kind of gentleman as Doc Mac and Mr. Cowper.
She heard him tell Mr. Cowper that the company was going to keep on paying him while he was laid up. He said, “They think very highly of you down in Sacramento, Cowper,” and you could tell that he tried to say it nicely, although it was a strain on him to do so and it came out sounding superior. That warmed her to Mr. Ross.
He chilled her down right away. As she showed him out he said, “No doubt you know, Mrs. Tonely, that your husband has several creditors here who would appreciate knowing when he might return.”
Nobody in their senses would have made Pete a real loan. If he’d borrowed money privately that was none of Mr. Ross’s business. Unless it was Ross he owed. But Ross wouldn’t have lent Pete money any more than the bank would. He had spoken out of pure meanness.
She let her eyes cross his pink face without looking at it, the way he always did to her, and said, “My name’s Rae Brown, Mr. Ross. I don’t have a husband.”
That shocked him maybe more than she meant it to. His pink cheeks went dark red and his jaw shook up and down. He turned away and strutted off like a turkey gobbler.
Well, she certainly was parading her shame. First to Doc Mac, then Ross. Might as well announce, “I was living in sin!” with a megaphone like they had at the rodeo.
She went in and passed Mr. Cowper’s door without speaking to him to see if he needed anything. In the kitchen she stood there for a while and felt her face burn red hot. Going around announcing her name, as if being Rae Brown was something to be proud of. It didn’t make any difference if she wasn’t ashamed. Other people were. They were ashamed for her, of her, that she lived among them. They blushed for her. Their shame was on her, a weight, a load she couldn’t get out from under.
“All right, let ’er buck.”
MacIver handled the book like it might go off if he wasn’t careful. He got his finger on the page and line he wanted, grimaced, and began to read in a jerky mumble.
And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab: which said, We will not come up:
Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?
Moreover thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou put out the eyes of these men? we will not come up.
“This making any sense to you?”
“Well, it might if you didn’t read it like you were spitting gravel.”
“I am not a reading man, William,” the doctor said with dignity. “Given time, I have made sense of a medical text. But what’s all this stuff? Which, and thou, and putting out ey
es?”
“I don’t know. If I could look at that book I might could figure it out. But it’s not a one-handed book.”
“Never heard it mentioned as such,” MacIver said. “Hey, Rae?”
“She’s hanging out the wash.”
MacIver went to call out from the back door. “Rae! You ever done any Bible reading?”
Cowper heard her cheerful voice call back, “I used to read it to my auntie sometimes.”
“Will you come make sense of this stuff to the divinity student in here?”
MacIver came back and she followed him. The smell of sunlight on newly washed sheets came in with her and she was laughing. “You two are reading the Bible?”
“Not real successfully,” Cowper said. “Maybe you could help us out.”
She took the thick, heavy, black-bound, red-edged book the minister had lent them. She held it with affectionate respect. “I haven’t seen this for a long time. It’s just like the one my aunt had.”
“Don’t lose the place! We had enough trouble finding it! See, there? It’s called Numbers 15. Now just start there, and look out for the whiches.”
She sat down in the straight chair, studied the page for a minute, and began to read. She read slowly, hesitating over a word now and then—wroth, tabernacle—but easily and with understanding. There was a music in it. A couple of times she glanced up to see if they wanted her to go on.
And Dathan and Abiram came out, and stood in the door of their tents, and their wives, and their sons, and their little children.
And Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the Lord hath sent me to do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind.
If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men; then the Lord hath not sent me.
But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord.
And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them:
And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.
They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.
And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also.
She looked at Cowper, and stopped.
After a minute MacIver said, “Whatever this Dathan and Abiram did, their wives and sons and little children didn’t, did they? That’s awful stuff.”
Cowper was having some trouble breathing. The doctor had his eye on him as he went on. “You read like an angel, Miss Rae. You come of a religious family?”
“Oh my sakes no. Aunt Bessie and I read her Bible because she liked to be read to when she was sick and there wasn’t anything else in the house. Then a neighbor heard she wanted something to read and brought over a whole box full of cowboy adventure stories.”
“Made a change from Moses and Korah and them, anyhow.” He got up and came over to Cowper. “Got trouble, William?”
Cowper nodded.
“I’ll go finish the wash,” Rae said, and slipped out, leaving the Bible on the side table. A black rectangle. Cowper shut his eyes and tried to breathe.
He went down into the pit, the earth swallowed him. But he was buried above ground.
Lying there in the long afternoons with nothing but time on his hands he felt what time was. It was his element, like air. It was a gift. His breath had begun to come easily again, the gift restored. He watched the slow unceasing changes of the light on the walls and ceiling and in the sky out his window. He watched July becoming August. The hours washed over him soft as the mild air.
Angus MacIver came in one morning, told him he’d been lying around like a hog in a wallow long enough, and began teaching him exercises to keep his muscles from wasting and get some strength in the good leg and arm. He did them faithfully, but doing anything at all both exhausted him and made him impatient to be doing more. It made the possibility of getting up off the damn bed, walking, walking back into the world, imaginable. But imagining it now, when it wasn’t possible, threatened his gift of ease, made him restless. Doing nothing, he could let peace flow back into him.
And often now the peace lasted through the night. He would wake at what had been his worst hour, just before the turn of night toward day, black dark, the town and the hills dead silent, and watch the stars in his window grow paler and fewer and the chairs and bureau and doorway taking on substance, a long untroubled wakening.
He knew he counted on the doctor visiting most days, sitting down and talking a while, but he hadn’t known how much until MacIver went off on one of his rounds, out to people on ranches up in the hills and at the big sawmill down the creek where, as he said, the hands kept practicing their sawing on themselves.
MacIver didn’t keep a horse, renting a mare and a buckboard from Hugh at the livery stable for his rounds, or a riding horse for an emergency when the patient couldn’t get into town. Rae said that he was liked and respected in Goldorado, but Cowper had wondered if his practice there was enough to live on. He was open about things like money that some men wouldn’t talk about, so Cowper asked him. MacIver told him that two years ago a friend had given him a half interest in a going lumber business over in the redwood country. “Staked me for life,” he said. “I’m in the clover. So long as people keep building houses.”
“Man doesn’t get many friends like that,” Cowper said, thinking of Mr. Bendischer.
MacIver nodded, but his face closed down. Some part of Angus MacIver had a fence around it that was posted KEEP OUT. No barbed wire, but the sign was clear from a distance. It just wasn’t clear to Cowper what was inside it.
Talking about himself to get away from whatever had shut MacIver down, he had said, “I got staked like that. When I was a kid.” He stopped. He didn’t want to tell the story.
But MacIver wanted to hear it. “Ran away from home?”
“My parents died. In a train wreck.” He stopped again, but couldn’t leave it there. He had to make his recitation. “On a switchback. My father worked for the Tomboy Mine up there. Near Ouray. The track had buckled since the last inspection. On a downgrade. Engine went off the rails down into the canyon and took the first car with it. They were in it. Me and my sister had gone back to the last car. The observation platform.”
“How old were you?”
“Cleo was fourteen. I was eleven.”
MacIver waited.
“Well, our next of kin was my mother’s uncle. He took me and my sister with him to Pueblo. Then he fixed it up somehow with the bank and skipped out with everything Father left us.” He heard his voice dull and level, like a rote recitation in school. “There was an old lawyer there in Pueblo, he’d have liked to get our uncle to justice. He tried. Couldn’t do it. But he took an interest in my sister and me. Cleo wanted to work and keep me in school, and he helped her do that. He saved us. Robert Bendischer. I honor his name. He put me through the mining school in Golden. Mrs. Bendischer never liked us.”
“How about your sister?”
“Cleo died of diphtheria. Two years after our parents.”
After a while MacIver said, “God moves in a mysterious way.” He had asked his questions gently, but spoke now with savage bleakness.
When he left that day he put his arm around Cowper’s shoulders. In his helplessness the doctor had handled him all the time, deft and gentle. This was different, awkward, a sudden half embrace that hurt. MacIver left without a word, scowling.
He had been away five days now. It seemed like nothing happened and nothing changed. He did his exercises, but they didn’t get easier, and except for the scabs healing over he didn’t feel he was
getting any better. His leg and wrist were still in heavy bandages, immobile, hot in the long hot afternoons and evenings. His side still hurt and his breath came short when he moved. Even the bruises didn’t seem to fade much. He still needed Rae to help him do anything at all.
She was good at thinking of what he might need and asking him about it or just doing it. He knew that and appreciated it. But he was so sick of still having to ask, can you do this, will you do that, that he didn’t always treat her the way he ought to. She was patient with his crankiness up to a point. Then she went silent, and when she’d done what was needed she’d leave him silently, going to another room or outside. But always in hearing.
When she had to leave the house, she told him, and made sure there was somebody within earshot, usually the ten-year-old from the only other house on South Fifth Street, a shy boy who wouldn’t meet your eyes. Tim always brought with him a game board that had a star design with indentations for marbles. He sat for hours moving the marbles into patterns. It should by rights have driven Cowper mad to watch the poor kid, but in fact he found that silent absorption soothing. And he wanted soothing. He was losing the sweet, idle flow of uncounted time. Often now he felt irritable, babyish, stupidly emotional, finding himself often in a fit of anger, or a panic, or halfway to tears. He lay there listening to the endless chorus of grasshoppers out on the dry, hot, gold hillsides, sweating, comfortless, desperately pushing despair away. Then Rae would come in and smile. She didn’t hold grudges any more than the cat. He was glad to see her, glad she was there. He didn’t know how to say so, but she seemed to be glad to see him and be there, so it wasn’t necessary.
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