Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  ERIC GUNNARSON

  It was ten thirty in the morning. The operator took the notepaper on which Eric had written his message, and tapped it out on the keys. “Will you be waiting for a reply, sir?”

  “Yes, I’ll just go over to the hotel, and get myself a room for the night, I have business here for a few days.”

  It was his intention to see a lawyer, to become versed in the things he would need to know in order to protect himself. His newspaper reading, too, had left him aware of how one man, Rockefeller, up north, had managed to gain control of an entire oil field. If one man were also to accomplish this here in the south, Eric wanted to be that man. Briefly he studied a map on the wall of the telegraph office, which showed an amazing network of communications across the country. The world was changing, shrinking. The past was dying. Time was speeding up…

  Time. He had too little of it. He started for the door.

  “Sir,” called the operator, “a reply is coming in.”

  He took it down and handed Eric the pad.

  RANDOLPH HERE STOP WELCOME BACK FROM THE DEAD STOP REPLY.

  S. R.

  Eric could not recall ever having been this thrilled, not even as a child. It was as if he could speak to his friend, over this vast distance. But he could not, not exactly. Nor did he wish to put in words exactly what it was he had discovered.

  POTENTIAL FOR GREAT ENTERPRISE STOP MUST ACT NEED ADVICE TIME ESSENTIAL

  And the reply came clicking and tapping back over the wires:

  RETAIN COUNSEL ENTRAIN BOSTON WILL AWAIT.

  “When is the next train east?” he asked, while paying the operator for his services.

  “Washington or New York?”

  “New York. Then Boston.”

  “That’ll pull out at nigh on to six o’clock tonight. You be in Boston bright and early tomorra morning.”

  Eric considered. He had time to see a lawyer today, and catch the train later. The problem was that he did not know any lawyers. There would be many, doubtless, over at the state capitol, whose handsome dome presided over the city, but he had an instinctive aversion, born of his background and isolated mountain youth, to lawyers making it their business to adorn the place where laws were made. Then he had an idea. In the nearby hotel, which appeared to be quite grand, there must be men of consequence who could recommend some worthy names. After stabling his horse, “for several days, at least,” he said, Eric went over to the hotel, entered the lobby, and saw Kristin looking right at him.

  He stopped moving, and stood rooted to the floor, transfixed. This was no portrait, but something far more uncanny, that had captured Kristin’s face and form, and pressed it whole upon a piece of shiny paper. Then he saw there were more such images, visions.

  “Move along there, please, sir,” shouted a bellboy, pushing through the lobby with a half-dozen bags. “Ain’t you never seen a photograph before?”

  Examination of the strange, lifelike pictures revealed that Eric was looking at an exhibit of Matthew Brady’s work. There was President Lincoln, and General Sherman, now a great hero since his army had cut the South in half by laying a sixty-mile-wide trail of waste from Atlanta to the sea. There were also photographs of people he did not recognize, but who seemed famous indeed.

  And among these was Kristin.

  He studied her face lovingly. She seemed not to have aged at all, but there was around her eyes now a hint of remove, a trace of calculation and resolve he had not known before.

  The encounter with her image stirred him to increase his own resolve. He was going east! He would see her! And this time he would see her as a man of affairs, of substance, prepared to…

  Prepared to what?

  He had had to sell animals to buy a suit of clothes. He did not yet have train fare. And he was married, the father of a child.

  I won’t think of it, he thought. I won’t let myself think that she has been waiting for me, and that now I can do nothing about it.

  Eric went to the dining room, ordered breakfast, and watched the businessmen as they came and went. Three well-dressed men, sitting at a nearby table, talked of stocks, investments, the war, and certain items of legislation now before the statehouse. He was just about to ask them if they might recommend good counsel, when a thin young man, ill dressed but spirited, passed by their table.

  “Hey, Phil,” one of the men called, “get any business out of your shingle yet?”

  There was a certain archness in the man’s tone, but Phil did not seem to mind.

  “Come a day,” he said, “when you’ll be begging me to split a fee.”

  The other men found this uproarious, but the younger one seemed not to mind at all. He passed closely to Eric’s table.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  There seemed no better way than but to ask: “I’m looking for an attorney. Can you refer me to one?”

  The man stopped and looked at Eric, studying him with a dry, wry expression that seemed characteristic. “You don’t look like a crook to me,” he said.

  “I’m not”

  “But I am a lawyer. What do you want a lawyer for?”

  “I can’t talk about it here.”

  “No one can.” This with the hint of a smile.

  “Are you…that is, when we consider…” Eric fumbled.

  “You mean to ask if I am any good in the profession, don’t you? The answer is that I am the best. I have, and I assure you of this without a shred of modesty, never lost a case.”

  “Why, that’s excellent,” said Eric.

  “Because I’ve never had a case,” said the man, thrusting out his hand. “Phillip Phettle, with a ph, at your service. What seems to be the trouble?”

  At first Eric was reluctant. The man had had no cases at all.

  But that was explainable. “I’m shut out here,” Phettle said, without bitterness. “I came here from Vermont, so I’m an outsider. The regular lawyers wish I would move away. But I can’t. I’m almost out of money. Now let’s talk about your retainer.”

  Phil Phettle’s confidence, his spirit and good humor, appealed to Eric. The man was bright, and spoke well. He seemed to know a great deal about operations in the capital, so Eric decided to test him.

  “What do you know of a man named Benjamin Horace?” he asked.

  Phettle’s eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, sir? I had you pegged for an honest man. Horace is a thief and a half. Possibly two thirds. If you’re seeking aid for Ben Horace, you’d best look elsewhere.”

  He rose from the table.

  “Sit down,” said Eric. “I think we can find common ground here.”

  Conscious that time was running, he explained the situation. He had discovered oil—some, he did not know how much—on his farm. No, the farm was not in his name. It belonged to Elaine. No, it was not a Homestead farm. And it was surrounded by Homestead farms. “That means—”

  “I know what it means. The Creedmore Reservation Clause.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you are asking what ought to be done to make sure the oil isn’t lost to you?”

  “Not me alone!” cried Eric, in a voice so sincere it impressed the young lawyer to his base. “No, is that what you think I’m doing here? Absolutely not. Everyone must have his rightful share of whatever profits there are. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I seek counsel. I have not been in my community too long, but I am getting to know some of the people. They are honest and that is a hindrance to their well-being—”

  “Spoken like a true patriot”

  “—and they will be no match for a man like Horace, who has already been able to buy a congressman, and get a powerful law on the books.”

  “You’re fortunate that he did,” Phettle said. “A law on the books is a target.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Phil Phettle drew his chair nearer the table, finished a cup of coffee, and began speaking rapidly and excitedly. “Does any other state,” he as
ked, “have a law or statute or provision comparable to the Creedmore Reservation? You don’t know, I’ll tell you. No. So? And does this so-called reservation apply to all of Pennsylvania? Again, no. And was it ever dealt with in the Pennsylvania legislature? No, once more. It is sui generis.”

  “I don’t—”

  “A thing unto itself. It’s not really a law at all. It’s a pseudolegal maneuver, fashioned to deceive yokels into believing that what belongs to them doesn’t. Are you following me?”

  “No, I’m right beside you, and maybe running ahead.”

  “Commendable. There is a course of action that suggests itself immediately. You and your neighbors must petition the state legislature for a hearing on the Creedmore Reservation.”

  Eric did not have time to respond before the lawyer added:

  “But a petition won’t work, because your country neighbors are too suspicious to sign it, assuming they can write. Secondly, Horace can afford more legislators than you can, so the petition would be thrown out anyway.”

  “Afford?”

  “Buy. With money. To do his will.”

  “Here in America, too?”

  “Hell, here in America most!” Phettle said, vehemently. “No, Gunnarson, don’t be deluded. The enemy must always be approached as if it had a preponderance of heavy weaponry. They’re sneaky. But so are we.”

  “We are?”

  “I haven’t even gotten started yet. No, no, ‘I have not yet begun to fight!’ That’s the way it goes. What are your immediate plans?”

  “I have to go to Boston to see a friend.”

  “This is not the time for a vacation trip.”

  “He’s in banking.”

  “Traveling is pretty good this time of year.”

  “I hope to get his help in developing the oil business in southern Pennsylvania.”

  “Benjamin Horace and Angus Creedmore are not going to like that.”

  Eric slammed his clenched fist down on the tabletop. A waiter rushed over. “Is everything all right, gentlemen?”

  “No,” said Eric.

  “Yes,” said Phil Phettle. “Just bring us some more coffee. Now,” he said to Eric, “you say you don’t have a Homestead farm. So be it. What we need is a test case. One of your neighbors, who lives on a Homestead farm, and upon whose land oil is also found, must take Benjamin Horace and the Creedmore Reservation to court. If Horace moves in when he learns of the oil strike, which I have no doubt that he will.”

  “But just one…?”

  “That’s all it takes, legally.”

  “It would be better if all of us fought together.”

  “Of course it would. But they’re stubborn, independent farmers. Can you get them together to agree on much of anything?”

  Eric thought it over. The farmers in his area cooperated splendidly only on matters common to all of them: barn raisings, threshing, wood cutting. Otherwise each individual saw to his business close to the vest, counted his shekels behind a high wall. “Maybe if they knew what it was they were fighting for,” he suggested. “Or if I bought up the leases myself…”

  “Then the test case would be yours. And Td have a client. But where are you going to get that kind of money?”

  “Hopefully in Boston,” Eric said.

  He had to sell the newly purchased stallion to afford train fare, but it didn’t seem to matter. Only the future mattered now, and what he could do with it. Everything in the past had been reduced to remote and indecipherable brilliances, like something beautiful he might one time have read.

  The train skirted New York at late twilight striking up through Jersey, across the Hudson, and on up the Atlantic coast. Eric watched from the window, saw the skyline sweeping low and powerful and long against the sky. There, yes, somewhere in that mass of flesh and stone was Kristin. And soon he would see her. Soon, on the return trip from Boston. Elaine and Elizabeth came to his mind, and love filled his heart as well. But still it was Kristin who rose above everything, and he rested content in the hope that somehow life might be put aright.

  He arrived in Boston in the rainy dawn. The black smokestack of the engine belched several last blasts of grime up onto the soot-ridden beams of the cavernous station. Eric walked along the train, looking about.

  “Mr. Gunnarson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Follow me, please.”

  Scott Randolph’s coachman, no doubt. Randolph was as good as his word. It was early morning, and the street outside the station was all but deserted, save for a few hackies, disconsolate as their sagging horses, standing in the pale light dripping rain. A large coach waited there on the street too. The coachman motioned Eric toward it, swinging up on the seat behind the horses. Eric climbed into the cab, wondering idly why a coachman would not hold the door for his passenger. He soon found out.

  Three men waited inside the coach. Two of them grabbed Eric before he had a chance to react and pressed him back against the seat on one side of the coach. The third man, seated opposite, his face in shadow, got right down to business.

  “We know why you’re here, Gunnarson.”

  What was this? Who knew what? “I’m glad you do,” he said.

  “Don’t sass your betters, Sven,” grunted one of the men holding him, and twisted Eric’s arm behind him.

  “I’d advise you to have a nice reunion with your old war crony, and then go back to your farm and your wife and your little girl You don’t want to be meddling in affairs for which you are unsuited.”

  The oil! Eric thought. And these men were threatening Elaine and Elizabeth. But who were they? Or who did they serve?

  “An immigrant boy with no citizenship, who killed him a man in the old country and ran away, no, Sven, that’s not the type we like here in America. Why, if that news got out, it could cause you a lot of trouble. Get the point?”

  Blackmail. An easy point to get. “But I am a citizen,” he told them, trying to calculate how these men would know so much about him. “I am also a war veteran.”

  “Who cares?” grunted the man who held his arm, giving it another twist.

  Eric suppressed a groan. He had figured it out. The one person who might use his past against him in this way was Joan Leeds! Now Mrs. Benjamin Horace, wife of the Pillar of Pittsburgh. Of course. But how quickly events were moving. Horace already knew of the oil strike, and was circling to protect his interests. Had he learned of Phil Phettle? Worse, was he ready to hurt Elaine and the child?

  “Let me tell you something,” Eric told the man, taking a chance. “I know Joan Leeds, too, and if I were she, or her husband, I would not want any diligent inquiry made into the cause of the death of a Mrs. Liz Leeds, Joan’s mother, back in New York a few winters ago—”

  “Shut up! You ain’t here to talk. You’re here to listen.”

  “—and I doubt Mr. Horace’s reputation would be well served, in his position as champion of the people of Pennsylvania, to know some of the activities his wife pursued when I knew her in New York. And I knew her very well,” he added.

  “Goddam. These immigrants don’t understand nothin’ unless you pound it into their thick skulls. Driver!” ordered the man. “Get us out of here, to a place where we can continue this conversation in earnest.”

  Eric had no desire to endure a beating. Before the coachman had a chance to snap his whip at the horses, Eric kicked out, catching his interlocutor in the solar plexus. The man snapped forward, gulping like a beached fish. The men on either side of Eric, caught off guard, leaned away, getting set to act, but they were too late. Eric drove an elbow into the chin of one, and jerked his arm free of the other. Getting up, he sent a knee into the face of the man who had been talking to him, threw a flurry of punches at the other two, and leaped from the coach just as it began to roll.

  “What the hell…?” called the coachman, turning around.

  “I changed my mind about the ride,” Eric told him, starting back into the station. It seemed unlikely his assailants would pursue
him there. He was right. The coach halted momentarily, its occupants deciding what to do, but then moved on.

  “There you are, finally. Gunnarson, how are you?”

  Scott Randolph. A little older, a bit leaner, but resplendent in morning clothes and cape. “I came down to the platform, but didn’t see you.”

  The men shook hands warmly. “I got off right away, and proceeded to hold a business discussion.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let us go somewhere and have breakfast and a talk. There are so many things to…tell me, did you…were you able to stop in New York?”

  “Eric, my God, yes. But at the time I thought you were dead, and so I told her…your Kristin is exceedingly lovely, I must say—”

  “Told her I was dead? Well, I shall stop on my way back to Pennsylvania, and put that aright—”

  “—and her son is an adorable blonde child—”

  “Son?” asked Eric.

  They were in Randolph’s coach now, driving to his house. The coach continued to move, the city to pass by outside its windows, the earth to spin, the sun to rise, the ocean to roll against the coast. But for that one fell moment, everything ceased, stopped, caught and frozen in an instant of shimmering time. Kristin had a son by Gustav Rolfson. Now she was as tied to him as he was to Elaine. Oh, there was no way out of the maze life had given them, no way…

  “Fine boy, too,” Randolph was saying. He had noted Eric’s moment of consternation, and was not chatting idly filling in time. He guessed at, but did not wish to inquire about, the depth of Eric’s feeling for Kristin.

  I will not think of it until I see Kristin with my own eyes, resolved Eric, and, with difficulty, put the matter aside.

  Randolph lived in a sprawling house on Beacon Hill. There, over a breakfast of fried haddock, eggs, potatoes, and port, they first discussed what had befallen them since Gettysburg. “I was unconscious or semiconscious in the Harrisburg hospital,” Randolph said. “Oh, it must have been for weeks. I was lucky. My leg had been blown away cleanly, and a field doctor cauterized the wound immediately. Save for that, I might have died of gangrene, as did thousands of others. When I finally recovered sufficiently to know what had happened, I tried to learn who among our regiment had survived. Not many. And, do you know, we missed the third and worst day of the battle? Pickett, the Rebel commander, charged right into our lines on Cemetery Ridge.”