Turpentine

by Spring Warren

  The shopkeep straightened, looked at the poster, looked at me. Spoke quietly. “Wouldna believed it, in my establishment, what’s the likelihood a that?”

  I cocked the gun.

  The shopkeep swore before I could speak. “Fuck!” He leaned over the counter and jerked the gun from my hand in sneering disgust.

  It was for the best, I told myself. I didn’t figure I had enough fight for another run.

  The shopkeep peered at the gun, muttering. “Greenhorns can’t handle shit.” He peered at the paper, then murmured, “Yup. Sure as hell fits the description, all right.” He put his hand out again. “You got yourself a deal. I’ll put this baby in the window with a sign.”

  Stunned, I gave him my hand. He shook it and pulled a cigar box out of the case.

  I laughed in relief and then, not so much out of greed as of not wanting him to ever know what was in the cigars, I demanded, “Both boxes.”

  “Now, that’s too steep.” He crossed his arms and stared at me.

  Smiling, I retrieved the pistol and threw it nonchalantly into my bag. “Hate to have to wait for smokes, but if I must, I’ll manage.” I put my coins on the counter, the crackers and meal in my bag, and tipped Ry’s cap. I was halfway to the door when the shopkeep called me back.

  CHAPTER 35

  I unwrapped one cigar and bought a palomino mare, a little lacking in personality but she behaved admirably. I got breakfast, a heavy coat, new boots, mittens, a thick woollen bedroll, a canvas tarp to keep the snow off, and a brand-new Winchester rifle. I rode out of Hell’s Gate with a full stomach and ham in the saddlebag, and—finding comfort in Laramore’s pronouncement of big country but few roads—I set out to find Phaegin.

  When the sun began to set, I made admirable camp, feeling stronger and more hopeful than I had for ages. The fire burned companionably. I drew out the ham for dinner and found the Alan and Jamieson envelope adhered to it, translucent with grease. I peeled it free, cut my ham and contemplated throwing the oily papers away, but decided I might yet find the documents of use. I mopped the envelope, then took out the papers in a lump. With them came a small piece of paper that I almost threw away as a bit of rubbish. It was a poem.

  I’ve not seen palaces

  worn jewels or drunk fine wine

  but I’m rich as any man

  because you are mine.

  It was a silly verse, and for a moment I was embarrassed for Lill, thinking she’d fallen so far to have written it. But it could not be. Other than the date, the letters were print, the characters as blocky as the hand that penned them. Osterlund had written the verse, a love letter to Lill. It was a testament to her life that she had so stirred the stolid man, a yup or a nope often the extent of his conversation, into this. Contentment her gift, indeed.

  I smiled and carefully refolded the poetry back into Ry’s pocket. One day I would return the verse to its rightful owner. In the meantime, I wiped pork fat from the smoky testament of phantom treatments and imagined pharmaceuticals, and from the envelopes that once held pleading letters for my mother. Through a greasy spot on one, I saw there was a pale blue sheet inside that I’d missed before. I pulled out onionskin stationery. On it, as familiar and dear as her own face, my mother’s handwriting.

  Mr. Jamieson,

  Thank you for your continued time and correspondence, especially as I haven’t the resources to pay you as you deserve. I rely on your good nature most fully. However, while I believe your advice is well intentioned, I cannot give up on my child. I did expect that Edward, faced with the many losses he has incurred in the last months, no less with the humiliation of my situation, would be angry. I believe, however, he will rise above my abasement, and as his grandmother always predicted, he will make anew his fortune and his name. When he has done so, he may well forgive me.

  Because of this belief, I implore you not to discontinue your search for my son. When you locate him, assure him my new husband is a good man, and that I am well and happy but for missing my Edward.

  Liesel (Bayard) Meaney

  I was incredulous. How could she have believed it of me? She should have known better than to think I would be angry about name or money or social position, and because she was faithless she had allowed these men to cheat us of everything! I crushed the missive and threw it down. After some time I picked it up, smoothed the thin paper.

  The nameless person I now was felt incredulity.

  Ned, however, had been hurt.

  Further, I had to acknowledge, Edward Turrentine Bayard III had been furious over the loss of his name, his supposed standings, before he’d even had any inkling of what actually happened. He had desired more than anything to wear the facade of gentility, even nobility, once again. The fault of our estrangement was dual, laughable, and most horribly tragic.

  I turned the letter over.

  But perhaps not permanent.

  Mrs. Aldus Meaney

  Drift Cottage

  Hammonasset, Connecticut

  Hammonasset. A tiny fishing village not forty miles from New Haven. All that time, my mother had been two long days’ walk from my hand.

  That night, I dreamed of Curly’s mother: now in a higher office, with sweeter cakes, and a sweet belief to salve her loneliness: that her son no longer delved into the poisonous throats of the coal mines. Then I peeked into my own mother’s life: she walked the salt marshes of a Connecticut beach with a good man, collecting indigo mussels, the great gray Atlantic booming and sighing, ever tethered by its imperceptible chain to the moon.

  The following days were clear, my horse swift and sure-footed. There were no bandits, no Indians, no distressed pilgrims to slow my way. Prairie dogs dug their holes off the road, the frosted grass was high and of the type my horse favored, creeks easy to find and easier to ford. My only hiatus: to the postal office in the tiny settlement of Lookout, Wyoming.

  There I drew a perfectly articulated chicken’s skeleton on the back of the clerk’s letter, a heart visible through the wishbone at the breast. I wrapped that and the rest of the Alan and Jamieson documents in brown paper and, for a thirty-cent Hamilton stamp, sent love and apology and, I hoped, comfort to Mrs. Aldus Meaney at Drift Cottage.

  Within two weeks, I came in sight of a freight wagon pulled by a brace of oxen. Beside the wagon walked one man and two women.

  I rode up behind the wagon and a fellow inside the wagon leaned out, a rifle on his arm. The man walking turned and gave me a scowling once-over. The women did not glance up. I was taken aback by their gaunt demeanor, sticklike fingers clutching blankets at their necks. Though they looked like nothing I had ever seen, there was something about one of the women that seemed familiar to me. I came closer and the man in the wagon cocked his firearm. I swept off my hat. “Good day.”

  The walking man demanded, “What’s your business?”

  I got off my horse, frost crunching underfoot. “On my way to Dakota Territory.”

  I stepped lively alongside and shook the man’s hand while trying to get another look at the woman.

  Apparently I didn’t seem a threat. The rifleman put his gun away and the man with whom I’d shaken hands looked a little abashed. “We’ve had troubles. Robbed two weeks back, and we’d already strained our supplies by”—he hiked a thumb toward one of the women—“picking that one up. So if you’re hungry, we can’t help you.”

  I patted my saddlebag. “I’ve got ham here, some meal, coffee. Be glad to share.”

  The woman stopped. Turned slowly and let the blanket fall from her head. It was Phaegin—or what remained of her. She was a virtual skeleton with sallow cheeks and hollow eyes, her tattered dress hanging from sharp shoulders. Still, Phaegin stirred my heart.

  She stammered, “Is it you?” She didn’t wait for a reply but launched herself into my arms. “Don’t ever leave me; never leave me again!”

  I held her, all knotted rope and stick limbs, and whispered, “Alice?”

  “Bessie. Bessie Dalton.”

&nb
sp; I got down on one knee. “Would you consider, Bessie Dalton, becoming Mrs. Tom Piper?”

  She squeezed my hand tighter than I would have bet she had strength for.

  “I don’t have a ring right now, but as soon as we get settled.”

  She smiled through tears. “I don’t need a ring.”

  “You’ll get one. Until then”—I drew out a box from the saddlebag—“cigars?” I opened the box and watched her face bloom into wonderment. And if those who witnessed Phaegin dancing across the frozen grass thought her reaction to cigars was an odd thing for a lady, we knew better.

  AFTERWORD

  Dear Grandad,

  Could this be the same Lill Martine you told us about? Tom said all your stories were yarns.

  Love, Neddy

  A lifetime later I’ve often thought of who I have been, and how often I have been remade. Sometimes the remaking was sweet. My mother eventually came west for me; I reincarnated as a fourth cousin, twice removed, of the good Aldus Meaney. The Piper family enjoyed the Meaneys’ loving company for two decades after and, notably, inherited money from Mrs. Meaney’s recouped fortune. Half of that inheritance went, anonymously, to Daniel Ritter, once lowly clerk but eventually the only honest judge on the state supreme court of Connecticut.

  Phaegin and I did, of course, marry, and blissfully did I become a husband. Soon after, perhaps too soon after, I was made a father, and certainly too quickly I became a grandfather—many times over.

  Often, the changes I experienced were merely mundane. I have been a freighter, an innkeeper, a baker, an illustrator, a poor electrician, and—what eventually brought me a comfortable retirement—a seller of automobiles.

  Sometimes the change was traumatic, identity stripped from my person like the hide from a stunned rabbit. Phaegin and I lost our second daughter and I have never recuperated from being cheated of my place as her father.

  As must be, fortuitously or not, all of my personages—from Edward Turrentine to Turpentine to Tom Piper, aristocrat, anarchist, salesman—were temporary. Sadly, even my reign as husband. Which is why, I believe, we love the past.

  Never is being so permanent as in yesteryear, when, like a Paleozoic squid, soft memory solidifies into story and, in that solid form, rejects the anguish of reality. So found my friend Amos Even, who died to retreat from the cruelty of the South, or Frank O’Hare Junior, who left a brutish father to become a washerwoman in wild Nebraska.

  Yet as the past is relegated, one steps closer to the fact that the end and the beginning are much the same. Eventually no one owns identity. If we exist at all after we are gone, it will be as a story, as a symbol, as something in thrall to another’s life. You will be a mere cautionary tale, an inspiration, a shame, a way to make someone laugh, a means to learn about that abstraction called history. You will become a fossil through which no blood courses, the shape of which you cannot choose.

  I read today Lill Martine died. An old woman on her deathbed, attended by four daughters and seven grandchildren, an old man at her side: Rhylander Osterlund, a figure of estimable constancy and a sometime poet.

  There was no mention in the obituary of Lill’s miraculous skill with the rifle, of her vividness, of the passions she excited, the murder she committed, and her reason for the flight west, no breath of the name she had been born with.

  Lill had been tamed in print, her many facets and colors pushed to one side, and where I might at one time have found fault in that, I would not presume to do so now. It was in the everyday she found joy as we all eventually do, given time enough to grow wise.

  I imagine I will be tamed as well. That I lived a full century may find its way into my obituary alongside my being named the first dealer of Ford motorcars in the Middle West and Rocky Mountain region.

  But if I could choose, I’d ask to be remembered differently. Therefore, I record not only my adventures, but also how entirely I enjoy a cup of strong coffee, what raptures I feel when faced with a drink and a friend, and how the light of my life came from Phaegin, in early mornings in bed, before children had roused and we were in so many ways naked.

  I am often lonely, with Phaegin gone years before, my own children aged, my grandchildren grown, and my great-grandchildren so numerous as to be anonymous and exhausting. Yet in these quiet years my adventures, bottled and stored, have grown agreeable with age: one of the few pleasures left to an old man.

  The delight that was missing in adventures filled with pistols and promises, hangings, bombs, coffins, and sorrow I’ve found in their memory. And now, being beyond both redemption and punishment, I finally reveal the canvas of my experience, tell my stories. I bear the weight of my entire life and feel it settle around my shoulders like a buffalo robe from long ago. It is a comfort and it is warm and will keep me until I, too, am gone from this earth.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I was raised in Wyoming and want to thank my parents, Robert and Mary Streeter, for that, for the stories that their Wyoming upbringings lent them, and for the stories that they in turn lent me. Additional thanks to my sister, Summer, and brother, Nathan, who have also enriched my days and letters.

  Having come to writing late, squeezed from a tube of paint, I thank my friends and teachers, often one and the same, for giving me a hand up time and time again: David Matlin and Gail Schneider who embody the creative life and encouraged me to take my first writing class, Gary Snyder who taught me much about language and vision and who introduced me to Carol, thanks to my secret agent Alan Taylor (a life-long appointment), Emily Albu who is even more polite than I am and is still a superstar, Kathy Olmsted who offers sharp historical perspective, and Bill Ainsworth, who reassures me about the promise of red ink.

  Thank you to my teachers at UCD: Lynne Freed who says what she thinks, and to Clarence Major, Pam Houston, Jack Hicks, Alan Williamson, and David Robertson. Thank you to the Ucross Foundation for the inspiring place and time in which to write.

  Thanks to Carol Kirshnit for miles of bicycle and running therapy, and to Eileen Rendahl, author extraordinaire, for jogging at my speed, for fielding so many crazy calls about everything in the publishing world, and for making me laugh no matter what.

  Thank you Shawna Ryan for reading the work time and time again and for allowing me to read your extraordinary prose. May we birth many books simultaneously in the years ahead. (And may the labor be shorter next time around!)

  Many friends have read drafts of my work, and plied me with alcohol. Joby and Ted Margadant, who threw me my first author’s event, Pablo Ortiz and Anna Pelufo, Chris Reynolds and Alessa Johns, Jaana Remes and Andres Resendez, Ari and Lesley Kelman, Melissa and Ken Franke, and Sally Madden, Web master. Extra thanks to Sally McKee and Allison Coudert, who insisted I send my work to Laura.

  Thank you Laura Gross, a wonderful agent and a source of moral support at all the right moments. I am so fortunate to be represented by you.

  Thank you John Lescroart for superb advice and the prize that made this possible, and Karen Joy Fowler for her astute support and kindness.

  Thank you Morgan Entrekin and Andrew Robinton for all the effort put into making this book happen. Working with you has been a pleasure.

  Thanks to my sons, Jesse and Sam, for handmade pizzas and sweet tea, for understanding struggle, and for being so creative, intelligent, and kind. I have to work hard to make them believe we’re related.

  Mostly, immeasurable gratitude to brilliant and beautiful Louis, for conversations with good whiskey in warm bars, plotting book projects, and untangling literary snarls. You make my life wonderful.

 

 

 
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