by Oakley Hall
“Don’t you worry about him,” I said. “I’ll walk you home on Monday.”
When she had gone I lay with my eyes closed and my teeth gritted. My head felt filled with some overheated substance that ached behind my eyes. I had had no idea how vulnerable I was. But now I had an idea how the Railroad pursued its ends. I thought of the revolver in the drawer, and having come to the pass where I must carry it to walk Belinda home from school.
It seemed that when you were in possession of a firearm you began to think in terms of it.
A hackie brought me a green bottle wrapped in white tissue paper. It was Amelia’s mother’s bruise remedy, and I dutifully sloshed the white stuff over my bruises and rubbed it in until I stank like a cucumber stall at the Washington Street market.
Jonas Barnacle carried my supper on a tray up the stairs. “So they gave you a good pummeling, Tom.”
“They did,” I said.
“Those Railroad folks can get away with about anything, I guess.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
21
FAITH, n. – Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
I was still aching and shaky on foggy Sunday morning when I presented myself at the early service at the Washington Street Church. I slid into a seat in a pew at the back of the church, which was a hollow box of bricks, with a lectern instead of an altar, a crucifix on the wall, and some numbers chalked on a blackboard, that must be hymns. These Protestants did not go in for decoration.
There were about thirty people present, and I could see Klosters’s bald head in the second row. The preacher, the Reverend Stottlemyer, who had brought Klosters to Jesus, paced behind the lectern. He wore a black suit, a high collar and a four-in-hand tie. He must have been six and a half feet tall and skinny as a post.
I had brought some rage and nervousness to this brick church, together with Bierce’s revolver in my pocket that seemed to weigh ten pounds.
Stottlemyer paced and halted to gaze out at the congregation with saucer eyes in his gaunt face. The eyes seemed to be fixed on me as he spoke.
“ ‘And the fear of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air; with all wherewith the ground teemeth, for into your hand are they delivered.’
“The words of the Lord! For these beasts, these fowls, represent our lower natures, my friends. And this lower nature must be subdued and disciplined by the regenerate Jesus-man.
“The Jesus-man must govern his lower nature, my friends. The ox is strong to labor, but that strength may no longer be expended without direction. Those fierce thoughts, which are as the lions and bears, must be stilled. After man has passed the flood and is regenerate, those very lions may be loosed upon him, the lower nature be slain, the Jesus-man in his higher nature left standing beside his own carcass.
“For as the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air are within our lower natures, so are the twelve apostles in our higher. They correspond to the twelve degrees of the Jesus-man, my friends, brought into perfect harmony and atonement. For in the central place in these harmonies is Adonai himself, Jesus spreading his welcoming arms to the Jesus-man.”
He paced, swung, and paced the other way, big-nosed and narrow-headed, with his eyes that flared like candles as he preached. He did not work himself up into any ferment, as though saving himself for the second service of the day, so it was difficult to understand what had caused Klosters to change his ways, but when he gazed out over his flock it continued to seem as though he stared straight at me. I leaned forward to cross myself and whisper a prayer, for it was like Satan himself in that jackstraw preacher knowing he had a shaky Catholic in his sights.
But after awhile he shifted into the offertory: “Our offering, my friends, is the table of Jesus. It is the food of God. The fire of heaven, which is the holiness of Jesus, consumes this offering, and all in seconds it ascends as sweet incense to Him!”
It seemed my salvation to skin out the door into the blowing fog of Washington Street when Stottlemyer wasn’t looking. I took up a post in the mouth of an alley a hundred feet down the street, wondering what to do if Klosters chose the other direction. But he came my way, looming out of the fog, big-hatted and alone.
I let him pass, then stepped out and jammed the muzzle of the revolver into his kidney. “Just step this way,” I heard my shrill voice say.
He stepped into the alley before he had figured out who I was. When he faced me I prodded the muzzle into his stomach. His hands were raised shoulder high. His pockmarked granite face was close to mine, his bloodshot eyes regarded me, his mouth turned down at the corners.
“What do you think you are doing?” he grated.
“You followed my landlord’s girl home from school on Friday.”
The corners of his mouth turned up. “These girls do like me. Can’t think why.”
“Don’t do it again,” I said.
His eyes closed in weariness, as though this was all too much for him. “You are a foolish young fellow,” he said. “You know you are not going to shoot me, and I know you are not going to shoot me.” But he did not lower his hands.
“I will shoot you if you offer that girl any harm,” I said, and suddenly I felt as futile as Major Copley.
When he lowered his right hand it came down like a hatchet on my wrist, knocking the revolver clattering to the pavement. Before I could move he slammed his boot down on it.
Panting a little from his effort, he said, “You are writing something about Senator Jennings that don’t want to be published. If you leave off publishing it I will leave that girl be.”
I rubbed my wrist, trying not to grimace at the pain. In fact I had not written much of the piece on Jennings, and I could rationalize that Bierce didn’t actually want to publish it anyway, he only wanted Jennings to know it was being written. It was entirely probable that he had made sure that Jennings learned of that fact, which had got me the beating I still ached from, despite the cucumber arnica; and this botch as well.
“All right,” I said.
He stooped to pick up the revolver and handed it to me butt first. He smiled bleakly. “Here’s your piece,” he said. “Don’t forget the Concealed Weapon Ordinance.” He opened his coat so I could see that he himself was not armed; then he lumbered off into the fog.
I was not in a good mood when Amelia and I took the ferry to Marin. I had been Futilitarian with a Concealed Weapon. In fact I had not been much of a hero since I had gone into action on the Brittain’s porch, having come out on the short end of all my scrapes since.
Amelia and I stood on the deck with fog blowing past us. I put an arm around her, to which she seemed to respond. “What’s the matter, Tom?”
“Things going wrong,” I said.
“Can I know?”
“Not today,” I said. “I wish the fog would let up, though.”
“It’s just what I chose for today!”
I gave her a squeeze.
The hoots of foghorns resounded down the Bay. Alcatraz loomed up like a ship bearing down on us, and faded away behind. We ascended Mount Tamalpais still in dense fog blowing over us in the open carriage with other sightseers crouched together in the seats before us, and Amelia huddled against me so that I could look down on the plane of her cheek, and the fringe of eyelashes beneath her bonnet. Suddenly we were out of the fog in brilliant sunshine.
Amelia cried out, “Oh!” as we sailed above the ocean of clouds that extended as far as could be seen in every direction, gleaming white, smooth as cream here and tumbled there, with Mount Diablo knifing the far billows to the east across the Bay like a fin.
As we strolled the summit she clung to my arm in the uneven footing, matching her steps to mine. “What a lovely show you have given me!” she said.
“It is only displayed this way for beautiful young ladies,” I said.
She laughed her w
arm breath against my cheek.
She pressed against me as we strolled like lovers among the other couples and two family groups with pinafored and sailor-bloused children running and calling to each other. We admired the prospects and walked on random paths. It was impossible to retire from the view of the others without descending two hundred feet into the clouds. It seemed to me that Amelia’s discomfort matched my own.
I held my arm around her waist and she pressed against me, looked into my face with a misty expression and laughed. I laughed with her. We were very far away from the dangers of Taylor Street, and her guardian constable, and my defeats.
“This evening is the Overland Monthly salon,” I said.
“I have heard of it,” Amelia said.
“I am invited, if you wish to attend with me.”
“I don’t know why I should be so lucky twice in one day!”
“What do you mean?”
“I would admire very much to meet the famous poets of San Francisco!” she exclaimed, leaning her weight against me.
22
WOMAN, n. – An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
As the editors of San Francisco’s leading magazine, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith were powerful in the literary world. Bierce had published occasional pieces in the Overland Monthly, which he referred to as the Warmedoverland, and he had invited me to accompany him to last month’s salon, where I had been introduced to Stoddard, a plump, effeminate man somewhat older than Bierce. Miss Coolbrith was tall and gracious, with a frieze of fair spit curls across her forehead. Although I had no literary aspirations I had been invited to return, which I understood to be because the young lady poets outnumbered the young men who were to provide them company.
The windows of Stoddard’s house on the slopes above North Beach were alight. Inside, the entryway was crowded with guests ridding themselves of coats and hats. Just past them Stoddard stood a host’s post, raising his hands palms flippered back at the wrists to greet each new arrival. He wore a white gardenia in his lapel, and his active eyebrows and moues of pleasure kept his face in constant motion.
Ina Coolbrith met us inside the crowded main room. “It is Mr. Redmond, the journalist! And this is?”
“Miss Brittain,” I said. “And this is Miss Coolbrith, Amelia.”
“I am an admirer of your verse, Miss Coolbrith,” Amelia said with an ease I admired. “And we have spent the day at Mount Tamalpais, which is the scene of many of your poems.”
Smiling at her, Ina Coolbrith said, “It was there that Mr. Miller and I gathered laurels for him to take to Lord Byron’s grave in England.”
Joaquin Miller was holding forth to a cluster of female poets across the room, a big blowhard fraud in my estimation, in his blue flannel miner’s shirt and shiny boots, which he moved forward and back so that the lady poets in their flowered frocks kept in motion evading his advances and compensating for his retreats. He was recently returned from England, where he was reported to have had a grand success. The British welcomed Westerners whom Easterners found ridiculous. Amelia gazed at the Poet of the Sierra with interest.
On the wall was an oil painting of Stoddard in a monk’s cowl, contemplating a skull. I thought the painting silly, and it cast a pall of pretension on Bierce’s desk skull.
Entering from a balcony were two handsome young ladies, one in black with a bouquet of violets pinned to her shoulder, the other in shimmering peach silk. Masses of golden hair were piled on her head. The two were such spectacular personages that the attention of the room was directed towards them, and I noticed one of Joaquin Miller’s acolytes slip away to join the crowd assembling around these two. In other parts of the room were several portly gentlemen who looked literarily important, one with a bald head sporting sprouts of colorless hair, another in a kind of military tunic, with elaborate longhorn mustachios. Standing beside a dark wood chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl was a pair of young male poets who wore the elaborate bow ties popularized by Oscar Wilde on his recent visit to San Francisco.
Amelia looked around her with such interest that I was pleased I had thought of bringing her to the Overland Monthly salon.
“Tom, please inform me who these individuals are!” she whispered, for Ina Coolbrith had turned to greet newcomers.
I didn’t know who many of them were. “That’s Joaquin Miller,” I said.
“Oh, there’s Mr. Bierce,” Amelia said. Bierce, whom I had not seen before, stood near the windows attended by his own band of females.
When I caught his eye we exchanged restrained salutes. I had to explain to him my bargain with Klosters. His glance rested appraisingly on Amelia. For someone who advertised his dislike of the female gender, Bierce did have a weakness for pretty women.
The poetess Emma McLachlan came up to be introduced to Amelia. “Please tell me who is the brilliant young lady with the violets!” Amelia said to her, when greetings and introductory comments had been run through. Miss McLachlan had mousy hair and a prim mouth. I did not find her attractive.
“That is Sibyl Sanderson,” she said. “She is a talented soprano, who wishes to pursue a career as an opera singer. But her father, Judge Sanderson, will have none of it. She is very daring! She has recently returned from Paris and she dresses always in black and wears violets. When asked if that is what the fashionable ladies are wearing in Paris, she said, ‘It is what the demimondaines wear!’ ”
Amelia looked properly shocked.
“And her companion with the magnificent hair?”
“She is Mrs. Atherton. She has recently serialized a very daring novel in Warmedoverland. Those two are often seen together.”
“The Randolphs of Redwoods!” Amelia said. “There was a pseudonym, as I recall.”
“Yes, ‘Asmodeus.’ ”
They were talking about matters I knew nothing about, and I was feeling sulky until Amelia touched my hand reassuringly.
“It is her first novel, I believe.”
“She claims she has written another which is even better,” Miss McLachlan said. “She is married to a ne’er-do-well, they say. George Atherton. She was a Miss Horn.”
“What distinguished company!” Amelia said. She told me that she wished to pay her respects to Mr. Miller and departed to join the bevy around the blue flannel shirt.
I was left with Miss McLachlan, who gave me her tight-lipped smile like a wink.
“Asmodeus was some kind of devil,” I said.
“The destroyer of domestic happiness,” she said. “He destroyed each of Sara’s seven husbands in succession.”
“Think of that,” I said.
“Have you read the novel, Mr. Redmond?”
I admitted that I had not and resolved not to. Amelia was now engaged in conversation with Joaquin Miller. I saw that she stood her ground when he lurched toward her.
When I had detached myself from Miss McLachlan I collected a glass of punch from a Chinese boy in a white shirt and black tie and made my way through conversational twos and threes toward Bierce’s orbit. I was sweating in the heat of the crush of bodies and the gaslights.
Bierce introduced me as his associate, which caused some interest. Amelia had abandoned Joaquin Miller and drifted over to join the group around the two daring young ladies.
Ina Coolbrith stood beside me. She seemed to be holding herself very stiffly, hands grasping her forearms. She smelled of rosewater.
In a lull in the conversation she said in a challenging tone, “I see that you have devastated another young poet in Tattle this week, Ambrose.”
Bierce bowed his head to her but did not respond.
“I wonder if she will ever write another verse.”
“If she does, it is probable that she will not send it to me for review,” Bierce said.
There was tittering among the young ladies around him, which I saw that Miss Coolbrith did not like.
“My niece, whom you also cruelly turned into a joke, has sworn she will never write again.”
Bierce said, “I wish that I were able to consider that a tragedy, Ina.”
“I do,” Miss Coolbrith said. “For I consider poetry unwritten to be elevated thought unexpressed, and elevated thought may help to make the world a better place. But of course elevated thought is not your metier, Ambrose.”
“That is of course true, madam,” Bierce said, and I saw from the whitening of his nostrils that he had restrained himself from saying more.
“I told my niece that yours is not the voice of the muse,” Miss Coolbrith continued. “But only of a cruel and disappointed man.”
“Disappointed, madam?”
“Disappointed,” Miss Coolbrith said, and I thought she meant it as cruelly as the cruelty of which she had accused Bierce. It seemed to me that one of them now, dramatically, must storm from the room. But Bierce only turned to address himself to one of his young ladies, and Miss Coolbrith, brushing at a wisp of hair on her forehead and affixing a smile to her face, turned to greet a young man in black broadcloth who looked like a preacher. I eased myself toward where Amelia stood listening to a speech Mrs. Atherton was making, with florid gestures.
When I looked back again Bierce had disappeared.
Amelia congratulated me on my friends as she and I walked over Nob Hill in the blessed cool air toward her home.
I said I could hardly claim they were my friends. I was no literary person.
“Surely there is a place for a journalist in such an accomplished group. Your Mr. Bierce was on a pedestal. And Miss McLachlan is quite interested in you.”
“It is not a mutual interest.”
She held my arm. We walked slowly so as not to arrive at 913 Taylor Street before we had to. She had a way of stretching her gait to match mine. Often our hips brushed.