Welcome to Hard Times

by E. L. Doctorow

  We did what we had to and the two men besides Ezra and me got on one horse and rode off south. Everyone else had already left. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the sun was low in the west but I was warm. My foot ached and flies were buzzing around my head.

  “Shall we say a word, Ezra?”

  “Expect so.”

  “Well what should it be?”

  He took his hat off and I took off mine and we stood looking down at the fresh earth: There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I thought of Fee putting his trust in wood, and fat Avery worrying for his establishment, and crippled Jack with a one-armed interest in things; I thought of the old Major who always wore his dress blues on Sunday; and I thought of the way redheaded Flo, who had plump knees, could sometimes get interested. I had been in the town a year and I knew them all. Behind me the town was now a ruin, and who would remember in another year that it was ever there or that they had ever lived?

  The Bad Man’s grinning face came back to me and I felt my shy hand choosing the glass he offered. Twenty years before I had put my young wife into the ground after the cholera took her and the same rage rose in my throat for something that was too strong for me, something I could not cope with.

  Kicking a clod with his toe Ezra said: “Well the Lord says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

  We rode back in to Hausenfield’s well to wash the grave dirt off. Jimmy Fee followed us and squatted with his back against the bottom of the windmill, but he wouldn’t wash and he wouldn’t look at us.

  I saw from where I stood that it would not do to leave that dead roan lying in the middle of the street. He was covered with the birds and I knew if the birds flew off he would be covered with bluebottle flies. When I finished washing I said to Ezra: “Between your mule and the Major’s pony I think they could just about pull that carcass out of here.”

  “Where to?”

  “Down along the rocks about a mile.”

  “No sense to that,” Ezra said, “unless you’re fixin’ to stay.”

  “I am.” I had hoped he was too.

  He looked at me: “Town’s gone, Blue.”

  “Now I don’t know,” I said. “We got a cemetery. That’s the beginnings of a town anyway.”

  Ezra poured half a bucket of water over his head. Then he wiped his face and neck with a rag, and then his arms and hands.

  “Blue, I came West from Vermont. They have trees in that country.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Water flows from the rocks, game will nibble at your back door, and if you’re half a man you can make your life without too much trouble.”

  “That’s what I once heard about this country.”

  “That’s what I heard too. Back in Vermont.”

  Ezra was a long-faced man, taller than I was, with a stoop in his shoulders and eyes like a beagle hound. He put on a coat and turned to look at the black smoking street and the scrubby stretches beyond:

  “Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”

  He walked over to his mule, fixed his saddle and climbed on. With his hunched shoulders and his long coat and sad eyes Ezra was not much of a sight on muleback.

  “There are other towns westerly,” he said. “A man’s a fool if he don’t know when to move on.”

  And I said: “Ezra, all my life I have been moving along. I have trailed cattle from Texas to Kansas, I have whacked bulls for Russell and Waddell, I have placer mined for myself through the Black Hills, I have seen minstrel shows in Cheyenne and played poker in Deadwood and Leadville and Dodge, I have moved from one side of the West to the other, like a pebble rolling in the pan, and if you think this place here is not much country I can tell you none of it is.”

  He was looking down at Jimmy Fee: “Come with me if you like, sonny. I’ll teach you to storekeep.”

  Jimmy sat there on his haunches, poking a twig in the dirt.

  “So be it,” Ezra said. He kicked his mule and rode off.

  Well I couldn’t waste time watching Ezra go, I had only an hour’s light to do something about that stinking horse. I couldn’t move him with just the little rig pony, it seemed the only thing to do was throw dirt on and make him a hill. So I did, piling ashes and dirt alongside his back and building up from there. Overhead the buzzards were turning, not too happy, and each time I threw a spadeful on the carrion, a horde of flies buzzed up around me.

  I finished by sundown and my back was sore. I rubbed it some and that’s when I realized the gun in my belt was gone. At first I thought I had dropped it but then I noticed little Jimmy was nowhere about. I walked over to the Indian’s shack.

  John Bear was on his knees making some more medicine pack, and Molly was crying on the buffalo rug. An oil lamp was in the corner but the boy was not there. I went outside and looked up to the rocks. Sure enough, there he was scrabbling along, waving the gun in his hand, he was going after the Bad Man from Bodie.

  It was something to bring him back, I had to do it so he wouldn’t shoot himself or me trying to get along that trail. I caught up with him and grabbed him from behind and carried him back down while he kicked and clawed. He was light but he fought hard, and he didn’t begin to whimper until I threw him down in a corner of Bear’s shack.

  I sat down myself to draw a breath. But Bear built up a small pit fire and by its light, Molly—turning her head in pain—strangled a wail in her throat and locked my eyes in a terrible green gaze. A moment later she was crying again and the boy was crying too and the night breeze started to moan through the shanty boards like an awful chorus of ghosts, and with all that misery in such small space I thought for one second to get up and get out of there and ride away fast. But I could no more do that than Fee and Flo and the others could get up from their graves—the Bad Man had fixed us all in the spot and he had fixed me by leaving me alive. Before long I could hear the coyotes jumping down from the rocks and panting past the shack over to the dead horse. They snarled and scratched and when I looked out the door I could see their shadows throwing up dirt all over the hill. Smoke still rose, blue now in the moonlight, and embers were glowing on the ground like peepholes to Hell.

  3

  Now the saying is common that Sam Colt made men equal. But if it is true then our town wouldn’t have burned up in the rain; instead that Bad Man would have been buried with due honors and a proper notice sent to the Territory Office. He would have had a hole in his chest, or his back, and the one who shot him would have Avery standing him a drink and maybe redheaded Flo and Molly smiling his way. Colt gave every man a gun, but you have to squeeze the trigger for yourself.

  A few times during that long cold night I thought the Bad Man was coming back. The Major’s pony, tethered outside, would whinny or snort, or some pebbles would roll down from the rocks, or Molly would cry out as if he was walking through the door. But really there was nothing he would come back for: In the morning I went out to stomp the numbness from my feet, and my eyes felt the shock of seeing air where the town had been. The chilly dawn rested right on the charred ground, the flats began at the horizon and came up to where I stood. I could not see a soul.

  I was stiff and sore and bleary from no sleep and my first breath of the frosty morning sent a pain into my stomach. I went over to the ruins of Ezra Maple’s store and started to poke around. Jimmy Fee woke up and came out of the shack and stood watching me while he made water in the middle of the street. He had his father’s wide-set eyes, the Fee look on his face that took you in but didn’t ask any questions, and his hair needed to be cut so bad that his head looked too large for his body. I had never seen such a skinny boy.

  “Are you hungry?” I called, but he didn’t answer.

  Two fallen planks lay like hands with their fingers touching and under them I found some dried
apples and peas in the ashes. The peas were well roasted.

  “Jimmy, look around for a coffeepot, find us a pot, boy.”

  That was the way to talk to him, he went right to it. I had not picked a handful of peas out of the ashes before he was running up with a good pot. We drew some water and washed the soot off and I built a fire out of China matches from my pocket and we brewed up some pea coffee. With the apples it helped the hunger, but it tasted bad enough to make me remember all the good coffee I had drunk in my life and the beef and bacon and bread I had eaten.

  I took some of the breakfast into the shack but Molly was asleep. She had cried almost until dawn. She lay with her arms out in front of her, thin and white, and her matted hair was caked at the tips with Bear’s mud medicine. The Indian was sitting by her side, chewing on some dried corn. I put down the pot and the apples and went back outside to scavenge with the boy.

  We recovered two charred tins of milk from Ezra’s store, a tomato can, a box of .45 shells, the head of a hammer, a handful of horseshoe nails and a hunk of lye soap. From the remains of the Silver Sun we picked out a length of balustrade, three oil lamps—one with the glass unbroken—and lots of black bottles and chipped glasses. Elsewhere we found a charred saddle and a round stove, intact, and Jimmy even came up with an almanac that was only burnt around the edges. As we hunted the sun rose warm and took the chill out of my back, and by noon we had a pile of goods sitting in front of Bear’s shanty.

  But I didn’t want to spend another night there.

  I stepped inside to see if Molly was awake. Slits and speckles of light lay across the floor and one strip of light fell on her open eyes. She looked bad. Her face was so thin I could see how the bones and blue veins went under her skin. The food beside her was untouched. I didn’t know what to say to her, I didn’t know what she would say to me, but I said:

  “Molly I’m going to build a dugout over by the well. Earth is the one thing we’ve got in supply and a good sod wall will do better against the weather than these boards will.”

  For a second I thought she was dead, she was so still. Then she was whispering something and I bent down to hear:

  “A man gave me a little trinket once. On a chain. I left it with the Major to hold.”

  I lowered my own voice: “Molly, I must tell you the old man is dead.”

  “Ah,” her eyes closed, “I knew …”

  “He died of a fit, he was cursing the Bad Man. Wait—”

  The pony was in the flats grazing on what he could, I had sent Jimmy out on his back after our salvage; but the Major’s rig was outside the door and under the seat I found a carved box of private things—pearl buttons, a tin of mustache wax, a collar, a Union medal and a small cross on a chain.

  I brought the cross in to Molly. I held it out to her and she reached up and gently took it from me with her long fingers and clutched it tight as she laid her head back down on her hands. Then she smiled. My heart jumped with that smile and I asked her would she eat something.

  “Take care of me Blue?” she said softly.

  “Yes Molly, if you allow.”

  Still smiling she said “Mayor”—whispering so that I bent down and put my ear almost to her lips—“if I had that knife now I wouldn’t drop it. I would stick it in you and watch the yellow flow.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand, I could not reconcile the words with the smile on her face. But I looked at her and saw what a sweet smile it was, full of hate, and I felt as if I had been swiped to the ground by the paw of a big cat.

  John Bear was turning over his garden patch with a piece of rock and he came around to the door just as I stepped out. I pushed by him without a word. The shovel was where I had left it, over by the offal. The coyotes had scalloped out one side of the dirt mound and eaten clear down to the bone. I knew they would be back at night for the rest, but I had to throw new dirt on anyway. An awful sense of hopelessness came over me. In this ruin and desolation, the ache of all my years rose in my bones and I was ready to sit down where I was and give up the ghost. What was the use? The woman in John Bear’s shack was no longer Molly, what had happened in Avery’s saloon could never be undone. The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures, and Molly’s grin had burned the hope right out of me.

  My hands were sore gripping the shovel again, they had swelled and blistered from all the grave-digging yesterday, it was only their needling distress which made me hold on tight as I could and march with that shovel over to the windmill. For no other reason than the pain shooting up my arms did I stick the blade into the ground and begin laying out a dugout.

  This windmill was the one thing of value that the Bad Man had left. Hausenfield had paid to have the well drilled and then he had made back his costs by charging everybody for the water. It was either the German’s good well water or the tepid stored from a rain or a long climb to a trickle spring up in the rocks. Most people paid. Fee had met the charge by building Hausenfield’s stable, Avery had used his girls. Some others took what they needed when Hausenfield wasn’t looking. I cut an eight-foot square near the windmill and wet it down with pails of water. I dug blocks of sod and piled them on the line. By digging four feet down and piling the sod two feet high you were sure of a ceiling you could stand under if you didn’t stretch. Jimmy Fee came riding in on the pony’s back and he gave the animal a drink. He held the bridle and watched me dig.

  “You makin’ another grave?” he said.

  Well I felt I was. But I said, “Hitch up that pony and find us some lumber you can’t break. I’m making a place to live.”

  By mid-afternoon there was a dead hot sun in the sky. I took my shirt off and put a cloth around my neck and as I worked I lifted my hat every few minutes to let the air in. There was no wind and the water in the tank went down and I had to climb the scaffold to turn those stubby mill blades. The digging and the climbing wore on me, I had worked all my life but the year I had lived in the town I had grown soft as I thought I had a right to do in my old age. I felt that year now. Luckily for me, Bear came out of his shack to take a nap in its shade side, and afterwards he walked over and without a word gave me a spell on the shovel. I guess he didn’t want me in his place any more than I wanted to be there. The digging was done by sundown.

  We found a fairly good shake in the rubble and dragged it over for a ridgepole. When it was in place I laid the odd bits of lumber Jimmy had collected across from the shake to the sod walls. Then I laid other wood over the cracks. Then we went up to the rocks and brought back armfuls of scrub and covered the boards and threw some dirt on and there was a dugout, roof and all. Of course it lacked a door for the hole on one side, but that was a refinement which could wait. What I wanted now was to set up the stove inside and eat some of the apples and maybe open one tin of the milk.

  I said to Jimmy: “Get in there and jump a little, tamp that floor down.” I had learned early in the morning that he was alright as long as you ordered him about. All day I had been telling him what to do and he had done it. This time he just stood with a far-off look on his face. I thought the dusk was recalling his father to him, but he pointed out to the flats and said: “There’s someone comin’.”

  The clouds were red over the flats and darkness was moving in. About a mile to the south something was making dust, and as we looked it showed itself to be a canvas-top wagon.

  “Jimmy get over by the Indian’s next to those things we gathered.” This time he moved. “And put that box of shells inside your shirt!” I called after him.

  John Bear went inside his hut and closed the door. I put on my shirt and stood in front of the dugout, and I loosened the Colt in my belt.

  We waited without moving for the wagon to arrive. It came on with a bump over the graves. When it reached the town’s edge the team slowed to a walk, a six-horse team, and I wondered what kind of covered wagon needed six horses. They were well used. Slowly down the burnt-out street they came as if the driver was taking in the sight. Then t
hey turned and pulled the creaking rig on toward me.

  “Hollo!” the driver called. He reined in just as I thought he was going to ride on past. He sat up there behind his steaming horses, a stout man, smiling widely under a bushy mustache, he might have been a smith except that he wore a striped shirt with sleeve garters. Turning in his seat he said to someone inside the wagon: “See, was no prairie fire, where is grass for prairie fire?”

  “Well you’re a damn genius, Zar,” a woman’s voice came from inside, “but I don’t see no Culver City neither.” I saw her come up behind his shoulder and the thing that struck me was she had no bonnet on her head.

  They both looked down at me.

  “Frand,” the man said, “there is mine camp in these hills, am I right?”

  “I’ve heard of one,” I said.

  “Ah hah! I am right. And what has happened here?”

  I said, “Well a man come by preaching hellfire.”

  He laughed and I could see the glint of a gold tooth: “Frand, listen. Two days past I learn is a mining camp westward, a place of business. But westward is big, and yesterday I am lost. Is rain, is dark, and only one strange light is in bottom of sky. You see what I’m telling you? There is good in everything, what for you was a town burning was for me a lamp in the window.” The man shook as he laughed. His jowls shook, his stomach shook.

  The woman said: “Don’t mind Zar, he’s a Russky.”