Forgiving

by LaVyrle Spencer

  How ironic that once she had pushed Noah away, crying, “No! I will not be like Addie!” while now she prayed to become more like her, only to find herself instead an aberration, a freak. It seemed the greatest of cruelties that nature had given her the need to be loved while robbing her of the ability to accept its most profound manifestation.

  Often she damned her father, that once-admired pillar of propriety, whose licentious acts had brought her to this impasse. Despising his memory only added to her grief, turning her lonelier and more retiring at home, more bitter and faultfinding at work, where, daily, she was forced to touch the tools she had once so valued for having been Isaac Merritt’s.

  One day in mid-July when the newspaper office was hot and pervaded by the smell of animal dung from the street, she made a regrettable scene. She had been counting the number of times Patrick got out his hip flask and tipped it up. She’d also been listening to the speed with which the type clicked into the composing stick. It seemed to have gotten slower as the afternoon progressed. A clunk and skitter sounded behind her, followed by a curse. She looked over her shoulder to find Patrick mumbling under his breath and perusing pied type that was scattered over the galley tray. Rather than begin sorting it, he reached for his flask again. She swung about and knocked the flask from his hand.

  “That’s right! Drink some more! That’ll fix the pied type, won’t it!” she shouted. On the floor the flask whirled twice and gurgled out its contents.

  Patrick tipped back on his heels. His cheeks were flushed and his gaze somewhat glassy.” ‘M sorry, Miss Sarah. Didn’t mean t——”

  “You didn’t mean,” she scoffed. “You poison yourself day after day with that... that swill while it slows down your work and fills the very air with fumes! Well, I’m sick of it, Mr. Bradigan, do you hear me! Sick of it and of you stumbling around here inept in the afternoons!”

  Her shrill words echoed in the room as she spun and stormed out the door, leaving Patrick and Josh staring after her. The puddle of liquor was soaking into the floorboards. The bottle had stopped gurgling. Josh crossed the room and picked it up, handed it to Patrick apologetically.

  “She didn’t mean it, Patrick.”

  “Yes, she did.” Patrick studied the bottle in his thin, knobby hands. He sniffed loudly. “I drink too much and I know it.”

  “Naw. You do all right. You set type faster than anybody she’s ever seen. She’s told me so.”

  Patrick shook his head abjectly, staring at the bottle. “No... she’s right. I’m nothing but a rock around her ankle.”

  He looked so forlorn Josh didn’t know what to say by way of comfort. “Come on.” He draped an arm over Patrick’s back. “I’ll help you pick up the type. We’ll have it all sorted by the time she gets back.”

  Sarah, however, did not come back before closing time. When Josh and Patrick left for the day they locked the door.

  She returned shortly after six P.M. to find the pied type straightened, the galley meticulously filled and lying on the composing stone with the furniture locked into place around it, ready to be printed.

  The room smelled of turpentine and was stiflingly hot, the back door closed, cutting off drafts. The front door was open to the street sounds that seemed remote and lonely. Sarah stood beside the printing press feeling as if the platen had just been lowered on her chest. She had lashed out at Patrick when it was not he with whom she was displeased, but with life. She had treated him unforgivably, and had no excuse. Granted, Patrick drank, but he managed his work in spite of it, and pied type only rarely. Anyone who worked around type long enough would pie it occasionally: this afternoon’s spill could have been caused by Josh or herself as easily as by Patrick. The three of them had established a wonderful working relationship. If anyone was threatening it lately it was she, not Patrick; she with her quick temper and sullen moods and her inability to be pleased, no matter how the others tried.

  She dropped to her chair, let her head fall back against it and closed her eyes.

  Oh Noah, she thought, I’m no good without you.

  The next morning Patrick failed to show up. Sarah’s apology waited on her lips, but by eight-thirty, when no Patrick appeared, she suspected she’d have no opportunity to express it. She looked up often, watching figures passing on the street, but by nine o’clock he still hadn’t arrived. She took the broom and went out to sweep her boardwalk, pausing several times to gaze up the street in the direction of the hotel, hoping to see his tall, curved frame come shambling toward her. Still no Patrick.

  She went inside and asked Josh, “What did he say yesterday?”

  Josh shrugged and studied the toes of his boots.

  “You can tell me, Josh. I know I was in the wrong and I’m very sorry for it. I only hope I get a chance to say so to him. What did he say?”

  “He said he knows he drinks too much and that he’s a rock around your ankle.”

  Sarah bit her lips to keep them from trembling, turned toward the window and murmured affectionately, “Oh Patrick.”

  By noon, when he still hadn’t appeared, she knew he was gone, knew even as she hustled over to the Grand Central Hotel to ask Sam Peoples if he knew where Patrick was.

  “He paid up this morning and left,” Sam told her.

  “On the stage?”

  “I’m afraid so, Miss Merritt.”

  She turned away quickly to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. Patrick, come back. I didn’t mean it. You were always so good to me, from the first night I came to town when you laid down your gold for me right here in this lobby and paid for my room. Please, Patrick, I’m so sorry.

  Patrick didn’t come back of course. He had vanished the way all tramp printers vanish, as she had early on expected him to, but as she had in later months believed he never would, for she had come to rely on him so completely she’d been unable to imagine running the paper without him. He’d been there at its inception. He’d set her first type and run her first copies under the big pine tree the day she’d been locked in that mineshaft. He’d been around here for months, singing amusing Irish ditties, training Josh—and a patient teacher he’d been—and manning the office whenever Sarah left it. And once he had even kissed her and asked her to marry him.

  One didn’t lose a friend like Patrick without regrets.

  Summer advanced and August came on—hot, dusty and dry. The underground quartz mining bore immense riches not only in gold, but in silver as well, while the prospect in placer mining continued at record highs. The shipments leaving Deadwood were valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. The James gang was raiding all over the upper central corridor of the country, and a kid named Antrim chalked up his first victims down in Arizona. Then one day in late August, a Deadwood freight wagon was found ten miles southwest of town with its driver and guards all dead and its thirty thousand dollars’ worth of gold and silver gone.

  Within an hour after the news reached town, Noah Campbell mounted a buckskin gelding in front of his office, signaled to the men who’d volunteered to ride with him and dug his heels into the horse’s sides. A cloud of dust rose as the riders galloped down Main Street with guns strapped to their hips, rolls behind their saddles and their buckskin bonnet strings cinched up tightly by wooden beads.

  The street was crowded with people who’d heard the news and had gathered to watch the posse off. Noah rode through them with his eyes leveled on the horizon and his expression grim. His glance shifted only once, when he passed the office of the Deadwood Chronicle, where Josh Dawkins, Addie Bay-singer, Sarah Merritt and her new printer, Edward Norvecky had gathered to watch the departure. Of the four, he saw only one, Sarah Merritt, dressed in her leather apron with her arms crossed tightly over the bib of it and her eyes following him, only him, intent and worried as he shifted his eyes from her and riveted them straight ahead as he galloped past.

  Robert rode with him, and Freeman Block, and Andy Tatum and Dan Turley and Craven Lee, and a delegation of three miners, plus an
ex-army tracker who went by the name of Wolf. They rode out toward Lead, across the forested hills of Terry Peak, through the limestone plateau, a high escarpment of buff and pink rock and invariable ponderosa pine. They spent their first night in a cave at the foot of the cliffs, continuing the next morning across “the racetrack,” a red valley of sandstone, clay and shale that entirely circled the hills, its soil so salty and dry no tree could survive in it and no man wanted to. Across the barren racetrack to the hogback ridge—the outer rim of the hills—traveling through eerie graveyards of petrified wood that dropped eventually to the arid stretches of the Great Plains beyond. And so into the plains themselves where water was scarce and food scarcer.

  The August sun scorched their skin. The wind dried their eyes. Their tongues felt swollen. Their mounts plodded listlessly, and they stopped often, pouring water from their canteens into their hats to water their horses, drinking sparingly themselves, gnawing on jerky to replace the salt in their systems, redonning their hats to feel the welcome coolness on their heads dry within minutes as they pushed on again.

  A hundred and fifty miles to the west lay the Bighorns, the probable destination of their prey, but little more than a blue haze on the horizon. The men plodded toward it. Their lips cracked. Their beards grew. Their skin stank. It became difficult to recall why they were out here in this purgatory.

  Their fourth night out they camped in the open on hard earth, saddle stiff and disheartened, with prickly pear and yucca for company.

  When they were bedded down on their comfortless bedrolls with their heads on their saddles, studying the stars, Robert said, “What’s wrong, Noah?”

  “We’re never going to catch those murderers. The sonsa-bitches are gone and they left three dead men behind.”

  “No, I mean, what else is wrong? You’ve ridden for four days and haven’t said a dozen civil words to anyone.”

  “It’s too goddamned dry out here for talking.”

  Robert let that pass. “They say in town you’ve gotten sour and heartless, that you’d as soon throw a drunk in jail as point him toward home. You never used to be that way.”

  “If you don’t mind, Robert, I’ve got some shut-eye to catch.”

  “It’s Sarah, isn’t it?”

  Noah snorted. “Sarah... shit.”

  “She’s just as bad as you. What the hell are the two of you trying to prove?”

  “Robert, shut up, will you? When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.”

  “You saw her out there in front of her place when we rode out, worried sick about you, don’t pretend you didn’t. Are you two going to stay stubborn for the rest of your lives?”

  Like a spring, Noah sat up. “Robert, goddammit, I’ve had about enough of you! Sarah Merritt is out of my life, and I’ll run my jail any way I see fit, and I’ll run this posse any way I see fit! Now shut the hell up and leave me alone!”

  With an angry lurch, he flung himself on his side and yanked his blanket to his shoulders, turning his back on his friend.

  That night while Noah slept, something bit him, some crawling creature, no doubt—a spider maybe, Doc Turley said, examining the welt in the morning. Turley broke a yucca spine and smeared some slimy juice on the bite, but it remained scarlet and swollen and left Noah feeling dizzy and fevered. Wolf, the tracker, returned from a brief scouting trip and said it was no use going on, they’d lost the trail. The murderers were on their way to the Bighorns while the posse was exhausted and hungry and sunburned. It was time to go home.

  The whole town saw them return, looking like a bunch of convicts, drooping in their saddles, with scraggly beards and dusty clothes and no prisoners in tow. Sarah went to the window of the Chronicle office and watched them ride by, relief slumping her shoulders. The hat she’d given Noah looked as though it had been sifted with flour. A dirty handkerchief hung around his neck, and his eyes, fixed straight ahead, appeared small and wincing in his sunburned face while his hands rested on his saddlehorn.

  “Looks like they didn’t catch ‘em,” Josh said, at her side.

  “No.”

  “They look pretty rough, don’t they?”

  “Eight days is a long time.”

  “You going to interview the marshal about it?”

  More than anything in the world, Sarah wanted to be that close to Noah once again, if only to ask him questions. The posse rode out of sight. Sarah drew a deep breath and turned to Josh. “If I draw up a list of questions, how would you like to do it?”

  Josh’s eyes bugged. “Really?”

  “You’ve got to start sometime.”

  “Well, if you think I can.”

  “You interview the marshal, then we’ll work on the story together.”

  “Gosh, thanks, Sarah!”

  That night at supper, Robert supplied the story in its entirety, while putting away enough food for two men.

  “Noah’s changed,” he remarked at one point.

  Sarah refused to ask. Instead she waited for Addie to do so.

  “He’s got the disposition of a wounded boar,” Robert said. “He’s surly and silent most of the time, and when he does talk everybody wishes he wouldn’t.”

  Sarah decided it was time she left the table. “Well... I’ve got some words to get on paper. Thank you, Robert, for filling me in.”

  “Sure.”

  When she had escaped the room Robert and Addie looked at each other and Addie asked, “Do you think either one of them will ever break down?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I took enough abuse trying to talk some sense into him without getting into it with her, too.”

  Over the summer the town’s population had leaped, as predicted the previous fall. It was no longer an uncommon sight to see women, even single ones of marriageable age, on the street. The arrival of women brought the arrival of the first ready-made clothing store for them, its’ first milliner, its first sidesaddles, its first sewing machine, which was purchased by Robert Baysinger for his wife’s curtain-making enterprise.

  Sarah Merritt had inaugurated a women’s column in the Chronicle.

  It seemed there was never a shortage of news.

  A schoolteacher named Amanda Searles was hired and would begin teaching in September. An assayer from the Denver mint, named Chambers Davis, opened a full metallurgical laboratory with one furnace for the melting of gold dust and two for crucible assays of ore. In the same building the town’s second stamp mill opened for business along with the first bathing arrangement with both hot and cold running water—the latter at the encouragement of Davis’s well-liked, socialite wife, Adrienne. A man named Seth Bullock, who’d run for sheriff in the fall and lost, was appointed to the position by Governor John Pennington. The Deadwood Post Office was established and the town was named the county seat. A judge named Murphy moved to town and built the first brick house in all of the Black Hills. The nearby village of Gayville was destroyed by fire, prompting the organization of the Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company—again, the first in the hills. A bigamist and soiled dove named Kitty LeRoy was shot and killed by her fifth husband, a faro dealer named Sam Curley, who then turned the gun on himself.

  Beyond the hills, the national bicycle craze took fire in the East with the first mass production of Colonel Albert Pope’s “Columbia” safety bicycle. Cycling clubs formed everywhere and started badgering for better roads, begging the newspapers to back them up in their efforts. Adrienne Davis had a bicycle shipped into Deadwood and stopped traffic everywhere when she was seen riding it in skirts shorter than her ankles.

  Meanwhile, James J. Hill was busy buying up land to lay down the foundations of his railroad empire while President Marvin Hughit of the North Western Railroad assured the mayor of Deadwood that the rails would head their way as soon as the survey showed it to be practical.

  By the end of August the grasshoppers left Minnesota.

  In September child labor became an issue in Massachusetts.

  In October the Evans and Hornick ox trai
n arrived in Deadwood from Fort Pierre with a record-breaking 300,000 pounds of freight.

  Over the stretch of that summer and autumn the face of Deadwood changed dramatically. The brush wickiups were replaced by frame buildings, many of them sporting exterior paint. Through their windows curtains could be seen. The flowers planted by the incoming women trimmed yards and fences. The town now employed a lamplighter/street cleaner who made the main thoroughfare a more pleasant place by both night and day. A new school building was erected. Children were seen walking to it in the mornings and from it in the afternoons.

  Deadwood had been domesticated.

  So had Addie Baysinger. One evening in late November, with supper over and her hand tight in Robert’s beneath the table, she smiled at Sarah and said, “We’re going to have a baby.”

  Sarah’s coffee cup never made it to her lips. It clicked onto her saucer as her eyes went round. For moments she only stared. At last she found her tongue.

  “Oh Addie, how perfect.”

  “We’re so happy. Aren’t we, Robert?” Addie turned her adoring gaze on Robert, who brought her hand from beneath the table and kissed her knuckles.

  His smile verified it even before he spoke. “Absolutely happy. We want a boy.”

  Sarah covered their joined hands with both of her own, squeezing hard. “This is wonderful news. I’m so happy for you. Congratulations.” Their countenances radiated such uncomplicated joy, the sight of them beaming at one another gripped Sarah’s heart. Her little sister and dear, kind Robert—they’d weathered every setback and emerged victorious.

  Truly, their happiness was a victory. Living with them, Sarah had observed its effects firsthand as the two of them settled into the routine of married life like contented birds building a nest. Now that nest would be filled, and it was time—Sarah realized—that she herself moved out of it.

  “When is the happy event?”

  Addie shrugged excitedly. “I don’t know for sure. Sometime in late spring, I think.”

  “The perfect time. Warm days and cool nights, and a while before the worst of the mosquitoes come out.”