‘What’s funny, father?’
‘Oh,’ and Johnny smiled, ‘I guess it’s funny that it’s so hard for a father to speak. Maybe my own father found it so. Maybe that’s why he never did. But I’m going to say just once what I mean. And what I mean to say, Peter, is that — I love you.’
Peter was silent then, and fixed his enormous eyes, eyes that seemed to reflect the entire room, the entire world, on his father. But the blue vein in his right temple, crooked as a worm, grew a little. Johnny was about to turn away when Peter spoke. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I love you, too.’
Johnny sucked in his lips, and when he could speak he said, ‘So then, all is well. And if I was going to tell you one thing, you know what that would be?’
Above them the windmill turned in the cold, dry wind, that mill turning to no purpose, doing no work, going through the motions only. Johnny hadn’t even conquered that, for it turned on him and cut him long before this brilliant son was born.
‘I’m not sure, father,’ Peter murmured.
‘I would tell you, Peter, never to mind what people say. People can never know the heart of another.’
‘I’ll never mind what people say.’
‘And Peter, please don’t say it quite like that. Most who don’t mind — most of them grow hard, get hard. You must be kind, you must be kind. I think the man you will become could hurt people terribly, because you’re strong. Do you understand kindness, Peter?’
‘I’m not sure whether I do, father.’
‘Well, then. To be kind is to try to remove obstacles in the way of those who love or need you.’
‘I understand that.’
Johnny sucked in his lips again. ‘I’ve always been something of an obstacle, Peter. But now I feel good. Thank you for understanding. And so now I’m going to go.’ But he stood yet another moment, a small smile on his lips, and then stepped suddenly forward and laid the flat of his hand on Peter’s head. ‘Good, good boy,’ he said. Then he went out and went upstairs to one of the rooms up there.
Up there Peter found him later, having heard a noise.
‘Peter?’ Rose called. ‘Peter? What on earth are you doing up there?’
Peter didn’t answer. She called again in a stage whisper from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Try not to wake your father. I think he’s very tired.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
When he came down, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen, and he addressed her as ‘Mother,’ not ‘Rose.’ The word in his mouth sounded so odd, so formal that she turned from the stove where she boiled water for tea.
‘Yes, Peter?’
He had apparently just completed combing his yellow hair, for he still bore in his right hand the black pocket comb he always carried, and before she spoke again he dragged his thumb over the teeth, and then again and again. She found the sound chilling. ‘Peter, please.’
He stood looking past her, at the opposite wall. She turned to follow his eyes. ‘What do you see there?’
Peter stood wondering what words he would use to tell her he had found his father upstairs, and had just cut him down from where he had hanged himself from one of those ropes coiled by the window for escape, in case of fire.
3
Neighbors, of course, and then tourists, having got wind of the suicide, pointed out The Inn as the place where ‘it’ had happened, and as customers drank in the saloon they gazed across at the whirling windmill and wondered at the courage of the handsome little woman who darted out to remove clothes from the line, touching this and that garment, who stooped to water flowers. Some longed to see her and the boy closer, to discover if in their faces there might yet remain some trace of the tragedy. She was now running the place as an eating house, but thanks to the stories she had but few customers: the room where one was eating might be just below where ‘it’ had happened, might point up the deaths and disappointments in their own lives.
But then many who had actually known Johnny moved away, for livings in and around Beech were marginal and desperate. As automobiles broke down less often, the man who had turned his barn into a roadside garage closed up and went away, weeds crowded in around the red gas pump. The chicken farm failed. The man who sold strange rocks and petrified wood had never made a go of it. There were new bartenders. The Inn itself was painted red now and renamed the Red Mill. Drummers passing through Beech were too tired to heed the old stigma or arrived too late at night to have been told about it — and anyway the only other choice was a dirty room above a store. The war, too, was distracting, and left people to cope with the curiously unsettling fact that men they’d known, had drunk with or quarreled with or loved or cheated — that such men had died in France, in trenches. How could it be, they thought, watching the sun sink down over the mountains in the west — how could it be that someone they knew could be dead in France?
Then for a time the saloons were closed, and Rose Gordon bought from one of them a two-thousand-dollar player piano for ten dollars! Then the saloons opened again — cautiously — run this time by bootleggers who raced Hudson automobiles down from Canada. Which was the faster, the Hudson or the Cadillac? Well, I’ll tell you, the other day Paul McLaughlin, that attorney in Herndon in a Cadillac and Jerry Disnard the bootlegger in a Hudson, they got to going up the new highway, and McLaughlin started to pass Disnard …
So with the war and the bootleggers and their night driving down from Canada, the old suicide at the Red Mill drifted off into the misty land of myth and wonder. Some got it wrong and told that Johnny had shot himself. Some said he had taken a poison available to doctors. Some said he had simply disappeared, deserted his wife and child, and in any event the little woman who remained behind was a fine person with a lot of guts to stay there and turn the place into a kind of roadhouse. Folks from Herndon, the tony crowd, war-rich, would roar down the highway in Mercers and Stutzes and stop at the bootleggers’ places and then have chicken at the place called the Red Mill. Did something with the batter on the chicken, and let me tell you!
Of course, you could have the steak if you wanted, and there were stacks of hot biscuits to melt in your mouth and wilted lettuce salad. She made the coffee fresh when you came so it wasn’t sitting around in those big urns like at other places, and then afterwards if you wanted to dance, there was a player piano, all the old ones, ‘Just Like a Gypsy’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ and the rest of the war tunes but who wants to think about that. ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘By the Light of the Stars.’
The boy? Her boy? Waits tables, but she comes in and asks if all is to your liking, and everything always is.
No, but the boy.
How should I know? Almost through or half through high school, I guess. Oh, it’s sort of that he looks at you. But doesn’t see you, or doesn’t want to see you. No, a lot of those bright kids are that way. Too much studying. I don’t know. A doctor. Of course it costs a lot. Who in hell said it didn’t? Why do you suppose she works so hard? No, you ought to drive out there sometime and if I was you, I’d make reservations. And I’d order the chicken, if I was you. And she might play the piano for you. That’s what she did, once, played for a living, they say.
It was Peter who fattened the fryers, who mixed a sour-smelling mash of bran and skimmed milk the dryland farmers brought in, and when the fryers were fat, it was he who killed them because Rose couldn’t, couldn’t even watch, wouldn’t watch. When killing time came she went inside and shut the doors and windows and sang and if necessary stopped her ears against the ungodly squawking as Peter quietly cornered first this and then that chicken in the corner of the pen. They knew what was coming, and Rose knew what was coming, so she stopped her ears or sang.
He wrung their heads off as kinder and surer and cleaner than using axe and block. He took a bird suddenly by the neck, twisted his wrist just so; the body twirled around twice and fell headless to the ground where it hopped and flopped and contracted and the discarded head beside it gazed with bright astonished eye at its own jerking body; only wh
en the body faltered and lay quiet did the lid come down over the eye, and all was over, all was over. Never did Peter spatter blood on his clean shirt; he looked on this immaculate proficiency as a preparation for the future. Scalded, plucked and singed, the chickens could now be looked on by Rose as produce, and she could fry them.
All was now prepared for the Burbank outfit; a Burbank had telephoned the saloon and the bartender had come to say the Burbanks expected chicken for supper and beds for twelve; Rose moved out of her room and fixed a cot in the kitchen; Peter moved into the shed with his father’s books. All was prepared, even a pencil nicely sharpened and laid beside the register. ‘My,’ Rose said, ‘if the Burbanks will just come every year, and then the other ranches. My!’
Peter seldom smiled at anyone but his mother.
You could see the spirits of the young fellows perk up as they approached Beech; down there the country was a little more settled and the sharp eye could see the roofs of barns and houses on the pint-sized ranches down there; several automobiles plowed slowly through the herd that parted and flowed around the craggy-looking machines like water past a rock; the young cowhands showed off a little for the drivers and passengers in the cars, spurred their saddle horses on the off side so they shied and pranced like real wild stuff. Phil grinned. Damn young fools! But he felt a real affection for them; they might not be of the quality of cowhands of years before, of the quality of men like Bronco Henry, but they were the best there was, these days, and in a way George was right as rain: you had to ride with the times, to accept the automobiles and the signs the drugstores tacked up on fenceposts and plastered against the sides of abandoned barns and sheds; Phil guessed they’d never again have Mrs Lewis pack a lunch big enough to last them for supper in Beech now that woman had started up her place. Fact was, Phil could do with a good chicken dinner himself! Fact was, his stomach was doing a powerful might of growling!
And like as not they’d run into some old-timers at the bar who remembered the country as it used to be, and they could chew the fat and have a shot or two. Phil enjoyed setting up drinks for friends, and he liked how when the Burbank outfit drove in, the town was theirs. The riffraff pretty well kept their distance, stayed away from the bar, the Mexican section hands who couldn’t even talk United States, the ignorant dryland farmers and sheepherders from north of town.
If there was anything Phil hated, it was drunkenness; it offended his keen instinct for order and decorum. Now, you take a drunk: he’ll get hold of you and chew your ear off with drivel. He’ll pretend he’s something he’s not, too big for his britches. And you can insult them or do any God damned thing to put them in their place and they’ll keep right on spouting. Phil remembered a time some years before when he’d been standing there at the bar enjoying the atmosphere and this barfly waltzed in and began to make himself objectionable. Now, Phil didn’t mind people taking a drink or two — he took a drink or two himself sometimes. But Jesus H. Christ!
You take when you’ve been trailing cattle twenty-five miles down the road and you’ve got your face all fixed for a drink and some loudmouthed scissorbill of a barfly; by rights, the barkeep ought to throw them out, but if they don’t, what are you going to do?
Phil had the fellow sized up right off, had from the beginning, soon’s the fellow’d come to Beech — oh, when was it? There’d been complaints about the fellow before; just happened Phil had never run up against him. Well, once was enough!
Used to be a drunk of a sheepherder come in — come in with his bitch of a dog and Phil hated animals in the house where humans are. This bitch’d lie sniffing at the sheep-herder’s feet, gazing up at him, watching his loose mouth. That bozo would talk your ear off about that dog, how smart she was, how fast, how quick, how trusting, how loyal, and by God how loving.
‘That little dog,’ the sheepherder said, hanging onto the bar to keep from falling over, ‘that little dog is just like my wife.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ Phil had said dryly. But the sheepherder didn’t get it. Just went driveling on. By and by somebody led him out and there was peace and quiet in the joint, and Phil sighed.
You can’t win every time and Phil had got caught with this duffer who for God’s sakes talked to the company at large about flowers, and to Phil in particular. There was poor Phil there, stuck. Silly duffer in town Phil wouldn’t have trusted as far as you could throw a cat by the tail. And then when Phil had tried to make it as plain as the nose on his kisser that his company wasn’t desired. So then — well, what the hell.
‘I wouldn’t a done that,’ George told Phil.
‘Sure you wouldn’t,’ Phil said cheerfully. ‘You didn’t have to listen to him.’
Old George was a great one for feeling sorry for people. Phil wondered right now how much it had to do with feeling sorry for people that made George make arrangements to eat and sleep at that woman’s place. For that half-baked barfly had suicided some years back. Loco.
Phil now rode over beside George. ‘Well, Fatso, there it is ahead of you — the metropolis of Beech.’
George nodded. ‘There it is all right.’
‘Looks pretty quiet in town. Guess they’re all under cover.
Ought to get the bunch in easy.’
‘Seems like.’
Phil frowned. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you, Fatso?’
‘Not a thing, Phil.’
‘Seems to me, it hurts you to take two words and hitch them up.’
‘I was never much of a one for talk, Phil.’
‘You’re no Edison talking machine, that’s a gut.’ Phil rode off at an angle through the herd, and then came up beside one of the young fellows. ‘I’m so hungry,’ he remarked, ‘that my big gut’s eating my little gut.’ The young fellow laughed at this, but still Phil didn’t feel good. Twenty-five years, a kind of silver anniversary, and there’d been something sour about the whole drive. Exactly what, he couldn’t tell. Was it age? He was just forty. Had the times got out of hand? Then he laughed. There for a minute, he’d begun to feel sorry for himself!
It was four in the afternoon when the Burbank outfit, tall and proud, rode into Beech; it had seldom been so quiet. The cowhands knew people watched admiring from the windows, and the girls upstairs would be prettying themselves, getting themselves ready. Even the wind seemed quieter. Far across, high on the hill, a few wild horses grazed. Seldom had it been so quiet, yet Phil kept his eyes peeled for any scissorbill wandering out to spook cattle. Nobody did; not a dog barked; the lead steers stood stiff-legged only a moment before the wide gate, heads down, sniffing, then they suddenly bucked on through giving the good swift kick at the gate posts. In fifteen minutes the herd was safe inside, the heavy plank gate closed on them, eighty thousand dollars’ worth of steers.
‘Never seen it quieter,’ Phil said. ‘Eh, Fatso? Never saw ’em go in so easy.’
‘For a fact,’ George said.
‘Well, Chatterbox,’ Phil said, ‘what say we mosey over and rinse the dust off our tongues?’
The young cowhands made happy sounds, and the old cowhand, oldest in the bunkhouse, smiled. Sitting straight, spurs jingling, they rode over to the saloon and tied up at the hitchracks. Inside, Phil grinned. ‘Set ’em up for the outfit,’ he said, and the barkeep did, except for the two who had already gone around the side and up the outside stairway. Phil had winked at them. They wouldn’t be seen for maybe half an hour.
‘Well,’ George said. ‘I’ll mosey over to the telegraph office and see if they know anything about the power.’ The power. It was a cant term, half slang, half esoteric. As engineers used ‘slipstick’ for ‘slide rule’ and realtors ‘pass papers’ when they transfer property, so did ranchers refer to ‘the power’ when they meant the locomotive. Without the power, only the cars already spotted at the chutes could be loaded.
‘They already phoned it’ll be late,’ Phil remarked. ‘Well, don’t get lost in the streets,’ and he watched George walk stiff and straight across the sag
ebrush space toward the depot. Poor George, Phil thought. He made people uncomfortable and he knew it. The young fellows couldn’t enjoy their drinks, couldn’t whoop it up with George around; they kept their eyes lowered and tried to watch their talk, with George around, and to see the girls they walked around outside and took the back stairs, and the girls never came down later, with George around. Nobody liked to put a nickel in the music box, and any place George graced was a funeral, for sure. Now, he’d go over there to the station and shoot the breeze with the operator and stay out of sight as long as he could. Anyway, it was considerate of him.
That is not to say that Phil himself ever had traffic with whores or told fast stories or jigged around like some men his age; that crap was not for him, not his dish. He was a Burbank, too, and his personal standards were — well. But he was tolerant — life had taught him that — and the men knew it, and he got a kick out of seeing them frolic around, even if they made damned fools of themselves. It embarrassed George.
For instance, as it grew dark (it looked as if the power was going to be even later) Phil went out back behind the saloon to take a quick leak, and there was the youngest of the young fellows sitting on the running board of an automobile, slumped there with his noggin bending low between his knees, already sick. Car must have belonged to some one of his sidekicks come down the highway from Herndon. Phil had to laugh. One of the young fellow’s friends was poking the kid, trying to get him to come alive.
‘Go way, go way,’ the young fellow kept moaning. ‘Oh, Jesus, go way.’
And the friend kept insisting. ‘Come on now. We got to do it. We got to do it now.’
‘Oh, go way, please just go way.’ In the white light from the gas lamp inside the poor young kid’s face was green. The kid’d remember that a long time, being sick, and hearing the bright music from the music box.
Phil finished his leak, sighed with comfort (his teeth had been floating) and he buttoned his levis, and walked over to the kid. ‘Having fun?’
The Power of the Dog Page 5
