Dutch Uncle

by Marilyn Durham

  The cantina crowd came to a momentary halt, frozen with shock as he fell on his knees and hands beside her. Ekman got his team under control and brought the wagon to a stop thirty yards away. He jumped out to run back. His woman was keening thinly, her hands over her eyes. It was the only sound for a second.

  Then the miners broke into a roar and surged around Jake to mob Ekman. He went down, crushed under their fists and boots, while his woman screamed and the deputies shoved and cursed, trying to reach him. Jake heard him crying. ‘I didn’t see her! I didn’t see her!’ A familiar voice was shouting, ‘It was an accident! An accident!’ But it was drowned in howls of ‘Kill the bastard! Stomp him into the ground!’

  ‘You Godforsaken animals, listen to me!’ a voice above Jake yelled. He looked up from Urraca as if waking from a trance and saw Clement Hand beside him with a double-barreled shotgun. He was raising the gun to blow apart the pack that was killing the Swede, but Jake reached up and caught the barrels.

  ‘Wait!’

  Clem’s eyes were running tears, and he shook with a rage close to that of the mob. ‘No! It’s starting now, don’t you see that? They’ll never stop!’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Jake drew his own gun and fired it into the air just over the heads of the crowd. It brought an instant of fear and attention. ‘Now,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll kill the next man who kicks him,’ Clem said in a loud, firm voice. ‘And if he’s too far back in the crowd, I’ll kill the ones in front of him first, then him. Get away from him now, all to one side, that way. Move, goddamn you!’

  ‘This little girl is still alive!’

  They began to move, slowly, stumbling over Arne, staring at Urraca.

  Jake stood up, his legs shaking with the effort, and beckoned to Augie Gebhardt, who came and took his gun. He saw Sánchez behind Clem with another sawed-off shotgun. No one protested. The miners stood dazed by the sudden cessation of their own fury. The woman jumped out of the wagon and ran to Ekman.

  Arne lay in an almost fetal position in the thick dust of the road, his head nearly invisible under his hunched shoulders. There was blood in the dirt and on his hands. Jake couldn’t tell whether he was still alive or not, nor did he much care. He stooped to pick up Urraca. As he turned away he asked Clem, ‘Is there anybody in this hole who’s any kind of a doctor?’ Clem shook his head, and Jake started away toward the jail. Behind him Clem said, ‘Somebody look at Ekman and see if he’s still alive. Just one of you. All right. One more step out and help pick him up and bring him back to the cantina. Now, the rest of you, get your mules and clear out. These women are tired, and none of you could look very good to them right now. I’m putting them in the jail for tonight for their own protection, in case some of you aren’t men enough to remember how to respect a woman. There’ll be guards on the jail, in case there are such men, and God help you if you come back tonight or tomorrow carrying any kind of weapon with you. Right now I’d rather kill the whole lot of you than live until Sunday. If that poor Swede dies there could be murder charges put on all of you. Think that over before you call any more attention to yourselves. And get out of here quietly when you go, so this child can have some rest.’

  He lowered the shotgun while he was speaking the last words, as if there were no doubts about whether they would obey him. Sánchez did the same, and Augie, at a signal from Sánchez, put Jake’s gun in his belt. Everyone stood frozen for a moment; then the crowd broke and began to move past the three men, not meekly, but frowning, murmuring, as if digesting the heart of some serious debate that affected them only at one remove. Yet they didn’t look at Clem as they passed him, because the women had come out to see and hear, and they were standing in the street now, pale and joyless; alien to the holiday that had ended so suddenly.

  Carrie was on the corner by the Red Front; dark eyes in a bloodless face as Jake approached with Urraca.

  ‘Where’s Paco?’ he asked.

  ‘Down at the jail with the two women. Is she—’

  ‘Then I can’t take her there. Where else?’

  ‘My room. I’ll get some water and bandages.’

  ‘She won’t need them. She’s dead.’

  Carrie put her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, dear God. Oh, no, Jake. Clem said—’

  ‘He said it to stop them.’

  She dropped behind him, leaning on the wall to cry soundlessly. One of the new women hurried from the street to catch up with him.

  ‘Mister, listen. I’m not a nurse, but I’ve taken care of sick people lots of times. Can I do anything for the baby?’ Jake stopped, looked at her. She had a plain, strong Irish face and she didn’t seem to be drunk. ‘I know somethin’ about broken bones, too. My father and my brothers worked in the mines all their lives.’ He nodded, blank faced, and let her follow him.

  Carrie stumbled after them and opened the doors so he could lay Urraca on her bed. The Irishwoman bent over her, then looked up at him in pity.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, mister. The poor little thing—’

  ‘I know. I didn’t say it out there because I didn’t want you to go back and tell the other women and start them crying in the street. Everything has stopped now. If it starts up again, it’ll be worse.’ He glanced at Carrie, who was half lying on the bed, crying, and stroking Urraca’s hair.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the woman.

  ‘Mary O’Neal.’

  ‘You look like you’ve got some sense, Miss O’Neal. Can you take charge of the rest of the women tonight? Take them down to the jail. Carrie will show you where it is. No. I will. And we’ll get all the blankets and cots we can round up for them. It’ll be close quarters, but not as close as the stage was, or that wagon you came in on. When they’re settled you can tell them about this, if it makes any difference to them. But make them understand they have to stay in the jail, whether they like it or not. There’ll be somebody outside all night if they want anything. Can you do that?’

  ‘I can make them hussies step without raising me eyebrows. I’ve been like a mother to half the sorry lot of them ever since we started out, including a few that’s older than me, too.’

  ‘Good girl. Carrie, give me the keys.’ She offered them, still crying, and he took them stonily. ‘Have you got any extra blankets here?’ He knew she did. She got them from her chest at the foot of the bed, and more from Clem’s room. She was looking at him with tearful expectation of some word from him, but he didn’t even meet her eyes. He put the bedding under his arm, then took Mary O’Neal out to point the way to the jail. He left her to gather the women while he delivered the blankets.

  As he reached the jail door, he remembered Paco would be in there. He could hear one of the women giggling as Paco talked animatedly. He put the blankets down on the chair outside and went to find more. He wasn’t ready to face Paco.

  He felt cold and queasy inside, as if he had just been kicked in the stomach, but his hands were steady. He could hear his own voice with the ear of a stranger. It gave orders, asked questions calmly. He just wasn’t ready for Carrie or Paco. They wouldn’t want calm control; they’d want emotion, feelings; and he was not ready yet.

  Other voices and acts kept recurring to his mind, monotonously. Urraca running from him; going under the iron hoofs and the ironbound wheels. Ekman sobbing, ‘I didn’t see her!’ as the mob beat his face in. Clem, the little man with dreams of valor, with a gun in his hands and authority in his voice: his hour, at last. Carrie sobbing on the bed beside Urraca, her hand stroking the thin hair.

  What he couldn’t see was himself in it. He had done nothing except pick up a trampled little remnant of Urraca that was so still after that last convulsion; so suddenly changed to nothing that he had to force himself to reach out and touch her.

  He kept moving steadily as he looked for his own place in things. Not that he wanted a place there. He wanted out.

  He got his gun back from a silent Augie Gebhardt, collected more blankets, borrowed cots from the Miners Supply. He still
had to bring buckets of water to the close-penned women, look at Carrie again, speak to Clem. And sometime soon he had to tell Paco his sister was dead, then find someplace for the boy to spend the night. He was going to have to force himself to keep moving and do all those things in the same way he had made himself touch Urraca’s body.

  The miners hadn’t gone home. The saloons were full, but the atmosphere in them was subdued. He made his first rounds, mechanically, further delaying the moment when he had to see Paco. In every place he entered he was asked about her. He told them she was in pretty bad shape, nothing more. He said the same thing each time. Their genuine concern seemed to mock his cold control.

  Yet they weren’t mocking him. He was appalled to see tears in some of their eyes, and retreated from the sight as quickly as he could, before they roused some feeling in him beside distaste and bafflement.

  They were the drunken carousers, the woman-hungry howlers, the mob that had mauled Ekman to a bloody crippled heap, and they cried for Urraca.

  What was she to them but a homely greaser kid, a deaf-and-dumb curiosity? A little spick pepper bud whom, if she had been above the age of thirteen, not one of them would’ve minded cornering in some crib or alley to make a whore of and forget. And if some older Paco should object to that, they’d kick him in the ass, or rub his face in the mud, or kill him. But now they cried and patted Jake’s back in sympathy because they thought she was only hurt, not dead.

  He had to stop thinking like that because that was only going to goad him into some kind of blind, crazy act like grabbing one of them by the throat, and he would be~ better off if he just quit thinking and kept moving.

  When he checked the cantina Clem was in charge, and reported that the women of the town had agreed to take in the new women wherever they could put up a cot tomorrow, and see that the proprieties were observed until they bad chosen their men.

  ‘They’d have been glad to do it all along,’ be said. ‘I just didn’t think so. I imagined they’d resent being asked, somehow.’

  Jake nodded, scarcely listening. ‘How’s Ekman?’ He didn’t want to know about that, either, but he had to say something.

  ‘Well, he’s alive. His teeth are gone in front, his ribs are broken, and his hands. But he’s tough as Spanish beef, so I guess if Sánchez’s mother doesn’t kill him with some of her concoctions he’ll pull through.’

  ‘I guess his girl won’t think so much of him without his teeth.’

  ‘Oh, she’s upstairs with him now. She seems to think all the more of him for taking such a beating. I guess she thinks some of it was on account of her, and she’s right. A couple of the other women are still here, too, and a couple slipped off with the men, so the number in the jail is reduced to seven. They’ll only need two extra cots.’

  ‘All right. I’ll tell Dugan.’

  Clem looked at him closely. ‘Jake, don’t you want some food before you go? You look like you could use something.’

  Jake shook his head.

  When he returned to the jail with the folding cots, Mary O’Neal was sitting on the chair outside the door, holding Paco on her lap. Jake put the cots inside first, then came back to her. She was murmuring something to the boy. Jake stood waiting for the worst moment yet. But she looked up and told him in a voice just above a whisper:

  ‘He heard the women talking about what happened, you know. And he wanted to run off and see after her himself. I didn’t know what you wanted done, but I couldn’t let him go, and I couldn’t let him just go on asking about her and wondering why nobody would let him see her. So I brought him out here and told him the truth of it.

  ‘He’s a fine one, a brave one, though, aren’t you, my boyo?’ She stroked his hair as she spoke. Paco’s face was hidden from Jake. ‘You can be proud of your boy,’ she said. ‘Oh, we cried some together, it’s true. But tears from the heart never did shame to anyone, no fear. Why, even the Lord Jesus cried for his friend Lazarus, and who knew better than He did what a fine place Heaven is to go to? I think he must be asleep. No? Paco, boy, your papa’s here to take you now.’

  Jake didn’t correct her. Paco slid off her lap and Jake scooped him up. He clung like a baby opossum.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve put you out of your beds,’ Mary said softly.

  ‘We’ve got a place, thanks.’ He was in such need of escape from her warm sympathy he could almost have pushed her through the jail door. But she didn’t put him to any further stress. Patting Paco gently on the back, she went in and left them alone.

  He’d told her they had a place to go. He didn’t know where it was. He would rather have the whole town come and stomp him to a rag, like Ekman, than go back to the cantina or any other place where there were people and submit to more sympathy and talk. He needed to find a place where no one would come. But what could he do with Paco?

  Carrie would take him, he knew, but he rejected the idea because, of all the people in town, he wanted least to see Carrie now and have the added burden of her grief put on him. He had never felt so close to panic. Shame for the emotion was the only thing that kept him from flight.

  At last he went to the back of the jail, where Paco’s box town was, and sat down on something that seemed firm enough to hold them and was backed by the adobe wall. Paco sat astraddle of him, legs hanging down on each side. When they had been there for a few minutes, the boy sniffed and wiped his nose on his arm, then clung to Jake’s shoulders again.

  ‘You all right like this?’ Jake asked him.

  Yes.’ They were silent. ‘Chake?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Does it hurt when you get dead?’

  Jake took a breath. ‘No.’

  ‘Not even a little bit?’

  ‘Maybe, just for a minute. But not after.’

  ‘Did she cry?’

  ‘No.’ He wished Paco were as incapable of speech as she had been. But the questions came, and he answered.

  ‘Mary said you can get dead so quick you don’t even know it.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did Urraca do that?’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t know what he would do about that lie. In the face of so many witnesses, but the truth was unthinkable. There was another pause, for which he was grateful, except that it gave him time to see Urraca’s final ten seconds of life again in his mind.

  ‘Chake?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did Urraca go to Heaven right away?’

  Jake closed his eyes. ‘I guess so. Sure. That’s what they say.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘No. You can’t see that. And I can’t explain it, either, so there’s no use asking me.’

  ‘Did Mama go up to Heaven when she was dead?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Carrie about all that, kid. I’m not much of an expert on Heaven.’ He stirred uncomfortably.

  ‘Me neither.’ Another pause. ‘I hope she didn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I hope Mama didn’t go up there. She didn’t like Urraca much.’

  Jake sighed. ‘Well, it’s supposed to be a big place. Maybe they won’t run into each other until Urraca’s big enough to take care of herself. Why don’t you be quiet and go to sleep now?’

  ‘Okay. You won’t go away?’

  ‘How can I go anyplace with you right here on top of me?’

  ‘Okay then.’

  His tailbone began to ache, but he didn’t shift his position until Paco’s breathing steadied and the looseness of his arms told Jake he was finally asleep. It took a long time. He couldn’t reach his cigars or get up. It was turning night cold, and his coat was inside the jail. His lack of faith in the existence of Heaven didn’t keep him from feeling he had lit up a new cinder in Hell with his hypocrisy. After a while he stretched out his legs, to take some of the weight off his feet, and closed his eyes.

  *

  He didn’t know he had been asleep until a touch on his arm startled him. It was Carrie, with a lamp in her hand. Paco only sighed
and nuzzled closer.

  ‘What on earth are you doing out here?’ she whispered. ‘Clem’s been looking for you. Why didn’t you bring him down to me?’ He stirred and muttered. ‘Come on, right now. You can put him in Clem’s bed. It doesn’t look as if he’s going to use it. Come on. Don’t be so pigheaded about everything.’

  He got up with a suppressed groan at his stiffness, and followed her. She went ahead of him and turned down Clem’s bed so he could ease Paco into it. He waited a few moments to see if the boy would wake.

  When they were out of the room and she had closed the door with care, she said, ‘Do you want some coffee? I have some hot.’ He nodded, moving his shoulders to work the cramp out of them.

  He drank the coffee while she sat and kept him company without staring at him. He thanked the God he didn’t believe in that she didn’t talk to him and seemed to be in control of herself. When he was finished she said firmly, ‘Now, I’m going to put you to bed, too, before you collapse.’ She made a fleeting effort to smile. ‘I remember you said you didn’t sleep last night, either.’

  ‘No. Let Paco have the whole bed to himself. I don’t want to wake him up.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to put you there. I meant my bed.’ She saw his look and explained quickly, ‘It’s all right. She isn’t there now. Mrs French came down with some new clothes and — and washed and dressed her, and Mr Farney made a coffin in almost no time. That’s the way they have to do things out here, you know. Because of the heat She’ll be buried tomorrow. It’s the best way. Oh, Jake.’ She came and put her arms around him, pressing his face into her body. ‘Oh, my darling, do come to bed. You look so dreadful.’ He got up, putting her back with an awkwardness he couldn’t help.

  ‘I’ll be all right. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much good to you tonight, Carrie.’ The look on her face told him at once that he’d said something stupid and wrong. He expected her anger for it, but her face showed him a mixture of surprise and something nearer to pity than anger.