“The Colonel?” he said in a tone of great offense. “Such a man, a self-murderer? Take it back, sir!”
Now the upstairs was ablaze, sour black smoke roiling from all the downstairs windows. Cudahy could now be heard singing “Camptown Races” as he moved from chamber to chamber, setting alight the amassed detritus of a lifetime. Then he appeared in a window, silhouetted by orange firelight, dancing a sort of jig, his movements so happy that I couldn’t see interrupting them or trying to block his joyfulness. And then I decided I couldn’t watch him die, that I, in fact, was partially responsible for his state of mind. And so it was that I charged against my better judgment into the burning mansion of Colonel Joshua Cudahy with an eye toward dragging him out to safety.
“Are you mad?” cried Silas as I took the porch steps two at a time and burst through a curtain of flame that separated the stairway from the front door, and I took those steps two and even three at a time until I reached the second story, where I found fire barring my way to my left and my right. I heard the Colonel singing “Oh! Susanna” in remarkably poor voice in the latter direction, then took down from the window a wool curtain that hadn’t yet started burning, wrapped it around myself, and pushed through the flames into a bedchamber where, illuminated by a fire that was rapidly consuming a bed ticked with straw, I saw the Colonel dancing with an empty dress and giggling between lyrics.
The smoke was thickening and made it hard to vocalize, but I managed to shout at him. “Colonel, you have to go or you’ll burn,” I said, but he seemed not to hear.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Colonel!” I yelled.
“There’ll be no cutting in here!” he shouted back at me. “This dance is mine!”
Though considerably aged he was a good deal larger than me, and clearly bereft of his reason, and so bearing in mind the supposed strength of the mad I slugged him as hard as I could in the belly. His uninhabited dress of a dance partner took much of the force out of the blow, however, and he swore at me with such ferocity that when he pulled back his fist to hit me I feared he’d knock me unconscious and doom me to roast by his side.
I was fortunate in that his aim was poor; I dodged the blow and decided to make one more effort before saving my own carcass. I picked up a small side table next to the burning bed and threw it at the window, shattering several of the panes and bringing in a draught of cold air that caused the flames within the room to swell larger and brighter. I battered the window frames with the table until there was room to get through, and I was so absorbed in this activity that it was only then I noticed the old man pulling at my sleeves.
“You’re breaking my window, ye insolent cur!”
I reared back and swung at him with the little table, intending merely to get him out of my way so that I could jump; but in an attempt to avoid the blow he fell back against the window, at which point I gave him a good, solid shove, and he fell out of the window and onto a shrub beneath, a conifer of some kind. I guessed it had been planted there as an ornament, though neglect had allowed it to grow into an unattractive shape that nonetheless afforded Colonel Cudahy a relatively soft landing. Between the fire and the shrub his decision to put on his buckskins had been a fortuitous one.
I hastened to climb out the window myself and jumped, aiming to his right onto another shrub. Its perennial stem was quite solid and so were the multiple branches extending from it; my landing was painful, but I was alive, if coughing and hacking like a consumptive with a cheroot in his jaws. I pulled the Colonel up out of the other bush and helped him to his feet.
“You’ve got some balls on you, throwing me out my own got-damn window!” His bellow was raspy and thick from the smoke, but they still must have heard him all the way back in Omaha.
Mr. Silas came stumbling toward us. “You’re saved, sir, praise Jesus.”
“Saved?” He turned and looked at the house. “Saved from that vengeful haint! You’re right, Silas.”
“Saved from the conflagration, Colonel.”
His face a tawny orange in the reflection of the fire, it seemed to dawn on him that his arsonous handiwork might have done him in. “So I am.”
He then sat his large frame down on the lawn and began sobbing. “I have sinned against you, Letitia,” he said, over and over again.
BRUTUS WAS UNACCUSTOMED to pulling the wagon after nightfall, and whinnied in mild protest as I drove him back to Omaha, but the cool breeze of the night felt good on my face, which in the morning would be as red as if I’d spent a July day in the sun without a hat. Arriving in town I put him up at the stable and had the boy lock the wagon in for the night, and crossing the street to the hotel I realized that I still hadn’t counted my money.
Entering the room I found Maggie asleep, and I lit the lamp and quietly opened the little gunnysack, from which I then extracted, to my great surprise, a brand-new double eagle, which nearly caused me to shout, not least because there were more coins inside, along with some dried juniper leaves and various other conjurer’s herbs. Ten double eagles were stacked on the writing desk that overlooked the street downstairs, which at this hour was reasonably quiet, with just a single pair of drunks arguing over a bottle of laudanum below, and listening to the muffled sounds of their murderous threats I sat marveling at my good fortune in encountering Colonel Cudahy. I had two hundred dollars in gold, enough to buy a share in the Greeley Colony with some left over. Notions of fate and destiny are for the weak-minded and superstitious and frequently lead such men into disaster; still, it seemed to me that night as though such forces were drawing me to the Colorado Territory, and for the first time in months I felt lucky.
FOUR YEARS LATER
ONE
DENVER, COLORADO, MARCH 1878
The Wm. O. Sadlaw Photographic Studio and Gallery
With the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains in the near distance and the smell of creosote and horseshit mingling in my nostrils I sat on the flat rooftop, exposing prints and idly contemplating the great rectangles of glass that comprised the skylight of my studio. This was one of those rare occasions when my lost Maggie’s face surfaced unbidden in my mind’s eye, inspiring the slightest twinge of regret; the steel-sharp print slowly emerging before me of a scowling, bejeweled bulldog of a Denver matron seemed a rebuke to the memory of that evanescent visage. The day was bright and the temperature mild, and the mountains in the short distance looked close enough for a stroll. Ostensibly I was engaged in the making of prints for sale, but the printing-out paper in the frames required only direct sunlight and no attention from me, and in fact I sat cross-legged on the tar paper and basked, thumbing through Aeschylus and wondering how quickly I could rush the afternoon’s scheduled portrait sittings and be gone. Where I went didn’t matter to me, only that I went.
I didn’t look up as the hinges of the trapdoor announced the arrival of Lemuel, my housekeeper’s yellow-haired idiot nephew. She didn’t seem particularly to like him but had worked hard to make me hire him four months before when my previous helper set off for the mountains to prospect silver, and the boy’s eager industriousness made up for his lack of intellect. His eyes were tiny and close-set, and his mouth generally open slightly, and even when it was closed his lower incisors and canines showed against his upper lip, giving him the outward aspect of a particularly dim terrier. I hoped he would see me reading and understand that I didn’t want to answer his question, whatever it was.
“Mr. Sadlaw?” he said. “There’s two ladies downstairs want to see you about something.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said without looking up, concentration fractured. I stood and checked the progress of the prints in their frames, cursing. The boy cringed like a whipped pup at my quiet tirade, and I asked him what was the matter.
“Nothing, Mr. Sadlaw.” His voice had changed but it occasionally still shifted into the higher registers, usually when I was annoyed with him.
“I ever hit you, boy?” He shook his head no. “Why the hell do you always act like I’
m about to, then?” He shrugged and scurried down the trapdoor. Upon hiring him I had been struck by his ripe odor, considerable even by the standards of Denver at that time. It called to mind a wound whose dressing badly wanted changing, and after three days working in close quarters I added to his weekly duties a bath, to be taken at Hinshaw’s Barber Shop down the street and put on my tab.
Following the wretch I found two women in the gallery, one of them examining the views in the box stereopticon, letting out little gasps at each new view. Like the studio, the gallery was skylit, and two rows of display counters ran along the walls. At the end of one, next to the stairway leading outside, was a piano, which the second woman had uncovered and on which she tinkled out an air I recognized as Chopin’s, though I couldn’t have named it. I noted with satisfaction their expensive dress and sauntered over to where the first one stood.
“Are you interested in arranging a sitting?” I asked, and she giggled.
“Not as yet,” she said. “We were anxious to inquire about the price of such a sitting.” She was tall and buxom, with an oddly fetching horsey quality and a tendency to overenunciate that seemed newly learned. At her bosom was a diamond brooch, and pearls dangled from her ears. Her petite friend at the piano was more conventionally pretty and less interested in having her picture taken, I thought. As the first of the two explained to me that any such expense would have to be approved by their husbands, the upright clock in the corner chimed two o’clock, time for my first sitters to arrive. The downstairs door opened and my customers mounted the stairs, as though they had been listening outside on the street for the chiming. I explained that I would have to be on my way and handed the lady a printed list of prices.
“Thank you, Mr. Sadlaw,” she said, each syllable slightly too clipped. “I shall discuss the matter with my husband, Mr. Forsyth.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing you both soon, then.” I bowed slightly and made my way with them to the entrance, where a stocky, bald-headed man stood next to a woman built like a broom, close to six feet tall and weighing, I would guess, no more than 120 pounds. They were both dressed for cold weather despite the warmth of the day, and I instructed the boy to begin the preparation of the plates.
When the couple had removed their outer garments they stood awkwardly, uncertain of where to stand or sit. She wore light gray silk with dark gray trimmings, as finely cut as could be had in Denver then, and despite her unusual frame looked quite handsome in the soft light of the early afternoon.
The studio had one glass wall in addition to its glass ceiling, and a series of thick, moveable black curtains. I adjusted the draperies until I had an agreeable light, then I had her sit down on a bench. I placed him behind her and instructed him to place his hand affectionately on the lady’s shoulder. She looked as though a large pink spider had crawled there, and he as though he were fondling a cadaver. As I focused I tried to lighten the mood with a joke or two, but the upside-down image on the ground glass didn’t get any happier.
“What’s the occasion,” I asked, thinking that a discussion might relax them a little. Instead his scowl intensified, and she turned away as though anxious to avoid provoking him further.
“We just want a goddamned picture to remember each other by,” the man said. “You hurry up and take it.”
At that moment Lemuel returned with the loaded plate holders; I ordered the boy upstairs to check the progress of the prints, smiled my most conciliatory smile at the curmudgeonly old bastard, and began taking pictures.
After the dyspeptic couple had gone and I had developed the plates, I prepared those for the next sitting and emerged from the darkroom. I was confronted then with a second couple, spooning like a pair of sixteen-year-olds on the upholstered bench opposite the piano, and it seemed a shame that the woman playing it hadn’t stayed behind to serenade them. As young Lemuel was engaged on the roof and they hadn’t seemed to notice me, I sat before the already exposed keyboard and gently began to coax “Beautiful Dreamer” from it. After a few bars I glanced over my shoulder and found them sitting bolt upright and embarrassed.
“Ready for your sitting?” I asked, and they both nodded. Despite their adolescent comportment they appeared to be in their thirties, the woman pretty and round-faced with corn silk hair and green eyes, the man heavy about the jaw, with wavy black hair and muttonchops. He wore a patch of white silk over his left eye, and when I moved them back into the studio he sat down and took it off. He seemed quite at ease as he extracted a box from his vest pocket and opened it to reveal an eye of glass. He stuffed the thing into its socket with a liquid pop while his wife, with no sign of squeamishness, tended to her hair. When their grooming was finished I arranged them together on a bench and asked them their preferences regarding pose and mood. He shrugged and she looked blank, and I suggested they move in closer to one another and look into one another’s eyes. When I had shot two of those I had them look straight at the camera, and then I amended the suggestion.
“Mr. Gill, why don’t you look over at her as she faces the camera?” It was less an aesthetic suggestion than a means to avoid wasting a negative on a grotesque pose that would result in no print orders. He understood my intentions better than I thought.
“Mr. Sadlaw, I don’t care a damn who sees I’ve got a marble eye.”
His wife nodded her enthusiastic assent. “I want to see his whole pretty face, if you don’t mind.” I shot the picture as requested, satisfied that I would sell it, and a few more besides that I wouldn’t have chanced without his blessing.
Finishing the plates in the darkroom afterward I found my thoughts wandering, for the first time in a very long while, in the direction of my old one-eyed friend Herbert Braunschweig of Cottonwood, Kansas. Over the years I had noted the town’s continuing presence on railroad maps as a stop on the milk run and nothing more; what had happened to any of its inhabitants after May of 1873 I couldn’t have said, nor whether I entered their thoughts at all, except as the killer of the town’s foremost citizen and, by extension, of its aspirations to greatness.
My third sitter of the afternoon failed to show up on time, and after half an hour’s wait I elected to leave. “What’ll I tell him if he shows up wanting his photograph made?” the boy asked.
“Tell him to take the sitting fee and invest in a goddamned timepiece,” I grumbled, straightening my necktie and preparing to leave. The boy was unsure whether to take me literally or not, and I clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Or tell him I was called away by an emergency.”
The only emergency lay in the fact that the lady in question lived in Golden, ten miles away, and refused on principle to receive any unannounced suitor after the hour of five in the afternoon.
My housekeeper was just returning from the Chinese laundryman’s with the day’s clean load when I met her on the stairs, and made no response when I told her I wouldn’t be home for dinner. A widow of fifty-five winters, hard ones by the look of her, she didn’t approve of my courting habits, though she knew no details. She was round as a medicine ball, and in the course of her daily labors she regularly worked herself up into wheezing fits the sound of which terrified me; she assured me that they were nothing extraordinary and continued to work harder than any woman or man I ever saw.
Immediately upon arriving in Denver I’d advertised for a housekeeper; it had been years since I lived alone, and I knew I would require daily help in the running of the household if I were to get any work done. I was specifically looking for a woman of the least enticing physical type, with the hope of avoiding temptations that might lead to distracting complications, and Ralph Banbury, the editor of the Denver Bulletin and the owner of my building, had recommended Mrs. Fenster. She had worked in his house for some months before Mrs. Banbury decided she would be happier without her scowling presence and replaced her with a young Bavarian girl, whom Banbury bedded within the week.
Much later, in his cups, he admitted that if Mrs. Fenster’s brother-in-law hadn’
t been one of the Bulletin’s pressmen, he would have joined the chorus of the town’s other papers in calling for her arrest upon the death of Mr. Fenster, ten years previous. Her story was that she had returned from a visit to her sister in Georgetown to find her husband shot to death in their bed, but the opinion of the U.S. Marshal was that she had come home and found him alive and well and in flagrante delicto with the lonely wife of the greengrocer downstairs. Her refusal to pantomime either shock or grief did little to help her case in the public’s mind, but neither the press nor the police ever succeeded in getting a word out of the other lady, who according to Banbury was so terrified of Mrs. Fenster that she left her husband and the state of Colorado six months later, never to return. Eventually the matter faded away without Mrs. Fenster ever having to spend a night away from her own blood-soaked bed, and a decade later the incident was largely forgotten.
Mrs. Fenster received three dollars a day from me six days a week (exactly twice what her sister’s boy collected), and on Saturdays she went off into the night with another sister who was even fatter and more dyspeptic than she was, returning Sunday evenings subdued and moodier than usual. I had no idea what they got up to apart from the suspicion that it involved church; every Saturday night before leaving she laid my good black suit out, and every Sunday she returned to find it still laid out, unworn.
I MADE MY way to the roof and then down via the ladder to the courtyard below, the quickest way to the livery stable on the street behind mine. The studio and gallery were previously operated by a melancholy Prussian by the name of Ernst Nielander who, after three quarters of a decade of operation in Denver, documenting the layers of its social sediment from the opium fiends and harlots at the bottom to the silver tycoons at the top, had found himself yearning to practice his craft in his suddenly peaceable native land. His desire to return was so strong that I was able to purchase the business as a going concern for less than it was worth; when he returned a year later, disillusioned and disappointed, and wanted to buy it back for the same price, I laughed in his face. He left Denver again and, so far as I know, was never heard from thereafter.
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