As the shadows grew longer, this horse, he thought approvingly, has the right idea, for the trail is good and the passes this side of the mountain might make a little more sense after all. And if things are as they should be, there’ll be a settlement down yonder, maybe big enough for a hotel with a sheet on the bed and a bite of something other than trail bacon and boiled beans.
With the thought came the settlement, opening up to him as the trail rounded a bluff. It was just what he had in mind, plus a cut extra—a well-seasoned cowtown with a sprinkling of mining. It had two hotels, he saw as he rode in, the near one with a restaurant and a livery right handy to it. There was a mercantile, more cow than plow, and half the barber shop was an assay office.
Younger Macleish rode up to the livery and slid off. He hooked an elbow around the horn and arched his back hard.
“Ridin’ long?”
Macleish turned around and grinned at the tubby little old bald-head who stood in the carriage door. “My back says so … Treat hosses po’ly here, do you?”
The old man grinned in return and took the bridle. “Misable,” he asserted. “Whup ’em every hour.”
“Well, whack this’n with a oat or two an’ give him water if he wants it or not.”
“He’ll rue the day,” said the oldster, his eyes twinkling.
Macleish followed him far enough inside for a glance to assure him that water really was there and that the hay was hay. Then he unbuckled his saddlebags and heaved them over his shoulder. “Which one o’ them hotels is best?”
“One of ’em ain’t rightly a hotel.”
“I’ll start out at the other.”
“The near one, then. Miz Appleton, now, she feeds.” The old man colored his information by casting his eyes upward most devoutly.
“Now, you know I ain’t et since my last meal?” Chuckling, Younger Macleish humped his saddlebags and stepped out into the street. It was only a step to the hotel porch, barely time enough to say howdy twice to passers-by. Macleish mounted the steps and thudded inside. It was small in there, but it had a stairway with a landing up the left and across the back, and under the landing, just like in the city but littler, a regular hotel kind of desk. He knew something was cooking right now, somewhere in the place, with onions and butter both, and he knew that not long ago something had been baked with vanilla in it. Everything was so clean he wanted to go out and shine his boots and come in again. Behind the desk was a doorway covered by nothing at all but red and blue beads. These moved and fell to again behind a little lady fat as the old livery man, but half his age and not the least bit bald. Her face was soft and plump as a sofa pillow and she had a regular homecoming smile.
“You’ll be Miz Appleton.”
“Come in. Put down those bags. You’ve come a ways, the looks of you. You hungry?”
Macleish looked around him, at the snowy antimacassars and the doilies under the vases of dried ferns and bright paper flowers, all of it spotless. “I feel dirtier’n I do hongry, but if I git any hongrier I’ll be dead of it. My name’s Younger Macleish.”
“You hurry and wash,” she ordered him like kinfolk, “while I set another something on the stove. You’ll find water and soap on the stand in your room, first right at the head of the stairs.” She gave him a glad smile and was gone through the wall of beads before he could grin back.
He shouldered his saddlebags and climbed the stairs, finding the room just where she had said, and just what the immaculate downstairs had led him to expect. He stood a moment in it shyly, feeling that a quick move would coat the walls with his personal grime, then shrugged off the feeling and turned to the washstand.
He had no plan to get all that fancied up; he just wanted to be clean. But clean or not, just plain shirtsleeves didn’t feel right to him in that place, and all he had to put over it was his Santiago vest. It had on it some gold-braid curlicues and a couple extra pockets and real wild satin lapels that a puncher might call Divin’ W if it was a brand. He put it on after he’d shaved till it hurt and reamed out his ears; he had half an idea Miz Appleton would send him back upstairs if they weren’t clean. He took off his pants and whacked off what dust he could, and put them on again and did his best to prettify the boots. When he was done he cleaned up from his cleaning up, setting the saddlebags in a corner and folding away his dirty shirt. He hung up his gunbelt, never giving it a second thought, or much of the first one either, bent to look in the mirror and paste down a lock of hair which sprang up again like a willow sapling, and went downstairs.
Miz Appleton clasped her hands together and cried out when she saw him: “Glo-ry! Don’t he look nice!” and Younger Macleish looked behind him and all around to see who she was talking about, until he saw there was no one there but himself and the lady. “It ain’t me, honest, ma’am,” he said. “It’s only this here gold braid.”
“Nonsense! You’re a fine-looking, clean-cut youngster. Wherever did you get that curly hair?”
He felt his ears get hot. He never had figured an answer to that. Women were always asking him that. Next thing you know she’d be saying he’d ought to be an actor. But she was asking him if he was ready to eat. He grinned his answer and she led him through a door at the end of the little lobby into the restaurant.
The restaurant had a door also into the street, which Macleish thought was pretty clever. It was a rectangular room, just big enough for three square tables and one long one. On each was a bowl of the dried flowers he had seen in the lobby. The big table had two of them. The whole place smelled like Sunday supper in the promised land. At one of the tables, two punchers and a man in a black coat were shoveling away silently as if the promise was being kept.
Along the back wall was a doorway covered with the same kind of bead curtain. Through it he could just barely make out another table, smaller than the others, covered with blinding white linen. He saw glasses there and a silver vase and a silver candlestick that matched it.
“Just you set,” said Miz Appleton, waving at one of the bare square tables, “and I’ll be right with you.”
Macleish said, “Real nice place here.” He pointed at the bead-screened alcove. “Who’s that for?”
“You want to see it?” Proudly beaming, she went to the alcove, took a wooden match from a box in her apron pocket, leaned in and lit the candle in the silver candlestick.
“Well, hey,” breathed Younger Macleish.
The alcove was just big enough for two people and the table. The seats were built right on to the wall like a window box. They had velour cushions and backs on them. Two places were set. At each place were three forks, two knives, four spoons, three glasses, and a starched napkin folded in a circle like a king’s crown, with the eight points sticking straight up. The cutlery looked all mismatched, but the handles were all the same: wide fork, narrow fork, thin knife, wide knife. The same with the glasses, all different shapes but with identical bases. He had never seen anything like it.
He asked again, “Who’s this for?”
“Anyone who likes to eat this way.”
“Now who would that be?” asked Macleish, honestly perplexed.
“I might say anyone who knows the difference between eating and dining.” She laughed at him suddenly. He was walleyed as a new calf seeing his first bull. “Or anybody that might like to learn.”
He wet his lips. “Me?”
She laughed at him again. “You’re right welcome, Mr. Macleish.” Then, in tones of real apology, “It’s got to cost a little more, though, and take a while to fix.”
“Oh that’s all right,” he said quickly, his eyes on the gleaming table. He picked up a salad fork between his fingertips and carefully set it down again. “You’re goin’ to have to break trail for me through all this.”
She laughed again and told him to set right down. She seemed to think he was no end funny, and he imagined he was; but there’s ways and ways of getting laughed at, and he didn’t mind her way. He sat down, careful not to bump anything, a
nd she whisked away the second place setting and left with it.
She was back in a moment with a dish, a long narrow oval of cut glass in which were arranged six celery stalks and a mound of what looked like olives only they were shiny black. She set it down and gently removed the napkin from under his chin and spread it on his lap, while he sat rigidly with his big scrubbed hard-work hands hidden under the edge of the table. “I ‘spect some folks think I’m addled in the head,” she chattered, “but I always say that good manners are the only real difference between the men and the beasts. I don’t reckon there’s another table like this this side of San Diego, not till you reach St. Louis. Don’t just stare at those olives, boy—eat ’em! … It just does me good to have someone dine instead of feed. Or learn it,” she added quickly and kindly. “Here.” And from under her arm she took a great big card and laid it before him.
MENU, it announced itself in block type at the top. All the rest was in script—flowery curly Spencerian script, so neat and straight and pretty that he just wagged his head in amazement over it. He could make out every single letter—but not one of the words.
“It’s in French,” she explained. “All real high-toned menus in real high-toned places are written in French. This one’s from the Hotel Metropole in San Francisco. I had my honeymoon there with Mister Appleton.” She smiled a little more brightly, even, than usual, and Macleish had the vague feeling that something hurt her. “I put that menu away and kep’ it for twelve years, and I said to myself that someday I’d serve up that dinner again in a place of my own, and now I do. These,” she explained, “are the appetizers, and this is the soup. Down here is fish and then meat. Here and here are vegetables and potatoes and all that, and then dessert and so on.”
“Appetizers?”
“They hone up your appetite. Make you hungry.”
He wagged his head again at the idea of folks needing to be made hungry at dinnertime. He squinted at the card and said, “Chat. Chat.”
“Chateaubriand,” she read out. “You cook beef in wine.”
“Why?”
She laughed. “Ask yourself that when you’ve tasted it.”
He forlornly handed her back the card. “I better leave all this to you, Miz Appleton. You just bring it on and tell me what to do.”
She left him munching on a stalk of celery. Each stick was packed full of a gooey, blue-y stuff that tasted like cheese and, as Miz Appleton explained to him when she came back to pour him a glass of very dry sherry, was cheese. He inhaled the whole dishful and drank the wine at a gulp, and sat there with his stomach growling for more.
So Younger Macleish ate a fragrant thin soup with crisp tiny fried cubes of bread afloat in it, some tender flakes of trout meat, four popovers, five salted breadsticks and two rolls; another dish of stuffed celery and olives, three helpings of the Chateaubriand and all the fixings that went with it; and four pieces of lemon meringue pie you could have sneezed off the plate it was so light. He drank white wine and red wine, sharp and thin, and at the end, in a third glass, a heavy red port that his tongue roots couldn’t believe. Nuts came with this, and a silver thing to crack them with, and a little bitty doll’s house sort of cup of coffee. Somewhere along the line he had lost the conviction that genteel folk didn’t know anything about eating, the helpings seemed so small; because they kept coming and coming, until at last he had to sneak a quick pull on his cinches and let his belt out a notch, silently commanding his liver to move over and make more room. Packed with well-being until it showed on his face in a sheen of sweat, he pressed limply at a nut in the nutcracker and wondered if Mr. Appleton was still alive or had died happy of eating.
“Mr. Appleton was killed on the way back,” said the little lady when she brought more coffee, smiling that brighter-than-usual smile. “The trace chain broke. He threw me clear but he went over with the horses. The only thing I can’t give you,” she went on rapidly, “is a brandy. At the Metropole you’ll see the gentlemen sitting around after their dinner smoking their fine Havana see-gars, and there’ll be brandy. Just a little drop of it in the bottom of a big glass like a flower vase. That’s so they can smell it better. Or sometimes they’ll call for a shot-glass too and pour in a little brandy and dip the end of their see-gar into it. Or put a drop or two right into their coffee. I do wish I had a bit of fine old brandy for you, so you’d know how it is. They always used to call for the oldest brandy, because that’s best.”
Killed on the way back, Macleish silently repeated to himself. That would be from the honeymoon. He said, “It’s all right about the brandy, Miz Appleton. I doubt I’d git a drop of anything all the way down. Not till tomorrow noon or so anyhow.”
“Well, I wish you had it all the same. How do you feel?”
“Miz Appleton,” he said with all his heart, “I ain’t lived such a life that I deserved all this.”
“I think you have,” she told him. “I think you will. You’re a nice young man, Mr. Macleish.”
He felt his ears getting hot again and stood up and batted his way through the red and blue beads and got clear of the alcove. Either he had to escape from all this goodness or he had to take a walk and shake down this dinner so he’d be able to lie down without spilling. He thanked her again and left her beaming after him, with her quick small hands folded together under her apron.
He’d already been past the livery and the mercantile, so he naturally ambled the other way. The town had its quota of bars, and a school right in town, and a church. Then there was a bank and a long row of dwellings and what do you know, a second mercantile, this one with a feed and grain warehouse attached. Then a smithy, and then the other hotel which, as the livery man had told him, wasn’t rightly a hotel. He passed the entrance with a glance over the bat-wings, went on three paces and then stopped.
It wasn’t the off-voice piano that stopped him, nor the size of the place, which was considerable for such a town, nor the glimpse of pink satin and soft hair somewhere along the bar, nor even the bar itself, the longest and most elaborate he had ever seen. It was the array behind the bar—four tiers all of twenty feet long each, rows and rows of bottles of all sizes and shapes. He had to wonder if there wasn’t a fine old brandy there. He didn’t want it or need it, and he didn’t know if he’d like it or not, but Miz Appleton had said he ought to have it. It was like a service to her. The dinner seemed to mean more to her even than it had to him, and it just seemed right to finish it off the way she said.
So he turned back and went into the place.
The bartender was a squint-eyed oldster wrapped in a long white butcher’s apron. You had an idea who he was talking to when you were by yourself at the bar, but it must have been pretty mystifying when the place was crowded.
“You got any brandy?” Macleish asked.
One of the man’s eyes scanned Younger Macleish’s fancy vest while the other one raked the northwest corner.
“Reckon we have.”
“Real old brandy?”
“It’s old.”
“You got see-gars?”
“Two kinds. Most men wouldn’t smoke the one, an’ most men wouldn’t pay for the other.”
“Gimme the best,” said Younger Macleish. He remembered something else and said “Uh,” as the bartender was about to turn away. He couldn’t see himself asking for a flower vase to drink his brandy out of, so he asked for the other instead. “Bring me a extra shot-glass with the brandy.”
The bartender walked to the far end and got an old kitchen chair with the back off it, and carried it back and set it down. Grunting, he got up on it and reached for a bottle on the fourth tier. He brought it down and held it so Macleish could see the label, but didn’t set it down and didn’t bring glasses. “Suit you?”
The question was asked in a way that seemed to mean more than it said. Macleish wondered if it had anything to do with money. He noticed suddenly that the girl, the one with the pink satin dress and all that hair, was watching him. He went into his poke and g
ot a gold ten dollars and laid it on the wood. “It’ll do,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about.
The bartender put the bottle down then and pulled the cork, and reached underneath for a glass with a small stem and a big bell, and the extra shot-glass. Macleish figured that if you drink brandy out of a big glass like that it must be something like beer; but when the bartender poured in only about a finger and quit, he remembered what Miz Appleton had said about the men smelling it. He took it and smelled it while the bartender went for the cigars. It smelled fine.
The bartender brought the cigar box and handed the whole thing to him, and he took out three. Two he stuck in his vest and got the other one going. The smoke was full-fleshed and kind to him. He took a little taste of the brandy and waited a second, and it was as if a good spirit had sat down in his throat in velvet pants. Turning his back to the bar and hooking up his elbows, he began a wordless worship of Miz Appleton and all her works. He was vaguely aware that the bartender was leaning across the far end, talking to the girl in pink, that the piano player expressed his disbelief in his own abilities by working with his fingers crossed, and that two faro games were operating in the corner. But none of this mattered to him; and as he swung around to dunk his cigar in the shot-glass and caught the pink girl’s eye as she climbed the stairs to the gallery, the moment of self-consciousness was lost in pure joy when he took his first drag of the brandied smoke.
He stood in this golden trance for some minutes and nobody bothered him until the girl came back downstairs and walked over to him. He smiled at her because he was ready to smile at anything, but if it was the first word she waited for, she’d have to give it; he couldn’t think of a one.
The Nail and the Oracle Page 4
