by Bill Albert
17
“I remember it being better before we moved here from Silver City,” she said. “Daddy was at home with us more of the time. Now we hardly see him and when he is at home he and Momma they quarrel and quarrel and quarrel. Poor Hen! Poor Momma! And her so poorly too.”
Anxious to talk, Vernie had sneaked up to my room the night after Bill’s fight. He had stayed in town at the Turkish baths.
“Mustn’t tell I’m here,” she whispered. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”
She sat cross-legged on the floor, the hem of her nightgown tucked under her. I noticed she had dainty feet for such a large girl.
She wanted to know all about me. I told her I ran away from an orphanage in New York to join the Wild West, that I’d been at school in Wallace and then about traveling with Glove. Naturally, I didn’t tell her anywhere near all about me.
“Oh!” she said clapping her hands together, “That’s so exciting, just like a novel, don’t you think? Buffalo Bill! Imagine that! I think it is very brave of you, doing all those things and not being able to speak. Do you mind me asking about, well, you know what?
“At the Wild West Show? How positively terrible for you! Did they have to shoot the horse? Oh dear me! Poor horse!”
She didn’t want to talk about herself. She said she never did anything really interesting.
“I like reading the best, do you? I read and read and read. What’s your favorite book?”
I was ashamed to tell her about the Dimes and I also figured it was better not to mention Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, what with Mark Twain’s feelings about Christian Science.
“Treasure Island? That’s nothing but a boy’s book. Have you read any books by Laura Jean Libbey?”
I hadn’t.
“Well she’s marvelous, but I guess my very favorite is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. And, of course, Good Wives. I just adore all those March girls to death. My favorite is Meg, but Hen, she likes a good weep over poor Beth going through the Valley of the Shadow. It is so, so . . . I don’t know, cozy I guess you could say.”
She talked at me for a couple of hours. Finally she worked herself around to Jesus. It was pretty much as Bill had feared.
“Have you been Saved in Jesus?” Vernie asked, reaching up to touch me on my outstretched leg. “No?”
She got up and sat on the bed next to me.
“May I?”
I could feel her warm breath against my skin. She ran a hesitant finger into the indentation on my neck. I felt something like a tingly shock and then suddenly, before I realized it, I was crying, those damned gaspy sobs that forced their way up from deep inside.
“Oh dear!” she exclaimed, pulling back. “Did I hurt you?”
I shook my head.
“Oh dear! Poor Herbert!”
She moved closer again and put her arm around me. That only made me cry harder. The last person to touch me with that kind of concern had been my mother. It was as if Vernie’s caressing finger and comforting arm had thrown me back through the years to a place of unquestioned security. To a time before I was told my mother’s story, before I was silenced forever by Hyman Budnitsky and before I became a spy.
“What’s the matter? Herbert, listen to me. There is hope, always. Listen, please, PLEASE listen. You know, don’t you, that He cleansed the lepers, and made the blind see and raised Lazarus from the dead? You must promise not to tell Daddy. Promise?”
I couldn’t understand why Jesus’s miracles should be a secret from Big Bill, but I crossed my heart anyway to show good faith. Then Vernie told me the real secret.
“Momma has asked Mrs. Blanchard to come over to visit with you. She is a first-class practitioner, a healer. You won’t tell Daddy, will you? Please, Herbert, you simply mustn’t tell him.”
There was so much I wasn’t telling Bill that Mrs. Blanchard and Jesus didn’t add much to what was already weighing me down.
18
By Saturday I had my first reports written out in clean copy ready to deliver to the detectives at the Elk Hotel on Monday. I was not looking forward to that meeting, nor to the one Mrs. Haywood and Vernie had planned for me. The two jaws of my dilemma—the jaws of my two dilemmas you might say—were rapidly closing on me.
As soon as Bill left the house on Saturday morning, Vernie made a telephone call. An hour later Mrs. Blanchard arrived.
I had pictured a severe, widow-weeded old lady. Mrs. Blanchard was none of those things. She was alarmingly tall, delicately beautiful, and young, not more than twenty-one years old. Her hair was pure gold, her skin milky and translucent. An angel, radiating complete calmness and an assurance of purpose which was intimidating. If I could have spoken, I would have been speechless at the sight of her gliding into the room.
“Good day to you all,” she said to us. “Hasn’t our Lord given us a glorious, lovely day today?”
After a few minutes of greetings and such things, Mrs. Haywood, Vernie, Henrietta, and Mrs. Agee, the woman who cooked and took care of Mrs. Haywood, withdrew discreetly from the sitting room. I was left alone with the too-lovely-for-a-Christian-Scientist Mrs. Blanchard.
She sat across from me, eyes closed as if asleep. Her eyelashes were so long they turned up at the ends. After about five minutes she slowly opened her eyes. Brown they were and quiet.
“Through prayer we find the healing power, Herbert. Silent prayer. When I close my eyes I can see clearly. I can see the spiritual fact of your perfect speech, and soon so will you.”
“Tell me about yourself,” she said, her voice like honeyed water.
I reached for my pencil.
“No, Herbert, tell me, speak to me.”
I shook my head and pointed to Hyman Budnitsky’s fingerprints on my neck.
“Don’t think of that, it is nothing, believe me. I know to you it is real, but I will show you through Divine Love that your affliction is but nothing and when you are able to understand that, it will vanish into its native nothingness. As Mrs. Eddy says, it will go like the dew before the morning sunshine. After all, it is only matter, not Spirit, and we are sustained by Spirit, by God and Divine Love. Jesus said, ‘We speak to the dumb words of Truth and they answer rejoicing.’ So, speak to me, Herbert, speak to me of that rejoicing.”
I tried to force out words. Of course, I could only gasp and spit like a fish thrown up on the river bank.
She smiled with a painfully gentle understanding.
“The path to Truth is strewn with the stones of doubt and illusion, yet it is the easiest path to walk when you can see the Light of Jesus.”
Then she sang in soft cadenced lilt.
Saw ye my Savior?
Heard ye the glad sound?
Felt ye the power of the Word?
‘Twas the Truth that made us free,
And was found by you and me
In the life and love of our Lord.
“Didn’t He create man in his own image?” she asked. “Is God not perfect? So then man too must be perfect and there can, therefore, be no sin, no sickness, and no death, because God cannot know these things.”
I shook my head. I wanted somehow to capture her beauty for myself, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. All Christians sound more or less the same to me, from the leg-twisting Mike Furlong right through to James McParland.
Mrs. Blanchard sat down next to me on the wicker couch. I felt the ice snake up my spine as she rested her warm hand on my leg.
“Jesus said, ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils. They shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall lay their hands on the sick and they shall recover.’”
The only thing that was recovering at that moment was my ardor. I felt myself blushing and crossed my legs, praying f
or my deliverance.
“Now speak, Herbert. Cast out the devils, cast out the delusions and accept the Truth. Speak and Rejoice!”
In response to her exhortations I opened my mouth. Then unexpectedly I shouted out something. At least I think I heard myself shout. It felt as if I had. Mrs. Blanchard obviously heard me.
“You see?” she said triumphantly.
She leaned over and embraced me, pulling me to her, holding my face tightly against her breasts and rocking slowly back and forth.
“This is the promise of God’s perfection in you, Herbert! This is the reality I hear that gives the lie to your protest, does it not? Gives the lie to sickness and sin. You have truly awakened from the dream. I am so happy for you! Praise Jesus!”
At that point, either from the shock of hearing my own voice or the excitement of being between Mrs. Blanchard’s breasts or a lack of air, maybe all three together, I fainted.
I woke up lying on my bed. Vernie sat in a chair by the window, her wide eyes fixed on me.
“Oh, dear Herbert, isn’t it too wonderful? You can speak, you can speak! Oh, Herbert! Isn’t Mrs. Blanchard wonderful? She says it was the Divine Love that did it, that she only made you aware of the Truth, but it really was her.”
I sat up. All I could remember was the serenity of Mrs. Blanchard’s face and the weight of her impressible breasts against my cheeks.
It wasn’t that I had never experienced sexual thoughts or even the sexual act itself. I had experienced it, the act that is, five times before and each time with a professional lady who insisted I accept her favors as a favor to her. I hadn’t been too favorably impressed. Messy, embarrassing, and over too quickly. Mrs. Blanchard’s caress was completely different. It was a bolt from Heaven, a true revelation, maybe even Divine.
“Herbert?” Vernie insisted. “Herbert, are you listening to me? Didn’t you tell me that you are an orphan? Didn’t you? Well, if you really are an orphan, then why then did you call out for your mother?”
If in fact I did shout out “Mother” that morning it’s the last word I’ve ever said aloud. Everyone was terribly disappointed. Mrs. Haywood and Vernie wept for me. I wept. Mrs. Blanchard prayed. It did no good. For all her best efforts I had relapsed permanently into spluttery silence.
“I blame only myself,” she said, a tiny furrow of doubt creasing her perfect brow. “I have within me some undiscovered error. Envy perhaps? Malice? Hate? Even Lust?”
At the mention of Lust my knees quivered and I had to sit down quickly. The three women stared at me. Did they know? Wasn’t it obvious that I was spilling over with it?
“We have been hasty, too easily satisfied with our reward, too complacent. God is the only power. I am sorry, Herbert, but I must go away and seek further guidance. I will pray, look into myself. Prayer and Truth will conquer in the end, I assure you. I will return to see you, Herbert. You must be strong.”
Mrs. Blanchard left walking, not gliding.
Good Christian Scientists that they were, Mrs. Haywood and Vernie tried at first not to blame me for what happened, but I could tell that they did. How could such a failure have been the fault of the saintly Mrs. Blanchard?
Over the next few months I was unable to avoid her attentive ministering. She had saved me, lost me, and was determined to save me again. I had become the worm in her personal apple of salvation. My stubborn refusal to speak ate away at her faith, and with each unsuccessful visit another layer of her calmness was peeled off. The uncertainty which had marked her brow at the end of our first meeting deepened and spread to her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Her melodious voice went harshly out of tune and even the luster of her golden hair began to dull.
Mrs. Blanchard’s lack of success in healing me and the increasingly obvious physical, mental, and spiritual decline it perpetuated finally proved too painful for Mrs. Haywood and for Vernie. They begged her to stop seeing me. When she insisted, they flatly forbade her to come to the house. Because I had declined to demonstrate perfection, I too was banished. Mine was an internal exile. I became perfectly invisible, except to Henrietta, who was too young and too sensible to join in. Not being seen or heard, not even allowed the leper’s bell, life at the Haywoods’ became intolerable. Fortunately, by that time Bill was in jail and I was on my way out of Denver. Unfortunately, I was also on my way back to Cripple Creek.
However, before all that, there was a lot more that had to happen.
19
On that Saturday my lustful thoughts, confused and unfocused though they were, had undone Mrs. Blanchard’s prayerful hard work. Unbeknownst to her and to me they had started the process of undoing the flawless Mrs. Blanchard herself. In the end, her final undoing was to prove to be my own.
Monday, November 9th, 1903 was to be a day of even greater dishonor for me, the day I was preparing officially to sign, seal and deliver my betrayals of Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners.
To make the task more difficult for me, as we walked into work that morning, Bill was in an expansive and confiding mood. Maybe it was because the sky was so blue, the mountains so clear, the air so fresh, or maybe it was because for once he actually had spent the previous night in the Turkish Baths and wasn’t suffering from the whisky and the whoring.
He talked about his childhood in Salt Lake City and about his father, who died when he was three years old.
“Can’t recall his face. Never was a photograph. It should be in there somewhere,” he tapped his head. “Don’t you think it should be? Even after all those years. I try sometimes to bring it back but it never comes. I’m sorry, Herbert, I guess it is a mite rum for me to talk like this with you having no father at all.”
Bill carried on nonetheless. I didn’t mind. I enjoy stories about fathers.
His had been a Pony Express rider like Buffalo Bill and had gone to California in 1849. Like most who wanted to get rich quick he had busted flat and drifted back home to Utah.
“He was a miner,” Bill said, “and I’m proud of that, although it meant not seeing him all that often as he wouldn’t take my mother, my sister and me to the camps. He came back to Salt Lake on my third birthday. I remember it was frosty cold, the same as today. I remember the way the day smelled, too. Wood smoke and bacon. I got those smells in my nose first thing this morning. Funny how I can recall a smell like that and not my father’s face.”
A working man stopped us and thanked him for a fine speech he had made to some group or other and said he would be mighty damn proud to shake Bill’s hand. Bill said it was him that was proud to be shaking hands.
“That’s what I call a good omen sign, Herbert. A real good one. You know the Indians are real strong on that kind of thing. Yes sir, I can feel we are going to have an excellent day ahead of us, a real humdinger!
“Where was I? Oh yeah, my Pa. That one time back in Salt Lake. My mother said he had come down especially to see me for my birthday. Anyway, in our back yard was this high board fence, gray, splintery wood with punched-out knots. I was always getting my legs switched by my mother for trying to climb it. Well, that day my father lifted me right up onto the top of that forbidden fence, told me to hang on tight, and then clambered over and took me down on the other side. Wouldn’t you think if I’ve kept all that so clear in my mind I could look down from the fence and pick out my father’s face staring back at me?”
He shook his head.
“Can’t do it. Everything is there but not his face.”
He fell silent after that for about a block. Then as suddenly as he had stopped, he took up the story again.
“We walked from that alley up to Main Street to where there was a big dry goods store. My Pa bought me this velvet suit, blue it was. Must have cost him a couple of day’s wages. My first pair of store-bought pants. On the way home he stopped off to visit friends and relations. Each time we stopped my father would tell them that it w
as my birthday and they’d give me money, candy, fruit, and such like.
“He died a few months later up at the mining camp, my Pa did. To this day I don’t know the full story. My mother said it was pneumonia, but I heard later that he’d been shot in a gunfight. Over what, who knows. In those days men shot each other down for the slightest insult and sometimes for no insult at all.
“My mother says when we got up to where they’d buried my father I tried to dig down to reach him. She had to pull me away. I can’t say I remember that.”
Should it have made me feel worse to double-deal a person who confided in me something as closely personal as not being able to remember his father’s face? Of course it should have and it did, too, but not bad enough to stop me going to the Elk Hotel. I had my own problems, just like I do now. And as Bill said, at least he had had a father whereas I didn’t even have one not to remember.
I arrived at the hotel at the appointed hour, my heart racing, my mouth dry, and my pocket stuffed with treason. There was no one to meet me. I waited in the lobby for over an hour before walking back to the Mining Exchange, all the time looking over my shoulder.
Bill had been right after all about that good sign. It made me think of Sunset Buffalo Dreamer. I wondered if he was still with the Wild West and whether he and Bent Nose were still sitting cross-legged next to each other, swapping stories and insults.
20
Neither Scott or Sterling ever returned for me or my reports. I found out later that they had been arrested trying to pull spikes on the Florence and Cripple Creek Railway so as to blame it on the Federation. When they got found out I was free and clear from having to become a Judas. At least that’s how I figured it back then.
A few days after the attempted derailment, Charles McCormick, the superintendent of the Vindicator Mine, and Melvin Beck, the shift boss, were blown apart by a gigantic explosion as they got out of the cage at the 600-foot level. The rescuers brought up what was left of the two unfortunate men in wicker baskets.
