Colter's Path (9781101604830)

by Judd, Cameron

“Got no money to make the journey, no-how,” Ben said. “Nor any good way to get it.”

  Jedd found himself almost ready to tell Scarlett he would front him enough money for the journey and Ben could pay him back when he struck color in the gold fields. He caught the impulsive words just in time. As kind a gesture as it would be to help out the man, Ben Scarlett was not a good risk, and Jedd was himself too poor at the moment to validly make the offer.

  “Gentlemen, it has been good to see you,” Jedd said, touching the brim of his hat and turning to go. “I wish and commend the best to both of you. Now, you two stay put a minute…. I’ll be back very shortly.”

  Jedd didn’t know if Bertram’s talk of being hungry was valid or simply a ruse to get drinking money. Even so, he went to a café around the corner and came out with a half loaf of bread and a little packet of cold fried sausages left unsold from that morning’s breakfast offerings. He presented the food to the two vagrants, instructing them to divide it, but Ben Scarlett declared he had eaten aplenty that day and gave the entire lot over to Bertram. A valiant act, Jedd thought.

  The way Bertram fell to the sausages made Jedd confident that his talk of hunger had been no falsehood, and the way Ben Scarlett intensely watched him eat made Jedd figure Ben’s claim of being already well fed was based more on a generous spirit than on the truth.

  Jedd walked away from the alley entrance, thinking of his own need for a meal and hoping he had enough left of his meager resources to buy himself one. He did. Enough for two, in fact.

  It was hard to be poor. He’d had his fill of it. Figuring Ben Scarlett knew far greater poverty than he, he circled around again after a few minutes of walking, and found, as he had hoped, Ben walking alone, Bertram having finished his rough meal and crawled back under his boardwalk. Jedd buttonholed Ben and took him with him to the same café he had visited before, and bought himself and Scarlett a meal.

  “Ben, this rumor about me having found gold in California…where do you figure it came from?”

  Ben gave a quizzical shrug at the question, which had been asked over coffee and apple pie that could have been fresher, but which to a man such as Scarlett were like the victuals of paradise. “Rumors are like wind somebody breaks in church…. Unless you hear it with your own ears when first it emerges, ain’t nobody who’ll own up to it after the fact.”

  “You do have your own way with words, Ben. That I’ve got to say.”

  “Why, thank you, sir. Thank you indeed. And I’m a right good singer, too, if you don’t mind me bragging on myself a little. I inherited a good singing voice from my great-uncle Earl.”

  “What do you know? And I didn’t even realize you could inherit things from a great-uncle.”

  “Live and learn, Mr. Jedd. Live and learn.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There was no written message, just a meagerly built black boy waiting in the lobby of the hotel to which Jedd had returned after finishing his meal with Ben Scarlett. The boy advanced toward Jedd as soon as he entered.

  “Mr. Colter, sir.”

  “Hello, young gentleman.”

  “I’ve come to let you know you’ve been asked for, sir,” the boy said. “My name’s Lankford; most call me Lank.”

  “I’m Jedd Colter, Lank. But I believe you must already know that.”

  “Yes, sir. You’ve been asked for, Mr. Colter, sir. At Seventeen Addington Street, sir.”

  Jedd held silent a moment. He knew that address well. It had been her address, before her marriage to the deplorable Stanley Wickham. The same address before which he had lingered so recently with Treemont Dalton.

  Her former address…or might it not be “former” any longer? Emma’s letter that Treemont had saved from the campfire had hinted that her marriage was quite troubled and possibly moving toward a premature end. If that perhaps had happened, she might be back home in this very town. Back living with her father, Zebulon McSwain, president of Bledsoe College, the oldest institution of higher learning in Knoxville and indeed the entire state.

  Might Emma herself have sent this invitation Lank had just presented to him? He ached to know, but Lank declined to answer the question. “I was told just to give you the address, no names.”

  “When, then?”

  “Tomorrow evening, sir,” Lank said. “Seven of the evening. That’s when you’ll be ’spected to be there. There will be supper in it for you, sir. A good one. My mama Jane is the cook. Mutton. Good, tender mutton.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Jedd said. “Do I need to send a written reply home with you? And if I do, should I make it out to a mister or a missus?”

  The lad would not be tricked. He grinned up at Jedd and said, “No note needed, sir. All I got to do is just tell what your answer is.”

  “My answer is yes. I’ll be there,” Jedd said. “Do I need to wear any fancy duds? I hope not, ’cause I got none.”

  “Just come as you is, sir. As you is. That’s all that’ll be expected. Have a fine evening, sir.”

  The boy scampered out the door, leaving Jedd smiling and puzzling over what might await him, and why, when he visited at Addington Street the next evening.

  It took Jedd a long time to fall asleep that night, his mind filled with thoughts of Emma and speculations about the upcoming visit to her old home. At last his mind grew weary of racing in circles of speculation, and he drifted into sleep scolding himself for letting his imagination run off with him. He’d had his chance to win Emma, and she’d rejected him. She’d married another, and done was done.

  Yet even as he fell asleep, countering thoughts pecked like hens at his mind: She sent you that letter. She told you of how her husband had disappointed her, of his strayings and his coldness and untoward ways. She hinted at a possible parting of ways with him and perhaps a return to her home. And you know in the honesty of your mind that it is your hope you can regain what you lost…no, what you never had, but wished for and might have had. He buried his head in his pillow and rolled onto his left side, his favored position for slumber.

  Then he saw himself sitting on a cross-topped church steeple, playing a fiddle with his thighs rested on the horizontal bar of the cross, legs straddled on either side of the upright. Aware that there was no such church nearby he could have climbed, and that he had never held, much less played, a fiddle in all his days, Jedd knew he was dreaming and surrendered himself to slumber.

  He awakened still thinking of the coming evening appointment on Addington Street, pondering how he would fill the hours of the day until that time came. He began with breakfast, purchased at the same café he had visited the evening before with Ben Scarlett. He’d expended almost every cent he possessed already and was able only to afford two day-old biscuits and a scrap of salty ham, but these he accepted and washed down with water.

  His straits were dire ones, no doubt, and he knew where he had to go if he hoped to better them. Otherwise he would be forced to flee his hotel with his lodging uncompensated, and this he, as an honest man, was unwilling to do. He had no horse left to sell. He and Tree had already sold their mounts to help fund their journey to Tennessee.

  So he made his way across town to the paper mill where the Sadler brothers kept their offices, overseeing their empire. It was a small empire by the standards of larger eastern cities, but substantial for the area in which it existed. Sadler holdings included mills, stores, land sales, and publishing interests. Jedd straightened his clothing, fingered his shaggy hair into submission, and wished he’d bothered to shave so as to be more presentable to men of business. Then he went inside, easily talked his way past a shabbily dressed, very mild-mannered, and sparely built secretarial clerk with the astonishing name of Ferkus Varney, and walked into the sanctum of the Sadlers, a world alien to such a man as Jedd Colter.

  Though the building in which it existed was functional and plain on its exterior, the second-floor suite where the Sadlers made their offices was elegantly appointed. Jedd immediately felt out of place when he
walked into the carpeted hallway and looked at the big paintings decorating it. Most were copies or stylistic imitations of classical work, but rumor around Knoxville had it that some were rare masterworks of tremendous value. Jedd didn’t know and it didn’t matter. His concept of art was that which nature created…mountains, trees, rivers, thunderstorms. He found it difficult to see why folks found it necessary to put paint on canvas to make a false mountain that was no more than image, when by simply stepping out their door they could see the real thing.

  Certainly he couldn’t see much sense in investing wealth in collections of pictures and statues and the like, when there was land to be had. A man who had land had the most real and tangible thing there was, beautiful in a way a painting or drawing could do no more than crudely mimic.

  But as Jedd looked around him, he was forced to remind himself that the Sadlers were men of power, influence, and wealth, while he was a restless wanderer so poor it nearly bankrupted him to buy a supper for a town drunk. So, who were the smart ones here after all? It was a question he didn’t like to face, or to answer honestly.

  “It’s yonder, through that door,” said Varney behind him, startling him. He wheeled and faced the spruce little man with a look so intense and fearsome that Varney faltered backward, stumbling and falling to his rump.

  “I’m…sorry,” Jedd said, extending his hand downward to help the fallen man up. Behind him, just then, a door opened and three figures emerged. Jedd pulled Varney to his feet and looked at the newcomers, none of whom he immediately recognized. He figured, though, that two of them were the Sadler brothers, Witherspoon and Wilberforce, men Jedd had never met but had heard described. Witherspoon was short and rotund, head round as a billiard ball; Wilberforce was tall and looming and thin, his skin nearly a Mediterranean olive whereas his brother’s was as ruddy as an Irish farmer’s. Jedd turned a glance to the third man present; then the glance became a fixed and astonished stare, for this man he did know, though he was so changed Jedd had not immediately recognized him.

  The violent loss of his teeth had changed not only Ottwell Plumb’s appearance—his mouth was now crumpled and small, his chin sitting higher into his face than before, his whole countenance seemingly in a state of collapse—but also his demeanor. The pain of what he had endured lingered in the dimmed light of his eyes, the wrenched cast of his brows, the pinched corners of his puckered mouth.

  “Mr. Varney, are you all right?” Jedd asked the timid clerk he’d just gotten back to his feet. Varney brushed himself off and gave nervous assurances of his welfare, his embarrassment thorough and obvious.

  “Very sorry,” Varney said. “Very sorry indeed.”

  “I regret having startled you,” Jedd said.

  “My own fault, sir. My own.”

  “Let’s hush this nonsense and have ourselves a bit of something worth drinking,” said Witherspoon Sadler.

  “A little early to be doing that, don’t you think, Withers?” said his brother, Wilberforce.

  “I was thinking of coffee,” Witherspoon said, glancing at Jedd. “My brother ever misinterprets anything I say.”

  Varney hurried into the office suite and off to a small kitchen area where a stove was kept burning for such times as this. He busied himself efficiently as Jedd turned to face Ottwell Plumb.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to you, Ottwell,” he said, and Plumb smiled, a very different smile than the last he had given to Jedd, when there were still gilded teeth in his mouth.

  “You warned me, Jedd,” he said. “You told me there might be those ready to do me such harm for my golden teeth, and I’m hanged if you weren’t right. I was struck down and subjected to, well, some fiercely unwanted dentistry not more than an hour after we parted, you and I. It was surely the greatest pain I have ever suffered in all my days so far, and if providence is cooperative, a level of pain I will never experience again.”

  “Enough talk of that unfortunate matter,” said Wilberforce Sadler, pushing himself in front of Jedd and putting out his long-fingered, thin hand. Jedd shook the hand of a soft-palmed businessman unaccustomed to manual labor. “Ottwell tells me many good things of you, Jedd,” Wilberforce went on. “It is acceptable to you to be called Jedd, I presume?” A small, fast smile. “Or is my presuming merely presumptuous?” He chuckled at what he clearly thought had been clever wordplay.

  “Jedd is my name, and Jedd I am pleased to be called, sir.”

  “And you may call me Wilberforce. Or merely Wilber, as my brother, Withers, is wont to do.”

  Wont to do. Jedd squelched a grimace. Wilberforce Sadler obviously was one who invested too much effort in trying to sound and appear sophisticated. Such pretentiousness might pass unnoticed in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, but Knoxville was still far too much a frontier town for such airs to fit comfortably.

  “It is fortunate that you have come by today,” Wilberforce told Jedd. “We had just been discussing the fact that we needed to have a general talk about our upcoming venture. Though not all the relevant parties are present, there are enough of us here to have a worthwhile discussion.”

  The meeting occurred in a carpeted conference room that stood between the offices of the two Sadler brothers. Hanging on the patterned wall were large landscapes in oil, similar in style to the paintings in the hallway.

  Jedd selected a chair at the side of the long, rectangular table and had just gotten settled when Witherspoon Sadler raised a fuss and hustled him to the head of the table instead. It was evident, from the glowering expression on Wilberforce’s watching face as this happened, that he had intended that head-of-the-table spot to be his own, but Witherspoon was determined and prevailed. Jedd kept his chair.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Sadler brothers had just seated themselves when another party entered the room: a young man, sandy-haired and attempting with little success to cultivate a mustache, and possessing piercing blue eyes, one slightly darker than the other. He wore business attire of a cheap make, and carried in his hand a leather-bound notepad with a heavy pencil fitted into loops on the spine. The unevenly blue eyes were quick and in constant motion, and gave most of their attention to Wilberforce Sadler.

  “We begin,” proclaimed Wilberforce. “The purpose we may give to our fortuitous and unplanned gathering today is simple: a general and introductory discussion of our venture, and the role we will play in it. It is regrettable that General Lloyd could not come by today, but to our misfortune he has been afflicted by ill health upon his rising this morning, and will not join us.”

  “Trots,” Witherspoon stage-whispered to Jedd, grinning. “He was afflicted this morning with the trots. He’d planned to visit us today, but instead is visiting his privy.”

  “Withers!” bellowed Wilberforce. “Dignity! Dignity!”

  The fatter brother nodded, chastened. “Liquidity of the bowels, I should have put it,” he said. “My brother is of delicate and perhaps puritanical sensibilities, Jedd.”

  Wilberforce sighed, rose from his chair, and yanked his brother up by the collar. Witherspoon came stumblingly to his feet, almost falling, but Wilberforce did not let him go. Witherspoon straightened and let Wilberforce turn him to face him. Witherspoon appeared about to speak, but his brother’s hand fired up and slapped Witherspoon’s fleshy cheek, hard. Witherspoon staggered back and against the table, gasping loudly in pain.

  Jedd was stunned. Nothing in the rather silly words spoken before seemed to Jedd to have been adequate to have prompted Wilberforce’s slapping of his brother. Jedd suspected at once that what was really playing out here transcended the matter immediately at hand. These two brothers had provoked and annoyed each other in a thousand ways for all the years of their lives, probably, and likely this was not the first time such minor violence had occurred between them.

  The young sandy-haired man with the mismatched eyes whipped open his notebook, slid the pencil from its sleeve, and began scribbling notes.

  Witherspoon, his left cheek a st
inging red, glared at his taller brother. “The day’ll come, Wilber, when that kind of treatment from you won’t be abided.”

  Wilberforce laughed. “If you don’t like hard treatment from me, Withers, don’t disport yourself in a manner that earns it. And if you plan to alter the way in which I interact with you, well, I’m standing right here. But you know you won’t do anything about it, any more than you ever have. Because some were born to lead and others to follow. Or, perhaps, to sit on their fat posteriors and keep their mouths closed if they know what’s good for them.”

  Jedd looked over at Ottwell Plumb, who was seated at the far end of the table from him. Plumb was watching the Sadlers with a listless, hollow gaze. Jedd was immediately seized with an urge to get up and leave the place and put behind the agreement he had made with Plumb. There was something strange, flawed, and maybe poisonous here. But years of having been raised to honor agreements and promises overwhelmed Jedd’s instincts and froze him to his chair. He slumped back, shunning the impulse to flee but wondering just what it would be to travel all the way across the nation in company with such contentious men as these.

  And who was the young scribbler so fervently recording the altercation? How, and why, did he fit into the scenario?

  Witherspoon had returned to his chair after the slapping incident, but seemed ready to get up again when Wilberforce put his hand gently on his brother’s shoulder and urged him to stay put. “You all right, Withers?” he asked, voice much softer, almost kindly. “That was a fierce blow, harder than intended. Are you all right?”

  Witherspoon Sadler’s shoulders began to heave and shake and his eyes moistened. Jedd had to look away, unable to watch a grown man weep so submissively and pathetically after such childish misuse by his own brother.

  The scribbling continued on the notepad. Wilberforce turned his glare toward the young man. “Crozier, why are you writing? And what?”

  The young man looked up, pencil stopping for a moment. “I’m doing what you hired me to do, Mr. Sadler,” he said. “I’m recording the details of the enterprise.”