Ernest sat down on the footboard. “You come around my sister or my niece ever again and I’ll fix you good, you goddamn pig raiser.”
I stormed into the house. Hattie was seated at the kitchen table, cradling our daughter as she fed from a liniment bottle. As soon as I entered, Hattie was on her feet and taking Matilda upstairs to our bedroom. Half of the house had been packed up, mostly smaller items that could fit into the wagon. Much of the furniture was still left, being too large to draw across town by a pair of decrepit mules.
I fumed and unwrapped a two-pound porterhouse from a parcel of butcher paper. The steak was as thick as an indexed atlas. The last cut of meat I’d taken from my shop before Cudahy’s men padlocked the doors. I fried it up in a pie pan over the hob of our stove. There were no plates or cutlery left in the cabinets, and I ate the steak straight out of the hot pan with some yellow beans and drank a nibble of whiskey and had a smoke from one of the clay pipes I kept in a rack next to a crock of tobacco.
When I went upstairs to our bedroom, Matilda was asleep in her bassinet and Hattie was seated in front of her princess dresser, filling a large oat sack. She hadn’t seen me enter. For a moment I leaned silently against the door frame. I swallowed some more of my amber and set the glass down on the dresser.
Hattie startled at the noise of the glass hitting the wood. “You scared me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said absently and continued to undress, lowering my suspenders in one fluid motion.
“You didn’t come home at all last night, and I was worried sick. I had my brother come over to look after us.”
I inserted myself into a flower-patterned chair and began to remove my socks. “It seems your brother is under the impression that you’re moving back in with your mother and raising our child on your own.”
“I am moving back in with her. For our daughter’s sake.”
“And then what? Back to gallivanting off with the mayor and whoever else?” I asked as I stripped down to my undershirt and began to root around in the drawers of Hattie’s dresser, looking under the folded stacks of clothes.
“We got into this thing too young.”
I continued to search the dresser. “Folks younger than us have got into it and stayed in it until the end of their days. That’s what marriage is.”
“What on earth are you looking for?”
I finally stopped my search upon finding a red bottle of laudanum. I held it up in an accusatory manner, pulled the cork, and dumped a long pour into the rest of my whiskey. I gulped it all down before it had a chance to mix. “That ought to numb me out so I can get a few winks, at least.”
“Dr. Arnold prescribes that to me for my nausea and postpregnancy pains.”
“Oh I know,” I said and pulled off my undershirt. “He also prescribes Guckenheimer rye for breakfast and cherry rum for boredom.”
Hattie slapped me hard across the face. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that. You come home smelling like brandy or worse most nights.”
I rubbed my cheek and peeled back the bedspread. “Well, if the truth is going to be had in the house with the serrated edge out, I thought I just might return a little of it your way.”
“And what truth is that? That you’re gone every day and I hardly get to see you except when you’re belly-up at the dinner table or holed away in your den with your nose in a bottle?”
“It’s called working. Working to make a living for you and me and our daughter.”
“Sometimes I don’t see you for so long I forget I’m married.”
I lay down and pulled the blanket up to my chest. “Is that so? Well, you go on and live with your mama for a while. See how that life suits you. You’ll be mending rags for clothes and cooking pottage in your bare feet.”
Hattie tied her silk robe shut and put her hand over her mouth. “She’s afraid. I’m afraid. You’re in big trouble with the worst kind of men. I’m afraid that one day I’m going to be telephoned to the hospital, and when I get there you’re going to be,” she paused, unable to even speak the word. “I have nightmares. I wake up in cold sweats and—”
I flung off the blankets, went over to my wife, and held her at the shoulders. “I ain’t in any trouble no more. I sold the place and all’s square. I’ll go back to work rounding up hogs and bartending for my sister or whatever else I can find, and there’ll be food on the table, and you won’t have to worry.”
Hattie looked at me blankly.
“All of this, the, the—” I struggled to find the words. “The rococo furniture, the gold wallpaper, your little silk articles,” I said and yanked a small drawer out of her dresser. I spilled its contents onto the bed: a sapphire ring, gold broaches, a pearl necklace, ribbon bows. “What’s all the stuffing worth to you? Because it makes me sick. I got folks who come to me every day, widows with three sick kids, men with no jobs, nigras who can’t spell their own names, all of them hungry and tired and broke and some of them homeless, and they come to me begging for a scrap of meat that’s gone bad or anything else that I might throw out. And you know what? That’ll never be us.”
Hattie swiped the jewelry off the bed in a flurry, scattering it across the room. “You think that’s what I’m talking about? Frills? You think that’s why I’m leaving you? A week ago two men tried to break into our house looking for you. Then last night you go missing and you come home bloodied up and covered in mud, and you’re telling me we’re safe? I won’t have our daughter living in danger. I won’t live in it.”
I lay back down in bed and folded my hands across my stomach. Matilda had woken from all the screaming and was now wailing herself. Hattie picked her up out of the bassinet and carried her around the room, cooing her and patting her bottom to calm her down.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Do? What have you been doing for months?”
“You’re staying here. I’m your husband, and that’s my little girl. I won’t have everybody, especially your own brother, making fun, laughing at me.”
“Oh you won’t, will you? What do you expect people to think when a jane like me what’s got everything marries a wet smack like you?”
I shot up from the bed and stood stammering. “A wet smack like me? So that’s how it is, huh? Well, this wet smack put you in the nice pink house of your dreams and filled it up with whatever your heart desired. Now you want to flee out when I get in a little trouble? Well, I won’t be the one to stop you.”
Hattie hustled out of the room with Matilda in her arms, leaving the oat sack filled with her jewelry and all else behind. She bounded down the steps and out the front door, crying the whole way with me chasing behind. I stopped on the porch again and watched her sprint across the yard toward the wagon where her brother stood and helped her onto the bench seat.
They were just about to depart when I finally called out, “I failed.”
Hattie and Ernest stared at me from their seat on the wagon.
I came closer. “I failed everything. I don’t know what else to do.”
Hattie was stunned.
“But, please, don’t leave me. Not now. Not ever. I won’t always fail. And I promise so long as you’re with me, you’ll never be scared or hungry or want for anything. I’ll—” I tried to speak as I came up to the side of the wagon, but my voice trembled. My hands shook so fiercely I thought my whole body might tumble apart like some old machine once the last bolt came loose. My words came out in a gurgle.
I continued, “I’ll be here at home more often. The only reason I haven’t been lately is because I wanted to make a good life for you. But I didn’t. God knows I failed about as bad as any man ever could. And you warned me. You knew better because you’re smarter than me. My sister warned me. Hell, even the man who took it all away from me warned me. And I cocked it up. I cocked it all up. Everything. But not you and not Matilda. Those things I got right. You
, you’re the only good choice I’ve made since I got the harebrained idea to come out here in the first place. Hell, in my whole life.”
I paused and tried not to cry. I tried to not even blink so I wouldn’t push the tears out of my eyes. The emotion even shocked myself. I drew up my words slowly, as if I needed a windlass to get them to the surface.
“You know,” I said, “the first time I saw you come into my sister’s saloon, I thought I’d be the goddamn luckiest fella in the world if I even got the chance to talk to you. And I was right. And every morning when I wake up and when I come home from work, even when I’m tired and grouchy, when I just get to look at you for a moment from across the room, I still feel the exact same way. And I should’ve told you that every chance I got. But I didn’t. I didn’t, and I’m a fool to have waited this long to tell you how I’ve felt about you every day. But please, I’m begging you. Don’t go now. Please, Hat, stay with me.”
Hattie repositioned Matilda in her arms. She’d swaddled the child in a blanket and held her to her chest like a package. Ernest pulled back on the mule reins, anxious to depart.
“Why should I?” Hattie asked.
“Because I love you. I love you, and I love our little baby girl and—”
Hattie looked down the street as blankly as if there wasn’t a thing left in the world. “I don’t love you. Not anymore.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
All I could think of to say was, “How can you say that? Love just doesn’t go away like it was never there.”
“Well, if it’s there at all anymore, it’s only there for you,” Hattie said coldly and told her brother to get those mules walking. Ernest sashayed the reins and the wagon rocked forward into a sullen march. I hollered and fell to my knees. I hollered at her to come back until the wagon disappeared around a corner at the end of our street.
Nightfall arrived before I was finally able to lift myself up from the grass and hobble back inside. I stood in the dark kitchen for a long time. Moonlight came through the windows. I memorized the items in the room as if I might never see them in that exact arrangement ever again: a half-open bag of flour on the counter, a dishrag neatly folded over the sink faucet, the pudding mold I used to put upside down on little Matilda’s head like a giant hat to make Hattie laugh nearly every night at dinner.
How many times had she reached a wet hand into the wire sponge basket on the wall? How many times had she accidentally spilt coffee grounds around the range kettle and cleaned them up in the crumb pan now hanging from a nail by the back door? If she never came back, I’d never move an inch of it. I’d let it all sit untouched even if mushrooms started growing out of the walls. None of it would change until God himself came down to wipe it all away.
It took me an hour to climb the stairs.
I sat down to rest on the fourth step for nearly half that time.
Daybreak arrived by the time I made it to our bedroom.
The bags she’d been trying to pack during our argument were strewn across the bedspread and the floor. She’d been in such a rush. Such a rush. I lost my breath at the thought of her scrambling around just to leave me. She wanted to get away from me so fast she didn’t even have enough time to pack all that she wanted to take. The thought of her running about madly just to get a few things together in a couple oat sacks broke my heart worse than any other image I’d ever suffered in my whole life.
Matted squares were still visible in the carpet where the pedal sewing machine I gave her last Christmas had stood just hours before. Even the potted plants she grew out of old oatmeal drums were gone. The wedding ring I took out on loan was left in a dish on the nightstand along with her house key.
Some of her long yellow hairs were shed on the bathroom floor. She had a ton of hair, and it was almost like living with a heavy cat. One morning not long ago, I found a loose strand in a clean stack of soup bowls and had a mind to toss the whole stack into the trash out of petty frustration.
What used to drive me mad suddenly put me on the floor.
Instead of sweeping the hairs up, I sealed them in an envelope to save. I knew it was ridiculous. But it also might prove to be the last piece of her I’d ever have. The things we leave behind end up staying with us longer than the things we keep.
I went into the bathroom and collapsed on the ground by the washtub I’d put in that past summer, just like I’d promised. I lay there for two whole days without sleeping or getting up to use the toilet. I remembered more from the past year with Hattie than I once thought I could retain about my entire life. And while all of it now seemed so abrupt, tender things had occurred between us, and they would always be tender in replay. I remembered the first time I came to see her after the night we met at the hotel dance, when I’d paid a man twenty dollars just to get her matching bow tie.
A week after that dance, I finally worked up the gumption to get dressed in my best pair of pants and boiled shirt and walk over without invitation to ask her out to dinner.
She had opened her door with a disturbed look but then said playfully, “Ah, if it isn’t the lonely boy with the tabby cat. I thought you might come snooping around my door sooner or later. Well, what’s it this time? Come to ask my hand in marriage again, have you?”
“No, Miss Hattie, I want to take you out to a restaurant.”
“Now, I told you I hate being called Hattie.”
I gripped my bowler as tightly as a boat wheel. “Right. Hat. I forgot.”
Hattie leaned up against the door frame in her sleeveless pajama suit. “I sincerely doubt you’ve forgotten one thing about me.”
I was staring at her bare armpit. “Well, I, maybe—”
“It’s cute when you stutter, but you should stop while you’re ahead.”
I regained my bearings. “I’d like to invite you out to dinner, but I’d also prefer to not be terrorized about it.”
“A real date, huh? Like music and flowers and the whole ball of wax?”
“Unless you’re any good at frying pancakes. In that case we might just as well stay in.”
Hattie looked at me cockeyed, the door still only halfway open. “I thought you said you didn’t think of women as kitchen maids and laundresses?”
“You remembered,” I said and couldn’t quit smiling.
“Of course I remembered. That was pretty bold talk for a man who lives alone with a stray cat he named Marmalade.”
“It seems you didn’t forget much about me, either.”
“Hard to forget a picture as sad as a man with no one to keep him company but a kitty.”
“Yeah, I shot that cat.”
Hattie laughed and opened the door fully. “Well, just don’t stand there with your hat in your hand. Come in. I can’t go out in my nightwear, and I need a few minutes to change.”
There were only a few pieces of sad furniture in her flat. A wicker sofa with mismatched cushions and a torn armchair. Unpainted walls, no windows. A pair of oil lamps lit up the front room. A canvas sheet hung across the doorjambs of the adjacent bedroom.
“Where are we going?” she asked as she disappeared behind the sheet on the door.
I stood in the middle of the main room, afraid to sit down or look at the walls or do anything but breathe. “I thought maybe the Antler Inn. It’s not far. We could walk from here.”
Her muffled voice came through the walls while she was changing. “Pretty fancy spot for a bartender. Who knows, Pat Crowe. You just might surprise me, yet.”
That day I’d thought: yes, there are still beautiful things left in this world.
How distant that all felt as I panted on the bathroom floor.
Like watching it from the surface of Neptune or farther.
Tomorrow I’d have the strength to track her down. I’d go straight over to her mother’s house and ask her all the questions I never got a chance
to ask. But morning came and the next one after that, and I still couldn’t summon the energy to move. On the third day, I was able enough to slump down the stairs into the kitchen and sleep on an old straw tick on the floor. The house wailed and creaked against a hard wind. When I really thought about it, there were no more questions to ask, not of any kind. What I knew then, what I knew the moment I saw her leave on that wagon, was all there was to know.
XIX
BY THE TIME Eddie Junior wandered back home, Billy and I had ridden well outside the city limits. We headed southwest, stopping only to urinate and water our new ponies, a pair of rangy sorrels we bought from a Tennessean making his way to Canada. We said goodbye to Silversmith, gave her to the Tennessee man for free, and told him that she was worn out but one hell of a good horse if given a week of rest to recover.
We made camp for the night in Fillmore County along the bed of Tuttle Creek. Some eighty or more miles put between us and the Omaha police. A new moon in the winter sky, bright enough to cast nighttime shadows across the old snow. We hitched our ponies under a barren eucalyptus tree that even at full foliage in the summer wouldn’t have provided enough shade for a vole. Billy counted out the gold from the ransom sack three times. He could not believe it. Nor could I.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
I sat in amazement at our feat, staring out at the wide-open tableland in front of us as if it hadn’t begun to exist until I saw it then, at that very moment. As if it were created for the first time by the simple fact it was I who was gazing upon it. I stood with my back against the eucalyptus, looked in the other direction. I knew no one was coming but couldn’t help but to imagine that at any moment a horde of police detectives would appear over the sunken snowy hills behind us, thrashing their horses with all the vexed deviltry of the riders from hell at the coming of the rapture. I filled my huge pipe with fragrant orinoco from a pouch dangling around my neck and stood puffing away without a thought in my head save for Hattie and my daughter Matilda and what they might think of me now.
World, Chase Me Down Page 17
