“In the parlor, at her knitting.” He scooted off in the direction of the henhouse, and I stepped onto the porch of the third dwelling I’d erected on that property, a large wooden structure of which I was quite proud. The first had been a rude dugout constructed in 1868 for my own use only, while I commenced setting up the farm and building the second. That was a sod house, small but comfortable, and when I’d finished it I sent to Ohio for Ninna and the boy. They had been living with her mother and father in Columbus during that time, Ninna earning her keep helping out in her father’s photographic studio.
We’d been two years in the sod house when I exercised my husbandly prerogative and took some of the money Ninna’s old Danish Papa had presented us with on the occasion of our marriage to buy some lumber and hire some workers. I then set about building a proper gable-and-wing house, under whose roof I had not slept since six months after its completion.
I stepped into the house without knocking and found her making a man’s thick woolen sweater. Plump and red in the face, her beautiful blond hair done up in elaborate braids draped across her head, she sat placidly near the fire, working her needles and dreaming. She greeted me quietly, with no curiosity as to the reason for my presence in her parlor when I ought to have been tending to the saloon in town, then returned her attention to the work at hand. Above her head was a framed print of the single-spired cathedral at Strasbourg I’d managed to salvage from my parents’ effects upon my return from the war.
Without preamble I accused her of allowing the drummer access to her person, which seemed to disturb her not in the least; when I finally asked her to deny or confirm it she nodded and said gently, “Twice, second time nice and slow.”
“For God’s sake, he said Garth was right outside chopping wood.”
She shook her head. “Sawing, not chopping. That big dead oak.”
For a moment I was distracted by my lingering satisfaction that the enormous Quercus alba was finally down. Its removal was a job I’d delayed far too long; it was already minus all its removable branches—dry wood being at a premium in a land where most people burned the dried excrement of cattle in the winter—and amounted to not much more than a denuded log with roots by the time Garth and I had pulled it out of the ground three days prior. A look of glassy-eyed reverie on her cretinous pan brought me back to the matter at hand. “And you weren’t afraid he’d chance to look in?”
She shrugged. “I ain’t Garth’s wife.”
“Just don’t be laying down with drummers,” I pleaded. “They tell everybody. That’s part of their job, telling stories to please people.”
“Mm-hm,” she nodded.
“I don’t suppose the sweater’s for me.”
“For Garth.” Garth was my second full-time hired man since I’d quit running the farm myself. I’d fired the first one and chased him out of town after the boy let slip quite innocently that with all the noise coming from Mama and Juno’s room he had trouble sleeping at night.
Had I known that she would take the next hired man into her bed just as quickly as she had Juno I would have let the old boy stay on. When he left he took a ring that had belonged to my father, and I nearly set out after him when I became aware of its loss. His trail was cold by that time, though, and I could find no one who would admit to seeing him since the afternoon of his leaving. Despite the sentimental value of the stolen ring I was inclined to forgive Juno; he was a good and conscientious worker, particularly skilled at construction. He had in fact helped me build the saloon in early ’71, when I first decided I’d seen enough of life on the farm; a simple oblong building with a pine bar running two-thirds of its length, and a skylight in its rear to allow for the taking of photographic portraits. The owner of the town’s previous saloon, a shack containing a table made of a plank set upon two empty whiskey barrels, had passed out in a snowbank at Christmas, and in his squalid demise I saw my opportunity. The financing required some effort on my part; after I’d spent the first part of it building the house, an expenditure of which she did not approve, Ninna had carefully hidden the remainder of her father’s wedding present. After a fruitless day or two’s search I found a cast-iron Dutch oven buried next to the dead white oak, full of coins; I brought it inside, cleaned it up and set it, empty, next to the hearth without comment. I took the bulk of the gold to buy the land and put up the building and used the remaining thirty-five dollars, spitefully and with a grateful nod to her father, to order a stereographic camera. As soon as the saloon was bringing in money I was sleeping nights in the loft above the blacksmith’s shop, returning to the farm only in the mornings to share in some of the daily work.
As I was the only farmer in the area with a second income I was also the only one who could afford a hired man on any regular basis, and there was some grumbling from my harder-working neighbors, who considered that I was violating the spirit and probably also the letter of the homestead act. There was also grumbling from Ninna, who met my suggestion that we both move to town with a derisive Danish snort. She’d married a farmer, and a farmer’s wife she would remain, even if the farmer went off and tended bar and took pictures. In the end I didn’t insist that she and the boy accompany me, principally because an attorney-at-law and land agent in Independence advised me that the whole family leaving the farm would likely have resulted in forfeiture, house or no house, improvements or no improvements. We were only two years away from proving up the claim and owning the land outright, so I relented and continued my solitary life in town, far from home and hearth.
Our condition was much improved in the financial sense, as saloonkeeping pays better than farming, but Ninna never hid the fact that she didn’t consider it honest work on a par with the killing labor of running a farm. She did consider the photographer’s trade an honorable one and couldn’t have complained if I’d abandoned the farm for that, but I made so little money taking pictures that it didn’t enter the argument.
Her infidelities didn’t chafe at me as I would have imagined; I was confident she never had a lover but me before I moved out of our house and into town. By then I was no longer the overgrown apprentice who’d tenderly led her off to bed on our wedding night in Columbus, nor was she still the shy near-virgin with barely a hundred words of English. In those days I imagined that her lack of wit was actually an inability to express herself in my own tongue; as she learned it, though, improving her fluency day by day and month by month, I came slowly and reluctantly to the sad conclusion that I had united myself in matrimony with a dolt. Now she was a large, vapid woman of twenty-six years with a fervid appetite for sexual congress, and though at times I missed her animal enthusiasm, I knew I’d never return to her bed, sullied as it was with the smells and emissions of other men.
I left her to her knitting, hoping I’d made some sort of impression. There was no sign of Garth, and I crossed behind the barn to the sod house to find the latchstring out. I unbarred the door and entered; the front room was colder than the outdoors, and so was the second, where my old rope bed stood piled up with Garth’s soiled clothes. He had pasted up an additional layer of the Optic on the wall, and my eye was drawn to a yellowed article about the local grange, scarcely legible in the daylight streaming through the front door and the single window. Momentarily the room darkened further, and I looked up to find Garth standing in the doorway, fists clenched and mouth set in a scowl.
“What the hell you figure you’re doing in my house with the got-damn door wide open?” He filled the doorframe, having even to stoop a bit as he crossed the threshold. His head was big for his body and looked even bigger since his thick black hair wanted cutting.
“It’s my house, Garth,” I pointed out helpfully.
“And letting the cold air inside, I’m liable to catch a got-damn chill and die.” He shut the door behind him, darkening the room and creating the vivid impression that he intended to do me harm.
“Hell, it’s colder inside here than out,” I said. “Don’t you build a fire at night
?”
The hearth was nearly bare, the few ashes therein gray and cold. “Don’t get in here until real late, and I’m too tired to start one then.”
“Why don’t you just sleep in there with her? Hell, you don’t think I mind, do you?”
He looked away sheepishly, relaxing his fists, and his shoulders sank as the air escaped from his lungs in something resembling a sob of despair. “It ain’t you, Bill, it’s her. Mrs. Ogden. She don’t, she don’t permit it.”
“You call her Mrs. Ogden?”
He looked down at the hard dirt floor and nodded.
“At her request?”
He nodded again, and I shook my head and chuckled. At that he gave me a sharp glance, but soon looked down again, then to his left. He picked at the exposed sod next to the doorframe, pouting like a babe.
“There’s all kinds of things a man’ll do for his sweetheart that he mightn’t have thought he would’ve,” he said quietly, and all at once I believed I knew some of the things she’d been making him do, things she’d learned from me. She knew enough not to ask a passing drummer to perform such acts upon her person, but with my besotted employee she didn’t hesitate to insist upon them; probably she suspected that he would become shamefully addicted to them, as it appeared he had.
“All right, it’s up to you, Garth, but if I were you I’d tell her you’re not putting your mouth down there again until she lets you sleep in the room with her.”
He nodded but continued to look away as I passed by him in the doorway, pushing the plank open with my shoulder. I passed by the house on the way to untie my horse and looked in the window, annoyed with Ninna for her lack of charity toward the poor fellow. It was snowing harder now, and little Clyde was attempting to pack some of it into a ball for throwing.
“Who’s that for?”
“That’s for drummers,” he said.
“What you got against drummers?” I asked him, a little concerned about what he might have seen the day before.
“Just don’t like ’em,” he said, and he threw the snowball at the side of the house. The snow was too dry and powdery, and it disintegrated before it reached its target. Undeterred, he reached down and started collecting some more. He bore an uncanny resemblance to my own father, both physical and temperamental. At seven years of age he had the demeanor of a middle-aged minister, and had accumulated as much learning as most adults; it was my hope to send him east for his schooling when he was twelve or so. As I rode off in the direction of town he seemed perfectly and happily unaware of me.
Shortly after I returned to the bar late in the afternoon, the door opened, letting in a dose of cold dry wind and the stately bulk of Tiny Rector. At six and a half feet his height was as striking as his obesity, though once the novelty of his size had worn off it was his rheumy, pale blue eyes that held your attention. Set against the near-black of his buffalo coat they seemed even lighter in hue, almost as white as the surrounding vitreous.
“Afternoon, Tiny,” I said. Winded, he responded with a mere rasping grunt and quickly became distracted by a headline on a newspaper I’d plastered vainly onto the wall for insulation. It had been less effective here than in the old sod house; the papers quickly split along the cracks between the planks of the wall, and the wind blew through in miniature gusts that cooled the room considerably, no matter how hot the stove might be burning. In the blue white light from the window he squinted at the small type of one of his own advertisements with his back to me, and I began to suspect that the visit was official in nature; he was Cottonwood’s mayor and de facto constable as well.
It was unusual to see Tiny before closing time for his store, so as his wind returned I broke the silence by pointing this out to him.
He turned toward me, as though just remembering the reason for his visit. “Goddamnit, Bill, what’s this I hear about you firing shots across Main Street?”
“You heard those shots yourself, Tiny, I saw you standing on the sidewalk in front of the store a minute later. What’s the matter, somebody bellyaching?”
“A whole lot of somebodies, Bill. There’s one or two want you arrested as an example. My own wife, among them, and you know how fond she is of you.”
“You planning to arrest me, Tiny?”
He held a finger out at me. “By Christ, I sure will if you do any such thing again. Goddamnit, Bill, we’re trying to run this like a real town. What the hell was the idea, anyway? I heard you gave that poor clothwit drummer a licking, too.”
“That poor drummer laid my wife and bragged about it.”
I had him there and he knew it. He propped his forearm onto the bar and leaned in for a different tack. “Let me tell you something, Bill. There’s going to be some big changes around Cottonwood and damned soon, too, when the railroad comes through. How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“There’s going to be opportunities for an ambitious young fellow like you, provided you don’t wreck things beforehand.”
The old opportunity-knocks-but-once oratory was one I’d heard many times, and I was only half listening as I poured him a shot of bourbon, his usual vice. “Uh-huh.” I nodded as he droned on about the future growth of Cottonwood and the part I could play in it.
He downed his bourbon and held the glass up for inspection, as though it might hold more if he looked carefully enough. “When I saw him he didn’t mention the shots, so maybe they passed unnoticed. I hope that’s so, for your sake.”
“Who’s that?”
He set the glass down and glared at me. “Mr. Leval and his wife.”
“Who’re they?”
He slammed his palm down onto the bar. “Goddamnit, Bill, you haven’t been listening to a damned word I’ve said! Leval’s the fellow that’s putting up the mansion. They got into town last night, and that’s why you can’t be carrying on any more like you did this morning.”
“Oh.”
“This Leval’s got plans I can’t tell you about, but believe me, in a year’s time you won’t know this poor little town. We’ll outshine Cherryvale and Independence both.”
I filled up his glass again. It didn’t seem likely to me; I was used to hearing grand schemes hatched at the bar. He looked sideways down at the bourbon and seemed as if he were about to turn it down, but there it was in his glass, and it would have been a shame to let it go to waste. He knocked it back and wiped his beard with his sleeve.
“Two bourbons and still an hour and a half before I can close the store,” he said, shaking his bearded jowls in a mock shudder. “Christ, Lillian better not find out about that.” His wife was a pleasant-looking but stern woman, and Tiny’s return to the Dry Goods and Grocery with liquor on his breath would be occasion for a haranguing. “I’d better get along, now, Bill, but you mind what I said. There’s no room for them kind of monkeyshines in Cottonwood any more.”
He waddled to the door and gave the frame a slap with the palm of his hand, then gave me a tiny, perfunctory wave good-bye. After his departure I took advantage of the lull in trade to remove Suetonius from beneath the bar and, pulling a chair up next to one of the lamps, began to read.
I hadn’t got far when Ed Feeney stepped through the door. Ed was the editor and publisher of the Labette County Optic, and he rubbed his hands together against the cold.
“Jaysus, Bill, why don’t you paper over those cracks? Cold as a witch’s tit in here.”
I looked up at him without offering a verbal response.
“I heard there was gunplay this afternoon. Care to comment?”
“You want a drink, Ed?”
“Give me a shot of rye. I heard Tiny came by to give you hell, too.”
I poured him his shot and took his coin. He peered over his spectacles at me, waiting patiently for my answer, but I leaned back and returned to De Vita Caesarum, or pretended to.
It was my ambitious father who began my studies in Latin and Greek, at an age when most schoolboys are still learning to figure simple sums
and read the simplest of Bible verses. They are all I got from him besides the slant of my jaw and the signet ring, since lost; if all that my education had ended up affording me was a little time of quiet reflection between rounds of serving drinks, I thought, it was probably enough.
There was no business until the late afternoon, at which time Tim Niedel and Michael Cornan walked in, and Tim slapped a quarter down onto the table.
“Whiskey, barkeep.”
“Same,” Cornan said. He claimed to be a preacher, though he had no church and worked with Tim six days a week when it was to be had. His face resembled an unbaked bread loaf just punched down by the baker’s powdered fist; that the distal part of his nose had been eaten away by some ailment, most likely venereal, added to the impression of concavity. He countered it with a thick whisk broom of an unwaxed mustache so large and unruly that it would have been funny if not for the sullen hostility expressed permanently by his gray eyes. Other than those glistening, cunning slits, he resembled nothing so much as a neglected corpse left unburied on the field of battle to puff with methane, just beginning to slowly deflate.
“Looking at the Good Book, are you, Bill?” Tim said.
“History,” I corrected him.
“There’s plenty of history in the Bible,” Cornan said with some menace. Offering no further argument I poured him a shot.
“That Leval got to town last night,” Tim said. “Stayed in the second floor suite of the hotel with his wife.”
“That’s what I hear.”
He spit a cheekful into the spitoon at his feet and slammed his whiskey down. “Yep. Wants to keep an eye on the building, is my guess, as it goes up. Though they say he’s looking after railroad business. Jobs going to be opening up soon.”
“How come you’re down here and not at the site?”
“Nothing more to be done. I’m short of lumber. Third time we’ve run clean out of one thing or another and had to wait while he ordered it up from Kansas City.”
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 2
