Fair Weather

by Richard Peck

  On the coach’s second turn it was being chased by an Indian war party riding bareback on spotted ponies. Some in the audience shied at their war cries and paint. But Buster was practically standing on Granddad’s head. Though the driver cracked his whip like anything, the war party drew ever nearer, waving ornamental axes. Now the governor and mayor were hanging on inside.

  With a burst of music from the Cowboy Band, Buffalo Bill himself pounded onto the field astride a burnished mount. Behind him galloped his Rough Riders, their hat brims turned back, their bandannas back to front around their necks, their chaps fleecy.

  The afternoon sun fell like a spotlight on Buffalo Bill in a hat white as swansdown. His fringed buckskin coat fit like a glove. His breeches looked painted on. His silver-toed boots were the tanned hides of animals too rare to have names. He leaned into the wind, and his waxed moustaches flowed against his face. Though he’d left his slender days behind him, he was the finest-looking man I ever saw.

  He and his Rough Riders pursued the war party at a stately pace, receiving an ovation. After all, Buffalo Bill was the most famous man alive.

  As they passed our way another time, the Indians’ ponies were even with the rear wheels of the Deadwood coach. Some of the party, bristling with feathers, were fixing to leap onto the coach roof. Buffalo Bill’s Rough Riders were closing from behind. It was a thrilling moment. And it was too much for Tip.

  He sprang from the bleacher. There was a sudden space between Granddad and Buster. Tip soared almost over the heads of the people in front of us. He lit running. Nobody had ever seen him move this fast, not even at dinner time. He was gone like greased lightning. Now he streaked onto the field, his ears laid back, his tongue lolling out. The Indian ponies swerved as Tip shot after the coach itself.

  I suppose he thought it was going to town, and he didn’t want to be left behind.

  The crowd gave him a round of applause. Some of them may have thought Tip was part of the show. Coach, war party, Buffalo Bill, and his Rough Riders had thundered past us. There was nothing to see but a cloud of dust.

  “Hecka-tee,” Granddad said. Buster was speechless.

  It occurred to me that Tip might be gone for good. Who that would kill quicker, Granddad or Buster, I didn’t like to think. We sat there stunned. Aunt Euterpe seemed as bewildered as she often was in our company.

  Then around the course they came once more, the Rough Riders dispersing the war party, who fanned out in retreat. Firing magnificent silver six-shooters at the sky, Buffalo Bill drew nigh the team and brought coach and horses to a whirlwind halt. His own mount reared beautifully.

  Three heads appeared at a window of the Deadwood coach: the governor, the mayor, and Tip. Somehow they’d let him inside, so he was in at the grand finale. Again the crowd roared. Tip barked.

  Granddad creaked to his feet. He parted the people ahead of us with his stick, making his way down onto the field. The band played “The Cowboy March” to signal intermission.

  But all eyes were on Granddad. There was still some glow to his ice-cream suit. His curly-brimmed Panama rode firm on his head. He waved his stick. “Come on, Tip! Leave them gentlemen be and come on down from there!”

  I saw it all. I wouldn’t have blinked. Buffalo Bill turned his horse. The perfectly trained beast took a prancing step or two nearer Granddad. Buffalo Bill leaned down from the saddle.

  “Si?” Buffalo Bill called out. “Well, blame my skeets if it isn’t Silas Fuller!”

  Granddad threw back his head and looked at the magnificence of Colonel Cody. “Hello there, Bill,” he said. “How’s business?”

  “It is you, isn’t it, Si? You old owlhoot.” Buffalo Bill sat back in his saddle and tipped up his hat.

  Yes, it was. It was Silas Fuller, our granddad. Aunt Euterpe was a statue beside me. Lottie’s jaw dropped.

  “How long has it been, Si?” Buffalo Bill wanted to know. Both he and Granddad were full-voiced men.

  “Twenty-nine years since the Battle of Tupelo,” said Granddad, “give or take.”

  “Did you ever make better than corporal?” Buffalo Bill was asking, and I nudged Aunt Euterpe.

  “Was Granddad in the Civil War?” We’d seen no medals.

  “He couldn’t wait to get into the fight,” she said. “He left a wife and two young daughters behind. My mother never drew an easy breath till the end of the war.”

  “Afraid Granddad wouldn’t come back,” I said.

  “No,” said Aunty. “Afraid he would.”

  * * *

  Down on the field Buffalo Bill was saying to Granddad, “Dog my cats, Si! I might have known you’d turn up again like a bad penny. You always were everywhere at once.”

  “That’s me,” Granddad croaked, “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Say, listen, Bill, let me collect Tip. Then I’d like you to meet my family.”

  Behind her gloved hand Aunt Euterpe shrieked.

  THE GREATEST DAY IN GRANDDAD’S LIFE

  Part Two

  Though it was intermission, few on our side of the coliseum budged from their bleachers. Their eyes were trained on the governor of the state and the mayor of the city easing themselves down from the Deadwood coach. The crowd may have wondered who the old owlhoot Colonel William F. Cody was talking to happened to be. A rumor circulated near us that Granddad was Mr. Mark Twain. Which he wouldn’t have minded.

  Granddad waved us down and we had to go, though Aunt Euterpe hung back. Buster moved in a dream, drawing nearer every boy’s idol, Buffalo Bill.

  “Here they are now,” said Granddad. “Bill, I’d like to make you acquainted with my daughter. Terpie, this here is Bill Cody.”

  Aunty faltered on uneven ground. Colonel Cody swept off his hat in the most graceful gesture I was ever to see a man make. His hair fell to his broad buckskinned shoulders. Aunty put forth a trembling hand and the colonel took it. He bent and his moustaches grazed her gloved wrist.

  She swayed like a poplar, and I thought she might pass from us. The most famous of American men had just kissed her wrist in the presence of the governor of the state and the mayor of the city, with an audience of thousands behind her. “Ma’am,” Colonel Cody said, “you bring a beautiful dignity to the proceedings.”

  The cat had her tongue.

  “And I take it that these lovely young ladies are your daughters?”

  This shook her loose. “Oh, no.” She turned a startled gaze upon us. “They’re Adelaide’s girls—my nieces.”

  The colonel liked to blind me. His shirtfront was gold lace. The studs were diamonds big as filberts. When he took my hand, I turned giddy. He passed along to Lottie, who went weak in the knee but held her ground.

  Now it was Buster’s turn. “Boy, tell him who you are,” said Granddad, who was forever forgetting our names.

  Buster was only as high as the colonel’s belt buckle, which was encrusted with turquoises. He was apt to hang his head in new company. But he gazed up now in a somewhat sanctified way. To our astonishment he said, “LeRoy Beckett, sir. At your service.”

  He was LeRoy Beckett, of course. But the fact that LeRoy was his real first name was his darkest secret. Now I suppose he thought Buster was a name too young and undignified.

  The colonel reached into his breast pocket. “Well, LeRoy, I believe this belongs to you.”

  He held out a silver dollar plugged neatly through the center. Whether Colonel Cody had himself used it for target practice or not, he didn’t say. He only pressed it into Buster’s hand. That silver dollar rode in Buster’s pocket forever after.

  The governor and the mayor were in no hurry to go. True politicians, they relished the colonel’s company before this big audience of voters. “John Altgeld,” said the governor, extending a hand to Granddad.

  “Si Fuller from down in Christian County,” Granddad replied. “I’ll shake your hand, though I’m a Republican from the day we put the Railsplitter into office.” Granddad reached a glad hand past him to Ma
yor Carter Harrison. “Mayor, I’d like to make you acquainted with my daughter Miz Fleischacker, from up on Schiller Street. Terpie, here’s His Honor.”

  Aunty lurched in that way she had. But the mayor was as smooth as his silk hat. Doffing it, he said, “Would that be August Fleischacker’s—”

  “Wife,” Aunty murmured, her face coloring like sunset. “The second one. I have been in widow’s weeds until very lately. This morning, in fact.” She fell into a confused silence.

  “Your late husband, ma’am, was a valued member of our business community,” said the mayor. “Before The Fire, of course.”

  “So good of you to say so,” said Aunty in a voice faint and far-off.

  This was our moment in the sun. I was bound and determined to remember it always, and so I have. But the Cowboy Band was playing “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and the intermission was all but over.

  When Colonel Cody learned that we ladies had been in bleacher seats, he said he wouldn’t stand for it. The bleachers would do for Granddad and Buster and Tip. But we were to watch the rest of the show from the colonel’s own box. Evidently it was reserved for fashionable ladies and crowned heads if they were in town.

  The colonel snapped his fingers. An usher appeared out of thin air to show us the way to our box seats. The governor and mayor withdrew, in search of voters.

  “Aunty,” I said as we went, “maybe now that you know the mayor—”

  “No, child,” she said. “In the social world it is not the men who matter.” But she was flushed from her moment of fame.

  * * *

  The colonel’s box offered front-row seats thrust out a little onto the field itself. It was draped in red, white, and blue bunting caught up with silver horseshoes. The usher opened a low door, and we were swept inside as the band opposite us struck up “After the Ball.”

  A row of little gold chairs with plush seats filled the box. At the far end a lady sat. She had a good full figure, putting me in mind of Mama, or Lottie. Though this figure was encased in the finest white lace you ever saw. I cannot speak for her feet, as her skirts were long and sweeping. Her delicate white-gloved hand rested atop the knob of a closed parasol. We couldn’t see her face for her hat.

  I have to go on about that hat. I never saw its equal before or since. It was of the finest straw, white. The swooping brim must have been three feet across. It dipped down over one shoulder, and the crown on it was as big as a chimney. An enormous watered-silk black bow was held in place by a diamond brooch. We stood transfixed. She turned in the gracefullest gesture toward us, and we saw her face.

  Lottie caught her breath, and the tears started in my eyes. Aunty faltered. She was the most beautiful woman we’d ever laid eyes on. Her pale blond hair was dressed up against the sweep of her hat. Her complexion was perfection. Where Mrs. Potter Palmer wore ropes of pearls, this lady’s swan neck was encircled with diamonds. I wondered if there was a crowned head under that hat.

  She smiled slightly and nodded nearly in our direction. But I had learned a hard lesson. Out here in the world, you thought twice before speaking to anybody you weren’t introduced to. Besides, my tongue was tied by her beauty. There was a scent of tuberoses in the box, and it must have come from her.

  We bumbled into our seats, keeping some distance. The second act of the show burst upon us. It was the buffalo hunt.

  Rolling eyes and throwing clods, the herd thundered back and forth before us. Rounding them up with many a fancy maneuver was Buffalo Bill, now changed into another outfit. To back him up were all the champion horsemen of the Sioux nation: Kicking Bear and No Neck and Jack Red Cloud. They were all over the place.

  From the corner of my eye I observed the lady. She didn’t slump against the chair back. She sat forward, and it showed the lovely line of her back. She was corseted tight as a tick. I saw how painful that much beauty must be.

  At long last they got all those buffalos corralled and herded off. The band broke into “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” The lady turned our way a little shyly. Of course we were strangers to her. Then we heard her voice, like music. “Isn’t it awfully dusty?” she remarked.

  Without thinking, Aunt Euterpe replied, “I said it would be.”

  “Are you enjoying the show?” the lady asked me.

  “Right much,” I heard myself answer, “though I expect my brother Buster and Granddad like it better.”

  “Yes, and your dog seems to be interested in a career in show business.” She smiled.

  Come to think of it, it was thanks to Tip that we were sitting in this box talking to this lady. “Well, he isn’t good for anything else,” I said, “excepting to keep Granddad company.”

  “Your grandfather and Colonel Cody are old friends?” The lady just touched her throat with a gloved hand. She wore a ring with a large stone over the glove. I’d never seen that before. There was so much I’d never seen.

  Aunt Euterpe leaned around me to reply. “Oh, yes, Papa and the colonel were in the war together.” She was more and more at ease in this lady’s company.

  The lady nodded. “Old comrades-in-arms,” she said, like more music. “And yet men at their most warlike are less cruel than women.”

  Aunt Euterpe started. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she replied, no doubt thinking of all those ladies who’d never left a card on her. The flowers on her hat quivered and the next act began.

  It was Colonel Cody again in still another costume, presenting “Unique Feats of Sharpshooting” on and off his horse. He was not a young man anymore. The rumor was that he fired buckshot so he was bound to hit something. But as Granddad would very likely say, it was all show business anyway.

  We came then to the grand finale with every member of the cast, man, woman, and child, on horse or afoot. The field became the Black Hills of Dakota. We were to have the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the last charge of General Custer.

  For a duel to the death, it had many a diversion. Buck Taylor, the King of the Cowboys, rode on his horse and under it. Utah Frank showed off a good deal of rope work. Colonel Cody led charge after charge, and the Germans and the Russians got into it.

  But at last, somebody being General George Armstrong Custer made his last stand, took a bullet, and toppled off his horse. Somebody impersonating the late Chief Sitting Bull won the day.

  A musical interlude followed to let the dead get up from where they fell and leave the field. Then the whole cast came back, the two-legged and the four-legged, to take their bows. The Rough Riders of all nations held high their flags and totems as the band played “Over the Waves” and “The Columbian March.”

  Then out rode Colonel William F. Cody for one last time, miraculously changed into an all-white outfit heavily embroidered. His horse pawed the air, and he raised his hat as the audience gave him one last standing ovation.

  It was over, but the colonel urged his horse straight at our box. He drew up and handed across the bunting a spray of sweet-smelling carnations in the colors of the American flag. They were for Aunt Euterpe.

  “Oh, no!” she cried out. “Never in my life . . .” But she clutched those flowers to her. It did my heart good. What I wouldn’t have given for Mama to see it, and to be handed flowers herself.

  Then in Buffalo Bill’s hand was, somehow, a nosegay of violets tied up in a silver ribbon. He was offering it to me, and another like it for Lottie. I remember yet his great gauntleted hand offering posies to those two country girls we were.

  Without prompting, the vast white horse moved on. Now Colonel Cody sat there in the sky, above the beautiful lady. She looked up at him with her modest smile, and the audience craned to see her. From nowhere at all the colonel flourished a great spray of American Beauty roses and handed them over. She received them like a princess of the realm.

  In a voice of sounding brass, he called out to the coliseum, “Ladies, Gentlemen, Children, I give you the toast of America—Miss Lillian Russell!”

  * *
*

  Behind her glove Aunt Euterpe gave another of her shrieks.

  The band struck up again “After the Ball,” the song made famous by Lillian Russell, and the crowd went crazy, singing along: “After the ball is over, after the break of day . . .”

  She set aside her parasol and stood, turning in a sweeping way to greet her public. She dropped a curtsy that would have graced any European court. And I read Lottie’s mind. This fallen woman who painted her face and had had three husbands and was barred from the Washington Park clubhouse was everything that Lottie would like to be. And I felt the same.

  Between us Aunt Euterpe sagged.

  You wouldn’t believe how fast Granddad made it to our box once he’d heard Miss Lillian Russell was in it. He was way ahead of Buster. He was way ahead of Tip. His specs were at the end of his nose and his new necktie was askew, and he was very nearly winded.

  Cradling her roses, Miss Russell put out her hand to him. “And you are Granddad, I believe?”

  His gnarled old mitt came out to trap her gloved fingertips. “Ma’am, I’m crude as a ripsawed plank,” he croaked, “but you have no greater admirer in the state of Illinois.”

  This was a pretty speech in its way, but Lottie and I worried about what might come next. Then it came.

  “Are you acquainted with my daughter Miz Fleischacker?” Granddad asked. “She don’t get out much, but here she is.”

  “Ah,” Miss Russell said uncertainly, drawing back a little.

  Then, without hardly wavering at all, Aunt Euterpe rose to this unexpected occasion. She spoke firmly. “Miss Russell,” she said, “you do our city an honor with your presence.”

  Now Miss Russell’s hand came out to meet Aunty’s. “I will remember your kind words, Mrs. Fleischacker, when I have forgotten the snubs of others in the society of Chicago.”

  And Lottie and I saw how things could be between two ladies of real refinement, even if Society wouldn’t know them.