by Pamela Morsi
Someone wrote it for him, she suggested to herself. He was busy with some . . . some undisclosed business and had to dictate the note to a less educated man. Some man in Topknot.
In truth, that was not an appealing thought either. That her beloved Gerald should have trusted words so personal to some other person was unthinkable.
But a graduate of Yale, a gentleman with apparent great interest in human nature and social concerns, who spoke as if he were widely read in those subjects as well as many others, would not, could not, be so uneducated as to create the note that she held in her hand.
Princess sat silent in the sun parlor. Her mind trying to fly in a hundred different directions. Her heart pounding as if she had just run up a hill. She pulled her thoughts tightly together, resisting panic.
"I love him," she whispered.
She glanced down, puzzled, at the note once more.
"That is all that matters."
Chapter 8
Queenie was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking. She was wearing only the black washing silk chemise that King had brought her from St. Louis. Even without her corset, her body was still shapely and youthful. She ran her hands along her unbound bosom. Her breasts were somewhat swelled and slightly sore. She moved her hands downward, surveying her body. Her waist was still attractively narrow and her abdomen was firm and flat.
The door creaked as it opened and King Calhoun walked in as if he owned the place. He glanced down at her thoughtfully for a long moment.
"Darlin’, is your man so distracted and worthless that you've got to touch yourself?"
Slowly, seductively, she grinned at him.
"If I remember correctly, mister," she said teasingly, "you used to like watching me touch myself."
"Queenie, darlin', I just like watching you," he said.
King dropped a knee beside her on the mussed sheeting and lay down full-length on top of her body. He was big and heavy and the weight of him pressed her deeply into the mattress.
So naturally her hands came up to caress his shoulders and then her arms wound around his neck.
"Ummm, darlin'," he said. "This is the most comfortable bed I ever owned."
She spread her legs slightly and wrapped her ankles around his shanks.
"The most comfortable part of it, you don't own," she told him. "I'm just lending it to you."
"I hope it's a long-term lease," he said. "A man could grow mighty fond of this."
She kissed him then. It was a long, lazy kiss. A sublimely satisfying meeting of mouths, oft practiced and mutually enjoyed.
When their lips parted, he looked down into her eyes warmly. Queenie knew that in his own way, he loved her.
"Am I smashing you?" he asked her.
She shook her head. "It feels good," she told him. "I missed my King."
"I missed you, too, darlin'," he admitted, and then grinned. "I suspect you figured that out from the five-minute, not-so-fun you got earlier."
She shrugged with unconcern. "It was all right," she told him quietly. "You don't have to make it a miracle for me every time, like I was some haughty empress."
"You're not an empress," he answered. "You're a queen, my queen, and I want to be good for you whenever we're together."
"It takes two for that, King and I'm ..." Queenie hesitated. "I'm not quite myself."
"It's not you, darlin'," King insisted. "It's me. Times are getting tough, Queenie. Those bankers in Saint Louis wouldn't give me a thin dime."
"Oh, King, I'm so sorry."
"I talked to Cedarleg tonight," he continued. "We'll be pumping oil from those rigs in the next couple of weeks. Without a refinery it won't be worth nothing."
"Two weeks? Are you sure?"
King shook his head. "You know the damned oil deposits. There ain't never nothing sure. But that oil is down there. I know it. We could hit it tomorrow or we might have to go down another hundred feet. But without a refinery to pump it to, we might as well just stop the work right now this minute."
"My offer to lend you what I have is still open," she said. "It's not much, King, but I'd bet every cent of it on you."
He made a tutting sound of disapproval. "I've been pretty clear on how I feel about that, darlin'," he said. "You've already invested your heart on me, there ain't no reason to throw your bank account in along with it."
Queenie said nothing, but held him to her breast comfortingly.
"I know that oil is there." King's frustration made his tone a little desperate. "Cedarleg agrees with me. It's a big field, maybe a million barrels a year, and it's all mine. But I can't afford to get it out of there if I can't have a way to refine it."
He sighed heavily. "I've just got to get me an investment stake from one of those down-your-nose, shoe-shined, my-shit-don't-stink, city bankers!"
King rolled off of her and threw an arm over his face. "I hate having to suck up to them, Queenie," he said. "I absolutely hate it."
She made sympathetic sounds and turned to her side to more easily caress his chest.
"It's like no matter how well I do, no matter how successful I am or how much money that I make, these men will always be treating me, as if I'm something from the barnyard that got stuck on their boot."
"If they think that they're fools," Queenie told him.
"They may be fools, but they are rich ones," King said. "A lot of them come from inherited money. Money that daddy or granddaddy got together and they've grown up with it all their lives, accepting it, believing it to be their birthright or some such."
He drew his arm away from his eyes and looked up at her. "I suppose I could stand it if I thought that all of them were that way. That all of them just have the misfortune not to understand that to have money some poor Joe somewhere has got to make it."
Queenie smiled at him.
"But the truth is that a lot of them know better. A lot of these bankers are smart and cagey and want to make a killing in the oil market. They don't see the future as clear as I do, but they do see the price of fuel oil going through the roof. And they see that the new internal combustion engines run on gasoline and that they can do lots of things that can't be done with steam boilers. They want to be a part of it all. They want a chance to get a piece of the newest pie. But it's me that they resist. It's me, Calhoun, that they are unsure about. A man whose name is King and calls his company Royal Oil. I thought it was a good idea, Queenie. I thought they'd respect something like that."
"It's a good name, King," she said. "It's a good name and it suits you and your company."
"But it doesn't suit the bankers. They'd rather loan money on a hardware store or a cotton crop, that's sure never going to make them only a tiny profit."
"They don't want to take the risk."
"But banking is meant to be risk," King said with certainty. "That's why it pays as well as it does. Essentially the banker is no different than the fellow that walks up to your wheel in the back room and puts ten dollars on twenty-three red."
Queenie nodded in agreement.
"It's something about me, something about the way I present myself to these money men that just doesn't work."
"Can you approach them differently?" she asked.
King sighed heavily.
"Lord knows, darlin', I've tried," he said. "Sometimes I go in like I think I'm the smartest, richest, most arrogant son-in-britches you ever met."
Queenie laughed.
"Then the next time, I'm all humble and bowing and treat them like they was the finest men I ever seen and I'm grateful for their attention. Either way, they just barely have time to see me and they never, never, have any money to throw my way."
"Why don't you try just being yourself?" she asked.
"Oh darlin', I do that, too," he admitted. "And that's what they like the very least."
He pulled her closer and laid his hand upon her breast, gently coaxing the nipple to harden.
"I just can't think about it anymore," King
declared finally with a sigh. "I need to think about something else."
Queenie was silent for a long moment, then gave a long sigh.
"I've got something else for you to think about, King," she said. "Though I'm not sure that you'll enjoy pondering it anymore than the other."
She rolled away from him and sat up on the end of the bed. She'd thought and thought and thought about what she must do. She didn't have to tell him, of course. It was her and her life and he didn't even need to know. Their relationship was a good one, but any relationship between a man and his whore was by nature fragile. If things got too tough, Calhoun would simply cease stopping by. He already had more than enough on his mind, but somehow, Queenie had to share it with him. She had to tell him. Somehow he had to know.
"What is it, darlin'?" he asked, looking at her curiously.
"Well, King," she said. "We seem to have gotten me pregnant."
The silence was a long one and almost deafening.
King rolled off the bed and onto his feet. Immediately he began to pace the floor, his expression worried.
"I guess I don't need to ask if you're sure," he said.
In its own way it was a question.
"I haven't seen a doctor," she admitted. "But I didn't get the curse this month, I've been throwing up for a week, and my breasts are pretty tender. That's just the way it was last time."
He stopped pacing and turned to look at her. "Last time?"
"I got pregnant when I was seventeen," she said. "That's why I left home. I thought ... I thought that the fellow loved me and wanted to marry me. I ran away from the farm with him. But at the very first big town he left me at the train station while he went to find a preacher, he said. I guess he's still looking for one. He never came back and I never saw him again."
King hesitated, staring at her. "I'm . . . I'm sorry," he said finally.
Queenie looked at him curiously. "Sorry because you made me pregnant?"
"Well, yes, I . . ."He looked extremely uncomfortable. "What I meant was that I am sorry that the man that you loved deserted you when you needed him."
"Oh, that." Queenie waved away his apology. "Truthfully, I don't think I loved him much at all." She sighed, thinking about the young girl that she had been. "And it was bound to happen. He was a fast-talking fellah selling grain shares. He was different, dressed fancy, I thought he was maybe the richest man in the world. I was naive then, very silly and naive. I believed in getting married and living happily ever after. But I also wanted more than a lifetime of hard work in a cotton field. I wanted money and marriage."
She shook her head and then looked up at him. Her smile carried no humor.
"Like most women I learned that I had to choose one or the other."
"What happened to your child?" he asked. "You never mentioned a child."
"I don't have one," she answered. "The old gal that gave me my first job in a saloon used a hay hook on me. After all these years I'd figured that she'd fixed me so well, I'd never be able to get pregnant again."
"Oh, Queenie," he whispered and sat down beside her on the bed, wrapping an arm around her waist.
She laid her head on his shoulder.
"I can see somebody next week and get it taken care of," she said.
"I'll find a doctor, Queenie, a good doctor. I won't have you risking your life at the hands of some clumsy barber. You mean too much to me."
She looked up at him and smiled.
"I shouldn't have worried you with this," she told him. "There is nothing in the world more guaranteed to set a man to packing than a girl telling him she's eating for two."
"Don't I know it," King replied. "I've been ruminating on the outbound train schedule for the last five minutes. And I could eagerly run from here to the station."
Queenie laughed. "You are always so danged honest, King," she said.
He planted a kiss on the top of her hea'd.
"It's just with you, Queenie," he told her. "I was so dishonest with my wife, it made us both ill."
"Oh, I doubt that," Queenie said. "Maybe you were unfaithful, but you could never have been dishonest."
"I was, absolutely, I was,” he insisted. "When she told me she was pregnant I felt just like I do now. I felt like running. But I always told her that I was so delighted."
"But you were delighted with Princess," Queenie reminded him.
"I am now," he said. "At the time I was just scared. We lost two before her to stillbirth and I lost count of the miscarriages. When she was pregnant I always felt more guilty and undeserving than I usually did."
"Guilty and undeserving?" Queenie looked at him, surprised. "I thought ... I thought you loved your wife. You always wear your wedding ring."
"I wear it, I guess to remind me that not loving her is the thing for which I feel most guilty of all," he said. "She deserved better than me and she never had a clue about the kind of man she got."
King looked down and twirled it on his finger.
"I don't believe in wasting time with regrets," he told Queenie.
Queenie took his hand and squeezed it.
"You're right," she agreed. "We made the choices we made then and we live with them now."
"We can never change the past," King said. "We can never go back and start over."
Queenie's brow furrowed thoughtfully. The words of a handsome young man standing in the darkness beside her niggled at her memory. A young man who wasn't sleeping too well, but resisted the temptation to take an offered cure.
In some ways I think I've been given a chance to start over again.
Work on the "P" went on twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, the understanding being that there would be plenty of days off once the well was drilled. With every pounding drop of the cable, the drill bit pushed deeper and deeper into the ground. Closer and closer to the reservoir of oil that had been waiting there for them for a hundred generations.
"You're a natural," Bob Earlie told Tom one afternoon. "And I ain't saying that cause you saved my biscuits. Men work all their dang lives in this and never feel it. But some of us, we feel it, we hear it, we taste it. That oil down under that rock is ours and getting it out is personal."
"I couldn't a said it better myself," Cedarleg piped in. "And if I'd a said it you'd not believe me, 'cause I'm so partial to ye."
Tom was embarrassed, almost ashamed to bask in their praise.
"I ... I like this work," he admitted. "I've always worked hard, I just never liked it before."
The other men laughed in agreement. But Tom knew that the words that he spoke were true. He did like the hard, hot work. He could smell the oil. Well maybe he couldn't quite smell it, but he knew somehow, just as Cedarleg and Calhoun knew, that there was oil beneath that ground.
After a hard day's effort, the worn table in Ma Pease's tent nearly groaned under the weight of good, hot food. Tom and Cedarleg managed to lighten the load by consuming a whole platter of ham and biscuits and at least a half gallon of red-eye gravy.
The two talked long and excitedly about the well. They'd hit a gas pocket early in the day. With great care and skill, Bob Earlie and Cedarleg had managed to expend the gas without blowing up everything from the top of the hill to Burford Corners. The gas pocket was frightening, but it was thrilling, too. More evidence that fine, wet, black petroleum was right below them.
Tom finally leaned back in his chair, almost moaning with fine satisfaction.
"I can't eat another bite, Ma," he declared. "What on earth makes you such a fine cook?"
"I just tried," she answered, then chuckled. "Did I tell you the story about the fellah that asked me if I could play the fiddle?"
"Yes, you did," Tom answered.
"I told him, 1 don't know, I never tried!'"
Ma laughed heartily at her own joke. Tom and Cedarleg just looked at each other and shook their heads.
Tom was feeling at peace. He'd spent part of his first paycheck on some dressgoods for Ma. He had
meant his gift simply as a way to repay her for all her hard work, but the old woman had teared up as if it were the kindest thing anyone had ever done. It had made him feel good. He leaned back in his chair, utterly content. Perhaps that was why Ma's next question caught him so unaware.
"You ever hear of a fellah named Gerald Crane?" she asked.
Every muscle in Tom's body stilled and every fiber of nerve became alert. His face became a mask that revealed nothing as his mind raced with a thousand questions.
"Gerald Crane?"
"Yeah," she said. "He's a fellah here in Topknot supposed to have been in the Rough Riders. Did you know him?"
Tom remained noncommittal. "I don't suspect I know every man that was in the Rough Riders," he said.
"Where'd you hear of him, Ma?" Cedarleg asked.
"Princess mentioned him when she was here the other day," she answered.
"Princess?" Tom asked blankly.
"Princess Calhoun," Cedarleg answered. "King Calhoun's daughter."
"I didn't know you were friends with King Calhoun's daughter, Ma," Tom said. "What illustrious company you keep."
"Illustrious?" The old woman snorted. "I've known Princess since she was in diapers."
"Further back than then, Ma," Cedarleg argued. "We knew Calhoun and his wife before that little gal was even born."
"And what we know about her is that there ain't nothing illustrious about her," Ma said. "She's as levelheaded and down-to-earth as any gal I ever knowed. At least she used to be."
"What do you mean by that?" Cedarleg eyed her curiously.
"Why, it's this Gerald Crane fellah," the old woman answered. "She told me that she's in love with him. She says he's handsome, rich, and she talks like he's a saint among men. She says that she's in love and is thinking to marry him."
"What does King say about him?" Cedarleg asked.
"I don't think she's bothered to mention this fellah to her daddy," Ma answered.
Cedarleg's brow furrowed. "That don't sound good to me."
"It didn't set quite right against my ears, neither," Ma admitted. "So I began asking around about him."
