‘You seem to be feeling sorry for yourself for some reason,’ said William. ‘Now, that’s not like you. If somebody were to ask me what kind of a man you are, I’d say carefree. Steady, not particularly ambitious, but a man who relishes the good and simple things in life, like a smoke, and a drink, and a game of cards, and hang whatever happens next Tuesday.’
‘Well, that’s not me at all,’ said Henry.
William looked at him in perplexity. He could see by the expression on Henry’s face that Henry was quite serious, and yet it was almost impossible for him to believe that he could be talking and acting like this.
‘Listen,’ William began, ‘if it’s anything to do with what happened at Sand Creek—’
Henry replied, ‘No. It’s nothing to do with Sand Creek. We’ve had our arguments about that, but I don’t bear grudges. I think you all got what was coming to you in any case, when your man Chivington had to give up politics, and Governor Evans had to resign.’
Major John Chivington had been the leader of the Denver volunteers who had massacred the Indians at Sand Creek; and his attack had been part of a showy political campaign to get himself elected as one of Colorado’s Territorial representatives. Governor Evans had helped him by pleading with Washington for permission to rout out the Cheyenne. Both men had been friends of William Byers. Both men had been ruined by the public revulsion and political scandal which the killings had aroused.
Henry, in all truthfulness, bore no malice against William for having supported Chivington so enthusiastically. Those had been different days in Denver—wilder, rougher, every man for himself, not the pretentious genteel society it affected to be today. But it had taught him what kind of a man William was; and what kind of men he liked to do business with: and he could not forget that, not ever.
He said, with his eyes lowered, stirring his punch with his sprig of mint, ‘I left Augusta, years ago, when we were first travelling out here.’
‘But you got back together again. You married.’
‘I left her at Council Bluffs, and travelled on here, thinking that she had gone back to Vermont; back to her parents. She hadn’t, in fact. She hadn’t gone any further than Des Moines; and there she waited for me to come after her. She met every train that came in from Council Bluffs, and asked every conductor if he’d seen me. Finally, she decided that I wasn’t coming after her, and so she came after me.’
‘And she found you? And you married her?’
Henry nodded. ‘That was the greatest single mistake of my whole life William. And the reason you think I’m carefree, and unambitious; the kind of man who lets life roll by and never worries about anything; is because I have to be, in order to live with Augusta, and to keep my sanity at the same time.’
William said nothing for a very long time. Then he sat back in his day-bed and looked at Henry with sympathy, but also with critical intentness. ‘You can’t blame Augusta, you know.’
‘I don’t. I blame only myself. Well, and circumstances. I was down to my lowest ebb when she caught up with me. No money; no friends; and Charley Harrison’s bummers had just worked me over because I’d caught Charley in bed with some woman.’
Some woman! he thought to himself. Nina, with her poised and elegant body, her strange erotic allure. And here he was, in William’s garden, calling her ‘some woman’.
‘Well,’ said William, ‘I suppose what you did was understandable, although it seems to have taken you a very long time to regret it so deeply. By the way, did you know that Charley Harrison was back in town?’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘Not on your life. He was out in southeast Kansas during the war, leading some raggle-taggle party of Confederate guerrillas. Apparently he was bushwhacked by Osage Indians riding with the Union Army, and wounded, but of course he was bald as an egg so they couldn’t scalp him. Instead, they ripped his beard off. He’s scarred, of course. Wears a false beard these days to hide his chin. But he’s alive, and well, and fat as ever. Walter Cheesman saw him down at the Platte Hotel.’
Henry drank a little punch, and took out his handkerchief to wipe his mouth. ‘I can’t say that I welcome the news.’
William made a moue, as if to say, what did it matter? Then he asked, ‘You’re going back to Augusta, then, in spite of everything?’
‘I don’t think I have any place else to go. I went back to Council Bluffs to see if—well, I don’t know. It’s hard to describe it. To see if I could go back all those years and start again, I suppose. It wasn’t a very logical thing to do.’
William said, ‘I sometimes miss the old days, when we were dragging our printing-press out here on a waggon.’
‘It was more than nostalgia,’ Henry told him. ‘It was—what can I say?—some sort of effort to rearrange my life, I suppose. To go back, and do it all over again. Fruitless, I know. But it wasn’t just sentiment. It was a real try at going back.’
‘What you need,’ said William, pouring himself a little more punch, ‘is a time-travelling machine.’
‘There isn’t any such thing,’ Henry replied.
‘Exactly,’ said William.
After leaving the Byers’ house, Henry spent the rest of the day visiting warehouses and wholesale suppliers, most of whom were long-standing friends of his; joining them in a smoke and a cup of coffee, and looking at some of the latest goods just in from the East, fire-extinguishing bombs in blue glass bottles, tubular hockey-skates, lavender-water, mirrors, and Harvard tennis-rackets. In the evening, when the air was growing colder and the mountain sky was stirring itself into one of those sunsets that looked like blackcurrant jelly stirred into a bowl of tapioca, he went back to the Front Range Hotel and ate dinner alone in the large mahogany-panelled dining-hall: a pork chop, fresh peas, and a baked potato.
He hardly slept that night. He stood by the window of his room looking at the lights twinkling all across Denver, and he knew that his past life was left behind him for ever.
Ten
Augusta was serving a grey-bearded miner called Jake Giddings when Henry walked in through the door of the store. She said nothing, but bustled off along the counter to bring what the old man wanted: a paper of pins, and a reel of strong brown thread. Henry came across the boarded floor and laid his hand on Jake’s shoulder, and smiled at him.
‘How’re you doing, Jake? Long time since anybody saw hide or hair of you.’
‘How do, Mr Roberts. Not so bad; although my feet ain’t what they used t’be. Been up over Basalt way, on the Frying Pan River, panning a little, not doing much, but scraping a living.’
‘Mrs Roberts looking after you?’ asked Henry, looking pointedly towards Augusta.
‘As always,’ said Jake.
Henry waited until Jake had been served, and had left the store and closed the door behind him. Augusta didn’t even glance at him, but tidied up the counter, straightened the cards of buttons on the rack, and then walked briskly around to the marble-topped meat table where she had been slicing bacon, and started to slice up more, turning the flywheel of the Enterprise slicer with strong, even, aggressive strokes of her arm.
‘Augusta?’ said Henry. The slicer made a sharp ringing sound as each rasher of bacon was cut, and added to the stack. ‘Augusta, I don’t know what to say to you.’
‘Then hold your peace.’
‘I had to go, I’m sorry.’
Her mouth was set, pudgy and determined. Her glasses were marked with a fingerprint, on the left-hand lens. She turned and turned the wheel of the slicer, and the rashers of bacon kept stacking up.
‘I’ve said, I’m sorry,’ he repeated.
‘I heard you.’
‘Can you just understand that sometimes—sometimes, a man wants to be free—to feel that he isn’t just a—well, I don’t know what to call it. A prisoner, of his own life.’
Augusta stopped turning the handle of the slicer. She wrapped the bacon she had sliced in greaseproof paper, and laid it on the counter, under the curv
ed glass display cabinet, next to the kielbasa and the salami and the goat’s-milk cheese. ‘Henry,’ she said, wiping her hands, and still not looking at him, ‘you were never a prisoner. You’re not a prisoner now. You’re free to go, whenever you want.’
‘Augusta—’
She lifted her head now, proudly, fiercely, and stared at him. ‘Henry, you were never a prisoner. I didn’t force you to marry me, and I have never forced you to stay with me. But you chose to do so, and that choice brought with it certain obligations. The obligation to respect me, the obligations to treat me with consideration, and the obligation not to hurt me. Perhaps you don’t love me, Henry, although I don’t believe that for one moment; but at least you can treat me as a wife, and a woman, and someone whose fate you freely decided to take charge of.’
She wept now, trembling, and clutching herself in her arms. ‘How do you think I felt that morning when I woke up and found that you had gone? How do you think I felt? Not a word, not a note. You could have been leaving me for ever, for all that I knew. You could have been going to kill yourself. If you could understand only a fraction of the pain and anxiety which I have been experiencing since last week, Henry; the tiniest fraction; well, then you would understand the meaning of true torment, and how unconditionally vicious one human being is capable of being to another.’
Henry listened to this, and then lowered his head. He felt both sad and bored. He knew that she would take him back; he was regretful that he had upset her so much; but he was more regretful that they would have to go through the long and tedious performance of sulking, and arguing, and apportioning blame, until at last he could settle down to his poker games again, and running the store, and smiling at Augusta occasionally to keep her happy. He had tried to break away; and his attempt had failed. All he wanted to do now was to settle back into the dream which had kept him happy and vacant-minded ever since Augusta had turned up at his boarding-house door in Denver and said, ‘Everything is going to be wonderful.’
‘I should refuse to take you back,’ said Augusta.
Henry raised his eyes. ‘You won’t, though, will you?’
She hesitated, and then she shook her head. ‘I’m just pleased that you’re back, Henry. It must have been terrible for you. I’m sorry. I thought about it again and again, what I’d do if you came walking in through that door. First of all I thought that I’d- shout at you, and tell you to get out, and never come back; and then I thought that I’d run up and hold you in my arms. Oh, but Henry; you have come back. Henry, you have, and I’m so sorry for being so cross with you!’
Now she came rustling around the counter, and she opened her arms for him, and held him close, her hands raised because they still smelled of bacon, her spectacle-frames tight against his chin, and he stood in the middle of the floor and patted her back as if he were calming a large dog, and knew that he was home.
She pulled back from him. ‘Where did you go?’ she asked him. ‘I was so worried about you. I thought you might have left me and gone on to San Francisco. You always said you wanted to. I really thought you were going to California and leave me here in Leadville.’
‘I went down to Denver, that’s all. Spent a few nights at the Front Range Hotel. Talked to William, and some of the warehouse people. That’s all. Nothing much. I don’t know, just getting myself straight.’
‘And are you straight now, my darling?’ she asked, reaching up and stroking his forehead with her fingers that smelled like bacon.
The question seemed so ludicrous that Henry found it almost impossible to answer. But he nodded, and kissed her forehead, and whispered, ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. It was some-thing that I felt the need to do.’
During the early evening, Henry checked the stock in the store, beans and oil and corn-meal flour and looked quickly through the accounts of the banking counter; dressed in his long brown duster coat, with a stub of a pencil behind his ear. Augusta looked at him fondly, and he realized that he was going to be let off very lightly for his escapade at Council Bluffs, not that he had yet told Augusta that he had been there; or ever would. It was one thing to tell her that he had wanted a few days alone, a few days of peace and solitude in Denver; it would be quite another to admit that he had been searching for the freedom which he had known before he met her.
There was pan-fried chicken with mustard greens for supper, and they ate it late, sitting over the kitchen table by the light of the kerosene-lamp, while outside the sky was as black as glass. Henry felt exhausted, and not very talkative, but Augusta chattered on about the store, and how many fly-whisks they had sold, and how Mrs Ellis had given birth to her twins at last, and how old Keith Briggs had been locked up for a day and a half for firing a gun in the Jack of Spades gambling hall. At last, as she was clearing away the dishes, she said, ‘Those two sourdoughs were down here yesterday.’
‘Which two sourdoughs?’
‘You know, Rische and the other one. The one who never says anything.’
‘Oh, yes. What did they want?’
‘I don’t know. They said they wanted to talk to you. They wouldn’t talk to anybody else. They said it was very important, though, and when you came back, if you did, could you go up to the Little Pittsburgh?’
Henry stared at Augusta’s back, as she pumped up more water to wash the dishes.
‘That was all they said? That it was very important?’
‘They said that you’d know what it was all about; but they didn’t want to talk to anybody else. They also told me not to confess to anyone at all that they had been here; or, if anybody had seen them here, and I couldn’t pretend that they hadn’t, to say that they had worked the Little Pittsburgh right down to the rocks, and there was nothing there but muck and gumbo.’
Henry said, ‘It sounds like they’ve found something.’
Augusta turned around, and pushed the hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘It didn’t sound that way to me, I must confess. They kept saying over and over again that they were still stony-broke, and that the mine had yielded nothing at all. Or at least Rische said that. The other one just looked at himself in the mirror and pulled faces.’
‘I don’t know’, said Henry, getting up on to his feet. ‘Sometimes the simplest of men can find the most extraordinary things. The whole of America was opened up by ordinary men and women. You think of those very early pioneers today. You think of the time when there was nothing but desert and prairie and mountain, and nobody to guide them through it all, and certainly no railroad to sleep on.’
‘Well, what if they have found something?’ asked Augusta.
Henry grasped her shoulders and kissed the parting at the back of her hair. ‘If they have, we could be rich. You wouldn’t mind that, would you? You could have a different carriage for every day of the week. Monday, a green one; Tuesday, something in bright red; Wednesday, a brown surrey; Thursday, a coal-black brougham.’
‘Oh, stop it, Henry,’ she said. ‘We argued before because you said you wanted money, and I didn’t.’
‘You shouldn’t work so hard,’ Henry murmured, into her hair.
‘That’s rather hard when your husband and partner is either playing poker in the back parlour or taking unwarranted vacations in Denver.’
‘You’re not going to blame me for that, are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I might. I might punish you for it.’
‘Madam,’ Henry replied, raising an eyebrow, and smiling. ‘You’re getting a little presumptuous, aren’t you, especially on the first night that your husband and master comes home?’
She raised her face him, that big pale face, and hesitantly he kissed her. Suddenly, unexpectedly, all her cornered frustrations burst loose, and she seized the hair at the back of his neck and kissed him so savagely, teeth and tongue, that his lips bled, and he could taste salt in his mouth.
She began to pant, in high-pitched, unintelligible whines. She took off her spectacles, and laid them with in
congruous care on the scrubbed kitchen table. Then, still panting, she tugged up her apron and her voluminous brown skirts, and pulled down her white layered bloomers, clutching the side of the kitchen sink for balance as she stepped out of them.
‘Now, now, now, Henry,’ she said, and scrabbled open his belt-buckle with bitten fingernails. Her eyes roamed wildly with astigmatism and apparently uncontrollable passion, although Henry as he looked down at her unbuttoning his britches thought: how much of this is real, and how much of it is what she thinks I expect from her? Her scalp where it showed through the parting of her hair looked so dead white.
She cupped her hand into his underwear, and brought out his softly-swollen penis. She kissed it as if it were an injured bird, and pressed it against her face. He had never seen her behave like this before. All of their sexual congress since they had been married had been decorous and ordinary, as if the acts of sodomy they had performed in Chicago had always to be atoned for. But she was breathing fiercely now, as if she were madly elated or hysterical, and she gripped his penis in her fist and beat it up and down until it stiffened, and then she kissed it again, and sucked at it, and rubbed it against her eyelids and her cheeks, and slavered and moaned and cried. Then, still grasping him, she lay back on the hard-tiled kitchen floor, pulling him after her, and lifted up her skirts, and cried, ‘Henry! Henry! Henry! Henry, I love you Henry!’ Releasing him, she plunged both of her hands up to the knuckles deep between her legs, and spread herself apart for him, a livid display of flesh and hair.
Henry leaned heavily on top of her, and pushed himself into her, and thrust at her, his knee caught on her skirt. The tiled floor pressed on his elbows; Augusta’s white distraught face joggled beneath him. He thrust and thrust as deeply as he could, while she kept herself stretched wide apart for him, her heavy legs raised high in the air, as if somebody were slowly waving a thick white bedroll on either side of him.
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