He’d locked it, but there was a trunk key lying out on the table with what had been in his pockets when he went up to the mine. She had to look.
Down at the bottom of the trunk she found a billfold with more than two hundred dollars in it in paper and three fifty-dollar gold pieces. Relieved, she shut it all up quick, shoved it back under the table, and wondered what to do with the key. She went out and hid it behind the paper-wasp nest in the outhouse. The wasps were long gone, but it didn’t seem like a place Pete, if he came back, or anybody would go sticking their hand in. Let alone if they knew about the black widow. She only wished she didn’t, but she’d seen it twice.
She’d said truly that she didn’t mind doing this job. She had minded nursing Roy’s boils because he was a hateful man, but caring for Aunt Bessie had been a job she loved. The only trouble had been that Bess was a heavy woman and when she first came home from the hospital, Rae at thirteen couldn’t even help her to turn over. Rae was a lot stronger now than she’d been then, and Mr. Cowper wasn’t a big man. Doc Mac showed her how to change the sheets. And there really wasn’t much to do for him. She wasn’t lonely or bored. She was grateful for the silence. The house had felt small and cramped when it was full of Pete’s big body and deep voice, and his friends that sat around with their hats on, smoking cigars and always talking. Now the quiet spread out in it, and her soul spread out in the quiet.
Some blue jays were yelling cheerfully at each other outside. The window was full of the gold August light. She sat thinking about things.
She thought a good deal about opening Mr. Cowper’s trunk. She’d hardly known him in the short time he’d been there; Pete had shown him the rooms. They’d all signed the agreement Mr. Bingham insisted on, and shaken hands. He had a pleasant manner, but good morning and good evening was about it. He had been gone all day at his work with the mine company, and had boarded at Mrs. Metcalf’s. It felt bad to go through his things, with him there in the next room knowing nothing about it, and she knowing nothing about him. She had needed to be sure his money was there, but she kept remembering when she looked for it and the memory troubled her. It was very clear; she could see the tray of the little trunk with papers and letters in it and some socks and handkerchiefs. She had lifted out the tray. Under it were some winter clothes and a dress shirt and coat and shoes, and under them a photograph in a cardboard frame of a dignified lady in 1870s dress, a small unframed blurry photograph of a little girl who looked unhappy, and a couple of books. He’d set his work books out on his worktable. The two in the trunk were Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, and Poems by William Cowper. His billfold was between the books. She was careful to replace the photographs on the cover of Poems.
That was a puzzle. His name was William Cowper. He said it Cooper, but he wrote it that way, like “cowboy.” She wondered why. Had he written that book? It was none of her business. She had had no business looking at his books anyhow. The trunk was locked now and the key was in the outhouse with the black widow.
Well into the shaft, almost past the daylight, he’d heard the framing creak loudly and thought that would be how a sailing ship would creak in a storm. He remembered that. He had set down his lantern to make another note. Looking up, he saw the weak glimmer on the rough pine beams. And that was it. That was all.
It came and went.
So did the ceiling of a room, slices of daylight, voices, blue jays squawking, the smell of tarweed. They came across his being and were clear but incomprehensible, like the pain. What ceiling, what room, what voices, why. It didn’t matter, it was all at a remove from him, none of it concerned him. A man he knew, MacIver, a girl’s face he knew but not who she was. They came, they went. It was easy, careless, peaceful.
There was a black rectangle in front of him. Just black, just there. Light around it, so it was like a hole in the light. It didn’t move. At the same time he saw it, a rhythm began to beat in his head like a hammer. It was made of words.
I, fed with judgment
The black rectangle was right in front of him but he couldn’t tell how large it was, how close or far. There was a great pressure on him, paralyzing and sickening him, holding him so he couldn’t move. He couldn’t get away from the black rectangle. It was there in front of him. It was all there was. The words beat at him. He tried to cry out for help. There was nobody to help him.
to receive a sentence
to re CEIVE a SEN tence
WORSE than a BI ram’s
Whether he opened his eyes or shut them there was the black space, the bright glare around it, and the words in the terrible rhythm.
The timbers creaked, he saw the glimmer on them overhead. He tried to cling to that because it was before the judgment, before the sentence, but they were gone, there was dirt in his mouth and the words beating, beating him down.
I, fed with JUDG ment
in a FLESH ly TOMB
AM
He came back. MacIver was talking to the girl. He didn’t understand what they said. He couldn’t. He was being thrown around on long, sickening waves. He was in a ship tossing, creaking, sinking out from under him. In a train swaying, swaying as it ran, running off the track, falling down into the canyon. He tried to call out for help. The wheels were beating out the rhythm he dreaded. Then MacIver’s face. Then it was all gone again.
He came back. Somebody was holding him, an arm around his shoulders, a comforting presence, but he heard something whimpering like a hurt dog. It made him ashamed.
“Hey,” she said, “you’re here. Aren’t you?” She was looking at him from close. He saw the gray-green irises of her eyes and the tiny springy hairs of her eyebrows. He understood her.
He tried to say yes or nod. Great pain closed in on him and he shut his eyes. But he had the understanding. It held him, held him here.
“What,” he said to MacIver.
“Tell you about it later.”
“What.”
MacIver watched him. Judging. Finally he said, “Cave-in.” The way he said it made it sound unimportant. Cowper had to think it out.
“Quake?”
MacIver shook his head once. “We have your notes. You wrote, ‘Unsafe at 200 yards.’ You’d gone on some past that.”
“Damn fool,” he wanted to say, meaning himself, but it was too difficult because of his chest. Instead after a while he asked again, “What.”
MacIver kept watching him. He reached a judgment.
“Stove you in some, William. Compound in the right leg, three ribs, maybe four, I’m not sure. Right wrist. Contusions and abrasions from here to Peru. Not to mention concussion. Satisfied?”
“Lucky.”
“Call that luck?”
“Left-handed.”
“God damn,” MacIver said softly, like a man admiring an ore vein.
Goldorado was just another mean little town, but one thing she liked about it was the water, mountain springwater clear as air. The house had a standpipe in the yard and water piped to a faucet in the kitchen sink. Mornings, after emptying the chamber pots in the outhouse, she could rinse them clean right there at the standpipe. The plentyness of water made housework easy and bathing luxurious. She could clean up and cool down whenever she felt like it, and do the same for her patient. These hot days there wasn’t much cross draft in his room even when she opened the front door, and having to lie in bed with his leg and arm all splinted and bandaged, hardly able to move, he got sweaty and miserable. Doc Mac gave her a bottle of rubbing alcohol to use where it was important not to get the dressings wet, and she took to sponging him off a couple of times a day. Anything cool was pleasant in the July afternoons, and there was nothing disagreeable about the job itself.
Treating Roy’s carbuncles had been disgusting, the sores, and the hair that grew all over his shoulders and back like a mangy old buffalo robe, and Roy always either moaning or cussing dirt at her for hurting him. She hadn’t seen a lot of men and it was interesting to learn Mr. Cowper’s body and compare it
to the few others she’d seen. He didn’t have a potbelly like Roy. Pete had a lot of wiry gold hair all over him and was milky white where he wasn’t tanned. Where it wasn’t all bashed and bruised, Mr. Cowper’s skin was an even pale brown, like baked bread instead of dough. He was neat, somehow, like an animal. Doing for him had never been hard as soon as she learned what needed doing.
Having to learn it had come unexpectedly. But when had she ever been able to expect anything?
They’d brought him down from the old mine on a stretcher straight into the house and laid him on the bed that had been her and Pete’s bed. A whole crowd came in after them, the little house was jam full of people, men women and children all jabbering with excitement about the accident. A couple of dogs got in with the crowd, putting Tiger into a panic fury, so she had to shut him into the kitchen and then into the cubby room, because people kept coming into the kitchen for something that was needed, water or a bowl, or just to stand and chatter about the cave-in. Most of the people had never spoken to Rae since she came there and didn’t speak to her now. Then all of a sudden they were gone. Doc Mac had cleared them out.
She knew him from when she’d had to go to him soon after they got to Goldorado, when she was bleeding, losing the baby. He had been kind then, and he always spoke to her in the street.
He stood in the hall when he’d got the door shut on the crowd, and said, “Will you come in here, Miz Tonely?” looking very serious. She followed him into the bedroom. She took a quick look at the man on the bed, not much of him to be seen for bandages. She was glad of that. People had kept saying how he was all torn up and his bones crushed, and she didn’t want to see it.
“I need to know if you can help me. He may not make it. I’ll do what I can for him, but I need help at it. I need a nurse. I haven’t found one yet. He’s completely helpless. Have you cared for anybody sick?”
“Some,” she said, scared by his hard, fast way of talking.
“I’ll try to get a trained nurse up here from Stockton or Sacramento. I’ll tell you exactly what to do. I’ll get you nurse’s wages from his company.” What he said came at her so fast she couldn’t keep up with it and didn’t answer. “There’s no place to put him but here,” the doctor said with so much trouble in his voice that she said, “I can try.”
His face cleared up. He looked at her keenly. She remembered that direct gaze from when she had gone to him with the bleeding. “All right!” he said. “Now let me show you what you’ll be doing.” He didn’t waste any time.
But in the middle of telling her about what she’d be expected to do he stopped as if he’d run out of steam.
“You’re a married woman,” he said.
She said nothing.
“If you were a girl. But you’ve seen a man.”
After a minute she said, “Yes.”
She might have been angry or embarrassed except that he was embarrassed, scowling and fidgeting, and she almost wanted to laugh.
“He will be as helpless as a baby. With the same needs.” His voice had gone hard again.
She nodded. “That’s all right,” she said.
She appreciated Doc Mac for thinking she might be too delicate minded to be able to look at a naked man and tend to his privacies, and the bedpan and all, but she wasn’t. And this man was so broken, so beaten, he had been treated so rough that for a while you couldn’t see him for his injuries.
She’d never minded having empty time, time by herself. She’d been worrying more than she knew about Pete and money and what next. She could admit to herself now that it was a relief as well as a grief that she’d lost the baby. And Pete.
She didn’t have any tears when he went like that, not a word. But she was sad that the good time they’d had ended that way. She’d gotten to feeling scornful of him for always being disappointed and discontented and giving up on things, and she was sorry about that now. He couldn’t help the way he was. But anyhow, gone was gone, and she could look ahead again.
It was all right being on her own. Enough money was coming in that she could really save some, enough to take her out of Goldorado. She didn’t know where she’d go, her last letter to Aunt Bess had come back stamped NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS. But she’d worry about that when the time came.
When there was nothing to do for him and the house was as clean as she cared to bother making it, she would sit in the armchair in his room sometimes with Tiger asleep in her lap and do nothing at all. She’d been worried in this town, and lonely. Now she wasn’t. She sat and thought.
She thought again about bodies. She didn’t like the word body. It was the same word for a living person and a corpse. Her own body, or Pete’s, which she knew every inch and mole and hair of, or the unconscious damaged body on the bed, were all alive, were what life was. A live body was absolutely different from a dead one, as different as a person from a photograph. The life was the mystery.
And then, holding and handling the hurt helpless man all the time, she was as close to him as she had ever been to Pete, but in a different way. There was no shame in it. There was no love in it. It was need, and pity.
It didn’t sound like much, but when you came to the edge between life and death where he was, and she with him, she saw how strong pity was, how deep it went. She’d loved making love with Petey, back when they ran off together, the wanting and fulfilling. It had made everything else unimportant. But the ache of tenderness she felt for her patient did just the opposite, it made things more important. What she and Pete had had was like a bonfire that went up in a blaze. This was like a lamp that let you see what was there.
It was a while before the doctor would tell him how he’d been found. He couldn’t hide his night horrors from Rae Brown, and she told MacIver about them. Maybe he thought they’d be worse if Cowper knew what had happened to him. Cowper was certain that they couldn’t be any worse and maybe might be better. So MacIver finally told him.
Ross, the local company manager, had appointed to meet him up at the old Venturado Mine around noon that day to check out what he’d found.
Knowing that, he remembered the climb up to the mine in the morning sunlight, a steep haul through scrub oak and wild lilac that were growing back across the red, rocky scar of the old access road. It was less than a mile from town but felt like wilderness, full of birdsongs and strong scents, young sunlight slanting bright through the pines and tangles of mountain mahogany. The sun was already hot on his shoulders when he saw the mine entrance, a black rectangle in all that brightness.
He had no memory of going in. Nothing. All he had was the creaking in the shaft, the lantern light on the roof beam.
Ross had got there a couple of hours after he did and went into the adit to call him. Going farther in, he saw and smelled the air full of sour dust, and saw Cowper’s lantern burning on the floor of the drift just in front of a chest-high tumble of rock and timber. “I thought it was a wall somebody built there,” he said. He was looking at it trying to understand what it was when he realized that something blue he saw sticking out from under it was Cowper’s shirt sleeve. He was facedown. Ross determined he was breathing. He hauled a couple of the bigger rocks off him but couldn’t move the beam across his legs, and hurried back down to town for help.
“He was still wheezing when he located me at Metcalf’s treating the old man’s piles,” MacIver said. “Never seen Ross out of breath and no hat before. Don’t expect to again. He’s asked about you. But he don’t come round to see you.”
“I owe him my life, I guess.”
“Heaviest debt there is,” said the doctor. “Just hope he forgives it.”
Cowper brooded for a while. “Who’s Abiram?”
“A-byerum? Darn if I know.”
“In the Bible, I think.”
“Oh well then,” MacIver said, “damned if I know, and damned if I don’t.”
“Miz Brown?”
“In here,” she called from the kitchen.
“You got a Bible?”
/>
She came to the doorway of the room wiping her hands down her apron. “Oh, no, Mr. Cowper, I don’t, I’m sorry.” She really was sorry, wanting to amend her fault. She was like that, like a child. “Maybe Mr. Robineau would have a spare one? I’ll go by the church and ask him when I go out.”
“Thank you,” Cowper said.
“But don’t bring old Robineau back with you,” said MacIver. “If this house is going to get filled with righteousness, I’m out of it.”
MacIver made him laugh. When he laughed his chest hurt so sharp the tears came into his eyes.
They had known each other two years ago in Ventura, when Cowper was first with the company. They met at a poker game and liked each other. MacIver had a practice there, but he also had a habit. Cowper had been in a low, lonesome place in his life. He was at a bar most nights. He was always glad to meet up with MacIver. The doctor had a keen wit, never lost his temper, was good company. He was such a gentlemanly drunk it took Cowper a while to realize that he was killing himself.
The company took Cowper on full time and sent him to inspect the Oro Grandy Mine, and he lost track of MacIver.
His first afternoon in Goldorado, he was not feeling encouraged about his stay there. Ross, the company’s local boss, was a buttoned-up, all-business man. The kid they’d found for him to rent rooms from was unfriendly. The town had popped up on the strength of a couple of shallow-lode mines and was giving out along with them; the four mines he had been sent to inspect were almost certainly played out or barren holes in the ground. A lot of downtown windows were boarded up, bleak even in the blaze of midsummer. A hound dog lay dead asleep in the middle of Main Street. It looked like a few weeks could be a long time there.
The doctor came out of the bank building, saw him, and said, “William Cowper,” half-questioning, as if not quite certain he had the name or the man right. When Cowper greeted him he looked relieved. He also looked like he’d been through the mangle. Otherwise he was much as he had been, and they picked up easily and pleasantly where they’d left off. Heading off the inevitable invitation to have one at the Bronco or the Nugget, MacIver made it clear that he wasn’t drinking. “Where do you get a real dinner here?” Cowper asked him instead. They went off to the hotel and dined early, but in style, with a white tablecloth, oysters, and chicken-fried steak. They drank each other’s health in seltzer water.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 21
