For the Love of a Woman

by Orrin Russell

  ‘I didn’t expect he would have survived that fall…’

  ‘Answer the question, sir,’ Crenshaw interrupted. ‘Is that the same Saul Farro you claimed under oath was dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ Balum said curtly.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, the man’s word has been proven false. A man who will lie under oath once will lie again.’

  ‘I was wrong, but that…’

  ‘Who exactly is this man?’ Crenshaw shouted, cutting Balum’s defense off. ‘Who are you, Balum? Are you a criminal?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You’ve not been imprisoned before?’

  Balum started to respond, but the memory of Bette’s Creek rose up, and another, darker memory buried deep in his past.

  ‘Does the name Bette’s Creek bring up anything?’

  Balum sat silently, teeth clenched together.

  ‘Were you not imprisoned for some time there?’

  ‘By a crooked sheriff who was hanged by the neck, yes.’

  ‘And Mexico. The Belén Jail. Did you not serve time there as well?’

  The blood ran from Balum’s face and he sat in a cold sweat, staring at the mass of onlookers gathered in the courthouse hall. A crushing sound beat against his eardrums like a surge of waves flung in violent lashings against the rocks

  ‘Well, Balum?’

  ‘For a crime I did not commit, yes.’ The words came out softly. He heard them leave his lips like sounds spoken by someone else, somewhere far away.

  A flutter of whispers rose over the hall.

  ‘The man has served time in two prisons,’ ranted Crenshaw, ‘and has clearly lied under oath. Is this the word of a man you will use to pass judgement on my client, Frederick Nelson? I have no further questions, your Honor.’

  Chester stood amongst the crowd outside the courthouse. When he spotted Balum exit through the doors with his head down he drew up alongside him and the two walked several blocks in silence before Chester spoke.

  ‘I was inside. Saw what happened. That Crenshaw fellow sure has put his nose up your past. Aside from me, there ain’t too many folks around who know about Bette’s Creek. He did some digging.’

  Balum said nothing. His eyes looked a few feet ahead into the street and his feet took him forward in determined paces.

  ‘I’d always wondered,’ said Chester, ‘if you was the same Balum in those stories about that Mexican jail. I figured either the stories were just stories, or you would have been too young.’ He swung his head over to Balum but found no response there. ‘You don’t have to say nothing. I won’t say nothing either. Let’s get us a whiskey.’

  In the Berlamont Hotel Restaurant they sat and ordered two whiskeys. Balum had not spoken. The whiskeys arrived and Chester took a strong gulp while Balum only turned his in circles on the table.

  ‘What do you make of the judge giving a week long recess?’ Chester attempted a line of conversation. ‘How can there be that many cases to go through? Bunch of troublemakers in this town I guess. But it don’t matter. Getting you out of that courtroom for a while will do you some good. The Silver Nest has another tournament on the calendar. What do you say you throw your hat in? Take your mind off things awhile.’

  Balum took his eyes off the glass. ‘I’m riding to Cheyenne. Will’s getting married. I wouldn’t miss it.’

  ‘Ah, that’s good. That’s good. Get your head some fresh air. You need to get away from things here, get away from the court, Freed, that girl…’

  ‘She’s coming with me.’

  ‘Coming with you?’

  ‘Her parents as well. We leave tomorrow. Her folks will drive a wagon.’

  ‘Jesus, Balum.’

  Balum smiled. The melancholy left his face and his eyes took on the old glimmer. Chester cringed. He looked about the restaurant and leaned forward.

  ‘I see how happy you are about that, Balum. But I’m your friend and I need to speak my mind. You’ve been spending every free hour with that girl. You’re head over heels, and it ain’t love, it’s infatuation. There’s a difference.’

  Balum scowled and started to speak but Chester raised a hand.

  ‘Hear me out, Balum. You’re under a lot of pressure with the trial, and this girl takes your mind from it. All you can think about is getting married and settling down. You’re jumping at the bit. So eager to find what you want you can’t see what everybody else does.’

  ‘What do they see?’

  ‘Problems.’

  ‘Name one.’

  Chester swung his head in a scan over the restaurant. He leaned on his elbows over the table, the fingers of his hands spread wide. ‘What business has Sanderson got going to the jail?’

  ‘Aston?’

  ‘Twice now.’

  ‘Ross hasn’t said anything about that.’

  ‘Why would he. Plenty on his plate too, and he ain’t a man to gossip.’

  ‘Could be any number of reasons.’

  ‘Balum, take the advice of an old man. I’ve been where you are now, and I’ve ignored plenty of advice I should have heeded. I’m telling you there’s something ain’t right going on and you’re barreling forward like you’ve got blinders on.’

  Balum stood and plucked his hat off the table.

  ‘I need to catch some shut eye, Chester. I leave early tomorrow. Good luck at the Silver Nest.’

  Chester watched his friend turn and leave through the dining hall doors. He’d upset him, that much was clear. He wondered what opinion Randolph might hold. While he considered this he reached over the table to Balum’s untouched glass and tossed its contents down his throat.

  12

  From the hawk’s view ten thousand feet above them their figures were but shapeless blemishes on an open and endless plain. The covered carriage the Sandersons drove was short and light and the horses pulling it leaned like browbeaten vassals into the traces. Balum’s roan walked in front, side by side with Sara’s paint. Massive upthrust peaks of mountaintops loomed unmoving to the west. For hours they rode without a change in the range of craggy summits that towered like lifeless gods on watch over the sprawl of land cast eastward. Under their dominion rode the travelers, all four silent as though carrying out an order to which no refusal could be made. Like four mourners spent by grief, haggard and plodding forward in mindless resolution.

  They stopped not for lunch but instead rode through the day while the sun’s light cast shadows that slowly shrank and inverted from west to east and stretched out again as the sun retreated and the silhouettes of the horses lengthened into spindly legs of spiders crossing the darkening plains in a garish march.

  At night they camped at the base of a cutbank where pines had taken root and flourished. Dead boughs sat crooked and bent on the ground, and over his knee Balum broke them and made a fire, and they ate in silence and retired to their bedding.

  For why such an uneasy atmosphere clouded their journey, Balum blamed a swath of perpetrators. The trial, Nelson, Farro, Freed, even Chester and his unwelcomed warnings which found no fair hearing in Balum’s mind.

  In the morning they breakfasted in comparable silence. Mrs. Sanderson drank coffee with her face long and set harshly along its formerly beautiful lines. Doubt snuck into Balum. Perhaps he had been too exuberant in inviting Sara to the wedding. It required the accompaniment of her parents; a journey upon which they had no desire to commence. He felt the Sandersons were carrying out the responsibilities of a job. What job, he did not know. Only that its finality was worth the cost of its labor.

  Late into the night they arrived in Cheyenne. Two days of fifty mile treks had sapped the travelers, and their legs took them through the Rosemonte Hotel doors like somnambulistic creatures trapped in bodies foreign and uncooperative. The Sandersons disappeared straight to their room. Balum returned to the street and drove the carriage and horses to the livery where they were unhitched and unsaddled, groomed and watered and fed.

  When the chores were completed he returned to th
e Rosemonte and stretched his tired frame over the mattress. Wearily he waited for sleep. It came, in time, but not before an interminable stretch of guilt in which his mind obsessed not over the woman in the room next to him, but on the one inhabiting the room over a brothel floor several blocks away. A room in which he had slept and laughed and made love. A room in which he had whispered her name softly, a name spelled out in flowing black letters across the envelope laying unopened and unread atop his desk in Denver.

  Tables covered the front yard of the CW Ranch, each punctuated with a centerpiece of cut flowers. Will wore a tailored broadcloth suit and his young bride walked with a veil dragging twenty feet behind her and smiling with glowing red cheeks all the while.

  When the ceremony concluded and the new couple was presented to the public, a feast was offered. Roasted beef, goat, pies, cakes. Liquor was distributed in such quantities that no soul who felt a thirst rise up in him went unsated. A fiddler took up his instrument and set the merry crowd to dancing. Children ran between the tables and screamed and laughed while their parents stuffed their gullets with food and drink.

  As the commotion grew, Charles found Balum and took him aside.

  ‘Word of the trial has made its way up,’ he said. ‘Is it as bad as they’re saying?’

  ‘Depends what they’re saying.’

  ‘That Nelson’s got some crack shot lawyer turning everything around and pinning it on you.’

  ‘He’s trying.’

  ‘I heard his brother hired him just for the job.’

  Balum flinched. ‘What brother?’

  ‘Half-brother, I guess. I don’t know. Those are the rumors. Tell me what the story is behind this girl you’ve brought up. She’s pretty. I’ll tell you that right now.’

  ‘Sara Sanderson. We met not long ago, but she wants what I want.’

  ‘From where your eyes keep drifting to, I’d be of a mind to disagree.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Come on now, Balum. You’ve been staring at Angelique ever since you showed up. You just looked at her now!’

  Balum looked her way again then pulled his head around, fighting himself.

  ‘And she’s been looking at you just as much,’ Charles continued. ‘So what happened? Up to a few weeks ago she was the gal for you. Now you show up with a new girl on your arm.’

  ‘Angelique doesn’t want me, Charles. She said as much before and I didn’t listen. I got the point this time.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘In her own way. Look at her now. Here with some fellow.’

  ‘Looks a little old to me,’ said Charles.

  Balum shrugged.

  ‘Get ready,’ Charles said under his breath. ‘Here she comes now. I’ll leave you to it.’

  Charles turned and left Balum standing in the open, a queasiness in his belly that couldn’t be blamed on the food. She came walking through the tables with a hand lifting the length of her dress. Her hair shone in immaculate locks, piled atop her head underneath a summer bonnet. The urge came over him to open his arms, to embrace her tightly against him, hold her there and smell the sweet scent of her neck uncovered. Instead he held his arms rigid against his body.

  ‘Balum,’ she said when she was close. Her head tilted slightly, and though warmth showed through her eyes, it was mixed with confusion and a hesitation much unlike her.

  ‘Angelique,’ he replied with a nod of his head.

  ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘Did you get my letter? I’ve been trying to reach you.’

  He stumbled over what to say. Before he had formed a reply, Sara’s voice appeared next to him.

  ‘Balum! Come dance with me.’

  She took him by the arm without a word of greeting directed at Angelique and pulled him away to the matted down grass in front of the fiddler where couples clapped their hands and bounced on a rhythm of celebration.

  He looked back, once. She stood watching him, alone, her dress held in her hands. Not a look of anger on her face, or irritation or disdain. A look altogether different. One he knew he was the cause of and, though he wished it, had no solution for the cure.

  Before the celebration had come to a close they left. A goodbye to Charles, to Will and Tessa. Balum’s eyes searched for Angelique, though for what purpose he wasn’t sure. He wanted to see her, hug her, explain things. Something. But she was gone, and Sara’s parents had already started the wagon homeward.

  The sound of music faded behind them. The notes grew fainter and disappeared out over the grandeur of the plains stretching endlessly southward. The roan and the paint rode alongside the carriage. They stopped late in the evening and rose early the next day as though no time had passed at all.

  Under a red morning sun they lumbered forward. The wagon wheels creaked in metronomed rhythm. Balum searched for his tobacco but he was out. He wiped the sweat from his brow and watched his mind skip like a kaleidoscope through his current burdens. He fought for something enjoyable on which to dwell but the trial would seep back into his mind, Nelson with it, Saul Farro lurking and waiting in Denver.

  When Sara pulled up alongside Balum and smiled, he gazed foolishly at her beauty as though a nubile young pixie had been sent to rescue him from his demons.

  ‘That was a beautiful wedding,’ she said with her eyes wide and searching.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘I loved Tessa’s dress. I want mine to be like that.’

  ‘It was nice.’

  ‘And I want music at my wedding. Fiddlers and lots of food and table settings like they had,’ she searched Balum’s face. ‘Are you going to marry me, Balum, or are you just enjoying your time?’

  Balum’s breath caught. She was a forward girl, yet even for her the question was overtly brazen. It caught him unprepared.

  ‘I want to settle down and have a ranch with a wife and children,’ he admitted.

  ‘Oh, so do I,’ she quickly agreed. ‘Think of what we could have together. Think of what we could do when we combine what we have.’

  Balum rode with his eyes plastered over a near featureless landscape.

  ‘With what you and I have between us,’ she went on, ‘we could find the perfect ranch. Buy the most beautiful spot of land, hire the best builders in all of Denver. I’ll start the search as soon as we get back.’

  He consented with a nod of his head, though his eyes did not stray from the bleakness that distended out from his horse’s ears as far as his vision would take him.

  13

  Another day in court. Enough to lose count of them. As he stood in front of the mirror of the hotel room in the early light of dawn he wished only to know the number left. May he move on with his life, he thought. A life with Sara Sanderson, a house in the countryside, mornings spent together on a rocker on the porch. The more he thought about it the more the fantasy grew in his head. He projected onto it all the joy his mind would muster.

  He pulled on his boots and placed his hat over his head. Every movement was carried out in a way that spared his eyes having to land on the letter still resting on his desk. He walked wide of it on the way out the door and left the Berlamont Hotel by way of the front door where Daniel Randolph surprised him in the street.

  ‘Morning there, early riser,’ Randolph tipped his hat. ‘I thought I’d invite you to breakfast. No good sitting in court on an empty stomach.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can fill it.’

  They took seats in the cafe across from the Denver Commercial Bank and ordered eggs and grits and bacon and endless cups of coffee brewed black and scalding. Their tongues balked at the bitterness but they drank it anyway while Randolph filled Balum in on Chester’s continued streak of luck at the Silver Nest. They ate breakfast and rambled on to each other on a field of meaningless topics until the hour came for Balum to leave for the courthouse. He made to rise from the table but Randolph stuck out a hand and motioned for Balum to wait.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something I saw
last night and thought I should tell you.’

  ‘Alright. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘I hit a bad streak of luck at the Silver Nest last night. Lost some money I shouldn’t have gambled. When I left I took a walk, ruminating mostly and kicking myself. Didn’t feel like going back home. I didn’t pay much attention to where I was going, and I ended up on High Street, just as you were riding in with the Sandersons. It was late. I was in a foul mood and you looked pretty haggard yourself, so I stayed on the other side of the street and didn’t say anything. I saw you climb up onto that carriage seat and drive it away with the two horses trailing after you. When I got to the end of that street I figured it was no use beating myself up anymore and I’d be better off asleep in bed. So I turned around and came walking right back down High Street. Past the Sanderson’s house.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘They had a visitor.’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Saul Farro.’

  Balum’s shoulders tightened and he bent his head forward. ‘What do you mean Saul Farro?’

  ‘He walked right out the front door. Shook Aston Sanderson’s hand before he left.’

  Balum snorted and looked away. Randolph waited for a reply, but none came.

  ‘You know any reason why Farro would be dropping in on the Sandersons late in the evening? Or any time at all, for that matter?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been him,’ said Balum.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘No. It was well past sunset. Dark out. It could have been anyone.’

  ‘Balum, you know full well there’s no mistaking Saul Farro. He’s near six and a half feet tall and built like a buffalo.’

  Balum was still shaking his head, his eyes not wanting to meet his friend.

  ‘Things don’t add up, Balum. You’ve been spending every free hour with the Sanderson girl while that trial is getting away from you.’

  ‘Don’t bring the girl into this.’

  ‘I will, because you’re my friend. And somebody’s got to tell you.’