A Good Man (10 page)
As to Celeste’s unusual reaction when they met, at first Ada had assumed the girl was so under her father’s thumb she dared not evidence surprise at anything he had chosen to do. Now she knows this was not the case at all. It is Randolph who is under Celeste’s thumb, although she seldom feels the need to squash him. Her stepdaughter is so lethargic, so unengaged with life that she is generally content to listlessly reflect back to people what they regard as proper and fitting. However, once in a blue moon, if Celeste feels her interests endangered, then those who threaten them better duck.
Perhaps Celeste, who has few preoccupations besides her hair, her clothes, and entertaining young gentlemen who admire her almost as much as she admires herself, was quickly pleased to have another woman in the house, assumed the two of them would naturally become best of friends, imagined jolly times giggling about her beaux, dressing each other’s hair, and sharing clothes and jewellery. It is difficult to say exactly what her stepdaughter may have been thinking; she is such a dim and frivolous girl.
True to form, Randolph had given her no hint of Mr. Dunne’s arrival. Five mornings ago, Ada had looked out the window and seen a man seated on her porch, a brooding figure dressed all in black. Startled, she had rushed into the kitchen and excitedly reported the trespasser to her husband. With his mouth full of toast Randolph had replied, “Yes, my dear, that is Mr. Dunne. That damn Gobbler Johnson has resurfaced – sent me a threatening letter. Until I get the matter sorted out, I thought it prudent to keep a man watching over the place.” Offering a placating smile, he continued to assure her that this was just a precaution, there was absolutely no need for alarm.
But Ada is alarmed, most dreadfully alarmed. After Gobbler Johnson had fired into her husband’s office, she had done her best to drag out of Randolph what was behind this mad act. With customary vagueness, Randolph had drawn a caricature of an ignorant prospector who, having lost an unwinnable case, had gotten it into his head that his legal counsel was at fault. In an act of bravado, the lout had fired a bullet into the wall above his lawyer’s head. Randolph had sworn there had been no genuine intention to harm him – Johnson had meant only to frighten him. And then he had conceded with a sorry-looking smile, “In that he was successful. His mission accomplished, he won’t be heard from again.” But Johnson has been heard from again and as a consequence, that very peculiar man, Mr. Dunne, is guarding her doorstep, armed to the teeth.
What she finds even more disturbing is Randolph’s attempt to arm her, to press a five-shot derringer pepperbox on her. When he informed her that Mr. Dunne was going to teach her how to use the weapon, she had retorted that she was not going to submit to any such nonsense, he could get that idea out of his head. Her husband had turned the pocket gun over to Mr. Dunne and put the onus on his hireling to get her to accept instruction.
Yesterday, Mr. Dunne had come to the door and solemnly declared it was time for her lesson. She had done her best to hold firm against him, but he was more stubborn than she had bargained for. He had simply persevered, saying the same thing over and over again with the single-mindedness of a child who wants something and will not relent until he has it. At last, it came to her that she could drive him off only by losing her temper or insulting him. But she could not bring herself to show him such rudeness.
With ill grace she followed him out of the house to buy some peace at the price of a lesson and be rid of him. Pedantically, Dunne had explained the working of the gun to her, shown her how to cock it. Standing beside her, solicitously supporting her arm, he directed her aim towards the lone cottonwood tree in the backyard. His touch was very light and delicate, as if he thought the slightest pressure would snap a fragile bone. Then, his breath gusting against her cheek, he whispered, “Now, Mrs. Tarr, fire away.” She did, two rounds, the second of which found its mark and bit off a small plaque of bark from the tree.
“Keep firing,” he said. “Once he’s struck you must not hesitate. You must finish the job.”
But the feel of the pistol jumping and struggling in her hand like a tiny animal squeezed in her fist had been so upsetting that she had dropped the gun at her feet and walked back into the house feeling vaguely ashamed and disgusted with herself. A few moments later she heard a timid knock and went to the door.
If Mr. Dunne had been the wilful child before, now he was contrite. He blurted out, “Oh, Mrs. Tarr, I don’t know what I done to offend you, but I am most grievous sorry. I only done what I was told, what needed to be done to keep you safe and somehow I …”
She looked down and saw the pocket pistol resting in the middle of his enormous palm.
Impulsively, she took him by the sleeve, drew him into the house, and walked him to the parlour, saying, “Mr. Dunne, I most sincerely apologize for leaving you without an explanation. You are most chivalrous and kind. I promise you I will keep that gun close. For your sake, to ease your mind.” She took the gun from his hand and stowed it away in her bag. “There. It is settled.”
And Mr. Dunne had beamed.
Ada Tarr turns her eyes back out the window where faithful Mr. Dunne keeps watch over her. This morning she made sugar doughnuts before the heat of the day took hold. There is a pitcher of fresh lemonade. Mr. Dunne is a robust man, the kind of man with a great hunger to feed. She gets up and goes to the kitchen to prepare him a tray.
Stepping out onto the porch she murmurs, “Mr. Dunne, would you care for some refreshment?”
And Mr. Dunne, anticipating his treat, is the very illustration of heart-felt gratitude.
FIVE
August 4, 1876
REACHED FORT BENTON
two days ago. The place is strained to the bursting point with sanctuary seekers. With a bit of luck I was able to secure lodgings for Hathaway, Joe, and myself in the Overland Hotel. A Methodist circuit rider had just been evicted because he was in arrears with his bill. The offer of two weeks’ payment – in advance – secured the room McMullen and I now share; greasing the palm of the bloodsucking proprietor with a little more cash got Hathaway a spot on the floor of the pantry.
Climbing the stairs to our room with Joe, I felt as if I was held together with nothing but flour paste. When McMullen stripped off his clothes and tossed himself down on his bed to sleep, I thought the glue had crumbled. I couldn’t trust my eyes. Stretched out on the counterpane, Joe resembled the corpse of one of those slaughtered bandits American lawmen lash to a board and prop up against a wall so they can have their photograph taken with the trophy. I saw that he is riddled with old bullet holes. Seven. I counted them to prove I wasn’t hallucinating. Maybe that sight gave me the jolt needed to shake loose that other picture from my head, the coyote’s accusing eyes, the slick guts hanging from its jaws. At any rate, given a respite from that, I slept the sleep of the dead, did not wake until three o’clock in the afternoon.
McMullen was up and about by then, spry and chipper, ready to embark on a tour of the saloons. He is determined to have a high old time in town before he returns to Fort Walsh to sell his cabin and its contents and collect his backpay from Walsh for breaking a string of mustangs for B Troop. No love lost between those two men, largely because Joe has never been able to hide his amusement at Walsh’s vanity, his taste for “dressing up.” The first time Joe saw the Major swanning about in a fringed buckskin shirt, a dress sword, and a slouch hat – which like a fussy milliner he had decorated with an eagle feather and a long silk scarf – he feigned wonder and amazement, saying within earshot of the Major that “Buffalo Bill himself could learn a thing or two from our very own eye-dazzler on how to primp and preen and prance.” It didn’t help Joe’s standing with the Major either when it got back to him that B Troop’s horse breaker was calling the hero-worshipping constables who sported imperials in admiration of their commander’s own dashing beard “Walsh’s Chinny Chin Chin Hairs.” The Major is not a man to be mocked; he holds a grudge.
Joe did his best to coax me to join him in a night on the town, but I begged off, pleading fatigue. I felt a contemptible sneak when he finally left, but I need to be discreet regarding my business with Major Guido Ilges. Joe is such a garrulous fellow that he is apt to drop a careless word on some occasion. This is a matter that requires circumspection.
Setting out to pay my call on Ilges, I had no idea of the character of the man I was about to encounter. Once or twice, when I’d been on leave in Benton, I had noticed him going about the street in uniform, but that hardly qualifies as acquaintance. And Walsh had been of little help in providing insight into his American counterpart. If the Major gets off on the wrong foot with a man, as he did with Joe, it blinds him to any virtues that individual might possess. “Six-foot-six of stogie-smoking, sauerkraut-farting Prussian” was the best he could do to sum Ilges up. The only useful thing for me in that description was the reference to Ilges’s weakness for cigars, so on my way to the post I stopped off at Wetzel’s General Merchandise to buy a peace offering to deliver along with the lettdecof introduction I carried in my pocket.
The tinkle of Wetzel’s bell, the aroma of oiled floorboards, sugar-cured bacon, coffee, soap, leather, pickling brine, boiled sweets, cheese, lanolin, and kerosene took me back to those happy Saturday mornings before what Mother euphemistically called the Great Disruption – a phrase that always capitalized itself in my boy’s mind as the title of a mysteriously arcane book whose meaning I could not grasp. But when I was five or six years old, long before the Great Disruption, long before Father flung himself at the feet of the scullery maid, every Saturday morning he and I would stroll down Ottawa’s streets to, as he put it, “take a look at the accounts” at Case’s Merchandise, son and heir, hand in hand. By then, Father’s business concerns had expanded beyond logging. The Merchandise was only one of his many enterprises and a very minor cog in his money-making apparatus, but to me it seemed his crowning achievement. Other boys may have dreamed of being Captain Cook, Francis Drake, or General Wolfe, but I can remember only one overweening ambition – to succeed lucky Mr. Tunbridge and to someday manage the Merchandise and take charge of that treasure house of mints, harnesses, oranges, enamelled pans, nuts, shovels, dates, shotguns, bolts of cloth, and gingersnaps. I wandered up and down the aisles touching and smelling all the wares, stood gazing up at the stamped-tin ceiling, mesmerized by the play of sunlight on its shiny surface while Mr. Tunbridge and Father examined the ledgers in a backroom. On those Saturdays I felt a happiness that seemed inextinguishable.
When I told Wetzel’s cordial clerk that I was looking for a box of cigars for the commander of the garrison, he was delighted to inform me the Major was a regular customer and to point me to Ilges’s favourite brand, manufactured by Kennedy Bros. of Canaan, Indiana. With the box tucked under my arm, I proceeded through the town. Fort Benton has suddenly become a gloomy place now, displays little of the rollicking high spirits I remember from my last visit here. Out-of-work river rats and freighters hang about on corners, hands stuffed in empty pockets, mourning the whores and whiskey a shortage of funds puts out of their reach. Poke-bonneted countrywomen eye the prices in shop windows, hands folded up in their aprons, calculating how to feed their families on a thin dime. All were so wrapped up in doleful thoughts that I did not merit so much as a glance as I made my way down Front Street – except one from a billy goat perched on a hogshead, chewing on an old flour sack.
Near the post I passed an encampment of soldiers, reinforcements in transit to face the Sioux. They are bivouacked hard by an alkali flat, and when a wind comes up, it raises a blizzard of dust. That afternoon it was blowing, and a spectral picket line of horses powdered in bitter white alkali was standing there, heads hung low in the heat. The soldiers sat drooped on campstools, or wandered about with a haunted, aimless air, their blue uniforms turned ashen. They looked to be at the end of a long campaign rather than at the beginning of one.
I gave the officer of the day Walsh’s letter of introduction, requested him to give it to the commander, and asked him to inquire whether Major Ilges would be so good as to grant me an interview. After a short wait, I was ushered into his office, a large, airy room spartanly furnished with a few cane chairs and an oak filing cabinet. Ilges was seated behind a baize-covered desk, a big map of Montana Territory on the wall behind him. He was wearing a green eyeshade and was toying with the letter he had just been given. When he stood to shakemy hand the room suddenly seemed to shrink, the ceiling to lower. The man dwarfed everything in sight.
Although his manner was professionally amiable it was also distinctly wary. His English is fluent with only a slight trace of the Deutsch. We passed a few pleasantries and managed to achieve an absolute unanimity of opinion on the weather: hot and with little prospect of rain. I gave him the cigars, accompanied with the white lie that they came with the compliments of Major Walsh. Ilges’s eyebrows gave a skeptical bob when he heard that, but he politely replied, “That is very kind of him.” At his insistence I helped myself to a cigar. We sat down and passed a few moments of awkward silence camouflaged in smoke.
Then, suddenly, Ilges embarked on an anecdote about a bizarre decree passed by the Prussian government which had forbidden the smoking of cigars in public unless they were fitted with a wire mesh to prevent their ends coming into contact with women’s crinolines. The Kaiser feared for the ladies’ lives, feared mass incinerations in the ballrooms of his kingdom. As he related this, Ilges’s accent noticeably thickened. It was as if he were performing in a music-hall skit, lampooning an officious German puffing away on his own terrible incendiary device. Finishing his story, he looked me steadily in the eye and said, “Ah, the Germans. So obsessed with rules, with order. Ridiculous, nein?”
