A Good Man (43 page)

“Oh, dreadful!” exclaimed Mrs. Henderson, holding up two red hands on either side of her face and wriggling her fingers in disgust.

“They consumed every blessed thing in their path, grass, corn, wheat, oats, the very leaves on the trees,” said Sumter, evidently pleased with the effect he was having on his landlady. “And that weren’t enough for the greedy beggars. Why next they went at the washing on the clothesline; sheets and shirts, pillowcases and trousers – et every last thread of it. They et horse harnesses hanging on corral posts. They et the canvas and paint right off wagons. It was destruction like you never seen. The farmer’s wife was out in her yard, swatting them with a shovel, and slipping around in the pulp of them like she was skating on ice. I stayed at the window wondering if they weren’t going to gnaw her down to the bones too.”

“Mr. Sumter, that’s enough,” said Mrs. Henderson, “we are dining!”

“I feared they’d chew the dirt right out from under the house,” persisted Sumter. “I feared they’d eat a grave so big I’d just drop down in the hole, a house for a coffin. No, let the Almighty spare us that awesome affliction again. A man can’t get ahead in this country. I believe we’re facing ruination again. Pass the potatoes.”

Unlike Sumter and his supper companions, Dunne wished the locusts would come, would accomplish the ruination of the country. When he returned to his room, he lay down on his bed and dreamily contemplated a cloud of destruction, millions upon millions of insects busy devouring everything in sight, busy getting to the bottom of things, revealing what the world was and always would be – a desert. He saw trees stripped bare, nothing left but skeletal branches and bony twigs outlined against a hot, clay-coloured sky. Spread under that sky, mile upon mile of dust clothed in a trembling shroud of insects. He stared at naked men and women, garments chewed from their bodies, starving horses and bawling cattle stumbling about dazed; he gazed at stray dogs coursing the ground, gobbling up the pests, jaws snapping as they gorged themselves, feasting on the locusts until their plague-swollen bellies dragged on the earth.

If that were the sight that greeted him in the morning, Dunne would be happy for it.

A little after midnight, sitting on the edge of his bed with a chair pulled close to serve as a desk, he wrote Mrs. Tarr a letter he hoped would bring her to her senses. It took him until dawn to finish it.

August 12, 1877

My dear Mrs. Tarr,

I write to you from Omaha, Nebraska, to tell you I am in decline. My good health has gone bad, my gums bleed continual and when I brush my hair it comes out in clumps. I went to the dtor and asked him why this might be. He give me a lookover and diagnosed it, said it is a common affliction of them who has had a great shock.

Now Mrs. Tarr I regret to tell you it was you who give me this great shock that led to my collapse. Accidental, I learned you have been keeping company with Wesley Case. I could not believe my eyes at first, but I kept watch on your place and saw it was true. On several occasions I seen him leaving the premises at times which point me to but one conclusion and that is that by trickery, lies, and low behaviour he has seduced you.

I have thought on this matter a good deal and I want you to know certain things. Here they are.

1. I left Fort Benton and did not make it clear I was coming back to you. This must’ve thrown you into deep bewilderment and despair. I know now it was most thoughtless of me to have destroyed your hope of happiness with me.

2. You was forced to mind brats to earn your daily bread, which must’ve been a great blow to you. I see how under such circumstances, a rich man like Wesley Case might’ve seemed to you the only way out since I was not at hand to rescue you from your pitiable circumstances.

I hold Wesley Case to blame. I will put you my reasons.

1. He broke the rules, which is to say he did not do as I done, which is not to pester you while you observed mourning for Mr. Tarr. Case barged in on you when you was faint and weak of spirit because you thought I did not care.

2. He took advantage of your penniless condition by luring you with his fortune. I call that a despicable, nasty way for a man to operate.

3. Like all rich fellows, he thinks whatever he wishes for is his by right. The feelings of an honest fellow like me mean nothing to him. No matter I watched over you and would’ve laid down my life to keep you safe from Gobbler Johnson, as you saw evidence every waking hour of the day, which is a thing a man like him would never have done. I know his kind, Mrs. Tarr, they have used me all my life and tossed me aside with a laugh when they had sucked all they could from me. Beware, he will do the same to you. Men like him are deceivers not to be trusted.

I believe I have now proved him to be a villain, but there is more, and it is worse. Even before he played fast and loose with you, I knew him for a man of bad character. This goes back many years. I have proof of what I say but I won’t put it down in black and white in a letter because him being around you so frequent the letter might fall into his hands. If I wrote down the things I know, he would sue me in a court of law, which is what a wealthy man always does because he knows the law looks on him favourable and scorns the ordinary man. He would hire himself some slick lawyer who makes a habit of proving that 2+2 makes 5, or that the sun comes up in the west. No matter the truth and right of a thing, men like Wesley Case always win in the end because they sit on bags of gold and buy the decisions they want with their filthy cash.

But if you want the truth and nothing but the truth about Wesley Case I will come to you direct and speak it to your face. All I will say here is that concerning him there was a
MIGHTY SCANDAL THAT NEVER COME TO LIGHT BECAUSE STRINGS WAS PULLED
. When you learn what he done you will see him for one of the most despicable beasts that ever walked the earth and you will be
REVOLTED
.

You can reach me at Mrs. Henderson’s Boarding House, the Market, Omaha, Nebraska, by telegram, and I will come in a flash to reveal to you everything about that wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the terrible deed he done that will raise the hair up on your head when you hear it. Then the veil will fall from your eyes and you will recognize you have only one true and constant admirer – Michael Dunne.

Yours truly,

Michael Dunne

Ada Tarr likes to think of the past few months as the summer of “Ada’s wager.” Her father had always scorned Pascal’s wager as ignoble theology, but she substitutes the word
love
for God. If she puts her faith in love, lives as if it exists, isn’t everything the better for it? And if it is real and she offers herself up to it, doesn’t she have everything to gain? Though betting on love and refusing Wesley’s offer of marriage seems to her at times a contradiction, she does not give in. She wants to draw out this summer of reckless happiness, give herself over to testing its strength, to seeing if it endures or snaps. She doesn’t underestimate what is at stake. For one thing, she knows her job is at risk. Talk about the schoolmarm and Wesley Case is making the rounds, she is sure of it. There is a change in the townspeople; she sees arched eyebrows, a hard, critical glint in the eyes of the respectable, even store clerks turn aloof and superior when serving her. But until some fool man can be found to take her place and work for starvation wages, the Jezebel in their midst will have to be tolerated. The prospect of losing her pupils tears at her heart, but it also drives her to do the best she can for them while they are still under her tutelage.

Since she began teaching, she has been badgering the school board to supply books for her young scholars, but all the misers do is put her off. All summer, she has been copying out passages from books in her own library, compiling readers that can be printed on the press of the
Fort Benton Record
in inexpensive newsprint pamphlets. But her hope of presenting her students with their own “books” on the first day of school was dashed when she asked the school board for the little bit of money to pay to have them run off. Mr. Hooper, the chairman, had given her a disdainful smile and said insinuatingly, “I don’t think that such a good idea, Missus. Aside from the expense, I’m not sure we’d approve of what you’d put into a youngster’s book.”

Slapped in the face for her efforts. All the work she had done. Some of it very close to an entire reworking of texts, rendering Grimm’s fairy tales and Aesop’s
Fables
in language even more bare and direct so they could be read and grasped by the smallest or most backward child, the hours spent compiling anthologies for the older children, searching out poems and editing selections of prose before copying them out in her finest copperplate for the printer, composing questions and commentaries to guide the children’s reading and understanding – she was not going to meekly let all that thought and care go for naught.

So Ada turned to Wesley. Until that moment, she had asked nothing from him. Once, in a moment of thoughtless levity, she had made a joke about living like the impoverished heroine of a novel, under threat of summary eviction by a wicked stepdaughter. Wesley had immediately urged her to get in touch with Celeste’s new husband; he would give her the money to buy the house from him. It had been nearly impossible to make him understand why she could not accept his handsome offer. Stubbornly, he had kept repeating, “What kind of man do you think I am? How many times must I repeat it? There is no
quid pro quo
attached.” To say such a thing only demonstrated his naïveté.

But asking him to finance the pamphlets was another matter. That was for the children’s good, not her own. Besides, he’d had a hand in the work from the very beginning. Ada had enlisted him to help her choose material for what she called the “big boys,” the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who sprawled at the back of class. Surely he could make suggestions of what would appeal to them, excite their enthusiasm. Night after night, the two of them had sat in the parlour, books stacked at their feet, flipping through pages and madly scribbling, Wesley sometimes reading aloud passages so she could pass judgment on their usefulness and suitability. In these moments, she felt him to be her
spiritual husband
, flattering herself that they were just like George Eliot and Mr. Lewes, scandalizing society by living together without benefit of clergy but united in a perfect sympathy, working to achieve high aims.

Wesley had acceded to even her strangest requests. When she had asked him to translate some of La Rochefoucauld’s
Maxims
for her students, he had jibbed a little, protested he was no scholar and joked about what would be made of any of that by shopkeepers’ and farmers’ sons? When she had answered that this was her homage to her father’s memory, that he had taught her French from this little book, and that her attachment to it was very strong, Wesley had said, “Well then, I’ll pay a visit to your girlhood,” and gone directly to work. She had seen he wanted to
know her better
and she had had to turn aside to hide her tears from him.

She recalls Wesley on a feverishly hot summer night a month ago, sitting in a pool of lamplight, thumbing through an old French/English dictionary as he sat at the table half-naked, his shirt draped over the back of his chair. Wesley’s face, his neck, his hands turned brown by the sun, the rest of his torso white as sized canvas, looking like an unfinished portrait. Over his shoulder he had commented, “Here is something that will have your big boys scratching their heads. It has me scratching mine. ‘A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others,’ ” he said teasingly. “Explain that to me, if you can.” And she had simply smiled and said, “I can’t, but you illustrate it every day.” And Wesley had grinned back at her, then lowered his head and returned to translating.