Captains and The Kings (14 page)

like life dealed him a dirty hand, too. Know anything about that?" "A little," said Joseph. "Bad as your own, eh?" "Perhaps." "But he don't look sour like you, boyo, and maybe there's something in that for me, too. Would you say he was soft?" "Perhaps. He supported an old grandmother on two dollars a week, working in a stable." "And you never supported anybody, and you a grown man seventeen, eighteen?" Joseph said nothing. "Heard that men seventeen and eighteen, married, and with kids, opening up the West," said Mr. Healey. "Covered wagons and all. Wilderness. They got guts. Think you got guts, Joseph Francis Xavier?" Joseph said, "I'll do anything." Mr. Healey nodded. "That's the password, boyo. That's the password of the men who survive. If you'd said anything else I'd not have bothered with you any longer. Think you'd like to join up with me?" "Depends on the pay, Mr. Healey." Mr. Healey nodded again with great approval. "That's what I like to hear. If you'd said that it depends on anything else I wouldn't waste my time on you. Money: that's the ticket. Looks like your Turk is waking up. What you say his name is, his monicker? Haroun Zieff? Heathen name. From now on he's-let me see. Harry Zeff. That's what we'll call him. Sounds more American. German. Lots of Germans in Pennsylvania. Good stuff in them. Know how to work, they do, and how to turn a profit, and never heard them whining, either. If there's anything I hate it's a whiner. What's your Turk trying to say to you?" The men in the coach were awakening, too, groaning, cursing, grunting, complaining. A long line of them formed for the latrine at the end of the coach, as they fingered their buttons impatiently. They exuded the old stink of sweat, tobacco smoke and stale perfume and wool. Some of them, pressed more than others, frankly exposed themselves in readiness and roared for loiterers to hurry. The prudishness which lived darkly in the nature of Joseph was affronted at this brutish display, and he turned reluctantly to Haroun who had begun to whimper with pain though his eyes still remained shut. The men jostled in the aisle, swaying with the sway of the slowing train, and some of them obsequiously nodded and grinned at Mr. Healey and some looked with indifference at the two youths opposite him as if they were no more than a pair of trussed chickens. Their immediate interest was their needs, and their importunities became increasingly obscene. The raw sunlight showed their swollen and gross and rapacious faces, and when they spoke or laughed the light glinted from large white teeth which resembled, to Joseph, the teeth of predatory beasts. "Hang it out the window!" bawled Mr. Healey in his genial fashion. This evoked fawning laughter and admiring comments on his wit. Mr. Healey spoke in a just perceptible brogue, and his mixture of Southern and Irish usage apparently charmed those who hoped to make a profit from or with him in Titusville. "You got a dirty mouth on you, Ed," said one man leaning over to slap Mr. Healey on his thick shoulder. "See you tomorrow?" "With cash," said Mr. Healey. "Don't do business 'cept it's cash." He looked at Joseph with a contented and important expression but Joseph was distastefully examining Haroun. Haroun's dark face was deeply flushed and very hot. His forehead gleamed with sweat and tendrils of his black hair clung to it as if stuck by syrup. His tremulous mouth moved and he spoke but Joseph could not understand his imploring words, and now his whole body moved restlessly with pain and distress, and sometimes he groaned. His toes had purpled and extruded through the kerchiefs which swathed them. Mr. Healey looked at him with interest, leaning forward. "Now Joseph Francis Xavier What," he said, "what do you propose we do with this boyeen-who's no concern of ours, eh? No friend of yours. Never saw him before, myself. Leave him on the train for the conductor to dispose of like rubbage?" Joseph felt a rush of the deep cold fury he always felt when anyone intruded upon him. He looked at Haroun and hated the boy for his present predicament. Then he said with anger, "I have a ten-dollar goldpiece. I'll give it to the trainman to help him. That's all I can do." He had a sick sensation of helplessness and wild impatience. "You got ten-dollar goldpieces? My, that's surprising," said Mr. Healey. "Thought you was a beggar, myself. So, you'll give a piece to the trainman, and you'll get off this here ole train and forget your little Turk ever lived. Know what I heard once from a Chinaman working on the railroad? If you save a man's life you got to take care of him the rest of your life. That's for tinkering with the fates, or something. Well, the trainman takes that nice yeller piece of yours, and what's he supposed to do then? Take the little Turk home with him in Titusville and dump him into his wife's bed? Know what I think? The trainman will take your money and just let the spalpeen die here, right in this coach, peaceful or not. It don't run back to Wheatfield for six whole days. Nobody's going to look in this coach until Saturday." Despairing, Joseph shook Haroun, but it was evident that the boy was unconscious. He kept up a steady moaning and muttering in delirium.
He lay flaccid against Joseph's greatcoat except when he struggled in his suffering. Joseph cried, "I don't know what to do!" "But you are real mad that you have to do anything, is that it? Don't blame you. I feel the same about people don't belong to me. We're coming into Titusville. Get that box of yours from under the seat. We'll just leave the Turk here. No use even to use that goldpiece. Lad looks like he's done for, anyways." But Joseph did not move. He looked up at Mr. Healey and his young face was gaunt and drawn and very white, and the dark freckles stood out on his nose and cheeks. His eyes were blue and enraged fire. "I don't know anyone in Titusville," he said. "Maybe you know somebody vvho'd take him in and care for him until he's better. I can give them the money." "Son," said Mr. Healey, standing up, "you don't know Titusville. It's like a jungle, it is that. I seen many a man, young as this and you, dying on the streets from cholera or ague or something, and nobody cared. Black gold fever: That's what's got this town. And when men are after gold, the divil take the hindmost, specially the sick and the weak. Everybody's too busy filling his pockets and robbing his neighbor. There ain't an inn or hotel in Titusville that ain't crowded to the doors, and no newfangled hospital, if that's what you're thinking about. You take people who are living peaceful in town or country, and they'll help a stranger-sometimes -out of Christian charity, but you take a madhouse like Titusville, a stranger is just a dog unless he's got two good hands and a good back to work with, or a stake. Now, if your Turk was a girl I'd know just the place who'd take him in. Own four or five, myself," and Mr. Healey chuckled. He pulled up his pantaloons and chuckled again. The train was moving very slowly now and the men in the coach were gathering up their bags and talking and laughing with the exuberance only the thought of money can induce. The coach was hurtfully glaring with sunlight but the wind that invaded the coach was very cool. Joseph closed his eyes and bit his lip so hard that it turned white. Ila- roun's restless hands were moving over him, as hot as coals. "Well, Joe, here we are, depot riding right in. Coming?" Joseph said, "I can't leave him. I'll find a way." He hated and detested himself. It would take very little, he thought, just to lift his box and walk from this coach and never look back. What was Haroun Zieff to him? But though he actually reached for his box his hand fell from it, and despair swept him like the intensity of physical illness. He thought of Scan and Regina. What if they were abandoned like this, in the event that he, Joseph, was no longer able to protect them? Would any Mr. Healey or even a Joseph Armagh come to their aid and save them?
"I'll find a way," said Joseph to the standing man near him. He saw only the big belly in its silk brocaded waistcoat and the jeweled trinkets of the gold watch chain which sparkled in the sunlight, and he smelled the odor of the man, fat and rich and sleek. "Now," said Mr. Healey. "That's what I like to hear a man say: Til find a way.' None of that, 'For the love of dear Jaysus, sir, help me, 'cause I'm too damned lazy and stupid and no-account to do it meself. I appeal to your Christian chanty, sir.' Any man says that to me," said Mr. Healey with real pent emotion, "I say to him, 'Get off your ass and help yourself as I did and millions afore you, damn you.' Wouldn't trust a psalm-singer or a beggar with a two-cent piece, no sir. They'd eat you alive, come they had the chance." The train had halted at a dismal makeshift depot and the men were running from it with shouts to acquaintances and friends they had seen from the windows. Mr. Healey waited. But Joseph had not been listening closely. He saw that Haroun had begun to shiver and that his child's face had suddenly turned gray. He tugged off his old greatcoat and clumsily wrapped Haroun in it. A trainman was coming down the aisle with a basket, in which he was depositing the empty bottles on the floor. Joseph called to him. "Hey, there, I need a hand with my sick friend! I've got to find a place for him to stay. Know of any?" The trainman stood up straight and scowled. Mr. Healey uttered an astonished grunt. "What the hell's the matter with you, Joe?" he demanded. "Ain't I here? Too proud to ask, eh, and me your old friend, Ed Healey!" The trainman recognized Mr. Healey, and came forward, bowing his head and tugging at his cap. He looked at the two boys. "Friends of yours, sir?" he asked in a groveling whine. He looked more closely, and was astonished at the sight of the two ragged youths, one of whom was obviously almost moribund. "Bet your life they are, Jim," said Mr. Healey. "My carryall out there with my shiftless Bill?" "Sure is, Mr. Healey, I'll run get him and he can help you with-with your friends," he added in a weak voice. "Give you a hand too. Glad to do it, sir. Anythin' for Mr. Healey, anythin'!" He looked again at Joseph and Haroun and blinked incredulously. "Capital," said Mr. Healey, and shook hands with the trainman and the dazed Joseph saw the gleam of silver before it disappeared. The trainman ran like a boy off the train, shouting to someone and calling. "Nothing like good silver, as ever}' Judas knows," said Mr. Healey, chuckling. He picked up his tall silk hat and set it like a shimmering chimney over his enormous rosy face.
"Whatever you do," said Joseph, rinding his voice and using it with hard and sullen pride, "I'll pay you for it." "That you will, boyo, that you will," said Mr. Healey. "Eh, here's my Bill." He said to Joseph, "I ain't a man for sweet talk, but I'll tell you this, Irish: A man who don't desert his friend is the man for me. Can trust him. Would trust him with my life." Joseph looked at him with the calm and enigmatic expression he had had to cultivate for many years and behind which he lived as if in ambush. Mr. Healey, seeing this, narrowed his little dark eyes and hummed under his breath, thoughtfully. He thought that there were a few men still in the world who were hard to fool, and Joseph was one of them. Mr. Healey was not vexed. He was amused. Never trust a simpleton, was one of his mottoes. He can ruin you, the simpleton, more devastatingly with his virtue than any thief with his thieving. The air was chill and bright outside the train, and the new rough depot platform milled with excited men carrying their wicker luggage and portmanteaus. Carryalls, surreys, carts, wagons, buggies, and a handsome carriage or two, horses and mules, awaited them, and a number of buxom women dressed gaudily and wrapped in beautiful shawls, their bonnets gay with flowers and ribbons and silk and velvet, their skirts elaborately hooped and embroidered. Everything dinned with ebullience and loud fast voices. If there was any thought of the fratricidal war gathering force in the country there was no sign of it here, no sober voice, no fearful word. A golden dust shimmered everywhere in the sunlight, adding a carnival aura to the scene. It was as if the insensate length of the train, itself, was quivering with excitement also, for it snorted, steam shrilly screamed, bells rang wildly. Everyone was in constant motion; there were no leisurely groups or easy attitudes. The scent of dust, smoke, warmed wood, hot iron, and coal was pervaded by an acrid odor Joseph had never encountered before, but which he was to learn was the odor of raw black oil. Just perceptible to the ear was a dull and steady pounding of machinery at a distance. Titusville, set among circling hills and valleys the color and gleaming texture of emerald velvet, was hardly a frontier town, though the normal and settled population was just in excess of one thousand, more or less. It was about forty miles from Lake Erie, and had been prosperous even before oil, being noted for its lumber production and its sawmills and its busy flatboats carrying wood down Oil Creek for distant parts. The farmers were prosperous also, for the land was rich and fertile, and life, to the people of the pretty village, had always been good and never arduous. They were of industrious Scots-Irish stock, with a few Germans equally sound and sober. But the newcomers from nearby states, and the oil frenzy, gave it the air of an exploding frontier town of the West, in spite of noble old mansions scattered at intervals throughout the town behind great oaks and elms and smooth lawns, and proud old families who pretended not to notice the raw newcomers and their frantic ways and their bawling voices. They also pretended to be immune to the new commerce on Oil Creek. They affected to be unaware of a recently unemployed trainman known jocularly as "Colonel" Edwin L. Drake, who had drilled the first artesian well in Titusville two years before. (They had heard, however, that he was keeping the Standard Oil Company at bay, and John D. Rockefeller, reputedly a nobody and a vulgarian and gross entrepreneur who thought of nothing but profit and exploitation, and recklessly destroyed beautiful countrysides in his delirious and insatiable search for wealth.) No one spoke of the new ten saloons and eight brothels in the town, two "op'ry houses," four inns, and one fairly new hotel. If these seemed unduly busy no one seemed to notice. These were for "outsiders," and did not exist for ladies and gentlemen who had vowed to keep Titusville Pure and Untrammeled, safe for Christian Families. There were six churches, filled at the two services every Sunday, and for Wednesday "meetings," and the many socials. The village, even with its new banks founded by "outsiders," was only the periphery of the churches, which dominated social life and its affairs. The cleavage between the "old residents" and the "outsiders" was apparently impassable, and both apparently ignored the other, to the "outsiders" knowing winks and bawdy hilarity. "Ain't nothing funnier than a big-mouth Christian," Mr. Healey would often remark. "And more murderous and greedy, neither. Just quote the Bible at them and you can get away with anything you got a mind to." Mr. Healey, during business sessions with the natives of Titusville, always quoted the Bible, though nobody could ever discover the text he had quoted so sonorously and with such evident reverence. He rarely, however, quoted the Bible to business associates, who were busy with the same deceit as himself. It sometimes annoyed Mr. Healey that after he had wasted time quoting the Bible at some apparently docile and gentlemanly native of Titusville and had invented sections which had won his own admiration for their eloquence and wisdom, the natives had gone out to gather up options in the countryside for themselves, "and their mouths looking just like they'd just drunk milk and eaten fresh bread," he would recall bitterly. "It just makes you remember," he would add, "that not every man who chews a straw is a greenhorn, and there's many a woman you think is a lady who can outsmart you and leave your pockets empty." Mr. Healey's "Bill" was a William Strickland from the stark hills of Ap- palachia, a Kentuckian. Joseph had never seen a man so tall and so exessively thin and lank.