Cottonwood (26 page)

Downstairs, more than slightly rattled, I bade the housekeeper good day, and asked her not to mention my visit to the lady of the house. She merely snuffled, and I didn’t know if this was in the way of a response or if her sinuses simply needed clearing. She shook her way to the shadowy recesses of the parlor, and she was completely hidden from me when a terrible shriek came from the upstairs, accompanied by a pounding like that of a cane on an oak floor. She came back into view and headed up the stairs.

“Always so nice when a caller brings a little ray of sunshine into a wintry house,” she said as she brushed past me on her way to answer Marc’s call. I walked out the front door with the unexpected sensation of freedom, for the first time in seventeen years, from the mark of Cain.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, though, I caught sight of a man staring at me like he wanted me dead. He was wearing a fur coat that probably cost six months’ pay for the average citizen of Cottonwood, and a pair of snakeskin boots whose price didn’t bear thinking about either; he was long and rough in the face, with a long, aquiline nose. Tall, if not very robust, he looked as though he were having trouble staying upright in the northerly breeze, and after baring his teeth at me he hurried away.

Shortly thereafter, at the door of my erstwhile saloon, a trio of early morning alcoholics awaited Gleason’s arrival. My first impulse was to wait elsewhere, lest I be mistaken for one of their number, but curiosity trumped pride, and I approached the door with a friendly wave.

“What time’s he open up?” I asked.

The three of them held a silent consultation amongst themselves, and finally one of them answered. “Eleven, I believe, sir,” he said. He was young, but his face showed signs of a long dedication to booze: sallow complexion, bulbous red nose, and gin blossoms speckling his cheekbones.

“Is that right?” We stood there for half a minute in nervous silence before I spoke again. “You know, I used to run this very saloon, a few years back, and there were always a few waiting for me to open every morning, just the way you are.”

Again they seemed to consult one another, as though wordlessly electing their next spokesman. The same one spoke again. “That so?”

“In fact I built this saloon. The one that stood here before it, too.”

There was no response to this at first, but one of them cocked his head to the side, as if trying to place me. They were all three young, less than thirty, though this wasn’t plain on first seeing them. The one who thought he knew me spoke up after a minute’s cogitation.

“You Clyde’s old man?” he asked. He spoke with a pronounced lisp, having only half a dozen or so teeth in his jaws.

“That’s me,” I said.

“I used to play with him when we was little. Went to school with him, too, up to the sixth grade.”

I knew the face, but it was that of a child grown into middle-age without ever having passed through its youth, and I couldn’t quite say who among Clyde’s coevals he used to be. “What’s your name, son?” I asked.

“Lester Pelletier,” he answered, and then his face merged comfortably with one in my mind from long ago, that of a small boy of limited intelligence but infinitely good humor who followed Clyde around at school and once or twice came out to the farm, unaccompanied by parents. Too dull-witted to have truly been friends with Clyde, they’d associated with each other by default, since there weren’t many other boys their age. Though he’d had a shorter distance to fall than many another rummy it still pained me to recognize him in such a degraded state, and I asked after his parents, of whom I had no memory at all, just for something to say.

“Pa’s dead, he fell off a horse drunk and cracked his head clean open on a rock, just like a goddamn melon. That was back in ’83, and then Ma said good riddance to him”—here the other two snickered—“and married Mr. Garfield from the mill.”

I remembered Garfield, a dour fat pink-faced fellow whose energies had been mainly devoted to the Methodist Building Association. “He’s a good man,” I said, though I’d never had any use for Garfield, who’d been opposed to my building the saloon in the first place.

“He kicked me out of the house; Pa wasn’t even dead six months. I was seventeen.”

“What’d he do that for?”

“Got some drink in me and passed out in the parlor. Busted a porcelain jug his mama brought over on a boat from England.”

The others laughed again, and Lester offered up a dim-witted smile, a puerile mixture of shame and pride. Then he lifted his arm in excitement and pointed across the street. I looked up to see my second ghost of the morning, for it seemed to me that the man sauntering toward us with an enigmatic half smile on his face was my own father, restored to life after nearly forty years under the earth.

“Father,” Clyde said, extending his hand politely, only slightly more obviously pleased or surprised to see me than he would have been at the age of seven or eight.

I took the hand, feeling a bit dazed, and clapped him on the back. “Clyde, boy.”

He unlocked the door to the saloon and let us in, and I followed the young souses inside. Clyde busied himself setting up the drinks for his former playmate and the latter’s companions and, once he’d done that, set up a second round in anticipation of its demand. Only then did he turn his attention to me.

“You know I’m married,” he said.

“That’s what Gleason told me.”

“She’s Mickelwhite’s daughter Eva, you remember her.”

I didn’t particularly, but I nodded as if I did. Mickelwhite had worked a plot not far from ours, and he hadn’t bothered to hide his contempt for me when I moved to town and let others do my farming for me. “When’d you tie the knot, anyway?”

“Fall of last year. We have a baby on the way,” he added contentedly but without undue enthusiasm. “You can come see us if you like. I’m guessing you’re here for the Benders, that right?”

“Partly. How’s your Ma?” I asked.

“She’s all right. She and Gordon opened ’em up a dress shop.”

“That’s her husband?”

“Gordon Canterwell. Came to town a year or so after you left. Used to own a shoe store, but Ma was earning our living making dresses, and he thought they could do that together.”

“You have a sister now?”

“That’s right. Fourteen years old, name of Maria.”

I asked him his address and left, though not without young Lester and his friends pestering me for a round. I wasn’t drinking myself, but I slapped a half dollar onto the bar and told Clyde to keep the change.

The early morning cloud cover had dissipated, transforming the morning into one of those very cold, very bright ones when the sun seems to have lost its will to warm the earth. I was headed east on Main, my hands jammed deep in my coat pockets and my mind elsewhere, when I nearly collided with a lady exiting Rector’s Department Store. I apologized to the lady before I’d seen her face, and when she turned it to me to say it was all right we both stopped breathing for a moment, and both began backing away from each other until we were at a safer distance.

The woman facing me down was Maggie Leval. Strands of white ran through the hair piled atop her head, her bust and hips were fuller and rounder than I remembered, and the sharpness of her facial features had grown softer, outlined now with a fine latticework of wrinkles and underlaid with a little fat. She was even more beautiful than when I’d seen her last, and I stammered when I finally thought to speak, out of a mix of outrage and adolescent terror.

“Good day, Madame,” I said.

By this time she had fully regained her sangfroid, and was able to regard me with the insouciance of a lady of quality forced by circumstance and the rules of civility to address a moderately repulsive stranger. “Good day, Sir.”

Out of the store behind her came the tall stranger who’d scowled at me earlier, and at the sight of me his face reddened and his fists clenched. Those hands looked as though they’d been broken a time or two, and as he advanced Maggie held him back with an upraised kid glove.

Choosing not to prolong my agony, I turned on my heel and headed west, conscious of the stiffness of my gait and trying to keep it dignified and graceful on account of my sense that she was watching me go. When I finally allowed myself a backward glance she was gone, and so was the giant.

Still flustered, I took a walk north up Lincoln Street toward the cemetery, with the intention of seeking Juno’s grave, or that first section where we’d buried Alf Cletus and Paul Lowry and the rest. Trees had been planted throughout, and though they were now in the skeletal habit of winter, they’d plainly thrived there. At the top of the rise was a grouping of cottonwoods taller than the rest, and that was where I found that group of mortuary pioneers.

The first grave I identified was Alf’s. It now bore a small, plain stone marker, inscribed simply A. CLETUS, 1873. The handful of other graves that had been there in that year had similarly been marked with simple headstones, with the sole exception of Minnie Lansdown, who now lay beneath a granite monument worthy of a senator’s wife. Only her name and dates of birth and death were inscribed thereupon, with no indicator of her relation to the memorialist; the customary “Beloved Wife” wouldn’t, in this case, have been appropriate.

A few feet away was Juno’s grave, with a mummified nosegay wedged into the juncture of stone and brittle yellow grass. To the west of it was that of the drummer A. J. Harticourt, and flanking them were two stones marked KNOWN BUT TO GOD, presumably the only two bodies from the orchard cemetery not to have been claimed and buried elsewhere. I wondered how it was that Harticourt, whose identity was known, hadn’t been shipped back to wherever his people were, but then I remembered my sole encounter with him in life and surmised that no one had thought highly enough of him to pay the cost of shipping his moldering carcass.

I was at first puzzled by Tiny Rector’s absence from this particular quarter of the necropolis, but I quickly caught sight of another grandiose marker in the near distance, separated from the rest of the dead by a small wrought-iron fence. No other resident of the cemetery had dared move in next to it, and my first impression of it was that it looked a bit lonely. At the top of the stone was a large cross, below which the stone was inscribed RECTOR in suitably bold capitals. Beneath that, in turn, was a space polished smooth for the inscription:

I wondered what had taken him off; Lillian had been coy about the circumstances of his demise, and it was easy enough to imagine that his love for sporting girls had hastened his end. Gleason or Clyde could enlighten me, I was sure, and while they were at it they might be able to explain to me the circumstances of Marc Leval’s return to town, and his wife’s to him. I’d have preferred to hear it from Maggie herself, and perhaps I would someday; more likely I’d never get the chance to speak civilly to her.

Any refusal on her part to deal with me was entirely my own doing. Toward the end of her time in Greeley she was writing me at my studio in Golden, Colorado, thrice weekly, letters which I burned, unopened. Toward the end of that time the envelopes began arriving with the words “urgent!” and “please read!” scrawled across their backs. These I consigned to the interior of the stove just as quickly as the others, reasoning that if she sought to reconcile, she had but to sell the house and join me in Golden; but after two weeks, then three, and then a month went by with no letter I was seized with a sudden panic. Without my ever opening one of them they’d had their desired effect upon me.

One September morning, then, I canceled the day’s sittings and set off for Greeley by rail, a journey I hadn’t thought I’d ever make again. The trip took most of a day; the little houses stood in rows, whitewashed all and gleaming in the late afternoon sun like jewels, and the trees had grown in to a degree that some of them actually offered shade. It was remarkably verdant, the vegetation in general was lush, and the general impression was of the best-ordered little town imaginable. Seeing the place and how pretty it was made it easy to forget how unhappy I’d been there, how unpleasant life could get for any resident who wasn’t a follower of its utopian aims, even if he was married to one who was.

Walking up the street to my former studio I passed the Hendricks, a couple Maggie and I had known slightly, and I doffed my hat and bid them good afternoon. Mr. Hendrick did not reciprocate; he looked at me as though I had ruined the digestion of his supper, and Mrs. Hendrick affected not to see me at all.

“The devil take you, then, you thick-witted bastard,” I said with a charming smile and a bow, and I put the hat back on.