E.L. Doctorow (14 page)

“It scares her?”

“Why she’s been cryin’ ever since. He has her out there somewhere right now moonin’ like a sick calf over her, poor thing she don’t know what to do.”

“Well if he’s taken a fancy for her,” I said, “there are worse things.”

“Blue,” said Adah, “there are fancies and fancies. She’s just a child, she don’t understand that kind of business, he got no sense treating her like that.”

“When Zar finds out he’ll kill ’em both,” Mae said.

“Well Zar don’t own the girl. Any of you could take a beau if you really wanted,” I said.

“Maybe we could, maybe we couldn’t,” Jessie said. “But he bought her. Paid her Pa a hundred dollars.”

“That Chink weren’t even her Pa,” Mae said to Jessie. “He said he was but he didn’t look as he could sire a flea.”

“You won’t let on will you Blue?”

“I’m dumb ladies.”

“Poor child,” said Adah, “there’s no telling what’ll happen. What is it possesses that boy I don’t hope to guess.”

I downed the drink and there were these three glum faces around me—weary Miss Adah with her fine mustache, long-jawed Jessie, plump Mae, her cheeks going to fat … What Zar would do worried them, but I think they were more frightened by Bert himself. They were uneasy at such a feeling in someone, it was beyond them. For me it was a revelation that such a thing was happening here. It was like someone had come along to put up a flag. I made up my mind if Zar raised a ruckus like the ladies feared I would do what I could for the boy. I wanted to nurture something like that, keep it going.

The more I thought about Bert the better I liked him. You like to see desperation still in its pimples. I went to Isaac’s tent and the Swede was there, and I told them about Bert. They had a good laugh. When I went back to the cabin Molly was sitting outside. We’d been having some afternoons of sweet rain, some evenings of slow-dying skies, and she’d taken to sitting on a stool in front of the cabin door and she’d watch the night come on. I sat down near her and I could just feel the smile when I told her there was a true lover come to town.

Then there was silence between us and I see no reason now not to put down what happened: I found myself aware of Molly in a way that was pleasure and pain at the same time. I felt her closeness. I kept thinking I was older than she was and you see it was a too familiar thought to have, I had no right to it. I was not Bert Albany, I wasn’t free to respect my feelings, and so nothing was said as the darkness came down. And when she went inside I sat still and waited until she would be asleep before I followed.

But that following Saturday was the night it first
appeared all our fortunes were changing. There was a big crowd of miners and they were feeling the season, their carryings-on was not just a bit of fun, it was liken to a shivaree. They brought mouth organs with them, one fellow came up with a banjo, there was a lot of dancing with the drinking and since the women were scarce among so many, the miners danced with each other, stomping out squares so as to make the ground shake. And insisting in all that noise was talk of a new stamping mill going up not far to the east. The Chinagirl had no worries about Zar that night. Bert kept her in sight of his bar all the time but the Russian wouldn’t have noticed if he had carried her around on his shoulders: Zar was blinded happy with the rumors, rushing around from one fellow to the next to hear every version. By midnight he’d decided the Company was going to lay a road down the trail from the mines so as to cart the ore to the new mill—

I didn’t trust myself to believe him. But it is true that the town was to be blessed with luck; and some of it was even to rub off on me.

I thought if Zar’s mind was a pony it would win the race. I wanted nothing to do with his happy expectations. But every time something else came up to justify them he would laugh at me, saying: “Wal, frand, am I crazy?” Until I had to go with the signs and tell him one day: “No, by God, Zar, you’re saner than me.”

Now you have to season the talk of a digger with a lot of salt. A digger’s a man who’ll look for pay dirt twenty years of days with just as much fervor and high hope the last day as the first. Why any time you’re near one you can hear his song: “I’m savin’ my money Jack, and as soon as I have me a grubstake, it’s goodbye to the Company. I’m off to Montany and find me that vugg of pure gold! I know where it is, I know the spot Jack, it’s jest a sittin’ and a waitin’ fer me …” And he buys Jack a drink on it; and they both believe it. I didn’t want to put stock in any rumor come down from the camp.

But there was a stamping mill gone up, that was a
fact. Alf told me it too: a town called Number Six and it was maybe fifteen miles dead east. Angus Mcellhenny told me something else: the Company shipped on the toll roads leading west from the camp, so it didn’t pay them to cart anything but high-grade ore. But if they cut a road down to us they could get to the new mill across the flats and pay no toll to anyone. And they could make their low grade pay off as well.

The way Angus spoke the idea made sense. And then one morning, early, a man rode down from the lodes and he had a string of mules trailing him. I’d never seen him before but I knew who he was, I’d heard him cursed too many times not to know him, Archie D. Brogan, the mine boss. He had pale-blue eyes in a face of fat, he was much too beefy for the miner’s garb he wore. He sat around drinking and jittery until Alf Moffet drove in with the stage, and then we knew why Brogan had come: three men in black tailored suits and derby hats stepped out and he nearly fell all over himself giving them a proper welcome. They were small men and they stepped precisely in our dirt, but they were the directors from the East and their engineer; so we cheered as Brogan put them on the mules and took them, bouncing, up the trail to the lodes.

“I shall build a hotel!” Zar cried after them and he even hugged Isaac Maple in his joy.

A few days later the Company men came back down to meet a special coach. And while waiting they fanned themselves with their derbies. “I never seen men with such white hands,” Adah said in a whisper, “why it’s indecent!” They talked to nobody, only asking Zar, at one point, if he carried wine. Zar was anguished because
he didn’t, and when they rode off he shook his fist after them: “I shall build a hotel!” It was a vow this time and somehow it made the prospect surer.

Not long afterwards we had a visit from a man owned a public house along the toll road leading west from the camp, and he looked us over carefully and measured out a lot for himself next to Swede’s wagon; and without my saying a word he put a ten-dollar gold piece in my hand—to hold it—and rode away saying he’d be back.

Well you see all this was a bloom in the heart, a springing of hope, and even when I tried to tell myself it was just like the afternoon sun—so cozying on the face, like a warm hand, that a man could dream of anything and expect it—even when I pressed myself with doubts, the hope squeezed out like a nectar. And as I sat with Molly another evening under the sky, with a new moon making us shadows to each other, I talked so easy I almost didn’t know myself; and she talked with me and it was as if we were two new people sprung from our old pains.

“Molly I swear I feel good times coming. The life here is working up. They’ll have to cut a road to get those Concord freighters through here. And to do that they’ll need lots of people, they’ll have lots of jobs!”

“I hated those three. Stepping around like they was afraid to get their feetsies dirty.”

“We don’t have ever to see ’em again, they just came out here to make up their minds—”

“Money for their flouncy city ladies—”

“Lord, what do we care! We’re going on the map!”

“You really think?”

“I know it. It’s our turn.”

“I am living better now than Avery ever gave me, I’ll say it Blue.”

“Molly I mean to make good for the three of us.”

“You always fancied Flo over me.”

“You were so forbidding—”

“I can’t forget him. I see him in my sleep.”

“If I can be alright in your eyes I’ll be alright in my own.”

“I keep hearing his voice: ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. It’s what he said to me.”

“Well then, if that’s so, I doubt it but if it’s so, if he does come back then we’ll be ready for him. We’ll all be ready.”

She was quiet for a minute. “We’ve both suffered,” she said. And I was holding her hand in my hands. It was enough to start me keeping the books again.

No, maybe I’m not telling it right. When I dipped my pen in the ink it was not just for celebration, it was something that had to be done. Zar and Isaac both came to me to claim frontage on the street once they saw Jonce Early’s ten-dollar gold piece. What other way was there to fix people’s rights? I don’t think I was such a fool as to be blinded by my feelings. We had bunks to sleep on and another room with a door, and they were good nights as we lay in one bunk, hugging like the two poor married creatures we were—she had the shyness of a bride, she was so becoming, I never knew such joy. But wasn’t this time of our conjunction the time of Jimmy’s dismay? And the sight of her smiles at me, like the closed door at night, a greater reason for his hate? She might waver and relent but it only fixed him more. He
stayed out all the day long, I didn’t see him from one meal to the next. He wouldn’t talk to me and when I’d catch sight of him outside as I’d be going about my business he’d slip away fast like he hadn’t heard me call. How good could it have been for two of us when there were three?

The pages are full of dealings, I see the entries, all through the year the street grew up and you can see how right here on the lines. I wrote each person’s name and what he owned. I put down how Molly had all rights to me as wife and Jimmy as son. I wrote out the claims. Jonce Early came back to build a public house where he’d staked out. A smith named Roebuck figured there would be plenty of horses by and by and digging tools to fix, and so he set up his forge. Another man—I can’t read his name, I never did hear him called—rode in with a wagon of coal he would sell in sacks when the winter came. More names with each passing months, I remember I marveled at it; hearing of our prospects, these people were coming to settle, it was common enough sense, but I always had the feeling somebody had certified Hard Times as a place in the world and that’s why it was happening.

Here it shows how my commissions rose on the Express business. Here is the marriage notice of Bert and the little girl—he could write, but all she did was put a mark down. Now that tells a lot, the minute I began to keep the records I was the natural party to every complaint, legal or otherwise. I used to feel I was a horsebreaker and each day one of a remuda I had to cut down to size. For several Saturdays running Miss
Adah, Mae and Jessie kept Bert happy by shunting only the drunkest and least able customers to the Chinese girl—so that all she had to do was lead them to a room, take their money and leave them sleeping there. Bert had a good length of wood near his hand while he tended the bar and he was ready to jump out and use it if he thought his sweetheart was having trouble. The ladies didn’t want that; and they suffered too whenever any of Bert’s digging friends made a joke of him for quitting his job at the lodes. “Like to be around the stuff, Bert?” someone would call out—and the strain just got to be too much for the ladies. They came to me as a delegation and elected me to break the news to Zar. “You can gentle him to it, Blue,” Miss Adah said, “it won’t be as bad as if he finds out for himself.”

So I did one day, while everyone else stayed out of sight. Well first I had to talk Zar out of killing Bert. And then out of firing him—that I did by convincing him Isaac Maple would hire the boy in his place. When I had him calmed down I said: “Look here Zar, what’s some little old Chinagirl matter when in just a few months you’ll have the finest saloon in these parts. A businessman like you can’t bother with such things.”

“Not a saloon, frand. An hotel. Two stories. Glass windows. A mirror. A polished wood bar.”

“Well there you are, that’s big time Zar, and big times are coming.”

“You are right.”

“Sure I’m right—hell you’ll be able to import a dozen Chinese if you want, this town grows up and you’ll have more girls than you can choose.”

“We will be a city!”

“Sure!”

“Alright Blue: you tell the boy I will not kill him.”

“That’s the decent thing, Zar.”

“He loffs her, he can have her.”

“Fine.”

“For three hundred dollars he can have her.”

Zar was a match for me, no question. When I took the news out to Bert and the others I looked at some long faces. But Molly came up with an idea: she said: “If Bert takes the girl, and brings in someone in her stead, maybe the Russian would make a trade.”

So I tried that and I guess Zar didn’t think there was a chance in Hell, he agreed readily. We sat there and it was like talking to some foreign king making a royal marriage for his daughter. If Bert got him another woman he wanted only one hundred dollars—which is what he’d paid for the Chinagirl—and he’d let the young fellow pay him in labor. That was all I could get out of him. He stuck to those terms for the best part of a week. Till finally Bert borrowed our mule and rig and rode off and was gone two days, and Lord! if he didn’t come back with a sad grey-haired woman, full of sags, and deliver her up with a flourish. That was Mrs. Clement and I never found out where Bert got her. You just didn’t look to find such enterprise in a boy like that, and part of it was the way he never told anyone how he did it.