Little Big Man (48 page)

In her true character she was right impudent. She could have put her clothes on now, but she didn’t, just lay back with her hands behind her head and her knees raised in the glare of the kerosene light, and says: “Say, you ain’t got a cigar?”

“Smoke, too, do you?” says I. “My, ain’t you the rough one.” I was needling her for the fun of it. I had to kill some time and didn’t know what else to do. I set down again on the foot of the bed, where there was ample room, for she lay along the length of it but was small and besides had her knees lifted. “I expected,” I says, “to find the K.C. gals more refined and ladylike.”

Well, her green eyes looked as if they started to flash, then suddenly she flung an arm across them and her thin chest commences to quake with sobs. Shortly I felt terrible, and I gathered her up in my arms, setting her on my lap again, and she cried against my shoulder, clutching into me as if it was her last hope upon earth.

“Now, now,” I says, giving her a fatherly kiss into the tangled red curls on the top of her head and patting her bare, bumpy spine, “you tell your troubles to Uncle Jack.”

She snuffles into my neck a bit, and then tells me the following.

“I was born and bred in Salt Lake City to one of the most respectable families there, my Ma being married at fifteen to a famous Mormon leader. You would know the name right off if I was to tell it. Now, outside folks have a funny idea about Mormons on account of the number of wives they take, but I tell you that is the reason why you won’t find a den of iniquity like this in Salt Lake. My Ma was my Pa’s eleventh wife, and you take us girls here at Dolly’s, why, we fight amongst ourselves all the time, but my mothers never did exchange a harsh word with one another. I had fifteen sisters and twenty-one brothers, and we lived in a house that was like a hotel. All we did was work and pray from early in the morning until night.

“Up to the age of fourteen, I guess there wasn’t a purer girl on earth than myself, for I regarded the human body as the holy temple of God and wouldn’t have dared to profane my mind with other than a wholesome thought. I had grown right pretty by then. One
day my mothers sent me over next door to borrow some sugar. Now the people that lived there was another Mormon elder named Woodbine and he had only six wives and ten children, and as it happened all the women and younguns was out working in the fields at this moment, only the elder was to home, a man of fifty with a big black beard.

“ ‘Amelia, isn’t it?’ he says as he lets me in. ‘What a pretty girl you have become. The sugar is I believe in the pantry.’ So he goes along with me there, and says: ‘I believe it is on the high shelf. I’ll lift you up.’ Which he does with his huge hands, and that’s all that happened then, except that when he put me down he was purple in the face and breathing hard though I couldn’t have weighed much.

“But a day or so later, my Pa calls me into his presence and informs me that Elder Woodbine would like to take me as his seventh wife. It wasn’t no good to protest, for my Pa had decided on it and I didn’t dare to cross him, so what I done is run away that very night.

“Well,” she says, sobbing at the thought of it, “there have been many times after when I regretted my foolishness, for in these two year since I have seen little but the worst side of the Gentiles, many of them just as whisker-faced as the Elder Woodbine and as old, and some with bodies furry as a bear; whereas instead of a device of pleasure to any man who comes down the road I would have been an honored Mormon wife.”

It could have happened, I reckon, though it was the typical story you could get out of any whore: they always stemmed from good families, by their account. I don’t say I swallowed the entirety of it. The mention of Salt Lake and Mormons, in themselves, would not have take my especial note, though you may recall my Pa’s aim away back to head for Utah, which is why I fell in with the Cheyenne and had all the subsequent adventures.

But while this here Amelia was setting on my lap, jaybird-naked, I noticed a tiny mole she had in the hollow at the base of her neck. Now the peculiarity of this was that my sister Sue Ann, who was thirteen when I last seen her, had a similar mole in that exact spot. I said before that this little harlot reminded me of somebody. But other than for the blemish, it wasn’t my sister, who was fairer and different of feature.

“Say,” I says to Amelia, “I might have some kin in Salt Lake. The last time I seen them, years ago, they intended to go there and
become Mormons. You might have heard of them if they made it.”

She pulls her head up and looks at me straight. For all that crying, her eyes was utter dry, but she had succeeded in rubbing away much of the powder and rouge on the lapels of my black coat. She was basically as freckled as me, underneath it all; and her hair was quite reddish.

“What did you say was the name?” she asks, with a shrewd squint.

“I never,” I says, “but if you want to know, it was Crabb. It would be my Ma and my sister Sue Ann, who I reckon might now be more than—well, thirty years of age, and then Margaret, a little younger—”

“Sue Ann,” cries Amelia. “That’s my mother’s name!” She laughs and shakes her hair and starts to cry again, clutching me about the neck.

That was when I finally figured out who she resembled: Myself.

“Then you
are
my Uncle Jack!” she says.

“Here now,” says I, “you better get your dress back on.”

CHAPTER
21
My Niece Amelia

I RECKON
of all the things that ever happened, this give me the greatest turn, meeting my niece under them conditions. Suppose I had—My flesh crawled to think of it. Would have had to blow my brains out, I expect, for damn me if I ever been a degenerate.

Now the more I looked at her, the more obvious was the relationship: I never cared for the way my beak turned up as if someone pushed me in the face when I was small and it moldable, but you know, I saw the same type of nose on this girl-niece of mine and it looked right cunning. I had a real kin-feeling for her, I expect, right from the first, which is why I picked her from the lineup and also why she did not attract me in the fleshly way.

That is the positive side of the situation. The negative is that she was a whore. There was no getting away from that fact, and it give me a deal of shame. I didn’t know what to do, so said again: “Get on them clothes.” Kindly though, like an uncle, and I reached her dress down from the hook and turned my back while she put it on.

Then I was suddenly embarrassed by my presence in this type of place. Funny, ain’t it, that I should apologize to her? I says: “Amelia, I just want you to know I come here only as a favor to that other fellow.”

“Mr. Hickok?” she asks. “Yes, he is always hereabout.”

I says: “I am going to take you away from all this. Beginning this very minute, you ain’t a crib-girl no more. Why, in a week you will have forgot all your unfortunate experiences, and in six months you’ll be a fine lady.”

For I did suddenly get this idea, standing right there. All my life I had yearned for a bit of class, and I purposed to achieve it in this
niece of mine. I was going to put her into one of them schools run by a maiden lady. I had my little roll to start on, and then, from what I gathered from the talk of them who hunted buffalo, there was wealth to be made in that profession. Two to three thousand dollars in a single season from September to March, which most of them would bring here to K.C. and spend over the summer on whiskey and women. Not me. I had an aim, the reclamation of Amelia. I had lost two families in violent circumstances; now I had found the beginnings of another in a house of ill fame.

First, though, we had to get out of that house. I expected some trouble about that, and took my gun out of its holster and put it into my waistband like Hickok had advised. But then I thought, little Amelia might get hit if there is gunplay. Better to buy out. Which is something you can do anywhere among white people.

So I went for my roll—and could not find it, though I had just earlier paid her that five dollars. I was sure I had kept it in my vest.

“Amelia,” I says, “did you see where I put my money?”

Now I have been talking here exclusively about my own reactions. That’s because my niece was apparently thrown into a state of shock by the revelation of our kinship. She had got dumbly into her dress and then stood primping her hair with her fingers, and when I briefly indicated my intention to take her out of there, had received it with a vague smile involving only the mouth. But now she gets a keen expression again and says: “I expect it might have fell out and rolled under the bed.”

So I gets down to take a look, and she pushes the door open quick and offers to run through it, but her old uncle proved more dexterous than she figured. I got her ankle and held on.

“I guess,” I says, “it’ll take you a while to straighten out. Now cough up that roll of mine or I’ll have to shake it out of you.”

She takes it from her hair. She had lifted it while telling the story of her Mormon years and clutching me, during which time she was going through my pockets. I wasn’t angry, considering the associations she had had for two years, poor kid.

We went up a back staircase to her room, and it was hardly an improvement on the crib, and she gathered together a few sorry possessions, powder and stuff, and put it into a cardboard suitcase, and I made her get into a more seemly outfit than that whore dress, and with my hand firmly under her arm, I steered her down and out to the front, in the course of which we passed through the hall
again, and now noises come from all the cubicles and the dance floor was crowded with a gathering of men, drunk and disorderly, so that you could see the point in lifting their firearms on the way in, else they’d all killed one another in short order. This was when I seen that big bouncer Harry beating the heads of them three buffalo hunters and pitching them into the street.

Well sir, I pulled Amelia through and into that office near the front door. Dolly was still there though Wild Bill wasn’t. I always remember she was rebraiding the lash of a rawhide riding quirt as we come in. If she swings it at me or Amelia, says I to myself, I’ll put five soft-nosed bullets in her, woman or not.

She looks up, smiles with her mustache, and says: “Enjoy yourself, Short Arm? Whyn’t you go take another, be a sport. Billy won’t be out for a while yet.”

“Looky here, Dolly,” I says, “I’m a-taking this kid along.” I was ashamed to tell of our relationship. I just said: “Don’t try and stop me.”

She tied a knot at the end of that quirt and swung it against her palm. Then says: “Why should I do that? This is Liberty Hall, hoss.” And chuckles hoarsely and in her grand swagger leaves the room and passes through the dancehall crowd towards the rear, them drunks falling away on either side of her as when a big ship comes into the harbor at San Francisco and the smaller craft make way.

I took Amelia to the hotel where I was staying, and the desk clerk started to grin with his bad teeth but I cut him off short by renting her a room next to mine on the second floor, and we went upstairs and I turned down her bed for her, sniffed at the pitcher on the dresser to see if the water was fresh, give her a flannel nightshirt of my own, for she didn’t have no decent sleeping garment, and kissed her goodnight on the forehead.

She had gone through all this right docile, without a word; not, I expect, having yet recovered from the surprise of finding her kin.

I was too excited to sleep much that night. “Amelia Crabb” is what I had wrote down on that hotel register. I didn’t know her Mormon name and did not want to. Nor was I really curious to hear more about her earlier life—not even about her Ma, my sister Sue Ann. I had been too long away from them people of my regular family. It kind of depressed me to think of their life in Salt Lake among the Latter-day Saints, being so foreign to all I knowed. I had
asked Amelia, on the way to the hotel, about my own Ma, her granny, and she said she didn’t recall her, so I reckoned she died somehow. I don’t mean I was without feeling, but all I had was now centered in this young girl, and more as to what she would become than what she was at present. Somebody to take care of. And I was going to do a better job than I had in the past. I hadn’t no Indians to worry about here, nor no U.S. Army. I could handle anybody else, even Wild Bill Hickok if it come to that.

Next day, pretty late, for Amelia had got into the habit in that whorehouse of sleeping through most of the light, we went out and got some clothes and in a dress what buttoned up to the throat and with her face washed clean you’d never have taken that girl for anything but the gentlest-born. She was right pale, but then that made her look all the more respectable, for a lady in them days never let the sun touch her skin.

Then I realized we hadn’t ought to stay at that hotel, which was not buggy or anything, but it was in the rougher part of town, flanked by a couple of saloons, and there was uncouth fellows sitting around the front, spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, and some of them might have knowed Amelia from Dolly’s. So by God if I didn’t go to the swellest place in K.C., with fancy gaslights and plush furniture in the lobby and flunkies in gold-braided outfits, and hire us a combination of connecting bedrooms with a nice parlor between. Must have cost seven-eight dollars a day or more. I don’t recall. I do remember the management was right snooty, but I threw money around like seed and their attitude changed directly.

Amelia herself didn’t do me no harm there, for it is amazing how she took to the new life. I suppose that Mormon upbringing hadn’t been so bad, as a foundation, and then her natural spirit added the rest, along with what she got from ladies’-fashion papers I bought her and the studying she did of the high class of women who resided in the hostelry: Senators’ wives and daughters, and those of Army generals and leaders of commerce. She developed a walk that looked like she was on tiny wheels beneath her long skirts, and when she took a cup of tea her dainty hand was raised like a bird in flight.