The Floor of Heaven (3 page)

Jim White was soon lying on the floor, blood oozing from his head, dying, and the Dutchman’s face was raw meat. Then Charlie saw a buffalo hunter plunge a knife into Wess’s back, driving the blade in up to the handle and giving it a mean, punishing twist. At once his friend collapsed to his knees. Dodging a flying chair, Charlie hurried over and somehow managed to drag Wess out the saloon door. A deep horseshoe-shaped wound had soaked the back of Wess’s shirt red, but he had not lost consciousness. Charlie got Wess on his horse, and he’d just mounted Whiskey Pete, his cow pony, when the sheriff ran over and indignantly barked that they were under arrest. Without a word, Charlie drew his big silver-plated, pearl-handled Colt .45 and charged Whiskey Pete up the wooden steps right at the lawman. The sheriff turned and ran. So with Wess slumped in the saddle and Charlie letting loose a triumphant cowboy yell, the two men put spurs to their horses and galloped east out of Dodge.

Telling the story to the LX hands, he said his point was “to illustrate what fools cowboys were after long drives up the trail.” “Had a shot been fired that night in the dance hall,” he lectured with an uncustomary earnestness, “the chances are several new mounds would have been added to Boot Hill,” Dodge City’s graveyard.

Sure enough, Charlie’s warning worked. None of his men landed in any real trouble in Caldwell. Instead, to the amusement of the whole outfit, it was Charlie who stumbled; and it was a fall that even an experienced hand like Charlie himself would never have anticipated.

AFTER THE cattle had been chuted onto stock cars and were on the rail to Chicago, Charlie passed a pleasant winter in Caldwell. Throughout the cold months he kept warm with festive nights and accommodating ladies. But in March Charlie received a letter from David Thomas Beals, the Boston-based owner of the sprawling LX Ranch. He was ordered to lead more than one hundred head of cow ponies and a crew of cowboys back down to the panhandle. As fate would have it, the same day the letter arrived he also received an invitation from Miss May Beals, the boss’s niece, to accompany her to church. And it was after the evening service, while they were standing on the church steps, that it happened.

Miss Beals introduced Charlie to her new friend, Mamie Lloyd. Charlie would always insist that he could not remember a word that passed between them. No doubt there must’ve been some conversation about the impression the raucous “Queen City of the Border” had made on Miss Lloyd; along with her parents, she’d only recently moved to Caldwell from their home in sedate Shelbyville, Illinois. Still, all Charlie could remember with any certainty was the impression the fifteen-year-old black-eyed Mamie made on him. Though she was still a ruddy-cheeked teenager, he detected a precocious maturity, an impressive promise of authority and confidence. She charmed him, too. Mamie presented herself with a self-conscious shyness, but even in those few moments on the church steps this well-bred reticence would without warning give way to a magnificently mischievous smile. Their one brief, seemingly inconsequential conversation that March evening had an immediate effect on Charlie: “I was a sure-enough locoed cowboy—up to my ears in love.”

It was a whirlwind courtship. Mamie’s father, H. Clay Lloyd, was, however, a bit of an impediment. The prospect of his only daughter taking up with a freewheeling Texas-born cowpuncher a dozen years her senior did not strike him as a promising match. But Charlie, as he would recall in his typically straightforward way, “wanted her and wanted her badly.” He went to work “with a brave heart and a face lined with brass.” Charlie pointed out to the old Yankee gent that while there was no denying that since his eleventh birthday he had spent a good deal of his days cowboying and living an adventuresome life on the range, he had managed to work his way up to being a top hand. You don’t achieve that position without earning respect, or becoming comfortable with responsibility. With no less diligence, he also convinced Mamie that his love was not simply impetuous but genuine.

Three days after they met, Mamie and Charlie were engaged. Three days after the engagement, they were married. With both Charlie’s mother and Mamie’s parents attending, the wedding dinner was held in the Phillips Hotel in Wellington, Kansas, a town not much bigger than Caldwell but with a decidedly more respectable reputation. And three days after the ceremony, Charlie saddled up to lead an outfit of twenty-five men, one hundred horses, and six wagons back down to the LX ranch in the Texas Panhandle. He left his new “girl-wife,” as he affectionately liked to call young Mamie, behind with her parents.

The abruptness of their separation—not even time for much of a honeymoon—did not sit too well with Charlie. He was torn. He needed a job, especially now that he was a married man. Staying in town, he’d have no way to make a living. Besides, David Beals was the best man he had ever worked for, an honest, broad-gauge cattle man. Mr. Beals was counting on him; it wouldn’t do to let him down. Resigned, Charlie rode off.

He spent a hardworking spring down in the southeastern corner of the panhandle in charge of a roundup crew roping and branding some three thousand cows that had been grazing along the Pease River. When he could, he wrote to Mamie. Her letters were more frequent, but their arrival was always bittersweet, each crisp page lying in his hand as if it were a tangible piece of the unlived life he’d left behind. It was an anxious, unsettled time, and the thought increasingly crossed his mind that the cowboy life had lost its charm.

Late in July, he started back to Caldwell with a new herd bound for the stockyards, and he had never ridden up the trail with such a sense of eagerness or anticipation. His reunion with Mamie that September was pure joy; she was even prettier than she had loomed in his campfire memories.

But no sooner was he reunited with his bride than the order came from Mr. Beals to take the outfit back to the panhandle and get another drove. Charlie didn’t want to go. The pleasures of sharing a feather mattress with Mamie were a lot more appealing than the prospect of bunking down with a herd of foul-smelling big-horned steers. Still, Charlie decided he’d better obey.

Brooding, his mood growing more and more keyed up, he went to town and supervised as the cook and a few hands loaded the wagon up with chuck. When it was done, he gave the order to move out, and men and horses started toward the territory line. It was a tense, largely silent departure.

Yet it was only as the outfit approached Bluff Creek that Charlie fully realized the extent of his displeasure. He couldn’t go west. He couldn’t bring himself to lead his horse across the creek bed and out of Kansas. He felt no need to explain himself to anyone. He simply told Charlie Sprague, a good, responsible hand, that he was turning everything over to him. Then he gave the boys a farewell wave, circled his horse around, and galloped back to Mamie.

CHARLIE DECIDED he’d become a merchant. First morning back, he woke up next to Mamie, and the comfortable warmth of her body curved around his made him realize he’d never return to his itinerant cowpunching life. Yet he knew he still had to earn a living. And then, before he had time even to worry too much about things, a thought popped into his head: Why not open a store? He mulled the possibility for only a few moments and, satisfied, judged that it offered as good a prospect as any job he’d get in town.

After breakfast, as the rash plan took deeper hold, he strung together some wishful logic and shared it with his wife. Rough as Caldwell was, he explained, eager to convince himself as much as Mamie, there was no denying the town was growing rapidly. A storekeeper who didn’t mind a bit of hard work should be able to find himself plenty of customers.

Full of confidence, he rented a vacant room on Main Street and only then began to set about trying to determine what he might sell. He was sitting in the empty space, puffing with a focused, pensive concentration on one of his adored brown cigars, when a flash of inspiration struck.

Other than whiskey and women, what was the one thing you could always count on a cowboy’s having a taste for? The answer was, literally, right on his lips: cigars! What would a night of celebrating in a good-time cow town be without a cigar or two? And it wasn’t, he raced on with a building enthusiasm, just the cattlemen he could count on as customers. The army was a growing presence in Caldwell. Cavalry brigades had originally arrived to patrol the nearby Indian Territory; keeping the peace between the Texas ranchers who were leasing grazing land to fatten their steers before shipping them east and the renegades intent on poaching required a good deal of diligence. Now additional troops were arriving in Caldwell to turn back the wagons loaded down with homesteaders hoping to sneak over the border and stake their claims to farmland in the Oklahoma Territory. Charlie was certain both the soldiers and the “Oklahoma boomers” flocking to town would also have a hankering for a good cigar.

He scraped together a few hundred dollars to get started and, aided by the seemingly unlimited credit obliging bankers made available, ordered a large shipment of cigars from an eastern factory. The cigars sold quickly, so an excited Charlie decided to offer his customers something more special. Just as cattlemen branded their herd, Charlie got the notion that he should display his own brand name, too. He grandly ordered 100,000 cigars with a trademark phrase, THE OKLAHOMA BOOMER, printed on a distinctive wrapper. It was a colossal shipment; on the day of delivery, boxes on top of boxes of cigars were crammed into the small store. For an uneasy moment, even Charlie wondered if his expectations had been extravagant. But his inventive marketing gamble worked. “They sold like hot cakes,” he bragged. In less than a year, Charlie had become, he announced with a self-made man’s unrestrained pride, “the Oklahoma border cigar king.”

Enjoying his newfound success, Charlie, always bold, decided to expand. He rented the adjoining store, cut an archway between the two rooms, and, once again guided by his own whimful appetitites, announced that he was opening an ice cream and oyster parlor.

It was a bit of an undertaking and, in addition, a costly one. The oysters, packed into deep wooden crates cushioned by sawdust and thick blocks of ice, would need to be shipped by railroad from the East. The ice cream could be churned locally, but people would need to be hired to do the time-consuming work. And since electricity had not yet made its way across the plains to Caldwell, the store’s freezers, loaded down with the vats of ice cream and crates of oysters, would require nearly constant hand-cranking. But Charlie was not discouraged by either the complications or the expense. He had been raised in Matagorda County, Texas Gulf Coast country, and fresh, fruit-studded ice cream and briny oysters had been his most coveted childhood treats. He had no doubts that fully grown cowboys and dirt farmers and cavalry men would also have a taste for his boyhood delicacies. And he was right. His Main Street ice cream and oyster parlor was an exotic success. He soon had a staff of five full-time clerks assisting him.

BUT CHARLIE was not complacent. He was always—or so it seemed to a bemused Mamie—thinking. And now, two years after stepping into a new life as a merchant, he’d commissioned a sign that he hoped would further expand his already prospering cigar business. He’d found an oil painter in town and hired him to create an advertisement for his Oklahoma Boomer brand. When the painter asked if he had an image in mind, without too much reflection Charlie answered that a scene depicting the rough-and-tumble cowboy life should get the attention of the boys coming off the trail.

Executed in bright colors on a oval board, the finished painting turned out better than Charlie had anticipated: Rearing back in the saddle of a sturdy gray mare, a cowboy had lassoed the hind hoofs of a longhorned steer. But what caught Charlie’s excited eye was the recognition that the man in the saddle was the spitting image of him in his heyday. It was his long, rather mournful face, his drooping mustache, his gay red sash twisted around his narrow waist, and his high-heeled Texas boots in the stirrups. I might as well as have posed for it, Charlie rejoiced.

Now he had to decide where to hang his sign. At first he considered placing it above the counter inside his store. It certainly would make the dim place a lot more inviting. But he rejected that location after it occurred to him that it would serve no commercial purpose; if people were inside, he already had their business. There was no sense in wasting such a surefire advertisement on them. And that’s how he got to thinking about the Bluff Creek bridge.

The sight of the creek had always stirred him and the boys riding up the trail. It was the gateway to the promised land. What better place to inform a hand coming in from rough country and looking forward to spending his pay that there was a genuine cowboy cigar store in Caldwell?

But once the sign was finally hanging from the top of the bridge, Charlie took one long look and an intense feeling of disappointment set in. He was, he abruptly recognized, no longer the man depicted in the painting. Standing there in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he had become something less. His merchant’s life had grown, as the cowboys liked to say when things turned wrong, scaly. Days that had once been spent with great adventure and the prospect of unforeseen excitement were now uniformly small and dull. He had tried on the settled life, but it had become a tight, uncomfortable fit. Standing on Bluff Creek bridge looking up at the painted sign, he realized the narrowness of his so-called success with a suddenness that was as jarring as it was admonitory. He knew: A storekeeper’s life had left him diminished.

Locked deep into this wistful mood, he returned home. In the morning, it had all suited him fine. But now something had shifted. Life on the range should have taught him the fragility of plans; it had been a mistake to allow himself to take to his merchant’s calling with so much uncritical determination and resolve. He still loved Mamie, and the fact that she was pregnant held the promise of a further blessing; those feelings were real and beyond doubts. But for Mamie’s sake and for his unborn child’s, as much as for his own self-esteem, he needed to move on into a life they all could be proud of. He would need to think of something else, another way to support Mamie and the baby that would not leave him so downhearted or, it hurt him to acknowledge, embarrassed. He had been grazing for too long.