The Whipping Boy (9 page)

And he did like the boarding house. He liked walking home from work with Jake, past the hydrangea bushes onto the scroll-sawed porch. He liked the fading flowered wallpaper in Jake's sitting room, now temporarily his room, and the towel, pitcher, and soap dish on a stand where he could wash up before dinner, and the smells of food coming up through the floor. And the free private hot bath, allowed twice a week in the big lion-claw bathtub on the first floor—far superior to the “washdowns” at the orphanage, where all the boys at once were ordered outside to have cold well water poured over their heads. The boarding house had its own orderliness: the meals with Mrs. Peltier, lounging in the parlor at night, where Messrs. Haskell, Albert, Taylor, Ferris, and sometimes Jaycox played dominoes for matchsticks. The more elderly Mr. Potts, who was too easily addled, often just watched. Comfortable in their game, they'd glance at Tom with amiable neutrality and invite him to play. They accepted him easily and wanted nothing from him. Sometimes they dismissed him, saying things like “Go away, you young buck. I know what's on a young buck's mind.” It was usually Mr. Jacob Haskell who said something like this, and Tom gloried in it. Haskell was a little older than Jake, short of stature, and, despite his joking with Tom, generally a shy man. Although they had no real conversations, Tom had a feeling of friendship with him.

There was some ongoing strife among the boarders. Mr. Potts's brainless cheerfulness got to them all at times. Haskell was the only one among them who had been a Yankee soldier, and Potts was always blithely tormenting him about it. Mrs. Peltier had her moods, too, and she was unbending about her rules. When you crossed her, that was it. Tom was frankly afraid of the landlady, but that wasn't much to complain about given the atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance in her house.

And he liked the nearby presence of the nameless woman upstairs. He liked that very much. But she was the big worry, too. Mrs. Peltier told Jake that she couldn't have a woman flouncing around her house without the proper clothes on, it didn't matter how injured she was. A lady kept herself covered neck to ankles, and she most certainly did not present herself to a crowd of men in a loose night robe.

Jake said that he couldn't throw the woman into the street while she was still recovering.

That was not her concern, Mrs. Peltier declared.

Several days of unpleasant standoff followed, and the landlady made it plain that she was waiting for him to do as she said. She became colder each day, and her dinners became smaller, hitting all the bachelors where they lived. Her normally munificent table shrank fast, with fewer vegetables, smaller portions of meat, and no desserts. Jake muttered at one of these poor dinners that they'd soon be fighting for food like common boarders. It had happened before, he later told Tom: when one of the men indulged in the bottle or started bringing women to a room, the food quickly went downhill. “Damn good way to get everybody on her bandwagon,” he muttered.

***

One evening the landlady also stopped making a plate for the woman. They could see about that themselves with food from the table, she informed them. Jake asked Tom to get a plate together and take it to her.

When Tom went up, she was still confused and tired, possibly more from the aftereffects of the “brain stimulant” than from her injury, and she didn't look as if she was ready to eat. A day later, she was better. She sat up in bed and began to nibble at her things while he stood watching her. She eventually said, “What are you looking at?”

“The plate—I'll wait for it.”

“That old ice wagon hates me.” She made a face at a chicken wing.

He didn't reply.

“She thinks I'm a whore.” She looked up and said in a different tone, “My memory's back.”

“It is?”

“Coming back, anyway.” She put down the chicken wing and looked at him appraisingly. “It's the queerest thing. Have you ever lost your memory?”

“Yes ma'am. Before I was four years old.”

She looked incredulous. “No one remembers what happened when they were babies.”

“Well, I remember everything else,” he said hesitantly.

“Who are you?”

“Tom Freshour,” he said, looking at the floor.

“Well, I know that,” she said impatiently. “I mean who are you? Mr. Jaycox isn't your father?”

“No ma'am. Until two weeks ago, I lived in the Armstrong Academy.”

“What's that?”

“It's a home for boys.”

“An orphanage?”

“Yes ma'am. A school and orphanage.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“I don't know. That's the part I can't remember.”

“An orphan . . .” she repeated softly, looking down the bedspread. “At least it's not your fault.”

“I beg your pardon, ma'am?”

She still looked down. “So you work with Jake at the hardware store?”

“Yes ma'am.” He couldn't believe how easily she was talking to him. He couldn't believe the color of her eyes.

“Have you met many of the people down there?”

“Where?”

“Where you work! The hardware store.”

He blushed. “Oh, yes. Most of them.”

“What kind of man is Mr. Dekker?”

Tom was surprised at the question. “There are two of them, father and son. I don't know them really. I'm just a runner and stockroom worker.”

“What's the father like?”

“I don't really know, ma'am.”

She looked at him curiously. “How old are you, Tom?”

Tom had neither a birthday nor a precise age. Such things were considered frivolity at the academy, although he'd read and heard enough about birthdays to be embarrassed that he couldn't answer her. “I guess I have to go back downstairs now,” he said, and retreated from the room.

Lying on the couch that night, Tom tossed and turned again, thinking about her, trying to anticipate other questions she might ask him. But now that she was recovering, would she soon be leaving?

***

The next evening Jake stayed very late at the store, and Tom got together the plate and carried it up the stairs, started to knock, and, seeing her through the partly open door, hesitated outside. She was not in bed but sitting at a table, a lamp before her, writing on a piece of paper, Mrs. Peltier's dressing gown loose on her shoulders. Tom couldn't get over the sight of her.

When he knocked, she looked up and quickly turned over the piece of paper. He came in and set the plate down on the table. She looked at him and smiled. Her eye was no longer bloodshot, and the only thing that seemed to remain of her injury was the disappearing bruise on her temple.

“Sorry about yesterday,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I wasn't very thoughtful when I asked about your age. I'm still curious, though. Are you about eighteen?”

“About sixteen,” he said.

“Mmm,” she said, looking at him with a little smile. “You're a big boy for sixteen.”

He smiled back numbly. “Yes ma'am.”

“Samantha King,” she said, the lamp glowing yellow in her face.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My name is Samantha King. Call me Sam, if you'd like. You didn't ask me yesterday.”

“Samantha King,” he repeated hesitantly.

She stood up and walked confidently to the window. “Is Take here?”

“He had to stay late at the store.”

“Is he going into the territory again soon?”

“I think so, ma'am.”

“Would you ask him to come talk with me when he comes back?”

It was two hours later before Jake arrived. A cool wind from the northeast was sweeping Texas Avenue when Tom met him on the porch and told him about her apparent full recovery. Jake looked dazed, and at first Tom assumed that it was because of his news. When Tom told him her name, Jake just stared and said vaguely, “We're hitting the road again. I guess we'll have to do something with her, or Mrs. P'll starve her out.” Without another word he went into the house and up the stairs to talk with Miss King, and came back down to tell Tom that she'd be riding the train with them, perhaps as far as Guthrie.

Tom was happy to hear that.

“Says she's okay. Says she left her suitcase in Tuskahoma and wants to collect it.”

Jake had been worrying about one thing or another for the entire brief time that Tom had known him, and tonight he seemed even more deeply preoccupied. From little things he'd said, Tom understood now that it had mostly to do with the store.

The next day, while Jake went to Dekker's for final instructions for the trip, he sent Tom to buy the tickets, theirs to Durant, on the St. Louis and San Francisco, and hers to Guthrie on the same train.

J
AKE HAD BEEN
unresponsive to the news about Miss King's improvement because he'd just had a brief but extraordinary talk with Ralph Dekker, after which he'd wandered the streets alone for an hour in a state of mild shock. That evening, word had come to him from Edgar Wyatt, the elevator man. “Old man wanta see you after six. By his window.” By his window was where Mr. Dekker had been for two weeks, his silent presence somehow like a judgment above the beehive of activity presided over by his son. Nervous jokes had been passing around that maybe the old man had finally sprung a leak.

Jake had climbed the narrow stairs to find Mr. Dekker sitting in the gloom, looking out his window at the oncoming night. His voice gravelly and thin, he continued to gaze over the darkening land. “I've thought about it a good while now, and decided that what he's doing is wrong. I'm going to stop it if I can. He's got the bank boys with him, so it won't be easy. I'll have to travel to St. Louis and do a little money finagling. I have to tell you, Jake, I've found out some other particulars, and Ernest plays a more dangerous game than I thought. If he stays, it'll be over my dead body. Right now, I'm asking you just to stay with the program. Don't do anything different than he asks. Just act like you're following his orders.”

He'd turned and looked at Jake then, his eye and expression not quite visible in the somber light. “I already talked to Dandy about this, just to make sure he's with us. I was going to talk to Marvin, but made up my mind against it. I'm picking friends careful now. The rest of them can go to hell for all I care. Jake, I want you to start thinking about running the store. You're my man. Start thinking about the way you'll do it. Even if we get out of this mess, God knows we'll have problems.”

Running the store was beyond any ambition Jake had ever had. He had daydreamed now and again about what he'd do if he was boss—who he'd like to see fired, and the like—but never to the point of losing any sleep over it. It was truly outside the range of his expectations. Why wouldn't Mr. Dekker himself take the store back in hand? Or if he was fixed on giving it over, why not to a younger man like Dandy? Why turn it over to an old horse like him?

But Mr. Dekker made it clear when he was finished talking that he would appreciate not answering a lot of questions, so Jake asked none at all. He just took a deep breath and said, “All right, I'll think about it,” and walked back down the murky aisle to the narrow stairs, feeling a chill on his spine as he went down. Mr. Dekker had come to a decision, and the implications to Jake were almost too big to take in. At the moment it overshadowed the news about Miss King.

The next day, Tuesday, at the store Jake was as nervous as a fiddler. Mostly it was due to this new thing on his mind, but the atmosphere of the place gave him the willies. People were acting suspicious, glancing at each other funny ways, and Peters, the only other salesman who hadn't yet caught a train, was jabbering and bragging so much that Jake finally told him to save some of his breath for breathing. Ernest knew how to bring out the worst in a man.

They were to leave for the territory on Wednesday morning. Miss King asked if she could go with Tom on a quick visit to a clothing store before their train, and Jake reckoned she could. He'd meet them at the station.

Stopping at Dekker to get his final instructions, Jake was surprised when the treasurer, McMurphy, told him to concentrate on the far western part of Choctaw country, in the Fringe. The trade was relatively poor over there. While Jake was talking to McMurphy, Ernest opened his office door, saw him, and quickly closed it again. Jake was glad to be shut of this place for a while, no matter if he was going on a collection trip. He saw no sign of Ralph's buggy in the yard and wondered if he had already left for St. Louis.

Jake walked down the hill to the depot, which had been half washed away. The entire frame part of the structure had been flattened by the swirling flood, leaving the brick walls. A gigantic gar, over nine feet long, was hanging from the big limb of a nearby tree, from a block and tackle. The monster fish had somehow been trapped inside the brick baggage room. The old ticket seller and baggage man were in high spirits. Having their workplace demolished made them happier than Jake had seen them in years.

To his exasperation, Miss King and Tom Freshour hadn't shown up by the time of the first call, but at last a rig clattered down the hill with about a minute to spare. She alighted, wearing a brown wool skirt with jacket, tailored white shirtwaist, and tan hat with feather. Alongside her was a well-dressed, tallish young man, dark of complexion, wearing a full ready-to-wear suit about the color of her skirt, including collar and string tie and a new pair of polish-leather shoes—all of which he sported with a sheepish look and a peculiar sideways twist to his body, shy about the new duds. He gave Jake a furtive glance, as if pleading with him not to make any comments.

Jake couldn't resist. “Who the heck is this?”

“May I introduce you to Mr. Thomas Freshour,” Miss King announced.

Jake wondered how she'd paid for all of it, but didn't ask.