Neighbors, of course, and then tourists, having got wind of the suicide, pointed out The Inn as the place where ‘it’ had happened, and as customers drank in the saloon they gazed across at the whirling windmill and wondered at the courage of the handsome little woman who darted out to remove clothes from the line, touching this and that garment, who stooped to water flowers. Some longed to see her and the boy closer, to discover if in their faces there might yet remain some trace of the tragedy. She was now running the place as an eating house, but thanks to the stories she had but few customers: the room where one was eating might be just below where ‘it’ had happened, might point up the deaths and disappointments in their own lives.
But then many who had actually known Johnny moved away, for livings in and around Beech were marginal and desperate. As automobiles broke down less often, the man who had turned his barn into a roadside garage closed up and went away, weeds crowded in around the red gas pump. The chicken farm failed. The man who sold strange rocks and petrified wood had never made a go of it. There were new bartenders. The Inn itself was painted red now and renamed the Red Mill. Drummers passing through Beech were too tired to heed the old stigma or arrived too late at night to have been told about it — and anyway the only other choice was a dirty room above a store. The war, too, was distracting, and left people to cope with the curiously unsettling fact that men they’d known, had drunk with or quarreled with or loved or cheated — that such men had died in France, in trenches. How could it be, they thought, watching the sun sink down over the mountains in the west — how could it be that someone they knew could be dead in France?
Then for a time the saloons were closed, and Rose Gordon bought from one of them a two-thousand-dollar player piano for ten dollars! Then the saloons opened again — cautiously — run this time by bootleggers who raced Hudson automobiles down from Canada. Which was the faster, the Hudson or the Cadillac? Well, I’ll tell you, the other day Paul McLaughlin, that attorney in Herndon in a Cadillac and Jerry Disnard the bootlegger in a Hudson, they got to going up the new highway, and McLaughlin started to pass Disnard …
So with the war and the bootleggers and their night driving down from Canada, the old suicide at the Red Mill drifted off into the misty land of myth and wonder. Some got it wrong and told that Johnny had shot himself. Some said he had taken a poison available to doctors. Some said he had simply disappeared, deserted his wife and child, and in any event the little woman who remained behind was a fine person with a lot of guts to stay there and turn the place into a kind of roadhouse. Folks from Herndon, the tony crowd, war-rich, would roar down the highway in Mercers and Stutzes and stop at the bootleggers’ places and then have chicken at the place called the Red Mill. Did something with the batter on the chicken, and let me tell you!
Of course, you could have the steak if you wanted, and there were stacks of hot biscuits to melt in your mouth and wilted lettuce salad. She made the coffee fresh when you came so it wasn’t sitting around in those big urns like at other places, and then afterwards if you wanted to dance, there was a player piano, all the old ones, ‘Just Like a Gypsy’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ and the rest of the war tunes but who wants to think about that. ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘By the Light of the Stars.’
The boy? Her boy? Waits tables, but she comes in and asks if all is to your liking, and everything always is.
No, but the boy.
How should I know? Almost through or half through high school, I guess. Oh, it’s sort of that he looks at you. But doesn’t see you, or doesn’t want to see you. No, a lot of those bright kids are that way. Too much studying. I don’t know. A doctor. Of course it costs a lot. Who in hell said it didn’t? Why do you suppose she works so hard? No, you ought to drive out there sometime and if I was you, I’d make reservations. And I’d order the chicken, if I was you. And she might play the piano for you. That’s what she did, once, played for a living, they say.
It was Peter who fattened the fryers, who mixed a sour-smelling mash of bran and skimmed milk the dryland farmers brought in, and when the fryers were fat, it was he who killed them because Rose couldn’t, couldn’t even watch, wouldn’t watch. When killing time came she went inside and shut the doors and windows and sang and if necessary stopped her ears against the ungodly squawking as Peter quietly cornered first this and then that chicken in the corner of the pen. They knew what was coming, and Rose knew what was coming, so she stopped her ears or sang.
He wrung their heads off as kinder and surer and cleaner than using axe and block. He took a bird suddenly by the neck, twisted his wrist just so; the body twirled around twice and fell headless to the ground where it hopped and flopped and contracted and the discarded head beside it gazed with bright astonished eye at its own jerking body; only when the body faltered and lay quiet did the lid come down over the eye, and all was over, all was over. Never did Peter spatter blood on his clean shirt; he looked on this immaculate proficiency as a preparation for the future. Scalded, plucked and singed, the chickens could now be looked on by Rose as produce, and she could fry them.
All was now prepared for the Burbank outfit; a Burbank had telephoned the saloon and the bartender had come to say the Burbanks expected chicken for supper and beds for twelve; Rose moved out of her room and fixed a cot in the kitchen; Peter moved into the shed with his father’s books. All was prepared, even a pencil nicely sharpened and laid beside the register. ‘My,’ Rose said, ‘if the Burbanks will just come every year, and then the other ranches. My!’
Peter seldom smiled at anyone but his mother.
You could see the spirits of the young fellows perk up as they approached Beech; down there the country was a little more settled and the sharp eye could see the roofs of barns and houses on the pint-sized ranches down there; several automobiles plowed slowly through the herd that parted and flowed around the craggy-looking machines like water past a rock; the young cowhands showed off a little for the drivers and passengers in the cars, spurred their saddle horses on the off side so they shied and pranced like real wild stuff. Phil grinned. Damn young fools! But he felt a real affection for them; they might not be of the quality of cowhands of years before, of the quality of men like Bronco Henry, but they were the best there was, these days, and in a way George was right as rain: you had to ride with the times, to accept the automobiles and the signs the drugstores tacked up on fenceposts and plastered against the sides of abandoned barns and sheds; Phil guessed they’d never again have Mrs Lewis pack a lunch big enough to last them for supper in Beech now that woman had started up her place. Fact was, Phil could do with a good chicken dinner himself! Fact was, his stomach was doing a powerful might of growling!
And like as not they’d run into some old-timers at the bar who remembered the country as it used to be, and they could chew the fat and have a shot or two. Phil enjoyed setting up drinks for friends, and he liked how when the Burbank outfit drove in, the town was theirs. The riffraff pretty well kept their distance, stayed away from the bar, the Mexican section hands who couldn’t even talk United States, the ignorant dryland farmers and sheepherders from north of town.
If there was anything Phil hated, it was drunkenness; it offended his keen instinct for order and decorum. Now, you take a drunk: he’ll get hold of you and chew your ear off with drivel. He’ll pretend he’s something he’s not, too big for his britches. And you can insult them or do any God damned thing to put them in their place and they’ll keep right on spouting. Phil remembered a time some years before when he’d been standing there at the bar enjoying the atmosphere and this barfly waltzed in and began to make himself objectionable. Now, Phil didn’t mind people taking a drink or two — he took a drink or two himself sometimes. But Jesus H. Christ!
You take when you’ve been trailing cattle twenty-five miles down the road and you’ve got your face all fixed for a drink and some loudmouthed scissorbill of a barfly; by rights, the barkeep ought to throw them out, but if they don’t, what are you going to do?
Phil had the fellow sized up right off, had from the beginning, soon’s the fellow’d come to Beech — oh, when was it? There’d been complaints about the fellow before; just happened Phil had never run up against him. Well, once was enough!
Used to be a drunk of a sheepherder come in — come in with his bitch of a dog and Phil hated animals in the house where humans are. This bitch’d lie sniffing at the sheep-herder’s feet, gazing up at him, watching his loose mouth. That bozo would talk your ear off about that dog, how smart she was, how fast, how quick, how trusting, how loyal, and by God how loving.
‘That little dog,’ the sheepherder said, hanging onto the bar to keep from falling over, ‘that little dog is just like my wife.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ Phil had said dryly. But the sheepherder didn’t get it. Just went driveling on. By and by somebody led him out and there was peace and quiet in the joint, and Phil sighed.
You can’t win every time and Phil had got caught with this duffer who for God’s sakes talked to the company at large about flowers, and to Phil in particular. There was poor Phil there, stuck. Silly duffer in town Phil wouldn’t have trusted as far as you could throw a cat by the tail. And then when Phil had tried to make it as plain as the nose on his kisser that his company wasn’t desired. So then — well, what the hell.
‘I wouldn’t a done that,’ George told Phil.
‘Sure you wouldn’t,’ Phil said cheerfully. ‘You didn’t have to listen to him.’
Old George was a great one for feeling sorry for people. Phil wondered right now how much it had to do with feeling sorry for people that made George make arrangements to eat and sleep at that woman’s place. For that half-baked barfly had suicided some years back. Loco.
Phil now rode over beside George. ‘Well, Fatso, there it is ahead of you — the metropolis of Beech.’
George nodded. ‘There it is all right.’
‘Looks pretty quiet in town. Guess they’re all under cover.
Ought to get the bunch in easy.’
‘Seems like.’
Phil frowned. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you, Fatso?’
‘Not a thing, Phil.’
‘Seems to me, it hurts you to take two words and hitch them up.’
‘I was never much of a one for talk, Phil.’
‘You’re no Edison talking machine, that’s a gut.’ Phil rode off at an angle through the herd, and then came up beside one of the young fellows. ‘I’m so hungry,’ he remarked, ‘that my big gut’s eating my little gut.’ The young fellow laughed at this, but still Phil didn’t feel good. Twenty-five years, a kind of silver anniversary, and there’d been something sour about the whole drive. Exactly what, he couldn’t tell. Was it age? He was just forty. Had the times got out of hand? Then he laughed. There for a minute, he’d begun to feel sorry for himself!
It was four in the afternoon when the Burbank outfit, tall and proud, rode into Beech; it had seldom been so quiet. The cowhands knew people watched admiring from the windows, and the girls upstairs would be prettying themselves, getting themselves ready. Even the wind seemed quieter. Far across, high on the hill, a few wild horses grazed. Seldom had it been so quiet, yet Phil kept his eyes peeled for any scissorbill wandering out to spook cattle. Nobody did; not a dog barked; the lead steers stood stiff-legged only a moment before the wide gate, heads down, sniffing, then they suddenly bucked on through giving the good swift kick at the gate posts. In fifteen minutes the herd was safe inside, the heavy plank gate closed on them, eighty thousand dollars’ worth of steers.
‘Never seen it quieter,’ Phil said. ‘Eh, Fatso? Never saw ’em go in so easy.’
‘For a fact,’ George said.
‘Well, Chatterbox,’ Phil said, ‘what say we mosey over and rinse the dust off our tongues?’
The young cowhands made happy sounds, and the old cowhand, oldest in the bunkhouse, smiled. Sitting straight, spurs jingling, they rode over to the saloon and tied up at the hitchracks. Inside, Phil grinned. ‘Set ’em up for the outfit,’ he said, and the barkeep did, except for the two who had already gone around the side and up the outside stairway. Phil had winked at them. They wouldn’t be seen for maybe half an hour.
‘Well,’ George said. ‘I’ll mosey over to the telegraph office and see if they know anything about the power.’ The power. It was a cant term, half slang, half esoteric. As engineers used ‘slipstick’ for ‘slide rule’ and realtors ‘pass papers’ when they transfer property, so did ranchers refer to ‘the power’ when they meant the locomotive. Without the power, only the cars already spotted at the chutes could be loaded.
‘They already phoned it’ll be late,’ Phil remarked. ‘Well, don’t get lost in the streets,’ and he watched George walk stiff and straight across the sagebrush space toward the depot. Poor George, Phil thought. He made people uncomfortable and he knew it. The young fellows couldn’t enjoy their drinks, couldn’t whoop it up with George around; they kept their eyes lowered and tried to watch their talk, with George around, and to see the girls they walked around outside and took the back stairs, and the girls never came down later, with George around. Nobody liked to put a nickel in the music box, and any place George graced was a funeral, for sure. Now, he’d go over there to the station and shoot the breeze with the operator and stay out of sight as long as he could. Anyway, it was considerate of him.
That is not to say that Phil himself ever had traffic with whores or told fast stories or jigged around like some men his age; that crap was not for him, not his dish. He was a Burbank, too, and his personal standards were — well. But he was tolerant — life had taught him that — and the men knew it, and he got a kick out of seeing them frolic around, even if they made damned fools of themselves. It embarrassed George.
For instance, as it grew dark (it looked as if the power was going to be even later) Phil went out back behind the saloon to take a quick leak, and there was the youngest of the young fellows sitting on the running board of an automobile, slumped there with his noggin bending low between his knees, already sick. Car must have belonged to some one of his sidekicks come down the highway from Herndon. Phil had to laugh. One of the young fellow’s friends was poking the kid, trying to get him to come alive.
‘Go way, go way,’ the young fellow kept moaning. ‘Oh, Jesus, go way.’
And the friend kept insisting. ‘Come on now. We got to do it. We got to do it now.’
‘Oh, go way, please just go way.’ In the white light from the gas lamp inside the poor young kid’s face was green. The kid’d remember that a long time, being sick, and hearing the bright music from the music box.
Phil finished his leak, sighed with comfort (his teeth had been floating) and he buttoned his levis, and walked over to the kid. ‘Having fun?’
‘Oh, Phil,’ the kid said, looking up with eyes like little boiled beets. ‘Oh, Phil.’
Phil chuckled. ‘You’ll maybe be all right after you eat.’
‘Oh dear Christ, don’t say eat. I’m gonna die.’
‘Die, hell,’ Phil laughed. ‘You got years and years of misery ahead for you.’
When were they going to eat, anyway? They all sure required more than the pickled egg, herring and peanuts handed out in the bar. If the power had been there, they’d be loaded by now, filled with grub and in the hay. But it wouldn’t be the first time they’d loaded by lantern light.
‘Recall one time,’ Phil said seriously inside, and told of loading cattle there in the dead of night in the dead of winter, in the days of Bronco Henry. ‘Fifty below it was,’ he recalled. ‘You got to be careful in that weather. This fool greenhorn working for the Ainsworths got all gowed up on booze and was chasing cattle around the pen and breathing deep through his mouth. Frosted his lungs. Dead the next day.’ He turned. ‘And where in hell you been?’ he now asked George, who had appeared out of nowhere.
‘Telegraph fellow asked me to his place up over the station for a cup of java. Got a real nice little place up there, nice little wife.’
‘What’s the story on the power?’
‘Won’t be in till morning. Stopped over at the eat-joint and said we’d be over pretty quick to eat.’
The woman over there at the eat-joint had pushed three tables together so there was room for the whole bunch. She greeted George and Phil pleasantly enough, so her suicide husband mustn’t have tipped his hand about being taken by the scruff of the neck. Well, hell, what man would dare tell a woman a shameful thing like that? She had got out white napkins for each place, quite an experience, Phil thought, for the cowhands who had about as much use for napkins as for finger bowls. La-di-dah. Worth the price of admission to see what the fellows did with them. The place was kind of roadhousey, and Phil guessed that accounted for the candles she had in old wine bottles.
And the paper flowers, the paper flowers.
Phil would have preferred to have had the whole place to himself, just for the Burbank outfit, but over in one corner was a party of six that gawked at them when they entered. Phil always had hated strangers around gawking and whispering and touching their lips with their napkins as if they were ladies and gentlemen. One of the women was smoking a cigarette, bold as brass and twice as cheap, and my wasn’t she trying to look elegant touching her lips with her napkin, like real quality, and then smoking that cigarette! It was Phil’s opinion that a woman who would smoke in public would do anything. And she was. She was drinking.
Over there, too, were paper flowers on the table, paper flowers in a bottle painted so it wouldn’t look like a milk bottle.
‘Well, where’s the service?’ Phil asked aloud. ‘If we can’t get the power, we ought to get the service, eh, lads.’ The young cowhands, cowed by the prissy roadhousey atmosphere and the napkins looked at Phil, admiring his poise.
Then there came through the swing door the woman’s son with a white napkin over his arm, just so. He wore pressed dark trousers and white starched shirt, and smiled at them there at the table, at the Burbank outfit, and went right on past to the table in the corner. Phil made a harsh chuckle. ‘Hmmmm,’ he said aloud. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’
Well, there’s one thing Phil could tell you: that young kid with a napkin over his arm was a sissy. Phil watched him standing there by the party of six. A little bit too heel-clicky to suit Phil, a little too spruce, funny little arrogance. Must have been the kid’s idea of some Frog waiter, something picked up from some moving picture he’d gone to, or maybe some fool story in a magazine.
Yes, the kid was talking to the party of six and yes, the kid had a little lisp just like every sissy Phil had ever heard, and a way of tasting his own words. Now, some people can get along with them, just as some can get along with Jews and shines, and that’s their business. But Phil couldn’t abide them.
He didn’t know why, but they made him uncomfortable, right down to his guts. Why in hell didn’t they snap out of it and get human?
And oh, didn’t that sissy kid just walk right by them, with that glance of his, and the lips set in a way that made Phil want to smack them!
‘Yeah,’ and Phil leaned back in his chair so the front legs were off the floor. ‘I guess we-all must be black.’
George sat there like the Great Stone Face.
Hmmm! Phil knew how to get the kid’s goat, and he chuckled, thinking of it. Imagine having a kid like that! Oh, Phil knew how to get his goat. Phil was sitting at one end of the improvised festive board, George at the other, just as they sat for breakfast at the back dining room table now that the Old Lady and the Old Gent were leading the social life in Brigham Young’s paradise, as Phil called Salt Lake City.
Now at that table in the town of Beech in the year 1924 at around eight of a fall evening, he reached across the table and picked the paper flowers out of the painted milk bottle; they did look absurd in his cracked, chapped, long-fingered hands. He had cut himself at noon opening a sardine can, and had neither mentioned the fact nor wiped off the blood. So there the flowers were, helpless in that marvelously clever hand.
‘My, oh my,’ he said, ‘but I wonder what young lady made these pretty posies?’ And he leaned to smell them, brought them to his thin, sensitive nose.
It surprised him that the boy didn’t color. The pale face remained pale, and Phil noted only the slight throbbing of a blue vein in the boy’s temple, a vein that emerged suddenly, like a worm. The boy then turned and marched right over.
‘The flowers? I made them, sir. My mother taught me how. She has a way with flowers.’
Phil leaned over and elaborately put the flowers back, and touched them, pretending to arrange them. ‘Oh, do pardon me,’ and he made a broad wink at the company around.
‘Would you care to give your order now, sir?’
Phil leaned back on the hind legs of his chair. His voice was a drawl. ‘I thought we had that settled. I thought we’d made previous arrangements.’
Now George spoke, first harrumphing. ‘It’s the chicken we want, boy.’
The men had decided to ignore the napkins. George did with his what you’re supposed to do. Phil then tucked his own under his chin and leaned forward to enjoy his chicken. He was bound to admit it was good, but maybe because of hunger sauce. The party of six had pulled their freight, hightailed it, and the kid fussed over there clearing up and putting out their candles. Phil felt a lot freer with the party of six gone, and he told an amusing story of Bronco Henry who had got himself plastered there in Beech one time years ago after they’d got the cattle loaded, and he woke up next morning in the barn across the road with a halter around his neck, tied up like a horse to the manger. One of his pals had pulled the trick on him. ‘And let me tell you,’ Phil laughed, ‘he looked pretty sheepish.’
‘Well,’ George said, ‘you fellows go on over, and I’ll settle up here.’
‘Ain’t he brought you the tab yet?’ Phil asked.
‘No, you all go on over to the lights and the music,’ George said, pretty fancy talk for him, ‘and I’ll settle up.’
So they scraped their chairs back and went over. The girls from upstairs had come down and stood at the bar smoking cigarettes and smiling around and cadging drinks and Phil watched the young fellows oblige. He felt strangely remote, even lonely, and sort of wished he wasn’t a Burbank, something like that, something. Those kids’d all have big heads in the morning, loading cattle, and maybe pick up the clap or syph, but they were sure kicking up their heels now, and maybe, who knew, maybe it was worth it. They threw their little bit of money around and loved up the ladies, and then they began to sing.
… hot time in the old town, tonight.
Most of them didn’t know the words, just went la-la-la, but Phil remembered them, and he looked into his empty glass and moved his lips with the true words. How he recalled being a punk kid at the time of the Spanish War, brass bands in those days in every park in every city, fireworks every Fourth; gone, proud, dead days. Wasn’t it on such a day he’d first laid eyes on Bronco Henry?
… hot time in the old town tonight.
Phil went out to take another leak, and looked off toward the east where the moon was about to rise. He sighed and shivered, buttoned his pants and when he was through, he walked around the saloon, all through with them in there, and across the sagebrush space to the hotel — Red Mill, for a fact. Nobody there at the desk, so he just went to work and picked up the pencil and wrote his name and George’s because George had apparently forgot that little nicety.
Upstairs, Phil peeked in first one room and then another, but George wasn’t in any of them, so he went into the last one he looked into, took off his shoes and pants and slid into the hay. He’d have to stay awake until he heard George’s heavy, familiar footsteps on the stairs, and then call him in there.
The moon was up, the room full and bright with moon. It caught the white pitcher and basin, the tall narrow wardrobe, caught the coil of hempen rope underneath the window; Phil turned this way and that way in bed and then on his back he stared up and thought about how they tell you when you’re a punk kid that the moonlight will drive you batty. He got up, tall and thin in his long underwear and walked to the window. The moon was strange on him. Where in hell was George? He suddenly smiled to himself, remembering the Old Lady’s words.
Go find George. Go find your brother. Different as they were, they were both brothers. And one thing at least they had in common — a blood tie.
George was probably with the telegraph fellow. Phil walked in his stocking feet to the opposite window. Hey, Georgie boy …
The windows in the upper part of the station were dark; in the moonlight the arm of the semaphore was raised to signal the power when it came, and the moonlight quarreled with the pale white eye of the lantern on the switch. Beyond, the moonlight lay like water on the stubble that grew on the hill that rose behind the town, and it picked out the gravestones at the bottom, stones like a handful of dice rolled down.
Had he dozed? Had Phil dozed? For George was standing in profile in the room, simply standing, but Phil felt he had caught George at something. Something, for who would stand still in the middle of a room?
‘George?’
‘Mmmm.’
Phil felt George’s weight sag the bed. Then George leaned over and pulled off his boots, grunting at the effort; then George rose, to loose his belt.
‘Where you been?’ Phil whispered. ‘The others bedded down yet?’
Came a long silence. Then George spoke. ‘What you said tonight, Phil, said about her boy, made her cry.’
Her?
Her!
Well, then. So the kid had run to mama, or mama had been eavesdropping at the swinging door. Her! Phil snuffled up an obstruction in his nose and swallowed. However George had been concerned about ‘her,’ Phil was not concerned that George would blame him. Far as Phil knew, George never blamed anybody, a virtue so remote and inhuman it probably accounted for the discomfort people felt in his presence; his silence they took for disapproval and it allowed them no chink to get at him and quarrel with him. His silence left people guilty and they had no chance to dilute their guilt with anger. Inhuman! But Phil felt no guilt. He always called the cards as they fell, played the cards as they were.
If she was behind the swinging door when he’d spoken — well, she shouldn’t have been listening, and if she had, what of it? Wouldn’t hurt her to know what people thought of the kid. Maybe she’d get hep to herself and put a bug in his ear, get him straightened out.
But what had kept George down there so long? Had he stood and talked to her? Had she cried on his shoulder? Had he touched and fondled her? The idea of such a thing made Phil wince. As George climbed into bed, Phil licked his lips. Damned if he could imagine George touching and fondling a woman.
Phil spoke into the moonlight. ‘Hear anything about the power?’
‘Nope,’ George said.
She was crying.
She!