On August 4, 1889, Barton Heydale spent his lunch hour with a prostitute named Roslyn who lived and worked in a two-room apartment in Wolfe’s Hotel on Railroad Avenue. The apartment was above a lunchroom, where Barton often stopped for something to eat after his visits with Roslyn. But on this day, he was consumed with the trouble of making a decision, and so he chose to forgo his meal in favor of sitting in Roslyn’s tiny kitchen and smoking cigarettes.
The thing he was trying to decide: where, and when, to kill himself.
Barton had not set upon his path to suicide lightly. He’d assembled his justifications, which read as such: he was lonesome; he was generally disliked; and he was ugly. None of these conditions, he felt, had any hope of improving. They would only worsen as the months and years passed.
Barton was twenty-nine years old and the manager of the only bank in Spokane Falls. This position should have garnered him respect and power. It instead earned him nothing but ire from the local citizenry, who, it turned out, had little trust for institutions, financial or otherwise. As a result, Barton had not married, or even made a single friend, in his six years in Spokane Falls. The strain of this lonesomeness had taken a toll on him physically. He’d grown portly and unfit. He wheezed when he walked too quickly. And to top it off, he’d just the afternoon prior received a terrible haircut.
Strangely, though his hair would grow back, it was this final offense that convinced him he was beyond salvage. He could not continue to exist in his current form. So, today would be his last. His last breakfast, his last time washing his face, blowing his nose, tying his shoes. And here with Roslyn, his last fuck. The fucking had been the same quality as always; no great send-off. This observation depressed him even more.
After each cigarette he finished, he pitched the butt out the kitchen window and watched it spiral to the alley below, the last bits of ash and smoke forming a satisfying tail. Then he rolled and lit a new one. If Roslyn’s apartment were on a higher floor, he reasoned, he would jump from the window. But Wolfe’s was only two stories tall. In the other room, Roslyn snored, asleep in her bed. She was a drunk. The later in the day he called on her, the more likely he was to find her asleep or sick. On this particular day, she was already stewed by the time Barton arrived at noon, and barely able to finish performing her services before nodding off.
Even if Barton could not jump out of the window, he did think he’d like to jump from something. That seemed a good way. Dramatic and quick. He would do it someplace where everyone in town could see. Then they’d all feel bad for how they’d treated him. They’d be so sorry, they’d reexamine their whole lives and ways of being. Maybe some of them—those who’d known him most immediately—would kill themselves as well, unable to cope with their role in his death. It cheered him slightly to imagine. He would jump from the bridge into the river. That was his choice. He’d made his decision and that felt good too.
He kept an eye on his watch, and when it said five minutes to one, he stood up from the chair, ran a hand through his terrible hair to straighten it, left his money for Roslyn on the kitchen table, and headed back to work. He was very strict with his employees about taking only an hour for lunch, no more. He adhered to the same rule himself. So if he was not going to kill himself right then and there, he felt he must return to his desk, even though it was a Sunday and no one else would be at the bank to see if he came back on time—or at all, for that matter. Barton worked seven days a week. He had never been absent or late. And today, just because it was his last day, would be no exception.
When the end of his workday did come, Barton locked the bank and walked with courage and purpose to the Post Street Bridge as planned. When he got there, his pace slowed. He stopped in the middle and assessed the situation. He had wanted witnesses, a horrified and grieving public. But weren’t there perhaps a few too many witnesses? The shores were taken over by families seeking solace from the late afternoon heat in the shade of pines, their feet in the water, children splashing nearby. Should children see such a thing? Barton had his ethics to consider. Also, the river was low. The summer’s temperature had been unrelenting, and now, in August, only a foot or two of water passed below the bridge. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t swim and was counting on drowning in the mighty Spokane.
He backed away from the edge. He would have to do something else. He assured himself he would not dillydally. He would take his life in the privacy of his own house that very night. A public spectacle was not his style after all. Let the people of Spokane Falls learn of his demise later, through whispers and rumor, a haunting of sideways information. Did he really . . . ? they’d ask whenever they passed the bank. And the answer would be Yes, he did.
He’d hang himself in his parlor as soon as he got home. There was an oak crossbeam above his doorway that would be perfect for the purpose.
Barton lived just north of downtown. His house was on a hill and from his front windows he could see Spokane Falls spread out before him. First, there was the river and the sawmill. Then there was the rail yard for the Northern Pacific. Then Railroad Avenue, with its cramped tenements to the east, city hall to the west, and Roslyn and the lunchroom in the middle. His bank, the post office, and a crush of bars and hotels of varying repute lined the blocks beyond that.
Up on his hill, Barton’s house stayed cool. He left his windows open in the evenings, and he generally found this to be his happiest time of day. Indeed, he felt his mood lift upon entering the house. He decided he would eat something. No need to kill himself on an empty stomach. But after that, he’d do it.
So, he enjoyed a large dinner and pretended, as he ate, to be a man in a fine, if not enviable, state. He accomplished this trick of the mind by taking stock of all the people he knew who were not having a nice meal in their nice homes on nice hills. There was the barber who had mutilated Barton’s already receding hairline. In retrospect, Barton was certain he had looked more than a little syphilitic. This man was likely studying his own complexion in a mirror at this very moment, overtaken by the horror of his disease, and by the poor choices that had landed him in such a state. Then there were Jim and Del Dweller, Barton’s rude and ungrateful employees at the bank—twin brothers who lived together in a stuffy house by the river and who were so cheap they probably only ever ate boiled potatoes. And lastly, there was Barton’s father, that hateful man who Barton felt certain was miserable in a variety of ways, though he could not imagine any specifically. Barton ate and thought of these people and their unpleasant situations. It bolstered him so thoroughly, he thought he might not want to end his life that night after all. But once this notion entered his mind, he chided himself for it. Coward, he thought, are you the sort who can’t follow through on a plan?
He was just finishing his meal when the bells began to sound. They were alarm bells from downtown. They startled him from the depths of his own mind. He went outside. It was still light out, so bright in comparison to Barton’s dining room that he had to squint, and at first he could not see anything wrong at all.
“What is it?” Barton shouted to his neighbor, who was standing on his own porch with his wife and daughter.
“A fire,” the man shouted back, pointing.
Now he could see. In the sharp light of the northern evening, a red-orange pocket emerged in the distance. The fire was so new, or so hot, or so something else—Barton did not know what—that it had not yet begun to produce smoke. Later, the smoke would come, and ash, which would rain down on the town. But at first, it was just the flames.
The fire was across the river and past the rail yard, in the heart of downtown. Barton looked. He allowed the fire to draw his eyes. In its brightness, he received a wonderful sight: a sparkling vision of brilliance and possibility. Barton was not a religious man, but he felt he was being gifted something from beyond himself.
Here now was a valid excuse to wait another day.