9

WE SAY and we say again that we do not love one child more than another, for to say so would make another child suffer and advertise that our capacity to love is so wanting it can embrace but one. We say it, and we lie, for we love most the child who needs us most or who needs us least, the wastrel or him who keeps his nose to the grindstone. We love most the child who looks like us or has our voice or the mole on the cheek, who has overlooked our failure or has comforted us in our humiliation.

Thomas Sweringen loved Beth above his other children because she was his firstborn; he could almost taste the love that consumed him when he first saw her in Emma's arms, red, wrinkled and squalling. What a miracle! Within days she was the beauty she had remained.

“My,” he would say, and his eyes would twinkle. “My, but you are an ugly little thing.”

“Oh, Papa!”

Oh, Papa.

He remembered the first day she talked, and do you know what the first word she said was? It was “Papa.” He remembered the first day she walked, and it was he who held his hand out to her and smiled as she stumbled towards him. Then she was tagging after him. He was forever slowing his steps.

“Too fast, Papa.”

He believed she had a special understanding of those things that meant much to him, secret places in the mountains where unnamed streams rushed down over the stones, where water beetles walked on the water in quiet places, where freshwater mussels lived that the Indians had used for wampum in days just gone. They knew where the slide-rock was once disturbed by the Indians who buried their dead underneath; they knew sudden openings in the dense timber — some called them parks and some, meadows — where white flowers shimmered before the eye and birds surprised there disappeared like birds who had hoped never to be seen. He and Beth knew where at each season the clouds caught and held the last glow of sunset, where the wind moved over the prairie and chased the tumbleweed before it. He believed that coyotes were not afraid of them and they both knew what gods were delighted with the scolding squirrels.

Only he and she — and she was only a little girl then — had been asked to assist at old Chief Tendoy's funeral, and this is why that was: Only they among the whites could make out in the sagebrush and slide-rock on the side of a certain mountain the imperious face and head of an Indian chief dressed in a warbonnet, the nose haughty and keen, the cheekbones high; there it seemed to float towards the west, protector of that valley and all those in it — those who had seen it. Good medicine for those who had seen it. None of the other children had seen it, nor Emma. Emma thought he was joking.

It was Beth this and Papa that. But Emma was a powerful woman, as events showed. He would have been content with the old log house and the acres as they were, but that was not enough for Emma, God knew exactly why, and of course she was right, a house with a sod roof is no right house for children if you can manage otherwise, and Emma could manage anything. It beat all.

He knew what he did not know. She knew what she knew, and that was that aristocracy is a local affair and that they were aristocrats thanks to George Sweringen's being the first white man in the valley, his discovery of gold, the acres and the extended acres, all those sheep and cattle and Emma's ancestors who had fought in the Revolution. He didn't know who his ancestors were — Pennsylvania Dutch people yes, but not who they were.

He was inarticulate and could not well have expressed his grief when at fourteen Beth was sent off to St. Margaret's down in Boise to be educated as a young lady must be in ways he did not understand. Why must she learn a foreign language? Where would she talk it? There was nothing they could teach her down there about how to walk across a room, or ride like an Indian.

From that school she wrote regularly always to both of them, Dear Mama and Papa, Mama first because Mama was Mama and Beth must know that a letter directed to him alone required him to answer and he had never written a personal letter in all his thirty-nine years. If he did write, he would write, Dear Beth, I wish you were here. Food didn't taste good anymore.

Only Beth almost got herself expelled from that school.

It came about like this: a young woman teacher at that school had been seen by other teachers probably not so pretty talking to a young man in the town right on the street, flirting, they said, so the headmistress fired the young teacher.

He was glad Beth protested. Why wouldn't a young woman talk to an attractive young man on the street? You see, Beth was fair. She led friends of hers up and down the halls of that old school, they all in their nightgowns and wouldn't go to bed and they did what they were not supposed to do after lights were off. They made fudge in their rooms in chafing dishes and talked loud. Some of the young teachers joined them. It looked like the Bishop was going to have to get called in to handle a situation that must not have crossed his mind at his ordination. Emma knew him.

Beth, brave as could be, stood up as ringleader, and she was expelled, but not really.

The headmistress knew a thing or two. She called Emma on the telephone; Emma got into her traveling clothes.

Emma and the headmistress palavered awhile and he imagined that by the time Emma was through the headmistress felt a bit smaller, for Emma would have said, he could almost hear her, “What kind of a school have you here that you can't handle girls of fifteen?” Emma had a way. She knew that everybody has weaknesses and that you can get at people through them.

To him, Emma said, “You can't allow a daughter to break rules, Thomas.”

He went for a walk. He hadn't much patience with many rules.

He looked with dismay on the young dudes who came as surveyors for the railroad, out there for a lark, and he objected to Beth's being a part of a lark, but only in his heart, for the world would have said, These are the young men a beautiful girl marries and goes away with. But maybe back there in the East their families might think Beth no more than the daughter of a woman with a few sheep. And if one thing made him sick, it was thinking anybody could hurt little Beth. She was still Little Beth to him.

Sometimes he wished she were ugly.

The young man had a sandy mustache and an answer to everything. One time when somebody said something about crows, the young man stopped short and said, “What do you want to know about crows?” He was cocky and walked with a springy bounce. You could imagine him laying down the law. But Emma and Beth had accepted him, and the parties around the valley began. It was not much to hope that, from now on, he would see Beth only at Christmastime, the past all forgotten and all those clouds that rose up from behind Gunsight Peak promising one thing or another.

“Beth,” he asked, “do you love this fellow?”

“I—” she looked at him, and then away. “I don't know, Papa.”

“Then you don't. They say you know if you do.”

“Well, he's well-off, and he comes of good people.”

“So do you come of good people, and you don't need his money. If you needed him it'd be different.”

Her eyes were gentle on him. “You know I'll never love another man as I love you.”

“Sure, but that's different, too. It's like your mother and Tom-Dick.”

“Well, I'll never like a man as I like you.”

So she didn't love this fellow. But Emma's will and Emma's influence and Emma's way of being right — why, Emma was like a brushfire. When you checked her in one place, she flared up over there.

But then, by golly, something happened. And a good thing Emma was in Salt Lake.

The original train schedule was possibly drawn up by an Easterner who did not consider such imponderables as cows wandering along the tracks, and blizzards. It called for the train to make the round trip from Salmon over the Divide into Montana and back in a single day. That would have been a sight to see. But in the wintertime it often took twenty-four hours to make it one way, and it was not unpleasant to be stuck all night on the top of the hill waiting for the second locomotive to come with a rotary snowplow, so long as you had your lunch, and enough kerosene in the lamps and coal for the stove down the car. You got to know strangers well, knew their nicknames, exchanged pictures of wives and children, saw them react in a pinch. Many who had shared sandwiches and confidences while the wind howled and leaned against the windows vowed to keep in touch over the years, and they did.

A more practical schedule called for the train to leave Salmon at seven in the morning on even days, lay over the night in Beech, Montana, and leave there at seven in the morning on odd days. The train did not run on Sunday. Because of the perverse nature of the days of the week, this meant one Sunday in Salmon and the next in Beech. Ideally, this called for either two wives or two homes. It was a situation disruptive to domestic life. The engineer was unmarried and assumed to be celibate, for surely a man with his responsibility would make no shabby arrangements. But the rest of the crew — the conductor, the brakeman and the fireman — were normally carnal. Tempering their lust with convention, they married. It followed that on odd Sundays the wives in Salmon and the husbands in Beech imagined what was going on over the hill in the other place and by the time the G&P had failed in 1939 and the track sold as scrap to Japan, they had all been divorced and remarried and divorced.

Whenever Emma Sweringen went on a trip, those left behind fell into the mood of holiday. The camp tenders whistled as they led their packhorses from the barn; the barking of the dogs was like laughter. The cook in the cookhouse took little nips of lemon extract.

When Emma left for Salt Lake to see Old White, the younger girls, Polly, Maude and Roberta, were all home from school in Salmon on Easter vacation. They began to make their plans. Roberta, just sixteen, wrote in her diary:

“Mama says you are only supposed to write your diary after supper when everything is over but now it is ten o'clock in the morning and Mama left for Salt Lake City just a little while ago and I'm writing in it. She says diaries are a good thing because later on you can read it and find out what you did and learn from it. Well for one thing Polly isn't going to wear hair ribbons all the time Mama is gone and Maude is going to do dance steps she learned from an awful girl who used to live in Denver. She's going to put Everybody's Doing It Now on the Edison. It's crazy.

“It rained night before last and we all caught rainwater off the roof in the boiler so after we all wash our hair we are going to make fudge and then Papa will let us drink coffee because he always does.

“Beth promised when she gets married to that fellow back East I can go back there and she and I will go to New York City and up in the Statue of Liberty. You can go clear up into the head I read in a book and when I get up there I am going to throw pennies down to the poor people. Won't they be surprised, though!

“Tom-Dick went off fishing this morning and I saw out the window Mama kissed him. He's pretty big to be kissed, for a boy. She thinks he doesn't do anything wrong. Ha-ha. He and some of the boys go swimming naked in the river. He probably smokes, too. I'm glad I'm not ten years old. I don't see why people like to fish because they are so slimy.

“Mama promised to bring me back a chocolate pot from ZCMI. That means Zion Commercial Mercantile Institute. When I go back to Salmon I am going to give a party and not ask a lot of people. Some of them are snots.”

Thomas Sweringen liked to see what was going on in the distance. He kept a pair of field glasses on top of the gunrack in the dining room and another tied to his saddlestrings. His eyes were as keen as a timber wolf's, and with field glasses he could judge conditions on the range forty miles away; not much closer he could give a man a name by how he sat in the saddle. If you know what's going on in the distance, you can get ready for what is to come.

As the train from Salmon approached the bridge where it stopped for Sweringens, he noted that it had already started to slow down. He picked up his glasses and looked across the field. It was just after nine in the morning; the train was almost an hour late. Something interesting must have happened.

He saw a man get down from the train with a sample case. A tall young man who made a wide gesture to Andy as the train pulled away. Walking across the field towards the house with that big case, the young man smiled as if he knew eyes were fixed on him, and Thomas, who did not intrude into another man's business unless asked, lowered his glasses and set them back on the gunrack. The girls were giggling upstairs.

Then the young man was at the front door and the spring sun behind him cast his shadow on the carpet in the hall. Thomas opened the door just as the young man raised his fist to knock.

“I saw you coming,” Thomas said.

“I'm Ben Burton,” the young man said. “And you're Mr. Sweringen and I'm blamed happy to make your acquaintance.” He shot out his hand that was at the end of his long arm and Thomas took it.

Now, how do you treat a young man who thinks you like him and would be hurt if he thought you didn't? You are good to him. All you can judge a man by is the way he treats you. It is not easy to be a salesman, you know, because you have what they want — your money — and if you wanted what they have, you would already have it.

He now shook the young man's hand. “You might as well get right down to it,” he said to young Burton. “What have you got in that case? The Rawleigh man was here time past so we've got plenty of medicine and vanilla and lemon extract and spices. You see we've got lightning rods.”

Ben Burton grinned. “It's myself I have to sell,” he said. “I want you to have something absolutely free.”

“Now, what would that be?”

Burton explained that he was with Everfresh Products and that he was prepared to hand over a year's supply of any two vegetables and fruits that instantly came fresh simply with the addition of water, in exchange for advertising space and the Sweringen good will. “You Sweringens are held in high regard in this valley.”

Well, on the face of it that sounded reasonable. Dried fruits and vegetables could be easily packed on the horses, and would be lighter for them to carry. Canned stuff weighs a lot, all that water. As for advertising space, Thomas assumed Burton had metal signs in the sample case he hoped to tack to fence posts.

“Sounds reasonable,” Thomas said.

Thus, Ben Burton entered the Sweringen ranch house. He followed Thomas into the dining room, a big high-ceilinged room whose windows, beyond the flourishing tangle of geraniums, looked out on Gunsight Peak. The dining room was not used for eating because everybody ate in the cookhouse below except for holidays when the whole family gathered, all the cousins and everybody.

“Open your case right there on the table,” Thomas said.

It was after Burton opened the case that Thomas realized what was up. No metal signs in there. Aside from the small sample bags of something or other, there were neat folded sheets of paper of the sort that fit together and are for covering a lot of space.

“Just a minute, young man,” Thomas said. “Just hold your horses.”

“Yes, Mr. Sweringen?”

“By any chance do you have the barn in mind?”

Burton's eyes looked innocent enough. He made a little motion with his head. “Why, yes, Mr. Sweringen. When I came into this country not ten days ago I noticed the barn — the prominence of that fine, big barn. I believe I have never seen so fine a barn, and so well situated, not even back in Iowa where barns are looked on as works of art. Your barn gives a grand aspect to the whole valley.”

“Young man,” Thomas said, “I don't know what you heard about the Sweringens around Salmon. Not much, if you didn't hear that my wife would skin any man alive who put a poster on that barn.”

Burton made that little ducking motion of his head, “Oh, now, Mr. Sweringen,” he said, “I don't think she'd do that. We had a fine talk on the train, she and I. Just a capital talk.”

“You talked to her on the train?”

“Yes sir. Oh, we talked and talked. Your wife and that daughter of yours, and I. We talked about the whole wide world and we talked about people's hands. Let me tell you, I was impressed. She said what I believe, that you can make anything you want of yourself. A truly fine philosophy.”

“That sounds like her.”

“And don't you think she meant by that you have also to sell yourself, what you think you are? Oh, a fine conversation. And let me tell you, Mr. Sweringen, I have never seen a lovelier girl than that daughter of yours in all my life, and Mr. Sweringen, I may be young, I was twenty-two years of age last March, but I have traveled a great deal, due to circumstances I hope to tell you about.”

“Mr. Burton,” Thomas said and spoke as gently as he could, but he called him Mr. Burton now to prepare him for the blow, “I was once a young man myself, and if I remember, young men rush in where angels fear to tread. I'm sorry, but you might just as well close up that case…”

“Papa?”

And there she stood. Thomas Sweringen never, in all his later years and there were a great, great many of them, ever forgot her standing in that room for the first time with the two men she loved, and her beauty, the love in her gray eyes was enough to make a man cry.

“Papa. He told me about many of the circumstances and where he's been. Please let him put the poster on the barn.”

Thomas Sweringen had never once refused her anything, even if he got skinned alive. And anyway, it was his barn, too.