Welcome to Hard Times

10

I have been trying to write what happened but it is hard, wishful work. Time is beginning to run out on me, and the form remembrance puts on things is making its own time and guiding my pen in ways I don’t trust. In my mind’s eye is an arch of suns multiplying the sky — or a long flickering night of one moon turning over and over into its shadows. I know this is trickery but I can’t blot it out. I think Molly, Molly, Molly and she is the time, turning in her phases like that moon, smiling and frowning while the boy grows big, setting down in frame like Fee his father … And I see something that never happened, the two of them carrying a giant cross with great effort, planting it over Fee. “I ain’t much for God,” he protests, “I always put my faith in people.”

Molly, could you really know what was coming? Or did it come because you knew it? Were you smarter than the life, or did the life depend on you?

There was a sign they put up when the weather grew warm. Isaac provided a bolt of muslin and Zar bought the paint; and young Bert spent a week painting the red letters in the style he copied out of a catalogue. Helga sewed on a canvas backing, making slits against the wind. And on a dazzling morning Swede raised up the sign over the street. From the scaffold of the well it stretched all the way across to the false front of Zar’s saloon: WELCOME TO HARD TIMES, it said, rippling in the breeze like a thing alive.

Most everyone stood outside for the occasion, gazing up at the banner and making comment. I figured you could see that sign half a mile away on the flats. But that was the morning Molly broke down crying and said: “Blue, for God’s sake let’s leave this place!”

And then, for some weeks, not a day passed and she didn’t say it again, begging, pleading with me to sell out: “It’s not safe any more, I swear we’ve got to get out of here!”

“Where do you want to go Molly?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Let’s just leave, Blue. Right now. Today. The three of us, we’ll find somewhere—”

“Molly what you’re saying makes no sense. Here we’ve put all this work and life down, we’ve made a home from nothing, and you want to ride off!”

“God, you’re a fool, Mayor. You always was a fool!”

“That may be. But I’m not fool enough to pull up stakes just when the claim is beginning to pay! You don’t think it’s different anywhere else do you? You don’t think there’s only one Turner riding this land!”

“Oh Christ there are hundreds, yes I know. Thousands. And they’re going to get me — they’re all coming for me!”

If I was a wiser man I would have seen where the misery was. You could step out the door and the scar of the old town was blocked from your sight, but the scar was still there.

“I suppose you’ll protect me! I suppose you’ll take care of me, just like the last time. Good old Mayor, fast with the gun he is, no worries with Mayor Blue marching behind your skirts. No worries at all!”

And there would be that hand closing over my heart, that almost forgotten pain.

“Why these fools, with their banners and their shacks, and their big plans — Oh God, we’ve got to get away from here!”

“Molly please—”

I would hold her in my arms and she would weep with great sobs that made her shudder: “Blue — I beg you — sell out — and we’ll go — to some city — Blue.” I would touch her hair, press her head to my chest and stand with her until she was quietened. I remember once how I sat her down at the table. Her green eyes were puffed with crying as she leaned on her elbow, her head in her hand, trying to listen to me.

“Molly, it could be you are right and this street in all its bustle will bring some Bad Man. I’ll say you are right — sure as winter brings summer we’ll draw our Man from Bodie. I suppose I know it as well as you. But you see this time we’ll be too good for him. Listen to what I say: I don’t mean I’ll stand up to his gun, I mean I won’t have to. When he came last time, the minute Flo walked over to him we were lost. Before Fee went in Avery’s place with his stick of wood we were lost. You fight them, you just look at them, and they have you. Molly it’s something I know, I’ve seen enough, I’ve seen them ride into a town, a bunch of them, feeling out the place, prodding for the right welcome. And when they get it you’d might as well turn your gun on yourself as try to turn them away. But a settled town drives them away. When the business is good and the life is working they can’t do a thing, they’re destroyed.”

“Oh Lord,” she wailed, “oh Jesus God, spare me from this man, this talker—”

“Molly! You know something? Listen to me, you know why he came that time? We wanted him. Our tongues were just hanging out for him. Even poor old Fee, he built a street but he couldn’t make a proper town. He must have knowed when he picked up that board the hope was already dead. If he didn’t know he wasn’t the man I think he was; if he was fooled he couldn’t know what life is.”

“Blue—”

“Molly, if you believe me, believe what I’m saying, and that Turner will never get to us!”

After a while she didn’t ask it any more. That in itself should have made me pack and ride us out. It was not from any comfort I supplied that she spoke no more of leaving; but from what, I think now, was a giving-in to the devil that grinned at her. Weren’t those cries—“I beg you Blue, please Blue, Blue Blue Blue”—weren’t they cries for help? I was no help, once more I was walking her to the saloon, behind her still.

It was as if she grudged anyone’s life who hadn’t suffered at the hands of that Bad Man. When people began to ride in under the banner she grew sullen. One day she fastened two sticks together for a cross and with Jimmy went out to the graves to put it at Fee’s head. I watched them from the cabin door, and I remembered the order of those graves: they were planting the cross, by mistake, for one-armed Jack Millay.

She would take no part in the life on the street, she began to stay inside, only sitting sometimes out in back when the weather was fair, looking at the view west of the rocks and the flats. I did the buying for us and Jimmy brought her the news. He was good at that, always managing to be where something was going on; and then he’d run to Molly to tell her about it. In that way she had all the news; and Jimmy had all her opinions. Molly’s opinions were much the same about everything. Whether it was someone come on the stage, or some rumor about the road, some new business of Zar’s or Isaac Maple’s, or some measure I had taken — she didn’t like it. Everything fell under her tongue and there would be suppers where I would eat while Molly would talk on and on, her mind wandering over each person, each foot of ground, and I’d be finished and my coffee drunk and her plate would hardly be touched. Jimmy listened to everything she said like it was gospel, no matter what she spoke of or how many times she’d said it before, he would drink up her words like they were mother’s milk.

There was only one person who Molly would tolerate and that was Jenks — not because he was anything but a fool but because he was so handy with guns. Jenks’s name never felt the whip at our table and that was why he was one of the few people Jimmy had a talking acquaintance with. Many’s the time I saw the boy helping Jenks at the stable, mucking out stalls, running errands. For pay Jimmy got to coddle the animals, and sometimes the boon of a lesson in gun handling. I found him at it once, holding a Colt shoulder-high, clicking off the trigger at the barn walls while Jenks held a stick under his wrist and ran a patter: “Hold’m steady, sonny, squeeze’m, squeeze’m, don’t yer pull, thet’s hit, line’m steady …” I tried to put a stop to it and that’s when I found out Jenks was teaching the boy just to oblige Molly, who had asked him the favor.

Now there is no wrong in showing a boy arms except it was like everything else Jimmy was getting. And the effect of it all wasn’t lost on other people. He was thickening into his father’s son but the look on his face was Molly’s. Mae told me privately, because she didn’t want to make any fuss she said, that she greeted the boy one day looking out her second-story window, and in a sudden rage he picked up a stone and threw it right up, hitting her in the chest. Isaac Maple caught him once pocketing a handful of shells from the counter. I settled with Isaac but it wasn’t the money that bothered him. And there was no settling at all with John Bear: the Indian’s garden patch was more than food to him, there was no one else who could make a plant grow. But one day he woke from his nooning and there was his greens all stepped on. He never thought of Jimmy, for some reason he made me understand it was Zar he blamed — unlikely as Zar would be to do such a thing. But I knew who it was. And I thought it wouldn’t do to talk to him or lay a hand to him. I thought it was Molly who needed reaching.

“Molly that boy gets wilder each day. He’s turning mean.”

“Is that what you think?”

“He threw a rock at Mae.”

“Well I hope it was thrown true.”

“Molly this is Fee’s boy—”

“I’ll tell you what’s rankling you Mayor, he’s a fondness for Jenks, he looks up to Jenks. And it burns don’t it?”

“Jenks has nothing to do with it!”

“Were you any good with a gun Mayor maybe you could teach the boy some manliness.”

“That’s not manliness.”

“Oh I’ll tell you it is, it is, Mayor—”

“Well is it manliness to step all over the Indian’s patch?”

She looked at me. Then she went to the door and called the boy and a moment later Jimmy came inside and stood in front of her.

“Was it you ruffled up those plants?”

The boy glanced at me with a disgusted look on his face: “No.”

“Was it?” Molly grabbed his shoulders and shook him and he went scared: “Yes ma’am.”

One two three she put the slaps smart across his face.

“You do such as that again, I’ll have your hide. You hear me?” She screamed: “You hear me?”

Well that wasn’t what I wanted either, I could have hurt him myself if it would serve the purpose. As it was he hated me as he fingered the slaps Molly gave him. A night or so later I found my ink jar turned over and the cover of one of the ledgers all soaked. It riled me and I was ready to forget anything but my own anger and light into the boy no matter what purpose it would serve. But as I turned there was Molly in the dugout, his room now, watching the boy get ready for bed.

“Look at them shoulders,” I listened to her murmur. “Molly’s Jim is gettin’ tall and strong, ain’t he? Molly feeds him up good and he’s turning into a sure enough man, isn’t it so? Big Jim they’ll call him and he’ll take care of his Molly, yes he will …”

This was the time of our greatest prosperity. Small clouds of gnats hung in the yellow evenings and horses tied up to the porch rails were touching rumps. Every rising sun saw another cone of dust sprouting up from the flats. People needed work; and it was like all the West was following the smell of it on the spring airs, like the scent of water on the desert. What were my feelings, did it make me uneasy to see our town as a refuge? How many times I would open the door to see wheels turning past us: it was a dusty couple pulling hard on their handcart, or a Pike County bunch filling a flatbed wagon, one limping beside with his kneecoat and Bowie belt, an old long rifle on his shoulders. You could tell the Pike Counties if only by their coughs. A man rode in one day wearing a dirty white linen suit, a roll of green felt was across his saddle, he was a faro dealer. And there was much bidding between Zar and Jonce Early to get the man. Zar got him. There was a raggedy old woman come along, nothing in her wagon but a pile of rags and a crate with three squawking chickens; and she made money selling their eggs for a dollar apiece. But most of the arrivals had just themselves to offer a boss and the money was going into the pockets mainly of those already settled on the street.

We were all doing a brisk business. People paid in every kind of exchange for my water — U.S. silver, greenbacks, Territory scrip; and when I wasn’t busy seeing to the well I was noting Express orders and taking mail. There was another stage on the line now and we had two arrivals each week. If you went into Isaac Maple’s store (“Maple Bros.” it said on the outside in paint, Isaac’s hope lettered for all to see), if you went in there, there was always someone ahead of you — even though Isaac had the Chinagirl helping him wait on customers. The store had every kind of stock you could wish, sugar, flour, foods canned and in brine barrels, preserves, dry goods, cutlery, carpentry tools, tar paper, rolls of barbed wire, tobaccos, anquitum for lice, corn starch, bottled lavender water and honey and castor oil — you’d think you was in Silver City.

Directly across from the store, every morning and evening, there was always a crowd in front of the tent, which Swede rented now for his eatery. They would stand there waiting for the big fellow to let them in. For twenty-five cents you could eat a breakfast of flourcakes and coffee, for fifty cents a dinner of salt pork, coffee and biscuits made up by Helga. I ate there myself once Molly stopped cooking.

As for the Russian he couldn’t ask for better business, even with his competition across the street. Whenever someone rode in it was usually to “Zar’s Palace” he went for information, since it was the tallest building in the town. Bert, behind the fancy bar over there, would send them to my door; or if it was Swede in his restaurant, he would wipe his big hands on his apron and lead the stranger over to me. There was nobody from the mine set up in the town as yet and so I kept a list of all those who wanted work. I didn’t state myself as an agent for the mine, in fact I was always sure to make it clear I wasn’t; but it helped me to know who was in town and besides I was able to use the chance to get another signature on the petition for statehood. And it always gave the stranger a feeling of having done all he could do until the hiring began, to write his name down. I must have had a half a hundred names on that list.

One day I came back to the cabin in the evening and there was no fire on the stove or supper on the table. Then she stopped doing laundry. And then I was the one sweeping dust, every morning, every night. The load gets heavier and you shift to it, that’s all, you can accommodate yourself without even realizing.

A man came up to me in front of Swede’s tent and said: “Mayor I was just by your place to post a letter but nobody answered the knock.”

“My wife’s always home,” I said.

“Well yes, and I saw smoke from your chimney pipe, the Mrs. Mayor hard of hearin’?” He grinned at me.

“Give me your letter,” I said, “I’ll take it now.”

I went down the street. It was a warm day and no wind blew. A heavy stench of life filled the air, flies stuck to your clothes and you had to rub the gnats off your face.

“Molly!” The door was latched and I banged it and banged it until she let me in.

“Listen,” I said, “you’ve got to stop this!”

“I don’t want filth in my house.”

“You think everyone knocks is the Man from Bodie?”

“Keep away from me!”

“People come to me with business, you run in the dugout. Someone wipes his feet and takes his hat off and you curse him!”

“Every manner of filth and dirt, every tramp, every stinking lowlife!”

“You are getting a name in this town, Molly. I don’t like you acting this way!”

“Get out then! They’re all like you. All the filth. They’re no worse than you are, damn you!” And she ran into the back room and slammed the door.

That was the way she was acting. It was as if each person coming into town was taking away a little more of her air to breathe. What could I do? I see now what was going on but can I say I saw then?

Jimmy accepted her disposition, it should have bothered him that she began to ignore him most of the time, but he saw her only a certain way and he was rewarded whenever she came back to him with a rush of feeling. He kept up his duties to her like a faith. For instance people knowing who he was would sometimes give him their dollars for the water. I was keeping no strict records on such payments, but I knew he turned over to Molly as much money as he ever gave into my hands. Where she hid it I didn’t know, or what she wanted to do with it. I knew she wasn’t making plans to leave, she was past making plans for her life, if I could have foreseen I would have put her on the stage myself, I would have bought her a catalogue dress and bonnet and packed her a satchel of greenbacks saying Go on Molly, you were right and I was wrong, the look of your cat’s green eyes will stay with me, go as far as this money takes you and leave Hard Times to the Mayor …

But one night I found out where the money went.

“Blue.” Her whisper coming across the room. “Blue, you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping? What’s on your mind, Blue, that you can’t sleep?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me. Tell Molly your trouble.”

“What?”

“You want to come over here, you want to come to your Molly? Alright. Alright.” I heard her moving in her bed, making room for me.

“I was just thinking of that letter come for Archie D. Brogan,” I said quickly. I didn’t know what had got into her.

“He’s got a letter?”

“A letter addressed with a typewriting machine. I wish I knew what it said, that’s all.”

A giggle: “Well you fool, why don’t you open it?”

“Go to sleep Molly.”

“Come here Blue. Come give me a hug and forget that letter you say is worrying you out of your sleep. It’s not any letter is it? You know what it is, come on, come to your Molly.”

I had not thought of her that way for how long? How long had it been since she turned, little by little, so compliant, that I felt I was some duplicate Bad Man taking his pleasure?

“I want to whisper something. I really have to tell something in your ear—”

I am a foolish man, I shall always have to go to Molly when she calls, knowing everything, expecting anything, I will still go. I put my feet over the side of the bunk and she cried, “JIMMY!” Loud enough to wake the town, “JIMMY!” she screamed.

And there at the door, the dim light of the cabin behind him, he stood torn out of his sleep and a shotgun cradled in his arm, the boy.

“You’ll keep away from me now Mayor? You’ll stay away? You try to touch me and you see what’ll happen to you? You see you lechering old bastard!” And that was her voice I recognized.

With a groan I was at the boy, wresting the gun from him. He was half asleep, he stumbled over to her bed and fell into her arms, making sounds like he was shivering. “There, it’s alright Jim, Molly’s alright, don’t you fret—” I took his arm and I pulled him away. “Go on to your bed,” I swung him past me, “go on or I’ll whip you good!” I herded him all the way back to his cot, shoving him so that he fell down the step into the dugout. “Oh oww!” he cried, rubbing his toes, and I left him sitting there and crying.

That new oily double-barrel glinting blue was in my hands and I swung it like a hammer against my desk but the stock didn’t break. Through the door there was Molly sitting up, holding the blanket up to her neck, her hair was down and she was giggling at her joke, the laughter came out of her closed mouth in fits. I threw the gun at her. It hit the wall and fell behind her. She stopped laughing, her mouth set in a prim smile, righteous and suffering, and that was the face I slammed the door on.

I sat down and held my head in my hands. How could one man have been so blind stupid in his life! God help me for my sight, my heart went out to this child. Was everything, even her old sweetness to me, a design on him? She was training him for the Bad Man, she was breaking him into a proper mount for her own ride to Hell, and I hadn’t seen it till now, I hadn’t ever understood it was not me who suffered her, it was Jimmy.

When it was decently day I went over to Zar’s place. “Pour you a breakfast Mayor?” Mae said quietly when I stepped through the doors. “You look as you could use it.”

The place was mostly empty, a few people were sleeping at the tables. The night air was still in the room, it was cool but it smelled bad.

“Bert not here yet?” I said.

“Can’t expeck him to leave a cozy bed jes’ cause he has a job to do,” she said, pouring, “can’t expeck him to leave his Chink honey.”

I took my drink.

“’Smatter, Blue, that wife o’ yourn givin’ ye a time?”

“What?”

“Man looks like you do in the mornin’, either it’s his wife or his liver. Ain’t got no liver trouble so far as I know.”

“You don’t look so good yourself,” I said. She had no color in her face, she was not so plump any more. “You not enjoying the prosperity, Mae?”

“What do you want, Mayor, goddamnit.” She was rubbing her forehead. “Don’t know what it’s like to breathe any more. Used to be jes’ the week’s end, these days every night is Saturday.”

Zar came clumping down the stairs. He dressed fancy now. “La la la,” he was singing, he came over and pinched Mae’s cheek. “Maechka,” he said, but she pushed his hand off and went to sit down with her glass.

“Blue,” the Russian turned smiling to me, “you are the man I am meaning to see. I have important business to talk.”

“Not now Zar.”

“Of course now. You have just to listen.” He carefully took from his pocket a folded piece of newspaper. “At Silver City I see there is Company, for three hundred dollars they will go anywhere with steam drill and dig the water.”

“So?”

“So I tell you and you won’t be mad. I am thinking closely of sending for them. That way I have my own well.”

“Congratulations.”

“But not to sell water to others, I promise you that.”

Mae laughed. He turned and glared at her.

“Zar,” I said, “do what you want. But the minute you put up a well Isaac Maple will too. You know that don’t you?”

He shrugged. “What do I care?”

“Well then why should you think I care what you do? Do what you want and good luck to you.” A couple of men walked in the doors and then a few more after them. The day was beginning. I put money on the bar and I walked out.

On the porch a man stepped in front of me: “Mornin’ Mayor,” he mumbled, “jest wonderin’ is there any news—”

“You’ll know when I know,” I said shortly.

“I know Mayor but I can’t—”

“Come over to my place when I’m there,” I said. “I got other business just now.”

Isaac was on his porch, putting out some wares, I went inside with him and spoke to him for a few minutes. When I was through I went down the street to the cabin. Molly was in the room behind the door and she was asleep, but the dugout was empty.

It was toward the middle of the morning but hot and still enough for afternoon. A few men were walking out of Swede’s tent and they were picking their teeth. I went up there and Swede was just coming out carrying a pair of kettles.

“I’m looking for my boy,” I said.

“Ya,” he smiled, “inside.”

Jimmy was not at any of the long tables. A dozen heads glanced up as I looked around. I found him out in back, cross-legged on the ground, rolling pancakes and stuffing them in his mouth. He wouldn’t look at me. Swede’s wife was standing by him, her hands in her apron, smiling as she watched him eat.

“Jimmy you’ll come with me,” I said.

I dug in my pockets to pay for his breakfast but Helga shook her head and waved my hand down. When he was finished I walked away without looking back. I went down the street past Bear’s shack, getting on the trail and climbing up. I was feeling short of breath but I kept up my pace and turned off well along the trail, when I saw a flat rock. I picked my way to it and sat down and waited for him. And a minute later he came along and stood a few feet away looking at me.

“Sit down here,” I said, “I’ve got something to say to you.” He didn’t move. “I won’t hurt you, come on.”

We sat side by side watching the town below us, a street of houses at the foot of that vast flatland, a small stir of life in all that stillness. A cool breeze blew on the face but down there it wasn’t enough to turn the windmill. Horses and mules were tied up along the railings, people were walking this way and that, every now and then a fragment of someone’s voice would rise up to our ears, or something would catch the sun and flash in our eyes.

“I brought you up here because I wanted to be sure no one would bother us,” I said. “What I have to say is private between you and me. You understand that?”

“Sure.”

“How old do you reckon you are? Fourteen? Fifteen years?”

“I don’ know.”

“You’re a sight bigger than the day I carried you down from these rocks. You remember that? You took my gun, you were going after that Bad Man killed your Daddy.”

My gaze went out beyond the town to the graves in the flats, and I suppose he looked there too. I didn’t dare look at him, I didn’t trust myself to say just what I wanted to say.

“You remember that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I could carry you now. I don’t suppose if you didn’t want it I could make you do anything. But I’ll tell you: when I got you down to the Indian’s shack I put you down too fast. I let you go too quick. I should have made plans for you then and there. But I never had practice being a father before and I didn’t know any better.”

I felt him looking at me but I kept my own eyes on the town. “Now look at down there. It’s not as neat as the town Fee put up, it don’t show one man’s mark. Just a patch job, spit and old lumber, but if he could see it he’d like it. He’d say it was alright.”

“How do you know what my Pa would say!”

“I used to talk to him. I know what he valued. He died two years short, it would have pleasured him to see this.”

He picked up a stone and tossed it away, watching it bounce down among the rocks.

“Now when he died I said to myself, ‘Well he has left a son and I’m going to look after his son and pass on the lesson I learned from Fee.’ It’s not something a person could learn in one day or one week. It’s something you have to learn into, like carpentry. You understand?”

He said nothing.

“And I knew that, so I never said a word to you. I figured if I did as your father did why that would be the way; if I did everything as Fee would have done it, well you’d learn alright. And you mightn’t suffer the loss so bad.”

Down below a woman was filling her buckets at the water tank. A man, it looked like Jenks, was walking into Zar’s Palace.

“Course I was wrong, I should have taken you in hand right away and talked to you as I am now. Molly has got to you, it’s natural I suppose, but if you grow to the life the way she has, I’m saying it clear as I can Jimmy, you won’t have the idea, you won’t be Fee’s son any more.”

“What do you know—”

“You’ve got to allow for Molly. She can’t give up her suffering.”

“My Pa had sand. He weren’t no coward.”

“Does she call me that? Well now I’ve got to tell you”—looking at him, feeling the desperation of what I was doing—“probably your Pa did only one shameful thing in his life and that was to rush in after Turner.”

“What?”

“That was the one time he was no example to you. He went in there to get himself killed.”

“What?”

“It’s what you do when a Bad Man comes, Jimmy. I tried to do it too but I am a bumbler by nature.”

“You better not talk that way about my Pa—” Lord, it made me faint-hearted, it was Fee’s face with no lines, a young hairless face with a frown of anger and no understanding at all. “You better not talk that way,” it said pursing its lips, “you better not!”

And what did I expect, you can’t tell something like that, who will know it? “Jim you can squeeze the trigger and knock down a Bad Man and as sure as you’ve been shootin’, another will come up in his place. They take to this land, they don’t need much to grow, just a few folks together will breed ’em, a little noise and they’ll spring up out of the empty shells. Jimmy!”

He had jumped up. Molly was stepping out of the cabin, a small figure in the street below.

“I have spoken to Isaac Maple,” I said trying to control my voice. “Isaac will need someone to help him out before long. The Chinagirl is getting too heavy to move around, her time is coming. What do you say to working in Isaac’s store? It will be good for you. You’re going to work regular hours. You’re going to learn reading and writing. You’re going to grow up proper with this town and the day will come—”

“She’s calling me! Here!” He waved his arms. “I’m here!”

I pulled him down. I took hold of his shoulders and held him down on the rocks. “What kind of a mama’s boy are you! How far do I have to take you to get you out of that woman’s spell! Listen to me I said the day is coming when no Man from Bodie will ride in but he’ll wither and dry up to dust. You hear me? I’m going to see you grow up with your own mind, I’m going to see you settled just like this town, you’re going to be a proper man and not some saddle fool wandering around with his grudge. Jimmy listen to me—”

He was struggling under me, a strong boy, not hearing, his face screwed up in hate. And I felt his breath clean as grass on my face and I talked on and on as if words could do something. “Listen listen,” I kept saying but the strength was draining out of me, like hope, and my mind was doing another talking: It’s too late, and I’ve done it wrong, I am too late.

He pushed me over and jumped up and delivered a kick in my side and ran off down the trail. It was a powerful kick and well aimed, I feel it now on a deep breath. Below in the town there was no sign of Molly. But as I sat up and looked I could hear a clatter somewhere and a moment later out of the tent two skirted figures stumbled into the sun, locked together. Someone shouted and people were running from all directions, pouring out of the saloon, the store, to make up a circle around those two. Another moment and I saw Jimmy arrive, ducking into the crowd.

It was Molly rolling around in the dirt with Swede’s wife Helga. Molly had made up her mind to take affront because the woman had been feeding up her boy. As I ran down I could hear people yelling encouragement. But by the time I made my way through the circle Jenks and Swede had pulled the two women apart. They stood glaring, wild-haired and gasping, scratched and mussed so you could hardly tell one from the other. Molly’s dress was torn in front. “Lookit thet tit,” a man said.

Later I stood in the cabin holding a hand to my side, watching the boy bathe her scalp where Helga had pulled out the hair. Molly was moaning on her bed. There was a knock at the door and it was Swede, wringing his hands. Behind him, down the street, was the sound of his ranting wife.

“Blue, dis is a bad tang, my vault, forgive my Helga, my vault—”

“You big dumb stupid Swede!” I shouted. I could feel the water come to my eyes. How was it his fault? What in Hell made him think he must take the blame?

11

I say that was the true end of me no matter what happened after. Sharp as the boy’s kick in my side, clear as the pain, was the sudden breathless vision I had of my unending futility. Who as well as I and what I am could have ensured the one’s madness and the other’s corruption? But we won’t think about it: I tried to keep my heart by taking it out of doors. And how long was I able to do that? One week? One hour?

Some of these spring-comers paid for lodging and moved into one of Isaac Maple’s cribs. And there was cabin space for those willing to share beds. But the town wasn’t big enough to take on everyone and nobody was doing any more building. Those who had the money to build were making it too easily in other ways. “Who cares where they stay,” Zar said to me, “they are drinking my whiskey, they are bouncing in my beds!” So after a while there were squatters staked out in back of the buildings, living out of their wagons, lying down for the night under lean-tos. And it began to make trouble.

I mean people would throw their slops into the alleys. Some didn’t care where they did their business and it got so you were hard put to walk in the street without putting your boot down in a mess. One morning Molly found a drunken man peeing against the door, and it drove her to distraction, she cried the whole day. I tried to call a meeting at the well of all the people who owned streetfront, some of them had privies in back, but not all; but only Jenks and Isaac and Swede came. Jenks said: “Jes watch yer step in all yer do. Hit’s good fer the land. How do the Indian get his greens up if not by shittin’ on ’em all winter?” Isaac was righteous: “Nobody cares a damn,” he said, “but if they all come up with dysentery ’tain’t themselves they’ll blame but each other.” Isaac had the right sentiment but he was a busy man. It was Swede and I who ended up digging and fencing sumps behind each side of the street. That Swede would do anything you asked of him, he would tilt his head away from his wen and close his eyes and nod yes — no matter what it was.

Well the sumps helped but not much. And there were other troubles too. A few of the job hunters were men not easy to look at, there was one fellow who had running sores all over his face, another, an old man, who was humpbacked with hands twisted and swollen out of shape. Isaac came to me claiming whenever one such came into his store everyone else cleared out and he lost business. It was not true, of course, he just wanted me to run these people out of the town. “Speak to Jenks,” I told him, “Jenks is the peace officer here.” Then Zar joined the protest, he refused to serve the hunchbacky one day and the man, in resentment, ran over to Mae and Jessie and waved his crippled hands in front of their eyes. Zar told Bert to throw the poor fellow out but Bert wouldn’t step out from behind the bar. The Russian came running to me and I told him he’d best serve the man his drink and he’d leave then twice as fast and with no trouble. “It’s easier in the end,” I said. But Zar like Isaac was for running these people off and Jenks finally rounded up three or four of them at gunpoint and shooed them away into the flats; but at night they were back, they wanted work like everyone, and for a while they made their way behind houses and took their meals behind Swede’s tent from what Helga handed out to them through the flap. And after a while they came into the store again and the saloons and so the trouble was not ended but in fact greater, with greater hard feelings.

One morning the egg lady found one of her three chickens with its head wrung off; she was an old-timer in the West and she told her sorrows to nobody, but grabbed up her cane and went into Zar’s Palace swinging. She must have been a teetotaler to blame only the whiskey for her lost hen, she bruised a number of shoulders and broke some bottles and a row of glasses Zar had proudly imported from the East before she was finally herded out; and that was my problem too because I was the one who had to gentle her.

The weather was getting hotter; and each morning of prosperity that would start out fresh and easy to breathe was turning into a day more hot and burdensome than the last. Every time Alf’s stage came in, or a freight wagon, all I wanted to see was some Eastern engineer, a man in black, with plans in his pocket and wages to give out. On Saturday night with the miners pouring in the town and the street filling with the noise of frolic from one end to the other I found Angus Mcellhenny lighting up his pipe in front of the stable.

“If the Company is going to lay a road,” I asked him, “why in hell don’t they start in?”

“Blue it’s many years I’ve been diggin’ the earth and I’ve seen fortunes in my shovel. But I’ve nought to show for it but my calluses and m’ mind is as weak as it ever was. I dinna know.”

“Well what do you hear around Angus?”

“Don’t pry at me my ferlie friend. I know nothin’. We are diggin’ hard six days o’ the week and keepin’ our eyes on the ground. I can tell you no more.”

“Alright Angus. But tell Archie D. Brogan when you see him there’s a letter in his name down here.”

He took the pipe from his mouth: “Who from?”

“It doesn’t say, Angus, it’s only his name on the front. You’ll tell him?”

He nodded and walked away.

It baffled me that Angus should be so close-mouthed, it wasn’t like him. Meanwhile the same questions I had put to him were being asked of other miners and none of them liked it, the hungry looks in the eyes of the towners didn’t go well with them. Some newcomers, not happy about waiting around, had gone up the trail looking for work at the lodes; and though they had ridden back, sourfaced, the same day, it didn’t sit well with the diggers that a lot of men were in the country wanting jobs. There was no love lost between the two groups that Saturday night. The miners, having their pay to spend, sort of took over at the saloons. One thing led to another and Jenks was kept fairly busy breaking up scuffles, once or twice he even had to draw his pistol to get things quiet. In our cabin I was at the desk trying to put some order in all my papers, and Molly sat with sewing on her lap, and we heard clearly the screeches of the ladies over at Zar’s every time a fight started. Molly’s hands shook so she couldn’t work the needle, she dropped her hands in her lap and I saw out of the corner of my eye how frightened she was. Every few minutes Jimmy would come rushing in to tell of the latest fuss, sweat on his forehead and such joy in his eyes he could hardly speak without stammering: “Old J-Jenks, he took care of ’m alright, socked ’m on the head, poom, like th-that—”

“Jimmy,” I said, “you stay in here now, go on to bed, it’s late. You hear me, son?” But he would never hear me.

He gave one glance to Molly and ran out, leaving the door open wide.

She made no move to stop him, sitting there her eyes fixed on nothing, one hand on her throat’s cross, the other knuckled against her teeth.

A day or two later and the sun not even up, Bert Albany rapped on the door until I heard him, and with the sleep still in my eyes I went with him up the street to Zar’s place. The faro dealer was lying on the floor there, ashen white, and a big red rent in his vest where he had been stabbed. Jenks was standing nearby, clutching the collar of that little hunchback, his gun was drawn and sticking in the man’s back. Bert told me the faro dealer had been lending out money to people at high rates, sometimes winning it back at his table. He had a list, Bert saw it, of the men indebted to him. The hunchbacky had been sitting there losing all of his loan, and when it was gone he jumped up and stuck a knife in the dealer’s belly.

The dealer was quiet, concentrating on his breathing, he was in his senses enough to know to lay still. I went out to John Bear’s shack. It showed even then the signs of resentment, the door was splintered, a board or two was gone from the roof. I woke the Indian up and gave him to understand there was someone needed doctoring. He came with me up to the saloon but when he saw it was Zar’s place and the Russian waiting at the door, he turned on his heel and went back the way he came.

Zar and I carried the dealer up to one of the rooms, Zar being careful every step not to get any of the man’s blood on his clothes. Miss Adah, with her hair in braids and a shawl over her nightdress, said she’d sit with the man and see what she could do.

When I came back down the stairs Jenks and his prisoner were gone, the few people who had watched the goings-on had drifted away. Zar offered me a drink but there wasn’t anything I wanted less. Outside was the sound of hammering, and from the porch, in the grey light, I saw Jenks in the front of his stable. He had put the hunchback in Hausenfield’s old boarded-up hearse wagon and was nailing the door shut.

“Jenks,” I went over to him, “what in God’s name are you doing!”

“Hit’ll do fer a jail, don’t ye thank?”

“You could tie him up without putting him in there!”

“Mayor, I is Shurff an’ I ain’t seen m’ pay yet. Don’t you fret, I’ll see he’s fed and stretches his laigs. Swede’ll proffer his leftovers. This man has stabbed a man, he’s got to pay.”

“You’ve thought it all out have you?”

He nodded: “Ah reckon we’ll requar that circus jedge,” he said solemn with his decision.

I looked at him. “Jenks,” I said, “I remember when you used to sleep most of your days and here it is not dawn and it’s clear to me you’re a changed man, thriving on his duty.”

He grinned. “Y’ll write thet letter fer me? Fer thet jedge?”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

The night was paling. I walked back toward the cabin in my untucked shirt and my bootlaces flapping. In the dirt against Isaac’s porch a man was asleep. On Zar’s steps another was huddled over his knees coughing fit to wake the dead. I should have been feeling sympathy for that dealer but I was feeling the pain of my own breathing.

Jimmy and Molly were still asleep. In the aftermath of her great battle he had taken my bunk to be near her if she needed, and the dugout had been left to me. But I was too shaken to lie down again, I boiled some coffee and sat at my desk looking at that letter for Archie D. Brogan, thinking Here rises another morning, a little hotter than the last. If someone from the mines doesn’t begin hiring soon, Jenks’s wagon will be filled to overflowing. Once there was work, once there was money, I told myself, everything would be alright. It was the promise of a year, a settlement growing towards its perfection. That was my notion but the only thing growing was trouble; and it made me shudder to think whatever perfection was, like the perfection I had with Molly, it was maybe past, silently come and gone, a moment long, just an instant in the shadow of one day, and any fool who was still waiting for it, like he dreamed, didn’t know what life is.

I counted the savings in my drawer — some two hundred fifty dollars’ worth — and I went out and hired four men who said they knew carpentry, and I sent them on a hunt for wood. The terms were three dollars apiece for each day they took to get up an office for me against the south wall of the cabin. After I did that there was a gathering in front of the cabin and I spoke to a number of people, one at a time. One man said he knew the printer’s trade and I gave him backing of seventy-five dollars to start up a press in the town. Another, an old drover, claimed he knew where if he could get a dozen head of fat prime cattle at three dollars a head, he would have them across the flats in a week and would sell them for slaughter for ten dollars. I told him to go ahead. A couple of people I lent money to straight off at a rate of one percent, and by noon I had gotten rid of all my money except what I needed to keep the three of us.

I went outside and stood up on a box in front of the windmill and I made an announcement to the people that gathered. I said until the roadwork began all water was free to anyone not owning property on the street. “The banner means what it says, boys!” I cried like a true politician. “There’s a payday coming for all, but until it comes we’ll wait together!” Nobody cheered but I didn’t think they would.

In all that time Molly stayed in the back room with the door shut, the boy carrying her cups of tea or some food.

I wasn’t finished by any means, I planned to write a letter to two or three of the banking companies in the Territory, asking them to consider opening up a branch in the town. I was tempting myself to ride up to the lodes with Brogan’s letter to see if I could commit someone to a hiring date. My mind was teeming with plans to keep the temperature down and the money fluent. Toward dusk Zar came barging in the front door. I had expected him.

“Mayor, what a frand is this!”

“What do you mean Zar?”

“I tell you I shall drill a well and then you cut your water prices. Is this the way a frand does?”

“Why you told me you would drill only for your own use,” I said, “I shouldn’t think it would matter to you.”

“This is dirty business, you are making angry a dangerous man!”

At that moment he didn’t look so dangerous. He had on his fancy check vest and kneecoat and a hempen cravat and around it all was his barkeep’s apron. He raged on, not even knowing he gave himself away, till finally I said: “Now you listen to me, Zar. You’re sending for a well driller? Fine, you’ll make it back soon enough, just go right ahead. You can hire out a good half dozen men to put up a windmill for you. While you’re at it think up a couple of more jobs so you can give out wages. God knows you’ve made enough money not to have to sweep your own place.”

“What’s this?”

“These people are lying around here spending their cash and they’re not making any. We’re grabbing everything they have—”

“Is this bad?”

“It could be. The Company seems to be taking its own sweet time about the road. Until it gets going we’re in a bad position. You can’t just take out, you have to put back in too, you’re a businessman, you know that.”

“I do not make whiskey to give away, frand. I do not tell a man to keep his money so he can spend it across the street.”

“Alright, you can still hire some of these people, give them a way of paying for your wares.”

He looked at me, his anger forgotten: “Blue, I think you are losing your mind …”

“I have lived around this country a long time, Zar. Take a look at the faces along your bar; if you can’t read the meanings you don’t stand to last very long.”

“They say you are giving away money—”

“I’ve invested some.”

“Blue, frand, I’m sorry I have screamed. You are a sick man.”

“You’d better give some thought to what I’m saying—”

He stomped over to the door shaking his head. “Alright,” I said to him, “I hope you’re hiding your gold in a good safe place.”

But when he was gone I had to ask myself: Could I be wrong? Was I running scared? If things were really tight neither the Russian nor any of the others would have to be told what to do. The situation was not all that bad. Isaac Maple, for instance, I knew for a fact he credited anyone who said he knew Ezra, his brother. Every poke came into town, it didn’t take him one day to find out how to get by Isaac, all he had to say is he’d seen Ezra, and was it at Bannock or Virginia City, it was all the same, he got down on Isaac’s books …

Was this not a way of hoping; or was I just being typical of myself, unable to do something in the morning without regretting it at night?

If Jimmy understood what I had done he gave no sign. Nor did I hear from Molly. I slept well at night, there were no sounds to waken me. In the morning Jimmy dragged in that bathtub from the well and pushed it into their room. He went back and forth with a bucket, I suppose Molly had decided to cleanse herself of what filth she could. When he had filled the tub he sat outside her door, his neck flushed red to his ears and that cursed shotgun across his knees.

Outside the front door there was a crowd gathered — for what? What more did I have to do? And then Archie D. Brogan showed up. He must have pushed aside a few of them, there was a lot of grumbling and a few shouts behind him when the door opened.

“Are you that Blue feller? Mcellhenny tells me you’ve a letter in my name. Brogan.”

I stood up. “That’s right. It’s been here more than a week.”

“Say what?”

“It’s been here in my desk a long while—”

“Why that son of a bitch sot, I’ll fix his hide, he just now told me last night. Well give it here.”

It was clear he was a mine boss. His hat was off but just to fan his face, he was a beefy man in his corduroys and he suffered the heat. I got the letter and handed it to him.

“Too bad you had to make a special trip,” I said, “you mostly get your mail up at the camp, don’t you?”

“What the hell business is it of your?” he said ripping open the envelope. And then, as he stood there puzzling out the words his florid face went pale. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and stomped out, leaving the door open wide.

Outside they made a path for him and he walked up the street to Zar’s Palace. Bert was standing by the door and I motioned him inside.

“Bert, what’s troubling you, what are you doing here?”

“Well Mr. Blue the girl is getting big as a melon and we don’t have a bed yet for the chile to be born in. I want us to have a real furniture bed, you know how I mean, but I’m already two weeks ahead on my pay—”

“Won’t Isaac Maple order on your word?”

“No sir, he knows me. Also, he’s been paying my honey wages and I can’t—”

“Alright, Bert, listen, I’ll loan you for that bed whatever it costs—”

He stammered, he looked sorry he had joined the crowd at my door. He was a fine gawky young fellow and I remember thinking, unwillingly, how just a few years older than Jimmy he was.

“Alright, Bert, you pay me when you can, now listen. That man just walked out of here, Archie Brogan?”

“Sure, don’t have to tell me that’s Mr. Brogan—”

“Go on back to your place and keep your eye on him. He has a letter I’d give my arm to know what it says. Man has a drink he sometimes talks out loud, you know what I mean?”

“Sure, Mr. Blue—”

“I wanted to say something to him about the road, he could put all these people out here to work if he had insructions, go on now.”

I showed him out and closed the door. I had been waiting for the mine boss to come down for his letter; and now that he had my heart pulsations ran so fast I could hardly keep myself sitting down. I bit off some plug and chewed and listened to the noise outside one door and the silence inside the other. The boy was gazing at me. I thought Well let me write Jenks’s request to the capital, let me compose my letter to the banking companies. But nothing I could do would matter if the mine didn’t lay its road. Why had that note been addressed to Brogan care of the town? Why had Angus said nothing to him for over a week?

I stepped outside and walked quickly up the street to the saloon. Some of those people walked along with me. “I’ve no news, I’ve nothing to say,” I told them as I walked. “I’m going in for a drink, anyone who’d care to stand me one is welcome to come along.” That put them off and I went into Zar’s and stood by the bar until I caught Bert’s eye.

He put a glass in front of me and poured: “Upstairs, Mr. Blue, he bought a whole bottle and went upstairs with Jessie.”

“Well this is a working day,” I said softly, “he must have something grand to celebrate.”

“He said not a word. He didn’t even act he knew who I was. Just took a bottle and marched up there with Miss Jess.”

Mae came over, pushing her hair back on her temples: “I wish that bastard would hurry up and die. How are you Blue?”

“Mae.”

“That goddamn dealer. Two days he’s been lying up there bleeding all over my bed. I don’ understand ol’ Adah, she sits up theah you’d thank ’twas her own man dyin’.”

“Well,” I said, “she has a feeling for such things.”

“Hell, he’s jest a-festerin’ away. And Lord if it don’t serve him right. First day he was here he wanted me to go upstairs just for the love of it. You hear me Blue? ‘Why you cheap bastard,’ I tell him, ‘I’ll go with you and you pay me like anyone else!’ And you know he wouldn’t? How do you like that for a dealer! One on the house Bertie, if’n you please.”

“Where’s Zar?” I said.

“Who cares!”

I sipped my whiskey and waited there at the bar, watching the stairs and trying not to look concerned. There were men sitting at the tables, talking, playing small-change poker, but the noise wasn’t such you couldn’t hear things. From one room above I heard the low moans of that dealer; and from another the sound of Archie D. Brogan singing up a song. After a while Jessie came down. Long Jessie went over to Mae and whispered something and they both giggled.

How many verses of that song I must have listened to, making out no words, but the Irish of the tune again and again. It would stop and I’d think well now we’ll hear no more, but he would start up again, having only paused to wet his throat.

Then, finally, a door opened, and down the stairs came the mine boss, lurching and holding the rail tight. He slipped and sat down on the bottom step; and he began to laugh. His face was red and his cheeks shot with thin blue veins. I was over there in an instant offering to help him up and that made him stop laughing. He waved my hand away, muttered something and went out the door. I followed and watched as he threw up in the street. When he was done he wiped his face with a red handkerchief and stalked into Isaac’s store, walking sober as a judge.

How clear I call up these moments — even the song he sang, a wild dirge, sings in my ears. A man I never knew! He came out of Isaac’s place with a bundle and brand-new saddlebags, stuffed full. He threw it on the back of his mule, mounted, and as I stood transfixed, rode down the street and into the flats.

I watched him a long while. Nobody else seemed to notice his leaving, people were all over the street, the lunch crowd was grouping in front of Swede’s tent. I went into the store. Isaac was there toting up figures on a pad. The fat Chinagirl was sitting and resting by the door, breathing with difficulty, her hands on her knees.

“Isaac what did that fellow buy?”

“Weren’t that the foreman?”

“It was.”

“Well he took some vittles, a fryin’ pan, a box of cartridges, matches, a blanket, bottle of castor oil, coupla ounces smokin’ tobacco …”

Did I have to be told? Did it have to be in a letter? The next day miners began coming down the trail, walking with their picks on their backs, riding two up on their mules. They filled the street. Angus Mcellhenny told me: “As long as the payroll kept coming, Blue, we kept diggin’ that rock. But I knew weeks ago it wasn’t ore we were diggin’. ’Twas only the color.”

Like the West, like my life: The color dazzles us, but when it’s too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim.

12

Of course now I put it down I can see that we were finished before we ever got started, our end was in our beginning. I am writing this and maybe it will be recovered and read; and I’ll say now how I picture some reader, a gentleman in a stuffed chair with a rug under him and a solid house around him and a whole city of stone streets around the house — a place like New York which Molly talked about one night, with gas lamps on each corner to light the dark, and polished carriages running behind the horses, and lots of fine manners … Do you think, mister, with all that settlement around you that you’re freer than me to make your fate? Do you click your tongue at my story? Well I wish I knew yours. Your father’s doing is in you, like his father’s was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that’s all.

I know it, it’s true, I’ve always known it. I scorn myself for a fool for all the bookkeeping I’ve done; as if notations in a ledger can fix life, as if some marks in a book can control things. There is only one record to keep and that’s the one I’m writing now, across the red lines, over the old marks. It won’t help me nor anyone I know. “This is who’s dead,” it says. It does nothing but it can add to the memory. The only hope I have now is that it will be read — and isn’t that a final curse on me, that I still have hope? I would laugh if I could, who will come here to find my ledgers of scrawls: that old toothless drover who took my savings to bring back beef on the hoof? If he wasn’t a liar he was old enough to be smart. I think I knew he was lying when I gave him the money, I was paying him a debt, I was paying him to leave. Maybe the circuit judge … although now I’m not clear in my head whether I wrote Jenks’s letter or not, did I give it to Alf or not, and anyway why should he come by since nothing is left to judge?

Jenks let free that bent-over fellow the minute he saw what chance there was. The hunchback scuttled off in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of him later, he was one of those looting Isaac’s store. At least I think so. In all that noise I can’t be sure what I saw, there was moonlight hot as the sun, bright as noon, but it was like the light of pain shining from the blackness.

“Jenks!” I remember Molly screamed. She had run outside and was standing, waving at the coach coming down the street. The Sheriff was atop his hearse wagon, the door on the side flapping open and shut. Sitting up there with him was Miss Adah and Jessie.

He thought Molly wanted to get on. “Hurry up, ma’am,” he said, leaning over to help her, “them bastards is about to cut loose.” And I thought too she was climbing up, even though I had despaired of getting her to go. But what she did, she pulled him down from the box and was all over the poor man, holding around his neck, clutching him, giving him kisses, moaning out her words: “Jenks, get him for me, you’ve got to get him, you have a hankerin’ don’t you Jenks, I’ve seen it, a woman can tell. Get him and I’ll go with you anywhere, I’ll be your natural wife, anything you please, I swear—”

The boy and I were looking on and the two women from up on the box. All the sound was coming from the saloon.

“For God’s sake Jenks,” said Jessie turning and looking back. “For God’s sake will you come on!”

“But ma’am, if’n hew please!” He was trying to get loose of Molly.

“Jenks, just one shot, why the man’s a target, why he’s just looking to come up dead!”

“Lady I done throwed my star away.”

Adah was weeping: “I left him up there, he’s still breathin’. I’ve no call to leave that dyin’ man alone.”

“Hush up! You dumb old woman,” Jessie said to her. “You think that damn dealer is worth gettin’ what Mae is gettin’? You want to go back there with Mae and that other one? — Lord God, Jenks, will you come on!”

At the saloon the crowd was spilling back on the porch and into the street. People were trying to see in like a crowd pushing toward the words of a preacher. You could hear Mae’s screams. I knew it wouldn’t be long and we’d all be suffering Turner, feeling his sermon. When he had come only God knows. He must have ridden down from the rocks, grinning to see such a boom of people; he must have come from the north, on the heels of the miners, he had left that way after all, the scythe swings back.

Wouldn’t I have seen him otherwise? All afternoon I had stood watching the dust roll back from the flats, once the stage came and went it was like a signal, folks were tying up their things, loading their animals and taking the walk. In front of my cabin it was like how many years before at Westport, Missouri, people standing and saying goodbye to each other but with their eyes gazing at the plains in front of them.

That old egg lady left, riding a wagon empty but for squawks; a chicken feather floated out behind her. Jonce Early pulled up stakes without so much as a look back. There were other smart ones, a handcart couple walked by with no expression at all on their faces. But most of those people who’d come looking for work, they were not moving beyond the street.

I had looked on too numb to move watching the street fill to overflow. I didn’t want to believe it, I wanted to tell Angus he was lying, I had the wild thought if I ran up the trail and pushed boulders across it, I could turn them back, those miners. It was a farrago, a sweltering of angers. The noise of talk was like a hoarse wind blowing. A miner came up to me and said quietly, “Stage due anytime you know?”

“Why yes,” I said with all politeness, “matter of fact it should be here this afternoon.”

He spit out some plug and looking at the ground said, “I’ll buy a passage, ye don’t mind.” He gave me a pouch of dust so I took him inside and wrote a ticket. When he left there was another miner in the door. And before long there was a line of men waiting their turn for tickets. They dropped bills into my hand, silver, chunks of high-graded. Through the doorway, over their heads I could see some towners watching.

I wrote slowly, making more contracts than Alf could comfortably carry, and thinking Now isn’t this queer how I got through these motions with my hands of ice, how peculiar to be doing business; like I once saw a man who was shot in the heart, he was as dead as you can be but he walked around awhile before he lay down.

I knew Zar and Isaac would come after me once the truth struck them, they would make me share their suffering. I gave the last man in line his ticket and they pushed in past him, their faces all dismay. They didn’t want to believe what their own eyes told them.

“The road Blue, whan shall they make the road!” the Russian kept saying.

“You know these flats out here, the way nothing is growing? Well when it’s an orchard of big, leafy trees with each leaf a five-dollar gold piece — that’s when you’ll get your road.”

“It ain’t fair,” Isaac said, “it’s not right. What do I do now, tell me what I’m s’posed to do now!”

“I don’t know Isaac.”

“I said it would come to this, I knew it would. I’m ruined! Ye sure sold me, ye surely traded me!”

“Maybe so.”

“Why I’d have found Ezra by now, I’d be with my brother today but for you!”

“I haven’t heard you complaining the past year Isaac. You’ve done alright.”

“Is that right, is that so? Curse your wretched soul I’ve put every penny I made into this street!”

“You must stop this Blue,” the Russian shook his fist, “you must do something!”

“Shall I put the gold back in the ground?”

“My hotel! My beautiful hotel! From where shall come the customers—”

“Goddamn you both, why don’t you let me be! What is it you want of me! Why am I the one always, people come running to me — get out of here, go on get out, I’m as hung up as you, can’t you see that?”

“Frand—”

“Why you think you’re bad off? You don’t even know! You’ve made enough money from this town, you’ve made enough I’ll tell you and if you don’t have tidy little bundles cached away you’re bigger fools than I take you for.”

“Blue, please”—the Russian held out his arms and he had this begging smile on his face, I could see that gold tooth of his—“please, we are losing everything.”

I had to sit down. I put my hands on my face and I felt my breath on my icy fingers. Those white-faced, black-derbied Eastern sons of Hell! How long had they known — maybe since the afternoon they waited for Alf, fanning themselves and keeping their mouths shut? Someone said they had made tests when they were up there, they had made markings on their charts — a year past! But they’d had their intentions, else why had the Territory Office sent Hayden Gillis? How long had we been waiting for something that was never to be? Even as the street was filling up the ore wagons were carting worthless rock westerly to the mills. Even as I scanned the flats each morning that letter to Brogan was lying on my desk. There is no fool like a fool in the West, why you can fool him so bad he won’t even know his possibilities are dead, his hopes only ghosts.

I said: “Get out while you can. Load your wagons and travel, because sure as you’re breathing it won’t be long and all these people stuck here like pigs on a pitchfork — they’re going to set up a holler.”

“What’s this!”

“A pair of dumb cowboys, that’s all you are. Fretting about your property when it’s your hides you should be thinking of—”

“What ye mean?”

“God help you what do you think I mean, you got eyes don’t you? This town is a bust. Every man in it has been sold!”

Now what I wonder is why they didn’t leave. I saw by the looks on their faces they knew I was telling them right. They had the chance to get out and I can’t account that they stayed, that they ran out of my door and went back, each to his selling counter, putting on a face and coddling the customer right past the time it became too late to leave. Will we not believe our disasters? Or was there nowhere they could go? It was the same with Swede too, there was time to pack and move on before the moon rose but he didn’t, not even in those last free moments after the man came.

Molly had opened her door to see the fuss, she stood there barefooted with her hair hanging down, she looked like Wrath. By the time Zar and Isaac had run out there was a dawn in her eyes. Color came into her cheeks and she broke out in a smile and she said to the boy, who was standing by her: “Lord, did you ever hope to see such a sight? Mayor, is that you I hear telling people to get on their horse?”

She began to giggle, she was really joyful, it might have been some farm girl laughing at her suitor. “Jimmy I swear, listen to Mayor Blue here, all these people he’s been a-wishin’ and a-wantin’, well here they are and look at him, he’s sick, the shit is scared out of him—”

When Alf came along in the afternoon he had from a distance the sight of a town filled with people and he didn’t need to be told what was going on. He reined his team a good way out, near the graves, and turned them around the other way before he and his helper started to toss off the freight. Even so they weren’t fast enough, miners were running out there, lugging their gear, there was a rush for the stage. I ran out too to say something to Alf but he was in no mood for talk. He grabbed the money pouch I gave him without even counting and climbed up on the box and flung out his whip and off the coach went, groaning, men were all over it like ants. I watched it going and then one man who hadn’t gotten a good hold fell off and he ran after for a bit, ending up standing out there waving his fist as the dust covered him.

Here was all this freight, boxes and barrels, standing in the open like wreckage. In my hands was the order list for Alf, and I looked back at the street and tore the paper into pieces. Swede came out, half running, pulling a handcart behind him, and began to load it up. He grunted and sweat ran down from his yellow hair and he picked up those barrels in a hug, those crates, even scooping up crackers where they had spilled out of a box broken open in its fall.

“Damnit,” I said to him, “it’s not some lady’s rug you have to leave clean!”

He began pulling the cart in, it was Isaac’s goods more than his own, he leaned forward on the bar like some ass, some dumb ox. I couldn’t help being furious at him, I wanted to hit him.

I walked beside Swede, my eyes on the town. It had no earthly reason for being there, it made no sense to exist. People naturally come together but is that enough? Just as naturally we think of ourselves alone. “Listen to me Swede: Gather up your belongings, take the locks off your spokes and you and your woman get out of here. With those bulls you got you’ll need a good start. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Aaah, ya—”

“Find yourself some other Swedes …”

I had the same advice for Bert Albany. When I got back to the street I suddenly thought of Bert and I sought him out. He was in the crib where they lived, comforting his wife, but nobody was comforting him. At first he didn’t want to leave—“Where to?” he said, he felt a loyalty to Zar, but more he was afraid any trip would put his Chinagirl in labor. I said, “Bert don’t argue with an old man. Wrap up what you can carry and come with me. No child has ever been born in this town, and that’s the saddest thing I will ever know, but it’s true and it always will be.”

Roebuck, the smithy, had a wagon, I found him ready to leave and I gave him all the greenbacks in my pocket to take on the couple. But when I put Bert and his wife up behind him I said only: “This man has consented to let you ride.” And I walked with the wagon through the milling people, stopping at the edge of the flats and watching it go on. “We was doing alright, Mr. Blue,” the boy called back, “what happened to us? Where do we go now?” And I saw that little girl turn back to look, a puffy, tear-stained face taking in with her eyes what her mind didn’t understand.

Soon there was a string of travelers spread out on the flats. And then, not ten feet in front of me, Angus Mcellhenny was standing, pulling tight the ropes on his mule’s load; and though I had known what to tell Zar and Isaac and Swede and Bert my brain was muddled now, and I couldn’t believe what was happening any more than they could. I went over to Angus but no words would leave my mouth, I didn’t even know what I wanted from him. His pipe was tight in his teeth, he wouldn’t look at me.

“You don’t tarry, Angus.”

“I’m no fool. Ye’ll be traveling yerself hae you any sense.”

“Angus,” I grabbed his arm, “can there still be gold up there?”

He sighed: “That mountain is picked so hollow, why it’s holey as a honeycomb, there’s nothin’ holdin’ it up save air. Listen to me Blue, there’s maybe a score of men still up at the site who can’t bear to be sold out. They’ll rot up there tryin’ to take it out on the rock.”

“It’s a property isn’t it? The Company will sell it if they can.”

“Aye, there’s enough fer salt. They will make a Chinaman of some poor soul who will buy the stock and come out and dig. And when he sees what he’s got he’ll blow out his brains.”

Another miner standing near Angus gave a laugh.

I tried to say something but the words choked in my throat. I looked ahead at the endless reaches, lit red in the late afternoon, and I felt the blood drying up in me.

“Blue,” Angus Mcellhenny said softly, and he glanced a moment at me, “dinna spook me wi’ yer troubles. Goodbye to ye. I know yer feelings fer yer wee town but I canna bear to think on it.”

Well that was the moment I asked myself what I was going to do. Everything was come to nothing. You try to dispose of your life to some purpose even though it appears to have none. My savings were gone; if I could get Molly and the boy on the buckboard how far could they go? Like Angus marching away out there among the others was the shambles of the town blowing off in every direction. All afternoon I watched to see who was leaving, feeling the pain of slow torture. But I have always been one for the protraction of misery and perhaps I counted each man who left as one less twist to the final pain. What I mean to say is I never made up my mind to leave, my will was exhausted. When the dusk came on there was a stillness over the town although the numbers were still thick. Men stood around, hardly anyone was moving. Anger, like heat, lay on the dust of the air. Jimmy came running by me, his eyes bulging, his mouth open as if he were about to scream. I looked where he’d come from, and I walked closer to see what I was seeing. From inside Zar’s saloon came the sound of one man’s haw haw laugh. Tied up at the railing was a bony used-up nag that I saw was once Hausenfield the German’s handsome bay.

Looking over the doors I could see only his shoulders and his hat. But then he raised his head and there was his dark reflection in Zar’s fancy mirror behind the bar. Two Bad Men, the Man multiplied. I remember feeling: He never left the town, it was waiting only for the proper light to see him where he’s been all the time.

“Hey, who’s the boss here,” he called out.

Someone pointed to Zar who was standing at the end of the counter.

“Say, friend, come have a drink, it’s good pizen ye made, I’ll swar—”

Zar didn’t move, and in the silence of that packed saloon the man leaned down the bar and shoved a full glass along. It went the whole distance, people stepping back not to block the way; and at the end of the counter it tipped gently on its side, a-making a pool of whiskey that spread and began to drip to the floor.

With a frown Zar lifted the bottom of his apron and began to dab at the liquid. The Man thought that was funny and laughed, and everyone looking on in that steaming glowing room began to laugh with him. Then Turner stood up to his full height so I could see now that blaze on the side of his face, the peculiar stare of his eye. He had caught sight of Mae and Mrs. Clement, standing shy behind the Russian.

“Hey honey,” he said softly but there was no other sound now. “Hey honey,” he said crooking his finger. In that moment I could feel my heart tipping, spilling out its shame, its nausea. I had to run from the Trick, I couldn’t tolerate it, what other name is there for the mockery that puts us back in our own steps? Here the earth turns and we turn with it, around it spins and we go mad with it.

Inside Jenks’s stable I found the mule and led him quickly to the cabin, but not by the street but behind the houses. I hitched him to the Major’s rig and then I went around to the front and stepped inside the door.

There was no light and I couldn’t see. I heard a rustle from the dugout and when I lit the lamp and held it up I saw them both cowering back inside there. Molly had the boy in front of her, he was gripping the shotgun; and over his shoulder she was pointing that knife at me.

“The mule’s hitched,” I said, “you want to quick take some things and ride out.”

“I’ll kill you Mayor,” she whispered. She stared at me like I was some animal ready to spring, poised with her legs wide and her hand high holding that stiletto. She looked as if it was I who had summoned him up.

“Don’t come any closer—”

“Molly in the name of God listen to what I’m telling you!”

In the shadows her eyes had the light of fire.

“Don’t you care!” I shouted. “You want it to happen again? You think I can atone more? Take him away from here, you’re mother to him, a bobcat’ll curry its young, won’t you do that, won’t you take him the hell out of here!”

The boy stood between us and now he raised the gun a little. “Look at this,” I said, “it should make you proud the way you’ve hexed this boy. Well I’m finished, I don’t want him, he’s nothing to me, go on the both of you, get out. The rig’s yours, the mule’s yours, everything — but quit my sight, you’ve been only misery to me. I rue the day I saw you Molly, I swear I curse the moment I laid eyes on you. Had I known what you was why I would have stood up to be shot, I would have held out my arms to the Bad Man. Shoot true, brother, or Molly Riordan is waiting who will do it much slower—”

And all the while I raged I could see I had no name in her gaze, this was what she wanted, for the Bad Man to return! she’d been waiting for him, a proper faithful wife. Nothing mattered to her, not me, not Jimmy, just herself and her Man from Bodie. I was ready to kill her.

And the boy standing there like he thought he was her son, it filled me with disgust. “What do you think you’re guarding there sonny, something worth the trouble? You think she cares a damn for you? Why she thinks no more of you than she does of me, right now she wouldn’t know if you put that muzzle in your eye and squeezed the trigger. Tell him Molly, he don’t believe me. Why you’re a simp to stand there, you ain’t got half the sense of your Daddy, you did and you’d be riding away right now!” I said, “Go on Jimmy, get out of here while you can, you don’t need her, you’re not the first she’s fooled, it’s no shame. Go on, boy. Go on—”

But he only raised the barrel a little. Well I’m thankful for that, there was not a flicker of belief in his eyes. What he was to do was not my reckoning, it burst from him with the force of shot, he was a long time in the squeeze. How I failed is how Molly did not fail, and in the miserable waste of our three lives I want to declare only for my own guilt.

Now in all this and what followed only once did it strike me to overcome both of them, hustle them on the wagon and take them away myself. It was at this moment, with no thought as how it could be done. I lunged at Molly over the boy’s outstretched arms almost at the same instant she heard the coach coming down the street. She crouched and came up past me, swiping at my ribs with the stiletto, putting a rent in my side — and she was out of there while I was stumbling over the boy.

That was as close as I came. Afterwards I hadn’t the time.

“Jenks,” screamed Jessie, “in a second I’m driving this thing myself, Jenks—”

“Now,” Molly was cooing, “here you tell me Mr. Jenks will run and just one man he has to take care of?” Her voice was as soft and natural as a sane woman’s. “Why Sheriff, I know you can shoot the balls off a man quick as a blink. You’re not runnin’ Sheriff, no sir, it makes no sense. Look here, even this shit yellow spine of a Mayor ain’t running.”

“That’s his business, please ma’am, the way I see hit I can’t shoot all those people down in much health.”

“Just him,” Molly gripped his shirt again, “just him, just that Bad Man from Bodie, you know what he did to me, you have any idea?”

“Well—”

“Jenks I promise good things, I swear, I can do more than those two on the box put together. Do you believe that?”

That brought Miss Adah out of her daze. Everything Molly had been saying suddenly made her stand up and point her finger: “Why I always knew,” she said with a voice of surprise, “yes I did, even when I passed on my wedding dress to you, that you was no lady.”

Down the street someone near the door of Zar’s Palace turned and saw the woman’s figure atop the coach. He said something and then a few men had separated from the crowd and were running toward us, shouting. The Bad Man was putting a match to everyone.

“Oh Lord, Jenks—” Jessie screamed, and she took up the reins. The Sheriff started to climb to the box but Molly grabbed his arm. At the same time I found myself slapping the horses’ rumps just as Jimmy did, although I think we had different reasons. And off lurched the coach, Miss Adah falling back on the roof.

The wheels spun up a cloud of blue dust under the moon. A minute after they were gone, three or four men hooted by on their horses, giving the chase, choking us standing there, flattening us against the cabin wall. I never saw either of those women again and I don’t know what happened to them.

“Oh lookit thet!” said Jenks. “Godamighty,” his voice broke, “lookit what hew done to me!”

Molly giggled: “Sheriff honey, you’ll listen to me now, won’t you?”

I’m trying to put down what happened but the closer I’ve come in time the less clear I am in my mind. I’m losing my blood to this rag, but more, I have the cold feeling everything I’ve written doesn’t tell how it was, no matter how careful I’ve been to get it all down it still escapes me: like what happened is far below my understanding beyond my sight. In my limits, taking a day for a day, a night for a night, have I showed the sand shifting under our feet, the terrible arrangement of our lives?

I can’t remember her foul words, poor Molly, what she said to Jenks, but only that it kept Jimmy rooted where he stood; and that by and by Jenks was spinning his Colt and checking each chamber, his simpleton pride rising like manhood to her promises. Or did he really believe he could stop the riot by killing Turner? At the far end of the street a bunch of men were running out of sight toward John Bear’s cabin. Next to the saloon Isaac’s store was locked and dark, but already someone was banging on the door.

In those moments I was unable to act. The way I am, I will do as well as anyone until a showdown. But also I was raging that Jenks could believe this woman cared for anything but herself and the Bad Man. The wolfy fool licked the syrup of her words and was marching up the street almost before I could run back inside and get my gun from the drawer. Molly ran in the dugout, already praying with that cross of hers. Jimmy, holding the shotgun slack in one hand, was in a stupor. “Get back inside!” I said to him.

I ran to catch up with Jenks: “You know what you’re doing?”

He was trotting like a hero: “Reckon,” he allowed himself to say. I wasn’t worth too much of his attention now Molly’s declarations were in his ears.

“Well I hope you find it worth it, Mr. Sheriff,” I said. “But you better have a plan!”

“Stay back—”

“You’re a damn fool. He won’t give you the time to sight. This ain’t a target to shoot, this is a Man from Bodie!”

“I kin get ’m awraht.”

I wanted to believe him. On the left side of the street one side of Swede’s tent was buckling and there was the clatter of pots and kettles. I could see now to the end of the street and in the bright blue shadow they were knocking John Bear’s shack to pieces. I thought Yes, can one shot do it? It will scatter the flames and the fire will go out.

13

That was the idea I held on to like my life, it moved me to action, it was a clear simple thought and I took it over from Jenks, becoming the fool he’d been, lifting the fool’s hat from his dead body to fit on myself, becoming Molly’s final fool, as I am now. But who could not in the face of such ruin, with the race burning crazy in that moon’s light? It was justice to kill him, the single face, the one man; I had to do something and what was most futile made the most sense. It was a giving in to them all, every one of those accursed people rolling over each other in the still warm dust of the street, scampering this way and that to find what to destroy.

But I wasn’t going after it the way Jenks did. He marched up the steps holding his polished pistol and he pulled one of the saloon doors back. “Hey!” he cried, raising the gun to sight, but the flood of light from inside made him blink, and what easy game he was bathed and blinking against the dark. After a great second’s silence there was a rush for the door, men stumbling outside, their shadows looming long on the lighted porch, down the steps, shadows turning into men in the street. Jenks was knocked off his balance, he tried to right himself, his gun hand was swinging wildly.

I heard Zar’s voice, “No, no!” and maybe the Russian was going toward the door thinking in a panic of the mirror in back of his bar, or the lamps hanging so grandly above the sawdust. I think it was Jenks’s wild shot which caught Zar in the stomach. From inside the Bad Man’s gun sounded twice, but Jenks was hit twice, the first shot took him in the chest and spinned him around, the second surely broke his neck. Jenks did a clown’s tumble down the steps and there he was twisted double, his face in open-mouthed surprise looking up at me from under his arm.

He’s still there, they’re all as they are. I can write with one hand but I can’t dig. Horses shied away from his fall, a man was running toward me, I thought What is he going to tell me? but he had a barrel stave in his hand. I held up my gun and he veered off like a dog on a richer scent.

Across the street Swede’s restaurant was a pile of canvas, humping and shifting, a living thing. He was pulling his wife out from under and I ran over and helped him. We put her on her feet and she grabbed Swede and held on to him, sobbing and hugging him. He was crying too, holding an iron skillet in his hand, his anger making him cry, and when it got the best of him he broke out of her grasp, cursing, and started to beat at the movement under the canvas, swinging that skillet with all his strength.

Helga pulled at him, trying to get him away. People were running every which way, meeting and grappling in the street. It was a lunatic town.

“Swede,” I cried, “get her out of here!”

He came to his senses, I have a glimpse now of his face suddenly calm under its shock of hair, white in the moon’s color. He picked up his wife and walked away quickly, straight out past the sump, going toward the shadow of the rocks.

From Zar’s Palace issued a woman’s rising voice of moans stopping short in one deathly scream.

I had remembered a bale of barbed wire standing behind Isaac’s store, a big spool of it, maybe Isaac from Vermont had been expecting the herds to come to Hard Times. I made for it, proud of my cunning; and I was in such a fever with my idea, the tear in my side didn’t hurt, nor the thought of Molly and the boy awaiting what might be, nor the moment’s glimpse I had, going down the alley of the looters beating down Isaac’s door. Through the walls of the saloon I could hear Turner begin to sing drunkenly, throw the furniture around — and it was thrilling to concentrate my hate.

Now from that spot there was a clear view to the rock hills lying under the moon as far east as the eye could see. I have the image in my mind of John Bear looking on from a ledge up there, although I’m not sure now this was the moment I spotted him. What can I say, he had no hat or shirt as he waited there on one knee while the mob wrecked his shack, by then he had no reason to wear white men’s clothes. I can’t understand how my eye found him, he was so still. But the moon picked him out for me, it was a lye moon etching him on my brain. There was motion in his stillness, something already done in his pose, and although I was not to see him again there is no break in the picture I have between then and this morning when I found the Russian on the floor by his bar.

Plotting for the Bad Man I couldn’t have understood John Bear last night, if I’d known what he was contemplating it would have made no sense to me. I was dragging that heavy spool up the alley in sweat and in pain and in righteousness. I saw Swede return, striding heavily toward Isaac’s store, and I called him and made him help me with the burden. “Ezra!” came Isaac Maple’s cry from within his store, “Ezraa-a-a!” out of the cracks and crashes from within and the agonized Swede wanted to go help him, but I kept him with me, infecting him with my madness, and like penitents hurrying before God’s wrath we made a bed of barbs on the porch, a trip wire from one post to the other, unwinding the roll, pushing it back and forth, back and forth, as Turner sang.

Swede had a length of planking and with it he climbed atop the overhang and lay flat, waiting; while I stepped back into the street feeling the moon’s light like a desert sun on my back. Behind the man’s horse I crouched, Hausenfield’s bay — a friend, like me, spurred to its bones — and “Turner!” I cried out. “Do you dare come out, Turner!” screaming his name again and again, the voice in my throat someone else’s, some stranger’s voice doing my work while I watched quietly as one by one the gas lights inside tinkled out and the saloon became dark. Then I shut up. My fingers squeezed out the slack in the trigger, my arm rested across the man’s own saddle, with my other hand I held the bay’s ear twisted tightly in my fist. In the great silence between that saloon door and me there was no movement. But all around there was riot: people were banging on sheet iron, attacking Isaac’s rented boxes down the street; someone was trying to get his wagon going but his horse shied and reared; it was the moment I saw, from the corner of my eye, the hunchback scuttling out of Maple Bros. store with his arms laden, a roll of yard goods streaming out after him.

Well he had the darkness he wanted, if he’d kept the light he might have seen the wire, but he needed to know where I was, where he’d be shooting. He came out, those doors snapping back against the wall, just a shape, a shadow with a hole of fire in its center. Even before the thwack in the horse’s side I had let go my shot. I heard a roar of surprise and saw him fall across the porch, a shadow becoming a man hideously stuck on those infernal barbs.

It is so easy if you have the conviction. I stood up and fired two more times, missing him but not caring, feeling the wonder of the event like a child. A fine spray of blood from the bay’s neck covered one side of my face, I could taste it. The Bad Man was trying to get off the wire, but I had hit him in the leg and he couldn’t raise himself. Swede didn’t have to swing down with that plank, he hung over the edge trying to bash the Bad Man but there was no need, his reach was too short. “No, Swede!” The man turned over on his back on his bed of barbs and shot straight up through the wood.

Swede slumped where he lay, dying like he would, with no sound. This morning Helga came back to the street from her hiding place. She called him and looked everywhere, poking at bodies in the wreckage, but she didn’t think to look up. Then she caught sight of those long arms hanging over the edge of the porch top, that head of yellow hair — and for a long while she screamed at him to come down. Swede dead was one of my blunders, one of the last great ones in my life of blunders beginning when I came to this land. I clubbed the Man from Bodie till he was insensible but it didn’t help Swede.

And then you see that wasn’t my last blunder at all, for I didn’t kill Turner I stopped too soon. It was still the Trick that made me cry out my misery and feel the shame of my being. Had I finished my work I would have only damned myself. All around the fights were going on, miners and towners trying to cripple and kill one another, hate riding their voices, gleaming on their knives, imprinted behind their running boots. And none of it had to do with Turner. He was just a man, my God! I felt his weight, I felt the weight of him over my shoulder, I smelled the sweat of him and the whiskey, it was blood that ran from his head and matted his hair. He had lost part of a staring eye on the barbs, his leg was broke, all my senses were glutted with him, I held his wrists together in my hands, and stumbled past that patient horse standing in the street and bleeding to death — and what else but the continuing Mockery could have given me the strength to tote him to the cabin?

“Alright Molly? Is it alright now? Is this what you wanted Molly?”

But she didn’t hear me. She stood against the wall as far away as she could and watched me drop him on the table. I could hardly catch my breath, I thought my head would burst and I remember falling and crawling to the cabin door and leaning my back against it because I felt if I lay down I would never be able to get up again. And I wish now I could not have seen what happened, or if I had to see it that my mind could split me from the memory. I would like to die on some green somewhere in the coolness of a tree’s shadow, when did I last sit with my back against a tree? the wish is so strong in me, like a thirst, I believe I must perish from it. When I think that Ezra Maple might have put him up on his mule and ridden him off to learn the storekeep’s trade; or that I might have taken him away myself, in those first hours, before Molly ever put her hooks into him, a carpenter’s son, just a hollow-eye orphan — a groan pushes through my lips like my ghost already in its Hell before I am dead. Helga walks up every few minutes, her hair hanging straight down, and she stands gazing at me with her mad eyes while she slowly tears her dress to tatters. Is it Molly again, those eyes? Is it all the eyes of those dead faces? I think no man has ever had such a watchfulness of dead faces, I have farmed the crop of this country, the land’s good yield along with Men from Bodie.

I told him to get by the door for it wouldn’t be minutes before the looters would reach us. I said with what breath I could gather, “Jimmy, over here, stand here with that gun.” But he was looking at her as he’d been looking for the year or more, he couldn’t do anything but look at her. It was his suffering, it was what she demanded.

What caution was Molly’s, what disbelief as she slowly moved toward Turner, the man of her dreaming, the great insulter, lying helpless in his own stinking juices on the eating table. Yes it was him alright the same one sure enough by God it was him and no need to wave her cross for protection, a knife would do, the stiletto, now she would use it. A jab to see if he was still alive, a gentle stick to hurt him awake, and he flinched and groaned. Back she jumped and then forward into another place and he tried to writhe away from the point. “Eh?” says Molly. “Eh?” as if to say remember me? remember your Molly? “Eh?” does this make you remember, or this, or this! — almost dancing with the grace of retribution.

“Molly, oh Lord, Molly stop it, stop it—” I shouted stumbling up, going for her. It was an endless frenzy, I cannot describe what she was doing, God have mercy on her, I saw the boy’s horror, for how many endless moments did he endure it? And how else could he speak, finally, when he had to call her and claim her as a right? How else could he make the sound of his need, create it true again? He spoke as she had taught him, manfully, with the proper instrument, booming of birth.

It was the moment Turner’s arms had closed around Molly as if in embrace. My hand was over the muzzle of the gun but the blast killed them both. Fainting, I could hear people outside tipping over the water tank, and it was that sound I listened to, the spread of water, an indecent gush.

14

And now I’ve put down what happened, everything that happened from one end to the other. And it scares me more than death scares me that it may show the truth. But how can it if I’ve written as if I knew as I lived them which minutes were important and which not; and spoken as if I knew the exact words everyone spoke? Does the truth come out in such scrawls, so bound by my limits?

But for Helga I have the town to myself, who’s not dead is scattered over the plains. The air is hot, and dry and still. The light of the sun parches me, my mouth is filled with dust, I cannot make spittle. There is no wind to stir the welcome banner, not a cloud. Only the flock of buzzards — sometimes rising, fluttering from some imagined scare — makes an occasional shadow. The street is busy with the work of jackals and vultures, flies, bugs, mice. Together they make a hum of enterprise.

I can forgive anyone but myself. The way I’m facing I can see out over the flats as the afternoon sun bakes colors across them. Who am I looking for, Jimmy? He’s gone, he’s riding hard, that mule and rig will take him places, another Bad Man from Bodie, who used to be Fee’s boy.

I seem to remember a man saying once they would build a railroad along the wagon trails west. It will bring them along the edge of the flats with their steam engines. I can see if I peer hard enough, I can see those telegraph poles up there like stitching between the earth and sky. Am I dying that slow?

This morning, before I started this, when the pain was too much to sit with, before my arm turned numb, I walked up and down seeing the fruit of the land. Isaac is dead in his store. In the rubble of Zar’s Palace that Mrs. Clement is dead although I don’t see a mark on her. The dealer must be upstairs. Mae is lying across a table, her dress pulled up around her neck. Her skull is broken and her teeth scattered on the table and on the floor.

In front of his bar lies the Russian, scalped expertly. The bullet he got was in his stomach — a red stain over his apron — he must still have been alive when John Bear reached him. As much as anything it was the sight of Zar, who once struck the Indian from behind, which got me to take my books out here and sit down and try to write what happened. I can forgive everyone but I cannot forgive myself. I told Molly we’d be ready for the Bad Man but we can never be ready. Nothing is ever buried, the earth rolls in its tracks, it never goes anywhere, it never changes, only the hope changes like morning and night, only the expectations rise and set. Why does there have to be promise before destruction? What more could I have done — if I hadn’t believed, they’d be alive today. Oh Molly, oh my boy … The first time I ran, the second time I stood up to him, but I failed both times, no matter what I’ve done it has failed.

Helga is standing here, she will watch me die. Who will take care of Swede’s wife? The mortal stench is everywhere, especially on me, and there is so much carrion in this town I wonder every buzzard on the land won’t be here before the sun sets. It has crossed my mind to set the street afire — that would scatter them. But there’s no wind and it would be hard work, harder than I can do.

And I have to allow, with great shame, I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.