Cottonwood (4 page)

As I approached the saloon a party consisting of six or seven men and one woman crossed the road and entered. I hurried in, took Tim’s place behind the bar and began serving. All the men but one were in working clothes, and well-known to me, some of them daily customers of the saloon; the last was paying for all the drinks, and he was dressed as a gentleman, with a better hat than the one I’d destroyed that morning and as fine a fur coat as I’d seen since leaving Ohio. The woman was dressed like no woman I had ever seen in any bar, any place, in fur and a fine hat, and dainty shoes peeking out from under the hem of her coat. It wasn’t her clothing that captivated, though. It was her face, long and sweet, her eyes large and luminescent, even in the dim lamplight; it wasn’t so much the fineness of the features, either, as what she did with them when I served her a glass of port wine from a dusty bottle that had sat untouched on the backbar since the day I opened, and on the backbar of my dead predecessor before that. An expression of merriment at her mouth stopped just shy of being a smirk, one that conveyed at once fondness, amused regret and recognition, as though we had once known each other in some distant, civilized locale. What was more, that look seemed there for my benefit alone, the result of a joke only we two shared, and I was sure it was visible from no one else’s vantage point, not even that of the dapper gentleman who was her husband.

They were of course the much-discussed Levals, and the men with them were the ones building their house. Leval took a drink and swept his gaze slowly around the room as though dispassionately appraising it for sale.

“What’s a saloon need with a skylight?” he wanted to know.

I was annoyed but I answered him. “It does double duty occasionally as a photographic studio,” I said, though at that point I hadn’t taken a photograph in six months or more.

“Oh, you’ll have to take our picture,” his wife said.

I calculated roughly the expense of buying fresh chemicals in my head. “Maybe it would be best to wait until your house is complete, and we could do it there.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” she said. Her husband didn’t respond, lost in thought as he contemplated the primitive skylight Juno and I had installed. For a while now I’d considered it a waste of money, like the stereograph camera, since neither one was being put to regular use. The prospect of photographing this woman, even in the company of her husband, made me think differently.

“All right, Maggie,” the husband said. “Best get you back to the hotel before tongues start wagging about me letting my wife frequent saloons.” He said this with a broad wink, and as they walked out the front door into the frigid night and down the street to their lodgings she waved at the laughing men in a familiar way.

Leval was back in forty-five minutes or so, and he seemed so much more at ease that I presumed he had taken the time to screw his lovely wife, but that may have just been the way my mind was oriented that evening. He was close to Tiny Rector’s age, which is to say fifteen or twenty years older than I was, but with the apparent vitality and energy of a much younger man. His wife couldn’t have been many years past thirty; presumably she inspired some of that youthful vigor.

“What’s the volume I spy behind you on the bar?”

“Suetonius,” I said, handing the volume to him. He opened it to a random page and examined it as though he understood it, going so far as to nod as if in appreciation of its contents; then he smiled wistfully and returned the book to me.

“I did very poorly in Greek and Latin both. I like to think it was for lack of effort rather than denseness on my part.”

I put the book back in its niche and smiled politely, none too interested in his schooldays.

“My wife, on the other hand, she reads both like she reads English.”

“Is that so?” I asked, at pains not to betray my excitement at the thought of so enticing a creature in possession of a classical education.

“She’s mad for it. In a month or so our library will be arriving. You can feel free to borrow anything in it.”

I thanked him. My own library’s holdings were so meager that I was on what I reckoned to be about my twentieth reading of
De
Vita Caesarum
, and I told him so.

He looked askance at me. “How does a saloonkeeper in a remote place like this come to read the classics?”

I took offense and had to temper my response. “May as well ask how a reader of the classics comes to keep a saloon in a remote place like this.”

“How, then?”

One thing I particularly valued about the prairie was the reticence of most of those living there, and the lack of interest, or overt interest anyway, in one’s neighbor’s origins. Though the substance of his questioning grated at me, his tone was one of gentle, amiable curiosity, and I gave in. “My father was a minister, and he instructed me in the classics from an early age. After his death my education was provided by the church, up to a point. After that I taught myself.”

“What else besides Latin and Greek?”

“Bits and pieces of various other subjects,” I said. My education was spotty enough that I didn’t care to shed light on the specific lacunae therein.

“Any other languages?”

“I know French and German. My mother was from a town called Mulhouse, in Alsace, and she spoke both to me.”

He leaned over the bar and slapped me on the shoulder. “My Papa was a Frenchman. We’re probably cousins, somewhere down the line. Though I suppose Alsace is part of Prussia now.” He tugged at his mustache, where it met with his sideburns. “What brought you to Kansas?”

“I had the foolish notion I wanted to be a farmer.”

“You abandon a claim?”

“Still working it, with the help of a hired man,” I said. I laid out for him the particulars of my situation, leaving out Ninna’s slatternly behavior, and he nodded thoughtfully.

“A man with several irons in the fire, then,” he said.

“I suppose that’s true. I’d be glad of giving up farming, though.”

He looked over toward the door for a moment, lifting his chin and scratching it absently, and then he turned back to me.

“You strike me as a man in constant search of a new challenge.”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“What would you think of taking on a partner here?” he asked quietly, having first assured himself that the other men were engaged in other conversation.

“I’m doing fine on my own,” I answered, somewhat taken aback.

“What if I was to tell you that within a year this town is going to grow like a damned weed? You think it might be good to have a bigger saloon, one that won’t be overshadowed by any newcomers?”

“Town’s been growing nice and steady since it’s been here.”

“Started with, what, about fifty men, half of them married?”

I hadn’t lived in town at the time, but that seemed about right, and I nodded.

“And it’s three hundred, three twenty-five now.”

Again I nodded. “Not counting the farms outside of town limits.”

“Bill—can I call you Bill? You call me Marc. Bill, this is between you and me.” He looked about him again, to satisfy himself that the others were still paying no attention. There were perhaps fifteen men in the bar in various degrees of inebriation, singing, laughing, and telling dirty stories. “There’s a railroad going to come through here,” Leval told me. “The Kansas City, Illinois, and Nebraska.”

I shrugged. “Track’s just a few dozen miles to the north and east right now. Two, three months it’ll pass through here. That’s not a secret.”

“I was instrumental in putting the bond issue on the ballot that paid for it, and getting the railroad to consider this as a route. You know why?”

“I don’t,” I allowed.

“Cattle pens are going to go up, Bill. That’s the part that not everybody’s privy to. Once the railroad comes through so will the cattle trails. Do you follow me?”

“I believe I do.”

“And are you familiar with the economic workings of these cattle towns?”

“I know there’s money to be made from cowboys and ranchers and railroads.”

“Goddamn right there’s money to be made. Now keep this to yourself, but Cottonwood’s going to be a cattle town to make Wichita look small and tame.”

“And that’s how come you’re building a house here without ever laying eyes on the place?”

“I’d laid eyes on it. I spent a week here at the hotel last year, drawing up plans and maps for the railroad and the cattle companies. Now why don’t you come see me tomorrow morning and we’ll discuss this. I’m setting up shop down at the bank. I’ll show you the maps of the railroad extensions and the new cattle trail.”

I nodded, considering this, and after ordering another round he left. As the evening dragged on I thought more and more about money and a new building for the saloon, about being in at the start of a cattle boom; it was past midnight, the revelers all gone home, before I thought of the drummer again, out at the Bender place, and my plan to ride out there and beat the tar out of him. The devil with him, I thought, and I limped, exhausted, down the street in the direction of the blacksmith’s loft for a night’s sleep.

I’d been so busy I hadn’t thought of sending to the hotel dining room for something to eat, and all I’d eaten was a little pemmican I had under the counter, salty and mummified. I wandered over to the hotel to see if any of the staff were awake, and knocking gently on the pane I found the other serving girl, dressed for bed. Hattie Steig was a plain, good-natured girl of about twenty-two or twenty-three, a widow whose husband had left town the year before, heading for a homestead in Russell County, where he was to establish the necessary improvements and then send for her. A month after Hiram Steig’s leaving, a body that had been discovered floating a few miles downstream in the Verdigris river shortly after his departure was confirmed as his; the identification had been weeks in coming as the man’s head had been crushed as by a hammer, its throat slit, and the body stripped naked. The money he had been carrying, all that he and Hattie had saved, had been stolen. Poor Hattie, unexpectedly alone and impoverished, had gone to work at the hotel, serving lunch and dinner and cleaning the rooms, all the while fending off the crudest of advances from the lodgers and guests.

“Anything left to eat in there?” I whispered when she opened the door.

“It’s all been put away until morning,” she said. “The Barneses lock the eats up so’s we don’t raid the larder at midnight. You want to come upstairs? I got the room to myself tonight, Kate’s gone for a spell.”

It had been a week since I’d last had a crack at Hattie, and the flesh was weak. At the moment there was no one else in town available to me, except for her mad co-worker Kate and my Ninna, neither of them acceptable alternatives. I was tired and hungry, but it was hard in my circumstances to turn down a chance at female companionship. Anyway, I told myself, it would curb my appetite for self-abuse for a day or two, thus staving off blindness or insanity for a while longer. “You sure it’s safe?” I asked her.

“I’m sure. The Barneses are at home tonight, and none of the guests is the kind that’d talk,” she said. She let me in and shut the door, leading me through the dining room to the stairs, and watching her ample rump swaying at the level of my eyes as she led me up the dark staircase I began to feel the first pleasurable stirrings of arousal.

The serving girls’ room was a tiny attic affair, with a single bed barely wide enough to accommodate two, and dark as pitch despite a large window; no moon or stars shone through the clouds. As we quickly disrobed and slid beneath the covers I wished I could stay the night, hating the idea of having to dress again and make my way back to the forge to sleep in the frozen loft. But the owners of the hotel would be there before sunup to get the kitchen ready, and if I were seen it would be Hattie’s job.

Fifteen minutes later I was creeping back down the stairs, having served what I suspected was Hattie’s real motive, that of warming up the bed; at the moment of ejaculation I had thought of Maggie Leval’s lascivious grin, which image had intensified the sensation considerably, as did the thought that she lay sleeping peaceably with her husband just one floor down in the hotel’s only suite.

My stomach growled as I opened the padlock on the forge, but I didn’t care. It was time for sleep.

2

COTTONWOOD, KANSAS DECEMBER 1872–JANUARY 1873

The Copper Pot

Ninna grumbled all the way into town, and the boy said not a word, just sat there in the back of the wagon looking miserable and cold in his thin coat, despite the sweater his mother had just finished knitting him. It matched the one she’d made for Garth; I had not received one.

“Christmas,” Ninna said. “Ought to spend it at home. Might be a good idea to go to church, even.”

“No Lutheran church around here,” I said. “Where would you go?”

She shrugged. “Ought to go to church on Christmas.”

Despite my best efforts to keep the day harmonious I opened my mouth. “And why would that be?”

“Jesus’s birthday,” she said quietly, gazing in her placid, bovine way at an abandoned dugout just outside of town. The land was unoccupied and had been since before I’d arrived, and I’d never heard whose place it had been or why it had been abandoned.