Cottonwood (7 page)

“Do about it?” I was confused for a moment, and thought perhaps she wanted me to take a poke at him. “Do you mean to say you’re insulted he asked?”

“I mean what are you willing to do to keep me from saying yes?” When I made no answer she elaborated, “Are you going to make me a better offer?”

I could think of no reason why I would want her to say no to such a proposal, save the potential loss of the occasional physical release she offered me, and I would hardly let that stand in the way of the happiness of a girl I considered something of a chum. I knew that wouldn’t pass muster as an answer, though. “I’m already married, Hattie” was what came out.

“You’re indecent,” she hissed at me after a moment’s pause, then turned on her heel and ran back to the hotel. I might have followed her and tried to straighten it out, but a trio of livery workers was making their way toward me and they looked thirsty. When I’d served the three of them I looked up and saw that Maggie had been watching the whole time. She was across the street about a hundred feet away, staring at me with that odd half-smile, and she gave me a small, shy wave with her hand at her waist, as though she’d been waiting just to catch my eye, and then hurried on her way. I was delighted, or at any rate I was until I saw that she was walking toward Kate Bender, who greeted her enthusiastically. They walked off together in the direction of the Levals’ uncompleted house, and my heart dropped from my chest into my belly when I saw that they were arm in arm like the best of friends.

Once the farm’s bitter morning demands were met, my time was mostly taken up with operating the booze wagon and overseeing the construction of the saloon. During this same period Marc was occupied with myriad projects, grand and small, from establishing the Cottonwood Livestock Pen Company to annexing an unincorporated plot of land east of Lincoln Street. The annexation effectively doubled the physical size of Cottonwood, though its southern half was empty grassland. Already, though, the population of the town had begun to swell with word of the construction work his various projects offered, and Marc predicted that building would soon commence there as well. “Prosperity and growth are self-perpetuating, given the right sort of men to promote them at the start,” he said to me one evening, slightly in his cups. I had taken the evening off and Gleason stood in my stead, manning the wagon. Marc and I sat on a couple of empty wooden crates in the drawing room of his unfinished house with a bottle of brandy between us.

In the light of the lantern the unfinished walls of the house cast strange and ominous shadows, and Maggie had declined an offer to join us there. The wind whistled through the beams, and Marc laughed affectionately at his wife’s superstitious nature.

“That’d be the ghost of an Osage chief, there,” he said of a low moaning blast of air from the north. I laughed, too, but despite the fur coat’s warmth I wished we were back at the hotel. No fire could be safely built in the incomplete fireplace, and my fingers were stiff, their skin cracking as I rubbed them together. Marc was, or affected to be, completely unfazed by the temperature, and I didn’t mention my discomfort for fear of disappointing him. He was in an expansive mood, as he often was, and had just offered me a share of the Livestock Pen Company.

“I don’t have anything to invest,” I told him honestly. My investment in the saloon had been 100 percent of its existing equity, since all my liquid assets had gone into its construction. I had a little cash set aside from its running, and Marc was paying me a small salary now, but it didn’t amount to a tenth of what he was proposing to award me in the cattle pens.

“You’ll invest the sweat of your brow,” he said, and he slapped me on the back, then handed me the bottle. “You’re my friend, and in Cottonwood, Kansas, that’s enough to guarantee a place of honor.” He’d swallowed more than his usual fill that evening, and he was one of those drunks who get full of bonhomie and sentiment; it was true, though, that I was his only friend in Cottonwood. There were other educated persons in the town, but none he’d taken a liking to. Dr. Salisbury, our physician, had a solid enough background in the sciences and the arts, but he was a sot, and in his cups he railed bitterly at the fate that had brought him west, and often as not he dissolved into tears; we had a pharmacist of some learning as well in Archie Collins, but Archie kept to himself and didn’t seem interested in companionship or conversation; Tiny Rector’s wife Lillian had been educated at a fine girls’ school in New England, but she was tetchy and had to be handled gently at the best of times.

He sat back on the crate and turned around so that he could see the town through the frame of the house. “One day there’ll be streets named after us,” he said.

“Bill Boulevard,” I joked, but he didn’t laugh; in fact he got more solemn.

“Every town of any importance has great men behind it at its beginnings. We may not have founded the town, Bill, but you and I are the ones who’ll make it known to the world.” He sounded right then as if he were hollow, and only by being that great man could he fill himself up again.

“I guess that’s so, Marc,” I said, and he was quiet for a while. I handed him the bottle again and he took a slug.

“What brought you here?” he asked. “I know you staked a claim, but why’d you want to do that?”

“I wanted to make a living, I suppose.”

“Not much of a living, farming. You’re an educated man.”

“I suppose I wanted to be in at the beginning of things. Osage hadn’t been gone long, territory was practically empty. I guess I thought there’d be opportunities here to make a dollar.”

“Aha,” he said, pleased with himself. “And there weren’t many of those until lately, were there?”

“There was the saloon.”

“Aha,” he said again. “A man of vision who saw a need and filled it.”

“Well, the old saloon was gone by then. You had to buy whiskey from Tiny or George, and neither one of them’d let a man drink on the premises.”

“And so you quit farming.”

“Didn’t quit, exactly.” I, too, had drunk more than I was accustomed to, and the words I wanted weren’t forthcoming in precisely the way I wanted them to be. “Tried to quit.”

“Why don’t you sleep at the farm?” he asked.

I nearly told him it was none of his goddamned business, but the words were slow enough in coming that I was able to hold them off. “Too far to ride,” I said.

“You ride there in the morning,” he said. “What’s the difference from riding there at night? You could save yourself the rent you pay that smith.”

What he really wanted to know about was Ninna, I knew. He’d seen us together only once, at Christmas, and seen the way we acted with each other; not like a husband and wife, but like a man and a woman who didn’t like each other much playing at it for an afternoon. And of course he’d heard stories. What the hell, I decided; we’re comrades and business partners, Marc and I, and we’re drunk besides. So I told him about Ninna and the men, and why I wouldn’t go back now. He listened and nodded.

“You say she’s a Dane?”

“Born in Copenhagen. Her old man got into some sort of a scrape and had to leave, ended up in Columbus, Ohio, operating a photographer’s studio. That’s where I met her. I was learning the trade from the old man.”

“Why’d you marry her in the first place?” he asked.

“I was twenty, the war was over, and she was a big, healthy, pretty gal. Her old pa had a little money, too. Next thing I knew little Clyde was on his way and I was still working as her pa’s helper, tending bar after hours, working those kinds of jobs and trying to figure out something more promising.”

Marc handed me back the bottle. “Woman’s infidelity is so much more treacherous than man’s. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I haven’t been living the monastic life myself since I left the farm.”

“Still, she’d forgive you for it, wouldn’t she? But you can’t forgive her. It’s a different sort of treachery. Different in kind, not degree.”

I just nodded. We finished the bottle and left it standing there on the unvarnished parquet next to the crates, from which we then rose. Upright he proved to be drunker than I’d thought, and he nearly crashed to the ground stepping down from the veranda onto the lawn. Theirs was a large property and there was no one about as we crossed it, Marc veering from left to right and holding both arms out for balance, as if he were feeling about for a railing on either side. Abruptly he slowed and then stopped, and I stepped aside, having seen it happen a time or two tending bar. He knelt and spewed, finishing with a noise I first thought to be a whimper of self-pity, but which quickly revealed itself as laughter.

“I trust,” he said, “that my regurgitation will remain a confidential matter.” He kept laughing, and I helped him to his feet and we ambled over the lawn and crossed Seward and First Streets to the hotel.

There in their rooms Maggie sat waiting for Marc. The roughhewn sitting room was even more overstuffed than it had been at Christmas, its plain wooden walls completely obscured by furnishings too elegant for it by half; presumably the bedchamber beyond was similarly jammed. It wasn’t nearly enough to furnish the house they were building, though, and I had been told that there were three times this much houseware in storage and at least that much on order from back east. It was cramped, but the dry warmth emanating from the stove, specially installed for them, was deeply satisfying to a man who slept in a converted hayloft.

Maggie clucked at our drunken state and we helped Marc to bed, where he immediately began to snore. She stepped outside the door with me when I took my leave and whispered to me in the dark hallway.

“I hope you enjoyed yourself,” she said.

“Sorry about this,” I said, mistaking her quiet tone for one of reproach. “Didn’t realize how soused he was until he tried to walk.”

“That’s all right. Marc doesn’t really take much time for his own pleasure, he can get drunk once a year if he wants to.”

She was giving me that look, the one that made me feel certain the man we’d just put into bed wasn’t her husband at all; I just nodded, afraid that if I spoke I’d say something foolish. “Good night,” I managed to stammer, and I carefully picked my way down the staircase. I didn’t hear the latch of their door click shut until after I was out of her sight.

Several days hence I was invited to join the Levals in their suite for an afternoon’s entertainment, and I found that young Gleason was again available to stand in my stead at the booze wagon except for a brief period when he would serve as my photographic assistant. Having fetched my good suit of clothes from the farm that morning I reported to the hotel promptly at three o’clock in Gleason’s company, carrying between us the stereographic camera, a tripod designed for the other, larger camera, a dark tent, and enough chemical solutions to open a drugstore of our own.

In the suite upstairs I was dismayed to find Katie Bender present, apparently as their guest. Her silken afternoon dress, of a similar cut and quality to Maggie’s own, was stiff and new, a gift from our hosts. Hattie was there, too, having brought up a tray of drinks, and she scowled at me with unconcealed disgust; we had not spoken since our exchange on the street, and if I ignored her it was because I was demonstrating to Gleason the setup of the camera, composing and focusing on the
canapé
upon which Marc and Maggie would sit for their portrait, facing the main window. With the windows and door thrown open, the room was barely bright enough for portraiture, but Maggie refused to wait for the completion of their house or that of the new studio next to my unfinished saloon, insisting upon a stereographic commemoration of their months in the suite.

I worked carefully at focusing; indoors, with only the light from the open windows and doors as illumination, my depth of field would be perilously shallow, even with a lengthy exposure. In these situations one often ended up with one’s subjects as nebulous blurs before perfectly crisp backgrounds, and I had cut only two glass plates for the occasion. Katie and Maggie seated themselves upon the
canapé
, staring upside down at my focusing glass, and as I ratcheted the lensboard forward and backward it was Maggie’s face I watched, trying to forget Katie’s was there next to it.

“Have you heard Hattie’s good news, Bill?” Katie asked me with a smile of such pure ingenuousness it had to be false. I didn’t know whether or not Hattie had accepted Comden’s proposal, nor whether an announcement had been made, so I said no.

Katie looked over at her chambermate and winked. “She’s engaged to marry Francis Comden in the spring.”

“Francis from downstairs? Really?” Maggie seemed genuinely surprised. “He’s just a boy.”

“He’s twenty,” Hattie snapped with greater venom than she evidently intended; she immediately forced herself to smile. “We’re going to go to Topeka to live.”

I pulled my head from the black shadecloth and noted that Gleason had finished setting up the dark tent in a corner of the room. In a moment I was gratefully inside it, preparing the first of the glass plates. When it had been coated I slipped it into a tray of silver nitrate and Gleason began preparing a second.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Katie said. “Young Francis has decided to study the law.”

Marc curled his lower lip in distaste. “Well, I suppose there’s always call for lawyering. The money doesn’t add up to much, though, unless you get into politics.”

“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Hattie asked with exaggerated formality.