Authors: Alexa Blair
After about ten minutes of walking away from his house- not long enough a time to leave his ranch- I bent over and emptied my stomach.
4
Any woman who means to survive in the frontier had better have a man that can protect her or a firearm with which to protect herself. I had neither. After two hours of walking, the need to protect myself against the untoward behavior of strangers felt stronger than at any point in my life than I can remember. Whenever I had gone to the barter market of a Saturday, I had no fears for my safety. Anyone who treated me ill would have to answer to Matthew. That was no longer the case. With the wedding happening tomorrow, everyone in Sawtooth would know that he would not have to answer to Matthew Callahan if he did anything to me.
Both general stores in town sell guns. Both store owners are smart enough to keep their guns behind their counters instead of out among the shelves where any fool might grab one, put some bullets in it, and rob the store owner blind. The owner of West General Store, Harold West, had never been mistaken for a fool. He was a thirty-seven year old man with gray hair and a thick pair of glasses. He always wore overalls of the kind that a person never sees in horse country.
Now I won’t say that all of Nevada was horse country, for it wasn’t. Yet that part of the state we lived in was horse country, for lay close to the northern border with Idaho. Sawtooth sat between the Owyhee and Bruneau Rivers. That part of the state had been Shoshone country for some time until white men with big dreams and deep pockets started pushing them out. Were it not for men like Harold West, the Indians might have stood a better chance at reclaiming the lands of their ancestors. What kept the frontier alive was not men with guns, or women willing to work hard, but supply wagons that ran every which were carrying all kinds of goods.
I entered the shop, for the first time feeling alone and uncertain. I had passed through the same jangling door with the word “West’s” painted in fanciful brown letters upon the door’s glass window. Before, I had done so with the sure knowledge that I belonged there. Now, I was no longer sure of anything.
Harold looked up from his counter. As it was a working day, business was slow. Harold made most of his money on Fridays and Saturdays. He had to divvy his resources carefully, for the profits of those two days subsidized the other four days he opened. He had told me this once when he sought out my advice. I told him to spend his money carefully and play the waiting game. The longer he stayed in business, the more of a reputation he would make in the town and its various surrounding communities. That reputation would come in handy, I had told him, while Sawtooth kept growing. If the day ever came when people no longer had a reason to remain in the town, that was the day he should cash out. He had responded by rubbing his chin with his index and middle finger in the way that I imagined Chinamen merchants did.
He said, “Mrs. Callahan, good to you. How fares the ranch?”
I blinked in surprise at his greeting. I had not expected to be called “Mrs.” ever again. Yet, he didn’t know. He didn’t know that my husband had divorced me. I walked towards him while my mind worked. There had to be something I could do with that- something…
Then, it came to me. I said, “I’m faring as well as ever. The ranch is well enough. Matthew is a good hand, as far as it goes. He tends his stock well. It’s our good fortune to have Mr. Renmyer looking after our cattle.”
Harold’s face brightened as I mentioned the name of the hired hand Matthew had been employing for the last eighteen months. He said, “Funny you should mention that, miss. I hear tell Mr. Renmyer has a new wife- an Irish woman, if I’ve heard rightly. He put himself an advertisement in one of our state’s newspapers. Turns out, a woman in Kansas read that advertisement. She came over here to marry Mr. Renmyer. Now isn’t that the darnedest thing you ever did hear?”
In fact, I had heard of Mr. Renmyer’s marriage. He had a small ceremony in the courthouse. Matthew and I had been in attendance. Jacob Renmyer had, at that time, his hand wrapped in bandages. He had broke his fist upon some poor man’s face. He and Matthew had exchanged many words in private since then. Knowing what I know now, I suppose that Mr. Renmyer put the idea in Matthew’s head. I could even imagine how it might have been that Matthew would not have divorced me if he had not thought of a way he might be able to have his cake and eat it too. He had found a way to get shrift of me even while finding someone to take my place in the household. I could only hope that she proved unequal to the tasks to which I had devoted myself over the years.
I said, “Well, Mr. Renmyer must do as he thinks best for himself.”
Harold’s expression softened by several degrees. He said, “Indeed he must. What can I do ya for today?”
“I’d like to buy a revolver. One of those Colts, if you have one.”
He did not react to the request. He could not have been less astonished if I told him that I had signed up to sail on a whaler that planned to leave for the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco. I tried not to become angry with him, for he wasn’t Matthew. He was just a man who was used to hearing people come in and say all manner of ludicrous things. Over time, one becomes desensitized to the outlandish statements of folks who don’t know any better.
He turned around and pulled a revolver down from three wooden pegs on the shelf, each of which had been placed exactly where they were to accommodate a gun the shape and size of a Colt six-shooter. He laid it on the counter in front of me. The gun produced a loud thumping sound. I almost jumped to hear it.
He said, “This here is your standard issue Colt Single Action Army revolver. This one here is called a Peacemaker. They make ‘em in a place called Hartford. That’s in Connecticut. Now I should tell you that while many of these weapons look very much like one another. This one here takes .45 caliber bullets. Other ones will take other bullets. If you put the wrong bullet in the wrong gun, you stand a chance at jamming your weapon. In the worst case, you’ll blow your own hand off.”
He produced a box full of bullets. He slid the box open, letting me see the little metal objects which were half as large as my index finger.
I said, “You can kill a man with this?”
Harold raised his eyebrows at me. He said, “You planning on killing someone, Mrs. Callahan?”
I answered as honestly as I could. If I ever had need of his services again, I wanted him to understand that I would always be straight with him. A customer who buys a gun and plays the shop owner false is a customer will be distrusted when next he finds himself looking for a weapon. I said, “I don’t know. I just think it might be that I’ll need to protect myself. This is a rough country, as I’m sure you understand.”
“That’s plain enough. Now I’ll show you the basics of how to use it. You’ll be wanting to practice with the gun on your own. You should also remember to clean your weapon regularly. A dirty gun is of no use to neither man nor beast. It’s just as like to backfire as it is to do nothing at all. Will you be need a pipe stem, rags, oil, and such Mrs. Callahan?”
Since I had a notion of how the gun might be paid for, I said, “If I don’t like the gun, can I return it to you later?”
“Nope. You buy it, you keep it.”
“Then, I’ll take the gun and the bullets for now. If it turns out that I like it, I’ll stop by some other time to buy the cleaning supplies.”
He produced a brown paper bag. He closed the box of bullets, then put it together with the gun in the bag. He said, “How will be paying for this, missus?”
“Would it be acceptable to charge it to my husband’s account?”
He said, “Certainly. In fact, as Mr. Callahan just paid off his account last week, you let him know that he has sixty days to come square with me. Does that sound acceptable to you?”
While he spoke, he pulled out a notebook from beneath the counter. He opened it to a page I recognized. It contained a list of all the items that Matthew had put on credit with the store over the last five years. The list was short, for Matthew never liked taking what he couldn’t pay for unless the item he needed exceeded his set budget for the month. He never dipped into his savings to pay for his necessities. He had always said that it was better to live on the dime than to live in the red.
I said, “Yes, it does. Thank you, sir.”
He invited me to return whenever it suited me. Then, I left the shop. When I emerged onto Sawtooth’s main street, I gasped in a breath. I saw something that I never expected to see. Matthew was in the arms of another woman.
5
He must have followed after me shortly after he gave me the news of his divorce. I don’t want to call it our divorce, as I’ve had nothing to do with it now or since. The woman who held him was short, perhaps five feet tall. Matthew stood a head and a half taller than her. She pressed the side of her face into his chest. She brought her hands up to the middle of his back. There, she moved them back and forth, up and down. He ducked a hand under her shirt where he-
I turned my face away, sure that I had turned as red as a beet. Men and women feeling each other up in public just wasn’t done. Any woman fondling a man on a public street was liable to get herself arrested. I looked down at my hands. The brown bag with the gun inside was still there. I had a sudden idea, one that I never suspected would come. I would shoot the fool girl right then and there. Then Matthew would take me back. He would have to; he couldn’t afford to do without the extra labor on the ranch.
I knelt down in the dusty street. I pulled the gun out. I loaded it as Harold had showed me. I did it slowly, to make sure that I was doing it right. When I loaded six bullets into the gun, I pulled back the hammer. The gun made a distinctive click that anyone who has ever been on the frontier for any amount of time will recognize. It was the sound of one person getting ready to kill another.
I held the revolver up in front of me. My hands shook, despite all my efforts to keep them steady. I didn’t even have my finger on the trigger. I said, “Stand still, if you value your lives.”
My goal then, as far as I can remember, was to separate the mail-order bride and Matthew. They were too close together. I might hit Matthew as easily as I might hit his soon-to-be wife. For everything that he had said, for everything that he was and wasn’t, I could not deny that I still loved him. I wanted him to take me back. I wanted him to tell me that he was just practicing upon me. I would have accepted any explanation or circumstance that would let me be his wife again. If that meant putting some poor girl in a shallow grave with a gunshot wound in her chest, then so be it. To me, that was a small price to pay.
When Matthew saw me standing there with a gun in my hand, shame came over him. He blushed while he pushed the girl away from him. She stumbled backwards, then fell down. He did not notice. All his attention was focused on me. That, I thought, was how it ought to be.
I moved the gun towards the girl sitting in the dust. Matthew said, “Mary, what are you doing with that gun?”
Tears came to my eyes. With my hands still shaking, I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I sniffled while I tried to hold back the tears as best I could. I said, “Matthew, I love you. I’ll do anything to be with you. I don’t know why you would choose this girl over me. I don’t know why. But if I have to, I’ll shoot her stone dead, right here and now.”
Matthew did not dare take a step forward. The girl’s face turned white as a sheet. Traffic at that time of day was slow in the town. There was no one around to tell me to stop. Even though I had a loaded gun in my hand- the symbol of the powerful American man- I felt as though the slightest breeze would blow me over.
He said, “Mary, don’t shoot. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t want to be hanging from the end of a rope, do you? That’s what will happen to you if you do this. Things won’t go back to the way they were. You’ll be hanged.”
That thought only made me more scared and more teary-eyed. I had not even thought that it would be possible for a woman to be hanged in Sawtooth. I had never seen it done in the twelve years that I was there. Men were hanged for any number of reasons. The most common reasons were murder and cattle rustling. I had not even considered what might happen to me after I shot anyone, if I shot anyone. It had seemed extremely improbable to me that a woman might be prosecuted for any crime whatsoever.
I said, “I just want to be with you. Why can’t you see that?”
Matthew took a step forward. It was a single, hesitant step. It drew my attention. I swung the gun in his direction. He hands became a slight bit steadier then, for I saw myself taking one of two courses. There was a third- turn the gun on myself- that didn’t occur to me until much later. Had I known what would come after the incident in the town’s main street, I would have done it. I would not have even hesitated.
He said, “I’m sorry Mary, but it’s over. It’s over. I want to be with Heather here.”
My vision became blurry from the tears. It was all I could do to focus on the gun’s two sights. I said, “Heather?”
Matthew took another step forward. I didn’t react, so he took another, and then another until he stood in front of the gun that I bought with his money. He said, “Heather Kinsey is her name. Now I’ve made my choice. I reckon you don’t like it none, and that’s your right. But no matter how bad you feel, you don’t have no right to go around shooting at anybody.”