A Congregation of Jackals (3 page)

“I’m down here,” he said.

Elinore looked at him, her bright green eyes agleam with the lowering sun, and said, “You received a telegram.”

“What’d it say?”

“I didn’t read it. I didn’t know if you’d want me to, so I brought it out here for you.”

One of the seventeen reasons Elinore made such a good wife was that she did not snoop. Another was her Oklahoma accent that sounded like honey to Oswell even after fourteen years of marriage. The thirty-nine-year-old woman’s right hand disappeared into the folds of her yellow dress and then produced a small white card that appeared no larger than a tooth from where Oswell sat.

“Where’s it from?”

“Montana Territory.”

Oswell’s guts froze. There was only one person he knew in the Montana Territory, and he had not heard from him in more than sixteen years.

“Do you want me to read it to you?”

“I’ll come up there and read it.” As Oswell pulled on his stiff, sun-baked socks and his warm, sun-softened boots he looked at the dragonflies circling atop the water and had an atypical urge to swat them.

Winded from his climb up the dell, Oswell huffed and then kissed his wife on the mouth. She handed him the white card affixed with cut-out pieces of typeface. He read it.

“I need to get back to fixing supper,” Elinore informed him.

“I’ll come with you. Rabbit?”

“Yes. And turnips.”

Oswell took his wife’s hand and they walked in silence toward the wooden gate that marked the perimeter of their Virginia ranch. He saw one brown cow grazing in the distance.

“She’s eating again,” he remarked.

“You think we should leave her out tonight or get her back in the barn?”

“Let’s leave her be. It’s not cold and we’ve got to get some weight on her before those cowboys come on through.” He untied the post and swung the log gate wide for his wife; the hinges creaked; the distant cow looked up and assessed the bipedal intruders.

“I’ve gotta fix that. Scares the girls.” Oswell spat upon the top hinge and then the lower one; he slowly closed the gate. The metal groaned longer and no less loudly than when he had opened it. “I’ll oil it tomorrow,” he said as he shut and tied the post.

Elinore scrutinized the hinges, shook her head and said, “We might need new ones altogether—I believe they’re rusted inside.”

“You might be right.”

The couple walked up the wide flat field upon which they grazed their cattle, through another gate and then across the wolds upon which seventeen sheep chewed, bleated and considered grass. During this walk, Oswell read the telegram two more times; after his third perusal, he spoke of its contents to his wife.

“I’ve been invited to a wedding.”

“In the Montana Territory?”

“Yeah. James Lingham’s.”

“I’ve never heard you mention him before.”

He shook his head and said, “I haven’t.”

“Do you intend to go?”

Oswell did not yet know the answer to the question, and presently, in his silent ruminations on the matter, forgot that it had been asked aloud. The couple approached the house in which they had dwelled for the past eleven years—since the day Elinore quit teaching and gave birth to their first child, Benjamin. They walked
toward the side porch, their shadows preceding them onto the wood; Oswell shook his head irritably and muttered something he did not wish his wife to hear.

“I’ll tend to supper,” Elinore said. She leaned over and kissed her distracted spouse on the cheek, opened the door and entered the house. Oswell stood there, the telegram cradled in his hands like a dead infant. He sat heavily upon one of the two rocking chairs and read it again.

MR O W DANFORD

13
CUTTER WAY HARRISFIELD VA=

DEAR OSWELL

I AM TO WED BEATRICE JEFFRIES ON
12
AUGUST

PLEASE JOIN US AT CEREMONY

ALL OLD ACQUAINTANCES WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE=

J LINGHAM

TRAILSPUR, MONTANA TERR

Though the pasted words were of a uniform typeface, the phrase “all old acquaintances” seemed printed in far darker ink. There was nothing he wanted to do less than travel to the Montana Territory and witness this ghost from his past get married—but there was a reason the invitation had been sent.

“You got the telegram, I see.”

Godfrey hitched up the warped rawhide belt that waged an internecine struggle with his potbelly; he climbed onto the porch, the rolled cigarette in his mouth not yet alight. Oswell saw a similar telegram clutched in his older brother’s right hand and nodded.

“Yeah. I got it,” the rancher said.

The beefy man sat in the adjacent rocking chair, adjusted
his denims and said, “Should we inquire what he meant by the phrase ‘all old acquaintances’?”

Oswell looked at the window behind him. Elinore cleaned a rabbit in the kitchen and then quartered it. The sound of the knife impacting the wood was silenced by the glass.

“She can’t hear us,” Godfrey said as he struck a match and lit his cigarette, rocking his chair forward as if the flame might escape him.

“You know what Lingham meant,” Oswell said. “You know who he meant. He wouldn’t have invited us otherwise. I didn’t invite him to my wedding, and you didn’t invite him to yours.”

Godfrey scratched his red and silver beard, drew thoughtfully upon his cigarette as if it might contain wisdom and said, “Do you suppose that he could have been coerced into contacting us?”

“I hadn’t considered that.” Oswell brooded upon his older brother’s suspicion and shook his head. “Nah. Lingham wouldn’t.”

“The Lingham we knew wouldn’t, but we don’t know this one—it’s been decades. We’re all different than we were.”

“You are fatter, that’s for certain.”

“You always call me fat when I’ve outsmarted you.”

“Lingham was solid. I don’t think he’d be part of a trap, no matter what. I can’t reconcile that suspicion with him.” Oswell turned and through the window watched his wife quarter an onion. To his brother’s reflection in the glass, he said, “You’re like Ma that way, always suspicious. The way she made the butcher weigh the meat before he charged her and then again after, to make sure he didn’t sneak any for himself.”

“You think we should go? Travel across the whole damn country and get tangled up in this old mess?”

Oswell turned from the window and looked at his brother directly, “I don’t think we’ve got a choice.”

Two small figures strode up the dirt road, excitedly discussing some subject, but the distance dissolved their words into unintelligible squawks by the time they reached the ears of Oswell and Godfrey.

The rancher continued, “It’s our mess as much as Lingham’s—or maybe more. And even if you’re right, even if he was coerced into contacting us, the man who coerced him is alive and likely knows where we live. Better to meet him out there.” Oswell glanced pointedly at his children coming up the road; Godfrey looked at his approaching niece and nephew and nodded.

In a quiet voice, the plump man said, “All these years, I prayed that he was dead.”

“So did I. Lingham and Dicky said the same prayer, I bet.”

“Do you think Dicky will go?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t one for responsibility, but he’s no coward.”

The children walked closer to the house, the words “not” and “hogs,” “licorice” and “penny” dimly audible to Oswell. Even from this distance, it was clear that they were his children.

Godfrey asked, “You’ve still got our gear?”

“Buried beneath the porch.” The children, a skinny brown-haired boy of eleven and a chubby redheaded girl of nine with freckles and a smile, reached the edge of the Danford property. “I put it down there when I built this place.” The brothers watched the children approach the house.

In a quiet voice that begat a coiled serpent of smoke Godfrey said, “You better dig it up.”

As a child, Richard Sterling had hated the nickname Dicky. When he was only three years old, his father had died of tuberculosis, leaving him in a New York City apartment bursting with women: three sisters (Peggy, Sam and Girdy), a mother and her mother. The absence of a male figure and the ubiquity of women had not made young Richard Sterling an especially masculine boy, nor did his delicate, pretty features, which his mother and her mother regularly referred to as “girl-handsome.” The nickname Dicky emasculated him further.

The lone male Sterling, with only eleven years behind him, had taken his first job working for a fishmonger on the east side near Park Row; when he came home, fetid with fish oil, pinched by blue crabs, iridescent scales in his black hair from when he scratched himself after handling carp, he looked at his mother and said, “Please call me Richard.”

Despite his request, no member of his family (excepting the deceased father) called him Richard. His grandmother died without ever once uttering the name. He resented being infantilized in a family where he and his dead father’s bank account provided almost all of the income (two sisters would hem dresses on occasion), and his ire at being saddled with the name Dicky only grew with its longevity.

Contrarily, as a strikingly handsome man of forty-four years, there was no other name he would have preferred over Dicky. No matter what he said to a woman, no matter what promises he made to her, no matter what fantastical shared future he promised her, he could not be wholly accountable: he was a guy named Dicky. Ladies should not take an adult man named Dicky too seriously, and if they did, who should they blame but themselves?

Several women on several different rainy days in several different bars said roughly, “He told me that he had never before been so truly in love with a woman as he was with me, that my voice was the sound he hoped to hear call him to dinner each night and read to him by the fireside. He asked me the size of my ring finger and also which type of caviar I most enjoyed.

“On Thursday, after we . . .” (The women trailed off here, embarrassed, momentarily excited and then ashamed of that brief excitement.) They continued, “On Thursday”—they leaned close and whispered—“afterwards . . . while we laid intertwined, he said that he was going to send his driver and carriage around to pick me up and take me to Connecticut. He intended to introduce me to his family.”

“What was the name of this man?”

“Dicky.”

Once that name was said, the listeners, the comforting confidants of the disenchanted ladies, began to lose their sympathy. The world of caviar and pearls and diamonds and champagne and dancing gowns and polo fields and Connecticut mansions is not offered to women by a man named Dicky.

With kind voices, the listeners asked, “Did you really believe him? Did you truly believe that he could offer all of that to you?”

The women pondered their confidants’ inquiry and realized how silly, how absurd the whole affair was, and soon learned to laugh when they thought of this idyllic fantasy proffered them by a grown man who went by a child’s name. There was also the memory of that Thursday, the women thought as heat suffused their tear-stained cheeks, that secret evening about which their future husbands would never know . . .

Dicky liked to think of that memory as his gift.

The casino was Dicky’s second-favorite place in the world (although he admitted that “wrapped in the arms and legs of a woman” may not be considered a place by some). Casino attendees were inclined toward thoughtless behavior—inspired by the free money gained or the hard-earned money lost—and there was always an angle to be played on people willing to take risks.

Wearing a finely-tailored brown three-piece suit, a matching top hat inlaid with silk, loafers, a maroon bow tie and matching gloves, the handsome man strode across the Oriental rugs that protected the burnished wood floor of Callington’s over to a roulette table around which were seated two sweaty, plump men, greed like a weird light in their eyes, and the pretty young woman upon whom he had been focused for the time it took him to crack the shells of and slowly chew nine rugose walnuts. Though occasionally a pretty lady did wander into the casino alone, the single woman found in such an establishment was most often a daughter who had been dragged out by her folks (and then abandoned) or somebody’s sister that nobody had any idea what to do with. If a fellow brought his wife and did not hate her, she sat near him; if a fellow brought his girlfriend, she sat near him; if a fellow brought both (Dicky saw that twice in
Charlotte), he held his wife’s hand while he winked suggestively at the other.

“Would you find it an impropriety for me to sit beside you, madam?” The young woman looked up at him; from this distance he could see that she was just north of twenty and unaccustomed to consorting with strange men. Her mouth was a tiny bit slack—her tongue and upper teeth showed in a way that suggested continual befuddlement—but her eyes were not those of a simpleton, which was good: an unintelligent woman knew that everyone else was smarter than she was and consequently mistrusted people. A fairly smart woman who mistook herself for a genius was far easier game.

“You may sit there,” she said. Dicky could not yet tell where she was from—he needed to get her to say something more before he could divine her town of origin from her dialect (a skill he had cultivated in the shops of Park Row and later at bars in Louisville). He removed his top hat and purposely let it slip from his fingers onto her lap. A nervous woman would have been startled or perhaps exclaimed, but this woman had only blinked and looked at the dropped item.

“I apologize,” he said as his fingers whisked along her thigh and pinched the brim of his fallen hat.

The croupier looked at Dicky and said, “Final wagers please.”

“I’ll sit this one out, Alabama.” (The croupier’s accent was a thick proclamation of his state of origin.)

The pretty young woman beside Dicky rearranged her orange skirt, her dark eyes furtively assessing the handsome man now seated on her left while his cologne invaded her nostrils. The little silver ball hopped and skipped and clicked and leaped as the squares beneath it flickered black and red and black and red and
black and red. The porcine fellows leaned toward the spinning wheel as if emanations from their foreheads might alter the sphere’s destiny. The pretty young woman watched, but with less interest. Either she was wealthy or she had not wagered substantially on the spin, Dicky presumed.