A Good Man (23 page)

Dunne watched him leave, a tiny, brisk, purposeful man, hardly bigger than a boy.

The very next day, Dunne gave Mr. Hind notice he was quitting his employ and left the old man raging against the ingratitude of servants. He carried off all his belongings in a single carpet bag, his clothes, McCorkle’s sovereigns, the scanty wages earned from Hind. Mrs. Hind’s missing jewellery also went with him. He saw now that stealing it had not been wise. But his desire to injure Hind had got the better of him. He would be careful not to make such a rash mistake again. Still, it had all come right in the end. McMicken’s promise of his “special care” left him feeling like a pig in clover.

But that situation cannot hold a candle to the one he finds himself in now. His days are exceedingly pleasant. There is the pleasure that comes from extracting his pay from Randolph Tarr each and every day and watching him squirm whenever the lawyer is reminded of what he is still owed for services provided in Chicago. It doesn’t matter that Tarr, in return, treats him with contempt, and doesn’t want him in the house. After all, this only excites greater kindness, greater gentleness on the part of Mrs. Tarr. He would sooner have her sympathy than sleep in a featherbed or eat a meal off china.

When he stares out at the empty countryside, when the hot wind burns his cheeks, he is entirely occupied reviewing his past and planning his future. His most private thoughts are formulated courtesy of the Polybius square, as if he were afraid some outside presence might be trying to read his mind. He thinks, over and over again, 333142 3252234233.

She cares. She cares
.

Sometimes, when all the Tarrs are asleep, he eases open the front door and slowly edges his bulk into the house. He stands staring up the dark stairway that leads to the bedrooms on the second floor, heart wildly beating in anticipation of the ascent. Then he begins his slow, careful, stealthy climb, moving on all fours, supporting himself on his palms and his toes, distributing his weight as evenly as possible to minimize creaking and squeaking from the steps.

Reaching the top, he continues to creep, testing each plank as he makes his way to Ada Tarr’s bedroom door. It is always left ajar to encourage the circulation of air. Of all the happy surprises he has received during his stay with the Tarrs, the most gratifying of them all was the discovery that Mr. and Mrs. Tarr do not share a bed.

Dunne never enters her room. He remains crouched in the doorway, listening to the sound, to the rhythm of her breathing. Whenever his mother produced another infant, Dunne remembers her warning everyone to see to it that the cat was kept out of the house. “They suck a baby’s breath,” she said.

That is what Dunne would like to do with Ada Tarr, to draw the warm breath from her lungs and take it into his.

TEN

JOE RETURNED TO
Fort Benton from the Cypress Hills by the middle of August, far more quickly than Case had expected. One afternoon he stomped into the Overland Hotel and announced to his partner, “I sold my cabin and contents to a no-nothing Englishman. McMullen’s flush.” When Case gave him his own news, that he had scouted a promising property and would like Joe’s opinion on the livestock before clinching the deal, McMullen said, “No better day than today.” That afternoon they toured the Worthington ranch; Joe made an inspection of the cattle and horses, and allowed as he thought the asking price for land and livestock to be fair. Then he added, “But the price ain’t everything. Be sure this is what you want. Don’t be going into this thing blind.”

But Case was sure, burning to begin the purposeful, independent life he imagined for himself. There was a substantial letter of credit deposited in the Fort Benton bank that he could draw on. At last he had somewhere to put that money to a worthy use. The next day, Worthington and he signed the document of purchase in Randolph Tarr’s office. When he came out of the lawyer’s, Case found Joe and a pretty sorrel mare with dainty hooves and trim legs waiting for him out in the street.

Joe tossed him the halter shank. “She’s yours,” he said. “I reckon a cattleman needs a cow pony.”

Case was surprised at how much this gesture touched him, but still felt obliged to protest McMullen’s generosity.

Joe’s only response was, “I got to throw
some
money into the pot in this poker game. Otherwise, I ain’t a player.”

That very day, Case sold his former mount to the proprietor of the livery stable. Then he and Joe bought supplies, and soon were riding past the Tarr house under Dunne’s watchful scrutiny, headed for their new residence, a four-room, wind-buffeted shack, lonely in a sea of drab grass. Mr. Worthington had decided on a clean break with the past, as if in doing so he could shed the bad luck and misfortune that had dogged him for years. Aside from a few personal items to which his wife had a sentimental attachment, he had lumped the rest of their goods into the purchase price: rickety furniture, chipped dishware, dodgy pots, threadbare linens, and tarnished cutlery. Worthington meant to travel light, get clear of the accursed place as fast as he could.

Case had bought a bottle of Monongahela whiskey to celebrate his acquisition. Lifting a glass to the shabby surroundings, he said, “To our new venture, Joe.”

McMullen lifted his glass to his lips, took a parsimonious, sombre swallow, and made no return to the toast.

Joe’s silence, his serious mien, bewildered Case. “This is a happy occasion. Why the dark face?”

“I know why I’m here, but I ain’t got no idea why you are,” said McMullen so softly that Case had to strain to catch his words. “I’m fifty-three year old and it only come to me recently that the way I’ve lived – spending free and gadding about – hasn’t left me so much as a pot to piss in. I’m about finished making my living bucking out rough stock. It come to me I’m facing a hungry old age and there ain’t much time for me to correct that prospect. So I naturally got to thinking, is Case going to stick this? Because if you ain’t in it for the long haul, my twenty-five per cent of nothing is nothing.”

“Listen, Joe,” said Case, “I’m not going to run from this. I want to build something here. Something that I can point to with a little pride. Up until now, my life’s been short on anything of that description.” Case realized that this confession had been more self-revealing than he would have liked, so he tried to temper the earnestness by adding a wry note. “Maybe it’s time I earned my bread from the sweat of my brows.”

Joe nodded solemnly. “If it’s sweat you want there’ll be aplenty of that in store for you. Starting tomorrow we got to get the bung out of our asses. Worthington put up but one cut of hay. We’re going to have to make another to get them cattle through the winter. And we ain’t got much time to do it.”

“Whatever you say.”

“All right then, this is what I say. Tomorrow, I’ll start mowing buffalo wool. It makes good feed but it’s short, scanty grass. Down near the river, the pasture grows higher and ranker, but there’s too much driftwood and suchlike laying about to use a horse-drawn mower. It’ll need to be hand-cut and hand-raked. That’s your job.” Joe hands Case an apologetic smile. “And don’t think I’m trying to shirk my share of the sweat riding a mower. It ain’t that. Horses has jumpy, nervous dispositions. A mower is a fearsome contraption to them, chattering and clicking away behind them. They’re like to bolt. If there was a runaway and you got jolted off the seat, that mower blade would chew you to pieces. I’d be scooping you up with a teaspoon to get enough bits in a coffee can to bury.”

“Well,” said Case, “I appreciate your concern for my well-being.”

Joe looked relieved. “Now that I been assured you mean to sweat, it wouldn’t do no harm to take another tot to celebrate. But only one,” he said. “After that the cork goes in the bottle. We got to make an early start tomorrow.”

Case has been reaping hay for three weeks. As soon as the dew burns off the grass, he starts for the river on his little mare, a scythe propped on his shoulder. At the beginning of the day the morning sun is nothing but a soft, warm hand coffee cs back. But in an hour or two, it turns hot as a stove lid, leaves him dripping sweat. By quitting time, the collar of his work shirt is starched with a rime of salt; crusty white stains loop the armpits.

The first week of mowing was agony. At dawn, he woke and creaked to the kitchen in a harvester’s stoop, back knotted, fingers curled into bird claws, frozen in the grip he had held locked to the handle until sunset the day before. A dull ache scoured his shoulders and the cords of his neck. But now he has found a rhythm to the work, an efficient action that swings the long blade back and forth, its weight sweeping it to and fro like a grandfather clock’s pendulum.

His body is toughening up; hard buds of callus are forming at the finger joints, and the skin of his palms is turning to rawhide. McMullen counselled him to piss on his hands to harden them, a suggestion he flinched from. But he did listen to Joe’s admonition that a sharp scythe is half the job, and whenever he pauses to take a breather, he gives the blade a few passes with the whetstone in his pocket, keeps it wickedly keen and glinting, sharp enough to shave a mouse, as McMullen says.

Now that his body has stopped torturing him, Case takes real pleasure in the way the tall grass tumbles with every pass of the scythe. It’s like being a boy playing war, toppling lead soldiers over. He likes the way grasshoppers spurt out of the seeded heads, their wings blurring in a papery-sounding whir. Sometimes they land on his shirt, cling there, antennae twitching, bulbous eyes trained on him. He never bothers to brush them away, holding to the tempo of the work, to the dance of the job. At intervals, the grass ahead of him explodes, a prairie chicken heaving up from a tussock with a rush of beating wings, or a rabbit bursts from its hiding place, scut twitching frantically. More than once he has struck a garter snake, which took a twisting, writhing ride on the scythe blade. Now he keeps an ear cocked for the dry-pea rattle of a diamondback. He doesn’t want to sweep a rattler out of the grass and have it come sliding down the scythe handle to strike him.

There are cottonwoods, willow thickets, cactus patches, and piles of bone-white driftwood heaved up when the Missouri was in spring flood that he must work around. At the tail end of summer, the river is at its lowest ebb. Geese and ducks promenade sandbars that hunch their backs out of the slack, greasy river. Stray feathers and down waft about, speckling the biscuit-coloured water. The riverbank is scribbled with green-and-white goose shit.

The waterfowl are flocking early, a sign, Joe says, of a hard winter coming. Great wavering flights of sandhill cranes streak the pale blue skies. At dawn, the geese lift off the river to feed, booming their sad, nasal honking, pinions whistling. Returning later in the day, they glide down like a lazy autumn blizzard. Wings spread cruciform, webbed feet braced for the shock, they plough furrows in the river, bob about for a few self-satisfied seconds before clambering up on a sandbar with a matronly waddle.

Occasionally, the rhythmic, repeated movement of the scythe induces in Case a dream-like state where scraps from his past blow about in his mind. Strange, disconnected bits. The unholy terror he felt at the age of three when the barber went to work on him with his big, shiny scissors, how he had screamed, fought, and struggled in the chair. Until that day his mother had been the one to cut his hair. It was her gentle hands he wanted on his head, wanted to hear her say, “All done, my handsome little man,ÉD; to feel her giving his earlobe that little tweak, his signal to scramble down from the chair.

Christmas Eve, carried out of doors in his father’s arms. The old man laughing, the smell of port on his breath, a new toboggan waiting in the back garden with an apple crate set on it. There was straw in the crate. His father nestled him down in it. A night so cold his nostrils stung, but the straw warm as a feather tick. Staring up at a blue-black sky, the stars bobbing with every tug to the towline. A carol the old man had sung, the creak of the frozen snow under his boots. He had wished that ride could go on forever, just as he had wanted his mother’s hands to never lift from his head. He had been content. They had all been content. The world itself had been content in those days. That’s how he remembers it.

But Case does his best not to let memories of the past intrude, nails his mind to the present, the gurgling song of red-winged blackbirds –
conka-ree conka-ree –
the agitated whistles of warning and alarmed chorus of
cack cack
as they ride the tips of willows, swaying in the wind. He fixes on a snag in the river where an eagle perches on a single branch poking above the waterline, staring at him with a hanging-judge’s cold eye. He glances over to his red mare mincing in her hobbles to a fresh patch of grass, watches her dip her nose in it.

He sets himself goals – to reap the grass between this boulder and that wild rose bush before he eats. An empty belly, the promise of satisfying it, hurries the ripping whoosh of the blade, fills the air with the sweet, sappy smell of fresh-cut hay. When he reaches that wild rose bush, he collects the packet of sandwiches stowed in his saddlebags, settles down in the shade of a thicket of willows, their leaves hanging like tattered ribbons, fills his mouth with bread and cold bacon, dried apples and raisins.