Against the Day (191 page)

It wasn’t exactly a religious
experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering
to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for
thanks. Her first rule became “Don’t thank me.” Her second was “Don’t take the
credit for anything that turns out well.” One day she woke up understanding
clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there
were very few limits on the good it became possible to do.

Stray had been accustomed to search
out the real interests that lay behind spoken ones, and think of ways to
reconcile them. Though the interests at war in the coal country were clear
enough, she had some trouble deciphering Ewball’s own in wanting to head down
there. Profit and power for Ewball were not objects of desire, though she would
never come to believe that he didn’t want to be leader of something, or have access
to resources of one sort

or another. But it was invisible, whatever that was, his
Anarchist remit. It never occurred to her he might just love getting into
trouble.

To her not particularly bitter
disappointment, it became rapidly evident that Ewball also took the Anarchist
view of love, marriage, childrearing and so forth. “Think of me as an
educational resource,” he told her. “Jeez Ewball, I don’t know, it’s basically
your dick,” she replied.

Nevertheless, due to feelings of
mental ambivalence which were just beginning at that time to be understood, it
had one day occurred to Ewball, after an absence measurable in years, to drop
in on his family in Denver, having got it into his head that Stray might want
to meet his parents, which she didn’t, all that much. One fleececlouded
weekday, with about half an hour’s warning over the telephone, they showed up
at his family home.

The Oust residence was still fairly
new, big and crossgabled, with a round tower and a lot of spindlework and
shingling, and large enough to accommodate an indeterminate number of Ousts and
Oust inlaws at any given time.

Ewball’s mother, Moline Velma Oust,
answered the door in person. “Ewball
Junior
?
Well convey your fundament in to the parlor!”

   
“This
is my mother. Ma, Miss Estrella Briggs.”

“You are welcome to our home, Miss
Briggs.” The Ousts had been living down in Denver for some while now, Leadville
having fallen on dismal times, lots and houses for sale everywhere you looked,
and no takers. “Remember that one across the street? Their For Sale sign went
up, we took a stopwatch, less than five minutes on the market, gone for ten
thousand. These days you couldn’t pay somebody to live in it.” Moline would
have taken as her exemplar the Lake County legend Baby Doe Tabor, seeing herself
dressed in stylish mourning up at some shafthouse with a rifle across her
knees, defending family property, and by extension the glory days of some
legendary town, to the bitter end. But so far her husband, Ewball Sr., had
shown little interest in being Haw Tabor, that is, dead.

“I see you admiring our new Steinway
piano, Miss Briggs. Do you play, by any chance?”

   
“Not
much, song accompaniments mostly.”

“I’m such a devotee of the Schubert
lieder myself
. . . .
Oh, do play us
something, won’t you!”

Stray got maybe four bars into a
onestep of the day called “I’m Going to Get Myself a Black Salome,” when Moline
remembered she had to see to the majolica, which was being dusted today.
“Mexican refugees, you know, it’s

so difficult sometimes—oh dear, no offense, I hope
you’re not one of Ewball’s—that is—”
 

   
Having
run into this sort of thing once or twice, Stray tried to steer her through it.
“ ‘
Ewball is a dear,
’ ”
she prompted,
“ ‘
but he brings home the most peculiar girls sometimes’?”

Moline, seeming visibly to relax,
favored her with a squint and a onesided smile. “Guess you know the general
outline, then. He’s got no sense of money, and there are young ladies of the
syndicalist persuasion who just have an instinct for that.”

“Mrs. Oust,” Stray said calmly, “I’m
not after anybody’s money, got enough of my own, thanks, fact it’s been me
picking up all the saloon tabs lately, and I sure wouldn’t mind you havin a
word ’th old Ewb about that, ’cause I figure it must be his upbringing?”

“
Well.
”
Off to that majolica
after all. But either she was the kind of goodnatured soul who can’t stay upset
for long, or she found Stray a refreshing enough change, or she just had the
attention span of a chipmunk, because in a couple of minutes she was back with
lemonade in a cutglass pitcher and matching glasses, waving off one of the
girls,
 
“ ’
Tá bien, no te preocupes, m’hija.
”

“
You.
”
A man of middle age
in galluses, holding a fistful of U.S. mail, stood in the doorway redfaced,
shaking, and just about to explode.

   
“Howdy,
Pa.”

Introducing
Stray did not deflect the elder Oust from his furious intention. “Ewball, what
the hell,” waving the wad of correspondence.

“Now
Father,” appealed Moline, “how many sons write home as regularly as our own
here?”

“That’s
just it. Pinhead!” he spat. As a stamp collector of average obsessiveness, his
unhappiness with his son had grown from bewilderment into an all but homicidal
rage. It seemed that young Ewball had been using postage stamps from the 1901
PanAmerican Issue, commemorating the Exposition of that name in Buffalo, New
York, where the Anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated President McKinley. These
stamps bore engraved vignettes of the latest in modern transportation, trains,
boats, and so forth, and by mistake, some of the onecent, twocent, and fourcent
denominations had been printed with these center designs upside down. One
thousand Fast Lake Navigation, 158 Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had
been sold before the errors were caught, and before stampcollector demand had
driven their prices quite through the roof, Ewball, sensitive to the
Anarchistic symbolism, had bought up and hoarded as many as he could find to
mail his letters with.

“Even
right side up,” shouted Ewball Senior, “any nincompoop knows enough to keep
stamps in mint condition—uncanceled, original gum intact! for
chrissakes—otherwise the secondarymarket value goes all to hell. Every

time you mailed one of these letters here you wasted
hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.”

“Exactly my point, sir. Inversion
symbolizes undoing. Here are three machines, false idols of the capitalist
faith, literally overthrown—along with an indirect reference of course to
the gunning down of Mark Hanna’s miserable stooge, that resolute enemy of human
progress—”

   
“I
voted for McKinley, damn it!”

“As long as you are truly penitent,
the people in their wisdom will forgive you.”

“Rrrrr!” Oust Senior threw the
letters in the air, dropped to all fours and charged screaming at Ewball, into
whose ankle he unhesitatingly sank his teeth. Ewball, in considerable pain,
sought with his other foot to step repeatedly on his father’s head, the two men
filling the air of the parlor meanwhile with language unfit for the sensitive
reader, let alone those ladies present, who gathering their skirts and moving
cautiously, were attempting to pull the disputants apart, when all at once the
curious Œdipal spectacle was interrupted by a loud gunshot.

A woman in a simple dress of dark
gray henrietta, calm and solid, holding a Remington target pistol, had entered
the room. Gunsmoke rose toward the ceiling, from which still descended the last
of a fine shower of plaster, lighted by the window behind to surround her
briefly in a bright cloud. Stray, looking upward, noticed there were several
patches of damaged ceiling along with the one just created. The Ousts, father
and son, had abandoned their struggle and risen to their feet, somewhat
apologetic, less to each other than to this matronly referee who had just
called a halt to their recreation.

“Thought I’d look in.” She slid the
teninch barrel of the weapon beneath the band of the white muslin apron she was
wearing.

“As always, Mrs. Traverse,” said Ma
Oust, “we are in your debt. Please don’t worry about the ceiling, we were
planning to have it redone anyway.”

   
“Ran
out of the B.B. caps, had to use a .22 short.”

“Quite unobjectionable, I’m sure. And
as you’re here, perhaps you wouldn’t mind seeing to our houseguest, Miss
Briggs. She might rather enjoy the Chinese Room, don’t you think? Estrella,
dear, anything you need, Mrs. Traverse is a miracleworking saint, and this
house would be simply chaos without her.”

   
When
they were alone, Mayva said, “We only met but that once in Durango.”

“Reef and I always meant to come see
you in Telluride soon as the baby was born, but one thing and another . . .”

   
 
“I sure heard enough about you over the
years, Estrella. Always figured

Reef’s future’d be with one of them girlies that tread a bit
closer to the Abyss. . . but here you are, a young lady showin nothin but
class.”

   
“Guess
you must miss him.”

   
“Yeahp
but you never know who’ll show up. How’s my grandbaby?”

   
“Here,
look.” Stray had snaps of Jesse she always carried in her purse.

   
“Oh
the little heartbreaker. If he don’t just favor Webb.”

   
“You
can keep these—”

   
“Oh,
no, that’s—”

   
“I
always have extras.”

   
“Well
I’m obliged. But how can he be this grownup already?”

   
“Don’t
remind me.”

They were in the Chinese Room by now,
fussing with drapes, coverlets, and dresser scarves in various “Chinese”
motifs. “Ewball and Frank, they’ve rode together off and on, I take it.”

“We were all down in Mexico a while
back. Frank got a little banged up but nothin serious.”

Mayva looked up awkwardly, hopeful.
“I know that’s where he was when he took care of that one killer the owners
hired. Do you know if he might’ve found the other one down there too?”

“Not so far’s I know. This was more
like a battle we got mixed up in. Frank fell off a horse. Took some time to
mend.”

She nodded. “He’s the patient one in
the family.” She looked Stray in the eyes. “I know it’s all any of us can do.”

Stray put her hand on Mayva’s.
“Somebody’11 get that Deuce Kindred someday, and Mr. Vibe too, it wouldn’t
surprise me. People that bad have a way of bringin it to themselves sooner or
later.”

Mayva took Stray’s arm and they went
down to the kitchen. “You can imagine how happy I was havin to go to work here,
in a millionaire’s mansion. Ran into ’em all on the train when they ’s movin
down from Leadville. Started playin with the little ones. Forgot how much I
missed that. Next thing I knew, there ’s old Moline pourin her heart out.
Everthin about Denver had her worryin, bigcity vices, schools for the children,
lowaltitude cookin, and she somehow got it into her head I was jake with all
that. Turns out she’s good people, good enough, just a little flighty now and
then. He’s all right too, I suppose, for a plute.”

Too fast almost to register, the
years had taken Mayva from a highstrung girl with foreignlooking eyes to this
calm dumpling of a housekeeper in a prosperous home that might as well be
halfway back east, set upwind from the sparks and soot of the trains, where she
kept portraits and knickknacks dusted, knew how much everything cost, what time
to the minute each of the

Oust kids would wake (all but the one maybe, the one with the
destiny), and where each of the family was likely to’ve gone when they weren’t
in the house
. . .
her once
spellbinding eyes brought back, as fieldcreatures are reenfolded at the end of
day, into orbits grown pillowsoft, on watch within, guarding a thousand secrets
of these old Territories never set down, and of how inevitable, right from the
minute the first easterners showed up, would be the betrayal of everyday life
out here, so hardwon, into the suburban penance the newcomers had long acceded to.
The children in her care never saw past the kind and forever bustling old gal,
never imagined her back in Leadville raising all those species of hell
. . . .

“We lived up in a cabin above the
snowline, brought home a little piñón that Christmas for a tree, shot a
ptarmigan for a turkey. Storm outside, baby blue electricity running down the
stovepipe. Little Reef loved ’em thundergusts, waving his arms, hollering ‘Ah!
Ah!’ every time one came booming down. Later on with blasting in the mines,
he’d get this little frown, like, ‘Where’s the lightning, where’s the rain?’
Just the dearest thing.”