Cottonwood (27 page)

“What’s that you said?” He’d stopped, and now he faced me; his wife still made out as though her husband addressed a ghost, invisible and inaudible to her.

“I said ‘the devil take you,’ and I hope you’ll excuse me, I only dared say it as you appeared to be hard of hearing.”

She yanked at his sleeve, and I went back on my way, surprised at the strength of my urge to knock his hat onto the dirt, and him right after it.

In the twilight our street looked much the same as ever. Two children I didn’t know played with an iron hoop in the yard of the house next to ours, however, making me think that the widow Dufferin had died since my leaving. Since she was one of the few neighbors who treated me as such in my last days in the Colony I was sorry for her passing; contemplating her house I noticed the Ash sisters, dyspeptic and indistinguishable one from the other, watching me from their front porch across the street with grand operatic disdain, spindly arms folded across their dry, titless chests. They were true believers in the Colony and had pegged me, correctly, as a troublemaker from the day I arrived, though they always held Maggie in exaggeratedly high esteem. I wished I could cross the street and tell them that she and I had never really been married, that in fact she’d been living in a state of grievous sin with her real husband’s killer (as I then imagined myself to be).

With no small trepidation I crossed the grass to my own front door and knocked loudly. I had scarcely any idea of what I’d say to her, but I was determined to keep things as calm as possible, despite the strong feelings involved, with only the minimum of shouting or begging necessary to win her to my way of thinking. Nonetheless when the door opened to reveal a bearded man in his shirtsleeves with a napkin tucked into his collar and a mouthful of food wadded in his cheek, jaw working steady and slow like a guernsey’s, I felt as though I’d been gutshot, and my next action was the result of raw emotion and not clear thinking.

“Well, you dirty son-of-a-bitch,” were the words that came out of my mouth, even as I balled up my fist and slammed it straight into his breadbasket. He went down in surprise, jaw still churning, and partially chewed chunks of corn fell from his open mouth as he hit the floor, scrambling to get back to his feet. I had already begun to regret the rashness of the act when I saw the boy coming at me, napkin tucked into his collar, and heard the scream of the unfamiliar woman at the dinner table across the dining room. The adolescent coming toward me with his fist upraised was sixteen or seventeen, and six feet in height at least, and with their mother at the table sat four smaller children. The lady of the house was not, of course, Maggie, and my failure to block the boy’s fist as it closed in on my jaw was at least partly due to the confusion this caused. I began apologizing on my way backward onto what was apparently no longer Maggie’s and my porch. The back of my skull made a solid contact with the wood, and to his credit the man I’d slugged held his son back while I regained my bearings.

After a brief explanation the man introduced himself politely as Hiram Wells, the new owner of the house, and explained that they’d bought it from a woman who had subsequently packed up and moved away, pointedly declining to leave a forwarding address. Hiram walked me off the porch while his wife and children stared after me, the oldest boy looking like he’d like to finish what he’d begun. I returned to Golden the next day and moved my studio shortly thereafter to Denver, and fourteen years passed without another scrap of news about her. I stood a better chance of having a conversation with the man in the grave before me about my past sins than I did with Maggie, if her reaction on the street had been any indication.

The day was getting colder, I thought, and I didn’t like the melancholy turn my thoughts were taking. There was a westerly egress from the boneyard, and I headed that way slowly, stopping at this stone and that to see if anybody else I knew had been laid low there. Two friendly old acquaintances lay near the gate, a teamster by the name of Bellows who’d passed away in ’77, and H. P. Gavin, a stonemason, who’d managed to hang on until ten years after that. Both of them had spent time and money in my saloon; dead, they were more a part of the town than I was.

I had thought that a look at the Bender trial might lift my spirits, but after lunchtime the courtroom was jammed, and I managed only to insinuate myself into the rear of the room, standing against the wall. The courthouse was still so new that everything in the courtroom seemed to creak: chairs, doors, the gate separating the bar from the gallery. I could only see the faces of those in the rearmost rows of seats, and most of these were unfamiliar to me. At the witness table sat two stout women, short in stature, with their ample backs to me, whom I took to be the defendants. Nothing about them seemed familiar, but I was looking from a distance, and after the passage of nearly seventeen years. Mr. Wembly stood before them, examining a witness regarding the business that had brought Mr. Sheale out to the Bender farm. Squinting, I recognized the witness as Mr. Henniston, Sheale’s associate, as fat as ever and pinker than before, his sparse hair gone goose white. Involuntarily I summoned to mind the image of his late partner, freshly exhumed and lying naked and corrupt on the soft green grass of the Benders’ orchard, even his clothing stolen by his hosts. I wondered if anything stood there now, if anyone now presumed to farm that patch of blood-soaked land.

Henniston was explaining Mr. Sheale’s motivations for traveling with such a large amount of cash on his person, and though the gallery was properly silent, Henniston’s voice was papery and hoarse, and in the end I couldn’t hear him well enough for my interest to hold. Before Mr. Henniston’s testimony had ended I exited the courtroom, vowing to return another day, early enough to have a seat nearer the bar. Passing through the main lobby I saw a rotund figure tottering in my direction. He was dressed in expensive but threadbare clothing, and his long sideburns were trimmed unevenly; it took me a moment to put a name to the familiar face, and he was already upon me when I called out a friendly greeting.

“Cy Patton,” I called out, extending my hand for a shake. He recoiled momentarily, and then he spat a feeble gob of thick saliva into my palm before hurrying past me to the court.

I was more amused than insulted, and since I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to poor Cy to merit such impertinence, I laughed it off and stepped out into the gelid afternoon air.

That afternoon I rode a hired roan mare out to my old farm. It hadn’t changed much, except that the house had been added to on its west side. I dismounted and tied the nag to the old post I’d planted myself and headed out behind the house. On the spot once occupied by the ramshackle barn I’d built now stood a solid new one, bigger than mine, too. Inside it a Negro of middle years was taking apart a bale of hay with a pitchfork and feeding it to some milk cows in a neatly constructed row of pens. When I called out to him from the door, he didn’t hear me over the wind; when I repeated myself his backward glance was wary.

“Sorry to trouble you,” I said. “I used to live here. I built that house out there, in fact.”

He squinted. “You Ogden, then?”

“That’s me,” I said. He was older than I’d first taken him for, maybe fifty or fifty-five.

“My name’s Haxley. And since you mention it, that roof you built was leaking the day I bought it. Had to replace it right then or it would have ruined the furniture, had to replace all the puncheons on the second floor, too. Just been the hired man living there before that, reckon he didn’t care if he got rained on. Not at all a properly built roof, Mr. Ogden.”

I had never been taken to task by a Negro before, but Haxley had me dead to rights. I’d done that roof myself, and even while I was hammering the shingles down I knew I’d have to do it again before too many years passed. “Sorry about that.”

“Your wife’s a real nice lady, though.”

“Bought it from her, did you?”

“Came up from Louisiana five years ago, she was living in town by then and eager to sell. She led me to understand you were gone for good and she represented that she had the right to sell without you. If you got a problem you’ll have to take it up with your wife. Your former wife.”

“Well, I have no problem. Just wanted to see the place is all. You’ve done some work on it, I see.”

“Knocked down that old sod house out back and built a shed. Put up this new barn, too. Old one was falling to pieces time I got to it. Might have blown over in a good stiff gale.”

Though I was mostly mad at myself for leaving Ninna with a rickety old barn, I suddenly felt equally angry at Garth for failing to restore it for her. “What happened to Garth?”

“Garth. Well, Garth was working the farm all by himself for Mrs. Canterwell, and he wanted to stay on, but he didn’t want to work for a colored man. Before he’d stay on he wanted me to agree to call him Mr. Doyle. So I let him go.”

“You know if he’s still around?”

“Killed by a train two, three years ago. Drunk on the tracks. When they found him he had a forty-five caliber Colt revolver in his hands, and the sheriff was of the opinion he might have got it into his head that he’d rob the train. Engineer said he thought there was two or three men running away, probably Garth’s drunken chums.”

“Mind if I ride around back?”

“Go right ahead.”

I took the mare around the side of the house and Mr. Haxley resumed his hammering. Even in the midst of winter it was clearly a more successful farm than when I’d run it. The furrows were straight and regular, the buildings neat and well maintained. I’d never looked back with any regret at my life as a farmer, and for the first time I felt a little ashamed that I hadn’t worked harder at it. I rode back to the front of the house and thanked Haxley for the look.

I rode back into town slowly; I hadn’t seen Ninna yet, and I wondered if this wouldn’t be the day to go in and make my apologies to her.

The ride into town was considerably shorter than it had been, the town limits having moved so much further out, and by the time I got to where her dress shop was the sun was low and she’d lit her lamps.

“Hello, Bill,” she said when I came through the door, with as little emotion as if I’d been gone no more than a couple of hours. She was tacking cloth to a dummy, and she held a half-dozen pins between her teeth when she smiled.

“Ninna.” She looked better than she ever had when we were young; still corpulent by any reasonable standard, she now carried it with considerable grace and charm. The once unformed quality in her face had been refined by the years into a look of good-natured tolerance, a quality sorely lacking during our years together.

“Heard you were back in town.”

“I am. Went out to the farm today.”

“I sold it a while back. Didn’t make sense to keep paying a hired man to do what was really the owner’s work.” There was a teasing quality to her tone, but no real malice that I could detect. Her accent had almost disappeared, and her mastery of colloquial English had improved also, with no sign of the vulgarisms she once favored; I attributed this to the company of a more attentive husband, and to an active life in town.

“I know. Looks like he’s done a good job on the place.”

She nodded. “Clyde got married.”

“I saw him this morning.”

“You see Maggie, too?”

“Briefly. She wasn’t glad to see me.”

Ninna’s lip protruded thoughtfully. “You been gone a long time, Bill.”

“You look lovely,” I said, with some genuine surprise at the regret I felt just then for having treated Ninna so poorly.

“Pish,” she said with a wave of her hand, but her face reddened a little further.

As she began tacking another piece of cloth to the dummy, a lady in black opened the door to the shop and strode majestically in, followed by a bucktoothed young woman who meekly looked at the floor and looked as if she expected to be backhanded across the face at any moment.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Canterwell,” she called out to Ninna. “This would be a convenient moment for you to fit me for the organdy.”

Ninna sighed so slightly that if I hadn’t been married to her once I wouldn’t have detected it; though the timing was plainly inconvenient for her, when she moved to greet the woman it was with an enthusiastic flourish and effusive “hello.” She turned to me with a nod that managed to be curt and friendly at once. “Good afternoon to you, sir. A pleasure to see you again.”

Outside on the sidewalk I heard behind me the words “Son of a bitch!” and then a powerful blow to my back, right between the scapulae, nearly felled me. I turned, ready to fight, and found myself staring into the scarred, friendly face of Herbert Braunschweig.

“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” he yelled, drawing sidelong glances from passersby. “I heard you were back, but I didn’t believe it.”

“You’re looking prosperous, Herbert.”

He straightened up and grabbed hold of the collars of his overcoat like a caricature of a big business man. “Goddamned right.” He had a glass eye now, which fixed on me more intently than the real one did.

“You have time for a drink?”

“Naw, I’m in a hurry, but listen, me and Renée got married a while back. You come on over for dinner tomorrow. You remember that big old cathouse Hank Jeffries built?”

I didn’t know the name but I assumed he meant the fancifully designed mansion that had been going up when I last saw the town. “The one with all the gables?”