The Bold Frontier (33 page)

“Now wait, I just want to show you something.” His free hand dropped; fly buttons popped open. Annemarie’s eyes grew huge, reflecting the cool orange light of the sky. “You krauts like weenie-wursts, don’t you? Here’s a weenie-wurst you can bite.” He pulled it all the way out and shook it, touching her skirt.

Annemarie screamed and flung herself back, incapable of rational thought. She screamed and kept on screaming, hitting him with her books, kicking him— “Hey, hey, for Christ’s sake, you kraut bitch!”—and in order to escape, he had to form a huge fist and bash her twice in the side of the head.

Annemarie sprawled in the alley. A woman stepped onto her back porch, hidden by the shed, and called out, “What is going on out there?” The burly young man turned and fled, stuffing his member back in his pants and struggling with the buttons as he dashed out of sight.

On the ground, lying half in a puddle of mud, Annemarie screamed uncontrollably. The woman ran out, identified her, and telephoned the Aalen house. Annemarie was still sobbing and wailing when Elsa arrived, running and out of breath. Annemarie was still moaning and crying when the family doctor drove up at half past six and forced two teaspoons of an opiate syrup into her mouth; she spit out most of it.

Willi didn’t sleep at all that night. He held Annemarie in his arms for a long period, rocking back and forth, or he sat beside her bed, crying harder than she did. He was ashamed of his tears, and unable to stop them.

It was morning before she was calm enough to give her father a description of the molester. As soon as she did, Willi took his cane and went downtown.

“Where is he? Where is the lout?” Willi demanded.

Finnerman laughed nervously; he couldn’t believe his red-faced caller was serious. “Willi, what the hell’s going on? You don’t want to butt heads with Moss, he’s twice your size …”

Willi rapped the desk with his cane. “Tell me, Jim. Where do I find him?
Verfluchene Abfall …
he’s going to pay.”

“For what?” Finnerman asked with false innocence.

“For molesting my daughter Annemarie,” Willi shouted. “For surprising her in the alley near my house and exposing his most private parts to her. She is a nervous high-strung girl. Weeping … half crazy because of what he did. Christ knows she may never get over it.” Willi was unconsciously slapping the cane into his free hand. “He won’t, either.”

“Jesus and Mary,” Finnerman whispered, crossing himself. “Moss works late in the saloon, I let him sleep late, I expect he’s still snoring out in the shed. Rear of the yard,” he added with a thumb hooked at the window. But Willi was already thundering down the rear stairs.

He crossed the trash-strewn yard and kicked at a grimy mongrel dancing around his pant legs. He was almost totally unaware of his surroundings, seeing instead an image of a soldier in Union blue charging through a smoking wood with a flashing bayonet upraised. The soldier was his father …

“What ’n hell—?” Moss Eames muttered a moment after Willi kicked open the slatted door. The burly young man lay on a pallet of old smelly blankets, and now he struggled up on his elbows, squinting until he identified the person within the shadow in the doorway. A smarmy smile oozed over his mouth. “You dumb heine, what are you doing in here? You made a big mist—”

Willi slashed the cane down, holding it tight by the ferrule. This time the knob broke the skin on Moss Eames’s brow. Blood ran. Moss cursed and thrashed, trying for a hold on Willi’s leg. Willi stamped his crotch, and from then on Moss, despite his size and power, never had a chance.

Cries from the shed brought Finnerman and his morning barkeep on the run. They pounded and shouted at the shed door.

“Keep out, I’m not finished with him,” Willi said in an iron voice. Left hand stretched behind him, he held the door shut while, with his right, he struck down again at the cringing bloody heap on the red blankets.

In a fresh collar and cravat, with his hair and mustaches combed, Willi stood stiff-legged in front of the desk. Chief Loy Bloodworthy looked uncomfortable and uncertain; Jim Finnerman, in the side chair, looked miserable.

“Moss is gone,” the chief said. “Lit out sometime this afternoon. Guess he was sound enough to walk.” Under shrubby brows, his eyes looked Willi up and down with a distinctly new respect. “Guess you didn’t kill him …”

“It was my right to do that if I wanted,” Willi said. “My daughter’s mind is unhinged.”

“Ah, she’ll get over it—”

“Some girls might,” Willi said stiffly. “Not Annemarie, I fear. Annemarie is frail in a way her mama and I have never understood.” Like a soldier being inspected, he braced his back and clasped his hands behind him. “I had every right to take the life of that trash.”

“We won’t argue it,” Bloodworthy muttered.

“He’s got no relatives that I know about,” Finnerman said. “To press charges, I mean.”

“Then it’s settled,” Willi announced. “Except for one thing. I would like an apology from someone for all the things I have been called because I am German. I am patriotic, a citizen—I love this land as much as either of you. I am not a
Dutchman
.”

Finnerman slouched deeper in the chair; Loy Bloodworthy looked sullenly at the saloon owner. Then, with an equally sullen glare at Willi, he shrugged and hauled his paunchy body up from the chair.

“Guess somebody does owe you that much.” Without enthusiasm, he offered his hand. Willi took it crisply, shook it up and down twice, like a pump handle.

“Thank you,” Willi said with a bow, and pivoted and left. The door closed.

“Stinking kraut,” Loy Bloodworthy muttered as he sank back in his chair. The men stared at one another like lovers suddenly aware of their mutual ardor for the first time.

Two nights later, in shirt sleeves, Willi left the house after supper with some new pickets in hand, plus a hammer and nails. It was a balmy evening, not quite dark yet; he could effect some repairs for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes.

He set his pickets, hammer and nails in the dirt by one of the burned bougainvillea vines twisting out of the ground. He pulled up his old patched work pants and knelt, then pried two blackened pickets from a section of the fence not completely destroyed.

He felt a quiet pride as he set about his work. He had won; been vindicated; there had been no more slurs, no more incidents, since his meeting with the police chief. Annemarie was no better, however; the doctor was thinking of sending her to a Los Angeles physician who specialized in nervous disorders of females. That was a tragic cross for Elsa to bear, but Willi dealt with it by reminding himself that every victory had its price. In the cool, windy evening, he could kneel there in the lowering dark, amid the smells of burned wood and sun-warmed earth, and feel that he had been vindicated.

The Eleventh Corps had been vindicated.

I did not run …

At the corner of the next house—the Johanssens were gone to a family reunion in Hanford—someone slipped into sight, an indistinct shadowy figure in the dusk, and raised a small pistol and fired one round into Willi’s back. He died during his slow awkward fall on the charred picket fence, which collapsed under the weight of his body.

“The wages of a hotel parlormaid are not all that high …” said the assistant manager of the Southern Hotel in Bakersfield.

Elsa twisted a black silk kerchief in her black-gloved hands. “I need the job, sir. We have just moved here. I have children to care for.” The brewery was shuttered, with no customers; it was up for sale, with no buyers.

The manager wrote in pencil on a small card. “All right. Now you said your first name was—”

“Elsie. It’s Elsie.”

“Your husband’s name?”

“He’s deceased. But it was Bill Allen,” she said, avoiding his eye. “Bill.”

I
N THOSE DAYS, NICK
Bray, though hardly a person of consequence, was decidedly a subject for conversation.

Often it took the form of a hushed, thrilled recitation of something that Nick had done. Or, if the speaker was an older gentleman, it might be a surly recitation which failed to hide the speaker’s envy of Nick’s youth and nerve. But whatever the style or substance, you always heard the same thing said in conclusion. “What a waste,” they said of Nick Bray, “what a damned, abominable waste.”

There was about Nick an air of someone doomed, though he was yet a young man in his twenties. But it seemed that he must have lived many more years than that because of all the scars he bore, and all the devils that never quite stayed bottled up inside him.

Nicholas Bray. Second of three sons of Solomon Nicholas Chadbourne Bray, merchant of Charles Town. Nick’s older brother was Solomon, his younger was Chadbourne. Nick was deemed too frivolous and reckless to be the equal of the thoughtful Solomon, too somber and bitter to be the match of the zestful and carefree Chad. He had fallen out with the family even before he reached his majority. No one knew all the divisive issues, but his father’s black bondsmen were surely one of the heaviest. For Nick would argue, “The natural or happiest state of man is freedom. From want, from debt, from servitude. Why should it be any different with an African?”

“Nick Bray,” they said, in an envious tone if the speaker was a waddling townsman who wished he could put Nick’s considerable talents to his service. “Nick Bray,” they said, with bosomy sighs that fluttered the candles if the speaker was a proper young wife of Charles Town already bored with her lot.

Nick Bray—what was he really? A rover and a rogue, with his hair to his shoulders, bright with some hideous Indian grease; his leggings all marked with ungodly stains of blood, ardent spirits, and other substances best banished from the Christian imagination; his great slung-jawed monster of a bulldog, Worthless, who was neither worthless nor comical, having torn out the throats of at least three who had failed to take serious measure of his master; his knife half as long as his forearm, and generously nicked from gouging into the bones of men he’d killed—that was Nick Bray.

He had a rotund partner, a ne’er-do-well of Huguenot blood named Huger Noggins (whose first name you must say correctly—You-gee). Noggins was a tough little fellow who worshipped Nick Bray with a mixture of mystification and exasperation. They complemented each other, and they made a deal of money together.

Nick was, sometimes, a cattle minder on the sea islands (they said he rustled his herds from Spaniards down in Florida); and he was, sometimes, a trader to the up-country tribes. And sometimes he just retreated to a hidden place on the wild shore of Winyah Bay, without his partner or his dog or any other companionship, there to carouse and let his demons out.

You saw Nick Bray striding in the sunshine on a Saturday in Charles Town, or riding fast through woodland shadows on one of his strong ponies, or wagering over a pit full of blood and feathers where metal-spurred cocks
f
ought to the death at twilight, far out in the country near the salt marsh, away from the constables.

Nick Bray of Carolina. A phantom you might glimpse on the horizon of a sand hill in the fall, swift as smoke to fly away. A rascal you’d find with a happy tavern slattern on each knee, but only for the night.

Nick Bray of Carolina. A rascal who was present, unseen, at many a table where safe, sober people dined and talked. Nick Bray was very real, even to those to whom he was no more than a legend…

The empty coach arrived at the Jacksonborough trading post on the Edisto on a hazy yellow afternoon in 1722. Twice a year the post held a fair for traders and neighbors, and on this day the autumn fair was in progress. The shooting matches and the contest with cudgels were over. The day’s most anticipated events, a raffle for a pair of silver-chased flintlock pistols, was yet to come. The game of the moment was the pole climb.

About sixty people crowded around the greased pole, shouting and chaffering as first one local boy and then another tried to climb to the top. Nick Bray and his partner, Huger Noggins, were among the enthusiasts. Nick waved an ale pot as he shouted a wager across the crowd. “Taken,” a man shouted back, and Noggins, who resembled a fat keg with legs on the bottom and a curly mop of hair on top, groaned at the extravagance. Noggins was flushed to a dark red from the last contest bare-handed straightening of a horse’s shoe. He’d won it in half the time of his nearest competitor.

Nick’s forehead glowed with sweat. His fine white blouse hung open on his chest. Over the rim of the ale pot at his lips he saw the coach settling on its leathern springs in the middle of a swirling dust cloud. He saw the postilion motioning and realized the signal was for him.

“Hold this, Huger.” He handed away the pewter pot and loosened his knife in the hip sheath as he walked over. Tan dust was settling like wig powder on the fine horses, the coachmen, the lacquered wood. Nick stopped to look closely at the escutcheon on the dusty door. No mistaking it.

He talked for a bit with the driver, then walked back to his partner. Nick’s bulldog lay in the shade of the palmetto-log store, asleep in the heat. The crowd cheered as the favorite slithered to within a foot of the top of the pole before sliding back down with a cry.

“Sir Pierce Cottloe sent his coach for me.”

“I don’t believe it,” Noggins said after he got over his surprise.

“Nor do I. But there it sits. Why do you suppose a man who hates me suddenly wants to give me a comfortable ride up to his house in Charles Town?”

“No explanation from his lackeys?”

“I asked, but they refused. Reckon I’ll just have to take the ride to find out.” Nick’s dark eyes held a look both thoughtful and wary.

Noggins started to protest, but Nick was all energy, rousing Worthless with his dusty calf-high boot. “Mind my horse, and if I’m not here by this time tomorrow, better start a search in the marshes.”

His old cloak over one arm, he clapped Noggins on the shoulder and whistled to the bulldog. Worthless jumped into the carriage, and Nick right after him. The carriage bore off on the northern road in a cloud of sunlit dust.