The City of Lovely Brothers (40 page)

They would have to walk about half a mile before they reached a street where they were likely to find a taxi.

Jake asked if he should run on ahead and hail one.

"No, I can walk that far," Caliban said. "The exercise will do me good."

It was a nice day, perhaps one of the last they would have that autumn. A number of people, most of them couples or families, had stepped out for a stroll along the river. Several of them turned to look at them when they saw Caliban clinging affectionately to Nick's arm. Jake commented on the stares they got.

"We're used to them," Caliban said, "and we know what they're thinking. Two men aren't supposed to walk arm and arm like a girl and her boyfriend. Then they notice my limp and think I'm holding on to him to support myself.

Being a cripple has its advantages."

"You're not a cripple yet, Uncle Cal."

"I need crutches, don't I?"

"If you can still walk half a mile with only Nick to lean on, then I'd say you're lame, very lame, but no cripple." "How long's it gonna be before he is, though?" Nick asked. "You're a doctor, Jake. I know Cal wants to know, even if he ain't asked. Will it get much worse?"

"Yes, there's no holding back the deterioration, and it will progress more quickly as time goes on. I can't say how long it will be until you're in a wheelchair, Uncle Cal, but it's coming."

"We both knew that," Caliban said. "Nick doesn't like to face it, but he knows, the same as I do."

* * * *

Jake's train east left late in the evening. At supper, Jake asked them, "I have a question for you two, something I've wondered about since I've known you. Do you ever quarrel? You don't seem to. I've never seen that in a couple."

"We had that big blow-out last Christmas, when you knitted me them wool pajamas for my present and made me wear 'em for a whole week. They itched!"

Caliban smiled. "I didn't knit you woolen pajamas for Christmas!"

"You didn't? The way I remember it, I went to bed in my birthday suit."

"Don't you ever disagree on anything? "Of course we do sometimes," Caliban said. "Is that a reason to quarrel about it?"

The United States was in the grip of the Great

Depression. Countless men in Davenport had lost their jobs, and their families survived on public relief. A vast shantytown sprang up near the river at the west end of the city, where thousands of people lived in filth and squalor.

Nick, like so many others there, was unemployed. He and Caliban would have to move so he could find work.

Caliban thought that with Nick's experience he could land a job in the stockyards in Kansas City, but Nick was against it. "I don't wanna go west ever again," he said, "not even a mile." So they had gone to Saint Louis, hoping Nick would find work there. Caliban's gold certificates would give them enough to live on for quite a while in spite of his medical bills, but no one had any idea how long the Depression would last. The end was nowhere in sight.

They found a one-room apartment on the ground

floor of a five-story walkup. Caliban could manage with difficulty the five steps in front of the building, but not a flight of stairs. It was in a run-down neighborhood. Drunks and derelicts idled away their aimless days in its trash-littered streets. Their one room was half the size of the front room of their house on the ranch. The paint was peeling, 50and the radiator hissed and clanged in a vain attempt to produce heat. The apartment came with a fold-down bed with a privacy curtain they could draw in front of it but never did, a closet-sized kitchen, and an even tinier bathroom, but at least Caliban would not have to use the toilet in the unlit hallway. Many of the bigger apartments —bigger, not big— did not have their own bathroom. As an added advantage, because the bathroom was minuscule, the bathtub was only a yard long with a built-in seat. Caliban would not have been able to get out of a bathtub he stretched out in without help.

There was no rug. Besides the fold-down bed, their furniture consisted of a worn-out sofa, a little side table with a lamp next to it, a kitchen table, three chairs, and a small dresser which they kept in the closet to give themselves the additional floor space for the wooden walking frame Nick had designed and built for Caliban.

They had a telephone, an indispensible luxury in case Caliban needed a doctor. Squeezed into the kitchen were a three-burner stove with an oven that did not always work, an icebox, and a sink which could hold two table settings but was only big enough to wash one pan at a time, and above the sink were cabinets for cookware and canned goods Caliban could not reach. They kept the tableware in the useless oven so Caliban could set the table. It was too 50hard for him to stand at the stove long enough to cook supper, but he did the lighter housework. He had to do it very slowly, but he had all day to do it in.

For a few weeks, every day Nick walked from store to store, business to business, factory to factory, trying to find work. He was never tempted to give up and spend the day leaning against the wall of a building like the many despondent, out-of-work men he saw. He attributed his determination to the necessity of caring for Caliban, but he would have done the same had he been on his own. It was not in his nature to remain idle.

They ate eggs, potatoes, beans, cheese, a daily piece of fruit, and drank coffee for a beverage, but Nick insisted Caliban drink four glasses of milk a day to keep his bones from crumbling. Two or three times a week, he came back from job hunting with a slab of liver, a carp, or some other cheap cut of meat. Their diet perked up when an Italian family on the third floor introduced them to pasta and its possibilities. For the anniversary of Nick's moving into Caliban's prairie house together they ate steak, fried potatoes, salad and cupcakes. They would have baked the potatoes, but could not get the oven to light.

When Nick came home with a birthday gift for

Caliban, Caliban did not want to accept it. "It isn't fair," he said. "I won't be able to buy you one. I can barely make it 51outside to sit on the front steps for a breath of foul air, much less walk a few blocks to the nearest store, where I won't find anything anyway."

But there was a big gift-wrapped box on the table when Nick came back from looking for work on his birthday. "I telephoned for a taxi," Caliban explained. He had spent what was, for them, a fortune on a complete rancher's outfit like what Nick had worn back in Caladelphia, with the cowboy shirt, the dungarees, the sculpted belt, the boots, the string tie, and the wide-brimmed hat. "I didn't buy you chaps or spurs, to save money," Caliban said.

Nick could not keep from smiling, but he grumbled,

"You forget we're living in the city now? Where'm I gonna wear these?"

"Right here in our apartment. And you're going to take them off piece by piece while I watch. Now go into the bathroom and try them on so I can see you come out all dressed up. And put on your silk skivvies underneath. I cooked supper, too."

"When do I take it all off?"

"Not until I tell you. Sometime after supper."

Caliban had cooked Nick's favorite beef stew, with bits of pork side and potatoes, carrots and turnips, and he had made biscuits for sopping up the gravy. When Nick 51had had seconds and cleaned his plate, Caliban said, "I have a surprise for you. Shut your eyes while I get it out of its hiding place."

It was a birthday cake he had baked himself.

"Where'd you get it?" Nick wanted to know.

"I baked it myself."

"How'd you do that?"

"With flour and sugar and eggs and butter and milk."

"How'd you get the flour and sugar down from the cupboard? I don't like you climbing up on a chair or onto the counter with that hip."

"I couldn't get up on a chair whether you liked me doing it or not. That nice Mrs. Cohen down the hall took them down for me and put them back when I finished."

"I bet she baked it for you, too."

"In a sense she did. She put it in her oven, since you haven't got around to fixing ours yet. But I made it, and the chocolate butter cream frosting, too."

"Where're the candles?"

"Fifty-two of them? Do you want to burn this place down?"

"How can I blow 'em out and make a wish if there ain't no candles?"

"You once told me there isn't anything you could 51wish for."

"Not for me, but I wouldn't 'a minded wishing this damn Depression would be over."

* * * *

They did not pretend cheerfulness, nor were they morose. Their sense of humor did not change. Times were hard for everyone, and they were not the kind of men to indulge in self-pity. But Nick grieved for Caliban's disability and failing health, and Caliban blamed himself for Nick's sense of helplessness and frustration at not being able to find work. If Nick had not been saddled with him, he could have gone west and found work on a ranch and escaped from the claustrophobic city and its pestilent air.

He told Nick how he felt.

"First of all, I hear things ain't no better out west.

You can't find ranch work no more'n you can find a factory job. I prob'ly couldn't get work if I asked for it in Caladelphia. Two, you ain't a burden, and we're gonna pull through this. Three, we got money, though it's going quick, but it ain't in the bank, thank God, it's in gold, and all of it.

Four, it's your money, what you got for selling your part of the ranch. I wouldn't have nothing without you."

Caliban understood that Nick's last words were not 51about money. Had they been as rich as Croesus, if he lost Caliban, Nick would have felt he had lost everything.

Nick eventually did find a job in Saint Louis, but he hated it. It was a long walk to get there, the work was boring, the pay was low, and the workers' morale was lower. In Davenport, although the people he worked with at the factory did not say much to each other, there was a kind of solidarity among them. They had a union; here they did not, and since the Depression the acrimony between bosses and workers had increased. Things had grown uglier, and people were afraid of the goons and even more afraid of losing their jobs. Some went so far as to accuse a fellow-worker of being an agitator. Nick always came home depressed, but a hug from Caliban was enough to cheer him up.

They had an income, but they continued to live

frugally. Nick could foresee the day when he would have to leave his job to care full time for Caliban. Their money would run out, and then what would they live on? Perhaps they could find a woman in their building desperate to supplement her husband's meager salary, or lack of one, to help care for him.

* * * *

Back in Caladelphia, Calvin Jr. was about to lose everything; the beginning of the Great Depression was no time to be mortgaged up to your earlobes. The banks could not touch the land of Calvin's quarter, since Darcie had finessed them when she had it incorporated as a city, but the buildings on it —the house, bunkhouse, barns, stables and sheds— were vulnerable, as were the livestock and equipment. Several Caladelphians had already lost their homes, and the bank owned a quarter of the businesses, including the mill. Their former owners continued to work there for the bank, but business was slow and they feared the bank would close them down and turn them out.

Calhoun owned all his property and everything on it, and Caleb's sons owned the eighth where their mother lived and sent her money every month. Hester still owned her house, but the general store belonged to the bank, and she ran it for them in return for a small percentage of the profits.

One morning before dawn, Calvin Jr. took the deed to the unsold half of Caleb's property, the bank abstract and the surveyor's drawings, got into the car, and drove to Miles City. He had an appointment to meet with Troilus Pardoner at nine.

"You told me on the telephone there's something I would want to know about," the lawyer said after they had shaken hands.

"Them acres by the northeast corner of the ranch my pa sold you, they're for sale. I thought you'd want 'em, so I come to you first."

"You thought right. Who's selling?"

"I am. I brought the deed and the surveyor's map.

It's good grazing land."

"Let's see them."

Pardoner glanced over the deed. Then he looked

suspiciously at Calvin Jr., knitting his brow, as if he were trying to read him. "This deed isn't made out to you. You don't have the authority to sell it. Not to me, not to anyone.

Where'd you get it?"

"In our office safe in Caladelphia."

"What was it doing there?" "We got the deeds to all the quarters there, excepting what you bought. Caladelphia been one ranch for generations."

"It isn't anymore. It hasn't been since your father and uncles divided it up and each of them went his own way."

"They weren't s'posed to. And they run it like one ranch for years after my grandpa left it to 'em."

"What do you mean by 'they weren't supposed to'?"

"Where he give 'em each a quarter in his will, my grandpa says they gotta stick together and keep the ranch whole."

"But they didn't, did they? Once the property became theirs he couldn't tell them what to do with it."

"That's 'cause he was dead."

Pardoner laughed. "No, my friend. Possession is nine points of the law. He couldn't tell them what to do because it wasn't his anymore, just like the acres you're trying to sell me now aren't yours."

"I got the deed to 'em, don't I?"

"You purloined it. What you want to do is an arrogation, a kind of embezzlement. In other words, Mr.

Caldwell, you're asking me to become an accomplice in a felony."

"So you ain't interested." "I didn't say I wasn't interested. I merely meant to explain that I will not purchase the property unless I'm very sure that my rights of ownership will be watertight and uncontestable."

"How can we know that?"

"
I'll
be the judge of that. I know the law; you obviously don't know anything. Are there people who will attest that the deed was kept in your safe and that the owners of the property knew it was kept there and consented to keeping it there?"