Cottonwood (2 page)

“Well, now, some of these ladies, they see a well-spoken, well-barbered, well-dressed man at the door and they can’t control themselves. The husband, see, maybe he’s off on business. Hell, sometimes he’s just out plowing the back forty.”

“And you’re plowing Madame in the front room.”

He snickered. “That’s about the long and short of it.”

“I just bet you could get you some of that around here,” I said.

He nodded and leaned forward, lowering his voice as though there were others in the room whom he wished to keep in the dark. “Just yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of screwing a nice big heifer of a dutchwoman, blond upstairs and down. Then she fed me lunch and afterward she had me climb back aboard.”

“Oh,” I said. “You must’ve been out at the Schwemm farm, up the road toward Neodesha. Lady of about sixty, got a wandering eye.”

Having seen Mrs. Schwemm he was appalled at the suggestion. “By God, not her. I seen she wasn’t going to buy and I got out of there quick as I could. Lord, what do you take me for, thinking I’d wet my dick in a crabbed old pot like that?”

“I guessed it was Mrs. Schwemm because the only other big dutchwoman around these parts is Mrs. Ogden, and I couldn’t picture a slick fellow like you giving a married lady a poke and then coming into her husband’s saloon to boast of it.”

I watched him turn that around in his head for a second, and then he laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. I seen her husband, though, out back cutting wood. Enormous fellow with an even bigger head and a shock of black hair like a wild Osage.”

He was so sure of himself that my coming around the front of the bar only bothered him a little, and when I got his head down in the crook of my elbow he still seemed to think it was a big joke. That pretty hat fell onto the floor as I bent him downward, and he was still chuckling, albeit uneasily, when my knee cracked his nose.

“That’s my hired man that cuts the wood, you flapjawed imbecile,” I told him, and he hollered and wept as I gave him the rush to the front door and threw him out into the street in front of the saloon. The lower third of his face was red, his mustache dripping onto the dirt, and he looked up at his hat in my hand as if he expected me to throw it at him.

“This is mine now,” I informed him, placing it on my head as I turned away, finding it a comfortable fit. I slammed the door and stepped back behind the bar. “How do I look, fellows?”

“Just fine, Bill,” Alf said. “Like a fancy man right out of Chicago.”

Clark just shrugged as the drummer walked back in, leaving the door open, pointing a Dragoon straight at me. “All right, you dirty dogfucker,” he said, his throat ragged and dry, “you hand that back over.”

I took the hat off and looked inside the band. Real silk, probably a twelve-dollar hat. I took my own Colt from beneath the bar and stuck it into the hat’s crown, aiming it toward the open door. “Best stand aside,” I told him. He failed to comply, and as a result the bullet came whistling very close by his head, and he dove for the floor, his gun clattering to the puncheons beside him.

I fired again, producing a second hole in the crown of the bowler. I was aiming at a plank nailed onto the trunk of a dead tree twenty yards or so across the dirt road from the saloon’s front door. The plank splintered pleasingly with each successive impact, and upon emptying the Colt I stepped over to the prostrate drummer, picked up his Dragoon and placed it onto the bar. “I’ll take this too.” He nodded, dripping blood from his twisted honker as he backed out of the building.

“Bill, you forgot old Mrs. Bender, on the road to Cherryvale,” Alf said.

“How’s that?”

“She’s a big old heifer of a dutchwoman, too.”

“That may be true, Alf, but I very much doubt our fancy drummer man there would have fucked her any faster than he would have done old Mrs. Schwemm. No, it was my own dear Ninna entertaining him yesterday afternoon.”

“It could be that you ought to go out and have a talk with that wife of yours,” Alf said, and I had to admit his point was well-taken. I didn’t so much mind Ninna laying with other men, really, but I did object to her indiscreet choice of partners. I walked over to the open door and looked out to see the drummer (whose name, I would discover, was A. J. Harticourt, though I never learned what A. J. stood for), hurrying up the street, trying to get someone to listen to his sad tale, pointing at the crown of his ruined bowler. The last I saw of him he was going into the hotel. The owner of the feed store across from the hotel glared at me and, turning away, said something I couldn’t hear; then I noticed Tiny Rector standing in front of his dry goods store and scowling, and I felt a measure of shame at my lack of restraint.

I sold Alf his bottle and he was gone; poor Clark nearly wept as I ordered him outside, as he’d counted on spending the afternoon there and didn’t want to invest in a pint to take along with him. When he was gone I locked the door and remounted for the ride back to the farm for a word with my good wife.

It had finally begun to snow when I got to the farm, and I found the boy outside waiting for it to accumulate enough to play with. As always he appeared neither happy nor unhappy to see me.

“Oughtn’t you to be in school today, Clyde?” I didn’t recall seeing him around that morning when I was helping Garth with the chores, and it occurred to me that he may have been hiding.

“Mama says long as I got this cough I don’t have to.” He essayed a none-too-convincing cough.

“If you’re well enough to play out in the cold, you’re well enough to be in school.”

“Mama says I don’t have to.”

Faced with that irrefutable logic I abandoned the argument. He was years ahead of the other children anyway, even the older ones. “Where is she?”

“In the parlor, at her knitting.” He scooted off in the direction of the henhouse, and I stepped onto the porch of the third dwelling I’d erected on that property, a large wooden structure of which I was quite proud. The first had been a rude dugout constructed in 1868 for my own use only, while I commenced setting up the farm and building the second. That was a sod house, small but comfortable, and when I’d finished it I sent to Ohio for Ninna and the boy. They had been living with her mother and father in Columbus during that time, Ninna earning her keep helping out in her father’s photographic studio.

We’d been two years in the sod house when I exercised my husbandly prerogative and took some of the money Ninna’s old Danish Papa had presented us with on the occasion of our marriage to buy some lumber and hire some workers. I then set about building a proper gable-and-wing house, under whose roof I had not slept since six months after its completion.

I stepped into the house without knocking and found her making a man’s thick woolen sweater. Plump and red in the face, her beautiful blond hair done up in elaborate braids draped across her head, she sat placidly near the fire, working her needles and dreaming. She greeted me quietly, with no curiosity as to the reason for my presence in her parlor when I ought to have been tending to the saloon in town, then returned her attention to the work at hand. Above her head was a framed print of the single-spired cathedral at Strasbourg I’d managed to salvage from my parents’ effects upon my return from the war.

Without preamble I accused her of allowing the drummer access to her person, which seemed to disturb her not in the least; when I finally asked her to deny or confirm it she nodded and said gently, “Twice, second time nice and slow.”

“For God’s sake, he said Garth was right outside chopping wood.”

She shook her head. “Sawing, not chopping. That big dead oak.”

For a moment I was distracted by my lingering satisfaction that the enormous
Quercus alba
was finally down. Its removal was a job I’d delayed far too long; it was already minus all its removable branches—dry wood being at a premium in a land where most people burned the dried excrement of cattle in the winter—and amounted to not much more than a denuded log with roots by the time Garth and I had pulled it out of the ground three days prior. A look of glassy-eyed reverie on her cretinous pan brought me back to the matter at hand. “And you weren’t afraid he’d chance to look in?”

She shrugged. “I ain’t Garth’s wife.”

“Just don’t be laying down with drummers,” I pleaded. “They tell everybody. That’s part of their job, telling stories to please people.”

“Mm-hm,” she nodded.

“I don’t suppose the sweater’s for me.”

“For Garth.” Garth was my second full-time hired man since I’d quit running the farm myself. I’d fired the first one and chased him out of town after the boy let slip quite innocently that with all the noise coming from Mama and Juno’s room he had trouble sleeping at night.

Had I known that she would take the next hired man into her bed just as quickly as she had Juno I would have let the old boy stay on. When he left he took a ring that had belonged to my father, and I nearly set out after him when I became aware of its loss. His trail was cold by that time, though, and I could find no one who would admit to seeing him since the afternoon of his leaving. Despite the sentimental value of the stolen ring I was inclined to forgive Juno; he was a good and conscientious worker, particularly skilled at construction. He had in fact helped me build the saloon in early ’71, when I first decided I’d seen enough of life on the farm; a simple oblong building with a pine bar running two-thirds of its length, and a skylight in its rear to allow for the taking of photographic portraits. The owner of the town’s previous saloon, a shack containing a table made of a plank set upon two empty whiskey barrels, had passed out in a snowbank at Christmas, and in his squalid demise I saw my opportunity. The financing required some effort on my part; after I’d spent the first part of it building the house, an expenditure of which she did not approve, Ninna had carefully hidden the remainder of her father’s wedding present. After a fruitless day or two’s search I found a cast-iron Dutch oven buried next to the dead white oak, full of coins; I brought it inside, cleaned it up and set it, empty, next to the hearth without comment. I took the bulk of the gold to buy the land and put up the building and used the remaining thirty-five dollars, spitefully and with a grateful nod to her father, to order a stereographic camera. As soon as the saloon was bringing in money I was sleeping nights in the loft above the blacksmith’s shop, returning to the farm only in the mornings to share in some of the daily work.

As I was the only farmer in the area with a second income I was also the only one who could afford a hired man on any regular basis, and there was some grumbling from my harder-working neighbors, who considered that I was violating the spirit and probably also the letter of the homestead act. There was also grumbling from Ninna, who met my suggestion that we both move to town with a derisive Danish snort. She’d married a farmer, and a farmer’s wife she would remain, even if the farmer went off and tended bar and took pictures. In the end I didn’t insist that she and the boy accompany me, principally because an attorney-at-law and land agent in Independence advised me that the whole family leaving the farm would likely have resulted in forfeiture, house or no house, improvements or no improvements. We were only two years away from proving up the claim and owning the land outright, so I relented and continued my solitary life in town, far from home and hearth.

Our condition was much improved in the financial sense, as saloonkeeping pays better than farming, but Ninna never hid the fact that she didn’t consider it honest work on a par with the killing labor of running a farm. She did consider the photographer’s trade an honorable one and couldn’t have complained if I’d abandoned the farm for that, but I made so little money taking pictures that it didn’t enter the argument.

Her infidelities didn’t chafe at me as I would have imagined; I was confident she never had a lover but me before I moved out of our house and into town. By then I was no longer the overgrown apprentice who’d tenderly led her off to bed on our wedding night in Columbus, nor was she still the shy near-virgin with barely a hundred words of English. In those days I imagined that her lack of wit was actually an inability to express herself in my own tongue; as she learned it, though, improving her fluency day by day and month by month, I came slowly and reluctantly to the sad conclusion that I had united myself in matrimony with a dolt. Now she was a large, vapid woman of twenty-six years with a fervid appetite for sexual congress, and though at times I missed her animal enthusiasm, I knew I’d never return to her bed, sullied as it was with the smells and emissions of other men.

I left her to her knitting, hoping I’d made some sort of impression. There was no sign of Garth, and I crossed behind the barn to the sod house to find the latchstring out. I unbarred the door and entered; the front room was colder than the outdoors, and so was the second, where my old rope bed stood piled up with Garth’s soiled clothes. He had pasted up an additional layer of the
Optic
on the wall, and my eye was drawn to a yellowed article about the local grange, scarcely legible in the daylight streaming through the front door and the single window. Momentarily the room darkened further, and I looked up to find Garth standing in the doorway, fists clenched and mouth set in a scowl.

“What the hell you figure you’re doing in my house with the got-damn door wide open?” He filled the doorframe, having even to stoop a bit as he crossed the threshold. His head was big for his body and looked even bigger since his thick black hair wanted cutting.