E.L. Doctorow (10 page)

The cabin I had built onto the dugout was not good against such weather. The door shook against its latch and snow came through the wall and settled in the corners. I moved the stove back to the dugout and we retreated there to sit with blankets around our shoulders and watch the glow of the fire in each other’s faces.

These were strange quiet moments. We didn’t have much to be proud of but I had to allow we were better
off than we might have been. I could take satisfaction from the thought that bitter as she was, Molly had never made to leave the place I offered her; and that Jimmy might have done otherwise than jump to work at my side and heed every word I told him. A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.

But I looked at Molly sitting near the stove, her head was turned to the side and her hands were folded in her lap and she was gazing at nothing and her eyes were lost listening to the wind and snow outside—and in that quiet moment it was plain to me if she didn’t up and leave the first chance she had it was because no other place could she so savor the discouragement of her life. And Jimmy, who worked so willingly, the first day I came to the old town I saw Fee planing a board and his son holding one end for him. I had never once seen the boy linger at something useless the way most children will. He had watched his Pa stumble out of the Silver Sun and he had taken him by the belt—and that was work too. Jimmy was a child fitted to the land, using all his senses to live with what it gave him, and if he did his share and did as I told him why it was because he knew no other way.

Therefore where were my good signs? This green-eyed woman and brown-eyed boy sitting here had never done but the only thing they could do. And if I felt like believing we were growing into a true family that was alright: if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.

I remembered that half-burnt old almanac we had and I thought it might be the right weather for teaching
the boy to read. I could put a point on a stick and show the letters by scratching them in the floor. So we began to do that, working at it a little each day, I would have him study a letter as it was printed and then say its name and then watch me write it with the stick. Sometimes Molly watched, no expression on her face, maybe she was learning something too.

But the weather was ornery. A storm would blow up for a few days until the snow was banked high enough to keep the inside of the cabin warm. Then the sun would break through for a morning, warm winds would come down from the rocks, and soon everything was melting like a sound of crickets and water was running off everywhere. At night the ground iced up, every roof was hung with ice and the cabin walls were exposed again to the cold winds. It went on like that, every snow bringing its chinook to devil the skin, one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.

Molly said one evening: “Here you’re going on and on with those damn letters and you don’t even see the boy is sick.”

Jimmy had coughed once or twice that I’d heard, but I hadn’t thought about it. I said: “You’re alright aren’t you Jimmy?”

“I’m alright.”

But the next day he was coughing a lot. Even in the dugout the ground was damp, at night I folded my blanket and put it under him and then sat up listening to him cough and shiver in his sleep. Molly lay on her
side on the other side of the stove, I could tell by her back she was wide awake and listening each time the boy coughed.

The next morning Jimmy couldn’t get up. He was shuddering under his blanket, his teeth chattered and there was a wheeze to his breath. His face was flushed and his eyes glittery. Molly looked at me like it was my fault he had come up sick.

Straightaway I went to the Russian’s. It was a grey cold morning and there was ice all along the railing and a muddy crust of snow on the ground. Inside his place Zar was pacing up and down and Adah and the three girls were sitting on the meeting chairs and making a breakfast of flour-cakes and sardines. It was cold in there but they all had coats.

“Zar,” I said, “I’ll trouble you for some whiskey, the boy has caught something on his chest.”

“So?” He waved his hand as he paced. “Take, take, there will be no miners again this week, what for do I need whiskey?”

Adah wanted to know what Jimmy’s symptoms were like. I told her he had a powerful cough and the chills and fever.

“Well it’s the weather for it,” the tall girl, Jessie, said, “I’m feeling poorly myself.”

“Ain’t the weather’s your trouble, honey,” Mae said to her, “jes the moon.”

Adah told me to wait a bit and she went into another room. Zar had built this place not much wider than a railroad car, and there were two rooms at the end of the public room, one in back of the other.

“No customers, only that deadhead Jenks,” Zar was
saying. He was vexed the way the weather closed off the trail to the mining camp.

“Hey Blue,” Mae got up from the table, “that’s a mighty fine beard y’ workin’ up there, you come over of an evenin’ and we’ll comb it for yuh.”

The Chinese had her mouth full and she had to put her hand up while she giggled.

“God’s truth,” Mae said, “all we ever see now is that Jenks and he ain’t good for much more’n polishin’ his damn guns. Beard like that’d keep a girl warm these nights.”

“And that New Englander Maple,” Zar said, “he does not drink, he does not use the women, he stays there in my tent. I buy from him I must pay money, a fine way to trade.”

Adah came out carrying two bottles. She told me there was turpentine in the little one for rubbing on the boy’s legs. In the big bottle was rum, which was better than whiskey, I was to mix it with some hot water and make him swallow as much as he could take. “Nothing like rum for the chest,” she told me.

Well I thanked her and went back and did as she said. And for a while it seemed to help. But in the afternoon Jimmy began to shiver again and he wouldn’t take any more rum. Each time he coughed his whole body shuddered. Molly fixed up some flour soup with bits of salt beef for supper but he wouldn’t eat it.

It began to frighten me hearing that boy cough away like a man, the sound came up from his bowels and pushed his tongue and eyes out and turned his face crimson. We had him wrapped in all the blankets and
the fire built up high but he couldn’t stop his shivering. I began to feel the awful helpless rage. We fussed with him hour after hour—sitting him up to ease his breathing, laying him down again—but nothing comforted him and he couldn’t get to sleep.

It must have been close on midnight and Jimmy began to whimper and look up from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know what else to do. There was an unnatural burning in his eyes and his cheeks drew in with each wheezing breath. Molly couldn’t look at him any more, she walked back and forth fingering the cross at her throat. When the boy was taken with a heavy fit of coughing she stepped up into the cabin and walked away in the dark.

Then I felt a breeze at my feet and I went into the cabin after her. She had the door partly open and she was looking across the windy moonlit reach to the Indian’s shack. “Mayor,” she said, “what will you do if the boy dies, will you bury him beside his Pa?”

She didn’t wait for any answer I might have had but went out just in that dress and headed across for John Bear’s place, walking that stiff walk of hers, hugging herself against the bite. A great anger rose in me as I closed the door, I could have struck her right then, I was distressed for the boy’s illness, I damned her for the grip she had on my life, this unrelenting whore.

A few minutes later the Indian was standing in the dugout looking down at Jimmy. The boy stared back in fear, Bear wore his buffalo robe over his shirt and his black hair hung from under his hat down to his shoulders. They regarded each other and no word was spoken—and then the Indian bent down and tore the
top blanket off Jimmy with such suddenness that he cried out and began to cough.

Bear went into his doctoring with a speed that was like solace. He hung the blanket across the doorway leading to the cabin. He put a pot of water on the stove and poked up the fire. When the water was boiling he threw in some herbs he had and in a few minutes the air in the dugout was sweet and steamy. We all watched his moves transfixed: he drew a tin out of his pocket and poured a handful of seed in his palm. Then he kneeled down and looked around the dugout.

“He wants a stone,” Molly said to me.

I ran outside and found a flat piece of rock and brought it to him. He began to pound the seed into a powder, when it was well ground it made the sharp odor of mustard. He took some water from our pail and spilled it over the powder till he had a thick paste of earth and mustard. Then, cupping it in one hand he went over to Jimmy and went down on his knees, straddling the boy.

Jimmy began to struggle then, kicking and throwing his arms up, but the Indian just drew back and looked at him until he quietened and turned his face away. Holding the mustard paste in one hand, Bear exposed the boy’s chest. Seeing that small white ribbed body made my heart hurt. Bear spread the medicine across from under one arm to the other, up to the throat, down as far as the stomach. Then he pulled down Jimmy’s shirt and bound the blanket tight around him.

I will say this, whatever else was to happen John Bear was the best doctor I ever saw, white or red; he had a true talent for healing and it must be owned him.

Before he left he stepped up to Molly and while she stood startled, unwound the thin chain from her throat and dropped the cross at Jimmy’s head. He was no Christian but a modest man; Molly had clutched the cross during her healing and he was no one to deny the power of a charm.

Then came that long day and night with the wind whipping snow down from the rocks, and inside the dugout, droplets of water prickling the sod walls as the steam rose from the pot on the stove. I kept feeding the fire and filling the pot. Molly sat with the boy propped against her, he was coughing up matter and spitting it into a rag she held to his face. His eyes were smarting from the mustard, his chest ached with the coughing and burned from the poultice, he was in thorough misery. Whenever he made as if to tear the blanket away she held his hands and whispered: “Let it burn, let it burn deep!”

Sometime during that siege Miss Adah came pounding on the door wanting to know how the boy was doing. She wouldn’t come in so I had to step outside and we shouted to each other a few moments before she scurried back to the saloon.

Jimmy didn’t take anything for supper but during the night, after the snow let up, I thought he was breathing easier. Still he couldn’t close his eyes and Molly, laying his head against her breast, put her arms around him. It was an effort for her, she was blushing, she kept looking at me as if she expected me to laugh at her.

There was a panic in her eyes for a moment, she wanted to talk to the boy, to soothe him, but she had
trouble with the words. She had to go back a long way to find them:

“I bet you never seen a big city. Molly used to live in New York, did you know that? Oh it’s a grand place with stone houses all in rows, and cobbled streets and lamps on each corner that the man comes to light each evening with a long taper. And the carriage buses you see, so shiny and clean, with horses pulling them that are braided in the mane, high stepping. Did you know that …?”

I was sitting with my back to the wall and chewing on a prairie cake and as Molly went on talking I watched her close. The more she talked the easier the words came. The boy’s eyes were open and listening and he was breathing heavily, and Molly sat with her own eyes closed as she summoned up her pictures.

“… and each morning I would have a fresh black frock to put on and a white linen apron and a little starched cap to pin to my hair, as clean and starched as a nun I was. And that house! Well you’ve never seen the likes, a good fifteen rooms, each room fitted out with its own set of furniture and its polished floor of wood and its fancy rug. Why you could disappear into one of those big soft beds. And in the dining room, that was a room just used for eating, can you see that? the table would be covered with a fine cloth tasseled at the edges, and maybe ten settings of pure silver forks and knives and spoons, with three or four glasses at each place for the different waters or wines. And with the people all talking and laughing and the room lit up with candles, in we would come from the kitchen, three or four of us, carrying trays of hot vegetables and buns and a hen,
maybe, and a roasted ham to serve to all the ladies and gentlemen. All the ladies and gentlemen …”

I will never forget her words. Even after the boy’s eyes were closed she sat holding him around, whispering these remembrances. It was the most she ever said about herself, it was the most I ever learned about her. She was speaking the brogue. I had never heard her use it before, and I wouldn’t again.

“All the lovely ladies, all the fine gentlemen …”

Then her eyes opened and she saw me looking and “Turn away!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Don’t you dare look at me, turn away!” Even without her telling me I would have had to, such terrible pride was blinding.

Later Molly slipped away from the boy and laid him down in his sleep which was so long in coming. And we each stretched out to get some sleep too. But all the blankets were on Jimmy and after the fire went down it was cold lying there, there was a chill in my bones that made them ache. I couldn’t sleep and neither could Molly. I heard her shivering. I moved near her and touched her shoulder and with a cry she rolled over and bundled up to me. “Damn you Mayor,” she whispered in my ear, “I swear I can’t bear the sight of you!” And I held her as tight as I could, feeling her breast on mine, feeling her breathing, and then the warmth came and I didn’t move until she was asleep. I think I had wanted to hold her ever since the fire. My hands were on her back and I could feel the scars under her dress. She was small, so much smaller than she looked. I held her around, pressing her to me and I thought well we’re both suffering our lives, only how we do it is different. If
it replenishes her to hate me then let her hate me. At the worst her hate is something between herself and herself. And knowing it I was ashamed I had ever felt poorly of her.