The business life was over, though. Skeedle was more interested in telling fortunes, for one thing. Trix was gone, for another. But the principal reason business was over was Ogden himself: though perfectly friendly, and not the least judgmental about whoring—it was obvious to Ogden that if such great pleasure could be bought there would be men willing to buy it—his large presence frightened away many potential customers. Dora found this amusing; Ogden was one of the most peaceful males she had ever encountered, and yet most of the men that came in to the bar were afraid of him. He was just so large. Experienced whorers knew that most whores had a special fellow, a customer who loved them and might become fiercely jealous despite full knowledge of the requirements of the trade. The new customers at the Hotel Hope assumed Ogden was just such a fellow; they might be feeling rowdy, but fewer and fewer of them seemed to feel rowdy enough to risk an encounter with a jealous Ogden.
Once Trix left, Dora didn’t bother looking for another girl. The bar did fair business—she would just get by with the bar. Once in a while, usually when Ogden was off hauling for the mines, a party would arrive and engage Skeedle for an evening. Or a new girl might show up and work for a few days before drifting on to Miles City or Helena or somewhere.
Two weeks after she met him, Dora asked Ogden if he wanted to marry her. She knew it would never occur to him to ask her because it would never occur to him that she might accept, or even consider it.
The question caught Ogden unaware and caused him to blush so deeply that he couldn’t speak. He had cherished the deep hope that he could stay with Dora forever, but he feared that such a thing was impossible and he tried not to let the hope swell. Marriage was beyond his imagining. He wasn’t even sure what you had to do in order to be allowed to marry. His shyness was so deep that he supposed that alone meant marriage was out of the question. And then, with no warning, sitting on the bed with him, wrapped in her housecoat, Dora brought it into the question.
“Married like Ma and Pa?” Ogden asked.
“Well, I don’t know your Ma and Pa,” Dora said. “I guess they’re probably pretty well matched, from the size of you. Do you want to marry me or not?”
She felt a slight pang of embarrassment at her forwardness—of course, this big boy wasn’t going to refuse her.
“Would we do it today, or when?” Ogden asked, his thoughts in a riot. He had come to the west meaning to farm; he had read a pamphlet describing the wonderful farming opportunities that abounded in the Dakotas, and here he was. But so far he was just a freight hauler; he didn’t have a farm, and Dora had confessed to him that she didn’t like farms much. How to manage the future seemed quite a puzzle. Ogden didn’t understand the steps involved in marriage; on the other hand he felt a frenzy not unlike the frenzy that had once caused him to run. In this case his frenzy was to get the marrying done immediately, before Dora changed her mind.
“We could—or tomorrow,” Dora said. She was surprised at her own impatience, which was so sharp she felt capable of being quite ruthless about getting her way. For more than twenty years she had danced away from every opportunity for marriage; now she not only wanted to marry Ogden, she wanted to marry him immediately. She suddenly felt that everything depended on quickness, though there was no real reason to think it did. But she felt it anyway—she wanted it concluded, and concluded now!
They located a preacher and got married the next day, with Skeedle, Doosie, and Potato Creek Johnny in attendance. Johnny just happened to be in town—he had been in love with Dora for years and always dropped by when he was in her vicinity. She had never been sweet on him, but she was friendly to a fault—and there was always hope.
Watching the wedding—Dora had bought Ogden a new coat to be married in; it was handsome but rather tight in the shoulders—Johnny concluded that he might just as well quit hoping. It seemed to him that a pretty tight knot was being tied. Later he got drunk and cut the cards with Skeedle, the prize being her favor. Johnny won the cut and spent a happy night.
“Calamity will be surprised when she comes back and finds you married,” he told the happy bride the next morning. The groom was sleeping late.
“She won’t be the surprisest, though,” Doosie said. She wore a long face and spoke in a dark tone, although she liked Potato Creek Johnny—he always complimented her cooking extravagantly.
“Well, who knows when Calamity will get back?” Dora said. She felt happy and was determined to ignore any line of commentary that might spoil her mood.
Potato Creek Johnny didn’t intend to be a mood spoiler. He was merely imagining Calamity’s amazement when she returned and discovered that Dora had married this huge youth. He thought Dora DuFran had become more beautiful than ever as a result of her union and wished her nothing but the best. Dora finally getting to be happy made the whole world look better.
Johnny assembled his gear and set off—it might be the day he would find the creek of gold, although that was unlikely. He had long since waded all the creeks within a day’s walk of Belle Fourche, and though one or two might carry an occasional gold fleck, none was the creek of gold. Only in wide-spaced dreams did he encounter the golden creek.
Despite Dora’s cheerfulness and Ogden’s big-boy courtesy—Doosie had to admit that he was a mighty polite boy; not once had he tramped in with muddy boots—Doosie continued to wear a long face and speak in dark tones. The marriage shocked her, and she did not bother to hide her shock. Dora, who ought to know how things went between young boys and older women, had acted hastily and foolishly, in Doosie’s view, and foolishly not merely in terms of youth and age; foolishly in terms of where her heart lay.
Dora couldn’t put up with it any longer; no matter how patient she was, or how nicely Ogden behaved, Doosie remained stiff, mighty stiff.
“Why do you look that way?” she asked Doosie finally—Ogden was out shoeing one of his draft horses.
Doosie made no reply; but she continued to look that way.
“You are the hardest person to get along with I’ve ever met, I guess,” Dora said. “All I did was get married. Don’t I have a right to get married?”
“Yes, but that don’t make it smart,” Doosie replied.
“What was so smart about what I had, I’d like to know?” Dora asked. “I’m forty-one years old, and what did I have?”
Again, Doosie sulled. She didn’t enjoy long conversations. In her opinion people talked far too much; what was talk? What did it solve, if people were just going to go on and do anything they wanted to? Talking couldn’t undo anything that had been done, and it rarely stopped people from making the most obvious mistakes.
“I don’t know what to say,” Dora said. “You won’t talk, you won’t smile, you won’t look at me. Is it Ogden you don’t like?”
“I like Ogden but I don’t know Ogden,” Doosie pointed out. “You ask me what you had—what you had was freedom. And you had a warm house, too.”
“I’ve still got a warm house—my goodness!” Dora said, exasperated.
“You ain’t got freedom, though,” Doosie said. “You’ll never be seeing freedom again. He’s got you now and he’ll keep you.”
“You make him sound like a jailor,” Dora said. “Freedom isn’t something everybody needs for their whole lives. About all I did with my freedom was cry. You think crying’s better than being the wife of a nice young man?”
“Yep,” Doosie said.
“You’re a hard one then,” Dora said. “Ogden’s never given me orders. He wouldn’t think of it. I give him orders. I told him he better go shoe that horse. He wouldn’t think of telling me to do something.”
“You just been married a month,” Doosie said. “Give him time. He may decide that men are supposed to give the orders.”
Ogden soon came in, and Dora gave up, but Doosie’s attitude didn’t improve. She did her work as precisely as ever, but she still wore a long face. Dora didn’t like to scold her—Doosie had been with her for years—but she found her long face inc
reasingly hard to live with. Besides, Skeedle suddenly left to try her hand at telling fortunes in Fargo; this left Dora with no one much to talk to. Ogden was too young, Calamity not yet back. Dora needed talk, too. She wasn’t meant to live in silence, with just her thoughts. Though more and more content with Ogden, she had to admit that talk wasn’t his strong suit. He was young and sweet, but he wasn’t voluble.
For all her happiness, Dora was not free of all agitation, either. Agitation nagged her like a toothache.
“Is it Blue?” she asked Doosie one morning. “Is that why you’re so sour?”
“That’s why,” Doosie said, a little relieved that Dora had finally figured it out. She didn’t like feeling angry at Dora—it spoiled the day.
Dora sighed. It seemed it was always Blue when there was agitation or disturbance. He was there, like a worm in the fruit, to remind one that nothing was really perfect.
“What makes you think I have to be concerned about Mr. Blue?” she asked, annoyed that Doosie seemed to be on Blue’s side and not hers.
“Because you married so quick,” Doosie said. “You was afraid he would come. He gonna come anyway, though. Then what?”
“Then he’ll find I’m a married woman,” Dora said, getting angry despite herself. “He’s married too, remember? There’s nothing either one of us can do about it now.”
She found it very annoying that Doosie had deciphered her sharp impatience to marry, when she had only half deciphered it herself. Of course she had feared Blue would come and destroy her future with Ogden.
Ogden might be too young for her, she might be too old for him, he might start giving her orders, he might be killed, she might die, they might come to hate one another; still, she wanted it and she wanted it immediately. However odd it might seem to others, for now her marriage was something good, and Dora had spent her share of years without very much that was good. Blue and she were beyond good and bad, in any clear sense. They were part of one another’s fate, perhaps the heart of one another’s fate, but they were never going to be one another’s whole. She wanted someone with whom she could have a whole, even if it changed, even if it led to tragedy. Having it and losing it seemed less terrible than never having it.
“What are you going to tell Ogden when he comes?” Doosie asked. The arrival of T. Blue—in her view it was sure to happen—had been preying on her mind of late.
“What are you going to tell Mr. Blue?” she added.
“The same thing he told me one day—that I’m married!” Dora said, her eyes flashing. “And you know something? I can’t wait! I wish he’d walk in right now.”
“You’re crazy!” Doosie said, alarmed at her boss’s hot hunger for confrontation. Ogden was just out in the backyard. If Mr. Blue came just then, somebody might end up dead; she had seen several people end up dead, and in cases where far less enduring emotion was involved.
Dora grabbed a book and threw it through the door into the saloon. No one was in the saloon at the time, but the book narrowly missed a spittoon.
“I doubt he’ll ever come!” she said. “I doubt he thinks I’m worth this long a ride. And I don’t care! He’s welcome to spend the rest of his life up on the Musselshell for all I care!”
An hour later Ogden found her sitting on their bed, trying desperately to stop crying. The sight made him weak in the legs. He had a terrible fear that he must have done something wrong. Why else would Dora be crying? It was a pretty day, and he had done all the chores. He racked his brain but could remember no error, or call to mind anything he might have forgotten.
“Are you sick?” he asked, looking at Dora’s red, anguished face. It was not the face he was used to seeing every morning. The sight of it alarmed him so much that he felt he might cry himself. Ogden knew what it was to cry—his brother Joe had accidentally cut his foot off with an ax one day, and the shock had killed him. Sometimes Ogden still cried about Joe, but only when alone. At times he felt low, even lower than low, for Joe had been his only friend.
But the fact that he himself cried provided no guide as to how he might help Dora. He felt helpless—perhaps she didn’t want to be married anymore. The minute that thought occurred to him, Ogden became convinced it was true. It had always been hard to believe Dora wanted to marry him, and that she wanted it no longer wouldn’t surprise him. He turned to leave, hoping to make the barn before he was overcome.
But Dora sprang up and threw herself into his arms. She didn’t say a word; she just clung to him, sobbing. Ogden felt it meant she didn’t want the marriage to cease, and he was too relieved to speak. He held her and stroked her hair.
The next day T. Blue, feeling merrier the closer he came to town, loped into Belle Fourche and asked a blacksmith to point him to the Hotel Hope.
“You’re too late, the girls all quit,” the blacksmith said. “You better go back to Deadwood, that’s my advice.”
“If my horse throws a shoe I might want your advice,” Blue said. He thought the blacksmith far too casual with his opinions. “I expect I can still find a girl, if I can locate the hotel,” he said.
The blacksmith pointed to a house across the street and about fifty yards east. A youth the size of a tree was whitewashing one wall of the house. By standing on a bucket he could reach well up to the planks of the second story.
“Who’s that giant?” Blue asked, rather surprised to see such a large youth working at Dora’s house.
“His name is Ogden something,” the blacksmith said. “I think he comes from Ohio.”
“I don’t guess I care where he comes from,” Blue said. “He looks like he could dig a mine all by himself. I wonder why he’s wasting his time whitewashing Dora’s house.”
“Because he’s married to her, that’s why,” the blacksmith said. He didn’t care much for cowboys—they were usually arrogant, in his view. Still, he hadn’t expected his remark to inflict such a shock on the cowboy with the fine buckskin mare. The man, who had ridden in looking rather ruddy from the brisk weather, had suddenly turned white as a sheet.
“That giant boy’s married to Dora?” Blue asked. Since the blacksmith seemed so casual, perhaps he was only making an attempt at humor.
“They’re married—it’s the talk of the town,” the blacksmith said.
“Mister, are you all right?” he asked after a bit. He had seldom seen a man go so abruptly from ruddy to white.
“I guess I don’t want the whorehouse—I guess a saloon will do,” said T. Blue.
3
THE NEWS THAT BLUE WAS IN TOWN WAS NOT LONG IN reaching the Hotel Hope. One could look out any window and see most of what was happening in Belle Fourche. Doosie looked out the kitchen window and saw a familiar-looking buckskin mare hitched in front of a saloon a little way up the street. The sight depressed her so much she could scarcely go on with her cooking. When the whorehouse closed and business fell off in the saloon, it seemed she might get some rest from her cooking, but then along came Ogden, who ate more at one meal than all the whores and customers in a normal day. The rest Doosie had hoped to get was one of those things that were mainly nice things to think about—in practice they never quite came.
Though Doosie had predicted that Blue would come, she hadn’t predicted he’d come immediately; but he had. The fact disturbed her so that she did stop cooking; she sat down in a chair with a big tin cup of coffee. She liked drinking coffee from a tin-miner’s cup—a few cups of coffee might help her get a grip on her feelings. The virtue of the tin cups was that they kept the coffee at a scalding temperature for quite a while, and Doosie liked it scalding. When she was low—and she was certainly low at the moment—scalding coffee was her comfort.
Doosie thought gloomily of all the years she had attended to Dora and Blue; how careful she had been to nurse them through their many quarrels and disputes, the separations and disappointments; she had also tried to keep them behaving decently during their ecstatic reunions. At times Dora was even more of a problem than Blue; she was so glad to s
ee him that she made little effort to control herself. Doosie had always hoped that someday they would settle down together and stop fighting so much. When T. Blue was around, Dora was happy; so was he. Why people who were only happy in one another’s company contrived to stay apart so much was puzzling to Doosie. She herself didn’t like men, on the whole, and had usually been content to see the last of the many who pestered her when she was younger.
But Dora, her kind boss, was far less critical of men than she was. Over the years, Doosie had seen Dora take fancies, usually brief, to any number of men, including some Doosie had been reluctant to let in the door. Dora wasn’t as hard on men as she should be, Doosie felt—anyone who would compliment her, dance with her, or just make her laugh would be welcomed for a while. Of course, Blue did all those things better than anyone else; little wonder Dora had kept on loving him through the years.
However, he had married—it had been a blow to Dora—but then, he was stuck off on a remote ranch most of the time and could not be blamed for wanting company. It was hard for Doosie to imagine Dora living on a ranch; also hard to imagine T. Blue staying any place for very long. Dora didn’t even like horses—the only pet she could tolerate was her bossy parrot, Fred.
Now, however, things were really in a fine mess; both old lovers were married, and not to one another. The confusion, the anger, the tears the situation would produce made Doosie wonder if the whole business—romance—could possibly be worth it. She herself had long since reached negative conclusions on the matter of the worth of romance, but the only person she could find who shared her view was Calamity. They had discussed the subject several times and agreed that no pleasure men brought was worth the havoc they wreaked through selfish and contrary behavior.