The Gamble

  “Yessir, she sure is.”

  “Good God! Did I do that t’ her?” Gandy looked horrified.

  “Not hardly. She’s limped ever since I knew her.”

  Gandy’s head snapped around. “Ever since you knew her?” This was getting worse.

  “Yup. She’s got a gimp leg.”

  Gandy felt himself blush for the first time in years.

  “A gimp leg?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I set her in the mud.” He watched Agatha disappear with her dirty clothing into the Finn’s laundry down the block. He felt like a heel.

  “You didn’t exactly set her in the mud, Scotty. She fell.”

  “She fell after I set her in the mud!”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “Well, why didn’t somebody say somethin’? How in tarnation was I supposed t’ know?”

  “Just figured you did. You been doin’ business next door to her for a month now. You collected rent from her. She walks down to Paulie’s twice a day so regular you could set your clock by her. Breakfast and supper. Never fails.”

  But Gandy had never looked twice at the woman. She was the kind who blended into the weatherbeaten boardwalk. A dull, gray moth upon a dull, gray rock. When he’d gone next door to introduce himself as the new owner of the building, she’d been sitting at her rolltop desk and hadn’t risen from her chair. Instead of bringing the rent over herself, she’d sent it with a timid, twittering old woman who looked as if she’d just swallowed a frog. The few times he’d eaten at Paulie’s he didn’t recall seeing her there.

  Sweet Jesus! What would the women of Proffitt say? If it was true that there was an “organizer” in town, he’d have them all on his head. And they’d have plenty to say in that nuisance of a rag they printed. He could see the headline now: SALOON OWNER TOPPLES CRIPPLED TEMPERANCE WORKER IN THE MUD.

  CHAPTER

  2

  At five-thirty that afternoon Scott Gandy left the rear of the saloon and walked up the same steps to the same landing Agatha had ascended earlier. He glanced at the two long windows, one on either side of her door, but as usual they were shrouded by thick lace. He tossed his cheroot over the railing and entered his own door. The saloon and its overhead apartments occupied three-fourths of the building, the millinery shop and corresponding apartment, one-fourth. Upstairs, his portion was bisected by a hall with the door at its west end and a window at its east. To the left were four rooms of equal size. To the right were Gandy’s living quarters and his private office. He entered the office, a small, spare room with wainscoted walls, a single west window, and only the necessary furnishings: a desk, two chairs, coat-tree, safe, and a small cast-iron stove.

  It was a cold room, the window curtainless, the wall above the waist-high wainscot painted a drab sage-green, the oak floor raw, bare. He moved to the safe, knelt, and spun the dial, locked away a packet of bills, then, with a sigh, stood and rubbed the back of his neck. Lord, it was quiet. Getting close to suppertime. Ivory had deserted the piano downstairs and Jack had gone to eat. Gandy glanced out the window, hooked his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and absently drummed a rhythm on the silk. The view outside offered little to buoy him. Unpainted frame buildings, muddy streets, and prairie. Nothing but prairie. No spreading water oak trees festooned with Spanish moss, no scent of magnolia drifting in on the spring breeze, no mockingbirds. He missed the mockingbirds.

  This time of day at Waverley, the family used to gather on the wide back veranda and sip glasses of minted iced tea, and Delia would toss cracked corn to the mockingbirds, trying to entice them to eat from her hand. He could see her yet, squatting in a billow of hooped skirts, cupping the corn in her palm. Golden head with ringlets down to her shoulders. Skin as white as milk. Fiddle-waisted. And her eyes, as dark and arresting as the notches on a dogwood petal, forever alluring.

  “Why don’t you feed the peacocks?” his father would call to her.

  But Delia would kneel patiently, cupped hand extended. “Because the peacocks are too audacious. And besides”—Delia would rest her chin on one shoulder and look back at her husband—“no fun tryin’ to get a tame bird to eat from your hand, is there, Scotty?” she would say teasingly.

  And his mother would glance his way and smile at the look she saw on her son’s face. But he never cared who knew it. He was as smitten with Delia as he’d been the first time he’d kissed her when they were fourteen years old.

  Then Leatrice would waddle to the door—good old Leatrice, with her skin as dark as sorghum syrup and breasts the size of watermelons. He wondered where she was now. “Suppuh, suh,” she’d announce. “Pipin’.”

  And Dorian Gandy would take his wife’s arm, and Scott himself would rise from his chair and slowly extend a hand to Delia. And she’d smile up at him with a promise for later and let herself be tugged to her feet. Then, hand in hand, they would follow his parents inside beneath the high, cool ceilings.

  But those days were gone forever.

  Gandy stared at the prairie. He blinked once, hard. His stomach rumbled, reminding him it was suppertime now. With a deep sigh, he turned from the window toward the desk and glanced at the calendar. Nearly four weeks he’d been here. Jubilee and the girls would arrive any day. They couldn’t get here fast enough to suit him. Things were dull without Jube.

  Leaving his office by a second door, he entered the adjoining sitting room of his private apartment. It was much cheerier, with burgundy draperies, a factory-made rug, and sturdy, masculine furniture. It held a leather settee with matching chairs, heavy mahogany tables, and two banquet lamps. To his left a door led directly to the hall; to his right a dresser held his humidor and hat block. On the wall above it hung a watercolor behind which was stuck a branch from a cotton plant, its three bolls grayed in their brown clawlike husks. The painting was that of a pillared mansion with a wide front veranda, flanked by lush greenery and sprawling lawns on which stood two poised peacocks.

  Waverley.

  His gaze lingered on the picture while he placed his hat on the block. Nostalgia hit him with the force of a blow. From the humidor he took a cheroot, as rich and brown as the soil from which that cotton boll had sprung, the rich Mississippi bottomlands of the great Tombigbee River. Lost in thought, he forgot to light his cigar, but absently stroked its length. He thought about Waverley for so long that he eventually laid the cheroot on the dresser, unused.

  He wandered into the adjoining bedroom and tossed his jacket onto a double bed. He recalled the rosewood fourposter at Waverley where he’d brought his bride and bedded her for the first time. The gauzy netting hanging all around, circling them in a private haven of their own. The flickering gas lantern sending trellised shadows through the mesh against her skin.

  Again he blinked. What was it that had triggered all these thoughts of Waverley? It wasn’t good to pine for the old days. He stripped off his vest and shirt and tossed them across the hobnail bedspread. At the washstand he used the pitcher and bowl. Delia had taught him that. She liked her man clean, she’d always said. Since Delia he’d learned that a lot of women liked a clean man, and clean men were so rare they could get a woman to do almost anything for them. It was only one of the sad things he’d learned since he’d lost Delia.

  Stop it, Gandy! There’s no goin’ back, so why do you punish yourself?

  Toweling his face, he ambled to the front window. It overlooked main street, giving him a view of something that at last took his mind off Delia and Waverley: Miss Agatha Downing limping toward Paulie’s Restaurant to have her supper. The towel stilled against his chin. Her limp was very real, very pronounced. How could he have missed it before? He frowned, recalling her plopping backward in the mud. Again, he almost blushed.

  She entered Paulie’s and disappeared. He lunged to the bed and pulled the watch from his vest pocket. Six o’clock exactly.

  He glanced toward the street, flung the towel aside, yanked a clean shirt from the chifforobe, and threw it
on. There was no logical reason for him to hurry, yet he did. Holding the vest in his teeth, he grabbed up his jacket and hat and hit the stairs at a run, still stuffing his shirttails in. By the time he reached Paulie’s, everything was buttoned and tucked into place.

  He saw her immediately upon entering. Her dress was the color of an evening sky and the top of her bustle poked through the back of her chair as Cyrus Paulie stood taking her order. Her shoulders were narrow, her neck long. She was small-ribbed and thin-armed and her dress fit with remarkable snugness. She wore a mountainous hat decorated with butterflies and bows beneath which little of her hair showed.

  Gandy moved inside and took a seat behind her, heard her order chicken.

  So why was he here, staring at the back of an old, lame woman? All those remembrances of home, he thought. Mississippi gentlemen were raised to have better manners than those he’d displayed today. If his mother were alive, she’d take him to task for his rudeness. And if Delia were alive—but if Delia were alive, he wouldn’t be living out here in this godforsaken cowtown in the first place.

  Cy delivered a plate of chicken dinner to Miss Downing, and Gandy ordered the same, studying her back while they both ate. When Cy came to deliver her apple cobbler and pick up her dirty plate, Scott signaled him over.

  “How was the meal, Scotty?” Cyrus Paulie was a jovial fellow with a ready smile. Unfortunately, his teeth looked as if someone had opened his mouth and thrown them in without caring where or in which direction they landed. He piled Scott’s dirty plate atop Agatha’s and displayed his sorry collection of snags.

  “Meal was fine, Cy.”

  “Get you some apple cobbler? Made fresh this afternoon.”

  “No, thanks, Cy. I’ll just settle up.” Scott drew a silver dollar from his waistcoat pocket and dropped it into Cy’s palm. “And take out the price of Miz Downin’s supper, too.”

  “Miss Downing?” Cy’s eyebrows nearly touched his hairline. “You mean Agatha?”

  “I do.”

  Cy glanced at the woman, then back at the saloon owner. No sense reminding Gandy he’d set the woman on her rump in the mud that very morning. A man didn’t forget a thing like that.

  “Sure thing, Scotty. Coffee?”

  Gandy patted his flat belly. “No, thanks. Full up.”

  “Well, then...” Cy gestured with the dirty plate. “Stop in again soon.”

  At the same time, Agatha took the proper coins from her handbag and caught Cyrus Paulie as he passed her table.

  “Well, how was everything, Miss Downin’?” he inquired as he stood beside her, resting the plates against the long white apron lashed around his middle.

  “Delicious, as usual. Give Emma my compliments.”

  “Sure will, ma’am, sure will.”

  She extended her coins. He ignored them and picked up her cobbler bowl. “No need for that. Your meal’s already paid for.”

  Agatha’s eyes widened. Her head snapped up, her hat teetered. “Paid for? But—”

  “By Mr. Gandy.” Cyrus nodded to a table behind her.

  She spun in her chair to find the bane of her morning seated at a nearby table watching every move she made. Apparently, he’d been doing so for some time; there was a soiled napkin on his table and he was enjoying an after-dinner cigar. His dark eyes were riveted upon her. While they stared at each other, the only thing that moved was the smoke coiling about his black hair. Until he politely nodded his head.

  The color leaped to her face. Her mouth tightened. “I can very well pay for my own, Mr. Paulie,” she declared, loudly enough that Gandy could hear. “And even if I couldn’t, I would not accept a meal from a lowlife like him. Tell Mr. Gandy I would cheerfully starve first.”

  She threw two coins on the table. One hit a sugar bowl and ricocheted to the floor, where it rolled for a full five seconds, then circled to a halt. In the silence it sounded like thunder.

  Agatha rose from her chair with all the dignity she could muster, feeling the curious eyes of other diners watching as she shuffled past Gandy to the door. He watched her all the way, but she lifted her chin high and glared at the brass doorknob.

  Outside, her eyes stung with humiliation. Some people got their satisfactions in cruel ways. She supposed he was chuckling.

  At home she struggled up the stairs, wishing once—just once!—she could stomp up the steps with all the outrage she felt. Instead, she was forced to stump up like an old woman. Well, she wasn’t an old woman. She wasn’t! And to prove it, when she got to the top she slammed the door so hard a picture fell off her parlor wall.

  She tore her hat off and paced the length of her apartment, rubbing her left hip. How humiliating! With a whole roomful of people looking on he chose to do a thing like that. But why? To taunt her? She’d put up with taunting since she was nine years old and had gone bouncing down a flight of stairs. Forever after, children had giggled, teased, and found disparaging names for “the gimp.” And even adults couldn’t resist a second glance. But this—this was debasing.

  In time her anger subsided, leaving her empty and forlorn. She put her hat in a bandbox, stowed it on the chifforobe shelf, wandered to the front window, and looked down on the street. Dusk had fallen. Across the way the lights from the Hoof and Horn splashed onto the boardwalk from behind the swinging doors. Below, they most likely did the same, though she could see no more than the railed roof of the boardwalk, just outside her floor-length window. The piano had started up. Its faraway tinkling, coupled with the sound of laughter, made her sad. She turned, studying the apartment: the perimeter of her world. One long, stuffy shotgun room filled with her old maid’s furnishings. Her prized Hepplewhite bed and matching chest with its inlay of white holly, the maroon horsehair settee with ivory crocheted antimacassars, the gateleg table, the lowboy, corner curio cabinet, the six-plate stove, the banjo clock, the sampler she’d knocked off the wall.

  With a sigh she went to pick it up. Hanging it on the nail, she read the familiar lines:

  Needle, thread, embroidery hoop;

  Satin stitch, French knot, and loop;

  Patience, care, and fortitude;

  Practice makes my stitching good.

  As she gazed at the sampler, a sad expression covered her face. How old had she been when her mother taught her to stitch? Seven? Eight? Before the accident, most certainly, because one of her earliest recollections was of standing beside her mother’s chair in the shabby house in Sedalia, Colorado, where her father had staked his claim in the gold fields, certain that this time he’d strike it rich. She remembered the house clearly, out of all the rest they’d lived in, because it was the one where it had happened. The one with the steep steps and the dark, narrow stairwell. Her mother had gotten an ivy plant from somewhere and had hung it in the kitchen window. The ivy had been the only cheerful note in the otherwise pitiful place. There was a worn wooden rocking chair below the plant. It was beside this chair Agatha had been standing, watching her mother demonstrate a perfect petal stitch, when she had piped up in her childish voice, “When I grow up I’m going to have little girls and I’ll do embroidery on all their fancy dresses.”

  Regina Downing had laid down her handiwork, drawn Agatha against the arm of the rocker, and kissed her cheek. “Then you be sure to get you a man who doesn’t drink up all the money for those pretty little dresses. Promise me that, will you, Gussie?”

  “I promise, Mommy.”

  “Good. Then sit down here on the stool and I’ll teach you the petal stitch. Got to know that one for making daisies.”

  The memory had lost none of its clarity over the years. Not the warm autumn sun cascading through the window. Not the sound of steam hissing from a kettle on the cookstove. Not the smell of barley soup and onions stewing for their supper. Why it had remained so clear, Agatha didn’t know. Perhaps it was the promise she’d made her mother, the only one she ever recalled her mother asking of her. Perhaps it was the first time she’d voiced her wishes about having little girls of her
own. Perhaps it was nothing more complex than the fact that she had learned the petal stitch that day, and she’d been stitching ever since.

  For whatever reason, the memory persevered. In it she was a hale and healthy little girl, leaning her belly against the arm of her mother’s rocker, standing on two sturdy legs. Her only other memory of that house was the night she made that fateful trip down the stairs, pushed by her own drunken father, ending forever the possibility of acquiring daughters or a husband to give them to her. For what man wanted a cripple?

  In the gloom of her lonely apartment, Agatha turned from the sampler and prepared for bed. She locked her door, hung up her clothing, including the cotton pad she wore over her left hip to make it match the right. She donned her nightdress and gave the weights of the banjo clock their nightly pull. Then she lay in the dark and listened to it.

  Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

  Lord, she hated the sound. Night after lonely night she went to bed and heard it marking off the days of her life. There were things she wanted, so many things. A real house, with a yard where she could plant flowers and vegetables, and where she could hang a swing in a tall cottonwood tree. A kitchen where she could cook suppers, a kitchen with a big oak table set for four, or six, or even eight. A clothesline where she could hang washing: snow-white socks from short to long, the longest hanging beside a man’s oversized chambray shirt. Someone who’d toiled all day and came home hungry and shared the supper table, laughing with his children. Those children, scrubbed shiny, wearing the beautiful hand-stitched nightdresses she would make herself, tucked into beds down the hall at this time of day. And someone there beside her at bedtime. Another human being telling her how his day had been, asking about hers, then holding her hand as he sighed off to sleep. Another’s even breathing in the same room with hers. He need not be handsome, or rich, or doting. Only sober, and honest, and kind.