Well you see all this was a bloom in the heart, a springing of hope, and even when I tried to tell myself it was just like the afternoon sun—so cozying on the face, like a warm hand, that a man could dream of anything and expect it—even when I pressed myself with doubts, the hope squeezed out like a nectar. And as I sat with Molly another evening under the sky, with a new moon making us shadows to each other, I talked so easy I almost didn’t know myself; and she talked with me and it was as if we were two new people sprung from our old pains.
“Molly I swear I feel good times coming. The life here is working up. They’ll have to cut a road to get those Concord freighters through here. And to do that they’ll need lots of people, they’ll have lots of jobs!”
“I hated those three. Stepping around like they was afraid to get their feetsies dirty.”
“We don’t have ever to see ’em again, they just came out here to make up their minds—”
“Money for their flouncy city ladies—”
“Lord, what do we care! We’re going on the map!”
“You really think?”
“I know it. It’s our turn.”
“I am living better now than Avery ever gave me, I’ll say it Blue.”
“Molly I mean to make good for the three of us.”
“You always fancied Flo over me.”
“You were so forbidding—”
“I can’t forget him. I see him in my sleep.”
“If I can be alright in your eyes I’ll be alright in my own.”
“I keep hearing his voice: ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. It’s what he said to me.”
“Well then, if that’s so, I doubt it but if it’s so, if he does come back then we’ll be ready for him. We’ll all be ready.”
She was quiet for a minute. “We’ve both suffered,” she said. And I was holding her hand in my hands. It was enough to start me keeping the books again.
No, maybe I’m not telling it right. When I dipped my pen in the ink it was not just for celebration, it was something that had to be done. Zar and Isaac both came to me to claim frontage on the street once they saw Jonce Early’s ten-dollar gold piece. What other way was there to fix people’s rights? I don’t think I was such a fool as to be blinded by my feelings. We had bunks to sleep on and another room with a door, and they were good nights as we lay in one bunk, hugging like the two poor married creatures we were—she had the shyness of a bride, she was so becoming, I never knew such joy. But wasn’t this time of our conjunction the time of Jimmy’s dismay? And the sight of her smiles at me, like the closed door at night, a greater reason for his hate? She might waver and relent but it only fixed him more. He stayed out all the day long, I didn’t see him from one meal to the next. He wouldn’t talk to me and when I’d catch sight of him outside as I’d be going about my business he’d slip away fast like he hadn’t heard me call. How good could it have been for two of us when there were three?
The pages are full of dealings, I see the entries, all through the year the street grew up and you can see how right here on the lines. I wrote each person’s name and what he owned. I put down how Molly had all rights to me as wife and Jimmy as son. I wrote out the claims. Jonce Early came back to build a public house where he’d staked out. A smith named Roebuck figured there would be plenty of horses by and by and digging tools to fix, and so he set up his forge. Another man—I can’t read his name, I never did hear him called—rode in with a wagon of coal he would sell in sacks when the winter came. More names with each passing months, I remember I marveled at it; hearing of our prospects, these people were coming to settle, it was common enough sense, but I always had the feeling somebody had certified Hard Times as a place in the world and that’s why it was happening.
Here it shows how my commissions rose on the Express business. Here is the marriage notice of Bert and the little girl—he could write, but all she did was put a mark down. Now that tells a lot, the minute I began to keep the records I was the natural party to every complaint, legal or otherwise. I used to feel I was a horsebreaker and each day one of a remuda I had to cut down to size. For several Saturdays running Miss Adah, Mae and Jessie kept Bert happy by shunting only the drunkest and least able customers to the Chinese girl—so that all she had to do was lead them to a room, take their money and leave them sleeping there. Bert had a good length of wood near his hand while he tended the bar and he was ready to jump out and use it if he thought his sweetheart was having trouble. The ladies didn’t want that; and they suffered too whenever any of Bert’s digging friends made a joke of him for quitting his job at the lodes. “Like to be around the stuff, Bert?” someone would call out—and the strain just got to be too much for the ladies. They came to me as a delegation and elected me to break the news to Zar. “You can gentle him to it, Blue,” Miss Adah said, “it won’t be as bad as if he finds out for himself.”
So I did one day, while everyone else stayed out of sight. Well first I had to talk Zar out of killing Bert. And then out of firing him—that I did by convincing him Isaac Maple would hire the boy in his place. When I had him calmed down I said: “Look here Zar, what’s some little old Chinagirl matter when in just a few months you’ll have the finest saloon in these parts. A businessman like you can’t bother with such things.”
“Not a saloon, frand. An hotel. Two stories. Glass windows. A mirror. A polished wood bar.”
“Well there you are, that’s big time Zar, and big times are coming.”
“You are right.”
“Sure I’m right—hell you’ll be able to import a dozen Chinese if you want, this town grows up and you’ll have more girls than you can choose.”
“We will be a city!”
“Sure!”
“Alright Blue: you tell the boy I will not kill him.”
“That’s the decent thing, Zar.”
“He loffs her, he can have her.”
“Fine.”
“For three hundred dollars he can have her.”
Zar was a match for me, no question. When I took the news out to Bert and the others I looked at some long faces. But Molly came up with an idea: she said: “If Bert takes the girl, and brings in someone in her stead, maybe the Russian would make a trade.”
So I tried that and I guess Zar didn’t think there was a chance in Hell, he agreed readily. We sat there and it was like talking to some foreign king making a royal marriage for his daughter. If Bert got him another woman he wanted only one hundred dollars—which is what he’d paid for the Chinagirl—and he’d let the young fellow pay him in labor. That was all I could get out of him. He stuck to those terms for the best part of a week. Till finally Bert borrowed our mule and rig and rode off and was gone two days, and Lord! if he didn’t come back with a sad grey-haired woman, full of sags, and deliver her up with a flourish. That was Mrs. Clement and I never found out where Bert got her. You just didn’t look to find such enterprise in a boy like that, and part of it was the way he never told anyone how he did it.
The Russian hadn’t expected Bert to come up with anyone but it was to his credit he stuck to the terms. He might even have delighted in the boy’s wherewithal. But then the trouble was Mae and Jessie. They didn’t take to the new woman at all, they sniffed at her and found her wanting. When Zar offered her the same arrangement he had with them they went into a rage. It was an insult to them, there was a big fuss and they made up their minds then and there to quit Zar and leave the town.
That was a noisy morning in my cabin, Jessie and Mae coming in and tearfully ordering me to write out tickets for the next stage. Miss Adah was with them, wringing her hands, and Zar shouting and ranting; and things were all inside out now as the girls were put out with Bert for disrupting things and Zar was standing up for him. But when Mae and Jessie demanded their share of the profits which Zar had been holding in trust for them, the Russian stopped the game: their money, along with his own, he had invested in the wood for the new “hotel.” It was all gone, receipted by Alf, he told the
furious women, and smiling he invited them to carry off their share of the lumber when it came on the freight wagons.
That took the heart out of them; and nothing more was said or done once the whole problem had reached its natural limits. By the time the lumber came, and Zar was hiring a few miners who knew how to carpenter, the women were actually looking forward to the luxury of those second-story rooms—although they never did warm up to old Mrs. Clement.
And by autumn, when the wedding was made, everyone—Zar, Mae, Jessie as well as the rest of us in the town—were happy for the two young people. And the only shadows were on the faces of Bert and his Chinagirl, both combed and clean but awful scared, and looking sorry about the whole thing.
I was the one did the marrying. I don’t regret it, I think it was proper enough, it sort of fell on me to finish the business I had become party to. We stood out in front of Zar’s old place. There was a scatter of people looking on including a few folks I barely knew. Over the heads, across the street, was Zar’s new saloon, two stories as it was planned, with three rooms with glass windows on the second floor and a false front another story high; next to it, with an alley in between, was Isaac Maple’s wood store which Swede had raised almost by himself. From where I stood the scar of the old street was blocked from my sight. None of the newcomers knew that I was no real Mayor, or that the words I spoke to wed the boy and girl were those few true phrases told to me by Miss Adah—who seemed ashamed even to recall them—plus what I could summon up in my mind from the ordained minister who married me more than twenty years before. Miss Adah had a Bible too, and had offered it to me until Mae pointed out the Chinagirl wasn’t hardly a Christian and so it would not be fitting.
Afterwards Zar gave out drinks on the house. His bar and his mirror weren’t arrived yet and he passed the liquor out from behind his plank, we all drank up, one of the new men showed a violin, and although it was afternoon we danced around on that new pine floor till it was tolerably sanctified. Swede brought his Helga in to dance, I danced with Molly, I did alright for an old man, that rigid back was soft in my hands and there was a flush of pleasure on Molly’s face as we stomped around, arms around, till we could dance no more.
Sometime between that heady evening she relented and that day we danced—there must have been a moment when we reached what perfection was left to our lives. “We’ve both suffered,” she said, but words don’t turn as the earth turns, they only have their season. When was the moment, I don’t know when, with all my remembrances I can’t find it; maybe it was during our dance, or it was some morning as a breeze of air shook the sun’s light; maybe it was one of those nights of hugging when we reached our ripeness and the earth turned past it; maybe we were asleep. Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.
What my mind sees now is the winter, November. The cabin is double-boarded, snug against the wind. Just inside, by the front door, is my desk, Swede’s table which I’ve bought from him. There are shelves on the walls filled with provisions, pegs hung with extra boughten clothes for all of us, a commode with an ironstone jug and washbowl. Mr. Hayden Gillis sits at my desk looking a long time at my books, a man all the way from the office of the Governor of the Territory.
“What have you charged for your lots Mr. Mayor,” he says shortly, turning around to face me.
“Well nothing to speak of. I put down witness stakes whenever someone claims a section he intends to build on. And he signs the ledger and I sign, that’s all.”
“You are not the promoter of this townsite?”
“No …”
“Would you believe it?” Molly says wiping her hands on her apron. “Anyone who wants, gets.”
He looks from her to me—a short man with a large head, hair falling back to his shoulders, small features down near his chin. “Your records are thorough. But I see no mention of your election as Mayor.”
“Well no sir, I just come by the title. You see it got around how I was keeping a write on things. And then when we found there’s going to be a road through us why people began to claim this piece and that along the street, and I kept things straight for them so there would be no fights. Mr. Zar, that’s the Russian, and Mr. Maple the storekeep, they’ve been building for when the crowd comes to lay the road. Zar owns the big place down the street and the public house opposite. Isaac has the store and he’s the one put up those sheet-iron cribs to rent. They are the big owners right now.”
“But for this place and the windmill not a foot of streetfront do we own,” Molly says angrily, “my husband likes to see other people make the money.”
“Alright Molly.”
“Somebody is going to drill another well, it’s bound to happen although Blue doesn’t see how. Then where will we be? I’ll tell you Mr. Gillis, this is more than an honest man standing before you, you can trust his records for they show against him!”
“Well,” the man says as he stands, “I think I’ve seen enough.” He pulls at his hammer-claw coat, takes his stovepipe from my desk. “If you will come with me, sir,” he says to me, and to Molly he nods.
Outside, although it is cold and the sky heavy, Zar and Isaac are waiting with their hats in their hands. We all four walk up to Zar’s new place, not a word being said as the man strides in the lead, badly bowed in the legs and rocking with each step. Jimmy darts in from nowhere and begins to walk behind him in imitation until I take a swipe at him and he’s gone again.
Isaac whispers to me: “Blue, if ye get the chance ask does he know Ezra Maple. He’s a travelin’ man, could be he’s met my brother along the way.”
I would like to ask it for Isaac, along with a few questions in my own mind, but the official is not a man who allows himself to be put upon. While the others wait at the bar we go upstairs to the room he’s taken (hastily given up by Jessie the day before) and he sits down at a table by the window and works with a sheaf of papers and ink stamps for a bit, muttering to himself as if I wasn’t even standing there.
“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Governor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians … What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.”
Then he turns and goes to his Gladstone traveling bag, unlocks it, burrows under some things and comes up with a labeled bottle of whiskey and two small glasses. He rubs the glasses with the flap of his coat, and then glancing up at me with that small face in that big head he hands me a glass and pours: “The jail can wait, but now let’s drink to the end of your tenure.”
Well everything he’s said I stow in my mind, only thinking now what his visit means: it will be a long year of expectations but by the spring they will come true.
I d
on’t remember tasting whiskey as good as that. A few minutes later I walked down the stairs while the anxious faces looked up at me from the bar: Zar, Isaac, Swede, Bert Albany—none of them would do. Before anyone could say anything I went out and up the street to the stable and found Jenks sleeping just inside the door. I shook him awake and dragged him back to Hayden Gillis. And at the top of the stairs, while everyone below looked on amazed, and while Jenks himself stood wide awake now with his mouth open the man stuck a tin star on his jacket and swore him in as a Deputy Sheriff, salary twenty-five dollars a year payable the following year.
“You ever kill your man?” Mr. Gillis asked Jenks.
Jenks turned red: “Yessir, reckon …”
“Good. You’re running this town now. See to it these folks make up a pot for a jailhouse. Get the records from Mr. Blue here and keep them neat. First time you get a serious outlaw, undead, write a letter to the capital and we’ll put a circuit judge on to you. Here’s paper. Town charter. Census list forms. Petition for statehood you can get people to sign when there’s nothing else to keep you busy.”
Then the man was clumping downstairs with his bag in his hand and his stovepipe hat and out the doors he went without a nod to anyone. Isaac Maple called up to me: “Blue?” But I shrugged and he ran out after. Everyone else crowded around me at the bar. What did it come to, this man’s visit? What was happening? I smiled because there could be no doubt. “Rest your mind Zar,” I said to the Russian, “all the money you’re in for will come back at you double.”
Jenks, in the meantime, was standing on the stairs with that sheaf of papers in his hand, glancing down at the badge on his coat and then toward the doors and back again at his chest. He was well confounded. But then he began to appreciate what had happened and as he came down each step his wolfy smile got wider and wider.