“Ah, yes. At first it was suicide, then it became patricide, as I recall.”
“There was initial confusion. In any case, I am Mr. Morrow’s replacement, so to say.”
Leo listened attentively as Rowland Price described in circumloquacious fashion the workings of the organization he represented but would not name. It was an outline shrouded in fog, shot through with moral contradiction, an edifice of cold moonbeams whose sole purpose lay in serving only those responsible for its construction.
“Mr. Brannan, I’ll be direct; there are some among us who believe that future development of the country will require different strategies than have been used to date, a more modern approach to suit these modern times we live in. Others disagree, and the result has been a measure of factional conflict within the organization. Needless to say, I represent the Praetorians, as we term ourselves. Mr. Brannan, it’s our sincere hope you will join with us in the shaping of a new and more prosperous America. Half the land in the west belongs to foreigners, English lords and the like, and we in the organization see changing that as yet another plank in our platform of overall reform.”
“Your secret society interests me greatly, Mr. Price.”
Price smiled crookedly. “Were we to achieve political power, Mr. Brannan, we would need be secretive no longer.”
“Politics? I understood you were all businessmen.”
“Politics and business, sir, have always been linked together like rose and brier.”
“Politics presumably represented by the brier.”
“I know you speak in jest, but there are many who would agree. Politics has become fouled by business interests in the east, and every man in Congress is to be had for a song.”
“And what should be the role of your organization?”
“Sir, we are committed to the patrician ideal. We look to ancient Rome for our model. The country must be run by men out of the ordinary, who understand the levers of power, yet are beyond the reach of bribery, since they already have all they need in the way of earthly riches.”
“Mr. Price, you are referring to an aristocracy.”
“Sir, I am.”
“Have you not studied the lesson of the French Revolution, Mr. Price? Aristocrats tend to lose their ideals, after which they lose their heads.”
“Those Frenchies, sir, were made decadent through generations of idleness. That is not the American way, nor could it ever be. Our patrician class, as we refer to it, would be tireless in pursuit of the best possible means to lift up every man in the country by his bootstraps. It cannot happen while Washington is at the beck and call of certain individuals for whom the democratic principles of government are a convenient cover for purest self-interest. We, on the other hand, would make no secret of our aims.”
“Is this to be done under the banner of the Democratic party, Mr. Price? You have already said you aren’t a Republican.”
“Neither banner will do, Mr. Brannan, and we have arrived at the crux of my mission. We foresee the legitimate and overdue need in America for a third political party.”
“To be called?”
“We have in mind—what else?—the Praetorian party.”
“And you would aim yourself at Washington, like the other parties.”
“Unlike the other parties. Like a clean prairie wind, Mr. Brannan, sweeping the common chaff before it. Something new, something without peer, a party that will care for the workingman without exploiting him, a party that will allow wealth, even excessive wealth, because we know that the rich man who follows our creed will not neglect the workers who created that wealth for him. We are not Socialists. There exists in the natural world all manner of inequality. Nowhere do we see absolute uniformity of strength or intelligence, of aptitude and ability. Equality for all persons is a facile dream, but with a new kind of man behind the helm of the ship of state, Mr. Brannan, a new society will emerge, not necessarily Utopian, but without the poverty and squalor we see so much of, especially in our great cities. America could become the model for a new kind of world, given the opportunity to demonstrate how it can be done, and for that we require the right leadership, the man who is right for so unique and far-reaching a quest.”
Leo watched Price’s face. There was a light sheen of sweat on his brow and upper lip, a flush to his skin, and his voice had become more animated than before. The man truly believed in and was moved by his own words, and Leo admitted the speech had been worth listening to, but it was politics still, however prettied up by talk of ideals and newness, and politics was a field that had never held the least interest for Leo. He assumed that the fledgling Praetorian party required a cash donation from the likes of himself in order to begin its earthshaking work. He supposed he could donate several thousand for their cause; they could do no more harm to the country than the hacks and thieves currently jostling for supremacy in Washington.
“A third alternative, eh, Mr. Price? I think I approve. You say there are those within your own existing group who do not?”
“A bunch of diehard traditionalists, sir. There is under way a mass defection to our side. If your name should be associated with our cause, there would certainly be a landslide, and after that, little to stop us beginning our crusade. I say crusade, Mr. Brannan, and I do not exaggerate. It will be nothing less than the moral awakening of our nation, the true flowering of the spirit of independence and opportunity America was founded upon.”
“Strong words. Mr. Price, powerful sentiments. Am I correct in my assumption that your cause has need of funds?”
“We have sufficient for the time being, sir. As I said, we all are fortunate. The thing we require is your consent to be the leader such a movement requires.”
“I beg your pardon? Leader?”
“Sir, I see I have not made my case clear. We wish you to represent us.”
“I, Mr. Price?”
“You, Mr. Brannan. You are one of the most famous men in America, famous not only for your wealth but for the way in which you avoid, with scrupulous modesty, the appearance or practice of flaunting that selfsame wealth. A pauper will not begrudge a rich man his riches if it was earned by legitimate means, and the pauper will respect that man if he presents himself as a frugal and honest person, for whom demonstrable excess is anathema. Sir, you are that man. You are perfect for the role that destiny and my colleagues are at this moment preparing.”
Leo went to the window and looked out at his town, the little of it he could see beneath the swirling grayness.
“Do you know anything of air movements, Mr. Price?”
“Air movements, sir?”
“We have a considerable problem at various times of the year. The air will not allow smoke from the chimneys to rise and be borne away. I have thought of blasting away part of the western slope to allow the prevailing westerlies access to our valley, but it is a project that requires engineering skills I doubt that any man has yet developed, despite our modern times.”
“The impossible can become the possible, given the will and the means.”
“You will not be distracted, will you, Mr. Price?”
“No, sir, I will not.”
Leo could see a man running along the street, but could see no reason for his haste; he was not chasing anyone, nor being chased. The running man disappeared below Leo’s window ledge. Leo was always slightly surprised when an individual stood out for some reason, however inconsequential the moment, because that individual worked for Leo. He could not look at anyone in Glory Hole without unconsciously acknowledging that the person worked for him in some capacity or other, or else was supported by the wage Leo paid to someone else. It was all his, a tiny kingdom in the clouds, and he was, he supposed, content to have it remain thus, for Glory Hole and for himself. Yet here was a complete stranger, with visionary talk of a new America, offering a wholly different kind of crown to Leo, almost begging him to take it. Price was not a crackpot. Leo had heard rumors of a secretive network at large in the west, and
now had learned it did exist, and was in the process of dividing itself in two, the conservatives and the so-called Praetorians, and those same revolutionaries who were causing the division wanted him, Leo Brannan, to be their figurehead, their spokesman, the face and name that would launch them from whatever clandestine warrens they presently inhabited into the light of day. They wanted him to be President of the United States. He was not prepared for so radical a notion, nor could he put it from him with any certainty. He admitted he was momentarily helpless, unable to think calmly and cogently about the thunderbolt that had been delivered to his office by the intense young man seated in front of his desk.
Jenks knocked and entered the room. Jenks had always waited for an instruction to enter before doing so, but Leo was in no mood to chastise him, discomforted as he was by the decision he was being asked to make.
“Sir … there has been an accident.”
“Accident?”
“A bad accident, I’m told … Your wife, sir, your wife is involved.… At the pithead, some kind of accident with the machinery …”
Those on the main street of Glory Hole witnessed an unusual event that morning; they saw Leo Brannan running as if all the demons of hell were in pursuit. He ran to the Deer Lick and found Dr. Gannett already in attendance. An alert worker had applied a tourniquet to Zoe’s upper arm, above the mangled elbow. The floor around her was slick and red with her blood.
Leo heard babbled words of his wife’s strange drift toward the cable gears despite shouted warnings, and the inexplicable insertion of her arm into the toothed wheels despite the safety rail there. Another voice told Leo his wife was seen to slip, and her arm had been thrust out to right herself, but had missed the rail and been plunged into the gears before anyone could shut the engine down. It had happened in an instant, and Zoe Brannan’s right arm resembled something that might have fallen from a butcher’s cart and been gnawed at by dogs. Leo turned away to vomit, while the doctor proceeded to remove the destroyed portion of Zoe’s arm during her convenient state of unconsciousness.
Omie’s face was the first thing Zoe recognized. She was in her bed, propped up by pillows, and Omie stood like a sentinel beside the covers, staring at her mother. Zoe wondered how she had come to be in bed at that hour—wan sunlight came through the windows—and why she felt that her right side was being squeezed in a vise. Looking down, she saw the cocoon of bandages around her shoulder and arm. The arm itself felt terribly painful, the fingers of her hand clenching and unclenching like a wounded starfish. Then Zoe saw that she had no right hand, and no right arm, and a scream that could not be uttered rose to plug her throat. Now she recalled entering the cable house, approaching the machinery there, and being struck so hard in her right side she had been lifted from the floor. The thing that struck her had done this—taken her arm off above the elbow and left a stump behind.
Her head sank back onto the pillows. She could not bear to think of what her arm would look like when the swathes of cotton were removed. A one-armed woman; could anything be more revolting than such an asymmetric creature? What might pass for a war loss on a man would simply look ugly and incongruous on a woman. Zoe wished the machine had killed her. The grief she felt over her discovery was like a humming in her brain, a desperate noise seeking escape, but there was none. A one-armed woman. She would never leave the room again, never allow anyone to see her deformity. She would kill herself, she decided, and erase the entire incident, along with a life no longer worth living.
“I didn’t see it,” said Omie, her voice made tiny by guilt.
Zoe could not even look at her. She wanted Omie to go away and stop staring at her. Zoe wanted to be alone so she could fling herself from the window on the north side of her room; the drop was at least forty feet onto solid rock; she would leap out headfirst to ensure her death. It would be done the moment Omie went away.
“I didn’t see it happen, Mama, I’m sorry.… If I had’ve seen it, I would’ve told you not to go … but I didn’t see it. My eye didn’t work.”
For just a few seconds Zoe was tempted to accept that her loss was Omie’s fault. What good was a clairvoyant daughter if she could not be relied upon to steer her own mother away from such a disaster? Omie was weeping, her mouth twisted. Zoe looked at her; she had never seen Omie so miserable.
“It wasn’t you.… It had nothing to do with you. It just … happened. Stop crying, please. It isn’t your fault, Omie. Now, please … seeing tears just makes my arm hurt more.”
“How … how can it hurt, Mama?”
“I don’t know. I can still feel it, though. I met a man once, a long time ago when I was your age, and he had just one arm, and he said he could feel his arm still, and his fingers.…”
Omie watched her mother’s face crease with sorrow as her voice died away, then a sob unlike any Omie had ever heard came bursting from Zoe, a huge sob, followed by a string of little sobbings, then her mother began to moan and cry in earnest, and roll her body from side to side, all the while crying tears so heavy they flooded down her cheeks like rain, and her moans became a wailing that made the hair on Omie’s neck stand straight up. Mama is in hell, Omie thought, and became frightened by the intensity of Zoe’s anguish. It came rushing from her in waves of horror and self-loathing that Omie could sense without truly understanding; where was the anger her mother should be feeling toward her for not having foreseen the accident? Could she truly have meant it when she said Omie was not to blame? The waves from Zoe were huge and dark, many voices and fears rolled together, and they rocked Omie on her heels as they swept by her like the wind from massive beating wings.
A nurse finally entered the room, having heard the horrendous wailing from the far end of the passageway, and told Omie to get out. Omie did so, and was followed all the way to her room by the rolling waves of grief and desolation and one other thing, a thing Omie would never have thought could come from her mother, but it was unmistakably there—a picture of the window in Mama’s room, and Mama throwing herself down onto the rocks below that window. Omie fell to the floor in shock, then picked herself up and raced back to Zoe’s door, but the nurse had locked it, and Zoe’s pitiful howling was lessening even as Omie tugged at the doorknob, and eventually gave out with a single racking sob, a smaller sob than the one that had begun everything. When all was quiet, Omie walked away. She would come back later and tell Mama not to go near the window. This time her eye was working.
Zoe learned of the presence in Elk House of a stranger by way of the nurse. The nurse did not know the gentleman’s name, but allowed that he was very dignified for a man so young. Zoe gave instructions that the gentleman was not to be allowed anywhere near her, and her husband was to stay away also. Leo had been at her bedside twice that Zoe could recall, and both times he had been unable to do anything but stand there, shaking his head, saying, “My dear … my dear …” until Zoe told him to go away. She did not want him looking at her bandaged stump, and she did not want to look at him. She found she hated him, for no particular reason, and it would be best for them both if he stayed away. The nurse neither agreed to deliver such a message nor said outright that she would not. She busied herself with the sheets, and hoped that Dr. Gannett would arrive soon to administer more laudanum to his patient. The nurse had no medical training, and could do little more than fetch and empty chamber pots and keep the patient’s room tidy.
When Omie visited, Zoe asked her for information on the stranger. Leo had never invited anyone to stay at the house before; he usually entertained those few men with whom he had business dealings at the Stag Hotel in town.
“His name is Rowland,” said Omie, “and he’s from Denver. He likes Papa very much, but I don’t care for him.”
“Why not? What is his reason for being here?”
“He says he came to pay his respects to Papa, and that’s what Papa says too.”
“Can you learn any more?”
Omie knew what that meant, but she had already lanced Rowlan
d’s head several times with her special eye, and the results had been a puzzlement. “There are lots of men with no faces, Mama.”
“No faces?”
“Well, I can’t see them, not clearly. They wear nice clothes, and they meet in a big room with dark wood all around the walls and smoke cigars and talk a lot.”
It meant nothing to Zoe beyond suggesting some kind of business meeting. She was no longer interested in Mr. Rowland Price.
“Can you still feel the fingers, Mama?”
“Yes, but not all the time, and they won’t do what I tell them to; isn’t that peculiar? Well, perhaps not, since they aren’t even there, Why should something that isn’t there do what I want?”
Omie smiled. Mama was making a joke, although not a very funny one, so she must be getting better.
“Have you been getting out of bed?”
“Once or twice.”
Zoe watched Omie’s face. She had been warned by Omie to stay clear of the windows; Omie would not say why. Zoe knew she could never do now what she had fully intended doing in those first awful hours when she became aware of her condition. Omie was the true nurse, not the woman appointed by Dr. Gannett; that bustling individual could not stop gushing about the doctor’s wonderful and awe-inspiring abilities as a man of medicine. Zoe suspected the nurse was in love with her employer, and even suspected the good doctor might be using her in his bed. Thoughts of that kind had become repugnant to Zoe. She did not wish to be touched by any man again. Her missing arm was like a returned hymen, a barrier to intimacy. This would be her lot from that time on, a shotgun marriage to her lessened self, with shame the bridesmaid.
She wondered how she might fill the hours and days and years ahead of her, spent as they would be within the walls of her room. If she was not going to kill herself, there would have to be some manner of distraction from her torment. Dr. Gannett’s laudanum was fairly efficacious as a solvent for her pain, even more effective as a means of loosening the strings around her mind. Sometimes she would daydream for hours after a stiff dose of the green liquid, her thoughts unspooling like ribbons hurled into an abyss, and her mood would veer from its habitual self-pity, allowing Zoe to roam the pastures of yesterday with Mr. Duckfeet and Mr. Pigeontoes, Nettie Dugan’s names for Clay and Drew. She pictured them both as boys, even as they ran alongside herself, a grown woman with two good arms, and as the drug relinquished its hold, Zoe would cry softly for what was gone forever.