Still carrying the gun, Chet went back to Chance’s. He felt grown up, a householder, able to hold up his end of any community obligations. Mrs. Chance was still incoherent. Broken ejaculations of joy came out of her, and she put a big red circle with a crayon around the date on the calendar. “I don’t ever want to forget what day it happened on,” she said.
“Neither you nor anyone else is likely to,” said Mr. Chance. “This day history has come to one of its great turning points.” Chet looked at him, his mind clicking with an idea that brought his tongue out between his teeth.
“Mr. Chance,” he said, “would you like a drink to celebrate?”
Mr. Chance looked startled, interrupted in a high thought. “I beg pardon?”
“Pa’s got some whiskey left. He’d throw a party if he was home. Come on over.”
“I don’t think we should,” Mrs. Chance said. She looked at her husband dubiously. “Your father might ...”
“Oh, Mother,” Mr. Chance said, and laid his arm across her back. “One bumper to honor the day. One toast to that thin red line of heroes. Chester here is carrying on his father’s tradition like a man of honor.” He bowed and shook Chet’s hand. “We’d be delighted, Sir,” he said, and they all laughed.
Nobody knew exactly how the party achieved the proportions it did. Mr. Chance suggested, after one drink, that it would be pleasant to have a neighbor or two, rescued from the terrors of the plague, come around and join in the thanksgiving, and Chet said sure, that was a keen idea. So Mr. Chance called Jewel King on the telephone, and when Jewel came he brought Chubby Klein with him, and a few minutes later three more men came to the door, looked in to see people gathered with glasses in their hands, and came in with alacrity. Within an hour there were eight men, three women, and the two Chance boys, besides Chet. Mr. Chance wouldn’t let any of the boys have any whiskey, but Chet, acting as bartender, sneaked a cup of it into the dining room and all three took a sip and smacked their lips. Later, Harvey called Chet into the parlor and whispered. “Hey, I’m drunk. Look.” He staggered, hiccoughed, caught himself, bowed low and apologized, staggered again. “Hic,” he said. “Had a drop too much.” Ed and Chet watched him, laughing secretly while loud voices rose in the kitchen.
Mr. Chance was proposing toasts every three minutes. “Gentlemen,” he would say, “I give you those heroic laddies in khaki who looked undaunted into the eyes of death and saved this ga-lorious empiah from the clutches of the Hun.”
“Yay!” the others said, banging cups on the table. “Give her the other barrel, Dictionary.”
“I crave your indulgence for one moment,” Mr. Chance said. “For one leetle moment, while I imbibe a few swallows of this delectable amber fluid.”
The noise went up and up. Chet went among them stiff with pride at having done all this, at having men pat him on the back or shake his hand and tell him, “You’re all right, kid, you’re a chip off the old block. What’s the word from the folks?” He guggled liquor out of the sloshing cask into a milk crock, and men dipped largely and frequently. About four o‘clock two more families arrived and were greeted with roars. People bulged the big kitchen; their laughter rattled the window frames. Dictionary Chance suggested periodically that it might be an idea worth consideration that some liquid refreshments be decanted from the aperture in the receptacle.
The more liquid refreshments were decanted from the aperture in the receptacle, the louder and more eloquent Mr. Chance became. He dominated the kitchen like an evangelist. He swung and swayed and chanted, led a rendition of “God Save the King,” thundered denunciations of the Beast of Berlin, thrust a large fist into the lapels of new arrivals and demanded news of the war, which they did not have. Within five minutes Mr. Chance and Jewel King were off in a corner holding a two-man chorus of “Johnny McGree McGraw,” keeping their voices down, in the interest of decency, to a level that couldn’t have been heard past Van Dam’s.
He did not forget to be grateful, either. Twice during the afternoon he caught Chet up in a long arm and publicly blessed him, and about five o‘clock, while Mrs. Chance pulled his sleeve and tried to catch his eye, he rose and cleared his throat and waited for silence. Chubby Klein and Jewel King booed and hissed, but he bore their insults with a reproving eye. “Siddown!” they said. “Speech!” said others. Mr. Chance spread his hands abroad and begged for silence, and finally they gave it to him, snickering.
“Ladees and gen‘lemen,” Mr. Chance said. “We have come together on this auspicious occasion....”
“What’s suspicious about it?” Chubby Klein said.
“On this auspicious occasion, to do honor to the gallant boys in Flanders’ fields, to celebrate the passing of the twin blights of pestilence and war ...”
“Siddown,” said Jewel King.
“... and last, but not least,” said Mr. Chance, “we are gathered here to cement our friendship with the owners of this good and hospitable house, our old friend Bo Mason and his wife, a universally loved woman.” He cleared his throat and looked around. “And finally, my friends, our immediate host, the boy who in the absence of father, mother, and brother, kept the home fires burning and finally, out of the greatness of his heart and the knowledge of what his father would do under similar circumstances, opened his house and his keg to our pleasure. Ladees and gen‘lemen, the Right Honorable Chester Mason, may he live to bung many a barrel! ”
Embarrassed and grinning and not knowing quite what to do with so many faces laughing at him, so many hands hiking cups up in salute, Chet stood in the dining room door and tried to be casual, tried to hide the fact that he was proud and excited and had never had such a grown-up feeling in his life.
And while he stood there with their loud and raucous approbation beating against him, the back door opened and the utterly flabbergasted face of his father looked in.
There was a moment of complete silence. Voices dropped away to nothing, cups hung at lips. Then in a concerted rush they were helping Bo in, limping heavily on slippered feet, his hands bandaged, his face drawn and hollow-eyed and bony with sickness. After him came Elsa, half-carrying Bruce and staggering under his weight. Hands took Bruce away from her, set him on the oven door, led her to a chair. All three of them, hospital-pale, sat and looked around. Chet saw that his father did not look pleased. His jaw was set harshly.
“What the devil is this?” he said.
From the dining room door Chet squeaked, “The war’s over!”
“I know the war’s over,” his father said. “But what’s this?” He jerked a bandaged hand at the silent ring of people. Chet swallowed and looked at Dictionary Chance.
Dictionary was not unequal to the occasion, after his temporary shock. He came up to clap Bo on the back; he swung and shook Elsa’s hand; he twinkled at the white-faced, big-eyed Bruce on the oven door.
“This, Sir,” he boomed, “is a welcoming committee of your friends and neighbors, met here to rejoice over your escape from the terrible sickness which has swept away to untimely graves so many of our good friends, God rest their souls! On the invitation of your manly young son we are here not only to celebrate that escape from the plague, but the emancipation of the whole world from the greater plague of war.” With the cup in his hand he bent from the waist and twinkled at Bo. “How’s it feel to get back, old hoss?”
Bo grunted. He looked across at Elsa and laughed a short, choppy laugh. The way his eyes came around and rested on Chet made Chet stop breathing, but his father’s voice was hearty enough. “You got a snootful,” he said. “Looks like you’ve all got a snoot, ful.”
“Sir,” said Dictionary Chance, “I have not had such a delightful snootful since the misguided government of this province suspended the God-given right of its free people to purchase and ingest intoxicating beverages.” He drained his cup and set it on the table. “Now neighbors,” he said, “it is clear that the Masons are not yet completely recovered in their strength. I suggest that we do whatever small jobs our ingenuit
y and gratitude can suggest, and silently steal away.”
“Yeah,” they said. “Sure.” They went in a body out to the sleigh and brought in the one bed that had been sent back, lugged it through the kitchen and set it up in the dining room, piled the mattress on it, swooped together bedding and sheets and left them for the women. Before the bed was made people began to shake hands and leave. Dictionary Chance, voluble to the last, stopped long enough to pour into Bo’s ear the virtues of his first-born. “We have enjoyed your hospitality, extended through young Chester,” he said. “If we may be of any service during your convalescence, please do not hesitate to call upon us. I am happy to say that, thanks in good part to the excellent medicinal waters I have imbibed at your house, our family is almost completely recovered and at your service.”
Mrs. Chance said goodbye with a quick, pleading smile and led Dictionary away, and there was nothing for Chet to do but face the eyes that had been waiting for him all the time.
“All right,” his father said. “Now will you tell me why in the name of Christ you invited that damned windbag and all the rest of the sponges over here to drink up my whiskey?”
Chet stood sullenly in the door. He had already given up any hope of explaining. Under his father’s hot eyes he boiled sulkily. Here he had held the fort all alone, milked the cows and kept the house. Everybody else praised him and said he was doing a keen job. But you could depend on Pa to fly off the handle and spoil everything.
“The war was over,” he said. “I asked them over to have a drink and celebrate.”
His father’s face and neck began to swell. “You asked them over! You asked them over. You said come right on over and drink all the whiskey in the house! Why God damn you ... !”
“Bo,” Elsa said quietly. Chet slid his eyes toward her long enough to see the pain and sympathy in her face, but he didn’t move. He set his mouth and faced his father, who was flapping his hands and looking upward in impotent rage. “Leave the house for ten days,” he said. “Go away for as much as a week and by Jesus everything goes wrong. How long were they over here?”
“Since about two,” Chet said. He met his father’s hard look with one just as bitter, and his father started from his chair as if to thrash him, but his sore hands and feet put him back, wincing. Two hot angry tears started from Chet’s eyes. He wished the old man wasn’t all crippled. It would be just fine if he tried to whip him and couldn’t make him say a word. He’d bite his tongue out before he’d make a sound, or say he was sorry, or anything.
“How much did they drink?”
“I don’t know,” Chet said. “Three crocks, I think.”
His father’s head shook back and forth. “Three crocks. At least a gallon. Twelve dollars’ worth. Oh Christ, if you had the sense of a pissant ...”
Laboriously, swearing with pain, he got up and hobbled to the keg. When he put down his bandaged hand and shook it his whole body stiffened. “I thought you only sold six gallons out of this,” he said to Elsa.
Her glance fluttered toward Chet. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought that was all ... Now Bo, don’t fly off the handle. We’re lucky to be alive ...
“I sold some out of there,” Chet said. “I’ve got the money in here.” His body stiff, his mind full of self-righteous, gloating hatred, he went in and got the money from the jar. With it was the list itemizing each sale. He laid it all on the table.
“So you’ve been selling liquor,” his father said. “I thought your mother told you to let that alone.”
“People came wanting it. It was medicine, so I thought I ought to sell it to them.”
His father laughed unpleasantly. “Probably sold it for a dollar a bottle,” he said, and picked up the list.
Now! Chet said. He waited, his blood beginning to pound with triumph. His father’s eye went down the list, stopped. “What’s this twenty-two fifty?”
“That’s five bottles of bourbon to Mr. Vickers.”
“That should only be twenty.”
“I know it,” Chet said. “But I got twenty-two fifty.” He met his father’s eye and almost beat it down.
“I ought to whale you within an inch of your life,” his father said. “You had no business selling anything. Now you spread my affairs all over town, you charge people too much and ruin good customers, you ask the whole damned town over here to drink up twelve dollars’ worth of stuff....”
“All right!” Chet shouted. “All right, I’ll tell you something!” He batted at his eyes with his forearm, seeing his father’s sick-thin face and seeing nothing else. “The day Ma and Brucie left, Louis Treat and another guy came in here and were going to steal the whole keg and I run ‘em out with the shotgun.” He stood with his fists balled, the tears blurry in his eyes, shouting at his father’s stiff, gray, expressionless face. “I wish I’d let ’em take it!” he said, his face twisting. “I wish I’d never done a thing to stop ‘em!”
His father’s face was dissolving, running, melting, and the bandaged hands were coming up in the air, and then his father was laughing, flung back against the kitchen table and shouting with uncontrollable mirth. Chet looked startled, and then sneered. His father’s hands pointed at him, his father’s breath came wheezy with laughter from spent lungs. “Okay, kid,” he said. “Okay, you’re a man. Nobody’s going to take it away from you. If you looked at Treat the way you just looked at me he’s running yet, I’d bet on it.”
Everything had dissolved so suddenly, the defiant stand he had made had produced such unlooked-for results, that Chet went grouchily into the parlor and sat by himself. After a minute his mother came in, her lips twitching with the beginning of a smile, and put her arms around him.
“Don’t be mad at Pa,” she said. “He didn’t understand at first. He’s proud of you, proud as he can be. So am I. You did just fine, Chet. It was more than a boy should have had to shoulder ...”
“If he’s so proud,” Chet said, “why does he have to laugh?”
“Because you looked so fierce you struck him funny, I guess.”
Chet scowled at the .30-30 and the shotgun hanging one on top of the other above the mantel. He shook his shoulders irritably inside his mother’s quick tight squeeze. “Well, there’s no call to laugh!” he said.
5
A week after their return from the hospital, Bo sat counting his money in the dining room. Elsa was already in bed; he could feel her watching him. Deliberately he counted out fifty dollars and pocketed the rest, almost six hundred dollars, a fine fat roll with a rubber band around it. He sat down on the edge of the bed and shook off his slippers.
“Coming to bed already?” Elsa said.
“Lot to do tomorrow.”
“What?”
He slid his pants off one leg, pulling at the cuff. “Change the wheels to bobs, for one thing.”
He knew she was lying there stiffly, accusing him with her eyes, but he pulled his shirt over his head and pretended not to know. Finally she said, “To go to Montana?”
“Yep.”
She lay stiff and straight on her side of the bed as he got into his nightgown and stretched out. Her voice went flatly up toward the ceiling. “So it wasn’t the epidemic. You’re in the whiskey business.”
“Look,” Bo said. He put his arm around her but she didn’t yield or turn her face. “I’ve still got six hundred, and it’ll be over a week before they get the bank open again and I have to pay that note. I can take the wagon and bring back twice as much as I did before. Double my money again.”
They lay in silence, with bitterness between them. Then Elsa said, “Fourteen years ago you were in the liquor business and you got out. Now you’re back in it worse.”
“What’s wrong with the liquor business?” he said. “Almost anywhere it’s perfectly legal. Just because this crackpot province passes a war measure ...”
“Even where it’s legal it isn’t respectable,” she said.
In exasperation he turned his back on her, turned over
again just as abruptly to say, “You sold some a while ago. Did it burn your fingers? Did the money you got for it poison you? I suppose you think you and Chet are a cinch for hellfire because you both sold whiskey.”
“It isn’t hellfire that bothers me,” she said. “I just want us to have a good solid place in the world where nobody can shame us with anything.”
“That’s sure ambitious,” he said. “That shows a lot of imagination, that does. Any dirt farmer in the province can claim that, practically.”
“But we can‘t,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll go down tomorrow and get the job of driving the honey-wagon. That’s a nice solid place in the world. That’s a steady job. And Heathcliff’s dead, they’ll need somebody.”
“Bo,” she said, “I’d rather see you doing that than what you’re going to do.”
“By God,” he said, almost in wonder, “I believe you would.” He turned away from her and settled himself to sleep. As long as he remained awake he did not feel her stir. When he woke in the morning he felt the antagonism still between them, but he went ahead anyway. And when he had returned with the load, and had peddled it in town and in all the little towns along the line, and had turned the whiskey into cash and paid back the note to the bank, he took off again with team and bobsled in January, and brought back enough to last through the rest of the winter.
Now the long closed winter, blizzard and cold snap and Chinook, delusive thaws in February and iron cold in March and heavy snow in April. Two line-riding cowpunchers from the Half-Diamond Bar froze to death on St. Patrick’s day in a forty-below blizzard. Mrs. John Chapman, widowed by the flu, created a sensation by taking strychnine for the lost affections of Hank Freeze, the most prosperous farmer on the north bench. As soon as it was clear that Mrs. Chapman had taken an overdose and would recover, people had a good deal of fun with that. What could you expect of a guy named Freeze?