Butcher's Crossing (37 page)

What did it mean? he asked himself again. Even this, his—he hesitated to call it love—his hunger after Francine, what did it mean? He thought again of Schneider; and suddenly he imagined Schneider in his place, alive, lying beside Francine. Without anger or resentment he saw him lying there, and saw him reach across and fondle Francine’s breast. He smiled; for he knew that Schneider would not have questioned, as he was questioning; would not have wondered; would not have let a look from Charley Hoge loose within him these doubts and these fears. With a kind of rough and sour friendliness, he would have taken his pleasure from Francine, and would have gone his way, and would not in any particular manner have thought of her again.

As Francine would not have thought again of him. And, he added suddenly, as Francine probably would not think again of him, Will Andrews, who lay now beside her.

In her sleep, in a whisper, Francine mouthed a word that he could not understand; she smiled, her breath caught, she breathed deeply, and moved a little beside him.

Though he did not want the thought to come to him, he knew that he, tool like Schneider, would leave her, would go his own way; though, unlike Schneider, he would think of her, remember her, in a way that he could not yet predict. He would leave her and he would not know her; he would never know her. Now the darkness was nearly complete in the room; he could barely see her face. With his eyes open in the darkness, he slid his hand down her arm until he found her hand, and lay quietly beside her. He thought of the men who had known her appetite and flesh, as he had known them, and had known nothing else; he thought of those men without resentment. In the dark they were faceless, and they did not speak, and they lay still in their breathing like himself. After a long while, his hand still loosely clasping Francine’s hand, he slept.

He woke suddenly, and did not know what caused him to awake. He blinked his eyes in the darkness. Across the room a dim glow flickered at the curtained window, died, and flickered again. A shout, thickened by distance, came into the room; the hooves of a horse thudded in the street outside. Andrews eased himself out of bed and stood for a moment, shaking his head sharply. Another burst of excited voices came up from the street; the wooden sidewalks clattered beneath heavy boots. He found his clothes in the darkness and pulled them on hastily; he listened for other sounds; he heard Francine’s regular, undisturbed breathing. He went quickly from the room, easing the door shut behind him, and tiptoed down the dark corridor toward the landing outside the building.

To the west, in the direction of the river, clearly visible above the low buildings of Butcher’s Crossing, a flame billowed up out of the darkness. For a moment Andrews clutched the handrail of the stairway in disbelief. The fire came from McDonald’s shack. Fanned by a heavy breeze from the west, it lighted the tall grove of cottonwoods across the road from it, so that the light gray trunks and deep green leafage were shown clearly against the darkness around them. The fire illumined its own smoke, which coiled upward in thick black ropes, and were dispersed and carried back toward the town on the breeze; a rank, acrid odor bit into Andrews’s nostrils. The clatter of running below him broke into his stillness; he went swiftly down the stairs, stumbled on the board sidewalk, and ran up the dusty road toward the fire.

Even at the point where the wagon-wheel trail turned off the road just above the grove of cottonwoods, he felt the great heat of the fire push against him. He paused there at the twin swaths of worn earth, which were clearly visible in the yellow-red glare of the fire; he was breathing sharply from his running, yet the heavy dregs of sleep were not yet cleared from his mind. Scattered in a wide, irregular semicircle about the flaming shack, fifteen or twenty persons stood, still and small and distinctly outlined against the billowing glare. Singly or in small clusters of two or three, they watched, and did not call out or move; only the dense heavy crackling of the flames came upon the night stillness, and only the great pulsations of the flame moved the men’s shadows behind them. Andrews rubbed his hands over his eyes, which were smarting from the haze that settled from the twisting coils of smoke, and ran toward the clusters of people. As he approached them, the intense heat made him turn his face away from the direction he was running, so that he collided with one of the small groups, knocking one of the onlookers aside. The man he bumped against did not look at him; his mouth was open, and his eyes were fixed on the huge blaze, the light of which played upon his face, casting it in deep and changing hues of red.

“What happened?” Andrews gasped.

The man’s eyes did not move; he did not speak; he shook his head.

Andrews looked from one face to another and saw no one that he recognized. He went from one person to another, peering into faces that were like distorted masks in the throbbing light.

When he came upon Charley Hoge, cringing before the heat and light and yet crouched as if to spring, he almost did not recognize him. Charley Hoge’s mouth was pulled open and awry, as if caught in a cry of terror or ecstasy; and his eyes, streaming from the smoke, were opened wide and unblinking. Andrews could see in them the reduced reflection of the fire, and it seemed almost that the fire was burning there, deep in the vision of Charley Hoge.

Andrews grasped him by the shoulders, and shook him.

“Charley! What happened? How did it start?”

Charley Hoge slid from under his grasp, and darted a few steps away.

“Leave me be,” he croaked, his eyes still fixed before him. “Leave me be.”

“What happened?” Andrews asked again.

For an instant Charley Hoge turned to him, away from the fire; in the shadow of his brows, his eyes were dull and empty. “The fire,” he said. “The fire, the fire.”

Andrews started to shake him again; but he paused, his hands lightly resting on Charley Hoge’s shoulders. From the crowd came a murmur, low but intense, rising in concert above the hiss and crackle of the flames; he felt more than saw a slight surging forward of the people around him.

He turned in the direction of the movement. For a moment he was blinded by the intensity of the flame—blue and white and yellow-orange, cut through with streaks of black—and his eyes narrowed against the brilliance. Then, among the scattered bales of buffalo hides, high above which the flames turned massively, he saw a dark furious movement. It was Miller, on a horse which reared and screamed in terror at the flames, but which was held under control by the sheer force of Miller’s strength. With furious jerks of the reins, which cut the bit deep into the horse’s bleeding mouth, and with heavy strokes of his heels against its sides, Miller forced his horse to dart among the scattered bales. For several moments Andrews gaped uncomprehendingly; senselessly, Miller darted up to the very mouth of the flame, and then let his horse pull away, and darted close again.

Andrews turned to Charley Hoge. “What’s he doing? He’ll kill himself. He—”

Charley Hoge’s mouth lifted in a vacant grin. “Watch,” he said. “Watch him.”

Then Andrews saw, and could not comprehend, and then realized what Miller was doing. Forcing his horse up to the bales piled close to the burning shack, he was pushing the piled bales so that they fell into the open mouth of the flame. Against those bales which lay singly upon the ground, he forced the breast of his horse, and raked the flanks relentlessly, so that the bale was pushed along the ground into the edge of the holocaust.

A cry came from Andrews’s dry throat. “The fool!” he shouted. “He’s crazy! He’ll kill himself!” And he started to move forward.

“Leave him be,” Charley Hoge said. His voice was high and clear and suddenly sharp. “Leave him be,” he said again. “It’s his fire. Leave him be.”

Andrews halted and turned upon Charley Hoge. “You mean—Did he set it?”

Charley Hoge nodded. “It’s Miller’s fire. You leave him be.”

After the first involuntary surge forward, the townspeople had not moved. Now they stood still, and watched Miller gallop recklessly among the smoking bales. Andrews slumped forward, weak and helpless. Like the others, he watched Miller in his wild riding.

After he had tumbled the hides nearest the shack into the fire, Miller rode somewhat away from the flames, leaped off his horse, and tied the reins to the tongue of one of the abandoned wagons that littered the area. A dark figure, shapeless in the outer edges of the firelight, he scuttled to one of the bales that lay on its side near the wagon. He stooped, and in the shadow became indistinguishable from the bale. He straightened, and the shapes became distinct, the bale moving upward as he straightened, seeming to the men who watched a huge appendage of his shoulders. For an instant, he swayed beneath the gigantic shape; then he lurched forward, and ran, halting abruptly at the side of the wagon, so that his burden toppled forward off his shoulders and crashed into the bed of the wagon, which swayed for a moment beneath the impact. Again and again, Miller ranged about the wagon, gathering the bales, swaying beneath their weight, lurching, and running with bent knees to the wagon.

“My God!” one of the townspeople behind Andrews said. “Them bales must weigh three, four hundred pounds.”

No one else spoke.

After Miller had boosted the fourth bale upon the wagon, he returned to his horse, unwound a length of rope from his saddle horn, and looped it around the apex of the oaken triangle that secured the wagon tongue to the frame. With the loose end of the rope in his hand, he returned to his horse, mounted it, and wound the end of the rope twice around his saddle horn. He shouted to the horse and dug his heels sharply into its sides; the horse strained forward; the rope tautened, and the wagon tongue lifted beneath the tension. Miller shouted again and slapped his palm on the horse’s rump; the sound of the slap cracked above the hiss and rumble of the fire. The wheels moved slowly, screeching on the rusted axles. Again Miller shouted, and dug his heels into the horse; the wagon moved more swiftly; the horse’s breath came in heavy groans and its hooves cut the dry earth. Then wagon and horse, as if released from a catapult, careened across the flat earth. Miller yelled once more, and guided horse and wagon straight toward the flame that grew from the shack and the piled hides. At the instant before it seemed that man and horse would plunge into the yellow-hot heart of the fire, Miller swerved his horse suddenly aside, unwinding in a rapid motion the rope from his saddle horn, so that the wagon, unloosed, plunged in its own momentum into the heart of the fire, spewing sparks over an area a hundred feet in diameter. For several moments after the wagon with its load of hides crashed into it, the fire darkened, as if the fury of the assault had extinguished it; then as the wagon caught, it flamed more furiously; and the townspeople drew back several steps before the intensity of the heat.

Behind him Andrews heard the sound of running feet and a shout that was almost a scream, high and animal in its intensity. Dully, he turned. McDonald, his black frock coat flared out at the sides, his arms flailing at random in the air, his sparse hair disheveled, was running toward the knotted bunches of townspeople around the fire—but his eyes looked beyond them wildly, fixed upon his burning office and his smoldering hides. He broke through the group of men, and would have continued running beyond them, had not Andrews caught him and held him back.

“My God!” McDonald said. “It’s burning!” He looked wildly around him, at the still and silent men. “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

“There’s nothing they can do,” Andrews said. “Just stand easy here. You’ll get hurt.”

Then McDonald saw Miller dragging another wagonload of hides into the widening circle of flames. He turned questioningly to Andrews.

“That’s Miller,” he said. “What’s he doing?” And then, still looking at Andrews, his jaw went slack and his eyes, beneath their tangled brows, widened. “No,” McDonald said hoarsely, and shook his head like a wounded beast, from side to side. “No, no. Miller. Did he—”

Andrews nodded.

Another cry, almost of agony, came from McDonald’s throat. He twisted away from Andrews, and with hands clenched into fists held like clubs above his head, he ran across the smoldering field toward Miller. On his horse, Miller turned to meet him; his smoke-blackened face broke in a wide and mirthless grin. He waited until McDonald was almost upon him, his fists raised impotently to strike out; then Miller dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, dodging away, so that McDonald struck at air. He drew his horse to a halt several yards away from where he had waited; McDonald turned and ran toward him again. Laughing now, Miller spurred away; and again McDonald beat his fists upon emptiness. For perhaps three minutes the two men moved jerkily like marionettes in the open space before the great fire, McDonald, almost sobbing between his clenched yellow teeth, chasing stubbornly and futilely after Miller, and Miller, his lips drawn back in a humorless grimace, always a few feet out of his reach.

Then, suddenly, McDonald stood still; his arms dropped loosely at his sides and he gave Miller a quiet, almost contemplative look, and shook his head. His shoulders slumped; with his knees sagging, he turned away and walked across to where Andrews and Charley Hoge stood. His face was streaked with soot and one eyebrow was singed where a flying ember had caught.

Andrews said: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, Mr. McDonald. It looks like he has gone crazy.”

McDonald nodded. “Looks like it.”

“And besides,” Andrews went on, “you said yourself the hides weren’t worth anything.”

“It’s not that,” McDonald said quietly. “It’s not that they were worth anything. But they were mine.”

The three men stood, silent and almost unconcerned, and watched Miller lug the bales and hides and pull the wagons up to stoke the fire. They did not look at each other; they did not speak. With an interest that appeared nearly detached, McDonald watched Miller drag the wagons and send them crashing into the ruins of other wagons that stood in stark skeletal shapes within the fire. Bale after bale, wagon after wagon went upon the flaming heap, until the fire was more than twice its original size. It took Miller nearly an hour to complete his task. When the last wagon with its load of bales went smashing into the fire, Miller turned and rode slowly up to the three men who stood together, watching him.