E.L. Doctorow (16 page)

That was only last winter but it seems like ancient days in my mind.

I have been trying to write what happened but it is hard, wishful work. Time is beginning to run out on me, and the form remembrance puts on things is making its own time and guiding my pen in ways I don’t trust. In my mind’s eye is an arch of suns multiplying the sky—or a long flickering night of one moon turning over and over into its shadows. I know this is trickery but I can’t blot it out. I think Molly, Molly, Molly and she is the time, turning in her phases like that moon, smiling and frowning while the boy grows big, setting down in frame like Fee his father … And I see something that never happened, the two of them carrying a giant cross with great effort, planting it over Fee. “I ain’t much for God,” he protests, “I always put my faith in people.”

Molly, could you really know what was coming? Or did it come because you knew it? Were you smarter than the life, or did the life depend on you?

There was a sign they put up when the weather grew warm. Isaac provided a bolt of muslin and Zar bought
the paint; and young Bert spent a week painting the red letters in the style he copied out of a catalogue. Helga sewed on a canvas backing, making slits against the wind. And on a dazzling morning Swede raised up the sign over the street. From the scaffold of the well it stretched all the way across to the false front of Zar’s saloon: WELCOME TO HARD TIMES, it said, rippling in the breeze like a thing alive.

Most everyone stood outside for the occasion, gazing up at the banner and making comment. I figured you could see that sign half a mile away on the flats. But that was the morning Molly broke down crying and said: “Blue, for God’s sake let’s leave this place!”

And then, for some weeks, not a day passed and she didn’t say it again, begging, pleading with me to sell out: “It’s not safe any more, I swear we’ve got to get out of here!”

“Where do you want to go Molly?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Let’s just leave, Blue. Right now. Today. The three of us, we’ll find somewhere—”

“Molly what you’re saying makes no sense. Here we’ve put all this work and life down, we’ve made a home from nothing, and you want to ride off!”

“God, you’re a fool, Mayor. You always was a fool!”

“That may be. But I’m not fool enough to pull up stakes just when the claim is beginning to pay! You don’t think it’s different anywhere else do you? You don’t think there’s only one Turner riding this land!”

“Oh Christ there are hundreds, yes I know. Thousands. And they’re going to get me—they’re all coming for me!”

If I was a wiser man I would have seen where the
misery was. You could step out the door and the scar of the old town was blocked from your sight, but the scar was still there.

“I suppose you’ll protect me! I suppose you’ll take care of me, just like the last time. Good old Mayor, fast with the gun he is, no worries with Mayor Blue marching behind your skirts. No worries at all!”

And there would be that hand closing over my heart, that almost forgotten pain.

“Why these fools, with their banners and their shacks, and their big plans—Oh God, we’ve got to get away from here!”

“Molly please—”

I would hold her in my arms and she would weep with great sobs that made her shudder: “Blue—I beg you—sell out—and we’ll go—to some city—Blue.” I would touch her hair, press her head to my chest and stand with her until she was quietened. I remember once how I sat her down at the table. Her green eyes were puffed with crying as she leaned on her elbow, her head in her hand, trying to listen to me.

“Molly, it could be you are right and this street in all its bustle will bring some Bad Man. I’ll say you are right—sure as winter brings summer we’ll draw our Man from Bodie. I suppose I know it as well as you. But you see this time we’ll be too good for him. Listen to what I say: I don’t mean I’ll stand up to his gun, I mean I won’t have to. When he came last time, the minute Flo walked over to him we were lost. Before Fee went in Avery’s place with his stick of wood we were lost. You fight them, you just look at them, and they have you. Molly it’s something I know, I’ve seen enough, I’ve seen
them ride into a town, a bunch of them, feeling out the place, prodding for the right welcome. And when they get it you’d might as well turn your gun on yourself as try to turn them away. But a settled town drives them away. When the business is good and the life is working they can’t do a thing, they’re destroyed.”

“Oh Lord,” she wailed, “oh Jesus God, spare me from this man, this talker—”

“Molly! You know something? Listen to me, you know why he came that time?
We wanted him
. Our tongues were just hanging out for him. Even poor old Fee, he built a street but he couldn’t make a proper town. He must have knowed when he picked up that board the hope was already dead. If he didn’t know he wasn’t the man I think he was; if he was fooled he couldn’t know what life is.”

“Blue—”

“Molly, if you believe me, believe what I’m saying, and that Turner will never get to us!”

After a while she didn’t ask it any more. That in itself should have made me pack and ride us out. It was not from any comfort I supplied that she spoke no more of leaving; but from what, I think now, was a giving-in to the devil that grinned at her. Weren’t those cries—“I beg you Blue, please Blue, Blue Blue Blue”—weren’t they cries for help? I was no help, once more I was walking her to the saloon, behind her still.

It was as if she grudged anyone’s life who hadn’t suffered at the hands of that Bad Man. When people began to ride in under the banner she grew sullen. One day she fastened two sticks together for a cross and with
Jimmy went out to the graves to put it at Fee’s head. I watched them from the cabin door, and I remembered the order of those graves: they were planting the cross, by mistake, for one-armed Jack Millay.

She would take no part in the life on the street, she began to stay inside, only sitting sometimes out in back when the weather was fair, looking at the view west of the rocks and the flats. I did the buying for us and Jimmy brought her the news. He was good at that, always managing to be where something was going on; and then he’d run to Molly to tell her about it. In that way she had all the news; and Jimmy had all her opinions. Molly’s opinions were much the same about everything. Whether it was someone come on the stage, or some rumor about the road, some new business of Zar’s or Isaac Maple’s, or some measure I had taken—she didn’t like it. Everything fell under her tongue and there would be suppers where I would eat while Molly would talk on and on, her mind wandering over each person, each foot of ground, and I’d be finished and my coffee drunk and her plate would hardly be touched. Jimmy listened to everything she said like it was gospel, no matter what she spoke of or how many times she’d said it before, he would drink up her words like they were mother’s milk.

There was only one person who Molly would tolerate and that was Jenks—not because he was anything but a fool but because he was so handy with guns. Jenks’s name never felt the whip at our table and that was why he was one of the few people Jimmy had a talking acquaintance with. Many’s the time I saw the boy helping Jenks at the stable, mucking out stalls, running
errands. For pay Jimmy got to coddle the animals, and sometimes the boon of a lesson in gun handling. I found him at it once, holding a Colt shoulder-high, clicking off the trigger at the barn walls while Jenks held a stick under his wrist and ran a patter: “Hold’m steady, sonny, squeeze’m, squeeze’m, don’t yer pull, thet’s hit, line’m steady …” I tried to put a stop to it and that’s when I found out Jenks was teaching the boy just to oblige Molly, who had asked him the favor.

Now there is no wrong in showing a boy arms except it was like everything else Jimmy was getting. And the effect of it all wasn’t lost on other people. He was thickening into his father’s son but the look on his face was Molly’s. Mae told me privately, because she didn’t want to make any fuss she said, that she greeted the boy one day looking out her second-story window, and in a sudden rage he picked up a stone and threw it right up, hitting her in the chest. Isaac Maple caught him once pocketing a handful of shells from the counter. I settled with Isaac but it wasn’t the money that bothered him. And there was no settling at all with John Bear: the Indian’s garden patch was more than food to him, there was no one else who could make a plant grow. But one day he woke from his nooning and there was his greens all stepped on. He never thought of Jimmy, for some reason he made me understand it was Zar he blamed—unlikely as Zar would be to do such a thing. But I knew who it was. And I thought it wouldn’t do to talk to him or lay a hand to him. I thought it was Molly who needed reaching.

“Molly that boy gets wilder each day. He’s turning mean.”

“Is that what you think?”

“He threw a rock at Mae.”

“Well I hope it was thrown true.”

“Molly this is Fee’s boy—”

“I’ll tell you what’s rankling you Mayor, he’s a fondness for Jenks, he looks up to Jenks. And it burns don’t it?”

“Jenks has nothing to do with it!”

“Were you any good with a gun Mayor maybe you could teach the boy some manliness.”

“That’s not manliness.”

“Oh I’ll tell you it is, it is, Mayor—”

“Well is it manliness to step all over the Indian’s patch?”

She looked at me. Then she went to the door and called the boy and a moment later Jimmy came inside and stood in front of her.

“Was it you ruffled up those plants?”

The boy glanced at me with a disgusted look on his face: “No.”

“Was it?” Molly grabbed his shoulders and shook him and he went scared: “Yes ma’am.”

One two three she put the slaps smart across his face.

“You do such as that again, I’ll have your hide. You hear me?” She screamed: “You hear me?”

Well that wasn’t what I wanted either, I could have hurt him myself if it would serve the purpose. As it was he hated me as he fingered the slaps Molly gave him. A night or so later I found my ink jar turned over and the cover of one of the ledgers all soaked. It riled me and I was ready to forget anything but my own anger and light into the boy no matter what purpose it would
serve. But as I turned there was Molly in the dugout, his room now, watching the boy get ready for bed.

“Look at them shoulders,” I listened to her murmur. “Molly’s Jim is gettin’ tall and strong, ain’t he? Molly feeds him up good and he’s turning into a sure enough man, isn’t it so? Big Jim they’ll call him and he’ll take care of his Molly, yes he will …”

This was the time of our greatest prosperity. Small clouds of gnats hung in the yellow evenings and horses tied up to the porch rails were touching rumps. Every rising sun saw another cone of dust sprouting up from the flats. People needed work; and it was like all the West was following the smell of it on the spring airs, like the scent of water on the desert. What were my feelings, did it make me uneasy to see our town as a refuge? How many times I would open the door to see wheels turning past us: it was a dusty couple pulling hard on their handcart, or a Pike County bunch filling a flatbed wagon, one limping beside with his kneecoat and Bowie belt, an old long rifle on his shoulders. You could tell the Pike Counties if only by their coughs. A man rode in one day wearing a dirty white linen suit, a roll of green felt was across his saddle, he was a faro dealer. And there was much bidding between Zar and Jonce Early to get the man. Zar got him. There was a raggedy old woman come along, nothing in her wagon but a pile of rags and a crate with three squawking chickens; and she made money selling their eggs for a dollar apiece. But most of the arrivals had just themselves to offer a boss and the money was going into the pockets mainly of those already settled on the street.

We were all doing a brisk business. People paid in every kind of exchange for my water—U.S. silver, greenbacks, Territory scrip; and when I wasn’t busy seeing to the well I was noting Express orders and taking mail. There was another stage on the line now and we had two arrivals each week. If you went into Isaac Maple’s store (“Maple Bros.” it said on the outside in paint, Isaac’s hope lettered for all to see), if you went in there, there was always someone ahead of you—even though Isaac had the Chinagirl helping him wait on customers. The store had every kind of stock you could wish, sugar, flour, foods canned and in brine barrels, preserves, dry goods, cutlery, carpentry tools, tar paper, rolls of barbed wire, tobaccos, anquitum for lice, corn starch, bottled lavender water and honey and castor oil—you’d think you was in Silver City.