Pamela Morsi (18 page)

He swallowed the curse that sprang to his lips and dropped both the hone and the razor onto the counter shelf with a clatter. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it quickly around his injury.

“Good morning, Mrs. Richardson,” he said formally.

“Good morning to you, Mr. Dewey,” she said. “I hope that I’m not interrupting.”

“No, no.”

He glanced over at old man Penderghast. The man was wide awake now and looking at Mrs. Richardson as if he’d never seen a woman before. Of course, in some ways that was entirely true. There weren’t a whole lot of women in the world who were like Mrs. Richardson. At least there weren’t in the world of Cottonwood, Texas.

She wore a startling black dress, but this was no widow’s weeds. It was trimmed in pale blue and crimson braid, which gave the somber style a festive appearance. Amos did not keep up with the fashions in ladies’ gowns, but the cut of the dress was like nothing he had ever seen before and could be nothing less than the very latest style. Its high collar, long sleeves and trimly gored skirt were all in themselves perfectly
respectable, but somehow they were put together in a way that made a man’s thoughts fly to what was beneath the thin covering of flimsy cloth.

She was smiling at him as if she knew exactly the direction of his thoughts. Deliberately Amos kept his mind blank and his body still, though he could not completely control the stirring of his loins. She was an attractive woman, there was no denying it. But it was more than simply that which kept men on edge. It was as if she were the embodiment of all things sexual and forbidden.

He could remember her when she had been a young girl, and even as Grover Richardson’s new bride. Her erotic sensuality had not been apparent then. Or had it? He had been so in love with Bess, he probably had just not noticed.

But he noticed her now. He had seen her in the park on Sunday and he had been jolted by the experience. She had not so much as touched his hand, yet every word she said, every movement she made, every minute he was in her presence had been rife with carnal awareness and sensuality.

Now, even as he tightened the pressure on the towel he’d wrapped around his cut hand, he was very aware of Pansy Richardson. He didn’t like it one bit.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, forcing civility into his voice.

The barbershop was a bastion of male privacy. Women never intruded. It was often a place of low conversation, bawdy humor and coarse language. Ladies were naturally excluded from that. Of course, some would have said that Pansy Richardson was no lady.

“I just stopped in for a shave and a haircut,” she told him, joking. Her laughter had a low, sultry quality that no decent woman would have been cursed with.

Amos didn’t even smile. He refused to give her that satisfaction.

Penderghast, however, was extremely entertained. The decrepit codger couldn’t hear it thunder, but his ears were perked up like those of a hound dog on the scent and his rheumy eyes were bright with expectation. He guffawed as if Mrs. Richardson were some vaudeville wag.

The woman gave the old fellow an appreciative glance. His tongue practically hung out of his mouth in response.

“I assume you do have some purpose in being here,” Amos said.

“Yes,” she answered, turning back to him. “I desire some professional service from you, Mr. Dewey.”

She said the word
desire
in such a way that Amos could feel the blush creeping up his neck and ears. He hated how she made him feel. He hated the loss of control. In fact, maybe he hated her.

“I can’t imagine what service I might provide, Mrs. Richardson.”

“Can’t you?” she asked.

He didn’t care for the banter. He didn’t care for the suggestiveness. She should just say what she had to say and get out of his place of business.

“You will have to speak forthrightly, ma’am. I am not good at guessing games.”

“No,” she said, “I’m sure you’re not. In fact. I would go so far as to suggest that you are probably not good at games of any kind.”

She turned her back on him and walked over to the mug case. Every man in town who came in for a regular shave had his personal mug for mixing shaving soap. Some mugs bore only the man’s name or initials. Others had pictures depicting his livelihood or avocation.
Joe Simpson’s had a picture of a lathe. Pete Davies’s showed hounds on a chase. Clive Benson’s proudly displayed a tuba.

“It’s like looking into the soul of every man in town,” the woman remarked.

Amos had the ridiculous urge to throw his body between her and the mugs to protect the privacy of his patrons. Women were supposed to be innocent and ignorant. Pansy Richardson knew far too much. She was a threat to any man who came near her.

“What is it that you want, Mrs. Richardson?” he asked her.

She turned in his direction and with a slow, deliberate regard, she let her eyes drift down him from head to toe.

“I just need for you to take a look at me,” she said.

“What?”

“My neck, Mr. Dewey,” she clarified. “I believe I have a carbuncle on my neck.” Her eyes widened in feigned shock. “Oh, dear, what were you thinking?”

He didn’t answer. He was not quick or clever enough to make the witty reply.

“That is part of your job, is it not?” she asked him. “Lancing boils, removing cysts. You have to learn to do those things to get a barber’s license.”

Amos nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“Then you will offer me relief?”

Her question was so strangely phrased as to make him more wary and ill at ease.

“Have you been feverish?” he asked. “Suffered aching? Swelling?”

“All of those,” she answered. “And I’ve beheld the awful thing in my mirror. You simply must help me.”

He could hardly refuse. The insidious infections
were not only painful, but dangerous. The sepsis could be loosed inside the body and cause serious illness or death.

“I can’t tell anything without an examination,” he said.

“That’s why I’m here.”

Amos would have been very happy to tell her to go elsewhere. But there was no one better qualified to help her in Cottonwood. She would have to take the train to Millville or Longview in order to see some other barber. Or perhaps a doctor, though they were certainly not known for their finer cutting skills. Most surgery involving
materia medica
was for removing a limb. The more delicate art of taking a knife to an angry boil was left to those of the barbering trade. Amos was not only the best barber in town, he was especially well schooled and experienced in treating infections. When a man spent his whole life getting a close look into the faces of other men, he learned a good deal about pus and infestation—the two biggest culprits of disease.

Yet there was a delicate question he had to ask her. But he was loath to ask it, even of a woman of questionable morals like this one.

He turned away from Penderghast, making the moment as private as a public place would allow.

“Mrs. Richardson,” he said quietly, “is it possible that you have … that you have the syphilis.”

Her initial reaction was to stare at him in puzzlement.

“Do you know what syphilis is?” he asked.

Her expression changed to incredulity, then anger. For a moment Amos thought the woman might slap him.

“Yes, Mr. Dewey,” she answered quietly, definitively,
“I do know what it is. I know how a person gets it. And I know that I do not have it.”

“Sometimes the very first symptom is a chancre that can be very much like a carbuncle.”

“This is not that,” she said through clenched teeth.

Amos didn’t pursue the subject further. He had seen several of the venereal sores and believed he would recognize the disease when he saw it.

“Please sit in the chair,” he suggested and made a courteous invitation with his hand, hoping to placate her displeasure.

He stooped down to the lower cabinet to retrieve the small leather kit that he referred to as his surgical bag. It contained a tin of salve, some boric acid, rubbing alcohol, sterile bandages and castor oil.

From his tool bracket he took a narrow probe and a small, thin scalpel.

When he turned back to the chair, he was surprised to see it empty. Mrs. Richardson continued to stand in the middle of the room, showing no indication of following his order.

“I need you to sit in the chair to examine you,” he said.

She was looking at him stone-faced and straight in the eye.

“I couldn’t possibly do that,” she said.

His brow furrowed in question.

“Why not?”

“Surely you know,” she said.

Amos didn’t have the vaguest idea.

“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I do not.”

She gestured toward the expanse of plate-glass window in the front of the shop and to old man Penderghast, who still sat wide-eyed in his seat.

“Are you thinking to put me on display, Mr. Dewey?” she asked. “Do you want every person in Cottonwood to have a nose pressed against that glass?”

“I … well, I …”

“Do you have any idea about how I am treated in this town?” she went on. “Everything I do is up for speculation and everything I do is watched. These people would like nothing better than to see me in that barber’s chair. They would undoubtedly come to the same erroneous conclusion that you have.”

The woman closed the distance between them, coming to stand directly in front of him. She was close enough for Amos to catch the scent of her. She was not heavily perfumed and musky, as he would have expected. She smelled clean and fresh, floral and almost innocent.

He took a retreating step backward.

She followed him. Her voice was low, meant only for his ears.

“I cannot, will not, allow myself to be a public spectacle, displayed for the amusement of the fine, upstanding citizens of Cottonwood,” she declared with conviction. “I’ve had more than my share of that, thank you very much, and I will not consent to more.”

His back to the counter, Amos could get no further away from her.

“I suppose I could look at your neck from a standing position,” he said. “I could even do it in the back room. There are no windows at all there, but the light is not too good.”

Mrs. Richardson stood in front of him for what seemed like an inordinately long time, hesitating as if to consider all of the alternatives. She glanced back at the barber’s chair and then at Amos once more.

“No, I think you were right the first time,” she said. “I should be seated. But the windows will have to be covered.”

“I can close the shades,” he said. “They are mostly for keeping out the heat of the afternoon sun. They would keep anyone from glancing in easily, though you can see through them.”

“The shades won’t be enough,” she said thoughtfully. “I want the window covered with paper before they are drawn.”

“All right,” he said.

“And I don’t want anyone else in here.”

“Of course not,” he agreed.

“Since there are gentlemen coming in and out all day,” she added, “I think it should be after regular business hours.”

“Okay.”

“The door will have to be locked and we will have to have complete privacy.”

Her demands were excessive; still, he continued to accede to them.

“I’ll let you know when would be the best time for me,” she said. She stepped back from him and smiled pleasantly. “Thank you very much, Mr. Dewey. You have been very helpful and I am certain that you will be able to cure what ails me.”

“I … I can’t know until I’ve looked at it thoroughly,” he told her.

“Yes,” she answered. “Isn’t that the way it always is.”

Her voice was throaty now and full of meaning. Amos had no idea what that meaning might be.

She turned from him and headed toward the door.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said.

Amos wasn’t sure if it was a threat or a promise.

She stopped in front of Penderghast and leaned forward
to loudly say good-bye. The woman was practically shoving her bosom in the old man’s face.

When she walked out the door, the grizzled codger was still grinning like a fool.

Amos snapped at him.

“So do you want a shave or are you just loitering!”

T
HE KISSING BOOTH WAS AN IDEA THAT TRULY APPEALED
to the gentlemen of the Monday Morning Merchants Association. As soon as Rome brought it up for discussion, he was roundly applauded. And the fact that the money raised was going to be used to pay for a professional fireworks display at the Fourth of July Fiftieth Anniversary Founder’s Day Picnic was even better.

“You just simply take the cake,” the mayor told him loudly, giving him an enthusiastic slap on the back. “You just simply take the cake.”

Most of the other men were equally congratulatory.

“I always say you got a good head on your shoulders,” Matt Purdy told him. “If you get tired of fetching and carrying all that
Mudd-y
ice, you can sure have a job toting ice that’s a lot more
Purdy.”

The man guffawed, clearly enjoying his own little joke. The fellows around him laughed as well, including Rome, who found more humor in the man’s behavior than his words.

“I think it’s bound to be a very successful venture,”
Huntley Boston said. “What young ladies are you recruiting to man the booth?” He chuckled. “Or perhaps I should say woman it.”

“I thought I would ask the mayor’s daughter,” Rome answered, “young Becky Timmons, the Benson girl and Betty Ditham.”

“Ah … Betty Ditham,” the banker said thoughtfully. “The daughter of my teller. She is certainly quite lovely and a sweet girl as well.”

“Betty is the prettiest girl in town,” Rome agreed. “So we’d sure want her. With the others we have a blonde and a brunette and a redhead, which should cover the preferences of just about every fellow in Cottonwood.”

“Except the misters who like their gals bald-headed,” Purdy piped up and then laughed uproariously at his further attempt at humor.

“My boys will be digging out their hoarded pennies for this, I’m certain,” Wade Pearsall announced to the room, proudly intimating that his shy, pimply sons, just out of knee pants, were now debonair swains.