Sudden Country (24 page)

Philo Heracles Hecate, aged 78, died suddenly Sunday at the House of the Blessed Lamb in Cheyenne, where he had been pastor for the past ten years. Witnesses to the tragedy, which took place during morning services in the grandiose Italian baroque church on Central Avenue, said Deacon Hecate suffered apoplexy near the end of his sermon and expired before anyone could come to his aid. The House of the Blessed Lamb, designed by its pastor and constructed upon the site of its modest predecessor, had been the subject of much debate between leaders of the congregation and city fathers, who would demolish it to make room for a skating parlor. Burial Tuesday following 10 A.M. services at the Schechaniah Sampson Memorial Chapel adjacent to the church.

In Cheyenne we sold the two remaining wagons and all but one horse to Sam Greenspan for less than half what we had paid him for just the wagons, and booked seats on the afternoon train to Denver with a connection to Amarillo. Mr. Knox made arrangements at a livery to board his mare Cassiopeia and send her out on the next stock train. Our identical new satchels, which required two hands to hoist on board, drew curious glances from some of our fellow passengers, but we paid them no heed.

Of the scene that occurred at Cousin Gertrude's house when my mother and I were reunited I will say little, for she has always been embarrassed by outward demonstrations of affection and may yet read these words. Suffice it to say that it felt grand to be treated as a little boy once again, to be embraced by her and even to suffer Gertrude's obfuscatory greetings and breathless comments about how many inches I had grown in such a short time.

That effusive woman did not appear to notice my wrapped hands and cut head. Although neither Mr. Knox nor Judge Blod nor I made reference to our hardships, I think from the look that passed between Mother and the schoolteacher when he took her hand politely that she understood all. To this day she has not asked me for an accounting. Her reaction was much less reserved when, in the privacy of the trap Mr. Knox hired to take us back to the station, I showed her what my satchel contained. She chattered incessantly of plans for the fortune–most of which never came true, I am happy to say; for I had no desire to attend Princeton.

Judge Constantine Blod bade us all farewell at the Good Part Boarding House, where he had returned solely to retrieve his bags. There he regained enough of his customary fustian to recite the "goodnight" speech from Macbeth; unimpressing my mother, who had cooled toward him greatly in his absence. Anyone observing their parting might have supposed that here were a lodger and a landlady who had scarcely met during the former's stay. To me he said precisely nothing.

I confess to a feeling of bitterness toward him yet, although he has been in his grave these fifteen years, having spent his final days secluded in a mansion on San Francisco's Nob Hill said to have survived the earthquake, crippled by gout and waiting for gangrene to take him. This is an unfair attitude, for if it were not for that early exposure to the popular press of the day, I should hardly be living in relative comfort on New York City's Upper West Side, the owner of a publishing firm whose line of pulp magazines, including
Dime Dazzlers
,
Racy Detective
,
Sixgun Western
, and
Tales from the Dungeon
, is selling surpassingly well despite a rather troublesome economic slump in this year of 1930. The only one of my enterprises not doing well, and which I have consistently refused to part with in the face of my lawyer's earnest entreaties to divest, is the geriatric
Progressive Publications
, Inc., based in Chicago, which has been losing money for years and whose sole claim to notoriety is that it was once Jed Knickerbocker's imprint.

Henry Knox and I correspond often since he retired as superintendent of the Panhandle School District, incorporated in 1899. Although in his late seventies, he is in sound health and attends all the games played by the boys' softball team he has sponsored for years, among his many community endowments and activities. He and my mother exchange Christmas cards faithfully, which I find heartening in view of the fact that they have been divorced since 1893, eighteen months almost to the day after their wedding. (His first wife succumbed to smallpox within a month of our return from Dakota). He has been urging me for some time to write this chronicle, and I am under pain of an angry letter to send it to him before publication so that he can correct the geography.

My mother is living, as I said. She sold the Good Part soon after the divorce and long after she had ceased to require the income provided by her lodgers; her reasons for keeping it so long, I am bound to relate, were a factor in Mr. Knox's decision to end the marriage. Two years later she married a third time and resides today in Chicago with her husband, who owns and manages a chain of meat-packing plants and slaughterhouses headquartered in that city. They are active socially and last month were weekend guests in the Florida home of Mr. and Mrs. Al Capone. I make it a point to visit on birthdays and holidays and occasions when my stepfather is away on business. He and I do not get on.

This year, a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum plans to unveil a gigantic head of George Washington he fashioned by means of chisels and dynamite out of a rock cliff named Rushmore, located somewhere in the Black Hills. It is to be joined by other heads. I read an interview in which Mr. Borglum stated that he chose the site because of the friendliness of its configuration to his purpose. I felt like congratulating myself, for the photograph that accompanied the interview was certainly of the cliff I had climbed, whose contours I had created by bringing down the entire face upon the head of Nazarene Pike.

I do not know what became of Black Ben Wedlock. He never returned to the Golden Gate Saloon, and today a filling station occupies that site. I hear rumors from time to time, mostly having to do with some scoundrel's death under a variety of disgraceful circumstances, but nothing concrete. I became excited once when a manuscript arrived on my desk purporting to be the fictionalized memoirs of one Franklin Bridegroom, "hero of the boarder" (sic); handwritten in a childish scrawl and nearly incomprehensible in its spelling, grammar, and punctuation, it was peppered nonetheless with authentic details and genuine frontier aphorisms (among numerous impossible escapes, willy-nilly chases, contrived rescues, and one-man victories over absurd odds) to convince me that its author was intimate with his subject. There was no cover letter and no return address on the envelope, only a Santa Fe postmark. I brooded over this unpublishable book for weeks, hoping that whoever had submitted it would get in touch with me. When he did not, I hired a private detective based in Albuquerque, who poked around the New Mexico capital for two weeks and sent me a ten-page report detailing his failure and a bill for seventy-five dollars. I still have the manuscript, and thus far no one has come forward to claim authorship.

I think of him often, and seldom with rancor. He was as he represented himself, if not precisely what he claimed to be; and if that makes no sense, then the reader will never understand why a thirteen-year-old boy should leave a good home to treat with guerrillas and Indians in the last decade of the old century. Given that same energy and the wisdom I now possess, I should do exactly as I did; for unlike the gold, long since spent and forgotten, the memories of adventure have grown brighter each year. And sometimes they are more than just memories. Sometimes–more since the death seven years ago of my beloved wife, Natalie, than before–when I lie half-awake in that flat black quarter hour that precedes the light, I hear distinctly unmusical voices raised in song, and I swear that they are just outside my window:

Oh, I'm a good old rebel,

now that's just what I am!

And I am ready.