The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (2 page)

It was the West also of rampant optimism. The consumptive in search of a cure, the criminal in quest of redemption, the failure in pursuit of a fresh start, the bigamist in flight from his wives; each found a fresh page upon which to start his journal anew. A world bereft of records, fingerprints, and the ubiquitous camera, and a blank amorphous map labeled the Great American Desert, offered
panacea to a variety of ills. Not since Alexander fled the shadow of his father into the vast reaches of the Known World had our solitary planet so plainly beckoned to the wanderer to cast aside his burdens and press on.

It was the West of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Billy the Kid; but it was also the West of William S. Hart, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne. It was big enough to encompass the bombastery of Buffalo Bill and Cecil B. DeMille and the skullduggery of the bloody brothers Harte.

This was Johnny Vermillion's West; a West that should have been, but never quite was.

Tannery, Nebraska, was a good place to sin, and now it's gone.

A few overgrown foundations, a well fallen in and filled with topsoil and chaff are left, and they're invisible from the traffic whirling past on the state highway. But for a few years, before the buffalo vanished and the farmers took their trade west to Omaha, Tannery roared like a young bull.

It boasted fifteen saloons, buck-toothed whores, a Masonic Temple, two banks, and a theater called the Golden Calf. This last seated six hundred, with triple-decked boxes nearly all the way around, but it stood vacant during the warm months when the hides were ripe. Stacks of them two stories high surrounded the tannery itself, attracting flies and repelling visitors not directly involved with the industry. The larger theatrical troupes passed the place by from May to November, leaving the citizens to manufacture entertainments of their own. A sporting lady known only as Roberta once rode a tame buffalo named Ambrose into the taproom of the Metropolitan Saloon and halfway up to her quarters
on the second floor when the stairs collapsed under the weight; but show me a ghost town without a buffalo-riding whore named Roberta in its past and I'll show you a town that plain bored itself out of existence. Our story is more original than that.

Nothing in the short stormy history of Tannery ever compared to the night the Prairie Rose Repertory Company performed
The Count of Monte Cristo
at the Golden Calf. People who claimed they were present that night were still talking about it years later, after the town had been dismantled and reassembled on the south bank of the Platte under the name Plowright.

Sadly, Plowright proved no more durable in its second incarnation than it had in its first. The spring runoff following the disastrous winter of 1886–87 swept the entire town downriver, drowning one-fifth of its population and scattering the survivors from Ohio to Oregon. But journals and letters carry the story, and aged participants close to the principals were candid in their memoirs.

During the frosty autumn of 1873, in response to a telegraphic exchange between Tannery and Kansas City, Isadore Weaver, proprietor of the Golden Calf, posted the first new bill to garnish the front of the theater since Mabel North, the Yankee Belle, had trilled “Listen to the Mockingbird” to the accompaniment of a live canary on its stage the Saturday after Easter. This was sensation. By the time he brushed out the last blister, a crowd had assembled, exhaling clouds of steam as they read the legend aloud:

FIRST WINTER TOUR

J. T. VERMILLION'S

PRAIRIE ROSE REPERTORY COMPANY

PRESENTS

“THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO”

(ADAPTED BY MR. C. RAGLAND FROM THE CLASSIC NOVEL

BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS
PÉRE
)

FEATURING

MR. J. T. VERMILLION

MISS APRIL CLAY

MAJOR EVELYN DAVIES

MME. ELIZABETH MORT-DAVIES

MR. CORNELIUS RAGLAND

ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY

A separate notice was plastered across the bottom, informing interested readers that the play would take place Saturday, November 7, at 8:00 P.M., and that all would be admitted for the sum of fifty cents.

“Never heard of any of 'em,” huffed Lysander Hubbard, publisher of the
Tannery Blanket
(“We Cover the Plains”); the poster had come by rail and not from his shop. “What've they done, I wonder?”

Stella Pardon, who ran the general merchandise with her husband, blew her red-lantern nose into a sturdy handkerchief. “Honestly, as long as none of them shot Lincoln, what does it signify? I'll be there, with or without Loyal.”

That, demonstrably, was the general sentiment. Weaver pasted up a SOLD OUT notice three days later.

On the Friday before the performance, the westbound U.P. panted to a halt beside the Prince Albert Memorial Depot and stood with steam rolling off its boiler while porters unloaded trunk after trunk onto the platform. Each piece of luggage was stenciled with the theatrical company's name in large, easy-to-read letters. Taking shelter inside this Stonehenge from flying snow, the five new
arrivals introduced themselves to the consumptive young staff reporter for the
Blanket
and a large sampling of residents and transients that had been gathered there for more than an hour.

The chief spokesman, identified as Mr. John Tyler Vermillion of Chicago, was a tall fellow a year or two shy of thirty, slim as a trotter. When he removed his hat, a fine soft black one with a broad brim, his longish fair hair whipped about him like a young Byron's. He wore silken moustaches and an imperial in the hollow of his chin, and even the yoke-shouldered buffalo hiders present acknowledged him uncommonly presentable. Existing photographic portraits indicate chiseled bone and eyes of that crystalline shade of blue that always reproduces pale in black-and-white. He must have made a fine figure that day in his gray ulster and beaver collar, Wellingtons shining on his narrow feet. Even Stella Pardon's eyes glistened like steamed plums.

“May I present Miss April Clay,” said he, sweeping every gaze with his hat toward the woman who had just joined them from aboard the day coach. “She will be playing the unattainable Mercedes; and may I warn you, gentlemen, she remains in character offstage as well as on.”

A chuckle coursed through the group, warmest in the throats of the “gentlemen” thus admonished. Bowler, badger-piece, and filthy slouch hat came away as one, in some cases exposing crania covered since All Hallow's Eve. For Miss Clay was a dainty daub, in the language of the day; a strawberry blonde with skin like milk, dressed to the fashion in a tweed traveling suit and cape, with an adorable little hat pinned to her upswept hair. She was then in her twenty-second year, five feet four in tiny patent leathers with a hint of heel. Her eyes were hazel, slanted gently (her grandmother, it was said, was Russian), and as large as asteroids.

“Where did you appear last?” inquired the young man from the
Blanket
.

The wind gusted. Miss Clay swayed and placed a slender hand in a suede glove against the reporter's waistcoat for support. She asked his pardon, withdrawing the hand. “The Tivoli, in Kansas City. I assayed the role of Viola in Mr. William Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
. I was Maria as well, and briefly a sailor.”

Her voice was astonishingly low for one of her stature. The reviewer for the
St. Louis Enquirer
had compared it to “a bassoon in heaven's ensemble.”

“Three parts in one play? How did you remember all the lines?”

“The sailor was nonspeaking,” said Mr. Vermillion. “We are a small company, but versatile. Each of us seldom portrays the same character twice in succession, and we often perform double and triple duty. In the hierarchy of the stage, repertory is solidly working class. In that, we are very like your own fine panners and prospectors, sifting the streams and prowling the hills all round for gold.”

Someone in the audience pointed out that Tannery was a buffalo town, not a mining camp. The leader of the troupe was unabashed.

“Your noble stalkers and skinners, if you will, conquering the brute and refining its outer shell for personal comfort. We come before you, ladies and gentlemen, to distract and amuse, to provide a brief holiday from the trials of daily existence.”

Applause crackled. He bowed and swung his hat. “Madame Elizabeth Mort-Davies, who has charmingly agreed to strain credulity and appear as the hero's silver-haired mother.”

Mme. Mort-Davies' hair was, in fact, a rather alarming shade of violet, piled high and caught cruelly with combs; it was not observed to move even when the wind toppled a large valise from the
mountain of luggage. She was nearly as tall as Mr. Vermillion, straight-backed and buxom, and fifty-five if she was a day. Matrons were her specialty, but she had been known to don a beard for Polonius, and strain credulity to cracking to allow Miss Clay to abandon the ingenue for a smaller part that offered more challenge. Saturday night, she would also pull a set of false whiskers as the venal warden of the Chateau d'If.

Her husband, introduced as Major Evelyn Davies (emphasis on that first long
E
), formerly of the Queen's horse guard, stood a head shorter and round as a barrel hoop in a buffalo coat and morning dress, dove-gray gaiters on his square-toed boots. He wore white handlebars and carried a gold-headed stick. His responsibilities included the beleagured Edmond Dantes' aged father and also the Abbe Faria, Dantes' fellow prisoner.

“Finally, Mr. Cornelius Ragland, the plain sturdy band that holds together our quartet of gems. Tomorrow night you shall know him as the villainous Danglars, and perhaps recognize him among an army of coachmen, stewards, and prison guards. However, impersonation is not the sum total of his genius. He is the playwright who distilled Dumas
Peré's
great work into three manageable acts, with time for intermission.”

Young Mr. Ragland was plain as tin, but far from sturdy; he made the hollow-chested journalist look burly by comparison. Stoop-shouldered, bespectacled, with ears that stuck out conveniently to prevent his hat from settling onto his shoulders, he appeared miserable in the cold, and his suit of clothes was far from clean. At every glance he belonged to that genus of sickly male described as Too Fragile for this World.

“What do
you
play, Mr. Vermillion?” someone called out. “The Chateau Deef?”

The leader of the troupe laughed with the others. “It will be my privilege to ask you to accept me in the person of Edmond Dantes and his alter ego, that mysterious, haunted fellow, the Count of Monte Cristo.” He bowed deeply, and those in witness could do naught but clap their hands. Frontier audiences were notoriously generous.

Isadore Weaver arrived, crimson-faced and puffing, apologizing for certain entrepreneurial details that had delayed him at the Golden Calf. He made the company's acquaintance and explained that accommodations awaited them at the Railroad Arms; a brace of stagehands was on its way to transport their costumes and stage properties to the theater. Mr. Vermillion seemed prepared to resume orating, but Miss Clay tugged at his sleeve and asked the fellow from the
Blanket
for the time of day. Among the crowd on the platform there was a furious scramble for pockets. The reporter alone came up empty-handed and bewildered by the situation.

Miss Clay smiled and produced a battered turnip watch and chain from her little reticule. “It's a handsome timepiece,” she said. “I couldn't resist a closer look.”

Blushing, the young man accepted its return, along with her sweet apology. Miss Clay, explained Mr. Vermillion, was a gifted parlor magician whose father had studied under Monsieur Robert-Houdin in Paris. His listeners applauded the charming demonstration of legerdemain, and not one noticed the blue-icicle gaze he fixed upon the pretty conjurer.

When the fire curtain rose Saturday night, bearing with it its wallpaper pattern of advertising (“TROPICAL FRUIT LAXATIVE, THE GENTLE PERSUADER, AVAILABLE AT BOYLAN'S
DRUGS”; “ELY & SONS PRESENT SUMMER AND WINTER SUITS FOR MEN AND BOYS”; “SHARPS METALLIC CARTRIDGES BY CASE OR GROSS, ORDER AT PARDON'S GENERAL MERCHANDISE”), a capacity crowd cheered everything, even the set.

The set, at least, benefited heavily from anticipation. Back then, itinerant actors traveled much more lightly than the Broadway road companies of the present day, depending upon theaters to supply all but their costumes and makeup and some hand properties specific to the production. The Golden Calf appealed in turn to its patrons, who built and painted sets and donated odd sticks of furniture, some of which came from the trash heap behind the Old Cathay Saloon after its biweekly brawl. As a result, the home of Edmond Dantes in Act I was more reminiscent of a Victorian jumble sale than of the play's French Empire setting, and when Edmond bearded Danglars in his own den in Act III, a number of sharp observers noted that the villain appeared to shop in the same places as his mortal enemy. But it was the performances that mattered.

Whatever his thespial challenges—he tended to speechify, and Mr. Ragland's script indulged that tendency—Mr. John Tyler Vermillion of Chicago cut a dashing figure in tights and delivered his soliloquys in a ringing tenor, punctuated by clashing blades and much athletic hopping about during the fencing scenes. Miss April Clay captivated the women with her courage and the men with her decolletage; a bit of modest lace in the last act, and a dash of talcum to her temples, supported the passage of years. Poor Mr. Ragland was a weak and unconvincing swordsman, but spoke his lines with a serpentine hiss (and a bit of a lisp) appropriate to the dastard of the drama. All agreed that the Madame and the Major
were rather fine, and the choice of material fortunate. During the quiet stretches, a great many fewer shots were fired into the ceiling than usual.