The City of Lovely Brothers (24 page)

"Miss Sachs was a woman, and she got a house, and all her food from the ranch free of charge."

"Don't Caliban got a house?"

"That Caleb built, and they both paid for the lumber and the men who helped build it, which you didn't. And don't go telling me he gets his food. Honest, Calvin, it's his ranch too!"

"I'll pay three dollars, like I did Miss Sachs."

"You'll pay ten."

"It's a good thing he doesn't know them forty next year is for Jake, or he'd 'a never give in," Nick said after they left, "no matter what Darcie said. Can't give Jake any of that fifty you're getting for this year, or there'll be another blow-out 'twixt him and Hooner."

* * * *

Nick's comment, how teaching Calvin Jr. for a year was worth twenty dollars, had passed through Caliban's mind that morning during the reading lesson. The boy was worth at least thirty. Caleb's three didn't give him half the trouble. The kid had been in a foul mood since he got to school, and had interrupted Lettie in the middle of her 30reading to blurt out, "This is a stupid story!" It was; most of the stories were, and the boy's father had chosen the book instead of letting Caliban pick the books he would be teaching from, because, as he said, he was paying for them.

"It's what there is in our book, Calvin Jr., and there are a lot of words in it for you to learn."

"Well, I don't wanna read it no more!"

"Anymore," Caliban corrected him, "and you will read it, along with the rest of your classmates. Go on reading, please, Lettie."

"Don't wanna hear it neither," Calvin Jr. said so loudly the children in the other groups turned to look at them. And he began to sing at the top of his voice so Lettie wouldn't be able to.

"You stop that racket and behave yourself!" Caliban ordered.

"How're you gonna stop me? You gonna give me a whupping? You wouldn't dare. You ain't got the right to."

Caliban kept a cane in the corner of the schoolroom.

He had only used it once since he'd begun teaching, and only gave the boy three whacks with it. Even thinking about hitting a child made him feel terrible, but he answered, "I have the right to, if I think it's necessary. I'm your uncle and your teacher, and this is my school. Your cousin Jake has the right, too." "Yeah, Jake'd do it. My pa and his is mad at each other."

"
Are
mad at each other."

"You want me to take the stick to him, Uncle Caliban?" Jake asked.

"I'll handle it, Jake."

"How're you gonna handle it?" Calvin Jr. asked defiantly.

Caliban quietly lifted him by his shirt collar and the seat of his pants and tossed him into the street. "You can come back when you're ready to behave yourself." Then he calmly closed the door and resumed the reading lesson.

* * * *

"You shoulda let Jake hit 'im," Nick said. "He was right, you know. You wouldn't'a done it yourself. Why didn't you let 'im?"

"Calvin's figured out that he and Caleb are how we got the money to pay Jake. Could you imagine what he'd do if he thought he was paying Calhoun's son ten dollars to beat his son?"

Nick laughed. "I don't see much what he
could
do, except go rail on Hooner on account o' Jake done it. And Hooner 'd laugh in his face." "He wouldn't. You don't know half of it."

"What's to know?"

"Old family history I never told you. I expect Jake doesn't know it either, or he wouldn't have offered to cane him for me. When I was six, Calvin dragged Calhoun to the woodshed and beat the tar out of him. Made him cry."

"Hooner cry? I can't imagine old Houn crying. How old was he? Sixteen? Seventeen?"

"Fifteen."

"Still can't picture it."

"He more than cried; he was screaming bloody murder. Calvin left him all bruised, and his ass was bleeding from where the whip cut him right through his pants. I saw the scars."

"Christ! What'd the kid do?"

"Got Julia pregnant."

Nick started laughing. "Good for him! And at fifteen no less!"

"Calvin made them get married."

"Well, it worked out good, didn't it? So Clay ain't no seven-month baby after all. He was born out of wedlock."

"Conceived out of wedlock."

"Don't start with them long sexy words o' yours now. I want to hear more of this." "There's no more to tell, except that I think Calhoun's never forgiven Calvin for that beating, not so much the beating as that Julia saw him crying. And on top of that, Calvin made
her
rub the lard into his backside to heal it. You won't tell Clay, will you?"

Nick was laughing. "Hell, no. I like Clay too much, and I wouldn't want to embarrass Julia."

"What's so funny?"

"Picturing Julia smearing lard on Hooner's fifteen-year-old ass. Musta been cute as a button then. It's damn nice now he's in his forties. Remember how he took off 'is pants for us that night he come to tell you about the fences?"

"As I remember it, he wasn't taking his off, he was putting yours on."

"Didn't mean it literally. See all them big words you taught me? Ain't I sexy?" He made a grab at Caliban's crotch.

"You're sexy when you use the wrong words and awful grammar, too, which is all the time."

"Like my testy-culls, and my ay-nuss, and my papoose—"

"Prepuce."

"Hey, you ain't interested, are you? We expecting Jake tonight?" "No, Jake's lesson is Friday this week."

"Then it must be that thing with Calv's kid. It didn't end there, did it?"

"No. As I told you, it turned ugly."

Hester, twenty years old and not yet married,

worked with her father at the general store. Calvin had seen his son playing in the street through the window and sent Hester to ask why he wasn't in school.

"'Cause Uncle Caliban said I didn't hafta read the story the others're reading."

"Well, that don't mean you can go off and play. You get on up to the house and help Mamma."

Darcie was not as easily deceived. She got more of the story out of him, how Caliban had thrown him out. She took him by the arm and marched him back to the

schoolhouse, where Jake told her the rest.

"You sassed your Uncle Caliban like that?" Darcie said, ready to explode. "Don't you think for a second I'm gonna put with it!" She went for the cane and thrashed him hard in front of the children until he was crying and sputtering that he'd never to do it again. Then she made him apologize to Caliban. She must have whacked him a dozen times.

"He deserved it."

"He did, but he was humiliated —don't interrupt me 30because I used a big word— which I admit might teach him a lesson, but the other children made fun of him after she left, and I had to threaten them with the cane to get them to stop. I wouldn't have used it, of course, but still… And that beating was as disruptive as Calvin Jr. carrying on."

"I'll let you get away with humiliated, but disruptive is just too fine a word. C'mere and kiss me."

Caliban smiled, shrugged, and went to get the kiss that wouldn't stop there. "I'd love to see the scene Calv makes when he finds out what Darcie done," Nick whispered in his sexiest voice as he nuzzled his face into Caliban's neck.

The scene Calvin made lasted almost two hours,

and the noise Calvin and Darcie made yelling at each other carried all the way to the bunkhouse. Calvin Jr. cowered in his room the whole time. He heard his father taking his side, but he knew the influence his mother had on him and was afraid he would come into his room and give him a second beating. Calvin didn't, but he did not come for their nightly father-son chat, either.

Jake had to help his family get their house ready for winter that week, so he rescheduled his private lesson with Caliban for Friday. They had to stuff cloth around the window frames to keep out the draughts, hang heavy burlap curtains in front of them, make sure every outside and inside door fit properly and closed tightly, and fill in any cracks that had developed since last winter. Theirs was the biggest house for miles around, two stories and five bedrooms, with two windows in each bedroom, an enormous kitchen, a separate dining room, and two parlors.

"What would anybody want two parlors for?"

Calhoun used to grumble. The Johnson house was a very unranchlike ranch house, but the Johnsons had been very unranchlike ranchers.

Caliban and Nick did not have to do as much to

theirs and could put it off for a while. They had only three windows and one door, and their entire house would have fit into Calhoun's two parlors and half his dining room.

On Friday, Jake stayed behind to sweep out the

schoolroom, bank the embers in the stove, and lock up the church while Caliban drove the wagon home. Calvin did not want anyone in his church "who had no business there," in other words, except Sunday. Then Jake got on his horse and rode to Caliban's for his lesson in history and current affairs.

Caliban was sitting at the table resting his leg on a second chair when Jake arrived. Nick met him at the door.

"So what's the week at the school been like for you, Jake?"

"Quiet, since Tuesday. I suppose Uncle Caliban told you what happened."

"He did, but he didn't hafta. The whole ranch knows about it. I woulda guessed there was something afoot from the way Calvin's been glaring at him even if nobody said a word. I'm glad he finally broke down and tossed 'im out on 'is ass."

"Personally, I'd have whaled on him. I've wanted to for weeks, but Uncle Caliban wouldn't let me. He says discipline is his responsibility."

"It seems to have worked out for the best," Caliban said, "but I still don't feel good about it. There has to be another way to keep a kid in line. I don't have to punish the others, at least not with the stick."

"It don't got nothing to do with you," Nick said.

"The real problem is the boy's father."

Jake agreed. "With the other kids all you have to do is say you'll send a note home to their parents, because they know they'll get it if you do. But I'd say the problem
was
31Uncle Calvin, not is. His son's the problem now."

"Come sit down and let's get started," Caliban said.

"I thought you came here to discuss history. Calvin Jr.

acting disruptive in class isn't history."

"I bet you wish it was," Nick teased.

First Caliban quizzed his nephew on last week's

lesson on the American presidency, and then they worked through some materials on the Indian uprisings Caliban had put together for him. Jake remarked that the subject must not have seemed like history to Caliban, who had lived through them.

"They haven't bothered us since I've been alive,"

Caliban said, "though we're not that far from where they wiped out General Custer. I was one year old then. Caleb says he remembers sitting up all night with every rifle in the house loaded while my grandpa waited for an attack which never came. I passed through one of their reservations on my way to Laramie, and all I saw there was a lot of poverty and misery. It's hard to believe that just ten years ago they were a danger to us."

"Pa said his grandpa had to fight off Indians."

"No surprise there. Our grandpa was the first settler around here, one of the first in what was then the far western corner of Dakota Territory. The Indians' buffalo were trampling his cattle, and his cattle were eating the 31buffalos' grass. And the farmers built fences. They hated us for that. We ranchers used to hate the farmers' fences just as much, but when I was a kid, we started building them ourselves."

"Hating people because they build fences instead o'

building fences because we hate each other," Nick said wryly.

Caliban told Jake to read through two chapters on the Civil War in the textbook and work through the questions at the end. Jake wrote out the answers while Caliban and Nick fixed supper. Then he checked to see if he had answered them correctly, put away his notebook, and went to set the table. "It's snowing," he said.

Nick went to the window. "Heavy, too, and there's a fierce wind. Can't hardly see two yards ahead o' you.

Surprising for the first snowfall of the season."

"You'll have to stay here tonight, Jake," Caliban said. "Your folks know where you are; they won't fret about you. It's too cold to sleep on the floor, though. This isn't summer. You can have my bed, and I'll bunk with Nick."

"I can sleep with you, Uncle Caliban. We're both thin enough to sleep two in your bed. There's no cause to inconvenience Nick."

"Meaning I'm fat, huh? Well, I can't help it. When 31I'm hungry, I eat; and I'm hungry now."

Caliban had taken Nick's comment about being fat as a joke, but Nick said next to nothing at the supper table, which was unlike him. Caliban thought he was annoyed that they would not be sleeping together, and it a Friday, too! Friday was a special night for them. Jake talked non-stop, nervously, as though Nick's silence embarrassed him.

Finally he asked, "Aren't you going to say
anything
, Nick?"

"Great grub, Cal."

"He's a wonderful cook, isn't he, my Uncle Cal? I mean Caliban. I'm sorry, it's just that I think of you as my Uncle Cal, because I always hear Nick call you that, but I can't because all my uncles are Cals."

Nick suddenly lightened up. "I don't call him Uncle Cal."

"You can call me Uncle Cal if you want to, Jake, and you can call Nick Uncle Nick, too, if he has no objection."

"Why'd I mind being called Uncle Nick?"

"Thanks, Uncle Nick. I'd like that. I think of you as one of my uncles, you know."

"That's right nephewly of you, Jake. You're my favorite Caldwell after Cal, and I like most o' them. We were talking o' one o' the exceptions earlier this evening."

"What'll we do after supper?" Jake asked. Caliban told him Friday night was their bath night.

"Not Saturday?"

"Your Uncle Cal and me switched to Fridays 'bout the time I come live here," Nick said. He went and got the tub from the corner and brought it to the middle of the kitchen. "Can't remember why." Friday was their biggest night for making love, and Saturday morning, too, and they liked to go to bed squeaky clean.