The City of Lovely Brothers (30 page)

They were gathered around the jukebox in one of

the saloons talking about what song they wanted to hear when a man standing at the bar called out, "Hey, who's the pretty boy?" They did not realize he was talking about them, and they ignored him. "You guys there at the jukebox, I asked who the pretty boy was," he repeated.

They turned to face him. Calhoun said, "Which one 37you mean? We're all good looking here."

"A damn sight better looking'n you," Charley added.

"You know which one. The queer."

Calhoun clenched his fists. "Ain't none of us queer, so you better take back what you said."

They moved forward as a group, expecting the man would back down, but it turned out a few of his cronies were drinking with him. A hush fell over the saloon.

"I wasn't talking about you," the man said to Calhoun. Calhoun glared at him.

The two groups of men faced each other in silence a few yards apart, ready to slug it out.

"In case you're too blind to figure it out…" the man sneered, "…it's—"

"It don't matter who it is," Calhoun interrupted. "If you say one of us's a faggot, you're calling us all faggots."

"That ain't impossible, is it?"

Clay and Jared moved in and started swinging. A

couple of the other customers joined in on the locals' side.

The fight became a free-for-all, with punches flying on all sides and tables and chairs knocked over. The saloonkeeper did not try to stop them, but he took a pistol from behind the bar and yelled, "First man I see reach for his gun gets it through the head!" Someone's fist caught Charley in the jaw, knocking him backward through the swinging doors. He followed him outside. They traded a few punches on the raised wooden walkway. Then Charley was pushed backward and tumbled over the railing into the street.

The fight was over almost as quickly as it began.

Calhoun caught the man who had insulted them by the arm, twisted it behind his back, and forced his head down onto the counter. Then he grabbed a whisky bottle, broke it against the bar, and held it to the man's face while he pushed up on his arm. "Maybe you're so sure we're faggots 'cause you want all seven of us to cornhole you, is that it?

Pull down his pants, Clay."

That ended the fight. "Okay, maybe I was wrong,"

the man said. "Can't always tell stuff like that."

All the men in the saloon turned to look at them.

Calhoun pushed his arm up more and would not have thought twice about breaking it. "Maybe you were wrong ain't good enough."

"My mistake. I didn't mean to start no trouble."

"Like hell you didn't. Now you go and shake every one of us by the hand and tell 'im to his face that he ain't no faggot and you're sorry you called 'im one. Me last. I ain't shaking your hand till you finish apologizing to all my kinfolk". The man shook Clay's hand and said he was sorry, then Zeke's …

"What happened to Charley?" Logan asked.

They found him lying in the street with his neck broken. The man he had been fighting with was nowhere in sight.

The saloonkeeper sent for the sheriff. The Caldwells described as best they could what the man whom Charley had been fighting looked like. No one in the saloon admitted to knowing him, but you could tell by the look on the saloonkeeper's face they were lying. The saloonkeeper probably knew who he was too.

* * * *

Calhoun had sent the truck home when they arrived in Billings. It would take them four days to get back to the ranch, and first the coroner wanted to do an autopsy. By then, it would be too late to bring the body with them.

Calhoun paid to have Charley buried in a cemetery in Billings.

Calhoun said the news was too bad to give over the phone; he would have to tell Hester in person. When they got back to Caladelphia, he went to see Darcie and asked her to come with him when he broke the news to her. Hester took it stoically. She asked how he had been killed and where he was buried. Then she went with Darcie to have the tailor fit her for a black mourning dress. It was ready in two days. No one ever saw her weep, but for a month her eyes were often red and puffy.

Calhoun paid her what was coming to Charley, and all the men who had been on the drive chipped in a small sum so Hester would have double Charley's wages. Hester and Charley had not had children. Darcie asked her if she wanted to come back to live with her and Calvin, but Hester said she would keep the house and live alone, although it had three bedrooms.

Hester only went twice to Billings to visit Charley's grave. She went the first time at the end of her month of mourning. The second and last time was right before she left Caladelphia.

They held a wake for Charley in Hester's house.

The women brought food, and Caliban played his guitar.

Hester's neighbors came, and a few of Charley's friends from the bunkhouse, and everyone in the family except Calvin. He had suffered a stroke while Calhoun and the others were on the drive and had been taken to a hospital in Miles City. He stayed there a month.

Calvin's stroke left him with slurred speech and a shaky right arm. He told Darcie he was going to put Calvin Jr. in charge of the ranch. Darcie objected that their son was only sixteen, immature for his age, and not at all reliable; Calvin argued that the responsibility would force him to grow up. In the end, it made no difference. Despite what was publicly an official change in management, Calvin Jr. was only nominally in charge. His father still made all the decisions and gave all the orders.

That nothing had really changed made no difference to Brandon and Logan, who refused to work for Calvin Jr.

even if he would be their boss in name only. They had disliked him since they were little, and had developed an ingrained contempt for him. They got in their car and left to find work for the winter, promising they would return in spring to herd for Calhoun. Logan came back as he had said he would, but by train, for he had sold his share of the car to his brother, who had met a girl and become engaged to her.

Logan described Emma Lenzinger, Brandon's bride—

to-be, as an attractive girl with a good head on her shoulders. Her parents owned a large sheep farm in western 38North Dakota, about twenty miles outside of Dickinson.

Emma was their only child, and the farm would pass on to her and her future husband when her parents grew too old to work it. Even Calhoun, who looked down his nose at sheep, agreed that it seemed Brandon had made a good match and his future looked bright.

* * * *

Brandon and Emma's wedding would take place the

third week in June. Caleb and Amanda, Logan, Lettie and her husband, Calhoun's Zeke, took the Northern Pacific Railway to Dickinson to attend. Caleb laid a plank across his wagon and nailed it to the sides to make a seat so they could drive to the station in Rosebud together. Calvin owned an automobile big enough to seat five, but he would not have lent it to them. Besides, it would have had to stay in Rosebud for a few days until they got back from North Dakota.

Nearly all the farm machinery was motorized now.

Calvin did not even own a wagon. He used his truck, which he had bought two years before he got the car. But the workers could not afford motorcars, and there were still quite a few wagons and shays on the ranch. Calvin might not have bought a car if Nick and Caliban had not bought 38one first, but within a week of their buying it, a new car, twice as big, was parked in front of his house. Clay and Jared had one for the two of them, and Darcie thought it was only a matter of time before Calvin broke down and bought one for Calvin Jr.

Calhoun did not like motor vehicles, and stubbornly refused to get a car, though it would have made life much easier for Julia, who most of the time had to take the shay or a wagon to get to Caladelphia Village. Clay had taught her to drive, so she took their car or Calhoun's truck when they were parked by the house, but many times they were not. Caleb used to ask to borrow Caliban's to go drinking in town, but Nick put his foot down after he had twice got too drunk to come home and failed to return it the next day, and they stopped lending it to him.

Caleb left the wagon at a smithy near the station and paid the blacksmith fifty cents to keep it for them. Only Logan had ridden a train before. Brandon met them at the station in the Lenzingers' truck and drove them to see the farm and meet his fiancée and future in-laws. They stayed for lunch; then Brandon drove them back to the hotel in town where he had reserved rooms for them. The marriage would take place in Dickinson, and after, the couple would go on a two-week honeymoon back east. Since it was a busy time of year at the ranch, the Caldwells were staying 38in Dickinson for only a couple of days.

Emma's folks had an impressive spread. "Sure looks like you made your fortune, son," Caleb told him.

Brandon put his arm around his fiancée's waist.

"Emma's my fortune," he said.

* * * *

More than a hundred guests attended Emma

Lenzinger's wedding. The Lenzingers were respected leaders of the Dickinson community, admired for their honesty, their hard work, and their readiness to lend a hand, not to mention their wealth. The good citizens of Dickinson had hoped she would marry a local boy, and she did not lack for suitors. However, it surprised no one that she had fallen for Brandon, who had not only inherited the good looks of the Caldwell men, but at six foot four combined his uncle Calvin's height with his uncle Calhoun's auburn hair and hazel eyes and his uncle Caliban's engaging smile.

Nick often said that, after Caliban, Brandon was the handsomest man at Caladelphia.

Emma wore a white satin bridal dress with a

removable train and a veil hanging from a wreath of white rosebuds. Brandon wore a dress suit, the first he had ever put on. He kept running a finger under his shirt collar, as if 38it was chaffing him. After they had exchanged vows at the church in Dickinson and he had slipped the gold wedding band on her finger and kissed her, the guests got into their cars and followed the Lenzingers back to the farm. The line of cars stretched for half a mile over the prairie.

They parked in a field a quarter-mile from the

house. Emma had decorated the front porch with crepe paper streamers and white, pink and pale blue balloons.

The Lenzingers had put out ten round tables on the lawn and a canopy over them in case of rain, but the weather was warm and sunny. The tables were covered with white cloths with little plates of home-made relishes beside each setting, and each had a small bouquet of wildflowers in the center.

They had hired waiters to serve their guests from a twenty-foot-long buffet table. The centerpiece of the buffet was a three-tiered wedding cake with little figurines of a bride and groom under a gazebo hung with wedding bells on top.

Caleb's and Amanda's' eyes bulged at the extravagance. But what impressed them most was the honeymoon to

Washington D.C. and Philadelphia to visit the cradle of our nation, and the couple would also go to Virginia Beach to see the ocean.

The champagne flowed freely. The Lenzingers had

eight sheep roasting slowly on spits behind the house to feed their guests. They were stuffed with rice, sausage 38meat, and minced onions and carrots, and the skin had been rubbed with pepper and garlic. They served freshly baked rolls and heaping bowlfuls of mashed potatoes and baby green peas and platters piled high with buttered corn on the cob to go with the mutton. As a first course, the waiters brought around little bowls of a fruit salad of cherries — cherries in June!— oranges and exotic pineapple.

Finally, they had built a raised platform for dancing and hired musicians — two fiddlers, a bass fiddle, a clarinet, and a banjo player with a harmonica. The platform had a railing around it and a post at each corner with Chinese lanterns hanging from streamers going from post to post. The party went on late into the night. After it broke up, the Caldwells thanked their in-laws, said goodbye to Emma, and then Brandon drove them back to their hotel.

Their train left early the next morning.

* * * *

When they arrived in Rosebud, they got their wagon and drove directly home. They dropped Lettie and Zeke at their house near Calhoun and Julia's. Lettie whipped up something for them to eat. It had been a long day, and they had had only one sparse meal on the train. After dinner, they drove back to Caleb's, and Logan walked home from 38there. It was past ten o'clock on a Saturday night.

Caleb and Amanda slept late. After breakfast, Caleb said he would ride to Caliban's and tell him about the wedding and what a big farm Brandon was going to own.

He would also want to hear about the honeymoon. Caliban had often said he would like to visit some of those big eastern cities.

Caleb thought he would surprise him, so he tied his horse to a bush about a quarter-mile from the house and walked the rest of the way. Jiggers, their new dog, trotted up to him to be petted when he saw him enter the yard, and then lay back down in his favorite spot by the pump. Inside, the house was silent. Caleb quietly opened the door to Caliban's bedroom. He meant to sneak up to his bed, yell "Boo!" and scare the pants off him.

Caliban's pants were off already. He and Nick were sleeping next to each other in bed, Nick on his back, Caliban lying on his side pressed close against his friend, his hand wrapped around Nick's penis.

Shaken, Caleb slowly pulled the door shut, tiptoed out of the house, and started back to where he had left to his horse. Nick must have heard something in his sleep, because he stirred, looked around, yawned, and gave Caliban a kiss. Caliban opened his eyes and smiled at him.

Then they made love. Caleb stopped after he had gone a few hundred

yards, however. Something made him turn back. He stood outside Caliban's window and looked inside. He saw his brother bent over Nick's cock, sucking on it.

Caleb stayed to watch, moving to the side so only one eye was peering in the corner of the window. He did not think they would notice him.

Caliban went on sucking for what seemed like hours to Caleb. Then he straddled Nick and lowered himself onto his cock, guiding it inside him with his hand until he was sitting on top of him and impaled to the hilt. Then he began to ride him, slowly at first, then faster, while Nick held his cock and pumped it. At last Nick let out a load moan, and Caliban squirted across his friend's chest, and then leaned forward and kissed him. Their mouths stayed pressed together, as if held there with glue.