The City of Lovely Brothers (43 page)

Two years had gone by since Calvin Jr. had paid the blacksmith, and no one had heard any news from him or of him. More businesses had failed, and more families had lost their homes and moved away. The bakery and tailor shop had closed; the dairy, greengrocer's and butcher squeaked by; only the garage and service station continued to do a halfway decent business; and the doctor went on seeing patients at regularly scheduled hours. A few people still owned a horse and stabled it in the barn. The bunkhouse stood empty. The men who had lived there had all drifted away to look for work. The people who had turned off their water heaters to save money paid Darcie a few cents to use the shower room. She lit the heater in the evening, and opened the room for the men on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, and Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for the women and small children. On Saturday mornings and afternoons the women came there to do their laundry. Caladelphia was far from a ghost town, but it looked as if Jake had been right to say it had no future.

Darcie's leaving her husband and Calvin Jr.'s

disappearance became and remained the talk of the town. The topic took second place only to the Depression and people's own financial woes. The Caladelphians had quickly forgotten the Caliban and Nick scandal, but every day they saw Darcie walk up the street and enter the silent house, leave it a half-hour or hour later, close the door behind her and return to Hester's lost in her thoughts. Of course no one asked her for news of her son or of Calvin.

Instead, speculation and rumors flew from lips to ears, and the stories told were more outlandish than the most far-fetched and ridiculous science fiction movies Hollywood deluges us with today.

More than anything, the sudden change in Darcie's personality convinced them she was harboring some dark and terrible secret and kept the rumors going. Once an outgoing and take-charge, natural community leader type of person, she had become reserved and withdrawn. Had they thought about it, her neighbors must have realized that her financial circumstances were no less dire than their own, but they were so accustomed to thinking of the Caldwells as wealthy landowners that it did not occur to them.

In fact, her financial situation was worse than theirs.

When Darcie went to feed Calvin his supper on the day Brandon and Logan had stopped by to see her, it occurred to her that it might be possible to give Caleb's sons the house without burdening them with Calvin's debts, that 54they could find some way to turn owning it to their advantage. It seemed logical they would have a legal claim to it in compensation for their stolen property. Of course, any claim the banks had would take precedence. She would have to look into it. She did not know the exact state of Calvin's finances, what he owned and what he owed.

Calvin Jr. would surely have hidden debts as well, but they would not affect what belonged to his father. Calvin had put his son in charge; he had not signed his property over to him. At the very least, it would let her know where she stood.

After she had fed and changed her husband and

tucked him in for the night, Darcie went into the office, opened the safe and strongbox, and studied every piece of paper she found in them. For the first time, the full scope of the financial mess Calvin and Calvin Jr. had got themselves into —got
her
into— and all its ramifications hit her.

Calvin Jr. had mortgaged her house twice over, the first time less than a year after Calvin's stroke, which he had been able to do because his father was still alive and therefore the house was not yet legally hers. Foreclosure on it and everything else was imminent. She could not believe the bank had put off repossessing it this long. The enormity of what they owed overwhelmed her. They were beyond destitute, worse off than paupers. They owned nothing and 54owed everything.

She sat in the office until late, half dazed, half focused on what to do next. She could not raise a finger to fix things on her own. The property legally belonged to Calvin until the banks came and grabbed it. Nor could she turn to her husband. Even if she had been willing to speak to him, there was nothing he could say or do. He thought big, but building castles in Spain would not dig them out of their hole. In any case, telling him would probably kill him.

She could not bring herself to confide in Hester, either.

She could see the day coming soon when the bank

would take the house and throw out its invalid occupant, and they would have to bring Calvin to Hester's. Then she and Hester would have to share a bedroom or they would have to convince Amanda to go to Lettie's. Either would work, but she cringed at the thought of living under the same roof as her husband.

Toward midnight, Hester came to look for her. "I was just going through the books, Calvin's finances,"

Darcie said. "With that no-good skunk of a son o' mine gone, somebody gotta to look into 'em and straighten out what needs straightening out before we find ourselves with our heads under water."

"Don't you think you oughtta go to bed and put this off till morning when you're less tired and your brain ain't 54all fuzzy?"

"I'll leave in a second. Just let me get these here papers sorted into piles and put back in the safe."

"I'll wait for you on the porch."

Darcie locked everything back in the safe and went home to bed. The next day, she got some men to carry the safe to Hester's house and put it in the bedroom Hester had given her.

* * * *

Darcie at seventy-three gave the impression of a strong, healthy, robust woman not a day over sixty. She was a good two inches shorter than when she had first come to the ranch, but her posture was as straight as ever; her hair, which she wore in a bun, had turned from dark brown to steel grey, the color of her eyes; and her stride, though slower, seemed to have lost none of its former energy. She went about her business with efficiency and determination. Inside, however, her soul was in torment.

For two years she had lived with the mortification of knowing what her son had done. At times she wished she could crawl into a hole and disappear forever. For two years she had lived under a cloud, expecting the storm to break over her at any moment and wash her away. For two 54years she had kept everything bottled up inside herself until she thought she would burst from anguish.

One morning toward the end of the winter of 1931, Darcie went to her old house to make Calvin his breakfast.

She made coffee and cooked him some oatmeal. Then she filled his bowl and poured a cup of coffee for each of them.

She left her cup on the table and put his on a tray next to the oatmeal. She picked it up and suddenly felt dizzy. She put it back on the table and leaned against the wall for a couple of minutes to steady herself. Then she pushed open his door and entered the bedroom.

Calvin was lying in bed waiting for her to feed him.

He had long accepted the fact that she would not speak to him and had not said a word to her in months. Their daily or twice-daily meetings took place in hostile silence.

"You know Calvin Jr. ain't never coming back," she said without a trace of emotion.

The sound of her voice was so unexpected, at first it did not register to Calvin that she had spoken to him.

"You should also know that we own nothing,

nothing. It's all gone, every inch o' land, every stick o'

furniture, every cent."

Calvin stared at her, uncomprehending.

"It's over, Calvin."

She took a pillow, covered his face with it, and 55pressed down hard. He did not struggle; he had not had the use of his limbs since his last stroke. After a minute without air, his legs and hips began to twitch. The twitching increased, became almost frantic, subsided, and finally stopped. Darcie held on to the pillow for ten minutes, her mind a blank. Then she fluffed it up, placed it at the head of the bed beside the others, and returned to the kitchen.

Hester found her sitting at the table, a bowl of congealed oatmeal and two cups of cold coffee in front of her. "Calvin's dead," Darcie said indifferently. "Musta passed away during the night."

"You sure?"

"Don't I know the difference between alive and dead? What I don't know is if we got enough money to bury 'im with." To hear her mother say they were that broke stunned Hester more than Calvin's death.

They buried him next to his brother Caleb. Only

Darcie and Hester attended the funeral, if one could call it that. Two men dug a hole, lowered the plain pine casket into it, and covered it up with dirt. Then everyone went home. Darcie had never inquired as to her son's whereabouts and did not attempt to inform him his father had died, but she sent letters to Betsy in Seattle and Tilda in Carson City.

"Now whatta we do?" Hester asked her mother. "Breathe easy. And then I was thinking o' using Calvin's house to open a restaurant and maybe turning the bunkhouse into a hotel. People could stay in the bedrooms up at the house, too."

"Who can afford to eat at restaurant, times being like they are? And what good is it having a hotel in Caladelphia? Nobody ever comes here."

"Worth a try, ain't it?"

They never got to find out. Now that Calvin was

dead and his son had disappeared, Darcie was presumed to own the ranch. The bank and Calvin's other creditors, who had been hovering around their ears since before the Depression as though they thought by some miracle they would find an immense sum of money hidden away in his mattress, swooped down on her and, to the astonishment of all Caladelphia, they took away everything they had thought she owned.

"My house is next. Then what?" Hester said.

"We do the only thing left us. We go live in the tent city in Billings and beg in the streets."

It did not come to that. Darcie received a letter from Betsy inviting her and Hester to sell all they had and come live in Seattle near her and her husband. He had a job in the fisheries and was doing well, or at least better than most.

Of course, they had nothing to sell. Calhoun gave them 55money for a train ticket to Seattle.

They argued and argued with Amanda, telling her

she would have to leave and go live with Lettie. She was as dense and stubborn as she had been when Calhoun advised her to sell her sons' house and land. "I think I'll just stay on here at Hester's," she told them. "I've gotten used to the place. Feels like home now."

Darcie and Hester were at a loss to deal with

Amanda's refusal to face reality. They could not go away and leave her there to wait until the bank turned her out.

Two days before she left for Seattle, Darcie went to the Johnson house to say farewell to Julia. She was still her closest friend, and although they had not had more than two or three heart-to-heart conversations a year since Calvin sold the property he had got from Caliban and Amanda, Darcie had carefully avoided talking about her financial difficulties when they did. Otherwise, they only had time to exchange a few words when Julia came to Caladelphia to shop. She made a point of stopping at Hester's store even when she had nothing to buy there. Before the Depression they used to telephone each other once a week to exchange news in order to feel close to each other, but Hester's phone had been disconnected for nonpayment of bills.

Julia and Darcie said little about themselves at their last meeting. Although she herself owned nothing, Darcie 55was no more pessimistic about the future than she was optimistic. She had always faced life head on and would continue to do so. But she poured her heart out about Amanda, not just the worry that she was not thinking clearly and was clearly unable to support herself, but her sense of guilt that her son and her husband had put her in that situation.

"Don't fret over it," Julia reassured her. "Once you're gone and she finds herself in an empty house, she'll go along with whatever me and Lettie tell her."

Julia was right. An hour after Darcie and Hester left Caladelphia, Lettie came to the house and brought her mother home with her. However, Amanda's depression increased after Lettie took her away. She spent a lot of time in her room doing nothing, forgot what she was doing when she had something to do, and seemed indifferent to her grandchildren. Lettie thought it might be the ranch that was weighing down on her and a change of scenery would do her good. She wrote to Brandon, and he came by train to Caladelphia and brought his mother back with him to Dickinson.

Darcie and Hester left for Seattle early in April. A representative of the bank came with movers before the month was out, and took everything in the house Caliban's great-grandfather had built and his brother Calvin had 55enlarged and modernized. They emptied the bunkhouse, too. A few days later, the bank had them torn down.

Upon learning from Darcie that Calvin Jr. had gone to Denver, Brandon and Logan went to Miles City to demand that Troilus Pardoner return their property. The lawyer feigned surprise that Calvin Jr. had not had the legal authority to sell it to him and said he was as much a victim as they. "What am I to do?" he asked. "The deed's in my name now, and I cannot afford to turn it over to you. The bank won't indemnify my loss if I surrender it. They couldn't get the money to cover it from Calvin Sr. since they already own everything he calls his own. I'd advise you to take the matter up with your cousin directly."

They went to Denver to look for him. When they

could find no trace of him, they tried to file a complaint with the Denver police, who referred them to the courthouse. They were told that the State of Colorado had no jurisdiction in the matter and they would need to press charges in Montana. The court in Montana could then request the authorities in Colorado to hunt him down and send him back to Montana for trial.

Brandon went home to North Dakota, and Logan

returned to Montana to formally accuse Calvin Jr. of peculation and press charges against him. As there was no 55bedroom for him in Hester's house, he stayed with his sister for a few days and then went back to Denver to find a job and look for Calvin Jr. on his own. He would not work in Caladelphia again until he got his land back, not even for Calhoun. He remained in Denver for over two years. By the time of his next visit to Caladelphia, Darcie and Hester were gone.