The Ox-Bow Incident (32 page)

He paused, and I could feel the bed shaking under his hands.

“All a great, cowardly lie,” he said violently. “All pose; empty, gutless pretense. All the time the truth was I didn’t take a gun because I didn’t want it to come to a showdown. The weakness that was in me all the time set up my sniveling little defense. I didn’t even expect to save those men. The most I hoped was that something would do it for me.

“Something,” he said bitterly.

Then I thought he was done, but he wasn’t. Getting over the hump, the big fact of what he saw as his cowardice, had just unplugged him. He let it all come. He was so tired he was like a blind man in a strange room, always bumping into something, the chair, the wash stand, the foot of the bed, but he couldn’t stay anywhere long. Only now and
then he’d sit down, or stand briefly in front of one of the windows, looking out, or by the bed, looking at me. It got so I knew from where he was and the tone of his voice when he started, what he was going to talk about. When he was stumbling around, his voice would be hoarse and his words tumultuous, and then it was always self-condemnation or a blast against Tetley, but with the blasts always ending in blaming himself too, more quietly, as if each time he saw anew the injustice of accusing Tetley. When he was sitting in the chair he would be still for a long time, and then begin, in a low, breaking voice, to remember something about Martin, or Martin’s wife and children as he saw them from that letter. The letter was an obsession itself. When he came to stand over me, it was to offer another clear proof, as he saw it now, that the flaw had been in him from the start, that he had never really hoped to save those men or force justice.

Once, when he had subsided into the chair and was silent longer than usual, I could hear that Rose and her husband weren’t down in the bar any longer, and after that I listened better.

Even so it was hard talk to hear because there wasn’t any answer. It was disordered and fragmentary, but if you admitted the big point, his own guilt, it wasn’t illogical, and it was impossible to make him see that nobody else could think him guilty. I tried just once to make him see that, and he turned and stared at me till I was done, which didn’t take long, and then laughed hard and suddenly, and stopped laughing suddenly and said, oh, yes, he was trying to play the Christ all right, but it wasn’t a part for cowards, and it hadn’t needed a Christ anyway; all it had needed was a man. And after that he would end each tirade against himself with another sudden laugh about trying to play the Christ. I had to let him go; if anything would help, that would. We couldn’t bridge the gap; he was all inside, I was all outside.

Finally, though, he was played out. He’d talked more
than an hour; I wasn’t sure, maybe two. From where I was sitting on the bed I could see through the window that it was late-afternoon sun on the eastern hills, and that the snow was almost gone from them already. It was a sad light, but lovely and peaceful, glowing as if it burned within the hills themselves. Then Davies just sat there with his head in his hands, now and then bending it so his fingers ran through his hair, but then lifting his head again, as if each time he decided he wouldn’t break, but stand it.

“You better get that sleep now,” I said, as quiet as I could.

He looked at me slowly, bringing his mind back. He appeared nearly dead, the hollows of his face so sunken that his skull showed in startling relief. But his eyes were a lot calmer, and though he was shivering, it wasn’t with that tightness any longer, but just as if he were exhausted and cold.

“I might as well, hadn’t I?” he said. He got up slowly and came to stand by the foot of the bed again.

“I’m sorry, Art,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You had to. You can rest now.”

He nodded.

I must have forgotten the voices downstairs, which had grown quieter as it got toward supper time, for I didn’t even realize that Gil’s was one of them now, until I heard somebody running on the boardwalk under the arcade, and coming in below us, slamming the door so the talk stopped. I stood up quickly, still listening, but there was just the one voice, young and excited, some boy, and then exclamations without anger, and a low murmur. I withdrew my hand from the gun belt again. I’d have to get Gil in sight to feel easy.

Davies said, as though it didn’t matter now, “I’ve even thought—” and paused so long I said, “What?”

“I’ve even thought,” he said, “that I wouldn’t have
needed a gun, that at the very end Tetley knew he was wrong too, and all I’d have had to do was say so.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “you were right in the first place. He was frozen onto that hanging. You’d have had to hit him over the head to bring him out of it.”

“I hold to that,” he said, like he was really hanging on hard to something. “I hold to that.”

And after a moment, “That he couldn’t have been moved, that there was for him no realization of sin.”

“There wasn’t,” I said. “You’d have had to kill him.”

There was no talk in the bar now, and I could hear somebody coming up the stairs.

“And I couldn’t have done that,” Davies said slowly. “And though even that might have been better, it is not altogether a weakness that I couldn’t.”

“Nobody could have done that,” I told him. I was glad he’d come back to that idea. It would be a saver for him.

“No,” he said wearily, and nodded.

“If I didn’t believe that—” he said.

“You couldn’t have stopped him any other way,” I assured him.

“No,” he said.

The door opened, and it was Gil and Canby.

“Hello,” Canby said to both of us, and then to me, “How long have you been awake? I just came up to see if you wanted something to eat.”

“I’ll come down,” I told him and, when he asked, said the shoulder was doing fine.

Gil was drunk, all right, in his steady way.

“Sorry,” he said, “didn’t know you had company,” as if he’d found me with a girl.

“It’s all right,” Davies said, “I was just going.”

“Did he wake you up?” Gil asked, belligerently, looking hard at us, to focus.

“I was awake,” I said. “Where did you go to get that drunk without my hearing you?”

“I took the horses over to Winder’s,” he said, “and he wanted to drink. He felt pretty low about the business.”

“
He
did?” I said.

“Bill’s not a bad guy, when you get to know him,” Gil maintained; “only pig-headed.

“Anyway,” he said cheerfully, “we won’t have to have another hanging. Tetley took care of himself.”

It caught me wide open, and I made a bad cover.

“Oh, Gerald, you mean?” I said, after too long a wait. “Yeah, I heard,” and tried to signal him off. He didn’t get it.

“No,” he said, “his old man too. After he heard about the kid he locked himself in the library and jumped on a sword. They had to break the door open to get him. Saw him through the window, lying on his face in there on the rug, with that big cavalry sword of his sticking up through his back.”

Canby saw me glance at Davies, and I guess I looked as funny as I felt. Canby turned quick to look at him too.

“Who would have thought the old bastard had that much feeling left in him?” Gil said.

Davies just stood there for a moment, staring at Gil. Then he made a little crying noise in his throat, a sort of whimper, like a pup, and I thought he was going to cave. He didn’t, though. He made that noise again, and then suddenly went out, closing the door behind him. We could hear him on the stairs, whimpering more and more. Once, by the sound, he fell.

“What in hell ails the prophet?” Gil asked.

“Go get him,” I told Canby, and when he stood there trying to see what I meant, “you can’t leave him alone, I tell you.” And then started to go myself. But Canby caught on, and pushed past me, and went out and down the stairs three or four at a time. I went to the window, and saw Davies already out in the street. He was sagging in the knees, but trying to run like he had to get away from something. I saw Canby catch up with him, and Davies try to
fight him off, but then give up. They came back together, Davies with his head down and wobbling loose on his neck. Canby was half holding him up.

“What in hell ails him?” Gil asked again, watching over my shoulder.

I heard Canby getting him up the stairs, and went over and closed the door. But we could still hear the shuffle of their feet, and Davies whimpering constantly now, like a woman crazy with grief. We listened while the shuffle and whimper passed the door and went down the hall, and then was shut off by another door closing.

“What’s the matter?” Gil asked, scared.

“He had a notion he was to blame,” I told him.

“For what?”

“The whole business.”

“
He
was?” Gil said. “That’s a good one.”

“Isn’t it?” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt sick for the old man.

We both thought about it for a minute.

“Well,” Gil said, “you better eat something. All this time, and losing that blood.”

“I’m not hungry,” I told him. I wasn’t, either.

“You better eat, though,” he said. “I gotta eat too,” he added. “I can’t drink any more till I eat something.”

Going down the stairs he said back up at me, “Smith was all for getting up a lynching party for Tetley, till we heard.”

“Smith’s a great hanger,” I said.

“Ain’t he,” Gil said.

We ate out in the back room, where it was already laid out for us, salt pork, winter rotten potatoes, beans and black coffee. At first it stuck in my throat, but I drank two cups of the coffee, and was hungry again. Canby came in while we were eating, and said Davies would be all right, he’d given him something to make him sleep and sent Sparks up to be with him. There was nobody in the bar, so
he stood watching us eat, with his towel in his hand. He said the story was all over town all right, that it took more to pass Smith out than he’d thought. But in one way it was working out good. They were taking up a pot for Martin’s wife. There was more than five hundred dollars in it already.

“Even old Bartlett chipped in,” Canby said, “but he’s not showing his face around much. He sent the money down by Sparks.”

“That reminds me,” Gil said, as if it hadn’t been on his mind, “I put in twenty-five apiece for us.”

I squared with him out of my Indian sack.

“She picked a good time for the pot, anyway,” Canby said. “Roundup over and none of you guys taken yet.

“It’s not a bad price at that,” he added, “for a husband that don’t know any better than to buy cattle in the spring without a bill of sale.”

He went back out to the bar, and we could hear him talking to somebody out there.

After a while, when he wasn’t talking any more, we went out, and Gil and Canby had their joke about the “Bitching Hour,” and we had a couple of drinks and a smoke. I didn’t want any more; what I still wanted was sleep. It seemed as if I hadn’t even got started on the sleeping I could do. I’ve noticed it works that way, when there’s something bothering you that you can’t do anything about, you always get sleepy. Besides, there were men beginning to come in who hadn’t been up there with us. They would look at us, and then stay at the other end of the bar and talk to Canby in low voices, now and then sneaking another look at us. Gil was getting sore about it. He still hadn’t had the fight he wanted, and he was drinking like he was just a pipe through the floor. He would stand there, staring at the men, and just waiting for one of them to say something he could start on.

When Rose Mapen came in again, all big smiles and walking like she was at the head of a parade, and the man with the red sideburns right behind her, I was scared. But
Gil fooled me. He picked up the bottle and two glasses and said, “Come on, I don’t want to fight that guy now. I’d kill him.”

Up in the room I stretched out on the bed. Gil put the bottle and glasses on the dresser and went over and looked out of the window into the street. It was about sunset, a clear sky again, and everything still. Gil opened the window, and the cool air came in, full of the smell of the meadows. Way off we could hear the meadow larks. Gil poured himself a drink and lit another cigarette. He blew the smoke hard, and it went out the window in a long, quick stream.

“I gave Winder the ten to give Farnley,” he said, like that made up for something.

“That’s good,” I said.

Downstairs we could hear Rose talking and then laughing and all the men laughing after her, the way they had in the afternoon. She was on show all right.

“If I started a fight with that guy, it would come to shootin’,” Gil said.

“We’ve had enough of that,” I told him.

“I know it,” he said, “but I don’t know how to start a decent fight with that kind of a guy.”

And then, like he was giving it a lot of attention, “He’s a funny guy. I don’t know how you’d start a decent fight with him.”

Tink-tink-a-link went the meadow lark. And then another one, even farther off, teenk-teenk-a-leenk.

Then Gil said, “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” as if he’d let it all go.

“Yeh,” I said.

CLIFTON FADIMAN

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” is your correspondent’s unwavering choice for the year’s finest first novel. It has many of the elements of an old-fashioned horse opera—monosyllabic cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, a Mae Western lady, barroom brawls, shootings, lynchings, a villainous Mexican. But it bears about the same relation to an ordinary Western that “The Maltese Falcon” does to a hack detective story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s sort of what you might call a masterpiece.…

“The Ox-Bow Incident” is not so much a story about a violent happening as a mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice. What lends the book an unusual touch—almost a touch of genius—is the way in which everything that is important in it revolves around the most profound moral issues and is presented only in terms of the tensest melodrama. Each of the characters—there are a score of them and they are realized with almost over-elaborate precision—bears a special relation to the problem of violence, from the sadistic Tetley to Davies, the saint
manqué
. But none of them figures merely as a spokesman for an idea or even a feeling; each one, you sense, is a whole life of which only a facet is presented in this particular episode.