While everybody got busy, I took a bottle of claret and a book from the shelves and went up to the bench under the dogwood tree by Waverley and read until nearly dark.
The next morning, Conley awaited me when I came downstairs. He sat at the dining table with a notebook. Before I could even pour coffee, he began going down his list of things I needed to attend to. All my affairs fallen into indescribable disarray.
First, there was a fistful of notes long overdue for payment. Lawsuits pending. A pressing matter. The Beaver Creek land, the slopes on both sides up to the ridge, would cover the debt. A buyer had made an offer.
—Hold or sell? Conley asked.
—Hold.
Second, there was an epistolary feud needing to be calmed, for it had heated up nearly to the point of gunplay. The story was this: Since learning to write in English, Big Dirt and Dreadful Water had been engaged in an epic poison-pen tournament based on the reopening of an old grievance concerning the parsing of an elk carcass on a hunting trip back almost into the last century, when they were both young. The issue was whose musket ball struck the killing blow. Honor was at stake. They had traded many letters full of insults and allegations, even though their wives were great friends and relatives, both being members of the Bird Clan.
—Talk to the wives, I said.
But Conley already had. The little round women were no help whatsoever in calming the dispute, for they viewed the two men as irrelevant for all purposes beyond providing a sure source of amusement. Conley handed me the full sheaf of back-and-forth correspondence. I riffled through the pages, reading a phrase here and there. Literacy, a blessing or a curse? In the end, I pitched the letters into the fire and said, Tell Big Dirt and Dreadful Water that every path through the world but peace leads to eight kinds of loneliness.
—That’s it?
—Yes. It’s excellent advice. I wish I’d always followed it. Present it to them with conviction.
Number three. The church and school, having been built more than twenty-five years previous and virtually identical in design and materials except for the steeple, were falling apart at exactly the same rate. Should the failing shake roofs be replaced or just patched?
Answer: Patched.
And also, Conley said, the paint on the clapboards was peeling off both buildings in flakes as big as a man’s hand. Repaint or let go au naturel?
Answer: The latter.
Four. I had been in charge of building and maintaining roads in that section of country for decades. Which one should the crew work on next?
—The worst one.
—That would be the wagon road north, Conley said. It keeps washing out in hard rains. Two different times recently, wagons with their oxen and drivers had tumbled into the ravine. It would be a very big job. Did I want to direct the road crew in the needed repairs or should he?
Answer: Change the designation from wagon road to bridle path. Alert the press.
On and on.
Conley reached the second dozen on his list, or somewhere thereabouts. The season having come round to the end of another summer, in anticipation of cold weather, our new preacher wanted to know how deep snow had to lie before he could call off services. And the schoolteacher wanted to know the same.
—We’ve not even reached the equinox.
Conley shrugged. They’ve been asking, he said.
I paid both men’s salaries and provided room and board entirely out of my own pocket. My answer was, Two shitting feet high at the very least.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES. I’d sit at my desk for hours drinking coffee and trying to reduce the stooks of paper that needed attending. Work all day until my buttocks clenched in spasms from inactivity. Look up from the desktop and refocus my eyes out into the room, and the piles had not diminished in the least. And when I went out among the people, some of them called me Will and some called me Colonel or Senator, and a few called me Chief, but only with a certain tilt of irony to their voices.
When they needed me, though, people still considered me the ultimate arbiter. I was the law. The high sheriff. Squire over white and Indian alike on my vast diminishing holdings and the adjoining remote unowned mountain land far from the nearest county seat. So people knocked on my door at all hours of the night to report crimes, and in those disrupted first years following the War there were a great many more than before, especially murders.
For example: come late spring, a bedraggled little circus had stopped in a nearby settlement of ten or fifteen families, a few brown cabins hunkered beside a stout stream. A patched tent was erected atop the ball field. And then that evening, a spectacular lamplit one-night show with a juggler and a slack-rope walker and a daringly clad girl who swung upside down on a trapeze with her hair hanging long in a point toward the ground. The main attraction was an old dim-eyed elephant with not too many years left in her but enough strength to sit on her hind legs on a big three-legged stool and use her trunk to hoist her trainer up to ride astraddle her neck and march two laps around the ring and sit back down and blow. On command, while making a sound like tooting a bugle, she could squirt water from her trunk out into the crowd and flap her big veined ears, stained and tattered along the edges as a blacksmith’s leather apron. It was an evening of wonders the show folk put on.
The morning after they cleared out, it was discovered that one of the musicians—a banjo picker and Ethiopian delineator, an artist of the burnt cork—had been killed, his head knocked open. He had been thrown into the millrace and his body had lodged face up against a board that was slid partway down into a slot in the race to regulate the flow of water to the wheel. All the blacking was washed away from his face, and underwater it looked up at you hopefully and strangely pale, the whitest thing in all the visible landscape. The top of his head was broken open in a bloodless mess the color and texture of caul fat.
No one would move him until I could come to investigate. And so for the better part of a day, all of the boys and most of the men had made the same precarious journey that I did upon arrival—walking spraddle-legged along the cross braces of the race to stare down through the rushing water onto the upturned countenance. The dark suit of fancy clothes and the longish black hair and even the cheeks of his face fluttered with the flowing water as if driven by a high wind.
When I acted like a lawman and asked questions, everybody talked about the amazing show, happy to tell me all about its many unexpected delights, especially that elephant. But nobody knew anything at all about the killing other than to repeat vague mutterings concerning somebody’s wife, though whose wife they could not or would not specify. And furthermore, who knew what old grudges and passions had prevailed among the departed animal trainers and painted clowns and contortionists and jugglers?
I had the dead man pulled out of the water and buried in the churchyard. I paid out of my own pocket for a simple stone marker and wrote an epitaph myself, which read:
SHOWMAN
D. 1867
I CAME FROM FAR AWAY EXPECTING PROFIT, BUT INSTEAD SUFFERED A GREAT LOSS.
At least we got a new addition to our word hoard out of the death. Previously, of course, there had been no reason to have a term for elephant. But long after her departure, the people kept marveling at her many features. It was all the talk. Those amazing ears. The people settled eventually on a name for her: kamama utana. Big butterfly.
UPON MY RETURN HOME, I found that against my best advice Big Dirt and Dreadful Water had continued their poison correspondence. And finally, when words became insufficient, Dreadful Water had cut Big Dirt a long slashing wound down his chest, bone-deep. Big Dirt was home trying to heal. And when I went to see Dreadful Water, he was more morose than remorseful.
—Me and Big Dirt were such friends back in the old times, he said. Damn him.
These were old grey-headed men fighting about something they could hardly remember. And the little stout wives had suddenly sided devoutly with their husbands and were now enemies too.
> I went from one to the other of the four parties saying exactly the same thing to them all: Stop this stupid shit you’re intent on doing to one another. When people get to the age you are, anybody that shares even a few of your memories is a treasure beyond price. Love them and forgive their foolishness and hope they’ll forgive yours.
I bore up under such responsibilities through three seasons, right up to the start of the next summer. And then I’d had all I could take. I fled, hitting the road once again, aiming for Warm Springs.
8
THE WARM SPRINGS HOTEL WAS A WONDROUS REFUGE DOWN IN ITS remote river gorge, four days from the nearest railhead. A summer resort, mostly. For the better part of two decades—before and after the War—I was frequently a resident in all quarters of the year, including the depths of winter when the hotel was nearly empty and cold drafts blew through the dark ballroom and the lawn was blanketed in snow, marred by a narrow path down which only the bravest guests ventured to immerse themselves in the steaming water of the pools.
Even in the lowest of low seasons there was money to be made at late-night card games and unattached women to court. Wealthy young widows and their spinster-cousin travel companions. The sad and needy wives of wealthy old men who napped through the afternoon by the broad lobby fireplace with their hands crossed over their uprisen bellies and then, after a big pork dinner, retired immediately to bed. And of course the lovely governesses, smart and brittle and filled with resentment.
The healthful waters of the several springs rose from the ground heavy with minerals from down in the earth’s core. Thick-textured and buoyant. You could probably pitch a baby into any one of the pools and it would bob right back to the surface. And the water was nice and warm, a little better than a hundred degrees except after a hard rain, when it inexplicably became hotter. It carried a faint sulfurous odor, but only enough to seem medicinal.
The water was said to be both diuretic and laxative, and the guests were encouraged to drink freely. So the help went up and down the halls day and night carrying china chamberpots, the contents sloshing under domed lids. Some among the guests contended for bragging rights as to quantity of water imbibed. I remember, before the War, one stout and somewhat elderly woman, attired in maroon to advertise her availability as a widow beyond the bounds of the last degree of mourning, powder caked in the creases of her face, claimed to drink as high as two gallons a day to no apparent detriment—but with no diminution of the neuralgic pain in her right hip, which burned as fierce as ever. Others among us credited the waters with relief from rheumatism, migraine headaches, psoriasis, and certain cancers.
But the finest use I could find for the hot water was a good long chin-deep soak in the middle of the night. Watching the wheel of the sky turn overhead. Orion in winter swinging his blade below his belt. The Seven Sisters, once distinct but becoming a singular and blurry patch against the dark as my eyesight waned. Jupiter and Saturn and Mars scattered about among the stars, depending on the year. The moons arcing overhead in whatever slivers or orbs they were scheduled to show at that particular time on that particular night. Lovely, the way the sky works. The constellations and planets and moons. Enough recurrence to assure us of the probable continuation of the universe, but not so repetitive as to become boring during the limited span we have to watch it all spin around.
We went to Warm Springs in search of magical waters, fresh mountain air, amusements, adventures, relief from pain. It offered unlimited leisure for as long as you could afford to stay, which for most was the entire summer. The hotel accommodated upward of three hundred guests, and it would be full all through the hot months, when wealthy plantation folk from the steamy lowlands came up for relief from the relentless and wasting heat and also to wrench their sick bowels back to health in the midst of what they called wilderness.
Many of us while in residence at the Springs swore allegiance to various strict diets. The harshest among us claimed to live on just the extreme essences, pure spring water and fresh air. I was not immune to the fashions of the Springs. One summer before the War, I forbade myself the consumption of animal food for nearly an entire summer. I lived on salad greens and sliced tomatoes and red wine. But at some point I reckoned I could not face a life without sausage biscuits. My first meal of meat was chicken thighs soaked in vinegar and hot peppers and cooked to a char over hickory coals. I sat at one of the communal tables in the dining hall and had to hold myself from planting my face in the plate like a dog at its dinner.
On foggy evenings in midsummer when it was cool enough for a fire to be lit in the big hearth, the delight of the flatlanders knew no bounds. A wood fire feeling good in midsummer; who could imagine such a wonder? Anyone who ever stayed there remembered at least two hard facts: the ballroom was two hundred and thirty-three feet long and the gallery was faced with thirty-five fat Doric columns.
I loved that gallery, which a few among us called the veranda and a lesser few the piazza. It stretched the full length of the building. A long row of green rocking chairs—three to a column—looked across the lawn to the river and the ridge of the western mountains. Scattered across the lawn were big old oaks and poplars with their trunks whitewashed from the ground to the height a painter could reach with dripping upstretched brush.
One summer evening before the War, rocking with the men on the gallery and looking out at the view with just enough light to see the smoke from our cigars and the faintest distant jag of ridgeline above the black river, one of the cigar smokers and Scotch drinkers, a man who featured himself a seasoned traveler, opined that anyone with genuine taste would find Warm Springs as superior to Saratoga as a mountain stream to a tidal gut.
For close to twenty years, any time I was in residence, no matter the season, the help knew to bring my coffee and an ounce of Calvados out to the rockers at sunrise. Hardly any of the guests stirred before breakfast began to be served in the dining hall, so I had the place to myself to rock and read and watch the fog lift off the river. Of course, I could have sat and rocked and watched virtually the same view from my own porch, but at home I would have been a stationary target.
I TRAVELED THE FINAL LEG of the journey to the Springs, riding from midday into night. The ferry at the crossing above Alexander was unaccountably delayed, but at least the roads were dry and the moon was coming on toward full, though its blue wash of light filtering onto the roadway through the fully leafed trees revealed barely more than I could have seen without it. The river was broad most of the way, the light falling on it like rubbed pewter, and the road in many places was hardly elevated above water level.
I did not make it to the Springs until nearly midnight, and the hotel’s day had wound down to a close. Out front, a groom remained awake to take my horse. A few night owls still smoked and sipped in the rockers on the gallery. I went inside and asked at the desk that the trunk of clothes and personal effects I kept in storage might be sent to the room. I collected forwarded mail and scanned the lobby. The lamps were dimmed down to flames no brighter than candles. Dinner was of course long over, and the doors to the dark dining hall were closed. A table of cardplayers gambled on. A couple in their early thirties, acting rapt with each other and apparently unmarried, began singing one of the new songs. They came together and danced a few steps, unself-consciously and pressed very close, and then the woman pulled away, laughing. She held out her hand and the man kissed the back and then the fingertips. And then he turned it over and kissed the cup of her gloved palm and then, above the button, her bare veined wrist. She looked at her wrist as if she had never seen it before, and then she wheeled with a becoming flare of skirt and walked across the lobby to the steps that led to the sleeping rooms. Her dancing partner and I both watched her go. The Gypsy palm reader still sat behind her little table, the hand of a grey-headed man in his sixties smoothed out flat in hers. She traced curves of lifeline and heartline very slowly with her forefinger, a calculated thrill running through every nerve of her customer and in itself w
orth the dollar her reading cost. As I walked to the bar, the Gypsy cut her eyes to me and went back to work. In passing, I heard a few of the words she said: tribulation followed by final peace.
The fate of us all, I thought. The easiest of predictions. None of us escape it.
At the bar in the corner, three older men sat humped over their nightcaps. They had spaced out along the bar stools incommunicative, maintaining the etiquette of men urinating together. I sat in the seat that best corresponded with the prevailing isolation.
I ordered a ham sandwich and what I intended to be a lone Tanqueray with lime and sugar. And a light. The bartender moved a lamp from the other end of the bar and set it in front of me. I twisted up the wick and began sorting mail. Nothing particularly personal, only desperate business correspondence from several lawyers either saying why I urgently needed to pay their clients or why their clients couldn’t pay me. And several periodicals, among them the latest Appleton’s Journal and a Cornhill Magazine many months in arrears of its cover date. While I ate the sandwich, I scanned an article in Appleton’s on the state of recent fiction. Its judgment was harsh, on the grounds that we live in a happy, beautiful, virile age. And yet our stories are unnecessarily glum. We do not want sighs or tears. We are all seeking happiness, whether through money or position. It is our privilege to resent any attempts to force unhappy thoughts on us. We rightly object to being made sad by our reading matter.
I decided those sentiments were occasion for a few more drinks.
And then the younger man who had kissed the woman’s wrist sat down on a stool beside me, his elbow and hip brushing mine as he took his seat. He still hummed the last bars of their song, which had about its melody and lyric the drama of desire and youth.
—Nice hotel, he said, after he had hummed to the end of the chorus.