Welcome to Hard Times by E. L. Doctorow
Molly came up at my back: “Mayor,” she said softly, “I know what you’re fixing to do, but I’ll tell you we don’t need another Ezra Maple here. Let this man go look for his brother and may he find him in Hell.”
I said nothing but went back to Zar’s. Alfs hat was on the table, Mae was sitting on his lap and Jessie was standing in back of him holding his ears, and they all three were laughing.
“Blue!” Alf called throwing his head back. “I begin to see your way of thinking’, there sure is a spirit of life hereabouts, yes sir, a spirit of life!”
“Alright then Alf supposing we talk business.”
Zar brought over a lamp and put it on the table. Alf excused himself to the ladies and while they stood watching he took some bills out of his pouch and spread them on the table. They were bills of transit for the goods outside and they were all marked paid.
“It adds to forty dollars Blue.”
“Bot the stamp is there,” Zar said examining the bills, “these goods are already paid. He wants us to pay again!”
“Tha’s right,” said Alf. “This provender was for Ezra Maple and Ezra ain’t here. Course if you like I’ll load it back on and be on my way.”
“Zar,” I said, “it’s a fair price for the goods received. Alf here drives the best stage this side of the Platte, he’s thought of highly by the Territory Express. They listen to what he says.” In my own mind I had expected Alf to ask for more than forty dollars; and that he put his demands in the form he did I found to be a mark of manners. He could always have charged separate for the supplies.
“I’ll give you my hand on it, Alf,” I said, and we shook across the table.
Then we exchanged letters: I gave him two—the pimply boy’s and another I had taken since—along with four dollars. Alf gave me one letter. “It’s meant for Ezra,” he said, “nail it up somewhere if he ever comes back.”
Then Alf had the idea that I would like to handle the Express business for the town. I allowed I would. He gave me a printed pad for writing all orders and tickets and the terms were three percentages on all monies I garnered excepting mail. We shook on that, too, and then I left Alf to enjoy the women while I went back outside to find forty dollars.
Zar followed me: “What kind of business is this? Women we give him and whiskey and we must pay for goods already paid!”
I said: “You want him to come back don’t you? We got to stay on the Company’s route or all the miners on the mountain won’t do us any good.”
“Forty dollars!”
In the daylight I was looking at the letter Alf had given me for Ezra Maple—and it was the one Isaac himself had written from Vermont.
“Maybe it won’t be your forty dollars,” I said to Zar.
I walked over to the well and held out the letter to Maple, saying: “It was right along with you on the stage.”
I remember he stared at that letter for a long time. He bit down on his pipe and his face got redder and redder. He was angry but there was a confusion of feeling in his face, I could tell he was glad because his brother had not run off knowing he was coming.
“What are you going to do now?” I said to him.
“Don’t know. Look for Ezra. I s’pose. Hunt him up.”
I did some powerful talking then. I told Isaac Maple he could go looking for his brother on a thousand different trails and he still might miss him. I told him there were mountains one way and deserts another, high enough and wide enough for armies to lose themselves in. I told him a man could use up all his money and most of his life looking for something in the West. But, I said, if he were to stake out in one place, make his name in the country, the word would travel surer than any letter that Isaac Maple was keeping a store in Hard Times. And one day the word would reach Ezra and he’d know where to come.
“Mr. Maple,” I said taking him by the arm, “those goods standing on the ground over there were meant for Ezra’s store. You can buy them from Alf Moffet for forty dollars. And you can sell them to the rest of us for twice that amount in water and shelter and cash together. We’ve a need for a store and no doubt the need will grow as more people settle here.”
I talked to the man for the best part of an hour; and at the end of that time, with all of us in a circle around him, he reached in his money belt and counted out forty dollars in greenbacks, licking his thumb and feeling the texture of each bill before he gave it into my hand.
Well the minute he did that I had Zar step up and meet him, and Miss Adah, who shook his hand and made him blush, and Jenks, who nodded and blinked his wolfy eyes, and the Chinese girl and Jimmy. Bear had gone back to his shack and Molly stood straight by the door of the cabin and would not come over. But it was a proper welcome Isaac Maple got even so.
A few minutes later the tall girl, Jessie, came out of Zar’s place smoothing down her hair. Then Mae followed supporting Alf who was laughing and blinking in the light. Alf had consumed a good amount of whiskey, he looked us all over standing around the stage and said: “Yessir, the spirit o’ life, spirit o’ life, yessir.”
The old man on the box moved over to the driver’s side and took up the reins and we helped Alf to sit up next to him. I gave Alf the forty dollars and the ordering list I had worked up for Zar and Isaac which he stuck in his vest.
“See you again Alf?”
“Tha’s right Blue, tha’s right!” He lifted his hat and his head went back as the old man flung his whip out and the wheels spun up dirt.
I felt pretty fair watching that wagon line out its dust over the flats—like I had done a good day’s work. But in the evening, over our supper of salted beef newly bought from Isaac Maple’s barrel, Molly couldn’t see I had done anything to be satisfied of.
“We’ll have to pay for this meat ten times what we could have by buying it ourselves,” she said.
“Well Molly I don’t favor keeping a store. Settling Ezra’s brother here puts money in the town.”
She looked at me. “The town! Oh Mayor you don’t fool me one bit—”
“What?”
“You’ll rope in every damn fool you can just to make up a herd. There’s surety in numbers, ain’t that what you think?”
“I don’t think that.”
“I know you Blue,” she giggled, and Jimmy watching her laughed too. But then Molly’s face went cold and she gazed at me: “Mayor, all the soft yellow spines in the world stack up to nothing when the Bad Man comes. I’ll tell you that, I know it.”
After that it was a race against the weather. Jenks began to build something with what lumber he could reclaim from the old street and it was clear to me whatever it was he was having a bad time. He finally admitted he wanted to raise a barn for his wagon and three animals. When Zar and I heard that we told him we would fetch wood from Fountain Creek and help him build a good enough stable if he would put up our horses without charge. He agreed, and we made two trips with both wagons—Zar’s and the black stage—and we weren’t choosy about the wood. I thought we could use every hand we had to advantage, it was a lot of work what with stalls and all; but Isaac Maple, who had rented Zar’s big tent for his own shelter, had no horse of his own and he saw no reason to join in; and Bear the Indian would have nothing to do with any of us while Zar was in our company—he spent most of his time away in the rocks, preparing traps I suppose and bringing down all the brush he could find.
All during these days Jimmy worked close by me in everything. He took care of the pony, he cut roots and gathered manure for fire, he cleaned the stove and helped with the chinking of the barn walls. He was always at my side and heeding whatever I told him to do. But I remember the way he watched her when Molly one morning went over to the old street and poked around in the rubble till she found the stiletto she had dropped the day of the fire and came back to nail it, teary-eyed, above our door.
And each morning the sun came up weaker and whiter, like an old man rising from his bed, and each morning’s chill was slower giving up the ground. T
6
The stable was not roofed before the true cold came, we drove the horses into the enclosure of the four high walls and while they snorted so you could see their breath and turned from one corner to another we took the corral apart and got some of the shaven logs up for joists. There was no good way of keeping warm except by moving. When the roof was up tolerably we made a railing of the remaining corral poles to go along in front of all the buildings—from the doors of the stable past Isaac Maple’s tent and past Zar’s place and the windmill to the door of the cabin I had built for Molly and Jimmy and me. A Dakota blizzard will freeze your eyes shut and drive you from your direction faster than your senses realize. I have known men to die in a drift a few feet from their doors because they had no rail to go by.
All during this hurried-up preparation against the winter I kept thinking how much we could use a good carpenter like Fee. A skilled man like that and it would not matter so much that the nails we had were soft and the lumber rotten. I worried what a blizzard might do to the stable roof. I took down the blades of the windmill to keep the water in the ground. Winter is a worrying time, you have to tuck your chin in and burrow down somewhere and hope there will still be something when the spring comes.
I had no clothes but the ones I wore, Molly had only her white dress and Jimmy had not even a hat. His pants didn’t cover his ankles and I had to tie a bit of rawhide around one of his shoes to keep the sole from flapping. We were not fit to meet the winter out of doors, and I knew when it set in in earnest we would have just our roof and each other to keep us from freezing. And that would be no comfort in a real blow.
For one week running the sun didn’t show through at all, the skies filled up grey and then snow began to sweep in on the wind. If you stood the bite long enough to take a look there was no more line between earth and sky. The flats were grey, the rock hills were grey and the wind, thick with snow, flew around your face in gusts so that you could even doubt your own balance, you could not be sure you were standing on ground or rising, without breath, in the sky.
The cabin I had built onto the dugout was not good against such weather. The door shook against its latch and snow came through the wall and settled in the corners. I moved the stove back to the dugout and we retreated there to sit with blankets around our shoulders and watch the glow of the fire in each other’s faces.
These were strange quiet moments. We didn’t have much to be proud of but I had to allow we were better off than we might have been. I could take satisfaction from the thought that bitter as she was, Molly had never made to leave the place I offered her; and that Jimmy might have done otherwise than jump to work at my side and heed every word I told him. A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.
But I looked at Molly sitting near the stove, her head was turned to the side and her hands were folded in her lap and she was gazing at nothing and her eyes were lost listening to the wind and snow outside—and in that quiet moment it was plain to me if she didn’t up and leave the first chance she had it was because no other place could she so savor the discouragement of her life. And Jimmy, who worked so willingly, the first day I came to the old town I saw Fee planing a board and his son holding one end for him. I had never once seen the boy linger at something useless the way most children will. He had watched his Pa stumble out of the Silver Sun and he had taken him by the belt—and that was work too. Jimmy was a child fitted to the land, using all his senses to live with what it gave him, and if he did his share and did as I told him why it was because he knew no other way.
Therefore where were my good signs? This green-eyed woman and brown-eyed boy sitting here had never done but the only thing they could do. And if I felt like believing we were growing into a true family that was alright: if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.
I remembered that half-burnt old almanac we had and I thought it might be the right weather for teaching the boy to read. I could put a point on a stick and show the letters by scratching them in the floor. So we began to do that, working at it a little each day, I would have him study a letter as it was printed and then say its name and then watch me write it with the stick. Sometimes Molly watched, no expression on her face, maybe she was learning something too.
But the weather was ornery. A storm would blow up for a few days until the snow was banked high enough to keep the inside of the cabin warm. Then the sun would break through for a morning, warm winds would come down from the rocks, and soon everything was melting like a sound of crickets and water was running off everywhere. At night the ground iced up, every roof was hung with ice and the cabin walls were exposed again to the cold winds. It went on like that, every snow bringing its chinook to devil the skin, one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn’t let you settle.
Molly said one evening: “Here you’re going on and on with those damn letters and you don’t even see the boy is sick.”
Jimmy had coughed once or twice that I’d heard, but I hadn’t thought about it. I said: “You’re alright aren’t you Jimmy?”
“I’m alright.”
But the next day he was coughing a lot. Even in the dugout the ground was damp, at night I folded my blanket and put it under him and then sat up listening to him cough and shiver in his sleep. Molly lay on her side on the other side of the stove, I could tell by her back she was wide awake and listening each time the boy coughed.
The next morning Jimmy couldn’t get up. He was shuddering under his blanket, his teeth chattered and there was a wheeze to his breath. His face was flushed and his eyes glittery. Molly looked at me like it was my fault he had come up sick.
Straightaway I went to the Russian’s. It was a grey cold morning and there was ice all along the railing and a muddy crust of snow on the ground. Inside his place Zar was pacing up and down and Adah and the three girls were sitting on the meeting chairs and making a breakfast of flour-cakes and sardines. It was cold in there but they all had coats.
“Zar,” I said, “I’ll trouble you for some whiskey, the boy has caught something on his chest.”
“So?” He waved his hand as he paced. “Take, take, there will be no miners again this week, what for do I need whiskey?”
Adah wanted to know what Jimmy’s symptoms were like. I told her he had a powerful cough and the chills and fever.
“Well it’s the weather for it,” the tall girl, Jessie, said, “I’m feeling poorly myself.”
“Ain’t the weather’s your trouble, honey,” Mae said to her, “jes the moon.”
Adah told me to wait a bit and she went into another room. Zar had built this place not much wider than a railroad car, and there were two rooms at the end of the public room, one in back of the other.
“No customers, only that deadhead Jenks,” Zar was saying. He was vexed the way the weather closed off the trail to the mining camp.
“Hey Blue,” Mae got up from the table, “that’s a mighty fine beard y’ workin’ up there, you come over of an evenin’ and we’ll comb it for yuh.”
The Chinese had her mouth full and she had to put her hand up while she giggled.
“God’s truth,” Mae said, “all we ever see now is that Jenks and he ain’t good for much more’n polishin’ his damn guns. Beard like that’d keep a girl warm these nights.”
“And that New Englander Maple,” Zar said, “he does not drink, he does not use the women, he stays there in my tent. I buy from him I must pay money, a fine way to trade.”
Adah came out carrying two bottles. She told me t
Well I thanked her and went back and did as she said. And for a while it seemed to help. But in the afternoon Jimmy began to shiver again and he wouldn’t take any more rum. Each time he coughed his whole body shuddered. Molly fixed up some flour soup with bits of salt beef for supper but he wouldn’t eat it.
It began to frighten me hearing that boy cough away like a man, the sound came up from his bowels and pushed his tongue and eyes out and turned his face crimson. We had him wrapped in all the blankets and the fire built up high but he couldn’t stop his shivering. I began to feel the awful helpless rage. We fussed with him hour after hour—sitting him up to ease his breathing, laying him down again—but nothing comforted him and he couldn’t get to sleep.
It must have been close on midnight and Jimmy began to whimper and look up from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know what else to do. There was an unnatural burning in his eyes and his cheeks drew in with each wheezing breath. Molly couldn’t look at him any more, she walked back and forth fingering the cross at her throat. When the boy was taken with a heavy fit of coughing she stepped up into the cabin and walked away in the dark.
Then I felt a breeze at my feet and I went into the cabin after her. She had the door partly open and she was looking across the windy moonlit reach to the Indian’s shack. “Mayor,” she said, “what will you do if the boy dies, will you bury him beside his Pa?”
She didn’t wait for any answer I might have had but went out just in that dress and headed across for John Bear’s place, walking that stiff walk of hers, hugging herself against the bite. A great anger rose in me as I closed the door, I could have struck her right then, I was distressed for the boy’s illness, I damned her for the grip she had on my life, this unrelenting whore.