Too, Goldie lived across the way. None could keep the young man from Goldie.
Abe opened the big wardrobe in the corner and hung his jacket there. He kept his vest on, and from its change pocket he withdrew a small, homemade dagger fashioned from a four-inch cut-spike nail. It was light as a toothbrush, its handle a lashed leather shoelace. He set it on a shelf inside the wardrobe. From his fob pocket, he withdrew the nickel-silver railroad watch his daddy had given him two years prior. It was Al Baach’s custom to give his boys a sturdy Waltham pocketwatch on their fifteenth birthday. Engraved on the case back of each was the following: A man without the time is lost.
Abe thumbed a smudge on the bezel and tucked it back in the pocket. It was half past six.
He sat down on the bed and untied his shoes. From underneath the inner sole, he produced the two twenty-dollar notes, plus the other bills he’d won, folded lengthwise. He kissed them and then knelt at the open wardrobe, where he reached to the back and undid a hidden latch. Then he shifted the false bottom and lifted it out, his old hidden spot under the slat. He set all the money but one twenty inside with the rest, replaced the slat, rehooked the latch, and sat for a moment on the floor with his back against the wall. He took full breaths and let them out slow.
The game at the Alhambra would bring him what he’d always been after. It was something to ponder.
At the window, cold air issued in at the sill. The shade was half drawn, and below him, folks walked the dirt streets laughing. The restaurant beside Fat Ruth’s radiated the stench of hog fat burned black. The cook stood out front in an undershirt despite the cold. He picked his teeth with a thumbnail and watched the ladies coming to work. There were more than usual on account of the grand opening across the creek. There were white ladies and black ladies and foreign ladies too. Fat Ruth’s was the first in the Bottom to do such a thing, and that was fine by the cook. He said to each as she passed, “You looking every inch a peacock tonight.”
Another man stepped from the restaurant and concurred. “Like a springtime payday out here,” he said.
Al rapped his middle boy’s door, three quick.
Abe had heard someone coming on the stairs. He picked up the spike nail and put it back in his pocket.
When he opened, there stood his daddy, sweat drops squeezing forth from the pores in his nose. Behind him was Jake, who smiled and pushed his way in and tried to make himself as tall as his younger brother by standing straight. He stuck his face in Abe’s. “Don’t forget whose room it was first,” he said. “Don’t forget who can whup you in a fair fight.”
Abe wouldn’t forget. After Goldie, it was Jake who knew him best.
Al closed the door behind him. “Do you play at Trent’s table?” he asked.
“Who’s tending bar?”
“You answer my question Abraham.” Al spoke loud and set his jaw. None of the boys would ever forget who could whup all three.
Abe said, “I played at his table and I won.”
Al shook his head and looked at his hands. He wanted to use them to choke his middle boy, but it would serve no end. Al had known it the first time he’d ever switched Abe, who was ten at the time and had been seen hopping a slow coal train. While Al swung the switch, the boy had whistled with his eyes shut, and he’d spat on the ground when it was done.
Choking the boy wouldn’t steer him clean. Al crossed his arms.
Abe thought his daddy looked old then, and he thought Jake did too.
Jake had a pint bottle in his back pocket. He had a pencil behind one ear and a skinny cigar behind the other. He was supposed to be fixing the storeroom shelves.
“Who’s tending bar?” Abe asked again.
“Big Bill. He come over with me,” Jake said. He was dark-handsome like Abe, but his nose was bigger and his chin weaker.
Abe knew by the way his brother said “come over with me” that Jake had been at Fat Ruth’s again. He’d been lifting from the saloon’s money box for two years, just enough to dip his wick once a week. Abe said, “Bill’s not well.”
“He’s better now.” Jake put his thumb to a corner edge of peeling wallpaper. “Worry about your own health Abe,” he said. “Be dead soon enough you get in with Trent.” He walked to the closed wardrobe and knocked on it. “Never was well made, was it?”
“Goldie won’t like seeing her daddy at the barback,” Abe said. “He’s ill.”
“Bill will be okay.” Al uncrossed his arms and breathed hard through his nose. He said, “Abraham, Henry Trent has nothing for you. You think he gives you everything, but he gives you nothing in the end.” He opened and closed his hands. “As he gives, he takes.”
There was a noise outside the door and the three of them turned their heads.
It was Sallie. She’d swung it open without knocking and looked at the men. She toted an unfamiliar baby girl on her hipbone. Behind her was Sam, the only Baach boy forever in need of sunlight. He was skinny as ever and fourteen years old.
“Stand up straight Samuel,” Al told him.
The boy did so and followed his mother inside.
“Shut the door,” Al told him.
Sallie said to leave it open. She looked at Abe when she spoke. “We’re not staying.”
The years had not been easy on Sallie, but they’d fortified her resolve. After Samuel’s birth in ’83, there was a still-born. A year after that, there was another, and for a time, Sallie only lay on her back in bed. She’d taken one basting spoon of chicken broth per night for two months. One day she came out of it and never looked back. The Baach boys did what she told them, and Goldie and Big Bill helped at Hood House when it was needed, but mostly Sallie ran the place, and she did so with considerable attention to cleanliness and well-kept books. In ’95, she took in the unwanted baby of a Tennessee girl working at Fat Ruth Malindy’s and named her Leila. With Goldie spelling her from time to time, Sallie attended that child’s every need, sleeping next to her crib up at the second house on the hill. At Christmastime in ’96, a wealthy friend of her father’s and his thin barren wife adopted Leila, and Sallie had nearly taken to her bed again. Instead she cried for a night and half a day. Then she stopped. “Sometimes, the eyes can’t keep from crying,” she’d told her boys. “They’re pushing out the poison.”
Now Sallie’s hair was mostly gray. She’d kept it long. She shook her head slow and said to Abe, “You look guilty.”
The unfamiliar baby tossed her little covered head and made a noise.
Sam tapped his foot on a floorboard by the bed. He suspected his brother of hiding money underneath.
They had all known that another motherless child was coming to Hood House to live because Sallie had proclaimed it and Goldie had backed her up. The child was born December 30th in a bed at Fat Ruth’s. Her mother had left before sunrise on New Year’s Day.
Abe regarded the baby and thought on how to answer his mother’s accusation of guilt. “I am guilty of making the kind of money that will build you another house, and another one after that. Anybody that wants to live on the hill can do it in—”
“I thought that maple baby carriage was in here,” Sallie said.
“Storeroom,” Al answered. “But steel brake is broken.” He looked at his watch and walked out the open door.
Jake pulled the half-spent cigar from behind his ear and lit it. He said, “Somebody’s got that carriage loaded with pickled egg jars.”