At the supper table, with Bierce at the head, Mollie at the foot, her mother beside her and the children and me distributed, Mrs. Day said, “Will you say grace, Mr. Bierce?”
“A toast!” Bierce said, rising. He held out his iced-tea glass down-table toward his wife:
“They stood before the altar and supplied the very fires in which their fat was fried!”
He was quoting himself.
His wife flushed, as though he had paid her a compliment.
“I suppose that is all the attention the Good Lord will receive at this table,” Mrs. Day said. “But you will come to church with us tomorrow, will you not, Mr. Bierce?”
“No, madam, I will not.”
“We will attend,” Mrs. Day said, trap-mouthed. “Your wife, and Day, Leigh and Helen. But you will not accompany your family?”
“I am the sworn enemy of organized piffle, madam,” Bierce said. “Including Sunday-scholiasts and Saturday pietaries.” He served up meat patties and gravy, potatoes and peas, and distributed the plates.
“And you, Mr. Redmond, are you also an enemy of religion?”
“I am Roman Catholic,” I said. My response was as unsatisfactory as Bierce’s. Mrs. Day appeared to be girding for sectarian battle.
“Momma,” Mollie Bierce said.
“Is Roman Catholic like Mikey Hennesey?” Day wanted to know.
“Yes, dear.”
“It is as honest a collection-extraction system as any protestant Bible-thumping,” Bierce said.
“Dr. Grove is a fine man!” Mollie Bierce said gently.
“I’m sure he is, my dear,” Bierce said. “And well deserving of your tiresome panegyrics.”
“Dr. Grove has a red nose!” Helen chirped.
“Helen!”
Bierce gazed at his wife with eyes in which I could discern no affection.
“And you are a journalist also, Mr. Redmond?” Mollie Bierce said. Her darkly pretty face regarded me with her gentle smile. I thought of the constant diplomacy that must be called for, with her mother and her husband. There was a brother, I knew; the third of what Bierce termed the “Holy Trinity.” I thought of my father and my brother Michael and the bitterness of interfamilial contentions, more intense and thus more savage than those with no blood connection; like the ferocity of Federals and Confederates murdering each other on the Southern killing fields.
I said I was an apprentice journalist, learning what I could from The Hornet’s Editor-in-chief and Tattler. I was always uneasy praising Bierce, for I knew he was absolutely aware of flattery.
Mollie asked what I was writing now.
I thought it best not to mention the Morton Street murders. “I have been inquiring into the Mussel Slough Tragedy,” I said. “There is some historical evidence that needs to be reconsidered.”
“Those farmers were no better than Communists,” Mrs. Day proclaimed, ramming her jaw out at me. “When this nation no longer respects property rights we are on the road to perdition.”
Bierce regarded her calmly and held his peace, comfortable with his conviction of the Railroad’s pervasive villainy. Now we knew that an enforcer from Virginia City, a connection of Nat McNair’s named Klosters, had been one of the sheriff’s deputies acting for the SP at Mussel Slough, and that the trials of the settlers in Circuit Court had been decided by Judge Aaron Jennings in every instance in favor of the Railroad.
We managed to finish supper without more hostilities. I had time alone with Mollie Bierce when she was showing me to the spare bedroom, arms filled with pillows and a quilt.
“I wish Mr. Bierce could relax more when he is here,” she said. “He is so busy in the City. When he comes home he brings his busyness with him, and by the time he can relax it is time to go back to that teeming life again. It can’t be good for him, Mr. Redmond.”
She bent to place the pillows and the folded quilt on the bed, and plump the pillows, bending to her work and pushing strands of dark hair back from her face.
“He is busy in many good causes, Mrs. Bierce,” I said.
“I know that, Mr. Redmond.”
After breakfast Day and Leigh badgered me to play ball again. This time I set up double-play practice. I lofted the ball or bowled grounders, to Leigh, who pegged to Day at second base, who hurled the ball to me at first, whereupon I tossed to Leigh again. The boys yelled with excitement as we pitched the ball around with increasing velocity.
Bierce watched from the veranda. I thought he wished he were a father who could play ball with his growing sons, but he was not. He was a closed-in man with an affliction of hating oppression, fraud and sham, and a talent for expressing his indignation in print. He would never be a good father, nor even a decent husband, whether or not he was able to relax from the demands of the teeming City.
Little Helen came outside and leaned against his leg, and he went back into the house with her. When Mollie Bierce called to the boys to dress for church, there was a good deal of complaint.
Mollie Bierce, Mrs. Day and the children trooped off to their Sunday duties, and Bierce and I went for a walk on the road that looped up the hillside above the town. I was in my shirtsleeves from playing ball with the boys, and Bierce left his jacket off as well, his concession to country relaxation. He carried a stick and batted at the weeds along the margins of the road, which narrowed and steepened as we mounted. It was a bright day with puffs of cloud drifting in from the coast.
“This is Larkmead,” Bierce said, flourishing the stick ahead. “Lillie Coit’s estate.”
Every San Francisco fireman knew of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, although her years as a fire-belle were before I had come to San Francisco. She loved firemen, had proved it as Lillie Hitchcock and continued to prove it after she had married Howard Coit. The grateful fellows of Knickerbocker #5 had awarded her one of their pins.
I couldn’t fault her for wanting to wear a fireman’s helmet. I remembered once as a child so loving a pair of copper-toed boots my father bought me at Gus Levenson’s Store in Sacramento that I took them to bed with me. Maybe it was something of the way that Lillie Coit loved the firemen of San Francisco’s Engine Companies.
It occurred to me that Bierce had been looking for her when he led me up this trail into Larkmead, and there she was, in a clearing with a horse trough, standing beside a splendid bay with his muzzle in the trough. She wore a yellow-brown dress of many layers and flounces, and a broad hat heaped with feathers. She was a rather stout little woman of about Bierce’s age, with a round, friendly brown face which lighted up as she swung toward us, waving her riding crop.
“Halloo Brosey!” she called to Bierce.
They embraced. I was introduced. The coldness that had hardened Bierce’s features within the bosom of his family had melted in Lillie Coit’s company. The two of them sat on a downed log, gossiping and laughing, while I paced the clearing gazing out over the treetops into blue distance. I was not included in their conversation, and I felt ill at ease as I patted the horse and paced some more and seated myself and looked down at my shoes.
Bierce waved me over to them.
“Listen to this,” he said to me. “About Beau McNair,” he said to Lillie Coit.
“He isn’t Nat’s son,” she said. She had a lisping way of talking, with an earnest set to her round face. “I was a sweet young thing myself at the time and didn’t pay much attention. I’m sure Carrie was carrying child when she married Nat. He adopted Beau.”
“If he was not the father, who was?” I asked. Jimmy Fairleigh had told me this, and I did not see what it could have to do with the Morton Street slashings.
She shrugged. “Old mysteries!”
“So she bore Beau in the City?” Bierce said.