The wagon consisted of four rear wheels, extra high, and a little two windowed hut daubed with one barn color coat of paint. A tin chimney, that could be removed and wired to the side, stuck abruptly from the center of the sharp pointed roof and poured a fresh, foreign smelling smoke into the hot night air. It mixed with whiffs of gunpowder. Large, outsized shutters, stolen from a Victorian estate and thick enough to be bulletproof, were nailed across the windows. The house wagon was rough, gaudy, a small fortress of unmatched parts, with an air about it of harsh and lonely ill-repute. It was a cramped and wandering hovel. Yet high over the horse’s sloping rump, the driver’s seat was draped with a soft silk-haired sheepskin. The dirty but comfortable curls hung to the floorboards and over the rusty springs.
Fat, hands in pockets, grinning, Wade worked his way down the street, careful to keep in shadow. He knew the Indians could see him, the wet shirt and trousers white. He stayed in the dark. For a time he sat, a drunk rolled in a corner, on an empty porch of the provisional store, resting. He saw a tin can blown suddenly into the air. The sharp-mouthed Indians leapt across the street to the sound of beating drums. He chuckled quietly from deep beneath his leather belt, watched them burn down, tormented by the moon.
Wade again crept lumbering toward the hut on wheels. The thin stick of the chimney turned a spotted orange. In a row of gray false fronts, among a few gilt lettered windows — a town laid out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains — the red wagon took its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road.
Wade, abstractly picking a tooth, saw the squaws clustered about the doll size steps. They looked darkly or, a few old and with toothless gums, happily, up to the bright light burning through splits and knotholes in the rain warped door. In the pack he saw one, two, that were maidens in unbelted dresses. The paralytic old chief’s sparkler flashed on their tightly drawn black hair. It was a circle he could not enter, never touch those with woodsmoke under their fingernails. The months of the maiden Indians came with the tearing of young dogs; Wade scratched his neck and looked at the gently stooping shoulders.
Suddenly, as bright lips parted, the stolid door flew open. In the heat of the boiling pot stove Cap Leech stood above them, holding by the throat a brown chested boy, the other hand dripping an instrument of metal.
Cap Leech dropped him. The boy — until that one moment the men outside had cried in his stead, he had curled his tongue and perspired — fell in pain from the platform. But Wade, as well as the audience of women, saw that he had jumped. And when he hit the ground he glanced quickly at foster mothers, sisters, clutched his jaw and screamed. The women babbled and turned away. Cap Leech raised the metal, flicked it, and the small skin wrapped molar landed among them. Dismayed, they fought for it, picked it up.
The street was empty except for the fiery Cap Leech still framed in the midget doorway and Wade trembling at his feet. A last string of firecrackers rattled and died. The little man with bare arms did not move.
“What do you want?”
His voice was hoarse from long speechless months. He wore black trousers and a stained vest folded low on a thin scarred waist. He stood with his back baking toward the stove the color of which, a cool glow, increased minute by minute. Glancing at the lantern, “Put it out,” he said. Wade sank down and grunted.
Cap Leech did not watch him lay his head on its side, burn his nose, blow, and blow again. With eyes bleakly commanding up and down the street as if the Indians still congregated, he continued merely to wipe, almost polish, the hammer pliers shape of metal. The duster-sized piece of waste rag fluffed up and down as he worked with thin fast fingers. Then, done looking at the town, he flung the tool backward, not turning to aim, and shoved the rag into his hip pocket. The pincers crashed behind the stove.
“It was the Sheriff told me to come over,” said Wade and brushed at the soot streaks on his trousers.
Cap Leech stepped into the flames and slammed the door. Wade listened to the hurried sounds, the clattering of small objects, a ransacked scuffling. After a pause he heard the whisper of iron, the shooting of grated coal, and the sudden breathing of the fire. Leech reappeared from beneath the wagon, scowled, flung up the steps and fastened a padlock through the rings.
“Bring that lantern,” he said.
He sank into the sheepskin and pushed the stiff, long handled brake. Wade saw that on his feet he wore only a toe curled pair of bedroom slippers.
With the easing forward of the hickory lever and the release of the wooden grip which bound the wheels and which, on wallowing hills, was apt to lock and pitch the wagon into the limbs of a bare tree, smoke flattened from the pipe and the men leaned backward, pulled with the head down charge of a blind horse chased by fire. The driver held a loose rein, ran his other hand through the shedding yellow locks on the seat and, shaggy toes pointed restfully together, stared with eyes that never watered toward the horizon, above and beyond any obstacle that might have crossed their path. The son of a light boned suffragette, kept alive by a spirit half stimulant, half sleep, he bounced unconscious of the twisting wagon frame, the knocks of the makeshift caisson.
“Turn around! Turn around, you’ve passed it.”
“Whoa,” said Cap Leech, sending not a signal down the reins, and the horse stopped. An obedient, angular wrenching of the shafts, a tilt as one wheel skidded up and across the sidewalk planking, and again Wade’s damp wavy hair scratched in his eyes. The stove at their backs was fanned by speed, not wind, and occasionally, without noise, chunked airy wads of ember from the funnel topped chimney, fireballs that floated in the wake of the blood letter.
The ministerial tie strings, knotted, but no longer in a bow, the high collar flapping about the neck, the ease with which he overrode the country familiar or not, all marked a man who had been anesthetized, against whose chest villagers of fifty years had spit their brains.
He drove with the one hand uselessly extended and peered far ahead of the low stars, dismissed without thinking Clare’s shut houses. He would travel unlighted roads to reach the distant end of the river, the last of his line. Echoing moans met him at the limits of every township.
Cap Leech did not stop his horse — wide at the rump it tapered to the small head, jet black prehistoric animal that could run forever — before the jail, but turned it instead, with a whisper to the pinned down ears, between the stone wall and vacant wooden wall. H? discovered, without an extra movement, the still and littered end of Clare. The wheels rocked in the glassy sand, the horse exhaled.
“You give me a ride here,” said Wade. Leech nimbly disappeared on the other side of the wagon. The silent flatlands, the lonely shrub, the plains, moved in upon the town and passed across the weeded railroad line carrying part of Clare off into the night, a few hundred yards into what was once grazing country, now shorn, beyond which there was nothing. Behind, on the streets they had just left, the loping body of a wild dog appeared at the cloudless, hardly sleeping skyline, turned and bounded into the jail.
“I’ll tell you what it says.” The Sheriff glanced at Wade, looked at Cap Leech from the side of his eye, wrinkled, brown, a mole. “Put his bag in the corner.” But for a moment longer he read to himself, holding with both hands the thumb-pressed pages of the yellow paper book. The thick dry lips hung loose, dissociated from the mind that had been concentrating for a long while and in a bad light. “The new of the moon is best,” he said briefly and was again silent. To study, he needed the rough cut desk, gum, dust, and streaks of coal dark ink under his fingers. He was gathered over the printed sheet, deciphering sign by sign, breathing at the end of every sentence. Now and then he stopped and his eyes retraced slowly to the top of the page.