…poor trees…
The population of Central County was around eleven hundred people: give or take a death here and a birth there or a few strangers deciding to make a new life or old-time residents to move away and never to return or come back soon because they were homesick.
Just like a short history of man, there were two towns in the county.
One of the towns was close to the northern range of mountains. That town was called Brooks. The other town was close to the southern range of mountains. It was called Billy.
The towns were named for Billy and Brooks Paterson: two brothers who had pioneered the county forty years before and had killed each other in a gunfight one September afternoon over the ownership of five chickens.
That fatal chicken argument occurred in 1881 but there was still a lot of strong feeling in the county in 1902 over who those chickens belonged to and who was to fault for the gunfight that killed both brothers and left two widows and nine fatherless children.
Brooks was the county seat but the people who lived in Billy always said, “Fuck Brooks.”
In the Early Winds of Morning
Just outside of Gompville a man was hanging from the bridge across the river. There was a look of disbelief on his face as if he still couldn’t believe that he was dead. He just refused to believe that he was dead. He wouldn’t believe he was dead until they buried him. His body swayed gently in the early winds of morning.
There was a barbed-wire drummer riding in the stagecoach with Greer and Cameron and Magic Child. The drummer looked like a fifty-year-old child with long skinny fingers and cold-white nails. He was going to Billy, then onto Brooks to sell barbed wire.
Business was good.
“There’s a lot of that going on around here now,” he said, pointing at the body. “It’s those gunmen from Portland. It’s their work.”
He was the only one talking. Nobody else had anything to say out loud. Greer and Cameron said what they had to say inside their minds.
Magic Child looked so calm you would have thought that she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers.
The stagecoach drove across the bridge without stopping. It sounded like a minor thunderstorm on the bridge. The wind turned the body, so that it was watching the stagecoach drive up the road along the river and then disappear into a turn of dusty green trees.
“Coffee” with the Widow
A couple of hours later, the stagecoach stopped at Widow Jane’s house. The driver always liked to have a cup of “coffee” with the widow on his way to Billy.
What he meant by a cup of coffee wasn’t really a cup of coffee. He had a romance going with the widow and he’d stop the stagecoach at her house and just parade all the passengers in. The widow would give everybody a cup of coffee and there was always a big platter of homemade doughnuts on the kitchen table.
Widow Jane was a very thin but jolly woman in her early fifties.
Then the driver, carrying a ceremonial cup of coffee in his hand, and the widow would go upstairs. All the passengers would sit downstairs in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while the driver would be upstairs with the widow in her bedroom having his “coffee.”
The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain.
Cora
Cameron had brought the trunk full of guns into the house with him. He didn’t want to leave the guns unattended in the stagecoach. Greer and Cameron never carried guns on their persons not unless they intended to kill somebody. Then they carried guns. The rest of the time the guns stayed in the trunk.
The barbed-wire drummer sat there in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hand and from time to time he would look down at the trunk that was beside Cameron, but he never said anything about it.
He was curious enough, though, about Magic Child to ask her what her name was.
“Magic Child,” Magic Child said.
“That’s a pretty name,” he said. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re quite a pretty girl.”
“Thank you.”
Then, to be polite, he asked Greer what his name was.
“Greer,” Greer said.
“That’s an interesting name,” he said.
Then he asked Cameron what his name was.
“Cameron,” Cameron said.
“Everybody here’s got an interesting name,” he said. “My name is Marvin Cora jones. You don’t come across many men who’s middle name is Cora. Anyway, I haven’t and I’ve been to a lot of places, including England.”
“Cora is a different kind of middle name for a man,” Cameron said.
Magic Child got up and went over to the stove and got some more coffee for Greer and Cameron. She also poured some for the barbed-wire drummer. She was smiling. There was a huge platter of doughnuts on the table and everybody was eating them. Widow Jane was a good cook.
Like a mirror the house continued to reflect the motion of the bed upstairs.
Greer and Cameron each had a glass of milk, too, from a beautiful porcelain pitcher on the table. They liked a glass of milk now and then. They also liked the smile on Magic Child’s face. It had been the first time that Magic Child had smiled.
“They named me Cora for my great-grandmother. I don’t mind. She met George Washington at a party. She said that he was really a nice man but he was a little shorter than what she had expected,” the barbed-wire drummer said. “I meet a lot of interesting people by telling them that my middle name is Cora. It’s something that gets people’s curiosity up. It’s kind of funny, too. I don’t mind people laughing because it is sort of funny for a man to have the name of Cora.”
Against the Dust
The driver and the widow came down the stairs with their arms in sweet affection around each other. “It certainly was nice of you to show that to me,” the driver said.
The widow’s face was twinkling like a star.
The driver acted mischievously solemn but you could tell that he was just playing around.
“It’s good to stop and have some coffee,” the driver said to everybody sitting at the table. “It makes travelling a little easier and those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head.”
There was no argument there.
Thoughts of July 12, 1902
About noon the stagecoach was rattling through the mountains. It was hot and boring. Cora, the barbed-wire drummer, had dozed off. He looked like a sleeping fence.
Greer was staring at the graceful billowing of Magic Child’s breasts against her long and simple dress. Cameron was thinking about the man who had been hanging from the bridge. He was thinking that he had once gotten drunk with him in Billings, Montana, at the turn of the century.
Cameron wasn’t totally certain but the man hanging from the bridge looked an awful lot like the guy he had gotten drunk with in Billings. If he wasn’t that man, he was his twin brother.
Magic Child was watching Greer stare at her breasts. She was imagining Greer touching them with his casually powerful-looking hands. She was excited and pleased inside of herself, knowing that she would be fucking Greer before the day was gone.
While Cameron was thinking about the dead man on the bridge, perhaps it was Denver where they had getter: drunk together, Magic Child was thinking about fucking him, too.