“Howdo.”
“Where did you find this wagon?” I said.
“Hit waer jes setting out thaer. I tuk it up.”
“And you’ve not looked in the door?”
“Didn’t think to—”
“Well that’s alright,” I said, “this is a burying wagon, you ever do any burying?”
“Never have.”
“Well you’ll find your first customer inside.”
Then I turned and saw Molly holding herself up at the side of the dugout. She had on that white dress and she was smiling at me, a queer, bitter smile. I rubbed my hand across my eyes and I thought why I have a safe name for this town, we’ll call it Hard Times. Same as we always called it.
Part 2 — Second Ledger
5
That was the way it ended and began again. From the day I returned Molly wore the wedding dress like she was born to it, she walked stiffly with her shoulders thrown back and her mouth grim against the pain. And when the pain was gone the set of it remained, the healed burns pulled her up tight, her chin was always in the air and the chain and cross was always plain to see around her neck. So that whenever I looked at her I was looking at rebuke.
The day Zar and I started to put up our buildings Molly took John Bear’s buffalo robe out of the dugout and went to return it to the Indian. Over to his shack she marched, stirred him out of the dumps and gave him back the lice-ridden fur with what must have been proud apology. I could see by her manner when she came back, it was as if the Indian’s property had been stolen by some no-account thief and she had squared the scales by returning it.
Molly was plentiful in her moods, unspeaking for days at a time, smiling with plans maybe or weeping for no clear reason but her memories. But when she had a mind to she could make anything in the world seem a taint on me. One morning Jimmy was helping me mix up some sod for chinking. Mae, the dumpity girl, came by with nothing much on her mind and started to talk to the boy and tease him a bit. Jimmy always watched Zar’s women with great attention and that gave them pleasure.
“Y’all sweet on me, li’l ol’ Jimmy?” the girl asked.
He blushed.
“Y’all take a fancy to Mae, don’t yuh?”
“No ma’am.”
“Here put yo’ hand here, now ain’t that soft as soft?”
She was holding Jimmy’s hand on her bosom and that’s when Molly showed up to give her a cuff on the ear. Mae was so shocked she had no anger but just bit her lip and ran off; Jimmy was suddenly back to the sod; and Molly stood regarding me as she would a lizard.
It was no pain I felt but a steady ache, like some hand was gently squeezing my heart. It never left me. I would look out to the graves in the flats or look up to the rocks or over at the scar of the old street and always I saw the face of the Man from Bodie. That was the trouble, I know now, that was my failing, that I couldn’t see past my own feelings, I had no thoughts beyond myself. The day came when I had a sturdy clapboard cabin affixed to the dugout so that altogether we had two rooms to live in. I knocked together a table using pieces of the balustrade from the old Silver Sun, and some boards, and Jimmy and I fell into the habit of saving whatever food we had for that table each evening. Molly would serve it up and then take her portion and step down into the dugout to eat alone, leaving the boy and me to taste what sweetness we could while not looking into each other’s eyes.
There was the business with Jenks. It was Jenks who brought Hausenfield’s wagon in off the plains, so pleased with his booty that he hadn’t smelled Hausenfield inside. His head was not much thicker than a broom handle and he had no chin to speak of; the way his sly yellowed eyes looked at you made you think of a wolf’s cunning, but really he was a stupid man. Before he managed to bury the German I had to show him where to do it and to point out how he could turn up the ground with the pickaxe lying across the door, and I had to tell him how deep he’d best dig and finally I ended up doing as much as he did. Then, with Hausenfield laid away this Jenks didn’t do another thing for a week but just sat around in the shade of his new wagon, eyeing the ladies or oiling his gun and his gunbelt.
Well he looked so deliberate toying with those arms day after day it took me some time to understand he was trying all the while to make up his mind for staying or moving on. He was just a poky, traveling where the trail took him, he had himself a black coach and he didn’t know how best to gain from it. Zar was angry because I let the fellow draw free water for the mule and grey and for his own horse, a patch-bald sorrel, while he did nothing in exchange. And I began to be tried too. We neither of us figured there was much good in Leo Jenks.
But one morning Molly approached him and with a loud, throaty voice, said to him: “Mr. Jenks, you find any use for that gun except in oiling it?”
He was sitting with his back to a wheel and he sprang up fast when she spoke and took his hat off.
“Well yes’m, ah kin shoot whur yew kin see.”
“Is that right?”
“It is, yes’m.”
“Well I see a windmill over there, and on top of that windmill is eight stubby blades and I’m looking at the one wavin’ straight up at heaven.”
Jenks put on his hat and cocked his pistol, aimed, and sent off a shot which splintered the topmost blade. The horses shied. Over by his shack John Bear stopped hoeing his rows and stood up to watch.
“I see the neck of a bottle,” cried Molly, “sticking up out of that rubble there.”
Jenks turned, took aim where she pointed, and the piece of glass sprayed into the air. Three more times Molly fixed her eye on things — a stone, a hump of dirt, a stick of wood — and each time this Jenks placed his round where she called it. The shots echoed off the rock hills and came back to us. Everyone was watching now, the women over by their tent, Zar from a corner of his new corral, and Jimmy squatting on the back of the Major’s buckboard. I was close enough to Jenks to see that when he took his aim those shifty wolf eyes of his squinted with some true knowledge.
He finally holstered his pistol and took his hat off again.
“I thank you, Mr. Jenks,” Molly said looking my way, “it’s good to find a man in these parts. I wish the Lord my husband knew the gun the way you do!”
After that Jenks had no trouble deciding what was his aim in life. He rode the wagon off east one dawn and at night came back with a half a dozen prairie dogs slung from the box. You have to be quick to hit a prairie dog while he’s diving for his hole — I learned later Jenks parked the stage in the middle of a dog town and lay atop of it for hours till the animals forgot he was there and came up out of their burrows.
Jenks turned out to be a good hunter and he bartered his kills for my water or for Zar’s liquor or for one of the girls. Fresh meat is a luxury and there is nothing will go down easier than a well-roasted haunch of dog or a good rabbit stew. But when Molly cooked up some of Jenks’s meat she always spiced it with her scorn, which made it hard to swallow.
By the time the stage came we were seeing the last of summer. The sun was getting white and it was setting earlier. The winds were lasting and they put out more of a bite. Each day they blew off more of the old town dust and ate away the char of the old street. Zar had his place built, a long low public house of clapboard and sod, it stood where his tent had stood — on the north side of the windmill — and its door, like the door of my new shack, faced to the southeast. When the stage drove in it was in front of Zar’s that the driver reined his horses.