Firewind, page 2
Oh, he married her, he married her.
How could he be so cruel?
She was so poor, she had to use
His wooden leg for fuel!
She turned before he was finished and fled to another room.
Denbow finished buttoning his pants. He clumped into the kitchen, pumped cold water into a basin, washed his face. In the mirror he used for shaving, he caught a glimpse of himself. Thick beard bristles made his cheeks look shadowed, made him look ten years older than thirty-one. To hell with that, too.
When he turned, Rose was there again. She said in a weary voice, "You're going to the saloon again, I suppose."
"What difference does it make where I go?"
"I wish you wouldn't drink so much-"
"What else is there for a cripple to do?"
"We could talk," she said.
"Sure. Talk about that job in the dispatcher's office down in Oakland, right?"
"It's a good job-"
"It's a miserable job," he said. "I'm not gonna sit behind some clerk's desk all day, shuffling papers. I couldn't stand it."
"Will, be reasonable. What other options do you have?"
"I'll get a tin cup," he said savagely, "and beg nickels on a street corner!"
"Won't you ever stop feeling sorry for yourself?"
He glared at her. Then he pushed past her, roughly, and stalked out to the front door. He heard Rose following, but he didn't look back at her. He jerked the door open and limped out onto the porch and started down the steps.
But he was too angry to pay proper attention to what he was doing. The tip of the wooden leg caught on one of the lower treads and sent him sprawling onto the path at the bottom.
He landed painfully on his hip and left elbow, rolled halfway onto his back. Above and behind him, Rose said, "Will!" and there was the slap of the door as she came out. She ran down the steps, bent over him with her hand extended.
A black rage had control of him now; he slapped her hand aside. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. "Get away from me!"
She flinched, backed up a step. Denbow struggled into a sitting position, got his good leg under him, and managed to heave himself erect. In one of the trees that flanked the house, a jay made a raucous cry, as if it were laughing at him. He could feel his face burning. He balled his fist and slammed it against the stump. Did it again. And again. "Will, don't-"
He swung away from her, hobbled down the path to the front gate. Outside it, he stood staring through dusty sunlight and tree shadows at Main Street a block away. You son of a bitch! he thought. And drove his fist once more into the dead stump of his leg.
***
In his cluttered study, Austin Trace sat staring at the silver-framed photographs on his desk. He spent too much time staring at them, brooding over them - he knew that. But he did it, anyway. They were like magnets that drew him, held him, stirred his pain, sharpened his love, and fueled his hate.
Clara, apple-cheeked and smiling, with the bloom of youth still in her round face. The bloom that had faded and withered, until in just three months she was old, old, and there was nothing in the once-bright blue of her eyes except death. And Stephen, so young and handsome in his uniform, smiling, proud - Lieutenant Stephen Trace, on the day of his graduation from West Point. An officer and a gentleman, unlike his father, who had been a mere corporal in the cavalry and who had decided within a year of his own enlistment that his ambitions lay outside the military. Yes, an officer and a gentleman, with his whole fine life ahead of him.
Four brief months of life ahead of him.
June 17, 1877: a day of infamy. The day young Stephen, while on his first assignment under Brevet Colonel Perry, captain of the 1st Cavalry at Fort Lapwai in Idaho Territory, had died in a place called White Bird Canyon on the Clearwater River - one of thirty-four soldiers butchered in a surprise attack by the goddamned Nez Perce Indians.
That had been the beginning of the Nez Perce War, that unprovoked slaughter in White Bird Canyon. Unprovoked, yes, no matter what the heathen chiefs claimed about broken treaties. Some of the young bucks had set to murdering white settlers, hadn't they? Colonel Perry and the two companies of his regiment had every right to march on Looking Glass's camp, and every right to expect to be met in open combat rather than in a vicious assault from ambush. Tired troops, thirty-six hours in the saddle from Fort Lapwai; unsuspecting troops, with their hands empty of weapons. Cut down, cut to ribbons, before they knew what was happening. Butchery. Stephen and thirty-three others, like steers in a slaughtering pen…
Four bloody months the war had raged. From the Clearwater to the Kamiah Crossing. Along the Lolo Trail over the Bitterroots. At the Big Hole River east of the Continental Divide. Across the Big Muddy at Cow Island near Fort Benton. And finally up into the Bear Paw Mountains. More fine, brave young soldiers killed, scores of them, including twenty-nine at Big Hole River, before General Miles put an end to it with six hundred troops, a Gatling gun, and a twelve-pound Napoleon. The savages had surrendered on the fifth day of October, Chief Joseph making a speech that was reported in newspapers all along the Pacific Coast. "From where the sun now stands," the brute had said in conclusion, "I will fight no more."
Clara had been in her grave just three weeks when Trace learned of the surrender and read the words of Chief Joseph. Learned, too, that the government intended no further punishment of the savages for what they'd done. The wounds inside him had broken open all over again, to fester with the pus of his rage and hate. He made a vow of his own that day. "From where the sun now stands," he had said to the photographs of Stephen and Clara, "I'll not rest until Joseph and Ollokut and Looking Glass and all the rest of them are punished - until I see them punished with my own eyes for what they have done."
At first he had sought his vengeance through peaceable means, political means. It was only after his entreaties continued to be met with indifference and scorn that he had begun making his own plans. It had taken him the better part of three years, cost him most of his fortune, but now it was done. Three hundred hard-bitten mercenary soldiers had been carefully recruited and were assembling now in Portland. Plans for his own surprise attack had been laid. All the necessary weaponry had been bought, brought here to Big Tree in small shipments, and was ready now for transit to Oregon. Once the arms arrived in Portland and his army of vengeance was ready, he would join them for the trek northward. He would kill Joseph himself, when the time came. He had thought of little else for more than a year now, dreamed of little else. Joseph would die by his hand, just as Stephen had died by Joseph's. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Abruptly Trace got to his feet - tall, dour, stoop-shouldered - and crossed to the window that looked out over the mill and the town beyond. On the siding he could see the two sealed boxcars waiting for their journey north. Winchester.44-40s and Remington Rolling-Block.50s, two Gatling guns, a howitzer, cases of government-issue sidearms, many thousand rounds of ammunition, kegs of black powder, and boxes of dynamite. Enough firepower to ensure that every last Nez Perce - men, women, children, babes in arms - was obliterated from the face of the earth.
He watched mill workers scurrying at their jobs below, knew what they would say if they knew of his plans. They would say he was mad, that his vendetta against the Nez Perce must surely fail. But he knew differently. If the shipment of munitions reached Portland, then the plan would succeed. He believed that with all his heart and soul. And the shipment would get through, he assured himself again. It was a simple matter of transportation, of two sealed boxcars traveling by established short-line routes from point A to point B. There was no reason, none, for anyone to question the bills of lading or to open the cars en route.
Trace turned again, went back to his desk, once again picked up the photographs of his dead wife and dead son. "Soon now, Stephen," he said softly. "Soon now, Clara. Soon."
What could possibly go wrong?
CHAPTER TWO
Rose Denbow sat at the table in her kitchen, finished with picking at another lonely supper. There were still two hours of daylight left, but the trees outside made the room dusky with shadow, and she had lighted a lamp. In its' flickery glow she read again the letter from her sister in San Francisco, which had arrived the week before. She had put off answering it, but tonight, with the pain of Will's cruelty still lingering, she felt the need to unburden herself.
She cleared the table, brought paper and pen and ink. For a time she sat staring at the paper, trying to arrange her thoughts. Then she dipped the pen's nib into the ink bottle, hesitated, and finally began to write.
***
Dear Meg,
I have your most recent letter. It is wonderful news that you are expecting again. I know how much Edward wants a son, and I hope you are able to give him one this time. You seem so happy, I hesitate to burden you with my troubles. Yet I do not know what to do, and I beg your understanding and advice.
Meg, my marriage is dying. I do not know if I can save it, or even if I want to save it, God help me. Will has changed so much since the accident, you cannot imagine what it has done to him and what he is doing to himself. He is so full of self-pity, it is destroying him by inches.
He no longer loves me, I am certain of that. I wonder sometimes if he ever did - deeply, as I loved him when we said our vows six years ago. And the truth is, dear Meg, I do not think I love him any longer, either. It isn't only how much he has changed, his self-pity. I would not admit it to myself until lately, but we were growing apart even before the accident.
Yet I do not know if I have the courage to leave him, or even if leaving is the right thing to do. It might make things even worse for him. I feel as though I would be betraying him.
***
Rose blotted the last few words, reread all that she'd written, very nearly crumpled the paper. Her face felt hot, moist, and not only with the heat that lay thickly in the room. She dried her cheeks with her apron, tucked a damp wisp under the comb that held her fine brown hair in place. Outside, the two Bennett kids were bouncing a rubber ball off the wall of their house; the steady thump, thump, thump and their intermingled shouts and laughter echoed through the fading afternoon and made Rose's head ache.
She drew another sheet of paper in front of her and once again picked up the pen.
***
There is another thing on my mind I must tell you about, for it makes the situation even more complicated. I have feelings for another man. No, you mustn't think I've shamed myself with him. Nor has he made improper advances, though I am quite sure he has feelings for me, too. His name is Matt Kincaid. He owns a small ranch in the nearby hills, where he raises cattle to feed the mill workers.
***
The pen felt slick in her fingers; she laid it down. When she reread these last words, they struck her as foolish and awkward. How could she send this to Meg? She crumpled the sheet, stood, and put it on the dying embers inside the stove. Waited until it caught and flamed before she returned to the table.
Matt Kincaid remained in her thoughts, as he often did these days, and she felt guilty and selfish, as if by thinking about him she were indulging in a form of adultery. The rational part of her mind rejected that, but the emotional part would not release her from her commitment to Will. If their marriage was intolerable now, who was to say it wouldn't become better with the passage of time? If she felt a strong attraction to Matt Kincaid, who was to say it was not simply a passing fancy created by the events of the past six months?
She couldn't decide what was true and what was right. All she knew for certain was that she must make a decision one way or another, and that it must be made soon.
She also knew, now, that she couldn't tell Meg about Matt Kincaid, at least not yet. Nor, for that matter, about the extent of her troubles with Will. Meg would understand - but it was something she must work out alone, and it must not have anything to do with whether or not she decided to leave her husband.
Feeling very much alone, Rose took the first page of the letter and burned it, too, in the stove.
***
The Big Tree Saloon had been deserted except for Pete Weidenbeck, who ran it for Austin Trace, when Denbow got there and claimed the puncheon table by the front window. Then Sam Honeycutt and that rancher, Kincaid, had come in, and later Burt Eilers, and then a rough-dressed stranger who had the look of a teamster. Now, with the day shift at the mill ended, the place was packed tight. The poker and faro tables were open, and Ollie Kimbrough was playing his accordion, and there was plenty of laughter and good fellowship. Denbow preferred it this way, even though he was still alone at the table and didn't enter into any of the conversations. He had enough emptiness and silence at home; here there was a sense of kinship. They all pitied him, sure, just as Rose did, and he hated their pity and their pretense that nothing had changed. But that didn't stop him from pretending he still belonged.
Wasn't much, but it was all he had left.
He drank from his fifth glass of beer, stared out through the window at the mill compound. Twelve years, he thought. The only job he'd ever had except for the summers he'd spent with his old man working the switch engine in the Oakland yards. A friend of Pa's had gotten him on at the mill here. Yard laborer, helper on Ben Purdom's rail crew, then first assistant in no time. He'd have been made crew chief when Ben retired, no question of that, if it hadn't been for that damned day one of the hoist lines broke as they were loading cut logs onto a flatcar and a rolling log caught him and crushed his leg, crushed his future along with it.
Twelve years. He was a mill hand, a railroad worker; he didn't know how to do anything else, hadn't wanted to do anything else. Now he was nothing. Half a man, a cripple. Would have been better if that log had landed on his head instead, put him out of his misery right then and there.
Moodily he rolled and lit a cigarette. No damn good to himself anymore, and no damn good to Rose, either. Not that that didn't work two ways. Her always yapping about starting a new life, pretending like everybody else that things weren't as bad as they seemed. Harping at him, pitying him. Maybe it'd be best for both of them if she moved on back to San Francisco and left him to fend for himself. He'd find some way to survive. He didn't need her or anybody else.
Talk and laughter rose and fell around him, with Ollie Kimbrough's accordion music rolling out jauntily in the background. He was sealed off from it, but he listened, anyway. Sam Honeycutt holding forth about what it was like working for the U.P. in the "Hell on Wheels" days after the war. Joe Ashmead and Burt Eilers and Cletus Boone talking about the fire over at Pine Hill. Al Baker and Webb Murdock yakking about something funny that had happened at the mill today. Nobody saying anything about how bad things looked, not tonight for a change. That subject had been talked to death; there was nothing any of them could do except wait it out, see what Trace decided to do in the end. If somebody started in on it, the music and laughter would die and the rest of the evening would be like an Irish wake.
Denbow sat alone because he had nothing to say himself, on any subject. He'd tried joining in a couple of times, right after he'd recovered from the surgery, but it had been awkward and painful - everybody uncomfortable, talk drying up, pity beating at him in waves. So he'd given up, let them know he wanted nothing more from them than to sit alone in their midst.
He finished his beer, shifted around on the bench to wave his empty glass at Pete Weidenbeck behind the plank. Weidenbeck didn't see him at first; he was serving the rough-dressed stranger another full glass. Denbow shouted above the din, "I'm next, Pete." Weidenbeck heard that, nodded, and lifted his hand.
When Denbow swung back, he saw Kincaid get up from where he was sitting next to Honeycutt and make his way over. The rancher stopped in front of him, produced a smile, and said, "Evening, Will."
Denbow scowled at him.
"Thought you might like some company."
"Yeah? Well, you thought wrong."
"… Buy you a beer?"
"I don't take handouts."
"I'm not offering one-"
"I'll pay for my own beer."
Kincaid kept standing there. His eyes were solemn - like Rose's eyes, like all their eyes when they looked at him. Big son of a bitch, quiet and easygoing, but tough in his own way. Even though he was an outsider, owned his piece of land just a year, the others liked him and accepted him. Denbow didn't like him at all. The pity was one reason, but the main one was that Kincaid was sniffing around Rose like a mongrel dog after a bitch in heat.
You'd have to be blind not to see it in the way he looked at her. And maybe she fancied him, too - likely did, judging from the one time he'd caught her looking back at Kincaid. Wasn't anything improper between them - Denbow would have known it if there was, for Rose could never lie to him - but there might be if he was out of the way.
"Well?" he said, sharp. "Why don't you drift?"
"All right," Kincaid said. "Sorry."
"Sorry? What the hell for?"
"Bothering you."
"Then quit doing it."
Kincaid shrugged, turned away. Denbow was aware that Honeycutt and Ashmead and a couple of the others were watching him; he glared at each of them until they shifted their gazes.
Weidenbeck came over with the fresh glass of beer. Denbow said, "Wait," and caught up the glass and drained it in a single convulsive swallow. He wiped his mouth, handed the empty glass back to Weidenbeck. "Again."
"Sure. Sure, Will."
Denbow looked out the window again. He had to relieve himself, but he'd wait until everybody went home to their wives and kids for supper. He'd wait all night if he had to. He wasn't going to let them see him get up and hobble out to the privy on his goddamn crutch.
