There were eight of us working girls living at Plum Street back then. In addition we had Simple Kitty greeting at the front of house, two more housemaids, two kitchen maids, a cook and a barman, a musical director, who played piano in the main parlour and organized musicians for the ballroom each night. There was also Carlos, the man-of-all-work. And overlooking us all with her beady eye and the tightest pocketbook in Colorado, there was Phoebe: once a working girl herself, now Madam to the most popular parlour house in Trinidad. Unlike me, she had learned early on how to keep hold of her money and get the hell out of the game.
Phoebe must have been among the wealthiest individuals in town, but there was never a time when she wasn’t on the lookout to be making more for herself. Any chance for another buck, Phoebe would be onto it. She’d developed a hundred sly ways to cheat the johns so that they wouldn’t feel it, or didn’t care. She used to cheat us girls too, charging interest on debts we’d run up here and there. In the early years, I hadn’t used to mind so much. I was grateful for such a comfortable place to live. But more recently my attitude had changed. After so many years on my back, splitting my earnings with Phoebe and having nothing whatsoever to show for them, I had been trying, at last, to get myself in hand. I had eased up on the laudanum. Eased up on the liquor too. And I was beginning to keep some of my money back.
One of the girls must have told Phoebe I was trying to get myself together, and she didn’t like it one bit. At thirty-seven years old, I wasn’t the youngest girl in the house, and maybe I wasn’t the prettiest either, but I knew what I was doing. I pulled in more than my fair share of business and Phoebe wasn’t ready to lose me.
The morning they shot Lippiatt she had presented me with an unpaid receipt from a dressmaker who’d been dead for two years. Maybe it was genuine – I had been drinking a lot two years before then, and the laudanum would have been playing its part. In any case, I had no way to check up on it. Even if I had, there wasn’t much I could have done about it. Phoebe held the town in her pocket. If she decided I owed her – well then, I owed her. For all its comforts and luxuries, Plum Street was a jail of sorts. Leaving it was never going to be a simple business …
As I sit here twenty years on, at my little desk overlooking the warm Pacific Ocean, it seems the greatest of miracles to me that I ever did.
But life at Plum Street had its compensations. For a few years I used to think that William Paxton was one of them. He owned a gun store in town, and a few others upstate, and from the frequency of his visits to see me, I assumed they made him a good living. He’d been my regular client since his wife was sick and dying, and he was a decent man: quiet, gentle and generous.
He used to talk to me about his wife when she was dying and, after that, when his grief had eased, about all sorts of things. Sex and music and … well, sex and music, mostly, which were our interests in common. Maybe a little bit about real estate and automobiles, too. In any case, we became friends. I told him something about my life before I came to Trinidad – not all of it true, of course. But I told him how I came from England, the child of two Christian missionaries, one long dead, the other long since returned to England – which was true. And I told him how, before circumstances changed, I used to travel the Western circuit with a group of popular musicians and stand before a full hall and sing and dance, and that once, long ago, I was quite a music hall sensation. Which was also true, so far as I recall.
He bought me a little, old-fashioned harpsichord – heaven knows how he found it – which I kept in my rooms (Phoebe said a piano would have made too much noise), and we used to sing together; or, more often, I would sing for him. I told him, as I told Inez, about how one fine day, when I was too old for this game, I wanted to open a little singing school, perhaps in Denver. He pinched me and laughed.
‘Don’t be absurd, Dora,’ he said, and I know he meant it kindly. ‘You’ll never be too old for this game. You’ll be adorable until the day you die.’
He used to tell me how much he cared for me. And I believe he did. Occasionally, when we were alone together, he used to mutter tender things; and I am convinced that in the last few weeks and months, before Lippiatt’s death seemed to change everything in our little town, his feelings for me were stronger than ever. He said to me, a month or so before Lippiatt died, that he was ‘missing the comfort of a wife’, and on another occasion, around the same time, I remember he said: ‘I want to behave to you as a gentleman should.’
Inevitably, perhaps, I played the words over until they meant what I wanted them to mean: something vast and precious. And I began to believe that he loved me and that I loved him.
Well, he came to see me in the week after Lippiatt’s death. The streets were still cluttered with angry delegates, and the sheriff’s men roamed among them, waving their guns. William sought me out at Plum Street in the midst of it, earlier in the day than was usual. If he had been anyone else, I might have kept him waiting. But William was different, and when I came down to the ballroom I greeted him warmly – too warmly. Beady Phoebe swept across the room and shot me a warning look. It was against house rules to form strong attachments. ‘For your own protection,’ she used to tell us. ‘I don’t want my girls getting their hearts all smashed up. Bad for business.’
‘No heart left to smash,’ I used to say.
But afterwards, I knew I should have listened. Our heads were side by side on the pillow … and I wince to remember the affection I felt as I looked across at him. He glanced at me, sheepish as hell, gave a tug on his moustache, which he never did before and, for the maddest moment, because he looked so terribly ill at ease, I was certain he would speak the words. He said:
‘Dora, I’ve been meaning to mention …’
‘Mention what, William?’
‘Only the fact is …’
‘Yes, William?’
‘Because I want to do right by you, Dora. Never doubt it.’
‘I never would doubt it, William.’
‘I probably would have been sunk without you, after Matty died.’ He laughed. ‘I tell myself you kept me sane. I believe you did.’
‘Nonsense. You kept yourself sane. I just …’ I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence, so I left it there.
‘Fact is, Dora …’
I stroked his face and kissed his shoulder. His shyness melted my heart! ‘The fact is,
what
,darling man?’ I said.
‘Fact is, I’ve met a girl in Denver.’
My heart gave a double beat of misery.
‘She’s the sweetest girl.’
‘A sweet girl?’ I repeated. ‘You have met a sweet girl in Denver?’
‘I’m sure you’d take to her.’
‘Oh. I am sure …’
‘I mean to say, if you ever met her.’ Idly, awkwardly, he stretched an arm across the bed to caress me. ‘She is the most lovely girl I ever met,’ he said, and as he spoke he continued to tweak and squeeze and massage. ‘And the beauty of it is, she’s young enough for a whole brood of children!’ He laughed. ‘Unlike you, Dora! You and I are as old as the hills.’
I smiled. And smiled again. I wasn’t so damn old.
‘And the point of it is, Dora. Well, she has very kindly – crazily – but yes, Dora. She has agreed to be my wife.’
‘Oh!’
‘Yes. I’m kind of reeling from it myself, truth be told.’
‘It’s wonderful news.’
‘Yes. Yes indeed it is. Only the reason I mention it,’ he said.
‘The reason you mention it …’ I kept smiling, but my hand brushed his away. And I can picture his face now: an expression of slight hurt, mild surprise. He rested his arm by his side. ‘Since this nonsense with Lippiatt …’ he continued. ‘Well, it was the last straw. And I want you to believe, Dora, that my only regret in all of it will be leaving you. But I have decided to settle in Denver. It’s a better city. Don’t you think?’
He seemed to expect a reply. ‘I hardly know,’ I said.
‘There is so much vice here in Trinidad,’ he said, without a trace of irony. ‘I don’t want my wife and children living in such a place. Trinidad’s not the place it used to be.’
‘But I’m sure it won’t always be like this,’ I said, as if anything I said might have altered anything. ‘It’s only these past few weeks that things have gotten so bad. I’m sure as soon as the two sides can find agreement …’
He shook his head. ‘They found a company man on the rail tracks outside Forbes camp last night. Shot dead.’ Somehow his hand had worked its way back to my breast. ‘Retaliation killing,’ he muttered. ‘It won’t be the last, either.’
‘Well, but—’
‘But … but – nothing,’ he said. ‘I just want you to be happy for me. Can you manage that?
Please?
’
‘Of course I’m happy for you, William,’ I said. He looked relieved and grateful. As if he believed me! And then he climbed on top of me again, and he mumbled to the pillow above my head: ‘I bought a nice house in Denver. I wish you could see it … But I’ll see you right, baby. It’s a promise.’
Since Lippiatt’s death the mood in town had soured, there was no doubt. Each evening, miners travelled in from the outlying camps to listen to Union men preaching, to be harried and beaten by the Baldwin-Felts detectives, and to harry and beat them back. Both sides stomped the streets, drinking and fighting, their heavy boots kicking up the dust, as if the town belonged only to them. The Union had an anthem, and intermittently the gathering miners would break into song, filling the streets with their bellowing voices. It was a song we would all, in Trinidad, become more than familiar with in the months to come. I wake with it sometimes, even now, playing in my head.
We are fighting for our rights, boys,
We are fighting for our homes …
It was early afternoon, a day or two after William Paxton had told me he was moving to Denver, and I was still recovering – if not from the heartbreak of it, then from mortification at my self-delusion. In all the drama of the last attempt, I still hadn’t fetched my package from Carravalho’s Drugstore, and I was making my way there, ignoring the miners, the police and the Unionists, the baking heat and the wretched, constant thrum of promised, longed-for violence. It was the first time I had been along North Commercial since the murder, and I couldn’t help pausing at the spot where Lippiatt had fallen. In the dry summer, I noticed, faint stains of his blood still lingered. I was studying them, somewhat ghoulishly, when I heard Inez’s voice:
‘Oh! It’s
you
!’ she cried. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you!’
I don’t think it occurred to her I would be anything but equally delighted to see her. And of course she was right. She looked young and fresh and full of hope, and so unlike the girls at Plum Street that I felt my heart lift. She said: ‘I wanted to come and find you days ago, but I didn’t know quite
how
… And now I’m on my way to the Union offices! What do you think about
that
?’ She sounded triumphant. ‘For heck’s sake, don’t tell Aunt Philippa though. She’ll murder me …’ She looked down at her feet, at the stain of blood. ‘Not literally, of course,’ she added. ‘I should think Lawrence O’Neill will be quite shocked to see me. Don’t you think so?’
I laughed. ‘He’ll have given up on you by now. I should think he’ll be astonished.’
‘I was lying low.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Had to, Dora. But it’s only been a week. Ten days. He can’t have forgotten me already. And if he says he has, I’ll know he is lying. He said he’d take me out to the camps. I’m fairly certain he promised me. So. Here I am. What do you think?’
Again, I found myself laughing. ‘You’re a braver woman than I am,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t get into an automobile with a Union man if my life depended on it. And certainly not if he was threatening to take me out to the towns … It’s dangerous,’ I felt compelled to add. ‘You realize, don’t you?’ Despite all she had witnessed, and on the very spot we were standing, I don’t believe she ever really understood it. ‘The company guards are no less trigger-happy than your Union friends.’
‘I
know that
!Actually, I was going to ask Lawrence if you might come with us,’ she said. ‘For the sake of …’ She stopped, frowned – and melted into that merry laugh of hers. ‘Well, I was going to say, “for respectability”, but it’s not quite what I mean, is it? It can’t be.’
‘Nothing respectable about me,’ I smiled. ‘Why don’t you visit Cokedale with your aunt instead?’ I said. ‘Leave Lawrence O’Neill and his Union well out of it. And me,’ I added. ‘It would be far safer. Didn’t you say she helped at the school?’
She shook her head. ‘Uncle Richard won’t allow it any more. Not now it’s finally gotten interesting.’
I wanted to tell her,
it’s not a game
. But she kept talking.
‘Anyhow, it would be more educational with Mr O’Neill. Don’t you think so? Plus, he’s absolutely right. I can’t be living here all this time, with bullets flying and people marching and everyone absolutely itching for a fight and still have not the slightest idea what they’re complaining about.’
‘Well I can
tell
you what they’re complaining about,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you want. You don’t have to go all the way out to the company towns to find out.’
‘But I
want
to go out there.’
It sounded plaintive. Standing on the spot where Lippiatt died, and almost – very nearly – stamping her little foot, her innocence and sweetness seemed less delightful suddenly; her open-minded curiosity not ad- mirable, but heartless and effete. ‘So you can look at the miners and their families like they’re zoo animals, I suppose,’ I said. ‘And risk getting shot. What would your aunt and uncle think?’
‘Why, I certainly don’t think they’re zoo animals,’ she replied. ‘And really what my aunt and uncle might think about it is hardly any concern …’
‘There’s plenty for the miners to complain about, I assure you.’
‘Oh, I’m sure there is,’ she said. She began to retreat. ‘Well … Dora … Miss …’ It occurred to me I had never told her my second name – my married name. I didn’t offer it then. ‘Miss … whatever your name is. Have a good day.’