Authors: Tim Sandlin
Dad sent a telegram to Granddad Wiggins back in Dover, but we never heard nothing from that side of the family. I guess they forgot Mom soon as she left Delaware. There wasn’t any point in going anywheres else, so Dad bought us a thirty-dollar shack back of the train depot, and we moved on in. On account of the explosion, there was a stiff competition amongst the Lutherans, the Congregationalists, and the Presbyterians for who could best take care of us. Believe me when I tell you this—Congregationalist women cook circles around Lutherans. Lutherans are fine with greens, but they fry the hell out of everything else. The Presbyterian folks give us a wooden table with legs that didn’t set proper and one chair but not two. They were fixing to come across with a second chair, only Dad nodded off while cutting the pastor’s hair and sliced his neck and it became apparent to one and all that Dad was an addict. After that, the Christian element pretty much wrote us off. Dad picked up some work dipping outhouses, but he didn’t do no real labor the rest of his life.
I could have pulled us through the summer, but come winter, I imagine Dad and me would have starved if Mr. Cox hadn’t taken an active interest in my welfare. He brought us flour and side meat to get by, then, soon as my leg healed, he hired me to clean up his various establishments, including the bank and the Bluebeard Cafe. He gave me his son’s cast-off clothing and a red harmonica I still have. Nobody said more about me and school. My formal education came to a close at thirteen.
I know you may wonder why Mr. Cox showed such kindness as to give me clothes and a job when there was plenty of others equally poor as myself. I have had a long while to think about this, and I have come up with superstition as the answer. Mr. Cox was a forward-looking man with no fondness for the nineteenth century–folks in those days didn’t think the past was superior to the future. That’s a new thing—yet he played poker two nights a week, and thusly he had become deeply superstitious. I think he saw me flying through the air and landing smack on his porch as a sign. Mr. Cox viewed his role as that of dynasty patriarch; his son wasn’t living up to expectations, then I dropped from the heavens into his lap. I was the draw he got to fill an inside straight. So to speak.
In later years, Bill claimed Mr. Cox took me as the cheapest labor to be found and took advantage, but I pointed out his acts of charity began even before I could be of any use to him—such as the Fourth of July. Fourth of July I’d only been without crutches a week and still couldn’t walk any distance, and Dad was sick like usual, so the Coxes came around and gave me a ride to the carnival grounds in Mr. Cox’s new Maxwell. On account of the picnic food, I had to ride on this platform strapped off the back end, but that was okay. I felt good anyway.
Fourth of July was the biggest of holidays back then in Montana. All others came in the cold part of the year, when about the best you could hope for was a dance. Fourth of July was an all-day outdoor event with potato-sack and three-legged races, a rodeo, and a baseball game. Carnies set up booths where you could throw hoops at milk bottles or shoot little targets with a .30-.30 that had a crooked barrel. There was a booth where men threw balls at a bull’s-eye, and if they hit it, this mechanical chair dumped a fancy woman backwards off her perch far enough so if you looked quick, you got a peek at her drawers. Imagine now-days a gang of men spending their money and effort to glimpse a woman’s undergarments.
We ate dinner under a pretty little grove of cottonwoods, and there was hot dogs, fried chicken, ham hock, cold potatoes and onions, lemonade, and chocolate cake. Afterward, Mr. Cox treated me and Agatha to blue cotton candy. I got sick and haven’t eaten nothing blue ever since.
***
Just after dark, I had to see a man about a dog. I did my privy business and was coming back to the tree where Mrs. Cox had a quilt spread, walking along the row between the booths there, when the first firework exploded smack in the sky over my head. Orange spires shot off every which way like a dandelion gone to seed in the wind, then at the tip end of each spire a white flash popped. I stopped dead in my tracks to look up at the effect, and somebody walked into my backside, knocking me forward and sending a pain up my bad leg.
A voice yelled, “Look out, you stupid oaf!”
I turned to face a cowboy, not much older than me, in one of them little Butch Cassidy hats and Spanish spurs. He had black, water-slicked hair and a scrawny mustache no thicker than his eyebrows. I hadn’t been in a fight since Mama died and my leg broke, and I guess I was spoiling for one. Whatever caused my hackle to rise, I took one look at the cowboy and decided to knock his block off.
I said, “Look out yourself, pecker head,” and we lit into each other. He hit me a time or two and I hit him back; then we commenced to roll around on the ground, neither one getting enough distance to land a proper punch. He raked my bad leg with a spur; I stuck a thumb in his eye. It was nothing but boys feeling their oats, the way they do, and I was having a pretty good time until we broke loose from each other and he pulled a pistol.
“What’s this?” I said.
“It’s what I aim to kill you with,” he said. It was a one-shot derringer about the size of his palm. It looked like a toy, but it wasn’t.
“You wouldn’t kill a man ’cause you tripped over him,” I said.
He said, “Like hell I wouldn’t.”
Just then Agatha Cox hollered from behind me, “Bill!” and she ran between us. “You put that gun away. This is my friend Oly. Do Mama and Daddy know you’re here?”
He looked like he wanted to shoot me real bad, but his sister was right in the way, jabbering like we were at afternoon tea. “Mama’ll be happy to see you. The last letter we got you were in Manitou Springs. How’d you get back from there? Ain’t no trains going south.”
“I rode my horse,” he said. The derringer disappeared into whatever hidden pocket where he kept it. “Ain’t that my shirt?”
“Daddy gave it to Oly. His clothes got blown up.”
“Well. I want my shirt back.”
At that point, I became disenchanted with Bill Cox. Agatha had been talking about him like he was Natty Bumppo of the high plains; even Mrs. Cox seemed to think her son was aboveboard, but anybody would try to shoot a man for stopping to look at a firework, then demand the shirt off his back wasn’t no Natty Bumppo, far as I was concerned. In front of Agatha and a crowd of mixed-gender carnies, I yanked Bill’s shirt off and threw it to the ground.
“Take your old shirt,” I said and walked off, doing my best not to show any limp.
He laughed in a mean fashion and called after me. “Them pants look like mine too.”
***
A year and a half later, Christmas, Mr. Cox introduced me to Bill again in the Bluebeard Cafe. Bill shook my hand and asked where my people was from, polite as could be, as if he didn’t recall me from Adam. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he went around threatening to shoot so many folks that he couldn’t bother to remember them. Or maybe he held himself in check ’cause his father was present.
I wasn’t in no position to start trouble with Bill then, on account of my own father was in county lockup that day, and I was vulnerable to insults. A Chinese man name of Hoo Sue Kong had got into a street shoot-out with police and been killed out front of a saloon on Minnesota Avenue. Afterward, the police searched the saloon and found an opium den in the basement, with my father in it. The other hopheads had cleared out soon as the shooting begun, but Dad was not in shape to climb stairs, so he got caught.
They locked him up for three months, which was probably for the good, it being December and all. I doubt he’d of made it through the winter outside of jail, and he didn’t make it through the spring. April 11, my father, Jan, fell asleep on the railroad track out by Coulson and the Burlington Number 41 squashed him. Nobody ever figured out how he come to be out by Coulson. I think maybe he tried to walk home to Sweden.
I was at the roller skating barn when they came to tell me my father had been smashed. I didn’t like skating so much as watching cowboys fall on their rear ends. Their legs aren’t shaped proper for the roller wheels; not a one I ever saw was any good at it. That woman doctor was sent to tell me the news. I don’t know why they sent her. She didn’t have no sympathy for Dad nor me.
I sat on this narrow bench by the skate floor, watching cowboys flail their arms and fall, and I thought about us leaving Dover for the West. As a rule, people go west in hope and east in defeat. On days like that one where Dad died, I think perhaps there is a life on the other side; the rest of the time, I don’t worry myself over it. Mr. Cox gave me an advance for the coffin, and once again, the various Christian groups outdid themselves with cakes and casseroles and such.
***
August of 1911, two days after my birthday, the Anglican Church there had a hayride down to Bitter Creek, where we built a cottonwood bonfire and played charades and roasted up an antelope. There was two wagons full of twenty-five young people, ranging in age from eight to twenty, and some chaperones that snuck off on occasion to nip the bottle.
I rode in the older kids’ wagon where we hunkered under blankets, pretending it was cold but in reality holding hands and carrying on—tame by what young ones do today out in public, but fairly scandalous for the time. You have to recall Montana wasn’t like Nebraska.
Anyway, they were singing “Bishop From Pike,” but I wasn’t; I never had no voice I cared to show off. Instead I pretended to yawn so’s to shift my weight over closer to one of the Pease sisters on my left—I forget which one, they was both somewhat horsey—when I felt soft fingers on my right hand and looked up to see Agatha Cox smiling sweet, right at me.
She said, “You can be my beau.”
Which nonplussed me no end. “You’re a little girl,” I said.
She pouted her lower lip out, and I must admit she was pretty as a button. “I’m thirteen. If I was Arapaho, I’d have three babies by now.”
I had no idea what being Arapaho had to do with holding my hand under the blanket. I tried a new tack. “Mr. Cox trusts me not to take advantage.”
She smiled. “It’s fine. When I’m nineteen and done with school, we’ll get married.”
Nineteen back then was practically an old maid. “Why wait till nineteen?” I asked. See how she switched me around. One minute I’m saying she’s too young, and the next I’m asking why we have to wait. Agatha always did have that affect on me.
“Because I don’t want to be biggered till I’m done with school.”
Biggered
meant pregnant. I knew that, even though it wasn’t really a Montana word. I’m not certain where Agatha had heard it, probably from a book. Agatha read books, so there was never was any telling what she might say next.
I said, “So, little girl, you’re planning on us courting for six years?”
She took my upper arm with her other hand and said, “We’ll know the joy of love.”
***
I never discovered whether Agatha played a part in my improved prospects or not, but soon after this Mr. Cox raised my position to that of bank steward. No more mopping out the Bluebeard kitchen at midnight. Now I wore a collar and necktie and worked in daylight. At first, I mostly filled inkwells and stoked the furnace, but before long I was numbering checks, posting statements, and taking mail out. Once I was sent to repossess a buggy, but when I got there, the man had burned it up. In the evenings, Agatha taught me numbers and improved my reading skills. She taught me how to talk more like a gentleman. She wanted me to advance in life so we could have a house with electricity and indoor hot water. She said she wasn’t bringing no papoose into my dirty shed.
I applied myself with gusto and soon I was dealing firsthand with customers. I helped farmers fill out loan papers, even though I never got permission to approve loans. I’d of given money to anybody needed it to survive, and in the banking business, you don’t loan money to those that need it.
The first time Mr. Cox turned me loose behind the teller window, he showed me a .36-caliber brass-handled pistol they kept on a shelf under the money drawer. He told me sooner or later someone would attempt to rob me.
He said, “Act meek. Say, ‘Yes, sir, here’s the money, sir,’ and give them whatever they want. Then, when they leave you follow the bastards into the street and kill them.”
“I never shot a pistol. I’m not certain if I know how.”
“It’s simple. Point this end at the robber and pull the trigger.”
“What about the safety?”
“Do you see a safety on this gun?”
“No, sir.”
“Point it at the robber’s rib cage and pull the trigger. If there’s more than one robber, keep pulling it until six of them are dead. Then you can quit. If you’re not willing to do this one thing for me, I’ll have to find a man who will.”
“I’m willing,” I said, although secretly, I had no such intention. I told Agatha, and she accused me of not loving her.
“If you truly love me, you won’t let a robber take my daddy’s money.”
“I guess not.”
“Someday that money will belong to us.”
My raise in position did not come with much of a raise in salary, only enough to pay for the clothes I was required to wear to the bank, and the Chinese laundry that kept them clean. In point of fact, without access to the Bluebeard kitchen, my added expenses went higher than my added income. I saved almost every penny in a hole under my shed floor—I didn’t trust the bank not to fail—and within three years I was ready to take a loan on a little rock house on West Fifth Street.
But then, before I had time to fill out the papers, as it had so often in the past, my circumstances turned upside down.
***
The winter of 1913 lasted just about forever, with snow covering the window of my shed and wind you got permanently stooped trying to walk against. One day in late March, Mr. Cox and Frank Lesley left me alone in the bank while they took their dinner down at the Bluebeard. That’s how we generally did it, then they would come back at 12:45 and relieve me while I ate out in the alley from a pail. I did not mind this arrangement, on account of ofttimes, Agatha took advantage of the hour when I was alone to sneak into the bank and we’d spark if there wasn’t any customers.