Telegraph Days (6 page)

He chuckled at his own wit, and blew a smoke ring.

I suspected that there was more to Teddy's absence than a toothache. My arrival in Rita Blanca as a resident had put him off his feed. Perhaps he had realized he couldn't marry me and keep me at a safe distance too. A dilemma of that sort probably contributed to his toothache.

“So will you really be staying with us for a while, Miss Court-right?” Aurel asked.

He didn't appear to be studying me, but I had the feeling that he didn't miss much, and the same could be said for Mrs. Karoo, though she smoked her pipe and kept her thoughts to herself.

“I can't speak for Sis but I'm sure not going back,” Jackson said. “If I was to, one of my uncles would pop me right in school.”

Jackson was right about that: the Courtrights had an innocent trust in highfalutin education—Greek and Latin and the like. If the uncles got hold of Jackson he'd be in Harvard College so quick it would make your head swim. Or if it wasn't Harvard College, it would be somewhere else just as stuffy. Maybe there wasn't much to be said for Rita Blanca, but nobody could mistake it for a stuffy place. I was a little startled that Jackson had been so forthright about his plans—usually he cleared major decisions with me before announcing them. I guess being a deputy sheriff for one day had been enough to render him independent, a happenstance I was of two minds about.

“I won't be going back either,” I said, not to be left out. “In the
course of walking up and down the street I noticed that the telegraph office is closed. Is that permanent, or temporary?

“A town without a well-functioning telegraph office is never likely to amount to much,” I added. I thought I'd hit them with a blunt opinion before springing my surprise.

“We had a telegrapher till last month,” Aurel said. “His name was Zeke Ryan. But then Zeke took himself a Comanche bride and is farming weeds somewhere down by the South Canadian.

“Your point is on the nose, though,” he added. “The hide business is hard on knives—we use 'em up at a terrible rate. If the telegraph was working I could replenish my knives in an efficient fashion, which presently I can't.”

“Why, Nellie can work a telegraph lickety-split,” Jackson said. He was on his way out the door but paused long enough to put a plug in for his sister.

“Uncle Grandy taught her,” he added, and then he left.

“I seem to remember that your uncle Grandy was a particular favorite of General Grant,” Aurel Imlah said, in a light tone. “Didn't he lose a leg or something?”

“At Antietam,” I said. “He was the only one of the uncles to fight for the Union side. And he was General Grant's personal telegrapher for most of the war.”

Mrs. Karoo got up and went to a small cupboard—she returned with three small glasses and a bottle of rum. She poured each of us a little, and I was glad to be included, although I did not often partake of spirituous liquors.

“I suppose there was some bitterness, after the peace,” Aurel remarked, sniffing his rum.

“Yes, there was,” I admitted. “So much bitterness that Uncle Grandy had to move to Louisville, Kentucky. But he was my mother's favorite brother, war or no war, so I was able to visit him in the summer.”

In fact Uncle Grandy had been a wonderful man, with a white tapering beard and a gift for watercolors. He taught me to play checkers when I was two—if I saw he had me cornered I'd push his hand away.

“You're in this game of life to win, aren't you, missy?” he said to me with a chuckle. I don't think he ever made it up with his brothers,
but then ours was hardly the only family that bitter conflict divided.

“I may be a little rusty with my codes at first,” I told the two of them. “It's been a while since I tapped a telegraph key. I'll soon improve and be reliable. Does anyone have a key to that shack of an office?”

“I'd be surprised if it's even locked,” Aurel said. “And I'd be surprised if you don't find a snake or two on the premises.”

“What would I get for a salary?” I asked, finishing my rum.

That stumped the two of them. Neither of them had any idea what a skilled telegrapher might be worth to the community of Rita Blanca. There was only the group of deacons Teddy Bunsen had mentioned, a loosely organized bunch, at least by the standards of Virginia small towns, where city fathers are thick on the ground.

“If you need me to send an order for some skinning knives I'll do it tomorrow,” I told Aurel. “We can figure out the salary, I expect. My younger brother is making fifteen dollars a month as deputy sheriff—and I'm well ahead of him when it comes to education, so I expect a little more than that.”

Aurel Imlah seemed amused. It seemed to me that Mrs. Karoo got a special light in her eyes when she looked at him.

Since there was still a little light left in the summer sky I left the two of them to their pipes and strolled down the street to my new place of business, the telegraph office. It wasn't locked, but it was snaky. I had taken the precaution to borrow a spade from Mrs. Karoo, and I used it to ease two bull snakes and a small copperhead out the door. Of course, bull snakes won't tolerate rattlers, so there was none of that breed to be seen, though I did have to mash a bunch of black widow spiders and one sizable tarantula. There was the dust of the ages on the windowpanes, but the most important thing of all, the telegraph key, seemed to work fine. Zeke Ryan had been thoughtful enough to cover it with a snug leather sheath.

Impatient as ever, I immediately sent a wire to Dodge City—I wanted to wake them up to the fact that there was a working telegrapher in Rita Blanca once more.

When I came out I happened to look over at the jail. Ted Bunsen was sitting on the edge of the gallows, swinging his legs and smoking a thin cigar. The man had proposed to me six times—I figured the least I could do was inquire about his toothache.

“Toothache's gone,” Ted mumbled. “Doc Siblee pulled the tooth. Now I've got a hole in my jaw big enough to stick a stob in.”

“Gargle some warm salt water,” I advised. “That usually helps, if you give it time.”

“Doc says rye whiskey might provide the best cure,” Ted said—it was not a reply that sat easy with me. It would be just like Teddy to get drunk and fall off his own gallows. He didn't strike me as lucky, which meant that he might break his neck in the fall. That might result in quick promotion for Jackson, but I didn't dislike Ted's ticklish kissing enough to really want him to break his neck.

I decided my intervention was doing Ted more harm than good, so I went on home in the deepening dusk. The back porch still held the smell of rum and pipe tobacco, but of the landlady and the hide hunter there was nothing to be seen.

I
HAD BARELY
tucked into a plate of flapjacks, sweetened with blackstrap molasses, when my brother, Jackson, popped in the door and gave me an irritated look.

“You're late for work!” he informed me. “You've got people lined up halfway to Dodge City, wanting to send off telegrams.

“The Skivvy Kid is even in line,” Jackson added, as if he were announcing the arrival of Napoleon or somebody else important enough to make me hurry my breakfast.

“I would have thought the Skivvy Kid would just shoot a line of people, if he found one in front of him,” I commented, though all I really knew about the Skivvy Kid was that he wore his long johns winter and summer, and was said to be a fine marksman.

I popped up to my room and hit a lick or two with the comb and the brush—when I looked out the window I saw that there was a big line of people waiting at the telegraph office. From a distance the folks seemed to be in a pretty good humor, idling and gossiping as human beings will when opportunity offers. I borrowed one of Mrs. Karoo's sunbonnets and was quickly out the door.

A cheer went up when folks figured out that I was no fluke—now the women could send off all the wires they wanted to the mail-order stores. The first thing I noticed was that the bull snakes had moved back in.

“Move back a step, miss,” I said to the first woman in line. “Let me just evacuate the snake population and I'll get to you as fast as I can.”

The bull snakes didn't take kindly to being evicted from their home of recent weeks. They hissed at me in that aggressive way they have, which seemed to irritate a lanky cowboy to such an extent that
he picked one of the snakes up by the tail, swung him around a few times, and threw him about halfway to Aurel Imlah's hide yard. The other snake prudently found himself a hole and crawled in it.

“I could probably educate those snakes, if I can have a day or two,” I informed the cowboy, who was no more impressed with me than he had been by the bull snakes.

“I got a herd arriving in Dodge tomorrow,” he informed me. “I need to be sure the railroad's ready for them.”

If you're interested in finding out quick how impatient the human race is, just apprentice yourself to a telegraph operator sometime. The old lady who had been first in line wanted to order pincushions and paperweights and she wanted them ordered from a store in Cincinnati. The cowboy who was hard on bull snakes wanted seventeen cattle cars waiting in Dodge City for noon departure to Kansas City. Preacher Milton was in dire need of extra hymnbooks, the pack rats having chewed up most of the available supply. Leo Oliphant was running low on palatable brown ale—he wanted twenty cases of the best sent out at once. Doc Siblee was out of tongue depressors, and the light twine he used for stitches was nearly all used up.

I really wanted this job, and I hadn't been officially hired yet, so I was as patient as a pet possum, although some requests purely stumped me.

Two stout gray-haired ladies who looked like sisters wanted me to send off a wire to Buffalo Bill—they wanted him to send each of them an autographed picture.

“Get him to send one of him scalping an Indian, if he has one,” the bossier of the two sisters requested.

“Now that's a fine thing to ask of a first-time telegrapher on her first day of work,” I told them, keeping my tone light and cheery. “I have no way of knowing where Buffalo Bill might be, much less whether he has photographs to spare.”

The ladies were unimpressed by my claim of inexperience. They wanted what they had stood in line for, and so far I wasn't providing it. If I ever stood for election in Rita Blanca I had a feeling I might not get their votes.

“Use your wits, young lady,” one of them said sharply. “Everybody knows that his wife, Lulu Cody, lives in Rochester, New York. You just
send off a wire to Lulu quick. Tell her that we want two pictures, and we want them signed by Buffalo Bill Cody himself.”

I was trying to phrase a diplomatic reply to that question when help came from an unexpected source—namely the Skivvy Kid, who happened to be in line right behind the ladies. He wore brown long johns with a cheap gray vest over them. The vest could have used mending. He had a gun stuck in his belt, though not a very big gun. Far from looking like a hardened killer, he looked like a choirboy who had just got separated from his choir.

“It would be a waste of time sending a wire all the way to Rochester,” he said. “Mr. Cody's over in Leavenworth at the moment, organizing a buffalo hunt for some rich men.”

The two women—by name the McClendon sisters—were loath to credit this information, even though it had come from the famous Skivvy Kid.

“There aren't any rich men in Leavenworth,” one of them told him. “We ought to know—our sister Mabel lives there.”

“No ma'am, the rich men are coming from Chicago in a special train. If you'll excuse me it's my baby sister's birthday—I'd like to send her a token of esteem.”

He coolly stepped around the McClendon sisters—I expected this to bring a challenge, but the Skivvy Kid's information had thrown the sisters into confusion; they abandoned the line for the moment and wandered off to discuss this new development.

The Skivvy Kid had a wide gentle mouth and dreamy eyes—just the sort of eyes I've always been a sucker for. But I was at work and I intended to be as professional as possible. The Kid took a telegraph blank and stared at it for a time, with a sense of strain. I don't think he knew what he wanted to say. Endearments may not have come easy to a man who seemed to live his life in his underwear.

“What's your sister's name?” I asked, in an effort to be helpful.

“Her name's Jesse but we call her Little Peach,” he said, the sign of hard effort in his face.

I took the pen and wrote a simple message: “Dear Little Peach stop I bet you're so grown up I wouldn't recognize you stop you'll get a bear hug next time we meet stop love from—”

Then I realized I didn't know his real name.

“Oh,” he said, seeing my dilemma. “I'm Andrew … just put Andy.”

“Let's do a little better than that, since it's her birthday,” I suggested.

The Skivvy Kid looked blank. The young fellow was genial, but he wasn't exactly full of talk.

“Love and kisses Andy,” I wrote on the telegraph form, and I showed it to him.

“Will that do?” I asked.

“That'll do,” he said.

B
EFORE
I
LET
the Skivvy Kid, whose real name was Andy Jessup, escape my office I invited him to take supper with me and my brother, Jackson, at Mrs. Karoo's boardinghouse. He didn't argue the matter—usually, as I came to know, the Skivvy Kid was all agreement.

“I rode a far piece to get to this telegraph office in time to wire my baby sister on her birthday,” he told me. “I'm tired. I believe I'll crawl under a wagon somewhere and have myself a snooze.”

“All right, but come running when you hear the dinner bell,” I warned him. “Vittles don't last long at Mrs. Karoo's.”