With that, I offer Chapter Two below:
CHAPTER TWO
ALVIRA
One morning on the western edge of
Tombstone, the woman who'd been calling herself Virgil Earp's wife long enough
to have made a fact of it killed a badger-sized rat with a shovel in the shed
behind the one-room adobe they shared with Virge's relations. When she was done pounding the rat she
summoned Virge down the ladder from the roof to view the remains. Virge was glad of a reason to excuse himself
from patching the several holes in the dried mud of the roof. Always the holes he repaired gave birth
overnight to more holes still larger and more ragged, and she knew he was close
to thinking it was beyond his power ever to catch up to their rate of
increase. He descended the ladder to
observe her rat. It was a Goliath
indeed, but Virge allowed he'd seen bigger.
Allie demanded to know where.
"Fort Donelson, Tennessee," he
replied, "during the Rebellion."
Suspiciously she squinted. "I declare, that war was the most
convenient thing that ever happened to you, when it comes to telling stretchers. I just hope someday I meet an old messmate of
yours, so's I can question him and expose all your fiddle-faddle."
He picked up the dead rat by the tail and
flung it into the creosote that grew thick behind the cabin. It hit the ground in a puff of dust and two
others darted into the open to scurry out of sight underneath brother James's
big Shattuck wagon. Allie shook her
head. "You've got to find us a cat
before these critters nibble up everything we own. I chased one off this morning that was
dragging a poke of coffee beans right out the door into the road."
Virge shrugged. "Only thing scarcer than unclaimed color
hereabouts is a mouser. I saw a fellow
give ten silver dollars t'other day for an old one-eyed tom with both ears chewed
off."
The corners of Allie's mouth turned down
in a little moue of sarcasm. "If brother Wyatt's so foxy about how to
get rich, how come he didn't fetch along a wagonload of cats?"
As usual Virge failed to rise to the
bait. Virge's younger brother Wyatt
prided himself on his foresight and business sense; it was on account of him
and his visions of prosperity that Virge and Allie - and older brother James
and his family too - had come to such a dry-bones spot as Tombstone in the
first place, to make their fortunes, as Wyatt was fond of saying. Allie harbored doubts about brother Wyatt and
his plots and often spoke her misgivings out, like now. But instead of taking issue—he seldom did—Virge
only stood close and wrapped one big arm around her. He favored her with that look of his that
could still make her squirm with delight, even after their five years of living
together. His smile was regretful. "I reckon," he said, "'t'ain't
no fit place to live atall."
She laid her head against his broad
chest. She smelled the good salt smell
of his sweat mixed with the spicy aroma of his shaving-soap and the faint whiff
of lye that lingered in his shirt from its last laundering. She threaded an arm underneath his jacket and
closed it about his waist. He felt so
firm that he might have been planted in the ground with roots, like an
oak. He was what she needed most. In the twenty-five troublesome years she'd
lived before he came swaggering along to cast his sunshine over her, Alvira
Sullivan had been steadily losing hope that this world offered anything beyond
a power of misery, or that she could ever count on another living soul, or that
there was any remedy at all for being so lonesome she ached. Virge had fixed that just by showing up. That was why she could abide a swarm of rats,
and an adobe hut with the mud stucco falling off in chunks and holes in the
roof so big you could look up through the rotten vigas and the rips in
the muslin of a night and count the stars.
Unmindful of her contentment, he gave her
a squeeze meant to reassure.
"Directly we'll have a proper house of our own, Al, I promise. Just be patient awhile longer."
She might fancy the man, but it was no
reason not to keep him feeling beholden.
She wagged in his face the swollen tips of her fingers, red as rosebuds
from sewing the stiff canvas she and Ceelie Anne were making into an awning for
Mr. Jim Vogan's saloon and bowling alley down the road. "Well, till you mining tycoons strike
the mother lode, sister Ceelie and me will just keep on slaving away with the
needle and thread and that Singer machine of mine. I expect if we work double shifts we can
manage to earn enough to feed the eight of us and the rats too.
Virge dipped his head the way he did when
he felt remorseful. Frank, his old
Pawnee dog, came loping around the corner of the hut, lifted a leg against the
nigh rear wheel of brother James's Shattuck, then stretched out in the dirt and
watched them with his liver-colored tongue dangling. Virge wistfully watched him back. Allie knew he was tormenting himself and it
made her feel smug.
Presently he said, "You know that
fellow Gird, the mining engineer? Wyatt
took him out to look at the claim this morning.
Gird says it looks to him like the ore's setting big end up. There's no telling how deep it goes without
working it, but what's on top assays out at about seventy dollars to the ton,
although he did get a hundred fifty out of our best piece of float. It might get get richer lower down." He paused and gave a squint. "Or it could peter out," he
admitted with a little sigh. "We can go ahead and sink on it and hope for
better value underneath, or we can just decide it won't stand blasting and sell
it off. Myself, I'm inclined to put her
on the market."
She barely heard him and in time he sensed
it and quit conversing to the empty air.
He was used to her notice winding off elsewhere whenever he remarked
about the mining. He'd always loved the
long chance, and in the three years they'd lived in Arizona he'd used every
free moment prospecting for the seam of gold, or silver, or copper, or lead, or
something, that was going to make them flush.
They weren't flush yet—far from it, God knew—but Virge felt sure they
would be, one day. Allie suspected
otherwise but never did begrudge him his hopes.
She was just weary of hearing him go on about them.
"Well," he laughed in a sheepish
way, "seeing as how I've put you in a doze with my palaver, I reckon I'll
go back to work and leave you a-slumbering."
She watched him climb the ladder nimble as
a cat despite his size and heft. It
always amazed her how quick and clever he could move and how graceful, him being
so big-boned and inclined to stoutness as he was. He looked over the edge of the roof at her
and grinned in his ruddy face so that his droopy mustache the color of cooked
carrots reversed itself and turned saucily up.
The sun kindled in his red-blond thatch.
She thought him the seemliest of sights up there, smiling down on
her. Allie had been an orphan girl and
homely with her freckles and her scrap of orange hair, yet this man, mighty and
handsome as he was, had wanted her. It
still seemed a marvel past all accounting.
She resumed feeding the laying hens as
she'd been doing when the rat appeared, while above her on the roof Virge
commenced humming in his tuneless way, troweling out the fresh mud. It was a wonder to her how jolly Virge could
be when brother Wyatt was such a draught of cold, with ways as dank as a
serpent's. Wyatt was the middle one in
age—there were two others apart from Jim, Morgan and Warren, younger than
he—but he always behaved as though the whole clan had got together and elected
him boss over the bunch of them. Maybe they had, at that. Whatever tune he called, every last Earp would
dance it.
Yet, though nearly all thought of him
vexed her, in a strange way Allie couldn't help holding him somewhat dear. Partly this was because he was of Virge's
blood, and close enough in likeness to be his twin save for being slighter, and
because he clearly doted on Virge. Also,
as an orphan Allie loved being in the heart of a big and boisterous family at
last and brother Wyatt was a part of that.
He was a long, rangy, good-looking cuss, over six foot high, with
close-set blue eyes and thick blond hair with auburn tones in it and the white
and slender hands of a gambler. He
carried himself like a potentate. Yet
there was his coldness. Sometimes it
frightened her.
After finishing with the chickens she went
into the jacal to make ready for dinner.
She skinned and cut up the two rabbits Virge had shot that morning and
picked the shot out of them and put them in a pot with some onions and potatoes
and peppers and set out to fix a stew.
On the other side of the cloth partition that divided the one room she
found brother Jim's stepdaughter Hattie lying still abed, in her nightdress at
eleven o'clock in the morning, and although it was no concern of Allie's how
much the girl lolled and lazed, Allie couldn't help reproaching her for her
layabout ways.
Hattie stretched in such manner that one
white globe of teat popped out of the yoke of her nightdress and showed its
nipple of pale pink, a vision that was wasted on Allie but when presented - as
it often was - to the menfolk of the house, sometimes fetched an appreciative
if guilty glance sideways. "You
cover yourself up, young woman," Allie admonished. Hattie had chill and empty eyes, pale as
moons. She fixed these on Allie, who
felt them on her like spots of frost.
"You ain't my mama to be telling me how to be," Hattie
remarked in surly fashion. She sat up on
her pallet with her knees under her chin and the bottom of the nightdress hiked
up to display her nearly hairless nether parts.
Allie turned aside in chagrin.
Hattie said, "Get yourself your own youngun to argue at."
At the sting of this Allie bit her lip and
fought back a surge of tears. She had
kept alive for long an ember of hope for the child she and Virge had always
wanted but hadn't got. The Lord only
knew why they were not favored in that way.
Maybe something was wrong with Allie inside. Or maybe—she didn't really believe this—there
was some taint to Virge's seed. Whatever
the reason, she longed for a babe as only an orphan can. She wanted a little girl she could dress in
pinafores and ribbons, who would grow up to be pretty and sly and funny and
wise. Virge wanted a girl too, to make
into a tomboy with scabs on her elbows and dirt on her knees and her hands sunk
to the wrists in a jar of night-crawlers. God, if there was a God, hadn't
answered that prayer in five long years.
There on the mountain at their sawmill camp by Thumb Butte above
Prescott, where they'd lived before coming here, she'd dared hope maybe He
would. He hadn't, or maybe didn't exist
atall and couldn't; and now Allie feared her ember of hope was fading out.
"No," she told Hattie by way of
reply, choking back her pain, "you ain't my youngun, and thank the Lord
for it. But it's the job of an aunt to
teach a girl what's becoming." She
scowled and added, "And what you're a-doing, ain't."
While Allie busied herself with the stew,
Hattie got up and went padding barefoot out of the jacal; Allie watched
through the window as she walked in the dooryard with the sun shining through
the thin cotton nightdress in such a way as to outline every curve of her. Hattie wanted Virge to see her body from his
perch on the roof. She leaned over to
pick up a pebble so that Virge could remark how her bosoms dangled. Then she threw the rock at the rooster, who
ruffled up his neck feathers and looked offended. "My mama's a
whore," Hattie said, as if addressing the rooster. "The man that says he's my papa is a
pimp."
Allie shook her head. Bad blood ran in Hattie's veins and it was
running hotter by the season as she grew out of her sullen girlhood toward a
woman's state. There was no telling what
scamp had got her; she was a woods colt and sister Bessie, her mama, had never
told the father's name. Bessie and
brother James—Jim, they mostly called him—were in the sporting trade and
because of this, by common consent many such large questions lay unanswered and
unexplored between them.
Allie conceded that Hattie was something
of an argument against having younguns.
But she also thought Hattie dwelt on carnal matters thanks to sister
Bessie, who'd passed on to the girl whatever demon it was that tempted women to
take up the gay life. Bessie herself was
a great beauty and wore a cloud of brunette hair. She was a devout Catholic and would regularly
go to mass and confession. The faith of
Rome was the perfect one for what she called a Cyprian, she always maintained,
because you could be absolved every morning for what you did by night. And Bessie favored the life, no question
about it. As a matter of fact, it was
probably what she was up to this very minute, down at the other end of town
where the cribs were.
Presently Hattie returned inside frowning
and Allie couldn't help wondering if it was because Virge had refused to leer
at her—Allie hoped that was the case.
Virge was a hot-blooded man; most every night he got after Allie, saying
he had a trouser serpent that wanted to bite her. Not that she minded it one bit. Smiling in secret she busied herself in the
kitchen. In a while Hattie began washing
up and doing her hair, although she kept the nightdress on. When the stew was ready Allie hollered out
the window to Virge and he came down the ladder all smeared with mud. While he cleaned his hands at the wash-basin
Hattie tried the same trick of putting her knees under her chin but Virge gave
her nary a look and Allie was pleased.
Brother Jim and his step-boy Frank showed
up for dinner. Jim had taken a job
tending bar down at Mr. Vogan's place, whose awning Allie and Ceelie were
sewing. Nephew Frank, who at sixteen was
a year older than his half-sister but no more related to Jim than Hattie was,
had got himself hired by a freighting outfit and was due to leave for Globe
tomorrow driving a rig. His nature was
just the opposite of Hattie's—free and laughing and brim-full of cheery
humor. Virge had named the dog after him
because Frank was so lively and the dog such a lollygagger and the difference
between them tickled Virge. Allie was
going to miss the boy. He poked fun at
Hattie - said half-naked as she was, she put him in mind of a prairie dog
partway skinned out, but not near as fetching.
Jim, who’d spoilt the girl, would never have spoken a scolding word.
Business was slow, Jim declared, and Mr.
Vogan had given him the afternoon off.
Allie liked Jim but thought him short on enterprise. He was as unlike Wyatt as it was possible to
be—lived day to day and till recently had never thought to lay a plan. He was given to fits of temper and could
swear something fearful when offended, but his heart was as big as a house and
he was fond of the younguns regardless of whose they were. He was a runt, overtopping little Allie
herself by only an inch or two, but still he possessed that grand and noble
Earp nose and a mustache every bit as sweeping as Virge's or Wyatt's. But his coloring was brown, where theirs was
fair and ran to red. He had a withered
arm from a wound he'd suffered in the Rebellion.
To accommodate brother Wyatt's notions
Jim, like Virge, had lately been obliged to interest himself in unfamiliar
matters. The two of them sat talking
about the Long Branch. That was the name
of Wyatt's newest mining claim. Virge
explained to Jim what he'd told Allie before, about the opinion of Gird the
engineer and whether they might be wise to sell the claim. This time Allie listened close enough to
conclude that though the engineer had given it some degree of praise, there was
still a better than even chance that the Long Branch mine might turn out to be
a bust.
Still, most of the signs were good; the
brokering of mining claims by and large was paying off, and though they were
still short of spending cash, Allie had to admit it was mostly the doing of
brother Wyatt that affairs were getting along as good as they were. He'd got all the brothers together—Morg and
Warren would be coming out from California soon—to go into the business. But if Allie wanted the family about her as
much as Wyatt did, she also hated having lost the peace and contentment of her
old home on Spruce Mountain by the Granite Creek valley above Prescott. So she was grateful to Wyatt but some wroth with
him too, on account of having had to tear loose from a foundation she'd set
down deep in those cool piney woods.
Presently Virge and Jim finished gabbing
about the mining claim—since neither was a natural man of affairs, there was a
limit to how much they could converse on topics of commerce when Wyatt wasn't around
to steer the talk. After dinner, Jim
went back downtown to while away the afternoon in the saloons along Allen
Street. Nephew Frank mounted the ladder
with Virge to help with fixing the roof.
Hattie finally donned a shirtwaist and skirt but lay back down on her
pallet twisting ringlets of black hair in her fingers and closely examining
them as if the hair-ends bore some powerful secret she was bound to parse out.
After scrubbing the stewpot and the dishes
and flatware Allie took thought of supper and made up her mind to fry some
chicken. Prowling in the yard, she
followed up the yellow hen whose laying had lately got unreliable and taking
her by the neck swung her aloft and wrenched off her head with one motion like
the cracking of a whip. While that one
dashed and wallowed she laid hands on another, the red with the one eye, and
dispatched her the same. Then she put a
pot of water on the fire to boil so she could scald off the plumage.
While waiting for the water to bubble she
dragged a rocking chair outdoors and sat in the yard letting the sun warm the
sweat and dishwater off her. The jacal
stood at the end of Allen Street which was a red-dirt road running between rows
of one-story adobes linked with fences made of ocotillo stalks and
mesquite-wood. Tombstone was a
poor-looking place and their jacal was likely the poorest item in
it. But with the silver strike booming
like it was, they'd been lucky to rent any kind of place at all; hundreds were
camping out in the hills roundabout. The
brothers had butted the three wagons up against the jacal with the
sheets run out like tent flies. On
nights when the weather was mild, the menfolk slept in the wagon-beds. Otherwise the whole bunch of them would crowd
into the cabin of a night like navy beans in an airtight. In the dark the rats would scramble over you
to get next to the fire in the corner hearth.
Virge's dog Frank, that they'd hoped would prove a rat-catcher, just lay
by the hearth with his head between his paws benignly watching the rats come
and go.
About the time the water came to a boil,
sister Ceelie Anne returned from seeing the sights in the town and offered to
help get the chickens ready. She brought
another chair out and the two of them sat there plucking tussocks of plumage
and smelling the damp, disagreeable odor of scalded feathers. When brother Wyatt arrived from Kansas, Allie
had been surprised to see a woman alongside of him on the wagon box. Not that he hadn't always been a
petticoat-chaser. It was just that Allie
never guessed he'd take up regular with a female. Still, she'd heard Virge tell how Wyatt was
married a long time ago in Missouri only to lose his bride by typhoid or
breach-birth or somesuch. The match seemed
to have been a case of love, and Virge said her perishing had broken Wyatt's
heart.
Whatever the truth of that, it was a
puzzle indeed why he'd settled on this one.
Brother Wyatt was a handsome fellow but sister Ceelie was near as plain
as a jenny. She owned a roundish face
with a big chin and a fleshy nose and a short, flat mouth that she generally
kept bitten into a lipless line. She had
deep-sunk eyes of cornflower blue, quite pretty but also vacant, like the
pleasant idiocy in the eyes of a cow.
Her hair was a dark auburn, coarse, inclined to kink and kept
short. She was reticent in a way that
could easily deepen into surliness.
Though Allie really didn't like her all that much, she somehow felt
inclined to protect her, if for no other reason than that sister Ceelie was a
woman like herself, and under the sway of a heedless man. But Ceelie didn't keep herself too clean, and
as they sat there in the sun plucking the chickens Allie could smell her odor of
unwashed grime even above the stink of the scalded feathers.
The sad fact of Ceelie's life was that in
recent months brother Wyatt seemed to be losing interest in her, and lately
she'd begun worrying he aimed to throw her over. Allie for her part thought sister Ceelie had
good reason to fret. So neglectful had
she got, and so prone to whining, it tested Allie's patience as sore as it
must've tested Wyatt's; Wyatt was somewhat vain and kept a spruce appearance
and always wore the finest clothes, and had no wish to present himself to the
world with a woman on his arm so unwashed she reeked and showing under the
sleeves of her bodice the dark round stains of old sweat. Allie had to admit, though, that the
slovenliness was a new development; there had been a time, not long ago, when
sister Ceelie was always fresh and clean and wore the prettiest dresses and
kept her silver bracelets polished, that were now dark with tarnish
While the sun traveled lower in the sky
they kept on pulling the moist feathers, the shadows running out longer and
thinner before them, and sister Ceelie complained that Wyatt wouldn't tell why
he'd taken his latest trip to Tucson—he'd been gone a week, and she feared he
kept a woman there to whom he was tendering his affections. Allie knew better because she'd overheard
Wyatt reporting to Virge what transpired.
Wyatt had met with Mr. Shibell, the sheriff of the county Tombstone was
in—Pima County, that was. Wyatt nursed political ambitions and was getting the
lay of the land talking to all the nabobs.
She told this to sister Ceelie but didn't think Ceelie was
convinced. Ceelie just fell disagreeably
silent.
Once Allie and Ceelie got the hens
plucked, they carried them inside to gut them and cut them up. Ceelie seemed in a dismal temper while they
worked and after a spell got into a bottle of Old Angelica. Once the wine had loosened her tongue she
commenced to tell how Wyatt had blacksmithed her for years first in a couple of
whorehouses in Peoria and then in those Kansas cattle towns, and all against
her will. She sobbed inconsolably when she told it and Allie went to her and
hugged her close, and when she did, Ceelie felt weightless, like a bag half
stuffed with feathers. Allie was shocked
and revolted by what Ceelie related but she’d long since learned what coiled and
darksome byways the Earp boys had trod in their time. She crooned and patted Ceelie's sharp
shoulder-blades, enveloped in her odor of soilment and in an almost menstrual
aroma she also gave off, which above the odors of wet feathers and chicken-guts
smelled like the air of hopelessness itself.
She could feel the throb of sister Ceelie's heart against her own.
Allie knew some of the Earps had run a
parlor house in Wichita a few years back and that Ceelie and sister Bessie had
been on the line there. She'd always
assumed Ceelie was in the trade by choice.
Now it seemed it was more of a case of white slavery or somesuch—though
Allie couldn't see how brother Wyatt could have compelled such degradation. Surely Ceelie could've run off if she
detested the life. But maybe Ceelie had
loved Wyatt too much to leave him. Or
maybe his force over her was too great.
Allie guessed what mattered was how a woman was made up. Bessie was made up for the sporting life and
Ceelie was made up different, just as Allie herself was. And besides, sister Bessie knew how much her
man favored her, while Ceelie doubted Wyatt felt any regard for her whatever,
with her loving him to torment. The
world was hard, Allie thought.
Later that same evening of Ceelie's
confession, when brother Wyatt came in just past midnight, Ceelie was seated at
the Singer, rocking the treadle furiously to and fro, swathed in the heavy
folds of Mr. Vogan's striped canvas canopy, the silver bracelets she always
wore tinkling together on her wrists as she worked. Brother Wyatt gazed for just a count or two
at her swollen face and Allie saw his nostrils dilate, almost as if he'd caught
that noisome scent of hers, and he turned to brother Jim, who was reading a
two-week-old Arizona Miner by the lamp, and said, "I think
I'll go downtown and deal some bank, if you want to ride the hearse," and
he walked right back out the door.
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