Steel: And Other Stories Read online

  She looked at Frank with a worried glance. “Aw, you’re not startin’ in again, Frank.”

  Frank explained it to both of them. He made it clear that he in no way regarded her as a mere cash purchase; that it was only the principle of the thing he wished to adhere to for both their sakes.

  “All you have to do is take the money,” he finished, “and everything will be all right.”

  She looked at her father. Her father looked at her.

  “Take it, father,” she sighed.

  Mr. O’Shea shrugged and took the money.

  “Four-nine-two,” sang Frank. “Three-five-seven … eight-one-six. Fifteen, fifteen and thrice on my breast I spit to guard me safe from fascinating charms.”

  “Frank!” she cried. “You got your shirt all wet!”

  * * *

  Then he told her that, instead of throwing out her bouquet, she’d have to let all the men make a rush for her garter.

  She squinted at him. “Come on, Frank. This is goin’ too far.”

  He looked pained.

  “I’m only trying to make things right for us,” he said. “I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

  “But—good God, Frank!—haven’t you done enough? You got me to change the wedding day. You bought me for fifteen dollars and spit all over yourself in front of Daddy. You make me wear this awful itchy hair bracelet. Well, I stood for it all. But I’m gettin’ a little tired of it all. Enough’s enough.”

  Frank got sad. He stroked her hand and looked like Joan of Arc going up in flames.

  “I’m only trying to do what I think is best,” he said. “We are beset by a host of dangers. We must be wary of what we do or all is lost.”

  She stared at him. “Frank, you do want to marry me, don’t you? This isn’t just a scheme to—?”

  He swept her into his arms and kissed her fervently.

  “Fulvia,” he said, “Dearest. I love you and I want to marry you. But we must do what is right.”

  Later Mr. O’Shea said, “He’s a jerk. Kick him out on his ear.”

  But she was rather chubby and she wasn’t very pretty and Frank was the only man who’d ever proposed to her.

  So she sighed and gave in. She talked it over with her mother and her father. She said that everything would be all right as soon as they got married. She said, “I’ll humor him until then, and then—whammo!”

  But she managed to talk him out of having the male wedding guests make a rush for her garter.

  “You don’t want me to get my neck broken, do you?” she asked.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Just throw them your stockings.”

  “Darlin’, let me throw my bouquet. Please?”

  He looked pensive.

  “All right,” he said. “But I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”

  He got some salt and put it in the hot oven in her kitchen. After a while he looked in.

  “Now our tears are dry and we’re all right for a while,” he said.

  * * *

  The wedding day arrived.

  Frank was up bright and early. He went to church and made sure all the windows were closed tight to keep the demons out. He told the pastor it was lucky it was February so the doors could be kept closed. He made it quite clear that no one was to be allowed to touch the doors during the ceremony.

  The pastor got mad when Frank fired his .38 up the chimney.

  “What in heaven’s name are you doing!” he asked.

  “I am just frightening off evil spirits,” said Frank.

  “Young man, there are no evil spirits in the First Calvary Episcopal Church!”

  Frank apologized. But, while the pastor was out in the lobby explaining the shot to a local policeman, Frank took some dishes out of his overcoat pocket, broke them and put the pieces under pew seats and in corners.

  Then he rushed downtown and bought twenty-five pounds of rice in case anyone ran out of it or forgot to bring it.

  Hurrying back to his betrothed’s house, he rang the bell.

  Mrs. O’Shea answered. Frank asked, “Where’s your daughter?”

  “You can’t see her now,” Mrs. O’Shea said.

  “I simply must,” Frank demanded. He rushed past Mrs. O’Shea and dashed up the stairs.

  He found his bride sitting on the bed in her petticoat polishing the shoes she was going to wear.

  She jumped up. “What’s the matter with you!” she cried.

  “Give me one of your shoes,” he gasped. “I almost forgot. It would have been doom if I’d forgotten.”

  He reached for a shoe. She drew back.

  “Get out of here!” she cried, pulling on her bathrobe.

  “Give me a shoe!”

  She said, “No. What am I supposed to wear? Galoshes?”

  “All right,” he said, plunged into her closet and came out with an old shoe.

  “I’ll take this,” he said and ran from the room.

  She remembered something and her wail followed him out. “You aren’t supposed to see me before we get married!”

  “That’s just a silly superstition!” he called back as he jumped down the staircase.

  In the kitchen he handed the shoe to Mr. O’Shea who was sipping coffee and smoking his pipe.

  “Give it to me,” said Frank.

  Mr. O’Shea said, “I’d like to.”

  Frank was oblivious. “Hand the shoe to me and say ‘I transfer authority,’” he said.

  Mr. O’Shea’s mouth fell open. He took the shoe and handed it back dumbly.

  “I transfer authority,” he said.

  Then he blinked. “Hey, wait!”

  But Frank was gone. He jumped back upstairs.

  “No!” she yelled as he ran into her room again. “Get the hell out of here!”

  He hit her on the head with the shoe. She howled. He swept her into his arms and kissed her violently.

  “My dearest wife,” he said and ran out.

  She burst into tears. “No, I’m not going to marry him!” She threw the polished shoes at the wall. “I don’t care if he’s the last man in the world. He’s awful!”

  After a while she picked up the shoes and polished them again.

  About then Frank was downtown making sure the caterer had used exactly the right ingredients in the cake. Then he bought Fulvia a paper hat to wear when she ran from the church to the sedan. He went to every second hand store in town and bought all the old shoes he could to use as a defense against malign spirits.

  By the time the wedding hour came he was exhausted.

  He sat in the church anteroom, panting, running over the list he’d made to make sure nothing had been forgotten.

  The organ started to play. And she came down the aisle with her father. Frank stood looking at her, still breathing quite heavily.

  Then his eyebrows flew up as he noticed that a latecomer was just entering the front door.

  “Oh, no!” he cried, covering his face with his hands. “I’m going to go up in a puff of smoke!”

  But he didn’t.

  When he opened his eyes, his bride was holding his hand tightly.

  “You see, Frank,” she comforted, “you were full of baloney all the time.”

  The ceremony was performed. And he was so numbed with surprise and shock and bewilderment that he forgot about shoes and bouquets and hats and rice and everything.

  As they rode to the hotel in the hired limousine, she stroked his hand.

  “Superstition,” she cooed. “It’s the bunk.”

  “But—” Frank offered.

  “Shush,” she said, pressing shut his protest with a kiss. “Aren’t you still alive?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, “and I can’t understand it.”

  At the door to their hotel room Frank looked at her. She looked at him. The bellboy looked away.

  Finally she said, “Carry me across the threshold, darlin’.”

  He smiled a flimsy smile.

  “I’d feel silly about i
t,” he said.

  “For me,” she insisted. “I’m entitled to one superstition.”

  He smiled then. “Yes,” he admitted and bent to pick her up.

  They never made it. She was awfully chubby.

  “Heart failure,” said the doctor.

  “Satan,” breathed Fulvia, remaining in a mottled funk the ensuing ten years.

  THE CONQUEROR

  That afternoon in 1871, the stage to Grantville had only the two of us as passengers, rocking and swaying in its dusty, hot confines under the fiery Texas sun. The young man sat across from me, one palm braced against the hard, dry leather of the seat, the other holding on his lap a small black bag.

  He was somewhere near nineteen or twenty. His build was almost delicate. He was dressed in checkered flannel and wore a dark tie with a stickpin in its center. You could tell he was a city boy.

  From the time we’d left Austin two hours before, I had been wondering about the bag he carried so carefully in his lap. I noticed that his light-blue eyes kept gazing down at it. Every time they did, his thin-lipped mouth would twitch—whether toward a smile or a grimace I couldn’t tell. Another black bag, slightly larger, was on the seat beside him, but to this he paid little attention.

  I’m an old man, and while not usually garrulous, I guess I do like to seek out conversation. Just the same, I hadn’t offered to speak in the time we’d been fellow passengers, and neither had he. For about an hour and a half I’d been trying to read the Austin paper, but now I laid it down beside me on the dusty seat. I glanced down again at the small bag and noted how tightly his slender fingers were clenched around the bone handle.

  Frankly, I was curious. And maybe there was something in the young man’s face that reminded me of Lew or Tylan—my sons. Anyhow, I picked up the newspaper and held it out to him.

  “Care to read it?” I asked him above the din of the 24 pounding hoofs and the rattle and creak of the stage.

  There was no smile on his face as he shook his head once. If anything, his mouth grew tighter until it was a line of almost bitter resolve. It is not often you see such an expression in the face of so young a man. It is too hard at that age to hold on to either bitterness or resolution, too easy to smile and laugh and soon forget the worst of evils. Maybe that was why the young man seemed so unusual to me.

  “I’m through with it if you’d like,” I said.

  “No, thank you,” he answered curtly.

  “Interesting story here,” I went on, unable to rein in a runaway tongue. “Some Mexican claims to have shot young Wesley Hardin.”

  The young man’s eyes raised up a moment from his bag and looked at me intently. Then they lowered to the bag again.

  “’Course I don’t believe a word of it,” I said. “The man’s not born yet who’ll put John Wesley away.”

  The young man did not choose to talk, I saw. I leaned back against the jolting seat and watched him as he studiously avoided my eyes.

  Still I would not stop. What is this strange compulsion of old men to share themselves? Perhaps they fear to lose their last years in emptiness. “You must have gold in that bag,” I said to him, “to guard it so zealously.”

  It was a smile he gave me now, though a mirthless one.

  “No, not gold,” the young man said, and as he finished saying so, I saw his lean throat move once nervously.

  I smiled and struck in deeper the wedge of conversation.

  “Going to Grantville?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he said—and I suddenly knew from his voice that he was no Southern man.

  I did not speak then. I turned my head away and looked out stiffly across the endless flat, watching through the choking haze of alkali dust, the bleached scrub which dotted the barren stretches. For a moment, I felt myself tightened with that rigidity we Southerners contracted in the presence of our conquerors.

  But there is something stronger than pride, and that is loneliness. It was what made me look back to the young man and once more see in him something of my own two boys who gave their lives at Shiloh. I could not, deep in myself, hate the young man for being from a different part of our nation. Even then, imbued as I was with the stiff pride of the Confederate, I was not good at hating.

  “Planning to live in Grantville?” I asked.

  The young man’s eyes glittered. “Just for a while,” he said. His fingers grew yet tighter on the bag he held so firmly in his lap. Then he suddenly blurted, “You want to see what I have in—”

  He stopped, his mouth tightening as if he were angry to have spoken.

  I didn’t know what to say to his impulsive, half-finished offer.

  The young man very obviously clutched at my indecision and said, “Well, never mind—you wouldn’t be interested.”

  And though I suppose I could have protested that I would, somehow I felt it would do no good.

  The young man leaned back and braced himself again as the coach yawed up a rock-strewn incline. Hot, blunt waves of dust-laden wind poured through the open windows at my side. The young man had rolled down the curtains on his side shortly after we’d left Austin.

  “Got business in our town?” I asked, after blowing dust from my nose and wiping it from around my eyes and mouth.

  He leaned forward slightly. “You live in Grantville?” he asked loudly as overhead the driver, Jeb Knowles, shouted commands to his three teams and snapped the leather popper of his whip over their straining bodies.

  I nodded. “Run a grocery there,” I said, smiling at him. “Been visiting up North with my oldest—with my son.”

  He didn’t seem to hear what I had said. Across his face a look as intent as any I have ever seen moved suddenly.

  “Can you tell me something?” he began. “Who’s the quickest pistolman in your town?”

  The question startled me, because it seemed born of no idle curiosity. I could see that the young man was far more than ordinarily interested in my reply. His hands were clutching, bloodless, the handle of his small black bag.

  “Pistolman?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Who’s the quickest in Grantville? Is it Hardin? Does he come there often? Or Longley? Do they come there?”

  That was the moment I knew something was not quite right in that young man. For, when he spoke those words, his face was strained and eager beyond a natural eagerness.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about such things,” I told him. “The town is rough enough; I’ll be the first man to admit to that. But I go my own way and folks like me go theirs and we stay out of trouble.”

  “But what about Hardin?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know about that either, young man,” I said. “Though I do believe someone said he was in Kansas now.”

  The young man’s face showed a keen and heartfelt disappointment.

  “Oh,” he said and sank back a little.

  He looked up suddenly. “But there are pistolmen there,” he said, “dangerous men?”

  I looked at him for a moment, wishing, somehow, that I had kept to my paper and not let the garrulity of age get the better of me. “There are such men,” I said stiffly, “wherever you look in our ravaged South.”

  “Is there a sheriff in Grantville?” the young man asked me then.

  “There is,” I said—but for some reason did not add that Sheriff Cleat was hardly more than a figurehead, a man who feared his own shadow and kept his appointment only because the county fathers were too far away to come and see for themselves what a futile job their appointee was doing.

  I didn’t tell the young man that. Vaguely uneasy, I told him nothing more at all and we were separated by silence again, me to my thoughts, he to his—whatever strange, twisted thoughts they were. He looked at his bag and fingered at the handle, and his narrow chest rose and fell with sudden lurches.

  A creaking, a rattling, a blurred spinning of thick spokes. A shouting, a deafening clatter of hoofs in the dust. Over the far rise, the buildings of Grantville were clustered an
d waiting.

  A young man was coming to town.

  * * *

  Grantville in the postwar period was typical of those Texas towns that struggled in the limbo between lawlessness and settlement. Into its dusty streets rode men tense with the anger of defeat. The very air seemed charged with their bitter resentments—resentments toward the occupying forces, toward the rabble-rousing carpetbaggers and, with that warped evaluation of the angry man, toward themselves and their own kind. Threatening death was everywhere, and the dust was often red with blood. In such a town I sold food to men who often died before their stomachs could digest it.

  I did not see the young man for hours after Jeb braked up the stage before the Blue Buck Hotel. I saw him move across the ground and up the hotel porch steps, holding tightly to his two bags.

  Then some old friends greeted me and I forgot him.

  I chatted for a while and then I walked by the store. Things there were in good order. I commended Merton Winthrop, the young man I had entrusted the store to in my three weeks’ absence, and then I went home, cleaned up, and put on fresh clothes.

  I judge it was near four that afternoon when I pushed through the batwings of the Nellie Gold Saloon. I am not nor ever was a heavy drinking man, but I’d had for several years the pleasurable habit of sitting in the cool shadows of a corner table with a whiskey drink to sip. It was a way that I’d found for lingering over minutes.

  That particular afternoon I had chatted for a while with George P. Shaughnessy, the afternoon bartender, then retired to my usual table to dream a few presupper dreams and listen to the idle buzz of conversations and the click of chips in the back-room poker game.

  That was where I was when the young man entered.

  In truth, when he first came in, I didn’t recognize him. For what a strange, incredible altering in his dress and carriage! The city clothes were gone; instead of a flannel coat he wore a broadcloth shirt, pearl-buttoned; in place of flannel trousers there were dark, tight-fitting trousers whose calves plunged into glossy, high-heeled boots. On his head a broad-brimmed hat cast a shadow across his grimly set features.

  His boot heels had clumped him almost to the bar before I recognized him, before I grew suddenly aware of what he had been keeping so guardedly in that small black bag.