Incident at Twenty-Mile Read online

  "Are you a reader? Me, I believe a man ought to read. Keeps his mind sharp and his horizons broad."

  "I don't read but the Bible. A man don't need nothing else, 'cause all the truth in this world is right there. Me and my wife read from the Good Book every morning and evening."

  "Your wife? Oh… yes. Yes, a guard told me that the new man had just got married. It is a crying shame, ain't it, how some men feel they've got to say smutty things about newly married folks? Joking about what they get up to, and how many times they do it, and how sore the wife is afterward! Men think they're being funny, but all they're being is filthy-minded. So you don't read anything but the Bible, eh? You know what I was reading when you came calling at my door? I was reading the most important book ever written-other, of course, than your Bible. I was reading The Revelation of the Forbidden Truth, which was written by a man who signs himself simply The Warrior. You ever hear tell of The Revelation of the Forbidden Truth, Mr. Tillman?"

  "Can't say I have," Tillman said, his curt tone showing he was no soft touch.

  "I'm sorry to hear that. But then, I suppose it isn't given to everyone to receive and understand the Forbidden Truth. Only to those who have been chosen to smite the politicians in Washington who are despoiling this beautiful land of ours. And the immigrants! And the papists! And the stockbrokers! And the-" He smiled suddenly. "But just listen to me, will you? Babbling away like a crazy man. Sane people, they don't care if the foreigners and the Catholics and the Jews blow up American battleships and get off scot-free! No! And they don't care if America's turning into a garbage pit for Europe to dump their ignorant scum into." He dropped onto his bunk and threw his arm over his face.

  "Ah…" Tillman began uncertainly. "Talking about reading and all, do you… ah… have a Bible in there?"

  Lieder did not respond.

  "I'm asking because my wife…" Tillman shrugged.

  "Because your wife what, Mr. Tillman?" Lieder asked from beneath his arm.

  "Well, I told her about you, and she said I should… I mean, she thought maybe you'd like to…"

  "Maybe I'd like to do what, Mr. Tillman?"

  The guard cleared his throat. "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

  Lieder smiled into his arm. But his voice was gentle and receptive when he answered, "Well now, I can't honestly say as I have, Mr. Tillman."

  "You haven't been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?"

  "N-no. But I confess that something in those words attracts me mightily." He lowered his arm and looked toward the spy-hole, his eyes vulnerable and sincere. "Your wife, she wouldn't have something I could read, would she? Something to guide my feet along the right path?"

  "I'll bring you some tracts tomorrow."

  "Will you, Mr. Tillman? I'd be so thankful."

  "You can count on it." Tillman closed the spy-hole and drew a deep breath. Mary will be pleased as punch when I tell her. Pleased as punch!

  Alone, Lieder's lips compressed into an astringent smile. "Well, now! I guess there's something to what Paul said in Friesians: 7, 13. Praise the word of the Lord, for it is Truth, and the truth will set you free."

  DUTCHMAN'S FINGER, YANKEE PROMISE, Sally's Drawers, Why Bother? Easy Squaw, Eureka Ditty… the Wyoming silver rush left so many short-lived and whimsically named towns in its wake that "Twenty-Mile" seems mundane by comparison, until you discover that the town wasn't twenty miles from anything. It sprang up overnight beside a narrow-gauge railway that connected the boomtown of Destiny to a high mountain silver mine called the Surprise Lode. The distance between these terminals was only seventeen miles as the crow flies, but if that crow had been obliged to take the train, it would have had to endure a tortuous forty-three mile crawl up the vertiginous switchbacks of the Medicine Bow Range, with solid rock walls almost brushing one side of the train and, on the other side, a series of stomach-fluttering drops into deep ravines.

  Some claim that Twenty-Mile got its name when the railroad surveyors, having chosen a point at random from which to measure distances, discovered a two-acre shelf of flatland about twenty miles up the line that would serve as a way station for supplies while they were blasting out the roadbed and laying track. The little cluster of unpainted, false-fronted buildings that sprouted up overnight came to be known as Twenty-Mile. Admittedly, it is not very gratifying to learn that Twenty-Mile was so called because it was twenty miles from a spot twenty miles away, but we are unlikely ever to get a better explanation because Twenty-Mile now exists only in small print on the survey quads, where its symbol indicates uninhabited agglomeration, map-maker language for a ghost town.

  This ghost town attracts occasional memento-hunters who, after working their way up the now-derelict and dangerous railroad cut in search of souvenirs from America's Vanished Past, report feeling a disquieting "chill" upon reaching Twenty-Mile's little scattering of abandoned, sun-bleached buildings. Old-timers say that the town's "bad totem" comes from what happened there in 1898 when, already slipping toward decay after its brief flurry of growth, it was inhabited by only a handful of hangers-on. But every Saturday evening a rattling five-car train used to carry the week's output of silver from the Surprise Lode down to Destiny to be smelted and shipped back East. The snorting narrow-gauge engine made a brief stop at Twenty-Mile to drop off sixty-or-so miners for their weekly bender. It would pick them up again on its return Sunday morning, as it brought coal, equipment, and supplies up to the Lode and to the residents of Twenty-Mile. This arrangement had been worked out by the mine managers to prevent their work force of misfits and drifters from getting down to Destiny, where they might find work that was less back-breaking, dangerous, and poorly paid, or even desert to the new gold fields up in the Klondike. But the Surprise Lode miners were a feckless, burnt-out bunch, content to stay where they were so long as they had all Saturday night to raise hell and squander their wages; and it was this hell-raising and wage-squandering that constituted Twenty-Mile's only excuse for existing, after its role as the mine's principal supply station had been superseded by Destiny, and the flood of independent prospectors that used to comb these mountains had dwindled to a trickle of half-crazed diehards.

  Even before the train came to a full stop, the fun-hungry miners would scramble down from the boxcars, whooping and shooting their slack-hammered old dogleg pistols into the air as they descended upon Bjorkvist's Boardinghouse, where they would devour huge quantities of pretty bad food. Then most of them would go to Kane's Mercantile Emporium to buy overalls or work gloves or muscle liniment or flannel shirts or chewing tobacco or patent medicines, and sometimes frilly little gifts for someone's birthday back home. Mr. Kane would keep their purchases for them until just before they scrambled back onto the train Sunday morning.

  From Kane's Mercantile, some went to Professor Murphy's Tonsorial Palace, where a coal-stoked boiler wheezed dangerously as it struggled to heat water for the four wooden tubs. You could get a bath for 35Вў, and a 15Вў shave came with enough bay rum slapped onto your cheeks to make your pals hoot and whistle when they smelled you coming into the Traveller's Welcome Hotel (which was not really a hotel, just a whorehouse with a bar). The reason some men got all bathed and shaved and bay-rum'd was because they believed they might get special treatment from the hotel's whores if they looked their best. No one ever specified what this "special treatment" might consist of, but the words were usually accompanied by winks and nudges and knowing snickers.

  Three "girls" worked the Traveller's Welcome: Frenchy, a tall, lean, yellow-eyed black woman from New Orleans; Chinky, a shy Chinese girl who spoke little English and never looked a man in the eyes; and Queeny, a loud, laughing, sloshy-breasted old Irishwoman who was said to be able to drink anything that didn't eat the bottom out of the glass before she got to it. The older miners preferred Queeny, saying she was a "barrel of laughs" and a "good ol' gal at heart"; the younger boys went for Chinky because more experienced girls might poke fun at them; and those who passed f
or connoisseurs went for Frenchy because everyone knew that black gals were just naturally better at it, and if she was also French…! Well, hey there! Stand aside!

  The miners greatly outnumbered Twenty-Mile's permanent population, which had shrunk from more than two hundred at the high tide of the town's fortunes to just fifteen souls, so few that they occupied only a handful of the unpainted wooden buildings that had been slapped up during the heady years of boom and hope, when the town's motto had been: Watch Us Grow! Now those empty buildings creaked and groaned softly as they surrendered themselves to the patient and deadly embrace of gravity.

  Twenty-Mile's fifteen residents included Mr. Kane, owner of the Mercantile Emporium ("Everything a Person Really Needs"). Mr. Kane's independent-minded seventeen-year-old daughter, Ruth Lillian, was accounted the town's beauty. Professor Murphy, as we have seen, sold hot baths, shaves, and generous splashes of bay rum at his Tonsorial Palace. Mrs. Bjorkvist ran the boarding-house, which was really just a big dining room that served "steaks" (the quotation marks are meant to suggest the same level of dubiousness as those around "girls" when describing the hotel's whores). These steaks came with cabbage, baking-powder biscuits, and canned peaches at every meal. There was a long room at the back with wooden bunks and skimpy straw mattresses on which miners stumbling back from the Traveller's Welcome could sleep. Bed, supper, and breakfast cost an all-in price of one dollar-robbery, the miners always grumbled, but they paid up. Although Mrs. Bjorkvist spoke with an accent that could blunt a hacksaw, she managed to make it known that she never wanted to see any of the Traveller's Welcome's "girls" around her establishment. There was a Mr. Bjorkvist skulking in the background, a hefty, scowling man with whose assistance she had borne two children. (One wag said he must have struck pay dirt each time he put in his spade.) Kersti Bjorkvist was a heavy-shouldered, thick-featured girl of twenty-two who worked in the kitchen and waited on tables, and her brother, Oskar, was a slow-witted boy a year older than Ruth Lillian Kane, whom he ogled in a moist, slack-jawed way that made Mr. Kane frown irritably. The Traveller's Welcome and its three girls were run by Mr. Delanny, who coughed a lot, wore sparkling white shirts with frills down the front, and was thin as a rail. Mr. Delanny was understood to have been a "big-time gambler" in his day, a reputation burnished by Jeff Calder, the one-legged Civil War veteran who served behind the hotel's bar and often complained that although he'd done more than his share in the defense of the Union, this no-account government refused to treat its wounded heroes like it ought to.

  As for the remaining three citizens of Twenty-Mile: B. J. Stone dealt with the donkeys they used up in the mine shafts. He was accounted "odd" because he read a lot and had a way of looking at you as though he knew something he wasn't telling. B. J. Stone's helper-of-all-work was called Coots, a gruff old mixed-blood, part Black, part Cherokee, who kept to himself and was rumored to be a dangerous man to fool with because he had been a gunfighter. Finally there was "Reverend" (see "steak" and "girls") Leroy Hibbard, who received a stipend from the mining company for accompanying the men back up to the Lode every Sunday morning and laying a soul-scourging sermon on the entire work force, which the Puritan Boston mine owners obliged to assemble and receive this bludgeoning enlightenment. Hibbard always stayed overnight at the mine after his exhausting witness and returned Monday afternoon, walking the fifteen miles back down the railroad track. The Reverend was locked in constant battle against the Depravity and Evil that lurk within all descendants of Adam, but every couple of weeks his moral fiber would begin to fray, and he would sneak in at the back door of the Traveller's Welcome late at night to drink with Jeff Calder, then he'd go sin with Frenchy, after which submersion in the sloughs of iniquity, he would stagger down the street in that blackest hour just before dawn, sobbing and crying out that he was a disgusting creature! a loathsome sinner! a fornicator! an unworthy vessel undeserving of God's forgiveness! Mrs. Bjorkvist made no secret of the fact that this was pretty much her own evaluation of the Reverend, who eagerly lapped up her loathing as a deliciously appropriate punishment for his wickedness. B. J. Stone (the Livery man who reads a lot?) found the Reverend ludicrous and openly laughed at him. And for this reason the man of God detested Stone with that marrow-deep hatred that the righteous claim to reserve for the sin but always visit upon the sinner.

  Every Sunday morning, after the train dropped off supplies and picked up the miners to carry them and their furry-mouthed hangovers back up to the Surprise Lode, Twenty-Mile was left feeling stiff and leaden, as though it were suffering its own kind of hangover, dazed by all the shouting and laughter, soured by drink, drained by loveless sexual excess. Most people slept late on Sundays, but Kersti Bjorkvist could usually be found sitting at her kitchen table, slump-shouldered and staring, and over at the hotel Jeff Calder would be stumping one-leggedly around the barroom behind his push broom, while upstairs the public girls sprawled in tangled, sweat-damp sheets.

  The spring bell over the door of Kane's Mercantile jangled as Mr. Delanny came in to pick up the bottles of Mother Grey's Patented Suppressant he used to keep his cough in check. Departing, he met Mrs. Bjorkvist at the door, and he lifted his hat in a sarcastically theatrical gesture that made her sniff and turn her head away. She wanted no truck with the man who owned The Traveller's Welcome, with its… its… its Whores of Babylon! Mrs. Bjorkvist's moral abhorrence of the hotel did not, however, extend to denying herself the profit she made by supplying that iniquitous den's residents with their daily dinners and suppers. Unable to lower herself to having such people in her establishment, she sent her daughter over with covered pots containing the meals, but she watched the clock to be sure the girl was gone no longer than was necessary to put the food under the warming hood of the hotel's kitchen stove, because… well, because you never know, do you?

  Knowing that Mrs. Bjorkvist never bought anything, Mr. Kane continued his Sunday morning routine of listing the supplies the train had brought up from Destiny, while his customer pecked along the counters, fingering the new stock and muttering over its price and quality. "Have you decided to celebrate our victory in Cuba with a little shopping spree, Mrs. Bjorkvist?" She compressed her lips and sniffed. "Caught a little cold, have we?" Mr. Kane asked in the flat, dental accent that would have revealed his ethnic roots to anyone less accent-deaf than Mrs. Bjorkvist. "Maybe you should try some of Mr. Delanny's Suppressant." Mrs. Bjorkvist's neck stiffened at the thought of taking anything into the tabernacle of her body that was used by that… panderer, that… that…! Something outside the store window snagged her attention. "Vat's dis den?" she demanded to know. Mr. Kane lifted his head to see Mr. Delanny standing in the middle of the road, talking to a young man who was carrying a heavy pack and had an ancient, oversized shotgun on an improvised rope sling over his shoulder. Except for the occasional prospector, the arrival of a stranger was a rare enough event in Twenty-Mile to justify Mrs. Bjorkvist's irritated "Vat's dis den?" And this young man's wide-brimmed farmer's hat and wide-toed farmer's boots said he was no prospector.

  "Vere d'ee tink he come from, den?" Mrs. Bjorkvist asked, her eyes riveted on the stranger, as though to nail him in place until she had made up her mind about him.

  "I have no idea, Mrs. Bjorkvist," Mr. Kane said in an indifferent tone he knew would irritate her.

  They watched Mr. Delanny smile and shake his head in response to a question from the stranger, then turn away to his hotel with a flip of his long, thin fingers that clearly said, "Good luck to you, boy." This was followed by a shake of his head that added, "You'll need it."

  The young man shifted the weight of his pack, tipped his hat back on his head with his thumb, and walked off. Mrs. Bjorkvist pressed her cheek against the window to peer diagonally down the street after him. It wasn't that she was nosy, but if she didn't have a perfect right to know what this stranger was up to, then who did? When he turned in at B. J. Stone's Livery, she nodded to herself. She might have guessed! What with the way that old man was always readi
ng books and looking at people like they were funny, or stupid, or… something! Imagine him daring to call other people funny! Him, who's nothing but a foul, vile-But she wouldn't contaminate her mind by even thinking that word.

  In a tone that said "Wouldn't you know it?" she informed Mr. Kane that the stranger had gone to the Livery.

  "Gone to the Livery, has he?" the shop-owner responded dryly. "Vat's dis vorld coming to, den?"

  Ruth Lillian Kane came down the stairs from the living quarters above, having washed the breakfast dishes while her father was opening the store. She greeted Mrs. Bjorkvist brightly (a little too brightly, because she didn't like her) and asked politely after her daughter. But the proprietress of the boarding house limited her response to a disapproving glance at the new gingham dress Ruth Lillian was wearing. Frills and vanity! He spoils her, that man. Trying to make up for the way her mother… well, enough said. Enough said. No good ever came from spoiling children. She ought to give him a piece of her mind, but she didn't have time to stand around talking nonsense. That stranger would be wanting to sleep and eat at her boarding house. Well, maybe she'd let him, and maybe not. It would depend on what sort he was. She'd just wait and see.

  Without further socializing, she left the store and crossed to her establishment.

  "Good-bye, Mrs. Bjorkvist," Mr. Kane called after her in a sing-song. "Always a pleasure to serve you."

  B. J. STONE TIPPED HIS chair back against the slab wall of the shoeing shed, carefully folded the two-day-old Cheyenne newspaper he had been reading, and scrubbed his grey-stubbled cheek with his knuckles. "From Nebraska, eh? And walked all the way! Well, there's cold water in the barrel. Help yourself. Dipper's right there. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, son, but if you're looking for work, you've come to just about the worst place in the Republic. There's absolutely nothing happening in Twenty-Mile. And that's on busy days. This is a town without history. Its past is only eleven years long, and it has no future at all. I'd offer you a little tide-over work, but what I make handling donkeys for the Lode is barely enough to keep my soul from leaking out of my body. I wouldn't even be able to afford old Coots here, if he wasn't willing to work for just bed, vittles, and my eternal gratitude. Isn't that right, Coots?"