menu_book Chapter 24

Section 23 of 1916 First Chapters Collection. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 1916 First Chapters Collection by various. Section 23. Happy Valley, a Story of Oregon by

Anne Shannon Monroe. Chapter 1 At Two Forks. I woke that morning in the gray dusty little cattle town of Two Forks with the terror of life shaking me like a palsy. My lips and tongue were parchment, a scum ridged my teeth. My whole body was loathsome. I tried to sink into unconsciousness, but my senses were maddeningly alert. I turned over in bed and fixed my gaze on the wallpaper. It was yellowed with age,

blistered and cracked. The design, a sickly greenish vine which wriggled its way around a brown lattice seemed a drunken staggering thing. I traced the design to where it began and ended, began and ended in dizzying reiteration. A cracked blister moved, a small brown bug crept horridly out from underneath. I shivered back into the sleazy bedding and tried frantically to fix my eyes on something less nauseating. There was a spidery wash stand and on it a bowl

and pitcher of white enamel badly scaled. Beside the stand stood a rusty pail ready for whatever might be emptied into it. I shrank more deeply under the bedding and my eyes went on another search of the room for something humanly endurable. The pale green window shade was a mass of cracks. The light pitted it like smallpox and beneath it a coarse lace curtain hung in dejected and slovenly unevenness. I looked to the ceiling. It was stained and streaked from many spillings

of water in the room above. A big fat blowfly moved heavily across. A laugh startled me. It came from the lobby outside. I sat up wide awake but almost instantly lay down again. My head was too heavy. Anger filled me. It was the Ratter's laugh. I would know that laugh in a thousand. A mean triumphant I've got you little sneak of a laugh which was a perfect expression of the hard cold tight little wart of a man from whom it emanated. It was all his doing,

the three days spree. He had insisted on a drink. I hadn't had a drink for over a week. I had known that if I could only get away from the town to the ranch where there was no saloon I could hold out. He had insisted and I had been a fool for the thousandth time. There was a loud banging on the door then the Ratter's voice. Starting. Well start I retorted. The triumphant laugh was repeated then. Knocked out. I didn't answer. He waited a minute then jerked open the door. You've got a half hour,

he said sharply and went away. I smelled frying ham and boiling coffee. The odor gagged me. I drew the sheet over my face. There was a second banging on the door. We're starting at once. Come now or don't. Go and be damned. The steps moved away. I was not again disturbed. Salky. Now I lay inert under the bedding. I had defied someone. I felt better. I had defied the Ratter. But why couldn't I have defied him three days earlier? The old weary sickness again filled

me. Over and over it had been the same story. Go where I would it would always be the same. The thing had caught me first at technical college. I was taking the course in civil engineering and I was expelled. It had got me again at law school. I was again expelled. I began to study privately in my grandfather's office and then after six months of going straight there had to be that confounded party celebrating my 21st birthday with wine and toasts winding up

with a debauch on my part which had ended things for me. My grandfather had thrown me bodily out of his life. He had given me a ticket to two forks, a scrap of paper calling for a chance at a drawing and a land-selling scheme and one hundred dollars in cash. The old judge's lip had trembled when he hurled these things at me and his face had purple. He had been proud of me. I was his only grandson. He didn't think so much of his granddaughters, my sisters. I was named for him

as had been my father. My father had been the first keen disappointment of his life. Drink had killed him before he entered his 40s. Then the old man had centered his hopes in me and I was going the same gate only faster. He was through with me. He as good as said so the night of the party when I made a fool of myself before his guests. He said it again when he handed me my transportation to this out-of-the-way corner of the west. This was his way of getting rid of me.

He had no hope. He had expressed none, but he must get rid of me in a way to save his pride. He was generous enough. My grandfather was not a rich man for he had had us all to bring up an educator according to his rather expensive standard of education and many of us to bury. I was sorry for him for if I truly loved anyone on earth it was he, but I was sorrier for myself for I didn't want to drink. I wanted to do anything else but drink.

Ennis had come in that morning when I was pushing my clothes into a suitcase. Ennis, blue, white, frail of body and big eyed. She took them all out and repacked smoothly and properly. Billy, she said with a sharpness in her voice which I knew to be a disguise of her real tenderness. Don't you feel too badly about it? You can't help it really. It's in your blood. It's in all our blood, she went on. And seeing that I was startled, not the drinking but the

scars of it. We can't help the freaky things we do. It's that that makes me so nervous and see things in the dark. I know it's that. And it's that that makes Claire so queer, makes her talk so often of pleasant little things like suicide and going insane, makes her stay in bed for days at a time with hysteria. Ennis, you don't mean no Billy. Claire doesn't drink, but it's the drink's scars. It's as if someone had taken a hot poker when we were all little babies and sort of seared

our brains over. There's the scar and some things are not in us that are in balance folks. They're seared out. We're all queer. Not grandfather, I said. I had worshipped my grandfather since the days when I had ridden on his foot before the living room fireplace and afterward leaning against his knee had watched the fire's reflection on the brass and arms while he told me wonderful tales. The old brass and arms of my grandfather's

massive white crowned head were inseparably woven into the happy memories of my childhood. My sisters had always been nervous and finicky. My mother had died early. My mother always a pale frightened woman sitting behind clothes blinds and looking down the path that led out of our yard to the street clutching now and then at her chair arms in an attitude of fearful waiting. My grandfather was the one solid rock of pride in my family. No, his father didn't put it on him,

but he put it on the rest of us. Billy, I'm older than you and I can remember a lot that has been kept from you. He drank fearfully in his young days, but he was the kind that can drink and continue clear headed. It never interfered, but Papa was very different. You don't remember him so well, Billy. He was like grandma's people, like you, slender and delicate, all nerves and temperament. Grandpa himself taught Papa to drink. Mama said so. Grandpa thought it was the way to do

to get him used to it as he grew up. Then he would always drink like a gentleman, but he was of a different temperament and he couldn't stand it, Billy, so he went down. How he suffered. I can see him now in delirium tremens. The house all shut up tight and dark to keep people from knowing. Mama always called it being sick. I can see him now, Billy. I would slip past into his room and no one was watching and watching as he felt his way around the room,

moving his long thin fingers, fingers just like yours, Billy, over the walls trying to find a way out. He thought he was bound in by thousands of tiny wires and if he could only get his finger on the right wire and follow it to the end, he could get out. It was tragic and it was true. He was bound by wires that led back to his father. His own father laid those wires about him and now they've wound on till they've caught you. There is no way out unless we could follow them

clear back to the beginning. There isn't any way, Billy, for he tried so hard and you were just like him but not nearly so strong. Billy, I want you to promise me just one thing. Don't ever marry. Let's just die off all that is left of us. Don't fasten the wires about anyone else. All at once I understood my sister Ennis as I never had before. Her sharpness, her cynicism, the unexpected leaf taking of John Hale several years earlier and her life since then devoted to

nerves and my grandfather's household. The understanding brought me out of hot anger to hotter tears. I sat limp on the bed while she finished packing. I promise, I whispered, but I'll make good out west. I took the suitcase from her. I'll go on a ranch and make good, I chokingly whispered. Ennis's face at last softened by a gentle sadness through which glimmered a faint ray of hope now came before me. Some way that ray of hope came strongest through the chaos of

impressions to keep it alive, to make it lighten her pinched face and send away all the shadows that had been the ambition that had held me steadfast on the four days trip across the continent and held me on landing at Osing on the long stage ride from the railway station to Two Forks and then it had all come from meeting the rider, I told myself. But my inner self told me that that was a lie. Always I must meet someone. It came from the devil of thirst within me.

I reached over to the old split bottom chair for my coat and drew out my wallet. It was empty, save for a slip of paper that gave me the title to 80 acres of land, 90 miles south of Two Forks. I ran my hand into my trousers pocket and brought out some silver and two gold pieces, $18.70. Again I cursed the rider and again deep inside I knew that I, not the rider, was to blame. I thought back over the past few days from the railway station at Osing we had motored all day

and all night, crossing two ranges of mountains. At daylight we had reached Two Forks, the gray dusty little cattle town. At breakfast I met the rider. It developed that he was the man I had come west to see, a clerk who would conduct the drawing for the Great Western Improvement Company for the company from whom my grandfather in some idle moment had purchased a ticket. The company he was told had been given a land grant by the government for service in building a wagon road

through the Inland Empire of Oregon. They had subdivided this land into tracks ranging from 20 to 200 acres and the only uncertainty with the ticket holder was which parcel he would draw. The drawing had taken place and I had been lucky winning 80 acres. It had seemed a good omen and I was in high spirits until I noticed the queer silent smiles of men who stood in little knots about the street corners. I made inquiries. Oh yes, the land was there all right. Yes, the

title was sound, a straight pattern from the government to the company. I asked no further questions. I meant to take a chance and find out what the smiles meant later. Perhaps they were smiling at my clothes while I smiled at theirs. If Cowboyland was lazily quiet and dustily uneventful, it was at least true to fiction in dress and then I had met the rider again and being blue became an easy victim. Again I counted my money. I wondered why they had left me that much

of what use was $18.70 to a man stranded in a dead little cattle town 200 miles from a railroad. It probably would not more than pay my hotel bill if the rumors of prices out west were true. Unable to stand my own thoughts any longer, I got up and washed and dressed and went out into the lobby. The hotel keeper, Old Van Vader, sat in a dilapidated armchair before a rusty heating stove, his head hunched down between his shoulders, his long chin sunk between the sharp knuckles

of his two hands, his long bleached out sandy mustache curled around his fists like some giant beetle's pincers. I took a vacant chair opposite him. At the same moment the outside door was pushed open and a big blustering man burst in. A seven-passenger touring car had stopped before the door and other men were getting out. We want an extra early dinner. We want it damn quick, see? said the stranger charging up to Van Vader who had not changed his position.

Hustle man, we've got the price. He jangled coin alluringly in his pocket. Van Vader lifted his chin just sufficiently to work his jaw. I guess you've tied up at the wrong stall. His chin went back to his knuckles. The stranger opened his eyes wide, came close, frowned, then whirled and strode out damning the country. The big car buzzed on down the dusty street. Van Vader again lifted his long chin from his knuckles. Guess you'll be wanting something to eat, boy. How'd an egg

poach tender set on your stomach? He got up and ambled toward the dining room. Surprised, I followed him. He tied on his apron and pushing open a swinging door, went into the kitchen and poached an egg. He also brought me a cup of thick black coffee. I drank it all, though it was as bitter as only long-standing much-boiled coffee can be. Also I ate the egg and then some way I felt better about the dusty little town and the router and myself and the whole world. I wanted to

see my ranch. I'd make good yet. I wonder, I ventured to old Van back in his armchair and his knuckles, if I could get a horse and overtake the rat. Bull pit? You want to overtake bull pit? He lifted his chin and spoke lazily in an altogether casual tone. Yes, if you think I could manage to keep the right road. There's just one main travel road south. I pulled out my watch, a handsome one, my 21st birthday gift from my grandfather. I knew with what precise care his exquisite taste had

selected it, but there was no other way. I'm short of cash, but if I could leave this watch with you and get a horse. He again lifted his chin from his knuckles, this time twisting his head on his neck with a gesture of pointing. Saul's eating hay and the corral out back. You'll find a saddle on the fence. I thanked him, but his chin had again sunk between his knuckles and already into his eyes had come a faraway look, such as I have seen in the eyes of a puma blinking in the sun in a park cage

as he dreamed of his world in his home. My words were wasted when I came around to the door with a horse, a long-legged lanky buckskin that had never seen a curry comb or brush, but had spirit. Van Vader met me with a parcel. You'll need grub. Follow the main road south. About 20 miles out, you will come to a well-traveled road leading off to the left. It goes to the Q Ranch. Bull Pit might stay there tonight. Otherwise, you'll find him on the main road that leads on over Wind Mountain

into Happy Valley. If I don't see him, I'll inquire. I answered glibly from my mount. He smiled a queer, slow smile and turned back into the hotel. End of section 23. Happy Valley, a story of Oregon, chapter one at two forks by Anne Shannon Monroe.