David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“You’ve met her husband, I’ll wager,” said Rosalie, igniting a general laughter.

“Maybe she’ll take it kindly if you give her your Shake Spear,” said one of the others.

“Lord knows Annie Janson weren’t impressed,” cried a third, to much amusement.

“Might I have a private word with you?” he asked of me.

I looked at the faces about me and knew they disapproved, but I could not live my life for their favor. I pushed myself to my feet and he followed, and we walked away from the women’s fire, listening to their cackles and their hooting. We did not step far, remaining close to the men’s fire. Andrew looked at me and smiled and then returned to a conversation with Mr. Dalton. Never had there been any mistrust between us on this score, and certainly he could not have mistaken my interest in Mr. Skye and found it inappropriate. Andrew would have seen the thing for precisely what it was and found amusement in it; here, among the rough and unlettered folk of the West, I had found perhaps the only person of a literary turn.

“Your husband tells me you are a great reader of books, Mrs. Maycott,” he said. “I wished to let you know that I am lucky enough to possess no small number of volumes, and I should be happy to lend you what you wish.”

“You are kind,” I said, “though I am not sure a roofed patch of forest floor is the best place to bring so precious a thing as a book.”

“You’ll have your own home soon enough. Your husband will fell some seventy or eighty good trees in his spare time, and when these are assembled we will have a cabin-raising party. If he is industrious about it, you should be inside doors within a month or two.”

I laughed. “A month or two sounds to me like a long time to be outside-of-doors.”

He coughed into his fist. “I am fortunate enough to be in possession of a large home, in which I live alone. I have two stories and several rooms. You may, if you wish, pass the time there. I have already made the offer to your husband. The two of you may stay with me.”

I sensed that he wished to add that if I chose to stay while Andrew worked about the property, I should be most welcome, but he did not yield to the temptation. Instead, he offered me a crooked smile in which his teeth, very white for a man his age, glistened in the light of the fires.

“It is a funny thing, is it not, people such as ourselves cast adrift in a place such as this?”

“How can you be certain that you and I are people of the same sort?” I asked him, though not unkindly. He addressed me with an attention that was not entirely appropriate, but the great difference in our ages, and the proximity of my husband not many feet away, made me feel there could be no danger in it.

I looked over at the beardless young man, who continued to sit with the others and yet somehow hold himself aloof. “Pray, who is that gentleman?” I asked Mr. Skye.

He let out a guffaw. “Mrs. Maycott, there are no gentlemen in the West. That man, however, is Jericho Richmond. He is Mr. Dalton’s friend.”

“Does he have but one? I thought I had observed that you are Mr. Dalton’s friend.”

“Indeed I am. My life should be far more difficult without his friendship. Jericho, however, is Dalton ’s very good friend. They live in the same home.”

“He is a handsome man. Does he not have a wife? I was led to believe that people married quite young in the West.”

Mr. Skye cleared his throat. “He and Dalton are very good friends.”

I then understood the nature of the connection, and that it was to be spoken of only obliquely. In some strange way, these ruffians of the West were more tolerant, out of necessity, than men of the East. Jericho Richmond, from what I had observed, worked with every bit the vigor as any other man, and that was, no doubt, all that was required of him. It was Hell we had come to, there could be no doubt of it, but it was turning out to be a curiously complex sort of Hell.

The scene was almost merry. One fellow named Isaac, who worked for Dalton -he called his men whiskey boys, and they ran his spirits throughout the four counties-played a tolerable fiddle. Another whiskey boy, a one-eyed fellow, entertained the children with the story of how he had, fifteen years earlier, been transported to America for the crime of catching a two-pound trout in a squire’s pond. Andrew stood with his arm around my shoulder, staring at our little hut, made by his labor and the community’s, and I knew he was in some small measure happy or, at the very least, satisfied.

The frolic, as such parties were termed, had been under way many hours, and the men had swallowed a river of whiskey, before trouble showed itself. One of the men who had done much of the work had struck me as the most unsavory of this western lot. He was, like Andrew, a carpenter. As with many western men, it was hard to guess his age, concealed as his face was beneath hair and grime, but I imagined him to be near forty and hardened by his years in the wilderness. He wore an old hunting shirt, much in need of mending, and had a wild prophet’s beard near as black as midnight, soiled with food and wood shavings and, I suspected, his own vomit. The other men made no secret of their dislike for him, but they tolerated him for his expertise. Indeed, I suspected that one reason Andrew had been so instantly embraced was because his carpentry skills meant the settlement would be less dependent upon this vile man.

Andrew had taken his measure early on. There had been a dark anger in his eyes when Andrew had mentioned his trade. The bearded man, Mueller, by name, had spat and shaken his head. “ Lot of eastern men call themselves what they like. Out here they ain’t nothing; no one calls himself carpenter till I give leave.” Rather than take offense or give challenge to this bumptious boasting, Andrew had instead given the man the respect he craved. If Mueller was nearby whenever Andrew performed some operation, he would ask the ruffian his opinion. He watched Mueller work and asked questions or made observations upon his skill-which, he informed me, was really quite impressive. “I hate it when men are full of bluster but without merit,” he said, “but I hate it more when they actually know of what they speak.”

This show of respect did its business, and soon enough Mueller was putting his arm about Andrew, drunkenly shouting that this city dweller would be a man yet. Dalton had informed us that Mueller lived some distance away and had little to do with their community except at those events where his skills could not be done without. Andrew understood that the best course was to pretend friendship and then send him on his way.

At the frolic, however, Mueller would not leave Andrew’s side, and his company-along with his stench, his belligerence, and his propensity for physical contact-began to grow wearisome, even oppressive. Westerners drink whiskey as though it were beer, but even by those standards Mueller drank great quantities. When he’d had enough to kill two ordinary men, he began to stagger on his feet and speak so he could hardly be understood. His beard became a great greasy tangle of gristle and tobacco and once, though I did not know its origin, blood.

All night I’d feared he’d been racing toward confrontation, and at last I was proved right. He approached Andrew and gave him a shove in his chest. “You got a nice woman there, Maycott!” he shouted, though they stood but inches from one another.

Andrew offered a faint smile and then shrugged, gesturing toward the crowd of people who gathered around while the fiddle player scratched at his instrument. A dozen or more Westerners sang along to “Lily in the Garden,” and Andrew wished to communicate that these conditions made conversation difficult.