Laurie Kingery - A Hero in the Making

“Can you spare a few minutes to come into the mercantile and tell me about it?” Kate asked. “I’ve got to admit, you’ve got me intrigued,” she said, her gaze darting between Ella and Bohannan. The other crate was now empty also and Bohannan appeared to be consoling disappointed townsfolk.

“No, I really have to start working on supper,” Ella said. “I’m sure I’ll see you sometime,” she said, keeping her tone carefree as she turned to go. “It really wasn’t that important.”

She crossed the street diagonally to the saloon, and back to the hardscrabble reality of her existence.

* * *

“You made a good haul today,” Nate said to Salali as he parked the medicine-show wagon under a tree in the meadow across from Simpson Creek’s white-clapboard church. “Sold every bottle. You’ll have to make some more before we go to any more towns.” He unhitched the horses, hobbling them before he let the geldings loose to graze, and saw that Robert had taken a cross-legged seat under one of the live oak trees, pulled off his striped turban and thrown it onto a nearby bush.

I’d faint dead away if he ever offered to help with the unhitching, or at least thank me, Nate thought. But he reminded himself that under the terms of their “deal,” he was responsible for the horses and wagon, and assisting Salali when the latter did shows, so he supposed his employer really didn’t owe him any help. Nate’s “pay,” in return, was his meals and, eventually, a ride as far as Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he planned to take the new Transcontinental Railroad to California.

In California he could finally be somebody. He’d loved his father, who’d raised him alone after his mother died when he was only a baby. But all his life he had wanted to become something more than his father had been, a jack-of-all-trades who’d taken Nate to a series of small towns to live. Cal Bohannan had been content with that. Nate wasn’t.

His cousin on his mother’s side, Russell Blake, had gone to San Francisco and had become the proprietor of a grand hotel, and moved in influential circles in that thriving town. He said he planned to run for mayor in the next election, and he’d offered Nate the chance to become his partner in the hotel, with a further promise to introduce him to the powerful men he counted as friends. Nate could become a powerful man, too.

But would he ever get to San Francisco? So far, Salali didn’t seem to be in any hurry to even get out of Texas.

The day after Nate met Salali, they’d put on a show in some small east Texas town, and he’d been impressed with the man’s effortless showmanship and his personal magnetism—and the way coins poured into his hands in exchange for pint bottles of the elixir. Salali seemed inexhaustible.

Nate wasn’t so impressed anymore. Now that he had someone else to do the hard work of taking care of the horse and the wagon, navigating their journey from town to town and obtaining their vittles, Salali became a different person between shows. He seemed to feel his sole contribution to the success of the medicine show should be mixing up the elixir—a combination of laudanum, sassafras and ginseng roots, actual snake oil, and at least half alcohol—when the supply ran low.

“Mmm,” Salali muttered, his mouth full of the sandwich he’d given Nate the money to buy before the show.

“Good sandwich? You should have seen the pretty girl who made it for you,” Nate said. “Did you see her in the crowd? Tiny and dark-haired, with big brown eyes?”

Salali shook his head and mumbled something through a last mouthful of sandwich that might have been a disinterested “no.”

“Why don’t we go back to her café for some supper tonight? The food’s cheaper than in the hotel, and you could meet Miss Ella. I’m sure she’d be right fascinated to make your acquaintance.” And I could see her again. He didn’t know why that was so important; after all, he wasn’t about to abandon his goal of reaching San Francisco to take root in Simpson Creek. But there was something so compelling about the plucky, hardworking Ella...

“She wasn’t fascinated enough to buy any,” his employer muttered.

Nate shrugged. “She’s had to mind her pennies. She wants to build her own restaurant so she doesn’t have to use the back room of the saloon anymore. What do you care that she didn’t buy any elixir? We sold ’em all.”

He wished he could take back the words after he saw Salali’s eyes light up when he said “saloon.” Within days of their meeting, Nate had discovered his employer had two vices, gambling and whiskey. But what other choice had Nate had, on foot in the middle of nowhere after his horse had broken a leg and he’d had to put him down? Hot and sweaty from carrying his banjo, saddlebags and saddle, he’d come across the medicine-show wagon, broken down about five miles from where Nate’s horse had put his leg in a hole. Nate had repaired the broken axle for the medicine-show man, and regretted the deal he’d made with him ever since.

After Salali’s last drunken binge, he’d begged Nate to keep him from succumbing to his vices again.

Evidently he’d forgotten that now, however, for he said, “That saloon got poker? Faro? Why don’t I go make us a stake gambling while you see your sweetheart? I won’t drink, I promise. Or maybe just one whiskey, just to wet my whistle. What d’ya say, Nate-boy?”

It was a familiar wheedle, and one Nate had resolved to ignore forever more. When Salali gambled, he drank then lost every penny in his pockets. Then he’d lie around in a drunken stupor for the next day, and wake up cranky as a wet rattlesnake.

Sorrowful and repentant after his last binge, he’d agreed to let Nate hold on to their money after a show, so Nate resolved to stick to his guns and do just that. The money was safe in its secret hiding place on the wagon. Even if it meant neither he nor his employer had anything more to eat today than the last of the buffalo jerky, he wasn’t going to let Salali get close to temptation. If they went to town, Salali would have to agree to go into the café via the back entrance, not through the saloon. He figured the medicine-show man wouldn’t agree, but Nate would have liked to see Ella Justiss again, even for a brief time.

“I can’t let you do that, compadre,” Nate said firmly. “You told me not to let you gamble away the profits, or drink liquor, and I’m sticking to that.” He tried to ignore the way Salali’s eyes glared at him in thwarted anger. “If you won’t agree to only visit the café, we’ll stay right here. I’m just doing what you asked me to do, remember?”

Salali yawned widely, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Think I’ll take me a siesta,” he muttered.

Maybe he’d change his mind about supper when he woke up, Nate thought. “Think I’ll take a nap, too,” he said, but he was talking to empty air. The medicine-show man was already snoring.

His employer had once admitted to him while drunk that his lately adopted surname, Salali, meant “Squirrel” in the Cherokee tongue, not “Generous Heart.” But there was nothing of the industrious planning-for-winter rodent or of generosity in Robert Salali, and Nate had to wonder why the chief had given it to him—and what he’d really done for the Indian. He didn’t believe for a minute that story of Salali killing a bear—the man was much too indolent. As Nate spread his blanket under the wagon to take advantage of the shade, he wondered what the Cherokee word for “lazy” was.

Someday soon, he and Salali would have to part ways, he thought, settling himself on his blanket and listening to his employer snore. Their arrangement wasn’t working. At the speed they were meandering through Texas, it would take years for Nate to reach Iowa, and the business opportunity in San Francisco that had been promised to him would have vanished.