E. Doctorow: Welcome to Hard Times

I sat down myself to draw a breath. But Bear built up a small pit fire and by its light, Molly — turning her head in pain — strangled a wail in her throat and locked my eyes in a terrible green gaze. A moment later she was crying again and the boy was crying too and the night breeze started to moan through the shanty boards like an awful chorus of ghosts, and with all that misery in such small space I thought for one second to get up and get out of there and ride away fast. But I could no more do that than Fee and Flo and the others could get up from their graves — the Bad Man had fixed us all in the spot and he had fixed me by leaving me alive. Before long I could hear the coyotes jumping down from the rocks and panting past the shack over to the dead horse. They snarled and scratched and when I looked out the door I could see their shadows throwing up dirt all over the hill. Smoke still rose, blue now in the moonlight, and embers were glowing on the ground like peepholes to Hell.

Now the saying is common that Sam Colt made men equal. But if it is true then our town wouldn’t have burned up in the rain; instead that Bad Man would have been buried with due honors and a proper notice sent to the Territory Office. He would have had a hole in his chest, or his back, and the one who shot him would have Avery standing him a drink and maybe redheaded Flo and Molly smiling his way. Colt gave every man a gun, but you have to squeeze the trigger for yourself.

A few times during that long cold night I thought the Bad Man was coming back. The Major’s pony, tethered outside, would whinny or snort, or some pebbles would roll down from the rocks, or Molly would cry out as if he was walking through the door. But really there was nothing he would come back for: In the morning I went out to stomp the numbness from my feet, and my eyes felt the shock of seeing air where the town had been. The chilly dawn rested right on the charred ground, the flats began at the horizon and came up to where I stood. I could not see a soul.

I was stiff and sore and bleary from no sleep and my first breath of the frosty morning sent a pain into my stomach. I went over to the ruins of Ezra Maple’s store and started to poke around. Jimmy Fee woke up and came out of the shack and stood watching me while he made water in the middle of the street. He had his father’s wide-set eyes, the Fee look on his face that took you in but didn’t ask any questions, and his hair needed to be cut so bad that his head looked too large for his body. I had never seen such a skinny boy.

“Are you hungry?” I called, but he didn’t answer.

Two fallen planks lay like hands with their fingers touching and under them I found some dried apples and peas in the ashes. The peas were well roasted.

“Jimmy, look around for a coffeepot, find us a pot, boy.”

That was the way to talk to him, he went right to it. I had not picked a handful of peas out of the ashes before he was running up with a good pot. We drew some water and washed the soot off and I built a fire out of China matches from my pocket and we brewed up some pea coffee. With the apples it helped the hunger, but it tasted bad enough to make me remember all the good coffee I had drunk in my life and the beef and bacon and bread I had eaten.

I took some of the breakfast into the shack but Molly was asleep. She had cried almost until dawn. She lay with her arms out in front of her, thin and white, and her matted hair was caked at the tips with Bear’s mud medicine. The Indian was sitting by her side, chewing on some dried corn. I put down the pot and the apples and went back outside to scavenge with the boy.

We recovered two charred tins of milk from Ezra’s store, a tomato can, a box of.45 shells, the head of a hammer, a handful of horseshoe nails and a hunk of lye soap. From the remains of the Silver Sun we picked out a length of balustrade, three oil lamps — one with the glass unbroken — and lots of black bottles and chipped glasses. Elsewhere we found a charred saddle and a round stove, intact, and Jimmy even came up with an almanac that was only burnt around the edges. As we hunted the sun rose warm and took the chill out of my back, and by noon we had a pile of goods sitting in front of Bear’s shanty.

But I didn’t want to spend another night there.

I stepped inside to see if Molly was awake. Slits and speckles of light lay across the floor and one strip of light fell on her open eyes. She looked bad. Her face was so thin I could see how the bones and blue veins went under her skin. The food beside her was untouched. I didn’t know what to say to her, I didn’t know what she would say to me, but I said:

“Molly I’m going to build a dugout over by the well. Earth is the one thing we’ve got in supply and a good sod wall will do better against the weather than these boards will.”

For a second I thought she was dead, she was so still. Then she was whispering something and I bent down to hear:

“A man gave me a little trinket once. On a chain. I left it with the Major to hold.”

I lowered my own voice: “Molly, I must tell you the old man is dead.”

“Ah,” her eyes closed, “I knew …”

“He died of a fit, he was cursing the Bad Man. Wait—”

The pony was in the flats grazing on what he could, I had sent Jimmy out on his back after our salvage; but the Major’s rig was outside the door and under the seat I found a carved box of private things — pearl buttons, a tin of mustache wax, a collar, a Union medal and a small cross on a chain.

I brought the cross in to Molly. I held it out to her and she reached up and gently took it from me with her long fingers and clutched it tight as she laid her head back down on her hands. Then she smiled. My heart jumped with that smile and I asked her would she eat something.

“Take care of me Blue?” she said softly.

“Yes Molly, if you allow.”

Still smiling she said “Mayor”—whispering so that I bent down and put my ear almost to her lips—“if I had that knife now I wouldn’t drop it. I would stick it in you and watch the yellow flow.”

For a moment I didn’t understand, I could not reconcile the words with the smile on her face. But I looked at her and saw what a sweet smile it was, full of hate, and I felt as if I had been swiped to the ground by the paw of a big cat.

John Bear was turning over his garden patch with a piece of rock and he came around to the door just as I stepped out. I pushed by him without a word. The shovel was where I had left it, over by the offal. The coyotes had scalloped out one side of the dirt mound and eaten clear down to the bone. I knew they would be back at night for the rest, but I had to throw new dirt on anyway. An awful sense of hopelessness came over me. In this ruin and desolation, the ache of all my years rose in my bones and I was ready to sit down where I was and give up the ghost. What was the use? The woman in John Bear’s shack was no longer Molly, what had happened in Avery’s saloon could never be undone. The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures, and Molly’s grin had burned the hope right out of me.

My hands were sore gripping the shovel again, they had swelled and blistered from all the grave-digging yesterday, it was only their needling distress which made me hold on tight as I could and march with that shovel over to the windmill. For no other reason than the pain shooting up my arms did I stick the blade into the ground and begin laying out a dugout.

This windmill was the one thing of value that the Bad Man had left. Hausenfield had paid to have the well drilled and then he had made back his costs by charging everybody for the water. It was either the German’s good well water or the tepid stored from a rain or a long climb to a trickle spring up in the rocks. Most people paid. Fee had met the charge by building Hausenfield’s stable, Avery had used his girls. Some others took what they needed when Hausenfield wasn’t looking. I cut an eight-foot square near the windmill and wet it down with pails of water. I dug blocks of sod and piled them on the line. By digging four feet down and piling the sod two feet high you were sure of a ceiling you could stand under if you didn’t stretch. Jimmy Fee came riding in on the pony’s back and he gave the animal a drink. He held the bridle and watched me dig.