Oakley Hall - Warlock

The house Kate Dollar had rented was of tarpaper and wooden battens, with red trim around the door and a single narrow window at the front. The door stood open and he knocked on the red frame and waited, hat in hands. Inside he could see two scuffed leather trunks with curved lids, one with a valise on top of it, the other standing open. In the room were three rawhide straight chairs, a love seat with one corner propped up on some bricks, an oilcloth-covered table beneath the pulley lamp, and, on the wall opposite him, a painting in a chipped gilt frame of a shepherd tending some sheep. The glass over it was cracked.

Kate Dollar came out of the doorway beyond the trunks. She had on a soiled apron and a white frilled shirt with a high collar. Her black hair was tied up in a scarf, and her face, clean and scrubbed-looking, seemed strangely different until he noticed that the beauty mark was missing. She did not look so tall, either, as she came across the creaking plank floor toward him. “Come in, Deputy,” she said.

He entered, and she stepped past him to close the door with a slap. “How do you like my house?”

“It’s a fine house.”

She looked at him in the almost rude way she had. “I see you didn’t know whether to come dressed for work or supper. There’ll be no supper till there’s some work done. I want you to slide those trunks into the bedroom for me, and then I want these walls washed down. Can you bring yourself to do that kind of work?”

“If nobody catches me at it.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, and raised a finger to touch the place where the beauty mark usually was. She smiled a different kind of smile. “I will have something on you, won’t I?”

She stood aside as he lifted the valise to the table, and slid the larger trunk into the bedroom. In the bedroom was a brass bed and an unpainted crate with dirty muslin curtains covering the front. On the crate, on a purple scarf, was a glass-covered picture of the Virgin. There was a wire stretched across one corner of the room, on which hung the clothes she had been wearing when she had come to the jail.

When he returned to the living room he could hear her in the kitchen, and a bucket of water and some cactus-fiber wads were on the table. He went to work on the tarpaper walls.

While he scrubbed the walls Kate Dollar worked in the kitchen and the bedroom, occasionally talking to him from whatever room she happened to be in, and once or twice, as she passed him, pointing out places he had missed. He thought it was as pleasant a time as he had ever spent.

Finished with the front room, he took his bucket into the bedroom. Now the wire in the corner was sagging with clothes. One of the trunks was empty and stood open; there was a mirror in the lid with red roses and blue stars painted around it. The top of the crate had been heaped with her things — a little black book, a silver cross on a beaded chain, a silver-chased box, a derringer, a tinted photograph in a gold frame. The picture of the Virgin stood apart from the clutter. She had a sad, sweet face, full of pity.

He moved closer to the crate. His hand hesitated, as his eyes had hesitated, to pry into her personal things there. But he picked up the tinted photograph. It showed a man with a reddish walrus mustache — a smiling, well-dressed, plump, handsome, touchy-looking man; at first the face seemed familiar and he thought it must be that of the dead man, Cletus, who had come to Warlock with her. Yet he decided it was not. He heard the slap of Kate Dollar’s slippers in the front room, and guiltily he put the photograph down and moved quickly away from the crate. Through the door he saw her pull down the lamp and light the wick with a paper spill. The room brightened around her, and she turned and smiled at him, but some essential part of the pleasantness had vanished, and he felt uncomfortable in the bedroom with the brass scrolled bed, and her private things.

He was nearly done when he began to smell the damp, sweet smell of cornbread, and cooking meat. She called to him that it was time to wash up, and he finished quickly. The oilcloth table was set with dented metal plates and thick white mugs. Kate Dollar had put out a crockery bowl of water and a cake of Pears soap for him, and he washed his hands carefully and wiped them dry on his trouser legs. He could see Kate Dollar in the little kitchen, before a charcoal fire set into a brick counter; her face was pink and prettily beaded with perspiration.

“You can sit down, Deputy,” she called. He did so, and continued to watch her working. She seemed very slim, and it occurred to him that she must not be wearing certain of her usual undergarments. She brought in a dish of cornbread, with a cloth over it, and he rose hurriedly, and seated himself again when she had returned to the kitchen — to rise again when she brought in the meat and greens. Finally she sat down opposite him.

“We’ll have to eat the cornbread dry,” she said. “I haven’t got anything to put on it.”

“Everything certainly smells fine,” he said. He watched her hands to see how she would use her knife and fork, and followed her example. He remembered that his mother had switched her fork to her right hand after she had cut her meat, and he was glad to see that Kate did it that way. In the lamplight he watched the dark down on her bare arms. Her knife scraped painfully on the metal plate.

“Eat your greens, Deputy.”

He grinned and said, “I remember my mother saying that.”

“It is a thing women say.” She had taken off her head scarf and her hair gleamed blue-black. Her teeth were very straight and white, and there was a fine down also on her upper lip. “Where is she?” she asked.

“Well, she’s dead, Miss Dollar.”

“Kate,” she said. “Just Kate.”

“Kate,” he said. “Well, she died, I don’t know — twelve years ago. That was back in Nebraska. She and the baby died of the influenza.”

“And your father?”

“Apaches shot him. That was in the early days here.”

“And Blaisedell killed your brother,” Kate said.

He looked down at his plate. Kate didn’t speak again, and the silence was heavy. He finished his meat and greens and took a piece of corn-bread from under the cloth. It was warm still, but it was dry in his mouth. He knew he was not being very good company. With an effort he laughed and said, “Well, there’s not many men in Warlock tonight, I guess, eating home-cooked food. And good, too. I mean with white women,” he added, thinking of the miners’ Mexican women.

“I’m not all white,” Kate said. “I’m a quarter Cherokee.”

“That’s good blood to have.”

“Why, I’ve thought so,” she said. “My grandmother was Cherokee. She was the finest woman I ever knew.” She looked at him intently, and then she said, “When my father was killed in the war she was going to go after the Yankee that did it, except she didn’t have any way of knowing what Yankee. I was five or six then and the first thing I remember was Grandma getting ready to go with her scalping knife. The only thing that held her back was not knowing how to find out who the Yankee was. Then when I was ten she just died. It always made me think the Yankee’d died too, and she knew it some way, and had gone off to get him where she knew she could find him.”

She smiled a little, but the way she had told it made him uncomfortable. It seemed to him they had talked only of death since they had sat down. He said, “I guess I would have known you for part Cherokee. With those black eyes.”

“My nose. I think I might’ve given up a little Cherokee blood for a decent-sized nose.”

He protested, and put his hand to his own nose, laughing; it was the first time he had ever been pleased with it.