The Bully of Order Read online

  The woman in the hat, the top button of her dress was undone. She must’ve felt the cold breath of the wind because she grasped her throat as if she meant to choke herself. I knew that I’d remember the white dress and the yellow hat for much longer than I’d remember the oxcart. Who remembers oxcarts? Bullwhackers, that’s who. Unfortunate that I could still conjure the scent of the boil and the dead rigidity of her hip as I held her.

  The first time I saw my wife, Nell, we were at a church in Cincinnati. She wore a blue dress with a white ribbon. I’ll never forget that. Ox and cart. Mud and puddle. Husband and wife.

  I looked up when I heard the shot and saw a man standing over the injured horse with a smoking pistol. The wreck had been cleared and loose planks spread over the holes in the street and the walkway. Sheasby was on his knees in front of his broken wall, picking at the damage with his doughy fingers, swinging his fat jowls around to whine, but no one was listening. I’d like to buy him out someday, chase him and his hardware store out of here, just to watch him go. He beats his children and I don’t like him.

  The oxen were brought over and the boy set chains to the dead horse and they dragged it away, most likely to Fortneau’s to be butchered, or, depending on the owner’s sentiment, it could be going up the hill to be buried, tombstone and flowers, not likely.

  Soon men again filled the streets. Look at them, all of them, beasty little slints. They landed here: torn, dirty, and scared; starving mostly, flashing their frantic grins and yellowpine teeth. Do your best, gents, and welcome to the Big Show. Watch the puddles. That one swallowed an oxcart. That other swallowed a town. Welcome to the white man’s burden, the slaughter of war ponies, the poisoning of the well. We’re doing it here, and we’ll take more if you got them.

  Maybe I should still be afraid but I’m not. I learned long ago that it’s easier to fail of your own volition than to be defeated, and truly weakness is only a triviality here, like bad teeth when the meat is tough. If you’re hungry, you’ll find a way to get it down.

  On cue, the rain whipped against the windows. The punky wood of the southern sill was swollen. My thumbnail scratch from last night, made to test the rottenness of the wood, was there and beady wet. I beheld a watery reflection in the imperfect glass and lo it was me. Thy ugly self a-blinking.

  A face doesn’t change anything, but hundreds do, because then they’re faceless.

  You say San Francisco is a rough town? New York? Shanghai? Our washerwomen are tougher than their meanest ax-murdering thugs. Our smallest, puniest orphan can beat Jim Corbett at arm wrestling. Our shortest Chinaman is six-four if he’s an inch.

  A body is a mob, a convulsion, an orgasm of destitute rabble. Listen to it breathe. Feed it. Keep it appeased, always. It’s written on the wall: THE HARBOR WELCOMES YOU.

  Down the street, at the docks, a new crowd was forming, inveterate roil. Among the black sea of hats was the pale flesh of a shaved head and the amber wood of a club. The hats parted and scattered and the bald head lurched after them. It was that mad German, Bellhouse, the barking dog that kept the Harbor up nights. He’d taken the strong and lawless ground and become a structurist (the Coast Sailor’s Union labor fight) and harrier (mill owners) and ultimately the king of the rampallions; a company of thieves, pimps, and murderers that served as the tendons and muscle to Bellhouse’s brain.

  I followed the pale head, a thumbnail among so many blackened hands, through the crowd and up the gangplank of a schooner christened Feather. Three men followed close behind him. No mistaking the biggest of the three, Tartan, a head above the tallest in the crowd, a shimmering green greatcoat and a black bowler. His big hands swung around and swatted two men onto their asses to study their feet, behold ye upended boots. On deck Bellhouse was passed a hatchet and he held it up and howled at the rain. Then a shotgun blast rang out from somewhere on deck and the crowd pulsed and shifted back and then forward like tidewater plants. Tartan had fallen. The two other men with him brought out their pistols and fired two shots apiece at the wheelhouse. There was no more shooting after that. A man was dragged from the cabin with a rope around his neck and tied to the rail like a finger in a square knot. Tartan was lifted to his feet and helped toward the wheelhouse. He’d been shot in the leg. My heart thudded against my ribs because I knew they’d be coming to find me. But not yet. The German yelled something at his men and then chopped the stern line. He forced his way forward and did the same thing to the bow. At first the ship didn’t move, and then ever so slowly it parted from the dock like ice from the floe and the gangplank slid and dropped into the water. With Tartan injured, Bellhouse and the two others had a tough time chasing the remaining stevedores from the deck into the water. If they wouldn’t jump, they were thrown. Hats were lost, tobacco surely ruined. A lone deckhand stood at the rail, nervously looking over his shoulder to make sure Bellhouse approved, and waved the tug into position. The tugman’s boy pitched him a line and he tied it off. The swimmers were fished out of the black water and hauled onto dry land. This was a Thursday in May, a day of no occasion.

  Bellhouse stood over the man tied by the neck, the ship’s captain most likely, pressed the man’s face against the stern rail, and waved good-bye to the crowd with the ax. People mostly cheered, save a few brave souls who booed. I never saw the shotgun. I had everything ready downstairs if they came back and needed buckshot removed. I’d sleep lightly tonight, expecting them.

  There were reasons for everything, even low piracy. Bellhouse and his men would ride back with the tug, and the next ship that didn’t pay the German’s tithe would get the same treatment or worse. Pay somebody or make them pay you, those were the choices. He’d abandoned ship’s crews on sandbars at low tide and was known to shoot them and stab them too, beat them unconscious and throw them in the water. The floating fleet. Last month he’d made a homemade bomb and blown up a cigar shop on F Street. One story went that he’d eaten human flesh in Whitehorse. All sorts, and Bellhouse was only one. He led his pack, but there were others that could pay to have him ripped apart on a whim.

  My father used to brag that he was a friend of Rockefeller, implied a business relationship, although as far as I knew the families had never met. He’d been a surgeon during the War, my father, but he put it away when he came home, tried his shaking hands at coal, and then oil. He couldn’t bear to see shoes or boots of any kind stacked willy-nilly on the floor or pant legs hiked up either, no matter if it were children or God save us a woman. I don’t think we ever even lived in the same state as the Rockefellers, let alone the same town. He bought stock and lost it, along with the rest of the country, but he took it to heart. There wasn’t much he didn’t. We seemed to be the opposite of the Rockefellers, but he’d tell you we were of a feather, my father would. At first he’d speak the powerful names like a trained bird, not knowing, but later in his life that changed. The blank cheerfulness subsided and he became more of a conjurer, a moribund circus magician, his incantations turned to questions and finally to pleas for mercy. He wasn’t a bad man, though, my father. He was a man in a hole looking up. There were many others like him that the War had left mostly useless, mostly ruined. When I left home I took his books and his bag and all of his tools. I might be worse than Bellhouse or Rockefeller or any of them, simply because I’m not who I say I am.

  A group of fishermen oared through Bellhouse’s wake in their Columbia River salmon boat. A boy stood in the stern, to his knees in fish, slicing and chucking guts. The two sets of oars went endlessly, like dragonfly wings.

  I stood and retrieved my writing tray from on top of the bookshelf and filled the inkwells and sat back down. With great pleasure I rubbed my stocking feet together and cracked my toes. When I was a child, my mother told me that I had beautiful feet, but the other children sometimes followed me and made fun of the way I walked. In the bedroom Nell kept a full-length mirror, and I couldn’t pass it without wondering at the body I lived in. Thank Christ I wasn’t a woman. Too ugly for the nunnery or th
e whorehouse. Napoleon said that women are machines for producing children. I believe that capacity and intent are two very different things. Nell had married down, and I was fine with that; she made me feel profoundly chosen.

  The sun slid through the clouds and disappeared, and once it was gone I sat in the dark. My plans to pen a letter to my brother Matius went foggy.

  “Nell,” I said. “Come in here for a moment, could you, please?”

  “I’m busy, Jacob. What do you want?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  I hesitated. “Sorry to bother you.”

  She appeared in the doorway. “You’re not bothering me. What is it?”

  “Sheasby’s wall was smashed by an oxcart. Bellhouse stole another ship.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  “Don’t smile about Sheasby’s trouble, or the next misfortune will fall on you.”

  “I’m not smiling.”

  “You are. You need some light in here.”

  I shook my head. She went to the table and lit the oil lamp. Her face changed, and I knew what she was about.

  “When is your brother to arrive?”

  The letter was in my desk, but I didn’t need to look at it again. I’d more or less memorized it. “June, I would guess. He sailed from San Francisco the first week of April. How long did it take us to make our way here?”

  “We stopped in Portland.”

  “Matius is doing the same. Jonas is there with his young wife.”

  “What kind of father follows the son?”

  “He’s visiting him. He’s not following him.”

  “Bleeding him dry,” she said.

  “I know that you don’t care for my brother, but he’ll not cease to be family, not ever.”

  “I don’t understand why he feels compelled to come here at all.”

  “He only wants to see how we’ve done for ourselves. For a visit. I haven’t seen him for years. It’s the longest we’ve been apart.”

  “And the years have seen you in your best condition.”

  “That isn’t true.” I basked in the compliment.

  “You’ve grown into this place. You’ve come into your own. I know Matius. He’ll come here and try and weasel his way into the cracks. You’d think you were six years the elder instead of him.”

  “He won’t be here long. A brief reunion.”

  There was a long silence. “You’ll take your dinner in here?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “It’ll be ready soon.”

  There was something else I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t remember what. No matter. I wanted a drink, but after last time Nell wouldn’t allow it, not with Matius on the way. What was allowed when it came to liquor was difficult to gauge. It was irrational for me to think that since she didn’t care for my brother, she didn’t care for me. She had her reasons. Matius had been awful at our wedding, fighting with Nell’s uncle until they were both bloody, but there was more, a secret that she’d never told me. I knew what it was, though; I could guess, and on the nights when I couldn’t sleep, there were times when I prayed for the sun to come up because I could just then get at the nature of Matius, and once I’d touched it, I couldn’t easily put it down.

  The gaslights in the street were lit, and their light smeared wetly on the grid and grime of the planked world. I took up my father’s Lord Bury spotting scope and bumped the brass against the glass as I always did and then leaned back and peeped into Sheasby’s windows. Curtains drawn wide; they knew they were being watched and behaved.

  Pass me the squash, dear.

  No coffee for me. I’ll be up all night.

  Wouldn’t want that. We’d die of boredom.

  But if I went to the bedroom window and looked toward the Line, I’d see something. At all hours you could see something there. Eight red houses in four blocks, last I heard. Twice as many taverns and trumpery shops to fleece the loggers. Haberdashers that’d sell you a suit of clothes that would fall off you in panels before you could get properly drunk. All the stinking, pitchy masses loaded into rooming houses built tall and teetering like real city tenements. The Line is the liver of this town; it holds all the poison and decides what to pass and what to keep. Ultimately it keeps us alive while promising to someday kill us.

  The scope was said to have been at Antietam, but it didn’t have a scratch on it. Twenty thousand dead if there was one. My father let me look upon it but never hold it or look through it. In this way too he limited my reach, by hand and by eye. After my wedding I stole the scope and the cedar box it traveled in and added it to the accumulation to be picked up by the freighters. Judgment is left to those with failed lives, and to God. Therefore, get in line.

  Duncan was walking now, running too, until he fell. My son, my lineage, the march of time; he kept mostly in the kitchen and in the bedroom with his mother. He was beautiful like her, and that was a blessing. I can’t say what he got from me, maybe his eyes—not the color but the actual hard marbles. During the day, in quiet moments, when I was downstairs, I could hear his bare feet banging against the floor above. I would look up and follow the sound and toy with the strange thought that bones grew, lengthened and grew. Trees grow, but lumber doesn’t. Towns grow, and graveyards. My son’s bones were growing while millions were dead in the ground and in the sea, uncountable. Twenty thousand in one day. Here again was the confirmation: a single face means nothing. And my brother was coming, profiled on deck, rolling waves, seafoam. What did that matter? I wanted to impress him, always had, and he was coming to see me.

  I truly enjoyed these moments, my time alone in the evening. Sanctuary was a word that came to mind when I shut the door behind me. Everyone should be so lucky to have a warm, safe place and a family to share it with. Soon I’d be able to spend more time at home. I’d already hired Miss Eakins to assist and clean up. The old woman was about as gloomy as a turkey vulture, but a great help in matters of consequence. You couldn’t shake her. In time, as the Harbor grew, I thought I could find a partner and we could share a practice and eventually I wouldn’t have to work at all. Because the stress on a charlatan is real. “Trust,” my father used to say, “is found in the eyes,” and then he’d pause. “And bank accounts. Trust is also found there. Churches too. The eyes, money, and God.” No wonder he was broken and penniless. Failure is more often delivered by maxim than by silence.

  Matius was arriving by ship but the trains were coming too, railroad grade was being cut, steel promised to every town. And that was the anthem of the Harbor: “The Railroad Is Coming.” I imagined myself the Harbor and my brother the railroad.

  When we first tied up on the Wishkah, we’d neither of us, Nell or myself, ever seen a place so dark and slick and brooding, treacherous as a wounded animal; and we’d come from Cleveland and then north from San Francisco, meaning we’d seen more than our share already. We’d even, for the sport and excitement and because we’d never make the same journey twice, stumbled in the wet muck of Portland and saw our first real coast Indians there, camped on the banks of the Willamette, and joked that the Harbor can’t be much worse than this, but it was; it was much worse. The trees of the coast were big enough, though, thousands of them, more than could be believed, and there was water to grow them till the end of time and on the mudflats coming in there’d been fowl that blocked out the sky when they flew, and farther in, near the mouth of the Hoquiam and the sorry settlement that polluted it, we came upon Indians paddling quickly with the tide in their sleek canoes. They looked just like the drawings I’d seen in books, as if they were pretending for our benefit. War paint. Deadly savages. I was afraid of them to the very bottom of my balls. Captain Gray must’ve felt the same when he arrived in 1792, because when the Indians came out to meet his ship he blasted them to pieces with a nine-pounder. Cannons, I suspect, are the true final refuge of cowards.

  “There’s been an accident,” Nell had said. She stood weakly
on her sea legs, pale, not ready for this, her first steps on the shoddy wharf, bent nails pounded flat like drowned worms. We’d been traveling for over a month, and we were finally and completely sick of it all and each other.

  I nodded, ignored her. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The bastards hadn’t even finished logging the streets or any of it. I’d never seen such a mess. The trash we’d passed on the Hoquiam was no better or worse. Town versus encampment versus battlefield. In contrast, a gold camp would be the peak of urbanity. It looked like something seen under a microscope tumbling and wet and then suddenly enlarged and not of this world. Welcome the mastodons and pygmy horses.

  “Don’t believe the pamphleteers,” my father had told me.

  “I’m not a fool. I can see the sense and the nonsense in them. I read closely, Father, every word.”

  “They’ve already set the hook in you.” He hooked a finger in the corner of his mouth and gave it a tug and laughed, stopped all at once and grimaced. “Protect your family. I can give no better advice than that.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ve swallowed their poison—it’s in your belly even now.”

  No, I thought. No, it was only the strictest analysis that had led me to the Harbor. And the pretty pictures and promises of wealth unbounded. I believed in the West and the wide openness of a man’s future. To me, independence was a man’s gift to himself, the only one to be received with honor. I was going, and I was taking Nell with me. Fire the cannons: I was gone. Oh sweet Christ I was on my own.

  So there it was: sloppy piles of turned earth, logs jutting, fires smoldering. They couldn’t make it worse, but God they were trying. The hovels—they weren’t houses—were made of red cedar shakes and lacked proper windows, shutters and no glass, somehow purely Puritan, like we’d caught them mid-exorcism. Where do y’all burn yer witches? The rain wasn’t strong but it was persistent, and even when it stopped the dripping kept its spirit alive until it returned. Everywhere I looked they’d cut down trees too large to move or do anything with, as children might do. I wanted to scream and stamp my feet.