The Bully of Order (8 page)

Eli Bernhardt, a former patient, saw me and came over to ask what I'd been thinking, leaving without telling anybody. Called me Doc, like he hadn't heard the news. “I'm not a doctor.” He apologized as if it was his fault and said he'd found a new doctor named Haslett, and by the way your wife is working for him. Wink. So there were no hard feelings. He remarked that I was bent lower than when I left and asked what had happened.

“I did something to my back falling off a woodcart.”

He looked me up and down like I was lying, but that was the truth.

“Riding a woodcart on a ship?”

“No, before I got on the ship.”

“Riding a woodcart when you were shanghaied?”

“Before that. In fact it was on my way to getting shanghaied.” I was wearing my broad-brimmed hat, tin pants, and Bergmans with the frilly false tongue, gleaming with bear grease. Everything I owned. A wad of money in my pocket the size of a child's fist. They knew I'd been in the camps because I wasn't dark and scurvious like a sailor returned from Australia, but pale and rope tough like them. Roll over the log and find a logger white as a grub. If a photograph were taken, I would be a creature of the main herd.

At the Pioneer I found myself seated beside a wayward powder monkey who was often ringing the bell, and when we struck up a conversation I admitted to formerly being employed as a physician and he confided, yelled into my face like I was the mouth of a cave, that he had recently been a patient of Dr. Haslett's, and “Whoowee, shoulda seen the nurse.”

“That's my wife.”

“Yer wife? How is that yer wife if yer you?”

The bartender and everyone down the line were listening, and honestly, I couldn't answer that.

“We took the vows, all of it.”

“Hell of a world. She doin workin for that behemoth?”

“I've been away.”

“But yer back.”

“Yes.” I yelled it. “Yes.”

The powder monkey climbed up onto the upper rung of his stool and yanked the rope on the bell. Cheers erupted, and the bartender stepped to. My neighbor peeled off bills and let them float to the bar top.

“She assisted in the surgery that removed my appendix. She had to shave my belly. Saw my mighty whitefish.”

“I wouldn't worry about it.”

“I wouldn't either. Ain't my wife.”

“No, she's not.”

“Maybe she could be, the way you let her run.”

When the bartender poured our drinks, I slid mine away and walked out. The smell of cordite was stuck in my nose.

My empire, gone. Wife, gone. Son, gone. A fine joke was unspooling against me. It was then that I went entirely sentimental for my days as a physician and the respect that came with it. I'd been great. I'd been right there in the cupboard where I was to be found, and then I'd left. Now my place had been taken. I'd come home and presented myself as a fool and a liar and had been treated accordingly. Another among the fallen, and when I got up I didn't rise half as far, and that's why they laughed. Shaking with rage, I headed out; what was expected, what I'd deliver. Another bar, another drink. I could be a man about this and go find her and cut her throat. Truthful now, the last thing I wanted was to hurt her. I'd rather let the smug bastards kill me. Nothing so kind as that, they laughed me out the swinging doors. Still, it took me three days to break free of the Line, my big stories all told, my money half spent.

Up the road, dreary and forlorn. Since I'd left they'd planked most of it, but the work had gotten shoddy as they moved away from the town proper. Half the planks were going to the mud by the footfall, some were missing altogether, slapped onto someone's chicken coop or icehouse wall most likely.

Without a knock or call, I entered Matius's house, my home. Nell was speechless, eyes locked on the upended corpse. I was what had been missing, so I thought, but I was useless to her, plain as that. A broken hinge served more purpose than me. She said she'd heard that I'd returned and she'd packed all of her possessions to take to Dr. Haslett's. She was leaving me. She'd left.

Her speech concluded, she walked by me, dumb stump that I am, and went to the bedroom and gathered the boy in her arms. His dirty socks kicked stains on her dress. He'd grown long and wiry and wore my furtive brow.

I reached in my coat pocket and produced a small, fuzzy-looking bear I'd carved from redwood. “For the young explorer, grown so big while I was away.”

“What is it?”

“A bear. What does it look like?”

He took the toy with him to the table and sat down and studied it. “It looks like a pig. Are you sure it's a bear?”

“It's a bear.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I made it.”

“You did not. You can't make bears.”

“I can.”

“No, you make pigs.” He looked at me and pushed up his nose and snorted.

“Why did you come back?” Nell asked.

“You're my wife still.” From the other pocket I brought out my wad of money, what was left from town, and set it on the table. I gently kicked my toe against Nell's steamer trunk, opened the lid, and looked inside at the folded clothes. “You'll stay the night at least. No time to be struttin off into the darkness lookin for a place to sleep. You ask me, you belong under this roof with me, not someone else's.”

“I'll not share a bed with you ever again.” She gathered the boy and went into the bedroom and shut the door. I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. She was in there thinking that I'd be coming in after her but I let her stew, let her get worked up with excitement for the fight or whatever she thought I'd bring in there. Imagine her surprise when she came out the next morning and discovered that I was gone.

I came back in the afternoon. She was still packed and still waiting. Duncan was sitting at the table, dressed in a stiff, brown suit.

“Haslett isn't coming for you. I talked to him.” This was a lie, I hadn't talked to the man at all. I'd played trumps at the Eagle and won seventeen dollars.

“I'll walk then.”

“He doesn't want you.”

“Well, I don't want you, so aren't we a pair.”

“Stay here with me. It's for the best. We'll forget this whole business.”

“You stink of liquor.”

“I know.”

“Why couldn't you stay away?” She had started to cry. She hated me, but I knew her and knew that she could love me again.

“I missed you.”

“Get out.”

“Are you stayin?”

“Get out.”

The next day when I returned I was churchly sober and glad to see that Nell had unpacked her things. I'd found a job working at Camp 21, but I didn't tell her. It wouldn't mean as much if I told her now. I'd wait until she showed her claws so I could turn her from anger. That was an easier move than turning her from disgust. Duncan was taking a nap in what I saw in the future as being our bed.

“You'll stay then?” I asked my teacup, but talking to her.

“I don't have a choice, do I?”

“It was a low thing that Haslett did. He took advantage of you.”

“He did not.”

“Well, it seems that way to me. He should be ashamed.”

“Is this your new adventure? To pretend you're an ignorant logger from God knows where?”

“It's a new start.”

“Jacob, I want to be clear.” Then she told me she didn't love me, didn't remember if she ever had. “I married a doctor.”

“You married an impostor.”

“I don't want to be married to an impostor. I don't want to be married to you at all.”

“I understand.”

“You understand? You're a fool, a weak idiot fool.”

“Duncan's sleeping.”

“I know that. I know what he's doing.” She turned her back to me. “You stay out of my garden and the henhouse too. That's our food, not yours.”

And that's how it went. Nell and Duncan stayed in the bedroom, and I slept on the floor in front of the fireplace like a dog. I didn't have anything to lose, but I wasn't like my father, a man looking up from a hole. I'd climb into this new life like I was climbing onto a springboard, ax in my hand, kerosene bottle hanging from my belt. My partner across from me, waiting with the whip. Day in.

I
f there were a
headline in the paper, it would read “Wife Surprisingly Un-Forsaken Retraces Bad Road.” I thought he was dead, that I'd never see him again. Strange the way that can play on your mind. It was like we'd never met or maybe I'd dreamed him, but then there he was like a stray dog, and one that had rolled in something besides.

I went to see Milo but couldn't bring myself to knock on the door. It was no secret what I'd done, and since Jacob had returned I could see that people were gossiping; their faces changed when they saw me, as if they'd been talking about me or thinking of me. It's no good searching for guilt in other people's faces. I was treated coldly, but I felt that walking around shamefaced asked for it, so it was my burden.

Jacob hired on with a logging outfit and disappeared again. I didn't know him anymore. He said he still worked as a physician if someone needed it, but no longer advertised. He'd never done that anyway, and I could see now that it was part of his plan, not to be noticed or bold, to fit in. The quiet chicken that eats and scratches and roosts but never lays. Before he left, I had him order supplies delivered from Heath's store so I wouldn't have to go to town. Duncan and I worked in the garden, and with the money Jacob brought us, we bought three pigs and four lambs. We had a bit of clear weather, and the sun felt lovely. He writes me letters; they come with the supplies or with whoever's passing by the house.

A family, the Parkers, moved into the abandoned homestead south of us. Edna was around the same age as me, and they had a boy, Zeb, the same age as Duncan. Lewis, the husband, worked at the mill and was gone most of the week, sleeping at the bunkhouse. They raised goats, and you could smell them from a mile off. Edna and I became friends, and Duncan and Zeb did too. We visited often, and soon it was them that brought the mail and any other news deemed valuable.

To my surprise, I began to expect and perhaps need the letters from Jacob, and it felt like maybe I understood him, or at least understood why I'd married him in the first place. I felt that in some ways I knew him for what he'd always been, but in others he presented himself fresh, whole cloth. He told me that he'd once stabbed his brother in the leg when he was a boy because Matius wouldn't stop teasing him. He stabbed him and locked him in the tack room in the barn and wouldn't let him out. He told me that with his back to the wall he felt the boards shake as his brother kicked and screamed to be let out.

“You can only take a thing so far,” he'd written.