Daguerreotype of a Good Man

I have been a long time getting to this and I will not pretend the telling comes easy. A man of fifty-three ought to have his accounts settled, his recollections filed in some order that makes a kind of sense, but the truth is I have carried this for forty-two years and I am no closer to understanding it than I was at eleven, standing in a kitchen doorway with bare feet on cold pine, watching a man I did not know eat my mother’s biscuits.

His name was Cass. That is what he gave and that is all he gave. Whether it was a first name or a last name or something he picked off the ground that morning, I cannot say. He rode into our town on the seventh of September, 1882, on a roan gelding that had been ridden beyond what was reasonable, and he did not explain himself and nobody with sense asked him to.

Our town was Garnet, Wyoming, and it was not much of a town. Fourteen buildings if you counted the livery and the privy behind the Occidental Saloon, which I did because I was eleven and eleven-year-old boys count everything. My mother ran the boarding house on Second Street, which was also the only street, and she had been running it alone for six months because my father was dead.

He had been killed in April over water. Not in a gunfight — nothing so clean. Dodd Sweeney came to the house while my father was mending fence along the Frawley line, and my father said something about the ditch, and Sweeney shot him in the chest from eight feet and rode back to the Frawley ranch and had supper. There was an inquest. The coroner’s jury met at the Occidental and the six men on the jury all worked Frawley cattle one way or another, and they ruled it self-defense, and that was the end of it. The water kept flowing the way Lute Frawley wanted it to flow. My mother kept the boarding house open because there was nothing else to keep open, and half the men she fed worked for the man who employed her husband’s killer.

I tell you this so you will understand what Cass rode into. Not just a town. A situation. My mother served Sweeney his supper twice a week and he paid her the same rate as any man and she took his money because money does not carry the smell of what earned it, and even if it did, we would have needed it just the same.

My father had been a quiet man, not large, not fast, not particularly good at anything except mending fence and growing squash. He had no gun. He was killed by a man with a gun and nobody in Garnet said a word about it because Garnet depended on Frawley’s payroll the way a wheel depends on its axle, and you do not break an axle over a fence-mender.

He came in off the Cheyenne road in late afternoon. The light that time of year in Wyoming has a quality I have not found anywhere else — thin and gold and full of dust, the kind of light that makes the sagebrush look like it is burning without heat. I was sitting on the porch shelling beans when I saw him. He rode with his weight low and his shoulders forward, a man who had spent more of his life on a horse than off one. His hat was the color of old mud. His boots were cracked across the insteps. He wore no spurs, which I noticed because a boy of eleven notices spurs.

He dismounted in front of the boarding house and stood for a moment looking at the building the way a man looks at a building he means to enter — not admiring it, reading it. The windows, the door, the porch roof, the alley alongside. Then he lifted his saddle off the roan and carried it up the porch steps one-handed and set it against the rail and asked if this was a place where a man could get a bed and a meal.

My mother came out drying her hands on her apron. She looked at him. I remember the looking — it lasted longer than it should have. Not the way a woman looks at a man she finds handsome, though maybe he was handsome, I had no way to judge. It was the way you look at a thing whose purpose you recognize immediately. A rattlesnake. A loaded gun on a table.

She said it was a dollar a night, meals included.

He paid for a week. Seven silver dollars, counted out from a leather poke that was not heavy enough to hold much more. He went upstairs and washed and came down for supper and sat at the long table with four of Frawley’s cowhands and a freighter bound for the railroad camp at Rock Creek. He did not speak except once, when he told my mother the biscuits were the best he had eaten since Abilene.

I watched from the kitchen doorway. I could see his hands. The right hand was steady. The left hand, which rested on his knee below the table, had a tremor in it — a fine, constant vibration, like a compass needle that cannot find north. When he caught me looking he moved the hand to the tabletop and pressed it flat against the wood, and the tremor stopped, and he went on eating.

I thought he was the answer to something. I was eleven and I still believed things had answers.

Three days passed. They passed the way all time passes in a small town — through meals and chores and the sound of boots on a boardwalk and the particular silence that falls after dark when there is nothing to do but listen to the coyotes argue with themselves out beyond the sage flats.

Cass ate breakfast at seven and supper at six. Between meals he walked the single street, or sat on the boarding house porch with his hat on his knee, or stood at the corral fence watching the horses do nothing. He spoke to my mother about the weather. He asked her once if the road north to Sheridan was passable with a wagon, and she said it was, and that was the end of that conversation. He did not speak to any of Frawley’s men. He did not go to the saloon. He carried a Colt on his right hip in a holster that was worn to the shape of the gun the way a glove wears to the shape of a hand, and the leather was dark with years of oil, and nobody mentioned it and nobody needed to.

I tried once to talk to him. It was the second morning. He was on the porch with a cup of my mother’s coffee, and the steam was rising from it into the cold September air, and the sage flats stretched out to the east, gray-green, and there was frost on the porch rail that was melting in the first sun. I sat on the step below him and asked where he had come from. He said south. I asked where he was going. He said north. I asked if he had fought in the war and he said he was too young for it, which meant he was older than he looked or younger than I thought, and I did not know which. He drank his coffee and looked at the sage flats and I understood that the conversation was over, though nobody had said it was.

The town knew. I do not know how a town knows a thing that nobody says, but it does. The way geese know to fly south. The way a horse knows a storm is coming before the clouds have formed. Garnet knew that something was going to happen, and it waited with the patience of a place that has no choice but to wait.

On the second day Dodd Sweeney came to the boarding house for supper.

He came every Tuesday and Thursday. He always sat at the head of the long table, though there was no head — it was a table, not a parliament. He was a big man, wide through the shoulders, with a face that was not cruel but was not anything else either. Blank as a plate. He was polite. He said “thank you, ma’am” when my mother set his plate down and “fine meal, ma’am” when he pushed back from the table. He tipped his hat when he came and when he left. He had killed my father five months before and he ate at my father’s table and he was polite about it.

That Tuesday he sat down and Cass was already seated. They were six feet apart. Sweeney looked at him the way you look at a new dog in the yard — assessing, not alarmed. Cass did not look up from his plate. My mother served them both. She served Sweeney first because he had been coming longer. I watched her hands on the serving ladle. Her knuckles went white. The tendons stood out on the backs of her hands like cords of rawhide. She set the ladle down and went back to the kitchen and stood at the dry sink with her back to the door and she did not move for a long time.

Nobody mentioned my father. Nobody mentioned the water. The freighter talked about the price of flour in Cheyenne. One of the cowhands said he had seen antelope up near Crazy Woman Creek. Sweeney said the weather had been dry and asked if anyone thought it would rain before October. Cass said nothing. He ate with the economy of a man who has eaten too many meals in too many places to have opinions about any of them. When he finished he set his napkin beside his plate and went upstairs and the house creaked as he walked the hall to his room.

That night I lay in bed and listened to the house and I could hear, or thought I could hear, Cass walking the floor of his room above mine. Back and forth. Not pacing — that would imply agitation. Walking the way a man walks who is measuring something. The floorboards talked under his weight and I counted his steps and tried to calculate the size of his room by the number of steps he took before he turned, and I arrived at a number that could not have been right, and I fell asleep doing the arithmetic.

On the third day Mr. Yewell came through.

He was an itinerant photographer working the small towns between Cheyenne and the Bighorns — a thin man with a thin beard and a covered wagon full of chemicals that smelled like something between vinegar and a struck match. He made tintypes. The process involved a sheet of iron coated in lacquer and chemicals I did not understand, and he could produce a likeness in four minutes. He charged fifty cents. He photographed the Becker family in front of their dry goods store, and old Hollis Pratt in his cavalry jacket from the war, and a cowhand named Espy who wanted to send his portrait back to a girl in Missouri who may or may not have been waiting for him.

In the afternoon Mr. Yewell set up on the boarding house porch and Cass allowed himself to be photographed. I do not know who suggested it. Cass sat in the cane-backed chair with his hat on his knee and his left hand pressed flat against the chair arm. His face in the image is narrow, tired, neither young nor old. His eyes look past the camera at something that is not there. The tremor in his left hand is invisible — his palm flat against the wood, the fingers slightly spread, holding still by force of will.

Mr. Yewell produced the image and Cass paid his fifty cents and looked at the plate for a long moment and set it on the porch rail. When he went inside, my mother picked it up and brought it to the kitchen. She did not give it back and he did not ask for it.

I have that tintype now. It sits in a cigar box in my desk drawer with a lock of my daughter’s hair and a discharge paper from the army and a deed to forty acres I never worked. I take it out sometimes. The man in the image is sitting in a chair and his hand is flat on the chair arm and he could be anyone.

Years later, when I was old enough to ask and she was old enough not to mind, my mother told me she had seen what Cass was the moment he rode in. She could have turned him away. She could have said the rooms were full, though they were not, and he would have ridden on to the next town and none of it would have happened.

She did not turn him away. She set a place for him at her table and she knew what she was setting in motion.

She never said she asked for it. She said she allowed it. In the West, I have found, that is the same thing.

It happened on a Thursday. Late afternoon. The light going amber behind the Bighorns and the shadows of the buildings stretching halfway across the street like something spilled.

Cass came downstairs. He wore his hat. He checked the loads in his Colt and spun the cylinder and holstered it. He walked out the door and down the porch steps and turned right toward the Occidental Saloon. He did not look back.

The town was on the boardwalks. I do not know how they knew to be there but they were — the Beckers, old Hollis Pratt, the Mexican woman who took in washing, three cowhands leaning on the corral fence. Watching. Not speaking. The audience at a thing that had been decided before anyone arrived.

I followed. I stayed on the far side of the street, behind the water trough in front of the livery. My mother did not follow. She was at the kitchen sink, washing the supper dishes. She did not look out the window. She washed the dishes and she dried them and she put them away, and she was doing that when the shots came, and she went on doing it after.

Cass pushed through the door of the Occidental. I could not see inside. I heard voices but not words — the low, flat sound of men speaking in a room where something is about to happen. It lasted perhaps ten seconds.

Two shots. Close together, the second chasing the first like an echo that arrived too soon.

Cass came out. He stood on the boardwalk and looked at his left hand. Blood ran from the web between his thumb and forefinger where the hammer had bitten him on the recoil. The tremor had made his grip wrong. He wrapped the hand in a bandanna from his back pocket and walked up the street toward the boarding house without hurrying.

Sweeney did not come out.

I went to the saloon door. I should not have gone but I went. Sweeney was on the floor between the bar and the first table. He was on his back. His hat was three feet from his head. His gun was in his hand but he had not fired it. The blood was spreading on the plank floor in a shape that had no name — not a circle, not a pool, just a shape that got larger while I watched. The barkeep was standing behind the bar with a rag in his hand and he had not moved and he did not move.

I looked at Sweeney’s boots. The left boot had a hole in the sole, just behind the ball of the foot — a hole the size of a nickel, worn through the leather. I could see his sock, which was gray. I had not known that. I had not known that the man who killed my father walked around with a hole in his boot. It should not have mattered. It mattered.

Cass returned to the boarding house. He went upstairs. He did not come down for supper. My mother set his place at the table anyway — plate, knife, fork, cup. She set it the way she set it every evening, with the fork to the left and the knife to the right and the cup above the knife. After an hour she cleared it. She washed the plate and the fork and the knife and the cup, all of them clean, none of them used, and she dried them and put them away.

The house was quiet. Frawley’s cowhands did not come for supper. The freighter had left that morning. My mother and I ate alone in the kitchen — cold biscuits and bacon and the last of the pear preserves from a jar my father had opened in March, a week before he was killed. Neither of us spoke. The bacon was too salty. The biscuits were from the morning and had gone hard. My mother ate with her eyes on her plate, steadily, the way she did everything — not fast, not slow, with the kind of attention that has nothing to do with the thing being attended to.

I could not sleep. The house made its noises — the settling of old timber, the wind off the flats pressing against the windows, the creak of a floorboard upstairs where Cass walked or did not walk; I could not tell whether I was hearing him or the house remembering him. I went downstairs at midnight, or near it. The kitchen was dark except for a candle on the table, burned down to a stub. My mother was sitting at the table. She was not crying. She was not doing anything. She was looking at the table surface, which was scarred from fifteen years of knives and forks and hot pans and the grain of the wood showing through the varnish in places where the varnish had been worn away by use.

I sat across from her. We did not speak. It was not a comfortable silence but it was not the other kind either. It was just what was left.

She said: “Your father is still dead.”

I did not know what to say to that. I still do not.

I said: “Was he a good man?”

I meant Cass. I think I meant Cass. But the question, once it was out, applied to everyone in the house and outside it and under the dirt and riding away from it, and my mother knew that, because she always knew more than I wanted her to know.

She said: “He was a man who did a thing.”

She blew out the candle and we sat in the dark for a while and then she went upstairs and I heard her door close.

He left before dawn. I know because I was awake. I was at the upstairs window that looked out over the porch roof and the street. The sky was not yet light but it was no longer dark — that gray time when the stars have faded and the sun has not committed itself.

Cass came out of the boarding house with his saddle over his left shoulder. His hand was wrapped in a clean bandanna — my mother’s, white cotton, not the one he had used the day before. He crossed the street to the livery and I heard him talking to his horse, low and without words, the sounds a man makes to an animal he has relied on. Then the creak of leather as he cinched the saddle. The horse blew through its nostrils. Cass led it out into the street and mounted and turned north toward the Sheridan road.

He did not look back at the boarding house. He did not wave. He had paid for a week and stayed four days and he did not ask for the difference. He rode north with the light behind him and his shadow stretching out ahead of him on the road, long and thin on the packed dirt. I watched until he was a mark on the road, and then a mark on the sage flat, and then a thing I might have been imagining, and then nothing.

I went downstairs. My mother was already in the kitchen. The stove was hot and the coffee was on. She was cutting biscuit dough on the scarred table, pressing the tin circle down and twisting it and lifting each round onto the baking sheet. She did not mention Cass. She did not mention the night before. She said good morning and told me to bring in wood for the stove.

A freighting outfit came through that morning — two men hauling dry goods to the railroad camp at Rock Creek. My mother fed them eggs and bacon and biscuits and charged the full rate. One of them asked about the trouble at the saloon the day before and my mother said she did not know much about it and could she get them more coffee. They paid and left and she washed the dishes.

Outside, in the street, the dirt was fresh in front of the Occidental. Someone had shoveled it at dawn — the barkeep, probably, or one of Frawley’s men, I never learned who. They had shoveled clean dirt over the blood and the dirt was darker where the blood was beneath it, but only if you knew to look. Children walked past on their way to the schoolhouse. They walked on the fresh dirt and did not know what was under it. A dog slept against the water trough. The Mexican woman hung washing on a line. Garnet, Wyoming, was a town and it went on being a town.

By noon the cowhands were back. Two of Frawley’s men rode in and tied up at the saloon and went inside and came out again and walked to the boarding house and asked my mother if she was serving dinner. She said she was. She served them pork and beans and biscuits and they ate without speaking and paid and left, and that was that. Frawley’s men would go on eating at my mother’s table.

I walked past the Occidental that afternoon on my way to bring a pail of water from the well. The dirt in front of the door was smooth and brown. Sweeney’s blood was under it. I walked on the fresh dirt and it did not feel different from any other dirt. I wanted it to. It did not.

The well water tasted of iron, the way it always did. I carried the pail back to the kitchen and my mother poured it into the reservoir on the stove and said nothing. She had work to do. The boarding house needed sweeping and the garden wanted water and there were linens to wash and a fence post leaning near the privy that would need resetting before winter.

I have that tintype in my desk. I have looked at it a thousand times.

The man in the image is sitting in a cane-backed chair on a porch. His hat is on his knee. His right hand rests on his thigh. His left hand is pressed flat against the arm of the chair, the fingers slightly spread. His face is lean, tired, the face of a man who has been in weather. His eyes look past the camera at something I cannot see.

You cannot see the tremor. The image caught the hand at the moment of stillness — the palm flat, the wood taking the shake out of him the way the earth takes the shake out of a fence post when you tamp it down. You see a man in a chair. His left hand is still and his name might be Cass.

I called it a daguerreotype for years before someone told me it was a tintype. I knew the word daguerreotype from a magazine and it sounded like what the image was — old, formal, a word from another time for a thing from another time. The correction did not take. I still call it what I called it when I was a boy, the same way I still call what happened at the Occidental a killing and not a gunfight, because a gunfight is what it looks like from outside and a killing is what it is.

I am fifty-three years old. My mother died in 1904 in the same house, in the same bed where my father slept before Sweeney killed him. She never spoke of Cass again. She never spoke of what she allowed. She ran the boarding house until her hands would not let her and then I ran it for a while and then I sold it to a man from Omaha who turned it into a hotel, and it burned in 1911, and now there is nothing there but the foundation stones.

Frawley died rich in 1898. The water still flows through his ditch, though it belongs to a company now. Nobody was punished. Nobody was rewarded. The water flowed the same direction it had always flowed.

I take out the photograph sometimes. I still do not know what I am looking at.