Saratoga Trunk Read online

  “Well,” she said gentiy, with his hand still on her throat so that he could feel the muscles moving under his palm as she spoke. “Well, if you think that I am lying and Kaka is lying and Cupide is lying why don’t you finish your business here in New Orleans and go back to the finest little lady in Texas?” His great fist doubled against her jaw, he pushed her delicate head back gendy, ruefully, in tender imitation of a blow.

  He was a bewildered, love-smitten Texan who had met a woman the like of whom he never had seen or dreamed of.

  For a week—two—three—they spent lazy hours talking, listening. The girl always until now had taken third place. Her mother had come first, then Aunt Belle; Kakaracou had waited on them, cooked New Orleans dishes for them, sewed for them. Cupide had run about for them tirelessly; he had been coachman, footman, butler, boots, page. Clio had worn second-best, had fetched and carried for the two women, had played bezique with Belle Piquery, bathed her mother’s forehead with eau-de-cologne when she was suffering from headache, pressed her fresh young cheek against Rita’s tear-furrowed one when she was sad, fed the two with her youth and high spirits. Now she found it wonderful to be the center of interest. Now she and Clint Maroon, suspicious of the world and resentful of it, could pour out to each other their hopes, their schemes, their longings, their emotions. It was almost as fascinating to listen as to speak. Not quite, but almost. He had told her his story disjointedly, in bits and pieces, for he was not an articulate man, and he had been taught to think that emotion was weakness.

  “I haven’t got any money, honey. I mean, money. I make my living gambling. I wouldn’t fool you. I raise horses some—or did, back home in Texas. Sometimes I race ‘em. That’s how come I left. I shot the man we caught trying to lame my three-year-old, Alamo. He’s almost pure Spanish, that chestnut. He steps so he hardly touches the ground; it’s like the way you see a dancer that never seems to have a foot on the floor he’s so light. It was a plain case; no jury in the Southwest could convict me, but I reckoned I’d better leave for now, anyway. And besides, I was ready to go. I always told Pa I’d come up North and get the land and money back they’d stole off him. Why, say, they came in and they took his land away from him as slick as if he’d been a hick playing a shell game at a country circus. Everybody in Texas knew Dacey Maroon, the town we lived in was named after him, Daceyville. Grampaw Maroon fought the siege of the Alamo; I was brought up on the story; it was sacred history like the stories in the Bible, only more real. He had fought over the very land he owned. Pa used to say that Daceyville and San Antonio were watered with the blood of their defenders. In Texas schools they teach the young ones about Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and battles of the Civil War like it was history, but mighty few up North know the story of the Alamo and San Jacinto. They’re as much a part of American history as the Revolution or Gettysburg, and more. Pa had come in and settled his land and married Ma and brought her to Texas from Virginia. Brought up gentle as she was you’d think she never could have stood what she had to. She was little—”

  “Like the one who embroidered the forget-me-not tie?”

  “Why—maybe.”

  “Men often marry their mothers,” Clio observed, dreamily. Then, hastily, she added, “I heard Aunt Belle say that, too.”

  But his was too literal a mind for Belle Piquery’s unconsciously sound psychology.

  “There’ll never be anybody like her. Everything around the house just so, and yet she’d never chase the menfolks out of the house to smoke, the way some women would. I reckon that was the way she was brought up in Virginia. She could gende the orneriest horse in Texas, and her two little hands weren’t any bigger than magnolia petals. Time she was married they drove into Texas from Virginia, through hell and high water. Pa worked that land there in Texas, staked it and claimed it and laid out the town of Daceyville, but Grampaw, he came in with Austin when Texas belonged to Mexico. That was real pioneering. They cleared, and they built cabins and planted grain. Funny thing about Texas. Do you know about Texas, honey?”

  “No. I have read that it is big. Enormous. And wild.”

  “It’s big, all right. Bigger than France, bigger than Germany, bigger than most of Europe rolled into one. Lots has been written about Texas, but it’s unknown territory. Maybe it’s because it’s so all-fired big. Grampaw Dacey Maroon, and Sam Houston and Martin and Jones and Pettus—the Old Three Hundred—and Bowie and Travis and Davy Crockett, why, they were my heroes the way other youngsters think of Washington or Napoleon or Daniel Boone. Bowie, sick and dying of pneumonia there in the Alamo, and hacking away at the Mexicans from his cot because he was too weak to stand up or even sit up, and twenty dead Mexicans heaped up on the floor around him when finally they got him—that’s what I mean when I say Texas. And then along through the West came a fellow named Huntington that used to be a watch peddler, and Mark Hopkins, and a storekeeper named Leland Stanford and a peddler named Charley Crocker. Smart as all get-out. Well, say, they pulled deals in Washington that no cattle or horse thief would have stooped to. They began to survey in Daceyville and they sent a low-down sneaking polecat to Pa and said, ‘You’ll give us your land and right of way through here and so many thousand dollars that you’ll raise among the folks here in Daceyville and we’ll run our railroad line through here and make a real town of it. If you don’t we’ll go ten miles the other side and you might as well be living in a graveyard.’

  “ ‘I’m damned if I will,’ “ Pa said, and he got his gun and he chased them off the place. They turned Daceyville into Poverty Flat; they built the depot ten miles away and we found we were living in a deserted village, everything closed up; you had to drive ten miles to get a sack of salt. Daceyville was nothing but a wide place in the road. Everybody moved out except us. Pa said we’d stay, and we did. The railroad they built yonder wasn’t even a decent road, but they’d been granted all that land by a rotten Congress that they’d bought up— land on both sides of the tracks for miles and miles, east and west. That’s what they were after, you see. They got all that land along the right of way—hundreds of thousands of acres—and it never cost them a cent of their own money. A handful of men owned the West. They were like kings. Pa said it wasn’t like America, it wasn’t taking a piece of land from the government and setding it and making it fit for civilized folks to live on. It was taking the land by force and by tricks— land that others had worked on and settled. Ma said it was like the days of the feudal lords in Europe, only this was supposed to be free America. It was free for them, all right. All the silver and iron and copper in the land they’d stolen, and the forests that stood on it and the rivers than ran through.”

  “But couldn’t your father fight them? Couldn’t he go to Washington and couldn’t he see those Congressmen? If it was his own land!”

  “He tried. That’s all he did for years till he was old and broke. I saw my mother and my father die in poverty on the land they’d cleared and built up. Pa couldn’t even take her back to Virginia to be buried with her kin the way she’d always asked to be. Texas was Grampaw Maroon’s lifeblood, and Pa’s—and mine, for a while. Not now. Reckon it’s turned to gall, my blood.”

  “It is bad to be bitter, Clint.”

  “Cleent,” he grinned, mocking her. “Can’t you talk American! Short, like this—Clint.” He clipped it smartly so that the sound fell on the ear like the clink of a coin. “Clint.”

  “Clint,” in brisk imitation.

  “That’s it, muchachita!”

  “What? What is that word?”

  “Oh, that. I learned that off the Mexicans down home. Spanish, I reckon. Muchachita. Means—uh—pretty little girl, kind of. Sweetheart.”

  “Very nice—that muchachita. But rather long for a dear name. And to be called muchachita one must be little.”

  He passed his hand slowly over his eyes as though to wipe away an inner vision. “That’s so. It doesn’t suit you, somehow. It just slipped out. It belongs to Texas.”

  “B
ut I like you to be Texas. It is right for you. You must never be different. I want to know more about Texas and these men. Tell me more.”

  “Nothing more to tell, honey. They’re the men I hate—them and their kind. Ever since I grew up I made up my mind they’d never get me like they’d got Pa. I was going to live off the rich and the suckers—and I have. Let ‘em look out for themselves. I live by gambling and racing once in a while and turning a trick when I can— decent most of the time. Not always. When I can get it honestly, I do it. When I can’t, I get it the best way I can. I’ve lived a rough life. The way I talk, I know better. But I want to talk the way the cowhands talk, and the folks back in Texas. I’ve come a far piece and I aim to go further, but Texas is where I belong. I’m going to make my pile off of them. I hate ‘em all. I’d as soon shoot them as I would a gray mule-deer or a cottonmouth out on the Black Prairie. I might as well tell you I’ve killed men, but never for money. I’ve known a lot of women; I’ve never married one of them and don’t aim to. I could be crazy about you but I ain’t going to be.”

  She looked at him as though seeing him clearly for the first time. “In a way, chéri, we’re two of a kind. You heard your mother and father talking of the wrong that had been done to them and it cut deeply into you. I heard my mother and Aunt Belle talking the same way when I was very young and they thought I didn’t hear or didn’t understand. I wonder why grown-up people think that children are idiots. I made up my mind early that some day I would pay them back, those people. I’m going to be rich and I’ll make them pay for what they did to Mama and Aunt Belle. Mama never hurt anybody—”

  “Well, excuse me, honey, but even back in Texas if shooting a man and killing him ain’t hurting him none, why—”

  “She didn’t kill him, I tell you. She—”

  “I know, I know. Anyway, she had the gun, no matter which way she was pointing it, and he grabbed it and the bullet went into him and he died. And they got an awful ugly name for that in the courts of law.”

  “If they thought she had killed him then why did they send her money all those years in France, to the day of her death?”

  “Not aiming to hurt your feelings, honey, but that’s called hush money where I come from.”

  “Then New Orleans is going to learn that a Dulaine has returned from France. I’m going to see New Orleans and New Orleans is going to see me.”

  “They’ll come down on you.”

  “They’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of women but I never saw any woman like you, Clio.”

  “There isn’t anyone like me,” she replied quite simply. Then, “They’ll come to me. You’ll see.”

  “Better not rile ‘em. They’ll find a way to make it hot for you. Anyway, you don’t want to stay down here steaming like a clam. We can clear out, go up to Saratoga for the races. That’s where I’m heading for. I wouldn’t be here this long if it wasn’t for you. You got me roped and tied, seems like.”

  “Saratoga? Is that a nice place?”

  “July and August there’s nothing like it in the whole country. Races every day, gambling, millionaires and pickpockets and sporting people and respectable family folks and politicians and famous theater actors and actresses, you’ll find them all at Saratoga.”

  “I’d like that. But I haven’t enough money, unless I sell something.”

  “Shucks, you’ll be with me. I can make enough for two.”

  She shook her head. “No, I am going to be free. You want to be free, too. Perhaps we can have a plan together though. Tell me, is it cool there in Saratoga—cool and fresh and gay?”

  “Well, not to say real cool. I’ve never been there before, but I’ve heard it’s up in the hills beyond Albany, and there’s pine woods all around, real spicy. And lakes. July, I was fixing to go up North. Come on.”

  She sat a moment very still, her eyes fixed, unblinking, deep in thought. When finally she spoke it was in a curious monotone, as though she were thinking aloud. “Two more months here. That will be enough for me. I have a plan. There are things I must find out, first. These past few weeks—lovely—but no more drifting, drifting.” She sighed, straightened, looked at him with a keen directness. “Clint, will you stay here in New Orleans for a month or perhaps a litde more?”

  He laughed rather shordy. “Wasn’t for you I’d been on my way before now. It’s too soft and pretty down here for me, and wet-hot. A week or two here and I was heading for St. Louis or maybe Kansas City and up north to Chicago. Clark Street, Chicago.”

  “Go then.”

  He looked down at his own big clasped hands, he glanced at the letter C so beautifully embroidered on the lower sleeve of his fine cambric shirt as he sat, coadess. In his hip pocket was a fine linen handkerchief hemstitched and marked in a design even more exquisite by the same hand—that of Kakaracou, expert though unwilling.

  “You got me roped, tied—and branded. It’s all over me, burned into my hide. C. Stands for Clio.”

  “It is for Clint, the letter C. You know that!”

  “I’d have a tough time making ‘em see that down in the cattle country back home in Texas. Me, Clint Maroon, embroidered and hemstitched. God! I’ll be wearing ruffles on my pants, next thing.”

  “Is it kind to talk like that?”

  “No, honey. Only I was just thinking how you can start something just fooling around and not meaning anything but a little fun, like that day I up and spoke to you at the Market.”

  Another woman would have said the obvious thing. But Clio Dulaine did not say, “Are you sorry?” She sat very still, waiting.

  He stood up. “I’m staying,” he said, and came over to her and put a hand on her head and then rocked it a little so that it lolled on her slender neck; a gesture of helpless resentment on his part. Then he strolled toward the garden doorway, where the hot sun lay like a metal sheet. She watched him go, high-heeled boots; tight pants, slim hips, vast shoulders, the head a little too small, perhaps, for the width and height of the structure of bone and muscle; the ears a little outstanding giving him a boyish look. She rose swiftly and came up behind him and put her two arms around him so that her hands just met across his chest. She pressed her cheek against the hard muscles of his shoulder blade. “I am so happy.”

  “Say that again.”

  “I am so happy, Clint.”

  “Say it again.”

  She gave him a little push toward the garden doorway. He had told her he loved to listen to her voice, sometimes he caught himself listening to it without actually hearing what she said. Hers was an alive voice, it had a vital note that buoyed you like fresh air or fresh water, it had a life-giving quality as though it came from the deep well of her inner being, as indeed it did. He had once said to her, “Back home in Texas the womenfolks are mighty fine, they don’t come any finer, but they’ve got kind of screechy voices; I don’t know, maybe it’s the dust or the alky water or maybe having to yell at the ornery menfolks to make ‘em listen. Your voice, it puts me in mind of the Texas sky at night, kind of soft and purple.”

  Clint Maroon stood a moment on the steps facing the courtyard and looked about him and listened and let the sun beat down upon his bare head and on his shoulders covered by the unaccustomed fineness of the cambric shirt. From the house, from the kitchen ell, from the garçonnière with the stable beneath came the homely soothing sounds and smells of life lived comfortably, easily, safely. In the kitchen Kaka was preparing the early midday meal that followed the morning black coffee. Clio, vigorous, healthy, was an early riser, a habit formed, doubtless, in her schooldays in France. She had, too, the habit of the light continental breakfast and the hearty lunch. Clint Maroon sniffed the air. The scent of baking breads delicately rolled, richly shortened; coffee; butter sputtering. He thought of the chuck wagon. Beans. Pork. Leaden biscuits. Come and get it! Under Clio’s tutelage he had learned about food in these past three weeks. He had learned to drink wine. Whisky, Clio said, was not a drink, it was a medi
cine. Wine, too, was something you cooked with, oddly enough. As for frying—that, it seemed, was for savages. Back in Texas everything went into the frying pan. You even fried bread. Clio was shocked or amused. Kaka was contemptuous. Things à la. Things au. He had learned about these, too.

  From the stable came a swish and a clatter and the sound of Cupide’s clear choirboy tenor. Cupide was in high spirits these past weeks. The little man worshiped the Texan. He scampered round him as a terrier frisks about a mastiff, he fetched and carried for him, he tried to imitate his gait, his drawling speech, his colloquialisms. Sprinkled through his own pot-au-feu of French, English, Gombo, this added a startling spice to his already piquant speech. “Bon jour!” he would say in morning greeting. “Howdy! Certainement! I sure aim to. It is a pleasure to see you as you drive the bays, Monsieur Maroon. Uh—you sure do handle a horse pretty. Yessiree!”

  Triumph irradiated the froglike face; the great square teeth gleamed in a grin. “I speak like a true vacher, yes?” Maroon delighted in teaching him bits of cowboy idiom. The peak of Cupide’s new knowledge was reached when one evening, standing in the drawing-room doorway to announce dinner, he had shouted, gleefully, “Come and get it or I’ll throw it away!” Ever since the death of Nicolas Dulaine the little man had been ruled by women in a manless household—Rita Dulaine, Belle Piquery, Clio, Kaka. Now he and Clint Maroon were two males together; it was fine; he smoked Clint’s cigars, he tended his horses; together they went to the horse sales, to the races. He loved to polish the Texan’s high-heeled boots, to brush his clothes; he neglected the work in the house where, in his little green baize apron, he used to rub and polish floors, furniture, crystal.

  Now, as he sluiced down the horses in the stable, he sang and whistled softly a song he had picked up with a strange rhythm. Queer music with a curious off-beat that you caught just before it dropped. He had heard it played by a tatterdemalion crowd of Negro boys who wandered the streets, minstrels who played and danced and sang and turned handsprings for pennies. The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band they called themselves. Their instruments were a fiddle made of an old cigar box, a kettle, a cowbell, a gourd filled with pebbles, a bull fiddle whose body was half an old barrel; horns, whistles, a harmonica. Out of these dégagé instruments issued a weird music that set your body twitching and your feet shuffling and your head wagging. A quarter of a century later this broken rhythm was to be known as ragtime, sdll later as jazz. Cupidon, whose ear was true and quick, had caught the broken rhythm perfectiy. He had learned, too, not to strike the high note fairly but to lead up to it—”crying” up to it they called it later. His whistle sounded jubilantly above the swish and thump as he worked.