The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories, Owen Wister [easy novels to read txt] 📗

Eastman accepts that. Says it's purer. Oh, it's not all sadness here!”

“How did you come to be in Sharon?” I asked my exotic acquaintance.

“Ah, how did I? How did all our crowd at the railroad? Somebody has got to sell tickets, somebody has got to run that hotel, and telegraphs have got to exist here. That's how we foreigners came. Many travellers change cars here, and one train usually misses the other, because the two companies do not love each other. You hear lots of language, especially in December. Eastern consumptives bound for southern California get left here, and drummers are also thick. Remarks range from 'How provoking!' to things I would not even say myself. So that big hotel and depot has to be kept running, and we fellows get a laugh now and then. Our lot is better than these people's.” He made a general gesture at Sharon.

“I should have thought it was worse,” said I. “No, for we'll be transferred some day. These poor folks are shipwrecked. Though it is their own foolishness, all this.”

Again my eye followed as he indicated the town with a sweep of his hand; and from the town I looked to the four quarters of heaven. I may have seen across into Old Mexico. No sign labels the boundary; the vacuum of continent goes on, you might think, to Patagonia. Symptoms of neighboring Mexico basked on the sand heaps along Sharon's spacious avenues—little torpid, indecent gnomes in sashes and open rags, with crowning-steeple straw hats, and murder dozing in their small black eyes. They might have crawled from holes in the sand, or hatched out of brown cracked pods on some weeds that trailed through the broken bottles, the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to Sharon, misses the town, and emerges thirty miles south across the sunlight in a shallow, futile lake, a cienaga, called Las Palomas. Then it evaporates into the ceaseless blue sky.

The water you get in Sharon is dragged by a herd of wind-wheels from the bowels of the sand. Over the town they turn and turn—Sharon's upper story—a filmy colony of slats. In some of the homes beneath them you may go up-stairs—in the American homes, not in the adobe Mexican caves of song, woman, and knives; and brick and stone edifices occur. Monuments of perished trade, these rise among their flatter neighbors cubical and stark; under-shirts, fire-arms, and groceries for sale in the ground-floor, blind dust-windows above. Most of the mansions, however, squat ephemerally upon the soil, no cellar to them, and no staircase, the total fragile box ready to bounce and caracole should the wind drive hard enough. Inside them, eating, mending, the newspaper, and more babies, eke out the twelvemonth; outside, the citizens loiter to their errands along the brief wide avenues of Sharon that empty into space. Men, women, and children move about in the town, sparse and casual, and over their heads in a white tribe the wind-wheels on their rudders veer to the breeze and indolently revolve above the gaping obsoleteness. Through the dumb town the locomotive bell tolls pervadingly when a train of freight or passengers trundles in from the horizon or out along the dwindling fence of telegraph poles. No matter where you are, you can hear it come and go, leaving Sharon behind, an airy carcass, bleached and ventilated, sitting on the sand, with the sun and the hot wind pouring through its bones.

This town was the magnate's child, the thing that was to keep his memory green; and as I took it in on that first walk of discovery, Stuart told me its story: how the magnate had decreed the railroad shops should be here; how, at that, corner lots grew in a night; how horsemen galloped the streets, shooting for joy, and the hasty tents rose while the houses were hammered together; how they had song, dance, cards, whiskey, license, murder, marriage, opera—the whole usual thing—regular as the clock in our West, in Australia, in Africa, in every virgin corner of the world where the Anglo-Saxon rushes to spend his animal spirits—regular as the clock, and in Sharon's case about fifteen minutes long. For they became greedy, the corner-lot people. They ran up prices for land which the railroad, the breath of their nostrils, wanted. They grew ugly, forgetting they were dealing with a magnate, and that a railroad from ocean to ocean can take its shops somewhere else with appalling ease. Thus did the corner lots become sand again in a night. “And in the words of the poet,” concluded Stuart, “Sharon has an immense future behind it.”

Our talk was changed by the sight of a lady leaning and calling over a fence.

“Mrs. Jeffries,” said she. “Oh, Mrs. Jeffries!”

“Well?” called a voice next door.

“I want to send Leola and Arvasita into your yard.”

“Well?” the voice repeated.

“Our tool-house blew over into your yard last night. It's jammed behind your tank.”

“Oh, indeed!”

A window in the next house was opened, a head put out, and this occasioned my presentation to both ladies. They were Mrs. Mattern and Mrs. Jeffries, and they fell instantly into a stiff caution of deportment; but they speedily found I was not worth being cautious over. Stuart whispered to me that they were widows of high standing, and mothers of competing favorites for the elocution prize; and I hastened to court their esteem. Mrs. Mattern was in body more ample, standing high and yellow and fluffy; but Mrs. Jeffries was smooth and small, and behind her spectacles she had an eye.

“You must not let us interrupt you, ladies,” said I, after some civilities. “Did I understand that something was to be carried somewhere?”

“You did,” said Mrs. Jeffries (she had come out of her house); “and I am pleased to notice no damage has been done to our fence—this time.”

“It would have been fixed right up at my expense, as always, Mrs. Jeffries,” retorted her neighbor, and started to keep abreast of Mrs. Jeffries as that lady walked and inspected the fence. Thus the two marched parallel along the frontier to the rear of their respective territories.

“You'll not resign?” said Stuart to me. “It is 'yours till death,' ain't it?”

I told him that it was.

“About once a month I can expect this,” said Mrs. Jeffries, returning along her frontier.

“Well, it's not the only case in Sharon, Mrs. Jeffries,” said Mrs. Mattern. “I'll remind you of them three coops when you kept poultry, and they got away across the railroad, along with the barber's shop.”

“But cannot we help you get it out?” said I, with a zealous wish for peace.

“You are very accommodating, sir,” said Mrs. Mattern.

“One of the prize-awarding committee,” said Stuart. “An elegant judge of oratory. Has decided many contests at Concord, the home of Emerson.”