Chapter 5: VUnpicking a Plot

May and June 1917

Almost the first person I saw in Bonners Ferry was Lewis. I turned into the main street and there he was about a hundred yards ahead walking arm in arm with a young woman. I didn’t have to see his face: his back view is as recognisable and the arrogant way he walked gave him away. This is only the third time I’ve seen him, but his personality is etched on my mind.

I stumbled to a stop. How well would he remember me? At our first meeting near Tulsa, I pulled him round to face me and I hit him before he had much time to focus on my features. In the rail yard at Yakima, it was dark and I was partly concealed behind a stack of wood while he was intent on finding the two thugs I had thrown off the train. I carried on walking, but I was careful not to come any closer to my quarry.

My mind was racing. I could go up to him now and take him to the local sheriff to ask for him to be held until the State Detective arrived from Seattle. I had no evidence that would justify keeping Lewis locked up and an Idaho sheriff might not feel obliged to help with an investigation in another State.

And I reminded myself, it was just an investigation. Ed Spencer in Yakima had already warned me that he couldn’t hold Lewis on my unsupported word. Unless the State Detective had been accumulating evidence, I could be faced with Lewis back out on the streets but now well warned that I was on his trail.

I needed more evidence before I approached my man. It seemed unlikely that he would recognise me, but I’d stay far enough away to deny him a good look. At least I wasn’t wearing my sombrero! My experience in Atlanta had brought it home to me that the way I dressed was a statement that people would read. Changing my clothes changed the image I projected.

This morning, I had expected to do a day’s work in the fields but when I heard that Lewis had been sighted, I went back to the cabin and changed into new jeans and boots. I was wearing a Stetson and the image I was trying to project was of the better class of hobo, keeping myself clean and presentable while I looked for work. Both previous times I had seen him I was in scruffier clothes and wearing a disreputable old sombrero.

He and his lady friend were strolling slowly but steadily, and I was finding it hard to maintain the distance between us. She is slim and quietly dressed and the only sort of feminine frill is the parasol she is carrying over one shoulder, twirling it from time to time as they chat. He was being attentive, and it looked as if they were laughing a lot. I was still trying to work out a plan to bring him to justice and I was following them for no particularly good reason.

I would be better employed looking for evidence that would make the sheriff decide to hold him. He wasn’t likely to drop a signed confession in the street when he pulled out his handkerchief but when they turned the corner out of sight, I suppressed an urge to speed up so I wouldn’t lose them!

Now they were out of sight, I took the opportunity to look around me. Bonners Ferry has a central area much like half a hundred other small towns, but it had a prosperous look with well-filled shops and clean streets. Towering above the shops and hotels there were lumber mills just outside the town and there was a fine grit of sawdust wafting in the air. I registered at last that the town was quiet and the streets almost empty.

That’s when I realised that this was early afternoon on a Saturday. The screech of saws that must fill the town from Monday to Friday would have stopped at noon. All the decent citizens would be at home getting dressed up for Saturday night. As if to confirm my deduction, there was a sudden commotion on my left and the noise of raised male voices when a man burst out of a saloon. The less respectable citizens would have made straight for a bar when the saws closed down.

I reached the intersection where Lewis had turned off and followed him round into a residential street. I had taken only one step when I realised that I had screwed up. The side street I was walking along had a lumber yard on the right facing a row of two-storied cottages each sitting prettily in its own little garden and separated from the road by white-painted fences. He was standing at the fourth cottage from me.

The girl was inside the gate looking up at Lewis, standing outside with his hands resting on the fence. She turned and glanced at me as I came round the corner, recognising that I was a stranger. She wasn’t alarmed by my presence, but she was interested enough to mention me to her beau who still had his back to me.

I spotted a track beside the first cottage in the row leading to a wooden foot bridge over a little stream. I increased my pace and stepped onto the planks trying to look as if I had been heading there all along. I didn’t look round to see what Lewis was doing but he didn’t call out or come after me so perhaps he hadn’t paid attention.

There was a track alongside the stream, and it slowly dawned on me that it was too regular to be natural. It passed through a copse of trees and when I emerged, I was not surprised to find a building almost straddling the stream. In case I missed the implications, there were the remains of an old water wheel lying half-buried in the grass beside the path.

“We got one of them gaz-o-lean engines now, in case you was wonderin’.”

The voice came from somewhere around the base of the building where the overhang of the second storey made a deep shadow. I didn’t spot the speaker until he drew on his cigar and the glow from the burning tip showed his features for an instant.

“Lookin’ for work?”

I admitted that I needed a job, but I was really looking for agricultural work. He stepped out from under the overhang, a big man but just beginning to go to seed.

“I wish I could offer you something in the mill, a big lad like you, but I’ve all the men I need. There’s a vacancy at the dairy farm just up the road, if you know anything about cows!”

He had been studying me as he spoke, and I noticed that his accent had become more refined as he went on.

“I’m Henrik Pedersen and I’m the miller.”

Some instinct prompted me to introduce myself as Alan McPherson. The only reason I could have given at the time was that his build and manner reminded me of Lewis and the other thugs I had met – the same smug self-regard. He asked me about places I’d worked and, again I was cagey, mentioning Napa Valley and the timber work in Canada but saying nothing about Yakima.

He hadn’t been to California, but he had worked the forests, so we chatted for a time about places we had both visited and people we had met. It may just have been that his memory was faulty but some of the errors he made sounded to me like traps. He would ask about a lumber mill but would place it on the wrong river and then he would watch me until I corrected him.

He was pleasant throughout, sharing funny things that had happened to him, but it felt that I was being tested. Eventually he relaxed and started talking about Bonners Ferry and his ambitions to build grain silos and a much bigger flour mill. He’d had to wait until his father died a few years before, but he had everything planned so he was going to waste no more time.

He gave me directions to Ted Andrew’s dairy farm and said that I could mention his name when I asked for a job.

“The guy he had left in a hurry so I don’t think Ted will be hard to convince – if you can milk a cow!”

I thanked him and moved away but he called after me: “Just make sure that you stay in the bed you’re given,” and he bellowed with laughter.

Once on my way, my mind went back to my near encounter with Lewis. He had been paying close attention to his lady friend so I thought there was a good chance that he wouldn’t have recognised me. They had looked like a settled couple, and it occurred to me that she might have reformed the thug I knew. He had a steady job in the flour mill, according to the deputy who’d come to visit, and a steady girlfriend so it was quite likely that he would have turned his back on his unsavoury past.

If he had, it put me in a difficult position. All I knew for certain to his discredit was that he had hit a Tulsa farmer with a pickaxe handle. I suspected him of being involved in the riot at Yakima and nasty business in Everett, but I had no proof. If he was now becoming a model citizen, had I any right to set the law after him? I decided to watch and wait, although I was conscious that it seems to be a weakness of mine to choose the least demanding option.

Having admitted that a good woman had the power to convert a bad man got me thinking of my own experience. Until I worked in the vineyard, I had known only the waitresses and landladies on the periphery of my life. The girls in Napa claiming Spanish descent were unashamedly looking for husbands: they would flirt with me but only to prompt quicker action from the man they planned to wed. In the time I was there I don’t think I was once alone in private with a Mexican American woman. Getting a husband was a game to them and they set all the rules.

Once they were married, the girls settled to having babies and running a home. Their husbands might drink in the cantina, but their women stayed in the house except for fiestas when they dressed in their best and sat together gossiping. As a society, the field hands and their families were warm, friendly and moral.

The ladies of Senor Sanches and his friends were totally different, once they were married, at least. They flirted with me openly in front of their husbands who were too busy flirting with other married women to take any notice. More surprising to me was that the women would try to get me alone. They made no secret of how far they were prepared to go for a lover.

It sounds impossibly priggish now, but I strongly disapproved of their want of loyalty. They were living well at the expense of their husbands, but they were prepared to lend his marital rights to any man that took their fancy. I struggled with my conscience even as I took advantage of some of the more tempting offers. Being skin to skin with a willing woman is like opening a Pandora’s box – once you’ve experienced the warm sensuality of a woman’s body you can’t rest until you have more of the same.

Eventually I fled from California heading for Nova Scotia. I didn’t give myself a reason at the time but perhaps I was hoping that amongst the women in the Canadian Province would be a loyal, faithful girl of Scottish descent that I could take as my wife. Since then, I had calmed down and gone back to working amongst men far from the company of women. Even the presence of Ellen in the outer office in Minneapolis didn’t rekindle my lust – I was able to treat her as a work colleague. I certainly wouldn’t have asked her out while she was my employee and under some sort of obligation to allow me more liberties than she otherwise would.

Now, her letters made it increasingly clear that I was high in her list of potential husbands. She would place two thoughts side by side without spelling out the link. For example, she understood that I could not visit her because of my sense of duty; she regretted that we had to be apart, but duty came first. Later in the same letter she remarked that she couldn’t consider marrying a man who didn’t have a sense of duty. I didn’t need footnotes to work out that my sense of responsibility was a winner, in her eyes.

The problem is that I know so little about her. She is a modern girl and perhaps she will expect to flirt after we are married, even have affairs if she chooses. The enthusiastic kiss she gave me when we parted might have been as special as it felt at the time, or it might be her usual way of parting with quite casual acquaintances. How could I – how could any man – be sure?

I didn’t think infidelity would be a problem with Helga. Once she makes up her mind that will be final. She has already returned three fiancés to the store as unsuitable and she will, presumably, continue to do so until she’s satisfied. But I can’t picture her staying in the hacienda having babies while her husband is out earning his wages and having a drink in the cantina at the end of the day. I’m certain that she’ll be the one out there hustling while her husband stays home and minds the kids.

Then I thought of Morag and Calum, the perfect couple. I could feel all the tension drain out of me when I thought of them still so much in love after all those years. I remembered that she had deserted her family to go with a man she hadn’t actually married, so where did that leave my deliberations on feminine honour!

I was brought back to the present by the clatter of milk pails through an open door. I walked forward into a busy milking parlour. There were thirty cows lined up with their heads in troughs and their hind ends almost touching in the middle, leaving a narrow gap for the workers. As I went in there were three people sitting on stools milking and another had clearly just finished a cow since she was carrying a full pail through a door at the far end that I assumed led to the dairy.

There was a man standing in the aisle between the beasts and he looked at me with an enquiring lift of his brows.

“I’d like a job, if there’s one going.”

He nodded to a cow and handed me an empty pail. I found a three-legged stool and pulled it up beside the beast he had indicated. She turned her head and gave me a careful scrutiny before she turned back to the trough. I put my hat on the back of my head and leaned in putting my forehead into that special place where the cow’s belly meets its back leg. A full udder can be very painful so cows will tolerate almost anyone relieving the tension, but they prefer to be milked by someone that treats them with gentle respect; they will produce an extra few pints for the right milkman.

I hadn’t milked a cow since I left Scotland but by the time I reached for her teats I felt right at home. The first stream of milk rattled into the galvanised bucket, and I let my hands take over while the noises around me faded and my mind became a contented blank. It was only when I stripped the cow and stood up to clap her neck, that I became aware once again of where I was.

“You’ve done that before,” the man that had handed me the pail remarked with a broad smile. “Take that through to the dairy and then you’ve another three beasts waiting.”

I would be expected to milk six cows morning and evening but I had arrived too late to do my full stint. It was just as well because my fingers were aching from the unaccustomed exercise. Dairy farming is a closely regimented task: the beasts must be milked twice a day, every day, within half an hour of their usual time. I would milk my cows in the same order each time, the same order as my predecessor and my successor after I had gone. In many ways it’s a gentle job with the pace set by the cows but, on the other hand, there are no days off or delayed starts after a night on the town.

After I had milked my quota that first evening, I brushed out the milking parlour and used a hose to clean the cows and the floor. Meantime, some of the others were in the dairy processing the milk and loading it into vats. All the evening milk went to the depot for transportation to towns and cities in the region. The morning milk was sold in Bonners Ferry and neighbouring areas with the surplus skimmed. The cream was sold locally, and the pigs had the skimmed milk. We also made enough butter to supply the local shops.

After the morning milking, the cows were driven out to pasture and the milking parlour was cleaned with disinfectant, followed by the dairy. We began the day with coffee and pancakes at four and had our main meal at about eight when most of the chores were done. Pete, the foreman, was excused cleaning duties; he harnessed the cart that took the milk into town. He delivered some of it to the general store, but he mostly sold door to door.

In the evening the cows were waiting to be allowed in. We washed their udders once we had let them into their chosen places. We were supposed to put on head collars to keep them in place, but we rarely bothered unless a cow was coming into season when she could become a bit lively. After we cleaned up the parlour, we had our evening meal and then, our final chore of the day, we loaded the milk to be taken to the depot. We took turns driving the cart since we were allowed to stay in town for the evening.

Cows only come into season occasionally, but they can become mischievous if not downright cantankerous when they are needing the services of a bull. I don’t know if it’s catching, but the entire human complement of Ted’s farm was in a constant state of sexual arousal the whole time I was there!

Ted is married to Jenny, who has charge of the dairy, but he lusts after Annie, a widow who milks four cows and looks after the pigs; she is walking out with Bill another milker who also tends the vegetable plot but she spends a lot of time in the company of Piotr; he is the accepted lover of Molly, Ted’s sister who is married to Pete, the farm foreman. My predecessor was sacked because he was discovered in bed with Jenny on an evening when Ted came back early from town to see Annie, leaving Bill to make his own way home.

It would have taken weeks for me to work out these interactions, but they were all pleased to tell me about themselves and each other. Fate had dealt unkindly with each of them throughout their lives, they all told me with varying degrees of self-pity. Ted and Molly were victims of a tyrannical father that kept them as slave labour; he had a poor opinion of his son, so he married him off to Jenny a clever woman that had expected to die a frustrated spinster. Molly had run away with Pete, a farmhand, but they had come crawling back (Jenny said) when her father died.

Piotr should have been working with the rest of his family in the steel mills of Pennsylvania had he not caught the eye of the daughter of the company boss. Her mother discovered the affair before it had gone beyond holding hands and she sent the girl to a finishing school in Switzerland. Unfortunately, as it turned out, she kept Piotr for herself, and they were eventually discovered in a state of nature in the bridal suite of the grand hotel. When he confided his story to Jenny, she decided that he must have a thing about older women, so she threw herself into his arms; when I arrived he was still trying to convince her to look elsewhere.

Annie had been strictly raised in a Christian sect that held rather extreme views on morality. Practically everything was a sin and I guess she gave up trying to work out for herself what was right (very little) and what was wrong (practically everything, and certainly everything that might bring pleasure). Her family were honoured when their pastor chose Annie to be his bride; he had buried two earlier wives but he was now in his sixties so there was hope for the young maid. About six months after the wedding, she woke one morning to find him stiff and cold beside her. She got dressed and collected all the money in the house including some funds belonging to the church and caught the first train out.

From the time the train pulled out of the depot, Annie began catching up on the sins she had missed out on. Before the conductor decided that her rowdy behaviour could no longer be tolerated, she had undergone a crash course in alcohol abuse and had discovered that, despite many nights of prayer and groans on the part of the preacher, her marriage had not been consummated. She was put off the train in Bonners Ferry just at the moment when Bill finished loading the milk churns; he took her back to the farm and she had remained ever since.

“I don’t want another husband,” she confided when she caught me bathing in the creek. “The man on the train said I was still a virgin but I’m not sure he got it right. Would you like to do it so I can be sure?”

I was sitting in water barely deep enough to reach my chest and it occurred to me that it would be impolite to turn down such a reasonable request from a handsome woman of twenty-five. She turned out to be a slow but enthusiastic learner and I began taking two baths a week since the weather was now getting much warmer. I became a bit uneasy when she told me that Bill was standing guard to make sure we weren’t interrupted.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind while we’re just walking out. If I do decide to marry anyone else, it’ll be Bill. Then I’ll be faithful and true.”

When Bill drove the milk to the depot, Annie went with him all dressed up and they spent the evening with friends in the town. They behaved like, and were treated as, an ordinary courting couple. She confided in me that he was allowed to kiss her at the end of the evening, but he was allowed no other liberties. When she wasn’t being a properly brought up young lady, she was satisfying Ted’s lust in the cottage she lived in or pleasing herself with Piotr and me.

He and I shared a room in the bothy, and we had frequent chats mainly about the female of our own species. We were both single men without either the money or the inclination to be married. He was the acknowledged lover of Molly, and he was really happy with that arrangement.

“She’s a married woman so there’s no danger of her expecting me to stay around for ever.”

He was shocked when I suggested that she might get a divorce.

“That would be a sin! I’m a catholic and I couldn’t marry a woman that had been divorced.”

He was more concerned about the time he spent with Annie. He would not walk out with a single girl until he was in a position to offer her his hand in matrimony. He would not actually propose, of course, until there were signs that a happy event was impending, but it would be immoral to seduce an unmarried woman. His code wouldn’t allow him to father a bastard. He admitted that Annie’s position as a widow was ambiguous, but he had overcome his objections.

“She’s so enthusiastic that I can’t resist her. I confess every time I see the priest, but he’s met Annie, so he understands my problem.”

Piotr took Annie back to our room when I was on the milk run to town, but she and I always met al fresco. The problem was Ted who was very jealous. He had been even worse before my predecessor seduced Jenny; now poor Ted had two women either of whom might cuckold him! Jenny was older than Ted by some years and she was not bonny. I don’t think she ever expected to be seduced but, now that it had happened once, she was on the alert for signs that lightening could strike the same spot twice.

She was often alone in the dairy, and she would often come up behind me as I was pouring milk through the muslin into the churn. She would lean forward to look over my shoulder, ostensibly to see the condition of the milk, but managing to rub her rather bony chest over my back.

All Molly wanted was to be considered the most desirable woman on the farm. She walked into my room looking for Piotr, she said, on the first evening after I arrived that he took the milk to the depot. She flirted with me, but she backed off seemingly contented, when I told her that her beauty placed her far above my humble hopes.

“There will be some nice girl for you, Alan,” she told me, giving my hand a little squeeze and then she left me with an extra sway to her generous hips.

With so much intrigue inside the farm it was some time before I was able to do anything about finding out if Lewis was living in Bonners Ferry. When it was my evening to drive the milk into the depot, I would eat in the town’s only diner or in the back room of the saloon where the men working in the wood yards ate. I dare say sawdust makes you thirsty, for none of them would eat unless they had a schooner of ale on the table.

The problem was that the men from the flour mill rarely came into town for social purposes. I often saw Henrik or one of his men going in and out of the stores or waiting for a train to arrive, but they didn’t drink in the saloon. All the millers seemed to be built to the same design; they were so alike in size and general deportment that I began to doubt that the man I saw with the girl on my first day actually was Lewis. Even the clothes they wore were of the same type and different than what was worn by farm hands and lumbermen.

I couldn’t ask many direct questions, of course, without drawing attention to myself. A great many people have a skeleton or two in their cupboard and they get very suspicious of strangers asking pointed questions. It’s all right to ask who owns a magnificent horse or an automobile but it’s definitely bad form to ask how long a man has lived in town or where he came from.

If I bumped into a miller in the bar, I could suggest that he reminded me of someone I met on my travels, and it would be acceptable to suggest a few places we might have visited at the same time. Etiquette did not require him to answer and any attempt on my part to persist would be considered suspicious. I was happy enough that the gossip at the farm was exclusively about sexual liaisons.

I never once had to answer questions about my background or history; I spent much of my time finding soothing answers to questions about the degree of lust I felt for each of the women on the farm. I fancied all of them enough to satisfy their vanity but not so much that I aroused the jealousy of their men. There was so much gossip going on within the farm about the other workers that it was some weeks before I noticed that I had access to a well-informed source.

Pete is married to Molly although you would have to be told that a relationship existed – and you would probably check the information. He had worked as a farm hand for her father, and she talked him into running off with her. She is really pretty, and Pete is nothing much to look at. He’s good with cows – in fact he serves in place of a vet for Ted and other owners of cows, sheep and horses in the district.

I’ve never heard him utter a word of complaint about his life and yet he announces his misery unmistakeably. He is thin and stooped with his head shrunk down between his shoulders as if he was protecting himself from an anticipated blow, but it is his face that proclaims his hard life to the world; he could make a living as an undertaker’s mute.

Every morning, he loads the pony cart and drives into town delivering milk to stores and houses. Once a month he spends the afternoon collecting payment from his customers. Since he doesn’t speak much when he’s about the dairy, I assumed that he was the sort of taciturn loner that’s fairly common particularly amongst the hobos. Much to my surprise, he’s considered to be an interesting and well-informed conversationalist by the townsfolk.

He chats to all his customers, a respected adviser not only on animal husbandry but on pretty well every domestic crisis. If your five-year-old won’t eat spinach or your hens have stopped laying, Pete will have useful advice to offer. He listens to girls and their lovers when they have quarrelled and frequently succeeds in bringing the young couple back to a better understanding. He’s not afraid to give unwelcome advice if, for instance, he thinks a proposed match will not work.

People confided in Pete even about situations where they had done something stupid; he would listen carefully and give considered advice. The one thing that was absolutely guaranteed is that Pete wouldn’t laugh at you – his face simply wasn’t constructed for laughter.

He took time to judge people, never rushing to hasty conclusions. I had been working for Ted for three weeks before Pete decided that I was on the side of the angels. He told me so when we drove into town one evening to load the churns on the train.

“You’re good with cows,” he began. “Firm but gentle – that’s the way they like to be milked you know. Piotr’s too rough and Annie’s too soft but you’re just as you should be. Milking’s more about the mind than the hands, you know.”

I’d never given a thought to the philosophy of dairy farming. I was firm but gentle because that way the cows were content, and I got an extra couple of pints out of my beasts. I liked being with the cows, finding them restful and undemanding company. Maybe Pete had a point about success with them starting in the mind!

That was the first of our conversations and many of the others turned on some philosophical observation by Pete. Inside the farm, he was regarded as uninteresting and unimportant – until an animal became ill, at least. In the town he was held in high esteem. When we had loaded the milk onto the train, we would join the village men sitting around the stove in the store. Pete would be eagerly welcomed and given the seat of honour.

Whatever they had been discussing before he arrived would be laid before him for his judgement. He would listen intently and ask questions, and then he would sit quietly getting his pipe lighted and drawing well. There would be complete silence while he deliberated, and their faces would brighten to the new insights they gained from his opinion when it came.

At first, I was content to let him tell me about the town and its inhabitants without questioning him, but I was conscious that I still hadn’t found out what was happening in the mill. Eventually I felt obliged to ask.