Chapter 11: Whore of Babylon

I would never win any speed contests sending telegrams. My fingers are big and they felt clumsy tapping on the key. But I’d had enough experience to send a message on my own. And to decode incoming ones. It was a small talent, but learning how to do something new never had hurt me.

Hunting and fishing were new once. Skinning. Roping. Shooting.

Of course everything at Mrs. Adler’s had been new at one point.

Credit due, Ollie Chambers may be portly and soft and over-careful around his wife, but he was a successful businessman.

He had the Bighorn Saloon and his customers spent money on his wife’s whores. Owned Ollie’s Emporium, most of the largest bank in town, and the Chink laundry.

I found out later that he went partners with Hank Mosby to add a side business to Mosby’s sawmill. They got into the paper-making business, using wood pulp.

The Little River Clarion would be their first customer, but Ollie had negotiated contracts with seven other Montana and Wyoming newspapers. He underbid the competition and, according to an interview in the Clarion, “As Montana moves to statehood, Little River will be creating new jobs. The future is coming.”

I had written the Gilmore Girls about letting Rebecca read their letters. It seemed kind of like good manners to ask first. They wrote back right sharp — teasing me about wedding plans.

That night, in bed after the saloons had closed, I took the cigar box from the top shelf of the chifforobe and handed it to Rebecca. She was touched, “Oh, Flint.”

There were 66 letters, tied in a blue ribbon, the latest one on top. Rebecca turned the stack upside down and said, “I’ll start with the first one.” Rosie nodded.

Rebecca leaned under the gas lantern and squinched her face up real pretty.

I couldn’t tell you why, but her reading those letters aloud to Rosie and me was ... intimate, I guess is the word. Maybe not intimate. But I felt like I was letting them into a private part of my life, sort of like a secret room.

Rebecca finished the first one, folded it real careful and put it back in the envelope. Retied the blue bow. She looked at her daughter, “We’ll just read one at a time.”

Rosie nodded.

That letter had been real welcome when it came. Nothing important, just chatty news about people I knew back home. Men who had come calling. A county fair, a sale on Easter bonnets.

Rebecca said, “Indianapolis sounds like heaven.”

Rosie nodded.

Mrs. Chambers spotted me walking on the raised Market Street sidewalk and asked me to stop by, “When you have a chance.”

I finished walking to the north end of town and turned back. She was in her office in the back of the hotel. Full-length dress buttoned to her neck, straight posture.

“Flint, I’d like you to keep an eye out up in No-Name.”

I nodded. The Gilmore Girls wouldn’t have let me get away with a non-answer like that.

She said, “Someone made an anonymous donation to Mrs. Hogg. Enough to rebuild her bar and restock it. Bigger and better than before. Hank Mosby is delivering the lumber tomorrow.”

I nodded again.

Interesting. A slap in the face to Reverend Venerable and his Holy Redemption congregation. And the Deacons.

I left to let Deputy Valdez know. Out of our official jurisdiction, but...

Once they started reading those Indianapolis letters, Rebecca and Rosie got real interested in my background. Maybe trying to get to know me better, maybe just curious about a different world. Maybe both.

Rebecca said, “Besides the whores, what was it like back there, Mr. Murdock?”

I thought about that. “I remember a lot of laughter in our house, probably that more than anything.”

I didn’t want to give them the wrong idea though, “But work too. We all worked in Clive Gilmore’s furniture store.”

Rebecca and Rosie nodded, that made sense.

“I started there when I was 7 or 8, sweeping the floors, dusting, polishing.”

Rosie said, “What was your grandfather like?”

A complicated question. Maybe it is for most everyone. “He worked hard, had to. But he ... seemed to enjoy life too. Even after Grandma Cicely passed.”

Rebecca and Rosie glanced at each other. I obliged.

“He called on a number of widow women over the years.” They were staring at me. “He was known to pay Mrs. Adler a visit, time to time.”

Rebecca jumped on that one, “Did the Gilmore Girls know?”

“Acourse. They teased him every bit as much as they did me.”

But once I started talking about the old days ... well, memories linger on.

“I was always big for my age,” Rebecca winked at Rosie, “So Grandpa Clive had me un-crating furniture, moving it around the showroom, delivering it.”

“How old?”

“Oh, by then I was probably 11, maybe 12, around in there. The Gilmore Girls worked in the store too. Sales, doing the books, got into buying. They had a pretty good idea what would be popular, sell.”

“Did your grandfather want you to take over the store? You know, someday.”

“He did. But he understood why I ... moved on.”

“Why did you?”

I’d thought about that some considerable. “I wasn’t unhappy, I just wanted something ... more, something different.”

Rebecca and Rosie were listening intently. Rebecca because of her own experience leaving Kansas City. Rosie probably because she didn’t have many hometown memories of her own.

“I wasn’t trying to get away from something. But the West was calling out to me. There was something out there, out here, that I had to see. Experience. I didn’t know what it was, what it would turn out to be ... just something new, something ... different.”

Rebecca reached for my buckle, winked at her daughter, “Big for his age.”

Rebecca and Rosie and I crossed Market — dodging a large freight wagon towed by two red and white Ayrshire oxen — and walked the two blocks down to the Holy Redemption Church of the Resurrected. The new bell tolled.

As they did in bed, they put me in the middle. Rebecca holding one arm, Rosie the other. Sheriff’s badge polished and pinned to my vest. Eight-gauge resting on my left shoulder, Peacemaker in my right holster. In theory, Cayuse was the only other armed man in Little River.

Reverend Venerable singled me out at the top of his sermon — pointing a scolding finger at me. We were seated in the last row, under the choir loft. No organ player this Sunday.

“The so-called sheriff of Little River sits idly by while fornicators of the lowest rank rebuild the Whore of Babylon’s palace of sin.”

Most people craned around to look at me. Most people didn’t look me in the eye though, the husbands especially. The Deacons — eleven of them now that Judge Dawkins had sentenced Deacon Cummings to six years for attempted murder — lined both the north and south walls, staring straight ahead.

The evening that we returned from our Appaloosa picnic, Rosie turned the mirror around. Studied herself in it; nodded, didn’t say a word. Rebecca winked at me.

I looked at Cayuse, “I’m not sure what’s going on these days.”

He nodded.

“It looks like Goodwin and Ollie, and probably Mosby, are trying to start up a new town.” Where the homesteaders had been driven off by the falling prices for cattle at Fort Métis.

“And I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Cravens.” Who had been planning a bordello in No-Name.

He nodded again.

“And I think it was Mrs. Chambers that is funding that No-Name Bar.” A fuck-you to the Cravens.

What had got me thinking about all this was a visit from Marshal Autry. He told me, “Better to head trouble off at the pass, than try to fix things after.”