Honeyville

‘Well? Name them!’

But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk about my dreams. I didn’t need to be saved by her. ‘I don’t want to start today. I enjoy myself,’ I said. Or at any rate (I didn’t add), I used to. But a girl can have too much of a thing. ‘I earn good money. And I never have to cook or clean – or listen to any man bellyaching … or at any rate not for long. And then,’ I leaned in and winked, ‘well, they lay down their dollars. And then they fuck off. Out of my bed, out of my room. Out of my life.’

She gasped, as I had intended.

‘Better a whore than a wife,’ I said. ‘Any day.’

Inez was neither of course. She was a lady with a rich and indulgent aunt, who volunteered her time at the library. Inez could do whatever and go wherever she liked. It made my head spin to imagine it.

She was ‘looking for love’, she told me. (I could have told her to save herself the trouble.) Instead we spent much of the evening talking about that. Inez and her search for love. Her search for adventure. Her search for a bigger life. She was restless.

‘Aunt Philippa has almost despaired of me,’ Inez said with a hint of pride. ‘She’s utterly convinced I’m going to die an old maid. And I tell her – well of course I shan’t!But you know, Dora, I do begin to wonder myself sometimes. I know I look younger than I am. People always say I do. But I’m going to be thirty next birthday – it’s old. For a lady. Don’t you think?’ She glanced at me. ‘I mean to say – you probably … Maybe you—’

‘Oh, I already have a husband,’ I muttered. I hadn’t intended to confide in her. Certainly not. But there it was: the effect of her warmth, surprising me, inviting me to reciprocate. I had no close confidantes, and didn’t want any. But she was difficult to resist.

‘You do?’

‘Somewhere. I haven’t laid eyes on him in seven years or so. But I certainly had a husband. Until I woke up one morning … And there – he was gone!’ I looked at her astonished face, eyes filling with sorrow yet again, and I burst out laughing. ‘Inez,’ I declared – and I think by then I had almost come to believe it. ‘It was the best morning of my life!’

‘But why? Did he? Was he—’

‘A louse. He ran off with our savings.’

‘No! And … children?’ she asked, tentatively. ‘What happened to the—’

‘No children.’

‘Oh. Well. I guess that’s something.’

A silence fell.

‘Well!’ Inez filled it, bless her. ‘It looks like I won’t be troubled by any little rug rats of my own either. The rate I’m going. And it’s not like I’ve been starved of suitors. Believe me, Dora. Just about every halfway eligible gentleman in Colorado has thrown his hat in the ring.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Everyone in town knows I’m wealthy. Rather, they know my Uncle Richard is wealthy. And they know my aunt will be sure to make Uncle Richard make me wealthy too, the day I become a bride. It’s what Aunt Philippa goes around telling everyone.’

‘You probably have gentleman queuing round the block.’

‘Well – yes. That is, I did. I’ve lost count of the gentlemen I’ve refused. And it’s not that I’m fussy.’

‘Of course not!’

‘It’s just that the gentlemen in this town … I don’t like to be insulting. And I guess – well, maybe you see a different side of them.’

‘I guess I probably do.’

‘But they’re so darned dull with me! All they seem to talk about is business. Who made how many dollars buying this or that piece of real estate. And then they talk about hunting. Which is all very well, except I’m not interested. And then they talk about their automobiles. I spend half an hour with them and I’m already thinking to myself, well you’re such a dull fish – why, I’d far prefer to spend the rest of my life with my nose buried inside a novel than to have to spend another ten minutes listening to you.’

I laughed.

She looked at me curiously. ‘If it’s not too silly to ask,’ she said, ‘do they talk about their automobiles with you?’

Just then the door to the street burst open. Two men, brawny bodies buttoned tight under high woollen waistcoats, necks sweating in collar and tie, strode into the room with such purpose and energy that everyone in the saloon, half full by then, paused in their conversation to inspect them. The two men seemed oblivious to the attention, didn’t glance from left to right, but marched directly to the bar. They looked grim, of course. And on the shirtsleeve of the man closest, I could see a smear of blood. Lippiatt’s blood. I knew it was Lippiatt’s – rather, I suspected it, because I recognized the men as having accompanied Lippiatt on his visit to Plum Street all those weeks ago. We – that is, the three men, a couple of the girls and I – had shared a few drinks, whiled away an hour or so in the ballroom before dispersing to our separate bedrooms. I wondered if they would recognize me.

I hoped so. I hoped that they would spot me and come across. They were at the centre of it all this evening, and I was curious to know what had happened since we saw Lippiatt’s body being dragged away down the street.

‘Dora!’ Inez whispered so loudly, my name echoed off the wooden floors. ‘He has blood in his sleeve! Do you suppose—?’

‘Hush!’ I said.

But he had already turned. They both had. They looked us up and down. We made an incongruous pair. The man without blood on his sleeve looked at me more closely. He turned to the other, muttered something … Yes, the other one nodded. Yes, indeed. It was me. The hooker from Plum Street. Both men raised a hand.

‘What? Do they know you?’ asked Inez, aghast. ‘Those terrifying-looking gentlemen?’

I wasn’t sure how to answer. It happened I couldn’t remember either of their names. And, until they chose to acknowledge me, I was duty bound – honour bound – to deny it anyway.

‘Dora!’ shouted the dark one.

And so it was decided.

They picked up their glasses and crossed the room towards us. ‘A sight for sore eyes,’ he said. ‘May we join you? Are you working tonight?’ They glanced at Inez, uncertain where she quite fitted in.

‘Working?’ Inez cried out. ‘Does she look like she is working? She most certainly is not working. Thank you very much …’ She studied them more closely, through whiskey-glazed eyes, and seemed to like what she saw. ‘However,’ she added, looking pointedly at the blonder one, the man with the blood on his shirt, ‘whatever your names may be, if you would like to sit yourselves down here …’ She missed the seat, patted the air around it and then seemed to lose her nerve. She glanced at me.

If I had sent the men away, how different things would be today! I didn’t do that. The excitement on her face – and the blood on his sleeve, and heck, they were two attractive men, and we were unaccompanied and a little drunk. I nodded, inviting the two of them to join us.

As they pulled up their chairs, Inez muttered something soft and briefly sobering about, ‘Aunt Philippa being worried.’ I could have called a halt to it then, I suppose. Or she could. She could have said to the men – ‘I really ought to be going.’ I might have walked with her to her home, since by then she was already canned, and certainly not able to make the journey alone. But I was canned too. I was off duty. I was having a good time. I don’t believe the thought even crossed my mind. ‘You said yourself you wanted to meet some new men,’ I whispered, and winked at her.

She swayed with laughter. ‘Oh, you’re shocking!’ she said gleefully. ‘I am in too deep now, for sure!’

Lawrence O’Neill was the taller, blonder, handsomer of the two, and the one with blood on his sleeve. He was an Irishman from Missouri; an activist, employed by the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) to do his worst in Trinidad. Back then, of course, before the Great War and the revolution in Russia, the battle between labour and capital was mustering strength and fury in every corner of the globe. It happened that, for the time being, the UMWA had designated Trinidad its American centre. It was here, among the mines of Colorado, that the Union was concentrating its funds, its fight – and all its best people. Lawrence O’Neill from Missouri was among them, he told us. And, yes, it was Captain Lippiatt’s blood on his sleeve.

We were all where we shouldn’t have been that night. I should have been working, of course. Inez should have been at home with her aunt, playing bezique. And, on the night their friend was murdered, you would have thought those two Union men had better things to do than while away the hours with a small-town librarian and a tired old girl like me.

‘Tell me, Inez Dubois,’ Lawrence O’Neill leaned his body in towards her, his expression teasing.

‘Tell you what, Lawrence O’Neill?’ she purred back at him … A little bit of confidence and polish – the thought flipped through my mind – and she might have made a fine hooker herself. ‘What shall I tell you, Lawrence O’Neill? I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.’

‘Inez, honey,’ I interrupted half-heartedly. ‘Don’t you think we ought to be heading home?’

‘What’s that, Auntie?’ she said.

It made me laugh. ‘Just take it easy, won’t you?’ I muttered. These men aren’t like the ones who talk to you about automobiles. That’s what I should have told her.The blood on their sleeves isn’t something they smeared on for after-dinner party games.

Lawrence wanted to talk about the company-owned mining camps, or ‘company towns’, as we sometimes called them. And they were towns, really: privately owned fiefdoms, fenced off from the rest of America. They had their own stores, doctors’ surgeries, chapels and schools; their own set of rules (no hookers, no liquor allowed); even their own currency: miners’ wages were paid partially in scrip, only valid in the company town’s overpriced stores. Lawrence asked her if she’d ever visited a company town herself.

Of course she’d never visited. For that matter, neither had I.