around Lutherans. Lutherans are fine with greens, but they fry the hell out of everything else. The Presbyterian folks give us a wooden table with legs that didn’t set proper and one chair but not two. They were fixing to come across with a second chair, only Dad nodded off while cutting the pastor’s hair and sliced his neck and it became apparent to one and all that Dad was an addict. After that, the Christian element pretty much wrote us off. Dad picked up some work dipping outhouses, but he didn’t do no real labor the rest of his life.
I could have pulled us through the summer, but come winter, I imagine Dad and me would have starved if Mr. Cox hadn’t taken an active interest in my welfare. He brought us flour and side meat to get by, then, soon as my leg healed, he hired me to clean up his various establishments, including the bank and the Bluebeard Cafe. He gave me his son’s cast-off clothing and a red harmonica I still have. Nobody said more about me and school. My formal education came to a close at thirteen.
I know you may wonder why Mr. Cox showed such kindness as to give me clothes and a job when there was plenty of others equally poor as myself. I have had a long while to think about this, and I have come up with superstition as the answer. Mr. Cox was a forward-looking man with no fondness for the nineteenth century–folks in those days didn’t think the past was superior to the future. That’s a new thing—yet he played poker two nights a week, and thusly he had become deeply superstitious. I think he saw me flying through the air and landing smack on his porch as a sign. Mr. Cox viewed his role as that of dynasty patriarch; his son wasn’t living up to expectations, then I dropped from the heavens into his lap. I was the draw he got to fill an inside straight. So to speak.
In later years, Bill claimed Mr. Cox took me as the cheapest labor to be found and took advantage, but I pointed out his acts of charity began even before I could be of any use to him—such as the Fourth of July. Fourth of July I’d only been without crutches a week and still couldn’t walk any distance, and Dad was sick like usual, so the Coxes came around and gave me a ride to the carnival grounds in Mr. Cox’s new Maxwell. On account of the picnic food, I had to ride on this platform strapped off the back end, but that was okay. I felt good anyway.
Fourth of July was the biggest of holidays back then in Montana. All others came in the cold part of the year, when about the best you could hope for was a dance. Fourth of July was an all-day outdoor event with potato-sack and three-legged races, a rodeo, and a baseball game. Carnies set up booths where you could throw hoops at milk bottles or shoot little targets with a .30-.30 that had a crooked barrel. There was a booth where men threw balls at a bull’s-eye, and if they hit it, this mechanical chair dumped a fancy woman backwards off her perch far enough so if you looked quick, you got a peek at her drawers. Imagine now-days a gang of men spending their money and effort to glimpse a woman’s undergarments.
We ate dinner under a pretty little grove of cottonwoods, and there was hot dogs, fried chicken, ham hock, cold potatoes and onions, lemonade, and chocolate cake. Afterward, Mr. Cox treated me and Agatha to blue cotton candy. I got sick and haven’t eaten nothing blue ever since.
***
Just after dark, I had to see a man about a dog. I did my privy business and was coming back to the tree where Mrs. Cox had a quilt spread, walking along the row between the booths there, when the first firework exploded smack in the sky over my head. Orange spires shot off every which way like a dandelion gone to seed in the wind, then at the tip end of each spire a white flash popped. I stopped dead in my tracks to look up at the effect, and somebody walked into my backside, knocking me forward and sending a pain up my bad leg.
A voice yelled, “Look out, you stupid oaf!”
I
I could have pulled us through the summer, but come winter, I imagine Dad and me would have starved if Mr. Cox hadn’t taken an active interest in my welfare. He brought us flour and side meat to get by, then, soon as my leg healed, he hired me to clean up his various establishments, including the bank and the Bluebeard Cafe. He gave me his son’s cast-off clothing and a red harmonica I still have. Nobody said more about me and school. My formal education came to a close at thirteen.
I know you may wonder why Mr. Cox showed such kindness as to give me clothes and a job when there was plenty of others equally poor as myself. I have had a long while to think about this, and I have come up with superstition as the answer. Mr. Cox was a forward-looking man with no fondness for the nineteenth century–folks in those days didn’t think the past was superior to the future. That’s a new thing—yet he played poker two nights a week, and thusly he had become deeply superstitious. I think he saw me flying through the air and landing smack on his porch as a sign. Mr. Cox viewed his role as that of dynasty patriarch; his son wasn’t living up to expectations, then I dropped from the heavens into his lap. I was the draw he got to fill an inside straight. So to speak.
In later years, Bill claimed Mr. Cox took me as the cheapest labor to be found and took advantage, but I pointed out his acts of charity began even before I could be of any use to him—such as the Fourth of July. Fourth of July I’d only been without crutches a week and still couldn’t walk any distance, and Dad was sick like usual, so the Coxes came around and gave me a ride to the carnival grounds in Mr. Cox’s new Maxwell. On account of the picnic food, I had to ride on this platform strapped off the back end, but that was okay. I felt good anyway.
Fourth of July was the biggest of holidays back then in Montana. All others came in the cold part of the year, when about the best you could hope for was a dance. Fourth of July was an all-day outdoor event with potato-sack and three-legged races, a rodeo, and a baseball game. Carnies set up booths where you could throw hoops at milk bottles or shoot little targets with a .30-.30 that had a crooked barrel. There was a booth where men threw balls at a bull’s-eye, and if they hit it, this mechanical chair dumped a fancy woman backwards off her perch far enough so if you looked quick, you got a peek at her drawers. Imagine now-days a gang of men spending their money and effort to glimpse a woman’s undergarments.
We ate dinner under a pretty little grove of cottonwoods, and there was hot dogs, fried chicken, ham hock, cold potatoes and onions, lemonade, and chocolate cake. Afterward, Mr. Cox treated me and Agatha to blue cotton candy. I got sick and haven’t eaten nothing blue ever since.
***
Just after dark, I had to see a man about a dog. I did my privy business and was coming back to the tree where Mrs. Cox had a quilt spread, walking along the row between the booths there, when the first firework exploded smack in the sky over my head. Orange spires shot off every which way like a dandelion gone to seed in the wind, then at the tip end of each spire a white flash popped. I stopped dead in my tracks to look up at the effect, and somebody walked into my backside, knocking me forward and sending a pain up my bad leg.
A voice yelled, “Look out, you stupid oaf!”
I
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