The Happiest Man

by ROBERT EASTON

1

As SOON as Blackwell’s man came into the Last Saloon we saw he was on his Christmas party. That was his trouble: trying to be happy once a year. His face wore hair and he wore three shirts which meant he’d been out six days — two hickory-grays and a Frisco dandy at the bottom that should have had a collar but had only a gold button in the middle of the throat. He was the stingiest man in the world, that man of Blackwell’s. Why, he was so stingy he wouldn’t buy the soap to do his laundry but waited until Mrs. Blackwell did out hers and used the dirty water. All year long he never spent a dime and then, come Christmas, he’d take a week and go to Frisco and tie one on.

He always rode home in a taxi — we could hear it outside, purring for him to come, telling you he had plenty of money but not much time. Said he’d seen rich city folk ride past all year and hang their face at him and he wanted to see how it was done. Sometimes he’d keep the cab a week, riding around, looking at things, and when he took the notion, he’d have it stopped so he could sleep, and when his shirt got overripe he’d go to Abel’s general store and buy another. That was why three shirts meant he’d been out a week.

But he didn’t look very happy. He passed right by us at the table and headed for the bar where Pete, our saloonkeeper, was leaning on his hand, under a blue eyeshade, thinking about Christmas.

“Howdy, Santa Claus,” says Blackwell’s man. “What’s old Santa got for good boys that is thirsty?”

“Tom and Cherry,” says Pete. “ Specials. ” Pete was a Dane, and kind of chewed his words — and his gray mustache in between times.

“Who?” says Blackwell’s man.

Behind the bar was a mirror that reflected the suspenders crossing on Pete’s back, and his apron strings, and the backs of all the bottles set on shelves along the mirror. Especially it reflected a great big bowl of something hot that gave off steam enough to wet the glass and made a heavenly image all of gold that tilled up a little, as if this stuff was just too wonderful to stay on earth.

Pete indicated it to Blackwell’s man with the smallest motion of one hand, as an artist shows his finest painting, and Blackwell’s man looked very happy all of a sudden and said, “Gimme some, Pete.”

Pete filled a coffee mug and set it. steaming on the bar.

They muttered over it a while and we sat and tried to hear them, and the wind talked around the corners of the Last Saloon and didn’t sound like Christmas Eve at all.

“Pete,” says Blackwell’s man, “it’s too sweet. Gimme something to cut it, something sour.”

Pete mixed him up a whiskey sour, but when he came to drink it the lemon mingled with the sweetness of the Tom and Jerry and came out in between, like castor oil.

“God!” said Blackwell’s man, not looking so happy. “Why don’t you learn to mix drinks, Pete? Or get some bottles readymixed like Frisco has?”

He tried a shot of straight Bourbon and then got arguing with Pete and finally blew clear up and went away just as happy as he’d come.

He let in wind that made us shrink and shiver right on through to the gizzard. Think of a cross between rheumatism and a fog and you’ll have that wind. It blew all the time in that country, straight from the salt marshes and the bay; and on Christmas Eve it followed Dynamite and Cherokee and me clear to the doorstep of the Last Saloon, and blew us indoors with a whoosh.

I don’t know what there was to celebrate. We had to be at work by six next morning. We worked in one of those outdoor factories that manufacture cattle instead of shoes or automobiles and work their men on Christmas Day and Sunday because cattle are just as hungry then as any other day. One of Dynamite’s boys was down sick with the measles. Cherokee’s wife was back in Oklahoma with her folks. I was a young kid a long way from home. But you know how fellows get after a while: they just have to celebrate something even if they make it up.

So there we were, and we called for Pete to fill us up again with Tom and Jerry.

He came along, saying about Blackwell’s man, “Poor fool — didn’t have no coat, didn’t have no hat. When he tries to buy a bottle I tell him, ‘No, you’ve had enough.’ He will never be happy.”

“No,” said Cherokee, “not if he lives a hundred years and goes to Frisco every day.”

“No,” said Pete, “he will never be happy.”

“Not like we are, anyway,” said Dynamite. “Nobody could be happy quite like we are.” And he made his blue eyes spark and his small young body shake and wiggle and become alive all over. He said, “I knowed a feller once was happy.”

“Plumb happy?” says Cherokee.

“Plumb happy,” says Dynamite.

“Didn’t have no Sunday job?” says I.

“Nope.”

“Didn’t have no wife or kids?” says Pete.

“Nope.”

“Well, let’s hear about him,” Cherokee says.

“Okay,” says Dynamite.

2

“It starts back home in Utah years ago — feller gets off a train, important feller too, ‘cause this was the Continental Comet, see, and she used to smoke through Red Jewel like a streak of light. But she stopped for him, and the railroaders gathered and yessed him up and down and cost him plenty before they was through and he could stand alone and let me see him. Now he was the unlikeliest feller you ever saw, small, pale, kind of humpy, but he had a maverick’s look in his eye, and the air got away behind him when he moved.

“D’rectly the train took off and whipped him with its tail of dust; and he stands there, a bag in each hand, faced south across the desert towards the mountains, and never knows she’s gone. Then he sees me standing there and quits his bags and comes and says to me, ‘I want to go down there.’ And do you know all he done was point a hand down south?

“‘Sure,’ I says.

“‘Fine,’ says he, ‘when do we start?’

“‘In the morning,’ I says, ‘I’ll get the ponies.’

“So I puts him up at the Princess Hotel, M. M. Berg proprietor, and gets a hippy sorrel horse from Hap, my pard, and about then I remember all this guy has said to me, or me to him, has been yes, no, bang-bang.

“Next morning bright and early I and the ponies was at the Hotel, and out he steps in a brand new pair of jeans and denim jumper that I knowed he’d bought from Charlie Pell across the street ‘cause I could tell Charlie’s denim when I seen it.

“‘Ready to go?’ I says.

“‘Ready to go!’ says he.

“With that he climbs aboard; and when I seen him do it I could tell he’d rode a horse maybe once, maybe twice.

“‘You’re traveling kind of light,’ I says.

“‘Yes,’ lie says, ‘I am.’

“‘How far did you figure to go?’

“‘How far?’ he says. ‘Far as you like.’ And waves another hand down south — down where the mountains rose up big and blue. My spine begun to creep. There was stuff about this here guy I’d never seen before. Now he weren’t a scientific kind, had no hammer for to bust up rocks and look inside, no nets nor bottles nor even a pencil — just his clothes and a silly kind of straw hat Charlie Pell had sold him. I couldn t figure it.

“I says to him, ‘We can ride till Christmas and it won’t bother me. I know folks as will put us up at night for a good long wavs at least.’

“‘Fine,’ he says.

“So we took off. We rode all day across the desert, heading for the mountains that stayed always just as blue and far away, and when I seen him ride I knowed there was no question of this feller having ridden once or twice before: it was only once. The sour alkali got in his nose and made him sneeze. The new blue denim chafed his legs till they was rare as minute steak — I knowed; I could tell it in the way he set his horse, cocked forward like a little boy that’s been whipped and can’t sit down. He never said a word. I couldn’t tell if he was sad or happy or just thinking hard. We rode and rode, and the sun got up and hit that desert square and bounced right back like fire from a red-hot stove. This feller’s face swole up till he couldn’t see the mountains he was riding for, his eyes run, and when I asked him how he felt he made a speech and says to me: ‘Fine.’

“Well, I was a little whipped myself when, just at dark, we rode into Hoopaloo’s place on Tank Crick out of Skull Valley. ‘How far are we from the mountains now?’ he says. ‘ We’ll be there this time tomorrow,’ I says, and hearing it he wants to look cheerful but can’t because his face is burnt so it has no play left in it. He gets off kindy sudden — like a bag of flour that’s had its bottom cut — and grabs the horn to keep from falling. I says to myself, ‘You little so-and-so, you’re game whatever you are.’

“For two days he couldn’t travel, and we laid up there with Hoopaloo, eating jerky stew and beans, but what he ate made him sick and we laid him over one day more. His face stayed raw as fire. We doctored it with bacon grease — with a rag on the end of a stick. It was Hoop’s idea, not mine. He said it was the boss stuff for burns though a shade salty. I bet the little gentleman could have said a good deal more about it but he didn’t. All he said was, ‘Thank-youvery-much-indeed! ‘ bright and sudden like a lark, and it always made Hoop jump a little.

“Come the fourth day and we rolled out early, Hoop and I, to do the chores, and he rolls with us. ‘That’s all right,’ we tell him, ‘there’s nothing much to do.’

“‘No,’ he says, ‘I want to help. I’ll feed the chickens.’

“Later I meets him leaving the chicken yard. His face is kind of seared over now, half brown, half red, like a piece of meat on a quick fire.

‘“Did I give them enough?’ he says.

“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘you did.'

“The yard was only ankle-deep in wheat.

‘“I’m very fond of chickens,’ he says. Damn his soul! You couldn’t help but like him.

“Then we hit the trail and by noon was in a country of scrub cedar — little old trees ten foot high that tried to be a forest and never made it but was built just proper for their size. The little gentleman said they was like the people of the earth that was cut small out of a big pattern.

“By noon we traveled in a country that was tall and green, where water run cold out of the stone. There was meadows — spots of shining sun where a man would want to stop and spend his life. There was ferns and flowers and the smack of trout hitting the water after flies, everything a man could ask, but it wasn’t good enough for him. ‘What’s on the other side?’ he says.

“By four o’clock the trees was growing thinner and the rocks whiter, and I knowed the timber line was due. That would fetch him round, I figured. He could see from there till his eyes ached.

“We ride along in shadow, cold, echoing ourselves from rock and snow, and come out finally on a slope where we can see and the sun lays still. There below us is the Twilight country, the widest country in the world. Far to the south she goes, gray and rolling as the ocean on a cloudy day, and in her canyons are the shadows of gray heat that lie till evening. She’s bare and empty as the sea. and far around her rim she seems to burn, which is the heat-smoke rising. She’s like a dish stuck in a fire, heaped with all the mountains of the world.

“‘That’s where I want to go,’ says the little gentleman.

“‘You can’t,’ I says.

“‘Why not?’ says he.

“‘There ain’t nobody goes to the Twilight country,’ I says.

“I told him of the water and the acid in the rocks, of winds that open on you like an oven door, of chambers in the stone that lets up gasses from the underworld.

“‘Of course,’ he says, ‘of course. I ought to go alone.’

“We turned around and started home.

3

“Away that autumn word come to me in Red Jewel how a feller crossing by the Twilight hills had found a mule, runaway mule; and d’rectly he come along himself leading that mule, and Eben James who owns the livery stable said it was his mule — one he’d sold my little gentleman. Then the cry got up and come around to me as being last to see the man. ‘Sure,’ I says, ‘I know where he is; I’ll find him.’

“So I gets Hap, my pard, who can track a bird through the air, and with him four good horses, grub, bedding, canvas bags for water, and we travels and finds the place this feller says he caught the mule. It’s up agin a rimrock in a canyon that was long and gray and quiet as the grave.

“South we went, and south, going up that canyon while the trail roughened out and quit, and the walls rose higher till they kept our sound for minutes before they gave it back. We never heard a living noise nor seen a sign till Hap stood by a flat stone and showed me where the mule had scuffed his shoe there coming down. A hind shoe, he said. To me it looked like maybe somebody struck a match there ten years ago.

“We worked all day to find that canyon’s head; we dumb by running water that was cold and sweet, through boulders that was big as buildings, and no trees, until we come to a place where the water run backwards.

“Ever come along a road and see a stile built over a fence? You say, ‘Gee whizz, Farmer Brown’s built him a stile. Wonder why? Must be for something special or he wouldn’t have taken all the trouble.’ Well, that’s how we felt that minute in that headless canyon, like some big Farmer Brown had been a-doing special things with the face of the earth, and left a place for us to wander up and over, to climb on down and see.

“And what we seen!

“She fanned down gradual a hundred miles, brown and bare and stony; and far down there what looked like rocks, and made an eddy in her like a stone in water, was really mountains. Gray walls begun on either side and reached up white to snow, and dirt flowed out of ‘em like water. It halfway filled the canyons, and higher still them walls was colored, red, yellow, orange, in a stain that rose and quit right sudden, like some time years ago a great big colored sea had filled the valley just so high. Above was gray, except where slides had gashed her white, and I figured, after studying a spell, that was because the heat-smoke in the summer rose and stayed right at that line of colors and made them twilights through the canyons and shut the sun off like a big umbrella, while all above was cooked plumb out to gray.

“Even now in winter the ground laid under shadow and the sun come pale and you kept looking up and looking up, thinking it was gonna rain but it weren’t. That was the shadow in the air and it set your skin to creep.

“Dirt and stone was dumped in loose and helter-skelter like people dumps in piles in city lots when they’re about to build, only these here piles was mountain chains. There weren’t no trees nor brush nor other stuff that didn’t matter or could go on later. This here was raw stuff for the beginning and boy, believe me! you could have built the world again with what we seen and had a lot to spare!

“Hap says to me, ‘Our mule passed here.’ He points me out a hole where water had been once, and then mud, and now a kind of whitish-yellow stuff that was like concrete only harder, and it stunk. There was rings of green and yellow round the edge that was the stain of acid from the rocks, and two little holes right in the center that looked like someone’d walked out there on stilts, and they was the marks of the forelegs of our mule. ‘He tried to drink here. Hap says.

‘“He must have been a thirsty mule,’ says I.

“So we kept along, and the canyons multiplied and run together and had no end and no beginning nor any meaning that was good that we could see, and Hap followed where that mule had gone like the flying birds follows the spring. We come on sudden valleys where the grass was green and water blue and always still, and all the sounds was echoes. We rode past bridges built by wind and water out of stone — where God lives in the rock, as the Indians say, and casts the only rightful shadow in that land; and when we seen His shadow lying on our trail we chilled, picked up, and hurried through.

“At night we heard a noise like somewheres far away a furnace door was open, and next morning if we passed that place we’d find the little birds all dead beside the trail and see the palest shadow going on the hills for miles, and that was where the wind had cut the stone.

“There was no sound by night or day we’d ever heard or liked, and one morning in the early darkness I heard a rooster crow. ‘Hap,’ I says, ‘wake up!’

“It come again.

“‘God,’ he says, ‘a rooster!’ and buries his head.

“I says, ‘Don’t be a fool. Our little gentleman was fond of chickens.’

“Right over a hummock in a valley that was green as spring, by water as made all the noises of the sea, we found his camp. New grass was coming on it. The willows of the table had begun to sprout. His bed was puffed up mealy by the rain; and on a cedar stump this rooster set agin that day and give the sun hello. All around him, hen-folk scratched and bustled after early worms and never heard a word.

“Hap says: ‘’Pears like he ain’t gathered many eggs of late, that little gentleman.’

“And Hap was right. He looked and looked, but this here trail was one he couldn’t follow, and some place, though I couldn’t say right where, it led up in the sky, I knowed.

“Then we traveled and went out the way we’d came, and as we passed them rocks and steeps we had a feeling like the shutting of a thousand doors; and when we got to Red Jewel the people that had been so hot for us to start had plumb forgot we’d gone. And the Continental Comet, she run through Red Jewel like a tongue of flame, as she does still, and never stopped again. . . . Nosh,” said Dynamite, wliich meant his story was over, “she never stopped again.”

We came back to the Last Saloon altogether in one breath, our eyes meeting as we drew it in and our feet scraping the floor, remembering how cramped they were.

“He left nothing?” Pete said.

“Nothing,” said Dynamite.

“What made you think he was so happy? ” said Cherokee. “Why?”

“Why?” said Dynamite. “Well, I don’t know — I used to wonder why myself. He never was a happy man to see. And then I figured it was this: he’d pitched his camp in the country he liked best and never had to break it up.”

We thought on that some time while the wind pecked and whined around the corners of the Last Saloon.

“Maybe so,” said Cherokee, “but me, I’d settle for a lot less than he done. If I could lay abed on Christmas morning, I think I’d settle for that.”

Pete said, “Same with me too.”

“Well, fellers,” said Cherokee, stretching himself, “we’d better move.”

We said “S’long” to Pete and went outside and drove away in Cherokee’s 1924 Dodge touring, with the wind hammering the isinglass and the faintest kind of shadow coming on the fields that would soon be Christmas.