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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Cookie Jug Ruse
Tom Sheehan
At a glance in the mirror, you’d have to say I am very particular in what I wear, not how I wear it, what I carry on my person, in my pockets or in my saddle bags, what kind of a saddle I put on what kind of a horse I ride. I am particular.
I am pretty damned particular about this horse I ride. I called him, from the first sight of him on a stable floor in a little Kansas town that long since changed its name, General Lee. He’ll always be General Lee, the General Lee we could have ridden to the top of the world with, but things got in our way.
Lee’s part and parcel of my aching dream for a place where, eventually, I will put my head down, where I’ll have a barrel of kids, a slew of horses, grass I can ride on for miles, a stream to fish, and a woman to make it all come true.
Of course, for a bachelor like me for 27 years, that will be a particular woman for that particular place and it will make General Lee stop of a sudden in case my eyes are closed in a riding nap, of which I take one every so often on my route to wherever.
Also, of course, I am not looking for a little white dreamlike cottage with a dreamlike white picket fence that couldn’t hold a pet lamb of a mind otherwise set for rambling freedom and sweeter grass.
No, sir. I’m looking for a feeling place, an aura, where shadows don’t play tricks and morning’s like a bugle itself, a heavenly bugle that sets the day on its running edge and you have to keep up to it to gain a piece of the morning glory.
From a long way back, things have been different for me. I’ve been in state homes and adoptive homes and makeshift homes and hovels and roadside camps and tent cities and places with no sides or no tops and I’ve known every weather cycle there is to know, and hated some and bore some, and kicked hell out of some, just to get warm or get fed or get a sleep that at least set me groggy for a restful spell.
In one of the adoptive homes, where I was caned every week for the least of my sins and many times for the sins of others who took some care to drop clues in my path that I never looked for, a haggard, beastly woman owned a cookie jug, which looked like a bear who’d been stuffed with the honey of a thousand bees’ nests, an ugly stuffed bear with a big yaw and a big gut.
Her only sweetness in life appeared to be the cookies she made, probably sugar at its premium content, because they sat in your throat where you could hold them in their melting and bring along the day’s sole goodness. But it didn’t dawn on me until I was long out of her place that there never came a day where half a dozen kids didn’t get her whip for getting into the cookie jug. She filled the cookie jug with her new cookies so we’d steal them and earn a beating; that was her glee making the cookies, spilling the aroma and daunting sweetness all over the house and the neighborhood so that we’d raid the jug of cookies, and be summoned to the belt, the stick, the handle of a broom or a brush or the flat side of the nearest loose board. It didn’t matter what joined her hand in delivering pain.
Little escaped me about that beastly, haggard woman’s armaments, for I knew both the flats and the edges of her cane, a broken chifferobe door, a wire hanger bent to wield instead of hold, a slat from an apple box, a rolling pin, a crippled dustpan. And once, from inside a closet with an open slat I saw into her night bedroom as she beat at a man with her cane until he did exactly what she wanted him to do. There, as I can remember, was one mortified, frightened, scrabbled but bruised lover who finally succumbed to her wiles. Once, after another night of such pummeling love, he went on an errand for her and never came back. We figured he’d found a new lover elsewhere.
When I left her tutelage, as one might say, I too was on my way looking for a new love; I was 11 years old. I rambled and rode and hooked rides on every kind of vehicle, my nose always to the west, for I wanted nothing of cities and orphanages and homes for truants and orphans and poor street urchins that often were scooped up by bounty hunters with a special warrant ---- to grace homes with unpaid servants, childish chattels, and those who became the worse for the wear that was not their fault. Some of the grandest homes were hovels of the worst kind, in a dank cellar, a hidden attic, or a whole floor graced with the young who could not fight their way through any accidental hole in the wall.
As children, in the wards of inner city slums, we hungered, stole, adventured in dark hallways, saw things too early for our minds and bodies, grew strange conceptions that promised to take years to correct or satisfy.
And so I came into a lower part of Illinois and then a chunk of Missouri and slept one night in the loft of a barn where a man found me looking up at him. He shushed his fingers across his lips, came back with food and water, then with some clothes, told me to sleep as long as I wanted and he’d send me to his brother who had his own place in Oklahoma.
He was a kind, delightful man, prematurely bent in his frame from the war, but whose smile was like a new day come on me, a good new day. His name was Lester Goode and a man could not have been named better Lester Goode.
“I’ve been there, where you’ve been, son,” he said, “and ‘t’were no fun for me and I fear ‘t’were no fun for you. I only work here, but I’m trying to get enough money to get me to my brother’s place, but I can’t ride and have to buy my way. Honus, my brother, doesn’t have much himself but what he lives on, farming and such and we figure if I can get there I can at least earn my vegetables if not the meat of the meal. Both us lived on near nothing too, childish vagrants going from one place to another, ahead of the law many times, or the property owner when we trespassed. You must know it all, like we did. Where are you headed?”
His kindness shined on me when I said, “I’m going west,” and he replied, “Oklahoma and my brother’s place is a good start for you. In a week, we’ll get it arranged.”
Lester Goode got that ride to Oklahoma for me and I moved from 11 years old to 17 at his brother’s place before he died and I lit out again. Lester had died before that and all the west just sat out there calling for me. I worked for a trail boss on a wagon train and kept my ears open for everything and my mouth shut and earned my way onto a cattle drive and did it all for a year and a half, everything called for by the trail boss, drag to scout.
Then the war came and I rode in a Confederate cavalry outfit and was hit twice, but not badly and started west again when the war was over, remembering, finally, with grace and thanksgiving for the good comrades in arms I served with. Somehow, in the deep of night, those comrades served anew on the line for me, getting me through new battle, new contests. Life, it proved without a doubt, was a contest … like there’d always be a winner take all.
It was in Kansas when I again saw General Lee, this time the colt of the name, standing like he belonged to the whole damned world, and I bought him right then, and worked a ranch in exchange for bringing him up and earned a way for him and me and moved on again. Six months ago, in western Colorado, tucked in between the blankets of two hills, I found my town.
At the top of a mountain pass, clear of prior obstacles on my trail … a skirmish with a drunken sheriff or marshal pushing a posse after someone and settling on my hide when I accidentally crossed their path, a pair of mountain men hungry for General Lee for their dinner, a few Indians making tribal and nation noises, I felt this town we’re in now, this very place. It slipped its noose over me when I cleared a short rise in the pass and North Haven fell into my vision.
I knew this was it in a flat out second. All kinds of messages came to me: lightened shadows would fall with day pushing them into place, the softest breath of air like a woman would breathe life onto me through her open mouth, her fingers would never be idle, and her hair would prove darker, more beautiful, with each shadow’s disappearance into late evening. I had found my town and knew my woman was in that town.
It was a dream scene: the grass as green as an Irishman’s tie on Paddy’s Day, the sky rolling with an ocean blue you only see on hand-painted maps in some Atlases, and the formation of the town, the unerring rectangular and lineal contours of it not trying to be pretty but utile, the general brownness of it at odd hours, the honest and neutral grayness of it except in direct sunlight as if some mastermind had planned it, set itself like a grand checkerboard out in front of me. From my dreams onward, neat as a teller’s counter on a slow day at the bank, I fell in love with it, with North Haven.
It was so special I instantly recalled the ugly woman who beat me often for stealing a sweet from her bear cookie jug. You just know that beauty leaps up from difference, from contrast.
It left an image with me … no matter the prize, hungry or poor or bereft people will do most anything to get what they want in their hands, in their guts, in their dreams … most anything. So into my mind came a necessary though fictional diversion to protect what was mine … at any cost. It might be a simple sweet for someone’s tooth, for every one of us has a demanding and at times tragic sweet tooth … for a wad of cash, a bag of coin, a mountain of gold in that far west. Eventually, I thought I ought to have a fictional gold mine plotted out on a map with graphic highlights noted to entice any searcher way from my real treasures. I drew a map. A fictional map. A phony map.
And as I played with it, and dreamt of the real thing, it aged, that map, it gained the secret character of the authentic; in a sense, it became the real thing. I carried it in my boot. It was plotted on a soft but durable cloth; it held the color of the available inks I “got my hands on.” It was my diversion.
As I looked down on North Haven, it presented one main street crossed by several smaller side roads, all dusty, probably all muddy in the rains and all hard--packed under August’s continual heat, and each of those features fit neatly into the checkerboard diagram fascinating me at my first look from afar.
The livery, on the first crossroad, showed itself by activity, the bank by its large, rough and hand painted sign. The general store was illuminated by carriage traffic by ranch women and children and the saloon by an almost solid stand of horses at the hitch rail in front. I knew the place from my long thirst.
North Haven was a cowboy town and promised to be my hometown. Let’s face it … I’d never had a real home, the kind that sits all around you when you’re away from it … not just chunks of it, not only your bedroom or the kitchen or that special cozy corner by the fireplace, but the whole shootin’ image with sensitive fingers, helpful hands, warm arms, and a love you can touch back in your own way, and likely in the same way it finds you.
And I knew all these images were perhaps my own images, and perhaps not, but they were not created by me. I figured they were of some other making.
All the witches and madmen and buffoons and bounty hunters were behind me, the whole pile of them, and I luxuriated in it the vision of their loss … not one of them here with me, not one of them here to greet me once I got down there to that checkerboard.
And to her, whoever she may be, and my own place, wherever that’ll be near the checkerboard.
I came into North Haven with my shadow in front of me, General Lee’s shadow squatting on the dirt road as big as a rock, a mass of dark nothing hardly imaginable as he muscled under me in his equine power. My own thin shadow faded into and out of buildings whose shadowy contours had been thrown ahead of them by swallowed sunlight.
And the saloon, The Sanctioned Rest, with an angel sitting at the end of the long sign telling me my first drink was at hand, was noisy. I tied General Lee off at the last spot on the hitch rail. “At ease, Sir,” I said, “thanks for another safe arrival. In a few minutes I’ll get you under cover, brushed and groomed and your status reasserted. Yes. Sir.”
He nickered once.
The noise in the saloon was a boisterous but happy one; no arguments, only one card game with more onlookers than players, the bar almost crowded out of sight. Two bartenders were working their way down the line of customers.
One of the bartenders looked at me, nodded, said a bright hello, and then said, “You’re new in town, ain’t you?”
When I nodded, he said, “First one’s on me,” and looked over his shoulder and qualified his gift, “but it’s really the boss’s doin’. His name’s Bart Bender that we all think he made up, but he’s never said otherwise, and my name’s Orville Szejack and nobody ever made that up. What’s yours?”
The pause may have hit him as significant, because I had not spoken my own name in months; and it seemed to catch onto a place in my throat, because it took some time getting out of there.
I figured I’d have to follow up my name with a litany of identity points he could chew on, pass on if there were any questions about the new gent in town, or for general gab behind the bar.
“Well, Orville, my name’s Burt Harte, now of North haven if I can manage it permanently, once of all over and everywhere since I was a kid running from cruel houses for lost kids. I served in the Confederate cavalry and my horse’s name is General Lee. I almost robbed a bank once when I was hungry, almost shot a sheriff who was mean as a viper. I’ve never been in jail, never quit a job except to move further west to right here and now, and I’ve always looked for the girl of my life and ain’t seen her yet. I will come back later, after I take care of General Lee, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
Orville Szejack smiled as wide as the back end of the bar, practically shaking his head in some newfound glee. “I’ll be here, Burt, and if I’m off duty, I’ll hang around for that drink. It’s a pleasure to meet someone who can talk without spitting, without cursing, without losing his place or his intentions.”
Szejack, I noticed right off, was probably 40 years old or so, his hair still brown and his eyes still blue with life, and I had noticed two fingers missing from his left hand, the fourth and the pinkie, right down to the knuckle. I knew a story had to cover the missing digits; I’d wait on it.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Szejack’s mind was running ahead, thinking here was a man who didn’t hide any part of his personality, his past, his true nature. A handsome young fellow, a fine addition to the town if it could be arranged or happen the way he wanted it to happen, if he found the woman of his life, and it was there and then that the bartender knew exactly who she was. Time would tell; Tessie Szejack, his brother’s daughter, had come to North Haven to live with him when her father died in a landslide, and Burt Harte would find her. He was sure of that.
I had no idea of what the bartender was thinking, but it was a good feeling that came between us, and I carried it with me as I went out to take care of General Lee.
After I made sure of General Lee’s comfort and keeping, I wandered around North Haven for a while, and in that very first sauntering of the town, I saw a raven-haired beauty as she exited the general store and stood for a moment on the boardwalk; nothing could hide her beauty, not the surroundings, not the other women on the boardwalk, not the clothes she wore, a yellow shirt, dark riding pants, and no hat on her head. I could not take my eyes off her, and there was one bare moment when I believed she had noticed my attention; but she casually, and lady-like, seemed to discount it.
When she moved off, she did not look back, but I swung about after taking a few steps and caught her head twisted my way; the signals were sent and known.
At the bar on his return, Szejack said, “If General Lee’s taken care of, Burt, I’ll have my drink now. Anything interesting out there?” He nodded at the door of the saloon.
“Oh, yeah,” I replied, the enthusiasm in my voice. “A dark-haired beauty at the store, though she may have been too young. But a real beauty.”
Szejack smiled back at me, a smile as wide as before. “In a yellow shirt and dark riding pants and no hat?” His eyes were lit with pleasure.
It didn’t hit me as a question, but as a statement of fact. “Yes, exactly,” I said, even as I saw a new look in his eyes.
“Isn’t that part of the warm welcome you were expecting from North Haven?”
His pause was gracious, informative of a sudden, and I thought he would prove to be the smartest man in North Haven. “That girl in the yellow shirt is Tessie Szejack, my brother’s daughter. She came to North Haven to live with me when her father died in a landslide that moved a whole mountain in Idaho. I’ll introduce you when the time is right. It sure isn’t now, though I think you’re aware of each other. By now, she ought to know a lot more about you than you know about her.”
But at that exact moment, from behind me, from the center of the room, a gruff, crude voice said, “Is that the quitter General Lee you been talkin’ about, mister, you the one bein’ cozy with the barkeep up there?”
I said, “You talking to me, mister?”
He was lantern-jawed man, had a nose like it had been pieced together, deep-set eye, a month or more of scraggly beard in place, and a hat that sat his head like a bucket.
The lantern-jawed man said, “You think I’m talkin’ to the stupid wall? I don’t do that too much.”
I couldn’t resist it, so I asked, “Well, when you do, who’s the stupidest, you or the wall?” I knew he’d react more to the crowd than to me, the embarrassment far more brittle than the slur.
He came up out of his seat, jumped into the space beside the table, and showed himself fully armed and ready to exact demands. He was as ugly in intention as he was in sight.
Szejack raised his hands and yelled, “He’s not armed, Gobbick. Better relax. You don’t want to know what’s coming at you right now from the front door.”
As soon as Gobbick turned to see what was at the door, and saw nobody, he looked back to see Szejack holding a shotgun aimed right at him. “Don’t do it, Gobbick,” the bartender said, “or you’re going down.”
Gobbick saw every man in the saloon staring at him, so he sat down abruptly, but the muttering about General Lee seemed to continue in his general irascibility. At length he quieted down.
The event passed and I figured Gobbick had enough for now, but was apt to spring a real surprise at me the next time: gents like him, which I had seen time and again, don’t let such things pass idly by … they bite back, and viciously.
I had not seen him for more than a week, when I noticed one of his pals in the saloon while I was talking to Orville Szejack right at the end of the bar, and Orville had asked, “Where in hell did you get that poke you showed me, Burt? You ought to put that in the bank. Where’s it from. You steal it? Find it? What?”
“Oh, no Orville, that’s from my own mine, way up in the hills. I haven’t put a claim in on it yet because the minute I do I know some old dirt dog will go prying when I’m not around and do some mining in my own place.”
“Can you find it easy enough?” Szejack was wide-eyed in wonder.
“Oh, I’ve got a neat map of it, on good cloth.” I said it as clear and as audible as could be.
“You keep it hidden?” Szejack said. “You don’t carry it around on you, do you?” He looked horrified waiting for the answer.
“Not a chance, Orville. I keep it in the sweetest place of all. Nobody’d ever look there.” I made a funny face and looked over my shoulder, as if I had given a specific direction.
Gobbick’s friend was up and out of the room as slyly as he could move, but moving all the time, heading off to spill what he had learned, information pushing him right out the saloon door.
Two days later, when I returned to my room at the hotel, I found the room had been searched; all the drawers and two bags opened, and the cookie jug upside down and empty.
The map was gone.
So were Gobbick and his one pal I did know. Nobody ever saw them again. Lost? Killed? Met a bear? A mad Indian or two or three? Another brigand or claim jumper looking for the map? Men like Gobbick also can’t keep their mouths shut.
And one day Orville Szejack invited me to dimmer at his place at the far end of town. Tessie Szejack was there, and with her first smile, the first look in her eye, the first touch of her hand, I was all the way home and never going to leave any part of it, not ever until Kingdom Comes to pass.
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