Chapter 2: The Paper Bride

There is a saying out here that a family goes from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and I have never once heard a man say it about his own people. My grandfather’s people were the ones it was made for.

They were somebody when the silver was coming up out of that country. Not the men who found the silver — the men who were already standing on the ground with the deed to it when the silver was found, which is the better position and the only one worth having. They held paper on grass and water that carried a hundred and forty head in a good year. They had a storefront on the main street with the name painted over the door. One of them sat a term in the territorial legislature, back when there was still a territory to sit in. Another held the county assessor’s office for eleven years.

That is one end of the saying. The other end was Elias, and he walked it in six years, and he never laid a dollar of it on anybody but himself. I will say that much for him, because it is the only thing in this story I can say for him.

Now, my part. I was not there. Nobody in my family was there except the man who did the thing, and he did not tell it to me as a boy. He told it later, to rooms, with whiskey in the room, and he told it the same way every time, down to the weather in it. Either it happened the way he said, or he had practiced it until it did. I could never get a year out of him, either. I keep it in the twenties because that is where it sits in my head, and I am not going to defend the date.

He was not lazy and he was not slow. His father was dead by then and the property had been divided. Elias took his share in one piece, and a man could have lived on it, and he did not. First the tables, in a room behind a cigar store, a green cloth on the table and two men at it who had come a long way to be there. Elias read them. For about a year he read them, which is the worst thing that ever happens to a man who plays, and then he stopped winning.

Then the grass went. Then the storefront. Then the medicine.

The druggist kept it in a brown bottle and called it medicine and did not ask what it was for, because he knew what it was for. Elias paid for it out of whatever was on him that week — a watch, a set of spurs, once a good saddle, which he carried the length of the main street in the middle of the day with the whole town watching, and nobody said a word to him about it, which was the town’s way.

When he had money, the clerk at that drugstore called him Mr. Hollis and set out a chair. When he did not have money, the same clerk met him in the doorway with one hand on the frame. He saw both ends of that inside of two years. He was not the only man in that county with a bottle in the house.

His mother’s brother was Amos Kerr. Amos had a place four miles out of town and a name at the bank that opened things. He had made up his mind about Elias the year Elias turned twenty and had not moved off it since, and there was no nickel in Amos Kerr for his sister’s boy. Everybody knew it. Elias knew it.

So he did not ask for a nickel. He told him he was getting married.

Amos Kerr cried. Elias had not counted on that and did not enjoy it. The old man went into the other room and came back with twenty dollars and put it in Elias’s hand, and said it was for the girl, and said to buy her something and find a place that did not leak, and said he would come out and see her as soon as the work let him. And then he said the other thing, the thing he always said, which was that Elias should put the medicine down now that he had a reason to.

Elias said he would.

There was a dry goods store in town that had bought itself a display figure out of a good season — a woman, paper laid over wire and painted, a face on it and hair pinned on, the kind of thing that stood in a window wearing a coat so that people could see the coat. The good season did not come back. The figure went into the back room behind the brooms, and it was there that Elias bought it, for four dollars, and the man who sold it to him did not ask why.

He brought it home in the dark, slung over a borrowed saddle, and put it in the bed in the inside room. He dressed it out of his mother’s trunk, a good dress kept back against a better day. He pinned a brooch on it and put color in its face with a brush and folded its hands and covered it to the chin and stood off and looked at it.

He said afterward that he never expected it to fool anybody for more than a minute. What he wanted was one look through a doorway. He wanted the old man to see a woman in a bed and go home happy.

Amos Kerr came at the end of the week with a piece of dress goods across the saddle and a box of candy in his coat. Elias met him in front of the house and said the girl was sick, had been bad all week, could not be up.

“Then I’ll look in on her,” Amos said. “I came four miles.”

“She’s asleep.”

“Then I’ll sit.”

Elias said sleeping was mostly what she did. Amos Kerr looked down the hall at the closed door, and then he looked at his nephew, and something moved behind the old man’s face and settled there. He said, “If she’s sick, I’ll pay for the doctor.”

Elias said she did not need a doctor.

Amos said every sick woman in the world had a man standing in front of her saying that. Then he walked to the door.

Elias caught him by the arm at the wrist, and both of them knew it was a mistake at the same moment, and neither of them let go.

I have heard enough men tell enough things to know what that is worth, so I will put this part down the way he told it. He told it slowly and he never changed a word of it.

She came through the blanket with her head down and then she raised it, and Elias knew the dress, because he had put it on her himself, and he knew the color high in the cheeks, because he had put that there with a brush in that kitchen at half past one in the morning.

She was white in a way that has nothing to do with a person being pale. It was the white of paper, and the red sat on top of it, and the eyes were brown and level.

She said, “I am sorry to have kept you standing in the yard. I was sick this morning. I am not sick now. Stay and eat with us.”

Then she made the old man a bow. Not a young woman’s bow — something a good deal older than that. Elias noticed it and could not have told you why it sat wrong. Then she turned around and went into the kitchen.

Amos Kerr took the good chair and sat down in it like a man taking possession of something. Elias stood against the wall. He said that hour was the longest of his life up to then, and he had spent some long ones.

She cooked. There was a roast on the table and potatoes and a pie with a lattice on top and a pot of coffee, and Elias could not have told you where a nickel’s worth of it came from or when it had been bought, and he did not ask. Amos ate his way through most of it and talked the whole time.

He talked about Elias’s mother. He said she would have been glad to see this, and he said it with his napkin up at his eye. He said the girl had a face on her that would hold up through a hard winter, which from Amos Kerr was a compliment worth about twenty dollars.

And when he went to bed he took out ten more dollars and put them on the table and told Elias to buy the girl something of her own, and Elias took it, and the old man went into the front room, and he was asleep before Elias had put the lamp out.

But across the table, in the lamplight, Elias watched her eat. That is the part he always came back to. That she ate. She put the food in and chewed it and asked the old man about the price of hay and about somebody’s brother who had gone out to California, and Elias sat with his hands under the table and looked at her face, and it came to him slowly and then all at once, the way those things come, that there was no blood under that white at all, and that the red was laid on top of it, and that he knew what the red was made of, because he had bought the tin of it himself at the dry goods store. The same tin he had used in the kitchen at half past one in the morning.

Something turned over in him and lay down. He put his fork on the plate and did not pick it up again. He said it was like a fly he had swallowed and could neither keep down nor spit out, and that he could taste it for three days.

In the morning he borrowed the livery wagon and drove Amos Kerr home. The old man thanked him at the gate and told him to bring the girl out to Sunday dinner and let his wife meet her, and Elias said he would.

Then he drove the wagon the four miles back into town and left it standing in the livery yard with the harness still on it, and did not go into the office to say he had brought it back.

He went to the drugstore. He went down to the line where the houses keep the red lamp. He did the thing a man does with ten dollars at the end of a bad week, which is to turn it into nothing faster than you would believe, and he did it until the money was gone and then he did a little more of it on credit, and then he was standing in the street a little after one in the morning with his collar open and his hat gone and a tab he could not settle, and they put him out the door and were not gentle about it.

He walked home the nine miles, because there was no other plan and nothing better at either end of it.

The house was dark. He went through it with the matchbox in his hand and came to the inside room, and the shape under the quilt had not moved, and the quilt was smooth, and the room smelled like nothing at all. No food, no coffee, no candle, nothing. As though the day before had happened to another man in another house.

He stood in that door a while. Then he carried her through the house and out the back and laid her down in the bare place in the middle of the yard where nothing grew, and her heels left two lines in the dirt the whole way. He knelt down and took the box of matches out of his pocket and took one out and held it.

“You would burn me,” she said.

He said that by then he was past being surprised. I take that to mean that something in him had let go its hold and had not come back.

“You would burn me,” she said again. “I stood up in that room for you. I put that old man’s supper in front of him. I put money in your hand twice, and you have never in your life done a thing to deserve it.”

He had the match in his fingers and could not bring it down to the box.

“Look at me,” she said.

And he did, and it was the same trick twice, the white and the red and the brown eyes level on him.

“I want a husband,” she said. “If the word troubles you, leave it out. I want a man who can walk out of this town and put a pick in the ground at a place I will name, and carry back what is in the box under it. That is the whole of the marriage. You will not have to look at me.”

He did not answer her.

“There is gold in that box that would keep you in medicine to the end of your life and past it,” she said. “You know what the living say. Better to lie rich than to live poor. They said it over my grave and laughed while they said it.”

She waited. He said she waited long enough that the match wore out between his fingers and he had to take another one out of the box.

“You are not a good man,” she said. “Do not stand there thinking I picked you for your character. I have been dead a long time and I am not particular. And do not turn your nose up at me — you are the pauper here, Elias Hollis, not me.”

“No,” he said.

“Then say it,” she said. “Say you will not.”

“Living men don’t marry the dead.” And then, and he always put the next part with it, close, like one word: “And that money is not mine.”

I have thought about that sentence more than anything else the man ever said, because I know what we are, and he knew what we are, and he had taken in his life a watch off a man who was asleep, and his mother’s silver, and twenty dollars off an old man who cried in his own parlor. He was not a thief with a rule in him. He was a man in a cold yard in the dark saying the first true thing that had come out of his mouth in six years, and I still do not know where he got it.

He told me once that while he stood there he thought about a thing he had heard from the old men when he was a boy — about men who took up with a woman out of a graveyard, and how they were found after, in a rented room, in the bed, dried down onto the bone with the hide still over them. He thought about that. And then he told me it was not the reason.

“All right,” she said. “You will be back.”

He said nothing.

“When it gets bad enough. And it will, Elias Hollis, because you are the kind that finds the bottom of whatever hole he is in and then digs it deeper — go out to Thirteen Mile. There is a flat out there with nothing on it but a few trees and the graves of people nobody remembers. In the middle of them is one with no stone on it. That one is mine. The box under it is full, and every dollar in it is yours the minute you put a shovel in the ground.”

Then she stopped. He said it was not like a person stopping. It was like a clock running down, whatever had been in the face of it running out, and then there was nothing in the yard but the thing he had bought for four dollars, in his mother’s dress, in the dirt, with the color on its cheeks.

He burned it. He stood there and burned it and stirred it with a stick until there was nothing left in the bare place but ash and the wire frame and heat coming off it. Then he went in the house and slept on the floor of the front room, because he could not make himself go into the inside room.

Two years, then. He did not go out to Thirteen Mile that night, or that month, or that year. He got work at the smelter and held it eleven weeks. He borrowed twenty dollars off a cousin and paid back eight. He had one good spring, because there is always a good spring in the middle of a story like this, and that is the difference between a story and a sermon. And then he did not have a good spring.

In the second fall, with nothing in the house that anybody would buy and not one door left in that county that would open for him, he took a shovel and a pick and a canteen and a box of matches and walked out of town, the way the dead woman told him to.

What he brought back from Thirteen Mile, and what it took off him and kept, is the next part.

Elias stands in that yard with the matchbook in his hand, and the woman in his mother’s dress talks long enough that he wears the first match out and has to take a second one. That detail is the whole chapter for me. A man who has truly decided doesn’t need another match.

I also have a soft spot for Amos Kerr, who rides four miles with candy in his coat, cries over his sister’s boy, and never once asks the question he came to ask.

If you’d like to read ahead, early chapters are available on my Patreon: https://patreon.com/zuochuang