Chasing the Sunset(4)

He also made a weekly visit to a responsive widow woman who received him with great pleasure into her bed. And afterwards, Sally Henderson always gave him a smile and a thank you for the ‘gifts’ he brought her. The arrangement suited them both. Sally was discreet, as was he and Nick liked her and enjoyed her company both in and out of bed. He believed from her behavior that she felt the same way about him. Of course, he was not quite sure about any woman’s true feelings anymore, but Sally appeared happy to see him whenever he visited, and went out of her way to make him welcome and comfortable. He could sleep with her whenever he needed to, and he did not have to pretend to love her in order to do so. And she did not have to pretend she needed anything from him except the pleasure they found together in bed and the pretty fripperies she now did not have to buy herself.

Then Mary had met Kenneth. An older, wealthy man visiting relatives in ‘the uncivilized wilds’ as he called it contemptuously, with no obvious means of support and no explanation as to why he, who professed to hate the country life, stayed. He was everything that Nick abhorred and everything Mary admired.

"Kenneth knows the proper way to hold eating utensils, the proper way to excuse oneself from the table, and the correct way to address a lady," Mary said to Nick in the midst of one of their fights about him. "He is mannerly and refined. I can see why you do not care for him."

Nick thought him both a dandy and a braggart, and he had heard rumors about the reason Kenneth was spending time here with his relations in the ‘back of beyond’ as he so disdainfully put it. When Nick tried to warn Mary away from the man, she threw a fit to rival all fits. He was jealous, Mary said with a sneer to her husband. Kenneth was her only friend, and he just did not want her to be happy. Nick gave in to her, as always, though he knew that he should not.

Mary began to spend a lot of time with Kenneth, and Nick tolerated it for some while. But when Mrs. Clark told him with a red face that Kenneth had spent several nights in the house while he had been away looking at some prime horses he was thinking about adding to his stock, he had finally put his foot down. He had told Mary not to see Kenneth again, and if he came to the house he was to be turned away. If they saw him in public to be polite but distant. They had a screaming fight that all the household help had heard, and Mary told him she was leaving him to go back to Boston with Kenneth, who was a gentleman and not some glorified farmer. Nick told her that he would kill her first.

That night, while Nick paced a hole in the floor of the stables, Mary fell down the front staircase and broke her neck. They found her valise on the stairs, packed with her jewels and a few personal items. At the inquest, the only thing that saved Nick from the hangman’s noose was the testimony of Ned, his head stableman. He swore that Nick was in the stables all night and could not have pushed Mary down the stairs. He, Ned, would swear it on a stack of Bibles, because did he not suffer for years from not being able to sleep nights himself and did he not hear the master walking back and forth and cursing all night long, and had he not gone down to comfort the man with some manly talk and a dram of whiskey or two?

Still, the incident gave rise to a lot of gossip, and old Kenneth had fanned the flames, playing the heartbroken lover with consummate ease. Nick could have forgiven Kenneth had he not come to the house and coolly demanded a large sum of money to stop feeding the rumor mill. Nick had thrown him out on his languid, skinny behind, and the rumors had increased in viciousness.

Because of all this, Nick had been having a hard time replacing the illustrious Mrs.

Clark. He was going to write her a heartfelt letter of thanks for all the years she had kept his house running smoothly and put palatable dinners on his table.

Just as soon as he got something in his belly beside greasy soup.

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The leather of the saddle creaked as Nick dismounted. He patted the black hide of the heavily sweating stallion affectionately.

“We blew out the cobwebs, didn't, Jet?” he murmured. Tommy, the stableboy, scurried over to take the horse from him. “Walk him for a while and cool him off gradually,” he told him. “Give him a handful or two of sweetfeed when you put him back in his stall.”

“Yessir, Mr. Nick,” Tommy said, his gap-toothed smile lighting up his freckled face. Nick tousled his hair affectionately as he walked away. Tommy was just another example of the havoc women created. His mother had been a barmaid at the Red Horse, a local inn with a bad reputation. She had been little better than a prostitute, drinking and carousing with whoever picked up the tab. When she had got pregnant with Tommy, she was not even certain who his father was, and it had not slowed her down any. She had kept right up with her old ways until the moment Tommy was born, and Nick knew that having Tommy hadn't changed her at all and she'd made the poor boy's life a misery.

When she had died in a drunken accident two years ago, Nick had gone to town and taken Tommy home with him. He had known the boy for years and the two had a friendship of sorts; Tommy had been doing little jobs for Nick since he was barely out of diapers, and Nick had always found something to pay him for, even if he had had to invent an errand. Something about Tommy had always pulled at his heart. Maybe it was his eyes; they had too much knowledge in them for one so young.

Whatever it was that drew him to Tommy, it had been a good decision to put him to work at the farm. He adored Nick and Ned, and if they had told him to walk down into the bowels of hell, Nick was sure that he would do it cheerfully, without question, and with that crooked little grin that seemed never to leave his freckled face.

Nick began to hum as he walked through the stables, looking with pride at his horses. He breathed deep of that special smell stables had, enjoying the odor. It was hay and sunlight and warm horse combined, and to him it was the sweetest perfume ever created. It was the smell of prosperity. His father had bought this land right after his marriage and built the house and stables here. He had brought with him two mares and a stallion he had won in a card game, and that stallion’s blood now ran through nearly every horse in the stables.

Geddes was the nearest town, and it consisted of four streets of residences and one main street containing businesses. Most of the population in this county was widespread, because the majority of the families around owned small farms, though there was a big manor house or two scattered around. You went to town to buy supplies, to get liquored up, or to see the doctor. But most of the time, you stayed on your own property.

Several families of Germans had settled in the area just a few years ago, after the failed attempt to establish a republic in their native country. It was a good idea, in theory; the republic was based on the ideals of Washington and Jefferson, but theories and realities didn’t always harmonize.

The German immigration to St. Louis had begun in the late 1820's following letters home from Gottfried Dude, who visited the area and compared the Missouri River valley with the Rhineland. These early German immigrants had consisted mainly of farmers and workmen, but there were also scholars and artists, writers and lawyers, ministers and teachers. The amount of knowledge that the political exiles brought with them made them valuable to any settlement, and they were in fact now the backbone of the community.

The Germans were commonly called Forty-eighters, and the greatest majority of them had settled in St. Louis, but a goodly amount of them had trickled down the Mississippi and settled here, which accounted for the abundance of blond hair and blue eyes in the countryside. It certainly made Nick, with his black hair and brown skin, stand out in the crowd. And it was certainly a funny thing to see a family in which the elders spoke with a distinct German accent and the youngsters with a slow Southern drawl.

One family had immigrated to this particular area, and then written to his friends and relatives still in St. Louis about the paradise to be found in this part of the country. The rest had all traveled here together, and they were a close-knit bunch who made good farmers and good neighbors. They were on the whole moral, friendly, and loyal. And they believed firmly in minding their own business, a fact which had definitely served Nick well after Mary had died.

Some of the local farmers who could afford it, and even some who could not, owned slaves that helped to work the land. In order to make a profit off of the cotton and tobacco that they grew here, they had to employ cheap labor. And slaves were as cheap a labor as you could get. All you had to do was feed them a minimal amount and give them a place to sleep at night, which in many cases was little better than the pen that the animals lived in. Some owners treated their slaves well, but those were the same people who treated their livestock well. They considered it a good investment.

But some, especially the more recent of the German immigrants, had refused to use slave labor on moral grounds, preferring instead to employ locals and have family members work alongside each other in the fields, oftentimes from sunup to sundown. Nick’s father, though not German, was one of that minority.

His father had traveled here more than thirty years ago with his young wife right after their marriage, promising her that they would not stay if she was not happy there. After the Lewis and Clark Expedition used St. Louis as the jumping off point for its explorations, the city had grown quickly into an important center of commerce and trade, attracting thousands of immigrants eager to find a new life on the edge of the frontier. St. Louis had just that year been incorporated as a city, and Missouri had become a state via the Missouri Compromise just three short years ago.