Free The Killings of Stanley Ketchel by James Carlos Blake Page A

instructed her to use it on her letters, else they might never reach him, or worse, even somehow help the law to track him down.
    By way of her answering letter, addressed to “S. Ketchel,” he came to learn there were no warrants for his arrest and never had been, as Thomas Kaicel was still among the living, albeit in chronic pain. He now spent the greater part of each day with a gin bottle, and it was left to Ketchel’s mother and his brother, John, to maintain the farm, toiling from dark to dark. Kaicel had lately taken to drinking at the taverns rather than at home, a variation she was glad of, as she much preferred to have him drunk at a distance than drunk in her parlor. She could not help wondering what Stanislaus was doing in such a remote reach as Montana and asked if he would return home now that he knew he was in no trouble with the law. As for changing his name to Ketchel, she only wished that by doing the same she could remove Thomas Kaicel from her life. She would not, however, then or ever after, address Ketchel as“Steve” or even “Stanley,” not even on an envelope. To her he would always be Stanislaus.
    He wrote back that he was employed in a gymnasium, but he would return to the farm if Kaicel were abusing her. He hoped the offer would comfort her, and hoped even more she would not take him up on it and force him to disappoint her. He was vastly relieved when her next letter admitted that although she was tempted to allege mistreatment in order to draw him home, she could not bring herself to deceive him. The fact of the matter, she said, was that Kaicel seemed to have lost all inclinations except for the demon rum, even his keenness for bullying. Still she hoped Stanislaus would at least come for a visit sometime soon, and she would continue to pray for his safety. She closed with the news that John had begun to court a lovely young neighbor girl named Rebeka Nelson.
     
    H E BOUGHT HIS first suits and some candy-striped shirts, a stylish derby. Kate Morgan presented him with a pocket watch. She taught him the sartorial trick of wearing gray-green neckties to compliment his eyes. They took afternoon walks through town, hearing the screech and growls of the gallows frames, the whistles and clangor of the trains bearing ore to the smelters. Kate liked everything about summer in Butte except for the higher stink it raised from the scores of privies along the shantytown alleys at the bottom of the hill.
    He had never seen so many cripples in one town. All of them former miners. Men with missing fingers, missing a hand, an arm. Faces disfigured with burn scars. Here and there an eye patch. It seemed half the people who worked in town had limps. One day he and Kate turned a corner and had to hop aside to avoid beingbowled over by a pair of legless men scooting side by side along the walkway on little roller platforms, arguing loudly whether Jeffries the Boilermaker was the equal of the Great John L. in his prime.
    Everywhere in town they heard coughing. The “song of the mines,” Kate called it, although she herself had a chronic need to clear her throat and was sometimes taken by seizures of hacking that left her red-eyed and breathless and had permanently rasped her voice. The first time she had such a coughing fit in Ketchel’s presence, she said she guessed she better quit her job at the Neversweat mine before it killed her.
    Almost all the downtown buildings were of brick or paintless stone and stained by smelter fumes. The surrounding mountains were black and gray, the hills streaked sickly yellow with tailings of ore. On good days the sky was the color of old tin, more often looked like a lid of dirt. The air was a tan haze and smelled of dirty pennies. A bird was a rare sight. Yet every Sunday that Ketchel and Kate rode the trolley to the Columbia Gardens at the edge of town to rent a rowboat on the lake and listen to the band concert and dance at the pavilion, the park was packed with happy