Free Fervent Charity by Paulette Callen Page B

could rent a narrow bed in the bunkhouse for a week. No bedding—most men just unrolled their own bedroll on top of the straw mattress—Jack lay on the mattress and covered himself up with an old horse blanket he’d stolen from the stable. The bunkhouse was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. But it was better than sleeping in the rain or in a snowdrift. One pot-bellied stove in the middle of it served to heat up the bunks nearest to it in the worst months of the year. But in the worst months of the year, no harvesting was done and few people traveled. So, in the winter, Jack Frye mostly had the place to himself. Now, however, he had to share it with about fifteen other men whose presence he mostly ignored, and they tried to ignore him. They weren’t generally interested in drinking with him or listening to his woes. They had troubles of their own. He found one exception—someone who had limped in with a bottle of cheap whiskey (though the rules of the bunkhouse, clearly posted for anyone to see, were no drinking or spitting allowed on the premises) and drank it up in a cloud of curses.
    “Shut up,” Jack told him loudly. “Can’t a man get some shut-eye?”
    The man threw his empty bottle at Jack, missing him widely. The bottle landed on the floor at the foot of his cot and broke.
    “Now you’re going to pick that up,” Jack snarled. “A man could cut himself on that.”
    “Pick it up yourself, you old shit.”
    Jack Frye wasn’t drunk at the moment. He had been lying on his bed, clad only in his grimy long-johns, dozing and contemplating the possibilities in the day ahead. Taking the insults of a young punk wasn’t one of them. He shot off his cot with a speed no one could have predicted and flung himself on top of this snappy young dog and began punching him in the face. Gleeve, who was drunk and taken by surprise, didn’t react. Jack hauled him over to where the broken pieces of bottle lay and threw him on his knees. “Now you pick up them pieces before I whip ya again.”
    Gleeve hesitated. His head was foggy from drink and the punches. Jack punched him again, this time hitting his shoulder.
    Gleeve picked up the three pieces of bottle, got to his feet and limped out of the bunkhouse.
    Jack didn’t think about the man again till the following afternoon when he was hunkered down in his usual corner of the Spittoon, rolling a cigarette, and he noticed the same fella. In the dim saloon light, he recognized him by his limp. The fella ordered a glass of cheap whiskey and started drinking, leaning on the bar. The more he drank, the louder was his voice till Jack could plainly hear him complaining about being shot for no good reason for just having fun with a squaw. A good lookin’ squaw, as they go, with the damndest thing by god—a knife in her boot, but that could only add to the fun, but for the interference of a sheriff who should know whose side to be on. Jack perked up his ears, then got up, stubbed his cigarette out on the floor with his foot, and strolled to the bar.
    “Naw, she don’t live in Charity,” Jack amiably corrected the man he had so thoroughly pummeled just the day before. “Snuce, hit me again.”
    Snuce was the bartender and the owner of the Spittoon. He got his name from the tobacco invariably pouched in his lower lip, and the dribble of brown always seeping out of the corner of his mouth. Nobody remembered anymore what his real name was.
    Snuce poured Jack another drink and slid it toward him.
    “Well, that’s where I got shot,” said Gleeve, eyeing Jack from under his hat and thinking he should know him from somewhere.
    Even in barroom light, Jack could see that the man’s face was swollen and purple. He congratulated himself on a good job.
    “She was right there in the barn,” insisted Gleeve Pruitt, “and Charity’s where I seen her all week, buyin’ oats in the livery stable big as you please, and buyin’ stuff at that O’Grady place with money and they was