The Long November Read online

  Clover and hay and a scent Steffie wore that night. Manure and cordite, lies, uselessness, and hope. Terror and little kids with cold behinds, and a poor, half-beaten Italian trying to cut a field of hay to keep some skeleton of a horse alive. Dreams, lies, smells, and life. Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty, why doesn’t it make some sense? What’s it all about? Why is Phil Rutledge dead? Why must it smell like clover hay and Steffie; why can’t it smell like the dark brown mess it really is?

  And so I came back to Toronto. But there were changes in our Joe. I wasn’t a punk with a pocketful of dough who tried to fill inside straights any longer. Sure, I was broke, and hungry, and standing in the center of my wardrobe; but in a tattered suitcase I carried my channel samples, my razor, and my hopes. And wrapped in some soft paper were two tiny pairs of pink panties. Toronto looked about the same. It’s a pretty city, and it curves around the lake and makes you think of homes, and people living happily in homes, and homes living happily in lawns of green grass. I suppose it’s as big a mess as any city in the world, but the exterior fools you. It exists for six days and lives for one. But on the outside it seems to die for one day and live for six. Toronto held great hopes for our Joe, for in Toronto somewhere was Steffie. In Toronto, on a fabulous street with the law at one end, and the harbor at the other, was the money to prove or disprove the Sleeping Squaw Gold Mine. When I arrived on that November day in ‘38, I headed, like any other bum, to the Sally Ann. And, as always, they took me into their warmth and shelter and befuddled Salvation.

  Curly once mentioned a little Jewish fellow who offered to grubstake him, a guy in the mining brokerage business who had impressed Curly with a sense of honesty. I remembered the name, it’s such an improbable one; Benjamin Franklin Kasten. I’m never likely to forget you, either, BF, with your shrewd business head, and the rest of you a mass of almost slobbish sentiment. How you admired the “tough guys” like Dick Barnett, and yet, in your heart, you didn’t want to be a smart, Bay Street sharpshooter. You really wanted to make a gold mine. You wanted people to point to a busy, thriving mine and say, “Look what Benjamin Franklin Kasten gave to Canada...see wealth where there never was wealth before.” You wanted Rebecca to know you hadn’t made a mistake when you left “Kasten’s Secondhand Furniture Store, Spadina near College, Open Evenings,” and even with all of the money you’ve made from the Sleeping Squaw, I’ll bet she still wishes you hadn’t left.

  “BF” wasn’t hard to find. The phone book listed “B. F. Kasten and Company, Mining Securities,” and when I stood outside the door I had a sense of being on the threshold of great enterprise. Inside, the dark-paneled walls, deep rugs, and mahogany furniture gave a warm feeling of permanence and security...it was part of BF’s build-up. A tall, cool-looking fellow, immaculately dressed came into the outer office right behind me, and walked familiarly through the gate and into an office marked “Mr. Barnett.” It was my first glimpse of Dick Barnett, too. Dick was, I guess, the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. Smooth as old Scotch and tough as a three-day beard. He wore his hundred and fifty dollar suits as though he’d been born in them. But he hadn’t been. He was born not far from BF’s furniture store, on Baldwin Street, and his name wasn’t Barnett, then. It was Barnatti, Ricardo Barnatti, and his pale skin and blue eyes must have come from a slip one of his ancestors made. His dark, curly hair was about the only remaining connection with Baldwin Street, with a world he fought to get away from. The dirty gutters, dirty kids, the smells of fish and fruit, and the fat, greasy women. That’s probably why Dick couldn’t slip past Sis Rutledge the way he slipped by all the other women in this world. She represented the world at the end of his dreams, the world where women bathed and wore girdles.

  But what a pair they were, eh, Joe? Little, fat BF, always sweating and always shouting, with his bald head shining like a headlight, and Barnett needling him all the time. They’d fight over a two dollar bet, or a fifty thousand share deal, or a hand of the unending “klabyosch.” They’d stand in front of the elevators, and bet on how many people would be in the car when the door opened, or how many women there’d be or how many men. And the odds were worked out over the years of doing it. I suppose they exchanged a thousand dollars a year, and wound up not twenty dollars apart. They knew their work with a sureness that was unbelievable, and they had more angles than Carters’ got little liver pills; but everyone who ever dealt with either of them got a run for his money.

  The samples looked beautiful, and anyone would have been impressed. But BF was an old hand at the game; he’d seen lots of good-looking samples that had been chipped from a moose pasture, and had seen thousands of dollars spent on claims, only to realize finally that they were, as they always had been, moose pasture. Barnett could see one more side of it, the chance to start a stampede into a new mining camp. The chance to unload a million shares of stock on the Sleeping Squaw claims, by electrifying Canada with a “new Kirkland Lake” or a “new Porcupine,” and the public’s excitement would carry away every share of stock they had at damned good prices. It was a question, again, of Dick being in the business to sell stock and BF really wanting to make a gold mine.

  Of course, as Dick put it, “I’ve got to make dough, Joe, my love-life costs so much. I’ve got to pay three hundred bucks on the first of each month in alimony...for what, I ask you? For a lazy bitch who wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

  It took three days to get the samples assayed and I refused to talk a deal until then. I’d made up my mind to try my life the “other way” and I was going to start by knowing what I wanted, and damned well sticking to it.

  BF took no chances. He wired the registry office in Cobalt while we waited for the assay results, just to be sure one Joe Mack did stake twenty claims thirty miles north of Moreland Lake. He liked the story of Curly Durant and the fact that Curly remembered him, and in time both he and Dick liked me. It’s a tough street, but it has to be, because it’s a tough league they’re batting in, and they get to where they trust no one, trust nothing. Of course, they get fooled now and then, eh, Joe? Sure, Quill Masters fooled them, but only for a while. You couldn’t really set them back, or turn them very far from their target...you could, at best, only delay them. In the end Masters was the sucker, so he didn’t fool anybody but himself. There was something about the Sleeping Squaw Mine that worked its way into the toughest hides, even worked its way into Dick Barnett’s. Or maybe it was the careless, suedey attitude of Sis Rutledge that got him, for one flick of her confident Rutledge finger could puncture him like nothing else ever did. He won, though, eh, Joe? Sure, he won, but it wasn’t until that hot night in September when he realized a little Baldwin Street handling was what Sis needed.

  I guess my career as a mine financier started the morning we made the deal. I used to think it started when I left a pile of miner’s clothes in the washroom in the basement of the Empire Hotel in North Bay, the morning after the soul-chilling freight train ride from Cobalt, but it hadn’t. It started when I sat across the desk from BF and made him take a tough deal in his own business, and the only reason I won was the values in gold shown across those vein samples from the Sleeping Squaw. BF wanted the deal, because he could see his gold mine with the wheels turning at the top of the shaft-head. What BF didn’t know was how prepared I was to go on living at the Sally Ann, until someone, somewhere, made the deal my way. I had nothing to sink to. I was on bottom.

  He smiled a friendly smile, and said, “These results are very nice, Mr. Mack...or perhaps I’d better call you Joe?”

  I took a rain check on the palsy-walsy stuff. He went on,

  “My partner and I are interested in what kind of a deal you want.”

  I eased a big deep breath through me, and let him have the top figure. “I’m not an expert on these things, Mr. Kasten, and I’ll go on calling you Mr. Kasten until we make a deal...there’s usually a three million share company formed on deals of this sort, with a million shares going for the properties. Right?”

  �
�Okay...so far...” BF answered.

  “And I understand it’s customary for this million shares to be split on some basis between the prospector and the promoters?”

  “Yes?” .

  “This is what I want...you and your partner here will assume all costs of financing and incorporating the Sleeping Squaw claims. You’ll give me a job here...working for you. You’ll give me two thousand dollars in cash, and I’ll split the million, half for me, and half for you and your partner.”

  I sat back and eased another big breath through me.

  “Well, Mr. Mack,” BF said, “the only thing you haven’t asked for is the office of president of the mine...”

  “I’ll take that, too,” I said.

  Barnett spoke for the first time. “Would you like my right hand thrown in, Mr. Mack?” he said, coldly. Then he turned to BF. “I think we’re wasting everyone’s time, BF. It’s been nice meeting Mr. Mack, but we can’t consider a deal like that.”

  I stood up and started gathering the assay results. BF’s bald dome was glistening.

  “Now, Dick, we’ve just heard Mr. Mack’s starting figure...we should...”

  I interrupted. “That isn’t a starting figure, gentlemen,” I said, trying to make it sound like a guy I’d once read about in the Saturday Evening Post, “that’s what I want. If I must take my claims elsewhere...I’ll do it.” I said good-by and left.

  They let me get all the way to the elevators before Barnett called me back, and when he did, he called me Joe. A week later BF handed me a certified check for two thousand dollars, an interim certificate for five hundred thousand shares of Sleeping Squaw Gold Mines, Ltd., and the draft of a prospectus of the company, in which one Joseph Mack, prospector, of Moreland Lake and Toronto, Ontario, was stated to be president and managing director. BF smiled and asked me what I was going to do with the money. I told him I was going to get some clothes and find a girl, but what I meant was, I was going to get my clothes out of a hotel where they’d been in hock for five years, and find Steffie. The new career of Joe Mack was off to a flying start.

  So you went to find your girl, eh, Joe? You knew it had to be then or never. A dream can go on being a dream just so long and then it becomes an ache, like the ache in your face when you’ve smiled too long at an old gag. But I had to see Steffie, to see whether I’d been nursing a kid dream or whether she was still the slim, blond goddess who held my life in her hands. Five years is a hell of a long time, and if Steffie hadn’t continued writing to Betty, continued the contact, however vague, the dream might have died of malnutrition. That was November, too, Joe. Yes, and as I walked along the street in Rosedale and saw the leaves piled near the curb, saw where some had been burned and smelled their faint traces in the air, I wondered about the five years. I wondered if I’d know her again. If we would be able to talk about the same things and laugh, as we once did, at the same things. Or cry. The houses along the street looked naked, but there was a warmth shining out of the windows that seemed to offset the smell of winter coming. It was sad, damned sad, and the excitement I always thought-I’d feel at that moment was missing. I thought, I guess, that I’d been gone too long.

  I stood in the hall and my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. The butler, an improbable guy who looked more like a wrestler, had just walked in to tell Miss Gibson “a Mr. Mack” wished to see her. I kept rubbing my sweaty palm on the leg of my trouser so my hand would be dry, and I looked at a huge oil portrait hanging on the wall to get cooled down a bit before she arrived. I don’t know how long she stood there, smiling, watching me before I became aware of her. When I turned, all of Steffie’s blond loveliness was there, right there in front of me, and my breath caught as it always had. I guess we stood for some time, just staring, trying, each of us, to see what the years had done. Steffie smiled again.

  “Hello, Joe Mack...” she said, and her voice sounded like a whisper of soft breeze.

  I gulped a couple of times while a little man ran up and down my spine. I managed a smile.

  “Hello, Steffie Gibson...”

  Most women move through this world like so many trained bumble-bees, dragging their top-heavy fannies behind them. When Steffie moved toward me she moved like a queen. The generations of Gibson poise were there to steady her, but her hand trembled a little when I took it. Her face was sad, just a bit, and the smile was sad. Sad, perhaps, for the lonely years we’d wasted, for the little kids waiting on a star, for something she could call her own. And I knew, somehow, as I stood there, trying to think of something to say, that she’d waited. Waited, knowing one day I’d show up, knowing one day I’d get back to her, and knowing very surely in her heart that no other man or woman would ever do for either of us. And as I knew then, Steffie, I know so well now. I’ll get back, Steffie, if they’ll let me. I’ll get back again, only this time I’ll know, my darling, this time I’ll have no doubts. I’ll get back, if it isn’t too late...oh God, what if it is?

  I don’t remember much conversation—we really didn’t have any little things to talk about. Steffie and I shared a deep dream, only we had to wait until we knew each other well enough to dream aloud. After a while we went for a walk and my original idea to take Steffie dancing seemed a little sacrilegious. There was a lovely walk along the bottom of a ravine and we walked slowly along it. The air was filled with leaves, and Steffie was wearing a scent of clover. We said nothing for a long time and I just held her arm close to me. Then we passed under a street lamp and I could see tears in her eyes. We stopped, and I kissed her. Afterwards she looked up and smiled the sad little smile again.

  “It’s been so long, Joe...”

  “We won’t be separated again, Steffie, not ever.”

  “It’s such a funny feeling, Joe...I feel as though I’d been a long way off and I’ve just come home...”

  “Darling, that stepped right out of my dreams...” Why must a smell that reminds me of that night come into this filthy room? It’s such a lovely smell, and in its clean body lies all the decent things we are. In it lies man’s love of soil, of work, of the animals he must keep and use, and of the animals he loves. With its cleanliness comes the dreary thought of pitiful attempts to live in a world where most of the civilized part is still jungle. But maybe, Joe, maybe if we keep on smelling clover hay, we’ll only remember things like Steffie Gibson, and we’ll forget those other smells, forget where they come from. No, I don’t want to forget, I want to remember...always. I want to remember they came from a he, and I want to find out who lied. But it’s hell to cower here and think of Steffie and that night we walked up a path in a ravine, because it tells me again and again how long she’s had to wait. She waited five years before, and she’s waited five more now, and maybe she’s waited for nothing. They haven’t that right. They can do what the hell they want with me, but why must Steffie have her life messed up? Not only Steffie, Joe, there are hundreds of thousands...maybe millions, who’ve waited and will still be waiting when they die. The guys who die are the lucky ones, it ends for them...but when will it end for their Steffies?

  It hadn’t been easy for Steffie during those years. Her mother died soon after they left Cataract City. I don’t know whether Mrs. Gibson ever really lived...she found it simpler to stay in bed and die slowly than face her husband’s mother. The Gibson mansion sure housed a sweet setup for a kid like Steffie, eh, Joe? I guess that’s why she tied our Joe, a letter with two grand in it, and a home and those kids together in the same bundle of dreams. Even in the Rutledge mansion where she more than paid her way, she wasn’t home. She did an eight hour bit as a receptionist for a flock of doctors, and then steered those baffled Rutledges through their whacky lives. Old man Rutledge had been Granny Gibson’s brother, and nuts as those kids were, theirs was the only home Steffie could go to. And she liked them, for all of their uselessness, and she never apologized for them. The polished slut of a mother who kept three thousand miles between herself and those kids; the alcoholic father who drank his
way from an alcoholic world to an alcoholic grave, and the trust company where old man Rutledge left his money buried behind a high dam combined to give Sis and Phil Rutledge their troubles. Old Man Rutledge left a little hole in the dam so his grandchildren could be “trickle-kids”; and the hole permitted a small trickle to ooze through to their waiting hands once a month.

  Yes, the war helped some people, eh, Joe? I don’t know about Sis, because her “out” depended on Dick Barnett...but it solved a hell of a lot of things for Phil. It got him away from cinnamon-brown bottles, gave him his first job, and let him die a damned sight more decently than his father had. He was mostly dead anyway...he was a member of the trust-fund dead, the living-dead. And so was Sis, though a man could solve her problems. But the only woman Phil had ever seen who could solve his was waiting five long years for me. Don’t trust your seed, long dead Rutledge, don’t trust these two slim kids, born a few moments apart; stifle them in a cold cream world because they’ll probably be fools. Let their father realize how useless he is, and let the varnished bitch who conveyed them to this world change her bed companions as often as the linen must be changed on the beds she desecrates.