Easy Pickings (26 page)

Surely, I say, you would each expect the same from your comrades of the long trail? Surely your dear old mothers would want the finest money could buy? Surely you want to do better than the Bar X, or the Hashknife boys, who bought a princely box for their departed? Surely, after all that suffering on the long trail, the lonely nights, the endless rains, the dismal food, you want to provide some comfort for your friend? A fine, waterproof, spacious, oak coffin, and a dandy parade, with a coronet band playing dirges and my four-horse black lacquered equipage with cut-glass windows and black pom-poms to take the departed to his last home?

That always works, and as fast as their trail boss shells out the trail wages, they're appropriating the fanciest box they can afford for old Tom or Red or Dusty, and forking over cartwheels for all the extras, too.

It is a principle of my business to sell the gaudiest goods just when the widow is wiping back the first flood of tears, or when the children, bereft, orphaned, adrift, are suddenly faced with the loss of their pa or ma, or maybe even a grandmother or aunt.

Now, I don't keep many coffins on the shelf because it isn't necessary, or at least it wasn't until recently. Dodge City was blessed with a cabinetmaker of uncommon ability, able to do magical things with wood. I had only to call upon Barcelona Brown for whatever I needed, and within hours he would have a splendid box ready for me, and for a modest price, too, which often enabled me to charge triple or quadruple the tariff, depending on who I was dealing with. A new widow would sometimes count out five or six times the price and be glad of it, certain she was doing her wifeliest for her deceased spouse, who succumbed to a buggy wreck.

I have always been aware that my business requires a certain political delicacy. I have been stalwart for strict enforcement of gun laws north of the dead line, that is, the Santa Fe track cleaving the town, even though there are certain popular watering holes north of the divide on Front Street, such as the Long Branch and the Alamo.

But south of the dead line is another pasture. I have always opposed rigorous law enforcement in that quaint quarter because it is bad for business. If the Texians wish to get into shooting affrays, that shines up my profits, and I hardly see why Mayor Dog Kelley and the mucketymucks should concern themselves with it. The cowboys are expendable Texians, not Kansans. Often I have declaimed to assorted deaf lawmen about that very thing. For example, I've braced Ford County Sheriff Bat Masterson several times, and Deputy City Marshal Wyatt Earp as well, suggesting a policy of liberality south of the dead line.

But I digress. My real vocation here is to tell about the coffinmaker Barcelona Brown, and explain his odd fate. I called the fellow the wizard of wood. He was a skinny, dreamy bachelor with wire-rimmed spectacles and a sniffle, and if he ever thought of acquiring a spouse, I never had an inkling of it. He was wedded to wood, if you will forgive that odd perception. Brown could conjure up a box so swiftly I could not fathom how he managed it. He thought of caskets the way kings think of palaces. A proper coffin should match the character and status of the departed, and be a comfort to the bereaved. An ideal coffin should impart glory, laud, and honor upon the bones within.

I shall always remember Barcelona Brown for the odd duck he was; the only man on earth so absorbed with the making of coffins that he could think of little else. It was a vocation even more sacred to him than a monk's. During those long stretches when his talents were not called upon, he sank into melancholia, and built gaudy furniture with a morose passivity that drove some customers away. He was in great demand to furnish bordellos, which wanted flameproof nightstands and sturdy double-reinforced beds, as well as elaborate parlor appurtenances. This he would do in a detached and wooden manner, for his heart was in coffins.

Normally, on that matter he didn't deal with the public at all. I would ascertain what the bereaved desired, whether a plain rectangular box, or a diamond-shaped coffin that apexed at the chest and narrowed at the foot, or a showy affair with nickel furnishings, and lo, he would set aside all other work in his board-and-batten whitewashed shop on Chestnut Street, west of the business district, and produce the item.

Thus he acquired a reputation. Anyone in Ford County who knew anything about sendoffs wanted a Barcelona Brown box. They knew they were getting the best of the art, with the wood so keenly joined that not a particle of light burrowed through any crack, the corners so perfectly mitered that the pieces of wood seemed to become one. He plainly guarded his trade secrets, and discouraged onlookers, so that he could proceed to build his boxes all alone, under the triple-lamp work light depended over his bench.

He was cranky about wood, constantly haranguing eastern suppliers to send him only the smoothest-grained oak and ash and hickory or walnut. Each of his boxes was a masterpiece of joining, but also an artistic creation as well, the wood so perfectly and harmoniously blending or contrasting, depending on the style, that people laid hand to it to verify that their eyes hadn't deceived them.

Fortunately, Dodge straddled the Santa Fe Railroad, which enabled Brown to order materials from afar, even though the metropolis lay beyond the frontier, and was barely past its rude beginnings. The express cars regularly disgorged exotic wood on his account.

He began to line his coffins with various fabrics, sometimes black velvet, other times watershot white silk, or gray taffeta, all carefully sewn and glued into place. But then he decided that one's eternal rest should be comfortable, and he began buying goose down from a Slovakian farmer's widow north of town, and contracting out the manufacture of quilted liners to the various seamstresses.

“Seems to me the departed should ought to be treated right, Phineas,” he announced to me on one occasion, when I had hurried over to order a plain pine planter beefed up to endure a trip back to Texas. A cattleman had died in the Dodge House of corruption of the liver, and his crew wanted to take him home to the banks of the Pedernales.

“Just a strong pine box, sealed so they won't have to endure the odors. That's what they want.”

Barcelona had shaken his head. “A cattleman ought to be laid out proper,” he said. “I can do what they want, but you had ought to tell them that the man deserves more respect.”

Irritably, Brown had set to work, and when I called that evening, he was putting the final touches on the box. Pine it may have been under the enamel, but now it gleamed blackly in the lamplight. It boasted fine filigreed nickel handles, and a strong black lid lined with felt, and a gray silk interior.

“Now don't you go hammering the lid down,” Brown had said. “You got to screw it down tight so it'll never come up or leak.”

I had promised I would, and the next dawn, when the crew rode up to carry their boss home, I presented them with a pine box such as they had never before seen.

“Your late Captain. He's in there, and he'll have an easy passage. Now, this here is watertighter than a brandy bottle, and you can float Mr. Roberts across the rivers in a pinch, but I don't recommend it,” I said.

“That's some box,” the foreman said.

“Finest made, by Dodge's own Barcelona Brown. Now, that's two hundred eighty-nine for the coffin, and a hundred twenty for my professional services.”

“That's a lot for a pine box.”

“That's no pine box, son, that's a Barcelona, the Tiffany of coffinmakers.”

“More than we wanted.”

“It's what you got. Now, do I receive the honest fruits of my labor so that I can release the departed to your tender care?”

They eyed the coffin, wonderment in their sun-blasted faces. Brown had outdone himself. This was a coffin that would promote a senator.

“Sort of fits the old man,” one allowed.

They paid. Company funds, of course.

One day I happened into Brown's tidy woodworking works and discovered him in an uncommonly cheerful mood. He had, scattered about, various pieces of costly ebony, obviously from different species of the tree: some of it was jet black, the variety found in Ceylon and India; others a warmer black, found in Niger; and then there was a stack of precious Calamander of Africa, the hazel brown wood mottled or striped with black. I knew something about ebony. It comes from the heartwood of the ebony tree. The rest of the trunk is a perfectly ordinary color.

“Phineas, I'm going to make me the lord of all caskets,” he whispered as he shaved a glowing black board with a drawknife. “I have in mind parking it by your window, right there on Front Street, for all the world to witness. Guess it should bring you some business.”

“I, ah, we'll wait and see,” I said, not wanting to commit to anything like that.

It took him a fortnight to construct it, and when I next saw it, he was nearly done. The box glowed malevolently. It was diamond-shaped and exceptionally long. Its walls consisted of three courses of ebony: brown-black at the top and bottom, jet black in the middle, all joined so seamlessly that they seemed a single piece of wood. The interior had been lined with lead sheeting, carefully soldered at every joint to foil moisture, and somehow wedded to the wood. Royal blue watershot silk quilting lined the interior, and the north end sported a pillow, also of royal blue.

The cover, which he was still polishing, was shaped from the Calamander, and arched triumphantly over the box. A blank brass nameplate had been screwed into it.

“It's entirely watertight, once it's sealed,” he said. “The lead, you know.”

“It looks awfully heavy, Barcelona.”

“It is. It's the heaviest coffin ever made. But look: I've added handles.”

Sure enough, five ornate silverplated handles graced each side, enabling ten pallbearers to shoulder the coffin.

“It sure is a comfort. I wouldn't mind spending eternity in it myself,” he said. “Fact is, I've been sleeping in it, just to try it out.”

He promptly undid his apron, stepped onto a stool, slipped into the coffin, and laid his hands across his breast, eyes closed. Then, after a long ticking moment, he sat upright, smiling, and eased out, being careful not to blemish his masterwork. He had the strangest, dreamiest look on his skinny face, a look such as I had never before witnessed on the face of the living, though I struggle hard to achieve just such an expression for the viewing of the departed.

That struck me as distinctly peculiar, but I said nothing.

“Done tomorrow,” he said. “I'd sure like to put it in your window.”

I decided it would attract business. There's nothing like death to open the purse strings. Citizens would gape. A few would come in and inquire. The truth of it was, there was no other casket on earth that even approached this one. They buried kings of France in less. No ancient pharaoh, wrapped in his mummy windings, got to rest in a tomb like that one.

“All right, bring it over.”

“I'll need some stevedores.”

“I'll find them,” I said. “What price shall I ask for it?”

“Oh, it's not for sale, Phineas.”

“Then what is the object?”

“I have made the perfect coffin. Let the world see it.”

“How about a two-thousand-dollar price?”

He stared sourly at me, his adam's apple bobbing up and down. “That is obscene,” he said.

“Three thousand, then.”

“You don't understand. It's a work of art.” He just shook his head at me as if I were a dunce.

“I will take bids,” I said. “Some cattleman will want it. Either that or a madam. I imagine there are harlots hereabout who'd pay whatever you ask.”

But he had turned his back to me, fondly rubbing the gleaming ebony with an oiled rag that smelled of lacquer.

I planned to force the issue: money talks. Hand him five hundred dollars in gold eagles and he would wilt fast enough. Then I would sell it for six times the investment.

I waited all the next day, but got no word from Brown that he had completed work on his masterpiece. Obviously, he was adding filigree, or maybe inlaying some exotic wood, or parqueting the lid, or carving a lion in bas relief into the glowing ebony.

I understood. A Rembrandt of coffin-making would not stop until he had perfected his coffin. He did not summon me that day, nor the next.

That afternoon Deputy City Marshal Wyatt Earp wandered in, as he or another of the constables often did. It was understood in Dodge that anything found in the pockets of the deceased belonged in the public till to establish city parks, and I ended up with a little pickle jar wherein I deposited silver and gold and base metal coin and bills and rings and fillings found on the late lamented. I carefully did not inquire as to the ultimate disposition of that material, but I noted that it never appeared in the town budget.

“Phineas, what's the matter with Brown?” he asked gently, supposing I would know.

I stared at him blankly.

Deputy Earp sighed. “Last night he headed for the Lady Gay and proceeded to get into a fight with three Texians, with painful results. The brawl trumped Eddie Foy for a few minutes.”

“Painful?”

“Doc McCarty had to sew up his flesh here and there and splint a finger. What got into him?”

“You suppose, just because we are allied in serving the bereaved, that I know anything about him,” I said. “In fact, I know very little. He's a vast mystery to me. He bachelors alone, lives and breathes woodworking, smells like varnish, has no known friends, though I call myself one, and eats solitary meals at Beatty and Kelley's restaurant, tips waitresses extravagantly, and attends the Union Church on occasion, always placing a dime in the collection plate.”

“You got no idea what got into him? I'm inclined not to haul him before the JP. Let it go.”

I shook my head. “Just what happened?” I asked.

“Brown was on the prod. Like he itched to start a fight. Them Texians, they took one look at the skinny fellow and just laughed it off. Lots of witnesses to that.”