Read an Excerpt
1
On August 4, 1889, Barton Heydale spent his lunch hour with a prostitute named Roslyn who lived and worked in a two-room apartment in Wolfe's Hotel on Railroad Avenue. The apartment was above a lunchroom, where Barton often stopped for something to eat after his visits with Roslyn. But on this day, he was consumed with the trouble of making a decision, and so he chose to forgo his meal in favor of sitting in Roslyn's tiny kitchen and smoking cigarettes.
The thing he was trying to decide: where, and when, to kill himself.
Barton had not set upon his path to suicide lightly. He'd assembled his justifications, which read as such: he was lonesome; he was generally disliked; and he was ugly. None of these conditions, he felt, had any hope of improving. They would only worsen as the months and years passed.
Barton was twenty-nine years old and the manager of the only bank in Spokane Falls. This position should have garnered him respect and power. It instead earned him nothing but ire from the local citizenry, who, it turned out, had little trust for institutions, financial or otherwise. As a result, Barton had not married, or even made a single friend, in his six years in Spokane Falls. The strain of this lonesomeness had taken a toll on him physically. He'd grown portly and unfit. He wheezed when he walked too quickly. And to top it off, he'd just the afternoon prior received a terrible haircut.
Strangely, though his hair would grow back, it was this final offense that convinced him he was beyond salvage. He could not continue to exist in his current form. So, today would be his last. His last breakfast, his last time washing his face, blowing his nose, tying his shoes. And here with Roslyn, his last fuck. The fucking had been the same quality as always; no great send-off. This observation depressed him even more.
After each cigarette he finished, he pitched the butt out the kitchen window and watched it spiral to the alley below, the last bits of ash and smoke forming a satisfying tail. Then he rolled and lit a new one. If Roslyn's apartment were on a higher floor, he reasoned, he would jump from the window. But Wolfe's was only two stories tall. In the other room, Roslyn snored, asleep in her bed. She was a drunk. The later in the day he called on her, the more likely he was to find her asleep or sick. On this particular day, she was already stewed by the time Barton arrived at noon, and barely able to finish performing her services before nodding off.
Even if Barton could not jump out of the window, he did think he'd like to jump from something. That seemed a good way. Dramatic and quick. He would do it someplace where everyone in town could see. Then they'd all feel bad for how they'd treated him. They'd be so sorry, they'd reexamine their whole lives and ways of being. Maybe some of them-those who'd known him most immediately-would kill themselves as well, unable to cope with their role in his death. It cheered him slightly to imagine. He would jump from the bridge into the river. That was his choice. He'd made his decision and that felt good too.
He kept an eye on his watch, and when it said five minutes to one, he stood up from the chair, ran a hand through his terrible hair to straighten it, left his money for Roslyn on the kitchen table, and headed back to work. He was very strict with his employees about taking only an hour for lunch, no more. He adhered to the same rule himself. So if he was not going to kill himself right then and there, he felt he must return to his desk, even though it was a Sunday and no one else would be at the bank to see if he came back on time-or at all, for that matter. Barton worked seven days a week. He had never been absent or late. And today, just because it was his last day, would be no exception.
When the end of his workday did come, Barton locked the bank and walked with courage and purpose to the Post Street Bridge as planned. When he got there, his pace slowed. He stopped in the middle and assessed the situation. He had wanted witnesses, a horrified and grieving public. But weren't there perhaps a few too many witnesses? The shores were taken over by families seeking solace from the late afternoon heat in the shade of pines, their feet in the water, children splashing nearby. Should children see such a thing? Barton had his ethics to consider. Also, the river was low. The summer's temperature had been unrelenting, and now, in August, only a foot or two of water passed below the bridge. It wasn't enough. He couldn't swim and was counting on drowning in the mighty Spokane.
He backed away from the edge. He would have to do something else. He assured himself he would not dillydally. He would take his life in the privacy of his own house that very night. A public spectacle was not his style after all. Let the people of Spokane Falls learn of his demise later, through whispers and rumor, a haunting of sideways information. Did he really . . .? they'd ask whenever they passed the bank. And the answer would be Yes, he did.
He'd hang himself in his parlor as soon as he got home. There was an oak crossbeam above his doorway that would be perfect for the purpose.
Barton lived just north of downtown. His house was on a hill and from his front windows he could see Spokane Falls spread out before him. First, there was the river and the sawmill. Then there was the rail yard for the Northern Pacific. Then Railroad Avenue, with its cramped tenements to the east, city hall to the west, and Roslyn and the lunchroom in the middle. His bank, the post office, and a crush of bars and hotels of varying repute lined the blocks beyond that.
Up on his hill, Barton's house stayed cool. He left his windows open in the evenings, and he generally found this to be his happiest time of day. Indeed, he felt his mood lift upon entering the house. He decided he would eat something. No need to kill himself on an empty stomach. But after that, he'd do it.
So, he enjoyed a large dinner and pretended, as he ate, to be a man in a fine, if not enviable, state. He accomplished this trick of the mind by taking stock of all the people he knew who were not having a nice meal in their nice homes on nice hills. There was the barber who had mutilated Barton's already receding hairline. In retrospect, Barton was certain he had looked more than a little syphilitic. This man was likely studying his own complexion in a mirror at this very moment, overtaken by the horror of his disease, and by the poor choices that had landed him in such a state. Then there were Jim and Del Dweller, Barton's rude and ungrateful employees at the bank-twin brothers who lived together in a stuffy house by the river and who were so cheap they probably only ever ate boiled potatoes. And lastly, there was Barton's father, that hateful man who Barton felt certain was miserable in a variety of ways, though he could not imagine any specifically. Barton ate and thought of these people and their unpleasant situations. It bolstered him so thoroughly, he thought he might not want to end his life that night after all. But once this notion entered his mind, he chided himself for it. Coward, he thought, are you the sort who can't follow through on a plan?
He was just finishing his meal when the bells began to sound. They were alarm bells from downtown. They startled him from the depths of his own mind. He went outside. It was still light out, so bright in comparison to Barton's dining room that he had to squint, and at first he could not see anything wrong at all.
"What is it?" Barton shouted to his neighbor, who was standing on his own porch with his wife and daughter.
"A fire," the man shouted back, pointing.
Now he could see. In the sharp light of the northern evening, a red-orange pocket emerged in the distance. The fire was so new, or so hot, or so something else-Barton did not know what-that it had not yet begun to produce smoke. Later, the smoke would come, and ash, which would rain down on the town. But at first, it was just the flames.
The fire was across the river and past the rail yard, in the heart of downtown. Barton looked. He allowed the fire to draw his eyes. In its brightness, he received a wonderful sight: a sparkling vision of brilliance and possibility. Barton was not a religious man, but he felt he was being gifted something from beyond himself.
Here now was a valid excuse to wait another day.
2
Barton had come to Spokane Falls in Washington Territory in 1883. He moved from Portland at the age of twenty-three to escape his domineering father and his depressive, overbearing mother. Barton's father was a lawyer. At the time, Barton was most of the way through his own training in law, his father having decreed that Barton would follow in his footsteps. The man was cold, calculating, and always after Barton about something, always berating him for any misstep. Those papers are out of order. Those shoes are scuffed. Your brain is as small as your dick. Your mother swears you're mine but we never had any men as ugly on my side of the family. Now, six years later, Barton could not recall the exact breaking point, only that one day he'd been at his job clerking for a Portland judge and the next he'd been on a train north, then a wagon coach east, bound for a place where silver had been discovered and any young man willing to work could make good for himself in the mines. This was what Barton wanted: to make good for himself. Himself and no one else.
His very first morning in Spokane Falls, he joined up with a group of other young men heading farther east to Coeur d'Alene. But once employed as a miner, Barton found the work did not suit him. It was an exhausting, dirty chore with no end. And so, after just two days, he quit and returned to Spokane Falls.
Back in town, it was his intention to go from business to business and inquire if any were hiring. It turned out he only needed to make one stop. The manager at the bank asked Barton if he could read and write and if he owned a second clean set of clothes. Barton said yes, and was told he could start as assistant manager right away. Six months later, this same manager skipped town to escape an improbably large gambling debt, leaving Barton in charge. Barton often thought back to this early turn of events. He wondered, had he gone into a different establishment first on his job hunt that day, might he now be living a completely different life-that of a hotelier, or a newspaperman, or even a dentist? Instead he'd ended up in a profession just as dreary as law. He'd borne his lot diligently these past six years, thinking surely the head of the only bank within a hundred miles was a position that, if taken seriously (as Barton took all things seriously), would make him a big man in the community. A respected man. Like his father in Portland, but less of an ass. This, however, had not turned out to be the case.
The big men of Spokane Falls weren't the men with two sets of clean clothes. They were prospectors in search of new claims. Loggers and sawmill workers covered in pitch, laughing loud in the bars. Cavalrymen telling stories of harrowing adventure and unceasing cruelty. They were men who held themselves up with their own bare, bleeding hands, who typified the wildness and ruggedness of a place that prided itself on being wild and rugged. The bank-holder of debts, giver of loans, reminder of reason and responsibility-was the opposite of all these things. And Barton himself, the personification of this oppositeness.
Spokane Falls had grown in the six years Barton had been there. At first, every building in town was made of wood, as if it were a prop in a play. The streets were dirt, which turned to mud in spring. Recently, though, Barton thought Spokane Falls had come to resemble a real city. There were three daily newspapers, an opera house, and a very fine bakery. And now, in 1889, Washington Territory was on the verge of being granted statehood. With that would come new money and new development. The flimsy clapboard buildings of the first half of the decade had mostly been replaced with more permanent structures. Many, like the bank, were made of brick or stone.
Barton wished he too could grow. He wished to be a city of a man. But Spokane Falls had not taken him along in this way. He felt the place picked on him just as his father had. If he had wanted to continue to be an abused rule follower, he would have stayed in Portland. For a long time, he had not known what to do about this problem.
Then he had decided to kill himself.
Then he saw the fire, and decided to do something else instead.
She thought about the city's changes too, sometimes. Though she felt no demands from it personally. And, conversely, she did not demand anything of it. A city was not a person. And even with people, she was not one to hold particular expectations.
She liked the bakery also, and the newspapers. The hotel where she lived got a single copy of each paper delivered in the mornings, and since most of the other residents weren't readers, she usually had her pick, even if she slept in. She had not been to the opera, but she appreciated the idea of it. For her, more than anything, the city was defined by sound. First it was the sawmill, all day and night, a din no one could escape. Then the trains came, pacing the day with their arrivals and departures. The rattle of horsecart wheels on the paved streets in the mornings. The shouting of men in the same streets after a certain time of night. Then, for a few hours again, only the sawmill.
