Atmosphere
The girls had been on the Desert Moon a little better than six weeks
when, one evening, Sam came out into my kitchen were I was setting
bread. Belle, Sadie and Goldie had gone home, and I had tidied up
after them, as usual, and everything in the kitchen was sweet, and
clean, and shining. I had the doors tight shut, so I couldn’t hear the
radio screeching away in the living-room, and the windows open, and
the evening breeze fresh from the deserts came in, blowing back my
ruffled white curtains and purifying the air.
“Mary,” Sam began, real solemn for him, “the ancients used to have
cities that they called cities of refuge. No matter what a fellow had
done, if he could get inside into one of those cities, he was safe.
Your kitchen always kinda seems like that to me—a city of refuge.”
“Lands, Sam,” I said, “what have you been up to that you are heading
this safety first movement?”
To tell the truth, I was a little put out with him for moseying in
there when I was setting bread. Like most men I’ve known, Sam never
had any particular hankering for my company unless he thought I could
be of some use to him. Generally, I am glad and proud to help Sam,
anyway I can; but not when I am setting bread. There is something
about setting bread that gives any moral woman a contented, uplifted
feeling that she likes to indulge in, undisturbed.
“I haven’t been up to anything,” Sam answered, “and I don’t aim to be.
But, Mary, some time ago you came to me with some suspicions. I
laughed them off. I am not laughing now. I’m worried. Queer things are
going on around here. What I want to know, now, is what do you know?”
“Nothing. What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you suspect, then, Sam?”
“Nothing. What do you?”
“Nothing.”
That, I see now, wouldn’t have been a bad place for us both to laugh.
Neither of us did.
“Have you any idea,” Sam questioned, “why the girls go prowling all
over the place, afoot and horseback, day-times, and night-times, too,
when they should be in their beds?”
I unfolded a dishtowel and spread it over my pan of bread. It was
ready for rising and I had not got a bit of uplift out of it.
“If I told you,” I said, “you’d only speak your little memory-gem,
about so much good in the worst of us.”
“No, I won’t, Mary. I’m all set for listening.”
“Well, all I know is just what I’ve known all along. They are hunting
for something.”
“Sure they are hunting for something. But what?”
“I don’t know. But, whatever it is, they are going to use it to get
revenge, to injure maliciously somebody.”
“Revenge, hell!” Sam said.
“Have it your own way. Only I happened one night to hear Gaby say to
Danny that they had come to this ranch for the purpose of revenge.”
“Revenge, hell!” Sam repeated himself. “Unless they are sore at me
about Canneziano.”
“It doesn’t make sense. They hate Canneziano. I’ve about decided that
they have come here to get revenge on, maliciously injure, someone who
isn’t on the place.”
“‘Brighten the corner where you are,’” Sam scoffed. “But never mind.
What else did they say, when you happened to overhear this revenge
remark?”
If he was ready, at last, to listen, I was more than ready to tell
what little I knew. I told; even to confessing about hiding in the
clothes closet.
“Well, well,” he drawled, when I had finished my story, “we are
probably making a mountain out of a molehill. I wouldn’t go
pussy-footing around after them, any more, if I were you, Mary.
There’s a screw loose somewhere, that’s sure; but it is not in the
Desert Moon’s machinery. We’ve got nothing on our consciences. We
don’t need to worry.”
Don’t need to worry! Sam and I, sitting in that peaceful kitchen,
talking so smart and frivolous, and deciding that we did not need to
worry is a memory I could well be shed of. We didn’t need to worry a
bit more than if I’d used arsenic in my covered pan of bread; not a
bit more than if there had been a den of rattlesnakes in the cupboard
under the sink, or gasoline instead of water in the tank on the back
of the stove. That is how safe and peaceful we really were, at that
minute, if we had had sense enough to know it. When I realize that
four weeks from that very evening, three people——
But I guess it would be better to tell things straight along, as they
happened. It seems to me a good book can not be hurried, any more than
a good cake can. “Mix and sift the dry ingredients,” is the way all
recipes for cakes begin.
However, since I suspected that I knew a sight more about making a
good cake than I did about making a good book, and since the young man
from back east—Indiana—in Nevada for his matrimonial health as are
about half of the population here, happened in just after I had
finished writing the above paragraph, I asked him whether he would,
for a consideration, read and correct my manuscript.
He had said, when he had come in from his fishing on Boulder Creek,
that afternoon, and asked to buy a meal, that he was an author by
profession. The looks of him almost made me decide not to put myself
in his class. I don’t know why it is that easterners, coming out here
and buying the same sort of clothes that our men wear, look so
ridiculous in them; but they do. Anyway, I invited him to stay to
supper, and then, as I have said, made the proposition about the
manuscript.
He said that he would be only too happy to edit the yarn, but that it
would probably take him several days to do it efficiently. In other
words, though he grandly refused the consideration, he got three full
days of board and rooms and fishing on the Desert Moon in return for
around two hours of work. And I got my clean pages all marked up with
“whoms” and “whichs” and funny dodad marks. It took me more than two
hours to get them all erased.
“Now,” he said, when he finally had read it, “I am going to be frank
with you. You mention dry ingredients. In my opinion, you have far too
many dry ingredients, and it is taking you much too long to accomplish
the mixing process.
“A book, to be successful, has to move swiftly. This is particularly
true of stories of crime and their detection. A properly constructed
story of this sort, begins with the murder. The wisest thing for you
to do, is to burn all of this that you have done, and make a fresh
beginning, at the time of the first murder.
“In the new copy, do attempt to get in some atmosphere. You must make
your readers feel the setting, as it were. Bring them across the wide
and multicolored deserts that lie between here and Telko, to this
marvelous farm. Show them the massive mountain ranges surrounding it;
let them breathe the rarefied air, drink deeply of the beauty. Give
them the changing colors of the mountains, from their jade greens to
their rich ruby hues, with the purpling cloud shadows swaying across
them. Let them hear the scurrying of the desert rats, the calls of the
owls, the howls of the coyotes. Paint for them the slender white
trunks of your aspen trees, and the green quivering of their leaves.
The harsh, rugged beauty, the color, the wonder of this northeastern
Nevada of yours is marvelous beyond description. But for all of it
that your manuscript shows, the action might have taken place on a
chicken farm in Vermont.”
“If the folks who read this story,” I said, “are downright pining for
Nevada atmosphere, let them come out here and get it. There is plenty
for all. A mile and a half of it, statistics show, for each person now
in the state. Nobody ever reads the descriptions in a story, anyway.
I’ve decided that authors put them in for the same reason that a cook,
when unexpected company comes, makes a double amount of dressing for
the chicken, or serves her creamed canned oysters on toast—to fill up,
to make enough to go around.”
“Well, Mrs. Magin,” he said, “I can only remark that as an author you
are a most excellent cook.”
“When I heard the first variation of that,” I said, “years, and years,
and years ago, I thought it was a little comical.”
“I am sorry,” he answered. “I thought that you were the sort of person
who would appreciate sincere criticism, even though it might not be
wholly complimentary.”
“Job wasn’t,” I told him, “and I don’t set up to be any better than he
was. What is more, if you can point to any man or woman in history or
out of it, who ever did appreciate sincere, uncomplimentary criticism,
I’ll pepper this story so full of atmosphere that folks will think
they are reading booster club’s literature about Florida.”
He could not do it. Consequently, I continue this story in my own way,
stating that if any more atmosphere is in it, it got there by mistake.
My plan is to turn it out so that, from now on, not more than a page
of it can be skipped at one time and the rest of it make sense.