Ten Nights in a Bar Room

A snow-smothered lumber outpost, already quivering beneath the whip-crack of winter, is seduced by the sudden amber glow of a new gin-mill; into that hearth stagger Joe Morgan—bark on his boots, resin in his lungs—whose thirst is stoked less by whiskey than by the ache of monotony. The amber turns to tar: pay envelopes vanish between wet glass bottoms, boots rot unwiped, and the bunkhouse rhythm of axes is replaced by the syncopated cough of a man drowning upright. His wife, once a humming presence at the cabin stove, fades into a monochrome wraith mending the same sock; their daughter Little Mary—luminous as a kerosene flame—becomes the hamlet’s wandering conscience, clutching a rag doll stitched from his discarded shirts. One dusk she pushes through the bat-wing doors; a quarrelsome drunk flings a pewter steamer that kisses her temple with a dull metallic sigh. Hours later, under a quilt calico-printed with bluebirds, she expires, her last breath fogging the room like the final steam from a locomotive that will never again depart. Morgan, galvanized by a grief that tastes of iron filings, torches the saloon in his mind long before hefting the match; he stalks the proprietor through saw-dust fog, only to be diverted by a logjam—gargantuan timbers groaning like cathedral bells—then by a conflagration that turns night into a roaring copper dome. Amid embers swirling like fireflies overdosing on starlight, he recognizes his own reflection in the fleeing bartender’s terror: two mirror-images of ruin. Revenge evaporates; what remains is the hush of snow extinguishing cinders, and a man trudging home to a woman whose eyes hold the vacant cradle of their child.