Romeo & Juliet Act One Scene 4
Romeo: I dream'd a dream tonight.
Mercurtio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercurtio: That dreamers often lie.
Romeo: In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.
"PUH-AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Two doors opened at the same instant onto the hallway in the wing of the Ponderosa ranch house that contained the bedrooms of Ben Cartwright's trio of young sons.
Two sleepy heads appeared outside of those doors, followed closely by two very weary, rather irritated male forms.
Twenty-two year old Adam Cartwright rubbed his head and then ran a hand along the back of his neck as he looked down the hall toward his little brother's room. "How many nights has it been now?" he asked his middle brother Hoss.
"Four," the teenager said, shaking his own head of reddish-blond hair.
"Only four? Are you sure?" Adam sighed. "I'm thinking it's five."
"Pretty sure it's four. There was that night Joe thought he saw the shadow of a giant on the wall that was comin' to get him."
"...thanks to Uncle Gunnar's tale of the end of the world as related by a certain middle brother just as little brother was going to sleep."
Hoss scowled. "Who'd a thought that little squirt would believe a wolf was gonna swallow up the world?"
"Which led to number two – the nightmare about that wolf eating Little Joe."
"I guess so," his brother admitted.
"I know so."
"PUH-AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Hoss shook his head. "That little cuss sure has got a set of lungs on him, ain't he?"
Adam rolled his eyes. "I can't seem to remember. What was number three?"
"That'd be the one about Hop Sing."
Adam pressed two fingers to his forehead. "Oh, right. The one where Hop Sing was really a dragon in disguise and he used his breath to cook the roast."
"And Little Joe's hiney," Hoss snorted.
Adam's hazel eyes went to the door down the hall. The handsome but exasperated young man rolled his eyes.
"I'd like to cook Little Joe's hiney..."
"So, what's four?"
"You remember, don't you? Four and five are the same. They had to do with Miss Jones –"
Hoss snapped his fingers. "Dang it, Adam, if you ain't right!"
He nodded. "Miss Jones – who, by the way, gave me nightmares as well when she was my teacher years ago – is really a witch..."
"...who hates little boys – 'specially ones by the name of Joe."
"PUH-AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
With one eye open and one eye closed, Adam winced. "Can't imagine why."
"So she keeps 'em after school," Hoss went on, "and then makes 'em disappear..."
"...telling their parents that they ran away when, in reality, she's cooking and eating them."
Hoss ' head was bobbin' up and down like a nag. "Well, I'll eat my hat. You're right it was five."
"PUH-AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
"Six," Adam sighed. "They're coming closer together now. I suppose one of us should go in and wake him."
Hoss was a giant at seventeen, weighing in over two hundred pounds and pushing six foot one.
He looked scared.
"Cain't we just, well, you know, let Joe wake up by hisself?" Hoss ran a hand along his shoulder. "The last time Joe dang near broke my collarbone kicking back with his feet."
He scoffed. "I'll trade that for the time he came right up out of the bed and knocked me into the wall – "
"Thinking you was that there Polly Prentiss what tried to kiss him in back of the school," Hoss grinned.
Adam touched his jaw, remembering Little Joe's small fist hitting his flesh. He only hoped his ten year old brother hadn't really punched Polly Prentiss...
Or kissed her.
"I'll flip you for it," Adam sighed.
Hoss looked skeptical. "How do I know you ain't got a two-headed coin?"
"You can have heads. I'll take tales." Adam placed his hand on the doorknob, ready to retrieve the coin, but stopped short of opening it. Turning back, he said, "Do you hear it?"
Hoss shook his head. "Hear what?"
"Listen."
He did. "To what? Joe ain't shoutin' no more."
"That's what I mean. Listen."
A different sound drifted along the half-lit hallway. Not the robust howl of a boy facing down imaginary foes, but a sad, forlorn whimpering.
Little Joe was crying.
Hoss looked like he'd shot himself in the foot. "Dag-nabbit, Joe, that ain't fair," he breathed.
Adam scowled. "Joe's ten years old. What does he know of 'fair'?"
The two of them looked at each other. They'd faced down rustlers, fought off Indians, and even survived Miss Jones. What was it about one crying little boy that made their knees go to jelly?
"You're the oldest," Hoss said at last.
Adam was tired of rolling his eyes, so he just shut them. A moment later they reopened and focused on the door to Joe's room. As he started down the hall, the oldest of Ben Cartwright's sons sighed.
"This is not what I came home from college for."
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Adam pushed the door open. "Joe," he called softly as he stepped in. "Joe, it's Adam."
It was the middle of the night. The only light in the room was the pale glow that entered through Joe's window, cast by the waxing October moon. His little brother's bed was full-size even though Joe, well, wasn't. At first he couldn't find him in the tempest of rumpled pillows and twisted blankets left in the wake of the storm of his latest nightmare. Then he spotted his youngest brother curled up so tightly in one corner of the bed he'd all but disappeared. Joe'd been experiencing night terrors ever since their father left for Placerville almost two weeks back to wrangle over grazing rights with a competitor and pick up some extra cash for the payroll. The Virginia City bank had had a run when a rumor leaked out that it was financially shaky. He'd talked to the owner and been assured it was not. Adam looked at his brother again. Out of the ten days Pa'd been gone, this made the sixth where he and Hoss had been abruptly awakened in the middle of the night by their little brother's screams. Joe had always been prone to nightmares. Most likely they were a consequence of his healthy and over-active imagination. Still, the usual toll on their sleep was maybe one night out of fourteen. Six out of ten was a record. It made him wonder what was going on in that little curly-brown head.
Thank goodness Pa would be home the day after tomorrow.
Approaching the bed and its occupant with the respect he would a sleeping grizzly, Adam called out again.
"Joe. It's Adam. Are you awake?"
Gauging the distance between himself and the softly sobbing ball of boy in the bed – making certain he would be out of range for both feet and fists – Adam took a tentative seat on its edge and tried again.
"Joe?"
Due to the moonlight he could just make out his brother's small shoulders showing above the satin edge of the thick wool blanket that covered him. They shook with each ragged breath Joe drew .
"Hey, Adam!" Hoss's reddish head poked through the opening in the door. "You got him – "
Adam held a hand up for silence and then pressed a finger to his lips before waving Hoss in. When his brother was standing at his side, Adam indicated the little boy with a nod.
Joe was talking in his sleep.
When Hoss spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. "What's he talkin' about? Can you tell?"
While he doubted a ten year old had too many secrets, it still made Adam uneasy listening to his brother's unconscious words. "Not much. He mostly keeps calling for Pa."
Hoss took hold of the chair near Joe's dresser. He dragged it over, turned it backwards, and sat down. Then he leaned his elbows on the chair-back and fixed his eyes on his still sound asleep little brother.
"Do you remember, Adam, if Joe was havin' nightmares afore Ma...afore Marie died?"
He didn't miss the correction. It was for his sake. While he had called his pa's third wife 'Marie', Joe and Hoss had called her 'Mama' and then 'Ma'.
He shook his head. "I went to school..."
"Oh, yeah. I plumb forgot. Guess you wouldn't then." His brother scowled. "Well, I been tryin' to wrack my brain these last few days. Seems to me that he didn't." His brother's ice-blue eyes flicked to the third member of the Cartwright brotherly trio. "Least wise nothin' like this."
They'd done their best to keep up with their determined, headstrong, and rambunctious little brother while their pa had been gone. At first Adam had let Joe tag along with him and Hoss rather than remaining in the ranch house with Hop Sing when they went out to ride the line and round up strays. Joe'd been eager to go and too eager to help. When he told him to stay put, he didn't. When he grumbled that Joe needed to listen and do what he was told, his brother got mouthy, telling him he was a better rancher and could bring all those cattle in by himself in half the time if he'd just get out of his way. He'd been tempted to comply, but figured Pa coming home to the trampled body of his youngest son was something he should avoid. The last straw had been when he told Joe to stay out of the corral and then found him riding bareback astride one of their freshly broken horses.
He figured Pa wouldn't like it if he came home to fratricide either, so from that point on he had banned Joe from the range and left him to help Hop Sing with the household chores.
Adam grinned. That had been a fine day. He'd come home early only to find the house quiet. At first he'd been relieved and then, puzzled, and finally concerned. He could hear Hop Sing in the kitchen humming a Mandarin tune, rattling dishes, shifting pans, and obviously cooking supper. Joe was nowhere to be seen. After a quick sweep of the house, he'd returned to the kitchen to find his little brother sitting on the chair by the cook's island with his hands tied behind his back and a gag in his mouth.
When his sympathetic stare went to their Chinese cook, Hop Sing remarked. "Little Joe and Hop Sing have velly good time. Play much."
He'd had to swallow his smile as his little brother's eyes sought him out. Joe's expressive eyebrows were drawn together in consternation.
"And just what were you two playing?" he'd asked.
The Chinese man reached over and caught a feathered headband from the table. He put it on his head. "Hop Sing Indian," he said, his black eyes sparkling. "Little Joe prisoner."
He really shouldn't have burst out laughing.
That had been two days before. Since then Joe had gone on to prove that not only was he stubborn and determined and rambunctious, he could also be downright unpleasant. His little brother had refused to talk to any of them, nursing a grudge that was watered with enough anger and self-pity to have the potential to overtake the year's record-breaking harvest.
Adam looked at Joe again. It was hard, dealing with him. Joe'd been barely more than five when he went off to school. He'd returned the year before – for all intents and purposes as a stranger – sliding back into his place at his father's side as if he had never been away. But he had been away and Joe knew it.
And resented it.
He couldn't blame the kid, really. He doubted Joe remembered any of their time together from before he went East. But he did. He remembered holding his little brother in his arms for the first time shortly after his birth, marveling at the power of his lungs and his will to survive. He remembered too waking to feed Joe in the middle of the night in order to let his Pa and Marie rest. And then there was that time when Joe was barely school age. He might have been seven. He'd been home for the summer and he and Hoss and Pa had just finished with breakfast and were ready to head to town. Joe was a no-show – again. When their pa made some sort of an excuse saying Joe had a cold and probably needed the extra sleep, he just snapped. Plain and simple snapped. He'd been out of his chair and up the stairs, thrusting Joe's door open and shouting at the top of his lungs that he'd better get his sorry little ass out of bed and get dressed and be out that door in five minutes or he'd take a strap to his backside.
Joe was curled up on the bed, the covers wrapped tightly around him. He didn't respond.
He couldn't.
Adam drew in a breath and let it blow out his nostrils in a steadying stream. He remembered striding over to the bed and taking hold of Joe's shoulder, intending to shake some sense into him. It was then he realized his brother was fevered. The whooping cough started about twelve hours late and continued for two months.
Two months.
Joe almost died.
He'd learned then that with Marie's son things were seldom going to be what they seemed. Hoss was an open book, pretty much like his mother had been. But Marie had secrets – some of them dark – and she'd been good at concealing them. Joe's mother had been as high-spirited as the horses her son now loved and just as headstrong as Joe; just as prone to leap before looking, to reach too high, too fall too far. Adam winced as if from a sudden headache. He had a flash of the beautiful woman on her horse in front of the house, riding up at a breakneck pace just because she could, and then of Marie on the ground. She'd been riding too fast that day –
And fallen as far as she could go.
"Adam," Hoss said, breaking into his nearly classic reverie. He heard his brother stand up and scoot the chair back. "I think Joe's wakin' up."
His little brother was stirring. The whimpering had fallen off to next to nothing now and, most likely, when Joe woke he would be none too happy to find his older brothers keeping watch over him. Adam scowled. Joe had something else in common with those freshly broken horses that, frankly, terrified him since it was contained in the very young, extremely vulnerable hide of a ten year old boy he loved.
He was prideful.
And pride, as Pa always told them, went before destruction.
Hoss was already out of the room. Adam heard his middle brother's door close.
He needed to do the same.
Adam rose to his feet and stood for a moment at the foot of Joe's bed. Roy Coffee had come out a few days back, warning them of bad men in the area. There were three of them – two known outlaws and a third unidentified man. They'd robbed the bank in Mesa Vista and been reported to be heading toward Ponderosa land. He'd watched his little brother's green eyes light with the thrill of it all – the defying of convention, the daring bank robbery itself, the flight on fast horses from the law, and finally the criminals' – yes, criminals' – escape. After Joe and Hoss had gone to bed, he'd sat with the lawman on the porch. Roy had the rocker while he'd perched on the edge of the table. They talked about the town and then his experiences back East, and then, without warning, the topic had become Joe.
"You know, Adam," Roy said as he rose to leave, "I worry about that youngest one of your Pa's."
"Joe?" he'd asked and then laughed. "I worry about him too. I worry about keeping him alive long enough to become a man."
The lawman didn't laugh. He nodded.
"Roy, what is it?"
The sheriff had drawn in a deep breath. He let it out so slowly it stirred the long whiskers in his mustache. "Now, I don't want to be talkin' out of turn. You know I respect your pa more than any other man."
He thought he knew what was coming.
"Go on."
Roy' clear blue eyes sought and held his gaze. "That boy's angry. Now, he's got a 'cause to be what with his mother dyin' with both him and her bein' so young."
"But..."
"With you and Hoss your pa seemed to walk the line, you know what I mean? Never too much to one side of the other. Just right. And he made you just about as right as men can be."
"Thank you, Roy," he replied, and then added, his tone concerned, "What is it you want to say, but you're not saying, Roy?"
He shook his head. "You're pa just don't walk or see straight where that boy is concerned. Ben oughta know better. You give some high-spirited mulish-minded maverick his head and he'll break his neck." He turned to look directly at him. "I seen an awful lot of good boys go bad because of a lack of a restraining hand."
He knew Roy was right. Well, at least in a way. Pa saw Marie in Joe – beautiful, feisty, sure-of-herself, easy to laugh and easier to cry, incredibly strong and incredibly fragile Marie – and that stayed his hand. As much as he had been formed by his father in the image of his mother – steady, rock-solid, clear-headed, poetry-loving Elizabeth – and Hoss by his pa's memories of Inger, Joe was growing up in the shadow of Marie.
He only hoped it wasn't too dark in there for the kid.
Adam let out one final sigh – well, for tonight at least – and returned to the head of the bed. Joe had not awakened. He'd shifted, pulled the covers up over his shoulders, and gone back into a deeper, more restful sleep. The black-haired man stood looking at his little brother for a minute and then bent and pressed his lips to that curly brown head. It wouldn't be long before he wouldn't dare do it.
So he was going to do it while he could.
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Joe Cartwright waited until he heard the door open and close – waited a full sixty seconds – and then cracked an eyelid and did the best he could to look sideways into his room without really looking – just in case Adam or Hoss were hiding there somewhere. When he was sure they weren't, he sat up in bed and drew his knees up to his chest and circled them with his arms. Slowly he drew in a deep breath and let the air out in one forcefully blown 'Whew!'
As Pa's foreman Andy would say, he felt fagged out and fit for flaying.
Pa didn't like him hanging around Andy.
Joe glanced out the window thinking about that day, almost two weeks back, when he'd watched his pa ride away, heading for Placerville. Pa being gone left a hole in him right there next to the hole that had opened up and never closed when his ma died. Adam told him once that 'nature abhors a vacuum'. He'd been mighty puzzled by that, wondering how Adam was talking about such a thing with pa right there in the room and didn't end up with his mouth being washed out with soap. He'd asked Hoss about it later and middle brother had laughed and laughed. Course, when he asked Hoss what the meaning of 'abhor' was, the big galoot didn't have an answer.
Then he'd been the one to laugh.
That night he asked his pa what Adam meant and Pa had told him that empty and unfilled spaces were unnatural and wouldn't be satisfied until something filled them up.
Joe shivered all the way from his curly brown head down to his bare toes. He had a vacuum in him and he knew what that 'something' was that was gonna fill him up.
It came to visit him in the night.
Shinnying out of bed, Joe drew his hand-me-down nightshirt up about his shoulders and held it closed with a fist while he crossed over to the table in front of the window. They could afford a new one but pa told him that was a waste of money and that the one he had on that had been Adam's was 'handsomely made' and would fit him well enough once he'd gained a little muscle. As it was it kept slipping down on his shoulders and made him feel even more like a kid dressing up in his pa's clothes. Only it wasn't his pa's. It was Adam's.
And Adam wasn't his pa.
Joe's teeth gritted together so hard it made his jaw ache. Just who did Adam think he was anyway, coming back so high-and-mighty from school, ordering them around, telling him and Hoss what to do on a ranch he hadn't seen for more than four years? They'd done fine without him before and they sure could do without him now. It had been awful the last week with pa gone. Adam acted like he'd been crowned king of the Ponderosa or something, telling them his word was law and he and Hoss had better do as he said or else.
'Or else what?' he'd shot back.
Adam's hazel eyes had said it for him.
I'll tell Pa.
Joe caught a glass from the table by his dresser and took a swig of tepid water. He glanced at his bed, but just couldn't quite go back there yet. Instead, he crossed to his bedroom door, opened it a crack, and looked out into the hall. Once he was sure it was empty Joe went to the stair and descended through the darkness into the great room. The fire was out so the room was completely still. It was so still the stillness sent a shiver up his back. It was kinda cold too. He looked longingly at the stairs. His room was warm. The fire was still hot. But then, in his room, there was that bed and those pillows and blankets and all that went with sleep including the one image he just couldn't get out of his head.
His pa laying at the bottom of a deep ravine, bleeding, with a bullet in his side.
Joe shuddered and tried to shake off the feeling of dread. He knew it was a dream. Had to be. What else could it be? But he'd had the same dream night after night after night, as if his pa – or maybe God was calling out to him. He remembered pa said God spoke in dreams.
God called good and righteous men that way in times of great need.
Joe halted in front of the big blue velvet chair. He stood there a minute, weighing the need of the child he' was against the man he knew he had to become. Finally, coming to a decision, he sat down and shifted back into it as far as he could and let it embrace him as his absent father could not. He imagined his pa was sitting there, holding him, touching his hair and speaking soft words to soothe away the nightmares, smelling of soap and sweat and smoke and pine.
Pa was in trouble.
Pa needed him.
Somehow, in spite of Adam, he'd find a way to rescue him. He had to.
Big brothers or not, God hadn't called Adam or Hoss.
He'd called him.
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The next morning when Adam came downstairs with his brother Hoss in tow, fully dressed and ready to begin the day, he found Little Joe curled up in their father's chair in the great room sound asleep. He and Hoss were heading out after breakfast to round up more steers. To Hop Sing's relief Joe had asked if he could go visit his friend Seth and Seth's dad was coming by later in the day to pick him up. It would do the kid some good, he and middle brother had agreed. Maybe raising a little ten year old Hell with Seth would tucker Joe out and he'd be able to sleep tonight.
As Hop Sing bustled into the room carrying a plate of steaming bacon and eggs, Hoss scratched his head and Adam shook his. They exchanged puzzled glances and then left Joe where he was.
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It would be a long time before either of them would see him again.