The Floor of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

parlor was an exotic success. He soon had a staff of five full-time clerks assisting him.
    BUT CHARLIE was not complacent. He was always—or so it seemed to a bemused Mamie—thinking. And now, two years after stepping into a new life as a merchant, he’d commissioned a sign that he hoped would further expand his already prospering cigar business. He’d found an oil painter in town and hired him to create an advertisement for his Oklahoma Boomer brand. When the painter asked if he had an image in mind, without too much reflection Charlie answered that a scene depicting the rough-and-tumble cowboy life should get the attention of the boys coming off the trail.
    Executed in bright colors on a oval board, the finished painting turned out better than Charlie had anticipated: Rearing back in the saddle of a sturdy gray mare, a cowboy had lassoed the hind hoofs of a longhorned steer. But what caught Charlie’s excited eye was the recognition that the man in the saddle was the spitting image of him in his heyday. It was his long, rather mournful face, his drooping mustache, his gay red sash twisted around his narrow waist, and his high-heeled Texas boots in the stirrups. I might as well as have posed for it, Charlie rejoiced.
    Now he had to decide where to hang his sign. At first he considered placing it above the counter inside his store. It certainly would make the dim place a lot more inviting. But he rejected that location after it occurred to him that it would serve no commercial purpose; if people were inside, he already had their business. There was no sense in wasting such a surefire advertisement on them. And that’s how he got to thinking about the Bluff Creek bridge.
    The sight of the creek had always stirred him and the boys riding up the trail. It was the gateway to the promised land. What better place to inform a hand coming in from rough country and looking forward to spending his pay that there was a genuine cowboy cigar store in Caldwell?
    But once the sign was finally hanging from the top of the bridge, Charlie took one long look and an intense feeling of disappointment set in. He was, he abruptly recognized, no longer the man depicted in the painting. Standing there in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, he had become something less. His merchant’s life had grown, as the cowboys liked to say when things turned wrong, scaly. Days that had once been spent with great adventure and the prospect of unforeseen excitement were now uniformly small and dull. He had tried on the settled life, but it had become a tight, uncomfortable fit. Standing on Bluff Creek bridge looking up at the painted sign, he realized the narrowness of his so-called success with a suddenness that was as jarring as it was admonitory. He knew: A storekeeper’s life had left him diminished.
    Locked deep into this wistful mood, he returned home. In the morning, it had all suited him fine. But now something had shifted. Life on the range should have taught him the fragility of plans; it had been a mistake to allow himself to take to his merchant’s calling with so much uncritical determination and resolve. He still loved Mamie, and the fact that she was pregnant held the promise of a further blessing; those feelings were real and beyond doubts. But for Mamie’s sake and for his unborn child’s, as much as for his own self-esteem, he needed to move on into a life they all could be proud of. He would need to think of something else, another way to support Mamie and the baby that would not leave him so downhearted or, it hurt him to acknowledge, embarrassed. He had been grazing for too long.
    As for the sign, it did its job. Like the blue-green waters of Bluff Creek, the hanging oval painting of the cowpuncher roping his steer became in time a landmark, too. And cowboys being cowboys, once the first mischief-maker put a bullet through the sign as he charged across the bridge on horseback, the other hands couldn’t help but use it as a target. It