Phil Burbank—Johnny Gordon: antagonism

Phil Burbank’s antagonism toward Johnny Gordon is expressed most decisively in a Beech saloon confrontation that begins with Johnny’s talk about civic pride and ends with Phil humiliating him for defending Peter Gordon. Phil later remembers the encounter as the necessary silencing of an obnoxious drunk; George Burbank’s rebuke and Peter’s experience of the same social contempt reveal the violence beneath that self-justification. The relationship pits Johnny’s education, earnestness, and care for his family against Phil’s authority in the saloon and his power to define who belongs there.

The Relationship and Its Setting

The conflict grows out of a difference in how the two men occupy public space. Johnny sometimes drinks because it makes him feel the equal of the big ranchers: they have money, he has education. In his dark doctor’s suit and starched collar, he enters the saloon after the cattle drive and talks about politics, education, Europe, and the war he predicts will involve them all. As he drinks, his speech slurs and he spills on himself, but he does not seem to notice when people edge away. The scene establishes both his vulnerability and the dignity he tries to claim through learning.

Phil’s place in the same room is more secure. He enjoys buying drinks for friends and the sense that the town belongs to the Burbank outfit when it rides in. He regards drunkenness as a disorderly performance: the drunk, in his view, talks without restraint and pretends to importance. Although Phil says he also takes a drink or two, he distinguishes his own drinking from the behavior he condemns. Johnny’s talk therefore irritates Phil not simply because it is drunken, but because it takes up the room and asserts a form of standing—education and civic judgment—that Phil has no interest in respecting.

The Saloon Confrontation

Johnny’s immediate subject is Beech’s lack of civic pride. He complains that the schoolhouse is not painted and that rubbish is dumped on a hill in view of the town. Pointing through the saloon door toward cans and broken glass catching the sun, he calls the scene an eyesore and objects to the desecration of beautiful country. The rancher answers with a personal insult. The exchange connects Johnny’s public idealism to a remembered episode of intimidation: the rancher asks whether Johnny was watering flowers when he had once fired a gun over his head.

Rather than retreat from the subject, Johnny explains why flowers matter to him. A neat flower bed at a railroad station, he says, gives travelers a favorable impression of a town and might encourage them to return. He recalls what he, his wife, and son planted at The Inn / Red Mill: hopvines that needed the right twine to climb without collapsing under their own weight, along with California poppies and nasturtiums. The practical particulars make his civic pride an account of care and labor, not merely a lecture. Phil’s later recollection reduces this speech to the offense of a drunk talking about flowers, exposing how little patience he has for the values Johnny is trying to explain.

The rancher turns the argument toward Peter, taunting him as a sissy and associating his gentleness with reading, thinking, making paper flowers, and not knowing the difference between a foul ball and a fly. Johnny removes his hat, smooths his hair, puts it back on, and insists that his son is not a sissy. When he lunges and repeats that the rancher cannot call Peter one, Phil answers with physical force. He grips Johnny by the front of his starched white shirt, shakes him, straightens his arm, and flings him across the room. Johnny hits the opposite wall, falls, tries to rise, and sinks back before eventually getting to his feet and crossing the road to The Inn / Red Mill. Magpies cry at him after being disturbed from a dead gopher.

Phil’s Retelling and George’s Rebuke

The same conflict reappears in Phil’s recollection, where the narration presents his own account of Johnny as a barfly who made himself objectionable. Phil remembers the man as a nuisance who talked to the company at large about flowers and to Phil in particular. He insists, in effect, that he was stuck listening and that he had made plain his company was unwanted. The retelling frames the assault as the consequence of having to endure Johnny, shifting attention from the imbalance between the men to Phil’s irritation.

George Burbank refuses that excuse. He tells Phil that he would not have done what Phil did. Phil answers cheerfully that George did not have to listen to Johnny. The exchange is brief, but it marks a clear difference between the brothers: George feels sorry for people, while Phil treats sympathy as unnecessary and Johnny’s humiliation as a response he brought upon himself. Phil remembers that Johnny later died by suicide, dismissing him as a fool; the recollection does not turn into remorse. Instead, it preserves the gap between George’s moral discomfort and Phil’s persistent contempt.

Phil’s objection to Johnny also carries a revealing contradiction. He claims to hate drunkenness because it violates order and decorum, yet he responds to the disorder not by withdrawing or appealing to restraint but by assaulting a smaller man. The difference between a drink or two and Johnny’s conspicuous drunkenness may be important to Phil’s own self-image, but it does not explain away his choice to turn irritation into public violence. His claim that Johnny forced the encounter is part of the way Phil makes aggression appear justified.

The Conflict Extends to Peter

Johnny’s defense of Peter makes the father-son bond central to the confrontation. At school, Peter is hazed and called a sissy; he is more deeply provoked when the boys call his father a drunk. He turns on them, then recognizes that they outnumber him and that their cruelty belongs to a recurring pattern in which one group gathers around an outsider. Johnny’s words in the saloon answer that humiliation directly: he rejects the label placed on his son and names Peter’s reading and thoughtfulness as the reasons others mock him.

Phil’s contempt for Johnny’s family does not end with the assault. Later, at the ranch, Phil tells the men about Peter’s books, pictures, and paper flowers, presenting the boy as an object of ridicule. As Peter crosses the camp opening, a ranch hand whistles at him; Phil sees Rose Gordon Burbank stiffen, and understands that the men look to him, rather than George, as the ranch’s boss. The whistle demonstrates the reach of Phil’s influence: his stories help make Peter vulnerable to the group’s scorn, while the authority Phil holds could have checked it. Peter does not pause or falter as he passes the tents, but that composure does not undo the public exposure Phil has helped create.

Meaning of the Antagonism

The relationship joins several forms of humiliation. Johnny is marked as a drunk in a town where the ranchers possess money and social authority; Peter is marked as effeminate because he reads, thinks, and makes paper flowers. When Johnny tries to resist the second stigma, Phil uses physical dominance to silence him. Later, Phil’s stories carry the same contempt from the saloon into the ranch camp, where the men’s whistle turns a family’s vulnerability into a group spectacle.

Flowers provide a pointed contrast between the men. For Johnny they are evidence of civic care: something planted, supported with the right twine, and watered so that a town might present itself well to travelers. Phil remembers the flower talk as proof that Johnny was an absurd nuisance. That difference in emphasis captures the antagonism’s larger structure: Johnny tries to make care visible in public, while Phil treats the effort as an intrusion and has the power to punish its speaker. George’s objection briefly makes that power answerable to another judgment, but Phil’s recollection shows that he does not accept the rebuke. The conflict remains unresolved in his own account, which preserves the assault as an irritation rather than a wrong.