Cottonwood (23 page)

She’d been my first sweetheart after I’d left the employ of the Harding farm, and scrupulously denied me certain liberties Mary Harding had delighted in granting. These, she said, would be enjoyed by her future husband only; she allowed, however, as how she hoped that would be me, and consequently permitted certain mild pleasures to be had. She was also willing to relieve me manually and on special occasions orally, and I found many opportunities to slip us unnoticed away from church socials and dances and the like, skills I had honed during my shameful liaison with Mrs. Harding. If Cordelia lacked Mary’s beauty and some of her charm as well, she had the attractive qualities of being unmarried and my own age and therefore a suitable girl to court; what’s more, her father was one of the few men in our town who’d allow me near his daughter.

Samuel Fenn, a deacon in my father’s church, had been one of only a handful of parishioners to side with him in his time of trouble, and Sam let it be known to one and all that he would have been proud to have me as his son-in-law, not despite my father’s character but because of it.

I had carried Cordelia’s picture with me, an artless oval albumen print in a brass locket, throughout the war. After a year her letters became irregular, even by the standards of military mail, and they grew briefer, too, though she still wrote of a future we would face together upon my return. By the end of the second year the letters ceased entirely, and I stopped writing, too, sensing that to put myself in the position of a supplicant would only engender her contempt. I vowed that when I returned I would win her back with all the charm and persuasion at my disposal.

On the sight of what had been my father’s church my mood darkened. My anger, directed as much at the parish and its scolds as at the old man himself, had gone cool as the years passed, until I had almost forgotten it was there. The sight of the steeple restored it to full burning life, and the fact that it had been recently painted seemed, absurdly, a deliberate insult to his memory. There was a light within, but I’d sworn long ago never to set foot inside the place again, and I swung open the iron gate that led to the boneyard without stopping in to inquire as to the identity of the current pastor.

It was late in the afternoon, overcast and warm, and I wandered to where my father and mother lay side by side, their differences crumbled to dust. I greeted my father in Greek and my mother in Alsatian and stood there for a moment without much else to say to them in either tongue. I was pondering where to get a room and considering my strategy for approaching Cordelia’s family when I was startled by someone calling my name.

I turned to see Cordelia’s older brother Peter, fatter than ever, his black hair thinned, huffing toward me from the cemetery gate.

“Good to see you, boy,” he said. “Back to stay?” He clapped me on the back and nearly knocked me over.

“Back to see my parents,” I said, nodding at the ground. “And back to see Cordelia, too.”

“Ah. Didn’t know if you would,” he said, looking down, and he bade me follow. I thought he meant to lead me into town, to Cordelia’s father’s house, where he would announce my return. I liked the idea of appearing in his company, as if the initiative were his own, and felt quite optimistic about the whole affair until we stopped at a single columnal marker.

It was inscribed with the name WARREN HEALEY; Warren had been a friend of mine, and I was sorry to see he’d passed on. My attention was then drawn to the name below it, one which puzzled me momentarily: CORDELIA HEALEY, BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER.

“The baby’s in there with her. Wouldn’t have lived anyway, the doctor said. Poor Warren shot the back of his mouth out the next morning.” I pulled out the locket, hidden as always in easy reach, and clenched it in my hand until I thought I’d crumple it. Despite that small, slightly melodramatic act I truthfully felt very little; surprise, certainly, the kind one feels when a set of truths is upended and revealed as illusion, and disappointment that my plans would have to change. Toward the girl I’d been hoping to wed, though, I felt nothing. I noted that the date of her death was in November of 1863; I had received the last of her letters in September. She had written me the sweetest of her billets-doux, then, with Warren Healey’s band of gold on her finger and his child curled in her belly, unaccountably still promising herself to me.

“I know Father would like to see you,” Peter said.

Of course I had figured on seeing Sam Fenn that evening for the purposes of asking Cordelia’s hand. “I expect I’d better be moving along. Give him my best,” I said.

I was on my way that very night. My next stop was Columbus, and upon arriving there I took a job assisting a Danish photographer, whose son-in-law I became in short order. I had only rarely looked back or thought of Cordelia since, and never with much emotion beyond a mild nostalgia, certainly never experiencing the powerful emotions I ought to have felt upon learning simultaneously of her marriage and death; the feeling that enveloped me on that cold morning in California handily outdid any I’d experienced at the time, and I was over it by the time my breakfast was done.

That day’s
Morning Call
, in addition to accounts of the travails of the Brazilians, and news of a dead Empress in Europe, carried another article on the Benders, one which altered my plans:

BENDERS ARRIVE IN KANSAS

Cottonwood, Kans., Jan. 19th, 1890—From our local Correspondent— Mrs. Almira Griffith and her daughter, Mrs. Eliza Davis, extradited from Michigan and accused of being Mrs. John Bender, Sr., and Katie Bender, the notorious assassins, have arrived at the Cottonwood, Kansas, train depot, where an angry throng awaited their presence. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for the second week of January, and once the pair are proven to be the Benders they will stand trial for the murders of more than a dozen men found buried in an orchard behind their house, as well as the shooting of Mr. Marc Leval, a leading citizen of the town of Cottonwood. Mrs. Leval herself was heard at the train station remarking that it was a great relief after so long a delay to have the killers in custody. Be that as it may, Gareth Lassiter, the attorney engaged to represent the women, assures us that they will be freed as soon as he has proven that they are not the Benders.

I re-read the article twice, trying to tease out its meaning—was I to understand that Maggie was in Cottonwood? I had pictured her in a hundred places around the world, imagined her rich again and poor again, wondered even whether she still lived, but never once did it occur to me that she might have returned to Cottonwood and the possibility of hanging for her husband’s murder. It took me several further readings to satisfy myself that I had understood correctly, that the two women charged with being the Benders would be charged with the killing of Marc Leval. That such a charge could be filed in the face of what everyone in Cottonwood knew about who’d killed Leval didn’t necessarily mean I was free to travel there, but it made the prospect worth considering; on that basis I began pondering a return, the first time I’d entertained the notion seriously since the morning she and I had ridden south into Indian Territory. Whether Maggie would consent to speak to me when I got there was another matter.

That morning I received, as expected, a message from Arthur Cruikshank, ordering me to vacate the premises at 4175 24th Street within fourteen days. When the notice came I was concentrating on the cash sale of a pair of cameras to an ambitious young photographer named Quackerell, prosperous and eager to expand. I had just about convinced him to take the whole inventory for a slightly reduced rate when another messenger arrived, this time with an envelope from Adelle. I opened it in the presence of the buyer:

Dear Bill,

I am most awfully sorry for what Arthur has done, and hope
and trust that you will forgive me.

This will, I trust, help you out in your transition.

Love,

Your own Adelle

P.S. Please destroy this letter. I will send word as to when we
can next safely meet.

Accompanying the letter were three hundred dollars in bills, far more than what I owed her. I must have been gaping in the most stupefied way at the money, because Quackerell improved his offer immediately, based upon the perfectly reasonable assumption that I’d received a better one. I accepted it gladly, signed his receipt and took his money. In an hour he returned with a wagon for the 11-by-12-inch camera, and I gave him an extra key to the front door so that he could return at his leisure for the furniture over the next day or two.

Having disposed of my studio and inventory, I hoped I’d also be able to quickly rid myself of the Clay Street building. If I could negotiate its sale to Morley for a cut rate I’d be happy; I’d be rid of it, and by selling it to him below market value I’d be doing the poor fellow a favor as well.

When I arrived at the wine dump, though, I was nonplussed to find its entrance decorated in black crepe, with a wreath hanging upon the door, a ribbon marked CONDOLÉANCES draped across it. Inside were all the rummies and the boy porter, looking like they hadn’t left since I’d seen them last, and next to the boy stood the most miserable looking woman I’d seen in some years. She wore a black organdy dress, her veil pulled upward and attached to her hat with a pin.

“Mrs. Morley? I’m the landlord.” I was about to ask the obvious question, but before I had a chance I caught sight of Morley lying defunct upon a low table. His hands were folded upon his chest, with the left one on top to reveal its horribly infected stump of a pinkie, black and gray and a little green; to judge from the smell he’d been gone from this world for a couple of days at least.

“I hope you come for the wake and not to badger him any more about that rent,” she said. Her teeth were half gone, and her right hand was missing its thumb; these were the things I noted in the cellar light of the wine dump; God knows what daylight would have revealed.

“I really came to talk to him about something else,” I said, nodding at the lump of meat on the table. My head felt heavy, and as I gazed on Morley’s swollen face I began to feel a need to regurgitate.

“Talk away,” Mrs. Morley said. “I doubt he’ll talk back.”

The deed to the wine dump was in my interior coat pocket. “Mrs. Morley, this is the deed to the building. I’m leaving San Francisco, and my intent in coming here was to turn the building’s title over to your husband.”

She squinted at me. “At what cost? ’Cause he didn’t have any scratch to throw around, and I got less.”

“No cost,” I said with some difficulty. “A gift to you.”

She turned her attention to the document, and after a minute’s scrutiny she said, “Let’s go find a notary and make it official.” In that gap-toothed grin I thought I saw a blessing, permission to return home to Kansas.

2

LABETTE COUNTY, KANSAS FEBRUARY, 1890

Inter Mortuos Liber

My traveling companion on the train trip East was a treasure: a copy of Procopius’s
Anecdota
(or
The Secret History
in English), purchased at an antiquarian bookshop shortly before leaving San Francisco; two hundred years old, it had come into stock just that day, and though its price was high, I had my recent windfall from Adelle in pocket and I indulged myself. It was the first copy I’d ever seen of it, but I’d wanted to read it since learning of its existence in my adolescence via my father’s scabrous journals. Procopius didn’t disappoint; the book was as full of scandal and ribaldry as those journals were, and my father’s affection for it was easily understood.

The diaries had been written in code and in classical Greek, and the hours I spent worriedly deciphering them (worriedly because I feared my mother might find and destroy the lot) contributed greatly to my fluency in that dead tongue; in them he recorded everything from his theological perspective (surprisingly heretical) to his bowel movements (frequent and enjoyable) to his sexual conquests (more so and more so). Before leaving this world he entrusted them to a lady parishioner who, though mentioned often therein, was unable to read them, with instructions to turn them over to me on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday. They were in my mother’s house when I went off to war, and I don’t know what happened to them after that; perhaps some randy, virginal schoolmaster in Parma, Ohio, bought them at auction for masturbatory fodder.

Before my first change of trains (there were three changes altogether, the last of these heading south and east from Kansas City) it occurred to me that I might be walking into a legal trap of some sort, but the risk seemed acceptable to me if it meant a chance to step off the train into what, strangely enough, I still thought of as my home, though I’d lived longer in Denver and San Francisco, and nearly as long in Tucson. Nothing else I might do, nothing I had planned in Texas or Philadelphia or Bucharest, seemed as compelling to me as a chance to glimpse, however briefly and at whatever risk to my liberty, my son, grown to manhood, or the widow Leval, or even the disappointed town itself, jilted by the cattle trade and me both. The tantalizing possibility of seeing Katie and Ma Bender at the end of a noose, however unlikely that was, beckoned as well.

I had looked the town up on maps a hundred times or more in sixteen years, and noted with satisfaction its continued presence on railroad timetables, but I’d had no specific word about Cottonwood or any of its inhabitants until the recent articles on the Benders began appearing. When the train approached the outer rings of the town the sky was overcast and thick with the promise of snow. To the east of the city limits stood a complex of low, circular, chimneyed structures, each expelling gray smoke into the cold, late afternoon air, arrayed around a central, two-story building with BRAUNSCHWEIG PRESSED BRICK CO. painted on its side; slightly further west was a massive, incomplete brick edifice which a sign out front identified as the future home of the Cottonwood Flour Mill. Where the tent city had stood years before were now houses with fenced-in yards, and in the distance I could see rows of buildings two and three stories tall, including one with RECTOR’S DEPT. STORE painted on its westerly side.