Cottonwood (5 page)

“Nothing to do with Jesus. It’s just a way to mark the fact that winter’s halfway over. People were lighting fires and having Christmas parties a long time before Jesus came along.”

She clucked, looking rather pretty with her cheeks ruddied by the wind. We saw the Rectors on their way to the Methodist services, and Tiny called out to us as we passed them. I waved back and so did the boy, but Ninna made as though she didn’t see them.

I tied the horse and wagon to the post in front of the hotel. “Now goddamn it,” I said, helping her down out of the wagon, “try and be nice to these people. They’re our business partners now.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I don’t care if that saloon burns down to the ground.” She stepped up onto the wooden sidewalk and entered the hotel without another look in my direction; the boy hopped out of the wagon and we followed her inside.

The Levals’ suite had been temporarily appointed with their own furniture, brought over from their home in Chicago, and it was as fine a setting as I’d seen since leaving Ohio. The suite—a somewhat grand description of what was essentially an enlarged version of the hotel’s standard room—was crammed to bursting with settees, stuffed chairs, tables of various kinds, two chests of drawers, and a large sofa, all of it finely wrought and expensive. Maggie and Marc steered us over to the sofa, after which Maggie ignored me and fawned over Ninna and Clyde, the latter in particular, feeding him cakes and hard candies imported from the east and generally behaving as if she’d never seen a boy child before. He seemed embarrassed but pleased at the attention, and even Ninna was disarmed in the face of Maggie’s onslaught of charm. Marc and I stood off to the side and discussed business, in particular the price for lumber for the new saloon, and we lost interest in the doings of the women and the child. Marc had become dissatisfied with his Kansas City supplier and wanted to know what I thought about a lumberyard he’d heard of in Bourbon County.

“He thinks he can gouge me when he can’t even guarantee delivery on time,” he said. “I’m inclined to go with this yard in Fort Scott just to show the complacent son-of-a-bitch.”

It was fine with me. I’d bought the lumber for the current building there at what I considered an extortionary rate, but Marc told me it was less than he’d been paying for the materials for his house. I was momentarily distracted by the squealing sound of Clyde’s laughter, and on the sofa I saw him doubled over in hysterics as Maggie clutched him from behind, tickling him below the rib cage. Ninna was smiling rather sternly now—she was not a particularly affectionate mother, at least physically—and I believe she was on the verge of intervening when a loud knocking came at the door. Maggie and Clyde, both flushed and breathless, sat upright as Marc opened the door. Cy Patton stood there, hat in hand, and Maggie stiffened. As he often did, Patton looked like a little dog who’d just evacuated his bowels on a rug, wet-eyed in anticipation of a whipping.

“Mr. Leval? Sorry to stop by unannounced on Christmas Day, but I heard you were entertaining and I thought it might be a good piece for the
Free Press
.”

“Come on in,” Marc said, and if he didn’t look in his wife’s direction it was surely to avoid the furious shaking of her head and the exasperated rolling of her eyes back into their orbits, but by the time Patton was in the room she had made her expression one of polite welcome. He was quick in his work, taking just a few notes and asking about the Levals’ families back east. Their responses were none too specific, if not actually evasive, and after a few questions of the same type to me and Ninna he left. As I shook hands with him at the door I noted that there was a chunk of some sort of food clinging, dried, to the corner of his mustache, and he mistook my smirk for a comradely smile; he shook my hand and wished me a Merry Christmas, and I wished him the same as he disappeared limping down the staircase.

Maggie’s spirits had dampened considerably since the knock at the door, and she tried to raise them again with the suggestion that we exchange presents. Our gifts to the Levals were meager: a wooden pipe for Marc (who, I subsequently learned, didn’t smoke, but who accepted the gift as graciously as if he did) and an embroidered Christmas stocking for Maggie, handmade by a somewhat resentful Ninna. From our generous hosts Clyde received a new coat—I hadn’t mentioned the need for one to the Levals, but having seen him on several occasions they could hardly have failed to notice—and a sled, store-bought. Ninna was given a hat in the current mode, which she sniffed at, uncomprehending. I received a Latin book, its spine stiff and uncracked, its leather still fresh and fragrant; it was the
De Senectute
,
De Amicitia
,
Paradoxa
, and
Somnium Scipionis
of Cicero, and in the same volume Cornelius Nepos’s
Life of Atticus
, with notes in English by Charles Anthon. My stupefaction and stammered thanks seemed to lift Maggie, who had certainly selected it herself, from the doldrums Cy Patton had inspired, and upon opening the book I was strangely thrilled to see that its inscription was in her own hand, with Marc’s added almost as an afterthought:

To Wm. Ogden,
our friend and partner in our newest ventures.
Merry Christmas 1872.

“I don’t know if you ever bother to read the commentaries,” Maggie said, “but I found Mr. Anthon’s notes to be most illuminating.”

“I’m sure they’re wonderful,” I said. On Marc’s face I read a fleeting smirk, gone too fast for me to tell whether it was born of fond indulgence or condescension toward his wife’s and my pretensions to erudition.

Though Ninna managed to be pleasant she remained suspicious and uncertain as to why these people were treating us as friends, and after we had drunk the eggnog and sung the carols (all of them unfamiliar to her) she rose and said that she’d had a delightful time and was sorry it was time to go.

Maggie had the good sense not to try and talk her out of it, and we went downstairs with their merry voices trailing us from the landing. The streets were deserted, or nearly so, as we headed out, and I couldn’t help noting how much happier the boy looked in his new, warm coat, his belly full of sweets and his head full of the ministrations of a pretty woman. He held the sled as if the snow might start any moment, and kept his face skyward.

We arrived back at the farm by four o’clock. Garth sat brazenly in the front parlor, reeking of the corn whiskey I’d given him that morning for the occasion and not troubling himself to hide his resentment at his exclusion from our Christmas celebration.

I returned to town at six o’clock or so that evening and opened the saloon, which we had not yet begun to dismantle. I poured whiskey until well past midnight, feeling hollow at the core for reasons I could not elucidate. To judge by the lugubrious air in the room my melancholy was shared by the majority of the drunkards present that night.

Patton’s article, when it appeared that week, didn’t amount to much, but I learned from Marc that it had offended Maggie anyway.

YULETIDE AT THE COTTONWOOD HOTEL

Our newest arrivals, Mr. and Mrs. Marc Leval, entertained on Christmas Day Mr. William Ogden, of Cottonwood, and his young family, in their grandly appointed suite at the Cottonwood Hotel. It was a jolly scene, reminiscent of many a winter’s holiday back home in Chicago, where the Levals resided before making Kansas their home. Asked if she missed family and friends there, Mrs. Leval pleasantly replied that she was delighted to be in Kansas, and tried only to look forward. Their splendid new house will be finished soon, we hear, and we hope soon to have details of Mr. Leval’s plans for the town, said to be as grandiose as the manse itself.

I saw nothing to offend there, but Marc told me that the day it appeared she took to her bed for the remainder of the afternoon. Ninna read the article and sniffed that she hadn’t been mentioned by name, but Clyde begged me to cut the article out with my penknife, and once I had he pressed it lovingly inside his copy of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
.

A little more than two weeks later I made the trip to the lumberyard in Fort Scott to procure the lumber and fixtures required for the new building. Between the coming of the railroad and the building of the cattle pens, Marc lacked the free time to go, and I was happy for the chance to escape the saloon and the loft for a few days. The day of my departure we had talked into the early afternoon about finances and construction plans, and it wasn’t until past four that I got started on the road to Fort Scott. I left a teetotaling farmboy named Horace Gleason in charge of the saloon in my absence; he was willing to ply the devil’s trade in return for instruction in the art and craft of photography. He had worked the bar one afternoon before, and afterward I had received so many complaints about the temperance lectures and Bible verses he dispensed alongside the bug juice that this time I had to extract a solemn oath that there would be no proselytizing until my return. I quit town astride a new mount, a chestnut mare purchased as company property by Marc, imaginatively named Red by its former owner.

In retrospect, I should have delayed my departure until morning; it was already dark by the time I was but a few miles north of town, the moon full and shining across the hills, the frozen ground shimmering in its glow and creating an atmosphere that suggested neither day nor night, precisely, but a dreamlike state somewhere between the two. The last snow had been some weeks before, on the day of the Levals’ arrival, and only patches of it remained on the sides of the mounds, mostly in places that stayed shady on clear days. When I got to the Big Hill Creek ford the mare’s shins cut like boat’s prows through a thin crust of ice on its surface, and presently I detected movement in a grove of trees on the other side and a grunt which I interpreted as human in origin.

“Who’s that?” I called out.

The noises ceased, and so did the grunting, though I believed I could now detect the sound of clothes rustling.

“Better show yourself,” I yelled, drawing my Colt as I did so.

“It’s all right,” came a male voice from the darkness, “I’m coming out.”

A moment later a stout young man appeared, hands clearly visible. “John Bender,” he yelled. He was Kate’s brother, and unlike her he spoke with a thick German accent. I had heard people claim that they were not brother and sister but husband and wife, offering as proof his awkwardness with the English language in contrast with her eloquence. I had only seen him once or twice before, but it did strike me now that there was no family resemblance between the two of them. He was squat and thick, with a square, flat face and the eyes of an imbecile. His trousers were imperfectly fastened, and it was my impression that, despite the cold, he’d been evacuating his bowels or abusing himself in the quiet solitude of the grove.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Fort Scott,” I answered. “Off to purchase some lumber.”

“You won’t make it tonight. Why don’t you stop at our house, have dinner and stay the night? Thirty cents, and you can have breakfast, too.”

Until then I had supposed I would stay at the hotel in Cherryvale, though it was a short distance out of my way; cold as it was, I had no desire to set up camp for the night, and Leval had entrusted me with cash for my expenses. Now, though, the prospect of turning in early for once appealed, and I considered the offer seriously.

“I was on my way to the Cherryvale Hotel. I don’t think it’s much further.”

He waved his hand in dismissal. “My sis used to work there,” he said, which I knew to be true. “Cost you seventy-five cents and you don’t get fed. My ma’s a real good cook,” he said, beckoning me, and he mounted a fine-looking horse and I followed him up the bank to a trail leading to their claim. “My sister’s a real beauty, too,” he called over his shoulder, and I had the sense that his statement was in the nature of an offer, rather than a mere boast.

After a few minute’s ride over the Hieronymous Mounds we arrived at the house, a square frame building with smoke rolling from the chimney and a warm, yellow-orange glow in its two front windows. There was a skeletal orchard a stone’s throw from the house, the branches of its thin young trees stretching upward into the moonlight as if in supplication. Bender dismounted and hurried to the door.

“Let me tell Ma and Pa we got us a guest.” He pronounced it “kest.”

A minute later he came out, followed by a short, scowling bear of a woman and a hugely muscular blackhaired man, his thick neck so bent as to be nearly parallel to the ground, and with a look on his face that made the old hag next to him look positively sweet. The old woman, whom I had seen on a few previous occasions, did not seem to remember me, and she snapped something to the boy in a
Hochdeutsch
patois that sounded remarkably like my mother’s Alsatian. The young man indicated that I should dismount, whereupon he led my horse away.

I entered the tiny dwelling and found it divided into two rooms by a large canvas sheet. On a small table against the wall stood a lamp, its luminescence dimmed by its smoke-darkened glass; the only other light came from a fire in the hearth. Something was cooking in a still-shiny copper pot suspended over the flame; the drummer had found a customer in old Ma Bender that night after all. I wondered if he’d screwed Kate or not, and whether he’d reduced the price of the pot accordingly. I decided he probably had on both counts.

By its smell I took what was bubbling in the pot to be corn, but before I had been in the house for half a minute another smell assaulted my nostrils, a very vague one, merely an accent to that of the cooking corn, but it soon overpowered my senses and I began to sicken. It was in fact a number of odors working in concert, ranging from dull to sharp, to produce a unified stench that called at once to mind graveyard detail in the army as well as the summer before I’d joined the army, when I’d worked stunning cattle in a slaughterhouse.