Cottonwood (6 page)

Mrs. Bender, huffing and shuffling painfully, produced a ladle and a large wooden bowl from the other side of the house and approached the pot. She pointed at a large, rough wooden table and indicated that I should sit; when I did so the faint odor that was causing me such unease intensified to such a degree that I was forced to stand. Then I saw that beneath the table was a section of flooring that did not fit the rest, precisely, giving the impression of a trap door. The two men had entered at this point, and they both stared at me with some degree of consternation, apparently because I remained on my feet.

“Sit,” the old man said, pointing to the chair I had just vacated, and it was an order rather than a suggestion.

His son was more diplomatic. “Take a seat, Ma will serve you up a bite to eat,” he said, but all eyes in the house were on me, defying me to stand any longer when I had been told to sit.

“I’ve had a change of heart,” I said, and I started for the door. “I thank you for your kind offer, but I’d like to make some more time tonight.”

The old man stood in the doorway, blocking my exit, and I repeated my statement in German, in case they hadn’t understood; my Alsatian accent took them by surprise.

“You won’t get far tonight,” John Bender said in Alsatian.

“Sit and eat,” his father said, still there in the door. “You insult my house.”

I pulled aside my coat, which I had not removed, and put my right hand on the grip of the Colt for the second time that evening. The old man’s expression grew more venomous, and I began to appreciate what an enormous beast he was; were his neck not bent as it was he would have reached six feet four or five inches in height, and he looked half that wide. He looked at the Colt and then gave me an appraising glance, as though calculating whether I could draw and fire before he reached me. I eased the Colt from my belt, simultaneously pulling the hammer back, and still I didn’t sense that the likelihood of old Bender moving aside had increased much. Then from the exterior came a sound that distracted him, that of a horse arriving at a good clip and then stopping. I heard someone dismount not far from the door, and a moment later Kate Bender appeared in the door behind him, shouting in German that I was the saloonkeeper in the town of Cottonwood and well-known locally. Before she got any further the old man shouted at her in a tone that would have curdled milk:
“Er versteht Deutsch!”

She stuck her head in and moved past her father. “Well, Bill Ogden, isn’t this a pleasant surprise,” she said cheerily, as though I was the last person she had expected to see upon poking her head in the door. She was breathing hard, and sweat had frozen patches of that long red hair. “Will you be joining us for supper this evening?” Though she looked at the Colt in my hand, noting presumably that it was cocked and ready to fire, she said nothing about it.

“I was just on my way,” I said. “Pleasure to see you, as always, Miss Kate.” I stepped past her father and crossed to where the horses were tied and retrieved my mount. Next to it was Kate’s, wheezing from exertion, and cold sweat shone on its coat. I heard them arguing in the cabin as I rode away in the direction of Cherryvale, the loudest belonging to old Mrs. Bender, and listening to the voices diminish in the distance I remembered my old Alsatian grandfather yelling at my mother and grandmother in German and French, demanding his meals and his pipe and sometimes just yelling because he liked the sound of it.

That night in the dining room of the Cherryvale Hotel where Kate had once worked, I told my host what had happened and we shared a laugh over my unease amongst the Benders. The hotelier proceded to share several anecdotes about Kate’s eccentric behavior, and then he called down a tiny old woman from one of the rooms who cradled in her arms a rifle.

“Don’t mind the gun, it goes where she does. Mrs. Kearney, tell Mr. Ogden here what happened to you out at the Bender house last year.”

She took a good look at me and, having decided I could be trusted with the tale, sat down in a chair. “I just got here to town, and I seen them signs she posted up all over about healing, and when I moved in here and got to know her some she told me she got her healing powers from a dead Indian chief. He told her how to do it, you see? And then she tells me she can talk to the spirits generally, and I says how I’d sure like to talk to my dead sister up in North Dakota.”

“I thought it was your mother, Mrs. Kearney,” the innkeeper said.

“No, Mother died in Wisconsin and I got nothing more to say to her. So she invited me out to her house, and we rode out together, it was getting to be sundown. We went in, and she told the family we was going to commune with the spirits, and the menfolk started acting peculiar and left the room with the old woman. Then Kate started drawing on the walls with a piece of coal. Drew up a picture of a man, and you knew it was a man because she went ahead and drew his rutting gear sticking out like a thumb. Then the old man, bent over double, walks in with a knife and damned if he didn’t stab that drawing of that man right in the heart, and while the knife’s still stuck in the wood there old Kate collapses like a rag doll and falls to the floor, crying out and talking in tongues. Right about then’s when I edged my seat a little closer to where my rifle was. The old man disappeared into the other room without a word, and I asked Kate if she was communing with the spirits yet and she said ‘I sure am, and what they’re telling me right now is to kill you
daid
.’ Well, I grabbed my rifle and charged out that door over to my horse. Sun was just going down, and I could hear Kate laughing while I rode away. I bet you I could hear her for half a mile or more, carried on the wind. I was scared to death she was following me until I finally got back here.”

“And how’d she act after that, in town?” the hotelier prompted her.

“Just like nothing was ever doing. I’d see her in here and she’d say ‘Morning, dearie,’ like we was still the best of friends.”

Mrs. Kearney excused herself and went upstairs and we poured a couple of glasses of whiskey.

“Bear in mind that Mrs. Kearney also believes that the phantom of Andy Jackson comes to her in the night and satisfies her carnally,” he said as the door upstairs closed. “But who knows but there’s a germ of truth to that business with the Benders?”

I drank my whiskey, trying to remember if I’d seen the outline of a man drawn on the wall at the Bender home, then went upstairs to my own bed, for I had a long ride ahead of me in the morning.

As I lay in bed that night something got me thinking about the ring Juno had stolen from me, a small masonic intaglio which I would have liked to pass on to Clyde, who would never know the grandfather he resembled so strongly in feature and temperament. As a boy of seven I had surreptitiously removed it from my father’s finger as he lay in his coffin; knowing he would have wanted me to have it I felt no guilt for its purloining, but even twenty years hence, abed in the Cherryvale Hotel a thousand miles to the southwest, I could still feel the great relief I experienced then when the lid was placed onto Papa’s coffin and the evidence of my crime laid into the ground.

I returned from Fort Scott a few days later, on a route that skirted the Bender place by some distance. The winter remained harsh and dark, and once we had begun tearing the old saloon down in anticipation of the lumber I had ordered, I opened up shop in the open air from the back of an old wagon, an arrangement that suited neither me nor my customers. Like me they longed for the warmth of the stove and the shelter of the thin walls, and I sustained myself with the thought of the new saloon and its grand setting, and of the money it would pull in. There would even be a stage, upon which women might dance and sing, and Leval and I had even discussed the purchase of a piano for me to accompany them upon.

In the meantime I had tried to hammer out a deal with the hotel whereby I could have set up shop temporarily in their dining room, but despite almost ruinously generous terms from me they declined; the Barneses were opposed to liquor on general principle. Daily and nightly I stood in the open air, wrapped in the old buffalo robe, dispensing booze and growling at my clientele. Marc offered to pay young Horace Gleason to do it for me, saying that eventually I would have to abandon the tending of the bar to some employee or another, that it ill became the owner of a saloon of the higher grade to be seen working there himself. But I had little else to occupy myself with then, save the demolition of the old saloon; with a crow-bar I had ceremoniously pried away from the structure the first of the planks, and watching the creaking separation of the still-soft wood that Juno and I had nailed together was bittersweet. I loved that kind of physical labor even less than I did farm work, and chose to remain at my post as the wrecking continued.

Late one afternoon in January I stood at the wagon passing the time of day with a man named Paul Lowry. He was about my age, with a bald head and a luxuriant red mustache; he had lived in Cottonwood for more than a year, working at various jobs requiring limited skill, and he claimed to have worked as a copper in Boston before heading west. He hoped I could put a good word in with Tiny or Marc, who were discussing the establishment of an official police force. I wasn’t inclined to recommend him, since he was a mean drunk who picked exclusively on smaller men, and slow to pay his tab besides. He also drank on the job; as he stood there downing one shot after another of my lowest mark of rye, he was in Marc’s employ as a day laborer on the house. He and another man, a long-bearded Bohemian, had been sent to Cherryvale where a load of lumber had been offloaded from the train, and the other man sat fuming in the loaded wagon, refusing to join him in a drink and anxious to return to work. Unlike myself Paul seemed not at all flustered by the approach of his employer’s wife; while I found my pulse racing and my mouth going dry, he merely doffed his hat and smiled, then mounted the wagon alongside his sullen colleague.

Once he was gone Maggie, who carried over her arms what at first appeared to be a perfectly inert black dog, favored me with that off-center smile that seemed to be mine alone. She seemed to flush, though I thought it be the cold air on her face that made her purse her lips in that shy manner, pleased with herself for some reason she was anxious to tell.

“Good day, Bill.”

“Maggie.” I tipped my hat, embarrassed at its condition. “Cold enough for you?” I asked idiotically, robbed of my wits by an adolescent tightening of my chest and a tingling in my groin.

“That’s what I’m doing here,” she said, and she held out the thing in her arms. It was a beaver coat, long and finely cut. “That’s from me and Marc, it was meant to be a gift at Christmas, but it hadn’t arrived.”

I took it from her and examined it without daring a guess at its cost. “You already gave me a book,” I babbled, for want of something gracious or clever to say.

“A last-minute substitute, so you wouldn’t go empty-handed Christmas morning.”

“I much enjoyed it in any case,” I said. “I’m well into my second reading.” I put on the coat and buttoned it up against the wind. “Thank you kindly.”

“It’s been breaking my heart, watching you out here in the cold every day with just that old buffalo skin to keep you warm.”

Again I felt embarrassed that she saw me in such an unflattering light, and all I could think to say was “Thank you” again.

As she took her leave I noticed Hattie watching down the street in front of the hotel. Maggie greeted her as she passed, a greeting Hattie majestically ignored as she walked my way, her arms crossed in front of her and pressed in tight against her bosom.

“She’s spoiling you, Bill.”

“It’s from him, too, Hattie.”

“I don’t see him bringing it down to you. Bet you fifty cents he don’t even know about it.”

“And how could that be when he’s got to have paid for it?” I asked her. Three nights before Hattie had snuck out of her room and made her way to the forge, knocking quietly and throwing rocks at the side of the loft until I woke and let her in. She stayed up there under the buffalo robe with me until so close to dawn I was afraid she wouldn’t get back to the hotel before her employers did; the whole time she kept going on about how wonderful it was to be abed together the whole night, how that was the way man and woman were supposed to be, and further on in that vein. To me, all it meant was that I had swapped a whole night’s sleep for a quick screwing, and the more she went on about how cozy and nice it was the more I felt I’d made a bad trade.

Now she leaned forward, her index finger extended toward my face. “Anyway, I got news for you, Bill Ogden. Francis Comden at the hotel asked me to marry him.” I rarely saw Hattie in daylight, and now she struck me as homelier than she had before, rounder of face and duller of eye; this may have been the result of having just seen Maggie, whose countenance was the more beautiful for being slightly reddened by the chill. It may also have had to do with the harshness of Hattie’s emotion, which had pinched her mouth and eyes smaller than usual.

“Which one’s Comden, now?” There were two Francises at the hotel, and I didn’t know the family name of either. The first was the boy at the reception who loved Kate, the one whose beard had not yet started growing and whose voice still cracked merrily when he spoke; the other was a long-faced ex-rebel who never quit talking about the war. I liked them both well enough and thought in either case she’d have done well to accept.

“You know exactly who he is! Anyway, the question isn’t who asked me, it’s what are you going to do about it?”