Cottonwood (8 page)

“No, Hattie dear. You may go. Congratulations on your engagement,” Maggie answered sweetly, without condescension and with a smile of such genuine benevolence that the hateful glare Hattie shot back at her shocked me. Maggie paid it no mind, or perhaps she didn’t notice. Marc was looking elsewhere, bored out of his wits, and Katie looked at me, her right eyebrow raised in a selfsatisfied manner that made me want to strike her.

Hattie stopped for a moment in the doorway and met my eyes, her features softening dolefully until she seemed no longer homely but very nearly beautiful, and though she appeared on the brink of saying something to me she simply closed the door and hurried down the stairs. I thought I heard a sob through the door but I wasn’t sure, and I came close to following her. There was nothing to be done, though, and in a moment Maggie’s presence and the task at hand chased all thoughts of Hattie from my mind.

In five minutes the first plate was ready, and I mounted the plate holder and made my exposure of Marc and Maggie sitting side by side. They were stiff and glum, the result of my injunction to remain very still, and I knew in advance the picture would have none of their personalities in it. When Gleason brought out the second plate holder, Katie insisted on playing a part in the composition, a suggestion which Maggie enthusiastically seconded. The three of them were at least livelier than the Levals by themselves, though it was difficult to make Katie understand the necessity of keeping her head still for the exposure.

When it was done, I retreated to the dark tent for the final treatment of the plates. Once they were finished I examined them and found their densities were acceptable and their images sharp. I then demonstrated to Gleason the proper technique of varnishing, after which I sent him on his way to open the saloon wagon; I would return the equipment to the forge’s loft later with Marc’s help.

“Can we see them?” Maggie asked.

“These are negatives,” I said, delaying their disappointment by a day. “I’ll print them out tomorrow.”

“Well, isn’t this cozy?” she said. She parked her silken bustle on one of four chairs surrounding a table, and after closing the door to the hallway and drawing the curtains Katie sat in its opposite.

“Wait until you hear about the entertainment they’ve got in store for us, Bill.” Marc looked to me like he’d rather go have his front teeth pulled.

“We’re going to speak with the other world,” Katie piped up enthusiastically. Maggie looked slightly embarrassed, but I sensed it was directed at her husband’s skepticism rather than at the ludicrous nature of the activity itself.

I was directed to sit between Katie and Maggie. At that close range I detected a whiff of eau de rose rising from Katie’s considerable bosom, a scent which mingled uneasily with the musky odor that emanated from her normally and which I might have found uncomfortably arousing were I not sitting across from a woman who made Katie look like a hairy-knuckled muleskinner. I surmised that the eau de rose was Maggie’s gift to her as well.

Marc spoke up as he took his seat opposite me. “You think we might get to talk to Abe Lincoln?” Maggie gave him a sharp look, and he raised his hands before him in a protestation of innocence. “I’m not making light.”

“You’d be well advised not to, Marc,” Kate said, her eyes wide and serious. “The spirits despise mockery, and skepticism, too.” She sounded like a bad actress playing a part on a stage, her voice deep and sepulchral like that of an old dowager rather than a young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four. Her accent had something vaguely English about it; she reminded me a little of a ham actor I’d seen once in Philadelphia playing the ghost in
Hamlet
, all quavering moans and groans and upraised, waving arms.

I noted that on the center table a single candle awaited lighting. Kate ordered us to lay our hands on the table as she lit it.

“Now, we must be silent for a moment and join hands as I attempt to make the crossing,” Kate said. She closed her eyes, and we sat there in silence, holding hands and gazing at the candle’s flame in the center of the table. I became aware, as Kate began to moan to my left, of the gentle rubbing of my palm by Maggie’s thumb on my right.

“Yes, I hear you, spirit. Make me your earthly lips, tongue, and teeth, I pray,” Kate said, her groaning even huskier than before, her head swaying left and right, forward and backward until she snapped upright, perfectly still.

“I’m here among you now,” she said in a flat, masculine voice that was quite convincing.

“Identify yourself, spirit, and tell us why you have returned,” she said in her own persona, or at any rate the one she was using for the séance. To my right Maggie’s hand tightened its grip on my own.

“Nigh on to six weeks now I lay unclaimed on the prairie. I come forth to accuse,” the purported spirit said, and despite my absolute disbelief in the present nonsense I felt a cold shudder move upward from the base of my spine like a wave to my scalp, for the voice sounded eerily familiar.

“Who do you accuse, spirit?” Kate said, and at that moment I believe all three of us had to restrain a simultaneous urge to correct her use of the pronoun.

“I accuse a man I wronged of wronging me in return,” said the masculine voice, and I was ever more certain that I knew it.

“How did you wrong this man, spirit?” Kate said.

“Upon arriving at his farm in his absence I took advantage of his addled wife’s loneliness and allowed her to take me into her bed.” With that confession I finally recognized the flat monotone of the drummer who’d screwed Ninna, and I supposed that this was a confidence he had exchanged with Katie in the process of seducing her, or in its aftermath. “He thereafter took my pistol and he shot out the crown of my hat.” Katie’s imitation of the drummer’s cadences and delivery and of his nasal drone were impeccable, based on my recollection of our sole, brief encounter.

“Surely, spirit, these are no great wrongs compared to your befouling the man’s marriage bed,” Kate said, the very soul of reason.

“Ah, would that that were all he had done, Kate,” the ghost lamented.

Kate shuddered. “Spirit, how is it that you know my name?”

“Kate, Kate. It’s I, A. J. Harticourt, who spent his last night of life in the hospitable shelter of your family home.”

“Mr. Harticourt? But word hadn’t reached us that you’d died.”

“I was followed, Kate, and when I set out the next morning the blackguard snuck behind me and crushed my skull with a hammer. He then robbed my body of what wealth I possessed, and even took my sample pots and pans.”

Maggie gasped and once again tightened her grip.

At this point Kate opened her eyes for the first time in several minutes and looked square into mine, resembling nothing so much as a rabid wolfhound, teeth bared in hateful anger. “
You.
Saloonkeeper. You slew me for revenge and for gain.” The drummer’s low, dull mumble had metamorphosed into a raucous shriek, and Kate rose slightly from her chair without letting go of my hand or Marc’s.

Marc’s mouth had drawn itself tighter than usual, his contempt for the proceedings transparent.

I didn’t mind Katie’s game so much, though I will admit to being mildly unnerved by her performance. Maggie, though, clearly took it seriously, shifting her eyes uneasily between Katie’s altered face and my own resolutely calm expression, and I wanted badly to disabuse her of the notion that I had killed the drummer. “Drummer,” I said to Katie. “Tell me, if you’re really him, what make of pistol I took off of you.”

She didn’t hesitate. “It was a Derringer, double barrel, given to me by my own brother.”

“It was a Dragoon. And what was the hat made of ? The one I shot the hell out of ?”

“The hat was wool felt, and brand-new, too.”

“It was silk, and if anyone wants proof of that it’s sitting in my booze wagon at this moment.” I looked at Katie as I said it, and her eyes shut again.

“Are you a deceitful spirit, then?” Katie cried out, and no reply in the other voice followed.

“I didn’t know such a thing existed as a lie from the other world,” Marc said with a low chuckle, and that earned him a glare from his wife.

Kate then began moaning once again, and I had the impression we were to be visited by another spirit, presumably one with a story less prone to contradiction. Maggie was quite excited now, leaning forward and peering at Kate’s head, which had recommenced its rhythmic back-and-forth motions.

With Katie murmuring quietly, Maggie started rubbing my palm again with her thumb, and to my absolute and total shock the dainty, pointed toe of her shoe slid its way under the cuff of my trouserleg and up my shin, which it rubbed very delicately.

That slight friction had what I presumed was its desired effect upon me physically. Moments later when we first heard shots fired into the air and the bell began ringing I found it somewhat inconvenient to have to stand and open the door. Now the sounds were joined by shouting in the street, but Kate seemed not to notice, as she was babbling away with her eyes still closed, and Maggie sat there looking confused and culpable. The prick-stand she’d inspired had softened somewhat by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, Marc at my heels, and when I got outside and saw what the commotion was about it melted away completely: the forge, my second home for all the long months since I’d opened my saloon, was burning.

To be more precise, the loft was what was burning. White smoke poured out the back of the building, filling the sky to the south; men were running into and out of the lower portion, and orange flames danced obscenely through the blackening boards of the upper part of the structure. Marc and I took our places and ran buckets of water back and forth with the others from the well at the end of Main Street in an attempt to douse the flames, but by the time the fire was discovered the loft was already well ablaze, and before long it was all we could do to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent buildings.

We were lucky that day in that there was no wind to speak of, and we managed to control the blaze until it had burned the forge down to a smoldering, blackened frame surrounding the anvil itself and the chimney. We continued to splash the charred wood with water well into the early part of the evening, and it was decided that we would watch the ruins through the night in shifts. It was then that I first spoke to Otis, beside whom I had been fighting the fire for several hours.

“For a change I got a little ahead of myself and I thought by God I’ll for once go home for lunch like the wife wants me to. Ten minutes after that I heard the bell ringing.” He shook his big head and looked like he wanted to cry.

We stepped into the smoky shell, and for the first time it came to me that I had nowhere to lay my head that night. Otis examined the forge itself in an effort to determine whether it or his tools were salvageable, and beneath the spot where the loft had hung I found the remains of my larger camera. Its brass lens barrel was warped by the heat and its glass elements had bubbled and were now clouded to the milky white of a cataracted eye. Its case and lensboard and bellows had been consumed by the heat down to a blackish gray ash, festooned with useless and misshapen metal fittings.

“Loft went up first, Otis,” Tim Niedel said, standing behind us. “Seems odd, don’t it?”

“It does,” I said, and Otis nodded, though he didn’t look as though he was giving it much thought. Something made me turn, though, at that very moment, and behind us I spied Hattie, her eyes brimming with tears, staring at me defiantly. Once she’d gotten my attention she lifted her skirts and ran up the street toward the hotel, and in the confusion I didn’t think of her again that night. I relieved Gleason at the back of the wagon and announced a round of free drinks for all the firefighting volunteers.

The next morning I rose early, awakened by the cold beneath a thin comforter in a second floor room at the hotel and sorely missing my buffalo robe and fur coat. Around eleven, after my work at the farm was done and before opening up the booze wagon, I prepared to print the stereo views I had taken the day before. I secured the paper and plates within a pair of printing frames and set them out on the roof of the hotel to print out. Even in the negative state I could see that my instincts regarding the first pose had been correct, and this was borne out when the prints were done; the dull Maggie and Marc who peered out from that
canapé
looked mesmerized. On the second they were indeed more like themselves, bright-eyed and wry, but Katie, as I’d anticipated, was recorded only as an oval blur above a dress; I had no stereoscope handy, but was practiced enough in the art of free-viewing that I was able to coax from it a three-dimensional image with my naked eyes. Marc and Maggie stood out in perfect relief against a soft
canapé
with Katie Bender between them, her head a hazy, silvery apparition in which could just be made out several faint impressions of disembodied eyes and teeth. My instinct was to chemically clean the plate for re-use, but something stopped me and I placed it in its padded berth in my negative case.

The talk of the town that day was primarily of the fire, and the work that would be involved in rebuilding Otis’s shop. Marc offered to divert the materials from the construction on his house, which would cease until the forge was completed and more lumber had arrived, and to facilitate a bank loan for him. The other item that occupied the idle tongues and brains of Cottonwood was the elopement the night before of the widow Hattie Steig and young Francis Comden, who had slipped out of town under cover of night; I don’t believe it occurred to anyone but me that Hattie was the author of the blaze.