Cottonwood (18 page)

“That’s him, all right. What shall we do to get him back to Kansas City?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Tim Niedel was standing next to me. “Easy, we’ll haul him to Cottonwood in a wagon with the rest of these poor souls and we’ll load him onto the train. You paying for it?”

Henniston nodded, then took another consoling nip from the bottle.

“Main question is, shouldn’t we be setting out after them sons of bitches already?” Tim waved an arm in the direction of the orchard graveyard, where men still toiled to bring the dead above-ground.

I hadn’t thought about it until then, but I called Marc over. “You think we ought to start organizing the men into search parties before the Benders get too far?”

I knew Marc was calculating in his head the amount of damage this was going to do the town’s reputation in the nation’s press, but I was nonetheless surprised at his response. “Useless. They’ve a day’s head start on us or better.” It was the first time he’d spoken to me since he’d arrived.

“All the more reason to set out now, rather than wait for tomorrow. And we can make up some of that time while they sleep.”

Several of the men were listening, and unaccustomed as he was to being contradicted he knew better than to allow his anger to show in their presence.

Tim spoke up, loud as he always was and not at all cowed by Marc. “There’s seven men dead over there at least, and surely more still in the ground, and who knows how many they kilt and throwed in the river like they did poor Hiram Steig, and we owe it to them to get the dirty bastards.”

Another man I didn’t know pushed his way over. I saw one-eyed Herbert coming our way.

“We don’t even know in which direction they fled,” Marc said.

“You think they might have passed through town?” I asked Tim.

“They’d be taking an awful chance. If they thought they was about to be found out, or maybe already had been, town’s the last place they’d want to be found passing through.”

“Could have gone south.”

“Could have,” Herbert said. The light from a torch was shining on him at such an angle that his eyesocket looked especially deep and round. “Open prairie down there, though. Nowhere to hide if anyone was to spot ’em, and you can see for miles to the south from these mounds. Me, I wouldn’t have gone south.”

“North,” I said, “along the Verdigris.”

Tim nodded. “There’s trees alongside the riverbank for miles and miles. That’s cover in the daytime, and you could travel at night. They could catch a train at Toronto or Eureka, and then they’re gone forever.”

I remembered finding young John Bender that night hiding in the trees alongside Big Hill Creek, and it made sense to me. “That’s for me, then. Time we started breaking the men down into search parties.”

Marc saw that the posses would organize themselves and get under way under his command or not; choosing the former, he raised his voice and made as though it had been his idea all along. “Gather round, men, we’re going to split up into companies and head out in search of the assassins.”

In the end there were six groups of four men each; each was assigned a particular trail that seemed a more or less likely escape route. My party consisted of Herbert Braunschweig, Tim Niedel, Marc, and myself, and we were assigned the northern track, along the Verdigris river, which all seemed to consider the most likely route for the Benders’ escape. There was some grumbling among the other groups, but no one questioned Marc’s right to assign himself the best chance for capturing the Benders.

At the outset there were eight of us; we would split up when the river forked into two, up by Neodesha. We reached it after a couple of hours, with the Fall running westward to Eureka and the Verdigris eastward to the town of Toronto, and then we were four. The fog had begun to clear by that time, and from behind a gauzy cloud cover the moon bathed the land before us with enough silvered light to ride without much difficulty. The ground beside the river was soft without being too muddy, and when the last of the fog had lifted we learned that we had unknowingly been following a set of tracks, those of a wagon whose front wheels were narrower than the rear pair, pulled by a single horse with another walking beside it. The hoofprints of both beasts were narrowly spaced, suggesting a slow pace and a heavy burden; whether this was the Benders’ own wagon or not we had no way to know, but we took it for a good sign.

At Guilford, whose town limits bordered the river, we spotted a shanty near the trail and awakened its sole occupant. Standing outside, we described to the drowsy farmer the horrors that had brought us there, and the family we sought. Half-sleeping, shrouded in an atmosphere of whiskey fumes, he reported that he had spotted a wagon carrying a man and two women, and another man with them on horseback, sometime late in the day; he had no clock of any kind and couldn’t be any more precise.

“Was one of the men bent over at the neck?” I asked.

“Couldn’t say,” he said. “Too occupied looking at the younger of the women.” He sounded like a southerner, maybe out of Tennessee.

“Redhead?”

“She was, too, and she smiled at me.” He cleared his throat and spat at the ground. “I was right in the midst of putting up that chicken coop there.” He indicated with his thumb a jumble of sticks nailed together with some twisted wire to form the core of a structure considerably cruder even than his shack. “I waved a hello to ’em, and they waved back. They was asking how far it was to Toronto or Middletown, and I told ’em how far, but I knew a better way to Middletown than along the river, and as I told it they kept on a-going, and so I walked along with ’em a ways. Probably a mile and a half. I was awful interested in that redhead, and I asked her ‘Are you married to him, there?’ and she said no, she was his sister. I damned near proposed marriage then and there.” He laughed at the absurdity of it, showing widely and irregularly spaced teeth, two of the upper incisors angled crazily outward. “They said they was going to perform in a show, a traveling thing, and they wondered if I’d like to come along.” He looked over at the river in the direction they’d gone, the very picture of wistful regret, apparently having forgotten what we’d told him three minutes earlier about who the Benders were and what they’d done. “I got a claim to work, though, and I’m damned if I’ll wreck one more thing in my life.”

We bade him goodnight; he nodded and shuffled back into his shack and we continued northward. “You think we ought to have asked him about that shortcut to Middletown?” Herbert asked.

“There’s no train in Middletown. They’d be going out of their way,” I said.

“They’d have killed him if he’d come along.”

“A poor man like that?” Herbert said. “What for?”

“For the amusement of it,” Tim said.

Herbert took hold of a metal rod he’d stuck into his saddle bag. He slapped it into the hand holding the reins so hard just the hearing of it smarted.

“Where’d you get that thing?” I asked.

“Bender’s hearth. Reckon they used it for a poker. I was thinking I might beat ’em to death rather than just shoot ’em.” He grinned and laughed, and so did I, but Marc and Tim acted as if they hadn’t heard him.

Two hours later or thereabouts the wagon tracks ended at a broken-down platform spring wagon, abandoned with a split axle. They would presumably now be riding two to a horse, and heavily loaded down. On the wagon were various items of value too heavy to carry on horseback for any distance: two finely tooled saddles, an ornately framed painting of a sharp-nosed woman in a cap and high-waisted dress of the kind fashionable thirty or forty years previous, and an assortment of copper pots and pans.

“That’s theirs, all right,” I said, indicating the only pot in the bunch that showed signs of having been used to cook. “I saw that hanging over their hearth in January.”

“Maybe one of us should go back and tell the others to come this way,” Tim said.

“No,” Marc said with a dismissive wave. “We’ll have found them and dealt with them by the time anyone could reach us.”

Herbert spat onto the ground, vaguely in the direction of Marc’s left boot. “Gonna hang the women just like the men, if I have anything to say in the matter. You got any objection to that, Mr. Leval?”

“None whatsoever,” Marc said, though I didn’t expect he intended to be placing the ropes around their necks himself.

“If we don’t bring ’em back to town we’ll never know exactly what they done or who they was in cahoots with,” Tim said.

“I know goddamn well what they done,” Herbert said. “I was up to my goddamn knees in it.”

Tim shook his head and spat. “Horrible, just thinking about it. Them coming to town and socializing like regular people, and all the while they was slaughtering travelers. You figure they was doing that all along?”

“They showed up in ’70, the men first,” Herbert said. “April or May, the women a month or so later. That house went up pretty damn quick, as I recall, quicker than the stable. I reckon they was planning all along to lure in travelers.”

“Was it ’70 or ’71?” I asked. “Seems like ’71 was when we started hearing about men setting out for Osage Mission and not getting there.”

“What gives me the fantods is that damned cellar underneath the house,” Herbert said. “Looks like they were all bled there.”

“Well, their throats was cut,” Tim said, “they had to bleed someplace, and that way the blood wouldn’t be spotted if they had a visitor they didn’t manage to do in, like old Bill here.”

I had been going over this in my head since we’d left. “But the backs of their skulls were already bashed in. Why cut the throats of dead men?”

“Some kind of sorcery, you think?” Tim asked in a nervous whisper.

Then I told them the story of Mrs. Kearney of Cherryvale, of the rifle, the abortive séance and the priapic figure of the man on the wall.

“I always knowed there was something not right about that Katie Bender,” Tim said. “Her and her haints and her curing deaf and dumbness and blindness, I always knowed there was something unchristian about all that business. And you know she used to come to the Methodist meetings on Sundays.”

“The hell with that,” Herbert said. “A bunch of common thieves, that’s all they were. All that spirit business, that’s pure bunkum.”

“Question is, did Katie Bender think it was bunkum?” Tim said.

“I think she did,” I said, thinking of the faked séance at the hotel.

Tim was growing frustrated at our inability to grasp what seemed to him obvious. “Then how do you explain them bleeding them dead men into the soil under their house when they could have just buried them?”

I didn’t have an answer for that, and for the most part we remained silent for the next couple of hours. We followed the tracks as thoughtlessly as the horses we rode, with the hoofbeats beneath us and the nearly inaudible trickling of the river to our left the only constant sounds to distract us from our private reveries.

When I was fifteen years old, and circumstances had led me to abandon my formal education in favor of gainful employment, I found work at a big dairy farm nearby owned by a man named Rudolph Harding. Rudolph wasn’t a bad man, and not a bad boss, either; for the most part he was fair and even-tempered, but I didn’t like him much. Partially it was the fact that he was very religiously inclined, and since I was the son of a minister he tried to draw me into theological conversations as we worked, or ate dinner, or on a few occasions when he drove me to my mother’s house in town in his wagon for that express purpose. As he came to recognize that I had fallen away from the church after my father’s passing, he decided that it was his Christian mission on earth to bring me back into the bosom of the Methodist faith. I listened politely, since he was my boss, but I found these conversations all but unbearable for the simple reason that I was regularly having my way with Mary Harding, his wife. She was his second wife, and fifteen years or so his junior. Every time Harding and I ended our workday getting down on our knees together and praying (or pretending to, in my case) I was tormented by the thought of Mary’s pretty face contorted in ecstasy, or worse, of her mouth wrapped around my prick, and after a year I quit to take a job in town as an attorney’s office boy. Harding was wounded when I left, not least because my new position paid less than the farm job, but I had reached the point where I was sure I couldn’t stand another of those damned prayer sessions without bursting out with the news that I’d been laying his wife and so frequently that the only excitement left in it was the increasingly likely possibility that we’d be found out. We had to take whatever furtive opportunities arose for our intimacies, and Mary had become progressively more fearless, even brazen, in her certainty that Rudolph was too trusting and witless to ever catch us. By the time I left I disliked Harding because he had treated me kindly and fairly, thereby failing to give me a reason to justify the wrong I had done him.

This memory came to me unbidden and unwelcome as we rode along the river in single file, with my good friend and business partner Marc in the lead. Occasionally the tracks of the horses faded when the ground got hard or when for some reason they took them onto higher and drier land, but always they started up again, the prints closely spaced.

We did not precisely follow the serpentine path of the river as the Benders had but kept to a beeline adjacent to it; twenty miles or so to the south of Toronto we heard a commotion in the bushes ahead of us. It might have been anything, but John Bender’s furtiveness in the bushes a few months ago came again to my mind, and I stopped and dismounted, signaling as I did so to the others to continue on.