Cottonwood (20 page)

“Wilson,” he said. He was oddly docile and seemed, I thought, almost pleased at this turn of events. Wishing I could go to Tim and Herbert’s aid I hurried instead to my dead horse, took what I could from the saddlebags, climbed aboard the deputy’s fresh horse and kicked its flank. Looking back I could see him for a long ways, thanks to that big white hat.

Discretion should have dictated that I stay clear of the Bender farm on my way back to Cottonwood; in fact a man in full possession of his senses would have bypassed Cottonwood entirely, followed the Benders’ lead and fled northward. Instead I rode directly to the murder site. Stopping a distance from the mound I dismounted and approached the house on foot. The crowd that had gathered there was noisy enough to be heard at a distance of a quarter mile, and the atmosphere was that of a carnival. People must have come from all directions to gawk; I would have estimated their number at well over a thousand, a far larger group than I’d ever seen assembled in Kansas. At first I saw no one I recognized, and then I spotted young Gleason setting up the camera next to one of the opened and presumably now empty graves. He glanced up as though he sensed he was being watched and he nodded at me and returned to his work. I watched him at it for a moment and then, curiously pleased by his competence, moved on. I counted seventeen coffins on the ground, all brand new, and wondered whether the cabinet-maker in Cherryvale had been holding so many ready-made in stock or whether he had worked all night to cover the deficit. Standing over one of the coffins was Mr. Henniston, and I nearly approached him to say hello when it struck me that I shouldn’t let myself be seen. I didn’t think Gleason would betray me, and no one else had shown any sign of recognition, so I turned and walked back to the tree where I’d tied the deputy’s horse, and started riding back to town.

Within five minutes I met a party of men and women, denizens of the tent city, in a buggy on their way to the farm. They greeted me with drunken good cheer, though I didn’t know any of them, and I knew then that if I continued in daylight I would be recognized. I couldn’t appear in town until nightfall anyway, so I rode off the trail and over the mounds and made camp along Big Hill Creek. I was asleep the minute my head hit the ground, warm and safe under the deputy’s blankets, and I slept without dreams, at least any that I could remember upon waking.

By that time the sun was low, and I felt perfectly refreshed. After the sun was well down I remounted and found my way back to the trail. I met no one going the other direction, though I could hear another raucously noisy party behind me. I rode fast enough that the sound of them receded into the distance by the time I arrived at the outskirts of Cottonwood, and I took the horse off the trail there, riding to the north until I was directly behind the Leval estate. I crossed it on foot and was shortly at the rear entrance, where I hitched the horse. I was still calculating the time I’d lost by not heading straight for the Osage Territory alone, and the risk involved in asking Maggie to come along, seeing as I’d just shot her husband down. I knocked on the door, convinced the gamble was a good one.

Rose opened the door and was clearly disappointed to see me and not her employer. “Where’s Missus?” I asked her, as if the missus in question were my own.

PART TWO

GHOSTS OF THE OSAGE 1890

1

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY, 1890

Slumgullion

Once, wandering northward early in the summer of 1864, I came upon a ruined one-and-a-half story farmhouse by the banks of a stream. The house itself, burnt out and long since emptied of all valuables, was practically roofless, and so full of holes as to be useless as shelter against the elements, but behind it stood a greenhouse whose remaining glass shingles glittered gray-brown in the sunlight like river mud.

Inside it I found only faded red pots, most broken, a few still containing a rich, stinking black soil into which all vegetable matter in the structure had long ago disintegrated; two thirds of the panes had fallen from the roof and walls, and lay on the floor in jumbled shards that crunched beneath my boots with each shifting of my weight. A scratching and clicking like those of a squirrel’s claws against glass made me glance upward at the ceiling, through which I saw gazing placidly down at me the lovely, spectral face of a woman.

Badly startled, I slipped and fell backwards against a potting table, which saved my hands being cut by the slivered glass on the floor. Leaning on it with my elbows I looked timorously back up to find the transparent lady still staring at me, her wistful smile as faint and pretty as condensed breath on the pane, tendering grace and unearned absolution.

It was a moment before I took note of her neighbor to the left, a seated man in a top hat, or the elderly couple to her right; as my brain digested this new information the lady transformed before my eyes from ectoplasm to ambrotype, her fading emulsion struck by the sun’s rays at the precise acute angle required to create the illusion of a positive image. The sheet was about ten by twelve inches in size, and unusual in that the photographer had made a very close composition of the lady’s head, his depth of focus so shallow that only her eyes and lips were sharp, her nose, ears, throat and collar all softened into an indistinct haze.

All the other shingles still in place proved to be discarded, back-less ambrotypes also, and carefully picking up from the ground a sliver of a broken one as curved and sharp as a scimitar I was able to distinguish a sloppily knotted cravat and the lapels of a coat cut in a no longer fashionable manner. I had no particular knowledge of photography then, but I knew the stories of battlefield photographers cutting windowpanes from their frames in abandoned houses for use as plates. This was, I supposed, the civilian householder’s revenge on the vandalizing photographers, letting the sun slowly bake their hard work back into clear, unadorned glass sheets. I had earlier entertained the notion of sleeping in the dilapidated house, but despite the lady’s beauty and benevolent aspect, the idea of spending the night in a place that produced phantoms in daylight made me uneasy, and I continued on down the road.

It was a lovely morning, the clouds wispy and slow-moving across the San Francisco sky, and stepping out of my studio with unpleasant business ahead of me I decided a walk would do me good. Instead of boarding a cable car, then, I walked to Kearney and followed it southward; at Clay Street I turned right and descended it until I arrived at a narrow building with no sign on its facade but the word WINE crudely painted above its door. The ramshackle building was in considerably worse condition than when I’d won it in a card game from a cousin of my own landlady’s, so drunk he bet the deed on two pair, eights and fives; his losses for the evening would have supported a family of four for a year. That the property was most likely worth less than the cash value of the bet he was trying to cover didn’t bother me much at the time, because I thought I’d make some money renting it. I never got around to throwing the current tenant out the door, though, or to making the improvements I’d planned, and in the end the place seemed destined to cost me rather than earn me money.

The reek from inside was almost enough to keep me from my task, but I crossed the threshold and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light. The building had once housed a proper saloon, for there was a blond patch on the floorboards in the shape of a bar, and another four feet behind that against the wall where a backbar had once stood. Stretching into the impenetrable blackness of the rear of the establishment were four long tables crowded with the most dissipated kind of drunk, most of whom looked close to unconsciousness. Most didn’t look up at my arrival, but those who did were engaged in nothing more neurologically taxing than tracking a moving object with their eyes, most of those red of vitreous, black of lid and dead in appearance.

At the rear of the building sat a thickset man stirring a cauldron on a low stove, its flame casting an orange glow on his right side. A boy who looked all of eleven or twelve years old scurried between the tables collecting empty vessels with alacrity, darting like a barn-swallow from cup to stein to can, often as not to a wino’s urgent but unintelligible protests. Once, arms laden with four containers of different sizes and materials, he neatly avoided a haymaker so wildly thrown that the lad giggled as he ducked it; the man that threw it fell forward over the rude pine bench and hit his head on the next bench over. When the souse got up and looked around he seemed not to remember how he’d ended up on the floor, and the blood that ran down his forehead and past his cracked lips to his filthy shirt collar was a source of mystery to him.

The man at the back of the room squinted at me as I strolled past his degenerate clientele. Once I got to the back it didn’t seem quite so dark, and the man lost his demonic aspect. “Stew’s a nickel a plate, wine’s a nickel a cup. Bring your own cup it’s still a nickel.” Behind him I distinguished in the firelight a shabby trio of old men, sleeping against the wall.

“You wall-eyed son of a bitch, it’s me, come to collect your arrears.”

“You can go and fuck yourself, ’cause I ain’t got it,” Morley said with a throatful of phlegm, which I was relieved to see him disgorge next to the stewpot and not into it. His old gray shirt had no collar attached, and it was open halfway down his chest, which was remarkably hairy except where it was scarred. He was unshaven, and where it still grew the hair on his head was long and hung in dull black oleaginous strings down to his shoulders. His eyes were partly obscured beneath thick orbital ridges adorned with the hairiest brows I’d ever seen, and after a moment he turned his attention, unconcerned, back to his potage.

“Pay up or get out,” I said. He continued to stir the pot, slowly, and then leaned in and took a long sniff, which produced a look of great satisfaction, accompanied by a heavy, happy sigh. The smell back there, oddly enough, wasn’t as putrid as it was in the front, where the winos sat; still, I wouldn’t on a bet have eaten a plate of that stew, upon whose surface sat a slick of yellow grease, its sheen broken occasionally by a bubble rising from the bottom with a gurgle. He actually looked up at me and offered up what looked like a genuine, proud smile.

“Now how’d you like a nickelsworth of the best stew on the Pacific coast, on the house for the landlord?”

“Thanks anyway.”

He looked offended, but he was shortly distracted by the arrival of a silhouette at the front door at which he squinted again, painfully, with his jaw hanging open.

A small man in a wretched suit of gray made his way shakily down the aisle, shuffling past the long tables lined with his besotted peers into the darkness of the back end of the narrow building. In his upraised hands he carried an object approximately the size of a paving brick, sloppily wrapped in butcher’s paper, and when he got within four feet of us Morley’s look got harder.

“What you think you’re doing here, Hamner? I told you to clear out.”

Trembling, the little man pulled back the paper to reveal a repellent slab of raw gray meat, releasing at the same time a stench so powerful it actually roused one of the men sleeping on the floor behind us. This old man sat up and leaned against the wall, scowling at the odor, and I saw that he wasn’t particularly old after all, perhaps no more than thirty, and as skeletally thin as an escapee from Andersonville.

Hamner was a little healthier looking than that, with some degree of sagging flesh on his bent and fragile-looking bones. “I think it’s mutton,” he said. “I had to do a terrible thing to get it.”

Morley took the package from the little fellow and hefted it. “Two jars,” he said, then slapped it down onto a cutting barrel next to the cauldron.

“I was sure hoping for four.”

Morley made as if to rise. “Are you sassing me back, boy?”

“No, sir, I just sure was hoping I could get four for this here. Like I said, I had to do something awful to get the meatcutter to part with it.”

“Three, then.” Morley pulled a big tin cup down from one of the hooks and filled it. Hamner took it over to a table in the corner and took a long swig, holding the cup reverently with both hands.

Morley took as good a look at the meat as the light permitted, and he growled as he started hacking at the meat with a dirty jackknife. It was an exceptionally gristly hunk of meat, and he had to saw at it almost from the start. “Hamner, you son of a bitch, that’s the only cup you’ll be gettin’ for this lump of maggots and gristle.”

Poor Hamner looked up like a boy who’d just lost his dog.

As Morley plucked the maggots from the meat he tossed them onto the floor, which amounted to a kindness, since there was sufficient filth there to support their metamorphoses into big, healthy
muscae domesticae
. “Cocksucker!” he yelled at Hamner. “I by Christ oughtta take away the jar I already gave ya, you thieving cur. Maggots! Jaysus.”

Now Hamner looked like they’d found his dog rabid, and were cocking their hammers back to put it down. His lip quivered, and he pulled the cup close to his chest; Morley made no move to take it, though. Maggots disposed of, he resumed cutting the meat, which hung over the lip of the cutting barrel and dangled over the stew, into which it fell morsel by morsel as he hacked away at it. Jackknife in his big paw, he was sawing with considerable difficulty through a tendon, shifting his weight to get a better angle for cutting when that thin man sitting against the wall stood abruptly and began swatting at himself, screaming in terror.