Cottonwood (31 page)

“That’ll show the sons of bitches,” he said as we mounted the staircase, lamps in hand, leaving the gory remains for Beatrice and Sally to remove. “What do you know, there was two of ’em after all.”

Madame Renée was in the kitchen, arms folded across her chest in a most forbidding manner. Herbert ignored this and embraced her, planting a kiss on her pursed lips and laughing again.

“Woman, we killed your rats. Let’s eat.”

She was still formal, if a little less angry. “They’re in the parlor. Tell them time to eat.”

In the parlor, to my surprise, I found my son, accompanied by a young woman I presumed to be his wife. He rose and, in a formal manner that reminded me again of my father, introduced me to her.

“Eva, may I present my father, William Ogden. Father, my wife Eva.”

“Née Mickelwhite, if I recall correctly.” She was small, with a long, equine face that was nonetheless pretty; when she smiled she showed a significant gap between her front teeth that did nothing to alter my previous impression. I took her hand and gently kissed the back of it, producing a small wave of giggling that underscored her childish quality. “I always knew you’d grow up to be a beauty,” I added, though in fact I didn’t remember her at all, except as an indistinct component of a gaggle of tots rampant on the Mickelwhite farm.

“We’re expecting a little Ogden,” she said, and beside her Clyde reddened and nearly smiled.

“If it’s a boy his name will be Flavius Josephus,” he said, and though I thought that was a terrible name for a lad to grow up with I was glad that Clyde still gave some thought to his Latin.

Young Beatrice stepped past me. “Dinner’s served,” she announced, and then she slipped away again. I held out my elbow for Eva to slip her arm into and we moved along to the dining room, where Herbert stood behind his chair. Madame Renée sat at the head of the table.

Madame Renée turned to me as Beatrice began to pour the wine. Like Herbert’s, her glass eye had a tendency to wander, and at that moment it was gazing placidly away from her nose and toward the door of the room. I wanted to ask what had become of the fleshly one, whether it had been plucked surgically or had just withered away. “You know for years Clyde used to come over and speak French,” she said.

“Ninna left him and the girl here while she worked. He has an ear for languages.”

“Oh, yes, that’s so,” his wife said, her voice still a girl’s. “He’s always got his nose in one of those old Greek books you left him.”

I was inordinately, irrationally pleased to hear this additional evidence that Clyde’s classical education hadn’t ended with my going. “Is that so, Clyde?” I asked him over her shoulder. “You still looking at those Greek texts?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “The Levals have been generous enough to make their library available to me.”

“They’ve been very kind to us,” Eva said as Sally began serving a pâté of some sort.

“Best one-eyed French cook in southeast Kansas, male or female,” Herbert said, and next to me I could sense Eva tensing up. That tension carried through all of us until our hostess broke it by laughing, and by the time the main course arrived on the table the atmosphere at table was one of genial bonhomie, helped along by Sally’s overattentive way with the wine bottle. I had counted three bottles opened so far for a table of five, and on the side table stood three more.

Herbert was a noisy eater, and his first bite of the beef, still giving off steam as he shoveled it past his lips, burned him so badly he had to swig down a whole glassful of burgundy. I, too, scorched my palate through impatience, but the succulence of the meat and the thick, blackish gravy wouldn’t wait. The others sat there, blowing on forkfuls, mashing potatoes and carrots into the stew, taking tiny bites, but when the eating of the beef began in earnest not much was said for a good ten minutes, until we began to slow down.

“Your boy here’s done a good job on the saloon,” Herbert said, swabbing at his sauce with a crust of bread. “Gleason, too.”

Madame Renée stood, with some expenditure of effort, and went into the kitchen to oversee the dishing out of the dessert, and Eva turned to me. “Maybe you could come over after supper and see our little house.”

“I’d be delighted,” I said, and we passed the time waiting for the pumpkin pie talking about the house and the improvements Clyde had made to it.

Dinner ended and I boarded Clyde’s buggy, flanked by the happy couple. They lived a few blocks north of Deputy Naylor’s, in a square little house much in the style of the others around it. There was a fence to mark the periphery of the lot, and Clyde gallantly carried his wife to the front door, since she wore no galoshes. His own he removed at the door, as I did mine, and we crossed the threshold into their parlor, already lit with a pair of small lamps that gave off an eerily warm glow. “Mama?” Eva called out.

“Coming,” a female voice cried from the kitchen.

As I looked about the room I recognized several items that had once been part of Ninna’s and my household: a small framed daguerreotype of my parents and me, taken when I was about three years of age, a miniature German Bible I’d carried to war at my mother’s insistence and had held onto afterward for reasons still not entirely clear to me, that lithograph of the cathedral at Strasbourg.

Then from the kitchen came a woman I recognized as Agnes Mickelwhite, mother of Eva and various other little Micklewhites since grown to adulthood. She curtsied politely. “Mr. Ogden, so nice to see you.”

I didn’t think she meant it, though for all I knew the deep, corrosive scowl she showed me may have been permanently carved into her toothless jaw. Agnes was no more attractive than she’d been as a young woman, possessed as she was of her daughter’s oblong face but lacking her softness of feature and sweetness of character. I smiled, though, and bowed and kissed her hand as I had her daughter’s. “And how is Mr. Mickelwhite?” I asked her.

“I’m afraid he’s passed on,” she said. “I’m living with the children now, until the baby comes.”

Eva then showed me some small things they’d received as wedding presents—including a large silver bowl from the Levals—and when she’d done Clyde showed me his bookcase. There were all the titles I’d left behind, in addition to those that had come from the Leval library. He’d added a few of his own, too, expensive-looking, leather-bound volumes of Marcus Aurelius and Herodotus.

“The saloon must be doing all right,” I said, leafing through the commentary of the Herodotus and thumping its binding. “This is calfskin.”

“The saloon does fine. I also do the bookkeeping for a dozen businesses in town, the flour mill and Braunschweig’s brick factory among them.”

“Is that so?” I said, and looking around the house I was pleased at how well my boy had done; a businessman and a scholar, he’d never spend another day of his life behind a plow. That I deserved no credit for his outcome didn’t diminish my pride in him, nor my sudden enthusiasm for the grandchild Eva carried.

When we’d finished visiting Clyde offered to drive me home, but I assured him I was content to walk. He accompanied me to the door and stepped outside with me anyway, and I steered him away from the door.

“How well do you know the Leval boy?”

“Marc? Very well. He works for us sometimes at the studio, after school.”

“Does he have any idea of his actual relation to you?”

“We don’t ever discuss it,” Clyde said, and I clapped his shoulder and bid him good night.

I elected to walk home through the snow, though Clyde had assured me he was happy to lend me the buggy. The snow had stopped, for a while at any rate, and I enjoyed the sight of the sleeping town, its sky a luminescent maroon. There were lights burning in various windows of the Naylor residence, and within I could hear Mrs. Davis’s little girl crying. A block to the west I felt a blow struck at my shoulder, and I went down. It was too dark to see my attacker, but I thought he held a walking stick, and I concentrated my efforts upon wresting it from him. Once all four of our hands were clutching the thing I kicked him in the breadbasket, and all the air went out of him as he let go. I then swung the stick in an arc to my right, and its head hit his with a very pleasing crack. As he got up I saw that he was considerably bigger than I, and when he ran away it was with lowered head, bent halfway over to conceal his identity; nonetheless there was no disguising Mr. Smight’s distinctly vertical silhouette as he stumbled off in the general direction of the Leval residence. I still held the walking stick, and adopted a boulevardier’s jaunty stride as I resumed my walk home. It took me a minute or two to calm down and get my breath back, but once I had done so I felt invigorated and nearly happy; once I got downtown, where the streetlights were just being put out, I saw that I’d acquired rather a fine piece of woodwork, its head made of what appeared to me to be solid silver.

I stopped before the front window of Rector’s Department Store, which was piled with goods of various kinds, their prices written next to them on small cards. A pair of dummies displayed the latest fashionable clothing from Chicago, and between them was a tabletop cunningly arranged with various kinds of feminine ornamentation, from combs to hatpins to costume jewelry. The interior of the store was as black as a cave, and though I tried to make out its secrets it held them there, inscrutable, in the dark. The young man extinguishing the streetlamps had placed his ladder on the lamp behind me, and when it went dark there wasn’t anything to see in the storefront, either, so I moved along. Tiny crystals of snow spattered the exposed portion of my face, and the wind continued to blow the new snowfall in curvaceous patterns upon the old. I found myself before the Levals’ house, staring up at what I thought might be her window, my grip tight on the walking stick; the windows were dark, and I didn’t know if I was being watched or not. Starting on my way again I slowed at the sight of a lamp moving toward me, its carrier indistinct despite its light and that of the streetlamps. As we neared one another I made out the figure of a man with a spade in one hand. His clothes, too thin for the night’s cold, were considerably soiled, and his face resembled that of a corpse several days in the ground, doughy and pale, framed by wild strands of white hair. He held the lamp in his other hand at the level of his face like Diogenes; so frightful was his appearance in the close light of the lamp that it took me several seconds rooted in place to apprehend that this was no revenant from Hades, but plain Michael Cornan.

“Who’s there?” he yelled.

“Shh,” I whispered, mindful of those sleeping nearby. “It’s me, Ogden.”

He looked at Maggie’s house and nodded. “Sinner,” he hissed. “Father of lies.”

“What are you doing out in the middle of the night with the spade?”

He gestured with his grisly head toward the cemetery several blocks to our north. “My old dog Pal died.”

“You buried him in the cemetery? Must be hard digging in this cold.”

He stared me down, shaking his head. “Coming out of that whorehouse in the dead of night, and here I was ready to think you innocent.”

“Good night, Cornan.” I walked around him, careful to keep my eyes on the street. I didn’t want to stay around and get mad enough to lose my temper.

“The wages of sin is death, Ogden,” he yelled.

Without turning I waved at him, as if in agreement.

“Prince of Darkness. Lord of the Flies. Beelzebub.”

I walked very slowly up Lincoln toward the Braunschweig home until I could hear him yell no more.

In the morning I showed the stick to Herbert, and told him I intended to have a word with Leval about Mr. Smight.

“No, don’t, you’ll make things worse. Tell you what, let me talk to him about it. Can’t have murder in the streets.”

“You tell him the next time Smight tries anything I’ll cripple him, too.”

Herbert thought that was funny. “There you go, a matched set.”

I walked over to the courthouse after breakfast to attend the trial and managed to be at the courthouse for the beginning of the day’s session, seated so close I could have jabbed a pencil into the defense attorney’s ear if I’d been of a mind to do so. I was eager to hear the testimony of former Deputy Sheriff Gilbert Clevenger, who’d tried to arrest me after I shot Marc Leval. He answered Wembly’s questions without emotion, and if I’d been a juror I’d have thought his testimony credible. Clevenger had aged considerably since our last meeting; in the seventeen years gone by he seemed to have aged thirty, his long wrinkled neck flapping like a turkey’s, his mustache gone yellow-white with a fringe of tobacco brown at the lip. After being awakened by the sound of gunfire he’d come upon the injured Marc Leval—I figured in his story not at all—and soon after encountered Braunschweig and Niedel. Shortly thereafter he discovered that four of his horses were missing, stolen by the Benders to make their escape. He hadn’t struck me as a man fresh out of bed that night; he’d been fully dressed and seemed quite alert, and I wondered how the Benders had managed to steal those horses if he was indeed awake. I also chewed on the fact that he’d mentioned the Bender killings that night, when there wasn’t any way I could imagine for him to have known about them then, as far away as he was.

After a brief cross-examination of Clevenger by Mr. Lassiter, Mr. Wembly called to the stand Mrs. McCann, Mrs. Davis’s former employer and the woman who’d brought the defendants to the attention of the Labette County authorities. Tiny-boned and fluttery as a hummingbird, she barely came up to the middle of Wembly’s chest as she moved to the stand. She wore a set of apparently painful false teeth that gave her a pronounced lisp, and produced a clicking sound with each movement of her delicate jaw; her voice was extremely high in pitch and girlish, but her small face, round as a pie-plate, was marked with the furrows of a lifetime of sour disappointment and disapproval.