Cottonwood (35 page)

Having quit the cemetery at its western end I spent a few more minutes skulking across dewy back lawns and through dampened shrubberies before finally reaching the Braunschweig home, very nearly as wet as I’d been that afternoon. My detour through the blackness of the bone orchard had been a profitable one; pressing myself flat against the side of the house, I spied Smight crouched in the shadows across the street with an eye on their front door. I slunk to the backyard and knocked on the kitchen door, and when Sally opened I raised my index finger to my lips.

She led me to Herbert, seated in his study cleaning his Colt. “What the hell happened? Old George Smight is out there camped in the goddamned bushes, and the girls won’t tell me squat.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and appeared quite relaxed.

“Where’s Maggie? What’d he do?”

“Aw, she’s upstairs with Renée.” As I turned to leave he called out. “Hold on, she’s fine, he just threatened her. Now how about you telling me what’s going on? Why’s George on the warpath?”

“I saw Maggie today, I don’t know how he knows about it.”

“You must have done more than seen her.” He let loose with a caustic little snort. “Sit down, why don’t you.”

“I’ll stand, thanks.”

“Well, Marc’s thrown her out, and he’s sent Smight to watch her. I guess she’s staying here for the time being.”

“What are we going to do about Smight out there?”

His eyes crinkled, and the scarring around the glass one went white against the ruddy pink of the rest of his face. “I guess we could just shoot him.” He started laughing pretty hard at that.

Beatrice cleared her throat at the door. “Mr. Braunschweig? Mrs. Braunschweig and Mrs. Leval want to know if he’s gone.”

“He’ll be gone in a minute, soon’s I’m done cleaning my Peacemaker.”

He brandished it, pointing the barrel toward the front of the house; the girl’s eyes got wide and she backed from the room. Herbert cackled and began loading the Colt. “You know I wouldn’t mind shooting that useless son-of-a-bitch.” He stood and I followed him to the front door. “You stay in here. He’ll listen to me, but you’re just going to make things worse.”

“You think it might be better to send Beatrice or Sally to fetch a policeman?”

“Hell’s bells,” Herbert said. “Don’t need any coppers to help me with this.”

I sat back down in the study, and looked at a framed photograph of the façade of the brick plant. I heard a yelp of pain outside like that of a small dog being whipped. Barely two minutes passed before Herbert came back inside, with no shots fired. “He’s gone now.”

There was a vivid spray of fresh blood on his right shirtcuff, and I asked him about it.

“I pistolwhipped that sack of shit right across the face, cut his nose open with the sight.” He started laughing, a nervous whooping that he had some difficulty in mastering long enough to speak again. “Got that pretty beaver coat of his bloodied up, too. Now tomorrow I’ll go talk to Leval and tell him to call that son of a bitch off.”

We went upstairs and knocked on the door of what had recently been my bedroom. Renée came to the door with much the same expression on her face that she’d worn ordering Herbert to destroy the kitchen rat.
“Alors?”

“Goddamn it, woman, how many times I got to tell you to speak English?” Her face didn’t soften, in fact it hardened so thoroughly she managed to frighten him. “All right, all right, he’s gone, and he won’t be back. Not tonight, anyways, he’s taking care of a bloody nose.”

“Can I see her?” I asked.

Renée stepped back into the room and shut the door, which reopened half a minute later.

“Another night,” she said.

Maggie didn’t leave the Braunschweigs’ house for the next seven days. Leval refused to allow young Marc to visit, and since by the next day most of the town knew the reason for her exile from her home (or some twisted version of it, altered in its details but accurate in its essence) no one came to call on her but me.

Herbert spoke to Leval as promised, and Smight stayed away from the house and from me, too. For the next few nights I surreptitiously visited the Braunschweigs’ after dinner, where I joined Maggie in her room. The servant girls let me in, and Renée and Herbert pretended they didn’t know I was there, though on one occasion Herbert and I bumped into one another in the hallway while I was on my way out. He punched me on the shoulder and snickered.

Maggie and I spoke as little as possible during those first midnight assignations, restricting ourselves, at her insistence, to the most practical kinds of speech: instructions to roll over, or move a leg, or help with a button. As the nights progressed, and the renewed novelty of one another’s intimate company faded, we gingerly began bringing up subjects from our shared past, subjects that, had we not replenished our affection for one another in the physical manner, might have been cause for ill will on both our parts.

I told her where I’d lived and how, leaving out at first the women I’d known. Soon enough, though, she asked about them, showing little jealousy but great interest as I described them. When I first brought it up she claimed never to have noticed Smight’s devotion to her, but the next night allowed as how she merely tolerated but never encouraged it. She nearly grew violent the next night when I mentioned it again, and though I felt sure there was more to be told I let it drop.

On the fourth night she began weeping uncontrollably as soon as I rolled off of her. Though I’d seen this behavior in half a dozen women over the years it was a first for her in my presence, and I placed a consoling hand on her shoulder. Perhaps I’d been too quick, or too rough; she shook her head no, it was nothing I’d done or failed to do.

She managed to regain her composure, but not her good spirits. “Everything’s gone wrong again. It’s punishment, Bill, just like last time. Chased from paradise, and after I managed to get back in, I spoil it by yielding again.”

“That’s goddamned foolishness,” I said.

“It’s not. Look at me. I can’t even leave this house. I’m reviled. I can’t see my boy. No one will speak to me when this is over.”

“Let’s leave. I can make a living anywhere.”

“I’m a married woman, with property, and I stand to lose a good deal of it if I leave Marc. And I’m the mother of a minor child I won’t leave behind.”

“He can come along, too,” I said.

“I don’t think so, Bill. I don’t think he’d leave his father, for one thing.”

“I’m his father,” I said.

“Things will go wrong again, Bill, I know it.”

“I don’t see how you and I can stay here, not together, anyway.”

She lay back and let out a long, exasperated breath. “Well, I don’t see how I can leave. Don’t you want to see your grandchildren born and grow up? Our grandchildren?”

“That’d be nice, I suppose,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I dressed and left shortly thereafter, feeling a bit of a chill at my back.

The next morning I got a surprise leaving Kelley’s boarding house. Crossing the street ahead of me was none other than Gil Clevenger, former Wilson County deputy; he had on a hat just like the broad-brimmed white one he’d had on when I’d tied him to that tree in ’73. I had a powerful urge to stop him and ask him if he remembered what had really happened. I thought of his testimony, and his claim that the sound of our gunfire had awakened him, though when he reached me he was fully dressed and showed no sign of having been freshly awakened from sleep. I thought again about him mentioning the Bender killings that morning, and then something really funny struck me. He’d asked me if I was part of the posse, a strange assumption for a peace officer to make about a man he’s just seen shoot another, a man in the process of tying said peace officer to a tree. I watched him board a surrey and ride off, and thought that the subject would bear more thought.

Later I stopped in to Rector’s Department Store for some tarpaper and nails to repair the roof of the studio and was waited upon by Michael Cornan, who seemed today to bear me no special ill will. As he wrote up my receipt I noted that his face was puffier than usual, with a red and swollen area on his left cheek.

“Did you hurt your face?” I asked him.

“Wasp stung me yesterday.”

“I was stung by a bee last week,” I said, omitting both the part of the body stung and the circumstance. “I suppose that’s spring on the prairie for you.”

“No, sir,” he said with great solemnity. “There’s nothing normal about it at all. I have never before been stung by wasp nor bee, nor bit by spider. Yesterday morning Mister Thorpe in Housewares came in with his hand all swole up, he’d been bit by a violin spider. Couldn’t hardly use that hand at all, and today he was so poorly he had to miss his shift. And Mrs. Rector had a mad barn-swallow in the house, nearly took her eye out.” He handed me my wrapped goods and the receipt, then leaned over the counter.
“Deus irae.”

Despite myself I had to swallow as I backed away from him. “Indeed,” I said, and I hurried downstairs and out of the store into the now-sinister sunshine. Further evidence of Mother Nature’s vernal malevolence came when I returned to the boarding house in the late afternoon to the sight of my landlady and one of my fellow tenants standing outside. Mr. Farraday, who worked for the city, bore several stings on his face and neck, and one on his hand. Unless I missed my guess he was next in line for Mrs. Kelley’s favors, and while we were superficially friendly there was always a calculating quality to his dealings with me. I always allowed him the advantage in our small competitions, and he must have been puzzled as to his failure thus far to replace me in her arms. He swelled with pride and venom as Mrs. Kelley described to me how she’d opened my room with the intention of cleaning it and found the room aswarm with bees. She’d screamed and run downstairs and, uncertain where I might be found, hurried to City Hall where Mr. Farraday gallantly abandoned his post and returned to the house with her. Alone he entered the house and discovered that the swarm had distributed itself throughout the upper floors, and he was stung seven times before he managed to save himself. Farraday was of the opinion that a hive had been founded in the attic, and now they awaited the arrival of Mr. Lafflin, a farmer and apiarist who, it was thought, might buy the hive and transport it to his farm.

“Otherwise we’ll have to smoke ’em out,” Farraday said. Despite the enmity he showed toward me I liked him and, particularly now, wished him every success in his courting of Mrs. Kelley. I congratulated him on his bravery and resourcefulness, and told Mrs. Kelley that I would spend the night at my son’s house. She seemed put out at my lack of faith in Mr. Lafflin’s ability to rid us of the bees by nightfall; I was convinced, though, that the other tenants were fortunate that the evening promised to be a warm one without rain. I wished I might have a chance to take a change of clothes away first, and briefly considered braving a trip to my room, but looking into the parlor windows I saw them outlined with bees, clinging in their puzzled way to the interior panes like beseeching phantoms. I walked the few blocks to Clyde’s house, where I asked Eva permission to stay the night.

“Will you stay for supper, too? You can go out for a ramble afterward,” she added, making me wonder if the whole town knew about my nightly visits to Maggie’s room.

“Supper would be delightful,” I said. Though I saw Clyde frequently, we rarely socialized outside of the studio, and I was happy to have a home-cooked meal. Agnes Mickelwhite grumbled at the sight of me, and offered the opinion that there was something not right about me sleeping on the
canapé
—she, of course, had the spare room—but Eva ignored her, and I ascribed Agnes’s hostility to circulating rumors.

To be polite, after dinner I inquired at the boarding house as to the disposition of the bees, and learned that Mr. Lafflin was still inside trying to manage the situation. Kindly neighbors had offered tents and blankets to the temporarily dispossessed, and the portly widow next door, she of the twinkling eyes and the permanently amused expression, informed me that every few minutes Mr. Lafflin, whose lantern could be seen intermittently in the upper story windows, let out a violent stream of blasphemies, which the widow repeated to me sotto voce. After paying my respects to the distraught Mrs. Kelley I made my nightly, laborious way to the Braunschweig home, taking as I did every night a different route. Tonight I circled to the south, along the railroad tracks, heading north at the city’s westernmost limit and east past the cemetery, and then south and slightly west again to the back door of the former brothel my friends had made a home. As was the case with the previous few nights, I was certain I hadn’t been followed, though I had certainly been seen and my destination surmised.

“I had a visit from Marc today,” Maggie announced, before she allowed me to begin undressing her (for she was always fully dressed and coiffed when I arrived). “He pointed out that in divorce proceedings he’d have the advantage over me. Depending on the judge I might get nothing.”

“I thought Herbert owned the judges around here.”

“He doesn’t own all of them, and there are plenty of them who remember me leaving with you.” She took a deep breath. “Marc was fully contrite, though, and he didn’t mention your nightly visits here.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know.”

“Of course he does. He’s willing to overlook a lot. He really does love me, you know.”