Cottonwood (38 page)

I turned to go. “I’m sure you have plenty to worry about, but you better keep this near the top of that list. I know where those two are buried,” I said, even though I didn’t.

I walked back to town along the tornado’s path. People filled the muddy streets now, and the sun had started shining through holes in the cloud cover. The church bells were ringing again, and I turned toward the boardinghouse. Inside Mrs. Kelley was sitting in the parlor in the company of Mr. Farraday, who glared at me.

“Where were you, Mr. Ogden? We were terribly afraid for you,” Mrs. Kelley said.

“Some of us were,” Farraday said.

I assured her that I’d been perfectly safe, and I gave a week’s notice; I was paid up through the end of the month and would require no refund.

“You’re leaving Cottonwood, then?” she asked.

“That I am. How are your wounds, Mr. Farraday?”

“Bettter,” he said. He folded his arms across his chest, as if to indicate that I wouldn’t get another word out of him.

“It’s Mr. Farraday’s belief that the bees were trying to warn us.” Mr. Farraday looked away, and I thought he resented Mrs. Kelley’s sharing with me his grand theory.

“Bees gone, then?”

“Mr. Lafflin managed to get them out,” Mrs. Kelley said. “With some difficulty and some injury.”

“Good for Mr. Lafflin,” I called out behind me, laboriously fighting my way up the staircase, and imagining the gladness my announcement must have kindled in Mr. Farraday’s heart. There were a number of dead bees in my room, perhaps forty or fifty, and I hoped that not all of them had given their lives in stinging poor Mr. Lafflin. I put on some dry clothes, washed off my bloody face in the washbasin and left, my precious copy of
The Secret History
in hand.

Following the storm’s path along the railroad tracks I found my hired gelding, broken and bloody on the rails near a lone boxcar that had been knocked clean off of a sidetrack at just about the point where the funnel had veered northward into town. I hoped I wouldn’t be held responsible for the animal’s value, and felt sorry that I’d taken it out on such a day. The easternmost third of the block that had contained the White Horse Restaurant was flattened, and the people who lived and did business there wandered about in confusion and despair at the extent of the wreckage. The Cottonwood Hotel was undamaged except for broken glass, and the only building west of it to have sustained any serious damage was the Leval/Rector mansion. Floating on its back in a rain barrel on Seward was the largest opossum I had ever seen, its pointed snout bloodied and its surprisingly ferocious battery of teeth posthumously bared; its scaly tail was the thickness of my thumb. Nearby, in the First Episcopalian Church, a morgue had been set up, and I went inside out of morbid curiosity.

There were four dead lying in state, all pulled from the wreckage of a single house from which, according to witnesses, they had refused to adjourn to a neighbor’s cellar. I heard the neighbor himself explaining it to the priest; they apparently believed that the power of their praying could avert the storm, that to repair to an underground shelter would have been tantamount to inviting God’s wrath. The two of them debated the theological point for a while, and I couldn’t help noting the expression of beatific calm on the face of one of the dead, a round little woman with brown hair going gray. The other three, two more women and a man, were so badly mangled their pre-mortem emotions couldn’t be readily divined.

Outside the church I heard preaching of the damnation-andhellfire variety, and around the corner of Second Street I saw Michael Cornan, bloodied and dangling his left arm at a crooked angle at his side, haranguing passersby. He had drawn a small crowd of the curious and desperate, and when he saw me he pointed and shrieked at me, in much the same tones as he’d used the night he found me standing outside the Levals’ window months before.

“There’s the cause, friends. There’s why God’s grace has fled Cottonwood like Lot in the night; there’s why misfortune has again visited our poor godfearing town.”

I should have walked on, but something about his performance fascinated me. There was a gash in his forehead, just above his left eye, that had mostly stopped bleeding, and his beard was stained with caked blood.

“Fornicators! Faithless deniers of the commandments! There stands your ideal, your epitome, your king. Learn from the Pharaoh’s mistakes! Repent now, and not after the next plague!”

His audience began looking at me instead of Cornan as he preached, and I moved on before he incited them to violence against me.

“You may walk away from me, sinner, but you can’t walk away from the sins that fester here,” he called to my back as I walked away.

That evening I called at Clyde’s. Ninna was there with her husband and daughter, and when I announced my intention to go all but Eva’s mother seemed genuinely sorry to hear it. Young Eva wondered if I wouldn’t at least stay until the birth of the child, and I told her I might. I went out the front door with Clyde, where we surveyed the street in the failing light of day. Twigs and leaves and whole branches littered it, and puddles of dirty water pooled in the rutted sand, but here there was no real damage to any of the houses, and without knowing anything about the destruction a few short blocks away the scene would have had a serene, homespun charm. The air smelled of the rain still, and the few clouds that remained above us were fluffy and innocuous, floating slowly westward in the wake of the storm.

Clyde offered me a drink, which I declined. I told him he looked tired, and he told me he’d been sleeping poorly, out of worry about the baby and impending fatherhood.

“What are you reading these days?”

“Suetonius,” he said. “Re-reading him. Maggie’s library. You?”

“Nothing at the moment. My books stayed in San Francisco. For a long time I used to go to the Mechanic’s Institute and read there in my free time.”

“I do most of my reading at the saloon, in the slow hours.” It was remarkable how he resembled my father, who’d died a much younger man than I was now, and not much older than Clyde. It was at that moment that I saw how much he resembled me as well, and I felt a sudden piercing sorrow and fervent hope that the resemblance was only physical.

I handed him the Procopius. “I found this in San Francisco before I left and read it on the trip east.”

“I’m not familiar with this.” He eyed it curiously, opened it, examined the title pages, and then began to read the first page. He was laughing before he could have been halfway down the page. “How salacious,” he said. “May I borrow it?”

“Keep it,” I said.

He nodded. “Do you think you’ll come back sometime?”

“I only stayed away before for fear of being hanged.”

“Not much chance of that,” he said. “Unless you shoot Mr. Leval again.” He snickered and looked out the side of his eye at me.

“I won’t shoot him,” I said. “He’s not long for this world anyway.” We watched a pack of dogs running east down the street, yelping and snapping at one another, and I wondered where they’d all come from, if they’d all got loose in the storm and banded together or if they ran together all the time. When they were gone I spoke again. “I might do something else before I leave, though, that I could swing for.”

He looked sideways at me again, but this time there was no silent laugh implicit in his expression.

EPILOGUE

Ventura, Cal.
June the 10th, 1935

Dear Clyde,

Trust you and your young wife are well, and the boy. All here
are healthy and as prosperous as can be hoped. Flavia is laid
up with a cold and Jake is in a foul mood about dinner not being on the table when he comes home from work, but if the alternative is me cooking he’s happy to do it himself.

We are in the midst of the “June Gloom” here, with fog lying
heavy on the coast every morning, sometimes lasting all day.
Today on my daily constitutional I witnessed an automobile
accident at the intersection of Poli and Ann Streets, just a few
blocks east of Flavia’s house. A beer truck hit a Plymouth, both
drivers blinded by the fog. No one was badly hurt, though the
driver of the Plymouth—still drunk from the night before—
cracked his head on his windshield and bled quite a bit. The
yeasty smell of beer rising from the macadam was quite pleasant, to tell the truth.

Your brother Marc writes that his daughter is now out of
nursing school, and plans to move to Wichita for hospital
work. I trust you will keep abreast of her activities and watch
over her in an avuncular manner; she isn’t a city girl, though
Marc says she likes to imagine that she will be one day merely
by virtue of moving there.

Flavia has been mildly annoyed with me of late because I’ve
been telling your grandchildren tales of the wild west, cowboys
and Indians and outlaws, stories cribbed mostly from the
moving pictures, since the real ones are mostly unsuitable for
children. They don’t know the difference, in fact I’m sure they
prefer the made-up ones. Sometimes I take out my old Dragoon to show them; one day last week I even took out the LABETTE CO. SHERIFF’S DEPUTY badge—I long ago, you’ll be glad
to learn, got rid of the patch of blood-stiffened muslin it had
been pinned to—and told them it had been my own. I imagine
its original owner was gnashing his teeth in Hades at my lies,
proud as he was of that hunk of tin.

The children lost interest in me and my stories quickly enough,
though (as they tend to do), and went outside to play at gangsters, a far more salubrious and amusing game than cowboys
and Indians in my view.

Write soon.
Affectionately yours,
Father

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The town of Cottonwood is a figment of my imagination, and I hope the real towns of Independence, Cherryvale, and Oswego, Kansas, will forgive my assigning bits and pieces of their histories to my fictional one. The characters herein are all fictional as well, with six notable exceptions: the Bender family, Mrs. Almira Griffith, and Mrs. Eliza Davis, whose actual lives were even more depraved and appalling than those presented here.

Readers interested in the true story of the Bender killings would do well to seek out
The Benders of Kansas
by John T. James (available from the publisher, Mostly Books, 111 East Sixth Street, Pittsburg, Kansas 66762). Written by the defense attorney who represented Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Griffith, this is by far the best account of the crimes I have found in print. I am grateful to Roger O’Connor, publisher of
The Benders of Kansas
and the man who knows more about the case than anyone else living, for his insights into the story. He is at work on a book about the case that promises to be the definitive account, and I anxiously await its release. (Another noteworthy version of the story still available is Fern Morrow Wood’s
The Benders: Keepers of the Devil’s Inn
, which comes to a very different conclusion—an interesting one though I disagree with it—regarding the identities of the two women.)

I am also indebted to the staff of the W.A. Rankin Memorial Library in Neodesha, Kansas; to Sally Hocker and the staff of the Spencer Research Library; and to the staff of the Kansas State Historical Society.

For research into photographic technologies of the nineteenth century I owe thanks to Rob McHenry, and to David Starkman and Susan Pinsky of
www.reel3d.com
. Rick Lasarow, M.D., checked the manuscript for medical accuracy and patiently answered my foolish questions, and Tim Moore helped me understand elements of early Kansas law. Kerri Kowal answered my questions about human decomposition, and her husband, Erik Kowal, helped me with my queries into the Danish language. Though the central character in this book is a classics scholar, I am not, and so I am particularly grateful to Timothy Engels for his help in constructing Bill’s Latin and Greek bibliographies. My brother-in-law Richard Monroe also helped out in the area of Latin grammar, and once again my friend and German translator Karl-Heinz Ebnet ensured that the German in the book was correct and appropriate to time and place.

Special thanks are also due to my editors, Dan Smetanka, Maria Rejt, and Joe Blades. Clair Lamb caught any number of inconsistencies and mistakes, and Charles Fischer, David Masiel, Terrill Lee Lankford, and Tod Goldberg all provided useful comments early on. Sylvie Rabineau, Abner Stein, Paul Marsh, and Dennis McMillan all have my gratitude, as of course does my friend and agent, the redoubtable Nicole Aragi, the best in the business. . . .