Of Grave Concern (3 page)

4

You have a lot of time to think in jail.

I took Eddie out of his cage and allowed him to perch on my shoulder. There was no need for both of us to feel locked up. While I sat on my bunk and fed Eddie some crusts of bread from the lunch I did not want, I pondered my predicament. I was feeling sorry for myself and not inclined to think rationally about my situation, but it would have been disaster to give in to melancholy. So I forced myself to admit that I had been in worse circumstances. I smiled when I recalled the time I had nearly died of malaria after wading through a mosquito-infested swamp in search of the Ghost Orchid, or when I landed in a nest of copperheads after falling through the rotted floor of a haunted cabin in the Ozarks. Nothing bad was immediately going to happen to me, safe in my cell. I had food and water, and there was Eddie to keep me company.

What led me here?
I asked myself.

What hadn't
was the answer.

The murderous work of the Bloody Benders was discovered four years before I was compelled at gunpoint to become a guest of the Dodge City Jail. The Bender saga had bled across the front pages of every newspaper in America. I had devoured every story, because Kate Bender was in a similar line of work to mine, at least up until the time she took up killing as a profession.

The Benders were an ostensible family of four who came to southeastern Kansas to stake a claim on some of the land that was up for grabs after the Osage Indians were removed by the government. On a desolate spot on the Osage Mission Trail, they built a shack and called it the Wayside Inn, offering hot meals and rest to travelers.

Old man Bender was around sixty and didn't speak much, and when he did, it was in guttural German. The old woman was about fifty and pretended not to understand English. Both were unpleasant and feared by their neighbors. The son, John, was considered a simpleton and given to fits of maniacal laughing.

Young Kate, however, was different.

She spoke English perfectly, or almost so, with a trace of what most took to be a German accent. She was smart and charming and attended Sunday school with her feeble-minded brother. Declaring an ability to communicate with the spirits and through them to render magnetic healings, she advertised her services in local newspapers and promised relief from all maladies. She claimed to restore eyesight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. In lectures she promoted free love, denied the power of death, and demonstrated commune with the spirits by some modest humbug—table tilting, raps and taps, magic slates.

Kate also conducted séances at the family's Wayside Inn, where she was particularly popular with the male guests. In addition to meals and lodging, the concern also sold groceries and supplies, which were stored in back. This back third of the cabin was divided from the rest by a canvas hung from a rope, a common enough device on the frontier, and visitors were asked to sit at the table with their backs against the cloth. The backs of their heads made a dimple in the canvas, which provided a handy target.

The Bender men would swing a six-pound hammer into the proffered skulls, it was reported, while Katie would delight in slitting their throats. I don't know how the papers knew this, because there wasn't anybody left talking who actually saw any of the murders. Such a division of labor is a logical guess, I suppose, but maybe it was Katie who bashed them in the head.

Afterward, the bodies were thrown down a trapdoor and they tumbled into a bloody slab in the cellar beneath the shack. Later, they would drag the bodies out back and plant them in the apple orchard.

The motive was money, the newspapers reported.

Some of the travelers carried thousands of dollars in gold, the papers said, intent on staking claims farther west. Others had wagons and fine horses. But whatever a lonely traveler had, it seems the Benders would murder to get it.

You can only engage in this sort of business for so long, however, before somebody comes along asking questions. For the Benders, the end came when Colonel Ed York came looking for his brother, a physician who had left word of his intention to stop at the Bender inn.

Katie Bender smiled and lied, saying they had not seen the good doctor, but that perhaps he had been delayed by an Indian attack or some other calamity. She promised to keep a watch out and even offered to conduct a séance to see what she could learn from the spirits—if only Colonel York would give her some time to communicate privately with the spirits. She urged him to come back the next night, preferably alone.

York declined. Uneasy, but lacking in proof, he moved on.

A few days later, a neighbor found the cabin vacated. Colonel York returned with a posse, finding to their horror the gruesome cellar—but no bodies. Then the good colonel noticed some depressions in the ground in the apple orchard out back, and someone began probing the soft dirt with a ramrod. It wasn't long before the rod brought up a tangled hank of blonde hair.

The first body recovered was that of Dr. Bill York, followed by many other corpses, and some parts of bodies. The Benders had killed at least eleven people, including one little girl accompanying her father. After the father was hammered and carved, the girl was buried alive in the orchard, the papers said.

The Benders, according to a family Bible found in the cabin, along with the six-pound hammer and an eight-day clock, weren't even all named Bender. The “son” was named Gebhardt, and he may have been the husband of Katie, who probably wasn't the daughter of the old man at all. But we'll probably never know for sure, as they disappeared as completely as the ghost of Hamlet's father at the cock crow.

But there were plenty of theories.

Some held the family made their escape by train and horseback through the Indian Nations to Texas. Others claimed to have seen the Benders in Kansas City or Michigan, and one account even had the infamous family making their escape to Mexico in a hot-air balloon.

A few said the Benders were already dead, that a Labette County posse had overtaken them and dispensed some frontier justice.

But, County Attorney Sutton, apparently, believed he finally had the real Kate Bender in custody. Proving it, however, would be a problem.

There's no way to conclusively prove a person's identity, except through a good photograph or by the living testimony of those who know her.

The authorities had only one picture of Kate Bender, a blurry tintype. It was an image that could represent a thousand young women in any given city. That could work both for and against me. People see what they want to see, and if they are inclined to believe I'm Kate Bender, they'd see me in the tintype. As for the memory of witnesses, it is a malleable thing that can be corrupted by anything from wishful thinking to an outright bribe to a bad night's sleep.

I estimated my chances were good for being dragged to Labette County and forced to stand trial . . . and perhaps even hanged. Juries are composed of men who represent a consensus of public opinion, and public opinion (no matter how those men may think or behave in private) always goes against a woman like me.

5

Women like me.

Exactly what kind of woman is that?

First of all, let me emphatically state that I am not a whore. That rumor has dogged every woman independent of mind or body since Eve plucked the apple. Never have I broken a home—happy or otherwise—although my own heart remains irrevocably shattered. I suppose it fair, however, to allow that I have sometimes used my feminine charm to get by. Violence repels me, so you will find none to suggest I have physically harmed another, and I am certainly no murderer like Katie Bender. But other charges have been leveled against me: I am a liar, a thief, a swindler, a con woman, a free lover, and a hypocrite. Those descriptions you will have to judge for yourself.

I am a Spiritualist, and I come by it honestly.

Spiritualism is a uniquely American invention, equal parts religion and carnival sideshow, a largely benevolent and oddly matriarchal institution that appeals to the adolescent sense of angst and awe in all of us. It has been known now for less than thirty years, ever since two little girls in New York state claimed they could talk to the dead.

The little girls were named Kate (of course!) and Margaret Fox, and they scared themselves and their family silly by saying a spirit calling itself “Mr. Splitfoot” would answer their questions through otherworldly raps, taps, and knocks.

From the very first, the messages spelled murder.

A peddler had been killed years ago and his body hidden in the basement of the family's home, old Splitfoot said. The Fox family dug, but they never found any bones. Seems the basement was prone to flooding, which made the search difficult. But despite the lack of evidence, soon all sorts of people were coming to see Maggie and Katie communicate with the dead peddler. The thing became formalized when the family started calling the demonstrations
séances
—French for “session,” but which means far more now.

The sisters became a sensation, and before long they could communicate not only with the spirits of lowly murdered peddlers but also dead dignitaries, including George Washington and randy old Ben Franklin. Eventually the sisters were playing packed opera houses and making more money than their poor blacksmith father ever dreamed.

Spiritualism became the newest rage.

After all, if messages could be sent via Mr. Morse's telegraph, which clicked and clacked, then why couldn't a sort of spiritual telegraph carry messages from the other side, in raps and knocks? What hath God wrought, indeed.

People found this new idea of life after death comforting in a way that the old religions didn't offer. There was no need to consult your preacher for answers or trust that all would be revealed in the fullness of time. Instead, all you had to do was sit at a table in the dark, ask whatever questions were lodged in your heart, and count one rap for “yes” and two raps for “no.”

In haunted Memphis, a house was not truly considered a house unless it had a full complement of ghost, and the stories that went with them. Spiritualism was accepted as just another part of the supernatural order.

 

 

My earliest brush with the other world came in 1858 when the steamboat
Pennsylvania
met disaster at Ship Island, sixty miles below Memphis. On June 13, her boilers exploded and 250 were killed outright, while dozens more were scalded to death by the steam or burned up in the fire that raced over the ruined hulk. The wounded were rushed by other boats to Memphis, where they were put in the great hall of the Exchange, and were constantly attended by a battalion of physicians and nurses. The ladies of Memphis also turned out, bringing flowers and candy and whatever else they thought might give some small comfort.

My mother was one of the ladies, and she dragged me with her to the Exchange. I had come to dread anything my mother thought was good for me, especially the Sunday-morning command performances at the Wolf River Baptist Church. I hated the suffocating Sunday clothes, I hated the sermons that preached slavery was ordained by God, and eventually I convinced myself that I hated my mother.

At the Exchange, we passed as quietly as in church among the rows of the men wrapped in cotton gauze soaked in linseed oil. Their breathing was tortured, their fingers and toes curled in pain, every one was cloaked in wicked odors. Many of the victims were deep in the embrace of morphine, silently wrapped in private dreams. Others were shrieking, and some begged for someone, anyone, to put an end to their suffering.

I was not yet eleven years old.

Each of the thirty-two men in the hall was a tragedy of unimaginable heartbreak, but there was one I remember with particular vividness. He was a nineteen-year-old mud clerk on the
Pennsylvania.
As I walked by his bed, a bandaged hand reached out and grasped my arm. He said nothing, but a single bloodshot blue eye blazed from a nest of gauze over his face.

“Hello,” I said.

“Annie!”

My mother tried to pull me away, but I resisted.

“No, my name's Ophelia.”

“Oh, my poor Annie! Don't you recognize me?”

Stoked by unknown fires, the eye flared.

My mother knelt, trying gently at first to remove the young man's hand from my arm, and then with more force.

“Please,” she said.

“Tell me, where is Sam?” the boy asked. “Is he on board?”

“I am here,” answered a slender man only a few years older than the stricken mud clerk. He wore dark clothes that were well-made but disheveled. Some kind of nautical hat, with a short brim, rested atop a crown of dark curls. A pencil and a brace of cigars were tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket. He drew up a chair and sat where the young man could see his face.

“I only stepped out a moment, my dear Henry,” the man said.

The man's voice carried the unvarnished rasp of the frontier side of upriver. It was shot with sadness and—at least I like to think now—carried the promise of wisdom. He was a cub pilot, on his way to earning his license. He had been responsible for securing Henry his position as mud clerk, a sort of unpaid apprenticeship.

“I shan't do it again, little brother, I vow.”

The blue eye closed in relief. The hand clutching my arm relaxed and the fingers slipped away. At the moment of release, I felt something electric jump from the young man to me, a kind of blue spark that did not burn.

“Thank you for staying with Henry until I returned,” the man told me and my mother in a soft voice. “I have sat here for the last forty-eight hours, and there are some things that are beyond the will of man to control. Many things, to my eternal regret.”

“He called me ‘Annie.'”

The man smiled.

“Our niece, our pet, the daughter of our sister, Pamela. She is about your age.”

“He shocked me.”

“I'm sorry, angel. His condition shocks me as well,” the man said, tears flowing. “I have humbled myself to the ground and prayed, as never man prayed before, that the great God would strike me to the earth, but spare my brother. If only He would pour out the fullness of His wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy upon this sinless youth.”

My mother put a hand on the man's shoulder.

“God's plan is not for us to know.”

“You do not understand,” the man said. “I will tell you. I left St. Louis on the
Pennsylvania,
but Mister Brown, the pilot who was killed by the explosion, had quarreled with Henry without cause.
He struck him in the face!
I was wild from that moment and left the boat to steer herself, so intent was I on avenging the insult. But the captain promised to put Brown off as soon as practicable, in New Orleans if he could, but by St. Louis at any rate. There not being room for the both of us on board, I stepped off the
Pennsylvania
five minutes before she left New Orleans, and sent with orders to take another boat to St. Louis. So you see, it was not God's plan that spared me from the inferno of the
Pennsylvania
—it was mine.”

“Sir,” my mother said, “you must not blame yourself.”

“Henry was asleep, was blown up into the sky, then fell back on the hot boilers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is injured internally. He got into the water and swam to shore, and got into the flatboat with the other survivors, with nothing on but his wet shirt, and he lay there, burning in the southern sun and freezing with the wind, till the
Kate Frisbee
came along. His wounds were not dressed until he arrived here, fifteen hours after the explosion.”

My mother cooed and patted his shoulder.

“But there is more,” the man said.

A week ago, while visiting his sister in St. Louis, he had had a strange dream. In it, he looked upon the body of his brother, dead, in a metal coffin, placed between two chairs. A bouquet of white roses rested on his chest, with a single red rose in the center. The dream was so real that he rushed downstairs, expecting to find Henry's body.

“If only I had realized the dream for the prophecy it was!” the cub pilot lamented. He took from his pocket a
carte de visite
photograph of his brother and passed it to my mother. Henry shared his older brother's strong jaw and high forehead, and the eyes had the same sad but mischievous quality. His hair was wild, as if he had just stepped out of his front door into a hurricane. The boy's clothes seemed two sizes too small for him. His outfit featured a vest whose buttons appeared ready to pop, a linen shirt with an irritatingly high collar, and an elaborately knotted silk tie at his throat, as if to keep it all together.

“But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth,” the student pilot said as he returned the photograph to his pocket. “You ladies have done well. Yesterday a beautiful girl of fifteen stooped timidly down by the side of our second mate, a handsome and noble-hearted fellow, and handed him a pretty bouquet. The doomed boy's eyes kindled and swelled with tears. He asked the girl to write her name on a card so that he might remember her by it.”

“How touching!” my mother said.

“Would it be asking much if your angel affixed her name to a card for Henry?”

Before my mother could reply, the man took the pencil from his breast pocket and handed it to me. The pencil stank of cigars. Then he gave me a card.

I wrote my name in a childish hand.

“Ophelia,” he read.

“It means help,” I said.

“Thank you, Ophelia Welch. You are too young to know what this means.”

He placed the card in the hand of his unconscious brother.

The mud clerk died within the hour.

Of course he had the metal coffin, resting across two chairs, and the bouquet of white roses with a single red one at its center.

But I had not seen the last of poor Henry.

Three nights later, his smiling face appeared in the mirror above my dressing table, undamaged as in the little photograph. But instead of being merely a frozen image, this image was alive. His face was illuminated by an unearthly blue light, his features were animated with mirth, and his hair was buffeted by some unseen gale. The ends of the silk tie danced and fluttered like the tail of a kite.

“O-
phel
-ia,” he called. “O-
phel
-ia, I see you!”

Then he laughed like a fiend.

I shot out of bed and spent the rest of the night with Tanté Marie, who patted my hair and told me that nothing in the mirror could hurt me. Still, she threw a cloth over the glass the next day. Henry never made any knocks or raps, but he found plenty of ways to show himself when I was alone. His face would appear in a windowpane or on a polished metal surface, or it would form in a bowl of water. Any reflective surface would do.

“O-
phel
-ia!”

Eventually I removed the cloth from my bedroom mirror. “Horrible Hank” had appeared to me so often that his appearance could no longer shock me. Being eleven years old, and steeped in Tanté Marie's stories about magical New Orleans, I assumed that seeing dead people was not all that unusual.

Besides, Hank told jokes.

“Why is a dog like a tree?” he would ask. “Because they both lose their bark when they die.”

Another: “Why has a chambermaid more lives than a cat? Because every morning she returns to dust.”

And: “What is the undertaker's favorite sport? Boxing.”

These were hilarious to my unseasoned sense of humor. As I grew older, the jokes grew somewhat coarse, and I would often catch Hank leering at me from the mirror.

“Stop that,” I would say.

But I was never sure if he heard me. If he did, he never gave a sign. Perhaps it was the eternal gale on his side that prevented him from hearing, or perhaps sound didn't pass from our world through the glass, or perhaps he just didn't feel like conversation.

Then, one night while I was sitting at the dresser and trying to draw a comb through my tangle of red hair, Hank appeared over my reflected shoulder. The wind on his side had calmed, his hair was positively neat, and his necktie was hardly flapping at all.

“Show me who you love,” he said, “and I'll show you who you are.”