Prairie Gothic (33 page)
Authors: J.M. Hayes
“It's not the abortion,” Judy tried to explain. “I'd support my daughters in that. Or help raise a child if they wanted. It was that they might be afraid to tell me. That they might go to some crazy, evil, unclean place just so I wouldn't know. It made me feel incompetent, like my failure to understand, and make our girls understand, contributed to something awful.”
“You've done fine,” Heather said. She wasn't angry anymore. She went across the room and into her mother's arms. Not fosterâjust a daughter to her mother at that moment. “We'll turn out OK, Mom. Really we will.”
***
Heather Lane was in bed. Judy had turned down the sheets in the guest room. Mad Dog would stay with them until he could seal up his house again. After Doc radioed with an update on the other Heather's condition, Judy's anxiety level gradually diminished. She abandoned the brothers to their companionable silence, the fire she had lit, the glasses of brandy she'd poured them, and followed her daughter's example. Boris and Hailey curled at their respective person's feet, almost muzzle to muzzle, drifting in and out of canid dreams.
“You're troubled,” Englishman said, “and not just about Buffalo Bob and your wolves.”
Mad Dog wondered if his brother was simply being perceptive or if his spirit still wandered that other realm. He nodded. “There were abortions in Benteen County. I should have known.”
“They're not illegal.”
Mad Dog nodded again. “True, but that doesn't make them right. Abortion is unacceptable.”
“Is it, Mad Dog? Is it really?”
“Every foetus is a returning soul.”
“Not every,” Englishman countered. “You've told me how Cheyenne souls recycle. You've also told me most people don't have souls. We're only meat.”
“Not you, Englishman. If you ever had a doubt, you should have lost it tonight.”
Englishman sighed. “Yeah. What are we, one-quarter, one-sixteenth? Our Cheyenne blood's pretty diluted. What about my daughter? Is she meat? Is Judy? How about Two of Two?”
“Not meat,” Mad Dog said.
“How can you be sure, Mad Dog? Today was my first experience with any of this. But you, you're a man who wants to serve the spirit world. You've told me you're a natural-born shaman.”
“I may have exaggerated.”
“But you have visited that other world. Many times. You said you recognized that skull you found today as Cheyenne. If you could do that, you should be able to recognize the soul of any Cheyenne, right?”
“I think so.”
“So you would have known if one of our Heathers was pregnant,” Englishman said, “unless there wasn't any soul there to recognize.”
“Actually,” Mad Dog said, “I think I knew.”
“And was there something there? Did you recognize a returning soul?”
“What are you really asking me, little brother?”
“I don't know, Mad Dog,” Englishman said. “I've believed in you for a long time. There've been too many things you understood that I can't explain away. I think you're right, but I think you're wrong too. I think you've latched onto a nineteenth century world view. You've grabbed hold of our mother's people's religion as it was in that brief time they were horsemen on the Plains running headlong into Manifest Destiny. I don't believe in meat, Mad Dog. I understand why the Cheyenne did. That's how they were treated, as if they were animals instead of people. That prevented them, and now you, from being able to recognize the rest of us, however flawed, for what we are. This philosophy of yours is narrow-minded and ethnocentric. It's Cheyenne to the exclusion of being human.”
“You, me as wellâ¦at least todayâ¦we touched some of what exists beyond the visible world. I don't know what to think about that yet. But I don't believe you've begun to comprehend it all. And I don't think you can decide whether all those girls who went to Harriet were murderers.”
“I'm just trying to do what's right.”
“Don't you think they were?”
Mad Dog swirled the brandy and stared into its depths. “Isn't truth eternal, Englishman? I have to follow my beliefs, even when they aren't easy.”
“So does everyone,” Englishman said. “But you can't hurt my daughter or any of those women. Believe what you want, Mad Dog. Don't harm anyone with it.”
“I wouldn't,” Mad Dog assured him. “My responsibility is to tell the truth as I understand it, not punish people.”
“I know,” Englishman said. Then he surprised Mad Dog one more time. “You told me about a place up on Pawnee Rock. A little spring where you said the spirits sometimes whisper. Let's you and me go there when it warms up. Offer some tobacco, sit and listen, maybe ask the spirits for guidance about the things that trouble us.”
“I'd like that, Englishman. I'd like that a lot.”
“Maybe we can take the girls with us. Judy too.”
“And Doc.”
“You thinking he, especially, needs guidance?”
“No more than me,” Mad Dog replied.
Englishman poured more brandy in their glasses and changed the subject. “You worrying about Dorothy and Mary? A resident of the Sunshine Towers confessed. The elevator's emergency exit opens on one of their secret escape routes. We'll probably find them tomorrow.”
“No. I don't think you will, and I'm fine with where I think they've gone. It's⦔
“What, Mad Dog, come on?”
“It's that cup.”
“Jesus, Mad Dog. You don't believe it was actually the Holy Grail?”
Mad Dog rubbed his hand against his chin. “Well⦔
Mad Dog & Englishman
, to which this story is a sequel, was my going-home-again novel. Thomas Wolfe says you can't do that. Singer/songwriter John Stewart (who has been scoring my novels, without his knowledge, since long before I began selling them) was more specific. In his song “Kansas” on album, he says, “â¦you can't go back to Kansas⦔
In spite of that sage advice, I not only went, I have returned a second time. I didn't expect to. Residents of the real Kansas, to which my Benteen County bears only an exaggerated resemblance, were probably thinking once was quite enough. Not that they would have easily found my book. There aren't many bookstores in the heart of the Plains anymore. They've gone the way of the Buffalo and the family farm.
Perhaps that's why it felt like the residents of Benteen County were so eager to escape onto the pages of another manuscript. They don't get out much. When they do, they do so with a vengeance. Benteen's residents took my plot hostage and began throwing me twists from the opening page. They spent a few thousand words relating their adventures, exaggerating a little, a lot, and maybe even indulging in a few tall tales. I juggled what they threw at me and tried not to leave any balls in the air at the end.
This is a novel, so its truths aren't limited to those confined by fact. Kansas is real enough, though Benteen County is a mix of personal memories and perceptions from irregular visits to Reno County over more than thirty years. The Sunflower State is prone to extremes of weather, but recent winters have been mild and the blizzard of January 2001 struck only Benteen County. Curious? See for yourself. Kansans delight in touristsâthey see so few. Old friend and fellow expatriate Kansan Mike Jacobs presented me with a t-shirt a few years ago. “Kansas Trek: to boldly go where no tourist has gone before” (Top Art Inc. © 1991). There's more to see than even the giant ball of twine and the Pretty Prairie Rodeo. Visitors really do pull off to the side of the road and wonder at that endless vault of sky. And Kansas has mountains more majestic than Mt. Sunflower, highest point in the state. They're mountainous thunderheads, and while they inspire fear as well as awe, they rival any natural wonders to be found at our national parks and monuments.
None of the characters are real. Except Hailey, but she's a German Shepherd and not a wolf hybrid. The two Haileys' resemblance is limited to the circumstances surrounding their rescues. The real Hailey is more a threat to Frisbees and tennis balls than bad guys. The character of the Hailey in this book is based on another pair of German Shepherds separated by forty yearsâSherry and Kimbaâand an unfortunate wolf hybrid, Casey Jones, I came to know in Albuquerque. Anyone considering wolves and wolf hybrids as pets should reconsider, or enter into the relationship only after very careful study. There's a difference between our companions and our competitors.
There also was a real Louis Henry Silverstein. He was the acquisitions editor at Poisoned Pen Press to whom I submitted. Louis passed away while I was writing the sequel. The Press sent an announcement and asked authors who knew him to write up their memories. We never met, except by email, though he had a profound impact on my life. I thought I might offer a small memorial of a different sort, and so “The Guardian of the Words” came to Benteen County.
There are those who truly believe in the family of the Magdalen. A German SS officer named Otto Rahn did search for the principal religious artifact in this text, and claimed to find it before dying in the snow of the Tyrolean Alps. After that, why not on to Kansas?
Mad Dog's Cheyenne philosophy is as accurately depicted as possible. Dr. Karl H. Schlesier, author of, helped me keep it so. Where Mad Dog may err in interpreting that philosophy, it's because he was misinformed by me.
Further credit where it's due. The quotes from the witch at the end of the hall, as well as Two's response, were all borrowed from Shakespeare (
King Lear
,
Julius Caesar
,
Macbeth
,
King Henry V
,
King Henry VI
), except and in order: Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”), Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(First Inaugural Address)
, Ned Washington (“High Noon”), Tennessee Williams
(Camino Real)
, Emily Dickinson
(Part I, Life)
, Virgil
(Aeneid)
, Henry Van Dyke
(The Prison and the Angel)
, Oscar Levant, an epitaph quoted by William Camden
(Remaines Concerning Britaine)
, William Ernest Hedley (
Echoes
), Mark Twain (“Note to London correspondent of the New York Journal”), Edwin Arlington Robinson (
New England
), Robert Southley
(The Soldier's Wife)
, and Woody Allen
(Take the Money and Run)
. Oh, and Judy's line, though not an accurate quote, is from the film
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. As for Oz, L. Frank Baum's imagination forever linked it to Kansas in 1900. Unless it wasn't imagination. Might Baum have actually visited these magical realms and reported fact instead of fiction? Mad Dog's expert opinion can be solicited over a slice of chocolate pie at Bertha's. Or we'll ask Dorothy, if we find her.
The usual suspects should be rounded up and thanked. You know who you are.
My critique group worked miracles and helped keep me on target while the citizens of Benteen County ran wild. They include Sheila Cottrell, Elizabeth Gunn, Mary Logue, and E.J. McGill; all, in one way or another, there from beginning to end. Margaret Falk and Bill Capron passed through and were significant contributors. Friend and author J.R. Dailey also read the manuscript, listened to me whine, and offered encouragement or suggestions, as appropriate.
Thanks to J.C. Martin of, and perhaps Bruce Dinges of The Arizona Historical Society, for the title. It's perfect.
Special thanks, again, to the wonderful people at Poisoned Pen Press. Without editors and publishers like Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald, who care enough to pick up the slack left by the big-box, one-size-fits-all publishing houses, there would have been no sequel, nor anything on which to base it.
Without my wife, Barbara, none of this would be possible. She helped shape whatever might be of value in these pages. For the flaws, I alone am responsible.
JMH
Tucson, by way of Hutchinson, Darlow, Partridge,
Manhattan, Wichita, Sedna Creek, et Tabun,
Albuquerque, and a yellow brick road
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