Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  THE STEREO VIEWS came out nicely, though not so nicely that I didn’t regret the loss of the trusty old camera I’d had to leave behind in Cottonwood when we went on the run. There were four of them, and I thought one should be unaltered for appearance’s sake; I chose for this the best of the views, and then I created a second negative of an amorphous haze using a lantern behind a sheet of muslin. This, superimposed onto the second plate, created the illusion of a partially materialized spectral body, roughly where the heart of a person standing next to the Colonel’s chair would have been. Seen through the stereopticon it was quite convincing and gave me a slight chill when I first saw a finished composite print. For the third plate I did something similar, with the luminous entity somewhat larger. And for the last one I made one more of the glowing, shapeless blob, after which I took several negatives of Maggie’s lovely, delicate hands at a distance from the lens that matched as closely as possible the Colonel’s, at roughly the level of his shoulders. It took me a while on the hotel roof to get the perfect print of the fourth view (the first three were so nearly effortless I wondered whether I shouldn’t make a profession of this), but when I had it, it was a thing of beauty, indisputably one of the most artistic images I’d ever made.

  Colonel Joshua Cudahy, in the winter of his years, sat weary in a fine oaken chair, and at his side floated a filmy apparition that might have been human in form or not, but for the proof offered by her hands, sufficiently materialized to register as they rested, transparent but unmistakably those of a woman, on the Colonel’s shoulders, as though the right arm were spanning his back and the left crooked to caress. The expression of weariness in his old eyes, the delicate interplay of light and shadow, the matching of negative to negative—they were all perfect, and perfection is an end I always attempt but seldom achieve.

  MAGGIE CONCURRED, AND she had no qualms about fooling the old fellow. She said that the notion that Cudahy thought that he was being haunted by the woman he’d loved was like something out of Sir Walter Scott (whom I doubt she’d ever read), and she was certain that if he sensed it, then it must be true. The fact that I was concocting sham pictures to convince him of the same did nothing to discourage her rapt interest in the enterprise, and in fact it was difficult to convince her that she couldn’t come along with me to present them to him. But if he understood that I had a female confederate, it might lead him to question whether those hands on his shoulders were those of his late wife’s otherworldly manifestation, and so I promised to relay to her a full accounting of his reaction.

  THAT NIGHT WE ate a much more modest supper, to my relief and at Maggie’s own suggestion, at a small restaurant operated by a German couple who laughed at my accent but complimented my fluency, telling me I spoke good German “für ein Ausländer.” The thick white sausages accompanied with sweet mustard and sauerkraut and a bottle of Rhine wine that we consumed pleased me considerably more than the previous night’s princely meal, and I felt a great sense of peace and satisfaction that I had succeeded in heading off my putative wife’s impending rage.

  As Maggie prepared to sleep I found myself restless. I put my clothes back on and left the hotel, wandering the streets until I found a saloon that looked hospitable instead of murderous, its patrons smoking cigars and laughing but not shouting at one another in a way that promised violence. Another point in its favor was that there were no women present, for in Omaha the only females in bars were there to provide services for which I had no more need that night.

  The bartender brought me my shot of rye and my draught of lager and I dropped the Colonel’s half-dollar onto the bar. There was a poker machine at the far end, and though I rarely found such devices tempting I dropped a nickel of my change into the slot and cranked the handle back. The machine dealt me three eights, upon which it deposited four nickels into the oval receptacle at the bottom of its cast-iron body. This was when I became aware of the presence of a tall and very drunken sot at my elbow.

  “Three eights. You know what that signifies?” He had long, oily black hair that hung in strings past his shoulders, and a long, well-trimmed beard, and he stared intently at me with tiny dark eyes, set a little too close together.

  “I do not.”

  “Three eights is twenty-four. Which is my age at the present time.”

  “That’s remarkable,” I said, trying hard to keep any tone of amusement out of my voice, since drunks who sense that they are being patronized can erupt in unexpected ways. And it was remarkable, because I would have guessed him to be forty at the very least; if he was telling the truth, then he must have led a dissolute life indeed.

  “There is an art and a science to interpreting coincidence, sir.”

  “Oh.”

  “Of course what the average man calls coincidence is in fact no such thing at all. Are you familiar with your Holy Bible?”

  “Intimately,” I said, neglecting to add that I didn’t lend it much credence.

  “For the price of a drink I would be happy to explain to you how various signs and wonders can be used to explain the world and its sundry denizens, and help us navigate the treacherous moral waters that surround us.”

  “The price of a drink?”

  “Not every Christian is a temperance man, sir. Jesus, after all, turned water into wine.”

  In the light of the gas lamp he swayed so hard he had to keep a hand on the bar to keep from toppling, and though his voice was firm I surmised he’d sampled a good bit of the stuff that very evening, just as I imagined the water-into-wine line was one he delivered two or three times a night. Nonetheless I felt magnanimous and fortunate in having been given, and satisfactorily completed, a difficult and remunerative task; so I bought him his drink and listened to his notions regarding using the Bible to tell the future. It involved numerology, by virtue of converting Greek letters (to my surprise he did display an admirable knowledge of the language) into integers, the whole enterprise vividly suggestive of madness.

  “How did you come to conceive these theories of prophecy?” I asked him.

  “I was born covered in a caul, and you know what that means to the ignorant. And so I was always being asked as a child to divine the future, which of course I had no earthly way of doing. And as the years went by I became interested in the notion that the Bible holds all the prophecy the world could want, if only we had the means to decipher its secrets. And so I began to study the book, but before long I realized that the true Bible was in Greek, not English or Latin. And there was in my hometown a very learned man, who volunteered to teach me Greek, and do you know that once I’d mastered the language I predicted the death of my tutor? And not a week later he was beaten to death by his own brother in a fight over a parcel of land. And I knew then that I had cracked it. And if you’ll advance me the price of another drink, I’ll gladly predict what’s to come for you.”

  I can’t say what caused me to turn down his offer; I certainly didn’t believe a bit of it, but there was something unclean about the fellow and I didn’t want him messing with my future one way or the other. I did buy him another libation, and left.

  AT FOUR THE next afternoon I took the wagon back to Bellevue, Brutus pulling at a pace more deliberate than was his habit. He was too old for this sort of labor, but I couldn’t afford a new horse any more than I could countenance the notion of condemning him to the glue factory, so I made allowances for his debility and resigned myself to longer travel times.

  The day was cold but the sky was blue and the light clear, rendering the landscape’s colors exceptionally vivid; the few clouds above me were perfectly white toward the top, fading to pale blue and orchid in their shadows beneath. Not for the first time I wished I could have been a painter instead of a photographer, if only for the possibility of preserving those fleeting colors for posterity.

  Several miles outside Bellevue I again reached the Cudahy mansion, where the butler let me in and led me to the parlor to await the master of the house. There I found Mr. Daniel B. Sila
s waiting also, and we quickly ran out of conversational pleasantries and sat clearing our throats, an awkward interlude that gave me the opportunity to examine a pair of old paintings hanging on the wall, both of which appeared in the photographs. They were brown and nearly opaque with a too-heavy coat of varnish, but it was no less clear that each had been made by the same hand, and that the painter had had little or no training. Still there was something pleasing about them, elk standing awkwardly around a watering hole with mountains in the distance in the first (one of the elk had an extra limb), and a bear much like the one in the entryway in the second. There was a demented rage in the bear’s eyes that was to my liking; it had been painted without much skill but with a passion.

  When Cudahy finally descended he was in a scowling, silent temper that was hard to decipher; was it melancholy or rancor or fear of the spirit world that kept him so quiet? He was wearing his buckskin suit again, and he seemed even older than he had the previous afternoon. By this time the last light was gone from the sky, and the butler limped into the parlor with a brightly glowing oil lamp. I produced a handheld Holmes stereograph and extended the first of the views.

  “Nothing,” he said, sounding neither pleased nor displeased, though quite as loud as ever, and handed it to Silas, who stuck out his lower lip and squinted.

  “Well, perhaps. Is that something there in the corner?” he said, proving that the mind is always prone to tricking itself, since this was the lone unadulterated view.

  “Might be, I didn’t see much in that one,” I said, taking the contraption back and reloading it with the second card. Cudahy took it from me and peered through the lenses with a scowl.

  “That some sort of fog, by your reckoning, or a fault in the picture?” he asked.

  “I asked myself that same question at first sight. A leaky bellows will produce a similar effect, and the same thing shows up in the third view.”

  Now Silas looked, wheezing slightly as he did so. “Might could be something there, Colonel.”

  I loaded the third view and Colonel Cudahy grunted. “More mist,” he said, turning it over to Silas and appearing to lose interest. “Don’t imagine that’s proof one way or the other, might be her or it might be you need a new apparatus.”

  I took the viewer back from Silas before he was quite ready to surrender it and loaded the fourth view. “That was what I was thinking to myself until I saw this one beginning to emerge in the printing frame.”

  Cudahy took it as though it were a loaded pistol. “Do ye mean to tell me you’ve captured proof of her existence on this here piece of cardboard?”

  “I don’t know about proof. I’ve seen such pictures before, but never one that made me shudder so.”

  Behind his moustache Silas looked perfectly spooked, and the color had drained right out of his face. “Have a look, Colonel,” he said, and the tone of his whisper had gone up a good octave.

  Cudahy placed the eyepiece of the viewer to his forehead, and for a moment all three of us stopped breathing; in my case, out of fear that he would see through my fakery, in Silas’s from a terror of the undead, and in the Colonel’s case I was left to wonder, until he flung the stereoscope away from him like a cottonmouth and pulled his chair back from the table. “Goddamn,” he howled.

  Naturally, I assumed the worst. Would I be sent to jail? Could I be prosecuted for creating a bogus spirit picture? Was there any law against such a forgery?

  Silas being too frightened to retrieve the viewer, I walked over to where it lay, biding my time in an attempt to come up with an excuse. But I was wrong; Cudahy believed.

  “She’s been here all along! And now I’ve proof! And proof that she means to do me in!” His voice had begun taking on a more rustic quality, as though his excitement were burning away a layer of acquired civilization.

  “Do you in?”

  “Damn it, man, you seen her hands around my throat!”

  “Begging your indulgence, Colonel, but it seems to me those hands are placed affectionately at your shoulders,” I said.

  “You didn’t know her! She means to see me dead before my time and I won’t have it. Did ye bring the salt?”

  “I did, Colonel. I left it on your porch.”

  “Haul it in, then. We’ll rid this house of that creature from hell one way or another and I’ll live out my years in peace!”

  I went out to the porch, equal parts relieved that he hadn’t caught me out and puzzled as to his intentions for the salt. There were two bags full and I dropped them onto the table in the parlor.

  “Good. I’ll start clockways out the front door, you start t’otherways and we’ll meet halfway. Between us we’ll have it done before she knows what came at her!”

  “Again, sir, begging your patience, I’m unclear as to your aim.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I understand, you’ll be wanting your pay. I don’t begrudge you a penny of it, my lad.” At that he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small gunnysack sewn shut with twine and tossed it at me, coins clinking inside. I had not ever named a price, hoping that his surprise at my results would make him carelessly generous. Desperate though I was to know the amount he’d handed me, I didn’t wish to appear greedy and so pocketed the bag without opening it, and the desire to know what further work was required of me compelled me to ask him what was to be done with the salt.

  “Surround the perimeter. She won’t be able to cross a line of salt, will she?” He was giddy now, laughing in an even louder voice than he’d been using, and he headed for the front door. “Pay particular care to the doors and windows.”

  I looked over at Silas, who was now staring into the stereopticon, presumably at the fourth view, for his lower lip was now visible and trembling.

  “Did you know he was mad when you engaged me?” I asked.

  “He’s not mad, look at the picture, damn you!” Finally Silas’s voice was raised to a normal volume. “You’d best secure the perimeter as he told you to do, I’d not want to be around him when he’s been disobeyed.”

  Outside I started counterclockwise, pouring a line of salt around the walls, executing a double layer at the windowsills and the side door that led to the kitchen, where through the window I spied the butler sitting quietly at a table, and he watched me pouring the salt with a notable lack of curiosity.

  Around the back of the house I met up again with Colonel Cudahy, his face deeply flushed and his breathing heavy, a grin of sinister elation on his lips. “We’ve got her trapped, son. Go tell Silas and Jacques-Louis to come on out of there.”

  “Silas and who?”

  “My majordomo, you’ll have to guide him by the elbow, he doesn’t hear anything.”

  I wanted more than anything else to be away from him, and so I returned to the house and informed Mr. Silas that his presence was required on the front lawn. He was still staring at the last of the stereo views. “I’ve never known such a woman’s love, that she’d return from the grave just to torment me,” he said as he stood and shambled toward the front door. “To think that he doesn’t want such a thing.”

  I caught up with the ancient butler, who was still at the table, dozing now, head cupped in his palm. I pointed at the front door and he nodded, rose with a terrific groan, and began to walk painfully out of the kitchen.

  Once we were assembled on the carriageway before the house the Colonel began a long tirade that dealt with, among other subjects, vengeful spirits, his opinion of the reputation of President Andrew Jackson (inflated, in Cudahy’s view), the importance of stressing arithmetic over reading in the education of young children, the barbarity of the German tongue, the inadvisability of eating mollusks no matter what the month, and, finally, the natural tendency of women to want to murder the men with whom they cohabit.

  “It’s because of what we do to their nether parts they hate us, and I don’t rightly blame them. As a lad amongst the fur traders in Canada I had to submit to such indecencies and once I was big enough to do so I kilt several who
treated me as I treated my wife. Although she never complained and even affected to like it when I placed my wacker in her hot place! Her lies made me aware that she detested the sight of me and when she passed I knowed she was going to stay about the house, just waiting for her chance to do me in! But now I’ve proved her presence and it’s time for a reckoning. She’s trapped in there and she will be destroyed! Not a trace shall remain on this earth and she by God will have moved on as is proper, either to heaven or hell as the Lord God wills it but her stay on earth will be done!”

  He was so worked up it was difficult to get him to hear me when I attempted to interrupt, but finally he heard me ask my question. “How do you mean to destroy her, Colonel?” I asked this partly out of actual curiosity as to how his brain had concocted such a plan and partly out of real concern for the physical well-being of all present.

  “By God, man, they’s only one way to get rid of a haint! And that’s a blaze. Nothing cleanses like a good fire!” And with that he ran inside the house.

  There was quite a bit of noise as Silas, the butler, and I watched the house, uncertain and afraid. I had no desire to enter the house and do battle with even a superannuated man of Cudahy’s size and mental state, and my companions seemed more puzzled than afraid. There was a loud crash, followed by a burst of flames through the parlor windows, and then another crash, which I now understood to be the dumping of a barrel of something flammable, followed by flames coming through the kitchen window. Now fire was also visible through the front door, having made its way into the foyer, and I thought I glimpsed the Colonel bounding up the central staircase. I could certainly hear him laughing with the gleefulness of a small child watching a pony trick at the circus, and I asked Silas if he had known Cudahy to be suicidal in the past.