Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

By four-­thirty the light outside was failing. Snow still descended, with the drift on the windward side of the train now brushing the lower edges of the windows. The fireman, with nothing to do in the cab, went through distributing armfuls of wood gleaned from the tender, which the conductor used in the small stoves at the head of each carriage. Seated closest to the fire, the girl with the tarot cards continued her lonely reading, the vaguely medieval devices on her cards seeming yet more archaic by the flutter of flames.

  Her first customer approached as the last frosty gleam drained from the carriage. In the gloom, the woman’s bulk could be felt more than seen; she was only half again as tall as she was wide, clad in material as humble and care-­stained as sackcloth, topped by a tasseled bonnet. Her eyes and the corners of her mouth were lost in the shadows of fleshy craters. As she moved, she seemed to wobble, as if rolling on mismatched wheels.

  The young woman did not bother to look as the other filled the seat opposite. “Good evening, ma’am,” she said. “I am Professor Kate.”

  “Almira,” said the other.

  “Our prospects in the coming season may be read in the cards . . . if we attend,” Kate continued.

  Her cue given, the old woman held out her right hand. In it, a sweaty and tarnished dollar coin.

  “Thank you, madam. And now to your question, which we may properly apprehend using the following arrangement . . .”

  As the night deepened, eyes turned to the pool of firelight at the head of the car, toward the two figures peering at the spread of cards beneath them. Necks craned. Expertly, as curiosity rose around them, the young woman’s voice, which projected so theatrically at the outset of the reading, became softer, drawing her audience closer.

  By the conductor’s next trip through the carriage, there was a small crowd gathered around the tarotist and her patron. The former, in the midst of explaining the significance of the seven of cups in the number eight position of the Celtic cross, glanced at the conductor as he passed, as if expecting him to object. But the conductor said nothing. Knowing as he did the number of empty hours that stretched ahead of them all, with the snow still falling and the line paralyzed through ten counties, of what significance was this small, harmless fraud? Two cars down, a large, occasionally raucous poker game between armed men had been under way for two hours. As long as it didn’t end in gunplay, he was prepared to allow Satan himself to climb up through the cross ties to practice his sorcery.

  Boredom worked in Professor Kate’s favor. As the night dragged on, with most of the passengers stuck upright in their seats and unable to sleep, they drifted forward. Almira, as if forgetting her assigned role, refused to move but sat with eyes closed and hands crossed, like an obstinate cat staking out her favorite corner of the sofa. But her stillness was an illusion: if one was alert, and had the dark-­adapted eyes of an owl, one would see that it was not Professor Kate herself but the old woman who collected the fees, snatching up the dollar coins with thick fingers and slipping them into her purse.

  For years it had been this way. Kate had grown and refined her skills at cards and beguiling of souls, and Almira, recognizing that Clarrity had gifted her with a prodigy, stood by and relieved her of the need to deal with the baser functions of their trade. Though Almira’s nature would not allow her to reflect an emotion as useless as awe, she felt it for this girl. Only a few months after she had arrived in that camp—­she had already forgotten the territory—­she had realized the futility of beating her, as it only hardened the girl’s pride into something diamondlike, more precious and inaccessibly buried. The spirit in her stayed her hand in a way her own daughter never did. Kate came to share her bed on cold nights and got the best cuts of the meat when meat was to be had. There was no more lace and silk, but there was gingham and the standing promise of cakes, sweet and enticing in the imagination of a girl. Almira’s forbearance had allowed the girl to become haughty, yes. But also profitable.

  AT MIDNIGHT, POCKET watches throughout the carriage sounded the hour. Owners roused, the chink of latches sprung as they checked the time, sighed, and clicked the covers shut. To the casual ear, so used to the cacophony of creaks and groans that accompanied train travel, the snow-­swaddled silence came not as a relief but as something disquieting, ominous. Yearning for a sign of civilization, a light in the gloom, the anxious watchers saw a jet of bronze sparks arc into the night, like a flare launched from a stricken ship. Backsides rose and spines unreeled—­were they rescued at last? But it was only a fellow passenger between the cars, discarding his spent cheroot into the snow. Reentering the car, he rubbed his frozen hands, confronted a gallery of disappointed faces, and asked, “What?”

  By 3:00 A.M. not even their discomfort prevented the travelers from drifting off to sleep. Professor Kate’s clientele thinned out. With a parting kiss, the cards went back in their satin wrapping. Almira counted out eight dollars, careful not to let the coins clink together lest the partnership be too obvious. Kate, the flinty hardness back on her face, shook her head slowly, holding up ten fingers. The eyes of the other inquired. Kate kept showing both hands, palms first this time, as if this were a more imperative ­gesture.

  Upon delivering more fuel to the stoves, the conductor retired to the caboose for a few hours’ shut-­eye. At first light he jerked awake with a curse on his lips. He stared at himself in the small mirror over the washbasin for some moments and, with a faintly aesthetic disdain on his face, took up his lathering cup to shave. He undertook this task with precise deliberateness, aiming his razor at every stray follicle, rinsing the blade with every stroke, like a man with nothing else to do but stroll the decks on a trans-­Atlantic passage. He was in no rush to confront the passengers again after their long night upright in their seats. Yet despite this care, he still ended up with a drop of blood on his collar that could not be concealed by his jacket.

  Making his way toward the engine, he found the poker game still under way in the third carriage. The four players were scattered, knocked down like bowling pins, their arms so listless they could barely hold their cards above their belts. The dealer, who was clad in a suit of green worsted with a houndstooth waistcoat, sat with one hand full of cards and the other resting on the bulge of the liquor flask on his breast pocket. As he passed, the conductor’s nose twitched—­the unwashed odor of these men was powerful, especially in contrast to the aroma of shaving lather still adhering to his upper lip. By his watch, their one-­hundred-­minute run to Iowa City had now taken eighteen hours.

  The conductor could never be mistaken for a sensitive man; for personal instance, he never let sentiment for a lonely wife and neglected son disturb his professional rounds. Yet even he could sense that the mood on the train had passed from mere annoyance through resignation to something more ominous. In the air, a suspension not only of ordinary life and its soothing routine, but of ordinary civilization, arrested and gradually more in question. The pressure of eyes on his back had become perceptible, a faintly hostile burrowing beneath his skin in search of some nugget of reassurance that would spare neither his flesh nor his bones. He became urgently conscious of the blot of blood on his collar. A Union Pacific conductor had been beaten almost to death by indignant customers trapped for five days on a snowbound train in Nebraska territory—­an eventuality whose only consolation was the fact that his attackers soon turned on each other over scraps of food. The injured man was rescued by his brakeman, who had rifled the baggage for boxes of fancy biscuits to distract the passengers. The railroad, innocent of sentiment, charged the cost of the biscuits against the salary of the injured man.

  In the foremost car, Professor Kate was back in her accustomed attitude, wrists resting on crossed knee, equally oblivious to her fellow passengers and their predicament. But her aloofness now had company: in addition to Almira, two new figures sat. The first was a young man, perhaps no older than twenty but dressed respectably in black overcoat and stickpin in his tie, lip ador
ned with a moustache he had clearly taken great pains to cultivate. Silent but with eyes open and receptive, he glanced at the conductor as he passed, nodding in acknowledgment of a comradely solidarity that was entirely in his own mind.

  The other newcomer was a hirsute lump of a man, bulk magnified by fringes of beard, eyebrow, ear hair, and unkempt mane streaked with gray. His face, such as could be seen, was split by deep clefts that were not laugh lines or frown lines, but corresponded with no known human expression. He was not so much sitting on the seat as grown upon it, a sloping mountain of flesh with no head, just a headlike peak conjoined with rocky shoulders. He acknowledged the conductor no more than a mountain would acknowledge the passage of an insect along its base.

  The women had, in fact, noted well the arrival of the two. Sure of his charms, the younger man had looked Kate in the eye with the same presumption he showed the conductor. But the message was different: not just mere agreeableness, but a gleam and a look of shared understanding, punctuated by a glance at her deck of cards that suggested amusement. No, he didn’t want a reading. No, he didn’t want to part her skirts. He and his partner, the human rock pile, were presenting their ser­vices. Kate eyed him, sizing up his suitability.

  “Kansas?” she asked.

  His eyes sparkled like a well-­rested child, promised a morning of play. “That would do,” he replied.

  With that, and no further negotiations necessary, the deal was struck. They all sat together for the next two hours, exchanging hushed words while the old woman embroidered a handkerchief that seemed more antique than herself. At one point the conductor came through, and although he never listened to the conversations of the passengers, he inadvertently heard Junior holding forth:

  “They come down that trail with cash. A regular bankful of coin every single day.”

  “It can’t be that easy,” Almira responded, emphasizing the can’t in a theatrical manner she had once seen among a troupe of variety players from Chicago.

  “It can . . .”

  But now they had noticed the conductor lingering in earshot. Four pairs of eyes turned on him, their repulsive force so powerful the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Indeed, for a man in his line of work overheard many things, and none of it was of any importance whatsoever next to what he might hear the very next moment, between businessmen and gamblers and lovers and families in the carriage beyond. Instead, he warded off their unspoken indignation with his one infallible defense—­the bland, professional equanimity of a man paid to take interest in nothing.

  And indeed, to mere laypersons, to the great multitude of ordinary citizens and nongrifters, the four seemed like nothing more than a collection of mismatched fellow travelers. The full value of their arrangement was only theoretical at this point. Its advantages would manifest only later, after the sound of a distant whistle perked up the passengers, and a passenger from the foremost carriage charged through, crying, “The rotary! The rotary!”

  They heard it before they saw it—­a deep, steady whooshing noise, like a wave breaking forever on a beach. Next, an arcing cascade of snow appeared over treetops, casting an icy penumbra that clothed the sun in crystalline sparks. The great, black, flat-­nosed beast slipped from behind the trees, and the passengers, heedless of the cold, threw open the windows to hang from the casements, whooping and pounding the sides of the carriages.

  Their salvation was a massive machine—­a converted locomotive with cowcatcher removed and a set of fanlike circular blades fitted to the smoke box. The blades spun in the great metallic maw, devouring the drifts ahead and tossing aside the leavings. Like a great slug hesitating as it contemplated a meal it could never engulf, the snow plow slowed to a creep as it neared the train. When it finally stopped, the whirling blades were just twelve inches from the nose of the locomotive.

  The engineers, bundled to their ears against the cold, came down from their cabs and met in the middle, shaking hands like two polar explorers congratulating each other. Unhurried by disaster or adulation, they stood thigh deep in the snow, exchanging lights, the blue haze of their celebratory cigars rising and mingling with the trickle of steam from the idling engines. By the ingenuity of man, another obstacle of nature had been conquered.

  But in their satisfaction, it did not occur to them that the stoves in the cars had gone out. With the windows temporarily opened, temperatures in the carriages plunged to below freezing. When they all finally got under way for Iowa City, the rotary leading the way in reverse, the passengers began to truly suffer.

  “Where is that blanked conductor?” they all demanded of each other. “Where is the heat?” But the conductor was too far away to hear, reluctantly stationed at the back of the rotary to warn for collisions. In his own discomfort, he did not think it urgent to ask someone else to deliver wood to the stoves.

  To those who suffered through it, this was the worst part of the ordeal, the four hour crawl behind the low-­geared snow plow, which they had all cheered at first but now cursed for its cruel slowness. Moisture of their exhalations froze on beards, lapels, seat backs, and windows. In this fresh misery, all propriety banished, unattached males and females huddling together for warmth, and the men too stupefied by cold to take advantage of the women forced into their arms.

  Kate, for her part, did not huddle and did not shiver. Enduring in proud self-­sufficiency, she seemed to drain of all color, her lips purpling over like dried blood, her skin becoming paler and more glassy. Her fingers succumbed by withdrawing into her small, hard fists. If anything, she was even more beautiful—­beautiful and terrible and scarcely human except when, with uncharacteristic curiosity, she cast looks at the old woman beside her. For her part, the latter sat with expression set and eyes half lidded, like some old dray horse enduring the cold solely through dumb, unquestionable instinct.

  The train reached Iowa City station at six in the evening. It was thirty-­two hours late. At the far end of the platform a table had been set up with pots of coffee and rolls, tended by wives and daughters of the local railroad men. Passengers stumbling off the carriages, lips blue and eyes hollowed, were led to this bounty gently, as if pushed too hard they would snap. Steaming tin cups were pushed into their stiff fingers, warming them so abruptly that it caused some little cries of pain. Those who so proved their power of speech were approached by a young man in mismatched plaid suit, bearing a pad and pencil in fingerless wool gloves, the handlebars on his lip decorated not with icicles but the oily sheen of the finest Parisian pomade. In his eyes, that combination of pity and idle curiosity common on the frontier, whenever complacence stared into the eyes of misfortune.

  “Care to tell your story?” the reporter asked everyone and no one, eyes sweeping the crowd with indiscriminate attentiveness. “Care to talk to The Iowa City Plainsman & Heartland Advertiser?” When no one answered, he narrowed his appeal, focusing on a young, strikingly beautiful redhead who was, at that very moment, taking her first sip of hot coffee. At the sight of her, his words stuck momentarily in his throat, and he simply stared as she tilted the cup to her pursed lips.

  “Want to tell the ­people what happened?” he asked, his voice hushed in amorous reverence.

  Kate seemed to consider answering him—­but then, as if remembering her circumstances, looked to her male companions to speak for her. The young man stepped forward, hat placed over his breast.

  “I will,” he began. “Much have I had occasion to ride these rails, but never to encounter such ill use. They were more prepared to convey cattle than their fellow men. Women and children and the elderly, exposed to the elements in this way—­were quite certainly to have perished had there been any more delay. Most of our baggage, I tell you, was inaccessible. Not a stick of warmth to be had—­a long, cruel night with nothing but idle vices to occupy us. Thrown upon our own resources—­wind and cold—­indifference and perfidy—­if not for my father’s Bible—­sustaining—­i
n that wilderness—­”

  The old man, as if activated by the mere mention of the word, raised his Bible in mute testimony. But he added nothing to the account. Instead, the young man went on, utterances breaking and scattering in the wake of his racing mind. And the reporter listened, his pencil poised above his pad but not writing yet, wondering if the young man’s wits were addled by the cold—­until professional instinct asserted itself.

  “And may I ask, what is your name?”

  “John Bender, Junior. This is my father, John Bender, Senior—­mother, Almira—­and sister—­” Gesturing at each member of his new family, the hurtling wreck of his thoughts drew to a halt as he introduced Kate—­and realized he had run out of lies. He suffered a fit of panic. But Kate, who could not remember an occasion when she was at a loss for words, merely gifted the reporter with the merest token of coquetry—­a half wink over the rim of her cup.

  With that, the reporter’s loins melted, and he forgot his curiosity at a “brother” who could not put a name to his “sister.”

  “So . . . do your father and mother speak?”

  “As it happens, in German only.”

  “Sag’ ihm, wir sind gerade eingetroffe.” said the old man in a weary voice, prompting the old woman to interject, “Sag’ ihm, er soll’ uns alleine lassen, der frechen Hund!”

  This having demonstrated the old ­couple’s uselessness to him, the reporter pursued the interview as if they’d ceased to exist. Looking at John Junior—­but drinking Kate in sidelong—­he asked, “From where may I say the Bender family has traveled, and to what destination and purpose?”

  Thus came the christening of this heretofore putative thing, “the Bender family.” On John Junior’s face, the faint glow of triumph at the success of their first deception, and his natural volubility, gave a singsong lilt to his answer:

  “From Cook County, Illinois, we hail, traveling to the state of Kansas with the intention of making our mark upon the land.”