Those who came near to him later told their wives about his smell. At one end, the deathly stink of gums pitted with rotting food. At the other, the stench of an orifice that had barely known cloth or water in months. It was hard to offend the nostrils of men like this, used to the odors that came with long hours of honest labor. But even they learned fast to stay upwind of John Bender, Senior.
By end of day the sun peeked under the roof of overcast, lighting up the newly finished Bender cabin with hardy crimson beams. The workmen stood in a semicircle around the north end, silently regarding what they had wrought together. A rude horse stall, fashioned from saplings, had been freshly roofed with prairie grass, and the bright, unweathered posts of the chicken coop were planted, waiting for fresh wire to be stretched between them. The little spread, incarnadined by the dying daylight, lay on the prairie like some unwashed, newborn thing, its future both bright and shadowed by possibility.
Later, after everyone had gone and the old man was asleep, Junior stood admiring the sign he had painted on an old board pried from the side of the wagon. With jerky, slashing strokes that made the letters seem almost Chinese, he’d stabbed out in wheel grease: Grocry.
Satisfied, he went off to fetch a nail and one of the shoe hammers his partner had brought from Germany—a coarse, angular, wooden-handled thing from the shop of some long-dead Alsatian cobbler. Its business end, crudely flattened, had already suffered untold strokes and was fit to strike many more.
Chapter Seven
Pink Pills for Pale People
When I first came to town,
They called me the roving jewel;
Now they’ve changed their tune,
They call me Katie Cruel,
Oh, diddle, lully day,
Oh de little lioday.
—“Katie Cruel,” traditional Scottish folk ballad
DECEMBER, 1870
ONE DAY, SOMEONE with a godlike vantage would look down on eastern Kansas and see a land stitched tightly together by steel. Remote Labette County would be amply served by three railroads: the St. Louis & San Francisco; the Southern Kansas; and Kansas City, Fort Scott & Gulf lines. Beyond the county spun the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; the St. Louis, Fort Scott & Wichita; the Missouri, Kansas & Tulsa—roads whose ever-shifting names, in consecutive topographical order, promised unbroken access to ever more far-flung locales. Before century’s end the little village of Cherryvale would become the confluence of three lines that formed a great asterisk on the prairie. And indeed, in 1927 a mortal with just such a godlike vantage, Charles Lindbergh, would use the great, five-pointed star to get his bearings as he flew solo from San Diego to St. Louis.
But in 1870 there was just Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston, reaching down from the Kansas River Valley as it raced two other roads to link cities in the north with the Oklahoma Territory. It crossed three county lines, then skirted the upper waters of the Neosho River, before it ground to a formal halt at the little town of Humboldt. Beyond, the grading and track-laying was well under way to extend it to the equally obscure towns of Neosho, Thayer, and Morehead, any or all of which might perish as communities if the executives back in Chicago or New York suddenly decided, on some brandy-induced whim, to move the rail bed a few miles east or west. Like the seasons and the growth of crops in their fields, the locals checked the progress of construction with quiet, low-grade anxiety—except that the railroad was more important that the seasons or the crop in any single year. Those other things, after all, were transient. The railroad would define the shape of their homes forever.
In mid-December the Bender men were at the LL&G station in Ottawa, Kansas, one hundred miles north of their claim. Junior waited by the tracks—there was no platform—with a cigarette stuck so deep in his mouth he risked burning his lips. Pacing at a fast walk, he periodically stopped short when he thought he heard a distant rumble, peering out over the short-grass prairie.
By noon there was a smudge in the sky where the line of the tracks met the horizon. Flitting back to the wagon, he found John Senior sitting there, studying his German Bible.
“They’re coming!”
“Ja.”
The train came on fast, stack smoke unfurling like a banner. It flew full throttle, as if reluctant to shorten steam until the last minute. The pause in Ottawa was accompanied by a bright metallic squeal that, for some peculiar reason, made Junior’s teeth hurt.
Male passengers jumped off before the carriages halted, clutching trunks whose momentum made them tumble as they hit the ground. Though Ottawa was a sizable settlement, not many got off there in the middle of a typical day. The train paused for the full three minutes of a neat stop—no water, no fuel—before the engineer blew the whistle again. The iron links of the couplers groaned as the carriages were yanked forward.
The riders who had jumped off early dusted themselves off, regarded their destination with pained, embarrassed grins, and resumed lugging their trunks. Junior stared at the absence before him with rising anxiety. He turned back to John Senior, shrugged. No women at all had debarked. Had there been some mistake?
A flash of skirts at the back of the last carriage. Before Junior could take two steps forward, two female figures seemed to flee from the train. One was young and thin, well-dressed in a buff-colored dress and hat tied with a lavender scarf, moving with a loping poise that alighted easily from the moving carriage. The other was a great round globule of a woman, clothed indifferently but in identical hat and scarf, who bounced awkwardly as her feet hit the ground.
“It’s them,” Junior said.
Rushing forward, he greeted them with kisses so forceful they felt like assaults. Then he took their carpetbags.
Kate was puffy-eyed, as if she had gotten no sleep; Almira was wearing her stone face, and not looking in Kate’s direction at all.
“Somethin’ eatin’ your corn?” Junior asked.
Almira stood mute. Kate seemed about to say something, but only managed to mutter, “This creature . . .” before giving up. For what purpose was there to recount yet another squabble with this miserable woman, who had adopted her as her child so long before yet never made the slightest effort to understand her? There had been a thousand times in the years since she had intended to abandon her. And yet—when there was a mark on the hook, and profit to be made, they worked together as if driven by a single mind. She often had occasion to wonder: was there any amount of money that would be enough for her to strike out on her own?
Her gaze shifted to Junior. There she saw his urgent, almost canine devotion, his eyes that seemed to pull her inward to some core of affection for which she had no use. As a female unattached, she had long become used to the ways men gazed at her, from the sybarite’s frank lust to the aesthete’s appraisal to the soft invitation of those caught in the grip of a romantic illusion. Of all these, the latter, the silent bid for marriage in the eyes of an unsuitable man, was the most contemptible. Stomaching it wearied her more than the journey from Kansas City.
From the station, the Benders proceeded to the shops to buy what their “grocry” lacked.
The wagon presently swayed on its springs with the weight of a cast-iron stove, lumber for store shelving, and a bedstead big enough for two, disassembled. There was a calendar clock for sale at the hardware for two dollars, and an Empire dining table with four wolf-paw feet. At the dry goods store, they procured a small cask of flour, another of cornmeal. On the way out, Almira spied a set of four table knives with long, triangular profiles and ivory-clad handles fastened with three rivets. She lofted one, feeling its balance.
Finally, a stop at the druggist for some patent medicines—Pink Pills for Pale People, Mentho Goose Grease, Seelye’s Wusa Tusa. Idly perusing the labels, Kate read that Gombault’s Caustic Balsam was a veterinary treatment for “wind galls, distemper, poll evil, founder, capped ho
ck & collar boils.” For “dyspepsia due to hyperacidity,” there was nothing better than Green’s August Flower, while the key ingredient in St. Jacob’s Oil—a liniment—was a goodly amount of chloroform. And of course everyone stocked Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound (“a positive cure for all those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population”), whose efficacy was guaranteed by containing twenty percent ethyl alcohol.
Displaying a flair for decorating, Almira also selected sprigs of dried herbs—sandhill sage, bee balm—for them to stock. Long experience running shops from Ohio to Colorado had taught her that such herbs were as useful for freshening an establishment as they were as merchandise.
“Wir hätten in Humboldt einkaufen sollen,” said the old man, impatient.
“There are no decent shops in Humboldt,” Almira answered.
“Sie wollte nicht den vollen Preis bezahlen.”
“We’re alone here, you ape,” she snapped. “You can speak English.”
John Senior shrugged. “You know what I say.”
THE QUALITY OF the shops in Ottawa was poor compensation for the journey that followed. The trip to their claim took a week of rocking and shaking in the back of the wagon, under scudding late autumn skies that too often opened up with frosty downpours that soaked through the patchwork Indian blanket Junior had traded for a half pouch of cigarette tobacco. As they pushed deeper into the desert, the women were chilled by the loneliness of the expanse, which seemed as forlorn as anything they had seen in their collective years on the frontier. From that modest elevation, they peered miles into the heart of a land stunted by the years of strife and neglect that had come to be known, the nation over, as Bleeding Kansas.
This was the time from the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the opening of the Civil War, when the future of the territory, slave or free, still hung in the balance. “bushwhackers” defending that peculiar institution and “jayhawkers” against it ranged the Missouri borderlands, committing acts of butchery so foul that reporters shrank from describing them. Settlers who dared try to prove out their claims, or even set a cooking fire for all to see, were rooted out by one side or the other, and sometimes both in turn. Others contemplating the effort were dissuaded by rumors of outrages by knife and fire made more heinous for their lack of details. In the process, the laying of the nation’s railroads and telegraph ground to a halt—something not even the Rocky Mountains accomplished. For years, as development skirted north, south, and west, the contested lands were hollowed out by the cycle of attack and reprisal, the delivery of bloody “messages” to the other side that were never heeded but never forgotten.
The wagon swayed for mile after desolate mile, bringing more charred barns and tangles of wrecked fencing into view. In the empty miles between the shallow-rooted towns, farms stood half built but abandoned; newly planted fruit trees grew up buried in weeds, and feral horses watched from the streambeds. Rolling on, they saw a schoolhouse, lovingly built and endowed by its community, abandoned to a mother skunk and her litter, who trooped inside as if lessons were about to resume. A discarded stove and rusty iron bedstead reclined in the grass like beached hulks. A little farther on, a dead calf, the leathery remains of its skin stretched tentlike over crumbling bones, sockets eyeless but staring.
When the sun grazed the bottom of the sky, and the journey was finally done for the day, the men unhitched the mule. Hobbling it, they set it loose to graze as they pitched camp. Blankets were spread under the wagon and an iron stand unfolded for the cook pot, as Kate and Almira came down to gather the only fuel at hand: pats of dried cattle dung. Kate hated this chore, the searching and stooping and picking at the revolting deposits with her fingers. The choicest of these “meadow muffins,” as Almira called them, were at least a foot around and a few days old—too old to attract flies, but fresh enough to retain some of their moisture, which helped them burn a little longer. The old woman instructed her to carry them in the hollow of her apron. Kate held her share of the flat, stinking things up and away from her skirts, fearing their odious substance would spoil them by mere proximity.
Night came as a relief, as the darkness poured itself widely and evenly over the sea of grass, hiding its interminable extent from their eyes. The old man made coffee by folding the beans in a canvas seat cover, beating it with the hammer he kept hung on his belt and boiling the blasted shards in stream water. The typical supper—dollops of fried corn mush, slabs of unctuous matter that passed for bacon—was consumed as the moon rose, and Kate retired some distance away to watch it. Here at last, after hours of creaking, clanging progress in the ancient wagon, a moment of peace. Here, she cast her eyes out over the desert and, with a deliberate effort of misperception, saw a distant figure in the moonlight, biding his time until the rescue she knew must come.
There was no sign of rain that evening, so there was no need for them to sleep under the wagon. Lying out on the open prairie, her nostrils filled with semisweet rot of the summer’s growth. Later, wrapped in the warm oblivion of her blankets, and with unbidden slip of memory, Kate was back in the tent camps of her childhood, soon after Clarrity had abandoned her with Almira.
Going to sleep among the sounds of eventide, she heard a distant fiddle wheeze as it was rosined. The clank of pans being washed, and the guttural utterances of a man decanting into a whore. A muffled gurgling sound—but this time coming not from somewhere beyond the canvas, but within her tent.
The seven year-old Kate got up, and peeking around the blanket separating her space from Almira’s, saw a man lying on his back in her bed. He was bearded amply, and hairy in every other place, down to the wiry thatch between his legs. She stared at this first, compelled and disgusted, until her eyes swept upward and she saw the leather thong twisted around his neck. His coal-smudged face was black, but his lips were blue. His eyes did not blink.
Almira stood nearby, arms crossed and cigarette burning in her fingers. She was as naked as the dead man. And in her eyes, not disapproval at Kate’s intrusion, but the patience of an instructress. She was silent as she raised the man’s open purse to the lamplight, patiently removing the last of his money. Kate stood starting for some minutes, expecting to be ordered back to her bed. But the order never came. In time the spectacle became unremarkable; Kate yawned.
The next morning the body was gone. Kate thought it best not to ask about it—until the impulse struck her ten years later, on the train, as they traveled to meet the Bender men in Ottawa. Tired of looking out at the expanse of gray winter prairie, she had turned to Almira.
“So did you do your real daughter the same as that miner in the tent?”
The other, who had expressed not a hint of emotion at the time, was suddenly indignant:”How dare you ask me that!”
Kate, surprised at this reaction, resorted to her first instinct—self-pity. “If you didn’t want to be asked, why were you so careless, leaving such a thing in front of a child?”
Almira, sneering—“You are the smart girl. But you are a little foolish too, yes?”
“I hate you.”
“Good. You learn.”
They had endured the rest of the trip in silence.
ON THEIR SIXTH day in the wagon they glimpsed the mounds from afar. Compared to the hills of Ohio or Indiana, or indeed anywhere she could think of, they were low, begrudging things, barely worth being called “topography.” But to Kate, in this expanse, these sweeping bottoms of vanished seas, the mounds might as well have been lofty mountain peaks. Their appearance meant rest at last, though in what quarters she could only imagine. The Bender men had told them nothing of the home they had built. Her only knowledge of them was from what they lacked, based on the supplies they had brought in the wagon.
Hurrying over the last few miles in the gathering dusk, they saw the cabin just as the quarter moon rose. The faint silvery gleam shone off the ti
n stovepipe like a landward beacon. As they approached the structure, sitting foursquare and alone, the mule pulled up, ears swiveling, murmuring with anxiety. Junior fumbled to light a lantern. John Senior, sensing they were not alone, reached behind his seat, drawing forth his hammer.
Suddenly Kate glimpsed a lean, scissor-sharp form emerge from the shadows, striking out for open ground. As it passed, she saw a wolf looking back at her, eyes aglow like smoldering coals. She shuddered as if someone had poured ice water on her open heart. The wolf was the familiar of one of the most dreaded of demons in the Lesser Key—old Amon, who anchored the left of her dark army, ever on watch to cast down Barbatos the Archer.
“Where is it going?” she asked Junior. “What bearing?”
“Northwest.”
“Northwest,” she repeated, sitting back in relief, as if the direction were of supreme significance.
Junior eyed the tool in the old man’s hand, “A lot of good a shoe hammer will do you against the likes of that.”
“You don’t know what good it can do,” the old man replied. Then he laid it beside his hip, in easy reach as always.
Junior’s feeble lamp threw more shadows than light. Exhausted from the trail, they spread their bedrolls on the floor of the cabin and went to sleep without supper.
The next morning Junior awoke to find Kate standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, appraising the walls. The way her hair was unclasped and cascading down her back inspired him to prop himself up on his elbow and stare.
“This will not do,” she said, pointing with her chin at the newsprint—from The Thayer Searchlight—the men had waxed to the walls.
“It’s done,” replied Junior, meaning to say “it is customary” but also implying “it is accomplished, so don’t touch it.”
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