Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

“What is a fence against the life of a man? Is this what we have become, that we may put mere things on the scales against the value of a human soul?”

  “I swear, woman, it’s our souls that are at risk here too. Do you think us so rich that we may stand on principles we can’t afford?”

  “I will not have your profanity in this house,” his mother replied. And though Leroy could not see her from his bed, he knew she was pointing as she rebuked him. “This is not one of your St. Louis doggeries, Cornelius Dick, where your kind more properly belong!”

  “And I think you not a proper mother at all, for all the strife you bring upon us. Your boys should be your first concern, should they not? Not some wandering—­”

  “Don’t say it!” she cried. “Let them say the word, but not us!”

  There was a pause, as Leroy imagined his father taking his mother’s trembling hand.

  “Listen here, Fla: this is only the beginning. They seem prepared to be patient, and we have a lot of property to sacrifice. That is a game we cannot win.”

  With that, there was another lull, and the rustle of skirts as his mother fled the table. When she closed the bedroom door, she did it not with a dramatic slam, but an eerie reticence, merely clicking it shut.

  They next day they found the pigs’ water trough smashed. The day after that, they had to rig a rude fishing pole to remove a dead goat from their well. Davis came to the door again around sundown, issuing the same demands and the same dark warnings. Cornelius again shut the door in his face. The Defensives retreated back to their camp on Crocker land, no doubt to plot their next stroke of mischief.

  The following morning, Leroy was breakfasting at the table with his father, who was reading the newspaper. Florence was feeding kindling into the stove when she remarked, “Where is that boy?”—­meaning Temple, who often retired to his room after morning chores to read his chapter books. Leroy was about to say something like “the usual place,” when a loud pop sounded from the loft. Then they heard Temple—­not exactly screaming, but delivering a deep and despairing moan, as if all his hopes had suddenly gone for naught.

  Cornelius shot up the ladder with Leroy just behind. They found Temple lying in his bed with his hands covering his face. Blood ran from between his clenched fingers. The bed, which was directly under the small window, was glittered with fragments of broken glass. Cornelius tried to pull his hands from his face but Temple would not budge them, as his father pried and begged and shouted at him to be a man and let himself be tended to. Temple relented—­and revealed the spray of shards that had embedded themselves in his face. Looking closer, Leroy could see that one dagger—­about an inch long—­had lodged in his shut eyelid and penetrated an unknowable distance into his eye.

  “What is it?” Florence cried from below.

  “Leroy, take the cart and fetch the yarb.”

  “What is it!”

  “For the Lord’s sake woman!” Cornelius cried.

  There were no book doctors within a day’s ride in those days. There was a “rubbing doctor” or herbalist named Mann just a half mile away, and he came at once. When the man saw Temple’s face, he issued a hiss of disapproval, as if all this was the result of some free and foolish choice.

  Cornelius inspected the window; it had been blown in from outside by some firearm. The shot had shattered the wooden cross-­tree, shivering all four panes of glass and sending them cascading inward. Looking out, he could see the bushwhacker encampment on its low hill, almost at eye level. The Defensives were hunched around their fire in poses that seemed unusually subdued, as if they had noted the arrival of the doctor and understood the consequences of what they had done. But Cornelius, in his fury, envisioned the sly and petulant smiles that hid behind their glowing cheroots. When Florence understood why her baby had been disfigured, she rounded furiously on Cornelius. “Why is that nigger still here? Why did you let him stay? Why couldn’t you be a man and get rid of him?” She lapsed into sobs, but when he touched her, she whipped her arm away. “Get away from me! How could you let this happen?” she screeched. “If those bastards want him, give him to them! Give him to them!”

  With that, Cornelius flew down the ladder, donned his hat and coat over his sleeping clothes—­for he had not had a chance to dress that morning—­and seized his rifle. After checking that it was loaded, he left the house without shutting the door.

  “See after him,” Florence ordered Leroy.

  His father strode with the kind of stomping determination that Leroy had seen before, in one of his incandescent rages. A mood, he had learned, where it was not wise to appear anywhere in his sight, but to follow discreetly. To his relief, Cornelius did not stride toward a final reckoning with the bushwhackers, but instead made for the dugout. But before he reached the door, he rounded on Leroy.

  “You, back to the house! Don’t test me, boy.”

  Leroy stopped—­and as his father’s eyes blazed at him, he started to drift back from where he had come. But when Cornelius turned back to the dugout, Leroy stopped. His mother, after all, had commanded him to do the exact opposite.

  It took a while for the next thing to happen. Leroy, bored, sat down on the prairie and picked at a rudbeckia blossom, separating the petals from the head and then pulling the head apart. When that was done, he stripped another, and then another after that, losing himself in the idle dismantling in the way he found comforting in times of strife. His lap was covered with yellow rudbeckia petals when he heard the door of the dugout open.

  Mr. Ernest Calvin Tubbs Junior came out first, grasping his portmanteau, the tails of his shirt loose and flapping in the breeze. His father came out after, not exactly escorting the Negro by the arm but close enough, rifle poised on his arm not exactly pointing at his guest but near enough to make his point. If he listened closely, Leroy could hear a disconnected word or two of what Tubbs was saying: “near an imposition as I dared . . . fairly upon the rights of man . . . an educated citizen . . .” But his father only nodded at him, eyes half lidded and stubborn as he propelled Tubbs onward.

  The flower petals tumbled to Leroy’s feet as he stood up to watch their progress over the hill. His father was ejecting Tubbs in a southwesterly direction, away from the Defensives camped on the other side of his property. Yet the way Tubbs moved, with shoulders rounded and head pulled down, testified to his vulnerability. With nothing but gently sloping ground between him and Captain Davis’s party, the Negro was an absurdly exposed figure on that expanse.

  Leroy watched him grow smaller and smaller until he was startled by his father’s voice right beside him.

  “Say nothing to your mother,” he said.

  There was no bite in his tone now, no reproach. Instead, there was a horrified look on his face, as if he had witnessed the crimes of some other person. As they walked back to the house together, Cornelius placed his hand on the back of Leroy’s neck, squeezing it gently over and over, as if he could pump away his guilt by repetitive acts of affection. For his part, Leroy would not have known what to say to his mother anyway.

  Tubbs was forgotten as the yarb wrapped Temple’s face in spiderweb dressings soaked in turpentine. The howls of agony this drew were, to the conventional thinking, therapeutic. Mann came down from the loft to give his report: the cuts to Temple’s face were extensive, though with careful tending some of them would not leave scars and most of the rest would be subtle marks. The jagged glass in his eye had penetrated as far as the white matter around his eyeball, the sclera, but removing it had caused no further damage. The wound would look ugly for a while, but would heal more completely than the cuts to his cheek and forehead.

  With word that her son would not be blinded or greatly disfigured, Florence collapsed into her chair with relief. Though it was only ten in the morning, Cornelius broke out the brandy and offered Doc Mann a cup. In the general celebration, even Leroy got a nip.

  Le
roy never saw the bushwhackers depart; he only noticed they were gone when he led the doctor’s horse out from his paddock hours later. Davis and his men had gone after Tubbs so hastily the embers of their morning fire were left smoldering. A thin column of smoke rose from their camp, drifted upward until it met a breeze high above the ground, and rushed to the southwest.

  Chapter Eleven

  A Pearl of Great Price

  MARCH, 1871

  KATE AND JOHN Junior mounted the wagon before dawn. There was a coating of frost on the seat, which Kate swept away with her gloved hand before sitting. Her backside was insulated by her flannel drawers, petticoat, skirt, and heavy wool overcoat, but it was only moments before the frigidity penetrated all those layers. For months she had been so cold that she thought with a proper shake her bones might shatter. It was an affliction on everyone in that season—­a dull, constant body-­cold that never seemed to go away, even in heated rooms—­that wore on every soul, like a collective, untreated toothache. As they began their trip to Cherryvale that morning, and the sun seemed to drag itself reluctantly over the far hills, Kate looked into her glove. The frost, which had temporarily melted when she wiped the seat, had frozen again in her palm.

  Being new to the territory, they had only the haziest notion how long winter might last in southeast Kansas. Some ladies at Harmony Grove told her to expect the warm-­up when the first shoots of green appeared on the horse apple tree. Others dismissed that as unscientific superstition and swore by the date of the first appearance of the spring peepers: after their songs began, there would be exactly three more killing frosts before the beginning of spring proper. Rudolph Brockman said it could happen anytime between March and May—­there was no sure way to tell year-­to-­year—­but in his experience when the turkey buzzards appeared there would be no more frosts. The question was of more than academic interest to the Benders: in winter, traffic on the Osage slowed to a trickle, and that was bad for the family business.

  They had an appointment with the neighbors that morning. After rolling and jerking through frozen ruts for twenty minutes, they neared the Brockman place in its little hollow out of the wind. Rudolph, as usual, hailed them straightaway. His partner Ern rarely came out, and when he did he stayed away, watching from a distance as he leaned and smoked a cigarette.

  “Morgen, Kate,” Rudolph said, eyes twinkling, and then to John Junior, as an afterthought, “And ye too, Johnny.”

  “Good morning to you, Rudolph,” she replied, with the merest smile necessary to charm him. Junior, for his part, was never insulted by his invisibility. It was only reasonable that men would pay tribute to Kate.

  “And this is it?” Brockman nodded at their latest delivery. It was a saddle, all but new, finely tooled and oiled. Pulling it toward him, he noted its quality, as well as its only flaw: the roughed-­up spot on the fender where Johnny had wrenched off the plate inscribed with the name of its owner. The silver stirrups on their leathers scrapped along the boards of the wagon as Brockman lifted the rig to examine the underside.

  “A pretty thing for a customer to leave behind.”

  “Presented in lieu of payment. You would be surprised to know how few of them will part with cash.”

  “Ja, we find that,” said the other as he finished his inspection. Then he pronounced, “There’s a man in Thayer who might take it. But best not rip the plate off next time—­it can be engraved again.”

  “We’re off to Cherryvale,” Kate said brightly. “Can you guess why?”

  “No. But I’d be delighted for ye to tell me.”

  “I have a job!”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “There’s a situation at the Cherryvale Hotel that might suit her,” said John Junior.

  “Oh pshaw on ‘might’ . . . it will suit, and it will be gay!”

  “That will be as temporary as the job, I think.”

  Kate put forth a hand to give his cheek a playful shove. And Brockman, smoldering with lust for her girlish vivacity, wished it were his cheek that was being shoved instead.

  “Well, it’s a good bet they pay ye in coin instead of tack,” he declared.

  Bidding Rudolph Brockman a good day, they struck out for Cherryvale, six and a half miles to the southwest. Out on open range the cold deepened and the breath of their horse was like the snort of a locomotive, vaporous plumes spraying forth as the wagon humped and tipped and its occupants huddled, not speaking. Over their left shoulders there was a glow beyond the overcast that hinted of a cheery, warm yellowness. But it was only a promise, and by the time they reached the outskirts of town it had not been redeemed.

  Before the railroad, Cherryvale was a one-­lane settlement with a well, a livery, and a general store. On the claim of Mr. Thomas Whelan, the LL&G had kept a tented work camp where supplies were stored and prepared for the extension of the railroad into Montgomery County. Through the early part of ’71 the railroad’s surveyors were seen all over the area, laying out an extensive network of streets. But to any of the one dozen or so permanent residents of the area, there never seemed to be anybody in the camp. Instead, the workmen were all at the town’s four saloons, situated along the thoroughfare in easy staggering distance from each other. Between them sprung up buildings that were one step up from the rude temporary structures that bloomed first on virgin ground—­each two or three stories, carpentered just enough to assure they would last more than a few seasons. Their slab frontages had none of the decorative elements, the architraves and wooden-­hewn scrollwork and dentils, that lent an air of permanence. Instead, they seemed to regard each other across the street half embarrassed by their ongoing existence, as if fully expecting to be demolished and improved at any moment.

  The avenue was mud. The freeze had at least turned its grotesque rills and craters rock hard, precluding the boards that usually stretched across it and were now piled loosely along the covered sidewalks. Junior had Kate’s arm as they stepped across them and through the hotel’s doors, scuffed with the marks of steel-­toed boots as years of travelers kicked their way onto the premises. Junior led the way until they gained the planked, unvarnished lobby, but Kate shot ahead of him to greet the proprietor, Mr. Jeremiah Babcock Moore. The latter seemed to know she was there even before he looked up. Junior had the uncomfortable impression Moore had been spying on their approach while they were still in the street.

  “My dear,” he pronounced as he put down the pen. Mr. Moore’s bare pate, which was like a pale bull’s-­eye encircled by a very long, waxed bolt of hair, flashed red as Kate laid hands on it, searching the contours.

  “Truly an expressive cranium!” she exclaimed, “Such a testament of character to one trained in the proper art!”

  Blushing to the roots of his lashes, Moore looked through them at Junior.

  “And this must be the celebrated brother.”

  “He is indeed,” he replied with artificial jocularity. “Here to serve the mistress.”

  “As you all must,” she declared.

  “Well, we thank you for delivering her fresh. And if I might steal her now . . . ?”

  “Gladly purloined,” said Junior with a sort of gallant presentation, mispronouncing the word and leaving thinly lettered Mr. Moore to wonder if it really should sound like “pure loined.”

  With nothing much else to do, Junior stayed to watch Kate work her first day as a waitress in the Cherryvale Hotel dining room. She was coached in the trade not by the smitten Mr. Moore but by Alice Acres, a tall, plain woman who needed spectacles only when she read yet squinted at all other times. She seemed to size Kate up at a glance, saying, “A small thing, aren’t you? I doubt we have an apron for your kind of little . . .”

  To which Kate dropped her facade of girlish haplessness and returned to the steely determination of her road days. Emulating Alice Acres to the very nuance, she learned how to take and remember orders; she learned how t
o communicate orders to the cook, who tended to deafness if the proper jargon was not used; she learned how to loft trays full of china brimming with meats and boiled potatoes and gravies, and deliver them with the minimum of steps to the table. She also learned how to dodge wandering hands that made for her ankles and bottom.

  As Brockman had predicted, the buzzards returned early that year and brought spring with them. There were more travelers from the East, and as they came into the hotel from streets of boot-­sucking muck, they were pleased to be attended by Kate the serving girl. Men would rush to claim a seat at one of her tables; the few women who came through also found her fine features a relief from the menagerie of hairy masculine mugs to which they were daily exposed.

  For all her bloody-­mindedness, Kate was pragmatic. She disliked the drudgery but valued the freedom to move among her neighbors in a context less guarded than the church at Harmony Grove. After those initial stares and gropes, she became all but invisible as she did her rounds. Moving among her customers, she overheard their problems, hopes, fears, and regrets. She learned all about the parents worried about the marriages of their daughters, or the lack of marriages, and the farmer who thought he bought a healthy cow but got one with foot rot, and the hilltop claim near Independence that turned out to be bottomland prone to flooding, and the lack of tooth powder at the dry goods store. There were ample rumors about the direction the railroad would be built, and sometimes mutually exclusive ones at neighboring tables at the same moment.

  But for all the flavors of their small concerns, underneath there was the same groan of offended pride. She had lived on the frontier all her life, but it was only here, amid the tinkling glassware and dusty bison heads of this minor hotel well beyond the main line, that she glimpsed the hidden truth. Behind the eyes of all of them, from the hardest gambler to the most cloistered frontier wife, lurked the identical plaint—­that their neighbors, the seed companies, the railroads, the banks, and especially the government, were together and severally out to get them. Everyone saw himself as an underdog; all shared the conviction the cosmos owed them a debt of decent luck. Meanwhile, all the other louts who also saw themselves as underdogs were really just fakes—­fat cats and bullies, scheming the ruin of the ordinary, honest folk. Everyone imagined he was his own master, and was proud of it. But with the freedom there came terror that it was just one short step above slavery. And the joy of the one never seemed to temper fear of the other.