She went some distance away in the direction of Spill Out Creek. When she was out of sight, she sat down on a patch of soft grass under a willow. She had been pondering which spread to use, as the more elaborate ones she used with her clients, like the Cross, seemed unfitting in this case. The matter at hand was not whether to buy a new combine or how to assure a good crop, but something purer and plainer. The destinies of two souls and their love—two things and the sum of them. Yes, a simple three-card pull.
She shuffled the cards, drew three from the top and laid them in a line on the grass. The first would be about her, the second about him, and the last their future. She turned over the first: the Four of Swords, Minor Arcana. With its appearance she gave a small, gratified cry: swords were the symbols of challenges, of work left to be done. Yet the number 4 betokened stability, stasis, quiescence. The card reflected the challenge of pausing, taking stock. It suggested respite from momentous tasks—a respite that, ironically, might seem more challenging than the work itself. In light of her decision to quit the murdering business, it was a very interesting card to pull. She felt vindicated in this decision, and encouraged in her judgment in making others.
Next, the Knight of Wands. Here was an appealing fellow, brightly dressed, sallying forth on some gallant errand. And yet in her experience his appeal could be deceiving: it could conceal a certain recklessness, activity for its own vain sake. In connection with Leroy Dick, the card’s appearance puzzled her—in his natural graveness, he seemed the very opposite of vanity. She considered the discrepancy for a while, staring into the gently swaying tendrils of the willow, until the solution presented itself. And then she slapped herself on the forehead at her obtuseness, for Knight Wands also attended the departure, iter interrupta. It was the card of transitions, calling for the resolution to break with the past. With respect to the potential end of Leroy’s marriage, this card fairly pulsated with significance.
Finally, the Chariot, Major Arcana. She fell back, right hand over her mouth. It was an odd card to correspond to their future together, the card of triumph through struggle. When it appeared, she usually read it as a call to the kind of narrow, grasping determination that might be taken for selfishness. Selfishness indeed, for a cause worthy of being misunderstood, even reviled. They would be together then, but not easily, and at a price in blood.
The shade of the tree chilled her straight through. The cards had given, but now they had taken away. She had chosen well to stop the killing, but the struggle was not over. She would need an act of courage to reverse herself again.
She gathered the cards and held them in her lap, warming them in her hands.
Chapter Fourteen
Persimmon and Stone
Oh that I was where I would be
Then I would be where I am not
Here I am where I must be
Go where I would, I cannot
Oh, diddle lully day
Oh, de little lioday
—“Katie Cruel,” traditional Scottish folk ballad
FEBRUARY, 1858
YOUNG KATE COULD tell when the railroad men were about to knock off from the sound of the tamping rods—the ones they used to pack the black powder in the drill holes for blasting—being thrown in a pile. The great metallic clanks of heaped iron marked the time of day like the chimes of a clock tower, if the mean little camp of tar and cesspits had any such thing. Instead, the doggeries and brothel tents spontaneously roused when the workday was done, the men filing home with money in their pockets and their brains addled by twelve hours of hammer-swinging and rubble-clearing and fiddling with fuses. Some of them staggered back home with bottles already in hand, from the boys who sold them at the very edges of the work zone. It never ceased to amaze Kate how fast a man could make himself seem drunk when his mind was set on it.
It was six months since Clarrity had left her with Almira. Somewhere in that time her seventh birthday had come and gone. She had not thought to share the date with her new guardian, though it loomed larger than Christmas in her former life. The latter was a public festival, a time she always had to share with other men bellowing for brandied eggnogs and holiday luck and further credit from the house. Her birthday, however, was a celebration she and her father shared in private, for which he saved the best gifts for her alone. He presented Nickers to her on her sixth, the pony led into the hotel lobby and caparisoned in roses for her delight. When she summoned this memory in bed at night, it made her weep. Convincing the lawmen that Kate was her daughter was only the beginning of the association. When Kate was stubborn, Almira was obliged to beat her. If she was in a kind mood, she used a knotted rope on the back of the child’s legs; when she was not, or if Kate supplied some pretext, she became more ingenious. After a client had left behind a pair of boot hooks, Almira took them to Kate’s hair. As the girl dangled clear of the ground by her unkempt mop, she stared into Almira’s eyes, impassive, relentless, until the other cried, “Kind vom Teufel geboren! Spawn der Hölle!” and beat her further, leaving bruises upon bruises on her back, her thighs, her rump.
But never her face. For when the drunken railroad men came, tramping up from the works ankle-deep in mud or snow, Almira made Kate stand outside the tent with her face washed and hair combed out. There was no wrong kind of attention for her to attract: if someone made an indecent remark, she was instructed to smile and say nothing; if they tried to touch, she was to lead them inside, where Almira would be waiting in a censorious lather:
“Is it my daughter you have cast ungeheuerliche eyes upon, you dog?” she would cry. The mark would deny it, of course, and Almira would go on not believing him, making him more and more panicked and less drunk until she made her offer: they might fuck Almira if they wished or they might not. But for her silence, they would nonetheless pay her the sum of five dollars.
Most did pay, and a few of them took up the challenge of her parted skirts. While this business was conducted, Kate was trained to retreat across the thoroughfare to a place far enough for propriety’s sake but close enough to summon in case of trouble. If Almira cried out the code word, “persimmon,” the girl was supposed to run for a local brawler Almira kept on retainer, for special interventions.
One of her more notable customers came to her at an odd hour, just after noon when the sky had turned a queasy, lemon-colored overcast. He was big man, barely taller than he was wide, with neatly combed whiskers and hat pulled down so hard it bowed over the dome of his skull. There was a cigar in his mouth, which he fidgeted and turned in his fingers as he strolled with the deliberate pace of a man too important to be anywhere in particular. Kate watched him go by, glancing and briefly appraising as he picked his way through the ruts with his ivory-handled walking stick. He showed her his suited back, vast and curved like some great woolen cello, until he slowed, stopped, and turned to regard her again. There was a question in his eyes that she could guess but was too young to answer. He spoke:
“Guten Tag, kleines Mädchen. Ist deine Mutter da?”
There was something familiar about the man, but also something that broke her nerve. She ran into the tent, coming out again under cover of Almira’s broad rear end. She peeked from back there as Almira challenged the man, saying, “Don’t you have anything better to do than frighten children?”
To which the visitor twirled and puffed his cigar. “Ich habe das Glück heute! Zwei Schönheiten zum Preis von einer . . .”
“You’ll have your fill of bad luck if you don’t state your business, aufschneider.”
It was the first time they laid eyes on John Flickinger. He was at that point just an ordinary poseur, a fairly skilled card cheat and whoremonger out of Illinois whose drinking had not yet jaundiced his skin, pickled his brain, and turned him into the derelict that would one day be known as Pa Bender.
In their tent, they entertained him for several hours simply by listening to him exp
ound—entirely in German—upon himself and his exploits. He had come from the other side after the troubles in ’48, having done some sort of mischief there that he hinted at but would not specify. He had worked at meatpacking in Chicago, at every position in the line from splitting the skulls of live steers to shoveling entrails. After tiring of that trade, he drifted west, where he found mixed success at the gaming tables. In St. Louis he was tarred and feathered for staking poker hands with plugged coins—an event he recounted with the sort of humor that came from knowing it could have gone much worse. In Arkansas he came into possession of a teenage squaw, whose services he sold out of a wagon at lumber camps.
As he attested to his skill at this trade he looked pointedly at Kate. But Almira disabused him of this notion: “The girl is fine where she is,” she said. “I’ve invested enough in her.” Upon which Flickinger lost interest in their conversation, claiming he was expected at the richest poker table in the camp. He rose, retrieved his walking stick, and plucked a quarter eagle from his purse. Placing the money in Kate’s hand, he laid an admiring caress on her cheek. Then he tipped his hat to take his leave.
“You never said what happened to the squaw,” Almira said to him.
Flickinger paused at the flap, gave a slight smile, and pushed through.
“Nichtsnutz,” Almira spat in her chaw bucket. “To imagine we’d need the likes of him.” Then she plucked the coin out of Kate’s hand and told her, “You, back outside. And don’t drag Kacke like that in here again.”
Even as she cursed Flickinger, pleasure curled Almira’s lips as she fingered his money.
For Kate’s error, Almira conceived a lesson: after she was finished with her next client, she summoned her and made her stand at attention with the chamber pot. “Go ahead, do the necessary,” she bade the fellow. The miner, a six-foot-tall giant with a full growth of beard to his solar plexus, had conducted his business with Almira with his underthings puddled around his booted feet. After regarding the girl for an instant, he fished from his shorts a warty sea creature the color of a day-old bruise.
His water came hesitantly at first, in fits and burbles. But soon it streamed enough to splatter Kate’s breast and neck.
“Stehen und bewegen sich nicht,” Almira warned, regarding her coolly until the task was done. With a parting shake, the miner tucked himself away and gave the corner of Kate’s mouth a playful caress with the same fingers.
“Now dump that and wash yourself. I check you do a good job!”
They encountered Flickinger again two years later in Virginia City, Nevada. This mountain town, perched in the lee of the Sierras, leapt into existence in 1859 after the discovery of a massive vein of silver. In a matter of months it was one of the biggest settlements in the swath of continent between Denver and San Francisco. Newcomers were still coming by the thousands when Almira and Kate found their way there, in hopes of either profiting directly from the Comstock lode or indirectly from the men who worked the diggings.
Kate had by this time come into her fullness of girlish beauty. She was tall and ginger-haired, with lips full and cleft like blossoms erupted with fragrance. She was not a woman yet—not in the fundamental sense—but teetered on that precipice. The newly rich placers of Virginia City, strolling past Almira’s tent with pockets full of black-veined ore and imaginations pent laden with fantasies, swiveled their heads at her and circled back.
Almira would give them a few minutes to get acquainted with her bait, then charge out in pointed (and pointedly loud) indignation. Soon the miners began to feel their fortunes and their expensive dreams about to slip away. Instead of cash money, Almira received her payoffs in grayish Comstock ore. Soon she had whole wheelbarrows of it, striped with the color of precious metal she’d learned to read as well as the faces of her hapless marks.
They were in the town one afternoon, Almira enjoying a pipeful of tobacco she’d traded for a fat cobble, Kate a fresh apple that cost a dollar because it had been packed in by mule from California. The single road through the camp was jammed with ore wagons. The butt of each backed up under the snouts of the blinkered teams of the next. Pedestrians maddened by the delay in crossing the town’s one street tried to push between the wagons, risking bites from the miserable, ornery horses. Most didn’t try, waiting as much as an hour for a break in the traffic. Almira and Kate had been standing for twenty minutes before they recognized Flickinger right in the front of them.
He was beside the thoroughfare, leaning on a mine car that had been stripped of its wheels and overturned. The usual cigar was in his mouth, stuck and smoldering as he stared into the ground, but the rest of his appearance suggested he had come down in the world. Instead of a suit, he wore a grease-tracked union suit with suspenders, his denim pants patched in mismatched fashion on both knees. On his feet he wore only socks, which were still clean, as if he had just lost his shoes. Instead of a trimmed and cologned face, he displayed a thatch like a backwoodsman, with bristles sticking from his nose and the caves of his ears. In his sallow skin and the bloated redness around his eyes, Kate recognized the familiar attributes of the well-lubricated man.
She thought him more horrid than ever, but his obvious turn of bad luck seemed to attract Almira. She paused in front of him, waiting for his reverie to break.
“Oh, du bist es . . .”
“Yes, indeed,” she replied. “What happened to your shoes?”
He cocked his head and smiled, unfurling a line of suppurating gums. “Lost,” he said.
“Best win ’em back before the weather turns.”
She clicked open the little leathern purse she kept on a string around her neck. “This will get you started,” she said, taking pleasure in returning the favor he’d once done her. He took the money with the unhesitating matter-of-factness of a man with no pride left to defend.
“Danke. Ich zahle es zurück.”
“No need. Just stay away from them antifogmatics!”
A gap opened up in the traffic as an overheated horse collapsed in its traces. Almira gathered Kate’s hand in the manner of a dock worker seizing the mooring rope. “Komm, du . . .” she ordered, and showed Flickinger a bob of her head—a “see you before too long” parting nod—as she crossed.
“Until next time,” he replied. Then he gave her money a close, skeptical look.
Chapter Fifteen
An Interview Concerning
Domestic Matters
SEPTEMBER, 1871
THE HIATUS HELD, but at the cost of tranquility at the Bender claim. Almira, impatient that her cracker tin was getting no heavier, took to fits of violent pique—slamming pots on the stove, neglecting the men’s washing, casting hateful glances in Kate’s direction. Kate contrived to be out of the cabin as much as possible, taking herself off to readings for miles in any direction, allowing Junior drive her in the wagon when she had need to go farther out. For his part, Junior tried to relieve the tension by becoming even more solicitous and chipper. This didn’t have its intended effect: his buoyant mood became so galling, Almira swore to cut his throat if he looked at her sideways.
The old man’s behavior changed not at all. When he wasn’t working their modest garden or grooming the ground over those other “plantings” in the orchard, he sat in the afternoon shade in front of the cabin, studying his Bible. He would stare long and hard at travelers coming up the trail. But only proper commerce was allowed with them now, so he would sour and look down. This often drove travelers to take their business to the Brockman place. Seeing this, Almira came out and slapped his book in the dust with a wet ladle. Even if they were not currently in the murdering business, they needed to be seen as conducting some legitimate activity.
“Couldn’t help but notice,” she addressed him, in German, “that you’ve shown a strong resistance lately to the nose grease. Care to tell how a man so given over to spirits will change?
Whence this sudden strength of character?”
He slowly bent and retrieved his book. He made her wait as he thumbed through the pages to find his place again, then replied, “Got a calling.”
“By what reasoning do you call what you got a ‘calling’?”
“ ‘Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth,’ ” he recited, without need to consult the text, “ ‘and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me. And the Lord said unto him, “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” ’ ”
Almira went inside.
One autumn Saturday a customer arrived not even John Senior could drive away. She came from the southeast, straight across the prairie, mounted legs apart like a man. Her head was covered with a straw sun hat tied with a green silk ribbon, which shadowed her face until she was ready to dismount. Junior, who stood at the window describing her approach to the seated Kate, gave a snort of recognition.
“Who is it?”
“Seems it’s Mary Ann Dick.”
The name sent a freezing stab through Kate’s belly. As she waited for the knock on the door, her thoughts flew to those gatherings on the lawn outside the church, to all those choir practices when she intermittently sought and hid from Leroy Dick. He had never showed a glimmer of reaction. And indeed, Kate would have been disappointed if he had responded like all the others. Those other slavering fools, leering and fishing with their eyes—she despised their desperation, their implicit invitation for her to take advantage of their desire. Indeed, ignoring them was her gift of mercy, as she would not raise their hopes and empty their purses. And in return for this, how they resented her. They would turn to their friends to call her a “peart whore,” an “uppish bitch” giving them “the high hat.” They said it fully in her hearing so that she would know the real nature of their attention.
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