Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  “Oh, aren’t you the smart one?” Almira mocked.

  “It’s not smarts but the sense the Lord gave any mule.”

  “He had no reason to doubt me,” insisted Junior. And with a contrite grimace, he held up his dirty sock for her to take away. For even then, at the sharp edge of their crisis, there were certain verities to honor.

  Kate felt like snatching the sock and stuffing it in his fool face. Or she could have wound it around Almira’s neck and strangled her misery at its source. But instead she took the foul garment, fingered its stains, and took it to her laundry basket.

  “You see what your glyphs and magic do for us now, I think,” derided the old woman. Kate didn’t rise to the bait, but turned the thought over in her mind, and rejected it. The colonel was not a man to be affected by fear of invisible forces. It was an advantage of modernity, she found, that obliviousness amounted to a powerful defense. She would need other skills to cope with the likes of him.

  The posse returned two days later. Spying them from a long way off, the old man muttered an archaic curse and went on spreading manure around the apple seedlings. Wicker switch in hand, sweat plastering her brow, Kate paused from beating their freshly laundered linens. So much for believing in Junior’s road agents, she thought. Then she beat the blankets so hard she split the calluses on her fingers.

  The colonel’s crew was at half strength this time—­just four riders, including himself and Whistler. York alighted and tipped his hat at Kate, but otherwise continued his interrogation as if no time had passed since his last visit.

  “You said he was heading east,” he stated.

  “Did I?”

  “You best not lawyer with us, miss. My brother’s rig was found in some woods ten miles west of here. West, I said. Horse is gone, but it’s his property, all right. Anything to say about that?”

  She shrugged. “What would you have me say? I saw him go east, but maybe he turned around and went west the next day. Maybe he had foul weather. Maybe he forgot something.”

  “And if you believe that . . .” chimed Whistler.

  “Let me understand, Colonel: are you accusing me of something? I told you my family was gone the day Dr. York called. Is it your intention to impeach my name by suggesting I have something to hide?”

  “Yes, we won’t have that,” interjected Junior, taking his cue for once. “No one has ever had occasion to speak about my sister’s honor.”

  “No, you mistake me . . .” said York, momentarily flummoxed by the turn in their interview.

  “For all our time here,” Kate said, “I’ve kept my good name, though the men of this county have behaved in far from gentlemanly fashion! And to have strangers come into our home and make such insinuations . . . it is disgraceful! Unspeakable!”

  “Unerwünscht,” suggested Almira.

  “Exactly.”

  “Understand me: I accuse no one of nothing. It is my entire purpose to learn my brother’s movements in the last week. Nothing more.”

  “It’s easy to think otherwise, the way you lord it about.”

  “The last thing I think myself to be, miss, is a ‘lord,’ ” he said.

  “I’m relieved to hear it.” Then, nudging him gently by the arm, she took him aside for a discreet conference that, because the cabin was so small, everyone else could hear anyway.

  “You and your family must be suffering the unendurable. Believe that we wish nothing more than for you to see his safe return. Trust me when I tell you that your visit here is not just happenstance. There is a larger purpose to it . . .”

  She presented him with a folded piece of paper. Opening it, he read the words PROF. MISS KATIE BENDER. It was one of the handbills she had distributed at the hotel.

  “A perfessor, you say,” he said, eyes parenthesized by mirth. “A formidable title. And what skills might we expect of you, young lady?”

  “Sympathetic gnosticism. Revised Lurianic theosophy. The art and science of telling.”

  “My, what a passel of syllables.”

  “You will be more impressed by the application.”

  He searched her face. Perceiving she was serious, he glanced at his assistant.

  “Do you go to school for that kind of learning?” asked Whistler.

  “It cannot be an accident that fate has brought us together,” she said, again ignoring Whistler. It took no theosophy to know he was mocking her. Coping with such ignorance was distasteful, but if she had to deal with it, it would not be with an underling.

  “How can we deny the fortuitous correspondence between need and means?” she asked. “You pose a question, I have the means to an answer. An adept is measured by the magnitude of the questions she treats. Come back here this evening after sunset. Come alone. Bring an item that once belonged to him—­a piece of jewelry, an article of clothing, anything. I guarantee to you, be he alive or dead, the cards will relieve your uncertainty.”

  York was no longer smiling. To be caught laughing at something not meant as a joke was an unfamiliar experience for him. It made him feel duped, and not a little frivolous, and inclined to react with surliness. Whistler knew what was coming:

  “The colonel will be glad to take help in any form,” he interceded. “After the more conventional forms of investigation are exhausted . . . he may well hold you to your offer.”

  “I can ask for no more,” she replied, “than faith and an open heart.”

  The party mounted up and struck west. When they were out of earshot of the cabin, Whistler steered his horse beside York’s.

  “You make anything out of that?”

  “A queer family is what I make of it,” replied the colonel. “The father looks to be a low-­grade imbecile. And the mother . . .”

  “Hardly better. But I’d bet my last two bits they know more than they’re saying.”

  “They know something. Something useful, I don’t know. Better we turn up that mare. Find her, and we got the party that sold her.”

  The moon rose full over freshly sown fields, gilding the furrows with silver. The colonel did not return for his reading—­as Kate had expected he would not—­but she sat up anyway, in Flickinger’s watching chair, stockingless and clad only in her camisole. The brush of evening breeze against her bare shoulders was unfamiliar to her, as was the feel of fabric against her bare legs. She concentrated on these sensations, eyes closed lightly, opening them now and again at some rustling in the grass or the turn of a bat’s wing above her head.

  DR. WILLIAM YORK had indeed come to them ten days before. He rode a fancy conveyance, buckle and watch chain shining and smelling of fancy soap. He stood at their door with the black bag that marked him as a professional. Not some upjumped yarb or purveyor of quack nostrums, but a genuine book doctor.

  “Evening,” he hailed her.

  “Good evening,” she replied, eyeing him up and down. In time, she would realize he had something of his brother’s ravening leanness about him. But there was a fullness to his mouth, a sensuousness to its curves, that distinguished him.

  “Might I trouble you for a drink and perhaps a bite to eat . . . before I push on to Cherryvale?”

  “There’s nothing in Cherryvale, sir, that cannot be bettered here. Come in.”

  He had come on that rare day when they’d taken down the canvas partition, thinking to clean the unsightly spot in the middle. Unlike their other guests, he could see straight across the cabin to the back door and Almira glowering at her stove. The old man was seated at the table, shoe hammer already in hand. Not a welcoming spectacle, but no worse than other tableaux a doctor might see on house calls to remote claims.

  The doctor needed no encouragement to set himself down at the table. His manner with a spoon and knife were worlds better than any visitor they had seen in those parts. Kate seated herself across from him, enjoying his display of gentility. She
had barely finished questioning him about his destination, his means, his contacts in the area, before Flickinger rose from his chair. York looked at him with an expression of pleasant anticipation on his face, as if expecting to converse about the prize turnip at the county fair. He still looked that way when the old man, with almost nothing of a backswing, struck him flush in the face with his hammer.

  Kate felt a scream crawl from the pit of her throat. York did not open his mouth but merely gushed blood from the hole where his nose had been—­an aperture in the shape of an upside-­down horseshoe, the kind that let the good luck run out. Then he crumpled to the planks like a balloon figure whose pin had been pulled.

  She rounded on Flickinger. “Fool, you didn’t let me talk to him!”

  He fidgeted with the head of his hammer, mixing York’s blood with the dirt and nose grease that were as always at the ends of his fingers. “He sounded like he needed fixin’,” he said. Then he withdrew to his seat, picked up his Bible and resumed his study.

  That was the last traveler they entertained until the elder York showed up at their door. It was the smoothest of any of their disposals, with hardly a misstep. No missteps, except for that small piece of missing intelligence, that he was a successful physician from a nearby town.

  Now, under the sowing moon, she became conscious of a faint whistling, out in the darkness, becoming more insistent. Staring ahead, she glimpsed something white crouching in the grass fifty yards from the cabin. She rose, and padding onto the stubbly turf, came upon a kneeling figure.

  “Took ye a while to come,” said Brockman. He spoke softly, but in the wake of her reverie, his voice boomed like cannon shot.

  “Shush, you fool! What are you doing here?”

  “I think ye must know. It’s all over the county.”

  “I know that if my parents catch you here . . .” she replied, searching over her shoulder. Whatever the legitimacy of his pretext, the notion that a man would take it upon himself to imperil her position in this way infuriated her. Never before had such a big and empty place seemed so small, so crowded with spying eyes. Becoming conscious of how flimsily she was dressed, she crossed her arms over herself.

  “That colonel,” whispered the other, “came by our store twice, asking the kinds of questions ought not be asked. He has it from somewhere that there is something between us.”

  “Something?”

  “He spoke around it. He suggested. I wanted ye to know it didn’t come from me.”

  “The man is distraught from the loss of his brother,” she replied. “We should pity him, and help him in any way we can.”

  “Pity a snake and suffer his fangs.”

  Alone with Brockman, she felt more compromised with every moment that passed. It was a quality of certain men, an artifact of their earnestness, that they could not conceal their need. And Brockman was very needy.

  “It seems to me that you barely know anything, Rudolph.”

  “I know that rig was known in every town from here to Fort Scott. It could not be sold safely.”

  “So you just left it?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “And the mare?”

  “I hired a man to take it down to Indian territory. I’ve use him before—­he can be trusted.”

  “Seems you’ve done your level best, then. What would you have of me?”

  He shifted. Though it was too dark for her to see his features, she knew he had that beset, dyspeptic look on his face, the one he wore when the occasion called for him to declare his devotion.

  “I think—­ye are displeased with me—­though I do only what may serve ye—­”

  Approaching him, she laid a hand on his left cheek and bent to kiss him on the right. His unshaven mug bristled like a flank of a boar. But there was also an earthly, surprisingly sweet smell to it, like roasted sweet corn. If not actual affection, she suddenly felt a sense of responsibility for him.

  “You should not come here. Trust me—­be patient. That is how you may serve.”

  “I will be patient,” he attested.

  The colonel came a third time two days later. Mounted, he rode at a walk with Whistler at his side. Ahead of them was a man on foot with a leashed dog. The latter was some kind of hound. Its white fur was ticked with red, its pendant ears sweeping the ground as it slung its snout back and forth across the turf. Kate watched them approach from ten minutes away. They sometimes veered off the thoroughfare, but came back as the hound dug its hind legs into the earth, standing almost erect in its frenzy to get back on the trail.

  They were more or less at the door when Kate opened up.

  “Pleasant afternoon, Colonel! I see you’ve finally come back to see me.”

  York’s adamantine glare begrudged no pleasantries. His gaze shifted from her to the dog and back as the animal leapt and snaked forward, straining to follow the scent into the Bender cabin. The colonel presented his gaze as if it was its own indictment. She met it squarely, signifying nothing, a bottomless void to swallow whatever shot from his eyes.

  “You understand what this hound is tracking?” Whistler asked.

  She presented an open hand to the dog, thinking she might distract it. But the animal only gave her palm a perfunctory sniff.

  “I never denied your brother was here. It is fortunate for you that he was. His presence should make it easier to account for his movements. Have you considered my offer?”

  York’s mouth twisted with repugnance. “I am too occupied presently,” he said, “to avail myself of such methods.”

  “May we bring the dog within?” asked Whistler, indicating the cabin.

  “You may not. For it will only tell you what you already know.”

  Whistler eyes widened, flitted in the colonel’s direction.

  “You should think hard on that answer.”

  “Gentlemen, this is pointless. I have already availed you a source many times more valuable—­”

  “I ask you again: will you step aside?”

  “No. Not without speaking with my parents first.”

  “That is reasonable,” opined Whistler, to which the colonel was about to say something, changed his mind, and looked away in smoldering sufferance.

  “My brother and father are away in Parsons until this evening. Come back tomorrow—­if good sense has not persuaded you otherwise.”

  York, with a click of his tongue, reversed his horse. The dog had other intentions: so reluctant was it to abandon the search that its handler had to sling it over his shoulder. As it was carried away it gazed back at Kate, letting out piteous, yelping barks.

  “My offer stands, Colonel!” she called out to him. “I’ll find your brother for you, even if he’s in Hell.”

  When York heard those words, even if he’s in Hell, an alarming sensation seized him. All the color drained from his face, and the back of his neck became sensitive to every stirring of the breeze. He was a man comfortable in his certainties, but they did not usually come to him this way, in the tone of a woman’s voice. For the way she said the words—­that she could even imagine such a mild man could be in Hell—­convinced him his brother had suffered the worst. Death, by misadventure or some darker means.

  The sensation wrung his gut. The mechanisms of intuition, after all, were as mysterious to him as any other kind of divination. Such things usually struck him as womanly, and embarrassed him. But this one burned and froze him, as if he had been shot with a bullet carved of ice.

  He rode on and didn’t look back. He went all the way back to Cherryvale, to the livery, where he didn’t meet the eyes of the man who accepted his horse. Without a word to Whistler, he proceeded straight to his hotel. In his room, he tossed his hat on the bed and filled his wash basin to the brim.

  Even if he’s in Hell, she’d said.

  Justice would come in its course, but it wou
ld keep for now. Instead, he plunged his face deep into the basin until the water overtopped his ears and his nose rested against the porcelain. Then, with a freedom he would never otherwise indulge, the colonel loosed a cry of grief.

  Chapter Twenty-­One

  Resolved

  SUNDAY

  THE PARISHIONERS AT Harmony Grove were startled to discover that regular choir practice had been canceled. Instead, a community-­wide meeting was convened in the schoolhouse. To accommodate the greatest number of citizens, no chairs or desks were left in the classroom. The ­people gathered on their feet, muslin frocks brushing woolen sleeves, fans and hats beating the stuffy air in rhythms that became synchronized as the congregants became more and more absorbed in the grim business laid before them.

  Minister Dienst stood aside, arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man waiting for a train he doubted would ever come. Seated beside him was an entirely bald man in a saloon keep’s apron, absently manipulated the ends of his moustache. To his left was George Majors, justice of the peace, leaning in to whisper to Leroy Dick. The latter was dressed in a suit of white linen that gleamed incandescent yellow in the full sunlight of the window. Dick cast a worried glance at George Mortimer, who stood with his wife as she kept up a monologue of barely audible commentary. Mortimer looked to John Moneyhon, standing in front of him with an obvious bulge in the small of his back. The Irishman, sensing someone watching him back there, turned, smiled, and flashed the pistol he had stashed in his waistband, flouting the convention that firearms were not to be carried in town halls. Moneyhon winked; Mortimer frowned.

  Among the last of the attendees to arrive were Old Man Bender and John Junior. Entering with heads down, they greeted no one and took up position along the back wall. Their presence was not as notable as the absence of Katie Bender. The nonappearance of the “witch” relieved some but disappointed most.

  When it seemed to Leroy Dick that most households of northwest Labette County were represented, he nodded to the man in the chair. The latter tapped the desktop with an ink pot to hush the assembly.