By the third evening McDonnaugh noticed that his prisoner was not well. “You aren’t fixin’ to tell my fortune again, are you?” he mocked. From his pack, he produced a hunk of salt pork wrapped in burlap. She took it, but in her weakened condition the meat was too tough for her to tear off the bone.
Now the captain began to worry. He stripped some pork with his knife and fed her by hand. The salt only made her throat feel worse, but she felt a rueful sort of victory in seeing him forced to feed her, like a mother. At last, she’d hit on a way to pierce his callous hide.
He didn’t make her stumble in the dark to drink from the river, but shared his canteen. When it was time to bed down, he fetched the extra blanket and threw the duster on top of that for good measure. The next morning he let her sleep until an hour after sunrise. When she awoke, he had fresh coffee waiting.
But it did no good. She sickened in the saddle, her head drooping lower and lower. The mare, perceiving her distress, had the courtesy to slow down, and the Pinkerton was left to circle them both, cursing his misfortune.
“Ain’t it my luck to pay good money for a horse? I could have brought your head in a sack.”
“To hell with you, Clarrity, if you won’t let me speak to her first,” she said, eyes half lidded.
“What?”
“He’s my pony don’t you dare sell him. Ain’t no deal you can make that won’t get you shot in the face. My paw, he bought Nickers. Ain’t no deal . . . nothing to do with me. My paw is watching, sure as you won’t live to spend those winnings.”
“You’re deleterious, girl,” said McDonnaugh.
“What’re you offering?” she said, looking straight at him but not seeing him. “To forget the harm you caused? Air out his guts, you might of. He’s watching for sure.”
Bad as she sounded, the Pinkerton wasn’t quite ready to quit the trail. Coming alongside, he lifted her chin to look into her eyes. The rims were the color of strawberry bruises, and her skin had gone sallow.
“Broke down,” she said, smiling.
“That’s the truth,” he said. He figured they were sixty miles from Salina, in a direction no one was likely to seek them. Was that enough for him to keep his prize? There was no way to be sure. But he could be sure that she would not survive another week on the run, sleeping outside, without recovering her strength.
He led her to a covered place to rest for the day. As she rested on a felled log, he collected kindling, produced a box of matches, and lit their first evening campfire. The spectacle served to crack her delirium—as the flames rose, she leaned in as close as she dared, staring into them. The light, so long withheld, was the point of a knife cutting through the bleary tangle of her sick.
“Damn you, you’ll roast yourself to death . . .” said the dandy as he stamped at the hem of her dress. Upon dousing the little flames with his heel, McDonnaugh tugged her backward by her elbows, then emptied his canteen on the smoking threads. Kate watched with remote interest, never raising a hand to save herself. Seems he preferred to deliver her alive after all.
“Now look what you’ve done to my skirt, just when I got it to dry,” she remarked.
“Funny. Fancy seeing you laugh as you go up in flames.”
“You’d have to get in line.”
After she was safely situated, he disappeared into the brush, the crunch of his footsteps fading into the distance. He was away for a time she didn’t care to measure in the fire’s exquisite influence. When he reappeared in the light, he had a gray rabbit in his fist.
“Hallo! Salt horse is off the menu for now.”
He cleaned and spitted the carcass, and laid it across the fire in two forked sticks he hacked from a cottonwood bough. He was fussing with the fire, nudging the wood as if he had some perfect arrangement in mind, when he suddenly stopped and stood up. Peering into the trees, he kept an ear cocked. His hand lay loosely on the grip of his pistol.
“What is it?” she asked.
He raised his free hand for her to be silent. They stayed that way long enough for one side of their dinner to cook through; as if direly inconvenienced, he bent to turn the spit, begrudging any sound the procedure made. Then he was back to interrogating the dark.
It was never the absence of light that spooked Kate. To her mind, darkness connoted nothing more than absence. Lying in the hotel rooms of her childhood, she grew to appreciate the deep darkness that didn’t include the veiled lamps of soiled doves plying their trade or the muzzle flashes of angry gamblers. Unbroken dark hid her from harm. Nothing bad ever happened to her there. When she arrived at the Bender cabin for the first time, she did so without fear—until that wolf had stared into Flickinger’s lamp. The light of its eyes terrified her more than gazing into the deepest of inky-black pits. It was that light, that unexpected gleam from the eyes of monsters lying in wait, that she dreaded—as she dreaded what might appear among the trees as McDonnaugh stood there, listening.
At length he gave up. Fetching his pack, he produced a small leather pouch, poked two fingers in, and sprinkled salt on the rabbit. By then the meat smelled good enough for her to forget McDonnaugh’s vigil and her illness. He held the spit for her to tear off a piece, which she did like a ravening animal. For his part, the Pinkerton didn’t touch the meat until he had stuffed a napkin down the front of his ruffled shirt.
“My, you’re a fastidious one,” she said, her mouth rimmed with grease.
He took a tentative bite, staring at her as he swallowed. “And I’ve never seen a ‘professor’ eat like a freight-car bum.”
She gnawed her piece down to the bones, then sucked the marrow. He held out a flask. She found this contained not water, but an odd-tasting liquor.
“It’s sloe gin,” he said when she regarded the flask. “Not stuff I usually pass around.”
She tipped it again. As she drank, she saw a figure rush from behind the Pinkerton.
The newcomer moved swiftly, soundlessly, as if it were floating above the ground. McDonnaugh hadn’t moved when a heavy object crumpled him from behind. The figure stood over him, stark in the firelight, and lifted the mallet to strike again. This time the Pinkerton’s skull cracked, making a sound like the splitting of a fence rail. Blood spattered through the camp, wetting the assailant, the horses, Kate’s face. The disassembly of his skull had exposed an artery that spasmed in the dirt.
“By the blood ye are sanctified,” said Flickinger as he stood over the mess he had made.
Kate was too stunned to speak. She stared at the hash of bone and brain on the ground as the disembodied vessel spurted, wilted, and went still. Yet for all the blood, the napkin under McDonnaugh’s chin was hardly stained.
“Nothing to say?” the old man said to her. “After all the trouble I went through tracking you down?”
“I . . . I . . .” she stammered, the cords in her throat wound too tight. This was clearly Flickinger that stood before her, but he was not quite the same. He was no longer a stranger to comb and razor. He had acquired a better tailor, with breeches and a collared shirt with a checked vest. Gore notwithstanding, he seemed half civilized. And yet—clean-shaven cheeks did nothing to soften those vaguely simian proportions of that brow, that nose, that almost nonexistent chin. The way he hulked over McDonnaugh, he could reach the ground without stooping.
“Hell’s bells, after those first few nights I thought he’d never set a fire. So I featured, it’s either now or never.”
“You’ve been following us?”
“When have I not looked after you, gumdrop?”
That word. She watched him as he bent in the dirt, extracted the spit from the dead man’s fingers and tested the meat.
“Es ist noch warm . . .” he said.
“Why did you call me that?”
“What? Doesn’t every father have a special name for his little girl?”
K
ate felt a vast chasm open in her abdomen. Cool at first, but with rising anger, she regarded Flickinger as he settled on his haunches to finish his meal.
“You’re a liar,” she said. “You know nothing about my father.”
He frowned. “You were young, but don’t you remember our time doing the poker rounds together? You don’t remember all the things I bought for you? The books? Nickers?”
“Shut your mouth! I don’t know how you know all that, but you aren’t him. He’s nothing like you.”
“The day of that business with Clarrity . . . I sure am sorry about that. Never had a day since I didn’t regret it. Drove me to years of drink—until I ran into you at that shithole camp in Colorado. Figured if I let on who I was to Almira, I’d never get you away from her for decent money. So I had to be patient . . .”
“Please, stop . . . I don’t want to hear it!” she cried, covering her ears.
“Suit yourself. I’ll grant you I never planned to wait so long to take you away. But after we lucked into that little business with the grocery, I figured, what was the bleedin’ rush? You were so good at running that show, you did me proud. Now we got enough bankroll to hit the circuit again. We’re together for good now, gumdrop. And we got the world at our feet.”
She wiped the blood from her face with the crook of her arm. At least with Flickinger’s mouth full of rabbit, she didn’t have to listen to his lies. If he was father to anything, it was just that—father of lies. Was this all some trick to enlist her services? She felt herself calm; she didn’t know how he’d learned details of her childhood, but she sensed Almira’s malign hand. Putting her name to this evil made it easier to endure.
Kate let their eyes meet. Still engrossed, the old man gave a satisfied grunt. She had never swung the hammer before, but she expected she might, in due time.
Acknowledgments
THIS WORK OF fiction sticks close to the history as far as it is known. In fact, no one is sure what happened to the Benders after they fled Labette County. There was a court case brought in 1889 against two Michigan women said to be Kate and Almira. But their physical identification was never secure, and the woman said to be Kate, one Sarah Eliza Davis, had none of the real Kate’s lively intelligence. The case was dropped in 1890 for lack of evidence.
There is also a tradition of deathbed confessions by men claiming to have been part of posses that caught the Benders. In most of these “confessions,” such as that of Jacob S. Frazee, the Benders were dealt summary justice and the participants sworn to secrecy. Unfortunately, none of them led to a shred of physical evidence proving that the murderers were, in fact, caught. For these reasons, I have indulged artistic license in envisioning what happened after the Benders’ disappearance.
The published histories I consulted included Fern Morrow Wood’s The Benders: Keepers of the Devil’s Inn, Phyllis de la Garza’s Death for Dinner, and John T. James’s The Benders in Kansas. I also wish to thank Wayne E. Hallowell of Cherryvale, Kansas, for giving me access to his voluminous collection of Bender material—as well as an after-hours look at the notorious Bender hammers in the Cherryvale Museum. His help with my research was not a given: many of Cherryvale’s residents despise the legacy of the Benders, preferring that their town be remembered as the birthplace of actress Vivian Vance (“Ethel” on I Love Lucy). The town’s “Bender Museum,” a recreation of the inn and grocery, was closed down in 1978 and never reopened.
I am also indebted to those who supported this project on Kickstarter, including (but not limited to) Nina Faust, David Hollander, Wayne Hughes, Tawny Martin, Robert Newton, Paul Noffsinger, Pamela Reichert, and Todd Yellin. Thanks to Robert Pohl for looking over the German, and James Warner for his comments on an early draft. All writers depend on the kindness of others, whether they be benefactors, editors, or readers.
About the Author
NICHOLAS NICASTRO was born in Astoria, New York in 1963. He has earned a B.A. in English from Cornell University (1985), an M.F.A. in filmmaking from New York University (1991), an M.A. in archaeology and a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell (1996 and 2003). He has worked as a film critic, a hospital orderly, a newspaper reporter, a library archivist, a college lecturer in anthropology and psychology, an animal behaviorist, and an advertising salesman. His writings include short fiction, travel, and science articles in such publications as The New York Times, The New York Observer, Film Comment, and The International Herald Tribune.
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Also by Nicholas Nicastro
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover photo by Precious Posh Photography.
HELL’S HALF-ACRE. Copyright © 2015 by Nicholas Nicastro. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780062422552
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062422569
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