Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “He thinks he can gouge me when he can’t even guarantee delivery on time,” he said. “I’m inclined to go with this yard in Fort Scott just to show the complacent son-of-a-bitch.”

  It was fine with me. I’d bought the lumber for the current building there at what I considered an extortionary rate, but Marc told me it was less than he’d been paying for the materials for his house. I was momentarily distracted by the squealing sound of Clyde’s laughter, and on the sofa I saw him doubled over in hysterics as Maggie clutched him from behind, tickling him below the rib cage. Ninna was smiling rather sternly now—she was not a particularly affectionate mother, at least physically—and I believe she was on the verge of intervening when a loud knocking came at the door. Maggie and Clyde, both flushed and breathless, sat upright as Marc opened the door. Cy Patton stood there, hat in hand, and Maggie stiffened. As he often did, Patton looked like a little dog who’d just evacuated his bowels on a rug, wet-eyed in anticipation of a whipping.

  “Mr. Leval? Sorry to stop by unannounced on Christmas Day, but I heard you were entertaining and I thought it might be a good piece for the Free Press.”

  “Come on in,” Marc said, and if he didn’t look in his wife’s direction it was surely to avoid the furious shaking of her head and the exasperated rolling of her eyes back into their orbits, but by the time Patton was in the room she had made her expression one of polite welcome. He was quick in his work, taking just a few notes and asking about the Levals’ families back east. Their responses were none too specific, if not actually evasive, and after a few questions of the same type to me and Ninna he left. As I shook hands with him at the door I noted that there was a chunk of some sort of food clinging, dried, to the corner of his mustache, and he mistook my smirk for a comradely smile; he shook my hand and wished me a Merry Christmas, and I wished him the same as he disappeared limping down the staircase.

  Maggie’s spirits had dampened considerably since the knock at the door, and she tried to raise them again with the suggestion that we exchange presents. Our gifts to the Levals were meager: a wooden pipe for Marc (who, I subsequently learned, didn’t smoke, but who accepted the gift as graciously as if he did) and an embroidered Christmas stocking for Maggie, handmade by a somewhat resentful Ninna. From our generous hosts Clyde received a new coat—I hadn’t mentioned the need for one to the Levals, but having seen him on several occasions they could hardly have failed to notice—and a sled, store-bought. Ninna was given a hat in the current mode, which she sniffed at, uncomprehending. I received a Latin book, its spine stiff and uncracked, its leather still fresh and fragrant; it was the De Senectute , De Amicitia, Paradoxa, and Somnium Scipionis of Cicero, and in the same volume Cornelius Nepos’s Life of Atticus, with notes in English by Charles Anthon. My stupefaction and stammered thanks seemed to lift Maggie, who had certainly selected it herself, from the doldrums Cy Patton had inspired, and upon opening the book I was strangely thrilled to see that its inscription was in her own hand, with Marc’s added almost as an afterthought:

  To Wm. Ogden,

  our friend and partner in our newest ventures.

  Merry Christmas 1872.

  “I don’t know if you ever bother to read the commentaries,” Maggie said, “but I found Mr. Anthon’s notes to be most illuminating.”

  “I’m sure they’re wonderful,” I said. On Marc’s face I read a fleeting smirk, gone too fast for me to tell whether it was born of fond indulgence or condescension toward his wife’s and my pretensions to erudition.

  Though Ninna managed to be pleasant she remained suspicious and uncertain as to why these people were treating us as friends, and after we had drunk the eggnog and sung the carols (all of them unfamiliar to her) she rose and said that she’d had a delightful time and was sorry it was time to go.

  Maggie had the good sense not to try and talk her out of it, and we went downstairs with their merry voices trailing us from the landing. The streets were deserted, or nearly so, as we headed out, and I couldn’t help noting how much happier the boy looked in his new, warm coat, his belly full of sweets and his head full of the ministrations of a pretty woman. He held the sled as if the snow might start any moment, and kept his face skyward.

  We arrived back at the farm by four o’clock. Garth sat brazenly in the front parlor, reeking of the corn whiskey I’d given him that morning for the occasion and not troubling himself to hide his resentment at his exclusion from our Christmas celebration.

  I returned to town at six o’clock or so that evening and opened the saloon, which we had not yet begun to dismantle. I poured whiskey until well past midnight, feeling hollow at the core for reasons I could not elucidate. To judge by the lugubrious air in the room my melancholy was shared by the majority of the drunkards present that night.

  Patton’s article, when it appeared that week, didn’t amount to much, but I learned from Marc that it had offended Maggie anyway.

  YULETIDE AT THE COTTONWOOD HOTEL

  Our newest arrivals, Mr. and Mrs. Marc Leval, entertained on Christmas Day Mr. William Ogden, of Cottonwood, and his young family, in their grandly appointed suite at the Cottonwood Hotel. It was a jolly scene, reminiscent of many a winter’s holiday back home in Chicago, where the Levals resided before making Kansas their home. Asked if she missed family and friends there, Mrs. Leval pleasantly replied that she was delighted to be in Kansas, and tried only to look forward. Their splendid new house will be finished soon, we hear, and we hope soon to have details of Mr. Leval’s plans for the town, said to be as grandiose as the manse itself.

  I saw nothing to offend there, but Marc told me that the day it appeared she took to her bed for the remainder of the afternoon. Ninna read the article and sniffed that she hadn’t been mentioned by name, but Clyde begged me to cut the article out with my penknife, and once I had he pressed it lovingly inside his copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  A little more than two weeks later I made the trip to the lumberyard in Fort Scott to procure the lumber and fixtures required for the new building. Between the coming of the railroad and the building of the cattle pens, Marc lacked the free time to go, and I was happy for the chance to escape the saloon and the loft for a few days. The day of my departure we had talked into the early afternoon about finances and construction plans, and it wasn’t until past four that I got started on the road to Fort Scott. I left a teetotaling farmboy named Horace Gleason in charge of the saloon in my absence; he was willing to ply the devil’s trade in return for instruction in the art and craft of photography. He had worked the bar one afternoon before, and afterward I had received so many complaints about the temperance lectures and Bible verses he dispensed alongside the bug juice that this time I had to extract a solemn oath that there would be no proselytizing until my return. I quit town astride a new mount, a chestnut mare purchased as company property by Marc, imaginatively named Red by its former owner.

  In retrospect, I should have delayed my departure until morning; it was already dark by the time I was but a few miles north of town, the moon full and shining across the hills, the frozen ground shimmering in its glow and creating an atmosphere that suggested neither day nor night, precisely, but a dreamlike state somewhere between the two. The last snow had been some weeks before, on the day of the Levals’ arrival, and only patches of it remained on the sides of the mounds, mostly in places that stayed shady on clear days. When I got to the Big Hill Creek ford the mare’s shins cut like boat’s prows through a thin crust of ice on its surface, and presently I detected movement in a grove of trees on the other side and a grunt which I interpreted as human in origin.

  “Who’s that?” I called out.

  The noises ceased, and so did the grunting, though I believed I could now detect the sound of clothes rustling.

  “Better show yourself,” I yelled, drawing my Colt as I did so.

  “It’s all right,” came a male voice from the darkness, “I’m coming out.”

  A moment later a stout young man appeared
, hands clearly visible. “John Bender,” he yelled. He was Kate’s brother, and unlike her he spoke with a thick German accent. I had heard people claim that they were not brother and sister but husband and wife, offering as proof his awkwardness with the English language in contrast with her eloquence. I had only seen him once or twice before, but it did strike me now that there was no family resemblance between the two of them. He was squat and thick, with a square, flat face and the eyes of an imbecile. His trousers were imperfectly fastened, and it was my impression that, despite the cold, he’d been evacuating his bowels or abusing himself in the quiet solitude of the grove.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Fort Scott,” I answered. “Off to purchase some lumber.”

  “You won’t make it tonight. Why don’t you stop at our house, have dinner and stay the night? Thirty cents, and you can have breakfast, too.”

  Until then I had supposed I would stay at the hotel in Cherryvale, though it was a short distance out of my way; cold as it was, I had no desire to set up camp for the night, and Leval had entrusted me with cash for my expenses. Now, though, the prospect of turning in early for once appealed, and I considered the offer seriously.

  “I was on my way to the Cherryvale Hotel. I don’t think it’s much further.”

  He waved his hand in dismissal. “My sis used to work there,” he said, which I knew to be true. “Cost you seventy-five cents and you don’t get fed. My ma’s a real good cook,” he said, beckoning me, and he mounted a fine-looking horse and I followed him up the bank to a trail leading to their claim. “My sister’s a real beauty, too,” he called over his shoulder, and I had the sense that his statement was in the nature of an offer, rather than a mere boast.

  After a few minute’s ride over the Hieronymous Mounds we arrived at the house, a square frame building with smoke rolling from the chimney and a warm, yellow-orange glow in its two front windows. There was a skeletal orchard a stone’s throw from the house, the branches of its thin young trees stretching upward into the moonlight as if in supplication. Bender dismounted and hurried to the door.

  “Let me tell Ma and Pa we got us a guest.” He pronounced it “kest.”

  A minute later he came out, followed by a short, scowling bear of a woman and a hugely muscular blackhaired man, his thick neck so bent as to be nearly parallel to the ground, and with a look on his face that made the old hag next to him look positively sweet. The old woman, whom I had seen on a few previous occasions, did not seem to remember me, and she snapped something to the boy in a Hochdeutsch patois that sounded remarkably like my mother’s Alsatian. The young man indicated that I should dismount, whereupon he led my horse away.

  I entered the tiny dwelling and found it divided into two rooms by a large canvas sheet. On a small table against the wall stood a lamp, its luminescence dimmed by its smoke-darkened glass; the only other light came from a fire in the hearth. Something was cooking in a still-shiny copper pot suspended over the flame; the drummer had found a customer in old Ma Bender that night after all. I wondered if he’d screwed Kate or not, and whether he’d reduced the price of the pot accordingly. I decided he probably had on both counts.

  By its smell I took what was bubbling in the pot to be corn, but before I had been in the house for half a minute another smell assaulted my nostrils, a very vague one, merely an accent to that of the cooking corn, but it soon overpowered my senses and I began to sicken. It was in fact a number of odors working in concert, ranging from dull to sharp, to produce a unified stench that called at once to mind graveyard detail in the army as well as the summer before I’d joined the army, when I’d worked stunning cattle in a slaughterhouse.

  Mrs. Bender, huffing and shuffling painfully, produced a ladle and a large wooden bowl from the other side of the house and approached the pot. She pointed at a large, rough wooden table and indicated that I should sit; when I did so the faint odor that was causing me such unease intensified to such a degree that I was forced to stand. Then I saw that beneath the table was a section of flooring that did not fit the rest, precisely, giving the impression of a trap door. The two men had entered at this point, and they both stared at me with some degree of consternation, apparently because I remained on my feet.

  “Sit,” the old man said, pointing to the chair I had just vacated, and it was an order rather than a suggestion.

  His son was more diplomatic. “Take a seat, Ma will serve you up a bite to eat,” he said, but all eyes in the house were on me, defying me to stand any longer when I had been told to sit.

  “I’ve had a change of heart,” I said, and I started for the door. “I thank you for your kind offer, but I’d like to make some more time tonight.”

  The old man stood in the doorway, blocking my exit, and I repeated my statement in German, in case they hadn’t understood; my Alsatian accent took them by surprise.

  “You won’t get far tonight,” John Bender said in Alsatian.

  “Sit and eat,” his father said, still there in the door. “You insult my house.”

  I pulled aside my coat, which I had not removed, and put my right hand on the grip of the Colt for the second time that evening. The old man’s expression grew more venomous, and I began to appreciate what an enormous beast he was; were his neck not bent as it was he would have reached six feet four or five inches in height, and he looked half that wide. He looked at the Colt and then gave me an appraising glance, as though calculating whether I could draw and fire before he reached me. I eased the Colt from my belt, simultaneously pulling the hammer back, and still I didn’t sense that the likelihood of old Bender moving aside had increased much. Then from the exterior came a sound that distracted him, that of a horse arriving at a good clip and then stopping. I heard someone dismount not far from the door, and a moment later Kate Bender appeared in the door behind him, shouting in German that I was the saloonkeeper in the town of Cottonwood and well-known locally. Before she got any further the old man shouted at her in a tone that would have curdled milk: “Er versteht Deutsch!”

  She stuck her head in and moved past her father. “Well, Bill Ogden, isn’t this a pleasant surprise,” she said cheerily, as though I was the last person she had expected to see upon poking her head in the door. She was breathing hard, and sweat had frozen patches of that long red hair. “Will you be joining us for supper this evening?” Though she looked at the Colt in my hand, noting presumably that it was cocked and ready to fire, she said nothing about it.

  “I was just on my way,” I said. “Pleasure to see you, as always, Miss Kate.” I stepped past her father and crossed to where the horses were tied and retrieved my mount. Next to it was Kate’s, wheezing from exertion, and cold sweat shone on its coat. I heard them arguing in the cabin as I rode away in the direction of Cherryvale, the loudest belonging to old Mrs. Bender, and listening to the voices diminish in the distance I remembered my old Alsatian grandfather yelling at my mother and grandmother in German and French, demanding his meals and his pipe and sometimes just yelling because he liked the sound of it.

  That night in the dining room of the Cherryvale Hotel where Kate had once worked, I told my host what had happened and we shared a laugh over my unease amongst the Benders. The hotelier proceded to share several anecdotes about Kate’s eccentric behavior, and then he called down a tiny old woman from one of the rooms who cradled in her arms a rifle.

  “Don’t mind the gun, it goes where she does. Mrs. Kearney, tell Mr. Ogden here what happened to you out at the Bender house last year.”

  She took a good look at me and, having decided I could be trusted with the tale, sat down in a chair. “I just got here to town, and I seen them signs she posted up all over about healing, and when I moved in here and got to know her some she told me she got her healing powers from a dead Indian chief. He told her how to do it, you see? And then she tells me she can talk to the spirits generally, and I says how I’d sure like to talk to my dead sister up in North Dakota.”

  “I
thought it was your mother, Mrs. Kearney,” the innkeeper said.

  “No, Mother died in Wisconsin and I got nothing more to say to her. So she invited me out to her house, and we rode out together, it was getting to be sundown. We went in, and she told the family we was going to commune with the spirits, and the menfolk started acting peculiar and left the room with the old woman. Then Kate started drawing on the walls with a piece of coal. Drew up a picture of a man, and you knew it was a man because she went ahead and drew his rutting gear sticking out like a thumb. Then the old man, bent over double, walks in with a knife and damned if he didn’t stab that drawing of that man right in the heart, and while the knife’s still stuck in the wood there old Kate collapses like a rag doll and falls to the floor, crying out and talking in tongues. Right about then’s when I edged my seat a little closer to where my rifle was. The old man disappeared into the other room without a word, and I asked Kate if she was communing with the spirits yet and she said ‘I sure am, and what they’re telling me right now is to kill you daid.’ Well, I grabbed my rifle and charged out that door over to my horse. Sun was just going down, and I could hear Kate laughing while I rode away. I bet you I could hear her for half a mile or more, carried on the wind. I was scared to death she was following me until I finally got back here.”