Scenes of the West Series. Copyright 1874 by Wm. O. Sadlaw, Golden, Colo.
No. 11. A Buffalo Hunter Killed, Scalped, and Left on the Prairie.
It was a stereoscopic view of a dead buffalo hunter, flat on his back and attended by two kneeling soldiers, one of them unable to suppress a shit-eating grin at the prospect of being photographed, even as an element in so grisly a spectacle. Maggie and I had spotted the soldiers to our northeast late one June morning, just a few hours outside of Dodge City; one stroke of ill luck after another had reduced us to crossing the plains aboard a creaking, decrepit photographer’s wagon, but when I saw the dead hunter’s skinless, bloody skull glistening in the midday sun I knew that our fortunes had changed. Having spent the last of my meager bankroll and the contents of Maggie’s jewel box during a brief, unhappy stay in Wichita for that rotting wagon, its meager contents, and a stereographic camera considerably inferior to the one I’d left at the Cottonwood Hotel, I set about committing the pathetic vista to glass, with Maggie’s enthusiastic but inexperienced assistance. The work did not go quickly, but the soldiers were models of coöperation, taking more interest in the making of the picture than in the disposition of the hunter’s remains, and before the plate was developed I knew I had something I could sell.
Idly I now examined a copy in the light of the studio lamp; despite the primitive conditions under which it was made, it was as fine a view as I’d ever done, with the soldiers, the cadaver, and the background each occupying a distinct plane, as crisp and rounded as the moment the lens projected their image onto the wet glass.
The others in the series were competently made, including a similar composition made low to the ground of a field of dead buffalo, the thick brown fur of the nearest two or three animals like dark cotton, so luxuriant that you wanted to stick your hand through the viewer into it. But none had the attraction of the dead hunter, whose post-mortem image had been seen by more people than he likely ever met in his life; with Dodge City already behind us that day I’d had no way of learning his name.
I replaced the view and started going through the boxes with the idea of throwing out all but my own views. Soon I’d be moving, out of the studio if not out of town entirely, and I might as well travel light. Even among the views I’d made there were precious few I cared to keep, and in the end I saved only the buffalo hunter and the dead buffalo; the rest I took outside to the alley for the ashman’s children, thoughtfully leaving an old Holmes viewer atop the views for their use as well. Then I mounted the stairs and crawled into my lonely bed.
Weary as I was from the day’s exertions I thought I’d fall quickly to sleep, as was usually the case, but the memory of that day outside Dodge, of Maggie’s endearing desire to be helpful and of her exaggerated grief at the realization that she wasn’t, got me thinking about her again, and I was a long time staring at the ceiling.
I spent most of the next day making plans for the liquidation of the studio, and going from photographer to photographer trying to interest a buyer. My spirits were reasonably high; the last few years had been lean ones anyway, and San Francisco’s considerable charms had exhausted themselves on me. The prospect of leaving almost pleased me, in fact, except for the galling fact that the leaving had been imposed by others.
Early in the afternoon I stepped out of one none-too-savory studio on Mission Street and strolled past women standing in doorways, revealing as much of themselves as the law and the winter temperatures would allow. I was importuned a dozen times as I walked up the street, with no intention whatsoever of partaking in the wares offered.
“Come on upstairs,” one fallen angel said at the corner of Twenty-First Street, “see what a real California Gal can do when she sets her mind to it.” She grinned, revealing a mouthful of yellow and gray stumps. Half a block farther another informed me that I hadn’t ever seen tits like hers, and her neighbor one door down wondered when I’d last enjoyed the company of two women at once. At Twenty-Second a short, round woman tugged at my sleeve, hissing urgently.
“How’d you like to slide your prick into the very same pussy as Booth and Lincoln both did?”
That one stopped me in my tracks. “You pleasured Lincoln and Booth?”
She slipped her arm into the crook of mine with a serenely proprietary smile. At close range she appeared old enough to have serviced the Continental Congress, with dyed black hair showing snowy at the roots and a wizened face that hinted at a beauty whose loss had apparently robbed her of her reason. “All the Booths. Especially Junius Brutus, he would have made me his bride. General Lee, President Davis, U.S. Grant, too. President Cleveland himself could give you a testimonial on my behalf. He likes to work his way up the backstairs with a little spittle.” To illustrate, she spat into her left hand and rubbed it into the palm of her right. “That young bride of his can’t hardly walk a straight line since they wed. Now he’s out of office it’s buggery morning, noon, and nighttime, poor thing.”
I closed my eyes and tried to picture a rainbow, or a moonrise over the Adirondacks. “Sounds like you get around a little bit.”
She nodded, her paint-slathered face assuming a contemplative pout. “I’m very much in demand.” She smiled, sweetly, and curtsied, her hand still on my arm. “I used to be Laura Keene, the tragedienne.”
I had seen Miss Keene onstage once, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and my natural inclination was to laugh at this shriveled harpy’s appropriation of her identity, but to her it was no joke, so I merely doffed my hat and apologized. “Afraid I’m in a hurry, Miss Keene, though it’s been a pleasure jawing with you.”
Her shoulders were so round her shrug was nearly imperceptible. “You’ll regret it tonight when you awake all alone dreaming of this sweet sweet pussy,” she said, and so confident was she of her allure that I lingered for a moment to hear more.
“So you knew old Honest Abe?”
“Abe Lincoln could do it five times nightly. Had to, in fact, that was what made Mrs. Lincoln into a madwoman. And when he died and she had suddenly to do without it, why that made her even madder. It’s that which finally killed her, in fact.”
She still clung to my arm as if we were about to take a stroll somewhere, though we stood rooted to the spot. I tipped my hat to her and told her I’d be on my way.
“Goddamnit,” she said, and she finally took her hand away, lifting her skirt to reveal a dark, hairy patch amidst much adipose whiteness, “how can you resist this? How can any man? This is the thing that brought Sherman through Atlanta. Thousands died in the most abject manner so he could shove himself into it quicker.”
Several of the street’s other denizens were watching us with unconcealed amusement, and I was beginning to get embarrassed. I handed her half a dollar in memory of my fallen Commander-in-Chief and took my leave, promising to visit her again soon.
Over the next few days I canceled what few sittings I had on my schedule and spent the days cataloguing my equipment and fixtures for sale; though I planned to continue as a photographer in some new locale, I had no desire to transport the 11-by-12-inch camera, or the various pieces of furniture and darkroom gear that I had accumulated over the last six or seven years. I hoped to be out of the building and of San Francisco entirely before Adelle’s sweet Arthur had a chance to bring the axe down on my head.
Several days hence I was awakened before dawn by an extraordinarily vivid auditory hallucination; I was conscious of the fact that I was in my bed in San Francisco before I knew that the voice wasn’t real.
“Sun’s up, Bill,” it said. “Time to be heading home.” The voice was Cordelia Fenn’s, and I thought it strange how precise and accurate my memory of its tone and timbre seemed, at more than a quarter century’s distance, and without my having given her more than passing thought in all that time.
By the time I’d made it home to my small Ohio town in ’65 the Great War had ended, though the massive wave of returning soldiers had not yet crested there. In my absence
my mother had passed on to whatever her reward amounted to, and my uncles and aunts were all either elsewhere or dead themselves; I had no interest in my school-day chums and owned no property there, real or otherwise. I had no particular sentimental attachment to the place, and no plans to spend my life there, or any part thereof beyond the succeeding week or two. I visited the town partly for the sake of seeing my parents’ gravesites for the last time—and the first, in my mother’s case—but most especially in hopes of leaving it with Miss Cordelia Fenn hanging on my arm as my wife.
She’d been my first sweetheart after I’d left the employ of the Harding farm, and scrupulously denied me certain liberties Mary Harding had delighted in granting. These, she said, would be enjoyed by her future husband only; she allowed, however, as how she hoped that would be me, and consequently permitted certain mild pleasures to be had. She was also willing to relieve me manually and on special occasions orally, and I found many opportunities to slip us unnoticed away from church socials and dances and the like, skills I had honed during my shameful liaison with Mrs. Harding. If Cordelia lacked Mary’s beauty and some of her charm as well, she had the attractive qualities of being unmarried and my own age and therefore a suitable girl to court; what’s more, her father was one of the few men in our town who’d allow me near his daughter.
Samuel Fenn, a deacon in my father’s church, had been one of only a handful of parishioners to side with him in his time of trouble, and Sam let it be known to one and all that he would have been proud to have me as his son-in-law, not despite my father’s character but because of it.
I had carried Cordelia’s picture with me, an artless oval albumen print in a brass locket, throughout the war. After a year her letters became irregular, even by the standards of military mail, and they grew briefer, too, though she still wrote of a future we would face together upon my return. By the end of the second year the letters ceased entirely, and I stopped writing, too, sensing that to put myself in the position of a supplicant would only engender her contempt. I vowed that when I returned I would win her back with all the charm and persuasion at my disposal.
On the sight of what had been my father’s church my mood darkened. My anger, directed as much at the parish and its scolds as at the old man himself, had gone cool as the years passed, until I had almost forgotten it was there. The sight of the steeple restored it to full burning life, and the fact that it had been recently painted seemed, absurdly, a deliberate insult to his memory. There was a light within, but I’d sworn long ago never to set foot inside the place again, and I swung open the iron gate that led to the boneyard without stopping in to inquire as to the identity of the current pastor.
It was late in the afternoon, overcast and warm, and I wandered to where my father and mother lay side by side, their differences crumbled to dust. I greeted my father in Greek and my mother in Alsatian and stood there for a moment without much else to say to them in either tongue. I was pondering where to get a room and considering my strategy for approaching Cordelia’s family when I was startled by someone calling my name.
I turned to see Cordelia’s older brother Peter, fatter than ever, his black hair thinned, huffing toward me from the cemetery gate.
“Good to see you, boy,” he said. “Back to stay?” He clapped me on the back and nearly knocked me over.
“Back to see my parents,” I said, nodding at the ground. “And back to see Cordelia, too.”
“Ah. Didn’t know if you would,” he said, looking down, and he bade me follow. I thought he meant to lead me into town, to Cordelia’s father’s house, where he would announce my return. I liked the idea of appearing in his company, as if the initiative were his own, and felt quite optimistic about the whole affair until we stopped at a single columnal marker.
It was inscribed with the name WARREN HEALEY; Warren had been a friend of mine, and I was sorry to see he’d passed on. My attention was then drawn to the name below it, one which puzzled me momentarily: CORDELIA HEALEY, BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER.
“The baby’s in there with her. Wouldn’t have lived anyway, the doctor said. Poor Warren shot the back of his mouth out the next morning.” I pulled out the locket, hidden as always in easy reach, and clenched it in my hand until I thought I’d crumple it. Despite that small, slightly melodramatic act I truthfully felt very little; surprise, certainly, the kind one feels when a set of truths is upended and revealed as illusion, and disappointment that my plans would have to change. Toward the girl I’d been hoping to wed, though, I felt nothing. I noted that the date of her death was in November of 1863; I had received the last of her letters in September. She had written me the sweetest of her billets-doux, then, with Warren Healey’s band of gold on her finger and his child curled in her belly, unaccountably still promising herself to me.
“I know Father would like to see you,” Peter said.
Of course I had figured on seeing Sam Fenn that evening for the purposes of asking Cordelia’s hand. “I expect I’d better be moving along. Give him my best,” I said.
I was on my way that very night. My next stop was Columbus, and upon arriving there I took a job assisting a Danish photographer, whose son-in-law I became in short order. I had only rarely looked back or thought of Cordelia since, and never with much emotion beyond a mild nostalgia, certainly never experiencing the powerful emotions I ought to have felt upon learning simultaneously of her marriage and death; the feeling that enveloped me on that cold morning in California handily outdid any I’d experienced at the time, and I was over it by the time my breakfast was done.
That day’s Morning Call, in addition to accounts of the travails of the Brazilians, and news of a dead Empress in Europe, carried another article on the Benders, one which altered my plans:
BENDERS ARRIVE IN KANSAS
Cottonwood, Kans., Jan. 19th, 1890—From our local Correspondent— Mrs. Almira Griffith and her daughter, Mrs. Eliza Davis, extradited from Michigan and accused of being Mrs. John Bender, Sr., and Katie Bender, the notorious assassins, have arrived at the Cottonwood, Kansas, train depot, where an angry throng awaited their presence. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for the second week of January, and once the pair are proven to be the Benders they will stand trial for the murders of more than a dozen men found buried in an orchard behind their house, as well as the shooting of Mr. Marc Leval, a leading citizen of the town of Cottonwood. Mrs. Leval herself was heard at the train station remarking that it was a great relief after so long a delay to have the killers in custody. Be that as it may, Gareth Lassiter, the attorney engaged to represent the women, assures us that they will be freed as soon as he has proven that they are not the Benders.
I re-read the article twice, trying to tease out its meaning—was I to understand that Maggie was in Cottonwood? I had pictured her in a hundred places around the world, imagined her rich again and poor again, wondered even whether she still lived, but never once did it occur to me that she might have returned to Cottonwood and the possibility of hanging for her husband’s murder. It took me several further readings to satisfy myself that I had understood correctly, that the two women charged with being the Benders would be charged with the killing of Marc Leval. That such a charge could be filed in the face of what everyone in Cottonwood knew about who’d killed Leval didn’t necessarily mean I was free to travel there, but it made the prospect worth considering; on that basis I began pondering a return, the first time I’d entertained the notion seriously since the morning she and I had ridden south into Indian Territory. Whether Maggie would consent to speak to me when I got there was another matter.
That morning I received, as expected, a message from Arthur Cruikshank, ordering me to vacate the premises at 4175 24th Street within fourteen days. When the notice came I was concentrating on the cash sale of a pair of cameras to an ambitious young photographer named Quackerell, prosperous and eager to expand. I had just about convinced him to take the whole inventory for a slightly reduced rate when another messenger arrived, this
time with an envelope from Adelle. I opened it in the presence of the buyer:
Dear Bill,
I am most awfully sorry for what Arthur has done, and hope and trust that you will forgive me.
This will, I trust, help you out in your transition.
Love,
Your own Adelle
P.S. Please destroy this letter. I will send word as to when we can next safely meet.
Accompanying the letter were three hundred dollars in bills, far more than what I owed her. I must have been gaping in the most stupefied way at the money, because Quackerell improved his offer immediately, based upon the perfectly reasonable assumption that I’d received a better one. I accepted it gladly, signed his receipt and took his money. In an hour he returned with a wagon for the 11-by-12-inch camera, and I gave him an extra key to the front door so that he could return at his leisure for the furniture over the next day or two.
Having disposed of my studio and inventory, I hoped I’d also be able to quickly rid myself of the Clay Street building. If I could negotiate its sale to Morley for a cut rate I’d be happy; I’d be rid of it, and by selling it to him below market value I’d be doing the poor fellow a favor as well.
When I arrived at the wine dump, though, I was nonplussed to find its entrance decorated in black crepe, with a wreath hanging upon the door, a ribbon marked CONDOLÉANCES draped across it. Inside were all the rummies and the boy porter, looking like they hadn’t left since I’d seen them last, and next to the boy stood the most miserable looking woman I’d seen in some years. She wore a black organdy dress, her veil pulled upward and attached to her hat with a pin.
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 17