Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Mrs. Morley? I’m the landlord.” I was about to ask the obvious question, but before I had a chance I caught sight of Morley lying defunct upon a low table. His hands were folded upon his chest, with the left one on top to reveal its horribly infected stump of a pinkie, black and gray and a little green; to judge from the smell he’d been gone from this world for a couple of days at least.

  “I hope you come for the wake and not to badger him any more about that rent,” she said. Her teeth were half gone, and her right hand was missing its thumb; these were the things I noted in the cellar light of the wine dump; God knows what daylight would have revealed.

  “I really came to talk to him about something else,” I said, nodding at the lump of meat on the table. My head felt heavy, and as I gazed on Morley’s swollen face I began to feel a need to regurgitate.

  “Talk away,” Mrs. Morley said. “I doubt he’ll talk back.”

  The deed to the wine dump was in my interior coat pocket. “Mrs. Morley, this is the deed to the building. I’m leaving San Francisco, and my intent in coming here was to turn the building’s title over to your husband.”

  She squinted at me. “At what cost? ’Cause he didn’t have any scratch to throw around, and I got less.”

  “No cost,” I said with some difficulty. “A gift to you.”

  She turned her attention to the document, and after a minute’s scrutiny she said, “Let’s go find a notary and make it official.” In that gap-toothed grin I thought I saw a blessing, permission to return home to Kansas.

  2

  LABETTE COUNTY, KANSAS FEBRUARY, 1890

  Inter Mortuos Liber

  My traveling companion on the train trip East was a treasure: a copy of Procopius’s Anecdota (or The Secret History in English), purchased at an antiquarian bookshop shortly before leaving San Francisco; two hundred years old, it had come into stock just that day, and though its price was high, I had my recent windfall from Adelle in pocket and I indulged myself. It was the first copy I’d ever seen of it, but I’d wanted to read it since learning of its existence in my adolescence via my father’s scabrous journals. Procopius didn’t disappoint; the book was as full of scandal and ribaldry as those journals were, and my father’s affection for it was easily understood.

  The diaries had been written in code and in classical Greek, and the hours I spent worriedly deciphering them (worriedly because I feared my mother might find and destroy the lot) contributed greatly to my fluency in that dead tongue; in them he recorded everything from his theological perspective (surprisingly heretical) to his bowel movements (frequent and enjoyable) to his sexual conquests (more so and more so). Before leaving this world he entrusted them to a lady parishioner who, though mentioned often therein, was unable to read them, with instructions to turn them over to me on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday. They were in my mother’s house when I went off to war, and I don’t know what happened to them after that; perhaps some randy, virginal schoolmaster in Parma, Ohio, bought them at auction for masturbatory fodder.

  Before my first change of trains (there were three changes altogether, the last of these heading south and east from Kansas City) it occurred to me that I might be walking into a legal trap of some sort, but the risk seemed acceptable to me if it meant a chance to step off the train into what, strangely enough, I still thought of as my home, though I’d lived longer in Denver and San Francisco, and nearly as long in Tucson. Nothing else I might do, nothing I had planned in Texas or Philadelphia or Bucharest, seemed as compelling to me as a chance to glimpse, however briefly and at whatever risk to my liberty, my son, grown to manhood, or the widow Leval, or even the disappointed town itself, jilted by the cattle trade and me both. The tantalizing possibility of seeing Katie and Ma Bender at the end of a noose, however unlikely that was, beckoned as well.

  I had looked the town up on maps a hundred times or more in sixteen years, and noted with satisfaction its continued presence on railroad timetables, but I’d had no specific word about Cottonwood or any of its inhabitants until the recent articles on the Benders began appearing. When the train approached the outer rings of the town the sky was overcast and thick with the promise of snow. To the east of the city limits stood a complex of low, circular, chimneyed structures, each expelling gray smoke into the cold, late afternoon air, arrayed around a central, two-story building with BRAUNSCHWEIG PRESSED BRICK CO. painted on its side; slightly further west was a massive, incomplete brick edifice which a sign out front identified as the future home of the Cottonwood Flour Mill. Where the tent city had stood years before were now houses with fenced-in yards, and in the distance I could see rows of buildings two and three stories tall, including one with RECTOR’S DEPT. STORE painted on its westerly side.

  The train slowed to a stop without my having distinguished a single familiar landmark, and I stepped onto the platform in a perplexed state. I stared about me in the cold, watching the breath steam out of my nose and almost wondering whether I’d gotten off at the wrong town. It didn’t smell, not the way I remembered it doing, and not the way San Francisco smelled, either; maybe it was the cold.

  A porter offered to help me with my trunk, and I told him to send it ahead to the Cottonwood Hotel. “Sure you don’t want the Rialto?”

  “The Cottonwood’s fine,” I told him, and gave him a quarter for his trouble and fifty cents to hire the dray. I then wandered east on Main, away from the Leval mansion, to see what the town had become.

  My first reaction was a dull disappointment, born of high expectations. I stood on a street that only faintly resembled the one I’d lived on a decade and a half previous, and the warm feeling of a homecoming, even an anonymous and furtive one, eluded me. I’d always held in mild contempt those San Franciscans who couldn’t stop talking about how grand the place was ten years previously, or twenty; now I understood perfectly their position. The Cottonwood in my mind’s eye was forever fixed in 1873, and anything that didn’t fit that picture of it seemed vaguely wrong, as if the Mona Lisa were wearing a flowered bonnet, or Michelangelo’s David a starched collar. Where Rector’s Dry Goods had stood was now a hardware store of brick and mortar, the original wooden building long gone, and the feed store next to Rector’s had been replaced by the Second National Bank of Cottonwood. The hotel had been rebuilt on a larger scale but at least inhabited the same lot as it once had, and I stepped into the lobby, where a small, well-starched young man with an extravagantly pointed mustache greeted me cheerfully.

  In comparison to its predecessor the lobby was luxurious almost to the point of comedy, with velvet on its walls, overstuffed furniture for lounging and a multitude of planters overflowing with such exotic botanical items as ferns and small trees. I asked the price of the room directly above the office, and the young man informed me that it was already occupied. “If it’s heat you’re worried about, we been renovated and all the rooms got steam heat now.” I told him I’d take a room on the third floor and told him my trunk would be arriving shortly. He proferred the register and I signed it “W. Sadlaw, San Francisco, Cal.” I nearly stopped myself and wrote “Ogden” instead, but discretion seemed called for under the present circumstances, at least to begin with.

  Down the street I stepped into a restaurant that stood where Otis’s forge had burned and been reborn, only to cede its place to this unexceptional building. It was a brick one like most I’d seen downtown, with a sign painted on its front identifying it as the White Horse Restaurant; inside it sported a shiny tin ceiling and a recently varnished floor. At that hour there were no customers, but a short, thin man stood up from a booth at which he sat in conference with a plump, white-haired woman and asked if I’d like something to eat. He had black hair and white chinwhiskers and seemed not at all unhappy to be interrupted.

  There was a circular counter in the center, and booths around the walls, and tables scattered throughout. A skylight provided the only daytime illumination besides the front window, and on a bright day it would have been a
cheery place. Today, though, it was gloomy as a sepulchre, and I took a seat at the counter and nodded at the lady, who despite some difficulty in rising to her feet greeted me with a warm smile. Seeing her walk I realized she was more than plump; she had some sort of arthritic trouble, as well. As she came over to take my order her husband, or so I took him to be, tied an apron on and went into the kitchen.

  “How about a hamsteak and some mashed potatoes?” I said, reading off the printed menu.

  “Yes, sir. Coffee?”

  “That’ll do fine,” I said, and she yelled back at her husband to start a pot.

  “You just in off the train?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Time of day. Nothing to eat on that train, and nothing good at any of the stops, and most don’t know to bring something. Lots of times we get whole families come in starving, kids all cranky from hunger.”

  She waddled back to the kitchen and yelled the rest of the order at him. I saw an abandoned newspaper on one of the booths, and I went over and rescued it from oblivion. It was the Optic, apparently a daily now. The lead story was the Bender hearing:

  DOUBTS ABOUT THE “BENDERS”

  PROSECUTION SILENT ABOUT WHY THESE TWO ARE THOUGHT TO BE THE KILLERS. THEIR ATTORNEY CLAIMS FALSE IMPRISONMENT

  Mrs. Eliza Davis and Mrs. Almira Griffith are still enjoying the hospitality of the county at the charming home of Deputy George Naylor and his wife Rebecca. Many longtime residents of Labette County who knew the Benders are wondering just how these two came to be identified as the murderous pair. If Mrs. Davis is in fact the notorious Katie Bender, then she has changed so considerably as to make a certain identification of her impossible. The editor of the Optic knew her well when she lived here and sees no sign that the lady in custody is she.

  I had read only half of the article when the woman returned with a cup of coffee.

  “Who’s the mayor these days?”

  “New one as of last month, name of Hutchens.”

  I nodded. “Never heard of him.”

  “You spent time here before?”

  “Some,” I allowed. “It’s been a while, though. In fact I used to sleep in a blacksmith’s forge on this very lot.”

  “It’s changed quite a bit since we been here,” she said, sitting down on a chair behind the counter, which didn’t seem wise, given the trouble she had lowering and raising herself up. “That’s seven, eight years, and it’s grown up like a weed.”

  “It’s a lot bigger than when I last saw it. But there was a time when we thought it’d outgrow Kansas City and St. Louis.”

  “Well, it still might. There’s going to be a college here, you know. And we got the brick plant, they’re going to build that up even bigger. And the flour mill.”

  “Cattle never came through, though.”

  She clucked. “There’s cattle all over around here,” she said.

  “There’s some cattle raised around here, sure, but this was going to be the end of a cattle trail.”

  Now she looked at me in pure consternation. “Cattle trail? There’s no cattle trail.”

  “No, there’s not.”

  “Anyway, we lived in Dodge a few years back, and I can tell you the cattle trails don’t last forever.”

  At that point her husband shook a tiny bell from the kitchen, and she wincingly pulled herself out of the chair. “Lordy me, I shouldn’ta sat down and I knew it, too.”

  A minute later she returned with my hamsteak, which I finished quickly and with great pleasure. I left the paper on the counter and proceeded on to my next stop, the county courthouse. On my way there I passed my old saloon, now known as the Palace, and saw someone go in who looked like an older incarnation of young Gleason, jowly already in his mid-thirties and with earlobes hanging down to his collar, almost. He wore a heavy coat and had his hands shoved into the pockets as if he’d forgotten his gloves, which I had known him to do in the old days.

  The central business district had expanded considerably and now spanned as far north as Sixth Street, and sidewalks of limestone slab had been set into place throughout. The courthouse, a massive three-story structure constructed of that same cut limestone, was located at the corner of Lincoln and Second. Upon entering the dim lobby I had the odd and fleeting sensation that I was turning myself in; still odder was the accompanying sense of relief. When I shook my head to clear it I drew a curious glance from a lady crossing the lobby, all bosom and florid hat, so full of figure and narrow of waist that I scarcely noted her face at first, though when I did it was rather pretty. She was bundled up against the cold and preparing to leave for the day, which made me wonder if I’d come too late in the day to find the County Attorney.

  “You seem to be lost,” she said.

  “I’m looking for the County Attorney.”

  “He’s on this floor, over that way,” she said, pointing to her left and smiling with such charm I nearly asked her if she was free for dinner. This wasn’t libertine San Francisco, however, so I merely tipped my hat and thanked her.

  I heard speech from within the office, and I entered without knocking. The room was darker even than the building’s lobby, and it took a moment’s adjustment to focus on the two figures therein. A narrow-shouldered man of thirty sat at a desk covered with papers and law books, and next to him was a prim young woman at a much neater secretary’s table. Her lamp burned brighter than his, for she was engaged in some sort of dictation, and he seemed to have been extemporizing when I interrupted them. Even in the yellow lamplight he looked very flushed, and from the way he asked me my business it sounded as if he had very little time to spare for the likes of me, whoever I might happen to be.

  “I’m Sadlaw,” I said. “Once known as Ogden.”

  “I’m Cal Wembly, County Attorney. Hang your hat and coat.” He gestured to the single seat available, a straight-backed wooden chair across from his desk, which I took without removing the coat, hat in hand.

  He turned to the young woman. “Miss Wynan, you may stop work for the day and go home.”

  She got up and, reluctantly, I thought, put on her wrap and extinguished the lamp on her desk. Once she’d shut the door the room was considerably blacker, with only Wembly’s feeble lamp and what little light came in through the transom for illumination. He made no move to adjust the lamp, which cast a sickly glow onto his face from beneath.

  “What’s your business, Mr. Ogden?”

  “I hear you’re prosecuting the Bender women. I was part of the posse that chased them down in ’73.”

  “I know who you are,” he said, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “I hear they’re charged with shooting Marc Leval.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Am I to understand that I’m not to be charged with that same crime?”

  “No warrant was ever issued for you, Mr. Ogden.”

  That surprised me, and it must have shown on my face. By now I was accustomed to the light, and I could make out a motto, tacked to the wall next to me:

  YOU CAN’T

  “EXPECT-TO-RATE”

  IF YOU

  EXPECTORATE

  I noted that there was no spittoon in the office, which since I didn’t chew was no loss to me, but which must have caused the occasional awkward moment. I thought I could see, nestled in the corner nearest my chair, a darkened spot where some miscreants had flouted the ban.

  I stood to shake hands with Wembly, who took mine and then returned to his work as though I’d already left the room. The courthouse lobby was dark by now, and I had the impression he was the last man working that night, and probably was most nights, too. The Bloody Benders would have been a coup for any prosecutor, and for an out-of-towner like him it would have made his career, maybe even set him on his way to the governorship someday. No wonder he’s willing to let me get away with shooting Marc Leval, I thought, and then I wondered how many other people in town would be so quick to forgive.

  Night had fallen when I made
my way to Second Street again and headed back toward Main. I stopped at the Palace saloon and pushed my way through the door. A frosted glass partition now separated a cigar counter from the bar itself, and I stepped through the interior door and found myself among a throng that rivaled any from the boomtown days. The bar was gaslit now, and the crowd jostled and jockeyed for position just like in any high-class saloon in San Francisco or Denver. The place still looked fancy and new, sixteen years into its existence, and I felt a surge of pride that made up for the gloom I’d felt since stepping off the train. The front and backbars had been replaced with even fancier ones than we’d started off with, and the backbar was now backed with fancifully patterned wallpaper, with framed foxhunting lithographs hanging on either side of its central mirror. There were three very busy bartenders, one of whom was Gleason, and I pushed my way to him. He tended to the customer next to me, and when I caught his eye there was no sign of recognition in it.

  “Beer,” I shouted, and he turned to get it for me. When he put it down on the bar I handed him a nickel and said “Thank you, Mr. Gleason,” and at that he gave me an odd look.

  “Mr. Ogden?”

  I gave him my hand and we shook. “Almost didn’t know you with that mustache, there.”

  “I see the bar’s still paying for itself.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, tugging at his shirtfront. “You seen Clyde?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t think he harbors any ill-will for you, if that’s what’s got you hesitating. Old Ninna, now, she might.” He poured a shot of bourbon for a grizzled rummy and took payment for it without a word being spoken between them. “Ninna’s married again.”

  “Good for her,” I said, and I meant it, too.

  He excused himself to go down to the other end of the bar to serve a couple of shy ones who couldn’t break through at the center where the bartenders were. I felt then a sudden and unexpected tenderness for Ninna; I had, I supposed, treated her rather cavalierly, and she’d committed no worse sin than expecting the farmer she’d married to tend to his farm and stay on it.