Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  Gleason returned and asked me where I’d been. As evasively I could I answered him; then I drew on my reserves of courage and asked the question I’d traveled half the continent to ask. “So Maggie’s living in town, is she?”

  “Um, yes sir, she is.”

  Before I could ask anything further there was another flurry of activity behind the bar. He asked me if I wanted another beer, on the house, but I didn’t care for any. “Maybe I’ll come and talk to you tomorrow, when it’s not quite so busy.”

  He nodded. “Isn’t very busy before noon, it’s just the real bad drunks then.”

  “It’s good to know there are a few constants.” I shook his hand and departed, and though tempted to visit one or all of my loved ones, I didn’t dare, and so I wandered around the east side of town, eventually ending up at the cemetery Tiny Rector and I had founded in ’73. Now it extended all the way down the hill-side and was encircled by the town, from which it was cut off by a four-foot-high stone fence. I leaned on the fence and peered into it, but the night was dark and I couldn’t see much more than the stones nearest me, vaguely illuminated by the streetlamp on the corner of Lincoln and Sixth, the latter a street that hadn’t even been laid out when I last saw Cottonwood. The name on the stone was Gerard Lafferty, dead the previous April, and I’d never heard of him. I’d known most of the first residents of this particular boneyard, if slightly or briefly in some cases, and I felt strangely offended at the notion that it was now filled with strangers to me.

  I wanted to see the west side, but headed back to Main Street for dinner, afraid that the restaurants might shut down before I had the chance to eat. The little place where I’d eaten the hamsteak was full of customers and its proprietress looked overburdened, so I stopped into the hotel restaurant where I ordered steak and scalloped potatoes. I’d purloined a battered copy of the Optic from the lobby and was leafing quietly through it when a woman I took at first to be my waitress put her hand on my shoulder in a familiar way.

  “Bill Ogden.”

  At my side was a considerably older and plumper Lillian Rector looking nonetheless healthier and happier than I’d ever seen her. She was dressed as elegantly as any woman I’d ever seen in Cottonwood, with a fur collar and jewels that looked as real as any I’d seen Adelle wear, and her white hair was painstakingly coiffed beneath a milliner’s confection of satin and feathers that would have turned heads on Nob Hill. Though the room felt overheated to me, her cheeks were so pink as to seem flushed from the cold. Perhaps that was the excitement of seeing an old friend.

  “Mrs. Rector,” I said, rising to my feet.

  “Lillian,” she insisted, though “Mrs. Rector” had always been fine before.

  “Where’s Tiny?” I said.

  “Henry’s gone to his reward, I’m afraid. I’m dining with my daughter and son-in-law, Dr. Kenneshaw.”

  I looked behind me to a table where a man and a woman of about my own age sat, sawing away at their dinners, as elegantly equipped as Lillian and completely uninterested in her long-lost friend.

  “I want you to know, Bill, that no one who matters here ever took seriously any of the things that were said against you, and you’ll always be welcome in my home. Will you come see me tomorrow?”

  I suggested nine-thirty in the morning.

  “Delightful. I live in what was once known as the Leval home,” she said. “I believe you know where it’s located.” Then she tiptoed with the grace of a tall, plump egret back to the table through the maze of tables and waitresses. Her daughter and son-in-law looked up at me when she took her seat, the latter with such sudden and considerable interest that I waved hello. I wondered if she hadn’t just pointed me out as the man who’d murdered the town’s leading citizen, just before the depression of ’73 stripped it of whatever hope remained of becoming a great Prairie Metropolis.

  When I awoke in the morning I was the first guest in the dining room, and I had my coffee and eggs with a nearly fond memory of the gruesome breakfasts Katie Bender used to serve me in the old dining room there, and of the way she used to flirt with me as I forced them down. My breakfast done, I put on my overcoat and hat and stepped into the lobby.

  “Is there a city directory I could consult?”

  The young fellow behind the desk took out the thin volume. “Any address in particular you want?”

  “Mrs. Marguerite Leval.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Leval. She’s right up Lincoln and Third, hold on . . . 254 Lincoln Street.”

  I thanked him and went outside. The sky’s dull cast made the wind seem even colder, and the men, women, and children who hurried past me on the street all seemed bent by it, no matter how warmly bundled. The sensation of freezing on Main Street at the gate of my booze wagon in the winter of ’73 came back to me very vividly, and I began to feel the new city merge in my mind’s eye with the old prairie town. Despite all the new buildings, and the lack of familiar faces, last night’s sensation of being a visitor with no sentimental link to the town was slowly metamorphosing into one of routine, almost as if I were walking up Main for the six thousandth time, as if I’d been there to see the town grow up into a small city and been part of the transition, and not just a small part of a story mothers told to frighten their boys and girls into obedience.

  And a city it was, if not one on the scale of San Francisco or Denver. Passersby were dressed for office work, the limestone sidewalks stretched out neat and new, the carriage traffic was slow and courteous; nothing in the picture suggested that all this had been wrested from the hands of the Osage just twenty years before. On the other side of Main I noted the presence of a strange-looking man with long white hair and a beard that jutted a foot down from his chin. He was heading toward me and looking straight into my eyes, and my first instinct was to hurry on. There was something familiar about him, though, and as he drew nearer, limping in an exaggerated manner, I recognized the face of Michael Cornan, still looking like someone had flattened his face with a shovel. Now his eyes appeared even smaller, and his look of concentrated anger had intensified. To my surprise he stuck out his hand, and I shook it.

  “Mr. Ogden. You’re back.”

  “I am,” I said. He kept clasping my hand, his expression deadly serious. “Are you still with the police department?”

  He shook his head. “No, sir.” He swatted at his bad leg with his hat. “Not since I shot off my foot. These days I direct the hardware department at Rector’s store.”

  “I saw it, coming into town. Looks like a big operation now.”

  “Oh, it is. Biggest in this part of the state.”

  “I’m just on my way to see old Mrs. Rector now.”

  He nodded his approval. “You tell her I said not to worry about hardwares.” He walked away from me toward his place of work; other passersby nodded and greeted him in a friendly way, and I wondered how he’d become so well liked over the years.

  The mansion looked in good repair from the outside, and Marc’s saplings had grown tall and wide enough to offer some shade in the summer. Some of the land had been sold off, since there were large houses on either side of the mansion on what had formerly been Marc’s property, and the one to its north was its equal in splendor.

  “Rector residence?” I said to the young woman who came to the door.

  “Who’s calling?” she asked.

  “Bill Ogden,” I told her, and she beckoned me to follow her. I stood waiting in the foyer while she ran to find someone, and after hanging my hat and coat on the rack by the door I idly examined a painting on the wall of the entryway. Its gilt frame must have cost more than Tiny used to gross in a good week; I took it for a copy, if a good one, of a bucolic scene of the Petit Trianon, its ill-starred mistress and her entourage playing at being rough-hewn country girls.

  Though still impressive, the mansion was as nothing compared to Adelle’s, which was in turn as nothing to those of certain of her peers. That part of the house visible from where I stood contained mostly the same fur
niture as it had in Maggie’s day, but there was a greater distribution of knickknacks and gewgaws than she ever would have tolerated. I wondered if she came by often, or ever.

  Once again Lillian startled me with a touch, this time the palm of her hand on the small of my back; I didn’t ever recall her touching me in the old days, or smiling much either, which she did now so broadly I could see where her son-in-law had planted gold in her molars. “Bill, how delightful you’ve come. I’ll have Hilda fetch us some cocoa.”

  We sat in what had been Marc’s study, now converted into a very feminine drawing room. The wall was papered in a faint, minty green, with every square inch of available counterspace covered in bric-à-brac and silk flowers. Hilda, a thick young woman with blond hair, served us our chocolate and spoke with a German accent. She seemed to have some difficulty understanding Lillian, who snapped at her when she erred, and I imagined the turnover in parlor maids was brisk at the Rector home.

  She told me about Tiny’s death five years before, and those of several other friends and acquaintances. After giving her a brief and necessarily incomplete account of my wanderings to the west I gingerly asked her about Maggie.

  She drew in a deep breath and closed her eyes for a minute. “Bill, you know, I think, that I consider you a person of quality. There are simply people in the world with whom such as you and I cannot allow ourselves to associate.”

  I started to raise a polite objection, but she cut me off and asked how I found the weather in Kansas. There’d be no news of Maggie through Lillian Rector, and I’d be calling on the woman myself soon enough, so I allowed the subject to change. The seasons in San Francisco were so mild as to seem nearly interchangeable, I told her, and I’d spent so much time there after the extremes of Denver, Tuscon, and Cheyenne that I’d almost forgotten what real heat and cold were like.

  “Do you plan to stay here?” she asked me, and I answered quite honestly that I had no idea yet.

  I left before long with an insincere promise to attend one of Lillian’s dinner parties and headed east with some trepidation. I was a good distance down Main Street when I started fishing uselessly about in my coat pockets for my gloves; most likely they’d fallen out of my coat at the Rectors’. I shoved my hands into the pockets for warmth and checked my watch; it was nearly ten-thirty, certainly late enough for an unannounced visit.

  Her house stood at the corner of Lincoln and Third Streets, a handsome, two-and-a-half-story brick affair in the Queen Anne style with stone columns on the porch and an expansive balcony on the second floor. It was an imposing dwelling, if not on the scale of the Leval-Rector manse. I knocked at the door and was greeted by an Irish woman of sixty, who responded with a snort to my announcement that I was an old friend of the family’s passing through. The part of the house I could see was dark, and even standing on the front porch in the cold I could smell its closed mustiness. Letting go the front door she turned on her heel and marched up the stairs, bellowing. “Someone to see you, never seen him before,” I heard her say before it slowly clicked shut.

  She came back down half a minute later and motioned me upstairs after her. “Come on, visiting’s upstairs this morning.”

  It struck me as unusual that I’d be received upstairs without having revealed my identity. Perhaps she was ill, I thought; or perhaps she’d heard of my arrival the night before. I followed the huffing Irishwoman up the stairs and was led to the master bedroom.

  “Here he is,” the woman said, and she hurriedly departed. The shades were drawn, and the room so dim I could barely make out an invitingly large bed, one I thought I remembered from the Levals’ former house. I couldn’t make out Maggie, though, and I stepped forward into the room, inhaling a more potent version of that musty smell I’d noted downstairs. I could hear rattling, clogged breaths being taken laboriously into desiccated lungs—surely not Maggie’s?— but I couldn’t quite place the sound in relation to my position in the room.

  “Maggie?” I said.

  Something flew past my head at that moment and shattered against the wall behind me, and a wretched, wet cry accompanied the hurling of it; glancing at the floor I saw that the projectile was a glass paperweight, the prismatic glistening of its shards the only element of color in the room. The person who’d thrown it was seated in a rocking chair near the window, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the low light of the room I saw a tormented face grimacing, trying to form words as a gnarled hand groped for something else to throw. Finally, the voice managed something intelligible: “Get out,” the voice said, choking with phlegm. I took in an involuntary rush of air as I divined in an instant of horrible clarity the identity of my invalid attacker, whom I took, for a delirious instant, for a ghost.

  “Marc,” I said, for it was he seated in the rocking chair. He had managed to get hold of a second piece of heavy glass.

  “Of. My. Town.” He heaved it, and I had to duck to avoid injury; whatever the extent of his incapacity, it hadn’t affected his throwing arm.

  “You’re alive?” I said, none too sure that this was the case.

  “Out,” he repeated, and as he laboriously attempted to rise from the rocking chair I backed from the room, hitting my shoulder on the doorframe. In silhouette against the window shade he looked even more spectral than he had a moment before. Never a burly man, he’d shed twenty-five or thirty pounds since his prime, and his face had grown haggard beyond his sixty or so years, his eyes rheumy and sunken into their sockets. As I disappeared around the corner into the hallway I thought I detected a trace of sadness amidst his rage, that same bitter disappointment in my character that had led him to fire at my back in May of ’73.

  Downstairs, more than slightly rattled, I bade the housekeeper good day, and asked her not to mention my visit to the lady of the house. She merely snuffled, and I didn’t know if this was in the way of a response or if her sinuses simply needed clearing. She shook her way to the shadowy recesses of the parlor, and she was completely hidden from me when a terrible shriek came from the upstairs, accompanied by a pounding like that of a cane on an oak floor. She came back into view and headed up the stairs.

  “Always so nice when a caller brings a little ray of sunshine into a wintry house,” she said as she brushed past me on her way to answer Marc’s call. I walked out the front door with the unexpected sensation of freedom, for the first time in seventeen years, from the mark of Cain.

  Stepping onto the sidewalk, though, I caught sight of a man staring at me like he wanted me dead. He was wearing a fur coat that probably cost six months’ pay for the average citizen of Cottonwood, and a pair of snakeskin boots whose price didn’t bear thinking about either; he was long and rough in the face, with a long, aquiline nose. Tall, if not very robust, he looked as though he were having trouble staying upright in the northerly breeze, and after baring his teeth at me he hurried away.

  Shortly thereafter, at the door of my erstwhile saloon, a trio of early morning alcoholics awaited Gleason’s arrival. My first impulse was to wait elsewhere, lest I be mistaken for one of their number, but curiosity trumped pride, and I approached the door with a friendly wave.

  “What time’s he open up?” I asked.

  The three of them held a silent consultation amongst themselves, and finally one of them answered. “Eleven, I believe, sir,” he said. He was young, but his face showed signs of a long dedication to booze: sallow complexion, bulbous red nose, and gin blossoms speckling his cheekbones.

  “Is that right?” We stood there for half a minute in nervous silence before I spoke again. “You know, I used to run this very saloon, a few years back, and there were always a few waiting for me to open every morning, just the way you are.”

  Again they seemed to consult one another, as though wordlessly electing their next spokesman. The same one spoke again. “That so?”

  “In fact I built this saloon. The one that stood here before it, too.”

  There was no response to this at first, but one of them cocked his
head to the side, as if trying to place me. They were all three young, less than thirty, though this wasn’t plain on first seeing them. The one who thought he knew me spoke up after a minute’s cogitation.

  “You Clyde’s old man?” he asked. He spoke with a pronounced lisp, having only half a dozen or so teeth in his jaws.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “I used to play with him when we was little. Went to school with him, too, up to the sixth grade.”

  I knew the face, but it was that of a child grown into middle-age without ever having passed through its youth, and I couldn’t quite say who among Clyde’s coevals he used to be. “What’s your name, son?” I asked.

  “Lester Pelletier,” he answered, and then his face merged comfortably with one in my mind from long ago, that of a small boy of limited intelligence but infinitely good humor who followed Clyde around at school and once or twice came out to the farm, unaccompanied by parents. Too dull-witted to have truly been friends with Clyde, they’d associated with each other by default, since there weren’t many other boys their age. Though he’d had a shorter distance to fall than many another rummy it still pained me to recognize him in such a degraded state, and I asked after his parents, of whom I had no memory at all, just for something to say.

  “Pa’s dead, he fell off a horse drunk and cracked his head clean open on a rock, just like a goddamn melon. That was back in ’83, and then Ma said good riddance to him”—here the other two snickered—“and married Mr. Garfield from the mill.”

  I remembered Garfield, a dour fat pink-faced fellow whose energies had been mainly devoted to the Methodist Building Association. “He’s a good man,” I said, though I’d never had any use for Garfield, who’d been opposed to my building the saloon in the first place.

  “He kicked me out of the house; Pa wasn’t even dead six months. I was seventeen.”

  “What’d he do that for?”