Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Got some drink in me and passed out in the parlor. Busted a porcelain jug his mama brought over on a boat from England.”

  The others laughed again, and Lester offered up a dim-witted smile, a puerile mixture of shame and pride. Then he lifted his arm in excitement and pointed across the street. I looked up to see my second ghost of the morning, for it seemed to me that the man sauntering toward us with an enigmatic half smile on his face was my own father, restored to life after nearly forty years under the earth.

  “Father,” Clyde said, extending his hand politely, only slightly more obviously pleased or surprised to see me than he would have been at the age of seven or eight.

  I took the hand, feeling a bit dazed, and clapped him on the back. “Clyde, boy.”

  He unlocked the door to the saloon and let us in, and I followed the young souses inside. Clyde busied himself setting up the drinks for his former playmate and the latter’s companions and, once he’d done that, set up a second round in anticipation of its demand. Only then did he turn his attention to me.

  “You know I’m married,” he said.

  “That’s what Gleason told me.”

  “She’s Mickelwhite’s daughter Eva, you remember her.”

  I didn’t particularly, but I nodded as if I did. Mickelwhite had worked a plot not far from ours, and he hadn’t bothered to hide his contempt for me when I moved to town and let others do my farming for me. “When’d you tie the knot, anyway?”

  “Fall of last year. We have a baby on the way,” he added contentedly but without undue enthusiasm. “You can come see us if you like. I’m guessing you’re here for the Benders, that right?”

  “Partly. How’s your Ma?” I asked.

  “She’s all right. She and Gordon opened ’em up a dress shop.”

  “That’s her husband?”

  “Gordon Canterwell. Came to town a year or so after you left. Used to own a shoe store, but Ma was earning our living making dresses, and he thought they could do that together.”

  “You have a sister now?”

  “That’s right. Fourteen years old, name of Maria.”

  I asked him his address and left, though not without young Lester and his friends pestering me for a round. I wasn’t drinking myself, but I slapped a half dollar onto the bar and told Clyde to keep the change.

  The early morning cloud cover had dissipated, transforming the morning into one of those very cold, very bright ones when the sun seems to have lost its will to warm the earth. I was headed east on Main, my hands jammed deep in my coat pockets and my mind elsewhere, when I nearly collided with a lady exiting Rector’s Department Store. I apologized to the lady before I’d seen her face, and when she turned it to me to say it was all right we both stopped breathing for a moment, and both began backing away from each other until we were at a safer distance.

  The woman facing me down was Maggie Leval. Strands of white ran through the hair piled atop her head, her bust and hips were fuller and rounder than I remembered, and the sharpness of her facial features had grown softer, outlined now with a fine latticework of wrinkles and underlaid with a little fat. She was even more beautiful than when I’d seen her last, and I stammered when I finally thought to speak, out of a mix of outrage and adolescent terror.

  “Good day, Madame,” I said.

  By this time she had fully regained her sangfroid, and was able to regard me with the insouciance of a lady of quality forced by circumstance and the rules of civility to address a moderately repulsive stranger. “Good day, Sir.”

  Out of the store behind her came the tall stranger who’d scowled at me earlier, and at the sight of me his face reddened and his fists clenched. Those hands looked as though they’d been broken a time or two, and as he advanced Maggie held him back with an upraised kid glove.

  Choosing not to prolong my agony, I turned on my heel and headed west, conscious of the stiffness of my gait and trying to keep it dignified and graceful on account of my sense that she was watching me go. When I finally allowed myself a backward glance she was gone, and so was the giant.

  Still flustered, I took a walk north up Lincoln Street toward the cemetery, with the intention of seeking Juno’s grave, or that first section where we’d buried Alf Cletus and Paul Lowry and the rest. Trees had been planted throughout, and though they were now in the skeletal habit of winter, they’d plainly thrived there. At the top of the rise was a grouping of cottonwoods taller than the rest, and that was where I found that group of mortuary pioneers.

  The first grave I identified was Alf’s. It now bore a small, plain stone marker, inscribed simply A. CLETUS, 1873. The handful of other graves that had been there in that year had similarly been marked with simple headstones, with the sole exception of Minnie Lansdown, who now lay beneath a granite monument worthy of a senator’s wife. Only her name and dates of birth and death were inscribed thereupon, with no indicator of her relation to the memorialist; the customary “Beloved Wife” wouldn’t, in this case, have been appropriate.

  A few feet away was Juno’s grave, with a mummified nosegay wedged into the juncture of stone and brittle yellow grass. To the west of it was that of the drummer A. J. Harticourt, and flanking them were two stones marked KNOWN BUT TO GOD, presumably the only two bodies from the orchard cemetery not to have been claimed and buried elsewhere. I wondered how it was that Harticourt, whose identity was known, hadn’t been shipped back to wherever his people were, but then I remembered my sole encounter with him in life and surmised that no one had thought highly enough of him to pay the cost of shipping his moldering carcass.

  I was at first puzzled by Tiny Rector’s absence from this particular quarter of the necropolis, but I quickly caught sight of another grandiose marker in the near distance, separated from the rest of the dead by a small wrought-iron fence. No other resident of the cemetery had dared move in next to it, and my first impression of it was that it looked a bit lonely. At the top of the stone was a large cross, below which the stone was inscribed RECTOR in suitably bold capitals. Beneath that, in turn, was a space polished smooth for the inscription:

  I wondered what had taken him off; Lillian had been coy about the circumstances of his demise, and it was easy enough to imagine that his love for sporting girls had hastened his end. Gleason or Clyde could enlighten me, I was sure, and while they were at it they might be able to explain to me the circumstances of Marc Leval’s return to town, and his wife’s to him. I’d have preferred to hear it from Maggie herself, and perhaps I would someday; more likely I’d never get the chance to speak civilly to her.

  Any refusal on her part to deal with me was entirely my own doing. Toward the end of her time in Greeley she was writing me at my studio in Golden, Colorado, thrice weekly, letters which I burned, unopened. Toward the end of that time the envelopes began arriving with the words “urgent!” and “please read!” scrawled across their backs. These I consigned to the interior of the stove just as quickly as the others, reasoning that if she sought to reconcile, she had but to sell the house and join me in Golden; but after two weeks, then three, and then a month went by with no letter I was seized with a sudden panic. Without my ever opening one of them they’d had their desired effect upon me.

  One September morning, then, I canceled the day’s sittings and set off for Greeley by rail, a journey I hadn’t thought I’d ever make again. The trip took most of a day; the little houses stood in rows, whitewashed all and gleaming in the late afternoon sun like jewels, and the trees had grown in to a degree that some of them actually offered shade. It was remarkably verdant, the vegetation in general was lush, and the general impression was of the best-ordered little town imaginable. Seeing the place and how pretty it was made it easy to forget how unhappy I’d been there, how unpleasant life could get for any resident who wasn’t a follower of its utopian aims, even if he was married to one who was.

  Walking up the street to my former studio I passed the Hendricks, a couple Maggie and I had known slightly, and I doff
ed my hat and bid them good afternoon. Mr. Hendrick did not reciprocate; he looked at me as though I had ruined the digestion of his supper, and Mrs. Hendrick affected not to see me at all.

  “The devil take you, then, you thick-witted bastard,” I said with a charming smile and a bow, and I put the hat back on.

  “What’s that you said?” He’d stopped, and now he faced me; his wife still made out as though her husband addressed a ghost, invisible and inaudible to her.

  “I said ‘the devil take you,’ and I hope you’ll excuse me, I only dared say it as you appeared to be hard of hearing.”

  She yanked at his sleeve, and I went back on my way, surprised at the strength of my urge to knock his hat onto the dirt, and him right after it.

  In the twilight our street looked much the same as ever. Two children I didn’t know played with an iron hoop in the yard of the house next to ours, however, making me think that the widow Dufferin had died since my leaving. Since she was one of the few neighbors who treated me as such in my last days in the Colony I was sorry for her passing; contemplating her house I noticed the Ash sisters, dyspeptic and indistinguishable one from the other, watching me from their front porch across the street with grand operatic disdain, spindly arms folded across their dry, titless chests. They were true believers in the Colony and had pegged me, correctly, as a troublemaker from the day I arrived, though they always held Maggie in exaggeratedly high esteem. I wished I could cross the street and tell them that she and I had never really been married, that in fact she’d been living in a state of grievous sin with her real husband’s killer (as I then imagined myself to be).

  With no small trepidation I crossed the grass to my own front door and knocked loudly. I had scarcely any idea of what I’d say to her, but I was determined to keep things as calm as possible, despite the strong feelings involved, with only the minimum of shouting or begging necessary to win her to my way of thinking. Nonetheless when the door opened to reveal a bearded man in his shirtsleeves with a napkin tucked into his collar and a mouthful of food wadded in his cheek, jaw working steady and slow like a guernsey’s, I felt as though I’d been gutshot, and my next action was the result of raw emotion and not clear thinking.

  “Well, you dirty son-of-a-bitch,” were the words that came out of my mouth, even as I balled up my fist and slammed it straight into his breadbasket. He went down in surprise, jaw still churning, and partially chewed chunks of corn fell from his open mouth as he hit the floor, scrambling to get back to his feet. I had already begun to regret the rashness of the act when I saw the boy coming at me, napkin tucked into his collar, and heard the scream of the unfamiliar woman at the dinner table across the dining room. The adolescent coming toward me with his fist upraised was sixteen or seventeen, and six feet in height at least, and with their mother at the table sat four smaller children. The lady of the house was not, of course, Maggie, and my failure to block the boy’s fist as it closed in on my jaw was at least partly due to the confusion this caused. I began apologizing on my way backward onto what was apparently no longer Maggie’s and my porch. The back of my skull made a solid contact with the wood, and to his credit the man I’d slugged held his son back while I regained my bearings.

  After a brief explanation the man introduced himself politely as Hiram Wells, the new owner of the house, and explained that they’d bought it from a woman who had subsequently packed up and moved away, pointedly declining to leave a forwarding address. Hiram walked me off the porch while his wife and children stared after me, the oldest boy looking like he’d like to finish what he’d begun. I returned to Golden the next day and moved my studio shortly thereafter to Denver, and fourteen years passed without another scrap of news about her. I stood a better chance of having a conversation with the man in the grave before me about my past sins than I did with Maggie, if her reaction on the street had been any indication.

  The day was getting colder, I thought, and I didn’t like the melancholy turn my thoughts were taking. There was a westerly egress from the boneyard, and I headed that way slowly, stopping at this stone and that to see if anybody else I knew had been laid low there. Two friendly old acquaintances lay near the gate, a teamster by the name of Bellows who’d passed away in ’77, and H. P. Gavin, a stonemason, who’d managed to hang on until ten years after that. Both of them had spent time and money in my saloon; dead, they were more a part of the town than I was.

  I had thought that a look at the Bender trial might lift my spirits, but after lunchtime the courtroom was jammed, and I managed only to insinuate myself into the rear of the room, standing against the wall. The courthouse was still so new that everything in the courtroom seemed to creak: chairs, doors, the gate separating the bar from the gallery. I could only see the faces of those in the rearmost rows of seats, and most of these were unfamiliar to me. At the witness table sat two stout women, short in stature, with their ample backs to me, whom I took to be the defendants. Nothing about them seemed familiar, but I was looking from a distance, and after the passage of nearly seventeen years. Mr. Wembly stood before them, examining a witness regarding the business that had brought Mr. Sheale out to the Bender farm. Squinting, I recognized the witness as Mr. Henniston, Sheale’s associate, as fat as ever and pinker than before, his sparse hair gone goose white. Involuntarily I summoned to mind the image of his late partner, freshly exhumed and lying naked and corrupt on the soft green grass of the Benders’ orchard, even his clothing stolen by his hosts. I wondered if anything stood there now, if anyone now presumed to farm that patch of blood-soaked land.

  Henniston was explaining Mr. Sheale’s motivations for traveling with such a large amount of cash on his person, and though the gallery was properly silent, Henniston’s voice was papery and hoarse, and in the end I couldn’t hear him well enough for my interest to hold. Before Mr. Henniston’s testimony had ended I exited the courtroom, vowing to return another day, early enough to have a seat nearer the bar. Passing through the main lobby I saw a rotund figure tottering in my direction. He was dressed in expensive but threadbare clothing, and his long sideburns were trimmed unevenly; it took me a moment to put a name to the familiar face, and he was already upon me when I called out a friendly greeting.

  “Cy Patton,” I called out, extending my hand for a shake. He recoiled momentarily, and then he spat a feeble gob of thick saliva into my palm before hurrying past me to the court.

  I was more amused than insulted, and since I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever done to poor Cy to merit such impertinence, I laughed it off and stepped out into the gelid afternoon air.

  That afternoon I rode a hired roan mare out to my old farm. It hadn’t changed much, except that the house had been added to on its west side. I dismounted and tied the nag to the old post I’d planted myself and headed out behind the house. On the spot once occupied by the ramshackle barn I’d built now stood a solid new one, bigger than mine, too. Inside it a Negro of middle years was taking apart a bale of hay with a pitchfork and feeding it to some milk cows in a neatly constructed row of pens. When I called out to him from the door, he didn’t hear me over the wind; when I repeated myself his backward glance was wary.

  “Sorry to trouble you,” I said. “I used to live here. I built that house out there, in fact.”

  He squinted. “You Ogden, then?”

  “That’s me,” I said. He was older than I’d first taken him for, maybe fifty or fifty-five.

  “My name’s Haxley. And since you mention it, that roof you built was leaking the day I bought it. Had to replace it right then or it would have ruined the furniture, had to replace all the puncheons on the second floor, too. Just been the hired man living there before that, reckon he didn’t care if he got rained on. Not at all a properly built roof, Mr. Ogden.”

  I had never been taken to task by a Negro before, but Haxley had me dead to rights. I’d done that roof myself, and even while I was hammering the shingles down I knew I’d have to do it again before too many years passed. “Sorry
about that.”

  “Your wife’s a real nice lady, though.”

  “Bought it from her, did you?”

  “Came up from Louisiana five years ago, she was living in town by then and eager to sell. She led me to understand you were gone for good and she represented that she had the right to sell without you. If you got a problem you’ll have to take it up with your wife. Your former wife.”

  “Well, I have no problem. Just wanted to see the place is all. You’ve done some work on it, I see.”

  “Knocked down that old sod house out back and built a shed. Put up this new barn, too. Old one was falling to pieces time I got to it. Might have blown over in a good stiff gale.”

  Though I was mostly mad at myself for leaving Ninna with a rickety old barn, I suddenly felt equally angry at Garth for failing to restore it for her. “What happened to Garth?”

  “Garth. Well, Garth was working the farm all by himself for Mrs. Canterwell, and he wanted to stay on, but he didn’t want to work for a colored man. Before he’d stay on he wanted me to agree to call him Mr. Doyle. So I let him go.”

  “You know if he’s still around?”

  “Killed by a train two, three years ago. Drunk on the tracks. When they found him he had a forty-five caliber Colt revolver in his hands, and the sheriff was of the opinion he might have got it into his head that he’d rob the train. Engineer said he thought there was two or three men running away, probably Garth’s drunken chums.”

  “Mind if I ride around back?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  I took the mare around the side of the house and Mr. Haxley resumed his hammering. Even in the midst of winter it was clearly a more successful farm than when I’d run it. The furrows were straight and regular, the buildings neat and well maintained. I’d never looked back with any regret at my life as a farmer, and for the first time I felt a little ashamed that I hadn’t worked harder at it. I rode back to the front of the house and thanked Haxley for the look.