Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “And everybody knows he’s my son?”

  “A lot of people think so. Baby was born maybe five, six months after she got here, and she made sure people didn’t get to see him right away, so she could say he’d come early. Well, hell, Renée was just about the only female in town who’d talk to her, so we saw him the day he was born. I’ll bet the little fucker weighed ten pounds.”

  The clock on the mantle chimed six times. “I went to see the Benders today, at the deputy’s house.”

  “That so?” He was momentarily apprehensive, as though expecting a pronouncement he didn’t think he’d like. When I didn’t express an opinion he relaxed. “Well, soon enough we’ll see them two dangling.”

  “Where do you think the men are?”

  “Dead, probably. And probably it was these two did it.”

  “You think it’s really them?”

  “ ’Course I do.”

  “I’m not so sure, especially the young one. Give Katie her due, she was sharp as a tack; in fact if you ask me she was the ringleader. That woman over at the deputy’s house is damn near a moron.”

  “Yeah, but she wasn’t always. You see that scar on her head? One of her husbands did that with a brick, caught her fucking a railroad man. She’s been half-idjit ever since, according to one of her sisters in Michigan.”

  “The young one’s a lot heavier than Katie ever was.”

  “Since you saw her last she’s had four husbands and six kids.”

  “Where are the other five?”

  “Oldest two are already working, the other three had to go into the almshouse after they arrested her.” That seemed to bother Herbert, and he shook his head. “Well, the tykes are probably better off away from the likes of that one.”

  A screech erupted from the kitchen. Hurrying there we found Madame Renée pounding with a tenderizing hammer at the wall where it met the floor and cursing in French at something with a vulgarity and vehemence that would have done Mrs. Griffith proud. Herbert bent down and pulled her away from the wall. The boards were visible where she’d hit, through the torn paper and broken plaster.

  “Now goddamnit Renée, you’re not going to get at it that way. You’re just going to punch up the wall and make it easier for it to get up here.”

  She had calmed down a little, but the look of outrage persisted on her face. “Rats,” she said. “Goddamn rats.”

  “I only ever seen one,” Herbert said, “but it’s a great big bastard.” He patted her on the back. “Me and Bill, we’ll go down and kill it.”

  “It’s about goddamn time,” she said. “Son of a beetch got into the flour.”

  She showed us a bag of flour in the pantry, the sack chewed through at the bottom and spilling a goodly amount. Dainty white rodentine footprints led from the sack to the spot where Madame Renée had gone after it with the hammer, with the larger floured impressions of her kitchen slippers blurring them at intervals.

  “Supper about ready?” Herbert asked, sniffing.

  She let loose another burst of Gallic obscenities, and Herbert discreetly backed out of the room. I followed him to his den, where he sat down at his writing desk.

  “Jesus, that’s some temper she’s got. You’d think I’d bred the rat myself and trained it just to get that flour.”

  We could still hear her banging drawers and cabinets and yelling, and the younger servant girl appeared in the doorway. “It’s that rat again, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Mr. Ogden and me are going down there to kill it, Sally.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, and curtsying, she left.

  “The girls are all scared of the damned thing. He’s a big old bastard, like I said.” He opened a locked drawer and took from it a Colt Dragoon and handed it to me.

  “Here you go,” he said. “This used to be yours.”

  Loading it I indeed recognized it as the same iron I’d taken off Harticourt the drummer so many years previous. “Where’d you get this?” I asked him, rather pleased at the sight of that relic of my frontier days.

  “Your saddle bag, the day you left,” he said, loading an old Colt Peacemaker of his own. He lit two big lamps and, taking one each, our guns stuffed into our belts, we put on our overcoats and then proceeded to the kitchen, where Herbert loaded a plate with a small quantity of bœuf bourguignon. Madame Renée scowled but said nothing, and we exited the house via the side door.

  The storm cellar was entered from the side of the house. I set down my lamp, since Herbert also carried the plate of stew, and dusted the snow off the heavy wooden trap doors before lifting them. I went down first, the stairs creaking so badly I was sure one of them would snap, but I reached the bottom safely and set the lamp down on the concrete floor. Behind me the stairs labored under Herbert’s boots, and I took the plate from him, too. Herbert then returned to the top to close the trap doors. It wasn’t as cold as I would have expected.

  “Turn the lamps all the way up and set that stew on the floor,” he said, and I did it. He got a couple of raggedy chairs from a corner of the room and we sat together near the west wall. In the poor light I could make out around the periphery pieces of derelict furniture, footlockers and valises, and what appeared to be a stack of paintings in gilded frames. Against the east wall was an enormous rack of wine bottles, numbering perhaps two hundred, with room for that many again.

  “That’s a lot of wine,” I said.

  “Well, Renée likes it with dinner, and it looks like it’s going to be outlawed here pretty quick if we’re not careful, so I bought a whole slew of it. I got more on the way.”

  “Outlawed?”

  “Outlawed, all throughout the state.”

  “Not too cold down here.”

  “No, stays nice and fresh in the summer, too. Lots of days I’ll sneak down here just to cool off.”

  “That rat won’t come out if we’re talking,” I said; having killed several thousand rats in my day I considered myself an expert on the subject.

  “Not this one, he’s a bold son of a bitch. He steals food right out from under Renée’s nose. This beef’ll get him out in the open.”

  The smell of the beef and its thick, soupy gravy was making my mouth water, and I wanted that rat dead so I could eat. Herbert, however, persisted in his jawing.

  “Last five years or so we’ve had two, three times as many rats as we used to. It’s a hell of a problem at the mill, I got a man on it full-time. You ask me, they come in on the trains.” He looked over at me, and in the harsh light of the lamp I noticed that his glass eye had gone considerably askew. Its pupil was oriented toward the floor, as if he were looking at me with the good one and watching for the rat with the bad.

  We were quiet for a minute, and sure enough the rat, or a rat anyway, poked his head into the light of the lamps and gingerly approached the fragrant, steaming plate of bœuf bourguignon. It raised its head in our direction as Herbert raised his Colt, but I touched his arm to make him stop. He looked quizzically at me but held his fire.

  As the rat began feeding a second rat of almost equal size cautiously made itself visible and crept up to the plate. Now I raised my weapon and Herbert his. The clicking back of the hammers merited only the slightest glances from the first rat, but the second turned tail and bolted for its hiding place. I fired and sent a bloody cascade of its various parts in all directions, and Herbert discharged his own a moment later, demolishing rat and plate both. The sound of gunfire in the cramped basement caused my ears to ring for some minutes afterward, and it took me a moment to realize that I was giggling ecstatically along with Herbert at the ghastly pile of fur, scales and entrails that confronted us.

  “That’ll show the sons of bitches,” he said as we mounted the staircase, lamps in hand, leaving the gory remains for Beatrice and Sally to remove. “What do you know, there was two of ’em after all.”

  Madame Renée was in the kitchen, arms folded across her chest in a most forbidding manner. Herbert ignored this and embraced her, planting a
kiss on her pursed lips and laughing again.

  “Woman, we killed your rats. Let’s eat.”

  She was still formal, if a little less angry. “They’re in the parlor. Tell them time to eat.”

  In the parlor, to my surprise, I found my son, accompanied by a young woman I presumed to be his wife. He rose and, in a formal manner that reminded me again of my father, introduced me to her.

  “Eva, may I present my father, William Ogden. Father, my wife Eva.”

  “Née Mickelwhite, if I recall correctly.” She was small, with a long, equine face that was nonetheless pretty; when she smiled she showed a significant gap between her front teeth that did nothing to alter my previous impression. I took her hand and gently kissed the back of it, producing a small wave of giggling that underscored her childish quality. “I always knew you’d grow up to be a beauty,” I added, though in fact I didn’t remember her at all, except as an indistinct component of a gaggle of tots rampant on the Mickelwhite farm.

  “We’re expecting a little Ogden,” she said, and beside her Clyde reddened and nearly smiled.

  “If it’s a boy his name will be Flavius Josephus,” he said, and though I thought that was a terrible name for a lad to grow up with I was glad that Clyde still gave some thought to his Latin.

  Young Beatrice stepped past me. “Dinner’s served,” she announced, and then she slipped away again. I held out my elbow for Eva to slip her arm into and we moved along to the dining room, where Herbert stood behind his chair. Madame Renée sat at the head of the table.

  Madame Renée turned to me as Beatrice began to pour the wine. Like Herbert’s, her glass eye had a tendency to wander, and at that moment it was gazing placidly away from her nose and toward the door of the room. I wanted to ask what had become of the fleshly one, whether it had been plucked surgically or had just withered away. “You know for years Clyde used to come over and speak French,” she said.

  “Ninna left him and the girl here while she worked. He has an ear for languages.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s so,” his wife said, her voice still a girl’s. “He’s always got his nose in one of those old Greek books you left him.”

  I was inordinately, irrationally pleased to hear this additional evidence that Clyde’s classical education hadn’t ended with my going. “Is that so, Clyde?” I asked him over her shoulder. “You still looking at those Greek texts?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “The Levals have been generous enough to make their library available to me.”

  “They’ve been very kind to us,” Eva said as Sally began serving a pâté of some sort.

  “Best one-eyed French cook in southeast Kansas, male or female,” Herbert said, and next to me I could sense Eva tensing up. That tension carried through all of us until our hostess broke it by laughing, and by the time the main course arrived on the table the atmosphere at table was one of genial bonhomie, helped along by Sally’s overattentive way with the wine bottle. I had counted three bottles opened so far for a table of five, and on the side table stood three more.

  Herbert was a noisy eater, and his first bite of the beef, still giving off steam as he shoveled it past his lips, burned him so badly he had to swig down a whole glassful of burgundy. I, too, scorched my palate through impatience, but the succulence of the meat and the thick, blackish gravy wouldn’t wait. The others sat there, blowing on forkfuls, mashing potatoes and carrots into the stew, taking tiny bites, but when the eating of the beef began in earnest not much was said for a good ten minutes, until we began to slow down.

  “Your boy here’s done a good job on the saloon,” Herbert said, swabbing at his sauce with a crust of bread. “Gleason, too.”

  Madame Renée stood, with some expenditure of effort, and went into the kitchen to oversee the dishing out of the dessert, and Eva turned to me. “Maybe you could come over after supper and see our little house.”

  “I’d be delighted,” I said, and we passed the time waiting for the pumpkin pie talking about the house and the improvements Clyde had made to it.

  Dinner ended and I boarded Clyde’s buggy, flanked by the happy couple. They lived a few blocks north of Deputy Naylor’s, in a square little house much in the style of the others around it. There was a fence to mark the periphery of the lot, and Clyde gallantly carried his wife to the front door, since she wore no galoshes. His own he removed at the door, as I did mine, and we crossed the threshold into their parlor, already lit with a pair of small lamps that gave off an eerily warm glow. “Mama?” Eva called out.

  “Coming,” a female voice cried from the kitchen.

  As I looked about the room I recognized several items that had once been part of Ninna’s and my household: a small framed daguerreotype of my parents and me, taken when I was about three years of age, a miniature German Bible I’d carried to war at my mother’s insistence and had held onto afterward for reasons still not entirely clear to me, that lithograph of the cathedral at Strasbourg.

  Then from the kitchen came a woman I recognized as Agnes Mickelwhite, mother of Eva and various other little Micklewhites since grown to adulthood. She curtsied politely. “Mr. Ogden, so nice to see you.”

  I didn’t think she meant it, though for all I knew the deep, corrosive scowl she showed me may have been permanently carved into her toothless jaw. Agnes was no more attractive than she’d been as a young woman, possessed as she was of her daughter’s oblong face but lacking her softness of feature and sweetness of character. I smiled, though, and bowed and kissed her hand as I had her daughter’s. “And how is Mr. Mickelwhite?” I asked her.

  “I’m afraid he’s passed on,” she said. “I’m living with the children now, until the baby comes.”

  Eva then showed me some small things they’d received as wedding presents—including a large silver bowl from the Levals—and when she’d done Clyde showed me his bookcase. There were all the titles I’d left behind, in addition to those that had come from the Leval library. He’d added a few of his own, too, expensive-looking, leather-bound volumes of Marcus Aurelius and Herodotus.

  “The saloon must be doing all right,” I said, leafing through the commentary of the Herodotus and thumping its binding. “This is calfskin.”

  “The saloon does fine. I also do the bookkeeping for a dozen businesses in town, the flour mill and Braunschweig’s brick factory among them.”

  “Is that so?” I said, and looking around the house I was pleased at how well my boy had done; a businessman and a scholar, he’d never spend another day of his life behind a plow. That I deserved no credit for his outcome didn’t diminish my pride in him, nor my sudden enthusiasm for the grandchild Eva carried.

  When we’d finished visiting Clyde offered to drive me home, but I assured him I was content to walk. He accompanied me to the door and stepped outside with me anyway, and I steered him away from the door.

  “How well do you know the Leval boy?”

  “Marc? Very well. He works for us sometimes at the studio, after school.”

  “Does he have any idea of his actual relation to you?”

  “We don’t ever discuss it,” Clyde said, and I clapped his shoulder and bid him good night.

  I elected to walk home through the snow, though Clyde had assured me he was happy to lend me the buggy. The snow had stopped, for a while at any rate, and I enjoyed the sight of the sleeping town, its sky a luminescent maroon. There were lights burning in various windows of the Naylor residence, and within I could hear Mrs. Davis’s little girl crying. A block to the west I felt a blow struck at my shoulder, and I went down. It was too dark to see my attacker, but I thought he held a walking stick, and I concentrated my efforts upon wresting it from him. Once all four of our hands were clutching the thing I kicked him in the breadbasket, and all the air went out of him as he let go. I then swung the stick in an arc to my right, and its head hit his with a very pleasing crack. As he got up I saw that he was considerably bigger than I, and when he ran away it was with lowered head, bent halfway
over to conceal his identity; nonetheless there was no disguising Mr. Smight’s distinctly vertical silhouette as he stumbled off in the general direction of the Leval residence. I still held the walking stick, and adopted a boulevardier’s jaunty stride as I resumed my walk home. It took me a minute or two to calm down and get my breath back, but once I had done so I felt invigorated and nearly happy; once I got downtown, where the streetlights were just being put out, I saw that I’d acquired rather a fine piece of woodwork, its head made of what appeared to me to be solid silver.

  I stopped before the front window of Rector’s Department Store, which was piled with goods of various kinds, their prices written next to them on small cards. A pair of dummies displayed the latest fashionable clothing from Chicago, and between them was a tabletop cunningly arranged with various kinds of feminine ornamentation, from combs to hatpins to costume jewelry. The interior of the store was as black as a cave, and though I tried to make out its secrets it held them there, inscrutable, in the dark. The young man extinguishing the streetlamps had placed his ladder on the lamp behind me, and when it went dark there wasn’t anything to see in the storefront, either, so I moved along. Tiny crystals of snow spattered the exposed portion of my face, and the wind continued to blow the new snowfall in curvaceous patterns upon the old. I found myself before the Levals’ house, staring up at what I thought might be her window, my grip tight on the walking stick; the windows were dark, and I didn’t know if I was being watched or not. Starting on my way again I slowed at the sight of a lamp moving toward me, its carrier indistinct despite its light and that of the streetlamps. As we neared one another I made out the figure of a man with a spade in one hand. His clothes, too thin for the night’s cold, were considerably soiled, and his face resembled that of a corpse several days in the ground, doughy and pale, framed by wild strands of white hair. He held the lamp in his other hand at the level of his face like Diogenes; so frightful was his appearance in the close light of the lamp that it took me several seconds rooted in place to apprehend that this was no revenant from Hades, but plain Michael Cornan.