Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Who’s there?” he yelled.

  “Shh,” I whispered, mindful of those sleeping nearby. “It’s me, Ogden.”

  He looked at Maggie’s house and nodded. “Sinner,” he hissed. “Father of lies.”

  “What are you doing out in the middle of the night with the spade?”

  He gestured with his grisly head toward the cemetery several blocks to our north. “My old dog Pal died.”

  “You buried him in the cemetery? Must be hard digging in this cold.”

  He stared me down, shaking his head. “Coming out of that whorehouse in the dead of night, and here I was ready to think you innocent.”

  “Good night, Cornan.” I walked around him, careful to keep my eyes on the street. I didn’t want to stay around and get mad enough to lose my temper.

  “The wages of sin is death, Ogden,” he yelled.

  Without turning I waved at him, as if in agreement.

  “Prince of Darkness. Lord of the Flies. Beelzebub.”

  I walked very slowly up Lincoln toward the Braunschweig home until I could hear him yell no more.

  In the morning I showed the stick to Herbert, and told him I intended to have a word with Leval about Mr. Smight.

  “No, don’t, you’ll make things worse. Tell you what, let me talk to him about it. Can’t have murder in the streets.”

  “You tell him the next time Smight tries anything I’ll cripple him, too.”

  Herbert thought that was funny. “There you go, a matched set.”

  I walked over to the courthouse after breakfast to attend the trial and managed to be at the courthouse for the beginning of the day’s session, seated so close I could have jabbed a pencil into the defense attorney’s ear if I’d been of a mind to do so. I was eager to hear the testimony of former Deputy Sheriff Gilbert Clevenger, who’d tried to arrest me after I shot Marc Leval. He answered Wembly’s questions without emotion, and if I’d been a juror I’d have thought his testimony credible. Clevenger had aged considerably since our last meeting; in the seventeen years gone by he seemed to have aged thirty, his long wrinkled neck flapping like a turkey’s, his mustache gone yellow-white with a fringe of tobacco brown at the lip. After being awakened by the sound of gunfire he’d come upon the injured Marc Leval—I figured in his story not at all—and soon after encountered Braunschweig and Niedel. Shortly thereafter he discovered that four of his horses were missing, stolen by the Benders to make their escape. He hadn’t struck me as a man fresh out of bed that night; he’d been fully dressed and seemed quite alert, and I wondered how the Benders had managed to steal those horses if he was indeed awake. I also chewed on the fact that he’d mentioned the Bender killings that night, when there wasn’t any way I could imagine for him to have known about them then, as far away as he was.

  After a brief cross-examination of Clevenger by Mr. Lassiter, Mr. Wembly called to the stand Mrs. McCann, Mrs. Davis’s former employer and the woman who’d brought the defendants to the attention of the Labette County authorities. Tiny-boned and fluttery as a hummingbird, she barely came up to the middle of Wembly’s chest as she moved to the stand. She wore a set of apparently painful false teeth that gave her a pronounced lisp, and produced a clicking sound with each movement of her delicate jaw; her voice was extremely high in pitch and girlish, but her small face, round as a pie-plate, was marked with the furrows of a lifetime of sour disappointment and disapproval.

  After the usual preliminary questions Wembly asked her how she’d come to know Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Davis had been her laundress, and had on several occasions told Mrs. McCann’s fortune; the two became close, and when Mrs. Davis became ill with a fever Mrs. McCann had cared for her.

  “When she became ill I considered it my Christian duty to care for her in her sickness, and for her babes. When feverish she confessed many, many awful things to me.”

  “What did she confess?”

  “Terrible things both banal and extraordinary. That she and her mother had been prostitutes in a logging camp, for one. That she trafficked with spirits, for another. And then one evening she was raving, insensate, about her mother, that awful creature. She nearly died that night, might have anyway if I hadn’t been there, swabbing her down with cool water.”

  Wembly nodded as if he’d been there himself. “Tell us what she said about the mother.”

  “That she’d killed three of her husbands.”

  Mr. Lassiter rose to object, but the judge sat him back down. Old Mrs. Griffith scowled and stared off at the window, and Mrs. Davis dandled the baby on her knee, to all appearances oblivious to her circumstances. Mr. Wembly then asked what had happened after Mrs. Davis’s recuperation.

  Mrs. McCann drew a deep breath, and I was reminded of a Chautauqua speaker about to deliver a monologue. “When Mrs. Davis recovered and realized what she’d told me, she knew I posed a threat to her and her mother. She tried to warn me off. ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ she said to me, ‘my mother and I were the Bloody Benders and we know how to deal with the likes of you.’ ” It was a practiced speech, well-rehearsed and dramatically rendered; I guessed that Mrs. McCann had been through some elocution lessons. As she brought it to a close, her face became a mask of wounded goodness. “And after I’d employed her, nursed her back to health, cared for her little ones!”

  Wembly shook his head, and I began to think he was a little smitten with Mrs. McCann who, though to my eye devoid of all erotic attraction, was possessed of the sort of overwhelming and slightly demented personality some men find irresistible. Mrs. Davis’s baby chose that moment to squeal delightedly at Wembly, her tiny arms outstretched to him, and the entire gallery broke into laughter, as did the panel of judges.

  The examination continued until lunchtime, after which I was intrigued enough to return, but I had lingered too long over my meal and would have had to settle for a much less desirable vantage point in the middle of the gallery. I elected to leave, and outside the courthouse I sat for a minute studying the comings and goings. It was easy to spot the country people in town for a glimpse of the notorious Benders, because they were the ones who stood and gawked at the rough limestone courthouse itself, four stories high. I began to stare at it myself, wondering at the cost of such an extravagant and massive structure. Constructed of rough-faced limestone, above each arched window on the ground floor was a gargoyle. I hadn’t noticed these before, and I went from window to window noting their individual faces and expressions, which ranged from the genuinely horrific to the whimsical. I was delighted to discover, at the building’s southeast corner, a gargoyle unmistakeably cut to resemble Herbert Braunschweig, with a horrific scowl on his mug, a tongue protruding grotesquely over his chin, and a disturbingly empty eye socket, hollowed from the limestone. I wondered what Herbert had done to provoke this sort of comment from the stone-cutter, and also why he hadn’t ordered it hacked away. Maybe, I thought as I left, he thought it was amusing.

  I felt rather good as I marched to the brick factory. The sky was clear by now, and nearing the plant the sun shone brightly on the snowy mantle, dirty gray with the falling soot from the enormous kiln chimneys. I hadn’t visited yet and wasn’t much interested in the brick business, but it was an impressively large industrial complex. A half dozen large kilns stood outside a warehouse, into whose open door I stepped. Inside it was hot and dry, with a great deal of loud noise. Over the clanking of some giant chain I could hear but not see, I asked a clay-smeared artisan where I could find Mr. Braunschweig’s office. Wordlessly he gestured at the far end of the building, where some doors were set into the wall.

  Inside one of the doors was an anteroom where a little lady in a starched white blouse sent me through to the interior office, where Herbert’s desk faced the window. He sat reading the morning’s Optic, none too happily.

  “Goddamnit, Bill, did you see this here?” He read, haltingly: “ ‘It is clear to anyone who knew them even slightly that these women are not the feminine half of the Bender clan. The young woman is sim
ple and dull, where Katie was sprightly and vivacious, and the old lady is a prime example of a New York Yankee, whereas Mrs. Bender was well known to be a Dutchwoman with no English. Mrs. Davis is considerably shorter than Katie was, and Mrs. Griffith a good deal taller than Mrs. Bender.’ Hell’s bells.” He slapped the paper down onto his desk and folded his arms across his chest, pouting like a little boy.

  “Pretty nice brick plant you got here, Herbert.”

  “Ain’t it?”

  “Went to the hearing this morning. That Mrs. McCann’s crazy as a bedbug.”

  “What, all that spirit business? Don’t pay that any mind, she caught those gals dead to rights.”

  “Those women just plain aren’t the Benders, Herbert. Look at Mrs. Davis. She’s an idiot.”

  He gestured with his chin at the anteroom. “Shut that, would you?”

  I went over and pulled the door closed.

  “That scar on Katie’s forehead,” he said, touching his own head above his glass eye. “The one that made her a simpleton. She says she got it from her husband. That’s bunk.” He swatted at the air before him as though at an invisible horsefly.

  “How do you know it’s bunk?”

  He looked to his right and to his left, though we were alone in the office. “You gotta keep this quiet. I know because it’s a bullet did that to her, and I’m the one that fired it.”

  That took me aback. “How’s that?”

  He drew in a deep breath. “I ain’t told anybody but Renée in the last sixteen years. All right. That morning we come upon the Benders, maybe three miles from where we split up. Me and Tim. It wasn’t like I told you, them firing on us. We got the drop on ’em, but young John fired and we fired back. Got John and the old man pretty quick, and Katie right after. The old lady was yelling her head off the whole time, but when Katie got hit she stopped and waved her arms to surrender.”

  “I heard some of those shots, after I’d shot Marc.”

  “So here we were, about to finish Katie off and the old woman, too—”

  “Wait a second, there. Tim was going along with this?”

  “Sure he was. Hell, he had a slug in his leg and it hurt like hell, he damn near bled to death. Anyhow, we were about to finish the both of ’em off, and old Ma said don’t, and I’ll show you where the money’s at.”

  “She said that in English?”

  “Sure did. So I thought, hell, let’s see. And we left Katie bleeding on the ground next to her Pa and young John, and we rode back with the old woman to an old hollow tree. Had five thousand dollars in it.”

  “So you let the old lady go and split the money?”

  He shrugged, wide-eyed. “A deal’s a deal, Bill. I didn’t think Katie’d live to tell about it for long, but sure looks like she did.”

  “What about the deputy?”

  “We come across him tied to the tree where you left him, and he told us what you done to Marc. So we paid him two hundred dollars to lie about it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He took a little convincing, but he took it. Anyway, part of your share went to your boy Clyde. I owe you, though, and if you’re going to stay in town you’ll need work. I’d set you up at the mill but I’m partners in it with Leval, you understand. I’ll set you up with some equity in the company. Shit, I got more’n I can spend now anyway.”

  I thanked him and told him I’d give it its due consideration, and I left the office to wander back to the center of town. On the way I passed before the Naylor residence, from whose front window the lady of the house waved at me, holding Mrs. Davis’s little girl who, home from the courthouse, laughed blithely.

  4

  LABETTE COUNTY, KANSAS APRIL, 1890 In the Springtime

  A lad of seven or eight years bounced lightly on the studio bench before a canvas backdrop, a seascape to match the sailor suit his parents had dressed him in. I tried to cajole a smile out of him, but he squinted at me in a suspicious way and held his poker face until finally his mother lost her temper and shouted, threatening him with a whipping if he didn’t give the man a nice happy grin. To my surprise the smile involved was quite genuine-looking and suitable for the camera.

  “Thank you kindly,” the lady said when the sitting was finished. They left, pleased, and I had hopes that once they returned for their proofs she’d return again with the boy’s father for a family portrait. I did the darkroom work myself, and while the plates dried I began browsing through the studio’s backfiles. I was favorably impressed with the quality of the work, both technically and aesthetically, though in fact it was not much different from the output of any competent small-town photographer. Most of the negatives and prints were portraits, with a few street scenes and farm animals here and there, and very few of them were stereographic in format, which puzzled me, since the firm still owned the stereo camera I’d left behind in ’73.

  At this point I had been working for Gleason and Ogden, Photographers, for nearly two months as studio manager, which allowed them to attend to their other interests without leaving the studio idle. The reader will note that this made me a de facto employee of Marc Leval, who had a share in the business; this, however, did not bring us into any more direct contact than we’d had before. I had not spoken to him or Maggie since my first days back in Cottonwood, though I had seen them both several times, and had spoken to Marc Leval, Jr., twice. On neither of those occasions did he show any sign that he knew me to be his father, nor any awareness that his parents and I had a shared and eventful history.

  I finally found the stereo views in one of two boxes resting on a high shelf in the storage closet, half forgotten, both of which I took to the front of the studio for perusal. The other box contained a bigger surprise: an 11-by-12-inch negative of myself, seated before a painted mountain backdrop I remembered owning some years before in Greeley. Maggie had taken it, and I thumbed through the rest of the negatives, fifty or so in number, pictures of herself and more of me, pictures of friends and neighbors and strangers, all dating to those unhappy months in ’74 and ’75 when I’d been chafing at the Colony’s constraints and trying to get Maggie to leave with me. Some of the pictures of Maggie were of my own making, and some seemed to be self-portraits dating from after my departure for Golden; in those she looked so stoically bereft, even in the reversed tones of the glass negatives, that my eyes began to moisten and I put the crate aside.

  I opened the other box and seated myself beneath the skylight with a Holmes Stereoscopic Viewer. The first card was a crudely mounted pair from which Paul Lowry’s dead eyes, their vitreous darkened with blood, stared back at me from beyond the pale alongside his hapless, anonymous prisoner, both of them hanging from the rafter as pathetically as on the night they died; it was one of the most sublime images I had ever put to glass. There were a handful of others I’d taken myself, and a raft of the kinds of stereo views typically made to promote a growing town: the Leval/Rector and Braunschweig mansions, City Hall, the County Courthouse before and after completion, and a very attractive series of the downtown business district covered in snow.

  At last there was a series in a box of its own, with the words THE BLOODY BENDERS OF KANSAS printed on a sheet of paper pasted to the lid above a list of the images contained therein:

  1. The Death House, as it Stood

  2. Rear View, the Death House

  3. The Cottonwood Hotel and Restaurant, Cottonwood Kans., Where Katie Bender Worked to Lure Unwary Travelers

  4. Interior View of the Death House, Showing the Bloodied Canvas Dividing it, Behind which the Bender Men Hid with the Hammer

  5. Satan’s Own Hearth

  6. The Bench on which the Victims Sat Before Death Struck

  7. The Charnel Pit into which the Victims Were Bled After Death

  8. Satan’s Own Orchard, Looking North

  9. A Row of Graves Amidst the Fruited Arbor

  10. The Mayor of Cottonwood, Kans., the Hon. Henry Rector, Wielding the Death Hammer

  11. The
Bones of an Unknown Traveler, his Skull Staved in

  12. A Box of Jewelry, Found on the Trail of the Killers’ Escape

  13. Members of the Posse that Failed to Overtake the Benders

  14. The Crowd that Gathered Upon Discovery of the Crimes

  15. Satan’s Own Orchard: The Burning of the Blood-Fed Trees

  16. The Tree that Awaits their Return

  The “members of the posse” were Tim and Herbert; Tim sat with his bandaged leg resting on a crude, handmade stool that may have come from the house, and Herbert’s legs and arms were covered with dried mud from digging the graves of the men he’d supposedly failed to catch up with. Gleason was indisputably a skilled photographer, even at that early stage, and I took some pride in the professional quality of the images. Only the last two in the set had any element of truquage, and only the last, a cottonwood tree with a quartet of hangman’s nooses hanging provocatively from its largest branch, was an out-and-out cheat.

  The fruit trees of the orchard had been relatively young and healthy, and their burning probably required lamp oil as fuel, to judge from the inky blackness of the smoke roiling upward from the grove. I suspected that their incineration had been Gleason’s own idea, for the sake of a dramatic picture. The only human figure in the tableau was Tiny Rector, and watching earnestly in the foreground right as the fire consumed the trees.

  There was an admirable and unposed photograph of the swarm of curiosity-seekers at the scene, including a family unmistakably engaged in a picnic at the right-hand edge of the composition, not far from the remains of the house, whose dismantling had proceeded considerably since the taking of view number one, its roof gone altogether and its windows stripped of glass. I had been told that as of a week after the discovery of the graveyard not a trace remained of the house, the stable or the orchard, and that Tiny Rector had taken home the hammers for safekeeping against the possibility that one day the Benders would be captured; presumably they now rested in some drawer in the prosecutor’s office.