The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  “By lightning,” his father had said.

  His father now dead. He still can’t think of it straight on—he takes a drink and squeezes his eyes shut, feeling the prick of tears.

  It feels to Peter like someone else’s recollection: James Force on the hill, the explosion, his head broken against a rock. But it hadn’t been lightning, Peter decides in a sudden leap of intuition.

  “So, was it an accident with your da, then, or not? What’re you worried about? That someone killed him?” Two days later, Peter is still sitting in one of Kellogg’s three saloons, and the man asking this question is named Camden Connors, an occasional friend of Peter’s who, being in the insurance and confidence business, has taken a professional interest in the episode.

  “Piss off,” Peter mumbles, spilling his whiskey into his lap.

  “Ah, I forgive you. A tragedy, no doubt—here, let me buy you another—”

  Peter takes a sip of the renewed whiskey, hiccoughs, and starts to giggle miserably.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just thought”—Peter wipes his eyes—“I’d ask him what to do. But I can’t ask him anything . . .” He stares into his glass. Then suddenly, something Camden said clicks in his awareness. With an effort he sits up slightly straighter. “You think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “What?” Camden leans forward, digging in his ear with a grubby finger.

  “But who—? Why—?” Peter clutches his head. Then suddenly it comes to him, in one of those moments of sublime clarity when the heavens of reason split open, banishing all uncertainty: Lucius Newton, the north diggings pit boss.

  All the elements are there. Newton is a hard, angry man, known and despised at local brothels for his cruelty; a teetotaler, but drunk on his own bile. His father and Newton had ever been near blows. When James Force called Newton a fool for using an unshaped charge in a tunnel through shale, Newton had spat in his face—Peter had been present for this incident, one among many—and when the blast loosened a boulder that crushed a man’s legs, Newton’s stare at the elder Force had been poison. An explosion in the middle of nowhere—Newton had dynamite at his disposal; and that was the only way that made sense. Someone had planted a charge near where James Force had been sent to take samples that day, and set it off at a fatal moment. . . .

  Peter explains his revelation to Connors, who seems unconvinced. “Well.” He slides his hat back and scratches his head. “Maybe, I guess. But an explosion—? With dynamite—? Hell of a way to kill a man.”

  “Nah”—Peter Force shakes his head—“wasn’t any accident, I’ll tell you that. I know what I saw. Didn’t look like any lightning.”

  Connors shrugs. “Like I say, maybe. Strange stuff happens out there. I know men’ve seen ghosts, glowing injuns, dogs with fire coming outta their eyes. Some even say the devil.”

  Peter nods, not listening. He has seen enough of anger, greed, and jealousy here on the frontier to understand what is possible, and even commonplace. The death of his father—there must be some rhyme or reason to it. The desperate optimism of the conspiracy theorist possesses Peter: that some kind of order must exist, even if it is that of scheming, hidden puppeteers.37 He stumbles back to the widow’s attic and, moving as if in a dream, withdraws his father’s revolver from a drawer.

  Around two a.m. he rips open the door of the hut where Newton lives in the mining company barracks. Newton spits and swears at getting woken, but quiets down when he sees the Smith & Wes son in Peter’s hand and the crazed look in his eye. Peter marches Newton at gunpoint to the sheriff’s house, and rouses the sheriff by hammering on the front door.

  Muffled curses inside the house, growing closer, and then the door swings open to reveal the bulky figure of John Muncie, sheriff of Kellogg County, dressed only in a pair of boots and a holster belt. In the puddle of yellow light cast by the swinging oil lantern above the door, the sheriff regards his visitors—Newton in his stained underwear like a pale, paunchy ghost in the darkness, Peter with his shirt unbuttoned, mud-smeared, and reeking of whiskey—and nods.

  “Y’all better come inside, then,” the sheriff says.

  They stagger into the living room, where the sheriff lights another lamp. The bedroom doorway opens and Mrs. Muncie appears, clad in a frilly nightdress and clutching an iron skillet.

  “Get back to bed, Trude,” the sheriff says. She retreats, and he turns back to Peter and his hostage. “Now then, what’s all this about?”

  Peter’s tongue feels like a dead thing in his mouth, the thought of explanations an intolerable delay before the towers of fury burning in his chest. Still, somehow, he manages to remember himself. “This man’s the one killed my dad, sheriff.” He tries to meet Muncie’s eyes but the room won’t stop spinning around him.

  “Sheriff, I did nothing! Nothing, I swear, he’s crazy!” Newton protests, struggling free from Peter’s grip on his collar.

  “What?” Without thinking, Peter jerks the pistol out of his belt, aiming it at the cringing pit boss. “Tell him or I swear, Newton, I’ll kill you. Tell him what you said you’d do to my dad!”—this being the gist, at least, of the sentence he slurs.

  “Please, Sheriff—”

  “I’m warning you—he did it, Sheriff. He’s got dynamite—didn’t I tell you it was an explosion spooked his horse? And I heard him say he’d kill my dad, with my own ears.” Which isn’t the precise truth, but this nuance is unimportant in the present moment.

  “All right now, Force, put it down.” The tone of Muncie’s voice brings Peter back to himself. He looks up to see the sheriff cock the hammer of his own revolver with practiced ease. “Put the gun down, boy.” Somehow the fact that Muncie is naked, apart from his boots, only makes him more threatening.

  Peter sways on his feet. Nonsensically, he pictures the night sky with its filigree of bright stars, arc’d over this wilderness and half-lit room—and abruptly his fury drains away, leaving only a sense of confusion and futility. “Listen, I’ve brought you the killer. Don’t you understand?”

  “I don’t care what he did. Right now what’s important is, you’ve drawn a gun in my house, and I don’t let that happen.” The sheriff starts to raise his revolver—but even drunk, an entire life lived on the frontier, scaling crags and handling a rifle, has left Peter alert enough to instantly level his own weapon at Muncie’s head.

  At this point in the story, Peter falls silent. Across from where he sits on the floor, she is motionless in the armchair and he realizes that she is asleep. He climbs stiffly to his feet and stretches.

  Still, somehow, against his will, he finds himself remembering that night in the Idaho cabin. How he and the sheriff had faced each other across the room, each staring down the barrel of the other’s gun.

  Everything that had occurred next seemed to happen much too fast. Muncie’s eyes had drilled into him, a gaze that—he’d known somewhere distantly—he was only able to meet because he was drunk. He felt like a finely tuned machine, sensitive to every fluttering of the other man’s eyelids, finger ready on the trigger.

  Then Newton tackled him and he stumbled, twisting and firing at the same time. Newton staggered away, clutching his stomach. The glint of something like a frying pan flying through the air behind him—Peter staggered with the blow and the sheriff’s fist smashed into his nose. His vision swam. Someone stepped on his wrist and he dropped the gun—and suddenly was lying on the ground, looking upward at Muncie’s revolver.

  Somewhere nearby, Newton was groaning softly. The sheriff kicked Peter’s pistol away and crossed to the whimpering pit boss, prodding Newton with the toe of his boot. Peter glimpsed a dark stain of blood spreading across the other man’s abdomen. Then Muncie moved back to stand over Peter.

  “That man’s always been a waste of skin,” the sheriff had said. “Still, I think you best get out of town now, boy.”

  Standing in the New York flophouse apartment, Peter remembers these words and closes his eyes. Outside, the light has faded
to blue, and then gray, shadows falling over the still lines of her face. She shifts in her sleep and murmurs something, a faint protest or demand.

  After a time, he lowers himself to sit on the floor again. Holding a newspaper propped in his lap as an alibi in case she should wake, he gazes at her features and tries to lose himself in the moment. But despite his efforts, recollections of the western frontier and of the deal he made with Morgan’s minion trouble his thoughts. So that gradually Peter begins to wonder, with a growing sense of dread, why—even after they have both decided to leave the past behind—that past still looms so near.

  CHAPTER X

  THE INNER SANCTUM

  FROM THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT (2ND PRECINCT) BLOTTER, JANUARY 18, 1901:

  Officers responded [to a] call from Morgan residence, interviewed Mr. Morgan [and his household] staff upon arrival.

  Suspects identified [as] Peter Force and Cheri-Anne Toledo arrived approximately 6pm, met [with] Mr. Morgan [and] Mr. Edison in Dining Room. Following brief Conversation suspects became agitated. Force alleged [to have] fired [a] gun at Mr. Morgan before fleeing.

  No injuries or items known missing. 3 bullet marks verified [on the] Dining Room wall. Suspects described as . . .38

  I am looking for a moment years ago, at the Pierpont Morgan mansion in New York: January 18, 1901, an evening at the heart of winter. The weather, according to the Times, is cold and clear, a wind from the north dropping the temperature below freezing. Piles of soot-stained snow line the streets. Icicles hang from the eaves of buildings and grace each doorway with a miniature portcullis, waiting to fall. Against the gas streetlamps, the branches of trees are monochrome, skeleton silhouettes.

  A gleaming black limousine glides like a ghost through the streets. In the back of the car she sits beside Peter on the lush velvet upholstery, sunk in private silence. She stares fixedly ahead, hardly registering her surroundings beyond the warring blind nesses of grief and fear.

  When Peter had shaken her awake in the apartment and she had seen the neat little man standing in the doorway, when the mechanic led her outside and explained the bargain that he’d made, her first reaction had been disbelief. A feeling that remains with her even now, as she is still somehow unwilling to accept the reality of his betrayal. That all of his kindnesses have been empty gestures, and that there is no one at all left whom she can trust.

  She tries to imagine what lies ahead, what may be demanded of her. And, thinking of the men she is being taken to meet, she understands clearly that the question is not one of whether she should be afraid, but of whether she is afraid enough.

  In the limousine beside her, the mechanic shifts nervously.

  “You were in jail. How is this worse?” he whispers. “They only want to talk.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  After a moment he turns away, unsettled by the stricken look on her face, to gaze out the window. The car pulls up in front of a massive brownstone situated on a corner lot, the manicured gardens surrounding the building now shrouded with frost. A murmur of disbelief escapes Peter’s lips. The house is incredible, the kind of place men like him are arrested for walking too near.

  Abruptly he realizes that, coming here, he has been operating on a kind of blind faith. But now he grasps, for the first time, exactly how far out of his depth he has ventured. These people could crumple him up and discard him without hesitating—this understanding is accompanied by a growing tendril of fear in his guts.

  The door swings open and two hulking guards wearing Pinker ton Detective uniforms motion for them to exit the car. Having no option, they do. The guards trail behind as they climb the wide steps of the mansion.

  They are greeted at the door by an immaculately dressed butler with a hooked nose and lacquered hair. He looks them up and down, instantly appraising their incomes, social station, and the exact degree of politeness necessary to the situation.

  The butler nods to Peter, his smile radiating contempt. “Your coat, sir?”

  Peter hesitates. He remembers sitting across from Neumann in the Suicide Hall, and the mechanic’s words of warning, which had seemed paranoid at the time. But now, feeling the weight of his father’s pistol in his pocket, hastily retrieved before leaving the apartment, he shakes his head. “I’ll keep it. Thanks.”

  He looks around at the wood paneling of the walls, the intricate tilework on the floor, the framed pictures, potted palms, and china vases. It is a place unlike any he has seen before, the vestibule of another world. He glances at her, hoping to share a covert look, but she ignores him.

  “Mademoiselle? May I take your wrap?”

  She nods, handing the butler her tattered scarf. He accepts the garment with thinly veiled distaste. “This way, please.” The butler walks away without waiting for them to follow. They proceed up a short flight of stairs, through the atrium and down a corridor, the Pinkertons trailing behind.

  Rounding a corner, she recognizes a painting by Van Groöte that her father once showed her in a book and feels an instant of vertigo. The framed pastoral scene depicts a pair of young shepherds in an alpine meadow, a flock of sheep grazing in the distance behind them—and for an instant she imagines that she could step into the painting, her father’s look of astonishment as she waves up at him from the page—

  Abruptly, together with this reverie and the memory of her father’s face, she also experiences a wash of anger. When her mother died, her father had worn that same look of stupefied disbelief; over the span of her childhood, he had retreated behind this expression, along with an ever-changing array of vague artistic pursuits, into a distance beyond her reach. In his absence, surrounded by the silent deference of the family servants who populated her world, she’d learned to rely only on herself, and on her studies—which, if not exactly comforting, were at least safe.

  None of which, she reminds herself now, has changed. She glances at the mechanic, then away. Briefly she had allowed herself to imagine—

  But how sentimentally stupid, she mocks herself, that hope had been. She should have known better: should have remembered that she can trust only herself. Only—her vertigo returns with such wrenching force that she nearly stumbles—she cannot even trust herself anymore.

  The butler stops and opens a set of double doors, gesturing for them to enter. Peter hesitates, and after a moment she pushes through ahead of him. The Pinkertons follow, silently taking up positions on either side of the door.

  The room inside is dimly lit, a single green-shaded electric bulb casting brown shadows over the walls. A round wooden table dominates the space, attended by armchairs upholstered in red leather. Pink marble columns rise in each corner, flanked by potted palms.

  A huge, elderly man with angry eyebrows and a face like a bulldog is seated at one end of the table—this must be Morgan, Peter guesses. Another man is sitting at the other end of the table, slumped over a technical journal in which he traces the words with his finger. The recognition is instant, but it takes Peter a long moment to digest the fact that he’s in the same room as Thomas Edison—the combination of the bilious lighting, the red glow of the walls, and the silence making him feel like he is dreaming.

  After a pause that is not quite long enough to be rude, but sufficient to convey an absolute sense of authority, Morgan sets down the newspaper that he is studying and looks up.

  “Mr. Force,” he rumbles. “Miss Toledo. Welcome to my home.” He stands, towering over the others in the room, and offers his hand to Peter, who takes it, mumbling a greeting in reply as he feels the financier’s fleshy palm envelop his own. Peter tries not to stare at the man’s nose. Releasing Peter from his grip, Morgan bows to her; she acknowledges the gesture with a small nod.

  “Thank you for coming to see me,” the financier continues. “Please, sit.”

  Peter eases himself into one of the armchairs near Edison. The inventor is still absorbed in his journal, apparently oblivious to their arrival. Peter shoots her a sideways glance, trying to r
ead her face for some sign of what she is thinking. But she looks like a photograph of herself taken from a great distance: features blurred, eyes dark and illegible. She remains standing.

  Morgan sighs and shrugs, returning to his seat. This is not how he likes to do business—business is war, he knows, but that does not mean it cannot be civilized. He rings a small silver bell and the butler appears in the doorway. “Bring us coffee for four,” he says. The butler nods and vanishes.

  An awkward silence ensues.

  “Mr. Morgan,” she begins finally, “I appreciate your hospitality. But you must understand if I am cautious, given that my presence here is not entirely of my own free will.”

  The financier fixes her for a moment with a penetrating gaze and then nods. “I understand, mademoiselle. The use of such methods is a thuggery that I abhor on principle.”

  “Yet you have employed them!” She stares at Morgan, and Peter can see that she is trembling. “Will you please explain your motives in bringing me here? For I cannot help suspect that you have some villainy in mind.”

  “Villainy is a complicated thing, Miss Toledo.”

  “You justify yourself, sir?”

  Peter, who has been silently watching, flinches at this comment. Although he’s still fumbling for some clue about what these men want, it seems clear to him that it’s best not to make them angry. Strangely though, it is the financier who finally looks away from her gaze.

  “Mademoiselle,” Morgan says stiffly, “justification gets most of us through our days.”

  The door swings open and the butler enters again, carrying a tray laden with coffee service. He sets the tray down and ceremoniously pours four cups, a faint clatter of china and the warm scent of French roast relieving for a moment the tensions that crisscross the room.