The Maid's Version

by Daniel Woodrell

  “You never.”

  “What earthly good would it do for me to lose everything—he would’ve died anyway.”

  And Ruby said to her sister, “There’s no way to love that in a man.”

  The second crucial event that urged Charles Lathrop to ruin was sparked on the seventh day of June, 1933, when he came awake in his home down Bois D’Arc Street and smelled betrayal wafting from his wife’s pillow. This scent of betrayal took the form of barbershop pomade, a richly scented, thickly poured pomade, pomade that had been transferred to his wife, surely while writhing in an illicit embrace, from her to her pillow, then, during the bright hours of that morning, into Lathrop’s mind.

  His wife, July, who had been born a Powell and was as pretty as all local Powell girls seemed to be, said something to him, but afterwards she was never sure what. Good morning, honey. Eggs sound okay? Sure is sunny out.

  Whatever she said received no response from Lathrop. He pulled on a sloppy set of clothes, clothes for doing messy chores, then dragged a white rocking chair out back of the house. He used the old ladle at the old well, pumped himself a dipper of water, then positioned the rocker among the grapevines his father had cultivated in what was by then Lathrop’s backyard. He placed the chair so that the vines closed in to render him invisible. He drank a bucket of well water that morning from the well his people had been drinking from since the War Between the States quieted. Lathrop had just turned thirty-one, and remained childless after nearly six years of marriage. His job was secure. He owned the house outright. But on that date in June he sat strangely in that white rocker behind the vines, drank well water from an old ladle, and howled. At several points he let loose with howls of anguish that neighbors recalled for years to come.

  Just as the factory whistle announced the noon hour, Lathrop rose from the rocker, walked into the house he’d been born in, on back to the master bedroom and a chestnut dresser that stood against the south wall between the windows. He bent to the bottom drawer, pulled it open and removed a ball of chamois cloth. From the cloth he extracted a large pistol of obscure make and placed it inside a pocket of his trousers. He then selected a black rain slicker from his closet. The slicker fell low enough to hide the pistol butt hanging from his pocket.

  He said several things to July, who never forgot them or disputed them and repeated them but twice, then walked out the front door and onto the sidewalk, taking stiff deliberate strides toward the town square. He turned west on Main Street where tall, wide trees shaded his passing. At the mouth of an alley that joined Main he passed the lean-to made of ill-fitted lumber known as the Clubhouse, where hardscrabble men drank and gambled at dice and cards or checkers while waiting to be hired for day work. Several of those men said they noted Lathrop, and that he exhibited “a strange wander to his eyes,” and walked like he was roped and being pulled by a mule to somewhere he didn’t really want to go.

  Lathrop went on past Clellon’s Billiards, where he made no impression, then the Raleigh Hotel, where a man named Pence standing on the veranda said howdy to him and received a curt wave of acknowledgment. Lathrop entered the square on the east side. As he threaded through the lunch-hour foot traffic he nodded absently to several people who would later that day dearly wish they’d touched his arm to pause and spoken with him. Halfway around he exited the square and continued downhill and north on the avenue.

  He walked several paces in that direction, then slipped into an unkempt alleyway behind the shops and stores. He came to the back entrance of the old Winslow Stables, which had been only partially converted to an automobile garage. There remained soaked inside those walls strong lingering aromas of horse sweat and liniment and horse apples that melded with the up-to-date stench from oil and gas. Tommy Uphaus worked in the bay attempting to repair either an old Republic truck or an older Apperson Jack Rabbit, he wasn’t sure which upon reflection, but he did turn when Lathrop addressed him in a soft polite voice: “John Teague around?”

  “Not now.”

  “When will he be?”

  “He’s off on business today.”

  “Won’t be in at all?”

  “I can’t think of why he would be.”

  For reasons he could never articulate, not at the time or decades later, Uphaus stepped completely away from his work into the alley, watching Charles Lathrop wearing a rain slicker disappear beneath clear sky toward the railroad tracks.

  Lathrop did soon after on that day become our first suicide (three others are certain) called by clarion misery to the dance hall site. The pit had finally been filled in earlier that year, the debris and sadness removed from view, the pit filled with dirt and smoothed level. Mrs. Henry Easthall watched Lathrop from close by, on the tracks where she walked hunting sassafras that might be growing to one side or the other, and said he had the pistol in his hand and spun around, paced irregular circles a few times, then went still at just about the center of the new dirt. He saw her watching and made an apparent statement to her but with intonations more appropriate to a question, so maybe it was, she never could decide: “It’s all gone flat since?”

  During those years in which Alma DeGeer Dunahew was considered to have become crazy, her brain turned to diseased meat by the unchecked spread of suspicion amidst a white simmering and reckless hostility, a caustic sickness between her ears could be witnessed by viewing the erosion of the very color in her eyes as she raged and the involuntary sideways tug of her lips as each heated word was thrown.

  Folks said, “Grief has chomped on her like wolves do a calf.”

  For some long seasons she was by spoken edict deemed unemployable among the finer families of West Table, once they’d tired of her bottom-dog scorn and wide accusations aimed generally upwards. She had on a bright gusty morning been summoned to the front parlor by Mrs. Glencross, who asked her to sit, and as Alma sat her eyes went to her remaining chores—the pale pleated curtains hung over windows often raised open to wind and blown dirt, their stylish dainty pleats making so much unnecessary trouble for Alma, the silly things, requiring that she part them gently to shoo dust and tiny black specks from the many, many whitish crevices, but not parted so much that they stretched ugly and remained gaped—and Mrs. Glencross went on about something in her level voice, no rises or dives in tone to alert one that she was getting to the serious point or points. There was a hallway rug of Persian design that needed beating in the yard, today or tomorrow, and on the post at the foot of the stairs waited the sinuous brass stem and glass globe of the Vapo-Cresolene lamp that must be lit at the arrival of every dusk to combat those pernicious poisons that ranged in darkened air and harmed children most—when she caught an odd note of finality, “That’s all. You’ve worked your last hour here. I know what you said at the Citizens’ Commission, Mrs. Dunahew, and it was shameful. I cannot have you in my house anymore.”

  (Mr. J. William Etchieson, cochairman of the Citizens’ Commission Inquiry, to Alma Dunahew on the stand: “Are you aware that Dr. Thomason has testified that he personally treated Mr. Glencross for burns?”

  Alma: “I figured as much.”

  “He treated him with salves and ointments repeatedly.”

  “I saw him come over repeatedly, and I saw the itty-bitty hole in the arm he treated, too—it might have hurt plenty for a couple of days, but it surely weren’t no kind of burn.”

  “Dr. Thomason noted that it was a small burn in scope but acute, and he managed to minimize the scarring.”

  “There never was no salve or nothing of the like on the bandages I took out to the rubbish after he come over, though, and done his treating. None of that yellow mess that you spread on burns, or the red kind, either. Only sometimes a little old spot of blood, and that only on the first visits.”)

  “They told me whatever testifyin’ I had to say would be held secret.”

  “Yes, well.”

  “So them official muckety-mucks all amount to liars, too.”

  “I believe you have cracked from so
much woe, but even cracked you surely know he had not a thing to do with the tragedy. Not a thing.”

  “I know what I know, ma’am, and there ain’t no way to not know it now.”

  “You’ve been snooping in my home ever since … I realize that … and we have been so very kind to you, always, haven’t we?”

  Alma stood, dismissed, fingered her hair into place, and stared fixedly toward the staircase, then as she departed said over her shoulder, “Ma’am? You’ll want the long kitchen matches to light that lamp.”

  She found occasional day work available in the more modest homes of other victims, sympathetic families who were also suspicious of various people but chose to stay silent in the face of enormous evil. Alma could not tolerate even sympathetic cowards for long, fearful that close contact with the surrendered might by example draw her own spirit into a puny presentation of itself, and to keep her spirit stout she did at times talk aloud about the silent and surrendered with mocking inflections as they sat inside the room she presently cleaned, sorting them out in understandable slurs as they paled, then reddened, and amidst the responding babble she’d leave their employ in the next flushing seconds, broom dropped to the floor, laundry washed but not hung on the line, and walk directly to the pit the explosion rendered. There she would bend at the waist and shriek her terrors downward past the scorched debris and brick wreckage to the mucked bottom and beyond, where she needed most to be heard.

  Folks said, “Alma believes she knows why and who but can’t do a thing—which is a black curse for a body to carry no matter how you say it.”

  She let her hair grow too long for kitchen work by simple forgetfulness, her mind had been trained elsewhere for so many weeks and months, but when she took notice of the new length in a restroom mirror decided on the spot to let it grow on forever, having an immediate hallowed sense that hair of an otherworldly length displayed a public, devotional reverence for the dead, for the dead and her quest to achieve for certain of the dead justice or blood, one or both, but especially both. Her clothes had never been special and now they were grimed by neglect and the upchucked spatter absorbed by plain cotton print as she tended a dying son who could hold nothing much down. She had no steady job and all kinds of miseries, and folks avoided her or became briefly blind when she walked past on the square with hair sprayed about her head neither combed nor bound. When so shunned she many times would follow closely on the heels of those who chose not to see her and whisper or deliver in singsong approximate injunctions from the Bible: “Masters share onto your servants that what’s A-OK and fair, hear?”

  Or: “The righteous fallseth seven times and is rose up standin’ at scratch again by rooster-crow tomorrow—what do you think about them apples?”

  Or: “The tongue of the just is chose as be silver, and ain’t none of you got tongues of silver.”

  The fallen, though, would still give her work, and Alma did at times swab and scrub inside establishments she would not have entered before, lowly and vile joints wherein neither her attitude nor station were held against her, and sweeping was sweeping and a bowl of stew and corn bread could carry a soul. These brigands and outcasts and assorted whores were sinners, yes, of the gravest kind, but they feared not the opinions of the highfalutin that held sway in this town about themselves or others. Alma pinched together what earnings she could from Cozy Grove and the Willows and Aunt Dot’s, and at Jupiter Grocery laid grubbed coins on the counter to again secure the smallest fatty ham hock, an onion and more navy beans for the boys.

  John Paul would take to sleeping outside the shack on those nights Sidney scratched most horribly after air and tried to inhale deeply but came up shallow. His straining chest and thin bones rattled like chains born far apart inside him that clanked together now as he emptied. Leukemia, no remedy but prayer, and don’t count on prayer to be heard when broadcast from this room in this shack during this mean year of our Lord. (John Paul would never again attend church nor pray privately from the time Sidney’s sickness accelerated through the completion of his own.) Sidney lay on an uneven cob mattress in the center of the floor, eyes shrunk to slits or suddenly drawn too far open, skin the color of spilled milk disappearing into a slow creek. John Paul wept and held on to Sidney’s feet to warm him. Wept and laid a wet cloth on the fevered forehead to cool him. Wept and ran outside to flee his brother’s rattling chains and the strangling stink and kept running. Alma tended her dying boy as well as she could with only a mother’s hands and beans in pork fat and no special medicine of any kind. James paced on these clenched nights from wall to wall and front to back and smacked himself in the face. He opened and closed his Barlow knife as he paced. He smacked and opened and closed and at times, as if whispering to a nearby cohort, repeated, “You’re right. You’re right.” Sidney lay among kin where he’d laid for weeks with ebbing breath and did not ask anymore for food or a cure, but stared up with resigning eyes and asked the ceiling or whatever to let him go, C’mon, just let me go, go now, go soon, go.

  He robbed banks. He called himself Irish Flannigan, a blatant falsehood and redundancy, as his true name was not Flannigan but Bosworth, and he was only guessing that he might be a pint or two Irish on his mother’s side. She was always nattering to him about their forebears and one time or another suggested that a dab of this or a dab of that from nearly every white-race bloodline of the world had been introduced into his veins, so he could claim kinship with just about everybody in charge if it somehow got him a leg up. It would be as Irish Flannigan that he achieved a bright but fleeting notoriety, became for a glorious time loved, feared, hated, idolized. He and the Irish Flannigan Gang robbed more banks in the breadbasket than any of his permanently famous brethren ever did—Pretty Boy, Dillinger, Machine Gun, Baby Face, the Barkers. He outrobbed them all, but somehow his deeds never clung to the national narrative of that era, never got much publicity in the big magazines back east or newsreels, and near the end of his life he groused to his guards and chaplain often about obvious unfairness in the dispersal of fame and that pure-dee boondocks boys like himself from any field of endeavor seldom if ever received the recognition their attainments merited. He always did know such things were stacked tilted toward sating the pet wants of the citified and precious, never truly forgot that, but still, in his all-American heart he couldn’t keep from … Eventually the chaplain arranged for a reporter from the KC Star to visit the outlaw footnote in Jeff City as his death day neared and listen while he spoke. Irish said many things that made it into the newspaper, the salient section of the article being this, “I come out of Protem, Missouri, hungry, hungry as the rest, I guess. Maybe just a little bit more. I done what I done. I won’t say I didn’t. I knocked over so many banks I count ’em in tens, and that number is three. I spent it when I had it, brother, danced with every girl worth dancing with and stuffed my gut with the best eats, too. I had fun. I did kill them I confessed to killing. I never wanted to kill none, none at all, but folks turn daffy on you sometimes, of a sudden think they’ve been sprung from a comic strip or radio show and get their dumb heinies shot. Those things I done, okay, but I never did kill no sheriff in West Table down there. That wasn’t me. It was the late Eldon Haines from Tulsa. We both of us sat in the same car, I’ll give you that. The sheriff they had down there was too friendly. Just too gol-durn friendly. We was stopped at a garage waiting on new tires and he come over to the car smiling, looking down to the plates, which were Georgia plates. He cozied up to the window and asked if we ever had been on the Oconee River, and Eldon cut him down. Cut him down right there in the alley before the old tires was switched with new, two shots, then stepped out and popped an extra one in his head. I want it known by all I never done a thing to the man except not see it coming.”

  At age ten John Paul Dunahew was on his own and raided gardens for supper after midnight. He’d been without all other kin since the twelfth of November when Alma became bizarre beyond civic tolerance and was taken to live at the Work Farm (Sidney
had very recently completed his haunting, brutal, audibly and visibly grotesque death inside the Dunahew shack, James had carried away only a Barlow knife with a bent blade and stolen gloves as he fled the region), and he chased anything that resulted in coins, delivered two of the three daily newspapers (Locator mornings, Scroll afternoons) and both of the weeklies (Gazette, Journal) and kept his few belongings (schoolbooks, a Big Chief tablet of paper with pencil stub, two sets of underwear made from grass-bleached flour sack, another shirt made of the same, and a big wooden spoon) in a burlap bag. The Work Farm expected him to supply four bits a week toward his mother’s upkeep and he did so and delivered it on foot, though he was seldom allowed to visit privately with her as she was not currently resident within her skin and they weren’t sure who or what was. He could not then and would not ever seem able to rest or sit idle—rest was dangerous for the poor, he knew that, too many thoughts of ordained and burgeoning unworthiness came to the impoverished when idle and ruined them thoroughly from the inside out. He knew that before he could say it and made himself stay on the move even when there was no place worthwhile to go. He rose in darkness (all my childhood and after he sat smoking Pall Malls on the back stoop and drinking instant coffee before the sun arrived) and hustled at any task that promised payment. He applied to caddy at the country club but was discouraged because of his size, and in a matter of only days became the evening rack boy at Clellon’s Billiards when old reformed Mr. Clellon realized that he was Buster-the-drunk’s youngest son. Poker games were allowed upstairs, moon and home-brew beer were sold from the cloakroom on the main floor, and the sheriff never came inside the place while wearing his badge. John Paul earned two cents a rack, and learned to say Good shot, Nice combination, or Great shape on that one, without looking up from whatever book or magazine he was reading at the moment. In short order he came to be considered something of a mascot by the sporting gents of town. (I did once, when rambling the nighthawk realm underage in marine green, encounter a table of deeply wrinkled and gin-blossomed ancients who heard my surname and ordered me a double whisky without asking if I’d take a drink before launching into fond windy reveries of Clellon’s and Clellon, Grandpa Buster and Dad.) Many times he received tips of two or four bits from country rakes who knew his circumstances, but more often he was stiffed by those who felt two cents a rack was generosity enough. Clellon was a heaped and rounded man who theatrically overlooked John Paul’s presence every night at closing time and locked him inside as though he believed the place empty, allowing the boy to sleep in safety beneath the three-cushion billiard table nearest the stove. He’d been nine, then, still, and felt protected by the apparent goodwill of the dubious. In the morning Clellon would open the front door and say, “How’d you get in here before me?” He would then count the pickled pigs’ feet in the jar on the counter by the cash box, count the pickled eggs in their jar, and sometimes make an announcement along these lines, “I wouldn’t eat more than three of each of them pickled things a day, myself. More’n that many a day and the brine’ll tan your stomach-sack into stiff leather, and leather ain’t what a fella wants down there when settin’ on the throne of a mornin’ to shed night soil.” He almost always brought a bologna sandwich and an apple from home wrapped in newspaper and would set that lunch in front of John Paul as the sun spread early light. “Now, you deliver all them papers, kid, but don’t forget school or I’ll go cut me a hickory switch.”