Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  “I guess we go out the hard way.” Heather English picked up a chair, stepped to the west end of the porch, and swung it against the screen. The sleeping porch was better constructed than she’d thought, but when Two added her efforts with the aid of a handy end table, it didn’t take long for them to open a tear in the mesh big enough to fit through.

  “They’ve got to know we can get out this way,” Heather Lane said.

  One agreed.

  “Maybe this is what they want us to do, but I can’t see that it matters. If we stay out here, we’re goners.”

  One stuck her head through the hole they’d made and surveyed the ground below. “Nobody down there.” She had to pull her head back inside to make herself heard. “Though they could be sitting behind the windows, watching for us. But there aren’t enough of them to watch all the windows. I’ve got an idea. If we make the hole a little bigger, we can stand on this ledge and jump over onto the roof of the side porch. It’ll be slick, but we might be able to follow it around to the front of the house, maybe come down someplace they aren’t watching.”

  Two nodded. “Sounds good. Then what?”

  “Then it’s your turn for ideas.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Don’t worry,” the first Heather reassured the second. “We probably won’t get that far anyway.”

  ***

  “She’s Mary Hornbaker,” Doc explained. The girl had been soothed, her vitals taken, and she’d been returned to Doc’s office, where he dug through his desk until he found a comic book to keep her occupied. She and Hailey were curled back up on the couch and Doc and Mad Dog stood just outside his closed door in the sterile hallway where they could respond if she needed.

  “She’s the mother of the dead baby?” Mad Dog thought the possibility should have occurred to him when he found a pale, confused teen locked in a barn in the middle of a blizzard as if she were being punished for some awful transgression. But it hadn’t. She seemed too young, too innocent. And he had troubles of his own.

  “She was out in the barn?” Doc heaved a sigh worthy of Atlas. “Well, you heard what she said. I don’t suppose I can claim the confidentiality of a doctor/patient relationship, not entirely anyway.”

  Mad Dog nodded and Doc sighed again. Mad Dog supposed doctors ran into a lot of strange human behavior, but, from the look of it, Doc was venturing into places seldom traveled.

  “She’s a Hornbaker?” Mad Dog asked, trying to recall any Hornbaker girls. “Who are her parents?”

  “I don’t know. This kid’s kind of a mystery. Last summer Simon Hornbaker caught me as I pulled into my driveway one night. He had Mary with him. Wanted me to confirm that she was pregnant. Up to then I didn’t know she existed. There’s no record of her birth that I can find. She’s never been in the school system.”

  “You’re kidding,” Mad Dog said, though he knew Doc wasn’t.

  “Simon didn’t want to explain her, but she was pregnant. When I confirmed that, he asked me to do an abortion.”

  “The son of our county’s foremost champion of the pro-life cause asked that?”

  “Maybe your values shift when it’s your own family.”

  Mad Dog didn’t argue. Long ago when he and Janie Jorgenson were the sweethearts of Buffalo Springs High by day, and studying comparative anatomy by Braille in the back seat of Mad Dog’s Chevy by night, Mad Dog had made that very choice. Worse, he’d just come up with the cash, then let Janie handle the then illegal solution to their problem all alone. It was not one of his prouder moments.

  “Well,” Doc continued, “you know I don’t do abortions. I refused, till he told me who the father was. I don’t guess it matters now. Simon said it was Tommie Irons. That Mary was his daughter and Tommie’s grand niece, and mentally retarded. Struck me as an interesting observation, coming from Simon. Plenty of folks would say the same of him. He told me Becky had a premonition there would be something wrong with the girl, so they hid her. Becky delivered her at home so the child wouldn’t have to be born at a hospital or known to the community.”

  “It can’t be true.” Mad Dog was sure that, as a natural born shaman, he would have felt the evil radiating from Tommie Irons. Then he remembered the bones in Tommie’s burial mound and didn’t feel sure of anything anymore. Not even his abilities as a shaman, which, come to think of it, weren’t proving very consistent.

  “So I said I’d do it.”

  “Jesus, Doc!” Without thinking, Mad Dog addressed a deity other than the one he favored. “Really?”

  “Rape and incest. Powerful arguments.”

  Most residents of Benteen County would have been surprised to learn Mad Dog was opposed to abortions. Not that they knew his history of involvement with the subject. Janie never spoke about it, then she left Buffalo Springs and never spoke to him again.

  Since rural Kansas was a conservative place, if you wanted to be an oddball and hold views contrary to the majority, you had to lean toward the liberal. Mad Dog did that, pretty near all the way to Commie Pinko, at least so the gossips down at Bertha’s would tell you over a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and a raised and disapproving eyebrow.

  Along with civil rights, women’s rights, arms control, gun control, welfare, and other definingly liberal issues, Mad Dog had been a stout proponent of a woman’s right to choose, and not just Janie’s—until he became a born-again Cheyenne.

  This was one of the tenets of Cheyenne faith that he had the most trouble with, but he didn’t think you got to pick and choose if you were going to be Cheyenne. It was like converting to Catholicism and then denying the Pope’s infallibility. It didn’t work.

  Mad Dog’s inclination was to believe a woman’s body was her own. What she wanted to do with it was up to her, not him, nor some group of mostly white males gathered in the District of Columbia. He’d never been a fan of abortion as birth control, but he’d preferred it to unwanted children. Then he started learning the Cheyenne way.

  People—Cheyennes—recycled. Those who had once been Cheyenne would be again. After they died, their souls went to wait among other Cheyenne souls until it was time for them to come back. Every Cheyenne baby contained the soul of a Cheyenne who had lived before, returning to earth to complete another cycle. There were no new people. Though eggs and sperm might meet to create a new physical form, it housed an old soul. That made abortion murder, plain and simple. Only, of course, nothing is ever simple.

  The Cheyenne don’t proselytize their religion to outsiders because outsiders aren’t people. Well, there were exceptions. They were willing to concede that other Native Americans were people, a little different and maybe just a tiny bit inferior, but people, also capable of recycling. But Earth’s teeming billions, the population rapidly filling the globe, the endless supply of whites who had come west and destroyed the buffalo and stolen their lands, those weren’t people. Those were spiders, a term of contempt. Worse, they had bodies, they occupied space, they could fight and kill and steal what belonged to people even though they weren’t people themselves. They had no souls. They were just beasts. Walking, talking meat. The Cheyenne didn’t care whether spiders aborted their foetuses, except that, occasionally, people didn’t come back as Cheyenne or other Native Americans. Occasionally, a soul appeared among the meat. Since you couldn’t tell whether someone had a soul until they were born and grew up enough to demonstrate personhood, Cheyennes, such as Mad Dog, opposed abortions under any circumstances.

  Mad Dog rubbed his fingers through nonexistent hair and pondered. Surely this was an exception. And then he let himself relax because Doc hadn’t done it. He might have planned to, but he hadn’t. The baby had been left in the womb until it arrived, stillborn. Maheo, or perhaps another of the pantheon of spirits who ruled over such things, had taken care of this abomination without Doc’s intervention.

  “But you didn’t do it, obviously.”

  “Well.” Doc didn’t look comfortable. “I didn’t do anything surgical, but I saw
to it that she got something that should have terminated her pregnancy. I thought it had. I told Simon I’d have to see her again. He agreed, only then he told me it had worked and she was fine and he couldn’t chance bringing her back. I went by the farm a few times. It was hard to catch Simon alone, but I used reporting on Tommie’s condition as an excuse to be there. Simon said they’d sent her away. I don’t know that I believed him. The only way I could have forced the issue was to make it public. I let it go. ”

  “Then, last night, Becky called. Told me she had a girl there in labor, only the baby wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t meet me at the clinic so I persuaded them to come here. It was Mary.”

  “Yeah,” Mad Dog said. “I know the rest. Mrs. Kraus filled me in on what you told Englishman. How they were already gone by the time you got here and there was just a little blood and a doll on the back porch of the funeral parlor.”

  Doc looked toward the door to the mortuary. He swung his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I lied,” Doc said.

  ***

  Mrs. Kraus was listening to a weather update on the radio. A freight train was stuck in a massive snowdrift on the old Santa Fe line that cut across the southern edge of the county. There was a local rash of downed phone and power lines. Things were a mess, but they were pretty much normal once you got a few miles from Benteen County. Forecasters predicted the storm would blow itself out by nightfall. The announcer was in the middle of a list of helpful suggestions, such as staying indoors, when the power went off, taking his reassuring voice with it.

  It didn’t get much darker in the sheriff’s office. There were only a couple of sixty-watt bulbs in the overhead lights and, with no phones to answer and no messages to transcribe, Mrs. Kraus hadn’t turned on her desk lamp. The office was just a wing off the south side of the main building. The room had tall windows facing front and rear. The sky was low and dull enough to diminish the illumination they normally provided, but with everything underneath that sky coated in reflective white, it wasn’t much dimmer than normal in the office.

  It was uncomfortably quiet, though, except for those groaning noises the old building made as the storm tried to shove it to the other side of town. And it was lonely. Mrs. Kraus thought about picking up the radio to check in with Englishman’s posse, only it hadn’t really been that long since they’d called. She didn’t want to start pestering them like some nervous old woman.

  She didn’t recognize the knock on the door to the sheriff’s office at first because of all the other noises the building was making. When she did, it was with relief. She walked over to the door and shouted, “Who’s there?” Ezekiel Hornbaker identified himself and she unlocked it and let him in. He entered, wide-eyed and cautious, as if he expected her to use him for target practice. She went over and put the Glock back on her desk. He wasn’t the company she wanted, but, any port…this sure qualified as a storm.

  “Your lights out too? Mine just went off and I thought I’d check. Make sure it wasn’t just one of the circuits that was out.”

  He appeared to take her silence for, if not a welcome, at least a truce. He edged a little farther into the room.

  “You heard from Englishman? Seen anything of Mad Dog?”

  “The sheriff will inform you about this investigation when he has time.” She didn’t really know anything, and wasn’t inclined to share what she did, including Mad Dog’s visit.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve made an ass of myself this morning.”

  Lord have mercy, an apology from Zeke Hornbaker.

  “It’s just that some issues rile me. Like abortion. It’s the same as infanticide, which it looked like this might be for awhile.”

  Infanticide. Zeke had a wider vocabulary than Mrs. Kraus would have given him credit for. He ambled over to the counter, looking less sheepish and more relaxed.

  “I didn’t mean any harm. There are things a man’s gotta stand up for.”

  Not a woman, of course. Only place a woman should stand was firmly behind her husband. Mrs. Kraus allowed herself a “harumph” that let Zeke know all was not forgiven.

  “Look here. I got carried away. I admit it. But it seemed like Englishman was too caught up in family matters and not paying proper attention to his job. Mad Dog’s sure got my dander up. And I’m concerned about where that baby came from. Who the mother might be and whether she may have contributed to its death.”

  Mrs. Kraus could contain herself no longer. “What about the father? If you’re gonna hand out blame, how about his share?”

  “Oh sure,” Hornbaker admitted. “The father’s to blame too, only he might not have known what was happening. Hell, sometimes the fathers don’t ever know there’s a pregnancy.”

  Maybe she was too young and ashamed to understand and tell anyone what was happening to her. Ignorance was no excuse in the eyes of the law, but if an unwilling mother’s inability to face reality was to be punished, how about the father’s unwillingness to bother finding out whether his seed sprouted after he planted it. Mrs. Kraus tossed in a “Pshaw.” There was no point in this argument anyway. They didn’t know the facts. They were just supposing. Only he was ready to blame and punish the woman, and Mrs. Kraus was inclined to defend her own sex. Sexists, that’s what they both were.

  Mrs. Kraus was no feminist. She hadn’t burned her bra or argued for the Equal Rights Amendment, wouldn’t be forced to share one of those unisex bathrooms like had turned up on Ally McBeal (not that she would admit watching the show). And she didn’t favor abortion, though there were times…What bothered her most was that the people kicking up the biggest fuss about it seemed to be men, like Zeke Hornbaker, with not the slightest clue of what it meant to carry a child and deliver it. Them and the women who bought into that stand-behind-your-man bullcrap.

  “But you’re right,” Zeke was saying. “I hear Doc says the baby was a stillborn. Everyone seems to agree, especially with the storm and all, there’s no rush to follow up on this. Everybody went home after Chairman Wynn left with the sheriff. Even Bontrager.” He shook his head as he leaned over and put his elbows on the counter. “I still feel like we should be doing more to find out,” he said.

  “Englishman’s doing all that’s possible.”

  “Oh, I know. He’s limited by the weather, and there wasn’t anything about that baby to give him a clue.”

  “There was the mark.” Mrs. Kraus regretted her words the moment they were out. She’d let herself grab a chance to show Hornbaker he didn’t know all he thought he knew.

  He leaned over the counter. “The mark?” He had turned wild eyed and peculiar looking. “What was it?”

  “Just that. A mark, like from an ink pen. Just a stupid offensive symbol, that’s all.”

  His eyes got big and his pupils looked hollow. “A swastika?” he whispered.

  It was Mrs. Kraus’ turn to be astonished. “How’d you know that?”

  There wasn’t anyone there to answer. She heard his footsteps pound across the foyer, down the back hall, and out toward the rear exit.

  She was alone in the courthouse. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, especially after the odd way in which Zeke Hornbaker had left, as if he’d just seen a ghost.

  A moment later, the supervisor came spinning out of the parking lot in the family’s old Dodge Powerwagon. He was going faster than he should. He swerved to avoid Judy’s Taurus and caught a front wheel in the edge of the ditch. The truck went in a circle and ended up passenger side down at a forty-five degree angle to the road.

  Hornbaker spun his wheels, forward and backward, and never moved an inch. She watched him kick open his door and go plowing through the drifts in Veteran’s Memorial Park, headed in the general direction of Bertha’s. He hadn’t even paused to take his coat. It was eerie.

  Mrs. Kraus didn’t believe in ghosts, though if any place in Benteen County was haunted, this should be it. Pretty much all the evil in the county passed through here. And there were thos
e two accused murderers who’d committed suicide by hanging themselves back in their cells about a century ago. The noises the old building made in the wind suddenly sounded more ominous. She relocked the door.

  A shadow seemed to flit by the windows. Just a low cloud, she reassured herself. A distant rafter—surely it was only a rafter—moaned. Boards creaked. It sounded like footsteps, like someone coming across the foyer from the entrance to the jail. She backed up against her desk and watched the door, expecting the knob to begin to turn. A disembodied voice whispered her name behind her.

  After Mrs. Kraus came down from the ceiling—where she was sure you could find the marks her fingernails had made as she sought to suspend herself there in sheer, unmitigated terror—she realized it had only been the radio. She had trouble finding the breath with which to answer it.

  ***

  “Mrs. Kraus?” the sheriff asked again.

  “Yes sir.” It was hard to hear her over the wind and the efforts of the Caddy’s defroster to keep the windshield clear.

  “We found the cruiser. It’s nearly buried in snow, but we dug down to one of the back doors and confirmed that no one came back to it. No people, no messages. Anything at your end?”

  “Power’s off. Supervisor Hornbaker…came in.” Her voice sounded breathless, like she’d just run a hard 10K. “Everybody’s gone. Even Hornbaker. Sheriff, he…seemed to know… about the swastika.”

  “How could he? And what makes you think so?”

  “He was being a know-it-all.” She was getting her breath back, or maybe she’d just been having trouble with her radio. “Said something about there being no way to identify the baby. I had to open my big trap. I told him there was a mark, a symbol. He turned seven shades of pale and said ‘A swastika,’ and then he ran out of here like the devil himself was nipping at his heels. Didn’t even stop for his coat.”

  Hornbakers kept popping up to cause him trouble, the sheriff thought. But how could the supervisor know what had been on the infant’s forehead? Was there some sort of neo-Nazi gang operating in Benteen County? Could bumbling Zeke Hornbaker be a member of a white supremacist group trafficking in deceased infants? Not possible, the sheriff told himself.