Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  When she looked up, he was next to her. “Get down,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I told ya, that’s why.”

  Before the next question left her lips, he yanked her tiny boot heels out of their sterling silver stirrups, pulled her off her saddle of tooled red leather, and planted her with a squish in the mud. He motioned to the man in the smock, who seized Nickers by the bit to lead him away. And the pony, after a moment’s hesitation and a widening of his eyes, followed.

  “You rascal, did you just sell my pony?”

  Clarrity was already standing by his horse. The way he stood, motioning for her to join him on his mount, was answer enough.

  Though it was hard to see from one end of the thoroughfare to the next, no one in the camp could fail to hear the riot that followed. Kate screamed, threw handfuls of mud, and cussed Clarrity and his mother in the manner she’d learned sleeping for a thousand nights above saloons from Ohio to Colorado. She called him a brute and pug ugly. She declared she would kill him “graveyard dead” for what he’d done. She discarded all the restraint she’d summoned when she left her father, lest she disappoint him—­for the sake of Nickers.

  Clarrity just stood and watched at first, as if he might outlast the eruption. But soon the effects of her words on passersby, the blast of hot abuse that would torch the manhood of tougher men, had its effect. Witnesses were startled . . . and then they laughed at him.

  He charged at her so fast her tirade died mid-­sentence. Then she was off her feet and being carried like a sack of meal by his side. He had her up on his mount and halfway out of town before she could think of another insult.

  “Who do you think you are, you—­you—­” she sputtered. She was seated just behind the saddle horn, her back against him, with his arms encircling her in a mockery of fatherly care as he grasped the reins. Closer to him now, she could smell his detestable odors—­the sweat and leather and staleness of his phlegmy, unwashed mouth. Disgusted, she needled back at him with her elbows.

  “Stop that,” he said. And when she jabbed him again, he twisted her ear so hard she cried out. Then he slipped his hand down the length of her belly, down to her crotch, and grasped her there.

  Kate was too surprised to speak or breathe. This was a shame that was beyond her experience, beyond all comprehension. Shocked, she felt his breath on her ear.

  “You little cunny, what makes you think you count for anything?”

  She was left to consider this question for several strides of his horse, until it occurred to him to say something else and he was back at her other ear: “Yer just lucky I don’t like ’em in the bud. But I cain’t speak for the next man . . .”

  He released her from that humiliating grip. Kate, feeling utterly bereft, scanned the horizon again for her father. For surely he would never stand for her to be treated this way.

  “My father will shoot you in the face.”

  Silent, he drove them into a zone of cleared land, picking his way around felled trees and piles of half-­planed lumber for the houses newly rich miners would build on the edge of camp. Beyond that, a forest stretched deep and trackless. As it swallowed them, she felt the temperature drop, until she hunched shivering against Clarrity’s detestable form. Resenting every bit of heat shared between them, she tried to sit apart. This drew another twist of her earlobe, which he applied this time without warning. Defeated, she could only sit with spine straight, making herself as unyielding a burden as possible, willing her hatred to emanate from every pore of her back.

  Another half day of this left her cold and exhausted, fatigue robbing her eyes of focus. She heard, but hardly saw, the stream they crossed, its waters stained by mud and stinking of some chemical that burned the inside of her nose. The horse, irritated, shook its head, setting her insides ajar in a way that increased her misery but not her wakefulness. Though vexed and insulted, she still took refuge in that insulating unconsciousness that children often adopted on long journeys. She adopted it—­with the difference that her young dreams were full of profanities and the ugly fates ­people like Clarrity would find in this world.

  They arrived at some new habitation. Perking up, she beheld a place that made the previous camp look like a proper metropolis. Instead of a chaotic agglomeration of roofs, this one was a mass of canvas tents stretched by lines that crissed and crossed like some insane spiderweb in argument with itself. As they stepped through the tortured mud on the edge of camp, Kate saw a full-­grown man come out of his tent and squat. Bent at the knees, he absently held his pants away from his ankles, regarding her with what seemed like philosophic calm, if that book on the pagan philosophers she had once read was any guide to such things. Then, in full view of God and everyone, his bowels let go a torrent of loose material that was the ultimate product of a bellyful of whiskey and a crust of rotten bread. When he caught her staring, he winked.

  “Why are we stopping here?” she asked Clarrity. “There is surely no decent hotel.”

  His only response was a guttural rumble that sounded somewhere between amused and self-­satisfied. As they found their way through the jumble of rope cords, it seemed not only Clarrity but his horse knew where they were going. They had been here many times before, and their arrival was not a matter of chance.

  They came to a gray tent sagging in a hollow. It was in a less favored position, far from the line in the forest where the loggers were working and distant from the creek that supplied the camp’s fresh water. On the ground, frequent spring rains had left the tent in a permanent morass. As the horse trudged to the flap, stepping high to extract its hooves from the mud, Clarrity gave a clicking sound with his tongue that served as some signal.

  Summoned from within was a not-­young woman. She wore a dirty smock, streaked with the guts of pickling fruits, over a gingham dress so stripped and worn that it seemed ready to split into tendrils. Her arms, ropy and soap-­blasted, were exposed to the elbow. Her features told of nothing—­neither past beauty nor ugliness, but only of cares. Her hair, on the other hand, was almost handsome, fair and sprinkled with flecks of gold. But gray was already spreading from the part, beginning its inevitable conquest.

  “Du,” is all she said.

  “With the package,” he replied, dismounting first.

  And the two of them stood together, akimbo and appraising her in the saddle as she glared back at them with an ingenue’s contempt.

  “Ganz richtig sieht sie nicht aus.”

  “She’s close enough,” answered Clarrity. “And how would they know anyway?”

  “True,” came the reply. “You! Get down.”

  THE CAMP—­THE BUSINESS of which she had never learned—­became her new home. Clarrity stayed in the tent with them for three days, sharing the woman’s bed, while Kate slept behind a canvas partition. The trappings of her former life were quietly withdrawn, to be replaced by those of another girl who had somehow disappeared. Whenever Kate demanded information about her, the woman answered only in German. She reserved her English for commands, such as “Git into these cloths” and “Eat this.”

  She was not mistreated at first. Compared to life on the trail with Clarrity, it was almost pleasant, with plenty to eat and almost nothing expected of her. As ordeals went, it was tolerable—­at least until her father decided that she need not play along anymore. She imagined he was very close now, perhaps in the next tent over, biding his time until he saw his opening for a rescue. For the moment, she studied the book of demonology she had spirited under her pillow, where the woman wouldn’t find it. Like a player dealt two weak pair in a game of seven card stud, she trusted that her full house would come.

  Clarrity disappeared on the morning of the fourth day. As much as she hated him, she was sorry to see his black mount—­her sole conveyance back to her former life—­go with him.

  That afternoon, two strangers came to the tent. The
woman called her out to be examined by them. Standing under a light drizzle of sickly yellow sunset, she could see their marshals’ badges shining through the mist, their interrogating eyes staring from under the brims of their hats. They seemed very interested in her particular whereabouts for the last two months.

  “Are you about to swear before God now that this is your daughter, Almira?”

  “Mein Gott, what a question! Who else’s girl would she be?” replied Almira, striking her brow with thespian effect. And as she did this, her eyes fixed on Kate in a warning that needed no stagecraft: fail me now and you will pay.

  She need not have bothered with threats. Her father had taught her never to cooperate with the law unless there was some clear profit in it. And if the marshals took her away, how would her father find her?

  The first marshal turned to the second and shrugged in capitulation. The other doffed his hat, pouring rain from the brim. And with that, the lawmen went back to their wet, miserable horses, who had been pushing their noses into the dead ground, blowing air into the mud in apparent frustration at the lack of fodder.

  Later, as she tucked into a plate of beans and broken hoecakes, she was surprised to notice Almira sitting across the board, smiling at her. She placed a plump, ripe apple on the table. In the gray world of the camp, the apple’s redness seemed almost to pulsate, like the beating heart of some strong, slaughtered tree. Kate stopped eating.

  “You are the smart girl,” said the woman. “Maybe the smartest yet.”

  “I want my father.”

  “Maybe you trust me, and we find him. Ser gut?”

  Kate chewed for a while, wondering what to do with the credit she had earned.

  “Who was the girl they were looking for?” she asked.

  Almira’s smile vanished. She rose to take her plate to the washtub.

  “Was she your daughter? What happened to her? Why did you need someone to pretend to be her?”

  Almira turned and pointed a dirty ladle at her. “You ask these questions, you maybe not so smart,” she said. And then, as if seeing Kate’s discomfort, her face softened until light spread into the creases and the dead weight lifted from her eyes, and she seemed for a moment not so very far from what Kate imagined was a mother.

  “You stay here, you ask me later. Now eat.”

  Chapter Four

  Hauling Varnish

  APRIL, 1870

  THE 440 “AMERICAN” rose from the Mississippi Valley spitting ember-­flecked fumes. As the train had pulled out of Davenport, the late season storm merely toyed with her, giving her a confetti send-­off of plump, happily dancing flakes. But somewhere along the main line to Iowa City, the sky’s mood soured. It unfurled great bales of rolling whiteness that smothered the smoke and sparks and seemed to demand more. By the twenty mile marker, the cowcatcher plowed a furrow through drifts that rose twelve inches an hour. Looking out of their windows, the passengers watched the train’s wake rise and curl into the adjoining cornfields, as if they all rode on a steamship.

  The farmers in the neighborhood could tell from the blackening smoke that the engine was in trouble. Inside a firebox caked with slag, the “American” strained to burn arm-­sized boughs of waterlogged wood as the engineer—­heedless of the signs—­cracked open the throttle. The farmers watched with remote pity as the train lost momentum in the snow. As she dragged, she pulled less air through her flues, making her burn still less efficiently, until the old engine seemed to stagger on her trucks. Three more desultory thrusts of the drive arm and she’d had enough. With a tired wheeze, she ground to a halt.

  Behind the tender and two mail cars, the five newly varnished wooden passenger carriages shone slick in the blizzard’s twilight. Unscheduled stops were not unusual on this line, but this pause felt different: windows slid open and covered heads stuck through, scanning the pastures for explanation. The cattle, belly deep in powder and likewise immobile, stared back.

  Heads turned downward at a figure manifesting in the crystalline swirl. The train’s brakeman, suspenders swinging by his oily flanks, ambled with a tender-­footed gait along the tracks. Sticking in the immediate lee of the train, he ignored the questions and throat-­clearings that descended on him. To his mind, professional aloofness was answer enough: in a trade full of necessary evils, passengers were the biggest evil and the least necessary.

  When he reached the engine, he found the fireman looking down from the cab with a blank expression that sought to dissociate him from the engineer. The latter, unembarrassed in what should have been his moment of shame, cast his eyes to the east with an interrogative flick:

  “How long?”

  The brakeman checked his watch. There was less than an hour until the 1:38 out of Davenport came through on the same line. And all three stood in silence, seeming to chew over the implications of their arrest.

  By 2:00 P.M. they were still alone on the track. Glancing at his watch, the conductor sucked his upper lip and supposed that the next train had been held at the station as the storm worsened. Outside, the sky was the gunmetal gray of a prairie blizzard that had installed itself, with obstinate malevolence, right above them. With the drifts building in front, there would be no question of resuming their run. They would have to be rescued.

  The interior of the first car blazed with the heat of bored, frustrated passengers. When the conductor appeared, all eyes fixed on him, as if he were the overdue keeper visiting a cage of unfed animals. Their predicament seemed still worse as the windows, humid with the breath of fifty bodies, were fogged whiter than the scene they concealed.

  The train was filled with the usual collection of mutually uncomprehending types. The businessmen in their suits and ties, on the short run to their franchises or bank branches or partners elsewhere in the great state of Iowa, grasping their briefcases with gloveless hands, fretting over dinners grown cold for them in their fine town houses. The westering families, their expressions charged with anxious, determined optimism, wearing every stitch of decent clothing they owned, weighed down by hatboxes and hobbyhorses and the other detritus of their former lives. And the wayfarers, the itinerant drunks and drifters, the ­people of indefinite means, the whores, the crooks one step ahead of the law, the absconded fathers, filling in the spaces between the commuters and the immigrants.

  “You already know as much as any of us,” the conductor announced without sympathy or preliminaries. “There’s no headway against this. The stoves will stay lit as long as there’s fuel—­women and children get priority. Best break out those warm clothes.”

  With that, he proceeded down the aisle to the next car. His face remained impassive as he was peppered with questions. How long will we remain here? Is rescue on the way? Does anybody know where we are? And he thought: how presumptuous of them all to believe information was so easily come by, so without consequences to dispense! What little regard they had for facts, that they expected them to come free!

  He occupied himself with such thoughts as he proceeded down the length of the crowded car, passing without notice a female passenger sitting alone on a seat designed for three. The girl’s solitariness was not explained by her general appearance, dressed as she was in a humble checked skirt, the plain pleats of her white blouse exposed beneath unbuttoned woolen coat. On her head, a pillbox hat of black straw barely covered a head of ginger hair, lustrous in hue and extent, loosely curled and faceted with drops of water condensed from the snow.

  No, it was her beauty that warded them off: a face of precise, enameled exquisiteness, unblemished as an infant’s, fanned by long black lashes, unlined in its fearsome symmetry, sealed from her surroundings as if on display in a vitrine. Her mouth, though red-­lipped, was not the rosy flower bud of contemporary calendars and matchboxes, but a tense line that seemed to bend slightly under some unseen pressure. Her eyes, black and elusive, were a prize sought by admirers, but when caught made them a
ll regret. Eyes like blades clad in velvet, soft by all appearances, yet suddenly, with an instant unsheathing, sharp enough to cut the souls of men.

  On the way from Davenport, Kate had barely seemed to register her surroundings, preferring to gaze toward the breath-­smeared window to her left. Her body was still, but the way she grasped the black lace handkerchief in her lap, compulsively squeezing and releasing it, flicking at its tortured folds with lacquered fingertips, betrayed the energy coursing through her. When the conductor confirmed their emergency, she turned from the window for the first time, watching him sidelong and coldly.

  She reached into her scuffed leather satchel. From it she pulled a small wood box. Opening it, she produced an oblong object, wrapped in purple satin and tied with a silk drawstring. Before touching the fastenings, she brought the parcel to her lips and, in a gesture both perfunctory and practiced, kissed it.

  Soon, the passengers were puzzled to hear a new sound coming from that formerly silent corner of the carriage: the click and slap of fresh playing cards dealt out, one by one, on a wicker seat bottom. And on Kate’s face there was a new expression for those who dared peek—­a relaxed, inviting readiness. She was open for business.

  The gamblers amongst her neighbors craned their necks at the prospect of some well-­timed diversion. They soon turned away in disgust, for the cards she dealt were not of the proper, money-­dividing kind, but that dandified, Gypsy sort with funny pictures and suits of cups, swords, wands, and coins. One elder fellow, wearing a bowler with a piece of the brim missing as if from a wolf bite, muttered, “What does she think this is, a French bordello?” Some of the other women looked on with mild curiosity, but dared not penetrate the zone of freezing exclusivity around the dealer. She distributed the cards facedown in a series of patterns—­crosses, horseshoes, circles, and vees—­occasionally turning one up and reflecting on it, as if totaling up a long line of figures in her head.