Chapter Five
Sixteen by Twenty-four
NOVEMBER, 1870
THE PRAIRIE STRETCHED beyond the brims of their hats to a listless horizon, pouring its way to infinity. For miles in every direction there were no trees or shrubs to relieve the eye, except along the streams that snaked down the imperceptible slopes, their entourages of shrubs on meandering paths to no place. To the newcomer used to the conveniences of scale offered by eastern landscapes—those houses and barns and fence lines that testified to human endeavor—the prairie offered nothing by which to measure its indifference. Only here and there lay some hump of soil topped with a treelet, stunted as if with astonishment at its strange elevation. These gestures at topography left the prairie monotonous but lumpen, a tablecloth spread over rotting secrets.
To the old-timer, by contrast, the place would have looked uncharacteristically lush. Since the end of the war it had rained more than usual in southeastern Kansas. This fostered new growth, fattened the streams, tamed the summer bush fires. The locusts, as if party to the conspiracy with the railroads and retailers and professional boomers drawing newcomers westward, kept a temporarily low profile. The only disadvantage to all that wet was a profusion of gnats breeding in the thickened backwaters. But what was a gnat compared to the prospect of a comfortable, independent life on one’s own clod of earth?
The corn just leaps out of the ground, says the Boomer, invariably over a mug he’s purchased for you at some neighborhood saloon. Just jumps up for you to take it. The soil’s charmed, I tell ya—laid down in the times of Adam and never planted since. Put a pint of Kansas dirt in a glass and leave it covered for a week and you know what you’ll have? No, not biscuits—not at first. Green shoots. Eatable green shoots. No seeds necessary. Now tell me, friend, if the soil is that fertile, imagine what she’ll do with modern methods, done the modern way? It’s a scientific fact that rain clouds follow cultivated earth. Somethin’ about breaking ground alters the hydrotautological cycle. Rain follows the plow, my friend.
The trail from Fort Scott drove like a frown line down the face of the prairie. Traced from the most distant horizon, the furrow seemed to flirt with the eye, disappearing now and then as it was hidden by the carpet of rusty autumn blooms. Closer, it resolved itself at last into twin wheel ruts. Between them ran a path of forlorn earth, trampled by untold pairs of boot heels.
The Bender men, John Senior and Junior, walked the trail from the east in their black woolen suits and city shoes. Between them a solitary mule trod with eyes half closed, pulling an ancient army wagon piled with supplies. Having already ridden and walked for many days together, they proceeded in silence, eyes sweeping the landscape but never meeting. For today they were not trail companions, liable to small talk and the little complaints prerogative of travelers. Today they were shoppers. And the prairie was not an oppressive emptiness, not the Great American Desert it was called back East, but a great emporium of opportunities.
Searching for them, John Junior’s eyes blazed with happy anticipation. His enthusiasm so energized his step that he often strayed into the ruts, causing himself to stumble, yet without any effect on his jaunty mood. What John Senior’s eyes burned with, deep in their fleshy sockets, no one could say.
Saw me a family that came back for the brother’s wedding in Ohio, and ya know what? Hale and plump, every one of them. Even the damn young’uns. Had to order yards ’n’ yards of new material from Ward’s to make ’em new clothes. With that kind of production, you work as you please, friend. You’re beholden to none. Now tell me, how much is that worth to you?
At a spot some days from Fort Scott but well short of Independence, they stopped to confer. Though there was no one to overhear them for miles, they spoke in such hushed tones that, even in the stillness of the evening, one could not hear them over the murmuring of insects in the turf. Now and again they peeked out at the scene around them, as if to confirm in their minds that yes, this was the place.
There was nothing on the surface to explain how suited it was to their purpose. The earth lay as flat and brown as anywhere else. But it had two key advantages. First, the spot afforded a clear view of the trail in every direction, from where it emerged between two mounds in the northeast to its disappearance southwest, toward the village of Cherryvale. From there, the approach of any traveler on those wastes could be spied for a good thirty minutes. And second, it was splendidly isolated, with no other buildings visible a few windowless roofs miles away. It was, in fact, the ideal place to build what was not intended to be acknowledged at all.
As the sky frowned and lowered after them, as if impatient to drive them to shelter, John Junior marked the spot with a cairn of pebbles. Then they resumed their journey southwest.
They arrived before sundown at a cabin a few miles short of Cherryvale. The house was small and unkempt, its boards apparently salvaged from other structures that had suffered through their share of winters and summers. There was a single window, covered with greased paper, and a door, set high above ground level in anticipation of a set of steps that had never been installed. Above, the words GUT STORES were painted on a board.
Two men stepped outside, eyes questioning but not vigorously, mouths too full to speak, the bibs from their interrupted dinner still stuck in their shirtfronts.
“Guten Abend,” John Junior hailed them, having discerned from their wariness that these were fellow Germans. “N’Abend,” came the reply, somewhat uncertainly. For eyeing the newcomers and their rig, Rudolph Brockman was troubled by certain signs. The wagon, being an ancient one that had seen action in the war in Tennessee and Kentucky, was a wreck, with sides patched rudely and a replaced rear axle wider than the front. Its load, though, was entirely store-bought and new, as if the newcomers were tenderfoots with no experience surviving on the frontier, and worse still, competitors in the supply trade. “Might we trouble you to camp on your property this evening?” Junior asked, punctuating his words with a small laugh that was meant to suggest he was harmless, but instead gave the impression he was simple.
Brockman turned to look to his cabin mate, Augustus Ern. The latter’s eyes, blasted almost opaque by ten thousand days of squinting through the prairie sun, signaled no objection.
“Ye may stay. But we beg ye to come in first to eat. If ye eat beans, that is.”
“We do,” replied Junior, who laughed again.
And so began the strange sojourn of the Benders with Brockman and Ern. That night and for three more, the visitors slept on blankets spread under the wagon, fully clothed in their city blacks. In the morning, Ern came outside to serve them breakfast of dried carrot coffee and biscuits from a dainty serving platter engraved with paisleys. This had once belonged to a young wife who, in her despair, had abandoned her westering husband and all her belongings on the side of the trail. Brockman had found many such useful items on his trips to and from Fort Scott—including his porcelain chamber pot, a concertina, a trousseau of women’s undergarments—and the coffeepot itself. For as much as the prairie was an unforgiving mistress, mankind was profligate in his giving, and would provide much to those who let themselves become as spare in character, as patient and mutely unchanging, as the prairie itself.
Brockman was still a young man, only in his late twenties. Multiple seasons on the plains had told on his health, however. Hair made sparse with labor and care, his scalp was cracked and burnt like an old buggy seat. The cold of winter made his joints ache. The heat of summer, exacerbated by his woolen clothes, filled him like some creeping venom, addling his brains. He dreaded the sun even in November; when he took the Bender men out to look at claims available in the neighborhood, he wore a linen cloth under his hat, which hung down to shade his neck. He had fashioned this himself out of cut-up women’s nightclothes from the abandoned trousseau.
The Benders obliged by going along on these excursions. To the virtues and disadvantages
of each parcel, John Junior would nod, perhaps adding some inane question, such as, “Would you say this is good country for emu?” John Senior sat in silence next to him in the wagon, expressing with the lean of his glowering bulk the urge to be as far as possible from his “son.” To direct questions, he would answer ja and nein, even if the questions were not “yes or no” ones. Brockman, perceiving them to be an odd pair, showed them every property except the one bordering his. Though he preferred German-speaking neighbors, these were not normal men. Most of all, he had learned to dread the sickly giggle of the younger one—that sound, a titter from Hell itself, was so irritating he believed he would hear it from miles away.
The newcomers showed no interest in any of the places they saw, including ones with year-round water and the right amount of timber. At a claim five miles north, when informed, “Ich hatte einen Rutengänger hier im letzten Sommer. Die Wuenschelrute sprang ihm aus seinen Händen!” they showed not a flicker of reaction, except when Junior pointed at a patch of fennel and asked if it could be brewed up into a tolerable tea.
Just as Brockman feared, they at last perked up at the place adjoining his to the northeast, though there was nothing to recommend it especially except proximity to the trail and a ragged stream a quarter mile away. Junior jumped out of his shirt with excitement. He kicked over a cairn of stones someone had built, which was common practice to prevent another claimant from establishing priority. The way he seemed to have prior knowledge it was there, however, set Brockman to thinking he had built it himself.
That they wanted to situate themselves beside the trail was all the proof he needed: the Benders had come to compete for his business. Worse, any store they set up would be encountered first by travelers coming west from Fort Scott.
It was a quiet half hour’s ride back to “Gut Stores,” with Brockman keeping his thoughts to himself and Junior at last realizing the virtue of silence. When Ern saw them coming up, and Brockman fixed him with a confirming look, Ern smiled. The Benders would be neighbors after all. “You owe me a nickel, then!” Ern declared, rubbing his hands together.
That evening—the Benders’ last before they trekked to Humboldt to register their claim—their hosts invited them inside to sup. The Germans had put a board between two flour barrels as a table, and stoked up the cooking fire to drive out the evening chill. Junior, who seemed delighted to be allowed into the inner sanctum at last, perched on an apple box and chirped excitedly. John Senior, by contrast, sat quietly, blinking, as if half blinded by the brightness of the lime wash on the walls.
After supper—beans and a joint of pork—Ern at last got the question out in the open: “So what are you intending with that land?”
To which Junior assaulted their ears with that damnable laugh, and launched into a description of a thousand implausible schemes about patent medicine farms and ostrich meat ranches and stages for observation balloons against the Indians. John Senior listened as he scooped his food into the toothy cleft between his beard hairs, palming his spoon like a child. He seemed particularly engaged by this question, his eyes threatening some unwonted eruption. Breathless with the rarity of it, Brockman and Ern watched it gather. Then the spoon lowered and the great cleft split:
“We’ll be in the murderin’ business,” he declared.
English. And that voice, like the scrape of a sinking hulk against the rim of a submarine canyon. Brockman and Ern were so surprised by this articulate croak, they barely registered its content.
But Junior did. Leaping from his apple box, he jabbered, “My father’s English is poor. He simply meant the butchery of animals all farmers must. Ja, vater?”
But the old man was already far away, tonguing his empty spoon for whatever sheen of pork grease was stuck to its underside. The temperature in the cabin, meanwhile, had seemed to drop five degrees.
Brockman lost patience. No use, he thought inwardly, of sticking oneself between one man who was pointlessly talkative and another who was cryptically silent. He brought out cigars, but smoked his quickly, without enjoyment. He offered no brandy to his guests.
Soon the Benders were back outside, under their wagon for the night. And Brockman was digging deep in the little box where he kept his spare buttons, needles, and U.S. currency.
After much rummaging, he found a nickel. Handing it over to Ern, he declared, “I think those two shall cost us far more than this.”
On the prairie, everyone is a rich man, says the Boomer. Just pick yer spot, build a little on it, and in five years the whole blinkin’ lot is yours. Don’t believe me on this, friend: believe the Congress of the whole United States. Just a little cabin, maybe a chicken coop, an’ someplace to keep hay for your horse. Free hay, that is, that you reap on your own property. Beholden to no man, like I said. Free an’ clear an’ yours. And he drinks, winking over the froth in his cup, while out of his breast pocket peeks the schedule of the trains for the railroad that will take you there. For the price of a ticket, of course.
Chapter Six
Horse High,
Bull Strong, Pig Tight
THE BENDER MEN returned from Humboldt a week later, wagon laden with building supplies. With the land conveyance done, and with it all necessity for further human contact, John Senior emerged from his torpor to take command of construction.
In less than a morning the two of them had leveled a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot spot fifty paces to the south of the trail. Next day, they dug the small cellar with their new, store-bought shovels, and a well that struck water just twelve feet down. They rigged out a stable from green saplings and a roof of sheaved grass. The afternoon after, they explored the big mound to the southeast, where Brockman said decent stone was available. In the glancing sunbeams, they spied a slab of yellow sandstone half exposed in the scree, gleaming. They wrangled the seven-foot-square monolith into the wagon by themselves. Four hours later it was in place as the floor of their cellar, under the spot where they intended to build a trapdoor.
Just then, as he beheld the rock of sand on which they would erect their temple, the old man was moved to fetch his Bible. He opened it to a well-creased page:
Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you . . .”
He wet a finger and turned the leaf.
And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.
The cabin was framed out in just two days, the old man fashioning joists with sure swings of the hammer. There was something about the knotty musculature of his right arm that made it seem incomplete without an implement at the end of it. Rudolph Brockman, watching from a distance, was impressed with the work, and heartened that perhaps his new neighbors were not so hapless after all.
The rest of the neighborhood was watching too. And when the newcomers had gotten as far as two men working alone should, a team of volunteers showed up for the final, labor-intensive steps. For the closure of a new habitation was not just a private matter in the Great American Desert—it was a sacrament of human enterprise, a shaking of a collective fist against the mute brutality of the elements. No invitation was necessary for it, and no compensation was expected.
They showed up at the Bender claim on a cold November morning. At the forefront was Leroy Dick, who introduced himself as “city trustee.” It was a lofty-sounding title, yet he carried it with the same ease as he wore his old bison-hide jacket. Shaking John Junior’s hand with real warmth, the magistrate examined the newcomer with gray eyes naturally averse to snap judgment. Junior did his best to invite one anyway, quailing in the elder man’s grasp as if h
alf crazed by the gravity of his personage. Yet Dick was barely his senior—he was just twenty-eight years old, and two years younger than his wife Mary Anne.
It was the virtue of a gentleman to avert one’s eyes from the weakness of another. Instead, Dick looked to the old man. The latter, already half turned away, would only acknowledge him with a faint grumble.
“We are sorely in need of baritones for our choir,” said Dick, bright and unfazed. “Should God will it, what a blessing you would be down in Harmony Grove Sunday next!”
To which the old man turned away completely, growling, “Wenn Gott es will.”
Dick introduced them all in turn—his brother Temple, whose work belt was already around his waist (nodding); John Moneyhon, a smooth-cheeked Irishman (hat tip); George Majors, Justice of the Peace (head bob); Minister Dienst, who had exchanged his starched collar for overalls (smile); Silas Toles and his brother Billy, who ran cattle on the prairie (nodding); and of course Brockman and Ern, who were there only to avoid the shame of revealing their real indifference to the newcomers (no gesture). And there were other names—Mortimer and McCrumb, Hornback and Swingle—which Junior heard and repeated with exaggeration, rolling the syllables around his mouth as if preparing for some future address to Congress.
The work left to be done was to complete the cabin’s roof and clad the walls with boards snuggly fit to keep out the winter winds. The menfolk of Osage Township went about these tasks in the same manner they had a dozen times before—with high spirits, good humor, and an unspoken awareness of their collective generosity.
The Benders, however, seemed ill-at-ease with this amiable invasion. Junior just wrung his hands, hardly driving a single nail. John Senior was all but overtly hostile—hoarding the implements for himself, he elbowed the other men aside and redid their work when he considered it beneath his standard. When Billy Toles tried to take a shingle from his pile, the old man whirled and growled at him. At midday, when the canteens of beer and applejack came out, he didn’t join them but went on hammering.
Hell's Half-Acre Page 5
