Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Kate peeled off the paper, balling the pages up and dropping them on the floor. The noise woke Almira, and finally the old man, who cursed in German and buried his head.

  “Why are you doing that?” asked Almira.

  “We’ll need this space, for the carving.”

  “The what?”

  “The glyphs,” said Kate with an ingenuous smile, as if she were a little girl keeping secrets. But when Junior opened his mouth to question her further, her face hardened and he kept his peace.

  She found somewhat more practical work to do when she got outside. Upon seeing Junior’s sign, Grocry, she took a broom and knocked the hat off his head.

  “What kind of oaf are you, to spell that way?”

  He regarded the sign. “Seems right to me.”

  “It would to an ape, wouldn’t it? Now if you’d get me a brush and paint, I’ll try to stop them laughing at us.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Watching Chair

  THE SNOW CAME about when it should have. One morning after the New Year the gloom of night didn’t lift by morning, but kept the sun at bay. A swath of thick overcast, so heavy the weight could be felt from the ground, covered the sky from horizon to horizon. When the first flakes fell they were small. Only later did the storm begin in earnest, speckling the prairie like the surface of some world-­sized egg.

  The relative warmth of the trail kept it free of snow for a while. The old man sat in the “watching chair” he’d moved outside, turning the pages of his Bible as he eyed the thoroughfare. At noon the Fort Scott–Independence stage came through, an occurrence that barely merited his attention. He was looking instead for traffic of a particular kind—­the well-­equipped, solitary, minimally armed kind. The traveler must also be separated enough from any others that no one else should be visible for as far as the eye could see. The criteria were very specific, for the four Benders had spent much time discussing it in the weeks they had settled into their new home.

  In his zeal to encounter this traffic, Old Man Bender was prepared to sit for all the hours of the day, moving so little that the snowflakes accumulated in his beard and great gristly mass of his hair, making him seem like some mythic monster from the caves of Sind.

  His dedication paid off as the afternoon faded and a lone figure on horseback appeared between the mounds. As he approached at a slow walk, no other travelers followed or intruded from the other direction. The visitor was still a half mile off when the old man, believing he could wait no longer, cried out, “Hier!”

  “I see him,” came the reply from the window. For after the days’ washing was done and food prepared, there was not much for Kate to do but sit, laying out her tarot in various patterns that might tell her how their enterprise might fare. Gathering up her cards, she looked to Almira, who retreated to the back of the cabin to warm up the savories that would lure their visitor in.

  The skinny mare was no bigger than a pony, stepping gingerly over the trail as if feeling her way over a frozen lake. Her rider was likewise thin, with gangling arms and legs draped over her flanks and a sparse growth of beard clinging to his face. With the snow falling harder now, he was peering up from under the brim of his hat as he neared the cabin. His soft eyes and air of pensive loneliness marked him for a boy, despite the bulge of the side holster under his buckskin jacket. His face ventured out from under his hat as he saw Kate standing alone in front of the cabin. The more he saw of her, staring back at him, the wider his mouth hung open.

  “Hello, good sir!” she hailed him. “Seems we’re getting some weather today.”

  “Seems.”

  Wary. Hand close to his hip.

  “Where are you bound, traveler?”

  “Tucson. Independence for now.”

  “Then you’ve got a ways to go! You’d be welcome to break your trip here, if you like. We have food, a fire. A warm place to bed down too, should you chose to sojourn . . .”

  Kate made no overt promises with the prospect of “bedding down,” but what man needed them when offered shelter by a pretty woman? The typical man supplied all the promises himself. And to punctuate the suggestion, she gave him a smile of such calculated sweetness she was aware of how false it should seem. And yet—­

  “All right,” replied the rider.

  Like actors awaiting their cue, Junior and the old man came out to play their respective roles. Junior, with a genial nod, led the horse to the stable. As their guest entered the cabin, the old man arranged the furniture, planting the back of a chair against the line of naked joists dividing the room and the table in front of it. The slashing rapidity of his movements was odd. It gave the stranger pause, but Kate was right beside him, laying a warm hand on his arm. With her touch, his doubts lapsed long enough for him to take the proffered seat.

  “Smells good, what’s cooking?” he said.

  “My mother keeps the best stew pot in east Kansas. What’s your name?”

  “John. John Jesperson.”

  She stayed close to him as he sat, keeping his eyes fixed on hers through a magnetism she had never understood but somehow knew how to control. And it was just as well, for the old man was already standing behind the curtain of joists, looking at the back of their guest’s head as he rehearsed swings of the hammer. Almira, alarmed, laid a hand on his arm to restrain him. The other angrily shook her off, looking to Kate for a signal. She gave him a freezing glance.

  “Warten.”

  She entertained Jesperson, serving him water in a mug of polished brass, until Junior finally returned from the stable. His examination of the boy’s rig was promising—­a fine saddle, brand new bridle and martingale, quality equipment in his bags. No cash money, of course, as any sane man would carry that close to his person.

  He looked to Kate, who made no response. She was a sphinx now, testing her wayfarer with riddles of desire and possibility. The way she had loosed her hair—­was that a signal? Women were not rare in this part of the frontier, but a roadside encounter with a young, conversable one, who brazenly displayed the lack of a ring on her left hand, was not a pleasure typically enjoyed by a young man on the trail. Not unless this was like the stories he had heard, among those dirty-­minded boys his age, of women who plied a certain trade in the remoteness and anonymity of the open range, with the active connivance of their parents. After all, did he not have money? And she was sitting adjacent to him, the top buttons at her neck undone, throat softly plunging to frontiers that beckoned, swell of maidenly bosom resting upon an arm bared to the elbow. She smiled, tilted her head, fingertips caressing spiral locks beside her ear—­the ear that seemed open only to him, to his halting attempts at conversation.

  “So what awaits in Tucson?” she was asking him.

  “An uncle got a claim on some copper near to. He died. There’s a lawyer there, but my paw can’t get away just now . . .”

  “Do you have any relations in these parts . . . someone who might be interested in your passing through?”

  “We are Illinois folk going back to my grandfather.”

  “I see,” she replied. And she went on presenting the smell of her, of candle wax and vanilla and burnt corncob. His stomach rumbled for Almira’s stew, and the impress of the young woman’s red lips, which he imagined were as smooth and hard as those of his sisters’ porcelain dolls he had once stolen and kissed. Seated, hypnotized, semi-­erect, he watched her eyes laugh at him until they flitted above and behind him, indicating some kind of signal. For him? For he was hungry indeed.

  And yet—­tremulous now on the threshold of a different sort of fate—­the Benders hesitated. John Senior stood behind, leaning against the hot stovepipe, hammer in left hand, right laid across his mouth in a tableau of personal reflection. John Junior hid in the corner, and Almira ambled forth with a bowl of stew. Scowling, she placed it in front of their guest like she was presenting an invoice, and Jesp
erson tore his eyes off Kate long enough to look up and shudder at her homeliness. Almira didn’t take it personal—­she never did.

  The old man launched himself, taking a long windup with his weapon that cast a swooping shadow across the rest of the cabin. Unfortunately for him, his hurtling reflection was visible in the polished surface of Jesperson’s water cup. The boy ducked. The butt of the hammer missed his head clean, striking his shoulder instead with a muffled thud. The blow broke his collarbone.

  But the pain only seemed to accelerate him. Rolling off his chair, he glanced off Kate’s lap and onto the floor. The old man, thwarted by the joists, was out of reach now, while Kate, who was both surprised by the boy’s quickness and annoyed at her partner’s clumsiness, did nothing but watch.

  Jesperson was fumbling under his overcoat for his gun. Before he could draw, John Junior was at his arm—­not with any particular violence, but almost discreetly, as if directing him to his proper seat at the theater. “Let’s have none of that, now,” he said, a chiding tone in his voice. “We’d just as well get on with our business.”

  “To hell with you,” replied the other, still fumbling, until the old man caught up and with a mighty swipe laid his hammer athwart the boy’s temple. His skull there opened up with a crack, spurting blood that caught Junior in the mouth and splashed Kate’s apron. “For God’s sake!” cried the boy, and then again, “For God’s sake!”

  With a twist he was free, retreating to the far corner of the cabin beside the bottles of patent medicine. Astonishment at his wounding made him forget his gun; he reached up to touch his face as his contents ran loose and pink over his nose and into his mouth, his face going white as he tasted his mortality.

  “You have murdered me.”

  “Steh still und lass mich dich töten!”

  John Senior struck again. The blow stove in the dome of the boy’s forehead, dislodging fragments of hair-­fringed skull and driving them into the matter beneath. This time, and without further comment, John Jesperson collapsed in an invertebrate heap.

  The four of them stood there for what felt like minutes but was only a few moments. Kate was the first to rouse from their collective shock. She stood up to inspect the blaze of red on her apron, then tore it off before the stain spread to her dress. Junior, giving the body wide berth, looked out the window to confirm that no one else was around—­the trail, disappearing now under the deepening snow, was deserted.

  As they had earlier agreed, their first step was to get the body out of sight. Junior dumped it in the space beneath the trapdoor. He followed it down with one of the ivory-­handled carving knives to cut the boy’s throat. The deed done, he stayed down there, contemplating for some time the slow seep of dead blood on the stone, as if unwilling to accept that Jesperson’s demise was final.

  It was almost as an afterthought that he searched the victim’s pockets. Coming up, he laid their loot on the table: $530 in notes from the Commercial National Bank of St. Louis, neatly stacked and tied with a piece of linen. Beside them were ten twenty-­dollar gold eagles in a small burlap sack and a silver locket on a neck chain. Inside the locket, Kate found a lock of smooth, straight blond hair, lovingly bound with a piece of pink hemp ribbon.

  Almira, with a sweeping movement of her forearm, deposited the coin and folding money in an old cracker tin. Then she placed the tin on a shelf in plain sight, next to others containing flints and old nails.

  “Best throw that in the fire,” she said, indicating the lock of hair. But to Kate, something about the delicacy of its tiny bow made it unfit for burning. She crumpled it in her fist, intending to find a more fitting end for it later.

  “Did you get his iron?” Almira asked Junior, after the trapdoor had already been closed and the table slid over it.

  Junior, hissing with annoyance, went back to fetch the gun he had forgotten.

  The inauguration of the Benders’ plan did not go as well as they’d hoped. Thanks to John Senior’s looming reflection, the victim’s instinct had almost redeemed his life. Only a sticky holster stood between success and disaster. Serving from different drinkware was one obvious change in their operation—­but it could not be the only one. There had to be a better way for the approach to be made than simply sneaking up from behind. Some way for the strike delivered in utter security, against which there was no defense.

  It was Almira who hit on the solution. The back of the army wagon was ribbed, with a canvas cover that could be stretched or rolled according to the weather. When they stripped off this cover and nailed it to the joists in the cabin, they found that it was a perfect fit from floor to rafters. Best of all, the canvas was a translucent divider, with the lamp in the front section casting sharp shadows. From the vantage of the back room, the outline of anyone seated at the table was projected as clearly as a paper silhouette.

  “Here is our fortune,” proclaimed Almira, proud of herself as she regarded the image of John Junior’s naked head through the screen. She flicked at it with a forefinger, making Junior’s head jerk forward. “Können Sie es tun?” she challenged the old man.

  “Watch me.”

  “If they all go as hard as that one, there’ll be no more,” Kate told them. “It is not what was promised.” Paroxysms of violence—­and a lap full of blood—­was not what she had come to expect from their collaboration. In her mind, the men coming down the trail were nothing more than gunmen and gamblers and grasping land speculators, the kind she had seen a thousand times at cards with her father or waiting patiently at the perfumed tent flaps of soiled doves. They tipped their caps at her but devoured her with their eyes. They thought their money entitled them to everything. For their sins, they should fall drily, silently, like pinned insects. Indeed, quickly. But not like this—­not a boy slathered in the same humors from which his mother had borne him, begging for his life.

  “So the princess is afraid of a little blood,” Almira laughed at her. “She wants only the easy money!”

  “I want what was promised.”

  “These isn’t playing at cards, kleines Mädchen. This is the business.”

  “Without me, there is no business.”

  “You will do as you are told,” Almira said, eyes flitting at the old man with his hammer.

  “No!” the head said from behind the canvas. It was Junior, with an urgency that compelled the women’s attention. He stood up, an erect man-­shadow speaking to them:

  “She’s right. It is not as it will be. I promise.”

  The surprising severity in his voice, and the fact that he was just a silhouette and not so obviously Junior, made them keep their silence.

  Chapter Nine

  Harmony Grove

  JANUARY, 1871

  SABBATH SER­VICES WERE held at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse at eight o’clock. Early in the morning, the deacons, including Leroy Dick and Justice of the Peace George Majors, stacked the children’s desks in the storeroom at the back of the school. With care lest they disturb the books left open there, they nudged the teacher’s desk against the windowless north wall and put out flowers gathered by the neighborhood children—­random and exuberant clutches of mallow and plains violet in the spring, hollyhock and phlox in the summer, aster and lady’s tresses and lobelia in autumn. There were no wildflowers to relieve the severity of the whitewashed room in winter, but there was a stove to light, and the topping up of the school’s supply of fuel with wood from their own piles.

  In all seasons, Dick had a final task: on the blackboard, in a round, sinuous cursive festooned with precious curls and bits of calligraphic business that struck folks as charming in such a serious man, he wrote chapter and verse of the day’s Reading. Under that, in a different color of chalk, he inscribed the title of the morning’s Lesson. This was dispatched to him by Minister Dienst late each Saturday night in the hands of his nine-­year-­old nephew, who turned up breathless from the mile ru
n from the minister’s house, but also from anticipation over the cakes and sweet cream Mary Ann Dick would reward him for his trouble. This Sunday the boy delivered a scrap of paper with the question, “How may we inquire after news not as Athenians, but as Chris­tians?”

  The two dozen or so residents of Osage Township parked their vehicles—­buggies and buckboards for the better-­off, pony carts for the less so—­right on the road. There was no need to leave space for vehicles to pass, because everyone who belonged there was already present, and there was no other conceivable destination for anyone to go but church.

  Ser­vices lasted two hours and were endured on hard benches. And when the last strains of the processional faded, and the ­people filed outside to exchange neighborly greetings, they would gather at tables piled with cakes and pies baked by the wives, accompanied by fresh tea in the summer or hot coffee in the cooler months. As the boys organized games of baseball in the schoolyard, and the girls gathered mulberries and jumped rope, the adults gathered in loose cohorts of gossips, flirts, or—­in the case of the married men—­to stand with hands thoughtfully in pockets, exchanging hard-­won bits of settler intelligence on well-­cladding and fence-­posting and privy-­digging and livestock. When the menfolk were done talking, they left the grass behind them stained with the slick, foamy black of their tobacco spit.

  A small group stayed behind for several hours more—­the church choir under the direction of Leroy Dick. The magistrate played no instrument, but consoled himself with the thought that the voices of his neighbors were nobler and more glorious than any fiddle or whistle. He spent untoward sums on new hymnals from back East, and took pride in training his female brethren, who, as their voices rose in praise of the Most High, looked back at him with pure, unspiritual pleasure. For women liked Leroy Dick. They were assured by the casualness of his masculinity, of his dark good looks that neither proclaimed themselves nor insisted upon their attentions. His dignity was not like a tower, loudly proclaiming itself and casting others in shadow. Instead, it was like the sun, serenely shining upon all without discrimination. When Dick stayed behind after practice to put the children’s desks back in order, he often had more than enough lady volunteers to help.