Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  She would smile as she noted these things. Smile and serve, and smile some more, the comely one with the spotless apron and empty head, bringing the bowl of salt and a whiff of rosewater and “May she please bring a new napkin for the gentleman’s shirtfront?” She served until her feet throbbed and smiled until her cheeks ached.

  For her own part, for all the pip cards life had dealt her, she felt no injury. To perceive oneself as cheated one needed to have expectations of her fellow men, of which she had none. Instead, she was conscious only of opportunities ripening and the urgency of her need to exploit them. For somewhere out there, probably in a better place than Kansas, her father was still searching for her. Not always actively, of course—­a player has to pause and replenish his bankroll from time to time. But just as she never forgot him, so must he never have forgotten about her. Now that she was grown, the search must succeed because they could find each other. Every dollar she earned, by hook or by crook, must bring them closer.

  And so one day, a ­couple of months after hiring her, Mr. Moore looked up and saw Kate handing a lady customer a handbill. Later, she handed out another, and still another from a stash she kept folded in her apron. Curious, he waited until she had gone to the kitchen, then retrieved one that had been left behind on a table. Lips rounded to a pensive pout, he read:

  Prof. Miss KATIE BENDER

  Can heal all sorts of diseases; can cure blindness, fits,

  palsies and all such diseases.

  Also dumbness and sickness of spirit.

  Residence, 14 miles east of Independence, on the road

  from Independence to Osage Mission, one and a half

  miles South East of Norahead Station

  KATE’S SHIFT ENDED around four o’clock, after the family dinner crowd was gone but before the poker and faro players showed up. John Junior waited for her in the lobby, rocking on his feet, turning the brim of his hat around in his fingers. She did not greet him but gave only the merest gesture, an arching of an eyebrow as she passed. He followed her out to the army wagon parked in the street. Like a proper boulevardier, he lifted her skirts for her as she stepped through the mire.

  Almira didn’t like Kate’s new job. When she was informed of it, after the fact, she remained silent in such a manner as to express she had much to say on the matter. Kate waited for the inevitable outburst.

  “You put us in danger, with these comings and goings about! You think you are the smart one, but one day will prove you wrong! I’ve seen it and it will come!”

  “You should see her there,” said Junior from the window, where he monitored the trail. “She’s some pumpkins, I tell you. She reigns over all of them.”

  “Acht, you are a fool. She will say something, in her pride. You don’t know her like I do.”

  “You don’t understand,” sighed Kate, the frustrated pedant. “It’s the opposite of what you say. We must be out there, being seen, lest suspicion fall on us sooner. It is easy to accuse what you don’t know.”

  “The wisdom of all your years?” Almira sneered. “Don’t listen to me, then, with all the time I’ve had at this. Sie!” she shouted at Pa. “What is it you say?”

  John Senior was smoking in the corner with his Bible in his lap, ensnared in a knot of smoky blue tendrils. He took the pipe stem from his mouth as if about to say something—­but then he smacked his lips and put it back.

  “Worthless!” Almira threw up her hands. “I am beset by fools and fools of fools, and it will end in blood, I tell you!”

  “Theirs, I’d wager,” remarked Kate.

  “Yours, I swear to you, if you give us away!”

  Thrown by so bald a threat, it took a moment for Kate to respond. But Junior preempted her:

  “Rider!” he cried, pulling back from the curtain. And at the word, with the automatic efficiency of a well-­drilled army unit, the Benders scrambled to their assigned places—­John Senior and Almira behind the canvas, Junior at the counter, hunching over as if hoping he might seem invisible. Kate stood front and center, hands at her waist, palming down the creases in her skirts. Like an actress at her makeup, but without a mirror, she precisely wetted an auburn strand with her spit and guided it over her brow to its station above her eye.

  They heard footsteps crunching on the icy stubble and a pregnant silence as their visitor paused beyond the door—­perhaps to straighten his hat, perhaps to pry manure from a boot. Then, after what seemed like cruel delay, the knock came.

  “Evening, traveler,” Kate said as she opened up and the lamplight fell across his face. This one was older than the last—­not a boy, but a man of some years, perhaps twenty-­five. He wore a billycock with an oilskin cover, the brim bent down over his eyes. The suit peeking from beneath his wet duster was assembled from madly clashing patterns—­pinstripes on his trousers, spinning paisleys on his vest. When he lifted his chin to answer, he revealed gray eyes, smoky but moist from the evening chill.

  “Sorry to come at your shutting in,” he said. “Must have misjudged the distance from St. Paul. Mought I trouble you?”

  “It is impossible for you do so, sir, because it is our pleasure.”

  Stepping inside, he stood back on his heels and took in what they presented: a spare interior somewhat overwarmed by the stove, Junior staring at him from before a wall of dusty patent medicine boxes, and Kate in her muslin apron, arms crossed behind her back as if concealing a gift.

  “If you’d set at the table, we’ll show you why we’re famous in these parts.”

  Unbuttoning, he sat. The act released Junior to go out and see to his horse.

  Upon Kate’s gentle questioning, he disclosed his name was Hiram; he was traveling east, to his family in Missouri, where he was to be married.

  “Are there no girls of Kansas you fancy?” she asked.

  “I am to be sealed to the godly Constance Adare of Jackson County, that we may be together through eternity, as is provided by Heavenly Father.”

  “I see.”

  Kate cast down her eyes, perceiving the situation and making an inward adjustment. She had read of Hiram’s faith—­at first instance, when someone had deposited The Pearl of Great Price in a hotel lobby in Casper, Wyoming. And there were other occasions later, such as in newspaper accounts of their tribulations and triumphs in settling in Utah, though these were not always sympathetic. It was no more or less a matter of indifference to her—­the hypocrisy of such clerics, no matter what doctrine stuffed their wooly heads, was equally deplorable. But they could be useful in keeping a body preoccupied:

  “Were not those of your stripe roused out of Jackson County, years ago?”

  “Not all of us,” he replied, smiling.

  “What do you mean, ‘sealed’?”

  “It is the belief of the true heirs of Christ that men and women are meant to dwell together not only in this life, but abide all the phases of our Father’s plan through all eternity. ‘I give unto you power, that whatsoever ye shall seal on earth shall be sealed in Heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven; and thus shall ye have power among this ­people.’ Helaman 10:7. But only if they are sealed according to ordinance.”

  “His plan?”

  “The Scripture says: ‘I rejoice in the day when my mortal shall put on immortality, and shall stand before him; then shall I see his face with pleasure, and he will say unto me: “Come unto me, ye blessed, there is a place prepared for you in the mansions of my Father.” ’ Enos 1:27. It is our fate to be judged for our choices, which will tell our path through Heaven, or Spirit Prison, as the case may be, to our proper station among the Three Spheres . . .”

  There was trail-­weariness in his voice that belied the Good News. She joined him at the table, elbow resting and chin in hand, attentiveness shining on her face.

  “But do you really want to talk about this?” he asked, developing a sm
ile to mirror hers.

  “I find nothing more fascinating.”

  “ ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that publisheth salvation,’ Isaiah 52:7.”

  With that, he unfolded his duster, which he had draped neatly upon the table, and extracted a book that was tucked in a pocket.

  “I see you have yours . . .” he said, gesturing at John Senior’s German Bible resting on a chair. “But have you seen mine?”

  His Book of Mormon was leather-­bound and ribboned, its spine limber from a thousand openings and closings. He cracked it, and in her mind she imagined the long and strenuous hours of his reciting and committing the passages to memory, all for an opportunity like this—­to present his benefaction, his pearl of great price, to a fair and receptive stranger. In her current state it seemed to her such a pleasant preoccupation that she allowed herself to be swept up in it, to momentarily see the world through the pleasant mist of his enthusiasm. He was turning the pages for her, running his fingers down the serried lines, as deliberate as a salesman showing off his traveling case full of jewels. The gracefulness of his fingertips hypnotized her, and for that minute she wanted to be what he perceived, a high plains bumpkin who had rarely glimpsed the orderly intricacies of the printed page.

  “I cannot help but believe I am called to some great labor in this land,” she heard him say, distantly.

  “What does it say about prophecy?” she asked, voice slowed to a contented purr.

  “The one from Tarsus said it best: ‘Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.’ ”

  “I don’t like that.”

  Silenced by this response, he moved aside for Almira, who was standing with the bowl of stew and a spoon, towel draped over her arm. She laid the meal before the spot on the canvas still stained with John Jesperson’s blood. Hiram obliged by sliding to the bowl, laying the book next to him as if it deserved a place setting. Kate, looking up, perceived the impatient glare in Almira’s eyes: Get on with it.

  “You say you have a mission. What are your plans after you are married?”

  “After the sealing I will bring my family west. There we will instruct by example the ways of a godly life.”

  “Do you have any friends or relations near-­abouts, who might help you?”

  He swallowed, and with the light of his certainty shining through his eyes like an oncoming train, said, “I am but a stranger in Egypt.”

  John Junior had returned from quartering Hiram’s horse. He nodded, cleared his throat significantly. The guttural noise irritated Kate, for without turning around she could somehow hear him nodding behind her, could sense the vector of this man’s fate without the need for its utterance. The knowledge of it filled her with unspeakable awe, is if she were some angel winging high above the earth, looking down and seeing not only the trails mortal men had laid down in their lives, but the paths ahead of them. The path of the man before her, the one attending so closely to the stew before his nose, would dead-­end right here, in the next moment. She was sure the terrible power of this could be read in her eyes. Averting them, she began to tremble.

  She startled at a sudden scratching noise behind the canvas, as if a boot heel were dragged along the boards.

  “Are you all right?” Hiram asked.

  She could not summon an answer, and in the clumsy silence the moment seemed to telescope, yawning before and disheartening her because she had run out of words for this man. Why does he not strike? she thought as she covered her eyes and felt a pinpricking warmth as she flushed from brow to breast. She had heard John Senior back there, heaving his clumsy bulk. Let it be done! she screamed inwardly, and again, Do it now! Still the man across from her sat alive, picking idly with his spoon for strands of meat in his bowl, and looking up at her with his decency, his indiscriminate Chris­tian­ity. Lips shaping fulsome pieties, teeth stuck with inches of pork tendon, he poured forth hypocrisies syrupy and ancient, appalling and aggrieving her. And now her face was naked too, and she could stand it no longer.

  “Töte ihn! Mach‘ schon!” someone cried.

  “Pardon?”

  Like a carpenter measuring twice to cut once, John Senior took his time. At last he swung, plunging the head of the Alsatian hammer through the screen at the round shadow beyond. And again his aim was off—­the blow struck the man not on the crown of the head but glanced off his right temple.

  Hiram pitched forward, his jaw striking the rim of his bowl and upending it. Then he straightened, an expression on his face like a man who had been bothered by an untoward fly. There was no blood yet, and apparently no pain, until the rip in his skin parted under the weight of torn flesh. Kate watched as a great fold of skin, including the man’s entire ear, slowly pulled free, flopping down like the page of a book left open in a breeze.

  Chapter Twelve

  A-­jayhawkin’

  SEPTEMBER, 1856

  LEROY DICK NEXT saw Ernest Tubbs Junior three weeks later, when he was on the way back from school. The trail led through some woods surrounding the district schoolhouse and into a stretch of unclaimed prairie split by wheel ruts. There he spied a knot of boys dancing with excitement over something. The four of them took turns rushing off to a spot on the ground a hundred yards from the trail, where each would come up short, loiter on jangly legs for a moment with hands in pockets, then dash back to the group.

  Closer, one of the boys called to Leroy: “You! C’mere an’ see somethin’!” And the others summoned him in the same peculiar way, with excitement but also a hint of dread, as if what they showed forced them to implicate as many witnesses as they could. And when Leroy approached slowly, eyes sweeping the grass for hints of mischief, the ringleader stamped his bare feet in the dirt and hung his arms at his sides and asked, “So c’mon Dick whatsamatter with ya are ya yella?”

  “No,” he replied, for yella he wasn’t, but had an inkling that this something would not be pleasant. Following the pointing fingers, he found his way off the trail, to a spot beside a straggling tree. It was a locust, boughs splayed just a foot or two above his extended arms, fringed with wreaths of red, inch-­long spikes. There was a loop of rope tied to one of the branches, running down only a few inches to where it was hacked with a dull knife. And below that lay a sack of skin with a roughly human outline.

  He stared at the body for quite some time without summoning much reaction. The time for disgust had long passed, for this was no longer a corpse but some kind of curio, like a mummy. The body was naked, the skin split where the edges of bones had begun to push through. It was darkened by decay, blue like a bruise, except for the ivory of the teeth exposed by the retracting lips, and the buttery yellow of the vitrified eyes. Between them was a scatter of freckles that, with a constriction of his gut, Leroy recognized.

  The abdomen was opened, gaping like a rifled knapsack. Yet it did not stink in the round, effusive way he’d encountered before, as when he and his father had discovered stock freshly killed on the range by coyotes. The blood was old now, soaking and searching deep into the soil. The stench of earth corrupted, like an unspeakable curse, or the soil itself in despair. It was an odor he would not encounter again until seventeen years later, in the pit under the Bender cabin.

  In the evening, with the western sky foiling the roofs with gold and salmon-­tinted shadows, he invited his father out for a private conversation. The discretion made him feel like a man, as did the effect his news had on Cornelius, whose bemusement at his youngest son’s grave demeanor soon tumbled.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  His father removed the pipe from his mouth and turned it about as if seeing it for the first time.

  “Then I suppose we’ll have to go out there tomorrow,” he said.

  They left th
e house the next morning before his mother or Temple were up. Leroy was particularly gratified that his elder brother was not included in their secret. Instead, they went out side by side in the market wagon, picks and shovels clanging in the bed as they bumped and rolled.

  When they reached the spot, Cornelius looked at the remains with a ruefulness that refused to rise to the level of empathy. The Negro had, after all, come uninvited into his life, and left it with a decent chance at escape, if he’d had the sense to use it properly. He might have made for the river and stayed hidden in the brush until nightfall. From there he could have slipped away to Lawrence, where Davis and his men would never have shown their faces. From there he could have taken a stage north to Nebraska, or Colorado Territory. What tragedy befell him was his own fault as much as anyone else’s. Why he expected heroics from a man with a family to defend was beyond comprehending.

  And yet.

  “We’ll take him a ways off the trail,” he said.

  They used the shovels to collect the remains, which disarticulated and scattered and unfurled wreaths of centipedes. As they rolled south, Leroy could not help but swivel in his seat and look back at the lump wrapped in canvas in the wagon bed, which until recently had been a living man. Laying a hand on his arm, his father gave him an admonishing glance as if to say “best not look back.”

  And so Leroy kept eyes forward as they rolled on, gliding along on ground flatter and gentler than the trail, scaring up plumes of sparrows and surprising the white-­tailed deer at their morning graze. They went some distance, seeking the lowest stretch of ground they could, until they reached a spot near the river where a solitary willow tree stood in a field of Queen Anne’s lace. There they stopped and together attacked the turf, until they had a gash that was roughly oval and three feet deep. Cornelius gently pushed Leroy aside and worked to deepen and straighten the hole until it was something like a proper grave.