Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  He was slick with sweat when he dropped the shovel. They shared the corners of the bundled canvas as they slid it from the wagon—­though they didn’t have to—­and laid it at the bottom. Then Cornelius brought out the Bible he had brought in a rucksack. Wetting his fingers, he turned to a passage he had apparently considered beforehand, and began to read in a voice that was clear but subdued, as if he was afraid of being overheard.

  “And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.

  And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put [them for] his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.

  And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

  And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;

  And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed . . .”

  Leroy often found himself numbed by the recitation of Scripture. Looking around, he gathered a bouquet of lacy white blossoms, with their solitary purple flowers in the center, and twisted one of the stems around the bundle to keep it from falling apart. And as his father came to the end of the passage, reading, “ ‘And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this [is] the gate of Heaven,’ ” he tossed the bouquet into the hole. Cornelius laid the book on the seat of the wagon and took up his shovel. Leroy did the same, and reversing the blades, they backfilled the grave.

  They sat in silence on the trip home, until they could see their fence line. Cornelius instructed him to gather a hammer and some nails to straighten one of the boards that had sagged, and then became silent again.

  The Tubbs incident had its effect on all the Dicks. Despite the assurances of the doctor, Temple’s face was left permanently scarred, spoiling his good looks. His poxy appearance did little for his prospects in the local marriage market, which embittered him and made him blame Tubbs and his entire race for bringing misfortune on him. When the war came, he joined up with Jim Lane to hunt Defensives, but also bullied and robbed free blacks whenever he could. When Leroy questioned this apparent contradiction, Temple quoted Lane himself: “We are not fighting to free black men but to free white men.”

  Florence Dick implored her Lord for the reason why her compassion had been so cruelly repaid. As the answer could never be some flaw in His design, she reasoned that her own vanity was to blame. In penance, she stopped indulging her appearance, stopped shaving herself and bathing, and entered into conjugal relations with Cornelius only out of sullen, joyless duty. She took to wearing a chemise made of sackcloth. Christmas was no longer kept, and sweets like cakes and pies were unknown in the Dick house, which became infamous in the neighborhood for its dreariness.

  Yet with every abnegation, every stingy choice, she became not more secure in her state of grace, but less. It seemed the Lord had in mind only to punish her and take her peace. Her sons forgot the last time they saw a smile on her face. Grinding to a pensive halt at her laundry boiler, she ruminated over the years of futility before her. Sometimes, she fondly imagined ending her life.

  For every time Cornelius assured himself that he was not to blame, the suspicion grew that he was only fooling himself. Though any father would surely have taken strict measures had a child been injured, it might have occurred to him to escort the Negro safely to Lawrence. In his fury, he knew he had been impulsive, and in his impulsiveness he had been weak. The thought afflicted him every time he looked at Leroy, who had been forced to bear witness to his error. To keep his son from seeing the self-­loathing in his face, he avoided looking at him at all, which Leroy noticed and wondered if he had somehow done wrong in bringing the discovery of the body to Cornelius’s attention. And minute by silent minute, stone by stone, the wall of mutual incomprehension rose up between father and son.

  Leroy grew up withdrawn and pensive, aware of the deep wrong that had been done his family and nursing this conviction like a secret love. Under most circumstances these qualities read as gravitas—­he was frequently astonished when he was roused from his daydreams to find that he was being nominated for some position of leadership in the schoolroom, or being admired by girls who took his quietude as a challenge. More often his mother, exasperated by his remoteness, accused him of being simple.

  When the war came, he was eighteen years old, with a good horse to ride and an old Colt Paterson .36 revolver nearly as long as his forearm. He had bought the latter in secret in Lawrence—­and regretted the purchase right away when he learned that the pistol had to be partly disassembled each time it was loaded. To add insult to ignorance, a chamber blew out the first time he tested it. Instead of buying a new cylinder, he opted to turn the weapon into a four-­shooter by never loading the defective chamber. After all, the fighting he had in mind would be no occasion for long exchanges of gunfire. For it was his intention that he would do his part for the Union by going a-­jayhawking along the Kansas River.

  This pastime, which usually involved armed gangs of abolitionists crossing the border into Missouri to deprive slaveholders of their slaves and other property, had by this time attained an almost mythic stature in Leroy’s mind. Not only was it sweet retribution for the wrongs he had personally suffered, but it allowed him to exercise the sense of indignation he had nursed through boyhood, as he heard stories of Missouri men invading Kansas to stuff ballot boxes, reducing the Territory to a veritable colony. Cornelius’s disapproval of any such ventures had held Leroy back. But now that the proslavery men had declared for secession, and the stain on his family’s honor was as obvious as the scars on Temple’s face, he could no longer resist the call to go forth and, at long last, settle some hash.

  Missouri itself was too far to go without rousing suspicion. Instead, he would ride in the other direction, toward Lecompton and the farms of Kansans who, if they didn’t own slaves themselves, were proslavery in sympathies. He was going hunting, he told his folks, and would return in a few days. From behind his newspaper, Cornelius advised, “Better take one of the Sharps, then.” And this Leroy delightedly did.

  He was joined on the trip by two classmates he had known all his life. Nathan Bannerman was the only son of an older ­couple in Lawrence that had grown rich on remittances from an uncle who had gone to California in ’49 and then, sadly, died of ague. Nathan had taken to dressing in the fashion of an East Coast slicker, in a green herringbone suit and a bowler. His gun—­a Colt Walker—­was nickel-­plated. Out of town he rode a gray, lithe Arabian that high-­stepped and cantered with its tail pertly upward, which caused some mirth among the ranch hands slumped on their mud-­splattered quarter horses. There were other qualities that Leroy heard associated with Nathan’s Jewishness that he did not credit, as long as he was a trustworthy partner in a scrap.

  Daniel H.T. Woodeson, whom everyone called Fess, was a short-­necked redhead with a face full of freckles like a bowl of black-­eyed peas. His gear, from the sway-­backed bay he rode to the rust-­smudged Smith & Wesson .22 he carried, inspired little confidence. But he had a droll, sweet-­natured disposition that was easy to take on the trail, combined with a volcanic hatred of bushwhackers that seemed to flare out of nowhere and vanish just as mysteriously. When he was asked, “Hey Fess, why do you hate them pukes so much?” that broad, gap-­toothed smile would break over him like one of those sailor-­take-­warning sunrises, and he would reply something like, “Why you mought as well ask why a body hates locusts!” To the question, “So why do they call you Fess, anyway?” he would reply, “Can’t rightly say, I do confess!”

 
The evening before they lit out they sat around, drinking applejack and arguing over a suitable name for their little gang. Any serious crew of jayhawkers, after all, had to have a handle, preferably terrifying but at least memorable to the string of victims they would leave in their train. Bannerman offered up “Lane’s Right Hands,” which Fess pretended not to understand:

  “Why would Jim Lane have more than one right hand? And why wouldn’t it be at the end of his right arm?”

  “Ain’t it typical of you to fuddle up what’s perfectly clear?” replied Bannerman. “Leroy, tell him.”

  “I’m not sure he’s far wrong.”

  Bannerman snorted and drank, and offered no objection to the choice they settled upon: they would ride into history as the Devil’s Angels.

  They struck out early one Monday morning under a clear cerulean dome, the rising sun warming their backs as it cast long snaking shadows ahead. It was a glorious morning to be eighteen and free and ennobled by a purpose. The horses’ hooves threw up sprays of dew that wet Leroy’s face and made the grass smell sweeter. In the side holster by his right leg, the carbine rested in its solid angularity, the scimitar like curve of its butt making him menacing and deadly and ready to do the Lord’s work.

  Their first destination was a farm outside Benecia where they had heard a secessionist flag was openly displayed. They found the place without trouble: a clapboard farmhouse standing in the center of a great oxbow abandoned by the Kansas River. From the south the crescent of water protected the farm like a moat, but from the river side the approach was flat and easy and covered by hedgerows. Taking up position behind one, they dismounted and ate a lunch of bread and hard cheese.

  Bannerman took out his Montgomery Ward spyglass to study the target. When he was done, Leroy took his turn, squinting as he chewed until the magnified image sprang into focus. Beneath a curl of hearth smoke and a wheeling flight of turkey buzzards, the house stood solid and unexceptional, freshly washed bedding draped over the fence. Just behind and to the right was a rude staff made from a hewn sapling, and from it flew a peculiar flag.

  To see it clearly, Leroy stuck his hunk of bread in his mouth and held the instrument with both hands. The flag was blood red, with a vertical cross of blue bars spangled with white stars and pairs of white objects—­small from that distance—­at the upper right and left corners. Try as he might, he couldn’t make out those white blotches.

  “Damn ugly thing.”

  “Let me see,” demanded Fess.

  Neither of his partners would speak up for the flag’s aesthetic appeal, but there was nothing they could do about it in broad daylight. After watering the horses, they bivouacked a half mile away. Reclining in the grass, Leroy watched the crickets flit between the stalks above him, their murmur bringing on a pleasant lethargy that made the coming errand seem the business of a different person. Above his upturned eyes, the bugs traced parabolas as they pursued their unfathomable errands, arcing as if deflected by the earth’s turning, the great cosmic swerve that comforted him as it joined all material things in their common mortality, until he let his eyelids droop and fell into a state of semiconsciousness that brought on an avalanche of thoughts that all seemed equally profound and equally forgettable.

  Sometime in late afternoon Fess brought out a mouth harp and commenced a repetitive twanging that intruded on Leroy’s repose. Sitting up, he sighted Fess crouching nearby with his boots off, pants rolled to the knees.

  “If you’re not going to play a tune on that thing, I’d just as soon see you lose it in the grass.”

  “Who’s gonna?”

  “Me.”

  “You and yer weight in wildcats.”

  Leroy extended a hand to take the instrument away, but Fess—­a mulish curl on his upper lip—­tucked it in his breast pocket.

  When night at last filled up the hollows, the Devil’s Angels rounded up their horses and returned to the homestead. A rising three-­quarter moon revealed that the laundry had disappeared from the fence, but they saw no one in the yard or at the windows, and the treason flag was still flying from its jack.

  “Snug and tight,” remarked Bannerman. “So what’s our play?”

  ’Fess laughed. “Play? We go down there and rip ’er down and they thank us for it, that’s our play!”

  “Like a strung trap, that mind of yours.”

  “Why don’t you sit on them spurs?”

  Bannerman looked to Leroy, who pulled out his Paterson and removed the barrel to confirm—­for the third time in a quarter hour—­that all the cylinders were loaded except the defective one.

  “Off we go.”

  They went down three abreast and ten yards apart. Leroy’s ears were bent with the effort to detect any threatening sound. Bannerman, meanwhile, made an unholy racket with those fancy steel spurs that gave a double click with each step.

  The gate to the inner yard was open. As the others went through, Leroy watched the glow through the grease-­papered window, looking for the telltale shadow of a head pausing in suspicion. But the place was inhabited only by ghosts. His foot brushed against something—­a doll fashioned out of an old sock, coif spun of bedraggled yarn, button eyes shining in the moonlight like splatters of mercury. Worried by their brightness, he nudged the doll over on its belly.

  They were standing under the staff now, looking up at the flag as it stirred and shrugged on the intermittent breeze.

  “Now what?”

  With an impatient snort, Bannerman placed one of his studded boots about three feet up the jack staff and pushed. Only a sapling, it bent somewhat, but not low enough for the top to be grabbed. Holstering his gun, Leroy reached up with both hands as Bannerman leaned with all his weight and Fess hooked an arm and pulled it down. After some moments’ effort they manhandled it level enough for Leroy to get his fingers on the hem of the flag. The sapling popped and groaned in protest; Leroy kept a wary eye on the house as he ripped the cloth from its mount and threw it over his left shoulder. In a celebratory mood now, Fess let the sapling go, to whip upward with a fearsome thwack.

  “Quiet, you fool!” Leroy hissed as the other did a little celebratory jig.

  “Listen! What’s that?” Bannerman breathed.

  Under Fess’s antics, Leroy had heard it—­the slow creak of old hinges limbering. There was a door opening somewhere, and behind it a scratching like nails on a board. Or the claws of a frantic animal being restrained.

  “Time to fly, boys!” Leroy cried.

  They cleared the fence just as the snarling began. Wrapped in the treason flag as he ran, Leroy couldn’t reach his gun. Bannerman, just ahead of him, whirled around and was illuminated as his barrel flicked red flame. Turning to see if the shot struck home, Leroy glimpsed a shadow bounding on four legs, features dark on a head that seemed as thick and square as a cobblestone. Its sound was the deep rumbling of some vengeful chthonic god. As it ran it rattled a chain of heavy forged links like those clanging between loaded railroad cars.

  In that headlong rush, defenseless with his gun out of reach, Leroy felt panic stuff itself inside his brain, filling it up from the very pit of his skull. His flight took him over obstacles—­hurtling over spare fence posts and dropped tools and other jetsam of settler life, but he was aware of nothing but a quaking and a shortness of breath that dried his throat as he gasped. He saw Bannerman turn again, present his Colt as if to fire but pull empty because he had forgotten to cock it first. With that failure, Bannerman’s nerve broke and he flew with an abandon as wholehearted as it was shameless.

  But just then, by some chance fall of the drapery on his body, Leroy found he could reach the grip of his pistol. With that sensation of smooth fatality, his senses all seemed to snap into focus; the molten coursing through his veins cooled, and some small part of his nerve asserted itself. Without really intending to, he grasped the Colt, withdrew it, and pulled back the
hammer. Turning, he sighted the shadow twenty feet behind him as it bestrode the prone form of Fess, who was thrashing manfully with fists that seemed to worry the dog as much as the patter of raindrops. The margin of safety was close, but some part of Leroy, some resolute agency in the tissue of lizard brain he shared with a cornered snake, made a decision. He touched off the charge, lighting with an incandescent stab a tableau of flailing arms and flashing carnassials.

  To Leroy, the sound of the shot was drowned out by the sudden silence that followed it. The shadow standing over Fess slumped sideways. There was a hearty pounding in his head as he stood, gun cocked for another shot as Bannerman suddenly appeared, stepping carefully at full height as he approached the toppled shadow.

  Jaws frozen in mid-­snarl, the mastiff gave a sigh like any dog settling down for a nap, and then a gurgling sound. It was two hundred pounds heavy.

  Bannerman whistled. “That was some shot. Right through the heart, you got ’im.”

  “You OK?” Leroy asked, meaning Fess. The other was still on his back, sleeving from his face a splatter of mastiff blood.

  “I swow, I saw the face of my Maker!” he exclaimed. And then he writhed in the grass, pumping his arms and legs like a pinned beetle as he whooped and cried, “Tell me that wasn’t fun! Tell me boys!”

  Their relief was cut short by the crack of someone else shooting from the house. Leroy heard a shot whistle by, close enough to tousle the hair over his ears. Looking back, he saw a figure at the door of the cabin, framed by the faint glow of a draped lantern. The form seemed to struggle to cock his rifle for a moment before raising it to his cheek—­but Leroy, intending not to stumble in the dark, turned his attention to escape and saw nothing more.