Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  No, Leroy Dick would never comport himself in that way. Instead, like some soaring angel, he remained too far above her to see the little torch she’d lit for him.

  Mary Ann Dick was another matter. Wives, after all, soar not so high, and tend to notice things like the little tricks other women play to catch their husbands’ eyes. In those moments before Mrs. Dick reached the door, as Kate sat in panicked stillness, she was sure that her desire had been noticed, that the other had come to settle her hash.

  She rose. Not wanting to open the door disarrayed, she reached back to bun her hair. When the soft knock came, she drifted to the door feeling fifty pounds lighter, as if she had been emptied bodily.

  “Kate,” her visitor said. She had just removed her hat and was looking at her with a faint bemusement.

  “Mrs. Dick! What a surprise.”

  “Oh, I’m sure not!”

  Lightness. Emptiness. Her hair was knotted too loosely and would dislodge around her shoulders.

  “Would you like to come in?”

  Mary Ann was not a beautiful woman, but a formidable one whose eye level was higher than the crown of Kate’s head. With her apron left at home, her solid green frock dominated the colorless room. After taking in the cabin’s plain-­spun amenities with a single, sweeping glance, her eyes settled on the cards on the table.

  “You must know why I’ve come. It’s all over the county.”

  “What is?”

  “You are either very modest or very shrewd, my dear . . .” she said as Kate readied for the accusation to come. She wondered how Junior had managed to disappear so quickly.

  “Must I beg?”

  Mary Ann gestured at the tarot. Kate, finally understanding, flushed with relief.

  “Of course! Sit down! I mean, please . . .”

  Unbidden, the other sat with her back against the canvas. Just as she settled in, someone opened the cabin’s back door, flooding the kitchen with a glare that back-­lit every stain and imperfection in the surface of the partition. Around Mrs. Dick’s head there suddenly loomed a stain of bodily fluids, a halo of cranial ejecta. Showing no outward reaction, Kate kept her visitor’s attention on the cards, shuffling them with a practiced slowness that lulled clients into a calm receptiveness.

  The door shut; she recognized the footsteps.

  “Mother, Mrs. Dick is here! Please bring coffee!”

  The footsteps paused. There was a clang as Almira transferred the coffeepot to the stove.

  “No need for that,” Mary Ann said. “I don’t want to be trouble . . . I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Not at all.”

  Settling down to business, Kate learned that her customer’s concerns were garden-­variety—­an issue of household finances, regarding the purchase of some farm equipment. As she turned over the cards she kept a close watch on the other woman, looking for any sign her questions were pretexts. But there was nothing of the jealous wife about Mary Ann Dick. Instead of insecurity, she seemed ennobled in her sturdy plainness. Moreover, there was a subtle air of pity about her, as if she took Kate for some exotic animal that had been lost among God’s more viable creatures. Kate had seen this arrogance before, among the respectable women in the towns she’d visited. It rankled; she felt a temptation to read the cards uncharitably, just to get back at the woman. But she refrained, as it would have discredited her craft more than it would have educated her client.

  Meanwhile, Junior had returned. He was outside, examining the quality of the tack on Mrs. Dick’s horse. What he was thinking was obvious to her, as it was to the old man as he made his way from the apple orchard, wielding his shovel halfway up the shaft like the improvised weapon of some medieval farmer conscripted direct from the fields.

  Almira appeared with the coffee, not so much serving the cups as foisting them. She met Kate’s eyes and asked, “Wird sie gehen weg von hier?”

  Kate gave a single, sharp shake of her head. The very notion was unthinkable—­they never took locals who might be missed or tracked to the grocery. But the hiatus had apparently made her partners desperate, and stupid. She dismissed Almira with a flick of her eyes.

  As she turned up the latter cards in the spread, Kate’s reading became more general. She perceived that money had always been an issue in the Dick marriage. The dispute over buying a reaper was rooted in a deep, abiding sense of mistrust. At this, Mary Ann’s eyes widened slightly; planting an elbow on the table, she absently fingered a locket on a chain around her neck. The card of the High Priestess appeared in the ninth position, giving Kate pause.

  “What is it?”

  “She suggests a hidden element,” Kate replied. “A factor hidden in mystery that may be apprehended only in stillness.”

  The other looked away, enacted stillness by dropping the locket.

  Meanwhile, someone else opened and closed the back door. The way the floorboards creaked told Kate it was the old man back there, behind the canvas. Junior came to the front window, peering in with faint expectancy, while Almira came out and crossed her arms. Their hovering made Kate uneasy—­could it be that they were set on defying her? Her thoughts raced as she read on, spinning as she considered what she would do. Mrs. Dick sat absorbed in the cards between them, strands of her straw-­colored hair clinging as it grazed the partition, while behind it the old man must have been gazing at her shadow, measuring it for final hewing. The others looked on significantly in that manner that filled Kate with trembling anxiety, through which she saw their undoing as Leroy came that evening with a terrible accusation on his face that turned aside all her assurances and put their love forever beyond fulfillment. Oh! Her words became nonsense now as Mary Ann’s face creased with puzzlement at this incoherence, and was that a slight rustling of the partition, a flutter in the air as an arm was cocked back?

  “We need to go!” Kate exclaimed, jumping to her feet.

  “Now? Why?”

  “The reading is over. Come now.”

  Mrs. Dick allowed herself to be led out as she looked down on Kate with part-­mouthed astonishment. So intent was she on Kate that she didn’t notice the expressions of the other Benders, slinking and glaring back like slighted jackals. None of them followed her out of the cabin.

  “There. Git on your horse and go,” Kate ordered. She grasped Mary Ann’s forearm so hard she left a mark on the skin.

  “I feel as if I’m intruding,” Mrs. Dick said as she massaged her arm.

  “Not at all. If you don’t feel the reading was worth my fee, take it back. Here.”

  And she held up her dollar, holding it contemptuously by the corners.

  Mrs. Dick didn’t take it. Instead, she asked, “Are you all right, my dear?”

  The woman’s presumption—­that it was Kate who was in danger and not herself—­was breathtaking. Even now, in the midst of this sacrifice, this self-­abnegation in the face of love, the nobility of her sentiments was not recognized. Rage coursing through her chest, she hissed through tight lips, “I am quite fine.”

  “If there’s something you can’t tell me now, come with me. We can send for your things.”

  The woman was determined to be planted in the garden like a turnip! Kate, at her wit’s end at how to get rid of her, laughed in her face. “How shall I convince you?” she asked. “Small minds like yours come here with no respect, like you are getting a horse shod!” She spat on the ground, then regretted it, for it was a habit she’d picked up as a child from Almira, and displayed only when she was upset and not thinking.

  “You have no need to be afraid,” said the other, and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  Kate drew back. She uttered her next words with exaggerated precision: “Do I look like a victim to you, Mrs. Dick? You ­people—­I can’t imagine what possesses you to see me the way you do!”

  With a tight smile of dismay, Mary Ann Dick turned away an
d stepped on the mounting block. In the saddle, she gathered her reins and looked down at Kate with an appraising eye.

  “The Lord is patient,” she said. “He will abide the turn of ages.”

  “It may take that long.”

  She stood and watched the other ride away, cantering into an autumn evening that seemed to shut behind her like a curtain. Suddenly the atmosphere felt close, too heavy to be squeezed from her lungs. She turned northwest and with puzzlement noted that she could discern no horizon. Instead, above an indistinct smudging of distance she saw fingers dark as denim bent-­knuckled into the air. The tips rose higher, fluttering and fading as they grasped at the nape of the sky.

  Junior came out and stood next to her.

  “Some kind of storm?” she wondered.

  “Fire.”

  “Brockman came before, talking about it,” said Almira, who had appeared behind them. “It’s been burning for days. Coming this way.”

  Brush fires, like locusts and hail, were inevitable hazards of prairie life. She heard tell of it from half-­drunk tradesmen at the hotel—­conflagrations that spanned whole counties, sheets of flame that reared and spat, burning some claims, sparing others, irrespective of fortune or circumstances. In that footsore, half-­conscious state she reached at the end of her shift, it was easy for her to imagine the birth of these blazes, to see the fork of lightning or the tossed cigarette in a tuft of dry grass. She envisioned the men coming with shovels and plows, gouging out firebreaks as the line of flames approached. And she could see their despair as they halted it in one place, only to watch it spark up in ten more places downwind.

  “Shall we worry?” asked Junior.

  “I won’t,” said Almira. “My roots hain’t deep.”

  At nightfall they gathered in front of the cabin to watch the show. When it was too dark to read, the old man laid his Bible aside and took out his pipe, packing the tobacco with a methodical grinding. Kate gazed across the weedy black expanse, listening to the peeping of the crickets that—­like most humans—­were oblivious to the roasting of their fellows just a few miles away. Junior chain-­smoked cigarettes, the glowing cherries at their ends flaring as he inhaled. A faint, infernal luminance appeared in the distance. It brightened as she watched, driving the stars from view as it blued the sky around the rampart of smoke.

  The clock chimed ten. The glow had become so strong Kate thought she could just see the glimmer of actual, licking flames. Junior suggested the wagon be hitched; he wondered if certain items should be readied for loading. Almira said, “Well, I’m to bed.”

  “What, now?” Junior asked.

  She laughed. “Anything happens, it won’t till morning.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure when it comes to these things.”

  “Let her go,” said Kate. “If the fire comes, she’ll get good practice for the great by-­and-­by.”

  “Such a way with words,” Almira sneered. “And as shifty as a Philadelphy lawyer.”

  Kate shifted to confront her. “Before you go—­don’t do that again.” And by that she made clear with her eyes the untoward plans they’d all had for Mary Ann Dick. “We had a pact. Put me in that position again and I’ll leave you flat. Mark my words.”

  She’d addressed herself only to Almira, as if the old woman was the font of all treachery and loathsomeness. The latter stood for a moment, then replied with a twist of her lips, “Yes, I believe you would, wouldn’t you?”

  Around midnight Kate tried to sleep. Through the small hours she got up now and then to look west: the fire seemed to burn no brighter, and faded with the dawn. The fitful night made her sleep late. Wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she headed outside, where she found Junior talking to Rudolph Brockman. He was reclining in the seat of his wagon with one of Junior’s cigarettes in his lips. His clothes were splattered with dry mud, the remains of his hair cowlicked in back and matted in front with the salt of dried sweat. He sat up when he saw her.

  “Morning, Kate.”

  “Good morning, Rudolph.”

  His unabashed gaze at her morning dishabille made her wrap her shawl more tightly around herself.

  “Rudolph’s been out at the fire,” said Junior.

  “I have. Was there most of the night.”

  “Is that a fact?” she replied, turning northwest. There was still a haze in the distance, but the great plumes of smoke were gone. The receding of the emergency was some kind of relief, she guessed. But she also felt an odd disappointment, a sense of being deprived of an exceptional moment.

  “There were fifty souls out there with picks and shovels. They dug a ­couple of miles of firebreaks, all by torchlight. That must have been a sight in itself, all of us out there in the middle of the devil’s own desert. They had four wagons runnin’ for water all night, and twenty more men spreadin’ it in front of the fire. Damned if any of it did any good, with all those sparks. A fountain like ye never have seen, high than a skylark’s fall.”

  “So how did you stop it?” asked Junior.

  “They didn’t,” Kate interjected.

  Brockman looked at her, a smile forming. “Ja. The wind changed a few hours before sunup. It blew the devil right back on hemself. By first light it was out.”

  Kate turned to go inside. “Thank you for stopping to see us, Rudolph.”

  When she was gone, Brockman stared after her in frank, if ambiguous, wonderment.

  “You’re asking how she knew about the fire,” said Junior.

  Brockman looked down on him as if a stone had suddenly broken out in song—­and a nonsensical song at that. But Junior was not to be deterred.

  “You see, she sees things,” he declared. “How she sees is not for us to understand. She just does.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Burned and Breakfasted

  THEY WENT OUT late in the afternoon to view the fire’s aftermath. Making an excursion of it, they took a picnic lunch of bread, cheese, and smoked pork. Kate wore her church outfit and Junior his felt top hat. The old man took his shoe hammer.

  Just beyond the mounds they found a fork stuck in the middle of the road, tines down. Almira had seen this before, in the highlands of Missouri and Arkansas, when someone had wanted to turn a threatening wind from their property. Here, they thought the magic might also be good for diverting fires.

  Moving on, the old man drove a cartwheel over the fork, knocking it down.

  “What did you do that for?” asked Kate.

  The twin humps of his shoulders rose and subsided in a gesture that seemed to say, Why not?

  Soon they reached a seared expanse, encrusted and issuing little curls of smoke like a pan of scalded milk venting through its skin. Here and there stood the remains of barns and fences the fire had overtaken, their uprights standing black and riblike. Relentless as it had been, the burning came to a sudden, inexplicable stop along a front whose position was as arbitrary as it was vast. Closer, and its smaller casualties became visible: little blackened carcasses of mice and rats who had only just escaped the hot ground, only to crawl a few feet into green grass and die. Where there were no ­people to deter them, crows fluttered down to pick at the banquet.

  Kate sat in the bed of the wagon with her eyes on all of this but not seeing it. Her mind was still on the encounter with Mary Ann Dick. What could have possessed the woman to come to her just then? Why, on that day of all days? If her years with the cards had taught her anything, it was that there were very few coincidences, very few eventualities without some hidden significance. If she were her own client, she would have advised herself to think about how her own conduct had invited near-­disaster. For it was a lie that mystics like herself blamed the stars for every turn of ill-­fortune. More often, she called not for her clients to resign themselves to Fate, but to strive for self-­knowledge.

  However mystifying, Kate’s encounter
with Mary Ann Dick had one lasting consequence. To her mind, in defying Almira in particular, she had shown character, because it was something she had never done before. Scorned her, yes—­shown disrespect and circumvented her intentions—­of course. But this time she had looked Almira straight in the eye and shown her what’s for.

  At last, she had exercised the prerogative her position gave her, for the purpose of sparing a life that was, truth to tell, an obstacle to her happiness. When Kate considered her sacrifice, she felt much like a heroine in a novel, handsome and misunderstood and doomed by her nobility to a life of loneliness. It made her want to cry, this splendid gesture of hers. And it made her very pleased, for it meant she had evened the scales with Mrs. Dick. She had proved she was worthy.

  Her worth was enhanced further by a remarkable incident at the Cherryvale Hotel. She had delivered a tray to a crew of rowdy railroad surveyors who proceeded to breakfast directly after a night crawling the saloons. Having separated herself from the earthy stink and grasp of the ringleader, she turned to see another patron, sitting upright with his hands around his throat. He sat alone and his face had gone dusky like a wine stain; in his eyes was the kind of panic of a man who had lost his last handhold on his way over a cliff. There was a ham steak on the plate in front of him, covered with onions and gravy and the utensils he had dropped as he began to choke.

  Kate went to him at once. No longer having the breath to cough, the man was pounding his napkined chest with his fists. Kate, floating before him like the harbinger of his Maker, took his hands gently in hers. Drawn into the shining blackness of her eyes, he calmed. She laid an open hand on his cheek. As if dazzled by the glare at the threshold of Heaven, he blinked, and seemed to forget he was choking. “Only faith. Only love,” she whispered, and beneath her nourishing gaze he attempted a last swallow—­and succeeded.