Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  The other diners at the ten o’clock breakfast sitting were silent. But when they saw the man was saved, his head bent forward to savor the breath she had restored, and Kate coolly retrieving her tray on her way to the kitchen, they gave her a polite round of applause. This acclaim carried her through the doors and went on for a few moments more, until she came out and made a curtain call, and the surveyors whooped and whistled, and the rest set down their coffees and cigarettes and gave her a solid ovation.

  When she returned to the kitchen she found Alice Acres eyeing her. “I’ve been serving here since it was bare rafters,” Alice remarked, “and I never had occasion to save a man’s life.”

  “I’d just as soon left it to you.”

  “Didn’t seem that way,” Alice said, and winked.

  On her handbill, Kate had claimed she could “heal all sorts of diseases; can cure blindness, fits, palsies and all such diseases.” Most of these conditions, she believed, had no basis in the physical body but were manifestations of maladies of spirit. Treating them lay well within the power of the tarot, which conferred self-­knowledge and therefore a power to heal that enlarged and complemented book medicine.

  Saving the choking Frühstücker in front of witnesses established her fame like no handbill ever could. In the following days she found messages left for her at the hotel desk. At homesteads five, ten, even twenty miles away, there were agues and tremors and pustulations to treat, and colicky babies and mothers with melancholy. Men had pains in their extremities that would not ease or eyes that would not focus. One invitation described a blacksmith who had been kicked in the temple by a horse: when he regained consciousness he seemed fine, but could no longer put names to his tools. Another woman, the mad wife of a farmer beyond the Mounds, had to be tied to her bed because she refused to eat anything but chips of broken lime from the walls of their cabin.

  As Kate read these appeals, she shook her head and marveled at the depth and variety of human misery. Meanwhile, Mr. Moore watched her with an impatient twitchiness about him, checking his watch. He too had never seen a waitress with these kinds of extramural skills—­and was not sure he liked it.

  She took all the business she could. Sometimes she would lay on hands, or recite charms derived from the Lesser Key; more often her ser­vices lay in simply affirming that her patients were beyond her power to heal. Yet this alone helped some of the afflicted, who revived and brightened in her presence. Desperate wives watched her caress their husbands and were glad. Windows and doors were shut to preserve the fragrance she left behind in rooms.

  Though she couldn’t know it at the time, this was the zenith of Kate’s public regard in Labette County.

  So busy did she become that she was obliged to take Junior’s help in running her out to her clients. On the trail they sat mostly in silence, with Junior catching her eye when he could and Kate not giving him the opportunity, until their eyes met by accident and Junior would flush and look away. When she was at the cards or visiting sickrooms, Junior hung around outside, watering the horses and talking to the husbands and ranch hands over the trough. “That’s money well spent,” he would say, indicating Kate with his chin. “She’s a genius. She can do some things Jesus could do.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Maybe she could rid my crop of those tarnation beetles, then,” ventured the husband, which caused Junior to lower his head and take great interest in his horse’s drinking.

  Kate encountered the man when she came out. His lips were in a sly twist, his expression so untoward that she thought he was trying to be indecent. But then he said, “Howdy Jesus!” and laughed at her.

  She was furious—­while she was resigned to be scorned sometimes and misunderstood most, she never, ever suffered being laughed at.

  When the wagon was out of earshot of the farm she rounded on Junior. “So what did you say to that man?”

  “Nothing. The truth.”

  “The truth isn’t for you to declare!” she cried. “I don’t ask you to drive to keep your mouth flapping. Just drive and keep it shut.”

  He muttered something like “shouldn’t be talking that way,” but so inarticulately that Kate ignored it.

  After choir practice that Sunday, and quite without planning it, Kate found herself alone with Leroy in the church. There was a nervous silence as he put away the hymnals and she pretended to tighten the bun in her hair that supported her hat. When she turned around, he was just out of arm’s reach as he closed the shutters. Impulsively, just out of the urgency of her need, she came half a step forward. Her gaze skimming the floor, she felt the gravity of his presence. She raised her eyes. Only a few inches the taller, he seemed equally affected by her, setting and resetting his hat until he held it in front of him, brim curled in his sweating fist. She was affronted by this hat that existed between them—­an obstacle that had suddenly sprung up between her and a prize she had not anticipated reaching quite yet but wanted now with a childlike, unreasoning intensity. She grasped the hat, giving it a halfhearted tug. He resisted, and she persisted, keeping hold of it.

  The moment matured, ripened, and rotted into awkwardness. He placed his hand on hers, not as a lover, but to disengage it gently, paternally. She blushed, not watching him as he made apologetic murmurs and withdrew.

  The door clanked shut. Alone, she cursed herself, flailing her fist against her thigh.

  “Fool. You fool. You little fool!” she cried.

  LEROY SAID NOTHING about this encounter when he got home. He did behave strangely in Mary Ann’s view, however, as he discovered her and Gertrude Dienst conversing over cigarettes at the stove. He apologized and retired to his bedroom—­something he never did in the afternoons.

  “Odd,” said Mary Ann.

  “A lot’s been odd since the new neighbors,” Mrs. Dienst remarked, eyes cast down and away in the posture she usually adopted for passing along stories.

  “Well, out with it then.”

  “Not much to tell, really. The Moneyhon baby has taken colic, I hear. Quite sudden it seems. Never been that way before.”

  “Well if the county turned on its ear every time a babe had a bad night . . .”

  “True, but that’s not all. We’ve ourselves got a clock that won’t run. It stopped the other day, right around when she did her latest miracle in the hotel. Father’s been at the works every night, but nothing’s for it. It won’t turn.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And there’s more,” Mrs. Dienst said, and coming closer, went on sotto voce: “Billy Toles can’t get nothing from his cows. All of ’em are as dry as week-­old pats. And you know what he says he saw when he was in sight of the Bender place?”

  “What?”

  “She was wringing out rags over a milking bucket. Wringing the milk from his cows.” And she leaned back after that as if to enjoy the spectacle of Mary Ann’s reaction.

  She laughed. “I didn’t think anybody believed in that kind of witchery anymore!”

  “Call it what you want, but isn’t it odd that they always have as many stores as they need, but keep hardly any animals?”

  “Maybe they buy their stores.”

  “On what income? If they get ten paying customers up there a month they get a thousand.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Mary Ann regarded the ashes at the tip of her smoke before flicking them into the stove. She wasn’t one to set stock in stories of charms and curses and necromancy. But nor could she deny that there was a foul air around the Bender claim, which she had experienced herself. Afraid of seeming foolish, she never told her friend about her reading with Kate Bender. After all, believing that cows could be milked at a distance was one thing, but admitting she had personally sought esoteric advice on her personal affairs was quite another. And
so she muted her skepticism. Taking Mary Ann’s silence as agreement, Gertrude felt entitled to believe her own gossip.

  Tales of odd goings-­on became as common as buffalo grass in the neighborhood and spread faster. George Mortimer, who had learned of the Bender rumors thirdhand from Mrs. Dienst and his wife, suddenly reported that his rifle wouldn’t shoot straight. No matter how much he fiddled with the sight, testing it on targets, his shot would always drift to the left when he shot at anything live. On hearing of this charmed gun, his friends were moved to perceive their own signs, like horseshoes suddenly found arms down, spilling their good fortune from their crooks. When none of the Benders were around, conversation revolved around them; when they were present, it dwelled on such obvious inanities, like the hymn chosen for the Sabbath ser­vice, that even Junior wondered if everyone had gone simple.

  Or gone mad, as Kate suspected when she got home from church one Sunday to find the train of her skirt crusted with salt. On seeing this, Almira stood back and sucked in her breath.

  “I’ve seen that before in a camp in the stade of Kentucky,” she said. “You are marked a consort of the devil, Frau Doktor Professor.”

  Junior held up a polished brass pot lid for Kate to see herself. The salt had been spread on the pew just before she sat down. If it stuck, it was supposed to prove she was a witch—­and there was much salt stuck in the folds of her skirt. She had encountered such superstitions before in a hundred mining and logging camps from Appalachia and to the Sierras, the primitive craft of ignoramuses who understood nothing of the subtleties of gnostic science. There was scarcely a tent of a whore and fishwife that didn’t have its devices, its evil-­turning charms. She pitied them.

  And yet, she couldn’t allow herself to come under attack without some kind of response. As she was changing out of her soiled clothes, and poured a draught of tepid water over the nape of her neck at the washbasin, she considered her occult options. But there was really only one—­the same one as when she prepared the spot on the wall for the “glyphs.”

  The rest of them were soon gathered in the cabin, watching at a discreet remove as Kate drew on the boards with a piece of charcoal. The figure she rendered was based on a figure from the Lesser Key: a hermaphroditic homunculus with big head, gangling limbs, bull’s-­eyes for breasts, and oversized penis.

  Almira and Junior were silent, pupils of a teacher introducing incomprehensible math. But then they heard a strange sound—­an odd, rhythmic rasping, as if something had struck a rat funny. All of them, including Kate at the wall, turned to the old man: he was slouching there with legs crossed, pipe in hand and poised as his lips cracked open to show wet, black gums. The way his mouth bent, and the otherworldly sawing that came out of it, indicated something remarkable: he was laughing.

  Kate glared at them all in turn, disdaining their coarseness. She couldn’t make them understand the technology—­some minds were too primitive for such things—­but she could still protect them with it. When she was satisfied with the figure, she stepped back, raised hands with palms open to the wall and recited:

  “Dullix, ix, ux. Yea, you can’t come over Pontio; Pontio is above Pilato . . .”

  THE THREAT TO Kate’s reputation was followed by word of missing travelers, last seen somewhere on the trail between Independence and Fort Scott. All of them were males, on the trail alone, and most were not important enough for formal inquiries to be made. When private investigators or family members did nose about, blame naturally fell on Indians and road agents and animal attacks. Local inns, like the Benders’, were never the first objects of suspicion.

  Rumors of lost spirits increased the sense that some malefic air had settled over the county. These were precisely the kinds of things that happened when the wrong types were allowed to ply their trades among God-­fearing folk. No one believed at first that Kate Bender had anything directly to do with the disappearances. But the disappearances put everyone on edge, and willing to believe the worst about matters far smaller and meaner. Two days after Gertrude Dienst told Mary Ann Dick about the “bewitched” cows, Billy Toles shot three of them. “I’ll be damned if I fill a witch’s bucket a day longer!” he declared. The next week, Kate went to church with Almira and Junior. There was something different this time. Her male neighbors had always been wont to sneak her subtle glances or whisper untoward comments just beneath her hearing. But now it seemed all pretense to civility had been dropped. Men made their impertinences directly to her face. Behind the backs of their wives, mothers, and daughters, they gestured acts she couldn’t understand but sensed insulted her modesty. Almira noticed them too and was none too happy to explain each outrage in detail.

  “The miners used that face when they wanted a cocksucking but could not ask for it,” she explained. “Do you know this, cocksucking?”

  “Yes, I know,” Kate growled, her cheeks flashing red. Despite her convictions, it made her uneasy to hear such a foul word used casually, on consecrated ground.

  “You know it only from books, I think!”

  After the ser­vice, as she strolled the yard to make the customary pleasantries with the women, she was met with glacial coolness. Mrs. Dienst smiled and saluted but her eyes refused to see her; the Moneyhon and Mortimer women offered up nothing but curt nods. Mary Ann Dick, who certainly understood the secret they shared, seemed atypically withholding, and then rushed off to stay by Leroy’s side, which she had never done in all the months Kate had attended ser­vices.

  And so it appeared the rumors of witchcraft had had their usual effect: when a young woman was convicted in the public mind, the respectable ladies of the community shunned her, and the men suddenly felt themselves freed from all scruples. Especially galling were the hardened attitudes of the women who had sought her advice, in some cases just a week before. To her courtesies, to her professional discretion with her secrets, they repaid her with contempt.

  It was an occupational hazard of faith healers that their patrons were indebted to them. Indeed, a practitioner’s very effectiveness depended on a spiritual potency she had and her patrons lacked. Consulting her made them feel their inadequacy. Kate had seen it all before and took it in stride.

  None of this really mattered to her as long as Leroy was there. With relief, she turned away from those small minds, those peasants, the broke-­down purple wars. He was standing by the chapel doors, conversing with effortless affability with this or that person as his sculptured, tendoned hands grasped his hymnal. Seeing him, she could not help but love this ideal, this model of effortless virility. For look at him, the calm radiance about his person that charmed and entranced all about him. His physicality beguiled her—­it was the perfect complement to the spiritual power she had cultivated within herself. How could she not love him? How could ordinary women not love him, if only in their dull, bovine ways, offering him only those benefactions of the flesh any woman could?

  Kate imagined Mary Ann Dick attempting to please him—­or imagined it as best she could, for lack of direct experience. For as many times as she had glimpsed Almira in the act, the latter had never sold Kate herself, never let her lure be snatched. And with Almira it was always a brief, stinking, violent act—­a shoving, hurried thing, with the two grunting and the adipose waves coursing up varicose, puckered thighs. It disgusted Kate, and it disgusted her still more how much the men enjoyed it. Dogs performed the act with more dignity in the streets.

  And so she moved toward him, unconscious of the space between them, the puddle of tobacco spit she strode upon, or her own body. She was aware only of the eyes that beheld him, and her throat burning for lack of the right words. As she approached, she saw him turn, saw his eyes settle on her. It was as if someone had opened an umbrella inside her chest, so fast did her heart swell.

  “Good morning, Leroy. Missus Dick,” she said, choosing her words deliberately. For him, she offered familiarity, the warmth of open arms and the female boso
m; for his wife, a bland formality.

  “Miss Bender,” replied Leroy. And his eyes did not avert but dwelled on her in a way that thrilled her at first. But as they fixed her for second after silent second, she grew afraid. For there was no response there to her summons, no heat. Only a blankness that felt like a dismissal. That, and a note of incomprehension in the set of his lips. With that glance, she felt totter the entire edifice of her hopes. Her voice shook as she took the hint, saying, “A lovely sermon today from the minister, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, lovely,” replied Mary Ann, staring.

  “Good morning, then.”

  “Good morning.”

  Kate turned away and proceeded directly to the wagon. She kept smiling and walked with the unhurried ease expected of the occasion.

  He doesn’t love me.

  Her legs felt alien to her now, foreign mechanisms she was obliged to work. There was some tissue rending in her that ran from her chest to her groin and back again. Junior appeared beside her, offering his hand as she stiffly mounted the seat. She saw his lips move but expected nothing of his words and didn’t hear them. He knew enough to drive her home without speaking again.

  He doesn’t love me.

  In the yard beside the cabin, Almira watched from the washtub as Kate alighted without waiting for Junior to help her down. She ran inside without saying anything, affliction flashing on her face. If other tantrums from years before were any guide, she expected Kate to fall on her bed and cry into the bedclothes until she tired and fell asleep. In the middle of the night she might wake and start again—­lamenting her loneliness, beseeching her father to come and rescue her, until Almira yelled across the room for her to shut up or be strangled by morning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I Will Be Reckoned With

  KATE WAS TOO ill the next day to go to work. Nor did she show up at the hotel for the next three days. Instead, she lingered in bed from late afternoon to late morning, reading as long as the light lasted, staring at the wall as the gloom rose and Almira lit the lamp. Kate knew what Almira was expecting: an eruption of emotion that would mark her as weak, as defeated by circumstances she was foolish enough to challenge. She perceived her watching from the stove, spitefully anticipating.