Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  But Kate would not gratify Almira. Instead of weeping, she kept a studious, monkish silence. And indeed, a life of penitent devotion appealed to her. Unappreciated by modernity, she came to think she had missed her proper century, that her soul was intended for a better, more profound time. In a nunnery—­or better yet as her male counterpart in one of the great monasteries of Europe—­she would have been free from the petty preoccupations of shopkeeps and hoteliers. With nothing expected of her but to pray, she could have studied the ancient classics, written masses and cantatas and requiems, become expert in mineralogy or entomology or icon painting. The potential range of her endeavors would have been so limitless, so grand compared to her life in that tiny, miserable cabin, that she felt the impulse to cry over her thwarted career. But this was exactly what she would not do in front of Almira.

  And then, of course, there was the object of the praying, to that Nazarene and his entourage of hypocrites. That would not have suited her. But she guessed she wouldn’t have been the only one in the rectory who secretly despised that figure on the cross. Everyone made his compromises.

  On the fourth day she got up, stripped to her shift, and bathed herself on the back porch. She used the wooden tub in which they mixed water and lye and meat drippings to make soap, still ringed with grease. When she was done, she felt not so much clean as marinaded, the soap leaving an acrid odor and a glossy sheen on her skin. After dressing, she donned her sun hat and walked the seven and a quarter miles to Cherryvale, picking wildflowers along the way to decorate the tables she would wait upon. When she arrived at the hotel, she was tired but in good spirits, glowing with perspiration and soap drippings, and not thinking of Leroy Dick at all.

  Mr. Moore looked up, drinking in the image of her as he usually did. But there was a glassy impassivity in his eyes and a reticence about his mouth that she had never seen in him before. She put it down to her unexplained absence.

  “Aren’t these pretty?” she remarked, presenting the flowers to him. “The lobelia are in bloom, and these are coreopsis.”

  “Welcome back,” he said, in a tone not welcoming at all. Now that she was close she saw the tiny beads of sweat peeking from the pores over his mouth.

  “What’s this, Jeremiah? I lay up sick for a few days and you don’t remember me?”

  “Couldn’t forget you, Kate,” he said, fidgeting, “except—­might you step back here for a moment?”

  He crooked a thumb toward his office. Kate, still determined to make light of the situation, offered her elbow for him to escort her, saying, “I’m not sure a proper lady would accept such an invitation. Shall I fetch a chaperone?”

  Moore gave a perfunctory laugh. But when the door was closed he dropped her arm and retreated behind the bulky bankers’ desk he had imported from Chicago. On the day it was delivered, she had swept the road dust off it for him, polished it, and placed a vase of daisies next to the blotter. Now its function was only to keep a safe distance between them.

  “What’s on your mind?” she said, concealing her unease by unfastening the buttons on her gloves.

  “You should know we’ve had complaints about certain members of our staff. I usually pay no mind to such talk, but when it becomes serious enough to cost us business, any responsible manager is compelled to act.”

  “Members of your staff . . . such as myself?”

  “You should know I consider myself less beholden to petty moralizing than the typical businessman in this camp. I’ve spent my share of time in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia. But a liberality of mind can never be an excuse for bad business. And any competent proprietor must take account of sentiment in the community.”

  “What are they saying about me?”

  He sat down, laying his hands athwart the crest of his belly.

  “It scarcely bears repeating. I don’t credit most of it.”

  “Are they calling me a witch, Jeremiah?”

  He fixed her with his eyes. The suggestion had surprised him.

  “No, not at all. No—­there’s talk of certain transactions occurring in the rooms, of a personal nature. The kind of thing that brings down the reputation of an establishment.”

  So they were calling her a harlot. In a way, she was disappointed by the quality of the lies against her. To traffic in black magic at least conveyed a certain formidability; to be a public whore was to suffer a common, passive sort of disrepute. Any woman could open her legs and ruin herself in that way. It was her impression many did.

  “Who is saying these things to you? The wives? Mary Ann Dick?”

  “I don’t think it proper to say.”

  “Not proper to say? And yet it’s proper to level such demeaning charges? Are these the fruits of your liberality? To insult me and my family? To think what my father would say when he finds out. And my poor mother . . .” And she let her voice catch, her eyes to mist. Moore shot to his feet immediately, kerchief at the ready. To accuse a young woman of public venality was one thing, but to allow her to weep into her bare hand was unthinkable.

  “Er, you should also know that I never approved of my employees distributing handbills to guests. The nature of your . . . side concern . . . is none of my business. But I would like to think I control which ser­vices are presented at this hotel.”

  “Do you care if it’s true?”

  “What is true?”

  “What they say about me.”

  He sat down again and resumed his pensive posture. “It doesn’t matter. Things like this take on a life of their own.”

  “So there’s nothing I can say to convince you?”

  “I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can say.”

  And there it was: a certain stress he laid on the words you can say, as if there was something else she might do for him instead. But he was halfhearted, as if the proposition was something he had just thought of on the spot. They stared at each other, she in frank astonishment, he in rising embarrassment, flushing to the crown of his bald head.

  “I’m disappointed to hear that, Jeremiah. I know I’ve allowed myself to be familiar with you, because I felt comfortable doing so. But I see now I’ve overestimated your quality as a man. Today, you have shown yourself as nothing other than a shit coward—­a shit coward who can’t even bring himself to make an indecent proposition. Good day.”

  Moore parted his lips as if to make a rejoinder—­but thought better of it. His face was not only flushed now but a deep shade of purple. It was the same color as the flaccid organ of that miner she had seen dead in Almira’s tent.

  She collected the few items she had left in the pantry—­an apron, a book of poems for slow hours on the job, a bonnet for sunny days on the walk home. As she came out, she caught the eyes of Alice Acres; there was a gleam of recognition at first, and a softening as if in sympathy. But then a shadow fell over them, like a crypt walled in for good. Kate didn’t speak to her and was hailed by no one as she crossed the lobby and stepped onto the planks of the sidewalk.

  Standing there, she noticed that none of the men were giving her the usual eye, the once-­over each performed according to his skill. It was a relief and also unnerving, this sudden revulsion she perceived in everyone around her. For the first time she yearned to see Junior’s devoted gaze as he waited for her in the wagon. But she had long ago broken him of this courtesy.

  She remained impassive as she walked out of town and into the prairie. But when she was alone her face cracked. Unwilling to betray her feelings to the crickets and grass stalks, she clapped her hand over her mouth and gave up a convulsed sob. The trail ahead of her became blurry, and the leathery smell under her nose was redoubled as her tears wet her kid-­clad fingers.

  It wasn’t until she passed the Brockman place and glimpsed the mounds that she felt her mood shift. Instead of wretched, she became determined. For working an inconsequential job in some minor town had never b
een her purpose. Her horizons had always been wider than other ­people’s, the quality of her ambition grander and finer. If they didn’t want her, so much the worse for them! Their petty, ignorant smugness would be repaid in full, in a different coin than they’d ever suspect.

  Approaching the door of the Bender cabin, her cheeks dried by the afternoon breeze, she knew for certain that her time was at hand. For her audacity, for her uniqueness among the dullards and rubes and puffed-­up moralizers, she had to be destined for renown. They would reckon with her.

  She found Almira beside the stove, scouring her stew pot with sand and elbow grease. She looked at Kate in the half-­inquiring, half-­accusing way she had greeted her for years. Kate responded with her usual weary disdain, turning away to unpin her hat.

  “Back early today.”

  “You miss nothing,” said Kate.

  “Ready to get back to work?”

  Damn her, what does she see in me? Kate wondered. Without looking back, she strode toward the back door and, with the kind of dramatic pause she had seen among hack actors, delivered a line over her shoulder:

  “Maybe.”

  THE DICKS PUT off the purchase of a new reaper for another year. The decision was reached by default, as the ­couple’s communication had become less frequent, more wary. For as long as they’d known each other, they had spoken more profoundly by touch than by words. Though Mary Ann had thought him pretty enough in his youth, she had not truly fallen for him until that moment when he handed her up to her seat in her father’s buggy. The sensation of his fingers grasping hers had made her so weak at the knees she could barely manage the climb. For the first time she felt what the other girls saw in Leroy. Embarrassed by these feelings, she turned her face away from him and murmured her farewell so indistinctly that Leroy thought he had somehow offended her.

  Standoffish around him, she became ever more an object of fascination to the young Leroy, who was all too used to batted lashes and fans snapped shut in his presence. Needing to pursue a woman seemed to him as absurd a notion as feeding a prairie dog. Yet this new desire appealed to him: where his effortless popularity had given him an air of indolent, almost feminine passivity, the pursuit of a goal focused his energies in a way that made him feel more of a man. Even his father perceived the change in him, and approved.

  He wooed Mary Ann in the customary ways, starting with chaste walks around the churchyard after ser­vices. Then he moved on to gallant offers to dance at barn-­raisings and weddings, and twilight walks among the cornstalks, fingers entwined. As she seemed to yield, Leroy realized that he had not offended her after all. She was, in fact, like all the other girls, flattered by his presence. But she was also different, seeming to take his interest as some bit of undeserved but unnecessary good luck bestowed on her by the universe. She wanted him, but if she couldn’t have him, she would survive. Next to the emotional fireworks he had seen in certain other girls, her fatalism was refreshing. The stakes of spending time with her seemed lower, without tension. Before long he came to look forward to this ease in her company. When their conversation inevitably turned to his ultimate intentions, the prospect of marriage didn’t appeal to him, exactly. But he couldn’t stomach the thought of losing her to someone else either.

  They were wed in the same church where both attended Sunday school, wearing the same clothes they were confirmed in. His best man was his brother Temple. Though older, Temple had not yet found a bride. The way he glowered through the ser­vice, a frown cracking his features along the latticework of his scars, showed that he was not happy to have been beaten to the altar by his little brother. When the time came for him to deliver the ring to the groom, he fumbled around his breast pocket, pretending he had forgotten it. But when Mary Ann stiffened with disapproval and a stir went through the crowd, Temple forgot his japes and handed over the hardware.

  There was a lot Leroy waited to tell her until after they married. He started with the sad tale of Ernest Tubbs and his ill-­fated stay at the Dick farm. She was the first person not directly involved in the affair he had ever discussed it with, and he did it with the relief of a man guarding a secret for too long. She listened with the patience requisite for Kansas brides, who had collectively heard almost as many tales of sabotage, murder, and rape done in the Territory as had been committed. And like virtually all her sisters, she forgave her man his trespasses. For lying there in her bridal shift, the bed still stained with the gift of her maidenhood, what else could she possibly do? As much as any gunman coming off the prairie with his weapon drawn, she was committed.

  When his confession turned to his jayhawking days in the ’60’s, though, her mood changed. As Leroy described the moonlight attacks, the chases, the shootouts and the corpses, a hardness came over her face. As he kept talking, her features froze into a pitiless mask, her eyes retreating into their sockets like an idol to some unyielding god.

  He plunged on a little longer, describing the sickness that had come over him as he looked on the bodies of the men he had killed. He recounted how he, Fess, and Bannerman had tried to soldier on after the massacre, tangling with Defensives and secessionists all over the county, but the relish had gone out of the enterprise for him. After Quantrill sacked Lawrence in ’64, the three of them swore sacred vengeance for the two hundred killed there. They rode hard for four days, pursuing the bushwhackers south, until something almost perceptibly broke in Leroy’s heart. Suddenly, he had nightmares that woke him from cold, cadaverous sleeps—­woke him in total darkness when the fires in their bivouacs had gone out and the stars were hidden away behind blank overcast. There was a particular terror in that, the plunging from nightmare to total darkness that refused to betray if he was asleep or waking. It got so bad, he confessed, that he stopped embarking on rides that would keep him out overnight on moonless nights. He took a lot of ridicule from his partners on that, his confession of weakness in the face of the enemy. But the enemies he was fighting were no longer the two-­legged kind.

  As he told her this, the way she drew back from him finally caused him to stop and wait. Into the ensuing silence crept the clicking of a locust outside the window, measuring off the moments in a lazy, chilled cadence. It had almost fallen silent, like a watch coming to the end of its wind, when Mary Ann spoke:

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Those six words were enough. In reply to his vulnerability, to the blackest hollows of his heart, they froze him. But she wasn’t finished:

  “Because I don’t want to hear it. It is unworthy of my husband. I don’t care who has not the benefit of God’s good grace as a result of your actions. I don’t care what side you were on. The Negroes can rot under the ground they worked for all I care, and the Union too. But no husband of mine will not show me that kind of weakness again. Do you understand?”

  Too humiliated to look at her, he nodded at the bedclothes.

  “Good. Now come and put it in me again. Until I get to like it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Necessity

  I’ll dye my petticoats red,

  And face them with the yellow

  I’ll tell the dyster’s lad

  I follow the Lichtbob fellow

  —­ “Katy Cruel”

  PERHAPS OUT OF pity, or perhaps because it seemed too good to be true, none of the other Benders questioned why Kate didn’t go into Cherryvale anymore. They made preparations instead. Junior spruced up the front of the grocery, policing trash and nailing loose boards and generally making the establishment plausible again. The old man mounded up more man-­sized furrows in the orchard. Almira gathered ingredients for one of her signature stew pots—­the kind that smelled good, but she never bothered to sample for taste because no one was ever intended to survive the first spoonful.

  The next candidates appeared that very afternoon—­another father and son. They were dressed in identical heavy black woolens, wearing
low caps with shallow brims over their eyes. Back on the trail they left their horse, a gray with a sway back and a mountain of impedimenta. Junior’s eyes lit up as he imagined the possibilities buried in all that loot; the old man, glad to be confronted with an opportunity to ply his trade, cracked his dry and mollusklike lips, a grin from the bottom of the bilge.

  “Добрый вечер. Можем ли мы приобрести некоторые результаты от вас?” asked the father.

  “What do you say, friend?” Kate asked.

  “Я сказал, мы можем купить коробку спичек?” And he began to make a stroking motion in the air, as if plucking an invisible harp.

  “We speak English. Or German. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  She shrugged, turned back to Almira as if to turn the problem over to her.

  “At least we know they aren’t from around here,” said Almira.

  “Bound to be something worth the freight in all that kit,” observed Junior.

  “Careful.” Kate looked at the boy, who stared back not with his father’s expectant incomprehension but something like amusement. It was likely the child knew more English than his paw.

  “What are you waiting for?” demanded Almira. “Invite them!”

  She looked at them for a long minute, measuring her reluctance against the pair’s appealing naiveté. The death of a child was a crime that couldn’t be rationalized so easily. And she still suffered a dull, remnant ache in her chest from her recent setbacks.

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Kate.”