Chapter Nineteen
Dispositions
APRIL, 1873
COLONEL ALEXANDER YORK was flushing marmots when they brought him word of his brother’s disappearance. The colonel always went out with his work crews to supervise the clearance of pests. They took a tanker pulled by four big percherons and a hundred-foot length of rubber hose he had custom-made in Ohio, which was a particular pride of his. In each infested area, they parked the wagon and ran the line out to. When the yipping creatures dove into their lodges, the crew flooded each one until water poured from the back holes and the prairie dogs washed out, half drowned.
Some of the vermin were more stubborn than others, inspiring a lively betting game on how long they would hold out. Colonel York did not approve of wagering. But during the war he’d learned the value of letting his men keep certain small vices, lest they acquire worse ones. So he kept the stakes in his cigar pocket, and kept the official time with the gold pocket watch he’d received from his regiment when he laid down his commission. Nobody ever argued over a bet after the colonel had certified a winner. He wasn’t the kind of man to suffer questioning of his probity.
By sundown the pasture was cleared, a pile of small waterlogged carcasses in a mound as high as his gun belt, toothy pink mouths gaping. They didn’t need to be arranged this way; they could have been deposited directly into the ditch his men had already prepared and limed. But York liked to have the fruits of his effort laid out clearly before disposal.
It was a preference that had raised eyebrows before, after that small action in Missouri when a company of his men had cornered an enemy column in a ravine outside of Westport. The enemy called themselves Defensives—but they were Confederates, or as close as made no difference—and by the end of the day there were scores of them dead and scattered in the field. The newspapermen liked a clean count, so York had the corpses collected and arranged in as pretty a line of cold bushwhackers as Jim Lane himself could have wished. Each man was laid out in dignified repose, cap stuck on head, weapon by his side. “Fish Market York” they called him, for his flair with display. There was never any need to guess the number of dead and wounded when Colonel Alexander York carried the field.
Today he’d bagged 216 marmots. His crew were halfway through the pile, passing them hand-to-hand to the pit, when a rider came up with a message from his sister-in-law in Fawn Creek, south of Independence. He perused her finely penned note, the letter in his right hand as he clutched a drowned rodent in his left. After he had read it three times, he fixed his eye on the boy who delivered it.
“How long’s your pap been gone?”
“Well on three days. Hain’t never been this late before.”
“Maybe he found himself some diversion in Fort Scott,” said the colonel. The joke raised an obsequious laugh from his men, but was of course preposterous. Everyone knew that Dr. William York was not the kind of man who sought “diversions.” He was, in fact, just the opposite: the kind of man who seemed impervious to the weaknesses of mere mortals. His brother would never pain his family with an unexcused disappearance. At least not willingly.
In Independence and beyond there had been word of disappearances of wayfarers along the Osage. Farm boys had busied themselves concocting dark rumors of man-eating boars, packs of slavering panthers, ghostly Indian avengers. Gangs of children danced around lone travelers as they rode out of town, telling them they would die. Adults frowned on such fear-mongering. Yet they still advised travelers to go out only in parties and to keep their weapons in easy reach.
The colonel didn’t need to ask if his brother had heeded those warnings; his nephew’s face told him all he needed to know.In ordinary times he would have turned the boy away with an admonishment to be patient—his father would turn up. But the times had become extraordinary.
“Come with me to the house,” he commanded the boy. Then, with an air of a man forsaking all pleasure, he handed the dead marmot to the man next to him. That man was Evelyn Whistler, who had come out of Philadelphia to serve as the colonel’s field adjutant. After the war, he took the job overseeing York’s properties. Where the colonel was thin and copiously maned, Whistler was stout and bald, and naturally dour by temperament. He took the drenched carcass with calm forbearance, as if he could expect life to offer him nothing better.
York leaned in. “How many guns can we get on short notice?”
“I don’t know.” Whistler shrugged. “Half a dozen. Ten.”
“Get ’em.”
York mounted his horse, rode out a ways, steered it around suddenly. “And damn it, the man who leaves that tarnation hose out overnight will be cold as a wagon tire when I get back!”
His house was a sixteen-room mansion done up in the French provincial style favored by his wife. The hipped roof and arched dormers had offered some interesting challenges in construction, but the finished house embarrassed him. For he accepted he was no country squire, but at his best a competent soldier, and at worst an unapologetic savage. When he was young and came west, he did so without any of the high ideals of “Christianizing the wilderness” or “spreading the boon of civilization.” He wanted nothing more than to get away from all that, to leave behind the world of ordinances and obligations, qualifications and courtesies, flounces, follies and cozies, crockeries and foreigners. For men like himself, the move to the Territories was an act of destruction, a sweeping away of all that suffocating excreta. In its place there would ideally arise—nothing.
Yet here he was, living in a house that represented everything he’d fled. His failure was total, for no matter how far he went, everything he loathed would follow as surely as his own shadow. His impotence gave him a permanent sense of being under siege. And indeed, the only part of the house he liked was the second floor gallery. Winding around three sides, bounded by an ornate rail studded with wrought-iron fleurs-de-lis, the balcony made an excellent firing position.
He changed for the trail—knee-length riding boots, jerkin of beaten leather, wide-brimmed hat lined with sealskin. On his way out he paused at a human skull he kept on his desk, flipping the hinged parietal bone to remove a handful of fresh cartridges. He had heard that ammunition stored in the brain case of a man gained special lethality.
When he came out, his search party was assembled. Seven men, all equipped for a long ride, with carbines and bandoliers across their chests. His nephew, innocent of arms, looked as useless as a boy prince in that crew.
“For Lord’s sake, someone give that boy a pistol,” he ordered. Launching himself off the block like a man half his age, the colonel steadied his mount and addressed his men.
“The doctor was last seen in Fort Scott. We’ll start there, and backtrack over every inch of the trail. We will miss no farmhouse, no privy, no dugout. If any man misses a sign, any single sign, he will answer to me.”
SINCE CLARRITY’S VISIT, so many had died at the “Grocry,” Kate lost count of them. Junior and the old man processed their guests with a speed and efficiency that required no comment. The cracker tin was filled and replaced by a hatbox, which was three-quarters full by the turn of ’73. The stream of “abandoned” or “bartered” goods they gave to Rudolph Brockman to turn into cash became so copious they didn’t bother explaining anymore, and Brockman didn’t ask. He simply examined them, took them off to Ottawa or Independence—the farther away, the better—and kept his cut from the proceeds.
Outside, the apple trees grew up straight and strong between the plots. Nourished by what lay below, some even bore good fruit. One autumn Saturday, Almira collected the best and baked them into a pie two feet across and four inches deep. She served it with fresh cream at the next Harmony Grove picnic. Kate watched with perverse fascination at her neighbors tucking into heaping plates of the pale, sickly flesh. Fittingly, the topic of conversation passed to the mystery of the disappearing travelers.
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br /> “I won’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve my suspicions about those vanished men,” pronounced Gertrude Dienst. Upon attracting the attention of everyone around her, she took a long pull on her lemonade to keep them in suspense. Then she said, “There never was a red Indian clever enough to do such mischief over so long a time. They don’t have the . . . application for it.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure o’ that,” objected Mrs. Moneyhon in the brogue that had not faded after ten years in America. “It’s the devil makes ’em devious.”
Mary Anne Dick stood by, nursing a cigarette that had burned almost to the fingers. She entertained no illusions about red Indians or wild animals or former Negro slaves out for revenge against the white race. To her mind, this evil had to dwell very close by, in plain sight, in a form innocent enough not to arouse suspicion. Moreover, the fiend must have the benefit of some kind of shelter, to work his crimes without fear of being seen. But, like Kate, she only listened to the others talk and did not share her thoughts.
Mrs. Dienst wasn’t ready to surrender her point: “Mark my words, there are white men responsible. Before long they’ll have to search every farm between here and Thayer. All of us will be suspected.”
“Stuff and applesauce!” retorted Moneyhon. “This isn’t Christian doing, I say.”
“Let us assign guilt to no single race of men,” said Minister Dienst, who approached the women with a spoon and a plate full of Almira’s pie. “The devil comes in the form of his choosing. Red, black, white—it matters not to him the form of his instrument. For he is the deceiver of the whole world. Remember Corinthians: ‘It is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.’ ”
Kate coughed at the sight of the minister quoting chapter and verse as corpuscles of Bender apple shone in his beard. No one else moved to help her as she struggled, so Brockman presented her with his mug of cider.
“From our apples?” she asked, rasping.
“From Iowa.”
She drank. The rest of their neighbors did not look at them, but Brockman’s gallantry to her was noted, and remembered.
Kate’s independent enterprise—her readings and therapeutic consultations—added little to her bankroll. Business had shriveled in most of the farms close in to Parsons and Cherryvale, as malign tongues continued to spread lies about the nature of her services. The good women of Labette County looked on her with contempt, while the men alternated between smug moralism and lusty impudence. Farther out, though, she was still in demand: she once had Junior drive her as far as Thayer to see a farmer about a possessed dog, and to Osage Mission to read the cards to an old woman suffering from ague. These trips, with their opportunities for her to speak to people other than Junior and Almira, kept alive the thinning tendril still connecting her with the rest of the human race. But they never paid enough for her to leave the Bender enterprise behind.
There came a time, she had found, when her loneliness faded, and mere aloneness conferred upon her a certain power. In the language of the mathematical texts she had once studied, she had weight, breadth, extension like every other mortal being, and yet she seemed to move along a unique set of axes. This private world intersected with the public one only in certain places—the shops in Cherryvale, choir practice, the serving table at the grocery—and there only with an increasing air of unreality.
And yet, as she studied these moments, she came to see the unreality stemmed from that unique perspective. Her axes not only intersected with the rest, they cut them through, like the beams of some hitherto unknown radiation that clarified flesh and exposed the bone. Conversations between strangers displayed their hidden meanings. Smiles transmogrified. The digits of extended hands betrayed their calculation. Patrons at the grocery lay with brains split on the sagittal plane, ugly dispositions pulsing forth. Never so insulated, she never before saw so much.
Time came when Brockman acted on his aspirations with Kate. He had been giving her significant glances for two years, dropping compliments, making clear that she was welcome to visit his claim any time. She would smile, showing him enough attention to flatter him but never enough to be confused with romantic interest. After all, they had come to need Brockman and his contacts among discreet merchants willing to sell the goods left behind by their “guests.” Of course, he could know nothing of how all those horses and saddles and shooting kits had really come to be orphaned. He enjoyed the profits too much to dare ask awkward questions. But disappointment in love, Almira warned her, might loosen his tongue in the company of the wrong people. Handling Brockman was her most demanding role—certainly more significant than the simple coquetry she used to distract their short-term visitors.
He paid her an unsolicited visit on an unseasonably warm March day. He stood below the single step of their doorway wearing a freshly laundered shirt and suspenders, examining his hat as if there was something deeply fascinating about it. His boots were caked with spring mud but shone enough around the clumps to show he had polished them that morning.
Men who approached women could be divided into two types: the ones who did so with smiles on their faces because they enjoyed the chase, and the ones without. Brockman was without. Instead, he showed the kind of frown a man wore when he took a steer to auction in a soft market, dubious of his return.
“Guten Morgen, Kate.”
“Good morning to you, Rudolph.”
“Uncommon fine day, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Well, I thought then that I might disturb ye to ask if ye might come out and walk . . . just out and about. If that’s agreeable.”
She reached out to tweak him in the breastbone. But he was standing too far away, so she poked the air. Brockman regarded this gesture with alarm—if she actually moved to hug him, he seemed as likely to draw his gun as let himself be touched.
“Of course I would, Rudolph. But Mother has me on the broom just now. Can we take a turn tomorrow, after choir?”
He winced at the complication. “I would be very pleased.”
Hat back on head, he retreated along the trail until he dropped into the low ground near his claim. There he paused, with only his head visible to her, standing as if arrested by some momentous thought. He stayed that way for a few moments as he weaved slightly on his feet, hands in his pockets.
Kate shut the door.
Inside, Almira glanced at her sidewise over her sewing. “Best be careful around that one,” she advised.
“Listen at you, making noises like a mother.”
From time to time Kate would order a new dress from a catalog, which the old man and Junior would fetch from the railhead at Thayer. Almira told her this was a waste of her money, and dangerous too, insofar as it made the family seem wealthier than mere grocery clerks ought to be. She could never wear such nice frocks in public. But it meant something to her to own the trappings of a finer sort of lady—one who belonged in the company of a dapper entrepreneur and cardsharp like her father. When she saw him again, she meant to look every bit as turned-out as the day she had been torn from him.
Next Sabbath, she discarded caution and wore something new to church: a dress of baby blue silk, trimmed in white velvet with mother-of-pearl buttons. On her head, a self-colored cap trimmed with spring wildflowers and a gauze veil. With the veil down, she saw the world as if through a heavenly vapor, pleasantly scattering the sunbeams and draining everything of its ugly details. The men of Harmony Grove preferred not to acknowledge her, but couldn’t help themselves, staring into a middle distance that included her in their peripheral vision. The women were better at concealing their envy, looking to each other significantly until their friends signaled it was safe to steal disapproving looks.
She didn’t hide herself in the back of the choir this time, but claimed front and
center of her section. There, Leroy confronted the scrubbed, shining, full-lipped presence of her. However unflappable he stood, there was no mistaking the extra color about his neck, the way he contrived to avoid looking directly at the altos. Kate, eyes on the hymnal, permitted herself the merest smile as she enjoyed the disruption around her. Nothing struck her quite as satisfying as exposing hypocrisy.
At the picnic, Brockman lost no time exacting what she had promised. With everyone watching, they went off on their own down the dirt road, Kate behind her veil again and Rudolph scurrying along beside, holding the hems of her skirts out of the dust.
“Wunderschön,” he was saying. “Ye are a visitation, my dear Kate. And don’t fear that I’ve missed the significance of thy timing, on the very day ye promised me thy company.”
“You presumptuous devil! To think a man would take such a high opinion of himself!”
They had walked out far enough among the fields not to be overheard. She curled her arm around his like folks in civilized places, as a lady always seeks the protection of her gentleman, and Rudolph gave a small start but did not recoil. The pressure of her gloved hand, and the eyes on him, loosened his tongue.
“It couldn’t be a secret how the feelings arose on thy account, Kate. I mean mine.”
Smiling, she said nothing. She’d often found that in situations like this, where a gentleman needed rebuffing but could not be written off, the less she said, the better.
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