Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  “Was he mahrdered?” asked John Moneyhon, his brogue manifesting a combination of “murdered” and “martyred.”

  Kneeling beside the body, Tom Mortimer worked to expose the face. The neck was stiff; turning the head was a struggle, until something seemed to crack within and the neck became an elastic stalk, free to turn beyond any natural angle.

  As sunlight fell on the dead man’s features they saw the eyelids were parted, the eyeballs purplish and protruding. The nose was entirely missing, leaving a chambered cleft. The neck itself was split open, the flesh rippling grotesquely, like crumpled paper. It didn’t take a coroner to tell that the victim’s face had been smashed with some blunt object, his throat carved from ear to ear.

  The body’s discovery electrified the crowd. A tumult of explanations expanded concentrically as witnesses in front turned to explain what they saw to those behind them. After that, cries of outrage, grief, and—­here and there—­an incongruous sprinkling of laughter from those who couldn’t take their tragedy without a dose of humor.

  That was when Leroy Dick finally became aware of the size of the throng. There were already more ­people gathered around the grave than had attended Sunday’s Harmony Grove meeting. Another mob swarmed around the Bender cabin. Still more ­people—­­people he didn’t recognize, ­people he never saw at church—­converged from every direction. He had no idea that many folk lived in this quarter of the state, much less Labette County.

  Some came mounted and some on wheeled conveyances, but most seemed to go on foot. How had they known to start this way in time? he wondered. How had they known there would be something to see? For he was used to uncovering acts of violence in his jayhawking days, and during the war, but this time felt different. In wartime, civilians stayed clear, lest they become casualties. Here, the carnage exerted an attraction that seemed as irresistible as it was ghastly. Some of the newcomers brought their children. Some bore picnic baskets.

  One useful arrival was Dr. Erasmus Keebles of Thayer. An older gentleman on the edge of retirement, he took a fast, fortifying swallow of rotgut before easing down from his buckboard. The crowd parted for him as he shambled over the uneven ground, one leg dragging from an old war wound. At the grave, he knelt and went through the formality of feeling for a pulse.

  “Is this your missing doctor?” he asked.

  The question drew blank faces. Though William York had lately become the most discussed man in Labette County, no one knew what he looked like in life. There was no photograph, and the only man nearby who knew him personally, Whistler, had honored his boss’s instructions not to approach the Bender claim.

  “He sort of looks like his brother,” said Minister Dienst, tilting his head sidewise.

  Now that they knew what to look for, the men trampled the apple saplings in search of more graves. There weren’t enough shovels to go around, so they tore the earth with boards pried from the Benders’ fence. Soon they turned up another body—­again male, again naked. This one had several large holes punched through the back of his skull. On seeing these, a certain correspondence occurred to Leroy.

  “Billy, please fetch those hammers from the cabin.”

  He returned with the three they’d discovered under the stove. Hefting each in turn, Leroy selected the largest hammer and knelt over the remains. The head precisely fit the wounds in the back of the victim’s skull.

  “It’s the devil’s work!” someone cried.

  Leroy felt a fit of light-­headedness. The quality of this body’s decay, its reduction to a bag of bones, was too close to that other corpse he had helped bury on the prairie years before. It was a memory he had succeeded in repressing for a half his lifetime, but was all the more powerful now that it had stirred. He shot upright, trying to settle his stomach with a deliberate effort of will. But he had to walk away for the moment, retiring some distance from the orchard to find his calm.

  Looking back, he considered the frenzied nest of activity around the Bender claim as if he were peering through a telescope. With this remoteness came another wave of emotion—­this time dismay. He was no detective, but he knew that such a disorganized search, no matter how righ­teously intended, would destroy as much evidence as it would recover.

  The stir over the discovery of the murder weapon lasted only a moment before the throng’s attention was compelled by the next outrage. The third burial was a collection of severed human limbs. These were more corrupted than the whole bodies, blackened by what appeared to be a halfhearted attempt to incinerate them. As George Mortimer probed the remains with his wagon rod, he uncovered a small leather-­bound book. Fishing out the half-­rotted thing, he read the spine:

  “It’s The Book of Mormon.”

  The sun climbed and the temperature rose and more bodies came to light. The exposed burials and the churning of hundreds of feet turned the trim little orchard into a blasted moonscape. Someone showed up with unused rafters from a barn-­raising. A gang of men positioned the wood under the Bender cabin and levered it off its foundations, exposing the tiny cellar and crawl space. As sunlight fell on those fetid spaces for the first time, the crowd of onlookers pressed in close, as if expecting to see a fully equipped dungeon. All they got, however, was a sandstone slab smeared with an indefinite brown substance, and a face full of stink. Most of them soon turned away, handkerchiefs at their noses. Not a few were temporarily put off their picnics.

  A thorough search of the cabin turned up a miscellany of objects—­lengths of broken watch chain, money clips empty of money, eyeglasses, assorted buttons from a dozen different garments. For lack of clear evidence connecting these to any of the bodies, they were piled on a barrelhead in the yard. Passersby pocketed them as souvenirs. And when they ran out of compelling mementoes, they started to work on the cabin itself, tearing off wallboards, sashes, roof shingles. Most of these, the genuine remains of the notorious Butchers’ Inn of Labette County, ended up as conversation pieces in parlors all over the state of Kansas.

  Certain of these objects became the focus of private rituals. Some were burned, to ritually punish the Benders through the things close to them. Still others were thought of in a different way: according to certain contrarians, anything the Benders touched had protective power, capable of warding off fell influences because they were imbued with such powerful evil. Horseshoes from the Bender corral were kept as talismans for years, falling ultimately to children and grandchildren never informed of their history. The last corroded remains of a Bender horseshoe was tossed in a slag heap by a descendant of the blacksmith Daniel Lindsay in 1932, after hanging over the door of his shop for almost sixty years.

  Dr. Keebles approached Leroy, unlit smoke in mouth and patting himself in search of a match. Leroy struck one of his own.

  “Obliged,” the doctor mouthed around his cigarette. After a long drag, he said, “I understand you’re the man to talk to about the disposition of the bodies.”

  “I can’t claim any such thing.”

  “Who’s the coroner in these parts, then?”

  “It’s Dr. Bender—­no relation—­up in Iola.”

  “Well, we need to get these bodies under cover soon or there won’t be much left to identify.”

  There were a half-­dozen open graves in and around the orchard. None of the bodies were of local ­people, so there had yet been no identifications. A message had been sent to Whistler for his help, but neither he nor the messenger had returned yet.

  There was a commotion as more remains surfaced. The diggers around the grave seemed compelled to gaze longer at this one, until their faces all seemed to orient in Leroy’s direction.

  “Aren’t they calling you?” Keebles asked.

  “Appears so.”

  They walked together with little urgency. Or more accurately, with all the urgency drained from them, for as the full scale of the calamity sank in, a few more bodies could do noth
ing to make it worse. As they approached, most of the diggers seemed to wander away, as if realizing some prior engagement. When he and Keebles got there, only Minister Dienst was left. He had an expression on his face, a look of empathic sufferance, that Leroy saw him wear at funerals for infants who’d died too young to have names.

  “I’m sorry, Leroy,” Dienst said, laying a dirty hand on his shoulder.

  “We’re all sorry . . .” Leroy began as he looked into the hole.

  This one was dumped faceup. The features didn’t register to Leroy’s eyes at first, as he regarded the gash across the throat and the fingertip-­sized bruises at the jaw. It occurred to him that he had finally achieved the kind of clinical gaze necessary for this kind of work. But then he allowed himself to look at the victim’s face—­to look at it as one would a living person, instead of a body of perishable evidence. That’s when its familiarity dawned on him.

  “Heavens no . . .” he began, then choked. He said: “God help me, what will I tell Mary Ann? What will I tell her?”

  He removed his hat, because he could think of nothing else to do. And then, alternately holding the hat at his side and in front of him, he despaired of his composure once more and walked away.

  Keebles studied the poor soul in the pit for a few moments, then tossed his cigarette.

  “Is this someone he knows?” he asked Minister Dienst.

  “His cousin. A rootless soul, as I recall. I don’t believe they even knew he was missing.”

  “His cousin? And his first thought was for his wife’s feelings. Remarkable.”

  “It is not remarkable,” replied the other, “if you know anything about our Leroy Dick.”

  The Benders’ horse and rig were gone. After the rain, the wheel ruts of the old army wagon, with its mismatched axles, were only faintly visible. Some diligent souls took it upon themselves to track it off the property and onto the Osage. At least initially, they seemed to have gone northeast, in the direction of Fort Scott. But the rush of onlookers soon turned the trail into an indecipherable mess. New arrivals from that direction were asked if they’d met a party of two men and two women along the way. No one had.

  There was talk of launching a posse that very day. But Leroy had no hope a blind search would turn up the Benders. They had at least several days’ head start, and there was no reason to expect they had stuck to the trail. In that time the fugitives could have reached any of several railheads, each of which could have taken them in several directions. The best hope for justice lay in wiring out an alert, hoping for further information.

  But as the bodies piled up and the mood of the crowd grew uglier, it became less content simply to wait around, taking in the Benders’ handiwork. The searchers dug into an old well, discovering a pair of corpses disposed haphazardly together. A bit of velvet ribbon in the hair of one body suggested they’d found their first woman of the day. The victims apparently were a ­couple, traveling together when they made the fateful mistake of visiting the grocery. Minister Dienst remembered hearing of a missing ­couple when he was in Humboldt the previous year: they were newlyweds—­she from Missouri, he bringing her back to a claim he’d staked in California. The girl was only fifteen.

  Then someone noticed that Rudolph Brockman was among the gawkers. He was walking from grave to grave, a peculiar expression on his face—­not so much shock or disgust, but rueful, as if some suspicion of his had been confirmed.

  “Brockman! Tell us where your friends are!” shouted Tom Mortimer.

  “Weren’t you with that witch after church the other day?” someone else chimed.

  “The nerve of him coming back here!”

  A look of slow, heavy-­eyed surprise, like a cow at the end of the slaughter chute, came over Brockman’s face. He had not anticipated this kind of trouble. If he had, he wouldn’t have tied his horse so far away. With unconvincing nonchalance, he reversed course.

  “Get that man!” shouted a picnicker.

  A mass of grasping avengers closed around Brockman. They secured him by arms, legs, shirtfront. Someone plucked the slouch-­rimmed cap off his head and tossed it into the crowd, triggering a scrum over its possession.

  “Lass mich in Ruhe! Ich bin unschuldig!”

  “You shut that squarehead talk!”

  “Ich kannte sie nicht! Lassen Sie mich gehen!”

  “I warned you . . .” said Mortimer, and after measuring the distance with outstretched arm, slugged Brockman across the mouth. His hand had a rock in it. The force of the blow drove one of the German’s half-­rotted eyeteeth into his mouth.

  “Take him inside!”

  They all understood what this meant. With Brockman half staggering among them, a dozen men pushed their way into the Bender cabin. Keebles followed with Leroy, who shouted, “This is unlawful, boys! He should be taken to the marshal for questioning.”

  “Every minute those bastards get further away!” replied Billy Toles, and then added—­because he was still haunted by the starved calf, “Right before her eyes, it was!”

  “There’s a way to do this properly. Tell them, Minister.”

  Dienst looked at Leroy with practiced compassion, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Leroy, but I agree with them.”

  When the searchers lifted the cabin they left it slightly askew on the ground. Some of the men stood uphill of the others as they tore down the canvas partition. By the pitiless light of a naked oil lamp, they looped a rope around a rafter. John Moneyhon tied the noose, looking up from his work now and then to give Brockman a black look. The latter went on in German, bemoaning his fate, cursing his tormentors, but at that moment none of them would acknowledge understanding his language, much less take sympathy.

  They noosed him and held him as three men took hold of the other end of the rope. Then, with the same collective “Ho!” they voiced at barn-­raisings, they lifted Brockman three feet off the floor. Their one concession to mercy was to leave his hands free. As he dangled, he struggled for purchase on the rope as he sputtered and spat blood from his bloody gums.

  “Still sounds like his jarman,” joked Moneyhon.

  They studied him as his face went from white to pink to red to blue. When his eyes had bugged so far that their roots were exposed and his movements seemed drunken, they released the rope. He dropped to the floorboards too weak to break his fall with his hands.

  George Mortimer stood over him. “Where are the Benders?” he asked. “They couldn’t have done all this alone. They had help. Where did they go?”

  He only gasped and wheezed, so they hung him again. Another lamp was lit and placed on the table, casting an enlarged, twisting shadow of Brockman against the roof.

  This time they waited until his tongue poked out like a blue-­headed snake from its hole, and Minister Dienst spoke up.

  “That’s enough.”

  They dropped him. Mortimer knelt and asked again, “Where are the Benders?”

  Too exhausted to struggle for breath, Brockman simply stared back.

  “Up.”

  Their neighbor was pulled aloft again. By now Leroy was furious. He was not only embarrassed to be part of such crude proceedings, he was conscious of the crowd of witnesses gathered around the open doors and windows. Pairs of unflinching eyes shined through the holes in the walls left where the souvenir hunters had peeled away the boards.

  At the back window there was a stranger in a herringbone suit. Engrossed, the man struggled to drink in everything with his eyes as he scribbled furiously in a notebook.

  “There are going to be murder charges if this goes much further!” Leroy warned.

  They ignored him, observing as Brockman kicked and swung. Soon his eyes turned back in their sockets and he lost consciousness.

  “Can’t you tell he didn’t know?” Leroy said. “Why would he show up here if he was part of it?”

  “He
knows somethin’.”

  Leroy pushed Mortimer aside and hugged Brockman’s legs.

  “Let him go!”

  They dropped the rope, letting the twitching body fall on Leroy, who teetered for a moment as he tried to keep his balance, then collapsed.

  No one moved as Leroy disentangled himself. All of them seemed in a state of moral suspension—­waiting, like the third parties outside, to see if events would brand them just or damned.

  Keebles came forward and laid a finger athwart Brockman’s neck. He seemed about to declare something, then paused as he kept his hand there.

  “He’s alive,” he granted.

  The men’s faces were impassive. By the time Brockman’s eyes were open, most of them had already skulked away. Later, few of them, except for Leroy Dick, would ever acknowledge they were in the room that night.

  Leroy sat beside Brockman as the latter recovered his wits. After ten minutes he turned on his side and begged for a drink; Leroy found a tin cup on the stove and some more or less fresh water in a cask. Tasting it, Brockman spat it out and said, “I said a drink.”

  “Sounds like your English is back.”

  The other man rolled to his knees and treaded the empty air behind him as he tried to gain purchase on the floor. It took him several fruitless minutes to become reacquainted with his extremities. Leroy stood up with him, a steadying hand on his elbow, until Brockman bent over again to fetch a hat—­not his own, which was long before claimed by the crowd, but someone else’s, abandoned in the tumult. It was too small for him, so he mashed it down over his chapped pate. If it had a decent brim he would have covered his face, but the narrow shade concealed only his eyes.

  As he turned to leave, he turned up his collar to hide the rope burns around his neck. Leroy held his arm.