Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Kate sucked in her breath and released it slowly as she endured the inescapable.

  “Until the day I woke up under the bridge, and Socken was not there. I looked on every street and down every alley. I took more beatings from my mother because I would not bring the men to her, I would look for this dog. I went to sleep the first day with wet eyes. And the second night. Until the third night, when I knew he would not come back. In those days, small animals were eaten by the rats if they were not guarded. That’s what I think happened to my sweet little Socken, when I was not watching.

  “But you see I was wrong, because on the seventh day he did come back. He was dirty, but plump, because he’d found some dumping somewhere, some offal, and had spent his time eating himself fat. He came back to my arms happy, moving his tail. And I made tears when I picked him up, and tears when I took him to the Main. I could hardly see him as I pushed him into the water, and held him under as he fought me. Until he shook and stopped moving. Then I let him go, to float down the river, with all the other things ­people threw from the bridge. And that was the last pet in my life, my Socken. Did you know that?”

  She found Kate’s eyes, and in the manner of her gaze drove home her meaning. Kate, for her part, would not begrudge her the satisfaction of a response. For if circumstances ever tempted her to go back to Almira, she would certainly drown herself first.

  “Better get ready,” she said. “Train’ll come soon.”

  It was the southbound, for Indian territory. Now that they had voted to separate, neither party wanted the burden of luggage. Almira and Flickinger took the apple crate and feed bag, on the theory that they would attract less notice in the rougher parts they were bound to; Kate and Junior were left with the steamer trunk clad in hideous dog hide. They would have abandoned it, if it meant all that potential evidence was forever beyond discovery. But of course it did not. For their transgressions, the pursuit would come, and would find every bit of material left behind. Each step in their journey would be reconstructed to the limits of the memories of everyone they met. For their safety, they could presume nothing less than Pinkertons on their trail, or what was marginally worse, God Himself.

  The train was bell-­less and black and unadorned like a cast-­iron stove. No passengers got off, and the conductor had his watch out as soon as he hit the ground—­the universal symbol of the short stop. Just like that, the moment of separation came. The men exchanged a handshake of two parties contractually satisfied. Leaving her bags to the old man, Almira pulled up her skirts and mounted the carriage. She refused to look at Kate or Junior, keeping her eyes fixed forward as she took her seat.

  “She’s blood-­addled,” explained Flickinger as he grasped Kate’s hand. Kate had never touched him before, and as much as she expected that to be a disagreeable sensation, she was surprised: the hand was warm and mostly greaseless. He did not overpress. And there was unwonted softness in the way his eyes peered through his dangling brows, meeting hers.

  “It won’t last,” she finally said.

  “The worst things never do.”

  It was as if she had dropped a glove at the zoo and seen it gallantly returned by an ape. With a parting squeeze that was, again, surprisingly human, the old man let her go. Bewildered, she watched him loft his bags on his shoulder and scale the steps with a supple, youthful ease. She looked to Junior, who was equally astonished.

  “You really don’t know some ­people.” He shrugged.

  With a shove that seemed to come from behind, the engine engaged. Kate watched, half disbelieving, as Almira slid away with an ease so much in contrast with her barnaclelike purchase on the rest of her life. As the train rolled away under its fan of gray smoke, she expected Almira to tumble forth at any moment. But no one appeared, and as the train receded to a faint parenthesis on the horizon, she finally allowed herself to contemplate her next step. She turned to Junior.

  “Thank God, alone at last,” she said, wrapping her arm around his.

  His eyes met hers as she cast the old familiar spell—­the charm of possibility. He raised his eyebrows: “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “After all, aren’t we husband and wife?”

  To this, he feigned a nonreaction, like a man who would neither believe his luck nor endanger it by asking questions.

  The northbound Southern Kansas Railroad train pulled in next, bound for Iola, Lawrence, and points east. Aboard, she took a spot beside him, not across, and kept their bodies in contact. The train accelerated, adopting a slow, loping motion as the roadbed rose and fell upon the shallow undulations of the plain.

  They passed Ottawa, where the four of them had started their wagon trip to the cabin in ’70; the town seemed larger and fouler than she remembered, with columns of coal smoke rising from a dozen stacks. Roads reached out from the settled area deep into the prairie, ready to serve homesteads yet to be built. Kate glimpsed a farmer behind his plow, flicking his horse with the switch as the steel blades of the sodbuster curled back the turf. He paused, wiped his forehead with his arm, and swiveled his head slowly as he tracked the train into the distance.

  An hour later they were in Lawrence. The station serving points south was on the eastern edge of town, at the end of a swooping curve that gave passengers a clear appreciation for the new downtown. This had been rapidly restored after Quantrill’s raid during the war. For those who would look, however, lingering evidence of that disaster was not hard to miss: blackened joists of burned buildings and mounds of charred brick were piled roof-­high in the bog beyond the tracks.

  There were tented carioles waiting at the station to take passengers into town. They hired one to take them to the best hotel in Lawrence, the Eldridge House. They checked in as “Mr. and Mrs. Hancock” of Kansas City.

  The act of writing their aliases in the register seemed to propel Junior into paroxysms of anticipation. On the stairs toward what he took to be their nuptial bed, she could sense the excitement in the way he took the steps. She encouraged him, proceeding up before him, rocking her hips before his eyes. Halfway up, she glanced down at him, lashes shining auburn in the lamplight, edges of her lips suggestively curled.

  Their room was on the third floor, with a canopied bed lined with ruffled skirts, chinoiserie washbowl, and lacquered commodes trimmed with ivory-­colored doilies. She noted a sickly sweet odor, like the scent of dried flowers, but found no bouquet—­what she perceived as sweetness was merely the absence of mildew, dust, and horseshit. The refined surrounds, so clearly superior to the squatters’ camps and frontier quarters of her adult years, roused long-­dormant tastes in her. Though she no longer remembered details of the places she stayed with her father, she felt them, in the place that assured her who she was. It warmed her to think this would be her new life.

  The bellhop had only just gone when Junior grabbed her. She countenanced it, suffering his lips on her face as her hat tumbled from her head. He was engrossed in this kissing for some time before he realized she was not kissing him back. Pulling away, he looked at her uncertainly.

  “Have I misconstrued what you said before, about being husband and wife?”

  “Of course not. It’s that thing. I can’t look at it any longer.”

  She inclined her head at the dog-­hair trunk, which sat cheap and incongruous in the splendor of their room. Releasing her, he stood over the trunk as if to menace it, declaring, “Yes, what an ugly impression must this thing make when our purpose is to make a better one! It should be removed from your sight—­the sight of anyone of taste.”

  As he bent to lift it by the handles, she laughed.

  “Best salvage what we can from inside, before it meets its fitting end.”

  There was not much to save: Almira had packed some of their threadbare bedding and some of the more costly patent medicines. Kate removed a bottle of the latter and put it aside while Junior was not looking. She also rescued the pin
k hemp ribbon they had taken after Jesperson’s murder two years ago—­his memento of his lady love. She had meant to dispose of it, but never seemed to find an appropriate place. Fetching about, she failed to find one just then either. She rolled it into a ball and stuffed it in her purse. The rest of the contents she waved for him to take away.

  “Be sure it’s never to be found.”

  “No other soul will ever see it.”

  He was away for half an hour. She contemplated a bath—­which she desperately needed—­but decided there would be time enough for that later, when she was free. For now, she had to make herself ready for him.

  He found her lying on the bed in just her camisole and knee-­length drawers, hair flowing down her shoulders like molten bronze from the crucible. For lack of proper rouge, she had colored her cheeks with drops of her own blood. Seeing her, he stared, blinked, swallowed—­he forgot to close the door. She angled her torso to the wall, permitting him a glimpse of breast that, despite malicious tongues, no other man had yet seen. He shut the door.

  Before getting to cases, she offered him a drink from a cut-­glass goblet. He took the glass without looking at its contents, draining it in a single gulp. This made her laugh; bringing him up short, she raised her glass and sipped from it with pointed slowness. He could stand no more. Snatching her goblet, he tossed it across the room and pitched himself on her.

  One chiming of the clock later, Kate’s camisole and drawers were still on, but Junior was sprawled across the bed in a medicated stupor. His rest was thanks to approximately fifteen doses of Tott’s Teething Cordial, “a salubrious Preparation of the most wholesome ingredients Formulated to soothe Baby’s nocturnal discomfort.” The actual ingredients were not listed on the label, but judging by Junior’s drooling on the bedspread, he found them more than “salubrious.” He snored with the clicking sound particular to infants.

  She dressed, and packed what little she wished to take in a small valise. The case was, in fact, pitifully small—­she was leaving all her clothes, shoes, and most of her toilette. Abandoning them was troubling in a small way, but also liberating. She was sloughing away her old skin, shedding the blood and spunk and guilt she had accumulated in all the lost years. The charge of sorcery was there too, and the salt of the witch test, and the residue of shame from Leroy Dick’s rejection. For this trip, she wore just a traveling dress of plain linen and a featherless bonnet. If she could have fled to her next career with face veiled completely, faceless like a refugee from the seraglio, she would have. But that would attract its own kind of attention.

  There were some $25,000 in banknotes and coin in their joint share of the bank. Gazing at this pile, she contemplated taking it all—­but did not. Theft would only oblige him to hunt her down. And whatever one might say about Junior, he had earned his share of the Bender windfall.

  She kept the sack, transferring Junior’s portion to an empty pillowcase. Then, with a final check in the mirror, she cracked the door. She took a last look at Junior, sparing him a trace sentimental fondness—­for she hoped this would be the last time she would lay eyes on him.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the desk clerk peeked from behind his newspaper, cocked an eyebrow.

  “Checking out already, Mrs. Hancock? Anything amiss with your room?”

  “No. Can you arrange a cab for me, please?”

  He glanced from her valise to the stairs, as if expecting Mr. Hancock to follow. “Be needing help with your bags?”

  “Just a cab to the station, please.”

  “East-­ or westbound? There are two stations.”

  “That, sir, is no one’s business but the driver.”

  “All right.”

  He tilted himself off his stool to go outside.

  “One more thing . . .” she said, holding a fifty dollar banknote so he could see the denomination. He halted. “If Mr. Hancock should inquire where I might have gone, could you see that he doesn’t find out from you?”

  The clerk smiled.

  Chapter Twenty-­Four

  Bounties

  REPORTERS WERE ON the abandoned Bender property right on the heels of the neighbors. Christening it “Hell’s Half-­Acre,” they competed to cast an atmosphere most worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. “What follows in its facts may read like the recital of some horrible dream,” began the Kansas City Times, “wherein nightmare mirrors upon the distempered brain a countless number of monsters and unnatural things, yet what is set down in the narrative is as true as the sun.” The Times went on to enliven its readers’ breakfasts with the following: “[Dr. York’s] . . . skull had been driven into the brain, and from the broken and battered crevices a dull stream of blood had oozed, plastering his hair with a kind of clammy paste, and running down upon his shoulders.” In a similar vein the Cincinnati Commercial reported, “The excavation beneath the house in which the murderers had allowed their victims to bleed before burial still bore the horrid signs. The scant rains of summer had not washed away the blood from the margin; it was half full of purple water.”

  As the coexistence of good looks and bad deeds was hard for many to rationalize, one of the few sure things known about the Benders—­that Kate was a handsome woman—­came in for hasty revision. Her “very high cheekbones, very sharp chin, resemble a wolf,” reported the Southern Kansas Advance, which went on to describe her as “round or stoop-­shouldered, and rather hollow-­breasted.” In the Walnut Valley Times she was “quite young, [with] red hair, and a person of rather repulsive appearance.” Harper’s Weekly had her “a repulsive-­looking creature . . . with a vicious and cruel eye.” By the time she appeared in the New York Sun, she was just “slatternly.”

  Inquiries went by wire in a widening circle that reached Chicago by the twenty-­fourth. They described a family of four, all adults, traveling together and speaking German, with the warning that the youngest and most cunning, the notorious Kate, could for all intents and purposes pass for a real American. From Topeka, Governor Osborne issued a proclamation noting “the atrocious murders recently committed in Labette County, under circumstances which fasten, beyond doubt, the commissions of these crimes upon a family known as the ‘Bender family,’ ” and establishing five hundred dollar bounties for the “apprehension and delivery” of each suspect. Whether they were to be “apprehended and delivered” dead or alive was left ambiguous. The handbills, which bore no illustrations of the suspects, were posted in freight offices and railroad stations. Most of them soon disappeared into the pockets of certain passersby, who supposed they might have a better shot at the Benders if no one else was looking.

  Rudolph Brockman wasn’t the last immigrant to suffer the suspicions of his neighbors. German-­speakers all over state suddenly came in for close, and possibly profitable, scrutiny. The entire Roach family of Ladore, just seven miles from the Bender place, was detained for questioning—­until the fact that the family consisted of five ­people, not four, and that the Roaches were known residents of their town going back to before Benders came to Kansas, convinced cooler heads to free them. The brief description of Old Man Bender in the governor’s proclamation (“about sixty years of age, five feet eight or nine inches, German, speaks little English, dark complexion, no whiskers, sparely built”) was vague enough to apply widely; lovers of justice all over Kansas were inspired to parade their “Dutch” vagrants and drunks, trophylike, through the streets of their towns. None of them turned out to be Pa Bender. Scores of red-­haired Janes were likewise roused from their hovels in work camps and mines, hauled before their local peace officers, and held on suspicion not just of prostitution, but serial murder. None of them panned out as Kate.

  Among the good ­people of southeast Kansas, the Benders’ temerity to escape provoked intense frustration. Posses, hastily convened and poorly instructed, hit the trails mere hours after the bodies appeared, heading more or less in random directions. One from Parsons
combed the wooded shores of the Verdigris River. A party from Cherryvale went south, into Oklahoma Indian territory. A third out of Thayer, believing the Benders had gone to ground somewhere nearby, left no stone unturned in the countryside around their town. The Thayer posse was so thorough that they halted a party of Minnesota Norwegians on their way to settlement in Colorado. The foreigners were forced out of their wagon at gunpoint, and compelled to unload all their belongings for inspection. Emptying the wagon was a two-­hour process that only made the members of the posse more ornery. No suspicious articles were found, and when one of the Norwegians—­a sixteen-­year-­old boy—­made the mistake of mouthing off to them in English, he got a pistol-­whipping. Asked later why he had accosted Norwegians when the Benders were known to be German, the leader of the posse explained, “Them Norweggers are roundheads, and a roundhead is a roundhead, and nobody can tell me any different!”

  The first real break in the case came with a headline in the Thayer Head-­Light. Down in a nearby draw, a man named Charles Nelson had stumbled on what looked like an old lumber wagon, abandoned with its horse. The horse, a mare, was not in its harness but tied alongside. The harness itself was found under the wagon, as if hastily disposed. The famished animal had been left for so long that she had licked away the wagon’s paint and chewed up its rail.

  Upon reporting his find, Nelson and a sheriff’s deputy returned to examine the wagon more closely. In the box they found some dried, unhusked ears of corn and an old shotgun with one barrel loaded. A wooden board was nailed below that, apparently to patch a hole in the bed. On the board was written the word “Grocery.” Prying it loose, they found another word on the reverse, painted in a more clumsy hand: “Grocry.”

  When Leroy Dick heard about the recovered wagon, he rushed north with Whistler and George Majors. By that time it had been taken to Thayer for safekeeping. The instant the livery doors were opened, Leroy recognized the Benders’ old army wagon, with its mismatched front and rear axles. He had seen it parked often enough at Harmony Grove on Sabbath mornings.