My stomach was empty, but I continued to heave dryly. Everything inside me seized and rippled. Still, I was starved. I picked two ears of the violet corn from a stalk at the edge of the property and ate it raw. It was as hard as flint and nearly inedible, and still I chewed it down to the cob and saved the other ear in my remaining pant pocket as I hobbled toward the whitewashed farmhouse. A pair of jacaranda trees as brilliantly purple as the maize swayed over the roof even though I could feel no wind. Two children, a boy and girl both of fair complexion, were playing in the dirt at the bottom of the porch stoop. I waved from a safe distance. I hollered a greeting and the children stared for a moment before retreating inside. They cried shrilly. Inside the farmhouse a sound like a giant pot hitting the floor.
I stood waiting.
You fool, I told myself. You scared the damn kids and whoever their forbearers might be won’t be too pleased at that. I listened closely. Footfalls from deep inside the house and then the screen door swung open. Behind a small-bore rifle came a giant old woman with a sprig of white hair that flowed like a beard in a breeze even though there was still no wind. With a bandolier slung over her cooking apron, she thrust the gun in my direction like a bayonet. A good thirty feet separated us.
She screamed at me in words unknowable.
Maybe Dutch, maybe Afrikaans.
I tried to speak but could manage no sound. I gestured at my wounds and begged for sympathy. What a sight I was: half of my pants completely torn away, my exposed leg swollen to elephantine mutation from the snake bites, my shirtfront torn and covered in old vomit, my entire left arm dead from numbing. I fell to my knees and looked skyward as if awaiting execution. A momentary rain came down nails, slowed to a dapple, then stopped altogether. A single passing cloud over a quivering sun.
Late summer lightning as faint as rumor past the flanked hills beyond.
The elderly woman screamed at me once more and continued to thrust her rifle.
“Kill me,” I said hoarsely though I figured my words were lost on her.
She approached five steps, halving the distance between us. I bent my head low, and the last thing I saw when I collapsed sideways into the mud were the pair of swaying jacaranda trees over the pitched roof of the farmhouse and the downcast eyes of the woman screaming at me still as she pushed her rifle into my chest before all went blank.
IX
THE SECOND AND third day of the trial passed with little flair as a slew of what the Omaha papers called “small-time” witnesses took the stand. Mrs. Jesse Witten, neighbor of our Grover Street hideout, identified me as one of the two men living in that cottage. She testified she had seen me enter and exit the house often, usually with supplies, and that I had been the one to paste paper over the windows to darken the commotion within.
In rebuttal, Ritchie pressed her on key points of my appearance. She told the court I kept my blond hair long about my shoulders and wore a beard without glasses. However, I currently wore my hair short above the ear and was clean-shaven and nearly thirty pounds trimmer, with periscopic spectacles. How could she explain the distinct physical differences between the man she fingered as me five years ago and the man who now sat at the defense table?
The courthouse crowd mumbled at the discrepancy. The proletariat gallery sent up wild cheers when Ritchie challenged her on the remarkable disparity between those characteristics and on her failing eyesight. He called her an octogenarian who wore corrective prescription goggles of triple magnification. He claimed that she could just as easily mistake a raccoon for a dog as she could identify a man whom she claimed she saw come and go only at night from a distance of nearly fifty yards.
Next came a number of witnesses who all claimed to have seen me riding a horse around the Grover cottage and the Cudahy mansion. A young stable worker swore he saw me atop a palomino mare that could have very well been gray or white or even tan on the day after Edward Junior’s disappearance. He admitted the early morning light could have made an impression on the horse’s coat. Ritchie laughed off his testimony as that which came from a boy who couldn’t tell the difference between sugar and flour if it was on his tongue.
A second witness agreed that the horse I rode was indeed cream in color, but he could not remember the breed or if the person atop the pony was tall or short, old or young. “Why,” Ritchie had said, “if the horse was indeed white or ashen, perhaps it was the pale horse of the apocalypse and the rider upon him was Death with Hades following close behind!”
The audience again broke out in raucous laughter at his allusion to the book of Revelation. Ritchie swayed back and forth clutching his jacket lapels, often smiling at the audience as if he were a play actor and the courtroom his stage. A third witness swore the horse was not white at all, but a dark red mare. A fifth claimed the animal was a piebald pony and the rider was dark-skinned and dressed in a bathrobe.
Ritchie scratched his ear and declared to the jury, “Why, maybe the person who allegedly stole Cudahy’s son wasn’t riding a horse at all. Perhaps he was saddled upon a wooden Pegasus on a carousel while circus music played on a loop.”
Even I had a chuckle at that one.
Judge Sutton rapped his gavel and warned Ritchie that making light of witness testimony in such a fashion was an affront to the integrity of his court.
“I disagree, Your Honor,” Ritchie said in response, stroking his necktie. “The only thing that risks the integrity of this court is the botched testimony itself and the caliber of the witnesses presented to us by government counsel.”
Judge Sutton was furious. “It’s not in your place to judge testimony. You are skating treacherously close to being held in contempt. Do not try my patience once more.”
“I wouldn’t dare, Your Honor. And I thank you for your patience. But someone in this room, maybe many somebodies, have perjured themselves on the stand here today, and I think I’m within my bounds to call the jury’s attention to these many discrepancies. For either we are listening to the tall tales of liars or we have come across something much grander: the very first chameleon horse known to science. And I, for one, stand very suspicious of both.”
On the afternoon of the third day, a factory worker named Toby Glynn took the stand in his stained boiler suit and sooty face. He told the story of how he heard me bragging in the Yarrow Saloon about the Cudahy abduction and all the gold I’d made from the ransom.
Let me say this: I hadn’t been in an Omaha saloon since the kidnapping. I’d never even heard of the Yarrow before. The things people will say just to be heard. The fabrications we create just to remind the world we exist.
Glynn said he’d been drinking whiskey and didn’t pay for a single pour as I bought rounds for the whole house with my twenty-dollar gold pieces all night long. When pressed, Glynn admitted he didn’t know who I was until that night. He also admitted he had five or six whiskeys and, weighing only one hundred and thirty pounds, was surely intoxicated by such an amount. Could his memory be colored by drink?
Perhaps, he admitted, but doubtful.
Ritchie pressed harder about young Glynn’s intentions. What prompted him to come forth and bear witness against a man he hardly knew, had never met before or after that supposed night in the Yarrow Saloon?
Glynn chewed his tongue as he thought on his reply.
“Well,” he said after a very labored pause. “I came forth for Mr. Cudahy and his family.”
Ritchie froze. “Oh? And do you know the Cudahy family well?”
Glynn stammered again. He was completely stymied. “I don’t know them at all.”
“And yet you came forth on their behalf?”
“Objection,” Louie Black said. “The witness’s intentions have nothing to do with what he saw or his testimony toward that fact.”
Ritchie rebutted, “Your Honor, motivation is a powerful thing. How often is it necessary to prove a motive when establishing a r
eason behind a crime? How often in these hallowed chambers do we search for a man’s motivation for committing crime? And so I ask the same of this witness, of any witness, because motivation can just as easily sway testimony as it can birth criminality. If I cannot challenge the veracity of this witness in such a manner—”
Judge Sutton stopped Ritchie with a wave of his hand. If the judge didn’t interrupt him, Ritchie was liable to go on for an hour or more before taking time to breathe. The man had more gas in his lungs than a filibuster. Besides, Judge Sutton agreed. “Objection overruled. The witness will answer the question.”
Glynn asked Ritchie to repeat the question. He studied on it longer with more chewing of his tongue and finally said, “I came forth because if I proved to be a friend to Mr. Cudahy, he might find it necessary to repay the favor.”
“Repay the favor? Do you have business pending before the court yourself that Mr. Cudahy might serve witness to?”
“No, sir. I’m a law-abiding man.”
“Well then, Mr. Glynn, I’m confused. How would Mr. Cudahy repay this favor? That’s what you referred to in your testimony as, correct? A favor?”
Glynn licked his lips. “Why, with cash, of course.”
The courtroom gasped.
“With cash? You mean to say you came forth hoping to be paid for your testimony?”
Glynn, in his soiled boiler coveralls and ashy face, responded firmly as if avowing his faith: “Isn’t that all right? Heck, the jury gets paid. You get paid. The judge gets paid. Everyone in this court gets paid. What makes me so different?”
Ritchie smiled. He looked at Louie Black who was palming his red face. “Nothing at all makes you different. Everyone in this court would like to get a little of Mr. Cudahy’s money if they could. You’re no different at all.”
To close out the last day of court before the weekend recess, Louie Black called Edward Cudahy Junior to the stand. The young man now stood nearly as tall as myself and just as strong of shoulder. He’d filled out about the chest and was handsome of jaw. He wore a tartan suit and pomaded hair in early recession along his temples. He was three weeks away from his twenty-first birthday, but looked closer to thirty and nowhere near the slender, peach-cheeked teenager I remembered snatching in front of his house five years earlier.
Louie Black wasted little time in cutting to the paste.
Yes, Eddie said, I was kidnapped by two men on my very own street. They knocked me bonkers over the head and threw a blanket about me and hauled me away in a wagon. There were two men. Yes, one of them is here today in this court. There he sits. Pat Crowe. I know the man from top to bottom. They blindfolded me and kept me tied to a chair in an empty house for two days, but it seemed longer than two weeks.
Black asked him about that house. “Is it true you assisted the Omaha police in finding that hideout cottage on Grover Street?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I stepped inside I knew it was the place. I saw all the cigarette butts on the floor that I had smoked while tied to a chair.”
“But you say you were blindfolded the whole time?”
“That’s right. They blinded me with a shirt, but they should’ve put plugs in my ears, too. I knew from the echo of the floorboards that it was an empty house. I could hear the tooting of our packing plant whistles and our locomotives. I couldn’t have been more than a mile away.”
Black ran his thumbs down the inside of his suspender straps. “Tell us more about this experience. How did your abductors treat you?”
“Treat me? Well, I never did much but sit there in that chair. They fed me coffee, crackers, cigarettes. A little whiskey and ham. They treated me pretty well.”
Black wobbled as if shocked. “Treated you pretty well?”
“As well as someone who’s kidnapped you could treat you, I suppose.”
“Well, then, it was a high time at the old Grover Street cottage, was it?”
“No, sir. I did not mean to imply that at all. I was scared to death. Scared for my life. I urinated on myself. I wasn’t allowed use of a toilet. The men, they drank a lot, and I feared they might harm me after they got drunk. I didn’t know if I’d survive the next five minutes or if I’d ever see my family again.”
Black asked, “Would you know these men again?”
“There were two of them. And one of them is Pat Crowe, like I said before. I could never forget him. I’d know him among all creation.”
“And how can you be so sure of that? Defense counsel has raised many points of contention here in this court about the ability of multiple witnesses to identify your captor, despite the fact that they all have identified the same one. So, tell us, how are you certain that one of your kidnappers was the defendant?”
Eddie nodded at me. I shrank in my chair.
He said, “Because I met him just four days earlier. He came to our house to converse with my dad one morning before I left for school.”
“Pat Crowe came to your house on Dewey Avenue? The same street on which he nabbed you off the sidewalk under the cover of dusk?”
“That’s right.”
“Interesting indeed. Very curious. Can you tell us about that meeting?”
“Well, he was in a desperate state to look at him.”
“Pat Crowe, you mean?”
“Yes. He was shaking from the cold and looked sickly in the face and had a pretty nasty cough. It’d been snowing out and he didn’t even have a coat about him. My dad knew him from when he was one of his employees at the packinghouse. He’d fallen on hard times. I think he was inebriated and begging. My dad offered him a good job in California. It seems he never took that offer. Looking back on it, he wasn’t there for any other reason than to get a good look at me. To size me up. Four nights later, him and his pal approached me on our street. They’d dressed up like police detectives and told me I was under arrest for robbing my aunt. Of course, that was just their ruse. Next thing I knew, I was pelted over the head, and everything went dark. I was knocked out for a good while. I don’t remember anything else after that until we arrived at their hideout. They forced me inside and bound me to a chair.”
“Did they talk to you in that house while you were tied up?”
“Yes. One of them was almost always in the room with me. Usually both were. The other man, Pat’s partner, was a drunk. He slurred his words and stunk of whiskey.”
“And what kind of things did they say to you?”
“Some of it I don’t remember too clearly anymore. I’ve tried to clear my head of it.”
“That’s only natural, I’d say. No one likes to recall traumatic episodes from their past. But is there anything at all you can tell the court in this regard?”
Eddie worked his hands together like a worried mother. “There is one something I’ll never forget no matter how hard I try. Pat Crowe, he said to me, he said that I better hope my father loves me more than his money. He said if my dad didn’t come forth with the gold that he, well”—Eddie sputtered, his voice strained—“that he’d slit my throat and dig a grave in the basement of that house. He said, ‘If your dad fails to deliver the money, you’re going into that grave and these barrels of quicklime will be your only coffin lining. It will be poured all around you after I have killed you. You will simply disappear, and no one on this earth will ever know what has become of you.’”
X
I WOKE FROM dream to the sound of trumpeting rain on a thatch roof. Laying on my back, staring at a ceiling unfamiliar, I blinked as rapidly as an animal come out of hibernation to unbearable sunshine. I choked on my phlegm and sat up spitting on my chin. My nostrils flared. The aromatic smell of acacia wood breaking apart in a mud stove. Dangling lines of eggplant and yellow carrots as long as femurs were strung about the walls like jute. A pair of grease lamps illuminated a farmhouse kitchen in threads. My vision a cluster of white spangles.
I sat up
fully and wiped my mouth.
I was shirtless with bandaging over my left shoulder and suddenly, in a flush, I remembered the bullet I took and the ambush in the deep red gully and wading downriver across the treeless flats of the unsunned veld. Thought I might vomit but did not. My recovering leg was encased in a puttee. A heavy nerve of rain strummed the roofing. I strained for a look out the window above my straw bed. Outside, a thundery sky and gristly downpour thrashed the field of purple corn. Adjacent to the maize line was a pink stone corral for a few heads of starving cattle who ran about in circles, soaked and terrified.
“You’re a considerable man to have survived,” a voice said from the back corner of the damp kitchen.
I turned. The giant old woman with the sprig of white hair sat on an upturned pail, husking corn into another pail between her knees. She wore pantaloons, cloth shoes, and a man’s shirtsleeves.
“Where am I?” I asked and massaged my aching eyelids.
The woman tossed some old husks into the cookstove. The fire belched upon receiving the weak tinder and then flared down again. “The Hotel Baroque.”
“You speak English.”
“I know English. Most trekboers do. Rather’d not speak it.”
“Language of your enemy and so on and so forth?”
The old woman rose and shuffled over to a cutting table where she mealed together a concoction of spider weed, goat milk, eucalyptus leaves, and some kind of jam that looked like black honey into a wooden bowl. I watched her intently. Three long wizardly hairs on her chin. Her flabby arms shook from the effort of muddling the ingredients. “I removed the bullet from your shoulder and cleaned the wound, but you’ll need to keep it in bandages or it will get infected,” she said and brought me the bowl and told me to drink the batter. “You’ve a mild dose of fever. This will make you feel right pert.”
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