Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I have all the hands I require.”

  “You won’t take me back.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I would were that my inclination, but I’ve a ruddy schedule to make.” His softening of the “sch” put her in mind of the English sailors among the crew during the Atlantic crossing. But he wasn’t English. “I would put ye ashore in Saint Looey did I not ken ye’d be raped and your white throat slit five minutes after we put off. The war took its toll of gentlemen, ye see.”

  “I am twenty-one and can care for myself.”

  “Ye’re eighteen or younger, or I’m no judge.” He gave the whistle two short blasts and corrected course around a float full of fishermen. “Are ye Catholic, Kate Fisher?”

  She wondered if Roman Catholics had a smell of their own, and if it was as evident to him as his was to her. “Yes.”

  “I’ve a place for ye, then. Now get below and tell that ruddy barbarian Isherwood he’s to keep his sweaty paws off ye until we land. In a nice way, mind. He killed a woman in Hannibal and he has terrible bad nightmares aboot it.”

  She never found out if he was joshing about the deck-hand. When the boat docked in St. Louis the pilot took her inland to a great stone building behind an evil-looking cathedral as large as downtown Davenport and then he passed out of her life forever. She never learned his name, but in later years, when whiskey and memory overtook her, she would smirk at his bluff innocence and despise him.

  The Mother Superior of the convent was a fat Frenchwoman of indeterminate age with a nose twice the size of hers with an angry red boil on the side of it and a moustache. She gave Kate—for from then on Mary Katherine was never known by any other name—to a very tall, very thin woman in a nun’s habit, who took her to another room where she was made to strip and climb into a wooden tub full of cold water and grasp her ankles while Sister scrubbed her back with brown soap and a coarse cloth until it stung. A bucket of icy water was dumped over her head and she toweled off shivering with thin terry and put on clean drawers—not her comfortable linen ones but a pair made of gray shoddy that chafed her thighs—and a plain white cotton shift. Sitting on a wormwood bench she pulled on coarse black knee-length stockings secured with plain garters and laced on a pair of man’s scuffed brown brogans that extended two inches past her toes and felt corrugated inside.

  When Sister advanced on her with steel shears she tried to run, but the thin woman was faster and much stronger and sat her on the bench with an arm wrench that made her cry out. She was still recovering from it when her wet black hair was gathered in a wiry fist and cut off at the nape of her neck with three crunching snips. No minors were allowed in the convent, and when that night she was locked in a ward with a dozen other shorn girls who spoke among themselves in whispers and stared at her without addressing her, she lay on her narrow cot crying, convinced she looked a horror. A few days later, however, when she was allowed to pass under Sister’s escort through the courtyard into the cathedral, she admired the boyishly ethereal face framed in a scarf looking back at her from the surface of the holy water. Although she genuflected and hurried to a pew before Sister could box her ears for the sin of Vanity, on her knees she determined never to let her hair grow back out.

  Big Nose Kate was born in the convent. The other girls called her that from the time they learned her name, and tailored jokes to her that were previously reserved for Mother Superior’s fearsome fistulated snout. The first time a girl used the name to her face, Kate knocked her down and straddled her and clawed at her eyes until Sister separated and whipped them both across their bare buttocks until they bled. Nevertheless it quickly became popular, and even the nuns came to use it to distinguish her from the other two Kates in their charge.

  So Big Nose Kate came out of that time, but more than just the name. On occasions later when the clergy got in the way of her vocation she would claim that the only difference between God’s house and a whorehouse was the pointed roof, and those who heard would think she was merely trying to shock them, but what she never spoke of was the Private Instruction in Sister’s cell. There among the hymnals and Latin dictionaries and votive candles she discovered that the reason nuns never squirmed like the girls under the scratching of their shoddy drawers was that they never wore them. The diet in the convent was mostly salmon from the riverboats, and Sister tasted of it, so that despite the irony of her adopted surname Kate never ate fish the rest of her life. After hours the girls practiced what they had learned from Sister with one another in their cots. Although Kate often took part, she gained far more knowledge than release from these sessions. For her the convent would be a lesson in the universal craving for physical fulfillment that she would carry to the grave.

  There were only two ways to get out of the convent.

  Escape was not one. The first week Kate was there, a sixteen-year-old girl whose baby had been remanded to an orphanage downriver slipped out of the cathedral while Sister was in holy rapture and was gone two days and one night. She attempted to sneak aboard a riverboat, was found out, and scrambled down the levee a hop ahead of the out-of-shape deckhand who pursued her and lost his footing and her trail at the bottom. On the second day a city policeman caught her picking through a trash barrel behind a restaurant, recognized the dirty convent shift she was wearing, and delivered her to Sister, who attended her lovingly during her long recovery from Sister’s whipping. Other attempts were made while Kate was in residence, but none came even that close to success, although the punishment was the same. The St. Louis city fathers were staunchly Catholic and the police were always willing to aid in recapturing runaways.

  Coming of age was the first of the sanctioned roads to freedom. Upon reaching twenty-one, the petitioner had the choice of entering the novitiate or leaving by the front door. A surprising number opted for the former, and Kate could always identify these among the novices, who spelled the nuns in the classroom and kept order in the dormitory, by their broken wills. She herself had no intention of letting that happen to her, or of spending the next four years begging carbolic off the nuns for her abraded thighs and tasting salmon in Sister’s cell. The second key to liberty—of a sort—was marriage.

  One of the convent’s unadvertised purposes was to serve as a kind of animal shelter for pioneers looking for wives. Several times a week, men stuffed into high boots and new suits of clothes tramped through the classroom and dormitory to look at the girls and talk with some of them. Mother Superior said they were settlers inspecting the spiritual arrangements before putting down stakes in the area, but no one was taken in by it and Mother Superior herself made no great effort to be convincing. Kate talked with a few of the men, but was offended by the blunt way they studied her build under her shift and by the sour earthen smell of them, and they in turn lost interest when their questions about her people went unanswered. Their wills, moreover, were as strong as hers if not stronger, something she had had quite enough of from her mother and from Sister. If they were shopping, she was too. When Sister noted her attitude and rebuked her during Private Instruction for the sin of Pride, Kate feigned ignorance; and rather than allow herself to be backed into admitting the true purpose of the visitations, the thin woman merely clenched her long jaw and raised her habit.

  Once a month the girls’ teeth were inspected by a dentist named Silas Melvin. Melvin was a fussy little man with a pink face and rimless spectacles and black hair receding into a half-moon four inches above his eyebrows, although he was still in his twenties. He affected a laughable fastidiousness of dress in view of his shabby coat and turned collars that convinced the other girls, who called him Aunt Silas, that their sex held no interest for him. Kate was less sure and settled the point one day by borrowing a shift from a girl several sizes smaller and arching her back so that her nipples stood out against the taut cotton while he was leaning over to look inside her mouth, causing him to drop his little mirror and crack the glass.

  She liked his clean smell. He admired her “Greek profile” a
nd said she had fine teeth. Mostly she liked the fact that he was plainly afraid of Sister and avoided her as much as he could without offending. A man who could be intimidated represented freedom. Kate encouraged his attentions, and soon he was making his visits twice a month, blaming an outbreak of pyorrhea in the city. No one credited it. By then it was commonly accepted that Aunt Silas was smitten with Big Nose Kate.

  Mother Superior blessed the match. Professional men were a sturdy influence on rebellious young women. Moreover, despite the fact that his stubborn Protestantism precluded their marrying inside the Church, Mother Superior was serene in its teachings and believed it would encompass them both in time; which made it a victory of Faith. So it was that six months after Kate came to the convent, she was wed by the pastor of the Presbyterian church.

  Dr. and Mrs. Silas Melvin booked steamboat passage on the Mississippi, she no longer a stowaway but a large handsome woman in stays and taffeta with a flat flowered hat pinned to her short hair, part of a modest trousseau presented to her by an admiring husband. At Vicksburg, a town rising slowly from mortar-smashed rubble and blasted trees, they transferred to a sleeper car and clattered over polished steel through scorched fields tangled with the rusty twisted corpses of old rails torn up by Sherman’s troops on the way to Atlanta. There the couple settled.

  In the late 1860s that town was still reeling from Sherman. Most of the burned blocks had been cleared, but for the rest of Kate’s life the stench of char would remind her of her first marriage. Widows took in washing, and so many backyards were crisscrossed with burdened clotheslines she wondered that any men were left in Atlanta. But they were in the streets, straggle-haired and bitten-bearded in rags of Confederate shoddy with sockets for eyes and stumps on display and filthy palms outstretched. At night they grew fangs and preyed on their daytime benefactors in alleys stinking of slops. For all that, Atlanta was rebuilding. Professional men were desperately needed, but because no one could afford to pay for their services they were rare. Soon after Silas nailed up his shingle he had a full practice. Although there was no money, the Melvins dined on pork pies and venison roasts and baskets of eggs and flasks of milk brought by his patients. Kate gained weight rapidly.

  Before long it became evident that the rich food was not to be blamed for this. Concerned when his wife became too ill mornings to eat breakfast, Silas brought home a doctor who had served as surgeon with General Bragg and who examined her and congratulated them both while accepting a large apple pie in lieu of his fee.

  She bore him a son.

  The son died.

  No one knew why he died. Not Kate, who bathed and cared for him as lovingly as she tended Silas’s instruments, which had to be boiled on the cookstove in the kitchen between usings, and the basin that had to be scoured of blood and iodine. Not Melvin, who wanted to send the boy to Baltimore to learn dentistry as soon as he was through with public school and looked to the day when he would be Old Doc Melvin to his son’s Young Doc Melvin. Certainly not the doctor, who signed the death certificate and shook his head and said that the war was still claiming victims in Atlanta. Baptized Presbyterian, the boy could not be buried out of the Catholic Church as Kate requested, but the local priest, a patient of Silas’s, agreed to preside at a secular ceremony in the couple’s house, after which a Presbyterian minister officiated at graveside.

  Silas died soon after. Yellow fever was sweeping the city, and as the symptoms were in keeping with the disease, Bragg’s old surgeon wrote it on the certificate. Kate knew it wasn’t that, or even the broken heart suggested by the doctor in private. It was Uncle Death come back to pay his respects to her family.

  Industry had come to Atlanta, and with it northern money. Kate buried Silas next to their son and sold their house and his practice to a dentist from Vermont with a birdlike wife and three pale children and went west. As she watched the green southern scenery sliding past the train window she could not know that she was tracing the steps of another Atlanta exile whom Uncle Death had compelled to leave some months earlier, a dentist like Silas, although that was where the resemblance ended; as indeed it did to anyone else she would ever know.

  When they met, the year was 1877 and the place was a clabber of adobe dugouts and unpainted shacks swept up against the base of Government Hill below Fort Griffin, Texas. He was a picket-thin man of twenty-five, with a phlegmy cough and a preference for colored shirts and gray suits of good material that flapped on him. She was Big Nose Kate, hefty at twenty-seven and developing a roll under her chin but a long way from fat, and working John Shanssey’s saloon on a financial arrangement with the beetle-browed ex-pugilist. Dentists were an interest, and although this one had swung a board from the peak of his tent on the edge of town with JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY, D.D.S. inexpertly painted on it, he spent most of his time playing poker and dealing faro in Shanssey’s. The men with whom he played were all big and filthy and stank of guts, but they bought their chips with fist-size wads of crisp bills obtained from the Fort Griffin paymaster in return for buffalo hides. The kill was so lush that year they lost hundreds of dollars and got up from the table lurching and laughing. Sometimes they didn’t, but the way Holliday played, smiling as he pulled in the chips and telling nigger jokes in his soft drawl and sipping frequently from the tumbler of whiskey that was always at his elbow, the mood around the table remained guardedly genial.

  She began as his partner. Some of the buffalo runners had wives and sweethearts back in civilization for whom they held back hide money not required for food and supplies. It was her role to make their acquaintance and get them to buy her drinks and jolly them into trying to double and treble those reserves. Kate was good with the quiet ones. She charmed and bullied and shamed and groped at them—for she had learned a long time before that a man who was drunk and aroused was more likely to spend money than one who was just drunk—and Sister’s Private Instruction had taught her that no oath was equal to the demands of the body. And if, after dropping the earnings of an entire season’s shooting and skinning on the turn of a pasteboard, a player showed signs of becoming truculent, a trip upstairs with Kate was usually all that was required to put him back on his feed, as Doc put it. For this she received a cut of the winnings after Shanssey had sliced his off the top.

  At sunup they went back to Doc’s tent, where she rubbed his back with alcohol and held his head when his coughing gutted him and lay with him when he had the strength for it. He was a fitful lover, stronger than he looked, and he kept at it with the same concentration he displayed at his table until he exploded and then collapsed wheezing. When he stirred she would have a tumbler ready for him and he would drink it off in two swallows and go to sleep. Her business fell off after that. She knew it was because the other Fort Griffin men, who spent all day with their bare arms inside buffalo carcasses to the shoulders and made breastworks of them when the Comanches came looking to strip off their skins, were afraid of catching what Doc had from her. She didn’t care. Doc’s action supported them both, and caring for him when he was low fed something in her that had been cheated when her son and husband died so suddenly. Every afternoon that Doc climbed out of his roll to put on a fresh shirt and take his place behind the cue box in Shanssey’s was ground held against the terrible Uncle.

  They shared secrets insofar as their self-protective natures allowed. Once when drinking he told her of his cousin in an Atlanta convent—she recognized the name of her alma mater’s old rival—to whom he still wrote letters, and beat Kate up for mentioning it when he was sober. After that she didn’t bring it up again, even at times when he looked at her and she knew she was being measured against the angel of the Lord back home and felt the urge to enlighten him as to what went on in convents. It wasn’t fear. If she gave any thought to such things at all, she would suppose that she loved Doc.

  Kate wasn’t present in the saloon when Doc and Ed Bailey fell out. Bailey was a buffalo runner and a sometime scout for the army who wore an issue Colt’s in a cavalry scabbard
with the strap unbuttoned. Doc caught him looking at the deadwood—sneaking a peek at Doc’s discards during poker—and admonished him quietly to “play poker,” which was the gentleman’s way of asking an opponent to refrain from cheating. Bailey withdrew his hand from the pile, drew two cards from the deck, then resumed his inspection of Doc’s deadwood. When Doc laid his cards facedown and began pulling in the pot, Bailey challenged him, his hand dropping under the table. Doc jerked a pearl-handled knife from his inside breast pocket and eviscerated him.

  A marshal’s deputy was present, and threw down on Doc and relieved him of the knife and two pistols while Bailey was still trying to keep his entrails from spilling over his belt. Doc was removed to a hotel while a wagon was readied to take him to the Shackleford County seat at Albany for a hearing.

  The story that got told later was full of lynch mobs and vigilantes and had Kate dressing up in man’s clothes and setting fire to a stable and then taking Doc away at gunpoint from the deputy left to guard him while the others were fighting the fire. The part about the man’s clothes and the fire was true enough, but they were just gestures to keep the glare off the deputy, an old customer whom Kate paid a hundred dollars to watch the blaze outside the window while she and Doc walked out. At dawn John Shanssey brought two horses to the cottonwoods by Collins Creek where the fugitives were hiding. From there they rode four hundred miles to Dodge City, Kansas, where cowboys were squalling for more games to lose money on and where Doc had a friend named Earp.

  That was four years ago. Kate missed Dodge; not the town itself, clapboard huts on a grass street studded with cow flop, and certainly not the profitable understanding Doc had as a gambler with Wyatt Earp, a man she distrusted, on the local police force, but rather the several weeks during which Doc practiced dentistry for real out of a walk-up office and introduced Kate to acquaintances as Mrs. Holliday. It all blew up when Doc stopped coming home nights, staying up drinking with Wyatt’s kid brother Morgan and betting on whether the next man through the door of the Long Branch would be wearing a kerchief or a cravat. She and Doc fought over it. He broke her nose; she clawed his face and decamped for Ogallala. He said she’d be back. She said he’d write begging her to come back. They were both right. He would get in a bad way and write her in his fine hand—always immaculate, whether he was drunk or sober—saying he needed her, and she would respond by returning. It was a pattern they would repeat in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, with Uncle following them all the way. He and Doc were old acquaintances.