Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  I retreated to the back of Tiny’s store and climbed the wooden steps to the rooftop, where I pushed my way through the crowd of perhaps twenty men to where four other members of the police brigade were on top of Lowry, tying his hands behind him.

  “Let him go,” I said, and I found myself ignored. They pulled Lowry to his feet, blubbering. The other prisoner seemed to take no ironic satisfaction in this, and presently the nooses were handed up from below to the men on the roof.

  “Tiny,” I said. “Put a stop to this.”

  He looked over at me and appeared to be chewing over the idea for a second. “Like hell,” he said.

  “You hear me? I speak for the town company and Marc Leval, and I say there’s going to be no hanging tonight.”

  The four who had turned on Lowry now faced me and I began wondering what it would take for the mob to start howling for my blood, too.

  “Mr. Leval ain’t here tonight, Bill,” one of them said, and I began backing toward the stairs.

  “That’s right, Bill, he ain’t,” Tiny said. “I’m still mayor and tonight what I say goes, you understand?”

  “Pretty well,” I said, and I hurried down to the laughter of some of the witnesses. I rounded the building through the alley and crossed the street to the saloon, where Gleason and the new man stood idly behind the bar. Barely a half dozen of the most dedicated or jaded stewbums remained drinking, and they didn’t seem to register my entrance.

  “Gleason. I need my Colt.”

  He handed it to me and I verified that it was loaded.

  “What’s going on outside? How’s old Alf ?”

  “Dead.” I put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “If I’m killed, half of my half of the bar is yours on condition you run it for my son until he’s old enough to pull his weight on the remaining quarter. Is that a deal?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Ogden,” he said, and I strode back out into the night with my blood boiling. Tiny Rector was my friend but by God I’d shoot him dead if he didn’t put a stop to this. It never got to that pass, though; before I got halfway to the store Lowry decided to put up a fight, and the result was that he went first, shoved over the ledge. The prisoner followed momentarily, and they both dangled there, struggling awfully, until out of pity Herbert and three other strong men from the crowd each took a kicking, shit-smeared leg and pulled. The nooses hadn’t been properly tied, and there was still no snapping of the necks; I yelled for the four good samaritans to get out of the way. When they saw I had the Colt in my hand, cocked and ready, they did so. I put a bullet into Lowry’s head from beneath his chin, and when his eyes went dead I did the same for the poor anonymous thief, if thief he truly was. The crowd quieted considerably now.

  My gaze chanced to light upon Miss Katie Bender again, whom I expected to find grinning in malicious delight at the horrible scene, or at the very least actively suppressing such a look; in fact, her face was contorted in revulsion and fear. When she saw me looking she managed an inappropriate, sickly smile in my direction and a friendly little wave.

  I looked up at Tiny, who sat winded on the edge of his rooftop, his own long fat legs dangling to the right of the ropes as they scraped against the shingles in an ever-slowing rhythm. Idly I wondered if we’d ever find out who the prisoner was, or if we’d ever catch the fugitive burglar. Tiny saw me looking, and his face told me nothing except that he was physically exhausted. As the crowd dispersed in morose silence I noticed Mrs. Rector in the window of the store, her face distorted by the moving lamplight and the flaws of the panes, but looking for all the world as if she were enjoying herself. I don’t suppose the whole thing took five minutes after the announcement was made; when I thought to look again for Katie she was nowhere to be seen.

  Wandering away, I supposed that the thing to do was to shut down the saloon, but a goodly proportion of the masses in the street was headed in its direction and I had no desire to make myself an enemy of this particular mob. On a whim I wandered back in the direction of the Leval Mansion to inform its inhabitants of the night’s events.

  Rose came to the door, wide-eyed, in her nightclothes, carrying a candle.

  “What was all that noise about?” she asked.

  “A hanging,” I said.

  “How’s that? At night?”

  I nodded and was on the verge of elaborating when I saw a pale figure holding another candle descend the staircase behind her. It was Maggie, in her nightclothes, and she stole up behind Rose so quietly the poor girl let out a yelp, her free hand darting to her mouth.

  “Come inside, Bill.”

  I did so and Rose shut the door. “It’s a hanging, missus. At night.”

  “Thank you, Rose. You may go back to bed.”

  Rose looked at her, and then at me. She hesitated; she wanted to hear more, and clearly had no desire to leave her married, night-clad mistress alone with a man, but she went obediently on her way.

  “Was it awful, Bill?” she asked. That look of weary amusement she wore most of the time was gone, and in the light of her candle I believed I saw tears in her eyes.

  “Yes, it was,” I said, though I wasn’t thinking any more of the night’s violence. She moved in closer to me.

  “Does it occur to you that there’s something wrong with you coming to my door in the middle of the night with Marc away? Or maybe you really are as innocent as you seem to be.”

  Though her tone was gentle I was suddenly filled with shame. “I thought you might be fearful from the noise outside. I’ll go, then,” I said, feeling pitiful and low-down, but she took my hand before I had the chance to turn away. She pulled me to the staircase, and we ascended without a word or a backward glance from her.

  4

  COTTONWOOD, KANSAS, M AY 1 8 7 3

  Atrocity

  The morning after the hanging it was on the verge of raining, and I slipped out of the Leval mansion before sunrise and crossed the lawn, still wet with dew, fighting guilty thoughts of what I’d done with methodical ones about what I had yet to do. I first ascertained that the two men were still hanging in front of Tiny’s store; all night long I had been tormented by the thought that they might be cut down before I got there. The dark street was already busy with early risers at work or heading to it, but the town was quieter right then than I’d heard it in months, and I crossed the street to the saloon, just as the first pale signs of the rising sun became evident over the tent city. Above me the sky was clear, and the stars were still visible and even bright, but to the west were thunderheads, and rain and cloud cover would ruin my chances. I devoutly hoped Gleason had stayed the night before after closing too late to return to his parents’ home, and when I opened the saloon door he lay there on the parquet, covered with a blanket I wouldn’t have used on my horse. I shook him with the toe of my boot and he stirred, shivering.

  “Next time you sleep here, leave the stove on. I’d hate to come in and find you’d croaked in the night.”

  He nodded, squinting. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Time to go to work. Come on, I need a hand.”

  In my room at the hotel we set up the dark tent and prepared four glass plates; he was good at it and already quicker than I was. Perhaps twenty minutes later we descended as quietly as we could with the stereographic camera, its tripod and the plates in their holders. The sky to the west was black, and to the east perfectly fair, and the light that shone on Lowry and his arrestee was a delicate rosy orange. The rain was already falling in the distance, though how far off I couldn’t say, and again I impressed upon Gleason the need for expedition. Eager to keep his mind off the cadavers before us he began asking questions about the amount of light available. The odd atmospheric situation made for a dramatic effect of soft, direct light bathing the dead from one side, creating shadows as black as if the night still lay on the earth.

  “Now see if you can’t impress upon our subjects the importance of remaining motionless.”

  He shuddered; somewhere in him were the remnants
of a choir-boy, appalled and astonished to find himself working in a den of sin. “You really think people want to look at pictures of this?” he asked, wrinkling his nose.

  “You’d be surprised at what they’ll look at,” I said, and I let him focus the lenses himself, instructing him to use as a marker the faces of the dead men. Watching their useless eyes moving in and out of focus on the ground glass would teach him not to take these things personally, I thought, and he performed his task quickly and well. We made four exposures from slightly differing angles and distances, and before I’d sent Gleason back up to the dark tent with the plates a crowd started forming to see what I was up to, and a breeze blew up from the west, strong enough to sway the hanged men’s bootless feet by the time I had the camera packed in its case. As I crossed the street to the hotel the first drops of rain hit my face, and after I’d put the camera safely inside the lobby I stood outside for a long time and got good and wet under the black sky, with a sharp clear light shining skygodlin down on me from the east. Then it was time to head out through the mud to the farm.

  The next morning the sun came out for an hour or so, and I hurried to the hotel roof with the plates in printing frames and made prints of all four views of the hanging. All the plates were of acceptable quality, and one of them was nearly perfect, with a nice sense of depth between the dangling corpses and the store behind them, and a pleasing range of tones from the highlights on Lowry’s shiny face to the inky vitrine of Tiny’s store. The thief in death wore a resigned expression, as if hanging at the hands of a mob was pretty much what he’d expected out of life on the prairie, whereas Paul Lowry’s eyes, though half-shut and focused on slightly divergent points in the indeterminate distance, still registered surprise and disbelief.

  Except for that hour’s respite, the rain continued for two solid days after the hanging, turning the streets of town into a thick soup of mud and horseshit. The tent city had things even worse, having no wooden sidewalks, and by the time the rain had quit a quarter of its population had taken sick. The rain was of course welcomed by the farmers, but its only other benefit was to soften the ground for digging graves.

  Before the town had a name, even before the decision was made to incorporate, a small patch of ground had of necessity been laid out for the burial of the dead, and the location of this patch now posed a twofold problem. Firstly, the town had outgrown it in a sudden and dramatic fashion; in the preceding half decade barely twenty souls had been put to rest there, whereas a quarter that number had died in or near Cottonwood by misadventure or disease just since the tent city had gone up. In a short time the graveyard would have to annex an adjoining property or two, and with land within the newly expanded city limits worth at least five times its previous valuation this was an absurd proposition. Secondly, its location at the south end of Seward placed it squarely in the center of the cattle pens, half of which were already in place; the question at hand, then, was not whether to move the dead but where to and how.

  Tiny and I decided to establish a new town cemetery on a mound to the northeast, and Tiny authorized the disbursal of city funds to hire a handful of denizens of the tent city to dig up the old boneyard and rebury the bodies in the new one. The process of dis- and re-interrment was soon to be the cause of some hard feelings on the part of a few longtime residents of Cottonwood; they objected to the disturbance of their loved ones’ bones, particularly since we failed to give anyone notice that the move was to take place. The first anyone knew about it was when a wagon containing a pair of rotten pine boxes side by side in its flatbed careened through the sloppy streets of town at a trot with a quartet of drunken, dirty gravediggers seated laughing and yelling atop their flimsy, rotten lids.

  Upon hearing a number of complaints regarding the gravediggers’ boisterousness, Tiny and I rode up to the new cemetery late on the first afternoon of the work. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky blue and clear and the air still smelling of the rain, which had stopped only that morning. At the mound, which offered a splendid view of the town to the southwest and a squalid one of the tent city to the southeast, we found no workers and no new graves dug; the only recently turned earth covered the graves of Lowry, Alf Cletus, and the anonymous thief. A row of four coffins sat on the wet grass in varying states of decay, unaccompanied by the markers that had identified their occupants in the old cemetery. Tiny’s mood deteriorated, and he was in a full sulk as we surveyed the mound, not even speaking as we tried to decide where to mark the boundaries. In short order the men showed up with another pair of caskets, and upon disembarking from the wagon hauled the boxes off the flatbed and lowered them roughly onto the wet grass next to the others.

  “Howdy, Mayor,” the foreman grinned at Tiny as he hopped off the wagon onto the ground. He had no front teeth, top or bottom.

  “Now just a goddamn minute,” Tiny wheezed, the first words out of his mouth in half an hour.

  The men had already climbed back aboard and were on the verge of returning to town, and the foreman cocked an ear in Tiny’s direction with a busy man’s air of distracted impatience. “You unhappy with something, Mayor? To my way of thinking, if we hurry we can get two more dug up by sundown.”

  Tiny’s eyes looked even bigger and rounder than usual, as if his anger was pushing them out of their orbits from behind. “And when, exactly, were you planning to dig the eight new graves? Were you planning to do it by lamplight?”

  The foreman thought hard, trying to provide the right answer. “No . . . When we got all the old ones filled in . . .”

  “And your plan is to leave these above ground all night?”

  “I don’t see any other way to . . .”

  “I’ll tell you the way to. You dig up two boxes at a time, you bring them up here and you bury them before you go back for more. You understand?”

  “You didn’t say to do that.” The foreman was thin of frame and bald on top, and the fringe of red hair circumnavigating his head had grown to a considerable length; he resembled a mangy, emaciated circus lion.

  “I shouldn’t have to. Anybody with the smallest lick of sense would know to do it that way. And you didn’t keep the caskets and the markers together. Now how the hell are you going to know what marker goes with what casket?”

  “Can’t hardly read ’em anyway. Probably need to carve new ones.”

  “All right,” Tiny said. “When I carve the new ones, how do I know which goes on which grave?”

  The foreman lifted his thick, tangled brows and gave a slight moue of consideration. “I suppose I’ll just try real hard to remember which one was which.”

  Tiny’s breath was coming in shorter and shorter bursts, and his face was red and shiny with sweat, making me afraid he might end up a resident of the mound sooner than anticipated. “You’ll try? Is that what you said?”

  “Yes, sir,” the foreman said. “I guess from here on out I’ll mark the boxes with a piece of charcoal, huh?”

  “And what about these, then?”

  “Look, mister, I don’t see as how it matters much if Smith’s buried in Jones’s plot, long as they’s both buried Christian.” He looked hopefully at Tiny, whose fists were tight at his sides, as if controlling them required a great effort.

  “You get down there and start opening them boxes up,” Tiny said quietly, like he was choking.

  The foreman blanched and shook his head, and the other men on the wagon looked at one another with drawn faces, silently debating whether the opening of the caskets fell inside or outside the job’s worth to them.

  “You hear me, you drunken son of a bitch? You get down here right now and start opening them boxes up or I’ll by Jesus put you in one of your own.”

  The foreman shook his head again without speaking, and Tiny sprung forward and with one hand around his throat picked the foreman up off the flatbed, lifted him into the air and dropped him onto the ground. Then he was on top of the man, his face redder than before, his big watery eyes even redder, his thumb pressin
g on the foreman’s trachea. That red hair splayed out, and his head pressed down into the mud with the pressure of Tiny’s weight on him.

  “Jesus, Tiny, let him up. You’re going to kill him.”

  “You son of a bitch!” His voice was louder and clearer now.

  I got my arm around his throat and pulled up, to little or no effect; though he was obese he was also strong as a dray horse. “You’re a married man and a grandfather. You’re still the Mayor, for God’s sake.”

  Finally he let go and stood up, inhaling and exhaling like a bellows for a blast furnace. The foreman lay on the ground with his eyes closed, choking, but after a while he wincingly sat up, his head leaving an indentation in the wet ground; then he pulled a crow-bar off of the wagon and started opening the coffins.

  “Lawrence Billings,” Tiny said wearily. I chose not to look, as did the men on the wagon, but with each name Tiny called out the foreman ran and fetched the appropriate marker, then shut the box again. When they got around to the fifth box Tiny let out a sob, and I saw him topple down onto his seat like a shot elephant and bury his face in his hands, snuffling and snorting like a whipped schoolboy. The rest of us regarded him cautiously, and the foreman broke our silence.

  “Who is it, Your Honor?”

  My curiosity overcame my sense of decorum, and I glanced at the open coffin. Inside were a yellow, broken skull and some bones, considerably jumbled at the foot of the casket from the ride between cemeteries. The remains of a black dress were affixed to the bottom of the coffin, and to the skull still clung a few strands of blond hair. I answered the foreman’s question. “That’s Minnie Lansdown.”