Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Minnie, my Minnie,” Tiny simpered, as if to explain his violent outburst. Minnie had died of a toxic dose of laudanum shortly after my arrival in Cottonwood, so I never knew her well, but I remembered her beauty and vivaciousness, and her husband’s misery and confusion at her death. Newt Lansdown gave up his homestead and headed west with the stated intention of hunting buffalo, and no one in Cottonwood had heard from him since. I knew of no sentimental connection between Minnie and Tiny, and I remembered Lillian Rector’s display of sorrow at the burial; still, she meant more to Tiny than a neighbor’s wife.

  The foreman placed the marker at the foot of the coffin and tenderly replaced the lid, and then opened the next one. Inside he found another skull and bones, an unarticulated mess of a skeleton like Minnie’s. Also visible were part of a belt and a more or less intact pair of boots. I shouldered Tiny, who was still in tears, shaking his head.

  “Come on now, Tiny, there’s work to be done. Who’s that in there?”

  Sniffling and hiccoughing, he stumbled onto all fours and then rose to his full height, regaining a good portion of his lost dignity in the process. “That’s Hiram Bussler. I sold his widow those boots after he died. You know, I believe he was the first one we buried there.”

  Once all six boxes and markers had been marked, I went into town for torches and two more shovels, and the seven of us dug into the soft earth well past sundown; when the dead were finally at rest once again I took the crew and Tiny down to the saloon for a quick drink, caked with several layers of rapidly drying mud. Before I left them there with a single drink under my belt, Tiny had downed three and was well on the way to drunken parity with the gravediggers.

  I stopped at the hotel and ordered a bath to be brought to my room and filled, then selected some fresh articles of clothing; after scrubbing all the dirt off, and giving myself a good over-all washing, I donned my clean suit of clothes and stopped in at the dining room downstairs, where I ate a beefsteak the size of my fist, accompanied by a large baked potato. Then I strolled out the door and east, toward Lincoln, whereupon I turned left and began walking to the north. I passed by First Street and casually examined some of the home construction going on there, wondering what percentage of the carpenter’s trade of the states of Kansas and Missouri was currently operating in Cottonwood. After First Street there was no sidewalk, and my fresh boots were considerably mud-died by the time I reached the recently dedicated Second Street and turned west. I sauntered casually to Seward and rather than turning south I continued on where the road ended, walking up onto the grass until to my immediate south was the rear entrance to the Leval home. I spun slowly around to determine whether I could spy anyone watching me; I saw no one, and moved through the blackness to the back door. Rose met me as she had the previous three nights, making a mute show of her disdain, but she accepted the half dollar I pressed into her hand and absented herself, leaving me free to roam the house.

  Maggie awaited me in her room, reclining upon her chaise longue in her nightgown, which she had drawn up over her thighs, affording me a view of her legs as they met her hips. Her hand was busy at work between them, and her eyes were closed. They did not open when I closed the door, though I deliberately made the latch click loudly to announce myself. I approached her, removing my coat, and as I drew near she smiled, still without opening her eyes.

  “Mm,” she said, her voice low in her throat, inhaling audibly. “You’ve had a bath, Bill.”

  I dropped to my knees at her side and put my mouth to the soft inside of her left thigh, and putting her hands to the sides of my head she slowly drew it down to where she wanted it, and for the fourth night in a row I wondered if I wasn’t dreaming.

  Accounts and dispatches purporting to be the work of eyewitnesses to the hangings, exaggerated and distorted to the level of travesty, began appearing in the region’s newspapers within the week of the event, and not long thereafter spread eastward in ever less reliable form; by the time it reached Marc’s eyes one Chicago daily claimed we had hanged not one but seven members of our police brigade, alongside the mayor and town council, and gutshot them as they kicked the air.

  The morning after his return Marc called me into his office at the bank. He had collected several eyewitness accounts, all of which ended with me shooting the dying men as they hung there and none of which, apparently, attributed my actions to pity or altruism. I explained myself to him, and though his disposition didn’t get any sunnier I did think he understood my part in the evening’s events.

  “We ought to have Tiny Rector up on charges,” he said.

  “That wouldn’t be a popular move on the part of a man seeking his office.”

  He gave me a look of disgust but didn’t comment; he knew it was true. “Was Maggie terribly upset? I’m told you came by to check on her the night of the riot.”

  “Somewhat upset. It was well over by the time I stopped by.”

  He held his eye on mine for an uncomfortable moment, then looked away, toward the room’s only window. “I should have insisted she come with me to Chicago. Better yet, I shouldn’t have left at all.”

  You think you could have stopped what happened, I almost asked, but I knew he did think so. He’d hardly ever failed at anything, and such a thing was hard for him to imagine.

  “Michael Cornan’s down in the tent city, recruiting some new men for the police brigade.”

  This took me aback, since Cornan had no experience in policing that I knew of; I’d thought he was trying to get a subscription up for a new church, of a denomination he was still in the midst of founding. “What’s he doing that for?”

  Marc ignored the question. “Why don’t you go find him and give him a hand, since you know some of the men yourself ?”

  “You coming along?”

  “Too much to do here.” He nodded at the door, outside which a dozen men had already stood waiting when I arrived. I got up and left, happy to leave his reproachful tone and superior air.

  “You’re invited for dinner tonight, by the way, you and Cornan both.”

  I smiled as true a smile as I could muster. “Delighted.”

  Though we all still called it the tent city, it had begun to take on the character of a shanty-town. Its numerous wooden structures were mostly constructed from the less desirable scrap lumber left over from some of Cottonwood’s buildings recently knocked down to make room for the new. Since a large number of the workers quartered there were carpenters, some of the work was quite sturdy; the crib of a quartet of harlots was a particular marvel, solid-looking and with makeshift bits of wooden gingerbread nailed about the door and windows for decoration. Tarpaper, doubtless stolen from one of the construction sites, covered the roof and protected the interior from another dousing like the one the whole tent city had received a few weeks before. Gleason and I had photographed it extensively early on three afternoons the previous week, and already its crudely picturesque aspect had changed enough that another session might have been warranted.

  I found Cornan near that very structure, striding through the tent city in cavalry boots. This being the middle of the day, the neighborhood was mostly deserted, its inhabitants engaged in constructing the metropolis-to-be. The distinct odors of two or three varieties of shit could still be detected in the spring air, and somewhere to the south one woman could be heard screeching abuse at another, who returned it with enthusiasm, adding some anatomical vulgarity for good measure. The mud had long since dried, but it had done so in such a churned-up state that it was quite uneven and difficult to negotiate, with large crusty ridges sticking out like waves. Before I could call out Cornan’s name he tripped and, catching himself with an extended hand, saw me approaching from behind. Though I made no sign of amusement, nor even of having noticed, he acted as if I had laughed, scowling at me as he righted himself.

  “Let’s see you navigate these rotten gullies for a couple of hours without tripping up once or twice.”

  “Marc sent me down to give you
a hand,” I said in the friendliest tone I knew.

  “I don’t need any help finding police officers. Not from you or anyone else. Good day, Bill.”

  He turned away and nearly collided with a couple of men who hadn’t found work that day, on their way to the whores’ crib.

  “Sorry about that, mister,” one of them offered, though it had been Cornan’s offense and not their own.

  Cornan surprised them by pulling his revolver and waving it at them. “Them days are over here,” he said as they backed away. Then he turned back toward me. “You hear? Over.”

  They backed into the crib, and a minute later one of its occupants leaned out the front door wearing nothing but a chemise. Her name was Lottie, and I knew her a little from the bar. She came in to drink and didn’t conduct any business transactions on the premises, though that would have been fine with me. “Well, hello, gentlemen. Got a few minutes at liberty, have we?”

  Cornan was flustered, and he put the gun back in its holster, a fancy one of tooled leather. “Not for the likes of you, you dirty harlot,” he said, though I suspected it was no coincidence that I’d found him here.

  “No need to be unkind, Mike,” Lottie said. “I thought to relieve some of your burden, is all.”

  “My burden won’t be relieved through sins of the flesh,” he yelled, and he hurried away from us.

  “How about you, bartender? You feel like keeping me company for a few minutes?” Fact is I did feel like it; Lottie was a good-looking woman, despite small eyes and a mean little mouth. I was sore at Maggie, too, since I knew she’d lain with her husband the night before, and probably that morning, too. I had money in my pocket and more on the way, and some free time as well, since Cornan had rejected my help in seeking new coppers, so I stepped inside. There were four rough doors on leather hinges in a short hallway, each leading to an individual crib; three of the doors were shut, with noises coming from inside. As I stepped into Lottie’s room one of them opened, and out of it stepped one of the men I had just seen entering. He was buttoning the top of his trousers, looking dazed and happy; I estimated that not three minutes had passed since he’d gone in.

  Lottie’s crib contained a narrow iron bed with a thin, lumpy mattress, wide enough for two occupants only if they were stacked vertically, a washing basin and a small trunk. She sat upon the bed, opened my trousers and extracted my prick, which she examined with an air of clinical detachment. I saw then a bottle of carbolic acid next to her washbasin, and that got me thinking about all the men who’d passed through that room in the past month or so. That in turn led to memories of wartime camp followers and the ravages their diseases had wrought upon some of my fellow soldiers, and I began to question the hygienic wisdom of inserting into Lottie the part of me she was in the process of examining.

  “Looks clean to me,” she pronounced. Outside I could hear some of the other girls, finished now with their clients, soliciting passersby. “What’s your pleasure?”

  “Maybe just a little bit of oral stimulation today, Lottie.”

  “A little bit of what?” she asked, squinting, head tilted to her left.

  “The French way,” I explained, and she nodded, brightening.

  “A cocksucking. That’s easy enough, I don’t even have to wash up after.”

  I slipped it into her mouth, and she worked at it with such skill that I was finished as quickly as the fellow down the hall had done. Having swallowed, Lottie wiped her lips with her long chemise, which she raised to show me her sex, tufted with hair as blond as that on her head. “You’ll have to stick around for some of this next time,” she said. I gave her two dollars and got ready to go.

  “How come you’re friends with that son-of-a-bitch, anyway?”

  For a second I thought she meant Marc. “Which son-of-a-bitch is that?”

  “Mike Cornan. He’s got balls, calling me a harlot and stomping off like that just ’cause you was with him.”

  I laughed at the notion of Cornan being my pal. “He’s no friend of mine.”

  “He just wants you to think he never comes around here. Well, he does, half the time preaching hellfire and damnation, the rest of the time earning it.”

  “I think he’s going to be the new chief of police.”

  She nodded. “The kind who’ll want a free piece of ass every day, plus a cut of everybody’s take. One good thing about this town so far is the only one we have to fuck for free is old Tiny Rector.”

  That didn’t sound so great to me, but I didn’t say it. She hustled me out onto the street ahead of her and called out to a group of laborers across the street. As a couple of them approached looking eager for fleshly contact I bid Lottie good-day and headed for the saloon.

  If Cornan had shown fear at the sight of Lottie that afternoon, he betrayed absolute terror in the face of Maggie Leval. Dressed in a stiff brown suit in a style predating the war and stinking of mold, he stammered and choked when addressed by her, and when he spoke to me or Marc it was in a stentorian bark like a sergeant’s, as if no woman was present. Maggie concentrated on the impossible task of putting him at his ease; in doing so she was able to fairly ignore me, and so our interactions had little of the guilty or furtive about them. At one point Marc and Cornan retired to the library to discuss some sort of constabulary business, and upon leaving us alone Marc looked over his shoulder with a particularly sour set to his mouth. “We’ll be just a few minutes, so enjoy yourselves.”

  As soon as the library door was shut I hastened to Maggie’s side. “He knows,” I hissed.

  “How would he? Anyway, he gets himself into spells where he acts like that. It’s all about business, not about you and me. Now go and sit down before he finds you whispering in my ear.”

  As the soup was served Marc was reading aloud a particularly unflattering account from an eastern newspaper of the riot, a declamation full of theatrical bombast; I was uncertain how to react to it, because his dramatic reading combined with the absurd claims made by the columnist, supposedly an eyewitness to the hangings, suggested a certain bleak comedy:

  “ ‘Our Prairie Correspondent reports that in the town of Cottonwood, in Kansas, a crowd of drunken ruffians spilled out of the town saloon’—that’s nice, Bill—‘in a murderous mood, the cause of which no one seems sure.’ ” He paused and looked around as we began lapping up the soup. “ ‘Having hanged one innocent passerby from one of the trees that gave the village its name, the bloodthirsty mob then forced its way into the offices of the City Hall, where it found Police Chief Paul Doughty’—that’s d-o-u-g-h-t-y, couldn’t even be bothered to get the man’s right name—‘standing guard. Upon his order to break up the assembly, the leaders thereof disarmed him forcibly and compelled him to disrobe.’ ” Having bellowed this last word for emphasis, Marc again looked up at us before resuming his reading. “ ‘At this point the mayor of Cottonwood exited his own chambers and demanded to know what was meant by the disruption to the business of the city. He and the remainder of the city’s police force were then similarly ordered to remove their clothing, and the mob, which by this time had grown to include fifty or sixty men, marched the lot of them outside to the same tree from which their luckless fellow citizen swung. From its branches and those of several others in its immediate vicinity the mayor and the town’s entire police force were strung, to the applause and raucous laughter of perhaps the lowest group of villains this part of the country has seen. With officers of the peace no longer an impediment, the lawless element has taken over the town completely and chaos reigns.’ ”

  I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

  “You find that amusing, Bill?”

  “Just picturing Tiny in the raw,” I said, and I saw Maggie’s hand race to her mouth to suppress a smile.

  “That’s our town being described there, for anyone to read that cares to. You don’t think that’s to the detriment of our reputation? Of the future of Cottonwood?”

  “There’s hardly a grain of truth to it.”
<
br />   “That doesn’t matter to some easterner who might otherwise be tempted to come here, or to invest money in the town.”

  “Seems like we have all the investment we need for the time being.”

  “We never have enough, Bill. We’re going to need more, and if we get the reputation of a Sodom on the plains we won’t get it.”

  “If we’re going to get the drivers up here, there’s going to be some wildness.”

  “Wildness is one thing. Debauchery’s another. Listen to this: ‘The town’s fancy ladies, estimated at a hundred and fifty or more in number, now conduct their business openly in the out-of-doors, and think nothing of importuning strolling citizens even when accompanied by wives and babes.’ ”

  Cornan leaned forward and hollered, “Begging your pardon, Mister Leval, but that last is just about the case.”

  “Prostitutes in the streets? Not downtown, surely?” Maggie asked, her eyes wide and credulous, leaning over her soup.

  Cornan reddened at her addressing him directly, and responded without meeting her eyes. “Not in the decent part of town, not yet anyway. In the shanty-town, though, they’re whoring openly without regard for decency or the laws of God or man. And we have to face the fact that the shanty-town is a part of this city.”

  He leaned forward and stared at Marc, who nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe something should be done.”

  “It’s a terrible idea,” I said. “Get rid of the whores and you’ll have a town full of men with one thing on their minds, and the lack of it will make them as wild as the mob in that newspaper article.”

  Cornan didn’t appreciate being contradicted. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at your attitude regarding the town whores, Mr. Ogden, after what I witnessed today south of Lincoln.”

  Marc and Maggie raised their eyebrows as one and turned to Cornan, riveted.

  “You didn’t see anything, Cornan.”

  “I saw you talking to a painted lady that stuck her half-naked body out into the street to see if you could be lured in. By the looks of things as I was hurrying off you were negotiating a price with her.”