Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  Before I could respond, Maggie turned sideways and buried her face in her hands, retching. She waved us off with her right hand as Marc and I each rose to her aid, and when she could get a word out she whispered, “Something went down wrong.” Her eyes were wet and rimmed with red, and she didn’t address me directly for the rest of the evening.

  The next morning I rode out to the farm as usual, where Garth and the new hired man were hard at work with the plowing. I pitched in for a while, which left me determined to hire a third man immediately, and when it came time to leave for town I stopped into the house if just to get out of the cold for a moment.

  “You been having your way with that woman,” Ninna said without accusation or anger, a simple statement of fact.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, considerably surprised.

  “Heard he was gone to Chicago for two, three weeks, and I seen the way you looked at her Christmastime.”

  “ ‘Saw,’ not ‘seen.’ ” It was a constant irritant to me that her English, as it grew over the years, became more and more colloquial and incorrect, but that was what I got for abandoning her to the field hands. “Anyway, that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Seen how she was looking at you, too, when she thought her man and me wasn’t looking.”

  “But you haven’t heard any talk?”

  She laid down her knitting for a second and looked straight at me with her big, pale blue eyes. “How would I hear talk? I don’t see nobody but Garth and that damned hunky you hired, and Clyde. Once a month I see the neighbors and they know less than me. They’re real farmers, do all the work themselves. No time to go to town and gossip.” She took up the needles again, and I went out. I hadn’t seen Clyde that morning, though I knew he was home, and I wanted to say hello.

  I found the boy up in the barn, nestled in the straw for warmth and trying to read Herodotus. “Making any progress?” I asked, and he looked up and shrugged slightly.

  “Some.” Then he looked back down at the page and scowled, much the way I used to when I was at that stage of puzzling out the Greek letters one by one, constructing them into words, and then reassembling the words to form sentences. I remembered the pride and pleasure I took from that experience, and I hoped that it was the same for him, and would soon become for him as it had for me so long ago, an escape from the day’s drudgery into the world of the ancients. I sensed that further interruption from me would break the spell and so crept out quietly, remounted the chestnut mare and rode back to town, calculating as I rode the amount of ill-will to be generated with Garth when Ninna took the new man to bed.

  The day was humid and cold without being foggy, exactly. I stopped in at the bank before I opened the saloon and found Marc in conference with a prosperous-looking fellow, beefy in the face and with a striking roll of fat around his neck like a pink collar. His hair was black, going gray in spots, and his muttonchop whiskers had gone white altogether. His little eyes bulged like a salamander’s, and his mouth remained open the entire time I was in his presence. Marc introduced the man as Silas Henniston of Kansas City.

  “Mr. Henniston’s gone and lost his business partner somewhere around here, Bill,” he said. He was in no sunnier a mood than he’d been since his return, and he didn’t bother to disguise his slightly contemptuous smile. “He thought perhaps we could help him out.”

  Henniston, oblivious, leaned forward. “He was traveling between Topeka and Independence, and his presence can be established at Osage Mission as of the middle of March.” His quavering hand plucked from his vest pocket a handkerchief that badly needed cleaning and pressed it to his brow, replacing it wet into the pocket.

  “What makes you think he’s been here?” I asked.

  “He had no plan I know of to venture here, but as he never arrived in Independence I thought he might have. I’ve established that he didn’t stay at your local hotel.”

  “Lots of people pass through this part of the state and don’t end up where they’re supposed to be,” I said, looking over to Marc for confirmation.

  “Mr. Henniston, here, is an officer of the Second National Bank of Kansas City,” Marc added, and though I knew nothing of the bank I assumed it was one with which the town did business, or intended to. “And his brother Hiram is a member of the state legislature.”

  “What’s this banker’s name?”

  Mr. Henniston cleared his throat. “Sheale. He’s not a banker. We’re partners in a lumber shipping venture separately from the bank. Mr. Sheale was traveling with a sum of gold on his person. It was his intention to purchase some land there for a warehouse, but the man he was supposed to buy it from never heard from him, nor did the builder.”

  The thought immediately crossed my mind that this fellow might have absconded with the cash. It must have shown on my face because Marc quickly discredited it. “He’s a rich man, so we’re not much concerned with the loss of the money on him as with his safety.”

  Mr. Henniston cleared his throat again and described the errant Sheale. “Tall, thin, forty-nine years of age, with a long mustache and a short beard beneath his lip.”

  “No, can’t say he sounds familiar to me,” I said, though I might have seen a dozen men answering to that description over the past several months.

  “Mr. Henniston hasn’t been to Cherryvale or Independence yet. I thought perhaps you might take him there.”

  “I’m tending bar this afternoon.”

  “Get the new man to cover for you.”

  “It’d make more sense to have the new man take him,” I said.

  “You’re going, and you’re going now. Go to the saloon and have the new man sent for. Good day, Mr. Henniston.”

  Henniston seemed relieved to be dismissed, and he got up to leave.

  “You’ll report back to me at the end of the day, Bill,” Marc said, his eyes down on a piece of paper on the desk. He peered up at the door when I didn’t respond, and I wanted to pick him up by the ears and pull him over the desk and thrash him until that supercilious look vanished from his pan. As if he sensed that, his lips curled slowly into a smile of the surliest disdain, whether for me or for Mr. Henniston I didn’t know.

  We got a horse for Mr. Henniston at the livery and set off. The way he sat upon the horse, shifting his great hams from side to side and favoring first one and then the other, his nostrils flaring at the discomfort of it, made me ask if he’d prefer I hired a wagon. He forced a jovial grin and assured me that he would be fine, though every step that horse took brought from him a wince and a short, shallow intake of breath.

  Cherryvale was on our way to Independence, and a mile or so out of Cottonwood I asked Mr. Henniston if he wanted to stop there on the return trip or on the way there. He had no preference, and when it loomed to our left we continued on our way past it. By then Henniston had settled into the saddle and nearly looked comfortable as he bounced, content to watch the green grass and wildflowers of the rolling mounds as we rode past them, seemingly forgetful of the matter at hand. Occasionally, though, he would grimace and squirm, clenching the left buttock and then relaxing it and doing the same with the right. Never once did he lift himself out of the saddle by putting his weight onto his stirruped feet, and I wondered if the condition of his knees prevented it. After one such painful readjustment of his ample rump I said it was a shame there was no rail service between the towns.

  “Ah, well. Train travel’s scarcely any more comfortable.”

  “Quicker, though. Your timing was lucky.”

  “How’s that?” he said, grunting painfully as the horse stepped into a slight depression in the path.

  “If this had happened last year you wouldn’t have had the train to bring you down from Kansas City.”

  His nostrils flared, though whether in pain or in distaste for the railroad I couldn’t say. “Stupid thing, that rail line.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Think. What’s it for? Transport people and goods. Now. What kind of goods is i
t going to be transporting?”

  “Mainly livestock out of Texas,” I said, and he startled me with a loud and openly derisive snort.

  “Christ almighty. He tried to get money out of us for those cattle pens. He’s still trying, which is the only reason I got you out here, watching me wheeze on the back of this scurvy nag.”

  “What have you got against cattle pens?”

  “I have nothing against cattle pens. I just don’t believe in ’em this far east. Those Texans don’t want to drive their cattle any further than absolutely necessary.”

  “Marc says the trail that’s going to lead up here is faster than the ones out west.”

  He held out his palm. “The new trail will be faster and cheaper by virtue of access to water, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He’s tried to sell us all on this and failed. I don’t know of any cattle people he’s managed to convert either. By the looks of the town there’s money coming in, though, so maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. But if I were you, and I wanted to invest in a cattle depot, I’d be looking a lot further west.”

  We didn’t talk much after that until we got to Independence. There we met the land agent who was to have brokered the sale of the warehouse space; he had seen no trace of Sheale, and after questioning the local hoteliers and rooming houses we concluded that we were too far south for any trace of the man, and we headed back northward. Henniston haltingly suggested that we stay longer, as he might still have conducted some of the business Mr. Sheale was meant to come down for, but I wasn’t anxious to wait around for him and I told him no. I was annoyed with him for his lack of faith in Cottonwood’s future, for his shortsightedness, and for the slow pace his girth had forced us to set for the day’s ride.

  By mid-afternoon we passed Cherryvale again, this time turning into town. The first man we saw was a farmer headed for the feed store. He was a big man in a straw hat, and he had just stepped down from his wagon. He got a look at Henniston, leaning over to his right, with some curiosity. Then Henniston straightened up and leaned over to his left. This was another trick to assuage the pain of being in the saddle, one he had started doing in Independence; he hadn’t wanted to dismount there for fear he’d be unable to get himself back onto the horse. The farmer began to laugh, and Henniston was quick to take offense. By the time he calmed down we established that the farmer hadn’t seen or heard of anything that might explain Mr. Sheale’s disappearance, and we proceeded to the hotel.

  I dismounted and brought the innkeeper outside. He listened carefully to Henniston’s story and reported that no one answering to Sheale’s description had stayed there. He thought it might be worth Henniston’s while to travel to Parsons or Oswego, but added as I had that a substantial number of men had started crossing the old Osage territory over the last few years without finishing it, vanishing as if the prairie had opened itself up and swallowed them up to feed that rich black soil beneath its grasses.

  “My God,” Henniston said. “You’re just like this one. You talk as if that’s a normal state of affairs.”

  The innkeeper and I traded looks and shrugged. “This isn’t Kansas City, Mr. Henniston,” I said. “This is the frontier.”

  Henniston spat. “Don’t tell me about the goddamned frontier, Mr. Ogden. I made my money in California, in forty-nine, and I know a damned sight more than you ever will about the hazards of the wilderness.” His face was scarlet by then and he was breathing harder than when we’d stopped. I thought the innkeeper was going to say something in rebuttal, but his attention was claimed by something up the street.

  “Well, if I’m not mistaken there’s an old friend of yours,” he said with a wink, and I turned to see the younger of the two John Benders coming toward us in a weatherbeaten platform spring wagon.

  I called to Bender and bade him stop. He turned slowly, with a simpleton’s smile on his lips, his eyebrows raised in curiosity, and looking me straight in the eyes betrayed no sign that he knew me. He nonetheless slowed to a stop.

  “Howdy. On my way to the feed store,” he said with a jaunty bouncing rhythm, his accent stronger than I remembered. He had a large scab on the tip of his nose, cracked and yellowing at the borders.

  “Mr. Bender. Remember me? I came out to your house one evening. Bill Ogden out of Cottonwood. Your sister Katie knows me.”

  Sitting there at the reins he nodded dumbly and looked Mr. Henniston up and down as though cataloguing his clothing and accessories; in particular he had his eye on a sturdy gold chain hanging from Henniston’s vest pocket.

  “This is Mr. Henniston,” I said. “He’s an officer of the Second National Bank of Kansas City, Missouri.”

  “Oh,” Bender said, transfixed by the gold chain. “Say, mister, do you know what’s the hour?”

  Henniston took out an enormous gold timepiece at the end of the chain and opened its casing. It filled most of his big palm and looked as heavy as a chunk of marble, and he held it to his ear and shook it. “I’m sorry, I forgot to wind it, I’m afraid. As I often do.”

  Bender looked like a cat watching birds through a metal screen, and something like horror flashed in his eyes as they saw the object of desire slip back into Henniston’s vest pocket.

  “We’re looking for a man who might have been traveling this way from the Osage Mission.”

  “I didn’t see nobody,” he said quickly.

  “Wait a minute, I don’t mean today. Anyway I haven’t given you the particulars. He’s about fifty, a tall fellow with a mustache and a beard. Thin.”

  Bender looked paler than he had a moment before, and the scab stood out harshly against the lightness of his face. “Ain’t seen him.”

  “Would have been about March, I’d think.”

  “I told you I ain’t seen him,” he said, and he turned the little wagon around and started back in the direction he’d come. “Ain’t hardly seen anyone lately.”

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “Home, I got chores to do.”

  “Weren’t you headed for the feed store?”

  Bender glanced at the store, wide-eyed. “Got all the feed I want,” he said, and he hurried off.

  “That’s a peculiar kind of a dutchman,” Henniston said.

  We stayed another half an hour, and we didn’t find anybody who’d seen Sheale. By the time we got back to Cottonwood it was getting dark, and I discovered that Mr. Henniston liked to take a drink. At the bar he knocked four or five back before Marc came looking for him.

  “Come along, Mr. Henniston, we’ve got dinner coming before too long.”

  “Can I invite my new friend Bill along?” Henniston asked. Our friendship was a development I hadn’t been aware of until that moment.

  “Afraid not. Now come along, we don’t want the soup to get cold.”

  After an effusive leave-taking Mr. Henniston left with Marc, who had not deigned to address me, and just for a moment I missed the town the way it had been, with a dismal, cramped saloon, no railroad and no bright future ahead as a cattle town.

  The next day at eleven in the morning I arrived at the saloon, where a small crowd of men including Silas Henniston already awaited my appearance, and I unlocked the building and let them in. My mind was turning several thoughts around at once, thoughts of opening the saloon at an earlier hour and hiring another hand for the farm and obtaining some books from the Levals’ library for Clyde, possibly even spending a little time tutoring the boy, and I promptly forgot to ask the men at the bar about the wayward Mr. Sheale. So did Mr. Henniston, who immediately ordered a whiskey. When he tried to pay for it I gave Gleason the high sign.

  “Sorry, mister, I can’t take your money,” he said, though it chagrined him not to.

  “Thank you, son,” Henniston said, and he turned to me with a grin and hoisted the drink. After two of them it occurred to him to bring up the matter at hand. No one had seen Mr. Sheale, and Henniston grew silent.

  I was surprised to see Herbert Braunschweig step through the door a few minutes la
ter. He never drank until the end of the working day, yet here he was at a quarter past eleven in the morning, bellying up and slapping his fist to the bar.

  “Whiskey, bartender.” Gleason poured him one and he drained it and held out his glass for another.

  “What brings you here this early, Herbert?”

  He scowled. “Henry Flank says I can’t work in the scaffolding any more. Wants me to work at framing, on the ground, and I ain’t gonna do it.”

  “How come?”

  “Working on the scaffolds, which I been doing since I was fourteen years old, calls for throwing and catching, and Flank says I can’t judge distances with one eye. It’s bullshit is what it is.”

  “When’d you lose that eye, anyway?”

  “Army, in ’63.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, I got into a scrap with a corporal who made a remark about my sister. Little cocksucker gouged it out.”

  Herbert was a big man, and I’d have hated to see the man that could do that to him. “Jesus.”

  “Well, I was choking the shit out of the little bastard, and I probably would have finished him off, otherwise. I spent some time in the stockade for it, but I was a good soldier.” He slapped the bar again. “And I was a damned good shot, too, even with my shooting eye gone. Goddamn Flank anyway.”

  Henniston had taken a couple more drinks by now, and he took an interest in Herbert’s troubles. “Maybe my friend Marc could intercede on your behalf,” he said, and Herbert laughed.

  “He’s everybody’s friend, that’s the trouble. He’s Flank’s friend, too.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m a guest in his home at the moment,” Henniston said. He explained his situation to Herbert, who didn’t think he’d seen Sheale.

  “I’ll keep my eye and ears open though. You think of asking down in Parsons?”

  “That’s what the man at the hotel in Cherryvale suggested,” Henniston said, and that got me thinking about John Bender, and from there I got to thinking about the night I’d stopped at his house.