Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Was one of the men bent over at the neck?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t say,” he said. “Too occupied looking at the younger of the women.” He sounded like a southerner, maybe out of Tennessee.

  “Redhead?”

  “She was, too, and she smiled at me.” He cleared his throat and spat at the ground. “I was right in the midst of putting up that chicken coop there.” He indicated with his thumb a jumble of sticks nailed together with some twisted wire to form the core of a structure considerably cruder even than his shack. “I waved a hello to ’em, and they waved back. They was asking how far it was to Toronto or Middletown, and I told ’em how far, but I knew a better way to Middletown than along the river, and as I told it they kept on a-going, and so I walked along with ’em a ways. Probably a mile and a half. I was awful interested in that redhead, and I asked her ‘Are you married to him, there?’ and she said no, she was his sister. I damned near proposed marriage then and there.” He laughed at the absurdity of it, showing widely and irregularly spaced teeth, two of the upper incisors angled crazily outward. “They said they was going to perform in a show, a traveling thing, and they wondered if I’d like to come along.” He looked over at the river in the direction they’d gone, the very picture of wistful regret, apparently having forgotten what we’d told him three minutes earlier about who the Benders were and what they’d done. “I got a claim to work, though, and I’m damned if I’ll wreck one more thing in my life.”

  We bade him goodnight; he nodded and shuffled back into his shack and we continued northward. “You think we ought to have asked him about that shortcut to Middletown?” Herbert asked.

  “There’s no train in Middletown. They’d be going out of their way,” I said.

  “They’d have killed him if he’d come along.”

  “A poor man like that?” Herbert said. “What for?”

  “For the amusement of it,” Tim said.

  Herbert took hold of a metal rod he’d stuck into his saddle bag. He slapped it into the hand holding the reins so hard just the hearing of it smarted.

  “Where’d you get that thing?” I asked.

  “Bender’s hearth. Reckon they used it for a poker. I was thinking I might beat ’em to death rather than just shoot ’em.” He grinned and laughed, and so did I, but Marc and Tim acted as if they hadn’t heard him.

  Two hours later or thereabouts the wagon tracks ended at a broken-down platform spring wagon, abandoned with a split axle. They would presumably now be riding two to a horse, and heavily loaded down. On the wagon were various items of value too heavy to carry on horseback for any distance: two finely tooled saddles, an ornately framed painting of a sharp-nosed woman in a cap and high-waisted dress of the kind fashionable thirty or forty years previous, and an assortment of copper pots and pans.

  “That’s theirs, all right,” I said, indicating the only pot in the bunch that showed signs of having been used to cook. “I saw that hanging over their hearth in January.”

  “Maybe one of us should go back and tell the others to come this way,” Tim said.

  “No,” Marc said with a dismissive wave. “We’ll have found them and dealt with them by the time anyone could reach us.”

  Herbert spat onto the ground, vaguely in the direction of Marc’s left boot. “Gonna hang the women just like the men, if I have anything to say in the matter. You got any objection to that, Mr. Leval?”

  “None whatsoever,” Marc said, though I didn’t expect he intended to be placing the ropes around their necks himself.

  “If we don’t bring ’em back to town we’ll never know exactly what they done or who they was in cahoots with,” Tim said.

  “I know goddamn well what they done,” Herbert said. “I was up to my goddamn knees in it.”

  Tim shook his head and spat. “Horrible, just thinking about it. Them coming to town and socializing like regular people, and all the while they was slaughtering travelers. You figure they was doing that all along?”

  “They showed up in ’70, the men first,” Herbert said. “April or May, the women a month or so later. That house went up pretty damn quick, as I recall, quicker than the stable. I reckon they was planning all along to lure in travelers.”

  “Was it ’70 or ’71?” I asked. “Seems like ’71 was when we started hearing about men setting out for Osage Mission and not getting there.”

  “What gives me the fantods is that damned cellar underneath the house,” Herbert said. “Looks like they were all bled there.”

  “Well, their throats was cut,” Tim said, “they had to bleed someplace, and that way the blood wouldn’t be spotted if they had a visitor they didn’t manage to do in, like old Bill here.”

  I had been going over this in my head since we’d left. “But the backs of their skulls were already bashed in. Why cut the throats of dead men?”

  “Some kind of sorcery, you think?” Tim asked in a nervous whisper.

  Then I told them the story of Mrs. Kearney of Cherryvale, of the rifle, the abortive séance and the priapic figure of the man on the wall.

  “I always knowed there was something not right about that Katie Bender,” Tim said. “Her and her haints and her curing deaf and dumbness and blindness, I always knowed there was something unchristian about all that business. And you know she used to come to the Methodist meetings on Sundays.”

  “The hell with that,” Herbert said. “A bunch of common thieves, that’s all they were. All that spirit business, that’s pure bunkum.”

  “Question is, did Katie Bender think it was bunkum?” Tim said.

  “I think she did,” I said, thinking of the faked séance at the hotel.

  Tim was growing frustrated at our inability to grasp what seemed to him obvious. “Then how do you explain them bleeding them dead men into the soil under their house when they could have just buried them?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, and for the most part we remained silent for the next couple of hours. We followed the tracks as thoughtlessly as the horses we rode, with the hoofbeats beneath us and the nearly inaudible trickling of the river to our left the only constant sounds to distract us from our private reveries.

  When I was fifteen years old, and circumstances had led me to abandon my formal education in favor of gainful employment, I found work at a big dairy farm nearby owned by a man named Rudolph Harding. Rudolph wasn’t a bad man, and not a bad boss, either; for the most part he was fair and even-tempered, but I didn’t like him much. Partially it was the fact that he was very religiously inclined, and since I was the son of a minister he tried to draw me into theological conversations as we worked, or ate dinner, or on a few occasions when he drove me to my mother’s house in town in his wagon for that express purpose. As he came to recognize that I had fallen away from the church after my father’s passing, he decided that it was his Christian mission on earth to bring me back into the bosom of the Methodist faith. I listened politely, since he was my boss, but I found these conversations all but unbearable for the simple reason that I was regularly having my way with Mary Harding, his wife. She was his second wife, and fifteen years or so his junior. Every time Harding and I ended our workday getting down on our knees together and praying (or pretending to, in my case) I was tormented by the thought of Mary’s pretty face contorted in ecstasy, or worse, of her mouth wrapped around my prick, and after a year I quit to take a job in town as an attorney’s office boy. Harding was wounded when I left, not least because my new position paid less than the farm job, but I had reached the point where I was sure I couldn’t stand another of those damned prayer sessions without bursting out with the news that I’d been laying his wife and so frequently that the only excitement left in it was the increasingly likely possibility that we’d be found out. We had to take whatever furtive opportunities arose for our intimacies, and Mary had become progressively more fearless, even brazen, in her certainty that Rudolph was too trusting and witless to ever catch us. By the time I left I disliked Hardin
g because he had treated me kindly and fairly, thereby failing to give me a reason to justify the wrong I had done him.

  This memory came to me unbidden and unwelcome as we rode along the river in single file, with my good friend and business partner Marc in the lead. Occasionally the tracks of the horses faded when the ground got hard or when for some reason they took them onto higher and drier land, but always they started up again, the prints closely spaced.

  We did not precisely follow the serpentine path of the river as the Benders had but kept to a beeline adjacent to it; twenty miles or so to the south of Toronto we heard a commotion in the bushes ahead of us. It might have been anything, but John Bender’s furtiveness in the bushes a few months ago came again to my mind, and I stopped and dismounted, signaling as I did so to the others to continue on.

  I walked my chestnut mare alongside the others, handed the reins to Herbert, and then outflanked the shrubbery and drew the Colt, halfway hoping the movement was that of a beaver or a bobcat.

  I crept on the ground to the bush and passed behind it; between it and the riverbank I found a grizzled character of indeterminable age, somewhere between thirty and seventy and none too hale looking even at the high end of that scale, seated upon the grass with his back leaning against a tree, oblivious to our presence. His trousers were about his ankles, and he pulled at his swollen organ, moaning dementedly. I cocked the Dragoon, and only then did he stop the rhythmic stroking of his prick. His gun sat just out of reach, atop a hat, and I told him to sit still. I grabbed the gun and pulled back.

  The others approached, and I told him to step out slow. He did so, arms upraised and beaming at us like we were his long-lost cousins. His pants remained at his feet and he shuffled forward as though that were his usual way of dressing and getting around. His cock did not deflate; it swung back and forth with each step he took, and I thought Tim Niedel might shoot him just to make that boner go away.

  “Any of you looking to acquire some jewelry?” he asked in a croak like that of a man who’s just been throttled. At that Herbert took the poker from his saddle bag and once again started smacking it into his palm, and the stranger looked still less certain of himself. That he might be a legitimate dealer in jewels seemed unlikely; open sores ate at his face, and he wore no shirt under his faded union army jacket.

  Finally Tim could stand no more, and he faced the fellow square on. “You goddamned dirty pervert, you get that prick of yours back down limp and get your drawers back up or I’ll by God shoot it off, you hear me?”

  The man covered his cock with his hands but was unable to calm the thing down. He did pull his trousers up, and that soothed Tim somewhat.

  “Let’s see ’em,” Marc said, and the man scampered back into the brush from which, after a moment’s rustling, he emerged holding a burning lantern and a finely-wrought ebony jewel box. He opened it and held it up for Marc to see, and then moved it to where Herbert and Tim and I could each in turn have a look.

  “How’s about that signet, there?” I asked.

  “Which one’s that?” he asked.

  “That one,” I said, leaning down and pointing to the ring Juno had died wearing.

  The wretch plucked it from the box and handed it to me. “One dollar,” he said.

  “And why should I pay you a dollar for something that’s already mine?” I asked, and the bedraggled jewel dealer looked confused and frightened; he suspected he was about to be robbed. I ignored him and addressed Marc. “This is a ring my hired hand stole when he left, the one we pulled out of the orchard.”

  “Where’d you get that ring?” Marc asked, drawing his revolver and pointing it straight at the man’s forehead.

  “Found it. Found some other things, too, next to a dead horse. It was still warm when I come acrost it, if you’re wanting something to fill your bellies. I can’t eat the whole thing by myself.”

  “Where’d you find it and when?”

  “Around nightfall. Only et a little piece of the haunch.”

  “Where, I said?”

  He pointed upriver, anxious to please. “Little bit up that way. We could build us a bonfire and roast us a whole hindquarter.”

  Marc holstered his gun, dismounted and took the jewel box. “There are some fine pieces in here.”

  “They must have a hell of a lot of cash, then, if they’re down to dumping gold.”

  “There was more things,” the man said. “In the saddle bags. Hell of a nice saddle, too, nice as that one there.” He indicated Marc’s saddle.

  “If they’re down to one horse, we still have a shot at stopping them before they get to Toronto,” Tim said.

  “That’s if we get going now,” I said to Marc, who was standing there looking thoughtfully at the man.

  Marc handed me the jewel box and climbed back onto the saddle. “All right, let’s get a move on, then.”

  “Hold on,” the man on the ground said, his eyes full of hurt and injustice. “You got to pay for them rings and things, they’re mine fair and square.”

  Marc reached into his vest with perfect calm, looking for all the world as if he were going to withdraw a sheaf of bills and pay the man for his trouble. Instead he drew again, and in what seemed like a single, deft motion brought the weapon up, pulled back the hammer and blew a hole in the man’s forehead, sending back a spray of gore onto the soft grass. Above it the poor devil collapsed, bitter for a second about his fate but dead before his knees gave up their burden. The three of us looked at Marc, who replaced his pistol and stared back at us, daring us to find fault with his action.

  Herbert spoke up first. “That weren’t strictly necessary, Mr. Leval.”

  “He was their confederate,” Marc said. “Let’s ride.”

  “Confederate, hell,” Tim yelled. “That was just a poor river rat scrounging for food, thought he’d gotten lucky for once in his sorry-assed life.”

  “Think about it, Mr. Niedel. They killed at least, what? Fourteen men we know of. Then there are those that were found earlier downstream in the Verdigris, and then there are all those unaccounted for. How many of those have there been in the last two or three years? Thirty? Fifty?”

  “That don’t make this dead man lying here their helper.”

  “Goddamn it, think. Where are the horses the dead men rode? Their saddles? Where did the Benders sell all those stolen goods? Those men in the orchard had been stripped right down to their skins. Multipy them by five or ten and you’ve got a lot to dispose of in a place as desolate as this.”

  Tim thought about it for a minute. “Maybe that’s so, maybe they did have confederates, but that don’t make him one of them.”

  “The hell with you, then,” Marc said, kicking his horse’s flank. “He was carrying stolen goods, and to my mind that makes him one of them. They’re five minutes closer to Toronto and the railroad right now.”

  He started along the bank, and after a moment’s hesitation Herbert and Tim went, too. I waited a moment longer and slipped the signet ring onto the little finger of my left hand and followed.

  A mile upriver we found the horse, its saddlebags picked clean by the man Marc had killed, and possibly by others. The cause of the beast’s death was immediately apparent: the haunch from which the jeweler had sliced a chunk of meat stank, and shortly below the fresh cut an old and festering wound still glistened in the light of the moon, hours after its putrescent fluids had ceased to flow.

  “Bet you two dollars that’s Mr. Sheale’s mount,” Tim said as the stink receded at our backs, and that was the last thing that was said for a long time.

  After that it was hard to judge the passage of time. We spread out, riding twenty feet abreast and approached every bush and shade tree as if it might contain a nest of vipers. We were all testy from the ride and the lack of sleep, and we debated whether to take the Benders back with us. Herbert still intended to hang them all on the spot, and Marc indicated again that he would make no move to stop it, though without indicating whether he’d su
lly his own hands in the process. Tim insisted we take them back to stand trial; how, though, if they only possessed one horse and no wagon, were we to return all four of them? In the meantime the tracks of that remaining horse had disappeared again, and I suggested to Tim that Katie might have summoned the powers of darkness to make the horse levitate. He didn’t think that was funny.

  We had quieted down again, hunkering down in our saddles, wrapped in blankets and all of us wishing we’d brought warmer clothes. I particularly missed the fine fur coat Marc and Maggie had presented me with for Christmas and my old buffalo robe. A few miles south of Middletown we came to a fork in the river, one of many we had encountered since we began heading north, and Marc stopped to point out a spot on the riverbank just short of the fork. There were hoofprints in the mud, but only those closest to the waterline remained muddy.

  “Those look like hoofprints to you?”

  “Sure, but old ones, and they’re leading in from the north.”

  “They may have backtracked,” Marc said.

  “And there’s three, maybe four horses there.”

  “They stole some horses, then. Herbert, you and Tim follow this fork. Bill and I’ll go on up to Toronto.”

  Herbert scowled. “What the hell for?”

  I imagined some variation of the phrase “because I said so” about to form on Marc’s lips, but he remained civil. “If they’re headed west they’ll catch the train at Neal, not Toronto.”

  “I still don’t think that’s any kind of tracks from them. I say we stick together.” I looked at the three of them as I said it, but it was Tim and Herbert I was trying to win over. I was sure Marc was wrong, but I’d never convince him of it.

  Tim and Herbert shifted their gazes from each other to me and finally to Marc. “I say we split up like Mr. Leval says,” Herbert said, and Tim nodded.

  “You want to catch up to the whole four of them when it’s just the two of you?” I asked.