Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Have you had a look at those two? If that’s what Katie Bender’s sweet hindquarters have come to then it’s a goddamned shame.”

  “I haven’t seen them up close.” I hadn’t come to talk about the Benders, though, and I tried to remember that I had reasons to be mad at him. “What’d you write about me, Ed?”

  “You didn’t give me much to write. Just that you were back.”

  “I don’t mean the other day, I mean when Maggie came back to town.”

  “Hell, you want to know what I wrote about Maggie?” He led me into the back of the printshop, into a room containing a multitude of newspapers hanging down from cylindrical racks. A bookcase held a large number of enormous volumes bound in light calfskin. “Help me with the date, here.”

  “Well, she left Greeley in September of seventy-five.”

  “Seventy-five . . . as I recall it was around the middle of October of that year that she came back . . . I was still a weekly, so that simplifies matters somewhat. Go on, sit down.”

  I sat at a large table, and shortly he produced a copy of the paper dated October 17th, 1875. The lead story was Maggie’s:

  VILLAINY UNPUNISHED

  RETURN OF MRS. LEVAL TO THE SCENE OF HER CRIMES—MR. NETTLE SAYS SHE WILL NOT BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE—OUTRAGE OF THE CITIZENRY

  The law-abiding citizens of Labette County are asking themselves why we now tolerate and even welcome the kinds of criminals we once set out after with torches ablaze. Mrs. Marguerite Leval has returned to Cottonwood to ask forgiveness of her husband, Marc Leval, who is in the frailest of health after being shot down by Mrs. Leval’s own illicit paramour, the notorious Bill Ogden, who had treacherously played at being Mr. Leval’s friend. That the two set off together immediately after the commission of the crimes does not move Mr. Nettle, the County Prosecutor, to file charges of attempted murder or accessory thereto.

  “You’ve got some crust, you son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “I ought to thrash you for that.”

  “Don’t get too cross about it. Maggie didn’t sue. Hell, Bill, I didn’t think you were coming back, is the thing.”

  The next number in the volume, for October 24th, was even worse:

  LOVE CONQUERS ALL

  MR. MARC LEVAL’S MEMORY RETURNS TO HIM—IT WAS THE BENDERS WHO SHOT HIM AS THEY FLED—HIS WIFE NOT TO BLAME, NOR HER FUGITIVE PARAMOUR

  Mrs. Marguerite Leval, recently returned from an unknown location whence she and her notorious cohort, Bill Ogden, had fled after the failed assassination of Mrs. Leval’s husband Marc, has effected a most remarkable recovery upon her husband, whose memory had been, it seems, damaged by the bullets that crippled him two and a half years ago. Previously, he had remained silent as to his assailant’s identity, and most here assumed that the guilty party was his rival for his wife’s affections, Bill Ogden. Now Mr. Leval has sworn, we are told, to the county attorney and others that it was the notorious Benders themselves that made him an invalid on the night they escaped into the ether. A lovelier testament to the healing powers of love would be difficult to imagine.

  “Mr. Smight came over and punched me in the face over that one, and then Herbert told me to put a stop to it quick or he’d have me shut down.”

  “I don’t guess you did.”

  “Story was losing steam by then anyway. What’s more, people were starting to feel a lot of sympathy for her. Look at this here,” he said, and he moved over to a separate set of volumes bound in the same light-colored calfskin. Selecting one he brought it over to the table. “I keep a separate morgue for the Free Press, but Cy’s too cheap to keep the Optic on hand.”

  He flipped around until he found the issue of October 16, 1875. “Here’s what Cy had to say about it.” His index finger traced down the page to the pertinent article. Here, too, Maggie was the subject of the lead article, but she wasn’t its villain.

  MRS. LEVAL HAS RETURNED

  IT IS HOPED THAT HER TESTIMONY WILL AID IN THE CAPTURE OF HER HUSBAND’S ATTACKER—SALOONKEEPER OGDEN SAID TO HAVE COMPELLED HER TO ACCOMPANY HIM ON HIS FLIGHT FROM JUSTICE.

  To the great joy of all Cottonwoodians, Mrs. Marguerite Leval, the wife of our friend Marc Leval, has returned to Cottonwood after an absence of more than two years, during which, Mrs. Leval’s intimates have informed the Free Press, she was held in the vilest of captivity by the outlaw Bill Ogden, who once operated a saloon here. Ogden’s motive in shooting his friend and protector, Mr. Leval, seems to have been an un-reciprocated love for Mrs. Leval.

  Ed’s arms were folded across his chest, and he looked down at me with great satisfaction. “So you see who your friends are and aren’t in the press. Cy dropped all that about you when Leval came out and said it was the Benders who shot him.”

  Distracted as I was, I had nonetheless to admit that the Optic ’s stories hit closer to the mark than the Free Press’s did. “Seems like old Cy thought even less of me than you.”

  “Nothing personal, on his part or mine. ’Course, like half the men in town, Cy was a little bit sweet on old Maggie. And he was doing what he did at least partly at Leval’s behest.”

  “Leval was looking pretty poorly when I saw him yesterday.”

  “He has his good days, too. He was at the trial last week, looked pretty dapper there in his wheelchair. Speaking of which, you want to go see the ladies?”

  “The Benders?” I said.

  “I was thinking I might try and talk my way past that Mrs. Naylor, see if I couldn’t get a few words with the ladies this afternoon after court lets out. Why don’t you come along and see what you think. Court’ll likely adjourn at three-thirty or four.”

  It was two-thirty now; in the interim I elected to stay and leaf through old volumes of the Optic and the Free Press, seated in a chair by the front window, catching up on any number of useless facts about Cottonwood’s economy and society, and various aspects of local and state politics that had escaped me during my long exile. And then—in one paper, ten years old, in an article on a Christmas party at the Methodist Church, I was struck by the names of two of the students: Maria Canterwell, Ninna’s girl, and Marc Leval, Jr. With strained voice I asked Ed about the latter child.

  He peered at me over his spectacles, as though trying to decide if I was pulling his leg. “That’d be Maggie’s boy. Born shortly after her arrival here.”

  I nodded. “Those articles from ’75 didn’t mention she was with child,” I said.

  “Hell, no,” Ed said. “No need, for one thing. Still a small town then, everybody knew.” He laughed under his breath. “Everybody except you, I guess.”

  When we left the offices of the Optic the snowy streets were hard to navigate, but they’d be worse in a day or two when the melting snow turned the frozen earth to mud and then to solid ice. We took Ed’s buggy toward a neighborhood east of downtown, then turned onto a street of cozy little cottages and pulled quickly in front of one of them. If memory served, this was very close to where the whores’ row of tent cribs had briefly stood during the boom. The Naylor residence looked quaint and comfortable beneath its white blanket, and gray smoke rose from its chimney. Before we had a chance to knock, a lady came to the door. She wore a plain brown dress covered by a heavily floured apron and looked none too happy to see Ed; I, on the other hand, might not have been there at all.

  “Mrs. Naylor, allow me to present Mr. Ogden. Mr. Ogden, this is Mrs. Naylor, the wife of Deputy Naylor of the Labette County Sheriff’s department. She’s the de facto matron of women at the moment.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Naylor,” I said with a suave, continental bow that normally won me great favor with married ladies of a certain age. Mrs. Naylor was unimpressed.

  “Here to see the ladies? I just got done feeding them.”

  “They ought to be pretty docile, then,” Ed said.

  “Docile? They’re horrid, just horrid. The language they use! And in front of the baby. It’s just a shame.” She led us through their small, warm parlor toward a back bedroom. �
�Don’t misunderstand, I’m awfully grateful for the money, but I wonder if those two wouldn’t be better off in the county jail.”

  “I thought it was decided there was no proper way to segregate them from the male prisoners?” Ed said.

  “Hah!” It was an unladylike ejaculation that nonetheless underscored in her a certain attractiveness I’d missed theretofore. “Segregation from men is the last thing those two want,” she said, and then she stopped and covered her mouth with her hands, grinning naughtily beneath them and flushing bright red. “Now the strict rule is a matron, that’s to say me, shall at all times be present during any interviews with men. That’s always the rule when we’ve got female prisoners, and apart from propriety’s sake, it’s to protect the women, of course. In this case, though, it’s more to protect the honor of the men.”

  “I heard what you said, you mackerel twat,” came the old woman’s muffled voice through the door.

  Mrs. Naylor took the compliment with greater equanimity than most of her peers would have, I think, turning to face Ed and me with a resigned look. “You hear what I have to put up with? This trial better not last much longer, is all I’ve got to say on the matter.”

  She unlocked the door and opened it, careful to remain outside the room, and Ed and I stepped in. Sitting in a rocking chair of hickory was a very careworn and haggard old woman, crabbed and bent over even seated as she was, and in a chair next to the window was a well-fed, idiotic-looking woman in her forties. A girl child two years old or thereabouts played at the latter’s feet with the end of a shawl.

  “Who the hell’s this,” the old woman snarled, with not a trace of Mrs. Bender’s Alsatian sound in her voice; I would have guessed New York, upstate somewhere.

  “You remember me, ladies. I’m with the Optic. Just came to ask a few more questions.” Ed indicated me with his hand. “And this is Mr. Ogden. Mr. Ogden, this is Mrs. Eliza Davis”—indicating the younger woman—“and this is her mother, Mrs. Almira Griffith.”

  Mrs. Davis’s leering smile made me cringe in much the same way Katie Bender’s flirtations once had, and she laughed and held her baby’s hand up in a wave. “You see there, Nattie? That there’s Mr. Ogden.” On her temple was a vivid scar partially covered by her coiffure. “Maybe he’ll be your new daddy.” She gave me a look of theatrically exaggerated sadness. “Her old daddy took off God knows where, and if he comes back to our house he’ll find us gone and no way to find us.”

  The old woman glowered at the bunch of us; I’d scarcely known old Mrs. Bender and would be hard-pressed to say whether this woman was she or not. I was puzzled by her daughter, also. While it wasn’t impossible to imagine that the lithe and vivacious Katie Bender had metamorphosed physically into this worn-out, obese creature, one thing that couldn’t be said about Katie was that she was stupid, and the younger of the women in the room seemed eager to prove from the outset that she was a numbskull.

  “Anything you want to ask the women, Mr. Ogden?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Habt ihr die Nacht vergessen, in der ich zu eurem Haus rausgeritten bin? Als eure Mannsleute mich umbringen wollten?”

  I discerned no trace of comprehension in their faces, nor of dissimulation. The younger woman cackled. “Damn if everybody down here in Kansas don’t speak Dutch.”

  “You’re not the first to try that, Mr. Ogden,” Ed said.

  They both looked pleased, as if they’d passed some sort of test.

  I tried again in English. “Remember the night I rode out to your place and your menfolk wanted to kill me?”

  “Our place in Michigan?” Mrs. Davis said.

  “He means the Bender place, out this way,” Ed said.

  “We ain’t the goddamn Benders,” the old lady yelled, rising out of the chair and making a fist at Ed.

  “I ain’t a Bender, but she is,” young Mrs. Davis said with the mischievous laugh of a naughty child, pointing at her mother. The old lady took several steps forward, claw extended at her daughter’s face.

  “That’s a goddamn lie and you know it.”

  “No it ain’t,” the daughter yelled. “You’re the Bender, Ma.”

  There was only one bed in the room for the three of them, covered with a patchwork quilt that didn’t look any too warm. “Mind if I sit on the bed, Mrs. Naylor?” Ed asked.

  “Go right ahead,” Mrs. Naylor replied lackadaisically. “Just make sure those two don’t climb on, too, out of habit.”

  “Cuntrag!” the old lady yelled, picking up a pincushion from a sewing basket to hurl at Mrs. Naylor, who ducked it as easily as if she had been expecting it.

  She shook her head. “Assaulting the matron, and right in front of witnesses. You’ll have no pecan pie this evening.”

  “I don’t care a steamin’ pile of shit about your fuckin’ pie!”

  I believe Ed was genuinely shocked at the language used, and even I was hard-pressed to recall when I’d last heard the mother tongue abused so colorfully by a member of the gentler sex. The daughter was laughing hard, full of joy at seeing Mrs. Naylor get the best of her mother.

  “I hope you’ll put that in your paper,” Mrs. Naylor said. “Let people around here find out what they’re like.”

  Ed looked at me, then at the old lady. “Tell Mr. Ogden how many husbands you’ve had.”

  The old woman looked as if she was trying to remember her multiplication tables, squinting at the ceiling and humming, before she finally spoke. “I ain’t telling you anything without Mr. Lassiter here.”

  “She’s been married six times,” the daughter chimed in. “Widowed four times and then two of ’em up and run out on her, including my papa.”

  “Shut your hole, Eliza,” the old woman yelled.

  Eliza showed a certain amount of confusion, but her fear of her mother won out, and she kept still until the baby made a noise about something outside the window in the failing light of day. On a tree limb in the backyard was a squirrel, its long curved puff of a tail undulating jerkily, and Eliza Davis let out a squeal of excitement as happy as the baby’s. “Looky there, it’s ol’ Handy.”

  “They have names?” I asked.

  “That one does, we saw him yesterday. See? He’s short a hand.” On close examination the squirrel, barely six feet from the window, proved to be missing its left forepaw. She held her little girl up for a better look. “See how he’s just got one hand, Nattie? Somebody must’ve cut it off with a knife.” The child burbled with delight as Ed and I made our exit.

  In the front room I was introduced to Mrs. Naylor’s husband, who had just returned home. “Never had a lady prisoner like them. I don’t know how we’ll manage, I really don’t. Becky’s a woman of very delicate sensibilities and it isn’t fair to expose her to that kind of language.”

  Mrs. Naylor stood beside him looking quite unconcerned, but she nodded her head. “That’s right, and I’d be obliged if you’d put that in your newspaper.”

  “I certainly will, madame,” Ed said, and we got our coats and hats and left. The snow was blowing still, and it was now dark. Ed didn’t say much until we were nearing downtown.

  “You remember a whore named Lottie, showed up around the time of the boom?”

  “I do,” I said. “Didn’t she operate out of a big tent right around where the Naylors’ house is now?”

  “That’s it, all right, she and a few others. Now Lottie, there was a woman who could cuss. One time I was down there with another one of the soiled doves, one by the name of Lulubelle, and a couple doors down we heard Lottie cry out ‘Stop, thief.’ I’d just finished up my business with Lulubelle, so I hiked up my drawers and took off after him, and pretty soon there was three or four of us chasing the poor fellow down. We caught him pretty quick and held him down, and old Lottie came over and kicked him right in the balls. She was barefoot, so it didn’t hurt him as much as it might have, and so she grabbed ’em and squoze.”

  I winced at the thought. “What then?”

  “She l
et out a string of violent obscenities the likes of which I’d never heard from the lips of a woman. Never have since, either, until this afternoon. Boy, she called him a cock-sucker and a fuckhead and a shit-heel and every other vulgar compound noun in the American vernacular. People were gathered around by then, and they started encouraging her to hurt him, and of course there were still men holding him down. I’d let go of the poor bastard by then. It got ugly after that.”

  We rode in silence again for a block or two; I watched the vapor blowing out the horse’s flaring nostrils in long bursts and tried to connect the two women I’d just seen with Katie and Ma Bender. Finally Ed spoke again. “I miss those days, when the town was a little wilder.”

  “It’s calmed down somewhat,” I said.

  “I suppose it could erupt again if those two are acquitted.”

  “You think they will be?”

  He shrugged. “That depends. But if the public decides they’re the Bender women and then the court finds otherwise, it’ll be hard to get those two out of town with their necks intact.”

  “I don’t see how anybody who knew the Benders could honestly say those two are they,” I said, finally.

  “Nope,” he said. He stopped the buggy in front of the Optic’s offices. Inside a pair of young men worked at the press, and Ed shook his head at the sight of them. “Look at those two, like molasses. Well, I guess I’d better go show ’em how it’s supposed to be done.”

  I could hear him yelling at the two apprentices, even once he’d shut the door and over the muffling effects of the snowfall. In a bleak mood I trudged through the snow to Herbert’s, where the smell of Madame Renée’s cooking was detectable even before I entered the front door. Herbert sat in the parlor reading the morning Free Press, and he waved me into the room.

  “Say, Renée’s cooking beef tonight. Bergy-own. You don’t look too good, Bill.”

  “I just found out Maggie had a baby.”

  “She sure as hell did. Little Marc Leval. Not so little now.”

  “That’s why she came back, isn’t it?”

  “You were gone and not answering her letters, is what I understand.”