Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  At the back of the box Gleason had added a few extra views, well printed but crudely mounted. Of these the most interesting by far was the only photograph I knew to exist of Katie Bender, seated next to Marc and Maggie in their suite in the old Cottonwood Hotel. Her indeterminate face floated in a fog above her crisply defined body, a ghost in three dimensions, with just the suggestions of features. I was sure in retrospect that Katie’s avoidance of the camera’s prosecutorial gaze had been deliberate; a recognizable photograph would certainly have been a help in either condemning or exonerating the two ladies in Deputy Naylor’s house, and I was willing to bet that wherever she’d lived before or after Kansas, no photograph existed of her there, either.

  A while later a man and woman came in wanting a portrait, or at least the woman did. The man grumbled the whole time, and when I pressed him as to why, he explained that since November he’d been the proud owner of one of Mr. Eastman’s box cameras, and couldn’t understand why in God’s name his wife wanted to pay someone to take their picture when he could do the same thing at home for the cost of the materials and processing. When I’d finished with them Gleason came in; his manner toward me was so deferential I had to remind him, not for the first time, who was the employer and who the employee.

  Accompanying him was Marc Leval, Junior, who greeted me politely but showed no special interest in me. In Greek I asked him about his studies, and he responded in a bashful but perfectly correct manner, and in that awkward smile I saw traces of Maggie’s own. When I complimented him on his Greek he gave the credit not to his schoolmaster but to his own mother and Clyde. He began straightening up the darkroom, choosing it instead of the studio in order to escape me, I thought, and my annoying questions.

  “That was a good job you did on those Bender views,” I said to Gleason when we were alone.

  Gleason’s tangled eyebrows shot upward and he nodded, his jowls aquiver. “Oh. Haven’t looked at those in ten years, I bet. Sold quite a few through Haymeyer and Sons, out of Philadelphia. Never really sold many of the others, except for a few of that lynching down on Main Street.”

  “Who farms the Bender plot nowadays?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know if anyone does. I heard someone tried to plant vegetables where the orchard was but they all came up blood red.”

  I let that pass without comment. “I may just ride out there one day and see what’s there.”

  “What for?” he asked. “Nothing left of the house or shed. I don’t even know how you’d find it, any more.”

  “Still, I have the day after tomorrow free and nothing to occupy me. Maybe I’ll hire a horse and ride on out there, take a picture or two.” I put on my coat and hat and called out my good-byes to the pair of them.

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Ogden . . .” Gleason took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Somebody asked me to give this to you.” He gave me a wink which would have been too broad onstage, and laughed out loud.

  The envelope read “Mr. Bill Ogden” and nothing else, and it was written in Maggie’s hand. I slipped the envelope into my own pocket, and again he laughed and winked so hard I thought he might hurt himself. Those flaccid jowls of his were apple-red when I took my leave, right up to his long ears.

  Night hadn’t fallen yet, and the day was still warm; walking east toward Kelley’s rooming house, where I had a room but took no meals, I saw old people and children gathered on their porches already as though summer were on the horizon. At Kelley’s I took the letter upstairs, avoiding the landlady, a handsome widow woman whose relation to me the reader will already have correctly surmised. I scrupulously paid my rent, however, and early, too; I had all the money from the sale of my studio in San Francisco, which I still intended to use to buy another once I decided where to settle, or to buy out Gleason and Clyde, if I stayed. In addition I had a not inconsiderable chunk of Adelle’s farewell gift left over, and I was making a small amount every week working at the studio. My relations with Mrs. Kelley, then, were strictly carnal (though with a dollop of sentimentality on her part).

  I opened the letter, seated on the thin mattress of my squeaky spring bed. It was written in very elegant Greek; translated, it read:

  Bill,

  I am sorry to have avoided you so studiously but propriety makes its demands. I have much to tell you about my life after your leaving.

  Pray write back (in this dead tongue for the sake of discretion) and let me know if you are willing to meet me someplace.

  M.

  The letter left me stupefied after so many weeks of coldness, and when the rapping came at the door I opened without thinking. There stood Mrs. Kelley, whose first name I hadn’t yet learned. She was a bit younger than I was, with auburn hair tending to blond, and a plump form that would soon, I feared, surrender to obesity; for the moment, however, her figure was pleasing, and her willingness to allow me access to it a welcome relief.

  “It’s four-thirty, Mr. Ogden,” she said. “No one else is home ’til quarter past five at least. Will you join me?”

  It would have been impolite to refuse, so I followed her down the hall to her room, where I enjoyed her charms under the watchful eye of her late husband Adolphus, who looked down from a portrait Gleason had done ten years earlier. He’d been a big mustachioed fellow, and his picture made him seem so goodnatured that I couldn’t imagine him objecting to his wife’s enjoying a quick lay in his absence. She was rather loud, though, and when the front door opened downstairs—well in advance of five-fifteen—she froze. I made haste to finish what I was up to, and we waited in silence, still conjoined at the hips, hoping that whoever it was would adjourn to his room so that I could dress and exit unseen. It was with some relief that I heard the door to our east open and close. I dressed and walked on tiptoe to my room, where I shut the door quietly and washed off my old fellow in the washbasin.

  The next morning I wrote Maggie back, again in Greek:

  M,

  I am contemplating a ride out to the Bender farm tomorrow. If you care to meet me there I will be there all afternoon with the camera.

  B.

  I took the letter to Gleason at the saloon and asked him to deliver it to Maggie. He accepted the assignment with another laugh, and in the light that shone through the entryway I saw him blush right down to his dangling earlobes. I wondered what it was that got him so flustered, since he was a married man now with children of his own and not unfamiliar with the ways of the world.

  “I reckon I can get young Marc to deliver it to his Ma.” He fanned himself with the letter, though the air in the saloon was cool. “Mr. Ogden, you just watch yourself.”

  “I’ll watch myself.”

  He started getting red again. “I don’t know what you got planned . . .” He touched the envelope in his pocket. “What you and Maggie . . . Mrs. Leval got planned . . . That Mr. Smight is a mean son of a bitch, and so’s his boss. Sad old cripple or no, Marc Leval doesn’t deserve her. No, sir.”

  That was when I understood what got him so flushed. After years of acquaintance, nearly fifteen of them as partners in business with her husband, Marguerite Leval still made him stammer and blush like a twelve-year-old with a crush on his schoolteacher. “I don’t have anything planned, I was just replying to her letter.”

  “All right, well, you take care, though, ’cause that husband of hers is a goddamned snake.” The way he yelled it after me I couldn’t tell if it was me or Marc he was mad at.

  The next morning I hired a horse and wagon from Thornton and Sons Livery at the western edge of Cottonwood and rode west in the direction of the old Bender claim. The day was magnificent, even warmer than its immediate predecessors, and the landscape I rode through was newly green, with some trees budding and a fair number showing leaves. Next to me was a basket containing a blanket, and a picnic lunch Renée Braunschweig had kindly packed for me consisting of cold chicken and fried potatoes, along with a bottle of burgundy from their cellar and a corkscrew; whethe
r I would have them to myself or not was still in question. In the rear of the wagon was the stereo camera and its attendant equipment, including twenty dry plates, each in its separate holder. Crossing the Big Hill Creek ford I remembered the night I’d met young John Bender there, hiding in a clump of shrubbery to my right, and I wondered if Katie Bender hadn’t saved my life that night; the number of travelers who left that shack alive was small.

  Seventeen years on it seemed the Benders were about to claim two last victims. Mrs. Griffith and her daughter Mrs. Davis had been found guilty of the clan’s crimes, despite the opinion of most of us who’d been acquainted with the female members of that family—and Labette County turned out to be full of men who’d known Katie quite well—that these were two other women entirely. When the trial was finally held in March, all of us old-timers who could have identified the real Bender women, down to a fellow who claimed only to have exchanged greetings once with Katie in front of the hotel, were excluded from the jury. The unfortunate pair now sat in the state prison at Larned awaiting an appeal that wasn’t expected to save them from the gallows, and in Topeka they were gearing up for the state’s first ever hanging of a woman; Mrs. Davis’s little girl was in the care of Mrs. Naylor, who was expected to adopt the child upon the occasion of her orphaning.

  When I reached the mound I found it remarkably familiar, despite the absence of the buildings and the orchard. It seemed absurd, even impossible that anything evil might have ever transpired in that bucolic, rolling vista, and the smell of the newly blooming wildflowers seemed to contradict my memory of the foul slaughterhouse stink that had clung to the farm the last time I’d seen it. I put the wagon underneath a budding cottonwood tree for the limited shade it offered, stepped down and walked to where I thought the house had stood, finding no trace of it, nor of the charnel pit. Where the orchard had been someone had laid down a large river stone, a little smaller than a man’s head, where each of the bodies had lain. I noticed that by several of these stones a depression could be discerned, and taking a walk to the east of the orchard’s former location, I noted a dozen or more such depressions in the grass; possibly they were naturally occurring, but I couldn’t help thinking of all the men who’d gone missing in those days and hadn’t ever been accounted for, and feeling that I was standing in a cemetery.

  I set up the camera and began to photograph the property, using Gleason’s stereographs as my reference, but before I was done I knew they were just pretty views of a hilly spring terrain; if Maggie didn’t come the day would be lost. The Benders had left no photographable physical trace behind them. To the northwest a column of thunderheads rose like giant galleons, white as cotton at their fluffy tops and shaded gray below, moving too fast for me to capture their imperial beauty faithfully.

  There were a few large trees left from the days of the Benders’ custodianship, including the cottonwood under which I’d placed the wagon, which I thought I recognized as the one from which the nooses had dangled in Gleason’s last stereo view. It must have been close to forty feet high by now; myriad red flowers drooped off of its branches in bunches close to a foot long. I sat under it and took from the buggy an edition of Ovid I’d borrowed from Clyde (its bookplate identified it as ex libris Marguerite Leval) and began reading.

  After a while had passed I began to get hungry, and a glance at my watch (gold, made in Switzerland; a gift from Adelle worth half a year’s rent on her studio) told me that the noon hour had come and gone. I rose, but before I could open the picnic basket I heard a voice command me not to move. Though I’m not particularly superstitious I couldn’t help feeling a little frisson of panic at the speaker’s German accent, and when I turned to face him, my hands in the air, I was greatly relieved to see that he wasn’t the vengeful shade of John Bender, Sr. or Jr.

  “This is private property,” the man said. He had a shotgun trained on my head.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just out taking pictures.”

  “You might have asked.”

  “Didn’t know where to find you.”

  “You Ogden?” he asked. “You were out here that day.”

  “That’s right. You’re Linder.”

  He nodded and lowered the shotgun. “I guess I don’t mind if you take a few pictures.”

  “You want some lunch?” I said. He shook his head no but invited me to go ahead and eat, and as I tore into the chicken he informed me that I was correct in assuming that there were more bodies buried on the farm.

  “In ’78 I bought this place from the fellow who had it after the Benders, and he told me he come across some bones down where the creek runs. Couple of years after that my old dog come running up to the back door with half a man’s hipbone in his teeth, and one time I busted up a skull with my plow. Them damn lazy Benders didn’t dig deep enough.”

  “Did you tell the sheriff ?”

  “What for?” he wanted to know.

  Linder had known all four of the Benders well, as the farm was a mere quarter mile from his, and he sought them out on occasion for the purpose of speaking German. He told the story of the afternoon the Benders were discovered to have been gone, and then he told a story I hadn’t heard, of an incident that had occurred after the posses had left the scene of the crimes.

  “I went home that night, and went to sleep, and sometime in the night they broke through my front door and tried to hang me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Some of the people that was over at the Bender place, twenty of them or so. They’d been drinking and they wanted to know was I in league with the Benders. I told ’em no, but they didn’t care. They dragged me out of bed and tied a rope into a noose. Then they put that around my neck and threw the other end over the branch of a tree outside and then they took turns hoisting me up into the air.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “To make me say I was with the Benders. I wasn’t, though, and I wouldn’t say it. After a while I passed out.”

  “And they left while you were unconscious?”

  “Yes, sir. I woke up on the ground a while later, all alone. I guess they’d had all the fun they could get from me.”

  “You see those women they put on trial in Cottonwood?”

  “Sure, I testified at the hearing. That old lady’s American, and Mrs. Bender talked German like she was from Freiburg, or maybe Strasbourg.”

  “Didn’t do any good, did it?”

  “No, too many people wanted to see them two hang.” From the northwest the thunderheads still approached, and he watched them carefully for a minute. “Well, Mr. Ogden, there’s work to be done yet. Good day.”

  He left, and I finished up the chicken with a small amount of the wine. I had already packed away the camera and its accompanying paraphernalia when I caught sight of a two-seated black buggy headed towards me from the east. At its reins was Maggie Leval, and she betrayed no emotion whatsoever as she approached, not until she got within ten feet of me and slowed to a stop; then she gave me the shyest version I’d ever seen of that wicked secret smile of hers, the one I’d seen that first night in Cottonwood when she and Marc came. We’d crossed paths a dozen times since my arrival in Cottonwood without exchanging greetings, and I had come to believe that she hated me. The note she’d sent had offered some hope, but the real reprieve was in that look she gave me. That on my own face must have been one of great relief, for she brightened further and hopped from the buggy and strode toward me. We held one another for a moment—she smelled of lavender and soap—and then she pulled away.

  “I brought a blanket, just in case you hadn’t,” she said.

  We did not waste time, as I had feared we might, on the recriminations and tears that I knew would come eventually. Instead in rather short order we were pressed in an embrace on the blanket she’d brought. Our clothing was soon shucked, mine hastily tossed aside onto the grass, hers folded neatly upon the seat of her conveyance, and the only words she spoke came as I descended the length of her body to place my tongu
e upon her: “No one’s done that to me in fifteen years,” she murmured.

  Naked, she revealed herself to have broadened since our last meeting, which pleased me more than it did her. As I exulted atop her, glorying in the nearness of her and intoxicated by her lovely face, timing the rhythm of my downstroke according to her least unspoken suggestion—an intake of breath, an arching backward of the throat or spine—I felt an abrupt, sharp jab on my right buttock. It burned, badly. My legs stiffened and I thrust myself forward rather faster and harder than I had been doing, resulting in an unintended ejaculation. This coincided with a delighted squeal of surprise from my paramour; looking upward, extracting myself from her, I saw a honeybee flying away to its doom, its rearmost part embedded in my ass.

  When Maggie understood what had provoked my spasm she laughed, and after a minute to get used to the idea so did I. She plucked the offending stinger from my ham, and we sat down on the blanket, in my case very carefully putting the weight on the left cheek.

  “What do you think of Marc,” was the first thing she asked, and I suppose I looked confused when I responded.

  “I suppose I was glad to learn I hadn’t killed him,” I said.

  “Not that Marc.” She stuck out her leg and playfully smacked my face with the sole of her delicate foot. “My son. He looks like you, don’t you think? Even more than Clyde does.”

  “I suppose he does. He’s a good boy. Doesn’t seem to know I’m anything to him.”

  “I don’t know. Now that you’re in town people are talking again. I’m sure he’s heard things.” She slapped my ham where I’d been stung, causing me considerable pain, and I let out a cry. “That’s for not answering my letters.”

  “I suppose I deserved that.”

  “You deserved worse. I don’t suppose you even opened them?”

  Those were, of course, the letters I’d burned, the still-sealed envelopes marked PLEASE READ! URGENT! “No, I didn’t, or I would’ve gone straight back to Greeley.”