She shrugged. “It occurred to me you might not have even read them, out of pigheadedness. After I’d been here a while, just before Marc was born, I tried to write you again, with Renée’s return address, but they came back undeliverable. If Marc had found out he’d have thrown me out.”
“I suppose Marc wishes me no good.”
“He’s not glad you’re back. He wanted to keep Clyde and Gleason from hiring you on at the studio, but they overruled him. Now he doesn’t want young Marc working there, but it turned into such a row he gave up and let him stay.”
“I thought it was odd the boy was still working with me.”
She blushed. “I threatened to tell him the truth and Marc backed down. He’s afraid I’ve forgiven you, thinks I might fall back into my old bad habits now that you’re in sight. That’s one reason I didn’t make any contact at first. It’s taken me this long to get his guard down.”
I stood, because my reclining pose was becoming untenable. “Are you going to stay with him?”
“It’s a little quick to be talking like that, isn’t it? After just one afternoon on the grass?”
“Maybe.”
She lowered herself to her elbows, her breasts prominent and pale in the piebald sunlight splashing through the cottonwood’s branches. The southeastern half of the sky was still clear, and the thunderheads were so close by in the other half that I thought I could hear the rain showering the trees in the near distance.
“The rain’s going to reach us, isn’t it?” Maggie said, the thought just then dawning on her. She stood and walked to her carriage, with the light from the southern sky fading to pale.
“Afraid so,” I said.
“We’d better go, then.” She began reapplying her corset, and before she had it halfway laced up she stopped. “Who knows how long ’til we get another chance to be alone like this?” she said, and loosened its laces again. The thing slipped to the ground, she stepped out of it and returned to the blanket.
I didn’t want to get rained on, but with my prick stiffening in the wind I decided she was right. After a quick look around me to check for any further hostile Apes melliferae, I dropped to my knees and surrendered to instinct.
The blanket was growing damp by the time we were done, and we both hastily dressed as the more violent part of the storm neared.
“I’m going to have to be getting back soon, and we can’t be seen coming from the same direction at the same time.” Maggie’s buggy had a canvas folding top to protect her from the storm, and I helped her attach the waterproof storm curtain to the sides of it. The wagon I’d hired had no such cover, but I agreed to wait an hour before following her back; in the meantime I went over to Linders’ house seeking shelter but found no one there, and instead stood next to the wagon holding an umbrella, which offered little protection from the nearly horizontal wind-borne torrent. By the time I actually started back I was as drenched as if I had jumped into a pond.
I skirted the town limits to the north in case anyone had noticed Maggie’s homeward route. The bouncing of the carriage on the slick, rocky terrain caused me considerable pain, and so I mostly rode tilted to my left, hanging awkwardly as though the buggy were about to overturn. My spirits were so high, though, that I found my own predicament amusing, and by the time I rode into town from the north I had formulated a plan to leave town with Maggie and our son. Tying the horse and carriage to the rail before the studio in the early evening, the rain still coming down hard, I laughed at the idea of sneaking out of Cottonwood with Maggie again.
There was a substantial leak in the northwest corner of the studio; I mopped up the collected liquid and placed a pair of buckets underneath it, and I moved the props and backdrops stored nearby. Since no one was about, I lit the stove and disrobed, hanging my clothing next to it, and, naked, set about preparing the stereo views.
When I had finished my work I left the darkroom and found Clyde in the office, working on the books.
“How was your visit to the killing ground?” he asked, with no comment offered as to my state of undress.
“Not much to see any more. Got stung by a bee, never mind where,” I said. “How’d you know I was out there?”
“Gleason told me. He’s a little sweet on old Maggie. Mrs. Leval. He’s scared Marc’ll kill you or her or both.” He then turned back to his columns of figures and stopped speaking. My clothes were hot and dry in some parts, cold and moist in others, but I put them on anyway, wished Clyde a good evening and set out for dinner.
The rain had stopped. After returning the horse and wagon I stopped in at the White Horse Restaurant, as had become my habit in the evenings, and midway through my meal of ham and mashed potatoes Mr. Smight himself stepped through the front door and approached my table. He had on his fur coat, and he didn’t remove his top hat; his eyes were bordered with red, and wet. A few diners, those who knew us both, stopped eating and stared as he stood there, fuming, his arms folded across his chest. I was at a disadvantage, since I didn’t want a scene that would get me barred from the establishment, the only really good meal to be had in town outside of a private residence. I didn’t want to start taking my meals at the rooming house, either, since that would mean more time with Mrs. Kelley, whom I planned to wean from my affections as quickly as possible. My weight was on my left haunch, as the right one was still considerably sore from the bee sting, and this made me feel somewhat ridiculous as I looked up at him.
“If I hear you’ve been seen at the Braunschweigs’ I’ll take you the hell apart,” he said.
I had no idea what he meant, and I should have smiled and promised to stay away from there, but his stupid arrogance got my hackles up.
“I’ll go wherever I damned please, you ignorant beanpole.”
His big, knobby hands formed fists, and for a moment the prospect of a real donnybrook made me regret my impulsive bravado as he clenched and unclenched them, angry beyond speech. I made a point of remaining outwardly calm and even continued to cut, chew and swallow my hamsteak, until finally he turned away and strode to the front door.
“You keep your distance from her, Ogden, or I’ll kill you,” he yelled, stepping out the front door. He slammed it shut so hard it blew back open, and the owner hastened to close it again. A few seconds of surprised silence followed before people started eating and talking again. I finished my meal quickly and left, knowing what they were mostly talking about. For the first time, it occurred to me that Mr. Smight might be more than simply Marc’s homme à tout faire. If his outburst had been anything to go by, he at least aspired to be Maggie’s as well.
My impulse, of course, was to hasten to the Braunschweig home, but instead I headed for Kelley’s, where my landlady and several of the other tenants were gathered at the downstairs parlor piano singing “O Susanna.” Upstairs in my room I put on a dry suit of clothes, then took the Dragoon out of my dresser drawer and loaded it. I was unnerved to realize as I descended the stairs that the group in the parlor was now singing “Johnny Get Your Gun,” but in fact it was one they sang almost every evening, and I succeeded in slipping out the front door without them inviting me to join up for a chorus.
On the stoop I looked about for Smight but saw no one. Keeping to the sidewalk I walked north to Seventh Street, confident I had no one on my heels, and then west. The night was growing cool, and I decided to cross the cemetery. Though there was no pavement therein it was grassy throughout, with very little mud exposed, though with each step across the damp grass my fresh trouser cuffs got wetter. It was dark that night, with only a quarter moon for illumination, but having my eyes accustomed to the darkness might prove a tactical advantage. I stopped at Tiny Rector’s lonesome grave and waited until I could easily make out the dates inscribed on the marker. I missed him at that moment more than I had at any moment since returning to Cottonwood, and wished he were there to offer some of his stern, commonsensical and useless advice.
Having quit the cemetery at its western end I spent a fe
w more minutes skulking across dewy back lawns and through dampened shrubberies before finally reaching the Braunschweig home, very nearly as wet as I’d been that afternoon. My detour through the blackness of the bone orchard had been a profitable one; pressing myself flat against the side of the house, I spied Smight crouched in the shadows across the street with an eye on their front door. I slunk to the backyard and knocked on the kitchen door, and when Sally opened I raised my index finger to my lips.
She led me to Herbert, seated in his study cleaning his Colt. “What the hell happened? Old George Smight is out there camped in the goddamned bushes, and the girls won’t tell me squat.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and appeared quite relaxed.
“Where’s Maggie? What’d he do?”
“Aw, she’s upstairs with Renée.” As I turned to leave he called out. “Hold on, she’s fine, he just threatened her. Now how about you telling me what’s going on? Why’s George on the warpath?”
“I saw Maggie today, I don’t know how he knows about it.”
“You must have done more than seen her.” He let loose with a caustic little snort. “Sit down, why don’t you.”
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
“Well, Marc’s thrown her out, and he’s sent Smight to watch her. I guess she’s staying here for the time being.”
“What are we going to do about Smight out there?”
His eyes crinkled, and the scarring around the glass one went white against the ruddy pink of the rest of his face. “I guess we could just shoot him.” He started laughing pretty hard at that.
Beatrice cleared her throat at the door. “Mr. Braunschweig? Mrs. Braunschweig and Mrs. Leval want to know if he’s gone.”
“He’ll be gone in a minute, soon’s I’m done cleaning my Peacemaker.”
He brandished it, pointing the barrel toward the front of the house; the girl’s eyes got wide and she backed from the room. Herbert cackled and began loading the Colt. “You know I wouldn’t mind shooting that useless son-of-a-bitch.” He stood and I followed him to the front door. “You stay in here. He’ll listen to me, but you’re just going to make things worse.”
“You think it might be better to send Beatrice or Sally to fetch a policeman?”
“Hell’s bells,” Herbert said. “Don’t need any coppers to help me with this.”
I sat back down in the study, and looked at a framed photograph of the façade of the brick plant. I heard a yelp of pain outside like that of a small dog being whipped. Barely two minutes passed before Herbert came back inside, with no shots fired. “He’s gone now.”
There was a vivid spray of fresh blood on his right shirtcuff, and I asked him about it.
“I pistolwhipped that sack of shit right across the face, cut his nose open with the sight.” He started laughing, a nervous whooping that he had some difficulty in mastering long enough to speak again. “Got that pretty beaver coat of his bloodied up, too. Now tomorrow I’ll go talk to Leval and tell him to call that son of a bitch off.”
We went upstairs and knocked on the door of what had recently been my bedroom. Renée came to the door with much the same expression on her face that she’d worn ordering Herbert to destroy the kitchen rat. “Alors?”
“Goddamn it, woman, how many times I got to tell you to speak English?” Her face didn’t soften, in fact it hardened so thoroughly she managed to frighten him. “All right, all right, he’s gone, and he won’t be back. Not tonight, anyways, he’s taking care of a bloody nose.”
“Can I see her?” I asked.
Renée stepped back into the room and shut the door, which reopened half a minute later.
“Another night,” she said.
Maggie didn’t leave the Braunschweigs’ house for the next seven days. Leval refused to allow young Marc to visit, and since by the next day most of the town knew the reason for her exile from her home (or some twisted version of it, altered in its details but accurate in its essence) no one came to call on her but me.
Herbert spoke to Leval as promised, and Smight stayed away from the house and from me, too. For the next few nights I surreptitiously visited the Braunschweigs’ after dinner, where I joined Maggie in her room. The servant girls let me in, and Renée and Herbert pretended they didn’t know I was there, though on one occasion Herbert and I bumped into one another in the hallway while I was on my way out. He punched me on the shoulder and snickered.
Maggie and I spoke as little as possible during those first midnight assignations, restricting ourselves, at her insistence, to the most practical kinds of speech: instructions to roll over, or move a leg, or help with a button. As the nights progressed, and the renewed novelty of one another’s intimate company faded, we gingerly began bringing up subjects from our shared past, subjects that, had we not replenished our affection for one another in the physical manner, might have been cause for ill will on both our parts.
I told her where I’d lived and how, leaving out at first the women I’d known. Soon enough, though, she asked about them, showing little jealousy but great interest as I described them. When I first brought it up she claimed never to have noticed Smight’s devotion to her, but the next night allowed as how she merely tolerated but never encouraged it. She nearly grew violent the next night when I mentioned it again, and though I felt sure there was more to be told I let it drop.
On the fourth night she began weeping uncontrollably as soon as I rolled off of her. Though I’d seen this behavior in half a dozen women over the years it was a first for her in my presence, and I placed a consoling hand on her shoulder. Perhaps I’d been too quick, or too rough; she shook her head no, it was nothing I’d done or failed to do.
She managed to regain her composure, but not her good spirits. “Everything’s gone wrong again. It’s punishment, Bill, just like last time. Chased from paradise, and after I managed to get back in, I spoil it by yielding again.”
“That’s goddamned foolishness,” I said.
“It’s not. Look at me. I can’t even leave this house. I’m reviled. I can’t see my boy. No one will speak to me when this is over.”
“Let’s leave. I can make a living anywhere.”
“I’m a married woman, with property, and I stand to lose a good deal of it if I leave Marc. And I’m the mother of a minor child I won’t leave behind.”
“He can come along, too,” I said.
“I don’t think so, Bill. I don’t think he’d leave his father, for one thing.”
“I’m his father,” I said.
“Things will go wrong again, Bill, I know it.”
“I don’t see how you and I can stay here, not together, anyway.”
She lay back and let out a long, exasperated breath. “Well, I don’t see how I can leave. Don’t you want to see your grandchildren born and grow up? Our grandchildren?”
“That’d be nice, I suppose,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I dressed and left shortly thereafter, feeling a bit of a chill at my back.
The next morning I got a surprise leaving Kelley’s boarding house. Crossing the street ahead of me was none other than Gil Clevenger, former Wilson County deputy; he had on a hat just like the broad-brimmed white one he’d had on when I’d tied him to that tree in ’73. I had a powerful urge to stop him and ask him if he remembered what had really happened. I thought of his testimony, and his claim that the sound of our gunfire had awakened him, though when he reached me he was fully dressed and showed no sign of having been freshly awakened from sleep. I thought again about him mentioning the Bender killings that morning, and then something really funny struck me. He’d asked me if I was part of the posse, a strange assumption for a peace officer to make about a man he’s just seen shoot another, a man in the process of tying said peace officer to a tree. I watched him board a surrey and ride off, and thought that the subject would bear more thought.
Later I stopped in to Rector’s Department Store for some tarpaper and nails to repair the roof of the studio and was waited u
pon by Michael Cornan, who seemed today to bear me no special ill will. As he wrote up my receipt I noted that his face was puffier than usual, with a red and swollen area on his left cheek.
“Did you hurt your face?” I asked him.
“Wasp stung me yesterday.”
“I was stung by a bee last week,” I said, omitting both the part of the body stung and the circumstance. “I suppose that’s spring on the prairie for you.”
“No, sir,” he said with great solemnity. “There’s nothing normal about it at all. I have never before been stung by wasp nor bee, nor bit by spider. Yesterday morning Mister Thorpe in Housewares came in with his hand all swole up, he’d been bit by a violin spider. Couldn’t hardly use that hand at all, and today he was so poorly he had to miss his shift. And Mrs. Rector had a mad barn-swallow in the house, nearly took her eye out.” He handed me my wrapped goods and the receipt, then leaned over the counter. “Deus irae.”
Despite myself I had to swallow as I backed away from him. “Indeed,” I said, and I hurried downstairs and out of the store into the now-sinister sunshine. Further evidence of Mother Nature’s vernal malevolence came when I returned to the boarding house in the late afternoon to the sight of my landlady and one of my fellow tenants standing outside. Mr. Farraday, who worked for the city, bore several stings on his face and neck, and one on his hand. Unless I missed my guess he was next in line for Mrs. Kelley’s favors, and while we were superficially friendly there was always a calculating quality to his dealings with me. I always allowed him the advantage in our small competitions, and he must have been puzzled as to his failure thus far to replace me in her arms. He swelled with pride and venom as Mrs. Kelley described to me how she’d opened my room with the intention of cleaning it and found the room aswarm with bees. She’d screamed and run downstairs and, uncertain where I might be found, hurried to City Hall where Mr. Farraday gallantly abandoned his post and returned to the house with her. Alone he entered the house and discovered that the swarm had distributed itself throughout the upper floors, and he was stung seven times before he managed to save himself. Farraday was of the opinion that a hive had been founded in the attic, and now they awaited the arrival of Mr. Lafflin, a farmer and apiarist who, it was thought, might buy the hive and transport it to his farm.
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 26
