Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  The streets of Cottonwood were deserted; the only sign of human habitation was the ringing of the church bells, which continued unabated against the roaring of the winds. A siren blew thin and insignificant from the rooftop of the courthouse. Big trees whipped back and forth, elastic as saplings, and a fresh green leaf slapped me in the face as hard as a lady’s palm as it careened un-moored through the warm air.

  The sky was nearly as dark as night, except for a band of yellow gray at the western horizon. From the eastern distance came a sound like the roar of a waterfall, ranging in pitch from the depths of the bass clef to a screeching overtone extending past the human ear’s ability to perceive. The sound drawing nearer and more cacaphonous, I rode for the Braunschweigs’, where I tied the gelding’s reins to a young sycamore and opened up the cellar door. I stomped down the rickety steps to the cellar, where Beatrice, Sally, and Madame Renée sat calmly in the light of the single lamp they’d brought down with them.

  “Where’s Maggie?” I asked.

  “She went home to be with her boy,” Renée said.

  “When?”

  “Just now,” Sally said. “We tried to stop her.”

  At the top of the steps—opening the trap doors upward only with great difficulty—I found that the panicked gelding had managed to extricate his reins from the sycamore; I couldn’t see in what direction he’d run, and so I started toward the Leval home on foot. The roar had become even louder and was now accompanied with that of large chunks of metal, stone, and wood being thrown together at random intervals. I could see the cloud now, a sinuous, massive black vortex perhaps an eighth of a mile in width, moving toward the center of town more or less parallel to the railroad. The percussive sound of an explosion augmented the general din for a few moments before dying away to leave only a shredding sound like the distant snapping of logs. The blast, I thought, had come from the new mill or the brick plant. I couldn’t hear the bells ringing any more, nor the siren.

  I stood in front of the Leval home and tried to gain entry, but its cellar appeared to be attainable only from the interior and the front and back doors had been barred shut. If Maggie had made it to the house before Marc and his Mr. Smight locked it she was fine; if not she was out in town somewhere. I hadn’t seen her heading back toward the Braunschweig house, and so I headed south toward Main Street in search of her and of a safe place to hide myself when the funnel got too close. That time was now, I judged, when I was close enough to hear the piteous whinnying of a horse being lifted into the air. I could see the animal being folded into the mass of wind, its legs uselessly churning the air around it, but it was too dark to tell if the indistinct form vanishing into the dusty cloud was my rented gelding.

  The tornado obscured both sides of Main Street to my east now, and the sound of crunching wood predominated, with a smattering of broken glass providing a delicate counterpoint. It had reached Rector’s department store, whose façade seemed wrecked beyond repair; every few seconds I was hit with some tiny broken object, and I suspected that I’d become part of the vortex myself if I didn’t find shelter in the next half minute or so.

  The White Horse Restaurant had a cellar accessible from its rear, and I was gratified to see that its front doors were unlocked. The noise inside the building was, paradoxically, louder than it had been outside, and I took that for a bad sign, as I did the cracking that came from the walls, suggesting the block of buildings was being lifted from its foundations. I reached the cellar door and hastened down the steps to find the owner of the White Horse, his wife, several regular patrons I knew by sight, and several strangers I took to be neighbors or simply passersby. They welcomed me curtly and the owner’s wife asked me, shouting at her lungs’ full capacity, what it was like upstairs. I didn’t have time to answer; if I had I wouldn’t have been heard over the sound of the instantaneous destruction of the building above.

  The cellar door blew off and brought with it a fair amount of dust and debris. The children screamed, and I was knocked to the floor, but I’d managed to stop the door, which rested now on my legs. My nose was pressed flat against the dirt floor, and judging from the pain I thought it was probably broken. My leg hurt, but seemed intact.

  There was much screaming in the cellar, but it subsided as the worst of the upstairs din died away, and by the time I managed to get the door off of me daylight, or a pale gray copy of it, could be made out through the empty doorway at the top of the stairs. That was when I heard a woman’s voice, ragged and strained, shouting.

  “Marc,” the voice said, and I rose from beneath the door, my nose pissing blood onto the dirt of the cellar floor. Ignoring the warnings of those behind me I mounted the debris-strewn steps and found myself standing out of doors in the ruins of the White Horse, only a few remnants of its frame and walls still standing. No one followed me as I limped over the shattered brick and glass, the splintered tables and chairs, and the piles of crumbled plaster, the rain still flying through the wind. On Main Street, bedraggled and as wet as if she’d just climbed fully clothed from a river, was Maggie, distraught and calling for Marc.

  Stumbling through the wreckage I hurried as fast as my injured leg would allow to her side. “Get downstairs,” I shouted, for out here the noise was still deafening.

  “I can’t find Marc,” she said.

  I tried to pull her with me back toward the cellar of the White Horse, but she wouldn’t come. She wiggled free of my grasp and began running after the tornado; to the west it seemed to lift off the ground, and I hoped this meant the town might thus be spared further damage. It went fully aloft at the corner of Main and Seward, inflicting harm only to the shingles of the building on the corner. Then, the lower end of the funnel out of my sight, came another explosion, louder than anything I ever heard in the war.

  “That’s him, I know it,” she shouted, and she took off running after the sound. I followed, but at a cripple’s pace, loping with my injured leg held out straight, and she got away from me. The blast continued for several seconds before it subsided, and when I reached the corner the funnel and Maggie were both out of sight. What I did see was Maggie’s former home, Lillian Rector’s mansion, its southern half leveled, its northern half more or less intact, its rooms cut open. Pieces of timbers and floorboards and chunks of stone and plaster dangled and fell from the torn ceiling, and when one length of splintered plank broke loose and tumbled onto the floor with a crash I heard a squeal of fright I was certain came from Maggie.

  When I reached the house I found her in Lillian’s parlor. There was no more entryway, but the northern part of the parlor was strangely intact, and only slightly wet, since the storm had only reached the interior a moment before. She stamped through the wrecked house until she reached the back porch, where she opened the trap doors of the cellar with me close on her heels.

  Inside it I could hear Lillian Rector sobbing.

  “Marc?” Maggie yelled.

  “Yes, he’s here,” Lillian answered, her voice thick and choking. “He’s all right.”

  “What’s he doing here?” I said, and before Maggie could answer I heard Marc Leval, Sr.’s voice coming from the cellar, thin and strained.

  “I’m all right, Maggie,” he said with some difficulty.

  “I thought we were looking for young Marc,” I said.

  “No,” Maggie said, her distress and panic having given way to anger. “He’s at home in our cellar, with Mr. Smight.” Her hair had come undone, and it cascaded down her back, plastered against her sopping dress.

  “Come down, please, it can’t be safe up there,” Lillian said.

  “We most certainly will not,” Maggie said.

  Still at a loss to understand what Marc Leval was doing in Lillian Rector’s cellar, and with no special desire to spend any time in his company, I nonetheless took Maggie firmly by the elbow and directed her toward the steps.

  “Stop it. I won’t go down there with those two.”

  The wind and rain hadn’t let up m
uch, and visibility in all directions was very poor. I tested my knee, thought it would bear her weight, and I dipped down and picked her up across my shoulders. She pounded on my back and yelled, and my knee seemed suddenly not as dependable as I’d thought, but I managed to wrangle her down the steps, at the bottom of which she dropped to her feet and marched over to where Marc sat in a stiff-backed wooden chair. There she slapped him so hard he tumbled to his side, nearly overturning the lamp on the floor next to him. There were five other people in the basement. Four of them—two men and two women—were servants of Lillian’s, and the fifth was Lillian herself; though Lillian rushed to Marc’s side to comfort and set him right, no one objected to Maggie’s attack on her shriveled, invalid husband. This struck me as odd, as did the fact that Lillian and Marc were only half-dressed.

  Rain poured down the stairway, since I’d been unable to shut it with Maggie on my shoulders, and she seemed ready to haul off and hit him again. I thought I’d try and stop her if she did, but she held off, and then she scampered up the steps so quickly I was unable to follow. The damage to my knee was worse than I’d thought, and climbing out of the cellar was a painful and slow undertaking. When I finally reached her she was standing underneath what remained of the master bedroom.

  “Look at that. He parked his goddamned wheelchair up there,” she said with a little laugh, pointing at a wicker chair outfitted with wheels, lying on its side at the lip of the overhanging floor.

  “How do you suppose he managed to get it up there?”

  “She had a ramp built when Tiny was sick.”

  Over against the shattered staircase was an incline with a separate banister, and the whole picture began to solidify in my mind. “Why were you out looking for him?” I asked.

  “I got home and found Smight and Marc Jr. in the cellar, and he wasn’t there. Smight claimed he didn’t know where he was, so I went out looking.”

  “How did you know where he’d be?”

  “I didn’t know for certain, I just knew he was crippled and there was a storm coming.”

  “But you knew he was laying down with old Lil Rector?”

  “I knew he saw her from time to time. I didn’t want to know any more than that. She was apparently very kind to him when he was first injured,” she said. “During my absence. I’ve always been able to ignore it until now.” She let out what might have been a sigh of relief. “Now that I’ve determined that he’s all right I don’t think I need to see him again anytime soon.”

  We were shielded there from the worst of the rain, and in the shadow of the room where she’d first accepted my attentions so long ago she once again took my hand.

  “I suppose I’ll go home and pack a couple of bags,” she said.

  I walked alone through the worst of the damage to the wreckage of the new mill, east of town. The silos were down, and the main building had collapsed, with only part of the north wall still standing. The railroad depot showed only damage to the loading platform, though, and the warehouse stood intact. Inside it I found Herbert, sitting on a stack of waterlogged flourbags.

  “No dead,” he said. His good eye was red and watery next to the pristine, healthy-looking artificial one. “Seven injured, one bad, hit by a flying brick.”

  “I talked to Clevenger this morning,” I said.

  He looked confused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  I kept my voice low, but not low enough for him. “We got to talking about where Katie and Ma Bender are buried.”

  “Well Jesus Christ on a pair of stilts,” he said, louder than he probably wanted to. “This is a hell of a time to be bringing that up.”

  “You had better get ready to pull some goddamned strings and stop those two women from hanging. I don’t care how you do it, but if you don’t I’ll make you damned sorry.”

  He stood up and pointed his finger out the door at the devastation without. “You see what I got to fix out there? You think I don’t have other things to worry about?”

  I turned to go. “I’m sure you have plenty to worry about, but you better keep this near the top of that list. I know where those two are buried,” I said, even though I didn’t.

  I walked back to town along the tornado’s path. People filled the muddy streets now, and the sun had started shining through holes in the cloud cover. The church bells were ringing again, and I turned toward the boardinghouse. Inside Mrs. Kelley was sitting in the parlor in the company of Mr. Farraday, who glared at me.

  “Where were you, Mr. Ogden? We were terribly afraid for you,” Mrs. Kelley said.

  “Some of us were,” Farraday said.

  I assured her that I’d been perfectly safe, and I gave a week’s notice; I was paid up through the end of the month and would require no refund.

  “You’re leaving Cottonwood, then?” she asked.

  “That I am. How are your wounds, Mr. Farraday?”

  “Bettter,” he said. He folded his arms across his chest, as if to indicate that I wouldn’t get another word out of him.

  “It’s Mr. Farraday’s belief that the bees were trying to warn us.” Mr. Farraday looked away, and I thought he resented Mrs. Kelley’s sharing with me his grand theory.

  “Bees gone, then?”

  “Mr. Lafflin managed to get them out,” Mrs. Kelley said. “With some difficulty and some injury.”

  “Good for Mr. Lafflin,” I called out behind me, laboriously fighting my way up the staircase, and imagining the gladness my announcement must have kindled in Mr. Farraday’s heart. There were a number of dead bees in my room, perhaps forty or fifty, and I hoped that not all of them had given their lives in stinging poor Mr. Lafflin. I put on some dry clothes, washed off my bloody face in the washbasin and left, my precious copy of The Secret History in hand.

  Following the storm’s path along the railroad tracks I found my hired gelding, broken and bloody on the rails near a lone boxcar that had been knocked clean off of a sidetrack at just about the point where the funnel had veered northward into town. I hoped I wouldn’t be held responsible for the animal’s value, and felt sorry that I’d taken it out on such a day. The easternmost third of the block that had contained the White Horse Restaurant was flattened, and the people who lived and did business there wandered about in confusion and despair at the extent of the wreckage. The Cottonwood Hotel was undamaged except for broken glass, and the only building west of it to have sustained any serious damage was the Leval/Rector mansion. Floating on its back in a rain barrel on Seward was the largest opossum I had ever seen, its pointed snout bloodied and its surprisingly ferocious battery of teeth posthumously bared; its scaly tail was the thickness of my thumb. Nearby, in the First Episcopalian Church, a morgue had been set up, and I went inside out of morbid curiosity.

  There were four dead lying in state, all pulled from the wreckage of a single house from which, according to witnesses, they had refused to adjourn to a neighbor’s cellar. I heard the neighbor himself explaining it to the priest; they apparently believed that the power of their praying could avert the storm, that to repair to an underground shelter would have been tantamount to inviting God’s wrath. The two of them debated the theological point for a while, and I couldn’t help noting the expression of beatific calm on the face of one of the dead, a round little woman with brown hair going gray. The other three, two more women and a man, were so badly mangled their pre-mortem emotions couldn’t be readily divined.

  Outside the church I heard preaching of the damnation-andhellfire variety, and around the corner of Second Street I saw Michael Cornan, bloodied and dangling his left arm at a crooked angle at his side, haranguing passersby. He had drawn a small crowd of the curious and desperate, and when he saw me he pointed and shrieked at me, in much the same tones as he’d used the night he found me standing outside the Levals’ window months before.

  “There’s the cause, friends. There’s why God’s grace has fled Cottonwood like Lot in the night; there’s why misfortune has again visited our poo
r godfearing town.”

  I should have walked on, but something about his performance fascinated me. There was a gash in his forehead, just above his left eye, that had mostly stopped bleeding, and his beard was stained with caked blood.

  “Fornicators! Faithless deniers of the commandments! There stands your ideal, your epitome, your king. Learn from the Pharaoh’s mistakes! Repent now, and not after the next plague!”

  His audience began looking at me instead of Cornan as he preached, and I moved on before he incited them to violence against me.

  “You may walk away from me, sinner, but you can’t walk away from the sins that fester here,” he called to my back as I walked away.

  That evening I called at Clyde’s. Ninna was there with her husband and daughter, and when I announced my intention to go all but Eva’s mother seemed genuinely sorry to hear it. Young Eva wondered if I wouldn’t at least stay until the birth of the child, and I told her I might. I went out the front door with Clyde, where we surveyed the street in the failing light of day. Twigs and leaves and whole branches littered it, and puddles of dirty water pooled in the rutted sand, but here there was no real damage to any of the houses, and without knowing anything about the destruction a few short blocks away the scene would have had a serene, homespun charm. The air smelled of the rain still, and the few clouds that remained above us were fluffy and innocuous, floating slowly westward in the wake of the storm.

  Clyde offered me a drink, which I declined. I told him he looked tired, and he told me he’d been sleeping poorly, out of worry about the baby and impending fatherhood.