Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  Lewis returned, bringing news, which he forgot to tell me when he saw the wreckage and I explained its cause. Frightened of his reaction, I followed him as he rushed through the house. He demanded that each of its vacant-eyed inhabitants tell him where Jocelyn was; one after another they shrugged or said they didn’t know, or stared at him without answering. He went to her room and stood in the doorway. The mattress had been dragged halfway off her bed. On the floor was a broken terra-cotta pot, its dirt, a potted palm, puddles of piss, an oil painting, and a nightgown. Both the painting and the nightgown bore the muddy prints of three different pairs of boots. I whispered soothing words to him, words I do not remember, while he walked rather more slowly down the stairs. He found Jocelyn at last, sitting at the kitchen table in a fresh dress, drinking whiskey. He held her and kissed her. She was unresponsive. Finally, she returned his gaze, reached out her hand, and patted his cheek. “Tell me their names,” he begged her. When she said she didn’t know any of the names, he looked, for a minute, as if he was ready to throw his life away in a reckless attack on the vigilante headquarters.

  “Lewis, I’m going to find out,” I said, gripping his shoulders. “They won’t be able to keep their names a secret. There were too many. Some of them will brag. You have to be patient and take my advice. If you go after the men who hurt Jocelyn, the others will gang up on you. And if you kill anyone, even in a fair fight, while the committee is in charge, they’ll hang you.”

  “I’m not just going after the ones who hurt Jocelyn,” he corrected me, taking a seat on a torn sofa and playing absentmindedly with a tuft of exposed horsehair. “I’m going to kill all of them.”

  In his right hand, he held the rock he had possessed since he was a boy of six. It was the size of a baseball, partly smooth, partly jagged, identifiable by its shape and by a cross of some darker mineral set in a white patch.

  “Well, Lewis,” I said, as you might say to a young boy who has voiced a laudable but unrealistic ambition, “that’s a big job. If we want to be able to finish it, we’ll need to plan well. We’ll need to use our heads.”

  Naturally, I assumed I would be able to reduce his plans to more manageable dimensions after a little time had passed.

  Then he told me the news. The governor of California had met with William Tell Coleman, the head of the Vigilance Committee. He had promised that Casey and Cora would be tried by an honest judge and an honest jury, and agreed to let a company of vigilantes into the county jail, supposedly to prevent Casey and Charley from escaping. In return, Coleman promised that his men would not do anything hasty—that, in particular, they would not kidnap the prisoners. Since there was nothing else I could do, I hoped that Coleman would keep his word.

  I sent letters to the newspapers by messenger, complaining that vigilantes had forced their way into my house, insulted my girls, and stolen the equivalent of two thousand dollars in money and valuables. A story in Saturday’s Alta California said that an “angry mob” had forced its way into Belle Cora’s house, damaged property, and frightened its residents. The editors, though understanding the community’s fury, deplored their lawless behavior; it would be absurd if the Vigilance Committee had to divert its resources to the protection of houses of ill repute.

  No man from the newspapers or the police came to my house to ask the girls what had happened to them, and I thought it was just as well. I did not want Charley to know; besides, girls as expensive as mine do not admit to being raped.

  I had the house cleaned and arranged for the girls to go to a hotel in Sacramento City. That night, when I went to see Charley, I was turned away.

  ON SUNDAY, THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE broke its promise to the governor. Thousands of men surrounded the jail. The muzzles of two mobile cannons were directed at its entrance. Vigilantes in top hats and frock coats, holding rifles, stood on a nearby roof. Others, with rifles and bayonets, controlled the street. They cleared Broadway and brought a coach pulled by two horses. Crowds watched from windows and from rooftops. Lewis, Edward, and I stood on the top of a building on the corner of Sacramento and Front Streets. We saw William Coleman and another man go into the jail and come out a half-hour later. Ten minutes after that, a murmur arose from the crowd as Casey walked out, under close guard and shackled.

  There was a strong wind coming in from the bay that morning. One of the vigilante guards lost his hat and couldn’t break ranks to fetch it. As Casey climbed into the waiting coach, he turned to look at the hat skidding and spinning and flipping end over end down the street. A man closed the coach door. One horse raised its tail, the other dipped its head, the whip flicked, the coach moved slowly, and armed men walked behind it.

  “They didn’t take Charley,” I told my brothers, and we all tried to comfort each other with that thought; but a few minutes later, they came back for him. His head was tilted down as he came out of the jail with a vigilante at each elbow. Once he looked up, but his back was to me. All around me, people were saying things that I could never forgive. I threw my arms around Lewis’s neck and whispered, “Not now. Patience. Patience.”

  The headquarters of the Committee of Vigilance was only two blocks from my house. I thought about that, how near Charley was, as I lay awake at night in my room, which was sparsely furnished now, with pale rectangles on the walls where ruined pictures and dressers had been removed. In the meantime, a sort of trial was under way. Over the course of two days, the executive committee read the records of the earlier trial, debated the evidence, and took a vote. Some said murder, some said manslaughter. Two voted to acquit. According to the committee’s rules, a majority was sufficient for hanging.

  ON MONDAY, JAMES KING OF WILLIAM died of a botched operation. A sponge had been left inside him.

  Every daily newspaper in San Francisco had been busy for a week, calling King the city’s noblest citizen, and anyone who disagreed had been prudently silent. Stores, saloons, and all public resorts were closed. Every flag was at half-mast except for the flag of Ten Engine, Casey’s fire company. The ships in the bay were draped in black; men wore black armbands. People were waiting in line the length of Montgomery Street to view King’s remains. I knew all this only by report; the one time I went outside, a man pointed at me, a hostile crowd began to gather, and after that I kept to the house.

  Thursday was the day of King’s burial. The crowds, thinking it was to be the main focus of the day’s pageantry, packed the First Presbyterian Church and massed on the pavements, in the windows, and on the balconies and hilltops along the route that the funeral procession must take to the sand dunes of Lone Mountain Cemetery. Around eleven, there was a knock on my door. It was Jason Rickey, one of the three men I had paid to join the vigilantes. He hesitated a moment, then said, “They’re hanging them both today. They’ll let you see him.”

  I walked quickly, putting everything I had into the effort to make one foot follow the other. In the two minutes it took me to get to the jail, I realized that the committee must know Rickey was in my pay: they had used him to deliver their message. It didn’t matter now.

  Men took me to a rear entrance to the second-story rooms. At the turning of the stairs, I saw a poster made by a firm of printers and engravers who had joined the vigilantes. It was the seal of the committee, and it consisted of some Latin mottos and an enormous open eye. Then I was brought to a chamber whose entrance was draped with flags, and I found myself being scrutinized by the members of the executive committee, including Samuel Brannan and William T. Coleman.

  “Why did you bring me to this room?” I asked, hoping to hear that, in view of the disagreement over the evidence, they were going to show clemency. “Have you got something to say to me?” They looked at each other. “You’re going to admit that you’ve made a mistake.”

  A few of the men, including Brannan, chuckled. Others, who thought this was no time for levity, threw them disapproving looks.

  “We wondered if you had anything to request,” said Coleman.

  I saw
how it was. They wanted to suck the marrow of it, the little courtesies, the last meal, the last visit, the last confession. The prisoner’s cooperation in these matters suggests a docile acceptance of the people’s judgment.

  Would it have done any good to tell these men what I thought of them? I had no heart for it. Time was short. “Is there a priest?” I asked.

  “Father Accolti is with Casey now.”

  “Bring him to Charley,” I said.

  CHARLEY’S ROOM CONTAINED A BED, a table, some chairs. There were two windows. Both had been boarded up. Two guards with rifles sat on chairs outside the door, and two guards with pistols sat inside, playing cards with Charley, who was picking his teeth. On another chair were the remnants of his last meal, which had consisted of oysters, scrambled eggs, and bacon. This dish is known in California as “Hangtown Fry,” and I would have suspected a cruel joke if I didn’t know how much Charley liked it.

  He had gained weight during the months he had gotten no exercise beyond a daily walk around the jail yard, and food became more important to him in jail than it had been outside. At the trial, he had been slim and elegant. Now he was almost as portly as his picture in the letter sheets the vigilantes later made to celebrate their crimes.

  Charley laid his cards facedown, and the guards set down their cards and put their hands on their weapons as he got up to kiss me. I held him as if I meant to crush him. He murmured to me soothingly, as if I were the one in trouble. “Go on, go on,” he said. “It’s good to feel you next to me. This is real good.”

  In case you are wondering, no one feels as alive in your arms as a man about to be executed. We heard hammering—the scaffold. I stiffened in terror. He said, “That’s some sound, all right, when it’s for you.”

  “Oh, Papa, Papa, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it. You know the first thing I did back in November was to try to bribe Billy Mulligan. He’s going to wish he took it.”

  “I know. I mean, I know you did.”

  “I didn’t do it the stupid way the papers say I did. I used my head. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to make it turn out better.”

  He shook his head and looked at me awhile, then blinked and said, “Once, in Rio,” and interrupted himself to kiss me, and began again, softly but clearly: “One time, it was in ’39, I had a dinner with some friends, and an hour later I got sick, so, woof, I’m in bed, chills, I’m off my head, talking in Italian. I saw angels. I saw a railroad train in the sky. I saw a snake swallow a church. When I’m making sense again, they tell me it’s been nine days. I ask, Where’s Ramón? ‘Ramón está morto.’ Okay, what about the other two—Hector? Alejondro? ‘Oh, those two; in the ground a week already. We got you a priest. But it wasn’t your time.’ ” He tilted his head and righted it. “In Natchez—in Natchez, that time I broke the bank, afterward there was a fracas in a saloon, a bullet meant for me killed a waiter, ripped a hole in his neck. He had a wife. I gave her some money. Her kids were there. She took it, but she said I ought to be hung. She thought I’d shot him—my English wasn’t so good then. I said to myself, Look, your time will come. So … okay. I don’t mean I’m not scared—but okay.”

  Father Accolti came in. I explained, “I want him to marry us, if it’s all right with you. Then I’ll really be Belle Cora.”

  He was still for a moment, and then he nodded. “All right. Let’s do it.”

  Somehow the priest—a slender young man in a black robe, with a round black hat, a white collar, a crooked nose—managed to obtain two rings for the ceremony. Our guards acted as witnesses, and the priest led us through our prayers. He asked us the usual questions, and we answered them as if many years of married life lay before us. Charley and Father Accolti talked in Italian, and Charley said the priest was from Lombardy.

  Later on, I said, “I’ve brought something to show you, but I don’t know if I should—it might cheer you, but it might make you sentimental.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s one of Anne’s letters.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  I reached into my purse and gave him the letter. He had read all the other letters from Anne about Frank. But this was the first time he had read one in the certain knowledge that Frank was his only posterity. He sat at the table with the letter in his hands. His lips moved. He took a slow breath. “He seems like a smart boy.”

  “He’s a wizard with numbers.”

  “Tell them to keep him away from cards.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard him voice regret about the kind of life he had led. “You mean that, Papa?”

  He thought about it. “Yeah.”

  We talked over old times, the day we met on the Israel Putnam, and our times together since, and his times in Milan, Rio, Natchez, New Orleans, and New York. Around twelve-fifteen, Accolti came back, took his confession, and gave him his last communion. At one o’clock, a distant bell tolled, and a triangle rang closer by. James King of William had been put in the ground, and now the committee was going to perform the two executions King had demanded. The burial was to be followed so promptly by the double hanging that it might justly be called a rite of the great man’s funeral. Guards came into the room to take Charley away. We held each other, and I said, “Now, Papa, I know what you’re like, so I know you’re going to show them what a man is.”

  He nodded. “You’ll see. Goodbye, Belle. Go down and watch me.”

  Two guards took me out the back and around and onto the other side of Sacramento Street, where people were gathering to watch—not many, thanks to the committee’s subterfuge. Why had they not waited another day, as everyone expected? Perhaps, despite the cooperation of every newspaper in the city save one, they weren’t as sure of their popularity as they pretended to be. Some of the spectators had dragged chairs to the spot so they could view the hanging in comfort. A few of these men stood up and gestured to their chairs. I realized much later that they had been inviting me to sit. Just then I couldn’t understand. I turned numbly toward the vigilante headquarters.

  Men with bayonets were as dense on the rooftops as fields of corn. Cavalry and infantry lined the streets around the building. The carpenters had built a platform on the roof, from which the ropes were suspended, and another platform outside two adjacent second-story windows, which were tall enough for men to walk through without crouching. I stood looking up at the ropes and the windows, aware that the space around me was filling up with people all craning their heads up, pointing, talking to each other. The sky was overcast, and a cold wind from the bay made the men around me turn up their collars. High above us, an arm in shirtsleeves reached out of the window of a second-floor room and dropped a piece of white paper, which was evidently a signal. Commands were shouted. Men on the streets and on the rooftops brought their weapons to their chests. A moment later, Charley shuffled out on the east platform, arms pinioned to his sides, feet bound with cords. Another man came out beside him to put the noose around his neck. It was Abner Mosely.

  Casey came next, onto the west platform. His right hand gripped a cambric handkerchief. The noose was put around his neck, then removed. He had asked to speak. He talked for seven minutes. I don’t think anyone there, including the newspaper stenographers who had been alerted at the last minute, could make out much of what he said. The first words, as later printed, were: “Gentlemen, I have been persecuted most relentlessly by the Alta, the Chronicle, and the Globe. I hope these editors will desist and allow my name to pass into oblivion and not publish it as a murderer. Gentlemen, I am not a murderer. I did not intend to commit murder. I do not feel afraid to meet my God on a charge of murder …” I do not know if his speech became rambling and incoherent, a sign of cowardice, as was alleged by the Alta, the Chronicle, the Globe, and also the Bulletin, the only paper he had failed to mention.

  During all this, Charley stood still, staring ahead without focus, as people do when they are lost in thought. He had trained himself, long ago, not to let his face show his opini
ons regarding the immediate future. Mosely slipped the noose back around Casey’s neck, then turned to Charley and said something the newspapers did not record: not a kind word, I think. I could not tell whether Charley answered, nor, from where I stood, could I discern any change in his expression. Mosely went back inside. It was 1:21 p.m. A bell rang sharply. My knees turned to water, and I gasped, thinking this was it, but it hadn’t happened yet. Some men in front of me took their hats off. At a second bell, the platform fell away. “Papa”—I felt the word in my throat, but it was only an inaudible croak. Charley and Casey dropped till the rope jerked them, and they turned a few times this way and that, as Casey’s handkerchief floated down to rest delicately on the point of a bayonet. I heard the ropes creak. Then there was another noise. After a second, I realized that people were cheering.

  LXI

  AFTER THE CORONER’S INQUEST, I had Charley embalmed and laid out in Mr. Rice’s house on Broadway. Only our friends knew where he was. The coffin, mahogany trimmed with silver, lay on two tables, between a pair of silver candelabras. A Byron collar and a dark-blue silk cravat hid the rope scar. The next day, a few black carriages followed the hearse to Mission Dolores. Irene sat beside me. Lewis and Big Pete talked quietly while I looked out the window. Once, when I turned back toward them, I realized something was different about Big Pete. At last I said, “Where’s your hat, Pete?” because he had brought along a black silk stovepipe hat instead of the strange misshapen object he usually put on top of his head.

  “Thought I’d try something else today,” he said.

  “I think Charley loved that stupid hat as much as you do,” I told him.

  Near the end of Powell Street, Lewis suddenly told the driver to stop: “I’ve got an errand. I’ll try and catch up later, but don’t wait.”