by Gary D. Svee
14
Nelly was hiding in the room where she kept her establishment’s books. He was coming, the sheriff had said. He was coming as her father had come to her as a little child so many years ago. Her fear was pulling the walls of the office in on her, burying her as she had tried to bury herself in the coal bin of her childhood home.
He was coming, as her father had, perhaps singing the little ditty that struck terror into her heart even now.
“Hey, little piggy, no sense to hide,
Papa’s coming to take his bride.”
Her father had taken her childhood away from her—and maybe her soul. Now this other man was coming to take her life. He would come to her door, and she would try to hide, but there would be nowhere to hide, and …
The walls of her office were closing in, squeezing the breath from her, and she swept aside the heavy velvet curtain that separated her office from the rest of the house. She was standing there, willing herself to breathe when the front door scuffed open.
Jack Galt stood there. He was dressed in rough but clean clothing. His boots had an oily sheen. His hair was short, very short and receding, giving him a high forehead and a sense of intelligence. His body was wound tight, and he moved with a certain grace. Most women might find him attractive, but for his eyes.
His eyes were washed out, irises not much darker than the sclera. But it wasn’t the lack of color that riveted Nelly’s attention. The eyes were opaque, as though they masked something too terrible for mortals to see.
When Galt’s survey of the room was complete, he stared at Nelly for a long moment. She wanted to speak, to break his hold over her, but she couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come. He smiled, then, a smile as flat and opaque as his eyes.
“Hello, Nelly.”
Nelly took two steps backward so quickly she almost fell.
Galt cocked his head, and resignation crowded into his voice. “The sheriff talked to you, didn’t he? He told you about Sally, and he told you I killed her.”
Nellie’s hands knotted into fists and darted to her face, her arms pulled tightly to her body as though she meant to hide behind them.
Galt shook his head. “Nelly, I didn’t kill Sally. I don’t know who did.”
Galt took a step toward her, and Nelly’s eyes widened in terror.
Galt stopped. “Nelly, I don’t mean to frighten you.”
Nelly took another step back.
Galt shook his head. “Nelly, you know what it is to be set apart, to have people turn the other way just because they don’t want to be seen near you. That’s what the sheriff is doing to me. He’s turning this community away from me. He’s telling people something he heard from the Yellowstone County sheriff. It’s not true, Nelly. I’m not what they say I am. If I were like that, I’d be in jail or hanged.”
A little moan escaped Nelly’s lips.
“Nelly, think about this. I know I’m not a handsome man. I know there is something about me that makes people uneasy, but I’ve always been decent to you and the girls, haven’t I?”
Nelly was staring at the floor.
“I always clean myself up before I come. I have never hurt any of the girls. I have only shown you respect. You have to admit that, Nelly. I’m no different from anyone else who comes through the door.
“Maybe if you and me went up to your room. Maybe I could show you I’m no different.”
“No, I don’t…”
Galt stared at the woman with his dead eyes. “Why, Nelly, you surprise me. You really don’t think you’re a whore, do you? You think your girls are whores, but you’re just their … What, Nelly? What do you think you are, Nelly? Their manager? Their provider? A businesswoman?”
Nelly sucked in her breath.
“Businesswoman. That’s it, isn’t it, Nelly? You think you’re a businesswoman? You don’t think you’re a whore, do you? That’s not good, Nelly, a whore should know herself for what she is. Maybe we should go to your room, Nelly, so you know what you are. I won’t hurt you, and you’ll thank me for that someday, Nelly. You’ll thank me.”
Nelly screamed, just as she had screamed as a child when her father sought her hiding place in her home on Saturday mornings. She screamed, knowing that it would tell Galt where she was hiding, knowing that it would lead him to her, but she screamed out her pain and her frustration and her anger and the words came. Again and again and again, they swirled through her mind:
“Hey, little piggy, no sense to hide,
Papa’s coming to take his bride.”
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sheriff Frank Drinkwalter was curled around his breakfast in the Stockman Café, absorbing the heat from the sausage and eggs and hash browns Tilly had just served him. He had the paper in front of him. Looking at the pictures, scanning through the long lines of words to find something, anything that made sense to him.
Maybe he could learn to read. Maybe Mac could teach him to remember the words as though each were a picture depicting something. He wouldn’t really be able to read, but he would be able to interpret some things, simple things like Wanted posters. He thought he could learn to do that. Names, faces, offenses, and where they were last seen. He could do that.
Drinkwalter swept the paper away with his hand, and then caught it before it slipped off the edge of the counter. Wouldn’t do to have someone ask him what he had read that upset him. That wouldn’t do at all. Drinkwalter cut the sausage links into bite-size chunks with the edge of his fork. They were good; Tilly’s food was always good, but it seemed a little flat this morning. Drinkwalter realized that his own apprehension was seasoning the meal, or rather stripping it of taste. Something was wrong.
He ignored the first tug on his shirtsleeve, thinking someone brushed against him as they moved past, but he turned at the second tug. Beulah was standing behind him. She had no makeup on and her hair was a tangle. That and the rough woolen dress she wore made her seem nothing so much as a farm wife, arisen in the middle of the night to seek the reason for the fuss in the henhouse.
“Sheriff, you’ve got to come. It’s Nelly.”
Drinkwalter closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. He stood, reaching in his pocket for a quarter. The tip was too much for a fifty-cent breakfast, but the sheriff liked to show his appreciation for Tilly’s special effort.
Drinkwalter took Beulah’s elbow, then, and the two stepped toward the door. Sal Carlotta was sitting at a table near the door. He dropped his head and turned his face toward the wall, not wanting to acknowledge any greeting by Beulah. Crazy woman. No telling what she would say.
As the door shut behind the two, Drinkwalter kept his hand on Beulah’s elbow, steering her up the street at a faster pace than she was accustomed to.
“Do we need a doctor, Beulah?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think a doctor could help her now.”
Drinkwalter’s teeth ground shut. “Tell me what happened. Tell me everything that happened.”
“It started last night. Tuesdays aren’t very busy as a rule, and the other … ladies and I were playing pinochle. Three-handed pinochle. Sometimes we play partners when Nelly or Ole is around, but most of the time—”
“What happened to Nelly? That’s what I need to know.”
“Well, we were playing. I had just bid thirty-two, and I was having the hardest time—”
“Beulah?”
A sob shook Beulah’s body. “Oh, Sheriff, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t—”
“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“We heard Nelly scream. A terrible scream it was, as though her soul were being torn from her body. It scared us. I don’t think I have ever heard anything that sounded so helpless. We stood up so fast, we knocked the table over, and the cards fluttered all over the floor.”
“We were all standing there all huddled together, and there wasn’t another sound from downstairs, not a sound.”
Beulah pulled the sheriff to a
stop on the boardwalk. “The silence was more frightening than the scream. With the scream, at least, we knew who it was coming from and from where. But in the silence we didn’t know what was happening … or what had happened.”
“I grabbed my shotgun, and the three of us started down the stairs in a knot, both of them hanging on me, and me glad for it. Even if it was something we couldn’t handle, it made me feel good that we were together.”
“When we got downstairs, the first thing we noticed was that the front door was standing wide open. A cold breeze was pouring through, and we weren’t … dressed for it. So we all took to shivering. I don’t know if it was the cold or being scared or what, but we were all shivering.”
“It was totally black outside, and we couldn’t tell what was out there, nothing anyway outside that little shaft of soft yellow light that came from the front door.”
“And then we saw that Nelly wasn’t there. We didn’t know what happened. We didn’t know what came through that front door and grabbed Nelly and dragged her off.”
Beulah stopped, looking up into Drinkwalter’s eyes, begging forgiveness for the women’s fear.
“We couldn’t go outside. We just couldn’t. So we walked to the front door to shut it. I heard someone moving around out there, Sheriff. Real soft it was, but I heard it. It took my breath away. I couldn’t go outside into that darkness and meet whatever it was that was out there. I just couldn’t.”
“That’s fine, Beulah, but what did you do then?”
“We started looking for Nelly inside the house. Didn’t seem to be much sense to it, but it was something we could do. We couldn’t just stand there, and we couldn’t go upstairs, and—”
“I know, so you went looking.”
“Yes,” Beulah said, resuming the walk toward her home. We went to the kitchen and opened the door really slow. By that time we were all thinking about what happened to Sally.”
Beulah stopped, waiting until the sheriff stopped to look into her eyes. “I don’t know what it is about the … business that draws people like that, but some people want to hurt us … whores. We all know that. We all wonder when someone strange comes through the door if he might be … one of those.”
“We’ve all been thinking about that since you told Nelly what that man did to Sally.”
Beulah’s eyes were asking forgiveness. “We didn’t want to step through that door because we were afraid—”
“Because you didn’t want to see Nelly like that.”
“Yes. We didn’t want to see her like that. She’s a good woman, Sheriff, she really is. People can’t see past what she does, but if they did, they’d see what a really nice person she is. We didn’t want to see her all cut up. We didn’t want to see her like that.”
“But you did open the door?”
“Yes, we did. We stepped through that door. But she wasn’t there.”
“It seemed awfully cold in the house. I guess it was because the front door had been open, but it felt colder than it was outside, like some Arctic wind swooped down and filled the house with cold and then swept away. So we put some wood in the stove, waiting to see that it caught fire. We hadn’t said a word to each other: the three of us moving like we had one mind and not talking at all.”
“But after we warmed up a little, we decided that we would look for Nelly …”
“In the house?”
“In the house. Well, we looked in her office. None of us had ever been there before, and we didn’t know what to expect. Well, I guess we knew a little something about it. Nelly is a really neat person. She makes all of us clean up after ourselves, and every Wednesday we go through that house from top to bottom. We just make it sparkle, so the … gentlemen will have a nice place to … conduct their business.”
Beulah pulled her elbow free from the sheriff’s hand and stared down at the boardwalk. A blush spread across her face.
“Well, I guess we expected it to be clean and neat, and it was, all except for this pile of blankets and sheets in the corner, and we thought it was funny, she left them there instead of setting them out so Ole could take them to the widow McPherson’s place.”
“We weren’t in there all that long before we heard this sigh, like somebody had held their breath for as long as they could and they were letting it go all at once. Then the whimpering started and the words that we couldn’t make sense of. Nelly was hiding in that pile of bedclothes, Sheriff, and she was talking gibberish, something about little piggies and wives.”
Sheriff Drinkwalter followed Beulah through the front door. Bridget and Jezzie—the sheriff had never known their real names—were standing in front of the velvet curtain that separated Nellie’s office door from the parlor.
“She’s in there, Sheriff,” Jezzie said, pointing into the darkness of the office.
The office was just as Beulah had said it would be, immaculately clean with a place for everything and everything in its place. The pile of blankets in the far corner of the room stood out as a cabin window leaking light stands out on a night-darkened prairie.
“Nelly? Nelly, I’ve come to talk to you. I just want to know what happened, and then maybe I can help make it better. I won’t hurt you, Nelly. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
The sheriff leaned over to tug at the top blanket on the pile.
“No, Daddy! No! Please don’t hurt me again. Mommy, Daddy is hurting me. Please make him stop. Please make him stop.”
And then in a voice that seemed so strange that the sheriff thought two people must be hidden in the blankets, came the words:
“Hey, little piggy, no sense to hide,
Papa’s coming to take his bride.”
The sheriff jerked back as though he had put his hand into a den of rattlesnakes.
“Beulah, I’m going to go get Doc Johnson. You ladies lock the doors and don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back in just a few minutes, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Doc Johnson stepped from Nelly’s office. He pulled a white handkerchief from somewhere within the confines of his three-piece suit and began polishing his wire-rimmed spectacles.
“What is it, Doc? Is she going to be all right?”
The question crossed Doc’s face, bringing up one eyebrow into a question mark.
“I don’t know. Odd that God didn’t give us the brain power to understand how our mind works, but he didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. My guess is that something scared the holy hell out of her.”
Doc held his glasses up to the light from the large front room window, and then slipped them on, working them down his nose until he could peer over the top of them at the sheriff.
“Do you remember Clyde Salzbary?”
“Yes, old guy used to live down by the tracks. Died”—the sheriff crossed his arms and leaned back to stare at the ceiling—“two, maybe three years ago.”
Doc Johnson nodded. “That’s him: old Army veteran. Served in the war under Sherman. Saw a lot of fighting. Saw a lot of things he couldn’t forget. Every now and then, someone would come by and tell me Clyde was having one of his fits.”
“Well, they weren’t exactly fits. Something would trigger his memories of the war, and he would be back there in the war. He and five or six of his mates had been separated from his troop. The Rebs were out looking for him, bayonets fixed. Clyde had squirmed under an old oak knocked down by cannon fire. He lay still as he could while the Rebs found and killed each of the men with him. Said he could recognize them by their screams, and then they came to him, jabbing into bushes with those long bayonets. One soldier was jabbing around the roots of that oak, and a cottonmouth struck at him. He danced a bit, and then killed the snake, everyone coming over to see what he was up to.”
Doc hesitated, looking into Drinkwalter’s eyes. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it, when killing a snake is more of a novelty than killing a man?”
“Anyway, Clyde was wondering when they’d started look
ing again. He was wondering, too, if there was another cottonmouth in that tree. But some sergeant came by and ordered the Rebs away. So after dark Clyde crawled out from under that oak and made it back to his camp, carrying that cottonmouth with him. Made a hatband of it and wore it until he died.”
“Anyway, every now and then, Clyde would wake up and find himself under that oak tree. I would go out there … Well there wasn’t anything I could do but order the Rebs away. Then I would tell him that I was Sergeant Corn. Clyde and the other soldiers called their sergeant that because he found corn whisky no matter where they were. So I’d tell Claude I had a shot of corn, and I’d give him a sedative. He’d sleep, sometimes for forty-eight hours. I’d ask one of his neighbors to go in and talk to Clyde, and he’d come out of it.”
“Don’t know what triggered Clyde. Don’t know what got him out of it, but a sedative and a friendly voice were all I could think of.”
“That’s what I told the ladies, to keep at least one person talking with Nelly all the time. If she isn’t better the first time she wakes, they’ll give her another dose.”
“Do you have any idea when she’ll be out of this?”
“None. She might never come out. I know what worked with Clyde, but I don’t know if that will work with Nelly. I suspect that her three friends will do more for Nelly than I can.”
Doc’s forehead wrinkled into another question mark. “What the hell scared her like that?”
“Oh, I know what scared her,” Drinkwalter said, “but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it unless Nelly comes to and tells me what happened.”
“Well, I’ll let you know the moment something breaks, Sheriff. That’s the most I can do.”
15
Mac McPherson tiptoed from the school into the sunlight, testing the day as tentatively as a mother tests her baby’s bathwater. Still, the light stabbed into his eyes, leaving him blinking in the shadow while other students spilled past.
A perfect day, a day that lured people into the sun to poke around in their gardens, tending carrots or corn or peas or potatoes. Mac took a deep breath of the spring air. Lilacs at the corner of the school loosed their scent on the air, teasing Mac’s nose.
