PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  September 28: in the cool sun of late morning, a fisherman sits whistling (more breath than notes) on a small dry spot on the old milldam at the Falls. He has just caught a large bullhead, but a few minutes ago he lost a flathead catfish that he believed everted its stomach to pitch out the hook. It was not, of course, as big as the eighty-three-pounder a fellow caught years ago before the big oil spill (that winter the river didn’t freeze properly for ice skating). In the man’s bait bucket are seven small cricket frogs that he caught earlier on Sharp’s Creek. (Over this dam, a few months later, a high school science teacher and his son will try to shoot the drop in their canoe: it will overturn and the man will strike his head and be pulled into a frothing eddy, and the fifteen-year-old boy will be unable to help, and he will watch his father drown as his mother videotapes from the bridge.)

  February 3: at the Emma Chase (where an elderly woman just said to her friend, You drink water like a bird), the conversation over coffee at the men’s table is about a courthouse clerk who has turned down a raise of $8.33 to her monthly check of $1,066.67. Last year she refused a $37.50-a-month raise. Her action and comments about the farmers’ economic struggle will be reported in the Kansas City Times: Agriculture supports Chase County, and I can’t understand why [the commissioners] could give raises when the people who are paying the wages aren’t making it. She also doesn’t understand why the county commission, to save money, has torn up blacktopped roads and put them back in gravel but still gives raises to road workers. When I go to the courthouse to talk to her about it, she says, I have nothing to say. It did nothing but cause trouble.

  March 12: Dorothy Selves pulls from the glass exhibit case in the county historical society museum a ledger from the Hinckley House, a hotel long gone from Cottonwood. The book, next to Captain Henry Brandley’s quill pen, always lies open to Monday, 18 May 1874; in a clear hand, the first entry is this:

  Brigham Young & 27 Wives. . . ..Salt Lake City, Utah.

  Below the name are other travelers from Denver, San Francisco, Niagara Falls, Saratoga Springs. Mrs. Selves makes a photocopy of the entry, believed here to be genuine. (Later I will send it to the historical department of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City, and the reply is two sentences: We are afraid that the signature in question is an example of 19th century farcical humor penned by some wag as a joke. While Brigham Young (1801–1877) traveled many miles within the Great Basin Region, after his return from the Midwest in the fall of 1848, he never again set foot east of the Rocky Mountains. When I report my findings to some historical society members, they are not much pleased, as if I’d stolen away a piece of history or the exhibit, but one man says, I like the truth better: who’d make a joke in a hotel register! They say it wasn’t Brigham, but, hell, somebody came through here—and he got away with keeping a bunch of women up in his room. That’s what happened.

  July 7: I am at the counter of Whitt Laughridge’s office (a man once said to me, Stand here long enough, bud, and you’ll hear every story in the county, and Whitt said, More likely every lie.) Someone tells a choice story about a neighbor, and Whitt is surprised to hear it so long afterward, and he says, That’s what I get for going to Florida. A boy brings in a funeral notice, a three-by-seven-inch card announcing the death of a countian. Notices are useful in a place with only a weekly newspaper, where burials draw sizable turnouts, especially if the weather is bad and people can’t get into the fields; funerals, in fact, are such social occasions that the bigger cemeteries have privies. A fellow so bent and wrinkled that he looks as if time just wadded him up stares at the slender card and says, Another shingle off the old roof.

  January 28: outside the Flint Hills Restaurant, a truck stop on the highway at the edge of Strong City: the mercury-vapor lamps cast a deathly green luminance into the dismal fog as if it were night; horses stamp restively in a trailer, and a pair of mutts pace the bed of a pickup; on the rusted bumper of an old Pontiac from Butler County is a sticker: OIL FIELD TRASH AND PROUD OF IT. Over-the-road rigs idle out their smudgy dieselings, their air brakes expelling, their running lights little auras of red and yellow, and trucks leave and arrive, some of the two thousand a day passing here. Inside, in the cigarette smoke, the Sunday papers from Kansas City and Wichita lie separated and spread on the counter and tables, and over them truckers dressed to be cowboys eat and laugh (the real cowboy in the corner is dressed more like a trucker), and the waitress brings them plates of food running up her forearms, and one fellow hears something surprising and says, Well I’ll be switched. I’m eating a western omelet filled with chilies, cheddar, and diced tomatoes, topped with salsa; it takes up half the big platter, the other side occupied by a hillock of hash browns, and it requires two glasses of milk to get it down (this is what happens when you skip breakfast and lunch and walk around half a day). A teamster, his road-shaken guts sagging like old drapery, gets up to leave, and, looking for the door, walks the wrong way in the L-shaped room, then turns to the windowless east wall, then turns toward the windowless north wall, turns again, and then mumbles, How’d I get in here at?

  March 13: while I’m gassing up at the station on the turnpike near Matfield, I talk to a young actor from New York City who’s driving to Los Angeles and seeing the West for the first time. I tell him that parts of the movies The Gypsy Moths and Bad Company were filmed here. Referring to the highway department sign a few miles up the pike,

  ENJOY SCENIC

  FLINT HILLS

  NEXT 31 MILES

  he says, I kind of like a place where the scenery has to be called to your attention, and I say that some travelers see the sign and, when they arrive here, ask, Where were they? We go into the burger stand for a soft drink, and I ask him how things out here look to him, and he says, Last week all I knew about Kansas was that it’s dry and flat and takes up two pages in the road atlas. I ask what he feels like on the prairie, and he says, Forty-eight hours ago, I was in Times Square. Now it seems I’ve been dumped out of a tall glass bottle—sort of uncorked and poured out. I ask, what do you think of life horizontal? and he says, I guess no one here has dreams of falling.

  September 30: I often do this: take a sandwich and a bottle of Guinness into a county cemetery and, eating and sipping, walk along reading tombstones. Today I’m in the largest burial ground here, Prairie Grove, a mile west of Cottonwood on the Osage Hill Road. This Arlington Cemetery of Chase County holds a power over me, I assume because I’ve come to know stories about so many of the people stretched out beneath me (could I rouse a couple of dozen of them, I think we could rewrite—correctly—western history). A woman of middle years is setting a wreath of plastic somethings on a grave, and as I pass I say hello and she scowls and nods in reluctance. A few minutes afterward, leaving in her Chrysler, she drives close, opens the electric window an inch, says, Please! This is not a tavern, seals herself in again, and rolls on. Then I come to this marker:

  MARGARET REPLOGLE SHORE

  1921–1977

  “THANKS FOR STOPPING BY. SEE YOU LATER.”

  I raise a toast. That evening I learn that Margaret’s family denied her request to have jazz played at the funeral.

  April 5: I have stopped in Elmdale to ask directions to a remote prairie-chicken booming ground; a couple of men look up from the papers of some business deal they are transacting on the hood of a truck. One gives directions, gets corrected by the other, then corrects the correction, and, finally, with information so correct as to be impossible to follow, I ask whether the small sedan I’m driving can get over the ruts and rocks, and one fellow says, I was awon-derin when you was agonna ask the important question, and the other says, He couldn’t get that little thing over a cow pie, and the first one bends down and looks at the clearance, and he rises and says, Hell, Eddy, he ain’t agonna get it over a wet fart.

  December 12: in the Senior Citizens’ Center on Broadway, there is a discussion about countians’ driving to Emporia to shop, and a man, not in the least meaning a double entendre, says
, The main business of this town is dying.

  October 10: (notebook entry) I’m sitting on a knobby hill with at least a six-mile-long view in every direction, the afternoon without winds as if they had been bound up, the grass stock-still, and I cannot see the slightest movement of anything anywhere: in the visible hundred-and-some square miles, nothing is happening. It’s as if the entire scene has been cast in a Steuben crystal sculpture and eternally stopped except for the tiny scratching of my pencil across this notebook page—good god, I’m the only thing happening here. Ten minutes later: no—in my miniature vision, I’ve been watching for visible events, not unseen processes. Significant “happening” is process occurring behind a screen of mere, if overwhelming, presences. What I see as stasis is, in fact, moving, and if my pen wiggles along faster than the fractional creepings of the continental plate and rooted mats below me that are a slow and grand erasing of what I see now, its movement counts for little when compared against the imperceptibilities going on here, forces completely remaking this place second by second, inch by inch. A traveler (who cannot even remotely detect the thousand-mile-an-hour spinning of the planet he rides through space at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, to say nothing of its solar and galactic movements and its precession) writes in his notebook nothing is happening. Man muses, God guffaws.

  June 3: at Bonnie & Clyde’s, the Strong City bar, I hear a man say, That big old hog wouldn’t get out of the truck. Wouldn’t budge. Now, you know Tom’s a poor-tempered sonofabitch to start with—kicks his help about as much as his hogs—so he grabbed that sow by the ears and pulled, and just as he did, Bobby, his hired hand, hit her on the hams with his cattle prod. That jolt went through them pig ears into Tom, and he started jumping around, flailing, cussing: he thought he’d been stung by a hornet. Bobby realized what happened, so he started jumping around, acting like he’d been got by a hornet too.

  April 8: Charles Ireland, the retired superintendent of Chase schools, and Whitt Laughridge and I are walking around the few crumbled remains of Kenbro, a twenties and thirties oil boomtown just across the line in Greenwood County. On the north side we come to some broken concrete and a few bricks and rusting pipes that mark the site of the home Charlie grew up in. He tugs on a piece of metal and tells how the company houses, made of wood, were tied down with long hoops of steel wrapped over them, like cord around a package, to keep the flimsy things from blowing away. When he comes to a small depression at the end of a walk, he says, This was Hamilton. That’s what we called the outhouse—I don’t remember why. We’d say, “Well, I got to go to Hamilton.” He smiles but on the way home is very quiet.

  May 31: the Cottonwood Falls clothier stands behind and leans on the men’s suit rack, and he stares out into the brightness of empty Broadway. I’ve often seen him there, immobile as a mannequin, practicing the prime requirement for making money in the town: patience. I cannot imagine living here and walking past his eternal gaze, wearing a suit I did not buy from him.

  November 2: one of the most frequently used references in the county is the big 1908 county plat called Methuselah’s Map, in the window of Whitt Laughridge’s realty office. It hangs in the narrow room across from his collection of prairie grasses on the south wall. This afternoon I asked him what caused the big stain on it in township twenty-one, range eight, near Bazaar, and Whitt says, Years ago, Methuselah used to hang in the insurance agent’s office here, right behind old Abe Conner’s chair. He spent a lot of time tilted back in that chair, sleeping. That splotch in twenty-one-eight is Abe’s hair oil. (From then on, whenever I pass the office window and see the stained map, Mr. Conner, forty years gone, is asleep against it.)

  May 8: do I only imagine that countians prefer to sit away from windows? In a bar, a café, a shop, the citizens cluster in the back, especially in an old commercial building, its length commonly three times greater than its width. Is it that they have had too much sky and openness? Does some atavism draw them to the darker, safer, more temperate rear of the cave, the café?

  On the Town:

  Versus Harry B. (II)

  THE TRIAL

  Ninety years later, The State v. Brandley has not yet died out, and I hear countians speak of it, not necessarily with accuracy but with notions: that Captain Henry Brandley gained his first wealth by waylaying guests who stopped over at his log house, a station on the old stage line before Perkins’ tavern replaced it; that he made enemies in his acquiring land and handling of mortgages; that son Harry was innocent and forced to stand trial for the real killer, his mother (abetting this idea is the murder of a man six years earlier committed by his wife’s lover, who, trying to throw off suspicion, wore a sunbonnet and a Mother Hubbard dress;) that Frank Rinard’s bloodstains on the Brandley porch and barn door never went away, and thereafter, the place and family were damned.

  It seemed there was more here than just a murder. I remembered Jane Roger talking about how nothing so vexed countians as financial success, how one could be forgiven almost anything except making big money: was it possible that the citizens wanted to punish not a murderer but an uppity plutocrat? If the Brandleys really did object to Rinard, weren’t there easier solutions than murder? I went to the courthouse and began going through the big books, and I found a few journal entries about bail, subpoenas, jury selection, changes of venue, but the one book giving details of the trial was missing. Another question arose: had the captain or his eldest daughter, Clara, who wrote much of the early history of the upper South Fork, seen to the disappearance of records? (After all, Clara was prone to polishing some pioneer deeds while ignoring nefarious ones.) Perhaps, but then again the county records are carelessly maintained (a teacher recently found lying on a hallway floor the coroner’s inquest of the Knute Rockne plane crash). A clerk told me that the Brandley material would have followed the trial to Emporia and then should have come back.

  I went to the Lyon County Courthouse, and James Hoy, a professor of English at Emporia State University, who has a special interest in the folk culture of the Flint Hills and who grew up a few miles southwest of the Brandley place, joined me. We made our way through the microfilm, then a clerk took us to a storage room behind the courthouse; it was an unheated, gritty, sorry room cheaply partitioned off from a county garage. When I saw it, I knew the quest was in trouble: the Chase records were not there and neither was any of the Lyon County material of the trial. The so-called mysteries people read and watch should be called riddles because they contain solutions; true mystery is a bottomless thing, and we were in one.

  Only a single avenue remained: Jim came up with accounts of the trial in the Emporia Gazette (William Allen White’s paper) and the Daily Republican. I want to tell you what happened to Harry Brandley, but I must warn you: the accounts are fragmentary (Little testimony has been given that is of much interest), in error (consecutive sentences have Elizabeth as Harry’s mother and his wife), and incompetently written (vague pronoun references and tangled grammar obscuring the simplest of facts).

  Jury selection began on a Monday afternoon nearly two years after the murder: those opposed to capital punishment or conviction on circumstantial evidence were excused, and the state seemed to win the first round. The trial, as it developed, repeated the proceedings in Cottonwood. Harry sat between the captain and Lizzie, within the railing. The first witness, a surveyor, presented a map of the murder scene, and four following witnesses testified to seeing Rinard riding toward the Brandley farm about sundown, and then Arthur Crocker described finding the body. The coroner came on to say that Rinard had been killed by a single bullet that entered the center of his face and ranged down into his neck: he concluded that this angle indicated that the shot came from above Rinard and that powder burns on his face suggested the gun was about eighteen inches away—or twice that if the victim was sweating.

  On the second day, the state worked to show that Frank and Miss Pearl were frequently together, and the defense did not challenge. Then the prosecution brought forward
one of its key witnesses, John Digman, who told of a dance in January preceding the murder: Rinard and Pearl were sitting in a window, and Digman pointed them out to Harry and said, as best he could remember, They’re having quite a conversation—you better fix that, to which Harry said, I’ll fix it all right, and walked away. The defense held that Harry was the floor manager who arranged the dancers and that he separated the couple, and then his counsel moved to strike all of Digman’s testimony, since the incident had occurred six months before the murder and proved neither malice nor threat. Following the long argument, the judge sustained the motion.

  Over the next two days were these events: the state called Charles Fisher and asked him to repeat a conversation he had with Rinard; at last it seemed the dead man would be heard, but the defense objected, motion sustained. Brandley’s counsel then moved to strike all testimony bearing on relations between Rinard and Pearl, again sustained. The state had lost its evidence of motive and now it would have to prove guilt without it.

  The prosecution called on W. H. Dosier to relate a conversation he had with Harry several weeks after the murder. Dosier said, He came to me to sign an affidavit for a change of venue and said that he wanted to be tried by twelve men. I said that if his father had done what he ought to have done, Harry never would have been suspected: when two other murders occurred in the neighborhood, his father had offered a reward, but when a man was killed at his own house he had ordered the hands out to work the next day. Harry said that if his father had done what he ought to have done, the damned dog would have been left lying in the hog lot where they found him. The defense moved to strike the testimony but was overruled, yet the state never again raised the question of the captain’s unusual action.