Cottonwood (14 page)

“Howdy, Mayor,” the foreman grinned at Tiny as he hopped off the wagon onto the ground. He had no front teeth, top or bottom.

“Now just a goddamn minute,” Tiny wheezed, the first words out of his mouth in half an hour.

The men had already climbed back aboard and were on the verge of returning to town, and the foreman cocked an ear in Tiny’s direction with a busy man’s air of distracted impatience. “You unhappy with something, Mayor? To my way of thinking, if we hurry we can get two more dug up by sundown.”

Tiny’s eyes looked even bigger and rounder than usual, as if his anger was pushing them out of their orbits from behind. “And when, exactly, were you planning to dig the eight new graves? Were you planning to do it by lamplight?”

The foreman thought hard, trying to provide the right answer. “No . . . When we got all the old ones filled in . . .”

“And your plan is to leave these above ground all night?”

“I don’t see any other way to . . .”

“I’ll tell you the way to. You dig up two boxes at a time, you bring them up here and you bury them before you go back for more. You understand?”

“You didn’t say to do that.” The foreman was thin of frame and bald on top, and the fringe of red hair circumnavigating his head had grown to a considerable length; he resembled a mangy, emaciated circus lion.

“I shouldn’t have to. Anybody with the smallest lick of sense would know to do it that way. And you didn’t keep the caskets and the markers together. Now how the hell are you going to know what marker goes with what casket?”

“Can’t hardly read ’em anyway. Probably need to carve new ones.”

“All right,” Tiny said. “When I carve the new ones, how do I know which goes on which grave?”

The foreman lifted his thick, tangled brows and gave a slight moue of consideration. “I suppose I’ll just try real hard to remember which one was which.”

Tiny’s breath was coming in shorter and shorter bursts, and his face was red and shiny with sweat, making me afraid he might end up a resident of the mound sooner than anticipated. “You’ll try? Is that what you said?”

“Yes, sir,” the foreman said. “I guess from here on out I’ll mark the boxes with a piece of charcoal, huh?”

“And what about these, then?”

“Look, mister, I don’t see as how it matters much if Smith’s buried in Jones’s plot, long as they’s both buried Christian.” He looked hopefully at Tiny, whose fists were tight at his sides, as if controlling them required a great effort.

“You get down there and start opening them boxes up,” Tiny said quietly, like he was choking.

The foreman blanched and shook his head, and the other men on the wagon looked at one another with drawn faces, silently debating whether the opening of the caskets fell inside or outside the job’s worth to them.

“You hear me, you drunken son of a bitch? You get down here right now and start opening them boxes up or I’ll by Jesus put you in one of your own.”

The foreman shook his head again without speaking, and Tiny sprung forward and with one hand around his throat picked the foreman up off the flatbed, lifted him into the air and dropped him onto the ground. Then he was on top of the man, his face redder than before, his big watery eyes even redder, his thumb pressing on the foreman’s trachea. That red hair splayed out, and his head pressed down into the mud with the pressure of Tiny’s weight on him.

“Jesus, Tiny, let him up. You’re going to kill him.”

“You son of a bitch!” His voice was louder and clearer now.

I got my arm around his throat and pulled up, to little or no effect; though he was obese he was also strong as a dray horse. “You’re a married man and a grandfather. You’re still the Mayor, for God’s sake.”

Finally he let go and stood up, inhaling and exhaling like a bellows for a blast furnace. The foreman lay on the ground with his eyes closed, choking, but after a while he wincingly sat up, his head leaving an indentation in the wet ground; then he pulled a crow-bar off of the wagon and started opening the coffins.

“Lawrence Billings,” Tiny said wearily. I chose not to look, as did the men on the wagon, but with each name Tiny called out the foreman ran and fetched the appropriate marker, then shut the box again. When they got around to the fifth box Tiny let out a sob, and I saw him topple down onto his seat like a shot elephant and bury his face in his hands, snuffling and snorting like a whipped schoolboy. The rest of us regarded him cautiously, and the foreman broke our silence.

“Who is it, Your Honor?”

My curiosity overcame my sense of decorum, and I glanced at the open coffin. Inside were a yellow, broken skull and some bones, considerably jumbled at the foot of the casket from the ride between cemeteries. The remains of a black dress were affixed to the bottom of the coffin, and to the skull still clung a few strands of blond hair. I answered the foreman’s question. “That’s Minnie Lansdown.”

“Minnie, my Minnie,” Tiny simpered, as if to explain his violent outburst. Minnie had died of a toxic dose of laudanum shortly after my arrival in Cottonwood, so I never knew her well, but I remembered her beauty and vivaciousness, and her husband’s misery and confusion at her death. Newt Lansdown gave up his homestead and headed west with the stated intention of hunting buffalo, and no one in Cottonwood had heard from him since. I knew of no sentimental connection between Minnie and Tiny, and I remembered Lillian Rector’s display of sorrow at the burial; still, she meant more to Tiny than a neighbor’s wife.

The foreman placed the marker at the foot of the coffin and tenderly replaced the lid, and then opened the next one. Inside he found another skull and bones, an unarticulated mess of a skeleton like Minnie’s. Also visible were part of a belt and a more or less intact pair of boots. I shouldered Tiny, who was still in tears, shaking his head.

“Come on now, Tiny, there’s work to be done. Who’s that in there?”

Sniffling and hiccoughing, he stumbled onto all fours and then rose to his full height, regaining a good portion of his lost dignity in the process. “That’s Hiram Bussler. I sold his widow those boots after he died. You know, I believe he was the first one we buried there.”

Once all six boxes and markers had been marked, I went into town for torches and two more shovels, and the seven of us dug into the soft earth well past sundown; when the dead were finally at rest once again I took the crew and Tiny down to the saloon for a quick drink, caked with several layers of rapidly drying mud. Before I left them there with a single drink under my belt, Tiny had downed three and was well on the way to drunken parity with the gravediggers.

I stopped at the hotel and ordered a bath to be brought to my room and filled, then selected some fresh articles of clothing; after scrubbing all the dirt off, and giving myself a good over-all washing, I donned my clean suit of clothes and stopped in at the dining room downstairs, where I ate a beefsteak the size of my fist, accompanied by a large baked potato. Then I strolled out the door and east, toward Lincoln, whereupon I turned left and began walking to the north. I passed by First Street and casually examined some of the home construction going on there, wondering what percentage of the carpenter’s trade of the states of Kansas and Missouri was currently operating in Cottonwood. After First Street there was no sidewalk, and my fresh boots were considerably mud-died by the time I reached the recently dedicated Second Street and turned west. I sauntered casually to Seward and rather than turning south I continued on where the road ended, walking up onto the grass until to my immediate south was the rear entrance to the Leval home. I spun slowly around to determine whether I could spy anyone watching me; I saw no one, and moved through the blackness to the back door. Rose met me as she had the previous three nights, making a mute show of her disdain, but she accepted the half dollar I pressed into her hand and absented herself, leaving me free to roam the house.

Maggie awaited me in her room, reclining upon her chaise longue in her nightgown, which she had drawn up over her thighs, affording me a view of her legs as they met her hips. Her hand was busy at work between them, and her eyes were closed. They did not open when I closed the door, though I deliberately made the latch click loudly to announce myself. I approached her, removing my coat, and as I drew near she smiled, still without opening her eyes.

“Mm,” she said, her voice low in her throat, inhaling audibly. “You’ve had a bath, Bill.”

I dropped to my knees at her side and put my mouth to the soft inside of her left thigh, and putting her hands to the sides of my head she slowly drew it down to where she wanted it, and for the fourth night in a row I wondered if I wasn’t dreaming.

Accounts and dispatches purporting to be the work of eyewitnesses to the hangings, exaggerated and distorted to the level of travesty, began appearing in the region’s newspapers within the week of the event, and not long thereafter spread eastward in ever less reliable form; by the time it reached Marc’s eyes one Chicago daily claimed we had hanged not one but seven members of our police brigade, alongside the mayor and town council, and gutshot them as they kicked the air.

The morning after his return Marc called me into his office at the bank. He had collected several eyewitness accounts, all of which ended with me shooting the dying men as they hung there and none of which, apparently, attributed my actions to pity or altruism. I explained myself to him, and though his disposition didn’t get any sunnier I did think he understood my part in the evening’s events.

“We ought to have Tiny Rector up on charges,” he said.

“That wouldn’t be a popular move on the part of a man seeking his office.”

He gave me a look of disgust but didn’t comment; he knew it was true. “Was Maggie terribly upset? I’m told you came by to check on her the night of the riot.”

“Somewhat upset. It was well over by the time I stopped by.”

He held his eye on mine for an uncomfortable moment, then looked away, toward the room’s only window. “I should have insisted she come with me to Chicago. Better yet, I shouldn’t have left at all.”

You think you could have stopped what happened, I almost asked, but I knew he did think so. He’d hardly ever failed at anything, and such a thing was hard for him to imagine.

“Michael Cornan’s down in the tent city, recruiting some new men for the police brigade.”

This took me aback, since Cornan had no experience in policing that I knew of; I’d thought he was trying to get a subscription up for a new church, of a denomination he was still in the midst of founding. “What’s he doing that for?”

Marc ignored the question. “Why don’t you go find him and give him a hand, since you know some of the men yourself ?”

“You coming along?”

“Too much to do here.” He nodded at the door, outside which a dozen men had already stood waiting when I arrived. I got up and left, happy to leave his reproachful tone and superior air.

“You’re invited for dinner tonight, by the way, you and Cornan both.”

I smiled as true a smile as I could muster. “Delighted.”

Though we all still called it the tent city, it had begun to take on the character of a shanty-town. Its numerous wooden structures were mostly constructed from the less desirable scrap lumber left over from some of Cottonwood’s buildings recently knocked down to make room for the new. Since a large number of the workers quartered there were carpenters, some of the work was quite sturdy; the crib of a quartet of harlots was a particular marvel, solid-looking and with makeshift bits of wooden gingerbread nailed about the door and windows for decoration. Tarpaper, doubtless stolen from one of the construction sites, covered the roof and protected the interior from another dousing like the one the whole tent city had received a few weeks before. Gleason and I had photographed it extensively early on three afternoons the previous week, and already its crudely picturesque aspect had changed enough that another session might have been warranted.

I found Cornan near that very structure, striding through the tent city in cavalry boots. This being the middle of the day, the neighborhood was mostly deserted, its inhabitants engaged in constructing the metropolis-to-be. The distinct odors of two or three varieties of shit could still be detected in the spring air, and somewhere to the south one woman could be heard screeching abuse at another, who returned it with enthusiasm, adding some anatomical vulgarity for good measure. The mud had long since dried, but it had done so in such a churned-up state that it was quite uneven and difficult to negotiate, with large crusty ridges sticking out like waves. Before I could call out Cornan’s name he tripped and, catching himself with an extended hand, saw me approaching from behind. Though I made no sign of amusement, nor even of having noticed, he acted as if I had laughed, scowling at me as he righted himself.

“Let’s see you navigate these rotten gullies for a couple of hours without tripping up once or twice.”

“Marc sent me down to give you a hand,” I said in the friendliest tone I knew.

“I don’t need any help finding police officers. Not from you or anyone else. Good day, Bill.”

He turned away and nearly collided with a couple of men who hadn’t found work that day, on their way to the whores’ crib.

“Sorry about that, mister,” one of them offered, though it had been Cornan’s offense and not their own.