Two steps took her to the cave entrance, and a quick sweep of the light showed the three kids wrapped in one another’s arms against the back wall, terrified but unharmed. Ernesto was the only one still screaming, his eyes tight shut, but the other two blinked against the light, and the girl’s mouth moved in speech: no blood, no shooter.
Mendez ducked back out the door, shining the beam along the path: nearly collapsed patchwork wall, smashed propane lamp, near-dead fire circle, path along the cliffs, a pair of feet.
Taco Alvarez lay stretched out with his feet toward the cave, blood on his forehead, hands empty of weaponry, one hand beginning to stir. The beam continued on and came to another pair of feet, white sneakers beneath a dark-brown robe.
Brother Erasmus stood, wooden staff in one hand, shotgun in the other. He blinked when the beam hit his eyes, but the smile on his face was beatific.
“Was he alone?” she asked. First things first.
“Alone, alone, all, all alone.”
She took the gun from him, peeled the shells out of it, and laid the empty weapon to one side. As she knelt to slap the handcuffs onto the groaning Taco Alvarez, the old man went past her to the entrance of the cave. When she looked up, all three children were wrapped around him like limpets on a rock, weeping.
Her cell phone, of course, couldn’t get a signal.
She was not about to leave these three kids out here while she went to summon help, and she was loath to put them into a car with their would-be murderer. In the end, she left Taco, cursing in two languages and with his feet bound by lengths of duct tape, in the gentle care of Brother Erasmus.
“I’ll send someone as soon as I get in range of a cell tower. You sure you’ll be okay with him? I could just leave him tied to a tree.”
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art . . . watching, with eternal lids apart.”
“I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near an eternity. Maybe twenty minutes, half an hour.”
By way of answer, he placed his hand on her shoulder and smiled down on her.
She glanced around at the children, who had passed through the terror phase and were now beginning to talk madly about the adventure, words tumbling over themselves. She looked back at him and said, “Thank you. He’d have shot me for sure. I should have been more cautious, coming here.”
“There is no fool like an old fool,” he said, as if to excuse her.
She laughed. “You’re right there. The last thing he could’ve expected was an old man with a cudgel.”
“Every inch that is not fool is rogue,” he said, his eyes sparkling.
“Well, I thank God for that. Okay, I’d better get these kids home. I’ll see you at the station.”
He merely smiled and leaned on his staff. She gathered up Enrique and his pair of protectors, got them across the creek dry-footed and into the car.
When she turned back, she saw Erasmus still standing there, outlined by the glow from the second propane lamp. “I met a fool in the forest,” she murmured, as a line from one of the summer Shakespeare productions percolated into her mind, “a motley fool.”
She got a signal for her phone two miles from the cave and called in her report. As she made her calls, she was dimly aware that the kids had moved on from reliving the moment of the gun going off to speculation about Erasmus. Enrique thought he was a hero in disguise. Ernesto wondered if he’d just dyed his hair and painted lines, to make himself look old. But Mina, with the superiority of age and the wisdom of her sex, said he was an angel, and that shut both the boys up until they reached the station.
Bonita Mendez thought all three might be right.
Of course, she could never be sure, because when the police arrived at the turnaround and followed the light to the thoroughly trussed Taco Alvarez, Brother Erasmus was no longer there.
Burying Mr. Henry
By Polly Nelson
They lifted my rag-wrapped body off the top of a munitions wagon and left me in Stratford County, Kansas, where I remained unconscious for the better part of two months due to infection, pain, and an excess of laudanum. Eventually the leg wound healed over and my addiction came under control. My aversion to the battleground remained, however; so when Stratford asked me to serve as part-time marshal, I was quick to raise my saber-scarred right hand. Thus ended my part in the great War Between the States.
I was still young in 1864 and I believed that, except for a slight limp, the personal effects of the war were over for me. But as most career lawmen will tell you, at least once in a lifetime some case will come along that offers you an education, and if you’re lucky it will touch your head, your heart, and your gut in equal measure. For me, such a case involved the burying of Mr. Henry: an event that came to represent everything I’d observed about the War Between the States and about the myriad odd effects it had on those who survived it — especially those made less by their exposure to that war. Many wished they could simply forget, transform, and become somebody else. A few of us succeeded, even if only for a short while.
I had never considered becoming a lawman, but it turned out to be a good decision for me. The only talents I’d developed during the war were a knack with a Colt firearm and — I like to think — a level head when it concerned my fellow man. Before the conflict began, my family had paid my ticket into the territory, so that I could cast a vote on whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Dear God, that the issue of slavery could have been resolved so simply. Anyway, coming out of my somnolence that painful November, I realized that I could hardly face the thought of returning to clerk in my father’s office.
I considered the possibilities, and it took me no more than a few days, maybe a week or two, before I decided that I could probably pass as a local. What might have been a temporary job as marshal grew into my permanent position. At my retirement in June of 1893, I had served in that capacity for twenty-nine years. The day I started, my constituents numbered just over sixty, but toward the end I had close to twelve thousand people under my jurisdiction.
In 1864, Stratford was pretty much unsettled, like any of a dozen other cow towns growing up around an assortment of settlers who came from as close as Illinois and as far as the steppes of Russia. Most of the older men had fought along the Missouri line, and most of them wanted never to see fighting again.
It looked to be an easy job, even during cattle-drive season, when the town might swell from sixty to a hundred fifty. I had an affinity for those young boys driving cattle for weeks on end. Many of them had no idea how to settle down because, even as young as twelve and thirteen, they had been forced to take up arms for one side or the other and fight for survival. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t recover from the experience as it was that they’d had no chance to experience a life worth recovering. And so they had to be protected, lest they stumble inadvertently beyond gambling and minor crimes into a shoot-out at dawn where death didn’t matter; they’d already seen too much of it. For them, the world remained a great lawless universe, and my job was to give them rules to live by — at least within the Stratford city limits.
That uneasy balance shifted when the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through about a half-mile west of downtown. Even before those tracks could be tested, the permanent population of Stratford swelled to three thousand people. In addition to the cowboys and the settlers, I began to deal with railroad workers, buffalo hunters, Mexican vaqueros, former slaves hoping to stake a claim for freedom, ex-soldiers still battling over abolition, and even some wealthy Easterners looking for adventure, come to see what all the hoopla was about. I had to deputize Arlen Dexter to help me keep order.
Arlen played a very important role in the Mr. Henry case: first, because he was my part-time deputy, and second, because he was Stratford’s fulltime undertaker. We never spoke about it, but I’m pretty sure Arlen saw no service in the war. Plenty of red-blooded Americans lost themselves in the territories until the war was over, and — some may not reca
ll — plenty of red-skinned Americans found themselves on the front lines, defending both sides of the slavery issue. For the most part, the nondrinking community members avoided the topic of who fought where, when, and why, lest bloody Kansas should begin to hemorrhage again.
I never really cared much for Arlen. He had a limited sense of humor and was way too fussy about clothing for my sensibility. He had a tendency to evaluate people based on the way they looked. And if a handsome young cowboy died, Arlen also had a tendency to show up a few weeks later in the same clothes that the cowboy had expired in. Still, while he might not have been the most scrupulous undertaker, he was a very good deputy. He was always prompt to the scene when there’d been a shoot-out. After all, it was in his best interest both as deputy and as undertaker to claim the victims. Somebody had to arrange for those burials.
If no kin came forward, the town would pay pauper’s fees, but Arlen was diligent about finding family, even months after the last rites. More times than not, Arlen would shame some relative into paying for the coffin and decent black suit that the undertaker said he’d provided the corpse, claiming that, come Judgment Day, every rising soul had a right to look decently saved. This was still in the days when the soul’s salvation meant something to those who considered the West to be God’s gift to the white man.
I often had a suspicion that Arlen’s clients went out of this world wearing only the suit they’d worn coming into it, except when the family lived close enough to attend the services. Even then, I suspect that Arlen’s decent black suit had been altered to fit the frame of more than one back-shot drunken cowboy.
Arlen had an eerie sense about people, both living and dead. Sometimes he would be looking out the office window and see seven or eight young boys coming in to unwind from a long cattle drive, some of them still wearing butternut-dyed Confederacy pants. For those especially, Arlen would jot notes about suit measurements. I came to appreciate how sensible Arlen’s observations could be: anyone crossing the Missouri line still wearing Confederate colors would very likely drink himself into first a shouting and then a shooting match. Arlen’s foresight still didn’t sit well with me.
The other annoying thing about Arlen was his feeling toward women. Generally speaking, he didn’t like them. Nor they, him. Of course, this led him to hold very little regard for the institution of marriage. That fact came to play an important part in the Mr. Henry case. Until Mr. Henry, I was under the impression that Arlen had never enjoyed the company of a woman who wasn’t paid for the interaction.
Arlen’s distaste meant that I had to handle all the disappearing-wife cases. I might get two or three of those in a year, more if the winter had been exceptionally long or the summer unusually hot.
The summer of 1866 was a scorcher. Whatever corn made it to full growth was cooked on the stalk, and since farmers couldn’t sell it to buy anything else, that’s all some people had to eat. Corn, both on the cob and off. Corn bread, corn mash, corn gruel, corn grits, corn pudding, corn dumplings, and, for the really special occasion, corn cakes.
I remember about the corn because when the emaciated Esau Bandler first walked into my office, the thought came to mind that he must have known a pretty steady diet of corn. His skin had that bleached-through color, and his hair looked to be the texture of thinned-out silks. He moved with an air of stoic resolve, passing through our door in the summer heat, wearing a Union greatcoat scarred with rips and tears like a map of warring nations across his constricted back.
I didn’t pick him for a disappearing-wife case, but Arlen did. Arlen usually left the office when some abandoned husband came in, and Esau had hardly begun his speech before Arlen was gone. Arlen had no patience. I could hardly ever help in those cases, but I’d always let the man talk. Although I stayed off the stuff myself, I usually kept a bottle of medicinal whiskey in my drawer to help these stricken men tell their tales. If the wife had been gone for more than a month, there was a good chance the husband hadn’t spoken to another human being in the past six weeks.
Most abandoned-husband stories ran pretty much to type, depending on the age of the disappearing wife. Six to eleven children if she was over thirty, often with one or two recently buried. Some women could get through the death and burial well enough, but they couldn’t seem to bear watching the hot prairie wind blow their children’s mounded graves away like last year’s crop gone to seed.
If the wife was originally from somewhere like Ohio or Kentucky, the husband stood a good chance of getting her back. I never heard any of them say as much, but often all those women needed was a look at some real trees and a few nights’ sleep in a bed raised off the floor. The women always came back for their children, even if they disagreed with their husbands on slavery issues.
Arlen hated hearing the husbands’ stories. Most likely added to his permanent sour on marriage. He’d also handled one too many birthing deaths. Probably the nicest thing he ever said about women was that if he had ever found himself in the unfortunate circumstance of being born one, he would have gone straight to the nearest convent. Odd, because the only time Arlen Dexter ever spent close to God was at the grave. And the only tenet he religiously held was one against hard liquor. He had been a drunk in his early years and had sworn never to touch the stuff again. He couldn’t even keep that faith because I personally gave him another drink, all because of Mr. Henry and Esau Bandler.
In 1862, Mr. Esau Bandler left his wife and four children homesteading on 320 wheat-seeded acres in northeast Kansas and rode south to join the frontiersmen fighting in the War Between the States, in an area where Kansas lost more men than did any other state in the Union.
Jump ahead to 1865, the war ending and Esau riding back home to his wife and family. Except that when he got home, there was nothing there. No wife, no children, no house, and no crops. Some men would have toughed it out and gone about the business of rebuilding their lives. Not Esau. By the time he got to me, he had already tracked down some neighbors who had gone into longhorn punching in north Texas. They were able to tell him what had happened to his children: cholera.
Nobody knew anything about the wife except that she had done her best by the children, and when the time came, she was the one who dug the graves, sold the animals, and lit the house afire. After that, she disappeared. A thinking man would have written her off as long gone. A gentle one would have hoped her happily settled somewhere else. Only one man in ten thousand would believe he could find her again and that, if found, she would still be available to him. Esau was that one in ten thousand. A man who had taken unto himself a wife.
By the time Esau had finished the telling of his personal tale of woe, there was only one man I could think of who might be able to help him: Mr. Henry.
I think I’ve mentioned that Stratford in 1866 was beginning to grow, and we could offer some accommodations. We had a hotel with four single rooms and two doubles. Ole Johansen’s Outfitting Store and Walter Goddard’s Barbershop were both standing then. So was Sokolov’s Dry Goods, and he took the post in there too. And of course there were the five saloons, two gambling houses, and one dance hall butting one another on down the wrong side of Main Street.
The best of those establishments was the Stratford House, next door to my office. You could buy a drink there and a decent meal and a reasonably lenient woman if you wanted. In most of my disappearing-wife cases, I would suggest that the bereaved husband get himself one, two, or all three items, depending on how hungry and hurt he looked at the time. But Esau Bandler didn’t seem like the kind who would enjoy any of those things, as badly as he might need them all.
That’s what led me to think of Mr. Henry.
Actually, I met Mr. Henry through Arlen Dexter. Mr. Henry had an uncommon tolerance for the neediness of the human beings who found their way through the open gates of his hundred-acre ranch. And Arlen found his way there often, although the trip took sixteen miles, both ways. Mr. Henry’s women would clean and mend whatever clothing Arlen might ha
ve recently acquired, and whenever he rode back to town, the hammered-tin badge on his chest would sit polished and straight.
I wouldn’t say that Mr. Henry and I were friends, but I liked him. He was a small man who carried himself well, and he always seemed to have the respect of the women who worked for him. It wasn’t a place to go for immoral women, although occasionally one of the bordello gals from town would get fed up or old or wise, and usually Mr. Henry would let her try working his piece of the countryside. Most of the women there seemed to make ends meet by serving hot food spread out on cottonwood tables. They offered up some choice provisions: eggs and butter, vegetables, and the occasional buffalo steak. Their chairs were overturned laundry tubs that they’d used to scrub clothing early of a morning.
To all outward appearances, Mr. Henry was a fine, upstanding man. In fact, one time in the early years, a woman stumbled into my office who had been horsewhipped across the face. Doc patched her up, and I took her out to Mr. Henry, who put her in a room off the kitchen and taught her to cook. That’s another disappearing-wife tale, but you can be sure her husband got no direction from me.
So the story on Mr. Henry was that he might at any given time have between two and twenty women living with him. Not the kind of high-stepping fancies that the saloon and dance hall carried. His women were the kind who could have been your sister, if you had a sister who’d known a streak of bad luck. More than a few were women whose husbands failed to return from the war, or returned so damaged that they forgot their wives were on the good side. I should have considered that before I sent Esau into their welcoming fold.
Mr. Henry’s general clientele were mostly older men, many of them looking for a wife, a night away from home, or just some friendly conversation. And surprisingly, it turned out that what a lot of those wild young cowboys from town really wanted, or wanted soon after the drunk wore off, was a good meal, a clean shirt, and a kind woman’s touch. So long as they behaved, Mr. Henry made room for them too. He had one boy staying with him for several months, cleaning up around the barn, talking to the women, learning to get over that fear of loud noises in the night.