The Last Crossing, page 7
They were tramping under the buckshot stars that riddled the deep blue sky over Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. An Atlantic storm slapped them sideways, filled their boot prints with cold rain in Massachusetts. Home, they said to themselves as they scrambled over snake fences in Iowa or waded through the ditches of Illinois, grass trailing along their waists. Home.
I saw them resurrecting.
I knew then I would see these boys for all of my natural born days, would never forget them, and that for the rest of my life I would wish it was my fate to take up my bed and go with them.
Now I wish I could witness Madge Dray do the same. In my mind, get up and go home to her sister, Lucy Stoveall.
7
LUCY The sun was so hot bright that when I came in the jail with Sheriff Hinckey, it nigh blinded me, the murk. I could just make out Justice Daniels setting behind a desk, shirt a patch of white in the dusk, and the silhouette of Mr. Straw, pressed up against the bars of the cell. I said nary a word, just stumbled by them, looking for Madge’s body. I found her in a corner. Her face was only part-covered, her two bare legs sticking out from the blanket, white, slender peeled willows. Madge’s body so thin, so small. Nobody had the decency to close her eyes.
I tried to cover her but the blanket wouldn’t reach head to toe. I caught a whiff of horse. The bastards had covered her with a saddle blanket. That she should be used so, the disrespect of it, put me all atremble, swept me with tears. I stood there, my head hanging, clenching down the shake in my throat until I could get my words out clear and strong. “You fetch my sister to our wagon. You get her off this dirt floor and out of this horse stink and you bring her to my wagon.” I turned round. The three of them, the law and Straw, were standing stock-still, looking at me.
I said to Mr. Daniels, loud and sharp, “I suppose you heard me?”
He didn’t like being spoken to so. It roused him up. “Miz Stoveall, we’ll deliver the body directly once you answer us a few questions. I got no interest in it going high here in my office.”
He had no business pushing back at me in that fashion. Putting it that way. But it worked. All I could do was fumble out, “What kind of questions?”
“Did Straw bring your sister back last night?”
“Yes, he did.”
“You are certain of that?”
“I heard her in the wagon. Felt her come over to kiss me. She always did so before sleep.”
“You did not lay eyes on Straw. But you say you felt your sister kiss you. Could be a dream you had.”
A sob rose up in me, I tried to choke it down. “No, no, this was no dream. I know what I felt!” I cried out. “But later I woke up and she wasn’t there. It scared me.”
“Maybe you supposed she’d snuck off to Straw. Tell the truth now, woman.”
“My baby sister, she was a good girl. She didn’t sneak off with Mr. Straw.”
“So where did she go, if it weren’t to Straw, do you reckon?”
Mr. Straw spoke up sudden, gave me a chance to collect myself. “Madame Magique. She went back to see more of Madame Magique, those boys parading her up and down Front Street. She had begged to stay.”
Mr. Daniels said, “You watch your p’s and q’s, Mr. Straw. Don’t go interfering with a witness.”
Mr. Straw said, “Mrs. Stoveall told you how it was and you got no business holding me.”
“We’ll see about that. I let you out of that cell, I know what you’re going to do. Run yourself across the Choteau County line and out of our jurisdiction. Then you’re scot-free. You’re laughing at us.”
I saw how it stood. Sheriff Hinckey could arrest nobody who was off this little parcel of land. By now the Kelsos were beyond the law’s short arm. Safe after a couple of hours of hard riding. But if I raised no hue and cry, laid no suspicion on them, they might believe they were free and clear. They might come back to Fort Benton in time, be delivered into my hands.
Mr. Daniels saw me thinking, stroked his fingers slowly up and down those shirt ruffles. It was like he was touching some spot on my body he oughtn’t. “Hinckey tells you your sister’s dead, but you don’t want to go see the body. You light out for Custis Straw’s property. Why’s that? Took off with a big old horse pistol. Sheriff Hinckey said you looked like you had a use for it.” He waited.
“It’s clear the law can’t keep a woman safe in this town, and it’s no use outside it. A body has to protect herself. That’s why I carried the gun.”
“You were going to settle with Straw yourself?”
“No,” I said, most careful, “my sister and me aren’t acquainted with many folks around here. Straw was a friendly customer. Only natural I’d turn his direction in time of trouble.”
“You ain’t being helpful, Miz Stoveall. Out with it.”
“I’m done talking to someone who does not listen. But you will listen to this. You see to it that my sister’s body is sent to our wagon. Right smartly.” Daniels tapped his desktop, Hinckey slouched against a wall, hands in his pockets. I looked at Custis Straw, who was hanging spread-eagled on the bars. There was sunlight coming through a window high up on the wall behind him, but he was blocking the most of it, the man is that wide. When I started for the door Mr. Straw called out to me. I stopped. “A wagon won’t do for preparing a body,” he said. “My room in the Stubhorn … you can have the use of it.”
I was about to say no, but then I saw he was right. That wagon is not a fitting place for a proper laying out. And Madge was always bragging on Mr. Straw’s hairbrushes, his bottles of sweet-smelling waters. She admired them so. I knew he would have store-bought soap, a dandified man like him. It wouldn’t do to wash her soft body with soap the two of us had boiled up out of fat and ashes. She ought to go to the earth sweet.
“I’m grateful,” I told Mr. Straw. Then my throat clutched, the fist of grief squeezing down hard, and I had to rush out of that jail.
I ran all the way back to the wagon, hand shielding my face from the looks of passersby, crawled into my gunny-sack bed like a mouse into its nest. I lie here, studying the daylight seeping through the canvas roof.
All my life I’ve tried not to imagine what might have been, but I can’t stop myself from doing so now. If the typhus hadn’t carried off Mother and Father when I was sixteen and Madge only seven – what then? Every nastiness seems to have followed from that. My father might have been nought but a Tennessee sharecropper, but he was a worker. We Drays never went hungry, never went cold. A gentle house, no whippings but ones that were earned. They even sent me for a time to the dame school, although plenty said it was a waste, to teach a girl to read. I didn’t know how happy I was until seven years ago; the typhoid took Mother and Father off and happiness with it. Next thing I knew, the landlord was on the doorstep telling us that Madge and me had a month to get off the property, he had found another man to work the place.
What choice had I when Abner Stoveall came courting? All our kin gone West, bound for greener pastures. He promised us both a roof over our heads, swearing to treat Madge like she was his own flesh and blood. Sitting in Mother’s kitchen, the betraying bastard bounced Madge on his knee, crawling his fingers all over her, tickling happy shrieks out of her.
Fool. A fool I was to take him at his word, sell myself to a man older than my own dead father for the prospect of eighty acres, a team of mules, two milch cows, a runty, screw-horned bull, a dozen scraggly chickens, five skinny hogs, a dirt-floor cabin with greased parchment windows. First time the candle was blown out and he crawled over on to me, I knew the high price I’d paid.
Then to find out the property really belonged to Abner’s younger brother Wisdom, who lived three mile down the road, that we were the tenants of a man who people said could skin a rat and sell it for beaver. It was hard to learn my husband was a liar and, worse, a lazy liar.
My, but didn’t Wisdom love to lord it over his older brother, bully him and hand out orders. Still, orders couldn’t get a lick of work from Abner. He didn’t have any more interest in ploughing or planting, in chopping weeds, in fixing fences, in putting up hay, in shucking corn than a hog who gets his rations fed to him regular would. Abner believed God had a purpose for him, and that purpose was to fool with fice dogs, ride a pacing horse, hunt, and drink whisky. With two healthy gals on the place to toil for him, why strain his delicate constitution? And pull our weight we did, pulled like a pair of mules.
You’d think the soft life we provided him would have eased some gratefulness out of Abner. But no, he’s always been a moody man. And Wisdom made him worse, brought his meanness to a boil. I used to dread the sight of Wisdom’s green-topped buggy coming down the road to check on his property. Abner knew better than to sass his little brother because Wisdom owned a hotter temper even than his own. Knocked Abner down in the yard with a trace chain once for back-talking him.
And after every one of Wisdom’s visits, didn’t Madge and me know we were going to catch it, that there’d be the very devil to pay for Abner’s treatment at his brother’s hands? Abner ranting on, the spit flying. “There’s my little brother wearing white moleskin gentry pants, and me as naked as Father Adam under a pair of old overhauls. It ain’t right, him so high and me so low. Giving me a scolding like I was a schoolboy.” Putting on a mincing voice. “ ‘Them calves got the scours, Abner. They been getting their hot bran mash like I said?’ ” Abner coming at me then, fist doubled up. “Goddamn it, woman, why ain’t you been boiling feed up for the cattle!” And when I told him he had never passed on word to me that Wisdom had ordered hot mash, he’d roar all the louder. “By the flaming Jesus, I ordered one or the other of you to see to it! Where’s that sister of yours! You won’t own up to shying off what I tell you to do, I’ll switch the truth out of her.”
And he would, lay into Madge with a willow, cross-hatch her legs with stripes because this was his almighty power to bend me. I’d do whatever he asked to spare Madge hurt and harm.
Every slice of bread that man ate was seasoned with the sweat of our brows. I ploughed; Madge sowed seed. I bucked stove wood; Madge stacked it. I milked; Madge churned. The butter went to town for sale, and the buttermilk down Abner’s gullet. Him riding off most days at noon, Lord knows where, coming home late for supper, full of whisky, slopping about from side to side in the saddle.
The farm was sinking beneath our feet while me and Madge bailed to keep it afloat. Weeds creeping into the fields, rats scampering in the corn bins, cows limping with hoof rot. Too much work, and too little money, and what cash did come in went riding out again in Abner’s pockets for a spree.
And in the end, Wisdom saw the pleasure of an upper hand wasn’t worth the losses. He wanted Abner out of his hair so almighty bad he handed him stake money to journey to Washington by the ocean.
But Washington is still hundreds of miles off and none of my sacrifice did a smidgen of good; I couldn’t save my baby sister after Abner dropped us in this Sodom and Gomorrah. He put us down among the wolves and the wolves tore Madge. Now I’ve got nothing left to do but to bare my angry teeth and bite, and when I sink them, they’ll feel the grip of my grieving jaw.
I won’t be used again. I know what Custis Straw’s playing at. I’m not blind. Nobody could miss those moony looks he sends me. You can see through men like a pane of glass, once you learn the trick. Straw’s trying to work on me just like Abner did, use Madge to get in my good graces. But I can play him one better.
Titus and Joel Kelso are more than Straw’s hired hands. I heard tell they’re some description of shirt-tail relations. They’re kin to Straw and kin knows kin, how it thinks, what it’s apt to do. I can inch what I need to know out of Straw and him not even cotton on to it. If the Kelsos have scampered for home, Straw’ll know where home is. If they took themselves off someplace else, he’ll have the best guess where that might be. Young fellows talk their plans.
But now I got to lose my anger until I’m done washing Madge, so that when I put my hands on her for the last time, they’ll be gentle.
CUSTIS I was about to offer Lucy Stoveall my condolences, but she left so abrupt I didn’t have time to finish rallying the words in my mind. They needed to be stately and comforting ones. A man can’t spur such words out on short notice. From the look of her, worn down so by sorrow, the wrong words would have ripped her apart like thin cloth.
The door banged shut behind her, Daniels got to his feet, paced the room. “That red-hair bitch is a liar. Maybe Straw’s been poking her too. Maybe she’s glad to have the sister out of the way,” he said to Hinckey.
He had more foul opinions to vent, but there came a click of the door latch, a slab of bright light, and Dr. Bengough stepped into the jail and gave me a quick nod of his head. “Dooley,” is all he said, meaning Aloysius had heard talk in the saloon I’d been arrested and rousted Bengough to look into it.
I was surely glad to see that stooped old man come edging over the floor like it was ice he was crossing. He shuffled himself over square in front of Daniels, took two snorts from his snuff box, sneezed, wiped his eyes, and said, “Well, Daniels, this is a damnable mess you got yourself into.”
“Straw’s in the mess, not me. He’s the one diddled a little girl, choked the life out of her.”
Bengough kept his voice reasonable, even-tempered. “Nonsense. What evidence do you have to support such a charge?”
“I’m getting my evidence.”
“Not good enough, Mr. Daniels. You can’t lock a man up on a guess or a whim. You must charge him or release him.”
“The law ain’t your trade, Doctor,” Daniels said.
One of Dr. Bengough’s hands came up and smoothed his twitch of white beard with a kid glove. I’ve seen him do that when he loses at cards and wants to disguise his irritation. “No, sir, it is not my trade. The trade I practise is ruled by one maxim, ‘Do no harm.’ You might adopt it for your own. Now release that man.”
The doctor is a man with a spine. The Democratic Party in Fort Benton might be run by Southerners and Fenian Irish, but despite being neither, he’s a power to reckon with. During the war, he fought Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus like a demon, and that gives him standing with the party faithful. You don’t want to get Bengough started on tyrant Lincoln, enemy of the rights and liberties of free men. Bengough didn’t keep his opinions to himself during the war and he paid the price for it – muck thrown at him in the streets of Illinois, and one or two spells in jail. Which makes him a hero to the Democrats hereabouts. It’s a point of pride for those rascals to number one man of principle amongst their sorry tribe.
It was no mystery what Daniels was thinking faced with the doctor. Willard Daniels had fished his job out of the pork barrel, and it doesn’t do to forget that Bengough has influence with the men who lift the lid on that barrel. If Justice Daniels wants to keep earning fifty cents for every paper he signs as notary public, and two dollars for each court session, he best not defy the good doctor.
Still, you could see Daniels struggling with the bitterness of his choice. Which was bigger, his love for his pocketbook or his hate for me? In the end, he motioned to Hinckey and said grudgingly, “Let Mr. Straw go.”
There was a rattling of keys, the rusty door screeched open, and I was sprung. “You’ll be back, Bible Reader,” Daniels said.
I laughed in his face. Bengough gave a yank on my arm, tugged me towards the door. “Behave yourself,” he said.
I wasn’t finished with Daniels yet. “I’m going to send some men to bring that poor girl to the Stubhorn. Be sure somebody’s here when they come.”
“Good Lord, don’t you beat all. You aim to have the pleasure of washing your little Madge?” Daniels said.
I took a step towards him, but Bengough held me tight. “Leave him be, Custis. Walk away.”
There was no profit in it, so I went along with Bengough, docile. The din and glare of the street was a blow to my senses; I leaned up against a hitching post while the wagon traffic grumbled by.
“You think it wise to have her taken to the Stubhorn on your say so? People will talk,” Bengough suggested mildly.
I was tired of questions; I’d had my fill of them. And sunshine was thumping my head, causing me to lose my bearings. Bengough put a glove to my shoulder. “You’re bound on going to perdition, aren’t you, Custis? Why not try to explain yourself?”
“I don’t want to be understood. It’s no concern of mine to be understood.”
“If a man won’t be understood, people think the worst of him. The worst is what happened to Madge Dray.” I just stood blinking, feeling sick. Bengough shook his head. “A little philosophy might broaden your outlook. As Epictetus says, In walking about, as you take care not to step on a nail or to sprain your foot, so take care not to damage your ruling faculty. The situation calls for you to exercise common sense.”
“Maybe,” was all I said. Though he’s often right, he puts too much store in book education. It’s irksome for a grown man to be expected to sit at his feet and polish him an apple, just because forty years ago he could read Latin and Greek. I was in no mood to yield. What I was willing to do was give him my hand. “I’m obliged for your help,” I said. “It was timely and welcome.”
Bengough gave my fingers a thoughtful squeeze and threw a tag from some scholar at me, all signs that I was forgiven. “ ‘Anyone can stop a man’s life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.’ ”
“Doctor, that doesn’t apply.”
“No, Custis, I speak to myself, not you. Seneca corrects the vanity of doctors. I must remind myself there is nothing I can do for Dutchie Hertog, his kidneys are failing, but he insists on a house call. I had better go and leave you to your own devices.”
