Hell's Half-Acre Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to M.J.O.

  Help your brother’s boat across the river, and your own will reach the shore.

  —­Hindu proverb

  Epigraph

  Let Kansas bleed, if she has a fancy for it . . . Blood is a very common fluid. It is worth very little. A man is killed, it does not matter much; it is really a matter of small consequence to him, to his family, or to the country.

  SENATOR LOUIS TREZEVANT WIGFALL

  (D-­TEXAS), 1858

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Nicastro

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Anteroom

  THE MAN AWOKE, nostrils plugged with slate dust as if he had become mineral. Half animate, he felt, but could not comprehend, that his right eyeball had been lying against the stone, rendering it misshapen. Blinking, his eyelid would not close over the flat-­sided bulb. He tried to rise but found the impulse would not direct his limbs but only drifted toward his extremities like a handful of dirt settling in a still pond. When his fingers flexed, they traced tremulous ant trails in the slate.

  A scratching pierced the stone man’s scab of deafness. To turn his head toward the sound seemed as impossible as twisting a tree stump rooted in the ground. The effort wrung from him a groan, but more ancient, like the croak of the first fish to lift its scaly head from the water.

  His wits coalesced. The slate that dusted him was the surface of some cellar floor. The closeness of the air around him, and the way sound fell dead nearby, suggested he lay in a tiny space, little more than a generously proportioned grave. In the vault of this peculiar oblivion, there were lines of flickering light, like a lamp shining through the seams of a rudely constructed door. Formless shadows broke the light that, by their shadows moving, seemed cast by living figures. The obscurities flitted, paused, whispered to each other. Thoughts freed from self-­consciousness, a buried Narcissus, he believed everything they said must be about him. He was correct.

  Instead of pain, he felt an ache that pierced him like a bad memory. The tears shed from his eyes rolled into tiny balls of mud as they coursed down his dusty cheek. Somewhere beyond his brow, far away, a more consequential wetness worried him, but the effort to feel the crown of his head was monumental. He felt split, rent, and discarded. He remembered a dream he’d had as a child, of shrinking so small he could enter a gopher’s lodge, slipping down its passages as soil and stone brushed his lips. It was not a nightmare, but it broke his heart. His father would drop torches in the burrows and brain the creatures with a spade as they rose to escape the smoke. On his father’s lips, the purse of satisfaction he made at a stockyard bargain.

  If he was sure of anything in this pit, as he shed from his brow some vital essence that he could not name, it was of the pure inconsequence of his existence. If one pebble had tumbled from the back of another in the most obscure corner of the darkest valley in the back of the moon, it would matter as much as him to his fellow men. In his abjectness he became a supernova of self-­pity. Imagining himself posted in the sky like Orion, he was visible to brokenhearted mothers everywhere, in broad daylight. They would come out of their dugouts and soddies, these women of the Kansas plains, and point with their lye-­scorched forefingers at the abandoned boy in the sky, prone and smashed and forever beyond their arms to embrace.

  He wanted his mother now. He wanted her so much he shed tears that drained down those channels of moon dust, down those lonely untracked lunar valleys to the place where sadness collected on this most doleful of worlds. He cried as he had not since he was first laid on his mother’s glistening belly, a purple-­faced infant. Like that babe, he could not utter the name of his beloved.

  The sky opened with a rusty squeak. From beyond, light from a linen wick shone, as brilliant to his frozen pupils as the gaze of the Almighty. Three figures stood above, looking at him by lamplight, squinting as if his form offended their eyes. This mute gaping went on for some minutes, until a fourth figure appeared: smaller, more slender than the others, shining with a certain warmness that suggested she wore no clothes.

  In his state of disassembly this did not seem strange to him. Nor was he surprised when she leapt into the pit in a single, pantherish bound. She was indeed naked, round limbs caressed by tendrils of light and gloom, loosed breasts casting shadows down to a maidenly tapered waist. She was regarding him with eyes half lidded, an appraising frown on her face.

  Cleaved in two, some part of his brain still perceived the girl’s handsomeness. Her face was perfectly ovoid, with a high, unblemished forehead and brows plucked into neat, downy arches. Her hair was thick and shining like pistol metal in the lamplight, yet adorned with a girlish bow. The only flaw: the thin, tight mouth that seemed to ripple with tension, as when she had conversed with him at the table, eons before.

  Perceiving the girl’s handsomeness, the man responded to it. Senses unspooling, dusty nostrils scraping the ground, his mouth found feminine toes mashed and tapered by years crammed in pointed boots. He could neither speak nor think, but by some convolution of mashed nerves, his sense of smell was heightened. He detected on those toes an odor he knew from the whorehouses of Dodge City, that particular combination of perfume and leather and sweat of women disrobed for pleasure. It made him want to form his lips into a gesture that should have been familiar to him but whose name was gone now, stolen. Instead, when he placed his rounded mouth on her foot, he drooled blood and spit on her toes.

  “By the Lord, a pig even now!” the girl declared, voice clear but fluttering in his ears like a scream launched in the teeth of a prairie wind.

  “Schnitt ihm,” someone said from above. “Jetzt.”

  Shaking her foot free, she disappeared behind him. Then the stone man felt himself rising, leaving his little nest of bodily humors. Stooping, she had hold of him now, grasping him by the strip of his undamaged pate. He moaned with the exertion of being so handled. And as she pulled him higher, he felt he might speak, might produce some kind of protest, until his attention was drawn to a sharp new insult to the left point of his jaw.

  They froze there together for a moment, her breath caressing his upturned forehead, the image of the girl’s face across the table. Suggesting, promising. The very prettiness of her! Caught in those lusty emanations, he forgot his meal. Her smile delivered up small, sharp, white teeth.

  Just then, when he was about to make some indecent suggestion, the girl pushed the tip of the blade through his jugular and drew it across his neck like a fiddler bowing the final note of the reel. He sprayed forth, the stream spattering the walls.

  The work done, she lowered him
back into place with what, in his final thought, seemed great gentleness. And then he was done.

  Chapter One

  What Remains

  APRIL, 1873

  ON A WET morning, grim-­faced men gathered with picks and shovels. They collected in a spot midway between the Bender cabin and the claim’s makeshift stable, making small talk as they smoked and picked at the ground and waited for Leroy Dick, the town trustee, to arrive from Harmony Grove.

  In any other gathering of the township’s citizens there would have been a degree of high spirits, that good-­natured joking they indulged no matter what the occasion, be it a wedding or funeral, just because they were men, and liked to believe they were impervious to mere circumstances. But there was little mirth this time—­except for the Irishman, John Moneyhon, who grinned when the name of pretty Kate Bender came up, and made an obscene gesture with his cigarette that drew knowing smiles from the others. But the smiles were thin, and brief.

  A steady rain the night before had softened the roads, delaying the trustee’s arrival until after nine. When he came, Dick was driving the little runabout he took on supply runs to Cherryvale or Parsons. Beside him sat Billy Toles, a neighboring rancher who, the previous afternoon, had first noticed the strange condition of the Bender place and run to straight to the magistrate.

  “You shouldn’t be up there without someone official,” Dick had told him. “They’d be within their rights to shoot you.”

  “There ain’t nobody up there for days, I tell you,” replied Toles, who observed a pitiful lowing from the vicinity of the Benders’ corral while rounding up a cow from the perimeter of the ­property.

  Dick listened to his story and kept his suspicions to himself.

  “I found the calf tied up. He was a long way dead, maybe four or five days,” Toles said. “And the heifer was not ten feet away, penned up, where she couldn’t get to the calf. Udders split like old melons. The stink of it, I tell you. And the flies, and the look of the poor beast, still screaming after she watched her baby starve before her eyes. Who does an animal that way? What kind of monster?” And Toles wagged his head slowly and profoundly in disbelief. “Right before her eyes,” he repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Dick said after a long silence. “I’ll get word to everyone around. We’ll meet tomorrow morning around nine—­and do this thing legal and proper.”

  The inquiry commenced as Dick stepped down from his runabout and announced, “Here we are, then.” With a heavy sigh of a man about to embark on matters of unfathomed complexity, he led the good citizens of northwestern Labette County to the front door of the Bender cabin.

  The first thing they noticed was that the sign formerly posted over the door—­GROCERY—­was gone. The condition of the nail holes suggested that it had been wrested away in a hurry.

  The door was not locked. It swung open silently on leather hinges, its swing checked by an apple box filled with twists of grass and old corn cobs. The interior of the cabin, furnished with a table, a few chairs, bedstead, and some meager scraps of merchandise, seemed forlorn but orderly. There was a fine layer of dust on the floor and the furniture innocent of finger-­ or footprints. Yet the pendulum of the eight-­day clock was still in motion.

  Though their cabin was soundly built, the Benders had never bothered to construct a proper ceiling for it, nor covered the plank walls with anything. This was not unusual—­most settlers in the vicinity had other priorities than caulking and papering, and indeed prided themselves on their sturdy plainness. Instead of any formal partition, the space was divided only by a square of duck canvas, grade heavy number 3, that had been taken from the roof of a wagon and stretched along a line of joists that bisected the room more or less in the center. Morning light from the cabin’s back window shone through the material; at the very center of it, partly obscuring the light, was a greasy splotch, as if something had exploded upon the canvas. The magistrate looked at the stain carefully but could see neither color nor consistency in it.

  Nothing was necessarily unusual, except for the feel of the place, which had always struck visitors as exceedingly odd, as if the doing of perverse things had impressed itself on the general atmosphere. It made grown men nervous under normal circumstances. Their disquiet was relieved only with the appearance of the daughter, coming forth with an open fearlessness that aroused and confounded them. Kate, with eyes that laughed or ridiculed. Kate, who swore like a man, whose hair blazed like whiskey held up to the sun. If the men said they were not hoping they would come upon a disrobed Kate on their uninvited tour, they’d have been lying.

  The contents of the place were more or less in place, except for one detail: there were virtually no personal items. No clothing on the drying rope, no linens on the bed. No dirty dishes in the washtub. Not so much as a dirty sock on the floor. Sifting the ashes in the stove, John Moneyhon reported them cold through and through. The planks on the wall were unclad—­but not undecorated. On the wall behind the clock, there were odd things carved in the wood. Nudging the clock aside, Dick uncovered carvings of roughly human shape. The homunculus was more or less true to life, except that certain body parts—­like the head and the male genitalia—­were exaggerated in size. Through the arms, head, torso, and penis there were carved rough X’s.

  Checking under the stove, Moneyhon found three hammers of varying size. These were not clumsy mallets but the kind of iron tools used by cobblers or farriers. These were not suspicious in themselves, but only puzzling in their method of disposal. What man kept his tools under a stove? And if they were supposed to be hidden, why not find a better place to conceal them?

  Billy Toles fetched a book from under the table. It was Old Man Bender’s German Bible—­the one he was often seen poring over. “Wasn’t this always at the end of his arm?” asked Billy, holding the book up by its corner like some putrid fish.

  “They’ve absquatulated,” declared George Mortimer. He was a farmer who had responded to Dick’s summons to investigate strange goings-­on at the Bender place by bringing his plow. What he expected to plow up with it, everyone wondered but no one would say.

  Then someone noticed something under a leg of the table. “Look! There’s something there!”

  All eyes fell on the outline of an opening in the floor—­a trapdoor flush against the planks except for a short length of boot leather nailed there as a handle. In a flash the table was lifted away, the door swung open. But light from the windows seemed loath to penetrate the space beneath.

  “Fetch a lantern,” Dick ordered.

  Toles was on his way down, using some rude bits of rock stuck in the surface of the passage as handholds. The floor of the cellar was only six feet below, and covered with a large square of undressed stone the Benders had brought in from somewhere. Though Billy credited his own bravery for being first in, a sense of futility struck him as he stood there in the gloom, unable to report anything about his surroundings.

  “I can’t see a thing. But it smells,” he said.

  “Smells how?”

  “Queer.”

  They passed a lantern down to him. Now he could see that the dugout was about eight feet square, with the sandstone monolith on the floor running to within six inches of the walls. From one side, the north, a crawl space had been excavated, with daylight showing through the cracks of the double doors at the far end. Kneeling, Toles brought the light down to the surface of the stone. Dark stains meandered over its pitted surface.

  “It’s old blood,” said Leroy Dick, who had lain on his belly to test the air in the passage.

  He pulled back to let John Moneyhon drop into the pit. “There must be some poor soul buried under this rock,” the Irishman declared. With the heavy work hammer he’d found under the stove, he commenced to pound on the sandstone, trying to break off a piece. With three swings he dislodged a chunk. But when he lifted it away, the soil underneath seemed dry, undist
urbed.

  “It’s not coming from underneath,” said Billy. “It’s here.”

  He was sniffing around the loose dirt beyond the edge of the stone, near the wall. Something wet the soil there, giving it a faintly shiny appearance, as if it had been sugared.

  “Here, use this,” said someone out of the glare above, holding out an iron rod for Billy to take. It was the kind of probe used to test the depth of topsoil in fields. Grasping it, heart pounding now, Billy stuck the end into the discolored ground. The rod sank down with virtually with no resistance, as if penetrating the cream on a pie. There was a faint squish as the tip disappeared, and a slight pull from below, as if a vacuum had formed from its entry. And then the smell hit him.

  “Oh my Lord!” he cried. A redoubled stench, the stinging odor of concentrated decay, hit him full in the face, making his eyes suddenly pour tears. “Oh my goodness.”

  “What is it?” Dick cried. He moved to stick his head back into the hole but was shoved back as Billy Toles scrambled out. The boy was frantic, crazed with fright from the rot and darkness and confinement. He didn’t stop until he was outside. Pacing, he took great gulps of fresh air, alternately slinging his arms around himself and pumping them, as if his body were a bellows.

  Moneyhon scoffed from the cellar. He took up the probe, saying, “Leave it to me, boys. This mess don’t bother me!”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” said Dick.

  Moneyhon had the rod in the mire again, shoving it down until it stopped, then stirring it around as if he were churning some pot of pure corruption. The layer of adulterated dirt went deep, almost half a yard. But despite his vigorous efforts, he found no victims buried there. And indeed, nothing solid at all. Instead, Moneyhon found the limits of even an Irishman’s strong stomach. Gut rolling and heaving, he abandoned the iron and the Bender hammer behind him. Presently he was outside with Billy Toles, gasping.