Northfield Page 4

  “Dropped my tobaccy,” I said, without looking up, and, when I sat up straight and tried to give the strangers a smile, well, practically every one of them was looking hard right back at me. Three of them had dismounted so that I couldn’t see nothing but their hats and legs, and most of the rest had reached inside their dusters.

  Struck me as odd. So did the fact that I counted eight horses, but only seven men, every mount saddled, too. Maybe they were highwaymen, I thought, but if they held me up, it would be downright comical what they got. Still, I was nervous. Like I said, the men were strangers, fancy rigs on their horses, and dressed in linen dusters and good clothes. And, like I said, as lonesome as this country was, if they killed or maimed me, nobody would find me for a ’coon’s age.

  But the taller man, he had trotted his big dun horse over toward me and bowed. He wore a gray hat and black broadcloth suit, with a silk tie. Shamed me, what dressed in muslin and duck trousers, boots covered with mud and muck from all the rain we’d been having. Surely admired his saddle. Never seen something so fancy, not in Minnesota, maybe not even in Kentucky. What’s more, there he sat, leaning over a mite, offering me Navy plug.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I found mine.”

  “But mine hasn’t been lying in manure.” He grinned, and I glanced at my boots and all the filth lying down in the wagon. So I tossed my tobaccy aside and took his, carved off a small bite, and started my chaw. When I give him back the plug, he bit off a mouthful, and held out his hand.

  “Name’s Wood,” he said. “Ben Wood.”

  “Joe Brown.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we just sat there, working our chaws, till I finally asked: “You-all lost?”

  “Wouldn’t say that,” Ben Wood said. “Debating on which way to go. On our way to find some tim-berlands.”

  “That would be north of here,” I shot back. “Long way north.”

  Ben Wood had an easy smile as he looked over the rolling plains. “Yes, sir, I’d dare say this is country for farming, not logging. Grew up on a Tennessee farm myself, yet my calling led elsewhere.”

  “Tennessee, huh?”

  “Land of Crockett and Houston and Jackson. Some say Eden.”

  “I grew up in Kentucky, come out here, though, before the rebellion.”

  Said this because I was still suspicious of these guys. They spoke like Southerners, and I wanted to see how they’d react to me calling the war a rebellion, secesh being touchy on that subject.

  “Lot of good Union men in eastern Tennessee, Mister Brown,” Ben Wood said, like he was reading my mind. And with that, the rest of the men come up over to the wagon, walking their horses now, and shook my hand, telling me their names. Seven of them. With eight horses. Really friendly gents, though I couldn’t recollect most of their names. There was a Horton and a Howard and a Chadwell, but I couldn’t tell you which was which five minutes after introductions.

  Well, we started talking about the timberlands, and my suspicions faded. War was over, had been for ten, eleven years, and they were most interested in hearing all about northern Minnesota, so I talked and talked till I had worn out my first chaw of tobacco and Ben Wood offered me another. I like to talk. Takes me a while, but once I get started…just ask Matilda.

  “Timber seems to be a sound investment,” Ben Wood said.

  “Better’n farming, I warrant,” I said.

  “Oh, farming’s a noble endeavor,” Ben Wood said. “Practically all of us grew up on farms, except Mister Chadwell there. He’s a city boy but has lived some up north of here. Why his tales of all that forest, that’s what led us out of eastern Tennessee.”

  “There’s some fine woods in that part of the country, too.”

  “Indeed. Well, sir, we’ve kept you from your home too long. Let us bid farewell and we’ll be on our way.”

  “No rush,” I said, enjoying the chance to converse with someone other than Matilda or Jezebel or that miser of a mercantile owner back in town. “My place is just a mile up the road.”

  “Still, it’s getting late.”

  “You’re more than welcome to spend the night at our place,” I said. “My Matilda, she sets a nice table, ’specially this time of year.”

  Thunder rolled in the distance. “We won’t im-pose,” Ben Wood said. “Mister King, he’s a fine cook…his food not as dour as his face would lead one to believe.”

  “No imposition,” I said.

  “Well.” The thunder cracked again, and Ben Wood turned to look at his colleagues.

  “Ain’t nobody ever accused me of a-being a duck,” said one of the guys whose name I had already forgotten, the one on the brown mare dusting off his pipe, and he started poking a finger through holes in his hat.

  “Then, Mister Brown,” Ben Wood said, “lead us to Camelot.”

  I released the brake, and rode on down the road, when there come a commotion—man alive!—and suddenly a wagon bolted out of the woods, driven by some fellow in a duster, too, and I almost stopped to see just what the blazes was going on here, but Ben Wood rode up alongside of me. There was that eighth man, he’d been hiding all along.

  “That’s Sam Wells,” Ben Wood told me, pulling the extra horse behind him. “Don’t mind him none. He’s shy is all.” He lowered his voice, tapped his temple. “Little touched in the head.”

  “What’s in the wagon?”

  “Our supplies. Long way from Tennessee, sir. Sam’s harmless, Mister Brown. I give you my word.”

  My suspicions had returned, but that Ben Wood could talk so smoothly, politely, it eased my apprehensions about them. I just didn’t know what Matilda would think.

  Well, that’s not entirely true.

  “First things first, Joe,” Matilda said, wiping her hands on the apron and blocking the front door. “There’s tobacco flakes stuck in your teeth, which is brown as molasses. Didn’t I ask you not to buy none of that devil’s chaw? Rot your mouth out, it will. Didn’t I tell you we don’t have money to squander? You don’t see me buying sassy-frass tea.”

  “Mister Wood over yonder, he offered me his own plug, Mama,” I told my wife. Which was the truth, I figured, pushing my own dirty store-bought plug deeper inside my mule-ear trousers pocket.

  “And that’s another thing. How many times before you get it through that thick skull of yours that we don’t have enough food to spare? You meet any fool on the road, you invite him over for supper, then work your jaw till midnight. Gracious, Joe, how many are there over yonder? Nine? We can’t spare no food for nine, ten men.”

  “It’s only eight, Mama, and they’re strangers, on their way north. From Tennessee. Said they wouldn’t take no food from us. Got their own.”

  Rain started to sprinkle, but she still blocked the door, staring over my shoulder at the camp Ben Wood and his friends had made in the field by the barn.

  “I don’t like it when you bring strangers home, Joe. Don’t like strangers.” She was looking at me again. “Did you order the plowshares?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Get the coffee?

  “Yes’m. And sugar, and flour.”

  “How much did Ziegler give you?”

  “Same as last time.”

  She snorted. “Well, best bring in them sacks before they get ruint by the rain.” When she looked up again, her face hardened and she let out an angry bark. Knew she wasn’t snapping at me no more, so I turned around to see Mister Wood standing by the well with a bucket, him just smiling at us.

  “What do you want?” my wife hollered at him.

  “Fetching water, ma’am, to boil potatoes.”

  “Well, if it’s water you’re after, fetch it. Don’t just stand there paralyzed.” She looked back at me. “What is it them men are doing here?”

  “Heading north to the logging country,” I started to say, but only got about halfway when Matilda was barking at Ben Wood again.

  “Missus Brown….” Ben Wood swept off his gray hat. “The Good Book says
in Saint Matthew, Chapter Twenty-Five, Verse Forty-One…‘Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungered, and ye gave no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me not in naked, and ye clothed me not, sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.’”

  Setting the bucket by the well, he reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out one of them little Bibles, the kinds soldiers oftentimes carried with them off to war, and he started thumbing through the pages as he walked toward us till he was protected somewhat from the little drizzle of rain under what passed for a porch at our place, and he was telling my wife, who on most Sundays didn’t cotton to having her toes preached on, to turn with him to Chapter Seven of the same Gospel.

  “‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’” he read. “‘For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.’” With that, he closed the Bible, put it back in his pocket, and walked back to the well, where he drew his water.

  My wife, she wasn’t never at a loss for words, and she wasn’t struck dumb too long by Ben Wood’s preaching.

  “That man is a preacher!” she told me, watching him sling a strap over his shoulder and haul the water bucket back to their camp, before reminding me to bring in the sugar, coffee, and flour.

  Thought they’d be gone come first light, but Ben Wood met me at the door with a handful of greenbacks.

  “I know we said we would not intrude, Mister Brown,” he told me, “but some of our horses are a little green, and my colleagues do not wish to travel all the way to the northern timbers on skittish mounts. We’d like to leave our wagon here, ride off to do some training, and return by evening.”

  Preacher or not, I figured Matilda would raise Cain about that, but before I could say one word, Ben Wood pulled a gold coin from his vest pocket and wrapped it inside the greenbacks, which he pressed into my hand.

  “Ain’t no need…,” I started, but Ben Wood had already turned around and was heading back to their camp.

  Which is how things went over the next three or so days. Matilda, she sure had no complaints because Ben Wood—directly we started calling him Preacher Wood—paid us each and every morning they was there, and he’d read Scripture with her of evenings. Like having a camp meeting at our place of evenings. And a horse ranch every afternoon, because, after the first day, they done some training at our place after they had come from wherever they rode off to each morn. Appeared to me they were teaching the horses neck-reining, jumping fences. Some of the horses seemed hopeless, but others learned fast, and those boys worked them animals, I mean to tell you. ’Course, if I had saddles and bridles like they had, I’d want my horses well trained, too.

  They all seemed nice fellows, even that Sam Wells who had startled me so when he come riding out of the woods with the wagon. Preacher Wood would come over of evenings and read Scripture with Matilda and me, and Matilda even baked an apple pie to share with his friends. ’Course, Preacher Wood, he insisted on paying for the pie, and Matilda didn’t protest too much.

  I’d come out to their camp each night, after Preacher Wood did his preaching, make sure they didn’t need anything, and we’d talk some more. Talked about lots of things, not just the country around here, but religion and science and farming and the War of the Rebellion.

  “Where are the biggest banks?” the serious fellow, the one who did the cooking, asked one evening.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You mean in the forest country?”

  “No, closer to here.”

  “Never really trusted banks,” I said, which got all of them to laughing, and I grinned and chuckled myself.

  “If there were more people like you, Joe,” the one with the Gus-sounding name said, “then men like us would….” He just grinned like I knew what he meant, though I didn’t, and the men busted out laughing again.

  “The banks?” Mr. King, the serious one, asked from the cook fire where he was getting coffee ready.

  “Oh, hear there’s a big one in Mankato. Reckon there must be a nice size bank in Northfield what with that big Ames mill on the river there.”

  “Ames?” The big fellow, the one with the pale blue eyes and thinning hair, straightened up. “As in Governor Ames from Mississippi?”

  “I told you that already, Cole!” said the clean-shaven one, the gent from somewhere here in Minnesota.

  “Hold your tongue, Stiles,” Preacher Wood said, and nobody was laughing any more.

  “Well, I think it’s his daddy,” I said, breaking the silence. “But, like I said, I know farming, not banking.”

  Preacher Wood’s grin returned. “I don’t know, Joe,” he told me, tossing me a new plug of Navy tobaccy “Were we to stay much longer, paying our way as the Lord sees fit, you might have to start your own savings and loan.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something!” I slapped my knee.

  “Then we might bring our business to yours,” Gus—Howard he was—said, and the laughing fit erupted one more time.

  Nice fellows, like I said. Plumb sorry I was when they announced the next morning that they had to be on their way, had to make their way north to see if that timberland was as glorious as they had been led to believe. They left behind a stack of silver coin and a couple of pouches of tobaccy which I wouldn’t find till they had ridden off.

  Even Matilda was sad to see them saddling their horses and hitching the team to the spring wagon, complaining that, had she known they was gonna leave, she would have made up some victuals for them to eat along the trail.

  “‘He that soweth the good seed is the Son of Man,’ Christ said,” Preacher Wood told us as he mounted his dun horse. “You have a fine farm, Mister Brown, ma’am, and we have been blessed by your generosity. You loveth the stranger, you gave him food and raiment. And we feel we are strangers no more. May the Lord bless you.”

  They rode north. Never saw a one of them again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MOLLIE ELLSWORTH

  If you whore long enough, nothing surprises you, and I have worked the tenderloin a long, long time.

  Jesse, he surprised me. Christ, he scared the shit out of me. He always did.

  With evening’s approach, I had retired to my upstairs room to get dressed, and, while pulling up black stockings, a loose floorboard squeaked. Looking up, I made out the form in the shadows, the form of a man, spying on me, in my room, in my bagnio.

  “Listen, mister,” I said, tying my kimono over what my mother would modestly have called “unmentionables”—but my modest days remained a far distant memory, much like Mother. “I entertain gentlemen, and gentleman do not spy on a woman in her bedroom. So get the hell out of here before I whistle for Fish and have him stove in your skull. Or fork over fifty cents for the peek show.”

  The shadowy figure barely moved, as if enjoying this, but I am not one to make empty threats, and not until I stuck finger and thumb to whistle for my bouncer, did the man speak. The accent was soft, Missouri, and his words chilled me.

  “Didn’t you run a house in Saint Louis, where you were called Kitty Traverse?”

  That took my breath away, and, as he stepped into the light, grinning, I uncontrollably stepped back against my dresser.

  “Jesse!”

  Jesse Woodson James was handsome—no woman could ever deny that—and I have never seen blue eyes so mesmerizing. Tall, usually smiling, quick with a joke and laugh, I might have looked forward to pleasing a man like him, per chance having him please me, but I had known Jesse for thirteen years. Silently, like a cat, he approached me, smiling his sweet smile, shaking his head at the irony of meeting me up here, after, by my tally, five years.

  At first he had been just some green kid riding with men, a bushwhacker perhaps, but still nothing more than a boy—shy, silly, devoutly religious, but equally insecure. After the war, or maybe during it, he had changed, and, when I
looked into those penetrating eyes, I no longer saw beauty, only death.

  “Guess I should call you Mollie, and you should call me W.G. Huddleson.”

  “All right, W.G.” Now, this is my house, and I had worked hard to secure a reputation and a foothold, and no bushwhacker, not even Jesse James, would ever see fear in Mollie Ellsworth’s eyes. Let a man see that, he shall trample you, sure as spit. So I turned, found the decanter and glasses, poured him a brandy, and myself a larger one, over shaking hands.

  “You frightened of me, Mollie?”

  His breath warmed my neck, and his long, smooth fingers topped my trembling hand, and he helped me set the decanter on the dresser, guiding me around to face him, rubbing my hand, tracing my fingers until our hands—his hands were so small and pasty with long, probing fingers— interlocked and he pulled me close to him.

  “Why would I be afraid of you, Mister Huddleson?” I said at last. “Hattie Floyd wasn’t.”

  He let go, taking his brandy, and laughed. “I haven’t heard that name in years.” He drank, trying hard to suppress that boyish cough because Jesse had never been much of a drinker.

  Years ago, perhaps shortly after the war, Hattie had worked for me in St. Louis, and Jesse had been sweet on her. At least, Hattie was sweet on him. Oh, sure, Jesse was a devout Baptist, son of a preacher, practically betrothed to his cousin and his cause, and his mother would have whipped the bitter hell out of him had she known he consorted with lewd women. But, hell, he was a man, a man often away from his home and lover. No different than any other gent I have known. Hattie did not have much experience, as a demimonde or anything else for that matter. Her man had been killed in the war, leaving her with two kids to feed, and, since her man had been a bushwhacker with Quantrill, and St. Louis was far more Union than Rebel, well, she did what she had to do. But she loved Jesse James, and, at the time, I thought maybe this young, good-looking Missouri boy and she would escape the bowels together, but I did not really know Jesse well, not then.