OMAHA, NEBRASKA, NOVEMBER 1873
Maggie was unhappy. Six months with me in the wilderness—proverbial but also, too often, literal—had sapped the joy from her, that delightful esprit that had attracted me to her as much as her considerable physical charms. As disastrous and miserable as the summer and fall of 1873 had been, the coming winter augured still worse, and as the weather had begun growing cooler Maggie’s normally garrulous and cheerful disposition curdled into an ominous silence, which I feared would end with her walking out on me to take her chances elsewhere.
It was my fault that we had been living in such a rude and penurious manner, crisscrossing the plains and stopping in towns too new or poor to have a permanent photographer, there making stereographic pictures of those few residents who could afford such a luxurious memento. Few of these towns had a boarding house suitable for a woman’s custom, and many was the night we slept in a canvas tent camped along a river; we considered ourselves very fortunate when we occasionally obtained permission to sleep in a hayloft stinking of horse piss, bare planks bespeckled with swallow shit.
I knew, too, that she missed the company of other women, for the towns we visited were largely populated by males of the sort who wander the western areas of our country looking for opportunity; seeing Maggie’s reaction to these villages I understood that they were unlikely, barring some fantastic stroke of good fortune, to attract many of the softer sex.
AND SO WHEN we arrived at the city of Omaha, Nebraska, I thought to regain some of her favor by checking into the Cozzens House hotel, which was reputed to be the finest in the middle of the nation, despite the town’s reputation for roughness, violence, and general squalor. Viewed from a purely economic standpoint this was not the wisest course of action open to me, but I hoped Maggie’s spirits would revive once she’d tasted a bit of the vie de luxe away from which I’d spirited her.
As I signed the guest ledger in a lobby whose opulence verged on vulgarity I asked the clerk where I could securely store a wagon loaded with photographic equipment and chemicals. He sniffed before each sentence he spoke, as though an air of imperiousness might counteract his hickish demeanor.
“You can store it where you stable your animal, sir,” he said. “Burwick’s livery is across the street and they’ll lock it away real tight for you.”
“Pardon me, sir,” said a small, portly man standing nearby as I walked away from the desk holding the room key. He wore a well-cut suit of gabardine, and he spoke so quietly that it was necessary to lean in closely to understand what he was saying. This, I surmised, was due to embarrassment over his pronounced lisp.
“I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but am I to understand that I am addressing a member of the photographic profession?”
“You are,” I said.
“My name is Daniel B. Silas. I am an attorney-at-law, and it happens that I have a client who’s in need of a good photographer. You are staying only for the night, or could you be persuaded to stay in our city for a day or two?”
My head was cocked at quite an angle trying to understand him, and at first I heard “city” as “shitty,” but I maintained my poise and didn’t snicker. “Our plan was to depart in the morning,” I said, trying to appear casually disinterested but in fact overjoyed at the prospect of recouping what this extravagant interlude was draining from our meager savings. “I would have assumed that a town of this size was full of photographic studios.”
“Yes, sir, it is.” He looked around the lobby as though afraid he’d be overheard saying something incriminating, which piqued my interest further. “None of them will take this job. On moral grounds.”
“Aha,” I said. “I understand. That’s not something I’d be willing to risk, either. In any event the world is already full of ‘girlie’ photographs.” I had no moral objections to dirty pictures, certainly—I had after all taken a few, purely for my own pleasure, back in Kansas—but I didn’t wish to run the risk of having them confiscated, thereby drawing attention to myself.
I had shocked him, and he hastened to correct my misapprehension. “Oh, no, sir, you mistake my intent. What this gentleman wants isn’t anything objectionable. His problem is the local fellows either think it’s buncombe or they can’t make it happen.”
“Can’t make what happen?”
He looked around, as though someone unseen might be listening, then leaned in just as I was doing.
“Make the spirits of the dead appear,” he whispered, his eyes widening for effect. “On a wet plate.”
Of course it was buncombe, of the purest and most foolish kind, but if there was money in it, I was hardly in a position to turn it down. I’d never made a spirit photograph before but the gist of it was simple double exposure, and the examples I’d seen of the genre seemed either inartistic or unconvincing or both, and I loved a challenge.
“Oh, I can make them appear. Tell me, who’s this gentleman?”
THAT NIGHT MAGGIE and I ate in the hotel dining room, she dressed in the one fine gown that remained to her and the only jewels she hadn’t sold during our flight from Kansas and I wearing my least shabby suit. I looked perfectly unworthy of her company and was aware that the waiter’s eyebrow was raised in condescension aimed at only me.
Maggie appeared completely unaware of it, however, and lapped at her lobster bisque and dissected her roast pheasant as calmly as if she still ate that way every night. She radiated a great relief, however, at this temporary restoration of her social station, and I brought up the possibility that we might spend another night there.
“That would be lovely, Bill,” she said, seemingly unconcerned about the cost, and then the headwaiter brought over the carte des desserts, at which point we dismissed the topic.
THAT NIGHT, AS I lay abed staring at the finely wrought plasterwork on the ceiling, all my physical wants having been satisfied, Maggie spoke to me in a measured tone I had heard her use with her husband, on those occasions where she wanted it to appear that she was merely making a suggestion, whereas in fact she was making a nonnegotiable demand.
“It’s awfully nice to lie in a proper bed, Bill.” Here I knew I was due for trouble, for she’d pointedly never complained about the hardships of a mostly outdoor existence, and I’d known for weeks that she longed to furnish me with a litany of grievances, legitimate ones in her case, for she was a city girl and a fancy one at that. “Don’t think it hasn’t been a fine adventure, parts of it, anyway. Until June I’d never spent a night of my life under the stars, and it was lovely for a while, but I’ll drown myself before I’ll spend the winter in a tent.”
“Naturally when winter comes we’ll go south where it’s temperate.”
“I won’t. I want to go to Greeley and rent a house.”
I winced a bit at the mention of the name. She had read about the Greeley Colony in the Colorado Territory, a utopian community whose aims appealed mightily to her; I found them inane and impractical. Maggie was, however, a woman of varied, eccentric, and passionate enthusiasms, spiritualism having briefly been one of those, and as these had a way of passing quickly I had hoped she’d abandon the idea of settling in Greeley. It did occur to me now that it was likely filled with the sort of people who might pay money for photographs of the spectral representations of their departed dear ones.
“We don’t know if they have need of a photographer,” I said, not bothering to mention my other erstwhile occupation, saloonkeep, since such a job was nonexistent in teetotal Greeley.
“It doesn’t matter, Bill, they’ll find something for you. You’ve farmed before.”
Not for long, I hadn’t. I loathed farming more than I’d hated being in the army. But she was right; we had to land somewhere eventually, and she wasn’t made for the rough life of a transient peddler. “All right,” I said, “we’ll head down there as soon as we quit Omaha.”
THE NEXT DAY, shortly before midday, I set out for the estate of Colonel Joshua Cudahy with the photographic wagon, pulled by my very tired, very old, uncomplaining paint, Brutus. Every mile or so he’d utter a grunt and drop a road apple, and for the time of year it was not an unpleasant ride.
Shortly after midday I arrived. The estate was near Bellevue, some nine miles to the south of the city, the house at its center designed in the geographically inappropriate manner of a neoclassical antebellum plantation house. Its exterior, at least, had fallen into considerable disrepair. Upon several loud administrations of the door knocker—iron, and in the shape of a lion’s head—I was greeted at the door by a silent, elderly butler wearing a frayed morning coat and an expression of deep puzzlement. Handing him my card I told him I was expected, and he disappeared into the house without speaking, shutting the door in my face.
There was no other habitation within a mile in any direction. The grounds were sumptuously wooded, and I thought it would be a good spot to put up a new house, though the one that stood now was an eyesore. I didn’t guess it to be more than thirty or forty years old, but the aura of irreversible decay that clung to it gave it the feel of a much older ruin. The boards of the roof of the porch needed whitewashing, the windows were dirty and in several cases cracked, and the oaken Corinthian columns were cracked vertically on the concave portions of its striations and doubtless ready to collapse; still, this had plainly once been an opulent place. I saw the smoldering ruins of such a house in Georgia at the end of the war.
I understood Colonel Cudahy to have been a fur trader with some past association with Mr. John Jacob Astor, and it surprised me that no local photographer had both the skills and low moral character necessary to cheat so rich a man. Whether the current condition of the premises was due to an old man’s neglectfulness or to a reduction in station, he had plainly been at one time a man of considerable means.
The butler reappeared and gestured for me to enter, again without speech, and I entered a vast, gloomy foyer in which stood a grizzly, rising up on its hind legs, mouth agape, forelegs poised to swat the viewer into the next world. Like the house and butler the bear was rapidly rotting, claws splintering, one glass eye gone altogether and the other cloudy, fur worn to bare, leathery skin in patches, the taxidermist’s understructure showing in others.
“I shot her myself in ’42, on the Platte. Would have finished me had I misfired. Left her cubs on the side of the river to die. Felt a little sorry for that later.”
The voice startled me, coming from behind, high in pitch and rustic in tone, and with the considerable volume customary with the newly hard of hearing. I spun on my heels to find myself addressing a man who almost looked capable of felling such a beast barehanded. Dressed in a badly worn-down buckskin suit, he had quite a splendid head of silver hair that he wore swept back and down to the shoulder, and even slightly stooped as he was he must have topped six feet three inches. His eyes, black and staring intently from beneath a pair of bushily simian brows, called to mind Brady’s photograph of John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most frightening-looking statesman America has yet produced.
“I’m Bill Sadlaw,” I said, holding out my right hand, which he ignored. I hadn’t gotten used to the name yet, and I still felt every time I said it that I’d be caught out as a liar, but Cudahy took right to it.
“Sadlaw. I knew a Sadlaw in Canada, about ’26, ’27. Cheated his partner out of about a hundred pounds’ worth of beaver pelt, sold it to some Iroquois who moved it along to the French. Partner, name of Harlick, sawed off this Sadlaw’s head, stuck it on a pole outside their camp as a warning. The one time I saw it it was pretty rotten, just a skull with hair sticking to it, and I asked Harlick what he was warning of. ‘Tom Harlick’s sawblade,’ was his answer. Don’t suppose that’s any kin of yours.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t believe any of us ever made that far north.”
“Well, sir, Dan Silas come by this morning and told me you could conjure a phantom onto glass. Is that so?”
“I have done,” I said, “but I’m curious as to why you don’t have a local man do it.”
“Three told me it was chicanery. A fourth tried to prove them right by stealing a tintype of my Letitia and placing a copy onto the background of a picture of me. Don’t know how it was done but it were such a patent fake I beat him within an inch of his death and wrecked his studio, smashed his camera and lenses and whatnot, and then saw to it that he made his way out of the state of Nebraska.”
I nodded in a sage manner, only slightly more trepidatious about my plan to try and fool the old goat. “Rightly so,” I said.
“Then there were three others who made attempts but captured nothing.”
“Have you attempted a medium?”
He laughed, and it sounded like a three-hundred-pound hog snorting over its dinner. “Table knockers and seers! Buncombe. I want photographic proof.” He lowered his voice. “I hear her, you see? All the time. And her gone fifteen years now. But I can’t prove it’s her, can’t prove I’m not bereft of my reason.”
“She speaks to you?” His own tentative autodiagnosis of non compos mentis seemed a plausible one to me.
“Whispers. And I hear doors closing, drawers being opened.”
I found myself shouting at him just to match his considerable volume, and I wondered how whispering Dan Silas made himself understood to his client. “Your butler? Does he hear her too?”
“He’s deaf as a plank,” the Colonel shouted, waving his hand across his face, and I wondered if the bellowing wasn’t out of sheer habit.
There was an element of risk in this, certainly, but I felt sure that the previous fraudster had been undone by a lack of artistry and technical finesse. “Now, Colonel, I should tell you that I’m currently working with a stereoscopic camera.”
“I’ve nothing against it. Hell, seems to me that would make it well-nigh impossible for you to falsify such a thing.”
That wasn’t the case at all but I nodded my agreement. “I don’t see how one could.”
I HIED TO the wagon, fed Brutus a lump of sugar from my hand, and took down my tripod and the case containing the camera. Once I had them in the house I returned to fetch my plates and chemicals, and by the time I had coated the plates with collodion the Colonel had already changed into a black wool suit and cravat twenty years out of fashion. “Was this a suit you owned when Mrs. Cudahy was still living?” I asked in a moment of inspiration.
He looked down at it as if to remind himself of which suit he’d just donned. “Seems to me it was,” he said.
“Good, that often helps, having objects familiar to the deceased,” I said, thinking myself clever for inventing spiritualist lore on the spot.
I set him up in the brightest room on the first floor, the parlor, which featured a large picture window with a thin white curtain that diffused the daylight nicely. He was seated in a chair upholstered in crushed green velour, the least worn piece of furniture I’d seen so far, and he had such an air of dignified antiquity that I felt a certain revulsion at the fact that I was cheating him. Then I reminded myself, as any number of other phony spiritualists must have done, that I was comforting him with proof that his wife’s love for him had survived death.
“WILL YOU RETURN tomorrow with the finished pictures?” he asked when the sitting was finished.
“I will, regardless of the outcome. You do understand we may be disappointed by the results,” I said, hoping that I wouldn’t lose my nerve, and also that my skills would prove equal to the task at hand.
He handed me a fifty-cent piece, at which I raised an eyebrow, hoping that he didn’t think that my fee would be so cheap, but I’d misunderstood. “Come ’round about sunset. And when ye return, do me a favor and bring me back two pounds of salt, ground, would ye?”
“Certainly,” I said, perfectly incurious as to his motive, and took my leave.
I HASTENED IN the wagon back to Omaha, though all the chemicals and equipment necessary for developing and printing the plates were in my wagon. It was well that the old bird hadn’t had his picture made since the days of tintypes, because if I’d had to show him the results as they were I’d have had to declare failure. The greater part of my labors would be performed in Omaha, at the hotel.
THE STEREO VIEWS came out nicely, though not so nicely that I didn’t regret the loss of the trusty old camera I’d had to leave behind in Cottonwood when we went on the run. There were four of them, and I thought one should be unaltered for appearance’s sake; I chose for this the best of the views, and then I created a second negative of an amorphous haze using a lantern behind a sheet of muslin. This, superimposed onto the second plate, created the illusion of a partially materialized spectral body, roughly where the heart of a person standing next to the Colonel’s chair would have been. Seen through the stereopticon it was quite convincing and gave me a slight chill when I first saw a finished composite print. For the third plate I did something similar, with the luminous entity somewhat larger. And for the last one I made one more of the glowing, shapeless blob, after which I took several negatives of Maggie’s lovely, delicate hands at a distance from the lens that matched as closely as possible the Colonel’s, at roughly the level of his shoulders. It took me a while on the hotel roof to get the perfect print of the fourth view (the first three were so nearly effortless I wondered whether I shouldn’t make a profession of this), but when I had it, it was a thing of beauty, indisputably one of the most artistic images I’d ever made.
Colonel Joshua Cudahy, in the winter of his years, sat weary in a fine oaken chair, and at his side floated a filmy apparition that might have been human in form or not, but for the proof offered by her hands, sufficiently materialized to register as they rested, transparent but unmistakably those of a woman, on the Colonel’s shoulders, as though the right arm were spanning his back and the left crooked to caress. The expression of weariness in his old eyes, the delicate interplay of light and shadow, the matching of negative to negative—they were all perfect, and perfection is an end I always attempt but seldom achieve.
MAGGIE CONCURRED, AND she had no qualms about fooling the old fellow. She said that the notion that Cudahy thought that he was being haunted by the woman he’d loved was like something out of Sir Walter Scott (whom I doubt she’d ever read), and she was certain that if he sensed it, then it must be true. The fact that I was concocting sham pictures to convince him of the same did nothing to discourage her rapt interest in the enterprise, and in fact it was difficult to convince her that she couldn’t come along with me to present them to him. But if he understood that I had a female confederate, it might lead him to question whether those hands on his shoulders were those of his late wife’s otherworldly manifestation, and so I promised to relay to her a full accounting of his reaction.
THAT NIGHT WE ate a much more modest supper, to my relief and at Maggie’s own suggestion, at a small restaurant operated by a German couple who laughed at my accent but complimented my fluency, telling me I spoke good German “für ein Ausländer.” The thick white sausages accompanied with sweet mustard and sauerkraut and a bottle of Rhine wine that we consumed pleased me considerably more than the previous night’s princely meal, and I felt a great sense of peace and satisfaction that I had succeeded in heading off my putative wife’s impending rage.
As Maggie prepared to sleep I found myself restless. I put my clothes back on and left the hotel, wandering the streets until I found a saloon that looked hospitable instead of murderous, its patrons smoking cigars and laughing but not shouting at one another in a way that promised violence. Another point in its favor was that there were no women present, for in Omaha the only females in bars were there to provide services for which I had no more need that night.
The bartender brought me my shot of rye and my draught of lager and I dropped the Colonel’s half-dollar onto the bar. There was a poker machine at the far end, and though I rarely found such devices tempting I dropped a nickel of my change into the slot and cranked the handle back. The machine dealt me three eights, upon which it deposited four nickels into the oval receptacle at the bottom of its cast-iron body. This was when I became aware of the presence of a tall and very drunken sot at my elbow.
“Three eights. You know what that signifies?” He had long, oily black hair that hung in strings past his shoulders, and a long, well-trimmed beard, and he stared intently at me with tiny dark eyes, set a little too close together.
“I do not.”
“Three eights is twenty-four. Which is my age at the present time.”
“That’s remarkable,” I said, trying hard to keep any tone of amusement out of my voice, since drunks who sense that they are being patronized can erupt in unexpected ways. And it was remarkable, because I would have guessed him to be forty at the very least; if he was telling the truth, then he must have led a dissolute life indeed.
“There is an art and a science to interpreting coincidence, sir.”
“Oh.”
“Of course what the average man calls coincidence is in fact no such thing at all. Are you familiar with your Holy Bible?”
“Intimately,” I said, neglecting to add that I didn’t lend it much credence.
“For the price of a drink I would be happy to explain to you how various signs and wonders can be used to explain the world and its sundry denizens, and help us navigate the treacherous moral waters that surround us.”
“The price of a drink?”
“Not every Christian is a temperance man, sir. Jesus, after all, turned water into wine.”
In the light of the gas lamp he swayed so hard he had to keep a hand on the bar to keep from toppling, and though his voice was firm I surmised he’d sampled a good bit of the stuff that very evening, just as I imagined the water-into-wine line was one he delivered two or three times a night. Nonetheless I felt magnanimous and fortunate in having been given, and satisfactorily completed, a difficult and remunerative task; so I bought him his drink and listened to his notions regarding using the Bible to tell the future. It involved numerology, by virtue of converting Greek letters (to my surprise he did display an admirable knowledge of the language) into integers, the whole enterprise vividly suggestive of madness.
“How did you come to conceive these theories of prophecy?” I asked him.
“I was born covered in a caul, and you know what that means to the ignorant. And so I was always being asked as a child to divine the future, which of course I had no earthly way of doing. And as the years went by I became interested in the notion that the Bible holds all the prophecy the world could want, if only we had the means to decipher its secrets. And so I began to study the book, but before long I realized that the true Bible was in Greek, not English or Latin. And there was in my hometown a very learned man, who volunteered to teach me Greek, and do you know that once I’d mastered the language I predicted the death of my tutor? And not a week later he was beaten to death by his own brother in a fight over a parcel of land. And I knew then that I had cracked it. And if you’ll advance me the price of another drink, I’ll gladly predict what’s to come for you.”
I can’t say what caused me to turn down his offer; I certainly didn’t believe a bit of it, but there was something unclean about the fellow and I didn’t want him messing with my future one way or the other. I did buy him another libation, and left.
AT FOUR THE next afternoon I took the wagon back to Bellevue, Brutus pulling at a pace more deliberate than was his habit. He was too old for this sort of labor, but I couldn’t afford a new horse any more than I could countenance the notion of condemning him to the glue factory, so I made allowances for his debility and resigned myself to longer travel times.
The day was cold but the sky was blue and the light clear, rendering the landscape’s colors exceptionally vivid; the few clouds above me were perfectly white toward the top, fading to pale blue and orchid in their shadows beneath. Not for the first time I wished I could have been a painter instead of a photographer, if only for the possibility of preserving those fleeting colors for posterity.
Several miles outside Bellevue I again reached the Cudahy mansion, where the butler let me in and led me to the parlor to await the master of the house. There I found Mr. Daniel B. Silas waiting also, and we quickly ran out of conversational pleasantries and sat clearing our throats, an awkward interlude that gave me the opportunity to examine a pair of old paintings hanging on the wall, both of which appeared in the photographs. They were brown and nearly opaque with a too-heavy coat of varnish, but it was no less clear that each had been made by the same hand, and that the painter had had little or no training. Still there was something pleasing about them, elk standing awkwardly around a watering hole with mountains in the distance in the first (one of the elk had an extra limb), and a bear much like the one in the entryway in the second. There was a demented rage in the bear’s eyes that was to my liking; it had been painted without much skill but with a passion.
When Cudahy finally descended he was in a scowling, silent temper that was hard to decipher; was it melancholy or rancor or fear of the spirit world that kept him so quiet? He was wearing his buckskin suit again, and he seemed even older than he had the previous afternoon. By this time the last light was gone from the sky, and the butler limped into the parlor with a brightly glowing oil lamp. I produced a handheld Holmes stereograph and extended the first of the views.
“Nothing,” he said, sounding neither pleased nor displeased, though quite as loud as ever, and handed it to Silas, who stuck out his lower lip and squinted.
“Well, perhaps. Is that something there in the corner?” he said, proving that the mind is always prone to tricking itself, since this was the lone unadulterated view.
“Might be, I didn’t see much in that one,” I said, taking the contraption back and reloading it with the second card. Cudahy took it from me and peered through the lenses with a scowl.
“That some sort of fog, by your reckoning, or a fault in the picture?” he asked.
“I asked myself that same question at first sight. A leaky bellows will produce a similar effect, and the same thing shows up in the third view.”
Now Silas looked, wheezing slightly as he did so. “Might could be something there, Colonel.”
I loaded the third view and Colonel Cudahy grunted. “More mist,” he said, turning it over to Silas and appearing to lose interest. “Don’t imagine that’s proof one way or the other, might be her or it might be you need a new apparatus.”
I took the viewer back from Silas before he was quite ready to surrender it and loaded the fourth view. “That was what I was thinking to myself until I saw this one beginning to emerge in the printing frame.”
Cudahy took it as though it were a loaded pistol. “Do ye mean to tell me you’ve captured proof of her existence on this here piece of cardboard?”
“I don’t know about proof. I’ve seen such pictures before, but never one that made me shudder so.”
Behind his moustache Silas looked perfectly spooked, and the color had drained right out of his face. “Have a look, Colonel,” he said, and the tone of his whisper had gone up a good octave.
Cudahy placed the eyepiece of the viewer to his forehead, and for a moment all three of us stopped breathing; in my case, out of fear that he would see through my fakery, in Silas’s from a terror of the undead, and in the Colonel’s case I was left to wonder, until he flung the stereoscope away from him like a cottonmouth and pulled his chair back from the table. “Goddamn,” he howled.
Naturally, I assumed the worst. Would I be sent to jail? Could I be prosecuted for creating a bogus spirit picture? Was there any law against such a forgery?
Silas being too frightened to retrieve the viewer, I walked over to where it lay, biding my time in an attempt to come up with an excuse. But I was wrong; Cudahy believed.
“She’s been here all along! And now I’ve proof! And proof that she means to do me in!” His voice had begun taking on a more rustic quality, as though his excitement were burning away a layer of acquired civilization.
“Do you in?”
“Damn it, man, you seen her hands around my throat!”
“Begging your indulgence, Colonel, but it seems to me those hands are placed affectionately at your shoulders,” I said.
“You didn’t know her! She means to see me dead before my time and I won’t have it. Did ye bring the salt?”
“I did, Colonel. I left it on your porch.”
“Haul it in, then. We’ll rid this house of that creature from hell one way or another and I’ll live out my years in peace!”
I went out to the porch, equal parts relieved that he hadn’t caught me out and puzzled as to his intentions for the salt. There were two bags full and I dropped them onto the table in the parlor.
“Good. I’ll start clockways out the front door, you start t’otherways and we’ll meet halfway. Between us we’ll have it done before she knows what came at her!”
“Again, sir, begging your patience, I’m unclear as to your aim.”
“Oh,” he said. “I understand, you’ll be wanting your pay. I don’t begrudge you a penny of it, my lad.” At that he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small gunnysack sewn shut with twine and tossed it at me, coins clinking inside. I had not ever named a price, hoping that his surprise at my results would make him carelessly generous. Desperate though I was to know the amount he’d handed me, I didn’t wish to appear greedy and so pocketed the bag without opening it, and the desire to know what further work was required of me compelled me to ask him what was to be done with the salt.
“Surround the perimeter. She won’t be able to cross a line of salt, will she?” He was giddy now, laughing in an even louder voice than he’d been using, and he headed for the front door. “Pay particular care to the doors and windows.”
I looked over at Silas, who was now staring into the stereopticon, presumably at the fourth view, for his lower lip was now visible and trembling.
“Did you know he was mad when you engaged me?” I asked.
“He’s not mad, look at the picture, damn you!” Finally Silas’s voice was raised to a normal volume. “You’d best secure the perimeter as he told you to do, I’d not want to be around him when he’s been disobeyed.”
Outside I started counterclockwise, pouring a line of salt around the walls, executing a double layer at the windowsills and the side door that led to the kitchen, where through the window I spied the butler sitting quietly at a table, and he watched me pouring the salt with a notable lack of curiosity.
Around the back of the house I met up again with Colonel Cudahy, his face deeply flushed and his breathing heavy, a grin of sinister elation on his lips. “We’ve got her trapped, son. Go tell Silas and Jacques-Louis to come on out of there.”
“Silas and who?”
“My majordomo, you’ll have to guide him by the elbow, he doesn’t hear anything.”
I wanted more than anything else to be away from him, and so I returned to the house and informed Mr. Silas that his presence was required on the front lawn. He was still staring at the last of the stereo views. “I’ve never known such a woman’s love, that she’d return from the grave just to torment me,” he said as he stood and shambled toward the front door. “To think that he doesn’t want such a thing.”
I caught up with the ancient butler, who was still at the table, dozing now, head cupped in his palm. I pointed at the front door and he nodded, rose with a terrific groan, and began to walk painfully out of the kitchen.
Once we were assembled on the carriageway before the house the Colonel began a long tirade that dealt with, among other subjects, vengeful spirits, his opinion of the reputation of President Andrew Jackson (inflated, in Cudahy’s view), the importance of stressing arithmetic over reading in the education of young children, the barbarity of the German tongue, the inadvisability of eating mollusks no matter what the month, and, finally, the natural tendency of women to want to murder the men with whom they cohabit.
“It’s because of what we do to their nether parts they hate us, and I don’t rightly blame them. As a lad amongst the fur traders in Canada I had to submit to such indecencies and once I was big enough to do so I kilt several who treated me as I treated my wife. Although she never complained and even affected to like it when I placed my wacker in her hot place! Her lies made me aware that she detested the sight of me and when she passed I knowed she was going to stay about the house, just waiting for her chance to do me in! But now I’ve proved her presence and it’s time for a reckoning. She’s trapped in there and she will be destroyed! Not a trace shall remain on this earth and she by God will have moved on as is proper, either to heaven or hell as the Lord God wills it but her stay on earth will be done!”
He was so worked up it was difficult to get him to hear me when I attempted to interrupt, but finally he heard me ask my question. “How do you mean to destroy her, Colonel?” I asked this partly out of actual curiosity as to how his brain had concocted such a plan and partly out of real concern for the physical well-being of all present.
“By God, man, they’s only one way to get rid of a haint! And that’s a blaze. Nothing cleanses like a good fire!” And with that he ran inside the house.
There was quite a bit of noise as Silas, the butler, and I watched the house, uncertain and afraid. I had no desire to enter the house and do battle with even a superannuated man of Cudahy’s size and mental state, and my companions seemed more puzzled than afraid. There was a loud crash, followed by a burst of flames through the parlor windows, and then another crash, which I now understood to be the dumping of a barrel of something flammable, followed by flames coming through the kitchen window. Now fire was also visible through the front door, having made its way into the foyer, and I thought I glimpsed the Colonel bounding up the central staircase. I could certainly hear him laughing with the gleefulness of a small child watching a pony trick at the circus, and I asked Silas if he had known Cudahy to be suicidal in the past.
“The Colonel?” he said in a tone of great offense. “Such a man, a self-murderer? Take it back, sir!”
Now the upstairs was ablaze, sour black smoke roiling from all the downstairs windows. Cudahy could now be heard singing “Camptown Races” as he moved from chamber to chamber, setting alight the amassed detritus of a lifetime. Then he appeared in a window, silhouetted by orange firelight, dancing a sort of jig, his movements so happy that I couldn’t see interrupting them or trying to block his joyfulness. And then I decided I couldn’t watch him die, that I, in fact, was partially responsible for his state of mind. And so it was that I charged against my better judgment into the burning mansion of Colonel Joshua Cudahy with an eye toward dragging him out to safety.
“Are you mad?” cried Silas as I took the porch steps two at a time and burst through a curtain of flame that separated the stairway from the front door, and I took those steps two and even three at a time until I reached the second story, where I found fire barring my way to my left and my right. I heard the Colonel singing “Oh! Susanna” in remarkably poor voice in the latter direction, then took down from the window a wool curtain that hadn’t yet started burning, wrapped it around myself, and pushed through the flames into a bedchamber where, illuminated by a fire that was rapidly consuming a bed ticked with straw, I saw the Colonel dancing with an empty dress and giggling between lyrics.
The smoke was thickening and made it hard to vocalize, but I managed to shout at him. “Colonel, you have to go or you’ll burn,” I said, but he seemed not to hear.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Colonel!” I yelled.
“There’ll be no cutting in here!” he shouted back at me. “This dance is mine!”
Though considerably aged he was a good deal larger than me, and clearly bereft of his reason, and so bearing in mind the supposed strength of the mad I slugged him as hard as I could in the belly. His uninhabited dress of a dance partner took much of the force out of the blow, however, and he swore at me with such ferocity that when he pulled back his fist to hit me I feared he’d knock me unconscious and doom me to roast by his side.
I was fortunate in that his aim was poor; I dodged the blow and decided to make one more effort before saving my own carcass. I picked up a small side table next to the burning bed and threw it at the window, shattering several of the panes and bringing in a draught of cold air that caused the flames within the room to swell larger and brighter. I battered the window frames with the table until there was room to get through, and I was so absorbed in this activity that it was only then I noticed the old man pulling at my sleeves.
“You’re breaking my window, ye insolent cur!”
I reared back and swung at him with the little table, intending merely to get him out of my way so that I could jump; but in an attempt to avoid the blow he fell back against the window, at which point I gave him a good, solid shove, and he fell out of the window and onto a shrub beneath, a conifer of some kind. I guessed it had been planted there as an ornament, though neglect had allowed it to grow into an unattractive shape that nonetheless afforded Colonel Cudahy a relatively soft landing. Between the fire and the shrub his decision to put on his buckskins had been a fortuitous one.
I hastened to climb out the window myself and jumped, aiming to his right onto another shrub. Its perennial stem was quite solid and so were the multiple branches extending from it; my landing was painful, but I was alive, if coughing and hacking like a consumptive with a cheroot in his jaws. I pulled the Colonel up out of the other bush and helped him to his feet.
“You’ve got some balls on you, throwing me out my own got-damn window!” His bellow was raspy and thick from the smoke, but they still must have heard him all the way back in Omaha.
Mr. Silas came stumbling toward us. “You’re saved, sir, praise Jesus.”
“Saved?” He turned and looked at the house. “Saved from that vengeful haint! You’re right, Silas.”
“Saved from the conflagration, Colonel.”
His face a tawny orange in the reflection of the fire, it seemed to dawn on him that his arsonous handiwork might have done him in. “So I am.”
He then sat his large frame down on the lawn and began sobbing. “I have sinned against you, Letitia,” he said, over and over again.
BRUTUS WAS UNACCUSTOMED to pulling the wagon after nightfall, and whinnied in mild protest as I drove him back to Omaha, but the cool breeze of the night felt good on my face, which in the morning would be as red as if I’d spent a July day in the sun without a hat. Arriving in town I put him up at the stable and had the boy lock the wagon in for the night, and crossing the street to the hotel I realized that I still hadn’t counted my money.
Entering the room I found Maggie asleep, and I lit the lamp and quietly opened the little gunnysack, from which I then extracted, to my great surprise, a brand-new double eagle, which nearly caused me to shout, not least because there were more coins inside, along with some dried juniper leaves and various other conjurer’s herbs. Ten double eagles were stacked on the writing desk that overlooked the street downstairs, which at this hour was reasonably quiet, with just a single pair of drunks arguing over a bottle of laudanum below, and listening to the muffled sounds of their murderous threats I sat marveling at my good fortune in encountering Colonel Cudahy. I had two hundred dollars in gold, enough to buy a share in the Greeley Colony with some left over. Notions of fate and destiny are for the weak-minded and superstitious and frequently lead such men into disaster; still, it seemed to me that night as though such forces were drawing me to the Colorado Territory, and for the first time in months I felt lucky.