On the Town:
Versus Harry B. (III)

THE HOUSE

 

If you’ve ever driven Interstate 35 between Kansas City and Wichita, you have passed right in front of what was once the large lawn of Captain Henry Brandley’s new home, and you’ve been within a thousand feet of the very ground where Frank Rinard was shot in the face, but you can’t see much because of the cedars and pines the captain planted as if he knew the turnpike would one day open things to public view.

My temptation is to say nothing of the Brandleys’ now remains other than the evergreen grove, when in fact the captain himself is here, or at least his dust lies between his first wife and Lizzie, and close to daughters Ruby and Flora Belle and son Harry in a tiny fenced plot made dim by overgrowth and the darkness cast by the big cedars. The old log home and its bloodstained porch are gone and so is the grand frame house of bay windows, porches, chimneys, and a central tower, the home the captain was starting when Rinard was murdered and which was just being finished when Harry returned a free man. Cap Brandley, the immigrant Swiss, called it Helvetia, a name countians found highfalutin and refused to recognize.

I’ve heard tales of the captain’s seeking solitude in the isolation of his fourth-story tower, sitting up there with only his bottle and dog (he gave the hands the day off when it died), staring out over his holdings, things a man could rely on, and remembering events a man could defend himself against—Utes, Confederates, the South Fork (he and his brother watched from a tree one night as a burning lantern on an old trunk floated around and around in their flooded log house, and each time the lantern passed the open door his brother said, There she goes, but the next morning the lantern and cabin were still there), the sky (once he got caught in a prairie hailstorm and held a flat rock over his head like a bumbershoot while his friend Charlie Rogler tried to take cover in a haycock and was beaten senseless—and perhaps remembering his simpler days as a splitter of rails and a digger of ditches, and recalling his first winter in the county when he lived on only corn bread and salt-cured wild birds.

In the months following the trial, Cap could look from his tower westward to where laborers were building the grade for the Orient Railway, which he believed would make his real estate investments skyrocket. I’ve heard tales of the old campaigner drinking too much up there and coming down to concoct some sort of hangover remedy from dried rabbits he kept in the cellar. I’ve heard that the homeplace, following the bloodshed, was cursed: the log house burning to the ground the year of the trial, the captain drinking himself unconscious and dying in the stall of the Matfield livery barn ten years afterward; Lizzie gone three years later; and three years after her, Harry (having spent the rest of his days sitting with his back to walls) found dead at forty-two in his bam, apparently from selfpoisoning; and eight years after that, Helvetia, occupied by tenants, mysteriously burning to the ground in the middle of the night. But Miss Pearl, the lovely dark sun around whom events turned, escaped: she married and lived into her eighties, outlasting all of them.

Today, what remains of Helvetia is a grassy swale and a few outlines of rock walkways. But down the slope to the east stands a small structure, the lower half of native stone, the upper of oak planks painted with red lead: depending on your view, it is ironic or fitting that the last remaining Brandley building is the barn where a hired hand was murdered. It is a simple but quaint thing in the Flint Hills vernacular style, the sort of barn that on a snowy evening belongs in a Currier and Ives print, were it not for the door with the dark blotch believed to be Frank Rinard’s ineradicable brain blood.

 

THE LEGACY

 

Now: I’ve been here several times before to try to piece the mystery together, and I’ve walked the place and tried to imagine its events and earlier aspect; today I’ve brought a copy of a description Harry’s eldest sister, Clara, wrote twenty-eight years after the murder about their life on this very ground, and I’ve been using it to check details and create dreamtime:

 

Here in the old house the children grew to maturity. They romped and played in a backyard shaded by box elder trees and one gorgeous morello cherry tree at the well. Here roamed the chickens, the young turkeys and geese, the dogs with their puppies, the cats with their kittens, and even the white rabbits with their young.

There was a front yard filled with cedar and cherry trees. Here purple lilacs and old-fashioned roses bloomed, and clove, pinks, and annual flowers in their season. Bird boxes on high poles to make them safe from cats were there and filled with chirping colonies of purple martins in early summer. Swift-winged swallows built their mud nests under the eaves. A latticed porch was covered with grape and scarlet trumpet vines where, in the hottest weather, hummingbirds whirred in the air, sucking nectar from the long tubular blossoms.

These scenes live in the memories of the children raised there, and now and then some vagrant scent of new blown rose or pink recalls it all, rekindles the past, recreates the old scene anew, with over it and in it and saturating it an all-pervading sense of the presence of Mother, Mother, Mother everywhere.

 

But the presence that saturates and rekindles the past here today is something else, something full of unresolved questions: from such a distance, could Mother really have heard the blood-gurgle of a dying man? Why didn’t Father offer a reward? Why didn’t the captain, with his power and wealth, try to help his son by finding the murderer? In a community so small and known to each other, how could a killer conceal himself? With miles of isolated country around, why would Harry shoot Rinard in the Brandley backyard? Why did the judge strike all testimony of motive? Why was Rinard’s friend not allowed to testify? Where was Miss Pearl on the night of the murder? Why didn’t the captain have to prove his whereabouts, and where did he go in the middle of that bloody night? Why was the cross-examination of the Brandleys so cursory and the prosecution so manifestly inept? In a time of growing Populist and Progressive sentiment, were some countians, roused by the captain’s wealth or a European hauteur, more interested in revenge than in real justice?

The questions the trial raised, perpetually damning in their irresolution, may have served some residents even better than a conviction: looking at all the evidence, it’s difficult to believe that Frank Rinard’s murderer was not in the courtroom when the clerk read the verdict, but to conclude that the killer was the man acquitted is much harder.

I think many countians feel justice was finally served: of the three great families of the upper South Fork, the Brandleys rose the highest and fell the fastest and farthest, and, unlike the big places of the Crockers and Roglers still standing handsome nearly a century later, the Brandley estate is come to a small, weedy cemetery, a stained bam, and tales continually retold as if poisons to keep privilege from taking root. The vengeance of the people is the long persistence of rumor, where the living haunt the dead.