North Dakota
August 1933
Through the night run to St. Paul she slept well, for the balloon launch—an all-night affair—at Soldier Field had left her exhausted. This had been followed by a long day of gathering her things from the kommunalka and saying her goodbyes. She told everyone it was just a few weeks’ visit to Montana. But word seemed, somehow, to have got around that she was pregnant. So no one really expected to see her again for a year, if ever. It was fine; she would miss some of the Germans, but the rest of them were as dust to be shaken from the soles of her Century of Progress oxfords.
The Germans went with her to Union Station, taking turns carrying her trunk and remarking on its extraordinary weight. She attributed this to all of the fascinating books on Leninist theory that she had acquired. And she wasn’t even lying about that, save for the “fascinating” part. Those things were hell to read, but cheap to get, and so she’d packed some in on the bottom layer just to keep the violin case from shifting around. She grew weary of listening to their lighthearted jibes. On the train, as if to prove the trunk wasn’t so schwer at all, she manhandled it up the steps onto the pullman and heaved it up onto a rack before the eyes of crestfallen Negro porters and emasculated German intellectuals who would gladly have helped her had she only stepped aside and been more ladylike.
As she was lifting and twisting to ram the thing home, she felt a tiny pop inside of her, so subtle that she was more aware of it in dim retrospect than in the actual moment. It had not been painful, more of an internal transition, like cracking a knuckle. But it was enough to tell her she was being a fool, so when the trunk was secure she averted her gaze from the reproachful brown eyes of the porters, went to her seat, and waved out the window to the Germans, blowing kisses as the Empire Builder began its five-day run to Seattle. She was deep asleep before the train had cleared the city limits, and awoke only once, during a brief stop in Dubuque. Morning found them in St. Paul for a twenty-minute transfer to the locomotives of the Great Northern. She might have detrained and stretched her legs in the station but did not feel like moving. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles she’d logged up and down the Midway had been nothing to her at the time, but now she felt as though she never wanted to take another step.
The great train pulled out of the Twin Cities and hooted and rumbled northwest for hour upon hour, making good time and few stops as it penetrated many hundreds of miles into a flat hinterland. Late in the afternoon they crossed the Red River of the North at Fargo and then turned due north for a two-hour run to Grand Forks, then west to travel through the evening toward Minot.
It was somewhere along here that Dawn finally admitted to herself that something was wrong. She’d have put it down to something she had eaten were it not for the fact that she’d not had a bite in twenty-four hours. Hunger pangs, then. But these pains were too central, too focused, too low in the pelvis. And somewhere in the long hours west of Minot, they became too severe for her to suffer them without a certain amount of writhing and gasping.
Sitting next to her was a quick, wrenlike woman in her sixties, Blanche Baker, who’d boarded at Grand Forks en route to her sister’s funeral in Havre. Not much was lost on Blanche, who had already extracted from Dawn the rudiments of her story. She might even have guessed that the real purpose of the sojourn in Montana was to serve out a pregnancy—it was a common enough sort of thing to do. Blanche sat still, eyes closed, as a sort of formal courtesy, but Dawn could tell she was not sleeping from the way her jaw tightened whenever Dawn thumped an armrest with a closed fist, arched her back, or stifled a cry of pain into a long train-brake hiss.
The cramping started to come in waves. In the respites between them Dawn began talking to Blanche. She apologized for the trouble. She could tell that Blanche was feeling—had shouldered—the responsibility, was wondering when to get up and summon the conductor. “Just a few more hours—a few more hundred miles down the line—I’ll be to where my family can help me,” Dawn insisted, hoping it would prevent Blanche from making a fuss. She named the stop and she named the people she deemed most likely to come out and meet her, though in truth she had no idea if her telegram had got through to any of them. She saw Blanche noting those data in a little diary she kept in her bag, Blanche being that sort of gal. Seeing the fountain pen drawing the strokes on the page, Dawn understood that matters were more serious than she’d let herself believe. During the next respite between cramps she realized she’d wet herself. Pulling the blanket off her lap for a run to the toilet, she found her skirt and her seat stained with blood.
It was later. She must have been making a spectacle of herself, for more people than just Blanche were now watching her. The whole carriage was awake, porters and conductors were on the job. The train’s whistle, which twenty-four hours ago had lulled her to sleep, took on a new, urgent keening: repeated triple blasts radiating across the infinite prairie like smoke signals in the dark. It was, she well knew, a way of summoning medical help to the next whistle-stop, one of a welter of cow towns and Indian agencies in a blurred block of agate type on the Great Northern timetable, slated, for the best of reasons, to be bypassed at three o’clock in the morning. Those who lived in such places were accustomed to rolling over and going back to sleep after being wakened by the long blasts of the Empire Builder’s whistle, and some could even identify the engineer by his signature. The triple blast, however, would visit their sleep as a nightmare and draw them toward the station in an unsettled frame of mind.
By such men was Dawn taken off the train on a stretcher, and only because of a last-second rolling of the eyes was attention drawn to her trunk, which was pulled down by excited men desperate to be given assignments, and slammed down on the planking of the platform next to her. A stark and simple sign read fort sickles. She smelled sagebrush. The cramps came on so severely that, for the first time, she cried out in pain. She collected vague impressions of a ride on dusty wash-boarded roads in the back of a truck, but these were no more well formed than memories she had from the age of two of her mother riding a horse across a similar landscape, red hair flying behind her, and the blue of Lake Michigan, and the boat to Petrograd.
Then a white room, a woman with a white face, needles, and a hissing mask.
The narrative conventions of Hollywood movies, reinforced by the Century of Progress ethos in which she had been marinating for three months, and combined with the natural relief she felt at having woken up at all, all served to get her off on the wrong—which was to say, too optimistic—foot when she came around. She was lying on a cot with a lot of something stuffed into her vagina. Common sense told her not to move. Logically this ought to be some sort of hospital, or at least clinic, but the more she looked around, the more she understood just how makeshift it was. It was, in fact, a large tent, probably Great War surplus. Efforts had been made to confer the sense, if not the reality, of permanence by laying a plank floor over the dirt and stringing electrical wires about. A stern High Plains wind was rattling the canvas roof and forcing its way down a rusty stovepipe that penetrated it through a canted asbestos slab, scenting the air with creosote. Hanging curtains defined a space scarcely wider than her cot. Beyond, she could hear a few other patients snoring, talking incoherently, or calling repeatedly for one Mrs. Kidd. The smoke of their cigarettes drifted over the top of Dawn’s little cell, catching splinters of light that poked in through moth holes in the canvas walls. A thumping door, and hard echoes, hinted at an adjacent structure made out of wood. Within it, hymns were playing on a Victrola. These were not the High Church four-parters of ivied northern churches but the righteous hollering of God-raging hill dwellers.
“Ooh, she’s awake,” said a woman’s voice in the Scandinavian vowels of the high Midwest. A movement of a curtain told Dawn that someone had been peeking in on her through some gap too small for her to have noticed. A brisk, icy chiff-chiff-chiff noise receded: a pair of stout thighs encased in coarse hose and chafing against each other. Two different hoarse men’s voices called out ardently for Mrs. Kidd in the accents of Oklahoma or Texas, but Mrs. Kidd was concerned with one thing only, and that was to get the attention of some man, apparently in the adjoining structure, whom she referred to variously as “Reverend Kidd,” “darling,” “sweetheart,” and “pumpkin.”
A man approached, praising Jesus, and swept the curtain open.
The infirmary contained perhaps a dozen beds, of which eight were occupied, half with Indians and half with white men. The former would be Lakota. They had been silent, so Dawn hadn’t known they were there. The white men were bony and unshaven, and Dawn guessed them to be Okies who had fled black blizzards north, and rebounded from the long, hard border of Canada.
She knew this part of the country well enough to be able to guess that Fort Sickles had literally been a fort, in the military sense of that term, within living memory. Once its mission of subjugating the Indians had been achieved, it would have been turned into an agency for keeping an eye on them, and doling out such goods and services as the government was willing to send their way. Places like this were notorious for attracting people on the make, who knew that they could get away with a lot. For how often, really, was the federal government going to send inspectors and auditors out to the likes of Fort Sickles?
Reverend Kidd would forever be Pumpkin to Dawn, whose first impression was of his red face and cloud of orange hair. “Praise Jesus!” he said again, and it wasn’t clear to her whether this in itself was an act of praise, or a command aimed at Dawn. He and Mrs. Kidd—a stocky woman in a white nurse’s outfit, complete with white hose—approached the cot and knelt to either side, each gripping one of her hands. With their free arms they reached across her abdomen and clenched their fingers together in here-is-the-steeple mode, above her. “Lord,” Pumpkin intoned, “by your grace has Mrs. Kidd cast out this girl’s demon and cleansed her womb of Lucifer’s pollution.”
“Having fouled her with his monstrosity,” Mrs. Kidd went on, “Satan reached out his scaly hand to take her soul down to hell, but by Your heavenly power acting through the healing touch of the Reverend Kidd, she was raked back from the brink of the pit. Now we pray that the poor orphan repent of her sins and be embraced into her new family. Amen!”
“Amen!” called Pumpkin, and then they both fell silent and Dawn realized that they were looking at her expectantly. A few “Amens” reached her ears from those Okies who were conscious enough to know what was going on; or perhaps for them it was like kicking out when struck on the knee with a hammer.
“How did you know I was an orphan?” Dawn asked.
They knew because she had told them. And, as she gradually figured out over the next few days, she had told them because Mrs. Kidd had been giving her drugs: an anesthetic generally used for veterinary applications but commonly employed by Mrs. Kidd on Indians, in whom its side effects (hallucinations, amnesia, rambling speech) could be overlooked given that it was so much less expensive than drugs formulated for humans and thus helped stretch the taxpayers’ money further. Mrs. Kidd employed a free hand both with it and with morphine: a more expensive compound that she was willing to spend on a white girl.
Between the hallucinogenic effects of the horse medicine and the narcotic sway of the morphine, Dawn got to understand her new situation in a piecemeal series of impressions, in its colorful and surreal way loosely comparable to being driven at high speed through Century of Progress lashed to the hood of a truck.
Mrs. Kidd, formerly Nurse Van Essen, née Trudy Larson, had been co-running the place with her late husband, Dr. Van Essen, who had killed himself with an overdose of morphine. The Office of Indian Affairs, which ran the clinic, had not yet sent out a replacement, so she was effectively the chief medical officer. Meanwhile the influx of Okies had drawn Reverend Kidd up out of Arkansas as a sort of missionary or chaplain; he had married Nurse Van Essen and made her into Mrs. Kidd. It was not clear to Dawn, from her difficult vantage point flat on her back on a cot, why so many Okies were hanging about the place, but then there was much about it that she would have been hard put to make sense of even had she been stone-cold sober the entire time. In any event, the Kidds now ran it.
All of this she collected from Mrs. Kidd during moments of near lucidity. Mrs. Kidd liked to bustle about straightening and inspecting things better left alone. She talked as she did so, confiding in Dawn as if Dawn were fully conscious; actually gave a damn; and knew Mrs. Kidd much better than was the case. Dawn, hardly able to take in the words, saw more than she heard. Mrs. Kidd dressed expensively, by regional standards. Normal, even for a reasonably prosperous ranch wife, would have been a cotton dress, no stockings, hair in a bun, lipstick on Sundays. Mrs. Kidd was somehow managing to have her hair done, and she went through white stockings and red lipstick like a burning department store.
So much for the Kidd saga. Disconcerted by the way she kept losing consciousness and waking up, Dawn tried to piece together the story of what was happening to her. She already knew that she had been “purged” of a “monstrosity” that was now sitting in formaldehyde in a mason jar on Pumpkin’s desk, proof visible of Satan’s physical presence in the world. Pumpkin kept threatening to show it to her whenever she evinced even mild skepticism about his account of the night of her arrival. After that, she had been subjected to an operation, thus far described only in King James Bible vocabulary, that hadn’t gone well—presumably a dilation and curettage? Non-viable embryos happened all the time. They tended to end in miscarriages. Pumpkin had seen the results, and construed it as a demon, and thought her recovery a miracle for which he deserved credit.
She woke up and they were standing around her bed casting out her demons. Memories, fresh but false, suggested she’d been hallucinating.
She woke up underwater. Many hands were pushing her down. It was not a hallucination. Some instinct deeper than consciousness told her not to inhale. She was on her back, looking up at a ring of faces, scattered by the water’s roiled surface. In the center of the ring, high above, was a shimmering white house atop a pink sandstone cliff.
One of her flailing heels struck the bottom. She gathered her legs under her and pushed up; the hands came away, letting her erupt into the air. She was standing in a river, ringed by men in suits, like pallbearers. But they were only baptizing her: a rite to which she had apparently given her consent while under the influence of some amnestic drug. They were in a cold, clear stream, at a bend where it hooked around a sandstone bluff with trees and a house on the top.
It was her second baptism, the first having occurred in a little Russian Orthodox church outside of Petrograd when she had been about seven. This one, however, happened in a place that she would always know in her bones as home. It was the landscape in which she had been born. The first natural smells she’d ever scented were in her nostrils as she drew breath now: sage, the tang of dust, cold running water, woodsmoke, pine. In some Greek mythic version of her story this would have imbued her with some autochthonous power that would have enabled her to run free of these people, but this landscape was as much prison as refuge. The winters, the wildlife, the scarcity of food, and malevolent humans forced people to cluster in camps, cabins, tipis, anywhere they could gather around a fire and share meat. And having joined such communities they found it unthinkable to leave them, and thereby subjugated themselves to those who by force of personality, strength of arms, or wealth ruled them. Dawn was as much a product of those societies as she was of the landscape. For it was in the mine heads, lumber camps, and ranches that bosses ruled, often with too heavy a hand. Men unused to rule rose up to struggle against them. Open war was fought between the workers and the hired goons brought in by the bosses. The law became involved, and out of it grew a shadow culture of Westerners who were too willful to be Communists but too political to be outlaws. Those were Dawn’s mother’s people. They would ride the rails to Chicago to attend Wobbly conventions, where they would thrill the Eastern factory organizers with their dash and bravado, their tales of pitched battles at mine heads two miles above sea level, and after a brief doomed romance it would all go wrong as the Easterners tried to impose revolutionary discipline on the Westerners, who would tell them to go piss up a rope. Her mother had met her father at one of those conventions and he had come west with her to see how it was and had fallen in love with her, and with here. So, emerging from the river into that landscape, shocked to full consciousness by the icy water, Dawn knew herself to be home, but knew also that home was a prison until she could get clear of communities like the one where the Kidds held sway.
Feeling much better, she politely declined her evening dose of drugs and was held down by Pumpkin and one of his acolytes as Mrs. Kidd, gazing into her eyes, slipped the needle into her arm. “There, there,” she murmured. This was always the last thing Dawn heard before she lost consciousness.
She woke up in a wood-walled room, lashed to a bed. Pumpkin was sitting next to her, back half turned. His left hand was smothering her breast and his right was up to no good; she smelled hot Vaseline and saw him cringe as he ejaculated on her bedspread.
She woke up to find herself alone in the room with Mrs. Kidd and her little black bag of hypodermics. “So, how’s my little Communist today?” her captor asked brightly. Mrs. Kidd was sweating with the effort of maintaining the façade of sarcastic cheer. “We should have left you by the side of the road to be et up by wolves!” she went on. “Slut—out of Chicago—show up here with your monster—ungrateful, unrepentant—and now you seduce my husband!”
She was crazy: a word Dawn had lost the habit of using as a result of hanging around with educated persons elevated through study of Freudian psychoanalysis. But it was a fine word in places like this, where—never mind what Freud might say—people, especially ones who’d found a way of getting a little bit of power, could simply go off the rails and wander off into a shadow world that was half made up, and half misseen through baroque systems of delusion. She was crazy. Crazy, and probably on drugs—most likely some kind of amphetamine. The most Dawn could possibly do was question her calmly, even meekly, in the hope of connecting with whatever part of her mind might still be sound.
“If you let me go, I will leave town.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you! To escape justice for your crime.”
“What crime?”
“Jail is the only place you’re going. And I’m going to keep you there until you sign those papers.”
“What papers?”
“Oh, I looked through your trunk. Found your Communist books. And found your papers from the veterans. Don’t you worry your pretty little head—Aurora.”
Dawn’s mind was reeling from more than just drugs. She had not heard her Russian name spoken aloud since her father had died. How did Mrs. Kidd know it?
From the papers she had found in the trunk. Her father had filled those papers out and used the name he preferred for her.
An even more salient point now came to mind: Mrs. Kidd had been rooting through her trunk. She’d delved deep enough to find some “Communist books.” The violin case was below those, under a false floor of cedar planks. Mrs. Kidd must have stopped there. Or perhaps she’d seen the violin case and assumed it contained a violin. She’d have mentioned the submachine gun by this point in the conversation if she knew about it.
“I stashed those papers safe and sound at the bank,” Mrs. Kidd went on.
“Bank?”
“In the vault. The banker is a close, personal friend. I see him every Monday. It’s where the reverend and I keep the Lord’s money.”
“From the collection plate.”
“Yes. The banker will keep your things safe and sound until we sort you out. And for a wayward slut like you, the only two ways out are jail or foster care in our home.”
Someone was knocking on the door. “Mrs. Kidd? Sheriff’s deputy.”
The arrival of a law officer was a fresh surprise to Dawn. It must have showed on her face, because Mrs. Kidd now savored a triumphant few moments. “It is open, Deputy James.”
Deputy James came in and enjoyed looking at Dawn for so long it even made Mrs. Kidd uncomfortable. Dawn remembered him, vaguely, from the night she’d been picked up from the train platform. “Deputy James,” Mrs. Kidd said, “you’ll remember Dawn. The girl who got pregnant and tried to give herself an abortion.”
“What?!” Dawn blurted.
Mrs. Kidd was waiting for that; she slapped Dawn across the face, knocking her back onto the bed.
“Oh now, Mrs. Kidd, you didn’t have to go and do that,” said Deputy James cheerfully.
“She’ll clean up soon enough and then you and the other deputies can have your fill of looking at her through the bars of her cage. Slut that she is, I’m sure she’ll enjoy being leered at. Why, who knows what kinds of favors she will offer you in exchange for special treatment. You’ll have to be strong and stern with this one.” Mrs. Kidd turned to look back at Dawn. Deputy James by now had slapped a handcuff over one of Dawn’s wrists and begun to untie it from the bed frame. When the rope loosened he dragged that hand over to the other and cuffed them together. Dawn’s eyes were full of tears and her nose was running, which infuriated her because it wasn’t that she was crying, it was just an automatic reaction to being hit in the face. “There, there,” Mrs. Kidd said, “would you like another injection to calm your mood, Dawn?”
Dawn shook her head no.
“She botched the abortion, like they all do, and almost kilt herself,” Mrs. Kidd told the lawman as Dawn was sitting up, waiting for her feet to be untied. “Now she’s better though. Ready to be discharged. But a miscreant who’s ready to be discharged is one who’s ready to be held to account for her crime, ain’t that so?”
“Couldn’t agree more, Mrs. Kidd, and you know that the full force of the law will come down on her once Judge Hughes comes back to town.”
There was no women’s jail and so they locked her up in a basement cell away from run-of-the-mill offenders. Neither James nor any of the other deputies laid a hand on her, proving that Mrs. Kidd, in a typical thought pattern for someone with her particular brand of crazy, assumed the worst of all of them, and so laid plans doomed to miscarry. That was something.
On the other hand, going through morphine withdrawal was no picnic, and left her in a condition that the euphemism-prone residents of the upper Midwest would describe as “quite a state.” That plus the overall lack of sanitary conditions probably made Dawn a lot less attractive to the jailers than Mrs. Kidd liked to imagine. Dawn had never quite been glamorous, but she’d been within striking distance of it and she had a general idea of how the magic worked, and what killed it. How anything could be less glamorous than morphine withdrawal in a basement jail cell in Fort Sickles, North Dakota, she could not imagine.
After a few days, though, the nausea and vomiting became less and she began to have long intervals of being lucid enough to take stock of her situation. Regrettably, much of that happened in the middle of the night when she’d rather be sleeping. She was still prone to twitchy legs, running nose, and goose bumps, but those at least didn’t interfere with her ability to think straight.
She could not guess how long she’d been “medicated” in the Kidds’ infirmary, but the number of needle marks in her arms was about twenty, the newer ones surrounded by bruises, tiny blue smudges lined up the veins like the blossoms of fireweed. Three or four weeks?
The trip from the infirmary to the jail had given her a sense of how Fort Sickles was laid out. The Kidds’ clinic was on Office of Indian Affairs land just at the place where a state highway crossed the border into the Lakota reservation. A miserable cluster of shacks and businesses—mostly drinking establishments—had sprung up there, with a Hooverville full of Okies growing on the white side of the line. But the real town was five miles away on the same highway, which ran parallel to the Great Northern tracks. It consisted of perhaps a hundred small wood-frame houses, kit-built from the Sears Roebuck catalog. A river ran nearby. Some of the nicer houses were set back in the shade of the trees that grew along its course. Smaller houses swarmed a town square adorned with a cannon and a statue of Custer. A bank, three churches, a library, and a courthouse fronted on the little patch of grass. Gaps between those stately edifices were plugged with saloons, drugstores, barbershops, and the like.
The sheriff and his little jail occupied a wing out back of the courthouse. She would not have to cover more than a hundred paces to reach her arraignment, when the time came. But Judge Hughes did not come back until a week after her arrest. And that was just as well, since by the time she was finally marched into the courtroom for her initial arraignment, she’d had time not only to put the morphine behind her and get cleaned up a little but to think her situation through and make some sense of that eventful last interview with Mrs. Kidd.
Mrs. Kidd had gone through Dawn’s trunk. Not all the way to the bottom. No, she’d stopped when she’d found the manila folder where Dawn kept her papers. That would include both her Soviet and U.S. passports. Dawn’s father had been a disabled Great War veteran, honorably discharged, and as such entitled to a monthly benefit check. Certain benefits were transferrable to Dawn upon his death. When she had made it back to Chicago last year, she’d found all of this paperwork in his flat, and retained it.
Seeing those papers, and knowing that Dawn was a minor and an orphan, Mrs. Kidd and Pumpkin had formed a plan to adopt her. This would enable them to intercept her checks from the veterans. Dawn’s papers had suddenly become valuable. Accordingly, Mrs. Kidd had taken them to the bank, which was catercorner across the town square from the courthouse/jail complex, and prevailed upon her personal friend, the manager, to store them in the vault along with the Lord’s money.
Dawn could only guess at the whereabouts of her trunk. It wouldn’t make sense for the Kidds to deposit the entire trunk in the bank vault. They probably had it stored at the infirmary. After she’d been in the jail for a couple of days, some of her clothes had showed up; Mrs. Kidd or someone must have taken those out of the trunk and had them delivered.
When the deputies had fingerprinted her, they’d confiscated some of her belongings, including the key to the violin case, which she’d got in the habit of wearing around her neck. Mrs. Kidd, of course, had noticed this, and asked about it, then supplied a useful answer: “Is that the key to your diary, sweetheart?” It seemed as good a lie as any and so Dawn had answered yes, then improvised an explanation: she must have left the diary on the train on the night of her hectic arrival in Fort Sickles. “There, there,” Mrs. Kidd had consoled her, “perhaps it was the Lord’s way of helping you forget all those old memories and start a new life.”
Why had she been thrown into the slammer, and how did that figure into the Kidds’ plan for that new life?
When the judge showed up, they were going to charge her with crimes related to abortion. That much was clear from the conversation between Mrs. Kidd and Deputy James when the latter had come to the infirmary to arrest her.
Women had miscarriages all the time, though. How could a judge really determine whether such an event had been spontaneous, or the result of a criminal act?
In the absence of direct witnesses, it would have to come down to the testimony of qualified medical professionals. They’d be able to examine the patient and render judgment as to whether the loss of the pregnancy had been an act of God or of man.
The only medical professional who could conceivably be called as witness was Mrs. Kidd.
Why go to all the trouble of having Dawn arrested and arraigned, though, if the goal was to adopt her so that her benefit checks could be intercepted?
Because Dawn, as a seventeen-year-old, would have some say in the matter. She’d have ways to fight the adoption. They didn’t want her to fight it. They wanted her to go before the judge and meekly consent to becoming a foster child of the Kidds. In order to make her do that, they had to have something they could hold over her. Which they did; a few words from Mrs. Kidd on the witness stand could put her away for years.
What troubled Dawn most about this scheme was the sheer level of desperation and baroque harebrained-ness it involved, and what that implied about the states of mind, and the financial straits, of the Reverend and Mrs. Kidd. More particularly the missus, since Pumpkin was so hapless. His inability to keep his hand off his cock when he was in the same room with Dawn must have been noticed by Mrs. Kidd, who had realized she had to get Dawn out of the infirmary, and away from the reverend, without letting her slip away altogether. So she was having the judicial system act as her jailer—much easier anyway than keeping Dawn restrained and drugged.
This was the bad side of the high plains: communities so remote that people could get away with anything, and, lacking contact with settled places, could wander far down strange thoughtways from which there was no route back to sanity. The Siberian taiga, the Australian outback, the interior of Brazil, must all have towns, and people, like this. Acting as fuel, or as accelerant, were the Indian agencies, bringing in unsupervised government money to establishments like the Kidds’ infirmary. Mrs. Kidd’s pharmacopoeia had unquestionably been paid for by taxpayers, and if she even bothered to cook the books, she would claim that all of those drugs were being used to relieve the suffering of the Lakota people.
The whole cast of characters was there in Judge Hughes’s courtroom. This session was a cattle call for every man, woman, and child who had run afoul of the law since his previous appearance, as well as family members, victims, witnesses, and curious spectators. Perhaps three dozen were in the place, including Reverend and Mrs. Kidd. Pumpkin averted his gaze but Mrs. Kidd gave Dawn a cool, searching look as the bailiff led her to a spot on a bench reserved for prisoners, off to one side, at right angles to the pews where free people sat. As soon as Dawn had sat down, Mrs. Kidd chiff-chiff-chiffed up the aisle, smiling sweetly for all to see. She bent over the rail, put her face so close to Dawn’s that her powder got up Dawn’s nose, and whispered: “I hope you have had time to consider our generous offer to take you in as our foster child. A simple nod will suffice and then all of this will be behind you.”
The calculation, though odious, was not a difficult one. Refusing the offer would bring down Mrs. Kidd’s false testimony. This would lead to prison time. Worse, there’d be an extensive paper trail that might be noticed, somewhere down the line, by Silent Al. Accepting the Kidds’ offer, on the other hand, would mean a release from chains and bars and a different style of imprisonment in the home of the Kidds. The latter would be much easier to escape from—and one opportunity to escape was all she required.
“What did you do with all of my things?” Dawn asked.
Mrs. Kidd smiled. “Honey, don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. We’ve already moved your trunk to our house. It’s waiting for you in your new room. All you need to do is say yes and you’ll be out of this nasty jail before sundown. You can settle into your new home with all of your things and it’ll be just fine.”
“Gosh, what kinda house is it? Is it real nice?”
“It’s so nice, sweetheart, so much better than the places you’ve been living. Dr. Van Essen, may God rest his soul, bought the land above the crick. Pumpkin and I built the house back in the woods there. We sit on the veranda and listen to the birds singing and the water running in the crick. You’re going to love it there.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Kidd, it sounds very nice.”
Noises back in the corridor indicated that Judge Hughes was about to come in. Mrs. Kidd chiff-chiff-chiffed back to her seat.
A cowboy seated in the back of the room let out a fart.
Everyone looked at him.
His big hat had been over his face as he’d dozed. Awakened by his own flatulence, he now nudged it back, then took it off to reveal his face.
It was a familiar face to Dawn. It was her mother’s half-cousin Reggie Walker, who in his forty or so years had pursued a wide range of occupations, some of which had been legal.
By what miracle was he here?
Blanche Baker. The woman on the train. She must have sent a telegram from Havre, letting Dawn’s kin know that the girl had been taken off the train at Fort Sickles, in distress.
Having got her attention, Reggie crossed his arms insouciantly over his chest with his thumbs projecting up. He glanced over at Mrs. Kidd, then turned back to look Dawn straight in the eye.
He shook his head no.
She did not make any particular response.
He raised a hand up lazily and drew it across his throat. Then he dropped it into the crook of his other arm and pantomimed an injection, his thumb depressing an imaginary plunger. Just in case he wasn’t making himself clear, he looked back at Mrs. Kidd. Then his eyes rolled back in their sockets, his tongue came out, his head fell back, and he sprawled in an imitation of death.
“You forced her to commit perjury,” Reggie said to her later. His tone was admiring, congratulatory. He was proud of her.
It was visiting hours at the jail. What had just happened in the courtroom made it clear that Dawn was going to be here for a while. She made no answer.
“She testified you gave yourself an abortion. That’s a lie, I figure.”
“Sure is. I wouldn’t have done it on a train.”
Reggie nodded. “Well, that’s gonna make her sleep poorly—a respectable woman and all.”
“You really think so, Reggie?”
“Oh, I do. Don’t matter how rotten she might be on the inside, or what she done in secret. To get up in front of those people and swear to something that ain’t so, that’s a big step. Bigger than killing someone.”
“What did you mean by that?” She imitated his pantomime from the courtroom.
“She killed her first husband. The doctor. Maybe kinda-sorta by accident. Not that he hadn’t been dipping into the ol’ medicine cabinet. He was. For a long time. Everyone knew it. That’s why it was a good way to get rid of him. They found him with the tube around his left arm, the needle in the vein, his heart stopped. Only problem being that he was left-handed.”
“Was there no investigation, no—”
Reggie shook his head. “She is a respectable lady hereabouts. At least, among the kinds of men who conduct investigations.” He turned and stared into Dawn’s eyes, his mustache drooping, his blue eyes sadly expectant. “You’re probably wondering why I showed up in that courtroom. Did what I did.”
“I reckon it did arouse my curiosity a bit. You seem awfully well informed for a man who doesn’t even live in these parts.”
“I been here for three weeks. Ever since your kin received a certain telegram. Been buying drinks and asking questions. I was going to visit you at that clinic, but once I started learning about the Kidds and their racket I decided against it.”
“Why didn’t you come say hi when I was in the jail?”
“Didn’t want to let the Kidds know I was onto what they were planning.”
“Making me say yes to being their foster child.”
For a completely uneducated and illiterate man, Reggie had a certain way of reacting when the person he was talking to was just being impossibly stupid. He broke eye contact. One corner of his mouth twitched back.
“Dawn Rae. She would’ve just killed you.”
“Oh.”
“Same as she did her ex-husband. They’d have sunk your body in the crick and collected your benefit checks forever.”
Dawn was knocked back for a spell. Partly just by the sudden and absolute knowledge that what Reggie was saying was true. They’d have held her down in her nice new bedroom at the Kidds’ house. The last words Dawn would have heard would have been “There, there.”
It had to be true. Like one of Dick’s mathematical proofs. Mrs. Kidd had ejected her from the infirmary because of Pumpkin’s wandering eye. To bring her into their home would create a much worse temptation, one that could only be dealt with in one way.
Also leaving her scatterbrained and off-balance for a bit was shock at how stupid she’d been not to have seen what Reggie had seen. She’d come so close to saying “yes” in that courtroom.
But there was another thing too. It had come to her when Reggie had mentioned that the Kidds would sink her body in the crick. She had a memory from when they had forcibly baptized her. They’d pushed her under. Drugged, she had come awake and looked up through the streaming water of the crick and seen the ring of people around her, the hands holding her down.
But above them, high on a sandstone bluff, there had been a white house with a veranda.
The silence had become long enough that even Reggie felt awkward. “Better for you to be in jail,” he insisted. “Hell, we can get you out of that.”
“Yes and no.”
“How you figure?”
“I got in trouble with the feds, Reggie.”
“Mmm.”
“They know my name. My Russian name. I never used it anywhere else. But Mrs. Kidd found it on my papers. Now it’s on the arraignment. The case documents. Eventually the feds will get wind of it and Silent Al will come to get me.”
“Who’s that?”
“A G-man I crossed paths with in D.C. Knows too much about me. Way too much.”
Reggie chewed on it for a while, like a twist of tobacco.
“I might need help from more than just you,” Dawn said. “Not that you ain’t terrific. But some jobs take more fellers.”
“You’re real special to me, Dawn, because of your ma, who was like a sister to me, and helped me through rough patches when I was drunk and crazy. I would do anything for you. But the kinds of fellers I judge you’re featuring are thin on the ground. It’s hard to get ’em together anymore, and pointed in the same direction. It takes an incentive is all I’m saying. Your feminine charms might go part of the way, but—”
“I got more to offer than feminine charms.”
“Let’s have it then.”
She was tired and lonely and her strongest emotion was to do nothing at all. To accept what was coming to her. This had been the case for a while, and was made more obvious now by her sitting across the table from Reggie Walker.
He was the kind of man to whom you could say anything, but once you had said it, it could not be unsaid. It would set in motion consequences as implacable as emptying seven hundred cylinders of hydrogen into a balloon. It was just his way.
She balked before saying what had been on her mind. He waited patiently, for it was in the nature of a man like him to do so, knowing that the consequences of speech could be of no small moment.
What came to her during that wait, strangely, was General Patton. It was not a particular set of words that Patton had spoken to her. It was rather the way he had looked at her, the feel of his eyes upon her when she had ridden her horse and danced with him at the ball, the regard he had shown her and the appraisal he had made of her as a warrior, one for whom there was no place in civilian peacetime society. One who would have to find her own place. If she failed in that, she would be guilty of letting herself down in the eyes of Patton and would never again be worthy of the regard he had shown her with his gaze. For to have earned his respect once and let him down later was a far worse thing than never to have earned it at all; it was the kind of respect that brought with it terrible responsibilities.
Reggie was still waiting, as a gun waits for its owner to pull the trigger.
“They told me my second arraignment is coming up in a week. That’s the one where I can enter a plea.”
“I am somewhat familiar with the process.”
“I can also post bail.”
“You got that much?”
“Well, I don’t know how much they’re gonna ask for, Reggie. But the answer is probably no. Even if I did, the Kidds took all my stuff. It was in a trunk. The trunk’s at their house. But I had papers too. Passports and such. Mrs. Kidd took that to the bank and put it in the vault. A big safe-deposit box where she and the reverend keep the Lord’s money.”
These words had roughly the same effect on Reggie Walker as insertion of a fresh dry cell into an electrical toy. He took his boots down off the adjoining chair and sat up straight, then reached down unconsciously with one hand to touch the top of his cowboy hat on the table, adjusting its angle slightly. “Bank vault, you say. Been awhile since I seen one of them from the inside.”
“Yep.”
“What’s she mean by the Lord’s money?”
“Collections they take from their flock.”
“Their flock is a sorry-looking bunch.”
“Maybe because they give all their money to the Lord.”
“Maybe.”
“Reverend Kidd came up from the South. He seems like a man with a past. Maybe he brought some of the Lord’s money with him. Maybe some of his flock down there got wise to his schemes.”
Reggie nodded. “They got a nice house over yonder. Nicest house in town, people say.”
“White house on a bluff above the riverbend?”
Reggie nodded, watching her alertly.
“On the other side the ground’s flat. You can drive right up to the water’s edge. They go there and baptize people.”
Reggie didn’t want to venture into this new topic of baptisms. “Folks say that Reverend Kidd bought that lot the day he showed up in town. Cash on the barrelhead. Hired some people to build the house. Always paid cash.”
“He brought money up from down South,” Dawn said. “Probably fleeced a bunch of Okies and got run out of town.”
Reggie said nothing for a while, just gazing off into space. Then, finally, he met Dawn’s eye.
Dawn said, “Get me some fellers like you said, Reggie, ones who feel as you do about banks.”
Reggie was nodding.
“Only thing is, Reggie?”
“Yeah, Dawn?”
“That house has to burn. Dawn has to die.”