The Maid's Version (6 page)
The town was represented from high to low, the disaster spared no class or faith, cut into every neighborhood and congregation, spread sadness with an indifferent aim. The well dressed and stunned, the sincere in bibs and broken shoes, sat side by side and sang the hymns they had in common. Mrs. Glencross, with Ethan and Virginia accompanying, sat next to the Dunahews, a public gesture Alma would never forget, though Mr. Glencross remained at home, still in pain from burns he’d received trying to pull survivors out of the ruin.
Six pastors and the only priest in the region addressed the mourners, voices rising to be heard over the tidal disruption of sobs, cries, hallelujahs, and occasional shrieks. The service lasted more than four hours, time for many mourners to settle, their thoughts to stray from piety and remembrance, and when finally the crowd wandered outside onto the sidewalk, into the street, quite a few voices blamed the deaths on a colossal accident of unfathomable origin, a test from above, while others could be heard suggesting earthly causes or suspects, courses of action that might remedy some of the mysteries, names of those thugs or crazies or outsiders that belonged at the top of any list. There was anger crossed with grief and nowhere to turn for answers but to those six pastors and the only priest and gossip.
The state penitentiary squatted above the Missouri River, a brick monstrosity with high red walls and guard towers, cold and wet, hot and humid by season, mean in spirit all the time. Seen through iron bars the flowing river was a constant beckoning toward escape, but the river had a savage history and accounted for a host of resolute cons who’d drowned while briefly free and fleeing across the hungry brown water. Discipline inside the walls aped the medieval, with prisoners clubbed by guards or lashed at a whim—for making eye contact or not making eye contact, for slouching like a hoodlum or standing insolently straight, because they talked back or wouldn’t answer at all—bats on the head regularly applied to encourage order or unconsciousness. The seriously disobedient were hung from chains in a damp basement room, feet held inches from the floor, tortured slowly by gravity, and as joints began to sag free from sockets screams reached into the cells above and alerted all who might misbehave to the meticulous agony that awaited them downstairs. It was a general population of tush hogs from the hills and bullies from the avenues, asshole bandits and free-world queers, snitches who sweated fear in their brains and tier-bosses who dreamed plans for vast empires of vice that might be made if ever they walked unshackled in sunlight again. The pen was a famously brutal place that released more brutes than it received, and sent them home changed beyond easy understanding or tolerance. Jack rollers and bank robbers, pimps and yegg men, some ready killers, some ready enough, returned to their villages or clusters of tenements with bitterly gained knowledge of meanness and the hollowing at their core that allowed them to employ it in any way that felt good at the time, which was mostly right now, this minute, on the spot.
The Arbor Dance Hall occupied a huge open room (the building had originally been a yellow-brick dairy barn) above an automobile garage, the ground level a dim space for mechanical repairs, new tires, or for men to stand around jawing with other men. It was operated by a gent known as Freddy Poltz who’d been Walter “Plug” Reinemann once, a tough who’d made a few mistakes on the streets of St. Louis, done his time, and upon release picked himself a fresh name from among the graves of his mother’s family in Borromeo Cemetery. As Plug Reinemann he’d been muscle for Egan’s Rats, shadowing Willie Egan himself as various gangland spats erupted, Jellyroll Hogan getting greedy, the Green Ones or Cuckoos trying to expand, dagoes off the boat and stray Hoosiers agitating all over. In 1921 he’d been lighting a cigar at Fourteenth and Franklin when Willie was assassinated, falling and standing, falling and standing again, then falling flat as a cop rushed over and asked if he’d say who shot him, and between bursts of blood from his mouth Willie replied, “Naw, I’m a good sport.”
Plug saw the future in Willie’s dying eyes and decided to avoid it by getting arrested per arrangement with the chief of detectives—nothing too serious, just a few years away for a robbery he had indeed committed—so Jellyroll and the others might forget his face, forget several things he’d done to earn his nickname while running with Willie. But in the passage of those few years in stir Plug slowly grew toward the available light and became aware of an astounding interior truth—he actually hated tough guys with their dullard insistence on petty tributes and gaudy hats worn at an angle, despised them, hated their humorless jokes and gleeful violence, maybe always had loathed them at a subterranean level even as he carried out their orders, and he would seek their company no more. Tough guys, once pondered in a quieted mind, were revealed to be boring, really, just so tediously dangerous and boring! As Freddy Poltz he amassed for himself an innocuous history as a commonplace rustic who’d done no notable wrongs or rights anyplace, ever. He married a sunny woman in the sticks who didn’t know his real name until he died in the blast, and had two children who after his passing felt timid and unmoored the remainder of their lives. His wife, Mae, worked as a cook and laundress for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Williams over on Curry Street. She was a regular on the bench outside the Greek’s, where every maid in town came to know and admire her seriousness of intent and casual charity.
The unraveling of Freddy Poltz began when the leaves were down. A fog bank low to ground lapped the skin on the mud to a treacherous slickness, and two eight-man football teams banged away at each other on sliding feet in that field beside the old high school where the Methodist church sits now. The leather ball disappeared into the huddling gray sky whenever punted, leading to entertaining miscalculations by stumbling players staring skyward who could only guess where the booted thing might squirt from the cloud and slipping off their heedless feet as they shifted directions to make a catch.
The teams churned the field of blanched autumn grass into a thin flat wallow and drew an audience with their animated voices. The small crowd was free with suggestions on how players might want to improve and were disputed from the scrum in return. At game’s end Freddy was exhausted, spattered by mud to the distance of his hair, and alarmed by a face beneath a brim hat that stared his way from the center of the crowd. He looked at the face and the face kept looking back. Freddy quickly said his so-longs and left the mud and the face followed. Freddy walked directly across the railroad tracks and took the path under the Fussell Creek bridge, where he stopped in the shadow, turned around, “What do you want?”
“You’re Plug, ain’t you? From Egan’s?”
“Not lately.”
“Who is it you are now, Plug?”
“A decent man, and I’m stayin’ him, too. So let’s us promise to not be seein’ each other again, Mikey.”
“Can’t make that promise, Plug—or Freddy—I hear you’re Freddy these days—might make myself into a goddam liar, and how’s Mother goin’ to feel if word I’m a goddam liar gets back to Kerry Patch?”
“So you’re still in the game.”
“It’s the only game that tickles me right.”
“Well, I don’t tickle no more, so leave me out. Just leave me the hell out of everything you might get up to—am I bein’ clear?”
“Okay, okay, don’t get in a huff. Just wanted to say hello ’cause I knew you when you was up to no good in the city, and here I go scoutin’ the boondocks—and this is sure ’nough the boondocks, brother, nothin’ but brush apes eatin’ dingleberries and draggin’ their squaws by the hair—when I see a city face from home to talk at, so I do that. Listen, I got no kick with you, we’re still pals, far as I care. But Humbert and Jellyroll and them, they wouldn’t call you pal. No, Mr. Poltz, I don’t think so. I don’t think they ever will. Not after what you done on Ashley Street that time.”
“What’s your bite?”
“Nothin’. I don’t want nothin’, not really. Only, say if people who know people you know dropped by while passin’ through here, solid people scoutin’ for safes and things like that, could you help them all they want? I think you should.”
Freddy walked home by a looping, indirect route and pulled the shades, told Mae and the kids he was going fishing of a sudden and might be away two or three days, but don’t worry if it’s more. He had no pistols, only a shotgun for taking game birds, a hefty double-barreled he’d never fired, and when he grabbed it dusty from the closet beside the bed, Mae asked, “What kind of fish is that for?”
“I might want to eat meat.”
“Why bother with the fish, then?”
“See you.”
He returned in three days, clean-shaven, wearing new clothes, with no fish and no meat. During the coming weeks his personality began to warp and erode; behavior she’d become accustomed to from him was now unconvincing or gone, his regular good cheer replaced by pacing about with a narrowing face and glancing from the windows. Her singing irritated him at any hour and he’d bark he wanted more gravy on his potatoes from now on and other days bark for not so much. He let the children climb onto him and play but did not join the play, seemed not to note them on his lap or clung to his leg or otherwise seeking his attention. He quit football on Saturdays and ate less. His sleep had stories in it that he mumbled in jags until certain scenes shouted him upright. After his death, she found among his personal effects inside a bottom drawer a folded edition of the
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reporting the big news that a dead man had been discovered in a clearing at Saunders Camp, beside the Twin Forks River. The victim had been shot until his face scattered beyond identification, the only clue to his name or origins a brim hat with a tag inside that read, Selz Fine Clothing, Carr Street, St. Louis, Mo.
Mr. Isaiah Willard was a jackleg preacher, a man of hard convictions walked up from Little Rock after he’d walked from several places before that. His preaching was not deeply rooted in the styling of any single church and had a rough angry tone, accusatory subject matter, sparks and ash flying from his mouth. He cast out plenty who had blackened spots on their souls and argued or would not tithe. He offered an unforgiving response to those who failed to accept his rendering of Scripture into a parched syllabus of sacrifice and toil, pain at unpredictable intervals but guaranteed, then death in the ground and a life eternal above if you’d minded his teachings to the end, hell if you hadn’t.
His church changed names and angles as he’d walked the nation, and here it was known simply as the Tree of Christ, housed in a small white storage shed at the southern edge of town. There were still a few tools leaning in a corner, half a sack of feed and a torn washtub, but he attracted a flock of seven who liked to be chastised by a stranger and raked across the coals. As his influence over the seven grew his preaching ranged about and added features that some would call vindictive, purely and simply, once they thought it over, but his flock doubled as these ranting subplots attracted those locals who dearly craved wrath.
There were so many acts or thoughts or mere thoughts of acts that could plant rot in a person and choke the flow of the blessed spirit until the soul became wizened and shrunken and fell away from the body, useless as a dry booger, and a soulless body was but a hospitable husk soon become filled by a demon. The soul of the damned was now a dry booger on the ground somewhere and the newly resident demon shielded behind the face of the husk laughed and laughed, threw stones at stained-glass windows, made babies sick, mothers die, pestilence abound. Preacher Willard accepted the Ten Commandments as a halfhearted start but kept adding amendments until the number of sins he couldn’t countenance was beyond memorization. He appeared to be adding new ones shaped to your own reported shortcomings until you were tailored appropriately for a residence in hell, and nowhere else, but a complete and prostrate begging of God and an increased tithe might, just might, earn you one more chance at heaven, who knows, give it a try, it’s only money.
Among the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing feet. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could be readily seen and blockaded. Through the spring of 1929 Willard and his knotty flock protested the Arbor Dance Hall. Those young decadent fools upstairs shook their bodies all about in thrall to impudent music, smoked cigarettes in mixed groups on the sidewalk, and from the alley a spill of devil juice scented the entire ugly picture. He reared back with the Book raised overhead and preached blue peril on the street outside until revelers began to mock him from the high windows, then from the street while walking past him with their promiscuous hands wandering one another. The top of Preacher Willard’s head unscrewed and hovered out of reach when derided by these gathered sinners with their smug hedonism and flouncy garb, and before the start of summer he said in a mighty letter of epic frustration printed in the newspaper, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop these sinners into the boiling pitch—see how they dance then!”