I often had a suspicion that Arlen’s clients went out of this world wearing only the suit they’d worn coming into it, except when the family lived close enough to attend the services. Even then, I suspect that Arlen’s decent black suit had been altered to fit the frame of more than one back-shot drunken cowboy.
Arlen had an eerie sense about people, both living and dead. Sometimes he would be looking out the office window and see seven or eight young boys coming in to unwind from a long cattle drive, some of them still wearing butternut-dyed Confederacy pants. For those especially, Arlen would jot notes about suit measurements. I came to appreciate how sensible Arlen’s observations could be: anyone crossing the Missouri line still wearing Confederate colors would very likely drink himself into first a shouting and then a shooting match. Arlen’s foresight still didn’t sit well with me.
The other annoying thing about Arlen was his feeling toward women. Generally speaking, he didn’t like them. Nor they, him. Of course, this led him to hold very little regard for the institution of marriage. That fact came to play an important part in the Mr. Henry case. Until Mr. Henry, I was under the impression that Arlen had never enjoyed the company of a woman who wasn’t paid for the interaction.
Arlen’s distaste meant that I had to handle all the disappearing-wife cases. I might get two or three of those in a year, more if the winter had been exceptionally long or the summer unusually hot.
The summer of 1866 was a scorcher. Whatever corn made it to full growth was cooked on the stalk, and since farmers couldn’t sell it to buy anything else, that’s all some people had to eat. Corn, both on the cob and off. Corn bread, corn mash, corn gruel, corn grits, corn pudding, corn dumplings, and, for the really special occasion, corn cakes.
I remember about the corn because when the emaciated Esau Bandler first walked into my office, the thought came to mind that he must have known a pretty steady diet of corn. His skin had that bleached-through color, and his hair looked to be the texture of thinned-out silks. He moved with an air of stoic resolve, passing through our door in the summer heat, wearing a Union greatcoat scarred with rips and tears like a map of warring nations across his constricted back.
I didn’t pick him for a disappearing-wife case, but Arlen did. Arlen usually left the office when some abandoned husband came in, and Esau had hardly begun his speech before Arlen was gone. Arlen had no patience. I could hardly ever help in those cases, but I’d always let the man talk. Although I stayed off the stuff myself, I usually kept a bottle of medicinal whiskey in my drawer to help these stricken men tell their tales. If the wife had been gone for more than a month, there was a good chance the husband hadn’t spoken to another human being in the past six weeks.
Most abandoned-husband stories ran pretty much to type, depending on the age of the disappearing wife. Six to eleven children if she was over thirty, often with one or two recently buried. Some women could get through the death and burial well enough, but they couldn’t seem to bear watching the hot prairie wind blow their children’s mounded graves away like last year’s crop gone to seed.
If the wife was originally from somewhere like Ohio or Kentucky, the husband stood a good chance of getting her back. I never heard any of them say as much, but often all those women needed was a look at some real trees and a few nights’ sleep in a bed raised off the floor. The women always came back for their children, even if they disagreed with their husbands on slavery issues.
Arlen hated hearing the husbands’ stories. Most likely added to his permanent sour on marriage. He’d also handled one too many birthing deaths. Probably the nicest thing he ever said about women was that if he had ever found himself in the unfortunate circumstance of being born one, he would have gone straight to the nearest convent. Odd, because the only time Arlen Dexter ever spent close to God was at the grave. And the only tenet he religiously held was one against hard liquor. He had been a drunk in his early years and had sworn never to touch the stuff again. He couldn’t even keep that faith because I personally gave him another drink, all because of Mr. Henry and Esau Bandler.
In 1862, Mr. Esau Bandler left his wife and four children homesteading on 320 wheat-seeded acres in northeast Kansas and rode south to join the frontiersmen fighting in the War Between the States, in an area where Kansas lost more men than did any other state in the Union.
Jump ahead to 1865, the war ending and Esau riding back home to his wife and family. Except that when he got home, there was nothing there. No wife, no children, no house, and no crops. Some men would have toughed it out and gone about the business of rebuilding their lives. Not Esau. By the time he got to me, he had already tracked down some neighbors who had gone into longhorn punching in north Texas. They were able to tell him what had happened to his children: cholera.
Nobody knew anything about the wife except that she had done her best by the children, and when the time came, she was the one who dug the graves, sold the animals, and lit the house afire. After that, she disappeared. A thinking man would have written her off as long gone. A gentle one would have hoped her happily settled somewhere else. Only one man in ten thousand would believe he could find her again and that, if found, she would still be available to him. Esau was that one in ten thousand. A man who had taken unto himself a wife.
By the time Esau had finished the telling of his personal tale of woe, there was only one man I could think of who might be able to help him: Mr. Henry.
I think I’ve mentioned that Stratford in 1866 was beginning to grow, and we could offer some accommodations. We had a hotel with four single rooms and two doubles. Ole Johansen’s Outfitting Store and Walter Goddard’s Barbershop were both standing then. So was Sokolov’s Dry Goods, and he took the post in there too. And of course there were the five saloons, two gambling houses, and one dance hall butting one another on down the wrong side of Main Street.
The best of those establishments was the Stratford House, next door to my office. You could buy a drink there and a decent meal and a reasonably lenient woman if you wanted. In most of my disappearing-wife cases, I would suggest that the bereaved husband get himself one, two, or all three items, depending on how hungry and hurt he looked at the time. But Esau Bandler didn’t seem like the kind who would enjoy any of those things, as badly as he might need them all.
That’s what led me to think of Mr. Henry.
Actually, I met Mr. Henry through Arlen Dexter. Mr. Henry had an uncommon tolerance for the neediness of the human beings who found their way through the open gates of his hundred-acre ranch. And Arlen found his way there often, although the trip took sixteen miles, both ways. Mr. Henry’s women would clean and mend whatever clothing Arlen might have recently acquired, and whenever he rode back to town, the hammered-tin badge on his chest would sit polished and straight.
I wouldn’t say that Mr. Henry and I were friends, but I liked him. He was a small man who carried himself well, and he always seemed to have the respect of the women who worked for him. It wasn’t a place to go for immoral women, although occasionally one of the bordello gals from town would get fed up or old or wise, and usually Mr. Henry would let her try working his piece of the countryside. Most of the women there seemed to make ends meet by serving hot food spread out on cottonwood tables. They offered up some choice provisions: eggs and butter, vegetables, and the occasional buffalo steak. Their chairs were overturned laundry tubs that they’d used to scrub clothing early of a morning.
To all outward appearances, Mr. Henry was a fine, upstanding man. In fact, one time in the early years, a woman stumbled into my office who had been horsewhipped across the face. Doc patched her up, and I took her out to Mr. Henry, who put her in a room off the kitchen and taught her to cook. That’s another disappearing-wife tale, but you can be sure her husband got no direction from me.