So the story on Mr. Henry was that he might at any given time have between two and twenty women living with him. Not the kind of high-stepping fancies that the saloon and dance hall carried. His women were the kind who could have been your sister, if you had a sister who’d known a streak of bad luck. More than a few were women whose husbands failed to return from the war, or returned so damaged that they forgot their wives were on the good side. I should have considered that before I sent Esau into their welcoming fold.
Mr. Henry’s general clientele were mostly older men, many of them looking for a wife, a night away from home, or just some friendly conversation. And surprisingly, it turned out that what a lot of those wild young cowboys from town really wanted, or wanted soon after the drunk wore off, was a good meal, a clean shirt, and a kind woman’s touch. So long as they behaved, Mr. Henry made room for them too. He had one boy staying with him for several months, cleaning up around the barn, talking to the women, learning to get over that fear of loud noises in the night.
I stayed there once or twice myself over the years, and I never found it to be anything but a clean and decent and honestly run affair. Mr. Henry’s was one of the few places that allowed the emigrant railroad workers to visit, although he made it clear in any language that he could and would shoot a gun in defense of his women.
When Mr. Henry lost a woman, it was usually because he had married her off to some widower out in the hinterlands. If the woman wanted to go, the man would give Mr. Henry whatever he could in exchange. Sometimes money, sometimes labor. Mr. Henry had some of the best produce to be gotten in the whole of Kansas, what with the cattle drivers, the farmers, the railroaders, and the women themselves coming back to visit.
So, looking into the cold religious fervor of Esau Bandler’s prairie-blue eyes, I figured that Mr. Bandler needed a dose of what Mr. Henry’s place could offer. I walked him through the door and across the splinter-board sidewalk to where I could draw a proper map in the dry dust that then formed Stratford’s Main Street.
Bandler had been gone an hour when Arlen came back to the office. I told him what he’d missed by way of Esau’s story, and when I finished by saying Esau should be renewing his soul at Mr. Henry’s by now, Arlen bet me we hadn’t seen the last of Esau Bandler. I remember joking about how maybe I’d sent him to the wrong kind of house; since maybe his was the wife who’d joined the convent. Arlen said no, but not joking back. A wife running from Esau wouldn’t join a convent because living with Esau himself would be closer to the wrath of God than most women could ever abide.
If it wasn’t the next day, then it must have been the day after. One of Mr. Henry’s women rode in to tell us there’d been trouble and asked if Arlen could come back to the ranch with her. I told Arlen to stay – I’d take this one. That’s when the woman broke down enough to tell us that Mr. Henry had been shot dead and they wanted both him and Esau Bandler to have a proper burial in the Stratford Cemetery. No blown-away grave for their Mr. Henry.
Ordinarily either Arlen or I tried to stay within shooting distance of Main Street, but the day Mr. Henry died, we left the cowpokes and the card sharks to fend for themselves while we rode the sixteen miles to Mr. Henry’s place.
It was one of those unforgiving hot, dry days with too much sun and too little shade. I remember thinking, as we bowed to pass through the open doorway into Mr. Henry’s personal quarters, just how low Esau Bandler must have had to stoop to gain access. It was a sparse room, with two of its sod-caked walls canted to one side. The remaining walls stood relatively straight, being propped up by additional structures that were added over the years: a kitchen wing and a large space where the women slept around the perimeter, while leaving an open area in the center. The complex of rooms smelled heavily of burnt buffalo dung, which the women scoured from the plains in summer and stockpiled in winter. Mr. Henry’s two windows were covered with an oiled paper that contributed to the smoky air of mystery within his private space.
He was dead, all right. Shot neat and clean through the chest. Right beside him lay Esau Bandler, who had turned the gun on himself after firing it into the heart of Mr. Henry. There wasn’t much for me to do, nor for Arlen either. Mr. Henry’s women all told the same story and they had already bathed and dressed both bodies in what looked to be matching black suits. Only thing left was to bury the pair.
I helped Arlen load the two of them into his burial wagon, and since the women had already said whatever words they’d wanted over Mr. Henry, I rode alongside them to the cemetery and then returned to see if the longhorns had left the town in a standing condition.
Fortunately it worked out to be a quiet afternoon. I sat by the window in my office and meditated on how little I actually knew about Mr. Henry. Stratford had grown dramatically in the past two years, but looking out on the facades along Main Street, I saw that the real nature of the buildings behind them was barely disguised by the gaudy signs designed to draw in the miscellany who passed our way. If even the buildings had something to hide, then why not Mr. Henry? At first it occurred to me that Esau Bandler might have proposed something unacceptable to one of the women. Maybe he enjoyed inflicting pain. He didn’t look like a man who readily accepted no for an answer. But to kill for a yes? That didn’t explain why he shot Mr. Henry.
Maybe those two had some unfinished business left over from the battlefield. God knows I had experienced a few tense moments myself, in the fear that some newcomer to town might remember seeing me at the shooting end of a Confederate rifle. I tossed this off as unlikely; neither of them talked enough to confirm any suspicions on that score.
A religious problem? Perhaps Mr. Henry belonged to that religious sect that felt themselves entitled to marry all those women at his ranch. It wouldn’t be the first time some counterbelieving zealot like Esau Bandler decided to save womankind from a life of multiple wifehood.
Where in hell was Arlen? I sank back in my chair and nodded to the passing gamblers, with their finely groomed handlebar mustaches, cultivated to camouflage lips that might quiver while bluffing at the table. A pair of prospectors passed, wearing full beards: those two should be so lucky as to have something to hide.
By the time Arlen had finished the undertaking half of his job and come back to the deputy half, I’d run through a half-dozen other whys and wherefores on Esau Bandler that I wanted to try on him.
But all Arlen wanted was a drink.
He came through the door with a bundle under his arm, threw it onto the chair by the window, and waited while I unlocked my drawer and poured him a whiskey. Alcohol does funny things to a man who’s been an abuser but hasn’t tasted it for years. Arlen sank like a two-day drunk.
“I probably never told you this before,” he said, “but I had a wife once. She was a good woman, strong and fine and courageous. She made a better man than I did, and one day after I’d drunk half a gallon of cheap sugar rye, I got on a horse and rode until I hit the Kansas border. I hardly ever think of her anymore.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, Arlen,” I said. “I’m sure there are lots of men out there who have left a woman behind. Most of them manage to find someone else.” I wanted Arlen to feel good enough to talk but not so good that he couldn’t. I poured him a second glass of whiskey and capped the bottle. “What about Mr. Henry, Arlen?”
Arlen tossed down his second helping and pushed the empty back to my side of the table. “Something else I probably never told you is that I rustle the clothes off dead bodies.”