The Blue Religion

Burying Mr. Henry by Polly Nelson

They lifted my rag-wrapped body off the top of a munitions wagon and left me in Stratford County, Kansas, where I remained unconscious for the better part of two months due to infection, pain, and an excess of laudanum. Eventually the leg wound healed over and my addiction came under control. My aversion to the battleground remained, however; so when Stratford asked me to serve as part-time marshal, I was quick to raise my saber-scarred right hand. Thus ended my part in the great War Between the States.

I was still young in 1864 and I believed that, except for a slight limp, the personal effects of the war were over for me. But as most career lawmen will tell you, at least once in a lifetime some case will come along that offers you an education, and if you’re lucky it will touch your head, your heart, and your gut in equal measure. For me, such a case involved the burying of Mr. Henry: an event that came to represent everything I’d observed about the War Between the States and about the myriad odd effects it had on those who survived it – especially those made less by their exposure to that war. Many wished they could simply forget, transform, and become somebody else. A few of us succeeded, even if only for a short while.

I had never considered becoming a lawman, but it turned out to be a good decision for me. The only talents I’d developed during the war were a knack with a Colt firearm and – I like to think – a level head when it concerned my fellow man. Before the conflict began, my family had paid my ticket into the territory, so that I could cast a vote on whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Dear God, that the issue of slavery could have been resolved so simply. Anyway, coming out of my somnolence that painful November, I realized that I could hardly face the thought of returning to clerk in my father’s office.

I considered the possibilities, and it took me no more than a few days, maybe a week or two, before I decided that I could probably pass as a local. What might have been a temporary job as marshal grew into my permanent position. At my retirement in June of 1893, I had served in that capacity for twenty-nine years. The day I started, my constituents numbered just over sixty, but toward the end I had close to twelve thousand people under my jurisdiction.

In 1864, Stratford was pretty much unsettled, like any of a dozen other cow towns growing up around an assortment of settlers who came from as close as Illinois and as far as the steppes of Russia. Most of the older men had fought along the Missouri line, and most of them wanted never to see fighting again.

It looked to be an easy job, even during cattle-drive season, when the town might swell from sixty to a hundred fifty. I had an affinity for those young boys driving cattle for weeks on end. Many of them had no idea how to settle down because, even as young as twelve and thirteen, they had been forced to take up arms for one side or the other and fight for survival. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t recover from the experience as it was that they’d had no chance to experience a life worth recovering. And so they had to be protected, lest they stumble inadvertently beyond gambling and minor crimes into a shoot-out at dawn where death didn’t matter; they’d already seen too much of it. For them, the world remained a great lawless universe, and my job was to give them rules to live by – at least within the Stratford city limits.

That uneasy balance shifted when the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through about a half-mile west of downtown. Even before those tracks could be tested, the permanent population of Stratford swelled to three thousand people. In addition to the cowboys and the settlers, I began to deal with railroad workers, buffalo hunters, Mexican vaqueros, former slaves hoping to stake a claim for freedom, ex-soldiers still battling over abolition, and even some wealthy Easterners looking for adventure, come to see what all the hoopla was about. I had to deputize Arlen Dexter to help me keep order.

Arlen played a very important role in the Mr. Henry case: first, because he was my part-time deputy, and second, because he was Stratford’s fulltime undertaker. We never spoke about it, but I’m pretty sure Arlen saw no service in the war. Plenty of red-blooded Americans lost themselves in the territories until the war was over, and – some may not recall – plenty of red-skinned Americans found themselves on the front lines, defending both sides of the slavery issue. For the most part, the nondrinking community members avoided the topic of who fought where, when, and why, lest bloody Kansas should begin to hemorrhage again.

I never really cared much for Arlen. He had a limited sense of humor and was way too fussy about clothing for my sensibility. He had a tendency to evaluate people based on the way they looked. And if a handsome young cowboy died, Arlen also had a tendency to show up a few weeks later in the same clothes that the cowboy had expired in. Still, while he might not have been the most scrupulous undertaker, he was a very good deputy. He was always prompt to the scene when there’d been a shoot-out. After all, it was in his best interest both as deputy and as undertaker to claim the victims. Somebody had to arrange for those burials.

If no kin came forward, the town would pay pauper’s fees, but Arlen was diligent about finding family, even months after the last rites. More times than not, Arlen would shame some relative into paying for the coffin and decent black suit that the undertaker said he’d provided the corpse, claiming that, come Judgment Day, every rising soul had a right to look decently saved. This was still in the days when the soul’s salvation meant something to those who considered the West to be God’s gift to the white man.

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.

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.”

I knew about that, of course, but at the time it seemed to be one of his lesser sins. It certainly wasn’t a topic I wanted him to elaborate on at that moment. “Arlen, what about Mr. Henry?”

Arlen indicated his empty glass and waited until I poured him another. I held on to the glass until he shrugged and picked up his bundle. Finishing off this third drink, Arlen opened the bundle and laid four pieces of fabric out neatly across the floor. “Maybe you didn’t have time to notice the fine jacket and the fine pair of trousers Mr. Henry was laid out in. And this other set here, equally fine, came from the corpse of Mr. Esau Bandler. I mean, what undertaker in his right mind could cover clothes as fine as these with ashes and dust and corn-poor Kansas sod?”

“I guess not you, Arlen.”

“I guess not me, but I certainly will next time.” Arlen indicated his glass again.

After no more than a second’s thought, I set a container for myself next to his. “I’m losing patience, Arlen. Pretty soon you’re going to kill another half-gallon of whiskey. Tell me what you know about Mr. Henry and Esau Bandler.”

“I know I should have planted those two, side by side and fully dressed, just the way Mr. Henry’s women and the good Lord intended it.”

“Why, Arlen?” At the sight of Arlen’s puckered face, I poured myself another round.

“Because then tonight I wouldn’t have to go to sleep knowing that Mr. Henry, without his clothes on, was Esau Bandler’s wife.”

I just sat there as Arlen picked up my bottle and put it under his left arm. “You mean…”

“I mean that when Mr. Bandler’s children died, Mr. Bandler’s wife decided that she had had enough of what mankind and nature had thrown her way, and she set out to become someone else.”

I had nothing to say.

“You know what I’ve learned from this?” Arlen reached across his chest and unhooked that deputy-marshal star from the side of his vest. “I’ve learned that a person’s secrets – a person’s past – ought to be respected whether living or dead.”

I remember feeling the effects of the liquor – similar to those I’d known when tapering off from the laudanum. I don’t know if I told him I agreed. I don’t even know if it took me a few moments to realize my agreement. The next thing I became aware of was watching Arlen Dexter walk out the door, across the boardwalk, and out into the street, where he unhitched the horse from his burying wagon, cinched up a saddle, and then rode slowly out into the world to become somebody else.

I don’t know why Arlen and I were shocked. It was no secret that a man could ride throughout the open plains and become anything he had the mind and the courage to be. Many of us had passed out of the nightmare of the War Between the States covering our wounds in whatever fashion might ensure survival. Who was I to cast that first stone? After all, would those kindly soldiers dressed in abolitionist blue have dropped me off behind Union lines if I’d been dressed in the Confederate brown of my own affiliation?

I don’t know how long it took me. Days, maybe. No more than a week or two. But I was always thinking. Finally, after I considered all the possibilities, it seemed to me that if the men could do it, why not the women? I do know that I got up one morning shortly thereafter, saddled up my own horse, and rode out to Mr. Henry’s place to see how I might help them begin anew. It turned out to be a good decision for me.