The Flaming Corsage

Edward Goes to the Slaughterhouse, June 11, 1910

IT WAS ALREADY late afternoon when Edward closed Katrina’s diary. He hitched up the horse he called Galway Kate to his demil-andau and rode out to the Cudahy slaughterhouse in West Albany. Cattle were being led out of a storage pen and up an inclined wooden runway onto the killing floor of the huge wooden shed, where Edward told a foreman he had urgent business with Clubber. Clubber, the foreman said, worked as a splitter, and Edward found him, heavy cleaver in hand, halving the backbone of a dead cow. Edward called his name, and Clubber turned and stared at Edward, then finished cutting the beast and handed the cleaver to a man beside him to cope with the next carcass. Clubber spoke to the foreman, then limped toward Edward, who was trying not to retch from the stench of the gutted animals. Clubber rinsed blood off his hands with a hose, and dried them on his trousers, which were full of bloodstains.

“Hey, Ed, what got you out here? I ain’t ever seen you out here.”

“You got a few minutes, Clubber?”

“I can take ten minutes.”

They walked out of the shed to Edward’s carriage.

“We’ll go have a drink.”

“Quick one’s all,” said Clubber.

“Get up here.”

They rode to George Karl’s saloon and Edward bought the beer. Clubber pinched himself a piece of beef on an onion slice from the lunch counter and sat at a table.

“Putting the bull’s head on Giles’s porch, what exactly happened? Tell it again, Clubber.”

“I told it twenty hundred times.”

“Once more.”

“Cully Watson says help him with the joke. Kill the bull, cut its head, leave it down at Giles’s, hell of a joke, you know it, he’ll wake up and say, ‘Hey, that’s a dead bull on my porch. Son bitch,’ he’ll say, ‘who’d do a thing like that?’ ”

“What did Cully do on the porch? Anything you remember?”

“Lifted the head with me.”

“What else?”

“Said where to set it.”

“Did he have a piece of paper?”

“Paper?”

“With some lines of verse on it.”

“What verse?”

“Any verse at all. Whatever you remember.”

“Verse.”

“What about the paper?”

Clubber drank some beer and searched for the paper.

“I guess he coulda had a paper.”

“What’d he do with it?”

“I don’t know. Put it in the mailbox?”

“That’s right. He put it in Giles’s mailbox.”

“Yeah. That’s it. It was part of the joke. Like a valentine, Cully said. He’ll get a valentine in the morning. I forgot that.”

Edward handed Clubber the verse he’d copied from Katrina’s diary. “Here’s what that valentine said.”

Clubber’s eyes moved across and down the page, up and across, down again, up and across again.

“What’s this stuff say?”

“It says in a roundabout way that Giles’s wife is down in New York having sex with two people, a man and a woman. The man is meant to be me. The scribe. That’s what it means.”

“That ain’t true.”

“You’re right. It’s all wrong.”

“No, that ain’t true on the valentine. It was a joke.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“It was a joke, I’m telling you. Cully said it was a joke. We laughed like hell at the joke. Just a goddamn dead-bull joke, Ed. That’s all it was, a dead-bull joke.”

“When Giles read it he went to New York and murdered his wife, shot me, then blew his own brains out through the top of his head. Nobody thought that was a joke.”

“That couldn’ta been why he done it, not the joke. It ain’t possible, Ed. He gotta had somethin’ else on his mind.”

“It was this, Clubber, it was this.”

Clubber suffered Edward’s words as a succession of blows, a whipped cur cowering from an affectionate hand. He pulled in his shoulder and cried, making no noise. He tried to remove the evidence of such unmanly behavior by rubbing the water off his face, wiping his fingers on his pants. When he did it again, he spread pink streaks of the damp cow blood on his cheeks and around his eyes.

“Couldn’t be. It ain’t true.”

“Wasn’t a joke, Clubber.”

“I wouldn’ta hurt Giles or ’specially you. You know that, Ed.”

“I know that, Clubber.”

Clubber made a noise in his throat, an involuntary blubbering, and ducked his head below table level so none could see. He coughed, a fake cough, and smeared his face in new places with the pink cow blood.

“Who put Cully up to it?”

Clubber only stared.

“Was it Maginn?”

“Maginn?”

After Edward revealed to Clubber the valentine’s fatal message, Clubber hid himself in the darkest corner of the attic of his two-story home on Van Woert Street. His sister Lydie saw his lunch pail and knew he’d come home but could not find him. When Clubber heard her step on the attic stairs he climbed out the window and leaped off the roof to kill himself. He broke an arm and an ankle, and sprained a shoulder, all of which were put in casts or wrapped by Doc Keegan at St. Peter’s Hospital. Lydie took her brother home from the hospital and when she went to sleep he crawled back up to the attic and threw himself off the same roof, breaking a leg and a hip, and earning his ticket to the asylum at Poughkeepsie.