It Begins
Mid-August 1876
As a favor to Dr. Shaw, Sebastian Kanady sampled the groundwater feed to Railtown whenever he had time away from his newspaper, The Courier. Railtown, a shantytown north of Wanee, Illinois, was a scramble of alleys that relied on Walker Creek for its water. At the northern edge of the community, a weathered windmill ran a waterwheel that raised the creek from a holding pond into a race.
The race emptied into a wooden tub mid-town where the wives of the miners, boilermakers, and wagonmakers met daily, gossiping, and sharing recipes while filling their buckets for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. And according to Dr. Shaw, infecting each other with skin diseases. Kanady posted signs wherever he sampled advising all users to boil their water until the results of water tests were known.
In a normal year, the creek would be ten feet wide and several feet deep with water lapping the banks. But this was no normal year. It hadn’t rained in Wanee since early June, leaving the creek narrowed with eddies of blue-green growth where fresh water had once flowed.
This day, Kanady was mapping a stream feeding Walker Creek from the north, a hand-drawn map in hand and a pencil clenched between his teeth. When the stream he followed split into two creeks a quarter mile up from the dam, he stayed to the right, having mapped, and taken water samples on the left feeders earlier in the afternoon. An eighth mile later, the creek he walked lazed around a bend that sent it northeast as far as the eye could see on the western Illinois plain. Far indeed.
He checked over his right shoulder, taking a directional sighting on the railroad windmill and water towers of Wanee shimmering in the distance. Black derby in his free hand, he wiped his sweating brow then returned to his hike, his hat well back on the crown of his dark-haired head. Another few feet on, he came upon foot and horseshoe tracks paralleling the stream. The footprints stumbled along, one print in the water, the other in a tumble of dust on the bank.
Kanady slurped from a canteen worn across his chest bandolero style, a trick he learned during the War. As a breeze blew through the tangle of narrow-leafed willow trees draping the stream ahead, the lowering sun lit a body, legs on the bank, head in the water.
Kanady splashed up the stream. A man lay with his right arm extended into the water, his head resting on it as though he napped. Water flowed around his arm, eddied in the cusp of his neck, and lapped his face. His left arm rode his hip down his dry left side.
From the stench of ammonia and sulfur, the man was dead. With a huff, Kanady slapped a mosquito on his neck as he shrugged out of his knapsack. Bugs swarmed in a swirling cloud rising from upstream pond stagnant behind an earthen dam.
He checked the western sky for the time. The constable would ask. The evening star sat low on the horizon; its bright burn dulled by the wind-driven dust of the coming dusk.
Pulling a handkerchief from his right trouser pocket, Kanady tied it over his nose and mouth before kneeling to study the body. Not only the smell, but the buzzing insects and larvae testified that the body had lain in the watershed for more than a day.
He opened the left side of the man’s suit coat with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. According to the label, the man had bought his black coat and matching trousers from the Marshal Fields store in Chicago. Kanady rubbed the fabric between his fingers. The gabardine felt as new as the bullet hole over the dead man’s heart.
Avoiding the blood stain, Kanady searched the pockets of the man’s coat for identification. The two vertical pinholes found in the left breast of the dead man’s suit coat weren’t a surprise given the man’s dress. Kanady had run into the man’s sort while in his travels to the west. Rail inspectors, union organizers, all sorts of men wore badges these days. And lawmen.
Kanady calculated the odds that the dead man, if a lawman, had tracked him to Wanee. Long was his summation of the odds, but not out of the realm of possibility. A more complete search of his pockets turned up a wooden chip marked as Confederate scrip tucked in the fob pocket of the man’s vest. Kanady toyed with the scrip, waiting for a shadow he’d seen upstream to move.
When it didn’t, he continued his inventory. The man’s boots were in the style some called cowboy, with a slanted heel and rounded toe. When alive, the man had been of average height, average weight, and had his brown hair trimmed by a barber. A muddy hole at the dead man’s feet and the lay of the body telegraphed that he had spun and fallen where he stood.
Guided by the body’s odor, like bayou shrimp gone off, Kanady weighed whether to move the dead man to the bank of the creek or leave him undisturbed. The fact that he had lain in the water long enough to taint it with the disease he carried was a public health consideration. His manner of death was a matter for the constable.
Sitting back on his haunches, Kanady memorized the placement of the man’s arms, legs, and head, knowing the constable would ask. His eyes locked on the man’s wet right wrist. What he saw there stirred memories of rifle fire stripping leaves from trees, leaving a thicket of naked trunks in its wake. Kanady fiddled with the cuff on his left wrist until the thunderous concussion faded from his mind.
He dusted his hands on his tan canvas pants, eyeing a windbreak of trees that protected a field beyond. The shot had come from that direction. The dead man had been shorter than him by an estimated four inches. Kanady stood and triangulated the shot from the height of his ears to a buckeye bush growing a few feet in front of the windbreak. He strolled toward it, rolling the scrip between his fingers, checking the ground at his feet for any clues to the shooter.
He found none but did find wagon tracks in the shadow of the towering, thick-trunked walnut trees. Without rain to wash them away or wind to disperse them, the dusty impressions could have been a day or days old. The wagon had turned right at the windbreak and onto the farm lane, a shod horse tied behind it. Kanady checked among the cows for a horse, seeing none, he figured the shod horse belonged to the dead man. Right or wrong.
At the buckeye bush, Kanady picked up the straightest stick he could find and held it to his shoulder like a rifle. He fired a fake shot, seeing the man spinning where he stood before falling into the stream. Kanady rubbed his right foot in an arc through fallen leaves, surfacing a spent .44-.40 cartridge, common to Winchester 73s and Frontier Colts. He dropped the casing in a trouser pocket. It clinked on the scrip.
A black hat bobbing in an eddy under a willow tree on the opposite side of the stream caught his eye. He crossed to, then waded across the stream. The grosgrain exterior band came with the hat. The interior band, though soggy, was stiff with salt from the man’s sweat, and it, like the body, smelled of rotten prawns. There was no calling card, but the dead man had jammed a folded flyer into the hat’s crown. Kanady slipped the quartered handbill into the same pocket as his other finds. He would deal with the lot later.
The man had been shot in the westernmost corner of Sullivan’s Dairy, owned by Wanee’s Head Trustee; some would say mayor. Walking down the opposite bank toward the body, he came upon two sets of footsteps amongst those left by Sullivan’s fat black and white cows wandering up and downstream as they grazed by and quenched their thirst in the stream.
One of the men had worn boots, the other shoes. The two had started a dirt slide when they crested the bank to follow the stream north. Whoever they were, they had left the body where it fell. Wise enough given the odor.
Kanady waded back to the body and his backpack, convinced he had seen what he could. He pulled out a pre-numbered canning jar and scooped in water, marked the number on the map and placed the sample in his knapsack next to the samples taken earlier in the day. He balanced his backpack against a bare brush to keep the samples upright, then flattened his map on the hard bank and sketched the twists, turns, and holding ponds along the stream. He reared back, then added a stickman where he found the body.
A shadow moved on the opposite bank. With the sun low and the breeze up, it could have been a man or nothing. He glanced at the body, then quickly back. The shadow was gone. He put his arms through the knapsack’s straps, heaved it onto his back and headed downstream to the northeastern edge of Railtown, a bit over two miles away.
The undertaker had located his business where the prevailing westerlies blew the stench of death out over fallow fields. Kanady’s cowboy boots made a hollow sound on the wooden plank porch of the undertaker’s whitewashed clapboard house. When his knock on the unpainted door went unanswered, he rounded the house and crossed to a red board and batten outbuilding. Hay bales stacked six feet high on all sides of the structure were meant to stop the smell of dead flesh seeping into the yard. Kanady slid the door open.
Duncan Cray, a red-headed and fair-complected man in his thirties, looked up from his worktable with a smile. “I don’t have any news for The Courier today, which is good news indeed. Since I have no undertaking to do, I am working on an experiment for Dr. Shaw. He is now interested in flies, wishing to know what local flies come and when on bodies left out in the weather. I am using a chunk of rotting pork on a theory of mine that men are more like pigs than we wish to believe.”
“And the purpose of this experiment?”
Cray shrugged. “Doc didn’t say, but I assume the results will better inform the time of death.” He adjusted his brown waxed canvas apron over his slender hips. “As we know from the War, bluebottle flies are quick to move in. You may have experienced what I describe at Chickamauga.”
The year’s younger Kanady nodded, seeing bodies iridescent with the dance of blue flies. “I’ll want to know more about your research once completed. But for now, I need your undertaking services. I found a dead man in a feeder stream. We need to gather him up and bury him — now.”
Kanady rummaged in the pocket of his canvas pants and produced a silver piece. “For your services. Doc will want to do one of his postmortems, so keep this under your hat until he is satisfied. If you require a compelling reason to keep this death quiet, the dead man smells of the bayou. I’ll take you to the body if you can break away from your study? Your findings may help us figure out how long he has been lying in the water; my guess is over two days.”
“Any identification?”
“The smell stopped me from searching the body. I took the sample and came right here.”
Cray nodded. “Wise. Doc will want to know about your find as soon as you get back to town. If you’re right about the smell, and it is cholera, disease may sweep through Railtown to Wanee in days.”
Cray closed the barn door, slid a nail in the lock, then stepped behind the outbuilding and harnessed a gray mare to his buckboard collection wagon. He raised the canvas cover on the raw board freightwagon when loaded to hide the dead from view. Kanady set his knapsack in the wagon bed and joined Cray on the plank seat for the ride, one booted foot resting on the buckboard.
Upon reaching the body, Cray handed Kanady a pair of long leather gloves and a leather apron then pulled a kerchief up over his nose, motioning Kanady to do the same. Cray unfolded a canvas, positioning it so that they could roll the body onto it with the least amount of contact, then overlapped the material and stitched it closed. One man at the foot and the other at the head, they swung the body aboard the wagon with a thud.
As they settled on the buckboard seat, Cray studied Kanady. “You didn’t tell me the dead man had a bullet hole in him or that he was a lawman. Two pinholes in his suit coat, and I felt a thin indentation around his right thigh above his knee from his holster tie-down. Whoever killed him waited until he was good and dead to steal his guns. That brand on his right wrist, anything you recognize?”
“Heard that some Reb bushwhackers had brands. Know that.”
“I’ll leave it to you to decide when to break the news to Constable Murphy. He’ll want to get the details from the horse’s mouth.”
Kanady shrugged. Fiddling with the cartridge in his pants pocket, he made plans to burn the flyer in the yard behind The Courier and scuff the ashes in with the loose dirt by the alley gate. He would drop the Confederate scrip into a tin he kept in his rooms over The Courier. He thought to hand the cartridge to Cray or Constable Murphy, that’s where his lies caught up with him. The first thing the constable would ask is where he found it. And the only way he could have found it was through a thorough search.
“What?” Cray asked.
“Hungry is all. I haven’t eaten all day.”
