Dead Woman's Crossing
a ghost story
When
the moon was a witchboat small and tossing
in
the fade-time where night can see day as her twin,
down
the red-dirt highway to Dead Woman's Crossing
came
the carnival rolling on a dustbowl wind.
They
spindled the midway, freakshow and toss-ring,
before
they spiked twenty ripe melons with gin
for
Harvest Home in the dark of September,
so
the marks could do what they don't remember.
Then
night seemed to give a coyote-moon cough
that
shook her gold earrings, and Katie showed up
with
her deathrattle tale of carnival past,
how
she, the schoolmarm, met Fannie the Dove
how
love like a cloudburst caught her at last
on
a September midway, bent moon above;
a
granite fist traded for a velvet hand
and
a five dollar ring for her wedding band.
The
Dove blew out of Texas like a broken
branch
running
from Jesus, Daddy Jim and the law.
When
she hit Mrs. Hamm's Saloon and Hog Ranch
she
knew she had almost no time left at all
but
still more than Katie, hellbound for a ditch,
face
pale through the water where the black crows caw.
Thru
plugged ears the Dove hears the walking night moan,
thru
shut eyes sees the bridge where Katie talks on.
The
heat lightning flickered as midnight slammed shut,
Kate woke from a nightmare where she was the wheat
waiting
dry in the dirt for the thresher's cut,
for the whiskey hard times in tangled sheets,
for one
scar too many from a White Owl blunt
while
the tumbleweeds wrote her name in the street.
She
put on her bonnet, she packed up her grip,
met
the Dove smiling with her child on her hip.
They
posed stiff as strangers on the early train,
the
nights and the men left behind in the dust.
They
got off at Clinton in the quick July rain
with
the last of the wheat burning red as rust.
When
the moon was a witchboat sailing the plains,
as
diamond eyes smiled into lily-white trust
in
the carnival night, storm in the willow,
the
teacher slept sweet with her red-haired pillow.
The
next day at midday, two girls and a child
left
town in a buggy to laugh and laugh last.
Fannie
screamed like a bobcat, the wind went wild;
Katie's man rode up through the tall sawgrass.
The
Dove saw the buck-knife draw a cutthroat grin;
all
she knew was to make the scared horse run fast
from
the man who had Katie, all his, all dead,
while the Dove had poison and a red dirt bed.
When
the moon's a hook, a witchboat, a sickle
when
the last of the wheat stands brown in the ground
while
Orion runs after Hecate the fickle
above
the dwindling lights of a dying town,
the
Dove does her dance to a penny whistle
and
a dead woman calls her child with that sound.
Now every fall when the carnival tops the ridge
it
rolls without stopping past Dead Woman's bridge.
~September 2014
This poem is written in the ottava rima form, with lines of eleven syllables. Or tries to be. It has been edited extensively.
Process
notes: Dead Woman's Crossing, also called Dead Women Crossing, refers
both to a small community by that name in Custer County, Oklahoma near
Weatherford, and the nearby bridge over Deer Creek where the decapitated
body of schoolteacher Katie De Witt James was found in August of 1905.
The events (other than my imaginary carnival) described in this story
are factual up to a point, with completely fictitious biographical
details and explanations of my own invention. You can get the details
(as far as actually known) of the unsolved murder of Katie De Witt James
and the poisoning of Fannie Norton here in this
wikipedia article.
'Grip' is an archaic word for a small traveling bag. Prostitutes of that era were often referred to euphemistically as '
Soiled Doves,' a term also used to describe women who had lost their virginity, were
free with their sexual favors or considered loose morally.
White Owl cigars, including
'blunts' are
an inexpensive brand that has been made in the South since 1887. They
have about the same place in cigar hierarchy as Swisher Sweets (once my
own occasional brand.)
Fannie Norton did use the name
'Mrs Ham,' but the eponymous Saloon and Hog Ranch is a flight of my
fancy taken loosely from the life of Calamity Jane, who in her youth is
reputed to have been a working girl at the infamous
Fort Laramie Three Mile Hog Ranch,
a 19th century 'military brothel' and stage coach stop near Fort
Laramie, Wyoming, also said, like Dead Woman's Crossing, to be haunted.
Images: Circus arriving in Seligman, Missouri, late 19th century
Public domain
via wikimedia commons
Dead Woman's Crossing, by Nathan Gunter on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons license
