What he was describing sounded more like theBarbary Coast than southern Illinois, but I nodded anyhow.
"And maybe you go twenty years without a flood. If one comes, you build everything back up afterwards. The river needs the town, and the town needs the river. A month or two later, even the smell is gone."
"The smell?"
Clarkgave me a prolonged smirk-sneer. “I have pondered the question of why a river will smell fresh and clean when it runs between its banks and will leave behind such a stink after it floods. I believe the answer is that a flood will turn a river upside down and bring the bottom to the top. When it runs off, you will have river-bottom everywhere you look. Not mud—mud is just dirt that got too wet for its own good. River-bottom is what is supposed to be kept out of sight. River-bottom is the ugly part of nature, where everything gets broken down and turned into something else. It has a lot of death in it, and death carries a powerful charge of smell. Death is a lively business, when you think about it."
"Must be hard to clean up."
"That stuff willcling. I figure Edgerton rebuilt itself three times between the 1870s and the start of the century. Every time they built it up, it got bigger. There was a full-time circus in a full-time fairground, you could find two saloons and two gambling houses on every block. It had that same old mentality, you know what I'm saying?"
"Wide open," I said.
"But you had your banks and your businesses, and you had your fine ladies along with your fancy ladies." He sneered at me with what looked like pride. “It was at that time your people arrived in Edgerton, you know. The famous Dunstan brothers, Omar and Sylvan. 1874."
"Omar and Sylvan?" I said. “I never heard of them before."
"The Dunstan brothers rode into town on the back of a hay wagon and jumped off with a couple of valises and two hundred dollars in gold coins. Don't let that hay wagon give you the wrong idea. The Dunstans had a big-city style about them. Smart, good-looking gentlemen who spoke the King's English, knew the best manners, and dressed in the latest fashions. After they found temporary lodgings, Omar and Sylvan walked into a gambling establishment and tripled their grubstake in a single afternoon."
"They were gamblers?"
"Their livelihoods were in commerce and finance. Nobody ever found out what they did before they came to Edgerton, though there was considerable talk. Some said they'd been bounty hunters. One or both of them was rumored to have been in prison."
"What did they do when they got here?"
"Everything they touched prospered. When the floods came along, Omar and Sylvan wound up better off than before. Bought properties cheap off those who left town. Bought land where they figured the town would grow. Fifteen, twenty years later, they held the leases on a lot of important buildings. Naturally, they were as catnip to the ladies."
Clarkloved the story of the Dunstan brothers. The arc from the hay wagon to wealth thrilled his imagination. By now, he all but considered Omar and Sylvan blood relatives whose achievements added to his own merit.
“I bet they were," I said.
"Handsome as the Devil, they say." The glorious sneer declared that despite the ravages of age, Clark Rutledge knew himself to be no less handsome. "You couldn't tell 'em apart. They say, from time to time their high spirits led them to give the ladies the impression that they were having a good time with someone other than they thought, if you catch my drift. You can put your money on one thing, they were let into a lot of nice houses when the Mister wasn't at home." He hesitated for a moment. "Howard fell pretty close to the same tree, from what I hear. And so did a couple of the other sons, but they either passed away early in life or ran off."
"There must have been a lot of resentment."
Clarkhesitated again. "You know how it goes. Get too high, they slap you down. Omar married a woman from New Orleans name of Ethel Bridges and settled down a bit. Still and all, one morning he left the house we're sitting in right now, and someone shot him deadwhile he waswalking to his carriage. Sylvan heard the shot and got outside just in time to see a man on horseback galloping down the street. That man was never brought to justice. Don't you think he could have been identified? If it was supposed to go that way?"
I nodded.
"Sylvan married his brother's widow, built a house outside of town, and moved in. He and Ethel had some kids, three, four, nobody knows for sure."
"There must be records."
"You're forgetting thetime, and you're forgetting theplace. Those babies were all born at home, and the Dunstans didn't care to use midwives or medical men."
"Why not?"
Clarkmomentarily lost his sneer, but his natural garrulousness won out over discretion. "A long time ago, an old-timer told me the Dunstan brothers never knew if their babies were going to come out deformed in some way medicine never heard about. Like with a huge big head and a body no bigger than a pin. Or a thing with gills under its ears and no arms and legs. Or worse than that. Nearly all those babies died, he told me, but the few that lived were kept in the attic."
He glanced at me. “If you ask me, one or two of Ethel's babies took a wrong turn in the oven, and Howard, the oldest child in the family, overheard more than was good for a little boy. Which could explain why the man became so wild and squandered his money. Howard did considerable damage, all in all. Toward the end, I believe he was plumb out of his head. You'd have to say he was in a kind of dream world."
I thought all of it had come from the dream world, specifically the dream world invented in the rumor mills of a small town. "Which brother was my great-great-grandfather? If Howard was the oldest child of the next generation, I guess it was Omar."
"What I heard was, the brothers shared everything. I don't think they knew which one was Howard's father."
I said something, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
Clarkdisplayed a sneer of magnificent worldliness. “I'd pick Sylvan. Omar was the steadier of the two. Sylvan kept on romancing the ladies even when he was living in that house with Ethel and their kids. When Howard came of age, he acted the same way, except more so. Which counted against him, because by that time Edgerton wasn't the way it used to be."
“It got respectable," I said.
"What happened was, Howard needed an Omar of his own, and because he didn't have one, he ran to seed. The Hatches and theMiltons took advantage of his weakness."
The stairs creaked, andClark straightened up in his chair. "Best not go into this around Nettie."
• 29
• Registering suspicion at a change in the daily pattern, Nettie lowered her eyebrows atClark. "Surprised to see you up so soon." She turned her attention to me. "How was your night's sleep?"
"Good enough."
"From what I heard, you thought the Devil was after you. All of us are so worried, it's a wonder we can sleep at all." Nettie billowed to the stove and turned on the gas flame beneath a cast-iron skillet. She took a carton of eggs and a package of bacon out of the refrigerator, slapped the bacon into the skillet, and, like a chef, neatly broke five eggs into a glass bowl with her right hand. "My feeling is that we are going to see some improvement in your mother."