The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation

By Dennis McAuliffe and David Grann

For those seeking a true family story of the Osage Reign of Terror portrayed in Killers of the Flower Moon

Journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr. grew up believing that his Osage Indian grandmother, Sybil Bolton, had died an early death in 1925 from kidney disease. It was only by chance that he learned the real cause was a gunshot wound, and that her murder may well have been engineered by his own grandfather.

As McAuliffe peeled away layers of suppressed history, he learned that Sybil was a victim of the systematic killing spree in the 1920s—when white men descended upon the oil-rich Osage reservation to court, marry, and murder Native women to gain control of their money.

The Deaths of Sybil Bolton is part murder mystery, part family memoir, and part spiritual journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641604192

Book preview

conscience.

PROLOGUE

Sometimes when I look at my infant son, I see in him America in miniature. His tiny body holds an immense history, not only of the young, immigrant nation that grew to greatness but also of the ancient, indigenous people for whom the American Dream was a nightmare, and still is.

To the eyes of his father, he is a beautiful baby. But not all that long ago, the U.S. government would have referred to him in official documents—as it did to one of his great-grandfathers—as a half-breed, breed for short. Members of polite, even religious, society would have called him a savage. Now, in keeping with the socially correct sensitivity toward ethnic groups (foreigners, they used to be called)—in the same spirit that substituted the words African American and Black for Negro, and other names—my son and I are considered mixed-blood Native Americans.

Names have changed, but not attitudes toward Indians. Like his father, my son will one day abruptly halt conversations by saying he is an Osage Indian. He will hear inherently racist remarks that his strawberry-blond hair and fair skin do not look Indian, but perhaps that accounts for his brown eyes. He will be asked what degree of Indian blood he has. I will teach him to answer the way I do now (I didn’t always): don’t ask me how much Indian blood I have until you ask a Black what his blood quantum is. My appearance may not be Indian, but my heart is—and it is what is in your heart, not what pumps through it, that makes you an Indian.

My son’s heritage has placed upon small shoulders a burden so great that a mighty nation has been unable to carry it, or chooses not to. He must find a way to balance the two sides of himself, to find a place in his life for the Indian part of him, which continues to have no place, or part, in his society. That is his challenge, and his curse. That is my gift to him.

As much as a father can, I will see to it that my son does not shirk from his responsibility by ignoring his true identity—as I did. If he does, I fear, he will be doomed to repeat the upheaval that shook me, literally, to my roots. That was my grandmother’s gift to me.

My life, and my mother’s, are testament that you cannot ignore who you are, and that the shunned side of you will one day rise up to be recognized. The truth about oneself, I learned painfully, is like one of my son’s new teeth cutting through his flesh as it pushes to the surface: It originates seemingly out of nothing, with which it crafts the material that makes it nearly indestructible; it proceeds to fill a space where, once, a void had been; the experience is excruciating, especially when—suddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhere—it surfaces to correct a lifelong lie. Once it appears, you are never the same again, but you get used to it. While it may be ugly, it is not nearly as ugly as the lie it pierced.

Like all fathers, I will tell my son the history inside him one day. Unlike his father, and his grandmother, he will learn all of it, and sooner rather than later. I was forty-one when I heard the last chapter of what should have been my life’s primer. My mother was sixty-seven when she heard the childhood story she was never told.

The stories I will tell my son will become the words that form his definition, the roots of his identity. In my case, and my mother’s, they led to a redefining and an uprooting that were devastating at my age; at my mother’s age, impossible to describe with merely a word.

I will tell my son about his two grandfathers, who embody the Great American Success Story. He will hear of the courage of his maternal grandfather, Bruno Neumann, who fled the Nazis during World War II. He had committed a crime so heinous in Hitler’s Germany that the SS pursued him all the way to England: he helped Jews escape, but he wasn’t Jewish himself. In London, he read his first book in English, The Forsyte Saga, and decided he would name his first daughter after a character in the book, Fleur. He did so in 1950. By then, he was in America, an economics writer in his adopted language. No doubt swayed by her father’s heroic acts to save Jews, Fleur became Jewish.

And my son will hear about his paternal grandfather, Dennis P. McAuliffe, who achieved the dreams of his Irish-immigrant parents by going to West Point and eventually becoming a three-star U.S. Army general. My father led part of the invasion of Cambodia in 1970. In the mid-seventies, he was commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama during the negotiation and ratification of the treaties that will finally give to Panama ownership of its canal. He was administrator of the Panama Canal Commission when the United States invaded that country during Christmas of 1989.

I had always considered myself the fortunate son of my family, whose fortunes had been defined entirely by the success of my father. I even carry his name. And like most Americans, I had always faced east, toward Europe and my father’s family origins—but away from my mother’s. Now I have had to do an abrupt about-face, turning west to confront the conflicting reality of my mother’s heritage.

She is part of the Great American Horror Story. She is the product—and, I learned, a narrow survivor—of the appalling destruction of American Indians in the death camps that were their reservations. This was a time far more devastating to them than the Indian-cavalry wars that have gotten so much movie play. It was a time far less capable of being rationalized by patriotic rhetoric than the military—and controversial—conflicts my father was involved in. Perhaps that is why this period in our history hardly dances with awareness.

It has been difficult for me, shaped and surrounded all my life by my parents’ love, to accept the realization that, to a greater degree, my destiny was shaped by hatred manifested in the extreme; that the history I carry within me is colored by racial discrimination of the most violent kind—directed against one half of my ancestors by the other half.

It is the Great American Tragedy that I have to tell my son. It is my grandmother’s story, and my mother’s, and mine.

PART ONE

DANCES WITH AWARENESS

CHAPTER ONE

July 2, 1991, was a Tuesday. That evening, I was standing in the kitchen with Fleur, looking at new pictures of our two children—my twelve-year-old stepson, Adam, and Kevin, my only child, five months old.

One photo showed Kevin in a pose I had seen all my life. With his head held heavenward, his hands extended in exclamation, he was looking up at his brother, smiling with his whole body.

Look, I said, he looks like my mother.

This was a stunning observation for someone who had never been any good at recognizing resemblances in anyone. On the other hand, it was the first thing Fleur had said when she opened her eyes, delirious from delivery, and saw this red, wrinkled thing resting on her stomach like a rumpled rag: He looks like your mother. These five months, I had often studied my son with the thought, He does?

We had come as close as any parents to naming a boy after his grandmother. We had picked the same initials, KBM: Kathleen Bolton McAuliffe, Kevin Blair McAuliffe. This way, we joked, we could get all of her monogrammed towels. Over the months, we noticed that he acts like my mother as well—he enjoys expressing himself (in fact, he’s a veritable tottering tower of burble) and is a pleasure to listen to. As for other likenesses, I had looked but saw only one: his joy.

But that night, staring startled at the photo, I could see my mother in his stance, profile, tilt of head, expression, and smile.

Much later, after Fleur had gone to bed, I was sitting on the balcony, drinking beer, and couldn’t shake a sadness growing over me. What if this happy baby lost his mother? How would that change him? I am his father, yes, but fathers of infants are like vice presidents—they take over the lesser functions and fill in when the boss can’t make it. A baby’s mother is his entire world. When Fleur is out of the room, he watches for her. When he’s sick, it’s not me he wants. When I’m holding him, he often stares at her. He turns this way and that, following her with his eyes as she goes about the room. When he sees her leaving the house without him, he cries—sometimes hysterically—until I can find a suitable diversion.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, it hit me—for the first time in my forty-one years—what a tragedy my mother had lived through. She was a baby when her mother died of kidney disease, alone in the house with her infant and only child, dropping dead suddenly, in front of the baby.

That was all I knew about my grandmother, other than that she was an Osage Indian and had attended a private East Coast boarding school—and that she was buried in an ermine coat.

I knew about as much about the Osages. I knew how to pronounce Osage (OH-sage), which put me a leg up on those who say oh-SAH-ga. My mother had told me our Osage ancestor was a chief, but over the years, as I noticed that all the Native Americans I met were descended from chiefs rather than from Indians, I had come to consider my mother’s claim a cliché. I had read somewhere that for a time in France it was chic for aristocratic women, playing savage, to make love to Osages brought over from America for that purpose. (I was never sure, though, if sex was the way to play savage, or the goal of playing it.) When I lived in Germany and dressed in a turtleneck sweater and sports coat, I was often told I looked French. I would smile, wag a finger and say, No, no, the French look like me.

I knew I looked just like a young Osage Indian warrior painted by George Catlin in 1832. I saw a reproduction of the portrait at a guesthouse at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where I was having dinner with my parents one night in 1974. My father, who spotted it between bites, had the same reaction that I was to have looking at Kevin’s picture. Look, he said, in near shock, he looks like Denny. It was like looking in the mirror: although the hair and eye colors were different, and the flesh tone in the painting was slightly more bronze, the Indian and I had the same hairline, forehead, cheeks, mouth, chin, jawline, shape of eyes—and nose. Big is such a little word for the sun of my facial solar system. Many photos of me, especially those taken outdoors, show much of my face in shadow. I had always thought my nose was Irish, but according to this 142-year-old painting, it was Indian. Now I knew whom to thank.

I also knew the Osages had discovered oil on their reservation in Oklahoma. My mother gets quarterly oil-royalty checks from the U.S. government, because she has something called a headright from the Osage tribe. She inherited it from her mother, and the headright will be divided into thirds and passed to her children when she dies. She is on the Osage tribal roll, and she votes—absentee—in tribal elections. Although she had never visited the Osages, she cherishes the monthly Osage newspaper she receives in the mail, and I was to discover that she saved many issues, especially the ones with pictures of Osages who looked like her or members of her family.

I have an ID card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs—a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood—identifying me as a member of the Osage Nation and giving my blood quantum and tribal roll number. I often joked that I was a card-carrying minority. A few years ago, after a particularly long and painful stretch of unemployment, I used the card to try to get a job. I showed it to a company personnel director, hoping it would help me hurdle the obstacle of being a white male competing with minorities and women for employment. I even called the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Osage Agency in Pawhuska, Oklahoma—the address was on the card—and asked someone if it would be too much of a stretch to say I was an American Indian when applying for a job.

You’re on the tribal roll, he said. You’re an Osage Indian, and you have every right to say you’re an Osage Indian. We recognize you as a member of the tribe.

Then he added, much to my delight and delicious anticipation, If you have any trouble with these people, have ’em call us. We’ll be happy to set ’em straight. I loved it.

The personnel director loved it, too. He laughed when he took my card, laughed when he studied it, laughed when he said he had to hand it to me, an Indian with light brown hair, blue eyes, white complexion, a beard—and balls. And he laughed when he said I still wasn’t getting the job.

I had never really thought of my mother’s mother in terms of actually being my grandmother, for I had a perfectly good one who was still very much alive and lively, Cara Mae Bolton, my mother’s stepmother. I had always called her Grandma, and thought of her only as that, because my mother had never considered her anyone other than her mother.

Like most children—even grown ones—I also never really thought of my mother or father in terms of actually being a child. But on the balcony that night, I began to think of my mother as a baby. Since I had just connected the physical similarities of Kevin and my mother in the photograph of Kevin, I pictured her as looking like my son, and loving her real mother the way Kevin loves his, watching her mother and watching for her, following her around the room with her eyes, smiling when she saw her.

But then to suddenly lose her mother, watching her one minute, seeing her fall, maybe falling with her in her arms, crying, crawling over her—my God, what a tragedy.

This baby was suddenly without the center of her universe. How much time—how many hours, days, weeks, months—did my mother spend looking around the room, over the shoulder of whoever was carrying her, looking down the hall, in every face that came into the room, for her mother, as Kevin might?

Then an equally strong feeling struck me: how remarkable it was that my mother turned out the way she did—so happy. A smile is the natural expression on my mother’s face. Anything else is foreign. Laughter is her language. I found myself thinking that if Fleur or I should die while Kevin was still a baby, I could only hope that he would turn out as happy as my mother, that his joy would triumph over his tragedy.

My son, I hope, has inherited his joy from my mother, for hers is of the enduring kind. I see my mother’s life as proof of the power of joy: her joy not only survived tragedy but conquered it. Joy must be more powerful than sorrow, I thought.

I went to bed thinking I had had too much to drink, but now I know: I was being prepared for what follows.

Fifteen hundred miles due west of my balcony, on the same day, July 2, but a few hours before my mental tour of the torture chamber of my mother’s infancy, my sister is wandering around a cemetery in Alta Vista, Kansas, searching for the grave of a very old man.

Carolyn Shoemaker is on vacation, and making an overnight stop in Manhattan, Kansas. The Little Apple, as this Manhattan calls itself, sits off Interstate 70 in east-central Kansas, a day’s drive from Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Carolyn lives. It is midafternoon when she checks into a motel in Manhattan. After sitting in the car since sunup, Jenny, her teenage daughter, is bored. Carolyn suggests that, for fun, they visit Alta Vista, only twenty-six miles south, on a road called the Skyline-Mill Creek Scenic Drive.

Alta Vista is the boyhood home of our grandfather, Harry Ben Bolton. His parents and two sisters are buried in the Alta Vista cemetery. His father, my great-grandfather John Nelson Bolton, or J.N., as he called himself, got there by blowing himself up while lighting a gas stove in 1944. It wasn’t so much the explosion that killed him as his run down the street afterward, on fire. No doubt he panicked when the stove blew up and he didn’t know what he was doing when he took off down the street, feeding the flames that engulfed him. But in our family lore, J.N. decided to prove one last time to his disapproving neighbors—at age eighty-one he had just married a schoolteacher half his age—that he still had it in him, by damn, at least enough to windsprint through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The Alta Vista cemetery is the loudest place in an otherwise dead-still little town. Thirty flagpoles—fifteen on each side—line the driveway, and their rope-and-brass riggings all snap in the wind against the hollow metal flagpoles. The effect is similar to that of thirty Salvation Army workers standing outside the same supermarket at Christmas, all ringing their bells at the same time but each to his own tempo. It is probably the only cemetery in the world where visitors routinely sing Jingle Bells to themselves as they pay respects to their departed loved ones.

The search for J. N. Bolton & Family begins. It can be done by car. Tire tracks in the grass circumnavigate the cemetery, and bisect it, but Carolyn and Jenny choose to walk. The headstones face away from the entrance, so they have to hike to the opposite side of the cemetery, to a line of evergreens about one hundred yards away, and backtrack.

There are probably more headstones than people living in Alta Vista. Many of the markers are so old, or so obscured by a yellow residue (caused by protein deposits of an insect called a midge), that the writing on them is impossible to read. Marion Horten’s tombstone has survived—so far—the ravages of years, wind and bugs. Co. G, 1st Colorado Infantry, Spanish-American War, it says. William P. Drummond’s tombstone is slightly less readable: Missouri [illegible] U.S. Dragoons, Mexican War, July 5, 1908. Other markers did not need words to convey the sadness of their existence, such as that of Laurel Rachel Union Thomas, born October 10, 1897, died October 19, 1897. For 9 d, her tombstone says. Nearby, a stone has broken into three parts, and is now held together by a rusted wire. Only the words Rouse, died Dec. 9, 1889 are visible. Another broken stone, the remnants resting by the stump, says, 9y, 6m.

The Bolton family plot, Carolyn discovers, lies just a few paces from the car. The back of the family marker, about chest-high, is rough-hewn gray-black marble, the ripples on its surface like those of a pond that froze on a windy day. The other side is shiny and smooth, and says, Bolton, Laura Taylor, wife of J. N. Bolton, May 10, 1871–July 20, 1908. Beneath that, John Nelson Bolton, 1863–1944. Facing the stone, to the right, is Olive, dau of J.N. and Laura Bolton. Died Feb. 22, 1904. Age 5y, 8m, ld. Olive has two headstones. The newer is a light brown marble pillar supporting an orb the size of a cannonball. Leaves and stems of a plant are etched around her name. They are olive branches. The older stone, barely readable, says, OB. Budded on Earth to bloom in heaven. To the left of Olive is Mother, the next to die; then Jesse, the younger daughter. Her stone is a simple marker that says only Jesse, 1902–1916. On the far left is Father, and then an empty plot, intended for Harry, the last member of the family, just in case, like his sisters, he didn’t make it out of Alta Vista alive.

After 1944, my grandfather was the only Bolton left, apart from my mother, so he must have been responsible for putting up Olive’s newer pillar-and-olive headstone, which looked more recent than the mid-forties. That surprised me when I heard about it. I had never thought of my grandfather as being so sentimental, especially over someone he would have had only a vague memory of. Olive was Harry’s older sister. He was four when she died, at age 5y, 8m, ld in 1904. I had never heard of her before, or don’t remember hearing that my grandfather had another sister besides Jesse. She was his beloved younger sister. She died of whatever was killing Kansas kids in 1916—tuberculosis, diabetes, smallpox, typhoid, the all-encompassing consumption. Regardless, the end result was the same: life-altering grief for the survivors. Jesse’s death made Harry long for a daughter, and for granddaughters. Perhaps he married my grandmother because she looked like Jesse. Perhaps Carolyn reminded him of her, which would explain why he was so attached to my sister. Jesse died eight years after her mother, Laura, and a year before Harry graduated from high school and left Alta Vista for college, and for good. Even before he met and married my grandmother, he must have feared that every woman in his life was cursed to die young and that he was cursed to bury them. He must have been sick of burying them all—Olive, his mother, Jesse. The death of my grandmother, shortly after their marriage and at a young age, lengthened the list, and must have reinforced his fears about women and shovels. He must have feared terribly for my mother, his only child, a girl. Would she carry the Bolton female curse, and would he have to carry her to her grave, too?

Finding the grave sites of great-grandparents, whom you didn’t know and know little about, is always anticlimactic. Once you have found them, there is not much to do but stand over them; perhaps squat by them; take pictures of the headstones; read them; do simple subtraction (1908 minus 1871); wonder what traits you may have inherited from them; make some profound, prophetic utterance like Well, that’s them, there they are; place flowers on their graves, if the thought was afore (next time you should, you think, if there is a next time); wonder when the last time flowers graced these graves; observe that there are no flowers on any grave in this cemetery, plastic or real. Inevitably, your thoughts turn to returning to the real world, getting back to your life, the road to which lies through the town of Alta Vista, not much of an improvement over the cemetery, but a lot quieter.

Carolyn and Jenny walk the ten paces to the car and drive in silence past the jingling flagpoles. Black cows across the road watch them as they leave the cemetery and head toward town, a mile south. Wind blowing across a cornfield transforms the leaves and caps on the plants, for just a second until a blink washes the image away, into a lake reflecting a cloudy sky and showing the octopus path of invisible breezes.

Just past the field, a welcome sign stands almost as an amulet. The Churches of Alta Vista Welcome You, it says, and lists them all, as if to turn back the unwelcomed—hell-raisers—from this particular heaven’s gate: St. Paul’s Lutheran, Baptist, Simpson United Methodist, Church of Christ.

Maybe there’s someone in Alta Vista who remembers Grandpa, Carolyn says.

One gear shift, and suddenly oaks, maples, and elms—the few that survived the Dutch elm disease epidemic of three decades earlier—are shading the sidewalk and the front porches of small, two-story clapboard houses. The first Alta Vistan comes into view: a weighty woman wielding a weed-whacker, whittling away with it at waist-high plants growing wildly. An eye blink—shutting on a turquoise clapboard house, opening on a laundry line across the street on which big bras, bigger bloomers, flap like the flags in other yards for the Fourth of July celebration two days away. A pickup truck, hitched to a boat, is parked in the yard of a gray clapboard house. On a porch, a woman fans herself while her husband waves at a rare sight: a Japanese car with Colorado license plates.

An intersection of red-brick churches—three of the four—guards the entrance to Alta Vista’s deserted, four-block main street, Main Street. Weed-grown lots, some filled with rusting farm equipment for sale, separate low, square granite buildings, whose brown facades give the street the look of a timeworn, fading photograph.

They pass a restaurant, Starvin’ Harv’s, park in front of the combined Alta Vista City Hall and Fire Station and go in. Carolyn asks a woman at the counter, the only person who appears to work there, if she knows anyone who knew the Boltons.

She doesn’t, but Bat Nelson probably does, she says. He’s ninety-one, and owns the barbershop two doors down. He knows everything about Alta Vista, and everybody who ever lived here. And in the same breath, not letting the chance slip away to raise twelve dollars for the town treasury, she asks, Have you seen our centennial book on Alta Vista? It’s full of old pictures. Maybe it has something on your family.

It does. The first page has a picture of a sign saying, J. N. Bolton. For General Merchandise. It is part of a scoreboard at the ballpark showing the names of baseball sponsors who chipped in in 1920, as the caption says. According to the book, J.N. had a meat market in Alta Vista in the 1890s. In 1900, he moved into a one-story building, the south half occupied by the Alta Vista State Bank, and opened the Bolton Mercantile Grocery Story. A picture of it in 1907 shows J. N. Bolton Dry Goods painted on the window, and signs for McCall Patterns 10 and 15 cents and Bradley and Metcalf Celebrated Boots and Shoes. Another picture, from 1909, shows J.N. standing in front of his store, one display window filled with shoes, the other with men’s hats. It is now called the J. N. Bolton General Store. J.N. looks small in stature and is wearing a bow tie and dark suit. His face is hidden behind a bushy mustache and beneath a dark hat.

The photo is black and white, of course, so it doesn’t show his one blue and one brown eye. J.N. apparently was quite a skirt-chaser, and gave new meaning to the act of giving a woman the eye. Perhaps he made his winks color-coordinated, one eye when he wore a blue suit, the other with brown. An old newspaper ad reproduced in the book says, YOUR STORE: We call this YOUR STORE because we want you to realize that it IS in every way a store for you. YOUR interests demand you get full value for your money. And Style demands a certain smartness; and Service, a courteous tending to the many little things that make a store worth while. FULL VALUE—STYLE—SERVICE. You get all of these at BOLTON’S.

Carolyn and Jenny walk two doors down to Nelson’s Barber & Beauty Shop. In the display window is a reprint of an article from a Topeka, Kansas, newspaper. The headline says, Barber, 91, Cutting Since He Was Little Shaver. An accompanying color photo shows a sixty-something man, with a full head of brown hair, shaving a customer, a straight-edge to his throat. The photo is obviously an old one of a younger Bat Nelson. Who would trust a shaky ninety-one-year-old to run a razor across his face? The article says: Seventy-six years ago… Alta Vista barber R. S. (Bat) Nelson had his first customer. Holly Johnson came in at 10:20 A.M. for a 10-cent shave. Nelson was just 15 years old then. He hasn’t put away his straight-edge razor since….At 91, Nelson’s hands are rock-steady, and his schedule is just as firm. He still opens his shop at 8 A.M. six days a week. The cost for a haircut has risen with the years but is still a modest $3. Bat began in the business at age eleven, as a shoeshine boy and janitor at a barbershop in town. Soon the barbers asked him to join them in their hair-cutting business. ‘I started with $9.80 in tools. I borrowed $10 from my brother and I was to pay him back $2 a month, which I knew I could do since I kept the shoeshine business…. After three months, if I could get a man in my chair, he’d become a regular.’ The article also quoted Denny Buchman, owner of Buchman’s Farm Supply across the street from the barbershop: Bat’s cut four generations of hair in my family, from my grandfathers down to my sons.

Bat Nelson is alone in the shop, sitting in one of two battered blue customers’ chairs. The newspaper photo, to Carolyn’s surprise, is recent. Bat doesn’t look ninety-one, not that Carolyn has seen that many nonagenarians to judge, especially ones who jump up out of their chairs, energetically and enthusiastically—faster in fact than she is able to open and shut the squeaky shop door and approach him—and greet her in a loud, clear, steady, cheerful, businesslike young voice, Well, what can I do for you today, young lady?

Along the wall opposite him are two ornate barber chairs that he bought in 1923. (You don’t find them like that this day and age, he says later. They weigh about three times as much as the chair you’d buy today.) In the center of the shop is a small, square counter. A red cash register, with a black dial phone attached to the back, occupies the countertop, rivaling the barber chairs in ornateness and age. The counter shelves display a collection of blue, red, yellow, and green hair tonics—antiques, the article calls them. Three walls of the shop are mirrored to the ceiling. High on the mirror of one is a brown sketch of a buffalo. The mirrored wall next to the barber chairs holds the only other picture in the shop: a color drawing of a spaniel. (That’s my dog, Bat explains later. I lost him in ’37. Welsh spaniel. Oh, he was beautiful. Cocoa brown and white.) Like Mr. Bojangles in the song, Bat Nelson is still mourning the dog he lost more than a half-century ago.

Whose granddaughter? Bat replies, when Carolyn tells him that her grandfather grew up here and asks him if he knew him. She’s beginning to think that this might be a waste of time. Harry Bolton, she repeats.

Harry Bolton? Bat echoes. He’s still shaking her hand with his two, squeezing it solidly and staring intently into her eyes, as if comparing. There is a momentary warble in his voice. Carolyn sees a slight squirt of water-wet brown eyes set behind black-rimmed glasses.

Harry Bolton’s granddaughter, he repeats. Oh, hell, how nice to see you. He smiles with delight, showing some gold in the back of his mouth. He was perhaps my closest pal.

After a round of exclamations on both sides, he says solemnly, I have always—I have always decorated the graves of his family.

A momentary loss for words. Where to start?

It is Bat who breaks the silence, answering the question Carolyn is about to ask. Harry was truly an all-American boy. He played basketball. He played tennis. He liked to play tennis. He was fair at it. Like I said, he was an all-American boy. Harry was talented.

What did you do together, you and Grandpa? Carolyn asks. The thought of growing up in Alta Vista and the full-time, unfulfilling quest for something to do makes her teenage daughter shift her weight. It was a mere eighty years ago, but Bat seems embarrassed by his inability to remember.

Oh, I don’t know, he says, fumbling. Just like all kids, I guess.

He walks to a stack of scrapbooks in a corner of the shop and uncovers a thin, paperbound pamphlet. It is the 1917 Alta Vista High School yearbook. Harry Bolton was one of twenty-four graduates that year, twenty-three more than were in the school’s first graduating class eight years earlier. The Harry pictured in the yearbook looks older than seventeen. Tragedies had chiseled their toll around his eyes and mouth. In photos of him taken ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years later, he would look younger. His hair is close-cropped on the sides; on top, long and slicked straight back, the way he wore it the rest of his life.

The caption under Harry’s picture says, Basketball, football, track, president of Shakespearians, debate, senior play. Then it quotes him as saying, I always manage to maintain a very high standing with the faculty. (His father was chairman of the school board.) The debate subject in that year of America’s entry into World War I was, Resolved, that every able-bodied male citizen of the United States should have one year’s military training before he is 25 years of age. Harry debated for the negative team, which lost unanimously to Harveyville High.

A humor section of the yearbook called Senior Personalities describes Harry as Alias: Windy. Disposition: Grouchy. Future Occupation: Minister. Hobby: Going to church. Favorite expression: ‘Rave on.’ A few pages later is another stab at humor, this one a fictional, futuristic account of coming back to Alta Vista in the spring of 1925, visiting for the first time since graduation: I began to inquire after the Class of ’17 by asking where Harry Bolton was. He was on Perry’s Ranch, where he had the job of driving geese to water, was the answer. He was still waiting for Dora to finish her course in domestic science.

Who’s Dora? Carolyn asks with a laugh.

Bat flips the pages to the Js and points to a picture of a mousy, dark-haired girl. That was his girlfriend, he says. The caption identifies her as Dora Johnson, modest, unpretentious one, merry though full of fun, winning friends from sun to sun. She was the daughter of the town jeweler, whose shop had been located across the street from Bat’s barbershop. Harry and Dora dated all through high school, Bat explains, but after Harry went to the University of Kansas, it was different. She went to Ottawa [Kansas], University of Ottawa. That broke that up. In fact, when Harry left Alta Vista for K.U., whose campus at Lawrence was only sixty miles east, that was the last of him, Bat says, frowning abruptly. I didn’t get to see much of him after that.

You know, I often wondered about how… Bat lets the rest of the sentence drop. It was just kind of an accident that I knew Harry passed away. I take the Alma [Kansas] paper, and I was reading it one day, and I saw his obituary. It was a simple death notice, short on details, such as cause of death. And so I sat down and wrote his wife a letter. ‘When the pain wears off, [and you] have a little time, write me and tell me [the details], won’t you please.’ But I never heard from her. Never heard from her.

In 1981, at age eighty-one, Harry was diagnosed with throat cancer. He spent his last three months in the hospital in Denver. He lost his vocal cords. Leukemia was discovered. Then he died of a stroke.

Throat cancer, Bat repeats slowly.

Stroke, Carolyn corrects.

Bat produces, seemingly out of nowhere, a black address book. His little black book. This book here, he says exuberantly, this book here is nothing but obituaries. Every page, every line of every page, is full. On each line, there is a name, a year, and an age.

These are all people that you knew? Carolyn asks, at once impressed by the number of friends he had, and horrified at all the death, the number of friends he has outlived.

Oh yes, Bat says, yes, yes.

Wow, Jenny chimes in.

Here, you go down that list there, he says, pointing to a right-hand page and running his finger down the left side, looking for Harry’s name.

I’m sure, I’m sure… flipping the pages.

Oh, there’s Harry B…. Carolyn reads.

Harry Bolton, there, in ’81, Bat says. He died in ’81. And there, John N. Bolton, yes, ’44, eighty-one years old.

Oh, that’s the same age as Grandpa when he died, Carolyn says. He was eighty-one. Well, maybe I can count on making it to eighty-one.

Eighty-one in ’44, Bat says, still looking at J.N.’s entry. You want to jot down some of those dates, or not?

Oh, I know them.

Oh, you got ’em, huh?

Yeah, I made… it said that on his tombstone.

"Mrs. John