The Legend of Mere Noire: A Mike Dodge Histery

CW: Themes of violence and substance abuse

The first arc of the blade split the long plank bar, driving Boisfort expensively into the bottles and jugs on the back wall.

Boisfort rose smelling of musk and sawdust and rye and corn whiskey and applejack and, most lamentably, the prized cognac delivered by train just that morning.

Struggling to his feet, the behemoth roared an oath that might have moved Tarabeth Montgomery to a far more homicidal act had he used his adopted tongue. As it was, the petite, axe-wielding Methodist read the storm in the Frenchman’s broad, bearded, scarlet countenance, and scampered off into the melee of farmers, millers, malingerers, and anger-besotted wives and daughters and spinsters liberated from another day of quilting and Scripture. Framed in the saloon’s doorway, the Methodist pastor, Freeborne, gawped in horror at what God had wrought.

“HELL’S VESTIBULE!” the comely Mauve Callahan shrieked as she scattered a group of farmers in from the hellish sun enjoying the fruits of their collective labor. Seth Callahan, ever the frugal man of the earth, swiped his jar of corn whiskey from the table before Maeve brought Seth’s own favorite axe down. Drink sloshing in his filthy, burn-scarred fist, he disappeared past a frozen Freeborne.

“STRONG DRINK IS SIN! STRONG DRINK IS SIN!”

Boisfort brought a ham-sized fist down on what remained of the bar. Axes and hymnbooks and bottles and pints halted in mid-swing or mid-swig, and the huge Frenchman panted as he forced a broad yellow smile that served merely to underscore his restrained menace.

“Sit,” The “Strong Tree” invited. “I will make you all a cordial. My grand-mere drank cherry until her ninety-seventh year. Please, let us talk like civilized folk.”

Even the mill workers hunkered in one corner, summoned by the midday “grog time” bell and determined in their brief respite, glanced up from their lagers and cards. Female heads turned toward the doorway. Rev. Freeborne was no more.

Whether out of Christian zeal or the long-bottled frustration of wages vanishing into saloon coffers or simply Boisfort Ferrand’s disastrous bid at placation, the women roundly rejected the invitation in a unified soprano roar and a symphony of forged iron on wood. The chaos reached full crescendo as the town marshal and his meager force arrived, having quelched earlier incursions at The Buena Villa Saloon and “Saloon.” The constabulary by this time was short one man and an index finger. The resignation of the former had followed the severance of the latter, but the riot quickly subsided in an adrenalin crash.

“Pity,” Marshal Mansford sighed, watching good Christian women being corralled into the street. “Are you all right, Henry?” he inquired in a Midwest approximation of Boisfort’s Christian name.

“Oui, yes.” Henri scanned the dark saloon mournfully. The mill workers’ Faro deck was splayed across the solitary undamaged table, and an axe handle jutted from between the glass eyes of the black bear the former trapper had vanquished mano-a-bruin. “Poor Mere Noire.”

“Mayor who?”

“Mere Noire, Mother Black,” Henri clarified. “I fear Mere Noire has suffered a second grave indignity.”

Mansford jerked his head toward the raiders. “Venture you wouldn’t mind swapping out Mayor Black here for one of these church hens, eh?” The grin dropped from his jowls as he caught the eye of a compact, sturdy femme with gray hair and forged steel eyes that promised a long evening ahead..

**

I glanced again at the bear above the bar, not the cartoon on the front plate glass serving up a sloppy burger. Mere Noire, framed in tubular neon proclaiming “Boisfort’s,” seemed resigned to its head wound.

“By all rights, shouldn’t that be Boisfort’s head over the bar?” I asked. “I don’t know how loose taxidermy laws were back in the day, but it seems kinda misleading.”

Wayne Laughton had paused for a swig of Heineken, and now he shrugged. “I’m guessing a giant scarred stuffed Frenchman would prolly have offended some folks. You never know, these days…”

Comments like that were why I’d kinda wanted to call it an evening before evening had actually arrived. We’d worked together for maybe four years, me covering federal policy, him tracking grain trends and piggie futures, and I’d never heard him once utter a racist word. But that four years was like 20 years ago. You never know, these days.

Wayne was back up from Florida for a family death – well, the postgame. When he’d proposed a reunion, Sarah was uncharacteristically supportive, or had some nefarious chick-flickery in mind in my absence. I was now stuck in a thick cloud of alpha testosterone, from the boisterous bar to the cages at the back where emancipated desk jockeys and buzzed young dudes were finding their inner lumberjack.

Ferrand’s Saloon had risen from the ashes, splinters, whatever, to survive the Millington Temperance Guild. Though rail and highway upgrades left “Old Millington” on the dusty fringes of town, the legend of the 1858 Barroom Blitz and Mere Noire turned out a major tourist draw as Route 66 became the Mother Road to every Boomer bro with a midlife jones and retro hipster and Japanese and German and Brit seeking homogenized pioneer culture and a selfie with a lobotomized bear.

I tapped the drink menu once again. Specifically, the redhead whose painted image accompanied Boisfort’s signature cocktail. A 19th Century 8, by Time-Life Books standards.

“Getting back to my original question, though,” I half-shouted over the Cubbies swinging away over an array of big-screens. “I take it this is Maeve Callahan, the head hatchet lady?”

“Axe.”

“Yeah. So why’s it called Callahan’s Curse? Seems like the riot only wound up helping wipe out Boisfort’s competition?”

Wayne was on his second Curse, and he snapped his fingers sloppily. “Oh, yeah, forgot about the murder.”

**

It hadn’t taken Mansford long to notice the ringleader’s absence. He dispatched his top 10-fingered officer to the Callahan home. Neither Maeve nor Seth were anywhere to be found.

The enterprising deputy then tried Millington Methodist, only to find Rev. Freestone stretched out on the front pew having treated his nerves in a manner the young man could smell from the rear pews. .

Seth Callahan himself turned up around dusk. It was suppertime, and Marshal Mansford already had released the remaining ladies of Millington Methodist on their husbands’ recognizance.

Callahan had returned home to find his frantic wife packing for what she planned as a few days “with a friend,” but he’d begun to worry for her safety. Mansford launched a “manhunt,” joined by a citizens’ posse in dire need of a distraction and simultaneously cheesed at and wary of their recently incarcerated spouses.

They found her in the wood behind Main close to midnight, and despite their bravado, the posse cursed the full moon that illuminated what was left of Maeve’s face and once-intact skull.

Marshal Mansford’s forensic resources consisted largely of the battered Graham’s Magazine a passing rail conductor had passed on years before, creased open to Mr. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Nobody’d heard tell of a homicidal orangutan in these parts, so the marshal proceeded from there.

Mansford had cleared his half-acre homestead 20 years before, and he instantly identified the contour of the axe head in Maeve Callahan’s ruined features and the mincemeat the blade’s edge had made of her right temple and cheek. The killer had wielded the broad flat side of the forest axe as a bludgeon.

Given Mrs. Mansford’s icy breakfast demeanor, the marshal set out on the bright to forge a theory of the crime. Given the lingering degree of marital separation following the Melee on Main, alibis were as sparse as axes were plentiful. G. Roeberts and Sons Provisions had enjoyed a land-office business in same the day before. By his noon meal (taken in peace at the jail), Mansford had inventoried seven slightly used axes. The lawman unearthed nine more long-handled axes of varying manufacture and vintage in barns and sheds, to the alternate embarrassment and outrage of the local husbands.

That left one axe unaccounted for. The one that had struck the first blow at Boisfort’s saloon. A chat with the now-sedate Temperance Guild revealed bad blood between lifetime Millingtonian Tarabeth Montgomery and Maeve, who’d swooped in from glamorous Cincinnati two years earlier to take Millington Methodist by storm.

The catalyst for the feud was pie – Tarabeth’s buttermilk pie, Tarabeth’s prize buttermilk pie five church festivals running. Until 1857. The grapevine revelation that Maeve had for a spell been THE society baker of Cincinnati’s Findlay Market district was the flashpoint. Tarabeth’s choice to openly and colorfully challenge the charismatic new Queen of Tarts even before the winning entry was sliced was the disastrous first shot a mile off the bow.

Tarabeth had underestimated Maeve’s sophisticated Queen City mystique, especially among the simple, compliant churchwomen tethered to this prairie waystation. And she’d forgotten a single inviolate commandment: You have a problem in God’s House, take it outside. Every passive-aggressive salvo she aimed at Maeve fell as flat as last year’s corn after the July tornadoes. When Tarabeth seized on rumors one of the local husbands had been spotted on the Callahan porch in the middle of afternoon mill shift, she received a frigid reaction to the hot goss, which her waning sisterhood perceived as particularly odious fruit of the soured vineyard. After all, Maeve had mobilized Millington Methodist in the war against that most insidious mistress, demon rum.

And then there was the testament of Henri Ferrand and Saloon proprietor Delbert Reichsmann as to Tarabeth’s prowess and power with an axe. Lem Montgomery had lost a right hand according to legend (his) in the Black Hawk War, and while the burly hog farmer brought home the bacon, his wife rustled up the kindling to fry it.

To Mansford’s keen deductive mind, that tied it all up with 12 feet of twine and a pretty red ribbon. A hearing for the newly dubbed “Virtue Patrol” raiders, including the still-frosty Mrs. Mansford, was set the next Tuesday at the McLean County Courthouse. Apprehending a depraved axe-murderer might put the impetuous fervor of a flock of riled-up churchwomen in perspective.

Mansford needn’t have worried. A similar incident had occurred in Towanda, just north of the “dry” city of Normal, and the temperance movement had gained traction with a growing segment weary of bar brawls and absent workers and spouses and retrieving sons from the law’s clutches. Of course, the women themselves were prohibited from testifying, but whether out of enduring devotion or a moral awakening or the notion of cracking an egg or tending to tots, the Millington men suddenly suffered collective memory loss. Millington’s saloonkeepers, mindful of future revenues, also descended into a fog about the fateful afternoon’s events.

In the end, Justice William Dodgson wasn’t buying the defense’s argument the morally outraged Methodists were within their rights to expunge a growing “community nuisance,” but he released the women for lack of convictable evidence. The judge freed Tarabeth on similar grounds, and the county coroner eventually came in with his own ruling of “death by misadventure” in Maeve’s passing. As Mrs. Mansford was finally speaking and mending, that set fine with the good marshal.

In a surprising epilogue, a bereaved and remorseful Seth Callahan pitched in to help rebuild Ferrand’s. Ferrand in turn offered a partnership in the saloon, out of compassion for the widower.

Or so goes the story on the back of the menu, under an 1889 sepia photo of the restored Boisfort Saloon, the bowed French giant, the blotchy and hobbled little Irishman, and, watching over the establishment like a snarling ursine unicorn, Mere Noire.

**

“Folks were shorter back then,” I noted, pulling out my phone. “Today’s average male height is, ummm, yeah — five foot-nine. Back in 1858, it would’ve been…five-seven.

“Point being, look at the photo. Boisfort towers over Callahan. You can see the scar on Henri’s cheek I’m guessing from the riot. And I don’t think those are birthmarks or liver spots on Callahan’s face or neck. Not to mention his hand. The one on the cane there. Do a finger count. Facial burns, a missing finger, God knows what else? Your conclusion?”

Wayne was silent for a moment. “Spouse abuse?”

The band had just launched into Toby Keith, so I responded more irritably than intended. “Or how about Seth did all this? I don’t know how hazardous mill work was pre-OSHA, but I gotta think still work was a risky proposition.

“Think about it. Callahan had access to as much corn and mash as he could sneak off the mill grounds, and I’m sure moonshining was largely a matter of trial and error and the occasional amputation. And why’d the Callahans move from Cincinnati to the middle of nowhere? Maybe they had to leave Ohio. Maybe the law got a little too close, maybe Seth’s experiments in distilling burnt down the bakery or just raised too many questions.”

“Wait, wait,” Wayne protested. “You’re saying Seth was doing all this right under his wife’s nose?”

“I’m saying a lot more than that. Can you imagine if Seth suddenly uprooted Maeve from a successful business and Cincinnati society, whatever that might have looked like? Unless Maeve prompted the move. Unless Maeve was Seth’s partner in matrimony and moonshining. Or maybe the boss.”

“I thought she was a church lady, making pies and busting up saloons—Oh.”

“Uh huh. Gotta imagine in a podunk town with three bars, the competition was fierce, even violent. For Ma and Pa moonshiners, it would be downright prohibitive. But what if you could get rid of all the competition with a couple hundred righteous strokes of the axe?

“But Maeve saw a way in. She’d heard about the temperance movement, and how lightly the courts were treating protestors. So Maeve lights a fire under the ladies and the good Rev. Freeborne. The Rev must have baptized his drawers when he witnessed the unleashed fury of his pissed-off parishioners.”

Wayne appropriated the last Prairie Popper, the sumbitch, and creaked back in his chair. “So what are you saying? I mean, they said Freeborne tucked tail and ran when hell broke loose. I mean, if the guys thought he’d riled up a bunch of gals to dry up the town, I guess that could make him a pretty unpopular guy. So what, Freeborne doubled back to smite Callahan?”

“Naw. Back then, a good Frenchman was usually a good Catholic, if Ferrand even attended church. Plus, Boisfort ministered to his own weary, disillusioned, loose-lipped flock. Maybe he’d fallen to Seth’s illicit activities, maybe from a drunk Seth himself, and when Maeve shows up ready to do battle with Demon Hooch, Henri puts it all together. After Maeve rejects his veiled invitation to negotiate over cordials, he gets her away from the mob, they argue, and he grabs his own axe...

“The surprise attacks on the Buena Villa and ‘Saloon’ came before the assault on Ferrand’s. Boisfort barely has time to gird for the onslaught, but maybe he could protect his prized Mere Noire. He quickly pulls the head from the wall with a hook or a broom, whatever, and, I don’t now, stows it behind the bar or in the back. But in all the ensuing mayhem, he has a solution that should confound Marshal Mansford and his men. Boisfort buries the hatchet, ah, axe – in Mama Bear’s brain pan and rehangs her. I assume back then there was no complicated hardware involved – probably just a heavy-duty spike or stake.”

“Yeah, but,” Wayne protested. “Even if Boisfort was six foot-one or two, it’s still quite a stretch to hoist that ginormous head back onto that spike or stake or whatever. I mean, look at the menu – Mayor Bear’s hanging at least nine feet high.”

“Ah, but you’re forgetting,” I declared, drowned out by an approximation of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”s satanic fiddle solo. “I said, you’re forgetting. This time, Boisfort had a handle on things. If he was as strong and skillful as the story goes, he could easily have hefted the skull back onto its perch with that ax handle. Says here a typical wood-chopping axe handle back then was about three feet long. Like Archimedes said, give me a long enough lever and I can move the world.”

“And speaking of leverage,” I added, “If Seth was in on Maeve’s scheme, which seems probable, he’d have had his eye on Boisfort and his wife even in the middle of an axe-flinging melee. Although he couldn’t have foreseen Henri eliminating Maeve, seems like it solved a big problem. Without his mastermind missus and with their criminal proceeds, Seth could go legit. No more exploding stills or missing digits. He had leverage over Boisfort, and alibied him to boot. And Boisfort had leverage over Callahan.

“Legend brought these two men together in their time of mutual loss, and forged a partnership that’s lasted 167 years despite trials and tumult and an occasional busted nose. In reality, what if a ladykiller and a bootlegger came together through mutual blackmail, ‘hiding’ a murder weapon in plain sight as an insurance policy for generations to come. Put that on the menu between the poppers and the Boisfort Bourbon Bacon Burger and see how it goes down.”

We all love a good legend like those pioneering souls liked their whiskey – neat. Wayne stared quietly at Mama Bear for a spell, then we indulged in a couple slabs of Tarabeth’s Death by Buttermilk Pie, nattered nostalgically about nothing, and retired to the cages for a little axe hurling without dislocating or amputating anything.

It was probably my last guy’s night out with Wayne, and I ambled across the parking lot with my doggybag and a mercifully fading Charlie Daniels earwig and a contented smirk. We all love a good legend, but nobody much likes a buzzkill.