K. Ford K.'s Blog

At night, the ghosts of girl-prostitutes carried fragile candles to light their way around the old dance hall. The diminutive prostitutes never bothered anyone and no one in Valentine, Nevada had ever seen them. Yet everyone heard the nightly clicking that sounded like knitting needles knitting. It was caused by the heels of the prostitute’s satin shoes as they danced their hundred-year-old dances. The prostitutes, not one over eighteen when she first came to Valentine, didn’t care much for the hot quick sex in the tiny rooms upstairs, but all the girls were wild about dancing.

The dance hall was called ‘The Cribs’ and it got its name from the twenty crib-like rooms on the upper floors. Each room contained a small bed that could not accommodate an entire man, requiring all but the shortest men to hang their muddy boots off the end while they had sex with the prostitutes who had just enough space to wriggle out of their undergarments.

The piano and singing were very loud and while the girls waited for the men to finish, they thought about the music and dancing downstairs. On the first floor there was a large stage complete with red velvet curtains that Madam Chantelle had brought from New Orleans. Gilded cardboard backdrops sat in their slots: there was an Irish pastoral scene, a gay Paris street and something that might have been the Garden of Eden.

Madam Chantelle was a formidable woman who ran the dance hall with matriarchal intensity. She infuriated many a man by showing up at his door step on Sunday morning insisting that he had not paid his bill the night before. Because of her tenacity, the town council closed the Cribs in 1918.

With as much dignity as she could muster, Madam Chantelle locked up each of the twenty tiny rooms and the front door of the Cribs with keys that always hung from her corset. Then she boarded the train that backed out of Valentine until it reached the switch where it could turn around and continue on to its destination. The little prostitutes who had not already died of syphilis or consumption either left on the train with Madam Chantelle, or stayed behind to marry the hapless miners who lived there.

The dance hall remained locked up tight against hoodlums and the erosion of time. But many years later, dry rot caused the entire front of the building to fall right off and into the weedy yard that had once been the most lush in Valentine.

From that time on, the dance hall was open like a doll’s house and passersby could look in at the rusted iron bed frames and broken gilded chairs, the wine-red, moth-eaten curtains and warped wooden stage that still had an air of gaiety.

There were four families in Valentine who could trace their origins to the young prostitutes at the Cribs. They were the families of Mr. Croft, the undertaker, Tuffy, the bartender, Miss Regina, the schoolteacher and the family of Esther Lily Thompson. The first three families accepted their risqué heritage, but the Thompson family went to great trouble to manufacture a fictitious and more distinguished background for their great-grandmother, Esther Lily.

The Thompson family, known as the most industrious of social climbers, claimed that Esther Lily was the daughter of a minister and his wife, that she was orphaned at the age of thirteen, taken in by the Thompson family out of kindness and eventually married to their grandfather, James, a man remembered for his quiet, religious ways.

The truth was that Esther Lily had no memory of her real parents, nor did she know where she was born or her last name. And while it was true that Esther Lily had come to Valentine at the age of thirteen, she was delivered to the Cribs by the businessman, Rodrigo Valentine who brought all the girl-prostitutes as far as the final train stop in the center of town.

Like the other girls, Esther Lily had fond memories of Rodrigo Valentine. He was an elegant, stretched-out man with an easygoing manner. He wore tight black trousers and narrow pink satin waistcoats with peppermints in the pockets. He smelled of copious amounts of lavender water and pipe tobacco. It was never known if the girls came with him by force, or free-will but as they were all well-dressed and well-fed, no one ever thought to ask. Rodrigo Valentine presented the girls like his favorite daughters and he received a bonus from Madam Chantelle for every virgin he delivered to the Cribs. The final train stop became known as Valentine’s Stop and eventually the official name of Valentine was adopted by the town.

After Madam Chantelle left town and locked Esther Lily out of the only home she knew, James Thompson, a poverty-stricken miner, took the homeless girl in and even enrolled her in school where she learned how to read and write. James and Esther Lily were married quietly a year later. Esther Lily was sixteen. James was thirty two.

James soon gave up mining and since he was good with numbers he become a bank teller at Valentine’s first bank. In time, their son, Christian, would become bank president.
In their later years, James and Esther Lily took long walks through the Valentine Cemetery, on a hill above town. They even chose a pretty spot under an apple tree where they wanted to be buried together. Unfortunately, James failed to add this detail to his will. After he died, their children, Christian, Jim and Minnie had James cremated because it was cheaper than burial and they wanted to keep the old man’s money for themselves.

Then they scattered James’ ashes to the wind and Esther Lily lost all hope of finding even a teaspoonful of his remains. Esther Lily became sullen, angry and impossible to reason with, adopting the contemptuous attitude of a prostitute who has been cheated out of her money.

“The only reason any of you exist is that James Thompson found me weeping on the doorstep of the Cribs and he took pity on me,” she scolded her children. “Now you honor his memory by throwing him away like rubbish. A dog would have a better chance of finding his remains than I would.”

Then she cried the quiet tears of the elderly and walked to the lawyer’s office to have her own will written. “Make it iron-clad,” she instructed the lawyer and she paid him with a garnet bracelet because the family didn’t trust her with access to her own bank accounts.

The day Esther Lily drew up her will was the day the front of the dance hall fell off, and still dressed in mourning for her late husband, Esther Lily followed the sound of knitting needles in her orthopedic shoes. On the front lawn of the Cribs she joined the invisible diminutive dancing whores, raising a great deal of dust for someone so old. “Your souls are free,” she shouted to her girlhood friends. “You can dance wherever you like.”

Esther Lily’s son came to get her and the family tried to confine her to the house but she found ingenious ways of escaping down to the dance hall, furtively sneaking through back yards and alleys. Once there, she even climbed inside the building and danced on the stage, lifting her skirts to expose her bloomers just like the old days.
When her family realized they could not prevent her from stealing away to dance at the Cribs, they moved to Carson City to hide their shame. They placed Esther Lily in a home for the aged, but she escaped numerous times before she died at the age of one hundred.

In her will, she asked to be buried in a section of the Valentine Cemetery known as ‘Whore’s Corner’. “Bury my bones with the whores because that’s where I belong. If you don’t, you might as well throw my bones to the dogs,” were her final instructions.

The Thompson family sent Esther Lily’s remains to Valentine for burial but none of them came for the funeral. The town put one funeral notice on the post office door and another in the paper stating the day and time of the burial, but only four people showed up for the ceremony. Father Townsend had already begun his words of condolence at the graveside when the four mourners showed up, and he was obliged to start over.

The four mourners, who all agreed later that nothing could have kept them from that funeral, were the most unlikely people to be united in anything. They were Bernice Babbitt, Mrs. Lin, Trina Trinket, and a handsome young man named Harold, who wore a black silk band cuffing his upper arm and who sobbed quietly throughout the brief ceremony.

Later, when they tried to remember exactly when their unusual friendship began, they couldn’t agree. Trina Trinket thought it started when the town council meeting dissolved into a fist fight over the closing of the present-day brothel, The Honey Bunny Ranch. Bernice Babbitt and Mrs. Lin were sure it began when Bernice found the concubine’s gift and thought it was a curse. But it was Harold who remembered that their friendship started long before that, on the day they all attended the funeral of Esther Lily Thompson, the last whore to be buried in Whore’s Corner.