The Woman of No Man's Land

The Woman of No Man's Land Part 1

Hell's Half Acre 1904

Thin, worn out and withered, Jed slouched along the gulley. His weary footsteps lit by a yellow moon, three days past full and just risen above the tree line. Jed is a beaten man of 29 years. His shoes tattered and soulless, his clothes more patch than whole cloth.

One hundred yards past a slow bend in the gully Jed met his wife, Anne, sitting in the dirt and rocks. She looked at him with her hollow, blank, brown eyes and knew the girl was gone.

Without prospects, itinerant, and slowly starving the small family of three had come to Fort Worth looking for work and shelter. After three days wandering the streets, alleys, and slums of the bustling town on the Trinity and being turned away at every saloon, livery, slaughterhouse and mercantile, Jeb had decided they could no longer keep the girl in tow.

Anne slipped away and headed towards the rail yard and Jed took the girl into the busiest, and roughest part of town, a few square blocks on the south side known locally as Hell's Half Acre, and abandoned her. He simply told her to wait in an alley and walked away. His mind screamed with guilt but was easily shouted down by the gnawing hunger in his belly.

Anne rose from the rocks in the gully and accepted the loss without grief. Grief required energy and she needed what little she could muster for the journey down to Waco.

The two thin shadows of Jed and Anne climbed the gully and crossed the barren field towards the Lancaster rail yard.

Anne knew that if work were not found in Waco Jed would catch the next train alone.

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Bessie was not her given name. Her given name was soon forgotten on the dusty back streets of Fort Worth. Young - about to be Bessie - did not fall into prostitution so much as reality in the Acre kicked her into it as a sole means of survival.

Bewildered and alone the young girl was shortly set upon by the denizens of the flop and whore houses of the Acre. Resources were scarce, food was scant and life was cheap in the Acre and another mouth was seen by most as unwanted competition.

She was saved from a back alley rape and knifing by an enterprising bawd named Effie who saw the foundling as an easy, steady source of income. Effie was an over the hill at 26 prostitute scraping together pennies and table scraps from cowboys and day laborers too broke to afford younger whores with less wear from working the Acre. For fourteen months Effie rented Bessie to any man with money, drugs or alcohol.

Confinement or restraint was unnecessary. Bessie did not run partly because she was too weak and abused to gather the energy but mainly because Effie's hell was better than the certain death she would meet alone on the streets and she knew it.

One morning Bessie found Effie cold, clammy, blue-tinged and already in the midst of rigor from a morphine overdose. Bessie herself became ridged with confusion and fear. When the man came to collect the rent from Effie he found Bessie standing silent, slowly rending her clothes and methodically eating the shreds. He roughly pushed the girl out of the shack and into the ally. After rifling through the one room shack and pocketing the few pennies he found and the remaining morphine he left to fetch the police.

A new whore from Amarillo, only one day in town, had moved in before Effie went feet first out the door. No one noticed the girl during the brief bustle as Effie was removed.

Still standing in the dank alley, a Jake fiend stumbled upon her and clumsily attempted to raise her skirt. Life slipped back into Bessie's eyes and she deftly cold-cocked the man and drifted out the alley.