The Whipping Boy
Speer Morgan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Speer Morgan
The first book of the Freshour series. The second book, The Freshour Cylinders, is a winner of the 1999 American Book Award.
“Morgan tells of a young man's search for wholeness in a time when the violence of the American frontier was giving way to a new kind of lawlessness. The Whipping Boy brings alive the pain and shame of a little-read chapter of history, when greed ruled, thievery wore a frock coat, and guile was the governing virtue. --Charles Gusewelle, columnist, Kansas City Star
"With The Whipping Boy, Speer Morgan delivers a rollicking page-turner. I read it once with a fierce compulsion to find out what would happen, a second time for the pleasure of the language and craft. --Wally Lamb
Here is the real West in its lurid twilight--the Oklahoma Indian Territory when the last land grab was under way. Here too is a good mystery, a bawdy romance, and characters with blood, not ink, in their veins. Every vignette of frontier life--flood, train wreck, blizzard, bank, brother, or church--is authentic. Forget L'Amour; what really happened is so much better, and done here by a better hand. --Will Baker
Chapter 1
Mid-morning on a late fall day in 1894, the sun was almost visible in thin clouds, and the sky over western Arkansas looked as if it was about to clear after days of on-and-off rain. But the air suddenly turned cool, with the quickening feel of more weather on the way. Within an hour the sun's halo disappeared, as two massive prongs of cold approached along the Arkansas River Valley from the east and the Indian Territory to the west, pushing wet southern air away from the earth in majestic anvil-shaped clouds.
In Fort Smith, a young murderer named Johnny Pointer was to be hanged at noon on the lawn of the old U.S. courthouse, a few hundred yards from the Arkansas River. It was the first execution ordered by Judge Isaac C. Parker in over a year, the longest interruption in his otherwise lethal twenty-year record on the bench. Newspapers from as far away as Boston had sent stringers for the event, which wasn't unusual for a Parker hanging. In a nation enveloped in a depression, a good hanging offered promise of spectacle, lurid detail, moralizing, sentimentality, and all the other elements of the best order of journalism.
A lot of sightseers from the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations had come over to see the white man hanged. It was ginning sea son, and some of the farmers were taking the occasion to bring in their cotton. There was a recently opened bridge across the Arkansas River that they could use, instead of the ancient log-and-plank barge operated by a disagreeable old man, who'd been subjecting his riders to the same jokes for over four decades - foul, ancient jokes which some people actually swam the river to avoid. Now people could just trot right across the bridge, high above the unpleasant old coot and his flyblown ferry.
At 10:30, hangman George Maledon appeared on the scaffold, a man of such slight build that he looked like a white beard on a stick. He adjusted the rope's length and checked the trap mechanism, which momentarily hushed the crowd when it chunked open. Farm wagons drifted slowly up the street, with rawboned children sprawled across bales that were destined for the factors along Garrison Avenue. Advertisers milled among them, cheerfully yelling that they were paying more than any other factor in town. In truth, there was nothing cheerful about the price of cotton in 1894, which, after decades of decline, was scraping along at less than fifty dollars a bale.
The streets must have afforded curious sights to the Indian and boomer kids - zinc-sheathed telegraph and telephone poles along one side, buildings as high as six stories, a horsecar track, and the big crowd, variously described in news accounts as "more than five hundred souls" and ''well above fifteen hundred." Monte sharks and patent-medicine salesmen were doing business along the street north of the old courthouse lawn - watchfully, since at previous hangings some had been arrested and fined. There were dippers milling in the crowd to steal watches and money. Men emerged from alleyways wiping their mouths with coat sleeves.
On the south side of Rogers Avenue rough three-tiered bleachers had been erected, and thirty-four orphan boys from the Choctaw Armstrong Academy dressed in plain butternut uniforms stood on the wooden planks, brought here by their missionary principal to witness, while still young and uncorrupted, the fruit of crime. Since their orphanage was in the farthermost sticks of the southwestern Choctaw Nation, where the only women were wraithlike crones who came once a week to wash the clothes, many of the boys were in fact concerned less with the fruits of crime than the amazing women promenading through the crowd behind their formidable madams in bright, deeply slashed pastel dresses.
At 11:47, Johnny Pointer, convicted of murdering two livestock-thief cohorts in separate incidents - shooting them through their heads while they lay asleep - was taken from the courthouse jail and with great difficulty led to the gallows. He complained, pushed, pulled, and fell on the ground, protesting that he was being mistreated, that he wanted his lawyer, that his dear mother had not visited him and he would not leave the world without seeing her one last time.
Pointer had been a cause célèbre in the local papers, partly be cause there hadn't been a hanging in a while. Also, Parker's usual clientele were whites and breeds illegally roaming the Indian Nations, hiding from the law, selling whiskey, stealing livestock, who one day got a little too drunk in a one-horse town like Nicksville, Claremore, Cloud Chief, Pitcher, White Bread, who went on a rampage, murdering somebody or several somebodies, and woke up in jail. Compared to these smelly types, Johnny Pointer was a member of the royalty, raised in a middle-class family, a white boy who had "gone astray and deserved mercy," as one newspaper put it. Other papers described him as a spoiled, treacherous, murdering brat - a "traitor to his race" - who deserved worse than hanging. There were four newspapers in Fort Smith and dozens of others on both sides of the border, all keen to gain readers and trying to outdo each other at ferocity of opinion and sensational ism, much of it conjured out of whiskey empurpled imaginations.
Johnny Pointer's protestations silenced the crowd. Dragged onto the high gallows by six stern deputy marshals, his knees and boots clunking against each of the thirteen steps, the prisoner rejected the advice of one of the deputies to take it like a man by sit ting down and bursting into copious tears. The marshals briefly conferred, then picked him up bodily so Mr. Maledon could slip his carefully tarred rope over Pointer's head and secure the knot under his left ear. Maledon normally tied his client's legs and placed a black bag over the head, but this time he did neither. Pointer was putting up such resistance that he wanted to finish the job as quickly as possible.
Desperately, Pointer got his hands loose and clasped his arms around one of the marshals at just the moment the diminutive hangman sprang the trap, "retarding the felon's fall," as one re porter described it, "and causing the struggling marshal almost to plunge through with him."
The newspapers gave wildly different accounts of what happened on the gallows and among the crowd after this point, but the primary fact was not disputed: the man who was to be skillfully ejected into hell at the hour of noon refused to die for forty-three minutes - a record by a good mark, even in the ample history of the Fort Smith gallows.
A half-hour after Johnny Pointer's mortal struggle began, Judge Parker was fetched at a board meeting of the Belle Grove School and asked what should be done about the unfortunate spectacle. His answer, as recorded by one reporter, was, "Let the son of a b-- go all night. You may hire an orchestra for all I care."
In earlier days, when Parker's court was located in the old officers' quarters of Fort Smith, and his dungeon below it, he held sole appealless jurisdiction for all murder, robbery, assault, and whiskey cases involving whites and non-full bloods in seventy-four thousand square miles of western Arkansas and the Indian Nations. On a number of occasions, Parker had saved the district money by sending two to five men at once to the gallows. New courts lately had been established in the Indian Nations and the white-settled Oklahoma Territory, and Parker's district was now whittled down, his authority shrunk. His cases were now subject to appeal, many were overturned, and Parker himself had gotten into bitter, public disagreements with federal officials over policy and management in the Indian Nations. Influential men in the United States government, including members of the Supreme Court, the solicitor general, the Congress, and the president, all regarded the now white-haired, dropsy-plagued judge as undesirable. In one of his more politic statements on the issue, the solicitor general said that Parker was "overzealous in convictions and executions, particularly of whites and half-breeds who he claims disturb the peace and dignity of the Indian Tribes." Parker's somewhat less politic response was that ''The solicitor general of the United States doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that it is against the law for whites and non tribal members to roam around the Indian Nations confiscating Indian lands, stealing livestock, and killing people. I advise him to read the treaties."
In 1894, in a fancy new gingerbread-gothic federal building located several blocks away from his old courtroom, Parker still kept up his accustomed schedule, holding court from daylight until dark six days a week. He would retire a little over a year after the Johnny Pointer hanging, with 174 convictions and 160 actual executions or jail deaths, the largest number of any judge in U.S. history, but his more remarkable accomplishment may have been how long he could talk, off the cuff, about disorderliness, drunkenness, murder, theft, rape, and the destruction of the Indian Nations by lawlessness. When delivering the death sentence to Johnny Pointer, he had subjected the poor hangee to the usual long lecture, at the end holding out hope for him that our Lord, whose Court could offer the only appeal, might afford one last chance for eternal mercy to whoever repented his sins and took his punishment humbly.
Johnny Pointer, refusing to die, showed no inclination to follow this advice.
The tone of the newspaper descriptions of his forty-three minute execution varied from the blackest moral outrage to the most whimsical carnival irony, making it hard to tell what the mood really was. It was noted that a large number of people in the crowd became ill, some with nausea, others with chills and fever and "sudden, catastrophic indigestion." Most of them did remain throughout the event, despite the increasing cold, the darkening sky, and the rain, which started after noon. A few younger witnesses mocked the hanging man in macabre cavortings around the gallows. This would later result in a peculiar high-kneed, walking dance called the Johnny Pointer, popular among children and teenagers in the border country as late as the 1950s.
The rain wasn't heavy at first, but several of the news stories telegraphed out of Fort Smith that evening noted the ominous weather.
So began the flood of 1894.
•
An event in its own way extraordinary happened to Tom Fresh our, one of the boys on the Armstrong Academy bleachers. Someone took a photograph of the thirty-four Choctaw orphans who'd been brought here to see what happened to criminals, but the photograph was a dud, the boys' faces all like clouds of light and shadow. It is impossible to guess which of them is Tom Freshour; being sixteen or seventeen (his birth date was not known), he must be one of the four or five tallest boys. The front door and window of the building behind the orphans, however, are perfectly in focus, as if the photograph had been intended to be of DEKKER HARDWARE. A Closed sign hangs on the big double door, evidence of Dekker's status as a wholesaler, since no retailer in that terrible depression year would have shunned the traffic brought by a hanging.
Sometime during Johnny Pointer's long demise, the front door of the building in this photograph opened, and through it walked the usher of young Tom Freshour's fate in the person of one Mr. Bob MacGinnis, hardware salesman. MacGinnis had been sent out to find errand boys. Seeing the entire bleachers of candidates, MacGinnis went up to them and announced, "Any of you want work? I need three boys." Most of them would probably have delivered a message to hell to get away from the spectacle on the gallows and the cold rain they were being forced to stand in, but MacGinnis's appearance was so sudden, his request so unexpected, that none responded.
For these boys, raised in the stolid, regimented gloom of an orphanage in the remote woods of the Indian Territory, it had been a day of perpetual wonders, new sights and sensations one after another starting at six o'clock that morning. First the trip on the train, which had caused some of the boys to get sick, others to hold on to their seats in fear. Few of them had ever traveled except on their two feet or riding a plow mule, and hurtling along at fifty miles an hour had been breathtaking. Then there was the spectacle of the crowd at the hanging, a throng of people including women costumed in the most unbelievable fashion, with the whole front of their dresses open in such a way that invited one to wonder what was in there - about which few of the boys had clear ideas. Stories circulating at the academy regarding the female sex came from boys who were under eight years old (the academy would take no older) who'd had sisters before becoming orphans, and their descriptions were passed on with such inaccuracy that girls sprouted all kinds of strange anatomical features. Tom Freshour had sometimes sneaked off to the scalding shed and passed time with one of the washing ladies on the day she worked, at least giving him some contact with the opposite sex. But this hardly softened the blow of seeing these powdered, perfumed, white-skinned creatures with their dresses gapped down the front. In addition to these shocks there had been the hanging (to these boys actually not the strangest of the day's events), the surging hysteria of the crowd, and now this nervous-looking man who'd suddenly appeared asking for volunteers for what? A job?
Failing to get any response, MacGinnis found their principal, a pokerfaced missionary named James Schoot, and told him that he needed three boys for regular employment.
The prospect of having three fewer to feed on his tight budget surely must have delighted the principal, although he was always anxious about losing "moral control" over the boys. Reverend Schoot was rigorous about moral control, which he administered liberally, regularly, at the drop of a hat, to their flesh. A teacher who briefly worked at the orphanage noted in his diary that Reverend Schoot "commonly held regular weekly disciplinary floggings as well as daily beatings. I have seen some boys beaten as often as six times per day." Handling so many beatings every day along with all of his other responsibilities must have been tiring work for the Reverend, and one would think he'd be happy to have fewer to perform; but if he worried about releasing the three boys, that would be understandable, since one of them might go into the world, get a pistol, come back to the Armstrong Academy, and pay him back for several thousand whippings.
Mission headquarters, however, would doubtless be pleased when he reported that three older charges had been gainfully employed in the world, so he swallowed whatever concerns he had and prepared to make a bargain. He demanded that the boys' first month's wages be sent to him, for which consideration he gave up all responsibility and control. MacGinnis agreed to this condition, he and the Reverend shook hands, and the boys were on their own.
In this way Tom Freshour, Hack Deneuve, and Joel Mayes were released from the cloistered orphanage, the only place they had ever known, into the world.
Chapter 2
As a salesman who had worked at Dekker Hardware for more than twenty years, W. W. 'Jake" Jaycox was present for the regular monthly sales meeting being held that day at the store. Neither he nor any of the other salesmen was aware of exactly what was going on across the street. Even later, Jake remained uninterested in the story of Johnny Pointer's hanging, despite the fact that he'd been across the street when it happened. Jake was pragmatic, hardheaded, and indifferent to how a man died who had shot a couple of his pals in the head while they were asleep. Having sold hardware in the Indian and Oklahoma territories for twenty-some years, Jake took a dim view of out laws and lawmen, criminals and courts - and he devoted as little thought to any of them as possible.
The "big office," where the salesmen were waiting, was on the east side of the building, and their view didn't include the gallows. All they could see out the window was the Dekker wagon yard, which was packed with hacks and farm wagons of every description. When the rain started afternoon, Jake wondered why the lot didn't begin to clear out, but he wondered more about why Mr. Dekker was late for the sales meeting - which never had happened before in his memory. He could see Mr. Dekker's plain Studebaker wagon and his son Ernest's fancy team parked in the crowd of other rigs, making him suspect that the two of them were in the old man's office, across the display room on the other side of the building. But punctual sales meetings were a sacred event, and he couldn't imagine why the old man would be so late if he was already here, unless he was having an extremely serious talk with his son.
For years, Jake had hoped that Ernest Dekker would find employment elsewhere. If his father got sick or feeble and Ernest took over, the place would surely go to hell. Ernest was not a hardware man. He was a gambler and socialite who dressed sharp and loafed around town with the straw-hat-and-palm-fan crowd, bird hunting, fishing, playing cards, watching horse races, chasing skirts, dabbling in investment schemes, talking real estate. But none of his interests had anything to do with hardware. Dekker Wholesale sold more than twenty-seven thousand separate items, including heavy hardware, sporting goods, enamelware and tinware, pumps, house and commercial furnishings, mechanics' tools, and farm implements, and Ernest didn't know a compression cock from a croquet set. He had never worked at the front desk or in the stockroom, nor had he gone out on the road. Exactly what he did on his occasional visits to the store Jake didn't know. Lately he had been hanging around Charles McMurphy, the treasurer, so apparently he helped with the figures, although Jake couldn't see Ernest stooping to such a lowly occupation as adding and subtracting. As vice president he pulled down a far higher salary than any of the salesmen, but he'd never to Jake's knowledge sold a stick of merchandise.
Waiting for the meeting to start, Jake daydreamed that the old man was finally in there giving Ernest what he'd long deserved, an invitation to get a job somewhere else. Shrewd and plain-dealing with most people, Mr. Dekker had always been soft on Ernest, probably because he was his only living son. Another son had died at the age of ten, and his one daughter had married and moved away years before. They had little in common: the father was a rough-and-ready commercial pioneer, while his son was of the leisured class. The old excuse for Ernest was that he had wild oats to sow, but now that he was near forty, that had worn thin.
The white sky had turned black, the office was dark, and Jake noticed that two or three wagons had torn out of the yard in an awful big hurry. He assumed it was just the weather. The waiting teams were restive, rattling the traces and whinnying as if they didn't particularly want to be pulling home in a storm. Peculiar noises were coming from the direction of the gallows, but none of the salesmen walked out front to see what was going on. The old man had been known to fire a salesman for going to the privy during one of these meetings, so they all stuck tight in the darkening room, chewing, waiting, wondering.
Bob MacGinnis was complaining about how poor things had got in his district. MacGinnis had been hired recently to replace J. D. Plagman, who'd committed suicide at the Wyandott Hotel in Texarkana, apparently because he was unable to sell hardware in southwest Arkansas - a sad fact, since the Angel of Commerce herself couldn't have sold much hardware after more than a year of the Panic. MacGinnis was not doing any better than Plagman had before he shot himself. "It's deader'n a nut down there," he said. "Nobody buyin much as nails."
Jack Peters wheezed in his high voice, "That's the way it is everywhere. The boom in Oklahoma Territory is a damn bust."
Dandy Pruitt and Marvin Beele both threw in their two cents about how low the Indian Nations had got. ''What little you sell, you can't count on being delivered. Trains ain't running half the time," Marvin said, quickly bobbing his head down and bull's eying the spittoon.
When Mr. Dekker finally did walk into the big office, at nearly a quarter after twelve, Jake was further mystified. The old man always started meetings urgently, by saying, "Let's see if you sons of bitches have sold any hardware this month." Today he came in and sat down and looked at them - toward them - with no particular expression except what appeared to Jake to be a kind of light glowing around his eyes. He said nothing. Mr. Dekker was a lean man of average height, tending to bald, with a fierce sharp beak of a nose and close-set eyes. He was waiting for somebody else to arrive.
After a time, Ernest came in. With one eyebrow floating high and a flushed look, the vice president took out a pre-rolled cigarette and put it into a black ivory holder. Jack Peters, the salesman for Oklahoma Territory, leaned out to light it. Unlike his father, Ernest was substantial in size, and he put on magisterial, impatient airs around "inferiors." He looked over the men and asked Bob MacGinnis to come outside. After talking with MacGinnis for a few minutes, Ernest returned alone. The salesmen looked around at one another suspiciously. This was a very odd start for a sales meeting.
At last Mr. Dekker said, ''You'd better tell em."
Ernest glanced at his father and took the ivory holder from his mouth. "All right," he said briskly. "Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, men, but it appears the Panic has finally got to us. The Mercantile Exchange Bank has called in our credit. They have demand notes and we have no choice but to meet them."
Jack Peters made a little oof sound, like he'd been hit in the gut. Marvin Beele rolled his eyes around to Jake. Pete Crapo of central Arkansas merely continued to look puzzled, his normal expression. Jake noticed that the old man, with head cocked back and eyes slightly narrowed, watched Ernest closely.
Ernest scowled at his cigarette. "Mr. Bradley, chief teller, notified us this morning. It was completely unexpected."
Jake knew something of Bradley. He'd seen him around town, running in the same crowd as Ernest.
Ernest continued, "I don't have to tell you how precarious this situation is. We'll have to take immediate action, or they'll seize our merchandise and shut us down. You realize we have no choice in the matter. We're declaring war against debt. We'll have to collect all accounts. Those of you who don't succeed I'm going to have to let go. I'm giving some of you couriers and I want you to keep em damn busy."
Couriers? As Ernest talked on, Jake's disbelief mounted. Heat ascended the back of his neck. He couldn't believe the old man would even listen to the idea of making an all-out collection sweep now. Nobody in the territory had any money. It was ship ping season after a bad harvest on top of a panic. Arkansas, Oklahoma, and all of the Indian Nations were in turmoil. The stores were tighter than he'd ever seen them. Business was in hibernation. The store owners were operating on bank debt and faith that the Panic would end.
And why had Ernest taken over the meeting?
MacGinnis came back in the office pushing three rangy-looking half-breeds. They were shivery and green around the gills.
MacGinnis looked like he'd seen a ghost. ''The man they're hanging over there ain't dead yet!" he said breathlessly. "He's been alive since twelve noon. Goddamnit, he's up there walkin, like ... like he can't get up a flight of stairs!"
"Maybe he's going the wrong way," Ernest said. "He ought to turn around and try the other direction. Where'd you find these boys?"
"They're from the Choctaw orphanage near Durant. Principal's out there waiting to talk to you."
"Are you young men Christians?" Ernest asked.
"Yes sir," two of them barked, skinny boys blinking their eyes and squinting through the gloom, as if they had no idea where they were. The third, who was taller and stouter, a well-featured young man, said nothing at all. He looked around the room with what appeared to be defiant silence.
The boys stood dripping before the scowling, chewing, tense salesmen.
"Choctaws, huh?" said Ernest Dekker. "Good. You can generally trust them for courier work better'n white boys."
Peters wheezed a little laugh, and an awkward silence followed. "We use couriers in town," Ernest said. "Now I want some of you men - the ones with the most money to collect - to have your own personal couriers. We can't count on the express or the post offices in the Nations. I want you men out there working the customers, and I want these couriers to make continuous delivery of everything over a hundred dollars. We have to show the bank, every day, that we're on the right track."
Marvin bobbed his head down and spat.
Then Jake cleared his throat and spoke. Unconsciously, he turned to the old man. "Our customers are behind, but there aren't many holding out on us. About the only kind of paper any body's got right now are customer IOUs and mortgages. We start hittin em hard now and we'll have a lot of closings."
Ernest flourished his cigarette. ''You men have been complaining so long that you sound like a flock of old soldiers at the court house. You ain't collecting debts because you've gotten lazy. You're so spoiled by the boom that you don't know how to take a little slowdown. Mr. Dekker, sitting before you now, sold hardware off the back of a buggy when the only other white peddlers on the road were the kind with kegs in their wagons. He was out there with a buggy full of pots and pans, and not just sellin, he was collecting his debts."
The old man looked uneasy at being the object of Ernest's oration, but still he said nothing. Jake wished he'd at least speak. Had the bank knocked the wind out of him?
''You, Jaycox. Eighteen months ago you were probably moving stock by the carload down in the Choctaw Nation."
"I haven't traveled the south route for seven years-"
''You're used to fat times, that's the plain fact! This is your first taste of hardscrabblin, gentlemen, and I don't know whether you're real salesmen or not. We'll just have to see."
Jake wanted to reply that he was a "real salesman" when Ernest Dekker was still wearing knee britches, and furthermore, Ernest had never been any kind of salesman, so how'd he get to be such an expert? But Mr. Dekker Senior was looking at him with an expression that suggested he stay quiet.
•
On the night train headed over the Kiamichi Mountains, Jake was in a dark mood. His newly hired "courier" sat beside him. After the meeting, Ernest Dekker had taken the new couriers off and talked to them about their new job. Jake had been assigned the biggest of the three, the one called Tom Freshour. He didn't say much and he stared a lot - particularly at females, of whom there happened to be one striking example in their car. To Jake's questions he gave stiffly polite but brief answers. He had a way of dimming his eyes and staring off to discourage conversation. He seemed to Jake tight-strung, sitting upright, almost as if he was at attention, even when dozing.
Jake needed this shavetail following him around like he needed a Chinese footman.
It was raining hard, thunder rattling the windows, as the train crawled up the ridge like mountain. Today's queer sales meeting had lasted well into the afternoon, and Jake had actually left before it was quite over in order to hightail up to his boarding house, get a travel grip, then rush back to the train station with the young man in tow. At the station people had all been talking furiously about what a nail-curler the hanging had been, but Jake was so preoccupied by what had happened at the store that he hadn't been curious.
Tom Freshour nodded off by the time they reached Talihina, and he slept with a restless, worried look, his head repeatedly jerking upright. He looked to be a half-breed, maybe quarter. The shirt and pants he was wearing were a cheap, thin grade of cotton, his soft-soled shoes had holes in them, and he shivered a little as he sat there nodding. Jake eventually moved to a seat across the aisle so he could spread out.
Couriers! If Ernest had ever been across the river on anything but bird-hunting trips, he might know that no matter how bad the express companies had got, you could always find a way. You could even mail cash, if you had to, by tearing it in two and sending it from two different places. Instead of paying a few dollars, the store would be buying train tickets, which would end up costing a good hunk of whatever money they could collect. Oh, but this was an all-out emergency, Ernest had insisted, and they needed to start making deposits right away.
Equally galling was the fact that Ernest had assigned Jake to collect what they called the south route, the Choctaw Nation, which hadn't been his territory for seven years. He was supposed to immediately collect "at least twenty percent of the account balance" being carried in the district. Ernest was shuffling the sales men between territories because he thought it would be easier for them to be tough on customers they didn't know so well. Furthermore, the bank suggested that they employ some scheme whereby the men could collect those stores that had no cash by trading the merchandise mortgages that Dekker held on them for the property mortgages that the stores held against their customers; but the bank was "still working on the details."
That was the point at which Jake begged out to catch the train.
He'd go south. He'd try to collect. But heaven help Dekker Wholesale Hardware and Supply. This sudden shift of authority to Ernest was truly strange. Why he should take over, Jake couldn't figure, unless this credit call had just knocked the stuffing out of the old man. Nor did he understand why Ernest appeared to relish it so much and had such a big plan all ready to layout: couriers, shifted districts, twenty percent collections, mortgage switches - had he made all that up on the spot?
Jake gazed at the sleeping boy and simmered. He would have no pension to look forward to if the store went down. How the store could stay solvent under Ernest Dekker he didn't know. As they approached the high point in the Kiamichi, rain had turned to hail, chunking into the side of the car like rocks.
To make his mood worse, Jake had the extremely vexing thought - he didn't believe it, but it occurred to him - that he could be wrong. It was true that the accounts had been getting further behind every month and a business couldn't subsist for ever on its reserves, panic or no panic. It was also true that how ever strange the plan was, at least it stood up to the problem. Whether he was acting like a fool or not, Ernest was at least acting. All these thoughts were irksome.
The storm was beating against the south side of the train with a vengeance. It was a real deluge. A window up the aisle was cracked open, and hail bounced off the transom into the car. As the train clattered slowly down the mountain, he wondered about the full blood villages out there in the storm, hid off in the hills, little gatherings of leaky, fleabag huts without fireplaces or outhouses.
The full bloods fed themselves by hunting, scratching gardens out of poor hill soil, and collecting government money. Back when he'd covered this territory, Jake had tried to sell hardware in a couple of full-blood towns, but the pickings were slim with no stores to speak of, just a few blacksmiths.
Yet the Choctaw and Cherokee were the "rich" tribes, and for tunes in cotton had been built forty years ago down this way and on the Red River. When Jake had traveled this district, there were still a handful of Choctaw growers trying to keep up the old plantation style, with house servants and fancy carriages. But that kind of thing had generally gone the way of the cotton market. In 1894 "cotton farmer" was another way to say poor folk.
On lower ground, the hail gave way to rain, and they crept into Tuskahoma, past the capitol, a two-story brick building with a mansard roof, lighted in the downpour by brilliant trees of lightning.
Jake noticed Tom Freshour was awake, and looking disconcerted. "Capitol of the Choctaw Nation," Jake said across the aisle. "Ever see that before?"
"No sir," the boy said, blinking his eyes dully. "The legislature meets there,'' Jake said.
''Yes sir."
Talkative devil.
Tuskahoma town consisted of a stunted row of false-front buildings on one side of the track, and across from it, down near the bank of the Kiamichi River, some older buildings including a blacksmith shop, a warehouse, and a hotel. Farms were strewn in no particular order on the surrounding hills, most of them with a few acres of valley cropland. The only person Jake was supposed to collect from here was John Blessing, but there was no way he could see him tonight.
Stepping off the car, Jake headed straight into the station house. The agent was gone. A gasoline stove sat hissing on the counter, and around the room were stacked crates, bales of new barbed wire, a saddle, and a case of saw blades from Dekker Hard ware that was being leaked on through the roof. Jake shoved it out of the drip. When he turned around, the woman in their car Tom had been watching was standing there.
"Hello," she said, smiling.
Jake was too surprised to smile back. "Hello."
Tom Freshour took one look at her and turned away. "Do you know where I could find a good hotel?"
"I know where a hotel is. Wouldn't necessarily call it good, ma'am." He hesitated a minute longer, not looking forward to getting soaking wet. The OK Hotel was where he'd always stayed when he traveled this route, and he hoped it was still in operation.
They headed across the muddy street, down the hillside through blowing, cold sheets of rain. The OK was still there, and Mrs. Oke, the gnarled root ofa woman who owned the hotel, was up busying around taking care of leaks, stuffing cracks, taking up rag rugs, and glancing nervously out the windows.
"Awful wet out there," Jake said, setting down his grip. "Black as a pocket," Mrs. Oke said.
"How have you been doing?"
"Oh, I'm all broke down and puny," she said, looking up at him with a glitter in her rheumy eyes. She was littler than ever probably weighed all of eighty pounds. "Ain't me I'm worried about tonight, it's that river."
Jake signed his name to the register. ''You remember me?"
"Course I do. You're Mr. Hardware. This your family?"
"No ma'am, I'm a bachelor. This is Tom. He's a new hand. And this lady's looking for a hotel."
She winked at Jake. "That boy's too handsome for the hardware business, hey?" She collected their fifty cents, lighted a hurricane lantern, then leaned toward Jake and said in hushed tones, "Got some deputies here tonight with a prisoner. Penny pinchers! Worried me to death tryin to get my price down." She took up the lantern and led them upstairs to a one-bed room, made a pallet on the floor for Tom, and got a couple of pans for leaks that were coming through the roof. A layer of old thin shakes was the only thing between them and the weather. Mrs. Oke left them to take care of the woman.
Jake decided that the weather was too terrible for him to go to the outhouse, so he peed out the window and the boy followed suit. "Don't get your pecker wet," Jake said.
Tom looked wary. "I won't, sir."
Jake took off his sopping clothes and put on his spare long johns. It occurred to him that the boy had no dry clothes, in fact no luggage at all. Having lived by himself, mostly in boarding houses, for thirty years, Jake wasn't accustomed to worrying about somebody else's domestic needs, but he dug out an undershirt and a pair of pants from his valise and offered them. Tom looked at the clothes, then at Jake, with the same unvarnished blankness, at first making no effort to take them.
''You want something dry?"
He took them, but instead of putting them on, laid them be side his pallet.
Jake shut down the wick and settled into the shuck mattress.
The boy quickly knelt by the flickering window and said the Lord's Prayer aloud, so hurriedly that it sounded like nine or ten long words: " ... forthineisthekingdom thepowerandtheglory foreveramen."
It was a thunder-rattled night, with fat raindrops unrelievedly beating on the roof, and Jake remained in a fitful state, smelling the bedbug-repelling kerosene soaked into the bedsteads, listening to the drip pans, worrying about how in the Sam Hill he was going to collect money from any of these stores. Jake remembered the Panic of '73, and this one was worse. In '73, he'd still been young enough not to worry, as long as his belly didn't get too empty. Still, he remembered how lucky he'd felt not to have a family to feed.
Through the night he fretted and tossed. Sometime before the first paleness of day, a thunderbolt shook the walls, and he rolled over and saw the boy at the window, outlined in a sky walking with fire. He had taken off his wet shirt, and in the lightning Jake saw a thick network of scars on his back. A good-sized kid. Tall. Maybe sixteen, hard to tell. Jake wondered about him in a dreamy kind of way-where he'd come from, how he'd been orphaned. He looked again through half-shut eyes and noticed that the boy turned toward him, stepped quietly over the pallet, now came swiftly toward the bed and was suddenly there above him. A dim fear went through Jake's mind, but he was just at the cusp of sleep. A boy with that many scars on his back could be a rotten apple. But he lay momentarily frozen between indecision and plain sleepiness, and before he had made up his mind to sit up, the boy stole away. Soon Jake tumbled headlong into a brief sleep full of vivid dreams.
Only to be waked up by banging and yelling, after what seemed like less than an hour. He put his feet on the floor - the boy wasn't in the room - and he walked over to the window. The sun wasn't up yet, but he saw in lantern reflection out a window what the boy had been watching.
The Kiamichi had become a river sure enough, out of its banks and roaring, and the hotel was sitting in the edge of it. A chicken house floated by, crowned by one forlorn leghorn. The door to the room swung open and Mrs. Oke poked her head in.
"Movin out!" she croaked. "Need help!"
Chapter 3
For Tom Freshour the last twenty-four hours had been like a dream -the long walk from the orphanage at Bokchito to Durant, the train ride from there to Fort Smith, and the hanging, then going into a big old building and standing before a roomful ofnervous, chewing men, and being given a job, and told that he would never return to the academy, just like that. And again a train into the territory, and staying the night in an atticlike room with a salesman named Mr. W. W. 'Jake" Jaycox while it rained without end. The whole world outside the Armstrong Academy was like a dream, only more sudden, more amazing, more full of strangeness. And this morning Tom's shivering and the gnawing hunger in his belly felt very real, but slogging up the cold, rain-swept hill carrying furniture seemed both real and dreaming - the real of the cold against his skin in the fantastic dreamy unendingness of the rain. Lanterns burned smoky and high around the common room of the OK Hotel. Water was over the floorboards and the old woman waded around, gathering up smaller things. A man carrying a huge wooden display grip with El Dorado Chemical & Drugs in sweeping red letters was helping move some of it. There were three others: a white prisoner with loosened leg manacles and two white men with badges. The deputies slouched in the common room, rolling cigarettes and passing a bottle back and forth. The old woman kept fussing at the ones who were helping, as they hauled food safe, tables, dressers, and even some beds out the door and up the hill. ''Apela!" She went down the little hall to the first-floor room and pounded on the door. "Wake up! Come out! Hurry."
Mr. Jaycox appeared, walking as stiffly as a table down the stairs, looking grizzled and grumpy, blinking at the water that covered the floor. "Good God almighty," he muttered. Soon he was helping Tom muscle a chest of drawers and parts of beds up the slippery hill, dropping things, getting their feet stuck in the mud. The drug salesman and the prisoner -the deputies called him "cedar thief" -continued helping, too, while the two deputy marshals did not. They bucked the furniture to a building behind John Blessing's General Merchandise. Back at the hotel, the water was more than ankle-deep. Mrs. Oke now was being followed around by the shorter ofthe deputies, who wanted to get back last night's room fee in payment for the labor of their prisoner. He was a fast-talking, snaky man with two big hogleg guns strapped backwards to his waist.
She had her cash box under her arm but wasn't about to hand back any money. "Ch sinti! Go away, you penny pincher!" she said angrily.
Mr. Jaycox picked up a lantern and walked between them. ''This place is flooding out. "
The door to the downstairs room opened and out came the woman they had met last night. She wore a high collar and a starched grey skirt, the hem of which floated in the water. It wasn't as if her appearance was unexpected, but to Tom the sight ofher was troubling. High-arched eyebrows, green eyes, and dark hair done up in a bun with stray curls down her temples - she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, though he hadn't seen many. He wanted to look away from her but found it impossible to do so. It occurred to him that she was from the city, the big city--an odd thought since, as far as he knew, he had never known anyone from a big city, much less a woman. The one woman he had really known was seventy-some years old and did not speak the same language he did, so they had done little talking. Yet however ill equipped he was to come up with such an opinion, still he thought it: big city.
She looked at both Mr. Jaycox and him with almost a smile. "I hope you're well this morning, Mr. Jaycox," she said, and while he looked momentarily bemused by this, she glanced around the somber disorder of the room, showing no sign of fear, hiked up her skirt and actually led them out of the hotel.
They all trailed up the hill and stood on the roofed porch of Blessing's store. Cheerless, begrudging, greenish light began filtering through clouds that showed no sign of letting up. Near the train depot, a man in a big-wheeled hack was mired up to the axle, his mare struggling wildly under the continuously booming thunder, and Tom went over and helped him push it out. People all around the village were crawling out of damp nests. A few were trudging back and forth, carrying things up from low-lying houses and buildings.
The young woman and Mrs. Oke, still clutching her cash box, remained on the porch watching the hopeless situation of the hotel, while others went inside and huddled around the stove. The prisoner and two deputies were soon grousing about this and that, the shorter deputy about the widow not refunding his money, the timber thief about having to do all the work.
The taller deputy, who had a woeful, guilty look, seemed mainly concerned about breakfast. "Git no sleep, work all mornin helpin her, you'd think she'd git us somethin ... "
"Who worked all morning?" the timber thief said. "Neither one of you dogberries knows how to work."
Townspeople trailed into the store a few at a time looking for help or consolation, clusters of refugees bringing more house hold items to the high ground, including bundles of clothes, chairs, broken-down beds, and some animals left outside - chickens, a little herd of goats, some cows. A couple of men wanted to "borrow" chicken wire from the store owner to make a temporary pen on the high ground behind the store, and he gave it to them. People talked quietly about who'd been washed out, who'd lost livestock, and where they could move things. The men made and lighted cigarettes, and the room smelled of sumac, tobacco, wet clothes, and upset nerves.
The young woman from the hotel stood beside Mrs. Oke on the porch; a moment earlier she had come inside and looked around. Tom noticed that no one spoke to her. The deputies and the timber thief quit quarreling and watched her in a sullen, walleyed way.
The short deputy poked Tom in the shoulder and said, with a dirty-toothed grin, "Like to git a little of that?"
"I beg your pardon?" Tom said.
"Oh ho! Listen to that, Wayne. We have an educated one here. He's so smart he don't know what I'm talking about."
"Tom," Mr. Jaycox said sharply, "could you come over here, please." He was sitting on a box back from the fire. He motioned Tom to sit next to him, then said quietly, ''You probably ought to keep away from them."
''Yes sir."
After a moment he said, “Tom, did you talk to that young woman?"
"No I didn't, sir."
The salesman looked puzzled. "I don't think I know her. I guess Mrs. Oke must have mentioned my name to her."
''Yes sir."
''You can call me Jake if you'd like."
"Thank you, sir."
Mr. Jaycox looked around the store and sighed.
Grim-faced, with mud to their knees, two more families from low-lying houses showed up, bringing things with them, and the store was now littered with wet furniture, wet bundles of clothes, wet and dismal people of all ages. Drips plinked down and buckets were accidentally knocked over on the floor.
Mr. Jaycox spoke so no one but Tom could hear him. "Looks like John Blessing's down to bartering pumpkins and sweet corn. This place is as sparse as a hillbilly's teeth. When I sold goods here, he was getting to be one of the best general merchants in the Nation." Jake shook his head. 'Today ain't the time for collecting. Not with what's going on here."
Tom watched the owner. He had dark bags under his eyes.
When he sold something he didn't ask for cash; he just wrote the figures in his big account book, larger in size than the "book of sins" kept by Reverend Schoot but with the same thick black cover. In all the confusion of traffic, people were asking the store keeper for loans of this and that, help, or advice. He tried to accommodate them, but he looked debilitated and strained. Nervously, fussily, he checked the buckets he'd set around the room to catch drips.
A thin, wavering cry came from the porch, and everyone in the room fell quiet - statues in a dimly lit room marbled with smoke. Several of them moved at once, crowding out to the front porch, and Tom followed, just in time to see the hotel they had slept in last night jolt and shudder and be swept away by the flood. The old woman cried out again - a thin, high, eerily familiar sound. The big building pivoted sideways and headed ponderously down stream on its foundation of logs, floating for some distance like a ship before doing a slow, staggering dip, tipping over and starting to break apart. Another building nearby was being shaken and torn by the force of the current. The warehouse next to the hotel had already collapsed into the river, and the downslope half of Tuskahoma appeared to be pretty much gone. Mrs. Oke's cry cut through the rain.
Tom was standing painfully close to the young woman, who gave off a heat that he could feel through the wet air. She turned and looked at him - slowly, actually raking her eyes up across him - and he backpedaled a step, tripped over a boot scraper, and fell hard on his tailbone. Humiliated, he got up quickly.
Mr. Jaycox came over. "I think we're going to have to call this trip a bust and try to catch a train back. The bridges are either going to be under water or blocked by ballast trains pretty soon. We'd be floating around out here till the cows come home. I'm just going to say hello to John Blessing. Come over and meet him."
Tom saw the young woman move a step, as if about to speak to Mr. Jaycox, but he didn't notice her.
The owner was behind his counter, wet and grim. He was a stout man, at least half-blood, with a scar cut deeply into his chin. When they walked over, Blessing stayed behind his counter, looking unfriendly. "What are you doin here, sellin rowboats?" Blessing said without preface, swallowing his words off short, as if they tasted bad in his mouth.
Mr. Jaycox held out a hand to shake, and Blessing barely touched it. "No sir. This is still Dandy's territory."
''You travelin Guthrie?"
"Guthrie and north of there," Mr. Jaycox said.
"Makin a lot of money in the white settlements?"
"Not lately."
"That's where all the money is. Sure ain't down here."
Mr. Jaycox smiled and shook his head. "Most of the money in Oklahoma Territory stays on the keno tables, John. Half the people in Guthrie moved out a couple of weeks ago for the Outlet rush."
"The free land," Blessing said sarcastically. "They'll have ours soon."
"Meet Tom Freshour, John. He just came on with us."
Blessing looked morosely toward the door. "So Dekker is hiring Indian boys to sell hardware? Must be in a bad way."
Mr. Jaycox looked taken aback. "Well now, John, that's a heck of a thing to say."
The storekeeper looked suspicious. "You ain't here to collect money from me, are you?"
"I'm just stopping off to say hello. I'll talk to you later."
"But that's what you're here for, isn't it," Blessing demanded. "I'm not going to pester you, John. You've been a good customer for a long time, and I can see what's go in on here today." This apparently was the wrong thing to say, because Blessing gritted his teeth and slammed his fist onto his account book so hard the glass cases rattled. "So you are here to dun me!"
Mr. Jaycox appeared startled at his sudden fury.
"What you wanta do, confiscate my stock, eh? Let me tell you something. You can have it!" He shoved a heavy sack across the counter, hitting the salesman in the leg, scattering ten penny nails all over the floor. A rope tree with coils of different-sized manila sat on his counter, and he picked up the end close to him and with a powerful spasmodic contraction of his shoulders flipped it toward them. It hit the floor next to Mr. Jaycox's boot.
"Damnation, John."
"Wanta shut me down, eh? Take my store. Ya can have it! Debtsandall!" He again pounded the accounts book. "Take - eh, eh!" He seemed breathless, his head bobbing and eyes blinking in a slow, strange way. ''Ya can have it!" He pointed at the account book.
Stepping backwards, the store owner bumped into his medicine shelf, reached into a box, and pulled out a pistol. It looked like the old wartime cap-and-ball revolver that Tom had seen the Reverend use. ''Take it!" he shouted, the scar on his chin livid. He waggled the pistol at them.
Remarkably fast, the crowded store was emptying of people.
Blessing remained behind his counter, eyes narrow, with the pistol aimed at Mr. Jaycox.
"Tom, we better be leaving." He put a hand on Tom's shoulder and Tom did what he did, backpedaling slowly until they had made it onto the porch.
''Take the damn thing!" John Blessing roared.
•
The first thing Tom noticed outside was that the young woman in the grey skirt and Mrs. Oke had apparently gone down the hill to get something, because now they were starting back up the hill. The two deputies remained, peeking through the front window, talking about the store owner, who was threatening now to kill himself and anybody who came in the door.
"It's against regulations to pull a gun in a post office," said the short one with two pistols.
"Naw, now -" said the tall one.
"This here's a goddamn post office, ain't it? He can't kill his self in there. If he's breaking postal regulations, we haul him to Guthrie. It's a good hunderd fifty miles, times six cents, plus the federal bounty. That's real money, mister."
The arrested man, sitting down against the wall, snorted, "He's a Indin. He can commit suicide anyplace he wants to."
''You're wrong there, cedar thief," the short deputy said. "He can't do it in a post office. It don't make no difference what kind of Indin he is."
"How in the hell are you going to git to Guthrie?" the cedar thief said vehemently. "Rivers are floodin, and you're too cheap to buy a ticket even if the trains was runnin, you and your damn six cent a mile! Besides which, I ain't goin two hunderd mile across the damn country chained to some son of a bitch that's tryin to kill hisself!"
"I don't know," the tall deputy said worriedly. "I think we oughter leave ... "
Peering intently through the rain, Tom saw Mrs. Oke with the young woman beside her carrying a suitcase, struggling toward the porch, sinking up to her shins in the street. Mrs. Oke held a little box of knickknacks. The woman stepped onto the porch first, and Mr. Jaycox was moving to warn her away when four or five shots came off so fast that Tom hardly had time to flinch. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed something coming through the door, a large black thing, flying like a saw blade cut loose from its axle, and the woman was knocked back off the porch into the mud, quick as a steer hit in the head with a sledgehammer.
It was Mr. Blessing's account book, hurled out the door with such force that she probably hadn't even seen it.
Mr. Jaycox went to her and knelt down. He yelled at Tom to help him.
Chapter 4
“Get out of here," came the hoarse voice from inside the building. "All of you!"
Back against the wall near the front door, a foolish grin on his face, the short deputy yelled, "I'm arresting you for shoo tin in a post office!"
"I do whatever I want to in my own store, hatak hata." Blash!
A bullet cut through the rain, and Jake instinctively ducked, dropping the woman back into the mud.
"Boy, she don't look good," the short deputy said, with the same goofy grin on his face.
The color had quickly left her face, her expression crumpled.
The big black ledger lay flopped open by her head with several bullet holes in it. Blessing had shot his own ledger, then hurled it out the door. Jake couldn't see any wounds besides an ugly, deep bruise on her temple. The boy was kneeling next to her in deep mud, his hands held out, not quite touching her.
"Come on," Jake said. ''We better get her out of the street be fore she drowns."