Jack Parker Comes of Age

by Ed Roberts

  There was, needless to say, no possibility of sleep that night for Jack Parker. Even after Carter and his men had left, he was too terrified to move from the barn and expose himself to view. It was not until the first glimmering of false dawn in the eastern sky that he bestirred himself and set off back to Mayfield. There was no question of continuing upon his chosen course, not after witnessing such a shocking crime. Whatever his feelings currently might be about his pa, Jack knew that Tom Parker was the law in Benton County, and that it would be his proper duty to make sure that these brutal deaths were avenged. The sooner that he reported the matter, the sooner that Timothy Carter and his bullies would be brought to justice.

  Dawn had arrived before Jack reached the edge of town. After seeing the terrible crime that he had been compelled to witness just a few short hours earlier, the boy was vaguely surprised to find that life in the little town seemed to be proceeding much as usual. Well, he thought, all that would soon change. As soon as his father had been apprised of the matter, then no doubt a posse would be mustered and Carter taken into custody and unceremoniously thrown into the cell at the back of the sheriff’s office. In this, though, Jack Parker was sadly mistaken.

  Tom Parker was already up, and when Jack entered through the kitchen door, his father turned to stare at him; anger plain in his face. ‘Where the hell have you been, you young whelp?’ was his greeting. ‘You didn’t sleep in your bed last night. What the devil are you about?’

  In the usual way of things, Jack would have been trembling at such a reception, but he knew that there were greater things at stake here, and so he stood his ground and replied, ‘I’ll tell you later. Aggie Roberts is dead. Lynched. So’s Mr Baxter.’

  Jack’s father stared at him, transfixed by the news. After a pause of a second or two, he said, ‘What are you talking about, boy? I tell you now, this best not be some story you dreamed up to get yourself out of trouble.’

  ‘It’s no story, Pa. I seed it with my own eyes.’

  Perhaps Tom saw how shaken up his son was, for he softened his tone somewhat and said, ‘We’ll talk later about where you been. Set there now and I’ll pour you a cup of coffee. Now what’s all this about Aggie?’

  After he had poured out the whole tale to his father, Jack said, ‘And that’s the God’s honest truth, sir. I saw Mr Carter with my own two eyes. He as good as murdered them, leastways he was in charge of the whole entire business. You going to arrest him?’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You’re not? But I tell you I saw him. He was behind the whole thing.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom Parker, his face strained and white, ‘You didn’t see him, son. Fact is, you weren’t even there.’

  It was to be almost thirty years before Jack Parker fully understood the strange look that his father’s face bore that morning. At the time, he thought that his father was tired and angry, but that wasn’t it at all. When he was a grown man, with children of his own, Jack was living on the fourth floor of an apartment building. He carelessly left the window open and came out of the bedroom to find his five-year-old son leaning so far out that he was in serious danger of overbalancing and falling to his death. Of course, Jack had rushed over to the child and snatched him to safety, and after he had scooped up the child with one hand and closed the window with the other, he had chanced to see his face reflected in a mirror. In an instant, he was transported back to 1891, as he recollected that peculiar look he had seen on his father’s face in April of that year. That strained expression did not indicate anger at all, but rather a terrible fear for the safety of a much loved child who had been in mortal danger.

  But now, as no more than a callow youth, Jack Parker wholly mistook the look on his father’s face, and interpreted it as being anger at Jack’s meddling in something his pa wanted to be let alone. He said suddenly to his father, ‘Are you in on this? Is that why you don’t want me saying aught of it?’

  Now anger really did come into Tom Parker’s face, and he said sharply, ‘You young fool, just do as you’re bid. This is nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Yes it is, though,’ cried Jack, every bit as roused as his father, ‘Aggie was a good friend to me, and I won’t see her murdered in such a way and nothing done about it!’

  The two of them stood there, facing each other. Then Jack recalled the hideous sight of a woman he had loved and respected choking out her life at the end of a rope and the tears came to his eyes. To his utter mortification and shame, he began sobbing like a little child, and in a moment, his father’s arms were around him, comforting and strong. Jack clung to his father, who stroked his head as gently as a woman, saying ‘There, it’s all right son. It’s all right.’

  After a space, Tom let go of his boy and said unexpectedly, ‘Lord, the rows I used to have with my own father, God rest him. I never thought it would come to me to play that part.’

  ‘You used to fight with your father, sir?’ asked Jack, staggered at the idea of the tough and resourceful sheriff of Benton County being a rebellious youth.

  ‘Why, yes. Those years from being a boy to becoming a man, they’re never easy for anybody. I ran away, you know, things got so bad between us. Is that what you was aiming for to do?’

  Jack shuffled his feet and looked down at the floor. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Going for a soldier, were you?’

  ‘Something like.’

  Tom Parker dismissed the subject with a brief laugh and said, ‘Well then, both you and me need to mend our ways, maybe. Meantime, happen I should trust you a mite more and tell you what’s what. We surely can’t carry on in this way, and that’s for certain sure, I can’t have you suspicioning as I was complicit in Aggie Roberts’ death. It isn’t to be thought of for a moment. Which means a history lesson, I guess.’

  Seeing the dismay that appeared on his son’s countenance at the dreadful word ‘history’, the sheriff’s lips twitched slightly and he said, ‘Don’t be afeared, I don’t mean “history”, like in the Wars of the Roses or Shakespeare. I’m talking of what’s been happening in these here parts in the last few years. Pour yourself a coffee and come with me to my study.’

  When the two of them were settled in the sheriff’s study, which was where he kept many of his official books, papers and records, Tom Parker said to his son, ‘I don’t look for you to repeat anything I say in this room to another living soul. Is that plain? You’ll see why, directly.’ There was a long pause, as he thought how best to proceed. Knowing, as he did, the ins and outs of the situation, it wasn’t easy to gauge how much of the background he would need to explore, in order to make things comprehensible. And how much of it would make sense to his son; he had no idea. At length, he said, ‘I guess that the current unpleasantness began just after that hard winter we had in eighty-six. You recollect the year that I made you that sledge? When the snow and ice lay on the ground for weeks at a time?’

  ‘I remember the sledge. I was nine or ten, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You were. Well, it was all well and good for a youngster like you, playing on your sledge and throwing snowballs, but there were men for whom that winter meant starvation and ruin. And it laid the seeds for what’s happened since, including the death of your friend. It was like this. . . .’

  Chapter 2

  For the first ranchers, the Wyoming Territory was something of a paradise. There was unlimited pasture and water for the taking. They let their herds of longhorns roam the range, rounding them up when needful, to brand or despatch to the slaughterhouse. All good things come to an end, though, and after the war between the states, the government in Washington began handing out parcels of land in Wyoming to more or less anybody who wanted it, with preference given to those who had fought for the Union. Each man was allocated one hundred and sixty acres, and if he farmed it for five years, then he could file claim and the land became his in perpetuity.

  None of this accorded with the wishes and desires of those already rearing stock in the Wyoming Territory. The small far
ms that sprang up soon enclosed their fields with barbed-wire fences, and this prevented the vast herds of cattle belonging to the big ranchers from wandering freely. Worse still was the closing off of access to rivers and streams, as the banks became lined with smallholdings; the owners of which objected to hundreds of longhorns trampling over their crops to reach the water and drink. The ranchers called this state of affairs ‘losing their water rights’.

  Perhaps the most irksome aspect of these developments was that some of the newcomers began keeping cattle as well. The increase in supply had the effect of driving down the price, and in the mid eighteen-eighties, the price of beef plummeted. Large landowners blamed this on the settlers and homesteaders, for whom they coined a variety of unflattering epithets, such as ‘squatters’ and ‘nesters’. There was an even worse name that the new homesteaders were called, and that was ‘rustlers’. The story was put about by the big cattle barons that steers were being stolen wholesale and that the chief culprits were the nesters and squatters. Theft of cattle or horses was treated in those days with the utmost severity, and the usual consequence, if once a man were detected in the act, was summary justice, known commonly as lynching.

  The winter of 1886 was so harsh that three-fourths of the cattle in Wyoming were wiped out. Following this disaster, the big ranchers reorganized how they raised their herds, relying less upon longhorns and instead introducing new, cross-bred types. That and various other innovations rejuvenated the industry, leaving only the problem of the homesteaders who were still flocking to the territory. A body called the Wyoming Stock Growers Association was founded, whose aim was to guard the interests of the rich against the paupers who were flooding in from the east. By 1891, the WSGA had become immensely rich and powerful, numbering among its members the State Governor and both senators for the new state of Wyoming. All that remained was to drive out the squatters and nesters and everything would be right in Wyoming.

  ‘And that’s pretty much how things stood until two weeks ago,’ Tom Parker told his son, ‘When John Baxter decided to write something about the situation for the newspapers.’ He reached into a pile of papers, delved around for a bit and then pulled out a page from a newspaper, which he handed to Jack. ‘Read this,’ he said.

  The page was from the front of the 25 June 1891 edition of The Buffalo Examiner; Incorporating the Wyoming Territory Agricultural Gazette and Intelligencer. Jack Parker read the following article, which was signed at the bottom by John Baxter:

  The citizens of both Benton County and its fair neighbour Johnson County, are heartily and irredeemably sick of the activities of the speculators and land grabbers who are making the lives of honest men and women a veritable misery, with their unfounded and unwarranted accusations of ‘rustling’ and cattle theft. The greedy and rapacious villains who hope to seize all the land in Wyoming and use it for their own purposes, are squeezing out all the settlers and homesteaders who live quietly on land legally granted to them by the Federal Government. By calumniating these decent folk as ‘rustlers’ and labelling them ‘squatters’ and ‘nesters’, the wealthy men who run the WYOMING STOCK GROWERS ASSOCIATION, including its leading light, TIMOTHY CARTER, think to turn right-minded people against their law-abiding neighbours and let the bully-boys of the W.S.G.A. ride roughshod over their ancient liberties. They need not imagine for a moment that they will be permitted to act in this fashion for very much longer!

  ‘Two days after that was published,’ said Tom Parker, ‘somebody smashed the front window of the Examiner’s office and lobbed in a stick of dynamite. Nobody was hurt, but their printing press was pretty well wrecked. These boys don’t fool around when you get crosswise to them.’

  ‘But you’ve got them now! I can swear in court that Timothy Carter was there when Aggie Roberts was killed, that it was his doing.’

  Sheriff Parker shook his head sadly and said, ‘You’ve a lot to learn, son. First off is that I’d have to arrest Carter and then persuade the district attorney to prosecute him. Then there’d be the grand jury indictment, and after that a trial. I’ll tell you now that the district attorney will do whatever the governor tells him, and Governor Barber is a member in good standing of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Any jury’d be made up of property owners, men who also have a stake in things staying the way they are. Even without being threatened or bribed, they’d most likely vote to acquit. But that’s not the worst of it. I don’t think it would even get that far. My guess is that once word got out that there was a witness to the murder, they’d come after you, seeking your life.’

  Hearing this from his father came as a dreadful shock to Jack. He was beginning to see now why his father was adamant about him keeping quiet about what he had seen. But it was all wrong, and he said to his father, ‘Can’t anything be done? Are they just to get away with it?’

  ‘Not while I got breath in my body,’ said Tom Parker grimly, ‘But this needs careful thought. There’s more than one lawman been killed by these fellows, you know.’

  ‘You don’t mean they’d kill you, Pa?’

  ‘They might. They just might, if I gave them cause and enough ordinary folk were on their side.’

  It is only in storybooks that families change abruptly overnight and the members all suddenly behave differently towards each other, following some illness, injury or other reason. It would be pleasant to relate that such was the case after the conversation that Sheriff Parker and his son had that morning, but it wouldn’t be true. The two of them still got on each other’s nerves after the talk they had that morning, but the seeds had been sown that day of a deeper understanding on both sides. Jack still found his father overbearing and apt to throw his weight around, and for his part, Tom Parker was frequently irritated by the cavalier attitude that his son displayed towards academic achievement. But something had changed for the better in their relationship, and after the night of the two lynchings, things were never again as awkward and strained between the two of them. In later years, both of them would regard the killing of Aggie Roberts as the catalyst that ultimately brought them together, after the estrangement of adolescence.

  Sheriff Parker waited until he was officially notified by another person of the deaths of John Baxter and Agatha Roberts, keeping his son’s involvement in the affair a closely guarded secret. That being so, he had no legitimate excuse to approach Timothy Carter about the two deaths. There is no telling how long Jack would have been able to restrain himself from talking of his first-hand knowledge of the crime to his friends in the schoolyard, which meant that it was a mercy that the summer vacation began just two days after the news broke about the murders. Jack was looking forward with great eagerness to the summer, which he proposed to spend in fishing, hunting and other relaxing pursuits. His plans received a rude shock however, when his father announced that this year was going to be different from preceding ones. How the thing had been worked, Jack had no idea at all, although he suspected that the hidden machinations on the part of his Aunt Marion, his pa’s sister, were at work.

  Aunt Marion often expressed the view that boys were a trouble and that Jack especially was a young limb of Satan. It would be just like her to spoil a fellow’s fun, thought Jack wrathfully, when his father told him what the summer would be holding for him this year. About this, however, he was quite wrong. The scheme was entirely of his father’s devising. He had done a lot of thinking since that fateful morning, the night after his son ran away from home, and the sheriff, as a fair man, had been forced to concede that no little portion of the blame for the bad atmosphere in the house which he shared with his son attached to him, rather than the boy. He had accordingly decided that it was time to let the youngster have a taste of the real world and think matters over a little, as touching upon either going off to college at some point, or starting straight in on a job of work.

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Sheriff Parker, as he outlined the plan to Jack, ‘As you’re no longer a child. Maybe I should o’ noticed before, but th
ere, there’s naught to be done about what’s past. We can remedy matters this year, though. Next month or so, there’ll be work, not play, for you.’

  At these words Jack’s heart sank, for when his father spoke of ‘work’, Jack thought that he most likely talked of schoolwork, reading and ciphering and so on. He had known some older boys whose parents had engaged tutors for them, in preparation for college. Something of what was going through his mind must have shown on his face, for his father’s eyes glinted with sudden amusement. He said, ‘You can make yourself easy, if you think that you’re going to be spending your days doing sums or learning about the constitution. Not but that you wouldn’t benefit from such a course of action.’

  ‘What’ll I be doing then, sir?’

  ‘How’d you like to spend some time helping your pa?’

  This was such a novel idea that Jack hardly knew what to say. He temporized by saying slowly, ‘I don’t rightly understand what you mean.’

  ‘Here’s the way of it,’ said his father, ‘We’re a man down at the moment. It don’t matter why, that don’t signify. But it means that I need somebody to do stuff for the horses, tidy up round the office, maybe write up some documents. You think you might help with it?’

  ‘I reckon so. You mean we’d be working together?’

  ‘Lord help me, I guess that’s what I’m saying, yes. Not all the time, mind. Sometimes I need somebody to set in the office and take note of enquiries and suchlike. But I dare say we’ll see much of each other, yes. What do you say?’

  ‘I’d sure like to give it a go, sir.’

  ‘Good boy. We’ll begin Monday. Best make the most of tomorrow, for you’re not apt to have a mort o’ spare time after this coming sabbath.’

  And so began the period of Jack Parker’s life which, he later realized, marked, very sharply, the end of his childhood. Hitherto he had been protected from the realities of life by spending his days at school, with boys who were for the main part a good deal younger than he. That summer of 1891, when his father took him on as, what was to all intents and purposes, an apprentice lawman, was the time when Jack learned about how the world really worked. It was, by the by, very different from the way things had been represented to him while he was attending school and going to church and Sunday School. By the time the summer ended and he had celebrated his sixteenth birthday, Jack wondered how he could ever have been such an innocent.