by Bill Albert
Bartlett Sinclair handed me a pencil and a piece of paper.
“Bring that light over here.”
Gold Tooth set a lantern on the table. Bartlett Sinclair motioned me to sit and said that I should think back on that train ride and write down all the names I could remember.
“What? Don’t you be playing with me, son! We know the names of the engineer and the fireman. Damn it! You know what we want. Come on, write me out those names.”
“Masks? Didn’t recognize anyone? You expect me to believe that? What about Harry Orchard, did you recognize him? Yes? You did? That’s better. Harry Orchard.”
I figured I could safely give him Harry as he had disappeared over into Montana.
“Paul Corcoran? No? Paddy Burke? No? Bill Davis? No? Any others you can remember? Only Harry Orchard, is that it? Why don’t I believe you, Hyman?”
“Boy’s told you, Mr. Sinclair, and I’m not going to let you badger him, frighten him any more.”
Ignoring Aunt May, he turned to one of the soldiers.
“Bring him in here,” he said.
A few moments later the soldier returned, pushing a slight, hunched figure in front of him. At first it was impossible to make out in the dimness who he was, although I knew right away there was only one person it could be. When he got closer to the light, the straw white hair downright confirmed my reckoning.
“Tell him and tell her,” ordered Bartlett Sinclair, “what you told me.”
“Benjamin Shorter!” exclaimed Aunt May. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Benny’s head remained bowed as he spoke in a muted, quivery voice.
“Ah . . . Francis Butler, Paddy Burke, Henry Maroni, Paul Corcoran, Harry Orchard, Arthur Wallace, Louis . . .”
“That’s plenty,” Bartlett Sinclair interrupted, flicking his hand at him to be quiet.
He smiled unhurriedly at Aunt May.
“You see, Mrs. Hutton? Names. A whole long list of names. But this boy here only went as far as the Wallace depot. Hyman, on the other hand, went all the way to Wardner. He saw it all from the beginning to the end. Didn’t you, Hyman?”
“What the hell is he doing here?” demanded Aunt May.
“Who? This brave boy? Why he came in on his own account, didn’t you, Benjamin? Told me he wasn’t sleeping nights for the terrible burden weighing so heavy on his conscience.”
I imagine that the only burden weighing on Benny’s conscience was that he’d been waiting too long to collect Sinclair’s posted reward. He’d moved on from picking the miners’ pockets to picking over their bones.
“Where’ve you been, Benjamin?” Aunt May asked harshly. “Why’d you want to run away like that? Why? Didn’t your Uncle Al and I always treat you white?”
Benny refused to answer or to look up.
“And why are you doing this?” she continued angrily. “They threaten you? You tell me right now if they have . . . Benjamin Shorter, I’m talking to you!”
“No threats, Mrs. Hutton. Boy’s being a good citizen is all.”
“Good citizen? Listen, Mr. Bartlett Sinclair, I’ve just been hearing exactly what kind of a good citizen my damn nephew there is. Stealing, robbing, lying, procuring. Now might be that’s your idea of a good citizen, but it sure as hell isn’t mine.”
Benny glared accusingly at me. At me! And his treachery hadn’t run its course yet either.
“I’m afraid there’s more to it, Mrs. Hutton,” Bartlett Sinclair said. “I hear this boy isn’t yours. That right? A stray is he? Well, I’ve been doing some checking up and it seems he’s wanted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Big reward on him too.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of those things-are-about-to-change-for-the-worse telegrams.
“Now he sure doesn’t look like a dangerous desperado, does he?” Bartlett Sinclair laughed. “But it asks here if we’ll hold him. And, of course, we will.”
Even if I had given him the names, and I suppose I would have been doing that after not too very long, he never had any intention of letting me go home.
“Pinkerton Detective? . . . Let me see that,” Aunt May said, the edge gone out of her voice.
“Why, this isn’t my Little Hy,” she cried out, throwing the telegram at Bartlett Sinclair’s feet. “Someone called Meyer Liebermann it says.”
“Same person,” he replied coldly. “You read down that second paragraph where it mentions a Hyman Budnitsky. Tried the same thing when they caught up with him before. Isn’t that right, Benjamin?”
Benny confirmed that it was indeed correct, at the same time giving me a confiding smile, as if to tell me that evened us up and he had no hard feelings for what I’d told Aunt May.
My good, loyal friend Benny December, a natural salesman, a sharp-tongued drummer who couldn’t help himself from helping himself. Being enterprising is what he called it, the “American Way” is what he called it. Others might call it just plain treacherous, disloyal, untrustworthy, or all of them wrapped up together. But, even as he was in the process of selling me South, I could not help but almost admire him for his ruthless purity of purpose.
This sudden reappearance of Meyer Liebermann ended the second act of Hyman Budnitsky’s Rescue from the Red Damask Walls of Spokane. There was to be but a single act, a couple of scenes and one further rescue to follow.
26
A bed-wetting nightmare fear, the story they told to children in Wallace to get them to behave.
“And if you don’t the bogeyman will come and eat you!”
And there he was, his large round black face inches from mine and grinning in the lantern light like a demon from Hell.
“Wadda y’all go and do, child, to get yerself so important to have Abraham Lincoln Baker lookin after ya all by hisself?”
Aunt May was forced to leave me in Kellogg. She stormed off saying she would return the next day with a lawyer, my customers, and, if necessary, the whole town of Wallace. I was put in a small tent in the care of Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Baker of the Twenty-fourth Infantry.
“At least y’all ain’t going to be wantin to play cards like them others in the stockade. Shee-it, but they is terrors with them pasteboards! We all’ll be lucky to get out of here with our uniforms and ain’t that the truth.”
Abraham Lincoln Baker was a short man, totally bald and with the blackest skin I’ve ever seen.
“Don’t mind me. My mother used to say I could talk the skin off a peach, talk the owl out of his tree, talk a pig from the trough. Runs in the family I guess, my daddy being a preacher back in the great state of South Carolina. Y’all ever been to South Carolina? No? Well, what have y’all been missin, child?” he laughed in a high-pitched cackle.
“Used to be I were in the Ninth Cavalry. Yes, sir, a real Buffalo Soldier. Y’all heard tell of the Buffalo Soldiers? Them Sioux Indians called us that. Never cottoned on to why they did. Damn unexpected folks them Indians. Anyways, the Tenth put that buffalo head right there in the middle of their regimental and said as how they was the genuine Buffalo Soldiers, but that ain’t right. We was all of us Buffalo Soldiers and ain’t that the truth.
“I was a man nearly grown but I was ‘fraid to death of them Indians when I joined up. That’s why I shaved myself like I done.”
He ran his hand over the top of his head.
“Can’t scalp ya if ya ain’t got ya no hair.”
I remembered Standing Elk’s story and wondered if the two of them had ever had a run-in. It would have been pointless to ask. To Abraham Lincoln Baker all Sioux probably looked alike, as I’m sure all Buffalo Soldiers did to Standing Elk.
“What’s that? Well, I’ll be hog-tied! Sure I do, enough to get by with anyways. Where’d y’all learn that at, child?”
For no reason except maybe that I was in a tent and he had started me thinking about Sunset Buff
alo Dreamer, I had asked him in sign if he understood.
“Haven’t seen that for years. Damn me, a white child that knows the sign. What’s that?”
I opened my shirt and took out the eagle’s claw. He let it sit in his hand and stared at it for a long time.
“I reckon how you must have had a powerful friend, boy. Yeah, real powerful.”
He leaned back to take another look at me.
“The sign? Somethin to be passin the time with, which oftimes ya got too much of in this man’s army. One of them Oglala scouts taught me when we was up at Pine Ridge in ‘90.”
He went on to tell me a story of Wounded Knee Creek. Not Charlie Pinto Face’s story, which had only been about the time after the bloody ending and an Indian’s story. Abraham Lincoln Baker told me a soldier’s story. How Big Foot and his people, who he figured had no business messing with the heathen Ghost Dance, had been caught by the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel Forsyth and then were cut down by four Hotchkiss cannon after they had surrendered.
“Don’t hold with all that killin. Women and children.” He shook his head. “No, it weren’t right for soldiers to be doin that. Mistake is all it were, though. That’s the way I sees it. Course, some figured how the Seventh was getting back for what happened to old Custer. That General Miles, he relieved the colonel of his command and put him up before an inquiry court. Said Colonel Forsyth was incompetent and I can’t say he weren’t right about that neither. Day after all that killin we had to ride fifty miles to rescue Forsyth and the Seventh from hostiles that had ‘em pinned down near a church.
“And here I is,” he said turning suddenly bogeyman angry, “playin at black mammy to a pissant white child! Me!” he shouted, banging a heavy fist on his chest, “Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Baker, Indian fighter, decorated veteran of San Juan Hill. And here I is,” he muttered. “Bad enough being stuck out in this no-account valley guardin these damn spiky miners, now they got me wet nursin. That surely ain’t no kind of soldierin for a man.”
He stopped talking, leaned over, opened the tent flap and looked outside.
“Y’all look at me, child,” he said in low urgent voice. “What do ya see? An old bald-headed nigger? That what ya see? And I am too, maybe the meanest bald-headed nigger y’all is ever going to meet up with. But what ya is lookin at, child, is a soldier. A soldier in the Army of the United States of America. I fought for my country, child. Killed for my country. And what does I get? What does all of us colored folk get? We find that Sweet Home of Freedom like we was promised? No, no sweet home. I’ll tell ya what we finds, what we gets. We gets us insults and we gets us lynchings!”
I signed that I was sorry about his troubles, but he wasn’t watching my hands.
“When we was bringin them Spaniard prisoners up on the railroad from Tampa to Fort McPherson, them whites, fine citizens of these United States, they spat and shouted all their cracker hate at us! Not the damn enemy, at us!
“All them good colored boys lyin dead down there in Cuba. For what? Y’all heard of Frazier Baker, child? No kin to me, but postmaster in Lake City in South Carolina. Burned him alive they did and his baby boy. Almost killed his wife and other childrens too. Would have if they’d caught them. Ain’t no sweet home in South Carolina for Frazier Baker. You know why? Because he were a colored man, an Afro-American man. That’s all the reason there were. It don’t take more than that. Y’all look at here.”
He unbuttoned his tunic and took out a folded newspaper. It was the front page from the Afro-American Sentinel from Omaha.
“See what they writes there?” he said, tapping his finger on the page. “Palmetto down in Georgia, they lynched half a dozen men at one time. Why? Because they was colored men, Afro-American men. It don’t take more than that, child and ain’t that the damn truth.”
27
She called Sergeant Louis Crawford of the U.S. First Cavalry the “Dreyfus of the Coeur d’Alenes.” Aunt May wrote in her book how this brave, selfless man, convinced that the miners couldn’t get a square deal under martial law and at great personal risk, helped eight prisoners to escape from the bullpen and maybe from being hanged, only to find himself sent to Alcatraz Island Prison for thirteen years. But Aunt May wrote down only that part of the story she wanted. There was more. I know. I was the ninth prisoner to escape that night.
“Y’all is one mighty fortunate white child,” Abraham Lincoln Baker said. “Y’all know why that is? Because ya fell in with Abraham Lincoln Baker at the time of his High Decision. Y’all don’t rightly know what I is talkin ‘bout, do ya, child? And, I ain’t got the time to be explainin it to y’all neither. I only gotta know if ya wants to stay here or if ya wants to go from here.”
It was McKinley’s war in the Philippines that did it for Abraham Lincoln Baker, that and the lynchings.
“I ain’t a goin,” he said simply.
He was telling me that days later. We were far away from Kellogg, hiding out in a cabin on the other side of Mullan.
“I’d heard white folks call them Filipinos ‘niggers,’ heard white folks sayin that over there it’s a ‘nigger fighting war.’ Well, this is one nigger who ain’t going to fight against no other niggers. Nowhere, no how, no sir! I’ve done with the white man’s army, done to death with it. You know what that Colonel Roosevelt said we done in Cuba? Read her there printed out clear in black and white in the Afro-American. He said we run away at San Juan Hill. Run away! We runaway niggers hadn’t have been there his own fat white ass would have been shot clean off. And when we gets back from Cuba are we the heroes that we was there? No we ain’t. We’s niggers. The same as before. Frazier Baker, Sam Hose, Elijah Strickland, hundreds of others too, most of them without no names, lynched, stake-burned niggers. And you know why?”
By then I did.
“Child, I surely am done with the white man’s army and ain’t that the damn truth!”
It was about nine o’clock when he gave me the sign to be quiet, picked up a heavy knapsack, took me by the hand, and led me outside. We were in the center of the camp, tents pegged out to either side. Light coming from about a dozen bonfires and lanterns made the night jump with phantoms. Somewhere a mouth organ was gasping out a tune, but otherwise it seemed real quiet, only the occasional soldier passing by.
The sergeant motioned me to follow him. We moved briskly down towards the edge of the camp. Over the tops of the tents I could see the bullpen guard towers and the high wire fence. Then we passed the last tent.
“Who goes there?” a voice challenged out of the dark.
“Primrose?” asked the sergeant.
“Sarge?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Everythin’s fine. Y’all just carry on with it, soldier.”
“Sure thing, Sarge.”
His footfalls faded and as they did another voice called to us, this time softly.
“Baker?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn it, you’re late! Got to get these boys on their way.”
“Don’t fret so, Crawford. I’s here now.”
A group of men emerged out of the darkness.
“What the hell?” Sergeant Crawford asked in a drink-slurred whisper when he spotted me.
“Boy’s goin with me. He don’t care to stay behind.”
“What boy’s this?”
“One they arrested today. One caused all that ruckus with them whores over to Wallace.”
“I heard tell about him. Jewish Mary?” he exclaimed too loudly.
“Keep yer voice quiet,” hissed Abraham Lincoln Baker. “Y’all want us all caught?”
“And these boys still owe me,” Crawford said, somewhere between petulant and indignant. “Only had two hundred and fifty dollars. Promised a hundred more.”
“Crawford,” cautioned the other sergeant. “Y’all is going to have more than a hundred dollars to trouble yer sorry ass about
if ya don’t get these boys gone right now.”
“Don’t take that damn uppity tone with me, nigger!” Crawford barked. “You Twenty-fourth boys think just . . .”
That was as far as he got. I heard a dull report and then a thud as Crawford hit the ground.
“Jesus!” one of the men said. “What the hell ya wanna go and do that for?”
“Man’s drunk,” the sergeant said brusquely. “Y’all will get where ya want to, don’t be worryin about him or that hundred dollars.”
There was some muttering but no one argued. After all, Crawford had been paid for getting them out. He became Aunt May’s great hero only because later that night he spent a big parcel of the miners’ money drinking and whoring in Wallace and was too befuddled to make his getaway. They caught up with him when he staggered off the train in Missoula.
Abraham Lincoln Baker, who really saved those eight men, was written out of Aunt May’s story, just like Teddy Roosevelt wrote the Buffalo Soldiers out of his story of San Juan Hill. In her book, the Negro soldiers are cruel and vicious brutes, mistreating the miners, their wives and children. Aunt May was way different from most people, but when it came to the Negro, she had exactly the same ideas as just about every other white person I ever knew.
“Quick as y’all can, quiet as ya can,” Sergeant Baker told them.
He tapped one man on the shoulder and the man started off in a doubled-up run into the gloom. We waited until the guard passed us going the other way and then the next man went and then the next. Finally it was my turn.
I ran as fast as I could but the ground was uneven and stony. About fifty yards out I twisted my ankle and fell heavily. I was sure that the entire camp must have heard me but there was no challenge. I found out later that the guards’ ears had been plugged shut with half-eagles.
It was Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Baker who found me, picked me up in his arms and carried me to safety.
28
The hill behind our cabin was covered in huckleberries. Every day Abraham would scramble up and pick a hatful for our supper—bacon, a tin of sardines, beans and coffee, the same as breakfast and lunch, only breakfast and lunch were cold as we couldn’t show any smoke. I sure missed fresh bread and eggs, Aunt May’s cooking, and all those extras from the Grand. Abraham scolded me, told me not to complain, that if it weren’t for the miners having stocked the cabin so full we’d be having huckleberries three times a day and anyway we were lucky not to be eating Cuban rations which he said had killed more soldiers than the enemy.
