“The moment they stepped out the door it began to rain bullets on them. Those that were on the square at the time said it sounded like a thunderclap had broken overhead. You couldn’t count the separate shots, they said. The bullets chewed holes in the cement sidewalk. The men must have all died in the first volley, but the deputies poured another round and then another into them as they went down. The fourth man had fallen a step behind, deciding not to trust everything to that sailor straw hat, maybe thinking they would just as soon not pay that reward, and when the noise broke he dove back into the bank. He had cast a quick look up above as he came out, and that woman in the car must have seen it. In any case, when he didn’t come out with the rest a thousand things that she must have noticed at the time and shaken off suddenly added up like a column of figures in her mind. She didn’t even try to run. She jumped out of the car and up onto the curb, swooped down and pried the pistol from the still-clutching hand of one of the bandits, and stepped over the body into the bank. By then the sheriff was one step behind her. He grabbed her and took the gun away from her and held her until help came. She was more than he could manage alone. They said it was all four big strong men could do to keep her from getting at that one and clawing his eyes out, and then when they dragged her outside she broke away and threw herself on the body in the doorway, crying, ‘Travis! Travis! Speak to me, Travis!’ They had taken her away, and taken away the informer too and locked him up for his own protection by the time we got there, but the bodies were still lying on the sidewalk where they had fallen.”
“Taking a little six-year-old child to see a sight like that!” my wife says, shaking her head.
“It was a terrible sight to see. Three strong young men cut off in the very Maytime of life, shot down like mad dogs before they even knew what was happening to them. I was sorry I had come. I wasn’t going to look any closer. I tried to back out of the crowd. Then Phil said, ‘My Lord! Why, ain’t that one there that Winfield boy, Travis?’ Oh, what a funny feeling came over me when I heard Phil say that!”
“Why, had you known him pretty well?”
“Yes. In fact—well, in fact, I had gone with Travis Winfield for a time, before I married your daddy.”
“You had!”
“In fact, Travis Winfield had once asked me to marry him. He was not a bad boy then. Wild, yes, but not mean, not any gangster. I—I thought about it awhile before I turned him down. That stung him, and he didn’t ask me a second time. I was just as glad. Oh, he was a good-looking boy! I don’t know what I might have said a second time. Well, he had quickly forgotten about me and I had gone out with other boys and in time had met and married Phil, your daddy, and wasn’t ever sorry that I had. But I want you to know I felt mighty queer standing there looking down at poor Travis—he was still handsome, even there in the dirt and all bloodied—lying on the common sidewalk with people staring at him, and thinking of that wild woman who had loved him so and had shared his wild life and now been dragged off to prison, and I was glad to have you there to hold on to. It was a comfort to me then to have my own child to hold on to his hand.”
Silence falls, and in it the dove utters again its dolorous refrain.
“My daddy and my brothers disapproved of Travis Winfield. I think—apart from the fact that I was infatuated with his reputation for wildness, and his good looks—I think I probably went with him mainly just to devil my brothers a bit, let them all worry over me a little maybe, at least give them some reason for all that concern over my reputation. I don’t believe I was ever really serious about him, and I never thought he was serious about me, partly because there were already lots of stories of other girls he hadn’t been serious over. So I was taken by surprise when he asked me that day to marry him. I told him I would give him my answer next week. I knew then what it would be, but I suppose I wanted a week of thinking of accepting what I knew I was going to turn down.
“You remember, honey, out back of my old home that little family graveyard where all my folks are buried? It was there that Travis Winfield proposed to me. I said to meet me there again next Sunday and I would give him my answer. I remember waiting for him to come. You know how still it can be on a farm on a Sunday afternoon. The only sound for miles around as I sat there waiting for him was the cooing of a dove. I sat there thinking, I’m going to turn him down, of course, but what if I was not to? What if I was to say yes? What would my life be like?
“There are people just born for trouble, you know; Travis Winfield was one of them. It was written all over him in letters like headlines. Wild. Stubborn. Headstrong. Full of resentment against those who had all the things he didn’t have. Proud. Vain. Believing the world owed him a living for the sake of his pretty face. No one woman could ever hope to hold him for long. After a while she wouldn’t even want to keep on trying, unless she was an utter fool. But certainly life with Travis wouldn’t be dull. It would be different from life on the farm, or in Blossom Prairie in a bungalow that had to be swept out and dusted every day.
“But I knew what I was going to say, and I said it. And maybe Travis wasn’t sorry to hear it. Maybe during the week he had begun to wish he hadn’t asked me. Most likely it was just his pride. He wasn’t used to having a girl say no to anything he wanted. In any case, he didn’t ask me again, and I was glad he didn’t. He just gave me a hot look and turned and left. After he was gone I sat there a long time listening to the mourning dove. I never saw him again until that day on the square. It’s years now since I even thought of Travis Winfield. It was hearing that mourning dove that brought it all back to my mind.”
We sit listening for some time to its call. Then something alarms it, and though we do not see it, we hear the thrashing of its wings among the branches and its departing cry.
“Who did shoot the one who told?” I ask.
“Oh, yes, him. The trustees of the bank voted him a big reward, but he never got to spend it. They found him a week later floating in the river, though it was a wonder, with all the lead he had in him. It was generally known to be the work of that Winfield tribe, but they could never prove it. Never tried any too hard, I don’t suppose.”
I make a move to rise, but seeing her face I sit down again. Brushing back a strand of her cotton-white hair, my mother says, “Aren’t people funny? There in his blood lay Travis, whom I had forgotten, dead, and deservedly so, I suppose, if any man deserves it. There was I, happy, with a good, loving husband and a decent home and a smooth, even life ahead of me and my own child’s hand in mine. And yet, thinking of that redheaded woman—even then on her way to prison—I felt, well, I don’t know what else to call it if not jealousy. Isn’t that crazy? What did she have? Nothing, less than nothing, and I had everything. It only lasted a moment, you understand, yet it comes back to me even now, and if it wasn’t jealousy, then I don’t know what else to call it.”
The Human Fly
IN LATE August 1935 this advertisement appeared in our local weekly, the New Jerusalem, Texas, Lariat and Northern Bee:
GRIPPO
The Human Fly
He Defies the Law of Gravity
! ! ! ! ! !
On Saturday, October 5
The Great
GRIPPO
Relying Entirely Upon the Strength of His Own Two Hands
Unassisted and Unprotected by
Ropes, Belts, Spurs, Nets, or
Any Safety Devices
Whatsoever
Will Attempt to Scale the Walls and Tower of the
CANAAN COUNTY COURTHOUSE
(Eight Stories Tall)
! ! ! ! ! !
See Grippo Risk Life and Limb in His
DEATH-DEFYING ASCENT
! ! ! ! ! !
Can He Do It
? ? ? ?
Grippo Boasts
“The Building I Can’t Climb Has Not Been Built!”
! ! ! ! ! !
Be On Hand for Whatever May Be Fall
! ! ! ! ! !
WARNING
Persons who have been Advised by Doctor
or Physician to Avoid Excitement are
Hereby Cautioned that they Attend at
THEIR OWN RISK
! ! ! ! ! !
This ad is your ticket of admission
My over-forty readers will surely remember the human flies. Younger ones, your parents will tell you that the human fly was a craze, like flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, of that desperate period the Great Depression.
Things were as desperate with us in New Jerusalem, Texas, as with others elsewhere in those times, and maybe a little more so; but we had no marathon dancing, no flagpole sitters. And although we had, in our courthouse, the building for it, we never expected to attract to us anything so exciting as a human fly.
New Jerusalem, it must be admitted, was and is rather off the beaten track. The town was not as big in 1935 as it had been in 1905, before Egyptian cotton cut so disastrously into the market for our one crop. An Egyptian will pick cotton for less pay even than a Negro. New Jerusalem had not grown as our grandfathers, the builders of our courthouse, so confidently envisaged it would.
So when in 1935, in the very depths of the Depression, our local Chamber of Commerce received a letter from this Grippo offering, upon a certain guarantee, to come to New Jerusalem and scale our courthouse, it seemed a blessing fallen from heaven. That year we seemed to have hit rock bottom. What the national Depression had left us, our regional dust storms had taken from us. Trade was at a standstill, with merchants leaning in their doorways or staring out their windows over the piles of unsold goods, men long out of work beginning to mutter their resentment, dangerously in need of some distraction. Our courthouse was just made for a human fly. People would flock to see him. The day he came to town would see much money change hands. To a man the C of C voted to accept his offer, assessed themselves, and raised for Grippo his minimum purse. This was rumored to be as much as one thousand dollars, which was a lot more money in those days than it is now, and in New Jerusalem still is. In return, as a matter of form, Grippo, or his heirs, agreed to waive any claim upon the town in the event that he should, while performing on municipal property, suffer any mishap.
During the five weeks that ticket-ad ran, the Lariat and Northern Bee, as I, its owner, editor, and publisher, can avouch, sold more copies than at any period in its previous, or subsequent, history. “California” Stan Reynolds might say he wasn’t going, but he was the only person in New Jerusalem, or in all of Canaan County, who wasn’t. Which was right where Stan always stood vis-à-vis his home town on everything: out in left field all by himself. Stan’s cantankerousness and lack of any civic sense—which is putting it mildly—was what had earned him his nickname, “California.” That was meant to be derisive. Stan had been telling us for years how he couldn’t wait to shake the dust of New Jerusalem off his heels; at last one day he announced his imminent departure for California, the land of his dreams. In a small community it is a great mistake to say a thing like that and then not do it. Especially if like Stan, in making the announcement, you burn all your bridges behind you by telling everybody exactly what you’ve always thought of them. Stan got as far as Paris, forty-seven miles west of here, on that and a couple of subsequent flights, and that was as close as Stan ever got to California, or ever would now that, as he himself publicly phrased it, he had saddled himself with a wife, now that there were two kids with another on its way, now that he was pushing thirty, and now that hard times were upon us, it looked like, to stay. So we called him, in mockery of his blighted dreams, “California,” and he called us—whatever he could lay tongue to. He was the town crab and killjoy, and when he said he wasn’t going he meant it. But if he thought he would be missed he was much mistaken. Everybody was tickled to hear that he would not be on hand to spoil the fun with his sour remarks the day Grippo came to town.
During the five weeks of mounting excitement from the time of the announcement to the great day itself the town took a fresh look at its courthouse. In the speculation that then went on about which face of the building Grippo would choose for his assault, the curbstone attorneys who occupied the benches around the courthouse lawn split into four parties each of which thought the other three were all plain lunatics, although the building was and is exactly the same on all four sides. During that period, as a contribution to the general interest aroused by the forthcoming event, the paper, drawing for material upon the files of the Northern Bee (which preceded the Lariat), ran a series of articles on the construction, architecture, and history of the courthouse. While doing research for an obituary this past week, we have had the occasion to reread that series. Briefly, what we said at the time was this.
The culture of small Southern towns like ours, we said, had been aptly called a Courthouse Culture. Certainly our courthouse, with its majestic steeple, visible on a clear day for forty miles in any direction, dominated New Jerusalem, despite the fact that it did not, as in many, if not most, Southern towns, occupy the center of the public square, but sat instead a block north of there in a spacious square of its own planted in leafy oaks and tall pecan trees. Constructed throughout of native Texas limestone, pitted like a Swiss cheese with impressions of marine fossils from the Jurassic and Pleistocene epochs, originally white, now mellowed to a pleasing soft cream color, the building had been begun in 1859 with the laying of the cornerstone. Interrupted by the War and the Reconstruction period, construction was resumed in 1878, completed, and the building formally dedicated with appropriate ceremonies still remembered by some of our senior citizens, in 1882.
The style of architecture we labeled Colonial Gothic, a characterization which the passage of years has brought no need to revise.
Originally the basement floor, now the county free schoolbook depository, had housed the prisoners awaiting trial in the courtrooms overhead. By 1885, however, the county crime rate having exceeded expectations, need was felt for more spacious quarters, and the present four-story jailhouse was erected on its site a block to the west. The ground floor, raised some ten feet off the ground, and reached by broad flights of stone steps on all four sides, each leading to arched double doors eighteen feet in height, was square in plan, buttressed at the corners. The second floor duplicated, on a one-quarter-reduced scale, the first. From the second floor the windowless tower rose one hundred and sixteen feet, exclusive of the weathervane, for an overall height of one hundred and sixty-eight feet. On each of the tower’s four sides was a round white clock face three feet in diameter. Above the clock was an open lookout. Above the lookout the tower terminated in a tapered cupola which housed the clock bell.
The clock bell, which on still days could be heard and the strokes counted up to ten miles away, with its bass, even somewhat solemn, but distinctly musical note, tolled every quarter hour beginning at 6 A.M. and going on until midnight, chiming four times for the quarter past, eight for the half, twelve for the three quarters, sixteen before the hour, and then the hour. This, the Lariat and Northern Bee informed its readers, added up to a total 877 chimes per day, 6,139 per week, 26,310 per month—taking thirty days as the average month—and finally, the staggering figure of 320,105 chimes per year!
We omitted in our series to count the number of steps of the stairway inside the tower mounting to the lookout above the clock—and not being as young and spry now as we were then, we must beg to be excused from supplying the omission! But we did remind our readers that the stairway was there, open to the public admission-free, whereupon all of Canaan County, always excepting “California” Stan Reynolds, of course, made the climb, many of them, although native-born, for the first time. From the lookout the view over the flat, bare prairies which surround us is extensive in all directions on a clear day. All who made the ascent and looked to earth from that dizzying height roundly declared that nothing, not even a thousand dollars, could induce them to attempt to scale it with nothing but their own two hands. There were some then who opposed permitting even the Great Grippo to mak
e the trial.
To arrive at the courthouse grounds by the hour they did on that Saturday morning, the fifth of October, some of the country people must have been traveling in their horse-drawn wagons since late the previous afternoon. They had begun to gather there by the light of the moon. By the time the clock sounded its first note of the day the lawn was already thronged. Cars with license tags from four surrounding counties were to be seen. Market Square as well as the public square being by then full, those arriving after six were obliged to take parking space wherever they could find it, some in residential streets as far distant as a mile’s walk. In the public square bargain sales were announced in loud paint on the show windows of every store. Needless to say, these would open their doors for business only after Grippo’s performance, as until then nobody would be doing any shopping, and the storekeepers and their employees were as eager as everybody else to see the show. By the time the clock struck seven the town, except for the courthouse lawn, was everywhere deserted and still. A thief could have walked off with the whole place unopposed, if he could have resisted the desire to see the human fly himself.
All eyes that day were turned steadily skywards. Indeed, for some time afterwards New Jerusalem and Canaan County, being accustomed in the pursuit of its ordinary daily occupations, such as plowing, cottonpicking, sweeping house, scrubbing clothes, et cetera, to an earthwards-inclined posture, was to suffer cricks in the neck in the proportions of an epidemic.
Shortly before eight o’clock a man wearing an aviator’s leather helmet strapped underneath his chin and large dark-tinted goggles so that his face was almost entirely hidden appeared at the edge of the crowd and commenced working his way through it.
“Mister,” one small boy mustered the courage to ask, “are you Grippo, the human fly?”
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 37
