The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  When he could no longer see the toe of his boot he got up, stroked his horse’s muzzle, slid the Winchester from its scabbard, and started toward the house, leaning forward on the balls of his feet and groping with one hand for unseen twigs and branches. Just inside carbine range a dog started barking, one of the yappy kind with a hysterical nature.

  The lamp went out. He stopped. He’d been towing a path of silence through the crickets; they started in again, filling the night with their stitching.

  He’d taken care to direct his gaze away from the light, to preserve his night vision. Now the shape of the house with its canted roof showed blacker than the sky behind it, an inverted check mark with dark clumps of trees standing well away from the perimeter. Diggs, or more likely his hardworking Cherokee wife, had made sure to clear the area of cover, forcing invaders into the open. He hoped his own silhouette wasn’t as exposed as he felt.

  Something moved against the foundation; his hands jerked involuntarily at the carbine. A chain jingled. It was the dog, stabbing its muzzle this way and that for a stray scent. A growling woof escaped its throat.

  In a little while—it seemed longer—a hinge squeaked. The dog fell to barking frantically. There was a blow, a yelp, a whimper. Wilkinson saw this movement. Then something moved against the scarcely lighter oblong of the window and he made out a man’s head and shoulders and something hovering above the hump of the one on the right: an axe.

  Wilkinson raised the Winchester to his shoulder. A trickle of sweat sprouted between his shoulder blades and wandered down toward his belt, prickling like ants’ legs. So far there had been no sign of the woman. He had little practical experience with Indians, had listened in fascination when men from the northern plains had told of the stalking properties of the breed. If she were behind him with some kind of weapon . . .

  He fired. The silhouette jerked away from the window. He didn’t know if he’d hit anything.

  Light bloomed in the window.

  “Goddamnit, douse that!”

  The lamp went out, but not before he spotted the man who had shouted, crouched on his haunches in front of the far corner of the house right of the window with the axe leveled across his abdomen. Wilkinson charged him, sprinting, gaze fixed to the spot. He was within pistol range when a shape grew up out of the ground and ran straight at him, swinging up the thing in his hands. The deputy closed the distance in six strides and swung the Winchester. The barrel connected with a thump and James Diggs fell at his feet.

  Parker listened, eyes half-shuttered behind their heavy lids, while the witnesses who had drifted in from East and West gave evidence against the slayer of J. C. Gould. They spoke for three days, at the end of which the jury retired briefly and then the foreman rose.

  Diggs died on the scaffold December 20, 1878, beside John Postoak, a Creek who had killed a married couple named Ingley in the Creek Nation. Diggs’s widow claimed her husband’s body for burial on the farm that had belonged to her father.

  II

  A PRAYER FOR NED CHRISTIE

  What though the field be lost?

  All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,

  And study of revenge, immortal hate,

  And courage never to submit or yield.

  —JOHN MILTON,

  Paradise Lost

  FIVE

  “That man is fond of his work.”

  When Mary Parker’s remark to jailer Burns reached the ears of its subject—as such things will—George Maledon accepted it as a compliment, not being given to analysis of those factors that may lead to a conclusion; but had he known the particulars, he would have forgiven them in the spirit of good Christian fore-bearance. Abstract concepts such as honor and the rule of law were alien to her gender.

  He did not experience satisfaction in being the instrument of a man’s early end, or in the suffering that might attend it, whatever the fellow’s transgressions. He believed, along with the judge, that it was the law that executed a man, and that their partnership in the act itself was nothing more than the practical application of a decision foreordained by an efficient system of justice. Maledon aspired to apply that same efficiency toward the swift and antiseptic extinction of the life force, with minimum pain and maximum effect. It was true that a man strung from a cottonwood branch with dirty twine and left to strangle wound up no more dead than one escorted to a straight drop and a broken neck from good rope on a proper scaffold; the great difference lay in the time involved, and the shame of a constricted windpipe and twelve minutes of convulsions. He had heard horror stories of botched lynchings that had made him weep for the reputation of his life’s work.

  In pursuit of proof for his theory, the little man with the grizzled beard and sunken eyes had burned many bowls of black shag in his long German pipe, poring over medical texts borrowed from Dr. Du Val, with their diagrams and colored transparencies of the human spinal canal, and worn his thumbs through those pages of farm and cattlemen’s catalogues devoted to the quality of obtainable hemp. The sections set aside by Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward for shed and barn maintenance—specifically pine pitch and the various grades of linseed oil—he had smudged with brown iron-gall ink his own annotations in the margins. These sheets he had torn out and anchored in a stack beneath the rough clay pot into which he knocked his dottles; it was his ambition, after he retired, at some long date, to publish a working manual on his craft, with chapters covering extensively these mundane details.

  Yucatan sisal was stiff and stubborn and unresponsive to treatment, and so he ordered good Kentucky hemp from St. Louis, an inch and an eighth thick, compressed to an inch after the necessary stretching with sandbags. Sears and Roebuck offered lubricants of the finest grade, which when kneaded into the coarse cord provided the acceleration required, when the trap opened and gravity took its part, to slam the great knot into the sweet hollow below and behind the left ear. (Maledon, himself left-handed, set the standard for this prejudice.) There followed that crisp report that announced the preferred vertebra well and truly split, and the nerves that carried sensation to the brain severed clean. In short, Maledon’s science bore the sureness and finality of a bullet through the eye. (The heart, he’d learned through bitter experience, was a slow messenger.)

  On the day of execution, Fort Smith residents observed him striding up Garrison Avenue, trailing smoke from the pipe his father had purchased in Bavaria and carrying a market basket on one arm. He was somewhat more fastidious about his dress than he was about his burden; his black suit was carefully brushed by his wife and his boots glistened with blacking, but the basket was the least bit small for its contents, and on those occasions when several customers awaited him, nooses hung out from under the hinged lids on both sides. They dangled yet again when he returned home; good rope could be used many times, reducing stress upon the court’s parsimonious budget, and when it came time to remove one from the rotation, he displayed it on the wall in his private study as a memento. The papered walls of the little room were covered with nooses, each accompanied by tintypes of the men who had worn them, when the likenesses were available. His penchant for retaining souvenirs, it was rumored, had led to high words and chilly relations between the Maledons, and on one volatile afternoon a number of tintypes snatched off their hooks and cast down a well. Days of silence in the domestic arrangement had followed.

  His wife disapproved of his work, changed subjects whenever it arose in conversation, and hectored him frequently about applying for another position with Parker’s court. What she failed to grasp, and what he lacked the vocabulary to convey, was that she was married to an accomplished slayer of men. He’d killed for the Union, shot men as a police officer under three chiefs, and would put down permanently a total of five prisoners attempting to escape the federal jail during his residency. The fate of the first, slain shortly before his promotion from turnkey to chief executioner, had filled him with remorse; not for the life wasted, but because it had cheated the scaffold, and by reflecti
on the engine of justice he’d sworn to maintain. It had been a factor in his immediate decision to accept the judge’s offer that first day in chambers. On the four succeeding occasions, he would not hesitate to draw and fire one of the paired Smith & Wessons he wore butts-forward on the belt he strapped around his waist (he remained a deputy U.S. marshal withal, which carried the responsibility of arming himself on duty and off), aiming from instinct for the vitals, the way he’d been taught, but he considered each instance a failure. Close observers would note that just before the hangings that directly succeeded those episodes, Maledon took extra time and care adjusting the nooses, as if to atone for whatever incaution had led to the prisoners’ fancy that there was a way around Parker’s pronouncements other than the vertical. He was a man of principle.

  Beyond question, Maledon’s wife disapproved of his work; but she inspected him for lint and loose buttons whenever he ventured out to perform it, like any good helpmeet, and corrected what needed correction on the spot, disregarding his protestations that it would make him tardy at his post. She would not be seen as a neglectful wife. These attentions bound her spiritually to Mary Parker, who baked cakes and cut flowers from her own garden to brighten the last days of the men her husband sent to perdition. They took tea together often, secure in their sisterhood.

  Maledon had not that respite to vary his days. He worshipped Isaac Parker but respected his office—held it in awe, bestowed as it was by hand by the man in the White House; Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Appomattox—and did not presume to overstep the invisible barrier that separated them. Deep within him he sensed a revulsion on Parker’s part for his lieutenant’s physical connection with the act of killing those who’d killed. He resented this in his turn, but chose to cloak the distance thus created in a pious German conviction in the difference between the classes. Women were a race unto themselves, unified by a common uterus, while men were divided like milch cows and beef on the hoof, geldings and studs. And so, once justice had carried, these partners in its carriage retired separately to their solitary reflections, the jurist to his case histories, the hangman to his ropes and tintypes. Unlike the military, the American judicial system there on the fringe of the frontier provided no club for officers of the court to socialize, commiserate, and find common ground. Maledon had not even the experience of a democratic upbringing to express his opinions on the situation even to himself.

  Both men, however, shared the same low opinion by their wives regarding certain aspects of their calling.

  In truth, apart from Maledon’s profession and the eagerness he brought to it, his mate had little to complain about. Tobacco was his only vice, and he confined his consumption to his study and the outdoors to preserve her linens. He attended church every Sunday, a few rows behind the Parkers, ignored other women apart from raising his hat when he passed them on the street, and did not take strong drink, nodding in approval whenever a condemned man used his circumstances to deliver a lecture on the evils of alcohol to the restless audience gathered to see him in his throes. In public, Mr. and Mrs. Maledon behaved as if they were equal to Judge and Mrs. Parker, who had the good grace not to betray the presumption. Their daughter, Annie, played with young Charlie, sometimes tormenting him according to the laws of her sex; when the new school had opened, they were among the first in attendance. Younger siblings, when they came along, would spend much time in one another’s company. The children were popular with their peers. Local opinion, led by the editors of the Fort Worth Elevator, did not hold with the clucking attitude of the Eastern press; those institutions represented civilized America, with a uniformed officer on every corner and space on the docket to parse out punishment one man at a time. Thanks to the judge and his most loyal servant, life was orderly there on the border, so long as one avoided the saloons and brothels, and the families of the men who stood for justice commanded respect.

  George Maledon was fond of his work. He took pleasure in it for itself alone, with no more malice toward those most directly involved than a wood-carver felt toward an unfinished piece of pine, or a painter a blank sheet of canvas. During his long, long career in the faithful service of the Eighth District Court, he would know only two exceptions, when he thoroughly savored the anticipation of bringing extinction to a fellow traveler.

  Both times he would be denied his subject.

  Ned Chistie was the first.

  SIX

  The most widely circulated photograph of Ned Christie, taken in Fort Smith in 1892, does not do him justice.

  He was born September 14, 1852, in Rabbit Trap Canyon in the Going Snake District of the Cherokee Nation, and was in his thirty-third year when his life turned full round on a pivot. Indians and whites acknowledged him an uncommonly fine-looking man, six-foot-four with black hair that reached nearly to his waist and Mandarin whiskers, well filled out for one who claimed Cherokee ancestry on both sides. He belonged to the tribal legislature—the Kee-too-wah—and with his frank eyes and easy smile had established a reputation for charming sworn enemies over to his side when it came to a vote. Women admired him, but he was devoted to his wife and children and kept close counsel with his father, a man widely revered in the nation as Uncle Watt, who knew little English but had seen that Ned became fluent. The son was indiscriminate in drink, but that was a general failing in a territory where alcohol was prohibited and as easy to obtain as a tick bite. Whether boring out a barrel in his gunsmith’s shop or walking along a street in Tahlequah deep in conversation with a fellow lawmaker, Ned Christie turned heads, male and female.

  Without question, his picture did not do him justice; but then, he was dead when it was taken.

  Christie’s cabin, in a clearing just inside Rabbit Trap with miles of dense black undergrowth at its back, was a regular stop on the local whiskey peddler’s route. This entrepreneur, who had served ninety days in the Fort Smith jail for mistaking a deputy U.S. marshal for a customer, carried a rawhide-bound notebook scribbled in cipher that told him when Christie was paid for his service to the electorate, and on that day turned his wagon toward Going Snake. On the afternoon whose events would bring Christie to Judge Parker’s attention it was payday, and he had purchased two squat earthen jugs of skullbender, distilled from water retrieved from the Salt Fork of the Arkansas, fermented potatoes, chewing tobacco, red pepper, and turpentine, with a pinch of gunpowder to taste. Christie carried the jugs as far as his front porch, where he and John Parris, Cherokee also, sat on split-bottom chairs passing the first jug back and forth, swigging, and taking target practice on trees and small animals with a pair of revolvers the gunsmith had brought home from his shop to test their sights. Christie’s wife came out to call him in for noon dinner but he sent her back inside.

  “Leetle off,” he said, when he’d missed the pine knot he’d aimed at and gonged the bucket hanging on his well.

  “Couldn’t be that snake piss we’re drinking,” Parris said.

  “Nope. I shoot better when I see double.”

  “How is that?”

  “I sight in betwixt the two.”

  They laughed loudly. Christie’s wife shut the window.

  Something moved in the brush. Parris closed one eye and fired. A yelp went up. A moment later a scruffy white dog slunk out into the open on three legs. The left rear was shattered and bleeding.

  “Shit. That’s my neighbor’s dog.”

  “He favor it?”

  “It’ll follow a coon right up a tree. Did anyway.”

  “He don’t have to know a coyote didn’t get it.” Parris leveled the revolver again.

  Christie backhanded the barrel. The bullet went skyward. The dog picked up its pace, panting and whimpering.

  “Headed home.” Christie pulled at the jug.

  “You’re too soft on critters. We better reload before your neighbor gets here.”

  “I won’t shoot a man over a dog. I wouldn’t shoot a dog over a man, come to that.”

  When in due course the neighbor appeared,
the two were nearing the bottom of the first jug and weren’t inclined toward patient conversation. Words were said, in English and Cherokee, and when the man turned around saying he’d see about that, Parris threw the jug at his head. Fortunately it missed; when it struck the ground, it was the ground that gave.

  “See if there’s any left,” Christie told Parris.

  Deputy United States Marshal Dan Maples rode out from Tahlequah in answer to the neighbor’s complaint. The pair was still on the porch drinking. The sun was setting, the cabin’s front and rear windows were in line, and the red orb seemed to be glaring from inside the walls. Maples had heard gunfire, but he knew Christie and stepped down with his Colt still in its hip scabbard. He was a smallish man but built like a prizefighter. He had a reputation back in Bentonville, Arkansas, of never having picked a quarrel, while putting an end to more than a few picked by others. People of the Nations considered him one of Parker’s good ones.

  “Ned, that dog had to be shot again and put down. A good coon dog’s worth two dollars. You ought to square it with your neighbor. We’ll just forget you tried to brain him.”

  “That was John, both times.”

  Maples heard Parris suck air in through his nose. The two didn’t seem to like each other that much. Liquor was the common bond.

  “I’ll take your word on that, Ned,” said the deputy. “It don’t matter who pays, just so’s it’s paid.”