The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Charlie and Jimmie Parker still attended church with their parents, but did not ride with them in their carriage on the way home or to noon dinner with friends, finding their own amusements in town; it was painfully evident that timid, pliable Jimmie had fallen victim to his older brother’s sinister influence. Father and firstborn rarely spoke. Having spent his wrath in court, the judge hadn’t the energy to pursue it at home, even were it still possible to change the course of events. Isaac and Mary drove in silence and separated inside the door, the judge to his study and his pile of portfolios, the wife to her sewing room and the squat bottle she kept on the shelf behind the wicker basket containing needles and spools of thread. She was as likely to take to it in the morning as in the evening, when sleep eluded her, with predictable results; she had given up baking cakes for the condemned after disastrously substituting salt for sugar on one occasion, and arranging and delivering bouquets of flowers to the new cells aboveground presented the obstacle of climbing stairs to one who could no longer trust where she put her feet. Her husband had questioned her drinking early in its course, but she had made no response other than to return the bottle to its place with the cork secure. Later from the dining room he’d heard the tiny clink of the neck touching the edge of a glass. She was the partner of his youth, the strength in his early struggles; he could not lecture her as he did the principals in the trials over which he presided. When along in the evening the light went out beneath her door and she passed to bed, Parker continued to read and smoke until the hall clock told him he had just eight hours to rest before morning session.

  With little opportunity for casual discourse at home, he found congenial company in his officers, particularly deputies like Madsen, Thomas, and Tilghman, whose tirelessness and insistence upon obtaining proper warrants best exemplified his dream of justice in the Eighth District. When he encountered them in hallways, in chambers, and in the marvelous hydraulic perpendicular railway that conveyed passengers between floors in the brick court house, he addressed them by their Christian names, while maintaining the customary formality behind the bench. (These officers in their turn called him “Your Honor” always.) In private they discussed baseball and the county fair, and in the lift one day Parker related the amusing anecdote of the time Belle Starr treated unsuspecting deputies to a meal of fried rattlesnake. More and more he discovered that exasperating woman’s record a source of pleasurable exchange, and it occurred to him that something of the heart had gone out of outlawry when she’d been blasted into legend. At such times his pallor and snowy whiskers took on the mien of an indulgent grandfather.

  His listeners this time were Chris Madsen and Bill Tilghman, who chuckled good-naturedly at a story they’d heard several times before in differing versions, from a half dozen deputies who swore they were present at Belle’s memorable dinner. It happened that the pair were on their way to the attic to review some items of physical evidence before testifying in the trial to which they’d been summoned, and they stayed aboard the car after the judge stepped out. The doors were not soundproof, and as the contraption continued its ascent, Parker overheard the following:

  Tilghman: “How old you figure the old man is?”

  Madsen: “Not sixty yet.”

  Tilghman: “He’s started in repeating himself.”

  Parker grunted. Perhaps he had. That was what came of having to defend one’s every decision time and again.

  The room where he spent most of his life was seldom less than two-thirds filled, even during such routine events as public drunkenness and a final divorce decree, for the theater of the courthouse was the town’s biggest attraction, and one never knew when a bit of drama might break out, such as the details during testimony of a romantic indiscretion or an attempt at escape; Maledon himself had ended five of those with his pistols, with which he was ambidextrous, although left-handed at table and on the scaffold. Then, too, there were the judge’s impassioned soliloquies when it came time to hand down his final judgments. Before his arrival, the men and women assembled chattered happily, offering one another apples and other cold victuals from sacks in hot weather and passing around vacuum bottles filled with soup or coffee when frost nibbled at the windows, but fell silent and rose at Crier Hammersly’s command when the white-haired man in black robes strode in and took his place in the leather-embossed chair. The smack of his gavel was superfluous as to establishing order and served no purpose other than overture.

  Once he claimed that familiar position, Parker’s humor changed, for as many cases claimed his attention as had from the start. His sphere shrank by the day, it seemed, with such business as Mollie King’s held up in debate over whether it belonged to the authority of the Cherokee court and not Fort Smith, but his docket remained elephantine, the largest in the United States and its territories, and larger than the famous Assizes of Great Britain. If anything it was increasing. It was as if the jackals who had preyed upon the people of the Nations had sensed the end of days, and become ferocious in their determination to squeeze the region of its last drop of innocent blood before the curtain fell. When the unassigned lands of the Cherokee Strip opened to homestead, some fifty thousand pilgrims had swarmed in to break ground, and in so doing offered the ruthless element that many more potential victims. Robbery remained steady, a staple of the venue, while rape and murder rose in direct proportion to immigration, the details becoming more grisly; clearing the room of women was not an option, and it distressed him to observe how many genteely dressed matrons and their daughters did not abandon their seats when such things unfolded—leaning forward, in fact, lest something be missed. He thought of his loyal executioner, retired now to shopkeeping, and was grateful that he himself had sired no daughters.

  It didn’t help trim the schedule when sensational novels trumpeted the heroic exploits of murderers like the Daltons, Bill Doolin, and Cherokee Bill, while readers who might have benefited by Parker’s efforts to protect the people he regarded as his flock had to make do with indignant editorials and the Congressional Record. Contributors to that journal, fusty in its appearance yet as purple in its prose as Buffalo Bill’s Leap for Life and Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road, included as many enemies as ever, as new antagonists rose in place of old ones who had retired or died. The opposition now was bipartisan: Whereas the aging Old Guard of Democratic imperialism had never forgiven him for switching sides, his tormentors now were as likely to come from his own side of the aisle. They saw in him a disgraceful relic of buccaneering days, to be flung overboard to improve the party’s chances in November, and this November in particular. Cleveland’s second term had been plagued by economic panic; the Republicans smelled blood.

  The world, it seemed, shared those pews with the curious loiterers, waiting for something to happen, for the Old Man of Fort Smith to stumble. It made a man slow and deliberate in his movements, forced him to retard the workings of his mind, like a phonograph winding down to a guttural growl. It was no good for the cylinder, and no good for the heart. His was winding down. He knew it, and all the strength he retained would be required to keep the predators from knowing it as well.

  The clock struck. He folded his spectacles, put aside his reading, and retired to prepare for fresh battle in the morning. So had it been for going on twenty-one years; but never before had he found it so difficult to rise from his bed when six o’clock came around.

  He had, however, one victory left in him, won on enemy ground, and one flight of judicial oratory that would stand up to examination for a century and beyond. The old man still had all his teeth.

  TWENTY

  Funeral bells were breaking up that old gang of Bill Doolin’s.

  Early in 1894, with the Nations alive with deputies, Indian policemen, and bounty killers hoping to retire on the rewards offered for the death or apprehension of him and his companions, Doolin married Edith, a minister’s daughter, and settled down to the life of a gentleman farmer in the Comanche and Kiowa Nation. There he read in the papers
of the slaughter and arrest of close friends, raised horses for racing purposes, and hired hands to plant crops and string fence. His split of the plunder would not hold out long in this fashion, but with five thousand dollars on his head, Doolin thought clodbusting beneath him.

  In his semiretirement he learned of the passing of old associates: of Charley Pierce and Bitter Creek Newcomb, spotted by nobodies, tracked down by wire, and slaughtered by federal men in a farmhouse. That was bad enough, but the wind from the twentieth century had brought a new indignity to death, the postmortem photograph. Doolin heard an undertaker in Guthrie had peeled down the sheets that covered their corpses for a man with a camera to record them in their nudity, hair slicked back with water and their livid multiple wounds obvious to see. Charlie had had bullets in the soles of his feet, for Christ’s sake. Was ammunition as cheap as that, that the blood-crazy marshals would go on pumping lead into a man as he lay on the ground already shot to pieces? In Vinita he’d seen a cabinet photograph of Bob and Grat Dalton and Tim Evans and Dick Broadwell, propped up on a barn door with a Winchester across Bob’s and Grat’s laps and all their boots off. Bob’s big toe stuck out of a hole in his sock. Doolin turned his head and spat when he thought how close he’d come to going along on that foolish Coffeyville job. But what of it, if any ignorant saloon swamp or nigger that swept up horse apples in the street could tag him for the reward and later spend a penny of it on a picture of him with a hole in his sock and slugs in his belly?

  It was dangerous to train a contrary creature like a horse with such thoughts distracting him. He took a holiday from work and wife in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, whose Victorian gimcrackery and steaming mineral waters soothed his raveled nerves and improved his breathing; he had contracted consumption somewhere in his breakneck travels through icy downpour, sodden heat, dusty wasteland, and pox-ridden settlements where a man who rode the owl-hoot trail might find peace at the high price of his harbor. It was the coughing and the retching and the general feeling of weakness that had turned him off that trail more than fear of the law; a fit of hacking in the middle of a holdup was just what some nance of a clerk needed to give him the Dutch courage to clobber Doolin with a spitoon and hold him for the authorities.

  That trail had taken him as far West as New Mexico Territory. One of his hosts there was Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a young adventurer with literary aspirations whose celebrity would come a generation later with publication of Paso por Aqui, the tale of a fugitive’s flight to avoid arrest; Rhodes thus became the first in a long line of writers who championed desperate men in quest of personal publicity and raw material. For his part, Doolin found him unnerving company, always staring at him when he thought Doolin wasn’t looking.

  Only in Eureka Springs could a man be truly alone with his thoughts. Subsiding into the smoky waters that brought out prickles of sweat like fire ants on his forehead, he swigged from a bottle of Old Pepper and considered himself on the road to health. Naked, he lay out of reach of the .38 Colt in its scabbard hanging on the back of a wooden chair when Deputy U.S. Marshal Bill Tilghman kicked open the bathhouse door and threw down on him with a .44. He was outdressed and outgunned and surrendered himself without a fight.

  “Where’s the rest?” he asked, dressed and in shackles, when they were outside.

  “I’m the shebang,” Tilghman said.

  “Well, hell. If I knew that I’d of put up some kind of argument.”

  “I wish you had.”

  “Where we headed, Fort Smith?”

  “Guthrie. You must answer for Ingalls.”

  “I wasn’t in on that.”

  “Your horse was. Lafe Shadley shot it out from under you and you gunned him down for it.”

  “He was a good horse, but I wasn’t riding him that day. I loaned it to Little Dick West for a fresh mount and rode into Guthrie to see the elephant. I wasn’t at Ingalls.”

  “You can tell that to the judge in Guthrie, and thank your lucky stars it ain’t Parker.”

  “I’d as lief it was. Guthrie’s a far piece to ride. I’m a sick man.” He coughed for emphasis; which was a mistake. It led to a fit. The waters had not had their chance to finish the cure.

  Tilghman untied Doolin’s horse from the hitching rail. Everyone knew his saddle rig on sight. “You can ride sitting up or hog-tied on your belly. It don’t make no difference to me either way, but one’s more pleasant for you.”

  “What’d I ever do to you to get your back up against me? I wish it was Heck took me instead of you.”

  “You’d get the same from him or worse. Now step into leather.”

  With Parker’s court in division, Guthrie held jurisdiction over Ingalls, where the Doolin Gang had slain three deputies during the siege on their hideout. Doolin was housed in the federal jail there, charged with the murder of Lafe Shadley, a deputy. He thought Tilghman unreasonable on that point. Heck Thomas had plenty of bark on him as well, but was less inclined to take such a thing as a necessary casualty personally. Doolin and Heck had always liked each other, apart from their professional differences.

  That ride—long and hot, with infrequent stops to rest and frequent prodding at the point of Winchesters belonging to the officers Tilghman had recruited to help with the escort, men who shared his unreasonable attitude toward decisions made in the heat of battle—erased the progress Doolin had made in the springs. Slick with sweat and pale, wheezing and spraying pink drops on his shirt, he fell into hallucinating in the wagon they’d dumped him into to discourage any hot ideas about breaking for freedom, and struck up a conversation with Grat Dalton, dead these three years. At the jail, Dr. Smith, the resident physician, fed him spoonfuls of a black gluteant made from tamarack bark, spikenard and dandelion root, hops, and honey, with a drop of coal oil substituted for brandy, which was banned from the institution. It was a tribute to the prisoner’s strength of will that he recovered from both his relapse and this treatment; but since the evidence rested upon a mass jailbreak led by his patient, Dr. Smith was not disposed to congratulate himself within anyone’s hearing.

  On July 5, 1896, several prisoners overpowered and disarmed a guard, opened cells, and spilled out, fourteen strong, into the countryside. The news reached the private telegraph station in the room in St. Louis of a successful contributor to the popular press; he paused while composing Bill Doolin Pays His Debt to decode the message that came tapping out, crumpled and threw away his pages, and began writing Bill Doolin’s Flight to Freedom. Heck Thomas, apprised at home in the house he shared with his second wife, Matie, hitched his suspenders up over his shoulders, loaded his Winchester, and went out. His grown son, Albert, already an experienced apprentice manhunter, rode beside him. Back home in Atlanta, Albert’s mother fretted. Heck had told her posse work was in the blood.

  Rufe Cannon, a deputy marshal who had taken part in the In-galls raid, joined the Thomases in their camp below the Cimarron, not far from where that bloodbath had taken place; Doolin, who ranged wide but always returned to old haunts, had set up his horse ranch in that vicinity. In the Nations, men of low character were like stubborn mule deer, seldom grazing more than a few miles from where they were born, and dying there more often than not; it was the terrain and the cooperation of their neighbors, not distance, that kept them out of custody for such long stretches. Edith Doolin was still in residence, cooking for the hands and promising to pay them when Bill came back and found a customer for his horses. Heck took advantage of his own friends in the community and greased the palms of promising strangers to keep a posting on what took place there. Slowly as erosion, personal profit and the changing population had worn away at loyalty in the face of a common enemy. Heck thought it sad to see, as he respected a hardworking criminal ahead of an opportunist, but you couldn’t stop the world from turning.

  After dark on August 23, a rider entered the deputies’ camp to report that Doolin’s wife had brought a team to the Noble brothers’ blacksmith shop in Lawton to have them reshod. It was a rush order; t
he horses were needed by morning. Cannon and the Thomases mounted up at dawn.

  Passing the Doolin spread, they spotted fresh wheel ruts turning into the road. That meant a household packed into a slow-moving wagon. They eased their pace to conserve horseflesh. Sometime past two P.M., they were met by the Noble brothers, who had sent the message. They had passed Edith Doolin’s covered wagon, heaped to the sheet with furniture, a cultivator, a plow, and a wooden coop filled with squawking chickens, headed toward Old Man Ellsworth’s store.

  “How do you know that’s where she’s headed?” Heck asked.

  Charlie Noble answered. “Brother Bob spotted Bill Doolin’s saddle rig on a horse in the shed behind the store.”

  His brother, a hulking youth with a wispy fair beard like spun sugar, confirmed this.

  The posse took the long way around to avoid meeting Edith Doolin on the road. Below a hill overlooking Ellsworth’s store, with living quarters in back and the shed behind the building, they tethered their mounts and crawled through the grass on their bellies, then took turns peering through a pair of field glasses Heck had confiscated from Bill Cook at the time of his arrest. There was a deal of activity going on about the store, but none of the men milling around came close to Doolin’s spindly build and stooped shoulders. The possemen shared plugs of tobacco and twists of jerked beef and waited for dark.