The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Mrs. Rogers returned to the kitchen to wash the pots and pans she’d left soaking. She dropped one, making a racket. Rogers chuckled. “All thumbs, I guess.”

  The clock ticked on the mantel below the big ten-gauge. Outside, the wind rose and fell. Rogers patted back a yawn. “I think I’ll go on to bed and leave you two to catch up.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “To bed? I don’t like you that way, Bill.” He tried to grin. He was aware that his wife had come to the door and stood there wiping her hands with her apron.

  “You only got two beds,” Bill said. “Mrs. Rogers can bunk with the kids and I guess Maggie can make herself comfortable in here. This bench is too short for me.”

  Ike Rogers figured he would remember that night as long as he lived. He and Bill stretched out fully clothed on the mattress, the Winchester next to Bill on the other side. Rogers lay in the dark with his eyes open, listening. When Bill’s breathing became even, he slid toward the edge.

  Bill sat up, his hand on his rifle. “What’s the matter, Ike?”

  “Just restless.” He sank back.

  Twice more during the night he tried again. Either Cherokee Bill was the lightest sleeper in the Nations or he’d learned to do without sleep entirely. It was no wonder he’d remained at large when so many of his fellow travelers were in jail or dead. Rogers began to ask himself what had made him think he could succeed where so many others had failed, often at the cost of their lives. He thought about his wife and children.

  In the morning—the slowest in coming Rogers had ever known—Clint Scales, a big Negro who helped out around the place, joined them at breakfast. Clint, who knew the situation, took one look at his employer’s exhausted face and nodded his head a quarter of an inch. Bill was filling his cup from the big two-gallon pot that stood on an iron trivet.

  Rogers’ boy and girl ate crisp bacon with their fingers, asking Bill questions about his life on the scout. The guest, who had had no childhood of his own, liked children. He told stories that opened their eyes wide. Any one of them was enough to hang him. He kept his gaze on Rogers as he spoke. His host began to realize the stories were meant more for him than for the little ones. Most of them seemed to have to do with the price of betrayal. When he paused between anecdotes, Rogers turned to his children and asked them if they’d like to go next door and play.

  “We want to stay and talk with Uncle Bill,” said the boy.

  “Bill can’t hang around anyplace for long.” He got up, Bill’s gaze following him, and took a cartwheel dollar out of the jar of household accounts. He held it out to Maggie, who had barely touched her plate; her appetite didn’t seem to be any better than Rogers’. “Why don’t you take the kids next door and leave them and buy two chickens? We’ll have them for noon dinner.”

  “We had chicken last night.”

  “I’ll stew them,” Mrs. Rogers said. “We’ve plenty of milk for gravy.”

  Maggie and the children bundled up and left. Rogers saw her glance at Bill from the door. Bill made a sandwich of bacon and a biscuit and appeared not to notice.

  When he finished eating, Bill stood and picked up his rifle. “I best get going. Tell Maggie I’ll see her in a few days.”

  Rogers said, “Sit a spell. She’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Why’d you send for me, Ike?”

  Mrs. Rogers paused in the midst of scrubbing dishes.

  “Why, to see Maggie,” said Rogers. “Her folks are in Nowata. I knew they wouldn’t miss her if she stayed the night.”

  Bill seemed to turn that over, standing big as a cast iron boiler in the low-ceilinged room holding the Winchester. Then he leaned it against the wall, took makings from a shirt pocket, and rolled a cigarette, twisting the ends. When he lifted a lid from the stove and set fire to a piece of kindling for a light, Clint Scales turned over his chair, scooped a chunk of hickory out of the woodbox, and swung it with both hands. It made a nasty thump when it struck Bill’s temple and he fell to the floor with a crash.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In August 1895, an event of monolithic proportions occurred in the Eighth District. Judge Isaac Charles Parker took his first holiday in twenty years.

  This decision shook the court to its soul. It was as if the stately brick building on Sixth Street had lifted its stone skirts and waded across the Arkansas to visit with the train station.

  Parker’s doctor, who had diagnosed him with a weakened heart as a result of a dropsical condition, had ordered the change of scenery and routine on pain of death (“You will listen to the sentence . . .”). The couple decided to visit Charlie, who had begun the practice of law in St. Louis, and left young Jimmie in charge of the brick house on Thirteenth Street, to which they’d moved from the old commissary. The younger son was studying for the bar in the State of Arkansas, and expressed eagerness to be alone with the choice legal library on the shelves in his father’s study; the proprietor of the House of Lords prepared for his nightly commerce on the judge’s credit. Unlike his brother, Jimmie was a morose drinker who kept to himself at the end of the bar and frequently had to be slapped awake at closing and pointed toward the exit. The bartenders who filled Mary Parker’s brandy order through the ladies’ entrance said he came by his habits honestly.

  Citizens gathered on the platform to watch as His Honor, wearing a cinderproof cape and carrying a stick, his white leonine head covered by a soft felt hat, saw his wife aboard a Pullman car and submitted his elbow to the support of a porter to join her. They noted that his face was gray with fatigue and that he made more use of the stick than just for fashion.

  They stopped to rest in Little Rock, then pressed on. Parker sat in on a case Charlie was defending in the St. Louis courthouse, where he disapproved of his son’s arrogance, which brought objections from the prosecution and several admonitions from the bench, but after the habit of years chose not to criticize him personally. He remembered his own early mistakes and counted upon the legal system to shape his son. He and Mary enjoyed the comforts of the Planter’s House, whose gilded dining room displayed prominently a large portrait of Charles Dickens, an early visitor, and when the judge felt energetic enough to venture out in the evening they attended a performance of The Pirates of Penzance at the opulent Olympic Theater. As the days passed the lines smoothed out in his features and they resumed the marblelike quality that had inspired some observers to compare them to a profile on a Roman coin. He had by this time taken to brushing his snowy hair in a dove’s-wing swoop over the right side of his forehead and combed out his beard so that it was broader at the base than at the top, and others thought he resembled a minor poet. He and Mary strolled the levee; passersby, alerted by the city’s social columns that the famous Hanging Judge of the Border was visiting, made note that his linen was acceptable and he did not strike matches on the seat of his trousers. They found his wife “blowsy,” wearing last season’s dress, but her expression was pleasant and she was kind to street vendors no matter how aggressive. When she opened her reticule and gave a coin to a one-legged veteran, her escort frowned. He and St. Louis appeared to share the same opinion about encouraging vagabonds.

  At length Parker felt rejuvenated enough to grant an interview to a local reporter, who soon learned that one did not so much ask questions of the judge as sit and record his instructions to the jury; in this case, readers of the St. Louis Globe Democrat. The subject was Cherokee Bill, who after two years of committing depredations against the residents of the Indian Nations was now in federal custody waiting out his appointment with the noose.

  “What is the cause of such deeds, do you ask?” said Parker; although in truth the young man had not. “There are now fifty or sixty murderers in the Fort Smith jail. They have been tried by an impartial jury; they have been convicted and have been sentenced to death. But they are resting in the jail, awaiting a hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States. While crime, in a general way, has decreased very much in the last twenty years, I hav
e no hesitation in saying that murders are largely on the increase. I attribute the increase to the reversals of the Supreme Court.”

  Here the reporter made so bold as to ask if His Honor did not believe in the appeals process.

  Parker drew on his cigar and broke an inch of ash into the crystal tray in his suite. “I have no objection to appeal. I even favor abolition of the death penalty”—the young man’s ink-pencil scratched furiously, as his subject leaned forward in his armchair—“provided there is a certainty of punishment, whatever the punishment may be, for in the uncertainty of punishment following crime lies the weakness of our halting justice.

  “This court is but the humble instrument to aid in the execution of that divine justice which has ever decided that he who takes what he cannot return—the life of another human being—shall lose his own.”

  The reporter made private note of the fact that Parker seemed to carry his court with him everywhere, like a pocket flask, and uncorked it any place he found suitable; but filed the story as written, or rather as it had been dictated to him.

  It ran in long paragraphs of uninterrupted monologue, with Parker’s tacit endorsement of an end to capital punishment—outlawed in far-off Michigan alone in all the world—buried in its text. St. Louis society deliberated but failed to agree upon a verdict for or against the man in the Globe Democrat’s dock. Generations had passed since the city’s unruly adolescence, and tales of lynchings and river pirates were repeated in the arch melodramatic tone usually reserved for parables from the Brothers Grimm. Its citizens were loath to surrender their perception of the ogre perched on its mountain of skulls.

  Parker read the article, sensed the interpretation, and sloughed it off with a roll of his shoulders, turning to the telegraph columns for news from Washington. Mary, sipping a cordial, saw this reaction and rejoiced. She wished, without disloyalty, that Isaac’s dropsy had presented itself years earlier, as nothing but the threat of death and permanent abandonment of his responsibilities would have forced him from the bench for more than a day, that day being Sunday or Christmas. They took long carriage rides, dined at the homes of local dignitaries, and watched Fort Smith fade like the details of a troubling dream, the jail and scaffold last in line. Mary Parker began to entertain the timid hope that her husband might retire. They would live in St. Louis, and Jimmie would join Charlie in his practice.

  Modern communications were against her. The news that came by wire to the local papers contained new encroachments by Congress (“haggling at my jurisdiction,” was Isaac’s phrase) and atrocities in the Oklahoma Territory. Isaac grew restive, unresponsive to the sights and sounds that surrounded them; his temper became short, his fingers drummed. Came the morning she drew on her robe and left the bedroom to find him standing fully clothed in their sitting room with a message from Western Union spread out on the writing table, and she knew their idyll was at an end.

  Back in January, Ike Rogers had found himself having the Devil’s own time collecting the reward on Cherokee Bill.

  Clint Scales, his hired man, had taken a mighty swing at Bill’s big head; the chunk of hickory had made a thump when it connected that Rogers himself had felt in his testicles, and Bill had dropped like a turd, shaking the house and showering plaster from the kitchen ceiling. Rogers reached to catch Bill’s Winchester, but missed, and before it struck the floor, Bill was up in an animal crouch, his hat gone, his hair in his eyes, and blood trickling down the side of his face. He lunged for the rifle. Rogers flung both arms around Bill’s waist and Scales, who had dropped the piece of firewood, caught Bill’s throat in the crook of his elbow while Mrs. Rogers, who had been watching from the sink, bent, scooped up the Winchester, and ran into the parlor.

  Bill writhed and bit and straightened his legs with a snap, carrying all three men across the room and into a wall, knocking a skillet off its nail, pinning Scales backward, and emptying his lungs with a woof. Dazed, the hired man relaxed his grip. Bill raised both hands above his head, closing them into a ten-fingered fist, and brought it down onto the back of Rogers’ neck with the force of a club. Rogers’ knees went weak, but he held on to the bear hug despite two more blows to his head and shoulder, the second of which numbed him all down one side. He felt his hands slipping, and Bill twisted free. In so doing, he raised one foot from the floor and Scales, recovering himself, hooked Bill’s other ankle with one of his own and snatched it out from under him. The three fell into a heap with the bandit on the bottom. Scales and Rogers beat at him with their fists. Bill turned over to shield his face and got both hands beneath him to shove upward and dislodge them, but Scales screwed a knee into the small of his back and forced him flat. Mrs. Rogers came running back in with a pair of manacles. The men jerked Bill’s hands behind him and Rogers hooked the cuffs around his wrists, ratcheting them tight. At length the man on the bottom stopped struggling, his breath whistling in and out.

  “Got him a head like a pine knot.” Scales, panting also, rolled over and sat on the base of Bill’s spine.

  Rogers rose, wobbling. His wife asked him if he was all right. He sent her for the Winchester and told Scales to hitch up the team.

  “Where we taking him?”

  “Nowata. Marshal Smith and Marshal Lawson’s been waiting on delivery since sunup.”

  Bill caught his breath, gulped, and spat. “They’ll wait till hell if they’re waiting for me.”

  Scales went out, passing Mrs. Rogers coming in with the rifle.

  When the wagon was ready, Rogers prodded Cherokee Bill outside and told him to sit in the bed. Rogers then swung up and latched the tailgate and mounted his horse. He rode behind with the Winchester across the throat of his saddle and Scales driving the wagon. He slid the clumsy useless burden of the big ball-and-percussion pistol out from under his belt and stuck it in a saddle pouch.

  Turning into the road—his wife, that good woman, watching from the porch—Ike Rogers felt easier than he had in days, when he’d first decided to set his snare. That night in bed with the worst killer in the Nations had nearly unmanned him, and in the kitchen he’d fought with the blind savage terror of a kit caught in the jaws of a wild boar, but in the end it was Bill’s time that had run out, and Bill knew it, too; he’d gentled right down once the cuffs were on. Rogers thought if he could remember what he’d done with that badge they’d given him he’d pin it on.

  The sun was out, headache bright on the snow. They crossed the Verdigris River basin, the horses stepping high to clout a path through the drifts, and climbed out of it onto the plain leading flat as a poker table to Nowata. Rogers saw Bill struggling with his shackles now, the big muscles across his shoulders bulging like pumpkins. The boar still had some piss in him after all.

  “Lay off that, Bill. You’ll rub yourself to the bone.”

  “They’re too tight, Ike. You want me to get the gangrene?”

  “The reward notices don’t say nothing against it.”

  “You’re a Judas son of a bitch.”

  “Times are hard, Bill.”

  The prisoner relaxed. Moments later, he started in again. His temple resumed bleeding as he strained against the short length of chain.

  “Bill, you’re stubborn as—”

  Bill braced his feet against the tailgate, his back against the headboard, and heaved. Something snapped. Rogers thought it was the tailgate latch, but then Bill got both hands on the sideboard and threw himself over. Jesus, he’s strong. He landed on his feet, but his momentum combined with the wagon’s almost pitched him forward onto his face. He stumbled, found his footing, and broke into a sprint, the sun glinting off the broken links dangling from his manacles.

  Scales hauled back hard on the lines; the team tried to rear. Rogers drew rein gently, taking his time. Three hundred yards of open plain separated the running man from the cover of the nearest cedarbrake. Rogers levered a shell into the chamber and raised the Winchester to his shoulder. The sound crackled loudly in the sharp air. The fugitive ran another cou
ple of yards, then slowed to a stop.

  “What’s the matter, Bill, restless?” Rogers called out.

  Cherokee Bill turned around and walked back toward the wagon. Taking his time.

  Deputies Smith and Lawson listened to Ike Rogers’ account, grinning all through the details of the previous night, and fitted the prisoner with irons for his legs, which were heavy enough to hobble a buffalo. After holding him for a while in the back room of a store, they took him, shuffling in his chains, to the Arkansas Valley Railroad yard and locked him in a cattle car. The train was a while leaving; people gathered around to peer through the slats at the man seated on a pile of straw. He leaned forward and cut loose with one of Ned Christie’s trademark high-pitched turkey gobbles. That sent them scrambling. He sat back and closed his eyes, sore in every muscle with his head pounding and fatigue settled deep in his joints. If he’d shot Ike Rogers last night when he’d been in the mood, he could have taken his rest then and been in Rabbit Trap Canyon by now, defying the Lighthorse and marshals from the ruins of Christie’s fort, where at fourteen he’d crawled over the charred logs, making popping noises with his mouth and tumbling enemies left and right.

  He awoke with the train moving. He had no idea how long he’d slept or how far he’d traveled. The scenery sliding along the openings between the slats was unfamiliar. He’d never been so far east. He was freezing. He wiggled his toes to draw feeling back into them and huddled deeper into his coat, moving awkwardly in his shackles. His belly gnawed. He’d eaten breakfast at Ike’s, so a fair number of hours had passed, but without knowing just when the train had begun rolling he remained disoriented as to space and time. He’d always preferred traveling by horse, which put a man closer to the earth and more in harmony with it. He wondered if someone would come to feed him and whether he’d be armed and what measures might be required to separate the man from his weapon, but the train kept going at a steady clip and no one came. It passed through low scrub and gullies spanned by shallow trestles and might have been crossing the face of the moon for all any of it signified.