The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Finally the wheels slowed, trash and hovels accumulated alongside the tracks, and the train belched and farted to a halt beside a low frame building with a plank sign swinging from chains stapled to the roof: CLAREMORE. The platform was jammed with people. As the steam settled they moved in and pressed their faces to the gaps between the slats. Eyes swiveled his way, jaws hung slack. For a time he enjoyed the attention, feeling like Sam Starr and Bill Doolin and the Daltons rolled into one. Then the novelty wore off and he lowered his chin to his chest, placing the brim of his hat between himself and the gawkers. He was glad when a couple of railroad men banged at the side of the car with coupling pins to back them away and the train lurched into motion.

  Monotony set in. His car passed through a string of small settlements without stopping. He learned to anticipate civilization whenever rusty buckets, empty beer bottles, piles of sodden newspapers, and shacks built of mud and lath began to congregate.

  At Wagoner, the train stopped again and four men gathered on the cinderbed to cover him with Winchesters while a fifth unlocked the car; this was Clint Scales, Ike Rogers’ hired man, who’d brained Bill with a chunk of forewood and sat on him. One of the others ordered him to step down and change trains. He recognized Marshal Bill Smith and behind him, back a pace and to the side to shield himself behind the marshal, Rogers in the flesh, looking more weaselly than usual with his moustaches standing out in stiff bristles. Bill didn’t know the other two, but their coats hung open showing stars on their waistcoats. One wore a Colt in a suspender rig under his arm.

  Hobbling along with the rifles at his back, circulation needling back into his legs in their irons, he was ordered to stop when a little man came puffing across the platform hauling a camera on a tripod and a black leatherette case. As he set up his equipment, the marshals and Scales lined up on either side of Bill.

  “Not by Rogers,” Bill said. “I won’t be photographed standing next to snake shit.”

  The marshals were accommodating. Bill maneuvered himself next to the man with the underarm pistol; he found out later it was Dick Crittenden, who had joined the party at Claremore with his brother Zeke. The little photographer gestured to them to press closer together. Bill threw a friendly arm across Crittenden’s shoulders. Just as his fingers touched the Colt’s grip, the marshal shoved him away.

  Cherokee Bill shrugged and posed with his hands in his pockets. The sun was too bright for the photographer’s inexperience; the picture was overexposed, and badly retouched later to bring out the men’s features, but Bill never got to see it. He was in jail in Fort Smith by sundown.

  August hung heavy as stink in Fort Smith. When an officer of the court met the Parkers at the station, he found little sign of recovery in the judge’s face, which appeared as pouched and gray as when he’d left for St. Louis. Cherokee Bill, whom he’d sentenced to hang for the murder of Ernest Melton, the housepainter, had made a break for freedom, and slain a man in the attempt.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Crawford Goldsby, as he was named in his indictment, retained an attorney whose name was known across the Nations nearly as well as his own. “Cherokee Bill and J. Warren Reed,” a source close to Colonel Crump was overheard to say. “No one’s seen a combination like that since Frank buried Jesse.”

  Counsel for the defense arrived just after Bill, in leg irons but wearing the too-tight suit and cutthroat collar Reed had procured for him, was seated behind the oaken table facing the bench. The lawyer surrendered his silver-headed stick at the door but retained his shimmering silk hat, which he removed with a Vaudeville twirl and set bottomside-up on the table. He tossed his gray kid gloves inside the crown, touched his cravat, flipped up his tails like a concert pianist, and sat down beside his client. Only then did he look at Bill, turning his head just far enough to wink at him.

  Parker came in, and Cherokee Bill laid eyes for the first time upon the man he’d once sworn to kill. He looked like an old lady in a black dress; Bill had known one or two in Fort Gibson who could have grown a set of whiskers just like his if they let them go long enough. He was fussy, too, just like a hag, opening his leather folder and arranging the sheets just so, wiping his pen with a little piece of stiff cloth and nodding as his clerk whispered in his ear. Then he smacked his gavel and looked at Bill while the charge was read. He hadn’t appeared to take any notice of the defendant before that, and there was nothing in his expression to indicate he thought any more of him than of anyone who had wandered into the gallery to take in the show.

  The pews were packed. People who’d come in less than half an hour before the proceedings stood at the back. Some of them wore stars, but mostly they looked like store clerks and day laborers, ordinary folk there for the entertainment. More than a few of the spectators were women, all dressed up in gloves and hats and little fur-trimmed jackets; they sat in a special section thought to be out of earshot of the more explicit testimony, but this segregation only called more attention to their distracting presence. The newspapers called it “Beauties’ Row,” and Parker was said to disapprove of it, chiefly because of the almost tangible wave of sympathy that washed the jurors’ way from that direction when the defense was pleading the prisoner’s case. But no loophole existed in the phrase “speedy and public trial” for the exclusion of women.

  Cherokee Bill was the draw. He’d heard some of the early birds had made a day’s wage in an hour by selling their seats, and someone had tried to bribe the bailiff to hold a place for him near the front. In the press section, reporters from as far away as St. Louis and Denver crowded in beside the gentlemen from the Elevator and the Evening Call. Attempts had been made by some of them to barter their way into the jail for an exclusive interview with the desperado, and when those had failed they’d filled their columns with all manner of nonsense about him to keep the story alive. Bill didn’t know it, but he and Parker shared contempt for the breed, although Bill enjoyed seeing his name in print when someone from outside gave a turnkey tobacco to get a paper into the jail; it seemed half of Fort Smith’s transient population was made up of friends in federal custody. Bill traded rations for a peek now and then, but the fun was going out of it. If this kept up, no one was going to give credence to the things he had done.

  And would do yet.

  Trial began at noon. A parade of witnesses appeared and identified him as the man who had robbed Schufeldt’s store and shot the housepainter point blank when he’d showed his face at a window. Everyone in Lenapah, it occurred to Bill, had picked that hour to do his shopping, and a good deal more than had been present, or he’d not have had room to raise his rifle. He muttered as much to Reed, who waved off the intelligence as a thing of no consequence. Bill began to have doubts about the man he’d heard so many favorable things about from acquaintances on the scout: The road agent’s friend, they’d called him. Gin blossoms on the attorney’s cheeks had raised his suspicions already. Cherokee Bill had never found a taste for the stuff, and considered the “blue ruin” the flaw that had led to the demise of such as Ned Christie. When it came down to brass tacks, the fellow who chose to ride the high country had only himself to rely on.

  His opinion altered not at all when the prosecution rested and Burns called the first witness for the defense: Bill’s own little brother, Clarence Goldsby, whom he hadn’t seen since Hector was a pup, and whom he knew rather less than the men he’d ridden with. He remembered a scrawny lad who’d wet his pants whenever their father lurched into the room, stoked high on Ginger Jake and resident evil. The slight young man who took the stand and stammered with his hand on the Bible lent no confidence to the case.

  Reed rose, but made no move to stray from behind the defense table, standing with his hands in his pockets jingling his loose change. A man who had to reassure himself he had the price of a drink was no good in a crisis.

  “You are the brother of the defendant,” Reed said. “Where does he live?”

  Clarence mumbled a response. Parker asked him to speak up. He
cleared his throat, leaned forward, and said, “Fort Gibson.”

  “How long have you lived there?”

  “About seventeen years.”

  “How old are you?”

  “About seventeen years.”

  Bill’s contempt calcified. He saw the gray-whiskered jasper at the prosecution table scribble a note. A man who wasn’t certain about his own age could not be expected to give certain evidence of anything.

  “Do you know where your brother was on the last day of November eighteen ninety-four?”

  “That morning, before daylight, he was at home, as near as I can remember.”

  Bill started to count on his fingers the months that had passed since he’d seen Clarence last. A sharp clank of the coins in Reed’s pocket made him leave off.

  “How long had he been there? How many nights?”

  “Two.”

  “Where did he stay in the daytime?”

  “Somewhere up in the hills.”

  “When you talk about the hills, that would be the Grand River Hills where he was?”

  There was some business during which the prosecution objected about leading the witness. Parker said, “Sustained,” and directed Reed to rephrase the question. Reed nodded, and established through Clarence that the Grand River Hills were indeed where brother Crawford had been at the time of the robbery in Lenapah. Bill saw his course then; he couldn’t believe the thing was so simple, and a glance at the men in the jurors’ seats, ox-faced and likely counting their fees, told him nothing.

  Bill’s mother and sister were in the gallery, seated close to the rail that separated America from Judge Parker. Bill turned to look at them from time to time, putting his hand on the back of his neck as if it were stiff. They looked as if they were attending a tent service. He couldn’t bring to mind just when he’d seen them last. There had been roast turkey and some stewed greens. Studying Parker he was unable to tell if he was even aware of their presence. It all seemed a waste of time and train fare. Bill would have to kick in a fat bank just to get them back home.

  The prosecutor thought so little of Clarence’s testimony he didn’t ask him any questions of his own. Reed rested; Bill knew he’d been betrayed as surely as if he’d retained that yellow snake Ike Rogers to represent him. He’d bored holes in Ike’s face all the time Ike was testifying, and taken grim satisfaction when the court laughed at his account of his night in bed with the man on trial; he’d as good as admitted he’d shit the bed. Even the old lady behind the bench had smiled. But now here Bill had gone again and built his trust on loose gravel.

  The opposition’s summation to the jury painted a picture of the defendant as scarlet as any cheap novel’s: He was a plague, a blight, and probably a cornholer, conceived in Texas and puked out onto the unsuspecting people of the territory, and Ernest Melton a hardworking family man who farted roses and left a widow and two half orphans to fend for themselves. (Bill was prepared to concede all of that, even the roses, but a fellow with a wife and kids ought to have sense enough to keep his head down when caps are being busted and not go peeking through strange windows.) When the graybeard prosecutor finished and sat down, twelve faces cut square out of bedrock turned Bill’s way.

  Then Reed rose, hooking his thumbs inside the armholes of his silk waistcoat and poking out his belly, and Bill found out what he was paying him for.

  Seldom raising his voice above conversation level, and balancing its timbre against the counterweight of his heavy handlebars, the gentleman from West Virginia poured honey onto his accent and proceeded to dismantle every one of the statements the United States had made against the poor Indian boy in the dock. He was a victim, not a disease, the son of a brutal father who’d deserted his family, and a sickly mother unequal to the challenge of rearing three children properly in the wicked Nations. (Mother and daughter, in bonnets, lowered their gazes to their folded hands; Clarence lifted his brave chin.) Nevertheless, Reed said, the boy was the sole support of them all. Where was counsel for the prosecution when in his desperation the lad fell in with low company? (Bill thought Reed was trying to cut the pie both ways: He wasn’t there when the housepainter got it, but if he was, it wasn’t his fault.) He spat words like calumny and canard at his esteemed colleague on the other side of the aisle and was generally as entertaining as any of the spellbinders with the Chautauqua; Bill hadn’t always understood what they were saying either, but it was thrilling to let himself be swept along by the torrent of syllables. Finally, harboring no illusions about his chances against the combined might of the U.S. marshals and the court in Fort Smith, young Crawford had appealed to a friend for shelter, only to be betrayed, beaten with a club, and thrown into a cattle car, where he was exhibited like a beast for the thirty pieces of silver on his head.

  Bill thought it a whizbang show, especially when Reed punctuated betrayed by jabbing an accusing finger at Ike Rogers in the gallery, reddening his face and making his whiskers twitch like a water rat’s. The Beauties were moved, too; some of them sobbed aloud. But when the attorney took his seat the jurors regarded the defendant with pitiless eyes. White men in suits, the bunch, not an honest pair of overalls among them.

  Parker told them how the law worked. He sounded tired, as if it were him who’d been measuring the floor of a cell for a month, and Bill, who’d heard stories of his sermonizing, was disappointed after the performance he’d just witnessed. Choking off a man’s life in his prime had become a daily thing and meant no more to him than moving his bowels.

  The jury left, to return twenty minutes later, hardly long enough for a hand of pinochle. Bill stood to hear the guilty verdict, and damn if the man standing next to him didn’t tip him another wink.

  There were cards in jail, and time enough for Bill to learn every new game. He was one of fifty-nine men waiting to hang. Sometimes he was taken from Murderers’ Row, where the condemned were segregated from the general population, to sit down with Reed. The attorney had applied to the president for clemency, but Cleveland hadn’t any on hand, so Reed had put in an application to the court in Washington with the claim that seven witnesses had come forward to swear that Cherokee Bill wasn’t in Lenapah at the time of the Melton killing.

  “Where was they when I was on trial?”

  “The same place.” Reed touched his temple.

  “What the hell use is that?”

  “Patience, boy. I save my best business for the curtain call.”

  His mother visited. Bill made arrangements with her to finance Reed’s inquiries and some other things and took a few dollars for the comforts. He’d been too busy stealing money to spend it, and she was his bank.

  Parker had set his execution for June 25. The date came and went by his order while the high court was reviewing the letter that Reed’s eloquent wife had composed for him. Bill had his picture taken with Deputy Lawson, who lent him an unloaded Winchester to pose with, like a dead grizzly stuffed and set upright with its claws raised. It was a fine weapon with an action as smooth as a sewing machine’s; he worked the lever rapidly several times and asked who owned it.

  “Houk, the postal inspector.”

  “That is a waste.” Bill returned it to Lawson with a sad smile and something growing inside him.

  In July, a former Doolin hanger-on named Ben Howell escaped from the Fort Smith jail. He’d begun a ninety-day sentence for stealing groceries in Ingalls, and as a short-timer had been allowed to wander the yard outside the building.

  In his cell, Cherokee Bill heard the row. Within minutes he had the details. He crawled under his cot, slid a broken brick from its place in the wall, removed a loaded Colt revolver from the recess, and replaced the brick, using his hands to spread out the loose mortar dust. Then he crawled back out and put the weapon in his slop bucket where the turnkey would be sure to find it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The dismal dungeon—the fetid, dripping purgatory of old Fort Smith, malarial and in a state of perpetual eclipse—still existed as a jail only in
the East, where progressive was never a term applied to anything connected with Isaac C. Parker. Its successor was a marvel of government architecture and late nineteenth-century technology, all sandblasted brick and polished steel, with the cells stacked in tiers—a cage inside a box—and a gear-driven mechanism that secured them doubly once their doors were locked with a conventional key. A bar ran the length of each row of cells, and when a lever was thrown, the “brake” slammed into place with a reverberating bang. Officials from throughout the federal penitentiary system traveled many miles to tour the facility, and of course to see the sinister scaffold; the splendid waterworks that hydrated the city rated a poor third. They had their pictures taken with the first two, like the deputy marshals with their quarries alive and dead, shining in their reflected glow.

  Veteran residents of both the old and new institutions agreed that the sanitary arrangements and ventilation were vastly improved, but there were some who said that the chuckle and squeak of the old gridiron gates did not sicken the heart nearly as much as when that pitiless shaft slammed shut like a mighty breech. It was as if the entire weight of the massive engine of U.S. justice had fallen on them from above, burying them alive. They preferred the rats and stink to the impersonal working of the machine, the measured exchange of fresh air for old breathing through the ductwork day and night as in a steam-powered lung. The coming century gleamed bright as cold steel, and thank God for Parker’s Tears that they wouldn’t live to see it.

  Lawrence Keating had been a night guard at the jail for six years, and for three years before that in the old basement keep; the newer men lingered in the guards’ quarters past their shifts to hear stories of the convicts old George Maledon had gunned down trying to escape. He liked the late hours, “when the boys are all asleep and look just like angels.” One of the oldest officers in the system, he was as white-haired as Judge Parker, with a magnificent set of moustaches and four children at home he let pull on them. Charles Burns, who had presided at Fort Smith’s very first hanging, had liked him, and “Uncle Dick” Berry, who had assumed Burns’s duties as head jailer upon his retirement, regarded Keating as his most dependable man. The prisoners considered him a mellow old gentleman who used no weapon when he struck them for calling him “Pops.” Fort Smith approved of him warmly; it was still a small town for all its modern conveniences and growing population, and a man who helped out on the pump wagon when fire broke out and tended bar in the beer tent on Independence Day was known to all.