I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  “Come on,” said Rufus. He led the column out the door and into the moonlight and shadows.

  Maoma still hacked at the thick leather to free the silver trinkets. “Ain’t you comin’?” asked Sam, holding two increasingly restless horses watching their herd disappear.

  “Hold this.” Maoma gave the light to Sam. Both hands free, Maoma redoubled his efforts, breathlessly hacking at the saddle as if it were a carcass. Finally finished, he tucked the silver bits into the remaining horse’s saddlebag and took the reins from Sam with a triumphant smile. Emboldened, he swung the lantern in a wide arc. Sam chuckled and Maoma let it go. The fire arced high and landed in a hay-filled corner. Sam danced a little hotfoot dance as the fire started and he ran his horse from the livery. An excited Sam paused to gawk at the flames until horses’ wild whinnying jolted him. Two terrified horses reared in their stalls.

  “What about them other horses?” Sam called to Maoma as he fled.

  From 100 feet away, the rest of the gang looked back to see Maoma and Sam emerge with the glowing light behind them.

  “What about them other horses?” Sam called again in an urgent whisper.

  Seeing the flames, Lewis dropped his reins and ran back to the livery. Maoma jauntily trotted his horse up to the others.

  “Where’s he goin’?” he asked of Lewis. Soon two horses bolted from the barn, Lewis chasing hard after as the flames broke through to the outside of the building.

  “C’mon,” Rufus prodded as he jumped up on his horse. The others followed, galloping to the edge of town. The fire grew shockingly fast. As Lewis’ horse, the last of them, gained its stride, he looked back and saw the whole livery building spewing flame. Alarmed voices echoed off the town’s buildings. Bodies appeared, arms waving madly, black shadows against the burning light.

  At a safe distance, Rufus slowed to a trot. As he did, Lewis rode past Maoma and shoved him, almost tipping him off his horse.

  “Whadja do that for?” Maoma demanded.

  “For almos’ killin’ them horses,” Lewis hollered.

  Maoma waved him off, “I knew you’d go get ‘em,” he mumbled in his own defense.

  Rufus ignored them as he stared at the besieged town. Secure that they couldn’t be seen, he watched the flames jump from the livery to the buildings on either side. The town bled orange firelight into the sky and smoke curled like giant puffs from the devil’s own pipe. Even this far away, Rufus heard the faint remains of town folks’ screams as the shadows ran back and forth, forming the long, ragged line of a bucket brigade. This was hell, Rufus thought as he watched them, as he watched them burn. This was it. The beginning. Watching the town burn and the townspeoples’ frenzy to save it, he felt sad. Staring at the desperate men he realized the destruction he and his men would wreak. He didn’t know why that saddened him. He had known that men would die. But that mattered less than the things he’d grown used to… the railroad station and the general store. Tulsey Town. It might all have to burn. Things he’d known all his life. He didn’t know what kind of life he’d lead without them. He accepted on faith in Bill and Henry Starr that it would be a better one.

  He turned away to see the wild and peaceful country glistening with moonlight. He forgot the hellish creatures dancing with the fire they had earned. He kept his eyes on the soft light. He rode on, trying to ignore the faint screaming behind him.

  News of the theft and fire was soon the talk of the Territory. Half of Checotah’s main street had burned. There was a great deal of speculation as to which of the Territory’s long list of badmen bore responsibility. The name “Rufus Buck” did not occur.

  ~

  “Whatchu doin?” Maoma asked.

  Rufus sat cross-legged, hunched over paper full of crossed out lines and scratchy minglings of small and capital letters. They were all bored. When Maoma and the others heard about the search of the Ft. Smith jail and the confiscation of Bill’s bullets, Rufus convinced them that a few bullets were purposely left for the guards to find to distract them from the real booty. They had heard nothing from or about Bill since. Rufus traveled to Okmulgee every couple of days. The only literate one of the gang, he searched the Ft. Smith Elevator for news. On seeing nothing about Bill’s escape, he hid his fear.

  “Nothin’ there,” he’d beam. “That means on schedule.”

  “When’s it gonna happen?” Lewis asked.

  “Soon,” Rufus replied. “Bill has to wait ‘til it cools down from the search. Guards get all antsy for a while, watchin’ every little thing. He gotta wait ‘til it all goes regular again an’ they ain’t payin’ much attention.”

  His men were bored but Rufus felt about to burst. He had to do something. He had willed an angel’s visitation. He had made himself the savior of the great Cherokee Bill. Now he had to nudge fate again. So he huddled over his few sheets of paper, ink stained fingers scribbling his manifesto to the white men of Indian Territory.

  “I’m workin’,” he barked as Lewis interrupted with yet another question about Cherokee Bill. An hour later, Rufus summoned them all.

  “I got somethin’ for you all to hear,” he called. As Maoma, Sam, Lewis and Luckey lumbered from sleep and ambled toward him, he held the paper and read in a clear, loud voice.

  THis is A WArNing to ALL THe WHiTe Men in indiAn TerrtorY. IT is A TruMpet, cALing to ALL Indians to rise and drive THeM from our Land, Like the CAnoniTes in THe Bibl. We do noT, wAnT to HurT, nobodY, BuT We WiLL FigHT, and WHen oTHers, see WHaT We, HaVe done, THey WiLL, rise up, And ALL, WiLL, join us. THis, is fair WArning. If you LeaVe, you, WiLL noT, geT, HurT. If You sTaY, You, WiLL be cuT doWn. MY nAMe, is, Rufus Buck, And, Me and MY gang, do noT, fear AnY, MAn. We ainT scared of diYin. We, ainT, scared To, kiLL. For WHAT, You done To, mY faTHer, And, His before, You, don’T deserve, To be, Here.

  Signed,

  THe Rufus Buck gAng

  He looked from his paper to his audience.

  “We done?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t think they gonna leave,” Lewis said.

  “Me neither,” Rufus replied.

  “We gonna kill ‘em all?”

  “If we have to... when all the Indian and colored join us. White folks’d do the same if we took theirs.”

  Lewis nodded in understanding. Sam wearily trudged back to the leanto for the nap from which he’d been roused.

  “The ones who leave,” Maoma smiled, “We can jus’ take what we want from what they leave behind, huh?”

  “Sure,” Rufus replied to Maoma’s delight.

  Alone at dusk, Rufus took his manifesto to Okmulgee. He rode through town as if strolling through a stage set deciding where to place a critical prop. He ignored the people. They didn’t matter now. They would only matter tomorrow, as they crowded around to read it, as they frantically murmured to each other, aghast.

  “Buck.”

  At his name, Rufus looked down to see Marshal John Garrett walking toward him. Garrett wore the smug, superior air common to Marshals approaching those over whom they had power. Rufus kept riding, barely having glanced at him.

  “Hold on there,” Garrett called, “We got business.”

  Rufus ignored him. Intent on the cataclysm that would soon engulf the Territory, Garrett was a persistent, buzzing fly, nothing more. It continued in Rufus’ ear.

  Garrett’s quiet rage at being so publicly ignored grew, as did his consternation. Where, he wondered, did this boy gain the self-possession to disregard him? Any man would pay for that. For Buck, who had defied him once, there would be a particularly high price.

  Oblivious to the threat, Rufus continued watchfully through town. He decided on Big Nellie’s place, a rather grand two-story structure that sold everything from clothes to foodstuffs to livery goods. More people walked in and out of there than any other. More women and children. The fear would be greatest, the panic more palpable with women and children. Men would comfort them, trying to coo away the terror. He did not stop, but rode all the way through the town and
out the other side. Safely out of sight, he tethered his horse and pulled some food from his saddlebag and waited for night.

  Pitch black with barely a moon, he walked back into the quiet town. Admiring the stillness in the dark, he stopped in front of Big Nellie’s. He looked up and down the street—almost empty. Empty enough. He took his missive from inside his shirt and unfolded it. He ironed the creases against the building’s flat surface. Satisfied, he pulled a small nail from his pocket and his gun from its holster. Using the gun’s handle, he pounded the nail into the wood. Again, quite fitting: the gun, same tool used to post their warning, would mercilessly enforce it. He affixed the note for all the Territory to see.

  At a more restless pace he returned to his horse, mounted, and rode home through the darkness.

  ~ ~ ~

  In that same pre-dawn dark of Friday, July 26, Cherokee Bill quietly chipped and dug at the grout of the loose bricks in his cell. He neatly piled the grout dust and chips before he removed the brick and saw the revolver and ammunition stored behind. Removing both, he hid them beneath his mattress and then returned the wall to its illusory state of perfection.

  ~ ~ ~

  Getting old, breaking his back in railroad gangs, he’d been waiting for something for thirty years and he didn’t have a clue what it was. He’d been waiting like a prisoner, and if he was a prisoner, he was waiting for release with no idea who held the key. Was it the wife who had cursed him and died near 13 years ago, the living child she saddled him with to remind him of her curse, the letter he carried like a lead weight all these years from superstitious fear of what vengeful horrors that dead hag might visit on him if he didn’t? Or had he cursed himself? He’d promised that he would rise again and prove the lie of his wife’s final accusation—rise from the animal he’d turned into—a transformation born of war and madness, but one that any real woman, any true helpmeet would have eased and assuaged as opposed to inflaming through vicious fishwifery and shrill recriminations. He had been waiting to rise, assuming that ascension would occur as effortlessly and efficiently as had his decline. He had slipped from man to… what he was…to dog… so seamlessly he just knew that the way back would be as easy. So he had waited. He waited. And it had never come. Now his back ached from morning ‘til night and his face bore the lines and sunburned mottling of a common cracker that in his former world he would have rightly almost owned; he was indistinguishable from any other man on the railroad line.

  His daughter entered the tiny one-room cabin they shared and immediately asked, “How come my Mama didn’t leave me nothin’?”

  Bill Swain turned and looked at the child as if she had sprouted wings. He jumped from his chair and grabbed her with both hands and shook her.

  “Who tol’ you to say that?” he shouted. “Who told ya’?”

  She shrugged and struggled to free her arms. “Ain’t nobody tol’ me nothin’. Lemme go.”

  As he loosened his grip, she said, “I was talkin’ to a girl whose mama died and an’ said she lef’ her things. Pretty things.”

  Bill Swain released his daughter.

  “I wanted to know if my mama lef’ me somethin’ like that.”

  “Your mama didn’t leave nobody nothin’,” he lied as he slowly returned to his chair, feeling the past’s dead hand brush his cheek.

  “Will you get me some pretty things?” she said to him with the first vocal and physical undulations of the coquette.

  Sickened, Swain rose and slapped her. “You start playin’ the whore on me girl an’ I will kill you.”

  She curled her mouth into a snarl as she stormed from the cabin and slammed the door behind her. A few moments later she returned, her face not recovered from the snarl. She marched straight to the pile of dirty blankets in the corner and lay down to sleep. Her father watched her, acknowledging for the first time her age and the promise he carried in his pocket—a promise something inside him would not allow him to ignore, a promise to show the girl the letter with which his dying wife had cursed him. He had promised her, and then he had promised himself. If he could not break the former promise, he had to keep the latter. Watching his girl’s face relax into sleep, he saw a threat to even his grossly diminished sense of himself—a diminution he had expected Providence to neutralize as readily as it had conjured it. To date, Providence had disappointed.

  This close to Indian Territory, he heard of men with no more than he making prosperous lives for themselves. They gave away land there, and all you had to be was fast enough to get there before all the other crackers with nothing. He could do that. He had been born better. To hell with providence. He would drag his own self back to worthiness. On July 26, 1895, he decided to cross a border into the notoriously wild Territory.

  ~

  On the morning of the 27th, the sun rose over Okmulgee and, as usual, the proprietor of Big Nellie’s place stepped outside his store with a broom in his hand. Sweeping his steps he noticed a piece of paper nailed to his wall. With an inward curse at the vandal who presumed the right to stick it there without so much as a by-your-leave, he ripped it from the wall and discarded it on the pile of dirt, dried horse dung and general debris that he swept out into the street.

  Chapters: Natural Selection -- its power compared with man’s selection -- its power on characters of trifling importance -- its power at all ages and on both sexes -- On the generality of intercrosses between individuals of the same species -- Circumstances favourable and unfavourable to the results of Natural Selection, namely, intercrossing, isolation, number of individuals -- Slow action -- Extinction caused by Natural Selection -- Action of Natural Selection, through Divergence of Character and Extinction, on the descendants from a common parent -- Low forms preserved -- Summary.

  Assaulted by the noise and hurlyburly of St. Louis, Judge Parker longed for and dreaded returning to Ft. Smith’s backwards border regions. For a moment, he thought that if he stayed here, in this place that he did not like, for which he had no ambitions, the fate of which was in no way tied to him… if he stayed here, he might not die. Nearing 60, he’d lived longer than many, not as long as some. There was no cosmic injustice in being near death. The doctors he came here to consult expressed sympathy, but no undue surprise. It was not the dying, but the dimming of all things that brought him so low. He was being robbed of his court piece by piece, of his jurisdiction and yes, he acknowledged pride enough to say, his power. His body raged and moaned day and night, bloody piss and his back afflicted so severely that he could sometimes barely move. His life dimmed on all fronts. He knew he should have taken comfort in all that he had accomplished, but he could not. He still did not know what he had hoped for the Territories, but he knew that they had not achieved it. As he prepared to submit himself to God’s mercy and judgment, he found himself committing the sin of looking at God’s things and finding them wanting. Looking at men, for they were God’s one true handiwork, fashioned in His image and so obligated to reflect something of the Godly in their doings. He saw nothing of it there. Were his expectations of God too high for the Almighty to live up to? St. Louis was among the nation’s crowning glories. Tall buildings and omnipresent trolley cars, giants of commerce and enormous spiderwebs of wires overhead to service the telegraph and telephone. But he found no more solace here than in Ft. Smith. All of the bustle and flow impressed him no more. He shocked himself as he thought of ants. Virulent, industrious ants hauling boulders from place to place, building hives and gobbling food. It was blasphemous and he chided himself, willfully dismissing the thought as soon as it arrived. But it lingered. So many whom he had spent his days judging and whose deeds he pondered had lied, murdered, raped and stole. At this point, he had to admit that their world had become his. Pitilessly imprisoning them and sentencing them to die, he had virtue on his side, but the trappings with which he had surrounded himself were vice and viciousness. He was more intimately acquainted with the works of murderers than with the works of any other class of men. He had chosen to share thei
r world—on the other side of the line of right; but to think that the stink had not touched him was vanity. The line that had once seemed a chasm was now a little piece of string. In this town full of good, productive men he felt woefully out of place, merely disguised, as if one of them might smell the stench on him and chase him from their midst. He walked along the crowded streets, just another man of business in a summer suit among many almost identical men, but this one steeped in wildness and damnation and he prayed to God to imbue him with the faith of youth wherein man’s goodness and preeminence in His eyes (and in his own) was sacrosanct, their works of significance, their lives—his life—of inherent value.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gray smoke filled the prison hallway. Tiny explosions chewed divots in the walls. The deafening gunshot noise magnified the chaos as stinging smoke obscured everything and guards fought scared and belligerent prisoners back into their cells.

  It was over. Starr knew it. He didn’t know exactly what went wrong but he knew it was over. Bill was trapped. They would kill him. He was probably shooting with a smile on his face—happier than he’d been in a long time. Starr saw a blood-soaked, stiff-backed guard, Larry Keating, proudly, painfully march through the hanging smoke like a dead man and heard him collapse on the ground. Other guards ran to him. Their gunfire died as they dragged him away and then it furiously redoubled as they shot their rage at Bill. Gunpowder burned Starr’s nostrils and the omnipresent bullets were like metal rain. Starr couldn’t see for the smoke. His ears hurt from the noise and it kept him from thinking things through. First he thought that he didn’t want Bill to die and then he threw the thought away because it wasn’t his concern—and then another smashing volley from the guards. Why the care for Bill’s life? A gunshot pinged off his cell bars sending him deeper into the corner. He didn’t want Bill dead. That stayed with him through the noise and gunfire. ‘It’s a helluva time to learn I like the sonofabitch,’ he thought. Cursing himself, he inched low toward his bars and tried to peer through the smoke.