Winding Stair (9781101559239)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
One
Two
Three
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
In Appreciation
About the Author
Teaser chapter
OTHER NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY TITLES BY DOUGLAS C. JONES
Praise for Douglas C. Jones
“A superb storyteller and authentic chronicler of the American West.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A master craftsman.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Our finest prose dramatist of the American West.”
—The Boston Globe
The Barefoot Brigade
“One of the best Civil War novels I have read.”
—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize–winning
author of Battle Cry of Freedom
“Jones writes about some of the most haunting men in the history of the American South—the dirt-farm infantry of the Confederate Army. . . . The strength and heart of The Barefoot Brigade lie in small events, individual antagonisms, boredom, waiting, slogging, hunger. One senses the men’s growing mutual dependence, a reflection of the families they have left behind, the cement that holds the Confederate Army together.”
—The New York Times
“Jones’s Civil War novel strives for a close-up, life-sized evocation of the conflict as it follows the men of a self-formed squad within the Third Arkansas Infantry Regiment.... This is sturdy, above-average Civil War fiction—strong on unromanticized detail and day-to-day grit.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Elkhorn Tavern
“Elkhorn Tavern has the beauty of Shane and the elegiac dignity of Red River without the false glamour or sentimentality of those classic Western films. Unquestionably it has the makings of a classic Western. Mr. Jones is at home among the ridges and hardwoods of a frontier valley: He knows what moves in its forests, how the land changes under the seasons. He holds us still and compels us to notice what we live in.”
—The New York Times
“Elkhorn Tavern is undoubtedly Jones’s finest novel. The characters are unforgettable, the atmosphere wonderfully detailed, and the action and suspense skillfully maintained.”
—Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
“Douglas C. Jones writes what might be called historical novels, but they are much more than that. They are stirring word pictures of the way things really were in this country not so long ago.... Elkhorn Tavern is even better than the books that preceded it.”
—The Associated Press
“Jones is a meticulous craftsman whose dialects, dialogues, settings, and sayings seem so right and natural that one had the satisfying feeling of having read a novel without one false note.”
—San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
“In this stunning historical novel, Jones re-creates place, people, and events brilliantly . . . a fine, strong, affecting saga.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fine, uncompromising, unusually angled piece of Civil War fiction—from a master of gritty historical[s].”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Jones may do for the historical novel what John Ford did for the Western film.”
—Library Journal
OTHER NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY TITLES BY DOUGLAS C. JONES
Elkhorn Tavern
The Barefoot Brigade
New American Library
Published by New American Library, a division of
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Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition.
First New American Library Printing, December 2011
Copyright © Kemm, Incorporated, 1979 All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
ISBN : 978-1-101-55923-9
Jones, Douglas C.
Winding stair.
I. Title
PZ4.J7534Wi [PS3560.0478] 813’.5’4
79-4195
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Author’s Note
This story is not a historical chronicle of the Rufus Buck gang, all five of whom went to the gallows in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on July 1,1, 1896, and with the exception of Judge Isaac Parker and George Maledon, all its characters are fictitious. But the narrative does describe the kinds of crimes for which the Buck gang and others were tried in the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is dedicated to the good and decent people—red, white, and black—of the Indian Nations, now eastern Oklahoma, who once suffered the ravages brought on by the complexities of national expansion.
From the platform under the gallows beam, where the ropes were placed on execution day, you could stand and look out beyond the confluence of the Poteau and Arkansas rivers. You could see between the Ouachita Mountains on the south and the Ozark Plateau to the north, along the flat floodplain extending westward through the Indian count
ry. It was a land given the tribes that had been removed from their farms east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s, given them as their own various sovereign domains and known thereafter as The Nations.
It seemed to me the first time I stood there that no place could be more desolate. In that country across the rivers, terrible things had begun and many had ended here, on the gallows tree. When the condemned fell through the trap, they did not face the land they had savaged but rather the courthouse that had once been an army officers’ barracks, and beyond that the frontier city of Fort Smith, its frame-and-brick and stone buildings like sharp-edged beads strung irregularly along Garrison Avenue, eastward from the river for more than half a mile to the Catholic church.
When one looked on this city of 11,000 people going about the usual business of civilization in 1890, there was about it some sensation fascinating and repelling at the same time, improbable of explanation but impossible to forget. I have tried many times to describe it. But if the soul and texture of old Fort Smith remain indefinable, at least some of the facts of which I am aware can be set down. Unfortunately, what I observed was at the lowest level of social endeavor, dealing as it did with crimes almost unimaginable—and their punishment.
A part of the atmosphere came undoubtedly from the reputation of the man who sat on the federal bench there, Isaac Parker. His was a jurisdiction primarily concerned with law in the Indian Territory. He was called the Hanging Judge in most Eastern newspapers, and with some justification. He came to the bench in Fort Smith in 1875, and during the first fifteen years of his office he sentenced more than a hundred men to hang. Of these, some were killed trying to escape; some died of disease in the jail; a few were pardoned by the President of the United States. All the others—eight blacks, nine Indians, and forty-seven white men—were executed.
From a distance, the scaffold looked like a bandshell. It sat at the southwestern end of what had been the old army fort compound, a city block or more surrounded by a six-foot stone wall. Within that larger enclosure a wooden fence large enough for perhaps a hundred spectators had been built around the gallows itself. Once inside the smaller fence, the nature of the structure became apparent. There were the thirteen steps rising ten feet above the ground to the platform that extended twenty paces under a slanted roof and back wall. A trap ran the entire length of the platform, directly beneath the massive oak beam on which it was said eight people could be hanged at one time. By June of 1890, the largest harvest on a single drop had been six.
Local citizens called it the Government Suspender.
One
The incident came to be known as the Winding Stair Massacre. On a warm spring morning in the mountains of the Choctaw Nation, I beheld the first of its victims when one of our posse men drew back a wagon sheet from the naked body of Mrs. Eagle John. She had been a reasonably attractive woman of about forty, but what she had been seemed of little consequence now. She was lying in the sassafras thicket of an old fallow field among the pines, her cotton-stockinged legs spread, her hair in disarray on the blackened ground. Her cheeks were puffed from internal bleeding although no marks of a beating showed on the dark, waxy skin of her face. One eye was open in an expression of surprise and disbelief. Her throat had been slashed, the wound gaping like a cleavered slab of pork, open to the cervical.
With the first shock of seeing that butchered body, it seemed incomprehensible that only four hours before I had been in my Fort Smith hotel room drawing maps of the city and of The Nations. I had arrived from Saint Louis a few days previously to work as clerk and investigator for Mr. William Evans, prosecuting attorney in Parker’s federal court, with the promise that soon I would be assigned to one of the deputy marshals on investigation of criminal cases. After I’d completed my degree at the University of Illinois and read law for a year in my father’s office, it had been decided that I should become acquainted with law enforcement. Father said if I was bent on becoming a prosecutor, which I was, then I’d best learn something about how the state provided defendants to prosecute. His friendship of many years’ standing with Isaac Parker made my appointment to the Fort Smith court possible. Now, in order to better explain the confused and often contradictory nature of the court and its function, I purposed to make maps for my father so that in my letters the terrain would be clear to him.
The maps were a device to overcome boredom as well. Evans kept me occupied during the day, but nights quickly became insufferable, with no friends or outside interests in the city. The thought had come to mind of attending Henryetta’s Frisco Hotel and Billiard Parlor, one of the bordellos near the railyards. But I had little desire for such commercial and sweaty coupling within the smell of river fish along the Fort Smith waterfront. Nor did the Garrison Avenue saloons, well accoutred as many were, hold any fascination. No matter the loneliness and boredom, I was determined not to spend each night becoming sotted in some barroom.
I was struggling with straightedge and India ink at the desk in my room—the Farmers’ Federal Bank clock had just struck midnight—when Joe Mountain came.
The Main Hotel was a good one with elevators, electric lights, and a rotating fan in the ceiling of each room. Even though it was relatively new, the hallway floors squeaked when anyone walked along them. But on that night I heard no sound of anyone until there was a sudden banging on my door. Before I could cross the room, the door swung open and there filling it was a large man wearing a Texas hat and a yellow duster that hung away from his legs like an unpegged tent. In the dim hallway light his teeth showed in a wide grin. He moved into the room silently as a large spider and I stepped back, reaching behind me for something heavy on the desk. His smile stretched across a wide, high-cheeked face, the eyeteeth fully a quarter-inch longer than the rest. It gave him the appearance of a smiling wolf.
“You Eben Pay?” he asked. His voice was deep, and although it had a soft guttural quality it filled the room.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“Cap’n says you come along with me. We’re goin’ to The Nations,” he said, eyes and teeth shining in the light from my desk lamp. Framing his massive Indian head was a shock of black hair falling straight across his ears to his shoulders. Along his left cheek was a line of blue dots, tattooed from eyebrow to jawbone.
“Captain who?” I asked, still moving away from him. He had brought into the room a heavy odor of cooked meat and tobacco, a pungent but not unpleasant smell that I had never experienced before.
“Cap’n Oscar Schiller. He and you and me and my little brother Blue Foot are goin’ to The Nations tonight. Me and Blue Foot track for the Cap’n. We’re Osage. I’m Joe Mountain. You got any boots?”
“Who in hell is Oscar Schiller?” I asked.
“He’s a marshal. One of Parker’s marshals. Best one around. He says you come with me. We got a big murder. Old Billy Evans, he told the Cap’n to take you along. Ain’t that what you’re here for?”
“That’s part of it,” I said.
“Well, you better get dressed. When the Cap’n gets after somebody that’s done murder, he don’t like to stand around.”
“Wait outside. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
He made no move to leave as I opened my trunk and started pulling out field gear.
“We’re gonna catch the late-night Texas freight,” he said. “What’s your first name, Eben Pay?”
“That’s all the name I’ve got. It was my father’s name. Still is.”
He laughed without changing expression. His wolf-teeth showed constantly in his dark face.
“It’s a good name. I like it. Does it mean anything?”
“No, it’s just a name.”
My hands shook as I laced my boots, partly from the Indian’s unexpected entry, also because I was getting into The Nations. I had the feeling as Joe Mountain watched me dress that he disapproved of my field gear, most especially the narrow-brimmed hat and the lace boots. He was wearing elaborately beaded and fringed moccasins.
&nbs
p; “I bet you never would have thought I was Osage,” he said, grinning. “With my hair like this. Us Osage, we used to wear it roached, but nowadays we just let it grow. Except for my little brother Blue Foot. He’s young, but he’s an old-fashioned Osage. He roaches his. You’ll see.”
Joe Mountain led me down the back fire stairs and into an alley, explaining that the hotel people raised hell when an Indian came parading through their lobby, even an Indian on government work. We hurried out to Garrison Avenue and along the dark street. All the gas jet streetlamps had been extinguished, as they were each night before ten. We could see a few saloon lights and I heard a player piano in a barely recognizable rendition of “Willie We Have Missed You.” We passed the American Express office and the Anheuser-Busch brewery with its stables facing the street, each of the high arched doorways crowned with a brass eagle.
“What’s happened in The Nations?” I asked, panting as I tried to keep up.
“Hell, Eben Pay, I don’t know. Cap’n, he’ll tell us all that when he feels like it.”
“Why do you call him Captain?”
“Because that’s what he wants to be called,” Joe Mountain said and laughed. “The Cap’n generally gets what he wants.”
As he spoke, I began to realize that he was not constantly grinning, as had first appeared. Rather, his teeth were too large for his mouth, so that his lips were always parted. Although he was as large as any man I had ever known, he walked with a flowing rhythm and grace that reminded me of a full-foliaged black locust tree bending in a hard breeze, the leaves in fluid motion.