Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  Choctaw policemen were already going into the house, weapons ready, when Schiller and Moon pulled up in a cloud of dust and dismounted at the well in one corner of the yard. Joe Mountain came riding up from the outbuildings. Tied to the high stone well curbing was a man, leaning crazily to one side, his head cut horribly and his beard crusted with blood. He was barefooted and nothing covered his body but long flannel underwear.

  “That’s Thomas Thrasher,” George Moon said. “He owns this place.”

  “Well, he’s dead,” Schiller said. They cut the rope holding the body to the curbing and it collapsed onto the ground, sliding down sideways in a sitting position, gone partly stiff. There were deep cuts through the underwear under the arms, into the rib cage, and the collarbone thrust up through a vicious wound in the shoulder like a celery stalk snapped in half.

  “There’s your murder weapon,” Schiller said, pointing to a single-bitted ax that lay a few feet away covered from haft to blade with blood. “Let’s get him on the porch.”

  It had started to rain. The air in the yard was still, like a vacuum, the large drops falling straight to the ground like lead pellets in a shot silo. High above, the wind was roaring.

  One of the Choctaw policemen came from the barn with a wagon canvas. We laid Thrasher’s body at one end of the porch and covered it. Somehow, looking at it had not been so bad as seeing the woman in the early morning, although the mutilation was much worse.

  We were on the porch, under cover from the rain, when Blue Foot came up from the outbuildings, waving his Winchester.

  “Cap’n! Another dead man in the pigsty. Them pigs been at his face.”

  A number of men ran to the pigpen, shouting and waving back the hogs bunched along one fencerow. From the sty they lifted a form, limp and completely naked. When they carried it to the house, I moved away to the far end of the porch. They put it beside the other body and some of them bent over what was left of the face.

  “One of the hired help, I’d guess,” George Moon said. “But I can’t tell which one, the way he’s been chewed. Mr. Thrasher had two Choctaws working for him here.”

  Somebody said, “This one’s shot through the back. See that lump on his chest? See that? That there’s the bullet, Cap’n.”

  “I want that slug,” Oscar Schiller said. “Gimme your knife, George.”

  Inside the house, Choctaw policemen were going through the rooms. I would have joined them except for my apprehension over what I might see then, so I stood on the porch, away from everyone, looking down across the yard where the rain was beginning to slant before a growing wind. The dead chickens had become sodden lumps of feathers, as though they had just been scalded and waited to be plucked. When Oscar Schiller touched my arm, I jumped. He was holding a flattened bullet in the palm of one hand.

  “You see that, Mr. Pay?” he asked. “That’s what a slug looks like that’s gone through a man. But the base is intact. It’s a .45.” He put it in a pocket and wiped his hand on his duster. He acted as though he enjoyed all of this.

  He was starting to say something else when there was a shout from the rear of the house. We ran to the backyard through the rain. There was a long line of hollyhocks bordering a path from the back porch to an unpainted privy. Blossoms had already begun on the tall stalks, but now the rain was beating them off, leaving petals strewn across the wet ground like red and white quilt pieces. At the privy there were half a dozen Choctaws, holding the door open.

  It was a two-holer and sitting on one hole was a young Indian man, his pants and drawers around his ankles. He sat slouched against one wall, his eyes staring out into the rain. His front was covered with congealed blood and the toilet seat was slick with it. I saw then the riddled door, each bullet hole with fresh, raw splinters showing harshly against the weathered wood. Schiller and Moon bent over the man, looking closely at his face.

  “You know this one, George?”

  “Yes, it’s Oshutubee. He was a carpenter apprentice to Mr. Thrasher. They did contract work for The Nations in Tuskahoma. That means the one we found in the pigpen was Price. A farmhand. Both of them were Choctaws.”

  “Get him with the others,” Schiller said. “At least this one hasn’t got a mess in his pants.”

  As the policemen carried the body around to the front porch, I walked toward the house with Schiller and Moon, drenched to the skin, and resolved that as soon as I got back to Fort Smith I would buy a slicker to go with the high-heeled boots.

  “Contract work, you said?”

  “Yes,” George Moon said. “Mr. Thrasher was a carpenter. He came to The Nations and married one of our women about twelve years ago.”

  “So he’s part of the Choctaw Nation.”

  “Yes, but still a white man. When he came here he had a child with him. From some marriage before, over in Arkansas, I guess. A little girl about six years old. She’s about eighteen now, I guess.”

  They stopped and looked at each other, the rain running off their hat brims.

  “And Mrs. Thrasher? Is she still alive?”

  They stood there in the rain for a long moment, looking at each other.

  “She was, the last I heard,” George Moon said. “But right now I wouldn’t bet on anything.”

  “Then we’ve got two women somewhere in this.”

  “Afraid so. Somewhere.”

  We had moved to the back porch when Joe Mountain rode up, his face wet with the rain, his teeth shining.

  “Bunch of horses, Cap’n. Maybe ten. Went off down the field behind the barn to the McAlester road. It looks like they split up there and some went both ways. But I can’t tell for certain. This rain has raised hell with tracks.”

  “All right. Get under cover. Pass the word along. I think we’re in for a twister blow.”

  To emphasize his words, a sudden gust of wind drove the rain across the porch and we moved quickly into the breezeway. Choctaw policemen were already there and George Moon started talking with them in words I couldn’t understand. Schiller motioned me into the house.

  The kitchen had been badly used. Part of a ham was in a roasting pan on the cold stove, and there were dirty dishes on the table, along with a platter of baked sweet potatoes, some partly eaten. The coffeepot was empty and Schiller filled it from a bucket on a small stand near the door. As he moved around to get the fire started again, his feet kicked through debris on the floor. There were three empty whiskey bottles, some broken plates, and bits of food. Lying brightly among the litter were several empty cartridge cases. When he had the stove going, the damper wide-open and the grate door as well, Schiller picked them up and looked at them.

  “Here’s .45 cases,” he said. He looked through the rear window at the privy, almost hidden now in the driving gray rain. “Well, Mr. Pay. We might as well bed in for the night.”

  So for the time being the hunt was over. It was something I hadn’t expected. But whoever had done these things was hours ahead of us, in which direction we didn’t know, and moving on rain-swept roads. Perhaps by now even out of this storm.

  We moved into the parlor. Chairs were overturned and some of the upholstered furniture had been ripped open with a knife. I thought of Mrs. John’s throat.

  “Cap’n,” George Moon said from the door. “There ain’t no sign of the women. We looked through the house and the outbuildings There ain’t no sign. We found a dead dog under the porch. Shot dead, an old hound dog.”

  “All right,” Schiller said. “Get your men under cover.”

  After George Moon had gone, Schiller turned to me and shook his head.

  “Not much to be done now,” he said. “As far ahead of us as they are, we’d not do much except get wet if we went out thrashing around in this weather.”

  “What about those women, Marshal?”

  “There’s three selections. They may not have been here when that bunch rode in. Off visiting someplace. Or, they may have run off to hide in the woods. Or, they’re in some ditch now, beyond our help.”r />
  “They could’ve been carried off.”

  He shook his head, still bouncing the brass cartridges in his hand. “I doubt it. They were traveling fast and likely didn’t want extra baggage. I’ll admit, Mr. Pay, two of the selections don’t set too well with me. I just hope to God they weren’t even here. But I feel like George Moon. I wouldn’t bet a dime on it. And if they ran off into the woods, why aren’t they back? Maybe they’re out there now, watching us, afraid to come in, not knowing who we are. And if they were here and caught, why weren’t they treated like Mrs. John? Used and slaughtered? The bunch that rode in here had time to get good and horny again after they left Hatchet Hill Road, so why would they have waited and carried the women off someplace else to use them?”

  It was the longest speech he had made to me. He turned back to the kitchen, where I could smell the coffee beginning to work. I knew he had no expectation of response to his questions, even if I’d had answers, which I didn’t. Someone was telling him the dead chickens in the yard had all been shot. Everything had moved so fast, what had happened to those chickens had never occurred to me. But they’d been shot, like the men. Everything had been shot except the hogs.

  Above the sounds of the growing storm, there was shouting from the front of the house that the canvas had blown off the bodies. They lay faceup, the water running off the cheeks that already had begun to look sunken and wasted like old candle wax burned out from the inside. Choctaws ran about the yard, one in pursuit of the canvas, others searching for large stones to anchor it in place. The thought crossed my mind of some kind of hysterical Easter egg hunt under a darkening sky gone berserk.

  Hail began to slant against the walls and windows of the house. More water fell with it, and the lightning that we had watched through much of the afternoon was over us now, so close the crash of thunder came immediately with the flashing brilliance. Everything, the whole day, was a swirling kaleidoscope of changing bloodred forms, shapeless and wet, and now the blinding blue-white light. The wind blew the dead chickens across the yard.

  “Get under cover,” Oscar Schiller was yelling. “There’s a root cellar in the kitchen.”

  Some of the Choctaws and Joe Mountain were running through the kitchen. Someone lit a lamp and Schiller was holding open a slanted door at the far end of the room, a door I had not noticed. It revealed wooden steps into the cellar and we stumbled down to find places among the food scattered across the earthen floor, apples and potatoes and flour. The gang had rifled this place, too. It smelled of damp burlap and rotting wood beams and bacon rind.

  “Blow out that light,” Schiller said. “It’s killing the air.”

  We sat there in total darkness, listening to the howl of the storm overhead. The wind and rain and hail beat against the house, and once, I heard glass shattering. Joe Mountain was squatting beside me in the dark and he pressed something into my hand, round and hard.

  “Apple,” he said, and I heard him bite into one of his own.

  There was a strange detachment from reality sitting there with no light. Like a vacuum in time and space, or an absence of gravity, where a man had to hold his hand to the floor beneath him now and again to keep from rolling over on his side like one of those ball-bottom dolls children play with. When Schiller and Moon began to talk, their voices came out of the void, disembodied, causing my mind to reshape the structure of their faces from the sounds alone. The sandstone rasp of Schiller’s voice made him seem larger than I knew he was, and George Moon’s slurred speech created the image in my mind of a flat, high-cheeked face, dark and with one milk white eye.

  “George, this looks like more than just turning the wolf loose,” Schiller said. “Did Thrasher keep money here?”

  “Not that anyone around here ever heard of,” George Moon said. “He made a little each year contractin’, but mostly spent it as he made it. He traded a little corn each year with the store in Hatchet Hill, for tobacco and dress cloth. He may have made a little bettin’ on races. But I don’t think they were after money, except what was layin’ around loose.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “It was the horse,” Moon said.

  From beside me, Joe Mountain spoke, his mouth full of apple. “There ain’t a horse left on the place now. There ain’t no stock. There’s a milk cow in the barn, been shot half a dozen times, and dead.”

  “He had a few beef cattle,” Moon said. “They’d be up in the woods now, in some of those old clearings, out on spring graze.”

  “They ain’t no cattle tracks out of here,” Joe Mountain said.

  “What horse are you talking about, George?” Schiller asked.

  “He’s a black racer. A stallion Mr. Thrasher bought in Texas a few years back. All black except for stockings on the rear hocks. Thrasher had some ordinary farm stock, but the black was a racer. Never bred to harness, Cap’n. Just a racer. Mr. Thrasher branded him with a T on the left flank, but it was hid by the saddle fender when he was rigged up. Mr. Thrasher didn’t want no brand that showed on his hide in races, because I guess he didn’t want to mark up that black coat at all.”

  There was a long silence while the storm raged above us. Then Schiller spoke again.

  “All right. The racer’s gone. And the two women. What about the women, George? Tell me about the women.”

  Once more, a long silence. Listening to the rattle of hail on the house, I wondered where the other Choctaw policemen and Blue Foot had taken refuge from the storm. Then George Moon spoke again.

  “Well, Cap’n, Mrs. Thrasher was a barren woman but a rich one. Not money rich, but land rich. She’s got family off down south of McAlester somewhere. But she owned this place, her and her first husband. They had no young’uns either. But she got this place when her daddy died, him as had come from Mississippi when he was a boy and took up this land.”

  “Choctaws.”

  “Sure. When Mr. Thrasher married, he got hisself a well-to-do woman.”

  “Did she gad around?”

  “Hell, no. She was a comely woman but a homebody. She visited a little here on the mountain, but that’s about all.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that they were speaking of this woman in the past tense, as though she were already gone. As I sat there in the dark, it was not a comforting thought.

  “All right, George. Now about the girl.”

  “A real pretty little thing,” he said. “Blond hair and blue eyes. Jennie is what they called her.”

  “Any beaus?”

  “None I know of. Mr. Thrasher watched over her pretty close. He had a wagon fitted out for sleeping and cooking so when he went to races in different places, he’d take Jennie along and she’d make his meals and they’d live in the wagon. Sometimes on contract jobs, too.”

  Above us, the storm seemed to be blowing over. But no one made any move to leave the cellar. Joe Mountain was eating another apple, his teeth grinding in the dark.

  Somebody started speaking Choctaw and George Moon said a few words, too. I could tell they were questions.

  “Charley Oskogee here lives down the road a ways,” George Moon said. “Sometimes he hires out to help Mr. Thrasher slaughter hogs or crib corn. His woman comes up now and again. He says there ain’t many people come up this way. He says there ain’t nobody courtin’ on Miss Jennie. Charley Oskogee, he’s one of my policemen.”

  There was no need to point out that the man with this information was a Choctaw policeman, but George Moon did it as a binding seal to what had been said, like a notary public’s imprint.

  “Charley says in the last few weeks there’s been some whiskey peddlers in the hills, sellin’ their winter makin’s.”

  “What kind of peddlers? What did they look like?”

  “Just peddlers. Charley says there ain’t nothin’ he can remember about any of ’em. Just down here in the hills peddlin’ their winter makin’s.”

  “You don’t remember any special ones, nosing around?”

  “Charley says no, he
don’t.”

  The talk stopped and we sat listening to the wind and rain. The howling storm had moved off to the east, into the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. The hail driving against the sides of the house was finished and now there was only the sodden roar of water falling on the roof. Climbing back to the kitchen, we could see shards of glass from a shattered window mixed with the other debris on the floor.

  George Moon went out to see to his men and Oscar Schiller began questioning the one called Charley. It wasn’t his real name, I knew. Many of The Nations people took up such names at least for their commerce with whites because tribal names were too often completely unpronounceable to English-speaking people, most of whom were not interested in learning Indian words, anyway.

  The two of them walked through the house, Schiller pressing the Choctaw for anything he might remember having seen before that was missing now. Charley said he could think of nothing. Except maybe Mr. Thrasher’s pearl hat. He said Thrasher always wore a black hat with a large mother-of-pearl button sewn on the front of the crown. He said they were always expensive hats, bought in Texas when Thrasher went there to race or on business. Schiller wrote it all down in his little book. Since we’d been at the Thrashers’, Schiller had been writing in a book, which he’d taken from the store of goods he carried in his saddlebags.

  Standing in the parlor, staring mutely at the ripped furniture, he took a small silver can from his pocket, not much larger than a thimble, that was filled with a light brown powder. He sucked on a wooden match until it was wet and dipped it into the powder. Deliberately recapping the can and slipping it inside his jacket, he put the matchstick back in his mouth and chewed on it. Father had told me there are many vices, women being one under certain circumstances. Hard spirits and black cigars, he’d said, would ferment the soul. But snuff dipping was just plain nasty. At least it explained the musty-sweet odor I’d noticed about Schiller.