Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  One thing was not explained. When he had a match, chewing it between his taut lips, his eyes were brighter and he moved more quickly. He was more talkative, too, for a man so naturally taciturn.

  Joe Mountain had the ham back in the oven. He had kicked up the fire again and the kitchen was warm and smelling of food. It was hard to reconcile that aura with all we had found in this place. He went into the root cellar and brought up a hatful of potatoes. Without bothering to brush the dust off, he put them in the oven.

  Some of the men were still in the barn and others squatted along the walls under the porch roofs, smoking. It had grown dark, and the tips of their cigarettes made hot little points of red light. The yard was a muddy pool, the lamps we had lighted inside making shining reflections across it. I wandered through the house, tired, leg-sore, and hungry, all of that forgotten when the excitement was at high pitch.

  Back in the kitchen, I found Joe Mountain carefully placing a number of bottles in Schiller’s saddlebags. He looked at me and grinned.

  “Found these in the cellar hid under the potatoes,” he said. “Old Thrasher made his own whiskey, I reckon.”

  “What are you doing with it?”

  “We confiscate whiskey,” he said, and laughed. “You can sell this kind of whiskey in Fort Smith for maybe fifty cents a bottle.”

  “Sell it?”

  “Sure, Eben Pay. Sell it. Nobody here gonna need it. We confiscate lots of whiskey in The Nations and sell it in Fort Smith. A little extra money don’t never hurt nobody.”

  “Does Marshal Schiller know you’re doing that?”

  Joe Mountain laughed again. The tattooed dots along his cheek were deep blue in the lamplight. “Hell, whose saddlebags you think these are?”

  There in the kitchen with Joe Mountain, I sat and tried to let it all leave my mind. This farm, suddenly depopulated by some savage bunch of drunks, a good farm probably going back to weeds now like so many of those deserted fields we’d passed in the woods crossing the mountains. I thought about the people moved here by force, into a land new and hard, already claimed by someone else. And I thought of how the vices of all men, no matter what color, seem to multiply as old social orders break down and new ones try to establish themselves.

  “How could they murder three men just for a horse?” I said, and it startled me that I’d said it aloud. Joe Mountain looked at me with that long-toothed grin that was no grin at all.

  “We had one a spell back, up in the Cherokee Nation,” he said. “Traveler just passing through killed a man and his little son with a sledgehammer for a pair of button shoes.”

  I started to protest the senseless brutality, and the seemingly blind acceptance of such a way of life by everyone concerned. But at that moment someone ran from the other end of the house into the breezeway and along it to the front porch, where George Moon and Schiller were talking.

  “Cap’n!” the man shouted. “You better come. There’s somebody in the bedroom attic. We just heard ’em.”

  “Damn,” I heard George Moon exclaim. “I should have thought of an attic.”

  Three

  With the first cry that someone was hiding in the house, men came with weapons up and cocked, but Schiller pushed among them, knocking down the gun muzzles. He went up onto a chiffonier like a monkey, awkward but effective, his pale eyes shining behind the steel-rimmed glasses as he found the attic hatch and pushed it aside. Charley Oskogee went up with him, his pistol ready. But there was no need for it. In a moment the two of them were pulling a girl from her hiding place. She was slack-lipped and wide-eyed, limp with shock, her long blond hair hanging over her face. They handed her down, a slender form that seemed childlike. But as we carried her to the walnut four-poster bed, her cotton dress plastered to her body with sweat, it was obvious that she was no child but a young woman full-blooming.

  Someone spread a heavy comforter over her, and Charley Oskogee bent close, pushing her hair back from her face. He spoke softly to her, but even though she had known him as a neighbor and had seen him many times, there was no sign of recognition on her face.

  Oscar Schiller took a lamp into the attic but was back almost at once.

  “Well, that’s one of them anyway,” he said to George Moon. “But there’s no sign of the other one up there.”

  “This is Jennie,” George Moon said. “I better send Charley Oskogee for his wife. We need a woman here now. It don’t look to me like you’ll get much from this girl tonight, Cap’n.”

  “No, I don’t think so either. But don’t send Charley. He ought to be here with the girl, because she knows him. Send one of your other boys.”

  The girl stared at us blankly, her eyes blue above pronounced cheekbones. I was struck by the long neck and delicately small head as she lay with her hair on the pillow framing her face. She reminded me of a print I had seen of Bronzino’s Lucrezia, even to the length of her straight nose and the finely sculpted upper lip, all so much admired by the Florentine artists. Such a face in this wilderness seemed a startling contradiction, and if from that moment I was not actually in love with Jennie Thrasher, most certainly I was at least infatuated by her face.

  Schiller quickly moved everyone out of the room excepting me and Charley Oskogee, myself because I was white, I supposed, and near the girl’s age. We tried to comfort her, telling her we were friends and she had nothing to fear, but she obviously didn’t hear a word we said. Once, as Schiller bent over her, she seemed to shrink back from the unblinking stare, and seeing that, he made no attempt to question her.

  Joe Mountain came in with a white enamel chamber pot. “She been up in that attic a long time, I bet, Cap’n,” he said. “I found this slop jar in another room for her.”

  “All right,” Schiller said impatiently. “Put it down, Joe. When the woman gets here, that can be taken care of.”

  We sat around the bed, watching her, the rain pounding on the roof as it came straight down. Twice, her eyes went from one of us to the next, but it was a long time before she spoke. We could hardly hear her when she did.

  “Where’s my papa?” she whispered. “What happened to my papa?”

  “He’s gone, missy,” Schiller said in his sandstone voice. Her eyes seemed to draw back from him. “We’re here to find who would do such a thing. I’m the law and these men are friends.”

  Her expression did not change as she turned her head toward the dark window where the faces of Choctaw policemen looked in.

  “I knew that was it,” she said, more loudly now. “I knew that was it when they did all that shooting.”

  “What shooting, missy?” Schiller asked, bending over her. But the urgency in his voice had no effect and she said nothing more. Finally he turned away from the bed and shrugged.

  She did not cry; her expression did not change, as she became aware for the first time of her father’s death. She appeared strangely detached, or perhaps resigned to it, as though she not only expected such a thing just then but had been expecting it for a long time. She lay with her pale Florentine features, staring without seeing toward the Indians at the window, their faces as expressionless as her own.

  Charley Osgokee’s wife came in finally, having ridden from her farm with one of the Choctaws, her shawl and long gingham dress plastered to her fat body from shoulders to knees. She was wearing a wide-brimmed man’s hat, which she threw into a corner, taking us all in with one quick sweep of her black eyes, saying nothing. She shooed us out like a flock of reluctant chickens and closed the door behind. In a moment, she opened it again and said something to her husband in Choctaw. Charley Oskogee hurried into the kitchen for hot coffee and meat gravy from the ham.

  Oscar Schiller drew me along the breezeway to the front porch and we stood close together in the dark where the rain made a thick dampness in the air.

  “Mr. Pay, come morning, me and these men are going to see if we can find anybody who might have seen the ones we’re after,” he said. “I don’t think people are going to say much at
this point, but we need to try. I want you to stay here with that girl.”

  “Stay here?”

  “Yes, and when she gets some sleep and some food and feels safe again, she’ll begin to talk. You find out what you can. What she saw. I don’t know what happened here, and I don’t know what might have happened to her. Not much, I’d suspect. Else that bunch wouldn’t have left her alive. I doubt they knew she was here.”

  “She doesn’t seem very talkative,” I said.

  “You just be around when she gets talkative.” We stood silently for a long time, my legs aching. I was very tired. Schiller may have sensed it. “You get some sleep, too,” he said. “We’ll be back in a day or so, and whether we catch anybody or not, we’ll all head back to Fort Smith. I’ll send a few of these men back to Hatchet Hill with those three bodies. And I’ll have one of them get a telegraph off to the marshal’s office to pass the word all through The Nations to be on the lookout for Milk Eye, and for that black horse.”

  He turned, leaving me standing there, but stopped and looked back. I thought I detected a smile.

  “I’ll leave a couple of the men here, too, in case they come back.”

  The thought that the marauders might return had not entered my mind until then. I doubted that Schiller thought they would, but if his purpose was to make the night more chilling than it already was for me, he had succeeded.

  We heard no more from the Choctaw woman in Jennie Thrasher’s room that night except once when she handed out the chamber pot and Charley Oskogee carried it off into the rain. After he brought it back, he looked inside the door for a moment but his wife closed it again. He said Miss Jennie was sleeping. Policemen by then were sleeping on the porches and all over the house, except in the kitchen, where Oscar Schiller sat with his hat off, studying what he’d written in the little book. I had not seen him before without the palmetto and his hair was straight and strawlike, cut short around the ears and neck. He was graying, but the gray was hard to detect because, one way or another, it was nearly colorless. He looked like some schoolboy, intense of mind, bent over his forms.

  I found a place in the breezeway and was shivering with cold when Joe Mountain appeared with a thick cotton quilt. He squatted beside me, eating a baked potato, hull and all. I was too tired to accept a bite when he offered it. As I rolled myself into the quilt, it occurred to me that only a few hours before I would have found my situation incongruous. Here I was in the wilds of Choctaw country, at the scene of a brutal murder, wrapped in a homemade quilt and refusing to eat when asked, not because the offer came from a man my friends in Saint Louis would have considered a heathen savage, but because I wanted sleep more than food. My mind stumbled through the events of the day, a day such as I had never spent before in all my life, but sleep came quickly with the warmth of the cover and the knowledge that the big Osage was there beside me in the night.

  Sometime during the dark hours before dawn, I woke to a sound other than the monotonous drumming of rain. It was a quavering wail, high-pitched for a moment before dropping into deep guttural moanings. It came from somewhere beyond the house and cut through the rain to the senses like a knife blade passed along the finger, unnoticed for a few seconds until the sting begins. I sat up, the quilt falling off my shoulders, the chills starting up my back.

  “What in God’s name?” I asked. Beside me, Joe Mountain laughed softly.

  “That’s Blue Foot, down in the barn,” he said. “He’s singing an old Osage death chant, for them men out there.” I knew he meant the three under the wagon canvas on the porch, grown stiff by now.

  “Why’s he doing that?” I said. “I didn’t think he even liked Choctaws, and two of those are Choctaws.”

  “He don’t like Choctaws,” Joe Mountain said. “But Blue Foot’s strong on all the old tribal stuff. He figures it’s his duty to send off the dead right, no matter who they are. My granddaddy taught me that chant and I taught Blue Foot. He does it pretty good, don’t he?”

  “I’ve no means of comparison.”

  “He does it pretty good. It’s an old chant, Eben Pay. From a long time back. So, Blue Foot, he’s sharing it with the Choctaws because the dead deserve it, and because it shows the Choctaws some of our old stuff that we had before they even came. And maybe he just wants to keep a few of them awake.”

  Once it was known, I found it soothing. I could not go back to sleep with it because although there was some of the rain’s same monotony about the chant, there was a stirring quality as well that demanded attention. There was a sad yet joyful feeling to it, and a sense of finality, the last good punctuation to a man’s life. As the eastern sky at the end of the breezeway began to turn pale, the song ended and I was sleeping again before Oscar Schiller and his posse were up and off into a new, wet day.

  Charley Oskogee’s wife had not slept. When I went into the kitchen there was fresh bread baking and a pot of boiling turnips, also coffee and a glass canning jar of hominy opened and ready to be fried. Without a word, she made me a breakfast of eggs and pork sausage heavily seasoned with black pepper and sage, and although the taste was almost as good as the smell of it cooking, it left a solid lump in my stomach for most of the day.

  Jennie Thrasher was wearing a clean dress and her hair had been braided into long plaits and rolled in two spirals above and behind each ear. She was lying on top of the bedcovers and her feet looked tiny in their black button shoes. She watched me as I came in and drew a chair over close to the bed.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  I told her, and when she waited for me to say more, I explained that I was from Saint Louis, a very large city.

  “I remember you from last night. Have you got any chewing gum?”

  When I told her I did not, she said she usually chewed paraffin but that was always in the fall, when her stepmother was canning. With that she lay there staring at me, and after an embarrassing moment of silence I began to tell her about Saint Louis. She became animated when I mentioned the zoo and sat up in the middle of the bed, drawing her legs back under her skirt.

  “Do they have tigers?”

  When she talked, she tilted her small, dainty head to one side, emphasizing the long neck. I could see the tiny blue blood veins running along it like faint pencil marks. She somehow looked older now than she had when we’d taken her from the attic.

  She was not reluctant to talk with me, and I suspected that on this hill farm she had few opportunities to see a white man her own age. After a while, I brought up the subject of the raid, and what she had seen or heard. As Schiller had supposed, it wasn’t much.

  She had been in the kitchen churning when the raiders appeared. She had seen none of them. Her father had run in and pulled her into the bedroom and told her to stay in the attic until he came for her, no matter what happened. He had been very excited, but he told her nothing about who might be coming into the yard or whether he knew any of them. I made a mental note to tell Oscar Schiller that Thrasher had apparently known someone in the group, and feared them.

  Jennie said she didn’t know where her stepmother had been at the time but later she heard her talking. There had been a great deal of talking and laughing in the yard, and then she heard them come into the house. She had been terrified, and the sequence of events seemed blurred in her thinking. There had been shooting, later, in the back and in the front yard. She said she thought she heard her papa cry out once, but she couldn’t be sure. Another time, she heard men’s voices and her stepmother’s as well in one of the rooms below her attic hiding place. But she couldn’t recall anything that was said except now and then loud cursing and swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  After a while it grew quiet, and she waited for her papa to come for her. Then there were other men running through the house and it started raining on the roof just above her head. I knew that was when we’d come. She said she was afraid the storm would blow the roof off.

  “You didn’t recognize any of the voices?
”

  She stared at me a long time, her eyes wide and her lips parted enough for me to see her tiny teeth set in perfect rows like sweet corn.

  “No,” she said. “I was too scared, and besides, up in that attic I couldn’t hear good. Listen, why don’t you make a cigarette and smoke it? I like to smell cigarette smoke.”

  Charley Oskogee was on the back porch with a rifle, watching the wood lines around the farm. My hands were shaking for some reason, and he smiled and rolled a cigarette for me. Passing back through the breezeway to the bedroom, I could see Joe Mountain on the front porch, a heavy Winchester cradled in one arm. It struck me that he looked intent, like a cat watching a mouse, and very deadly, as he stared across the rainy clearing.

  I sat beside Jennie Thrasher for much of that day, smoking because she enjoyed watching me. But from time to time she ignored me, either sitting on the bed or lying back on the high pillows, smoothing her skirt down along her thighs with both hands. Once, when the Indian woman was out of the room and we could hear her rattling pans in the kitchen, Jennie sat up and leaned close to me. I was holding a cigarette between thumb and forefinger and she reached down and took my hand in hers and lifted it to her mouth. I could feel the soft warmth of her lips as she drew deeply on the cigarette, twice, inhaling like a man.

  “You sure got soft fingers,” she said. “I bet you don’t hoe much corn or anything like that.”

  “No, not much,” I said, my chest heaving as she gently released my hand. She lay back and closed her eyes. I tried to compose myself, but as I looked at her there on the bed, it was difficult. I finally left the room and went to the front porch and stood watching the rain, feeling the heat of the cigarette on my fingers where she had touched me. I put the cigarette to my mouth and felt the wetness of her lips on it. My heart continued to thump, and for a while I forgot all the killing and blood and the disfigured bodies and the milk-eyed man. My mind was spinning with thoughts of other things.