Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  Later in the day, one of George Moon’s men rode back in to see if Jennie Thrasher had said anything that might be useful. I told him what she’d said as he stuffed food into his mouth, and then he was off again into the rain, riding down to the road and east toward McAlester. Joe Mountain came up to me and we stood watching the rain fall. It was slackening enough so that in the distance we could see the pale gray outlines of far mountain ridges.

  “That’s a pretty little girl, ain’t she?” he asked and he was grinning at me. I could feel my face reddening and I changed the subject before it went any further.

  “You think those men will come back here?”

  “No. If they do, that’ll be the end of the case,” he said, and laughed. He pointed the muzzle of the Winchester toward the wood line where we had appeared the day before. “How many men you think I could hit with this rifle if they was to ride out of those trees and come down on us? How many before they got to us?”

  “Where do you think they went, Joe?”

  “Holed up someplace. I’d bet a far piece from here. This rain likely cooled ’em off some. They was about to run their full course any ways, as much as they’d been drinking. But I don’t worry about that. I let the Cap’n worry about it.”

  Jennie Thrasher came out of her room only once that day. She stood in the breezeway leaning against the wall, watching the rain. In that light, her eyes turned as gray as the far mountains.

  On the next day, Oscar Schiller and his posse came back. That was the day Jennie told me about the whiskey peddler. We were in her room, she in a rocker by the window.

  “Has anyone been visiting through here the past few weeks?” I asked. George Moon had said he believed the men who came here were strangers to the area, yet somehow they had known about the horse, or whatever else it was they were looking for.

  “In the spring, there’s always a few come by,” she said, rocking and looking out through the thin white curtain that framed the window. “Whiskey peddlers mostly, with their winter mix.”

  “I suppose they just wander through. I don’t suppose you know many of them.”

  “No. They just come. In the spring. There was one came by two, maybe three weeks back, the only one so far this year. Papa never bought any whiskey from any of them. He always makes his own.” She paused and sat silently a moment. “He always made his own.”

  I didn’t want her drawing back into a shell, thinking about what had happened to her father, so I asked her the obvious question.

  “Did you know this one who came by—two, maybe three weeks ago?”

  “No. Papa said he was a Creek. He came along the road from McAlester on a horse and leading a mule. He said he wanted to get to the Frisco railroad along the Kiamichi because there were lots of people along there who might want whiskey. They sat out on the edge of the porch and talked because Papa liked to jaw with whoever came along. They got talking about horse racing and the man said he’d heard Papa had a good racer and Papa said he did and took the man down to look at Tar Baby.”

  “Tar Baby?”

  “That’s Papa’s racer. A black stallion.”

  I recalled the night before, in the parlor. In that room were a number of books and one was Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. It and the Bible there looked well used. I wondered if Thrasher had ever read the stories aloud to the girl, back when they’d first come into this wild country to live and become Choctaws.

  “Then they came back and drank a few sips of Papa’s whiskey. The man said he didn’t like traveling the roads because the Choctaw lighthorse might catch him and arrest him for the whiskey he was carrying on the mule. So Papa told him he could get to Hatchet Hill going along the ridgelines, through the woods.”

  There it was! A man interested in looking at a racehorse and finding a back route into this place, off the roads. It didn’t matter now if I did scare her off. I had to ask the next question. I tried to sound calm.

  “What did this man look like?”

  She knew at once what I was driving at then, and she stared at me for a long time.

  “Just a little man with a brown face,” she said. “Just a Creek.”

  “Would you know him again if you saw him?”

  “Yes. Mama and me were in the parlor, cutting quilt pieces, and I was at the window over the porch where him and Papa were talking. I was close enough to spit on him.”

  “His voice, Jennie. When you were up in the attic, did you hear anyone who sounded like this whiskey peddler?”

  “No,” she said, and abruptly rose from the rocker and went to the bed. “I’m tired now. If you aren’t going to smoke anymore, I’m going to take a nap.”

  That was the end of it, but it was enough. I was elated, and even her pouting mouth could not detract from the moment. I got out and let her have her nap, although I was sure she had no intention of sleeping. She would lie there on that bed thinking about what we’d talked about, and about that Creek whiskey peddler.

  When Schiller and his posse rode in, they were wet and tired and muddy. He listened to me without comment, then went into the kitchen and wrote everything down in his little book. He took some railroad passes from his always-ready saddlebags and handed them to me.

  “Mr. Pay, I want you to take Miss Thrasher back to Fort Smith. And pick up that nigger kid Emmitt in Hatchet Hill. Evans will want to place both of ’em in protective custody. George Moon has to go in anyway, to testify in another case, so he’ll ride along with you back to the railroad and then on into town. Me and these other men are going down to Charley Oskogee’s to get fresh horses. We’re not finished nosing around yet. I think I’ll drift up into the Creek Nation. I’ve got other business there anyway. All we can do now is wait.” He added as though to himself, “They’re all stupid and taken to drink, so that black horse can’t stay hid long. There’s more to it than a horse, but I don’t know what. Yet.”

  He wasted no time about it. He had his posse mounted and filing out of the yard toward Charley Oskogee’s farm within a few minutes. Joe Mountain waved to me and grinned as he rode off, but Schiller lagged behind, sitting in his saddle and looking at me and George Moon as we stood on the porch.

  “George, you look out for this young gentleman,” he said, meaning me. “And, Mr. Pay, you see the U.S. commissioner in Fort Smith and get us some John Doe warrants for murder and rape. Four of them. And one on Milk Eye Rufus Deer. We’ll be needing them.” He still sat there looking at us with those unblinking eyes, as though he wanted to say more but didn’t know how. Then he said, “And you take good care of that Miss Thrasher. You hadn’t ought to mind that, I suspect.” For the first time since I’d known him, I saw him smile openly, only it was more like a leer, showing snuff-stained teeth. He reined away and called back, “I’ll see you in a few days in Fort Smith.”

  Actually, it would be two weeks.

  FOUR

  In the compound of what had once been the army post at Fort Smith, all the buildings had been razed except for a commissary and the officers’ quarters, which now housed the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas. These and the gallows were the only structures within the enclosure of the former fort walls, and the commissary was used only for storage now, although when he first arrived, Judge Parker and his family had taken up residence there. The officers’ quarters was a typical two-story military sandstone of the Jacksonian era with a gabled roof that ran the length of the building and high verandas at front and rear of a central hall. On one side of this passage was the courtroom, and on the other the judge’s chambers and the offices of the United States attorney and other officials of the court.

  Originally the jail had been in the basement of the courthouse but recently an addition had been patched onto the south end of the structure for this purpose. There, the cathedral windows with one-inch iron bars looked out onto the compound. Each window was three stories high and behind them, inside the shell of the outer walls, was a birdcage of cells rising in tiers above the floor.<
br />
  I had become only vaguely aware of these physical surroundings on my initial arrival in Fort Smith, having been more concerned with personalities than with sandstone and oak beams. On the first day, I had paid my respects to Judge Parker and had given him my father’s best wishes. Most men encountering Isaac Parker for the first time did so with some trepidation in light of his reputation. I found him to be a gentle and genial man. He was fifty-two at that time but looked much older, his large head of hair and close-cropped beard laced with white. He had asked after my father and recalled for me the times the two of them had argued cases in the federal court at Saint Joseph. But his heavy workload had not allowed for more than a few moments of casual conversation and he sent me along to the prosecutor’s office with my father’s letter of introduction in hand.

  William Evans knew the details of my coming and he had greeted me as though I were his long-lost nephew. He was an older man than Parker but looked younger. His beard was long but well kept and he had the habit of peeping over his pince-nez when he talked, all the while fingering the gold watch chain that draped across his massive belly. From it were suspended a number of small badges indicating his fraternal affiliations and academic achievements. After his effusive greeting, he had set me immediately to work among the files and briefs and documents attendant to the function of his office.

  All that had been interrupted by the midnight train ride to Kiamichi River and my introduction to violent crime as it sometimes occurred in the Indian country.

  When I returned from the Choctaw Nation with a retinue of Indian policemen and our two witnesses, Evans took charge personally, housing Jennie Thrasher and Emmitt in the women’s section of the jail. There were no inmates at the time and the cells located on the top floor of the courthouse building proper were adequate if not elaborate. Both Jennie and the boy were allowed to come and go as they pleased, but for their own safety could not leave the courthouse without being accompanied by a jailer or a deputy marshal.

  I had hoped Evans would include me in his interrogation of witnesses in the Winding Stair case, but apparently he had reason not to. He told me nothing afterward of what either Jennie or Emmitt had said, and I could only suppose that I had already heard anything they had to tell. But he was anxious that I spend some time with the girl, in the event she might recall some detail important to the case. Each time I saw her, I reported dutifully to Evans what had been said. Or at least, most of it.

  During this time I had not a word from Oscar Schiller. I imagined him to be roaming The Nations, confiscating whiskey from honest fanners for his own private sale in Fort Smith. But my low opinion of him was not shared by Evans.

  “One of our best men,” he said. “When he brings in a prisoner, we’re always sure of conviction.” Evans told me that Schiller had gone off to join the Third Arkansas Infantry during the war, a boy of barely fourteen. I had noticed that at a distance, Schiller looked young, perhaps no more than thirty, but at close range, it became clearly apparent that he was older, and Evans’s remarks assured me the marshal was at least in his early forties.

  “Why do his people call him Captain?” I asked.

  Evans laughed, puffing a large cigar and peering at me over his glasses.

  “Schiller came home from the war something of a hero. Badly wounded at the Wilderness. In that same fight he killed a Yankee artillery captain and brought back his saber as a trophy. He spent a great deal of his time going from one saloon to the next along Garrison Avenue, telling the story. His drinking companions began calling him Captain, although he had been discharged out of the army a private.”

  “I can’t imagine him telling stories,” I said.

  “A frenzy of purging himself, I suspect, after all he’d seen in the war. He left Fort Smith for about ten years, then came back and worked in the marshal’s office for a while before he got his commission. I’m afraid somewhere along the way, he became a bluenose. Never drinks.”

  Evans had me at work among his other assistants. There was little to remind me of the Winding Stair case except for my daily talks with Jennie Thrasher in the fort compound or among the gravestones of the National Cemetery on the banks of the Poteau River.

  The walks began the day after we returned from The Nations and continued throughout those two weeks when the weather turned warm and muggy, promise of the humid, sweltering times ahead along the river bottoms. Before noon each day I left Evans’s office and bought a lunch of chicken or meat loaf sandwiches and small cakes, all neatly stacked in what the locals called a poke—a brown paper bag. Lunch in hand, I would return to the courthouse and ascend the steep stairs to the women’s cells above the main rooms and extend my greetings to Zelda Mores, who had special charge of Jennie Thrasher.

  Zelda was a lady jailer. She was very heavy, well into her fifties, with a small bun of graying hair at the back of her head and the trace of a black mustache across her upper lip. She always accompanied Jennie when the girl left her cell. On those days when we went to the cemetery for lunch, Zelda would be some paces behind, watching, always keeping us within range of the .45 British Webley revolver she carried. Zelda had become a legend in Fort Smith after the time an escaping prisoner had made a dash for the compound wall in broad daylight. The lady jailer fired one shot with her awkward-looking pistol and so severely wounded the man that he died in jail awaiting trial. The casual manner of that story’s telling in the Garrison Avenue saloons had appalled me at first, but such stories were beginning to be routine.

  Jennie and I usually walked from the south gate of the compound and the cemetery to a stand of large elm trees where the ground sloped down to the Poteau. There we ate and talked of weather and racehorses and tigers. Among the gravestones were meadowlarks, and the branches overhead were generally aswarm with sparrows and jays. Jennie began to call one of the elms our tree and insisted that I cut her initials into its bark. I explained that such a thing was likely against the law, it being a tree in a national cemetery and therefore government property.

  My infatuation with her increased. Sometimes I rolled a cigarette and let her smoke it and each day I brought chewing gum. Zelda disapproved of both. She would frown at us, standing in the shade of an elm some distance off, her feet planted wide apart and holding her purse in her left hand, ready, I presumed, to draw the Webley with the right should the situation require it. The thought at such times that Jennie might be attacked for what she knew never entered my mind. I felt her to be as safe with Zelda as I would have with Joe Mountain and his Winchester.

  Jennie treated me as though I might be some longtime friend for whom she had considerable affection. I was astonished at first with her familiarity. As though we had grown up together and knew each other’s secrets and barn-loft escapades. Yet, looking back, I realize there was an intense reserve that she held up between us, impenetrable as a box hedge.

  She never spoke of her childhood, or of her days in the Winding Stair. Whenever I turned the subject in that direction she impatiently walked away or stood throwing stones toward the river, pouting and silent. On the other hand, she seemed fascinated with anything I might tell her about the city or my own life.

  “Tell me about your mama,” she said once. “I never knew mine. She died when I was little.”

  I explained how my mother’s people emigrated from Georgia before the Civil War. “They started farming up in the Ozarks, about a hundred miles from here,” I said. “It wasn’t very good farmland. Then, when the war started, all the men went off to join the army and left the women to tend the hogs and cornfields. Mother and her brother and my grandmother were alone.”

  “I hate it when I’m left alone,” Jennie said.

  I remembered what Mother had told me about those times, how the two armies came together almost in Grandmother’s front yard, and fought the battle of Pea Ridge. “Down here in the South they call it Elkhorn Tavern,” I said.

  “I never heard about it.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, according to M
other. There was a lot of noise, and some bullets hit the house. But after the armies had gone, then the bad times started.”

  “What kind of bad times, Eben?”

  “Partisan bands started raiding through that hill country. They claimed to be fighting for one side or the other, but actually they were out for loot and plunder.”

  “Plunder?”

  “Anything they could lay hands on. Livestock especially. Mother said they were always after food. They’d even scrape the salt from the smokehouse floors where it had dripped off the meat.”

  “And your folks were alone through all that?”

  “Actually, not quite. For almost a year after the battle they were nursing a wounded Union soldier they’d found on Pea Ridge. When he left, he took my mother with him. That was my father.” And I recounted how the wounded Union soldier had eventually married the young girl who had helped nurse him back to health. They had gone off to Missouri, where a few years later I was born to them and given my father’s name, Eben Pay.

  “I like that story, Eben,” Jennie said. “And now your mama’s people are still in the Ozarks.”

  “Yes. A few, I suppose. The war broke up the family. But there are some here. Father took us back only once, when I was very young. All I can recall of it is an old lady who kept wanting to kiss me because she said I looked like some relative in Georgia. She had white whiskers on her chin that scratched me.”

  Jennie laughed. She suddenly took one of my hands and placed it against her cheek.

  “See, Eben, I’ve got white whiskers, too.”

  Her skin was warm under my fingers, with a hint of dampness from the heat. At that moment Zelda Mores called down the slope that it was time to go, and, laughing, Jennie jumped up and ran back toward the courthouse compound. As Jennie went past her, the old mustached bitch fell in behind her like an escort of cavalry.