Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  Schiller drew up a chair close to the bed, and when Garret came in he was on the other side, pressing in, too, as though they were squeezing the young Creek between them. After a few moments, Cornkiller began to straighten and I could see a flicker of cold light deep in his eyes. He glared at Schiller and bared his teeth.

  “Goddamn, mister, why’d you do that?”

  “I want you to understand what serious trouble you’re in, Skitty.”

  “I ain’t in no trouble. I ain’t sold any whiskey for a long spell. They ain’t a drop on the place. Goddamn, you ain’t got no call doin’ all this pushin’ and shovin’. I ain’t done nothin’.”

  “You sell whiskey all over The Nations, and everybody knows it,” Garret said. “You’ve been fined once and spent time in Fort Smith Jail once for it. Don’t try to horseshit us, Skitty.”

  “I ain’t sold a drop since you caught me last time, Garret.”

  “You were in the Choctaw Nation less than a month ago, with a mule loaded with whiskey,” Schiller said. Cornkiller’s head jerked back and forth as each marshal shot his questions. “We know all about it.”

  “Goddamn, mister, I ain’t been in no Choctaw Nation.”

  “You were in there with a man named Johnny Boins,” Schiller said. There was that quick light in the depths of Cornkiller’s eyes, quickly shut off.

  “I don’t know nobody by that name.”

  “You’re a big bettin’ man, Skitty,” Garret said, bending close to him. “You ever see a racer called Tar Baby?”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “I didn’t say the horse was a stallion. How’d you know that horse ain’t a mare?”

  “I never said he wasn’t.”

  “You said him! You said you never heard of him!”

  Cornkiller lowered his head. “I never heard of him.”

  Schiller reached over and, with the cup of his hand under the young Creek’s chin, lifted his face. The eyes were defiant.

  “We like looking at men we talk to,” Schiller said. “Now, Skitty, you were in Choctaw Nation with a man named Milk Eye Rufus Deer, not long ago, wasn’t you?” Again that instant flash of light in his eyes.

  “I never heard of no such man.”

  “I said don’t horseshit us,” Garret snapped. “Everybody in Creek Nation has heard of Milk Eye.”

  “Goddamn, Garret, I heard of him. But I never knowed him and I never been no place with him, not in Choctaw Nation nor no place else.”

  “Yes, you were,” Schiller said. “You killed a Choctaw woman down there, after you raped her.”

  “I never done no such a thing,” Cornkiller yelled, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were like an animal’s, caught in a steel trap. Close to his face, Schiller’s glasses gleamed malevolently.

  “You killed a Choctaw woman, and then you killed a man named Thrasher and his two hired hands, and then you raped his wife. And you killed her, too.”

  “I never, either,” Cornkiller screamed, pulling against the cuffs on his wrist.

  “You killed the first one; then you killed Mrs. Thrasher, too,” Schiller roared and he leaped up, kicking back the chair. Suddenly the nickel-plated revolver was out, the muzzle pressed hard into Cornkiller’s throat. The young Creek gagged, trying to pull back as Schiller pushed the gun muzzle into his neck. “I ought to blow your goddamned lying throat out right here.”

  Cornkiller’s eyes bugged and he choked as Schiller rolled back the hammer to full cock. For an instant, I was sure he was going to kill the Indian.

  “Nobody killed that Thrasher woman. She got loose . . .” He stopped, still gagging. The realization of what he’d said spread across his face like a blush. For a moment only, Schiller kept the pressure on Cornkiller’s throat, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, the big pistol was back beneath the marshal’s duck jacket. Skitty Cornkiller sat there, tears running down his cheeks, coughing, his eyes rolling.

  “Oh goddamn, mister, that hurt me,” he sobbed. “You really hurt me, mister. Oh goddamn, goddamn.”

  If he knew what he was saying, the significance of it was obvious to us all. We had been waiting for the Choctaw police to report that they’d found the woman’s body, but apparently she was alive, still in hiding, afraid to come out. If she could be found to bear witness . . .

  “All right, Skitty,” Schiller said softly, almost gently. “That’s about all for now. Except you might tell us who did kill those people, if you didn’t.”

  Cornkiller spoke without lifting his head.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about it. I don’t know nothin’ about no killin’. I ain’t gone talk to you no more, mister. Goddamn you.”

  “Well, it don’t matter. Eben, you got another one of those warrants?”

  I handed him a John Doe. Schiller slapped it on the bed beside the young Creek.

  “Can you read, Skitty?” Cornkiller shook his head. “I’ll read it all to you, then. We don’t want you to make any mistake about this. You’re arrested for rape and murder in the Choctaw Nation.”

  “We’ll just take you down and turn you over to the Choctaw police,” Garret said.

  Skitty Cornkiller’s head snapped back up and he looked wildly at the two men before him.

  “Goddamn, Garret, you can’t turn me over to no Indian police. You gotta take me to Fort Smith. That Thrasher was white . . . .” He knew as he said it that he’d made a second mistake.

  “You don’t like them Indian courts too much, do you?” Garret said. “They’ll convict your ass in a hurry and tie you to a tree and shoot you to death, won’t they?”

  Schiller bent over him, still speaking softly. “Skitty, how’d you know he was white?”

  “Well, goddamn,” Cornkiller stammered. “Well, goddamn. It’s in all the newspapers.”

  “You just said you can’t read.”

  “Well, goddamn. Somebody told me about it.”

  “You’re under arrest, Skitty. But we aren’t taking you to the Choctaw lighthorse. We’re taking you to Fort Smith.” Schiller read him the warrant. The whole episode left a hard metallic taste in my mouth. But I was confident Skitty Cornkiller was one of the Winding Stair bunch. I wasn’t so sure about the black man.

  In the barn, we found more evidence. There was a mule and a broken-down mare with the hair worn off her gaskins from trace chains. She had been as badly used as the rest of this farm. But there were two other horses, both good stock and showing signs of having been well kept. One was a bay gelding, the other a blue roan stallion, strong but past his time for prime breeding. The bay had a T brand on one flank.

  “I’d say this is a Thrasher horse,” Oscar Schiller said, running his hand along the withers of the bay. “He ain’t Tar Baby, though, sure as hell. That roan, he looks like he might be called Ole Blue. Better take these two to Fort Smith. You might find somebody to recognize ’em, along with Skitty Cornkiller.”

  He was thinking of the black boy Emmitt, but he was thinking of Jennie Thrasher as well, and I saw the trace of a smile on his thin lips. I felt my anger rising, choking my words.

  “What has to be done is pretty obvious, Marshal.”

  “Turn these other two nags out. From the looks of it, open-range graze will be better than anything they’ve had here.”

  “They’ll sure as hell eat Grube’s garden,” I said. “Why don’t you take them in and sell them?”

  His cold eyes turned on me for a moment, but then the smile was back, only a twitch but undeniable.

  “There’s no market for stock like this, or I would,” he said. “And for Grube’s garden, he’s not going to be needing it anyway.”

  We shackled our prisoners together and sat them on the floor in the room where Joe Mountain worked over the cookstove, making breakfast. The two men were subdued now, almost resigned, and they told the Osage where he could find salt pork and flour for gravy. We gave them coffee while we waited for the food and twice Moma July rolled a cigarette for the black, though he ref
used to do so for Skitty Cornkiller.

  There obviously existed a strange bond between our two men. It was as though the younger was father to the older. Like a child, Grube constantly watched Skitty Cornkiller’s face as if trying to catch some unspoken thought, waiting for the opportunity to support or encourage the young Creek. And the Indian treated Nason Grube as he might a young girl, his expression guarded, his manner gentle. They spoke infrequently to each other, and then in Creek so that only Moma July and Garret understood what passed. I found it somehow typical of this place that an old uneducated black man had learned in his years in The Nations how to converse in another tongue. A number of times, they looked at each other silently. It was like a hunter and his well-trained dog looking at each other, the one with fondness, the other awaiting command.

  Neither of the marshals asked further questions of the two. Burris Garret sat in a chair tilted against one wall, watching the Osage scrambling eggs. Oscar Schiller had gone into the bedroom and sat there with the palmetto off, writing notes in his little book, his hair hanging damply across his forehead.

  The prisoners ate awkwardly, their hands still cuffed. The rest of us made fast work of the greasy meal, Schiller insisting on moving out of there quickly.

  When our little cavalcade reached the railroad tracks, Schiller pulled up and sat thinking, chewing on his matchstick for a long time before he spoke, staring out across the rolling country of the Canadian River bottoms, lush and green under the July sun. He was trying to make some kind of decision, I knew, and a great part of it was whether he would tell us what he planned. Finally, he motioned the black marshal and me away from the others, leaving Joe Mountain and Moma July with the prisoners.

  “I been thinking ever since Cornkiller said that woman in Choctaw Nation had got loose,” he said, and I knew he was speaking about Mrs. Thrasher. “If that’s true, we ought to find her.”

  He turned squarely toward me, twisting in his saddle, his eyes cold.

  “Eben. You’re the lawyer on this chase. What’s our chances for a conviction on the Thrasher killings with what we got now?”

  “Not a strong case,” I said, and because he was now including me in his thinking, my resentment once more began to disappear. “We can put them on Hatchet Hill Road with that boy’s testimony. But all we’ve got to put them at the Thrasher farm is that we tracked them there. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . Cornkiller can be identified as the whiskey runner out scouting for the racehorse. We’ve got what appears to be a Thrasher animal, and we’ve got the button hat, but both could have been bought from somebody else. And that note Johnny Boins forgot to burn, that doesn’t prove much either. And the whore’s story would be shaky.”

  Oscar Schiller grunted and looked off across the countryside again, nodding his head just enough to make the wide brim of the palmetto quiver.

  “That’s how I figured it,” he said. “I’ve seen Parker juries convict on less, but I’d like to be sure, dead sure. We could hang’em all on the Hatchet Hill thing, but that depends on whether we ever get that kid to telling his tale on a witness stand.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  Burris Garret laughed.

  “I want these people on the Thrasher thing,” Schiller said. “If Cornkiller was right, and that woman is still alive, maybe she saw enough to put the whole lot of them at the scene. When the killings were done.”

  He spat the chewed matchstick off to one side and turned to me again.

  “Now we’ve got a couple more of these bastards, the woman ought not be afraid to show herself.”

  “We haven’t got Milk Eye,” Burris Garret said.

  “I’ve got to try it anyway. Don’t noise around what I’m up to. I’ll ride up here to Checotah and take a KATY train and catch up with you later in Fort Smith.”

  He reined his horse away from us, glancing back toward the two prisoners.

  “Take them two on in. And for God’s sake, watch ’em close because if they do anything foolish, the Creek will cut ’em in half with that shotgun, and we don’t make any profit on dead prisoners.”

  We watched him as he kicked his horse along the railroad tracks, riding awkwardly as though his legs were too short for his feet to seat in the stirrups.

  The day was turning muggy and hot, and a short time after we left the railroad embankment, Burris Garret and I shed our jackets. The Creek policeman kept his army coat on, but Garret and I were sweating our shirts damp.

  At one point, we paused under some large sycamore trees to rest the horses and have some water, and I heard Nason Grube and Skitty Cornkiller break their silence with a few words in Creek.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Moma July.

  “The colored man, he says, ‘What they gone do with us Mr. Cornkiller?’ ”

  “Yeah, and what did Cornkiller say?”

  “Cornkiller says, ‘They gone try and hang us, old man.’ ”

  TEN

  During our ride to Fort Smith, Burris Garret talked with the two prisoners as though we were all farmers going to market our hogs. Nason Grube responded at once, smiling and flicking his long pink tongue across his lips, and after a while Skitty Cornkiller was talking, too, with all the casualness of any good citizen not remotely concerned with being accused of capital crimes. They spoke of crops and horses and the weather and how The Nations had changed for the worse since the railroads had started building through the country.

  Moma July never joined in any of this. He rode or sat at the campfire with hooded eyes, watching, holding that vicious short gun across his lap. Oscar Schiller had been right. He was anxious for an excuse to use it.

  It was incomprehensible that these two prisoners, wearing our steel bracelets and suspected of rape, could speak so easily in our presence. And it was equally unfathomable that Burris Garret could be so amiable with two people into whose faces he had only a few hours before thrust a cocked .45.

  I came to know a great deal about the black marshal on that trip. He was a truly gentle man, and a gentleman besides. When he was in school, he told me, he had become interested in Creek law, but had finally given it up. He reckoned that soon The Nations would become a part of some United States territory and anything he might know about Creek law would be of little use in white man’s court. He was a great deal like Joe Mountain, speaking of white man’s government, white man’s greed, white man’s encroachment on Indian country, doing it without any embarrassment or excuse.

  “Of course, white men haven’t got a corner on that market,” he said. “Only thing is, they’re better at it.”

  His straightforwardness and honesty were rare.

  On the second night, Garret and I were drinking coffee while Joe Mountain and the Creek policeman slept, soon to be wakened for their turn at standing guard. Neither of our prisoners had given any indication they might try to escape, but Garret insisted on two being awake to watch them at all times. Of course, when we camped, we chained them to a tree. We had been amused at Moma July’s snoring, and spoke of how the racket scared the night birds away. Then Garret turned serious, staring into the fire and sipping his coffee from the collapsible tin cup he always carried.

  “I’ll be glad when it comes,” he said. “Making The Nations a territory. Since the war, people like me, black people who came here slaves and were freed, or the ones born here since, we’ve all been part of some tribe. I’m supposed to be a Creek. But hell, anybody can look at me and tell I’m no Creek.” He laughed, his hat tilted back and the firelight showing on his high forehead. “Most of us don’t really feel like we belong to The Nations, even though we belong to the land. I think we’d be better off if this was all a territory. I’d feel better about it anyway.”

  But later, lying with my legs apart still from the saddle soreness, I watched the brilliant sky with its pinpoint of July stars, and I wondered. Here was a black man, legally a red one, anxious to go from the society that had nurtured him. I could understand why he’d feel he didn’t belong in the re
d culture, but I wasn’t sure he’d find it any different when he became a part of the white one. There was an uncertainty in the man standing now with one foot in either, not satisfied with his lot among the Creeks and unsure of his future with the whites.

  It was early morning when we came to the Arkansas River ferry. Halfway across the river, we could smell the fresh bread just coming from the ovens in the town’s bakeries. Along the Fort Smith shore there were a number of people who somehow knew of our coming. It was a large group, mostly men and boys, and at first I was apprehensive. But they caused no trouble, wanting only to have a look at our prisoners. They gave way before Joe Mountain and Moma July, leading our handcuffed pair off the slip and along the street. Burris Garret and I followed with the horses.

  “That’s two of the sons a bitches,” someone shouted. But other than that, the crowd was silent. For a moment I recalled what Judge Parker had said about quick justice and mobs.

  Once we had our prisoners turned over to the deputies at the federal jail, Burris Garret and Moma July said good-bye. They were going directly back to the Creek Nation.

  “That Milk Eye man can’t hide out forever,” Garret said. “Take care of that nose.”

  Moma July shook hands solemnly without speaking. I hated to see them go. Joe Mountain said he was going to the Choctaw Strip, a small slice of land on the Fort Smith side of the river just south of the federal compound on Belle Point and the site of the original fort. It was now a collection of ramshackle shanties.

  “You need me, you send any of these Indians who hang around, Eben Pay.” His grin widened. “They’ll know where to find me.” I had the suspicion that although he still harbored a lingering animosity against the Choctaws, he didn’t let that get in the way of socializing with some of their women.