Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  I went directly to Evans’s office, hoping to catch him after his regular morning session with his assistants. There was a strong temptation to go up to the women’s section of the jail, but I wanted some time before seeing Jennie Thrasher. Evans’s morning meeting was apparently a busy one. He didn’t come for two hours. In that time, I occupied myself with a flyswatter and read the various Fort Smith newspapers always scattered about the prosecutor’s office. One story explained why local citizens had met us at the ferry slip. An account of the Creek Nation arrest was printed, with all the details, and for the first time Rufus Deer was named as a suspect in the Winding Stair Massacre.

  When Evans came in, face flushed with the heat, I waved one of the newspapers before him.

  “Look at this,” I said. “Where’d they get all this?”

  He threw a stack of papers onto the desk and slipped off his coat. His shirt was drenched with sweat.

  “Well, I see you’re back, and still with that sweet disposition,” he said. He stared at my face over his pince-nez. “And I see all my informants were correct. Your nose is crooked as a dog’s hind leg. How is it?”

  “It’s just fine, thank you,” I said, still holding out the newspaper. “How did they get this?”

  “It’s all true, isn’t it?”

  “For once, yes. Of course, there are the usual misspellings of names.” The newspapers persisted in naming me Eban.

  “Oscar Schiller gave it all to the telegraph operator in Checotah the day you caught them,” Evans said.

  “For God’s sake, didn’t he know that was like coming right in with it to these newspaper offices? All these telegraphers are stringers.”

  “Oscar Schiller generally knows exactly what he’s doing, wouldn’t you say?”

  “This is all over The Nations by now, just like it’s all over Fort Smith. If Milk Eye didn’t know before that we were after him, he sure as hell does now.”

  Evans sat down and flamed up one of his fat cigars, and when he looked at me I saw he was slipping into his professorial role.

  “Milk Eye has undoubtedly known all along,” he said. “Now everyone else has the same advantage.” He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and finally pulled forth a yellow telegraph paper and tossed it to me. It was a dispatch from Okmulgee, capital of the Creek Nation, signed by Governor Legus Perryman. It offered a $500 reward for the capture and conviction of one Rufus Deer, citizen of the Creek Nation. “You see, that’s something that never would have happened if Schiller hadn’t spread the word. With that reward out, there are a lot of people who might be tempted to help us a little.”

  “I can see the other side of it, too,” I said. “A reward can make money for Deputy Marshal Oscar Schiller.”

  “That, too,” he said, squinting at me through the smoke and holding both arms out to the side to catch some of the air circulated by the large ceiling fan. “But if it helps bring the son of a bitch in, more power to him.”

  I tossed the wire back onto the desk.

  “All right, I can accept that, but not with very much grace.”

  He was twisting his head from side to side, staring at my nose, taking it in from all angles. In that massive beard, I suspected there was a smile.

  “You know, I think that nose looks better on you now.”

  “If Joe Mountain hadn’t pulled me out of that place, it would look a great deal worse.”

  “Yes, I know all about it. Everybody in town knows about it. How you took on the whole Frisco railroad and how Oscar Schiller sent the Osage down to . . . well, let us say, to assist you.”

  “After I’d sobered up, I was grateful for it, but I don’t take that with very good grace, either.”

  “You’re a hardheaded man, Eben,” Evans said. “Now, tell me your program.”

  I stood there gaping at him for a moment. It was difficult to believe that Evans was giving me any leeway. “I suppose we need to get a hearing set up with the commissioner, and get these two new ones over there, along with . . .”

  He waited, but I wasn’t ready to say it. Finally he nodded, and I was glad he was no longer smiling.

  “Yes. Along with the colored boy and the Thrasher girl. You’ll need to show them the horses first, over in the federal stable. If they identify those, that would be enough for the commissioner to bind them over for the grand jury. So no need for showing them the prisoners until the hearing. If they recognize the horses.”

  From Evans’s knowledge of the details, I knew the wire Oscar Schiller had sent from Checotah had been to the prosecutor’s office.

  “I’ll handle the presentation of the government’s case. Let me know when the details are taken care of.” He was going through one of his drawers and finally pulled forth a thick, folded paper and a badge. He laid them before me on the desk. “I almost forgot this. It came over from the marshal’s office yesterday.”

  The badge was a six-pointed star imprinted with the words United States Deputy Marshal and it seemed to weigh two pounds. The paper was a document prepared in the marshal’s office and signed by Judge Parker making me a temporary special deputy assigned to the prosecutor’s office in the case of the Winding Stair killings. I was completely dumbfounded.

  “Now, this doesn’t mean you’re to hang a lot of iron on your belt and start running around The Nations arresting people,” Evans said. “We’d have a hell of a time explaining to your father if you went and got your ears shot off. But with that, you can do a great deal more around here, with authority that is more than word of mouth. It’ll take some load off me and the deputies.”

  Evans rose from his chair and lifted his right-hand shoulder high.

  “Raise your hand. Do you, Eben Pay, swear and affirm that you will, to the best of your ability, perform the duties of special United States deputy marshal for the government and for this court, taking no fees other than those due you, so help you God?”

  “I do,” I said, feeling foolish.

  “Sign the last page and leave it here,” he said, and sat back down, yanking his chair close under the desk. He began to leaf through the stacks of papers lying there.

  “So for now, go on, and let me know what you’re doing from time to time. I’ve got my own work to do.”

  “I really don’t understand this,” I said.

  Once more he peered over his pince-nez, a little impatiently.

  “Oscar Schiller recommended it, and I approved,” he said. “Now go, Eben.”

  That son of a bitch Schiller, I thought, but with the badge in my hand, I was in no mood for sour grapes. It was just a chunk of metal and a scrap of paper, I said to myself, yet there was about it an exhilaration beyond anything I’d yet known. It was better even than having the people of this court save me from my drunken brawls. I could only hope that someday I’d feel as good about passing my bar examinations. Outside Evans’s office, I pinned on the star but got no farther than the compound before taking it off and slipping it into my pocket. It made me feel as conspicuous as a naked man.

  Commissioner Mitchell said he could take our hearing in two days, on Monday, though it would mean setting aside less serious cases. He asked me how soon Evans was going to the grand jury with the case and I told him we hoped to have all the members of the gang in custody before we presented it. He then congratulated me on becoming a special deputy and once more I was reminded that in Fort Smith the Parker court had few secrets.

  “By the way,” Mitchell said. “Johnny Boins’s parents are in town. Staying at your hotel, they say. Hired a lawyer from Little Rock to defend their boy. The man says he’ll ask the court to appoint him counsel for any of the other defendants in the case who haven’t got a lawyer. Says it’s all a put-up deal, by Oscar Schiller and the other officers of the court. He’s been in town once, while you were in The Nations, telling that story. Name’s Merriweather McRoy. He’s one damned fine lawyer.”

  It didn’t make me feel any easier about the case. Except for the black boy’s testimony, ever
ything we had was circumstantial. But I was too busy to worry with it then. I arranged to have Emmitt taken to the stables and look at the blue roan, and regardless of what Evans had said, I set up a window-room confrontation so the boy could get a look at Skitty Cornkiller and Nason Grube before the hearing. I held off on Jennie Thrasher. Let her see them first in the magistrate’s court, when she was under oath, I thought, brutal as that might be.

  At midafternoon, I went to the hotel to get out of my crusty field gear and take a bath. The high-heeled boots had put knots in my calves that hurt with each step. In the hotel saloon, the coolest place in Fort Smith with its open tubs of cracked ice behind the bar, I drank beer and had liver and bacon. The waiter seemed more attentive to my needs than usual. When I went to the cashier, he called me marshal and said there was no charge. I paid him anyway, embarrassed but trying to carry it off as casually as possible. I tossed two silver dollars on the counter and touched the brim of my hat with two fingers as I sauntered to the elevator. All pretense of calm disappeared when I walked into my room again. Jennie Thrasher was sitting on the bed.

  “Hello, Eben,” she said.

  In the faint light from the window she was like a porcelain doll, cool and detached in this sweltering room, a smile sculpted on her full mouth, her hands lying in her lap. Her blouse was unbuttoned partway down the front and I could see the lacy top of a cotton chemise covering the hollow between her breasts. She looked altogether breathtaking.

  She was up quickly, moving across the room and pressing against me as she threw her arms around my waist. Her eyes and mouth turned up to my face in open invitation, and I started to take her in my arms and carry her to the bed, to hell with Evans and Schiller and this whole case. But with a willowy movement she was away from me, laughing, teasing me with the rhythm of her body.

  “Are you glad to see me?”

  “Damn it, Jennie,” I said, suddenly furious with the illusion she purposely gave, had always given, of some delicious feast just out of reach, and with no more substance than a fistful of July breeze. “What are you doing here?”

  “My God. What happened to your nose, Eben?” She reached up and touched it lightly and I drew away from her impatiently.

  “Never mind my nose. I ran into a Frisco locomotive. Now, what in God’s name are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you,” she said, her head tilted to one side in the way she had, and I realized she was a coquette beyond all the talent of any young woman I had ever found in Saint Louis society. The kind of woman I had always despised. But I did not despise Jennie Thrasher, and the contradiction made me more furious than ever, because it bewildered me.

  “I got tired of that hot jail,” she said, doing a little half-turn dance step, holding her skirt out to either side. “That old baggage Zelda Mores drinks a bucket of beer each afternoon when it’s hot, and I just waited until she went to the privy and I slipped out. She’s likely still sitting over there sweating and fanning her fat neck and not even knowing I’m gone.”

  “You can’t do this,” I said, slapping my hat down on the desk, where all my maps for father were still undone. “How’d you get up here? How’d you get in this room?”

  “You were eating when I came in, and I told one of those nice men downstairs that you’d asked me to come over on official business, because now you’re a marshal, and he sent a boy up here with a key because I told him we shouldn’t disturb your dinnertime.”

  “Just like that, you told them I’d sent for you and they let you in, just like that?”

  “Sure. I smiled at him.” And she laughed.

  There was the urge to charge across the room like a rutting bull and grab her before she could move that laughing, moist mouth out of my reach, to take her face between my hands and hurt her. But Evans’s words, not to get involved, were stark and irrefutable in my mind. Jennie herself broke the spell, turning away from me and sitting on the bed once more, with an expression of complete detachment. Her face and mood were as mobile and intractable as a summer storm blowing in from The Nations, and it left me defenseless and miserable.

  “Come, let’s talk, and give me a cigarette,” she said. “I’ve missed our little talks.”

  I gave her a tailor-made cigarette and lit it for her and she puffed it a number of times, inhaling deeply and with a satisfied sigh. She patted my shoulder as though I were some pet dog or horse, but it felt good to have her touch me, even in that way. It came home to me again that the vision of a beautiful little girl, innocent and without defense—what I had seen lying on the bed at the farm in Winding Stair—was more illusion than reality. That I could sit near her and think such a thing was some sort of triumph, but I wasn’t sure I liked it much.

  “We’ve got to get you back to the courthouse. All hell’s going to break loose if they find you gone.”

  “All right. But after I smoke.”

  “You haven’t got any business wandering around the streets where anybody can get at you.”

  “I was lonesome,” she said with a flash of temper, her mood shifting again. “Nobody over there at that damned jail likes me. You like me, don’t you, Eben?” She didn’t wait for my response, but rushed on as though afraid I might not tell her what she wanted to hear. “It’s worse than the farm. Nobody to talk to and nobody who cares about me.”

  “That’s not true, Jennie. We’ve got you in there because we don’t want anyone to hurt you.”

  “Just because of the case, and you want me to talk all about it and I’ve already told you all about it. It’s all just official, and you are, too. Sometimes you make me sick, Eben, really—you’re so official.”

  “Listen, Jennie, we’ve brought in two men and a horse that may have belonged to your father and you’ll have to come to the commissioner’s hearing and tell us whether you can identify any of them.”

  “You see? You’re so damned official.” She puffed on the cigarette, turning it hot and red. She had switched on the ceiling fan before I arrived, but it did not stir the air enough to dissipate the smoke. “I read in the newspapers you arrested a nigger and a Creek.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say ‘nigger’!” It was a thing my mother had always impressed on me, but until now I had not realized how distasteful the term was.

  “All right. Colored man. Colored man, is that better?” She jumped up and marched over to the window and stood there looking through the curtain at Garrison Avenue below. “Why should I know them? I told that old bastard with the beard that I didn’t see anything that day. Why do you all keep bringing it up?”

  I moved over behind her, close enough to smell her hair. Now was the time to tell her the best of it, something that I was sure would make her happy.

  “Jennie, we think your stepmother is alive,” I said quietly. “We’re almost sure of it. Oscar Schiller is in the Choctaw Nation now, trying to find her.”

  Her back stiffened and for a long time she faced away from me, trembling. Then she whirled on me and her eyes were full.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said we think your stepmother is still alive.”

  With a shriek she flung herself against me, pounding at my chest with her fists. One blow struck me in the mouth and I tasted blood before I could react and pin her arms to her sides. The lighted cigarette had dropped onto the rug, filling the still room with a pungent odor of burning hair. As suddenly as her rage developed, it disappeared and she collapsed against me, sobbing.

  “Oh God, my papa’s dead and that bitch is still alive,” she cried. “Oh God, God, God, my poor papa. What am I gonna do now?”

  She was sobbing, moaning, gasping out words hardly intelligible, her tears wetting my shirt as she hung against me. Then she shuddered violently and pushed me back and sat on the bed, her head down, still crying. I had no idea what to say to her. I handed her my handkerchief.

  “Here, wipe your face. Blow your nose.”

  “God, what am I gonna do now?” she asked softly. She s
nuffled into the handkerchief and looked up at me, her eyes red and her skin blotched. “I’m sorry, Eben. But me and her never got along at all. She’s just an old bitch.”

  “But, Jennie, she raised you.”

  “No! No, she didn’t. Papa raised me. He always kept me close to him whenever he went anyplace, to races or up to Tuskahoma to build things for the Indians. He knew I never liked any of those people, and he knew I never liked that old bitch, and she didn’t like me either, and he knew that, too.”

  I sat with her and she let me put my arm around her shoulders and hold her near. For a long time she said nothing, wiping at her face with the handkerchief.

  “Papa never sent me to the Choctaw school, the only one around,” she said. “He took it on himself to teach me to read and to write. Sometimes in the evening we’d sit in the front room and he’d read to me out of his books. Then he’d go off to bed with that old bitch who was always fussing about me not doing enough around the house. Mostly, I stayed with Papa or the hands, in the barn or in the fields or the blacksmith shed. Papa let me because he knew I didn’t like her.”

  “But she never mistreated you, did she?”

  “Papa wouldn’t let her do that. But she’d look at me with those black Indian eyes and I knew she hated me.” She drew back then and looked at me a long time and touched my cheek with her fingertips. They felt cool and dry. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Yes. Button your blouse.”

  I was glad Joe Mountain had shown me the rear stairwell. Holding Jennie’s arm, I moved her out into the alley and onto Rogers Avenue and along it toward the federal compound. We walked in the afternoon heat without saying anything until we reached the north gate; then she stood back from me.

  “I’ll go on from here alone. I don’t want you having trouble with Zelda Mores,” she said. “And Monday, I’ll say whatever you want me to say at that hearing or whatever it is.”