Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  “Jennie, I just want you to say the truth.”

  “Oh hell, Eben, this is all such a mess.”

  “In the morning, I’ll ask Zelda to take you over to the stable and look at that horse. He’s a bay gelding with a T brand.”

  “It’s probably Red,” she said. She was looking toward the river now, and she seemed defeated. “If she’s still alive, she’s probably hiding on her brother’s place down close to McAlester. He’s got a big farm down there and she used to visit him all the time, always nagging Papa to take her down there. That’s probably where she is.”

  She turned to me once more and lifted her fingers to my face.

  “You’re a nice man, Eben Pay. And I wish you were still in Saint Louis. I wish you’d never come. You don’t belong in this place.” And she turned and quickly walked into the compound.

  Feeling a little sick, I was inclined to agree with her.

  At the Frisco depot a northbound passenger was loading out and the station was crowded. But there was no one at the telegraph window and I sent a wire to Oscar Schiller, in care of George Moon at Hatchet Hill. I suggested that he look closely at the farm of Mrs. Thrasher’s brother in McAlester. If the woman was alive, that was where she would be.

  For the first time in my life, I felt the need, the real need, for a stiff drink of hard liquor. Back in my room, alone, I had it and sat in the growing darkness thinking about Jennie Thrasher and what she’d said to me. And about her stepmother and her father and how life had been for them all on that farm in the mountains. The more I thought about it, the more depressing it became.

  Next to such things as smallpox and cholera, whiskey was the most malignant and destructive force on the frontier. There had been a history of liquor traffic in Saint Louis, of which most of us were only vaguely aware. There the French and later the English voyageurs had supplied their expeditions into the wilderness. The trade whiskey had moved up the Missouri, the Kansas and Smoky Hill, the Platte, and the Yellowstone, a commodity both lucrative and insidious in white intercourse with the Indians. It had moved along the Arkansas, too, beyond Fort Smith and into the western country even before Indian territory was established there, and it continued well past the tenure of the Parker court despite all efforts to stop it.

  It infected not only the red man but the white as well. There was, in 1890, an alcohol problem in the frontier army, within law-enforcement agencies, and among the citizenry at large, whether in high places or low. It was debilitating or caustic, creating lethargy on the one hand, violence on the other.

  To many, it was the subject of jokes, the rough humor of the taproom, where it was variously called Pop Skull or Tiger Sweat or Panther Piss. But to many it was deadly serious and for some it shrank life expectancy at an astonishing rate. Not only for those who used it and suffered its physical effects, but for those who were the victims of men besotted with it.

  No one ever attempted to explain to me the nature of its hold on so many. Nor why, regardless of its obvious bad effects, there never seemed an end to those who rushed to its addiction. In Fort Smith, I began to learn from experience some measure of its attraction. Yet to this day, the power of its appeal remains a mystery to me. And to every man or woman, it had a different use.

  Sometimes, it was the happiness water. It provided bleared solutions to hard problems. It was the hallucination of well-being amidst the drudgery of existence. It was escape, from whatever dreadful reality each man or woman harbored in his or her mind. It gave courage where before there had been only fear. It lent color and excitement to a life that was in fact drab and dull.

  For me, it vaporized loneliness. In college and later in Saint Louis, I had known its temporary qualities in the form of high-spirited larks and sprees with classmates or city friends. But in Fort Smith, its purpose became not to brighten experience, but to erase it. To blot it out, for a few hours, until everything became bearable again.

  In that weekend when we were somewhere between the start and the finish of the Winding Stair case, I knew it as gentle anesthesia. As it took hold of me, there were times when the impulse came to go down into the city, to meet strangers and treat them as friends. To go find Joe Mountain, whoring in the Choctaw Strip. To go to Evans’s home or even to Parker’s, and play with the children and wait for an invitation to dinner. To go back to the federal compound and take Jennie Thrasher from the jail and bring her to my room again.

  But each such impulse was quickly throttled. I still had enough reason left to realize that I could hardly walk across the room, much less on the streets of Fort Smith. The thought of being arrested for drunkenness by the city police, thrown in the city jail, was both horrifying and funny at the same time. But I stayed in my room, and thought, To hell with everybody.

  I recall little of those two days. But somehow my good fortune did not desert me, and unlike so many who have fallen hard into the bottle on occasion, I had no desire to return to it. I never became totally drunk again.

  ELEVEN

  Another of those vicious little summer thunderstorms was brewing the evening we rode into Low Hawk Corners a few miles southeast of Okmulgee in the Creek Nation. There was Moma July, who had met us at the Muskogee train depot with horses, and there were Joe Mountain and Blue Foot. We were to meet Burris Garret at the small crossroads community from which he had wired that Milk Eye Rufus Deer might be in the neighborhood. Oscar Schiller was still in the Choctaw Nation, looking for Mrs. Thrasher. It brought a certain pride to be coming to The Nations on this manhunt without the little marshal who wore eyeglasses, but it gave me an uneasy feeling not to have him there. I knew Garret was a capable man and would have plenty of help from the Creek police if we needed it. But Schiller’s absence left a blind spot in my confidence, much as I hated to admit it.

  There was a great deal to put us in good spirits. On Monday, July 14, just three days before, the United States commissioner had conducted a preliminary hearing that disclosed sufficient evidence to hold Skitty Cornkiller and Nason Grube for the grand jury. They were in the federal jail without bail. Emmitt had recognized the Creek whiskey peddler as one of the men who assaulted Mrs. Eagle John on Hatchet Hill Road, and the roan was indeed Ole Blue. The boy had not been so positive about Nason Grube, but under Evans’s intensive probing he had finally concluded that he could identify the man as a member of the gang.

  The bay we found at the Cornkiller farm was her father’s horse, Jennie Thrasher told us, and she was positive in her identification of Skitty Cornkiller as the whiskey man who had appeared at the Thrasher farm showing such interest in the racer Tar Baby. She said the pearl hat had been her father’s, beyond a doubt.

  Throughout the hearing she had been calm, even stoic. She seldom looked at me, and then only when she thought I was unaware of it. I sensed no hostility in her, only a cool detachment, and I made no effort to speak with her, knowing as I did how she must have felt about being drawn deeper into the case. I had to admire her, although she seemed to give her testimony out of a feeling of resignation. Afterward, Evans had taken me aside to comment on it.

  “I don’t know what you did to that girl, but whatever it was, it worked. She’ll make a good witness.”

  Evans and I had spent considerable time in the jail’s visiting rooms with Cornkiller and Grube, trying to get some sort of information out of them, but both continued to insist they knew nothing about the crimes. Skitty Cornkiller said he had bought both horses and the hat from a passing stranger. He said he had a bill of sale on the horses but had lost it when he was drunk. They refused to admit knowing Johnny Boins, and for his part Boins would not talk with us at all. Merriweather McRoy, the Little Rock lawyer, had been with him a number of times by then, and any possibility of cooperation from the tall, handsome man had become a forlorn hope.

  Low Hawk Corners was a settlement of fewer than a dozen buildings, the principal one being the store of Louie Low Hawk, a Creek who operated a general merchandising business and had for a long time been
confidant and aid to the Creek lighthorse police. He was a smallish man, like many Creeks I had seen, but otherwise bore no resemblance to the common conception of Indian. His hair was brown, his eyes gray, and his complexion fair as my own. He was highly respected among his own people, I learned, having served a number of terms in their legislature. When I met him he was a member of the Creek school board, which handled the not inconsiderable task of administering the educational system in the tribe. He and Burris Garret met us as we rode up and directed us to the large barn only a few yards behind the store, where we stabled our horses. A number of mounts were in the stalls and I assumed correctly that Creek policemen had gathered there ahead of us.

  It was growing dark and beginning to spatter a few drops of rain as we went to the store, a building typical of structures in that country—long and low with wide porches front and rear. Had there been a breezeway through the center of the place, it could have passed almost exactly for the Thrasher farm in the Winding Stair. Incredible as it seemed, the rainy night I had first spent at the farm was little more than a month before, yet the events compressed into that short time had affected me more profoundly than all the prior happenings of my entire life.

  As we came up I could see an old Creek woman in a rocking chair at one end of the back porch. She watched us with black eyes in a face that was much the same in shape, color, and texture as a black walnut shell. Her features were etched, it seemed, in some hard substance, the lines and ridges so sharply drawn that one might not touch them without being cut. She wore an ankle-length calico dress, a ragged shawl, and a wide-brimmed man’s hat over gray and thinning hair. As she rocked, watching us, she puffed slowly on a corncob pipe.

  The inside of the store was no different from any other of its kind. Living quarters at one end, the rest of the building taken over by a long counter with a coffee grinder and hand-crank cash register, shelves and boxes and barrels, a cold potbellied stove, leather and metal gear suspended from pegs all along each wall, and two tables with chairs and benches for hangers-on. Along the rear wall, looking out onto the barren backyard and barn, were two large windows. A number of men were lounging about, watching us quietly with dark eyes. Most wore the canvas duck jackets and trousers so popular in this land, and in their drab immobility they reminded me of a tintype photograph, suspended in time on a metal plate. Some wore badges and all were heavily armed.

  Burris Garret drew me to one of the tables and Louie Low Hawk brought tin cups of apple cider and bowls of chili. Moma July joined us, but he appeared tense and ate very little. Joe Mountain and Blue Foot, leaning against the wall in a space not occupied by any of the Creek policemen, ate standing, their rifles leaning against the wall behind them. A few customers came and went, mostly women and young girls, and each time Louie Low Hawk cranked the cash register it made a loud clanging like an aged fire engine.

  “This is called a posse base of operations,” Burris Garret said around a mouthful of chili. “You’ve never been involved in one of these, have you?”

  “No. But it doesn’t appear to be too clandestine.”

  He laughed. “Hell no, everybody knows we’re here. But that’s a thing can’t be avoided. We can hope they aren’t guessing correctly why we’re here.”

  “We been tellin’ around that we’re after the horse thieves been stealing stock south of here,” Moma July said. He had begun to smoke brown husk-paper cigarettes, one after another.

  “Not even those policemen over there know why we’re here or which direction we might ride out. Dawn tomorrow, we’ll take a ride, and if we’re lucky, we might catch our friend Rufus Deer.”

  “We use Low Hawk’s place a lot for this,” Moma July said. “He’s my cousin.”

  “What makes you think Milk Eye will be around here? If I were in his place, I’d be in Mexico or at least Colorado.”

  “He gets homesick. It’s what I’m counting on,” Garret said. He had finished his meal and took a gold-plated toothpick from his vest pocket and began to scratch at his teeth with it. “We’ve got an informant. White man, runs a brick kiln a few miles from here. Name’s Orthro Smith. He calls his place Smith’s Furnace. He’s got a man who’s been working for him off and on lately named Smoker Chubee. Now, this Chubee has been seen from time to time with Rufus Deer, and he let slip the other day that Rufus was showing up at the Furnace. It’s a hangout for a lot of these local studs. I think Smith sells whiskey up there, but we don’t bother him as long as he keeps telling us things we need to know. So that’s where we’ll ride first tomorrow. If Rufus isn’t there, we’ll swing over past his folks’ farm.”

  “The Deer farm?”

  “Yes. Where Rufus lives with his folks when he’s not out in The Nations someplace getting into mischief. Did you see that old woman on the back porch when you came in?”

  “In the rocking chair, yes.”

  “Well, that’s the old lady. That’s Rufus Deer’s mother.”

  “For God’s sake, what’s she doing here?” I asked.

  “She and the old man, Old Man Deer, they rode into the Corners this afternoon in a wagon to buy some wire or something,” Garret said, picking at his teeth. “With the storm coming up, they decided not to try and get home tonight. The old man is at one of the houses down the road. The old lady asked Louie Low Hawk if she could stay on his porch to keep from getting wet.”

  “She’s done it before,” Moma July said. “She just sleeps in that chair.”

  “She can’t be blind,” I said. “She sure as hell knows we’re here.”

  “Of course. But likely she isn’t sure what for. If she does, she’s right where we want her to be. If she stays the night here, we’ll get to her farm before she can in the morning. In case that’s where Rufus is.”

  “But the old man . . .”

  “One of my men is with him,” Moma July said. “They’re all playin’ cards and likely drunk by now. The old man ain’t goin’ nowhere. He don’t care what happens to Rufus anyway.”

  It all seemed pretty slipshod to me, but I could only assume these men were dealing with people they knew. Louie Low Hawk had brought a box of dominoes and we started to play, a coal-oil lamp on the table. There was a hard yellow cheese made from goat’s milk and we chewed on that and listened to the rain and the coming of thunder from the west. I tried to concentrate on the game to dispel an uneasy feeling I had about the whole thing. The Creek policemen standing back against the wall watching us with those still black eyes did little to calm my nerves.

  When it became clear that we would spend the night here, Joe Mountain came over and said he and his little brother would go find a bed in the barn.

  “Joe, why don’t you get some blankets from Mr. Lou Hawk and sleep on the back porch?” I said. “I’d like it if you kept an eye on that old woman out there.”

  “That old lady in the rocker?” he asked, grinning.

  “That’s the one. If she leaves, I want to know about it right off.”

  “All right, Eben Pay. You want us to stop her if she tries to go someplace?”

  “No. Just let me know right off if she does.”

  The two Osages left and Burris Garret laughed.

  “That old woman won’t go out in this wet.”

  “You told me you’d known her son for a long time,” I said.

  “Rufus? Sure, since we grew up together north of here. Rufus wasn’t a bad kid. But he was always tough, making up for being such a runt. His mother was always a nice old woman, too. She used to make us sweet corn bread muffins.”

  What happened to his eye?”

  “He was born that way. You know, his own old man gave him that name. Milk Eye. The old man was just an uneducated Yuchi trying to rake out a living on a little farm. He was always ashamed of Rufus because of the eye. I think he felt like he was responsible for it somehow, and his own bitterness turned him against the boy.”

  “Rufus was always mean, but smart, too,” Moma July said. “But he didn’t go to much school.”


  “You’ve known him a long time, too?” I asked.

  “Sure. He stole one of my daddy’s horses when he was just a kid. We got the horse back when he tried to sell it in Okmulgee. The Indian court had him whipped. That was the first time he had any trouble with the law.”

  Burris Garret laughed, his gold toothpick still between his lips, sticking out through his beard like a tiny spike.

  “Rufus was a little wild, even then,” he said. “He and I used to go over to the Seminole Nation and raise hell. We stole a pig over there once. Roasted it on a sandbar of the Wewoka River and ate about half of it in one night. Got sick as pups. We must have been all of twelve years old.”

  “He got meaner every year,” Moma July said. “He was car-ryin’ guns everywhere he went when he was still a young’un. But he always went to church with his mama.”

  “Rufus got interested in horse racing and chicken fights and all kinds of gambling,” Garret said. “He always had plenty of money when most of us were still dead broke going through the academy.”

  “I never went to the academy,” Moma July said.

  “No, and you didn’t get into all kinds of trouble, either. Rufus was a suspect in a lot of the bad things going on around here. And I suspect he’s been accused of doing more than he did. But he stole a few horses, and he was in on some penny-ante holdups over in Cherokee Nation. He started hanging out with some of the wild ones who were coming into the Territory in the seventies. Him still a kid. He got a reputation for visiting you at night if he didn’t like you, killing your chickens or setting fire to your barn. People around here have been a little afraid of him for as long as I can remember.”

  “Does he still attend church?” I asked.

  “Before this Winding Stair thing, he did. He’s a testifying Baptist. There was a white Baptist mission preacher a few years ago thought he had Rufus talking in tongues one night. But all Rufus was doing was confessing a few of his sins in Yuchi dialect.”