Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  “Then the one they called Smoker, that one”—pointing again—“he went back in the house and after a while came out with my husband’s shotgun and rifle. He took’em over and threw them in the well. I started shaking then because I was afraid, and I stood behind my husband. The man called Rufus said they’d come to buy some horses. My husband said he didn’t have any for sale. So the Creek whiskey peddler, he went down to the barn while we all stood around on the porch, and when he came back he said the black was there. I knew he was talking about Tar Baby, my husband’s racer. The one with the bad eye, the one they called Rufus, said he wanted to buy that horse. My husband said he wasn’t for sale.”

  Evans had placed the half-empty water glass on the edge of Judge Parker’s bench, within her reach. Now she took it and drank again and I saw her hands shaking. She brushed her lips lightly with her hand.

  “So then that white man”—and she pointed to Johnny Boins—“asked my husband where his daughter was at. My husband said she was in town, visiting some friends. And when he said that, this white man swore an oath. He started to come over to my husband, but the man called Rufus laughed and pushed him away and said they were hungry and wanted something to eat.

  “They all went into the kitchen with us, and my husband said they were welcome to anything we had. There was some ham and sweet potatoes and some other stuff. I don’t remember what. I fixed it and put out dishes on the table and they drank from their bottles and laughed and talked, mostly about racing horses. My husband they had sitting over against one wall on the floor, and the one called Smoker was standing beside him. When I had the meal on the table, I went over and sat down next to my husband.

  “After a little bit, our two hired hands came in. They’d been out driving our cows to some summer pasture in the woods. John Price and Oshutubee. They sat down and ate some ham, too, and took some drinks from these other men. The one called Rufus said they ought to eat, after working so hard, but they were both a little scared, too. While they were all eating, that white man—”

  “Johnny Boins,” Evans said.

  “Yes. Well, he asked Oshutubee where Jennie was at. Oshutubee looked over at my husband, and then he said he didn’t know. In a little while, Oshutubee said he needed to go outside and they all laughed and said the ham was good but too greasy. Oshutubee got up from the table and went out and the one called Smoker went with him. In a minute, the one called Rufus got up, too, and went out back. When he did, that Creek whiskey peddler took out a little pistol and put it on the table and said we’d all just sit and talk while Oshutubee made his business out back in the privy, and when he got back he could tell us all about it. They all laughed at that, too. Except John Price, who was real scared by then. He looked a little sick to his stomach.

  “Then I heard shooting in the backyard. I think there were six shots. Everybody just sat there real quiet then. Pretty soon the man with the bad eye and this Smoker came in, and Smoker had his pistol out. He started hulling empty cartridge casings out of his gun and reloading it. That’s when my husband said they could take the horses and anything else they wanted, but not to hurt anybody. John Price had started shaking. They made us go out to the front yard again. Then . . .”

  She coughed, and Evans went to his table and refilled the water glass. She drank once more, the only sound in the courtroom the low buzz of September flies. Mrs. Thrasher almost choked on the water, coughing for a moment after Evans took the glass. At the defense table, Nason Grube was facedown on his folded arms. Beside him Skitty Cornkiller was slumped in his chair, his eyes unseeing. But Johnny Boins was sitting straight, a smile still on his lips, his eyes searching the faces of the jury. Smoker Chubee chewed slowly, his pockmarked jaws working methodically.

  “They made my husband and John Price go out in the yard. The white man pushed me up against the wall . . . and started putting his hands under my clothes. He kept asking me where my daughter was, and laughing. He started unbuttoning my clothes. My husband saw it and the ones in the yard pushed him down in the dirt.”

  She caught her breath with a sharp, rasping intake, her face showing the strain. Judge Parker spoke to her softly, so softly I couldn’t hear his words. Her breasts lifted as she took a deep breath.

  “The man called Rufus told my husband and John Price to take off their clothes. They were all waving guns around then. They made my husband and John Price take off their clothes, down to their underwear. . . .” She broke down for a moment, her choked sobbing the only sound now where even the buzzing flies were unheard. With a shudder, she continued, her eyes bright with the tears.

  “The man called Rufus said he wanted my husband and John Price to fight. They shoved them together. That colored man was laughing, lying on the ground, and the white man was still feeling me and trying to get my clothes off. The other two, Rufus and the whiskey peddler, were standing behind my husband and John Price, shoving them together, hitting them with guns. The one called Smoker was over at the well curb, watching, just standing there rolling the cylinder of his gun with his fingers. Then the one called Rufus made John Price take off his underwear and he was naked. That whiskey peddler was shooting at the ground close to my husband’s feet, yelling they should fight or he’d shoot them in the backside.

  “But John Price broke and run. Toward the barn, running all naked. The one called Rufus started yelling, ‘Shoot him, shoot him,’ and he was making foul oaths. That’s when Smoker shot John Price in the back, while he was running away.”

  She paused to take another deep breath and I looked at Smoker Chubee. He was still chewing, but the fingers of his hands were making little tapping movements on the tabletop.

  “Then it all started happening,” Mrs. Thrasher said, her voice trembling and hardly audible in the room. “Two of them carried John Price’s body to the pigpen and threw it in. They were laughing about it. That’s when the white man, Boins, turned me loose and him and the man with the bad eye tied my husband to the well curbing. My husband was begging them . . .” She choked on it and bent her face into her hands. But she recovered quickly. “I could hear the white man, Boins, raving about my stepdaughter. He was saying vile things about her and about my husband. He was foaming at the mouth when he ran back onto the porch and tore at my clothes and my husband was begging them to stop and take anything they wanted. They got all around me and had me on the floor on my back . . . tearing off my clothes until I was all . . . naked. They . . . held me there, and . . . each of them knew me, each one, and the others watching and my husband begging them to take anything. . . .”

  She stopped again, but her crying was finished. It was as though she were in a hypnotic trance, her eyes wide and glassy, staring above the heads of the spectators. This time, when Parker spoke, I could hear him.

  “Mrs. Thrasher, there is nothing for you to be ashamed of,” he said gently. “You have done no wrong.”

  “I tried to fight them,” she said, the words rushing out now. “Then afterwards, they just left me lying there, except for the whiskey peddler, and he sat close to me with his little pistol and he’d point it at me and make a popping sound with his lips and then laugh. The others started shooting at my chickens. But nobody hit one, and the man called Rufus said something to Smoker, and he started shooting them, killing them with his big pistol. The colored man said there was a dog hid under the porch. He was just an old hound dog. He never even barked at anybody who came. He was old and afraid. The one called Smoker bent down and looked under the porch and then he shot under there and I heard the old dog make one little bark and that was all.

  “Somebody said all this made them hungry again. They dragged me into the house, holding me where I was naked. But the white man, Boins, was yelling bad things about my husband and stepdaughter and I saw him take the ax from a chopping log at the end of the porch. I saw him running out to the well curbing, where my husband was tied, and I screamed at him because I was afraid for my husband. But the others had me inside by then. They tied me to Je
nnie’s bed with cotton line we had on the breezeway for hanging wash when it rained. Outside, I heard my husband yell once. Then they were all in the kitchen, breaking things and running through the house. The white man came in, and he was all bloody and . . . he knew me again, there on Jennie’s bed. He was all bloody.”

  I thought of Jennie, lying in the attic above that brutal scene. Behind me, a woman in the crowd had begun to sob.

  “After the white man left me, I got loose. They were too drunk to tie me good. I was afraid to go into the breezeway. I could hear them in the kitchen. I went out one of the bedroom windows and started around the front of the house to untie my husband, but when I saw him . . . I knew he was dead. And that one”—she pointed to Smoker Chubee—“was leaning against the well curbing, looking at me. I went a little crazy. I started to run, and I thought he’d shoot me like he did John Price. But nothing happened and I ran down the hill away from the house so they couldn’t see me, the ones inside in the kitchen. I ran across the McAlester road and into the woods and started west towards my brother’s farm.”

  Her story was finished, and there was a soundless sigh in the courtroom, felt but not heard. Her hands in her lap were working together, the fingers twisting.

  “Mrs. Thrasher, how long did it take you to get to your brother’s?” Evans asked.

  She gave a little jerk, her eyes slowly coming into focus. When she spoke, the words were shrill, almost hysterical.

  “I don’t know. I was naked, and then the storm came and I sheltered under a big cedar while it was dark and wet. I ran past the place where my husband had his cows on summer pasture. The bushes cut me. I slept and went on and it was daylight and I stayed in the deep woods. I hid in my brother’s barn at night until he came out to do the morning milking.”

  “And you stayed at your brother’s farm until Marshal Schiller found you there?”

  “Yes, sir. The Cap’n came to my brother’s house twice. The first time, I was afraid to come out. I was scared of those men finding me. The next time, he told my brother the men who did it had been caught and the one called Rufus had been killed up at Okmulgee. So I came out and he brought me here.”

  “Mrs. Thrasher, I know this is a terrible experience, but allow me to ask once more. These men who knew you against your will and came to your farm and killed your two hired men and your husband, are these those same men?” And he swept his arm back toward the defense table. Her eyes sought the face of each one, pausing only a few seconds on the bowed head of Nason Grube.

  “Yes, they’re the ones, along with the one they called Rufus, who had a bad eye.”

  Now, again, Evans asked for the black Texas hat, and when he placed it in her hands she broke down once more and for a few terrible long moments sat sobbing.

  “Is this your husband’s hat?”

  Now I understand why Evans had made such a small fight of introducing the hat before, why he had not even shown it to Jennie. It would have been superfluous, at best. The impact on the jury of Mrs. Thrasher holding her husband’s hat and sobbing, head down, must have been overwhelming.

  “Let the record show she has answered in the affirmative,” Judge Parker said. “You may enter it in evidence if you wish, Mr. Evans.”

  “Mrs. Thrasher, I had planned to ask you to identify other items here today, but the experience has been painful enough already. You are a brave woman.”

  McRoy came out of his chair with great hesitation. From his expression, I knew this trial had now become a painfully distasteful experience for him and I could not help but feel sympathetic. As he neared her, she regained control and her dark eyes met his.

  “Only a few questions, Mrs. Thrasher,” he said, addressing her as gently as Evans had. “You said these men were drinking. How drunk were they?”

  “Your Honor, she has no way of quantifying such a thing,” Evans said.

  “You’ll have to rephrase that, Mr. McRoy.”

  “Very well, Your Honor. Mrs. Thrasher, you saw these men drinking? How much drinking were they doing?”

  “They had been drinking when they got there. They all had bottles and they drank all the while. Some of them couldn’t hardly stand up. Except for the one they called Smoker. I didn’t see him drinking.”

  “They were crazy drunk?”

  Before he could object, Mrs. Thrasher said they were and Evans let it pass.

  “Now, Mrs. Thrasher,” McRoy said, “you were afraid and highly excited while all this was going on. Being in that state, how can you be sure these are the men who were there that day?”

  “Because I saw them.”

  “But can you be sure these are the same men?”

  “She’s said so, Mr. McRoy. She’s testified to it,” Parker snapped, and his glasses made their little pecking sound on the green felt.

  “Mrs. Thrasher, how frequently do you see colored men down there in Winding Stair?”

  “There are a few there,” she said.

  “But you don’t see them often?”

  “Not very.”

  “This defendant,” McRoy said, and he pointed to Nason Grube. “Was there anything about his face that would make you remember him?”

  Nason Grube had placed his face in his arms on the defense table.

  “He was just a colored man.”

  “Nothing unusual about his features?”

  “No. Just a colored man.”

  McRoy walked back to the defense table and whispered to Nason Grube. When the black face rose, the eyes were red as though he had been crying. McRoy touched the large welted scars along Nason Grube’s cheeks.

  “Scars so obvious as this, Mrs. Thrasher, and you failed to see them?”

  “I was too scared to notice that,” she said.

  “Everyone in this courtroom can see these scars, Mrs. Thrasher. And are you telling us now that you saw no such scars on the face of the man who lay close over your body that day . . . ?”

  “Mr. McRoy, there is no need to be that graphic,” Judge Parker snapped.

  “Very well, Your Honor. Mrs. Thrasher, you did not see these scars that day?”

  “I don’t remember. It was all so sudden and awful.”

  McRoy shook his head and, walking around the defense table to his chair, glanced at the jury.

  “That’s all I have.”

  “Mrs. Thrasher, you’re excused,” Judge Parker said. “Mr. Evans?”

  “Your Honor, the government rests.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The jury was a grim-faced crew after Mrs. Thrasher’s testimony. Among the spectators, even the horse racers and chicken fighters were taking no bets on acquittal, at any odds. But McRoy still seemed confident when he called his first witness, a man named Philas Schafer, who identified himself as the Boinses’ family doctor. He was a smallish man with a well-trimmed beard and perhaps the most expensive waistcoat in the room.

  “Dr. Schafer, what has been your relationship to Johnny Boins and his family?” McRoy started.

  “I have been their physician. I have been the personal confidant of the family for years, and a personal friend of John Boins, Sr.”

  “And what has been the relationship between Johnny and his parents?”

  “On the parents’ part, a bit of overindulgence and a tendency to overlook what in normal children and young men is generally considered to be antisocial activity. On the boy’s part, a sometimes violently manifested urge to break family ties, although this has been thwarted by the parents’ overweening attention to him and his own reluctance to leave their protection.”

  “Your Honor, I don’t see that this has any relevancy to the case,” Evans remarked almost casually.

  “It may well have, Mr. Evans,” Judge Parker said. “I’m going to allow it for a while yet. Proceed, Mr. McRoy.”

  “Doctor, as a medical expert, how would you describe Johnny Boins as a boy and as a young man?”

  “At a very early age, it was apparent he was different. Unlike other boys. He was wild and undi
sciplined, often violent to his playmates and to adults, to the extent sometimes of inflicting physical injury. This was a condition that persisted throughout his life. The most disturbing part of it was that he never showed contrition for his acts. I have never known him to display the slightest repugnance over anything he did.”

  Johnny Boins looked back through the crowd, arrogantly, as though proud of what this medical man was saying.

  “As an expert witness, Doctor, would you say that the defendant often acted without any clear understanding of what was right and wrong?”

  “I would say so, many times. Although he was brought up in a Christian home of outstanding quality, given love and affection, he seemed to rebel against all proper deportment from an early age.”

  “In your opinion as a medical expert, Doctor, would you say this condition has improved over the years?” McRoy said. It began to be amusing, this constant reference to Schafer as a “medical expert,” a term designed to impress the jury, but from their expressions having little effect.

  “It has not improved. It has gotten worse.”

  “Would you say at this moment, Doctor, that Johnny Boins is capable of determining what is morally right and wrong?”

  “No, I doubt he can make that distinction.”

  McRoy was trying to avoid the rope by sending his client to the asylum, and Johnny Boins seemed unaware of what was happening. Or, I thought, perhaps he knew exactly and was playing his part well. He still smirked, his eyes going boldly about the room.

  “Do you think he can make such a determination before the law?”

  “If he cannot determine right from wrong morally, it is hardly likely he can do so under the law. The restraints of Christian morality are more wide-ranging, it seems to me, than are those of the law.”