Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she paused in her step. I opened the umbrella.

  “You mustn’t get your new hat wet,” I said.

  “Hello, Eben.” Her voice was so soft I could hardly hear her. “I didn’t think I’d see you.”

  “I’ve been waiting all morning to see you off,” I lied. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

  She moved quickly to the edge of the porch and stopped there, holding Emmitt’s hand. The boy glared up at me. I knew everyone in the hack was watching us, and it made me uncomfortable.

  “It’s raining, isn’t it?”

  “It’s been raining all morning,” I said. “It’s not a very good day for traveling, I’m afraid.” I thought of that long ride up the mountains from Hatchet Hill to the Thrasher farm.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  From the hack, George Moon called, “Hurry on, Miss Jennie. We’ll miss that train.”

  But she stood silently, not looking at me again after that first moment. Her eyes were bright, but she didn’t cry as she watched the rain falling into the muddy compound and beyond, along the lines of trees beside the railroad that marked the river line.

  “Are you going back to Saint Louis now?”

  “In a few days,” I said. “My mother’s been sick. But I’ll be back when . . . I’ll be back someday.”

  The boy tugged at her hand.

  “Come on. Miss Jennie, we gotta get away from here.”

  “Jennie, I’m sorry about all this.”

  “It was just a thing that happened,” she said.

  “I could write you, if you’d like.”

  She acted as though she had not heard.

  “I hope your mother gets better,” she said. “I’ve gotta go now. We’ll be late for the train.”

  We went down the steps awkwardly, me holding the umbrella over her and the boy pulling her along. He jumped into the hack first and I held her arm as she stepped up, the water running off the edge of the umbrella onto my head. For a second her hand clasped mine, and I started to say something more. But the hack driver whipped his team away and they curled around in a circle and across the compound, splashing mud. I stood there, the umbrella up, water running down my arm, and as they drove through the gate I saw her face once, looking back.

  I stayed there until my feet were thoroughly soaked, looking at that dismal empty gate, the rain splattering around me. Oscar Schiller and Joe Mountain were on the porch. I’d no idea how long they had been there. I went up to them, and it seemed to me there was a hint of compassion on Oscar Schiller’s face. The gray light gave a green cast to his unblinking eyes behind the thick spectacles.

  We stood silently, for it seemed not to be a morning for talking, watching the rain, my umbrella hanging from my hand like a large broken bat, its wings partly open. We could hear the incoming whistle of the southbound Frisco passenger and the clanging of its bell, nearing the depot at the foot of Garrison Avenue. Above, crows were cawing, flying through the rain toward the Indian country. There was the heavy smell of wet clay and wet leaves and wet cotton cloth. Oscar Schiller took out his snuff can, dipped a matchstick into it, and popped the match into his mouth, chewing it slowly.

  “Evans tells me you’re going home,” he said finally.

  “Just for a while,” I said. “I’ll keep my room. Depends on how long the appeal takes. I may not come back until we hear from that. But I want some more time with Mr. Evans. I want to work with him some more. First, I need to get home and talk with my father and see to my mother.”

  “Man needs to get home now and again,” Joe Mountain said. “Back to the place he come from.”

  “Right now, I feel as though I came from here,” I said. I shook the umbrella and the fine spray showered their slickers. Joe Mountain had shed that outlandish plaid suit and was back in his field gear.

  “I think I need a drink,” I said. “If I worked any more right now, I’d get Mr. Evans’s papers all wet anyway.”

  “Me, too,” Joe Mountain said. “I’m headin’ for Osage country right away and a good drink would help the trip.”

  “You two go on, then,” Oscar Schiller said. “I’ve got some business here. Got a case up in Cherokee Nation, so I’ll be getting on with that. You sure you don’t want to come along, Eben?”

  “No. Not this time.”

  “All right. Good luck to you, and we’ll see you sometime later.” He made no effort to shake my hand, but turned and walked into the courthouse.

  I suppose in one’s misery there is a tendency to become more pugnacious than usual. When Joe Mountain and I walked into Henryetta’s Frisco Hotel and Billiard Parlor, I welcomed the big woman’s protest that no Indians were allowed in her place.

  “Joe Mountain is with me,” I said. “And he stays if I do, and if I don’t, you’re going to get more trouble from the local police than you’re capable of handling.”

  She stepped back as though I’d hit her, and I saw Big Rachael looming up behind her. But then she laughed, showing the gold teeth, recovering quickly.

  “You’re getting more like the Cap’n every time I see you,” she said, but there was no acid in it. I suspected her ban on Indians was more than anything else a concession to her white customers. “Rachael, get these men some drinks.”

  We sat in the same alcove where Oscar Schiller and I had first talked with Lila, behind the hanging beads. Big Rachael brought beer for Joe Mountain, gin and lemonade for me. When I offered to pay, he said Miss Henryetta had told him it was all on the house, anything we wanted. We watched the switch engines in the yard, puffing their smudgy black smoke into the gray mist. Brakemen moved among them in long rubber raincoats, carrying lighted lanterns as though it were the dark of night.

  “How’d you like to go to Saint Louis, Joe?”

  “No. Big places ain’t good for me. Fort Smith is as much as I can handle.” After each sip of beer, he smacked his lips loudly. “When you goin’ home, Eben Pay?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. I need to get away from here.”

  “Yeah, that’s good. You need to get away.”

  He fished under his slicker for a moment and came out with a fistful of red cardboard strips. He tossed two of them onto the table before me.

  “Where’d you get railroad passes?”

  “Hell, you know where. The Cap’n. He says you might need’em, to get home and back again someday. Can’t have one of the officers of Judge Parker’s court payin’ to ride trains, he says.”

  I took a long drink, hoping the big Osage would not see that I was about to cry. But I suspect he knew, and understood.

  The images began to come fast to my mind then. I remembered those first few days on the Thrasher farm. It had been raining then, too, with Jennie and me talking. She was lying like some storybook princess on the bed, laughing and asking me questions about streetcars and electric lights and college dormitories. The gray stones among the meadowlarks and the short grass in the National Cemetery where we walked. The warmth of her lips when she kissed me, the butterfly pressure of her fingers on my arm, the golden hair blowing against my face and clinging as though it were magnetized, her eyes close to mine. And her last look back as the hack took her through the compound gate and to the Choctaw Nation and the Winding Stair, to that same farm. I saw in my mind the rain falling in those mountains, grim and forbidding and remote. The rain falling on everything now, slate gray and cold to the bone.

  He was a slight, slope-shouldered man, standing barely five feet three inches tall and weighing 127 pounds. He had eyes deep-set under bushy brows and a long, balding forehead, and a blond beard flared out over the top of his vest like a coal scoop. He had been a police officer on the Fort Smith force and a jailer at the federal jail. His principal job now was the care of Judge Parker’s gallows, and his name was George Maledon.

  Under his supervision, the platform of the great machine was kept white and smooth with holystone and the hinges along the trap well-oiled. He issued the tickets for t
hose chosen as witnesses on execution days and he ensured order and good conduct at such times, being in charge of all the deputy marshals assigned to the task. In his own rooms, he kept the ropes. They were fine-grade hemp, woven in Saint Louis, six strands with a total diameter of one inch. He kept them smooth and flexible by careful applications of linseed oil and pitch.

  He was an expert at the hangman’s knot, thirteen coils that were always placed just beneath the left ear of the condemned, the rope then draped over the head toward the right shoulder. When the trap opened, the victim fell straight down and the rope popped taut, the knot snapping neckbone in one clean jerk. Most of those he had dropped had given a single, mighty lurch and were unconscious and then dead. Only a few had strangled, taking a long time to die.

  It was he who contracted for the pine coffins, always waiting beneath the gallows platform in neat rows on hanging days. It was he who chartered the black-draped wagons to haul them away, he who arranged for undertakers to clean the bodies left in such a terrible mess by suddenly relaxed anal sphincter muscles. It was he who buried those bodies left unclaimed, who took a signed receipt from the next of kin for those who were claimed. He kept the receipts in a little book, pasted in like photographs in a family album.

  He was proud of the work he did for Parker. He boasted that none of his customers had ever come back to complain. Yet there was in his face a vacant, haunted look, and some who came near him said to see his eyes was like peering through knotholes in a fence, with nothing on the other side but midnight.

  Already he had plans for retiring and touring the country with his ropes and his double-action pistols. He had used the latter to personally dispatch at least three escaping prisoners. Of the former, one he was saving had hanged nineteen men. He would set up his sideshow tent and lecture on the evils of drink and the exploits of the men he had executed with a single, sharp pull of the trap lever. He would let the kiddies run their tiny hands over the huge, soft coils of rope.

  In Fort Smith newspapers, he was called the Prince of Hangmen.

  TWENTY

  Christmas had passed, and January, before the Supreme Court returned the Thrasher and Garret cases to the western district of Arkansas, confirmed without opinion. Evans wired me at once when Judge Parker set the execution date of February 18, a Wednesday. Once again I made the long train ride from Saint Louis to the border of Indian country. There was snow in the Ozarks, dappling the steep slopes with white, a backdrop for the massed formations of oak and hickory and walnut. The gray and leafless ranks of hardwood were thick and largely uncut from valley to high hogback ridge. Twice, I saw deer running away through the woods. Some of the higher ridges were hidden in mist, under a thick-clouded sky, and from time to time flurries of white swept past the windows that had frosted over as we passed across the Boston Mountains. It was a wild and desolate country.

  There was a mood of homecoming when I arrived. William Evans and his wife came to my hotel the first night and we ate veal cutlets covered with the thick cream gravy so popular in that part of the country. We discussed the cases, but I was grateful to Evans that he avoided any mention of Jennie Thrasher. At the courthouse the next day, Oscar Schiller greeted me, if it could be called that, with a curt nod and no unnecessary conversation. Joe Mountain was there, too, and he hugged me like a great grinning bear, almost smothering me. He smelled like grease and old leather and tobacco, and I found it a welcome change from the perfumed parlors of young women in Saint Louis whom I had been seeing over the holidays.

  I visited Judge Parker for a few moments, giving him my father’s best regards, and he seemed years older than when I’d seen him last. The dark patches under his eyes had extended all across his cheeks now and his hair was white. As I left the judge’s chambers, Zelda Mores was waiting in the corridor, and at first I thought she might hug me, too. But she didn’t. Instead she extended her hand like a man and gave me a firm grip. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. Over the months, her attitude of hostility toward me had mellowed. There was now gentle forbearance, as though she thought I needed forgiveness and compassion. The fondness of this large, mustached woman for Jennie Thrasher disturbed me, but it was a thing I tried not to think too much about.

  It came as a surprise, even a shock, to learn that Smoker Chubee had been asking to see me. Evans suggested I make arrangements to meet with the dark killer before it was too late. And thus, on the evening before the executions, I found myself in a conference stall at the federal jail. The room was one of many along the north wall of the jail enclosure where lawyers could speak with their clients. There was a single door leading out into the jail proper, with a heavy metal screen, a small table and two chairs, and a clear glass lightbulb hanging from the ceiling on a tangled cord. Waiting, I paced back and forth to keep warm. Although I could hear the big coal furnace under the building bellow and huff, little of the heat seemed to reach this corner of the jail complex.

  When Smoker Chubee appeared, dragging heavy leg-irons, I could see that he had gained a great deal of weight since the trial. His face was puffy, the eyes sunken in folds of flesh. But they had the same flat, deadly look I recalled so vividly. Shuffling in, he showed no sign of recognition, no flicker of emotion in his wooden face. A jailer pushed him through the door and toward the table, the chains making it difficult for him to move with his usual grace, that of a night-prowling cat. Now he reminded me more of a fat Rogers Avenue fruit merchant in summer, scowling over his bins and watchful of street urchins who might steal an apple or a bunch of grapes.

  “Mr. Pay, are you armed?” the jailer asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. I’ll be just outside the door if you need me.”

  We settled into the chairs on either side of the table. Smoker Chubee clumsily, his leg chains dragging across the floor. He sat with his elbows on the table, handcuffed arms before him, watching me as he spoke.

  “Have you got any smokes?”

  I placed a package of tailor-mades and matches on the table before him, and he lighted one before speaking again. He inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs for a long time before allowing it to roll lazily from between parted lips. His eyes took on a glazed light, which I assumed to be some expression of satisfaction.

  “Don’t they give you tobacco?”

  “A little. But this isn’t one of your better hotels in Fort Smith,” he said, puffing a fog of smoke now. “But it’s not too bad. They just took my order for my last meal tomorrow morning. Pork chops and steak, I’m having, with apple pie and a lot of milk. Goat’s milk. I’ll be gut-full. They’ll have a nice wad to clean up after they drop me.”

  He said it all with a natural calmness, as though he might be speaking of having breakfast at the Main Hotel. He held his breath, lungs full of smoke. Under the glaring light overhead, the pockmarks in his fat cheeks looked like the pits in a peach stone.

  “All right, Smoker. You wanted to see me,” I said.

  “Mr. Pay, I want to ask a favor. I don’t trust any of these other white bastards around here. Would you do me a favor?”

  “That depends on what it is,” I said.

  “It’s not much. I just want you to give some information to the newspapers after they swing me through that trap out there.” And he inclined his head in the direction of the compound where the gallows stood.

  “What kind of information?”

  “It’s just a little story. So everybody will know Smoker Chubee never raped anyone.”

  “You’ve been convicted of it,” I said. “I don’t know that anything I say to the newspapers will change that.”

  “Yes, it will. I’ve done enough to be hanged, all right, but rape isn’t one of them. I’ve always taken certain pride in what I do, Mr. Pay. I don’t want at the last to be remembered as a man who does rape. You can let me have that much, can’t you?”

  His speech was startling, coming as it did from the scarred black face. He used the language as well as most college professors I had
known, although his vocabulary was limited. He watched the effect of his words on me, drawing on the cigarette, burning the tip down a full quarter-inch and turning it red-hot. Only half-finished with the fast cigarette, he lighted a second one from it.

  “These are good smokes,” he said, puffing. I took one of the cigarettes, too, and we sat smoking silently for a few moments. I knew he needed no time to think of how to begin. He had gone over it all in his cell. I was sure. But he left me waiting, my feet growing colder each minute. He started slowly, at last, watching me closely, watching the impact of each word.

  “My mother was a slave,” he said. “She was a little girl when removal started. A Creek slave. After they got to the Territory, her folks tried to run away, to Mexico. There were a lot of those colored slaves who tried it. They didn’t know it was over five hundred miles, and a lot of that through Comanche country. They’d never heard of Comanches.”

  As he drew on the cigarette, I could see its pinpoint of fire in his eyes. I recalled what Joe Mountain had said about this man: a dog without a home.

  “Well, the bunch Mother started to Mexico with, the Comanches caught ’em. Somewhere in west Texas. She told me what she could remember of it, but she had no clear idea of locations. After they’d killed all the others, the Comanches took Mother with them. I guess them Comanches hadn’t seen many colored people. They cut the skin on her arms and peeled it back to see what was underneath. She carried those scars on her arms to her deathbed. Other than that, they treated her well enough.

  “As near as I can figure, she was with them for about a year. Then the band was on Red River doing some horse trading and a Seminole saw her in the band. He offered to buy her, and the Comanches were willing. So she ended up back in the Territory, with a Seminole master. Near where Wewoka is now. I don’t suppose you knew that Wewoka, the Seminole capital, was founded by a colored man.”