Winding Stair (9781101559239)

by Jones, Douglas C.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It was. Anyway, this Seminole raised Mother and then married her in his old age. I was their son. The old man’s name was Tub Something-or-other. I never knew him. He died of cholera about ten years before the war.”

  From that, I knew Smoker Chubee must have been about forty years old. When I’d first seen him, he hadn’t looked it, but now with the fat, he looked even older.

  “I was raised like a good Seminole. Seminoles always treated their colored people well, even when they were slaves. Afterward, a woman like my mother was just another member of the tribe. Not only by law, but by treatment. We lived in one of those little towns, all colored people like you find in The Nations, where they settled and made their own life after they were freed. But we were still Seminoles and I went to one of their schools.

  “I started herding livestock. I was a drover, and a pretty good one. I made some drives up from Texas to the railheads. My first drive was to Baxter Springs. I trailed a herd into Ellsworth once. After the cattle were sold and we got paid off, we went into town for hell-raising. Next day we were getting our gear ready for the ride south, not much hurry, and everybody with pop head. About noon, a bunch of men rode out from town. They were armed to the teeth, and on serious business. They caught me up with ropes, and said they were about to teach me to leave their womenfolks alone. They dragged me off into a dry wash, where there was a tree down, and they spread me on that tree and pulled off my pants. All those white men I’d come north with just stood around and watched, afraid to do anything.”

  The muscles of his face moved as he recalled it, twisting and knotting, but his eyes still seemed detached, not a part of it. He smoked for a long time, watching my face.

  “These people that live on deserts, in Africa,” he said. “Where the chiefs have a whole herd of wives . . .”

  “Harems?”

  “Yeah. Harems. And they keep these men to guard the women who aren’t men at all.”

  “Eunuchs?”

  “That’s the word. Eunuchs. Those Kansas men had a butcher knife, and they did that to me. I would have bled to death but the cook in our outfit dragged me back to camp and stopped the blood with a red-hot branding iron. You know, those bastards took it all. They took it all.”

  “They emasculated you?”

  “That’s the other word.” And he laughed. Not from the memory, but from the effect it was obviously having on me.

  “For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell that story on the witness stand?”

  “It’s not an easy story to tell,” he said. “Besides, they had me on the killings. They can’t hang you but once.”

  What he said next, I was sure he had not intended to say, had not planned. But somehow, once he was started, it all came out. He seemed to think aloud as though I was not there.

  “A thing like that takes something away from a man.” He seemed amused at his double entendre. “It makes him think in a way most men don’t think. You take something away from him that all other men have, so he tries to make all the rest of living different than other men. Until you take his pants off, nobody knows he’s different. He’s more woman than man, maybe. But he’s not that, either. He’s nothing. There’s going to be no women in all his life and there’s going to be no children or grandchildren all his life.

  “At first, I was just mad. But after a while, that changed. I was sorry they hadn’t killed me. They left me to walk around alive, but I was really dead.”

  “And you started to take it all out on everybody then, with a gun?”

  He gave a start, coming back to the moment and apparently only then realizing what he’d just said to me.

  “Maybe. I never thought about it like that exactly. It was just a thing I started doing. But whatever I did, I wanted to do it better than anybody else. It wasn’t revenge. It was something else.”

  “But you enjoyed it.”

  “There are only so many things a man can enjoy in his life. One of the best is women. When that was gone, something had to take its place. Did you ever see an old blind man who’s been blind a long time? After his eyes go, his fingers take on more feeling. It doesn’t happen all at once, but after a while, his fingers take on some of the things the eyes have done.”

  It suddenly struck me that although in most cases a killer may not even be aware of it, here was one who recognized, perhaps dimly, that his own destructiveness was something sexual, something to replace all chance of his ever being with a woman again. What he said next made me believe that Smoker Chubee had never really blamed those Kansas men who had castrated him. He blamed women. Not just the one who had brought on the retribution, but all women.

  “I watched Rufus and those other boys having their time with Mrs. Thrasher and it was almost like having the pleasure myself, just watching.”

  But if he hated women, why had he let her go that day when she’d slipped out of the house? He’d seen her just before she ran down across the yard and into the woods, just watched her and nothing more. I asked him why and it was as incomprehensible to him as to me.

  “Damned if I know why I didn’t shoot her,” he said. “That was another one of my big mistakes. If I had, the rope wouldn’t be waiting for me right now.”

  For many years, I have thought about that interview with Smoker Chubee. It has become impossible for me to assess what my feelings were at the time. Perhaps most distressing of all was that with this most violent of men, I took it all rather for granted. It was some hours later, lying in my bed, before I realized that the Kansas incident was not a part of his brutal nature, but the beginning of it.

  “Now, do you think you might tell that to the newspapers?”

  I had no doubt the press would be overjoyed with such a sensational story. But I had a price.

  “If you’ll do a favor for me,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Just answer a few questions.”

  For an instant, what might have been a grimace of quick anger crossed his face. But those eyes remained unchanged, hard and cold. It was the most chilling thing about this man, the unchanging eyes.

  “Just for your own amusement?”

  “If you want to call it that. Did you do anything in Kansas that might have led those men to such a thing?”

  He shrugged. “I lay with a white woman,” he said. He lifted his hands to his face, the fingers touching the deep pockmarks. “Before I had the smallpox, I wasn’t a bad-looking nigger. It wasn’t the first white woman I’d been with. But it never was against their will or without their consent. Isn’t that how the judge said it?”

  “That’s how he said it.”

  “I guess you’d rather think of me as a Seminole, laying with a white woman.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”

  “I guess to you, a Seminole is a nigger, too.”

  “If you thought that, why did you call me in here? For somebody who’s asking a favor, you’re an arrogant son of a bitch.”

  He laughed, and I think he actually enjoyed me saying it.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? After they cut me and I got back home, I laid up a long time. My mother died about then. They said it was consumption. She’d always been a brave little woman. But she took the consumption and died.” For the first time, he lowered his gaze. He stared at his hands a moment, squeezing them together until the knuckles were white. “She was the only person I ever had any feeling for. The only person who ever had any feeling for me.”

  The moment passed quickly and he seemed to shake himself as he took a fresh cigarette from the package and struck a match to it.

  “I started getting into a little trouble then. A little horse stealing in Creek Nation and out west amongst the Kiowas and Cheyennes. I started working with pistols, and I got pretty good at that, too. Before long, I got to be what we call a hired shooter.”

  He leaned back and sighed, blowing smoke up at the bare bulb above us. I looked at hi
s hands, long and delicate like so many Indian hands I had seen, yet they had a heavy strength inherited from his mother.

  “Yeah, I hired out to kill people. For money. Sometimes I charged fifty dollars. Sometimes five hundred. There are a lot of men like that in The Nations. Go to any crossroads store and you can find one or two. Most of them aren’t worth a sack of horseshit. They like to get drunk and brag. I never made that mistake. Only mistake I ever made was getting together with that wild little Yuchi.”

  “Milk Eye?”

  “Yeah, Rufus. He was crazy. But I liked him. He paid me to shoot. He was always in trouble, and he couldn’t shoot worth a damn, and I guess he didn’t have the stomach for it either. So he’d hire me for that chore.”

  “Smoker, something’s been bothering me for a long time, since we rode into that farmyard and saw all those dead chickens. Why in the world would you want to shoot those chickens, and the dog and the milk cow?”

  “I killed anything Rufus paid me to kill.”

  He said it almost casually, as though he were speaking of chopping cotton or weeding corn, as though it meant absolutely nothing to him. I knew then, sitting in that cold little room in the federal jail, that it truly didn’t mean anything to him. It was sickening, beyond my understanding.

  “Smoker, you said Rufus Deer didn’t have the stomach for shooting, but he was at Low Hawk Corners that night, when you killed Marshal Garret.”

  “I never did understand that,” he said. “Rufus wanted to come along on that. He wanted to pop away at that marshal. I think that was the first time he’d ever shot at anybody, even in the dark. That was funny, when you were on the stand, telling about bullets hitting the wall and breaking the window glass. Those were old Rufus’s shots. All mine went right at Garret.”

  “Joe Mountain says he’s glad you missed him that night.”

  “The big Osage? Hell, I wasn’t shooting at him. Rufus was going to give me that black horse for killing Garret.” He sat for a moment, rubbing his cheeks with those slender fingers, the nails a pinkish white. “Those damned Osages. If they hadn’t hit that horse, I’d be in Oklahoma Territory now, have traded that horse for a whole string of good Comanche stock.”

  “Smoker, that old woman . . .”

  “Rufus’s mother? That old woman, she’s tough as boot leather. We had it all planned with her. Rufus did, anyway. I’d let out the word Rufus was coming and Rufus figured that would bring Garret out, to get up a posse for him. Most likely at Low Hawk Corners. Rufus was smart. He was a smart little bastard. If Garret was in that store, then the old woman would be on the back porch. It was all a signal. The storm was just luck. If it hadn’t been for that, the old woman would have made some other excuse to stay the night at the Corners. But the storm gave her and the old man a good reason to stay in town. The old man, he didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t know what was happening. He was drunk most of the time, and Rufus never did trust him much. But that old woman. She’s got all kinds of guts.”

  He laughed, a short burst of sound that gave me a start.

  “When Rufus saw his old lady on that porch, he got so excited he couldn’t talk. So I called out to Garret. . . .”

  He rose abruptly, dropping his cigarette on the floor and grinding it out with his toe, the leg-irons rattling. Before he could reach the door, I was in front of him, holding his arm, and we stood there face-to-face. He seemed smaller than he had that day I’d arrested him, a little stooped. I had to look down into his eyes.

  “Smoker,” I said. “Tell me. That colored man. Was he with you the day you hit the Thrasher farm?”

  The smile that never reached his eyes came quickly.

  “Well, Mr. Pay, you people convicted him, didn’t you?”

  I sensed it was useless to ask anything about the three men condemned along with him. But somehow, talking about Rufus Deer failed to qualify under the same code.

  “But you and Rufus put this whole Thrasher thing together?”

  “Hell, no. Rufus planned it. I went along because he paid me.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “He paid me eleven dollars and a little gold watch we got off that first woman.”

  “Mrs. Eagle John?”

  “I guess that’s the one. He paid me fifteen dollars we found at the Thrasher farm. And he was going to give me the black horse.”

  “You shot three men for twenty-six dollars?”

  “There was the horse, don’t forget,” he said. “Besides, I told you once. I liked Rufus. You had to know Rufus. He could talk a man into almost anything, make it sound profitable. He had half a dozen stores in The Nations paying him money just to leave them alone. And the other owlhooters left those stores alone, too, because they knew if they didn’t, Rufus would send me after them. Hell, owlhooters over there were more scared of Rufus than they were of your federal marshals.”

  “Just a minute,” I said, and handed him what was left of the package of cigarettes. “One more thing. That death’s-head note we found in the colored boy’s cell. What about that?”

  “Note? I don’t know anything about any note.” I was sure he was telling the truth, but with that noncommittal face, who could tell?

  “Judge Parker would sure like to know about that.”

  “Judge Parker?” He laughed again, that mirthless cough. “I wish somebody had offered to pay me to shoot him a long time ago.”

  “Come on, Smoker, you don’t think you could come in here and shoot Judge Parker, do you?”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t do it here. At the Methodist church, or that hospital he’s always visiting, or on the streets. It wouldn’t be hard. Only getting away from here afterward would be hard.”

  I couldn’t resist asking him the next question.

  “Smoker, how much would you have charged to kill Judge Parker?”

  He thought about it a moment, holding the package of cigarettes in his hands, turning them slowly.

  “That job would take a thousand,” he said.

  He pulled away from me and slammed his handcuffs against the door. The jailer was there at once, and I wondered if he’d heard anything we’d said. He took Smoker Chubee’s arm and led him out and along the hall toward death row, high in the tiered cells at the far end of the building. Smoker held back for only a moment, looking over his shoulder at me when he spoke.

  “You remember that little story,” he said. And then they were gone.

  The courthouse compound when I stepped out into it was no colder than that cubicle had been. The wind was coming in from the southwest, blowing hard across the Winding Stair Mountains and out into the Arkansas Valley. I was glad I’d brought my heavy coat from Saint Louis. The compound was deserted and the only illumination was from gaslights along the walls. I walked before the wind, hands thrust into my coat pockets, thinking about the man I’d just seen and how alien his story would sound related in the fashionable living rooms of Saint Louis. I knew there were such things as professional killers, but I had never known one, certainly never to my knowledge talked with one. It seemed fantastic that I had sat alone with such a man in a dismal little room, chilled to the bone as he revealed calmly the extent of his viciousness. Yet I found it impossible to despise him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Under cloudy February skies, the light of dawn had begun to show the details of the federal compound. Many of the people there had come in darkness, to wait, and others were still arriving. A small group, about forty, were clustered around the gallows enclosure, waiting for George Maledon to open the gate. These were the ticket holders, the lawyers and newspapermen and prominent citizens of the town who had asked to be witnesses to the executions. All the others huddled along the walls of the compound, taking shelter against the wind until the condemned men appeared at the south door of the federal jail. A few were on the walls already, where they could catch some view of what would happen on the platform under the heavy oak beam. Some small boys were in the trees along the streets, hanging like r
accoons, arms and legs wrapped around the bare branches. A truant officer moved along the rows of maples, pulling down those who were supposed to be in school. But most of them were Indians from The Nations, children of families who stood below, and they remained in the gray dawn light, dark lumps in the thicket of leafless limbs.

  At the north end of the building, near the courtroom, lights burned in two offices. William Evans was going through briefs and drinking coffee from an old army china mug. And Judge Isaac Parker was there, even though on this day there were no hearings scheduled before him. He would receive no visitors, and even those with court business would not disturb him. It was said that on these days he was morose and withdrawn. He read his Bible and paced the worn Oriental carpet that floored his chambers, his face gray and his lips set in a hard line. It was said, too, that during these times he was likely to write one of the letters for which he had become famous, to officials in Washington city, scalding the system of law enforcement in The Nations and pleading for something more effective, something that allowed the people who lived there to have more voice in trying their own criminals. He would fret and fume until he heard the sound of the trap falling, a sound that echoed across the compound and through the surrounding streets like a boxcar door being slammed shut. Then, it was said, he would kneel behind his massive desk and pray, nobody knew for what or for whom.

  Three deputy marshals came from the front of the building, with Winchesters, stationing themselves about the yard, watching the little knots of Indians along the walls. Everyone kept their hands pressed deep into coat pockets, their feet scuffling in the light film of snow that drifted across the ground in powdery wisps. Toward the river, a freight train passed, the engine whistle giving sharp warning to those coming from Choctaw Strip, west of the compound. There were crows in the elms and sycamores along the Poteau, and their raucous cawing came strongly on the wind. They were always there on hanging days, the old-timers said. Now and again, there was the yeasty odor of fresh bread as the wagons at the nearby bakeries loaded and began their morning runs through the city. Somewhere near National Cemetery a dog barked, and beyond that, a mill whistle sounded the call to work. A bank clock along Garrison Avenue struck eight, the sound faint and distant.