The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

by James Lincoln Collier

  “Of course, they took me out there because they knew nobody would be around. A half mile down to the end of that road, where nobody ever went. Think of it, Gene. Scared to death and fighting like mad even if it was no use, knowing that in five or ten minutes I’d be dangling in the air, the breath choking out of me.

  “They put the noose around my neck, ran the rope up through that light fixture. Four men grabbed the rope and pulled me up by the neck until I was two feet off the ground, jerking around, trying to shout, gasping for air. Then they left. I can’t say how long I dangled there, struggling and gasping. Seemed like forever at the time, but I don’t guess it was more than five minutes at most. A person can’t go without air for very long.”

  I had been a little child back in 1925 when the specter was lynched. What had I thought when I got up in the morning and my dad was gone—just gone, no explanation, disappeared for good into thin air? No more Sunday breakfasts kneeling up beside him in the booth in the diner, being fed bits of sausage and pancakes soaked in maple syrup. No more whatever else we did together. No nothing anymore.

  I didn’t remember any of it—didn’t remember the pancakes and sausages, didn’t remember what he looked like, what it felt like to snuggle down beside him in the diner, smelling the sausages, smelling his aftershave, if he wore any. Didn’t remember any of it. I wished I did. I wished I could remember kneeling in that booth next to my dad, holding a fork in my fist and stabbing around at the plate to get hold of a piece of pancake. It would have meant a lot to me to remember that. But I couldn’t. “Tell me what happened to my dad.”

  “Yes, you’d want to know that, wouldn’t you? They let him go, of course. They shouldn’t have, but naturally they did. He was a local man, upstanding family man, married to the judge’s daughter. Of course they let him go. I was from Chicago, and they didn’t let me go.”

  “Who let him go?”

  “You’ll have to ask your beloved grampa about that. He knows.”

  “Do you know where my dad is now?”

  “Yes, Gene. Perhaps, if things work out the way I want them to, I could tell you where he is.”

  “You mean if I kill Grampa for you.” I could feel myself tighten and grow cold.

  “You have a chance to redress the wrong that was done to me, Gene. You’re a fair-minded boy. You can even the score. It’s only right, Gene. You must be able to see that.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t see where killing somebody else does you any good now. What good will it do you?”

  “Ah, you don’t understand, Gene. I might find peace at last.”

  I considered. “What had Grampa to do with it? He would never have gone out with a mob and lynched somebody.”

  “He might as well have. It came down to the same thing in the end.”

  “Well, you can forget about it. I’m not going to do it. Now, leave me alone. I have to finish reading my book.”

  “Oh, but you’re going to do it, Gene. Very soon. In the next few days. You’re going to take a baseball bat and crack it across his skull. I’ve seen you swing a baseball bat, Gene. I’ve seen you hit a ball down the third baseline so hard it handcuffed the fielder.”

  There was no use pretending I wasn’t scared. He’d made Sonny’s dad walk off into midair; he’d made Mr. Samuels drive into a tree. “I won’t do it,” I said. My voice was cracked and ragged.

  “Yes, you will, Gene. There’s no use fighting me. You might as well accept it.” Then it was gone.

  I wished I could tell Grampa about all of this. There was no way I could walk up to him and say, “Grampa, you better watch out, because I might try to kill you.” No way I could get him to understand that the specter was real, that it had already killed somebody and was likely to kill somebody else. I figured my dad would believe me. He’d know. He was bound to, considering everything. He’d believe me if I told him about the specter. Why couldn’t I tell him? Why had he run away and left me facing the voice by myself? I whispered, “Come back, Dad. Come back. I need you. I really need you.”

  But there was no answer. I had to tell Grampa something. I had to talk to him. I had to at least find out what he’d done wrong to get the specter so angry at him. Maybe it would turn out that Grampa had a good explanation for what happened that would satisfy the specter. I wasn’t going to bet on that, but it was worth a try.

  I had something else to do first, however. My baseball bat was a thirty-two-inch Reach that Grampa had given me for my birthday a couple of years back. He’d taken me to Brown’s Sporting Goods on Water Street so I could pick out a bat that suited me. He’d advised me to get the biggest bat I could manage, because I was getting my growth spurt and would grow into it soon enough. It was just about perfect for me now.

  After supper I got it out of my room, where I kept it leaning in a corner. Then I walked with it over to Sonny’s cabin. Sonny was sitting on the car seat on the porch in the twilight, eating a pork sandwich and reading one of his dad’s cowboy magazines. They didn’t eat at regular times at the Hawkins’. I sat down beside him on the car seat. “How can you read in the dark, Sonny?”

  “It ain’t that dark. I can read when there ain’t hardly any light. I’m reading this here West magazine. Pretty good stuff. They got this character called Stoney Lonesome, who’s big and strong but gentle with everybody ‘cept crooks. You can’t help liking him. I wouldn’t mind being strong and gentle like him.”

  “You told me once you’d never seen a grownup you wanted to be like.”

  “Stoney Lonesome ain’t a grown-up. He’s in a book,” Sonny said. “They got a lotta stories about him in Dad’s cowboy magazines.”

  “What’re you going to do when you’ve read your dad’s magazines all up? You’ll have to start buying your own.”

  “Naw, Yewgene, I wouldn’t waste the money. I’ll just read ‘em all over again. Half of ‘em are pretty much the same anyway.”

  “You know, Sonny, you can get cowboy books from the library for free. They have a lot of them there.”

  “I wouldn’t go to no library. It ain’t my style. The library might be all right for you and Sam, but it don’t suit me. Too much like a church.”

  “It isn’t like a church, Sonny,” I said. “It’s different, except that you have to be quiet.”

  “Maybe that’s it. I don’t like having to be quiet. Makes me feel closed in. To tell the truth, Yewgene, most every kind of rule makes me feel closed in. Expect I got it from my dad. He didn’t like having no job, for it made him feel closed in. I reckon having a wife and kids made him feel closed in, too. I’ve said he shouldn’t of had us, but where would that have left me?”

  “You have to get over feeling closed in by everything, Sonny. It won’t do you any good.”

  He decided to change the subject. “What you got your bat for, Yewgene? Getting a little dark for baseball.”

  “The specter was on me again. About Grampa. He says he wants me to do it soon. I’m scared half to death I might do it.”

  “What’s the bat got to do with it?” Sonny said.

  “He wants me to use the bat to—for it. It won’t seem strange for me to come walking in with a bat. Says I should catch Grampa alone and make it look like robbers did it. He says nobody’ll suspect me.”

  “Probably they wouldn’t,” Sonny said. “Probably you could get away with it.”

  “I don’t care about that. If I ever did it I’d have to kill myself anyway. Jump out of a window or something. I couldn’t live with myself.”

  Sonny took a bite of his sandwich and nodded. “I can see that,” he said. “I don’t know as I could live with myself neither if I killed my grampa. Wouldn’t matter so much if it was one of my twerpy sisters.” He paused to chew. “Of course, I ain’t got any grampa. So far as I know. Mom’s dad died a while back and Dad’s father wouldn’t speak to him.”

  “I figured it might be a good idea for me to leave my bat at your house.”

  “You really think you might
do it, Gene?”

  “It worries the pants off me, Sonny. Look what the specter did to your dad. Look what it did to Sam’s dad. If your dad couldn’t fight it off, how do you think I’m going to?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We got to think of something.”

  But we couldn’t think of anything. “I better get home,” I said. “I’ve got to see if I can find out some more from Grampa.” I handed Sonny the bat. “If I come around wanting it back and acting funny, don’t give it to me.”

  “I won’t, Gene. You can bet on that.”

  I went on home. Grampa was sitting in his easy chair by the front window, listening to the news on the radio. The announcer was saying that the Senate would probably approve the new Social Security program that President Roosevelt wanted to put in. I didn’t know what Social Security was and didn’t care. “Where’s Mom, Grampa?”

  “She went to her church meeting. She said she’d be back by nine.”

  I reached over and turned the radio off.

  “Hey, Gene,” Grampa said. “I want to hear the news. This Social Security bill is important.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I have to talk to you. You have to tell me some things.” I didn’t sit down, but stood in front of him so he wouldn’t be above me.

  He saw that I was serious. “All right,” he said. “I can read about the Social Security bill in the paper tomorrow. What’s on your mind?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “We found out what happened in Magnolia a while back.”

  “Oh? What did you discover?”

  “Somebody was lynched out at the old Toffey house. Somebody who was involved in an oil swindle.”

  He stared at me for a moment, his mouth puffed out. “What makes you think that?”

  “We went out there.”

  “You, Sonny, and Sam, I assume.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “We found a noose hanging from a light fixture in an upstairs room. And under the noose a body. Well, the bones of a body. The rest of him had rotted away.”

  His mouth was tight. “Why on earth were you kids prowling around up there?”

  For a moment I thought about telling him about the voice. But he’d never believe me. Instead, I said, “We saw some stuff in one of the old Chronicles about an oil swindle. It mentioned the old Toffey house.”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “It also mentioned my dad. Thomas Richards. That was him, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded his head. “It was.”

  “Sonny figured out his dad was involved, because he owned these oil certificates he kept in an envelope in his bureau. Sam figured her dad had something to do with it, because he didn’t run anything about it in the paper. Nothing about a lynching at all. We saw that all our fathers were mixed up in it, so we went on out there and discovered the dead guy.”

  “Hold it a minute, Gene. There’s a piece missing here. What made you conclude that somebody had been lynched if there was nothing about it in the Chronicle?”

  I could have made it clearer to him if I’d been able to tell him about the specter. “We found a newspaper clipping from the St. Louis paper about it.”

  “Found it where?”

  “Out at the Toffey house,” I said. “It was in the dead man’s pocket.” I paused. “Grampa, Mr. Samuels admitted the whole thing.”

  He jerked his head back in surprise. “Samuels told you about this?”

  “He had to. We’d figured out most of it already. This Gallen guy had come out from Chicago, bought the old Toffey house, and told everybody there was oil under it. He got caught, and they lynched him.” I paused again. “What I want to know is what you did. You helped to cover it up, didn’t you?”

  He leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. Then he sighed. “I suppose we were foolish to think we could keep it a secret forever. Too many people knew about it.” He looked back at me. “But I’ll tell you, Gene, bringing it all out is going to make a lot of trouble for people around here. Sonny, for example. Does he really want people to know what his dad did back then?”

  “Sonny knows. He doesn’t know exactly what his dad did, but he knows it wasn’t right.”

  He took his hands from behind his head and nodded. “I suppose Sam knows that her dad was part of the cover-up, as you put it.”

  “Yes. We figured that out. She didn’t want to believe it at first, but her dad confessed.”

  He nodded. “Yes, we covered it up. That’s true, Gene. We thought that it was best for everybody in town to let the waters close over it. I still think so. I thought it was the right decision. You have to remember, Gene, that if we’d brought in the state prosecutor there’d have been an investigation and these men might have gone to jail for murder. Family men, a lot of them, who’d walked straight all their lives but got caught up in the emotions of this.”

  “Is that what you did that was wrong?”

  He gave me a funny look. “Gene, why do you keep insisting that I did something wrong back then?”

  “Because—” But I couldn’t tell him how I knew. “Sonny said his dad told him.”

  He nodded. “All right. I’ll tell you about it. I’m not ashamed. It was a mistake, but it was an honest mistake. You see, Gene, right from the beginning some of us were suspicious of the whole thing. It didn’t make sense that nobody had ever figured out there was oil around here before. At the time people all over the United States were running around looking for oil in hopes of getting rich. Somebody was bound to have tested the area around here. So I checked with somebody I knew in the geology department at Washington University in St. Louis. They told me that a survey of the area had been done some years back, and there wasn’t much chance of finding oil around here.

  “But people in Magnolia were throwing money at this fellow Gallen—throwing their life’s savings at him, anything they could lay their hands on.”

  “Sonny’s dad sold his car and his fishing boat to get money to invest in it.”

  He nodded. “He wasn’t the only one. Gene, you take a fellow who’s never had anything and never expects to have anything. A fellow who has been looking up from the bottom of the barrel all his life, working hard jobs since he was fourteen years old, and knows he’ll go on working hard jobs until the day he dies, because he hasn’t got any pension—nothing like the Social Security that Roosevelt wants to put in. Knows he can’t possibly save enough to carry him in his old age. Suddenly he sees a chance to raise himself up a little, walk around town with some cash in his pocket, buy a little car, get his wife a couple of new dresses, bicycles for the kids. It doesn’t take much to persuade a person wearing those shoes to spend what little he’s saved to buy a piece of pie in the sky.

  “I was a judge, I had contacts with the prosecutor’s office in St. Louis. They got in touch with the FBI. It didn’t take them long to get the goods on the fellow. He was known—had run similar swindles in other places. They picked him up and jailed him here. They jailed your poor dad along with him because he was Gallen’s partner. They were brought before me to set bail. I figured your dad wouldn’t run. He could make a case that he’d been victimized by Gallen along with everybody else, and maybe get off with a short sentence. Maybe get off scot-free. Besides, he had a wife and a child in Magnolia whom he adored and wasn’t likely to flee. So I set a reasonable bail for him, and let him go home.

  “But I knew I couldn’t turn Gallen loose. He’d disappear as quick as lightning. He begged and pleaded. He said that the whole town was against him, and that his life wouldn’t be worth two cents if I held him in jail. He’d gotten death threats, anonymous letters.”

  He frowned and rubbed his forehead. “That’s where I made my mistake. I should have taken the death threats more seriously. You understand, Gene, that death threats of that kind are pretty common. Every judge gets them once in a while from people he’s sent to jail. So I discounted the death threats. What I shou
ld have done was to transfer Gallen to another town where they had better security than our two constables. I didn’t, and at three in the morning some masked men came, took Gallen away, and hanged him.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute, but stood staring at Grampa. Then I said, “Do you know who they were?”

  He nodded. “Pretty much. It’s hard to keep a thing like that quiet. People hear a neighbor’s car start at three in the morning. A wife wakes up and discovers that her husband isn’t there. Somebody with a couple of drinks under his belt starts dropping little hints. It gets around.”

  “Was Mr. Hawkins one of them?”

  “That’s what I always heard. Mind you, Gene, I don’t have any evidence.” He rubbed his forehead again. “You have to understand that people were bitterly angry. They were seeing their life’s savings going down the drain. Losing their houses in some cases. I didn’t understand that well enough. But your dad did. For several days they’d been coming to him asking where their money was. He was the front man, the spokesman for the operation. Gallen was spending a lot of time in Chicago, I gather, and your dad had to deal with all these angry people. Gallen was clever that way. He wanted to have somebody out front to take the heat. So it was your dad who was seeing the bitterness in people’s faces, hearing the anger in their voices. He knew there was a good chance they’d turn violent. Knew it better than I did. So the minute I turned him loose he took what little money he had and disappeared. Drove off into the night.”

  I stood thinking for a minute. There was something else I wanted to know, but was afraid of getting an answer I wouldn’t like. I took a deep breath. “Grampa, did Dad know it was a swindle—know there wasn’t any oil under the Toffey farm?”