Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Over the next many weeks, William’s investigations convinced him that his wife was innocent of any intimacies, and he continued to work for their reconciliation until, growing desperate, he tried to force negotiations by writing up a “cross suit” asking for custody of their daughter. On someone’s advice, Pearl refused, so William rewrote his suit to ask for only rights of visitation in the event of a divorce, but he didn’t file that second one. Pearl remained intractable, refusing to proceed with her divorce petition beyond filing it, although she still allowed him to take their daughter on his business trips. Yet, on someone’s counsel, Pearl kept the threat hanging above William. But why?

  Grayston was determined he would not lose a third child, certainly not to some rover whose business dealings, he had discovered, couldn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Unearthing the truth, he believed, would surely lead to a way of protecting what he most loved, his little girl.

  His investigations made it easy for him to dismiss the gossip, but his insistence on Pearl’s innocence did not silence rumor, nor did it keep people from interpreting the bad blood between him and Bayne as nothing more than a love triangle. Wasn’t adultery, said the tittle-tattle, the reason the interloper, too craven to answer Grayston, carried a pistol instead of simply moving out of a dismal room? What’s more, in the face of Grayston’s charges and threats, wasn’t Bayne’s long and perfect silence de facto proof of his dalliance? Wouldn’t a younger, larger man, if innocent, take some action against his accuser?

  For almost eighteen months, things dragged on without resolution. On the nineteenth of November, 1901, in that same letter to his father, William cryptically encouraged him to “read between the lines” and closed saying he would soon send more:

  A year ago last spring I was preparing for a business trip to St. Louis, and lay awake thinking of the awful corruption in Joplin and how terrible it would be for me to allow my little daughter to be educated in the schools of East Joplin unless the atmosphere of those schools should be radically changed. As I lay thinking most intently, and my little daughter huddled in my arms, waiting for her mamma to come to bed, I thought I would speak of this feature of the matter to my wife and listen to her views. . . .

  [My thoughts] seemed to open up an ocean of problems and to suggest a new standpoint from which to view almost every problem before me, and that minute I decided to revise every opinion held by me on every subject coming up before me and to see if it were possible to discover and weed out any serious errors in my views and plans and methods of business conduct. Well, I have kept the resolution steadily in mind to the present hour and am happier for having done so.

  Such was his Spencerian interpretation of evolutionary change being accompanied by dissolution that he saw a single human life reflecting the course of its species in a kind of emotional ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Through reason, he was at last reaching a rational untangling of the situation, and a new and different life could emerge from the old.

  The morning after sending his letter, Thursday, the twenty-first of November, Grayston went south of town to examine the Panther Mine and returned that afternoon with a sample of lead ore in his pocket. It was not the piece of lead about to change his life.

  He stopped by the office, just a hundred yards beyond Fourth and Main, one flight up, to talk to his brother about some legal matters, he showed George the ore, and at about four thirty William left smiling in his new, raised spirits. He walked to Sixth Street with an acquaintance, then, his motive unknown, abruptly turned around and, striding swiftly, headed back to that hexed crux of all Joplin, where stood the two hotels, the House of Lords, and the Club Saloon.

  Grayston was moving toward the very place where, a little more than a century later, I sat reading old newspaper accounts about his approach. His time was four thirty p.m. and mine was four fifty. His day was a pleasant Thursday afternoon a week before Thanksgiving, and mine was a drizzly Tuesday just past the vernal equinox.

  What comes next is a conjunction of hour and place and three men’s lives, a ghostly triangle redrawing itself into something different, as if it were evolving: William, George, William. Once the new figure was accurately drawn and understood, none of those men would emerge from it unchanged.

  5

  Gladiator Without a Sword

  HE IS NOT HERE TO SPEAK, that peerless speaker, and he cannot tell his story, not a word of it, and what is about to happen comes from others, almost all of them adversaries. I will, for reasons to become clear, presume to speak for him, because without him, this sentence, this book, would not exist. I set down sentences with the hope they are inspirited and that the truth of what occurred near the end of the second year of a new millennium will at last come to light, however ghostly — ghastly — it may be.

  21 November 1901, 4:30 p.m. The shops and offices are about to close, and workers begin to crowd the Joplin sidewalks, and the new electric trolleys fill with riders, the overhead wires sparking and popping at each juncture and the rails gleaming among the brick pavement. William Grayston is thirty-nine years old, of middle height, muscular, his hairline in retreat. He has a vigor unmatched in his family except by his father who, nearing seventy, can still stand forth to lay out the perils of Hell and bring strong men to their knees in hope of redemption, that word his son heard so often back in Christian County.

  4:35. William is walking south on Main. He wears a dark, three-piece woolen suit, a tan chesterfield draped over his left arm, derby on his head. In his pockets are a few slips of notes, a key, a snapshot of the Panther Mine, and a sample of lead ore from it. Nothing else. For some reason, he turns around from his acquaintance at Sixth Street and heads north along the west side of Main, moving fast, as if in pursuit. Something apparently has been said to him to cause him to alter his course. No record of what those words were or of their import will remain, but from them there will be no turning back. His renewed good spirits seem to have vanished in an instant. Clearly, reaction has replaced reasoning.

  4:37. He weaves his way among the crowd, the trolleys rumbling and clanging; out of a shop comes the scent of fresh cigars, from a tavern the odor of soured beer, and there’s the smell of new shoes, ladies’ cosmetics, the unmistakable emanations of a hardware store and a drug counter and a newsstand. The streets are rank with life.

  4:42. As he nears the intersection of Fourth and Main, he calls out to a man walking ahead. No response. Grayston closes the distance and calls again, louder, “Say there! Bayne!” The big man hears the voice but only quickens his step until he reaches the corner, and there he stops as if according to plan, and strikes a nonchalant lean against the front of the Club Saloon where two bartenders stand talking about the funeral that has briefly (and conveniently) closed the tavern. They are Frank Geier and George Bayless, and they go silent when Bayne takes his incongruously casual stance, seemingly on a mark, against the worn building covered with old advertising signs, a place that should have been torn down years ago. Across the street is the new, round-towered Keystone Hotel with an elaborately executed facade of Carthage limestone accented by wrought iron around the entrance to the Joplin National Bank; next to it is another elaborate entryway recently changed into the compact Mirror News and Cigar Stand — Freeman and Lawrence, proprietors.

  4:43. In the block north, a couple of hundred feet away: Are men standing at the windows above the House of Lords Restaurant and Bar? Are they looking to get a good view of something, as if the intersection is about to become an arena? William Grayston is familiar with arenas, but this one is not a speaker’s stump or an orator’s stage or a debater’s platform. It is a marketplace Colosseum, and entering is the eminent attorney from Sparta, Missouri, a gladiator, albeit one lacking sword, shield, or helmet. Ave! Moriturus te saluto!

  4:44. “Say there!” he calls out again. “Bayne, you son of a bitch!” Now Bayne is waiting for him. Grayston shouts for all to hear: “You can’t live in the same town I do! I’ve told you and I mean it!” Bayne s
traightens from his devil-may-care slouch but does not remove his right hand from his overcoat pocket, nor does he speak. Can nothing provoke this man to response, not even a theatric and public insult and challenge? Grayston whips back his right arm and hits Bayne on the left jaw hard enough to send the big man against the door of the saloon. There’s only one punch. Hats go flying.

  4:45. The superintendent recovers his balance, thrusts the right side of his overcoat forward and, from the hip, squeezes the trigger on the pistol in his outer pocket. The bullet strikes Frank Geier just above the heart. Even before the bartender hits the sidewalk, Bayne pulls out the pistol, and as William begins to rise from picking up his hat, the gun gets shoved right above his heart, only the chesterfield over his left arm to protect him, and point-blank, Bayne fires again. The bullet penetrates the coat, pierces William’s weskit, perforates the left ventricle of his heart, punctures his liver, and passes on down to his pelvis where it ricochets off the bone and stops.

  4:46. Grayston turns, lunges into the street, drops his smoldering, powder-burned coat, and takes another bullet, this one in the back, above the heart, shattering his left shoulder blade. Bayne fires two more shots. They go wild. The gun is empty, but he has hit two men with three shots, all of them into the upper left side of the body, either into the heart or just above. It is skillful, almost professional, shooting.

  4:47. Frank Geier lies on the sidewalk by the saloon door. He will survive. Grayston, still holding his derby, unable to stand straight, reaches the east side of Main and staggers one step into the little news-depot, and there, between printed words, those pleasures so much a part of his life, he falls backward as proprietor Harvey Lawrence catches him by the collar and lowers him. His twitching legs lie in the ornate doorway and his head on the sidewalk. Under the amphitheater of the Roman Colosseum was a small exit for the slain: the Portal of Death.

  4:48. A man claiming to be a doctor from Kansas City, not to be heard from again, comes forward as if a deus ex machina, feels for a pulse, and finds it: weak, weaker, gone. Except for the dark splotch on Grayston’s vest above the heart, there is not much blood. At the bottom of the circle of silent, gaping faces, William stares blindly into the sinking light of the implacably godless sky of the Thursday before Thanksgiving, and a woman at the back of the crowd says, “What’s the matter?” and a man answers, “Oh, nothing — only a man killed.”

  4:49. Someone else goes into the street where the trolleys have come to a halt, and he stomps out the burning chesterfield and hands it to a helmeted man — either a taxi driver or a constable (he will testify later), both of whom wear similar headgear.

  4:50. Then a second deus ex machina: the acting county coroner comes from nowhere and rifles through Grayston’s pockets. He finds no weapon. He appears disappointed.

  In a struggle for existence, the fittest has survived.

  The next day, the Press in Carthage, the county seat, wrote: “Joplin was the scene of another awful tragedy yesterday afternoon and another was added to the long list of crimes which has been growing there so rapidly during the present month.” Reporters in Jasper County and across the state presented the deadly events as a classic love triangle, and that was what most of Joplin believed, and so did my father who first told me the story, and so I believed until a few weeks after that rainy day in the Joplin library when Q and I began trying to follow the tracks of the killer.

  The moment Bayne emptied the revolver, he returned it to his overcoat pocket. With remarkable calmness and assurance for someone who had just shot down two people in public view, one of them a prominent lawyer, and thereby transformed a young woman into a widow and a little girl into a fatherless child, he walked away, accompanied by a man large enough to be a bodyguard. The pair was headed toward Bayne’s Waterworks office a block distant and behind the Joplin Hotel owned by his boss, Tom Connor.

  Before they could reach it, two police and an ex-constable stopped them and asked the killer why he shot Grayston, to which he, speaking at long last, said, “The son of a bitch hit me.” The police took the pistol from him and checked the cylinder to find all five bullets spent. The assassin had fired until he could fire no more. Then a third deus ex machina in the form of two more people: Bayne’s lawyers — one the author of Pearl’s divorce petition, and both men Grayston’s frequent adversaries in court. They somehow quickly got from their offices and made it through the big throng filling the streets to reach Bayne just in time to tell him to say nothing more. The killer went into his second public silence, that one lasting seven months.

  William’s attorney brother, in their office only a few hundred feet from the site of the shooting, for reasons unknown, took two hours to get a warrant sworn out for the arrest of Bayne. Even then the gunman was not formally arrested but simply turned over to Walter Fletcher, once a miner, an uneducated man who had been elected justice of the peace and who right then also happened to be the acting coroner, neither position requiring knowledge of law or medicine. While Fletcher, he who searched Grayston’s pockets, wrangled and stormed over jurisdiction with a constable trying to serve the warrant for Bayne’s arrest, the murderer sat watching, utterly silent, fully placid, as if guaranteed the outcome of it all. One reporter wrote the killer was “cool and unconcerned, [showing] no agitation.”

  Finally, Fletcher spoke of “an understanding” that Bayne was not to be placed in jail but merely taken into custody by a deputy constable, a secret-handshake brother of the slayer, and escorted to their lodge hall for supper before going on to Carthage and a room in the elegant Harrington Hotel, the social center of town. Later, when asked about such an unorthodox arrangement, Justice Fletcher told the deputy to say there was concern about mob action. That explanation might bear up for anyone who sees a dining table in a lodge hall and a room in a hotel as providing greater security than a cell in a police station.

  During all of these shenanigans, Fletcher managed to retrieve the burned overcoat and the bloodied vest (it would never be seen again), and he even argued for the murder weapon to be given back to the assassin, but the city marshal refused to hand over the pistol. Justice Fletcher also contrived to take bartender George Bayless, the key witness, into Bayne’s office for a private conference and then on to the Globe office for a chat with a reporter.

  At the coroner’s inquest that evening, five carefully selected jury men gave the only verdict possible to a murder executed in broad daylight before dozens of witnesses: “W. E. Grayston came to his death from a gunshot wound inflicted by one George G. Bayne.” But two jurors, at the urging of Fletcher, tried to insert the interpretation that the homicide was done in self-defense. A coroner’s jury, of course, does not exist to establish motive. But if Justice Fletcher’s connivances were obvious, it wasn’t then apparent why he would expose himself to charges of several manifest malfeasances.

  The following morning, November 22, Bayne was returned to Joplin where he waived arraignment and was admitted to a bail set by Fletcher of only three-thousand dollars. The Press wrote, “There is general surprise in Carthage that the bail should be so low, even if Bayne should be admitted to bail at all.” Also brought about that day was the first of three eventual changes of venue — not out of Joplin but out of the courtrooms of certain judges and into the purview of the uneducated justice of the peace, Fletcher.

  Again at liberty, the murderer went immediately to the Payton boardinghouse, his access to Pearl at last unfettered, and he packed his bag — that simple act Grayston had demanded for eighteen months — and returned to his office where he stayed the night, using for a pillow his rolled overcoat, the one he wore while gunning down William. The next day Bayne boarded a Frisco coach for Illinois where he spent the succeeding several days with his mother.

  As he, lips sealed, waited for the homicide trial, he never exhibited anything but quiet certainty about his case, despite shooting point-blank an unarmed man bending over to pick up his hat, and firing a second bullet into his back, both shots di
rected at the heart. Bayne did not once attempt to aim for a leg or arm; he fired no warning shot; he did not brandish the weapon; and he did not respond with his own large fists. Yet he seemed assured his argument of self-defense against a man who punched him once but clearly intended no further blows would prevail in the murder trial.

  An undertaker’s ambulance, a new horse-drawn vehicle, came to take Grayston to the morgue for an autopsy. The county physician removed the slug from William’s broken shoulder blade but left in the other, deeply embedded mortal piece of lead, and today it lies with William’s remains under a few feet of flinty soil on a hillside north of Sparta in Christian County, in a forgotten family cemetery big enough to hold only seven other related burials, one of them his infant son, Herbert.

  Those eight Graystons rest beneath five old cedars, the graves marked for a century by only small, rough fieldstones that look more accidental than placed, meager memorials from the man who put them there, the paterfamilias, the old stonecutter from England, “the hermit poet-preacher” who apparently saw things of this realm as dross, distractions from the true life-eternal promised to the delivered.

  The last words I’ve been able to find from him reveal his hope that his freethinking son — the one who believed any heaven would be of human making — had changed his mind and at last joined that blessed gathering of the redeemed waiting somewhere beyond this particular vale of tears.

  And, of tears shed during the justments for the deceased, none exceeded those from William’s first wife who, wrote the Press,

  arose in the church and stated in the presence of the living and the dead in a voice broken with sobs, that the trouble which caused her separation from W. E. Grayston was her own fault, and that she felt it her duty at this time and upon this occasion to offer this restitution, this exoneration from blame to his memory; that had she been a little less impatient and had acted as she should have done, that they might have been living happily together today, because she had always loved him and him only.