by Ron Hansen
Newcomb and Pierce went out back to the shed where they practiced leaping from the tin roof onto their saddles. Doolin and Broadwell arm-wrestled, the loser having his fist slammed into a plate of butter, Broadwell red-faced and grunting, Doolin laughing in that odd way of his, ‘Hayuk hayuk hayuk.’ And Julia sat across from gentleman Bill Powers as he resined up his bow. He said, ‘My tomatoes burned up in the sun this year. Cornstalks went brown and shredded apart before they’d reached my knee. I chopped the heads off thirteen rattlers out by the privy. Walked everywhere with a hoe and was glad I never married. It’s too dry in the West for gardens.’
Julia looked especially genteel in that rough company. She had a parasol she stayed under for most of the hot afternoon and she gingerly lifted the hem of her white dress whenever she walked through the grass. My brother and I sat at the table playing checkers and she sat very quietly next to me while Eugenia sketched her with a copy of The Woman’s Home Companion that she was using to fan herself. I’d jump a checker and king myself and Bob would lean to gaze at Miss Moore’s drawing pad. ‘That’s very accomplished,’ he said.
Eugenia wiped charcoal off her fingers with her shirttail. ‘Julia’s easy to draw. She sits still so long. Most people shift around all the time.’
I said, ‘She got rid of all that when she was younger.’
And Bob said, ‘You know, that’s really something to comment on, Julia. How’d you get grown-up so fast?’
‘Are you teasing?’
‘No! I swear you’ve got ten years on me.’
‘You’re very mature,’ said Miss Moore,
She turned to me. ‘They’re making fun of me, aren’t they.’
‘Nope. I think that’s genuine.’
She smiled shyly at Miss Moore. ‘I can be awfully holy sometimes.’
Then it was dark and everything broke up and Charlie Pierce drove Julia home in a surrey he’d sold to someone in Kansas.
Blackface Charley had hired a blackboard to escort Miss Jean Thorne there and that was how I came to visit the Rock Island Hotel in Hennessey. I sat on the hard boards of the wagon-back, swinging my legs while Bryant hunched forward on the bench seat with his shirt collar pushed up where his scar was. He’d blotted ladies’ facial powder on it and it gave him a chalky look. He had a mean-looking canker sore pulling his lip awry.
It was ten at night by the time we hitched the team in Hennessey. There were paper balloons in the shape of donkeys tied to the hitching racks. Railroad flares were spitting and spewing in the street and some salesmen who were meeting at the Rock Island Hotel were pitching them back and forth at each other. The railroad men stood watching with their hands in their overalls.
Bryant took Miss Thorne to sit with him on a bench at the depot and I sat on the chintz furniture in the hotel parlor reading the newspapers.
A big blond man in chalk-striped pants and vest came out of his room and locked the door. He had the sleeves rolled up on his white shirt and a cowlick he’d tried to wet down. He must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. He asked the proprietor for the night register and wrote down all the names in a pocket notebook. He pointed to me. ‘Who’s that?’
Mr. Thorne told him he didn’t know.
The marshal stood on the parlor rug with both hands in his pockets. ‘What’s your name?’
I was reading about a farm boy named McLaughlin in Tulsa who knew how to make a baseball sink when he pitched it. ‘Charlie McLaughlin,’ I said. ‘How’s your day been?’
He ignored that. ‘Where you from?’
‘You ever heard of Liberal, Kansas?’
‘I was city marshal of Woodsdale when they were battling Hugoton over the Stevens County seat.’
‘Well, it’s near there all right.’
He read from his pocket notebook. ‘How come you aren’t registered?’
‘I just come here to read the papers.’ I folded it up and walked out.
I saw Bryant sitting on a pile of railroad ties alone while brakemen walked along the tops of boxcars, turning the brake-release wheels. I didn’t ask why Miss Thorne had left him. I just told him that Deputy Marshal Ed Short was in town and he’d better stay somewhere else. So he rode east to Mulhall where his brother Jim had a homestead, but there the same man kept walking his horse by the house day in and day out and Bryant figured him for a detective, so he took off again and stayed until late July in the cow camp at Buffalo Springs.
Mr. Short was a hired gun who got federal money from Chief Marshal William Grimes for policing the second judicial district. Short had put on spectacles and read through the files of outlaws that a deputy marshal named Christian Madsen kept in the Guthrie courthouse, and Short matched the cowboy from Texas called Blackface Charley Bryant with the train robber at Wharton described by the fireman and engineer of the Santa Fe–Texas Express. So he’d rented an office in Hennessey and lived at the Rock Island Hotel where a drifter had told him Bryant had a sweetheart, and Short rode west on a regular basis to sit on his horse with binoculars and see an acre away the white-painted two-storey house that he’d been informed now belonged to the wanted man’s sister, Daisy. I guess Short never saw my brother. Bob was savvy that way.
By August the four or five or six of us at the dugout had wild vegetables and stray calf to eat and Doolin and I would sit by the river at night fishing for bullhead with bamboo poles while the others squatted around a bonfire and passed a brown jug, playing spoons on their knees while Powers played fiddle. I visited Julia just once, for a Saturday evening of doing nothing, which is what I could afford. She wore a yellow dress with a lace collar and we threw yarn balls at the cameos on the piano. I stuck a knife in a tree from ten feet away and I sat in the dirt while she sat in the swing and she wet my hair down and middle-parted it. She asked me questions about Miss Moore but she was still in a snit about her. Julia thought I was being corrupted. I was nineteen years old; she was eighteen.
By August, Bryant looked awful. There was green in his eyes and his skin was yellow and he couldn’t hold a supper down. Whenever I saw him he had a washrag over his face and his hands at his crotch, rocking from side to side on his bedroll. The disease had infected his brain too, and he’d sulk under a tree and contort his mouth as if he were yelling at hecklers in his own private saloon. Then he’d explode to his feet and dash out into the sun and punch his fists very rapidly, then walk back to his seat and repeat the brawl over and over until Pierce or Powers shook him.
He left for Mulhall and his brother’s doctor on August 1st, a pint of whiskey that was hot as Tabasco beneath his shirt, his legs tied to the saddle. But he fainted and almost choked on his vomit before he spurred his horse up onto the wooden porch of the hotel in Hennessey and yelled for the hostess to fetch him.
He was carried to an upstairs room and Miss Thorne gave him a pan bath. Then, while a local physician attended him, she walked across the street to what was once a lawyer’s office. Ed Short had a checkered dinner napkin spread on his desk and his revolver disassembled under the light of a kerosene lantern. He raised his eyes to the woman in the doorway.
‘He’s here,’ said Miss Jean Thorne.
The next morning she walked into Bryant’s room with a tray of breakfast under a white hand towel. He was flat on his back in bed with his Winchester against his leg on the blankets. All he moved was his eyes.
‘I don’t think I can eat,’ he said.
She left the door open and set the tray down on a bureau and then United States Deputy Marshal Ed Short appeared in the doorway in a black suit, his gray hat held over a pistol.
‘We’re going to Wichita, Charley,’
Short took Bryant’s rifle and put his six-shooter in his suit-coat pocket. He let him use the bedpan and wash himself in the basin, then handcuffed him and pushed the limping man into the hallway where the pregnant girl who cleaned rooms was wiping lamp smoke off the ceiling. Short and Bryant stayed in the deputy marshal’s office that night, eating chicken gizzards, playing cribbage. And on
the afternoon of August 3rd, a crowd followed the two men to the Hennessey depot and stood behind them as they sat on the bench awaiting the northbound train. A tall man with a stationary face told Short he’d heard the Daltons were going to stage a desperate rescue. Short said, ‘Let ’em try.’ Then the train came chuffing in and they boarded with two coach tickets.
The train stopped again at Enid and Bryant asked to have a cigarette, so they both walked forward to sit in the smoking car. Short rolled one for Bryant and one for himself and then he looked around at the smokers on the parlor furniture: men with handlebar mustaches and dark suits and derbies, reading newspapers or the Bible. One opened a pocket watch and snapped it shut. The cars banged forward into a roll and the tobacco smoke grew toward the opened tops of the windows where it was sheared off by the breeze. The men were staring at Bryant, who had to raise up both manacled hands to take the cigarette out of his mouth.
‘They’re gawking at my face,’ said Bryant. He turned his shirt collar up.
‘They never seen a murderer before.’
‘That’s just the excuse. It’s my scar they’re staring at.’
He said that so loud the men turned their heads away.
When they’d smoked their cigarettes down, Short stubbed them both out on the floor and told Bryant to stand. They lurched down through two swaying, vestibuled Pullmans until they got to a baggage car that he hammered with his fist. ‘You won’t be so uncomfortable here,’ said Short.
A slot opened and closed and then the baggage door slid and Short pushed Bryant inside. A bald man in suspendered trousers and a yellowed union suit that was stained with food near the buttons sat down on a chair next to a trunk. He had an inch-long beard along his jaw.
Short handed across his own revolver. ‘I left his rifle in the coach. Can you watch him while I get it?’
‘Wasn’t doin’ much anyways, Ed.’
The man put Short’s revolver in a mail sorter over his head. Bryant sat down on a box with his hands between his knees. He rocked calmly with the train. With his mind focused he wasn’t crazy at all. He said, ‘This scar come from when I was a four-year-old child. Slept too near the stove and my mother tripped over me one morning.’
The baggage man looked. ‘Ain’t hardly noticeable at all.’ He cut a chunk of barbwire with a tinsnips and stapled the wire to a board.
‘That a hobby, is it?’
‘My barbwire collection.’
‘I bet you get plenty of examples, travelin’ as much as you do.’
The baggage man faced a board of twelve strands towards Bryant. ‘You an old cowhand?’
Bryant squinted. ‘That top one’s a Kelly with a staple barb.’
‘Patented 1868. What’s this one?’
Bryant got up from the box and walked over. ‘Hell, that’s just a Glidden barb on two wires.’
‘When was it patented?’
‘How am I supposed to know that?’
‘I do: 1874. I’ve made a regular study of this,’ the baggage man said.
‘That last one I can’t get at all.’
The baggage man looked down. ‘This one? This is what they call an A. Ellwood spread.’
Bryant kicked the board away and snatched Short’s pistol out of the pigeonhole. He snapped the hammer back and slumped down on top of the trunk. He was panting with just that little movement. ‘Don’t you stir now. You just continue with what you were doing. I don’t have no reason at all to hurt you yet.’
‘Well, it’d serve me right for being so stupid.’
Bryant gasped for air and wiped his face inside his sleeve. The baggage man said, ‘I wouldn’t’ve suspected you was so sick.’
‘I’m as bad off as a man can be and not have maggots in his nose. Each morning when I wake up alive, I’m surprised. That’s why I needed the gun. I can’t stand the suspense anymore.’
‘This your last roundup, is it?’ the baggage man said.
Short bumped back through the cars with Bryant’s Winchester at carry. A black porter stood on the platform between the Pullman and the baggage car holding a step stool against his knee. Short took his hat off and leaned out into the air. His blond hair blew flat on his head.
‘What’s the next stop?’
‘Waukomis. About two minute away.’
Blackface Charley Bryant heard Short’s voice, shoved the baggage door open, lifted the deputy marshal’s revolver up. ‘You should see the surprise on your face, Mr. Short.’
Short glared at him, then swung Bryant’s rifle up to his hip and fired it just as Bryant pulled the trigger of Short’s revolver. It sounded like two doors slamming, and all the air was blue. Bryant was flung back against the steel of the car; Short staggered back a step with a dark hole in his vest that he brushed at like it was food crumbs. Bryant grimaced and started to sag down and the deputy marshal shot him again and Bryant sat down hard.
Bryant saw his legs twitching and the urine making a stain on his pants but his back was broken and the nerves were dead: his pain was small as heartburn. He closed his eyes and lowered the pistol and Short took him for dead. Short leaned against the railing with blood oozing through his vest and saw the depot a quarter-mile ahead with women in bustles on the dock. He pushed away to drag his prisoner out of the doorway and spare the women’s eyes, but he hadn’t walked a half a yard before Bryant lifted his pistol again and fired five explosions, even clicking the trigger through three empty cartridges before he let the pistol drop to his lap.
Short slammed back against the Pullman door with the blasts and took bullets in his lung, his liver, his kidney, his spleen. Smoke rolled between the cars and sucked out as the brakes screeched on the rails. The porter and the conductor were crouched at the end of the Pullman and passengers knelt on the floor. The baggage man shoved the baggage door wide and wrenched the pistol from Bryant’s hand and dragged him back by the collar of his shirt and kicked his head until it was soft, shouting, ‘You bastard!’ over and over again.
Short heaved forward from the Pullman car and walked across the platform and into the baggage car. (I’ve never heard of a stronger man.) The front of his suit was blood. ‘Let’s lay him up on this trunk,’ he said.
The baggage man stared at him, disbelieving. Short bent for Blackface Charley Bryant’s trouser cuffs and the baggage man took his shoulders and they lifted the body up that way. The dead man’s eyes were closed and blood slid out of his mouth like saliva.
Short said, ‘I’m pretty woozy,’ and sat himself down on the board floor. Then he leaned on his elbow and sagged against the trunk. He shut his eyes. ‘Have you ever rode a horse hard for two days without sleep and laid yourself down on a feather bed?’
When the train stopped in Waukomis he was dead.
10
That summer Grattan Dalton spent in a California jail. Railroad detective Will Smith came by his cell in middle May with an Oklahoma paper. He put on spectacles and read aloud the accounts of the Wharton train robbery. The coward Ransom Payne was one of the quoted witnesses. Smith folded his spectacles up and said, ‘I’ve been puzzling it in my mind but I can’t figure out why your brothers would do such a thing when you got a jury trial coming up. Seems to me that might prejudice the court just a little.’
Grat lay on his mattress with his hands behind his head. He said, ‘Maybe there wasn’t nothing better to do. Maybe choir practice was canceled.’
Smith walked six cells down to where Bill Dalton was reading a law book, his finger moving under the words. Smith inquired about Bill’s family and his upcoming trial but my brother started reciting aloud from the text until the detective left.
Bill had so many friends in the county it seemed unlikely to the prosecution that they’d convict him for anything, so they let him out after the arraignment. It was not so with Grat. His trial for ‘assault to commit robbery’ at Alila was held in the Tulare County courthouse in Visalia on June 18, 1891. His attorney, Breckinridge, walked into the courtroom reading his law clerk’s
brief for the first time. He shook hands with the prosecution and several Southern Pacific executives in the gallery, whispering something and laughing longer than they did. He sat down next to Grat, smelling of witch hazel. Grat’s hair was shaved off because of lice in the jail pillows. His ears stuck out; his face was pale. He wore a white shirt that was too big for him and a tie he’d already unknotted.
‘Are you nervous at all?’ Breckinridge asked.
‘I learned the tiniest bit about the law from being a marshal in the Oklahoma Territory and I know for a fact you can’t convict an accessory unless you’ve got one of the supposed principals arrested, I don’t see how this trial can last longer than afternoon.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Breckinridge, and he unfastened the clasps on his briefcase.
The trial lasted three weeks and defense lawyer Breckinridge arose from his chair in objection no more than a dozen times. He did not cross-examine Smith or the other detectives. He accepted Bob’s worn spurs as exhibits, also the plug horses said to have been used for the getaway, even the locomotive engineer’s identification that Grat must’ve been the robber because he was ‘similar in size.’
In July, Breckinridge came in from a lunch recess blowing off his mustache comb. ‘I just had the best chicken and dumplings I’ve ever tasted.’
‘Good,’ said Grat. ‘Appears to me you needed the energy.’
Breckinridge glared at him. ‘The way to handle this case is to simply ride it out. Let the prosecution make all the mistakes. We’ll get a mistrial on the rules of evidence alone.’
‘Maybe I’m just the least little bit cranky because a lawyer named John Ahem told me I was being jobbed. He said the Southern Pacific Railroad made you a wealthy man.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
My brother scratched the itch in his hands. His knuckles were big as steelies. ‘Them are my sentiments too, Mr. Breckinridge. You shoulda heard me defend your honorable self from them lies. I was danged vociferous.’