The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  But Fort Smith still loved its judge. The slapdash, temporary cowtown of ’75 had gentrified with brick and mortar and side entrances to the saloons for the ladies; electric lights blazed in the federal courtroom, and although Parker thought the wire the traction company men were stringing between poles to electrify the streetcar line unsightly, it was one more sign of progress, erected on the solid foundation of the rule of law. Feared and despised in the jail, hated in the low dens of the Nations, he walked the city streets unconcerned for his safety, always allowing time to stop and converse with shopkeepers and fellow members of the Methodist and Catholic congregations and to pat the heads of their children and remark upon their growth. He was elected president annually of the Sebastian County Fair Association, an office looked upon with more reverence than mayor. Representatives of the Eastern journals expecting to find an uncouth mountebank, tobacco stains in his beard and a pistol in his belt, discovered instead a dignified and benevolent old uncle with the head of a Roman senator. In interviews he was amiable and watched with sly pleasure as they hastened to record his learned theories in their grubby little blocks, knowing their editors would butcher or bury them among advertisements for cream separators and whisker balm.

  At home, Parker dwelt upon his personal failures.

  These came to him when his wife had retired. He’d finished annotating in his jagged hand the case histories he’d brought home and sat in the horsehair chair in his study with the lamp glowing on the Bible in his lap. Charles, his firstborn, had developed a wild streak, which he’d managed to conceal on Sundays and holy days when Parker was home, and which his mother was too gentle to remark upon even to his father. By the time Parker learned of it, it had progressed too far to reverse; but judging was his profession, he blamed himself for overlooking the evidence when it was right under his nose. Charlie had spent time with Annie Maledon, George’s daughter. That had ended badly, and Parker had been too relieved to hear it was over to inquire into the details. He’d had too much respect for his chief of executions to express his disapproval, but he’d hoped Maledon would be aware of the class differences and put an end to the affair on his own. In this he’d disappointed his employer. But Fort Smith was a small town still, for all its advances, and Parker could not help overhearing rumors of other liaisons and caddish behavior, which if he had a daughter he would be sure to bring to the attention of the boy’s father; but perhaps not, if the father were Judge Parker and he someone else. He hoped the boy had the character to come to a realization about himself and make the necessary adjustments. The iron was in the blood, after all; he was the son of a jurist and the great-great-grandnephew of a governor.

  Young James was timid and lazy. His sensitivity came from his mother, who continued to deliver flowers and cakes to the men awaiting execution. Such a nature, determined to see decency where it did not exist, was less than equal to the challenge of disciplining a youth with no initiative or ambition. Parker himself could not remember when he’d last tasted one of Mary’s cakes. The turnkeys, who could not resist sneaking samples, avowed that she had become an uncommonly fine baker through practice.

  One man could bring order to a wilderness, provided he had vision and the sense of purpose the job required. One man could raise his sons to observe probity and devotion to duty and society, assuming he possessed those qualities himself and applied himself to the task. No man could do both. No man should be expected to try. Yet he had tried.

  He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, as if the weariness rested in them alone. The house was quiet but for the gasps of the fire dying in the stone hearth, the chimney cracking as it cooled. Mary, who had taken to drinking a glass of brandy each night to conquer insomnia, would be unconscious from the spirit’s effects, and Jimmie would sleep around the clock if he didn’t have to eat or get up to use the chamber pot. Parker didn’t know if Charlie was even home. It was at times like this, here in the one place where a man should have the authority he reserved for the three hundred thousand people in his charge, that he gave himself permission to ruminate upon the past and find sympathy for that impossible woman Belle Starr.

  Most of what was written about the West was rubbish, and more rubbish was written about Myra Belle Shirley from Arkansas than about Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Buffalo Bill Cody combined.

  The process by which a lank-limbed, crab-ridden consort of bushwhackers with a face like a log butt made the long climb from the brothels of Carthage, Missouri, to be coronated the Bandit Queen of the Border said more about the hacks who performed the ceremony than it did about their subject. To them, shut up in their whiskey-soaked furnished rooms in New York and scrawling in chair cars hurtling at forty miles per hour through the country they wrote about and never looked at, every desperado had a soft spot for orphans and kittens and every woman who strayed off the path of domesticity to follow the outlaw trail looked like the girls who modeled corsets in catalogues. The scribblers in soiled collars and beetle hats knew nothing of the conditions on the scout, and the unavailability of such refinements as face powder, dental hygiene, and soap.

  Belle, at least, was real; which may have been the reason why her saga endured while the debutantes’ parade of Indian princesses, Miners’ Madonnas, Sirens of the Cimarron, and Buckskin Betsies, Bonnies, and Belindas had finished up back at the pulp mill. They’d sprung full-grown from the semen of their creators’ pens and hadn’t the blood in their veins to survive. There was no reason to believe either that at one time—say, twenty years before she made Judge Parker’s acquaintance—she had not been comely. For certain her manners were those of a woman of breeding. But the nickel novelists would not have been interested in her in those days, because her story up to then wouldn’t have sprung the collar of a pastor.

  Well, there was the romance with Cole Younger; but a past without a spot of scarlet is a dismal thing.

  She was the daughter of well-to-do Virginians in the Arkansas Ozarks, that feral land of green mounded hills and deep cuts exposing strata of granite and limestone, natural skyscrapers dizzying to behold from top or bottom, which stretching into the Nations would form the rear elevation of Ned Christie’s fort. The family moved soon after, and by age eight Myra Belle was heiress to a mercantile empire in Jasper County, Missouri: hotel, livery, and blacksmith shop, maintained by John Shirley and his sons, Bud and Preston, the girl’s brothers. In that year she enrolled in the Carthage Academy for Young Ladies, where she learned to pour tea, play piano, and read and write in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. She took to horseback lessons with decorous skill; lithographs that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper many years later blundered in showing a flaxen-haired hellion galloping through treacherous mountain passes astraddle. The one equestrian photograph she posed for shows a middle-aged woman wound in yards of velvet, with a plume on her hat, a pistol on her hip, and both lower limbs arranged demurely on one side. Boasted she: “I did everything Cole and Jesse and Frank did, sidesaddle and wearing a bustle.”

  Federal troops taught her to hate. They burned Shirley’s empire to the ground in 1863, charging that the hotel had been used to harbor rebels, and shot young Bud to death for protesting. In that year, most of Missouri decamped to Texas, and Shirley, an entrepreneur despite his grief, packed up the remains of his family and possessions and followed it to Scyene, where he and Preston bred horses for sale to cattle outfits intending to drive their beeves to the hungry postwar Eastern markets. This was when Myra Belle would learn the details of reproduction among mammals, and also the various techniques employed by start-up cattlemen to swell their herds. Hair branding, the running iron, and other methods and tools of the rustling trade became as familiar to her as the embroidery hoop.

  It’s unclear whether she met Cole Younger at this time, or if they’d known each other in Missouri, where he’d ridden with Bloody Bill Anderson’s bushwhackers and acquired the skills necessary to rob banks and trains. As the brains of the James Gang, he was too sanguine to hav
e trotted after Myra Belle to Texas, whatever her charms at the time, and so it’s likely their relationship heated up there, as did most things. Both had lost beloved family members to the Union; great romances have been constructed on common ground less firm. It’s a matter of record that she became pregnant, and whether the father was Younger or Frank Reed, whom she married, is open to speculation. Reed was a former guerrilla who had plundered Kansas and Missouri with the infamous Tom Starr. Myra Belle’s preferences had become predictable.

  Pearl was born in Bates County, Missouri, where Reed had rejoined Starr. The murder of a man named Shannon forced a temporary move to California. There a boy was born and scarcely christened before a mishandled stage robbery sent them back to Texas at speed. John Shirley lent them money to open a livery stable, but Myra Belle ran the business while Reed worked in the field to stock the stalls with stolen horses.

  This was an unwise undertaking in a state where horse thieves were regarded with less favor than common murderers. On August 6, 1874, Lamar County Deputy Sheriff J. T. Morris shot and killed Reed. His widow placed the children with her parents and took up dealing faro in Dallas, on occasion crooking the game in favor of Jesse James, who had fled the posses in Missouri to spend some Yankee gold while on holiday. The arrangement was strictly for old times’ sake; Jesse had nettled at Cole Younger’s equal share of notoriety for the raids they’d pulled off together, and Myra Belle remained loyal to her first love. She considered Jesse a straitlaced hypocrite who preached the Ten Commandments and kept only the ones that didn’t count, and Jesse thought her a harlot and a card cheat into the bargain.

  Followed a stint in Galena, Kansas, playing house with Cole’s cousin Bruce Younger, a gambler in the saloons of that cow capital. (Cole was at this time beginning a life sentence in the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater for the misguided robbery of the bank in Northfield.) When Bruce’s luck ran cold, she decamped to a sixty-acre farm on the Canadian River in the Nations, assuming housekeeping duties as the wife of Tom Starr’s son, a man nearly ten years her junior. It was at this point that she dropped the name Myra and became Belle Starr, on the advice of a Eufala numerologist; all her life the Bandit Queen considered herself a student of the modern sciences, refusing to travel without her astrology charts and a carved wooden head partitioned off like a butcher’s guide with phrenological labels identifying the seats of humor, passion, culture, perversity, and patience. (She claimed for her own part a prodigious bump of loyalty.)

  It was 1880, and the last golden decade of the authentic Wild West had begun. Within two years, Jesse James would be dead, shot in the back by a Judas; Pat Garrett would bust a cap on Billy the Kid, his confederate in the Lincoln County War; and Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton would learn the rudiments of keeping the peace for Judge Parker before deciding to try their hands at breaking it. Buffalo Bill would soon pimp the frontier for the entertainment of paying spectators in New York, Chicago, and Europe, Jesse’s brother Frank James would beat numberless charges of robbery and murder and conduct ticketed tours of the James ranch, and Sitting Bull and Geronimo would surrender to the U.S. Cavalry. A nation of dime-novel readers, their thirst unslaked, would turn their attention to Belle Starr, whose likeness in Harper’s and Ned Buntline’s Own bore a closer resemblance to Jenny Lind than the horse-faced matron who rose in kid gloves, a hat with a veil, and floor-length skirts when Judge Parker entered the Fort Smith courtroom. Beside her was Sam Starr, looking decidedly less comfortable in a stiff town suit purchased by their attorney for the occasion, his dark Cherokee neck cruelly bisected by a starched white collar. His black eyes sought constantly for egress, only to come to a full stop at the calm, muttonchopped countenance of George S. Winston, Parker’s private bailiff, and the butt of the Army Colt revolver rising ostentatiously above a cavalry scabbard strapped to his hip. He was a Negro, and Starr subscribed to his father’s fear and hatred of the fighting freedman. He was precocious in his precaution; Winston’s service to the court predated Parker’s, and in several attempts at escape from that room, none had succeeded.

  Belle was less impressed. When the principals and spectators were seating themselves, and before Parker could snap his gavel, she spotted an old enemy, and before Winston could react, she made a beeline for the penned-off section reserved for officers and the press, seized a little man seated there by his lapels, dragged him over the oaken railing, and slashed a red welt across his face with a riding whip Winston had not thought to confiscate from her. By the time the bailiff reached the scene, the man had slumped back into his seat, a hand to his cheek, and Belle surrendered her weapon without resistance. She left Winston holding it and returned to her spot beside Sam.

  It developed that the little man—Albert A. Powe, editor of the Fort Smith Evening Call—had written some fanciful prose upon the $10,000 reward offered for the arrest and conviction of Sam and Belle Starr, with emphasis upon Belle’s amorous adventures with the outlaw aristocracy, and she’d taken it upon herself to defend her honor without awaiting her husband’s intervention. Parker, a man of surpassing humor and irony despite his reputation in the Puritan East, banged for silence, waggled a finger at the codefendant, and warned her, with subterranean forces twitching at the corners of his mouth, that another such digression from the dignity of the courtroom would bring a charge of contempt, and time spent in the women’s detention in the old barracks. (Observers could not help but note, as she sank into a curtsey worthy of the Court of St. James’s, that Parker cupped a hand over the unseemly reaction in the lower half of his face.)

  Photographs had managed to capture the ravages of time upon the protean feminine face, but such reminiscences bear witness to the powers of seduction of those who have known beauty, and the wisdom that although it will not last, the memory that it once existed will continue to reap reward in the future. On this evidence alone, her loveliness stands beside Helen’s of Troy.

  The month was October 1883. Parker’s power was at its height. Barring presidential intervention—and Chester Alan Arthur, whose likeness belongs in Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language beside the phrase “political hack,” offered no such illusion—his pronouncements carried all the weight of the stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. But Belle was unimpressed. Parker was a man, by all accounts a gentleman, and once a woman has taken the measure of the brutes, the higher species are tame birds for the slaughter. The charge was horse stealing, a capital offense in that place, where to leave a man dismounted was to condemn him to death. But Parker had never marked a woman for hanging, and this prejudice encouraged her to believe that her danger was not mortal. The difference was the same that favored the gambler who could afford to lose. She bet everything on the hand that God had dealt her, and counted upon the odds to rescue Sam as well.

  Thank God they had not been brought up on a lesser charge.

  She had known many men, in and out of the Biblical sense, and to each she had been faithful, until such time as fate and the astrological forces instructed her to shift her allegiance. For the time being, they directed her to stand by Sam. When prosecutor Clayton, a mattress-faced carpetbagger straight out of a political cartoon in the Charleston Mercury, berated Sam on the stand for his deficiency in letters, she sent lethal glances from the attorney to Parker, who—it seemed to her—flinched, and directed Clayton to restrict himself to the evidence. This was an epiphany. It was as if she herself were directing the trial.

  Four days of this, the pendulum swinging between conviction and acquittal as the pettifogging lawyers parsed out the facts, evicted the jury while the finer points were dissected, squabbled over, and both counsels silenced like unruly children by the waggling finger behind the bench, and then Parker lectured to the panel at stultifying length and bade it retire to consider its verdict. No suspense there; had Parker simply said, “Guilty,” and thanked the jurors for the waste of their lives, the result would not have been different. After a brief recess—briefer, perhaps, if the clock were not
so near noon, and luncheon not promised for the deliberators—the farmer in the foreman’s seat, solemn and monkey-faced in his clean overalls, stood and let fall the stones of doom.

  “You will listen to the sentence of the law,” Parker told the couple, “which is that you, Sam and Belle Starr, will spend not less, nor more than one year in the Detroit House of Corrections, in penal servitude for your crimes against the citizenry of the United States.” Or some such babble; Belle paid little attention beyond the price.

  She caned chairs for nine months, in the stone building on the Detroit River (in the language of the pavement, up the river would survive its source by many years). None of the matrons complained about her behavior, and Sam was as docile on the men’s side. They were released on the same day, whereupon they left the Siberian Michigan wilderness for the opportunities still to be found in the Nations.

  TWELVE

  She saved Blue Duck’s life, after Isaac Parker, Jesus Christ, and Blue Duck himself had laid it to rest. It was a thing to take pride in, even if the life itself wasn’t worth a broken stay, and would likely play itself out behind walls of stone doing God-knows-what with his fellow prisoners.

  Belle liked his looks and grooming. He was a white man despite the name, spent fifteen minutes each morning trimming his pencil moustache with a pair of nail scissors, used pine needles to clean his teeth, and changed his shirt twice a week. He never raised a hand to her, even when she striped his face with her riding whip for laughing when she used a mounting block to board her favorite mare.