by The Branch
“I been wondering if you changed your mind about leasing them twenty acres,” he said.
“You wasted a trip. I’d as soon let them lie fallow as let you take a plow to them.”
A whining note entered his tone. “What the hell did I ever do to you?”
“Not a thing, Watson, and you won’t as long as I refuse you the opportunity.”
She’d had too much experience with his breed to give him specifics. Wives kept a loose hitch on secrets when there was another woman around to confide in, and Mrs. Watson was a refined Easterner who knew good breeding and trusted in it, although too late for her relationship with Edgar. Belle had learned from her that her husband had fled a murder charge in the Florida wilderness. It wasn’t the killing that bothered Belle so much as the length of his flight to avoid prosecution. Where she came from, a road agent placed his faith in his neighbors and in his knowledge of familiar terrain to confuse posses and make them lose heart and turn home. A man who abandoned his neighborhood to the enemy never stopped running. She saw a field half-tended when trouble came and no money to collect from a man on the scout.
“You’re lying about letting that land lay fallow,” he said. “I heard you got a tenant.”
“You heard right. We’ve entered into a contract, so go skulk about someone else’s barn.”
Watson produced makings from his overall bib and built a cigarette. He made as shoddy a job of it as he had his life. “He was to bust that contract, you’d have a summer’s worth of brush to clear away next growing season.”
“He’ll keep to it. Not every man is as slippery as you.”
“Trouble dogs you like a whipped hound. If Parker’s men take you down for this or that, the territory will claim your spread, and there’s a parcel of seed gone to crows and such and nothing to show for a broken back. Might could be he’d see reason when it’s put to him and cut his losses.”
“We’ll see what they have to say about that in Tahlequah, and Fort Smith if it comes to that. Conspiracy to violate a signed covenant is a matter for the courts.”
“I reckon the Nation and Parker’s court have enough on their hands with Ned Christie and the like not to trouble me over it.”
Belle lost her temper. That wet mouth and what it was doing to that sorry cigarette infuriated her sense of the social graces. “I don’t suppose the United States officers would trouble you, but the authorities in Florida might.”
Watson, it seemed to her, turned green. With shaking fingers he took one last slobbery drag on his smoke and dropped it onto the trodden hay at his feet, where it might have caught the barn on fire if she hadn’t mashed it out as soon as he left. “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all day long,” was all he had to say in parting.
Months passed. Her unplanted twenty grew over in weeds and juniper and she made plans to sell it in the spring. Younger’s Bend was poor enough ground for crops, and with Sam’s old gang scattered to the winds it was a useless space of God’s forsaken earth.
Reed sent her a copy of Blue Duck’s pardon, signed by Cleveland. It was months old, and she had yet to hear from the man she’d worked so hard to set free.
On February 2, 1889, she was one day short of her forty-third birthday. Her gift was Jim July’s sullen acquiescence to her prodding; men were weak creatures, after all, boys at heart, and the legend of Sam Starr’s bold surrender sent him over at the last. She watched him assemble the rags of his best finery, an old guerrilla shirt whose linen ruffles she’d put to the iron with care, a slouch hat without too many stains and a snakeskin band, and a fine pair of stovepipe boots, and agreed to ride with him as far as San Bois in the Choctaw Nation, thirty miles from the Canadian. They stopped for the night at the home of friends, dined on biscuits and gravy, boiled radishes, and Arbuckle’s coffee strong enough to raise a blister on a bullhide, slept fitfully on a featherbed, and parted at sunup on Belle’s birthday, Jim to Fort Smith and Belle back to Younger’s Bend. At 3:00 P.M., saddleworn and hungry, she put in at the house of Jack Rose, a neighbor, and partook of fare similar to the previous evening’s. She could not help but remember Reed’s promise that she would celebrate Blue Duck’s freedom over French snails and red wine.
In her physical and emotional exhaustion, her loneliness, Belle was only partly aware of Edgar Watson’s presence in the yard. Everyone knew everyone else in the eastern Nations; friends were friendly with enemies, and enemies observed truces in the name of Christian forebearance. She recalled, as she saddled up for the ride home, that the men who had met to slay one another in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, had played a convivial game of poker the night before. This was too much complication for the dullards who wrote cheap novels, but was entirely in keeping with standards in the territories. In any case she considered Watson beneath contempt and outside serious consideration; the mere mention of Florida had been sufficient to bring him to heel. She jerked tight the cinch, mounted modestly to the side, and quirted her trusty whip across Venus’ withers.
Her way led around Watson’s poor farm, where a fence required her to detour through low scrub to pick up the road that led to Younger’s Bend and her cabin, which stood one hundred fifty yards from Watson’s house. A figure stood behind that fence as she passed. She gave it no heed other than to spur Venus into a lively trot.
The first charge struck her full in the back, tipping her from the saddle as the second raked her neck. She knew it for turkey shot, not nearly as heavy as the pellets meant for buck deer, but the force of it stunned her as she struggled to roll onto her back in the road. She knew from observation that people who fell on their faces invariably died in that position, like limp rags with one arm crumpled beneath them. The fire to survive burned fiercely within her.
Thus she had a full view of the killer who leapt the fence and poured a freshly reloaded barrel into her face and throat.
But the fire still burned. She was conscious when a neighbor brought Pearl to her mother’s side many minutes after the shooter left her in a wallow of bloody mud. Belle managed to string syllables into one or two words that meant nothing to her listeners—Open your ears! she screamed in her skull; Understand me!—then coughed up a jiggerful of blood and sank into darkness.
Marshal John Carroll noted that Judge Parker moaned and closed his eyes when the word came in of Belle Starr’s death. After deputies reported the details, he called for the detention of Edgar A. Watson, Belle’s son Ed, and Jim July.
“Your Honor, July was on his way to Fort Smith when it happened.”
“You of all people should know better than to underestimate these border raiders when it comes to hard riding. He could have doubled back, then dug in his spurs for town after the murder was done. Some men get to brooding over good advice from a woman when they’re let alone.”
For July’s part, when the news arrived he procured a fresh mount, lathered it up clear back to the Canadian, threw down on Watson, and brought him in to jail himself. But the man never faced trial. Neighbors declined to testify against him at his hearing, and communications with Florida failed to produce a warrant for murder or any other felony. The charge was dropped, and July’s action removed him from suspicion. No one was ever indicted in the death of Belle Starr.
Parker permitted himself a moment to remember a woman he would miss in his courtroom. Belle Starr had won the granite heart of Cole Younger, called Jesse James a hypocrite to his face, beaten justice in Fort Smith, yet withal maintained the outward appearance of a woman of culture; she’d read The Iliad in the earliest Latin translation, while Parker himself had struggled with Pope’s popular version in English, ridden the High Country in the pirate tradition of Mary Read and Jeanne de Belville, and very nearly had shot the best prosecutor in the United States out from under his hat in full view of the citizens of Sebastian County; she had romanced a Texas banker, it was said, and left him with a thirty-thousand-dollar shortage in his books; a male citizen of the Cherokee Nation had been forced at the point of her gun
to retrieve her hat when it blew off her head, which action she explained was a lesson in good manners. Belle had had her troubles with her grown children, as who had not, and brought two of the Eighth District’s most infamous bandits to the hobble in Fort Smith. She had known how to reload at full gallop and which spoon to use when she stirred her tea. Parker’s world was a more orderly place without her, and so much more drab. He wept.
IV
A FLAW IN THE SYSTEM
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
—FRANCIS BACON
FIFTEEN
A hangman had feelings.
He was a man for all that, and fretted about bills and cracks in the cistern and whether he was a good husband and father. The pests who swarmed in to plumb his depths and make them public had paid entirely too much attention to the “hang” and none at all to the “man.” But they were less than human themselves, and so when they came to call he filled his pipe and let them fondle his rope collection and dropped before them his pearls of wisdom burnished with Bavarian graveyard humor. “Haunted? No. I have never hanged a man who came back to have the job done over.”
They took it all down like monkeys pretending to be stenographers and still managed to get it wrong. He read that he’d smiled grimly (a difficult expression to carry off; he’d tried before and his son had laughed at him) and said, “No, and if one ever came back to haunt me I’d hang ’em again.” They compared his deep-set eyes to sockets in a bare skull; his beard was “noose-shaped,” his build cadaverous. To a man they plundered the mortuary advertisements in their own newspapers for terms to characterize him. An editorial cartoonist in Baltimore had rendered a vile likeness in pen-and-ink, a humpbacked Reaper grinning in his hood with a pile of human bones at his feet; he’d thrown it in the fireplace before Annie could see it.
She’d been little then, and by God if he could turn back the clock he wouldn’t hesitate.
It grieved George Maledon that his daughter had in all probability lost her innocence to the one young man in Fort Smith who did not fear him. Charles Parker was a self-loving dandy, and enjoyed an easy popularity among fellows of his own age that went no deeper than the white enamel on a wash basin, beneath which was brackish zinc. Under it they liked him no better than anyone else and professed friendship merely to declare independence of their disapproving parents. Their gibes, good-natured on the surface, bore an adumbration of contempt for themselves as well as for him. In that society, Charles alone was immune to self-loathing.
Fort Smith had grown beyond all prediction since Maledon had first set foot on the scaffold, but it was like an onion that had grown too swiftly by way of heavy unseasonal rains, with the outer layers wrapped loosely around the solid inner bulb, wherein resided the small rough town of 1875, where every citizen knew all the others and news of their least consequential actions was more current and reliable in the barbershop and around the barrel stove in the Mercantile than in the Elevator and the Evening Call combined; there, he had learned of his daughter’s unchaste reputation. Young Charlie had claimed her virtue, then turned from her to fresh challenges, and rather than picking herself up from the dust and shaking it from her skirts she had continued to drag herself through it with whoever’s son was willing, and with one or two who were no longer anyone’s son, with wives and children Annie’s own age at home. Saddle tramps she had had, half-caste Indians from the Nations, and men who had come to town to face Parker’s justice for misdemeanors in the territories. She had wasted little time after her humiliation, with the result that when her father learned of her infamy, it was far too late to take a razor strop to her with any promise that it would raise any more than welts on her legs and sweat on his brow. He took it down from its hook above the basin, held it for a time, and returned it to its place, years older than when he had unhooked it.
“What did you expect?” asked his wife, when he confronted her. “Did you think she would come to you with her pain, you in your study with those nooses all around and pictures of the dead men whose necks you put them on?”
“It was the law did that. I only took out the suffering.”
“Did you think the suffering began when you sent them through the trap?”
“Where is Annie?”
“I haven’t seen her in days. How many days before that did you see her?”
He said no more. Since the day his wife had chucked his first tintypes and ropes down the well, he’d known it was impossible to argue with a woman on the basis of logic. You asked them a question and they responded by asking another that had no answer.
Disloyally—so he admitted to himself—he blamed his late wife for his daughter’s beauty. Plain women had little to fear from predatory males, and had Annie inherited her father’s bony brow or her stepmother’s unornamental features instead of the wealth of black hair that glistened unfettered to her waist, the striking eyes and Cupid’s-bow lips, the figure that needed no corset to lift the breasts and narrow the waist, she would have remained at home. She was also too intelligent for her gender, becoming aware at an early age that the woman whose responsibility it became to rear her from childhood cared more for their son, James; and that, together with her father’s dread reputation that kept respectable suitors from their door, had forced her into the gravitational pull of young men whose histories demonstrated their lack of fear of the engine of justice he helped to maintain. Children brought up in divided households were rebellious by nature. What better way to declare one’s independence than to take up with the enemies of domestic tranquility?
Of all his acquaintances, restricted as they were by circumstances to the officers of the Eighth District Court, there was one alone who might be expected to understand his plight and offer counsel. He put his forage cap in hand and called upon Judge Parker in his chambers.
Parker sat him down with the reserved cordiality he’d shown Maledon from their first meeting, in that same room so redolent with the memory of good cigars, disintegrating leather bindings, and the fading phantoms of sour mash and expectorated tobacco left by the conflicted men who had sat before him behind that great walnut desk. Reading his guest’s expression with those eyes that had recorded the characters of a hundred or more defendants and hundreds more who had given evidence for and against them, the judge excused himself, and returned moments later with a stout bottle of brandy and two crystal glasses clutched in his hairless pink hand and poured them each two fingers of honey-colored liquid. Maledon, who read men as easily, and who as Parker’s closest ally in the hundred years’ war against chaos knew his host better even than William H. H. Clayton and the army of men who had ridden for him in the Nations, recognized this as an act without precedence. The brandy, of course, came from Mary Parker’s own store, procured through the ladies’ entrance to the House of Lords to bring on the sleep that would not come to her otherwise. The woman kept impossible standards, and would have been far more content wedded to a store clerk or a postal carrier, whose most important decisions did not involve the lives of men. The same was true of Maledon’s own wife. He and Parker were twins from the same exacting mother, however much the judge feared and detested his chief executioner’s proximity to the consequences of his pronouncements of sentence. Parker’s fingers never touched their necks.
For all that, Maledon had spent less time in that room than anyone else in the district’s service. There was the brief interview that had led to his promotion from turnkey to hangman, and two other confrontations, when he’d asked to be excused the abhorrent duty of hanging a fellow veteran of the Union Army, and when he’d rebelled against sacrificing his time with family to operate the gallows at night. (Much good that had done him.) Parker had agreed both times, handing the first assignment to a guard from the jail and postponing the second to a daylight hour. Parker was reason personified, distilled as purely as the spirits they shared upon this occasion. Parker for his part took a healthy sip in commemora
tion of the singular nature of the event; Maledon, whose lips had not brushed liquor since the early days of his service to the Army of the Potomac, dampened his moustache merely and left the remainder of the contents of his glass untasted.
“Annie—” He cleared his throat.
“Yes.”
Parker, he now saw, with the rush of disillusion that comes to a disciple when the fog lifts and he sees his idol for a creature of clay, had invested all the penitence of a degraded sinner into that single syllable. In it his listener heard a paragraph of apology and confession. Charles Parker was a cross to be borne only by the lowest of God’s creatures.
The silence that followed fell with the thud of a charge from a Confederate mortar. It was not to be borne, and so Parker filled it with a slap of his palm upon the stack of leather portfolios that made an impenetrable forest between him and the desk’s inlaid top. Maledon did not deceive himself that the records there contained had direct application to the business at hand; it was symbolic of the towering evil that faced Fort Smith.
“Marshal Yoes’s men keep a vigilant eye upon the recidivists who pass through this jurisdiction,” Parker said. “I won’t blaspheme so far as to say that I mark the sparrow’s fall, but through them I flatter myself to say that I know rather more about what goes on in the district than the gentlemen of the press.”
Maledon made no expression, his head tilted forward and his beard on his chest, as he learned that his daughter had been seen in company of late with a man named Frank Carver, at twenty-four her senior by six years. Parker’s description, detailed and factual, painted a picture of the sort of young man who attracted the attention of impressionable girls: tall and slender, with barbered imperials and a taste for fine clothes, including the splendid boots that had led so often to covetousness and tragedy in the Nations, which was where he made his home. He spent money far too ostentatiously to have come by it through honest labor.