The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  In September 1893, the Doolins cut loose at thirteen deputy U.S. marshals surrounding a house where they’d holed up near Ingalls. The return fire shattered windows, knocked shingles off their hinges, killed a goat, and shot away the front door, but three deputies were killed and all but two of the gang got away: Arkansas Tom, who surrendered, and a teenage prostitute named Jennie Stevens, whose horse Bill Tilghman shot out from under her as she leapt a fence toward freedom. The tiny Stevens and a friend, Annie McDougal, had been selling their favors to the Doolins for months, donning male dress to act as lookout during some robberies and stealing eggs and chickens to feed them when they were in hiding. Tilghman, exasperated at the size of his catch, spanked Stevens over his knee before placing her in custody. After a bank in Pawnee gave up ten thousand dollars to her friends, he and Steve Burke, another Parker deputy, captured McDougal, but not before she’d shredded Burke’s face with her nails, knocked off his hat, and torn tufts of hair from his scalp.

  “Little bitches,” said Burke, upon depositing her in the women’s quarters of the Fort Smith jail beside Jennie Stevens. A reporter overheard and, either misunderstanding him or in deference to decorous editorial policy, dubbed the dwarfish Stevens “Little Britches.” Not to be outdone, his colleagues anointed McDougal “Cattle Annie,” and the pair enjoyed a brief scarlet vogue in half-dime novels before history lost interest. Parker damned the Fourth Estate for making romantic figures out of petty thieves and cheap harlots.

  The comedy was light enough, and too much so for the grim record. In one afternoon in Ingalls, the Doolin Gang had slain more men than the Daltons had managed to do in three years, and in the same gesture slaughtered more peace officers than the Jameses and Youngers combined. Parker raged at his new marshal, George J. Crump. The rewards mounted.

  The gang spread out. It slew a sheriff during a robbery in Canadian, Texas; an auditor in a bank in Southwest City, Missouri (witnesses identified Bill Dalton, reformed politician, as his murderer); and returned to Dover, Oklahoma Territory, robbing the Rock Island line and shooting to pieces several innocent bystanders during the getaway. Rumor held that Red Buck was mustered out of the association for this atrocity; casualties among noncombatants played hell with romantic legend. (In Thieves’ Valhalla, Jesse James played faro with Belle Starr and chuckled, stopping the hole in his head with a palm to preserve the resonance.) After Tulsa Jack was stricken dead on that ride, and Bitter Creek Newcomb and Charley Pierce fell victim to reward-conscious ranch hands, the gang was decimated. Raids spread as far as California and Iowa would be laid at its door in reporters’ desperate attempts to stretch the gravy, but their editors grew restless; it was true that they wrote for morons, but morons had been known to rebel, as witness the election of Benjamin Harris to the office of president, which error had been rectified by the return of Grover Cleveland. With more pressing news streaming in from economic panic in the East and the Spanish situation in the Caribbean, and nothing fresh from the vanishing Nations, the name Doolin slipped to the inside pages, then away.

  But Bill Doolin was still at large, and his final chapter would be the strangest of all, although none would know its truth for many years.

  George Maledon followed the saga listlessly in the company of the dead men who shared his tiny study. His interest in criminal activity in the Nations, which he had once kept track of as avidly as a farmer tracing the path of a blight that would one day be his personal concern, had evaporated, and with it his zeal for his profession. He began to consider retirement. Then in the spring of 1895, three years since Annie had left the shelter of his roof, his wife came to him in his study to say that his daughter had been brought to St. James Hospital in Fort Smith with a bullet in her spine.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the Nations, Ginger Jake was known as the Great Divider: You never knew how it would affect a man under its influence, or indeed if it would affect the same man twice the same way.

  Sometimes, the distillate made the drinker more the way he was when sober, creating a kind of caricature. If he was angry and given to violent outbursts, it might make him react to the smallest slight with savage blows or a weapon; if he was gentle and good-humored, he might meet the vilest insult with a jest or an offer to buy a drink for his calumniator.

  At other times, a complete reversal of personality was the result. Many of the men who employed the opportunity of George Maledon’s scaffold to deliver oratories on the pernicious poison of strong drink and women of ill fame before they swung were by reputation God-fearing men of good conduct who had turned bestial on the authority of Jamaica ginger. A number of their fellows had lost their lives refusing to defend themselves against assailants, imagining themselves to be more peaceful men than they were when sober, and trusting in all mankind.

  Frank Carver, soft-spoken and clean in his habits, liked by men and admired by women, belonged to the most dangerous category, a changeling who depending upon the amount drunk, the strength of the mix, and the phase of the moon, might laugh off an injurious remark or horsewhip a stranger he suspected was talking about him behind his back on no evidence at all. Those who had seen him on benders had learned to give him distance or flutter on his perimeter, waiting to see which way the frog jumped before pressing their acquaintance. However, this last course was perilous, because his mood was likely to shift with the speed of a striking snake, but with less warning. There were men in Texas who could confirm that, if their shattered jaws didn’t get in the way of their speech, and a divorced woman in Okmulgee with a scar that pulled her face out of line when she tried to smile.

  Most of what went into the record about Carver’s last meeting with Annie Maledon came directly from the written statement she had dictated before she died, eleven weeks after a round from his revolver lodged in the soft tissue of her spine, where no surgeon could get to it without causing more damage. Her last days had been spent in a state of semiconsciousness, with morphine in her veins to ease her passing over.

  Carver, she said, returned from Texas while she was in residence with Frank Walker, a man known to them both, and called upon her there several times when Walker was out. Harsh words were spoken, resulting twice in threats against her life if she did not come away with him. Annie explained that by this time her former lover was in a state of constant inebriation, and that she feared to be with him, as she had seen how quickly his humor could change from affable to morose. The most frightening thing about him in this condition, she said, was that he managed to walk straight and speak without slurring under circumstances that would have reduced a man of much greater height and bulk to a gibbering idiot without a rudder; one had to know him as intimately as she to recognize the hazard.

  On the night of March 25, 1895, Carver sent word to meet him on the east side of the tracks belonging to the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad in Muskogee; the note informed her that he was leaving for Texas forever and that it was the last time she would see him. She suspected his motives, but was reluctant to ignore the invitation and give him cause to change his mind. However far she had drifted from the lessons of home and family, she still prayed every night, beginning with the prayer that Carver would go away and never return. She persuaded Frank Walker to accompany her to the assignation.

  Carver’s appearance under the light of a tallow streetlamp reassured them both. He never failed to put on a fresh collar, drunk or sober, but his boots shone, his coat was brushed and pressed, his whiskers trimmed, and for the first time in weeks the whites of his eyes were clear. Annie leaned forward from the waist just far enough to smell the sweet scent of the pine needles Carver used to pick his teeth, and determine that there was no liquor on his breath. She satisfied herself that he had broken the shackles once again and nudged Walker, who stepped forward and shook Carver’s hand.

  The three agreed to bless Carver’s departure with a last night on the town. In the first place they stopped, Carver immediately began drinking, and as they moved on to the next, Annie clung close
r to Walker, who curled his arm around her waist comfortingly; he did not know the man well enough to recognize the signs of moral disintegration hidden beneath his clear speech and steady step. While leaving the third house of notorious reputation, Carver leaned close to Annie and whispered in her ear: “Honey, you’re done for tonight. I’m going to kill you before morning.”

  “What did he say?” asked Walker, when she clutched his arm.

  Carver produced a heavy-barreled revolver from beneath his waistcoat and fired it into the air.

  “None of that, Frank,” Walker said. “You’ll have the Cherokee Lighthorse on us all.”

  Carver grinned and returned the revolver to his belt. They walked another square. Then he jerked out the weapon and fired twice at a streetlamp. The second bullet came closest, brushing the flame. When Walker opened his mouth to protest, Carver leveled the revolver at Annie, who whimpered and turned into the other man’s arms. There was another report and she shuddered and sagged in Walker’s embrace.

  Carver fled, but returned moments later as a crowd gathered around the young woman lying in the street with Walker supporting her head with a hand. “Oh, Annie, are you dead?” cried Carver. “Who has done this?” Then he ran away again.

  Annie Maledon’s former lover was arrested that night in the home he was once again sharing with his wife and children and removed in shackles to Fort Smith, with the deputies in escort speculating aloud as to whether George Maledon would attend to his humanitarian duty or let Carver strangle; George White, whose blunder while serving in Maledon’s capacity had led to the beheading of John Thornton, described that affair and said he wondered which was more distressing for the man in the noose. Carver arrived in Fort Smith pale and shrunken in his restraints.

  Frank Walker had not been seen since the night of the slaying; rumors insisted he had a wife in Texas and had likely returned to her, but no one knew the address or if he lived there under the same name. While the prosecution was preparing its case, Carver’s brother and other relatives pooled their resources and retained J. Warren Reed to plead for the defense.

  In the years since his successful fight on behalf of Belle Starr’s lover, Blue Duck, Reed had if anything adopted more resplendence in his dress, with velvet facings on his lapels and ornaments of fraternal affiliations dangling like tiny scalps from his watch chain; his girth had increased as well, and he had foresworn at last the discomfort of a corset. His persistent preference for clawhammer coats caused the citizens who saw him strutting the boardwalks brandishing his gold-headed stick to remark upon the way his backside thrust out his tails like a rooster’s. These same observers gossiped that his remarkable wife, Viola, who had studied for the bar in West Virginia but had been balked by the barricade of her gender, was the more accomplished lawyer of the pair, and that without her application and counsel, the popinjay whose very name turned Judge Parker’s gaze glacial would still be defending chicken thieves in the Appalachians. But Parker himself, while enjoying this assessment, knew it to be unfair; Reed was an aggressive debater, predatory in the extreme, and a polished thespian whose stage was the courtroom. He could charm and repel by turns, and in so doing deflect attention from the evidence most damaging to his client.

  Before 1889, the Reeds of the world had been helpless against Parker’s suzerainty. With no fixed system of appeal in place, the judge could turn the stampede over the facts with a snap of his gavel, a threat to consign the transgressor to the basement dungeon for contempt, and what amounted to a directed conviction during his instructions to the jury. But Washington had cut the ballocks off the old bull; such tactics were grounds for reversal, and Reed, who knew he stood no chance in Parker’s court the first time around, had but to goad the old man into committing a judicial indiscretion that would earn a second trial. A baseball enthusiast, the attorney was determined to keep fouling off pitches until he wore down the fellow on the mound and belted one deep into fair territory. That had been his strategy throughout his first seven years in practice in Fort Smith, and of the 134 men he had represented in capital cases, only two had hanged. The rest had been discharged during preliminary examination, acquitted by juries, or had their sentences reduced or commuted by order of authorities higher than Parker. The letter signed by President Cleveland ordering Blue Duck’s pardon hung in a frame in Reed’s office opposite a steel lithograph of the martyred Abraham Lincoln.

  In Walker’s absence, conviction depended heavily upon the deathbed statement of the victim. Reed here was in his element: As handy as Blue Duck’s isolation had proven in structuring his pardon, he valued even more the testimony of an eyewitness who could be cross-examined without its author offering a word in rebuttal. He went to work on the several inconsistencies in the rambling, agonized text, drew numerous objections from the prosecution, sustainments and warnings from the bench, and made copious notes for his request for appeal of the verdict and sentence he fully anticipated. The prosecution, less savage following the retirement of William H. H. Clayton in favor of a judgeship in the new central district in McAlester, was vigorous nonetheless, and the jury voted to convict. On July 9, Parker sentenced Carver to hang on the first day of October.

  Throughout the proceedings, George Maledon, who seldom attended court, sat in the gallery, keeping his own counsel and directing his sunken gaze toward the back of the head of the man who sat at the defense table beside Reed. He was among the first to leave when the verdict was announced.

  Fort Smith society, which convened without exception to retry all of Parker’s cases in the Silver Dollar, the brothels on First Street, and the sewing circles on Garrison, pondered over whether Maledon would set aside his professional considerations and select common balers’ twine and a shoddy choke-knot for the man who had stolen his daughter’s innocence (this against anecdotal evidence to the contrary) and her life, so excruciating in its prolonged withdrawal, with spinal fluid staining the winding-sheets; but it had underestimated the depth of his dedication to the machinery of justice. He determined on using virgin rope, and rejected two shipments of Kentucky hemp that he pronounced substandard because of heavy rains during the growing season before deciding upon the third. His discrimination in this detail rivaled those of connoisseurs of French wine, who knew vineyards and their climate with biblical scholarship. The fibers that would separate Frank Carver from this pale would be the finest in Western agriculture, and the measure of pitch and linseed as precise as a chemist’s when preparing a purgative for a close family member. Like Parker, whose reversals and disappointments had honed his judicial decisions to a razor’s edge, America’s Executioner was devoted to the highest principles in this personal affair. He applied these same attentions to the scaffold, ordering the replacement of certain joints that appeared quite servicable on the surface and supervising the sanding down of the finish by convict labor and the application of a fresh coat of whitewash.

  The infamous scaffold had by this time acquired a slant roof to protect it from rain. When viewed from behind in its high enclosure, it resembled nothing more sinister than a storage building for harnesses or grain. The black scars of that vengeful bolt of lightning at its inauguration had long since been concealed by cosmetic attention. Parker’s Tears had never looked more decorous.

  These attentions were lost on the Supreme Court, whose members had not forgotten the injuries inflicted upon it in public by the pen of the man in charge of the Eighth District Court. They reviewed Reed’s writ of error, pared to the basics by the coolheaded Viola, considered the implications of a sentence of death carried out by the father of the victim in the case, reversed Parker, and granted the defendant a new trial. Smelling blood, Reed launched a fresh attack on four points of conflict in Annie’s statement, and this time secured a victory more apparent to him than to most of those who followed the trial: While the first jury had voted in favor of Carver’s execution after four short hours, the second required two full days of deliberation before agreeing upon a verdict of murder in the fi
rst degree.

  Maledon, frustrated only by the protraction of justice, re-stretched his rope, dismantled, cleaned, and reassembled the gears that operated the trap, and made the mistake of confiding to an acquaintance that he was looking forward to this execution. The remark reached Reed, who conveyed it to certain supernumeraries with the ear of higher powers in the system. Meanwhile he filed a second writ of error. A third trial was granted. The additional time enabled the attorney for the defense to assemble a set of witnesses who offered testimony confirming Annie Maledon’s faithlessness to most of the virtues. This jury ruled in favor of murder in the second degree and recommended life imprisonment.

  At the sentencing, Parker hesitated, fingering his gavel, and was seen to review his prepared remarks, sliding his spectacles up and down his nose as if the words he himself had written were foreign to him; which in fact they were. He was weary, visibly so, he had a pain in his belly and a heart that beat all out of cadence with the consistency of his moral principles. Each new reversal of his decisions had plagued him with the unfamiliar malady of second thoughts and self-doubt. At length he tightened his grip on the handle his palm had polished to a high gloss, ruled in favor of the advice of the jurors, and commended Frank Carver to the custody of the penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, for the rest of his natural life. The gavel cracked.

  George Maledon that day petitioned Judge Parker for his retirement. The request was granted. After a brief attempt at the grocery business in Fort Smith, where his wife kept the books and wrapped the customers’ purchases with care, he bought an eighty-acre farm in Fayetteville, Arkansas; but Mother Nature proved as harsh a partner as the justice system, and he gave his acreage to the weeds and joined a carnival tour. There in a tent not much larger than his study, he exhibited his collection of ropes and tintypes and made his case for the certainty of punishment in a scripted speech cribbed largely from Parker’s comments to the press and accepted questions from his audience. Spiritualism was in the ascendant; most of his interviewers were curious about the shades of the men he had slain. He combed his fingers through his beard and said that if any of them were disposed to return, he would simply hang them again.