by J. Lee Butts
“Absolute truth of the thing was that I had less than fond memories of the night I dynamited Morgan Bryce’s cabin down in the Choctaw Nation. Shower of debris when that one stick blew his table through the roof put several bumps on my head, and if any of the heavier stuff had managed to find me, I’d probably be buried in his front yard today. Folks like Bryce and Big Eagle had a habit of digging in like badgers, and about as hard to root out. Figured if I went after Smilin’ Jack and had to blast him loose, Cletis Broadbent was the man I needed to see. On top of my Smilin’ Jack problem, I’d just managed to sink into my favorite chair and pull my boots off when Elizabeth presented me with even more reasons not to spend much time soaking my feet.”
3
“THE WORST KIND OF MEN”
“HAYDEN, I HAVE something important I must discuss with you.” Her eyebrows pinched together and caused deep furrows across her forehead. Last time she sounded that serious was when she told me about her father’s death. She’d pulled a footstool up next to my chair. A folded piece of the roughest kind of paper rested on her lap, partially concealed in her favorite lace handkerchief.
Reached out for her, placed my hand on her shoulder, and said, “What’s the problem, Elizabeth?”
She covered my hand with hers and gave me that painful, more-serious-than-yellow-fever look again. “Several years before you arrived in Fort Smith I had a friend named Birdie Mae Blackwell.”
“I’ve never so much as heard you mention anyone by that name.” Like most men, I flattered the bejabbers out of myself and harbored the rather elevated belief that my wife told me absolutely everything. The abrupt revelation about Birdie Mae was the first time I realized Elizabeth had deep, perhaps dark secrets, and an astonishing skill for keeping me from finding out things she didn’t want known.
“Birdie Mae arrived in town in the back of a spring wagon very close to being dead. She’d delivered a baby on the side of the road just outside Fort Smith. The loss of blood and lack of treatment almost killed her. A family on their monthly trip in from Dyer found the poor girl and brought her here. The first place they stopped was our store. I nursed her back to health.”
“Sweet Merciful God, Elizabeth. Did you know her prior to any of that?”
“No. I’d never seen her before the day Lester McIntyre and his wife appeared out front with the girl in her wagon.”
“What about the child?”
“She had already passed.” Pained sorrow filled her voice. “We buried her out in the Little Angels section of the town cemetery under a stone with the name Ramona chiseled into it. Birdie Mae stayed on with Papa and me for over a year. We became close friends in spite of the fact that she had one serious and evidently insurmountable character flaw.”
“And what was that?” Couldn’t have imagined the answer I got back then. But now, today, it would be real easy.
“She had an almost lethal fascination for the worst kind of men. Birdie’s beauty captivated everyone she met—men and women. Auburn hair cut like a boy’s, beautiful brown eyes, a willowy figure, and all the attributes to accentuate it served to gain the attention of men for miles around Fort Smith. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that she had a face like one of those angels used to illustrate passages in our family Bible. On top of everything else, she never met a stranger and, all too often, that overly friendly attitude was misinterpreted. We had a constant parade of randy males milling around the store the entire time she stayed with us.”
“Did you ever learn where she came from and how she managed to get here?” I asked.
“She did finally tell me most of her story, but only after extracting an ironclad promise not to act on anything she revealed.”
Secrets were like puzzles to me, and I couldn’t resist asking, “And what did she reveal, Elizabeth?”
“She came to us from Memphis where her father was a well-known and highly respected lawyer, judge, and local politician. They had been very close because of her mother’s untimely death from consumption when Birdie was but a child.” Elizabeth picked nervously at the lace handkerchief twisted around her left hand, then caressed the letter in her lap as though to gain enough strength to keep going. “Once she reached her early teens, the tender connection to her father vanished in the cloud of her promiscuous behavior. Judge Blackwell caught her more than once unclothed and in the arms of a man he’d never seen before. On more than one occasion he grew so violently incensed with her wanton actions that he beat her senseless with a buggy whip. As long as she could, Birdie harbored the secret of a child that resulted from one of her unfortunate liaisons. Then, in the seventh month of a pregnancy she could no longer hide, she took one of her father’s wagons, fled Memphis, and simply headed west. I suppose the harshness of a month on Arkansas back roads in a wagon hastened the miscarriage of poor little Ramona.”
“Where is all this leading, Elizabeth?”
“As I said, she stayed with us for about a year, then left in the company of one of the most awful men you can imagine.”
Well, having just heard Birdie Mae Blackwell’s history, it didn’t come as too great a shock. The story seemed all too common and one oft repeated about women and girls who managed to make their way to wild places like Fort Smith and the Nations. “Who?”
“His name was Martin Luther Big Eagle and he leads a band of brigands who live in an infamous criminal refuge out on the Canadian called Robber’s Roost.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather from a baby duck’s behind. There he was again, Martin Luther Big Eagle himself. A man whose name I’d never heard spoken as little as a week before.
“This note came while you were out in the Nations with Barnes Reed. I was helping a customer in the store one day last week when a short, filthy man dressed in the most raggedy clothing you can imagine just appeared behind me. He handed me this note and said, ‘Tole her I’d brang it to yuh,’ then disappeared like a puff of smoke.” She handed me the ragged piece of paper. “Read it.”
It appeared to have been written on the rendered portion of a heavy page ripped from the back of a family Bible. Don’t remember the exact words in the beginning, but she said something to the effect that her life had turned into a living hell since leaving Fort Smith. Big Eagle had become brutally abusive, and she’d sought refuge in the Good Book in an effort to find some comfort from her persecutions. She admitted the error of her ways, and begged Elizabeth to do anything she could to help rescue her from a life she felt would soon drive her to self-destruction. The final few words are still etched in my brain as if by acid. “I have secured a small pistol and, if my situation does not see some alteration soon, I will be forced to bring an end to my own life.” Her cry for help was a piteous thing and brought tears to my wife’s eyes again as I read it aloud.
Guess I could have told Elizabeth I already had plans for Big Eagle, and the rescue of Birdie Mae Blackwell would just be icing on a great big cake, but didn’t.
“Can you help her, Hayden?”
Suppose it was one of the few times a husband has a chance to look heroic to his wife without really having to put out much effort, so I took it.
I kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “I’ll do what I can.”
Next morning, Carlton and I started our search for Cletis Broadbent’s place. After a day or so of ambling all over the rolling hills surrounding the Mulberry Community First Baptist Church, we finally came upon a crude farmhouse so far back out in the sticks the chickens carried big clubs to fight off the wildcats. Pretty sure Cletis worked body and soul at the contraband whiskey business in an effort to make enough money to stay alive. Most likely, he did his share of introducing over in the Nations, but he was smart enough to cook the stuff away from the house. Besides, I hadn’t come there to arrest him for bootlegging.
When we presented him with my proposal of a fifty-cent-a-day fee for the use of his military fieldpiece, the man almost broke down and cried. I figured we’d need the thing for at least a month, a
nd fifteen dollars was probably more money than ole Cletis had seen at one time in most of his adult life. Less than five minutes after our arrival, we stood around a heap of canvas in a rickety, crumbling barn and listened as he described his favorite toy.
“Yessiree bob, sir. She’s a beaut. Know yew boys’ve seen me set her off at the Fourth of July celebration in Fort Smith. That old cannon out front of the courthouse is plugged, yew know. Cain’t be fired. So every year since that spell of well-known Yankee-inspired unpleasantness back in the sixties, I drags Miss Beulah here over and shakes the ground a little. Usually shoot her off five or six times.”
He pulled the heavy tarp away from the gun, stood back, and admired it. A tobacco-stained smile sliced across his round, hairless face. Dark brown juice from a piece of homegrown Arkansas twist dribbled off his chin and decorated the front of his faded, heavily patched overalls.
“Yew boys want to take her out back and shoot her off a time or two so’s yew get the hang of it?” He grinned like a kid asking if a friend wanted to take a turn rolling his hoop down the street.
“Think that’s an absolutely capital idea there, Cletis. Carlton and I don’t have any experience in the use of artillery this size.” My partner punctuated that assessment by placing his hands behind the grips of bone-handled Colts and pushing them forward. The happy farmer hooked a team of mules up to the caisson and pulled the whole contraption out into a field behind his house. The short, stout man talked the whole time.
“Just a few days after that bloody skirmish at Pea Ridge, I slipped back up there scoutin’ around for anythin’ that might be valuable. Them ole boys left an awful lot of stuff scattered around. Hell, they was bodies everywhere, and some of them poor Yankee boys rotted right there on the ground. Lord God, I found ‘under bushes, behind rocks, all over. Most of them poor kids had mighty nice boots, though. Still have eight or ten pair of ’em. Praise God, it was the only fight I saw during the war, and I’m damned glad Gettysburg and places like that were so far away I couldn’t make ’em. The Ridge was my first and last battle. Had all I wanted with that ’un. Packed my kit and came the hell back home.
“After the Ridge, President Davis started conscripting every man ’tween the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Guess them officers would of arrested me for a deserter if’n the war had gone the other way and we’d of won. All that killin’ lasted three more years, and they’d probably have shot me without so much as a trial, but they couldn’t ketch me.”
He pulled everything up to a spot on the edge of a plowed field behind his cabin that appeared to have been used for practice before. Wheel ruts caused the carriage to drop about six inches into the ground.
“Them grooves help cut down on the recoil,” he said as he detached the gun from the caisson.
Tobacco juice flew in every direction as he flipped the lid back on the ammunition box and pulled out an oblong paper cartridge filled with powder that appeared to be just slightly larger than the six-pound balls the thing fired.
“Found four of these munitions chests full of kattridges same day I come across Miss Beulah. She got dumped in a ra-vine, but I ain’t sure by which side. Think it was them Union fellers. Hard to tell, though, ’cause both parties in the disagreement used some of the same kinda stuff.” He shrugged his shoulders and threw us an impish smile. “Had to steal the carriage off another’n what had a cracked barrel. The beautiful Beulah had a busted axle. Hell, it took me more than a week, but I finally got her all home.”
Carlton’s enthusiasm for the weapon bordered on the way you’d expect a five-year-old kid to act at Christmas. “Well, now, Cletis. Were you an artilleryman?” he asked.
“No, Marshal Cecil, I were not. When it comes to knocking thangs down and blowing thangs up, I’m completely self-taught.”
He pushed a long pole with a brush he called a “screw” into the muzzle of the little howitzer, swabbed it out with a wet sponge, then shoved the cartridge home with a ramrod almost six feet long.
“Yew’ll need to do everything I just did each and every time yew reload. Clear it with the screw, swab it out, push the kat-tridge down gingerly. Don’t pound on it with the ramrod. Then yew roll a ball in, tamp her down, and take this piece of wire—yew call this a pick—clean out the touchhole here on top, and punch on through to the paper kat-tridge. Pour a little more powder in the cleared-out touchhole like this, and she’s ready to shoot.”
“Any special instructions on how to sight the beautiful Miss Beulah?” a grinning Carlton asked.
Our bootlegging cannoneer dipped into a leather pouch and pulled out a pair of fairly simple-looking brass instruments. “Friend of mine over in Mountainburg served in the field artillery fer a while in the fighting back East. He give me these thangs. This here one is the level. Think he called it a hausse. Yew set it on the base of the gun to help get it level. This ’un here is the sight. Yew set ’er up on the gun like this and line ’er up with that ’un on the end of the barrel.” He grinned, and continued to decorate a spot at his feet with more tobacco juice. “Yew can do all that if’n yew’ve half a mind to. But hell, boys, if’n I wuz yew I’d use the Cletis Broadment method. Just have to eyeball it, Marshal Cecil. Always worked better fer me anyways. After yew fire her the first two or three times, yew’ll have the range and elevation down pretty well.” He struck a lucifer and put it to a piece of wick about a foot long.
“Yew want to light her up, Marshal Cecil?” His gaptoothed grin displayed a mouth full of rotted teeth covered with a thick brown layer of tobacco stains. He held the glowing match out for Carlton and used his tongue to roll the wad around in his mouth.
“Yew betcha,” Carlton said as he took the smoking cord and stepped to a spot Cletis pointed out.
“Put this here cotton in your ears too.” My happy friend quickly plugged his ears and stretched his arm out to put fire to powder.
“Mr. Tilden, yew’d best stand over here next to me, and if’n yew want to continue hearing for the rest of the day, yew might want to cover up too. She’s sighted in for that big elm tree across the field yonder, Marshal. Stepped that off at least ten times. Almost exactly two hundred yards.”
Carlton threw us a wicked grin, turned, and pushed the burning lighter onto the howitzer’s touchhole. After a quick flash on top of the barrel, a thunderous explosion engulfed the whole area around us. Billowing gray-black smoke filled the air, and the acrid, sulfurous smell of burnt powder singed our nostrils as Cletis quickly pointed out the iron ball rocketing toward the target. A resounding crack shot back across the field when it hit about five feet above the ground almost dead center of the already damaged tree. Bark and wood splinters flew in all directions and showered an area for ten feet around all the gnarled roots that stuck out of the ground like an old man’s bony knees. Carlton hopped around the cannon, giggled, and danced. Man seemed demented in the childlike joy brought on by all the noise and smoke.
Before Cletis could think to react, the newly enthused, freshly trained, novice artilleryman ran over to the caisson, grabbed another cartridge, and started to stuff it in. Broadbent almost had a stroke. He screamed, darted toward Carlton, and knocked him to the ground a split second before the hot debris left in the tube ignited the second load and detonated in a cloud of deafening, but harmless smoke.
Our farmer, bootlegger, and amateur cannoneer jumped up and started beating on Carlton with his chewed-up piece of a hat. My astonished friend rolled around on the ground for a second or so before he managed to get to his feet and use his own hat in self-defense.
I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Two grown men were now slapping on each other like kids in a schoolyard fight. Epithets like “stupid damned yahoo” and “crazy goddamned farmer” got pitched around for about a minute before I stepped between them and stopped the physical part of the dispute.
Cletis’s head looked like it just might go off like the cannon. “Done tole yew to do exactly like what I done. Have to clean it with the screw, us
e a wet sponge to put out any chunks of paper or sech that might be burning, and then—and only then, dumb-ass—yew load the kat-ridge. Good thing yew hadn’t got to the point of using the ramrod on that load. Beulah coulda shot that thing through yew like a giant Comanche arrow.”
Carlton got real quiet. He turned, stared at Beulah’s still-smoking barrel, and scratched his head. “Well, you know, I wondered why you had to do all that silly-assed stuff. Hell, you don’t have to go to all that trouble loading a Navy Colt, but I suppose a pistol wouldn’t have the kind of residue left you’d find in this gun.”
I pulled on his sleeve, turned him around, and said, “Apologize to Cletis, Carlton. He might well have saved your silly hide.”
Cecil was a big enough man to say his sorrys without so much as a twinge of phoniness. That seemed to satisfy Cletis and calmed him down. We got the red-faced clod-kicker to go through his whole song and dance one more time to make sure we both understood every step of the loading process.
By late that afternoon, Cecil had fired the gun at least five more times. His studied performance convinced our sodbusting bootlegger we would take care of his plaything like it belonged to us.
Loaded up our ammunition box with fifty of his paper cartridges, the same number of six-pound balls, the additional necessary equipment, and agreed to pay another ten cents for every shot fired once we found Big Eagle’s nest. I figured the extra charges were well worth it and if we couldn’t bring any wall in the Nations down with fifty blasts from Miss Beulah, we might just as well give up and drag back home with our tails between our legs.
Paid Broadbent ten dollars in advance out of my own pocket. Swear the man got a look on his face like he’d just inherited enough money to make him the financial equal of any Texas cattle baron or the richest Eastern railroad magnate.
“Marshal Tilden, yew’ve been mighty righteous ’bout this from the beginning. I mean, yew ’splained everthang and paid like yew said yew would.” Then, he got real quiet and all conspiratorial. “So, I’ve got one more thang might help yew out when you get out into the wild places.”