I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  “Goddammit girl you get away from him. Get up here!”

  She glanced at her father with a newfound dispassion that bordered contempt.

  “You all outlaws, huh?”

  Rufus nodded assent. “The Rufus Buck Gang.”

  “What you all do?”

  “We drive white folks outta Indian Territory.”

  “HA!” Bill Swain spat.

  Rufus aimed his gun at Bill Swain’s head.

  “We’ll do it like this,” Rufus said. “I start shootin’ at five. One… two...”

  “C’mon girl!” Swain yelled at Theodosia.

  She looked at her father as if he were no one.

  “…three…”

  “Holy God, fuck dammit!” Swain frantically snapped his reins. His mare hurried forward.

  “We didn’t rob him,” Maoma complained.

  “We ain’t got nothin’” Theodosia assured, and then smiled. She turned to Rufus.

  “I’m white,” she said.

  “You started it,” Rufus said, eying her like a prize. “Weren’t for you, wouldn’t be no Buck Gang. You ain’t white,” he told her. “You more ‘n that. Whiter ‘n white.”

  She beamed. Her teeth flashed between her full, pink lips. She took his hand, clasped it, and playfully swung it back and forth. Rufus too smiled as she followed him to his horse. He mounted, and then dragged her up behind him. His skin tingled as she put her hands around his waist. Grabbing the reins, his hand touched the flesh of her smooth thigh and it was as warm and soft as in his dream.

  Luckey and Lewis wordlessly expressed their awe at the audacity of taking a white girl so quickly. Sam and Maoma sat taller in their saddles.

  News of the white woman’s rape at the hands of five colored fiends paralyzed Okmulgee—along with news of the old man forced to watch his daughter so befouled—and then the tale of the naked and hacked up Jack Shafey stunned the town.

  According to the newspapers, during the course of her repeated ravishments, the woman received critical injuries. The man, they said, was so disfigured by knife wounds that he would never be able to show his face again. Soon everyone knew whom to blame. The name Rufus Buck bounced off the walls of every home where every man feared for the virtue of his wife and his daughters. Buck’s unspeakable deeds and unthinkable motive of eradicating those who would make something out of this rough, naked land ignited every telegraph wire, precluding sleep, rattling dreams, and worst of all, kindling fears of a battle against an enemy on his own land and full of such righteous zealotry and vengeful brutality—a battle that, should the Indians of the Territories rise up and follow, not even white men squatting on Indian land would know for sure they had the right to win.

  8

  Throughout his preparations for the Buck trial—the formulation of the lies and obfuscations increasingly necessary to feed the illusions he required to make it through each day—phrases from the book lashed out at him like serpents. Reading bone-dry descriptions of natural phenomena, words suddenly assaulted him as if usurped and perverted by a merciless Evil.

  Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.

  So he read the whole as if navigating a minefield, heart pounding, nerves spent, knowledge that the next words might strike. He tried to understand. It was like a code, foul profundities hidden in seemingly benign and sympathetic prose.

  … we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness.

  Aberrations, legions of them, perhaps chosen by the mute earth itself as most fit to inhabit it. An earth contemptuous of virtue, and ignorant of the resurrection of the body of Our Lord.

  We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed.

  Rufus Buck had killed John Garrett. He was one such aberration. The girl, with her white skin and beauty, even more so. The soul he’d sought to save in Buck had committed the sin of cold-blooded murder. Buck was not the first of his inmates to commit another crime. But Parker had distinguished this one with particular attention. On this one he had wagered the value of his stewardship of the Territories. Was he doing God’s work? Buck would tell. Redeeming the son to assuage John Buck, the father, was to have been the justification for his reign over the Territories—the particular to represent the whole.

  When he began, he had thought God guided his hand. But that balm had abandoned him and he could not sufficiently trace his steps to discover where he had lost his way and perhaps regain His path. Since he could no longer think his work Divine in origin, he could no longer whitewash its viciousness to some, and its failure to rise to the standards he had dreamt for it. But he could make amends. If John Buck had been the victim of his stewardship, Rufus Buck would reap the reward. On the day of Rufus Buck’s sentence for the paltry crime of whiskey peddling, he had taken responsibility for him just as he had taken responsibility for the Territories all those years ago. Acceding to the failure of his Territorial dominion—the collapse of his Lordly experiment with living men—he planned to redeem himself through this one boy. His grand Territorial whole may have turned dubious or even monstrous, he thought, but he could make this small, purely human amends.

  When he heard about John Garrett’s murder, a cold tingle settled on him. Shot three times in an alley. The Rufus Buck he had saved. An abrupt turn, a descent. Wrongness and no control. And then he’d learned the true tale of that monstrous little girl—a white girl so young, who should have been so innocent. He felt a perilous unraveling of the fabric he had woven in this land, and worse, he realized that the order he had placed upon it was not only Godless, but illusory—a sheer linen mocking a woolen blanket.

  He felt powerless, which compelled him back to Virgil Purefoy’s damnable book.

  The whole of it was insidious. He sensed it, though he could not fully comprehend it. He paused in his reading to absorb outrageous passages, to reread them and let his mind accept the alien concepts, like wood does a stickpin under pressure. He snatched moments of understanding, but they made the whole more terrifying. He read compulsively—every line, some more times than he could count. Signs, symbols. Vague hints of shocking import. A riddle and a trick. Talk of low things—butterflies and zebras, their habitats and morphology, interspersed with missiles of blasphemy sharp enough to pierce his mind. He damned himself for slurping it up like the most sinful glutton, but he could not stop. He sensed truth in it. That was his sin. That was his curse.

  When he first learned the extent of Buck’s malice, he feared his chest would crack from the effort of breathing. He had not heard the knock, but saw Bass Reeves’ face in his doorway. His principal Marshal wore an unaccustomed look. Parker saw fear on the face that had never shown any.

  “Judge, there’s trouble.”

  Parker gave the Marshal his full attention.

  “There’s been a rape, and a… cutting.” Reeves struggled for the words to describe it. Then he blurted, “They made her Daddy watch! Then they cut a man all up an’ left him nothing, not a stitch on his back.”

  “Who?” Parker asked as he rose.

  “They said the R
ufus Buck Gang.”

  That’s when Parker fell to his knees. He collapsed as if hands slammed down on his shoulders to force him into this sinfully alien position of submission and humility. The force exerted was so physically powerful that he actively resisted the urge to fold his hands and pray for mercy—to pray that no deeper supplication be demanded of him. Reeves ran to drag him to a chair.

  “Lemme get help,” Reeves said, already halfway to the door.

  “No!” Parker insisted. “Just water. Just water. Please.”

  Reluctantly, Reeves complied. As Parker reached for the water, Reeves could not miss his trembling hand, so he placed his own on top of Parker’s to support the glass. After a deep draught, Parker breathed easier, and smiled, waving Reeves and the water away.

  “When did this happen?” he asked.

  “Both two days ago.”

  “Nothing since?”

  “Not that we know. Buck was talkin’ about white folks in the Territory. He told em’ all to get out, and to tell all the rest to go, too, or face the same.”

  “He killed John Garrett, and now this,” Parker muttered to himself. “How is the woman?”

  “She’s strong, Judge. Tol’ us all she could. She wants to go mighty bad, though. They was on their way back home, Virginia I think.”

  “Bring them to me. The woman and her father and the other man. If they can’t come here, I will go to them. I need to hear them. I need to see.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Capturing the Buck Gang is your priority.”

  “No different than after Garrett,” Reeves replied. “Only now we’re lookin’ for five of ‘em.”

  Reeves nodded and turned to the door. “You sure you don’t want me to get you someone?” he asked the judge.

  “No. Thank you.”

  One of his deputies had been murdered in broad daylight and cold blood. A woman had been raped and her father forced to watch. Another man had been, from all descriptions, mutilated. He had meant to save Buck, to erase the accusatory image of so many like his shattered father—by saving the son. He had sought to salve his conscious for the damage he had done, facilitated, and acceded to, and now he would pay for seeking cheap redemption for crimes so intractable that any Christian would have known there could be no forgiveness. God would only sink him further as punishment for his ghastly hubris.

  Now he would hear it all. He would minister to the victims and absorb their tales and horrors—with the knowledge that they, among so many others, lay on his head.

  ~

  It was news about the Buck Gang that drove him to Cherokee Bill’s cell that day.

  “What did he want?” he had asked the murderous half-Indian.

  “To make things like they was before,” Bill replied. “For the Indians.”

  To turn back to a time he could only imagine. Fantasy. He wanted what any boy wants, only he had the spleen and steel to grab for it at any cost. He saw similar in Bill—a child, clutching at things, grasping at and throwing things, doing untold damage to satisfy his wants and leaving blood and wreckage in his wake.

  He fought for ways to distinguish himself and his acts from Bill’s. He had not known. He had sought only to do good and God’s will—and not from greed or covetousness. He could not have known what the book said—that some deviations of structure so strongly pronounced as to deserve to be called monstrosities arise, or that we forget that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life or that improving the stock in a particular place is done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit. He had forgotten the country he inhabited. He had thought it close to heaven, had dreamed that he could make it so. In fact, it might have been a form of hell.

  Bill broke men and so did Buck. They shot and hacked and raped them. Parker broke a land and its peoples. The white ones trampled everything in their wake and the brown ones either slunk beneath the onslaught or hacked away at everything without conscience. Both were products of this place. Both were his doing. He sought Bill and felt pity for Buck because he and they were one. It was all of them—all of the “great” men desperate to change their worlds. They were grasping children, doing untold damage to satisfy wants they arrogantly attributed to God and higher callings, and leaving behind them little more than ghastly tales and vaguely remembered tears.

  ~ ~ ~

  Theodosia liked the warmth. Despite the heat, she pressed herself against Rufus Buck as she clasped his waist. Through her thin dress she felt his body heat and the contours of his skin—the undulation of his ribs, his stomach, his chest. She laid her cheek against his back and faintly heard his heartbeat. She had rarely felt a human touch. Her father did not hoist her aloft or affectionately chafe her. He did not hug or hold her. He had only even hit her a few times, but sufficiently hard that she learned her lesson and he didn’t have to do it often. She had no other kin. She was an island, but made of flesh, as if set apart from other men and women by an invisible sea. She saw them holding hands on the street, cradling young ones, leading them by the hand, children climbing atop one another like puppies, but none of that happened to her. No one touched or cradled or fondled her. She did not know why. She figured she was different. Dangerous, like the flesh-rending, scavenging animals she compulsively spied on. Like the big black birds she so loved to watch. These dark ones, too, were different—swooping down on their wagon as no one ever had, defying her father as she had never considered, whisking her up and flying her away as if she were a mouse in a field. She had always watched and wondered at the black and brown ones in the towns they passed. Her father didn’t treat them like he did the white ones. He treated them like they were nothing. He treated them like he treated her. She hadn’t dared, but she wanted to approach them, to see if, secretly, behind the skin, she was like them and that was why none of the white ones would touch her. She thought of asking her father if that’s why they wandered, why they never settled down or grew to know places or people; but with his teeth gnashing and grumbling about “niggers” when he encountered the dark ones, she figured she’d better not. He hated them, so she didn’t want to ask if she and her father were like them, though she suspected. Now, as she thrilled to the horse galloping beneath her and held onto the man who had snatched her away from the wagon she’d followed all her life like a mule, as she closed her mouth against the flying bugs, felt their tiny sting as they smashed against her face, as the earth sailed beneath her as if she were not of it, for the first time in her life she knew that she was where she ought to be. For the first time she knew that she was free and she belonged.

  She and Rufus did not speak during that first brisk ride. Feeling her arms tight around him, looking down and seeing her soft, white hands, he rode with a resoluteness he had always sought, but never known—with an Angel on his back, her wings outspread, flying across the world. He squinted against the wind and absorbed its urgency. It spurred him with sultry, silent encouragements that dangled all the wonders he could achieve before him like jewels. He knew his destination, and knew its fatefulness to be Divine in its justice. Benton Callahan, a cattleman who grazed his herds on Indian Territory, was the son of H.P. Callahan, who had called him filth and expelled him from the Wealaka Mission school with a venomous, spittle-filled torrent of revulsion and disgust… Benton Callahan, son of H.P. Callahan, had a ranch southeast of Okmulgee. That’s where Rufus rode.

  ~

  His first shot hit the colored cowboy’s horse. It’s legs buckled beneath it and the cowboy flew from his saddle like a cannon ball. Grazing cattle bolted to a cacophony of mooing and thumping hooves. Slowly, the ground began to shake beneath the heavy animals’ rumblings. Wide-eyed Theodosia panted with excitement. Rufus leapt from his horse and marched toward Benton Callahan, who, recovering nearby from the shock of seeing his man shot down, spurred his horse. A bullet ripped through the horse’s b
ack leg and Callahan hit the ground. The black cowboy got back to his feet and tried to run. Sam and Maoma both fired wildly at him. Blood sprayed from the cowboy’s shoulder and he pitched forward yet again. He didn’t move this time. Two horses thrashed and screamed wildly in pain. Callahan crab-walked backwards away from the gang, terror in his eyes. With the black cowboy laying bloody and still, Sam and Maoma turned their guns to Callahan. Shots popped and he felt a furious burning, as if the side of his head were on fire. When he lowered his hand from the burning, the hand dripped blood. Lewis shot one horse in the head, silencing it, and then shot the other.

  Theodosia bounced up and down, unable to contain her excitement. Her head shook as if she couldn’t decide in which thrilling direction to look. Her arms slapped at her sides and her feet shuffled like her breathlessly indecisive eyes. She half giggled while gasping air as if there were not enough in the world to sate her.

  Luckey stood over the black cowboy lying face-down on the ground, the top of his shirt now soaked with blood. Luckey hesitantly nudged the body with his foot. The cowboy didn’t budge.

  “Is he dead?” Luckey asked.

  Lewis shrugged. “Dunno,” he replied.

  Rufus stood over the bleeding Callahan, “Your Daddy tell you ‘bout me?”

  Still scooting away on his backside, he vigorously shook his bloody head from side to side.

  “He threw me outta his school,” Rufus continued, brandishing his gun as carelessly as you would a stick. “Called me all kinda names. I had a knife. Should o’ stuck him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Callahan mumbled, trying to keep his eyes on all the gang at once.

  “You gonna shoot him?” Theodosia excitedly screeched her arms circling and feet hopping as if skipping an invisible rope.