Zeke and Ned

by Larry McMurtry

  When he put her on the bed, Jewel began to shriek and kick at him. She shrieked so loudly that he could hear the shrieks echoing off the Mountain. With Jewel shrieking every time she could catch her breath, Ned felt at a loss for what to do. He had heard of instances in which women suddenly lost their minds for no reason, and wondered if he was witnessing such a case in his wife. Why would Jewel throw a cup of coffee and scald her sister? She might not want him to go on the scout, but that was no reason for wasting good coffee. He remembered, then, that his father, Watt Christie, had told him women sometimes went crazy when they were with child, losing their tempers and having savage crying fits—all for no reason that he could ever determine. Lydia, Ned’s mother, had made biscuits one morning while she was carrying Ned, and Watt had merely mentioned that the biscuits seemed a bit heavier than usual. Before Watt had even got all the words out of his mouth, Lydia had started picking up the rest of the biscuits, heaving them hard and fast at Watt before running out the door of their cabin, crying like she had been beaten with a stick. Looking at Jewel, Ned understood now what his father had been talking about.

  After a few moments, rattled by Jewel’s wild shrieking, Ned knelt beside her on the bed and gave her three good shakes. The strength went out of her then, and she stopped shrieking and lay on the bed looking at him, her hair a wild tangle. Her eyes gradually came back to being the eyes he recognized: his wife’s eyes. And yet, though Jewel grew quiet, he had the feeling that she was still defiant.

  “I hope you feel silly now—you went and scalded your sister,” he said. “I expect she’s packing to go home, before she gets injured worse.”

  “She ain’t going home,” Jewel said.

  “What?” Ned asked, hoping he had misheard.

  “If you’re going, I want Liza to stay,” Jewel informed him. “I ain’t staying here alone, I told you that.”

  Ned suddenly slapped her—not a hard slap; one just hard enough to let her know he would not have his wife defy him. But Jewel took the slap, and hardly changed expression.

  Ned began to feel futile. Maybe he had brought home a madwoman to be his wife. Nothing he said or did seemed to affect her. He had given her a shake and given her a smack, and she still seemed set on having her way.

  “What if the white law comes?” he asked, to remind her of what they had been talking about before she threw the coffee.

  “It was Pa they would be wanting to try. You didn’t do nothing wrong,” Jewel said.

  “That’s how you see it, that don’t mean the white law would see it that way,” Ned told her. “I guess you wouldn’t like it if they put me in jail for a year, or hung me so I’d be dead forever. Then you’d be alone for sure.”

  Jewel knew well enough that there was reason in what he said, but there was more to this than reason. Sometimes Ned wanted to go, whether there was any particular need to or not. That was the way of men, and that was what had driven her to anger. Usually when she got a little annoyed with Ned, or expressed a criticism as she had the day he was too hasty about digging Tuxie’s grave, she felt abashed later at her own behaviour. But in this instance, she felt no regret, just sadness at knowing she and Ned were different. They would always be different. He wanted a boy and the right to go when he felt like it. She wanted a girl, and a man who would always be by her side. She could not make him understand that he could go off someday and be gone forever. Every time he left, she had to live with the fear that she might never see him again. But Ned did not fear like she did, and she knew it was foolish of her to expect him to—maybe men did not feel bad things the way women did.

  Jewel saw that Ned was looking at her with puzzlement. He probably wanted her to say she was sorry for throwing the coffee. She did not feel sorry, though, just a little surprised at herself that she had got so angry with him. She had thrown the cup, and even tried to punch him, though he was nearly twice her weight.

  Ned did not quite know how to get life back to normal, now that Jewel had practically gone crazy. She had a few tears on her cheeks, but she was not crying, nor did she appear to be angry anymore. He was still kneeling above her, on the bed; but the woman he was looking down at did not seem to be the woman he had awakened with only an hour before. She was there, but they were separate—a troubling thing. He wanted his woman close to him, not separate; he did not want Jewel to be willing one thing, while he willed another.

  He thought if they could be private, it might help pull them back close. But when he touched her, Jewel did not stir. She closed her eyes and kept them closed, until he saw it was no good and took his hand away. Then she looked at him again—calm, but separate.

  “What are you scared of, Jewel, if it ain’t a bear?” Ned asked, hoping to get some notion of why she wanted so badly to keep him home.

  “Some man might get me,” Jewel said. “I fear it all the time.”

  Ned was profoundly startled. It never occurred to him that Jewel feared such a thing. After all, she was his wife. His name would protect her.

  “I doubt there’s a man who wants to die bad enough that he’d interfere with my wife,” Ned said, a quiver in his voice. Now that Jewel had told him what she really feared in his absence, he was outraged at the mere possibility of a man offering her abuse.

  “I fear it all the time,” Jewel said, again. “There’s men coming across the Mountain that don’t even know who you are.”

  “Why, Jewel—I never supposed that was your worry,” Ned told her.

  Jewel frowned slightly, though she could tell Ned was thinking about what she had said, at least.

  Ned, once he thought about it, had to admit that Jewel’s worry had some merit. His reputation as a marksman did not extend much past the District. Rough men did come over the Mountain, too, men who would have no more mercy on Jewel than they would on a chicken they might want to eat. He had been vain, he knew now, to think that no man would bother his wife just because she was his wife.

  Suddenly, the thought that he might have to go on the scout worried him in the way that it worried Jewel.

  He sighed, and lay down beside her to give the matter some thought. The consequences of the courtroom battle took on a different weight. It made him annoyed with Zeke, for if Zeke had not insisted upon slipping off with a woman who was not even available, he himself would not be facing the prospect of going on the scout and leaving his wife to the whims of strange men wandering over the Mountain.

  Jewel saw that Ned was anxious now, too. What she had said about some stranger getting her had upset him. When she saw the anxious look on his face, the last of her anger died. She put her hand on her husband’s arm; she did not want him to be scared.

  “Maybe the white law won’t come,” Jewel ventured. “Maybe they’ll take the Becks, and you can just stay home.”

  “Maybe,” Ned said. But he did not believe it.

  The one thing he could count on about the white law, Ned knew, was that sooner or later, day or night, winter or summer, they would come.

  9

  AFTER MUCH COGITATION AND A CAREFUL STUDY OF THE COURT’S finances, Judge Isaac Parker finally decided to send two marshals to Tahlequah to bring in the perpetrators of the courtroom massacre, an event that had made the papers as far away as Tennessee. To the Judge’s great vexation, and before he had even dispatched the marshals, a newspaper fellow from Memphis showed up in Fort Smith and made so bold as to knock on his door.

  The man was tall and had a squint, which did not excuse the fact that he had arrived at the house so early that the Judge had yet to snap his suspenders.

  “How many do you expect to hang this time, Judge?” the fellow asked. He had not bothered with the formality of an introduction.

  “Who are you, sir?” the Judge asked.

  “I’m G. M. A. Dogwood, Memphis Sentinel,” the tall fellow said. “This massacre’s hot news. I’d like to send off my story as soon as the telegraph office opens today.”

  “Send off any story you like,” the Judge said. �
�The court ain’t in session, and it’s time for my breakfast.”

  With that, he shut the door in the reporter’s face and sat down to a substantial meal of grits and eggs. Chilly Stufflebean had been invited to breakfast and was eating with a will. The Judge’s hope was that if Chilly was kept fed to capacity for a few days, his memory would improve. Though the Judge had probed and questioned, he had so far failed to extract from Chilly or anyone else an accurate account of what had happened in the Tahlequah courthouse. The Judge thought food might help, but he had applied that theory for three days now, with disappointing results. Chilly was vague on even the most basic of details, such as who had fired the first shot.

  “It might have been T Spade Beck,” Chilly said, well aware that the Judge was disappointed in his reporting. On his second day back in Fort Smith, after a good night’s rest, the Judge had taken him into his chambers and sat him down for serious questioning. The Judge got out a tablet and a pen, and prepared to write down details of the event as Chilly supplied them.

  “We’ll do this orderly, Chilly,” the Judge told his bailiff. “We’ll do it an item at a time. Who fired the first shot, and who did it hit, if it hit anybody?”

  Three days and two solid breakfasts later, there was no clear progress made on item one, or any other item, except the final body count. Chilly was willing to vouch that twelve men had been buried in Tahlequah, but that was the only thing he was certain about.

  The battle had been like a dream. Chilly had kept hoping that it was a dream, so that he could just wake up and find himself somewhere else; but he was not somewhere else, and it was not a dream, either. The noise of the guns in the close room was deafening; he could smell the gunpowder, and later, the blood that spilled out of the dead and wounded onto the courtroom floor. The fighting had seemed to go on for most of the morning, and yet other witnesses who had found their way to Fort Smith assured the Judge that it had all been over in two or three minutes, which to Chilly did not seem possible.

  He felt sure that if he had kept to the right road and come straight home, he could have done a better job of reporting. As it was, the Judge got so discouraged with Chilly’s faulty memory that he put his pen back in the inkwell and stuck the tablet back in a drawer.

  “The human memory is a dull instrument,” the Judge said, as he sat at his kitchen table watching Chilly Stufflebean getting fuller, but no smarter.

  “Speak for yourself, Ike,” Mart told him. “My memory’s as sharp as a tack. I can remember every rude thing you ever said to me.”

  “That may be true, but the fact is, I never meant to marry a tack,” the Judge said. “That newspaper fellow had an odd name—it had three initials in it.”

  Later, on the way to the courthouse, the Judge saw the same newspaperman talking to Dan Maples and Buck Massey, the two marshals he was preparing to dispatch to the Going Snake District. The sight was unwelcome. He did not approve of marshals spouting off to the papers. Several good lawmen of his acquaintance had been ruined by getting their names in the papers too often. Usually it made them vainglorious, which led to recklessness. The next thing you knew, they were shot, or else they turned into politicians and ran for the legislature.

  “I’d like your name again, sir,” the Judge said to the newspaperman, as he approached his two marshals. “You spewed it out so quick I didn’t catch it on the first pass.”

  “G. M. A. Dogwood, at your service,” the fellow said. “I’ll repeat my question, too. How many of these Cherokees do you expect to hang?”

  “That’s a passel of initials you’re sporting, Mr. Dogwood,” the Judge said, ignoring the question about hanging Cherokees.

  The Judge waited politely a moment, hoping the fellow would say what the initials stood for. But he did not.

  “What, are you ashamed of your own name, sir?” the Judge asked, only to see the tall, squinty fellow turn beet red.

  “The fact is, my mother was religious,” Mr. Dogwood replied.

  “Religious how?” the Judge inquired.

  “Religious enough to name me God Moses Abraham Dogwood, that’s how,” Mr. Dogwood answered. Then, deeply embarrassed, the newspaperman turned and walked off toward the saloon. The two marshals, Maples and Massey, were left to explain themselves to the Judge, who eyed them pleasantly.

  “That fellow was a newspaperman,” he told them. “What was he telling you?”

  “Just that the folks in Memphis are hot about the Cherokees,” Dan Maples said. “There’s a fellow named Christie they say is a prime outlaw.”

  “I’ve heard the name. Chilly met him,” the Judge said. “What kind of outlawry does he practice?”

  “Why, I don’t rightly know, Judge,” Dan Maples replied. “I’ve heard he’s the best shot in the whole District.”

  “I’m a pretty good shot myself, but I ain’t an outlaw,” the Judge informed him. “Mr. Christie could be a law-abiding citizen, for all you know.”

  Buck Massey, a young man without schooling, planned to pay a quick visit to a whore before setting off on the long trip. The whore he had in mind was named Mary. She had a small room behind the saloon. Buck was hoping the Judge would not detain them long with idle questionings. He had been thinking of Mary all morning, and lust had him in a painful state. He had asked Dan Maples whether there were whores in Tahlequah, but Dan did not volunteer an opinion.

  “There might be a whore there, I have not made such an inquiry,” Dan said, in an aloof voice that annoyed Buck a little.

  In Buck’s view, the ready availability of whores was a factor that always had to be considered, in marshaling. He was not married, and being in a lustful state for too long was apt to affect his aim, or even his judgment. If he was going among dangerous Cherokees, he needed a steady aim, which was why he was impatient to get down the street to Mary. It vexed him that the fat old judge had detained them. What did the old fool want, anyway? Buck could see the saloon just down the street, and imagined Mary in her little room with the low bed. He was hard put to curb his impatience, as Judge Parker reviewed their equipment. The Judge even went so far as to lift a foot on each horse, to be certain the animals were properly shod.

  “You men can go, now. Watch yourselves,” the Judge said. “When you get to Tahlequah, see if you can locate Sheriff Bobtail and ask him what happened. I want you to be polite.”

  “Polite? I thought you wanted us to catch killers,” Buck Massey said.

  With that, Buck mounted, and to the Judge’s astonishment rode his horse across the street, dismounting at the saloon. It was scarcely thirty yards from where they had been standing and talking.

  “Your Mr. Massey’s hasty, I see,” the Judge said. “There he goes into the saloon. Is he a drunkard?”

  “No, sir, a whorer,” Dan Maples said, painfully chagrined. He had chosen Buck Massey to go with him, and now the young imbecile had embarrassed him in front of Judge Parker.

  “I see,” said the Judge, looking after Buck as the young marshal practically ran inside the saloon. “Be careful, Dan. There’s folks up in those hills that don’t scruple to shoot for ambush.”

  “I know, Judge—I intend to be watchful,” Dan assured him.

  Later, through the window of his chambers, the Judge watched the two marshals ride off. Before they were out of sight, the newspaper fellow, G. M. A. Dogwood, stumbled out of the saloon and fell down dead drunk in the mud in the street, where he lay for some time, snoring.

  That evening, the Judge told Mart about the newspaperman, thinking she might be curious.

  “Why, his ma stuck too much religion on his name,” Mart said. “I’d drink, too, if I was named God. Wouldn’t you, Ike?”

  The Judge did not answer. He was thinking about the two marshals, and the long ride they had to make, over the hills to Tahlequah and the Cherokee Nation.

  10

  BECCA DID NOT SAY MUCH ON THE RIDE BACK HOME, BUT ZEKE WAS not about to let her reticence worry him.

  Becca observed, too, that Zeke was
on his best behaviour. He had even helped her on the horse he had purchased for her, a rare departure from his usual practice of riding off the moment he got his own horse saddled and mounted, leaving the womenfolk to trail behind him as best they could. Watching Zeke, Becca felt alterations of cold and heat. She knew that forgiveness was the Christian way, but it was a way she was not able to comfortably walk in—not just yet. The anger she felt when she thought about the adulteries Zeke had committed with the dead woman was indelible within her, and helping her catch her stirrup once or twice was not going to wipe it out.

  The moment she got in the house—it seemed like a palace, compared to Old Ma’s cabin—Becca went upstairs and transferred all her garments to a cedar trunk that stood at the foot of the bed in the little room under the roof where Liza slept. It was the same place where Jewel had slept, too, before she went off with Ned Christie.

  Becca spread two quilts and a blanket where her eldest daughter had once spread her pallet. She put her Bible and a candle beside the quilts and blanket. Becca’s Bible was a copy of one of the Testaments of the Holy Bible, printed in the Cherokee language. The book had been a wedding present from her Grandmother Sixkiller, who had brought the Bible all the way from Georgia. It was the only thing the army had allowed her grandmother to take from her home when they came and carted her family off to the prison stockades, before the long march away from their homeland. Reading her grandmother’s Bible gave Becca comfort. She liked to pore over a page or two of the Lord’s words before she went to sleep.

  Then she searched carefully through the roomy bedroom where she and Zeke made their marriage bed, to be sure that none of her possessions remained. All she found was a hair ribbon, and a sock that had fallen behind the bed.

  Becca felt a sadness growing within her, as she removed her things from the big room where she had come seventeen years before. Though Zeke had been a raw fellow then—apt to dribble tobacco juice on the sheets; prone to cursing when he was drunk; and given to lusts that were apt to come on him at inconvenient times, such as when she was mending a shirt, or trying to tend a child—she had accepted his rawness and impatience, and had found moments of happiness with him. In the mornings, he was generous with his affections, and he never tired of telling stories to the girls, or to the triplets, when they came along after a time.