That Night at the Palace

by Watson, L. D.

  “Right.”

  “So…” Brewster paused in thought, “he sees some guy fixing a tire on the side of the road late at night and stopped to help.”

  “That makes sense, Cliff would have turned left off Main onto the highway a few blocks to get to his house. He would have gone right past Washington’s Feed Store, too.”

  “So let’s say the guy’s on the side of the highway out in front of the feed store with a flat, and this kid stops to help, and the guy whacks him over the head with a tire iron then puts the boy in his own car and dumps him here.”

  “Then it was just some random guy who suddenly decided to kill?”

  “No, this wasn’t random. The kid’s head is too bashed in. There was passion behind it. The human skull is pretty thick. If you hit it once or twice with a tire iron you’ll get one or two fairly small dents. He would probably die, but this killer hit him over and over. You don’t do that randomly. You do that out of rage.”

  “But Cliff wouldn’t have stopped for someone if he knew he might get killed.”

  “So we’ve got a killer who hated this kid enough to beat him to death, and the kid didn’t know anything about it.”

  “If he wanted to kill Cliff, then…”

  “Chief, you have a killer right here in Elza. Chances are that this Jesse is on his list. Bring him in for questioning. He’s better off in jail than he is on his own. We need to question him anyway. He’s probably talked to the killer and doesn’t even know it.”

  In the distance a ’37 Ford Woody rumbled along the rutted road that was becoming congested with cars.

  “Just what I need. Onlookers.”

  The law officers began walking toward the end of the bridge where Toad and Hunker stood watching the men below pulling Cliff’s mangled body from the brush.

  When the chief reached Toad, who was still standing guard, he pointed to the man getting out of the Woody. “I don’t know who that is, but if he tries to get a look down at Cliff, slap some cuffs on him.”

  “I don’t have any cuffs.”

  Jefferson pulled some handcuffs off his belt as the man, with great determination, made his way through the high grass toward the tracks.

  “Let’s go, Corporal,” Jefferson said to Brewster. “Toad can take care of this.”

  The two began walking along the tracks to the prowler as the man from the Woody came toward them. Before he got to Jefferson and Brewster, Toad, hunting rifle still in hand, intercepted him.

  “Sir, you’re gonna have to turn around and go home. We have police business here,” Toad ordered in a tone that impressed himself far more than the other man.

  The man reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a notepad. “I’m David Roberson with the Jacksonville Statesman. I need a few words with your chief.”

  “I said no,” Toad replied emphatically, growing more impressed with his importance.

  “I hadn’t thought about this,” Jefferson said softly to Brewster. “I’ll deal with it, Toad.”

  Brewster followed Jefferson to the reporter.

  “Are you sure, Chief? I’ve got this.” Toad said, disappointed that he didn’t get to use the handcuffs.

  “Go back to the bridge and see if they need any help,” Jefferson ordered his deputy.

  The reporter watched the deputy leave and turned to Jefferson and asked, “Really, his name is Toad?”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Roberson?”

  “I hear you got a bad one,” the reporter said, a bit too cheerfully for anyone’s taste.

  “We don’t have any information for you. Come back in a day or so.”

  “Is he down there? I’d love to get some pictures.” Roberson said, ignoring the Chief and walking past Jefferson and Brewster to the bridge as he pulled a Spartus camera out of the side pocket of his coat.

  “No pictures,” Jefferson ordered, grabbing the camera as Roberson passed him by.

  “Chief, you can’t stop me. The press has a right to be here,” Roberson defended just as he got a look down the bank at Cliff’s twisted and mangled body. “Good God almighty.”

  “No pictures,” Jefferson repeated as he walked up to the reporter and handed back the camera.

  Roberson stared down at Cliff. Then he raised and unfolded the camera. “I can’t print it, but I gotta take one to show the guys back at the paper.”

  “No pictures. That kid was a friend of mine.”

  Roberson sighed as he relented, and then asked compassionately, “What happened here, Chief?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Brewster answered with authority.

  “Who are you?”

  “Brewster McKinney, Texas Rangers.”

  “THE Brewster McKinney?” Roberson said as he excitedly tried to write notes while holding the camera.

  “We have a murder. The kid’s name is Cliff.” Brewster paused and looked at the Chief.

  “Cliff Tidwell.”

  “Cliff Tidwell. He was hit in the back of the head. We think with a tire iron,” Brewster looked at Jefferson and then continued. “He died immediately. Put that in your paper as a quote from me. You got that. You do not mention the gator. His mom and dad don’t need to read that in the paper. Besides, like I said, all that happened after he was dead. If I read one word about an alligator in that paper of yours, I’m going to come find you and I’m gonna tie you to one of those trees down there and leave you overnight and see what happens. You got that?”

  The reporter stared at the tall, gruff old Ranger and nodded his head.

  Jefferson couldn’t help but smile. It never would have entered his mind to threaten to kill a reporter, but he wasn’t Brewster McKinney. Over the years since their first meeting, the chief had read many newspaper accounts of the Ranger’s exploits. The man was famous, and he had a reputation for being tough and ruthless. A law officer making an arrest was common news, but a law officer single-handedly apprehending four armed robbers was the sort of thing that legends are made of. McKinney is a walking, talking legend. It was, for instance, well known that the he carried a Colt .45 automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat like a gangster. Some claim that his draw was so fast that there wasn’t a man alive who could match him. Jefferson, conversely, had never taken his weapon from its holster and prayed that he never would. The only time he came close was the night that George Henry McMillan’s was robbed, and thankfully the burglars were long gone before Jefferson got the call. Of course, that’s why McKinney could make threats to a reporter. He knew full well that the reporter had read the same articles that Jefferson had read, and though it was unbelievable that the Ranger would follow through with his threat, no man alive would take that risk, not when they knew McKinney’s reputation.

  “Do you have any suspects, Mr. McKinney?” Roberson asked timidly.

  “Yes, and we’re going to make an arrest. Make sure you put that in your paper.”

  #

  ELZA, TEXAS

  June 26, 1936

  Jesse and Cliff were sitting on the steps of George Henry McMillan’s store sipping RCs. On hot days like this the boys worked their way around town. First they tended to their chores at home - that mainly applied to Cliff. Then they would meet up downtown at eight in the morning and head over to McMillan’s to sweep and stock shelves. Then they would go to Washington’s Feed Store to see if they could do a little work there. If they were lucky, they could get a dime for cleaning the place up. Sometime around ten Jewel would join them and they would all spend the rest of the day either hanging out downtown or heading to the bridge to fish. If Mr. Washington didn’t have any work, they would usually head back to McMillan’s and sit on the steps listening to the old men argue.

  This morning they were sitting on the steps of McMillan’s.

  To their left, Shorty Newman and one of the older men were sitting on a couple of o
ld wooden chairs playing checkers. In Elza there were the men who had work, like Jesse’s and Cliff’s fathers, and there were the young men who couldn’t find work (or didn’t want to find work), who spent most of their days at the domino hall. Lastly, there were the old men who had long since done their work. These old men spent their days sitting around George Henry’s discussing the world’s problems while playing checkers. As a rule, the boys preferred to hang around with the older men. The old men had great stories, although rarely true, and they never asked the boys to go do anything without offering to pay a nickel or dime.

  George Henry’s, being the best place to buy groceries in town, naturally got a lot of traffic. Everybody, young and old, came through the store sooner or later, and the boys found the conversation amusing.

  Some days a couple of the younger men like Shorty Newman and Elza Police Chief Thomas Jefferson Hightower would be there. Shorty had a reputation for being the best checker player in town, and he’d been in the process of proving his prowess all morning long.

  The events in Jacksonville the day before had both boys confused and even depressed, but neither understood exactly why. First, neither boy was prepared for the sight of a man being hanged. When they hopped in the back of Toad Lowery’s truck, all they were thinking about was the excitement of the moment. They had heard of hangings and lynchings, and somehow it seemed entertaining, but the thought that a man would actually die didn’t become a reality until they saw it happen. More importantly, both boys had felt that they were going up to Jacksonville to watch justice take place. A bad man was going to get what he deserved. But, Jesse, for one, felt sure that an innocent man was murdered by an angry mob, and the two of them, along with Jewel, were a part of the mob. And if, in fact, an innocent man was killed, they were as guilty of murder as anyone.

  None of them had spoken all the way home. When they had gotten to Elza they were all three ready to go home even though it was still early in the day. So when Toad stopped in the middle of Main Street, the kids had simply said goodbye and headed their separate ways.

  All morning long Jesse had wanted to bring up the subject to Cliff but didn’t know what to say. Sitting there on George Henry’s steps, he was still churning it all in his mind when an old Ford Model-AA pickup pulled to a stop at the gas pump.

  The two boys knew the truck, as they did every truck around town. One glance and they knew exactly who was coming down the road. This truck was of particular interest to them. There wasn’t a man in all of East Texas that fascinated the boys more than old Cherokee-One-Leg. There were all sorts of stories about the man - that he had lost his leg to an alligator, that he had been a Buffalo Soldier and fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, and, some said, that he even helped track down Geronimo.

  One day the boys were at George Henry’s with Cliff’s dad when some of the men began talking about how they should bring the Klan back and run all the blacks back to Africa. Before that Jesse had never seen Cliff’s dad angry. Both boys had gotten whippings from the man, more than once, generally for some trouble Cliff thought up, but even then he was only a little angry. That day at George Henry’s, Ned Tidwell was flat-out mad.

  He had argued that many of the black folks in the area had a lot more right to live in this country than any of those men in the store. There were blacks, he had said, that fought at the Alamo. Then he said that there were six hundred black men who had stood alongside Andy Jackson and Jean Lafitte when the British tried to take New Orleans. As a matter of fact, he added that Cherokee-One-Leg’s grandfather was one of them. Then he said that Cherokee’s grandpa went on to become one of the first mountain men, and his father had scouted alongside Kit Carson. Cherokee, he said, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt.

  With this new information, combined with the fact that Cherokee-One-Leg had survived an alligator attack and wore the gator’s teeth around his neck as proof, the two twelve-year-olds were in absolute awe of the old black man. All things considered, the boys, quite rightly, held a lot more respect for the old, crippled man named Cherokee than they did most of the white men in and around Elza.

  The two watched in wonderment as the lean old man gingerly climbed out of the cab of his Ford with his one good leg and the peg attached to the other. He had an old homemade crutch that he pulled out of the truck and used it to stiffly hobble over to one of the pumps to begin filling up his pickup. In Jacksonville and Henderson some fill-up stations had the new electric pumps, but McMillan’s had the old visible pumps with the glass tank at the top that bubbled as gas flowed down into the vehicle.

  The old one-legged man used the pump handle to pump a couple of gallons of gasoline into the globe and then watched it drain into his tank. When he finished, he took his crutch and hobbled toward the front door. As he began up the steps where Jesse and Cliff were sitting, Shorty, who had been in the delegation from Elza the day before, asked, “So Cherokee, what’d you think about that hangin’ yesterday?”

  The old black man stopped still. He slowly lowered his good leg off the step and turned to face Shorty. Standing tall, he stared icily at the man and said, “That boy didn’t do nothing’. They hung him like a damn criminal and all he done wrong was be born black.”

  Jesse and Cliff froze as both felt a cold chill from the tension.

  “Well that girl said he did. I know. I heard her,” Shorty cockily replied.

  Jesse watched as the old man’s eyes, which had been yellowed with age, burn almost red with anger. “Bucky didn’t do nothin’. He was at my house. He was reading to me. My eyes is bad and I can’t read no more. He was readin’ the Bible. When he went home some of you boys grabbed ‘im and put ‘im in jail. And then yesterday ya lynched ‘im. No one bothered to ask. Nobody cared to ask if he did it or not.”

  Jesse looked over at the police chief, who was sitting on a bench sipping a Dr Pepper, not appearing interested in involving himself in a scuff with Cherokee-One-Leg.

  Shorty looked at the man, realizing that he may have started something that he shouldn’t have. “She said he did. You said he didn’t. Who are we to believe?”

  The old man’s anger now burned. Jefferson tensed, knowing that he may have to do something.

  Jesse and Cliff sat wide-eyed as Cherokee flung his crutch to the ground, straightened up, and walked without the slightest hint of difficulty to Shorty, who was now visibly frightened.

  Standing directly over Shorty, the old Indian fighter said, “Bucky was with me. Are you calling me a liar?”

  Shorty shrunk before Cherokee, who was easily forty years his senior, and with his head down, softly said, “No.”

  Jefferson then stood to his feet, “We don’t want any trouble Cherokee. Shorty went too far. The fact is I should have shut him up before he opened his stupid mouth. Bucky was a good boy. I known him all his life. I don’t need you to tell me he didn’t do it. Anybody who knew him knows he didn’t do it. I’m sorry, Cherokee. I’m truly sorry.”

  The old man looked Chief Hightower in the eye and nodded his head. The anger had altered slightly to sadness, and Jesse could see that there was a hint of a tear in the old warrior’s eyes.

  As Cherokee-One-Leg walked back to the steps, Cliff got up, picked up the old man’s crutch, and handed it to him. The Indian fighter took the crutch, nodded his head to Cliff, and climbed the steps past Jesse and into McMillan’s store.

  Jefferson sat back down on the bench, and Shorty got back to his game, but no one said a word. Jesse looked at Cliff, who motioned with his head for them to leave. Jesse got up and silently sat his empty RC bottle in the bottle crate by the steps, and the two boys started walking toward Main Street.

  Once out of earshot of the store Cliff said, “Gemma Crawford’s daddy raped that girl.”

  Jesse didn’t know what to say. He knew it was true but he had no words. He just nodded.

  “We’re the only ones who know.”

&n
bsp; “I know,” Jesse replied. “And he’s gonna do somethin’ bad to Jewel’s mama, too.”

  “We’ve gotta tell somebody. Maybe we should talk to Jefferson.”

  “He ain’t gonna listen to a couple of kids, especially one that got stuck in the Palace air shaft.”

  “Should we tell Jewel?”

  “What are we gonna tell her? That her mama is carrying on with Gemma’s daddy? We don’t even know if it’s true. She’ll just get mad at us.”

  The two boys walked along the side of the road, silently in thought for a few minutes, when Cherokee-One-Leg pulled up beside them in his Ford pickup.

  “You boys hop in the back,” the old man ordered without further explanation.

  Jesse and Cliff looked at each other and then did as they were told. It wasn’t that either felt obligated to obey, but they both sensed something in the man, and they respected him.

  #

  Cherokee turned the truck off the highway and headed down the old road toward the tracks. He turned left and followed the worn ruts along the tracks to the old trestle across the Neches. When he got to the bridge, he stopped and climbed out with what Jesse thought was amazing agility for a man in his eighties with only one leg.

  The boys climbed out of the bed of the truck and without a word followed the old Indian fighter as he walked out onto the trestle.

  “You boys come out here and fish, don’t you?” The old man asked, but it was really a statement.

  Cliff and Jesse looked at each other, curious about what the old man wanted with them. Cliff finally answered the man, “Yes, sir, but we don’t catch much.”

  The old man rested his arms on the crossbeam of the trestle and looked out at the river below. “This is a good spot. I fished here when I was a kid. That was before they laid these tracks.”

  Jesse and Cliff climbed up and sat on the crossbeam that Cherokee was leaning on, just as they did almost every day.