I Dreamt I Was in Heaven_The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  A few hours later, he woke to daylight and sounds of mayhem. He listened. He rolled to his feet and shuffled to the large window, his leg irons clanking raggedly. Down below, despite the hot August sun, came a river of horses and wagons as far as he could see, a swarm of people flowing toward the courthouse. More shots sounded. The screams and curses grew louder. It was a lynching mob. Sam, Luckey and Maoma watched Rufus. They felt his fear. They felt him fighting it.

  “Let ‘em come,” Rufus said out loud to no one.

  Maoma wrestled his chains even more desperately.

  Panicked, Sam rose and shuffled furiously to the window. It was like something from a storybook. There were hundreds down there. The street was thick with them, all focused on the courthouse doors. Armed men stood before the building repeatedly pushing them back with their rifle barrels.

  “They gonna let ‘em have us!” the terrified Sam hollered. “They gonna let ‘em lynch us!” He fell as he rushed from the window to the door, half crawling, chains clanging, to bang and scream for salvation. Looking over his shoulder, Rufus saw a tear against Luckey Davis’ cheek, quickly wiped away. He knew what they were thinking. They all thought it was the end—that they would die now. Rufus watched his men like they were players on a stage, and wondered if they screamed and cried over death itself, or over the rough, bloody kind of dying that lynching meant. He wondered if he would see her again before he died. As the volume rose outside—as loud as running horses but dripping rage—he wondered if she would cry at his lynching for the love of him. Silent, stoic tears fell down Luckey’s face. Sam continued pleading at the heavy wooden door. Maoma’s body jerked and shuddered, rattling his chains in intermittent spasms of frustration and ineffectuality.

  A key turned in the lock and the door swung open. On all fours, Sam skittered away.

  Rufus pointed and laughed. “You look jus’ like a monkey,” he said to Sam.

  Rifle aloft, barrel to the ceiling, Deputy N.B. Irwin stepped inside. Behind him stood Marshal Samuel Haynes, his rifle pointed at the Bucks.

  “Nice to see you boys havin’ a good time,” Irwin said, noting the laugh. Before he could say another word, Maoma shouted amidst a cacophony of his own rattling chains.

  “You gonna drag us out there for ‘em ain’t ya’? You gonna let ‘em lynch us, you damned cowards!”

  Irwin barely glanced at him and continued as if Maoma had not spoken. “Doubtless you boys seen the crowd outside. They got guns, clubs, torches and anything else they can carry. Hell, I saw some woman down there wavin’ a skillet. An’ we hear tell of folks headin’ this way from all over.”

  He paused and glanced at them. He had their attention.

  “Now our job is to get you all safe to Ft. Smith, to stand trial for what you done to them people. To do that, we gotta get you outta here. We talked it over, and best to do it after dark.”

  “You settin’ us free?” Luckey Davis asked?

  Irwin looked at him with something close to pity. “No son. We’re gonna get you outta town after dark and on a train to Ft. Smith for trial. But we gotta do it without the folks out front hearin’—or the folks camped out all along the town. If they get to you, they gonna kill, and won’t be much we can do about it. You’re gonna have to be quiet, and carry your chains, real tight up against yourselves.” He made a fist before his chest as if pulling up the chains attached to leg irons. “If you don’t make no noise, we should be able to get you outta here safe.”

  All eyes stayed on him and he seemed satisfied. “We’ll get y’all somethin’ to eat before we go.” He backed out of the room and closed the door. They all heard the key turn in the lock.

  2

  Since hearing of their capture, Parker had thought of little but the Bucks. The connections and coincidences seemed too numerous to ignore. In them, he sensed an historic pageant, a series of pre-destined events, momentous in their outcome, to which he was somehow central. He was desperate to understand his part.

  His search led him to the Ft. Smith jail where he informed the surprised jailers that he wished to confer with Cherokee Bill. Just 20 years old, half-Negro like Buck, he and the judge had danced an exhausting legal waltz that wasn’t yet finished. While awaiting the Supreme Court review of his richly deserved death sentence, Bill had attempted escape and murdered one of Parker’s jailers. Parker had considered the Supreme Court decision to question his sentence a personal affront. He blamed its deadly aftermath more on the Court’s incompetent and unjustifiable interference than on the man who pulled the trigger. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s inexcusable meddling, Parker had made intemperate remarks and brandished the open insubordination that led, over time, to the dissolution of his court. He’d memorized what the Fort Smith Elevator had written because it justified his outrage:

  “For the benefit of those who may not understand why Cherokee Bill was not hanged (why he was allowed to remain alive long enough to commit another brutal murder), we will say that his case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States upon what is known in the law as technicalities—little instruments sometimes used by lawyers to protect the rights of litigants but oftener used to defeat the ends of justice. It will remain there until the bald-headed and big-bellied respectables who compose that body get ready to look into its merits.”

  The judges of the Supreme Court reviewed Parker’s sentence as if something less than justice had been dispensed—as if that same justice had not almost miraculously dragged 74,000 square miles of Indian Territory towards civilization. Everyone knew Bill was a killer. He was just a different kind of one. Parker understood white violence: Rage, greed, sheer viciousness… any one could explain it. He understood Indian violence: A heathen people, their land threatened, uncivilized… he understood. But despite the innocent lives that myriad violence had taken, he preferred it to Negro docility. That was inhuman. It left one waiting, dreading the inevitably violent reaction to their state. He had turned Republican at the first secession and supported Lincoln throughout the war, but he understood why Southerners had scuttled Reconstruction. Handing black men the power to exact revenge for such treatment would have led to slaughter. Whenever a Negro outlaw faced his court, he wondered, ‘Is this the one? Is this their violent Moses come to lead them from the desert?’ He had to admit that he took particular interest in locking these up or sending them straight to hell by way of the hangman. It was his Christian duty to spare the civilized world the havoc they might wreak. Looking at the crimes behind Bill’s shockingly young eyes, he saw that revenge. A half-breed: A white man’s pride with a black man’s history stoking the flames—a dangerous mix.

  ~ ~ ~

  As Crawford Goldsby (aka Cherokee Bill) sat in his cell, Judge Parker, who had recently sentenced him to die, was the last person he expected to see. Bill noticed that the first floor prison noise had fallen from a holler to a hush. He wondered what had caused it, but he wasn’t interested enough to get off of his cot to find out. He figured that if it concerned him, he’d know soon enough. And here it was. During their last meeting, Judge Parker had sat on his courtroom throne, solemnly stroking his long, white beard as he, almost absently, in a hail of verbose grandiosity, wished mercy on his soul and sentenced him to die. He was supposed to have hanged on June 25th. It was August.

  He wasn’t dead yet.

  Cherokee Bill did not stand when the judge entered his cell. He saw no reason. He and the Judge had danced a dance, but for him, it was over. He would no more have risen for a discarded girl who sashayed past to flatter herself with more of his attentions.

  “Get up you murderin’ nigger!” the jailer yelled as he furiously raised his club and struck Goldsby. Always on guard, Bill twisted to let his back take the blow. The jailer raised his club for another lash when the Judge rushed forward.

  “No. It’s alright,” Parker said as he raised a steadying hand. But the jailer tried to push past him, struggling with the frail Judge. The man’s wild eyes frightened Parker, who wondere
d if Goldsby, the man he had twice sentenced to die, would bother to save him.

  “He killed Larry Keating,” the guard pleaded, as if begging Parker to let him continue beating the man who killed his fellow jailer. There might have been tears in his eyes. Embarrassed, Parker briefly looked away.

  “It’s alright. It’s alright,” Parker soothed as the man mastered himself and lowered his weapon. “Could you bring me a chair?” Parker asked, and the jailer gratefully disappeared to fetch one.

  As the dangerous episode ended, Goldsby lay back on his cot and barely looked at Parker; he stared intently at the bottom of the bunk above his. Parker stooped a bit to see what was so interesting at that particular spot but couldn’t see a thing without twisting himself into an undignified position. Annoyed, he straightened up. Whether Goldsby was purposefully behaving oddly or just doing what came naturally, Parker couldn’t tell.

  The jailer brought the chair; Parker sat. He had not been to the jail in some time, and while Bill stared in silence, he sat in awe of the copious splotches of fresh and dried tobacco-laden spittle dripping down and stuck to the walls. The smell was nowhere near as offensive as the old jail had been, but it remained stunning. A veritable tornado of flies hovered over the barely-covered waste bucket. How long and hard he had fought to get this jail built to replace the travesty that was the old one, and like so much resulting from long, hard fights, the result seemed commendable, but just shy of being worth all of that effort.

  When he tore his eyes from the laden walls, he found Cherokee Bill looking straight at him.

  “What can I do for you, Judge? Or you just come to let the jailer get a crack in?”

  “You’ve heard about Buck?” Parker asked.

  “Don’t hear much here.”

  That was a lie. Buck had been imprisoned here a mere month ago and had befriended Bill. Some suspected Buck of helping to plan the attempted escape during which Bill had murdered the jailer. Parker wondered if Buck had played a part in that critical episode, the one that precipitated his fight with his judicial “betters,” which accelerated his diminution in the eyes of what he reviled as “the legal community.” Parker to Bill to Buck… the connections were too tight. He felt them tighten, cold like shackles.

  And then the Judge surprised Bill.

  “What did he want?” Parker asked.

  This question had no subtext. In the months of courtrooms, lawyers and even the Supreme Court, Bill was unused to that. He read Judge Parker’s face and saw nothing of subterfuge, only earnest inquiry. He rewarded forthrightness in kind.

  “To be me,” he said. “I think he wanted to be me.”

  “You’ve thought about him, too…” Parker said.

  “To make things like they was before,” Bill continued.

  “What things?”

  “For the Indians.”

  “He’s almost still a boy. What does he know about how things were?”

  “What he knows don’t matter. What he thinks he knows… what he wants to know… What he dreams… That matters.”

  Parker closed his eyes and let his body slump with heaviness and guilt. “Had it not been for me, he never would have met you,” he said. “I’d known his father, you see. I felt for his father, and trying to save the son, started all of this.” The silence lingered. Parker sat, eyes closed, remembering… Bill watched him indulge the melodramatic pose for a while, and then lost interest.

  “Don’t get choked up about it,” Bill replied, lying back and returning his gaze to the bunk above. “I’m sure he’d o’ managed to kill someone without you.”

  ~

  One year prior, Parker’s clerk had knocked. “John Buck and Samuel W. Brown,” young Virgil Purefoy had announced.

  Predictably, Purefoy dawdled, gawking for a moment before he closed the door. Equally predictably, Parker both embraced and resented the look on the young, glowing face—a look that said he eyed a commemorative statue brought miraculously to life. The son of a prominent Virginia landowner, he’d come all this way to clerk for the famous judge and see the last of both him, and the notorious Territories he ruled. He’d been here eight months and after all that time still regarded the Judge with a longing and tenderness, as if forever acknowledging the spectacle of vaporous history made magically and momentarily visible. Yes, the boy’s making an historical romance of him amused the Judge. But it hurt. His end was on him. He didn’t need reminding.

  Virgil ushered into Parker’s office Sam Brown, the mixed-blood Chief of the Euchee Indians and John Buck, a rancher and member of the Creek Council. Sam Brown’s face wore a practiced, official’s smile; John Buck’s an emptiness that bespoke some level of inward devastation.

  The Judge offered them refreshment. Each refused.

  “We’ve come,” Sam Brown began, as he lowered himself to his seat, “to ask for your help.”

  The judge interrupted to avoid acknowledging the gross diminution of his power and influence. “I know,” he said. But I also know you’ve dispatched emissaries to Washington directly. How have they fared?”

  Brown tilted his head, a man couching his words. “We’ve had respectful hearings wherever we’ve been welcomed, but nothing’s changed. As you know, white intruders continue to flout the laws of land ownership, and the Dawes Commission plans are moving forward. What happened to the Cherokee can happen to us.”

  John Buck stared at a fixed point slightly ahead of him as if confounded. Parker doubted he had heard a word. Brown, on the other hand, understood everything; and it was at him that Parker grew angry. Why was Brown dragging him through this play-act that made his waning hurt like a disease of the bones? Brown knew good and well that Indian Territory was a Washington scrim elaborately hung to assuage its own conscience and mollify the Civilized Tribes. It was sheer as lace to everyone there. Parker dealt daily with the friction of the lie versus the reality, trying to make brown people like this silent John Buck understand that nobody meant what they said on the level of nations, that it was all a dumb-show, an elaborate theatrical staged to distract from the real goings-on backstage. The Indian Territory was attached, sold, divided and spoken for. There was already more than $1,000,000 worth of railroad property in it. As far as the Indians were concerned, it was gone. And Brown knew it. He was, after all, half white. He understood. He was prosperous, on his way to substantial fortune. He owned the trading post and post office at the Wealaka Mission, both of which relied on white trade. He understood: Bureaucracy, politics, coercion. It was in his blood. Brown took all the proper and necessary steps to protect his people, just as he took steps to protect himself. He had been instrumental in recruiting H.P. Callahan, a Bible-worshiping white man, to teach Indian children white men’s ways at the Wealaka Mission School. He handled a meeting such as this, the bureaucratic dance and wrangle of it, like a white man—a mechanical matter of course. His job, he understood, was to be seen taking the appropriate steps—taking action, regardless of outcome. Results, in this case preordained, were neither here nor there. Through acts like installing Callahan at the school, perhaps he was trying to prepare his people for the inevitable. Parker wondered if men like Brown, to their own people, were heroes or traitors.

  John Buck listened mute and seemingly unawares. Occasionally he’d shift his eyes to Parker. Parker always “felt” when he did so and turned. Each time, Buck held his gaze. Full-blooded Indian, he had the face of a totem and Parker feared accusation in his expressionless placidity. The half-white Brown was not really Indian to him. Brown was a white man with a tinge. A part of Brown was like Parker. But Buck was different. He looked different. Parker assumed he thought different. He would not understand why white men relentlessly hounded his people across the land, wanting more and more and more of it. He simply would not understand such egregious taking. To him, it would be akin to some animal acquisitiveness that you would beat out of a dog but was, for some reason, allowed to run rampant in white men. Brown understood, as did Parker: They both understood that ther
e was never enough, no such thing as too much. One could always have more. Wants, to them, were like breaths. Parker sympathized with the Indians, and could sometimes see their treatment as unjust, but he understood why they were treated as they were, and part of him saw no fault in it; yes, part of him saw destiny—not justice—but destiny in the dying, the loss, the winning and the godawful losing—it was the way of things. It was God’s will.

  Residing in Indian Territory, presiding over the criminals small and large who passed through his court every day, Parker had seen that there were different kinds of men and different ways of being. Buck was, through and through, an Indian. He was a kind who did not understand.