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

by Leonce Gaiter

  “There ain’t nobody else!” Hassan shouted, as if driven mad that his truths would not take hold. “Ain’t no Indians killin’ white folks but you.”

  No lie had ever been so vile, Rufus thought. No man so foul for telling one.

  ~

  “He said the man was gonna pay for lyin’, an’ ‘cept for my Daddy, I ain’t never seen nobody so mad,” the girl recalled to Parker. “Rufus started hittin’ him real hard with his gun. He was bleedin’ from all over his face. His whole face was red. Like a red Indian.” She giggled at her joke.

  “It must have upset you to see that. Did you want him to stop?” Parker entreated, aching for it to be true. “Didn’t you beg him to stop?”

  She picked up a book from the table beside her. She stopped talking and gave it her full attention, obviously enjoying the feel of the tender leather, her fingertips tracing the tiny veins running through it. She looked at Parker and smiled. She examined the gold lettering that she could barely decipher. Again she flashed her appreciation at the ailing Judge.

  Parker trembled and closed his eyes as she conferred her blessings on the abominable book.

  ~

  Flaps of raw flesh hung from Henry Hassan’s face. Rufus raised his arm to bring the pistol down again, so slick with viscous blood that it flew from his hand as if purposefully flung. So Rufus used his fist.

  Rosetta Hassan made another of her wavering, hysterical charges at Rufus. Again Sam struck her to the ground. She screamed and wailed like a grievously wounded animal—the only sounds, now that her husband had stopped begging for mercy. Now, barely conscious, he only swayed to the rhythm of the blows. Rufus strained every muscle to keep his victim’s dead weight upright.

  Theodosia slipped from the saddle and walked toward the carnage. She leaned forward, her arms out to her sides. She stuck her neck out to its fullest and opened her mouth in an expressive “O”. She bent her knees so that she crouched as she oh so slowly circled the scene. Then she slowly flapped her arms like giant wings.

  “Bawk,” she cried. “Bawk!”

  She flapped her arms in a sudden flurry, as if willing herself to ascend, and then she flapped them slowly once again. Rosetta Hassan stared at her in amazement.

  “Bawk. Bawk!” Theodosia made a sudden dash at the wife, as if to peck her eyes out, and then retreated just as quickly.

  Rosetta Hassan screamed. As if glimpsing the hell she feared, she screamed long and loud, so loudly that Rufus stopped beating her husband and turned to her. He released Henry Hassan and strode to the screaming wife. He grabbed her hair and dragged her toward the barn. Her screams redoubled and her hands clawed at his hands as her legs kicked at the brown, chalky dirt.

  After swaying like a tree half-felled, Henry Hassan slipped to the ground.

  “Come on!” Rufus ordered.

  “What about them?” Lewis asked, indicating the old woman and the children.

  “Bring ‘em.”

  Having gained her knees if not her legs, Rosetta Hassan intermittently crawled and staggered as Rufus pulled her by a handful of hair. Once in the barn, he threw her to the ground.

  “Take off your clothes,” he ordered.

  She grabbed her dress tightly around her. Maoma and Sam entered, and even Maoma did not instantly exult in this display, its outline too unpredictable, its outcome open-ended, it’s violence as likely to splatter on him as anyone else. Lewis and Luckey followed, herding the old woman and the children inside the barn.

  Rufus stormed toward them, grabbed one of the children and pointed a gun at his small head.

  “Take ‘em off or I kill him,” he said.

  With a new burst of tears, Rosetta Hassan slowly unbuttoned her dress. Her old mother bit her lip to fight back tears, and averted her eyes.

  “Please take the children away. Please!” the old woman wept.

  Rosetta asked herself what sins she had committed. As she unbuttoned her dress, exposing more and more of her flesh, a gun pointed to her young child’s head, she thought back on her life to identify the acts or omissions to so anger almighty God that this should befall her. As she felt the warm air on her breasts, she admitted that she found none, that there was no sin of equal breadth for which this would be a fitting punishment. As Rufus, annoyed at the slow unveiling, ripped her dress open, she abandoned a lifetime of belief in justice, in goodness as an inviolable shield against the darkness that she knew existed in the world, but that she assumed could never touch her.

  As she saw the short Negro and the tall Indian lead the children and her mother from the barn, she let go. Every muscle, every tendon relaxed, and she disappeared. She barely felt Rufus Buck spread her legs; she barely noticed his stiff member popping from his pants as he pulled them down. She stared blankly at the ceiling as he entered her and did not hear the energetic grunts or feel the pain as he violently thrust himself inside her. Nor did she hear the whelps of delight from Maoma as he urged his leader on, so distracted by the lust and violence on display that he did not notice his leader’s desperation or his tears as he viciously raped Rosetta Hassan.

  Outside, Lewis, Luckey, the old woman and the children all shielded their eyes from the brilliant sunlight-smeared sight of Theodosia continuing her cackling game with the prostrate Henry Hassan.

  “Gawk!” she squawked as she dove in at him, her fingers snatching sharply at him like a beak before she soared off again.

  The onlookers stared, rapt. Then, as if abruptly impressed with Hassan’s immobility, Theodosia dropped her arms, stood straight, and stared at the bloody figure on the ground. After a period of study, she approached and hunkered down next to him. She lifted one bloody eyelid until she saw the eyeball beneath. Then she let it drop. The eye closed. She lifted it again and let it drop. Again the eye closed. She tried the other eye with the same result. She smoothed his hair and laid his arms neatly at his sides.

  Satisfied, she rose and walked away. The old woman renewed her scowl of terror and disbelief as Lewis and Luckey watched the odd girl disappear into the barn. Fascinated, afraid of missing a scene of equal peculiarity to the one they’d just witnessed, Lewis and Luckey herded the reluctant old woman and the children after Theodosia—back into the barn.

  With Rosetta Hassan’s print dress like a full body halo on the ground around them, Sam Sampson, his pants, belt and drawers around his knees and his exposed bare backside pumping up and down, breathed heavily and closed his eyes in tight concentration as he plunged himself inside Rosetta Hassan. With his dark legs straight and close together on top of her white legs bent and spread out, they looked like a backwards/frontwards, two-toned frog. It made Theodosia giggle, breaking the lonely cadence of Sam’s breathy pants.

  Rufus and Maoma stood on one side of the panting man on top of the wide-eyed naked woman, her mouth half-open in what seemed an aborted expression of shock. Maoma rubbed his still-thick crotch; he had already taken her. Lewis and Luckey steered the old woman and the children into a corner, barely able to keep their eyes off the naked breasts and heaving buttocks on the ground. The old woman took in every face in the square room as if seeking confirmation that it was all really happening. She did not know what to feel. She had no emotions to apply to this; it stood outside the frame of what was human and so she could not feel it. This was more than ravishment. It was her own presence and that of the children, these men watching, her daughter’s nakedness witnessed by all and her trance-like torpor amidst the repulsive violence done her. Torn between reaching out to her daughter and shielding her grandchildren from the sight—she could have held her daughter’s hand as the man heaved on top of her, or cradled her head and cooed soft comforts as the naked man rutted inches away—torn between that and running away and never turning back, she stood the children in the corner with their faces to the wall, then turned her own back to the scene, conferring upon it the privacy of a rite that she could not comprehend and therefore dared not witness.

  Intrigued with Rosetta Hassan’s unmoving f
ace, as still as a photograph—as still as death, Theodosia moved to the pair’s heads. The breathy groans grew louder and Sam’s naked thrusts more rapid and ferocious, but Rosetta’s face did not change. It stared, open-mouthed and motionless, like a statue locked in prayer. Theodosia felt sad at the sight of Rosetta Hassan’s face. She fell to her knees and touched it, laying her palm on the warm cheek. Rosetta Hassan did not move.

  Sam moaned and uttered a short burst of grunts that rose in frequency and volume until he fairly screamed, and then fell still. He opened his eyes as if regaining consciousness, and looked at the blank white face that lay corpse-like beneath him. He shuddered as his penis slipped out of her, stood and pulled his pants up, smiling with accomplishment and satisfaction at Rufus and Maoma, the former staring glum hatred at the naked woman on the ground, while the latter grinned and nodded in camaraderie.

  As Theodosia stroked the raped woman’s beatific face, Luckey moved to straddle Rosetta Hassan. He unbuckled his belt, and pulled down his pants, his penis erect as he lay on her, and with one hand guided himself inside her with a sigh. Theodosia ignored Lewis as his naked backside slapped noisily against Rosetta Hassan. Enamored with the quiet beauty of the woman’s deathly gaze, Theodosia placed her pointing finger on one of Rosetta Hassan’s eyelids and slowly pulled it down. As she removed her finger, the lid popped open. Theodosia knew that only one thing would crown the woman’s transformation to the only sublimity and purity she had known—the lifeless rigidity that lay still, sun-baked and at one with everything, as if sculpted by the earth from various elements for the big, black birds to play with, just another piece of the immobile, unspeaking nothing all over—so Theodosia tried again to close Rosetta Hassan’s eyes, first one and then the other, but each time the lids popped unblinkingly open. As Luckey’s rowdy grunts crescendoed and his naked backside clinched tight, Theodosia pinched Rosetta Hassan’s nose. The woman’s eyes continued staring fixedly toward the barn ceiling. The breathless Luckey rose to his feet while Theodosia, with one hand pinching Rosetta Hassan’s nose, placed her other hand over the naked woman’s mouth. All watched. Nobody moved.

  Eyes still unblinkingly staring, Rosetta Hassan’s stiff arms began flailing up and down against the ground as legs rhythmically kicked at straw and muffled sounds struggling for breath gurgled from beneath Theodosia’s hand. The flailing hands then found Theodosia, pounding and clawing at her. Theodosia removed her hands from the woman’s face to swat at the limbs now attacking her. No longer muffled through Theodosia’s flesh, Rosetta Hassan’s monotonal moans, like those from a slow, drooling child, grew louder.

  For Theodosia, the beauty was gone. The potential to become like the stiff, dead things that so resplendently littered the land—it collapsed in that fit of graceless flapping about and mewling, so Theodosia sat on Rosetta Hassan’s moaning face. She plopped her buttocks on the woman’s face as if it were a pisspot. The woman’s screams intermittently vibrated against her skin and dirty drawers as she giggled and bounced up and down. She went up and the screams grew louder, and down, they grew softer—louder and softer as she rose and fell. Sam laughed and Moama clapped his hands and stamped his foot in time to her bouncing and the rise and fall of Rosetta Hassan’s cries.

  ~

  Spittle flew from his lips as he held the book aloft like a preacher’s Bible, red-faced and jowls trembling.

  “She touched this!” he shouted at the bewildered Virgil Purefoy. “As she giggled and recounted the sickening perversions, she placed her little hand upon it as if in some vile benediction, gazed so lovingly at it—have you seen her face, beautiful, isn’t it?—as close to an angel as you will ever see—and she ravished this book with her eyes as if from here she learned to hide her ugliness behind everything that civilized men find pleasing, as if from here,” he said, beating on the book as if to punish it, “to cloak the bloody filth that she is, like no human creature—inhuman. She is as white as you and I with a heart as black as any on Murderer’s Row. And you,” he pointed at Purefoy, “you brought this here, this filth,” and he heaved the book at him. “Were it not for you and this book, I never would have known… she might never have been.” He ran for the book and snatched it off the ground where it lay. “As if the pages conjured her,” he said. “As if to punish me for what I have done, for what I have failed to do here in this Territory. Was I so wrong? Is it,” and he swept his arms as if to take in all 74,000 square miles, “is it so unforgivable that I should be punished by this land vomiting up that girl and Rufus Buck? She sat here, in all her beauty, across from me and told me laughingly of rape and degradation, of rot and death. She loves death; it enlivens her, the darkness, the stillness, the unknown, the rot and the stench that frighten ordinary men to trembling, that fills me with horror as it threatens me. She breathes it like air.”

  Parker fell into his chair. He rested his head in trembling hands.

  After a few moments of dumbly staring at the back of Parker’s head, Purefoy tiptoed toward him. He peered around the edge of the chair as if a jack-in-the-box might pop up. Instead, he saw a scared old man.

  “Judge?” Purefoy whispered.

  Parker slowly shook his head from side to side. “We must tell no one,” he whispered.

  Purefoy waited. “Not tell what?” he finally asked.

  Parker rifled through phrases and pages that floated in his mind’s eye like ticker tape dribbled from on high. Each shard was a piece of the prophecy, reminding him of the world The Book (and that’s how he conceived it now—The Book) presaged—monstrosities born of a chaos without a Godly, guiding hand, against which all he could do was rail like a mad dog at thunder.

  “We’ll say what the father said, the liar—that she was forced, kidnapped, defiled by the Bucks. That’s what the jury must hear. It’s what the Territory will accept upon looking at her and seeing her beauty and then, across the courtroom, seeing the black faces that tortured white men and raped white women. They will weep for purity’s innocence. She must represent, in its most vivid form, what these savages are capable of. Looking upon that beautiful face, they must never imagine that it is as depraved as the black ones sitting not far—perhaps more so, no righteous outrage excusing her, born with skin soft and white as cotton, born to a white man who fought for his right to reign supreme over the Rufus Bucks who now outrage their way across my Territory—behaving not as the cow-like beings we like to think them, but as viciously as we would have if similarly abased. It can’t be borne. The jury will never hear of her repulsive gestures upon Rosetta Hassan. They will never conceive of the world the book foresaw. They will never know what I have made.”

  Purefoy was not sure what Parker meant. He assigned it to ill health and old age.

  “As she parades her innocence on the stand, she will be all white men,” Parker said, as if to himself. “She will be all of us.”

  \\

  As he rode from the Hassan farm, Rufus turned back to seal the tableau he’d left behind: Three children stood weeping as Henry Hassan dragged his bloodied, broken body, inch by inch, toward the barn where his wife lay naked and seemingly lifeless, as the old woman hysterically pulled on his arms as if engaged in absurd attempts to lift and carry him.

  With Theodosia, his Angel, in the saddle behind him, Rufus felt satisfied.

  12

  After news of the Hassan farm, women and children traveled under armed guard. Deputy Marshals Samuel Haynes and N.B. Irwin mounted more posses to hunt the Bucks than the Territory had ever seen at one time. The Creek Lighthorse joined the hunt in numbers.

  Lewis and Luckey felt it first. It was just a sense, a mild itch of finality, an inkling of chances passed, of endings.

  Lewis assigned his downheartedness to Theodosia’s antics preventing his full-throated enjoyment of Rosetta Hassan. He felt as if he had failed in a duty—reneged on his end of a bargain. Luckey assured him that it was no grave matter, and simultaneously wondered what accounted for his own dampened spirits.

&
nbsp; “White folks’ll think twice about comin’ to the Territory after this,” Rufus had announced, recalling the wreckage at the Hassan’s. Lewis, though, kept hearing Henry Hassan’s voice.

  “There ain’t nobody else,” he’d said. “Ain’t no Indians killin’ white folks but you.”

  If that was true, Luckey thought, and they were alone, then it wouldn’t be long now. The blackest of them all, not white and not even a little bit Indian, he knew he’d be the first to fall no matter who caught up to them.

  “I been thinkin’ about that farm,” Luckey said.

  “What about it?” replied Lewis.

  “We oughta buy it. It’s time.” Lewis looked at Luckey and, as usual, they instantly understood one another.

  Luckey trotted his horse up to Rufus.

  “We need supplies,” he said. “And some money. We oughta do some robbin’.”

  Rufus looked thoughtful for a moment, and then nodded his head in condescending agreement. Luckey let his horse fall back in line with Lewis.

  “When we get what we want, it’s time to go,” he said to his friend.

  “Go where? What about takin’ back the Territory?” Lewis asked

  “Go find a farm. Like that man said, might be nobody else. After what we done, if they catch up to us…”

  As they rode in silence, each imagining himself hunted and cornered like an animal.

  Rufus steered the group north, crossed the Canadian River, and held up a store in a sawmill town. Theodosia took ribbons and dresses and two little dolls. The rest stole fresh horses, cash, stocked up on guns and ammunition, and stuffed their pockets with jewelry and candy.

  Exhilarated, they cantered back across the river to rob another store Maoma knew. Energized by the store’s bounty and the ease with which they took it, they broke every shelf and display case as they strewed flour and sugar like New Years’ revelers.