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

by Leonce Gaiter

  Lewis, Luckey, Sam and even Maoma were surprised when Rufus then audaciously rode south, toward Okmulgee, which was full of law. But with their blood still up, they ignored their jitters. They galloped right over them with whoops and hollers to rob a store just West of the big town.

  They bound and gagged the terrified store owner, raided the cash and stuffed meat and tobacco into gunny sacks. Theodosia was greatly disappointed when Rufus refused to linger and spread sugar and flour as they had the last time.

  Word spread quickly about the string of robberies. The posses gained ground on the gang. By the time they traced the third robbery, Marshals Irwin and Hunt were no more than a few hours behind them.

  Fired up by their day-long spree, Rufus stopped in a glade seven miles north of Okmulgee. He chose well. It was high ground at the base of Flat Rock, an outcropping that rose another 200 feet behind them. They could spy anyone coming from any direction.

  The gang members excitedly dismounted as their horses grazed on the dry summer grass.

  “Let’s see it!” Maoma cried as each of them emptied pockets and dumped sacks full of everything from socks to cash into one large pile. Once pockets and bags were empty, they took a moment to appreciate the rich mound before Maoma, unable to resist, dove hungrily into it. Sam, Lewis and Luckey laughingly dove right after.

  “Hold on,” Rufus shouted, but the melee on the pile intensified. He pulled his gun and shot in the air.

  Hunted men, they panicked at the sound of the shot, fumbling for their guns, eyes whipping in every direction to spot the vengeance that had finally found them. They awoke to their fear. It filled their throats, and they could no longer deny it, or mask its source. They had done so much—killed and raped—for the dream of awakening the Territories, but now they heard that they had failed and if the man Rufus beat half to death was right and the Territories would not awaken—then all they had done was sin like they heard about in church. Nothing more. All they could expect was retribution. Had they succeeded, had Indians risen up, their acts, however violent, would have been virtuous, like in the Good Book.

  Only Rufus did not feel it. He laughed at their anxious faces, oblivious to what lurked behind them. “I’ll do the dividin’ here,” he smiled boastfully at Theodosia, who ignored him.

  As the four confirmed that the law had not found them, they slumped and sighed relief. Maoma never knew his heart could beat so fast. As they rose, the pile before them no longer gleamed like righteous bounty. It had a stain on it.

  Luckey blurted, “Let’s split it up an’ go.”

  “This is a good spot,” Rufus replied. “We’ll camp here an’ split it tomorrow.”

  “Let’s split it now,” Luckey insisted.

  “What for?” Rufus asked.

  “Me an’ Lewis gonna buy a farm.”

  “Ain’t enough here to buy no farm,” he scoffed.

  “We’ll get more.”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll camp here tonight”

  “Me an’ Lewis,” Lucky repeated with emphasis, “gonna buy a farm.”

  Rufus understood. He felt dizzy. He tasted bile.

  “The man said ain’t no one else doin’ what we doin’,” Lewis broke in, betraying little of the fear he felt.

  “He was lyin’,” Rufus insisted. “That’s what got him beat. He’s a goddamned liar.”

  “We ain’t seen no one,” Lewis pleaded. “We ain’t seen no dead white folks, no burned out farms. Ain’t seen no Indians out doin’ what we doin’.”

  “After what we done, they’re lookin’ for us,” Luckey explained. “If we stick together an’ keep doin’ the same, they gonna catch us.”

  It was hard to speak as he tried to staunch the spinning. “They jus’ waitin’ for the right time,” Rufus said, his arms strangely outstretched as he tried to gain his balance. “After what we done...

  “That’s it,” he said, as if hitting upon an irrefutable point, “after what we jus’ done, they’ll be comin’ now. When word of them folks at that farm spreads, it’ll start.”

  “They said the Creeks lookin’ for us, too,” Lewis muttered.

  Rufus plopped down on the ground. He hung his head, breathing hard. The others took the novelty for rage. Inside his head, thoughts whirred and buzzed and he couldn’t make sense of them. This was wrong. His success had been assured. It was predestined by an Angel of God. Providence had led him to Cherokee bill—a great man at the time—who embraced and clarified his mission. Seeing his father’s pain and all those years of studying tragic mementos on shelves against the wall. These events had molded him into the man that he was, the man who could extract retribution and finally bestow justice. He had been born Indian and colored and his mother had never known her parents and his father had lost everything and he had endured S.P. Callahan calling him and his kind dirt. It had happened because God had endowed him with the strength to spill as much of the white men’s blood as it took to make it right. It had been fate. This was his destiny.

  ~

  On the prairie one mile north of where the Buck gang gathered, Marshal Samuel Haynes raised his hand and stilled his horse on hearing a gunshot in the distance. Marshal N.B Irwin and the rest of the 10-man posse, white, black and Indian, stopped behind him. Haynes turned his head in the direction from which the shot sounded. He heard nothing more. Without so much as a nod to the posse, he spurred his horse to a gallop. He knew it was them.

  ~

  “I’m gonna go now,” Theodosia sang. She skipped to the pile of loot and pulled a lace-covered doll from it. Stroking the doll’s hair, without glancing at Rufus or any of the others, she sashayed confidently into the brush and disappeared.

  Still reeling, Rufus thought of dreams. He looked at the puzzled faces staring at him and wondered if the last days had been that—a dream as real as the one years ago that sent shudders from his shoulders to his toes and torrents of jissom gushing from his cock. Had he killed a man… how many days… 10 days ago? He looked at the pile of takings on the ground and wondered where they’d come from. The strange scene at the Hassan farm… the beautiful Angel… All phantoms. Perhaps he’d been wounded and rode in a daze. The world spun alarmingly.

  Luckey slowly turned from him and walked toward the pile of stolen goods. Calmly, he knelt and began moving items from here to there, into piles. Lewis joined him, and then Maoma.

  That’s when Sam saw the dust. This, he thought, must have been what it was like for those the gang rode down upon—a dust cloud approaching, death and the devil inside.

  “Folks comin’” he cried.

  Rufus exhaled an audible grunt as he leapt to his feet. Flung from his mind were all the shadowy thoughts as he spied the approaching cloud. Something was coming—there was someone to fight.

  “Get the ammo,” he ordered as he flew to the pile and grabbed rifles and cartridge belts. Pressured by his urgency, the others did the same.

  Rufus, rifle at the ready, heaved himself at the ground at the edge of the plateau. The other four threw themselves at the plateau’s perimeter and their shots soon snapped like firecrackers. The posse scattered around the base of Flat Rock as the Buck gang’s shots rained down. Some possemen slipped from their horses and took cover in the rocky terrain.

  Rufus smiled as he fired wildly. His path once more clear, his sense of purpose restored, he felt reborn after a quick, terrifying descent into oblivion. The shots deafened him. The smoke stung his eyes. As the posse returned fire, divots exploded in the trees and ground around him.

  More horses flocked to the base of the hill. Drawn by the fire, there must have been fifty men down there. Rufus whooped with excitement. This is the way the Rufus Buck Gang would go down. It would take everything the Territory had; and if the Bucks were hell bound, they’d drag enough of the Territory with them that no one would ever forget.

  He glimpsed men crawling their way up the hill, sheltering behind rocks and brush. When he ran out of ammunition, he retreated to the interior to reload, and t
hen retook his place on the perimeter.

  Excitedly, he looked to his right, ready to share his exhilaration with his gang, but he saw their fear instead. He remembered that they would have abandoned him, forsworn their mission and slunk away. He was glad that this siege had forced them, against their will, to act like men.

  Despite the gang’s relentless fire, the possemen crept their way closer. The battle raged. By late afternoon, the Bucks had been driven to the very top of the rocks and the law, now numbering close to one hundred, crawled like ants over their original shooting ground.

  Night fell and the rifle barrels shot sparks like struck matches up and down the hill. Rufus crouched in the center of the Flat Rock summit reloading when he saw Lewis and Luckey run past him. As Maoma fled in the same direction, a head broached the rim of summit and bullets scored the air all around him. The gang members shot behind them as they fled. Rufus found himself in both his gang’s and the posse’s lines of fire. He darted after his gang, firing blindly behind him. He almost tripped over Luckey, who rolled on the ground grasping his leg. Rufus spotted the blood trickling between Luckey’s fingers, but a bullet almost singed his ear and he kept running. He glimpsed outlines of Lewis, Sam and Moama spread out before him in the thick smoke. The flaming rifles sprouted in front of them as well as behind. Rufus slid behind a tree. He lost sight of the others. Breathless, he assumed they were dead and prepared for the same. He slipped more bullets into his revolver amidst the pepper of shots from all directions; he pumped cartridges into his rifle and then he steeled himself for one great, last run. He would go down in glory.

  A deafening explosion, a blast of wind like a smack to his head ripped his guns from his hands. Dazed, smoke choked him. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. When he opened his eyes, at least twenty guns stared down at him.

  Having grown tired of the siege, one of the possemen had shot dynamite from the barrel of his gun, bringing the gang to their knees.

  ~

  Sickly pale with deep purple rings around her eyes, Rosetta Hassan looked like a fevered corpse as she lay in the hotel bed. Her eyes stared straight ahead although her head moved slightly in response to voices, as if to reach her, sound had to battle the barriers her trials had erected all around her.

  Marshal Bass Reeves had accompanied Judge Parker to the hotel room in which she stayed under doctor’s supervision, but upon seeing his black face, she began the slow, agonized keening that so frightened everyone—a sound from hell and beyond that she had learned from her ravaged husband. Reeves slipped back through the door, leaving Parker, the opulently bandaged Henry Hassan, and the doctor alone with the bedridden woman.

  Parker, trembling and fighting to maintain his composure, sat in a chair next to the bed, and spoke softly.

  “I hear you wish to testify against those who did this.”

  Her wide eyes straight ahead, as if perpetually awaiting the next terror, her head slipped toward her husband, who smiled weakly at her. She shook her head ‘yes.’

  “That is very brave of you,” Parker reassured. He wanted to reach for her hand, but feared his tremors would be too violent and noticeable.

  “We will catch them soon, I promise,” he said. “They will be punished for this. You will have justice.”

  Her blank face did not register his soothing words.

  Unable to conceive a delicate approach, he said, “The young girl…”

  Rosetta Hassan’s eyes flew instantly to his and a low moan grumbled in her throat. The doctor approached, took her hand and stroked it.

  “It’s alright now,” he said. “It’s alright.”

  The sounds fell to a labored breathing. The doctor nodded to the Judge.

  “They took her,” Parker said, his voice breaking. “They ripped her from her father’s arms and forced upon her the same violence and degradation to which you were so brutally subjected.”

  Rosetta Hassan’s head shifted and she stared again at the ceiling.

  “Offenses barely endurable for a grown woman—imposed by men capable of lusts and evil beyond description—upon so pure a child.”

  A tear formed in Parker’s eye. He cried for this and the surfeit of other lies he had told to the desperate.

  On seeing the tear, Rosetta Hassan lifted her hand to his face as if to touch it, but stopped halfway as if the strength or the will had left her.

  Parker took her hand. There was deep pain in the exhausted old face—pain sharp enough to puncture her obsession with her own.

  “Bring her,” she whispered.

  Parker’s grip involuntarily tensed on Rosetta Hassan’s hand. He released it immediately. Christian forgiveness. Rosetta Hassan would practice it. She would confer it upon the deserving innocent—as was proper. It’s the sort of gesture that in his more Christian tempers, he would have made himself.

  The idea of it sickened him—the depraved girl standing at her victim’s bedside receiving her benediction. It sickened him; and he would endure it. He would witness it. He would assist it; and all because to do so camouflaged the world and men to the degree that he could stand to say he served a God who sanctioned them.

  Parker sent his Marshal to fetch the girl’s father—the filthy vagabond who recalled himself a gentleman—and for Mrs. Pinch to bring the girl. Bill Swain arrived with himself and his clothes washed—haphazardly—as if he’d lost the art of doing it properly, his skinny pants smudged and stained, his hair combed, but greasy, whether from natural oils or beautifying pomades it was impossible to tell. He worked hard to present an upright appearance, and he seemed more desperate for his efforts.

  “The Buck’s victim in there has asked to see your daughter,” Parker informed Swain, who shook his head in grave and enthusiastic assent. “I told her that your daughter was also a victim. I asked the woman to imagine the crimes visited upon herself, but imposed on one so young.” Parker searched Swain’s face for the rigors of liar’s remorse.

  “That’s jus’ what happened,” Swain earnestly intoned. “That’s how it happened.”

  Parker weighed the satisfaction of calling Swain a liar against his own need to propagate the lie.

  “You must see to it,” Parker confided, leaning so close to Swain he could smell nervous sweat on him, “that she tells the story that you so movingly told—of abduction and rape, of desperate fear and forced participation in their filth… forced participation. It is imperative that Rosetta Hassan hears that tale,” Parker leaned back to gauge whether Swain had grasped the import. “Do you understand?” Parker emphasized, intensifying his already burning gaze.

  Bill Swain’s simpering mien fell like a discarded costume mask. Everything about him hardened.

  “I didn’t do nothin’ to deserve this,” seethed the haggard, ill-kempt man. “I was the son o’ one of the best families in Mississippi. My wife was a beauty and our children should have been the pride of the state, married to the finest, to make more of the best. That’s what I was born to,” he insisted, indignantly jabbing his finger at Parker as if he were to blame. “That’s who I shoulda been.”

  Parker ignored the flared nostril outrage and focused on the disbelief—that Bill Swain could not fathom what he had become.

  “And you are still that man,” Parker reassured. “The jury and all the world watching this trial must see that you are. In your daughter, they must see the kind of girl that such a well-born man would raise.”

  “They took her,” Swain exhorted as if daring one last time to convince himself. “It took three of ‘em to hold me back.”

  Parker couldn’t stand any more. Disgust overwhelmed him.

  “They did not take her,” he almost shouted. “She went with them because she wanted to. They did not force her.” He paused to settle his temper, but instead grew more and more incensed. “She enjoyed it!” Parker hissed at him.

  Angry tears filled Bill Swain’s eyes.

  “No one will believe the Bucks. You just make sure your daughter tells the same lies that
we so deftly tell—both to that poor woman in there whom she helped terrorize, and on the witness stand.”

  Swain wept.

  Softening, Parker added, “You cannot live with the idea of what she’s done. I understand. Nor can I. The world in which she could do this… it is not the world we made. Not the one we meant to.” Self-pity and guilt descended like a mist.

  “We deserved better,” he mumbled to himself as he turned away from Swain. “Our memories need not be stained with this.”

  13

  As the Rufus Buck Gang was run to ground at Flat Rock summit, Cherokee Bill stood trial in Judge Parker’s court for the murder of jail guard Lawrence Keating. The trial lasted three days, at the end of which Bill was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The day after his sentence, he received a visit from the man who had condemned him to die to discuss the mind and motives of young Rufus Buck.

  Legal maneuvering, the details to which he’d long since stopped attending, delayed Bill’s execution; so he was still in his cell when Buck returned to Ft. Smith—not for petty thievery or liquor running this time, but to the first floor—Murderer’s Row.

  Henry Starr had been Bill’s sole source for information since his failed breakout and subsequent close confinement. Bill was not surprised to hear that Rufus had been likewise confined. If Starr was to be believed—and that was always a question—Buck’s crimes had far bettered Bill’s in the outlaw department. A lot of rape and murder, they said. The whole Territory terrified. Bill tended to believe it. Parker’s visit had telegraphed the scare Buck had put in the white folks; and nothin’ scared white folks like a rapin’, killin’ Negro. Bill felt a twinge of pride. He admitted to himself a certain excitement at Buck’s return. Recalling the obstacles he had originally overcome to seek him out, Bill figured the boy would show up somehow—close confinement or not. ‘Little Rufus Buck,’ Bill thought, ‘made it to the first floor.’