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

by Leonce Gaiter

  Rufus never came.

  “How come we ain’t seen nothin’ o’ him?” Bill asked Henry Starr after a week or so.

  “They think he’s worse than you,” Starr said. “He ain’t getting’ outta that cell.”

  “You seen him?” Bill asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  He had not thought of Buck. He forced himself not to. Shame was the culprit, but he did not dwell on it. He had lied to Buck and manipulated him, and then during happenings resulting from his lies and manipulations, he had saved Bill’s life while simultaneously betraying him to win freedom for himself. He chuckled bitterly inside. It was typical of him—so morally immoral, so uprightly low down.

  “Think he’ll watch me hang?” Bill asked.

  Starr shrugged. “Don’t know if he’ll ask. Don’t know if they’d let him.”

  Deep down, Bill wanted him there. No one had ever looked up to him like that. He had never inspired anyone. Buck there would prove that he had meant something.

  ~

  On March 17, 1896, the whole jail—the whole Territory—knew that Cherokee Bill would die. Rufus Buck knew, though he should have been dead. The Judge had originally set the Buck Gang’s hanging for October 31, 1895. Supreme Court review then delayed their executions until July of 1896. Rufus wished that they had died before Bill. He didn’t know why.

  Six months had passed in solitude and stillness, despite the clamor and stink of the Ft. Smith jail. Rufus rose, he ate, he slept, armed guards walked him in the yard, and then he did it all again. He thought of little. He thought of dying and decided that the act itself did not impress him. He convinced himself, however, that his death would finally unleash the upheaval that he had worked so hard to incite in life. So he learned to anticipate death as children do Christmas. It would bring the greatest gift.

  To secure his martyrdom, he took to writing letters. Addressed “To the Indian people of Indian Territory,” the letters explained how their freedom had been slowly stolen, how their land had been usurped, their dignity ground to dust. Day after day he wrote, seeking new, improved and more persuasive ways to tell his tale. He wrote about the forces that compelled his quest, the Divine presence that guided him, and the Angel that came first in a dream and then in the flesh to accompany him. He told how he had sought to free all of the Indian and colored people. He prophesied that in death, he would succeed.

  He waited for her. Any commotion in the jail and he sat up, hoping that she had come. He forgave her for the trial. It hurt that she had barely looked at him, but he knew in his heart that they made her say those things. It wasn’t her fault.

  So that Rufus could remain God’s servant to his people, so that Parker could remain the righteous architect of Territories, so that Bill Swain could remain a gentleman, Theodosia remained the innocent. To Rufus, she was God’s voice in his ear. So white, and so pure; she was all good things on this earth.

  ~

  The unimaginably frail Rosetta Hassan took the stand and spoke unsteadily of her ordeal at the hands of the merciless Buck gang. She wept. During her frightful testimony, the jury glared with open hatred at the five defendants, who sat unmoved.

  As Rosetta Hassan was led from the witness stand, the Judge called Theodosia Swain in trembling disbelief at his own actions, his own voice disembodied, as if as if it bled, hollow, from another world. Everything before him flickered as if projected from a distance.

  Rosetta Hassan smiled adoringly and sympathetically as she passed the child, who was dressed in white and pale pink. The gallery audibly gasped at so beautiful a creature called to speak on so grisly a crime. After swearing in, Theodosia sat to give her testimony.

  “Do you recognize these men here?” the prosecutor asked, pointing to the defendants.

  Theodosia lowered her eyes. “Yes, sir,” she replied, so softly that few in the courtroom could hear her.

  “How do you know these men?”

  She paused, appearing to most as if the event were too painful to recall. “They took me,” she said, sneaking a peak at the jury. Seeing the men paying her rapt attention, she could not help but flash a smile in their direction, which sent them nodding and smiling at one another like proud grandfathers. She looked at the gallery audience, preparing to do the same, but caught her father’s glowering face and resumed her diffident air, staring at her lap and only occasionally allowing her eyes to flutter upwards.

  “What do you mean, they took you?”

  “They took me from my Papa,” she said, looking up at her father in the gallery.

  All eyes turned to Bill Swain, who, in order to appear visibly shaken, hung his head.

  “He tried to stop ‘em,” she continued with more vehemence. “It took three of ‘em to hold him back.” She beamed at her father, who returned a tremulous, tear-stained smile of his own. The courtroom was spellbound.

  “What happened after they took you?” the prosecutor asked.

  “They made me watch.”

  “Did they make you watch at the Hassan farm?”

  “Yes sir,” her sudden broad smile disconcerted the prosecutor. Judge Parker sat in his chair, his head erect, his eyes closed as if in desperate concentration or silent prayer, willing this girl to play her part.

  “Did you see these men force themselves on Rosetta Hassan?”

  “Her eyes was open, too,” Theodosia said, to questioning stares. Parker’s own eyes popped open and he shifted in his chair. Theodosia glanced at him. “Almost as big as yours,” she said to him, giggling.

  Bill Swain bounced to his feet in the gallery. Murmurs erupted.

  Parker sternly addressed the witness. “Did these men force themselves on you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Uh uh,” she replied.

  Parker raised his voice. “Did they do to you what they did to Rosetta Hassan?”

  “I closed the man’s eyes,” Theodosia boasted, this time to the jury.

  “Did they violate you!?” Parker thundered.

  “Girl!” Swain shouted from the gallery.

  All five of the Buck gang giggled as if she’d told a private joke.

  “Order!” Parker thundered.

  The courtroom hushed. Parker nodded to the prosecutor.

  “Did they violate you?” the prosecutor repeated.

  Theodosia cast an eye at the glowering Judge and then at her irate father.

  “He stuck his thing in me.” She couldn’t help but titter.

  The courtroom gasped.

  “Who?”

  “Rufus Buck,” she replied, her shoulders squished and her head tilted in coquettish modesty.

  Rufus Buck smiled shyly back at her.

  “You have no further questions?” Parker asked in the tones of an order.

  “No, your Honor.”

  “Step down,” Parker said to the girl.

  Her father rose. As she passed into the gallery, he grabbed her hand and marched the beautiful, smiling creature from the courtroom as she craned her neck to eye Rufus Buck one last time. Buck stood, confusing the courtroom as he gazed devotedly after her.

  14

  Every day, a letter arrived from the jail. Another of Rufus Buck’s missives haranguing the Indians to follow his Divine lead and rise up against the white men who slowly stole their lands and their souls. Parker would have paid money never to see one of those letters again, but he trusted no one else to do what must be done—to burn each and every one of them to ashes.

  His health had turned. He suffered frequent fevers. Breathing grew more difficult. Pain up and down his back nearly crippled him. It was March, and he would be officially stripped of his power in September, his court disbanded. In two days, Cherokee Bill would die. Strangely, Parker found himself moved by the latter far more than the former.

  Again he visited Bill. Again his visit disordered the jail and caused widespread comment, but the dying Judge did not care.

  “Have you prepared for what’s to come?” Parker asked.

>   Bill shrugged. “You?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “No,” Parker sighed. “Not so good.”

  A silence fell that neither sought to break. Each felt quite comfortable in it. Each was part of the other’s world—law and outlaw, creatures of the honest wild. They shared that.

  “Do you have any requests? Any goods or messages that I can pass along?” asked Parker.

  “Nah. Stole a helluva lotta money an’ ain’t got nothin’.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that for you, it wasn’t about the money.”

  Bill smiled a charming smile. “If you are right about that, Judge, I am a bigger fool than I thought.”

  They enjoyed another silence. Hearing nothing for so long, the guard looked in to see the Judge and the outlaw seated in phlegmatic ease.

  Parker had no idea how long he’d been there when the guard’s loud throat-clearing roused him.

  “I’d best be going,” Parker said. But he did not rise. Only when he heard the key in the lock and the creaky door swing open did he do so.

  “See you soon, Judge.”

  “I fear so, son,” Parker replied.

  “Hell awaits,” said Bill.

  It was a struggling mass of humanity that had gathered on and around the steps and walls and when the time came there was a scramble even among those who were provided with passes. There was a crush and a jam for a few minutes but order was at last restored in a measure and all awaited the moment when the door should open for the coming of the condemned man.

  The crowd outside had swelled to increased numbers, all the available buildings and sheds being occupied. A pathway was cleared through the crowd, and very shortly after the clock struck two the door opened and the doomed man was brought forth, a guard on either side. The march to the gallows was taken up.

  “This is about as good a day to die as any,” remarked Cherokee as he glanced around.

  The death warrant was then read, during which Bill gazed about as if a little impatient to have the thing over with.

  The priest offered a short prayer, the condemned man listening attentively the meanwhile, and then as if knowing what was to come next, Cherokee bill walked forward till he stood upon the trap. His arms and legs were bound, and it was while this was being done that Bill spoke to different ones in the crowd below.

  “Good-bye, all you chums down that way,” said he, with a smile. There was a creaking sound as the trap was sprung and the body shot downward. The fall was scarcely six feet, but the rope had been adjusted carefully and the neck was broken. The muscles twisted once or twice, but that was all.

  Judge Parker sat in his office during the hanging. He heard the trap door swing.

  ~

  As his execution date approached, Rufus wrote more frantically, filling piles of paper with his scrawling mix of print and cursive, painstakingly wrought. Each day, he took desperately to his pen to redeem his cause and ennoble himself in his father’s eyes.

  Each day Parker received and read the writings, and each day he burned them in his fireplace. He considered it a form of private conversation—an obscene intimacy between himself and Rufus Buck.

  One week before the execution, the letters stopped. On the first letter-less day, Parker told Purefoy to discover why. Purefoy reported that Rufus had written nothing that day. As subsequent days passed with no further words from Buck, Parker found that he missed them. They were the only truthful conversation he had left.

  After two weeks, convinced that Buck’s pen had spent itself, Parker, visibly weakening, pulled The Book from his lower desk drawer. He rose and walked to the fire and threw it on top. He then sent for Virgil Purefoy and all the court records of the Rufus Buck gang trial and sentencing.

  Purefoy arrived and immediately saw the leather-bound book on the fire, the gold lettering still visible on the not-yet-blackened spine “… Species arles Darw.” He said nothing as he dropped the records on the table. Parker sat down before them and gestured for Purefoy to do the same.

  “It is not enough,” Parker said to the confused clerk. “She must be purged.” He had burned the book; and now he would erase the girl and all the connections between it and him. As if fearing it might rise from the grave, he would further bury The Book and the world it said that he had helped create.

  He was half mad with the irony: the last bulwark against a Godlessly anarchic world that threatened to engulf them all; the unwitting architect of that world’s monstrosities.

  “We must go through these,” Parker declared, flicking a hand at the records as if shooing them, “and remove all mention of her.”

  Purefoy protested. “Sir, these are official court records…”

  “The father cannot be trusted,” Parker continued. “Of course, the girl cannot. Others might be told or come to suspect. There can be nothing left.”

  “You look tired, sir. Why don’t I…”

  “Don’t patronize me, boy” Parker spat, slamming his palm on the table. “You are full of idolatrous gazes and deferent sounds, but you brought filth into my house and stuck my face in it like I was some ill-trained dog. Well now you can help me clean up the mess”

  “The gift was a sign of my esteem…”

  “Don’t you dare lecture me about the sanctity of the Court,” Parker interrupted. “I am the court. I have been the court for 20 years. What are you?”

  Purefoy visibly trembled. “I just meant, sir…”

  “I’m not tired, you fool. I’m dying. Now do as I say.” Parker shoved a file toward him.

  They worked through the night. By morning, they had replaced the offending documents. They watched the originals burn in the fireplace, filling the room with noxious smoke. Purefoy worked in utter dismay at his and Parker’s actions. No thieving or larceny would have pained him more.

  When the task was done, Purefoy rose to leave.

  “Take your things and go home,” Parker said to him. “Back to Virginia. Go home. There’s nothing left here.”

  “But sir, my career is here.”

  Parker smiled. “So you still want one, even after this? The taste is not so sour that you abandon the whole scheme?” Parker waved his hand before his face as if shooing a fly. “Stay then. You belong now. The lies that gird this place are of your making as well as mine.”

  Purefoy turned to go, nerve endings tingling with equal parts mortification and relief.

  Holding the arm of Marshal Bass Reeves, Judge Parker attended the execution of Rufus Buck and his gang. He had to admit that they comported themselves like men. They walked calmly to the gallows. They did not weep or call out when the black hoods were placed on their heads. They ignored the taunts of the crowd.

  Parker tried to resist, he tried to ignore the impulse like a drunk the bottle, but he finally scanned the crowd for the man whose pain had been so palpable that it had set this hell in motion—a pain that to this day he dreaded remembering, much less revisiting, a pain that could only have grown even more unendurable; but he did not spy John Buck among those who’d come to watch the hanging. At that—this paltry sign of God’s grudging, diminutive grace—he took solace.

  The trap dropped with its horrible “chug” at 1:25 o’clock. Lewis Davis died in three minutes, his neck broken. The necks of Sam Sampson and Maoma July were also broken, and they died quickly.

  Rufus Buck and Luckey Davis were strangled to death. Luckey’s body drew up several times before it straightened out. Rufus Buck did not suffer, of course, unconsciousness coming over him as soon as the rope shut off his breath; but it was several minutes before the contortions of his body ceased.

  As the black hood fell and snuffed out the world, he writhed at the end of the rope. He gasped for air in exultation at the glorious Indian awakening his death would ignite. He would witness it, he knew, from his seat in Heaven, his Angel at his side.

  As Rufus Buck hung at the end of a rope, a guard discovered a photograph
in his cell. It was his mother’s likeness. On the back, there was a poem in his own hand, lovingly decorated with drawings of a crucifix, ivy, and the face of Jesus Christ:

  mY dreAm

  I, dremP’t I was in Heaven,

  Among, The AngeLs, Fair;

  I’d, near seen none so HAndSome

  THAT, Twine in golden, Hair;

  They Looked, so neat, and Sang So Sweet

  And, PLAY,d, THE THE golden HArP,

  I WAS ABouT To, Pick, an, AngeL ouT,

  And, TAKe Her TO, mY HearT;

  BuT, The moment I, BegAn, To, PLEA,

  I, THougHT of You, mY LOVe,

  There, WAS none I’d, seen So BeauTiFull,

  On earth, or, HeAven Above.

  gooDby

  1Day of July

  The yeore off

  1896

  FaATHER, Son, HOLy GHOST

  virtue & resurresurrection

  Judge Parker lay bedridden and desperately ill as his Court was dissolved on September 1, 1896. As the dissolution occurred, all hailed the unshakable virtue of the man who had singlehandedly civilized a once-savage land.

  END