by J. Lee Butts
We pitched out of the wagon. I landed in the water. Went down and thought I’d never come up. Weeds clogged the ditch bottom and pulled at my feet. Must’ve been more unconscious than conscious for a minute or two. Maybe more. I came half awake, tangled under a clump of trash and twigs, on the far side of that swampy smelling trench. Heard the man in black again before I could see him.
“Get in the wagon, Benny. Hurry up. We don’t have much time. Them ole boys from Mississippi might grow a piece of brain big enough between the ten of ’em to come back this way.”
Cleared the mud and blood from my eyes just as he fired two more shots into my father’s body. Papa had landed at the water’s edge and half floated there. Wanted to help so bad I thought I’d explode. Parts of me just wouldn’t move at the time. The shock of my father’s death, the fall, and my wound partially paralyzed me.
I heard screaming. But it didn’t seem real. It all sounded a long way off. Muffled for a while, then sharp and awful—the kind of awful that leaves no doubt when someone’s dying. It took a while before I realized I knew the people doing the screaming.
A short man wearing a long, ragged military coat ran past the man in black and jumped into the wagon. The belt around his waist bristled with pistols and a huge knife. He stood there for a moment and spat tobacco juice over his shoulder. Then he dove into my mother’s belongings like a man going swimming.
Furniture, pots, pans, and clothing flew from the wagon’s back and sides like wounded birds going to ground. When he came up wearing one of mother’s bonnets, he giggled and laughed like something crazed.
“See anything, Benny?” The man in black paced along the ditch. He stared at the stumps, grass, and floating logs. I knew if he spotted me he wouldn’t miss again.
“Can’t find that big Kentucky farm boy,” he snarled. “Think I got him clean, but it’d be nice to put a couple more in him before we leave.”
More squeals and giggles came pouring out the back of the wagon like a waterfall. “Preacher. Look. Look what Benny done found. Stupid greenhorn hid it under the boards jest like they always does.”
The short man jumped from the back of the wagon and handed the leather pouch to his leader, then danced and twirled around the money after they dumped it on the ground. His half-witted brain probably couldn’t completely comprehend what he’d discovered.
“Well, look at you, Benny. Fifteen brand spankin’ new twenty-dollar gold pieces. Three hundred dollars. Damned fine take when you figure all we had to do was kill a stupid plow chaser and his family.” The black-clad killer dropped the coins into the bag one at a time. He’d lied. Papa had put five hundred dollars in that bag.
Then he shoved the leather sack into his coat pocket, strolled to his tall black horse like a man on his way to Sunday school, and jumped into the saddle. “Go get the others and let’s get away from here, Benny,” he yelled.
“Don’t think they’s ready to go just yet, Preacher. You know they’s never ready till the screamin’ stops.” He turned, cupped a hand over his right ear, and looked toward the spot in the trees where the man in black had first appeared. “Hear ’em?”
“Do as you’re told, Benny. Go get ’em. We’ve got to get away from here right now.”
Then the son of a bitch sat on his horse looking at my father’s lifeless body, raised the Bible toward heaven, and said, “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth. I regret your inheritance is this stinkin’ Arkansas canal, brother, but I feel my needs far exceed those of a Kentucky sodbuster. Nothing personal. Come on, Satan, let’s get gone.” He put the spur to his huge horse and darted past Benny.
The little man yelled at the trees, “Come on. The Preacher’s a-leavin’. Come on. Hurry up.” Only the screams answered him from the darkness of the forest.
He stood in the road, hopped from foot to foot, scratched himself, and waited for the wailing to stop. He twitched and fidgeted, then vanished for about a minute and came back leading two horses and the biggest mule I’d ever seen.
The freshly fallen rainwater drained me of energy. Struggled to stay conscious. Got harder to do by the second. My concentration wandered all over Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Then the quiet shocked me back.
Two men stumbled out of the woods pulling at their pants. They all resembled fearful men called Texians I’d seen on wanted posters tacked to trees along our route from Kentucky. Benny led their mounts to them. The man who rode the mule needed an animal that large. He stood every inch of six and a half feet and looked to weigh nigh two hundred and fifty pounds. They swung into their saddles and vanished into the muddy distance. Flew back into the woods like buzzards scared away from a meal by the appearance of larger, more powerful animals.
“Mr. Tilden, did you recognize Saginaw Bob Magruder or know he called himself the Preacher?”
“Well, no, I didn’t know the man, Junior. Already told you that. Never seen Arkansas, Texas, or the Indian Territories. Kentucky farm boys weren’t privy to their law enforcement problems. Go get yourself a map. Arkansas Post, not far from where Magruder murdered my family, sat on a swampy piece of bog just east of the Mississippi. Who could have expected an ambush in such a place by men like those? My family’s slaughter was a classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He mulled that one over for a while before he said, “You’ve described an awful scene, Mr. Tilden. I’m surprised you can remember it in such detail after all these years.”
“What I’ve described so far can’t compare to what I found in the woods, Junior.” Pulled a red bandanna from my pocket and wiped away the tear.
Guess that open display of emotion surprised Franklin J. Jr. “After more than sixty years, it still affects you so deeply?”
“Till then I’d never seen anybody die, boy. My grandparents passed long before I got born. Magruder killed my father right in my face. It’s not a thing you forget. No matter the passage of time. Took me almost two hours to crawl out of that ditch and recover enough to find and load my gruesome cargo into the wagon. When I located what those animals left of my mother and Rachael, I had trouble telling which was which. Only the clothing on the ground near their bodies gave away the mystery. Wept so much it could have refloated Noah’s boat. Stood over those bodies and swore horrible, bloody vengeance. I’ve worked real hard not to think about that scene any more than necessary since then.”
“What had they done to your mother and sister?”
“Won’t tell you that. A gentleman doesn’t discuss such subjects. You wouldn’t print it anyway. The tender readers of Pulaski County would run you and your editor out of the state if I told you the whole truth of the thing. So there’s no point. It’s enough you know that men skilled in the use of a Bowie knife can render a human being damn near unrecognizable.”
“I thought we agreed you’d tell me everything, black or white. Spots and all.”
“I didn’t agree to anything. I’m just telling you the story of how fate got me started as a lawman. Won’t go into detail about the barbarity of my mother’s and sister’s deaths. That’s my final word on the matter, Junior.”
“All right. Okay. Can we go on? Oh—wait just a minute.” He fished around in his pants pocket and came up with a small knife. Little shavings from his pencil filtered down to General Black Jack Pershing, who rolled over on his orange-striped back and swatted at them like they were pesky gnats.
Well, I left almost everything my parents owned in the road and pushed the oxen toward Winchester Township. Fell asleep. Exhaustion, shock, loss of blood—all of it finally caught up with me. When I woke, the wagon had rolled to a stop in front of a rough saloon. Burned letters in a primitive rough-cut board sign over the door announced it as “Hooty Gwen’s.” Got quite a reaction when I stumbled in and fell to my knees just inside the door. An unwelcome silence rushed around the place.
Then, a man at one of the tables along the right side of the room jumped up, grabbed my arm, and led me to hi
s chair.
“Lord in heaven, son. What happened to you?” He helped me get seated and looked at my face.
“Man dressed like a preacher shot me.”
He turned to the bartender and said, “Hooty, bring me a rag and some water. This boy’s been shot.” He poked around on my head for a minute. “My name’s Robbie Bullard, son. What’s yours?”
“Hayden Tilden.”
He waved toward some men across the table. “That one’s Chester Gober, and the other’s Beaver Acorn.” They both gave me a wide-eyed nod and acted like they wanted to hit the door as fast as they could.
A man who sat alone at the only other table stood and moved to a spot behind the one called Chester. He carried a large tumbler of whiskey and swayed slightly when he stopped. “Ain’t you gonna introduce me, Robbie? I’m just as important as these spit wads. I got rights just like these others.”
Hooty Gwen dropped a wet rag in Bullard’s hand and placed a pan of water beside a bottle of reddish green liquid on the table in front of me.
“Sorry there, Chad. Forgot you were here. You’ve always been the quietest drunk in these parts, and it’s easy to forget you’re around. Hayden, the one about to fall down behind Chester goes by the name of Chad Luther. Most folks around here think that’s an alias, but if you call him that he’ll come to supper, when he’s sober.”
“You say a preacher shot you, son?” Hooty Gwen pulled a chair up beside me and dabbed around on the back of my neck with another wet rag. His bald head sparkled like a glass doorknob under the light thrown from a kerosene lamp hanging above the table.
“Yes, sir. Big man. Had three others with him. Short, tobacco chewing fella he called Benny and two others. They all dressed like Texians and carried pistols and big knives. I’ll know them when I see them again.”
The one introduced as Beaver said, “Damn, boy. You’ve just described Saginaw Bob Magruder and his gang. That little one was most likely Benny Stubbs. Other two was Azel Stroud and Cecil Morris. Worst kinda murderin’ scum in these parts. They robbed a bank over in Ennis, Mississippi, couple of days ago. Killed a sheriff and some other folks in the process. You’re lucky you’re alive.”
“Yeah, lucky,” added Chad Luther. “You travelin’ alone, son?”
“No. I left my family outside in the wagon.” Bullard squeezed my blood into the pan of water. “They’re all dead.”
The town’s entire drunken welcoming committee jerked a nervous look at the door. “How many do you have, Hayden?” asked Chester Gober.
“Could you speak up, boy? I can barely hear you.” Luther moved around his friend, stopped next to me, and frowned down at the wound on my face. “Lord almighty,” he whispered.
“Three dead. My father, mother, and sister.”
Hooty Gwen glanced at each face around the table. “We’d better send for Horace. If they’s been murder done, he needs to know about it.”
They all nodded their agreement just as Chester Gober jumped from his chair. “I’ll go get ’im. You boys see what’s in the wagon.” He skulked toward the door like a man afraid the devil waited in the dark, peeked out for a moment, then disappeared.
Bullard dropped his bloody rag in the pan and lifted the lantern from its hook above the table. “I guess we’d better look.”
“I ain’t goin’ out there in the dark to stare at folk murdered by Bob Magruder and his bunch,” Luther whined. He took a deep swallow from his glass and added, “I-I’ll stay here with the boy till ya’ll get back.”
Gwen and Acorn followed Bullard’s light and were gone but a minute or two. Stunned and white-faced, they stumbled back in and immediately headed for the bar.
Beaver Acorn threw down a shot of something straight that made him shake his head. “I ain’t seen anyone cut up that bad since Bosephus Chandler fell on the big blade down at Sheridan’s sawmill.”
Everyone stared at me like I was dead too. Things got real quiet. I could hear the clock on the wall by the bar. Time just kind of stood still for about a minute. Then the door busted open and Chester Gober pulled a man who looked like a farmer in by the arm.
“Dammit, Hooty, this crazy boozehound jerked me out of a warm bed with some wild story about murder and robbery. If this turns out like the last dodge you and this swarm of barflies tried to pull on me, I’ll have you all prosecuted the next time Judge McCord makes the circuit.”
“Hayden, meet Horace Potts, the sometimes mayor of our little hole in the road,” said Hooty Gwen. “Horace, this boy has three bodies out in his wagon. We’ve all seen ’em. We’re pretty sure Saginaw Bob Magruder and his bunch did the killings. What are we gonna do about it?”
Potts looked at me like a man who’d just been presented with a plate of his own deep-fried internal organs. “Bury ’em,” he squawked, and ran for the door like a scalded dog.
Well, I’ve got to hand it to that bunch of drunks. In the middle of a moonless night, they took me to what went for their local church, helped me unload my family, and placed them on its porch.
Slept in the wagon on top of boards saturated in their blood. Had a terrible dream. A skeletal apparition dressed like a preacher flew down from heaven. In each bony hand, a tiny pistol spat fire at me. Behind him, a three-headed dog snapped at his black horse’s feet. I heard the shrieks of women I knew. Next morning at daylight, Robbie and the others came back and took turns helping me dig graves.
No undertaker tended my mother, father, or Rachael. No preacher said words over them. They went in the ground wrapped in blankets that once kept them warm during icy Kentucky winters. I wasted no time over those graves. The bullets that killed Papa and creased my face caused an infection of my soul. Finding the bodies of my mother and sister forced that infection into my heart. I had but one object in life, as far as I could see—find the Magruder gang and kill as many of them as I could. No matter how long it took. No matter where they tried to hide. They were dead men from the moment I threw the last shovel of dirt on my family.
I ran from that graveyard to Winchester Township’s only mercantile and gun shop. A clerk named Westbrook, wearing garters on his arms, bought my wagon and team. That money, and the two bags Benny Stubbs had failed to find, left me fairly well off. All told, it amounted to almost two thousand dollars.
“Hold it. Wait just a minute, Mr. Tilden. Where exactly did your father hide all that extra money?” Franklin J. Lightfoot Jr. looked at me like a kid with his fingers caught in a set of Chinese handcuffs.
“Oh, I’m right sorry there, Junior. Forgot to tell you Benny Stubbs didn’t come anywhere close to finding all the money hid in the wagon. Papa stashed a bag in the water barrel and another in a hollowed-out spot under the seat. We set out for Texas with just over fifteen hundred dollars. Benny found only five hundred of it. What with selling the wagon and team, I had a nice little stake when it all shook out. Bought myself a Winchester model 1876, .45-70 hunting rifle with a thirty-inch octagon barrel and extra sights, a used Colt’s Richards Conversion, and two boxes of ammunition for each. That rifle was one whopper of a big ole gun. Learned how to shoot one just like it from a friend back home named Clovis Hickerson. I could hit a sparrow at five hundred yards. What with some new duds and the weapons, I didn’t spend all that much.”
“What about a horse? Didn’t you need a horse?”
“Of course I needed a horse. Mr. Westbrook told me that the best in town belonged to none other than the honorable Mr. Horace Potts, the low-life coward of a mayor who ran from me the night before.”
“Did he sell it to you?”
“Well, he didn’t want to. Let’s just say when I left him standing in front of his barn I rode a fine chestnut mare named Thunder, and he had more money in hand than an Arkansas dirt farmer normally saw in two years. I still have the bill of sale. He wrote it on a page torn from his family Bible.”
“Then what?”
“It took me about two hours to go back up the Great River Road and find Magruder’s trail. But once I did
I almost rode that big chestnut to death catching up with him. I hoped early on to find those cutthroats in the woods and kill them out of the sight of civilization and the law, but my luck didn’t hold.”
“So, you caught up with him and his gang?”
“I did. Took me almost three days, but I found them in that tick-riddled burg by the Arkansas River just south of here named Pine Bluff.”
Franklin J. looked surprised. “My family lives there.” He scribbled in his book some more. “I take it you counted skill as a tracker in your background?”
“Junior, you could have tracked Magruder and his bunch. Those arrogant jaybirds left a trail wide enough for a blind Sunday school teacher to follow. I guess they figured the posse from Mississippi had already given up on them, and no one in my family survived to give chase or tell the tale. They plowed along like a steam engine and a string of freight cars. The four of them tore down enough bushes and small trees between Winchester and Pine Bluff to build a three-room house.”
I walked Thunder up and down all the streets and alleys of the rowdiest parts of Pine Bluff. Checked every hitching post for the Preacher’s stallion and that big ole mule. Stopped three times and asked local loafers if they had seen four scruffy men, one on a large black horse.
Almost all of them laughed at me and snorted out something along the lines of, “Hell, boy, do you see anybody here that ain’t scruffy?” or “Jesus H. Christ, might near everybody in this mud pie of a town is either scruffy or riding somethin’ big and black.”
There’d be gales of laughter from the dawdlers who sat on the benches or walkways. The laughing usually stopped when that .45-70 came out of its hiding place behind my right leg and nestled in the crook of my left arm. Sight of the rifle—in the hands of a six-foot-tall, raw-boned farm boy with a nasty cut on his face—sobered many an Arkansas drunk that night.
It took almost an hour, but I finally spotted the Preacher’s mount. Biggest mule in Arkansas stood beside it. Found them tied in front of a saloon named the Dew Drop Inn. Appeared to me the establishment had at one time been a makeshift hotel, but now danced and laughed to the tune of lewd women and drunken men.