The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  “I do whatever I want to in my own store, hatak hata.”

  Blash!

  A bullet cut through the rain, and Jake instinctively ducked, dropping the woman back into the mud.

  “Boy, she don’t look good,” the short deputy said, with the same goofy grin on his face.

  The color had quickly left her face, her expression crumpled. The big black ledger lay flopped open by her head with several bullet holes in it. Blessing had shot his own ledger, then hurled it out the door. Jake couldn’t see any wounds besides an ugly, deep bruise on her temple. The boy was kneeling next to her in deep mud, his hands held out, not quite touching her.

  “Come on,” Jake said. “We better get her out of the street before she drowns.”

  “Is she shot?” the short deputy asked, grinning stupidly.

  “Listen,” Jake said, “if you keep ragging that man in there, he’ll just get madder. He’s off on a jag. Leave him alone. Let him cool off.”

  “Indin goes off his rocker, there’s hell to pay,” the short deputy said, waving one of his .45s toward Jake. “This here is the law’s work.” The tall deputy crouched on the other side of the doorway.

  Jake scooped up the woman and took her to the storage building behind the store. Mrs. Oke and Tom followed. It was an old dwelling house, stacked haphazardly with merchandise—kitchen cabinets, bundles of clothes, Bibles, mirrors, standing coat hooks, spittoons. The woman’s face remained ashen. The heavy binding of the ledger must have hit her right where she lived. Jake again looked for signs of other wounds, but saw none. Mrs. Oke found a horse blanket, wrapped her in it, and sent the boy to get the doctor. Outside, the deputy continued nagging John Blessing.

  “Cain’t pull a gun in a federal post office, mister.”

  “Leave me alone! I have dynamite!”

  Jake had remained calm until now, but he found himself standing outside, mad, with his heart pounding hard. It was no wonder people hated the law, when they hired these malletheads and paid them nothing but travel bounties and rewards. He was pacing in and out the door when Tom returned. The one doctor in town had taken a call miles away during the night and wasn’t back. Mrs. Oke looked up at Jake and shook her head. “Don’t know what to do,” she said quietly. The woman’s eyes were drawn up, and Jake knelt and felt her pulse. She had only a small cut on her temple, but beneath it was the deep, spreading bruise.

  “Come on out!” the deputy yelled at Mr. Blessing.

  Jake cursed under his breath, and was just standing to go outside when a tremendous thud hit the wall. Glass and part of the wooden frame of the window blew out, shards spraying across the floor. The first thought Jake had was that lightning had struck the wall, although the smell coming through the window quickly told him differently.

  “Clear the glass off!” he shouted, pointing to the woman. The boy and Mrs. Oke helped brush away the glass and undid the blanket. Mrs. Oke loosened her clothes. Jake went outside the shed. The sulfurous stink of powder dynamite lay thick in the rainy air; part of the store’s back wall and roof and all of the windows had been blown out.

  Jake was the first one inside the smoking store, and he found what was left of John in a corner. He dragged him out onto the front porch, then went back inside and took a piece of calico off a shelf to put over the storekeeper’s face. His tattered, blackened legs stuck out below. The explosion had shredded his trousers into smoking rags hanging off his still-intact galluses. With his hat pulled low over his eyes, Jake knelt by the steaming corpse, dizzy from his own pulse.

  The timber thief, who had been sitting against the wall near the front door, continued to sit there, looking stunned but unhurt. The deputies had escaped visible injury, although the one with two guns looked even more unhinged than before. He walked up to the corpse and, to Jake’s amazement, pushed it with his toe. “What I told you. The son of a bitch ruint the post office. We’ll haul him to Guthrie for the pelt.”

  His tall, morose partner glanced at him with wifely recrimination. “Naw, we oughter get out of here.”

  Jake stood up and fixed the short one with a baleful look. “That man has seven sons and about twenty cousins. They’ll be showing up here real soon. Lay a finger on his body and you won’t know who snuffed the candle.”

  This seemed to make some impression on the knucklehead. His partner kept urging that they get out of town, and eventually the two faded away, prisoner in tow, into the storm.

  Jake heard the sound of a whistle coming from the south. The night train from Texas had made it through. He went back in the storage room. The woman’s color was much better now, but the lump on her temple really was ugly.

  Mrs. Oke stood up to Jake, close, with her head down. “My fault.”

  “It ain’t your fault,” Jake said.

  “Carry her to Fort Smith to see the doctor. Please do that, Mr. Hardware. I’m too old, hey?”

  The train went by, slowing to a stop at the little platform. Jake didn’t have much time to make up his mind. “Come on, kid. I guess we better take her with us. You get her by the feet.”

  The woman was limp as a rag, and it wasn’t easy toting her to the train. Tom acted het-up, bumbling and confused, and it nearly broke Jake’s back getting her through the mud, onto the platform, and into the car. Finally aboard, they laid her across a seat, took the wet horse blanket from around her, and wrapped her in a slightly less wet coat from Jake’s valise, not much use when her dress was sopping. He wiped the mud from her face with his handkerchief. The left eye, below her swollen temple, was bloodshot.

  As the train got under way, Jake looked down and saw Mrs. Oke standing in the door of the station house, and he pushed up the window and yelled, “Do you know what her name is?”

  Mrs. Oke made no sign or response. Shawl wrapped tightly around her head, she gazed in Jake’s direction with the implacable blankness of a full blood, as if losing her hotel had returned her to the primitive fate that all these years she’d worked to avoid.

  They took off briskly up the hill—only the engine, a mail car, and two passenger cars. This train was the first luck he’d had that day. They made it handily over the fog-enshrouded Kiamichi Mountains, and Jake imagined they’d be in Fort Smith inside of two hours. But down the other side, in the lowlands, the roadbed was covered by water in several places, and they had to slow down.

  Across the aisle, Tom looked uneasy. He kept staring at the woman, who had slipped until her head was tilted backwards, her long neck revealed, curly black hair in disarray, mouth slightly open. Her color was a little better.

  “Fix her so her head ain’t dangling down like that,” Jake said.

  The boy didn’t seem to hear him.

  “Go straighten her up before she hurts her durn neck.”

  Tom moved to do so, but he seemed afraid to touch her, and Jake fumed when he had to get up and do it himself. This courier that big shot Dekker had foisted off on him was about as much use as a mule collar hanging around his neck, what with keeping him awake at night, not doing what he was asked, and never saying enough to let you know what was going on in his head. To heck with him. To heck with em all. Jake moved to a seat in the rear of the car, shut his eyes, and tried to take a nap.

  4

  EVERY TIME Tom looked at her, he couldn’t take his eyes away. She was awake some of the time now, rising occasionally, squinting as if she had a severe headache.

  The train entered the bottomlands at a crawl. Rain was still coming down in sheets. Tom saw whole endless fields covered in water, with islands of land here and there. Stranded cattle stood up to their bellies, unable to make it to higher ground because of fences or potholes. Farther out, the water looked dead calm, but in places along the train’s roadbed it flowed in a riverlike current. When he heard the wheels pushing through water, Tom stuck his head out the window and saw that they were headed into what looked for all the world like a giant, trackless lake planted mysteriously with trees. Lonely clusters of squatters’ shacks stood in the fl
ood, surrounded by floating debris of all kinds, and the train had slowed to such a pace that he could see it all—barrels, dead chickens, snakes. On the roof of one shack sat a wet cat with his tail curled up around him, looking down at the water.

  Below Talihina, where they were barely moving through the water, a huddle of people on the roadbed flagged down the train. The engineer stopped and they pushed onto the cars—a soggy crowd, mixed breeds and whites, mournful-looking men with the black-scarred faces of coal miners, farmers, women in bonnets with sleeping and crying babies, and fretting, bird-chested, hookworm-skinny children. Farther along, the train ran into another and still another flock, adding more than thirty people in all to their car. The women were lugging tins of beans and tomatoes and bits of this and that—lard buckets full of radishes and potatoes and any other kind of food they could find to take. The men carried saddles, boxes and sacks of clothes, axes, rolled-up screen wire, kerosene lanterns, shotguns.

  Mr. Jaycox, buffeted by people jamming themselves and their belongings into the seats and aisle around him, had apparently given up trying to take a nap. The sodden throng gave up a fearsome ammonia-smelling fog of bodies, kid pee, vegetables, and who knows what else. After the third bunch had scrambled on board, Tom noticed that the woman was sitting halfway up, looking around in bewilderment at the crowd. She was awake but dazed. A short, rough-looking man shoved her upright and sat next to her, and she gazed at him in woozy astonishment.

  “Get your hands off of me,” she said, pushing him back.

  “What the hell?” he sputtered.

  “You smell bad,” she said.

  “Why—”

  Mr. Jaycox got up and elbowed toward her. “She has a head wound. She’s injured.”

  “She’ll git a wound all right, talkin to me like that,” the man snarled. “No got-damn woman—”

  “You smell like a skunk,” she stated; Tom could hear her plainly despite the hubbub. Face pallid, hair tangled and wet, one eye bloodshot, she looked wild as a wounded mustang. Mr. Jaycox eventually managed to bring her up with Tom and him, although by the time he got there, someone had already stolen his seat, and there was more confusion getting the man out, and getting her, Tom, and himself settled into two seats—the boy squashed against the window, her in the middle, and Mr. Jaycox on the aisle. She seemed to have very little idea where she was or what was happening. Brief fits of talking came up and passed, but her expression was forlorn. She muttered things neither of them could understand. Being awake seemed to tire her out; soon her head lolled onto Tom’s shoulder, and she fell into a delirious, worried sleep.

  Her blouse undone at the top by Mrs. Oke, white unmentionables visible, muddy clothes in disarray, she went from cold and stiff to feverish and limber, then back to cold. With her pushing against him in the seat, Tom felt his tool of generation (as Reverend Schoot called it) rising up hard as a stick in his wet pants. At the Armstrong Academy, his tool never got him into anything but trouble. When it went off in dreams, it was deceptively pleasant at the moment, but when cots were examined and evidence was found, it was worth between ten and fifteen lashes, depending on the Reverend’s mood. Tom tried to avoid this by masturbation. He abused himself despite the fact that it was bad for him, made his brain heavy and dull, caused exhaustion of the nerves, weakened memory, bad posture, narrow-chestedness, flabby muscles, consumption, paralysis, heart disease, and in some cases suicide. It was bad for him, but he did it only to avoid the nightly emissions. Most of the older boys at the orphanage had a dim grasp of the primitive facts about human reproduction, but it was taboo as a subject of jokes or conversation. The Reverend had his spies among the boys, and you had to be very careful about what you said.

  He squirmed in the seat in an effort to get farther from the woman, but there was no place to go. She was touching him in several places, her head leaning onto his shoulder, hair in his neck, and her arm down loosely at her side, hand against his leg.

  Suddenly she pulled her head up and announced, “I have to go-”

  Tom looked out the window, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “I was afraid this would happen,” Mr. Jaycox said. “Help me, Tom.”

  They got her up and pressed her through to the back of the car. The water closet had run over, but several desperate people were nevertheless waiting to use it. She moaned as they pushed through the crowd. The train kept stopping entirely so the engineer could assess the depth of water ahead, and Mr. Jaycox said, “Tom, we’re going to have to take a chance here. Make way, please.” They propelled her out the door and down the steps. It was nearly dark, and there wasn’t a dry spot of land anywhere within reach, and lightning was still cracking as if the storm had just started. The track was a good hand’s depth below the surface. They were standing in a lake. To Tom’s dismay, Mr. Jaycox advised her to relieve herself right there.

  After some confusion, she had in fact drawn down her scanties and was dangling from their grasp, one on each side, south pole nearly touching the water, but she did not do her business. “Don’t have much time, ma’am. This train’s gonna start back up,” Mr. Jaycox said. She looked out to the side, puzzled at what must have seemed in her delirium like an endless expanse of brown water. Four or five little boys hung out the window, watching with interest.

  “You said you needed to go. Now’s your chance!”

  “I’m . . . dead?” she mumbled.

  “No ma’am, you aren’t dead. I doubt that you’ll need to do this when you’re dead.”

  “I’m a dead duck,” she sighed.

  Every way they looked was some kind of critter—prairie chickens, rabbits, snakes—trying to find a perch above the water. A very live snake was swimming vigorously toward them. It was a blacksnake, and it came right for her leg, nuzzled against it, and tried to climb for higher ground.

  She looked at it dully. “Thas a snake?”

  “Yes ma’am, but it’s just a blacksnake. He’s looking for something to climb up. Now if you’ll go ahead and finish, I’ll get you out of here.”

  “Lemme loose, you two!”

  “Go ahead, now. Drain the lizard. Let er go—”

  She finally did so, while the boys who were leaning out the window continued to look on seriously. The train was slowly moving on now, and they stood her up, unraveled the snake from her leg and pitched it away, struggled her back aboard, and pushed her through the crowd. Children were wailing. A man somewhere in the car was in a coughing frenzy.

  It was completely dark when they idled through the mining town of Poteau, which was flooded out by the very river they were supposed to cross ahead. The train stopped on a dry patch just outside town, and passengers piled out, some so tired they just sat or lay down on the roadbed. The light of sheltered campfires reflected from a nearby hill, and word passed around that most of Poteau’s few hundred citizens had retreated to high ground. Some of the miners decided to stay and join them, fearful of the big Poteau River crossing ahead. The train waited for the better part of an hour and Tom, passing through the crowd, heard all kinds of speculations about what lay ahead, from the most ominous to the rosiest: the track was good to the north, it was completely washed out, the roadbed was steadily higher, it was steadily lower, the bridge into Fort Smith had disappeared, it was ten feet above the water—everyone seemed to have a different, extreme idea, and the engineer took his time making up his mind. All wires were down, and there was no way to check by telegraph.

  A little band of locals who had spotted the train showed up and wanted to get on, but the sooners who’d already been in the car defended their spots as fiercely as if they owned the railroad line. Pushing and yelling fights broke out in the darkness, and Tom was afraid the woman was going to wake up again with some other terrible problem—or that she would die before they made it to Fort Smith.

  “My stomach’s so empty it hurts,” Mr. Jaycox said.

  A woman with a pokeful of onions between her legs sat in the seat in front of them. Mr. Jaycox l
eaned over and asked her if she’d take a nickel for a couple of onions. He gave one to Tom and they sat there peeling and munching on them.

  The injured woman’s condition kept worrying Tom. After they’d all reloaded, the conductor walked along beside each car with a lantern and called, “Can’t tell how the bridge is ahead, but however it is, it’ll just get worse. I’m taking this engine in. Anybody don’t want to chance it ought to get off here.” He took out his watch and looked at it. “You have two minutes!”

  There was more pushing as a handful of passengers decided to get themselves and their belongings off the train. A single gas lamp was lit somewhere in the car, providing dim light, and when the train started to move, the woman grew wakeful and started mumbling and cursing again. She tried to sit up straight. She flung her arms and legs around with as little concern as a baby, one leg going over Mr. Jaycox’s until she was half in his lap, and she pushed directly against Tom’s thighs.

  If it was possible to die of blushing, Tom was a goner. He was immobilized, every muscle in his body stiff. When she sank headfirst, completely dead weight, into his lap, he looked down, truly scared, at the top of her muddy, damp head. Mr. Jaycox reached over and felt the pulse in her neck. He straightened her head so she could breathe. “Just leave her be.” He glanced sourly at Tom. “I wish that engineer would just take us wherever we’re going, either to Fort Smith or the bottom of the Poteau River. I’m about to the point I don’t care which.”

  At a settlement called Cameron, on the shoulder of a hill, three more passengers who were afraid of the last bridge jumped off the slow-moving car.

  Tom heard more anxious talk about logjams and fallen bridges.

  Near midnight, the murmuring in the car died away as they finally approached the Poteau River bridge into Fort Smith. A woman with a nervous, reedy voice started saying “The Lord is my shepherd,” and others joined in. In the blackness of night they could see nothing, and the river was so loud and close that the train already seemed to be under water. Partway out came an immense shudder. “The Lord is my shepherd” died away. Even the babies stopped crying. Tom quit trying to look out. Couplings clattered against each other as the bridge wobbled and swayed in the river with the current and the weight of the train. The steady ch-ch-ch of steam from the engine turned peculiar, then stopped altogether.