The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  “Regulators are under water!” somebody said.

  They lost power, and when he felt the car’s vibration change and heard a loud splashing of water, Tom realized they were in it high above the wheels, plowing through the river on deeply submerged track. Water poured in from cracks in the floor planking.

  He had been in feverish worried excitement since the woman fell on him. He was less anxious about the river than he was about her. She lay slumped on him, her bosom crushed against his leg, her head rubbing and jerking in his lap with the wild motions of the train. Sweat ran down his face like tears, and he squirmed in the seat, wanting both to get away and not to get away. The feeling of euphoria in his lower extremities was so potent that he seemed almost to float above the seat. He looked down at her head, trying to decide whether to move it, then his breath caught and in the momentary silence of the car, his was the only cry—startled, unintentional, brief.

  Steam could be heard bubbling out the regulators, and the crowd gave up a ragged cheer. They’d made it across the bridge. The engineer stopped immediately when they reached Coke Hill, a high spot on the river end of Fort Smith, and the cars were still draining water as passengers piled off. Tom extricated himself and tried to stand up, but his body was numb, his knees rubbery, and he could hardly get out of the seat.

  5

  JAKE HAD NEVER been so happy to step off a train in his life. Located a couple of hundred yards west of Parker’s gallows, Coke Hill was a little settlement off to itself, occupied by two bleak saloons, a ramshackle two-story hotel of dubious reputation called the Belle Point, and a huddle of poor dwelling houses. He hurried over to the hotel and secured a porter with a rig.

  The porter took the highest route, his mare trotting sure-footedly through the streams of water in the brick streets. In the coolness the woman was briefly wakeful, mumbling and cussing, but still unable to talk sense. The boy acted sleepy and confused. Jake felt markedly better despite his exhaustion and hunger, moving briskly through the clean, cold air. As he’d expected, the low end of town was thoroughly flooded at the confluence of the Poteau and Arkansas rivers. The ground floor of the Dekker building was bound to be under.

  St.John’s Hospital was out Second Street, a modest house with tall windows and a picket fence around it. A red flag with black letters hung by the entrance: SMALL POX. A young man with a hat pushed back on his head and a patch of hair hanging down his forehead sat on the front step underneath the flag, calmly puffing on a pipe. The rain had momentarily stopped.

  “Doctor in?”

  “I’m Doc Eldon. Who is that?”

  “Jake Jaycox.”

  “What brings you?”

  “I have a patient for you.”

  “Wouldn’t have smallpox, would he?”

  “It’s a she. No, she doesn’t.”

  “I can’t do a thing for her, Mr. Jaycox. We’ve been under quarantine going on four days. I wouldn’t even want to examine her.”

  “Where can I take her?”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Hit in the head. Can’t seem to wake up.”

  “Does she know her own name?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, ask her.”

  Jake turned and asked what her name was. She gave no answer, and after a moment the boy, on whose shoulder she leaned, said grimly, “Sleeping again.”

  “Probably has a concussion,” the doctor said quietly. He sat there a while nursing his pipe, looking out into the night, the SMALL POX sign waving slightly in the breeze above his head. “Can she stand up?”

  “Not on her own.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t see her. I’ve got eleven people packed in Vaseline in here.”

  “I’ve heard there’s a lying-in hospital on Seventh Street.”

  Eldon hesitated. “Yep. That’s Doc Finch. He’ll be about all you’ll find tonight. I’ve had people by here every few minutes. Doctors will be out all over town.”

  “So you reckon that’s the place to go?”

  Eldon again hesitated, and gave a little shrug. “Well, he’ll be there, anyway.”

  With that precarious recommendation, on they went to Seventh Street, where Jake asked the porter to wait while they took the woman inside, with hopes of leaving her.

  Finch’s “hospital” was as busy as Muskogee on a Saturday night. A trail of blood led to a partly shut door, behind which someone was yelling, “Ashes, linen! Hurry up!” Jake learned from others in the waiting room that the doctor was trying to stop the bleeding of a boy who had chopped a hunk out of his ankle.

  Around the room were several kids, some wailing, with mothers trying to calm and shush them. A couple of fathers sat on the back bench, stiff and sleepy, faces emptied of all expression. Jake wondered, as he often had, what it was like to be perpetually tormented by sick and dying children, having to bring them to these carbolic- and liniment-reeking rooms, and so often having to bury them. He’d never had a wife, partly for that reason. To have a family was to sign up for the army of illness and death.

  Tom Freshour sat straight-backed but sleepy on a bench with the woman listing against him, her eyes closed. Even with her leaning on him and his own eyes almost shut, the boy still sat up straight.

  The chief nurse was an angry-faced woman who regarded the three of them with icy displeasure, and her scowl worsened when Jake admitted they didn’t know the injured woman’s name. A fat, full-bearded man careened into the waiting room and glanced around with a wild glint to his eye. His nose was livid, and he smelled and looked like a back-alley drunkard. He was the doctor, it turned out. He took a couple more children by the arms and dragged them into the back room. The chief nurse remained behind her desk, surveying people in the room with disapproval. Two other nurses scuttled here and there, doing the work of the place.

  Jake regretted even coming here. The woman would get better medical care under a railroad trestle than in this sawbones’ joint. By now he was so tired that he could have walked out the door and gone to sleep in a mud puddle in the yard. For a while he stood there looking at the boy, who gazed in sleepy bewilderment at him. Jake let out a big sigh. “Come on. We can’t leave her in this place.”

  ***

  Mrs. Peltier was as decent and kind a landlady as ever lived—as long as her rules weren’t broken. Jake had lived at her Bachelors’ House for thirteen years and was not shy about knocking on her door in the middle of the night. She woke up and attended to the woman without complaint, taking her into the spare bed in her own parlor.

  Jake and the boy sat in exhausted silence at the little table in Mrs. Peltier’s kitchen. They shared a loaf of bread, a couple of apples, and bottles of strawberry-flavored soda water from the icebox. After watching Jake, Tom eventually reached for the bright red soda. He drank it, looked at it in sleepy amazement, and wolfed down some bread.

  “What will happen to her, Mr. Jaycox?” he asked, blinking his eyes slowly.

  Jake shook his head. “I never heard of anybody killed by an accounts book before, but you never can say for sure.”

  The boy looked away from Jake, into his strawberry soda.

  “By the way, you can call me Jake.”

  “Yes sir.” The boy’s eyelids soon descended, and he fell asleep sitting upright, in mid-chew. Jake had to help him up. He pushed him upstairs.

  A note had been shoved under Jake’s door. Helped to the couch, Tom curled up and went to sleep. His clothes were still wet, but the room was warm enough, and Jake let it be. He walked over to the note on the floor, hesitated, then decided that it was probably from the store, and he didn’t want to see it. Not tonight. He noticed Tom’s face, a little rounder and more like a child’s when he was asleep. But he wasn’t a boy. He was a young man who just didn’t quite know it yet. Jake went in and shut his own door to merciful, private quietness. Finally.

  ***

  At 6:30 the next morning, Jake and Tom were slogging down R
ogers Avenue fortified by a good boarding-house breakfast. Mrs. Peltier had judged their patient improved, sleeping soundly and with better color. It was still cloudy but not raining, the streets quiet, horsecars not running. The note Jake had waited until morning to read was somewhat mysterious. It said simply, “Jake, I need to see you as soon as you get back. Ralph Dekker.” A block away from the Dekker building they hit the floodwater, and it was thigh-deep by the time they got to the front door. Directly across the street, the old courthouse jail sat on its privileged hillock a couple of feet above the flood. The last block of Rogers Avenue sloped sharply downhill to the train station, which had completely disappeared, roof, chimney, and all, beneath the flood.

  The sandbagging around the store building was so far under that Jake didn’t even see it until he bumped into it. The front door was open to the water. Around the large front sales room floated sundry items of stock and trash, a couple of spittoons, and one rat swimming for its life, among the carcasses of many others. The sales desk barely stuck out of the water. A worker paddled a johnboat piled with stock from the sports equipment shelves toward the rear of the big room.

  The narrow stairs were busy with haggard, wet men who looked like they’d been at work for hours. Jake and the boy went for the elevator, which was about to go up with three huge boxes of shotgun loads in the middle of the platform. The elevator operator was Edgar Wyatt, a short black man with massive shoulders who pulled and braked the ropes that drove the fifteen-foot-square wall-less platform up and down the unguarded shaft between floors. Jake and the boy clambered onto it from the water. The basement, normally visible through the big space on all sides of the elevator, was a giant vessel of water.

  “Get everything out from below?” Jake asked.

  “Nosuh,” Edgar said. “Been workin since in the night, but the river risin so fast, can’t keep up with it. It start to comin in, got to thundering down this hole. One of the mens almost got washed down.”

  “Is Mr. Dekker here?”

  “They all been comin and goin.” He began pulling the ropes. “Some of em on the shippin floor.”

  “I’ll just get off there. Could you put this boy to work, Edgar? He can help with carrying.”

  “Yessuh. Them other two new ones already workin.”

  He pulled the thick up-rope and the mechanism groaned and creaked as they ascended the half-floor to the shipping floor. Murky daylight drifted through the nearly closed big shipping doors that opened onto the railroad spur on the east side. Sitting at the big flat construction table were three salesmen—Jack Peters, Marvin Beele, and Dandy Pruitt—all looking as whipped and gloomy as cur dogs. Ernest Dekker had them in some kind of meeting. Ralph Dekker was nowhere in sight.

  Jake walked off the back side of the elevator, out of their sight, and stood in the shadows by the long row of coat hooks. The two Arkansas salesmen weren’t there. A short, fat man with a derby hat sat beside the salesmen at the shipping desk. Jake had seen him around before, and believed that he was a lawyer. He was looking straight ahead with eyes dead as fish bait, the stub of a cigar sticking out the middle of his mouth. A heap of papers lay on the desk in front of him. Ernest, freshly shaved and powdered, wearing a dapper sportsman’s waistcoat, waved around his black ivory cigarette holder, holding forth about collections. Jake heard snatches: “. . . on them with all fours. Hit em direct, no apologizing. Make it plain and clear, if they don’t have cash, we’ll take the mortgages . . .”

  Jake wondered where the old man was. He heard the elevator descend again, and as it went by he took a glance to see if Mr. Dekker might be on it. No such luck. The salesmen looked pretty uncomfortable. Marvin Beele was churning hard on his quid.

  Ernest turned the meeting over to the lawyer, whose tongue flicked out and ran over his lips. His voice was tight, constricted, high, and not clearly audible to Jake . . . real estate property . . . white men can own improvements. These here forms . . . get him to sign . . .” Jake strained to hear as the lawyer held up a printed document and pointed at the bottom of it. After a while, his tongue snaked out and he plugged the cigar back into the middle of his mouth, apparently finished.

  Marvin spat over his shoulder in the direction of the open port before asking a question, to which the lawyer answered, “Whatever improvements they got themselves and whatever customers’ property mortgages they’re holdin.”

  Ernest had picked up one of the forms. “. . . doing them a favor . . .”

  When Jake heard the elevator coming back up, he hopped onto it. He held up his hand with a warning look so Edgar wouldn’t say anything. After they’d glided above the third floor, he asked, “Where’d you last see Mr. Dekker, Edgar? I’m supposed to find him.”

  “I took him to the fifth earlier this mornin. Hadn’t seen him since.”

  “That’s where I want to go, then.”

  When they got to the top floor, Jake saw Mr. Dekker sitting in a chair by a window on the southwest wall of the building. He picked his way hesitantly between barrels of nails, approaching the old man.

  Mr. Dekker looked up and gave a little smile. “Look out there, Jake,” he said, waving toward the window.

  It was a strange sight—the confluence of the rivers turned into a vast brown moving plain, with this building at the edge of it and the Indian Nation far, far on the other side. Across Coke Hill, the upper works of the bridge Jake had crossed last night were halfway under the flood, jammed with debris. The new Arkansas River bridge wasn’t visible from this window, but Jake reckoned you could probably dangle your feet in the river from it.

  Mr. Dekker looked distant, wrapped in his own thoughts. Before the takeover by his son, he would have been running all over the store giving everybody hell, and here he was sitting on his backside staring out on the view like an old soldier on the front porch. For a long time he remained silent.

  Finally Jake said, “I got back late last night. Saw your note this morning.”

  The old man’s face clouded a little. “How’d you get back?”

  “Last train. Damn engineer took us over that.” He nodded toward the Poteau bridge.

  Mr. Dekker smiled again weakly and took a slow breath. “You know, Jake, one of the worst things can happen to a man is to realize he was doing something all wrong just at the minute it’s taken out of his hands. Must be why some people get so scared when they’re dying.”

  Jake sat down on the edge of a bin stuffed full of washboards.

  The old man continued to look bemused, as if he was thinking about events that had happened a long time ago. “You may not know this, but Ernest is pretty good pals with some of the young fellows at the bank. They cooked this up together. The bank’s having problems right now, that’s no secret. But instead of calling in a little debt from all their main accounts, they’re calling the whole kit and caboodle off us. Ernest talked to the Young Turks at Mercantile and convinced them our situation was getting worse with me running the store, and he made them a proposition. If they’d put him in charge, he’d guarantee to find a way to meet a good part of our debt.”

  Jake was surprised not by the facts but by how plainly Mr. Dekker was describing it. “Can they do that?”

  “Well, they did do it, whether they can or not. They’ll declare us in default at the end of next month if I don’t step down. That’s the way they put it to me.”

  Jake looked out the window over the flooded river plain, trying to resist his urge to comment. “That’s goddamn blackmail.”

  “I’ve been around and around it, Jake, and there’s not much I can do. It’s a call loan. I visited Shelby White yesterday. He’s the head of the Mercantile board, but of course he’s on their rope. We’ve known each other long enough for him to tell me the whole story, anyway.” Mr. Dekker allowed a brief bitterness to color his expression.

  “What makes them think Ernest can get water from a dry hole?” Jake said heatedly. “They’re just going to take Dekker down. What good’ll that do?”

  �
�Depends on how desperate they are for cash. We have the building and stock, and we’ve got some real estate here and there. If Ernest fails and we go bust, they’ll pull a quick twenty or twenty-five thousand from a fire sale off our carcass, which would be that much more cash than they have today. And there’d be another benefit, too. Every debtor in town would have the stuffing scared out of them. Whatever tune the Mercantile called, they’d line up like choirboys to sing it. Although . . .” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t quite all add up.” Mr. Dekker looked uncertain. “Anyhow, if we owed a lot of different creditors, they couldn’t do this. But we don’t. Ernest’s been working with McMurphy, and I let them concentrate all our suppliers’ debts at the bank. They’ve got us in their pocket, and it’s my fault for not watchin the store closer.”

  “So he’s been planning this?”

  “Course he has.”

  Jake searched his face for the gall that he himself felt. “Well, what do you think about it?”

  Mr. Dekker allowed a melancholy smile. “I guess I could be proud of him. He’s takin the risk, all right. You boys don’t collect, his future won’t look good. Course, neither will yours or mine.”

  “Well, if my first effort to collect was any sign, we might as well hang it up.” Jake told him about what had happened with John Blessing.

  Mr. Dekker asked a few questions, then sat in another long silence. “Well, now he’s got a scheme to collect mortgages at stores where you men can’t get cash. The bank’s going along with it. He hired some two-dollar lawyer. They’re setting up all kind of new arrangements.” Bitterness had edged back into Mr. Dekker’s expression, although his tone remained mild. “Well, Jake. I guess there’s a time when the old guard passes. It happens different ways, but it always happens.”