by Speer Morgan
It worked this way: Dekker customers who couldn’t immediately pay at least half their debt in cash—as few could—were to be given the option of signing “mortgage transfer agreements.” These documents exchanged the standard merchandise mortgages previously held by Dekker against them for property mortgages—either the store owners’ own business properties or the mortgages that stores were holding against their customers’ debts. Almost all the substantial merchants held mortgages on the land of their regular customers, acting as banks where few banks existed.
This got a little complicated, Ernest’s lawyer had allowed, since it was still illegal for outsiders to own tribal land, so the mortgages in the Nations officially applied only to “improvements”—buildings, not land—“until such time as ownership of the attendant property is provided by law,” when the tribes finally gave up the ownership of lands. In the sales territories in Arkansas, Kansas, and the white-settled Oklahoma Territory around Guthrie and Enid, the transfers did attach actual real estate now, or claimed to.
The whole thing amounted to Dekker’s foreclosing on its customers’ debts but accepting as payment the mortgage-based debts that they held on their own customers—“at our rate,” the lawyer said. Jake didn’t know enough about property law to judge whether these mortgage transfer agreements were legal, but he did know enough about human nature to dread trying to make customers hand over other people’s land.
Ernest and the bank had foreseen that problem and had devised a “generous incentive plan,” which by itself could make some of the salesmen “financially independent,” according to the lawyer. Salesmen were to be paid ten cents per acre in outright cash for every acre up to five thousand that they put under mortgage, and fifteen cents thereafter. Furthermore they would receive a two-cent bonus on land within more desirable areas. Jake noticed that some of the salesmen, who until then had acted glum and confused, began to wake up and pay attention to the details.
The rate of transfer of property to debt would normally be twenty-five cents per acre. A store with two hundred fifty dollars of unpayable debt needed to hand over paper on about a thousand acres for it. For this simple shuffling of paper the salesman was to get two hundred dollars cold cash, three hundred if the property was within certain fixed areas, receivable on a weekly basis and fully backed by the bank. Jake again noticed the expressions of the salesmen: Dandy frowning, Pete Crapo looking bewildered but excited, fat Jack Peters nearly giving off steam, he was figuring arithmetic so fast behind his eyes.
The retailer had the advantage of then owning his Dekker-supplied stock free and clear. “After that,” the lawyer said, “he can stay in bidness or he can fail, it don’t make no different to us. Hell, he can up and leave with the merchandise as far as we care, because we’re holding something that won’t go away.”
Jake’s brief Monday night talk with Mr. Dekker presided over his daydreaming. He remembered every word of the old man’s speech to him, and all over again he felt the prickle of both elation and dread that he’d felt as he descended the dark stairs.
***
By the time they stopped at Tuskahoma station, Tom had succumbed to what looked like deep sleep, and Jake got out to help Miss King look for her suitcase. They had a five-minute stop, and he searched around the little platform while Miss King went over to the storage shed behind poor Mr. Blessing’s store. On the platform Jake bought a nickel bag of popcorn from a boy who was there meeting trains—the only sign of enterprise. The town felt sodden and bleak. Four or five men lounged along the false fronts next to the boarded-up hulk of Blessing’s store. The downslope part of Tuskahoma now consisted of tin rubble and the scattered log remains of the OK Hotel, and the whole place was as empty and sleepy as a ghost town.
Jake stuck his head inside the station house and saw a muddy suitcase sitting by itself on the floor.
Miss King was on the other side of the train; Jake hesitated, decided to look for himself, and opened the suitcase a crack. He saw a glint of metal and opened it slightly more, discovering a five-shot Smith & Wesson pistol and box of .38-caliber smokeless bullets, which made him doubt that the suitcase was hers. But it also carried women’s clothes, and he saw a piece of paper, which he unfolded. The scribbled notes on it confounded him sufficiently that he sat there staring at it until the hissing of steam alerted him to get back aboard. He folded up the paper and put it into his pocket, then closed the suitcase and took it to the train.
Already back in the car, Miss King was delighted. “Where’d you find it?”
“In the station,” Jake said gruffly. “Sittin right there. Didn’t take a genius.” Jake reckoned he’d take his time and look over that piece of paper more closely later. He didn’t have the energy to worry about anything else right now.
***
A little past noon they arrived at Grant, not far from the Texas border. They were supposed to have a three-hour wait before switching to the once-a-day straight west to Durant, where Jake planned to rent a rig and travel around, hitting some customers but taking his time about it. From Durant, Miss King was supposed to continue on to Guthrie, or wherever she was going.
The Grant station operator, a full blood with a smooth face and long hair, was hunched over a clattering telegraph machine on his desk, just finishing a message. He glanced up at them, and didn’t respond at all to Jake’s hello. People sure had gotten friendly in Choctaw country. The depot was dirty and unpleasant, with flyspecked windows, a door that slammed hard each time it was used. Three older men sat near the stove, working hard at disregarding a sign on the wall that said USE THE SPITTOON. Miss King’s appearance caused them to work even harder. The train was scheduled to come through soon, but the operator acted unsure about when it would in fact arrive.
Miss King chose to wait in the street rather than stand around in the spitting den. Jake and the boy walked over to call on George Marston, of Marston & Sons General Implements, which was just across the way. Marston ran a tool store, blacksmith shop, and wagon yard. Three wagons were parked this way and that outside, and a small pack of razor-backed dogs were trotting around nearby, grazing on some trash in the street.
When Jake had first traveled in this territory, Marston had been a blacksmith, and he’d built up the implement dealership over years of hard work. Dandy had mentioned that the “& Sons” on his sign no longer applied, one son having died of a sickness and another gone off somewhere. The Red River was only a few miles away from here, and during the long cotton slump of the last years, a lot of people had crossed it and never come back. Marston was a white man married to an Indian, well established but not particularly prosperous.
They found him at work on an axle, and he didn’t act too friendly when he saw Jake. He barely nodded when Jake introduced Tom. Customers had a way of smelling “collection,” so Marston’s cool reception didn’t surprise Jake. What did surprise him was that when he eventually worked his way around to the subject of the mortgage transfer, Marston agreed with little hesitation to sign it and give Jake the papers on three customers’ properties. “None of them are good for it, anyway,” he said almost angrily. “I been holdin that paper for over two year. Just show me where you want me to sign.”
“Now, you understand it gives Dekker Company a hold on that land until the bill’s cleared up. And I have to take the land papers—”
“I’ll sign the damn thing.” He hustled to a back room and came out with a pencil and three land-use warrants. Jake sat down and wrote out the land descriptions, and Marston hurriedly scratched his name in big block letters across the bottom of the transfer. When they’d finished, Jake asked if he could rent a wagon for a few days if the train was held up, and Marston said he didn’t have any for rent.
Jake was puzzled at how easily Marston had signed over the land, but as he and Tom walked out of the place, he realized something about Ernest’s scheme. A lot of store owners were so strapped for cash and worn out from being unable to collect from their customers that they wou
ld take the deal.
Back at the depot, the door slammed behind them, and the stationmaster looked at Jake suspiciously. Jake wondered if word had passed down the line that he’d had something to do with John Blessing’s death. Telegraphers were like a knitting club, shooting news, gossip, and lies around the Nation fast as lightning.
Jake knew about grudges from growing up in the hill country of northern Arkansas, but they had a very serious way of going about them in the Indian Territory. Achowa, they called it—blood feud—and instead of broken arms, swollen heads, cuts, and hurt feelings, which made up the balance of feuding in Jake’s home country around Bentonville, out here people got shot, houses burned down, children scalped, and neighbors massacred. Over the years, at Indian stores, he’d heard tales of seemingly unending feuds resulting from the murder of some family member or friend, or from some dispute over good bottomland. Bitter memories never died, and young men fired by liquor would vindicate foul deeds, imagined or real, done to their relatives as far back as fifty years.
Jake saw in the quick glance of one of the old men in the station that something was going on here. One of them got up and looked out the window, as if expecting to see somebody outside.
The train to Durant definitely wasn’t running, due to problems on the track south of here. Jake asked when it would be running, and the tight-lipped stationmaster said, “May be several days.”
Jake went back outside to tell Miss King and Tom the news. Carrying their luggage out, he remembered the note that was folded in his pocket.
8
THE THREE OF THEM stood oddly close together in the November afternoon light, a wind picking up, white clouds rolling from the south over their heads, Tom now fully wakened from his train sleep to the sight of Miss King’s glorious breeze-ruddied face. Jake wasn’t saying much, but then Jake nearly always seemed preoccupied. Looking at Miss King was to Tom like eating some good food, and as the wind blew a few loose wisps of hair round her face, a strand of it almost touched him, and he smelled the scented soap she had used—lavender, lime, he did not know its name.
He would never forget this moment of the three of them standing there. He was finally over the edge, completely head over heels for her, although his ideas about the relations of women and men were so sketchy that he did not think of it as that, did not think of it as anything, really, but merely kept drifting toward her, as if she were a magnet and he an iron filing, and he was washed over with an unexplainable, curious, elaborate warmth from his head to his feet.
She told Jake that she wanted to travel on with them instead of being stuck here. Jake looked neutral. “I have a little money,” she said. “I’ll help rent a buggy.”
“George Marston has stopped renting,” Jake said. “Aren’t a lot of other places to choose from.”
Grant consisted of a mud-packed street and eight or ten buildings, half of which looked unoccupied.
“Then we should buy one,” she said.
“Cost more than I’ve got,” Jake said irritably.
“I’m glad to help. I do have a little money.”
Jake’s heavy gaze stayed on her a while longer, and Tom got the distinct impression that he wanted to say something to her, but he sighed and looked away. “Guess we don’t have any choice unless we want to stay in this friendly place.”
They walked eastward, knocking on the doors of farmhouses, inquiring whether someone would rent or sell them a rig. Tom’s heels were blistered by the time they found a prospect a mile out of the village—a wily-looking older man sitting in a latticeback chair against the front of his shack, wearing an enormous turban, several handkerchiefs knotted loosely around his neck, a thick layering of brightly colored shirts, and a knee-length robe.
Despite the fact that Tom was by race an Indian, or part Indian, he didn’t know much about the tribes of the Nation, his education having been limited to such things as English grammar, the Bible, and white Dissenter history, but he’d seen these turbaned men before—Seminoles, they were called—on grocery day when they got to ride from Bokchito into Durant. This man was as tall as Jake, and drinking from a crockery jug something that smelled like coal oil. He and Jake were soon talking, and he offered them a plain flatbed farm wagon with missing wheel spokes, patched-together harness (laid out in the dirt), and two grey-faced, ratty-coated old mules who were indignant at being taken out of the pasture this time of the afternoon and made to stand together for harnessing. They bucked and twitched and rolled their eyes as the man struggled to get them both into collars. Tom had spent enough hours behind mules in the academy’s corn field to not like the look of these two.
Finally having done it, the man stood back and wiped his brow, sweating despite the cool wind. Children had been coming out of the house, first two, then three, then another, and another—the older ones dressed in robes not unlike those of their stately, mildly inebriated father, except their robes were not as thick with underlayers as his. Apparently the very youngest got no clothes at all, because among the gaggle of children were two little girls, utterly naked, and Tom couldn’t keep his eyes from brushing down their bellies to the strange, decisive cleft below.
Jake and the man squatted down to bargain on the ground, which especially interested the older boys, as Jake twice put money down and both times was rejected. Eventually he got up and went over to check the mules’ teeth. The farmer sat back on his haunches, looking peacefully into the distance, with the pile of money before him. “God almighty,” Jake said, scowling into one of the mules’ mouths. The other one refused to allow his mouth to be opened. Caught by the nose, he snapped viciously, and Jake gave up and walked around the rig, examining the underside. Then he ambled over to Tom and Miss King. “That one’s got piano keys for teeth. I’d walk to Guthrie before I’d give him more than I’ve put down.”
Without a word, Miss King turned her back, unbuttoned the top of her dress, withdrew something—several bills—and went straight over and laid them down with Jake’s offer.
The old man looked fleetingly at it, scooped it all up, and quickly sprang into action, grabbing suitcases and loading them up. In the blink of an eye they were ready, and the man ambled into his house to put his money up.
“Boy, you sure primed his pump,” Jake said. “How much did you give him?”
She smiled and gave no answer.
“I don’t mind making a fool of myself in a horse trade, but I like to know how much of a fool.”
“Twenty dollars,” she said innocently, climbing onto the seat.
“Now I know.”
“Call me the fool if you want. It’s my money.”
Tom got into the back, and Jake got up next to Miss King and took the reins. “Hey-up, hey! Get on! Hey!”
The mules didn’t move, didn’t so much as raise their ears. Jake pushed back his hat and sat there for a moment. “Let’s go!” He popped the reins on their backs.
They stayed put.
The Seminole came out of his cabin carrying a large coffeepot, and said, “Hafta talk Indian.”
“Well, you might have told us that,” Jake said disgustedly, getting back down from the seat. “Tom, see if you can make these durn mules move. If you can’t, we’ll take our money back.”
Tom didn’t talk Indian much better than Jake did. It wasn’t allowed at the academy, although some of the boys spoke a little pidgin Choctaw on the sly, the “trade language,” and he’d learned a few phrases from the washing lady. But he was more than happy to sit by Miss King, hip to hip, on the small driver’s seat.
“Kanima!”
No luck. The Seminole stepped off his porch, poured coffee into a cracked dog’s bowl, and brought it over to the mules who, first one and then the other, unhesitatingly sucked it up.
“Aiya!” the farmer yelled, whacking one of them on the nose with his open palm, and both mules raised their old fuzzy ears halfway up and inched out. Tom rattled the traces and scolded them along. For a while, Jake walked alongside them like an ox
driver, and all of the children, including the naked ones, followed, making a ragtag parade, the father bringing up the rear, holding the bowl. “Cold coffee, good for mules,” he said.
Jake climbed into the back of the wagon, muttering, “I’ve seen it all.”
Down the road the children eventually fell away. The mules became more reticent and twitchy, and Tom had to keep snapping the reins and yelling. The animals were not only half deaf, or pretending it, but they worked against each other, one slowing while the other pulled, raking out sideways in the traces, nipping at each other and carrying on. The road was a slippery, potholed, muddy ribbon through the grassland, and the only time the mules hurried was at the roughest spots. They trotted smartly through holes and mud puddles and over rocks, throwing Tom and Miss King back and forth against each other like marbles in a can.
The countryside was flat and low here, surprisingly different from the hilly country around Bokchito, which probably wasn’t more than thirty miles away. When Tom thought of how close they were, and that they were actually getting closer, it made him uneasy. Jake situated himself in the back of the wagon as they slipped and slid through the village, scattering dogs out of the way, and finally headed out the road toward Durant. Going through the sleepy little town, Tom caught a glimpse of only one man, leaning against the wall of Marston & Sons.
Jake was propped against the suitcases. “So you’re going to Guthrie?” he shouted above the rattle.
“Yes,” she said indifferently.
“I’ve got a lot of calls between here and there. You’ll want to be taking the first train you can get.”
“I’d like to travel with you the whole distance,” she said. “I won’t get in your way.”
After a moment Jake said, “You interested in this kind of thing?
“What’s that?
“Hardware business.”
“I’m interested in business, in general. Whoops.” Thrown against Tom, she pushed on his leg to right herself.