The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  Joe ended up giving him eighty-five dollars and not signing. He also gave Jake some parting advice about traveling. “North of here, keep an eye out. Lot of these sodbusters didn’t get no land, and they’re scattering in all directions. They come limping in here every day, begging potatoes and such. One wagon leaves, another be coming down the road. Sorriest-looking bunch of white people I ever did see. Kind that pick up stakes every six months and never make a crop. Lot of em claim they’ve been robbed and such.”

  When Jake and Tom walked back toward the center of town, Jake kept having the feeling something odd was going on, something over and above the confusion of the town. He felt almost as if he was being watched. The traffic was mostly women and their kids, some of them carrying a package or bouquet of flowers, and congregating at the little log shack that served as the local jail. Several men wearing Oklahoma Territory badges sat on the ground outside, smoking and playing cards, and he went over and asked what all the excitement was.

  “Charley Bryant’s in there,” said one of them, nodding at the shack.

  “I’ll be,” Jake said noncommittally.

  “Never hear of Blackface Charley Bryant?”

  “Not until today.”

  “Well, he’s worth a thousand dollars,” said the deputy, with a one-fanged smile.

  Out of curiosity, Jake and Tom poked inside the stifling shack, which was crowded mostly with women and kids. A short man with a weak chin, thinning hair, and a go-to-hell mustache lay on a blanket against the slat wall, with what looked like about a dozen wounds in him, all packed or dressed but some still bleeding. He was surrounded by flowers, cakes, and unopened gifts. Jake found himself standing next to a bone-skinny woman with stringy hair, age maybe sixteen, with a front tooth missing and a baby on her shoulder. She was a white woman, but the women here were mostly mixed bloods, with babies or kids hanging tight to their dresses. The jail shack was thick with rose water and sweat, people sniffling, whispering, and crying. “It’s a shame,” one murmured over and over, “such a shame.” There was a mood of expectation in the crowded room. Jake never understood why the women worshiped these outlaws so much.

  Mr. Bryant opened his eyes and glanced around nervously. Someone produced a bottle of rye and poured a little down his throat. He swallowed and croaked, “Let it be known I kilt nine men!”

  The skinny mother beside Jake sighed, with a bright look in her eyes.

  “How many?” another asked.

  “I did, I kilt nine men,” groaned Charley Bryant.

  “Oh, my!” said another. “Nine of em.”

  One of the women near the dying outlaw produced a pair of scissors and quickly leaned over and snipped off a lock of his thinning hair. “Are you ashamed for a life of sin?” asked a sterner voice.

  Bryant looked to be working hard to stay conscious. “I never kilt no women. I always loved a good woman.”

  “Tell us about the men you killed,” demanded the stern voice.

  He didn’t seem to know where to start.

  “Were they all bad men?” a more timid voice prompted.

  “The worst.” He coughed. “Gamblers, thieves, woman-rapers.”

  “Are you ashamed?” repeated the stern voice.

  “Not one bit,” said Blackface Charley Bryant.

  Several of them sighed at once. The one who was kneeling beside Charley Bryant poured some more whiskey down his throat. “You done what you had to, Charley.”

  ***

  Jake and Tom had just walked out the door when they caught sight of Miss King hurrying down the street toward the hotel. The deputies all stopped playing cards and stared at her.

  “Good morning,” she said with a smile.

  “Mornin,” Jake said in a subdued tone. Tom looked embarrassed again. She volunteered that she’d been to the telegraph office. “Wire somebody back home?”

  She answered without hesitation. “Raymond Phillips. He’s the closest I have to a family now in St. Louis. He was my guardian after my mother died.” She added, “Ray gave me your name before I left St. Louis.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, Ray gave me a list of men he thought might have business experience in the Oklahoma Territory.”

  They stopped beside the wagon, where Tom leaned against the wall and picked up his newspaper again.

  “Don’t believe I recall a Raymond Phillips.” Jake was surprised that she was answering the very question he’d put off asking her.

  “He heard your name from someone. Maybe your employer.”

  “So this man knows Ralph Dekker?” Jake asked.

  “Ray’s a lawyer, and he deals with all kinds of businessmen. He knows people in Fort Smith.”

  It might have been merely the coincidence of her answering the question that was on his mind, but something about this bothered Jake. And then again, it sounded like it could be the simple truth.

  Tom remained with his head still stuck in the newspaper.

  “Good morning, Tom,” Miss King said. “Did you have a good night’s sleep?”

  Tom kept his head buried in his paper. The two mules, brushed down to their grey-coated glory, stood nearby, dozing in the traces.

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  10

  THE ANTI-MONOPOLIST was the first newspaper Tom had ever really read, although he had glanced over the headlines of papers left around the smoking parlor at Mrs. Peltier’s. Suffering, lurid crimes, labor strikes, political turmoil, misery, hunger, orphans in the streets, families in desperate straits all around the United States—Reverend Schoot called such things “messages from an evil world,” which was why he forbade newspapers at the academy. Tom had gone through the paper’s ten pages several times, devouring it all, notices as well as news—advertisements for “summer camps” and for other papers with intriguing names like RipSaw, Sledgehammer, and The Appeal to Reason. But his curiosity about things in the newspaper occupied the thinnest, flickering surface of his mind. What he was really thinking about was Sam King and what happened with her in the bathhouse last night.

  When it was time to go, she climbed up beside him, pushing against him on the little seat, giving him a brief, cool smile. A tingling of pleasure and fear and inexplicable sorrow went through him. He avoided looking directly at her, not knowing if he could stand another day of being this close to her.

  Apparently the mules had decided that today was a nonworking day, and they started very slowly, lugging through Durant as if they were pulling a ten-ton wagon. Rolling past the bathhouse, Tom sat rigid on the seat, aware that Sam glanced at him, wishing she would stop looking at him, wishing she wouldn’t stop, ever. They ground along past the pool hall, where today a lone man wearing a black duster was leaning against the unpainted wall, hat low over his face.

  ***

  Tom decided to call the mules Grant and Lee. The biter was Grant; Lee was the less openly irritable of the two, but a deeper treachery lurked in his rheumy eye, as he waited for the chance to do major damage to someone. Finally beginning to wake up on the road, the two grizzled, annoyed creatures clashed and pulled against each other. After a while they started trying a new trick, to the surprise of all three of their passengers: in rutted, potholed stretches in the road their ears slowly perked up, and they walked faster and faster into a trot. Tom figured that they’d decided to risk broken legs in an effort to shatter a wheel or bounce their passengers out.

  Tom controlled the mules the best he could, and Sam grabbed hold of him, of his leg or whatever was available, and held on for dear life. Jake wedged himself into the back in an effort to avoid falling out. As they ratded down the road, Jake’s mood unaccountably turned better. He seemed glad to have left Durant.

  Tom loved it, wobbling and bouncing through the ruts with Sam holding on to his thigh.

  “Why are they running?” Sam asked, straightening herself back up on the seat.

  “They heard me talking about the glue factory,” Jake yelled.

  “Well, they didn�
�t do this yesterday.”

  “Probably talked it over last night.”

  “I don’t believe they talk much,” Tom said. “Their names are Grant and Lee.”

  Jake and Sam both laughed, to Tom’s surprise. He didn’t typically make jokes.

  They turned north on the old Butterfield Route, the “Texas Road,” the very same road that Mrs. Peltier’s rooming house was on, a hundred fifty miles away in Fort Smith. By midday they reached Boggy Depot, a village of abandoned buildings and quietness as deep as the forest that surrounded it. Seven or eight fine old houses were scattered around the hills.

  “Busy little town until the railroad came in twelve miles from here,” Jake said. “Made a wallflower out of it. We’ve only got one customer left here.”

  It was a blacksmith and harness dealer. He was clean-shaping a handle when they arrived, and he kept working. He shook his head impatiently when Jake talked to him about collecting on his outstanding debt. “No English,” he said, holding his hammer away from his body threateningly.

  “If you won’t pay on the debt and you don’t sign, they may close out your merchandise mortgage.”

  Jake went on and explained the mortgage transfer agreement, and the blacksmith only narrowed his eyes slightly and went back to hammering on the handle. He didn’t care to be polite. But when they were about to leave, he suddenly quit his forge and offered them all a drink from his well, as if deciding at the last minute to be friendly. He smiled unconvincingly, first at Jake, then Tom. “Thirsty? Want water?”

  Sam, leaning against the wagon with her arms crossed, said she certainly did, and the blacksmith pumped water and offered the bucket first to Jake, then Sam, and finally Tom, who drank half a bucket despite the awful taste and smell of it and the sour looks both Sam and Jake were still making. The blacksmith smiled broadly now, as if pleased at how much they had enjoyed his water.

  When Tom offered some to the mules, they sniffed it but wouldn’t drink. Jake looked worried. “That stuff tastes like coal mine tailings.”

  “Are there coal mines here?” Sam asked, still making a face. Jake got out a handkerchief and blotted at his mouth. “All you’d have to do is widen out the mouth of that well and you’d have the start of one.”

  Back on the wagon, Sam turned to Jake. “He didn’t want to talk to you, did he?” she said.

  “I don’t blame him.” Jake sounded generally disgusted.

  “Why?” Sam asked.

  “Askin somebody to sign away their own property is bad enough. Would you want to sign away your customers’ property?”

  Going out of Boggy Depot, the mules returned to their slow pace. “So why do you want him to sign this thing?”

  “You’re askin the wrong person.” Jake still sounded annoyed. “They say the bank wants better mortgages. We’ve always used merchandise mortgages. If they don’t pay, after while we take the stock back. I’ve had to do it quite a few times, and I don’t mind it, either. Now they don’t pay, we’re gonna take land.”

  “You don’t think it’s fair?” Sam asked. Tom glanced at her and noticed that she was staring ahead. The wagon creaked along, the mules again acting their ages. Jake didn’t answer her for a moment, and Tom glanced back.

  “We’re changing the rules on them right when they’re at their weakest. Nobody has any money to speak of. The price they’re puttin to the land ain’t fair. I don’t call any of it fair. They have a word for people that sneak out and claim a quarter section of land before the gun goes off. They call em sooners. I guess you’d call this sooner than sooner. The land ain’t even signed away from the tribe.”

  Tom was curious about why Jake was now talking freely with Sam about business, after having told him not to. Jake couldn’t see her face, but Tom could, and he saw her eyes—a look in them as if a light had unexpectedly shone into them. She started to say something and then stopped; her mouth came open and after a pause she asked, “Who’s they?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You said ‘they’ decided to do this. Who are you talking about?”

  “Well, it ain’t Mr. Dekker, I’ll tell you that,” Jake said. “He wouldn’t turn on his customers like this.”

  “So he’s an honest man?”

  Jake seemed too peeved to talk further about it. She started to say something else, but decided not to.

  Later that day, they were hungry and stopped at a farm shack.

  “Hello the house!” Jake yelled. A woman eventually peeked around a rough wooden door, and he asked if they could buy some dinner from her.

  The lady presented them each with a trencher of bread with lard drippings and something that tasted like scrambled prairie-chicken eggs with pumpkin mashed into it. The house was dark, lighted by a single coal oil lamp, and it had a packed earthen floor. Kerosene had been spilled on the floor to combat fleas, and Tom was not used to the strong smell of it. The kind lady hovered around them, concerned about whether they liked the food. She had given Jake larger portions. They ate off a long single plank in the tiny, dirty, sagging, windowless house. After a lifetime of terrible food, Tom didn’t mind it, but Miss King looked less comfortable, and ate only a few bites. Children stood around watching them with luminous eyes.

  One of them, a scrawny boy ten years old, sidled toward Tom with a shy smile. “My father ran away,” he said in Choctaw, and to his surprise Tom understood him.

  “When?”

  “Long time ago,” the boy said. “He went that way.” He pointed up the road in the direction they were headed, still smiling. “He will never come back.”

  The lady wouldn’t take payment for her hospitality, so Jake gave her a dollar to “buy a gift” for her kids, and they were back on the road. Sam acted a little woozy, as if the food wasn’t agreeing with her. Jake, too, began to look under the weather. After a couple of miles they met a farm wagon coming fast the other way, with a man and woman on the seat and all form of possessions tied onto the back. The woman’s face, as they rattled and bounced past, looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Just ahead, a group of people were camped in a walnut grove. They were whooping and yelling, the smell of liquor thick in the air. Three young men lurched from the campsite toward them, and Jake said, “Don’t slow down, Tom.”

  The young men approached the wagon and walked along beside it. “Na homi! Oka homi!” they yelled. “Oka homi!”

  Tom snapped the reins.

  “Oka homi!” One of them came around in front of the team and stood in the way, smiling stupidly. He took out a knife and held it up in the air. Grant bit at him and actually got a nip of his arm, and he shrieked and moved out of the way, causing his two cohorts to break up in laughter. The young men were ragged, stinking, bleak beneath their hilarity. The one with the knife made an ineffectual swing at them as they passed by.

  Sam glanced back at them. “Why were they saying ‘Oklahoma’?”

  “‘Oka homi,’” Jake said. “Red water. Whiskey. They wanted us to refill their jugs.”

  “I don’t feel good,” Sam said.

  Soon they were passing other travelers on the road, wagons with bony children trooping along behind them, and Jake said that they were probably settlers who’d not found land in the Outlet rush. “My stomach’s a little upset, too,” Jake admitted.

  As if she’d been waiting for someone else to mention it, Sam got down from the wagon and immediately vomited. She couldn’t sit upright, so Tom helped her into the back—Jake and Sam side by side, puckered and sick and ill complexioned.

  “Wasn’t the food,” Jake said sourly. “That blacksmith gave us bad water. I knew better’n to take it.

  Jake was as sick to his stomach as Sam was. They had to stop several times. Tom remained well despite having drunk a lot of the water, and he drove the mules on through the fading afternoon. The animals had gotten tired, and they no longer tried to run through the rough spots in the road. By late afternoon all of them were exhausted and wanted to stop, but they needed drinking water. On top o
f it all, Tom could not shake the strange feeling that they were being followed. Every time they momentarily stopped, he’d hear a sound behind them, some rustling or shuffling or stepping.

  “Turn to Violet Springs,” Jake said grimly. “It’s a damn whiskey town, but we don’t have any choice.”

  They had passed into an edge of the Seminole Nation and were now close to the border of Oklahoma Territory. They came to a good-sized river with an untended cable ferry across it. The mules refused to approach it. They had apparently decided they’d done enough work for one day. Tom tried every Indian word he could think of, he whacked them on the nose, he pulled them. Then Jake said, “Get em a drink of the river water,” and Tom did so, by cupping his hands and bringing up a little, first to one, then the other. The mules liked the water very much, but rather than going on down to the ferry they just stood there, waiting for him to bring more handfuls. He had to stand in front of them with drinks, successively closer to the river, until it was right under their nose, and finally in a rush they clattered onto the ferry, where there was a watering trough nailed onto the planks. Tom started to drink a handful of the river water himself and Jake stopped him. “Don’t you drink it. They run cows up the Canadian.”

  Tom turned a big winding gear that pulled the log-and-plank raft on its cable across the river, rippling dark under the purple sky. In the middle of the river Sam said in a calm but strange voice, “I have a terrible headache.” Just as they hit the other side, Tom saw someone arriving at the opposite bank, but it was too dark to tell anything about him.

  “That man has been following us all day,” Tom said.

  Jake glanced toward him and only grunted.

  As they approached Violet Springs, Tom heard piano sounds somewhere in the distance, and headed in their direction. It was almost dark when he came to the cluster of buildings that seemed to form the center of town. There was no main street, just buildings and shacks facing different directions. Pianos seemed to be playing in almost every lighted place, and voices drifted from here and there. Tom found what looked like a town well, but it was surrounded by mud, and when he got down and approached it, he made out dark shapes all around. It was a pig wallow. One of the pigs got to its feet, came over, and started nuzzling and pushing at Tom’s leg. Its grunting breath smelled alcoholic, and it appeared to be begging for something.