The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  The old woman sighed. “Ain’ cotchin no fish today. Still too muddy.” She glanced over at Tom and shook her head. “He won’t hurt ya, don’t worry.”

  The old man held out his hands and when Tom moved over he touched his face, the ends of his fingers gently moving across cheekbones, forehead, chin. While the fingers played over his face, the air seemed to Tom to go strangely quiet, even the sounds of the river receding.

  The old woman glanced over and said wryly, “He a dangerous type?”

  The old man dropped his hands and went back to fishing, as if he had suddenly lost interest. “Most of em died,” he said sadly. “We had slow fever and malaria worse’n they do now. Cholera. Smallpox—they give that to us on purpose. Took us all to what they called the longhouse and inoculated us with it to git it all over with at once. Our officers was drunkards, to a man, ever god-blessed one of em. Did nothin but drink, some of em. They had parties and balls, and more balls and parties. Seem like every night. The most Indins I seen was the ones they invited to them parties! They’d be in there just a-dancin around like a bunch of wheelin windmills. Didn’t invite the enlisted men to the parties, nosir, they invited the god-blessed Indins instead! Said they was civilized Indians. Hoped they’d bring purty women, ye see, since there wasn’t much in the way of white women around. All us enlisted men could do was hide in the shadows and watch the officers and Indins having a good time, peekin in the windows like little boys—Indins, Indin women, maybe a coupla white women would be in there, and us with no women a-tall.”

  “You makin up for it in your old age,” the old woman sighed.

  “It weren’t healthy livin like that!” the old man said vehemently. “You know what us boys lived for out here on the wild frontier?”

  “What?”

  He turned his silvery eyes toward Tom. “Mail. That’s what. Goddurn mail. That’s what your brave boys on the frontier thought about. Messages from the outside world. Any kind of god-blessed message, they just couldn’t wait to git it. Me, I never got no mail,” he said.

  “Nary a stitch,” the old woman said.

  “I seen others like me die from not gettin no mail. But I lived, mail or not! Lived to help build the rock fort. I was still in the army then, ye see. I stayed. Don’t know why. Just did. Stayed right here. Was the only one to live through it. We built the rock fort—biggest, shining, most beautiful thing you ever did see. Hundreds of tons of limestone. Mortar—lakes of it! Fort Smith! It cost the U.S. Treasure aplenty, they was shippin gold out here by the barrelful to pay for it. Guard towers on the ends reaching up to the clouds. Big parade ground. Took us years to build it. Officers’ quarters—that jail up there was the officers’ quarters, and I helped build it. And ye know what?”

  “What?” Tom was genuinely interested.

  “About the time we got her built, the fancy boys up in Washington decided it wasn’t no reason for her after all, and they told us to tear her down again. Yessir. That’s when I quit em. Decided if they was fool enough not to know whether to build a fort or tear it down, I wasn’t workin for em no longer.”

  “Sho did,” the old woman said.

  “I stayed in the neighborhood.” He sniffed. “Farmed. Raised cotton in the bottoms right up there around the bend. Got revenge, too,” he added portentously.

  “Revenge?”

  He beckoned for Tom to come closer. He had a smile of sheer wickedness on his sunken-jawed face. “C’mere. Come close, lemme tell you what I did.”

  Tom took a step closer, and the old man reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I built a house.”

  Tom smelled his papery old breath. “House?”

  “Yeah! Built her with the rock they tore outa that fort. Used the spare mortar they had done left. Used the wood casements they was about to let rot. I built the purtiest blessed house that ever was. How do you like them biscuits?”

  “That’s nice,” Tom said.

  “Well, damn right it is. It’s what I mean when I say I sleep in the fort. Take it from the oldest son of a bitch on the frontier, my young friend: revenge is sweet.” He cackled. “Sweetest revenge that is! Just ponder that, Mr. Indin. I’ve got some serious fishin to do.”

  “What kind of Indian am I?”

  The old man smiled worriedly. “Well, I reckon you’ll have to find out yourself.” He pulled out his hook. “How’s my worm?”

  “Look fine,” the old black woman sighed. “No fish want him, though. River’s still too high.”

  Tom had a while to wait, and he walked on, up one of many trails to the army graveyard on the hill beyond Judge Parker’s gallows. He walked among the small, weathered, older grave markers, and among the more recent graves of Civil War soldiers. Graves reminded Tom of the basement at the academy. He walked on quickly toward Coke Hill. Many of the people who lived in the shanties scattered around the hill were colored—blacks and Indians, bloods of all sorts—living in thrown-together structures made of driftwood, sticks, rags, old boards, tin. Smoke floated slowly in lumpy coruscations in the quiet damp air. He went toward the few “real” houses on the hill, which were old and musty smelling, with boards bending out and holes in roofs. At the corner of a building a horse stood with his ribs sticking out like a washboard. This oldest part of town, near where the fort had been in the old days, was inhabited by blind poverty.

  He went back to the station for the first train in from the territory. Jake wasn’t on it. Tom left and wandered the riverbank for several more hours, then returned for the second arrival and again was disappointed. The last train was due to come in after nine o’clock that night, plenty of time for him to go back to Mrs. Peltier’s for supper. But he didn’t look forward to the prospect of answering questions that the men were likely to put to him. He continued to fear that Mrs. Peltier would have little sympathy for someone without a job and that she might ask him to leave the boarding house.

  Back on the riverfront, tired and hungry, he made a nest in the weeds and took a nap. He slipped into a vivid dream about trying to build a house out of the academy building, trying to take bricks out of the walls and carry them through a dark forest to his site; but each time he went for more bricks, the Reverend was there, right beside him, marking his name down in the book, and the bricks wouldn’t be pulled from the walls . . .

  Tom woke up shivering in the cold night, sat up, and looked across a moonlit ribbon of river. He walked over to meet the last train out of Oklahoma Territory. It didn’t show up, and the stationmaster told him that there’d been a big wreck just south of the Enid station.

  “Railroad war,” he said grimly, and proceeded to look busy. The next train coming from that direction, via Red Fork, was at eleven o’clock Saturday morning.

  When he walked out of the station, a boy came gliding up to him in the dark on a soft-tired bicycle. “You Tom Freshour?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Been lookin for you all day. Telegram. Can you read?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave Tom a yellow envelope, and Tom read the telegram in light coming through the door.

  WHAT HAPPENED KEEP YOUR EARS OPEN ABOUT MR D

  BE CAREFUL WILL BE BACK AS SOON AS I CAN GET

  THERE JAKE

  He sat down on a bench, holding it in his hand. He was relieved to hear from Jake, relieved to know for sure that he was coming. It was the first message from afar, from anybody, that Tom had ever gotten in his life—except for the yearly Christmas letter from the Presbyterian Mission sent to everybody at Bokchito—and the mere fact of it, addressed to him alone, made him feel good. He understood what the old fisherman had meant today about the soldiers yearning for mail. He looked up the hill above the station, where lights burned in several windows of the Dekker building, lights even from the top floor. He thought of the old man, dead in the chair beside his bed.

  He thought of Sam.

  She’d invited him to come to her room tonight. He had grown uneasy about Sam, although his urge to see her outweighed it. The
more he was with her, the more uncomfortably unlike her he felt. She was so far beyond him—older, a woman from the city, a woman of experience—why would she care about him?

  Lightheaded from hunger, he walked through the streets into the lobby of the Main Hotel, with its legion of empty wooden chairs all lined up like soldiers, past the hard gaze of the clerk at the front desk, up the wide staircase to the third floor. He tapped on her door. No answer. He tapped again. Finally he tried the door and it was open. The room was lighted by a single lamp sitting on a dressing table in front of a mirror. Sam was sitting there, completely still, in front of it.

  ***

  As he approached her, she remained sitting at the straight-backed chair in front of the mirror. She glanced at him without turning around. “The boy made it back.” Something was stuck into the mirror’s frame with the lamp just in front of it. She was wearing an ivory-colored dressing gown.

  Tom walked up to her and could see that it was the photograph from Mr. Dekker’s album.

  “Is it you?” he asked.

  Sam stared at the picture. She seemed to imitate the child’s expression unconsciously, and her face looked eerily the same. Her eyes were shiny in the immediate glow of the lamp.

  She continued to look at it. “What do you know about your mother, Tom?” she asked.

  Tom didn’t particularly like talking about mothers and fathers. It was like talking about how old he was. He knew nothing about it, and it made him feel stupid.

  She waited. “Can’t you answer me?”

  “Well, I have a mother. Or had one. I wasn’t born in the orphanage . . .”

  “I didn’t think you were born from a pumpkin. But then this mother of yours was gone forever, and your father was probably gone before forever.” Her eyes narrowed. “And you became a little Christian Indian. After fifteen years of never seeing her, never knowing her name, never knowing if she’s an Indian or a white woman, is she still your mother? Was she ever your mother, really?”

  “I don’t think my mother’s alive.”

  “She might be. And would you protect her? Let’s say she walked in that door and I threatened her, would you protect her from me?”

  “I shouldn’t have to protect her from you.”

  She snorted at him. “You talk like a lawyer.”

  Her mood was quickly spreading over him like a bruise. She seemed careless and angry.

  “You don’t get knocked off course, do you, Tommy? You’re all worked up inside, but you act so stiff and straight and young. At least you do now. And look at you. Look at yourself! That was one thing your mother gave you. She must have been a beautiful woman, Tommy. Everything’s new. You’re excited. You’re free, you’re out, like a child in springtime. But life starts getting to you. One of these days, Mr. Whipping Boy, you might just throw the account book out the door, like our storekeeper did.”

  Her eyes had wandered from him back to the photograph stuck in the mirror frame. “There’s such a lot of tears and sentiment about children. People cry and moan about them. They worry about if they’re with their mothers, or if their fathers are alive, or whether they have a nice Christian orphanage to live in, and when they die, they worry about whether their little souls have flitted up to heaven where they belong. Did you ever think, Tommy, that the children would be better off without our sentiment and tears?” Her eyes played across the photograph. She took a deep breath. “Forget it. Don’t listen to me. I feel Irish when I drink a little. I begin to sound like my mother. I saw her drunk. A couple of times. She was like a different person. All her proper English accent forgotten. As Irish as the day is long. It was her best-kept secret.”

  She sighed and stood up and put on a tired smile. “You must be hungry. I have plenty of dinner left—I didn’t eat much. You don’t mind eating after me, do you?” A small table on wheels with a white tablecloth and several dishes stood against the wall. When he hesitated, she turned and looked at him directly, her back illumined in the lamp, her front dark. “Go on and eat,” she said. “Don’t start looking at me.”

  She took him by his arm, guided him over, and sat him down. There was a whole baked chicken, potatoes, stuffing, green beans, pie, a fresh loaf of bread. She brought over the other chair and sat down opposite him, served him food, and poured both of them some wine. He ate hungrily but self-consciously. He was grateful to her for the dinner, but as she sat there drinking and watching him, he felt like a boy who had accidentally blundered into an adult occasion.

  She offered him a glass. “Would you like wine?”

  He tasted it—another first—and shuddered. It was intriguingly terrible, and he sipped again.

  “Why’d you turn against your mother?” he asked her.

  “She was a madam, Tom. Her hotel was a casino and whorehouse. Some of them were younger than me, you know. Her girls. When I was fifteen, I was in St. Louis and visited the hotel without her knowing about it. I met a girl and started talking to her. She thought I wanted to work there. She was thirteen years old and already a veteran.” Sam looked tired. “I was almost never in St. Louis. She kept me away. I was supposed to stay in Chicago, where people didn’t know about my mother. I was supposed to become a perfect lady.”

  She drank the rest of the wine in her glass and stared toward the soft gaslight coming through the window. “I grew up in Chicago. The young ladies I knew in Chicago got married or they quickly became old maids, hiding in their fathers’ houses: the sheep and goats got separated, but as far as I was concerned they were all headed for the slaughter. My acquaintances became less respectable. I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t want to sit in parlors with my finger crooked around a teacup handle, talking about the weather. I didn’t want to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to be out in the world—with a business of some kind, but that didn’t seem possible. I became what they call a sporting woman.”

  She gave him a pale smile. “After my mother died, I’d seen enough of that life to understand why she kept me away. I started thinking that maybe I’d been unfair to her, but it was too late to do anything about it. Anyway, she left me what remained of her estate. I was her only child. She had no one else.”

  Another wince went across her face when she looked at him. “So. There you have the long life of Samantha King up to 1894. But the past is a bucket of ashes, Tommy. Now I can do something in the world, and I will, whether I’m a woman or not. Whether I have a past or not. I will.”

  “What’s a ‘sporting woman’?”

  “Oh Tommy, I took money from men. I wasn’t a whore exactly, but I did.”

  He felt a little dizzy, from her strange vehemence and from the wine. “Why?”

  Sam’s jaw tightened, her eyes flashed on him with jade intensity. “Don’t act stupid, Tommy. Be ignorant, but don’t act stupid.”

  Abashed by her fierceness, he didn’t respond.

  For a moment she looked into her own thoughts, then her eyes focused on him again. “Why do you put down your fork when you talk?”

  “We were taught to,” he said.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” she said irritably, “you’ll starve to death.” She rose and began pacing. She seemed restless and preoccupied. But after a while she turned, and with a purposeful smile said, “Enough of that. Do you want to take a bath?”

  She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  He walked to the window and looked out on the neat row of gaslights down the avenue. He continued to explore the glass of wine with sips, waiting for her to come out. In the novel Tom had read that week, a sophisticated, evil man was always standing by fireplaces and windows with a glass of wine, but Tom wasn’t a sophisticated anything. His feeling of how much older Sam was, how much more experience she’d had, was deepened by her story. The more he knew of her, the more formidable she became. The door opened and she swooped back in, her dark hair down around her shoulders. “Do you want to take a bath? There’s plenty of hot water.”

  The tiled bathroom was huge, the
tub was the largest he’d ever seen. Tom was awed by the hot water gushing out of the spigot. He’d heard of “running hot water” but could not believe the profusion of it. Hurriedly, he took off his clothes and got into the tub after it was filled. She washed his shoulders and back with sweetsmelling soap.

  She knelt down and washed around the front of his neck and chest and down around his belly, smiling at him and giving his wine-numb lips a little kiss. “You have no idea what a lady-killer you could be.”

  “Lady-killer?”

  “I want to keep you for my own, Tommy.” Her face came close, and the intimacy of the moment was overwhelmingly sweet to him—the closeness of her face with the steam on her glowing skin, her breath on him. “You don’t know that you’re beautiful, do you?” she said softly.

  Tom smiled awkwardly, embarrassed and excited at once.

  But as she rubbed the soap down past the water on his belly and on his penis, it was already hard. The nightgown was falling down from one shoulder, revealing the globe of her right breast. “I think I’ll join you.” She stood, took it all the way off, and remained there as his eyes feasted on her, then she stepped into the tub and sat down slowly in front of him, actually between his legs. The water rose all the way to the rim. He loved her smooth back and the feel of her buttocks between his thighs. She leaned against him, pushing him against the tub, the two of them lying back, her breasts tipping up out of the water. She wiggled slightly against him. He glanced around at the huge bathroom, the gleaming brass fixtures, and his partial dizziness again made him uneasy. The wine.

  She laid her head back on his chest and said softly, “You’re not like other men. I hate the way most of them act, the little cocks. As if they knew everything, as if they owned everything—women included. Their possessiveness makes me sick . . . What’s that against me?”

  “Against you?”

  “That thing I feel.”

  “Nothing.” He scooted back.

  “It feels like something to me.” She completely turned around, sloshing water over the tiles, and reached out, taking him again first in one hand, then putting both hands around it, holding it very gently and moving her hands up and down in the water. She leaned over and put her mouth down around the tip of it, at the moment protruding from the water. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them she had slid her mouth down it until her face was under water. She came up for air but kept her mouth around the tip of it before going down again. Tom shut his eyes.