The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  He went around to the dilapidated back porch, where the door was standing partly open. By the porch steps, he glanced around but wasn’t quite prepared for what he found. At the edge of a patch of moonlit weeds beside the building, he saw—and slowly went up and touched with his bare foot—Hack’s satchel. It didn’t even cross his mind to wonder why Hack had brought it with him instead of making the delivery and then catching a later train, because there was no question now that he had to go inside. He took the dangling shoes off his belt loop and laid them beside the satchel.

  In the complete darkness of the back hallway, the building’s smells provoked in him an instant melancholy. He stood still for a moment trying to collect himself. Then he walked on through the hall to the door leading to the Reverend’s library, where the musty smell of the books was agonizingly familiar. He reached out and felt across their dry spines, as if to confirm that he really was in this place. Still he’d heard nothing except a creaking here and there in the house—no doors opening, no one walking down the stairs. The Reverend’s office door was half shut, and he opened it gently, the room dimly lit by the lantern behind it in the adjacent bedroom. He walked quietly to the open bedroom door, seeing the lantern on the dresser and the capsized chair. The Reverend’s bed was messed up but unoccupied. Had Hack come and taken him outside at gunpoint? Was Hack lurking on the grounds and the Reverend gone patrolling? He’d seen no lights anywhere else in the building.

  Back in the office, he glanced around. The heavy kneeling block sat before the Reverend’s desk. How many Fridays he had walked into this room and heard his defects read to him, the Reverend always sitting while he read, using his most monotonous, clerkly voice, implying that this was the standard and unavoidable inventory of living—poor attentiveness in school, failing to sit up straight and eat in silence, bad washing after fieldwork, improper care of uniform for marching practice, improper language, and so on and so on—he could hear the droning voice coming out of the square block of a man, but always with a hidden edge of anticipation beneath. Then he would ask Tom to remove his shirt, to kneel here.

  Everything was the same in this room. The Reverend’s own books, all lined up in the same order, Institutes of the Christian Religion prominent among them. Various books on education and the training of boys. Antichrist on the American Continent—Tom had always looked at that title and wondered about it. He took it down and flipped through the pages. It was a big, illuminated book with color plates and drawings throughout—mostly of Indians, with various tribal names beneath the plates, all grotesque, exaggerated renderings, naked devils and monsters dancing around fires with blood-dripping spears.

  A terrible, bitter grief welled up in him, and he wanted to tear the book to pieces. He must not even throw it down, he realized. He set it down quietly and started to go back into the hallway when he had the feeling that someone was standing nearby watching him. He looked around the room until his eye lighted on the filing cabinet. “The annals of shame,” he’d once heard the Reverend call it. He walked around the desk and found several keys on a ring in the top drawer. As he picked it up he heard something, a voice somewhere in the timbers of the building. Hurriedly, he tried keys until one of them opened the cabinet drawer. Folders in it were put away in three carefully demarcated groups, and he found his own name in the back section. In his file were several pages with the single word RECORDS printed on the top. Each of these pages was a listing of transgressions, pages and pages of them going back for years, each with the appropriate “judgment” listed. The Reverend apparently spent a great deal of time copying the pages of his “book of sins” in his fastidiously plain script. Tom’s life appeared to consist entirely of transgressions, until he found at the back of the file a single yellowed piece of paper, dated 14 July 1880, with a tilting spider’s scrawl written across it: “To Whom it May Concern the Enfant in Question was received as a Foundling at Osi Tamaha Where he was Left near the Big Tree by Party or Partys. . .” Tom deciphered as much as he could of the rest—“possibly Apache . . . delivered to the Skullyville Agency . . . Captain Sam Sixkiller High Sheriff & Warden”—but he had to do it quickly, because he unquestionably heard a muffled yell somewhere in the building. He dropped the paper back into the file, shut the cabinet, and retreated back down the hall.

  At the basement entrance, a coolness leaked through the bottom of the door. He stood there thinking he’d readily go to hell before he would descend those stairs, but there was a light coming through the crack, and another, louder cry, and definitely it came from there.

  He pushed open the thick door and went down. At the base of the half-rotted stairs, beyond the graveyard—mounds of both marked and unmarked burial places of orphans and Civil War soldiers—past huge barrels that at one time had been used for water storage, in a small pool of light coming from one lantern, Hack knelt in the dirt with his shirt off and his arms tied behind him. Standing by him, with his short braided horsewhip in one hand and a pistol in the other, was the Reverend James Schoot.

  He saw Tom at the base of the stairs and said, “You’re just in time for judgment, Mr. Freshour. Come and join us.”

  ***

  “Your friend Mr. Deneuve came to do me harm,” the Reverend said, with the fixed blankness on his face that Tom had seen so many times. His arm fell hard, the whip snapped across Hack’s back, causing him to topple into the dirt. “Get back on your knees.” Hack struggled up, with stripes of blood on his back visible from twenty feet away. The Reverend talked while he did it, as always, in a tone controlled but excited and only partly connected to the flailing arm. Tom had heard it so many times. I am a stronger and more vital animal than you, it seemed to say.

  “You are a threat to God’s work. You are pestilent in His eyes.”

  The sight of the Reverend beating Hack, the terrible familiarity of this place, the dirt and rotten smell permeating the damp, grief-filled darkness made Tom weak in the knees, nauseated. He hid behind one of the huge containers, breathing, trying to gain control of himself.

  “Come here, boy.”

  With his back against the vat, Tom looked around it and was surprised to see the Reverend coming toward him, with the pistol held at the ready. Tom ran back into the darkness. The Reverend pulled off one ear-splitting blast, the bullet eating air close to his head. Tom went around a corner and stopped, waiting to see if he would follow, his pulse pounding. Tom had one advantage, thanks to the Reverend: he knew every nook and cranny of this stinking basement.

  Hack had just stood up. Walking back to him, the Reverend said, louder, “Kneel down, boy. Now!” Tom found a rock and threw it into the darkness near them, hoping he would waste a shot on it. The Reverend shouted at Tom, “If you don’t come here now, I will send this sinner to his final judgment. Do you hear me? I’ll count to ten, and if you haven’t come here into the light, slowly, with your hands in the air, his sickness will be over. It is in your hands. One, two . . .”

  Tom came partway out so that he could see better. Hack was still standing, and the Reverend kicked him hard in the knee. There was a sickening crunch, Hack screamed in pain and fell to the ground, and the Reverend aimed the pistol toward his head. “. . . four, five, six—you don’t think I mean it?”

  “I’m coming,” Tom said.

  “No!” Hack wailed. “Don’t. He’ll kill us both!”

  Tom didn’t know what to do. He didn’t believe that the Reverend would execute Hack. Tom had no weapon, but during one of his exiles down here he had whittled on some old hoe handles, using a piece of metal he’d laboriously sharpened on the foundation rock. He’d made primitive candles out of tightly twisted paper, talked some matches out of the boy who brought him water, and practiced spear throwing. He had spent hours and hours doing this, until hunger and darkness prevented him. He and some of the other boys had hunted in the woods, too, with spears and bows, homemade from ash saplings, and he’d gotten good enough to kill an occasional rabbit with a spear. He ran to the corner where he
remembered leaving the spear, and felt across the damp rough rock.

  “Seven . . .”

  Finally his hand found three of them. He grabbed one, swiveled around, and threw it toward the Reverend. He’d thrown without looking, and it missed, but the clattering caused the Reverend to crouch down. Tom knew that he would come after him now. He took the remaining two spears and moved back from the wall into the darkness so he wouldn’t get cornered.

  The Reverend leaned over and picked up the lantern. He took a step toward Tom, but then saw Hack trying to crawl away and changed his mind. He placed the lantern back on the ground and quickly counted, “Nine, ten! This is your last chance, Mr. Freshour. Do you want to kill your friend?”

  “Don’t come!” Hack bellowed.

  Tom was just opening his mouth to say he would come when to his astonishment the Reverend aimed the gun at Hack’s head and pulled the trigger. He shot him once, in the temple, and Hack thrashed in the dirt. The Reverend looked up, and the sight of his face in the shadowy yellow light, the inert black eyes—the awful, indifferent fixity looming above Hack’s death tremor—changed something in Tom forever. By inborn fact of temperament, against all odds, Tom had stubbornly resisted what this man had tried to make him believe—that there was evil in thè world, that there were people who were in the grip of evil, in whom it eclipsed anything else. Partly because the Reverend so avidly believed it, Tom had resisted this knowledge, but now he knew that the Reverend had been right, because he was one of them. In his heart this man was an inflicter of pain, a killer, and whatever good he did was finally nothing beside it—null and void, zero, utterly meaningless.

  Without thinking it in words, Tom at last became a believer.

  Turning toward him, the Reverend raised the pistol and aimed it in his direction. Tom fell to the dirt and scrambled to the side. There was another blast and a thump near his hand. He had missed, but the flash had revealed the Reverend. Tom stood up. Using all of his body, he launched another of the sharpened handles. Just as the pistol went off again, the spear struck the Reverend in the shoulder and he grunted with surprise and pain. The gun fell from his hand, and slowly he leaned over to retrieve it.

  Tom never hesitated. Giving the Cherokee death gobble that the boys used to make when they wrestled, he ran toward the Reverend. The noise made the Reverend hesitate just a second, causing a hitch to his movement as he brought the gun up, and when he straightened, Tom rammed him with the sharpened stick in his belly. His mouth hinged wide open in surprise, and he staggered backwards against a pillar and roared in pain as Tom pushed the spear home. The gun went off again, a wild shot, and Tom kicked it out of his hand. The Reverend tried to pull the spear from his gut, and he bellowed again as a red stain blossomed across his front. He pulled it out but was bleeding lavishly; he fell to his knees, crawled, then stood up and stumbled toward the stairs, crashing into something and falling again. Tom darted up the stairs ahead of him, slammed the door, and bolted it. He stood outside the door gulping air, and he heard the Reverend dragging himself to the top of the stairs.

  “Let me out,” he said weakly.

  Tom didn’t reply.

  “God will forgive you, sinner,” he groaned.

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Then you will go to hell,” the Reverend said feebly. “Please,” he panted through the door. “Let me out.”

  Tom wondered why none of the boys from this side of the building had come at the sounds of gunshots in the basement, and guessed that they were afraid for their lives. He had a chance to get away without being seen, and he took it. He ran to the back door and fell headlong down the steps. He lay on the ground a moment, winded, stars bursting in his head. Lying there, he saw Hack’s satchel, left on the ground. He crawled over, grabbed it and the shoes, and ran for the barn. With luck he could hold on to a horse long enough to get away from here.

  PART THREE

  23

  TOM HAD TAKEN one of the Reverend’s team horses and ridden through rapidly falling temperatures. The day came, and he was riding into the face of real winter weather coming down across the plains. He made the St. Louis and San Francisco tracks and followed the old, washed-out military road that went alongside it, north into the Winding Stair Mountains. He didn’t know how hungry and tired he was until he fell off the horse from exhaustion. He led the horse down to a gully under a trestle, out of the biting wind, and went to sleep on the ground.

  After a nap filled with wild visions, he woke up feeling stiff and strange. The sky was grey and closed in, with a curtain of greenish darkness approaching from the northwest.

  What he’d done last night seemed like a dream. He felt unmoored, adrift, almost to the point of not being sure who he was anymore. The horse was standing nearby with his head down, and Tom noticed Hack’s satchel on the back of it. When he’d saddled him, he’d tied it on and forgotten about it. He walked over and unbuckled it. At first he just looked inside without touching anything. Then he put the satchel down, took out five neat envelopes, and lined them up on the ground. Five bundles of twenty-dollar bills. He counted a bundle. There were twenty-five of them. Two thousand five hundred dollars in all.

  Inside the satchel was also a letter, a plain envelope with John Crilley / Muskogee / I. T. written neatly on the outside. It was sealed.

  He walked up the embankment to the railroad track and stood looking toward the south. Although he’d been traveling northward, he still was not far from Texas. Texas was like a different country, he had heard. People went there and began new lives. GTT, they wrote on their cabin doors—gone to Texas. He could go there and start a whole new life. A third life. Find a place and settle in, maybe pass for a white man—a white man with money. He sat on a rock and put his head down, unconsciously running his fingers through his hair. He thought about those evenings when he and Jake came home to Mrs. Peltier’s. The good suppers, sitting with the men playing cards, the easy acceptance they’d shown him. The way Jake obviously cared about him. He thought about the danger Jake could be in. And Sam King. Thinking about her weakened and bewildered him.

  If he returned to Fort Smith and confessed the truth, he would be hanged. For an instant, he saw Johnny Pointer being dragged to the gallows, begging not to die. Tom sat, hands slowly running through his hair, thinking hard. Had anyone known that he was leaving Fort Smith with Hack? The note he’d left for Jake was the only evidence. If Jake wasn’t back yet, he could destroy it.

  Stubbornness had made Tom avoid the habit of lying. At Bokchito, the ultimate defiance was to not be a liar. I am not saved, he had always admitted, I am not chosen. But he knew he could lie and keep a straight face about it. If he returned to Fort Smith, he had better be able to.

  He went down the embankment, untied his horse, and rode north.

  ***

  Monday morning, well before light, Jake sat on the edge of his bed under a wall lamp, admiring Tom’s flawless hand—his gracefully double-backed D, sweeping J, and evenly inclined letters:

  Saturday Morning

  Dear Jake,

  In case you arrive while I’m gone: I am going to Muskogee with Hack Deneuve. He knows about what has been going on and he may talk to me. Deacon M. is staying in the Paris Hotel. I saw him at the hardware store, too, and believe that he works for them.

  They fired me on Thursday.

  Sam is here, staying at the Main Hotel. She came back from St. Louis to talk to you.

  I’ll be back.

  Tom

  Jake had read the note when they’d arrived last evening, but he’d been almost too exhausted to comprehend it. The last few miles of their day-long trip from Muskogee had consisted of open warfare with Grant and Lee. Fighting with two thirty-year-old mules was worse than fighting two eight-hundred-pound boulders, since these particular mules were not only obstinate almost beyond belief but also they looked at him out of their beady eyes with a hard-edged glint of triumph, as if bragging about it.

  Jake had actually begun the day
feeling affectionate toward them. They’d acted fine coming out of Muskogee, traveling at a good clip. But around Sallisaw they started getting stiff, and pretty soon it wasn’t a matter of their walking at whatever pace they wanted, but absolute, intractable, full-bore balk. It would have been easier to have shot them than what he ended up doing, which was to trudge along beside them with a jerk-line arrangement, pulling and pushing and kicking and carrying on. Leonard was no help, since all he did was sit in the wagon complaining about his stomach. Between the mules and the lawyer, it was a long day.

  And here was Tom’s note, which let him know that whatever difficulty he’d had getting here might be the least of his troubles.

  He had suspected that Deacon Miller was working for Ernest, but seeing it delineated in Tom’s clear hand made it unpleasantly plain. But was Miller openly working for him?

  Yesterday it had been obvious to Jake that Ernest had hired Miller, but the closer he stared it in the face, the more peculiar it looked. Why would a businessman—a businessman with Judge Parker’s crossbeam a hundred yards from his front door—hire a killer to stalk an employee? Why not just fire him? This was the wrong side of the river for that kind of behavior.

  Jake left Tom’s note on the table so Leonard could read it when he woke up, went down to the kitchen, and chugged a cup of cold leftover coffee. He hurried up the alley to the wagon yard, where he ignored the mules, who were still off in mule dreamland. He snugged a borrowed saddle onto a brushy-tailed mare that he sometimes used in town, and in the chill last blackness of night rode her at a gallop to the store. He let himself in the back door with his key and walked into the unlit shipping room.