by Tom Franklin
When they rode on, the new recruit, who said his landlord had taken his mule, sat aback a horse for the first time in his life. There’d been a brief discussion of whether or not to arm him and Ardy Grant mentioned the possibility that this fellow himself might be a gang member. You never knew. Briefly they joked about shooting or hanging him as the fellow whitened in the saddle, but Oscar said he’d vouch for him, knew him to be a decent enough character. Someone else suggested the farmer would serve them better by riding in front—if anyone shot from the cover of woods or from a house, let them kill their own. Wasn’t the posse doing a service for these rural folk? Then let the rural folk work to protect it.
Four more farms yielded six more sharecroppers and four gaunt mules and so now behind a shield of nervous locals the train of men felt more solidly protected. Spirits were high and jokes abounded and flasks of whiskey were tossed from horse to horse.
Within two hours they’d arrived at the covered bridge that marked the western boundary of Mitcham Beat. Now the talking ceased and the men dismounted to piss or stretch their legs and let the horses rest. Some led theirs down to the edge of the creek for water but others stood looking anxiously at the trees across the wide green creek. The land known as the Bear Thicket.
Somebody said they ought to just set it afire and let it burn all the way to Bedsole’s store. Set it afire and follow the flames in. Show them hell. Show them a damned breech.
Too wet, Ardy Grant pointed out.
Oscar had remained on his horse and sat with his breath billowing away from his mouth and the cold wind chapping his cheeks, his legs concealed by his coat. He had a telescope which he uncapped and extended and raised and peered through for a long time. He, Ardy Grant, and the Thompsons conferred about strategy, should they go through the thicket where the possibility of ambush was greater, or go via Coffeeville and risk their element of surprise. They agreed to go on through here, but to send the farmers in first. Oscar called for them to mount up and soon hooves thundered over the bridge.
The horses moved quickly underneath them, but the Bear Thicket seemed a hundred miles long. It felt as though they were riding through a canyon at night, dark inways into the woods on both sides like caves where shooters could lurk, each knothole a depraved grinning face, each jutting black limb a gun barrel. Each rider wary that he might be the one whose head or chest fell within the sights of the dead-eyed country scoundrels, scoundrels who’d shoot and then before their smoke dispersed disappear farther back into the woods only to reappear somewhere else to shoot again. Jokes had hushed and more than a time or two someone got jittery and fired into the cross-stitched woods only to flush a brown thrasher or finch. Oscar called a halt and had Ardy Grant pass a stern word back saying not to shoot unless you knew what the heck you were shooting at, that all this nervous firing would do was let the enemy know their position. Then they clamored on.
Waite and Macky sat resting at the edge of the woods at the top of a hollow, a picked cotton field alongside it. They could not see far and seemed to be the only living things about.
King nickered, spooked. His breath a mist. Waite rose from the stump he’d been sitting on and gazed down into the bowl of the hollow but saw nothing. The land below seemed clear of the annoying underbrush, just sloping ground plastered with wet leaves. Trees every few yards and fences of light brown vines strung between the trees and corded about themselves. Leading the horse, Waite got them moving again, descending to the bottom, veering farther from the road. He guessed they’d gone two miles thus far, each mile put behind them bettering their chances to get out alive. Even his back felt a little looser, and so it seemed particularly wry of fate to produce, just as they reached the bottom of the hollow, two men out of the fog.
The pair appeared less than thirty yards away, and for a long bizarre instant the sheriff thought his eyes were playing a joke on him—the men seemed to be the same man, or man and reflection in air: they wore identical overalls and straw hats, and the same brownish beards hung down their denim shirts like palls of Spanish moss. They raised identical single-shot rifles, too, both left-handed, and both sent a bullet past Waite’s ears on either side of his head.
He and Macky dropped flat to the leaves and scrambled behind a mound of sand as the men dropped, too, but continued to rattle off shots, reloading and firing the single-shots at a shocking rate of speed. Waite fired a few rounds, then made himself stop, he couldn’t afford to waste ammunition.
Then King! he thought, and realized the horse was gone, escaped in the shooting.
The woods had grown very quiet now, even the drip of dew seemed to have receded. Waite looked around. The fog was lifting—bad luck. With him against the two of them, he’d do better with more cover. He scrutinized the terrain before him, trying to spot something to shoot at, but all was quiet.
“Mack Burke!” came a voice from down the hollow. Closer than Waite had reckoned. “That you?”
“Don’t answer,” Waite whispered. He peered toward where the voice had come from but saw nothing, just the brown leaf-splotched ground and trees. Then he thought he saw movement. A gust of breath already vanishing, but he made out the tree from which it came. He sighted it and waited.
One of the fellows broke out running up the side of the hill. Waite aimed at him, but a second before he pulled the trigger the man dove behind a tree growing sideways out of the ground. Waite kept his sight trained where he’d been but then saw him again, several steps to the left—he was going for position, to get them in a cross fire.
They were in a fix, plain and simple. He shifted to lead the moving man but remained aware of his twin, who he assumed hadn’t left his original tree. He caught sight of the second fellow again, now a good thirty feet farther uphill, and fired twice, hitting nothing but leaves and trees. Then the man vanished. Something pricked him on the cheek and he thought he’d been shot but it was only splinters of bark from a nearby hit. The first man had been smart and located Waite’s position.
“You recognize ’em?” Waite whispered.
The boy lay peering out into the distance, pulling at his handcuffs. He nodded. “Huz and Buz Smith,” he said.
“They part of Tooch’s bunch?”
Macky nodded. Then he shook his head.
“Which is it, boy?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Waite whispered for the boy to stay low, to not move, and rolled himself between a log and the roots of a tree, his elbows in foul-smelling water. He felt it was a good strategic spot, unless they rushed him. Better, too, to put a little space between him and Macky. If they rushed them, Waite would get one of them, he was sure.
When the posse finally passed the end of the thicket and was riding along a fence line, it came upon a hill and the first riders over the other side saw the tiny leaning smudge of a shack on the landscape with smoke rising from its chimney like a line drawn into the sky. Oscar called for them to quicken and they did, quirting their nervous horses and kicking up mud as they descended on the homestead. A trio of hounds appeared and one was trampled, the others tumbling tail-tucked-away. No one gave an order but the finest horses came sliding into the yard first and men jumped off with drawn pistols and marched over the porch boards and the brother of the cobbler Wilkins kicked in the door. He came out dragging a short bald man by the seat of his britches and the blacksmith wound a rope about his bare feet and tied the other end to the pommel of his saddle.
The fellow screamed his innocence as he sat in the dirt. One of his arms was in a sling made from a diaper. Oscar raised a hand for him to quiet down and asked his name.
He stuttered it out. Butch Reed.
“Ardy,” Oscar said, “you’ve been out here in this wilderness doing your detective work. What have you dug up about Butch Reed here?”
“He’s a night rider,” Grant replied, poking a chaw of tobacco into his mouth with a finger. When he had it secure he wiped the finger on his horse’s neck and put his glove back on. “One of th
e worst ones. A member of Hell-at-the-Breech, all right.”
“It’s ah, ah, ah lie,” Reed said, flapping his good arm.
Grant was off his horse in a flash, a knife from his belt at the man’s throat. “You call me a liar again and you won’t make your own hanging.”
Oscar swung down and put a hand on Grant’s shoulder. The young man pushed Reed to the ground.
“Are you a member of this lawless band?” Oscar asked him.
“I am nuh, nuh, nuh not, sir.”
“Did you sign their paper?”
“I never signed no no no no no paper,” he said.
“What of this, then?” Grant asked, taking from his coat a soiled piece of newsprint. He unfolded it slowly. “It says ‘Butch Reed’ right here.”
The man’s face grew even whiter.
“Well, I did sign,” he confessed, “but they they they they they made me. They held guns on me and said if I didn’t they’d burn my house and barn d-d-d-d-d-down and shoot me in the gut.” Then crying he said they’d forced other fellows to sign, too. Made them slice open their hands and write it in blood. He said a lot of them out here were for the gang but some weren’t. Some were just trying to raise a crop and feed their families.
“This day will be recalled as the day justice came through,” Oscar said, turning. He climbed onto his horse. “And this gang and all its members will be stamped out. You, sir,” he said to Reed, “have sealed your fate with your lie.”
Grant remounted and they spurred their horses, Reed screaming as he was dragged, but soon his cries were lost in the pounding of hooves and only those in the rear of the posse who cared to look back saw the pregnant woman and a pair of young girls come onto the porch and watch them go.
They cut across a field looking for a good hanging tree but saw none and turned left onto a narrow wet trail between two more fields.
“I believe we took a wrong turn and wound up in Illinois,” the lawyer Drake called.
They found a medium-size sweet gum dead center in a field, a child’s swing dangling. A few grackles lifting from its upper limbs. The gum looked sturdy enough to hold the weight of a man, but when they knelt in the mud to noose Reed’s neck they found him dead already, his skull caved in from a hoof. They pulled him into the sky anyway and left him swinging. A sign of things to come.
Someone shouted and pointed at one of the country fellows they’d drafted, galloping away on the horse they’d given him, kicking it viciously in the sides.
“He’ll tell them we’re coming,” said Virgil Thompson.
“Ardy,” Oscar said.
“Yes, sir.”
He got down off his mount and pulled his rifle from its scabbard.
“Don’t shoot,” another of the farmers said. He hopped down from the mule he rode. “That was his cousin y’all just pulled up in that tree yonder.”
As if he didn’t hear, Grant pushed his hat off and knelt on one knee in the high dead bracken and cocked the rifle and aimed. He paused to wipe dew from his cheek and aimed again. The fleeing man seemed out of range. Then Grant shot. In the distance the farmer lurched and tumbled sideways off the horse. His legs came up once and then he was lost in the field. Two fellows were dispatched to retrieve the animal but ordered to leave the man where he lay. Then the posse pushed on.
Soon they’d left behind the flat terrain of field and were riding alongside yet another forest of pine trees on land that rose and fell. They rode through those pines and through more fields, coming upon a tiny cabin with a springhouse beside it and a fenced shed in the rear. A search found the cabin empty but there were warm coals in the fireplace, a pot of coffee half gone.
Beware, Oscar advised, they’re around, and close. Keep your eyes on the trees. They left two men stationed at the cabin with instructions to capture anyone who returned, then the rest went on.
Half an hour later, at point, Ardy Grant saw a riderless horse loping across the field. He raised an arm and the great moving mass of men and horse came to a gradual stop, like a train slowing. As the horse drew near, Oscar said, “My god, that’s Billy’s.”
Grant handed the judge his reins and dismounted, walking slowly toward the spooked horse where it stood sideways in the road, wall-eyed, its tail jerking. He spoke softly and raised a hand and sidled up to it, took its reins where they hung down and adjusted the bit. He stroked King’s mane and fed him a carrot from his pocket and said more things. After a few moments he led the horse over to Oscar and said, “We have to assume they’ve killed the sheriff.”
Oscar lowered his head. He raised it.
As men behind heard this news and passed it back through the posse, each rider straightened in his saddle. Some removed their hats. They looked at one another in silence, and then cursed or said they were doing the right thing, being here. They said it had to end, and end today. This wasn’t any way to begin a new century.
Grant had pulled up onto his own mount and with Waite’s in tow they began to ride hard again.
They came to a house and Grant rode right up on the porch and began firing through the windows. A woman screamed. A girl. The Thompson brothers had ridden around the side, tearing down a garden fence, and were waiting at the back door when the family spilled out. Claudius Thompson leveled his long pistol at the farmer who had shaving lotion on his cheeks and neck and shot him in the chest. His wife shrieked and flung herself down onto him. Several barefoot children scrabbled underneath the porch. One older boy, fourteen or fifteen, stood his ground and Virgil Thompson drew a gleaming shotgun from its sheath alongside his horse’s withers. The boy backed up against the house. He shook his head. One-handed, Thompson breeched the shotgun and checked its loads. He snapped it closed, raised it one-armed, and shot the boy in the head.
Much of the posse had passed and was headed to the next farm on the horizon when Oscar got his horse, which had been spooked, to the back of the house. He looked at the dead man and boy and then at the Thompson brothers.
No one spoke.
The woman was still shrieking. She flung herself at Oscar’s horse and he pushed at her. He said something nobody heard, then a gunshot came from inside the house and a bullet passed through the empty sleeve of Virgil Thompson. He and his brother both raised their pistols and fired into the window, exploding it in. They spurred their mounts around the house and paused at an angle from the windows.
“Send a man in,” Claudius Thompson commanded.
Grant rolled off his horse and ran to the edge of the wall, pistol drawn. He crept alongside the house—grinning, Oscar saw—and at the corner turned and dashed to the front door. He kicked it open and went in firing. A moment later he came out.
“All’s clear in here,” he said.
They noticed smoke coming out the windows, and by the time they left to join the rest of the men, fire was licking out the front door and the children were crawling from under the house coughing.
Across the field more of the posse had shot a man a half-dozen times and shot several wiry blue dogs and corralled the man’s wife and another woman into the pigpen. A light rain had begun to fall. One of the women held a squalling baby.
Oscar, now ashen-faced, called for a halt. He got down from his horse and seemed unsteady on his legs. He handed the reins to Drake. He looked at the dead man where he lay on his belly in the mud with nothing in his hand but a pair of pliers. He looked at the two women on their knees in the pigpen. The baby kept screaming.
“Somebody get them out of there,” he said.
The barber slid his pistol into his pants and moved to obey but as he approached the pen the women shrank back, clutching each other, the baby between them.
“We must interrogate any man before he’s dealt with,” Oscar said. “I’ll not have a massacre on my hands.”
“You’ve got that already,” Virgil Thompson said.
“But in war,” Claudius Thompson added, “such is sometimes necessary.”
Oscar looked at Grant. “Let me see your lis
t, Ardy, and we’ll determine if this man’s name is on it. If it’s not…”
He never finished. Someone was shooting to the east, perhaps half a mile distant.
Grant turned his horse that direction and whooped. Others followed. Oscar looked again at the women in the pen, both crying now, the baby splattered in mud.
“Oh my Lord,” he said.
The road curved into trees. The posse followed it a quarter mile in. Gunshots were louder now, to the north. Grant selected three young men and told the others to spread out along the road in as long a line as they could, fifty feet apart.
“If we flush ’em out,” he said, “shoot ’em.”
The fog was gone but all Mack could discern were trees. Waite gazed out, from time to time he’d raise his rifle and shoot, then peer to see if he’d hit anything. There were other gunshots, too, coming from the west. Waite didn’t seem to notice them.
“Mack!” Huz Smith called from down the hollow.
He wanted to answer.
“You okay, boy? He got you gagged?”
“Don’t say nothing,” Waite hissed.
Mack looked to the top of the hollow. He’d had a revelation. Telling Waite about his killing Arch had freed him from his guilt, but now here he was in custody with his hands bound, on the way to a hanging. At first that prospect had seemed a relief after a year’s worry, but now as bullets flew overhead he knew the last thing in the world he wanted was to die—by bullet, rope, or anything else. He wanted to live. What if he’d told Tooch the truth, he wondered. Tooch at worst would have killed him. Which was what the town folk were going to do. Yes, maybe Tooch would have killed him, but he might very well have had another angle. Tooch viewed things differently than most.