by Bill Harris
“In addition,” Utterbach continued, “if I see you in Malone I will assume, until I know otherwise, you have come with larceny in your heart, rather than an apology on your tongue. Is that clear also?”
Several chickens were pecking at the teeth in the dirt as if they were bloody kernels of corn. Niall attempted to kick at them and lost his balance, falling against the woman with a pained grunt. She cooed softly to the man who had maltreated her. “I know him,” she said, leading Niall, half bent, waddling wide-legged, leaving a weaving trickle of blood, as if he were trailing a snake. “You explained it clear.” Stopping to gently pat his back as he shook through his belly’s wrenching discharge. “He understands,” she said. She continued guiding him to the well.
He started it and now he is done, the boy thought, as he led the watered horse back to the lawman. He wondered how many men over time the brown-skinned man had killed.
“You saw it all?”
The boy nodded. Knew these were not his first.
“You had breakfast?”
The boy shook his head, indicating he wasn’t hungry.
“Get what belongs to you and a horse. You’re coming with me.”
The boy took the bay Gideon Turlock had ridden in on, and the tack and trail gear with it. He had nothing of his own to take, not even the nickel from the Turlocks he was owed.
To Malone
As noon was approaching and they had been riding for four hours or so, moving across the terrain like two ants on a tabletop, the lawman said, “Telling each other stories is how people get to know one another. I’ll start.”
For the three days of their journey, riding deeper into the empty terrain, he told a sluice of tales, breaking the boring sameness of the skillet bottom-flat western high plains: short grass, dry lakes, the occasional sagebrush: coyotes, deer, antelope, quail, prairie dogs, or small herds of cattle watering themselves in a stream near the occasional distant homestead of sod brick dwelling, outhouse, barn, or shed—the family pausing from their toil to stare and wave, their yelling children and yapping dog running along after, until ordered to halt and scuff back to their chores and sentry duty. For the boy these lasted only however long it took for them to appear and then for them to pass from his view. He did not look back, as if assuming they would not be there if he did. Only later did it occur to him that the lawman’s wave to the distant people had not solely been a polite gesture of acknowledgement but of thanks for their assisting him in his search for the Turlocks.
Meanwhile the lawman told of the sorrowful history of how Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek came at gunpoint, staggering and bedraggled to Oklahoma. How it was cruelty in its most treacherous form. Told of the history of coloreds there, escaping new forms of after-Reconstruction slavery. Told too, on that first day and evening, of his family, of his father’s place, as an Indian-fighting soldier from seventeen, good man that he was, in Oklahoma’s story. Told of his brother Haskell, who ran a stable, feed, and transport business in Malone, and his sister-in-law Florine Bell, the schoolmistress.
They stopped that first evening, as would be their pattern, while there was still light to read by after a simple supper. The lawman reading aloud by last daylight and then campfire from American Notes by Charles Dickens, detailing the Englishman’s travels by rail, coach, and steamship during his trip to America, mostly way out east. The boy slept a tossed, grunting sleep.
The man said the morning of the second day, “I must be telling it well, since there have been no interruptions for events to be clarified or people to be explained.” Then for much of that day he told about the land, its ways, and the secrets of surviving it.
The boy listened, deep. Not missing a word of the stories, or readings, or the way Cochrane Utterbach did all he did. The way he walked, talked, was aware of where he was, as he had been in the yard.
“My daddy used to say you let a man know that you hold him in respect and it’s likely he will rise to your expectations,” the lawman said on the third evening. “Said, Make no enemies by mistake.”
It was too dark to read under the cloudless, twinkling night canopy, them stretched out beside a trickling spring, propped against their saddles, the winking flames of the ticking twig fire licking at the blackness. As his goodnight, Utterbach said, “We get to Malone in the morning. If you want, no matter what went on before, your new life can start right now. Do you understand?”
It was then the boy spoke. Told him, a word at a time:
Everybody had died but him. Sister got an achy, vomiting cold, believed to have been the Spanish flu. Mother thought if looked after proper it would be gone in three days. Instead, by the fourth, it was Sister who was gone. Buried among the patch of primroses she so loved. Three weeks later Mother went down with the same symptoms. He and Father, at Mother’s insistence, had slept in the barn, and therefore thought that explained their survival. Then Father contracted it, with the same result.
He, for who else was there, had buried them, as best he could, in shallow, stone-topped graves by the flowerbed. And then with what he could carry on horseback wandered until near death to, if it was called anything, Old Miller’s Place. Wondered why Niall Burleson, who already had a dog and a woman to fetch and beat, didn’t run him off, or, just let him die.
Said he had thought about running away but had feared there was no escape across the flat of the ever-same emptiness.
Said that much and then quit, though there was still so much he couldn’t make himself tell.
That night he slept through moonset without dreaming.
The next forenoon, after having passed the increasing scatter of farms and ranches, Utterbach halted his horse, handed a pair of binoculars to the boy, and pointed ahead of them.
He saw the train off to their right crawling along the far horizon like a linked line of ants inching its way toward a point right-angle to their route, and its whistle that he had heard some nights back, stealing in on eastern night winds faint as a mouse’s heartbeat. That had made him hug himself as he trembled nearly to weeping.
The boy had already seen the town, had watched it grow, as it was rising from the ditch where the dusty flat of the earth met the expanse of rain-gray sky.
Two circles hot against his sockets, unfocused at first at his memory of his recurring dream on waking, then converging to one circle, and with a last slight adjustment of the binoculars’ knob there it was, the town in sharper detail. Buildings, and smoke, but still too far distanced to make out people or horses.
Utterbach, in that moment, quiet as the boy had been over their time together.
The boy handed the device back. He told himself he had known this day was coming. It was the final seen but unseen part of what he had dreamed.
The lawman hayed his horse and the boy hayed his. The lawman picked up his story where he had left off, the boy watching, trying to control his breathing, as they approached Malone. A place with colors and no hateful people, a place he had wanted so hard he thought maybe that he had willed it with each body clench, lip bite, and fist clutch against stinging blows from Niall’s lash across his back, hinny, and thighs.
When they reached Malone the train had arrived before them and was being readied for departure. The engine was a shiny black, steam-snorting bull, hunkered, ready to heave up and roar forth. The depot on the left at the end of the main street was empty of passengers and freight that had been on board. The lumberyard was on their right.
As much time as he had spent—multiple days dreaming and fitful, half-awake a.m. hours—constructing detail by detail the world over the gray horizon, nothing had prepared him for the sudden whirl storm of unimagined things that swept across the flat gray plains of his vision and limited experience. It was a swirling whirl of eye-popping new. Two-story-building tall poles strung together with wire running down the length of both sides of the main street and alongside the railroad tracks from way, way back until way, way off where they met at a dot.
Machines, horseless
carriages that he had only heard spoken about. They seemed smaller versions of the train engine, self-powered and of shiny metal, with room for two or four. The horses didn’t take notice or shy away at the loud chug and honk of them as he did.
They crossed the railroad tracks, and were on Malone’s main street, lined on both sides with commercial establishments. Buildings with specific purposes—bank, hotel, restaurants, stores, and others, including the stable—none of which had been detailed in his dream.
The thing his dream or the binoculars had helped him foresee was the color in the town, the surprise of the stunning-hued signs, facades, products, their containers, and the cheerful clothing of the townspeople. It was like a dream garden. He had not seen colors to match since the primroses and petunias where he had put his people.
Malone on first impression was a place of laughter and high chins and postures like iron poles on the townspeople—mostly, it seemed, people of color and Seminoles and Creeks in broad-brimmed hats—who spoke, nodded, hunched one another, and stared, questions on their faces. Pointing.
He and Deputy Marshall Cochrane Utterbach reached the stable, harness, saddlery, and horseshoeing establishment on the main street near the edge of town. A small crew of coloreds serviced customers on horseback and in wagons. And a man in a derby, a leather apron over his clothes, came out grinning. He featured the lawman except for his drooping mustaches. The brother, the boy figured. Haskell Utterbach. They embraced and expressed their genuine joy at seeing each other. After their greeting they spoke softly below the conversations of the customers and clang of horseshoeing, the stable man nodding before slapping Cochran on his shoulder and reentering the stable.
Cochran motioned to the boy to dismount, and a young man came from inside the stable and took charge of their horses.
They stepped up onto the long boardwalk that ran the length of the block of buildings, the lawman’s treads echoing with each step.
“Is the judge about?” Utterbach asked, as he stopped in front of the U.S. Land Office to converse with the three men lounging, laughing, whittling, chawing, smoking there, who proved to be lawmen like him.
Teasing the lawman: “See you brought in a desperado.”
“Looks like he put up quite a fight.”
Laughter.
“There a price on his head, Cochran?”
“Price? Or lice?” someone asked.
Laughter.
The lawman cussed them good-naturedly, and once their joviality faded one asked, “You find the Turlocks?”
The boy wandered a few steps off, head swimming in the blazing of sights and smells, sawdust, paint, food odors, perfume, liquor, and sounds, layers of conversations, wondering if he would ever be able to go to sleep among all the bustle and confusion. He moved up the plank sidewalk to the general store to look in though the polished glass. Saw instead a skinny scarecrow in tatters in front of a boy in city clothes. He turned quickly and the city boy was there. Wearing a cloth cap, store-bought jacket with too-short sleeves, knee britches, long socks, and ankle high shoes. There was no scarecrow behind the town boy. They stared at each other until the town boy held his nose, crossed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue before he raced off laughing as if in tickled terror toward the train as it whistled, bellowed, and churned into motion.
The boy turned quickly back to the reflection in the window glass to see the scarecrow turn as he turned to face it. He was the scarecrow in filthy tatters. He stared in wonder at the grimy bundle of rags he was clothed in. That was the condition the marshal had referred to and held Niall responsible for back in the yard! He began to itch, as if the lack of awareness of how he must look to others had protected him from realization of the filthiness that covered him.
His stare was broken by the lawman’s whistle and motion for him to come.
The Turlocks will maraud no more, was how the lawman put it to the man he introduced as Judge Cleve Chitwood. Asked by the judge why had he not brought the bodies as usual, the lawman said for one thing he left an ignorant, heavy-handed Irish son-of-a-bitch some chores to do while he healed.
“And?”
“Brought a reliable eyewitness instead,” Utterbach said.
“That?” The judge asked.
“My witness.”
The boy stared at the shelves of what he guessed to be law books in the back room of the U. S. Land Office. They were the first books of any kind he had seen since he wandered from his home.
Called by the judge, the thin man on crutches they had passed in the outer office hobbled in, propped his crutches against the wall, and sat at the side desk. They gave him time to get ready. When he nodded the lawman spoke his deposition, as the judge called it, and the thin man wrote.
“I, Cochran Utterbach, Deputy Marshal of Randolph County, Oklahoma, am speaking in the matter of the deaths of fugitives Gideon Turlock and Zachariah Turlock, brothers, wanted in the county of Monroe, state of Oklahoma, for the crime of murder.”
The boy watched the ink pen dipping, lifting, soaring like a hawk on the wind, flowing the words onto the paper, as Utterbach told how it had been back there outside in the yard. His part in it, how he had cooperated in the apprehension by volunteering the whereabouts of the felons, was included. The lawman then looked the paper over and signed it.
“And as my witness,” Utterbach said and turned to him.
“Are you of sound mind?” Judge Chitwood asked.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, although he was not totally sure.
“Can you read and cipher?” the judge asked.
“I learned some—before,” was as honest as he could be.
“Do you know who the president of the United States of American is?”
“It was President Taft.”
“Still is.”
“Yes sir. William Howard.”
The judge nodded. Did he know the year?
That he was certain of. “1910.”
“Right you are. Place your left hand on the bible,” the judge said to him.
He did, raising his right as the lawman Cochran Utterbach had done.
“Repeat after me,” the judge said. “I . . .”
“I . . .”
“State your name,” the thin man said, not looking up.
“Your name,” the boy said.
“Tell your name.”
“Branch Ottley.” He felt foolish.
“I, Branch Ottley.”
“I, Branch Ottley.”
“Do swear . . .”
“Do swear . . .” Trying at the same time to watch the pen writing his words, and to keep his hand from trembling like an anxious dog due a whipping. The pen dipping, gliding along the paper.
“That the foresaid facts relating to Deputy Cochran Utterbach’s attempt to arrest Zachariah and Gideon Turlock for the crime of murder, and their subsequent actions of resistance that resulted in the deaths of the Turlock brothers . . .”
He repeated the judge’s words.
“Are exact as you witnessed them?”
“Are exact as I witnessed them.”
The judge nodded, moving the bible away. “Anything to add to this account, Master Ottley?”
“No sir.”
“Thank you very much sir.”
The writing man blotted the white paper with a smaller square of green and handed it to the judge, who looked over as the thin man dipped the pen, tapped off the excess, and offered it to the boy. The boy took it, his hand trembling.
“Affix your signature or mark,” the judge said.
Branch Ottley feared he had forgotten his letters and how to sign his name. Willing himself not to look at either of them, and with a heavy hand, he scratched his shaky signature into the paper. He laid the pen down and stepped back, sweating, smelling the stink of his clothes and himself, and studied the grain in the floor.
The judge picked up the pen and signed the document, blew on it, and handed it back to the thin man. “Mr. Ottley, you are now an official part of th
e history of the town of Malone, Oklahoma territory.”
On meeting Branch Ottley, Haskell’s wife Florine Belle, smiling her sunrise smile, asked, “Should we feed him before we bathe him, or you think we might lose him in the deluge of resulting mud?”
“How did you feel all that time, before that lawman came to save you?” Son asked.
“He didn’t come to save me,” Branch said.
“But he did.”
“He didn’t even know I was going to be there.”
“But you were.”
“I was.”
“And you thought it was your fault?”
“What? That he killed them?”
“No. Before he came. Your fault that you couldn’t do anything?”
“Like what?”
“Get away.”
“Maybe. You ask tough questions. At first I was a little mad at him.”
“Who? That Irishman Niall? I would have been too. A lot.”
“At the lawman, my uncle—”
Son knew to wait.
“—for taking so long to come.”
“But you didn’t know he was coming.”
“Not him, but somebody.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Sometimes I knew somebody would come because I wished it so hard. But sometimes I knew Niall would kill me, or I would just die, before anybody came.”
“Were you scared when he came and started fighting with Niall and the Turlocks?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember watching him.”
“Was he scared?”
“He told me later that all he focused on was what he was doing.”
“Not even that they might shoot him?”
“Nope. That’s what he said.”
“Just what he was doing?”
“Yep.”
Son asked, “Did you ever think about going back and hurting Niall some more?”
“Yes. A lot. Every time I got scared—or mad.”
“Did you?”
“No. Not him.”
“Do you still think about it?”
“Sometimes.”
“You were lucky.”
“I was.”
And they were both silent. Tired.