by Rilla Askew
“I’ll just tell you the truth,” the man said. “It’s a wonder more than one of them didn’t get killed. I don’t know how John Lodi kept from getting blasted into the next century from the sound and the size of it. Unless what Dayberry claims happened is what happened.” His bushy mustache twitched side to side as if his nose itched him, and he began to scratch with stubbly fingers in the coarse grizzled hairs. He paused a moment longer, and the deputy marshal in his calm patience awaited him, until at last the man said, “J.G. claims Fate shot his own self in the neck.” Angus Alford shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t know. I was around back, loading my wagon. Time I got out here, there wasn’t a lot to see but a dead man and them fat barrels getting clogged with dust.” He looked down at the scuffed dirt beneath the dead man’s open palm. “Well, it was right there, mister.” He nodded at the empty hand, glanced up briefly in the direction of the open stable doorway. His expression turned smoothly blank. “It’s all I can tell you.” He stepped back into his place among the onlookers.
Another voice came from the back of the crowd, not the first one but a second, higher-pitched one, goading as one goads a fight in a tone of high glee. “Tell him the rest of it, Angus! That kid you and Tatum drug around from the back yonder! Tell him ’bout that squaw y’all was fighting with!”
For the first time Sheriff Moore stirred as if the goings-on in the street held some interest for him. He moved into the center of the circle, spat the pine toothpick off to the side as he spoke. “Maybe you want to talk to John Lodi,” he told the deputy. “He been sitting in yonder pretty calm a long time. He could probably tell you what you want to know.”
The sheriff ’s bright obsidian eyes moved coolly around the circle of white faces, and then he looked up at the deputy U.S. marshal, whose composed face revealed no impression of the last few moments’ revelations; disclosed nothing of the way in which, within Mitchelltree’s mind, several unconnected thoughts wheeled and collided, raucous as the jaybirds on the creekbank, saying, Yes, that would surely be the gun he’d sold Fayette that evening on the ridge at sunset, with the two dead mules and the spilled wagon sprawled hopelessly down the hillside in the dying light, sold for thirty-five dollars, an outrageous price, which Mitchelltree then had attributed to the man’s drunkenness but was not about to pass up, and he had waited until past dusk while Fayette went to get the thirty-five U.S. paper dollars, and he had tested them by feel and taste in the growing darkness before he finally handed the unloaded pistol to Lodi and said, Now, I buried the shells yonder by that black mule’s hind end, you can come dig ’em up tomorrow if you want ’em, and walked off down the back side of the ridge north in the darkness, thirty-five dollars richer but weaponless and afoot, and, Yes, he was certainly going to have to miss this night’s stopover at Miss Marilla’s, which thought swept him with alternating waves of relief and regret, for he had in his secret heart thought he’d ask her to marry him this visit, which accounted for his late start, as he’d packed and repacked his saddlebag a half-dozen times, and watered the stallion and brushed him and oiled the saddle and fooled around, making up his mind a different way each time he considered the idea through to its conclusion, and now the decision was out of his hands, he thought, with that commingling of relief and regret. His attention returned to the men before him, in particular to the Choctaw sheriff with whom he shared an unnamed affinity in the face of these white onlookers, and he nodded at Moore to go on.
The sheriff said again, his eyes steady on the brown man’s eyes, “Maybe you want to go yonder and have a talk with John.”
They entered the stable doors, trailing a little ragtag crowd of men and boys who’d broken off from the main crowd and followed them down the street. J. G. Dayberry alone stood in the archway and shooed the men back, saying, “Y’all go on about your business, now. You got no call to come in here.” The deputy marshal was already striding the few steps into the dim interior to where John Lodi sat, unmoving, expressionless, with his offspring lined up behind him, and the Choctaw sheriff, who routinely detached his interior life from the goings-on of white people, did not even glance back. Dayberry stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the scarred piece of timber that held up the crossbeam, his hatchet face turned now to the bunch of men and boys outside in the fading sunlight, now cocked the other way to watch and listen to the three men inside his barn.
Mitchelltree spoke first. His resonant voice rolled in the grayness, echoing nearly to the rafters, though all he said, standing a little to the side of where John Lodi sat, was “Evening.”
No answer from Lodi.
“Sorry to hear about your brother,” the deputy said, as if Fayette had dropped dead of natural causes and had already been planted out north at the Waddy cemetery, instead of lying fifty rods away in the street with his head and neck blown to tatters. The deputy reached up and took off his big white Stetson hat, held it loosely at his side in one hand, the pepperbox pistol pointed floorward in the other. In a few moments he went on. “Got a few questions I wanted to ask.” His face was turned up as if he were searching the rafters for the source of that rolling echo which was only his own vibrating voice. The deep color of his skin blended with the dimness of the barn’s interior, so that even the burnished light that seemed to illuminate it on cloudy days was extinguished, and Dayberry couldn’t see any expression on the lawman’s face, only the lift and turn of features, the coal-colored mustache a black slash above the white teeth. Tecumseh Moore stood a few feet to the other side of Lodi, and his face bore as little expression as Mitchelltree’s, so that it seemed to the livery owner that the darkness in the barn had wiped their features blank. They stood so casually, so relaxed and nonchalant in the grayness, that one could easily believe they’d sauntered into the barn on other business and had just paused a minute before the man seated on the haybale to pass the time of day.
Dayberry’s attention was taken by a couple of boys outside as they scuffled in the dirt, each elbowing the other out of the way in order to claim a spot in the row of men edging nearer the barn door, and the livery owner called out, “Here, now. Y’all quit!” And then he recognized his own youngest son at the back of the row, the boy’s woolen cap poking out underneath Tarleton Maye’s elbow, and Dayberry cried in a sort of subdued shout (for he did not want to disturb the serious proceedings taking place inside his stable), “You! Grady! You get on in the house! I’ll tan your hide in a minute. Right now, hear?” He saw the red cap duck back and disappear behind the row of onlookers, and not really satisfied but too torn by his divided attention to pursue the matter further, he turned back to peer inside the barn.
Mitchelltree spoke in a low, almost secretive tone to John Lodi, but the deputy’s voice was too rich and resonant, and Dayberry recovered every word.
“Folks tell me he had a weapon. Some unusual type of four-barrel breech loader.” Mitchelltree paused an inordinately long time between each word, as if each carried particular significance. “A unique type of a weapon.” He paused between the sentences as well. “Now, it do sound to me like we got a self-defense situation here. Trouble is . . . somehow or another . . . that gun disappeared.”
John Lodi did not raise his head, lift his face, acknowledge the man’s presence in any manner, and his youngsters stood perfectly motionless behind him as well, although all three pairs of those eyes were focused keenly on the deputy U.S. marshal, and Jim Dayberry, his head cocked as he looked birdlike through one eye at the interior of his stable before he turned his sharp gaze back to the street again, noticed that the skinny scrinch-eyed female in boy’s trousers glared at Mitchelltree with animosity and what appeared to be a kind of familiarity, or at least acquaintanceship. Recognition. That was wonder enough to the livery owner, but then Mitchelltree did something that took him fully by surprise, and Dayberry forgot all about the little gaggle of onlookers outside his stable, forgot about his son Grady, who’d ought to have gone straight in the house after school and not come hanging around th
is unfortunate business; forgot, in fact, about John Lodi’s youngsters as well.
Burd Mitchelltree squatted down in the straw and dried manure, laid the pistol on its side carefully in the dusty leavings, and brought his face to a level just even with John Lodi’s—just almost exactly as if John Lodi was a little child, Dayberry thought. And when the deputy spoke, his bass voice had that gentleness and coaxing in it you might use with a child who’s too scared or too shy to answer. Dayberry sucked his breath in through his teeth because he thought sure as anything John Lodi was going to haul off and knock that deputy marshal head over heels.
“What I need to know,” Mitchelltree said in his patient, deeptimbred voice, “is how it happen your brother end up with two holes in him. I’m going to go on and do my investigating here, but I’ll know what I’m doing a little better if you explain how that come about.”
Still no response from Lodi. The youngsters might have been a row of oddly dressed store mannequins behind him. Over in the stable portion of the barn, a horse snuffled softly. The silence spun out long. Tecumseh Moore reached up and scratched the side of his head beneath his hat, and even that soft scritching proclaimed itself loud in the darkness.
“You wouldn’t know what become of that gun, would you?” Mitchelltree said. He balanced his big Stetson on one knee. Dusted the ghostly brim. After a while he said, “I don’t guess you would’ve sent somebody out to get it, would you? That wouldn’t probably make much sense.”
For the first time, John Lodi raised his eyes from the barn floor, looked over at the deputy marshal, the two men’s faces on a parallel plane, and Dayberry saw that his employee had no notion of what Mitchelltree was talking about, and he saw that Mitchelltree also saw it, because the deputy nodded his head once.
“Well,” he went on after a bit, “you don’t have to tell me anything. Save it for the grand jury. I just thought you might help me out. Now, you know what I’m going to tell the judge in terms of what I see here going to sound pretty shaky, not the self-defense type of situation could keep a man from getting hanged. I do believe it to be that, I think so. But all I see, I see an unarmed man dead in the street from two big-caliber bullet holes, and we got a weapon here”—he glanced down at the pepperbox pistol lying dull and bulky on the barn floor, but he didn’t make a move to touch it—“hadn’t been fired but once, one barrel, and if we don’t find that other gun we got us a mystery that won’t lay down very quick.”
J. G. Dayberry was aching to remind the lawman that there were forty witnesses in the street this minute who could testify that Fate Lodi had been armed; he wanted to point out that those same witnesses were any one of them a potential thief, any one of them could have had the opportunity to filch that gun out from beneath the dead man’s fingers; above all, he was itching to pipe in with his opinion that Fate Lodi had shot his own self in the neck. But Dayberry was as stilled by the rolling music of Burden Mitchelltree’s voice as John Lodi seemed to be, as all the people present appeared to be, for even the Choctaw sheriff turned his black eyes to the smooth plane of the deputy’s forehead, listening. And Dayberry, lulled as he was, thought of how a snake charms a bird with its side-to-side swaying, and he thought the rise and fall of that voice was exactly the same, the hypnotic rhythm of words and the timbre, the soothing sound of it, almost singing, almost chanting, but pitched low and vibrating; it might have been thunder, the low roll of thunder from the far side of a mountain where the cloud that contains it cannot be seen, and Dayberry forgot to think about the ragtag bunch of men and boys behind him, but he remembered what he’d heard of the black deputy’s reputation, remembered he’d heard that Bird Mitchelltree (and Dayberry, like nearly all white men, thought his first name was Bird; the Woolerton paper and the McAlester Journal even printed it that way) could smooth-talk an outlaw into surrendering if he could get close enough to talk to him. There was another colored deputy, old Bass Reeves up at Muskogee, who was famous for his sly disguises that let him get the drop on any outlaw he set out to serve a warrant on, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Bud Ledbetter—who, of course, was white anyway—was known all over the Territory and half the nation for his pure-dee bootleather toughness, but Burden Mitchelltree’s reputation was of an airier nature, and it was marred by hints of impropriety—rumors that he was too quick to arrest a man who crossed him, too slow to act on a warrant if it was a Negro or an Indian he counted as friend—old stories Dayberry himself had never paid much mind too, laying them off onto the fact that the man was colored, and white folks in this part of the Nation were bound to talk that way about a colored marshal. But on the other hand he’d never believed the tale of how the lawman had talked all nine of Rafe Buckhorn’s gang into surrendering after their murderous three-day rape and robbery rampage from Oklahoma Territory to Creek Nation all the way down to Gaine’s Creek south of Woolerton, talked them into it without a soul, lawman or outlaw, firing a single shot at each other, which was a story that had gone around for six or seven years. Listening in the barn doorway, unable to open his mouth to pipe in with his well-founded opinions about Fate’s killing, and thinking ironically that maybe it was true what folks said, that this was one bird that could charm a snake, the livery owner listened to Mitchelltree speaking low to John Lodi, and he was not the least surprised when his chronically silent employee, who hadn’t spoken a word since the very moment of the killing, now opened his mouth and said, “I reckon Fay’s gun went off when he fell. I guess it was that howdah did that to his neck.”
It was only then, as if the spell had been suddenly broken, that Dayberry could blink his eyes clear enough to realize that the taller of John Lodi’s two daughters, the pretty one with the pale face and the piled-up mass of dark hair and the many petticoats, was twisting around silently in the dim light of the stable, grimacing as she tried to peel her sister’s bony hand off where it was clamped over her shoulder.
“Well,” Mitchelltree said, and dipped his high-domed forehead once, running his great blunt fingers around the pale brim of his hat. He had not yet looked up at the two daughters; his eyes were on the barn floor. At last the deputy nodded again, seemed to be thinking. “That sounds reasonable,” he said. (And J. G. Dayberry, thinking, See, now, that’s what I been saying, what I been saying, grunted softly and nodded his head, and behind him the row of men and boys, who had crept close enough while the livery owner was distracted to hear this last part, also grunted and nodded, and the boy Thomas in imitation of the onlookers also grunted and nodded, and none of the witnesses present, with the possible exception of the Choctaw sheriff, disbelieved for the moment this implausible, nearly impossible explanation.)
“Mm-huh,” the deputy said, and unfolded himself from where he’d been squatting; he rose to his full six-foot height with a sort of languid uncoiling motion, shook his corduroy pantslegs back down over his boot tops, replaced the Stetson on his head. “Well, you know I have to carry you to the federal jail at McAlester. I guess in a month or two they’ll hold the preliminary, see if the judge believe there’s enough evidence a crime been committed to bind you over for the grand jury.” The pepperbox still lay on the stable floor in front of his feet. Mitchelltree glanced at it. “Probably they going to find they got enough evidence,” he said. He raised his eyes, glanced at the two daughters, let his gaze slide past them as smoothly as if he did not see the elder’s hand clamped upon the younger in gritted silence, past the big blond boy in the felt hat, and on around to Tecumseh Moore, who stood looking at the row of men and boys blackening the stable door.
Mitchelltree followed the sheriff ’s gaze. He spoke again, his eyes on the bunch of onlookers, though he did not appear to be speaking to them. It was hard to tell, really, just who he was speaking to when he said, “I got two little problems here. One, I got to be in court at Fort Smith tomorrow, one o’clock. Two, I don’t intend to leave here till I find out what become of that gun.” He paused just an instant. “If there was another gun.” He gazed casually at the onlookers, who shuf
fled and gazed back, and there followed then the long wait-time that was such a part of the deputy’s habit, which pause gave opportunity for the elder daughter to slip her hand from the younger girl’s shoulder, and the two stood then in the lengthening silence with the older one’s arm around the waist of the other, her mouth moving imperceptibly against her sister’s ear. The boy stood beside them, waiting as the others waited. Still the deputy did not look at the youngsters but kept his eyes nonchalantly and carefully trained on the men outside the door. He went on after a while, saying, “You got any farewelling to do, you best go on and do it. Need to eat or use the privy or anything, you go on now. We likely to be traveling a long while after dark.”
His eyes were so focused on the men in the doorway that it took even Tecumseh Moore an instant to realize the deputy marshal was speaking to Lodi. Mitchelltree said, “Get your horse saddled, do what you got to do, meet me out front soon as you get ready. We might get as far as Poteau this evening if we start pretty quick,” and he reached down to scoop the pepperbox into his fist. It wasn’t until then that everyone, John Lodi and his daughters and the little livery owner included, understood what the deputy meant. He aimed to take John Lodi with him to Fort Smith.
Dayberry said, “He ain’t got a horse.”
Mitchelltree said, “Reckon you’ll have to give him one, won’t you?” and walked directly into and parted the little crowd in the doorway, striding out into the reddening light.
The divided, grumbling men turned and fumbled like newly hatched ducklings into a line behind him as the deputy strode rapidly along the street, back toward where the larger crowd still milled about the corpse, and he scattered that bunch as well as he knelt once again beside the body. He was, to all appearances, oblivious to the covert glares and low, murderous mumbles that followed him. For twenty-five years there’d been only one place on the continent where a black man could arrest a white man—could, in fact, kill a white man if necessary—without causing a riot or a lynching, and that place was Indian Territory. But such conditions were rapidly changing. From his first days on the bench, Judge Parker had recommended Negroes, particularly Indian freedmen, for appointments as deputy U.S. marshals because of their known reliability and bravery, because they often spoke native language, because of the fact that Creeks and Seminoles trusted a black man about a thousand times sooner than a white man and would therefore be less likely to resist, defy, or shoot him outright the minute they saw him trying to arrest one of their people. Even now, as Parker’s court was being stripped of all authority, there were still more than a dozen Negro deputy U.S. marshals under appointment in I.T., but Burden Mitchelltree had never achieved the harmony and grudging respect that Grant Foreman, Bass Reeves, Poorboy Fortune, some of the other black deputy marshals held within the swelling white population. And it was precisely because of this abruptness in his actions following those long, calm silences, which the white settlers thought of as highhandedness (or, more commonly among those who’d migrated from the Deep South, as many of the whites in the Choctaw Nation had, uppitiness), combined with that barely detectable tremor of irony or contempt in his voice, that the rumors and glares and little grumbles of resentment followed him almost anywhere he went. Now, as he knelt on the street in the riotous dying light, several of the white townsmen slid sidelong glances at one another, or mumbled beneath their breaths and spat. But Burd Mitchelltree paid them not the least attention as he rolled the stiffening body onto its side to examine it from the back.