Winding Stair (9781101559239) (22 page)

Louie Low Hawk came out to meet us, swearing softly when he saw what the policemen were dragging. They dropped Milk Eye's feet with two distinct sodden plops in the mud of the yard and left him lying there. Low Hawk said something about watching the body because of the stray dogs that were always wandering around the place.

Burris Garret was still lying where I'd left him, but now the lamps had been moved back and someone had pulled a blanket over his face.

“Goddamn it, goddamn it,” I said, bending close to the body and pulling back the blanket. His eyes were open and I closed them with my fingertips. His face was still warm. Everyone stood back away from me, along the walls, watching silently. I covered his face again.

“Where's the old woman?” I asked, my voice choking. Louie Low Hawk looked at me questioningly and shook his head.

“What old woman?”

“The one in the damned rocking chair. Milk Eye's mother.”

“I reckon she run when the shooting started.”

“Like hell she did. She sat there through all of it. Then she was gone.”

He shook his head again and shrugged, and his expression told me he made no connection between the old woman and the shooting.

“I don't know where she's at. But, Marshal Pay, there's something you ought to know. Burris said something just before he died.”

“He said something?”

“He tried to talk right after you left. I couldn't make anything out at first. I got down close to him and he said, ‘Smoker Chubee.' That's what he said. He said it twice.”

My mind was so fogged, the name made no impression on me.

“Smoker Chubee? What does that mean?”

“It's a name. The man's been working for Orthro Smith at the Furnace. Burris said, ‘Smoker Chubee. Smoker Chubee's voice out there.' Then he died.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“I'm positive, Marshal.”

“And he works at the Furnace? Goddamn, man, we've got to get up there with this posse.” I must have sounded a little frantic because Louie Low Hawk took my arm and held me firmly.

“Moma July's already gone. If Smoker comes back to that Furnace, he'll have him.”

“Did he take men with him?” I asked, looking around the room, and from the number of them still there I already knew the answer.

“No, he went by hisself. Don't fret, Marshal Pay. If Smoker goes back there, Moma July will have him.”

“Yes, and probably blow his head half off with that damned shotgun.”

“We can't stop it one way or another now,” Louie Low Hawk said, in the tone I suspected he would use to soothe an angry child. “You'd be too late if you started now. Whatever's gonna happen has already happened, most likely, or will before you could get there. Why don't you come back in the kitchen for a cup of coffee?”

Strangely, with his mention of it, this place suddenly smelled like fresh-ground coffee. My mind darted from one thought to the next, and I seemed unable to control it. The unexpected viciousness of the night's events was pressing down on me with smothering weight. Louie Low Hawk continued to talk, but his words meant nothing to me. I could only look down at the bundled figure of Burris Garret and think that but for his last words for me to get away from him as we stood on the porch together, I might be lying there, too, riddled with bullets that came from the red flashing night.

“Mr. Low Hawk,” I cut in. “Have you got any whiskey?”

It startled him and he drew back, and I sensed a tension in the room from my words, spoken too loudly and too harshly.

“That's again' the law,” he said.

“I'm not trying to arrest you,” I said, waving a hand impatiently. “But I need a drink and someplace to think.”

With considerable hesitation he led me back into his living quarters, where a number of women were gathered around a cookstove jabbering in Creek, standing in their nightgowns. As we entered they were silent, watching us until Louie Low Hawk said a few sharp words and they withdrew into another part of the house, looking back at me as they went.

I sat at the kitchen table and Louie Low Hawk brought me a half-gallon jug and a cup, explaining this was for medicine only, and not for sale. Joe Mountain came in and said something about a bad night with two men dead and a good horse besides. Then he and the Creek storekeeper left me there alone and I tried to think of what needed doing. There was no one else left to give this thing direction, but I was immobile.

I thought of the name Smoker Chubee and knew we should mount a posse and go after him. I thought of the two Osages with their rifles out there in the darkness of that porch when the shooting started, and of Rufus Deer's body lying spread-eagle in the yard. And I damned Oscar Schiller for not being here. But always, my thinking returned to the figure of Burris Garret, stiffening now in the next room but once bending across a fire toward me and telling me of his dreams for The Nations becoming a United States territory, a dream he would never see. I thought of his high, handsome forehead and his dark, penetrating eyes, and it became very difficult to control my emotions. I knew there should be bitterness and hatred because of what had happened, but somehow there was nothing but a total loneliness, an empty sense of frustration and inadequacy and loss. We had yet another of our Winding Stair killers now, but it was not worth the cost.

B
y dawn, the sky was clear and the sun came hot and blistering. Before the people of the community began to gather, some of the men in our posse washed the mud from Milk Eye Rufus Deer's face and laid his body on a door unhinged from the barn. They took the rifle we had found in the lane and put it under his folded arms, and one of them with a Kodak box camera snapped his photograph. His eyes were still open.

As though by some prearranged signal, when this ceremony was completed, the people appeared. There were a few whites, but mostly there were Creeks, and they stood in a large circle, well back from the small body still lying on the door, but now without the rifle. That had been handed over to Joe Mountain for safekeeping until our return to Fort Smith.

Their young came with them, and their dogs, all held back a respectful distance. I could see no sign of mourning on their faces. It seemed they came to view some ghastly sideshow that passed only infrequently and wanted the opportunity to tell their grandchildren they had been there. Not a word was spoken. The only sounds were the bleatings of Louie Low Hawk 's goats behind the barn and somewhere to the west a mourning dove making his low signal that the rain had passed. With the exception of a few men wearing red or yellow neck scarves, they were a colorless group, a study in gray and faded blue or tan work clothes bleached even more by the harsh rising sunlight.

The Creek policemen allowed the people to have their look, and then lifted the body from its resting place and wrapped it in blankets secured with heavy hemp rope.

After they had Milk Eye's body laid out on the porch, they came inside for Burris Garret. I had some inclination to protest, but decided against it, for he was after all a part of these people although of a different color. They took the cover off him and laid him on the porch near Milk Eye, and it occurred to me that one of the purposes of these long porches was for laying out the dead. Still wordlessly, the people passed by the body of the marshal, and a few of the men took off their hats for a moment. Soon it was over, and they began to disappear, each going back to kitchen or barn or field to begin the day's work. The policemen wrapped Garret as they had Milk Eye.

I heard a wagon coming near and soon it drew up at one end of the porch. A small man, looking very old but somehow familiar, got down and, with two policemen helping, lifted the body of Milk Eye and slid it into the back of the wagon. I knew this was Old Man Deer, and on the wagon seat, her hat off now and the shawl pulled up over her head like a heavy veil, was the old woman. She sat looking straight ahead, her face hidden under the shawl, her hands folded in her lap.

When the body was safely stowed, the old man came back to the porch and stood for a moment staring at the mummylike form of Burris Garret. Watching from a rear window, I could see no expression on his face, no sign of emotion. Then he went back to the wagon and climbed to the box and whipped his mule, driving across the backyard and leaving deep ruts in the still-wet ground.

Louie Low Hawk was writing out what amounted to a coroner's report, another of his duties in this place, where I had learned he was not only a member of the school board but mayor as well. He told me he would send it on to Okmulgee.
Two men killed,
he wrote in laborious English,
one the result of ambush, the other at the hands of federal officers from Fort Smith in defense of their lives.
After he finished, he wrote a second one for me, identical to the first, signed it, and sealed it with red wax, into which he imprinted his initials.

“We don't know whether it was Burris or your Indian scouts who hit Rufus,” he said. “It could have been both. But now, with the family taking Rufus home to bury, we'll never know. And it's just as good. I'd as soon not mention that maybe the ones who helped kill him were Osages. Some of my people might not like that. So I just said federal officers.”

“I didn't see any signs of grief over his death out there.”

“No. Our people weren't proud of him and the things he did, and a lot of them were afraid of him. But he's still one of us. I'd as soon leave it uncertain who actually hit him.”

During all of this the Okmulgee doctor had arrived. He was a white man who had known Burris Garret for years and spoke highly of him as a peace officer and as a man. We discussed disposition of the body. I knew there was no money available from Fort Smith for the burial, and I gave the doctor twenty-five dollars to help with the expenses. He assured me it would be handled in the best possible manner. He would take the body back with him to Okmulgee, along with Louie Low Hawk's report of the incident, and some of the Creek policemen would ride with him as a guard of honor, more or less. My impression that Burris Garret had been well liked in this country was confirmed when Louie Low Hawk said that if Smoker Chubee was caught, he'd best not be kept around the Corners too long. Some of the local citizens might try to take the law into their own hands.

I was still hesitant about going out after the man whose voice Garret had recognized. There was a pattern of confusion in my thoughts. I wasn't sure I had the authority to mount a posse. Besides, having seen Oscar Schiller work, I had learned that one must plan ahead clearly in such dealings, and I couldn't escape the idea that for lack of that, Burris Garret had paid with his life. At any rate, my mind was not functioning clearly.

As it turned out, the matter solved itself. Shortly after the doctor and his escort of Creeks departed, someone ran in to say two horsemen were coming down the lane behind Louie Low Hawk 's barn. One of them was Moma July. I felt great relief, but no personal pride, because things were developing not because of any plan but in spite of my indecisiveness.

They rode round the corner of the barn and into the yard, Moma July in the rear with his shotgun across his saddle. Leading was a dark-faced man manacled and hatless, his black hair swept back from his face. As they came up, I saw it was a deeply pockmarked face, but otherwise strikingly exotic and well formed. His skin was the color of ebony, yet his features were Asiatic with a finely formed nose, narrow and straight between prominent cheekbones and over a wide mouth and clean-shaven jaw. His eyes were black, set wide apart and slightly slanted under brows so fine they appeared to have been plucked. I supposed him to be under forty, rather heavy in body but tall enough to take the weight without any appearance of obesity. His glance swept across the yard and the Creek policemen waiting there.

As they drew rein, Moma July searched out Joe Mountain among us and nodded.

“You Osage boys hit another horse last night. This one.” And he waved the muzzle of his shotgun at the man mounted before him. “He come to the Furnace riding a little bay shot all to hell. Hadn't been for that, he'd have beat me there and been gone.”

Louie Low Hawk was close behind me as I waited on the edge of the porch, and he said, “That's him. That's Smoker. I told you Moma July would get him if he was there to be got.”

Creek policemen moved around the horses and pulled Smoker Chubee down, roughly shoving him forward to stand in front of me. He seemed unaware of them and their hard hands on him, watching me alone now, his black eyes hot as Oscar Schiller's blue ones were cold. When I stepped off the porch, our faces were on a level. He stood there with his back straight, his head up, and a breeze that had started up from the west stirred his hair and dropped a shock of it across his face. It was longer than I had supposed and partly covered his eyes.

“Are you Smoker Chubee?” I asked.

“I am,” he said, and his voice was deep and clear. He stared directly back at me.

“I arrest you for the murder of United States Marshal Garret.” A sardonic smile crossed his mouth for a moment before he spoke.

“On what evidence?”

“We'll make that clear to you in Fort Smith,” I said, and it was beginning to anger me.

“Have you got a warrant?”

“No, but I'm arresting you on strong probability. And it occurs to me that you are likely a man wanted for another crime in the Choctaw Nation. Done in company with your friend Rufus Deer.”

“I've never been in the Choctaw Nation,” he said, still smiling.

“How long have you known Rufus Deer?” I asked. He shrugged. “Well, it's long enough for you to be known in these parts. Where were you the first week of June?”