The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (32 page)

People were robbing banks again, now that they had reopened following their little holiday. In town every Saturday there was talk of some bold new stickup. Then on Monday back to the fields, up and down the long weary rows, swinging a hoe or dragging a sack, and Jesse dreamed of fast cars, a new one stolen every week, always on the move, always in the money, spend it fast before it burned a hole in your pocket, plenty more where it came from, of living by the gun, quick on the trigger, feared and adored by multitudes, your exploits followed in the daily newspapers, good-looking women at your feet, fancy clothes, fast company. And when his name was on everybody's lips, then wouldn't Naomi feel sorry! Suppose you got caught? That was the risk you ran. Suppose you got killed? Suppose you did. Death by gunfire, quick, clean, a pistol bucking in your hand, at the end of a few glorious years, dying young and leaving a handsome corpse—compared with that was long life, spent in a cotton field, such a precious thing? Before long Jesse had begun to save up his money.

His earnings at picking went to the support of the family, but what he picked up playing Saturday-night dances was his. After being jilted he had recklessly gone back to smoking; now he quit again and once more began putting his tobacco money in a jar. It was no mule this time that he was saving for. He had to have a pistol; and before she would be reliable as a getaway car the old buggy needed a set of rings and at least one new tire to replace the one on the right rear with the boot and the slow leak around the valve.

Which bank Mr. O. B. Childress kept his money in Jesse did not know, but he wanted to be sure not to rob that one. Not that Jesse had any love for Bull. But Bull's money was, or would be, Naomi's; and if it should come to pass that having robbed just one bank and gotten away with it he decided not to make a career of it but came back home rich and they got married after all, he would not want it on his conscience that some part of his money was his wife's. The surest way to avoid it was to go outside the state.

Across the river over in Texas, in the county-seat town of Clarksville some forty miles away, was a bank which had been the object not long since of a spectacularly unsuccessful robbery attempt. The three robbers had been shot down like fish in a barrel as they emerged from the bank by lawmen posted on the adjacent rooftops. That gang had failed because they were too many—including a fourth who had informed the law of their plans. No one would be able to tip them off on him; and according to Jesse's calculations, swollen with self-conceit, the Clarksville sheriffs would be incapable of imagining that their bank might be struck again. And when things had blown over and he returned home in the chips, he would explain how he came into it by saying he had gone wildcatting in Texas and struck oil. And if he got caught? He was not aiming to get caught. And if he got killed? Who was there to care if he did?

The old buggy turned out to need more than a new tire or two, as Jesse found when, cotton picking over, he went to work on her. He gave her a valve job, up to his elbows in grinding compound, cleaned the plugs, put in points, regulated the timer. Then came the crowning touch, installation of a second carburetor, taken from the companion car, the adapter engineered by himself. The result: pickup that left new cars sitting, as he proved on the road to Tishomingo, where he went one day in October in quest of that pistol.

And on a subsequent trip shortly thereafter, thanks to those two carburetors, she hit seventy, shaking like a shimmy dancer, but she did it. That was a practice run down to Clarksville, where under an assumed name he opened a savings account at the bank with that fruit jar full of pennies and nickels and dimes, which took the teller a long time to sort out and count, giving Jesse a chance to study the layout.

He chose Halloween. You could wear a mask then and be just one among many, and the noise of firing, should it come to that, would be lost among the firecrackers and torpedoes. The night before Jesse wrote a letter to his folks, to be mailed from somewhere when the job was finished (it was found on him afterwards), explaining that he had left home to seek his fortune and would come back when he had made good, that he had left without saying good-by so as to avoid tears, and not to worry about him.

He left the car in a side street in back of the bank, as planned, engine running, a thing that attracted no notice in those days when old cars were often left running at the curb for fear of their not starting again. In an alleyway he slipped on his witch's mask. The square was filled with masked revelers and there was noise of fireworks. At the door of the bank Jesse faltered for just a moment, then boldly stepped in.

It was all over in seconds. Jesse went to one of the cages, pulled his pistol, and said, “This is a stickup.” The teller ducked, bells clanged, Jesse panicked and ran, straight into the arms of a bank guard, who held him in a bear hug while a second guard slugged him senseless with a blackjack.

A young man who identified himself as his attorney, appointed by the court, came round a few days later to visit Jesse in his cell. He was still new to his trade and nervous as a young intern with his first cancer patient. In exasperation he said at last, “Fool! If you just had to rob a bank, why didn't you pick one near home? Or don't you even know that here in Texas armed bank robbery is a capital offense?”

No, Jesse said, he never knew that.

At the trial the lawyer pled his client's youth and previous good character and lack of criminal record. But there had been a rash of bank robberies of late, and it was felt that an example must be made. Being from out of state went against the defendant also. The jury was out one hour and returned a verdict of guilty, and the judge sentenced Jesse Neighbours to die in the electric chair.

Appeal was denied, and in answer to their letter to the Governor of Texas, Jesse's father and mother received a form reply regretting that nothing could be done, the law must take its course.

Execution was fixed for a day in February. Will and Vera went down to Huntsville the day before to bid the boy good-by. They were given an hour together, but three quarters of it passed in silence. They spoke of things going on around home, as they had agreed beforehand they would. Once or twice they laughed over something, and once started all three laughed loudly. All through the interview his mother kept glancing nervously at her boy's hair despite herself, thinking of it being shaved off, as she had heard was done. Nothing was said about Naomi Childress. When the time was about up Jesse said he was sorry for the troubles he had brought on them, and they said not to think about that. He said tell his little brothers, and especially Doak, not to be proud of their outlaw brother and want to follow in his footsteps, but to be sensible boys and stick to farming, as crime did not pay. His mother would have liked to ask if he had made his peace with the Lord but was afraid of embarrassing him. When it came time to say good-by they kissed and she managed to stay dry-eyed, as Will had admonished her that she must. It was he whose eyes filled with tears as he and Jesse shook hands.

They were told they could come for him anytime after seven the next morning. Money being a little tight, and neither of them feeling much like sleep, they passed the night sitting in the waiting room of the depot. They did not know the exact hour of execution. But when at shortly past five the lights in the station dimmed they reached for one another's hand and sat holding them until, after about four minutes by the clock on the wall, the lights brightened again. At seven at the penitentiary gate they found a truck waiting with a casket on the bed. They were given Jesse's effects, his guitar, his clothes, and a bale of tinfoil from the inner wrappings of ready-rolled cigarettes, each sheet rubbed out smooth as a mirror, at the sight of which his mother could not keep back a tear.

They were given a ride back to the depot in the cab of the truck. There the casket was put on the scales and weighed and Will paid the lading charges. Then it was put on a cart and rolled out to the end of the platform. They went back to their seats in the waiting room. There remained in the shoe box which Vera had put up for their trip some biscuits and meat, but neither felt hungry. When the train came in they watched the casket loaded into a freight car. Their seats were in a coach in the rear. The overhead rack being too narrow for it, the guitar rode across their laps. And still though they sat, in four hundred and fifty miles it happened now and again that one or the other would brush the strings, drawing from them a low chord like a sob.

A Good Indian

W
HEN
I
WAS
a boy I was ashamed of the color of my skin—ashamed for my family, for the whole white race. From that red Oklahoma earth which we walked upon and called ours had sprung the red man; we palefaces were aliens and usurpers. On our farm you could not plow ten feet, especially not after erosion had laid the soil bare and the dust storms had flayed it rawer still, without turning up a flint arrowhead, and while I treasured them, they were a reproach to me. The name “Sooner,” so proudly worn by our state, to me was an emblem of infamy; and although at school we were taught to glorify that day in 1889 when our forefathers had gathered on the borders of what was then called Indian Territory, poised themselves, and at the crack of the starter's pistol swarmed in and staked their claim to however much they could pace off and fence in, I was not a bit proud of my grandfather's part in that adventure. My father might sigh and say he wished Papa had gotten more while the getting was good; to me it was evident at an early age that Grandpa must have stolen our fifty acres from some poor Indian brave, perhaps the very one who, in leaving, had sown the earth with dragon's teeth in the form of his arrowheads, and whom I pictured as proud and noble and sad, like the one on the head of the nickel.

Whenever I had a nickel, and bought myself a magazine, I sided with them—the Apaches, the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes—against my own people, and excused their cruelties. And when we kids played cowboys and Indians, I always took the part of Geronimo or Quanah Parker, and sometimes I came near to drawing blood with my stone tomahawk in trying to lift the scalp of my fallen paleface foe.

That tomahawk, by the way, was the genuine article. Like everybody else in our parts, we had an Indian burial mound on the property, and over the years ours yielded me, in addition to the tomahawk, stone grinding pestles and scraps of painted pottery, knucklebones, a skull, skinning knives of flint and obsidian, worn-down bits of antlers, and always arrowheads of all colors and of sizes for every variety of game, from tiny ones hardly bigger than a grain of corn, to great broadheads which I liked to think had once brought down two-ton buffaloes.

Feeling always something of a renegade (for stories of the Indian Wars were still told during my boyhood), I read all I could lay my hands on of the history of the Indians. The record of the white man's greed and perfidy was hardly to be believed. From the very beginning, in Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, those original owners of the entire American continent welcomed the invaders as friends and neighbors, and where they did not make them outright gifts of land enough to live on (the Indians all had a very backward and undeveloped sense of individual land ownership and did not believe that one man could own what belonged to all men—what belonged, in fact, to no man, but instead to the Great Spirit), they sold it to them at fair, not to say overgenerous, prices. And then the whites (I thought of them in those days as like white mice, with the quick, grasping paws and the sharp, busy teeth and the greedy little red bug-eyes of white mice) overran the Indians like a plague. In every state of the Union those who had once owned all saw it nibbled away and gobbled up until they were dispossessed of their ancient hunting grounds and herded into pens called reservations. Where they resisted they lost, and were punished for defending what was theirs. Where they conferred, and went voluntarily, with treaties guaranteeing the bounds of the reservation in perpetuity, they saw, in the same generation, in the same decade, often by the very signatories, every treaty mocked and broken. Mice do not know how to share; what's yours is theirs—all of it. And so the Indians were moved off these reservations to others farther west, on land belonging to yet other Indians, and given a treaty guaranteeing that it would never happen again.

Then positively the last resettlement was proposed—at gunpoint—to them. All the Indians, from all over, would be brought together in one large tract, and this land would be theirs for as long as the sun should shine: here was a treaty to show for it, hung with red ribbons and seals like tassels. And from the shrunken reservations which were all that remained to them of the land of their fathers, in Alabama, in Tennessee and Carolina and Mississippi and Florida, they were herded like winter cattle, and thousands left dead along the trail, to Oklahoma. It was not much good, this land; but it was theirs. The treaty was signed by the Great White Father in Washington, D.C. But Great White Fathers come and go, and that one was no sooner gone than the mice were running in the walls and boldly scampering out to thieve by night, and breeding and clamoring to get in; and the sun went down in the land which was to be theirs for so long as the sun should shine, and the red men were herded onto the last reservations, little pockets of the leanest land where the best was none too fat, and all the rest declared to belong to whichever white man got there “sooner” and staked his claim.

When you are a kid, you can get so carried away that those olden times seem more real to you than the times you live in.

I was scarcely able to look an Indian in the face whenever I met one on the street in town on a Saturday afternoon, when they came in from off the nearby reservation. I could scarcely believe they were Indians. They were parodies of white men, as a scarecrow is a parody of a man. Instead of beaded moccasins they wore broken-down old bluchers that the poorest poor white would long since have thrown away—possibly had. (I noticed the feet first, no doubt, because I hung my head and kept my eyes cast down.) Instead of fringed buckskin hunting shirts, they wore frayed and threadbare imitation-chamois work shirts, and over them wore baggy overalls of railway-engineer's pattern, black-and-white-striped. Instead of war bonnets of eagle feathers, they wore greasy old wool caps with pinched and broken bills or sweaty-banded old black felt hats with uncreased crowns. No bareback pinto ponies did they ride, but came in creaky old swaybacked wagons drawn by swaybacked mules with collar and trace galls and flyblown sores around their scrawny necks and down their slatted sides from pulling a plow. Along the tailgate of the wagon would sit a row of dark, runty children, stiff and impassive as a row of prize dolls in a carnival tent.