The Whipping Boy (28 page)

They talked some more as she helped him finish the bed, but they were both preoccupied. It was time for him to go to the train station. When the coast was clear, they hurried down the stairs and out the back door. “I'm staying at the Main Hotel,” she said. “Room three-oh-three. Come after dark. Don't fail me, Tom.”

***

The station still smelled of the flood, of dead fish and river silt. Because of its closeness to the store, Tom decided not to hang around there between trains. He checked the schedule, got the arrival times of the three trains that Jake could be on, and promptly left. With nothing to do but wait for the first arrival, he decided to walk down along the river.

The air was cold and damp. New huts made of driftwood and scraps of tin had already been set up here and there along the Arkansas, amid the willow and scrub trees, and there were people fishing. Slowly walking upriver along the shoreline, looking through the fog across to the Choctaw Nation on the shore beyond, Tom felt unsettled. Last night was like a wonderful dream, another of many unbelievable events in his new life. In less than a month, he had seen a man hanged, a hotel float away in a torrent, and the land turn to water; he had seen a substantial business turn into a brooding empty hulk abuzz with rumors and secret dealings; he had read newspapers and a novel; he had found a dead man sitting in his house and been chased by a murderer in the company of a beautiful woman; he had bathed with this woman and made love with her and slept all night with her and talked with her about her life. There seemed to be no end to vivid and strange experiences, yet the curve of Tom's memory kept leading him into his past, pulling him through the curtains back into his drab life before the flood, as if there was something important that he'd left behind in the backwoods of the Nation. Looking across the river, he imagined that he could almost see the building in the fog—improbably large, looming tall with its fifteen chimneys and two-story arched brick arcades in the front, porches on both the first and second floors, its high windows with broken shutters like rotten teeth.

He didn't just hate the academy. It wasn't that simple. After all, it was a privilege to grow up doing something besides farm chores, a privilege to learn to read and have a chance to sharpen his mind. He knew that to be true. Yet staring across the river into the mirage, Tom could not forget that it was Friday, the day of his reckoning, the day that every other minute of every other day at the orphanage pointed to, when the implacable, austere, fixed mouth read his sins, large and small, and told him to take off his shirt and kneel at the post. Tom thought about what Sam had said about taking her mother's money, about not being strong enough to turn it down. He had been the same way with Reverend Schoot's sins and punishment. He did not believe in them, he did not accept them, but he took them even when he was smart enough and physically large enough not to take them. The Reverend had his unbending certainty and his cunning and his guns. When boys escaped Bokchito, they always ended up back there—either that or they would be reported dead. You will never get away. That's what he had always told himself.

He turned and walked along upriver. There was a surprising amount of activity in the strip of scrubland between the rows of tracks and the river. The shanties on Coke Hill had escaped the flood. He smelled coal and wood burning in open fires. A baby cried somewhere, a mother fussed at kids. There were little camps of hobos—men with the distant, disengaged eyes of perennial wanderers.

An old man was fishing with a cane pole near a wrecked boat dock; a black woman, who looked nearly as old as he, stood nearby, also fishing. She baited his hook for him. The old man appeared to be blind, or nearly blind, and Tom was surprised when he turned toward him and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Just walking,” Tom said.

The old man blinked his clouded eyes and smiled a little. “Bet ye wonder why an old blind man still goes fishin this time of the year.”

“No sir . . .”

“Well, do ye or don't ye?” He smiled again. “I'll tell you why. Time you get this old, you don't know whether you'll see the spring. I'm the oldest white man on the frontier.”

Tom almost believed it, by the look of the old man's face, wrinkled and savaged by time, eyes with a blanked-over silvery haze.

“I'm near a hundred year old,” he said.

“Tellin the trut,” muttered the old black woman. “He de oldest white, I de oldest colored. We a pair.”

“Ye a white man or a Indin?” the old man asked. When Tom didn't answer him immediately, he turned to the black woman. “What is he?”

She squinted at Tom. ‘Cain' rightly say. He well favored, though.”

“So are ye a Indin or not?”

“Part Indian,” Tom said.

“Well, good,” the old man said. “We got that settled.” He stood there for a minute, sensing his pole, then pulled up his line. “I got any bait on here?”

“Doin all right,” the old woman said.

“Know where I sleep at night?” the old man asked Tom.

“No sir,” Tom said.

“In the fort.”

“Which fort?”

“Can't ye see the fort behind you?”

Tom turned around. “No . . .”

The old man pointed up the hill. “Right there, see those twenty-five-foot rock walls? See those towers on the ends?”

“Took de walls down,” the old woman muttered, as if she'd said it many times before.

“Yes,” the old man said, “they sure did. They took the walls down. And I was here before they ever put em up! I was here when there was nothing but a timber fort. I lived through it. I was fifteen year old when they come through St. Louis roundin up boys to be in the army. My daddy sold me to the army for two dollars. This was before the War Between the States, before the Mexican War, before any goddamn war except the British. They brought us up here on barges, a hundred of us. Give us uniforms. Had to git up at four-thirty in the morning and stand in the parade ground, march around and do exercises accordin to this little Blue Book, they called it. Had to defend the frontier!”

“You did?”

“Did what?”

“Have to defend the frontier.”

The old man burst out laughing. “From what?”

“I don't know—Indians?”

“I thought ye said
you
was a Indin?”

“I'm part Indian,” Tom said again.

“What type of Indin would you partly be?” the old man asked.

“I don't know.”

“Well, come over here and I'll tell you. I can read faces.”

Tom didn't move.

The old woman sighed. “Ain' cotchin no fish today. Still too muddy.” She glanced over at Tom and shook her head. “He won't hurt ya, don't worry.”

The old man held out his hands and when Tom moved over he touched his face, the ends of his fingers gently moving across cheekbones, forehead, chin. While the fingers played over his face, the air seemed to Tom to go strangely quiet, even the sounds of the river receding.

The old woman glanced over and said wryly, “He a dangerous type?”

The old man dropped his hands and went back to fishing, as if he had suddenly lost interest. “Most of em died,” he said sadly. “We had slow fever and malaria worse'n they do now. Cholera. Smallpox—they give that to us on purpose. Took us all to what they called the longhouse and inoculated us with it to git it all over with at once. Our officers was drunkards, to a man, ever god-blessed one of em. Did nothin but drink, some of em. They had parties and balls, and more balls and parties. Seem like every night. The most Indins I seen was the ones they invited to them parties! They'd be in there just a-dancin around like a bunch of wheelin windmills. Didn't invite the enlisted men to the parties, nosir, they invited the god-blessed Indins instead! Said they was civilized Indians. Hoped they'd bring purty women, ye see, since there wasn't much in the way of white women around. All us enlisted men could do was hide in the shadows and watch the officers and Indins having a good time, peekin in the windows like little boys—Indins, Indin women, maybe a coupla white women would be in there, and us with no women a-tall.”

“You makin up for it in your old age,” the old woman sighed.

“It weren't healthy livin like that!” the old man said vehemently. “You know what us boys lived for out here on the wild frontier?”

“What?”

He turned his silvery eyes toward Tom. “Mail. That's what. Goddurn mail. That's what your brave boys on the frontier thought about. Messages from the outside world. Any kind of god-blessed message, they just couldn't wait to git it. Me, I never got no mail,” he said.

“Nary a stitch,” the old woman said.

“I seen others like me die from not gettin no mail. But I lived, mail or not! Lived to help build the rock fort. I was still in the army then, ye see. I stayed. Don't know why. Just did. Stayed right here. Was the only one to live through it. We built the rock fort—biggest, shining, most beautiful thing you ever did see. Hundreds of tons of limestone. Mortar—lakes of it! Fort Smith! It cost the U.S. Treasure aplenty, they was shippin gold out here by the barrelful to pay for it. Guard towers on the ends reaching up to the clouds. Big parade ground. Took us years to build it. Officers' quarters—that jail up there was the officers' quarters, and I helped build it. And ye know what?”

“What?” Tom was genuinely interested.

“About the time we got her built, the fancy boys up in Washington decided it wasn't no reason for her after all, and they told us to tear her down again. Yessir. That's when I quit em. Decided if they was fool enough not to know whether to build a fort or tear it down, I wasn't workin for em no longer.”

“Sho did,” the old woman said.

“I stayed in the neighborhood.” He sniffed. “Farmed. Raised cotton in the bottoms right up there around the bend. Got revenge, too,” he added portentously.

“Revenge?”

He beckoned for Tom to come closer. He had a smile of sheer wickedness on his sunken-jawed face. “C'mere. Come close, lemme tell you what I did.”

Tom took a step closer, and the old man reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I built a house.”

Tom smelled his papery old breath. “House?”

“Yeah! Built her with the rock they tore outa that fort. Used the spare mortar they had done left. Used the wood casements they was about to let rot. I built the purtiest blessed house that ever was. How do you like them biscuits?”

“That's nice,” Tom said.

“Well, damn right it is. It's what I mean when I say I sleep in the fort. Take it from the oldest son of a bitch on the frontier, my young friend: revenge is sweet.” He cackled. “Sweetest revenge that is! Just ponder that, Mr. Indin. I've got some serious fishin to do.”

“What kind of Indian am I?”

The old man smiled worriedly. “Well, I reckon you'll have to find out yourself.” He pulled out his hook. “How's my worm?”

“Look fine,” the old black woman sighed. “No fish want him, though. River's still too high.”

Tom had a while to wait, and he walked on, up one of many trails to the army graveyard on the hill beyond Judge Parker's gallows. He walked among the small, weathered, older grave markers, and among the more recent graves of Civil War soldiers. Graves reminded Tom of the basement at the academy. He walked on quickly toward Coke Hill. Many of the people who lived in the shanties scattered around the hill were colored—blacks and Indians, bloods of all sorts—living in thrown-together structures made of driftwood, sticks, rags, old boards, tin. Smoke floated slowly in lumpy coruscations in the quiet damp air. He went toward the few “real” houses on the hill, which were old and musty smelling, with boards bending out and holes in roofs. At the corner of a building a horse stood with his ribs sticking out like a washboard. This oldest part of town, near where the fort had been in the old days, was inhabited by blind poverty.

He went back to the station for the first train in from the territory. Jake wasn't on it. Tom left and wandered the riverbank for several more hours, then returned for the second arrival and again was disappointed. The last train was due to come in after nine o'clock that night, plenty of time for him to go back to Mrs. Peltier's for supper. But he didn't look forward to the prospect of answering questions that the men were likely to put to him. He continued to fear that Mrs. Peltier would have little sympathy for someone without a job and that she might ask him to leave the boarding house.

Back on the riverfront, tired and hungry, he made a nest in the weeds and took a nap. He slipped into a vivid dream about trying to build a house out of the academy building, trying to take bricks out of the walls and carry them through a dark forest to his site; but each time he went for more bricks, the Reverend was there, right beside him, marking his name down in the book, and the bricks wouldn't be pulled from the walls . . .

Tom woke up shivering in the cold night, sat up, and looked across a moonlit ribbon of river. He walked over to meet the last train out of Oklahoma Territory. It didn't show up, and the stationmaster told him that there'd been a big wreck just south of the Enid station.

“Railroad war,” he said grimly, and proceeded to look busy. The next train coming from that direction, via Red Fork, was at eleven o'clock Saturday morning.

When he walked out of the station, a boy came gliding up to him in the dark on a soft-tired bicycle. “You Tom Freshour?”

Tom nodded.

“Been lookin for you all day. Telegram. Can you read?”

“Yes.”

He gave Tom a yellow envelope, and Tom read the telegram in light coming through the door.

 

WHAT HAPPENED KEEP YOUR EARS OPEN ABOUT MR D

BE CAREFUL WILL BE BACK AS SOON AS I CAN GET

THERE JAKE