Zeke and Ned (6 page)

A little before noon, the fog burned off. Zeke was half a mind to track the bear, but then he thought of Polly Beck and let the notion go. She had not been at the meeting place the last few times he had come to visit. T. Spade might have got suspicious and penned her up. T. Spade was cranky—but he was not a pure fool.

When Zeke came in sight of the mill, he was relieved to see that no wagons were waiting with grain to grind. Then he saw Polly going into the mill with an apron full of kindling. He did not try to attract her attention; if T Spade was suspicious, he might be laying a trap. He could be in the loft with a rifle, waiting.

Zeke circled the mill, keeping well into the underbrush. He wanted to be sure none of T Spade's lazy cousins were lounging by the cistern, or getting drunk in the smokehouse. He tied Joe to a little post oak tree, not far from the small clearing where he had often met Polly.

There were no cousins in sight, but while he was studying the situation, Polly came out the back door and stood on the porch, looking his way. Zeke was well hidden in a chinaberry thicket. Polly could not see him, but maybe she could sense him—he was not sure. While he was watching, Polly walked the length of the porch and bent over to scrape something out of a bucket—lye soap, it looked like. She was a pretty woman, light of step; he had always fancied women who were light of step. The sight of her made him all the more anxious to get the gunplay over with, so he could take her on home.

A glimpse of Polly in her beauty, after missing her so long, put Zeke in the honeymoon mood right away. Before he could even enjoy thinking about it thoroughly, T Spade Beck stepped out on the porch, in his long johns. When he saw Polly bending over the lye bucket, he went right over and started pulling up her clothes. T Spade had a white, pointy beard hanging off his chin, which made him look goatish, Zeke thought. There he was, trying to rut with Polly in plain sight, like an ugly old billy!

Zeke pulled two pistols, shoved his way out of the thicket, and started shooting. T Spade looked startled. He had not gotten very far with his rutting, and when he saw Zeke Proctor coming at him with
two guns blazing, he experienced an abrupt change of mood. He usually kept a rifle on the back porch for just such emergencies, but he had taken the rifle into the mill and was caught now, in his underwear, without a weapon—a damn nuisance to be sure.

Polly had been in a dreamy mood when T. Spade crowded up against her by the lye bucket. She was not in a state to discourage him. Then, to her shock, while still bent over, she saw Zeke spring out of the thicket with his guns in his hands.

I should have got word to him, she thought—I should have let him know.

She felt a horrible mistake was about to happen. Zeke might be upset about the weevils, but mainly he was coming at T. Spade because he wanted her. He did not realize she had changed, had decided to stay a wife to T. Spade.

Zeke could not be shooting her husband, Polly thought. Polly immediately jumped in front of T. Spade. She would explain the matter to Zeke when things were calmer.

“No, Zeke . . . no! Leave be!” Polly said.

As she said it, she felt something nudge her chest. To her relief, Zeke stopped shooting; the fact that she was shielding T Spade had brought him to his senses, she thought.

Her relief was so great that it made her weak for a moment, her legs giving way. She sank down, braced against T Spade's legs. She looked for Zeke, to see if he had put away his guns. She had a big need to speak to Zeke; there were just a few words she needed to say to him. She hoped her husband would not take it wrong.

Then Polly's eyesight began to fail her. It was as if a cloud came over her eyes, white as the mists had been in the mornings, in her girlhood in the Tennessee hills. One moment she saw Zeke standing by the woods; then she could not see him at all. When she looked up at her husband to see if he was angry, she could not see him, either. A mist had blown in and settled in her eyes.

“T, it's looking rainy . . . you better go inside and get your overalls on,” Polly said. Zeke drifted out of her mind; then she lay back flat on the porch, a heaviness on her limbs and on her eyelids.

But she was worried about her husband—he was not really dressed for chilly weather, and he was prone to coughs.

“You get on inside now, where you'll be warm,” Polly said to her husband, in a worried tone.

Then the heaviness became a lightness, and Polly forgot that worry, and all worries. The mist grew thicker and more white; it hid the valley and the hills; it hid T Spade and Zeke; it was whiter than the mists of Tennessee.

The mist surrounded her. The mist was all she knew.

Z
EKE KEPT WALKING TOWARD
T. S
PADE'S PORCH. POLLY BECK WAS
still—too still. He had to find out what he had done.

T. Spade himself seemed dazed. He went inside the mill and came back out a moment later with a rifle, but then all he did was prop the rifle up against a barrel on the porch.

“Polly, wake up,” T Spade demanded. But Polly did not wake up.

Zeke kept hoping she would sit up, or at least make some movement. If she would do that much, he would be happy to go. He would just go home, and let things be. He had lost all interest in shooting T Spade, and from T Spade's behaviour, T Spade evidently had no interest in shooting him.

T. Spade bent down next to Polly, and tried to lift her. Though he was a large man, the effort was too much for him. Normally, he could lift his wife easily, since she was lighter than a big sack of cornmeal. But now she seemed much too heavy to lift. He looked up at Zeke, who stood silently at the foot of the porch steps.

“Help me carry her in, Zeke,” T Spade requested. His voice was flat and dull. Zeke stepped up onto the porch, and bent down on the other side of Polly's body.

The shock had weakened both men, and it was all they could do to lift Polly and carry her up to the bed in the loft. Why carry her up? You'll just have to carry her back down to bury her, Zeke thought, as they struggled up the stairs. There was a small spot of blood on the front of her dress. The spot was right over her heart.

After they got Polly settled, T Spade sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed and dipped some snuff. From the rocking chair, he had a good view out the door of the loft, all the way across the valley and to the hills. He did not look at Zeke, nor did he have any more words inside him.

Zeke had no words, either. He stood by the bed for an awkward moment, looking down at Polly. She was as white as if she were made
of snow. There were not many women in the Going Snake District so light of skin. Becca would have been jealous of that skin, if he had managed to bring Polly home with him.

Zeke felt he ought to say something to T. Spade, but he could not think what the right words might be. There did not seem to be any words right enough. A lot of things could be changed, but not death. Polly could not come back to life, no matter what words Zeke might say.

Zeke walked on down the stairs and out of the mill, so distracted that he completely forgot he had come to the Beck mill horseback. He had walked almost a mile in the general direction of his home before he remembered his horse Joe.

While he was walking back to get his horse, he jumped the same fat yearling bear that both he and Sully Eagle had tried to kill. The bear was trying to scratch out some varmint, a badger maybe, that he had cornered in its hole. The bear stopped scratching for a moment, and gave Zeke an impudent look.

But Zeke walked on by and left the young bear to its scratching. He had just killed Polly Beck—an innocent woman—a woman he had meant to marry.

The last thing he wanted to have to do on such a day was skin an impudent bear.

Z
EKE WAS SO UPSET ON THE WAY HOME THAT HE COULD NOT THINK
clearly. He had ridden off with every intention of bringing Polly Beck, a red-haired, light-stepping woman, back to his house to be his second wife, but instead ended up killing her with a shot meant for her husband, T Spade.

T. Spade should have been dead by now, or at least well wounded, and he and Polly should be riding home to start their married life together. But T Spade was rocking in a rocking chair, looking out the window of his loft—and Polly was laid out a few feet away, dead.

It was a terrible turn of events, and Zeke knew that he had no one to blame for it but himself. In the first place, he should have never tried to shoot T Spade with a pistol. He had never been much of a pistol shot, which was why he had brought his Winchester. But when he saw T Spade pulling up Polly's dress right there on the front porch, he
had lost control of his thinking to such an extent that he had popped off with his pistols, when he should have sat down with his rifle and taken sober aim.

A worse thought was the possibility that Polly had a change of heart and no longer wanted to leave her husband. Maybe she had not cared that T. Spade was pulling up her dress; maybe she had wanted him to—in which case Zeke had killed a happily married woman—a woman he should have never been slipping off with in the first place.

It had been an accident. He had wanted to love Polly, not kill her. But what he had wanted or intended no longer mattered: he had shed her life's blood and put her in her grave. The weight of guilt on his conscience was heavy as an anvil, and he would be carrying the anvil of that guilt forever.

That was the worst of it: Polly would always be dead, and it would always be his fault. He could never make up to her that he had killed her. Instead of being with him by a warm campfire, on a quilt or a buffalo robe, she would be dead in the dirt—a grievous waste of a light-stepping woman, and one that should not have been.

Zeke became so distraught he did not know whether to ride on or stop, go home or go away. He knew he would have to sort out the question of the law pretty soon, but he was not up to it right this minute. Dog Town was about five miles away, and in Dog Town maybe he could find someone to give him counsel—or failing that, someone to sell him whiskey. He needed to have a few sips and brace up. T Spade Beck might be dazed for the moment, but his dazement would pass, and he and his brothers and cousins would be taking up arms.

Polly had been half Cherokee—the same as Zeke Proctor. Zeke's mother, Dicey Downing, had been Cherokee, and his father, William, had been white. William Proctor had lived as a true Cherokee, joining his wife's family on the Cherokee Nation in their native Georgia soon after his marriage to Zeke's mother.

T. Spade was a white man. Under the law, when a white man married a Cherokee woman, he became an adopted citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and subject to their laws. But T Spade had not conducted himself as a Cherokee; in fact, he had resented the notion that he was supposed to become a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and had made his resentment known to Polly's family, as well as the rest of the tribes living in and around Tahlequah. He had gotten away with charging Indians higher prices for grinding grain than he charged whites, only
because Polly's family was liked and respected throughout the Nation. White men got away with stealing from Indians because Indians were not allowed to testify against whites, though plenty of whites testified against Cherokees. T. Spade knew the law, and took full advantage of it.

T. Spade himself was not popular with his in-laws, either, but they tolerated him because of Polly. Knowing T. Spade, he might even try to get the white marshals after Zeke, even though it would be wrong-headed. If Zeke were tried for shooting Polly, then he ought to be tried in the tribal court. The white marshals would not be likely to care that the shooting had been a tragic accident; they would jail him and then hang him for having shot a white man's wife.

In Dog Town, the first person Zeke saw was Tuxie Miller. Tuxie was loading a keg of nails in his wagon, and it was all he could do to lift the keg.

“Dern, you wouldn't think nails would weigh this much,” Tuxie said, when he finally got the keg securely situated.

“Where's Ned? I need advice,” Zeke said abruptly, when he rode up next to Tuxie's wagon. He did not have time to discuss the weight of fencing nails with Tuxie Miller.

“Why, Ned's at home, I believe,” Tuxie told him. “If it's just advice you need, I can sell you some for a nickel.”

Tuxie was in a light mood, as he always was when he managed to escape Dale, his terrier of a wife, for even a few hours. Dale did not tolerate long absences, or laziness of any sort. In her view, the hours of sunlight were made for working. If Tuxie even felt like yawning between sunup and sundown, he had to leave home to do it.

His remark about selling advice did not amuse Zeke Proctor one bit.

“I just kilt somebody, I got to talk to Ned,” Zeke blurted.

“Good Lord—was it T Spade?” Tuxie inquired. Tahlequah and Dog Town were small communities, and gossip traveled easily between the two towns. Tuxie himself had heard there might be bad blood between Zeke and T Spade Beck.

“No, it's worse than that. I kilt Polly. It was an accident,” Zeke said. “I shot at T Spade, and Polly jumped right in front of him just at the wrong time. She's dead.”

This news knocked Tuxie right out of his jesting mood. Zeke Proctor was going to need a good deal more than a nickel's worth of
advice. As soon as word of the killing got back to Judge Parker in Arkansas, the white marshals would be coming, right or wrong.

“We better go on up and see Ned, then,” Tuxie agreed. “You want to get a jug?”

“I want to get a jug,” Zeke replied.

The thought of Polly, white as snow on that bed, was heavy on his mind.

N
ED
C
HRISTIE HEARD ABOUT THE KILLING BEFORE
Z
EKE AND TUXIE
arrived. Soldier Sixkiller, Jewel's cousin, had happened by that afternoon. Soldier had heard it from Bear Grimmet in Siloam Springs; Bear had heard it from one of T Spade's cousins.