ONE
Two long blasts on the whistle, each bent in the middle by the wind on the river. It seemed to be shrieking his name.
“Well, they’ll know we’re coming.” Mary Parker took her fingers from her ears.
“I think they know already.”
Spotting the crowd on the dock, she drew in little Charlie and huddled closer to her husband. “Have they come with baskets of flowers or buckets of tar?”
“They’re empty-handed. Come to see the carpetbagger.”
“How soon can you prove them wrong?”
“Soon. I have my predecessor to thank for heightening the contrast.”
“They cried for his impeachment.”
“I studied his record. He’s fortunate they didn’t dangle him from his own scaffold.”
“I should think a town with a fort would be an orderly place.”
“The fort is closed. The town has thirty saloons and one bank. I am the order.”
When the steamboat bumped against the hempbound pilings, the crowd eased back to allow the hands to erect the gangplank and bear trunks and portmanteaux to the dock for passengers to claim. Some newcomers were greeted and borne away amidst jabber, others escaped interest, looking for porters and transportation. Most of those gathered watched as Isaac and Mary Parker and their small son alighted. They saw a man in excess of six feet tall and two hundred pounds, wearing a sandy Vandyke beard, a soft hat, and a duster to protect his gray suit from cinders, accompanied by a large woman near his age in gloves, a cape, and a hat secured with a scarf under her chin. Patent-leather shoes showed beneath the hem of her skirt. The boy, in necktie, cap, and knickerbockers, had a high complexion and kept close to his parents, although not from fear; he intercepted the curious glances of strangers with his father’s level blue gaze.
“Your honor?”
Parker lifted his chin to confront the stranger. He was a man close to his own thirty-seven years, pale-eyed and neatly barbered, in a frock coat too heavy for the season, but he gripped Parker’s hand with a dry palm.
“You’re the first to address me so.”
“William Clayton, chief prosecutor.” He bowed to Mary and acknowledged the child with a nod but no interest. “Welcome to Fort Smith.”
It was a hot Sunday in early May. The family and Clayton boarded a waiting phaeton, sat with hands folded while the Negro driver and a porter secured their luggage, and rode down a broad street harrowed by hooves and carriage wheels to a fine dust that rose in clouds like flour and cast a scrim over a town built largely of unpainted wood, with neither sidewalks nor lamps to illuminate the streets at night. The saloons were shuttered for the sabbath, but wagons and horses lined the hitching rails, and stragglers from the dock dodged heavy oncoming traffic to run alongside the phaeton, staring at the occupants. Clayton tapped the driver’s shoulder with his stick and he picked up the pace, leaving the rubbernecks behind but raising still more dust. Mary drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and held it to her nose and mouth.
“Isaac”—her voice was muffled, but still she lowered it a notch—“we’ve made a great mistake.”
He patted her other hand. “No, Mary. We are faced with a great task. These people need us. We must not fail them.”
Clayton spoke, distracting Mary’s attention from a row of bright petticoats fluttering from a second-floor balcony like the flags of many nations. “No school yet, Mrs. Parker, but we hope to remedy that by the time the lad’s old enough.”
“He’s seen our nation’s capital and much of the continent in between,” she said. “His education began early.”
“How soon may I inspect the garrison?” asked Parker.
“Directly you’re settled in. You’ll welcome the early start. Many of the prisoners have waited months for their cases to come to trial, and eighteen are charged with capital offenses. If you can convene by the end of this month at the earliest, you just may clear the docket in time for Independence Day.”
“As late as that?”
“Judge Story kept an untidy desk.”
“I’ve heard it was worse than that.”
“That’s the popular view, but I wouldn’t cast it about up at the courthouse. It’s a Democratic stronghold and, begging your honor’s pardon, you’re an appointee of President Grant. Moreover—” He faltered, cleared his throat.
“I’m a turncoat. Everyone’s aware of my original party affiliation, Mr. Clayton. The decision to switch has given me unique insight. I intend to keep politics out of my courtroom. I’d as soon hang a Republican as a Democrat.”
“Isaac!”
He glanced at his son. “I’m sorry, my dear.”
“People hereabouts would pay to see a thing like that,” Clayton said.
“I understand they did.”
“Judge Story suffered from sloth more than greed, although he had a chronic case of that as well. In fourteen months he managed to run up an expense bill of four hundred thousand.”
“The taxpayers should be grateful he didn’t show more initiative.”
“At this point it’s impossible to distinguish between simple attrition due to gross negligence and bald-faced theft. The Eighth is a big jurisdiction: all of the Western District of Arkansas and the Indian Nations, including places few white men have ever set foot on, and them that have you wouldn’t want to meet out in the open. Prussia’s smaller. A great deal can pass unnoticed in a responsibility that size. If Story was half as corrupt as he was incompetent, he could have made the Tweed Ring look like a First Street pickpocket. It will take most of the month for an honest man to begin to make sense of it all.”
“Please be prepared to plead your most pressing cases a week from tomorrow.”
The prosecutor’s eyes flickered, the irises scarcely darker than the whites. “I don’t see how you can do it, and neither will you once you’ve had a look about.”
Three-year-old Charles Parker tugged at his father’s sleeve. “Papa, when may we see the gallows?”
* * *
“It’s the damnedest assignment any man ever undertook, or ever will,” Clayton said. “All your judgments are final, hanging and all, with no appeal between you and Almighty God—not counting the president, who considering the human offal you’ll be passing sentence on wouldn’t touch it with a poker. It’s instant history; and if you do it the way it needs to be done, it’ll be the death of you.”
“Are you attempting to frighten me off?”
“No, sir. A man ought to know what he’s harnessing himself up to. My motives are less than Christian. We’re to be partners, and a thing done no more than halfway by the one must be done one hundred and fifty percent by the other. I’m ambitious, but I ain’t suicidal.”
Parker’s face registered disapproval of the deliberate lapse in grammar. His wife and son were unpacking in the Hotel Le Flore. Judge and prosecutor were seated in what was to be his chambers, a small square room barely large enough to contain a black walnut desk the size of a dining table, three tufted-leather chairs, shelves, and a credenza, with nary a horizontal surface not piled high with papers and bursting portfolios bearing witness to the disorganization of the previous administration. The curling leaves seemed to defy gravity, scaling the walls from floor to ceiling, their yellowed corners stirring in the breeze through the open window. Notwithstanding that, the air was stagnant, redolent of tobacco long since chewed and expectorated, and murky with the exhaust of the cigars the pair was smoking. A revolving bookcase leaned drunkenly to one side, stuffed with mustard-colored bound case histories with the hangdog look of children neglected and forgotten. A mausoleum of justice overlooked; a dead plant in a dry pot.
“Equal and exact justice,” Parker said, when that image came to him. “Jefferson’s words. If we can keep them in mind, we can dispense with everything else.”
“Jefferson was a Democrat.”
“What of it? Lincoln was a Republican. Together they freed millions. In any event, this is an oasis in the political desert. I explained that once.” The judge broke two inches of ash into a heavy brass tray that performed double duty as a paperweight. “Thank you for the tour. My family and I will establish quarters in the commissary. Will you have someone see it’s made ready as soon as possible? I don’t wish to burden the electorate with a hotel bill any larger than is necessary.”
“I’ll attend to it. What did you think of the jail?”
Parker repressed a shudder. He’d served in Congress and fought with the Home Guard under Rosecrans, but the atrocities he’d witnessed were little more than an anteroom to the dungeon beneath his feet, separated into two sections by a stone wall that extended up through the ground floor, with prisoners sprawled on rough concrete, some in shackles, buckets for sanitary use. The stench was a permanent fixture. The rest of the building, two brick stories that had sheltered officers during garrison days, devoted half the surface level to court proceedings, the rest to the handmaidens of justice.
The judge addressed a different subject, somewhat to Clayton’s surprise; the attorney had placed him as a humanitarian, who would at least inquire about the possibillity of constructing a proper jail. “The scaffold,” he said. “Is it as sound as it appears?”
“It would take a charge of powder to dismantle it. It’s been struck once by lightning and survived.”
This arrangement was visible through the window at a distance of three hundred yards. It stood fourteen feet high on the site of the old powder magazine, extended for twenty feet, and supported a twelve- by twelve-inch beam suitable for hanging a dozen condemned men simultaneously.
“So far it’s served only one,” Clayton went on; “a half-breed named Childers, who slit an old man’s throat for his horse. Old Judge Caldwell commissioned a substantial example of architecture to inspire fear in the territory. He underestimated the highwaymen’s resolve. Here in town they call it Sam Grant’s wash line.”
“Who is responsible for it?”
“Jim Fagan, whom you’ll meet presently. He’s U.S. marshal, and your chief law enforcement officer. I believe he assigns a man from time to time to apply whitewash and inspect it for termites.”
“The executioner should see to that.”
“At present we’ve no one in that particular post.”
“We should. I want to see personnel records on everyone who serves this court.”
“I recommend you requisition a shovel.” Clayton swept an arm along the mountain range of paper that surrounded them.
Someone knocked. Parker raised his voice, inviting the visitor inside. The door opened, admitting a small, narrow-gauged man in a blue uniform with a Sam Browne belt. He looked at the judge briefly, then at Clayton, and removed his forage cap. Strands of silver glittered in his broom-shaped whiskers and a shelf of brow left his eyes in deep shadow.
“Sir, we had a disturbance. I feared you may have heard it.”
“What sort of disturbance?” asked Parker, before the prosecutor could respond.
When the man hesitated, Clayton said, “George Maledon, meet Judge Isaac Parker. Maledon’s a deputy sheriff, helps out downstairs.”
Maledon faced Parker. “Man threw his slops at a turnkey. I had to bust him.” He patted the pistol on his hip.
“You shot him?” asked Clayton.
“No, sir, I used the other end. Doc Du Val says he’ll live.”
“Very well. We don’t want another incident so soon after the last.” To Parker: “Maledon shot an escaping prisoner last month. A single ball through the heart from a rifle.”
“What is your experience?” Parker asked.
“Before this billet I was a policeman in Fort Smith five years.”
“Would you consider resigning from the county and accepting a position in charge of executions in this district?”
Two tiny points of light guttered deep in the other’s skull. “I would for a fact,” he said. “Your honor.”
TWO
“Oyez! Oyez! The Honorable District Court of the United States for the Western District of Arkansas, having criminal jurisdiction of the Indian Territory, is now in session.”
The tenor voice of Court Crier J. G. Hammersly, a short-legged man with a rooster chest, rang like a temple bell in the eternal twilight of the courtroom.
Parker, looking no more and certainly no less in authority seated behind a brawny cherry-paneled desk in his black robes, snapped his gavel. “The court is ready for the first case.”
And, by God, thought William H. H. Clayton, it is. The big regulator clock on the wall above the heads of the jurors twitched one second past eight A.M., Monday, May 10, 1875; eight days after Grant’s new appointee set foot on dry land from the narrow Arkansas, like Moses from the mountain. At the time, his chief prosecutor had not thought the thing possible; but he’d learned a parcel about the man’s character during the past week and would not repeat the mistake.
The clerk, Stephen Wheeler, baby-faced and without vocal inflection, rose and glanced down at the docket on his writing table. “The United States versus Daniel H. Evans. Charge, murder.”
Evans, young and clean-shaven, was careful in his appearance. The suit and shirt his attorney had provided for him had evidently been selected by the client, for the collar and cuffs fitted him as if they’d been made to his measure and the coat lay smooth across his shoulders. He stood accused of having murdered a nineteen-year-old boy in the Creek Nation for his boots. When apprehended, the defendant had been wearing an uncommonly fine pair with hand-tooled tops and high, sloping heels, nearly new. He’d been tried before the previous judge, but the jury had disagreed on a verdict, and he’d been returned to jail. In the meantime the father of the slain youth had come forward, and in the presence of the jury he now identified his son’s boots by some horseshoe nails the boy had driven to secure a faulty heel. Evans, who’d been jubilant and answered Parker’s occasional remarks to him with polite banter, remained silent and pale throughout the man’s testimony.
“The United States versus James Moore. Charge, murder.”
Moore, whose deep sunburn had had little time to fade since his capture, plucked at his moustaches and glared at the witnesses against him, who identified him as one of the territory’s leading horse thieves. While fleeing a citizens’ posse led by two of James Fagan’s deputies, the desperado had shot and killed William Spivey, the first federal officer to give his life in the service of the Eighth District court. On that occasion Moore escaped, only to be arrested by two more deputy marshals when he abandoned horse stealing for cattle rustling. A partner testifying against him gave evidence that Moore had been traveling with the owner of a herd, intending to murder him to gain possession, when he wandered into the deputies’ hands. Shackled during the journey to Fort Smith, the defendant had boasted of having killed eight men.
“The United States versus Edmund Campbell. Charge, murder.”
A Negro native of the Choctaw Nation, the heavy-shouldered Campbell had drunk himself into a fury over a hasty remark made by a neighbor, Lawson Ross, gone to Ross’s house, and butchered the man and his common-law wife. He stared at the floor throughout the trial with angry eyes in a sullen face.
“The United States versus Smoker Mankiller. Charge, murder.”
Unfortunately named for his present circumstances, the Choctaw sat broad and motionless at the defense table, not understanding a word of the evidence against him in English. For no reason ever given he’d borrowed a gun from an acquaintance named William Short and shot him to death with it. He’d been overheard proudly acknowledging the act, but since his arrest had changed his story, blaming it on two brothers named Welch.
“The United States versus John Whittington. Charge, murder.”
The defendant was visibly ill, sallow-featured and shining with perspiration. The eighteen-year-old son of the victim in the case, John J. Turner, confirmed that he’d seen Whittington stab Turner’s father along the Red River in the Chickasaw Nation, and had subdued and held him until help came to bring him to justice. Whittington and the elder Turner had been seen drinking in a low saloon on the Texas side of the river, where Turner had paid the bartender from a swollen leather poke. It was determined that on the way back home, the man under examination had bludgeoned his companion with a makeshift club, then brought his knife into play when the other had refused to stay down. When arrested, Whittington had had a large sum of money in his pocket.
“The United States versus Samuel Fooy. Charge, murder.”
Fooy, Cherokee on his mother’s side, had confessed to the slaying of John Emmett Neff, a schoolteacher in the Cherokee Nation whose skeleton had been found a year later with a bullet hole in the skull. Returning from the tribal capital of Tahlequah with three hundred dollars in back salary, Neff had offered the farm wife who had put him up for the night a five-dollar bill to settle the fifty-cent fee. Told she could not change it, the schoolteacher had struck out on foot for a nearby store to procure the silver. Fooy, a neighbor visiting the house, had gone out after him. When the victim was identified based on his name in a book found near the remains, the rest was legwork.
The six men were tried and convicted in a little more than a month. Judge Parker’s charges to the juries left small doubt as to his sympathies, and Chief Prosecutor Clayton listened in wonder as the man behind the desk instructed them which way to vote. When the foreman in the Evans case informed him of the panel’s decision, Parker thanked him in a tone of satisfaction Clayton hadn’t heard from him previously. At his sentencing, the young man who had coveted a pair of fine boots even unto death stood tight-faced before the cruel voice from the bench. Execution was scheduled for September 3, 1875.
“I sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead!” Parker banged his gavel.
And then he wept.
* * *
Clayton stood throughout each sentencing, accompanied by his assistant, a young, ham-faced man named James Brizzolara, who at the age of fourteen had risen to the rank of colonel in the insurgent army of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy. The judge’s tone on these occasions remained level.
“There, on the morning of September third, eighteen seventy-five, you will be conducted…”
“… on the morning of September third, eighteen seventy-five…”
“… September third, eighteen seventy-five…”
“… September third…”
“By God,” Clayton was heard to mutter, when the date was repeated a fourth time. “By God.”
On the sixth and last, young Colonel Brizzolara whispered to his superior, “They’ll not make mention of Sam Grant’s wash line after this. What do you think they’ll call the infernal machine now?”
“‘Parker’s tears.’” Clayton smoothed a cigar between his fingers.
* * *
Ropes were not difficult to obtain in Fort Smith, where cattle outfits from Texas stopped to lubricate their throats and replenish their equipment before swimming the herds across the Arkansas to the railroad depot. George Maledon, however, was particular, and incurred the impatience of clerks in half a dozen saddleries before settling on two hundred feet of the best and thickest hemp to be found east of El Paso. He procured linseed oil as well and spent hours working it by hand into the fibers until they were as pliant as a gentlewoman’s hair and would glide around the coarsest neck until the gargantuan knot fixed itself beneath the mastoid bone behind the left ear and snapped the cervical vertebra like a stalk of celery; to the knot itself he applied pitch to prevent slipping. He’d paid close attention to the process when John Childers was hanged for killing a peddler, and obtained the technical information from Dr. Ben T. Du Val, who stitched up the prisoners when they got into fights and had timed Childers’ moment of death against his heavy pocket watch for the official record. Forty-five, Bavarian-born, Maledon had been raised in Detroit, served with the First Arkansas Federal Battery during the rebellion, and been a city policeman before accepting a position as deputy sheriff of Sebastian County and a part-time appointment as deputy U.S. marshal to legitimize his service in the Fort Smith jail. He’d slain a man during an escape attempt and thought no more of it than he had of shooting Confederate rebels.
Two-hundred-pound sandbags manufactured for the purpose of damming the banks when the Arkansas River swelled in the spring were tied to ropes, and Maledon spent the weeks leading to the executions industriously, testing the single twenty-foot trap and the ropes’ tensile strength several times daily. Soon, the squee-thump of the apparatus became as much a part of the sounds of Fort Smith as the creak and rattle of wagons and the tintack pianos in the Silver Dollar, the House of Lords, the Last Chance, and the whorehouses in the Row.
From time to time, as the settlement on the river entered the smothering heat of late summer, the little man paused to mop his brow and watch the steady stream of traffic turn up the dust on Garrison Avenue. Dust and traffic both grew heavier by the day.
* * *
A former military man who had taught tactics and strategy at a seminary in Pennsylvania, William H. H. Clayton stood absolutely erect at the window in Parker’s chambers. From one angle showed Maledon’s mighty engine of human destruction, from another the incoming tide of carriages, buckboards, and riders on horseback. Wheels locked hubs, mules balked, curses flowed.
“They’ve been coming in all week,” the prosecutor said. “The hotels and boardinghouses are filled. The price of tent canvas has gone up three times in three days. I don’t know how many more our little hamlet will hold.”
“It’s good for trade. Why should the saloons be the only ones to profit?” The judge, in shirtsleeves and the black waistcoat he wore to church, sat behind the desk reading sworn affidavits. On Sundays it was his habit in this his first season on the bench to accompany his wife and son to Methodist services, dine with them at noon in the stone commissary where they had taken up residence, then report to the courthouse to bring himself up to date on the docket.
“There isn’t a farmer in the state who’s stayed home to bring in the harvest,” said Clayton, “nor a civilized Indian in the territory who hasn’t pawned his watch to make the trip. They’ve all read about the grand exhibition, or had an account read to them if they don’t know their letters. Something about it appeared in the New York Herald last week.”
“Splendid. A public judgment followed by public punishment is the swiftest way to clear the foul air left by Story and his cronies.”
“The Eastern press seems to hold that the fate of these men should be private.”
“An execution carried out in secrecy is no better than lynching from a dry branch.”
“You ought to write that, and set the record straight. The journalists have all convinced themselves we’re savages out here.”
“They’ll write what they please regardless. I used to see them on Capitol Hill, scribbling in their grubby little blocks before they’d been in to meet with their subjects. They have their forum and I have mine.”
Clayton observed Maledon at work. The scaffold was visible from every building in the garrison. “How much more must he test? The man is a fanatic.”
“Fanatics have their uses. I’m confident he’ll serve this court well.”
“No doubt. He’s committed. I confess I preferred having him in the basement. The faces in the jail are milder.”
“I didn’t reassign him for his looks.”
* * *
Spectators began entering the garrison at dawn. By ten o’clock, the hour scheduled for the execution, the grounds of the old powder magazine were no longer visible for the bodies that had pressed themselves in around the scaffold. Others perched like pigeons on porch roofs and hung like fruit from trees. Deputy marshals and guards from the jail, armed with revolvers and carbines, kept the central structure clear. The songbird colors worn by the women from the Row showed brightly among dark suits, overalls, and gingham dresses, and the stooped shoulders of the Reverend H. M. Granade drew a question mark at the top of the gallows stairs beside the brief apostrophe of George Maledon, turned out in a new suit and a gray slouch hat. His hands hung at his sides, within reach of the lever that opened the long trap by means of a simple gear. It was difficult to tell where his tangled beard ended and black broadcloth began. His eyes hid beneath a mantel of bone as substantial as the scaffold itself.
Parker’s stolid figure stood framed in a ground-floor window of the courthouse. It was not seen to move.
On the stroke of the hour the condemned, escorted by deputies led by Marshal Fagan, shuttle-stopped their way from the jail, wrists shackled and irons on their ankles. They climbed the stairs and assumed their places on the paired planks of the trap, nooses stirring before them in the breeze from the river. Granade read aloud a pious statement dictated by John Whittington, the knife-murderer, then led the crowd in a hymn. Asked by Fagan if they had anything to say, only two of the men in shackles spoke: Boot-fancier Daniel Evans looked out over the crowd and said, “There are worse men here than me.” James Moore, the horse thief, said good-bye to an acquaintance in the audience. Maledon left his post to adjust the black caps and fuss with the nooses. When at length he was satisfied with their placement, he returned to the lever and pulled.
Dr. Du Val, standing beneath the platform, inspected the six men for pulses, waiting two minutes for each with watch in hand. At the end of the month he would collect two dollars per man for this service.
He nodded. The man in the window turned away.
The Branch and the Scaffold copyright © 2009 by Loren D. Estleman
Billy Gashade copyright © 1997 by Loren D. Estleman
