The Last Crossing (7 page)

CUSTIS STRAW
Here I am, caught watering the haystack out back of the livery stable, a pistol at my ear. The cold touch of gunmetal kicks my trickle into a roaring freshet. Fear does wonders for a man’s pisser.

“Steady now, Mr. Straw. Finish your business and then tuck it away.”

I’d know that bullfrog voice anywhere. “Why, Sheriff Hinckey, I never knew you to be so enterprising. Road agent is a step up from your usual – picking the pockets of drunks you find in the street.”

“Hold your sauce, Straw.”

“I’ll hold my sauce when you take that revolver off me. I don’t exercise my right to bear arms. I might piss on your boots, but I’m not equipped to shoot you.”

“Come along.”

“Where?”

“Justice of the Peace Daniels is waiting on you in the jail.”

“I’m arrested?”

No answer, he just waits for me to stow my peter, gives me a bunt with the gun barrel, and commences marching me right down the main pike, Front Street, busiest thoroughfare in Fort Benton. Hinckey’s got a goodly audience this morning to troop me by, what with a mule-train forming up outside T. C. Powers’s establishment, all the skinners propped against their wagons, gulping a breakfast of cornbread.
“Here!” one of them hollers. “What’s Straw done? You catch him pinching Bibles, Sheriff?”

I holler back, “I’m being hauled in for voting Republican, boys!” That old conniver, Justice Daniels, would certain like to see that made a capital crime. Whole damn town’s full of Southerners, all of them swearing he was a colonel in the war, proprietor of a plantation with five, six, seven hundred happy Negroes. Nothing but cracker liars who counted themselves lucky to own a mule before the war. Pitiful stories way too big for their sorry selves.

The old adobe jail’s directly ahead, run down and crumbly from rain and neglect. Sheriff Hinckey and Justice Daniels stint on the repairs because they don’t believe the county ought to be burdened with neither its upkeep nor the expense of feeding prisoners. Anybody commits a felony that isn’t a hanging offence, they just run them over the Choteau County line. Good riddance to bad rubbish. They hold on to murderers when they can, which isn’t often. A hanging draws a big crowd and is good for business.

“Get in there!” Hinckey barks, ramming me through the door.

Willard Daniels, spiffy in an old claw-hammer coat, is sitting behind a battered rolltop desk, peeling an apple. He doesn’t look up, just watches the skin peel off the pippin like a red scarf unwinding.

“Here he is. I brung him,” Hinckey announces grandly, looking to get his head patted.

Mr. Justice lifts his yellow eyes to me.

“That’s right,” I say. “Rover fetched me, but being a dog he can’t say why.”

Old Daniels likes to play gentleman, Southern-variety. He’s wearing a white shirt with ratty ruffles like weeviled-out cotton bolls all down its front, a shirt so threadbare you can see his nipples right through the cloth, brown as pennies. He sets the apple down on a sheet of paper, snaps shut the penknife, wipes his fingers on the sleeve of his coat, and says, “Show him, Hinckey. Show Mr. Straw why he’s been brought.”

Hinckey starts for a dark corner, tiptoeing in his boots. I follow the high-stepping, chicken-gaited fool with my eyes. Then I spot it, a
small body lying covered by a blanket. I make out one pale foot peeking out from underneath, the other wearing a man’s brogan. I glance at Daniels. The old man licks his thin lips, nods to Hinckey, and the Sheriff sweeps the blanket off the corpse.

Jesus Christ Almighty. Poor little Marjorie Dray in a homespun dress, sorrel hair fanned out, bits of dried grass and twigs tangled in her curls, a belt pulled tight around her throat. She’s bitten her bottom lip clean through.

I have to steady myself against the sight, lean on Daniels’s desk, breathing like I aim to suck up all the air in the room. Daniels touches my hand with a cold palm. “That ain’t all,” he says. “Let Mr. Straw see the rest.”

Hinckey lifts the hem of Madge’s dress over jutting hip bones. There’s streaks of rusty blood, blisters of dried spunk on her thin thighs, a skimpy patch of russet hair. I have to shut my eyes. Daniels’s voice presses on me out of the darkness. “She been trifled with, Mr. Straw.”

“Goddamn it, cover her up!”

“Do as Mr. Straw says, Sheriff.”

Dizziness forces me to open my eyes before I topple over. Daniels grins nastily. “Who do you figure for such a terrible deed, Mr. Straw?” he asks.

“How the hell do I know?”

“You was seen with her last night.”

It’s an accusation, but I can’t find the words to answer it, not with little Madge lying so. Hinckey’s only pulled the blanket up to her shoulders. The sight of those teeth clamped cruelly through her lip, the belt that choked the life out of Madge Dray – I can’t bear to look upon it. “Take that belt off her.”

“No, sir. I ain’t going to meddle with evidence.”

I move fast, drop to my knees, tear at the belt, rock up on my feet to see the old man with a hand held up to warn Sheriff Hinckey off from interfering with me. The belt is cold in my hand, clammy as the dead flesh I just touched.

Daniels props a boot up on his desk, resumes in an easy, cheerful voice. “Word is you escorted her to that show last night on the
riverboat. Had her on your arm. Little wash girl who laundered your stockings and shirts, handkerchiefs and dirty underdrawers, you took her out for a night on the town. Seeing her brother-in-law’s away doing business, maybe you thought – cat’s away, the mice will play.”

“Yessir,” agrees Hinckey. “Mr. Abner Stoveall goes off to sell whisky to British Indians, nigger crawls out the woodpile.”

“Crawls out,” Daniels adds, with a nasty curl of the lip, “to have some fresh, sweet cherry pie.”

“Keep that talk to yourself, you filthy old hog.” My words sound righteous, stiff, maybe like a man playing innocent. Somebody with something to hide.

Daniels’s voice grows stronger, buttery confident. “Man your age puts his eye on a young gal like that – thirteen, fourteen year old-most times he don’t sashay about with her. Don’t want to look unseemly.” Daniels pauses. “Besotted is a danger, Mr. Straw. It’s maggots in the brain. You ought to have asked for her hand. Better to do the decent thing.” Daniels starts quartering the apple, precise as a watchmaker. “Maybe you and Miz Stoveall had an understanding about her baby sister. Was that how it was, Mr. Straw? Miz Stoveall forced to take up pimping after her husband left her high and dry?” He spears a section of apple with the penknife, pops it in his mouth, chews wetly, noisily.

“You don’t know Lucy Stoveall if you think that. She’s an upright woman.”

“Well, I’m puzzled because this morning when the body was found in that alley between the Four Aces and the livery – just off Front Street where you and Madge was seen watching the boys haul Madame Magique around in that wagon …” Cagy old bastard waits to see if I have anything to say about what he’s suggesting. I don’t. Won’t give him the satisfaction. “Well, Hinckey here went to fetch Lucy Stoveall out of her wagon, but Miz Stoveall wouldn’t come. She let it drop she had business out at your ranch. Now why is it you’re the first person she wants to see after terrible news like she received this morning?” He tilts his head to one side, cocks a curious magpie eye at me.

“I don’t know why she would head for my ranch. I keep a room at the Stubhorn.”

“Maybe she thought you to be doing an honest day’s work for once,” Daniels says. “Don’t you think it strange you don’t know what she wants with you, Straw?”

“I’m no judge of strange.”

“Hell, you ask me, you set the standard for it. Everybody knows you’re peculiar. You fuck her dead or alive, Straw?” For a moment, I think to hit him, but I hold myself steady, stare back.

Daniels is eyeing me like a cat ready to pounce. “I see you ain’t wearing a belt, Mr. Straw.”

“I’m a suspenders man.” I draw my coat back to show him my red galluses.

“Put the belt on, Mr. Straw,” Daniels orders me.

There it is, forgotten in my hand. I slip it around my waist. The tongue of the buckle has to notch in the last punch hole, the one nearest the tip of the tongue, three down from the one showing the wear of use. “If the shoe fits wear it,” I say to him. “The shoe doesn’t fit, Daniels. Look for yourself.”

“Maybe there was two of you. Maybe you had a accomplice. Maybe that piece of leather belongs to him.”

This is so stupid that he’s got to believe what he’s saying, which means he didn’t haul me in here just to humiliate or harass me.

“If that’s all you’ve got, I’ll be gone.”

“I got more. Sheriff Hinckey told me that when that Stoveall woman headed off to your property she went with a big old horse pistol. Maybe she’s got a reason to shoot you.”

“You best ask her.” I turn to leave.

“I will. And until I get an answer I’m putting you under protective custody. Lock you up until we get to the bottom of this.”

I swing back on him. “In a pig’s eye you’re putting me in custody!”

“No? What’s going to stop me?”

“Writ of habeas corpus.”

Daniels scrapes the sole of his boot off the edge of the desk, hoists himself out of the chair. There’s banked fire flickering behind the
scum of cataract on his eyes. “Don’t you trot no dog Latin at me. I read law for a year with a lawyer in Kentucky. How you think I got this job?”

“You got the job because the great Party of the Democracy doesn’t count many hereabouts that know how to read and write.”

“If I was a considerate man I’d scrub my arse before you kiss it,” says Daniels. “But I ain’t.” He yanks a stubby parlour gun from his back pocket, holds it up in my face to admire its nickel-plate finish and gutta-percha grip, then slashes me across the mouth with the butt. His blow’s an old man’s, abrupt and jerky, not much pop to it, it’s mostly the surprise of it that staggers me. I wipe blood from my lips. “You son of a bitch.”

Daniels strokes the ruffles on his shirt front, gestures with the pistol. “Let me enlighten you, Mr. Straw. Habeas corpus. It is the Latin for ‘you must have the body,’ if I remember my Blackstone. And you have the body, Straw,” he says, poking the pistol barrel at little Marjorie Dray. “I have produced it.” He levels the tiny pistol in my face. “That is my reading of the Latin in this case. Do you dispute it?”

I spit blood on the packed-dirt floor.

“If you press me again, Mr. Straw, I shall have
you
for a habeas corpus. Do you understand
my
Latinity, sir?”

“I do. If nothing else, we’re clear on that.”

LUCY STOVEALL
You come awake and it’s all a blur. Then the buggy wheel in your mind takes a turn, stops dead on that same spot it’s been coming to rest on since the bad news, and everything clicks sharp. You see little yellow and pink flowers on low-growth cactus, crumbs of sand under your nose scurrying with red ants.

My baby sister is dead. Madge is dead.

I laid down on this knoll to spy out the lie of the land, but my mind flew off into blackness. No sleep last night after I found Madge’s bed empty. Wondering where she had gone, I walked the streets, then sat waiting for her to come back, kept the lantern
burning for the traveller lost in the blizzard. Sweet Madge wasn’t a girl to run off. Still wide-eyed awake when Sheriff Hinckey rode up to our wagon. The look on his face, I knew deep down in my heart he only had dreadfulness to announce.

The Sheriff couldn’t stop me from lighting out. My mind was set on this. Rightfully it’s man’s business, but I want the Kelso brothers for myself. After I’m done with them, the law can do with me what they please. That’s all I had in my mind, covering three mile this morning from town, running and walking, gunny sack banging against my leg like the devil’s fist. Nothing but the Kelsos. Wailed the whole way, wailed like a Virginia nigger sold to Alabama, never stopped until I came up here on Straw’s ranch, spotted that soddie where his kin, that scum he hired to ride herd on his horses, squat. Then I had to stick my hand in my mouth so’s to break off my lamenting, so’s not to give warning.

It’s quiet now but for the hum of bugs, the dry scratch of wind in the bunchgrass. Sun laying on my shoulders hot as a stove lid. Nothing shows below, no smoke rising from the tin chimney of the soddie, no Joel and Titus Kelso to be seen about, just Straw’s remuda drifting about the brown plain. Mustangs in the corral half-asleep, heads hanging in the heat, lazy tails switching flies.

My poke bonnet’s gone, don’t know where, but I still got my sack, clutched it so tight while I slept my fingers went stiff. All I got to do now is stand and that buggy wheel in my mind will turn, roll me down the hill past the corral, roll me right to the door of that soddie with the weeds growing out the roof, roll me right up to those slumpy walls, that window winking in the sun like a crazy man’s eye.

Go down, Lucy Stoveall.

The horses come crowding to the corral rails, nicker friendly as I pass. I stop dead, wondering if the sound will raise the Kelsos. Then I remember the big Navy Colt is still in the gunny sack. I drag it out. Long as my forearm, the heavy barrel takes a dive for the ground like a dowsing wand. A scorcher breeze peels a mist of dust off the yard, throws it in my teeth. Rusty hammer won’t cock, both thumbs pressing hard and it won’t set. Then it grinds, clicks into place.