The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (23 page)

And so she told Dipley that nothing would make her happier than to be married to him, but there might be a slight problem. She had earlier told him she’d run away from her third husband, Osborne, because he beat her once too often, but, she now clarified, they were not yet divorced when she fled. She had assumed Osborne would file for divorce on grounds of abandonment, but what if he hadn’t? Bigamy was a serious crime. She could write to him and ask if they were divorced, but he was a vindictive man and
couldn’t be trusted to tell her the truth. She would have to write to the court clerk in Coffeyville to find out if a divorce decree was on record. If Osborne had not filed, she would have to do so herself.

“It might all take a while, darling,” she said, “but it will be worth it, so we can be married without any doubt over our head.”

He was not pleased by this turn but knew she was right. They had to ensure she was lawfully free to remarry. It was important to steer clear of any legal complication that might help the navy to find him.

All right, he said, for now they would just
say
they were husband and wife. They would be Walter and Goldie…Hurtz. He’d known a fellow in the navy by that name. Luckiest dice roller he’d ever seen. Besides, living together was sort of like being married too, wasn’t it? Married by the common law. Only not so it was bigamy.

How very true, she said, that was the way to look at it. The thing to do now, he said, was for both of them to get some kind of jobs and put aside some money. As soon as they could afford it they would go to Coffeyville and talk to the court clerk and see for themselves what was what with her divorce.

She patted his arm and said it was a fine plan. She said it was a comfort to be with a man who knew how to get things done.

“Stick with me, girl,” he said, “and you’ll go places.”

O
N
M
ONDAY AFTERNOON
a few days later, they presented themselves as man and wife in a Springfield employment office and interviewed with a Mr. Spears. In answer to the man’s questions, Walter Hurtz assured him that he was an able ranch hand with plenty of experience working in the fields, and Goldie Hurtz assured him she was indeed a good cook, if she did say so herself, and a first-rate housekeeper.

Spears excused himself and went into a glass-walled rear office and they saw him make a telephone call. Then he came back out and gave them directions to get to R. P. Dickerson’s office.

The interview with Dickerson was brief. He was pleased they were natives and therefore familiar with the region. He made clear the sort of help he was looking for on the ranch. He asked to see Walter Hurtz’s palms and seemed satisfied with their calluses. He asked Goldie Hurtz her recipe for fried chicken and she was but half-finished telling it to him when he flicked his hand dismissively and said, “Good enough, girl, good enough. Can’t wait to taste it. The job pays thirty a month plus room and board. You folks want it?”

“Sure do,” Walter said.

“Then it’s yours. We’ll go out to the ranch morning after tomorrow. Meet me at the depot. Train leaves at ten-forty-five sharp.”

“We’ll be there, Mr. Dickerson.”

“Call me colonel.”

D
ickerson was waiting for them when they got to the depot. He gave them their coach tickets and said he was riding in a different car. When the train reached Conway they were all to meet at the baggage carrier. He then went off to the smoking car, where Ketchel was already ensconced.

It was nearly noon when they pulled into Conway. Ketchel and Dickerson stepped down to the platform and the colonel pointed. “There they are.”

The couple was making their way toward them, the young man holding a valise in each hand, the woman carrying a smaller valise and a handbag.

“Fella seems fit enough,” the colonel said. “Got a good grip on
him. I always test that the first time I shake a man’s hand. I think he’ll do all right. Who in hell needs Bailey anyway?”

Ketchel’s attention was entirely on the woman. She wore no hat, her yellow hair knotted in a bun atop her head. As she came nearer he saw that she was pretty, her eyes gray.

The colonel introduced Walt and Goldie, and beamed as he told them, “And this fella here is none other than Stanley Ketchel, middleweight boxing champ of the world. He’ll be your boss.”

Dipley put down a valise and put out his hand. “Heard of you,” he said. Ketchel’s once-over and handshake were perfunctory.

Goldie had not heard of him, but she was entirely familiar with the way he looked at her. “A champion!” she said. “I’ve never met a champion before.”

“Let me help you with that,” Ketchel said, taking the valise.

“Why, thank you, kind sir.”

He told himself she could not possibly be the girl who’d smiled at him from a passing streetcar in San Francisco two summers ago, the girl whose face had come to him in the night so many times since. But she could have been her twin.

O
N THE RIDE
to the ranch he sat up front with the colonel, who drove and did most of the talking, and the girl and Hurtz sat in the rear seat. Ketchel intermittently glanced back at her as casually as he could, and she every time smiled at him.

During a pause in the colonel’s monologue, she asked, “Does your wife live on the ranch as well, Colonel Dickerson? Or at your home in Springfield?”

“Not married,” the colonel said. “Never had the good fortune to find the right woman like your man Hurtz here.”

“What about you, Mr. Ketchel?” she said. “Have you had such good fortune?”

He had a fleeting vision of Kate Morgan’s lovely face.

“Sorry to say I haven’t,” he said. And returned her smile.

When the carriage reined up in front of the house, the Baileys came out to meet the new couple. Dickerson and Ketchel took down their bags, and then Bailey drove Walt and Goldie to a cabin just the other side of the hollow, where they would be staying for the next two days until the Baileys had moved out of the ranch house and they could move in.

Ketchel did not see her again that day.

T
HE CABIN HAD
been stocked with canned goods and baking supplies. That evening, over a supper of beans and beef stew and biscuits, Goldie said they’d been lucky to get jobs at such a fine place.

Walt said the place was all right. There was no ignoring the pique in his voice, so she asked if something was bothering him. Was there was something about Colonel Dickerson he didn’t like?

“The colonel’s all right,” he said. “It’s just, well, that damn boxer sure thinks he’s something, don’t he? The way he looks at everybody like he’s so much better. So what he’s a champion? Just means he’s got a harder head than everybody else is all.”

She laughed as though he’d made a good joke, then leaned across the table to stroke his arm. “I bet he could crack walnuts on that hard head, huh? I bet he could use it for an anvil.”

“I bet,” Walt said. “But say, I wish you wouldn’t, well…be so damn
friendly
with him. I think he’s a wolf.”

She made a wry face and said, “Oh now, honey, I don’t think he
is, but don’t worry, I know how to handle wolves. Besides, he
is
our boss. I think we ought to try and get along with him, don’t you?” She squeezed his arm. “Listen, every time we think of something that hard head might be good for, we’ll save it up to tell each other when we’re alone.”

“Hell, we’ll be laughing to beat the band every night.”

She came around the table and took him by the hand and over to the bed and began to undress him. And took his mind off Mr. Stanley Ketchel.

Afterward, lying under the covers against the cool night, Walt snoring lightly beside her, she thought: You best play it mighty careful, girl.

But oh, did he give you the eye, this famous champion. This surely prosperous and famous champion.

Play your cards right and, well…who knows?

S
OMETIME IN THE
night she was jostled awake in darkness when Walt leaned over her to get at the lamp.

“What is it?” she said.

He struck a match and the walls quavered in the sudden flare of light.

“Jesus!” he yelled.

Hunched over the supper dishes she’d left on the table was a huge yellow rat. Its eyes flamed at them and then it streaked to the floor and vanished through a crack in the boards she wouldn’t have believed it could fit through.

T
HE COLONEL SPENT
the following morning attending to paperwork up in his quarters. He had pressing business in Springfield and would be departing for the Conway depot that afternoon, tak
ing Mrs. Bailey and Hilda in the carriage with him. He would check the women into a Springfield hotel for the next two nights. Bailey would arrive in Springfield on Saturday and they would leave for Kentucky on that evening’s train.

After putting Walt to work at finishing the paint job on the barn, Bailey packed his and his wife’s clothing and smaller belongings and put the bags in the carriage. The Hilda girl’s goods all fit into a single small suitcase. The bed and wardrobe in the dining room, both of which Bailey had crafted himself and which his wife meant to have in Kentucky, he would dismantle and take by wagon to Conway for shipment Saturday morning.

Mrs. Bailey kept Goldie occupied in the kitchen all morning, showing her where everything was stored, instructing her in the mealtime routines and the colonel’s favorite recipes, each of which was written on a small card and kept in a file box in the pantry. She lectured Goldie on the vagaries of the ice box and of the man who delivered the ice for it. She wrote down her usual shopping schedule in Conway and what supplies could be procured there, which things she could get only in Springfield.

The noon meal was a hectic affair, the colonel giving Ketchel last-minute instructions about things that had to be done in his absence, Bailey chiming in with any particulars that Dickerson left out and reminding him that a carpenter named Noland was coming from Conway on Saturday morning to finish a few interior details on the new barn. Also, another sharecropper family would be arriving in a few days, a little earlier than previously expected, and the house they would be living in was still in need of a cleanup and some minor repairs. If Ketchel lent him a hand, Bailey said, they could have the place ready by tomorrow afternoon. Ketchel said sure thing. As for Walt, he would be working with Brazeale for the
next week or two. Brazeale had agreed to plow an extra field in exchange for a better share of the next crop, but he needed help, and Dickerson had promised him Walt Hurtz. The colonel told Ketchel to just make sure Walt tended to the horses in the barn first thing every morning before going to Brazeale’s.

While the men ate and talked in the dining room, Ketchel caught glimpses of Goldie moving about in the kitchen as she worked with Mrs. Bailey. Only once did she look out the kitchen door just as he looked toward it. She smiled brightly and waggled her fingers. Then Mrs. Bailey was beside her and scowled from one of them to the other before drawing the girl out of his view.

A
FTER DINNER,
K
ETCHEL
went out to the shooting range beside the barn for his daily session, pushing a wheelbarrow full of empty bottles. The Colt was tucked in his waistband and the Remington .22 rifle the colonel had given him in Michigan was slung across his back. A week earlier he’d accidentally knocked the little rifle to the floor after giving it a cleaning and he had been intending to test the sights to be sure they had not been jarred out of alignment.

Walt was high on a ladder, brushing paint along the top of the barn wall, his paint bucket hung on a ladder hook. He paused in his work to watch as Ketchel wheeled the barrow up to the mound only a few yards from the foot of the ladder and transferred the bottles to the dirt slope, spacing them at various heights. His boots crunched on the broken glass of previous practice sessions.

“If you’re fixing to do some shooting,” Walt said, “hold on till I get out of the way.”

Ketchel looked up at him. “You wouldn’t be in the way unless you sat right in front of what I was shooting at.” He took up the barrow handles and started away from the mound.

Walt watched him a moment and then carefully set his brush across the mouth of the paint can and started down the rungs. About forty feet away Ketchel unslung the rifle and set it against the barrow, then faced the mound and drew the Colt.

“Wait a minute!” Walt called out. He was not halfway down the ladder.

Ketchel raised the Colt. Walt pressed himself tightly against the ladder and tried to make himself small as Ketchel fired six shots in steady succession, each one shattering glass.

In the kitchen Goldie’s heart heaved. “What’s that!”

“Mr. Ketchel killing bottles,” Mrs. Bailey said. “Kills him a bunch every day. Murders a whole lot of tin cans too. Now pay attention here, girl, to this pecan pie recipe. It’s nothing in the world the colonel likes better for dessert than pecan pie, but there’s a tricky part to this and you best get it right.”

Ketchel slipped the empty revolver back into his pants. Walt exhaled a long breath and swore softly, his heart shoving against his ribs.

Now Ketchel had the Remington to his shoulder. Walt again hugged the ladder hard and the first riflecrack sent a tin can flipping through the air. Ketchel continued shooting, whanging away one can after another. With one bullet left in the magazine, he worked the bolt and aimed up toward the barn roof.

Walt cringed and felt a great urge to urinate. “Oh, Jesus!”

Ketchel squeezed off the shot and the bullet rang on the weathercock atop the barn roof and set its arms spinning.

The Remington’s sights were fine.

While Ketchel reloaded the Colt, Walt scooted down the ladder and hastened to a spot well behind the firing line. Ketchel did not even look his way. After shooting up several more loads of .45 cartridges, he called it a day.

“You’re a pretty fair hand with that thing,” Walt said.

Ketchel’s glance seemed surprised, as if he’d forgotten Walt was there. He put the Colt in his waistband and slung the rifle over his shoulder and started rolling the wheelbarrow back to the shed behind the house.

Walt hurried up alongside him. “Say, Mr. Ketchel, could I borrow that rifle, you reckon?”

“Say what?”

Walt told him about the rat. “I figure with that rifle I might could pop him good if he shows again tonight.”

“Nothing nastier than a damn rat,” Ketchel said. “You know how to clean a rifle?”

“Sure I do.”

Ketchel handed him the Remington and Walt followed him back to the house, where he was left waiting at the kitchen door while Ketchel retrieved a handful of bullets and a cleaning kit.

A
S THE COLONEL
settled himself in the driver’s seat and took up the reins, all set to leave for Conway with Mrs. Bailey and Hilda, Ketchel told him not to worry, he could take care of things.

“Hell, son, if there’s anybody can take care of things, it’s you. I’m not worried.”

He hupped the team into motion and Mrs. Bailey once more waved so long. Bailey called out that he’d see her the day after tomorrow and he’d better not find her drunk and dancing on a saloon table, by God, and everybody laughed.

Goldie worked in the kitchen the remainder of the day, preparing supper for Ketchel and Bailey while they loaded the dismantled bed and wardrobe on a mule-drawn dray and took it down the
road to Brazeale’s house, where Bailey would spend his last two nights on the ranch.

Just before sundown, Walt finished the final brushstrokes on the barn. The plan had been for him and Goldie to move their things into the ranch house late that afternoon, including the cabin bed to replace the Baileys’ bed, but everything had fallen behind schedule and Ketchel said the move could wait until the next day. Walt said that would be a problem, since he would be in the field with Brazeale until almost dark. Ketchel said that was all right, he would help Mrs. Hurtz move their things to the house as soon as he was done helping Bailey clean up the tenant house.