The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (7 page)

By way of her answering letter, addressed to “S. Ketchel,” he came to learn there were no warrants for his arrest and never had been, as Thomas Kaicel was still among the living, albeit in chronic pain. He now spent the greater part of each day with a gin bottle, and it was left to Ketchel’s mother and his brother, John, to maintain the farm, toiling from dark to dark. Kaicel had lately taken to drinking at the taverns rather than at home, a variation she was glad of, as she much preferred to have him drunk at a distance than drunk in her parlor. She could not help wondering what Stanislaus was doing in such a remote reach as Montana and asked if he would return home now that he knew he was in no trouble with the law. As for changing his name to Ketchel, she only wished that by doing the same she could remove Thomas Kaicel from her life. She would not, however, then or ever after, address Ketchel as
“Steve” or even “Stanley,” not even on an envelope. To her he would always be Stanislaus.

He wrote back that he was employed in a gymnasium, but he would return to the farm if Kaicel were abusing her. He hoped the offer would comfort her, and hoped even more she would not take him up on it and force him to disappoint her. He was vastly relieved when her next letter admitted that although she was tempted to allege mistreatment in order to draw him home, she could not bring herself to deceive him. The fact of the matter, she said, was that Kaicel seemed to have lost all inclinations except for the demon rum, even his keenness for bullying. Still she hoped Stanislaus would at least come for a visit sometime soon, and she would continue to pray for his safety. She closed with the news that John had begun to court a lovely young neighbor girl named Rebeka Nelson.

H
E BOUGHT HIS
first suits and some candy-striped shirts, a stylish derby. Kate Morgan presented him with a pocket watch. She taught him the sartorial trick of wearing gray-green neckties to compliment his eyes. They took afternoon walks through town, hearing the screech and growls of the gallows frames, the whistles and clangor of the trains bearing ore to the smelters. Kate liked everything about summer in Butte except for the higher stink it raised from the scores of privies along the shantytown alleys at the bottom of the hill.

He had never seen so many cripples in one town. All of them former miners. Men with missing fingers, missing a hand, an arm. Faces disfigured with burn scars. Here and there an eye patch. It seemed half the people who worked in town had limps. One day he and Kate turned a corner and had to hop aside to avoid being
bowled over by a pair of legless men scooting side by side along the walkway on little roller platforms, arguing loudly whether Jeffries the Boilermaker was the equal of the Great John L. in his prime.

Everywhere in town they heard coughing. The “song of the mines,” Kate called it, although she herself had a chronic need to clear her throat and was sometimes taken by seizures of hacking that left her red-eyed and breathless and had permanently rasped her voice. The first time she had such a coughing fit in Ketchel’s presence, she said she guessed she better quit her job at the Neversweat mine before it killed her.

Almost all the downtown buildings were of brick or paintless stone and stained by smelter fumes. The surrounding mountains were black and gray, the hills streaked sickly yellow with tailings of ore. On good days the sky was the color of old tin, more often looked like a lid of dirt. The air was a tan haze and smelled of dirty pennies. A bird was a rare sight. Yet every Sunday that Ketchel and Kate rode the trolley to the Columbia Gardens at the edge of town to rent a rowboat on the lake and listen to the band concert and dance at the pavilion, the park was packed with happy crowds.

Sometimes he and Kate took dinner in the Finlen Hotel, which she informed him was the swankest to be found in all of the West between Denver and San Francisco. Sometimes they ventured into the sizable Chinatown to regard the Celestials and wonder at their catlike speech, the mysterious orthography of their signs and posters, the peculiar odors permeating the neighborhoods. They dined on fried rice and egg rolls and savory exotic dishes whose ingredient meats Kate advised him it was best not to inquire into, considering the rumors of what so often became of cats and dogs in Chinatown.

They attended the theater and delighted in the vaudeville acts,
in the comic skits and acrobatic dogs and jugglers and magicians. At the Broadway he saw his first moving picture, a short film featuring a locomotive that sped head-on toward the camera and sent spectators scrambling from their seats to get out of its way. When
The Great Train Robbery
came to town the theater was packed every night, and Ketchel was hardly the only one who attended its every showing. No dime novel he’d ever read roused such vivid images in his head as were projected onto the white sheet screen for twelve thrilling minutes. At the end, when one of the outlaws pointed his six-shooter at the audience, some among them gasped and Ketchel felt the room’s collective cringe, and when the gun discharged with a puff of smoke he flinched too. Even on subsequent viewings, each time he stared into the bore of the bandit’s revolver he felt the same exhilarating dread.

A few days after the movie left town, he looked into the muzzle of an actual pistol, cocked and aimed at him across a span of some ten feet as the crowd in the Copper Queen parted from the line of fire. It was the first time a real gun had ever been pointed at him, and yet the situation felt somehow familiar. The man with the gun was a miner with a grievance regarding a dance girl but perhaps was neither so cold-blooded nor so drunk as to be oblivious to the consequence of murder. Maybe that was why he hesitated to pull the trigger. Or maybe it was simply a paralyzing disbelief as Ketchel walked up to him without a word or blink and snatched the gun aside so abruptly the man inadvertently squeezed off a round through the front window and into the side of a passing dry goods wagon. Ketchel wrenched the gun from his grasp and backhanded him with it, opening his cheek to the bone and knocking him to his knees. Then dragged him by the collar to the door and slung him into the street.

The ejected miner never returned nor made claim for his six-shooter, so Ketchel kept it. A single-action .45-caliber Frontier model Colt. And Kate Morgan, who’d grown up the only girl among five brothers on the family ranch and learned much about guns from an early age, taught him how to shoot it.

They went to the garbage dump outside of town and fired upon numberless cans and bottles. He was elated to discover he had a knack, and he laughed like a happy child when she called him a natural-born deadeye. He stood poised with the gun tucked in his waistband and stared narrowly at an empty bottle of James E. Pepper whiskey atop an empty oil drum and said with low menace: “I told you this town wasn’t big enough for both of us, Bad Jim.” Then yanked out the Colt and fired, reducing the hapless Bad Jim Pepper to shattered glass.

“I’m Jesse James!” he shouted. “I’m Bob Dalton!”

“Yes, yes, you are!” Kate happily yelled.

A rat emerged from a pile of scrap and rose on its hind legs as if to have a better look at the cause of all this clamor. Kate spotted it. “Bushwhacker on your right, Jesse!”

Ketchel whirled and fired at it and missed, the bullet ringing off a rusted axle. The rat remained upright and staring. It had been shot at more times than Ketchel could know and it had grown confident in its long experience with poor marksmanship. It twitched its whiskers.

“Bedamn if the rascal’s not funning you,” Kate said.

The rat turned and started to walk away in no hurry at all. Ketchel shot it and it went tumbling and then lay spasming until he stepped closer and with his next bullet removed half its head.

“I guess he’ll think twice before giving you the razz again,” Kate said. Then saw Ketchel’s face. “What?”

“Ah, hell. That was lowdown.”

“What was?”

“Shooting him in the back.”

She put a hand over her smile.

He said, “I’m serious.”

She laughed so hard she lapsed into a spell of coughing.

The first time he went out on the streets with the gun tucked in his waistband under his coat flap, he wore a new pair of tooled cowboy boots and a boss-of-the-plains hat pulled low over his eyes. Kate held close to his arm and whispered, “Now I know how Wild Bill’s woman felt.”

And he smiled a crooked smile in the manner of the storied pistoleers he idolized.

H
E FINISHED OFF
Kid McGuire in the final minute of the first round, the knockout punch snapping McGuire’s head sideways with such force he would have to wear a neck brace for the next two weeks. A week later he fought Kid Leroy and the only time this Kid touched him was when they shook hands at the opening bell. Ketchel then belabored him for a half-minute before landing one to the stomach that doubled Leroy over and clubbing him behind the ear to end it.

Thompson rebuked him after both matches for continuing to fight like a hooligan.

“Christ’s sake, Reece,” Ketchel said, “I bet most managers are
glad
when their guy wins.”

Only two days after the Leroy bout he substituted for an injured fighter against an opponent named Young Gilsey. He forced himself to box, to jab and sidle, to circle his opponent, to exercise finesse rather than simply whale away. He reaped praise from Reece
and Mickey as they tended him between rounds. “You see? You can do it,” Thompson said. “Never said I couldn’t,” Ketchel said. But then in the fourth Gilsey connected with a hook to the eye that made Ketchel wince and he retaliated like a man amok. Twenty seconds later Gilsey went down for the count. Ketchel ignored Thompson’s reproving glare and raised a fist high in appreciation of the crowd’s acclaim.

He fought twice in September, knocking out tough Bob Merrywell in four rounds and then dropping Jimmy Murray in three. The day before the Murray fight, Kate baked him a chocolate cake in Miss Juno’s oven and put eighteen flaming candles on it and sang “Happy Birthday.” As a present, she gave him a shoulder holster for the Colt.

In October he fought a rematch with Merrywell, a free-swinging affair that had the crammed arena howling with excitement from the opening bell and ended with Merrywell crashing to the canvas unconscious in the middle of round three. Yet Thompson was so displeased with Ketchel’s persistence in his alley style of fighting that he matched himself against him again, a ten-rounder this time, telling Ketchel he needed another firsthand boxing lesson. Ketchel shrugged and said, “Sure thing, Reece,” secretly certain that this time he would knock Thompson silly. But once again he was frustrated by Thompson’s style of fighting in constant retreat and only sporadically closing in to score with quick jabs before again scooting out of Ketchel’s range. As before, Thompson was steadily booed for refusing to slug it out, but as before, he won the decision. And believed he had made his point. “I keep proving it to you, kid, a slugger can’t beat a boxer. When you gonna start doing like I say?”

During the next two months he had four fights and won them
all by knockout. One of the bouts was in Miles City and one in Lewiston, his first fights outside of Butte. His reputation was spreading throughout Montana.

But he continued to fight without discipline, and Thompson continued to disparage him for a clumsy brawler. “You still don’t get it, do you? I guess you just ain’t
smart
enough to get it.”

That Thompson truly believed such mockery would serve good purpose merely underscored his misunderstanding of Stanley Ketchel’s nature. Ketchel veiled his anger with an expression of sincerity and said he knew he’d been a disappointment, but he thought he was starting to catch on. “Don’t quit on me, Reece. Let’s go another ten rounds, you and me. I’ll show you I can box.”

Thompson said okay, one last time, but only on two conditions. If both of them were still on their feet at the end of the fight it would be declared a draw, because he did not want to add another loss to Ketchel’s record. Plus, Ketchel had to promise that if he didn’t win this time he would henceforth fight
exactly
as Thompson instructed him to.

Ketchel said they had a deal.

As Thompson expected, the fight went the distance and was ruled a draw. He had not, however, expected to confront such a disciplined display of boxing skill. Had not expected the jarring Ketchel jab that countered every jab of his own. Nor the nimble Ketchel footwork that repeatedly worked him into the corners or against the ropes where Ketchel each time rocked him with punches before he could manage to escape. The more seasoned observers in the crowd could tell that Ketchel was letting him off the hook each time, that he was not so much interested in scoring a knockout as in giving the man a thrashing. Thompson went down at least once in every round. He was unrecognizable at the final bell but was
cheered for his fortitude. An unmarked Ketchel congratulated him on avoiding a knockout and then fired him as his manager.

Stanley Ketchel would have sixty-four fights of record and lose only four, and it is one of the quirks of boxing history that two of those losses were to Maurice Thompson, the only two bouts Thompson ever won in a total of eight professional matches.

H
IS MOTHER WROTE
to announce John’s Christmas Day marriage to Rebeka. The newlyweds would live with her on the farm. She was happy to report that Rebeka was as strong and industrious as she was pretty and kind. Kaicel’s opinion of the marriage was unknown for the simple reason that he had been missing for more than a month. He’d sometimes been absent for a few days at a time, but when he still hadn’t shown up or sent word in almost two weeks, she had dispatched John to Grand Rapids to make inquiry at the police station and at the hospital. He even asked about him in all of the taverns on the road between town and the farm. But no one knew where he had gone. Her keenest fear was that, despite her hopes and prayers, the man might yet return.

Ketchel was delighted to learn of John’s marriage, and Kate contracted his high spirits. They celebrated the wedding that night along with the arrival of the New Year.