The Ox-Bow Incident (12 page)

One skinny old man in a blue work shirt, with his galluses out over it, and with a narrow, big-nosed head and his gray hair rumpled up so he looked like a rooster, was peering hard through his spectacles, and exclaiming furiously when a rider showed. A little old woman, as skinny and stooped and chickenlike as he was, was trying to keep him from going any farther. When he saw me he stared at me wildly. He had big eyes, anyway, and they were twice as big through those glasses.

“You goin’?” he rasped at me, shaking his stick at the corner.

“John, John,” the old lady clucked, “it don’t do for you to go gettin’ excited.”

“I ain’t excited,” the old man twittered, pounding his stick on the road, “I ain’t excited; I’m jest plumb disgusted.”

I’d stopped because he’d caught hold of my shirtsleeve.

“You’re goin’, ain’t you?” he threatened me again.

“It looks like it, dad,” I said.

He didn’t like my answer.

“Looks like it?” he crowed. “Looks like it? Well, I guess it better look like it. What kinda stuff you boys made of these days?

“You know how long they been dandlin’ around down there?” He jabbed his stick at the corner again.

“They got to get information yet,” I told him.

“More’n half an hour, that’s what, more’n half an hour already. Half an hour since I seen how they was lallygaggin’ around and started timin’ them,” he said triumphantly, hauling a big, thick turnip out of his pocket and rapping it with the forefinger of the hand that had the cane in it. He glared up at me with those big eyes.

“An’ God knows how long before that; God only knows. Looks like,” he cackled scornfully.

“John,” the old woman protested, “the young man don’t even know us.”

“An’ a good job fer him he don’t,” the old man told her.

He was still hanging onto me.

“You know those men that was killed?” he asked me.

“There was only one.”

“Only one. There was three. Three of Drew’s men was killed. Another one of ’em just told me so. And they gotta get information.” He spit off to the side.

My face was getting hot. I didn’t like to just yank my arm away from an old man like that, but people along the street were beginning to look at us instead of the show down at the corner. They weren’t having any trouble hearing the old man either.

“There’s no great rush,” I told him, sharp. “They got four or five hours’ start already.”

“No hurry,” he said, but not so loud, and let go of my shirt. “Chee-rist,” he boiled again, “five hours’ start and no hurry. That’s sense now, ain’t it? I s’pose if they had ten hours’ start you’d jest set to home and wait fer ’em.

“You get on down there,” he ordered, when I’d started on anyway. He trotted after me two or three steps, cackling, “Get a move on,” and gave me a rap across the seat with his stick.

I didn’t look around, but could still hear him, “No hurry, Chee-rist, no hurry,” and his wife trying to gentle him down.

I was pretty hot, the way you get when old people or sick people or smart kids talk up to you and make you look foolish because they know you won’t do anything, or even say much. I rolled myself a cigarette as I went along, and at the corner stopped and lit it and sucked in a couple to get hold of myself. But one thing I did see. If that old cackler who didn’t even have the facts straight could heat me up when I knew he was wrong, then a lot of these men must be fixed so that nothing could turn them off unless it could save their faces. The women were as stirred up as the men,
and though a lot of them would have been glad if they could keep their own men out of it, that didn’t make any difference. When a man’s put on his grim business face, and hauled out a gun he maybe hasn’t used for years, except for jack rabbits, he doesn’t want to go back without a good excuse. And there were people along the walks now, too, a few old men, and a good many women and excited small boys, some of the women holding smaller children by the hands to keep them from getting out where the horses were. That meant an audience that had to be played up to from the start.

In the edge of the street opposite Canby’s, where things were thickest, I saw a little fellow no bigger than the one that had been crying because her mother and father were arguing. He was barefooted, and had on patched overalls, and had a big head of curls bleached nearly white. He was all eyes for what was going on, and stood there squirming his toes on the hard mud without a notion where he was. I didn’t see any other kid as small who wasn’t attached, so I figured he must be Tommy.

“Young fellow, your mother’s looking for you,” I told him.

He said for me to look at the horsies, and explained something pretty lengthy, which I couldn’t rightly follow, about the guns. It was too bad to spoil his big time, but he was in a bad place. I put on a hard face, and put it right down close to him, and said, “Tommy, you git for home,” and switched him around and patted him on the pants, saying, “Git now,” again. I guess I overdid it, because he backed as far as the boardwalk, looking at me all the time, and stopped there, and then his face gathered in a pucker toward his nose and he burst out bawling. I started toward him to ease it off a little, but when he saw me coming he let out a still louder wail and lit out for the corner. He slowed down there, and looked back a couple of times, digging at his eyes, but then went on out of sight up the cross street at a little half-jog that I figured was going to take him all the
way. Well, I probably wouldn’t ever have to see that woman again, anyway.

When I got across the street to Davies, he was done talking to Joyce, and was standing there staring blankly at the men, his face tired as it had been after the talk in the bar, but the jaw muscles still bulging.

“Bartlett not back yet?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Wonder what’s holding him?” I said.

He shook his head again.

“I’m sorry about Risley,” I said, “but I think the Judge will come.”

He nodded. Then he brought his eyes back to see me, and smiled a little.

“There wasn’t anything else you could do,” he said. “Maybe there isn’t anything any of us can do. They’ve made a show out of it now.”

I saw I didn’t have to tell him anything about that.

“Yeh,” I said, looking at the riders in the street too. And there was a change in them. Farnley was still sitting there with no change but a tighter bridle hand, and three or four others, one of them Gil, were still standing at Canby’s tie rail. But the rest of them, what with the wait, and the women standing on the walk watching them, looked as grim as ever, but not quite honest. There was a lot of playacting in it now, passing pretty hard jokes without much point to them, and having more trouble with the horses than they had to.

“They’d be willing to quit if it was dark,” I said.

He smiled a little, but shook his head again.

“Well, they’d go orderly pretty easy,” I suggested.

“They might do that,” he admitted.

I told him what I’d told the Judge about their having to go by Drew’s anyway.

“You could get them to promise to pick Risley up, and he’d take care of it.”

He considered that and nodded more vigorously. He thought it was a clincher too.

“It’s queer what simple things you don’t think of when you’re excited,” he said. “There’s a simple little thing, and it’s the whole answer.”

Then he added, “We’ll have to let the Judge tell them, though. They wouldn’t dare listen to me.”

I looked at him. He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t care who does it.”

He went on as if he was thinking it farther to himself. “Yes, that will do it.”

Then, “Thank you. I know it was a hard place for you.”

I didn’t see why he felt as sure as all that about it, but I was glad he thought it cleared me.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Glad to do it. But the way things are, that’ll have to be my stake to you.”

He looked at me with those eyes full of questions too. I thought maybe he’d get rid of them, that being more his way than Canby’s. But he didn’t get the chance if he was going to. Smith, being tight and bored, and having a crowd, picked this time to play the clown again. He got everybody’s attention, which wasn’t on much, by picking on Gabe Hart’s one meanness. He called out from the steps to the bar.

“Coming along, Sparks?” he called, so the men grinned, finding that old joke funny about a nigger always being easy to scare. I hadn’t noticed Sparks, but I saw him now, standing on the other side of the street with that constant look of his of pleasant but not very happy astonishment.

Sparks was a queer, slow, careful nigger, who got his living as a sort of general handy man to the village, splitting wood, shoveling snow, raking leaves, things like that; even baby tending, and slept around wherever was handiest to the jobs, in sheds or attics, though he had a sort of little shack he called his own out in the tall weeds behind the boarded-up church. He was a tall, stooped, thin,
chocolate-colored man, with kinky hair, gray as if powdered, and big, limp hands and feet. When he talked his deep, easy voice always sounded anxious to please, slow but cheerful, but when he sang, which he did about most any work which had a regular rhythm, like sweeping or raking, he sang only slow, unhappy hymn tunes. He was anything but a fast worker, but he did things up thorough and neat, and he was honest to the bone, and the cleanest nigger I ever knew. He wore dungarees and a blue shirt, always like they’d just been washed, and his palms were clean tan, and clean steelblue where they met the skin from the backs of his hands. He had a dry, clean, powdered look all over all the time. It was said that he’d been a minister back in Ohio before he came west, but he didn’t talk about himself, outside of what he was doing right at the time, so nobody really knew anything about him, but they all liked him all right, and there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t trust him with. They made jokes about him and to him, but friendly ones, the sort they might make to any town character who was gentle and could take joking right.

When the men grinned they all looked across at Sparks. He was embarrassed.

“No, suh, Mistah Smith, ah don’t guess so,” he said, shaking his head but smiling to show he wasn’t offended.

“You better come, Sparks,” Smith yelled again. “It ain’t every day we get a hanging in a town as dead as this one.”

The men stopped grinning. They didn’t mind Smith joking Sparks, but that offended their present sense of indecision and secrecy. It seemed wrong to yell about a lynching. I felt it too, that someone might be listening who shouldn’t hear; and that in spite of the fact that everybody in town knew.

Smith saw he’d made a mistake. When Sparks continued to look down and smile and shake his head, he yelled, “You ain’t afraid, is yoh, Spahks,” badly imitating Spark’s drawl. “Not of a little thing like this,” he cried in his own
voice again. “You don’t have to do anything, you know. The real work is all signed up. But I thought maybe we ought to have a reverend along. There’ll be some praying to do, and maybe we ought to have a hymn or two afterward, to kind of cheer us up. You do know the cheerfullest hymns, Sparks.”

The men laughed again, and Smith was emboldened.

“That is,” he said loudly, “unless Mr. Osgood here is going along. He has first call, of course, being in practice.”

“I’m not going, if it interests you,” Osgood said, with surprising sharpness for him. “If you men choose to act in violence, and with no more recognition of what you’re doing than this levity implies, I wash my hands. Willful murderers are not company for a Christian.”

That stung, but not usefully. A bawling out from a man like Osgood doesn’t sit well. Some of the men still grinned a little, but the sour way.

“I was afraid the shepherd would feel his flock was a bit too far astray for him to risk herding them this time,” Smith lamented. Osgood was hit, and looked it. He knew the men tolerated him at best, and the knowledge, even when he could delude himself into believing it private, made it doubly difficult for him to keep trying to win them. Sometimes, as now, he was even pitiable. But he had an incurable gift of robbing himself even of pity. After a moment he answered, “I am sorry for you, all of you.”

“Don’t cry, parson,” Smith warned him. “We’ll do the best we can without you.

“I guess it’s up to you, Sparks,” he yelled.

Sparks surprised us. “Maybe it is, Mistah Smith,” he said seriously. “Somebody ought to go along that feels the way Mistah Osgood and ah do; beggin’ yoh pahdon, Mistah Osgood. If he don’ feel it’s raght foh him to go, it looks lahk ah’m the onlay one laift.”

This unassuming conviction of duty, and its implication of distinct right and wrong, was not funny.

Quickly Smith struggled. “Maybe Mr. Osgood will lend
you his Bible, Sparks, so’s we can have the right kind of reading at the burial.”

This was partially successful. Osgood was obviously offended to be so freely talked of by Smith, and perhaps even to have his name coupled with Sparks’. And everyone knew Sparks couldn’t read.

“You will lend him your Book, won’t you, Reverend,” Smith asked Osgood. He had no sense for the end of a joke. Osgood had the thick, pale kind of skin that can’t get red, so he got whiter, and was trembling a little.

Sparks came across the street in his slow, dragging gait. He didn’t swing his arms when he walked, but let them hang down as if he had a pail of water in each hand.

When he was close enough to talk more quietly, he said, “No, thank you, Mistah Osgood,” and turning to Smith told him, “Ah knows mah text to pray without the Book, Mistah Smith.

“But ah’m a slow walkah,” he said, smiling especially at Winder, “you wouldn’t have anothah mule ah could borrow, would you, Mistah Winder?”

Winder didn’t know what to say, knowing it was still a joke except to Sparks.

Smith said, “Sure he would, Sparks. Gabe, you just trot back and get the Reverend a good saddle mule, will you? An easy one, mind; he ain’t much padded.”

The men were quiet.

Finally, Winder said, “Your mouth’s too damn loose, Smith.”

“I’m talking to Gabe,” Smith said, but avoided Winder’s stare.