Winding Stair (9781101559239) (35 page)

“Would you explain your involvement in the cause now in hearing?” McRoy asked.

“Yes. I was retained by your law firm, Mr. McRoy, to go into Creek Nation and search the premises of a farm occupied by two of these defendants, Nason Grube and Skitty Cornkiller.”

“Did you find anything of evidentiary value?”

“We found a bill of sale for two horses. It was stuck behind a calendar tacked to the kitchen wall. I suppose it was a kitchen. There was a cookstove in there.”

I tried to picture in my mind the Cornkiller farm, but too many other images intervened. I could recall nothing tacked to the walls of the kitchen except a page from a
Police Gazette,
an engraving of a woman trapeze artist. McRoy was passing the slip of paper to the witness.

“This is the paper,” Fentress said.

“Would you describe the signature?”

“Yes, it's a drawing. The whole thing is done in pencil, and there's no proper signature. Only a drawing of what appears to be a deer's head, with antlers.”

There was a grumble of sudden conversation in the crowd and Judge Parker slammed the bench with his hand. McRoy asked once more that the bill of sale be entered in evidence, and over Evans's fuming about theatrics. Judge Parker allowed it. Fentress was excused and once more Nason Gtube was on the stand, hands tightly held between his knees.

“Nason,” McRoy said, “have you ever killed anyone?”

“Never in my life. No, sir.”

“Nason, when was the last time you knew a woman?”

For a moment, Nason Grube sat silent, his fingers twitching. He drew a deep breath and swallowed, and I could not help feeling sorry for him.

“Mr. McRoy, I don't remember. It's been a long time ago.”

“Nason, have you ever raped anyone?”

“God is my witness, Mr. McRoy, I ain't ever done that.”

“Now, Nason, you know that you are testifying here under oath and that in God's name you have sworn to tell the truth—”

“For heaven's sake, Your Honor,” Evans shouted.

“All right, all right,” Parker said, waving Evans back into his seat. “Get on with it, Mr. McRoy.”

“Nason, have you ever been in the Choctaw Nation?”

“No, sir, never in my life.”

Evans was across the room in a headlong rush to begin his cross-examination. He grabbed the Texas pearl hat from the railing before the jury and waved it under Nason Grube's nose. Grube drew back quickly, his eyes going wide.

“You were arrested with this hat on your head,” Evans said, and his voice shook with intensity. “Where did you get it?”

“Mr. Cornkiller give it to me. He had it one time when he come back from Muskogee or Okmulgee. I don't remember which. He'd been horse tradin' and he said—”

“Never mind what he said,” Evans roared, tossing the hat in the general direction of the jury. It came to rest on the floor directly before the box. “Can you read, Mr. Grube?”

“No, sir.”

“Then how can you recognize a bill of sale?”

“I seen it before.”

Evans darted over to the jury railing again. He snatched the yellow paper and thrust it into Nason Grube's hands.

“Read that, Mr. Grube.”

There was a long pause, Grube staring at the paper in his hands. He shook his head.

“You don't know whether it says something about two horses or three pigs, do you, Mr. Grube?”

“No, sir. I just seen that—”

“All right, please just answer my questions,” Evans said, pulling the paper from Grube's hands. “Now, you say you've never been in Choctaw Nation. Is that right?”

“I never been there.”

“Isn't it true that you first came into the Indian country on a work permit with the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroad?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That line runs straight through the Choctaw Nation.”

“But I was just workin' on the northern section—”

Evans cut in again, pressing harder than he had at any point in this trial. It was having its effect on the witness, who had begun to sweat, his black face shining and the scar welts seeming to stand out even more prominently on his cheeks.

“Didn't you watch the officers from this court searching your farm the day you were arrested?”

“I see 'em lookin' around, yes, sir.”

“They didn't find any bill of sale, did they?”

“Objection,” McRoy said. “He's testifying, Your Honor.”

“Sustained.”

Evans kept boring in, keeping Grube confused as his questions jumped back and forth from one subject to another. Grube's mind seemed to adjust to each new idea and then he was asked about something else. It was a technique I wanted to remember.

“You and Mr. Cornkiller over there, you make a lot of money farming. Is that true?”

“No, sir, we don't make much.”

“How much do you make in, say, a year?”

“Not much. We sell a little garden truck.”

“And those trips of Mr. Cornkiller's, they aren't for trading stock, are they? They're for selling whiskey. Isn't that right?”

“We sell some. . . .”

“Don't you trade whiskey for groceries when you need them, and a pair of shoes now and then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That so-called bill of sale says you paid seventy-five dollars each for two horses. That's a lot of money. Where did it come from, Mr. Grube?”

Nason Grube's eyes darted around the room.

“When's the last time you saw seventy-five dollars on that farm?”

“I don't remember. Mr. Cornkiller . . .”

“You were sitting right over there”—and Evans pointed to the defense table, at the vacant chair between Cornkiller and Smoker Chubee—“when a little Choctaw woman, a brave little woman, testified under oath that you raped her.”

“I never done that. I swear I never done that. . . .”

“So now you're telling us that she was lying, that she saw your face just over hers when she was lying on that porch naked and—”

“Objection, Your Honor,” McRoy shouted, banging the table with his fists.

“Stop the dramatics, Mr. Evans,” Judge Parker said.

“Your Honor, I was simply paraphrasing an early question of the defense counsel when Mrs. Thrasher was on the stand,” Evans said, his nostrils flared.

“Mr. Evans, I repeat, stop the dramatics.”

“Very well.” Evans strode away from the stand and turned back, his arms extended stiffly at his sides. “Are you testifying that Mrs. Thrasher was lying?”

“Yes, sir, I guess I am. I think she just got the wrong nigger.”

Evans released the witness, and the fury of his attack left the crowd leaning forward openmouthed as McRoy rested his case. Once more, McRoy moved for a directed verdict and once more Judge Parker denied it.

Judge Parker said he would take closing arguments after a noon recess, and Joe Mountain and I went out along the river to smoke together. I had no yearning for food, and the big Osage sensed my need for solitude.

“You want me to leave you alone, Eben Pay?”

“No, I'd rather you walked with me, Joe,” I said. “I just want to be away from that mob back there.”

The shock of Jennie Thrasher's testimony had already begun to wear off, but the thought of it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I considered the defendants, back there in the federal building, chained and waiting now for judgment. A two-week drunk, Johnny Boins had said, and the lives of so many people changed as a result of it, damaged or destroyed forever. It had touched me only in passing, and yet I knew that at this moment, walking along the river with my friend, Eben Pay was a different man from the one who had taken the train south from Saint Louis little more than three months before.

“Going away from a trial like that, a murder trial, leaves a man empty, Joe,” I said. “It wrings a man out.”

“I like it,” he said, his teeth showing when he turned his head toward me. The wind spread the tail of his plaid suitcoat out behind his butt like the cowcatcher on a Frisco locomotive. “I like them men up there yellin' at one another.”

“You go after somebody with all the enthusiasm and ardor of justice on the march, and then when you've got them in that room, with their lives in the balance, everything takes on a new dimension.”

He stopped and looked at me for a moment, only half sensing what I was saying.

“Well, I like goin' after 'em, too. But I like it near as well when they're in front of Parker. I like it all.”

“It takes away all a man's dignity, having his life laid out bare before all those gawking people, sopping it up like free whiskey. Hell, even a killer ought to have some dignity left to himself.”

“You worry too much, Eben Pay,” Joe Mountain said.

We were standing now on the high ground of Belle Point, where the Arkansas and the Poteau flow together. The breeze off the flat floodplain to the west was cool. It was almost like October, and I half expected to smell elm leaves burning, as they would be soon along the streets of my home in Saint Louis. As soon as this was over, I would go there, to see after my mother's health and sort out my thoughts, waiting the verdict of the Supreme Court, for I knew Merriweather McRoy would appeal both the Garret and the Thrasher cases.

We watched a small Negro boy pull a three-foot catfish from the water near the new pilings of the Jay Gould bridge. I was reminded of Emmitt, still cloistered in that cell in the women's jail, still frightened for his life.

“I wonder what it feels like, being on trial for your life,” I said. Joe Mountain squeezed the fire from his cigarette and shredded the short butt, watching the tobacco blow quickly away in the wind.

“You sure bother yourself about funny things, Eben Pay. You don't have to think about that, unless you do murder. And get caught.”

“Justice tempered with mercy,” I said. “That's the way it's supposed to work.” From where we stood, we could see the gallows roof in the federal compound, rising above the stone wall.

“Well, if you got to think about that, just put your mind to what we found in that farmyard. Wasn't much mercy showed there, was there? Besides, maybe ole McRoy will argue them jurors into a not guilty.” And he laughed.

“McRoy's good. He's a good lawyer, knows plenty of tricks.” Somewhere along the river, a train whistled. “I wonder why Johnny Boins's parents weren't there.”

“They gone. I heard they left town two days ago.”

“Maybe it's understandable, knowing the strong case Evans had, not wanting to be there and see their boy in that situation. But how could they just take that train out of here, and leave him alone?”

“Maybe they give up on him finally,” Joe Mountain said. “Anyway, it don't matter to Johnny Boins. He don't give a damn. He don't give a damn for nothin'.”

I thought of Smoker Chubee. Grube and Cornkiller seemed to me poor derelicts caught up in all this, brought into it by Rufus Deer. But there was an evil and brooding spirit about the dark-skinned man with the deep pockmarks, impossible to define. Thinking of him made a chill go up my spine, as it had so often when I watched him in the courtroom.

“What about that Chubee, Joe?”

For a long time, Joe Mountain looked across the river into the Indian country, where beginning heat was making a blue haze far out along the horizon.

“In the old days, he'd have been leading war parties,” he said, and I sensed a certain admiration in his voice. “He's a deadly man, Eben Pay.”

His sudden seriousness was somehow funny, and I laughed.

“You sound as though you might be afraid of him, Joe.”

“Any man's a fool if he ain't a little scared of a homeless dog,” he said. Then he laughed, too, showing those huge teeth. “But I tell you, I'm glad the only time we ever shot at each other, he missed. What bothers me is I missed, too, that night in Creek Nation. That bothers me, Eben Pay.”

Downriver, we could see a steamboat pulling into one of the docks at the foot of Garrison Avenue. On the decks were bushels of peaches and bales of cotton, these last for the Fort Smith textile mills.

“Well, we'd best get back,” I said. “We may as well see the finish of this.”

“You bet,” Joe Mountain said.

When Evans rose to make his argument, his hair and beard were fresh combed. All his combativeness of the closing moments of testimony was gone, and when he spoke his voice was calm and deliberate.

“Gentlemen of the jury. The evidence has shown that at the very least, this is what happened. Rufus Deer and Johnny Boins planned a vicious crime together. Having seen a racehorse and a girl they coveted, they sent Skitty Cornkiller, a well-traveled man in his occupation as a whiskey peddler, into Choctaw Nation to find that horse and that girl. Then the three of them in company with two other companions, Nason Grube and Smoker Chubee, went to the farm where horse and girl had been found. Nason Grube because he was the constant companion of Cornkiller. Smoker Chubee because he was an expert with firearms, a bodyguard for these schemers.

“This massive evidence”—and he waved his hand toward the pile of exhibits on the jury railing—“and the testimony of Mrs. Thomas Thrasher put them at the scene of the crimes, and Mrs. Thrasher's horrifying story revealed to you what happened there. Rape and murder! Committed by this gang of men, with malice aforethought. With vicious disregard for human life and for the morality long associated with civilized societies. Done with laughter!