“We keep the lamps lit,” Jewel said. She didn’t really look at me directly, when she said it; she looked away, as if she was afraid of what I’d see if she looked me in the eye.
When Jewel took me inside, I saw that the walls were two logs thick. Ned had poured sand between the logs. That was careful planning, but the house was dark as pitch. The night animals might have enjoyed being inside it, but I didn’t. I like a little light when I’m inside. I get surly as a badger if I have to sit around in a pitch-dark place.
Becca didn’t like to waste kerosene keeping the lamps lit, but I was always at her to change the wicks and keep things bright, especially if it was a cloudy day and I had to be inside. I hate a dark house, and Jewel was like me in that way. Now, her own husband had put her in a house that was nearly as dark as a cave.
While I was stumbling around trying not to fall over a bench or a churn, I heard a pig grunt. A shoat came walking over to me.
“What’s this? Why would you keep a pig in the house?” I asked. Jewel had never been expected to live in any house that harbored swine before. Swine belonged in the pigpen, not in the house.
“Ned’s got water stored,” Jewel said. “He brings the goats in at night, too. He says if we have animals inside, we could hold out a month if the white law comes again.”
I was getting bothered. I wanted to talk to Ned. My girl was accustomed to doing chores with the livestock, but not in the house. She looked pale and poorly; she had fallen off in her face, too. I know what was done to her by those white rascals was terrible—some women would have died from it. But I would rather Ned had taken her away to Texas or someplace farther west, than to stick her in a fort and have her smell pigs and goats at night. In the old times, after the Trail of Tears, some folks kept their livestock in with them to protect the critters from bears and wolves—but now, there were very few bears, and almost no wolves.
“Where is Ned, Jewel?” I asked. “I’ve come from Fort Smith. I’ve seen the Judge. Maybe there’s a way to head off this war, so you can live in a regular house again.”
I saw that Jewel didn’t believe me. She had accepted her husband’s way. I don’t expect Jewel believed that she would ever live in a regular house again, or be happy, either.
“Ned found a honey tree,” Jewel said. “He went off with the axe and the wheelbarrow and some buckets. I guess he’ll be back when he’s cleaned out the honey.”
Impatience is one of my failings. I’d rather be on the go than wait. But Jewel asked if I’d stay the night, and I said I would.
“Did he go east or west?” I asked. “I know he couldn’t go up because we’re on top of the Mountain. I want to talk to him as quick as I can, Jewel.”
“Why, he went west, Pa,” Jewel said, and I was soon out the door. The sound of an axe striking a tree carries a long way. I figured I could locate Ned and be of some help.
I located him, but not quick. I kept going west and kept going west, until I was less than a mile from Tuxie Miller’s. I was wondering if the bees had stung Ned so bad he couldn’t chop. I was a wily honey robber myself, having robbed many a bee and slipped off unstung, but Ned did not have my experience. I saw a swarm of honeybees overcome a boy, once. It was Charley Bobtail’s youngest boy, and the bees worked him over so bad the boy was a whole week getting back on his feet. I thought maybe the same had happened to Ned, but just as I was about to ride on toward the Millers—they had rebuilt their house and were living there now—I heard the axe.
When I found Ned, he had roped himself to the trunk of an old, half-dead sycamore tree. He was twenty feet up, bees swarming all around him. He had made himself a kind of cigar out of leaf tobacco and was puffing smoke at the bees as best he could, while he worked with the axe. He already had a wheelbarrow full of honey, and a bucket of comb, but he was still chopping away.
“Ned, that’s enough honey for three winters,” I told him. “Come on down.”
“I might not find another bee tree for three winters, either,” he said. “There’s more honey in here—I mean to have it, before I quit.”
“You’re only a half a mile from Tuxie’s,” I reminded him. “Why didn’t you get him to help you?”
“Let him find his own bee tree,” Ned said. “You can help, if you’re anxious to be useful.”
We ended up with three buckets of comb and a wheelbarrow so full of honey buckets we could barely push it. It was dark honey, so strong it would make you cough. I couldn’t resist licking a fingerful now and then, but Ned didn’t touch it.
“You’re welcome to a lick because you helped,” he said. “I’m putting the rest in a barrel.”
“Is that for the same reason you’re keeping a pig in your house?” I inquired. “Are you that determined to fight?”
Ned had got grave, since his injury. He looked at me solemn.
“The white law’s determined to kill me,” he replied. “I have to be determined to fight.”
“Now, maybe not, Ned,” I informed him. “I was in Arkansas yesterday.”
“Yes, I heard,” he said. “Taking another goddamn dead marshal home.”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “I saw Judge Parker myself.”
Ned got a stony look on his face. We took turns wheeling the wheelbarrow, which was heavy. When it came my turn, I had to keep my mind on where I was going. If I hit a rock or a root and turned the wheelbarrow over, it would be a terrible waste of all that honey.
“Ned, you oughtn’t to fight if you don’t have to,” I told him, next time it was his turn to wheel. “If it’ll die, let it die on its own, without no more bloodshed.”
“What makes you think it will die?” he asked. “The marshals that come after me were well trained enough not to kill one another. I had to do all the killing, and I killed four. Why in the world would it die after all that?”
“Because sometimes things just die,” I told him. “There’s only so many marshals to be hired, and crimes are happening every day. The Starrs are robbing everything that moves over to the west. Maybe they’ll send all their marshals after the Starrs and just forget us here in the Going Snake.”
“Maybe—but what if they don’t?” Ned asked. “If they don’t, I’ll have to fight, and I want to be ready.”
“I saw Judge Parker. His wife died,” I told him. “And Tailcoat Jones drowned, along with his whore.”
Ned just kept wheeling the wheelbarrow. News didn’t seem to affect him. He had chosen his path, and he meant to keep on it, whatever the news.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I said. “Tailcoat Jones is dead, and he was the leader of that bunch what attacked you.”
“He let them ruffians take turns with my Jewel,” Ned replied. “I had expected to kill him myself, but if he’s dead, I can’t. So that ain’t good news, to me. I didn’t know the Judge or his wife, so I got nothing to say about that.”
His tone with me was so stiff, I felt myself getting riled. Ned and I had been friends for years, and I had just helped him fill several buckets with honey. I had lost my touch with the bees, too. I got stung four times while I was trying to be helpful. I didn’t appreciate the man talking to me as if I was a stranger or a fool, but I thought it was important to try and argue Ned out of armed conflict with the authorities. So, I held in my temper.
“The point about this judge is that the loss of his wife has just about broke the man,” I said. “He’s so grieved, he’s closed his court for forty days.”
“She must have been a good wife,” Ned remarked.
“Well, the Judge thought so,” I said, “If we was to go there and talk to him on the day he opens his court back up, I believe he’d be fair. He might call this thing off, if you could talk to him face-to-face.”
“Does the Judge speak Cherokee?” Ned asked. We had just come into the clearing where his fort stood.
“I don’t expect so, no,” I replied.
“Then we can’t talk, and I see no point in the trip,” Ned said. “I’ll be talking Che
rokee and nothing else, till the day I die.”
“You’re too goddamn stubborn to associate with, Ned,” I told him. “If talking a few words of English to a weary old judge would save your life and maybe Jewel’s life, too, why wouldn’t it be worth doing?”
Ned got that eagle look then.
“No,” was all he said.
Jewel came out, and began to take the buckets from the wheelbarrow.
I knew from the way Ned Christie looked that nothing now could turn him from the warrior path.
18
THAT NIGHT, JEWEL MADE ME A GOOD CORN MUSH AND SOME flavorful beans with a little pork rind in them. It was an old recipe of her mother’s. Ned allowed a little of the honey to be used to sweeten the mush, but he put the rest in a barrel and nailed the lid on. He had a good potato pit, and a great pile of corn stored. I could see he was preparing for a long siege.
But the meal had put us in a friendly mood and I let the quarrel go, for Jewel’s sake. We brought out the checkerboard and played several games, though the house was too dim for fine concentration on checkers. The fireplace didn’t cast much of a glow, and Ned would allow only one lamp.
Jewel stood behind him, and rubbed his head while we played. One reason for the dimness was that Ned’s one good eye was variable. He saw bright lights in his head, and got headaches and cramps in his neck. Jewel had a little oil of some kind that Old Turtle Man had given her. She rubbed the oil on Ned’s neck, while I lost three checker games.
“You ain’t the checker player you used to be, Zeke,” Ned remarked.
“No, because I ain’t an owl or a bat,” I said. “I play better checkers when I can see the board.
“I can’t even see my hand,” I added. “I might be making moves I don’t want to make, for all I know.”
“I have to save this one eye,” Ned explained, in an easier tone. “I can see sharp and shoot fine, but it waters up if I strain it. I like to rest it, when I can.”
“All right, but what about your whistling?” I asked. “Learned any new tunes while you’re sitting around in the dark?”
He hadn’t. Ned still bested me at whistling—always had—but it still didn’t keep me from attempting a tune. My whistling was so paltry that Jewel smiled. It was the only time I saw her smile, during our whole visit.
What I noticed as we sat by the fireplace was that Jewel and Ned were close now. Before the battle, my feeling was that the two of them had not quite settled into the married life yet. They were nervous, and rarely stood near one another, or touched in public.
Now, it was the opposite: they were seldom out of hand’s reach of one another. Ned had taken to smoking an old pipe. Jewel brought him his tobacco, and drew on the pipe a time or two herself, while she tamped it for him. Before they went up to sleep, she soaked a rag and laid it over his eyes for a few minutes. Ned was always reaching out to hold her hand for a moment, and Jewel didn’t draw away. I guess adversity had brought them close together, only it seemed to me that too much damage came along with the closeness.
I would rather they could have stayed nervous, and spared them the wounds. They would have settled into the married way, once they got a little older. Time—not raping and shooting—would have brought them closer.
After we gave up whistling, the two of them went up to bed. Jewel held the lamp. At the top of the stairs, she turned. Just for a moment, I saw her white face looking down at me. It was just a glimpse; Jewel soon followed Ned on to bed. But seeing her face like that haunted me so that I couldn’t get to sleep. I sat by the fire in Ned’s fort, watching the embers cool, until the roosters began to crow and the day birds flutter.
I was not one to talk much to my children, I guess. I yarned with them, and sung them songs, but I left most of the talking to Becca.
That night, though, I waited, hoping Jewel would come down a minute, so we could chat. It wasn’t one thing in particular I wanted to talk to her about, and I don’t know if there was anything in particular Jewel wanted to say to me. I just know that her look, from the head of the stairs, unsettled me. For years after, when Jewel’s face came to me, whether in day thoughts or night dreams, it was that look I remembered.
The next morning, Ned took me through his fort and showed me the rest of his preparations. He had acquired plenty of rifles, and enough gunpowder and bullets to have fought the Civil War all over again. He had even dammed a little stream and rechanneled it, so it would flow through the fort. He had barrels to catch rainwater as well, and had rubber hoses attached to them so he could siphon water inside.
Ned had prepared careful, but I got melancholy seeing all the fortifying he had done.
“You ain’t just ready for war, Ned—you want war!” I told him. That was the point that troubled me.
Ned didn’t deny it. He had the eagle look again.
“I was a farmer till the whites done what they done,” he said. “Now I’m a warrior, and I intend to be a fine one.”
“I expect you will, Ned,” I told him.
Jewel got upset when she saw me getting ready to leave.
“I wish you could just stay one more night, Pa,” she said.
“I can’t, hon—your ma’s poorly,” I told her.
Jewel looked sad. On impulse, I asked her if she was with child. I don’t know what feeling brought those words out of my mouth—but Jewel just shook her head.
Later, riding away, I wished I hadn’t asked, for she got the distant look when I did. She looked past me, and shook her head.
Jewel was not yet eighteen. I don’t know what I thought the hurry was for her to have a child, especially after the bad business with Tailcoat Jones and his gang of white ruffians.
Ned wore a big-brimmed hat in sunlight, to shield his eyes. He was practicing shooting, when I left. He had walked over to the woods and was shooting crabapples off a tree. He didn’t miss a one, not while I was looking.
19
TUXIE’S WAS ON THE WAY HOME. I THOUGHT I’D STOP AND GET HIS opinion and Dale’s about Ned’s war. They were his close friends, and I thought maybe they’d want to speak to him, too, about the possibility of squaring things with the old judge.
But I arrived at a bad moment. The Millers had just buried their baby girl Sarah, the one who had been at the breast the day they were burned out. Losing babies was common, in that time; but it was the Miller family’s first loss, and they took it hard. The children were all howling, and Tuxie was so upset he could barely spade the dirt over the little grave. Dale didn’t speak at all. She was staring away, like Jewel. Tears had made ruts in her cheeks, from heavy crying.
“I swear, Tuxie. What did the tyke die of?” I inquired, speaking soft.
“I don’t know, Zeke. She just didn’t wake up this morning,” Tuxie said.
“Well, I swear,” I said, again.
There was not a thing I could do for a family with such a fresh loss. I left them to their grief, and rode on home.
Years later, Dale Miller mentioned to me that the baby’s digestion had never been good, after the raid.
“She spit up my milk, couldn’t hold it down,” Dale said. “I expect she got too scared, with me trying to nurse her while I was chasing around.”
I guess that baby girl was one more victim of Tailcoat Jones and his raid.
20
WHILE THE OLD JUDGE WAS IN MOURNING, THE GOVERNOR OF Arkansas, evidently an old fool, sent five marshals after me for the killing of Marshal Lee Chaney.
I guess the Governor hadn’t heard about the Cherokee Militia, when he sent those marshals after me.
After the outrageous affair at the horserace in Dog Town, with Marshal Chaney blazing away for no reason before he even produced a warrant, there was a boom in recruiting. Before I knew it, the Cherokee Militia numbered over thirty men. Partridge McElmore joined up, and three of his brothers. Victor Horsefly volunteered, and so did Edley Springston. Then there was Cooley Silk and his brother Arley, and Lightning Boles, along with several Cherokees I scarc
ely knew.
I was particularly proud to have got Victor Horsefly into the Militia. Victor was so big, he was an outcast. He weighed so much—over four hundred pounds—that he had to be weighed on a cattle scale. The only horse in the District stout enough to carry him was a draft horse he had journeyed all the way up to Wisconsin to purchase. Victor was a quiet fellow who didn’t rage often, but when he did, snapping a spine would be no more to him than snapping a twig. He once kicked the whole front off a saloon in Fort Smith, after which he swam the river and walked home. Nobody said a word about arresting him, although the saloon had to be totally rebuilt. When they ran over to the courthouse after Victor kicked down the front of the saloon, Judge Parker took one look at Victor out his window, and promptly ruled that saloons were beyond the protection of the law.
“A man that large is best left to his own devices,” the Judge said— or at least that’s what was reported to me.
The leader of the marshals the Governor sent to arrest me was named Coon Rattersee. Coon was fresh from a raid against the Starr boys, and was said to have wounded two Starrs in a chase that went on for fifty miles.
It was rainy the day Coon and his deputies rode into Tahlequah in their yellow slickers. I only had about three hours’ notice that they were coming, but I was able to put twenty-five well-armed militiamen in the street to greet him.
I was at the head of them, armed with a ten-gauge shotgun. Seeing what a shotgun had done to Sam Beck that day in the courtroom convinced me that the fowling piece should not be scorned as a weapon.
Coon Rattersee had convinced himself that he was the equal of the Starrs, which he wasn’t. I knew him slightly. We had once hunted turkey together, but we quarreled because the rash son-of-a-bitch claimed an old gobbler I shot. Now here he was in Tahlequah, in a yellow slicker.
I don’t believe he had expected resistance—at least not to the extent of twenty-five armed Cherokees.