I felt so peculiar about the matter that I rode all night, though I was dead tired from trying to show Ned that I could plant as many potatoes as he could.
I’d seen Ned and Jewel, but I hadn’t reached them, not as I could have reached them before the Tailcoat Jones attack. I had to doubt that I’d ever see either one of them alive again; and that’s a terrible doubt, considering that Jewel was my oldest living child.
“At least you tried, Zeke,” Arch Scraper said, when I described the visit to him. I was eager to talk to someone, and Arch was the first person I met.
“Tried, and failed,” I replied.
Tried and failed would be my feeling about that visit for many years to come. I told myself many a time that I ought to have done more.
Then I realized it was one of those hard games where you’re beat before you start. Ned Christie didn’t want my help, or anybody’s help. Jewel didn’t want it, either—not by then.
What they wanted was what they had: their fort, each other, and their war.
32
I RODE HOME, AND MARRIED MAY. SHE WAS BUT NINETEEN, AND skinny-legged as a killdeer, but she made as merry a wife as any man could want. To the triplets, she was like a sister, before and after she became a wife to me.
I had taken to reading the Bible some, the same book Becca had thrust on me in the Tahlequah jail. There was foolishness in it, and way too many names, but I noticed that all the old prophets and patriarchs had themselves wives. I felt it was no slight to Becca’s memory that I took May as my new wife. I am not a monk, and cannot abide without a woman to lay abed with. Some would say May was too young to be made my wife, but I dispute that—and besides, there’s nothing in Bec’s old Bible about the age of wives, nothing that I could locate, anyway.
The proof is in the pudding, they say, and the pudding in our case was a fine baby boy May produced a mere nine months after I’d had Preacher Joe in to marry us.
To my surprise, May fought me to a standstill on the name. She wanted to name the baby William, after her grandfather, but I insisted on naming him Ned, after my friend Ned Christie, the great warrior of the Cherokee people. He had stood off the white law for more than three years, when our little Ned was born.
Then, to my vexation, May started calling the baby Billy anyway. May might have been young, but what a will she had! She would resist to the end, if she wasn’t allowed her way.
“His name ain’t Billy, it’s Ned!” I told her, one day when I caught her using Billy.
“Don’t you forget it, either, May Proctor!” I went on. I was getting fairly riled that she would be bold enough to defy me in such a matter.
“He’s gotta have a nickname, don’t he?” she asked. May tended to colour up in the cheeks when her temper flared. She was colouring up pretty good when she looked at me.
“His name is Ned, and that’s his only name!” I insisted. “A Cherokee warrior don’t need any other name but his own.”
May didn’t answer, but she was looking at the baby as if she was passing a secret to him. I knew she meant to call him Billy again, the moment I was out of earshot.
I went off my head for a minute, and shook May like a terrier shakes a rat.
“You’ll call him Ned, by God!” I told her. “If I catch you calling him Billy again, I’ll slap your cheek and give you old bully hell!”
But then the triplets started calling him Billy, and the hired help, too. Billy was the name that stuck—not Ned. I guess May had her way that time, though it’s a mystery to me how she got it.
By the time the boy was five, I was calling him Billy myself.
I’ve pondered it, and the only notion I could come up with was that the boy wasn’t meant to have a warrior’s name. He grew up to be so shortsighted that he couldn’t count his own fingers, not with his arm stuck straight out in front of him. The glasses the eye doc fitted him with were thick as a plate. He was good with figures, though. He could do sums in his head that I couldn’t have got correct if I had a month.
I held the name business against May. It was a bone we fought over time and time again, whenever either one of us felt cranky.
“I thought I ought to get to name my firstborn son,” I told her. “But, by God, I didn’t!”
“Billy ain’t your firstborn son—Willie is,” May reminded me.
“So thanks to your damn stubbornness, we’ve got two Bills in the family,” I pointed out.
“Billy was my firstborn son!” May retorted. “I suppose I had as good a right to name him as you.”
I took no part in the naming, after that. One of our girls was nearly six months old before May got around to telling me her name. I was sheriff of the Going Snake District by then, and was on the road a lot, rounding up various rascals who were trying to elude the law.
She was a bright-eyed little girl, too. She was just beginning to gum bones and try to crawl around, when I come in and happened to notice her on the floor, making straight for the fireplace.
“What’s that little one’s name?” I asked.
“Dorothy Ruth,” May told me. She was cooking at the time.
“Why, that’s two fine names wasted on one tot,” I told her. “Why not save the Ruth for the next little gal that comes along?”
“Her name’s Dorothy Ruth, Zeke,” May informed me. And that was that.
33
THE FALL AFTER MY VISIT TO NED AND JEWEL, WHEN THE FROST ON the Mountain was hard enough to leave ice in the wagon ruts, the last battle of Ned’s war was fought to its bloody conclusion. L. P. Isabel led fourteen marshals up the Mountain; a coloured man drove the mule team that pulled the cannon.
Rather than come through the Going Snake, where folks would have noticed them and given Ned the alert, the marshals dragged that blessed cannon nearly forty miles out of their way, in order to come at Ned from the eastern road, where there were fewer neighbours.
It was wasted effort. Arley Silk was up on the eastern reaches of the Mountain on a deer hunt, and saw the posse coming. He raced ahead of the bunch and informed Ned. The difference it made was that Ned had time to get his milk cow into the fort, along with sufficient fodder to keep her inside for a while.
Arley told me later that he tried to get Ned to run, or at least to let him bring Jewel out, from fear of what the cannon might do. But Ned and Jewel both refused to leave their home. According to Arley, the two of them were as cool as if they were on their way to a barn dance or a church picnic.
Ned did question Arley about how big the cannon was. When he heard it was just a small one, he shrugged off the threat.
This time, the posse didn’t bother to request Ned’s surrender before they started firing. They announced their arrival with a cannon shot. The ball sailed completely over the fort, and damaged a tree stump a hundred yards on.
Right then, the marshals realized what Ned Christie had suspected when he told Arley Silk to stop worrying about the cannon and get along home. The posse contained several men who had been around cannon during the War, but none of them were gunners, and their skills with the weapon were slight.
Besides that, they had only brought fourteen cannonballs. I guess they figured that if they could just thunk a ball or two into the fort, the walls would fall in and Ned would come stumbling out and offer himself to the hangman.
It was poor planning, of course. Six of the fourteen cannonballs missed the fort completely. Several of them tore holes in Ned’s garden—he had long since gathered in the vegetables by then—and a few just sailed on into the brush beyond the clearing. One I know of was found by a peddler nearly twenty years after the battle. It’s on display in Tulsa, I believe.
Eight cannonballs hit some part of the fort, but most of them hit low. They dented the bottom logs a little, but made no impression on the structure. Three hit it square, and did some damage to the outer logs, but no wall fell or was penetrated. When the posse had used up its last cannonball, Ned, Jewel, and the milk cow were still inside the fort, snug as bugs in
a rug.
So far, Ned had not even bothered to fire at the possemen. Respect for his marksmanship was one reason for the poor job the marshals did with the cannon.
Later, when I visited the site of the battle and saw how little damage those fourteen cannonballs had done to Ned’s fort, I figured Ned himself must have had a good laugh at the antics of this last posse. Here they had dragged a cannon over one hundred miles, and yet had only thought to bring fourteen cannonballs, though more than half the posse—including Marshal Isabel—had been in on the earlier assaults and knew what a sturdy fort they had to try and knock down.
I have no doubt that L. P. Isabel and the rest were at their wit’s end—the ones that had wits, at least. They were all anxious to reap glory by bringing in Ned Christie—or else bringing him down—and there they were, out of cannonballs, with Ned safe as ever.
The spirits of all the great Cherokee warriors must have been proud of Ned Christie, that day. Even the white man’s cannon hadn’t been able to blast him out of his fort.
34
MILO CREEKMORE, THOUGH A LIMPING CRIPPLE, HAD COME WITH Isabel and the others. It was a painful journey for a man with a knocked-down hip, but Milo made it because he was convinced that this time, the posse had the firepower to bring out their man.
“We didn’t just bring the cannon,” Milo told me. We were talking about the battle a few months later. “A cannon can go off in its aim, though L.P. didn’t think so. He had himself a fine fit when we used up that last ball, and Ned was still inside.”
“Who’d he cuss the loudest? The cannon, or Ned?” I inquired.
“The Judge,” Milo said, which surprised me. “He’s right, too. That new judge don’t have no more sense than a beetsie bug.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Milo,” I replied. “I have had very few opportunities to converse with beetsie bugs, and so far, I ain’t talked to that new judge at all.”
“Well, it was Crittenden who forced us to bring the dern cannon,” Milo informed me. “He thought if we made that kind of show, Ned would give up. I knew better, and L.P. knew better, and most of the boys knew better. None of us wanted to drag that heavy son-of-a-bitch along.”
It was a story that would echo through the Cherokee hills for years. I’m an old man now, and I still hear it in barber shops and general stores: that posse dragged a cannon all over Indian Territory, and then had not a man who could shoot it accurate.
Many a Cherokee warrior has gone up against the white posses and won, but Ned Christie, to this day, is the only one to stand down a cannon. That’s one reason his name will live forever among the Cherokee people.
“It’s a dern good thing we thought to bring that dynamite,” Milo went on.
“Yep. The dynamite finished it,” I said.
“We’d have never took him without it,” Milo replied.
“That’s my belief, too,” I said.
35
DONNY GREASE, AGED EIGHTEEN AND RIDING WITH HIS FIRST POSSE, was the man who got the job of planting the dynamite up against Ned’s fort.
It was pitch-dark the second night of the siege. The cannon-balls had been used up, and L. P. Isabel was mad enough to bite a hydrophobic dog, but Donny Grease still didn’t want to do the deed.
“I just come along on this posse because I owe money on a mule,” the boy said. “This dynamite could go off any time and blow me to kingdom come.
“And if that don’t happen, Ned Christie will shoot me,” he added.
Milo Creekmore said the boy was shaking so hard he nearly dropped the dynamite when L.P. shoved the sticks into his hand.
“Son, it’s so dark, an owl couldn’t draw a bead on you,” L.P. told him. “Wiggle on over there, and do it.”
Donny Grease started off on his belly, and then realized he didn’t have any matches to light the fuse. He wiggled back, and borrowed some from Johnny Copeland.
“It’s a heavy dew,” he said, when he came crawling back. “I’m as wet as if I crawled through the creek.”
“You better keep that fuse dry, boy, or you will get shot,” L.P. informed him. “Hurry up now, before it gets light.”
The boy done his job, too. Milo said it was still dim when the dynamite exploded and blew the west wall off the fort.
Jewel had lingered in bed after Ned got up and went downstairs to light the lamp. She didn’t sleep well with white men on the Mountain; I expect she was too afraid that what had happened to her once might happen to her again.
She was halfway down the stairs, when the blast came. It was like a cyclone took her and flung her across the fort. Jewel didn’t regain consciousness until the middle of the afternoon, at which time she couldn’t hear out of either one of her ears. Her hearing finally came back in the left ear, but never came back in the right. She was deaf in her right ear for the rest of her life.
36
NED LIVED THROUGH THE BLAST—LIVED THROUGH IT, AND CAME running out of the hole in that fort, with his two .44 pistols blazing. The possemen were charging by then, and Ned was firing at them with both barrels. They say he raised a high Cherokee war cry, maybe in hopes of spooking the horses.
Donny Grease was crawling for dear life on his belly, trying to wiggle back to a patch of dry cornstalks, the only nearby cover that offered him any hope. The first he saw of tall Ned Christie was when Ned came racing through the gloom and smoke and jumped right over him, making for the same cornstalks. It’s certain Ned didn’t know he was jumping over a posseman, or Donny Grease wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.
Donny raised up his pistol, and shot. The bullet entered Ned’s brain, killing him in midstride.
The great warrior of the Cherokees died in the dawn light, by his own corn patch.
Some of the possemen didn’t accept that Ned Christie, the man they had hounded and hunted for four long years, was truly dead. Tuxie said when he and Dale got there, half the possemen still had their guns in their hands, twitchy smiles on their faces. When the coroner examined Ned’s body in Fort Smith, he counted twenty-two bullet wounds. Twenty-one of them were shot into him after he was done killed.
Ned was stone dead, and propped up on a door—but the marshals still had their guns out. I guess the fools thought he might come back alive and attack them still.
L. P. Isabel asked Tuxie if the dead man was really Ned. One of the possemen even had the notion that Ned Christie might have escaped and made it into the hills.
“It’s him, and you goddamn rascals killed him,” Tuxie told them, tears in his eyes. The sight of his friend, shot by more than twenty bullets, caused a heavy sadness to come upon him. For a moment, the sadness was so heavy, Tuxie told me, he could scarcely lift his feet.
It was over: Ned was dead, just as they had all predicted. But predicting it and seeing it with his own eyes were two different things.
“Ned Christie was my lifelong friend,” Tuxie told them.
Donny Grease was practically in shock. I think it was a wonder to him, that he had been the one to kill the famous warrior.
“They shot and shot,” Donny Grease told Tuxie, bewilderment in his voice. “I never shot but that once. The last thing I expected in my life was to be the man that killed Ned Christie.” He would say it again, a thousand times, at barbecues and fish fries, to newspapermen and gossips and wide-eyed children, down the years, through the long course of his life.
Then Dale chimed in.
“Cover up his body. It’s not a thing for his wife to see, if she’s still alive,” Dale told them, blunt as ever. “You done your job, now it’s time to be respectful of the man.”
The men of the posse were quick to heed Dale Miller’s reprimand, you can bet. They covered Ned’s body decently.
“Good Lord,” Milo Creekmore said. “We’re so dern het up, we plumb forgot about Mrs. Christie.”
Later, Milo told me it was a thing that bothered his conscience for the rest of his life. He ran into the fort with Dale Miller, while the others put Ned’s body i
n a wagon for transport to Fort Smith. They found Jewel unconscious on the floor. They pulled her out, and laid her on a blanket. But she had swallowed a lot of smoke, like Ned had in that first fire.
For a time, they feared for her life.
Dale Miller told me she first thought it was an earthquake, when the dynamite blast slapped across the hills that morning. She had been in an earthquake once, while passing through Illinois when she was a mere girl. Ever since, she had had a powerful fear of quaking ground. She was milking her brindle cow, and Tuxie was carrying a bucket of slops to the pigpen, when the big noise hit. The rooster had been crowing, the pigs grunting, and the morning birds making a racket. They had heard each of the fourteen cannonballs being fired the first day, but the sound of the dynamite made that little cannon pop seem like a firecracker. The dynamite was louder than a hundred cannons.
What Tuxie remembered was how the barnyard, always so noisy at first light, with chickens complaining and pigs grunting for their slop, got quiet as midnight, the morning the Fort Smith posse used dynamite to blow up Ned Christie’s fort.
The Miller’s brindle milk cow was so affected by the blast that she didn’t let her milk down again for three days.
37
NED CHRISTIE’S WAR WAS OVER. OUR BRAVE NED WAS NO MORE.
By evening, news of Ned’s death had spread across the whole of the Going Snake District, and on into the rest of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee people knew that their warrior hawk had passed into the spirit land; men and women sat on their porches and cried. For years afterward, folks would talk about what they had been doing when they first heard the terrible news.
Frank Beck was the one who told me. I was in the middle of birthing a heifer calf at the time. My right arm was bloody to the shoulder from reaching in to try and turn the calf so it could slip on out.