The Whipping Boy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Map of Indian Nations

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART TWO

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART THREE

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1994 by Speer Morgan

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Morgan, Speer, date.

  The whipping boy / Speer Morgan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-67725-4

  I. Title.

  PS3563.087149W49 1994 93-40836

  813'.54—dc20 CIP

  eISBN 978-0-547-52413-9

  v2.1213

  Map by Jacques Chazaud

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to John Sterling and Esther Newberg, who keep the faith, and to the National Endowment for the Arts, whose fellowship came along just in time.

  This one is for

  Caitlin Derbyshire Morgan

  Prologue

  MID-MORNING on a late fall day in 1894, the sun was almost visible in thin clouds, and the sky over western Arkansas looked as if it was about to clear after days of on-and-off rain. But the air suddenly turned cool, with the quickening feel of more weather on the way. Within an hour the sun’s halo disappeared, as two massive prongs of cold approached along the Arkansas River Valley from the east and the Indian Territory to the west, pushing wet southern air away from the earth in majestic anvil-shaped clouds.

  In Fort Smith, a young murderer named Johnny Pointer was to be hanged at noon on the lawn of the old U.S. courthouse, a few hundred yards from the Arkansas River. It was the first execution ordered by Judge Isaac C. Parker in over a year, the longest interruption in his otherwise lethal twenty-year record on the bench. Newspapers from as far away as Boston had sent stringers for the event, which wasn’t unusual for a Parker hanging. In a nation enveloped in a depression, a good hanging offered promise of spectacle, lurid detail, moralizing, sentimentality, and all the other elements of the best order of journalism.

  A lot of sightseers from the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations had come over to see the white man hanged. It was ginning season, and some of the farmers were taking the occasion to bring in their cotton. There was a recently opened bridge across the Arkansas River that they could use, instead of the ancient log-and-plank barge operated by a disagreeable old man, who’d been subjecting his riders to the same jokes for over four decades—foul, ancient jokes which some people actually swam the river to avoid. Now people could just trot right across the bridge, high above the unpleasant old coot and his flyblown ferry.

  At 10:30, hangman George Maledon appeared on the scaffold, a man of such slight build that he looked like a white beard on a stick. He adjusted the rope’s length and checked the trap mechanism, which momentarily hushed the crowd when it chunked open. Farm wagons drifted slowly up the street, with rawboned children sprawled across bales that were destined for the factors along Garrison Avenue. Advertisers milled among them, cheerfully yelling that they were paying more than any other factor in town. In truth, there was nothing cheerful about the price of cotton in 1894, which, after decades of decline, was scraping along at less than fifty dollars a bale.

  The streets must have afforded curious sights to the Indian and boomer kids—zinc-sheathed telegraph and telephone poles along one side, buildings as high as six stories, a horsecar track, and the big crowd, variously described in news accounts as “more than five hundred souls” and “well above fifteen hundred.” Monte sharks and patent-medicine salesmen were doing business along the street north of the old courthouse lawn—watchfully, since at previous hangings some had been arrested and fined. There were dippers milling in the crowd to steal watches and money. Men emerged from alleyways wiping their mouths with coat sleeves.

  On the south side of Rogers Avenue rough three-tiered bleachers had been erected, and thirty-four orphan boys from the Choctaw Armstrong Academy dressed in plain butternut uniforms stood on the wooden planks, brought here by their missionary principal to witness, while still young and uncorrupted, the fruit of crime. Since their orphanage was in the farthermost sticks of the southwestern Choctaw Nation, where the only women were wraithlike crones who came once a week to wash the clothes, many of the boys were in fact concerned less with the fruits of crime than the amazing women promenading through the crowd behind their formidable madams in bright, deeply slashed pastel dresses.

  At 11:47, Johnny Pointer, convicted of murdering two livestock-thief cohorts in separate incidents—shooting them through their heads while they lay asleep—was taken from the courthouse jail and with great difficulty led to the gallows. He complained, pushed, pulled, and fell on the ground, protesting that he was being mistreated, that he wanted his lawyer, that his dear mother had not visited him and he would not leave the world without seeing her one last time.

  Pointer had been a cause célèbre in the local papers, partly because there hadn’t been a hanging in a while. Also, Parker’s usual clientele were whites and breeds illegally roaming the Indian Nations, hiding from the law, selling whiskey, stealing livestock, who one day got a little too drunk in a one-horse town like Nicksville, Claremore, Cloud Chief, Pitcher, White Bread, who went on a rampage, murdering somebody or several somebodies, and woke up in jail. Compared to these smelly types, Johnny Pointer was a member of the royalty, raised in a middle-class family, a white boy who had “gone astray and deserved mercy,” as one newspaper put it. Other papers described him as a spoiled, treacherous, murdering brat—a “traitor to his race”—who deserved worse than hanging. There were four newspapers in Fort Smith and dozens of others on both sides of the border, all keen to gain readers and trying to outdo each other at ferocity of opinion and sensationalism, much of it conjured out of whiskey-empurpled imaginations.

  Johnny Pointer’s protestations silenced the crowd. Dragged onto the high gallows by six stern deputy marshals, his knees and boots clunking against each of the thirteen steps, the prisoner rejected the advice of one of the deputies to take it like a man by sitting down and bursting into copious tears. The marshals briefly conferred, then picked him up bodily so Mr. Maledon could slip his carefully tarred rope over Pointer’s head and secure the knot under his left ear. Maledon normally tied his client’s legs and placed a black bag over the head, but this time he did neither. Pointer was putting up such resistance that he wanted to finish the job as quickly as possible.

  Desperately, Pointer got his hands loose and clasped his arms around one of the marshals at just the moment the diminutive hangman sprang the trap, “retarding the felon’s fall,” as one reporter described it, “and causing the struggling marshal almost to plunge through with him.”

  The newspapers gave wildly different accounts of what happened on the gallows and among the crowd after this point, but the primary fact was not disputed: the man
who was to be skillfully ejected into hell at the hour of noon refused to die for forty-three minutes—a record by a good mark, even in the ample history of the Fort Smith gallows.

  A half-hour after Johnny Pointer’s mortal struggle began, Judge Parker was fetched at a board meeting of the Belle Grove School and asked what should be done about the unfortunate spectacle. His answer, as recorded by one reporter, was, “Let the son of a b— go all night. You may hire an orchestra for all I care.”

  In earlier days, when Parker’s court was located in the old officers’ quarters of Fort Smith, and his dungeon below it, he held sole appealless jurisdiction for all murder, robbery, assault, and whiskey cases involving whites and non-full bloods in seventy-four thousand square miles of western Arkansas and the Indian Nations. On a number of occasions, Parker had saved the district money by sending two to five men at once to the gallows. New courts lately had been established in the Indian Nations and the white-settled Oklahoma Territory, and Parker’s district was now whittled down, his authority shrunk. His cases were now subject to appeal, many were overturned, and Parker himself had gotten into bitter, public disagreements with federal officials over policy and management in the Indian Nations. Influential men in the United States government, including members of the Supreme Court, the solicitor general, the Congress, and the president, all regarded the now white-haired, dropsy-plagued judge as undesirable. In one of his more politic statements on the issue, the solicitor general said that Parker was “overzealous in convictions and executions, particularly of whites and half-breeds who he claims disturb the peace and dignity of the Indian Tribes.” Parker’s somewhat less politic response was that “The solicitor general of the United States doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that it is against the law for whites and nontribal members to roam around the Indian Nations confiscating Indian lands, stealing livestock, and killing people. I advise him to read the treaties.”

  In 1894, in a fancy new gingerbread-gothic federal building located several blocks away from his old courtroom, Parker still kept up his accustomed schedule, holding court from daylight until dark six days a week. He would retire a little over a year after the Johnny Pointer hanging, with 174 convictions and 160 actual executions or jail deaths, the largest number of any judge in U.S. history, but his more remarkable accomplishment may have been how long he could talk, off the cuff, about disorderliness, drunkenness, murder, theft, rape, and the destruction of the Indian Nations by lawlessness. When delivering the death sentence to Johnny Pointer, he had subjected the poor hangee to the usual long lecture, at the end holding out hope for him that our Lord, whose Court could offer the only appeal, might afford one last chance for eternal mercy to whoever repented his sins and took his punishment humbly.

  Johnny Pointer, refusing to die, showed no inclination to follow this advice.

  The tone of the newspaper descriptions of his forty-three-minute execution varied from the blackest moral outrage to the most whimsical carnival irony, making it hard to tell what the mood really was. It was noted that a large number of people in the crowd became ill, some with nausea, others with chills and fever and “sudden, catastrophic indigestion.” Most of them did remain throughout the event, despite the increasing cold, the darkening sky, and the rain, which started after noon. A few younger witnesses mocked the hanging man in macabre cavortings around the gallows. This would later result in a peculiar high-kneed, walking dance called the Johnny Pointer, popular among children and teenagers in the border country as late as the 1950s.

  The rain wasn’t heavy at first, but several of the news stories telegraphed out of Fort Smith that evening noted the ominous weather.

  So began the flood of 1894.

  ***

  An event in its own way extraordinary happened to Tom Freshour, one of the boys on the Armstrong Academy bleachers. Someone took a photograph of the thirty-four Choctaw orphans who’d been brought here to see what happened to criminals, but the photograph was a dud, the boys’ faces all like clouds of light and shadow. It is impossible to guess which of them is Tom Freshour; being sixteen or seventeen (his birth date was not known), he must be one of the four or five tallest boys. The front door and window of the building behind the orphans, however, are perfectly in focus, as if the photograph had been intended to be of dekker hardware. A Closed sign hangs on the big double door, evidence of Dekker’s status as a wholesaler, since no retailer in that terrible depression year would have shunned the traffic brought by a hanging.

  Sometime during Johnny Pointer’s long demise, the front door of the building in this photograph opened, and through it walked the usher of young Tom Freshour’s fate in the person of one Mr. Bob MacGinnis, hardware salesman. MacGinnis had been sent out to find errand boys. Seeing the entire bleachers of candidates, MacGinnis went up to them and announced, “Any of you want work? I need three boys.” Most of them would probably have delivered a message to hell to get away from the spectacle on the gallows and the cold rain they were being forced to stand in, but MacGinnis’s appearance was so sudden, his request so unexpected, that none responded.

  For these boys, raised in the stolid, regimented gloom of an orphanage in the remote woods of the Indian Territory, it had been a day of perpetual wonders, new sights and sensations one after another starting at six o’clock that morning. First the trip on the train, which had caused some of the boys to get sick, others to hold on to their seats in fear. Few of them had ever traveled except on their two feet or riding a plow mule, and hurding along at fifty miles an hour had been breathtaking. Then there was the spectacle of the crowd at the hanging, a throng of people including women costumed in the most unbelievable fashion, with the whole front of their dresses open in such a way that invited one to wonder what was in there—about which few of the boys had clear ideas. Stories circulating at the academy regarding the female sex came from boys who were under eight years old (the academy would take no older) who’d had sisters before becoming orphans, and their descriptions were passed on with such inaccuracy that girls sprouted all kinds of strange anatomical features. Tom Freshour had sometimes sneaked off to the scalding shed and passed time with one of the washing ladies on the day she worked, at least giving him some contact with the opposite sex. But this hardly softened the blow of seeing these powdered, perfumed, white-skinned creatures with their dresses gapped down the front. In addition to these shocks there had been the hanging (to these boys actually not the strangest of the day’s events), the surging hysteria of the crowd, and now this nervous-looking man who’d suddenly appeared asking for volunteers for what? A job?

  Failing to get any response, MacGinnis found their principal, a pokerfaced missionary named James Schoot, and told him that he needed three boys for regular employment.

  The prospect of having three fewer to feed on his tight budget surely must have delighted the principal, although he was always anxious about losing “moral control” over the boys. Reverend Schoot was rigorous about moral control, which he administered liberally, regularly, at the drop of a hat, to their flesh. A teacher who briefly worked at the orphanage noted in his diary that Reverend Schoot “commonly held regular weekly disciplinary floggings as well as daily beatings. I have seen some boys beaten as often as six times per day.” Handling so many beatings every day along with all of his other responsibilities must have been tiring work for the Reverend, and one would think he’d be happy to have fewer to perform; but if he worried about releasing the three boys, that would be understandable, since one of them might go into the world, get a pistol, come back to the Armstrong Academy, and pay him back for several thousand whippings.

  Mission headquarters, however, would doubtless be pleased when he reported that three older charges had been gainfully employed in the world, so he swallowed whatever concerns he had and prepared to make a bargain. He demanded that the boys’ first month’s wages be sent to him, for which consideration he gave up all responsibility and control. MacGinnis agreed to this condition, he and the Reve
rend shook hands, and the boys were on their own.

  In this way Tom Freshour, Hack Deneuve, and Joel Mayes were released from the cloistered orphanage, the only place they had ever known, into the world.

  PART ONE

  1

  AS A SALESMAN who had worked at Dekker Hardware for more than twenty years, W. W. “Jake” Jaycox was present for the regular monthly sales meeting being held that day at the store. Neither he nor any of the other salesmen was aware of exactly what was going on across the street. Even later, Jake remained uninterested in the story of Johnny Pointer’s hanging, despite the fact that he’d been across the street when it happened. Jake was pragmatic, hardheaded, and indifferent to how a man died who had shot a couple of his pals in the head while they were asleep. Having sold hardware in the Indian and Oklahoma territories for twenty-some years, Jake took a dim view of outlaws and lawmen, criminals and courts—and he devoted as little thought to any of them as possible.

  The “big office,” where the salesmen were waiting, was on the east side of the building, and their view didn’t include the gallows. All they could see out the window was the Dekker wagon yard, which was packed with hacks and farm wagons of every description. When the rain started after noon, Jake wondered why the lot didn’t begin to clear out, but he wondered more about why Mr. Dekker was late for the sales meeting—which never had happened before in his memory. He could see Mr. Dekker’s plain Studebaker wagon and his son Ernest’s fancy team parked in the crowd of other rigs, making him suspect that the two of them were in the old man’s office, across the display room on the other side of the building. But punctual sales meetings were a sacred event, and he couldn’t imagine why the old man would be so late if he was already here, unless he was having an extremely serious talk with his son.