Almost Midnight (3 page)

Yes, it made perfectly good sense that Darrell should become a preacher. And if so, Lexie just naturally assumed it would be a Pentecostal preacher. He was raised in Pentecostalism, after all, and the southwest Missouri Ozarks was thick with Pentecostal churches. But the region was also thick with Holiness, Baptist, and Methodist churches. This was the very heart of the Bible Belt, and Darrell could have become almost any kind of preacher he wanted.

Of course, there was also the chance he could have become an
outlaw, though in Darrell’s case nobody really took that option seriously. For a lot of local kids, however, it was just as real an option as anything else. Because here was the thing about the southwest Missouri Ozarks: the region was steeped not only in piety but also in criminality. If the hills rang out with the sweet sound of revival, they also crackled with gunfire and simmered with feuds too stubborn to die, scores waiting to be settled. This was the way it had always been, at least as long as anyone cared to remember. The preacher and the outlaw stood side by side in the local Ozarks mythology, the one proclaiming repentance and eternal glory, the other vengeance and going for broke, both promising relief from grievances real and imagined, ancient and new.

The Ozarks had always attracted outlaws, men and women who were out of sorts with mainstream society, who harbored deep grudges and had few if any bridges left to burn. The rough-and-tumble terrain, with its rugged bluffs, lost caves, and steep hillsides, afforded plenty of places for hiding out, digging in, making plans for that one last score, that one last run for happiness. In the turbulent era following the Civil War, ragtag bands of bushwhackers and night raiders wandered throughout the area, terrorizing local communities and forcing homesteaders to pack up and leave for safer pastures in Iowa, Kansas, or even California. Not long afterward, some of the most celebrated outlaws of the American frontier, including Jesse and Frank James, the Daltons, and the Doolin Gang, used the Ozarks as both a staging ground for their criminal operations and a place for giving the slip to pursuing lawmen. Decades later, during the Dirty Thirties, it was much the same story, with out-of-state heavies making strategic detours into the Ozarks and sometimes shooting up the scenery as they passed through. In 1932 a Reeds Spring blacksmith named Joe Gunn experienced the thrill of a lifetime when he was forced into a car occupied by Bonnie and Clyde and two of their gang members. The outlaws were on the run and needed Joe’s help navigating some of the local back roads. Joe steered them out of Missouri and to safety in Arkansas, and a grateful Clyde rewarded him with a crisp ten-dollar bill.

And then, of course, there was moonshine. During Prohibition, the region became notorious for its wildcat whiskey stills, many of which were buried so deeply in the hills most federal agents wouldn’t have been able to find them even if they’d had the nerve to go looking. In addition to fueling the local economy, the moonshine racket heightened the region’s atmosphere of mystery and danger. Everyone knew about the stills, even if their exact location was frequently a zealously guarded secret, and everyone knew that the men and women tending them could be ruthless in dealing with unwanted visitors.

The region was also famous for its vigilante justice. In the southwest Missouri Ozarks, the traditional way of settling scores was to settle them yourself. If you wanted to right some wrong, redress some grievance, you did so by taking the law into your own hands, frequently with the help of your close kin. This was partly because the Scotch Irish who had moved into the area during the mid-1800s, rapidly becoming its dominant ethnic group, seemed to have an inherited mistrust of established authority. Mainly, however, it was because there was very good reason in the southwest Missouri Ozarks for mistrusting established authority: the region seemed to breed corruption. Among longtime residents, corruption was taken for granted; it was an open secret. It was assumed that county sheriffs were living out of the pockets of local bad guys, that judges would always remember at the moment of truth which side their bread was buttered on, and that crooked politicians would somehow finagle their way to re-election. It was assumed that the law had virtually nothing to do with justice. The law was a matter of connections, whom you were related to, whom you owed money to, whom you were buying favors from; justice was something you took care of yourself.

The most notorious case of vigilantism in the Missouri Ozarks took place right next door to Stone County, just a few miles down the road from where Darrell would grow up more than half a century later. On April 5, 1885, roughly a hundred men, most of them upstanding citizens—lodge members, Republicans, the works—
started a secret society aimed at combating the lawlessness that had become an entrenched fact of life in Taney County, a rural tract bordering Stone County all the way from the Arkansas line halfway up to Springfield. The men initially called themselves the Law-and-Order League, but they soon became known as the Bald Knobbers after their practice of holding meetings on Snapp’s Bald, a treeless peak located several miles from the Taney County seat of Forsyth. There’s little question the Bald Knobbers had legitimate grievances. Over the previous twenty years, close to forty murders had been committed in Taney County, but not a single person had been convicted in connection with any of them. In some cases, county prosecutors had simply counted their blessings and looked the other way, and in others, the ones that actually went to trial, jurors had usually found persuasive reason—fear of reprisal, donations of good whiskey—to vote for acquittal.

The Bald Knobbers were led by Nat Kinney, a giant of a man at six six, close to three hundred pounds, who had previously put in stints as a gunslinger, a street brawler, and a saloonkeeper in Springfield before moving to Taney County in 1883 and opening a Sunday school. Kinney was just about perfect for the Ozarks. At once a preacher and an outlaw, a man of God and of violence, he’d deliver hell-and-thunder sermons from his Sunday school lectern with his two six-shooters ready for action on a table beside him. At the outset, Kinney and his men seemed motivated by the best of intentions. They claimed to be interested only in cleaning up law enforcement in Taney County and assisting the courts in obtaining convictions for serious crimes. The best of intentions, however, proved alarmingly short-lived. In their first official action, just ten days after their initial secret meeting on Snapp’s Bald, the Knobbers snatched two local troublemakers, the brothers Frank and Tubal Taylor, straight from the county jail in Forsyth and lynched them from a black oak by a well-traveled road just outside of town. The Taylor boys had been terrorizing townspeople for years with random acts of violence; Kinney and his men were only too happy to make a public example of them.

Over the next three years, the Bald Knobbers took vigilantism to a level unheard of even in the Ozarks. Not content with punishing perpetrators of violent crime, they appointed themselves moral custodians of Taney County, routinely administering beatings and lashings to anyone they suspected of being a philanderer, a dead-beat, or just plain disreputable. Their reign of self-righteous nastiness came to an end in August 1888 when Kinney was gunned down in a confrontation with a local tough named Billy Miles, but not before the frenzy of violence and recrimination they’d set off had spread to several neighboring counties.

The Bald Knobbers may have revived the age-old practice of lynching, but the most famous hanging in the history of the southwest Missouri Ozarks appears to have been an entirely legal affair. Early on a Friday evening in May 1937, a thirty-six-year-old drifter and convicted murderer named Roscoe “Red” Jackson climbed the fourteen steps to the gallows that had been erected next to the back wall of the Stone County Courthouse in Galena. Reaching the top, and looking out over the crowd that had gathered to watch his execution, Jackson decided he might as well close things off with a little speech.

“As far as death is concerned, there is no reason to fear—it’s what you leave behind,” he said in a clear, calm voice, pausing for a moment while the noose was slipped around his neck. “Well, now, folks, it’s not everybody that realizes what it takes to die,” he went on, his voice still clear, still calm. “It’s easy when it comes accidental, but it’s not so easy when it comes gradual. I want you to feel I’m the center of all this public reproach and disturbance. I know it’s too much to ask for the gratitude of everyone, but I’m leaving without any ingratitude to anyone.”

The executioner pulled a lever and Jackson’s body shot down eleven feet to the bottom of a shallow pit that had been dug beneath the hanging platform. This was the last legal public hanging in the United States. It took place just eight miles from Mease’s Hollow, less than a decade before Darrell Mease was born.

So this was it: the outlaw culture, the culture of daring and violence,
which local Ozarks kids were partly raised in. And for many kids, especially boys, it held considerably more allure than the other culture, the culture of piety and revival, which competed for their attention. They grew up hearing stories of miraculous healings and midnight conversions. But they also grew up hearing of desperadoes and bootleggers, of Big Nat Kinney and the Bald Knobbers taking care of business their own way, the tried-and-true backwoods way, of Red Jackson standing tall to the end, asking no favors, copping no pleas. The desperadoes and Big Nat and Red Jackson usually won out; theirs was the side with the greater romance.

Of course, local Ozarks kids usually didn’t have far to go in embracing the romance of the outlaw. As often as not, they only needed look to their own families and they’d find a grandfather who’d made his living bootlegging, a favorite uncle who’d served serious time for something he may or may not have done, a first cousin who’d already been in and out of trouble so often he was first-name familiar with practically every cop in the county. Local Ozarks kids came by their knowledge of outlaw culture honestly; it was part of their lived experience.

They also came by their cynicism and mistrust of established authority honestly. Here again, local kids usually didn’t have to stray very far from the front porch to hear the stories that were an integral part of the local folk wisdom. They heard stories of double-dealing prosecutors, judges on the take, sheriffs on the take, the whole damn system on the take; they heard of sheriff’s deputies busting people up just for the hell of it, of justice being auctioned off down at the courthouse like livestock at a county fair. Sometimes the stories featured members of their own families.

Darrell certainly heard his share of such stories growing up, including several featuring his uncle Otto, a hard-drinking, sly-humored man who was married to Lexie’s older sister Walsie. When Lexie was still a schoolgirl, Otto Ray was a justice of the peace in Reeds Spring with a reputation for playing mean and dirty. If he happened to be low on booze and strapped for cash (as was frequently
the case), no problem, old Otto would simply send out a deputy to arrest someone,
anyone
, for public drunkenness. After fining the miscreant, he’d have enough money to head on down to the liquor store for a fresh bottle or two.

There were other stories, too—quite a few involving Lexie’s brother Herbert, who held several law enforcement jobs in the Reeds Spring area over the years, including a tempestuous stint as town marshal. Herbert rarely missed an opportunity to leave his mark. He’d make his rounds with a leaded glove tucked into his jacket pocket, hoping (practically pleading) for an excuse to demonstrate its effectiveness when smashed against some poor local’s skull. One evening, he threw two drunks into the tank and deliberately left the cell door wide open. Sitting at his desk with his feet up, he said, “I’ll shoot the first one that comes out that door.” One of the drunks later maintained that his buddy pushed him. His buddy denied it, insisting that the fellow walked out on his own. Pushed or not, the drunk came through the open door and Herbert, true to his word, shot him in the stomach with a .38. The fellow lived, but even Herbert’s die-hard supporters (who weren’t numerous to begin with) wondered whether the time hadn’t perhaps arrived for their marshal to move on.

Herbert did eventually move on, taking his family to California and hunkering down in an abandoned saloon in the Independence—Lone Pine area. He prospected for gold and tried his hand at one or two other things, but mostly he gave the local citizenry ample cause to wish he’d never left Missouri. For a while he limited himself to penny-ante mayhem, bullying, brawling, the usual stuff, but then one night he strode into a bar just outside of Independence and blew some guy’s arm off with a .300 Magnum. The local authorities must have had a hard time containing their glee. The guy Herbert shot had long been suspected (without evidence to pin him down) of brutally slaying and then decapitating two kids in the nearby desert several years earlier. And Herbert? Would anyone really object too loudly if Herbert were sent away for a nice stretch, courtesy of the state?

Herbert’s stretch, when all was said and done, amounted to two years in the minimum-security Tehachapi Prison near Bakersfield. He was still serving his time when Lexie dropped by with Darrell and Larry in the summer of 1964. As a high-school graduation present for Darrell, Lexie had taken the boys on a road trip to visit relatives in California, leaving R.J., who really didn’t like straying too far from Stone County, at home to take care of Rita. Lexie thought this was a good opportunity for the boys to see their Uncle Herbert, maybe even have something to eat with him at the prison, so they picked up some buns and cold cuts in town and stopped by. Herbert was glad to see them. They were relaxing at a shaded picnic table on the prison grounds when Darrell took out his pocketknife to spread some mayonnaise on a sandwich. Herbert chuckled and told him, “You’d better get that back in your pocket or I might never get out of here.”

D
ARRELL LOVED THAT
two-week road trip to California. He thought it was just about the best graduation present he could have received. Lexie was happy giving it to him. She was pleased he’d stuck it out and earned his high-school diploma—and earned it with some distinction. Despite his sporadic study habits, Darrell made the honor roll his senior year, finishing fifth in a class of twenty-seven. Not that Darrell himself put much stock in the accomplishment. The school, he joked with his friends, was probably just hard up for another live body to fill out the roster.