The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (47 page)

“A what? Mourning dove?” my wife says. “I never knew we had them here.”
Here
being among the budding sugar maples and the prim starched white paper birches in the bustle and thaw of a crisp New England spring.

“I never knew you did either,” says my mother. “What is a mourning dove doing way off up here?”

“What are you doing way off up here?” I say.

For my mother, too, has left Texas, lives out in Indianapolis. Now she has come on her annual visit to us. We sit on the sun porch, rushing the season a bit. As always, we two have fallen to reminiscing of Blossom Prairie and our life there before my father's death, telling stories by the hour which both of us have heard and told so often now that it is the rhythm which stirs us more than the words, our tongues thickening steadily until the accent is barely intelligible to my Yankee wife, who listens amused, amazed, bewildered, bored, and sometimes appalled.

“Son, do you remember,” my mother says, “the time the bank was held up?”

I am still listening to the dove, and I have to ask her what she said. But now she is listening to the dove and does not hear me.

“The time the bank was held up? No, I don't remember that. First time I ever heard of it.”

“Hmm? What did you say? First time you ever heard of what?”

“Of the bank being held up. The bank in Blossom Prairie?”

“Really? Oh, you remember such funny things! Old Finus, that used to come around to the house every afternoon selling hot tamales. Why anybody should clutter up their memory with him, I don't know! Lord, I would never have given him another thought this side of the grave. And not remember the great bank robbery! You were old enough. You remember lots of things that happened long before that. I took you with me, and we saw the dead men lying on the sidewalk on the square. You've forgotten that?”

“Dead men? Lying on the sidewalk? On the square? What dead men?”

“The bank robbers. All shot dead as they came out of the bank. You don't remember?”

“What!” says my wife. “You took a child to see a sight like—”

“That's the kind of thing I remember! Not an old boy who used to come around crying, ‘Hot tamales!' Why, that was just about the biggest thing that ever happened in Blossom Prairie, I should think.”

I open more cans of beer, and she drinks and sets down the can and wipes her lips and says, “Well, it was back in the bad old days. When lots of men were out of work and some of the young ones, who had all cut their teeth on a gun, took to living by it. The age of the great outlaws, when we had Public Enemy Number One, Two, Three. In our parts Pretty Boy Floyd was carrying on. And Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.”

“Did Clyde and Bonnie stick up the bank in Blossom Prairie?”

“No, no, it wasn't them. But it was in those days and times. No, the ones that stuck up the bank in Blossom Prairie—”

“Wait. Who was Pretty Boy Floyd?” asks my wife. “Who were Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker?”

“You never heard of them?” asks my mother, wiping away her mustache of suds.

“Now we will never get the story of the Blossom Prairie bank robbery,” say I.

“Never heard of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker? Never even heard of Pretty Boy Floyd?”

“Pretty Boy!” my wife laughs. “Pretty Boy!”

“Clyde Barrow,” I say, “was a notorious outlaw, and Bonnie Parker his gun moll. They came out of West Dallas, the real low-down tough section of the town. They tore around sticking up banks and filling stations and honky-tonks, and between them shot and killed any number of bank tellers and gas-pump operators and law officers in Texas in the early thirties. We used to follow the exploits of Clyde and Bonnie in the newspapers every day, like keeping up with the baseball scores. We really cannot claim Pretty Boy Floyd. He was an Oklahoma hero.”

“You're making fun,” says my mother. “Well, no doubt they did a lot of bad things, but let me tell you, hon”—this to her daughter-in-law—“you can go back down there and out in the country and to this day you'll find a many an old farmer will tell you he was proud to give Pretty Boy Floyd a night's lodging when the law was hounding him down like a poor hunted animal, and more than likely they found a twenty-dollar bill under his breakfast plate after he had left the next morning. And he never got that nickname for nothing. Oh, he was a good-looking boy!”

“Well, what about the ones that held up the bank in Blossom Prairie?”

“He was a good-looking boy, too. All three of them were.”

“She just never could resist an outlaw,” I say.

The dove calls again, and my wife says, “What a sad, lonesome sound. I hope she doesn't come to nest around here. I wouldn't like to listen to that all day.”

“As a matter of fact,” says my mother, “as a matter of fact, I knew one of them. Travis Winfield, his name was. He was the leader of the gang. You wouldn't remember the Winfields, I don't suppose? Lived in that big old yellow frame house beyond the bridge out on the old McCoy road? A wild bunch, all of those Winfields, the girls as well as the boys, but good-looking, all of them, and Travis was the best-looking, and the wildest, of the lot. Well, anyway. One day when you were—oh, let's see, you must have been six or seven, which would make it—how old are you now, hon, thirty-eight?”

“Seven.”

“Thirty-seven?”

“Yes'm.”

“Are you sure?”

“I
was
. Aren't you?”

“Oh, you! Well, anyway, it was during the summer that you had your tonsils and adenoids out. Remember? We were living at the time in Mr. Early Ellender's little cottage out on College Avenue. I had that little old Model-A Ford coupé that your daddy had bought me.”

“Was there a college in Blossom Prairie?” my wife asks.

“No!”

“Well, you were just getting over that operation, and that's how you happened to be at home at the time and not off somewhere or other out of call. I remember I was fixing dinner when the telephone rang.… No, honey, there wasn't any college in Blossom Prairie. It was just a little bitty old place—though it was the county seat, and we all thought we were really coming up in the world when we left the farm and moved into town. It was so little that his daddy used to come home for his dinner every day. What you call lunch.… Well, the telephone rang and it was Phil. ‘Hop in your car and come right down!' he said. ‘They've just shot and killed three men robbing the bank!'”

“Then why was it called College Avenue? That doesn't make much sense.”

“Don't ask me. I just grew up there.”

“Well, but didn't it ever occur to you to wonder why they would call it that when there wasn't any—”

“Now, here is what had happened. These four men—”

“Three, you just a minute ago said.”

“I said three were killed. These four men had been camping out down in Red River Bottom and—However, I better start with the woman. There was this woman, see. She had come into town about a month before. A stranger. She took a house, and she gave herself out to be a widow woman interested in maybe settling in the town and opening some kind of business with the money her husband had left her. And she had had a husband, all right, but she was no widow, nor even a grass widow. That came out at the trial. In fact, her husband showed up at the trial. When the judge sentenced her to eighteen years in the penitentiary this man stood up in the courtroom and said, ‘Mildred! I'll still be waiting for you!' And she said, ‘You'll wait a lot longer than any eighteen years!' And as they were taking her away he yelled, ‘Mildred! Darling! I forgive you!' Meaning he forgave her for leaving him and running off with Travis. And that she-devil turned and told him I-can't-tell-you-what that he could do with his such-and-such forgiveness, right there in front of the judge and jury and the whole town and county. And still the poor fool did not give up but went round to the jailhouse and yelled up at the window of her cell until finally she came to the bars. And do you know what she told him was the one thing he could do that might win her back?—and this, you understand, would be after waiting for her to come out of the penitentiary for eighteen years. To get a gun and go shoot the one that had told on them to the law and had got the lover that she had run off with killed. However, it was not him that did it.”

“That did what? Wait. I don't—”

“She was a cutter! Well, shortly after coming to town she went to the bank one day and opened an account. The very next day she was back and said she had changed her mind and wanted to draw her money out. They asked her why, and she said she had had her money in a bank once that had been held up, and she seemed to imply that that bank had looked a lot stronger than what she saw of ours. This piqued the manager, and he took her on a tour of the place to convince her that her money was safe with them, showing her all the strong vaults and the time locks and the burglar-alarm system and how it worked and whatnot. Besides, he said, there had never been any bank robberies in Blossom Prairie. So he convinced her, and she said she would let her money stay. After that she would come in every so often and make a deposit or a withdrawal, and she got to know the layout of the bank. She was making a map of it at home, and after each trip she would go and fill it in some more and correct any mistakes she had made in it. That way, too, she came to know when the big deposits were made by the business firms and the big-scale farmers and when there was always the most cash on hand in the bank.”

“Meanwhile, she wasn't spending much time in that house in town. She told her neighbors—and of course they told everybody and his dog—that she still hadn't made up her mind to settle in Blossom Prairie and was looking over other spots around the county before deciding. She was seen on the road a lot, and she was a demon at the wheel. I was a pretty hot driver my own self, but—”

“Was! You still are. You scare me half to death.”

“Well, that redheaded woman handled a car like no other woman and few men that I ever saw. In town she would spread her shopping over all the grocery stores so it wouldn't look like she was buying more food than a lone woman could eat, and she bought a good deal of bootleg liquor too, it came out later, and she would fill up the car and slip off down to Red River Bottom where Travis and his gang were camped out, though of course nobody knew that at the time. Whenever any squirrel hunter would happen to come up on them Travis kept out of sight, as he was the only local boy among them, and the other three made out that they were a hunting party too.

“Travis had been gone from home for some years, and everybody had pretty well forgotten him, except for maybe a couple of dozen girls who would have liked to but couldn't. Word would get back every now and again of some trouble he had gotten into and gotten himself out of. Now he had rounded up this gang and come back to rob the bank in his old home town. But though he had grown up there, he had to have that woman, or somebody, to draw him a map of the bank, for I don't suppose poor Travis had ever set foot in it in his life.

“All the while that he was holing up down there in the woods laying his plans Travis had living with him in that tent, and eating and drinking with him, one man who was in constant touch with the sheriff. He had told him all about that woman and about that map she was drawing of the bank and every little detail and switch in their plans. Imagine it? Living with three men for a whole month and letting on to be their friend, listening to them plan how they'll do this and do that to get the money and make their getaway, and knowing all the while that they were walking into a death trap that he himself had set, for pay, and that they were doomed to die as surely as if he himself had pulled the trigger on them? I'm not saying that what they were meaning to do was right, you understand. But can you just feature a skunk like that?

“I and Phil must have been just about the only people in town that didn't know the bank was set to be robbed that Monday morning. The sheriff had gone out and hired eight extra deputies, old country boys, good shots, squirrel hunters, and had them waiting, each with a thirty-thirty rifle, on the roofs of the buildings on each corner across the street from the bank, the old Ben Milam Hotel and the other, well, office buildings, stores downstairs on the street and doctors' and lawyers' offices upstairs, four stories high. The tellers in the bank had all been told not to put up any resistance but to give them what they asked for, to fill up their sacks for them, they'd have it all right back. The tip-off man was to wear something special. I seem to recall he wore a sailor straw hat, so they would recognize him and not shoot him.

“You remember, the bank in Blossom Prairie sits on the northwest corner of the square. The street that goes out to the north, Depot Street, goes past the cotton compress and over the tracks and past the ice house and towards the river. That would be the street they would come in on. The one going out to the west went past your daddy's shop and over the creek and on out of town in the direction of Paris. Down this street that morning, headed towards the square, came a wagon loaded high with baled hay. On the wagon seat, dressed up in overalls and a twenty-five-cent hardware-store straw hat, sat Sheriff Ross Shirley, and under the seat lay a sawed-off pump shotgun. At twenty minutes to eleven he set his team in motion with a flick of the reins. A moment later a car came round the corner and pulled up alongside the curb, and four men got out and ducked into the bank. As soon as they were inside, the sheriff says ‘Come up' to his team, and up on the rooftops the rifle barrels poke over the walls and point down, followed by the heads of those eight deputies. The woman was driving, and she stayed in the car, keeping the engine idling. The wagon came down the street towards her, rattling over those old
bois-d'arc
paving bricks, until it got to just a little ways in front of the car. There suddenly the left rear wheel flew off the axle, the load of hay came tumbling down, scattering clear across the street, bales bouncing and breaking apart, the street completely blocked. The woman in the car made a sudden change in plans. She threw into reverse and backed around the corner into Depot Street, thinking that now, instead of going out by the Paris road, they would have to cross the square and go out by the southwest. Then she sees ahead of her a man fixing a flat tire on a big delivery van out in the middle of the street halfway down the block. This meant, she thought, that she would have to cut diagonally across the square, through the traffic and around the plaza and out by the southeast corner. She didn't know it, but they had her cut off there, too. In another minute or so the men burst out of the bank carrying the sacks.