The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (2 page)

H
is mother was Julia Oblinski, born of Polish immigrants, an intelligent and variously talented woman with a gift for the piano and a special fondness for Chopin. But circumstance and mean luck wed her to Thomas Kaicel at the age of fifteen.

Kaicel was an immigrant Russian of Polish ancestry, a large man of rough ways and rash temper. Dark rumor clung to him like an alien odor. It was said he had killed a man in Russia and fled to London and from there shipped to America. He had lived for a time in New York and toiled as a street cleaner, gravedigger, ferryman. He’d been with a red labor union, they said, had battled in the streets of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, had acquired the scar over his eye in Chicago. It was anyone’s guess why he moved to western Michigan or how he had come by the means to buy a dairy farm.
Whatever the case, he knew about milk cows, and the dairy turned steady if not bountiful profits. Over time he gained a passing acquaintance with some of his neighbors, but he was not one for socializing. He lived quietly and minded his business, kept his own counsel and the nightly company of whiskey.

He’d been in the region a year when one Saturday in town he ran into Fredrick Oblinski, whose wagon he had once helped to extricate from a mudhole, and was introduced to his wife and daughter. It was early winter. Their breath formed plumes in the air. Kaicel had for some time been in want of a wife, and the moment he set eyes on young Julia he determined that she was the one.

Two weeks later he asked for her hand. In that rural past, farm girls married early and brides of fifteen were no rarity. Nor was it of great social import that Kaicel was the girl’s senior by at least twenty years, his age but one more thing about him no one knew for certain. Julia’s parents were aware of the frightful rumors that attached to Thomas Kaicel, yet they respected him as a hardworking man of property and were in favor of the marriage. When the girl declined his proposal with the explanation that she thought herself too young to become a mother, Kaicel dismissed her objection as irrelevant and appealed to the parents to set her straight. The Oblinskis sympathized with him, but they had been in America long enough to have assumed much of its social attitude. If their daughter did not want to marry right away, well, give her a little time, they told him, she was barely more than a child but she was smart and practical, keep wooing her, she’d come around. The mother whispered that the girl was not one to admit it but was probably just fearful of the marriage bed.

What could he do but as they advised? He called on her each of the next three Saturday afternoons, hat in hand, black beard
trimmed and hair heavy with pomade, footwear scraped of cow dung. His forefinger tugged at the unfamiliar clinch of necktie. They sat in the parlor over a tray of tea and cookies set out by the mother and made small talk punctuated by periods of silence during which the girl seemed well at ease while he sweat prodigiously in the heat of the fire and badly craved a drink. Young Julia was polite, if somewhat distant. She owned a poise beyond her years that slightly unnerved him. Nevertheless, every visit made him more determined in his suit.

For her part, his calls were an ordeal to be endured in the name of etiquette. He did not speak English very well and never would, and it required effort to hide her amusement at his accent and maladroit diction, which in truth afforded the only fun she found in his company. His most recent visit had so bored her that she offered to entertain him at the piano in order to entertain herself. She asked what he would like to hear but did not know the Russian folk tunes he named, so she performed bits of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, asking with each segue if he knew the music. He shook his head repeatedly, feeling his ignorance hoisting into display like a red banner. Then she began the “Marche Funèbre” and he said “Yes, I know!” She asked him to name it, or its composer, and his jubilation fell like a swatted bee. Her smile was mocking and she left off the march for a polonaise. He sensed her perception of him as an uncultured peasant and felt an angry ache in his chest. When he got home that night he uncorked a new bottle and next morning awoke on the floor.

O
VER THE NEXT
days he grew fretful that Julia Oblinski would never deign to marry him, and the looming doubt was unbearable. Late one evening, sitting before an untouched bowl of congealing
stew and a nearly depleted bottle, he determined to resolve the issue without further delay. He drained his glass and snatched up his hat and coat and went out to saddle his horse. He rehearsed with the animal his apology to the Oblinskis for calling at this hour, but he was certain they would understand his need of a definite answer. He rode into a night of cold wind and rushing clouds. The snowless ground was dappled under the radiance of a gibbous moon. But it was even later than he thought, and when he came in view of the house not a window showed lamplight. He reined up under the trees beside the front gate and reconsidered. The wind had grown stronger, jostling the heavy shadows of the pines. He had sobered appreciably.

Fool, he thought. I am a damned fool.

He was about to rein the horse around when the moon came clear of the clouds and he saw her creep out of her second-floor window. She moved in a crouch to the end of the eave, and as she shinned down the drainpipe the wind raised her skirt and he glimpsed long pale legs. She dropped the last few feet to the ground and hurried away into the darkness, bearing for the vague shape of the barn.

He dismounted and hitched the horse and set out after her, a hand clamped to his hat against the wind. Not until he was almost to the barn did he see the dim glow at the side window. He sidled up to it and peeked within. The animals were placid in their stalls in the light of a lantern hung on a post at the rear of the barn, where she and a burly young man stood embraced and kissing. The young man’s hand was under her shirt. She pushed off his hat and Kaicel saw that the boy was perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old. He shed his jacket and said something and she laughed, though Kaicel could not hear them. They kissed again and unbuttoned
each other’s shirts and lowered out of Kaicel’s sight behind the partition of an empty stall.

He found the boy’s horse tethered behind the barn. The saddle scabbard held a Winchester carbine. He slid the rifle out and levered the magazine empty of cartridges, then put the weapon back in its sheath. Then returned to the door and opened it just wide enough to slip inside, trying to be noiseless. But an inrush of wind blew straw the length of the barn and twirled the flame in the lantern, shaking the shadows on the wall. He heard her urgent whisper: “
Father.
”

There was a hasty rustling. The boy rose and peered over the stall at Kaicel, then stepped out shirtless, buckling his belt, and said, “Who the hell are
you?
”

Kaicel stood smirking through his beard, his thumbs hooked in his pockets. The boy was not as large as he’d thought. Now the girl peeked from behind the stall, holding her removed blouse to her breasts.

“Oh God,” she said, “Mr. Kaicel.”

“The Russki?” the boy said. She nodded and the boy’s face clenched. “What’re you sneaking around here for, mister?”

Kaicel took off his coat and draped it over a wheelbarrow, hung his hat on a rope hook, began rolling up his sleeves.

The boy could fight but was no match for a brawler of Kaicel’s size and seasoning. He cut the Russian’s lower lip and welted a cheek, but Kaicel bloodied his nose and blacked both eyes and broke two of his ribs, then finished him with a knee to the crotch. The boy lay helpless, holding himself and rocking in pain. The girl looked on with her fist at her mouth and tears coursing. Kaicel ordered her to bring the rest of the boy’s clothes, then pulled him to his feet and half-dragged him out to the horse. He jammed the
boy’s hat on his head and heaved him up into the saddle and stuffed his shirt and coat under the cantle. He put the reins in his hands and told him never to come back. Then slapped the horse on the rump and it loped away in the windblown night.

The girl was still crying as she followed him back into the barn. She begged him not tell her parents. She swore it was the first time she had ever met with the boy, swore they had done nothing but kiss and touch. She had put her shirt on but it remained unbuttoned and he could see the inner swells of her breasts. He could not tell if she were being truthful but thought it unlikely that one so callow could lie with such conviction. He perceived an advantage in saying he did not believe her. She wept harder and made to button the shirt but he pushed her hands away.

“If I too, then I cannot tell to nobody and you stay the secret. Yes? Be the clever girl.”

She was in a state. If she had another choice she didn’t know what it was. He took her silence for consent and snatched her into the stall, her single small cry less of pain than dismay, and anyway lost to the wind.

I
N TRUTH SHE
had been meeting with the boy about once a week for more than two months. They had known each other since childhood and attended the same school, though he was several grades ahead of her. It wasn’t until the most recent summer, following his graduation and her sudden womanly bloom, that their friendship progressed to something more and the barn assignations began. Although he was her first such experience, she was scarcely his, and she knew it. He was too easy about it all, too apparently practiced. Yet the knowledge in no way diminished her delight in their sport, and she anyhow believed herself in love. He guided her
from first timid kisses and tentative touches to kissing in the fabled French mode and caressing in thrillingly wicked ways, and as the last of her reserve fell like an apple from a shaken tree, the lovers clove in the most intimate embrace of all.

She knew nothing of the boy’s difficulty with a girl just the year before, a difficulty that threatened public accusations and cumbersome legalities until his father’s generous allocation of cash settled the matter to the satisfaction of all parties. His father, a widower, could well afford such a solution, having prospered hugely in the timber business and being even richer than his neighbors supposed. But he was not used to being put over a barrel. He had himself been no model of deportment in his younger days and had traded his share of bruises. His name was Jerome but everyone addressed him as Captain Jerry. When he beheld his son’s battered aspect at the dinner table the day after the boy’s encounter with Kaicel and asked what happened, the boy, who would not lie to him, related the particulars. The father sighed deeply at the girl’s age and the possible necessity of another payoff. Only the remembered follies of his own youth checked his impulse to take a belt to the seat of his son’s pants and never mind that the boy was almost seventeen. As for the Russian dairyman, there was a time Captain Jerry would have taken a pick handle to him as encouragement to mend his bullying ways, but such days were past. He was tired, the father, weary of combat in all forms and venues from saloon fights to courtroom confrontations. He hankered after a tranquil dotage. For some years now he had been wanting to take permanent leave of Michigan and its protracted winters, and when business had taken him to the Missouri Ozarks a year ago for the first time, he found the region so lovely and amenable in climate that he bought a house in Springfield in anticipation of relocating there for good.
His son’s fight with Kaicel and the reason for it decided him that it was as good a time as any to make the move. The next day Captain Jerry put his Michigan properties on the market and that evening departed with his son on the train for St. Louis.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
the postman delivered the boy’s hastily scribbled note of farewell. Julia read it and burned it and wept in her life’s single instance of self-pity.

On the subsequent Saturday, just a few days after the episode in the barn, Thomas Kaicel called again. To her parents he explained the bruises on his face as the result of a clumsy fall from a wagon while repairing a seat brace. Julia’s only surprise at his call was at her lack of surprise. Of course he would come, she thought. Only such a one as he would persist in a suit for such as she. So en-webbed was she in despair, in a sense of ruination that could never be made right, in fear of what might become of such a worthless fool as herself, that when he once again tendered his proposal of marriage, she accepted. On the single condition that she could take her piano with her. He agreed and felt victorious. Her parents were delighted at the news of their betrothal and said to Kaicel that they had told him so.

Three weeks later they were wed in Grand Rapids. None of the ceremony’s attendees could recall a less-animated bride, though none was so unkind as to say so. The first true smile of her marriage came at the birth of her child, a blond and hazel-eyed son, who arrived a month earlier than expected and was christened Stanislaus, after a favored uncle of hers who had died young. Everyone beamed on the mother and remarked on the boy’s likeness to her. That the child’s features showed no ready resemblance to the father was not uncommon in newborns, they said to Kaicel.
When the child matured, they said, the similarities would emerge. But he sensed their effort in his presence to hold down eyebrows and suppress knowing smiles. And as the boy grew from infant to toddler to grammar school student, Thomas Kaicel more and more knew the same bitter taste that had always jumped to his tongue when the carnival sharps turned up the correct one of the three cards, the shell that hid the pea.

T
he years passed and the distance widened between Thomas Kaicel and his family. Evenings found him on the porch with his whiskey and whittling knife, muttering to himself in the gathering gloom until full dark and time for bed. Julia never called him by any name but Kaicel, even when speaking of him to her two sons, the younger one, John, born ten months after Stanislaus.

The brothers called him “sir” until the summer day when Kaicel cuffed Stanislaus harder than usual for some alleged failing and the boy rushed at him with fists swinging. From the first of his school days Stanislaus had discovered his natural bent for fighting, the exhilaration of trading punches. He had not yet heard of adrenaline but well knew its effect, the small trembling that came whenever he was about to fight but which had nothing to do with fear,
only with his body’s readiness to inflict and absorb pain. By the time he was twelve, even some of the older boys kept their distance. He had not completed the eighth grade when he was permanently expelled for fighting, and he had since spent his days laboring on the dairy farm.

However, at 135 pounds and a few weeks shy of age sixteen, he was far from ready for Kaicel. The man threw him against the barn wall, thrashed him, knocked him senseless. When she caught sight of Stanislaus that evening, Julia was aghast and berated her husband for a bully. Without raising his eyes from his plate Kaicel told her to shut up. She saw Stanislaus’s hand tighten around his fork and said nothing more, fearing blood at the table. The ensuing hush was broken solely by the clinking of Kaicel’s tableware as he finished eating, the scrape of his chair when he departed for the porch.

Julia made Stanislaus promise not to fight with him, not even if the man should hit him again, which he surely would. Kaicel was a brute, she said, not above deliberately and badly harming him.

Still, the boy never again addressed him as “sir,” only as “mister,” usually in a tone to draw warning against insolence. Kaicel still slapped him on the head in occasional moments of extreme displeasure, but not so often as before nor quite as hard, and always now, it pleased Stanislaus to note, with a wary readiness for counterattack.

In such instances, he would glare at the man and think You
better
be set, you stinky bastard.

S
INCE THEIR EARLY
childhood, Julia had encouraged her sons to join in her nightly ritual at the piano after Kaicel had removed to the porch. The boys sat to either side of her and she instructed
them in the fundamentals of the instrument. Neither of the brothers would ever learn to play the piano well, but they gained a deep appreciation of its classic works. Stanislaus shared his mother’s love of Chopin, and his favorite piece was the “Funeral March.”

They always capped their evenings with a mix of popular songs both venerable and new, the mother swaying on the bench as she played, the brothers harmonizing on the lyrics of Stephen Foster and the great songs of the Civil War, Stanislaus vastly preferring the earthy die-hard loyalty of “Dixie” to the punishing martial pieties of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Their repertoire ranged from the quaint “Yellow Rose of Texas” to the much more recent and immensely popular “After the Ball.” The younger son’s voice was capable, but Stanislaus owned an extraordinary baritone, and it was his mother’s dream that his gift might someday gain him a public prominence.

Stanislaus, too, liked to imagine himself famous, though in a far different fashion from his mother. His own ideals were bred of a rapture with dime novelettes. Julia had once discovered a copy in his wardrobe and accused him of degrading his mind. She made him get rid of it but remained unaware of the other volumes he kept hidden under the mattress. The novelettes abounded with hazardous forays and blasting guns and the dust of galloping getaways. The boy venerated the notorious outlaws of an Old West that at this time was in fact far from old. Indeed, in 1886, the year of Stanislaus’s birth, Bill Hickok had been dead a mere decade, Billy the Kid but five years, Jesse James only four. Stanislaus was already six when the Dalton Gang was spectacularly slaughtered in Coffeyville, Kansas. For years afterward he heard men speak of the Daltons in timbres of awe. He was profoundly aware that only fifteen years separated him in age from Emmett Dalton, the youngest
of the bunch and its sole survivor at Coffeyville, now locked away for life in a Kansas penitentiary. He felt it a low trick of fate that he’d been born a wink too tardy to ride in such legendary company. He daydreamt of being a desperado, a long rider of renown, of being sought for interviews and accounts of his daring exploits. Of posing narrow-eyed and with thumbs in gunbelt for photographs to accompany expositions of him as a highly dangerous but much misunderstood man. Of being the subject of mournful ballads long after he passed from the earth.

Y
ET IF THE
day of the Old West was done, the wildness of the West was not. The boy knew there was still much untamed territory on the far side of the Mississippi and by the waning days of the following summer he was determined to light out for it. He had not yet decided on a day for his departure when circumstance took a turn to speed him on his way.

One afternoon in the barn, Kaicel gave him another ringing slap on the ear and it was the one too many. The boy snatched up an empty milk bucket and swung it by the bail, striking Kaicel a glancing blow to the side of the head. Stanislaus tried to hit him again but missed and the man grabbed the bucket and wrenched it away. And now Kaicel advanced on him, swinging the bucket with vicious sidearm sweeps, the boy hopping back from each swipe with his arms flinging outward as if he were doing some rustic dance. A pitchfork came to hand, and Stanislaus brandished it like a soldier at ready bayonet. Kaicel stood fast for a moment, then snarled and flung the bucket at him. Stanislaus dodged it and impaled him.

Kaicel cried out and twisted away, pulling the pitchfork from the boy’s grip. It dangled from the man’s side, the handle end tap
ping the floor as he tottered backward, fingers fumbling at the three deep-rooted prongs pinioning his bloody shirt to his rib cage, the upper portion of his breeches reddening rapidly.

He fell to his knees and said, “I am killed.” Then folded onto his side, still gripping the prongs, blood darkening the dirt beneath him, legs working slowly as if they might yet somehow bear him away from this terrible strait.

Stanislaus stared down at him for a moment, then snatched up his cap and jacket and ran to his secret niche under the hayloft and extracted his entire fortune, three silver dollars and three more in paper. Then fled.

His mother was in the cackling henhouse and his brother in the privy singing to himself at his ease with a mail-order catalog. Neither had heard Kaicel’s yell and neither saw the boy as he raced across the pasture to the fence and hurdled it. He ran into the woods and headed for the rail tracks beyond.

He followed the tracks southward for several miles to where they curved between a long steep hill and a marshy lake and the trains were forced to reduce their speed. He had often fished in this lake and watched the passing trains and thought how simple it would be to board one moving so slowly. He hunkered in the brush and waited, his pulse still thumping in astonishment at what he’d done, with the thrill of being a fugitive desperado, a soon-to-be-wanted man.

Within the hour a freight came chugging round the hill and he laughed to see boxcars with open doors. He waited until the engine went by and then ran out of the brush and up the bed embankment and alongside the train. And was hugely surprised by how much faster the cars were moving now he was so near to them and their great racketing wheels.

An open boxcar came rolling by and he grabbed the iron handle at the bottom of the sliding door with both hands and tried to swing himself up. But he couldn’t get his feet into the car and the train was gaining speed and now he was being pulled along like an oversized rag doll, legs flapping and feet glancing off the roadbed, trying for purchase on the air itself. He was afraid to let go of the handle, certain he would be killed or lose part of himself to the wheels. He could not hear his own yells above the rumble of the train. And then he was tugged roughly by the back of his jacket and the seat of his trousers and his shirt collar closed tight around his throat, strangling him. Someone hollered “Turn loose! Turn
loose,
damnit!” But he could not quit his desperate grip. Then a heavy stick jabbed at his fingers and one hand abruptly surrendered its hold and the other slipped loose and for an instant he thought he was falling but was instead hoisted and slung into the car like a sack of spuds.

He heaved for breath and sat up, his neck sore. A pair of men were regarding him in obviously amused wonder. Hoboes, days unshaved and roughly clothed. One with a black patch over an eye and a white worm of scar curving to midcheek from under it, the other holding a walking stick across his shoulders like a yoke.

The one-eyed one showed a greenish grin and said, “Kinda new at this, ain’t you, sonny?”

T
HE WALKING-STICK
bo was called Steamer. Bound for New Orleans after a visit to Mackinaw City, though the purpose of the visit he did not tell. The one-eye was Iron George, who jerked his thumb northward when the boy asked where he was from and wagged a finger to the south at the question of where he was going. Stanislaus laughed and said “Yeah, me too.”

They shared with him their entire rations of a half-loaf of crusty bread and two tins of sardines and two pop bottles of water. He expected them to ask for money and thought he would lie and say he had none or they might rob him of all of it, but the subject never came up. They all three sat by the open door and watched the country rolling by and he was cautioned to face rearward to avoid being hit in the eye by a blown cinder. The train would arrive next morning in Chicago where both men intended to catch a southbound freight. They told him the best spot just beyond the city railyard for catching one heading westward. But he’d have to improve his boarding technique or he’d not make it anywhere but to a potter’s field, and he would be buried there in pieces.

They taught him the various ways to get on different kinds of moving cars and how to jump off a moving train. To lessen the risk of breaking his neck in a crash he was advised to sleep with his feet always in the direction the train was heading. They even coached him in techniques for riding the rods, the framework of metal bars on the undercarriage of a car. It was the most dangerous ride of all and strictly a last resort, but a man never knew when the rods might be all that was available to him and so he ought to know how to do it. Iron George had ridden the rods in Texas some years before for more than two hundred miles and still couldn’t believe he lived through it. Steamer had done it once in a Pennsylvania winter for fifty miles he thought would never end.

He listened closely and remembered everything. As the train sped into the rising night they told stories of boes they’d seen killed or maimed under the wheels. Iron George held up for the boy’s regard a hand missing the most part of two fingers, lost to a coupler. They told of scraps with brakemen, whom they called “shacks,” with yard bulls and smalltown cops. Told of farmers who had run
them off their property at gunpoint, sometimes with gunfire, of farmers’ wives or daughters who’d fed them, and of a memorable few who’d done more than that. They explicated for him the symbols hoboes inscribed on railside trees, barn walls, fence posts and gates and road signs, warnings to other boes of rough towns and tough cops, bad-tempered farmers and mean dogs, or to inform where a meal could be had and whether it would be free or require payment in labor, or where the nearest hobo camp could be found. They told him he’d need a bindle, a blanket bedroll tied with a loop of rope so he could carry it strapped across his back, that a good bindle always contained an extra shirt and pair of socks, a chunk of soap, a packet of matches. If he didn’t have a pocketknife he’d better get one and carry it within easy grab. His makings of a bindle began with Iron George’s gift of a small worn blanket he said he no longer needed. Steamer gave him some matches and broke a pencil in two and gave him the piece with the sharpened point. Except from his mother, he’d never met with such generosity.

Deep in the night he woke to the car’s easy rocking over the rails. His companions’ snores rasped in the shadows. He got up and went to sit by the open door. A high moon lit the trackside pastures and woodlands and sleeping hamlets. The wind rushed cool against him. Cinders streaked brightly orange into the passing darkness like small mute fireworks of celebration. He felt free as a hawk.