Zeke and Ned (13 page)

Chilly Stufflebean was taking a short nap on his bench when the Judge walked in and informed him that he had been loaned out to Judge Sixkiller as bailiff for the Proctor trial.

“All that way?” Chilly asked. He had rarely left the precincts of Fort Smith. A journey to the Cherokee country seemed a frightening prospect.

“What if I get lost?” he asked, nervous at the thought of having to journey so far.

“Why, you won't get lost, Chilly—there's a road,” Judge Parker said.

W
HEN
B
ECCA WALKED INTO THE
T
AHLEQUAH JAIL
, Z
EKE WAS
nonplussed. It was the last thing he would have expected.

Becca rarely traveled, except by foot. As a girl, she had taken a bad fright, once; some mules ran off with a wagon her folks had left her in,
and a wild, one-horned cow charged the mules and spooked them. Becca had not been hurt in the runaway, but as a result developed a fear of animal locomotion which had proven lifelong. If Becca Proctor needed to go somewhere, she walked.

“Why, Bec . . . what have you got?” Zeke asked, when Becca walked in. She wore a thin shawl, and carried a small hamper. Zeke's immediate thought was that there might be a gun in the hamper. He had stopped worrying about the Becks walking into the jail and shooting him. The Becks were biding their time. They had been biding their time ever since Ned Christie had turned back Davie Beck's recent charge.

Now here stood Becca, with a hamper over her arm. She might have got tired of being without a man. If she had a gun, she probably wanted him to take it and break jail. Becca had never been content with his strayings, which were frequent, though mostly just to horseraces, or the gambling halls of Dog Town or Stinking Water.

The trouble was, Becca Proctor had fury in her. It slumbered deep beneath her smoky grey eyes and rarely came up. But when her fury did come up, Becca struck like a snake, snarled like a she-panther, bit like a frothing sow. Once, she had got her teeth in Zeke's ear—they were in the barn at the time—and he yelled so loud the milk cow jumped the fence and left. Another time, Becca had raked at his eyes with her fingernails and only just missed scratching one of them out. He still had a diagonal scar across his eyelid from that scrape.

Now Becca was in the Tahlequah jail, having walked fourteen miles on a chill day, carrying a hamper over her arm. When Zeke had last seen her, she had been feeling particularly off-colour, but she did not look off-colour now. She had been propelled to walk fourteen miles by one of two things—loneliness or anger—and Zeke was fairly certain it was not loneliness. Either she meant to free him or she meant to kill him, Zeke could not immediately guess which. Sheriff Bobtail had wandered off to the store to buy fishhooks. He planned to get in a day of fishing before the big trial, which was in three days. The Sheriff would be no help if Becca was bent on vengeance, and neither would Pete, who was snoring under a bench.

Pete had adapted well to jail life. Now and again, he even caught a rat, but Zeke had no time to worry about Pete's rat catching, with Becca standing there. She walked over to the cell, and looked him up and down.

“You're skinny looking, don't they feed you?” she asked.

“Old Mandy does the jail cooking,” Zeke informed her. Her remark had been made in a neutral tone, and so Zeke could not get a sense of how things lay with her. For the time being, he thought best to keep to the back of the cell.

Becca came closer. She put her hand in the hamper, and came out with a Bible. She looked at him a moment, and thrust it through the bars of the cell.

“I brought you this, Zeke,” she said. “You need to read it. There's things in it about how a husband should treat a wife. I marked the place where it says it.”

Zeke felt let down. He had primed himself for escape or murder, and now Becca was holding out a Bible. It irritated him that the woman would suppose he did not know how to treat a wife. After all, they'd been together now for seventeen years. He knew very well how to treat a wife. If she wanted to walk fourteen miles and risk the rain, she would have done better to bring him grub.

“I will take this Bible, but I would rather have had a pork chop,” he told her, taking the big book.

Becca just looked at him.

“I won't be cooking no pork chops for you until I know about that woman you shot,” she said. “If you was slipping out with her, I want to know it.”

Zeke was startled by the audacity of the question. Here the woman had walked fourteen miles in the rain, just to ask him if he had been slipping out.

“The Bible says not to traffic with harlots,” Becca said. “I won't be a wife to a man who does. I don't care if the whore is dead.”

“Becca, I'm here trying not to get hung or shot up by the Becks,” Zeke informed her. “This is a matter we can talk about if I live.”

“We can talk about it right now, I reckon,” Becca said. “You ride off one day without a by-your-leave, and the next thing I know you've kilt a woman. I'm your wife. I want to know about it.”

Zeke felt rattled. Charley Bobtail had deserted his post, otherwise Becca would not be able to stand there bringing up uncomfortable matters. She would not bring them up in front of a sheriff, but where was the Sheriff when his prisoner needed protecting?

When he tried to think how to answer what she was asking, he felt
a confusion spreading in his mind, like milk spilt on a table. The whole business of Sully and the cornmeal and the weevils and the yearling bear all seemed as if they had happened to someone else—some friend of his, or a cousin, or a kinsman, or somebody he had been traveling with. He could barely remember sneaking up to the Beck mill with his three guns, nor could he get Polly Beck to stand up clear in his mind's eye. He remembered he had been meaning to take Polly home and have her for a second wife, but he no longer clearly remembered what had led up to his decision. It had all happened in another time; or, it had been a dream he was somehow unable to awaken from.

“Bec, it was an accident that I killed the woman,” he said, finally. “I went to kill T. Spade because of the matter of the weevils. The woman got in the way of my shot, and it killed her. It was a plain accident . . . that's why I give myself up for trial.”

“It ain't the killing I need to know about,” Becca said. “It's what went on between you and her
before
the killing.”

Becca paused, and looked at Zeke carefully. He looked miserable as a wet dog on a cold day. Zeke had never liked having his actions questioned, or examined in any way. If he came home with a bloody nose, or a tooth knocked loose, or a scrape on his knuckles, he welcomed no commentary or inquiry. If she asked him how he skinned his hand, he would swell up and sulk for hours—yet, she
always
asked him. She did not consider herself hard to get along with, particularly, but she had no intention of living with a man she could not question, if questions plainly suggested themselves. Now he had killed a woman, and she meant to know what lay behind it. She did not accept the weevil explanation.

Zeke hesitated, running over in his mind what he could remember, and what he wanted to talk about. The thing he remembered most clearly was the yearling bear. Though the bear had jumped out of the fog, he remembered that it had a little white spot on its muzzle. His main wish was that he could start life over just before he jumped the bear. He had gone into that fog a free man, and had come out of it a prisoner of actions he had never intended.

The last thing he needed was for Becca to be asking him questions about his relations with a dead woman. He could barely remember the relations—everything that had happened since came to overshadow any prior relations with Polly Beck.

“I was brought up to think it proper for a man to take more than one wife,” Zeke said, finally. “In the Old Nation, it was the common thing.”

Becca's grey eyes narrowed and darkened.

“You meant to force her on me, then,” she said, after a moment.

“It's right in this Bible, somewhere,” Zeke replied. “The patriarchs in olden times had more than one wife. I've heard preachers say it. In the Old Place, men could take more than one wife.”

“You're a hypocrite, Zeke. Don't be talking to me of preachers, and don't be talking to me about the Old Place. If it was olden times, I could send you packing with nothing but the clothes on your back,” Becca told him. “You meant to bring that harlot home with you, didn't you? You would have forced her on me—wouldn't you?”

His look was a look of guilt, Becca realized: he had whored with the woman until he decided to marry her, in order to whore with her more. The killing was an accident, she believed that part. But it was not the killing she was concerned about right this moment.

“If you want things to be like olden times, then you can pretend you don't have a wife and a family, because now you don't,” Becca informed him. “I'm going back to my people, Zeke—and I'm taking the children with me. I won't live with a man that would force a harlot on me.”

As a Keetoowah brother, Zeke had taken a vow to uphold the old ways of his people. Cherokee families had been mother-led clans; when a Cherokee man married, he joined his wife's family. If a Cherokee wife wanted to divorce her husband, all she had to do was pack his things and put them outside the door, since the marriage property and the children belonged to her. These were all things Zeke knew; in his heat over Polly Beck, he had somehow managed to put them out of his mind. Now here was his wife, telling him that if he wanted to live by the old ways, he had to live by
all
of them. It was a damn nuisance!

Zeke knew he better come up with a good reason for Becca to stay, and quick.

“But what about the stock?” Zeke blurted. “Charley Bobtail won't let me out, and the stock will run wild.”

From the look on Becca's face, the reason he had chosen for her to stay was not convincing. In fact, it made her eyes darken even more.

“Sully can tend to the stock,” Becca said. Her voice was low.

She turned to leave, but then looked back once more at the man who had been her husband for seventeen years. Her face looked like death.

“I won't be a wife to you no more, Zeke Proctor—this is the end of it,” she said.

Zeke tried to think of another argument that would make her change her mind. But he could not come up with one—his mind had gone blank.

Becca waited for a comment, but she saw that Zeke was stumped.

“Good-bye, Zeke,” she said. “I wish you success at your trial.”

Then she left.

Zeke sat down on the hard bunk where he slept. Pete woke up and jumped in his lap, hoping his master would scratch him under the chin. But Zeke was too low to feel like scratching Pete's neck. Sully Eagle was no hand with livestock; half the cows would soon get loose from him, and go wild. The more he thought about the situation, the lower his spirits sank.

He felt a pain starting, deep in his rib cage.

He knew he'd be lucky to have a cow left, by the time he got out of the jail.

F
OUR OF THE
B
ECKS
—W
ILLY
, F
RANK
, S
AM, AND
T. S
PADE—DECIDED
to make a trip to Fort Smith to see if they could bribe a marshal.

Judge Isaac Parker had been a terrible disappointment. With only three days to go until the trial, Zeke Proctor still rested in the Tahlequah jail, eating free food. He even had his dog for a companion. Willy Beck's view was that they needed to bribe a marshal and bribe him quick, else Zeke Proctor would be tried in Cherokee court and no doubt would escape the consequences of his murderous actions.

“We're white—he ought to be tried white,” Sam Beck said, more than once. That Sam Beck took it into his head to speak at all was an indication of how serious the matter was. Sam Beck had been known to go as long as two years without saying a word to anyone, unless it was to Dickie, his mule. If he spoke at all, it would usually be to repeat something one of his brothers had just said. Within the family circle, this tendency had earned him the nickname Echo.

Now, though, Sam Beck ceased to be an echo—he was so outraged that Zeke got to keep his dog in jail, he offered to contribute $4 toward bribing the marshal.

On the trip to Fort Smith, Sam harped on the matter of the dog so much that T. Spade finally lost his temper and yelled at his brother.

“Quit your yapping about his damn terrier,” he said. “If you want to yap, yap about my wife who got kilt. Now I'll have to go court some hussy I don't even know, or else do my own cooking.”

Sam had not considered that aspect of the matter. When the brothers arrived at the mill, T. Spade had been subsisting on a diet of cornbread. Being a miller, he had access to abundant corn. It was obvious, once Sam thought about it, that T. Spade was right: he would have to court up a new wife. A diet of cornbread alone would soon grow boresome.

Davie Beck had been left at home. He was too volatile for the delicate negotiations that might be necessary if a marshal was to be bribed. Since his encounter with Ned Christie, Davie had spent most of his time at a blacksmith shop in Dog Town. His plan was to convert an old saw blade into a knife, so he could rip Ned Christie's guts out the next time he saw him. Davie was no blacksmith, and the work was proceeding slowly. He kept using larger and larger saw blades, in order to insure himself a fatal rip when he went for Ned Christie's guts.

On the way to Fort Smith, the Beck brothers ran into Sully Eagle. Sully was sitting by the road, thinking. When he saw the Beck brothers approaching, he regretted not having chosen another road to think by. They knew he worked for Zeke; he and Zeke were both Cherokee; and the Becks were frustrated men—what if they decided to hang him, to relieve their feelings?