The Whipping Boy (10 page)

As their train joggled across a landscape still pockmarked by temporary ponds of water, he noticed that Tom quickly became drowsy, his lack of sleep over the last several days apparently catching up with him in the gentle rattling and swaying. Miss King drew the attention of the handful of men on the train, even as she sat completely still, staring out the window. There was something about this young woman, now that she was getting well—a gathering purposefulness, Jake thought. Mrs. Peltier had become convinced that she was a floozie—an “Irish woman,” as the landlady put it. She was the sort of woman who presented a challenge just by her presence. In his earlier days, he had met a few like her, and won the battle by retreating from the field.

Jake was curious about Samantha King, but his mind was as cluttered as the Dekker shipping floor right now, and he didn't want to put anything else into it. She'd be leaving soon, going about her business. Which was good, he figured, for the young man helping him. Jake had noticed the way Tom had been noticing her. But she was too much for a kid like him. A young man shouldn't be introduced to females like this. He ought to start with a homelier neighborhood example to get his bearings set . . .

As they curved southward, the old man's talk with him kept going through his mind. Mr. Dekker wanted Jake to go along with Ernest until he'd made his trip to St. Louis and gotten together the money necessary to pay off the debt. Jake was under the impression that the old man's original financing had been from banks in St. Louis, so it made sense that he was going there.

The store had problems, all right, but Jake figured that if it could weather the depression, they'd pull through. The flood hadn't ruined that much stock. Stains on the walls, the loss of some records—these were minor hindrances, and the store did get a free rat-exterminating job out of it. Ernest's “reorganization” of the stock would probably end up costing more than the flood. He'd been jamming everything either on or close to the shipping floor, as if he was expecting to sell it all next week, for what reason Jake couldn't guess, since it would make it hard to find items when merchandise started moving a little faster in March.

Jake had been going along with the program, just like the old man asked him to do, following instructions, studying accounts, and getting them straight to the penny. They'd had to attend daily meetings presided over by Ernest, his stubby little bulldog of a lawyer, and, on two occasions, Bradley, of the bank, who preached to the salesmen about how to get the accounts collected. Jake would sooner have gone outside and picked corn out of corral dust than go to these meetings. Although Ernest had no experience in the territory, he had a lot of strong opinions: The days of carrying no-account customers were over. They were declaring war on debt. This was a crusade. No prisoners would be taken. The new business era of the twentieth century was around the corner, when money would be made by the bold use of capital. To solve Dekker's problem, he and responsible officials at the bank were going to offer the salesmen incentives to collect. And what's more, they had devised a plan whereby most customers who didn't have cash could satisfy their debts through paper transactions.

It worked this way: Dekker customers who couldn't immediately pay at least half their debt in cash—as few could—were to be given the option of signing “mortgage transfer agreements.” These documents exchanged the standard merchandise mortgages previously held by Dekker against them for property mortgages—either the store owners' own business properties or the mortgages that stores were holding against their customers' debts. Almost all the substantial merchants held mortgages on the land of their regular customers, acting as banks where few banks existed.

This got a little complicated, Ernest's lawyer had allowed, since it was still illegal for outsiders to own tribal land, so the mortgages in the Nations officially applied only to “improvements”—buildings, not land—“until such time as ownership of the attendant property is provided by law,” when the tribes finally gave up the ownership of lands. In the sales territories in Arkansas, Kansas, and the white-settled Oklahoma Territory around Guthrie and Enid, the transfers did attach actual real estate now, or claimed to.

The whole thing amounted to Dekker's foreclosing on its customers' debts but accepting as payment the mortgage-based debts that they held on their own customers—“at our rate,” the lawyer said. Jake didn't know enough about property law to judge whether these mortgage transfer agreements were legal, but he did know enough about human nature to dread trying to make customers hand over other people's land.

Ernest and the bank had foreseen that problem and had devised a “generous incentive plan,” which by itself could make some of the salesmen “financially independent,” according to the lawyer. Salesmen were to be paid ten cents per acre in outright cash for every acre up to five thousand that they put under mortgage, and fifteen cents thereafter. Furthermore they would receive a two-cent bonus on land within more desirable areas. Jake noticed that some of the salesmen, who until then had acted glum and confused, began to wake up and pay attention to the details.

The rate of transfer of property to debt would normally be twenty-five cents per acre. A store with two hundred fifty dollars of unpayable debt needed to hand over paper on about a thousand acres for it. For this simple shuffling of paper the salesman was to get two hundred dollars cold cash, three hundred if the property was within certain fixed areas, receivable on a weekly basis and fully backed by the bank. Jake again noticed the expressions of the salesmen: Dandy frowning, Pete Crapo looking bewildered but excited, fat Jack Peters nearly giving off steam, he was figuring arithmetic so fast behind his eyes.

The retailer had the advantage of then owning his Dekker-supplied stock free and clear. “After that,” the lawyer said, “he can stay in bidness or he can fail, it don't make no different to us. Hell, he can up and leave with the merchandise as far as we care, because we're holding something that won't go away.”

Jake's brief Monday night talk with Mr. Dekker presided over his daydreaming. He remembered every word of the old man's speech to him, and all over again he felt the prickle of both elation and dread that he'd felt as he descended the dark stairs.

***

By the time they stopped at Tuskahoma station, Tom had succumbed to what looked like deep sleep, and Jake got out to help Miss King look for her suitcase. They had a five-minute stop, and he searched around the little platform while Miss King went over to the storage shed behind poor Mr. Blessing's store. On the platform Jake bought a nickel bag of popcorn from a boy who was there meeting trains—the only sign of enterprise. The town felt sodden and bleak. Four or five men lounged along the false fronts next to the boarded-up hulk of Blessing's store. The downslope part of Tuskahoma now consisted of tin rubble and the scattered log remains of the OK Hotel, and the whole place was as empty and sleepy as a ghost town.

Jake stuck his head inside the station house and saw a muddy suitcase sitting by itself on the floor.

Miss King was on the other side of the train; Jake hesitated, decided to look for himself, and opened the suitcase a crack. He saw a glint of metal and opened it slightly more, discovering a five-shot Smith & Wesson pistol and box of .38-caliber smokeless bullets, which made him doubt that the suitcase was hers. But it also carried women's clothes, and he saw a piece of paper, which he unfolded. The scribbled notes on it confounded him sufficiently that he sat there staring at it until the hissing of steam alerted him to get back aboard. He folded up the paper and put it into his pocket, then closed the suitcase and took it to the train.

Already back in the car, Miss King was delighted. “Where'd you find it?”

“In the station,” Jake said gruffly. “Sittin right there. Didn't take a genius.” Jake reckoned he'd take his time and look over that piece of paper more closely later. He didn't have the energy to worry about anything else right now.

***

A little past noon they arrived at Grant, not far from the Texas border. They were supposed to have a three-hour wait before switching to the once-a-day straight west to Durant, where Jake planned to rent a rig and travel around, hitting some customers but taking his time about it. From Durant, Miss King was supposed to continue on to Guthrie, or wherever she was going.

The Grant station operator, a full blood with a smooth face and long hair, was hunched over a clattering telegraph machine on his desk, just finishing a message. He glanced up at them, and didn't respond at all to Jake's hello. People sure had gotten friendly in Choctaw country. The depot was dirty and unpleasant, with flyspecked windows, a door that slammed hard each time it was used. Three older men sat near the stove, working hard at disregarding a sign on the wall that said
USE THE SPITTOON
. Miss King's appearance caused them to work even harder. The train was scheduled to come through soon, but the operator acted unsure about when it would in fact arrive.

Miss King chose to wait in the street rather than stand around in the spitting den. Jake and the boy walked over to call on George Marston, of Marston & Sons General Implements, which was just across the way. Marston ran a tool store, blacksmith shop, and wagon yard. Three wagons were parked this way and that outside, and a small pack of razor-backed dogs were trotting around nearby, grazing on some trash in the street.

When Jake had first traveled in this territory, Marston had been a blacksmith, and he'd built up the implement dealership over years of hard work. Dandy had mentioned that the “& Sons” on his sign no longer applied, one son having died of a sickness and another gone off somewhere. The Red River was only a few miles away from here, and during the long cotton slump of the last years, a lot of people had crossed it and never come back. Marston was a white man married to an Indian, well established but not particularly prosperous.

They found him at work on an axle, and he didn't act too friendly when he saw Jake. He barely nodded when Jake introduced Tom. Customers had a way of smelling “collection,” so Marston's cool reception didn't surprise Jake. What did surprise him was that when he eventually worked his way around to the subject of the mortgage transfer, Marston agreed with little hesitation to sign it and give Jake the papers on three customers' properties. “None of them are good for it, anyway,” he said almost angrily. “I been holdin that paper for over two year. Just show me where you want me to sign.”

“Now, you understand it gives Dekker Company a hold on that land until the bill's cleared up. And I have to take the land papers—”

“I'll sign the damn thing.” He hustled to a back room and came out with a pencil and three land-use warrants. Jake sat down and wrote out the land descriptions, and Marston hurriedly scratched his name in big block letters across the bottom of the transfer. When they'd finished, Jake asked if he could rent a wagon for a few days if the train was held up, and Marston said he didn't have any for rent.

Jake was puzzled at how easily Marston had signed over the land, but as he and Tom walked out of the place, he realized something about Ernest's scheme. A lot of store owners were so strapped for cash and worn out from being unable to collect from their customers that they would take the deal.

Back at the depot, the door slammed behind them, and the stationmaster looked at Jake suspiciously. Jake wondered if word had passed down the line that he'd had something to do with John Blessing's death. Telegraphers were like a knitting club, shooting news, gossip, and lies around the Nation fast as lightning.

Jake knew about grudges from growing up in the hill country of northern Arkansas, but they had a very serious way of going about them in the Indian Territory.
Achowa
, they called it—blood feud—and instead of broken arms, swollen heads, cuts, and hurt feelings, which made up the balance of feuding in Jake's home country around Bentonville, out here people got shot, houses burned down, children scalped, and neighbors massacred. Over the years, at Indian stores, he'd heard tales of seemingly unending feuds resulting from the murder of some family member or friend, or from some dispute over good bottomland. Bitter memories never died, and young men fired by liquor would vindicate foul deeds, imagined or real, done to their relatives as far back as fifty years.

Jake saw in the quick glance of one of the old men in the station that something was going on here. One of them got up and looked out the window, as if expecting to see somebody outside.

The train to Durant definitely wasn't running, due to problems on the track south of here. Jake asked when it would be running, and the tight-lipped stationmaster said, “May be several days.”

Jake went back outside to tell Miss King and Tom the news. Carrying their luggage out, he remembered the note that was folded in his pocket.

T
HE THREE OF THEM
stood oddly close together in the November afternoon light, a wind picking up, white clouds rolling from the south over their heads, Tom now fully wakened from his train sleep to the sight of Miss King's glorious breeze-ruddied face. Jake wasn't saying much, but then Jake nearly always seemed preoccupied. Looking at Miss King was to Tom like eating some good food, and as the wind blew a few loose wisps of hair round her face, a strand of it almost touched him, and he smelled the scented soap she had used—lavender, lime, he did not know its name.

He would never forget this moment of the three of them standing there. He was finally over the edge, completely head over heels for her, although his ideas about the relations of women and men were so sketchy that he did not think of it as that, did not think of it as anything, really, but merely kept drifting toward her, as if she were a magnet and he an iron filing, and he was washed over with an unexplainable, curious, elaborate warmth from his head to his feet.