The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (12 page)

Sure enough, he won the cigars, after dealing the cards out twice, with a lot of flourishes and gestures that were meant to look professional, I guess. When the turnkey had left, feeling pretty sour, he said, “Now what do you think of that? I cheated him both times and got away with it. He didn’t notice a thing. It’s the perfect note to end up on.”

He lit a cigar and said he would tell me his life story, and he said, “I was born in the meanest brothel in New Orleans, and my mother hated me from the minute I arrived. Now you may ask yourself, how can this fool enjoy himself so much when he’s in such bad trouble, and I’ll tell you. This is the most notice that ever was taken of me in my whole life. There aren’t many would admit that sort of thing, but I’m so near finished it doesn’t make any difference. As a boy, I grew up loitering around low dives and running the orneriest kind of errands, and most of the things I did wouldn’t be fit for a decent boy’s ears. Over all, I had less than a year of schooling, in a convent, but when my blessed mother got her own place she took me out and put me to work as can-rusher and linen boy.

“I learned my educated speech from the high-born people that came there. We had the very best custom, even the Mayor, and professors from out of colleges. And all the reformers that now and then started clean-up drives would always come back once they’d made their first visit. I’ll say this for my mother; she ran a fair house and never tried to hurry a customer, or encourage the girls to wink him in.

“A gambler taught me to deal cards, and I broke away when I was fourteen to go on my own. I think I can rightly say that the first thing I ever did to be proud of was stand still when those two swine ran out. It must have been my father’s blood, it couldn’t have been my mother’s. Who do you suppose he was? I often wonder. He’ll stir in his sleep tomorrow night, for his wandering boy’s about to mount the scaffold.”

“You didn’t do murder,” I broke in, somehow affected and mixed up by all this poor, silly speech. “They’ll find you not guilty, they’re bound to.”

He held out the hunting-case watch that was taken off the farmer they killed below St. Genevieve. “A gambler has instincts,” he said. “Someday you’ll be going along and you’ll say to yourself, that fellow looks familiar, and it’ll be the towheaded brat of those people we slaughtered for a few baubles down the road. Give him back his watch.”

I was angry at myself, for I was about to cry, though knowing he wasn’t worth it, so I seized the watch sullenly and got up to leave.

“One more thing,” he said. “The girl Jennie. Shep killed her folks, all of them, in a shanty in Illinois. He propped logs against the doors and burned it after he’d caught her down at the spring. John was planning to put her in a crib in Memphis. You look after her—take her to your paw and see she’s well treated.”

When I left, he had opened a bottle of wine and lit another of his cigars. He seemed perfectly content, so I figured that he realized they couldn’t convict him on evidence as flimsy as what they had.

But at the trial next day they didn’t waste much time, but got right down to brass tacks. It was in a dingy brick building with a courtroom of ugly benches and a raised platform at one end where they had a pine desk, very high and important, for the judge. He was late getting in, and seemed in a poison bad humor, and kept looking at his watch, as if it was our fault. He had on a checkered waistcoat and a pair of steel glasses and he kept drinking water one glass after another till I began to wonder if he hadn’t eaten something that didn’t agree with him the night before.

Jennie and I were witnesses, so we told our stories, but neither of us laid anything real bad against Slater. They didn’t have a jury, but said it would be better not to, in a case of this severity. Besides, they agreed it would take too long to raise one, with the judge leaving tomorrow and all. A prosecutor, who they said was employed by the county, out of taxes, got up and made a long speech, and in the middle he crooked a finger at a colored boy in the rear who had a big armful of books, with paper markers sticking out of them, and when he brought them up, the prosecutor read out a lot of tiresome long references that he said were “precedents.”

They mostly showed that when a man shoved in with a group and that group did something contrary to law, he was just as guilty as they were. “This defendant is an accessory not only before the fact but after the fact,” said the prosecutor, and the judge said, “It will be so taken into account in the summing up.”

At the beginning of the trial, they had asked Slater if he was represented by Counsel, and he got up and stated that he couldn’t afford it, he only had a few small coins and the clothes he was wearing, unless they would care to make him a price on a deck of marked cards he had, along with a pair of no-seven dice. Both the judge and the prosecutor had a look at them, but they said there wasn’t any sense making an offer, they were so clumsy a child could spot them, and so they told Slater he was just out of luck, he’d have to defend himself. Then the judge added that it was generally the custom for the Court to appoint a counsel in cases of this
kind but there was only one lawyer qualified in the area and he was over in Illinois having some land surveyed.

While all this went on, I noticed Mr. Chouteau, sitting next to me, stirring around angrily from time to time, and now he muttered that this was “a damnable farce” and that the people ought to stop it. Later on he told me that the administration that was in then was corrupt and run-down, and that it would likely be voted out at the next election.

Anyhow, they heard all the witnesses, which were Jennie and me, along with the people that were in Mr. Chouteau’s store, and then the judge asked Slater if he was ready to present the defense. Slater got up, looking interested and relieved that they’d noticed him, and said that the defense was built around the fact that he hadn’t killed anybody. Then he sat down, and the judge thanked him, as he said, “for making such a clear and well-organized defense, without taking up the Court’s time a-wandering off on side issues.” When he came out with this piece of poppycock, Mr. Chouteau stirred around so I thought he was going to get up and leave, but somebody reminded him he was a witness, so he sat back down again.

Afterwards, the judge banged his gavel and spent ten minutes “summing up for the jury.” He explained first that although there wasn’t any jury in this case, he would prefer to sum up just the same, because it was the only part of the trial he enjoyed, and besides, he had got kind of used to it. So he told the jury to be sure and avoid prejudice one way or the other, and not let Slater’s ratty appearance tell against him, but only consider the evidence, and that in the sight of God, Slater and a man like Pierre Chouteau were equal, and when they were born you couldn’t tell one from the other. Then he went ahead and fixed the time of the hanging at eleven o’clock the next morning.

I’m not going to dwell on that day, for it wasn’t something you’d care to remember, in spite of the fact that nearly everything they did was mostly comical, if you consider it apart from the final misery for Joe. First off, the sheriff, who’d received a lot of criticism lately
for hanging people in a bored and listless way, announced he was “going to do a job on Joe Slater that will make St. Louis go down in history.” Boiling it down, then, they turned it into a regular celebration, with a procession and hawkers selling candy and pamphlets about famous murders of the past, and somebody dug up the old book about Murrel, which they said told how Slater got his start, only his name wasn’t mentioned in it anywhere—I remember well enough from reading it. A kind and thoughtful delegation came down to the jail early, bringing some elegant new clothes, including a stovepipe hat and a frock coat, for as one of them said, “It would be a crying shame for a man to be the poorest dressed figure at his own hanging.” The hat had black crepe paper wrapped around it nearly to the top, which was fashionable just then, but everybody said it would be especially appropriate in the present instance.

But the most ridiculous thing was when they asked Joe if he had any last wishes, and he said yes, he’d admire to take a steamboat ride. So they dressed him up and went parading down Market Street, with Joe and the sheriff in front, all blown up with importance, and they got the ferryboat out and a whole passel of them rode across to Illinois and up and down both banks, with the sheriff and others pointing out landmarks and telling him their plans for this and that piece of real estate, just as if Slater would be on hand to see it.

The sightseeing tour took so long, and ate up so much of the morning, that everybody agreed it would be better to have lunch before going ahead. So they went to the Planter’s House and had a whopper of a banquet, also out of taxes, and Slater tanked up on punch so that his legs were kind of rubber, you might say, and that’s the way he went to the gallows, which was a very good thing, in my opinion.

Mr. Chouteau said that, all in all, it was the most disgusting exhibition that administration had put on yet, but the sheriff stated that he’d taken a canvass and hadn’t found anybody with a complaint worth mentioning, excepting possibly the corpse. “I hope
it will end all this talk of skimping,” he said. “From now on maybe they’ll realize that when we hang a man in St. Louis, we aim to hang him in style.”

That night at the Chouteaus’ it was decided that Jennie and I should take the boat for Independence, where the wagon trains formed. “If you find your father gone,” said Mr. Chouteau, as generous and considerate as always, “you come back and we’ll see you home to Louisville. Your trip got off to a stormy beginning, but perhaps that means smooth sailing from now on.”

I hoped so, but I really didn’t believe it for a minute. I was too used to trouble, and as it turned out I was right.

It was very early in the morning when we said goodbye to the Chouteaus, with the ladies sniffling and taking on in their fussy, kindhearted way. They had got the cooks to put up a basket lunch that would have fed a family of ten back and forth to Russia, I reckon, and it weighed so much we had to carry it together. This was lucky, for the cooking on that boat had gone to rot and ruin, mainly because the regular cook, which was a darky, had had a misunderstanding with a lady acquaintance in town, and her arguments had been set out in the form of five or six punctures with an awl. So that, making a joke, they said his goose would be cooked for quite a spell.

Consequently the captain had a substitute take over at the last minute, who was a man regularly employed in swabbing down the engines with a bundle of waste, which had got to be such a habit that when he changed jobs he just put it on platters and poured gravy over it and served it to the customers, or anyhow that’s what people said.

The Chouteaus also gave both Jennie and me some new clothes, but I didn’t care for mine. They were a pair of blue pants that buckled below the knees and a jacket with a belt and a cap with a button on top, which Jennie said was a very modish outfit and I ought to be proud. But I wasn’t very long in figuring that over in Illinois, where she came from, the styles might be fifteen or twenty years behind, so I cut off the buckles, to let the pants hang down, and lost the belt off the jacket overboard, and got
rid of the button, so that pretty soon I was comfortable again, and didn’t stand out from the herd.

The trip was interesting but dull, if you know what I mean. That is, it was interesting to look at all that muddy water and those cottonwood bottoms for about ten minutes, but dull if you kept it up much longer. Right off, I found out that the girl Jennie was very well named; I knew now how they worked it out. When it came to balkiness of disposition, there wasn’t scarcely anything to choose from between her and a mule. Not that she wasn’t sweet; I think probably her sweetest expressions were when she was having her bullheadedest notions. Here I’d been living free and easy for a while, without my mother or Aunt Kitty bossing, and now I had to do things to suit this Jennie. In books I’ve read, I notice that they do a lot of talking about so-and-so’s “character,” making the point that hardly anybody’s what they seem but that everybody’s pretty deep and shifty. I can well believe it.

To look at that Jennie, you would think an angel had come down to help brighten things up, and put us in a happier frame of mind, but let me tell you what she did. The first morning we went in to breakfast, being a wide assortment of food with a crust like a stove lid—fried ham, fried bacon, fried cornbread, fried mush, and such like—she thumbs’d down when one of the passengers, very accommodating and polite, offered me a cigar. I told her I’d been smoking catalpa beans since the diaper stage, almost, but she only gave me that sweet smile and stated that cigars were for grown men, and anyway ought to be smoked out in the middle of a field, so that as few as possible would get suffocated.

Before we left the Chouteaus, there was talk about getting us different cabins, but Jennie said it was a waste of money; we could make out with upper and lower bunks easily enough. Besides, as it turned out, the boat was crowded. I didn’t entirely understand all the ruckus, but they said it had something to do with “delicacy.” Then they said it was all right because of the great difference in our ages—she would be like a mother to me. When we got ready for bed the first night, it began to seep in what they were talking
about. They were afraid she would pester me to death, and she almost did. To start off, it was, “Have you been to the bathroom, Jaimie?” then, “Did you wash your feet, Jaimie?” and “Have you brushed your teeth yet?” I told her I’d been cleaning my teeth, when they needed it, with a willow twig, which is what Indians and such use in the woods, but she had a new pig-bristle brush, along with some salt, so I had to troop back and do it all over.

Not only that, but she made me put on a nightgown to sleep in, as free as if she owned me. Furthermore, I didn’t care to have her loitering around when I got ready for bed. But she said she’d been raised in a one-room cabin with five brothers, and not to be silly. Even so, there are some things a body wants to do in private, and undressing is one of them. She herself was as open as a statue in the park, and likely imagined that she looked handsome in her pelt, only she didn’t—she was soft and round where she should have had muscles, and I’d bet she couldn’t have sprung a rabbit trap if her life depended on it. When I was tucked in below, and she had snuggled down above, she asked me to say my prayers, but I told her I didn’t know any, so she said one for us both, blessing everybody she could think of, including a number of persons that were strangers to me, and ended up by hoping Slater would find a comfortable berth in heaven. I felt a little better, then, knowing she was off on the wrong foot, and so went to sleep.