Читать книгу The Last Fair Deal Going Down - David Rhodes - Страница 8

Chapter II

JOHN CHARLES WAS THE OLDEST. THE PATH THE REST OF US walked to the Independent Public School #4 he had made. The letters SLEDGE had been carved into the wooden desk tops and filled with ink before any of the rest of us had come. What we did as children John C. had done first; not differently, but first. And Mrs. Candlewine had seen us all. She had sat behind her desk and called the name John C. Sledge from a sheet of paper, had looked out across the room and had seen a hand rise, had looked into a pair of dark brown eyes half closed from want of sleep and thought to herself, “Bring the children unto me.” Then she more straightened her wirelike body, tucked a loose fold of dress up under her thigh, caught a glimpse of a strand of once blond, virgin hair, and read Richard L. Stephens. She had seen all of us — John Charles, Mary, Nellie, Walter, Will, Paul, and myself — walk through the first-grade door and raise our hands after our names had been read. She had walked beside us while we stood in line along the cinder-block hall waiting to be let outside, punished us for throwing erasers, and even once had gone in front of the town council screaming, “The children . . . The children . . . What you do to the children,” for us.

Mrs. Candlewine drove to our house one afternoon after school, parked her car next to the windmill (which is not important in itself), and walked around to the back porch, conscious that by doing so she was admitting, assuming, a familiarity with our family. John Charles, then eight, answered the door and pushed it aside for her to enter.

“Hello, John,” she said. “Is your mother or father at home?”

“No,” he answered, still holding the door, waiting for her to come in.

“Do they know you are playing with your father’s pocketknife?”

“It’s mine,” he answered.

“Do you know when they will be back?”

“Dad’s at work and he’ll be home in a couple hours.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She’ll be back, I think, in a little while.”

“Where’s your sister, John? Is she sick?”

“I don’t know.” John Charles had slowly closed the screen door, reasonably content that Mrs. Candlewine had no intention of coming inside.

“How is school going for you?”

“O.K.”

Andrea Sledge came walking up onto the backyard out of the fog. She was five-and-a-half months pregnant. “Here’s Mom,” said John C. Mrs. Candlewine turned to face her and began talking before she had completed the steps up the porch.

“Hello, Mrs. Sledge. I’m Mrs. Candlewine, Mary’s teacher at school, and Mary hasn’t been to school this last week, so I thought I’d come out and see if there was any trouble and if I could help in any way. I’ve brought some work for her to do here at home so she won’t be so far behind when she comes back. She’s such a lovely girl, Mrs. Sledge.”

Andrea sat down on the upper step and put her hands to her head as though to rub something away. “She’s gone . . . Mary’s gone.”

“Gone?” asked Mrs. Candlewine, wondering not so much about Andrea’s choice of word but of what the word had to do with Mary. John Charles had gone back into some farther room in the house.

“Yes,” Mother answered, staring out away from the house. “Into the City. The City has taken my baby.” And she began to cry. Mrs. Candlewine rested a minute against the side of the house and sat down beside Andrea. She did not know what to say but felt guilty just watching, the way it is funny to see someone fall down on the ice and break a leg — but not funny when they are watching you laughing.

“Mrs. Sledge, you’re mistaken. She’s probably just wandered away — to a friend’s house or something. You know how children are.”

“Not Mary, she’d never do that,” Andrea said, still crying. “She was such a good baby ... I wish I had never come here. I wish I had never left Wisconsin.”

“Now, Mrs. Sledge, be strong. When was the last time you saw Mary?”

“Sunday afternoon. She was out here in the yard. I wasn’t paying too close attention to her — but watching her just the same. She was playing some kind of game, chasing those little yellow butterflies, trying to get near enough to blow on them.... I hate this wretched place.” When she had said this last thing she was not crying.

“Now where might she have gone, Mrs. Sledge? To a friend’s house maybe. Have you checked with her playmates?”

“I’ve been a good mother, Mrs. Candlewine.”

“I know, Mrs. Sledge, but . . .”

“No you don’t. You don’t think that at all. You think it’s my fault that my baby’s gone into the City — that I didn’t whip her, or make her help with the washing, or do her Sunday School lessons. But she was always good . . . never unhappy.” Her eyes were dry now and she pointed down into the fog. “It’s That . . . that.”

Mrs. Candlewine went inside the house and told John Charles to stay with his mother while she went away, and to stop playing with his pocketknife. She drove to the police station, the highway patrol, the homes of the other children in Mary’s class, to the amusement park, and to the zoo. Late in the evening she returned to the Sledges’, where she found Luke and Andrea sitting on the back porch. The afterdark had come.

“Mrs. Candlewine, this is my husband,” said Andrea.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Candlewine.

“Mrs. Candlewine was Mary’s teacher,” Andrea told her husband, who acknowledged the fact by lowering his eyes.

“I’ve checked with Mary’s friends and none of them have seen her. I’m sure that if we have patience and pray, she will turn up. Children have been known to wander off into the woods and be gone for weeks.”

“Mary’s in the City, Mrs. Candlewine. Somehow she walked down there and a monument opened and she went in. It is an insult to tell ourselves lies.”

“No,” said Mrs. Candlewine, her whole body quivering but her voice steady and flat. “She is not in the City. She is not. God protects the innocent. He would never let such a thing happen. Were I to believe that I’d walk in there myself and find her.”

“No you wouldn’t, Mrs. Candlewine — just like you won’t now. Just like I won’t.”

“She’s not in the City,” said Luke, being careful to talk to neither woman in particular. “Even she wasn’t that stupid. But she’ll never come back either — someone has killed her — perhaps by accident, in an automobile, was afraid and sank her in the river . . . or perhaps intentionally; there are such people.”

“I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs. Candlewine, “the way you think,” and went home and waited. She waited for a week, then two, and then three. Once she stopped John Charles in the hall and asked if his sister had returned home yet. “No,” he answered and she never asked again. She waited, and continued to wait. She read the names Nellie Sledge, Walter Sledge, waiting — Will Sledge, Paul Sledge. Then she quit waiting and told me once while I fumbled with sticks of colored paraffin to fill up the hollow spaces between the outline of distant characters in my coloring book: “I knew your sister, Mary, before she got on the train that took her away.” I wanted Mrs. Candlewine to help me with the crayons because the colors kept running over the lines and leaving blotches inside the hollow spaces but she said I was doing fine and walked on down the row of desks to watch another colorer, of whose style I was envious.

When John Charles was twenty he was in love with a girl whose name I did not know for a long time because Nellie and Walt and Father had forgotten it. The idea of being in love excited him. That would have been in 1933 when the railroad was only running one train a week through to Chicago and that one didn’t stop. The farmers had weathered the depression well and we had made out by what John C. and Father could steal and what was given to us out of conscience. He was in love with a girl who lived on the western side of Des Moines. They went to Missouri because he had been indirectly offered a job with a stone quarry by Tommy Robinson, a man from St. Louis he had met playing horseshoes. She was excited and a little afraid because John C. had told her St. Louis was a tough town.

He wrote home once, two years later, and Nellie had kept the letter and showed it to me. The paper had turned yellow and was dissolving the ink: “Doing fine. Read in the paper the other day that the railroad is starting up again. Life is hard out here and you have to be tough to stay alive, but I’m doing fine. Hope to be home for a visit soon.” On December 22, 1939, Father met him at the station. Two railroad hands lifted the box out of the freight car and set it on the platform. Tickie unfastened the letter held by three achromatic thumbtacks from the lid and gave it to Father.

L. Sledge, Mang.

Des Moines Depot

Des Moines, Iowa

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you that on November 19, 1939, John Charles Sledge was found guilty of Section 31 of Chapter 18 of the Missouri Penal Code, Judge Garnold presiding. Executed at 5:10 A.M., December 21, 1939, Missouri State Penitentiary and pronounced dead by State Coronor Bill Mallory.

(Casket and shipping charges paid by the State of Missouri)

Elliot Winfield

Public Relations Dir.

St. Louis, Missouri.

Father and Tickie carried John Charles inside the depot and Father took him home in the pickup after work. He showed Andrea the letter and she read it. Nellie cried while she held me against her in the rocking chair. From her bed Mother looked at Luke and then he went into the living room. Walt and Will were not at home yet and Paul played his guitar until Father told him that if he wanted to play it to go out on the porch. Then Paul began to cry.

Many years later Nellie told me all she could remember about John Charles; the rest I have learned from the people who knew and remembered him from Des Moines and from St. Louis, back issues of the St. Louis Daily, and finally what I was led to believe must have happened — those magicless, empty (re)constructions of real people, real things, and real movement — thin lines that can never even hope to approximate the color they are to represent.

John Charles and Hermie Huber drove to Missouri in a blue Plymouth. It took John C. two months to steal enough gasoline for the trip, which he stored in five-gallon milk cans and put in the trunk. Hermie had fourteen dollars and John had six. Just into Missouri they broke down because of the fan blade cutting into the radiator. John C. purchased the parts from a junkyard and repaired the car. This made them nervous because they hadn’t counted on it and also because it was bad.

In St. Louis John Charles located Tommy Robinson, who oddly enough was there and helped him obtain a job at the quarry. This was a sign, a good omen. John C. and Hermie rented a trailer house in Eastown Court. Things had worked out. John C. sold the Plymouth to a “fish” living next to him. They bought a new car. They had done the things that they had planned in Des Moines to do — reached the goal they had imagined for themselves in the several months before and sat now, in their imagined blue trailer house, looking at each other and trying to be gentle. Perhaps that was it, limited expectations, that caused what later happened; but things are never that simple, and you must see for yourself.

John Charles worked for a little under three years as a dynamiter at the Rocky Edge Quarry. There was satisfaction in this. He learned quickly and an offhand manner soon characterized his work, which some of the men there called “dangerous.” But the beginning novelty of his work drained away and he found himself left with the remains of a noisy boredom — his job. The safety regulations were obscure and as he had long ago discovered, no one really even cared about those. No, he was too much to be confined in such a way. He had expected more than this. After thirty months he quit his job at the quarry and became a bartender at the D & D Bar.

The new position was better — more than he could have hoped it to be. Missouri was a dry state then and only beer could be purchased and consumed in a public building. John Charles was inspired. He worked hard. He was a good bartender and the customers enjoyed his manner and conversation. He bought half interest in the bar and renamed it Dirty John’s. Twice a month he drove over the state line into Iowa and bought thirty quarts of good bourbon and drove back to St. Louis. He never kept more than four or five bottles behind the counter and in the case of a raid would throw them out the window he kept open in the back, overlooking a steep hill which was used as a garbage dump by the people in the neighborhood.

Mr. Meadon, characteristically a regular, said that John Charles did a good business and was looked up to by the young boys in the area. And the only complaint he mentioned was with John C.’s “lack of discretion: There was nothing he liked better than to pull out a bottle of booze and set it on the counter in front of a new customer, and while his eyes bulged out of his head say, ‘What can I do for you?’ like it was an everyday thing to see booze for sale in public. It made the rest of us uneasy.”

John Charles carried a small nickel-plated revolver in a special pocket he had fashioned for himself from a description in one of his paperbacks about the old West — Two Gun Lust (1929, J. Fellows) — where Lance turns to face the sheriff after emptying both his Peacemakers into the sheriff’s deputies, who clutter the saloon floor below and around him, and silently takes a derringer from the pocket that kept it pressed against the small of his back, saying, “Sheriff, there ain’t no man alive can arrest me.” The sheriff answers, “You’re looking at him, Lance. Your days are through.” Lance fires the derringer from his hip and the sheriff falls dead across the doorway. “Sucker,” mumbles Lance to himself as he steps over the sheriff’s body and walks outside (page 123).¹

John Charles was an exciting bartender because he was able to transpose these episodes into real events acted out by many of his friends in Texas and Wyoming. His voice was dynamic and during the climax of a story he would whip out his pistol (learned from many hours of practicing in front of the bedroom mirror at home, with the help of Hermie, who sat on the bed and commented on the dramatic impact of each draw), and from a semicrouching position deliver the end of the tale and replace the revolver in its secret pocket. In a special sling around his arm he kept what he called a “stiletto,” a knife he had paid over fifteen dollars for at a pawnshop owned by a man considering himself to be a shrewd judge of character, and when you pushed the button on its side a six-inch blade was ejected straight out the front end. He would take the knife out while no one was watching (he was never quite as good with his knife drawing) and shove it into the ribs of his victim, saying, “You’re dead, pal,” then pull the knife out in front of him and push the button, sending the blade zinging out into the open air.

For Hermie, St. Louis was not a particularly rough town. She grew tired of living in a trailer and so they moved into a large house closer to the tavern. John C. was sure it had been an old “hothouse.” Hermie also grew tired of having nothing more to order than some fifteen pieces of furniture and three meals a day, two or three of which she ate by herself; so instead of simply waiting for her child to be born she sectioned off the upstairs rooms and took in boarders.

John Charles was quick to notice the change in his house and was even pleased. He returned home earlier in the evenings and sat in his living room with his boarders and told stories of what had happened at Dirty John’s that night — the fights, the gambling, the raids, and the women. Many times he would follow an interested boarder to his room after the rest had gone to bed and stay up the entire night telling stories and drinking whiskey . . . or until Hermie came, demanding that he come to bed. But John Charles was more than this.

Alice Van Hooser had lived in St. Louis ten years and was a secretary for Eponic Business Forms, Inc. She was thirty-five, slightly heavy, with natural brown hair, a remarkable Indiana accent, and an image of herself that had become ever since high school increasingly fantastic. Together with a friend of hers of roughly the same potential, she decided to tempt the wheel of fortune and chance a beer at a bar they had heard about called Dirty John’s.

The bar was very dark when they entered and everyone had stopped talking. But as soon as they had shut the door behind them the talking resumed and several lights were turned on. They shuffled toward the bar, casually. John C. waited for them. Looking at a bottle of bourbon sitting on the bar before her, Alice ordered a beer. John Charles filled a glass from a wooden keg and sat it before her. “Say, Baby,” he whispered, “how about ditching that friend of yours and us getting together a little later on?” Alice’s girl friend, taking the hint, not from the words, which she didn’t hear, but from the tone that characterized the mumbling, immediately announced her departure, stating that she could be reached at any hour to provide a ride home. Alice took her beer to a table and sat down with it. John Charles closed the bar at ten P.M. and he and Alice listened to country Western music from the jukebox while John C. told of his experiences with the law in Texas and Arizona, where he had been a deputy sheriff, and showed her newspaper clippings of famous contemporary crimes committed by old friends.

Alice Van Hooser was a woman who had lived thirty-five reasonable years. She lived with her mother. Any advancement from this station was in some way going to be a concession, something given up momentarily before returning to normal. She gave in to being known around Dirty John’s as “Lil,” spending evenings in a motel, wearing black stockings, and sitting quietly at a back table watching John Charles behind the bar and knowing from his face that his wife would be coming in that night. To all this she gave in, but she was more than these things. She kept some to herself.

Hermie had a baby girl while John Charles took Lil with him on a “run” into Iowa to pick up another load of bourbon. She lay in the hospital as quietly as an unexploded charge of dynamite: that is, she might have thought many things but mostly she was a wife who had heard so many plans and schemes and adventures and happenings and stories and tales from her husband and about him that she failed to care whether they corresponded to things that actually had happened or if they had happened, when. Furthermore, because she never knew what was true and what wasn’t concerning the actions of her husband, she either decided that everything was unreal or that at least everything was irrelevant to her situation, which included John Charles, the man. She thought this was the way she felt. Yet she could not account for the anxiety. What she did not know was that John Charles, the man, was very much connected with those everythings that were unreal and irrelevant.

John Charles told Hermie about numerous fights he had taken part in at Dirty John’s. He recounted them in a very matter-of-fact manner though each presentation lasted over a quarter of an hour.² Once, listening, struggling with the baby, she had said that she didn’t care. This ended the story. John C. had bolted from the room, thinking that not caring was the same as not believing, which was more important.

One night while Alice Van Hooser waited at her table for Mrs. Sledge to leave, two heavyset insurance salesmen walked into the bar. They had been drinking earlier in the evening and shouted at John C. to bring drinks. John C. brought them drinks and went back to sit next to his wife at the counter. Hermie, who didn’t like being at the bar at all, offered a statement establishing a relationship between these two men and the quality of the overall atmosphere of Dirty John’s. John Charles looked at the men for several minutes and got up from his stool to give them another drink. He secured himself a standing position between the two men. They were having difficulty standing up during those intervals when a high degree of gesticulation was necessary to the conversation. One of these physical explanations glanced off the shoulder of John Charles and he pivoted on his left foot and hit the man square on the jaw with his right hand, which mysteriously concealed a roll of nickels from the cash register. Before the other man could turn around John C. was in a low, semicrouching position with the stiletto blade extending from his left hand. “Come on, big man,” he shouted, “let’s see how tough you really are.” The man busted the top of a beer glass off on the counter and made a slow lunge at John Charles who easily stepped aside, cutting his arm as he passed. The man he had originally hit was picking himself off the floor and John C. stopped his assault with a kick to the face. His opponent with the broken glass had dropped it and was standing in the middle of the barroom, holding his bleeding arm and swaying back and forth. John Charles put his open hand against the man’s face and shoved him back onto an occupied table, sending glass, beer, bourbon, and cigarette butts flying around him. “Somebody patch up his arm,” said John C. “then throw the bastards out. I don’t want anybody dying in here and giving us a bad name.” Several men laughed and John C. walked back over to Hermie and cleaned his knife with a napkin.

“Those bums will think twice before coming in here and starting trouble.”

“So what!” Hermie said. “I’m going home. I hate this bar. It stinks in here and why do you want me to come anyway? Are you showing off? Well I don’t care. I DON’T CARE.” (She yelled this.) “You don’t impress me and I’ve got to take the baby-sitter home.”

“Baby-sitter!” John C. closed the knife and put it back in his arm holster.

“Yes, baby-sitter. It may have not occurred to you that that’s what it’s all about — baby-sitters and shopping and getting by.... And don’t wake the baby when you come in.” And she left.

John Charles watched her walk out, smiled warily at several people sitting next to him, and went back to sit with Alice Van Hooser. Alice arranged her hair around her head and smiled. “How did I look?” he asked.

“When?”

“The fight.”

“Fine,” she answered. John took a drink out of Lil’s glass and sat swirling the beer around the bottom of the glass, forcing out the few remaining bubbles.

“The wife suspects something,” he said.

“Did she say something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“She’s getting a private investigator to follow me. Somebody around here must have been informing her.”

“John ...”

“Sure, Lil, I saw my lawyer yesterday and he said that the divorce papers will go through in a month. But until then we have to be careful” (he gestured), “because if we get caught by this detective the divorce will be thrown out of court.”

“Why?”

“Some legality.”

“But John, a separation. Anyone can get a separation. My cousin ...”

“Right. I’m getting one. As a matter of fact I’m all packed. The only thing that is left to do is decide about who takes the kid.”

“But she’s only three months old, John.”

“I know, but Hermie hates kids — always has. She wants me to take her.”

John Charles did not have to take the child. In fact he never left home at all except for a week when Alice’s mother went for a visit to her sister’s house in Illinois. John C. started a Friday-night poker table in Dirty John’s and Alice began collecting her debts; she refused to come to the tavern when she knew Mrs. Sledge would be coming; she refused to stay overnight in a motel room, but went home to her mother; she said whiskey runs were too dangerous and refused to go along. John Charles bought her a diamond ring and complained that the divorce proceedings were being slowed down by false information brought in by the private detective, whom he had had a gun-fight with in Iowa after picking up a load of whiskey — but no one was hurt because John C. knew that if he shot him there would be a lot of very ticklish questions that were better unasked because it was just the excuse the law needed to throw the book at him because they had been after him ever since he had come to St. Louis from Texas because of the reputation he had built for himself down there and that in order to keep one step ahead of the law he had to be smart — smarter than even his emotions. Alice had the ring appraised, and threw it away.

Perhaps Alice’s new attitude had penetrated into John Charles’s general understanding of the area in which he lived; or perhaps that understanding, responsive only to sharp variations, had failed to contain Hermie; or perhaps it had slowly, finally, failed to contain anything that was not already defined by it. Somehow within this labyrinth of understanding one single action became necessary. This action, by itself, is opaque and bleak, as if there had never been an infidelity charge against Hermie — never had been a desperate confusion in John C: just as though there had never been a Chief Black Hawk living on the Rock River, only someone who had built a huge monument resembling an Indian and called it that: just as though there had never been a world full of people thirty years ago. The stone remains and fantasy is the only way of memory. John Charles called Alice Van Hooser on the telephone while she sat eating dinner with her mother, August 16, 1939.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, Lil?”

“Yes.”

“This is John.”

“Where are you?” she asked. (This must have been unexpected. John C. had used the phone before, many times, to call Alice. Unusual, I believe it was, but not important enough to be exigent.)

“I’m in the hospital. Hermie has been seriously hurt. She got out of the car to shoot at a crow with my shotgun and it exploded. She is in critical condition and they don’t know if she will live.”

“What?!” And John Charles retold the story — his wife was dying from an injury she had received when an old shotgun she was firing exploded. Alice stayed home that day with her mother and talked again to John C. that afternoon. He said that there was no change in Hermie’s condition and asked her to come to Dirty John’s that evening. She did and John C. closed the bar early in order to visit his wife before visiting hours were closed.

The following afternoon Alice Van Hooser went into downtown St. Louis after work to buy a piece of material for her mother to make draperies with. From the front window of Woolworths she saw Hermie Sledge carrying her baby and walking toward the post office. She, Alice, changed a quarter and telephoned John C. at his home. He answered and he sounded tired. “She was in the intensive care ward and they wouldn’t let me see her,” said John Charles and added that the divorce proceedings were complete and that he only had to go to his lawyer’s office and sign them. Alice was not able to find a suitable color of material and drove home. John Charles was in some way surprised by the phone call.

He bought a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells — Nitro Long Range Express No. 4 Shot — and a stick of dynamite. He cut open one of the shells and poured the shot down the toilet in his basement. He placed the shotless shell in the firing chamber of a single-barrel gun and cut open the stick of dynamite. With a kitchen spoon he poured two and a half large spoonfuls of dynamite down the barrel of the gun and poked a piece of wadded paper after it with a cleaning rod. He carried the weapon outside and laid it on the floorboards of the back seat of his automobile.

Two days later he asked Hermie to bring the baby and come for a ride in the country. She consented and they drove out of St. Louis. After two hours of leaning over the steering wheel and looking up into the sky John Charles stopped the car and asked Hermie if she wanted to take a shot at a crow. Hermie at first couldn’t see the crow, then she didn’t want to shoot at it because the noise would frighten the child. John C. offered to take the child away, but by this time the crow was gone. They stopped at Dirty John’s on the way home and went inside for a beer, though Hermie complained. John C. then wanted her to go outside and shoot bottles in the dump behind the tavern but she didn’t want to. He asked her to come outside and throw bottles in the air for him while he shot, but she declined again and demanded to be taken home. Hugh Carson, the daytime bartender, said he’d throw some bottles up in the air for him, and John C., irritated, asked if he wouldn’t rather shoot them himself. The baby was screaming at the top of her lungs by then and John Charles and Hermie and the baby went home.

He took the shotgun out of the car and put it in the basement, where he carried it from room to room, first putting it down and going upstairs, then coming down and moving it again, not sleeping well. Three days later he was sitting on the toilet in the basement and called upstairs to his wife. She came down and he pointed to the shotgun standing against the wall, indicating that there was something wrong with the firing pin, and asked Hermie to try it out. She did and the gun worked, decapitating Hermie and splattering huge pieces of her around on the basement walls, running blood on the floor. John Charles got off the toilet and vomited. He ran upstairs and met a boarder, told him to call the hospital, that a gun his wife was shooting had exploded, and ran outside.

The police held an investigation and reporters took pictures of the room in which the calamity took place. The paper wrote “A HORRIBLE ACCIDENT.” But John Charles was not out dancing in the streets. He was sitting in an uncleaned corner of Dirty John’s drinking bourbon and raving internally. He wanted nothing but to go back to his basement and reconstruct the act again and again, and vomit till exhaustion came over him. But he was hiding from the reporters — it was all he could do to be coherent enough to telephone Alice and tell her what had happened, and that didn’t take much.

But Hermie’s death was not an accident of that kind, and it was a short time before the investigators noticed that no shot could be found in the walls, and that no Nitro Long Range Express No. 4 Shot known could blow holes in water pipes from six feet away, holes in concrete. More careful inspection showed the missing shot lying in the bottom of the toilet, its weight too heavy to be moved by the force of the water. The sheriff was notified and he brought John Charles to the St. Louis station house for questioning.

Thirty-six hours later, without sleep, the sheriff again reconstructed the supposed murder for John Charles who still sat in his chair saying: “No . . . No . . . That isn’t true.... Give me a cigarette, you bums.” But this time the sheriff brought in a blown-up picture of his wife after the explosion, severed fingers and eye-gell in perfect focus, and John C. gave up. He confessed putting the dynamite in the shotgun, getting his wife to shoot it, and wished he had died with her. The sheriff let him go back into a cell, where he fell asleep and slept for three hours, when he was awakened to retell the story to the County Attorney.

The stupidity of the shot in the toilet, of removing the shot at all, and the confession afterward were not grossness or even depravity. John Charles was not a killer by any estimation or in any extent except that he had killed his wife — an accident within his mind, a slight oversimplification that he might have avoided if he had only stayed in bed later one morning or had a little less to drink some afternoon. If only he hadn’t thought about it, the killing. If only he hadn’t killed Hermie. And I must remind myself again in order to get through this next part, he did kill Hermie.

On September 3, 1939, Howard Vendermarken, County Attorney for St. Louis County, filed the County Attorney’s True Information statement at the State Court House, wording the charge as follows: “That John Charles Sledge, in the County and State aforesaid did on or about the twenty-second day of August, 1939, A.D., unlawfully, feloniously, and with the intent thereof, murder Mrs. Hermie Sledge, his wife.” John Charles was brought into court and asked by Judge Garnold if he had legal representation; to this he answered no. Asked then if he wished legal representation; to this he answered yes. Asked if he had preference he answered no. Asked if Wayne B. Hanek met with his approval and he answered yes. Newspaper reporters asked Wayne B. Hanek if there was a special reason he had been chosen and he answered no, that it was not in his power to refuse to act as legal counsel when appointed to do so by the court. Asked to make further comments on the “dynamite murderer” and he declined.

Two days later John Charles was in court with his lawyer. He sat on a wooden chair, highly varnished, and listened to Howard Vendermarken’s motion to change the wording of the County Attorney’s True Information by inserting the words “willfully and deliberately.” Wayne B. Hanek stated that the proposed wording established a degree of crime that was hitherto unsubstantiated by legal procedure. The Clerk wrote: “Comes now Howard Vendermarken, County Attorney of St. Louis County, Missouri, and for and in behalf of the State moves the Court to permit him to file an amendment to the County Attorney’s True Information filed here on September 3 so as to correct errors and omissions therein and he attaches hereto a copy of said proposed amendment. Then comes Wayne B. Hanek speaking for and in behalf of the defendant John Charles Sledge and opposes aforesaid amendment on the grounds that the newly proposed wording is not fully implied by previous evidence acquired by lawful procedure. Judge M. Garnold sets date of September 10, 1939, to decide on ruling.”

On September 10, 1939, John Charles was again in court. The County Attorney, his first amendment being overruled, offered a new amendment to the County Attorney’s True Information which included the words “specific intent to kill.” Wayne B. Hanek objected to this amendment on the grounds that it established a degree of crime not yet substantiated by lawfully begotten evidence. Judge M. Garnold set the date September 11, 1939, to decide on the ruling. County Attorney Vendermarken then moved that a special assistant, Peter Lynch, be appointed to help compile evidence for the County of St. Louis. Wayne B. Hanek objected on the grounds of non-impartial treatment but was overruled.

“September 11, 1939. Comes now Howard Vendermarken, County Attorney of St. Louis County, Missouri, and for and in behalf of the State moves the court to permit him to file an amendment to the County Attorney’s True Information filed here September 3 so as to correct errors and omissions therein, proposing that the words ‘specific intent to kill’ be inserted after the second ‘with’ in County Attorney’s True Information, omitting the words ‘intent’ and ‘thereof,’ thus allowing the County Attorney’s True Information to read: ‘. . . did on or about the twenty-second day of August, 1939, A.D., unlawfully, feloniously, and with the specific intent to kill, murder Mrs. Hermie Sledge, his wife.’ ” Wayne B. Hanek objected to this amendment on the grounds that it was not substantiated by legally begotten evidence and the objection was sustained.

All of this is necessary — important to see precisely how these men go about their living — how they do what they do.

“September 12, 1939. Comes now Howard Vendermarken, County Attorney of St. Louis County, Missouri, and for and in behalf of the State moves the court to permit him to file an amendment to the County Attorney’s True Information filed here on September 3 so as to correct errors and other omissions therein, proposing the words ‘designedly and with malice aforethought’ and a comma (,) between the words ‘designedly’ and ‘and’ be inserted into the County Attorney’s True Information, thus allowing the said statement to read: ‘. . . did on or about the twenty-second day of August, 1939, A.D., unlawfully, feloniously, designedly, and with malice aforethought and with the intent thereof, murder Mrs. Hermie Sledge, his wife.’ ” Wayne B. Hanek violently objected to the above amendment on the grounds that the particular wording was in no way a description of a crime as stated specifically by the Missouri Penal Code. Judge M. Garnold overruled this objection and passed the amendment, after which Hanek, reading from a piece of paper extracted from his briefcase, demanded (in behalf of his client, John Charles Sledge) that the County Attorney acting for and in behalf of the State of Missouri:

1. Show how the defendant did, on or about the twenty-second day of August, 1939, murder Mrs. Hermie Sledge, his wife.

2. Show how the defendant did murder feloniously.

3. Show how the defendant did murder with the intent thereof.

4. Show how the defendant did murder designedly.

5. Show how the defendant did murder with malice aforethought.

6. Show how the defendant did murder unlawfully.

7. Show how the defendant, if guilty of the above, has specifically committed an act in violation of the Missouri Penal Code.

Two days later John Charles stood before the court and in counsel with his lawyer asked to be allowed to stand on a demurrer. Judge Garnold denied this and asked John Charles for his plea. John C. again stood on a demurrer and was taken back to his cell under a bond of twenty-five thousand dollars. Asked by the press what this meant, Hanek answered: “Standing on a denied demurrer is essentially a plea of guilty, though not necessarily.”

The trial was set for November 3, 1939. John Charles requested a guitar brought to his cell which he played and sang to himself. The St. Louis Daily was allowed an interview with him and he consented to pose with his guitar. “I’ve been in hard scrapes before,” he said. John Charles seemed to be winning.

On October 15, 1939, “the defendant was served with a Notice of Additional Testimony in criminal case Number 1131 by the County Attorney, consisting of forty-three typewritten, single-spaced, legal-sized pages, covering the testimony of sixty-seven witnesses.” Attorney Wayne B. Hanek appeared before the court and asked that the trial be postponed in order that he and his client might have time to go over the Notice of Additional Information. The County Attorney argued that the material was not unexpected and was even common in cases of this sort. That objection was overruled and due to the extremity of the case the trial was postponed twelve days.

On November 12, 13, and 14, while John Charles sat playing his guitar in his cell, Hanek sat in the courtroom with the County Attorney and his assistant, selecting members of the jury.

“Your name,” the Judge would ask.

“Steve McMorgan.”

“Occupation?”

“I run a gas station on lower Manchester.”

“Have you formed any opinion whatsoever concerning the upcoming State vs. Sledge trial?”

“No, Sir.”

“Are you for or against advocating the death penalty in cases of this nature?” And depending on the answer to this question one of the two attorneys would object and the proposed jury member would be eliminated. This continued until 10:32 A.M., November 14, when Judge M. Garnold informed Wayne B. Hanek that he had reached his limit of objections. Out of the next eighteen persons the County Attorney picked twelve. John Charles was allowed another interview with the press. Twelve character witnesses were subpoenaed by Wayne Hanek and waited outside the courtroom to be called: Ivan Norice, Richard Irwin, Lawrence Owens, Susan Pugh, Jack Ruimer, Dorothy Hammer, Chester Lutz, Mrs. Chester Lutz, Edwin Elder, Jr., Donna Erickson, Loren Burr, and Ken Butters.

John Charles’s trial began with the presentation of three exhibits by the County Attorney; a shotgun with a damaged barrel, People’s Exhibit A; a small handful of Number 4 shot, People’s Exhibit B; and three enlarged pictures of Hermie Sledge, one before and two after the explosion, People’s Exhibit C. Wayne B. Hanek objected to the pictures, calling them “pure sensationalism with no judicial value,” but was overruled. The County Sheriff was called to the witness stand by Vendermarken and related John Charles’s confession following the thirty-six-hour interrogation. Hanek, cross-examining, asked when a charge had actually been made against John Charles. To this he answered two days following the confession. Hanek moved that the evidence be stricken from the record or be labeled “circumstantial” on the grounds that the evidence had been obtained in such a way as to be a violation of legal procedure. The motion was overruled and the County Attorney called the State Coroner to the witness stand. He told of the dynamite burns on Hermie’s body and further substantiated the confession. When cross-examined, the Coroner, in answer to the question of the mental condition of the defendant at the time of this confession, stated that he was told by John Charles Sledge himself that he was of “sound mind.” The next witness, Bill Gordon, day bartender at Dirty John’s, testified that John C. and Hermie had come into the bar on August nineteenth and John C. had asked Hermie to come outside and shoot bottles. Under cross-examination he told the court that John Charles had also offered to shoot the “dynamite gun” himself if someone else would throw bottles — and that John C. had even offered to let him, Bill Gordon, shoot it.

The following day Alice Van Hooser was called to the witness stand and testified that John Charles had telephoned her on August 16, 1939, and told her that Hermie Sledge had been injured while shooting an old shotgun, and was in critical condition. She further added that she had seen Hermie the following day in St. Louis and she had not appeared to be suffering from a shotgun exploding near her. This was taken from the record and the question withdrawn because Alice Van Hooser was discovered to be no true authority on physiology. She admitted a relationship between herself and the defendant and said that John Charles had told her that divorce papers had been drawn up and awaited his signature. John Charles’s attorney asked Alice Van Hooser if she had any reason to believe that John C. would murder his wife but the question was rejected because it was discovered that Alice Van Hooser was not a qualified psychologist. Wayne Hanek asked for a recess and it was granted until the next morning.

“The Last Punch . . . Final Trick from Hanek’s Bag of Tricks . . . Surprise Tactics used by Hanek,” were what the papers wrote about that morning in the courtroom. Hanek’s wizardry over legal rhetoric as exemplified by his brilliant objections to the County Attorney’s evidence was superseded by this final act. The State rested its case against John Charles Sledge and Judge Garnold called out for the defense to offer its case. Wayne B. Hanek stood beside his client and a hush came over the courtroom. The Court Officer stood by the room where the witnesses waited to be called. They had not been allowed in the room. Hanek placed his fists down on the table in front of him and said, “The defense rests.” Then he sat down. County Attorney Vendermarken, surprised and taken off guard, motioned that the court be recessed for thirty minutes while he prepared his closing speech to the jury. Wayne B. Hanek objected. Judge M. Garnold declared that the court be recessed for one-half hour. The County Attorney’s closing speech was given by his assistant over the objections of Hanek and the jury left the courtroom. Fifteen minutes later they returned and every member in turn stood, and giving his name first said, “Guilty, and I advise the court to execute the death penalty.” Wayne B. Hanek stood up then and said he would appeal the case before the State Supreme Court. Judge Garnold, before the five newsmen that had taken notes through the trial, stated that he would follow the recommendation of the jury unless prompted to do otherwise by the Governor of Missouri, which he evidently was not because on November 19, 1939, he declared to John Charles that he should be hanged by the neck until dead. Asked if he had anything to say and John C. said, “I did it and I guess I’ll have to take what’s coming to me.” Judge Garnold leaned forward in his chair and folded his paper hands. “Perhaps it’s only divine destiny that ...” He was not allowed to finish.

“No,” said John Charles, “it’s not. I’m guilty. I’ve even convicted myself. I was just born mean, I reckon.”

The appeal was granted and the Missouri Supreme Court read over the Official Transcript of the trial and upheld the finding of the lower court. John Charles played his guitar and was allowed another interview; then they came and moved him to the State Prison. He remained in “death row” twenty-five days and was allowed no interviews. No one came to visit him and the prison help was cordial to him — beer-can-like people to whom “shotgun killer,” “dynamite murderer,” and “Dirty John” meant nothing. Up to here is about all that I know. Isn’t that really all anyone needs to know? So the following is not fact, but a condition I place on the past, to let John Charles keep ahead of himself — so that he did not wake up that morning covered with a sweet gray sweat growing out of his body, shaking and screaming, vomiting from half-dreamed visions of Hermie and an ugliness too horrible to realize with all the lights turned off by a master switch and his cell door opening and three figures coming toward him across the concrete — only one’s supposed to be a priest but long ago he told them not to bring one because he despised the sniveling excuses of men — and retching green and blood-black vomit onto the bed — sick, they puffing him across his cell — fully aware of his own terror, thus pushing the terror still further and further, up the steps and tying his feet, his body crippling over with pain, unable to see now, and jerking his head up to the rope and the jeering from the throng of good people come to watch him die. Screaming and writhing. I invoke the past to let that not have happened, so that he rose from his bed and walked straight out of his cell, onto the platform waving to the hundreds of people that had come to honor him, knowing that he was not a real killer, and even kicked one of the henchmen down the stairs when he was not looking, saying: “Sucker.” That crowd laughed and another henchman pulled the lever and John C. was dead. And the prisoners rioted because of the hanging and one of the guards was shot off the wall and another lost his hand. Let Fast Eddie inherit his cigarettes and guitar. After all, what does it matter?

And I remembered the child. It took me two full months of looking at dusty, disease-ridden records of long collapsed detention orphanages to find her name — Jennie — and another two months to find her. Alice Van Hooser had wanted to adopt her but was unable to because of her unworthiness revealed by herself during the trial. Alice’s mother took out adoption papers for the girl but was also refused because of her association with her daughter. It had cost Alice five hundred dollars to get Jennie and they moved into Iowa with her mother and were living in Cedar Rapids when I found them.

“Yes?” Alice said. She had not opened the screen door. Her eyes were like light-bulb sockets, only expressionless, and any excess weight she may have had at one time was gone.

“My name is Sledge, Reuben Sledge. Are you Miss Van Hooser?”

“Yes.”

“Is Jennie here?”

“What do you want with her?”

“I just want to talk to her. Clear some things up.” A tall slim woman came up beside Alice. “This is Jennie,” she said.

“Jennie, my name is Reuben Sledge. I suppose you were too young to remember your father.” She looked at me through the screen door.

“What do you want, Mr. Sledge?” asked Alice.

“Well . . . do you remember your father or mother?”

“No,” she said, still looking at me like a magazine salesman. I stood looking back at her and mumbled something about thank-you and I was your father’s brother and your mother’s mother lived not too far from me and left. I thought I heard Alice say something then as I walked away but I couldn’t be sure what it was.

The Des Moines City Council learned of the execution of John Charles and acted immediately. Orders were sent out by the director of these affairs and Father learned that his son had been denied burial rites and sacred ground anywhere in Polk County and that similar action was being taken in the surrounding counties for fear that he would attempt to transport his son across the county line. So he went to the farmers and asked for a couple of yards of secluded land; but was unable to obtain anything because they felt that it would be illegal.

“Andrea,” Father said.

Mother looked up from her bed and stared at him. “No,” she said, “they wouldn’t . . . anywhere else and they couldn’t.”

“They have,” said Luke. “There is nothing left. I’ll go tomorrow to the junkyard and . . .”

“No,” said Andrea, “no . . . no . . . no. Burn him in the furnace — throw him in the river — bury him in the yard.”

“But he’s our son. Do you want him laying out in the yard for the rest of our lives?”

“Not our son. He was my son. I grew him in me — where were you then? — at the depot. I fed him and where were you? I told him to leave, from the time he was old enough to hear I begged him to leave — to go away and never come back. I begged him to leave the girl behind, to take nothing with him — nothing that could bring him back — and where were you? And he’s come home, to me, to kill me with his deadness, scream at me from his tomb in the basement — the horror, the mockery. There is a curse on my body.”

“No,” said Luke. “The people have done this.”

“A curse. Look at my hands, my face. I’m dying. I’m dying from something that was small when I was born and like ink has smeared through me. Look at my legs.” And she threw back the covers, revealing her thin legs, lined with varicose veins. “Those are veins, black veins bulging with poison, tearing themselves out of my body.”

Nellie had come to the door and stood holding me against her, and looked at Mother sitting on the bed rocking back and forth, her hands rubbing up and back, down her legs. Nellie carried me to the bed and held me out for Mother to take. She took me in her arms, clutched me hard against her breasts, and then turning her head aside thrust me away. Nellie gathered me from her and left the room. Luke caught the edge of the covers in his hands and raised them to cover Andrea. “Don’t touch me,” she screamed and grabbed at the blankets herself, pulling them around her and from under the mattress.

Father went to an auto salvage yard and bought a car, a Ford as Nellie tells it, and pulled it home with a chain. Walt and Father brought John Charles out of the basement and put him into the back seat. They carried Mother’s body, wrapped in a sheet (because even though Father did not believe her talk of curses and poison he might not have been so sure and didn’t want Paul to touch her), from her bed and laid her across the front seat. They pulled the car down Clinton and at First Avenue unloosed the chain. They pushed the Ford by hand around the corner and sent it off down into the fog. They stood on the rim and listened to the tires against the road. Below they heard the monument closing, like a huge boulder dropping several feet into a grass-lined pocket of earth — the perfect seal.... No other sound came up from the fog and they went home.