A Grave Ordeal

Daniel Lee

It’s said he was a tall man for his day, but slight and emaciated, pale and gaunt as a haunted night watchman. His eyes, they say, were sunken and sallow and his beard like coarse white straw. At night he was said to give off a light of his own, and some suspected this the key to his gang’s seeming ability to appear from out the nothingness and descend unexpectedly upon their victims. His age at the time of death could not be verified by any records of the day, though some newspapers stated with confidence that he was forty-two, while others claimed ages as young as thirty five, or as old as fifty. They say he was a charismatic man, raucous, quick to laugh and visibly content among friends, but cruel, prone to unprovoked bursts of violence and, allegedly, rape as well as the eleven murders with which he has become historically associated. But it’s said too that he would confound his friends and members of his own gang with moments of tenderness and gentility befitting a man of an altogether different temperament. He would stand amid the trees of his adored Kentucky. His lips would move, and no sound was heard. That he was famously criminal is known. That on his land no homestead was ever found is also fact. That he fashioned accoutrements from the jawbones of his victims, this too is true. And it is also true that from this peculiarity came his name: Jawbone John South.

He was an unmarried man, though in his book South of Hell Jim Francis suggested that he was throughout his life enamored of only one woman, Caroline Kennedy, whose lineage is known and whose marriage to Henry Echolls of Owensboro, Kentucky, so broke his heart that he could not see to taking another as his wife.

The man’s ability to pirouette about the law remains astonishing, as most of the crimes he’s said to have committed allegedly occurred within only a hundred or so miles of Christian County. And yet the man was never prosecuted. Indeed, one might suspect the lack of court documents pertaining to John or his crimes, and the relative inability or unwillingness of the local authority to take such a man down, to be in part responsible for history’s swallowing up of so luminous a figure. In that way perhaps the law triumphed, for what is the life of a man such as South if forgotten? So titanic a force he seems to have been that it remains a wonder we do not speak his name in the same breath as Jesse James or Billy the Kid.

So it is that the particulars of his life have so evaporated, and we are today left with little more than speculation and myth. Of his many alleged exploits, however, one above all has persevered. And it is principally for this anecdote that the man is remembered at all, at least among students of niche history, and of the bizarre. The story, it’s said, goes like this.

Two days before the Casper Heritage Bank robbery, the South gang was still mapping out the particulars. From the front door would enter a masked John South along with Cote Johnson and John’s fellow Confederate veteran Absolum Solomon. The men would be armed each with his signature piece - John with his custom Smith & Wesson, with its fang trigger, from out its jawbone holster – and would be backed by the lookout, Ely Carlson. The back exit would be covered by Jeremiah Jeroboam and the native Sam Kintuck. On the table still remained the matter of escape. This was in general the point of contention among the group. As the name among them, John was understandably perceived to be the principal quarry for any who might pursue them. So long, then, as the men were in his company, they too would be pursued. Still, the men were less than willing to split up and leave John the sole caretaker of the loot, and he in turn was uninterested in leaving it in their collective care until some supposed rendezvous. His will, of course, was seldom questioned with much defiance, lest their jawbones too be made to hang from some adornment, their teeth strung like shells upon some necklace.

So it was that at that penultimate negotiating table the men et, stowed away in the tool shed of Ely’s uncle. By all accounts it stank of must and awfulness. It was there that Ely and Jeremiah slapped cards on the makeshift table, hastily assembled from two sawhorses and an old door, and slapped hands on the back of young Cote. It was they who’d found the boy, they who’d introduced the runaway to John, a meeting that ended with young Cote’s induction. It was he who now sat slurping up some meal, scooping plate after plateful into his bottomless gullet, at which sight Jeremiah proclaimed, “The boy shovels more’n a gravedigger!” And it was then, it’s said, that John had his epiphany.

By all reasoning, it was a perfect plan, the men agreed, and nearly the whole of the following day was consumed with selecting a proper plot, subduing the groundskeeper, and digging the pit. The unearthed box was upturned over the hole and emptied of its occupant, but as it was it lay more than a foot shorter than John stood, and try as he might to construct an extension, old Absolum’s carpentry skills left the thing still wanting in length so that in repose within, though his arms be at his sides, John’s resemblance to the crucified Christ – with knees bent sidelong as though even now in genuflection – was unmistakable.

With evening upon them, John acquiesced to the state of the casket, seeing as he would not be inside but for a couple few hours. Its walls were lined with newspaper, and that night John accepted from his men a toast to his ingenuity. He would, for all intents and purposes, vanish from beneath the nose of the law, while his men dispersed knew exactly where he – and the money – would be, only to return when the coast was clear to exhume their captain and split the winnings. One suspects they must have spent that night in awe, however, at the sheer distrust of a man who would insist upon being entombed along with the money, lest some independent-minded among them should return to perform an early excavation.

The day came. A red sky. A sticky humidity. Chicken for breakfast. A two hour ride into Casper. A round of beers as the clock hand ticked minute by minute closer to the changing of the guard, mid day lunch.

One thing that can be corroborated is that there was, on that day, no changing of the guard. Casper Heritage records are surprisingly detailed on this point. There was to be no mid day lunch. Instead, as the morning became afternoon, and as John and his men watched from the sunbeam-striped saloon across the street, the one standing watchman became two, then three, then four. And from their perch no doubt the South gang perceived their opportunity lost.

What happened remains a mystery. Had someone seen them enter town and announced their approach? Or, more apocalyptic to John, was there a traitor in his midst? Whatever words were whispered at that table, whatever arguments made, John was not swayed. And at 4:00pm on July 18^th 1885, the South gang rushed the Casper Heritage Bank.

The native Sam Kintuck was shot dead before he even made it inside, the watchman’s next bullet just grazing Jeremiah, his third sent astray as he was himself gunned down and so the back exit was secured. Across the front entrance an exchange of gunfire, a hallowed sea of flame igniting about the air between the men and in its settling upon the earth two guards laid out parallel, final expressions of agony upon their faces. And our heroes stepped them over, into the bank, wherein the last watchman was slain, its staff and clientele held at point until the money was brought out and handed over. In this time several deputies had gathered outside, and with the emergence of the criminals another round of gunplay ensued. The men managed to mount their horses and begin their escape, though a momentary glance from Cote to one of the lawmen was all the confirmation John needed of his gut sense and he shot the boy dead right there on the street before turning and taking off at a gallop toward the cemetery.

Absolum, Ely and Jeremiah stayed by him even as the hoofbeats of the pursuing horsemen of the law grew hotter upon their heels and the shapes of the headstones before them took on the qualities of silhouettes in the deepening twilight.

John stepped into the box and stood at the precipice as though a mutineer walking the plank above an empty ocean. He transformed into a folded up likeness, an origami man inside a little wooden house. He would have lain on his back, twisted at the waist so to curl up his legs to fit. He would have clutched the sack of money in his fist, stuffed in beside him as though the effigy of an animal joining him for the night’s long slumber. Now he would have breathed in his last full lung’s worth of fresh air, and perhaps briefly contemplated the seeming endlessness of the world about him in those moments before it was taken, and his universe reduced to that within the casket.

The lid placed over him, one nail at a time driven into the walls of the frame, and the light of the moon hidden too, and the world gone dark with that most crippling of all nights content not only to blind but to deafen, and to keep from us the secrets of all the senses save touch, which serve only to reveal, moment by moment, inevitably, horror, if not in fact then in the mind’s eye.

The box was lowered into the hole, allowed to rest directly upon what remained of its former occupant, and with a speed unknown to any of the three men before that night, the pit was filled, the soft soil shoveled quickly and without care until it reached the lawn. And then they stowed the tools, mounted their rides, and rode hard. We’ll imagine they did this just as the lights of the lawmen’s lanterns appeared like fireflies at the edge of the trees.

And those lights gave chase with a heretofore unseen commitment, following the men well past their anticipated distance and into the night so far that it became day. Their backs sore and their minds ill at ease with the thoughts of both the nature of their pursuers – be they human or something supernatural – and their captain, still interred in dirt, inert.

They decided to part ways, one man in each direction but that from which the lawmen came. It’s a matter of record that Jeremiah Jeroboam boarded the 8:20 out of Slaughters headed north, doubtless trying for the state line. Absolum turned west, though his reasons are unclear. His home was in Stamping Ground, though it was surely not his intention to make his way there, not now. Ely made for his uncle’s house.

It seemed the huntsmen required neither sleep nor moment’s pause for sake of tracking, as the men fled in cold sweats across the longest, blackest country of their lives. There were strangers, perceived as chances along the way for salvation, invariably either avoided or frightened off, as the fugitives passed in the night, bleary eyed and ravenous. Among these was Peter Panaticker, in whose surplus store Absolum nearly hid. Panaticker would later describe the man as ancient, reminiscent as some forgotten smell of those myths from long ago, as though the walking husk of a dead god, a hollow tabernacle of whisky and ash that spun on its heel at the sight of the storeowner, then stood swaying in the dark until the rain began to fall and he staggered away toward an oily horse tied at the post.

The train departed Sebree without Jeremiah, who doubled back and would have caught sight of three horsemen riding sidelong the locomotive, rifles upturned lances, blades like shark fins cutting through the downpour above the surface of the black mountains in the distance: bayonets.

It’s unclear precisely when Ely decided as well to turn back. What is known is that he lacked his partners’ luck, and when the lawmen returned to Casper they did so with his corpse, carried over their heads like a triumphant king returned from some victory abroad, but prostrate and gored upon the serrated blades of their rifles.

What, in this time, must have transpired within the casket? One might presuppose that those first anticipated couple few hours were themselves agony, for surely upon the driving of that final nail, let alone the dropping of the box into the hole, and the subsequent covering up by six feet of soil, the ultimate quality of this plan must have become clear.

Suppose the men did not return. What then? Suppose they chose instead to wait out his air and appetite, wait out what remained of his life within that box, perhaps as vengeance for the death of Cote, and divide the money three ways instead of four. He must have felt himself a fool, and his decision a terrible, terrible miscalculation.

Upon the realization of his confined quarters, it’s said John immediately began clawing at the wood, scraping and screaming to his last. And then, lungs emptied and voice chords shot, he lay alone, imprisoned and immobile, as though a child’s pet, passed on and buried in a shoebox in the yard. Perhaps buried before its time. How many, he must have wondered, of those lain to rest in the graves about him were not themselves fully passed at their lives’ perceived terminus? How many awoke in the nights following their inundation to find themselves so trapped?

There are the stories of the paranoid who would insist they be buried with a string around one finger, run through the earth and attached to a bell above their graves. Thus, should they awaken to the horror of horrors, the ringing of the bell would sound their return. And so, the expression “saved by the bell.”

John South has no such string, and no such bell. Perhaps his alleged bioluminescence made for something of a glow within the box, and perhaps, were that the case, this permitted him some little relief. But we must presume this was likely not the case, and that the man was shrouded in blackness like nothing he’d theretofore known.

Perhaps he calmed himself with a rhyme, or a song, or the anticipation of the counting of the money. But what games the mind must play upon a man in such a predicament. Hours passed. One wonders whether he was conscious of the time, and at what point he must have known the agreed-upon moment of his salvation had come and gone.

By now he would have begun to hear a drumming reverberating down from the surface like the footsteps of the multitudes, as though an army passed above him. It was raining. A sprig of lightning would have resounded within his chamber deep and loud, a shrieking voice transformed into the cries of the dead in the neighboring graves, and the sound of the sifting of the packed soil as it trickled in through the holes and cracks where Absolum’s extension had been hastily fashioned – these like the repercussions of his neighbors’ movements nearer him. He imagined the coffin’s previous tenant lying crushed beneath him, tracing his corroded finger along the bottom wall, searching for and finding its weak spots and cracks. He felt a tremor at his back.

He leapt up, pressed his chest to the coffin lid, struggled to move. Clapped his palms to the side walls and felt the worming of the scavengers snaking their way inside the box. Drew his fists to his throat in fevered prayer and perceived the air, thin and stale, at last replaced with the stench of the dead earth outside. It was at that moment more than he could take, and he wrestled his fang-trigger gun from its holster, screwed the nose into his chin and squeezed, only to realize his last bullet had been made to rest within the skull of young Cote Johnson, and that from this nightmare he would find no such immediate reprieve.

And so, in this way, four days passed. It remains unclear whether the men were on the run for all that time or whether they had in fact tried to wait him out, never suspecting that after so long he could have still been alive. And indeed, on that morning of the fourth day, when the caked pounds of rotted soil were swept away and at last the sarcophagus exhumed, it was not a man emerged from that box but some other, alien creature, stinking of piss and pale like some amphibian native only to the subterranean world.

It’s said he was never the same after that. It’s said he scarcely spoke again, and then only under his breath. That children venturing near his property had the habit of disappearing. It’s said there were at night great holocausts upon his land, which on investigation revealed themselves to be the burning scourges of some spectral event, sent down screaming and wailing from out the fiery heavens, as though stones from out the fists of the almighty. And those who bore witness to these remains would later swear that across the charred faces were still visible the indentations of enormous clenched fingers.

Who can say what cosmic war was waged within that pit? What foul condemnation or inevitable judgment took place that so incurred the wrath of the great unknown? He would dance naked about the smoldering craters of the fallen stars, howling and speaking in tongues, blaspheming. He would move through town, and men would step from his path. He became a local legend, a ghost story. So much so that after his passing, there was talk that perhaps even then he was not really gone, and that in the final cruel move of that providential chess game, he had been doomed once more to visit the grave a living man. Some go so far as to add that his casket was later disinterred by a group of curious youths who reported seeing scratch marks on the ceiling of the coffin.

Absolum died but a month after the Casper Heritage robbery, allegedly of sheer exhaustion and stress beyond the bounds of what his aging heart could take. Jeremiah, with his cut of the Casper loot, moved to Alabama, where he married schoolteacher Henrietta Thatcher and made a life. He was shot dead at the age of fifty-two attempting a robbery of the Casper Heritage Bank.

And as for John South, by some his body is said to rest in the same plot, in the same cemetery, some say within the same box, as on those three nights in 1885. But by those who claim subscription to the story of its disinterment, it’s said he rose from that place and for decades after still walked among the living, though whether as one of them or not, they cannot say.