Every Day by the Sun Read online

  Thompson was facing trial “for abduction of a female and unlawful cohabitation.” This was no news to Oxford. Everyone knew that Thompson was keeping a teenage mistress, Eudora Watkins. She lived with an African American woman who worked in Thompson’s household and, according to rumor, served “sexual purposes.” Eudora herself was under indictment for carrying a deadly weapon.

  When Sullivan passed Thompson on his way into court, Thompson cursed him, “applying to him … a very gross epithet.” Charlie attempted to arrest Thompson, who at first went peaceably. Then he refused to go any farther. In the ensuing scuffle, Thompson grabbed Charlie’s “coat sleeve, lapel or throat,” and Charlie shouted for help. A man appeared within seconds; everyone inside the courthouse heard the shouting and commotion. The three men became locked in a deadly embrace. Charlie drew his revolver and said, “Thompson, if you don’t let me go, I’ll kill you.” Then he lowered the gun and pointed it at the ground and repeated, “Turn me loose or I will kill you.”

  “Shoot, you barn-burning son of a bitch!” Thompson yelled. And so Charlie did. Thompson was dead, a bullet through his heart. Charlie surrendered, was indicted for manslaughter, and released on $2,500 bail pending the next court session. No one knows why Thompson accused Charlie of arson. As Williamson writes, barn burning, “the crime of sneaks and cowards,” was not one of Charlie’s failings. At his trial in May 1884, Charlie Butler was found not guilty of manslaughter, the consensus being that “if there was any man who needed killing in Lafayette County … it was Sam Thompson.”

  Throughout the next year Charlie continued to serve as marshal and tax collector. Since taxes had been raised to support a new school, a considerable amount of money was flowing through his hands. Then the board of aldermen hired attorney J. W. T. Falkner to audit the books. He found a great deal of tax revenue missing. No one knew exactly how much, since Charlie had been keeping the accounts. Before Christmas 1887, Charlie Butler disappeared. He took his leave on a westbound train with an estimated three to five thousand dollars in embezzled city tax revenues and a beautiful octoroon, a seamstress in the Jacob Thompson household. Jacob Thompson was a prominent lawyer and politician who served as secretary of the Interior from 1857 to 1861. They vanished without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again—or so the Falkner version of the story goes.

  Four inches of snow fell on Lafayette County that December. Oxford must have looked like a Christmas card. I ache for Maud, who turned sixteen that November. She never (in my lifetime) put up a Christmas tree, no red and green candles in the dining room, no wreath on the front door. There was no Christmas celebration for Maud in 1887 or thereafter. I had always thought Dean’s death caused her to ignore the holiday. Now I know better.

  I’ve learned much more about Charlie’s disappearance thanks to a newly discovered cousin, Carolyn Butler Cherry. We share Charlie, for better or for worse, as a great-grandfather: Charlie’s son, Sherwood, was Carolyn’s grandfather; Charlie’s daughter, Maud, was my grandmother. (Charlie was William Faulkner’s grandfather.) I was raised in the Faulkner family, where Charlie’s infamous departure was never discussed. Carolyn grew up in the Butler family, where the consensus was that Charlie had no intention of abandoning his wife and children, was planning to come back home someday, and was possibly killed by a prisoner he was transporting.

  The source of this information, previously unpublished and appearing here for the first time with Carolyn’s permission, is a letter passed down in the Butler family. It is handwritten by Charlie and dated November 19, 1887:

  Topeka Kansas 11–19/87

  My Dear Lelia,

  I did not stop in either St Louis or Kansas. I was up all night last night & feel real well this morning. I will only be here a few minutes, so I will have to make this short—but I will write you a long letter as soon as I stop. I never saw any body that I even know before I left—Cairo. I wanted to stop and see Barry Glick in Kansas City but did not stop will see when I come back through there. Much love and kisses for your self and children.

  Lovingly,

  Charlie

  According to Carolyn, the Butler family has long believed that Charlie, acting as a deputy sheriff, was in the process of transporting a prisoner from Topeka, Kansas, to Holly Springs, Mississippi. He and the unnamed prisoner disappeared and were never heard from again. Sometime after the disappearance in November 1887, Lelia Butler received an envelope marked “United States Senate/Official or Department Business/FREE” postage. It was addressed to Mrs. L. D. Butler of Oxford, Mississippi. The envelope contained an unused ticket, number D437, on the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad. The ticket was issued in Memphis on November 13, 1887. The passenger is identified as “Charles Butler + one.” It was good from Memphis to Holly Springs. The account listed was I.C.R.R. and it was good for one trip only, until November 31 [sic], 1887. This reservation for two seats was sent to her apparently because it had been paid for in advance but had not been used.

  Another document that was passed down in the Butler family is a telegram dated “December 188?” from Topeka, Kansas, addressed to “G. T. O’Haver Supt of Police Mps.” The message reads simply “No such warrant applied for.” It is signed “E. B. Allen, Secy State.”

  A month after Charlie disappeared, Lelia must have contacted authorities to investigate whether he was indeed assigned to bring back a prisoner from Kansas. The Memphis superintendent of police, G. T. O’Haver, contacted Topeka on her behalf, and this telegram indicates that no prisoner transfer warrant was applied for, by Charlie or anyone else.

  It is possible that Charlie told Lelia that he was going to Topeka to escort a prisoner back to Mississippi. The letter does not mention his mission, which implies that Lelia might have known why he was in Topeka.

  Carolyn observed that “the tone of the letter does not appear to be from a man who was about to disappear, leaving a wife and two children.” I agree, but if there was no warrant or prisoner, Charlie’s letter becomes suspect. Why was he in Topeka? At best, the letter seems to be a poignant farewell to his wife and children. One senses the desperation of a man on the run, missing his family and racked by guilt, yet at the same time trying to cover his tracks and provide a plausible explanation for his disappearance. The promised follow-up letter (“a long letter as soon as I stop”) never arrived.

  With his experience in law enforcement, Charlie would have known that reserving a train ticket for two was routine planning for transporting a prisoner. At a stopover in Memphis, before boarding the train to Kansas (via Cairo, Illinois) he reserved two return tickets from Memphis to Holly Springs for “Charlie Butler + one.” Two days later he posted a letter from Topeka and disappeared forever.

  Carolyn grew up believing that the prisoner Charlie allegedly was transporting from Topeka robbed and killed him. She accepted that his letter to Lelia was sincere and that he intended to return to Oxford and take his punishment. She grew up hoping for the best, whereas I grew up knowing nothing about the Butlers.

  However, I now believe Charles E. Butler may have surfaced in Fort Smith, Arkansas. In 1899, a “G. S. Butler” was sworn in as a U.S. deputy marshal at Fort Smith. Was this Charles E. Butler’s alias? Charles may have substituted his father’s and son’s initials for his own. His father’s middle initial was G and his son was named Sherwood.

  It is logical that Charlie would have returned to law enforcement. If so, Fort Smith was the place to do it. The Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas was based there. Judge Isaac C. Parker, known as the “hanging judge,” presided over the court, which had jurisdiction over the Indian territories and many lawmen on its payroll.

  It is intriguing that the deputy marshal’s oath of office signed “G. S. Butler” contains a signature similar to Charlie’s handwriting. He had a distinctive way of writing a capital B with a loop before it. This loop can be seen in both the G. S. Butler signature and the name “Barry” in line eleven of Charlie’s November 19 letter to his w
ife.

  G. S. Butler was a man of mystery who left behind no personal data, no birth or burial records. He is not listed on any census in Fort Smith, Arkansas, or the surrounding counties. Who was he? Was he Charles E. Butler?

  When Charlie left Oxford with the town’s tax receipts, a seamstress in the household of Jacob Thompson disappeared at the same time. It was said that they ran away together. The 1880 census listed two mulatto servants in the Thompson household, Laura Poindexter, twenty-five, born in Kentucky in 1855, and her daughter, Lou, six, born in Tennessee in 1874. At the time of the census, Jacob Thompson lived in Memphis, but he had retired by 1887 and had a home in Oxford when Laura ran away (presumably taking her daughter with her). It is possible that Laura Poindexter was the “beautiful octoroon” who disappeared with Charlie Butler. We will probably never know.

  The situation is as complicated as a William Faulkner short story: After Maud’s father ran away with tax receipts, her future father-in-law, J. W. T. Falkner, in his capacity as city attorney, prosecuted Charlie Butler in absentia. Obviously, Maud and Murry were so much in love that they did not allow the tensions between their parents to affect them. Almost to the day nine years later they were married, and from then on neither her father’s crime nor his name was discussed by the Falkners.* William would not have learned about his Butler grandfather at home. Perhaps one of his schoolmates said, one day at recess, “Hey, Bill, I hear your granddaddy ran off with the town’s money.”

  In January 1888, Charlie was voted out of office, in absentia, at a special meeting of the board of aldermen held “for the purpose of hearing report of committee to audit Books of C.E. Butler, absconding marshall.”

  At the time of Charlie’s flight, Lelia was thirty-eight years old. Their marriage had been above reproach. Charlie was considered an earnest, hardworking provider. Although Lelia herself remained a mystery, refusing to discuss her past with anyone, the couple was well connected socially. The problem, as Joel Williamson diplomatically observes, was that Charlie and Lelia “did not get along.” Lelia did not have any more children after Sherwood and Maud. The absence of doctors’ records of miscarriages or stillbirths would suggest that after Maud’s birth there was little or no sexual relationship between Lelia and Charlie.

  Charlie did not leave his family penniless. The house was in Lelia’s name, and in 1889, the 148 acres that Charlie had inherited from his parents were auctioned off on the courthouse steps. Meanwhile, Maud attended the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls in Columbus, Mississippi. In 1890, she and Lelia were living in Texarkana, Arkansas, where Maud worked as a secretary. She and her mother visited Sherwood often in Oxford. Maud renewed friendships with her childhood friends, among them Holland Falkner and her brother Murry.

  Murry and Maud were married in the Methodist parsonage on November 8, 1896, quietly, without any family members present. They left for their new home in New Albany, Mississippi, the next morning. Lelia did not attend the ceremony because of her hard feelings toward Murry’s father. For years afterward, whenever she wrote to her daughter, the letters were addressed:

  Miss Maud Butler

  in care of

  Mr. Murry Falkner

  No wonder Maud never talked about her family.

  Lelia died leaving little tangible evidence of her existence, no letters or books, no pieces of jewelry or furniture. I have one painting, fourteen-by-twenty-two-inch, oil on canvas, of three ears of Indian corn with large husks, tied together against an azure background. The painting has no date. The signature is in white block letters in the lower right-hand corner: “Lelia Dean Butler.” The painting is so old and dry that the oils have flaked off, leaving splotches of bare canvas. I found it rolled up on the top shelf of a linen closet when I moved into my grandmother’s house in 1970. Now it hangs in our living room in an ornate antique gilt frame.

  Above Lelia’s Indian Corn hangs a painting by Maud, an oil on canvas approximately the same size, unframed. It is a near-life-size portrait of a beautiful copper-skinned African American girl, just the head and shoulders, dressed in green with a small green cap on her close-cropped black hair, a gaudy red and green drape behind her. Her large black eyes stare solemnly out at you. The painting is signed in the lower left-hand corner “MFalkner,” Maud’s standard signature. Printed on the back of the canvas in her distinctive hand is the title, Dulcie. The portrait is undated but I know that Dulcie modeled for Maud’s art class at Oxford’s Mary Buie Museum in the 1940s. I also know that Maud would never have displayed Dulcie in the living room or anywhere else.

  When I asked my grandmother to help me join the DAR—having failed miserably as a Girl Scout I thought I might fare better as a Daughter of the American Revolution—she made her attitude toward her ancestors quite clear. “Lamb,” she said, “I don’t know whether my ancestors were hanging by their heads or their tails and I don’t intend to find out. Not even for you.”

  *In the summer of 2008 I asked my father’s cousin Dot Falkner Dodson, Murry’s niece, what she had heard about Charlie. She was shocked that I would bring up the subject and was cautious and politic in her reply. She said that she’d always wondered if I “knew about it.” Charlie’s disappearance was still a taboo subject among the Falkners, more than a century after the fact!

  We arrived at Oxford after dark and were met at the station by our grandmother and grandfather Falkner. We descended from the coach … covered with soot, cinders and sweat … speechless with wonder; never had we seen so many people, so many horses and carriages, and so much movement everywhere. And the lights—arc lights! As we drove to Grandfather’s house by way of the town square we noticed the fine board sidewalks which extended the whole way.… People were walking along them and it was already past nine at night. We could hardly wait to see these wonderful sights by daylight.

  —JACK FALKNER, 1902

  WHEN J. W. T. FALKNER MOVED HIS HOUSEHOLD FROM RIPLEY, Mississippi, the Old Colonel’s home base, to Oxford, he bought property on South Street within sight of the courthouse. In 1899, he built one of the largest houses in town, a three-story white elephant the family called “the Big Place.” The lot had originally belonged to Maud Butler Falkner’s grandfather in the 1830s. For years the house stood in the center of the large lot facing east; then it was moved to the northwest corner, facing north. The Falkners celebrated the turn of the century in the third-floor ballroom.

  Even as J.W.T. flourished, however, his older son Murry suffered major setbacks. His dream had been to operate his grandfather’s short-run railroad, the Gulf & Ship Island, a narrow-gauge line connecting Ripley, Tennessee, and Pontotoc, Mississippi. It was affectionately known as the “Doodlebug Line.” With little interest in attending college, Murry had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the operation of “his” railroad. He loved every job on the train and enthusiastically served as fire tender, engineer, and conductor. If he couldn’t live in the West and be a cowboy, this was the next best thing.

  He and Maud settled halfway between either terminus in New Albany, where their first three sons, William, Jack, and John, were born. Murry was content with his railroad career and growing family until J.W.T., without warning or explanation, sold the Gulf & Ship Island out from under him. Penniless, unschooled, and desperate, his railroad dreams gone forever, Murry moved his family to Oxford and operated businesses financed by his father, first a freight line and livery stable, and later a hardware store. But his boys were happy. Oxford was quite a change from rural New Albany. They were used to going to bed with the chickens and had never seen streets lit up at night.

  They moved into a big two-story cottage south of the square, trimmed with gingerbread latticework, with large front and back yards. They needed the extra room since Lelia had come to live with them. Maud, however, needed even more help with her three boys than Lelia could provide. Caroline Barr, a small African American woman in her sixties, was the solution. She had worked for the Young Colonel in Ripley and moved t
o Oxford with him when her own children were grown. She settled into the cabin behind Maud and Murry’s home and soon became a second mother to the boys. They called her “Mammy Callie.” She moved into the cabin behind Rowan Oak when William bought the place in 1930, and lived there until she died.

  William, Jack, and John took to their new surroundings and made their presence known in Oxford. The saying went, “If you pick on a Falkner you’ll have to whip all three.” With William as their undisputed leader, or as Jack put it, “crew chief in word and deed,” the brothers roamed the streets on their ponies. According to Jack they had “played the same games, eaten at the same table and generally read the same books. In short, the day-to-day life of one had been the same as that of the other.” They honored a code of conduct instilled in them by Maud and Mammy: “Rise when a lady entered a room … lie only when it would be of great value to another … take pride in family and country … [be part of] a closely knit and self-sustaining family unit” until inevitably “each would go his separate way to do what he had the capacity to do and to refrain from doing what he had the capacity to withstand.”

  Before Dean was born, the Falkner brothers’ infatuation with flying began. One day a balloonist appeared in Oxford. With or without the mayor’s consent, he dug a fire pit on the square and started a fire. With the aid of his assistant he slowly inflated his hot-air balloon with smoke from burning tires. A crowd soon gathered, including the Falkner brothers. The thick smoke blackened their faces. The balloonist drank whiskey from a jug, and when the balloon was ready to lift off he jumped on the swing (no gondola but only a wooden plank suspended by ropes) and was airborne. William and his brothers were transfixed by the miracle of flight. The canvas balloon, trailing smoke and with its drunken, blackened rider clinging to the ropes, cleared the two-story buildings south of the square and rose as high as two hundred feet above ground. A little breeze nudged it gently southward. The boys chased the smoking craft down South Street. Within seconds, the hot air cooling, the balloon began to descend. The dangling balloonist had no clue where he would land. The Falkner boys were ecstatic when the balloon came to rest on their grandfather’s property and the canopy collapsed. They ran pell-mell around the house only to find Mammy Callie brandishing a scantling at the “crazy man” whose smoking wreck lay on top of the henhouse. As alarmed chickens flapped about them, William explained to Mammy Callie that the airborne intruder meant no harm and in fact was probably the greatest living person in Mississippi, if not the world.