(1869-1911) (1911-1976)

a poem by Thomas Thornburg

In Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where the rolling purple plains
Have turned to dust beneath the wheel of Time,
At the turn of this last century, having come around to crime,
Elmer McCurdy turned to robbing trains.
There the ghost of John Brown’s body walks the bloody Kansas flat,
And the shades of Frank and Jesse James ride by in mask and hat;
What the freezing winds of winter or the deadly summer suns
Will not tender, men may render with a gun.
O, there’s just as many live outside as live inside the law
And old Elmer was as far-out then as any ever saw;
When he strapped a reputation on and rode to Dead Man’s Pass,
He said the world could kiss his outlaw ass.
He was so mad, so truly bad, so dangerous to know,
He was Manfred in a cowboy suit; he was Grendel on the go;
He’d a six-gun for his Cicero and dynamite for brains,
And he hated anything as straight as trains.

Hurdy-gurdy
Down and dirty
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

Now when Elmer commenced blowing up the bends of all the track,
Stationmasters of disaster started crying for some slack,
And bankers started bitching as they sang the business blues
And they asked their sassy sheriff what to do,
What to do?
What to do, do, do?
O, they asked their sassy sheriff what to do?

Now this sheriff was as bad an inlaw as you ever saw;
He was Donder on a drunk man, he was Blitzen on the draw;
He was Una in a union suit, a buckskin Charlemagne,
And he hated folks for robbing, hopping, or for pulling train.
So he printed up a circular and sent it all around,
And it said that they intended to put Elmer in the ground,
And it said if anybody else would like to join the fun,
There was money for a posse to keep Elmer on the run.
It was nineteen and eleven in the merry month of May
When Elmer saddled up and rode to rob one sunny day,
And he rode from dawn to daylight and he yodeled as he rode
For the silver in the saddlebags of swag that he bestrode;
And he whistled quite merrily as he rode out of the draw
But dumb behind him rode the dogging law.
Elmer went about his work through June and through July,
And he robbed quite conscientiously as summer cantered by;
Through the grim dog days of August and in warm September rains
Old Elmer never missed a day of work at robbing trains.

In the dappled chase of Autumn when the wild October wind
Raced the chuffing locomotive down the chute to Dead Man’s Bend,
Elmer rode like sixty-seven, like the Devil on the loose
Going crazy in the saddle when the iron from his cayuse
Was arcing fire from rail to rail coming up on that caboose;
He’d a hotbox on his starboard hip and a cog caught in his brain,
While underneath his Stetson ran a single-track refrain,
And he would have died unsatisfied if he could not rob trains.
All the passengers was puzzled until Elmer made it clear
To stick ‘em up as he threw down against the engineer;
And when he ran things down for them the crew began to shake,
But the whistle blew, and the brakeman knew, and he threw down the brake.
Then the people started grinning when he reined up on the track
And he nabbed a couple railroad cops and robbed ‘em back to back;
He was laughing like a goblin as the people passed the word
That it was hurdy-gurdy
Down and diry
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

But it was his final caper there that Elmer ever turned
For he had infuriated far too many he had burned;
You may read it in the papers there, the Oklahoma press
Says he tried to draw against John Law and came out second best.
O, the Pawhuskans applauded when they brought old Elmer in
And their preachers copped an opportunity to steal on sin;
And the teachers taught the sons and daughters truths about the gun
But the truth of truths
They could not use
And
Still abuse

Is
Elmer did it all for fun.
Hurdy-gurdy
Down and dirty
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

It’s down in books in libraries if any think I lie:
How they claimed they could cool Elmer’s act and hang him high and dry;
But Elmer fooled the hangman and the folks when he went West
With a 32:20 dum-dum slug behind his Sunday vest.
Well, the undertaker undertook to empty Elmer out
And had boxed him up quite proper when the folks began to shout
(Underneath the rouge and lipstick you could see old Elmer grin)
That there was no ground for miles around that he could put him in.
Well, that puts the undertaker into something of a stew,
So he goes and asks the Sheriff what the hell he’s gonna do?
And the Sherrif said, “I delivered him dead; now you’ll have to decide.”
Well, the undertaker wrung his hands, and stomped his feet and cried,
And I think he went and took a drink, and walked around outside
A little while (about a mile) and shook his head and sighed;
Then he went back home and got a comb and parted Elmer on the side,
And he put his robber outfit on him like used to ride
And then, dig: he took his biggest rig and ran him up on formaldehyde,
And this coroner hung him up inside his corner closet where he dried,
And he said, “God! He’s purty!”
Hurdy-gurdy
Down and dirty
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

So, though they could not make, they could not take, nor put him into jail,
They socked his hard-case carcass on the old South-Western mail,
And if you laid a sawbuck down you drew nine dollars change
To see old train-robbing Elmer robbing people from the train.
And they hung a sign around his neck that said to come and see
The Oklahoma Bad-man (women and children admitted free).
So from Tulsa down to Ponca City Elmer made the scene,
From Shawnee down to Bartlesville and all spots in between,
From Wichita to Enid Elmer made a million miles
Exchanging trains through sun and rain, and all the changing styles.

The years ran by like rabbits; people did what people do;
The Yanks went over and came back, and twenty-three skidoo;
America went on the wagon, people stayed at home,
And Henry Sinclair pulled a caper called the Teapot Dome;
We kidnapped Tutankhamen and put him in the bank
And Richard Loeb and Leopold kidnapped Bobby Franks;
We dedicated Lincoln and earned the world’s applause
And then we put Marcus Garvey in the can for breaking nigger laws;
An Oklahoma Walton tried to stand up like a man
And in due process was impeached by the local Ku Klux Klan;
Half the nation spun around when the wild tornadoes blew
And the other half hummed right along with Rhapsody in Blue;
Folks pitched in to bathtub gin or radiator raw;
Jack Scopes got busted for trying to make a monkey of the law;
The eight-hour workday was declared to be When Day Is Done,
And Our Lord Ford sent down word to give everybody one;
Gene Tunney took a funny count that made the people swear
And Sacco and Venzetti took a hot-squat in the chair;
Alphonse Capone took a fall one Philadelphia morn,
Steamboat Willie made the scene and Mickey Mouse was born;
And folks said, “Hi!” to passersby, or “How ya doin, fine?”
And Al Capone sent Bugs Moran a funny Valentine;
Mrs. Harding showed the world the inconstancy of class,
And funny Albert theorized the inconstancy of mass;
The Scottsboro Boys got bum-wrapped for that Alabama thing,
And Herbert Hoover signed into law a song no one can sing;
FDR cut his new deal to keep us free from fear
And when he asked us what we wanted, we said, “We Want Beer!”
One hundred thousand homeless kids roamed the Big Apple’s digs
And Walter Disney pork-barreled an empire from Three Little Pigs;
The bottom broke out of the joke; the nation was a sink;
We prohibited prohibition and everybody took a drink;
The Catholic League of Decency decided what was mete,
And Irish Catholic coppers killed strikers in the street;
John Dillinger took in a movie one Chicago day,
He took his ticket C.O.D. and came back D.O.A.
Joe Louis flattened Maxie Baer to let the whole world know,
And John L. flattened Bill Hutchinson and started the C.I.O.
Then Roosevelt ran past Alf Landon; Jesse Owens ran like scat,
And fourteen thousand Goodyear Rubber workers sat down flat.
Three thousand Americans organized to fight the King of Spain
While General Motors tried to flush their families down the drain.
Three thousand Americans dead in Spain to support the commonweal,
While in Chicago their brothers died fighting U.S. Steel;

The Garment Workers dropped a stitch; labor buttons were worn;
We gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler—and Wrong Way Corrigan was born;
Then Hitler gave Lindbergh a medal and Lucky Lindy made the news
Again by blaming the Second World War on Roosevelt and the Jews;
And the lid blew off like Krakatoa; America went to war,
And then came home and went to work in the Army Surplus Store;
The century passed the halfway mark, the nation changed its clothes,
We busted half of Hollywood and then busted Tokyo Rose;
The filthy bearded communists with their filthy bearded bombs
Crept in and hid beneath the bed in loyal American homes;
Kids signed their letters S.W.A.K. and sealed ‘em with a kiss,
And Good Sir Richard saved the day and busted Alger Hiss;
Hello, Young Lovers, whoever you are, I’ve been in love like you;
It was craaaazy, man, the times were rare, like twenty-three skidoo …
Twenty-three skidoo?
Great googlie-wooglies! I almost forgot
Old Elmer McCurdy hanging in here somewhere, left to rot;
They gave old Elmer a flattop and they combed his hair in ducks,
And by some means they pegged his jeans and dressed him in white bucks;
Then the fella who owned Elmer had to hock him for a while,
So they hung him in a fun-house up above the main turnstile.
But your customer there didn’t seem to care, nor noticed nothing funny
About the scene—you know what I mean—at least he paid his money
To see the show-and rightly so, if Elmer was a dummy.
Give a hippy marijuana and you know how he’ll act.
He’ll rape your wife and your whole damn family: IT’S A PROVEN FACT!
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test! Mr. Natural! Window Pane!
We took a toke on a little dope, then did it all again:
Hell, No, I Won’t Go; I’m leaving on a jet plane;
Here’s the word from Thunderbird (you know it makes you sick)
Acid made our face break out, and so did Trick Dick.
We decimated Viet Nam; Calley took a rap;
We gave the Orient our grain; and they gave us the clap.
We learned to hate the word Watergate; we learned about the fix,
But the rednecks all went Hippy; the Hippies all went arty,
And we invited all of us to our own birthday party,
And it was Nineteen-Seventy-Six.

They say the Six Million Dollar Man can jump a country mile,
They say he has an eye can see behind your whitest smile,
They say he has the baddest moves the outlaws ever saw,
They say, in the modern world of today, he is the Law.
Well, the whole thing blended when they intended to make a TV show
About the Six Million Dollar Man for less than half that dough
(The little children in Appalachia laughed and clapped their hands
While their little rickety knees stuck out like rubber bands):
They cast it in a fun-house, where the lights and cameras run,
And they sent a dude to rearrange the dummies, just for fun;
So when he climbed through layers of Time the dust there made him cough,
And when he leaned too hard on Elmer, Elmer’s arm fell off!
Yep, it was old hurdy-gurdy
Down and dirty
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

Well, they called the Sheriff right away and he rode through the town
And handcuffed half the carnival and third-degreed the clown,
And made the folks stand outside the ropes while they cut Elmer down.
And then they told the story through—a little less than I’ve told you,
I guess because I’m wordy.
And there’s your story, ain’t it funny about a fun-house mummy
Who lived to hang and hanged to live; now tell me, who’s the dummy?
But there it is … the whole damn shot, and now the song is sung,
But the thing that hangs around for me is: was he hanged or was he hung?
Was he right, riding into night? Or was he wrong, dead wrong?
Or can we finish Elmer off, even in a song?
Is there some reason (is it treason?) that keeps a man from harm
It took two centuries of Law and Order to disarm?
Well, one day when your children steal enough horsepower from the sun
And their children laugh like maniacs and light out on the run,
I trust they’ll sup a stirrup cup and live life hurdy-gurdy
When I am down, and dirty, like
Elmer McCurdy
Whoopee ti

Thomas Thornburg

© 1977