The Horse Killers
Bored and angry, a group of kids in a small East Texas town took out their hostility on a horse, whose violent death shocked the world.
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And besides, there is the pool. Among whites and blacks alike, it is acknowledged that the Silsbee Swim Club, located on the northeast edge of town, continues to discourage black children from using the only “public” pool in town. Compared with most small East Texas towns, Silsbee has always struck me as a harmonious and inviting place; no one could put it in the same league as its Klan-friendly neighbor, Vidor. But it is easy to see how blacks in Silsbee have viewed the pool as an ugly reminder that there will always be two distinct classes, one with privileges withheld from the other.
“I’m gonna show you where our children swim,” Joyce says as we drive. She directs me toward a battered old mulecart dirt road that zigzags its way until it dead-ends in the middle of a pine thicket. Directly below us is a fast-moving, malt-colored slough. It is of indeterminable depth, and one can only imagine what lurks beneath the surface. We glumly stare at the creek in silence for a while. Then Joyce says, “A little girl came and told us our children was swimming in here. We come over here and we yell at ’em, ‘Y’all get out of that ol’ nasty water right now!’”
“We whupped ’em right there on the spot,” remembers Darlene.
A friend of the women who has accompanied us begins to shiver. “They never should’ve been out here,” she murmurs.
“That’s right,” Joyce says. “They never should’ve. But they got nowhere else to go.”
APPARENTLY IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE children swimming in Coach Woodard’s stock tank. They had discovered the tank while following a trail that led from the projects into the Piney Woods. After a mile or so, the trail emptied out to a pasture surrounded by barbed wire. A mile and a fence were nothing for bored kids looking to stay cool on summer afternoons. There was too much heat, and too much time to kill—beginning in May, when Willie, Charisse, Doyle, and Mason were all suspended through the end of the semester following the second burglary of Silsbee Middle School.
Now it was a new semester, though it was starting pretty much as the last one had ended. On Wednesday, September 13, Doyle was hauled into the principal’s office. Someone had spray-painted the word “Doyle” on the kindergarten walls. There was only one Doyle in the school system. “Why did you do it?” an administrator asked him.
He shrugged. “I thought it would be fun,” he said. Then he added, “I just didn’t have nothing to do.”
It had been that kind of day, and not just for Doyle. His big brother Sam, along with the chronic runaway Mason, had been disruptive in school and were now spending their daytime hours in detention cubicles at the Student Alternative Center, adjacent to the high school. Getting lectured at, hunched in a little space all day long like a dog at a kennel—on days like this one, they had to get out. They had to hit the trail.
When they got to the pasture, two cows and a calf were standing by the tank. Suddenly no one was thinking about swimming. They advanced on the cattle. The dumb animals skittered away. The kids began to chase them, around and around the pasture, laughing at the cattle, throwing sticks at them. In a panic, the cattle rammed through a rickety wooden gate and fled to another area of the property. The kids agreed that the whole episode was rather thrilling. They resolved to come back the next day.
Eight of them did. Accompanying Willie, Charisse, Sam, Doyle, Mason, and their new classmate Oliver were two brothers, Tory and Horace, who were eight and nine respectively but already well on their way to establishing themselves as classroom scourges. A ninth boy, Maurice, had chased the cattle with them the previous day but was grounded by his parents that day after his progress report arrived in the mail. He would miss out on the fun.
Along the trail they happened upon two other boys, who were walking their dogs. “We’re going to the pasture to chase some cattle around,” someone explained. Why not, said the two boys. And so a throng consisting of nine boys, one girl, and two dogs followed the trail, crawled under the barbed wire, and roamed around the pasture, searching for the cattle until they saw, instead, the horse.
It stood alone, grazing in the meadow, about 150 yards away from the barn where it spent its nights. Only an hour or so earlier, at five in the afternoon, Coach Woodard had paid it his daily after-school visit. Now it stared at ten young strangers. They were not here to feed it, or to ride it. Still, they were coming its way. Mister Wilson Boy began to run.
They gave chase. The horse galloped around the pasture several times with Willie, Sam, Doyle, Mason, Oliver, Tory, and Horace on its heels. The meadow was littered with oak limbs ranging from one to two feet long and one to two inches wide. The boys began to pick up the sticks and hurl them at the horse. Tory, the eight-year-old, found a glass bottle and flung it, but the horse was too fast. The others, however, were hitting their mark. Charisse tossed one stick, missed, and then began scrambling around the meadow, gathering sticks for the boys.
Suddenly they had the horse backed up against the fence. The boys closed in. The horse tried to pivot away, and one of its hind legs became entangled in the barbed wire. Sam, Doyle, Willie, Mason, and the nine-year-old boy, Horace, began to flail away at the horse, hitting it repeatedly in the backside, ribs, belly, and neck. Then, from shock or a well-aimed throw, the animal fell hard to the ground.
The boys descended upon it and went to work on its head while the horse lay defenseless. The two boys with the dogs had seen enough. They retreated to the woods as the others jeered at them.
When the horse was no longer moving, one of the boys took a stick and rammed it hard up the animal’s nostril. Their blood-stained weapons were strewn around the horse. The children looked around. It was still daylight. To round off the afternoon, they broke into Coach Woodard’s toolshed, stole a few ropes, a machete, and a few cans of spray paint, threw a Weed Eater into the stock tank, and started the tractor engine—which was still running at seven o’clock Friday morning, when Coach Woodard visited the pasture to pay his ritual morning visit to Mister Wilson Boy.
ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, ONE OF the two boys who had retreated from the pasture showed up at school crying. He wouldn’t say why he was upset. But across town, in the Student Alternative Center, Mason put the finishing touches on a sketch he had been making of a demon figure, scrawled “Lord of Pain” above it, and then leaned over to the boy in the adjacent detention cubicle. “Me and Sam and Doyle was the ones that killed the horse,” he whispered.
The horse killing had been the talk of Silsbee all weekend long, but the perpetrators were thought to be gang members from Kountze or perhaps some satanic cult—until Mason opened his mouth. The listener told what he had heard to Hardin County deputy sheriff Thomas Tyler, a hefty and amiable black man who had lived in west Silsbee his entire life. Tyler plucked Doyle from class that morning. The twelve-year-old boy gave the deputy the names of all the children who had been out at the pasture.
That Monday evening, the mothers of the perpetrators took their children to Tyler’s house and conferred in the deputy’s garage. He knew all of them—was kin, in fact, to more than one. The mothers were upset, the children less so as they recounted the episode. They didn’t know it was Coach Woodard’s farm. They hadn’t tried to kill the horse. They were just playing around, and one thing led to another. The horse, they insisted, still looked alive when they last saw it.
The parents offered to pool what money they had to give Coach Woodard. Several pledged to give their kids a whipping. When they had run out of things to say, the deputy weighed the situation. “Well,” he said, “I’ll do all I can to help. We’ve got to bring ’em all in to the juvenile office tomorrow—there’s no way around that. At the very least, I’ll try to see to it that they don’t punish the girl since she didn’t hit the horse.”
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