by Gary D. Svee
Silence stretched until Mac’s words tiptoed out. “Why did you do that?”
The sheriff took off his hat and stared south toward the Beartooths as though he expected to find the words he needed written there, but that page was blank, too.
“Look, Mac, I had Tilly over at the Stockman make me some beef sandwiches. She makes ’em better than anyone. Well, I’m hungrier than a bear right now. If you’d like, maybe we could eat, and I’ll tell you about it. How does that sound?”
Mac was hungry, always he was hungry, but it wasn’t the sandwiches that pulled him off his horse. Scarecrows don’t have many friends. It would be a shame to waste the ones they had.
“Told you Tilly makes the best sandwiches.”
Mac nodded, his mouth full of beef and home-baked bread.
“I’ve got a couple cans of peaches, too, but I thought we would have those later … when we were hunting.”
Mac nodded again.
Drinkwalter sighed. “I’ve been thinking about this for a week, how I was going to tell you, but none of it seems to make any sense.”
The sheriff scuffed graffiti into a soft patch of silt with an uprooted willow, long dead and gray from the sun. He sighed, and then the words began:
“Secrets are hard to keep, Mac. Hard to keep when they are our own and harder still when they belong to someone else. I have secrets I used to share with Ol’ Deak. … I need someone else to share those secrets with now, Mac.”
“So I’m asking you straight out, Mac. No more stupid tests. Can I trust you to keep my secrets?”
Mac nodded.
The sheriff scuffed the dirt with his boot. “Mac, I can’t read or write.”
Mac’s brow wrinkled. “Lots of people can’t read or write.”
“Not many sheriffs can’t.”
Mac nodded. “I could teach you.…”
“No, Mac, I can’t learn it. It’s not that I’m stupid. It’s just that there’s something wrong with the way that I see letters. They’re all in a jumble, and I can’t make them out the way most folks can. I’ve been to a lot of doctors. They say I’m dyslexic. It can’t be cured, and I can’t read or write. So Deak did all my reading and writing for me. He read all the notes from the commissioners and all the wanted posters and some of the stories in the newspapers. He wrote the reports and kept the books.”
“Mac, I’d like you to do that for me.”
“Why not one of the deputies?”
Sheriff Drinkwalter shook his head. “There’s more to it than that, Mac. When I was growing up, I thought I was stupid. I went to school like everybody else, but I couldn’t learn to read. I was learning my lessons, though, one lesson, anyway. The other kids would ‘read’ that lesson to me. ‘Frank Drinkwalter is the dumbest kid ever to enter grade school. He’s too dumb to read and too dumb to learn anything.’”
“You know what it’s like to be singled out like that, don’t you, Mac?”
Mac picked up a piece of driftwood and scratched at the ground. “Yeah, I know.”
“I did a little teaching, too, with my fists, so they would know what it was like to hurt, the way they were hurting me. But they’d gang up on me, and I’d get the worst of it. I got kicked out of school.”
“I worked around the farm until I was fifteen, my mother teaching me everything she could. I’m not dumb, Mac. I can do more math in my head than most people can do with a paper and pencil, but I can’t read.”
“I left home, but it was no better. I took a job on the railroad. They liked the way I swung a hammer, but it was clear to me that was all I could hope for.”
“That’s when I started drinking and fighting. I either had a shot of Old Crow in front of me or I was beating the hell out of someone I didn’t even know. The gandies would cheer me on then, as long as the blood was flowing.”
“Then I heard about a doctor in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I went up to see him. He ran some tests on me. Said I was smart, smarter than most people. Said there were others like me. But he couldn’t help me learn to read. What the hell good does it do to be smart if you can’t read?”
Drinkwalter stared into Mac’s eyes. “I was thinking about going into a tough bar and picking a fight with three or four toughs. People would be cheering me on while the toughs beat me to death. I thought that was what I ought to do, go out with a cheer.”
“It was April, and I was walking past this park on the way to the bad side of town. It was all greened up, leaves coming out on the trees fresh as a tiny baby. I don’t know what made me sit down on that bench. Maybe I just wanted a little peace before …”
“I sat there thinking about a lot of things, about Ma, about how she would feel when she found out what happened to me. I was thinking that it was a hell of a poor way to pay her back for everything she had done for me.”
“Then I caught the scent of roses. I looked around and this young woman was standing behind me. She had her back to the sun, and it set her hair afire, like a shining halo. I couldn’t see her face; it was all in shadow. I thought God had sent me an angel.”
“Mac, you remember when I sent you up on top of the bank at Keyser Creek, and you found the sego lilies?”
Mac nodded.
“You remember how beautiful they are? Too beautiful to put into words. You can only feel their beauty deep down in your soul?”
Mac whispered, “Yes.”
“That’s how beautiful she is. I can only draw lines around her with words. She shines, Mac. From some inner beauty, she shines. She is …”
The sheriff shook his head in the wonder of that moment.
“Anyhow, she said, ‘My name is Catherine Lang.’”
“I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. She reached out and took my hand. We stood then and walked together through the park, hand in hand. We must have walked, because I can vaguely remember the trees stepping past us, but I can’t remember my feet touching the earth.”
“We didn’t speak until we reached an ice-cream parlor. We both had strawberry sodas. I didn’t even ask her what she wanted. I just knew … I told her everything, Mac. Things I hadn’t been able to tell anyone else, not even my mother. She hung on each word as though it were a diamond, and she was measuring its clarity and brilliance. And when I finished, she told me about herself. Her father had owned a freighting business when she was a child. He worked himself to death, leaving enough money to keep Catherine and her mother … comfortably.”
“Her mother is very ill, has been for years. So Catherine has been caring for her, spending her life caring for her mother as her father did. I met her mother, Mac. Even after years of illness, you can still see her beauty. I’ve since wondered if Catherine’s father didn’t work himself so hard just so that he might feel more worthy of her.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Wouldn’t that be something? Throwing away your life so you would feel worthy to spend it with someone special?”
The sheriff shrugged. “I stayed in Cincinnati for a month, and then I decided to move West. I thought I could find something out here that I couldn’t find there, something that would make my life worthy enough to offer to her.”
“So I settled into this job. I knew most of what it was like to be on the other side, so I’m especially well trained for it. People think of sheriffs as legal ruffians who stalk miscreants, daring them to break the king’s law. But it isn’t like that, not in Eagles Nest, anyway. We are arbiters, peacemakers. That’s a worthy life to offer a woman, Mac.”
“It was ten years ago that I left Cincinnati. Catherine and I haven’t seen each other since. I teamed up with Deak not long after I came to this country. He was my…”
Drinkwalter scuffed at the dirt at his feet with his boots.
“Mac, did you ever read Cyrano de Bergerac?”
Mac shook his head.
“I saw the play a couple of times. It’s a story about a tongue-tied young man who wants to court the beautiful Roxanne. He recruits Cyrano de Bergerac to plight his troth
from the shadows as the young man stands before Roxanne’s balcony. Cyrano is in love with Roxanne, too, but he won’t court her because he possesses a ‘great nose.’ He makes light of that. One of his lines is: ‘A great nose indicates a great man—genial, courteous, intellectual, virile, courageous.’”
“So Cyrano speaks of his love for Roxanne and in so doing allows the young man to win her hand. Deak was my Cyrano, Mac. I have been courting Catherine with words. Deak put my words on the pages, and he has been reading me her letters. Since Deak died … I know she’s worried about me, but…”
The sheriff scuffed at the ground with his boot. “Mac, the most private things a man has to say are between him and the woman he loves. Do you understand, now, why I put you through the tests I did?”
It was Mac’s turn to scuff in the dust with his boots. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Mac, I need somebody around the office who can be my eyes and voice. I need someone who can read the notes from the commissioners and stories from the paper so I know what’s going on. But mostly, I need someone to play Cyrano to Catherine.”
“I told the commissioners I needed someone to fill in for Deak. They agreed to give me five dollars a week. If you want the job, it’s yours. You’ll have to come around the jail every night after school. Sometimes I might need you on weekends, but not often.”
“Would you do that for me, Mac, and never talk to anyone about what I’ve told you today, never tell anyone about what’s in those letters?”
Mac cleared his throat. “I’d do that for nothing if you want.”
“No, Mac. The letters from Catherine are my life. Certainly, my life is worth five dollars a week.”
The horses danced as they neared the McPherson shack. The raw meat on their backs made them edgy. Let them dance, Mac thought as the hunters drifted through the trees. Let them dance, and I will dance with them. I will climb down from the saddle and dance in celebration of God’s bounty.
The door to the cabin opened the moment the horses pulled to a stop, and Mac’s mother stepped out on the porch, her hand shading her eyes as though it were still day and not evening.
And then she saw Mac, and a smile spread across her face, and she danced a little, sending the horses again into a dance of their own.
They hung the antelope in the root cellar, lined still with winter ice. Drinkwalter turned to Mary.
“Ma’am, I’ve got no call to ask you this, but if I were to cut some butterfly steaks from one of these animals, and if you had some flour and pepper and salt…”
Mac’s excitement was contagious, and Mary was almost giddy with it.
“Didn’t you hear me when I invited you to dinner to share the great bounty two hunters have brought to me?”
Drinkwalter grinned. “I guess I missed that.”
“Well, sir, you will not miss dinner. If you will give me those steaks, you and Mac can attend to your ablutions while I attend to the feast.”
“Ma’am, we are of like mind.”
“Yes, sir, we are.”
“Are you of one mind, Mac?” Drinkwalter asked.
“More of half a mind,” Mac said, “if I am to believe what I am told.”
The three laughed then, giddy with the moment.
7
Mac stood across the street from the school, pretending to be examining the tiny buds on the lilac bushes beside the stucco one-story building where Doc Johnson practiced medicine. Mac wondered momentarily why medicine is always practiced, whether doctors ever get it right. But the whimsy flittered in and out of his mind, his attention pulled back to the crowd of girls and boys across the street.
They were chattering with one another. Even from across the street, he could hear the ebb and flow of their conversations. Two stood off by themselves at the corner of the building. That would be Sally Gingrich and Ben Haraldson. They seemed always to walk in a little sphere that had room only for them.
Mac didn’t hear the bell, but it must have sounded. The little cliques broke into swirls of color that disappeared into the maw of the school. He waited a moment more and then stepped into the street. He thought he saw a flicker of movement in the window of the Salisbury house. Mrs. Salisbury was probably watching him. Everybody would be watching him. He stood out like a boil on a beautiful girl’s nose.
He didn’t want the clothes. He had told his mother and Sheriff Drinkwalter that. He didn’t want Deakins’s clothes. But his mother had said that it would be a waste not to take the sheriff’s offering, and there was no room for waste in their lives. So they had picked through the sheriff’s beneficence, his mother washing each piece with care, hanging each to dry in the cabin.
The collection included new boots, woolen pants and a blue plaid shirt. When he had dressed that morning, his mother had smiled.
“A handsome lad, that Mac McPherson,” she said with a grin. “A handsome lad, and a fine dresser.”
But Mac didn’t feel like a handsome lad or a fine dresser. He was wearing a dead man’s clothes. Surely someone would see that. Someone would remember seeing this shirt or those trousers on Old Deak. They wouldn’t call him a scarecrow then. They would call him a grave robber or a ghoul. They would ask him what it felt like to have a dead man’s shirt clinging to his skin, if he could smell the dirt of the grave.
Mac stepped up to the school door, peering through the window into the dark hall within. It was empty. The other students would already be in class. He would have to walk past the whole classroom to take his seat in the rear of the room. They would all see him, then. They would all see the clothes that he was wearing.
Mac stepped up to the classroom door. He swallowed once and stepped through, keeping his eyes on the back wall of the classroom so that no one could catch his eye, so Scarecrow wouldn’t have to look at any of the other children.
He was still staring at the wall when Matt Stilson tripped him, when he dropped his books and fell headlong into a desk and then on the floor. The eyes of everyone in the classroom jerked around to focus on him, to see the blood gushing from his nose. That was good, Mac thought as he held a handkerchief up to catch the blood. As long as he was bleeding, they wouldn’t notice that he was wearing a dead man’s clothes.
Sheriff Frank Drinkwalter sat behind the closed door to his tiny office, wastepaper basket propped between his knees. He was whittling a stick into a pile of shavings in the basket. If he were looking for something in the branch, the face of a long dead friend, a mule deer’s arching neck, he would have been disappointed. There was no art in the branch, only solace.
A pocket knife the sheriff kept honed to a fine edge stripped the branch into long smooth shavings. It was art only in that it occupied enough of his mind to keep it from skipping back to the letters lying now in the top drawer on his desk.
He had the regular correspondence on his desk: a letter from the commissioners, some officious-looking documents from the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Department in Billings. Mac would zip through those. But the two letters in his desk drawer…
Drinkwalter could see the concern guiding Catherine’s fine hand in the second letter. He couldn’t read the words, but he could see the tension in her hand. He remembered her hands, fine boned, soft, and beautiful. The sheriff had heard a college professor talking once about hands.
The professor said that it was a common misconception that the superiority of man’s brain separated him from the other animals. But the brain was the tail end of the evolutionary scale, he said. Hands were such wonderful instruments with so many uses that the brain had developed simply in order to better use them.
The knife slipped, sending the razor-sharp blade toward the fingers of the sheriff’s left hand. He jerked back. Best not to let the mind wander too far when one is whittling, the sheriff thought.
A soft rap at the door: Mac had come to read the secrets between Frank Drinkwalter and the woman he loved. The sheriff clicked the knife’s blade shut and scooted the wastepaper basket beneath his desk, the
dead branch poking from one corner.
“Come in, Mac,” the sheriff whispered. The door latch clicked and the scarred oaken door swung open. Mac stood framed in the door. The boy’s clothes were wrinkled and soiled. His nose was red and looked sore to the touch. A bruise glowed under one eye.
Sheriff Drinkwalter’s face wrinkled into a question. “What the hell happened to you, boy?”
“Nothing.”
“Mac, if this is nothing, you better head for the hospital when something happens. Now, what happened?”
“Matt Stilson tripped me in class. Hit my nose on one of the desks as I was going down. I ran him down after class.”
“That Matt Stilson must be one hell of a tough kid.”
“He wasn’t so tough. Not the second one, either. But then they came at me all in a bunch.”
“Yes,” the sheriff whispered. “All in a bunch. You can’t beat them all, Mac. I tried that when I was not much older than you. You can’t beat them all.”
Mac’s back stiffened. “They can’t beat me. Not one of them. Not all of them. They can’t beat me.”
“You feel like working today?”
Mac nodded, grimacing at the jolt of pain that followed the movement.
“I’m ready.”
“We’ve got some warm water on the stove, and some washcloths. Why don’t you go out and clean up before we start?”
“Don’t need to.”
“Maybe you don’t, but I need you to. I don’t want to sit here looking at you like that.”
Mac started to nod, but anchored his head in place with the first shot of pain. “Okay.”
“Mac, put some cold water on that blood on your shirt. It’ll keep it from staining.”
“Doesn’t matter. Won’t be wearing them anymore.”
“Just try it.”
Mac turned and walked stiff-legged from the room, his head and neck stiff, as though he were balancing a book on it.
Sheriff Frank Drinkwalter leaned back in his chair, remembering what it was to be different, to lash out with his fists at the injustices. Mac shouldn’t have to go through that. No one should.
