by Gary D. Svee
A moment later Mac stepped into the office again, his face clean, his shirt wet from the cold water. “Looks like the blood came out,” he said.
“Good. You feel up to going through the mail?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you close the door? Bert will be coming back any minute, now.”
“Okay.”
“First, the commissioners.” Drinkwalter handed Mac a letter bearing the county seal, and an ornate letter opener from his drawer. Mac opened the envelope. “It’s the minutes of their last meeting,” Mac said.
“No sense reading it all. Anything in there about the sheriff’s office or me?”
Mac scanned through the letter. “The board approved an expenditure of five dollars a week for temporary help to fill in for Mr. Deakins, deceased.”
“That’s you, Mac.”
“Temporary?”
“Don’t worry about that. Usually, I would be in there asking for a new deputy. I’d pay him five dollars a week until I knew that he would work out. But if the commissioners can get temporary help for five dollars a week, they won’t complain.”
Mac set the letter and envelope aside and reached for another.
“Mac, after we get done, you should file that in the cabinet over there under COMMISSIONERS.”
Mac nodded.
“This one’s from the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s office.”
“What’s Big Jim up to?”
Mac looked up.
“James Thompson, Yellowstone County Sheriff.”
“Oh.” Mac nodded and winced, closing one eye and opening it slowly. “Do you want me to read it to you?”
“Yeah.”
Mac stared at the letter. “Well, where the salutation should be, it says ‘One sorry son of a bitch to another.’”
Drinkwalter grinned. “Well, what’s that sorry son of a bitch got to say?”
“You catch the bait and have Tilly at the Stockman’s make some of her sandwiches. I’ll take three. Get a bucket of brew from Pete Pfeister. Do that, and I will grace you with my preeminent self and show you how an expert catches the wily trout. Train schedule says six-thirty A.M. Saturday, so you can figure about seven-fifteen.’”
“‘What do you say, you sorry son of a bitch?’”
Drinkwalter grinned. He reached into his top desk drawer and pulled out a tablet of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink, unscrewing the lid for Mac.
“You write what I tell you, okay?”
“Don’t write very fast.”
“Don’t talk very fast.”
Mac nodded, and the sheriff began his letter.
“Dear sorry son of a bitch:”
“‘I supply the bait, the food, the beer, and the fishing hole. In return, you bless me with your presence. I don’t see how I can go wrong with a deal like that.’”
The sheriff paused. “Mac, would you like to go fishing Saturday?”
“I think I’ll have to work.”
“Take a day off. I’d like you to come.”
“You catch the bait?”
Drinkwalter nodded.
“You get me one of Tilly’s sandwiches?”
Drinkwalter grinned and nodded.
“I don’t have a pole.”
“I’ve got an extra one.”
“Deak’s?”
“yours if you want it.”
Mac grinned. “All right, I’ll grace you with my preeminence.”
“One sorry son of a bitch to another?”
“One sorry son of a bitch to another.”
Drinkwalter grinned, “Okay, finish the letter with: “I’ll introduce you to my newest deputy. He is young yet, but he has all the makings of one sorry son of a bitch.’”
“Sign it, ‘Yours truly, S.S.O.B.’”
Mac finished the letter and the sheriff took it.
“Looks fine to me,” he said, holding it up to the light.
Drinkwalter took the pen from Mac then, and signed the letter with a fine flourish, handing it back to Mac.
Mac looked suspiciously at the sheriff. “I thought you couldn’t write.”
“I can’t, Mac. Catherine showed me how to write my name. It’s the same to me as drawing a picture of a horse. I don’t write my name: I draw it.”
Mac cocked his head. “Maybe I could teach you to draw other words?”
The sheriff leaned back in his chair. “Maybe you could, Mac. Maybe you could. The Chinese write with pictures, you know.”
Mac shook his head. He didn’t know.
“Anyhow, let’s get on with this.”
Drinkwalter took a deep breath. He cocked his head and stared at Mac for a moment, before reaching into the top drawer of his desk. He pulled out two letters, placing them on the desk. He chose one, working as much by feel as sight and held it to his nose.
“Some women perfume their letters,” the sheriff said. “Catherine doesn’t, but I swear they take on her scent. Sometimes it’s wild rose or fresh mint. In the spring I smell apple blossoms, subtle but very, very sweet. There are apple trees in that park where we met, and in the spring I can tell when she has gone there to sit in the sun.”
The sheriff handed the envelope to Mac. “Shut your eyes, Mac, and hold the letter up to your nose. What scent does it carry?”
Mac shut his eyes. At first he smelled nothing. Then he picked up what seemed to be the slightly sharp scent of paper, the slightly alcoholic scent of ink. He didn’t really smell the apple blossoms so much as sense them. He seemed to be carried back to a time when his mother had carried him through an orchard in spring. The blossoms were everywhere, shimmering in a warm spring breeze.
“Mac?”
Mac opened his eyes; the sheriff was staring at him.
“For a minute there, boy, it looked as though you had gone somewhere else.”
“I … I did. To an apple orchard.”
Drinkwalter smiled. “Yes, an apple orchard. Open it, Mac.”
Mac slipped the point of the letter opener beneath the envelope’s seal, the blade hissing against the paper as it opened the letter’s secrets.
The letter was written in blue ink, in the same flowery hand as on the envelope.
“‘Beloved.’ It begins with beloved.”
“Yes,” the sheriff whispered. “Well, read it slowly, Mac, so I can feel the words.”
“Beloved:”
“We are nearing the end of another spring apart. No matter what I am doing, I cannot pull the moment of our meeting from my mind. I will be at the bank, tallying a column of figures, and my mind will pull me away and put me again in that park, our park.”
“Even after all these years, I don’t know what led me to our park that day. I remember only seeing you on that bench. You seemed so sad, but it was not your sadness that pulled me to you. It was something else. Something I don’t understand.”
“It was your sadness, however, that caused me to take your hand. I felt a need to reach out to you, to tell you that you were not alone, not so alone anyway as you seemed to think you were.”
“Until you took my hand, I had not realized how alone I had been. I had my work, and the caring for my mother. Those tasks kept me busy, but they didn’t make me whole.”
“Isn’t it strange how two specks could swirl about in the cosmos and on coming together find that each is a perfect match for the other?”
“Yesterday was a fine spring day, and I returned to our bench in our park. I sat there with the warmth of the sun caressing my neck and thought of you. There was a young couple strolling by, and they had the look of rapture on their faces. I thought then that the park may hold magic for young lovers—and for those who are no longer so young.”
“Mother is slipping. It distresses me so to see her failing. She has given me nothing but love. And yet, sometimes, I resent that my life is given to the caring for her. I feel terrible then, guilty that I would think such awful thoughts. And then I think of you, and how much I would like to be there with you and…�
��
“I am such a wretched soul. I need to be made whole, my beloved, but that is impossible at this time.”
“I am writing this as I prepare for bed, but I know that I will not sleep. I will think of you through the darkness until the sun kisses the eastern window in my bedroom. I will dream then that the sun’s warmth is your own.”
“Good night, my beloved.”
“Catherine”
“Deak, I remember that you have a birthday coming. I will send you a box of cookies along with my love. Please take care of my husband to be.”
There was a long silence, and then Mac whispered, “That’s all.”
“Yes. Mac would you get me a cup of coffee before we begin the second letter?”
Mac nodded, reaching for the cup on the sheriff’s desk. The cup was caked with the residue of coffee long gone. Mac looked at the cup with distaste. “You ought to clean this thing up.”
“Son, it took me years to get that cup tamed the way I want it. I would no more wash that cup than a pipe smoker would scrub out his favorite pipe.”
Mac’s face wrinkled with distaste, and he left the room holding the cup with two fingers at arm’s length.
Drinkwalter smiled, and then held the letter again to his nose, wondering at that day in the park. Drinkwalter remembered every moment of their first meeting. He had sat on the park bench for nearly an hour before she stepped up behind him. He hadn’t seen the beauty of the park in that terrible hour, only the bleakness, the hopelessness of his own life. And then she appeared behind him, wearing a soft green dress the color of the leaves emerging from the park’s trees.…
Mac stepped through the door, coffee cup held at arm’s length. The sheriff lay the letter on the desk, embarrassed to have been caught in such an intimate moment.
“Had to scour that cup. It might as well have been painted brown.”
The sheriff looked into the cup and scowled. “You ruined it! You ruined my cup. How could you have taken it upon yourself to ruin my cup? I’ve had that cup since I left Cincinnati, and now you’ve gone and ruined it.”
“Probably saved you from scurvy or leprosy or something like that. You ought to be grateful.”
“Grateful? I ought to be grateful? You mutilated my cup.”
The sheriff stared at the cup as though it were the body of a good friend, stricken down in the midst of a conversation.
Mac, unrepentant, urged the sheriff along. “Want me to read the second letter?”
The sheriff nodded, setting the cup gingerly on the desk, as though it might crack without the strong glue of old caffeine to hold it together.
“Beloved:”
“For what seems to be a century now, I have gone to my mailbox to find a letter waiting there for me. It is almost as though you are waiting there for me, and I treasure those meetings. They hold my life together.”
“But today the mailbox was empty but for the new Sears Roebuck catalog. On most days, receiving the catalog would please me. I sometimes spend evenings poring over that book, seeing what’s new in fashion. Mrs. Glynnis tries to keep up, and always her store’s front window is full of color and style. But hers is the only store I see walking to work in the morning. So the catalog gives me something to compare with her choices.”
“I peruse the men’s clothing, too, imagining you in this hat and that suit. I found one in the current catalog that I believe would fit you perfectly. It is cut for tall, rangy men like you, and it comes in a light blue that would bring out the color of your eyes. It would be wonderfully appropriate for our day, and I thought about ordering it, having it sent to you for whatever alterations it might need, but then I thought that it might be out of style when finally we are wed. That thought tore at me so.”
“I manage to make it through my days by thinking about what it will be like when we are together. And then I think of all the things that might happen that would keep us from fulfilling our lives.”
“Your descriptions of Montana make it seem so grand—and so terrible. Your words take me to the mountains and the green rivers and the bright sun and the soft shadows. But I have felt the pain of winter blizzards in your words, too.”
“It seems that the land is written so large there that it can’t help stepping on mankind now and again as I worry about you, think of all the things that could take you from me, and leave me with … nothing. I would die then. I would die in the hope that we might find ourselves in the cosmos as we found ourselves in that park.”
“Whatever danger has kept you from writing, I pray it is finished, now, and that I will find your letters in my mailbox with a note from Postmaster Jackson, saying he is sorry for the inconvenience, that your letters had slipped his attention in some shadow or another.”
“Know, my beloved, that my prayers follow this letter and my love. Always my love.”
“Catherine”
Sheriff Drinkwalter turned to stare out the window at his back. He watched the leaves of the lilac bushes north of the jail cut silver slivers from the golden sun in an alchemy known only to them. He turned then to face Mac.
“Do you see, now, why I tested you before I offered you this job?”
“Yes,” Mac whispered.
Drinkwalter nodded. He reached into his desk, pulling stationery and pen from the drawer. “Would you write a letter for me, now?”
Mac nodded.
“Dearly Beloved:”
“As you can see, my handwriting has changed. Our good friend Deak, chronicler of my love for you, has died. We buried him on a windy, blustery day. I thought that I heard his voice in the wind, protesting his leaving this earth before he met you.”
“How many times have I seen you stepping from that train, parasol over your shoulder, and the conductor watching you with adoring eyes? I know he will be doing that because to be near you is to fall in love with you.”
“I knew that you would be worried, and I have spent more than one sleepless night trying to decide how to remain in touch with you. You can’t imagine—or perhaps you can—what it was to have two of your letters here and not be able to hear your words.”
“I saw a swami in a carnival once. He would ask someone in the audience to write a note and seal it in an envelope. He would hold the envelope to his forehead then, and tell the audience what was written there. I’ve been doing that with your letters, holding them to my face as though the words could flow straight from your pen into my heart. But I haven’t the swami’s gift.”
“I have asked Mac McPherson to play my Cyrano de Bergerac. He is fourteen, and a good student at the high school. He reminds me of myself at that age, independent and more than a little curmudgeonly.”
“I suspect that Mac will be leaving here in three or four years, bound for some university or another. But perhaps by then, we can be together, and this cruel separation will be ended.”
“I love you more than life.”
“Frank”
“Did you get that, Mac?”
Mac nodded.
“I want you to say something to Catherine, now. You will come to know her through our letters, but she has to come to know you, too.”
“Is this a test?”
“Yes, I suppose you might say that. She will be putting a lot of trust in you, and she’s never met you.”
Mac bent over the page, carefully writing the words.
“What did you write, Mac?”
Mac set straight up in his chair, holding the letter in both hands. “‘I will read your words truly. The words I write for the sheriff will be his.’”
Mac looked up at the sheriff.
“Is that all, Mac?”
“No.” The boy looked the sheriff in the eyes. “I also wrote: ‘I can’t wait to see you step down from the train with a parasol over your shoulder.’”
The sheriff smiled. “That’s fine, Mac. That’s just fine.”
8
Sheriff Frank Drinkwalter was staring out his office window when he heard the tentative kno
ck. He turned to an empty doorway and said, “Yes?”
Mac edged around the door to the desk. He stood there at attention, stiff as an army cadet at an inspection. He swallowed twice and then the words came in a rush.
“I was wondering if I could work full-time. I would sweep floors, clean up around here. I’d do anything you needed me to do, and I wouldn’t backtalk you the way I do sometimes.”
“What about school? I don’t think your mother would take kindly to your leaving school.”
Mac looked up, his face pale and barren as an alkali flat. “They kicked me out of school.”
The words seemed to cut the boy’s underpinnings. He sagged, but he made an effort to pull himself straight, to say the words that needed to be said.
“I haven’t told Ma yet. She’s always said that education is something they can’t take away from you. But Ma was wrong. They took it away from me.”
The boy pulled his eyes up to look at the sheriff, willing him to understand.
“I wanted to please Ma, to give her something for all the things she does for me, but I can’t go to school anymore, so I’ll have to find a job. I’d like to work for you, if you’d let me. I can do the reading and writing for you, and I’m more than a little handy with numbers. Mr. Aiperspach says he never saw anybody so good at math as I am, so I can do your figuring for you. I won’t let you down. I make it a point not to let anybody down, but now … Ma…”
Mac shut his eyes. The sheriff could see the muscles bulge in the boy’s jaw as he gritted his teeth, fighting the tears that welled up behind his eyelids.
“Why did they kick you out, Mac?”
Mac squeezed the words between gritted teeth. “Because I picked a fight with Matt Stilson. They don’t allow ruffians in school. They said not to come back.”
“They talk to you in the superintendent’s office?”
Mac nodded.
“Who was there?”
“Superintendent Gibbs and Miss Pinkham and Major Stilson.”
“Yes, Major Stilson.” Drinkwalter leaned back in his chair. “Do you think they are still there?”
“Probably. They told me to leave. They said they had some things to talk about.”
“Most likely they’re patting themselves on the back for their prompt action in ridding the school of a ruffian.”
