Paper Sheriff

by Short, Luke;

  Daley, watching him carefully, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. But he could not keep the pity out of his eyes and Reese, seeing it, was unaccountably angry. Judge Heatherly felt sorry for him, Jen felt sorry for him and now Jim Daley felt sorry for him too. The anger died then and Reese rose. “Jim, the Hoads are celebrating tonight. They’ll be liquored up and they may take a notion to come to town and crow. If they come in stay away from them, unless they get into some trouble you have to handle.”

  Daley nodded and said quietly, “They’re an easy bunch to hate, all right.”

  “And not worth risking your life for,” Reese said dryly. “See you tomorrow, Jim.”

  Reese went out the corridor’s rear door and headed for the open shed where the horses of the county employees were stabled. He saddled his grey gelding, then rode down the alley which led onto Bale’s main street.

  Normally he liked the sight of the wide street of false front buildings at this hour of the early evening. Businessmen, their stores locked up for the day, would wave to him on their way home. Kids, running on last minute errands, would call to him. The Best Bet, a big box of a saloon with a hotel in its second storey, would be cheerfully noisy. The horses and riders coming into town for the evening or leaving town for the night would have stirred up the dust that seemed yellow in the rays of the slanted sun. This same sun seemed to bring out the color in the few drably painted buildings and in the weathered wood of the unpainted ones.

  But as he rode down the street now the town seemed to hold no charm or friendliness. For the first time since he was sworn into office he wondered why he had let his friends prevail upon him to run for sheriff. They had promised him that after they elected him he would become a “paper sheriff”, a figurehead. He could hire himself a good deputy, they said, and go about his business of running his Slash Seven cattle outfit. What they were after, they told him; was a stockman sheriff, one of their own, not a miner’s sheriff and not a soft sheriff who would take money and open up the town and attract a rough element by its easy reputation. But now, he thought morosely, he had been rewarded for his labors by this bitter farce of the Hoad trial.

  His mood stayed with him for the two mile ride over rolling prairie grassland which brought him to his own fence and gate. The Slash Seven, the original Joe Bale ranch bought by his father, had the sprawling look of having been built by a man who wanted plenty of room. The big two-storey log house had single storey wings on the east and west sides and lay among giant cottonwoods so thickly foliaged that the flowers Callie planted had to fight for enough sun. It was a big house meant for a big family, Reese thought—a family it would never have. Reese rode past it and the cookshack-bunk-house to the pasture gate where he unsaddled and turned out his grey. There was smoke coming from the chimney stack of the kitchen wing, and that meant Callie was home. A kind of quiet dread touched him as he moved toward the open kitchen door and stepped inside.

  Callie was at the big iron stove against the far wall and Reese noted she had changed out of her blue dress into a drab and unbecoming brown one over which she now wore an apron. At his entrance she turned to look at him but did not speak. Reese nodded and said mildly, “Smells good in here.”

  He shucked out of his coat and hung it and his hat on a nail beside the door, then moved over to the sink. As he took down the wash basin and filled it from the sink pump, he said, “You didn’t have to come home to get my supper, Callie. Why didn’t you stay?”

  “I wanted to,” Callie said shortly.

  Reese glanced at her swiftly, searchingly, and he could tell that the color in her usually wan cheeks did not come from the heat of the stove but from the Hoads’ moonshine. He untied his tie, rolled up his sleeves and was soaping his face when Callie said from close behind him, “I wanted to stay, but I came home. Remember that, will you?”

  Reese rinsed his face, reached for a towel and then, drying himself, turned to Callie. “All right, but why?”

  There was anger in Callie’s face, he saw, and he could smell the rank odor of whisky on her breath.

  “You’ll find out,” she said enigmatically.

  She went back to the stove and now Reese, after hanging up the towel, moved over to the cupboard, took down a bottle of whisky and a glass and poured himself a drink.

  “Make me one too,” Callie said.

  Wordlessly, Reese took down a second glass, poured a drink, then moved with both glasses over to the pump and splashed water into them. He could not yet fathom Callie’s mood nor the meaning of her words, but he knew she was laying the groundwork for something special. Moving across the room he extended Callie’s drink to her and then lifted his own. It had barely touched his lips when he saw Callie move swiftly. A fraction of a second later he caught the full force of Callie’s drink in his face. Slowly he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and then very calmly threw the contents of his own drink in Callie’s face.

  Callie gasped with shock and Reese said quietly, “Smarts the eyes, doesn’t it?” He turned now and went back to the counter, towelled himself, poured another drink, mixed water with it, then turned to watch Callie. She was wiping her face with a dishtowel and was at the same time crying.

  “Pa would shoot you for that!” Callie said furiously.

  “He’d probably shoot me for less than that,” Reese said contemptuously. “Now let’s talk this out, Callie, not fight it out. What’s wrong?”

  “You ask that?” Callie said hotly. “After trying to hang my uncle, after keeping secrets from me along with that bitch of a woman, you ask me that?”

  “Callie, your uncle killed a man. You heard how he killed him this morning. And when you kill a man in the way he did, you hang for it.”

  “Why did you hunt up this cowboy that said he saw Uncle Orville shoot Will Flowers?” Callie demanded angrily. Then she said, “You and Jen Truro paid him to say that, didn’t you?”

  “Is that what your family thinks? Is that what you think?”

  “We think Uncle Orville shot him in a fair fight, just like he said!”

  “That cow puncher was telling the truth, Callie. Nobody paid him anything.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but can you prove that damn woman of yours didn’t?”

  Reese set down his drink. “‘That woman of yours’,” he echoed. “Callie, I’ve got one woman. You.”

  “That you wish you didn’t have,” Callie said hotly.

  Reese said, “That’s right.”

  “Well, you’ve got me and I’ve got you,” Callie said. “I’ll keep you too.”

  “I reckon you will,” Reese said, as if to himself.

  “Do you know how I’ll keep you?” Callie asked vengefully. “By doing everything a wife should do. I came home to get your supper tonight, didn’t I? Do you want to go to bed with me? Let’s go in the bedroom. Do you want to make a baby? Let’s make a baby. Is there anything you want from me?”

  “No,” Reese said gently. “Nothing, Callie.”

  “You see, I’ll never give you cause to divorce me,” Callie said angrily. “You can leave me for that damn woman if you want, but I don’t think you will. She’ll want you married to her, but you’re married to me and always will be.”

  Reese said quietly, “It’s not much of a marriage for you, is it, Callie?”

  Callie said, suddenly sober, “It’s nothing. You could make it something, but you won’t.”

  “We made a mistake, Callie.”

  “You made the mistake,” Callie said flatly. “You wanted me and I let you have me because I loved you. I could still love you, only you won’t let me.”

  Reese reached for his drink, lifted it and looked over the glass at his wife. Everything she said was true, he thought, but her saying it didn’t change anything. He felt a sudden pity for her that was flawed by contempt. She was acting as she had been taught to act by her family clan—with loyalty, headlong temper and vindictiveness. She could not help herself nor could he help her. He took a sip of his dr
ink and put his glass down very gently, watching it as if he thought it might break. Then he looked up at her. “I’m only being honest, Callie.”

  “Then be dishonest!” Callie cried. “Pretend you love me! Pretend we have a good marriage! Pretend you like my family! Pretend you want a dozen kids! Pretend you’re alive, because you’re only going through the motions of living now?” Then she added in a small, dismal voice, “Like me.”

  Reese said tonelessly, “That wouldn’t work, Callie, and you’re smart enough to know it.”

  “It wouldn’t work?” Callie asked fiercely. “It’s the only thing that will work! You’re my man, you’re married to me and you’ll stay married to me. Make the best of it, Reese. If you’ll try, I’ll try.”

  Reese straightened up and said quietly, “It’s no use, Callie. Let’s have supper.”

  “Your supper’s in the oven. I don’t want any.” Callie moved swiftly into the living room and Reese heard the sound of her heel taps crossing it, followed by the sound of the door to the bedroom shutting.

  Now he drained off his drink and poured himself another, wondering what had brought this to a head tonight. He suspected that it was because he and Jen had kept the secret of a witness whose testimony should have hanged Orville Hoad. Had he ever told Callie that he loved Jen Truro? He didn’t have to, he supposed wryly. At one time the whole town, the whole county knew it, so why shouldn’t Callie have known it?

  Jen had known twice and she knew it now, just as she knew the unlovely history of his marriage to Callie Hoad. That marriage had happened two years ago when, like a fool, he had chosen the path of honor that had led to this misery. He could not remember when he had first loved Jen. Perhaps it was when she came back from college to read law in her father’s office, determined to become a lawyer. At least that was when he proposed to her the first time. Jen had put him off, saying that while she loved him, she first wanted to study under her father and be admitted to the Bar. He had agreed to wait, watching with both amazement and amusement while she fought and clawed for her right to take the Bar examination, which she passed so brilliantly that she could not be denied admittance to the Bar and the right to practice as the first woman lawyer in the State’s history.

  Looking back at it, he supposed the turning point was the paralytic stroke suffered by Sebastian Truro, Jen’s father. Her mother was long dead and there was no one to take care of him and his law practice except Jen. When he proposed for the second time, even the tenth time, he received the same answer—her father needed her and she had no right to carry the burden of an invalid father into their marriage.

  It was after this tenth refusal that Reese, in rage and frustration, had made up his mind to forget her. He had met Callie Hoad at a Fourth of July dance and thought her refreshingly unlike the other Hoads. She and her father were newly come to the country to join the clan of the less prosperous Hoads. He began half-heartedly courting Callie, more to spite Jen than because of his love for Callie. It was just as Callie said, she loved him and, inevitably, too well. When she became pregnant by him, he had offered marriage and she had accepted. Four months later she miscarried their child.

  This, Reese supposed, was the history of half the marriages in the Christian world; it could almost be called the human condition. Women married men they didn’t really love in order to protect their good names, and men married women they were only momentarily fond of in order to save them from disgrace. They accepted what fate or nature handed them—a partner for life, children to raise and a companionship of sorts, tempered by quarrels, reconciliations and monotony.

  This acceptance, of course, was what Callie expected of him and against which his whole being revolted. Part of his reason for agreeing to run for Sheriff had been to get away from her and from the smothering idiocy of the Hoad clan. Callie, he found, didn’t consider herself an individual, only a member of the family that could do no wrong. Originally the Hoads had come from the hill country of Tennessee—a hard-drinking, hard-bargaining, hard-fighting and hard-luck clan who attributed their own survival to the fact they were one united and loyal family. They were as alien to him as a group of Australian bushmen and hardly more understandable.

  He finished his drink, then picked up the bottle to pour himself another. He hesitated, bottle in hand, and then with a kind of self-loathing, he put down the bottle and corked it. He couldn’t change any of this by crawling into a bottle, he thought wryly. I’m like a lone man, heading into the desert, leading a horse that’s carrying plenty of food and water. I have to go, but I don’t know where I’m going.

  At that moment he knew the deepest loneliness.

  Ty and Orville Hoad sat in rocking chairs on the veranda of Orville’s peeled log house, a jug of pale whisky between them, watching the dusk slowly fade into the night. Buddy, after taking his sister Callie home, had returned and he, his cousins, Junior and Emmett and Big John, all Orville’s boys, partly sobered up by the supper just finished, had taken off for town to continue their celebration. Min, Orville’s wife, had cleaned up and gone immediately to bed so that the two brothers were alone for the first time that day. Orville’s chair was on a squeaky board and he hitched it forward, then stretched out his long legs which he crossed at the ankles.

  “Ty, I done me some thinking these last couple of weeks. Lordy, I had enough time to do it.”

  “About hanging?”

  “Some, I reckon, but mostly what I was going to do if I got off.”

  “You can’t be that lucky twice, Orv,” Ty said dryly.

  “You’re wrong, Ty, I can,” Orville said flatly. He looked at his brother. “You ain’t thought much about what happened today, have you?”

  “Only that at one time this morning I thought you were as good as dead. What should I’ve been thinking about?”

  “Why, the reason I got off.”

  “That’s easy. Like I said, anybody with eyes could see it. Four of them jurymen from over south didn’t like being told what to do by a woman.”

  “Me, I’ve been thinking past that,” Orville said proudly. “Way, way past that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, if that lady lawyer couldn’t hang me, then who’ll she ever get a conviction against so long as there’s a jury there?”

  Ty grunted in surprise. What Orville said was true and he hadn’t thought of it that way. He leaned down now, lifted the jug from beside his yellowed panama on the porch floor and took a drink of the fiery whisky, put back the corn cob cork and offered the jug to Orville, who only shook his head. Ty put the jug back beside his hat, feeling the rich warmth of the whisky churn around his supper. He said, “Supposing that’s true?”

  Orville laughed silently. “Me, I’m not going to keep scratching so hard. I aim to have me a little cash money coming in. I aim to buy more range that will run more cows.” He looked at Ty. “You got more’n me, Ty, but you got enough? You got all you want? You want to get more?”

  “Any man does. What d’you have in mind?”

  Orville leaned forward now. He pointed loosely out into the lowering night. “Forty miles yonder is the National Trail. Those big Texas herds will be coming up all summer. There’s enough of us Hoads to make up a bunch, Ty. We could stampede every other herd and we got the men to round up and drive off part of every herd. We move in quick up into the mountains.”

  “I know what’s coming,” Ty said dryly. “You want my line cabin and corrals in Copper Canyon.”

  “Why, surely,” Orville said. “There’s room to handle them and grass to hold them. As soon as the brands are healed over we drive them down the other side of the mountain and sell them in Grant County and Jefferson and Moffitt.”

  Ty thought a minute and then said, “Yes, but it’s risky, Orv. Those Texans are mean and tough.”

  “I’m meaner and tougher than any Texan I ever seen,” Orv said placidly. He paused. “It ain’t as risky as you think, Ty, because we’re safe here.”

  “Reese, you mean?”
>
  “Hell, no, I don’t mean Reese. He ain’t one of us Hoads.”

  “Then how are we safe?”

  “Callie,” Orville said simply.

  It was too dark for Ty to see Orville’s face but he looked toward him anyway. “What’s she got to do with it?”

  “We organize a cattle company with Callie as head. She signs all the bills of sale. She’s the buyer and the seller.”

  “But why Callie? Why not you or me?”

  “You don’t see it,” Orville said sadly. “Why, it’s as simple as this: Callie’s Reese’s wife. He’ll think a long time before arresting her, but even if he does she’s safe enough.”

  “How d’you figure that?”

  “A woman can’t testify against her husband and a husband can’t testify against his wife. If he gets one of us, there’s that lady lawyer again. Besides, we’d be stealing from Texans and that ain’t really stealing to a Sutton County jury. See what we got working for us?”

  Ty reviewed Orville’s reasoning. “He can’t get at Callie, no jury will convict a man Jen Truro is prosecuting and we don’t like Texans.”

  It was Orville’s turn to take a drink now and he did. When he could talk again, he said, “Yep. Find any holes in it?”

  “Reese could deputize other men to gather evidence against us.”

  “They’ll be plumb hard to hire,” Orville said gently. “There’s plenty of us Hoads and we ain’t soft. Let Reese try to find the Hoad that shoots a deputy or a witness.”

  Ty thought carefully now. The time Buster Hoad had been dragged by a horse and killed, they had counted twenty-three Hoads by blood or marriage who attended Buster’s funeral. Yes, as Orville said, there were plenty of Hoads to take care of any trouble that came up. All in all, it was a good scheme. It would take nerve and endurance, two qualities the Hoads had a plenty. The only question was, would Callie throw in with them and agree to act as responsible owner? She and Reese, Ty knew, were not getting along. They had fallen out of love or whatever it was that kept a man and his woman together, but how far out of love had Callie fallen? he wondered. Then he said aloud, “All right, Orv. I’ll talk with Callie. You talked this over with the boys?”