One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

  Tommy stepped inside and went into a small room off the living room. The chairs were there and the picture of his grandfather’s half-Belgians, Bob and Nellie. That was all there was.

  “The desk is gone,” Tommy said.

  “How’s that?” T-Bone said from behind him.

  “The desk,” Tommy said, returning.

  When their clothes were dry they wore what they needed and packed the rest in their bags. Outside the sky was blacker than Toby’s ass and the wind was whipping down from the west. Tommy found tools and a piece of plywood in the shed and nailed the wood over the broken window. T-Bone had fallen asleep on the couch. Tommy walked out to the barn and went inside. The box stalls were empty but hadn’t been shovelled, the calf pen was three feet deep in manure. Above, the mow door was flung open to the weather and the hay there was black from rain. Tommy shut the door and latched it and went back to the house where T-Bone had opened another can of beans from the pantry.

  “Fat city, Thomas,” he grinned.

  Tommy had a mouthful of beans, but he couldn’t get interested.

  “What we going to do, Thomas?”

  Tommy was standing by the window, watching. “Storm’s about here,” he said. “We’ll wait it out and then we’ll go see my sister.”

  “Where she?”

  “About two miles east,” Tommy said. “Her and her dykehopper got a dairy farm, two hundred acres.”

  “What’s he hoppin’?”

  “Dykehopper — a Dutchman,” Tommy said. “That’s all there is around here — dykehoppers and square heads.” He looked up as the first drop hit the window. “And one Irish mick in the middle of ‘em all. Only had ninety acres, but he done all right.”

  The storm came on then, pelting the windows and the cedar roof with rain the size of gum drops. Tommy stood and looked at the gale a while. The car pulled into the drive while he was watching the ditches fill.

  Thompson came in first, moving nervously through the front door, his holster flap open and his right hand on the butt of his gun. He was a twenty-one-year-old with six months’ service on the force and the only time he’d had his gun out was to clean it and to practise looking steely-eyed in front of a mirror.

  “You fellas just hold it right there,” he said coming in. He looked like a cat about to scoot.

  His partner, Langkamp, was standing in the back door then. He was a veteran and he took a couple minutes to look the situation over.

  What he saw was a coloured man eating beans at the kitchen counter and another man, this one white, standing looking out the window. The coloured was tall and wiry, his hair cropped short. He was wearing old dress pants, hitched high, and an undershirt. The other man was not so tall, but heavier — big through the chest and the upper arms. His sandy hair was curled above his ears, in need of cutting. He had an open face when he turned; his nose was bent slightly to the left. He was wearing faded brown pants and a t-shirt. The white man spoke first.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “We got a report from somebody driving by,” Langkamp said, stepping easily into the room. He’d been on the force enough years to know how to handle himself. “Said a couple of bums were breaking in here.” He paused to look at T-Bone Pike. “Said one of ‘em was a coloured man.”

  “Did he say what colour?” Tommy asked.

  T-Bone was easing toward the door. Tommy put out a hand to stop him.

  “You guys maybe out doing a little stealing?” young Thompson asked.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “We were thinking ‘bout maybe stealing your brains. Looks like somebody beat us to it.”

  “You goddamn smart mouth,” Thompson said and he stepped closer.

  “This his grandfather’s house!” T-Bone exclaimed.

  Langkamp stepped behind and threw a rough hammerlock on T-Bone, pushing his face against the wall. “Keep your mouth shut, darky,” he said.

  “Let him go, for Christ’s sake,” Tommy said.

  Young Thompson decided to get some practical use out of his police training. He grabbed Tommy’s arm from behind and twisted upward. And then the constable was on the floor, both hands behind him and his nose mashed into the linoleum. Langkamp had no choice but to put his gun on Tommy. Thompson had a spot of blood on his lip as he got up.

  “You guys are going to jail,” he pouted.

  “I don’t think so,” Tommy said. “This is my house. I’m Tommy Cochrane.”

  Langkamp lowered his revolver. “You’re Tommy Cochrane the boxer?”

  “No. But I am Tommy Cochrane.”

  THREE

  Peter Vedder was a dairy farmer — and a good one, he’d be the first to tell you. He would also tell you, with little urging, that he was his own man, a man with sixty-five milking Friesian Holsteins that were the envy of his neighbours, a man who was tight with a dollar, a man who was proud of his active role in the Dutch Reform church, a man who — at age forty — was branching out some, raising fallow pigs and doing a little cash cropping on land rented from neighbours who maybe weren’t doing quite so well as Pete Vedder.

  Of course, Pete had been left the farm when his father died and that had helped. Without a mortgage around his neck, success had come pretty easily to Pete and, as was usually the case, he didn’t have to work quite as hard as his father before him, who in turn probably had it marginally easier than Pete’s grandfather, who had arrived in the area from Holland at the turn of the century with little more than a few dollars in his pocket and a stubborn set in his mind.

  The only time Pete ever went against his father’s grain was when he chose a wife. Eighteen years ago Pete had gone out of the Dutch community and married Margaret Cochrane — Peg to everyone. Pete had no idea what prompted this minor rebellion in himself, but he knew that the marriage was strong and his wife was obedient and that was enough for him. The fact that there were no children bothered him and he blamed his wife, of course. After all, everything else he’d ever owned — cattle, pigs, chickens and dogs — had managed to reproduce.

  Pete Vedder was strong as an ox, narrow-minded and sometimes mean-spirited, and he was happy as hell with his lot in life. There were things he would not tolerate — a man who drank too much, for example, or a man who didn’t give himself over at least in part to his God and his church.

  A man like his brother-in-law, for instance, who was standing across the living room from Pete this wet July afternoon. Tommy Cochrane had shown up in typical fashion, with a yellow-eyed nigger in tow, the two of them escorted by a pair of cops, one of whom — Dirk Langkamp — was a friend of Pete’s and a fellow member at the Lions Club in Marlow.

  “What else are we supposed to do?” Langkamp was asking. “We got a tip that a couple of bums are breaking into the house. What are we supposed to think?”

  “Nothing else for you to think,” Pete agreed.

  “Especially when thinking isn’t something you do a lot,” Tommy said.

  Langkamp looked at Pete. “You hear the mouth on him? I guess they figure that’s smart down in the city.”

  “Why don’t you take your pup somewhere and train him?” Tommy asked Langkamp cheerfully.

  Young Thompson, sullen-eyed by the door, decided to let the insult pass. He’d had enough of Tommy Cochrane for one day. He was going to have to work on his hammerlock a little; he’d been damn good at it in training.

  Now Pete was shaking his head to show Langkamp that he was disgusted with his brother-in-law. And Langkamp was nodding at Pete in sympathy. And Tommy was about to puke watching the two of them and their dog and pony show. After a moment the cops decided that justice had been sufficiently served for one day and they left. When they were gone Tommy asked after his sister.

  “She’s in town,” Pete told him. He shook his head again. “I thought maybe we’d seen the last of you.”

  “Well, you’ve always been wrong more than you’ve been right, Pete,” Tommy told him. “I’m surprised you haven’t got used to it by now.”

/>   Pete gave him one of his you’re-going-to-hell-Tommy-Cochrane looks and then said he had chores to do. He took a denim jacket from a hook and stomped off to the barn in calf-high rubber boots.

  “Some bad feelings between that man and you, Thomas,” T-Bone said when Pete was gone.

  “Aw, I suppose I’d push him in the creek if he was on fire,” Tommy said. “Other than that ...”

  They sat on the porch and waited for Peg Cochrane — she would never be Peg Vedder to Tommy — to come home. T-Bone sat in a wicker rocker and stretched his long legs across the porch floor.

  “Maybe we should help that man Pete at the barn.”

  “Naw, he don’t want us,” Tommy said. “He’d tell us no if we asked, then complain that we didn’t offer.”

  They stayed for supper at the farm. Peg cooked a meal that had T-Bone Pike in his glory. Prime roast and potatoes and creamed corn and fresh baked rolls. Apple pie for dessert. T-Bone took seconds, then thirds of everything, praising Peg to the skies as he tucked it away.

  “The finest cooking I had since my mama, Miss Peg,” he said.

  “You’re eating enough of it,” Pete Vedder said.

  “Why, thank you, sir.”

  Peg was smiling at the talk but she was watching Tommy. It seemed every time her little brother came home, he wore a different disguise. Cocky teenager, triumphant warrior, flushed lover. This time he was none of these. This time he was a little older, a little sadder. There were flecks of grey in his temples and hard scar tissue on his chin and above one eye. Scraped elbows and brown freckles had been replaced by these.

  But his grey eyes were the same, and when he looked at her, they sparked and lit up and made her feel like she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. Her kid brother.

  “We talked to Gus Washbone on the long distance,” she said. “He said you just disappeared.”

  “That’s true,” Tommy said and he put down his fork. “We’ve been moving around a bit, me and Bones.”

  Peg reached out as if to touch the mark on his chin, but she held back. “Are you going to fight again?”

  “No. That was my last shot. I’m not going to hang around, getting my brains beat out for nickels and dimes.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  Tommy shrugged. “So am I.”

  T-Bone used his boarding house reach to snare another piece of pie from under the scowl of Pete Vedder.

  “No mo’ pie for you, sir?” T-Bone smiled.

  “I guess I’ll have another slice if I want,” Pete snapped. “It’s from my larder, isn’t it?”

  “Help yourself,” T-Bone smiled.

  Tommy smiled. “That’s it, keep your strength up, Bones.”

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” Peg asked.

  “Well,” Tommy said and he took a drink of coffee, “I came home to help Granddad. I guess he’s beyond that. But the farm sure as hell needs attention and I guess nobody alive knows that place better than me.”

  Peg was suddenly looking at her food.

  “That’s what I want to do,” Tommy said but he knew something was sour at the table.

  “Tender a bid,” Pete Vedder told him.

  Tommy looked over at his sister. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “The farm’s going on real estate this week,” Pete said.

  “Who the hell told you that you could sell my grandfather’s farm?” Tommy asked quietly.

  “It’s my farm,” Pete said. He looked over at Peg. “Our farm, I mean.”

  “Granddad was failing these last couple of years,” Peg said then. “There were some people hanging around, men he knew from the racetrack. Pete was afraid — we were afraid that someone might talk Granddad into signing the farm away. So we talked to the lawyer and we had Granddad turn the farm over to us.”

  Tommy was staring at his brother-in-law. “How’d you ever get that old man to agree to that?”

  “He was boozing all the time,” Pete said. “The doctor agreed and the lawyer agreed and that was about all we needed.”

  “All you needed to steal his farm?” Tommy asked. He turned to Peg. “There was no will?”

  She nodded. “There was a will. He left everything to you and me. But there wasn’t much, Tommy. Not enough money to cover the funeral. Other than that, what was in the house and barns. Some equipment. Of course, half the farm is yours.”

  “The hell it is,” Pete said angrily. “He’s not going to walk in here after all these years and lay claim to the place. He gave that up a long time ago. I didn’t get where I am today by being a fool. I’ll not turn that farm over to have him drink it away or gamble it away or run the place into the ground.”

  “Half the farm is Tommy’s,” Peg told him.

  “No,” he said emphatically. “Six years he’s been away. Fifteen since he lived here. He turned his back on the family to go off chasing the devil and now he’ll have to live with it. Do you think he cares about family? Ask him when he last set foot inside a church.”

  “That’s it,” Tommy said. “Let’s drag God into this.”

  “Listen to the blasphemy,” Pete said to his wife. He looked back to Tommy. “The deed is in my name,” he said. “If you’re interested in the property the asking price is ten thousand dollars. I had it appraised. Now you can sit here and whine to your sister ’til you’re blue in the face, but the place is in my name and you won’t get it for a nickel cheaper. Now, I’ve got a meeting in town and I’m going to be late.”

  He got up from the table and took his coat from a hook by the door and walked outside. Five seconds later he pushed his head through the doorway.

  “I want a word with you out here a minute, Tom.”

  On the porch Pete stood spread-legged tough, hands in his back pockets. Tommy stepped close, his eyes on a spot on the farmer’s jawline where he’d love to land a right hand. Pete stepped back a little but kept his hard look.

  “I won’t have that coloured sleeping in this house,” he said.

  “You’re a fine Christian man, Pete,” Tommy said softly.

  “I don’t want you here either,” Pete went on, “but you’re Peg’s brother, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. But I won’t have that coloured here at night. I don’t trust those people, I never have.”

  “One of these days, Pete, you’re going to rise straight up into heaven,” Tommy said and he went back into the house.

  He and T-Bone spent the night in the old farmhouse. Peg drove them in a new Studebaker, supplied them with blankets and a pair of coal oil lamps. After she’d gone, Tommy, on a hunch, went into the cellar and found a pint bottle of Bushmills stashed in the floor joists there. James Cochrane had had a habit of hiding booze and then forgetting where he’d left it.

  They sat in the front room and drank the whiskey straight, the lamps showing light enough, Tommy in his granddad’s chair and T-Bone stretched out on the couch, reminiscing about the meal they’d just taken.

  “Never had pie so good, Thomas.”

  Tommy capped the bottle and tossed it over. T-Bone drank and made a face.

  “And that roast of beef. Wasn’t that some nice meat, Thomas?”

  “It was lovely, Bones. A regular banquet.”

  “I reckon that man Pete don’t have much use for you, Thomas. Or for T-Bone either, I expect. He surely don’t want you on this here farm. Hard to figure a man like that, and married to your sister yet.”

  “Did you see her, Bones? Hair cut as short as mine. Her beautiful red hair.” He took a drink. “I’ll bet she’s gained twenty pounds since I seen her last. That’s his doing, that and the hair.”

  “Don’t know if you could blame that on the man, Thomas.”

  Tommy was working the Bushmills pretty good now. “Cochranes have worked this ground for eighty years, Bones. I can’t see turning it over to some Bible-thumper to sell off.”

  “He got the deed though, Thomas. Jedge always side with the man with the piece of paper, it seem
.”

  Tommy took more of the Irish. “He pulled a fast one, Bones, that son of a bitch. The old man must have been slipping bad to let Pete Vedder get the best of him.”

  “Maybe we best be movin’ on in the morning, Thomas,” T-Bone said. “We been doin’ all right movin’ around. Nothing but trouble here.”

  Tommy finished the bottle. “I don’t want to lose the farm,” he said softly. “It’s all that’s left of the family. Now I may be just a dumb mick, but that much I know.”

  She made another pot of tea and carried it out on the porch to drink while she waited. (“Drinkin tea like a Chinaman,” her grandfather would say.)

  It had thunderstormed noisily for an hour late in the afternoon, and the rain had cooled things off. The night was still now, the thunder had come and gone. But Peg found that her mind was not still. The thunder that was her brother had come and it had not gone.

  Somehow she had lost herself. When it had happened, she had no idea. Maybe she had just eroded away under the force of her husband’s will, little by little slipping into his shadow until she was finally just a small piece of him. A silent accessory, like the seed drill or the baler.

  But a shadow in a shadow is not even that.

  It took her brother’s return to remind her who she was. She realized that she was beginning to despise her husband for the very things she had once admired. His cock-sure confidence, his single-minded way of handling matters, his habit of taking charge.

  She had given up a lot for him, out of love or infatuation or whatever you would label it. She’d abandoned even her religion for him, to the great despair of her grandfather (he himself was a lapsed Catholic, but that didn’t matter). But the Lord was the Lord, she’d told James Cochrane, and when it came down to cases it really didn’t matter which road you took into town, as long as you got there.

  Yes, she’d given up a lot for Pete Vedder. The one thing she hadn’t counted on giving up was herself.

  He came home around midnight, smelling of the cheap rye she knew was passed around the Lions Club meetings. Gold-plated hypocrite, she thought as she followed him inside the house. He was smiling as he took off his coat, from the rye and from the realization she was indeed alone in the house. His will be done.