Chiefs

by Stuart Woods

  “Can he take care of himself?”

  “I went to country school with him. I never saw him start a fight, but I never saw him let anybody push him around, either.”

  “Will he do it for the money?”

  “Yes,” said Holmes. “But if he works out, I think we ought to consider giving him more after a while. He’s got a family.”

  “Is he all right with guns?”

  “He won’t use a shotgun, but I’ve seen him shoot squirrel with a .22.”

  “He’s a good man in the church. I reckon he’s about as respected as any man around here his age.”

  “How old is Will Henry, anyway?”

  “About thirty. He was two years behind me in school.”

  There was silence again. Holmes had not spoken except to answer questions. Now he said his piece. “Will Henry’s a responsible man. He’s not stupid, and I don’t think he’d ever use the job to push anybody around, the way Foxy might. He pays his bills, and he’s from an old family in Meriwether County. He’s never been a very successful farmer, but he’s had the gumption to stick to it until the weevil came along. When that happened he had the good sense to get out before he was over his head in debt. He’s well known as a man of character and a Christian. He’s never done anything but farm, but I think if he took the job he’d feel obligated to give it his best, and I think that could be pretty good. I think we should hire him.”

  “So moved,” said Frank Mudter without hesitation.

  “Seconded,” said Ben Birdsong.

  “All in favor, say, ‘Aye.’ “

  There was a collective aye from everybody but Idus Bray. “Well, I guess if you’re bent on having a Chief, Will Henry’d do about as little damage as anybody. Aye.”

  “The council unanimously approves the application of William Henry Lee as Chief of police,” said Holmes. There was a stir and a scraping of chairs. “There’s one more thing. This is the first time the city has ever hired a man to do what might be a dangerous job. We’re asking this man to carry a gun and protect us, and there’s always the possibility that he could get killed doing it. I think we ought to do something about some insurance for his family if he should be killed or disabled in the line of duty.”

  Idus Bray spoke up. “I don’t think the city ought to go buying insurance policies for its employees. Sets a bad precedent.”

  “Why don’t we give him another ten dollars a month, with the provision that he spend it on insurance?” replied Ben Birdsong.

  “So moved,” said Frank Mudter.

  Seconded,” said Lamar Maddox.

  “All in Favor?”

  “Aye,” said four men.

  “All opposed?”

  “Nay,” said Idus Bray. “It’s a bad precedent.”

  “The motion is passed,” said Holmes. “Any further business?”

  “Move we adjourn.”

  “Seconded.”

  “All in favor?”

  “Aye!”

  “Happy New Year, Gentlemen.”

  3

  WILL HENRY LEE stepped from his front porch with the fear and resolve of a man who has finally decided to jump from a great height into unknown waters. His historical perspective was sufficient for him to know that his descent of the five steps to the front yard was changing not just his own life, but the future of his line. Somewhere in one of the boxes stacked on the flatbed wagon was a Bible that recorded his forebears back to the year 1798, and now, at noon on this last day of 1919, he was to be the first man of that succession to leave the land, except to go to war.

  He joined the small group of people who stood shivering near the idling car. Two of the black people made a farewell and separated themselves from the group, trudging over the frozen ground to one of the small, unpainted houses a few yards away. The other two remained to say a few parting words. The black woman dabbed at her eyes as he approached.

  “Now, Flossie, don’t you do that,” Will Henry said. “You know you’re going to be back with us real soon.”

  “That’s right, Flossie,” said Will Henry’s wife, Carrie, dabbing at her own eyes. “You know we can’t get along without you and Robert.”

  “Yes’m,” Flossie replied. She turned to the children in an effort to distract herself. The little girl, the smaller of the two, was carefully holding a box tied with string. “You children make that lemon cheese cake last you awhile, now. It’s gon’ be a little while ‘til I can make you another one. And Eloise, don’t you let Billy eat it all up, hear?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Flossie,” replied the child firmly.

  Will Henry called Flossie’s husband, Robert, aside. “Don’t say anything to Flossie yet, but I think I might be able to get things fixed up in a week or ten days. I’ve got to talk to Mr. Holmes at the bank one more time, and we’ll have to find you a house in town. Mr. Holmes wants Jesse and Nellie to stay on at the farm and keep it up until the bank can find a buyer.” Jesse and Nellie Cole were the only other remaining employees on the farm. Nellie was Flossie’s sister.

  “Tha’s jes’ fine, Mr. Will Henry, jes’ fine. An’ I’ll git the rest of yo’ things into town jes’ as fast as that mule will move.”

  The two men shook hands, the first time they had ever done so. Robert held on to Will Henry’s hand for a moment. “Mist’ Will Henry, you a good farmer, a good farmer.”

  Will Henry smiled gratefully, though he knew this was not true.

  “Couldn’t nobody do no better,” Robert said. “Couldn’t nobody beat the weevil ‘cept a rich man, a mighty rich man.”

  As they climbed into the Ford, Will Henry took in the yard and the house with a final glance. Everything looked as cold and hard as the weather. It would be pretty in the spring, if there were anybody here to see to it. He forced himself not to think of anything that had happened to him here, of his father and grandfather. He would think of that later, alone with himself. He drove the car out of the yard, picking his way carefully through the red winter mud, toward the main Delano road. In the bouncing mirror he caught a glimpse of Flossie and Robert standing in the yard, looking after them. He quickly looked away.

  In the car Billy hung over the front seat. “Mama, why can’t I have my own room in town? I don’t want Eloise to have half my room.” Will Henry heard Billy catch himself, knowing he was sounding selfish. “I can’t sleep with Eloise in the room,” he continued, trying another tack. “She snores.”

  Carrie disposed of this transparency with a reproachful glance. “Billy, you know we have to have a guest room.”

  “But we hardly ever have any company; it’ll just be emp—”

  “Billy.”

  The boy sank into the back seat, glaring sullenly at the back of his mother’s neck. Eloise stuck her tongue out at him.

  Will Henry glanced at Carrie. He knew she was both looking forward to life in Delano and frightened. She would enjoy having friends within walking distance, but she would feel insecure at first without the farm. He had given her no clear definition of his job. He would be, he had said, “working for the city,” and he was vague about what the work entailed. She had accepted that, at least for the moment. He was not looking forward to telling her the whole of it.

  Will Henry retreated into himself as he drove. He tapped out a rhythm on the steering wheel and sang absently to himself. “Bringing in the Sheaves, Bringing in the Sheaves. We shall come, rejoicing, Bringing in the Sheaves….”

  He felt the way some men feel when they leave the army; the way some men feel when they have paid their debts; the way any man feels when he is free.

  “We shall come, rejoicing, Bringing in the Sheaves!”

  4

  HUGH HOLMES had anticipated the outcome of the city council meeting, even to the method of arranging the insurance policy. He had expected Idus Bray to object, but he was prepared to suggest the extra money as a compromise. Nevertheless, he was pleased that somebody else had suggested it. He had anticipated the results to the extent that, on
the day after Christmas, he had given Will Henry Lee a year’s lease on a house recently repossessed by the bank when its owner had simply disappeared, on the occasion of the failure of his grain and feed business. Holmes sent his own housekeeper to clean the place before the Lee family arrived. He knew Carrie would be exhausted enough from the packing and unpacking without the additional chore of making habitable a house which had been disused for some months. Before the lease was signed Holmes raised the insurance question.

  “Will Henry, have you thought about the possibility of your getting killed if you take this job?”

  “Well, I guess I’m going to have to carry a gun. That’s part of the job. But I figure I’m about as likely to get kicked to death by somebody’s mule while I’m directing traffic on Main Street on a Saturday afternoon as I am to get shot.”

  “I expect you’re probably right, but I’ll tell you the truth, I think that just by carrying a gun—and you have got to carry one, folks will expect it—you’ll increase your chances of somebody taking a shot at you. You know, the English policemen, the bobbies, they’re called, don’t wear guns. They figure if criminals know they’re not going to get shot at by the police, they’re less likely to carry guns themselves, and I think they’re probably right, at least for England. But we Americans, especially we southerners, don’t see it that way. We’re not very far from a time in this country when a man was more likely to get shot at if he didn’t carry a gun, and we can’t seem to forget it. So I think you ought to keep the possibility of getting shot at in mind. That’s why I want you to make me a promise, and I won’t recommend you for the job unless you do.”

  “What’s that, Hugh?”

  “I want you to agree to take out a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy. I’ll make the arrangements for you.” Holmes already had arrangements in mind.

  “Ten thousand dollars!”

  “I know that sounds like a lot, Will Henry, but it’s not. Your children are still young—what are they?”

  “Billy’s eight, and Eloise is six.”

  “Yes, young, and if anything happens to you Carrie’s going to need fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a year to raise and educate them. In fact, her expenses would be just about as high as they are with you around. You don’t eat all that much. Even with ten thousand dollars in the bank she’d have to go to work to make that last until they’re finished school, don’t you see that? If she didn’t go to work she’d have finished spending that money just about the time Billy would be ready to go to college. You want him to go to college, don’t you? He’s going to need that kind of education to make something of himself in this country.”

  “Carrie and I have talked about it. We’d like him to go; Eloise, too, if we can manage it.”

  “Well, if you save your money, you can. But Carrie could never manage it by herself. Not unless she has some capital to see her through. Now, I’m not going to have a widow and two children on my conscience or on the city’s conscience if something happens to you. Will you promise me to take out that insurance policy?”

  “Well, all right, Hugh. I guess you’re right. How much is it going to cost me?”

  “Several dollars a month, but the council is going to add enough to your salary to take care of it.”

  “I appreciate that, Hugh.”

  “There are going to be a lot of expenses connected with a Chief of police that the council hasn’t even thought about yet. We’re going to have to have a jail. When you start arresting people, we’ve got to have a place to put them. You’re going to need a car—I figure you can use your own and take gas out of the city pump until I can get that through. They’ve already approved a firehouse, and I reckon a couple of extra rooms onto that will do for a jail. Why don’t you think about what you might need? After you’re appointed, you might go up to Greenville and talk to Skeeter Willis and see what he’s got up there. Then you and I’ll get up a budget, and I’ll spoon-feed it to Idus Bray and the rest of them, and one of these days before long we’ll have us a proper police station. I’ll tell Idus the station will have to have a telephone. That’ll do it for him.”

  While the council was meeting to approve Will Henry’s appointment, the Lee family moved into the house on Lower Third Street. Delano was situated at a point where Pine Mountain began its rise from the valley. Broad Street cut across the town at the place where the hillside started to be steep, and streets numbered two, three, and four ran vertically up the hill, at right angles to Broad Street. The upper ends of the streets attracted more expensive homes, since the sites afforded a view of the town. The lower ends of the streets contained neat frame and brick houses occupied by small merchants and the better-paid railroad people. Upper Third Street was the prettiest and most desirable in town. Lower Third Street, therefore, had a slight edge on Lower Second and Fourth streets.

  Carrie was delighted with their location. It made it, in her mind, all the more necessary to have a guest room, and Billy was quartered with Eloise in spite of increasingly loud protests and, eventually, hot tears. Eloise maintained a smug silence, but permitted herself an occasional triumphant glance in his direction. Carrie banished Will Henry and Billy to the yard, where they discovered a swing blade and a rusty lawn mower in the back shed. They set about taming the overgrown lawn and pulling weeds from the skimpy flower beds. By late afternoon the two of them were thoroughly muddy. They enjoyed their first bath in their running-water tub, and when they sat down to a fried chicken supper, Will Henry experienced the odd sensation of having lived in the house for a long time. He felt they would like it here. Carrie was certain of it.

  Will Henry and Carrie Lee were town people now, after having spent all their lives on middle Georgia farmland, half that period in hard times. Both, at thirty, were handsome people. Will Henry stood just under six feet tall and was of a muscular build, the product of sturdy ancestors and hard, physical work. If his ears were a bit large, his nose a bit blunt, and his jaw square and aggressive, his eyes softened the total effect considerably. Large and brown, they conveyed intelligence and sensitivity, and the soft tenor of his voice and his manner of speaking reinforced the impression immediately. He had a temper, which he took pride in not showing, and this restraint enhanced the aura of strength, both physical and psychic, which he exuded. He was shy, but not withdrawn.

  Carrie was tall and trim of figure and very nearly beautiful. An Irish grandmother had willed her black hair and green eyes and a sense of humor. She had none of her husband’s shyness and little of his restraint; pragmatism and often bluntness ruled her existence, but a natural charm and lack of desire to wound made her views seem refreshing rather than offensive to others.

  They both came of families that preceded their republic, the Lees claiming a connection with those of Virginia, and the Callaways, Carrie’s family, going back to seventeenth-century Kentucky and a connection with Boone. Given an opportunity, Carrie would refer to Fenimore Cooper’s description of Boone’s daring rescue of the Callaway girls from the Indians.

  Neither of their families had had anything but land since what was locally referred to as the War Between the States. Still, they had inherited intelligence and gentility and a love of music and books. In their home they entertained themselves and had done so even before the children came. They both sang, and Carrie played serviceable Mozart and Bach. They had read Twain and Hawthorne and Dickens, among others. They had both had some higher education, though neither had earned a degree. While Will Henry had been in his third year at Gordon Military College at Barnesville, his father had died suddenly, and the farm had demanded his presence. Will Henry, after an adolescence of waiting, had proposed to Carrie, and she had come home from Bessie Tift College at Forsyth and unhesitatingly become his wife, as she had known for a long time she would.

  Will Henry had had ambitions for the law, but the land had been in the family for a long time, though much had been sold during Reconstruction, and he felt a responsibility toward the ten families who lived
upon it. At the beginning of their marriage, the farm had offered security and familiarity and even promise, so they had not felt thwarted—not, at least, in a way they could admit to each other.

  And now they had left the farm, something Will Henry had begun to think he would never do. He had grown up there, and when it became his, it waited for him each day, demanding to be sown, reaped, milked, repaired, fertilized, and made profitable. He had hacked away diligently, but he had worked without fervor and without much talent, and the land had yielded a profit only so long as the soil and the times had been easy enough to require neither fervor nor talent. When the boll weevil had come, Will Henry had at first seen it as simply another demand upon his efforts. But when the pestilence had shown signs of hanging on, when even the best of farmers was struggling for existence, then the weevil began to look like something Will Henry had begun to despair of ever finding: an honorable way out.

  After supper Carrie read to them from Great Expectations, because, she said, that was what they all had of their new life, then the children were put to bed. Will Henry and Carrie tidied up about the house until nearly midnight, then woke the children. At the stroke of twelve, somebody blew the siren at the firehouse, and they all sang “Auld Lang Syne” and kissed. Carrie read a passage from the Bible, Will Henry said a prayer of hope for the new year, and they all went to bed. Will Henry and Carrie were alone for the first time in their new existence. A weight had been lifted from them, and they enjoyed their love more than they had in months. They fell asleep exhausted and happy.

  5

  IT WAS his first morning on the new job, and Will Henry and Carrie sat in the car in front of the city hall. The car had no heater, and lap robes were pulled tightly around them. As they talked, the windows of the car misted over. Will Henry was glad, for he did not know what her reaction would be when he told her about the job as Chief, and he did not want passers-by to see her upset. When he told her, her expression changed only slightly, and she was silent, her eyes remaining on his face. He could not look away from her, for fear of seeming even more guilty than he felt.