Early's Fall

by Jerry Peterson

  “Ever have need for those?” he asked.

  Clark started her truck.

  “They're for show,” she said, a smile crinkling at the corners of her eyes as she backed the rig around. She aimed it for a dirt street. “ 'Course our Legion post has a turkey shoot each fall to raise a little money. I've won it the last three years, so the word gets around, you don't mess with little Evie.”

  Clark bucked her pickup across the railroad tracks and onto US Two-Eighty-Three, a wide graveled road. Dust billowed out behind her truck as it picked up speed, the speedometer coming to peg on sixty.

  “Adam tells me,” Clark said, “you think Howdy's son killed his wife.”

  “Got a letter from him. Says Bill told him.”

  “Lordy, these family things get messy, don't they?”

  “You know Bill?”

  Clark peered ahead at a ranch truck loaded with baled hay trundling along on her side of the road. She swung out to pass. “Not really,” she said. “I grew up in the next county over. Didn't marry Adam until Bill was off in college.”

  “Kids?”

  “Pardon?” Clark asked as she swung her truck back to the right side of the road.

  “You and your husband?”

  “Two from my first marriage. Both in grade school now. My first husband was killed in the war.”

  “Had to be hard.”

  “He was a deputy. When he joined the Army, I wangled the job for myself. Couldn't have made it if I didn't have my mother to look after the children. Then when Albert was killed—he didn't even get out of the States, mind you, killed in a training accident they told me—I couldn't have made it if I didn't have the job to go to every day.”

  “And Sheriff Clark?”

  “Met him a couple years later. We took a liking to one another and everything since, as they say, is beautiful history.”

  “After the rain,” Early said.

  “The sun does shine,” Clark answered.

  “So what can you tell me about Bill's parents?”

  She glanced at Early. “Solid citizens. Good people. Howdy's been a deacon in his little Baptist church forever, Adam says, and he and his wife have taught Sunday school for all of that long. If Howdy tells you something, you can count on it being the Lord's honest truth.”

  “And Bill?”

  “As I said, I only kinda knew of him. Went to college late, I'm told, and spent most of the war there. Why he didn't join the Army or wasn't drafted has been a wonder to Adam, and to me now that I think about it.”

  “May have had a friend on the draft board.”

  “That's possible.”

  Early itched at his mustache. “Bill ever known to be violent?”

  “I asked Adam. He says no, that he only remembers him as being unremarkable.”

  A quarter of an hour after Clark and Early left Wakeeney, Clark moved her foot from the gas pedal to the brake. She wheeled her truck off onto a dirt track that wandered west along the meandering Smoky Hill River. Several miles on, Clark guided her truck off onto another track, less distinct, that led into the hills north of the river. The truck rumbled over a cattle guard in a break in a line fence.

  “We're on Howdy's ranch now,” Clark said. She nodded toward where the track angled off into a shallow canyon. “Buildings and corral are up there 'bout half a mile, tucked back in where the winter winds can't get.”

  A jackrabbit came out of a thatch of grass and sat, watching the red pickup pass by.

  The track made a bend. Beyond it laid a cluster of buildings hugging the west wall of the canyon, a corral further out and, to the east side of it, a windmill, the fan facing the southwest and turning at a lazy rate, the air here cracking clear, the sky overhead the color of a blue-white diamond, the sun baking.

  “My field glasses are under the seat,” Clark said. “Get them out for me, would you?”

  Early grubbed around until his fingers felt a leather case. He drew it out and took the glasses from it. Early saw Clark hunched forward against the steering wheel, peering at the near horizon.

  “I see someone up on the windmill,” she said. “Put the glasses on him and tell me who he is.”

  “How am I going to know?” Early asked as he raised the binoculars to his eyes. He fiddled with the focus wheel.

  “You can describe him, can't you?”

  “Sure. Nothing unusual about the fella. Wait a minute. The hair coming down from under his hat at the back is longish, kind of like Buffalo Bill.”

  “White?”

  He squinted at the image in the glasses. “Hat shades it. Could be.”

  “That's Howdy. His wife chops his hair back to collar-length when it gets below his shoulders.” Clark turned her truck off the track and held tight to the steering wheel as the pickup rocked over rougher ground. After some moments, the truck rolled out onto dirt well churned by the hooves of cows crowding in to get to the concrete water tank at the base of the windmill. But no cattle were in sight.

  Clark stopped her truck. She stepped out and looked up at the man on the high scaffold of the windmill. She shaded her eyes from the sun that seemed, to Early, to burn brighter in the west than it did at home.

  “Howdy,” Clark called out, “brought somebody who needs to talk to you.”

  “You all keep your britches on,” came a voice from above. “I'll be down in a minute.”

  Clark and Early leaned against the fender of her truck. They watched Howdy Smitts step over the side of the windmill's scaffold and onto a ladder and back his way down, a dented bucket in one hand. When Smitts stepped from the ladder onto the dirt, he set his bucket on the water tank's ledge.

  “Gotta take care of the machinery,” he said. Smitts pulled a rag from the bucket and scrubbed at the grease on his hands. “You don't and your machinery quits takin' care of you.”

  “Howdy, this is the sheriff from Riley County.”

  “Figured that. Don't get many strangers coming this far out unless they got purpose.”

  “Says you wrote him a letter.”

  “Yup.” Smitts threw the rag back in the bucket. He took out a bar of soap and soaped his hands in the stock tank. “Grease out of place can be miserable stuff. . . . Sheriff, Jen and I liked Judith. Thought she was about the best thing that ever happened for our son.”

  Early held out the letter. “You wrote this then?”

  After Smitts shook the water from his hands, he took a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. He tipped his head back, peering through the bifocal at the paper. “I did. You had some doubt?”

  “My county attorney said I had to confirm it.”

  “Now you got the thing confirmed.” Smitts took a bandana from his back pocket. He wiped his hands dry.

  “When was Bill here?”

  “Wednesday last.”

  “He have the child with him?”

  “No, and that really bothered me. I asked, and he said Isaac—don't know where they got that name, sure wasn't in our family—said he'd left Isaac with a friend. Bill looked a wreck. Second time he was here since spring.”

  “Really?” Early said. “When was the first?”

  “Night of the day Judith was killed, only we didn't know Judith was dead, not until a day later and Bill got back to Manhattan and sent us a telegram. You remember that, Evie.”

  Clark turned to Early. “I brought it out.”

  “I have to ask, Mister Smitts,” Early said. “You didn't come to the funeral.”

  “Well, something just didn't feel right. I kept replaying the conversation we had had that night—just the most disjointed stuff. It was like Bill couldn't focus on anything for more than a minute. I could tell something wasn't right, but I couldn't get Bill to tell me what it was. Come time to get on the train, I couldn't do it. Jen and I came home.”

  “So you thought your son killed Judith.”

  “No, not at the time. But there was just something telling me, ‘Howdy, you and Jen don't belong at tha
t funeral.’ ”

  Early took out his notebook and pencil. He jotted a couple words. “Tell me about Wednesday last.”

  A blue fly buzzed past Smitts's battered Windcutter hat. He snatched the fly from the air, popped it between his hands, and let the insect's broken body fall to the dust. “I spray and spray, but never get them all. . . . Bill drove in about this time—we talked right where we are now—looked like he'd been pulled through a knothole, big circles under his eyes—puffy like he'd been crying—and he hadn't shaved that day. He rambled for awhile about nothing. Then he did start to cry, and that's when he told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “What I put in the letter, that he'd killed Judith. . . . I asked him why he was telling me and telling me now, and he said he needed someone to forgive him.”

  “Did you?”

  “You a Christian?”

  “I understand you're a Baptist, Mister Smitts. Me too.”

  “Sheriff, murder is a violation of God's law. I can't forgive that. Maybe God can, but not me.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Jen wasn't here. She was over at the Thomasons'—the next ranch yon way—” Smitts waved over his shoulder “—helping Missus Thomason put up squash. I wanted Bill to stay, to talk to his mother. But when I told him I couldn't forgive him, he just bolted. Jumped in that new car he's got and scratched dirt.”

  “Know where he went?”

  “I assume to get Isaac. From there, I don't know.”

  “Help me understand one thing. I've seen killing but nothing even remotely as violent as this, not even in war, and war's awful. Where's this come from?”

  “Can't be sure,” Smitts said. “I got my suspicions, and, if you tell my wife, I'll deny it because she doesn't know. I've kept it from her.”

  “What's that?”

  “There's a streak in Bill. It's surfaced a couple times that I know of, first when he was, oh, fifteen or so. I sent him out to bring in some of the young stock. He came back on foot, said his horse got away and he couldn't catch her. I found the horse some weeks later, in a ravine, dead—shot.”

  “Bill carrying a rifle?”

  “Out here, we all carry a pistol or a rifle when we're riding. Snakes, you know. . . . Bill said it wasn't him, and I didn't find his rifle, either.”

  “You said a couple times?”

  “Yeah.” Smitts took off his Windcutter. He combed his fingers through his mane of white hair—a gesture of hesitation. Early recognized it, had used it himself when he needed to think twice about what he wanted to say. Smitts resettled his hat. “Five, maybe six years later when Bill was in college over at Fort Hays, he hit a girl, beat her pretty bad over what I don't know. I had to buy him out of trouble to keep the big whodaddy from kicking him out of school, and I bought him out of trouble with the girl too. Did it all without Bill's mother knowing.”

  “But why not tell her?”

  “She always thought her boy was near perfect, and he was for the most part . . . for the most part.”

  Early closed his notebook. He slipped it back in his pocket. “If we catch your son, you testify at his trial?”

  Smitts leaned against the concrete water tank. He pushed his heel at the dirt. “If it comes to that I guess.”

  “You don't think we'll catch him.”

  “Sheriff, this is open country out here. Man puts his mind to it, he can just evaporate, never leave a trace.”

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  September 21—Wednesday Evening

  Good News

  Early, the only one to board the Union-Pacific's Number Seventy at Wakeeney, pushed back through the first two passenger cars to the dining car, lights coming on in response to the sun slipping below the horizon behind the train, the train pounding away toward the night that had already come to the east. He found he had the dining car to himself except for a lone couple at a distant table. Early dropped his valise and hat on a chair at a table set for two, and took the chair on the opposite side for himself.

  A menu lay there on the linen tablecloth, and to the side, by the window, a small crystal vase with a rose. Early couldn't help himself. A sucker for roses, he sniffed it before he opened the menu and commenced reading the evening's selections.

  An ebony hand placed a goblet of water to his right.

  “Sheriff Early, what will you have tonight?”

  Early twisted around. He stared up. “Tony?”

  “The same.”

  “I didn't know you worked this train.”

  “Luck of the draw. What may I get for you?”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Well, Eddie's cooking up some lamb chops and shrimp scampi for him and me. What say I have him make an extra portion?”

  Early laid the menu aside. “Excellent, but only if you'll eat with me.”

  “ 'Fraid that's against the railroad's rules, but since I'm quitting the railroad—”

  “The heck you say.”

  Tony Haskins grinned, his broad smile adding new light to the dining car. “I'll tell you about it just as soon as I bring you your scampi,” he said and left for the galley.

  Early rescued his valise and hat. He set them under the table. Caught with a moment of time and little to see outside the dining car's windows, Early instead took notice of a painting that hung on the wall at the end of the car. Was it a painting or a print? Print likely. And he recognized the style without even needing to see the signature—a Remington—a cavalry unit riding hard, right out of the frame toward the painter and all who looked at the picture.

  Tony slid a dish of shrimp scampi sizzling in lemon butter in front of Early and set a second dish across from him. “Like that painting, do you?” he asked as he slipped into the chair opposite Early.

  “Yes. That Frederick Remington, he just had a feel for what the Old West was. What I really like is the way he painted his cowboys.”

  “How so?”

  “There wasn't a handsome kid among them. All his cowboys were scruffy and beat up, but never beat down, even when they were carrying a motherless calf on their saddle in a blizzard.”

  Early forked up a hot, peppered shrimp. He ate it while Tony ate one of his.

  “So you're quitting the railroad,” Early said as he reached to sip his water.

  Again Tony grinned. “Yessir. The Seventy gets into Chicago in the morning. I spend a day with my family, then catch the Cardinal the next morning for Washington. I'm going to be President Truman's steward.”

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  September 24—Saturday Afternoon

  Manhunt

  Early and his horse cut a beefy Hereford calf away from a small herd. When the calf ran, Early swung his lariat once and let the loop fly out low, under the calf's rear hooves. In the instant the horse set her own hooves, Early yanked up the rope, spilling the whiteface onto the dirt of the corral.

  “Jimmy,” Walter Estes called out from the gate of Osage orange poles he held open, “you sure can throw a rope.”

  “I'm gettin' better. Been out of practice so darn long.” Early walked his horse toward the gate, dragging the bawling calf behind. A cow bellowed. She bolted out from the others and stampeded toward her calf. Early spurred his horse. She kicked into a gallop and raced out the gate with the calf still on the end of the line. “Cut 'er off, Walter!” Early hollered.

  Estes slammed the gate, and the cow veered away, bellowing, spit frothing from her mouth.

  Early reined his horse in near the branding fire. And four cowboys—three of them neighbors—ran out, all in chaps like Early, one—Hutch Tolliver—with horn loppers, a second with a syringe, and a third with a hot iron. The fourth, fat Roger Arnold, squatted on the calf's shoulders while Early's horse leaned into the lariat rope, keeping the calf stretched out.

  Less than a minute and they had the work done. Tolliver pitched the loppers aside and loosened the rope that bound the calf's hocks. He whipped the loop away. “Let 'er
go, Rog,” he called to his partner.

  Arnold came up, the calf almost as fast. She stagger-trotted away, bruised, burned, and bloody, to join a bunch of calves beyond the corral, all dehorned, vaccinated for brucellosis, branded and, the bull calves, cut—deprived of their bullhood.

  Thelma, in a loose dress that hid her expansive middle, came up with Nadine Estes, the two visiting and laughing, carrying a tray of glasses and a pitcher of iced lemonade.

  “Jimmy, take a break,” Thelma said, her smile large. She held up the pitcher.

  “Don't have to tell me twice.” Early waved the other men over as he walked his horse toward where the women stood with Estes, Estes sweeping a dripping cold glass across his forehead.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “you spittin' dust like me?”

  “Dust and cow hair.”

  Thelma filled a glass, and Missus Estes handed it up to Early.

  Arnold helped himself to a full glass before he leaned an elbow against Early's saddle. “How many we got left, Cactus?” he asked.

  Early studied the cattle in the corral. He moved an index finger across them, counting. “Looks to be maybe ten or a dozen.” Early downed half his lemonade, only to choke. He puckered his lips and spit an errant seed to the side.

  Estes checked the back of an envelope. “Unless I failed to mark a couple down, I'd say a baker's dozen, Jimmy.”

  “Half an hour then?” Arnold asked. He pushed his Small Alpine Stetson onto the back of his head.

  Early laughed. “That sweet young thing you married keeping you on a short rein?”

  “Well, she does miss me if I don't get home for supper.”

  Tolliver, gangly, tall—taller still in his Big-brim Alpine—came up. He dodged in and patted Arnold's girth. “You sure haven't missed many suppers, have you, Rog?”

  Arnold twisted away, snickering.

  Tolliver grabbed at Arnold's ribs, and the fat cowboy went up in hoots of laughter, sloshing lemonade onto Early and his sweaty horse. The horse jumped to the side, and Arnold went down, Tolliver on top of him, working at Arnold's ribs.