Love and Lament (41 page)

Mary Bet alighted from the buggy, and, lifting her long skirt, climbed the two steps of the front stoop, her heavy black shoes crunching the loose cement. There being no knocker, she rapped on the door and peered around to the closer window. She shielded her eyes and made out a parlor with a rug and rocking chair, perhaps a sofa, piled with what looked like clothes.

She waited for a minute or two, then went around and called out, “Where’s your mother at, chil’ren?”

One girl, with a streak of dirt across one cheek, pointed across the street, then began sucking her thumb, and the other one said, “She’s not here.”

“Are you a Cadwallader?” Mary Bet asked the latter. Getting a nod in response, she said, “What about your brother?”

“He’s—he’s—” The other girl now took her thumb out of her mouth and began laughing, and the Cadwallader girl—a pretty little thing, all bones and long waves of yellow hair—glared at her friend and said, “He’s out in the garden.”

Mary Bet started heading down around the back, and the girl called out, “Ma’am? I think you’re real pretty.” The other girl laughed again, for which she was shished by the young Cadwallader.

Mary Bet turned and said, “I think you are too,” which pleased the girl. “Do you know who I am?” Mary Bet asked. Both of them shook their heads. “I’m the sheriff.” The dirty-faced girl started to laugh, but caught herself, and both girls just stared at Mary Bet as though they didn’t know what to make of such a statement.

“I thought the sheriff was a man,” the Cadwallader girl said.

“He was,” Mary Bet said.

“Where’s your badge?” The voice was from a young man. Mary Bet looked down the yard past the house toward a row of head-high corn and saw a boy approaching. His hair was darker than his sister’s, but he had the same high, almost Asian-looking cheekbones; he peered at Mary Bet through cautious, skeptical eyes as he came slowly up toward her, his long arms dangling, casually holding a scythe.

“I don’t usually bring it with me,” Mary Bet said. “What’s your name?”

“Matthew Cadwallader,” he said. “Or just Matt.” He stopped about fifteen feet away and surveyed her with a sweep of his eyes. “You have a gun?”

“Huh,” she laughed. “No, I don’t carry a gun either.”

“Don’t you ever need one?”

“Not regularly.”

He nodded, but seemed doubtful about her and her purpose here. He was skinny like his sister, but with strong muscles in his
arms, shoulders, and neck, and Mary Bet could see now that he was handsome despite a blaze of acne along both cheeks. The laces on his canvas work shoes were undone, his singlet undershirt and even his suspenders were damp, and the undershirt was coming untucked from his blue dungarees. He waited for her to speak.

“Have you seen a pickax, sorta new, with some kind of grip to it?” she asked.

The boy stood there a moment, arms akimbo, his eyes moving from Mary Bet to the girls, who had gone silent, watching the proceedings as though in a theater balcony. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Why?”

“You don’t mind if I have a look around, do you?” she asked, tilting her hat against the sun that was creeping around the crooked chimney.

The boy’s eyes darted left and right, he licked his lips, and said, his voice now subdued, “Help yourself.”

Mary Bet nodded once and headed toward the boy, who was now holding his elbows. He smiled at her as she brushed past him on the narrow strip of grass that was low enough for walking. “Why don’t you show me around?” she said. Standing this close she noticed an odor of tobacco on his breath and in his clothes, and he had that musky, sweaty smell of boys his age, which reminded her of Joe Dorsett and of Siler.

The garden extended about a hundred feet down to a gully lined with a tangle of briars and high weeds. A scarecrow of straw-stuffed dungarees and flannel shirt, with an underwear head, stood in the middle of the garden. A crow, perched on its shoulder, flew off at their approach. Mary Bet looked around for a tree stump and saw a large one over by a slat fence that enclosed a neighbor’s rain cistern. “Where do you keep your tools and such?” she asked.

“In the shed.” The boy nodded toward a small wood outbuilding crusted in the same gray as the house. She began walking along the
sloped ground, studying it for snakes that might be hiding in the high grass.

When she reached the shed, the boy came up alongside her and said, “It’s not locked, cause there’s nothing to hide.” The door, consisting of three boarded-together planks, was closed with a bolt and hasp, as well as a staple, which had no lock. She thumbed back the bolt and flicked the metal strap open, and then she pulled on the door.

“I can’t see anything in there,” she said. “You’ll have to bring me a light, or else start taking everything out one by one where I can see them.”

“All right,” Matt said, “but don’t you need a search warrant or something?”

“A search warrant? What’ve you been reading? I’m the sheriff. Go fetch me a pen and paper along with the lantern, if you’ve a mind to.”

“That’s all right, I’ll just get the lantern.”

While he was gone, Mary Bet went ahead into the gloom and found that she could see well enough by the rift of daylight angling through the doorway. She brushed a spider off her face, and went over to a chinked wall, scattering a host of crickets. She picked out two wooden-handled tools and brought them out for examination. One of them was a rusty posthole spade with a long handle, the other a pickax with incised cross-hatching around the end.

The boy came along swinging a lantern with a cloudy globe. He looked square at her and said, “I’ve never seen that before.”

“What?”

He nodded toward both tools, but then clamped his lips together.

“Let’s see what else we have here,” she said. The boy lit the lantern, and it fizzed to life, a sudden ember in a cave, and everything was angles and shadows. In contrast to the ill-kempt yard, the shed was an orderly arrangement of wooden crates lining the walls, hand
tools hanging on nails, riding tackle, a push mower with well-oiled blades, and shelves holding jars of screws, washers, and nails in assorted sizes. The crates contained odd pieces of wood, bits of wire mesh, squares of some new kind of thin metal, and other odds and ends. Mary Bet’s eye went to a short-handled froe hanging from two nails. She reached for it and at the same time said, “You ever use that mower?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, “I hire out some.”

“Where’d this come from?” she asked, holding up the froe, its foot-long blade nicked and scraped.

“I ’on know,” he said. “Always had it, I guess.”

“What do you use it for?”

“Splittin’ firewood and stuff.”

“Looks like its been used on rocks or something.”

Matt shook his head and narrowed his eyes, but when she stared back at him he looked off into a corner, holding up the lantern as though searching for something. Mary Bet told him to keep the light steady, and she went over to the shelves and began pushing things around. Behind the mason jars of screws and nails she found more canning jars filled with what appeared to be preserves and relish. “I might have to take these in as evidence,” she said. “And I don’t mean that lightly, boy. Hold that lantern to where I can see.”

“See what?”

“See what all you’ve got here. Where’d you put the tablecloth?”

“What tablecloth?”

“Mrs. Gooch’s linen tablecloth. The one with the red stitching along the border. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

She heard him sniffling, but he was looking away from her. She reached into the bosom of her blouse and pulled out a handkerchief. “Here,” she said. He shook his head, and wiped the tears with his free hand.

“How much of this is yours, and how much did you steal?”

He said nothing, just sniffed in hard, trying to master himself.

“Don’t you know you can go to the penitentiary for this? This is a serious offense, young man, and I aim to prosecute it with everything I know how. Here you’ve got the town all upset, thinking there’s a gang of hoodlums and cutthroats on the loose. What’s the matter with you?”

The boy just stood there shaking his head, looking at the wall and the shelves as though for something he could show her.

She suddenly wanted to go over and put her arm around him, but she went on with her badgering. “If you don’t start talking, I’m going to get my deputies out here to haul you in. You’re not too young to put in jail. What were you doing snooping around Mrs. Gooch’s yard for, anyway?”

“I’ll get the tablecloth,” he spluttered. “I didn’t know whose it was, I swear I didn’t.” He put the lantern down and turned to go. Mary Bet twisted the wheel to extinguish the flame, then followed him out.

“You wait for me, son,” she said. “I don’t want you out of my sight.” She followed him up a rickety set of steps to a back porch—a rectangle of studs and beams enclosed by translucent oilcloth. In the wan light inside she could make out old wicker and wood furniture, oil cans, a pump handle, and a yellow pine table where piles of folded clothes were spread. The boy went over to a rattan armchair, lifted up the cushion, and pulled out a neatly folded oblong of red-bordered white linen.

“What did you aim to do with that?” she asked.

“I was going to give it to my mother for a Christmas present.”

“What in the world? Law, son, your mother wouldn’t take such a thing. How much you think a nice thing like that costs?”

“I don’t know. I was going to cut it up and make napkins out of it, and maybe a shawl for Betty Ann Murchison.”

“Murchison, huh? I don’t know any Betty Ann Murchison. But you’ve got no business taking people’s things and chopping them up. The very idea.” She gave him a chastising tilt of her head, her brimmed hat shuttering like a stern black wing. He stood before her in the murky light, hands clasped in front and his head sunk. “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demanded. “What else did you take?”

“I took some jars of stuff and some tools. That froe out there and a maul and wedge.”

“What’d you need ’em both for? Looks like one’d do you as good as th’other.” She snorted a little laugh. “What’s the sense in stealing something you don’t need?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Of course you don’t. If you had sense enough to know, you wouldn’t’ve done it in the first place. What church y’all go to?”

“Mama goes to the Presbyterian mostly, not every week.”

“And you?”

“I quit going when I turned thirteen. I’m not much on church-going.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged and crossed his arms in front of his chest. He bit on his lower lip, then looked at Mary Bet in a challenging way.

“Well,” she said, “If you’d gone to church more you’d know what it says in the Bible about stealing. It’s against the Ten Commandments, so it’s a sin. You could be on the road to breaking more commandments for all I know.” The boy made a curt nod of agreement, and Mary Bet said, “It’s hot in here, let’s go outside where I can see you better. I need to talk to you.”

They went back out and stood in the shade of a massive oak. The smell of honeysuckle hung thick in the air behind them where a snarled row of vines and shrubs defined the border of the property. “What time does your mother get home?”

“Just after six, every day except Saturday, and then she gets off at one.”

“You ever hear from your father?”

The boy’s lips tightened. He glanced sharply at her, then away. “Not much, no. He writes letters to us, but my mother quit reading them. If there’s no money in them, she just throws them away.”

“Does he send money regularly?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the girl that died—she was your youngest sister, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, ma’am. Emma. She was seven. She wanted to go to the state fair in Raleigh so she could see a lady with fish scales for skin. I don’t know why she wanted to see that.”

“What do you want to do?” she asked him.

“Ma’am?”

“What do you aim to do with your life, son?” She wondered why she was wasting so much time on this young man; she was liable to miss her dinner entirely, which meant a long and very hungry afternoon, with nothing but a box of raisins in her office. She could never admit she’d spent her dinnertime talking to the town thief and not brought him in, and she hated making up a story.

“I’d like to work with cars,” the boy said. “If I could.”

Mary Bet nodded, appraising the boy and his seriousness; she doubted he’d be able to stick with anything long enough to learn how it worked, especially something as complicated as an automobile. “Do you know where all these things that you stole belong?”

“Yes, ma’am. Am I going to jail?”

“I haven’t decided yet.” She cleared her throat, then spoke in as forceful a voice as she knew how, as if she were talking to a wayward child, which, after all, she was. “The main thing is that we need to get these tools and such back to their rightful owners, and
you have to make up for taking them.” She waited for him to offer a suggestion, but when it became clear that none was forthcoming she said, “Son, you have about three seconds to start talking. After that I won’t be in such a charitable mood.”

“I’ll do whatever you think I should.”

“You think I should be lenient with you?”

“I don’t know if you should. I shouldn’t have taken them things. I just—I just saw them and I had to have them. I can’t explain it right.” He smiled at her in what she thought was a put-on sheepish way.

“I don’t reckon you can explain it right, because there’s nothing right about it. I’m thinking if I brought you into the lockup I’d save you some trouble, since you’re bound to land there sooner or later. I’ll let the judge decide what to do with you. He’s out on the circuit, he’ll be back next Wednesday.”

The boy stood there, leaning on one leg, hands in his pockets, staring at the ground as if for an answer, or because he couldn’t look squarely in the face of the law when it was threatening to lock him away. Mary Bet felt her legs prickle with the heat, and her underarms were slick in perspiration. “Well?” she demanded. “Why shouldn’t I do that?” She really did want him to come up with a good answer, and she watched as it finally dawned on him, with the awareness of one who has found a missing item after a long search, that he might talk himself out of a bad scrape.