Love and Lament (43 page)

Everett looked like he wanted to run. He still had his hands in the air, and he had a kind of pleading look, as though to say, “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” But Sugg just shifted the gun from one person to the other, jabbing it in the air to see if he could make them turn and run.

“Why don’t you get your hands in the air, little lady,” he said, “like your deputy. I don’t believe you’re really the sheriff. I think you bought that badge somewhere and now you just want this still because it’s situated right prettily here.”

“I don’t want any such thing,” she told him. “Except for you to put that gun down. I’m going to step over to where you are, and by the time I get there, I expect that gun to be lying on the ground to where you cain’t get it. Make haste now, boy.” She spat what was in her mouth and started slowly forward, keeping her dark eyes on him.

He poked the gun toward her, and Mary Bet’s heart leapt. But she kept stepping. “You got a gun in that skirt?” he asked.

“I might, and Deputy Everett might. We’re taking you in, so unless you aim to kill us both and hide our bodies and get clean out of this state, you’d best do as I say. And if you do kill us, I’m telling you, you won’t rest a night, because the Bureau of Investigation and every policeman in the country will be out looking for you for killing a woman sheriff, and they’ll find you too and string you up just like they strung up Shackleford Davies. I saw him a-ridin’ on his coffin. I reckon you remember that hanging?”

He nodded, looking a little less sure of himself. There were now only twenty feet between them. Everett had held his ground, and his tongue, for which she was grateful. Sugg was working his cheeks in and out like a bellows while he was studying the problem, but it only made him more sinister, as if he were a little less than fully human.

And then she was standing five feet away from him. “Don’t point that at me!” she snapped. He lowered the barrel. “Set it on the ground, slow, so it doesn’t go off.”

He put the stock down, then picked it back up. “What happens if I just run off?”

“Then we’ll come after you. I know who your people are, and we’ll find you and it’ll go a lot worse for you. Right now, you’ve got
six months in the county jail, but if you run off I’ll see you get put in the state penitentiary for five years.” She didn’t know if he would believe her; she guessed he knew more about the criminal justice system than she did. “You ever been there?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I’ve been in the jail, though, and I didn’t particularly like it.”

“I don’t reckon you did. It hasn’t gotten any better. Just do what I say, and I’ll tell Judge Lane to go easy on you. But if you run off, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

He set the stock down, then knelt to lay the gun on the ground. He stood up as Everett came slowly forward with the handcuffs.

Everett drove—Mary Bet having never learned how—and Sugg sat up front, his shackled hands in his lap. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t have any second thoughts on the way and try anything foolish. You’ll get good food there in the jail, and I’ll see that you get all the blankets you need. We’ll put you in where there’re new folding cots with springs—they’re better than the old iron ones.” She had to shout over the wind from the car’s speed, and Sugg just nodded.

When they got there he was compliant. He said, “I’m never going to live down getting taken in by a woman. Can I tell people you had a gun?”

“Tell ’em what you want,” she said. “It’s a lie, but I don’t expect it’s the first you’ve ever told, nor’ll be the last.”

CHAPTER 26

1918

S
HE RESPONDED TO
Leon’s letters, telling him to take care and filling him in on the details of her life. She told him that being sheriff mostly gave her respect for the responsibility Hooper and men like him had shouldered. “But I reckon I’m doing a right good job of it, because the Board hasn’t let me go yet.” She wanted to tell him about Matthew Cadwallader, ask him if he thought it was graft to let the boy pay off his debt to society by chopping her wood and painting her back stoop.

The days rushed along, and when a letter arrived she thought, “This will be the last one, and then a telegram will come.” His letters were weeks behind the newspaper reports from the front. “He’s already gone,” she thought, “and there will be no time to prepare for it and the rest of my life as a spinster.”

Once he wrote that it was only the thought of her that kept him from temptation, and she wondered what he meant. She could picture his broad face and smile and his sparse eyebrows, but the
image was from a photograph he had sent her, posed in his green wool uniform. In her mind, he merged with a hundred other soldiers, all alike, so she tried to see him coming into her office to visit, hat in hand, jacket open.

She imagined temptresses and French prostitutes servicing the soldiers at sordid, dirty hovels and way stations in godforsaken towns. But had God really forsaken them and could the French women be so different and lacking in morals than the women of Haw County? Perhaps during a time of war everyone was desperate, and Leon was no different from anybody. He was lonely and needed to feel the warmth of another human being, poor man. He had had only one serious affair, so he had told her, and that was with Ann Murchison. She thought, “I’ve waited too long. He’ll fall in love with a French woman for sure, and come home married.” Flora told her to quit thinking such thoughts and keep her mind on her darning.

There was a letter in which he said they were heading to Toul in northeastern France. She got out her father’s old atlas and found the town, located along the Moselle River. It seemed too close to Germany. She had nothing against the Germans—her people had come from Germany—and yet now they were fighting the rest of Europe. It made no sense, and nobody around seemed to have any satisfactory explanation for it. It was just a terrible war, something men seemed bent on doing.

She tried to picture a quaint little village with a Gothic church and farmhouses scattered about, but she kept seeing mud and men and horses and big guns on wheels and dirt-smeared women trailing behind in kerchiefs and aprons, and the men and horses, and many dogs as well, were all on the march toward some horrible reckoning over a road where the noise of explosions and gunfire grew louder and louder. She’d heard of machine guns and tanks and trenches and airplanes that shot each other from the sky, and
it all seemed so remote and terrible she could hardly picture Leon Thomas in such a hellish mess. She preferred to think of him as he was here, leaning into her office of a morning with a big smile on his face and that cast in one eye.

He wrote to her as often as he could, he told her, but twice a month didn’t seem often enough to her. Her palms would itch something fierce on mornings she was sure a letter was coming, and then there would be nothing and the whole day would feel pointless and miserable.

One day in late September when the newspapers reported Allied troops moving toward the Meuse River, Mary Bet decided it was high time for a proper inspection of the county jail and convict camp. She took along her young charge so that he could see for himself where he might be headed if he didn’t mend his ways.

They started out at the jail, south of the courthouse. “You write down what I tell you in that notebook,” she said to Matthew. “Write down sixteen white and nine colored inmates.” She watched as his hand formed slow, clumsy letters. “Good, now let’s speak to the warden.”

She introduced Matthew to Warden Hargrove, a leather-faced man of indeterminate age with buckteeth and one half-closed eye. “Warden,” she said, “this is Matthew Cadwallader, helping me out for a while.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the warden said. He nodded at the boy. It was known, but not mentioned, that she had hired the boy shortly after he had gone around returning the stolen items and apologizing and offering to work for the people he had stolen from. Only Mrs. Gooch had come asking Mary Bet if she planned to send the boy to juvenile court. Mary Bet asked her if she was pressing a charge; Mrs. Gooch said she would think about it, and that maybe she should speak to the judge first. “That’s fine,” Mary Bet said. Mrs. Gooch turned up her nose, said, “Well,” and walked out.

“Are the inmates well cared for, Warden?” Mary Bet asked.

“Yes, ma’am. But we could use a sewerage system in here. It’s more than me and Hiram can handle, back and forth with the pots all day.”

“Write that down,” she told Matthew. “The board’ll get a full report.”

“And we could use gutters. That roof water ain’t fit for drinking, getting mixed with the oil in the pumps.”

“Write that down.”

Next they drove out to the convict camp to the north. “Now, if you’re on good behavior,” she told Matthew, “you’d get to work out here.”

“I’m not going to prison,” he told her.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

They walked around the little wooden buildings, accompanied by the camp warden. There were pens with goats and pigs, and a pasture that held cattle and mules. Three men in dungarees and black-and-white striped shirts were in the pigpen at work on the stockade fence. “We could use a pasture for the hogs,” the supervisor told them. He was a short man, not much over Mary Bet’s height, with a thick mustache like hog bristles. Matthew was writing before Mary Bet said a word. “And you know these shacks—”

“I’ve been after the board to do something about it since before I was sheriff. Mr. Teague wanted brick buildings, and I think it’s high time. Next meeting I’m going to tell them it’s the least we can do to honor the request of our sheriff serving overseas. Besides, I can see now for myself you can’t keep things sanitary like this.”

“No, ma’am, we can’t.”

“How about the crops and stores?”

“Fine. Plenty to feed the stock and—what is it now, thirty-nine or forty, with fourteen here and them at the jail. I don’t know if they’ll be enough for brick buildings.” He spat and then went on.
“Hundred and fifty bushels of sweet potatoes,” he said, reading from a sheet, “two hundred pounds tobacco, six tons meadow hay. The pea vine’s not so good this year.” He went on about the wheat and corn, the stock and straw, Matthew writing it all down.

“You say there’s fifty acres in cultivation,” Mary Bet said. “And we’ve got all these woods around here. How much?”

“With the woods on the north side,” he said, holding his hand out, the last two fingers of which were nubs, “near ’bout three hundred acres.”

Mary Bet looked at Matthew. “Well?” she said. “Should the county put brick buildings out here?”

“If you say they should.”

“It’s not up to me, it’s up to the Board of Commissioners. How’re we gonna pay for it?”

“Looks like you could sell some of this land,” Matthew said.

“How much?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe two hundred acres.”

Mary Bet felt a smile coming to her face. “So you were paying attention. If there’s any left over, they can buy war bonds.” The supervisor nodded, and they followed him, his mud-caked boots indicating the driest way back between ruts in the road.

They thanked him and got in Mary Bet’s top-buggy, and on the way home she said, “He and the warden are brothers. Mr. Sam ran his own store up past Silkton, until a few years ago. He got drunk and ran over a colored boy. Crushed his skull. He went to the penitentiary for fifteen months, and had to close his shop. Now he works for the county. Does a good job. He was happy to have a second chance. I don’t know how he lost those fingers.”

“Do you ever drink?” Matthew asked.

“Drink? Me? What kind of a question is that? No, I don’t.” Mary Bet thought a minute as they rolled along past a stubbly, sere field of cut corn. “I use to think liquor was evil. But then I thought, how
could something that happens in nature be evil? Fruits decay and ferment. And the people that drink it aren’t evil, mostly. It’s what people do who can’t resist it that’s evil.” She thought, I don’t care if he’s listening, I’m going to say what I want. “The Devil’s medicine, my mother called it. Her father was a drunkard.”

“What about your father?”

She glanced at the boy, high cheekbones and red skin like he was of a different race, and yet he reminded her strongly of somebody she knew well. “Reach into my handbag, will you, son? Get that round tin out. Press it open.” He opened it and held it to her, and she took a pinch for each nostril. “Help yourself, but not too much.” He took a tiny pinch, stared at it, smelled it, then sniffed it in.