by Reed Arvin
“But not you. Didn’t you ever want to leave?” It had always surprised Henry that Sarah hadn’t got as far away from her controlling father and brother as possible. For one thing, it would have done her social life good; the assumption, mostly perpetrated by Roger, was that the Crandalls were too good for Council Grove. It had been especially hard for Sarah, because asking her out meant facing Tyler. Few in Council Grove had felt up to that task.
“It’s not that I thought I couldn’t leave,” she answered. “I’m not my mother, you know.”
“I wasn’t implying anything.”
She softened. “All right. I just didn’t want you to think I was the helpless little farm girl. It was just different with me. I didn’t need the work, but that wasn’t it either. For some reason I keep on choosing to try and fix this life.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He could feel her weighing the consequences of opening up. After a moment she said, “It comes down to getting a new life or staying to fix this one. I keep staying.” She smiled softly. “You might have noticed my family isn’t exactly in the best of shape.”
“Go easy on yourself,” Henry said. “I’m not sure one person can make a whole family right.”
“All the same, I never stop thinking we could live together in peace somehow. It’s been my little pipe dream. Of course, now it’s too late, really.” Her eyes moved past him, out through the window. “You know something I’ve never admitted to a soul?”
Henry’s eyes followed hers, not sure he wanted to be Sarah’s confessor. But he didn’t doubt she needed someone; she could hardly take her feelings to Roger, and her mother was barely hanging on. “What’s that?” he asked quietly.
“It’s horrible, but the truth is I’ve tried to kill that feeling of believing sometimes, kill it dead.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It must be easier to live without always thinking about how things could be better. You get tired of hoping, of wanting some image of how a family should be. You start wanting to give up.”
“Maybe you were just trying to survive.”
Sarah shook her head. “Everyone thinks I’m brave. No matter how bad things got, I always smiled and kept on going. Year after year, I was the rock. Both Daddy and Roger counted on me, you know.”
Henry was genuinely surprised. “For what?”
Sarah looked down. “I’ve only just been able to admit this to myself. But I realize now I gave them the space to hate each other.”
Henry fell silent; the stark intimacy of Sarah’s confession was disconcerting. But whether because Tyler’s controlling hand was gone or simply because her father’s death had brought her emotions to the surface, she seemed determined to unload. “I would always intervene,” she said. “I’d plead with them to stop fighting. I really believe they let their rage vent knowing that I would keep them from killing each other. Not literally, maybe. But things were said in this house . . .” She looked up. “Believe me, there were times I wanted to let them tear each other to pieces and be done with it. I wanted them to leave Mother and me in peace.” She sighed. “There was worse than that in me, Henry. There were times I even wanted to turn rotten inside, like my father. I know what he was. But I couldn’t do it. Believing is just a part of me.”
Henry set down his cup. “Look, I really don’t want to ask this, but I’m glad you brought up your mother.” He paused, feeling the weight of the question. “Were there problems between your parents? Marriage problems?”
Sarah accepted the question without surprise. “Not like you mean,” she said, staring into her coffee. “Their whole relationship fits into one sentence: She was the obedient wife.”
“So nothing rocked the boat between them.”
“Everything revolved around Daddy. He was the great provider, the lord of everything. You live with a strong man like that, after a while your life doesn’t make sense without him.” She frowned. “Of course, it didn’t make sense with him either. She just shut down, bit by bit. She was so different when I was a girl, so much brighter. But Daddy changed during that time, too.”
“How?”
“Something was on his mind a lot near the end,” she replied. “His shell was cracking a little.”
“What do you mean?”
“Less confident, I guess. You won’t believe this, but there were times I think he almost looked scared. But only to us. I don’t think anybody around town could have noticed it.”
Henry paused, thinking. “Any idea what was behind it?”
She shook her head. “You couldn’t talk to him about it, of course. He would have just turned on that stone face and made you feel like a fool.” She smiled. “He was so hard on Mother. It’s ironic that losing him has finally done her in.”
“I know,” Henry said quietly. “She doesn’t look good.”
“She’s fifty-six, Henry. And helpless.” She turned her face away. “And if Roger contests the will . . .”
“Maybe he won’t,” Henry said.
She smiled sadly. “Can we change the subject?”
“Of course.”
“It’s not just Daddy who’s changed, you know. Look at you.” She poured him more coffee, a thoughtful look on her face. “You know,” she said, “I gave you quite a lot of thought back then, when we were in school. You probably had no idea.”
“We didn’t talk much that last year.”
“I even kept up with you when you left. I was impressed when you went to seminary.”
Henry suppressed a frown; Council Grove was the one place on earth where what had happened during that time was common knowledge. “It didn’t end very impressively,” he said.
Sarah nodded. “You know, Henry, all this talk makes me feel old. It started at the funeral. Lately I feel like I’ve been alive a million years.”
“It’s grief,” Henry said. “It ages you.”
She looked up at him and said, “I’m only twenty-seven, Henry. How can I not be young?”
Henry greeted territory with which he was painfully familiar. “When a parent dies your youth dies with them. It doesn’t matter if you’re twelve when it happens. You see your own mortality, and the second you see that, you’re not a child anymore.”
“Pastor Chambers came by after Daddy died. I thought what he said would help, but it hasn’t.”
Henry shrugged. “Does that surprise you?”
“No. But I could use some comfort.” She smiled. “I still think you would have made a good preacher, Henry.”
Henry looked down at his coffee, dark and impenetrable. “I lacked the essential ingredient.”
“What’s that?”
“Faith,” he said simply. “The one thing a preacher can’t do without.”
“You just need to find it again.”
“I don’t want to find it again.”
Sarah shook her head. “If you ever had any, you still do. It’s not something you put on and take off like a coat. I already told you I tried to kill my own, and I couldn’t do it. It just stayed in me, still believing.”
“Maybe I’m the exception.”
She regarded him silently a moment, then took a deep breath. “And now, my final act of believing. Just as futile as the others, but as usual, I can’t help it.”
“What’s that?”
“Henry, I’m glad about the will.”
Henry set down his coffee. “You can’t be serious.”
Sarah nodded. “If the will had gone as planned, wouldn’t everything be the same, only worse? Roger would take Daddy’s place. And would we ever figure out how to love one another, how to take care of each other? And we’re all we have, Henry. I’m not kidding myself about that. I told you that Pastor Chambers came out here after Daddy died. I didn’t tell you that he was the only one who came.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. My God, after all these years.”
“It’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’m not surprised. I know we’re hated. But it makes Roger
’s big act so horrible. We’re completely alone. That’s the unspoken truth that hangs over our heads here.”
Henry hesitated, trying to process her words. “Do you actually believe this was some desperate gamble by your father to bring you all together?”
Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said doubtfully. “If Daddy had wanted that, he could have started it a long time ago. I only know that if that will had been what everybody expected, it would have been the death of this family.”
“You have a gift to see any good in this.”
She smiled grimly. “Or maybe it’s a curse, the curse of not knowing when to give up.” She laughed, and a trace of bitterness filtered through her voice. “It’s like Daddy always told Roger. I guess there’s a lot of things you’d change if you was king of the world. He was right about that, wasn’t he? In spite of how he meant it?” She let her fingers entwine in the fabric of her collar. “But we’re not kings of this world. It was just a saying.” She stood, forcing herself to brighten. Her face had colored, and Henry wondered if she was suddenly embarrassed to have shared so much. “Now go see Roger,” she said. “It looks like he’s wrapping up out there.” She smiled her melancholy smile again, and looking at her, Henry could hardly believe she was Roger’s sister. Living in that house had left its inevitable marks on her, but she had somehow managed to hang on to some genuine grace. To have done so in the face of those two men was a brave accomplishment.
Sarah led him out through the back door, squeezing his hand good-bye. Henry walked toward the cattle pens some distance away, admiring the rolling expanse of land that stretched out from the back fence to the horizon; it was prime cattle land, capable of sustaining one head every two acres. The land fell gently away from the homestead, making a huge, shallow cup a mile and a half across. Sixty yards from the house was a series of working pens, the grass pounded into dirt from the constant traffic of cattle and cowboys. Crandall and his hands were running young bulls— Angus yearlings, dark red like Oklahoma clay. Their commotion raised a small whirlwind of dust and dirt. Henry could see Roger on horseback herding a group of ten or so into one of the pens, a system designed to trap cattle one at a time for polling, castration, or any examinations by the vet. The pen was built in a V shape, wide at the entrance and increasingly narrow at the back. The narrow part of the pen led into the trap, a set of restraints that held a single animal firmly in place, locking onto its head and collapsing down onto its sides. Roger pushed the little herd toward the narrow end, until at last one young bull turned into the trap, and three ranch hands immediately clamped the metal pipes hard around his neck and body. The bull bellowed wildly, struggling uselessly against the bars.
Roger saw Henry as he approached, nodded, but didn’t speak. He walked casually up to the yearling in the trap and picked up a huge set of shears built like the tools firemen use to cut through door handles. Taking his place near the head of the bull, he placed the cutting edge of the shears on one of the bull’s small horns and, pulling the handles together, sliced through the horn just above the hairline. The bull called out, a voice full of dull resentment and unfocused anger at the intrusion. He began bucking, actually knocking a ranch hand off his perch above the trap. As he bucked, the animal got a front leg caught in between the bars of the side restraints, agitating him further. One of the ranch hands said, “Mr. Crandall, we better let him out. We leave him in there and he’s gonna break a leg.”
A hand moved toward the handles to release the chute, but Crandall, looking straight at Henry, said, “We’ll never get him back in the trap now. He’ll be wary. Hold your ground.” Roger moved to the other side of the bull and attempted to position the shears on the remaining horn. This proved difficult, as the bull was now fully enraged, and even with the restraints was moving violently. Henry held his breath; it was obvious that the bull’s leg would be broken at any second. Roger grappled with the shears, his own face red with effort and irritation. “Stand still, damn you,” he yelled, and at that moment he pulled the shears together with all his might. Henry blanched; the shears partially missed their mark, cutting cleanly through half the horn but tearing through the remainder, creating a gash on the animal that immediately began bleeding profusely. Roger cursed loudly and barked instructions to the hands, all of whom were older and clearly more experienced in handling cattle. “Let the son of a bitch out,” he yelled at last, and with a violent struggle the bull freed himself, miraculously keeping his legs intact. With a final, enraged bellow he ran through the herd with blood and sweat flying from his head, dispersing it back to the far end of the pen.
“We’ll have to paint that cut, Mr. Crandall,” one of the hands said. “It’ll infect without it.”
“I know that,” Crandall said harshly, turning toward Henry and heading back to the house. “You catch him,” he added over his shoulder. “I got a meeting.”
Henry walked with Roger to the house, mounting the stairs to the back porch. He was appalled at the episode with the bull. He wasn’t squeamish; he had been present at everything from artificial insemination to breech births. But those procedures should be handled professionally, minimizing the pain to the animal. It was pure ego that had driven Roger to handle the delicate polling process, and that ego had caused the young bull a great deal of agony. More important, it had cost Roger the respect of his ranch crew. Henry frowned; that process was likely to continue. In Roger’s vain, desperate attempts to project his authority, he was likely to cause a great deal of havoc all over Cheney County, and not just on animals.
Roger led Henry through the back door of the house into the mud-room, a utility area at the back of the house. Henry stood a distance away as Roger sat on a low bench and pulled his boots off. Crandall’s arms were spattered with blood from the bull, and he washed it off in a big metal sink at one end of the room.
“What happened to your lip?” Henry asked. “You got quite a pop there.”
“Bull ran me into a fence,” Roger said over his shoulder. “Right before you got here. But I got him for it.” He rubbed a towel over his face and the back of his neck. Turning, he looked at Henry stoically, ignoring the ugly scene of the past several minutes. “I’m going back to Topeka tomorrow late. Got business up there. Be back Monday, maybe Tuesday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. We may need to talk.”
“Don’t see as there’s much to talk about,” Roger stated. “Look, Mathews, I’m not going to drag this out. The truth is I went to Topeka this morning to get myself a lawyer. I gotta look after my own interests.”
Roger’s words were no surprise; Henry had been expecting this. If Amanda’s vague suspicions panned into something real, it would certainly be better that way, in the end. But for another reason, he deeply regretted hearing Roger’s words; Sheldon Parker had made it clear that any more complications spelled the end of his own time on the case. Roger’s decision would probably bring that ending about, which frustrated Henry immensely. He had played a complicated game of controlling information, gaining time, and hoping for answers before Parker pulled the plug. That game was now probably obsolete. “All right, Roger,” he said, hiding his disappointment. “I hope you got yourself a good one, because I have the feeling you’re going to need it.”
“It’s Frank Hesston. Carl Durand set it up.”
“Durand?” The ghost in the machine.
“Durand’s been a friend to this family for more than twenty-five years, which is more than I can say for you. Whoever he recommends is fine by me. He’s got no feelings for Boyd, that’s for damn sure.”
“Are you saying Durand knows Boyd, Roger?”
“I didn’t say that,” Roger snapped. “I’m just sayin’ Durand is for me. And he says go with Hesston, and that’s good enough. Anyway, it’s all set. We met in Durand’s office this morning. Hesston says I should contest. He says I can win.”
Hearing Durand’s name again so soon after his talk with Amanda lit up Henry’s brain. He looked at Roger’s split lip
, examining it more closely. He’s lying about that. It’s several hours old. “Have Hesston call me,” he said. “I’m still the executor of the estate.”
“For now,” Roger said darkly. “One thing I’ve already learned, executors can be removed. I’ve got a feeling you’ll be back in Chicago to stay, Mathews. Your time down here is short.”
Probably right, and Sheldon Parker will save you the trouble of petitioning the court. Henry rose, but felt little anger toward Roger for his insult; Roger Crandall, he decided, was nothing but a small-town bully in a tight spot, and he didn’t have time to worry about people like that. Things would work out however they did, that was all. And if Amanda’s vague suspicions turned out to bear fruit, nobody could predict how things would change. “I’ll expect Hesston’s call,” he said. “We’ll proceed from there.” He turned and walked out of the room.
Henry knew his obligation to call Parker was absolute. Sheldon had demanded instant updates whenever his situation changed substantively, and Roger’s obtaining legal counsel, however inevitable, certainly represented such a change. But still he hesitated. He had driven back over to the motel in two minds, fatigued with his indecision. He looked at his watch: it was Saturday, and he would have to catch Parker at home. But it was likely that his next conversation with Parker about the Crandall will would be his last. The situation had deteriorated from day one, devolving by stages into what would shortly be a frozen legal muddle. Now, with Roger’s decision, the chaos was complete. There was no longer any real way to justify his continuing involvement in so messy and time-consuming a case. He would call. He would explain everything, Parker would lower the boom, and he would be on a plane, back to his real life. On Monday he would be filing briefs for Technologies Enterprises.
And where does that leave Boyd? The words formed in his brain, unbidden. Henry knew of Hesston; well known in the state, he had actually come as a guest speaker to law school while Henry was attending. He was superbly connected in state politics and on intimate terms with every district judge in the state. Against whom, Henry imagined, some hapless, court-appointed legal hack will be sacrificially pitted on behalf of one Raymond Boyd. It shouldn’t take long. A day, maybe two. The strong will eat the weak, because the strong have better lawyers. Raymond will be off to the funny farm, and Roger can take over Council Grove like everyone expects. The order of the universe will be restored.