The Ghost of Two Forks
Elmer Kelton
A railroad was often a blessing to early Texas towns, but it could as easily be a curse. Many new towns sprang up and thrived along the rights-of-way as track layers moved into new territory eager for improved transportation. But other towns, once prosperous, withered and died because the Eastern money counters and the surveyors favored a route that bypassed them.
Such a town was Two Forks, for years a county seat. Its voters had approved a bond issue that built a fine new stone courthouse with a tall cupola that sported a clock face on each of its four sides. From the day its doors first opened for business, it had been Sandy Fuller’s job to sweep its floors and keep its brass doorknobs bright and shiny. In winter he kept wood boxes full for the several pot-bellied heaters. All these were tasks he enjoyed, for he had hand-carried many of the stones that went into its building, and he felt he owned a share of it.
Most people would say Sandy was not among the brightest members of the community, that his limited skills restricted him to the most menial of tasks. At fifty his back was beginning to bend. Toting all those heavy stones had not been good for his arthritis, either. But whatever his own shortcomings might have been, his two Jersey cows gave more milk than any in town, and his three dozen laying hens kept much of the community well fixed for eggs. He also kept a dandy little garden, selling much of its produce to his neighbors, giving it to those who could not pay.
Those assets, along with his housekeeping job at the courthouse, yielded everything Sandy needed for the good though simple life. He told his cowboy friend Cap Anderson that he hoped it would last all of his days and that Heaven would be just like Two Forks. He and Cap had ridden broncs together in their younger years, until too many falls forced Sandy to find less strenuous work. Cap still held a steady ranch job, though now he rode gentler horses.
Everybody in town knew Sandy, but a thousand miles away, in a cloud of cigar smoke at the railroad directors’ conference table, decisions were made by men who had never heard of him. All they knew of Two Forks was that it was in the wrong place. The surveyors had marked a route that would miss the town by at least six miles. They were about to strike a death blow to the prosperous little community, but that was Two Forks’ misfortune and none of their own.
Sandy had every reason to remain where he was, among friends, working in a courthouse he had helped to build. Among other things, he visited the cemetery almost every day, carrying a bucket of water to sprinkle on wildflowers that grew over two graves. One tombstone marked the resting place of Ardella Fuller, loving wife and mother. Beneath the shadow of the other, topped by the carved figure of a lamb, lay the infant daughter of Sandy and Ardella. The date of death was the same on both stones.
For months Sandy had heard rumors that the railroad was coming. He shared his neighbors’ early enthusiasm, because the shining rails could bring fresh enterprise to the town he loved. Sandy’s thin wage might not increase, but it pleased him to think it would be a boon to his friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, he kept the courthouse spotless and clean. It was the town’s crowning glory, and his own.
He paid little attention to whispered rumors that surveyors were placing stakes across the Bar M ranch far south of town. It seemed unreasonable that the railroad’s builders would not want to make the fullest use of a promising community like Two Forks. It was already a landmark of sorts, its courthouse clock tower standing proudly three stories high, visible for miles across the open prairie. The striking of the clock was music to Sandy’s ears.
Not until he heard the county judge talking to two of the commissioners did he begin feeling uneasy. He stopped pushing his broom to eavesdrop.
The judge said, “I met with the railroad people. They tell me we’ve got no chance to change their minds. The Bar M offered them the right-of-way cheap because Old Man Mathers figures to sell town lots. The graders are already at work.”
A commissioner asked, “What kind of a county seat will this be then, six miles from the railroad?”
“Old Man Mathers figures sooner or later we’ll have no choice but to move it to his town.”
“We can’t move a stone courthouse, and this one ain’t half paid for.”
“No, but you can be sure Mathers will try to convince the voters to build a new one over on the railroad.”
The commissioner declared, “He’ll play hell doin’ it. Most of the county’s voters live right here in Two Forks.”
That sounded reasonable to Sandy. He went back to his sweeping and put the worry behind him.
That night as he watered the wildflowers on Ardella’s grave, he talked to her just as he had talked to her when she was alive. “Don’t you be frettin’ none, honey. The folks ain’t goin’ to go off and leave a good town like this, especially one with such a pretty courthouse, and it not paid for yet.”
But it played out like the judge had said. The graders followed the surveyors, and the rails followed the graders. Old Man Mathers had a crew staking out town lots along the right-of-way. He donated a large town square for the building of a new courthouse. He put up a big new general store and guaranteed that his prices would be lower than those in Two Forks because he could obtain his goods directly from the railroad without the extra cost of freighting them in by wagon.
Sandy refused to acknowledge the writing on the wall, even when he stood with Cap Anderson and watched skids being placed beneath the Jones family’s frame house. He watched a six-mule team slide the structure across the prairie toward the new town of Mathers.
“They’ll wish they hadn’t moved,” he told Cap. “They’ll get awful lonesome over there without their old neighbors.”
But one by one, the old neighbors moved too. House after house made the six mile drag to a new site on the railroad or rode over there on wag-on beds extended in tandem. In time, Two Forks began to look as if a tornado had skipped through, taking out structures at random, leaving behind only cedar-post foundations and falling-down sections of yard fence. Weeds grew where flowerbeds and gardens had been.
“Town’s not the same anymore,” he told Ardella. “But the courthouse ain’t changed.” He swept every day, for dust from the abandoned lots made it more difficult to keep its floors clean. He polished the doorknobs and, as he could get to them, washed the windows.
Cap Anderson sympathized. “You can’t blame folks for leavin’. They’ve got families, most of them. They’ve got to go where they can make a livin’.” Cap lived north of Two Forks. The new town was a hardship for him because it meant he had to travel six miles farther than when he could do all his business here.
Time came when almost the only people still living in Two Forks were those who worked in the courthouse: the judge and his wife, the county clerk, the sheriff, a deputy, the jail keeper, and Sandy. The operator of the last general store loaded his goods on wagons and hauled them to a new building in Mathers. His old place stood vacant. It made Sandy think of a dogie calf. One night some young vandals from the new town sneaked in under the cover of darkness to break out the store’s windows, and those of what had been the blacksmith shop.
The judge was the first of the courthouse crowd to surrender. He had his big house sawed in two and hauled over to Mathers. Sandy heard that one section was sprung a little during the trip so that the two never fit back together just right. After some loud cussing, the judge grudgingly accepted the patching job, though his wife was never again satisfied with the house. The county clerk was not long in following the judge to Mathers.
The sheriff and his crew had to stay because the jail was still in Two Forks, though the lawman spent most of his time enforcing the ordinances in the new town. The few residents remaining in Two Forks were not given to crimes and misdemeanors.
The judge became increasingly vocal about the nuisance of living in one town and working in another. Sandy heard his voice ringing down the hall. “There is no longer any question about it. We’ve got to move the county seat to
Mathers.”
Sandy almost dropped his broom.
The sheriff agreed with the judge’s opinion but pointed out that such a move would require a vote of the county’s citizens.
The judge said, “Most of them are in Mathers now. Who is left to vote for staying in Two Forks?”
As it turned out, the only dissenting votes were Sandy’s and those of some farmers and ranch people like Cap, afraid of higher taxes. Sandy listened disconsolately as the ballots were counted in the clerk’s office. He quickly saw that his vote was being crushed beneath the weight of all those others.
He heard the judge say, “Now we’ve got to have a bond vote so we can build a new courthouse.”
The sheriff was skeptical. “The county still owes ten years’ payments on this one. Do you think the landowners are goin’ to vote another tax burden on themselves?”
“The people in town outnumber the country voters,” the judge argued. “They’re tired of having to come all the way over here to do business with the county government.”
And so it was. The new citizens of Mathers were overwhelmingly in favor of a new courthouse, especially after the judge pointed out that most of the added tax burden would be levied upon landowners and not themselves. Old Man Mathers was especially pleased. His son-in-law was a builder and a cinch to get the construction contract from the commissioners’ court. The stone would be quarried from the south end of the Mathers ranch. It was a foregone conclusion that the price of building stone was going to run high.
Watering the flowers, Sandy told Ardella, “It’s goin’ to take them a while to get that new courthouse built. I’ll bet it won’t be nothin’ like as pretty as this one here.”
He was right. He sneaked over to Mathers one Sunday afternoon to steal a peek at the construction work. The side walls were up, and the roof was half built. He took a measure of satisfaction in the fact that this courthouse was going to be butt-ugly. It offered no imagination in its architecture, no adornments, just four plain square walls and a row of deep-set windows that reminded him of the eye sockets in a skull.
What was more, he had been told that this courthouse was costing twice as much as the older one. There would be hell to pay for the judge and some others when the next election rolled around. But that was still more than a year off.
From people who came to the old Two Forks courthouse to do business with the county, Sandy heard rumblings of discontent. Cap led a petition drive, demanding that the county refuse to accept the new structure on the basis that it was badly designed, shoddily built, and uglier than a mud fence. But the judge ruled that the petitions did not represent a large enough percentage of the voters and thus was invalid.
Construction was completed, and the new courthouse was approved by the commissioners’ court. The next step was to move the records from the older building. Sandy’s hopes soared when a dozen ranchers and their cowboys, including Cap, surrounded the Two Forks courthouse and vowed to stop, at gunpoint if necessary, any transfer of documents.
The judge and the sheriff foiled that attempt by bringing in two Texas Rangers to enforce the court order. The ranchers and their cowboys might have gone up against the United States Army, but they knew better than to oppose the Texas Rangers. Sandy and Cap watched crestfallen as the county records were placed in a line of wagons and hauled away.
That night he told Ardella, “I don’t know what I’m goin’ to do now, except for one thing. I ain’t leavin’ you and the baby, and I ain’t leavin’ my courthouse.”
The judge came to him the next day with a proposition. “You’d just as well give it up, Sandy, and come on over to Mathers. We need a janitor to take care of the new courthouse like you’ve taken care of this one.”
Sandy knew one reason they wanted him was that they could not find anyone else willing to do the job for the same low pay.
“No sir,” he said. “I’m satisfied where I’m at.”
“But there’s nothing for you to do here.”
“This courthouse is still here, and it needs somebody to care for it.”
The judge began to show impatience. “Don’t you understand? This courthouse is vacant. Retired. We don’t need anybody to take care of it.”
“But it still belongs to the county, don’t it? We’re all still payin’ for it, ain’t we?”
“That is beside the point. We can’t pay you to sweep out an abandoned building. We will pay you to take care of the new one.”
“One way and another, I reckon I’ll get by. If anything ever happens to that new courthouse, you’ll be glad you’ve got this one sittin’ here waitin’ for you.”
The judge shook his head in disgust. “A man who would argue with a fool is a fool himself.” He turned away but stopped to say, “Your paycheck ends today.”
Money had never been an important issue with Sandy. He could get by on very little. Between his garden, his chickens, and his milk cows, he would not go hungry.
He told the judge, “If you ever need me, you’ll know where to look.”
“Damn it, man, don’t you realize that Two Forks is a dead town?”
“It ain’t dead as long as somebody lives in it. That’ll be me.”
Sandy cooked his meals and slept in a plain frame shack. It would be a stretch of the language to say he actually lived there. He lived in the courthouse. He was accustomed to going there before daylight and making sure it was ready for business. In winter he built fires in all the stoves to take the chill off before the first of the staff arrived. Now, though, it was summer. He opened windows so a cooling breeze could freshen the air. Everything continued the same as before with one important difference: no one was in the courthouse except him.
With all the desks and chairs removed, the sweeping chore was easier because he did not have to work around the obstacles. The empty rooms looked larger than before. In the county clerk’s office the shelves were bare where once they had been full of records of land transactions, court decisions, marriages and births and deaths. Sandy did not need the records to help him remember, however. He had been a witness to almost everything that had happened here.
Having more time on his hands, he spent longer at the cemetery, talking to Ardella. He wiped dust from the carved lamb atop the baby’s tombstone. “It’s awful quiet here now,” he said, “but in a way I kind of like it. Sometimes I got tired of all that noise. And I don’t have a lot of people throwin’ their trash around. You ought to see how clean the courthouse is.”
He almost never went to Mathers. The sight of that squatty new courthouse made his eyes hurt. He still bartered enough butter and eggs to trade for the few groceries he needed, mainly coffee and bacon and such. Every two or three days, Cap or some other rancher or cowboy took his produce to town for him and brought back whatever he ordered from the general store.
He had noticed that the new courthouse did not even have lightning rods like the old one. Maybe one day lightning would strike, the building would burn down, and they would have to move the county seat back to Two Forks. The county could not afford to be paying for three courthouses at the same time. Well, when it happened, they would find the old one as good as when they had left it. Better even, for Sandy made improvements on it here and there.
But lightning did not strike. Time went dragging on. A windstorm took most of the roof from Sandy’s shack. He decided to move into the jail, which stood in the shadow of the courthouse. He reasoned that a building always fared better when someone lived in it than when it stood vacant. They would need the jail again someday when they returned to Two Forks. He kept it as clean as the courthouse.
One by one, his rancher and cowboy friends died or moved away. Cap remained, but he did not often go to town anymore. No longer could Sandy depend on someone else to carry his butter and eggs to town. He had no choice but to walk the six miles to Mathers, carrying his goods in a cloth sack, then walking back with food he could not produce for himself. Most of the townspeople had forgotten about him. Now
they talked about him again. He was “poor, feeble-minded old Sandy,” who didn’t have the sense to give up and quit beating a dead horse.
He became the ghost of Two Forks, a ragged apparition who showed up briefly on the dirt streets of Mather every three or four days, said little or nothing to anybody, and disappeared like a wisp of smoke. A few of the more superstitious even suggested that he had died of lonesome and that what they saw was a wraith, a will-of-the-wisp. Town boys dared each other to visit the Two Forks cemetery after dark and see if the ghost would appear.
He did, on a few occasions. Sandy was as protective of the cemetery as of the courthouse. He was afraid vandals might topple some of the tombstones, especially Ardella’s or the baby’s. After several town boys hurried home shaking with fright, talking about the ghost that appeared out of nowhere, the nocturnal visits stopped. Hardly anyone except Sandy came to the cemetery anymore.
The few abandoned frame houses gradually succumbed to time and the weather, sinking back to the ground or giving up to the wind which scattered them in pieces across the old townsite. Only the grand old courthouse remained, and the jail. The ghost of Two Forks continued to care for them, to keep up repairs.
Then one day a cowboy happened by on his way to town. It was a hot summer day, but the courthouse windows remained closed. Sandy had routinely opened them each morning from spring into late fall.
Maybe the old man was ill, the cowboy thought. He rode up to the courthouse and tested the front door. It was locked. He led his horse to the jail and went inside. Sandy was not there. The stove was cold. Sandy’s coffeepot sat empty except for yesterday’s grounds. Alarmed, the cowboy went outside and called. The only response was the echo of his own voice. A circle through the townsite yielded no sign.
He rode to town and went directly to the office of the new sheriff. A small delegation of townspeople—mostly older ones who remembered the heyday of Two Forks—accompanied him back to the ghost town. They searched every room, every closet in the old courthouse, half expecting to find Sandy dead in one of them. They even climbed up into the clock tower. They did not find him.
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