Feast for Thieves

by Marcus Brotherton

  “I was born in 1921. This coming January I’ll turn twenty-six.”

  “You seem much older than your years. You sure you ain’t older?”

  I scratched my nose, thinking. “I reckon every man who’s been to war comes home an old soul. That’s what.”

  He coughed again. “I figured as much. Me, I’ll be sixty-eight next month. And to answer your last question, my head feels these days all mixed up, Reverend, if you really must know. I guess it was ten years ago now when I first got sick. No, make that eleven. The first season we paid the doctor’s bills out of that year’s harvest. That year we got by. The second year Mert started driving the school bus in addition to her duties at the church. That year we got by, too. The third year we began to sell her canning. The fourth year she added the mail route. The fifth year we sold the sheep. The sixth year we sold the cow and the goat.” He looked me back in the eyes and coughed again. “We kept getting by.”

  “And bills kept coming in.”

  “That they did.” He coughed again. “A man stays hopeful for a lot of years. But it was Mert I worried about most. Those bills wouldn’t stop. I kept going to the doctor, and those bills kept piling up, and this year we looked around and saw we didn’t have no more to sell. Then Martha called Mert at the church and said the doctor had called about a prospect for this operation. That sounded so good to both of us. Mert said we’d afford it somehow but there was only one way, and I didn’t want to sell what she was proposing we sell. So I rolled the dice, thinking that would solve all our problems if it worked. I could keep my land. Begin to farm again. Make some money. Pay back what I owed.” He coughed. “But it don’t matter now.”

  “What exactly did Mert propose you sell?”

  He coughed. “In the back room is a valise. Go get it.”

  I rose from the chair, walked to the back room, spotted the valise, and brought it back to Mr. Cahoon. I set down the valise in front of Mr. Cahoon but he didn’t touch it.

  “It’s all yours,” he said. “For the church, I mean. It’s all there—everything I stole plus interest. Count it and make sure.”

  I opened the valise. Inside were bound bundles of hundred dollar bills.

  “Fourteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Twelve thousand for what I stole. Plus two thousand extra for the trouble I put the church through.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  He coughed. “Mert will stay in an apartment in town. I got enough extra to provide a bit for her, and she’ll do okay with all her jobs. Maybe she can drop the mail route. She’ll be okay.”

  I stared at him, suddenly putting two and two together.

  He saw the surprise on my face and he laughed, a long, sorrowful laugh. Then he coughed and wiped away the blood with the handkerchief. “Here I was all these years sitting on the very thing that would set us free from our troubles. A man such as me loves my land, but here I was holding on to my land and being hopeful at the expenditure of everything else. Even my integrity.” He coughed again.

  “You sold your farm, Mr. Cahoon.”

  “I don’t need any dirt where I’m going.”

  “Where’s that exactly?”

  He removed the oxygen tube from his nose, grabbed both canes, and struggled to his feet. “Drive me over to the sheriff’s, Rowdy.”

  “To the sheriff’s?”

  “You heard me right. I’m going to jail.”

  It seemed a shame to me.

  Here was all the folks in our church raising a heap of money for a building when one of our own families was in desperate need. I said as much to the sheriff later, and he shook his head and exhaled noisily. He called Mert at the church and brought her and Clay into his office at the jailhouse where he talked to them for a long time. I stood outside the door and they talked in hushed voices for more than two hours. When they came out, the matter was settled. The money from the Cahoon’s land was going to go back to the church. Mert and Clay both insisted on that, the sheriff told me later. She and Clay were proud people. They hadn’t let their needs be known, and that was their undoing, Mert and Clay both admitted, but that was no reason the money shouldn’t go toward what it was originally intended for. The sheriff tried to talk them out of it, saying they could find another way, but Mert and Clay both put their feet down.

  Clay insisted on going straight to jail. The sheriff wouldn’t hear of it, but the Cahoons were insistent folks, so Clay spent two nights in the Cut Eye jail, then returned to his sickbed in Mert’s new apartment east of the city hall and barbershop.

  Halligan held a special congregational meeting the next Sunday after the service. A few folks wanted to throw the book at the Cahoons. A few others wanted Mert to resign from her job as church secretary, but Halligan said nothing doing.

  Mert and Clay came to the meeting. They hadn’t missed a Sunday in more than twenty-five years, and they weren’t about to start now. Halligan read a letter the Cahoons had written in advance, one where they both apologized for their transgressions. The apology was sincere, I didn’t doubt it. And afterward there were a lot of tears and handshaking. Folks hugged the Cahoons and apologized for not helping carry their burdens better.

  There was a new sense of resolve that the congregation undertook, a promise to look in better on folks to make sure they were okay. The next week a new visitation committee formed. The folks on the committee vowed they’d raise special funds to help folks throughout the community, and an offering was held right then and there. More than a thousand dollars was raised, with promise of more offerings to come, and the committee set about disbursing the funds right away in a way that could help the folks that needed it most.

  The following Friday, Clay Cahoon died. He passed away sitting in his chair in their new apartment in the city, and Mert asked me to take his funeral, so I did. Halligan secured permission from the new owner, and we buried Clay Cahoon on a quiet corner of the land that used to be their property. The burial plot was situated on a low rise overlooking a stream of fresh flowing water that started underground elsewhere on the land and bubbled to the surface and became a brook.

  Everyone in town turned out for the funeral. Clay Cahoon was well-known around these parts, and folks paid tribute to a man who loved to work outdoors, a man who loved his wife, and a man who hoped so hard for a better way of living that he grasped for that which he thought would make things right, even though it didn’t.

  No one excused his crime. There was a ripple of talk that theft was theft, and folks agreed with that, they did. But there was also widespread talk of forgiveness, of understanding that crimes often carry with them a great deal of complexity, and of renewed resolve to care for the needs of Mert Cahoon, the newest widow in church.

  The day after the funeral, Halligan Barker drove over to the parsonage and knocked on my door. His brow was furrowed and he shook in anger.

  “I just checked the county records,” he said. “The contract’s already notarized, and it can’t be undone. But I’m kicking myself for not checking this sooner. You’ll never guess who bought the Cahoons’ farm.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s an unnamed developer—some big company from out east—but that ain’t the half of it.” The sheriff balled up his fists tight.

  I shrugged. “What’s the whole of it?”

  “Mert and Clay didn’t know anything about what was going to happen to their land. Nobody did, that I can plainly see. The plans have been on file with the planning commission for more than two years, but they were all kept hush-hush at the courthouse. They’re gonna build a new tavern. Oh, it ain’t just a tavern. It’s a monstrosity. This one’s gonna be five times the size of the Sugar House. They want to attract folks from other states. It’s gonna have a gambling casino and a hotel, and an expanded brothel with girly shows each night. It’s even gonna have a full-course buffet restaurant—shoot, it’ll put the Pine Oak Café out of business. They’re even gonna build an airstrip out back so rich men can fly their planes in and
out for a weekend’s amusement. The town’s going to be ruined, Rowdy. Plumb ruined.”

  “Can anything stop it?”

  “Not a blamed thing. I drove by the property early this morning. A construction crew’s already on the location. They came from Oklahoma and they’ve got three shifts working around the clock. Foundation for the hotel’s already dug, and they’re already pouring concrete to build the airstrip. They want to get the strip built as soon as possible so they can fly in more investors as they build.”

  My eyebrows raised to the roof of my forehead in disbelief. “I can’t believe nobody knew about this.”

  The sheriff snarled. “Well, there’s been one man who’s known about it all along. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s majority owner of the unnamed company that’s developing it. When it came to the legalities for Cut Eye, this man railroaded the whole thing straight through.”

  “Who’d do such a thing?” I asked, feeling the tingles of foreboding that I was getting used to when it came to discussing town business.

  Halligan spat in the dirt next to my front steps. “None other than Mayor Oris Floyd.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Well, I waited for my trial, and October passed and November flew by in a jiffy, and then it was December 1946, and the weather turned cold even for Texas. A skiff of snow fell one morning, but by afternoon it was gone. Mostly the ground packed up cold and the wind blew hard from the northeast. Rain fell a few days but it dried up and more wind blew, and at night the wind snuck in through the walls of the parsonage with enough of a groan to make me check and see if the Springfield was still under my bed and loaded.

  Right around then we started work on our church building project. Cold ground notwithstanding, the fellas dug the septic field, and the inside walls of the church building were taken down to the bare studs in preparation for insulation and drywall. New gravel was poured and light fixtures and paint was ordered, and we started fixing up the parsonage at the same time. But I confess there was little excitement for the work all around.

  With the thought of this new development monstrosity looming right outside our town, folks talked mostly about how Cut Eye would be dying soon. The old Cut Eye, at least. A new Cut Eye was being built, a modern Cut Eye, and big money would soon be flowing up and down Highway 2 with all the greed and corruption that came along with it. There wasn’t anything one small community church could do to change things, folks admitted with a kick in the dust.

  Across town, the developers worked night and day on the casino and hotel. The airfield was built in a jiffy and airplanes started flying more investors in and out. I hated the development, but I did sneak a peek or two at those planes. There were Beech and Cessna, Aero and Luscombe. Small, single-prop fliers flown by wealthy ranchers and oilmen, businessmen from the city and their attorneys. My favorite private airplane was the Ryan Navion. A brand-new one flew in one morning and I saw the fella and his copilot climb out of the sliding canopy. Although I’d made more than a dozen jumps out of an airplane, I’d never actually landed in one. Maybe in thirty years when they let me out of jail I’d get to fly in one of those shiny new planes and even get to land. I pushed the thought far from my mind.

  Oh, all over town, it seemed development sprung up from the backside of nowhere. Roads were plowed through where cows had once grazed. A new apartment complex began. A field was leveled and graveled over for a new parking lot. The framing began in earnest for the main casino building—the one that would hold the new tavern and restaurant. Permits for the business of bringing in dancing girls were still being held up at a state level, but the mayor promised investors that was but a technicality that would soon be remedied.

  Right about then Oris Floyd stepped off the church deacon board. He was too busy with the new development project, and besides, the church wasn’t doing much advancement by comparison, he said with a laugh. That left just the sheriff and Deputy Roy on the deacon board, so Deuce Gibbons came on, and that meant three, and Deputy Roy allowed for a revision in the church constitution to make it legal.

  Church work became more difficult all around. Sunday after Sunday, attendance was down in the services. I gripped the pulpit with both hands and my messages were clear and bold. I kept up the visitation rounds and the men’s Bible study, the jail ministry, and the work projects on Saturdays. But it seemed the spark had left. The excitement of changing a community for the better was over. Our church was a fossil of an institution, folks muttered under their breath. An old-time establishment that didn’t matter for nothing in a dangerously modern town.

  There were a few bright spots along the way. One was that a bunch of the new folks started a new prayer meeting. The old meeting on Wednesday nights continued, but this one happened Saturday mornings, real early. At first only a handful came. Word trickled out and more and more began to join along. There was no great agenda at all. Just prayer. Prayer and more prayer and then more prayer still. That’s all we did. Pray.

  Of no small wonderment to me, my ministry of counseling folks began to boom, just like Bobbie had predicted it would back when she first showed me the ropes. A middle-aged father stopped by and wondered how he could help his teenage son. The teen was being ornery, making hard choices, stuffing cotton in his ears to all wisdom. I didn’t know much about parenting, but I listened to the fella for a long time, just like Bobbie said to do. I listened, and listened, and listened. And then I prayed with the fella. That was it.

  A married couple knocked on my door one evening and said they needed to talk. They was fighting all the time, they said, not listening to each other, and I didn’t know nothing about marriage neither, but Bobbie had shown me some straightforward verses earlier to prepare for such a knock on my door. Husbands, love your wives, I read to them, and when they left, well, they didn’t look quite as ornery toward each other anymore, although I figured they’d still have a long ways to go.

  Folks came out of the woodworks with all sorts of problems. One man hated his supervisor at the plant. Another fella cheated Uncle Sam on his taxes and now felt remorse. A woman wanted to stop gossiping but didn’t know how. Another was just mad all the time, yelling at her kids, saying she felt ready to explode.

  Other problems emerged, problems difficult even to talk about. Person after person came to me to unload, and I found it surprising, even startling to learn some of the things that went on behind closed doors within a community. I reckon it’s like that anywhere. I asked Bobbie about this—about why the counseling load had suddenly spiked. She said that when folks know the truth of your situation, or at least know you’re not perfect as a minister, then they start to open up more about the difficulties they’re going through. That, and it was nearing Christmas. Counseling loads always climbed around the holidays, she added.

  Gummer Lopez swung by the pine stand one Monday morning when I was out cutting firewood and asked to talk. His need for counsel proved far more pleasant than most. He’d been courting Emma Hackathorn for a few months now and boldly wondered aloud if a fella such as him would ever stand a chance asking Emma to marry him.

  “You love her with all your heart?” I asked, setting down my axe.

  He nodded.

  “She love you the same way?” I asked.

  He nodded again.

  “What’s the problem?”

  Oh, there were a heap of problems, Gummer said. She had the children, for one. And they liked him just fine, and he cared for them a great deal, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be any good as a stepfather to them. Then there was limited time between Emma’s husband passing and now. Gummer wasn’t sure if long enough had passed and worried what folks around town might say. Then there was the whole notion of marriage, Gummer admitted. He couldn’t rightly sort it through in his mind—being attached to one person for the rest of his life. He loved Emma, but he wasn’t sure if he was man enough to go the distance.

  “Gummer,” I said, looking at my axe blade, “I don’t know a hill of beans about marriage coun
seling, but the way I see it, marriage is kinda like baseball. Last month when Boston beat St. Louis in the World Series, every man in town’s got his ear glued to the radio—right?”

  He nodded.

  “I reckon the problem is you’re closing your eyes whenever you see the ball fly toward you—that’s what. But when it comes to playing in the series, Providence ordains it. Your body demands it. You yourself want to play ball. So step to the plate, man, put your fears to bat, and swing for the fences.”

  Gummer left with a smile. I didn’t ask him further what he intended to do, but I reckon he’d tell me when he figured it out for himself.

  Another bright spot was that Christmas 1946 came and went with no small amount of joyful fuss. Sunny and I spent every breakfast together now over at the café. She was talking up a storm and even reading a few words, and she drew and colored pictures for me every evening and brought them to me each morning at the café. She loved living with the Hackathorn children, and Emma was enjoying having another little girl around, she told me. Emma and Gummer were spending every wakeful hour together ever since the talk I had with Gummer, and I secretly hoped that if they’d get married one day, and if I ended up in the slammer for a long spell, that Gummer would end up raising my daughter for me. There were far worse plans for my daughter’s future, I reckoned. Far worse indeed. But those were all in our rearview mirror now.

  For Christmas I built Sunny a dollhouse and painted it up pink and yellow and leafy green. Bobbie made for her enormous families of rag dolls and stuffed animals—oh, it seemed like every week a new present went to the child. I borrowed a scroll saw and built Sunny a menagerie of birds to play with too. All the birds of Texas—bobwhite quail and Inca doves and band-tailed pigeons and eagles and Cooper’s hawks, roadrunners and mockingbirds and even a great blue heron.

  Sunny’s dollhouse was clean and bright, and Bobbie helped me cut out scraps of flowered wallpaper from some she had left over. Together we built Sunny a home she could delight in. We did.