by Rilla Askew
“Yes, ma’am. But, then, like I said, there might’ve been some irregularities.”
“What does that mean?
“How the sheriff went about things, well, let me just say, Sheriff Holloway’s a fellow who doesn’t necessarily hold real tight to regulation.” Langley unfolded his lanky frame and stood up, towering over her. “Welp, just thought I’d let you know. We may be on opposite sides of the aisle, but we both serve the same constituency down there.”
“The D.A.’s got to uphold the law!” she burst out.
“Oh, well,” the senator drawled, “probably not if he thinks he hadn’t got a case. Might’ve helped if the sheriff had got himself a proper search warrant. Anyhow, I didn’t say he’s definitely going to drop them, just said he’s thinking about it. That’s all he told me.” Langley started for the door, paused and turned back. “One thing about it, ma’am, Tom Waters, the county judge, county sheriff, they’re all in the same boat you and me are.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He cocked his shaggy head, gazed down at her. “Why, we all got to get elected if we intend to serve.”
Monica remained standing for a long time after the senator left. What did he mean by that last remark? House Bill 1830 was a win-win, that’s what Leadership kept saying. A win-win. Dear God, she couldn’t go into committee like this, her mind a whirling mess thinking about how her fabulously high-profile achievement was on the verge of being ripped away! And yet there was no way for her not to think about it. She lifted the receiver to call Charlie, slammed it down again. No! She would figure this out herself. Oh, damn that Langley for coming in here and filling her mind with such crap—that was just exactly what he’d intended, wasn’t it? That sly old lawyerly aw-shucks-ma’am act. He wanted to strip her of her confidence, make her fumble, make her second-guess herself. She was not going to let that happen. All right then, what to do . . . what to do . . .
A press conference. Of course. She would fix the cowardly D.A., and that old fox Langley, too, and she knew just how to do it: she would put in a call to every friendly contact she had at the local networks, the newspapers. Standing in the rotunda downstairs, she would praise Latimer County law enforcement to the hilt. In particular she’d want to thank District Attorney Tom Waters for having the courage to uphold the state’s laws, no matter who transgressed them, because no one is above the law, and Tom Waters is a man of principle, she’d say, a man willing to prosecute transgressors no matter how personally difficult the circumstance might be for him. Then just let him try and slither out of pressing charges!
She had to get on it today, though, right now, this minute, in time for the clips to make the evening newscasts. No, God no—her hair. She couldn’t do it today. She’d have to arrange things for tomorrow morning. Surely that would be soon enough. Just so long as she held her press conference before the D.A. gave one or, heaven forbid, quietly dropped the charges. Monica jabbed her knuckle on the intercom button so as not to chip a nail. “Beverly, bring your Rolodex and come here a minute. And please tell me you’ve managed to get Kevin on the phone!”
Monday | February 18, 2008 | 8:45 A.M.
Bob Brown’s farm | Cedar
The whole time I was walking out to the farm I kept wishing I had on my hoodie, but it was in Aunt Sweet’s dirty clothes hamper with blood on it so I’d just put on two shirts. All yesterday’s sun was gone, the sky was dark cloudy, turning cold. I’ve walked home from town a bunch of times, it’s only like three miles, and then the gravel turnoff, but seemed to me like right then it was taking forever. I had to jump down in the bar ditch to hide every time I seen a car coming, and then I’d climb out and walk fast to try to keep warm. I reminded myself to get my feeding coat out of the hall closet before I go. Me and Grandpa don’t feed anymore but we used to, or I used to. That used to be part of my chores, slop the pigs, feed the goats, throw scratch to the chickens, till Tipper and Anna killed the rooster last November, coming at it from both sides inside the chicken pen, with me yelling and running from the barn to stop them, which I couldn’t. I wanted to hide that old bloody rooster but I knew that wouldn’t do any good. My grandpa would just ask me what went with it, and I’d have to tell. Sure enough, when he got home and seen what the dogs done, he went right to the house for his .22. Once that starts, he said, they won’t never quit, they’re no use to anybody, and I said they’re use to me, Tipper is. Grandpa looked at Tipper wagging her tail with her tongue out and Anna skulking in a wide half circle about as far away from Grandpa as she could get—she knew she did a bad thing, but I don’t think Tipper ever knew it—and then he looked at me real still a minute, turned, and carried the rifle back to the house.
He never once blessed me out for not shutting the gate properly, but the next Saturday morning he got me up early, told me to come help him, and we loaded the goats and the two brood sows in the trailer, lashed the chickens in their crates in the truck bed, and Grandpa called Anna and she jumped into the cab between us, and we took them all to the sale barn at Wister. We had to give Anna away to a kid from Summerfield because wouldn’t nobody buy her—she was too old—but we sold all the rest. Since then we been out of the farming business, but we still call our place the farm. That happened in November, a little before Thanksgiving, right around the time my grandpa started to change. Or change maybe isn’t the right word. He was still like himself, only fierce.
Then, over Christmas is when Tipper disappeared. I was staying in town for Christmas break so I didn’t know, but when Uncle Terry took me back to the farm, she wasn’t in the yard to meet me. I whistled and called for her. I knew something was wrong by how Grandpa and Uncle Tee looked at each other. She’d went hunting on her own one night, Grandpa said, and never came home. We drove around the country roads and checked down in the creek bottoms, we even took a flashlight and went into the old coal mine back in the ridge behind our place, calling and calling, but we never found her.
Man, I was freezing. I tried walking faster. I ticked off the chores I needed to do before heading out to the cemetery: get the mail, check the propane tank gauge, fill the wood box, light the stove in the bathroom and leave the tap dripping in case it gets really cold. Haul off the trash. When I reached the gravel turnoff to our place, I looked in the mailbox. Nothing but an Alco flyer and this week’s specials from Roy’s Cardinal Food Store. I took out running, covered the half mile to the house in no time, but when I got to our yard, I stopped.
My aunt’s house in town is kind of regular-looking and brick, but ours is real old. It sits where the first son of the original Robert John Brown built his own house after the Browns came here from Mississippi as illegal immigrants—that’s what Grandpa says, or that’s what he’s been saying since November—and it’s got a peaked roof like a pyramid hat and a big porch and two front doors. There was yellow plastic tape crisscrossing both doors and the porch posts and windows. I could see black writing on the yellow plastic, POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS. I didn’t know they did that. They must’ve did it after the sheriff put me in a headlock and wrestled me into his backseat for the ride to Aunt Sweet’s house. I looked yonder at the barn. It was the same, yellow strips across the wide open barn door. Where’s the truck? I thought. Grandpa always parks in front of the barn. I went around behind the house, but I didn’t see the truck back there, either. Now how was I going to get to the cemetery? I’d never drove on actual roads yet, but I’ve been hauling trash to the gulley and driving to the mailbox since last year when I got tall enough to reach the pedals with only two cushions behind me. I figured that old dirt road to Brown’s Prairie Cemetery wouldn’t be any problem, but I couldn’t get there without the truck—at least not quick enough to be to Aunt Sweet’s house in time for supper. It’s almost ten miles. I started feeling mad.
I stomped onto the porch and grabbed one of the yellow tapes covering the back door and tried to jerk it down but it just stretched, so I took out the Swiss Army knif
e I’d snuck away from my cousin who stole it from the preacher and cut the tape. I cut down every yellow tape at the back of the house, and then I went to the front and got all that and wadded it in a ball and took it to the burn barrel. Then I went to the barn. Our barn’s pretty old, too, maybe even older than the house. Nobody uses that kind of barn around here anymore. They all got pole barns and steel sheds delivered on trucks and set up by the company. I had to reach up high where the tape was nailed to the outside wall, and I wadded that bunch, got the kerosene off the porch and poured it over the whole mess in the burn barrel, and then I went to the house for some matches.
I was standing at the kitchen window thinking how that yellow plastic might make a terrible smoke and some neighbor might see and drive over to check, and then they’d be wanting to know how come I wasn’t in school and where was my grandpa and who smashed up my face and all kinds of questions I didn’t feel like talking about, so I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t light it but just haul it out to the trash ditch, when I seen something move inside the open square of the barn door. I eased over behind the kitchen door for the .22, and that’s when I found out my grandpa’s rifle was gone. Well, that made me even madder. They got no right to just take a person’s gun, I thought, it’s in the Constitution! I went to the window and looked at the barn door again. I didn’t see anything now. Probably it was just the wind blowing an old feed sack, I told myself. I stepped real quiet onto the back porch.
Out past the smokehouse I could see Sugar in Mr. Herrington’s pasture, grazing with her head down. That’s when I got my next idea. I went down the steps and stopped at the woodpile and got me a stick of wood and walked on out to the barn, stood at the door and called, “Anybody here?” A stirred-up pigeon flapped across from one of the rafters. I waited awhile. I didn’t hear nothing, so I ran in fast and jumped up on the stall and reached high on the wall for the old bridle. It was stuck or something, I had to use both hands and I jerked it a bunch of times and got it down finally and raced out the door. I didn’t stop till I was back up on the porch. I had to drop the bridle to get my breath, it made a loud chink on the porch planks, and I stood doubled over with my hands on my knees. My heart was pounding like crazy. I’d lost my stick of wood. I watched the barn door some more. Nothing. All right, I said. Okay.
I went back inside the house for an apple. My grandpa buys ’em by the bagful at Roy’s Cardinal Food Store in Wilburton on account of they’re cheaper that way, but when I looked in the bottom drawer of the icebox, the bag of apples was gone. So were the potatoes and carrots. And then, when I got to looking, so was pretty much everything else, the milk and orange juice and cheese and baloney, even the jar of pickles. Alls that was left was the Arm & Hammer box and the tub of butter and the stuff in the door, pepper sauce and mustard and ketchup and jelly. Well, that made me maddest of all. They’d took my grandpa’s gun and stole all our food and taped up our house! It wasn’t right. I could see why my grandpa was getting so fierce about everything. Plus, it looked like they’d got his truck, too, because it wasn’t here, it wasn’t at Sweet’s house, and Grandpa sure wasn’t out someplace driving it around. And now with no apples, what was I going to use to catch Sugar? And then I thought, Well, how about sugar? She’d probably like that. So I grabbed the sugar bowl off the table and went out to the back fence.
When I whistled, she raised her head, and pretty soon here she came, trotting across the field. I climbed through the barbed wire and stood with the sugar bowl behind me because I didn’t want her to know I didn’t have any apples for her today. The reason I call her Sugar is on account of the white spots on her rump that look like sugar sprinkled on top of the rusty roan color because she’s part Appaloosa, or that’s what Grandpa says. I don’t know what Mr. Herrington calls her. Him and my grandpa don’t talk anymore. They had a fight about something Mr. Herrington said in church, and right after that’s when me and Grandpa took our membership and started going around. That was like about three years ago, and now Mr. Herrington and Grandpa act like they don’t see each other when they see each other, so I never heard what he named her. But I don’t want you to think I had it in my mind to steal the neighbor’s horse. I just wanted to borrow her to get to the cemetery to visit my mother, then I aimed to bring her right back.
Monday | February 18, 2008 | Morning
Brown’s farm | Cedar
Through a small hole in the barn wall Luis watches the boy. He tells himself he has no reason to be afraid because of a boy, but he is afraid. The boy is a lightskin, he has been beaten—his eyes are bruised like raw liver—and he is too young to be alone. Someone will soon come to be with him. Maybe the same someone who hit him. Luis knows he should hide himself, he should crawl back inside the small space where he is safe, but the boy is trying to capture the red mare, and Luis cannot stop watching. His hands ache to touch the mare’s neck, glide the bit between her teeth. He could bridle her so easy. How many years since he worked the horses? Many years now, since his youngest, Miguel, was very small. Luis watches the boy raise his palm to the mare’s mouth, but the boy is not smooth and cunning with the bit, and the mare shies, trots away a little distance, stands shaking her head up and down. She turns her head to the boy, snorts once, a soft laugh, looks back across the pasture toward the line of trees. She is joking with him. She will wait for more sugar. The boy returns to the fence for the white bowl; he walks toward her again, talking softly, his hand open, the bridle in his other hand behind his back. The boy is not skillful but he is very patient. Again and again he tries to capture the mare.
A car is coming! No, a big truck. Luis recognizes the sound of diesel motor. Quickly he leaves the knothole, goes as fast as he can across the barn, crawls inside the wooden bin.
He lies very still, breathing hard. The truck door slams. A man is calling beside the house, the same word over and over:¡Dus-tee! ¡Dus-tee! Luis knows he is calling for the boy. He wishes the boy would come quickly so the man will go away. There are footsteps crunching the dry grass outside the barn, and then the man is inside the barn. The word is not so loud now, curled up on the end like a question. ¿Dustee? The footsteps walk all around the floor of the barn, the dull thump of hard-heeled boots on soft wood, so near that Luis is afraid to turn his head to peer through the wooden slats, afraid to breathe hardly, afraid his thundering heart will betray him.
Luis closes his eyes, makes the sign of the cross with one finger, without moving his arm. But the man walks away, goes out of the barn, and Luis breathes again. Soon the word is coming from beside the fence where the boy tried to catch the mare. ¡Dus-tee! Silence. The faint chink of the steel bridle, then silence again. Heavy bootsteps as the man walks quickly past the open barn door, and the loud motor starts, and then a great roar as the truck drives away.
After a long while Luis turns his head, peers through the slats, but all he can see is the splintery barn floor, soft with hay dust and bird droppings. His stomach groans. He is thirsty. But he tells himself that this time he will wait for the night. Only when no light shows between the slats, then will he climb out and go for food. He breathes slowly, deeply. Growing quiet. After a little while, he begins to pray.
Monday | February 18, 2008 | 9:55 A.M.
Latimer County Courthouse | Wilburton, Oklahoma
Sweet Kirkendall was not a person who ran late but here she was pulling up to the courthouse at almost ten o’clock. Dadgum Terry’s hide, he was so dadgummed stubborn. She grabbed her purse from the floorboard and hurried in through the side door and up the stairs, her boots thunking on the tile steps; she slipped into the courtroom and sat on the nearest bench before she realized that nothing had started yet. The judge wasn’t even here, or the D.A. or anybody, only a few family members scattered around the room. Sweet sat tapping her boots, digging in her purse for her Tums, glancing up at the wall clock—she’d been hurrying so fast it was hard to stop. She considered going back out to the hall to see if the lawyer from Sti
pe’s office was there.
Somehow, communicating through the not-real-smart girl at the answering service over the weekend, Sweet hadn’t quite got it straight if the lawyer would meet her here today or if she was supposed to go to McAlester and give them a check first. Sweet’s chest tightened with the familiar money dread. They were going to have to cash in Terry’s retirement CD, she’d already figured that out. He was going to have a fit when she told him—but it couldn’t be helped! Where else were they going to get the money? She wasn’t about to leave her daddy’s fate in the hands of some Legal Aid lawyer! People in this state got sent to prison for decades on just the least little old drug charges, and the majority of them were represented by Legal Aid. Sweet had no idea how much worse her daddy’s case was going to be, but she thought probably a lot. She bit her lip, started to stand up, but then several young men in orange coveralls started coming up the stairs, crowding her view through the glass doors, so she sat back down.
They filed in like a work gang, five skinny white boys in handcuffs and one Indian and Pastor Garcia, and her father at the end, trailed by a big deputy with a dark crew cut. In spite of how upset she was, Sweet felt a rush of pride. Sixty-four years old but he moved like a man half that age: small, tough-boned, his thinning hair combed back neatly over his bald spot. The light from the big windows reflected off his glasses. He didn’t look at her, even though he had to know she was there—he walked by not six feet away—but followed the others into the row of seats to her right. The big deputy sat in the row behind them. Oh, it killed her to see her daddy in handcuffs. It just cut her to the quick. The assistant district attorney, a skinny guy with a huge Adam’s apple who’d moved here from Arkansas, came in and sat at his table with his suit coat open, and in a moment the pretty ponytailed court reporter slipped in from the back, took her place next to the judge’s bench—Sweet had served on jury duty before, this part was familiar—and Mr. Cramer the court clerk called out, “All rise,” and Judge Yates entered. “You may be seated.” Everybody sat down.