Sarah Todd

by Chloe Garner

  Sarah sighed and pulled out her supply.

  “You’ll need to crush it finer to get it to steep,” she said.

  “I remember,” he said. “Daddy smoked it, too.”

  She watched him out of the room, then looked back at Jimmy.

  “I’m waitin’,” she said.

  “What do you intend to do?” he asked, his voice even.

  “Dunno yet,” she said. “Gonna have to find out exactly what happened.”

  “I killed ‘em,” Peter said. “That’s what happened. I want to know why in hell you think I care what you or anyone else thinks.”

  “‘Cause you killed two men,” Sarah said. “We don’t let that pass, here. Never did.”

  “I’m Peter Lawson,” the man said, straightening in his chair. “I do whatever I want.”

  “No you don’t,” Jimmy said, soft, like a promise. “You do what I want.”

  Peter shot him a look fit to turn water to vinegar.

  “You aren’t going to let her do anything to him,” Lise said. “He’s your brother. How would it look if a Todd were seen to punish a Lawson?”

  Sarah ran a tongue along her lip, giving Lise a long, measured look.

  “Seems to me y’all were all sequestered away in here when I came up,” she said. “How does it look for a Todd to be defendin’ a whole house full of Lawsons all by herself?”

  Lise narrowed her eyes.

  “They were drunk hooligans. Which is what started this problem in the first place. If we’d come down on them like they deserved, they’d just say we murdered a bunch more of them.”

  “Is that how it were?” Sarah asked, looking at Peter. “Were they drunk?”

  Peter looked at Jimmy, who nodded once.

  “We all were,” he said. Sarah twisted her head slightly.

  “That changes things. And you know it, Peter Lawson. Don’t you give me that ego of yours, when the truth is all you need.”

  “I don’t have to defend myself,” he said. Sarah took the cup of tea from Thomas with a quick, dry smile, and sipped at it once, then set it down on the table.

  “Y’all been gone a long time. You can come back in here, guns blazin’, and claim that the place has been yours the whole time, anyway, or you can earn it, same as your pa before you. Folk trusted the Lawsons to do right by them, tempers an’ all.” She glanced at Jimmy. “I say Elaine had a lot to do with that, and God help you now, tryin’ to do it without her, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m gonna do right by these people, and if that means gettin’ after Little Peter for doin’ wrong, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Don’t call him that,” Lise snapped. Sarah shrugged.

  “You prefer Petey?” she asked. “Peter Lawson’s ten years dead.”

  “Told you it would be the same fight,” Thomas said, going to sit down.

  “Shut up, Thomas,” three of the brothers said in unison. He seemed pleased by this.

  “You aren’t a Lawson,” Lise said. “You can’t do anything to him.”

  “Can and will, should I see fit,” Sarah said. “You choose to protect him, I’ll go through you.”

  “Is that a threat?” Lise asked. Sarah liked how easy it was to provoke the woman. It just made her want to do it more.

  “No one’s making threats,” Jimmy said. “That’s just where Sarah is. We knew that the town would have changed without us, and it would move on some without us, as well. They respect us, but not if we go around killing their boys with no cause.”

  “You can’t mean that you’re going to turn Peter over to her,” Lise said. “I won’t stand for it.”

  “Then sit,” Sarah said, standing up.

  “I’m not saying that, either,” Jimmy said. “This is tricky, and we’ll figure it out. No one’s turning Petey over to a mob.”

  Sarah looked at Jimmy and found his eyes hard on her. She shook her head

  “I’ll do what I have to do, Jimmy.”

  “Not if we...” Lise started.

  “Shut up, Lise,” Peter said, seeing what Sarah saw on Jimmy’s face. “Just shut the hell up.”

  “You’ll do what I permit you to do,” Jimmy said. “I know you have to do something, but I’m not going to let you do anything you want.”

  “I ain’t your lapdog, Jimmy,” Sarah said, putting her tea down on the table carefully and standing to face him. “I ain’t ever been anyone’s lapdog, not now and not ever goin’ to. I’ll do what I see fit, and if I have to come through you, I’ll do it.”

  “Sarah,” Thomas pleaded. “There’s got to be a way.”

  She didn’t look at him.

  “Little Peter killed a man. Two. Offers no defense of himself,” Sarah said. “I killed men for less than that. I’ll talk to the folk who was there and try to be evenhanded, but I ain’t makin’ exceptions, not for Lawsons, not for nobody.”

  Jimmy’s jaw flexed.

  The room was silent.

  The whole house was silent.

  “I won’t let you kill him, Sarah,” he said. “You need to know that.”

  “I know that y’all think that the meanin’ of bein’ a Lawson is that you can do whatever you like, murder a man, and no one’ll lift a finger to you. It ain’t true. Not in Lawrence. Not no more.”

  “I think you should go,” Wade said. “If you intend to threaten Peter, we don’t want you here, and this conversation does no one any good.”

  “We aren’t done,” Jimmy said.

  “Jimmy, throw her out,” Lise said.

  “She isn’t one of us,” Rich said.

  “Never has been,” Wade agreed.

  “Shut up, all of you,” Jimmy said. Sarah just watched him.

  He could threaten her, if he wanted to. She realized this. He held a trump card. She’d shot Pete in the chest in cold blood, up in the mine, and covered it up from everyone. All he had to do was tell the people in town that’s what she’d done, and any authority she had would be gone. It didn’t matter that she’d had her reasons, or that she was acting in the best interest of the town, whereas Peter had likely gotten in a drunken misadventure at the tavern that had resulted in shooting and bodies. By her own standards, what she’d done was worse.

  She knew he held family above all else. And that threatening to kill Peter had probably been pushing it too far. Oh, but it felt good to rile Lise. She couldn’t regret that. Worth it, at twice the cost.

  He was evaluating, putting everything on that feather-sensitive balance in his head, determining if he thought she were worth it, in the end.

  If she just disappeared, she doubted anyone would try to do anything about it. Not if everyone thought the Lawsons had been involved. Not if everyone knew that, if the Lawsons had done it, it had been with Jimmy’s blessing.

  Say what she might, he still held that much power in Lawrence.

  “Cards are all played, Jimmy,” she said softly. She wasn’t pleading, she wasn’t pushing. She put herself in the position she was in, and she was prepared. No advance, no retreat. Just Sarah and Jimmy standing in a room deciding what happened next.

  “You mediate drunken fights at the tavern?” Jimmy asked.

  “Not often,” she said. “Everyone knows the tavern’s another country, as far as I’m concerned.”

  He nodded.

  “The fight was in the street in front of it. Nod if that’s true, Petey.”

  Peter nodded once. The room was holding its collective breath, but no one argued or tried to intervene, now. Not now that Sarah and Jimmy were actually talking.

  “What of that?” Jimmy asked. Sarah shrugged.

  “Depends on who got killed and who done the killing,” she said. “One of the good sons kills scum, I might let it pass, dependin’ on circumstances, I might drag him around town after my horse for a couple hours.”

  “You were both drunk. He said things about the Lawsons you thought were unacceptable and, after telling him to take them back and being rejected, you shot him. The friend who died was legit
imate self defense. Nod if that’s true, Petey.”

  Sarah let her eyes dart over to Peter, who gave another sharp little nod.

  “That holds up with the other men there,” Sarah said, leaving a warning in her tone, “which it ain’t likely to, after tonight, but I’ll get to the bottom of it, I’d say he deserves a horsewhipping out front of the general store.”

  “You’d do it?” Jimmy asked.

  “‘Course,” Sarah said.

  “I can live with that,” Jimmy said.

  “No,” Lise said. “You can’t...”

  Jimmy held up a hand, a soft motion that was even more fatal than a sharp one would have been. She fell silent.

  “Even Lawsons fall under the common laws,” Jimmy said. “You all take this as your warning. The gun on your hip and your last name don’t combine to be a license to do whatever the hell you feel like. Sarah will beat you for it in public, and you know I’ll do it in private.” He blinked once, like a snake, making Sarah try to remember when he’d last done it. “That’s how it is.”

  She gave him a head dip.

  “That’s how it is,” she said. She looked down at her tea, draining the entire cup in two swallows and putting her hat back on.

  “I’ll talk to the folk in town tomorrow,” she said.

  “We have work up in the mountains,” he said. “I’m not going to slow it for this.”

  “I want to be there,” she said, a slight warning in her voice. He nodded.

  “You will be. I’ll come find you in the afternoon to interview laborers.”

  Only Jimmy Lawson.

  Lise made to argue with him, but the air had gone out of her. Sarah doubted she’d be visiting his bed tonight. Not after all that.

  She looked around the room.

  “Night, all. Thanks for the tea, Thomas.”

  “I’ll make sure they get gremlin for the kitchen,” he told her. “No reason they shouldn’t know how to make it.”

  She touched her hat, and turned back to find Jimmy waiting in the doorway for her. Still feeling just a touch uneasy, she walked toward him, letting him take her elbow as they made their way to the front door.

  “Don’t push me,” he said, his voice very low. “There’s a line.”

  “I know,” Sarah said. “Don’t change what I gotta do.”

  He was so hard, but so was she.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Don’t make no difference to me,” she said with a meaningful pause, “either way.”

  He nodded once, then let go of her elbow. Outside, her horse was tied to a rail of the porch. She untied the animal and mounted up.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jimmy said. She touched her hat and turned the black horse away from the house and past the corpse of the dying bonfire toward home.

  Threading one needle after another.

  ––—

  Thomas showed up in the morning after she finished her tea.

  “Jimmy send you?” she asked as she let him in.

  “Not as such,” he told her, heading to the office and sitting down. “I just wanted to... say somethings that he might not say.”

  “Oh?” she asked, coming to sit down across from him.

  “You two,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “I’ll never understand.”

  “What’s to understand?” Sarah asked. Thomas gave her a funny look, then shook his head again.

  “He laid into Peter last night after you left,” Thomas said. “Told us all that we were stupid for not seeing that you were right, that we need to hold ourselves to the same standards we do everyone else, and that just killing people because they say things we don’t like isn’t going to fly.”

  Sarah shrugged, internally quite pleased, but not showing it. She hadn’t completely burnt that bridge.

  “Lise is furious,” Thomas said, “but I think everyone else got it. I’m still not sure I believe that you’re going to whip him in public, but I don’t think anyone’s going to try to stop you.”

  “I s’pect I’ve made a permanent enemy in Lise,” Sarah said.

  “I suspect you’re right,” Thomas told her. Sarah didn’t tell him that she was pretty sure she’d had a lifelong enemy in the woman the first time Lise had tried to use seduction to manipulate Jimmy, but she thought it pretty loudly.

  “Anything else?” Sarah asked. Thomas gave her the same funny look again.

  “You’d really walk away from everything with Jimmy over this?”

  “This or anythin’ else we decided we couldn’t come to an agreement on,” she said. “I ain’t a Lawson, Thomas. Your pa made it clear the day after your ma’s funeral.”

  “He was wrong,” Thomas said. “You’re one of us, and sending you away was the wrong thing to do. He just couldn’t deal with you being around when you reminded him of her so much.”

  “You think so?” Sarah asked.

  “I know it,” Thomas told her. She smiled, shaking her head.

  “Your pa hated me from the day I first showed up at your house. I wasn’t a Lawson, and I was inconvenient to boot. He never had a handle on how to treat little girls, and he was glad to see the back of me the very first day he could get away with it.”

  “He wasn’t a bad man, Sarah,” Thomas argued.

  “Didn’t say he was,” Sarah answered. “Just that he weren’t a good one, neither.”

  Thomas sighed.

  “I still think you’re one of us, even if we didn’t get you to come with us, all those years ago.”

  “If your family held a vote, you’d lose,” Sarah said, standing. “I got folk to talk to.”

  “Can I come with you?” Thomas asked. “I know it’s going to make things harder in town, but it would make things easier at home.”

  “You keep your mouth shut?” Sarah asked.

  “You know me better than to need to ask,” Thomas told her and she gave him a nod, going to get her hat off the wall.

  “You can listen, but you speak out of turn once and I’ll send you home quicker’n you can count.”

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  She went to go find the black horse, who had wandered a ways from the house and appeared to be inspecting a hole in the ground as if something were going to pop out and scare him.

  “Dumber’n mud pajamas,” Sarah said, grabbing him by the mane and dragging him back to the barn to saddle him. Thomas waited, then followed her into town.

  There was already an assembly there.

  “He can’t be here,” someone called as Sarah rode by. “He’s a Lawson.”

  She continued on to Granger’s before dismounting, looking around at the assembled men and women. Most of them were locals, but there were plenty of strangers just here for the show. She thought she might have even recognized a few of them as bandits, trying to blend in through the crowd.

  “I want him hung,” a woman screamed.

  Sarah leaned against the walkway in front of Granger’s and let the opinions pour in.

  People needed to feel heard, even if she didn’t actually listen.

  Finally, she’d had enough.

  “Who was actually there, that night?” she asked, hoisting herself up onto the plank walkway and standing so she could see. Hands went up.

  “Come on up here,” she said. “Everyone who was actually there to see and hear it, y’all head into Granger’s and I’ll deal with you individually.”

  “I want him hanging,” the woman screamed again. “He killed Winnie, and I want to see him dead for that.”

  She was up onto the walkway, charging at Sarah with the unmistakable aura of entitlement that she should be there.

  “And you would be...” Sarah asked. “Wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend?”

  Sarah was of the mind that the generations should separate themselves visually by going off their Perpeto for a few years as they had more generations behind them, but some women wanted to look eighteen forever, and Sarah poked fun at them any time she got opportunity. Vanity and
intelligence rarely went together.

  “I’m his wife, and I want justice,” the woman said.

  “Your husband was out drinking and picking fights with the Lawsons and you were just at home hopin’ he would behave himself well enough that he made it home alive another night,” Sarah said. “That about size things up?”

  “He didn’t pick a fight,” the woman said. “He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

  “So you weren’t at home hopin’ like hell he didn’t get too drunk and start mouthin’ off,” Sarah said. “You was here.”

  “Everyone says,” the woman said.

  “I heard it all happened in the tavern, anyway,” Sarah said. “I don’t care what happens to your husband inside that place.”

  “It wasn’t,” the woman screamed, beside herself. “It was outside. They all came outside.”

  Willie and Paulie were actually pretty good at ejecting violence at the last minute so that Sarah would have to deal with it instead of them, so this part of the story Sarah actually believed.

  She shrugged.

  “You got your sources, I got mine.”

  “He’s a Lawson,” the woman pleaded, her pitch rising. “A’ course they’re gonna close ranks and lie through their teeth to protect one of their own.”

  Sarah turned to face the milling crowd.

  “I ain’t gonna hang a Lawson,” she said loudly. “This is a grandson of Eli Lawrence and the son of Peter and Elaine Lawson we’re talkin’ about, same as the one standin’ here with me now. This town owes them a lot, and while they ain’t got free rein to do whatever they like ‘round here, anyone callin’ for me to kill one of ‘em is a fool.”

  “See?” the woman screeched. “See? She’s biased. She’s one of ‘em. I tol’ you.”

  Sarah turned passively to go into Granger’s, letting Thomas follow at his own pace. The men inside were milling much like the ones outside, but their numbers were much smaller. Sarah went to sit on the counter by the register, letting them form a ring around her.

  “I’m gonna make this real simple for you boys,” she said. “Some of you were at the Lawsons’ last night, some of you weren’t. Some of you are so hung over you ain’t seeing so well yet. I ain’t gonna take lyin’ and I ain’t gonna take bias against the Lawsons. They’re here, they’re gonna stay here, and you can deal with it or you can’t. Ain’t my problem.”