by Amy Stewart
But what of the next Anna Kayser? William Conklin had shown only a passing interest in anything I did. At best I could hope that he’d consider the fifth floor to be my realm, and leave me to run it as I saw fit. At worst—and honestly, this was what I suspected would happen—he’d never come to my defense, or take a risk for me, or champion one of my causes.
Norma told me that it was about time I championed my own causes. But a jail is like a miniature army (to put it in terms that Norma would understand), with a commander, and troops following orders, and a line of accountability that goes not to the president, but to an even more capricious and unpredictable elected party: the Board of Freeholders. I could champion my own causes all day long, but I could also champion myself right out of a job.
It was a dispiriting few days, then, as I, along with everyone else at the jail, awaited the vote tally and the name of the man who was to take the office of sheriff. I saw very little of Sheriff Heath during that time. He seemed to be consumed with putting his papers in order for his successor. When he wasn’t working at that, he went out on as many calls with his deputies as he could, for old time’s sake. I wasn’t invited along, but I watched them come and go from the windows on the fifth floor.
This, too, seemed a foretelling of the days to come. I could imagine William Conklin rushing out with his favorite deputy—who wouldn’t be me, I just knew it—and only realizing once he was at the scene that there were women and children to be looked after, and that he should’ve brought a matron to help. The idea would be a fleeting one, easily vanquished.
The results were due to be announced on the Monday after the election. Norma’s newspapers arrived in batches twice daily. Because we lived so far out of town, it was not unusual for the morning editions to come in the afternoon, and the afternoon or evening editions to turn up the next day. That was fine on an ordinary day, but in the wake of an election such as this one, it wouldn’t do.
On that Monday I was still in my dressing-gown, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, when Norma stumped in from the barn and ordered me to get dressed. “We’ll go as far as Ridgewood and see what they have to tell us, but we might have to ride all the way into Hackensack. You’ll want to meet your new boss, anyway.”
“William Conklin and I are already acquainted,” I said.
She frowned at that. “Fix yourself up. I want you hatted and booted by nine.”
At her insistence I put on my best uniform. Fleurette was working down in Fort Lee that day, so the two of us went to town on our own.
The news-stand at the Ridgewood train station had a bit in the way of early returns, but nothing that mattered to us. New Jersey had gone for Hughes for president, and opinions were divided over whether Wilson would carry the country. Senator Frelinghuysen advanced from the state senate to the national seat, and state senator Edge won the governor’s seat.
“They certainly went for the Republicans,” Norma said as she squinted at the results.
“Well, everyone likes Joe Frelinghuysen, and even the Democrats wanted Mr. Edge for governor,” I said.
“That’s the most you’ve ever had to say about politics,” Norma said.
“I had a stake in it. Let’s go on to Hackensack.”
Norma picked up a paper at the station and read it on the train. There was plenty of chatter among the passengers about the election, but it mostly concerned the race for president, and speculation on how New York might’ve voted. No one seemed to have a thing to say about the office of sheriff.
It wasn’t until the train arrived in Hackensack that I began to feel truly uneasy. The news-stands there had no better information than what we’d heard in Ridgewood, but there was a burble of conversation all around us that seemed to suggest that the Republicans had made a clean sweep of it.
Oddly, my first worry was for Sheriff Heath. He would be out of a job, and I would not. The idea of working for John Courter had never been allowed to take root in my mind, and it was only barely creeping in at that moment.
Norma pushed her way through the crowded train station and I followed. Out on the street, it was business as usual: the bunting had come down, the campaign signs were gone, and the air of merriment and expectation had given way to the ordinary bustle of a Monday morning. The lack of any sign of the election—the noticeable absence of it—put a very firm line in my mind. There was everything that came before November 7, and there was now.
I had not prepared myself for the question of how different those two periods of time might be. I’d been so busy trying to do my job, and to stay out trouble, that I hadn’t even sensed that a line was being drawn right down the middle of my life—but here it was.
There was more of a crowd at the courthouse, where the votes were being tallied and announced. I was overtaken by a sudden urge to steer clear, to duck inside the side door at the jail, and to run upstairs to the female section, where I might spend the day on the most ordinary of activities for my inmates, consumed by routine, until someone came upstairs to tell me the news.
But Norma marched right into the scrum of reporters and spectators gathered around the courthouse steps and demanded to know the latest results. I kept away from her. My face was suddenly very hot and I thought I might have a fever. There were so many people talking all at once that I couldn’t take any of it in. I started to feel unaccountably dizzy until I realized that I was holding my breath.
Then Norma turned around and stared at me. There were so many people in between the two of us that our view of each other came intermittently as people passed back and forth. Norma was a grim-countenanced woman on the best of days, but I knew how to read her expressions and didn’t have to be told.
I turned and tried to go back up Essex Street, to the train station, as if to turn back the morning like the hands of a clock. But Norma was too fast and caught me by the elbow.
I wouldn’t look at her. The words just drifted around, attached to no one.
“It’s a loss for Heath and for Conklin. John Courter’s already moving into the sheriff’s office. You’d better go on over there.”
But I kept on. Never had a train station seemed like such a refuge.
Norma shuffled along beside me. “It’s no good to run off. You knew it could happen.”
I dodged three young men laughing and elbowing each other on the curb. What did they have to celebrate? I had a sudden urge to knock someone over and hoped, for the sake of general peace and orderliness, that no one stepped in my way and gave me the chance.
Norma’s legs were shorter but she had no trouble in keeping up. Nothing ever stopped Norma.
“You’re John Courter’s deputy now,” Norma called.
I wasn’t and I never would be.
“Of course you’re free to run home, but those inmates of yours are locked inside.”
That stopped me. What of my inmates? I was their link to the world outside, to the courts, to whatever sort of future they might wish for. Their lives could change on the whim of the voters, even if they never met the man who lived in the sheriff’s apartment.
John Courter would live in the Heath family’s apartment. I had never even allowed myself to imagine that. It was a cramped and dull little space, but Mrs. Heath had exerted considerable effort to make it her own, with her doilies and her embroidered pillows, and the little shelf of books on the wall, and the sheriff’s overcoat on a peg in the corner.
All of that was gone, wasn’t it? It had all been carted off.
I stood a few blocks away from the courthouse and the adjoining jail-house and thought about what those places had come to mean to me. I had fought vigorously within the walls of the courthouse, at first to protect my own family, and then to defend my inmates.
It was there that I met Sheriff Heath for the first time. He’d stopped me on the courthouse steps when I went to lodge a complaint against the man who was then harassing my family, and as we spoke, a deputy ran over and called for him to attend to some other, more important matt
er. I felt so irrelevant as he ran off to answer to his duties and left me to wander on back home. He had a sense of purpose about him and I did not.
All of that changed when he hired me on.
It was unbearable to imagine going back to that old life of mine, the life I had before I met him.
Norma was right. I had no idea how John Courter would govern as sheriff, but it wouldn’t do to miss a day’s work just because I wasn’t ready to find out. I had been called upon, in my job, to handle far worse situations than this one. Any deputy might have to face the wrong end of a gun in the course of everyday duties. Was a newly elected sheriff really enough of a threat to make me turn and run away?
Norma had her back to me, leaving me to my deliberations. But then a train whistle sounded in the distance and Norma was suddenly eager to be off, or she pretended to be. “That’s my train,” she said, with barely a backward glance. “Go on back to work.”
With that, Norma trudged off. I watched her go, and envied the fact that she was returning to her own domestic sphere, where she was in complete command, and never had to worry about having her life upended over an election. I could picture Norma at home, walking back into the foyer and putting her hat on the rack. I felt a wave of longing for our familiar old house, even though I’d only left it an hour or two before. It was a longing for the life I had before I walked out the door that morning and the election made itself manifest.
But this was not a time for self-indulgence. I couldn’t know what my job would be like under the new sheriff, but there was nothing to do but to go and find out.
I kept my mind a very deliberate blank as I walked around the courthouse and into the side door where the deputies and guards came and went. This path took me right past the sheriff’s office, which I regretted at once. Somehow I thought I’d sneak into the jail and go directly upstairs. (Was I planning to do that every day for the next three years? I couldn’t say.)
But it was too late: as I turned down the corridor, I saw my new boss speaking to a few men I didn’t recognize. They stopped talking when I approached, and stepped back so that I might pass.
Mr. Courter was leaning in the doorway to the sheriff’s office. (I could call him “the new sheriff” or I could call him “Mr. Courter,” but I could not yet say “Sheriff Courter.”) It would be an exaggeration to say that there was anything merry in his expression—he was not a man given to merriment—but there was a flushed triumph about his countenance, and the hard edge of victory in his eyes.
I gave what I hoped was a respectful nod and said, “I understand you’re to be congratulated. I know that I speak for the rest of—”
“That’ll do,” he said. “You must have some things upstairs. I’ll send one of my boys up to collect them.”
I looked around at the other men, all of them young and burly. Had he hired them as deputies?
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I’m—yes, I do keep some things upstairs in my cell, but it’s because I’m so often on duty overnight.”
Already I felt the ground slipping out from underneath me. There was some small noise among the men—shuffles, coughs, a suppressed laugh—and then came Mr. Courter’s voice, more officious this time.
“This office has no duties that require a lady deputy. You can go on home.”
34
i don’t remember walking out of the jail. I managed to get a block or two away without noticing a thing about my surroundings. By the time Sheriff Heath caught up with me, he was calling my name impatiently, as if he’d already said it three or four times.
I felt his hand on my elbow. The sensation was too familiar to bear.
He never did get over the impulse to help me onto train platforms, over mud puddles, or even, once, to steer me around the collapsed body of a rail-yard worker knocked out cold and left for dead. It wasn’t an affectionate touch, necessarily, but it was confident and trusting and something to be relied upon. To feel it at that moment stabbed at me so sharply that I startled and nearly stumbled.
“Pardon me, Deputy,” the sheriff said, thinking he’d scared me. (But he wasn’t a sheriff anymore, and I no longer a deputy. What were we to call each other?)
“I only just found out.” I hardly trusted myself to speak and rushed the words out before my voice broke.
Sheriff Heath—Mr. Heath, I would have to grow accustomed to it—stood exactly six feet tall, just as I did, which meant that when I turned around, we looked each other squarely in the eye. There were very few men who weren’t forced to look ever so slightly up at me, and I always saw the merest whisper of resentment of that in their eyes.
But Mr. Heath met me levelly. He was as unknowable to me as any other man might be—he had his own family, his own private life and worries, and moved in a world of civic affairs that was entirely closed to me—but when we stood like that, looking directly at each other, I always felt that he was in some way my mirror image.
No longer. The platform that had elevated both of us—a platform of public service, elected office, useful and prestigious work—had been pulled out from under us, and there we stood, two flat-footed mortals.
Mr. Heath seemed at a loss, so I said, “Is it absolutely certain? Aren’t there any more boxes of ballots to be counted?”
“Only a few. They worked all night.”
“Cordelia must be—”
But he didn’t want to talk about Cordelia. “I know what John Courter’s trying to do. He won’t get away with it.”
I had no interest in reassurances from Mr. Heath, the civilian, with all his powers stripped away. “He’s already done it. He has every right to. I was hired, and I can be fired.”
I couldn’t stand around on the sidewalk any longer arguing over it. Everything I’d come to believe about myself was dropping away, and I couldn’t take the shock of it. All at once I was nothing but an unmarried woman without an income, with still more unmarried female relations at home—but how would they live? What were they to do without my salary? One fresh worry after another came charging into my mind, each with more disastrous implications than the last.
On to the train station I marched, with Mr. Heath matching my stride. The two of us were known around Hackensack, which meant that any number of well-intentioned citizens tried to stop and speak to us, but then thought better of it at the sight of my face going pink and white and red, and Mr. Heath’s downturned brim shielding his visage.
Rushing to the station was pointless, as there was no train yet and nothing to do but wait. People were far more inclined to come and speak to us if we were simply standing about on the platform, so by unspoken agreement we hid ourselves behind the station agent’s office.
Now Mr. Heath spoke quickly, as he could see that he wouldn’t hold my attention for long. “What I’m trying to tell you is that you have civil service protections. It’s an odd bit of turnabout, because the Republicans were the ones who pushed for it to protect their appointees when Democrats came into office. Now that they’re in office, they’re finding themselves stuck with Democratic appointees under the rules they wanted.”
“Then someone needs to go and tell Mr. Courter that, because he doesn’t seem to know it.”
“Oh, he knows it. A whole gaggle of them were just down at the courthouse asking for a list of every civil servant subject to the rules, as well as every political appointee who’d be exempt.”
I had no patience for this discussion. “Well, was I on the list, or wasn’t I?”
“That’s the trouble. There is no list. The law was only passed this summer. The county clerk is having to rush around and pull it together. I’ve been there all morning to make sure the records from my department were looked over in the presence of witnesses and properly accounted for.”
“I’m surprised Mr. Courter didn’t burn them as soon as he took possession of your office.”
“He couldn’t. I took them home a week ago.”
“A week ago! But you were so sure you’d win, and Mr. Conkl
in, too!”
It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what William Conklin would do now that he’d lost his run for sheriff. I couldn’t be bothered about him. He seemed like the kind of man who always landed on his feet.
“I was never as certain as Cordelia was, but there was no point in saying it. Things turned against us in the last couple of weeks. When I saw those leaflets on the lamp-posts—”
“‘Demon Deputy’! My God, this is all because of me!” I had an urge once again to turn and run, but I was squeezed into a corner behind the station agent’s office with Mr. Heath blocking the way.
“It wasn’t you,” he insisted. “There was just . . . a mean-spiritedness running through the entire campaign that I’d never seen before. I think it’s the war. Everyone’s ready to rush off and fight, and all of a sudden there’s an enemy around every corner.”
“Yes, the war. And here we are, with a German-speaking lady deputy out making trouble, and two political offices lost over it.” I had never felt so bitter.
There was a train coming at last. I moved to brush past Mr. Heath.
“What I came to tell you,” he said, quickly, seeing that he was about to lose his opportunity, “is that you need to hire an attorney and fight for your job. You have the law behind you.”
I barked out an angry laugh, but it was drowned out by the scream of the engine’s brakes. “The law? What could the law do about a sheriff who doesn’t want me in his jail? How am I to work with that man? How am I to conduct my duties when he’ll be looking every day for cause to dismiss me? Oughtn’t I to seek work where I’m wanted? It’s a shame you won’t have that stenographer job open, because I could use it now.”
That stung. The blank look of shock on Mr. Heath’s face told me that he hadn’t yet fully taken in the fact that he, too, was without employment prospects.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I’ll go on home and listen to Norma read aloud from the employment notices from the paper.”
“Deputy—Miss Kopp.” Mr. Heath had trouble saying it, too: we were both attached to our titles. “You don’t seem to understand. All my men are losing their positions. He’s fired everyone.”