1922 Page 10

  “No; you don’t. You need 750, that’s what you need, and you could have it today. Either bank it or walk out with it in your pocket, all the same to me either way. You paid off the mortgage on your place 3 years ago. It’s free and clear. So there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t turn around and take out another mortgage. It’s done all the time, my boy, and by the best people. You’d be surprised at some of the paper we’re carrying. All the best people. Yessir.”

  “I thank you very kindly, Mr. Stoppenhauser, but I don’t think so. That mortgage was like a gray cloud over my head the whole time it was in force, and—”

  “Wilf, that’s the point!” The finger went up again. This time it wagged back and forth, like the pendulum of the Regulator. “That is exactly the rootin’-tootin’, cowboy-shootin’ point! It’s the fellows who take out a mortgage and then feel like they’re always walking around in sunshine who end up defaulting and losing their valuable property! Fellows like you, who carry that bank-paper like a barrowload of rocks on a gloomy day, are the fellows who always pay back! And do you want to tell me that there aren’t improvements you could make? A roof to fix? A little more livestock?” He gave me a sly and roguish look. “Maybe even indoor plumbing, like your neighbor down the road? Such things pay for themselves, you know. You could end up with improvements that far outweigh the cost of a mortgage. Value for money, Wilf! Value for money!”

  I thought it over. At last I said, “I’m very tempted, sir. I won’t lie about that—”

  “No need to. A banker’s office, the priest’s confessional—very little difference. The best men in this county have sat in that chair, Wilf. The very best.”

  “But I only came in for a shortie loan—which you have kindly granted—and this new proposal needs a little thinking about.” A new idea occurred to me, one that was surprisingly pleasant. “And I ought to talk it over with my boy, Henry—Hank, as he likes to be called now. He’s getting to an age where he needs to be consulted, because what I’ve got will be his someday.”

  “Understood, completely understood. But it’s the right thing to do, believe me.” He got to his feet and stuck out his hand. I got to mine and shook it. “You came in here to buy a fish, Wilf. I’m offering to sell you a pole. Much better deal.”

  “Thank you.” And, leaving the bank, I thought: I’ll talk it over with my son. It was a good thought. A warm thought in a heart that had been chilly for months.

  * * *

  The mind is a funny thing, isn’t it? Preoccupied as I was by Mr. Stoppenhauser’s unsolicited offer of a mortgage, I never noticed that the vehicle I’d come in had been replaced by the one Henry had taken to school. I’m not sure I would have noticed right away even if I’d had less weighty matters on my mind. They were both familiar to me, after all; they were both mine. I only realized when I was leaning in to get the crank and saw a folded piece of paper, held down by a rock, on the driving seat.

  I just stood there for a moment, half in and half out of the T, one hand on the side of the cab, the other reaching under the seat, which was where we kept the crank. I suppose I knew why Henry had left school and made this swap even before I pulled his note from beneath the makeshift paperweight and unfolded it. The truck was more reliable on a long trip. A trip to Omaha, for instance.

  Poppa,

  I have taken the truck. I guess you know where I am going. Leave me alone. I know you can send Sheriff Jones after me to bring me back, but if you do I will tell everything. You might think I’d change my mind because I am “just a kid,” BUT I WONT. Without Shan I dont care about nothing. I love you Poppa even if I don’t know why, since everything we did has brought me mizzery.

  Your Loving Son,

  Henry “Hank” James

  I drove back to the farm in a daze. I think some people waved to me—I think even Sallie Cotterie, who was minding the Cotteries’ roadside vegetable stand, waved to me—and I probably waved back, but I’ve no memory of doing so. For the first time since Sheriff Jones had come out to the farm, asking his cheerful, no-answers-needed questions and looking at everything with his cold inquisitive eyes, the electric chair seemed like a real possibility to me, so real I could almost feel the buckles on my skin as the leather straps were tightened on my wrists and above my elbows.

  He would be caught whether I kept my mouth shut or not. That seemed inevitable to me. He had no money, not even six bits to fill the truck’s gas tank, so he’d be walking long before he even got to Elkhorn. If he managed to steal some gas, he’d be caught when he approached the place where she was now living (Henry assumed as a prisoner; it had never crossed his unfinished mind that she might be a willing guest). Surely Harlan had given the person in charge—Sister Camilla—Henry’s description. Even if he hadn’t considered the possibility of the outraged swain making an appearance at the site of his lady-love’s durance vile, Sister Camilla would have. In her business, she had surely dealt with outraged swains before.

  My only hope was that, once accosted by the authorities, Henry would keep silent long enough to realize that he’d been snared by his own foolishly romantic notions rather than by my interference. Hoping for a teenage boy to come to his senses is like betting on a long shot at the horse track, but what else did I have?

  As I drove into the dooryard, a wild thought crossed my mind: leave the T running, pack a bag, and take off for Colorado. The idea lived for no more than two seconds. I had money—75 dollars, in fact—but the T would die long before I crossed the state line at Julesburg. And that wasn’t the important thing; if it had been, I could always have driven as far as Lincoln and then traded the T and 60 of my dollars for a reliable car. No, it was the place. The home place. My home place. I had murdered my wife to keep it, and I wasn’t going to leave it now because my foolish and immature accomplice had gotten it into his head to take off on a romantic quest. If I left the farm, it wouldn’t be for Colorado; it would be for state prison. And I would be taken there in chains.

  * * *

  That was Monday. There was no word on Tuesday or Wednesday. Sheriff Jones didn’t come to tell me Henry had been picked up hitch-hiking on the Lincoln-Omaha Highway, and Harl Cotterie didn’t come to tell me (with Puritanical satisfaction, no doubt) that the Omaha police had arrested Henry at Sister Camilla’s request, and he was currently sitting in the pokey, telling wild tales about knives and wells and burlap bags. All was quiet on the farm. I worked in the garden harvesting pantry-vegetables, I mended fence, I milked the cows, I fed the chickens—and I did it all in a daze. Part of me, and not a small part, either, believed that all of this was a long and terribly complex dream from which I would awake with Arlette snoring beside me and the sound of Henry chopping wood for the morning fire.

  Then, on Thursday, Mrs. McReady—the dear and portly widow who taught academic subjects at Hemingford School—came by in her own Model T to ask me if Henry was all right. “There’s an . . . an intestinal distress going around,” she said. “I wondered if he caught it. He left very suddenly.”

  “He’s distressed all right,” I said, “but it’s a love-bug instead of a stomach-bug. He’s run off, Mrs. McReady.” Unexpected tears, stinging and hot, rose in my eyes. I took the handkerchief from the pocket on the front of my biballs, but some of them ran down my cheeks before I could wipe them away.

  When my vision was clear again, I saw that Mrs. McReady, who meant well by every child, even the difficult ones, was near tears herself. She must have known all along what kind of bug Henry was suffering from.

  “He’ll be back, Mr. James. Don’t you fear. I’ve seen this before, and I expect to see it a time or two again before I retire, although that time’s not so far away as it once was.” She lowered her voice, as if she feared George the rooster or one of his feathered harem might be a spy. “The one you want to watch out for is her father. He’s a hard and unbending man. Not a bad man, but hard.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I suppose you know where his daughter is now.”

/>   She lowered her eyes. It was answer enough.

  “Thank you for coming out, Mrs. McReady. Can I ask you to keep this to yourself?”

  “Of course . . . but the children are already whispering.”

  Yes. They would be.

  “Are you on the exchange, Mr. James?” She looked for telephone wires. “I see you are not. Never mind. If I hear anything, I’ll come out and tell you.”

  “You mean if you hear anything before Harlan Cotterie or Sheriff Jones.”

  “God will take care of your son. Shannon, too. You know, they really were a lovely couple; everyone said so. Sometimes the fruit ripens too early, and a frost kills it. Such a shame. Such a sad, sad shame.”

  She shook my hand—a man’s strong grip—and then drove away in her flivver. I don’t think she realized that, at the end, she had spoken of Shannon and my son in the past tense.

  * * *

  On Friday Sheriff Jones came out, driving the car with the gold star on the door. And he wasn’t alone. Following along behind was my truck. My heart leaped at the sight of it, then sank again when I saw who was behind the wheel: Lars Olsen.

  I tried to wait quietly while Jones went through his Ritual of Arrival: belt-hitching, forehead-wiping (even though the day was chilly and overcast), hair-brushing. I couldn’t do it. “Is he all right? Did you find him?”

  “No, nope, can’t say we did.” He mounted the porch steps. “Line-rider over east of Lyme Biska found the truck, but no sign of the kid. We might know better about the state of his health if you’d reported this when it happened. Wouldn’t we?”

  “I was hoping he’d come back on his own,” I said dully. “He’s gone to Omaha. I don’t know how much I need to tell you, Sheriff—”

  Lars Olsen had meandered into auditory range, ears all but flapping. “Go on back to my car, Olsen,” Jones said. “This is a private conversation.”

  Lars, a meek soul, scurried off without demur. Jones turned back to me. He was far less cheerful than on his previous visit, and had dispensed with the bumbling persona, as well.

  “I already know enough, don’t I? That your kid got Harl Cotterie’s daughter in the fam’ly way and has probably gone haring off to Omaha. He run the truck off the road into a field of high grass when he knew the tank was ’bout dry. That was smart. He get that kind of smart from you? Or from Arlette?”

  I said nothing, but he’d given me an idea. Just a little one, but it might come in handy.

  “I’ll tell you one thing he did that we’ll thank him for,” Jones said. “Might keep him out of jail, too. He yanked all the grass from under the truck before he went on his merry way. So the exhaust wouldn’t catch it afire, you know. Start a big prairie fire that burned a couple thousand acres, a jury might get a bit touchy, don’t you think? Even if the offender was only 15 or so?”

  “Well, it didn’t happen, Sheriff—he did the right thing—so why are you going on about it?” I knew the answer, of course. Sheriff Jones might not give a hoot in a high wind for the likes of Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, but he was good friends with Harl. They were both members of the newly formed Elks Lodge, and Harl had it in for my son.

  “A little touchy, aren’t you?” He wiped his forehead again, then resettled his Stetson. “Well, I might be touchy, too, if it was my son. And you know what? If it was my son and Harl Cotterie was my neighbor—my good neighbor—I might’ve just taken a run down there and said, ‘Harl? You know what? I think my son might be going to try and see your daughter. You want to tell someone to be on the peep for him?’ But you didn’t do that, either, did you?”

  The idea he’d given me was looking better and better, and it was almost time to spring it.

  “He hasn’t shown up wherever she is, has he?”

  “Not yet, no, he may still be looking for it.”

  “I don’t think he ran away to see Shannon,” I said.

  “Why, then? Do they have a better brand of ice cream there in Omaha? Because that’s the way he was headed, sure as your life.”

  “I think he went looking for his mother. I think she may have gotten in touch with him.”

  That stopped him for a good ten seconds, long enough for a wipe of the forehead and a brush of the hair. Then he said, “How would she do that?”

  “A letter would be my best guess.” The Hemingford Home Grocery was also the post office, where all the general delivery went. “They would have given it to him when he went in for candy or a bag of peanuts, as he often does on his way back from school. I don’t know for sure, Sheriff, any more than I know why you came out here acting like I committed some kind of crime. I wasn’t the one who knocked her up.”

  “You ought to hush that kind of talk about a nice girl!”

  “Maybe yes and maybe no, but this was as much a surprise to me as it was to the Cotteries, and now my boy is gone. They at least know where their daughter is.”

  Once again he was stumped. Then he took out a little notebook from his back pocket and jotted something in it. He put it back and asked, “You don’t know for sure that your wife got in touch with your kid, though—that’s what you’re telling me? It’s just a guess?”

  “I know he talked a lot about his mother after she left, but then he stopped. And I know he hasn’t shown up at that home where Harlan and his wife stuck Shannon.” And on that score I was as surprised as Sheriff Jones . . . but awfully grateful. “Put the two things together, and what do you get?”

  “I don’t know,” Jones said, frowning. “I truly don’t. I thought I had this figured out, but I’ve been wrong before, haven’t I? Yes, and will be again. ‘We are all bound in error,’ that’s what the Book says. But good God, kids make my life hard. If you hear from your son, Wilfred, I’d tell him to get his skinny ass home and stay away from Shannon Cotterie, if he knows where she is. She won’t want to see him, guarantee you that. Good news is no prairie fire, and we can’t arrest him for stealing his father’s truck.”

  “No,” I said grimly, “you’d never get me to press charges on that one.”

  “But.” He raised his finger, which reminded me of Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. “Three days ago, in Lyme Biska—not so far from where the rider found your truck—someone held up that grocery and ethyl station on the edge of town. The one with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof? Took 23 dollars. I got the report sitting on my desk. It was a young fella dressed in old cowboy clothes, with a bandanna pulled up over his mouth and a plainsman hat slouched down over his eyes. The owner’s mother was tending the counter, and the fella menaced her with some sort of tool. She thought it might have been a crowbar or a pry-rod, but who knows? She’s pushing 80 and half-blind.”

  It was my time to be silent. I was flabbergasted. At last I said, “Henry left from school, Sheriff, and so far as I can remember he was wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers that day. He didn’t take any of his clothes, and in any case he doesn’t have any cowboy clothes, if you mean boots and all. Nor does he have a plainsman’s hat.”

  “He could have stolen those things, too, couldn’t he?”

  “If you don’t know anything more than what you just said, you ought to stop. I know you’re friends with Harlan—”

  “Now, now, this has nothing to do with that.”

  It did and we both knew it, but there was no reason to go any farther down that road. Maybe my 80 acres didn’t stack up very high against Harlan Cotterie’s 400, but I was still a landowner and a taxpayer, and I wasn’t going to be browbeaten. That was the point I was making, and Sheriff Jones had taken it.

  “My son’s not a robber, and he doesn’t threaten women. That’s not how he acts and not the way he was raised.”

  Not until just lately, anyway, a voice inside whispered.

  “Probably just a drifter looking for a quick payday,” Jones said. “But I felt like I had to bring it up, and so I did. And we don’t know what people might say, do we? Talk gets around. Everybody talks, don’t they? Talk’s cheap. The subject’s cl
osed as far as I’m concerned—let the Lyme County Sheriff worry about what goes on in Lyme Biska, that’s my motto—but you should know that the Omaha police are keeping an eye on the place where Shannon Cotterie’s at. Just in case your son gets in touch, you know.”

  He brushed back his hair, then resettled his hat a final time.

  “Maybe he’ll come back on his own, no harm done, and we can write this whole thing off as, I don’t know, a bad debt.”

  “Fine. Just don’t call him a bad son, unless you’re willing to call Shannon Cotterie a bad daughter.”

  The way his nostrils flared suggested he didn’t like that much, but he didn’t reply to it. What he said was, “If he comes back and says he’s seen his mother, let me know, would you? We’ve got her on the books as a missing person. Silly, I know, but the law is the law.”

  “I’ll do that, of course.”

  He nodded and went to his car. Lars had settled behind the wheel. Jones shooed him over—the sheriff was the kind of man who did his own driving. I thought about the young man who’d held up the store, and tried to tell myself that my Henry would never do such a thing, and even if he were driven to it, he wouldn’t be sly enough to put on clothes he’d stolen out of somebody’s barn or bunkhouse. But Henry was different now, and murderers learn slyness, don’t they? It’s a survival skill. I thought that maybe—

  But no. I won’t say it that way. It’s too weak. This is my confession, my last word on everything, and if I can’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, what good is it? What good is anything?

  It was him. It was Henry. I had seen by Sheriff Jones’s eyes that he only brought up that side-o’-the-road robbery because I wouldn’t kowtow to him the way he thought I should’ve, but I believed it. Because I knew more than Sheriff Jones. After helping your father to murder your mother, what was stealing some new clothes and waving a crowbar in an old granny’s face? No such much. And if he tried it once, he would try it again, once those 23 dollars were gone. Probably in Omaha. Where they would catch him. And then the whole thing might come out. Almost certainly would come out.