Lay Down My Sword and Shield (33 page)

“Do you think you can get it up again today?” I said.

“Yeah, buddy, if you don’t mind flying drunk,” he said.

We walked out into the rain, crossed the lawn, and climbed over the fence to the plane. The air was sweet with the smell of the wet land and the dripping trees and the ruined tomatoes that had been pounded into the furrows. The chain on the windmill had broken and the water was spilling white over the lip of the trough into the horse lot. I could see the willows on the riverbank bending against the sky, and the deep cut of the drainages on the distant hills and the thin line of sunlight on the horizon’s edge. My two oil wells glistened blackly in the rain, pumping up and down with their obscene motion, and the weathered shacks of the Negro and Mexican farmworkers stood out against the washed land like matchboxes that had been dropped from the sky at an odd angle.

The pilot wiped the plane’s windows clean of mud and grass with his windbreaker, and we took off across the pasture in a shower of water from the backdraft of the propellers. Just before we reached the river the pilot pulled back on the stick and gave the engines everything they would take, and we lifted over the trees into the sky and turned into the wind. The river, the willows, the post oaks, and Cappie’s cabin dropped away below us, and then the house and the deep tire imprints of the Senator’s limousine on my gravel lane, and finally the small whitewashed markers in the Holland family cemetery.

EPILOGUE

N
O ONE WON
the strike, not the growers or the farm companies or the field workers, because the storm didn’t leave anything to win. After the water had drained from the fields, the ruined citrus lay on the ground and rotted under the humid sun until the air was heavy with the smell of the cantaloupe, watermelon, and grapefruit that dried into cysts and then burst apart. The cotton rows were washed flat and the sweep of mud through the fields baked out hard and smooth in the late August heat as though nothing had ever been planted there.

I withdrew from the election, and one of the Senator’s aides released Lester Dixon’s deposition to a state news service, but no one was particularly interested in it. A reporter from
The Austin American
telephoned me and asked if I had seen it, would I like him to read it to me over the phone, and I answered that I wouldn’t and would he do several things with it of his choosing, and I never heard about it again. Since then I’ve come to believe that one’s crimes and private guilt, those obsessions that we hide like that ugly black diamond in the soft tissue of the mind, are really not very important to other people.

Bailey acted as my defense lawyer at my hearing in Pueblo Verde, and had the assault charge dropped after he promised the district attorney we would file our own charges against the sheriff’s department (there were several lovely frames
in the news film that showed the deputy’s khaki knee bending upward into my eye). I was even proud of Bailey. He was a better criminal lawyer than I had thought, or at least he was that day, and even though the court was hostile to us and the judge stared hotly at Bailey when he addressed the bench, he was determined that I wouldn’t get any time and he made the county prosecutor stumble in his wording and contradict himself. I was given a year’s probation for resisting arrest and disturbing the peace, and we went across the street to an outdoor barbecue stand and drank beer for three hours in the warm shade of an oak tree. Two weeks later I received a letter of reprimand from someone in the Texas Bar Association, and I refolded it in the envelope and returned it with a pass to the Houston livestock show.

Verisa divorced me and took the Cadillac, eighty acres I owned up in Comal County, and the two natural gas wells, but I held on to the ranch and the house and my thoroughbred horses. She went to Europe for six months, and occasionally her name was mentioned on the society pages of
The New York Times
(a reception at the American embassy in London, dancing with a member of the Kennedy entourage in a Paris nightclub), then she returned to Dallas, where she had been born, and bought a penthouse apartment overlooking the city’s skyline and the green hills beyond. She entertained everyone, and from time to time I heard stories about what a radiant hostess she was and how many unusual and interesting people she managed to have at her parties. She sent me an invitation to her wedding, and at first I didn’t recognize the groom’s name, then I remembered meeting him once at a Democratic cocktail party in San Antonio. He had inherited the controlling stock in a newspaper, and he had turned the paper’s editorial page into a right-wing invective against everything liberal in the state. But I remembered him most for the fact that he didn’t drink and that his clean-cut chin was always at an upward angle when he turned his profile to you. I sent them a silver service with a one-line note of best wishes on a card inside. Four months later he was killed with another woman in an automobile accident on the Fort Worth highway. Verisa inherited the newspaper, and after a period of mourning the parties began again at the penthouse and her picture appeared regularly on the society pages with a young district attorney who rumor said might run for governor in two years.

Rie and I were married right after the divorce, and the next fall we had twin boys. They were both big for twins, and I named one Sam for my father and the other Hackberry, since I felt there should always be one gunfighter in the Holland family. Bailey bought out my half of the law practice, although he argued against it in his emotional way and wanted to continue the partnership, but I was through with the R. C. Richardson account and dealing with oil company executives. I didn’t practice for seven months, and spent the winter and early spring working on the ranch. I dug fence holes and strung new wire on the pasture, reshingled the barn roof that had been stripped by the storm, put a new water well down, and plowed and seeded sixty-five acres of corn and tomatoes. And each time I twisted the posthole digger in the ground or drove a six-penny nail down flat in the wood, I could feel the last drops of Jack Daniel’s sweat out through my pores and dry in the wind, and a new resilience in my body that I hadn’t felt since I pitched at Baylor. I worked hard each morning, with the sun low over the willows on the riverbank, and through the day until late evening when the shadow from the tractor fell out across the rows and the purple light drew away over the horizon. And when I had pulled the seed drill over the last furrows against the back fence I could already smell the land beginning to take hold of new life, and after the next shower small green plants would bud one morning in long, even lines.

Rie and I took my best three-year-old up to Lexington that spring and raced him at Keeneland. Each afternoon we sat in the sun with mint juleps and watched the horses break from the starting gate on the far side of the field, with the jockeys like toy men on their backs, and move in a tight formation down the backstretch, the lead horses pushing hard for the rail, then into the far turn as the roar of their hooves grew louder, their bodies glistening with sweat, and Rie would be on her feet with her arms wrapped tightly in mine, the quirts whipping down into the horses’ flanks and the sod flying into the air, and then there was that heart-beating rush when they came down the homestretch with the jockeys pouring it into them, and the thunder against the turf was louder than the shouting of the crowd. We won a thirty-five-hundred-dollar purse in one race, and placed in two others, and the evening before we left for Texas I took Rie on a long drive through the bluegrass and the Cumberland Mountains. The limestone cliffs rose straight up out of the hollows, and the tops of the white oaks and beech trees were covered with the sun’s last light. I was tired and quiet inside after the two weeks of racing, and the rolling hills stretched away toward Virginia in a violet haze, but a sense of time and its ephemeral quality began to weigh on me, as when you give yourself too long a period of restoring things that you hurt through indifference or cynicism in the first place.

Two days after we returned home I drove to San Antonio and became a trial lawyer for the A.C.L.U.

It’s summer again now, and the corn is green against the brown rows in the fields, and I irrigated my cotton acreage from the water well I put down and the bolls have started to come out white in the leaves. In the evening I can smell the dampness of the earth in the breeze off the river, and the wet sweetness of the Bermuda grass in the horse pasture, and just before dusk the wind flattens out the smoke from Cappie’s cabin and there’s just a hint in the warm air of oak logs burning in a woodstove. I built a large, circular crib around a chinaberry tree in the side yard for the boys to play in, and every afternoon while I sit on the verandah and try to outline a defense for impossible cases, I’m distracted by the spangle of sunlight and shade on their tan bodies. They’re both strong boys and they don’t like being inside the crib, and they show me their disapproval by throwing their stuffed animals out on the grass. Sometimes after their nap they shake the side of the crib so violently that Rie has to bring them up on the verandah and let them play in all the wadded paper at my feet. When I look at them I can see my father and Old Hack in their faces, and I try not to look over at the white markers in the cemetery or I would have to grieve just a little on that old problem of time and loss and the failure of history to atone in its own sequence.

Turn the page
to meet Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland,
the hero of James Lee Burke’s
newest heart-stopping mystery

RAIN GODS

Now available
from Simon & Schuster

O
N THE BURNT-OUT
end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white stucco filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed. Next to the filling station was a mechanic’s shed whose desiccated boards lay collapsed upon a rusted pickup truck with four flat bald tires. At the intersection a stoplight hung from a horizontal cable strung between two power poles, its plastic covers shot out by .22 rifles.

The young man entered a phone booth and wiped his face slick with the flat of his hand. His denim shirt was stiff with salt and open on his chest, his hair mowed into the scalp, GI-style. He pulled an unlabeled pint bottle from the front of his jeans and unscrewed the cap. Down the right side of his face was a swollen pink scar that was as bright and shiny as plastic and looked pasted onto the skin rather than part of it. The mescal in the bottle was yellow and thick with threadworms that seemed to light against the sunset when he tipped the neck to his mouth. Inside the booth, he could feel his heart quickening and lines of sweat running down from his armpits into the waistband of his undershorts. His index finger trembled as he punched in the numbers on the phone’s console.

“What’s your emergency?” a woman dispatcher asked.

The rolling countryside was the color of a browned biscuit, stretching away endlessly, the monotony of rocks and creosote brush and grit and mesquite trees interrupted only by an occasional windmill rattling in the breeze.

“Last night there was some shooting here. A lot of it,” he said. “I heard it in the dark and saw the flashes.”

“Shooting where?”

“By that old church. I think that’s what happened. I was drinking. I saw it from down the road. It scared the doo-doo out of me.”

There was a pause. “Are you drinking now, sir?”

“Not really. I mean, not much. Just a few hits of Mexican worm juice.”

“Tell us where you are, and we’ll send out a cruiser. Will you wait there for a cruiser to come out?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with me. A lot of wets go through here. There’s oceans of trash down by the border. Dirty diapers and moldy clothes and rotted food and tennis shoes without strings in them. Why would they take the strings out of their tennis shoes?”

“Is this about illegals?”

“I said I heard somebody busting caps. That’s all I’m reporting. Maybe I heard a tailgate drop. I’m sure I did. It clanked in the dark.”

“Sir, where are you calling from?”

“The same place I heard all that shooting.”

“Give me your name, please.”

“What name they got for a guy so dumb he thinks doing the right thing is the right thing? Answer me that, please, ma’am.”

He tried to slam down the receiver on the hook but missed. The phone receiver swung back and forth from the phone box as the young man with the welted pink scar on his face drove away, road dust sucking back through the glassless windows of his car.

Twenty-four hours later, at sunset, the sky turned to turquoise; then the strips of black cloud along the horizon were backlit by a red brilliance that was like the glow of a forge, as though the cooling of the day were about to be set into abeyance so the sun’s heat could prevail through the night into the following dawn. Across the street from the abandoned filling station, a tall man in his seventies, wearing western-cut khakis and hand-tooled boots and an old-fashioned gun belt and a dove-colored Stetson, parked his truck in front of what appeared to be the shell of a Spanish mission. The roof had caved onto the floor, and the doors had been twisted off the hinges and carried inside and broken up and used for firewood by homeless people or teenage vandals. The only tree in the crossroads community was a giant willow; it shaded one side of the church and created a strange effect of shadow and red light on the stucco walls, as though a grass fire were approaching the structure and about to consume it.

In reality, the church had been built not by Spaniards or Mexicans but by an industrialist who had become the most hated man in America after his company security forces and members of the Colorado militia massacred eleven children and two women during a miners’ strike in 1914. Later, the industrialist reinvented himself as a philanthropist and humanitarian and rehabilitated his family name by building churches around the country. But the miners did not get their union, and this particular church became a scorched cipher that few associate with the two women and eleven children who had tried to hide in a root cellar while the canvas tent above them rained ash and flame upon their heads.