The Watchman (11 page)

Yes, she said. You are. I never knew you, Jason. I always thought of you somehow as different than the way I saw you—today at the funeral—afterwards when you did that kind thing and came to me and walked me home from Mount Rose cemetery. And tonight when you stayed with me. You were even kind and understanding about spending our date in the place where Cole—where we used to spend our evenings together.

I didn't mind that, he said with a shiver.

Jason, I just don't think I could have gotten through tonight alone.

Your—daddy? he said cautiously.

He's upstairs, she said softly. But he's terribly worried about something now. He won't even look up at me when I bring him his supper plate and his glass of milk. He just sits and stares at his gun belt on the chair by the window.

Well, he's worried about catching Cole's murderer, he said, straight out, risking much.

Yes, she said thoughtfully after a second. Yes, that's it. Cole's murderer. Daddy takes his job very seriously.

Well, it's a serious thing, I reckon—becoming a sheriff.

It is, she said. But you're wrong. Daddy didn't become a sheriff—^he was born sheriff. Like a man of music, a

painter, a poet. It's something born. And do you know something astonishing, Jason?—in all the years my daddy's been a lawman he has never shot his gun at a single living thing. Not even animals. Sometimes he reads to me. He always used to read to me when I was little. Poetry. William Blake, Keats, John Donne, Wordsworth.

She lifted her head to the night again, and suddenly, in an accident of striking sadness, the dead rose fell from her hair at the very moment when Jason heard again within her, from somewhere in the red-leaved, grieving secrets of the belly below her breast, that moan once more.

"—for everything that lives is holy," she whispered in a shaken and small voice, then seemed to breathe in evenness again, gathering strength from something in the dark. That's Blake, she said. That's something Daddy is always saying: "For everything that lives is holy." And then he breaks his pistol and puts the bullets under Mama's Bible in the bureau drawer and he sits alone and says nothing for a great long while like he was letting some dirt or bloodshed wash from off him in the rain of silent lamplight. You believe me, don't you, Jason? she said, her voice risen a little, a quarter-tone higher, her cold-tipped fingers rising suddenly to touch his cheek and lips as if they might beg out the blessing of a Yes.

Yes, said Jason.

You must believe me, she said. Daddy's never shot his gun at any Uving being. Not even so much as a rabbit. Not any human creature—not any living thing. Once I remember—Oh, I remember, a drunken ranch hand in Tulsa. He shot and killed two men in a little country grocery store that sold moonshine whiskey. And Daddy had to go take him in. And Daddy came in the grocery store just as the man was reloading his gun and Daddy walked across the floor toward the man with his hand out, pleading, kind and gentle—pleading—and the drunk man pointed his gun at Daddy and said if he came a step farther he would shoot him, but Daddy just kept on coming and the man shot Daddy twice through the shoulder and once in the leg. And Daddy didn't even take his own gun out of the holster. You see how he is? You believe me, don't you, Jason? And he took the gun out of the ranch hand's fingers and the men who saw it and Miss Shackleford who ran the store all swear to it—he walked away and dropped the man's gun in a big barrel of pickles and then he came back to the man—wounded, mind you—shot three times and bleeding

as he was and he laid his hands on the man's shoulders and he was crying but it wasn't for anything that hurt him, I know that!—it was for the man and what he knew other men would do to him! And he shook the man's shoulders hke he was a bad child and he shouted: "Don't you know, boy! Don't you know!—that everything that lives is holy?" It's legend down in Osage County, Oklahoma, and in the country across the Arkansas River where it happened. Don't you believe me, Jason? I wish I could see your face in the dark. I think you're laughingl

He said: I'm not. I'm not laughing, Jill.

I'm cold, Jason, she whispered, and he thought he heard her teeth chatter. I'm cold. Is there a wind tonight?

No wind, he said. It's fall, JiU. It's like this on river nights when it's fall.

Jason, put your arms around me, she whispered, moving down from the stoop, coming against him. I'm cold, Jason. I'm cold and I'm afraid.

He put his arms around her and felt her shoulders quaking under his touch, her breasts against his breast leaping with the shudder of a sudden little storm of sobs and he could feel the shape of her mouth upon his neck, the hps open and shaped to terror and the breath quick and warm, though the place where they touched his neck was wet and when she breathed out it felt cool, and he felt bigger than the fog, the night, the river, tall aU the way to the vast, dark ceihng where the lost and unseen stars wandered among the exile of heavens.

Maybe, he whispered. Maybe I better let you get up to bed. You'U catch your death.

A minute, she sobbed. Just a minute more. Hold me tighter, Jason. Hold me till the scaring goes.

Yes. Yes. I will hold you till it goes, he said.

Behind him in the house something moved, creaked, the speech of hinge and flood-swollen door upon its jamb. A light shot a thin gold bar down the narrow staircase. It was not Dede Moonshine. It was the door to the upper floors.

Daughter? Jill? the Sheriff called, not loudly, but Ib a strong, quiet command.

It's me. Daddy, she called up the dark beyond the doorway.

Then come up, he said. Who are you with? I've been waiting up for hours for you to come.

Yes, Daddy.

I'll not embarrass your young beau, he said. I'll not ask him his intention in keeping you out tiJl one o'clock. He may now leave. And, daughter JiU—come up to bed now. I mean this very minute now.

Before him in the dark she had been there: the warmth, scent, sweet whispering laughs. Now suddenly gone. Gone without a brush of her lips, a cold squeeze of her fingers, so much as a touch. He could not see the expression on her face when Luther called to her but in the flash when she whirled at his command and paused for a moment, face uplifted to the narrow doorway at the top of the staircase, her profile: lashed eye and flared nostril and the open, quivering mouth: that half-face painted in dusky yellow for an instant from the long light raced zigzag down the steps from the lamps in the Sheriff's parlor: something stunned and confounded in her face, something begun to work among the soft features, twisting them into the grimace of an emotion which Jason was not to see completed, so swiftly did she bow her head and shoulders and then rush in a whisper of sandals up the light-cloven darkness toward her father; an expression he somehow was to remember as the gathering together of a stricken realization within her of an absent-mindedness, a guilt at neglect, a terror at the thought of having hurt someone by her selfishness.

Any arrests this morning, Mister Alt? said the Prosecuting Attorney.

The Sheriff stares at Mister Christmas Janders stony-eyed, holds back his answer that bare moment sufficient to let Janders know that he quietly acknowledges the jibe: County Attorney Christmas Janders knows quite well there have been no arrests and Luther wants him to know that he knows what Janders knows.

None, Mister Janders.

Christmas Janders smiles, fetches off his spectacles, and pinches once or twice at the red marks they left, high on the chisel-thin bridge of his long, white nose.

New suspects? New leads. Mister Alt?

Janders always makes a light emphasis on "Mister" when he speaks to Luther Alt; he never calls him Sheriff.

Night and day. Mister Janders, said Luther Alt, I am looking, watching, weighing every possible suspect.

Still, however, says landers, pursing his lips. Nothing really spaded up yet, eh? Nothing much to go on, eh? You know. Mister Alt—I reckon you know, at least—that we've got a queer kind of stew in our pot with the case of this Blake boy's murder. It's a broth, you might say, that could well be spoiled by too many cooks.

With reference to what, Mister landers?

The matter of jurisdiction, Mister Alt.

That's right, Alt, echoes Chief of Police Flick Smither-man. Jurisdiction. That's the matter.

Christmas landers touches together the chalky tips of his bony fingers and frowns into the air as if he were about to indict a dust mote or intimidate a shabby sunbeam from the dirty window.

There would, he went on suddenly, be none of this confusion as to who hunts whom if the Blake boy had had the common courtesy to get himself murdered anywhere else but on the Indian Mound. Oh, does my levity offend you. Mister Alt? You paled. Still and all, if we took our hard jobs too grimly, Mister Alt, we'd none of us last long.

God damn and that's the truth, said the Chief of Police.

As I was saying, Mister Alt, landers went on. The Mound —where the murder was committed. One city block to the left—a Hock to the right—seventy-five yards to the north or south—if the crime had happened anywhere but on the Mound it would be a matter for Chief Smitherman here to find the killer—a city matter. Mister Alt. At least, till the killer's in our hands.

That's right, said the Chief, nodding twice in kind of flabby punctuation. That's what it would be!

But the Mound, Mister Alt, said Christmas landers. It's like a strange alien island here in our midst. The Mound, Mister Alt, isn't really part of Adena at all being, as you know it well to be, under the authority, jurisdiction and control of the State Penitentiary as it has been since nineteen-and-nine. It's a strange little prehistoric principality in our midst. A state monument with no real government but the Prison Board and no real governor but our good warden Verge Holly.

Soldier Holly, said the Chief. That's what they call him— Soldier. By God, there's a stiff one, all right. No bull and blabber about good old Soldier. Tough as a singletree and mean as garbroth with that cage of mean monkeys up there.

Now naturally, said the County Attorney, it would be

silly to say that Chief Smitherman and his men won't do all they can to hunt this monster down. Not that it's really a city matter—a police matter, mind you. But they'll keep an eye peeled night and day.

Day and night, said Smitherman. Almost Hke it was really our job.

And whose job is it to find the boy's murderer? said Luther.

Yours, Mister Alt, said Christmas landers. And mine. It's a County Business now, you see. The County to find him, the County to arraign, the County to try, and the County to make certain he ends up being led through the prison wheel-gate. And then he's Soldier Holly's piece of meat. Assuming, said Luther, that we catch the murderer. We'll catch him, said Christmas landers. Oh, never doubt it.

By God, that's for sure, said the Chief. That's for goddam sure.

And assuming that the—death penalty—that the murderer gets the death penalty, said Luther.

That, too, you must not doubt, Mister Alt, said Christmas Janders.

Under what legal jurisdiction was it made entirely a County matter? whispered Luther.

I spent two hours in conference last night, said Christmas Janders smoothly. With Warden Holly and the Prison Board. We spent thirty minutes on the phone with the Governor. It was thus decided. It's reasonable—a County matter is a State matter when all is said and done. And the Mound is not Adena-ruled—it is County-ruled, State-ruled—Prison-ruled when you come right down to it. And Soldier Holly, you might say, is king.

By God, a good old boy—Soldier! growled the Chief. Maybe he might find it within his infinte wisdom, said Luther drily, to deputize a force of convicts and send them out to hunt the murderer down.

Do I gather from your little joke, Mister Alt, that you don't relish this job of hunting? murmured the prosecutor.

I am mighty aware of my duties to the County and the people, Mister Janders, said the Sheriff.

Of course you are, Mister Alt. Why, you're almost a sort of legend in Mound County—for that matter, in the whole length and breadth of the state. Sheriff Luther Alt—a name whispered from Weirton to the Big Sandy, from Huntington

to Harper's Ferry. Sometimes with all your modesty and close-mouthed seriousness, Mister Alt, I don't think you really grasp what a big name you've got. Why, Mound County folks look up to you as a kind of strong, fatherly watchman to keep the haunts and boogeymen away at night. Alongside of you. Mister Alt, the people see me as not much more as a dull and colorless clerk! And so I am, Mister Alt —so I am! But that's all right. I wouldn't want it any other way. My rewards are humble but sufficient—I prefer them in the shadows. Guns make me uneasy. Mister Alt—I much favor having them in the hands of the man in whose great shadow, modestly, I labor. Still and all, even those pen-scratching hours have their moments of lofty reward.

The reward of seeing Justice done? said Luther Alt.

Justice, said Christmas Janders. There's a fine word, Mister Alt. It's like Heaven. Naturally, all good Christians hope to reach it. Sadly enough, time and human abuse have blurred its meaning. Poor Justice. It's not much good as a word any more except, of course, in campaign speeches. It's a pity you're not an attorney. Mister Alt, or you'd know better what I'm fumbling to say. Justice. No wonder they show Justice as a woman—so many things to so many men. Do you think, really. Mister Alt, that when the people elect me Mound County Attorney they want me to turn out pretty little Justices?—like a watchmaker squinting over his twinkling bench? Justices? Those aren't my creations. Mister Alt. I honestly wish they were—I think sometimes, by chance, they are. But people know what they want from me just as they know what they want from an eggman, a sassafras peddler, a butcher, or an icebox salesman. And I'm sorely afraid that what they want of me is not Justices, Mister Alt.

And what do you fancy they do want, Mister Janders?

Convictions, Mister Alt.

Despite the occasional conviction of the innocent—the crazy—the ones spoiled in the oven like cakes that fall when Fate stomps his foot on the pantry floor. Convictions, Mister Janders. Even of them?