The Scribe (2 page)

Burke looked up from his book slowly as Canby came through the door.

“Evening, Anse.”

“Evening, Sheriff,” Burke said. He dropped his feet from the desk and leaned over it with the catalog in hand, pointing out one of the shotguns drawn on a spread of the sporting goods pages.

“Look here, Sheriff. I've got my eye on this double-barreled Lefaucheux,” he said, sounding out the French very slowly. “Three percent discount if you send them cash.”

“Get the Pieper instead,” Canby said, putting the Winchester in the gun cabinet next to the door. “Rifle and a shotgun side by side. Hard to beat.”

“I would,” Burke said, his face coloring, “if I had twenty-four dollars.”

Canby felt his neck burning. His own Pieper hung in the cabinet next to the Winchester, though he'd been no closer to a twenty-four-dollar budget when he got it than Anse was now. He'd confiscated it from a pimp called Big Slim Gourley in Atlanta's Shermantown district in '76. He locked the cabinet and turned back to Burke, bent over the catalog with him. Burke's dirty fingernail was poised over the Lefaucheux. The catalog called it a “high-grade import.” Canby was doubtful of that, at eight dollars.

“They'll ship it out to you for approval if you give the express agent a dollar. Can you believe that? Have to give them a dollar to look it over in your own house. Like they don't trust you not to steal the damned thing.”

Canby looked at him wearily, thinking of all the swindles and petty hustlers he had seen—at least until he had come up to these mountains. “I guess times are changing, Anse.” He sat on the edge of the desk and put a hand on Burke's shoulder. The deputy's eyes lingered for a second, as they often did, on the vertical scar that ran down Canby's left cheek. Then they noted the bloody handkerchief for the first time.

“Well, be damned,” he said.

“Yep,” Canby said, “where've we put the kerosene?”

Burke's eyes hardly left the bandage while he busied himself getting the canister of fuel. They widened when Canby pulled the sticky cloth from the wound, peeling it by degrees from the long gashes.

“Hell, Thomas, did you wrestle it?”

“Thought he was dead,” Canby said, pouring kerosene on the cuts and wiping them clean with the bloodied handkerchief. The kerosene burned deep. “Fetch me a bedsheet, would you?”

Burke came back with a sheet from the jail's single cell, tearing it into strips as he walked. He looked out the window into the dark. “Have you brought it back?”

“I buried it.”

“Folks'll want to see the carcass.”

“Is my word not good enough?” Canby asked. His eyes burned brightly on Burke's face until the older man looked away.

“Sure, sure,” Burke said, not sounding so. His eyes still on the black window, he said, “Mountain folk are different, Thomas. It's not personal, but you ain't from around here. Some of these families been here a hundred, hundred and fifty years. You got to ease into their trust.”

“I thought I'd've eased in after nearly four years.”

Anse smiled. “You still on Atlanta time. Four years ain't a drop in the bucket up here.”

Burke yanked open one of the desk's drawers and pulled a
bottle of Jameson whiskey from it, along with two glasses mottled with fingerprints. “I'm grateful for your bringing this up from town,” he said, offering Canby a half-filled glass. “Beats the hell out of anything that ever came out of Gilleland's still.” He raised his glass to Canby and said thoughtfully before taking a sip, “I haven't passed blood in months.”

“To your health, then,” Canby said, raising his glass.

There was a single knock at the door and then it opened, the lanky frame of John Dodson nearly reaching to the top of the doorway. He had taken off his shopkeeper's apron and was hatless. A supper napkin hung from where he had stuffed it into the pocket of his striped pants and he held a yellow telegraph paper in his left hand.

“This just came over the wire for you, Sheriff,” he said.

“Come in, John,” Canby said. “Like a drink?”

“Wish I could. I'm already in a bad spot for leaving in the middle of supper.” He held the paper out to Canby. “It's from Atlanta.”

Dodson studied Canby's face as he read the message. “Atlanta. Don't they even stop to eat down there?”

Canby spoke without looking up. “Not if they can help it. They eat standing up, walking.” But his voice trailed off when he saw the telegraph was from Vernon Thompson, his old sergeant. Vernon had made chief the year before Canby left the force and Canby had never quite adjusted to the news of his old mentor presiding over the department, knowing what he knew. How Vernon could be among them without being of them was a mystery. Canby read:

VERY SENSITIVE CASE DEVELOPING HERE [STOP] NEED AN OLD HAND WITH NO CONNECTIONS TO CURRENT FORCE [STOP]

“Can you believe all them words? A telegraph that long costs something,” Dodson was saying. “They spend money like they'd as soon burn it.”

SUSPECT THAT PERPETRATOR MAY BE INSIDE MAN [STOP] CANT SAY MORE OVER THE LINE [STOP]

“You going to wire him back tonight?” Dodson asked.

Canby shook his head. “You go on back and finish your supper, John. I'll come by in half an hour, if that's not too late.”

Dodson shot Burke a look before he turned to go. “Goddamned Atlanta,” he muttered as he shut the door.

Canby stared at the telegraph's last lines.

MEET AT POWERS FERRY SIX OCLOCK WEDNESDAY [STOP] KNOW YOU WILL BE RELUCTANT BUT NEED HELP [STOP] YOUR FRIEND, V

Canby read the telegraph over once more before wadding it into a ball and tossing it into the cuspidor. Burke was looking at him expectantly.

“Nothing to fret over, Anse,” he said. “Just an old friend saying hello the only way he knows how.” He picked up the bottle
of Jameson and poured them each another round. He grimaced when he tossed back his glass, whether from the burn of the whiskey or the thought of his reply to Vernon, he was not sure. But he knew that when he stopped by Dodson's store, Dodson would make him tap out the message himself. The language was not the kind Dodson cared to have sent out on his line:

VERNON [STOP] GO TO HELL

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER
Canby stood on the board porch of the sheriff's office, watching Burke make his way down the dark street. He saw Burke list sideways and worried that the big man might have started on the Jameson before he returned from the mountains, but as the deputy moved on he could just make out a dark pile of horse manure that Burke had weaved around. Canby looked up and saw that the sky was overcast, no moon and no stars. This street so dark, he thought, because it had no gaslights, had only the lamplight from the houses to illumine it.

As the sound of Burke's padding footsteps on the dirt road faded, Canby turned back to the office door and shut it tightly. The door had no lock, the jail's only keys being the two that opened the cell and the barred gun cabinet. He jingled them in his pocket and thought about going home, lighting a lamp, and pulling down one of his father's old books, maybe Marcus Aurelius, and reading until he felt like sleep.
You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last
, that had been one of Angus's favorites.

The words sounded in his head as he walked down the wooden steps, thinking of his itinerary for tomorrow, the last day of September. There was one property line dispute to be presented before the county judge first thing in the morning, then the monthly trade day that afternoon. If he could get through the day without locking any of the local farmers up for public inebriation, he and Anse would probably spend the evening at the jail playing dominoes. It being payday, he supposed he would break out another bottle of Jameson around dark.

Canby stood in the middle of the quiet street for a moment, looking up at the gray clouds scudding across the sky, the dim hulk of the mountains in the distance, then walked quickly to Dodson's store. He knocked on the glass of the double doors before letting himself in. Dodson, who had been drowsing at the telegraph table, sat up and looked at him through tired eyes.

Canby wrote out his message longhand on the form and gave it to Dodson. The storekeeper's finger began tapping out the message, the clicking key's rhythm insistent and sonorous at the same time. While Dodson worked, Canby counted out change on the form, dropping the coins one at a time on the paper.

ALL RIGHT THEN [STOP] BUT NO POLITICS

As he put the last nickel down on the table, Canby saw Dodson glancing at his forearm.

“Damn,” Canby said, looking down at his arm. In spite of the kerosene and the fresh bandage, the blood had started to flow again.

October 3

C
ANBY WATCHED THE LAST TARDY STUDENT DISAPPEAR
into the Vinings schoolhouse, the door slapping shut behind him, before he stepped out of the sycamores where he'd tied his horse. He crossed the dirt yard out front of the white clapboard building and sidled up to the closest of the windows. Looked inside.

She was at the front of the room, harried he could tell by the milling students, the boys especially slow to settle down, to take their places at the desks. A row of Latin conjugations across the slate blackboard behind her, legacy of what Angus had taught her, taught him, in the little schoolhouse on Whitehall Street, in the way back before the war. She had always been the better student,
il migliore
, his father had loved to say. Now she shuffled the papers on her desk, stacked them, and held her hands out for the students to come to order. A white blouse with the collar up to her delicate chin. Chestnut hair pinned atop her head. Eyes flashing green as she smiled at her scholars.

His plan was to watch her for a while, as he'd watched her candlelit house last night, grateful that no suitor came calling before she snuffed the lights at ten. To watch and see whether he could tell, in the daylight, if she carried any bitterness in her face, the resolute cast of defiant disappointment that was the lifelong portion of a jilted Georgia lady. He thought her better than that. Hoped he would be confirmed and that he could wait out here until she dismissed the students for lunchtime, to have a word before he went down into Atlanta.

Inside, Julia had quieted the students and stood in front of her desk with a little girl standing before her, facing the class, Julia's hands on her thin shoulders. “This is Lauren Clay,” Julia said. “Who just came up from Savannah. Her father works on the railroad.”

The little girl nodded at her new classmates, shy, solemn.

“Tell us something about yourself, Lauren.”

“My name is Lauren,” the girl said, her speech impaired, the
r
in her name slurred. One of the boys snickered and Julia shot him a fierce look.

“I swap my
r
's for my
w
's,” the girl said as she looked around the room. “It's something I've been working on.”

Working said as
wuwking
, straightforward and earnest. Canby saw that Julia's eyes had misted as she patted the girl's shoulders.

“Spoken in the voice God gave her,” Julia said as she guided the girl to her desk, “and not a thing wrong with it.”

And then Canby saw that Julia was looking through the window at him. He nodded to her through the glass and she
nodded back just as slowly, studied him a long moment before moving back to the front of the room to begin her lesson.

He decided then that he would wait there until lunchtime. Thought that it might be prudent, though, to greet her from the saddle, sitting his horse in the dirt yard, lest she emerge from the schoolhouse bearing a poker or skillet to launch as a missile his way.

He walked under the shadow of Vinings Mountain, her voice clear behind him as she led the students through their recitations, to the trees where the horse waited. Her voice faltered once and he stopped in the silence, listening, until she resumed the lesson.