Feast for Thieves (28 page)

“To the sheriff’s?”

“You heard me right. I’m going to jail.”

It seemed a shame to me.

Here was all the folks in our church raising a heap of money for a building when one of our own families was in desperate need. I said as much to the sheriff later, and he shook his head and exhaled noisily. He called Mert at the church and brought her and Clay into his office at the jailhouse where he talked to them for a long time. I stood outside the door and they talked in hushed voices for more than two hours. When they came out, the matter was settled. The money from the Cahoon’s land was going to go back to the church. Mert and Clay both insisted on that, the sheriff told me later. She and Clay were proud people. They hadn’t let their needs be known, and that was their undoing, Mert and Clay both admitted, but that was no reason the money shouldn’t go toward what it was originally intended for. The sheriff tried to talk them out of it, saying they could find another way, but Mert and Clay both put their feet down.

Clay insisted on going straight to jail. The sheriff wouldn’t hear of it, but the Cahoons were insistent folks, so Clay spent two nights in the Cut Eye jail, then returned to his sickbed in Mert’s new apartment east of the city hall and barbershop.

Halligan held a special congregational meeting the next Sunday after the service. A few folks wanted to throw the book at the Cahoons. A few others wanted Mert to resign from her job as church secretary, but Halligan said nothing doing.

Mert and Clay came to the meeting. They hadn’t missed a Sunday in more than twenty-five years, and they weren’t about to start now. Halligan read a letter the Cahoons had written in advance, one where they both apologized for their transgressions. The apology was sincere, I didn’t doubt it. And afterward there
were a lot of tears and handshaking. Folks hugged the Cahoons and apologized for not helping carry their burdens better.

There was a new sense of resolve that the congregation undertook, a promise to look in better on folks to make sure they were okay. The next week a new visitation committee formed. The folks on the committee vowed they’d raise special funds to help folks throughout the community, and an offering was held right then and there. More than a thousand dollars was raised, with promise of more offerings to come, and the committee set about disbursing the funds right away in a way that could help the folks that needed it most.

The following Friday, Clay Cahoon died. He passed away sitting in his chair in their new apartment in the city, and Mert asked me to take his funeral, so I did. Halligan secured permission from the new owner, and we buried Clay Cahoon on a quiet corner of the land that used to be their property. The burial plot was situated on a low rise overlooking a stream of fresh flowing water that started underground elsewhere on the land and bubbled to the surface and became a brook.

Everyone in town turned out for the funeral. Clay Cahoon was well-known around these parts, and folks paid tribute to a man who loved to work outdoors, a man who loved his wife, and a man who hoped so hard for a better way of living that he grasped for that which he thought would make things right, even though it didn’t.

No one excused his crime. There was a ripple of talk that theft was theft, and folks agreed with that, they did. But there was also widespread talk of forgiveness, of understanding that crimes often carry with them a great deal of complexity, and of renewed resolve to care for the needs of Mert Cahoon, the newest widow in church.

The day after the funeral, Halligan Barker drove over to the parsonage and knocked on my door. His brow was furrowed and he shook in anger.

“I just checked the county records,” he said. “The contract’s already notarized, and it can’t be undone. But I’m kicking myself for not checking this sooner. You’ll never guess who bought the Cahoons’ farm.”

I shook my head.

“It’s an unnamed developer—some big company from out east—but that ain’t the half of it.” The sheriff balled up his fists tight.

I shrugged. “What’s the whole of it?”

“Mert and Clay didn’t know anything about what was going to happen to their land. Nobody did, that I can plainly see. The plans have been on file with the planning commission for more than two years, but they were all kept hush-hush at the courthouse. They’re gonna build a new tavern. Oh, it ain’t just a tavern. It’s a monstrosity. This one’s gonna be five times the size of the Sugar House. They want to attract folks from other states. It’s gonna have a gambling casino and a hotel, and an expanded brothel with girly shows each night. It’s even gonna have a full-course buffet restaurant—shoot, it’ll put the Pine Oak Café out of business. They’re even gonna build an airstrip out back so rich men can fly their planes in and out for a weekend’s amusement. The town’s going to be ruined, Rowdy. Plumb ruined.”

“Can anything stop it?”

“Not a blamed thing. I drove by the property early this morning. A construction crew’s already on the location. They came from Oklahoma and they’ve got three shifts working around the clock. Foundation for the hotel’s already dug, and they’re already pouring concrete to build the airstrip. They want to get the strip built as soon as possible so they can fly in more investors as they build.”

My eyebrows raised to the roof of my forehead in disbelief. “I can’t believe nobody knew about this.”

The sheriff snarled. “Well, there’s been one man who’s known about it all along. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s majority owner of the unnamed company that’s developing it. When it came to the legalities for Cut Eye, this man railroaded the whole thing straight through.”

“Who’d do such a thing?” I asked, feeling the tingles of foreboding that I was getting used to when it came to discussing town business.

Halligan spat in the dirt next to my front steps. “None other than Mayor Oris Floyd.”

TWENTY-FOUR

W
ell, I waited for my trial, and October passed and November flew by in a jiffy, and then it was December 1946, and the weather turned cold even for Texas. A skiff of snow fell one morning, but by afternoon it was gone. Mostly the ground packed up cold and the wind blew hard from the northeast. Rain fell a few days but it dried up and more wind blew, and at night the wind snuck in through the walls of the parsonage with enough of a groan to make me check and see if the Springfield was still under my bed and loaded.

Right around then we started work on our church building project. Cold ground notwithstanding, the fellas dug the septic field, and the inside walls of the church building were taken down to the bare studs in preparation for insulation and drywall. New gravel was poured and light fixtures and paint was ordered, and we started fixing up the parsonage at the same time. But I confess there was little excitement for the work all around.

With the thought of this new development monstrosity looming right outside our town, folks talked mostly about how Cut Eye would be dying soon. The old Cut Eye, at least. A new Cut Eye was being built, a modern Cut Eye, and big money would soon be flowing up and down Highway 2 with all the greed and corruption that came along with it. There wasn’t anything one small community church could do to change things, folks admitted with a kick in the dust.

Across town, the developers worked night and day on the casino and hotel. The airfield was built in a jiffy and airplanes started flying more investors in and out. I hated the development, but I did sneak a peek or two at those planes. There were Beech and Cessna, Aero and Luscombe. Small, single-prop fliers flown by wealthy ranchers and oilmen, businessmen from the city and their attorneys. My favorite private airplane was the Ryan Navion. A brand-new one flew in one morning and I saw the fella and his copilot climb out of the sliding canopy. Although I’d made more than a dozen jumps out of an airplane, I’d never actually landed in one. Maybe in thirty years when they let me out of jail I’d get to fly in one of those shiny new planes and even get to land. I pushed the thought far from my mind.

Oh, all over town, it seemed development sprung up from the backside of nowhere. Roads were plowed through where cows had once grazed. A new apartment complex began. A field was leveled and graveled over for a new parking lot. The framing began in earnest for the main casino building—the one that would hold the new tavern and restaurant. Permits for the business of bringing in dancing girls were still being held up at a state level, but the mayor promised investors that was but a technicality that would soon be remedied.

Right about then Oris Floyd stepped off the church deacon board. He was too busy with the new development project, and besides, the church wasn’t doing much advancement by comparison, he said with a laugh. That left just the sheriff and Deputy Roy on the deacon board, so Deuce Gibbons came on, and that meant three, and Deputy Roy allowed for a revision in the church constitution to make it legal.

Church work became more difficult all around. Sunday after Sunday, attendance was down in the services. I gripped the pulpit with both hands and my messages were clear and bold. I kept up the visitation rounds and the men’s Bible study, the jail ministry,
and the work projects on Saturdays. But it seemed the spark had left. The excitement of changing a community for the better was over. Our church was a fossil of an institution, folks muttered under their breath. An old-time establishment that didn’t matter for nothing in a dangerously modern town.

There were a few bright spots along the way. One was that a bunch of the new folks started a new prayer meeting. The old meeting on Wednesday nights continued, but this one happened Saturday mornings, real early. At first only a handful came. Word trickled out and more and more began to join along. There was no great agenda at all. Just prayer. Prayer and more prayer and then more prayer still. That’s all we did. Pray.

Of no small wonderment to me, my ministry of counseling folks began to boom, just like Bobbie had predicted it would back when she first showed me the ropes. A middle-aged father stopped by and wondered how he could help his teenage son. The teen was being ornery, making hard choices, stuffing cotton in his ears to all wisdom. I didn’t know much about parenting, but I listened to the fella for a long time, just like Bobbie said to do. I listened, and listened, and listened. And then I prayed with the fella. That was it.

A married couple knocked on my door one evening and said they needed to talk. They was fighting all the time, they said, not listening to each other, and I didn’t know nothing about marriage neither, but Bobbie had shown me some straightforward verses earlier to prepare for such a knock on my door.
Husbands, love your wives
, I read to them, and when they left, well, they didn’t look quite as ornery toward each other anymore, although I figured they’d still have a long ways to go.

Folks came out of the woodworks with all sorts of problems. One man hated his supervisor at the plant. Another fella cheated Uncle Sam on his taxes and now felt remorse. A woman wanted to stop gossiping but didn’t know how. Another was just mad all
the time, yelling at her kids, saying she felt ready to explode.

Other problems emerged, problems difficult even to talk about. Person after person came to me to unload, and I found it surprising, even startling to learn some of the things that went on behind closed doors within a community. I reckon it’s like that anywhere. I asked Bobbie about this—about why the counseling load had suddenly spiked. She said that when folks know the truth of your situation, or at least know you’re not perfect as a minister, then they start to open up more about the difficulties they’re going through. That, and it was nearing Christmas. Counseling loads always climbed around the holidays, she added.