Love and Lament Read online

  Tomorrow we leave for Southampton, and so on to France.

  Miss Mary Bet, you have been so kind to me I hardly know how to tell you just how much I appreciate your friendship. I cannot understand why, but I do know that I long to tell you everything that either gives me pleasure or worry. I suppose it is because you are the most unselfish person in the world and understand human nature. Well, I will have to bid you good night before you become disgusted trying to read this long, uninteresting, scribbled letter. So hurry to dreamland, and dream that you have many friends, but none who care for you more than I—this will be a true dream. Love and best wishes,

  Sincerely,

  LST

  Mary Bet folded up the onionskin pages and returned them to the envelope. She studied the stamps with their likenesses of British royalty. She’d never gotten a letter from overseas, and she wondered what Leon had been doing for the three weeks it took the letter to arrive. Probably he was in France somewhere, involved in something so dangerous she wouldn’t want to even picture it. She tucked it into her scrapbook. Then, as she started downstairs, she took it out again. Why not show it to Flora? News from abroad was important to everybody these days.

  Flora was sitting at her machine, her back straight as a board and her head bowed. The machine whirred and clicked, the bobbin and treadle in their own rhythms that sometimes intermeshed, like that great comet that had come dashing around the sun. Mary Bet said, “Here’s a letter from England.” Her friend glanced up briefly. “It’s from Leon Thomas, with news from the regiment. Shall I read it?” Flora nodded, and so Mary Bet plopped onto the settee and read almost all the way to the end.

  “Is that all?” Flora asked. She never said much, but when she did speak, her words always meant more than what was in them.

  Mary Bet laughed. “Well, almost. All right, he goes on to talk about how he appreciates my friendship and he always wants to tell me things and … well, that’s about it. And he signs it love and best wishes, and then sincerely. That’s kind of peculiar.”

  The machine went on to the hem of the muslin sleeve, then stopped. Flora turned around, her mouth a chipmunk smile, scolding with a minute shake of the head. “Now, I have something to tell you, Miss Mary Bet. Just this morning one of the girls at the shop was talking about Leon Thomas.”

  Other women talking about Leon meant that other women were thinking about him, and Mary Bet had to fight her natural curiosity. “What was she talking about him for?” she asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

  “She was telling about when he stood up to that preacher that time.” She regarded Mary Bet with a penetrating, amused look. “You know, when the boys were up training in Durham.”

  “I know the time,” Mary Bet said. “Just what was she saying?”

  “She was wondering if he was being joshed by the boys over there, once the story went round. I expect they’ll keep him true to his word.”

  Mary Bet shook her head and pictured the men poking fun at Leon, trying to tempt him into—she didn’t want to imagine what. “I don’t know he ought to’ve challenged a preacher that a-way,” she said. “What made him to do that, do you reckon?”

  “You know him better than I do. Why do you think he did?”

  She tried to picture him sitting in the pew, hot to the point of burning, until he felt he would burst if he had to listen to one more thing, a fire of righteousness and love for his fellows taking over and making him stand up. She smiled almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something got into him.”

  She felt for him, putting himself on the line that way, and a sudden warmth spread over her as she sat there, and a fear she had never known. She had a strange feeling, of a soft warm wind and an empty field with deepening shadows along the edge. When Flora turned back to her work, she said a quick prayer for him, a soldier far away.

  “Do you think we’d hear about it, if they—if any of them got hurt over there?”

  “You’d know more about that than I do, working in the courthouse.”

  “Nobody’s said anything about it. I reckon they’ll telegraph if anybody from around here got hurt. The telegraph office would get word out to Leon’s brothers, and send a notice over to the courthouse. Over to me, come to think of it.”

  “Why do you want to dwell on such a thing, Mary Bet?” Flora was concentrating on her work now, guiding the underarm through the pecking needle.

  “It eases my mind some. If I imagine the worst, then I don’t see how it could turn out that way. Things always turn out different to how you imagine.”

  “What do you think of Leon?”

  “I like him,” Mary Bet said. “I don’t know why he volunteered though. His father was shot in the War between the States. And here there’s a war in Europe, and our boys have to go over there and fight it for them. It doesn’t seem right somehow. But I reckon it’s the way of things.”

  “Does he give you an address where you can write him back?”

  “No, they’re on the move.” She thought about Leon, his broad smiling face and stocky body, tramping along in a mass of dark-clad soldiers in their brimmed doughboy helmets, and she wished now that she had never been coy with him. “Well, maybe they’re better off over there, with the flu as bad as it is.” She smiled vaguely.

  Flora paused. “I heard the flu was worse over there.”

  “I didn’t need to hear that,” Mary Bet said. “Anyway, I don’t reckon they’ll send them to the front, as green as they are.”

  She had begun to realize that she did love Leon, though mostly what that word meant to her was that she thought of him in connection with family and home. She thought it likely that he had a more romantic nature than she—he had once praised her for her practicality, for how well she was able to put unpleasant and difficult things out of her mind. And though she had taken it as a compliment, she thought he had put his finger on a weakness of her character. But she also understood that since he was the more romantic, he could probably be relied upon to do as she wanted him to. She liked that about him, that he seemed gallant regarding her needs. Yet the real test lay in how he and they endured, and she thought of her parents and how her mother had said that marriage was like a coat that didn’t fit quite right. Oh, what was the point of wondering about married life with Leon? He had not properly proposed, and—she could hardly stand the thought—he was fighting in a war.

  Surely they would not put untested men right up at the front. She was the sheriff of Haw County, but what could she do? Her jurisdiction ended at the county line. But she had been turning an idea around in her mind. The note falling from the scrapbook had told her it was time to go, and now that she was in a position to get some answers she didn’t think it would be an abuse of her power to work in a visit to a fellow sheriff, as long as she was out in Morganton visiting her father anyway. A barrier had to be breached if she was ever to get on with her life.

  SHE THOUGHT OF taking the boy out with her and Deputy Everett to apprehend a bootlegger, then decided not to show him any more immoral behavior than he was already familiar with. She went on the raid, because there was no one else available, the able-bodied being off at war, and when they got out to the still and found the place abandoned and started chopping it up, one of the Sugg brothers came out from a little pup tent with a sawed-off shotgun and demanded they leave. Mary Bet told him that she was the sheriff. She showed him the badge on her jacket and he laughed, and she said, “I’m the governor’s constable here in Haw County and I’m going to haul you in, so I suggest you put that thing down and start moving.”

  Sugg had a grizzled beard that looked as though he’d hacked it off with a knife, tried to shave it, and given up. His sloe eyes drooped in a sad way, and his overalls were caked with hops on the bib and dirt on the knees. He looked more dangerous than anybody she knew, the way he just stared, as though he were looking at a tree, or some animal he was studying how to get the better of; a scar along the side of his mouth creased h
is face and added ten years to his age, which she put at around forty.

  Everett looked like he wanted to run. He still had his hands in the air, and he had a kind of pleading look, as though to say, “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” But Sugg just shifted the gun from one person to the other, jabbing it in the air to see if he could make them turn and run.

  “Why don’t you get your hands in the air, little lady,” he said, “like your deputy. I don’t believe you’re really the sheriff. I think you bought that badge somewhere and now you just want this still because it’s situated right prettily here.”

  “I don’t want any such thing,” she told him. “Except for you to put that gun down. I’m going to step over to where you are, and by the time I get there, I expect that gun to be lying on the ground to where you cain’t get it. Make haste now, boy.” She spat what was in her mouth and started slowly forward, keeping her dark eyes on him.

  He poked the gun toward her, and Mary Bet’s heart leapt. But she kept stepping. “You got a gun in that skirt?” he asked.

  “I might, and Deputy Everett might. We’re taking you in, so unless you aim to kill us both and hide our bodies and get clean out of this state, you’d best do as I say. And if you do kill us, I’m telling you, you won’t rest a night, because the Bureau of Investigation and every policeman in the country will be out looking for you for killing a woman sheriff, and they’ll find you too and string you up just like they strung up Shackleford Davies. I saw him a-ridin’ on his coffin. I reckon you remember that hanging?”

  He nodded, looking a little less sure of himself. There were now only twenty feet between them. Everett had held his ground, and his tongue, for which she was grateful. Sugg was working his cheeks in and out like a bellows while he was studying the problem, but it only made him more sinister, as if he were a little less than fully human.

  And then she was standing five feet away from him. “Don’t point that at me!” she snapped. He lowered the barrel. “Set it on the ground, slow, so it doesn’t go off.”

  He put the stock down, then picked it back up. “What happens if I just run off?”

  “Then we’ll come after you. I know who your people are, and we’ll find you and it’ll go a lot worse for you. Right now, you’ve got six months in the county jail, but if you run off I’ll see you get put in the state penitentiary for five years.” She didn’t know if he would believe her; she guessed he knew more about the criminal justice system than she did. “You ever been there?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve been in the jail, though, and I didn’t particularly like it.”

  “I don’t reckon you did. It hasn’t gotten any better. Just do what I say, and I’ll tell Judge Lane to go easy on you. But if you run off, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  He set the stock down, then knelt to lay the gun on the ground. He stood up as Everett came slowly forward with the handcuffs.

  Everett drove—Mary Bet having never learned how—and Sugg sat up front, his shackled hands in his lap. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t have any second thoughts on the way and try anything foolish. You’ll get good food there in the jail, and I’ll see that you get all the blankets you need. We’ll put you in where there’re new folding cots with springs—they’re better than the old iron ones.” She had to shout over the wind from the car’s speed, and Sugg just nodded.

  When they got there he was compliant. He said, “I’m never going to live down getting taken in by a woman. Can I tell people you had a gun?”

  “Tell ’em what you want,” she said. “It’s a lie, but I don’t expect it’s the first you’ve ever told, nor’ll be the last.”

  CHAPTER 26

  1918

  SHE RESPONDED TO Leon’s letters, telling him to take care and filling him in on the details of her life. She told him that being sheriff mostly gave her respect for the responsibility Hooper and men like him had shouldered. “But I reckon I’m doing a right good job of it, because the Board hasn’t let me go yet.” She wanted to tell him about Matthew Cadwallader, ask him if he thought it was graft to let the boy pay off his debt to society by chopping her wood and painting her back stoop.

  The days rushed along, and when a letter arrived she thought, “This will be the last one, and then a telegram will come.” His letters were weeks behind the newspaper reports from the front. “He’s already gone,” she thought, “and there will be no time to prepare for it and the rest of my life as a spinster.”

  Once he wrote that it was only the thought of her that kept him from temptation, and she wondered what he meant. She could picture his broad face and smile and his sparse eyebrows, but the image was from a photograph he had sent her, posed in his green wool uniform. In her mind, he merged with a hundred other soldiers, all alike, so she tried to see him coming into her office to visit, hat in hand, jacket open.

  She imagined temptresses and French prostitutes servicing the soldiers at sordid, dirty hovels and way stations in godforsaken towns. But had God really forsaken them and could the French women be so different and lacking in morals than the women of Haw County? Perhaps during a time of war everyone was desperate, and Leon was no different from anybody. He was lonely and needed to feel the warmth of another human being, poor man. He had had only one serious affair, so he had told her, and that was with Ann Murchison. She thought, “I’ve waited too long. He’ll fall in love with a French woman for sure, and come home married.” Flora told her to quit thinking such thoughts and keep her mind on her darning.

  There was a letter in which he said they were heading to Toul in northeastern France. She got out her father’s old atlas and found the town, located along the Moselle River. It seemed too close to Germany. She had nothing against the Germans—her people had come from Germany—and yet now they were fighting the rest of Europe. It made no sense, and nobody around seemed to have any satisfactory explanation for it. It was just a terrible war, something men seemed bent on doing.

  She tried to picture a quaint little village with a Gothic church and farmhouses scattered about, but she kept seeing mud and men and horses and big guns on wheels and dirt-smeared women trailing behind in kerchiefs and aprons, and the men and horses, and many dogs as well, were all on the march toward some horrible reckoning over a road where the noise of explosions and gunfire grew louder and louder. She’d heard of machine guns and tanks and trenches and airplanes that shot each other from the sky, and it all seemed so remote and terrible she could hardly picture Leon Thomas in such a hellish mess. She preferred to think of him as he was here, leaning into her office of a morning with a big smile on his face and that cast in one eye.

  He wrote to her as often as he could, he told her, but twice a month didn’t seem often enough to her. Her palms would itch something fierce on mornings she was sure a letter was coming, and then there would be nothing and the whole day would feel pointless and miserable.

  One day in late September when the newspapers reported Allied troops moving toward the Meuse River, Mary Bet decided it was high time for a proper inspection of the county jail and convict camp. She took along her young charge so that he could see for himself where he might be headed if he didn’t mend his ways.

  They started out at the jail, south of the courthouse. “You write down what I tell you in that notebook,” she said to Matthew. “Write down sixteen white and nine colored inmates.” She watched as his hand formed slow, clumsy letters. “Good, now let’s speak to the warden.”

  She introduced Matthew to Warden Hargrove, a leather-faced man of indeterminate age with buckteeth and one half-closed eye. “Warden,” she said, “this is Matthew Cadwallader, helping me out for a while.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the warden said. He nodded at the boy. It was known, but not mentioned, that she had hired the boy shortly after he had gone around returning the stolen items and apologizing and offering to work for the people he had stolen from. Only Mrs. Gooch had come asking Mary Bet if she planned to send the boy to juvenile
court. Mary Bet asked her if she was pressing a charge; Mrs. Gooch said she would think about it, and that maybe she should speak to the judge first. “That’s fine,” Mary Bet said. Mrs. Gooch turned up her nose, said, “Well,” and walked out.

  “Are the inmates well cared for, Warden?” Mary Bet asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. But we could use a sewerage system in here. It’s more than me and Hiram can handle, back and forth with the pots all day.”

  “Write that down,” she told Matthew. “The board’ll get a full report.”

  “And we could use gutters. That roof water ain’t fit for drinking, getting mixed with the oil in the pumps.”

  “Write that down.”

  Next they drove out to the convict camp to the north. “Now, if you’re on good behavior,” she told Matthew, “you’d get to work out here.”

  “I’m not going to prison,” he told her.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  They walked around the little wooden buildings, accompanied by the camp warden. There were pens with goats and pigs, and a pasture that held cattle and mules. Three men in dungarees and black-and-white striped shirts were in the pigpen at work on the stockade fence. “We could use a pasture for the hogs,” the supervisor told them. He was a short man, not much over Mary Bet’s height, with a thick mustache like hog bristles. Matthew was writing before Mary Bet said a word. “And you know these shacks—”

  “I’ve been after the board to do something about it since before I was sheriff. Mr. Teague wanted brick buildings, and I think it’s high time. Next meeting I’m going to tell them it’s the least we can do to honor the request of our sheriff serving overseas. Besides, I can see now for myself you can’t keep things sanitary like this.”

  “No, ma’am, we can’t.”

  “How about the crops and stores?”

  “Fine. Plenty to feed the stock and—what is it now, thirty-nine or forty, with fourteen here and them at the jail. I don’t know if they’ll be enough for brick buildings.” He spat and then went on. “Hundred and fifty bushels of sweet potatoes,” he said, reading from a sheet, “two hundred pounds tobacco, six tons meadow hay. The pea vine’s not so good this year.” He went on about the wheat and corn, the stock and straw, Matthew writing it all down.