Jack Parker Comes of Age Read online

  The first few days of helping out his father passed peaceably enough for Sheriff Parker’s son. The boy swept the floor, tidied the office, went to the livery stable to see about the care of horses, and ran errands around town for his father. It was on the Wednesday that word was received of another lynching. The death of Aggie Roberts and John Baxter had been guyed up by local ranchers as a straightforward case of a pair of rustlers getting their due deserts. Aggie had certainly kept cattle, hence the nickname of ‘Cattle Aggie’, and Baxter, in addition to being her lover, was also her business partner in this enterprise. Whether they had really been engaged in snatching steers from the open range and somehow spiriting them away was another matter entirely. Tom Parker did not believe it for a moment, but there were plenty in town who did. The general prosperity of the town of Mayfield was founded upon the cattle trade, and money flowed in from the big ranchers and their workers. Most of the homesteaders were as poor as Job’s cat, so if there was a side to be taken in any dispute, it made sense to be with the cattle barons, rather than the two-bit sod-busters. This little piece of realpolitik was quite shocking to Jack when he learned about it from his father. It had never before struck him that decent people might be inclined to turn a blind eye to murder, just for the sake of their business interests. Still and all, that was how things were – at least according to his father, who ought to know.

  Despite theoretically working together, in actual fact Jack and his father saw little of each other for most of the day. The sheriff had many things to attend to around Mayfield and in the surrounding farms, so he was seldom in the office. It was to ensure that the office was never left unattended that Tom Parker had thought it a smart dodge to have his son around the place. On Wednesday, however, the two of them were both in the office when the door was flung open and a man rushed in, saying breathlessly, ‘There’s been another lynching, sheriff.’

  ‘The devil there has!’ exclaimed Tom Parker, ‘Where now?’

  ‘Fellow called Carmen, had a claim up by the river.’

  ‘Is it certain he’s dead?

  ‘Seed him with my own two eyes. Spoke to his wife, what’s more. She told me he was taken.’

  ‘Well,’ said the sheriff calmly, ‘If he’s dead, then there’s no point in hurrying. Set yourself down there and tell me the way of it. Jack, could we rustle up a pot of coffee for our visitor?’

  Joe Abbot, once he was settled in a chair with a pot of strong, black coffee near at hand, related the sad story. It appeared that three men had called at Frank Carmen’s home a little after dusk and represented themselves as having a warrant to take him off for questioning about the theft of a maverick. According to his wife, Frank had been dubious about the whole thing, but since the other men had him covered with drawn pistols, there was little he could do. The party set off north, in the direction of the river.

  Abbot had some business of an agricultural nature to conduct with Frank Carmen and so called at his cabin, early that morning. When Frank’s wife told him what had happened, Abbot had ridden up the track a ways until he had come to a little clearing, where there dangled from a branch the body of Frank Carmen. A square of pasteboard had been affixed to the body and this bore, in red paint, the single word ‘Thief’.

  Having delivered himself of this information, Joe Abbot was in no hurry to linger in the sheriff’s office. He said, ‘Those boys, meaning Carter and his scamps, are running pretty free. From all I’m able to apprehend, you’re no more able to stop ’em than we are, Sheriff Parker.’

  Jack was shocked to hear somebody speaking to his father in this way, but Tom Parker didn’t seem at all put out. He rubbed his chin and said, ‘You might recollect that old saying, the one as touches upon giving a man enough rope ’til he hangs his self.’

  ‘The only folk being hanged round these parts are innocent men and women, just trying to make an honest living,’ observed Abbot, before wishing the sheriff a good day and leaving, presumably to spread the news of the latest outrage.

  His father’s face was thunderous at hearing this Parthian shot and so Jack said nothing, waiting to see what would happen next. His father caught sight of his nervous expression and he said at once, ‘Don’t take on boy, every time you see me frowning so. I ain’t vexed with you.’

  ‘So what will you do, sir?’

  ‘Well, we’ll make a start, if you can fetch three horses for us. Get them tacked up and bring them here.’

  ‘Three? Is somebody else coming with us?’

  ‘No, but someone else’ll be returning,’ said Sheriff Parker dryly, ‘Less’n you fancy sharing your mount with a dead man, you’d best bring an extra horse.’

  After Jack returned from the livery stable, leading the required three mounts, he and his father set off to seek the late Frank Carmen. This was the first time that his father had actually consented to allow Jack to join him on any official business and he felt a keen sense of excitement.

  Before heading up to the woods which fringed the river, Tom Parker called on the widow Carmen – although she had yet to learn of the melancholy circumstance of her bereavement. Joe Abbot had not wanted to break the news and felt that the sheriff was the proper person to undertake the task. When she heard the horses approaching, Mary Carmen rushed from her home and, recognizing the sheriff, cried, ‘Thank God you’re here. Is there any news of my husband? I’m guessing Joe told you what’s afoot?’

  The sheriff said, ‘Joe Abbot came by my office this day, yes. Told me that your husband was taken last night.’

  ‘Said they had a warrant,’ said Mary Carmen, ‘Didn’t look much like lawmen, though.’

  ‘Well,’ said the sheriff, ‘Me and my assistant here, we’re going up by the river to see what’s what. That’s the way they went, yes?’

  ‘You’ll come and tell me directly if you find aught, yes?’

  ‘That I will, Mrs Carmen, that I will.’

  They set off downhill. If Mary Carmen had guessed the reason for the third horse which they were leading, she had given no indication of it.

  It wasn’t hard to find the clearing of which Abbot had told them; it was right on the path. The hanging body put Jack Parker in mind of the death of Aggie Roberts and he gulped, fighting back tears. His father, though, walked his horse forward and then dismounted; following which he walked around the corpse, examining it from all angles. Jack too got down from his horse, but felt unable to approach the hanged man. Instead, he looked around the glen and spied something lying by a tree-root. He went across and bent down to pick the thing up. It was a half-smoked cigarillo. Holding it up to his ear, he rolled it back and forth a little, listening to the dry rustling of the leaves from which it had been made. Then his father called irritably, ‘Are you going to stop fooling around over there, for I could surely do with a hand here.’

  Popping the cheroot into his pocket, Jack went over to help his father cut down the body of Frank Carmen. At first, he shrank back from the feel of the dead flesh, but his father said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re more delicate than a girl.’ So he held the corpse steady, as Sheriff Parker sawed away at the rope. He had to mount his horse in order to gain enough height to reach the taut rope above the noose which encircled Carmen’s neck. He said to his son, ‘Take a hold of him now, I don’t want to see him tumble into the dust like a piece of trash. He deserves respect, even in death.’

  After a second or two, the rope parted and jack Parker found himself in the disagreeable position of more or less embracing a corpse. He endeavoured at first to hold the man upright, but this proved impossible and so he gently lowered the late farmer into a sitting position. Something which struck the boy most forcibly was that in cheap thrillers, the sort of novelettes and dime novels which were almost all he ever read, dead bodies are sometimes carried by people who pretend that they are merely drunk; so that they can get out of a scrape of some kind. They might smuggle the corpse past a lawman by gripping its arms and saying, ‘Come on fellow, you had too much to dr
ink, you know!’ This real dead body, though, was nothing like a drunk man. There was something indefinably awful about a corpse, which could never be mistaken for anything else. This stuck in Jack’s mind for many years afterwards – the dead feel of the body.

  Once the two of them had laid the body carefully, and with as much dignity as was possible, over the saddle of the spare mount, lashing the ankles to the wrists so that it would not slide off, the two of them stopped for breath. Tom Parker said to his son, ‘We’d best take a look around, but I’m not hopeful of finding anything to tie this foul business to anybody in especial.’

  Jack took the cigarillo from his pocket and said diffidently, ‘Well sir, there’s this.’

  His father’s eyes narrowed and he took the rolled leaves from Jack. He said, ‘This might’ve lain here a good long while. There’s no way o’ knowin’ if it was smoked by one of them as did this thing.’

  Very hesitantly, Jack said, ‘Well, I figure that it was raining pretty hard, late yesterday afternoon, up ’til dusk. If this had been laying here then, it would be soggy and wet now. But just listen to it, when you roll it. It’s dry as a bone. I reckon somebody dashed it down last night, after the rain stopped.’

  The sheriff held the cheroot up to his ear and did as his son had suggested. Then he sniffed it delicately, as though he were smelling some fragrant rose. Giving his son an odd and inscrutable look, he said, ‘You’re something else again, son. You know that?’

  ‘Have I done something wrong?’ asked the boy anxiously.

  ‘You done something right is more how I would put it. I should have looked round here a bit myself before troubling myself about a man who was already dead.’ Tom Parker handed the cigarillo to his son and said, ‘Here, smell this.’

  After sniffing dubiously, Jack said, ‘That’s strange. It smells a bit like candy.’

  ‘Don’t it though? It’s aniseed. They flavour the leaves with it sometimes, it’s popular down south in Mexico. You get it in Texas too, just across the border.’

  ‘Does it signify?’

  ‘It might. Timothy Carter has a couple of Texans working on his spread. It’s what I told Joe Abbot this morning. Give a man enough rope and he’s certain-sure to hang himself in the end. Good work, son. For spotting this, I mean.’

  In all his days, Jack Parker had never heard anything as dreadful and spine-chilling as the shriek that Mary Carmen emitted, when she caught sight of her dead husband. Perhaps she had been waiting for them to return from the river, because Mrs Carmen was outside her cabin and there was no way of avoiding her seeing them pass by. After that initial scream, the woman set up a keening cry, which put Jack in mind of a wounded animal, caught in a trap. His father, who must have encountered such scenes before, dealt humanely but firmly with the distracted widow, explaining that he needed to take the mortal remains of Frank Carmen to town, in the hope that examination of the body would yield some clue as to the perpetrators of the lynching.

  Jack and his father did not speak again, not until they reached Mayfield. Both, in their different ways, were shaken by the morning’s events. As they rode down Main Street with their grim burden, people on the sidewalk stopped to stare. It could only be supposed that Joe Abbot had already spread word of what had occurred, for nobody came up and asked whose body this was, or what had happened to him. It looked like they already knew.

  The sheriff and his son placed the dead man in the presently unoccupied cell at back of the office. Then they washed their hands and Jack set a pot of coffee to boil. His father said, ‘This is what being a lawman is really like, Jack. It’s a dirty business, and you have to try and stay clean. I don’t mean physically, you understand.’

  ‘I think I see what you mean, sir.’

  ‘Do you though? I’d think as you’d a sight rather go off to college than get mixed up in this kind of thing day by day.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied his son slowly, ‘Seems to me that you are all that stands between and betwixt a whole heap o’ beastliness. You’re a-guarding the folk hereabouts, even if they don’t really know it.’

  Sheriff Parker looked penetratingly at his boy and, after a space, said, ‘I reckon you just about summed it up. You think you’d care to lend a hand at this work when you’re a bit older?’

  ‘It may be so, Pa.’

  Theoretically, Sheriff Parker had two deputies. One of them had been granted leave of absence to deal with a family loss over in Johnson County, which accounts for why the sheriff had wanted another pair of hands about the office for a week or two. The other deputy, a young man by the name of Brandon Ross, spent much of his time patrolling the areas where the homesteaders lived, reassuring them that the law would protect them. While the sheriff and his son supped their coffee, Brandon came through the door and Tom Parker gave him the bare bones of recent developments. The young man shook his head and said, ‘There’s already two families of settlers getting ready to dig up and leave. They say they’ve had enough. That Aggie Roberts business has spooked folks and no mistake, and I can’t say as I blame them none. A woman hanged from a tree! I never heard the like.’

  ‘It won’t take much more,’ said the sheriff, ‘To trigger a regular exodus. But there’s another side to the thing. People in town are disgusted about the lynchings, too. For all that the boys from the WSGA are good for trade and prosperity, nobody likes to see wanton killings like that. I’m hopeful that the mood is changing and that the folk in town might make common cause with the newcomers.’

  ‘You reckon so?’ asked Brandon Carter doubtfully.

  ‘I’m hopeful of it. It won’t take much more to tip the balance.’

  Sheriff Parker’s remarks on this subject proved prescient, for the very next day an incident took place which did indeed serve to turn the tide of public opinion against Timothy Carter and his bullies. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the following day’s events were the turning point; it was to be another ten days before the town was effectually roused and prepared to stand behind their sheriff in resisting the actions of the ranchers.

  Chapter 3

  The day after he had helped bring the corpse of the late Frank Carmen to town, Jack was taking things easy at the livery stable. One of the fellows from school, a boy a year younger than him, had acquired work at the livery stable over the summer. It was pleasant to relax a little and chat with somebody more of his own age, rather than being party to grim conversations about murder, mayhem and rapine.

  It was late afternoon and Jack was hopeful of his father dismissing him soon and telling him that he might go over to his Aunt Marion’s for a meal. The one thing which he had not fully appreciated before coming to work with his father, was the fact that the sheriff’s job was really twenty-four hours a day. He had always known that his father was out all day and often in the evening as well, but he had not really given any thought to what this actually meant. Now, he could see all the demands made upon his father’s time. Only a small part of the work entailed actually detecting or preventing crime. There were permits to be issued, documents filed, land deeds examined and a hundred and one other things. The duties were wide-ranging, and related every bit as much to civil matters as they did to keeping the peace.

  Jack and Pete Hedstrom were playing pitch and toss against a wall, with a few odd cents they had between them. Jack was having the best of it, when there came the sound of furious and hard riding and a man on horseback passed them at breakneck speed, heading down the street towards the sheriff’s office. Some instinct told Jack that this was urgent business and he said to Pete, ‘I’d best be off. That looks like it might involve my pa.’

  ‘I never thought you got along too well with your pa,’ said Pete, ‘Something change between you and him?’

  ‘Not exactly. Maybe I’m seeing another side to him lately.’

  ‘I sure wish I could spend my time in the sheriff’s office, rather than this old stable. It must be right exciting.’

  ‘Not really that,�
�� said Jack thoughtfully, ‘Exciting isn’t the word. It’s important. For everybody.’

  Having taken leave of his friend, Jack headed towards his father’s office and was not in the slightest degree surprised to see the horse which lately he had seen being ridden so hard, tethered to the hitching rail outside the office. He slipped in quietly and listened to what was being said. His father was speaking in the slow, patient tone he used when he was trying to get something important fixed clearly in his mind. He said to the man who had ridden into town, ‘You’re sure about that? That it’s Harker, I mean?’

  ‘Well, he’s laying dead outside m’cabin. Come and see for your own self.’

  ‘I purpose to take just such a course, but I needs must know the facts first. You kill a man, you put your neck in hazard, you know that as well as I do.’

  ‘You think if I’d o’ killed him other than in defence of myself, I would have come racing here to report the matter to you, Sheriff? Sides which, my partner’s up there waiting for us. He’ll take oath that what I say is the way of it.’

  ‘I’m not questioning your word, just making sure you realize what a serious business this is.’

  What had happened, as Jack later gathered from his father, was as follows. The man who had come galloping into town was a homesteader who was strongly suspected by the sheriff of moonshining. At any rate, he shared his cabin not with a wife, but another man. There was no suggestion that there was anything unnatural about this arrangement, it being widely supposed that this other fellow was by way of being a business partner in the distilling of ardent spirits. Sheriff Parker suspected that the reason that only one of the men had come to report the death was that the other was busily engaged in covering up all traces of the still and any evidence of moonshine liquor.