Lawman

“Now don’t try t’make me sound like some talebearin’ ol’ biddy,” Garrick growled. “Some of th’ scandal was in the newspaper, seein’ as how the Gillespie boys’ father founded that town an’ all, and you know how people talk. It sure beats jawin’ about the carpetbaggers still crawlin all over Texas. All right, if you must know, I heard tell that in Gillespie Springs, Livy Gillespie’s about as welcome as fire ants at a picnic.

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” Cal wondered aloud.

Garrick snorted again. “Who knows? It ain’t like their little farm’s prime acreage or nothin’, though Dan did manage to keep the taxes paid on the place. Some say she’s just stayin’ so as not to give Robert Gillespie, her brother-in-law, the satisfaction. He wants her gone bad, ol’ Bob does, so he can add their land to his holdings, but Dan didn’t change his will before he died. His old will specified that the land went wholly to Livy ‘and their issue.”’

“Isn’t that a little inconsistent?”

His brother looked puzzled.

“Not to change the will, I mean, after going to the trouble of killing the man who’d cuckolded him and of leaving a note and all.”

Garrick shrugged again. “Damnation, Cal, the man had to have been out of his mind, after findin’ out some Mexican had taken his place in her bed, and killin’ him. He must have just forgot!” His voice took on a scornful edge. “And now the ‘issue’ that’s gonna be livin’ there is some other man’s bastard.”

“Garrick—” began Sam.

“Oh, shut up, little brother. You think just ‘cause you married the preacher’s daughter that every woman is as innocent and pure as they’d like you to believe! Well, if my wife skeedaddlin’ at the sight of my chopped-off leg ain’t enough proof that women ain’t t’be trusted, then the likes a’ Livy Gillespie surely oughta be!”

Ignoring Garrick’s bitter remark, Cal met Sam’s gaze in a moment of shared amusement, both remembering the circumstances of Sam’s hasty wedding to Mercy, which had come after their wedding night rather than before. Yes, Garrick supposed a lot of things that weren’t necessarily so. Maybe this was another of them.

In any case, however, it wasn’t going to matter to Cal. By now his head was throbbing unmercifully, the pain settling behind his eyes like red-hot needles, so that even the flickering light of the lamp caused agony when he looked at it.

“I hope y’all will excuse me, but I’m gonna turn in,” he said, rising to his feet. “It’s been a long day.”

Once he had reached the sanctuary of his room, he had a moment of indecision. Should he dig into the old carpetbag he kept under the bed and bring out the bottle of laudanum he hadn’t used in months? Was it weak to seek relief from this pain in a bottle of strong medicine? He didn’t want to start craving it, the way he’d seen some wounded men do during the war. Yet he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep when the pain got to be this intense, so at last he reached under the bed and brought it out, unstoppering it and taking a couple of sips. He knew its euphoric effects would banish his headache and then bring a healing sleep. And maybe the narcoticinduced euphoria would keep him from thinking about Livy Gillespie.

He’d think about Lizabeth, the woman who’d taken him in when he’d finally fallen off his horse at her isolated farmhouse, wounded, shivering with fever and having no idea of who he was. Even though he’d been wearing a blue uniform in the midst of rebel territory, Lizabeth had hidden him and nursed him until he was well. When he’d gotten better he’d just never gotten around to leaving. He didn’t know what regiment to return to anyway.

Eventually love had grown between him and the widowed Lizabeth and he had married her, only to lose her to pneumonia later. From there he’d drifted on to Abilene, where Sam had found him tending bar as “Deacon Paxton.”

Yes, Cal would think of Lizabeth. Now there had been a good woman, a trustworthy woman. As he lay in the comforting darkness of the bedroom, waiting for the laudanum to take effect, he tried to remember her face. She’d been a blonde, her hair a reddish-gold shade she called strawberry. She’d had big green eyes and a determined chin…but somehow, every time he tried to picture her, Livy’s face intruded instead.

Walking up the steps of the Bryan Episcopal Church was like coming home. Built of freestone in hues of mellow gold and gray, the exterior of the building was in harmony with the golden autumn morning.

Entering the sanctuary through the short narthex, Cal lifted his eyes with pleasure to the stained-glass window behind the altar, which portrayed Jesus as the Good Shepherd, surrounded by sheep and tenderly holding a lamb. It had been purchased at some considerable sacrifice by the parishioners when the church was still newly built, a couple of years before the war, and Cal, just ordained, had taken over as the rector. That window reminded him of why he wanted to minister to God’s people. He’d often write his sermons while sitting in the front pew, looking up at that window for inspiration.

“So it’s true—you’re back. What are you doing here?” demanded a raspy voice behind him.

Cal knew who it was before he turned around. “Hello, Josiah,” he said, extending his hand as he faced the man who’d taken his place as rector. “Yes, I’m back, and not dead after all, it seems.” He smiled pleasantly at the portly man, who was five years his senior. “It’s nice to be home.”

Josiah Maxwell just breathed heavily, his dark eyes suspicious. “I said, what’re you doing here?” He jerked his head around to indicate that he meant the interior of the church.

Cal sighed inwardly. So Maxwell wasn’t going to make it easy. “Why, I just came to look at my favorite picture. It sustained me, thinking about that picture during the war. I even remembered it after the shell hit—” he gestured toward his patch and the scars “—and I couldn’t remember anything else. I just couldn’t remember where I’d seen it.”

He knew as soon as he’d said it that mentioning the war had been the wrong thing to do. It gave Maxwell an excuse to object to him sooner.

“You mean when you were wearing a blue coat and killing other Texas boys?” Maxwell asked with a sneer.

Cal took a deep breath. If he’d thought his appearance would appeal to Maxwell’s sense of compassion, he’d been deluding himself. “Josiah, that’s all over now. It’s been over for three years. I’d hoped by now folks would be willing to let bygones be bygones, and live for today and the future, not dwell in the past, however tragic it’s been for all of us. I—I’d even hoped maybe you might have some work for me to do to help you here.”

Maxwell’s flush had risen up his neck, past his muttonchop-whiskered jowls to the top of his thinning brown hair.

“Work? For you? I’m the rector here—I don’t need any help.”

“I know you’re the rector, Josiah,” Cal said patiently. “I’m not trying to take your place, merely to offer assistance. I’d be happy to do anything, as a deacon or in whatever capacity you’d like. When I left, this place was crying out for an assistant rector.”

Maxwell’s arms folded over his ample belly. “I got nothing for you to do here,” he insisted. “I reckon I’d sooner work with the devil himself.”

“You wouldn’t consider consulting the vestry first, before giving me your final answer?” Cal asked, referring to the lay governing board of the church. “I’m willing to wait until they can meet.”

“I’ll just bet you are,” said Maxwell with an ugly laugh. “You waited three years after the war was over to come home, didn’t you? I guess that makes you a patient man. But the vestry isn’t going to vote any different, so you may as well forget it.”

Cal thought about explaining his loss of memory, then dismissed the idea. Chances were Maxwell had already heard that part, too, and didn’t believe it. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Cal made himself say in a calm tone. “Well, I’ll see you on Sunday, then, Josiah.”

“I wouldn’t bother, if I were you. Folks see you come in, they’re apt to leave. They don’t hold with worshippin’ alongside a’ traitors.”

Cal just stared at him for a moment before turning on his heel to go. Back in the narthex, he encountered a drawn, haggard woman dressed in mourning black, who looked faintly familiar.

“Good mornin’, ma’am. Aren’t you Miss Lucy Snow? Cal Devlin,” he explained, when the woman just stared, gaping, at his eye patch. “It’s nice to see you again,” he said politely, while thinking inwardly that Annie had spoken the truth when she’d said Lucy was a wrinkled-up prune.

The woman’s blank stare turned to narrow-eyed outrage. “Don’t you even speak to me, you blue-bellied devil!” she snarled, and swept on past him with a swish of black bombazine.

So he wasn’t even welcome in his own church, he thought. Perhaps it was just a matter of time, of being patient while people he’d ministered to learned to trust him all over again. Perhaps he’d have to work on the Devlin farm for a spell, training and selling horses with Sam. Cal liked horses well enough, he guessed, and Sam would welcome his help, though he didn’t actually need it. But even as Cal considered the appealing prospect he knew it wasn’t for him. He wanted something of his own to do.

He mounted Goliad outside the stone church and headed down to the post office. He’d promised Mercy he’d see if there was a letter from Abilene from her father, the Reverend Fairweather. And Annie wanted some yellow thread from the mercantile. Now there were two good places to determine if his reception at the church was going to be typical of the whole town.

The post office was just a small frame building, hardly big enough for the clerk and three chattering ladies who occupied it, two of whom were enormously fat and identical in all respects, including the number of chins they possessed. The Goodlet twins? Sam had told him back in Abilene how the twins were no longer the buxom charmers who’d once competed for his attention.

Conversation ceased as he entered the post office. “Good morning, ladies,” he said, bowing before stepping up to the counter, where the clerk favored him with a basilisk glare.

The third woman put a net-gloved hand up to her mouth as if Beelzebub had just spoken to her.

“Well, I never,” murmured one of the twins.

“The nerve of some people!” sputtered the other, setting her chins wagging.

Cal smiled grimly at the Wanted poster on the wall, suppressing the urge to ask Leticia what she’d “never” and Alicia whether she meant he’d had a lot of nerve not to be dead.

“What do you want, mister?” demanded the goggle-eyed clerk, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. It was as if he hadn’t been the prize pupil in Cal’s catechism class before the war.

‘’Nothing much,” he said pleasantly. “Just wanted to see if my sister-in-law, Mercy Devlin, had any mail waiting.”

The clerk looked through a stack of letters. “Yup. Here,” he said, shoving one of them across the counter at him, then staring pointedly toward the door.

Cal took the hint, feeling the women’s eyes on him all the way out the door and hearing the buzz of talk begin once he was safely out of the building. On to the mercantile, then. Since it was just three short blocks, he left Goliad tied to the post-office hitching post.

He passed the Bonny Blue Flag Saloon, remembering that it had been merely the Bryan Saloon before the war. He was thirsty, but kept on walking. Maybe he’d stop in after he was done with his errand. Stepping off the plank sidewalk and into the dusty street to allow two more ladies to pass, he tipped his hat, but they merely stuck their noses in the air and sailed on, their bustles sending their skirts billowing in their wakes.

Sitting on a weathered bench outside the Bryan Mercantile and Emporium was a trio of idlers.