He rose, shook hands with Sheriff Riggs, thanked him for his time.
“Guess you’ll be on your way soon enough,” Riggs said.
“Guess I will,” Henry replied.
Riggs walked him to the door, watched him cross to his pickup, nodded once more when Henry glanced back.
Back inside the office, Riggs asked Lang if he’d called the saloon.
“Clarence Ames,” Lang said. “He and his buddies were drinking with your boy and Evie Chandler last night.”
“That’s the girl who works for Knox Honeycutt, right? Pretty one from Ozona.”
“That’s the one.”
“Clarence Ames,” Riggs said thoughtfully. “Get him on the phone for me, Alvin. Tell him I’ll be visitin’ with him this evening.”
By the time war came to Europe, Evan Riggs—despite his tender years—was already earning money as a singer. He played bars and saloons across most of the county, even stretching his legs as far as Loma Alta, Comstock, Langley, and Sanderson. The original songs he was showcasing were those that he would later record on
The Whiskey Poet
. He played the songs folks asked for as well, tunes like “The Convict and the Rose,” “Truck Driver’s Blues,” “It Makes No Difference Now,” and “Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland.” He put his own twist on them, which listeners seemed to appreciate, and there was no shortage of interest from local radio stations and small labels. But Evan was hungrier than that. He wanted a shot at the big show. It was something that Carson could never understand, and did not seem to try.
“Two types of folks,” Carson told him one evening in the summer of 1942. Out on the veranda, Carson and Evan were smoking cigarettes, drinking a glass of whiskey, taking a rare chance to mind each other’s business.
“And who would they be?”
“Folks who accept what they have and make the best of it and folks who are restless and will never be happy.”
“I guess you’re saying you’re the former and I’m the latter,” Evan said.
“Guess I am,” Carson replied.
“You think you’re happy?”
Carson smiled and sipped his whiskey. “You out on the road doin’ whatever you’re doin’. I’ve been here taking care of everything. Been spending a good deal of time with Rebecca, too, you know? Soon enough, I’ll be asking her to marry me.”
“You’ve been saying that for years, Cars. Maybe I’ll get there first.”
Carson grinned. “She would no more have you than a dose of syphilis. Besides, you may be out there bein’ a big ol’ country-singin’ star, but you are still only eighteen years old.”
“Love does not recognize age, dear brother. Besides, the day you ask her is the day I’ll know it’s true. If I believed you for a second, I might be jealous.”
“You are a hopeless dreamer, little man, a hopeless dreamer.” Carson smiled; it was nothing more than fraternal banter. They had not shared a cross word for as long as Evan could remember. Somehow, as their childhood years faded behind them, they had straightened out their conflicting angles.
Evan was silent for a time and then said, “I think I’m gonna sign up.”
“For what? Dumbass College?”
“The army.”
Carson turned and looked at his younger brother as if he had just shit in the soup.
“What the hell?”
“I think I have to,” Evan said.
“You are kiddin’ me.”
“Nope.”
“What the hell would you wanna go do somethin’ like that for?”
“Not sayin’ I want to. Sayin’ I should.”
“Doesn’t change the question.”
“Because it will get here soon enough. Because if we don’t take some action, then we may find ourselves without any choice in the matter.”
“You are talkin’ crazy, Evan. That there is some European thing. That is thousands of miles away. Nothin’ to do with us, and never will be.”
“Everything to do with us, and already is,” Evan replied, aware that Carson could not have been reading newspapers or listening to the wireless.
“Well, you go on and do whatever you think is right, Mr. Busybody,” Carson said. “I guess I’ll just rest here a spell and see how it all pans out.”
“Well, if I get killed over there, then Rebecca won’t have to choose between us,” Evan replied, knowing such a comment would needle his brother.
“She don’t have to choose nothin’, my feeble-minded sibling,” Carson replied. “She’s just waiting for me to make my move, and I have no doubt she will accept me.”
Evan smiled but said nothing. He reached for his guitar.
“Shee-it, you gonna start playin’ that thing again?” Carson asked. “Sounds like someone choking a cat with five-strand barbwire.”
“I wrote a love song for you and Rebecca Wyatt,” Evan said. “Callin’ it ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
Carson flicked his cigarette butt at Evan. “Prize Number One A-hole,” he said, and got up from his chair.
Evan stayed out on the veranda a while, was surprised when his ma came out to join him.
“Pretty,” she said. “What was that?”
“Just another tune I’m wrestlin’ with.”
“Carson says you were talkin’ ’bout the army.”
“He was right.”
“That’s a tough thing for a mother to hear, though it comes as no surprise.”
“Seems like the right thing to do.”
“Which is you all over, Evan Riggs.”
“Carson doesn’t see it that way.”
“Who knows how Carson sees things, sweetheart. He’s a good man, an honest man, hardworking and loyal to your daddy, but you and he could not be more different.”
“He says he’s been spendin’ a lot of time with Rebecca.”
“Don’t doubt it,” Grace said.
“Says he’s gonna ask her to marry him. You believe that?”
Grace didn’t reply for a while. She looked out toward the skyline and sighed. “Out here folks up and marry out of sheer loneliness. Even folks who shouldn’t get married do so. All I can say is that Rebecca Wyatt for a wife would be the best thing that could ever happen to your brother.”
“You figure she’d take him?” Evan’s voice was hesitant, uncertain. He was feeling things he didn’t want to feel, but he couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud, even to his ma.
“She’ll take him if no one else is asking,” Grace replied, and they both knew exactly what that meant.
“Carson should stay here and keep the farm going.”
“That’s the easiest path for him, and so that’s the one he’ll take.”
“And I’ll take the hardest one, right?”
“Not necessarily, no. Just a different one.”
Evan laid down his guitar. “Joining up … I think it’s somethin’ I have to do, Ma. Otherwise I’ll never be able to live with myself. But I ain’t scared, because I know I’m not gonna die out there.”
“How so?”
“Meant for somethin’ else,” he said. “I really feel that … like I am meant for some other life.”
Grace Riggs reached out and took Evan’s hand. “You are a special one, no doubt about that,” she said, smiling. “Your father says you are gonna conquer the world with your songs. He’s mighty proud of you. Maybe he don’t show it, but he is. You know that, right?”
“I heard him singin’ one of my tunes the other day. He didn’t know I was there, but I heard him.”
Grace laughed gently. “He was singin’ one this mornin’. I asked him whose song it was. He said it was one o’ yours. I told him let’s leave it that way, okay?”
Evan laughed with his mother, and it seemed that not only was the war a million miles away, but also their wish to discuss it. Same went for whatever was going on between Carson and Rebecca Wyatt.
At last she said, “You do what you feel is right, Evan. You always have, and you always will. I could try to convince you otherwise, but I’m not of a mind to. I know better.”
“You don’t want me to go, I won’t.”
“Don’t lay that on me, Evan.”
“I’m sorry. I just meant that—”
“I know what you meant, and it’s appreciated, but this is your decision. Just stay home as long as you can.”
Grace rose from where she was sitting and stood beside her son. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Who knows? You may change your mind,” she said, but they both knew he wouldn’t.
As fate would have it, Evan Riggs would miss both Thanksgiving and Christmas that year. His decision made, he drove out to Sonora and met with army recruiters there. He signed up for the infantry, was told he should report to the office in San Angelo on Monday, November sixteenth. News of the war in Europe had been filtering through, and for anyone of a mind to garner further information, there were ways and means. The US Marine Corps had landed on the Solomon Islands, taken Florida Island first, then established a bridgehead at Guadalcanal. The advancing German forces had reached Stalingrad, the British Eighth Army had seized key positions near El Alamein, and Himmler had already instigated the wholesale obliteration of the Jewish people. Fifty thousand had been murdered by the SS in the Warsaw ghetto alone. There were rumors that “death camps” had been created for the killing of people on an industrial scale.
On the evening of Saturday, November fourteenth, Evan Riggs walked across to the Wyatt place to find Rebecca.
“You’ve come to say goodbye, I guess,” she said. Her daddy had fetched her from inside, and she found Evan on the veranda.
“I have, yes.”
“There’s no chance you’ll change your mind, then?”
Evan just smiled.
“I knew there wasn’t, but you knew I was gonna ask.”
“You want to sit awhile, Rebecca?”
“You want me to?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You gonna get serious on me, Evan Riggs?”
“Too late,” he replied.
Rebecca perched on the railing. She was all of twenty years old, and the age gap between them seemed insignificant now.
“I have always loved you,” Evan said. “You know that, right?”
“What’s not to love?”
“But … well, we never …”
“You have kissed me five times,” Rebecca said. “Once in the kitchen to see how it felt, twice as thank-yous for Christmas presents, once out of politeness at Thanksgiving, and one time in the barn after Rocket died and I sat with you while you sobbed your heart out. You never really kissed me for love, Evan Riggs.”
“I was always afraid that you loved Carson more,” Evan said.
“I love you both,” she said. “You’re different people, and I love you for different reasons. Carson has chased me forever, and I can respect that. He knows what he wants, or at least he thinks he does. It was you I wanted to be chased by, but you no more know what you want than …” She shook her head resignedly. “You are an enigma to me, Evan.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
“Sure you don’t. You can’t help who you are.”
“I am sorry if I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me. You just disappointed me.”
“Then I am sorry for disappointing you.”
“We are not going to spend this time apologizing to each other.”
“I came to say goodbye, but I’ll be back.”
“You seem very sure.”
“I am.”
“Lot of boys are getting killed out there.”
“I’m coming back,” Evan said, and there was not a hint of doubt in his voice. “I have things that need taking care of.”
“And might I be one of those things?”
Evan smiled. “You read me like a book, Rebecca Wyatt.”
“When I can get the pages open, sure.”
Evan stepped forward, opened his arms to her, and she came. They held each other for a long time, and when he kissed her, it was neither polite nor a thank-you. It was passionate and heartfelt, and it stirred something within both of them that they had always known was there but had never tried to unearth.
“You do this to me now?” she said. “Before you go get yourself shot in your dumb ass in Italy or whatever?”
“No one is shooting me in my dumb ass in Italy or anyplace else, Rebecca Wyatt,” Evan said. “The war will end by Christmas, if I’m to believe the propaganda. Whatever happens, it will end, and I’ll make it home.”
“Make sure you do,” she whispered.
“And I have this for good luck,” he said, and from his pocket he took Vernon Harvey’s watch.
“Gave that to Carson,” she said.
“With your hands yes, but with your heart you gave it to me.”
Rebecca pulled him close. She kissed him once more and then stood with her hands gripping the veranda rail as he walked away into the darkness.
Rebecca Wyatt and Evan Riggs would not see each other for nearly three years, and their reunion would be bittersweet for so many unexpected reasons.
William Riggs drove his youngest son out to San Angelo. It was a bright November morning. The sky was crisp cut from blue linen, the sun high and warm and comforting. Carson had hugged him awkwardly, told him he still figured it a dumbass idea, and Grace had tried her best not to cry, yet had failed awfully. By the time the truck pulled away, her handkerchief could have been wrung out for irrigation. She did not want to drive all the way to San Angelo simply because she knew the drive back would be worse than staying behind. Carson tried to comfort her in his own well-meant but clumsy manner, and before William and Evan had even made the highway, she had convinced herself that this was nothing more than a brief separation. Evan’s conviction was definitely convincing; she knew in her heart of hearts that she would not be losing her son.
There was a bus awaiting the army’s newest recruits, a bus bound for Fort Benning in Georgia. It was a thousand miles or more, all the way through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. They would stop merely to change drivers in Shreveport and Meridian. They would eat at highway diners, sleep right where they sat, hold their bladders until they were given leave to piss, and pray for the roads to get smoother the farther east they went. They did not. By the time they arrived, many of them felt that they could not have ached more had they endured twenty-four hours in a washing machine.
Within an hour, Evan Riggs met his drill sergeant, a terrier-faced bundle of spite and malevolence called Ronald Curtis. Curtis was a career soldier, and the thought of stabbing Japs with a bayonet fevered his blood. Slipped discs and related complications meant he would never see a frontline, and that challenged him far more than a mess of greenhorns with little discipline and less intelligence. Within days, Evan Riggs would cross him, and yet the resultant barrage of extra duty, additional drilling, and merciless belittlement that Curtis would inflict upon the younger Riggs was perhaps exclusively responsible for Riggs’s return from the war. Whatever could be said of him, Ronald Curtis made Evan Riggs a different kind of man. The man who left Fort Benning was equipped not only to survive the Allied invasion of Italy under Alexander and Clark, but also attacks from the twenty-sixth Panzer Division behind the Nicotera defense line, a brief assignment to Molina Pass on the main route from Salerno to Naples, a prolonged exchange as his own unit supported the thirty-sixth Texas Division against von Doering’s group, and numerous other frontline skirmishes. The men Evan had trained alongside were no different than he, and yet most of them did not return. Many of them fell right beside him, their blood spilled on foreign soil, their heads and hearts punctured by German bullets, their legs blown clean away by landmines. Perhaps Ronald Curtis had something to do with this, or perhaps it was Evan Riggs’s own single-minded determination that he would return from the war that saw him through … perhaps the same single-minded determination that would see him survive two decades in Reeves without giving up the ghost.