If only that had been the case, then the events of the early hours of Saturday morning, February 5, 1949 might never have taken place.
But they did take place, and—in hindsight—it was doubtful that anything could have been done to stop them.
“You done poked a hornet’s nest, son,” Glenn Chandler said as Henry got out of the truck in front of the house.
Evie walked to the porch steps and looked up at her pa. He had on a face that she rarely saw.
“Sent one of his boys out here to warn you off.”
“Warn us off?” Evie asked. “Who was it? What did he say?”
“It was Alvin Lang, Carson Riggs’s deputy, and he said that Henry should find his way home right about now.” Chandler looked down at his daughter. “And you, my sweet, should be a mite more careful about the company you keep; otherwise there mightn’t be work for you in Calvary.”
“What did you say?” Henry asked.
Chandler smiled. “I said I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and that if he had business with you, then he should take it up with you. I told him I wasn’t no messenger boy for the Redbird County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Go, Daddy!” Evie said, laughing, but her father didn’t join her in the laughter.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re digging up, but what I do know is that Carson Riggs ain’t happy about it. These are people you don’t want to upset, for a great deal of reasons.”
“We went over to Odessa,” Evie said.
“What the hell for?”
“See Carson and Evan’s ma in the psych place they got up there at Ector County Hospital.”
Glenn Chandler seemed to take a step back, though in truth he didn’t move an inch. “You did what?”
“We went on out to—” Henry started.
Chandler raised his hand without looking at Henry. “I’m asking my girl, son,” he said, his tone direct, unflinching.
“Pa?” Evie said, her voice tremulous.
Chandler took a moment and then came on down the porch steps. He waved at the pair of them. They came around the front of the trunk and stood before him as if scolded kids. Henry had his hands clasped behind his back, just as he’d been required to stand when being addressed by a boss at Reeves.
“People’s lives are people’s lives,” Chandler said. “Now, I don’t know what kind of deal you had with Evan back there in Reeves, son, but Evan ain’t Carson, that’s for sure. Seems to me that whatever you tryin’ to dig up is something he wants to stay buried. He lost his father, his mother’s out there in Ector, his brother’s in jail for murder, and now some ex-con snot-nosed punk comes sniffin’ around his personal affairs like a hungry stray in the yard. Maybe they’s all dead bodies up in that man’s yard, maybe not. I don’t know, and I don’t care to know. What I do care about is that I got a sheriff’s deputy, in uniform, mind—Sam Browne and .44 to boot—over my place on a Sunday morning, telling me that Carson Riggs don’t much care for my daughter getting herself up in his business. That’s gonna give a father some cause for concern.”
“Daddy, I’m more than capable of takin’ care of myself, and Henry hasn’t gotten me into anything that I didn’t want to get into.”
Chandler smiled. “So tell me, sweet pea, what is it
exactly
that you pair of busybodies have gotten yourself into?”
Evie glanced at Henry. They both knew the answer to the question, as did Glenn Chandler.
“’S what I figured,” he said. “In fact, I’d go so far to say that if you took everything you know between you and put it together, you wouldn’t even reach half a clue.”
“Pa … Henry made a promise. He gave his word to Evan.”
“I understand that, sweetheart, but that is between Henry and Evan, and it doesn’t include you. I find out that whatever is going on here is jeopardizing your safety, then I am gonna get concerned, and I am going to dissuade you from pursuing this. I am your father, Evie, and that is my instinct. And your mother would say the same thing.”
Evie shook her head. “No, she would not.”
Chandler looked momentarily surprised. “You’re telling me what my wife would have thought?”
“I’m telling you what you know she would have said about this, Pa. Last-chance saloon for the lost and lonely. That’s what she used to say, right? This house is the last-chance saloon for the lost and lonely. You told me that. You told me that she never backed off, that she always spoke her mind, that she always had something to say about the things she disagreed with. You told me that she was the toughest woman you ever met.”
“Well, she ain’t here now, Evie, and you are, and that’s what I have to deal with.”
“No, Pa, what you have to deal with is that she and I are the same … at least in that way, and I have made a decision. I want to help Henry keep his word to Evan, and you have to accept that I am not a child no more, and that’s just the way it is.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep. End of discussion.”
Chandler turned to Henry Quinn. “And what do you have to say about all of this, Henry Quinn from Reeves County Prison?”
“I don’t have anything to say, Mr. Chandler. I understand what you’re feeling, and I understand that Carson Riggs sent his deputy over here to warn us off, but I guess I’m as stubborn as your daughter. I made a promise to a man who saved my life, and I reckon that until I’ve done what he asked me, this is not really my life. That may sound crazy, but it’s the way I think. If I were up there in Reeves and I knew I was never gonna get out, and this girl was all I had in the world, would I want to say sorry? Would I want to make some kind of reparation? I think I would, sir. Evan Riggs can’t do that, but I can, and I said I would, so I’m going to.”
“And if folks get hurt in the process? People who have no right getting hurt?”
“I don’t intend that, sir,” Henry said. “Least of all Evie. And she can quit right now, and if she does, I’ll be sorry about that, but it won’t stop me.”
Chandler smiled. “Jeez, you pair are so alike, it’s painful to watch.”
“No one is gonna get hurt, Daddy,” Evie said. “I mean, what’s he gonna do? Kill us?”
“He’s the law, sweetheart. Don’t be so naive. Fifteen minutes and he could have Henry here back in Reeves for another half dozen years. He’s been sheriff in Calvary since the war. You don’t think that says something about the sway he holds over there? Whatever the deal is with Redbird County Sheriff’s Department, I am thinking that Carson Riggs is the grand dragon of all that and more besides. He’ll find out that you went up to Odessa. You think he won’t? Christ, Evie. You went to see his mother in the hospital. What were you thinking?”
“We were thinking that his mother might be able to shed some light on where Evan’s daughter is,” Henry said.
“And?”
“She has pretty much lost the plot,” Henry said. “She’s been up there at least fifteen years. She’s an old woman. She didn’t make a great deal of sense, but she spoke of someone called Rebecca, and from what we can guess, Rebecca was up there at Ector County, too. Seems that Grace Riggs visited her, and then Carson told her not to visit anymore. Anyway, from what she said, it seems that this Rebecca is dead, may even have died in Ector itself.”
“The girl’s mother?” Glenn asked. “Is that who this Rebecca is?”
“That’s what we think,” Evie said.
“And the daughter’s name is Sarah, right?”
“Right,” Henry replied.
“And you didn’t think to ask them if this Rebecca died in their care, seeing as how you were already in the building causing trouble?”
Henry looked at Evie. Evie looked right back.
“Not exactly Holmes and Watson, are you?” Chandler said, to which neither of them had an appropriate answer.
“Easy enough to find out, I guess,” Chandler said, “but the more people you speak to, the more questions you ask, the more certain Sheriff Carson Riggs will know what you’re doing.”
Glenn Chandler took a step forward and put his hands on Evie’s shoulders. “If I lose you …” He hesitated, then shook his head and sighed deeply.
“Pa—” she started, but her father raised his right hand and placed it against her cheek. He kissed her forehead, and then he turned to Henry.
“I said it before and I’ll say it again. Anything happens to her, Mr. Quinn …”
“Nothing’s gonna happen, Pa,” Evie interjected.
“I’ll take care of her, sir,” Henry said. “I give you my word.”
“So be it,” Chandler said, and with that he turned and walked back to the house.
Henry reached out his hand. Evie took it.
“He sent Alvin Lang out here,” she said.
“You know him?”
“Some.”
“I met him when I arrived,” Henry said. “When I went down to Riggs’s office. He’s a big guy, and like Riggs said, he’s the grandson of the governor or whatever.”
“Big guy with a small dick, I reckon,” Evie said.
“You know this from personal experience?”
“Fuck off, Henry Quinn.”
Henry laughed.
“So where now?”
“Calvary cemetery first, then Clarence Ames,” Henry said.
“Last thing Clarence said to us was something about buryin’ ourselves. You think it was a hint?”
“No idea, but I want to see if there are any Riggs graves out there, or graves for anyone called Sarah who could be the right age for Evan’s daughter. If not, I want to go back to Ector and get into their records office.”
“You ain’t quittin’ ’til you know for sure what happened, are you?”
Henry nodded. “Here until the last dog is hung, little lady.”
Evie laughed. “Who the hell talks like that, Henry Quinn? I mean, really? ’Til the last dog is hung. You are
such
a loser.”
“Enough of that there mouth, woman,” Henry snarled. “Ain’t you got some cleanin’ to do?”
She swung her hand backward and connected with his shoulder. “Just get in the car, will you?” she replied. “Christ, sometimes you are fuller of shit than a Christmas goose.”
The world came to see Evan Riggs. At least that’s the way it seemed.
It had to be said that Carson held up his end of the deal, and the old barn where Rocket once lived was transformed into something special. Carson and a handful of men from town—George Eakins, Warren Garfield, Roy Sperling among them—took one side off the building and created an open stage. They set a platform for the band inside, hung lights all over, pulled hay bales out and covered them in tablecloths where food could be set down. Though it was February, it was temperate, somewhere in the late sixties; it was warm enough for folks to be out there in shirtsleeves and cotton print dresses, cool enough to dance and not have folks passing out from heatstroke.
And the boys built a dance floor, as well; they dragged a couple of dozen rail sleepers down from the lumberyard, set them in front of the barn to the right, laid floorboards over and nailed them fast. It was a sight to see, watching them put it all together like a Swiss chronometer.
Carson ran the whole thing like a site foreman, barking orders, telling Roy Sperling to “heft it like a man, not a schoolgirl,” to which Sperling recommended he “go soak your head in a bucket of bullshit, Carson … I’m a doctor, not a goddamned longshoreman.” It was good-humored, and Evan made a point of getting out there and pitching in.
“Stay out of it,” Carson told him. “Know you can drag sleepers and nail down boards with the best of us, but what would happen if some darn fool like Warren Garfield dropped a hammer on your hands, eh? The man’s a lawyer, not a carpenter. You stick to your rehearsals; we’ll build you your Grand Ole Opry.”
For the first time in as long as Evan could recall, there seemed to be no tension between them. It was a good feeling. Maybe Carson was mellowing. He was twenty-nine years old, had been sheriff for five of those years, and perhaps the simple fact of having to deal with real peoples’ lives day after day had settled him somewhat. Carson had never been the soul of patience, but a law-enforcement job demanded a good deal of patience, if only to contend with the utter stupidity and ignorance of some folks. Other than that, it required more than enough sensitivity, delivering up bad news about car wrecks, arms and legs lost in agricultural machinery, the mess left behind after a once-in-a-decade homicide. Such business as this was all sheriff business, and Carson appeared to have grown into it without the expected awkwardness that folks had predicted. Maybe, after all was said and done, Carson was the better choice for Rebecca. Evan could see that, and he loved her so much that he couldn’t find it in himself to resent her for loving someone else, even if that someone else was Carson. Part of being human seemed to be reconciling oneself to the fact that one could not always have what one wanted. As with Lilly, so with Rebecca, but for different reasons. Lilly denied herself the world. Rebecca just denied herself the limits of human experience.
By late afternoon on Friday the fourth, the Riggs farm was already like the scene of a wedding party. There was an excitement in the air, perhaps nothing more than the thrill of having a real-live celebrity music star in Calvary, perhaps for reasons known only to those attending. Whatever the motivation, it didn’t matter; the atmosphere was everything, the hubbub and the noise, the flowers, the food, the plates of baked goods and cured hams and pitchers of home brew that were endlessly ferried from the backs of cars and trucks and station wagons. Clarence Ames and his wife, Laetitia, showed up with a whole hog—head, tail, and all in between—and William Riggs and George Eakins helped him rig up a spit. They had that thing turning by four in the afternoon, and by six the smell was sufficient to draw even greater crowds from Lord only knew where.
Grace Riggs watched her son take the stage at eight, and the roar of voices must have come from nigh on three hundred throats. She didn’t know for sure, and she sure wasn’t of a mind to be doing any counting, but that was the way it seemed. A sea of smiling faces right across the front yard and all the way down to the barn.
William stood beside her, snaked his arm around her waist.
“Our boy done good,” he said.
“They both done good,” she replied, and was about to say something further when she was interrupted by Evan and his pickup band breaking forth into “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart).” Evan and the boys had worked up a number of covers, some of the recent hits from Ernest Tubb, Tex Williams, and Bob Wills, but it was Evan’s songs that the people of Calvary, Ozona, and Sonora had come to hear, and when he hit the opening lick of “I’ll Try and Be a Better Man” the place went crazy. Double bassist fell apart in the middle eight, but no one seemed to notice, and if they did, they didn’t care. The dance floor looked like it would drop right through the sleepers, but people kept on dancing. Evan was grinning like a fool, making quips about the folks he knew, telling tales of how such and such a line was inspired by some darn fool stunt he and Carson had pulled when they were kids, and it seemed like the world that had showed up was a world owned outright by the Riggs brothers.
After a soulful rendition of “Lord, I Done So Wrong,” Evan made Carson come up on stage and take a round of applause.
“Our one and only Sheriff Riggs!” he shouted, and the place erupted. “Just wanna say that all of this could not have been possible without my big brother here … finest brother a man could ever wish for.”
Grace Riggs shed a tear.
Rebecca Wyatt watched from the left side of the stage and didn’t know which brother she loved the most.
William stood between George Eakins and Roy Sperling, a glass of ten-year-old bourbon in his hand, and he felt his heart swell like a balloon.
Carson took his applause and the hollering with good humor. He made a joke about illegal drinking and live music and how he had a couple of his men taking notes of all the license plates. Someone threw a bread roll. Carson saw it coming and kicked it back high over the crowd. Everyone fell about laughing. Evan and Carson hugged each other, and then Evan strapped on his guitar and tore the place apart with a version of “Cigareets and Whusky and Wild, Wild Women” that The Sons of The Pioneers would never have recognized.
Evan came off the stage at ten. He had three encores, and then he asked them if they didn’t have homes to go to. He was done, drenched in sweat, face redder than a beet, hair like damp string. He went inside and washed up, was back out by half past to a crowd of folks waiting with handshakes and backslaps and a seemingly endless supply of liquor.
Carson was dealing with some drunken squabble between two girls who should have known better when Rebecca cornered Evan near the smaller of the sheds beside the barn.
The pickup band were playing slow dance numbers for those whose feet could still support their weight, and Evan was soaking it all up like it was Christmas, Thanksgiving, and some kind of anniversary tied together with a bow.
“You done so good,” she said, and Evan could see she was almost drunk. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen, and he knew that she would marry his brother.
“I have to say goodbye, Evan. You know that, right?”
“Not tonight you don’t,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” she said, and she raised her hand and touched the side of his face.
Evan tilted his head as her fingers touched him. He closed his eyes, and he inhaled the smell of her perfume, no perfume that ever came from a bottle, and he felt for a moment that this symbolic goodbye was, in fact, a farewell to everything that Calvary was, everything he had been before this night, as if playing his songs for these people was his way of bidding adieu to the world that had made him who he was.
In truth, she was the main part of it all. Rebecca Wyatt. Skinny girl who rocked up a thousand years before with bangs and pigtails and a sass all her own.
“Remember this?” he said, and from his vest pocket he took the pocket watch.
She smiled, reached out and touched it. “You recall the stories I told you?” she said.
“Corporal Vernon Harvey from Snowflake, Arizona, got his darn fool legs blown off in the Argonne Forest,” Evan said.
Rebecca raised her eyebrows. “You impress me, Evan Riggs.”
“He didn’t save no children from burning farmhouses, did he?”
She smiled. “I doubt it, no.”
“Nor did he track no German sniper for three days and then kill him stone dead with a bullet to the heart.”
She shook her head.
“Loved those stories,” Evan said. “Used to lie awake looking at that watch and wondering what the hell really happened.”
“I’m sure nothing quite so dramatic as what I told you.”
“I’m gonna go on believing every word of it,” Evan said.
Rebecca looked away for a moment, a wistful expression on her face. “That was always the difference between you and Carson, wasn’t it? He always asked
Why?
and you always asked
Why Not?
You wanted to believe everything was possible.”
“Still do.”
“Guess it comes down to which of us forget we were all children once upon a time.”
“Maybe,” Evan said. “I don’t know.” He put the watch back in his vest pocket.
Rebecca touched his shirtsleeve, her fingers just glancing off it tentatively, almost as if she didn’t want to risk any real physical contact. “I am staying, you know?”
“I know you are.”
“And I will marry Carson.”
“I know that, too.”
“Are you mad at me for that?”
Evan shook his head. “Nope.”
She laughed. “That’s a telltale Evan
nope
,” she said. “That’s a
nope
that means
yes
.”
Evan took her hand and walked away from the edge of the barn to a table someone had set over behind the hog roast.
He was quiet for a time, just looking at her, perhaps soaking up whatever he could of that moment because he knew he would never be able to look at her in such a way again, and then he said, “You want to know what I want? What I really want, Rebecca?”
“I don’t think I do,” she said. “Not if it’s gonna hurt.”
He smiled, closed his hands over hers. “I want to hear that your kids are doing good in school, that Carson is the best sheriff in the county, that your pa is gonna be a grandpa, that you still listen to my records, and that you don’t hate me for leaving you behind.”
“You’re not leaving me behind, Evan,” she said. “I could come if I wanted to.”
“But you don’t want to,” he said.
“Not that I don’t want to, but that I can’t. It’s a life, Evan. You know that. Some people can do that; some people can’t. I gotta have foundations somewhere or I start seeing things all wrong, you know? I gotta know where I’m gonna be tomorrow and which horizon I’m looking for; otherwise … well, you know what I mean. That’s the way it is, and I don’t see that you can shoehorn one into the skin of another and make it work.”
“You can’t,” Evan said. “I seen people, good musicians, great songwriters, and they get off at the first bus stop and head back home. It’s a shitty life, that’s the truth, but I gotta do it.”
“I know you have, and you will find someone who can do it with you.”
“I’ll find someone,” Evan said, “but she won’t be you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I know, but you don’t need to say it. I can feel it. I can see it written all over your face. Just hurts me, you know? I don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rebecca shook her head. “No more sorry, neither.”
Evan smiled. It was a smile of philosophical resignation.
“Walk me back?” she said.
“Be a pleasure, ma’am.”
Evan told his ma that he would be back in half an hour or so, that he was seeing Rebecca home.
“Well, you make sure you get on back here pronto,” she said. “This party’s for you, and you can’t be missing any of it, okay?”
Evan kissed his mother on the cheek. “Thanks for all of this, Ma,” he said.
“I didn’t do much o’ nothin’,” she said. “You got Carson to thank for this.”
“I know,” Evan said. “He done good.”
By the time they reached the Wyatt place, the sights and sounds of the party were distant ghosts. They stood on the veranda together, Rebecca’s hand on the railing, Evan’s hand over hers, and when she turned and looked up at him, he could not stop himself from kissing her. It was a goodbye kiss. That’s what he told himself. He had not kissed her since he’d left for the war. This time it was different. This time it was fueled by loss and sadness and a pent-up wave of feelings that were all some variation of
missing you already
.
She turned toward him then, pressed her body against his as he put his arms around her and tried to pull her even closer.
“Oh God … Evan … no …” she exhaled, but she didn’t mean a word of it, and he couldn’t stop himself, and didn’t want to, and then they went through the screen door and down the hallway to the stairs and hesitated before climbing, and she led the way, her hand out behind her, and he took that hand and followed her to her room, and even as they passed through the doorway, it was as if he were watching himself from the downstairs hallway … as if he had let her go up alone … as if he had steeled himself resolutely against all temptation, as if the head had won over the heart and he had indeed let her go.
But he had not, and he did not, and the door closed behind them.
Evan Riggs and Rebecca Wyatt showed each other how things would have been if Moirai and the spinning of threads had not woven their lives apart.
Their lovemaking was furious, perhaps angry, each convinced to show the other what each was being denied, as if here was a way to release something that could never truly escape.
And when they were done, they said nothing. Evan merely rose from the mattress, got dressed, and left the Wyatt house.
A hundred yards away, he glanced back, but he did not see her watching him from any window.
Evan had been absent for close to an hour, but if anyone thought something was awry, they did not speak of it.