Mockingbird Songs

  And the Calvary he returned to was a different place with a different atmosphere, and though at first he believed it was his own eyes and ears that had changed, he began to understand that the changes were real and specific, and most of them were attributable to his brother.

  Carson Riggs, by default, by fate, by accident, had assumed the position of sheriff in November of 1944. He was all of twenty-five years of age, the cock of the walk, playing dalliance with self-importance, a gun on his hip, a coolness in his gaze, a sense of assumed authority that belied the truth of his inherent insecurity. Evan had seen such men in the army. Power and money merely exaggerate what is already there. In war, such men got other men killed and then spoke of collateral damage and acceptable losses. In peacetime, with no war to fight, it seemed such men created skirmishes and smaller wars to keep their uncertain minds occupied.

  It appeared to Evan that Carson had become such a man, had perhaps been such a man all along, but the law had now given him an outlet for this predilection. A cruel facet had come to the fore, an aura possessive of cold angles and sharp corners, and the warm reception afforded Evan—the valiant hero, the decorated soldier—was neither appreciated nor condoned. Carson made comments, sly and cool, and it was obvious that envy played a part.

  “You couldn’t have been more fussed over if you’d been killed out there,” he said, and Evan heard something else entirely. Had Evan been killed, there would been a sense of loss, of course, but Carson would have received the attention and the sympathy. Evan would have been forgotten, as was everyone who died, but Carson would carry that burden as if a knapsack of sorrow, and use it to his advantage. Evan could see that in his older brother, and he did not like what he saw.

  William and Grace Riggs were not so devout or religiously-minded as to consider that the return of their younger son had much of anything to do with God, but even they bowed their heads and made silent thanks in church. William Riggs knew that war was a crapshoot when it came to who survived and who didn’t, and he was just grateful that the dice had fallen in his favor. Grace held her son for a long time that day, seeing him walk down the road in his uniform, the smart snap in his stride, the colors on his breast, aware—as all mothers are—that something had changed in her son. His shadow was more dense, possessive of some immutable darkness that neither time nor love would ever fade. As Plato said, Only the dead have seen the end of war.

  Where Evan found the most visible welcome was on the doorstep of the Wyatt house.

  Rebecca seemed in shock, even though word had gone ahead that he was returning.

  “Evan …” she exhaled, and ran to him, throwing her arms around him, pulling him tight, as if to let go would see her slide right off the surface of the world and vanish into space.

  Later she would speak of Carson, the things she’d heard, the things she didn’t believe, but for now her thoughts were for no one but the younger Riggs, asking him questions about his campaign medal, his Combat Infantry Badge, what acts of heroism had earned him two Bronze Stars. And Evan made light of it all, saying that his mind had been filled with images of his hometown, of her, of the songs he would write upon his return, of the future he’d planned.

  The tension between them was unbearable. The effortless ease with which they had shared one another’s company had been replaced by an awkward uncertainty. They were older, perhaps somehow wiser, and—as was the case with all people—the simplicity and innocence of youth had been turned over for self-doubt and shades of cynicism. In different ways, adulthood had shown them that the world was not the magical place they’d believed it to be as children, but an altogether more sinister place.

  Later, when the excitement had somewhat exhausted itself, when Evan and Rebecca were sitting out on the Riggses’ veranda, William and Grace asleep, Carson attending to some sheriff’s business, she gave Evan a reason for some of her reticence.

  “He asked if I would be his girl,” she said, her voice faltering. “When they voted him in as sheriff. It was that night. He was a little drunk. He asked me if I would be his girl.”

  “If you would marry him?” Evan asked, unsurprised by this revelation.

  “Not in the words, no,” she replied, “but in the intention.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Half of the truth.”

  “Which half?”

  “That I felt it wasn’t right to discuss it until after you were home safe.”

  “Or you heard word that I was dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet he was upset,” Evan said.

  “No, not really. At least not visibly so. I think he wanted to hear a yes or a reason for no that made sense. He got the latter.”

  “But he didn’t believe it.”

  “I don’t know, Evan. He has changed, and not a small amount. He used to be so easy to read, to predict, to deal with, but now he seems to have lost his way.”

  “Or found a way that winds up somewhere bad.”

  “You think?”

  “I think.”

  “Regardless, I feel for him, and I do love him in my own way,” Rebecca said.

  “You love everyone, Rebecca,” Evan said, and he reached out and took her hand. “That, perhaps, will be your downfall.”

  She smiled. She knew he was right, but what could she do? She could not change who she was, and the world had yet to hurt her sufficiently to make her be someone else.

  “You know that I love you, too, Evan,” she said, “but the last thing in the world that I want to do is stand between you and your brother.”

  Evan smiled and did not speak for a while. What he felt and what he wanted to say were in his heart, but they could not survive the circuitous route to his lips. There was too much pent-up emotion in his chest. He loved the girl, no doubt about it, had carried thoughts of her through Italy and France and Germany and Holland, carried them like a lost man carries water from an oasis. When the battles raged and the bullets flew, he packed them deep beneath everything for fear that they would be shot from his hands, but when he came to rest he found that they were still there, still intact, perhaps scattered with dust, but nevertheless unharmed.

  Perhaps it was true that those who survived war were those with the greatest desire to come home.

  And yet, for all that he felt, he could see that Rebecca was torn. Perhaps it was inherent in a woman to seek some sense of stability, a sense of firm ground beneath her feet, an inherent wish to raise a family. Carson could provide that stability. He could give Rebecca a home, a place to be, a place where she could raise children and know that tomorrow was within her control. Evan couldn’t do that, either, and believed he never would.

  “You don’t stand between Carson and me,” Evan said. “You never have. If anything, you have enabled us to be closer than we would have been without you.”

  “That is a very sweet thing to say,” Rebecca replied, “but I don’t know if it is really the truth.”

  Evan reached out and took her hand. “This is who I am,” he said. “I will always be this way, and I have no wish to change. I’ll stay in Calvary a while, but I will leave, and I have no idea where I will go. I am willing to let the wind take me, I guess.” He smiled, looked away toward the horizon.

  “You know that there are disagreements between Carson and your father,” Rebecca said. “About the farm … the land.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oil people. You know about that, right?”

  “Oil people have been chasing my father for years, Rebecca. They will continue to chase him, but he won’t sell.”

  “He and Carson argue about it.”

  “So I understand. Right now it is not an issue. My father will stand firm.”

  “And what about us?”

  “Us?”

  “Yes, Evan. You and I. What about us? You are going to leave, sure. I have always known that, but isn’t there something inside that says you should stay?”

  “You are the only reason I’d stay, Re
becca,” he said, “but something scratches at me, and it doesn’t stop, and the only remedy is to keep moving.”

  “You are a gypsy.”

  Evan smiled. “That’s what my ma used to say. I was left on the porch and she took me in, said I was her own.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. You and Carson are so very different.”

  “Enough for now,” Evan said. “I’m only just back. Let me find my feet, okay? We’ll have time to talk, to work things out.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “Because time has a way of running through your fingers. Seems like yesterday we were nothing but kids, and now here we are, making decisions that will affect us when we’re fifty and sixty years old.”

  “I can’t think that far ahead. Tomorrow is enough for me.”

  He leaned up and kissed her on the cheek. She put her arms around him and pulled him close, but she could feel—just like always—that there was something deep inside him that made him want to pull away.

  A week later, a cool evening, Evan and Carson on the veranda as the sun glowered along the horizon.

  “Sheriff seems to suit you,” Evan said. “Youngest in the history of the county, or so I hear.”

  Carson smiled. “But you are the war hero, brother.”

  “The war will be forgotten,” Evan replied, “as will those who fought it, even though there were so few from Calvary. And it will be forgotten because that’s what people want to do.”

  “I missed you,” Carson said, and for a moment everything was forgotten but the fact that they were once as close as brothers could ever be, and this was something that could never be taken away.

  “I missed you, too,” Evan said.

  “A day didn’t go by when I didn’t wonder if I’d see you again. And it wasn’t easy for Ma. She cried a lot. Never seen her attend church so much as when you weren’t here.”

  “Maybe that’s what brought me back.”

  “Bullshit,” Carson said. “Prayers and church and whatever … all so much nonsense. A man makes his own life. A man makes his own death as well. You came back because you have things to do. Can’t say I understand them, but then again, I don’t need to because they ain’t my things.”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  “I know.”

  “A year, maybe two,” Evan said.

  “That long?” Carson asked, and there was an edge in his tone, as if the earlier moment of fraternal empathy was gone.

  Evan turned and looked at his older brother. They had been apart for less than three years, but a world of change had taken place in both their lives.

  “You want me to go, Carson?”

  “I want you to do what you feel is right for you, Evan.”

  “Am I in the way?”

  “Of what?”

  “The oil people. Rebecca.”

  Carson stepped forward and gripped the veranda rail. “She told you.”

  “She tells me everything. We are friends, Carson—always have been, always will be. You and I and Rebecca don’t have secrets. That’s not the way we were raised and not the way we are as people.”

  “Maybe there are things that are of no concern to you.”

  “Maybe there are, but I assure you that I have no intention of distracting you from your plans, Carson.”

  Carson nodded. He inhaled, exhaled. “That presumes that you would have the means to distract me.”

  Evan frowned. “What has happened to us, Carson? What happened while I was gone? I understand that you’re sheriff now, but that doesn’t mean you can quit this family or change the way this family cares for one another.”

  “You and I are very different people, Evan,” Carson said, his tone matter-of-fact, businesslike. “Comes a time when you start to think about your future, and how you were as a child bears no relation to how you are as a man—”

  “That makes no sense,” Evan interjected. “How you are as a man has everything to do with how you were as a child.”

  “Perhaps for you, Evan, but not for me. What I want and what you want are not the same thing. I don’t understand you, and I don’t expect you to understand me. That is just how it is, and you can fight it or accept it.”

  “So what do you want, Carson?”

  Carson smiled. “I want everything, Evan.” He turned and looked at his younger brother, and there was a shadow in his eyes that was unfamiliar. “Everything I can get, and more besides.”

  Carson let go of the railing and walked back into the house.

  Evan stood there for some time in the coolness of the evening, and he felt strangely and uncomfortably afraid, not only for Carson, but for everyone else as well.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was hard for Henry not to see his life as a divided thing. The accidental shooting of Sally O’Brien was not so much a semicolon as a full-blown end of paragraph. Life had stopped for three years and had now begun again with the sense that what came before bore no relation to what was now on the way. Paragraphs from different books, the characters anomalous, the dialogue fractured and confusing.

  He woke before Evie, slipped silently from the bed, put on his jeans and a T-shirt, and made his way out to the kitchen. Glenn Chandler was gone, presumably to work, and Henry went about the business of making coffee in a stranger’s house.

  Standing on the veranda, looking out over the flatlands of West Texas, he felt as if this place was no longer his home. The Great Depression had almost killed the spirit of the state, and though oil had brought money, it had never erased the feeling that everything could be swept away in a heartbeat.

  Remnants of the past were frequent and varied. Take a drive in any direction, and there were signs of leaving, of giving up, of quitting this godforsaken place for someplace better. A row of eroded fence posts like rotted teeth marking some long-vanished boundary; the stone bed of a redundant gas station, the subterranean tanks nothing more than vast mouths filled with dirt and rust and the bleached skeletons of prairie dogs, jackrabbits, and snakes. Broken-down convenience stores, the once-bright colors whipped by wind and dust into ghosts of former colors. Texas was a cul-de-sac for the westerlies, carrying with them bitterness and aggravation and the memory of failure.

  “Hey.”

  Henry turned and saw Evie standing there in the doorway. She had on nothing but Henry’s shirt; she came up behind him, snaked her hands around his waist, and rested her head against his shoulder.

  “You left me sleeping,” she said.

  “You looked happy,” Henry replied. “Like you were dreaming.”

  She sighed gently and pulled him closer. “Did you see my dad this morning?”

  Henry turned within her arms and faced her. “No. He was gone before I woke.”

  Evie leaned up and kissed him. “You wanna hear about how I don’t normally do this?”

  “I know you don’t normally do this,” Henry said, smiling. “And neither do I.”

  “I know you don’t. You’ve been in Reeves for three years.”

  “Still, even if I hadn’t …”

  “Come on,” Evie said. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  She made eggs and rye toast and fresh coffee. Then she asked about Evan’s daughter and what it was really about.

  “Just keeping a promise,” Henry said. “Evan took care of me, saved me from some trouble right at the start.”

  “The hard-won lesson?” she asked, referencing the scar.

  Henry nodded. “The hard-won lesson, yes. So I owe him. He gave up his daughter. I don’t really know the details, but I guess that he’s got something to say to her and he needs to say it.”

  “He’s never gonna come out of Reeves, is he?”

  “Maybe, but if he does, he’ll only go someplace else the same.”

  “How do you even deal with that?” Evie asked. “Knowing that you’ll die in prison, that you’ll never be free, never drive a car, never make love, never …” Her voice trailed away.

/>   “One day at a time, I guess,” Henry replied. “Three years seems like forever when you start it. Hell, a week seems like forever on the first night. But you get into a groove, a routine, a pattern of doing things a certain way that uses up the time. You teach yourself not to think. That’s the main thing. You teach yourself not to think about the past or the future, just about what’s happening right now. It’s like being drunk without the liquor. Everything is now—nothing before, nothing after.” Henry smiled ruefully. “It’s a tough habit to get out of.”

  “Don’t worry,” Evie said. “I’m not asking you to think about our future.”

  “I didn’t mean that, sweetheart. I meant with everything. You’re eating breakfast, and all you’re thinking about is eating breakfast. You’re at the gas station, and all that’s on your mind is the gas station and filling the tank and whatever. It’s not the way you normally think. Your mind is yesterday and tomorrow, you know? Everything is yesterday and tomorrow. You do a few years in a place like Reeves and your mind ain’t on nothin’ but today.”

  “So what’s happening for you today, then?” Evie asked.

  “Figured I’d go stick my nose in some places and see if I get bit.”

  Evie smiled. “You don’t back off, do you?”

  “Hey, only thing I’ve heard is that there’s some history with Evan and his brother. Carson Riggs may have himself a reputation as a tough guy, but I’m not breaking the law, and I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m just here to deliver a message.”

  “Well, you go deliver your message, Henry Quinn, and if someone bites you and you need some first aid, you come on back here and we’ll fix you up.”

  “You got any suggestions as to where I should start?”

  “Go on and speak with Clarence Ames, I guess. Seems he had the most to say.”

  “Also made it clear that the conversation was done.”

  “Place is full of ears. Man says different things when he thinks he ain’t bein’ listened to.”

  “And where’s he at?”

  “Clarence has a place on the far side of Calvary. Head through town, on past the Honeycutts, keep on that road, and you can’t miss it. Used to be white, two stories, round tower on the left-hand side, has a lean-to on the right where he parks his truck. You’ll know it when you see it.”