EMMETSBURG: Ten

Bumping and banging along in that rattling truck it took the better part of an hour to reach Mallard. The town appeared quite suddenly, more as a crossroads, a meeting point for local farmers than a real town. There was a small schoolhouse church, the Savings and Loan, a scattering of houses and Bert Himmel's general store.

The store faced the church. It was a long squat wood frame, with a low flat roof. There was a couple petroleum pumps out front. At the corner, beside the telegraph pole was a white red and green Sunoco sign. The sign was competed with the church as the tallest structure in town, and could be seen for the better part of a mile in most any direction. There was trouble up ahead, and John felt a chill run down his spine. Not for anything specific just yet, but from a sense of impending calamity.

John steered around a horse drawn wagon and turned off the road at Himmel’s. The store had been there forever just about, and looked like something out of those languishing ghost towns out west. There was some sort of dust up near the door. A half dozen men, local cattlemen and farmers, mostly, had Mallard’s sheriff cornered against the wall.

There was Big Jim Connolly, who had lost his wife the year before during childbirth, and tended a herd of cattle with his two boys. Jesse Laughton from just the other side from Mallard, who had served during the war but hadn't left the States. Ernest Vogel was there. Tall and bent like a reed in a steady breeze, Ernie's wife, Jeanie, had just given birth to their third. Beside him was a fellow whose name John couldn’t recall, and several other fellows he didn’t know, all of who looked fit to burst. Some of their wives and kids were clustered near haphazardly parked wagons and beat up old trucks, looking every bit as fierce (maybe more so) than their husbands.

Old Avery Lysander was there, but just sort of observed beside the door. Avery seemed nice enough, at least for all the times he and John had spoken. He was a bit older than John, not by much, though he looked a good deal older. Nice enough guy, but there was something about him that John never quite trusted. The way he sort of leaned, lazy and bent, a brown wool newsboy cap pulled down to obscure his gaze, always reminded John of punks he'd seen trolling the docks in New York. Each had an angle, a w ay to get over on someone with the least amount of effort possible. This day, the way he was leaning up against a post, sort of half hidden in the shade Avery reminded John of the skulking blackmarket thugs in Paris back alleys during the war. They were all cut from the same cloth, he thought.

The Sheriff, doing his best in a rotten situation, was a hulk of a man by the name of Calvin Wilson Saunders, known to everyone as C.W. He stood head and shoulders above most of the rabble. With arms like trees and quite a reputation in these parts when he was a boy, Saunders might have brushed them all aside with hardly any effort. C.W. wore a simple brown-rimmed hat that threw a deep shadow across a round’s face deeply cut by the years. He wore coveralls and a blue work shirt, looking like he’d just come off the farm he ran himself just east of town. His face burned bright red, accentuating the stubbly growth of beard along his jaw. Saunders spotted John climbing from his truck. The middle-aged sheriff’s ponderous green eyes almost pleaded for rescue.

“Fellas,” John heard Saunders say to the men, “I appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s really for the best.”

“Ain’t for my best, or your best, or any of us!” one of the men grumbled.

“I know it ain’t right, Bill,” said C.W., laying a hand on the shoulder of the only man there how could give him a real fight.

Connolly looked uncomfortably at the hand on his shoulder. The two men were friends, but this threatened to unravel that bond completely. “What gives the State the right to come in and tell us how to run our farms.”

“Listen, boys,” Saunders fired back, folding his arms resolutely, “I’m in the same boat as the rest of you. I got cattle, but the law is the law.”

Saunders grew frustrated, felt trapped. Even the hardest man could see that he wasn’t too happy about the law either.

“Whose side are you on, Calvin?” said one guy, in a heavy Dutch accent.

Saunders nearly snapped at the guy, but thought better of it. “Now we can all argue this till we’re blue in the face, but that won’t change the law!”

“Well, maybe we ought take it to a higher law,” said the Dutch fellow. Connolly shook his head at the ground. An oddly conniving smirk came to Avery Lysander. It went unnoticed by everyone but John.