Emmetsburg: Forty-seven

“Between a rock and a hard place, ain’t that what they call it, C.W.?” Stan Pickett stood alone in the dusty dirt road with the Sheriff near the gate to his farm. They were like two pauper chieftains negotiating terms between two opposing armies. Except these two armies could find no terms, and instead seemed poised, even eager for battle.

Just down the road a line of thirty-some State troopers in blue stood ready near where an old Maple beside Stan’s big red barn bent her shade over the road and a cluster of vehicles. They were thirty of the biggest, meanest, hardest looking men the governor knew, picking ech man personally. They faced a bigger number of farmers gathered tensely to the entrance to Stan’s farm, a small drive across a weedy drainage ditch. Behind them Stan’s wife stood on the wrap-around porch of their white-washed two story home with their three children. A number of the other wives joined her there, some eager or more eager than their husbands to join the fight.

C.W. and Stan stood at the fulcrum of this moment, hands in their pockets, talking calm and low, as if they might discuss the rising heat of the day or Wes Ferrell’s no hitter against the St. Louis browns, Chaplin’s new movie or Hoover’s ineptitude. Neither was fooled by the gravity of all this. They knew only too well that what gentlemanly agreement they might come to in the middle of that road would dissolve in the face of inevitable history and raging emotion.

Forty men stood at the entrance of Stan Pickett’s farm. They stood in the road, running in a ragged line down across the ditch and halfway across Stan’s yard. Forty men had filled their hands with clubs and shovels, some of them. Others rolled up their sleeves, and spit into their hands, prepared to send those troopers back to Des Moines and the governor as a lesson. Backed into a corner there was nothing else they could do as men but stand and fight.

“That what they call it, Stan?” C.W. rubbed the moist back of his neck. “Rock and a hard place?”

“It’s something.” Stan tugged a rag from his pocket and dabbed the sweat from his face. He looked at the men in his yard and back at C.W. Both man regarded the troopers or a long worrisome moment.

“It’s something all right.”

“Like Sittin’ Bull and Custer out here,” Stan smiled weakly.

“Both know how that turned out.”

“Question is, which of us is Custer and…” his words trailed away Stan pushed the rag back into his pocket.

“Good question.”

Stan looked C.W. squarely in the eye. His expression suddenly stark and grave. “Know I can’t let them inspector near my cattle.”

C.W. groaned. He’d played checkers with Stan Pickett and half the others a thousand times out front of Bert Himmel’s place over the years. He recalled the night his wife had complications delivering their third child, the small boy hovering t his mom’s apron on the porch. He raced Stan and his wife to Emmetsburg in the back of his truck. When the boy was born healthy later the next day he and old Stan celebrated by getting good and lit at a local watering hole.

“And you know I've got to uphold the law, Stan.”

Stan scratched the top of his head and shrugged, resigned to the events rolling across his farm like an avalanche. “Different ways of looking at the law.”

“Don't have that luxury.”

C.W. stared coldly at Stan, whose gaze was away across the fields and his herb dotting the yellow green hillside opposite. He tried to imagine himself in Stan's place, and wondered if he wouldn't react the same. The moment evaporated. Stan nodded sharply and pursed his lips.

“Expect I should be getting back.”

C.W. Nodded fatally and frowned. “God help us, Stan.”