Emmetsburg: Forty-eight

The Government inspectors climbed into one car, piloted by a State trooper. The pale sedan crept forward towards the farm and the ready line of men waiting there. It was flanked by troopers, truncheons at the ready, like a somber funeral procession, like a mafia phalanx for a fallen thug, scowling for retribution. Their faces were carved in stone, spirits hardened fo the inevitable battle. It was more than their duty.. The law was the sovereign of these men, and they had fully taken that realm into their hearts.

The men opposing them were cousins of a different sovereign. Their king was an ambiguous notion of freedom, filtered through flawed hearts. They saw themselves as defenders to the ramparts of their individual fortresses. The lawmen were alternately enemy and ally. In moments such as this, when the law waved the enemy banner, it was impossible to see that it was the law that maintained peace when the ramparts encroached upon their neighbor.

They met in the road, pausing for a moment, crushing the air between them so that it was explosive and alive. It was inevitable, the battle, and as brutal and calamitous as promised.. On cue, as if it had all been choreographed, truncheons rose in the heated air on the lawman's side. This, this was the moment where law and liberty could not be reconciled, and would be defined in violence and blood.

Clubs met fists and fists and two by fours. Men cried and fell and bled, as the tempo of battle rose. At first numbers and determination favored the famers. Still the lawmen pressed forward, driving their adversaries steady back across the ditch. The battle spilled into the yard where it degraded into individual grudges.

C.W. was in the thick of the fight. Struggling against neighbors and old friends, he found the whole mess utterly obscene and decided it was enough.. Seizing Stan Pickett by the collar, C.W. shook him hard, hoping to wrestle enough sense that together they might stop all this. For a moment he truly believed it was in the power of a single man to stop the fight by no more than strength of will and charcter. When an axe handle came down upon the crown of his head all reason disappeared in a cold white flash of pain and gushing blood.

The sound of solid wood meeting skull momentarily stopped the fight. It sounded like a gunshot, and might have brought down a lesser man. Instead it set C.W. on fire with anger. Pouring blood down the front of his body, C.W. tore the two sides apart, with the ease of an autumn twister smashing a path through tall harvest corn. Opening his arms wide, as though he might embrace the troopers in those massive arms, C.W. herded them back to the ditch, all the while shouting at the farmers to retreat.

On both sides the injured and bruised gathered themselves up and rejoined their ranks. It created a sudden vacuum he was quick to seize upon. C.W. went across, straight to Stan. Avery pushed his way through the line and strode right up to Stan Pickett. The men closed ranks quickly behind Stan. Avery Lysander pushed his way forward, standing beside Stan.

“Your boys had enough, C.W?” said Avery, fighting to catch his breath.

“Pipe down, Avery,” said Stan, sympathetic to the wounded man before him. “Ain't suppose to be how neighbors settle things, C.W.”

“Then put an end to this, Stan,” said C.W. “No point in seeing anyone else get hurt.”

“Afraid I can't. Stand my ground and defend my family.”

C.W. looked at him a good long time, trying to figure another way. Stan, Avery and the others had dig in their heels, and there was no other way but the hard one. He turned and rejoined the troopers. The moment he reached them they started forward in a line towards the seething anxious mob opposite. This time Avery was out front.

“Send 'em to hell boys!” he cried, before the end of a police club caught him in the gut and then across the shoulders.

The troopers now enveloped the farmers like a glove. Stan Pickett led them forward at the center of the police line, but it was a trap. The line curled around, forming an unbroken circle. One by one the farmers were hauled from that circle to a spot where they were forced to sit at gunpoint.

“Sit still, boys. Sure would hate to pull this here trigger,” cautioned one of the troopers, holding a twelve gauge. It was loaded with salt pellets and not lethal buckshot, unknown to the momentarily defeated farmers.

Was predictable that the inspectors would find several sick cows among the herd. It was enough to condemn them all. Herded together, three State troopers went from animal to animal and put a bullet in their head. That done the carcasses were doused with gas and set alight. The smoke rose straight into the calm air, like a call to war that could be seen for miles. C.W. watched it from the floorboard of his auto as a trooper patched up the wound on his head.

“Took a wallop there, Sheriff.” By now most of the men had been released. C.W. thought better of arresting anyone, most especially Avery Lysander. Not that he didn't have ample cause. The gash in his head was enough to send someone to the penitentiary. C.W. did not want to give them the power that would accompany an arrest. It seemed such an action would only enflame the fears and emotions running like a wildfire through the hearts of men.

“Got a good hard head,” C.W. said, not taking his eyes off the column of smoke.

“Think maybe folks will get the idea we mean do uphold the law,” said the trooper.

“Nope.” He knew better. “Bad day's coming. This won't stop till blood gets shed.”

This wasn't a victory, by any measure. There was no room for satisfaction, and affliction he fought to hold at bay. This was a tragedy, pure and simple. Any man who saw it any differently had a hard reckoning to make with the Lord one day.

“Looks like you shed a fair amount yourself, Sheriff.”

C.W. Ignored him. He closed his eyes and groaned slightly, “Bad day is coming.”

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.”

Emmetsburg: Forty-six

“George,” John nodded.

The deputies stopped behind, and just to either side of Bremer, like over-protective sons than public employees.Both of them were young and baby-faced.. At least that's how they appeared to John, serving only to make him feel a bit ancient. One of them was tall and well built, the other short and a little on the doughy side.His name was Ray. His parents ran a tailor shop downtown. None of the men were armed. Ray held a set of wrist irons. He nervously shifted them from hand to hand. George nodded respectfully and motioned to John's wound.

“John. How's that hand?”

“Help you fellas?”

“Hope you'll forgive the intrusion, but we've come for him.”

John scrtached the back of his head trying to figure why Louis didn't seem immediately surprised. Then all at once his expression changed, as if it was manufactured or contrived.

“John, I swear I don't...” Louis began before Bremer cut him off.

“Best you not say another word,son.”

“What's this all about, George?” asked John.

Bremer went over and laid a hand gently upon Louis' shoulder.. “I think your guest knows.” His eyes met Louis with a judicious quality. He patted the man's shoulder almost sympatheically. “My deputies here trust you won't be any trouble.”

The deputies were patient as John pulled Bremer aside. They had known each other for almost their whole lives. George Bremer was the first person John had seen the day he stepped off the Milwaukee line from the war. John led him over to the cellar door.

“What's this all about, George?'

Bremer kept his voice low. His brow was tortured. The words fell heavily. “A wrecker pulled his car out of the creek. John, there was a body inside, a white woman.”

“George, I was all over that car, if there'd been...”

“She was in the rear compartment. Her hands and feet were bound. There was a rope around her neck.”

Both men looked over at Louis. John felt a shiver of dread that he had left Louis alone with Anna. He felt betrayed by Louis. It raged red hot in his veins.

“You're sure?”

“Afraid so.”

“Who was she?”

“Don't know.”

“He says his name is Louis, Louis Stanton.” John hesitated. “About all I've been able to get out of him.Like they both fell out of the sky.”

“Folks just don't fall out of the sky.”

.