FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
THE SHERIFF
a quarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a Barren Sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.
He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.
It is a lawless country.
For fourteen years I’ve watched it with my boys, and not one year has passed without a thieving or a disturbance caught up like some bad notion by our townsmen. Man and woman, out here at least, don’t learn to keep to their own houses of a night. I’ve found them, plenty of them, faces that I knew, some I didn’t know, in the most unlikely lots or ditches or clear under a porch. If I didn’t find them first there were others did. I slept light, waiting for those to come and tell me.
There was one death.
But a man gets used to a pair of handcuffs on his hip. The string our tank key is hung from — we only got the one cell — has been around my neck the entire fourteen years. And there’s not one shirt I own but what it’s got badge holes through the pocket. Some men don’t commit crimes, but they’re ready to. I’ve had two ranchers come to me in the middle of the night with a horse between them, and they trusted me to know whose horse it was. A man gets used to staying around a jail. I did. And there’s one thing sure; it’ll never have to hold no woman. There are other rooms in town for that.
I used to follow the tracks of a single horse for miles in my pickup truck and that man I trailed — there were only a few prints in the sand like someone stirred it with a stick — had committed a violation, was running all the time I drove. Or I was called to pay a visit to some woman who discovered a man on her place. I wore my cartridge belt summer or winter and my sleeves rolled up.
It was the men or women who didn’t have no place to hide that gave me trouble. Them people too easy found doing things a man can’t talk about, things that happened or not depending on whether you arrived five minutes early or five late. They broke the law all right, directly they couldn’t quiet down and talk when I was near enough to see. It almost depended on how much white showed from the side of the road before my torch was even lit. I took them in. I’ve got no time to waste with men like that.