CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Every time I find myself on the verge of giving up on the human race, I meet somebody like Frank and Nan Riddle. Then I’m forced to pull up a few inches short of the simon-pure misanthropy my instincts tell me is the only sane response to my own species. People like them are what everybody could be if we’d all just practice a little common decency. I also suspected that what he’d said about being careful with the checkbook was modesty on his part. Either that or the desire to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself, something my dad always claimed was a sound practice for anyone, man or woman. I knew that with the war on and oil at an all-time high, even a few acres in the Batson Field would yield very generous royalties, and my guess was that they had money enough in the bank to buy just about anything they wanted. But they also had something that was almost as important: sense enough not to want much.

After breakfast he offered to take me into the county seat to a doctor.

I shook my head. “They’re bound to have seen me limping off last night, so I’d just as soon not have it known around town that a stranger with a broken foot was looking for medical attention.”

Instead I asked him if he’d drive me to the nearest phone to make a call. “Be happy to,” he replied. “But if you’re not going to see the doctor, why don’t you stay here and rest and let me make it for you? That is, if it’s not too personal.”

I thought for a few seconds. I’d already decided to take Deader Simms up on his offer of help. It was either that or call the phone company office in Palestine and leave a message for Nora to come get me. But I reasoned that Simms could more easily afford the time and the gasoline. Of course I could have called Jim Rutherford, but that would have meant going back to Jefferson County, something I didn’t intend to do. But there was no reason Riddle couldn’t deliver a message to Simms for me. And I was utterly exhausted. “Okay,” I said. “But you need to understand that if he’s not at home you may be stuck with me until tomorrow.”

He waved off the possibility as not worthy of concern. “Always glad to have a little company. Don’t you worry about it.”

I gave him Simms’s number and tried to pay him for his trouble. He acted mildly insulted at the suggestion, which was exactly what I had expected. He did agree to take my unlimited gas rationing card and fill his truck up while he was in town. A few minutes later I dozed off into a dreamless sleep between sparkling white sheets that smelled faintly of wood smoke and lye soap.

They woke me shortly before the noon meal, which consisted of home-cured ham, winter turnip greens, hot corn bread, and more ribbon cane syrup.

“Your Mr. Simms answered on the second ring,” Riddle told me as we sat down at the table. “He said he’d send somebody to take you wherever you needed to go, but he thought it would probably be late in the day or maybe even early evening when they got here.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“He also asked me if you’d made any progress.”

“What did you tell him?”

He gave me an ironic smile. “I said you’d made so much progress that you’d got your foot broke and your car stole, and that you probably didn’t need no more progress right now.”

I laughed. “You’re right, you know. I sure don’t need any more cases like this. Which is why I’m quitting law enforcement and going back to ranching.”

“I don’t blame you. I did tell him that you said you’d call him in the next few days, and that you had part of the answer.”

After we ate I took two more codeine tablets and spent the bulk of the afternoon dozing in a rocking chair beside the fireplace. Riddle was in and out as he did his chores around the place. They had a battery radio, and a couple of times I heard the strains of fiddle music and once I caught a Cajun-tinged voice that identified the station as one in Lafayette, Louisiana. A little after four Nan came in with a mug of fresh coffee for me and noticed me gazing at the picture of a young man in an army uniform that sat on the mantelpiece. “That’s our boy, Sam,” she said.

“You don’t look old enough to have a boy in the army,” I said.

“I was fifteen when we got married,” she replied with a girlish laugh. “We get started young down here.”

“Do you have any other children?”

“One daughter. She’s married to a fellow that works at the Texas Company refinery in Port Arthur. He does some real important something-or-other that keeps him out of the army. I reckon they figure he’s worth more where he’s at than he would be carrying a gun. I wish Sam had something like that. I worry about him all the time.”

She left the room and I drank my coffee, then dozed a little more. About an hour before sundown my host helped me hobble out onto the porch for a breath of fresh air. It was chilly, but being out-of-doors lifted my spirits. The sky had cleared during the day, and the dying light of the setting sun gave the remote clearing an unworldly feel. The land we were on had never been logged. All around us loomed a great forest of tall climax hardwoods. It was a setting that made it easy to imagine what the whole country had been like before the white man came. We sat in a pair of rough-hewn hickory rockers and talked. I told him about Isaiah Tucker’s journey to Texas and about the founding of La Rosa, and he recounted to me how his great-grandparents had come to the Big Thicket in the 1840s, and I learned that Kaiser’s Burnout got its name when a Confederate officer named Kaiser torched several hundred acres trying to flush out draft resisters during the Civil War. We talked of dogs we’d hunted behind and deer we’d killed and men we’d known, now all gone from this earth. Finally our conversation lapsed and we sat in silence enjoying the timeless peace of the gathering twilight. Then, just as we were rising to go inside, Jack Amber’s Cord glided softly up the drive and stopped in front of the house.