Read Online All That I Have by Castle Freeman - Free Book Online Page B

That’s so, they do. But it can also mean that if they see you, they’re happy. Whether you’re really doing the job or not don’t matter as much as being seen doing it does.
    That don’t make sense, does it? No, it don’t. Come to that, electing the sheriff don’t make sense. It ain’t that kind of job. A couple of hundred people climb onto an airliner and are waiting to take off. Do they get to have an election to decide who’s going to be pilot? Do they get to pick the one who looks best in a pilot uniform, the one who sounds best on the radio? No. Somebody else decides who’s the pilot, and the passengers like it — or they get off the plane.
    It looks to me like electing the sheriff is like electing the pilot. Don’t misunderstand: I ain’t against elections. Majority rules. Democracy’s a wonderful thing. But from time to time we take it right out the window.
    Clemmie says thinking that way makes me some kind of a Nazi, some kind of a storm trooper. We’ve gone a few rounds on that one, too.
    “Do I look like a storm trooper to you?” I ask her.
    “No,” says Clemmie, “you don’t look like one, but you think like one. That’s worse.”
    “It is?”
    “Mister Law. You think you are the law. You think you and the law are the same.”
    “I do?”
    “Shut up,” says Clemmie.
    “I didn’t say nothing.”
    “I know you didn’t,” says Clemmie. “Shut up.”
    “Wait, now,” I say. “Wait, now. Let’s see. You reckon I think I’m the law, but, let’s see. What is the law? Who does the law come from? It comes from the people, don’t it?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “You suppose so. I suppose so, too. How?”
    “How, what?”
    “How do the people decide what laws to have? Elections, ain’t it?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “You suppose right. Elections. You’re going great, here. Okay, we’ll take the next one real slow. How did I get my job? I was elected, wasn’t I? I seem to recall being elected. Sure, I was. The people elected me.”
    I reckon I’ve tagged her there. But I get to sleep on the couch, just the same, and then next morning I get to look at her back again. Clemmie may take life too seriously, sometimes.
    All I’m saying is about sheriffing. Democracy makes sheriffing harder, and easier. It makes doing the job harder and holding the job easier — or maybe it’s the other way around.
    ’Course, a lot depends on what you think the job is.

    One day when I’d been sheriff ’s deputy for six months or so and was getting to feel like I could handle the work, Wingate gave me a court writ of some kind for a fellow named Chalmers Babcock, who everybody called Chum.
    Chalmers Babcock sounds like the name of a high flier. Chum was anything but. He must have been eighty at the time. He and his wife lived way to hell out in the woods in West Gilead: no plumbing, no electric. Chum got by picking ferns and trapping muskrats and working at the sawmill in the winter. I don’t recall what kind of trouble he was in that had led to him being served, but it was nothing unusual. Chum was in and out of court quite a lot. If it hadn’t been for having to go to court, he’d never have got to town at all, it looked like.
    So it was that I took the writ and set out for West Gilead on a fine warm day in May with dandelions in the meadows and the little shadbushes coming out pink and white along the roads. Yes, the dandelions were out and the shadblow, too — and right along with them, sure enough, the blackflies were as thick as you ever see them. When I got out of the patrol car at Chum’s, far back in the middle of the woods as he was, the flies were worse. I mean, they were right there, swarming around my head and face like a cloud of poison gas.
    Chum’s wife was waiting for me in the dooryard. She wore one of those headdresses made of black mosquito netting to keep the bugs off, so you couldn’t see her face. She looked like an Arab woman.
    “Mrs. Babcock?” I said. “Is Mr.