James Burke - Heartwood

The rope jerked Krause off his feet and dragged him tumbling and strangling across the ground, across rocks, into the side of a tree stump, through a tangle of chicken wire and cedar posts that someone had stacked and partially burned.

I reined up Beau under a cottonwood, freed the rope from the pommel, and tossed the coil over a tree limb and caught the end with my hand. Krause was trying to get to his feet, his fingers wedging under the rope that was now pinched tightly into his throat. I rewrapped the rope on the pommel and kicked Beau in the ribs again and felt Johnny Krause rise from the earth into the air, his half-top boots kicking frantically.

Beau's saddle creaked against the rope's tension as I watched Johnny Krause's face turn gray and then purple while his tongue protruded from his mouth.

Then I saw the lights of a car that had come to rest in a ditch, and the silhouette of a man running toward me.

" What are you doing here, L.Q.?" I asked.

" Somebody better talk sense to you. This might be my way, but it ain't yours," he said.

"He molested Temple. Hanging's not enough."

"Don't give his kind no power. That's the lesson me and you didn't learn down in Coahuila."

Beau tossed his head against the reins and blew air, shifting his hooves and barreling up his ribs like he did when he didn't want to take his saddle.

I released the rope and let it spin loose from the pommel. I heard Johnny Krause thump against the earth, his breath like a stifled scream.

Then I watched Ronnie Cross walk right through L.Q.'s shape, shattering it like splinters of charcoal-colored glass against the glare of headlights in the background.

"I was with Essie and Lucas at your house when them guys called. We got ahold of some Texas Rangers," he said.

I wiped my hands on my thighs and stared at him silently from the saddle. Then, as though waking from a dream, I looked up at the wind in the cottonwoods and the heat lightning flickering on the leaves, and once again wondered who really lived inside my skin.

The next morning I had my receptionist call Earl Deitrich's house and get the ex-mercenary named Fletcher Grinnel on the phone.

"Last night I hung a piece of shit named Johnny Krause in a tree," I said.

"You're a busy fellow," he replied.

"He just gave you up on the murder of Cholo Ramirez. Check out the statistics on the number of people currently being executed in Texas, Grinnel. You going to ride the gurney for Earl Deitrich?"

"Say again, please?"

Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Peggy Jean Deitrich parked her automobile in front of my house and walked across the grass to the driveway, where I was planting climbing roses on the trellises I had nailed up on posts on each side of the drive. I had painted the posts and trellises and the crossbeam white, and the roses were as bright as drops of blood against the paint.

The balled root systems were three feet in diameter and packed in sawdust and black dirt and wrapped with wet burlap. I knelt on the grass and snipped the burlap away and washed the roots loose with a garden hose and lowered them into a freshly dug hole that I had worked with horse manure. I put the garden hose into the hole and watched the water rise in a soapy brown froth to the rim, then I began shoveling compost in on top of it.

"You're right good at that," she said, and sat down on my folding metal chair in the shade.

"What's up, Peggy Jean?"

She wore jeans and shined boots and a plaid snap-button shirt and a thin hand-tooled brown belt with a silver buckle and a silver tip on the tongue. The wind blew the myrtle above her head and made patterns of sunlight and shadow on her skin, and for just a moment I saw us both together again among the oak trees above the riverbank when she allowed me to lose my virginity inside her.

"Jeff's out on bail and still doesn't realize he'll probably go to prison. Earl expects to be indicted for murder momentarily and is usually drunk by noon. He also goes out unwashed and unshaved in public. But maybe you know all that," she said.

"Sorry. I don't have an interest anymore in tracking what they do."

"We're defaulting on the Wyoming land deal. Earl's creditors are calling in all his debts. I think it's what you planned, Billy Bob."

"Earl stepped in his own shit, Peggy Jean."

"I want to hire you as our attorney."

"Nope."

"I can pay. Earl has a half-million-dollar life insurance policy I can borrow on."

I shook my head. "Let me give you some advice instead and it won't cost you a nickel. If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.

"That's what will happen to Earl. He'll become more and more desperate, and more and more people will take advantage of his situation. The ducks will nibble him to death and eventually he'll come to Lourdes. If I were his attorney, I'd tell him to negotiate a plea now and try to avoid a capital conviction."

She got up from the chair and gazed at my house, the barn and Beau in the lot and the windmill ginning and the fields that had been harvested and were marbled with shadows and the willows by the tank that were blowing in the wind.

She looked up at the red oak plank I had hung from the crossbeam over the driveway.

"Why did you name your place Heartwood?" she asked.

"It comes from a story my father told me when I was baptized. It has to do with the way certain kinds of trees grow outward from the center."

I sat down in the folding chair and filled a jelly glass with Kool-Aid from a plastic pitcher. My hair was damp with perspiration and in the shade the wind felt cool against my skin.

She stood behind me and her shadow intersected mine on the grass. Then the sun went behind a cloud and our shadows grayed and disappeared. She stroked the hair on the back of my head, upward, as she might a child's.

"Heartwood is a good name. Goodbye, Billy Bob," she said.

Then she was gone. I never saw her again.

After Labor Day the weather turned dry and hot, and there were fires in the hills west of the hardpan, flecks of light you could see at night from the highway, like an indistinct red glimmering inside black glass. I tried not to think about the Deitrichs anymore, and instead to concentrate on my own life and the expectation and promise that each sunrise held for those who accepted the day for the gift it was.

Fletcher Grinnel had given up Earl Deitrich in front of a grand jury and Kippy Jo was off the hook for the shooting of the intruder, Bubba Grimes. She and Wilbur had gone to Wyoming to begin drilling on their property, even though she still maintained that Wilbur would bring in a duster.

Lucas was preparing to return to school at Texas A amp;M and was talking about Esmeralda joining him there. But Ronnie Cross found excuses to visit my house with regularity and to ask about Esmeralda, and she in turn had a way of dropping by when he was there. In those moments I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

Temple Carrol and me?

She still said I lived with ghosts.

But even though I told myself each day I was through with the Deitrichs and the avarice and meretriciousness of the world they represented, I knew better. They were too much a part of us, the town, our history, the innocence and goodness we had perhaps created as a wishful reflection of ourselves in the form of Peggy Jean Murphy.