one part-time deputy, ran myself an automobile business and went fishing Saturdays. Now I’ve got eleven full-time deputies, twelve radio cars, uniforms, what-have-you. You don’t have to tell me—I’ve got kids same as you. All I stopped you for was to tell you I need a new deputy out here on Eden’s Neck and you’re it.”
“Not me, I’m not,” Spig O’Leary said.
“You. O’Leary, the hot shot of the Eden’s Neck Branch of the Home Owner’s League. There’s not one of you people contributes a damn’ thing except to live here and bellyache. You could all go to hell for me. Except Miss Fairlie. I’m worried about her, with this new set-up.”
“What new set-up?”
Yerby looked at him. Then he shrugged. “Why don’t you take a week off and stick around, O’Leary?” he said sardonically. “You might get the score. But you be in at eight to-morrow morning and take your oath. And take it seriously. I don’t pass out any gilt badges just for laughs.”
He started to his car and turned. “And thanks, Spig. I sure appreciate . . .”
“You go to hell.” O’Leary’s grey eyes lighted. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Buck Yerby grinned. He looked at his watch. “How about a quick drink on it? You got time?”
“Not for this lousy joint, I haven’t.”
There was a sudden, smouldering fire in Yerby’s eyes. “I figure it doesn’t hurt the Three D for the sheriff to drop in for a drink if a drink doesn’t hurt the sheriff,” he said evenly. “Nick’s a citizen. He’s got his place over on Shad Creek. His kids go to school with yours and mine. Maybe he is a Greek with lousy taste in blue glass—like that ex-brother-in-law of yours says he is. But you couldn’t print what Nick thinks about Stanley S. Ashton. Kathy was a friend of Nick’s when he had that Greasy Spoon on Church Street.”
O’Leary’s face flushed, the heat smouldering in his own eyes. “That’s no business——”
“Right. And it’s no business of Ashton’s if Nick likes blue glass, and you can tell Ashton the quicker he gets out of here the better everybody’s going to like it. And there’s a lot of people think you’re just as big a heel as he is a louse, O’Leary—sounding off on Sudley the other night. So what if he doesn’t believe in zoning laws? There’s nobody in Devon hates gambling and the slots the way he hates ’em. He’s done a lot more for this county than any of you people. And personally, I don’t think you’re a heel, O’Leary. I think you’re a plain sucker.”
He opened his car door. “You think you’re down on Sudley. Well, that’s nothing to how he’s down on you.” He got in and slammed the door. “If you haven’t seen that thing” (he made an angry gesture towards the signboard in the corner of the pasture) “you better take a look at it. That’s what Sudley thinks of you, O’Leary.”
The loose gravel peppered Spig’s legs as the car shot forward. He stood there staring at the sign he’d taken for granted was the sign for the County Fair. He shut his eyes and opened them again. There was no mistake. There it was—and with it an empty hollow where his stomach had been.
“For Sale. For Industrial Development. 600 Acres. 2000 Feet of River Frontage. See H. Sudley, 19 Church Street, Devonport.”
Spig O’Leary stood staring at it, the bottom dropping out of everything important to him in Devon County. That was Sudley’s answer to the people on Eden’s Neck and the petition for some kind of law to protect their homes. It was so stupefying that the people waiting to get to the gas pumps had to sound their horn twice before he heard it and moved.
The green and gold of the winter wheat and the flower-embroidered tapestry of the pastures behind the white ribbons of mile-long fences were a blur on either side of him. He drove slowly, still a little dazed. That’s what Sudley thinks of you, O’Leary. But there was nothing he’d said nor anything he’d done that could possibly be taken as a personal attack on Sudley. He came to the end of the fences where the highway curved gently into the woods of Eden, fifty feet from the side of Sudley’s tobacco fields stretching down to the river-front behind the shallow arc of beeches and willow oaks that they were going to give the State. He turned left into the cross-way, half-way to the bridge, and waited for the traffic to clear for him to go across into the gravelled side road marked “Plumtree Cove” that ran between the back woods of Plumtree and Miss Fairlie’s fields in her section of the bridge approach. The narrow strip for the roadside park, behind him as he waited in the cross-way, was the only thing he could think of that could have offended Sudley as deeply as Yerby said he was offended. Having the whole side of his place bottled up behind a lousy fifty feet, with no access out to the bridge and its approach, might be what had infuriated him. There was nothing else, certainly.
A sudden flush of adrenalin made the blood tingle at the back of his neck. He crossed over into the gravelled road, jerked to a stop at the mail box and got out a letter to Tip from the county agent and the evening papers. The sound of a tractor was coming from Miss Fairlie’s field. He drove on around the bend and jammed his brakes on to keep from hitting a green truck standing tail-on in the middle of the road. It was Sudley’s truck and his tractor up in the field, with his seventeen-year-old boy Charlie at the gears. Sudley himself was leaning on the fence in front of the truck.
He turned as Spig opened his car door and got out. For an instant his pale blue eyes were not shuttered. The sudden, naked violence in them was so intense that Spig stopped motionless. It was Sudley who spoke first.
“Good evening, Mr. O’Leary.” His eyes were shuttered again, his voice soft as it always was. He turned back to the fence, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Keep your contours smoother, son!” he shouted. “Narrower in the dip!” He dropped his hands to the fence rail. “I like a pretty field. Miss Fairlie’s tractor’s in the shop, so I thought I’d help her out. Gives the boy extra for that car he wants. His mother wants to give it to him—he’s her baby, spoiled rotten. I say he’s got to earn it.”
Across the field Sprig could see the boy swinging the red tractor in a graceful arc to narrow the dip in the rib of the contour. His face was taut, his full mouth sullen, his dark eyes stormy with resentment as he whipped the tractor back up the field.
“Fine boy you’ve got, Mr. O’Leary,” Sudley said. “Glad I don’t raise vegetables—he’d run me out of business. Tells me he’s eleven. That’s the kind of boy I like to see.”
“Tip’s okay,” Spig said shortly. He tried to keep his voice as even and as affable as Sudley’s. “Look. I just saw this sign of yours.”
“I figured you’d see it.” Sudley interrupted him calmly. “And I figured you wouldn’t like it, Mr. O’Leary. I know you and Mr. Ashton got the idea nobody’s got a right to sell land—except you and Mr. Ashton.”
Watch it, Mac. He’s needling you. “Ashton and I aren’t selling any land, Mr. Sudley,” Spig said quietly. “We’re giving the State that little strip along your fence.”
“I’ve heard you say that.”
“You wouldn’t be calling me a liar, by any chance, would you?”
“You’re putting it that way, Mr. O’Leary.” Sudley’s eyes met his steadily. “We’ve got different ways, here in Devon. You new people here on Eden’s Neck—you’ve got fine ideas. But you’ve got jobs in Washington, or money so you don’t need jobs. We find it sort of hard to tell people in debt with no money they can’t sell a mite of worn-out tobacco land when they’re offered a big price for it. Or tell a widow with five kids she can’t sell beer and soft crab. As long as it’s beer and soft crab she’s selling, Mr. O’Leary. We don’t much go for double dealing, here in Devon.”
Watch it, O’Leary . . . watch it. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mr. Sudley. It isn’t because we never gave you access to the bridge road, is it? Or are you really opposed to a couple of picnic tables under a beech tree?”