“Why don’t you let Wade there take your bag?”
But the zodiac was strong and he fell once more to creasing the paper against the round of his knee, tongue tip appearing at the corner of his mouth. He considered the indoor gardener’s calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and church holidays, with a slow beating of his heart and patient, slight movements in the cane chair. A gambled harvest, the weather, and days on which accidents were most likely to occur, he calculated; and he discovered, prodding the elements, that they were in the old of the moon. He shut it, leaned forward, and carefully lay it before him on sheets scrawled with dates of years long past and those still to come.
“Wade,” staring at Cap Leech, “go bring me that pointing dog. She shouldn’t be out back.”
The Sheriff stretched forth a palm like a large gland, then Leech; and they shook hands in the last quarter, some few hours after the Minnesota medicine man, hardly planning to pause, had entered Clare. And, having allowed the Sheriff to grasp his own quick fingers — despite lotions of disinfectants and the protection of rubber gloves in the past they were covered with growths of small warts — Cap Leech placed his black satchel on the desk between them, snapped it open. The odor of herbs and germicides, a sharp perfume, rose among the smells of leather and tarnished handcuffs. One smell was strongest, living faintly upon the body of the man with the small bag. Leech pushed up the dirty rolls of his sleeves — nothing tied concealed to that gray flesh — and, reaching into the satchel, brought forth a small tin can and placed it also on the desk. The can and a few pieces of metal were all that remained of the Leech who in his youth had stood thin, well washed, and stern before the cadaver of an aged negro.
Ether. It lay in the bottom of the can like turpentine. The Sheriff bowed slowly forward, sniffed once, twice. He breathed such fumes never before found floating in the far-country kitchens. But, foreign as they were even to the Sheriff, they were fumes that vaguely suggested the fractured leg, were tainted with the going under or coming out of a whimpering sleep. His head nodded. Then the Sheriff straightened and, fumbling with the blade of a little knife, cut at the insides of an apple-large cob pipe. It filled his hand, was covered with kernelless pock holes, missing teeth. He puffed quickly and the sweet fumes disappeared in tobacco smoke.
“You use that on them, then,” said the Sheriff.
“Sometimes,” answered Leech, “sometimes I don’t.”
“It’s in your clothes.” The Clare Sheriff was invested with the office to inspect, whip, or detain any unique descendant of the fork country pale families, was in a position to remember when they settled and how well or poorly they had grown. But before him stood a man concerned even more than himself with noxious growth, who was allowed, obviously schooled, to approach his fellow men with the intimate puncture of a needle.
“Why don’t you sit down?” said the Sheriff. Now and then he still caught a taste, some sort of chloride or oxide, at least a poison, of the medicine man’s evaporating drug. “What else you got in that bag?” He picked up his pamphlet, licked his thumb, then with a sweep cleared the smothered desk. “You fellows have it all,” he said in a friendly, uncertain voice to the stranger who, sixty himself, might have been discovered plucking under the chin an old man suffering a head cold. “Hurt them when you want to, collecting all those bottles and knives. But,” and the Sheriff looked to the door, “there’s not much doctoring or tooth pulling for you here.”
“That so.”
“I don’t believe there’s a tree standing within a hundred mile where you could hang a shingle. If there was, they’d tear it down.”
Cap Leech lifted the tin can, sniffed, fixed the cotton stopper. Those eye whites, dull bits of glass pressed against the skin, hovered over the floor. Without raising them he began to laugh, “Open your hand.” Slowly, in the fat of the Sheriff’s upturned palm, he drew a circle with his broken fingertip. “Disease,” he said, “thriving. Catch a fly in your fist and you could infect the town.” Quickly, with the iced cotton, he swabbed the hand, let it go. “Clean. For awhile.”
“Wade,” the Sheriff drew back and called, “come here, Wade!”
In a stoop Wade pulled the pointer through the doorway. It brought with it the smell of rain, the smell of paws, forelegs and chest soaked in storm and caked with the mud of a downpour; it twisted its head, drops beating against its eyes, and shook, would have spattered the walls, between Wade’s knees. All day it shied and staggered under the sun. But by nightfall it was able to force moisture, to yelp at the shell-like roll of a cloudburst in its ears, to walk as if leaving puddles across the floor, to smell as if the rain had actually come down and driven it bleating and thin into a rivulet filling ditch.
Wade walked stiff-legged, raised his head to smile, and pulled, lifted the dog by its throat. All four of the animal’s legs were rigid, hind legs clamped straight up and down, front paws crossed over its bleeding snout. He dropped the dog in the middle of the room, released the matted fur. His hands were wet, the bottoms of his trousers damp.
“Sheriff, this dog is scratched.”
“Scratched?”
“Yes, sir. She’s cut up.”
“Got ahold of her, did they?”
“Yes, sir. They must have claws.”
The first motorcycle the Sheriff saw appeared at dusk, bounded around a corner of the granary and sped without lights down one gutter of the sanded street. He had raised a hand against it, started at the whirr of wheels spoked with dirt and a few oily flower stems, and had begun to run clumsily, freshly shaved and scented, as it jumped the wooden walk, leapt, a small thunderbird, and flashed through a plate glass window.
The Sheriff sat down, stared thoughtfully at the animal whose rump still clung to the air, whose injured nose lay hidden. Then, slowly, he reached for it, lifted it with a brief grunt until its chest was on his lap. And he waited until the nose was uncovered, while it probed blindly, and at last allowed his fat cheek to be licked, touched with blood. He chuckled, “She’s been out back.”
After shoving and kissing the round face of the Sheriff — the tongue that was clamped between its own teeth flicked once the lobe of his ear — the slick keen head of the pointer dropped and with slow high climbing motions the dog stepped and pawed ungainly hind legs against his trousers, attempted to thrust and double its whole body onto his knees. The Sheriff held his breath, slowly pushed the pointer to the floor.
Without a murmur it slunk off. “She’s sick,” said the Sheriff and watched for some expression to curl across the healer’s cleft face. Not a grimace appeared, but slowly, with slackening pulse, he seemed to unwind and, reaching once more the tin can for a whiff of salts, dropped a white hand tolerantly to the desk top. There was a switch up his spine, a spark of truth in the watery tapping of his fingers. “Don’t say anything,” the Sheriff stepped forward, then behind the desk, “I’ll do the talking.” He rubbed the prognosticator’s pamphlet against his beard. “He’ll listen,” thought the Sheriff, “no traveling man’s that good.”
Beyond them bloomed the desert that had starved to silence the calls of loveless dogs, buried under successive sand waves the hoof prints of single fading riders or the footprints of man and woman running with clothes bundled quickly beneath their arms. Any nomad tribes that had once burned raiding fires at night were gone, human drops sprinkled and spent in the sand, as bodies slipped from the edge of the horse blanket, had been settled upon and obscured by wingless insects or fried, like the heads of small but ruddy desert flowers, in the sun of one afternoon.