Free All That I Have by Castle Freeman Page A

would I?”
    “I didn’t say you did,” said Wingate. “I ain’t here to say one way or another what anybody did. I’m here to serve you.”
    “You can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “You don’t know who you’re serving,” said Chum, very pleased with himself. “A man wouldn’t know his own mother if she was wearing one of these.” He tugged at the black bug veil, which hung down to his chest. “You can’t prove who I am. You can’t serve me.”
    At that I felt my blood pressure starting to climb. Here’s Chum, living out in the woods like a rabid coon, more than half crazy, pissing into fruit jars to throw at public servants, by now well into his second day of wasting the sheriff ’s time and the taxpayers’ money over a two-dollar lawsuit with the rabid coon down the road, who’s as crazy as he is — and he thinks he can come over like some crafty lawyer in a pin-striped suit. I wanted to cuff him and take him in to the lockup.
    Wingate knew it, too. He knew how I felt. He put his hand on my shoulder for a second and leaned toward Chum a little, like he was trying to see through Chum’s blackfly veil. He shook his head.
    “You’re right,” said Wingate. “I couldn’t swear it was you. It looks like you got us, Chum.”
    “Hah. Very clever,” said Chum. “But I ain’t saying nothing to that, am I? I ain’t answering like it’s me. You can’t prove it’s me.”
    “It looks like we’ll have to go back to the clerk and advise him, we’ll have to tell him it ain’t been served,” said Wingate. He handed the summons in its envelope to me.
    “Put it in the car,” said Wingate.
    I went to our patrol car and put the summons on the dash, then returned to Wingate and the two Babcocks. Wingate was talking to Mrs. Babcock.
    “I saw Lucinda the other day,” he told her. “How is she doing?” Lucinda was Mrs. Babcock’s big sister. She had come out of the hospital after having a female operation.
    “She don’t seem to rally,” said Mrs. Babcock. “She don’t have any energy.”
    “I know it,” said Wingate.
    “Lucy ain’t young,” said Mrs. Babcock.
    “I know it,” said Wingate.
    “None of us is,” said Mrs. Babcock.
    “I know it,” said Wingate.
    We got in the patrol car and started back to the office. There, Wingate took out the summons, signed it, and handed it to me.
    “Just take it across and give it to the clerk,” he said. “Tell him it’s served.”
    “But it ain’t,” I said.
    “Yes, it is,” said Wingate. “Chum knows where he has to be. He knows when. If he don’t, she does. Chum will show up. She’ll drag him in by his ear if she has to.”
    That was, oh, twenty-five, thirty years ago. Chum and Mrs. Chum are under the grass. Wingate’s over eighty, and I ain’t exactly green in the sap, myself. That business with Chum was sheriffing the way I was learning to do it from Wingate. Sometimes you have to hold back and let a thing develop, was one of his rules.
    It’s still good, too. It’s a good rule. But a kid like Sean tests it. Yes, he does. An old fool like Chum, you can let him develop and things will get better. He’ll come around, or if he don’t his wife will make him. You know that. With Sean, if you let him develop, you don’t know. Things may get better. They may get worse.

9
    BIG LOOKERS ON THE DOWNSIDE
     
    Saturday is no day off for the sheriff. Evildoers, the unlucky, and our most faithful customers, the plain rock-stupid, are generally open for business well before noon, and then of course you build through the day Saturday to your big night of the week for bad behavior.
    I thought I’d give myself a ride over to Manchester that Saturday and have a visit with Emory O’Connor, see if I couldn’t get some kind of an idea about who it was we were dealing with at the Russians’ place. Then later on, I meant to poke around here and there, try to start Sean out of whatever hole he’d gone down. Deputy Keen, I guessed, would be doing the