The Sheriff Of Storytown

Another thing that happens during this weekend is that I find the cowboy drawing. I find a lot—mostly sketches from shows or ads, copied with a charcoal pencil on rough paper. They are signed and dated: CVH 1985. 

Outside the rain cuts in sideways. It pings off the windows and makes music in the rough metal exteriors of the air conditioners. I hum along, the one about the bullfighters, and know the street looks like the rapids. Someone’s receipts blow out of their car and wash toward South Lake Ave. 

So the cowboy. His charcoal thighs tense around the saddle, head bent, eyeless under the brim of a strong hat. One gloved hand is on his hip, one on the reins. The horse looks dead ahead. I tell myself my young uncle drew him from his hospital chair in the den downstairs, watching re-runs of Gunsmoke while the cancer vined up through his frontal lobe. The horse is mid-stride.

We all get a cowboy period, right? This is upstate NY though. No cowboys, just apples. When I first met my husband he was in agricultural school. We would drive through the city and he would announce the Latin names of all the trees like an incantation: Malus pumila, Liquidambar stryaciflua, Tilia cordata, the little-leaf Linden. You could say them now in time with the rain, the way the announcer would at a baseball game. Nomar Garciaparra was my favorite. Neither Yankee nor cowboy. 

My husband is in the basement trying to make the sump pump come on while I empty the closet with the tiny breach. This is my grandparents’ house, which is now technically my house, even though it’s in New York and I live in Boston. After all this time it still smells like a new bar of Dial soap. 

Later, in a drawer looking for towels, I will find a small box with the tin badge: Sheriff of Storytown. My uncle’s name etched in. A campy old fairytale village, you earned your badge at Storytown by not crying when your stagecoach was robbed. 

In the car on the way home the wheels lift and settle over the torrent. The heat blasts dust motes through my eyelashes and I fiddle with the station we lose to static around the Berkshires. There’s a game on somewhere, and we listen with the heated seats blazing, eyes dead ahead, rooting for anyone, even though we no longer recognize their names.