Ever the showman, he rustles the folder and clears his throat.
“Calvin Cooper,” he says, in his ringmaster’s tone. As though he’s introducing, to the waiting patrons, the next act for their astonishment and amazement.
39.
ORSON CALHOUN HEARD THE SHOTS, OF COURSE. That sporadic chatter of ordnance. Then silence. Sometimes long silences. Then another burst. All day yesterday. It went on for hours.
And he’s not hiding, he just has work to do. He figured the shots would find him eventually. In the meantime, he wants to get his workshop back in order, as best he can.
Order. Without that, what do we have?
So this has been his dedicated task for the past several days, ever since someone broke in and ransacked his shop in the early hours of the morning, laying waste to his carefully organized tools, overturning his tables, trashing his repair projects, scribbling nonsense words about Damnatio and Memorae all over his walls. For a long while, after he first discovered the carnage, and after he reported it to Cooper, he just stood and stared at the wreckage despondently. Cried, even, sure—he cried. Jobs he’d long been toiling on were lost causes, in total disarray. Gears and nuts and finer pieces that he’d laid out patiently, over weeks, just so, carefully assembled and displayed on oilcloth on his worktable, had been scattered, haphazard, in the dust. All that work, all that order, undone. Like time itself was moving backward toward chaos. The universe undoing itself.
Besides which, his tools were everywhere—and what is a man without tools? Every hammer, every wrench, every screwdriver, every awl, all of which had their own prescribed slots on the pegboard, their own designated nails to be hung from carefully, their own individual outlines on the pegboard traced lovingly by Orson’s own hand, so that when a tool went missing you could see exactly where it once belonged and where it would one day return. Well, that entire wall was bare. Nothing but ghostly outlines, left on the wall like the reminder of a crime. Like the chalk outlines of corpses after a massacre.
The emptiness of it all overwhelmed him.
So he had only one recourse. Get back to work.
Now, after a day or so, he is maybe halfway back to normal. Almost all the tools are replaced in their proper spots. There’s a hammer missing here, pliers absent there, but, as a whole, there’s something like order in evidence. Something like tranquillity restored to his troubled mind. The individual projects, too, have been reassembled as best he can manage, the apparent detritus grouped and bundled together by job. That took time. But at least it’s a starting point, he thinks. He knows in some part of his heart that this workshop will never be fully restored, and he suspects he may not live long enough to restore it. But the work of attempting this restoration has given him solace and quelled his roiling soul.
For the past few days, that’s been enough.
He stands now with a weighted hammer in his hand. It’s a twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer, a good weight for most everyday jobs. He searches for its proper spot on the wall. Only a few spaces are left vacant now. He notes a ballpeen hammer hanging in the wrong spot on its nail. Stupid, Orson, he thinks, then pulls it off and hangs it in a loop on the waist of his overalls until it can find its proper place. The hammer, the right one, that belongs in that spot is still missing, apparently, and this realization sparks a surge in his skull of the same stabbing painful despondency that’s been plaguing him for days. The sense that not only will this task never be finished but that all tasks, always, are fraudulent, a joke. But without tasks—well, he won’t allow himself to entertain that notion.
Instead, he searches the board for this hammer’s proper spot, its home, and in that quiet moment, he hears the name of the sheriff—Calvin Cooper—called out loudly from somewhere outside. It comes from the street in a voice that he doesn’t recognize. It must be one of those visitors, he thinks. These men who arrived yesterday and brought the gunfire with them. He assumes eventually they’ll come for him. If they want to find him, he’s here, in his workshop, working. And, to be honest, that’s exactly where he’d want to be if they should come.
But something about the name of the sheriff draws him away from his task and to his workshop door. The sheriff has also been good to him, kind to him, giving him tasks and projects, even with things that weren’t desperate for fixing. The sheriff seemed to understand the turmoil in his mind, and how the work would calm it. So he was always good about finding broken things for Orson to fiddle with, bringing them to him like offerings. Just so Orson could puzzle over them for weeks and thus pass his hours away.
So Orson walks over to the doorway of his shop to see if he can spy the nature of the proceedings he’s overheard. Who is calling the sheriff? There’s some hubbub, he sees, over by the chapel. A small crowd of residents gathered there. A few of those visitors assembled there, too. A woman sitting in a lawn chair, for some reason.
He watches a minute longer, holding the hammer loosely in his hand, putting the work of the workshop aside for just a moment, and listens.
Fran watches at the window. They can’t hear everything, but she heard Cooper’s name, she’s sure of that. She enlisted a few of the older residents in the chapel to watch over Isaac, and take him to the back; they even found a deck of playing cards stashed in a cabinet. Isaac had never seen a deck of cards before. He stared at it in wonder.
Now Fran’s free to linger at the window and watch, which feels like a bad idea, yet she can’t pull herself away. Whatever’s happening out there is not good, that’s obvious. Two people are dead already. And they just called out Cooper’s name.
Robinson hears the name, too, and comes to the window and joins her.
“What’s going on?” he says in a quiet voice.
“I don’t know. They just called Cooper’s name.”
“Calvin Cooper,” Rigo says again, loudly, like a judge about to pronounce sentence.
Cooper steps forward.
“Let me save you the trouble,” says Cooper, in a steady voice, but loud enough that everyone can hear. Rigo’s surprised at this, which is good, Cooper thinks. Just give me this one moment of advantage.
He strides toward Rigo, until they’re standing just a few feet apart.