Book Report: All That I Have

16. Castle Freeman Jr., All That I Have (2009) (6/23/2020)

Here's another book that I'm not sure why I have it—and another book that I'm now glad I've read. Set in rural Vermont, it's not quite a thriller—it's too quiet and spare for that. I suppose it's really a character study, of a small-town sheriff and the people in his life. But there are some bad guys (Russians), a ne'er-do-well, a rival, and some allies. There is a break-in and a theft, and the victims (the bad guys) wanting their stolen property back. Some people get beat up. Mostly, there's wry, wise humor as Sheriff Lucian Wing exercises his own brand of law enforcement—which is mainly a hands-off approach. As he explains it:

So: Deputy Keen says I'm not doing my job, that I'm giving Sean a get-out-of-jail-free card. Am I? I guess I am. Is that because of what Addison [Lucian's father-in-law, a lawyer] said back then? Am I making Sean a special case? Am I going easy on him because I think he's one of my own? Never. Sean ain't mine. I don't want him; he don't want me. If I'm giving him some extra rope—and I am—it's because that's my method. That's sheriffing. In sheriffing you don't stop things from happening. You know you can't do that, mostly, so you don't try. People are going to do what they're going to do. You let things happen. "Let them come to you," said Wingate [Lucian's mentor, now retired].
 Your bad boys, he was talking about. Let your bad boys come to you. The idea is that you give them a little cover, a little time to figure things out and come around. What you're aiming for is a taxpayer with a few good stories, a few memories that today make him shake his head, and not a convict sitting in a jail cell somewhere. . . .
 Sure, there are bad boys who test Wingate's method, who won't come to you, who will not shape up, not ever. Sean may be one of them. But you don't assume that. You try to use the method with Sean, too. At least you try until you get done trying. Then you come down onto the hard bottom of the law, the bedrock, the place where Deputy Keen wants to do business. Then you say that your job is to make the law work, to make it real, and in the end what makes the law real can only be one thing. If you're a trooper, you carry it on your hip; if you're a sheriff like Wingate, like me, you keep it locked up in your sock drawer. But you've got it, you know where it is, you know how to use it, you know you're allowed to use it, and so does everybody else.
 Would Sean make us all come down onto that hard place? I didn't think he would. And this time, anyhow, I was right. Because as it happened, I didn't catch up with Sean. Sean caught up with me.

Freeman is very good with spare, laconic dialogue as well. Here's an example, where Lucian recalls the conversation he had with Wingate early in his career, as the sheriff sought to persuade Lucian to shift from being a state trooper to being one of Wingate's deputies (which, coincidentally, would mean a big cut in pay):

"Well, . . . you think it over," said Wingate. "You ain't got to make up your mind now."
 "I will. I will think it over."
 "Sure," said Wingate. "You think it over. Think it over good. The sheriff ain't the [trooper] barracks, you know. It's like, it's like the difference between going fishing with a cane pole and taking off all your clothes and jumping into the pond and swimming around with the fish all day and maybe grabbing one from time to time."
 "Which is which, Sheriff?"
 "Sheriff's swimming around with the fish," said Wingate.
 "I'll get back to you," I said.
 "It's like the difference between being the fellow who puts the doors and windows in a big house and being the fellow who builds a little house, but he builds the whole thing," said Wingate.
 "I'll think it over."
 "Sheriff's the one builds the whole house," said Wingate.
 "I thought so," I said. . . .
 I was on patrol that morning, supposed to be, so I left Wingate, promising to think about his deputy job. I thought about it for two minutes. No, I didn't. I didn't think about it that long. I didn't think about it at all; I didn't have to.
 The next day I turned in my flat hat.

I very much enjoyed Lucian's voice and his go-slow, take-it-all-in manner. No hothead he; quite the opposite. Nor does he need to know everything. He's a bit like one of those fish slipping through the shadows along the river bank, taking advantage of his surroundings but not forcing anything. Path of least resistance. And in the case of this particular story, it ends up working.

There are two more Lucian Wing books, Old Number Five and Children of the Valley. I will certainly be reading them. 

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Monterey County's numbers today: 1,341 confirmed cases, 108 hospitalizations, and (still) 12 deaths. For the first two numbers, that's up 185 and 10 since Friday, when I last posted. I'm not going out to any restaurants or touristed areas anytime soon.

Stay safe.