Episode 1: The Orange Word
The paint was still wet. Ran in little orange tears down the barn, tall as a man. EVICTED.
My mother said the county picked orange so you couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. Everyone in the county would know, don’t stand against the Sheriff of Greenwood.
This is how I remember it.
Len Locke kept his letters in the drawer by the stove. Stamps on, no postmarks, all addressed to Robert Locke. His son who went away. Father and son weren’t estranged. They didn’t have a falling out. They were just two men cut from the same cloth. Quiet. Unwilling to say the words to each other that needed to be said.
The sheriff’s department stickered the house. Neon dots on the fridge, on the oak table he built from the oak tree taken down by a windstorm, on the lamp his mother bought at the church yard sale, the lampshade now yellowed with age.
Each dot a subtraction. Each dot a sign of the county taking from the Locke’s. Each dot an entry in a ledger that couldn’t be balanced because the keeper of it was corrupt and had an insatiable greed.
At the end of the lane, two cruisers idled like mountain lions laying in wait for prey. Sheriff Wolfe kept his hands clean. He sent his men for business like this. His men were loyal dogs, feeding off the scraps he gave them. They watched, waited, and kept careful records of the comings and goings. They knew who Robert was before he even reached the farm. But they never made a move until they knew they could get something from it.
Robert came home for the first time in years that morning. He didn’t cry, and he didn’t pray. He folded the letters from that drawer into his duffel walked past the orange word as the deputies watched from their cruisers.
He buried his dad at St. Bridget’s after lunch. I wasn’t there but they say Father Tucker was. Father Tucker gave a sermon. People still quote it. He said our lives are measured in many ways and it isn’t any of our job to take those measurements. Every person lives a life that weaves from good actions to bad actions, creating a tapestry. Our duty to one another is to help each other take more good actions than bad actions in hopes of make the best tapestry we can.
At the camp we will sometimes ask each other if we are weaving a bit to the good side or the bad side whenever we do something. As that one quote says, “why do we ask if it is moral to steal a loaf of bread to feed a hungry family instead of asking if it is moral to hoard bread when people are hungry?” Sometimes weaving to the bad is necessary and if God has a problem with it, we can have words when he takes me up.
Marion was there, at the grave. She was the lawyer from town. They say Robert and she knew each other from years back. Len had gone to her for help when the sheriff set his sights on the Locke farm. She fought back the best she could but Sheriff Wolfe was backed by Gisborn from Greenwood Capital Partners. They had deep pockets and an agenda to buy up all the farmland with the goal of leasing it back to the farmers. Inevitable as nightfall, they said. Can’t fight monsters like that. At least we thought you couldn’t.
Len knew it was a lost cause. Men like Len don’t handle losses well. When Marion reported the court’s final ruling Len took it quietly. Marion told him there would be an appeal but for a man like Len, fighting against a soulless system just to keep hold of a farm seemed pointless. His son joined the army, preferring to be a soldier than a farmer. Maybe this way of life no longer had meaning.
Neighbors found his body in the barn a week later.
After the funeral Marion approached Robert. They exchanged very few words. They say she told him quietly, “If a badge asks you to meet today, don’t. Then call me.”
Some of the farmers in the camp called it harvest season, but the combines, trucks, and tractors weren’t in the fields. Just the deputies and the suits from Greenwood Capital Partners doing the reaping
On the way back from the dirt and the prayers, they stopped him.
They called it compliance. Show your papers, prove your name, let them hold your wallet like it belonged to the county first and you second. Sheriff Wolfe wasn’t rude. He didn’t have to be. He said, “Everybody proves who they are in Greenwood now,” and Robert said, “No need, I’m not sticking around.” They cuffed him “for safety,” which meant theirs, and walked him into that concrete room where the lights hum just loud enough to tell you you’re not the one in charge.
I saw it because I’d learned to stand where nobody looked, between the Coke machine and the pillar. My daddy was in one of those rooms and I would go down to the Sheriff as often as I could in hopes of seeing him.
Marion made two calls. Sheriff Wolfe was powerful. Gisborn was powerful. Even they had to defer to the judges who held the line for justice. And after a few hours that felt longer, Robert walked back out the same door they took him in. Sheriff Wolfe, ever the politician, made a show of it, telling Robert they just needed to dot the i’s, cross the t’s and Robert was free to go back from wherever he came.
The press was there. If you would call a fired TV reporter with a substack “the press.” Evan “Vance” Keating was waiting at the detention center, this was well before he learned to be careful. Camera up, hot breath in the cold. “Hero vet profiled by Sheriff Wolfe, any comment?” Robert kept walking. Marion told Vance to blur the kid in the back of the frame, me, and for once, he did.
This was the day Robert Locke returned to Greenwood County. This was the day things would start to change, but we wouldn’t know it because before our lives got better, the Sheriff made them a whole lot worse.
I found and kept a copy of the auction manifest from that week. County Property Yard, Friday, 9 a.m. “Assorted garage, value to be determined.” Lot 17: Wooden tool chest: engraved L. LOCKE. You can’t sell a man’s life and experience, but you could divide up his life into tiny parcels and sell them off to the highest bidder. Sell them to people who might be just as desperate, looking for a good bargain on a bailer to get them through the next season.
That was the trick of it. Keep folk focused on each other instead of the real threat to their lives. The night before the auction, the trucks and bikes rolled loud to a roadside memorial, and Sheriff Wolfe counted plates. The camera on the pole blinked red. Somewhere in that noise of people eulogizing Len Locke, Robert made a choice. Everyone there has a different tale about what made him change his mind about leaving. Was it seeing Marion again? Was it the mistreatment by the sheriff? Nobody will ever really know. I tried to ask him once, and all he told me was a person never really knows what will happen when they are truly desperate and sometimes we find our noble spirits in that desperation.
Next time I’ll tell you how the toolbox came home, and how Little John changed his mind about the soldier with clean boots.