The Vallis Defense: Cold Human
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
Chapter 14: The Weight of the Thing
Saint Bart’s Parish Office, Tuesday Afternoon, February 2012
The parish office smells of old wood and something herbal rising from the mug on Father Finlay’s desk. Scott registered the tea at the first session and has stopped expecting otherwise. Third time in this room, two chairs angled toward each other across the desk, the framed print of the Annunciation on the wall behind Father Finlay’s shoulder. Scott has studied the brushwork in detail during pauses. The angel’s hand is raised, palm open, and Mary’s head is tilted. The light in the painting falls from the upper left and lands on her face, and Scott has decided the artist got that part right, because light behaves like that in a room with one window.
Father Finlay opens the folder between them. He reads the topic heading to himself, closes it again, and looks up.
“Tell me about your father.”
Scott says he didn’t have one.
Father Finlay sets his hands on the closed folder and says, “Tell me about the men who stood in for him.”
Scott thinks about that, and then he starts.
He talks about Judge Upcott first, because the Judge arrived earliest and stayed longest. The tall Pecos County judge who sealed a five-year-old’s identity and then showed up at every crisis afterward without being asked. Who taught Scott by example what it looked like when a man used his position to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves. The Judge walks with a cane now, a knee replacement that slowed his stride but changed nothing else about him. Scott doesn’t say this to Finlay; he’s talking about the shape of the man, not the current state of his joints.
He talks about Sheriff King, who ran interference and kept counsel and never once made Scott feel like a case file. He talks about Joseph Black, who’s known everything from the beginning and kept it close, who married Honour, raised a family, and built a law practice in Fort Stockton.
He talks about Alex Piotrowski, and his voice changes when he does. The Korean War veteran and master mechanic who hired a teenage boy, taught him to work with his hands, introduced him to estate auctions, and left him a lot when he died. Mr. Piotrowski was the father Scott never had, not by blood but because he chose Scott and kept choosing him, every day. Scott misses the man who taught him what it means to be a man, and who then trusted him to go be one.
Father Finlay listens, and when Scott finishes he sits motionless for a moment, his eyes on Scott’s face.
“You have been well fathered.”
Scott has never thought about it in those terms. He looks at the angel’s open hand on the wall behind Finlay, and Father Finlay waits before he continues.
“The question is what you carry forward from that. Not the pain of Mr. Piotrowski’s absence, but the shape those men gave you.”
“I think about that more now than I used to,” Scott says.
“That’s what this process is for.” Finlay says it plainly. He picks up his pen, makes a brief note, and moves on.
The session turns to what Scott is bringing into the marriage from the life that preceded Janie. He’s direct about it: the financial settlement, the properties, the bar, the ranch, the Trust that Everett manages. Father Finlay waves the money aside with a loose gesture.
“I’m not interested in the numbers. I’ve heard plenty of those.” He leans forward slightly. “What do you believe you owe Janie that no settlement can provide?”
Scott turns the question over before he answers. “An honest account of who I am. Before she stands up in front of everyone and says yes to it permanently.”
Father Finlay holds his gaze, then opens the folder again and writes something. He closes it and squares it on the desk with both hands.
They close before the hour, which is Father Finlay’s habit. He walks Scott to the corridor outside the office and they stand there for a moment, light from the nave windows falling in pale slants across the stone floor.
“Two weeks,” Finlay says. “Give Janie my regards.”
“I will.”
Scott turns toward the side door that opens onto the park between Saint Bart’s and 20 Main Street. Through the glass the drapes of his home are rustling, Red waiting for his return.
The Black Horse, Tuesday Evening, February 2012
The ground floor of the Black Horse is deserted after last call. Chairs stacked on half the tables, the lights behind the bar turned to the amber setting Shirl prefers for closing, the performance area dark. The row of taps catches the low glow and holds it. Scott’s been down here a while, just because he likes it at this hour when the room belongs to him. A playlist runs low on the house system, something with a slow guitar line that keeps circling back to the same three chords. Red has given up on the evening and lies under the high-top near the door, chin on his forepaws, watching Scott.
Taylor comes through from the kitchen carrying a glass of water and drops onto a barstool, pulling one knee up against the edge of the bar. She’s been at the Black Horse long enough that the building has become her place too.
“How’d the thing with the priest go?”
“Fine.”
“You like him.”
“I do.”
She drinks her water and sets it on the bar, her fingers staying around the glass, and for a while the playlist fills the space between them. The slow guitar line cycles again, and Taylor hums along with it under her breath.
The conversation drifts without agenda, midnight behind them and nowhere to be. Taylor mentions she’s been sitting in on a Tuesday-night class at NTSU. Business fundamentals, not enrolled, just listening with the professor’s permission. She wants to see if it’s something she can use. She says this straight and quick, watching his face, her fingers tightening slightly.
“Sounds like a good use of a Tuesday.”
Her fingers loosen. She turns the glass a quarter rotation on the bar top and looks at the amber light moving through the water.
“I figure if Shirl’s going to keep handing me stuff to do, I should know what I’m looking at. The inventory sheets alone, Scott. She’s got a system but it’s all in her head. If she ever gets hit by a bus this place goes dark in a week.”
“I’ve told her to delegate.”
“She ignores you.”
“She does.”
A grin crosses her face and is gone, and then she’s turning it again. She asks about the trip to Fort Stockton this week and Scott tells her about the ranch work, about what Rita’s crew has been doing on the west wing. The post and beam framing is exposed now, cleaned and sealed, and Rita found original hardware in the crawlspace that she’s having restored rather than replaced. Taylor listens with her chin on her knee.
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“It is.”
“Worth it though.”
“I think so.”
She drains what’s left and sets the empty on the bar with a tap, looking at it, her thumb tracing the rim. The playlist has cycled to something slower, a pedal steel sliding under the guitar. Red shifts under the high-top and resettles.
“Janie is lucky,” Taylor says, her voice level, her eyes down, and then she lifts them to Scott, holds there, and looks away.
She slides off the barstool, puts the empty where the dirty rack lives, and walks toward the door, her steps silent on the hardwood.
“Night, Scott,” she says from the door, without turning around.
Red lifts his head from the floor, watches her go, and puts it back down. His ears track her footsteps until they fade, and then he looks at Scott.
The bar finishes settling, the music ends, and the house system clicks to standby. Scott kills the amber lights behind the taps and stands for a moment in the dark with his hand on the switch plate. The building breathes around him, old brick, distressed wood and the faint smell of the kitchen’s last service. He turns the deadbolt on the front door, checks the rear exit by the employee lot, and climbs the stairs home, Red padding along at his heel, the dog’s nails ticking on each step.
Fort Stockton, Wednesday, February 2012
Scott leaves Levall at seven with Red in the passenger seat and the Brute pointed south on 84, the February morning flat and grey across the mesquite. Hours of open road between here and Fort Stockton. He drives with the window cracked an inch, cold air threading through the cab, Red’s nose tipped toward it. The land scrolls by, and he leaves the radio off.
He arrives around noon and goes straight to the courthouse. Judge Upcott is behind his desk with a stack of case files and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead when Scott knocks on the open frame, the cane leaning against the credenza. Upcott stands and takes Scott’s hand with firm pressure, his other palm closing over Scott’s knuckles, and he doesn’t let go right away. Then he reaches for the phone on his desk, calls Sheriff King’s cell, and tells him lunch is happening whether he wants it to or not.
The Cattleman’s Cafe hasn’t changed: good beef, reasonable prices, tables with paper placemats, a waitress who knows the judge’s order before he sits down. King arrives a few minutes behind them, still in uniform, badge catching the overhead fluorescent as he drops into the chair across from Scott. The conversation covers Scott’s life in the sequence the two older men care about most: the engagement, the wedding date, Janie, the ranch renovation, the bar. The Judge asks about Everett Wahl’s management of the Trust, and the Sheriff asks how Janie’s semester at SMU is going. The steak sandwiches arrive, and King steals one of Scott’s fries and dares him with his eyes to comment.
After lunch they walk over to the Sheriff’s Department. The Sheriff leads Scott back through the building to the secure storage room, where an evidence deputy wheels out a cart carrying Mr. Piotrowski’s gun collection in cases Scott recognizes. The same cases he helped the Sheriff carry from Mr. Piotrowski’s home after he died, now wearing a thin coat of evidence department dust. The Sheriff has kept them in good condition. Scott opens each one in turn, checking the contents against the inventory list, running a clean patch through the bore of each rifle out of habit. His hands know this work from Mr. Piotrowski and the Marines.
He gives the Sheriff his pick of the collection as payment, the arrangement they settled on years ago. Sheriff King takes one of the older bolt-actions, a rifle with a walnut stock that Mr. Piotrowski bought at an auction in Midland in 2005, holds it across both palms, and takes his time looking at it.
“He’d approve,” Scott says.
Sheriff King sets the rifle back in its case.
At the truck Scott lifts the bed cover and opens the steel storage box he welded and bolted in for this trip. The collection fits with room to spare. He locks it and pockets the key, and Red watches from the passenger window with his chin on the sill.
The cemetery is sparse in the mid-afternoon, the tall cypress trees standing against the cold sky, at odds with the surrounding desert but entirely right here. Scott parks on the gravel shoulder and walks to Mr. Piotrowski’s grave with Red at his heel, the dog moving between the stones with his ears forward.
Scott crouches at the headstone, where the granite is clean. Someone has been out here recently, and he suspects Adele Monroe.
He gives Mr. Piotrowski the week: the ranch, Rita and her crew, what the west wing is going to look like when it’s done. He tells him about the Pre-Cana sessions with Father Finlay, about the wedding in June, and that he wishes Mr. Piotrowski could be there for it. Red sits beside the stone, ears shifting at the sound of Scott’s words. After a few minutes Scott presses his palm against the top of the granite, feeling the chill of it, and stands.
He walks to the newer section, where the ground has healed around the Van Pelt headstone. He kneels and brushes a few dead grass stems from the base of the marker. The names are cut deep into the stone, and he has no memories of the people they belong to, only photographs and a settlement document. Whatever debt he owes them can’t be paid in words. He stays there with his hand resting on the grass beside the stone, and then he rises and walks back to the truck, Red following.
Adele Monroe’s place is two blocks off Main Street, the house she bought when she retired from managing the boarding house and turned it over to her niece from Kansas City. Close enough to keep watch without being in the middle of it. It’s as neat as Adele herself, the porch light on. She comes out the side door before Scott reaches the front walk. She’s rail-thin and sharp-eyed, takes his hand in both of hers and tells him he looks good, and then immediately reaches up and straightens his collar.
“Come inside. You’re letting the cold in standing there.”
He follows her into the kitchen, which is her domain and has been since before Mr. Piotrowski died. She sets a plate of pecan squares in front of him before he’s finished sitting down, and he eats what she gives him. They talk about the boarding house, how her niece is managing it, and whether the garage apartment’s hot water heater is going to survive another summer.
“And the girl,” Adele says. “Honour told me.”
“Janie.”
“Janie Mendoza. Honour says she’s exactly right for you.”
“She is.”
Adele pats his hand once, firmly. “Mr. Piotrowski would be very pleased.” Scott looks at her hand on his.
Dinner at Honour and Joseph’s is full and overlapping, the kids ricocheting through the house until Joseph applies a single look that slows them to a manageable speed. Clover is at the door when Scott arrives, tail going in circles, and Red sniffs her from nose to tail and stands patient under the fuss. Cathy drops to her knees and wraps both arms around Red’s neck while Joey attaches himself to Clover, and the four of them, two children and two dogs, disappear into the backyard in a tangle of limbs and barking.
Honour gives Scott the same hug she’s given him since he was a teenager. She pulls back and looks at his face, her eyes moving across it. Then she turns him by the shoulders toward the kitchen.
“Joseph, pour this man something. He drove five hours.”
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