The Courthouse Square

Patrick Reilly had not planned to become a lawyer in a town that barely needed one.

He had come west from Ohio in 1878, twenty-six years old, carrying a law degree from a school in Columbus that no one in Nevada had heard of and a letter of introduction from a judge who was dead by the time Patrick arrived. He had intended to go to San Francisco. Reno was supposed to be a stop on the way, a night at the depot hotel, a hot meal before the final push over the mountains.

That had been twelve years ago.

The Washoe County Courthouse sat on Court Street, a block north of the river, and Patrick could see it from the window of his office on the second floor of a building that housed, on the ground level, a hardware store and occasionally a dentist. The courthouse had been completed in 1873, a solid brick building with arched windows that looked, in certain light, like it belonged in a more established city. It was the most permanent-looking structure in Reno, which was not a town known for permanence.

Patrick\'s practice consisted largely of property disputes, mining claims, the occasional assault, and a growing number of divorce petitions that arrived from the East with women who looked surprised to find themselves in the desert. Nevada\'s divorce laws were already more permissive than most states, and word was spreading. Six months of residency, a filing, a hearing before the judge, and you were free. Women arrived on the Southern Pacific with trunks and attorneys\' letters and an expression Patrick had come to recognize: the careful blankness of someone starting over in a place they had not chosen.

He took some of these cases. He was not the best attorney in Reno -- that was Sam Belford, who had been practicing since the Comstock days and knew every judge in the state by first name -- but Patrick was thorough and he showed up on time, which in Reno\'s legal community distinguished him more than it should have.

On the morning of March 14, 1890, he walked to the courthouse as he did every weekday, crossing Virginia Street at Commercial Row and turning north on Court. The sky was the colorless gray that meant rain or snow in the Sierra, and the Truckee was running high, the water the color of milky tea. He noted this the way he noted most things about the river, which was the way you note the behavior of a neighbor who is mostly quiet but occasionally unpredictable.

The courthouse square was busy. A survey crew was working near the southeast corner, driving stakes for something no one had explained. Two ranchers stood near the entrance, arguing about a fence line with the exhausted certainty of men who had been arguing about the same fence line for years. A woman in a traveling suit sat on the bench by the front door, reading a letter, and Patrick recognized her as a client -- Mrs. Harmon, from Philadelphia, waiting for her hearing.

"Good morning," he said.

"Is it always this cold?" she said.

"It\'s March."

"March in Philadelphia is not this cold."

"March in Philadelphia is not this dry either."

She looked at him as if dryness were a personal insult and went back to her letter.

Inside, the courthouse smelled of wood polish and tobacco and the particular bureaucratic staleness of rooms where decisions are recorded in triplicate. The clerk\'s office was on the first floor, and Patrick stopped to check the docket. Three divorce hearings this week, two property disputes, a criminal matter involving a stolen horse. The horse case was his.

Judge Wilson was on the bench, a lean man with a gray beard who had the useful judicial quality of appearing to listen carefully while thinking about something else entirely. Patrick had argued before him perhaps two hundred times and still could not tell, until the ruling came, which way Wilson was leaning. This was either a sign of excellent judicial temperament or excellent poker skills. In Nevada, the distinction was not always clear.

The morning session began at ten. Patrick sat through the first divorce hearing, which took eleven minutes. The second took fourteen. Mrs. Harmon\'s took nine. She signed the papers with a hand that did not shake, collected her copies, and walked out of the courthouse into the March wind without looking back. Patrick watched her go and thought, as he often did after these hearings, that freedom looked different on everyone.

His horse case was in the afternoon. The defendant was a man named Briggs who had taken a bay mare from a corral on Fourth Street and ridden it to Sparks, where he had attempted to sell it to a man who happened to know the mare\'s owner. The defense, such as it was, rested on Briggs\'s claim that he had believed the horse was abandoned. Patrick presented the owner\'s testimony, the corral gate\'s latch, and the bill of sale Briggs had attempted to draft on the back of a restaurant receipt.

Judge Wilson ruled in seventeen minutes. Briggs went to jail. The mare went home.

Patrick walked back to his office in the late afternoon, crossing the square as the light went long and gold over the courthouse roof. The survey crew was gone. The stakes remained, small wooden markers in the dirt, pointing toward something that hadn\'t been built yet.

He stopped at the river on his way home and looked at the water. It was still high. Higher than the morning, maybe. The color had changed from tea to something closer to rust. He made a note of it the way he made notes of everything -- precisely, without alarm, as a matter of record.

Six days later, the river would flood.

But that evening it was just a river running high, and the courthouse was a solid building on a solid square, and the town was twenty-two years old and still deciding what it was. Patrick Reilly stood on the bank and watched the water and thought about Mrs. Harmon on the train back to Philadelphia, and Briggs in his cell, and the surveyor\'s stakes in the ground, and how all of it -- the law, the land, the river -- was just a set of lines people agreed to respect until they didn\'t.

He walked home. The river kept rising.

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