Paul Shapera
The Sheriff
[Hank]
And the sun comes up
Along the eastern desert
Where the wild men ride
Bring trouble in their wake

And there ain't much sense
When love and death come riding
Or the code you find to face yourself each day

Well we always known
Mama had seen trouble
In the days before
My sisters and I came

And she gave us each
Our first gun at seven
For when the wild side came
To claim us too one day

And the sun comes up
Along the eastern desert
Where the Barnsdale gang
Is coming soon they say

And mama said, "It's that gun
That will see you through to morning
And your code is how you face yourself each day"
I was a teenage boy on a summer night
At a party neath the warm moonlight
When Becky Smith crushed my heart in her hand

I felt the tears well in my eyes
If other kids would see me cry
The mocking would be more than I could stand
So off into forest there I ran

There's rumors bout a werewolf tribe
Outside the town and on that night
I found one lying there beneath the moon

Wounded, bleeding from her side
Half-girl, half-wolf and to my eyes
Such beauty to that point I'd never known
Three days I stayed and tended to her wounds

I never saw a mountain
I never saw a sky
I never saw a sight that looks
Quite like you look tonight

It's you that are the reason
The stars fall from the sky
Into my heart and light my soul
The way you look tonight
I never saw an angel
A sunrise or a light
That held a candle to you
Oh to you here on this night

If I live to be a thousand
Or had seen the birth of time
It would never take my breath away
The way you do tonight

Them summer nights then she would come
Outside my house and out I'd run
Boy and she-wolf running paw and hand

Together in the moonlit woods
The summer smells, her eyes of gold
Together in our magic midnight land
And one night there she made of me a man

I never saw a mountain
I never saw a sky
I never saw a sight that looks
Quite like you did tonight
It's you who are the reason

The stars fall from the sky
Into my heart and light my soul
The way you look tonight
I never saw an angel
A sunrise or a light
That held a candle to you
Oh to you here on this night

If I live to be a thousand
Or had seen the birth of time
It would never take my breath away
The way you do tonight

As we lay there naked, smiling, curled
Her furry ears perked up she heard
Some sounds of trouble somewhere far away

She said that "It's the Barnsdale gang
They're at your place" and so we raced
In desperation but we took too long
My sisters and my mama they were gone

She caught their scent
We tracked them down
To a ranch outside of town
She told me she was sure they were alive

But fifteen men were there and I
Had just one gun strapped to my side
She softly growled and told me not to mind
She said "My love, I'll get you inside"

[Growling, gunshots, men yelling and screaming]

I would have wept upon her fallen body
My heart still aches for her to this day
But in that house, upstairs in that bedroom
Barnsdale had my mama locked away

So I burst in, my gun all locked and loaded
That man he had my mama in his bed
And he stared at me with a look I still remember
Before I filled him full of lead

My mama, she looked at me
And lit a cigarette
Glanced at the dead body
And took a nice long drag

"Well boy," she said real slowly
Then sighed and shook her head
"You just killed your daddy
Me and him, we go way back"