The Burden of Proof

by Scott Turow

  “There’s some kind of covenant. When the Braces sold, everybody agreed their family could always harvest the fields they’d planted for personal consumption. You can be the honorary Charlie for today. I’m sure it will be an improvement,” she added, in a heavy sarcastic tone he had not heard from her before. She cleared Sam’s plate and brought out a number of plastic buckets from below the sink. Sam grabbed his at once and begged her to hurry, but Sonny paused, tying a bandanna across her forehead. She extended a bucket to Stern, then took a ragged straw hat from a shelf and without ceremony placed it on his head. “You’ll need this for the sun.”

  “Shall I look in a mirror?”

  “It’s magnificent,” she said. “Trust me.” She reached up again to angle the brim and gave him a merry look. For a second she seemed, despite her heavy form, winsome as a cheerleader, the kind of girl who would be grabbed and whirled about by some fellow, even though there was probably not a moment in her life when she’d been that sort of woman, and Lord knew, he had never been that kind of man. Then he followed Sonny and the boy from the dank cabin, and entered blinking into the potent daylight, his heart flopping about with a kind of febrile stirring.

  Pregnant, Sonny nonetheless remained far more agile than he; the boy, of course, climbed like a mountain goat. They plunged briefly into the woods and up a steep trail in the ravine. Stern, straining, puffing a bit, followed them back into the sunlight. After a few hundred feet of deep weeds, burned yellow already, they came to another graveled road. It curved, dry and white, beside the limitless acres of the farm, the low plants rising out of their hummocks in perfect ranks, the berries hanging red and luminous, bright as jewels. Sam reached to Sonny and then, by force of habit, extended the other hand, small and grimy, to Stern, who took it as well. So, he thought, still dazzled by the light and the overpowering heat. He had no sense of direction. The cabin was somewhere behind them, but he had no inclination to look back. Holding Sam’s hand, he crossed the road and began walking with them into the strawberry field.

  “When I was twenty,” Sonny said, “I wanted to meet somebody who was perfect. Now that I’m past forty, I just wonder if anyone is normal.” As they walked into the field, she went on unburdening herself, her gestures emphatic, speaking in her unguarded way about her husband. She seemed to be at one of those impasses in her marriage where she suddenly viewed her husband as she might a neighbor observed from an undisclosed vantage, say a window or a terrace, seeing him only as a peculiar unfathomable individual who lived nearby.

  “His passion for what is actually happening is only to the extent he can reduce it to expression. You know?” She looked back to Stern, wearing her bandanna, squinting in the sun. Down the rows of the strawberry field, Sam ran in gym shoes and jeans, his feet kicking out, the yellow bucket bouncing at his side. His thin voice carried back to them in a swell of wind. “And the point of expression is so that he has things in control. I’m sure that’s why he’s not here.”

  “What’s that?” Stern was losing her, much as he tried. She was speaking for the most part to herself.

  “Pure jealousy. Can you believe it?” Trudging along, she laughed: the notion was ridiculous. Briefly, Stern felt an unidentifiable twinge. “I think the idea of meeting you was more than he could stand. You know, my adversary—it sounds so professional. He can’t conceive of me with a life apart from him, paying attention to anyone but him. I don’t know how he’ll live with a baby.”

  “I apologize. This is certainly my fault for being so insistent,” said Stern.

  “Oh, it’s my fault,” she said. “It’s mine. Believe me. I was up all night, realizing that for the one billionth time. I think my mother made me feel obliged to put up with temperamental people.”

  Listening to Sonny, who was twisted about by impulse and emotion—beseeching, beleaguered, ironic, angry—it struck Stern that Clara and he had had the benefit of certain good fortune. In his time, the definitions were clearer. Men and women of middle-class upbringing anywhere in the Western world desired to marry, to bear and rear children. Et cetera. Everyone traveled along the same ruts in the road. But for Sonny, marrying late in life, in the New Era, everything was a matter of choice. She got up in the morning and started from scratch, wondering about relationships, marriage, men, the erratic fellow she’d chosen—who, from her description, still seemed to be half a boy. He was reminded of Marta, who often said she would find a male companion just as soon as she figured out what she needed one for.

  “How long is it you two have known each other, you and your husband?” Stern asked. He was a few feet away from her, kneeling awkwardly to look at the plants.

  She gave him instructions on how to harvest the fruit. The overripe berries, dark as blood, looked wonderful but would not hold. “And you may as well roll your pant legs up. There’s no pride out here and a lot of dust and mud. What did you ask me?”

  He repeated the question.

  “We’ve only been married a few years, if that’s what you meant, but I’ve known him forever. It was a doomed relationship right from the start. I was his T.A. in Freshman English. The people in the English Department were scandalized when I started going out with him. Well, not scandalized. That department wasn’t scandalized by anything, but they thought it was pretty odd.”

  “He was a freshman?”

  “An older freshman, in my defense. He’d been in the service. But he was irresistible. He’s very dark, very big, very quiet. It was like someone put a mountain down in my classroom.” Sonny in the great heat shook her head, apparently overcome by the memory. “Talk about romantic. How could I resist a man who came back from Vietnam with poems hidden in the pockets of his camouflage outfits? I wanted to believe that poetry could transform the world, but Charlie really did. Have you ever known anyone like that?”

  “My brother. I would say. He was a poet,” said Stern, who had just finished rolling his trousers, exposing a row of pale flesh over his black nylon hose. He must have looked worse than a scarecrow. The straw hat she’d given him was too large and rested unevenly on his ears.

  “Honestly?”

  “Oh yes, a young one. He wrote romantic verse in a number of languages. I believe he was quite gifted. My sister still has Jacobo’s poems somewhere. I would like to read them again someday, but just now it would be a melancholy experience.” He took on momentarily the stung look he could not avoid from time to time, a close expression of admitted pain.

  “He passed away?”

  “Long ago. I seldom speak of him, actually. But he was an extraordinary figure—destined for greatness. He was the most remarkable young man. Handsome, bright. He wrote poems. He declaimed in public. He was a prize scholar. And he was also quite a rogue. That was an important aspect of his character. Always in the midst of one misadventure or another. Filching fruit from a stand. For a period when he was sixteen, he would sneak out at night to keep company with the mother of one of his friends.”

  Sonny made a lascivious sound: Oo la la. “He sounds as if he was something.”

  “That he was,” said Stern, and repeated the phrase. “He was the child the world adored. I felt this, of course, as a terrible weight, being the younger brother.” In his parents’ home, his brother as the first-born and a son had assumed a natural centrality, a regal primogeniture. Handsome, outgoing, willful, Jacobo had in one fashion or another overpowered everyone. Their mother lived under his spell, basking in each achievement, and their father was no more capable of confronting Jacobo than anyone else. Even as a child, Jacobo had more or less run the household, his moods and passions governing them all like the tolling grandfather clock in the front hall. At the age of fifty-six Stern could still recall his jealousy. There was probably no fury in his life like the rush of emotion Jacobo had inspired. Stern, too, was dominated by him, awestruck but also wildly resentful. Jacobo was often cruel. He relished Alejandro’s admiration, but he would not allow any equal in his domain. How many times did they enact the same scene
, where Alejandro wept in humiliation and rage, and Jacobo laughed a bit before yielding to comfort him? Che, pibe. “The entire life of my household—my mother’s especially—was at an end after he died.”

  He stood straight and rubbed his knees. In the heat and wind, he felt a dreamy vagueness. The field of fruit, the irrigated furrows and the plants rising from the hills of straw, stretched in all directions into the dusty haze. There was not another soul around, not another voice, except for Sam’s, and the birds’, and the drone of planes approaching a country airfield ten or twenty miles away. Argentina, he thought suddenly. Its cruel history, its fateful cycles of hope and repression, pained him like a crushing hold applied to a vital place; it was always that way. He seldom thought of any of this, and when he did, the memories filled him with an ardor, fresh as any lover’s, for the United States. There were cousins left down there who prospered generally, but had also suffered terribly; they wrote once a year, sending money, which Stern invested for them in bank accounts here.

  “How old was he then?” Sonny asked of Jacobo.

  “Seventeen years four months.”

  “How horrible. What happened?”

  “One of those terrible tales of impulsive youth. He fell in with a Zionist crowd. Wealthy young Jewish people. My mother was thrilled at first by such impressive comradeship. When she eventually realized how strong Jacobo’s attachments were, it was too late to retrieve him. This was in the midst of World War II. Argentina was supposedly neutral, but tilted toward the Axis, and these were politically dangerous views to hold. Jacobo decided that he would go to Palestine, fight with Haganah. He could not be dissuaded. He knew, like everyone else, that he was destined to be a hero. There were thirty of them. We went down to see them off and the boat truly looked as if it would sink before it left the harbor. My mother wept; she knew she would never see him again. And she did not. The Germans said the Allies had sunk the boat; the Allies blamed the Germans. Perhaps it was a storm. We never knew.”

  Here amid the acres, thinking of all of this, speaking of what was lost and so momentous, he saw his present life as vulnerable as a paper construction. In Sonny’s company, there was, for whatever reason, less sadness. But it was like letting your fingertips drift along the raised features of a relief—he could feel the textures and recognized again his deepest secret, that without Clara, with the children grown, he had been left with no fundamental alliance. He could sense the desperate struggle every day had been, doing what had been done before with a determined effort to give it no reflection. Far from the city and those routines, he was strongly under the influence of this hearty outspoken young woman. The images were of things thriving, unfolding in the torrid early season heat, as if there was some fertile spirit carried from her, like the scent of humus on the occasional spells of warm wind.

  “Charlie’s not that kind of magnetic personality. He believes in the lives of the poets. A higher essence. He doesn’t want to live like everybody else. He’s grim and silent and—if you ask his wife—deliberately difficult.”

  Stern, straddling the row, reared his head to smile at her. He had moved on quite a distance from their starting point, stirring under the leaves and pulling, and Sonny just now was following him along, eating idly from her bucket. The fruit, baked by the sun, was wild with fragrance and incredibly sweet, gliding and soft on the tongue.

  “It’s not all that funny. We tried to live together for ten years and it never worked. Somebody was always moving out.”

  “There was a change eventually, I take it.”

  “When I got sick. Charlie showed up at the hospital with a bunch of posies and begged me to marry him. Begged—and I hardly needed to be begged at that point.” She had a few berries in her hand and she stepped over a row to drop them in Stern’s bucket. She made a remark: the stooping killed her back. Across her forehead, the bandanna had been darkened by sweat. Sam appeared at just that moment, as he had from time to time, holding aloft a huge berry. Both Stern and she took an instant to extol the prize. “He was very convincing. And you know how it is—it’s a crisis, you think you’re looking right to the center of things. I figured I loved Charlie, he loved me. The rest of it was details.” She shook her head. “Nobody promises us we’ll be happy, do they?”

  “No,” said Stern.

  “No,” she said. “Anyway, it was very complicated by then.”

  “I imagine,” said Stern quietly. He saw that this Charlie was due some commendation, having the heart to beg for the hand of a woman whose life hung in the balance.

  “Oh, it wasn’t what you’d think.” She seemed to be smiling. “He was married,” Sonny said. “I told you: there were details.”

  “Hmm.” Stern took an instant, adjusting. “Sam’s mother?”

  “That’s right. He married her after one of our breakups. As I said, it’s been an up-and-down relationship.”

  “Well, you know the sayings,” said Stern.

  “Which ones?”

  “Many. ‘True love never did run smooth’?”

  Sonny shrugged. The thought was not consoling.

  “How did you meet your wife?”

  “Oh, that.” Stern lifted a hand, prepared to consign the story to the ineffable, and then thought better of it, that it would be, in a word, unfair. “I worked for Clara’s father. He let me office space. One thing led to another.”

  “And what was not smooth?”

  “Most everything. You can imagine the complications when a penniless immigrant falls in love with the boss’s daughter.”

  “Her parents objected?”

  Stern made a sound, still not quite able, even thirty years later, to withstand the recollection of the disruption.

  “And they never accepted you?”

  “On the contrary. After I married Clara, her father offered to take me into his practice. He was quite prominent. I lived in dread of him but envied his success, and was much too callow to refuse.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We learned a bit about each other. Eventually, we had a serious disagreement.”

  “Over what? Can I ask?”

  “Oh, this is a very embarrassing story,” said Stern. He stood up to face her, adjusting the hat on his head. The rim was shot round with straw bands that had come loose and scratched his forehead when he moved. “One day my father-in-law called me into his office and told me there was a file he wanted me to steal from the county courthouse. A divorce matter for an important client, in which the husband had managed to sue first. This was thirty years ago, and the request was not quite as unthinkable as it might be today, but it remained a serious matter.”

  “You’re kidding! And your relationship fell apart when you refused?”

  “No, our relationship suffered when I did as he asked. We knew much too much about one another then. He knew how craven I was; I knew that he was corrupt. I suppose that having the courage to do that convinced me that I could walk out on Henry, too.”

  Stern glanced over to Klonsky. He had never told that story to another mortal soul, not even to Clara, whose loyalties, so early in their marriage, he could not fully depend on. Sonny had now sat down with the bucket between her knees, her face bright with the heat, massaging her lower back. It seemed they had passed the point where he could shock her; if he went marauding naked down the rows, she would nod and accept it with the same placid smile as a further exchange of intimacies.

  He bent again—the brightest berries were beneath the leaves, resting just above the straw beddings—but he remained under the charm of his own story. For a short time, his image of Henry with his braces and his white widow’s peak was as clear as if he were only a row or two over. He had been as brazen in this request as in so many other things, putting it to Stern right in front of the client, a fretful-looking woman in a tight blond hairdo and a dark green suit. Stern had wondered a bit about Henry’s relationship with her. It was well known that Henry was not a man of perfect virtue; but that question, like many
others, went unanswered. ‘Oh, don’t look at me that way,’ said Henry. ‘This stuff is done all the time. I give Griffin McKenna one hundred dollars every Christmas to make sure no one does it on any of the bank’s cases, and half the goddamn files disappear anyway.’ But you have to sign for the file, Stern noted. ‘Are they going to look at your dog tags? Write down a name. Jones. Jablonsky, for Chrissake. Just make damn certain that you don’t write down Mittler—or even Stern, for that matter.’ For some reason, this recollection seemed to have been edging up on him for days. Then he remembered: John and Dixon. Amid the present amity, the thought was troubling and he immediately put it aside.

  “He sounds like he was a pretty tough customer.”

  “Oh, he was. No question about that. I have not met many men tougher than Henry. He reminded me of certain policemen. In some ways, he seemed to be made of stone. Resolute. This was how it was. Punkt.”

  “Did Clara like him?”

  “Ah, well. Now that is another question.” For a moment, he turned his attention to the plant; this picking, hard on the back and thighs, was satisfying work, quickly rewarding, and tempting in its own way. He found a berry large as a small apple and showed it to her. “Clara had strong feelings for him. She sat by his bed weeping when he died. At many other times, in earlier years, she reviled him, and probably in stronger terms than most children criticize or rebuke their parents.”

  “That sounds like my mother and me,” said Sonny. A wind, most welcome, came up then and raised dust in a revenant form down the road. When he looked back to Sonny, she had her eyes closed and both hands placed over the full shape in her middle. He was afraid that she was in pain, but it became clear quickly that it was, instead, resolve which gripped her. “God,” she said. “God, I am going to do better.” She opened her eyes then and greeted him with a magnificent smile—happy to be here, to have survived it all, to swear her vows and to see him sharing this, their acre of common ground.